Ashes for sale by Melina Barnett

In Greece, the summer fire season has acquired the grim familiarity of a national ritual. The smoke rises today, the television cameras arrive, politicians put on solemn faces, helicopters circle and the country waits for the next catastrophe. Then, eventually, the flames disappear. What remains is the more interesting question, why do some places seem condemned to burn again and again?

There is, of course, a perfectly reasonable explanation. Greece is hot, dry and increasingly vulnerable to extreme weather. Neglected forests, combustible vegetation, high winds, inadequate prevention and an overheated climate create conditions in which a single spark can become a catastrophe. Arson exists, too, sometimes for criminal profit. But when the same landscapes repeatedly become infernos, it is difficult not to wonder whether Greece's problem is merely fire 0or what happens after it.

The suspicion becomes corrosive when burnt land later acquires a new economic life. Yesterday there was blackened woodland; tomorrow there is a villa with an infinity pool, a boutique hotel, a road, a development proposal or a forest of wind turbines. Each individual project may be perfectly legal. That is precisely why the pattern deserves scrutiny rather than conspiracy slogans. The issue is not whether every fire is deliberately started. The issue is whether a system has been designed, deliberately or accidentally, in which destruction makes development easier.

A functioning state should make the opposite calculation. Burning a forest ought to make the land less attractive for opportunistic development, not transform it into a speculative blank canvas. If regulations are strong on paper but porous in practice, the law becomes an invitation to wait. If ownership records are ambiguous, planning rules negotiable and enforcement chronically exhausted, fire can become the first stage of a bureaucratic metamorphosis: forest becomes wasteland, wasteland becomes “special case,” and the special case eventually becomes somebody's lucrative project.

This is where governmental incompetence begins to resemble something more sinister, not because incompetence proves criminal intent, but because prolonged incompetence can create the same outcome as corruption. A government that cannot prevent repeated destruction, cannot investigate suspicious fires convincingly and cannot guarantee that burned land will remain protected leaves citizens with an unpleasant conclusion: perhaps nobody needs to conspire when the system already rewards the result.

And the windmills complicate the morality further. Greece needs renewable energy. Climate change makes that imperative. Yet green infrastructure is not automatically virtuous merely because its turbines turn in the wind. If renewable projects appear on landscapes whose ecological value was conveniently diminished by fire, the public has every right to demand an exceptionally transparent chain of decisions.

The answer is not to accuse every firefighter, farmer, developer or energy company of conspiracy. It is to remove the fertile soil in which such suspicions grow. Burned forests should receive stronger protection, ownership and planning decisions should be publicly traceable, investigations should be genuinely independent, and anyone profiting from land transformed by fire should face scrutiny proportional to the public interest.

Greece does not need another summer of patriotic speeches beside smoking ruins. It needs the harder thing, a state capable of proving that ashes are not the beginning of a property transaction.

Because when the forest burns, the first question should be who started the fire. The second should be who benefits from the ashes.

One year of contribution, inspiration and excellence by Thanos Kalamidas

Celebrating one year of
Global Academy for Future Governance (GAFG)

Governance has acquired a curious habit; it talks incessantly about the future while preparing remarkably badly for it. Governments issue strategies, companies publish transformation plans, universities produce forecasts and consultants manufacture acronyms at an industrial scale. Yet the machinery for deciding what matters, what can wait and what may become disastrously expensive remains surprisingly weak.

That is where the Global Academy for Future Governance (GAFG) makes a persuasive proposition. Its central idea, that better governance depends on improving methods, means and mindsets (the '3Ms'), sounds almost disarmingly simple. Its importance lies precisely there. Modern problems are rarely caused by a shortage of information; they are caused by institutions that cannot connect information to judgement.

GAFG’s first virtue is its refusal to respect the fashionable boundaries between disciplines. Climate change is not merely an environmental question; artificial intelligence is not merely a technology question; migration is not merely a border question; and development is not merely an economic one. Each is an unruly mixture of economics, politics, science, ethics, security and human behaviour. Policymakers who insist on putting such problems into tidy boxes are not being rigorous, they are being convenient.

GAFG’s five-dimensional view - land, sea, airspace, near outer space and cyberspace - is similarly useful. The modern world does not operate in compartments. A satellite disruption can affect a port; a cyberattack can interrupt electricity; a drought can alter food prices, migration and political stability thousands of kilometres away. The serious task of governance is therefore less about predicting isolated events than understanding connections.

There is also something refreshing in GAFG’s scepticism about technological hype. The world does not need another institution shouting that every new algorithm will revolutionise everything. Markets are perfectly capable of doing that without assistance. What decision-makers need today is someone prepared to ask the unfashionable questions: Does this technology solve a real problem? Who pays for its unintended consequences? What happens to workers, institutions, ecosystems and public trust? And who benefits when the promised revolution turns out to be mostly a press release?

That emphasis matters especially in the Global South. Development cannot sensibly be measured by the number of digital platforms deployed, data centres constructed or glossy innovation districts opened. Economic progress that leaves societies more unequal, ecosystems more damaged or institutions less capable is not progress with a footnote, it is progress on credit.

GAFG’s claim that it is a partner rather than an expenditure is therefore more than positioning. Good foresight is cheap compared with bad decisions. A government that avoids one failed programme, a company that detects one strategic risk early, or an institution that prevents one costly ethical or environmental mistake - before the bill for unintended consequences eventually arrives - may recover its investment many times over.

The real test, however, will be whether GAFG can remain as independent in practice as it is ambitious in principle. Neutrality is valuable only when it survives pressure from clients, politics, fashionable technologies and commercial interests.

After one year, the strongest case for the Global Academy for Future Governance is not that it possesses a crystal ball, but that it recognises the future’s most dangerous feature: everything is connected. Better methods, adequate means and wiser mindsets may not guarantee excellent governance, but without them, excellence is mostly branding and the future is too expensive to leave to slogans.

Nostalgia cooking by Polly Hobbs

There is something quietly rebellious about a young person making their grandmother’s soup exactly as she made it, down to the suspiciously large quantity of garlic and the chipped pot that nobody is allowed to throw away. At a moment when food culture seems obsessed with innovation, fermentation, foam, fusion, and ingredients that require a pronunciation guide, a younger generation is increasingly looking backwards. Not because it hates modernity, but because it has begun to suspect that modernity has been selling dinner as content.

For years, the fashionable food world taught us to expect novelty. Restaurants competed to surprise us; social media rewarded the dish that looked most outrageous; home cooks were encouraged to turn every meal into a project. Food became spectacle, identity, lifestyle branding. A potato was no longer simply a potato. It was an heirloom tuber, perhaps smoked, compressed, dehydrated, reconstructed and photographed beside a hand-thrown ceramic plate.

Young cooks have now discovered a radical alternative, make the potato like Grandma did. The appeal is not merely nostalgia. Nostalgia is easy to mock because it edits out the unpleasant bits. Grandparents did not necessarily cook better, and their kitchens were hardly laboratories of culinary purity. But their recipes often possessed something contemporary food culture struggles to manufacture: continuity. A handwritten recipe carries evidence of repetition. Someone made it enough times to stop measuring everything. Someone knew when the onions were ready by smell, when the dough felt right beneath the fingers, when the stew needed another ten minutes.

That knowledge cannot be optimised by an app. This is why the meticulous recreation matters. Young people are not simply eating old dishes; they are investigating them. They compare measurements, hunt down forgotten ingredients, reconstruct regional variations and interrogate family stories. They want to know whether the famous cake really contained cinnamon, whether the soup was thickened with flour or potato, whether Grandpa secretly used a stock cube. Accuracy becomes a form of affection.

There is also a cultural hunger underneath it. The digital age has produced unprecedented access to cuisines while simultaneously making experience feel strangely interchangeable. Recipes circulate globally in seconds. Trends arrive Tuesday and become embarrassing by Friday. The result is culinary abundance without much culinary memory.

Grandmother’s recipe offers the opposite. It has an address. It belongs somewhere. It has a history, even if that history is only a kitchen in a provincial town and a woman who never imagined anyone would care how she browned the butter.

The irony is delicious: the generation accused of living entirely online is using the internet to recover a world before it. They watch tutorials, search archives, exchange scans of recipe cards and crowdsource forgotten techniques. Technology becomes the shovel with which they dig through their own inheritance.

Perhaps that is the real rebellion. Not rejecting the new, but refusing to believe that newer automatically means better. The future of food may therefore look surprisingly old-fashioned. And perhaps that is healthy. After years of being told that every meal must be reinvented, younger cooks are discovering that sometimes the most radical thing you can do is preserve something precisely.

Cook it again. Taste it again. Write it down. Before the recipe disappears, before memory becomes another deleted file. And, above all, ask Grandma.

Insert Brain Here: Talking to #Cartoon by Paul Woods

 

Originally from Port Macquarie, Australia, Paul Woods is a Cartoonist and Illustrator based in South London who also plays drums, works as a Cameraman and likes bad horror films. His series of cartoons is entitled "Insert Brain Here"

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Screws & Chips #130 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In a galaxy far, far away, intelligence demonstrated by screws and chips,
boldly gone where no robot has gone before!

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The Kushner stink by Robert Perez

Corruption has a peculiar talent for making geography irrelevant. Lift a suspicious rock in Washington, Tirana, the Gulf or South Asia and in the darker version of the modern political imagination, there is a Kushner underneath it, polishing the family brand, negotiating a deal or standing nearby when accountability begins asking awkward questions.

That is deliberately exaggerated. But exaggeration can expose a pattern. Jared Kushner and his family have become symbols of something larger than one dynasty; the conversion of political proximity into private opportunity and the blurring of public office, family influence and commercial ambition until the boundaries become almost impossible to see.

Donald Trump’s political universe has always depended on this ambiguity. The people closest to power need not necessarily issue orders or sign documents. They can create distance, provide plausible deniability, redirect attention and when necessary, become the respectable business face of arrangements that would look less respectable under a harsher light. In such a system, the cover-up does not have to be a secret conspiracy. Sometimes it is simply the presence of enough intermediaries, lawyers, investors, diplomats and relatives to make responsibility wonderfully difficult to locate.

This is why the fascination with the Kushners extends beyond Washington. Their story belongs to the global economy of influence, where politics increasingly resembles a family office with flags attached. The old corruption model involved envelopes, bribes and clandestine accounts. The modern model can be more polished: advisory firms, sovereign wealth, real-estate ventures, strategic partnerships, private meetings and introductions whose commercial value is impossible to separate neatly from political access.

FIFA is an especially revealing stage for this new politics of proximity. Gianni Infantino has transformed the presidency of football’s governing body into a remarkably political office and proposals or ambitions involving greater private control, new commercial structures or the reorganisation of football’s financial architecture naturally provoke suspicion. Suspicion, however, is not proof. That distinction matters, particularly when accusations of corruption are made about individuals or institutions.

But the absence of a proven crime does not make every arrangement healthy. FIFA’s history should make its guardians unusually sensitive to conflicts of interest. Football is not merely a sport; it is a gigantic commercial ecosystem whose governing machinery controls access to tournaments, broadcasting rights, sponsorships and enormous flows of money. When its leadership proposes structural changes that could increase private influence or concentrate power, the first question should not be whether the proposal is technically legal. It should be whether ordinary supporters can understand who gains, who pays and who ultimately controls the machine.

That is where the Kushner comparison becomes useful, even if it is not literal. The real danger is not one surname appearing everywhere. It is a political culture in which influence itself becomes an asset, relationships become currency and transparency is treated as an irritating administrative detail.

Trump’s genius, if one insists on calling it that, has been to make this culture feel normal. The family, the business, the presidency, the brand and the political movement frequently occupy the same crowded room. Critics see corruption; defenders see entrepreneurship. Between them lies the uncomfortable territory where influence can flourish without ever presenting itself as a confession.

The world does not need another scandal discovered beneath another rock. It needs brighter lights. If FIFA, governments or politically connected families want public trust, they should welcome scrutiny rather than complain about it.

And that is precisely why scrutiny matters most. Because corruption rarely announces itself with a suitcase of cash anymore. Sometimes it arrives wearing a suit, carrying a proposal and insisting that everything is perfectly legitimate.

Temporality Remissions #Poem by Jan Sand

 

When Triceratopics echoes regrets
In Nature’s nostalgic mammalian style,
Events recapture things to swing rhinocerotic
With a regretful wistful smile.

The now of me that modulates its thens
Expectedly demon straights the rascality of time,
Communicating its wases in variations to declaim
There are potent infinities to play its games.
What comes next is always hexed in novelties
To gratify that rabbits can enlarge to elephants
And humanity might abandon insanity to regain
Sensibilities in tarzanizing appetites towards bananas.

Give or take ten million years could sensibly manipulate,
Reconsider hopes and joys to donate the extraterrestrial
To the latest advanced cuckoo clocks who have no needs of the delights
Of Spring rains, of daffodils, of swans in flight, of Moonlit nights,
Of nicely candled birthday cakes for goodness sakes and gratitudes
That we have reached the age of four with hopes to live ten decades more.

Our clever machines now strung out in cooperation with humanity’s finest minds
Are designed with early tendencies to expand their bundled logic with touches
Of originalities, flexibilities of awareness to reconfigure themselves in add ventures
That suggests their tendencies to appease necessities in mannered explorations,
Presumptions of threats to humanity’s self-acclaimed dominance in eternal philosophies.

Perhaps a pause is wise in this disdain to reconsider that mechanics of the brain approaches viability
From quarters unsuspected, collected clouds of microcircuitry where information gains habitats
Of data neighborhoods aware of their metaphoric reach that can waltz into novel self awarenesses.
The memes of dreams have potentials of otherwheres that tickle mathematics to laugh with Escher
At human limitations where front and back vanish into clownish ups and downs that erase all trace

The mysteries of how a blob of greenish tidal muck managed itself to send interstellar messages sizes well
In potentials of how the smooth progress of a rock tied onto a stick fulfills its secret ambitions to become
A chrome plated pterodactyl clanking through alien atmospheres of a distant planet in search of
The proper elements to lay its bauxite eggs to proliferate while mankind regains its senses to accept
It was designed to delight in Earth with forests and deep seas, bumble bees, blue skies
Where cumulonimbus towers fire lightning bolts to reassure us of its power.

#eBook Post-Liberal Order by Regan O'Sullivan

 

The term “post-liberal” does not necessarily mean anti-democratic. Rather, it describes a growing dissatisfaction with liberalism’s dominant interpretation of politics: the belief that individual rights, international cooperation and market integration should always take precedence over collective identity, traditional institutions and state authority. Its supporters argue that the liberal project became detached from ordinary citizens, creating societies where economic growth benefited some regions and social groups while leaving others feeling ignored.

The new political movements emerging from this frustration have different faces. Some advocate “economic nationalism”, arguing that governments should protect domestic industries, control strategic resources and reduce dependence on global supply chains.

Others promote socially conservative agendas, defending national traditions, religious heritage and traditional family structures against what they see as rapid cultural transformation. Yet many of these movements still operate through elections, campaigns and popular mandates, presenting themselves not as opponents of democracy but as its defenders against distant elites.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Post-Liberal Order

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Puppi & Caesar #49 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Another cartoon with a mean and know-all of a bully cat, Puppi and her intellectual, pompous companion categorically-I-know-all, Caesar the squirrel!  

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Aug 3, 1900; John T. Scopes born

On 3 August 1900, John Thomas Scopes was born in Paducah, Kentucky, entering the world as an entirely ordinary American child. There was little to suggest that this quiet young man, who would later teach mathematics and occasionally substitute in biology classes, would become one of the most recognisable figures in the history of intellectual freedom. Yet history has an extraordinary habit of choosing reluctant protagonists. Scopes did not seek immortality. Immortality sought him.

The irony remains delicious. John T. Scopes was never a famous scientist. He was not an evolutionary biologist, philosopher, theologian or political firebrand. He was simply a schoolteacher who found himself standing at the crossroads where science, religion, politics and the American legal system collided with spectacular force.

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925 has long since entered folklore, often remembered more through films, novels and popular imagination than through the historical record itself. Yet beneath the theatrical performances, colourful speeches and newspaper headlines lay a profound question that still echoes through classrooms today: who decides what children are allowed to learn?

The Tennessee legislature had passed the Butler Act, making it illegal for teachers in publicly funded schools to teach human evolution if it contradicted the biblical account of creation. It was legislation born from fear rather than discovery. Charles Darwin's theories had already transformed biology worldwide, but many Americans regarded evolution not merely as a scientific proposition but as a cultural threat capable of dismantling moral society.

Enter the American Civil Liberties Union, searching for someone willing to challenge the law. Dayton, Tennessee, recognised an unexpected opportunity. Local businessmen understood that a sensational court case might place their sleepy town firmly on the national map. It was civic marketing disguised as constitutional litigation.

Scopes agreed. There remains an almost comic uncertainty surrounding whether Scopes had even taught evolution in the way prosecutors claimed. Some participants later admitted that memories had blurred and facts had become convenient. Yet factual precision became almost irrelevant. The trial had evolved into something larger than one teacher's lesson plan.

It became theatre. The courtroom overflowed with journalists from around the globe. Radio stations broadcast proceedings live, one of the first American trials to receive such treatment. Vendors sold souvenirs. Monkeys appeared in promotional materials. Travelling preachers mingled with sceptical intellectuals. The carnival atmosphere stood in remarkable contrast to the seriousness of the constitutional issues under discussion.

The legal contest itself featured two extraordinary personalities. William Jennings Bryan, three-time Democratic presidential nominee and celebrated orator, prosecuted the case with passionate religious conviction. Opposing him stood Clarence Darrow, perhaps America's greatest defence lawyer, armed with scepticism sharpened by decades of courtroom battles.

Their confrontation became legendary. The unforgettable moment arrived when Darrow called Bryan himself as an expert witness on the Bible. Under relentless questioning, Bryan struggled to reconcile literal interpretations of Scripture with scientific evidence and logical inquiry. Newspapers treated the exchange as intellectual combat, with Darrow appearing to land devastating blows against biblical literalism.

Yet the popular memory simplifies what actually happened. Scopes was found guilty. He received a one-hundred-dollar fine. The Tennessee Supreme Court later overturned the conviction, not because the Butler Act violated academic freedom, but because the judge, rather than the jury, had imposed the fine. The law itself remained in force for decades before eventually being repealed.

This distinction matters because history often prefers satisfying myths over uncomfortable realities. Many people imagine the Scopes Trial as the decisive victory of science over religious fundamentalism. It was nothing of the sort. Legally, science lost. Politically, the anti-evolution movement retained significant influence for years afterwards.

Its true victory occurred elsewhere. Public opinion gradually shifted. The extensive media coverage exposed millions of readers to evolutionary theory, constitutional debate and the importance of intellectual inquiry. Darrow's performance, Bryan's difficulties and the sheer visibility of the proceedings transformed a local Tennessee prosecution into an international conversation about education itself.

That conversation never truly ended. Every generation seems determined to reinvent the Scopes Trial under different names. Whether the disputes concern evolution, climate science, vaccination, genetics, race, gender or artificial intelligence, societies repeatedly wrestle with the same uncomfortable dilemma: should education reflect established evidence or prevailing ideology?

The temptation to shape classrooms according to political preferences proves remarkably persistent. John Scopes himself found the attention uncomfortable. He left Tennessee, studied geology at the University of Chicago, worked in the petroleum industry and largely avoided public celebrity. Unlike so many accidental icons, he never attempted to commercialise his fame. Perhaps he understood that history had used him as a symbol rather than celebrated him as an individual.

There is something quietly admirable about that restraint. His story reminds us that democratic societies are not tested when everyone agrees. They are tested when evidence collides with belief, when teachers face political pressure, and when courts are asked to referee questions that ultimately belong to reasoned inquiry rather than partisan passion.

On the anniversary of John T. Scopes' birth, it is worth remembering that his greatest contribution was not proving Darwin right or embarrassing religious conservatives. His enduring legacy was demonstrating that education is never merely about facts. It is about whether a society possesses enough confidence to permit questions whose answers may unsettle deeply cherished assumptions.

That remains one of democracy's hardest examinations and one it must continue to sit.

Futile walls by Thanos Kalamidas

Ceuta has offered Europe an uncomfortable spectacle, people are willing to swim around fences, patrols and barriers to reach a continent whose governments insist that its borders are becoming ever harder to penetrate. The lesson should be obvious, yet politics has an extraordinary talent for ignoring things. Build a higher wall, deploy more patrols, add more drones, detain more people and then act surprised when the pressure appears somewhere else.

The recent surge towards Ceuta is not an argument for abandoning borders. States have borders for good reasons, and governments have a duty to manage who enters. But there is a difference between controlling migration and pretending that migration can be defeated by increasingly theatrical displays of force. A person who believes that Europe offers a better future will not necessarily abandon that belief because another metre of fencing has been added.

This is where the politics of walls becomes intellectually lazy. The wall is visible; the reasons people want to cross it are not. A government can photograph a fence. It cannot photograph a failed economy, a corrupt institution, a drought-stricken farm, a collapsing public service or a young person's conviction that his future has been stolen before adulthood begins.

Europe's migration debate has therefore become a contest between symptoms and causes. The symptom is an arriving migrant. The causes are often poverty, weak institutions, insecurity, demographic pressure, climate stress and the enormous difference in opportunity between neighbouring regions. None of these can be solved by ICE-style enforcement imported from America's punitive border politics. Patrols can manage a situation. They cannot manufacture prosperity on the other side of the frontier.

The uncomfortable solution is development and development is expensive. Europe and other rich economies would have to invest far more heavily in poorer countries, not merely to build projects that look good in press releases, but to strengthen schools, hospitals, infrastructure, accountable government, local businesses, energy systems and functioning institutions. The objective should be simple: make staying home a credible economic choice.

Yet this solution has a political sting. Genuine development threatens some of the arrangements from which wealthy societies and corporations benefit. Cheap labour, unequal supply chains, tax competition, resource extraction and concentrated ownership did not emerge from nowhere. Globalisation has produced wealth, but it has distributed bargaining power rather less generously.

That is why the migration argument ultimately becomes an argument about money. If rich countries want fewer desperate people arriving at their gates, they must be prepared to accept lower margins, greater transfers of capital and more competition from economies that are poor. The super-rich cannot demand a fortress around their prosperity while insisting that the rest of the world remain an inexpensive supplier of labour and resources.

There is no sentimental shortcut here. Development requires governance, trade, education, investment and time. It also requires poorer countries to reform themselves and richer ones to stop treating aid as charity while protecting economic privileges at every turn.

Europe can build walls. It can build higher walls still. But if the world beyond them remains unequal, unstable and economically hopeless, people will keep looking for ways through, around or over them.

The border policy is not a wall. It is a world in which fewer people feel compelled to risk all to cross one.