A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts!
'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade.
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Me My Mind & I #20: Great Green Lake #Cartoon by Patrick McWade
Authoritarian populism editing art by Thanos Kalamidas
Art can be bad, pretentious, ugly, provocative and occasionally downright ridiculous. That is precisely the point with freedom of expression and democracy. In a free society, art does not need political permission to exist.
So the removal of Joel Shapiro’s Blue from the grounds of the Kennedy Center, followed by the removal of Kehinde Wiley’s painting from a United States embassy in the Dominican Republic, should make anyone who cares about culture pause. The two cases are not remotely equivalent to Nazi Germany, and pretending otherwise would trivialise the horrors of dictatorship. But they create an uncomfortable historical déjà vu: the moment when political power begins deciding that certain kinds of art are ideologically unacceptable.
That is where the alarm bell should ring. The Nazis understood the propaganda value of cultural cleansing. Modernism, abstraction and experimental art were attacked as decadent, corrupt and fundamentally hostile to the supposedly pure German spirit. Thousands of works were confiscated from museums and private collections. The infamous “Degenerate Art” campaign turned artistic taste into a political weapon. Art was no longer judged simply on aesthetic grounds. It was judged according to the identity, politics, race or supposed moral character of its creator.
Eventually masterpieces disappeared into storage, private collections and foreign markets and, in some cases, flames. Hitler's own artistic tastes were revealing. He despised much of modern art while embracing monumental classicism, grand architecture, heroic figures and decorative splendour. The aesthetic was not merely decoration. It was politics carved into stone.
And here is the uncomfortable part, authoritarianism rarely announces itself by saying, “We are beginning the destruction of culture.” It usually arrives dressed as taste, efficiency, restoration, patriotism or common sense.
We are told that certain works are “woke”. Others are supposedly offensive, inappropriate or aesthetically terrifying. A painting commissioned by the American government can suddenly become politically contaminated because the artist has expressed views disliked by the administration. A sculpture can be removed from a major cultural institution because its presence no longer fits somebody's preferred vision.
Perhaps the works will be preserved elsewhere. Perhaps they will even find better homes. That matters. But the principle matters more.
Who gets to decide? If a conservative government can remove progressive art because it dislikes the politics behind it, a future progressive government can remove conservative art for precisely the same reason. Once that door is opened, everybody eventually discovers that censorship has an appetite.
The greatest danger is not that one sculpture disappears. It is that political leaders become comfortable with the idea that culture should reflect the ruler rather than challenge the public.
Museums, embassies and national cultural institutions should not function as presidential living rooms decorated according to personal taste. They belong to the public. Their walls should contain disagreement, contradiction, beauty, ugliness, tradition, experimentation and occasionally things that make visitors furious.
That is what culture does. The lesson of Nazi Germany is therefore not that every removal of artwork is fascism. It is something more subtle and more important: never allow political power to acquire the habit of deciding what art is acceptable.
Today it may be a painting. Tomorrow it may be a sculpture. Eventually, if nobody objects, the blank wall itself can become the message.
The Sea #Poem by Jan Sand
Let me ride the tail
Of the blue-eyed whale,
Use the ocean for a pillow,
While the cobalt sea
Tosses me
On waves that hiss and billow.
Oh, the world heaves up
And the world falls down
While the waves rise up so high –
From their knife edged tip
Green teeth flip
Diamonds into the sky.
The sapphire wind
Herds ragged clouds
To the line at the end of it all,
While the pale moon floats
Over the wind’s wild goats
With a bounce like a ghostly ball.
Deep down below
Where shadows go
With thick snaky arms and teeth.
Great black things
On leathery wings
Move in waters as deadly as Lethe.
But the top of the sea
Makes me see, makes me free
Where the air stings my throat like a blade.
All the gulls tumble by
Through the eye of the sky
In a circus cavalcade.
The look of the machine by Lakeshia Jenkins
We may be witnessing the birth of an art period without quite knowing what to call it. Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism: each of these labels arrived after artists had already begun producing images that looked unmistakably like one another. Today, something similar is happening inside neural networks. The emerging visual language of generative AI is beginning to look sufficiently distinctive that it deserves to be considered not merely a technology, but an aesthetic period in its own right.
Call it Latent Space Aestheticism. The phrase may sound pretentious, which is precisely why it works. Art history has never been short of grand names for peculiar moments. What matters is that AI-generated imagery is acquiring recurring visual habits: immaculate surfaces, cinematic lighting, strangely perfect faces, atmospheric depth, hyper-controlled colour, elaborate compositions, dreamlike realism and an almost obsessive fondness for the spectacular. Even when prompted toward different subjects, the images often seem to belong to the same extended family.
That family resemblance is important. A neural network does not possess an artistic manifesto. It does not wake up in the morning and decide that dramatic backlighting is having a moment. Yet its internal representations can produce aesthetic characteristics that appear surprisingly coherent. Research has even shown that perturbing neural-network parameters can produce images perceived by humans as artistic renditions, suggesting that aesthetic qualities can emerge from the structure of learned visual representations themselves.
This is where the argument becomes more interesting than the familiar question of whether AI makes “real art”. That question is becoming boring. The more revealing question is: what does AI art look like when nobody tells it what art should look like?
The answer, increasingly, is that it looks like everything we have already taught machines to consider visually desirable. Latent Space Aestheticism is therefore not an aesthetic of originality so much as an aesthetic of statistical memory. The machine has absorbed millions of visual conventions and learned the relationships between them. It knows, in its mathematical fashion, what cinematic looks like, what luxurious looks like, what mysterious looks like and what “epic” is supposed to look like.
And it combines them with terrifying efficiency. The result can be beautiful. It can also be exhausting.
Look at enough AI-generated imagery and a peculiar sameness begins to emerge. The heroic woman standing in impossible atmospheric light. The futuristic city glowing beneath an enormous moon. The medieval castle photographed as though it were advertising a prestige television series. The perfectly weathered astronaut. The melancholy portrait with immaculate skin and strategically placed mist.
The machine has discovered visual clichés and, like a very enthusiastic art student, it cannot stop using them. That may be the great paradox of this emerging period. AI has potentially unlimited capacity for variation, yet its aesthetic tendencies can be remarkably conservative. Recent research into autonomous AI image-generation loops has found precisely this kind of convergence, with systems repeatedly drifting toward a relatively narrow collection of commercially safe visual motifs.
This makes Latent Space Aestheticism both fascinating and slightly sinister. Every artistic movement has constraints. Impressionists had light. Cubists had geometry. Surrealists had dreams. AI has probability. The difference is that the constraint is largely invisible.
We see the finished image, not the enormous statistical landscape behind it. We see a picture; the machine has navigated a multidimensional field of associations, probabilities and learned visual relationships. Recent philosophical work on latent space has consequently argued that these spaces should be understood not simply as technical mechanisms but as structured fields of possibilities that shape what can appear.
That makes the machine's aesthetic fingerprints culturally significant. Perhaps future art historians will look back at our period and recognise something we currently cannot: that the first great AI aesthetic was not defined by the disappearance of style, but by the emergence of machine style.
It will not necessarily be the art of machines replacing artists. More intriguingly, it may be the moment when machines began developing recognisable visual accents. And like every accent, once we notice it, we will never quite be able to unhear it.
CANTO 35 #Thoughts by David Sparenberg
I dreamed we were a swarm of fallen damselflies, floating face down in the water of a gigantic toilet bowl, urinating. The yellow streams of hot, acidic waste were changing the chemical composition of the toilet water. The water began to heat and bubble and eventually boil.
The sides of the toilet bowl were towering walls of thick ice. As the heat of the toxic water increased, portions of the ice walls collapsed.
The bubbling, boiling water gushed and exploded into a raging geyser, spilling out in a torrent, flooding the bathroom floor. We were swept away. All of us were gone.
On August 26, 2026, a monumental geological disaster occurred. A portion of a glacier in the Himalayan Mountains violently collapsed into a lake, sending a colossal flash flood across a sizeable region of Nepal and Tibet.
If you view video recordings of the disaster, the monstrous current of mud and water towers above buildings. Fleeing human beings appear reduced to the scale of ants before the savage, speeding torrent. Images are terrifying, surreal and nearly unimaginable. But the images are real-the reality shatters illusions.
The death count exceeds 900 and continues rising. The missing number in the thousands. Tourist destinations, villages, small towns, and transportation centers have disappeared.
This geo-disaster is not a subjective nightmare. It is not an apocalyptic movie to entertain our morbid apathy. It happened and was a terrifying, deadly reality in itself and a stark warning. Nobody needs to be a prophetic forecaster to tremble at the future of global warming.
Dante’s Inferno is written in 34 cantos. Canto number 35 is an addition to the rungs
of hell, added by the overshoot obsessions of the Technozoic Era – our current age of
machine-domination, total war, and the rapidly advancing tyranny of the artificial state.
Addendum, September 1, 2026: Here in Washington State, nicknamed the Evergreen
State due to our extensive forests, we have had 50+ wildfires this past summer. Thirty
deadwhales have washed up along the coast. As waters of Puget Sound and portions
ofthe Pacific heat up, oxygen levels drop and a variety of dead ocean fishes are coming
ashore along diverse beaches.
There are climate collapse events of floods, fires and prolonged heatwaves happening
globally, increasing in frequency and intensity year after year.
Greta Thunberg warned us that governments, even the best of them, are not doing
enough to combat global warming. In the United States, voters, refusing or unable to
connect the dots of common sense, have returned to the Presidency a criminally
depraved climate denier.
How much more suffering, loss and depletion will be endured before the sufficient
Reason of necessity transitions the planet from the encroaching Earth-Hells of the
technozoic death wish into the woke-gardens of an Ecozoic affirmation and our species
realignmentwith evolutionary purpose? The question is not rhetorical.
David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. Currently David has six eBooks of poetry and prose published by OVI Books, Stockholm, Sweden. He recently completed a play, political and contemporary, but based in the traditions of German Expressionist Theatre, to be published shortly - currently available for production and performance. Interested? Contact. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian Citizen of Creation.
Charity without a conscience by Shanna Shepard
There is something almost painfully absurd about celebrating the International Day of Charity in an age when online scammers have turned generosity into a hunting ground, while governments increasingly treat genuine humanitarian work as an inconvenient expense.
The irony becomes particularly sharp when Donald Trump’s America enters the picture. Charity is supposed to be one of humanity’s simplest ideas: someone has something, someone else desperately needs it, and the first person decides to share. No ideology should be required. No passport should be checked. No political loyalty test should stand between a hungry child and a meal, or between a sick mother and medical care.
Yet the modern world has somehow managed to complicate even that. Online, generosity is constantly ambushed. Fake charities appear after earthquakes, wars, floods and fires. Fraudsters invent suffering because suffering sells. A photograph, a tragic caption and a donation button can be enough to turn compassion into somebody else's cryptocurrency portfolio. The internet has given humanity an extraordinary ability to help strangers—and an equally extraordinary ability to exploit them.
But if online scammers are the petty criminals of compassion, governments can become something more consequential when they decide that humanitarian assistance is expendable.
Trump's administration has dramatically reduced American foreign aid, with U.S. assistance falling sharply and further cuts proposed for humanitarian and global-health programmes. The administration's argument is familiar: America first, taxpayers first, domestic priorities first.
Fine. Governments have budgets. Governments have responsibilities. Nobody seriously argues that every aid programme is perfectly designed or that every dollar is spent intelligently.
But there is a gigantic difference between reforming charity and abandoning it. When aid programmes disappear, the people affected are rarely government ministers. They are usually people who have never heard of Washington's political arguments. They are mothers in clinics, children needing vaccines, refugees sleeping in camps, communities confronting famine, and local organisations trying to provide services that their own governments cannot afford.
That is the uncomfortable truth about charity: the people who need it don't get to vote on whether the billionaire, government or politician providing it has decided that they are sufficiently deserving.
And there is something especially cynical about celebrating compassion while withdrawing the resources that make compassion possible.
The hypocrisy becomes harder to ignore when humanitarian money is reduced while political causes that fit an administration's ideological preferences can still find funding. Recent proposals to direct American money towards conservative organisations and right-wing media initiatives in Europe illustrate how "America First" can become less about stopping foreign spending than about deciding which foreign spending is politically fashionable.
That isn't charity. That is influence dressed up as generosity. Real charity doesn't demand ideological obedience. It doesn't ask whether the hungry person supports your political party. It doesn't care whether the refugee reads the newspaper you like. It doesn't investigate whether the premature baby has the correct opinion about immigration. Compassion is not supposed to be a branch of political marketing.
And this is where International Day of Charity ought to make us uncomfortable rather than merely sentimental. Lighting buildings, posting inspirational quotations and sharing photographs of smiling volunteers is easy. The harder question is whether we are prepared to protect the institutions that actually deliver help and whether we are willing to distinguish legitimate charities from fraudsters without using the existence of scams as an excuse to abandon charity altogether.
Because the answer to fraudulent generosity cannot be less generosity. It should be better generosity. Verify before donating. Demand transparency. Support organisations with credible records. Give locally when appropriate and internationally when necessary. And, above all, remember that charity is not weakness.
It is civilisation. The online scammer understands something politicians sometimes forget: people are willing to give because they care about strangers. Perhaps that is precisely what we should refuse to
The royals need a little Harry and Meghan by Cassandra Sparks
Perhaps Harry and Meghan’s return is precisely what the British public and, rather more awkwardly, the royal family need at this particular moment.
Not because the Sussexes are about to resume royal duties. They are not. Not because the old quarrels have magically evaporated. They have not. And certainly not because Britain is suddenly suffering from a shortage of royal drama. Britain has never had that problem.
But the return of Harry, Meghan and their children to Britain after six years in California changes something important: it puts the family back into the same physical landscape. Archie and Lilibet will grow up with Britain not merely as a story told by their father, but as a place they actually know. Harry can be closer to his father. The royal family can, at least theoretically, become a family again.
That may sound terribly sentimental. It is also rather practical. The monarchy has always depended on an extraordinary mixture of symbolism and ordinary human theatre. The public does not merely watch constitutional functions; it watches families. It watches marriages, children, disagreements, reconciliations, funerals and Christmas lunches. The Windsors have survived precisely because, beneath all the ceremony, they remain recognisably human.
The Sussex rupture damaged that illusion. For years, the royal family has effectively been performing a strange television drama in which two of the principal characters have been written out but never quite disappeared. Harry and Meghan remained everywhere and nowhere: physically in California, emotionally entangled with Britain, permanently present in headlines and absent from family photographs.
Their return could finally end that peculiar arrangement. It does not require Charles to hand them a balcony seat or William to suddenly embrace his brother beneath the cameras. Indeed, that would probably be the worst possible approach. The Sussexes are returning as private citizens, not as a rival royal court. That distinction matters.
The opportunity is therefore much simpler. Let them come home. Let Harry see his father more often. Let his children know their grandfather. Let cousins become cousins rather than characters in competing media narratives. Let William and Harry, eventually and privately, discover whether there remains enough brotherhood beneath the accumulated grievances to have an actual conversation.
And perhaps Britain itself could try something similarly radical: move on. The country has spent an astonishing amount of energy deciding whether Harry and Meghan are victims, villains, opportunists, rebels, traitors, celebrities or misunderstood aristocrats. They are probably, like most married couples, a somewhat less exciting combination of all these things and several others.
Meghan remains deeply polarising. Harry remains deeply complicated. Neither deserves automatic absolution. But neither needs permanent exile from the national conversation—or, more importantly, from his own family.
There is also a delicious irony here. The monarchy's traditional strength has been continuity. Yet its current challenge is relevance. A younger generation wants authenticity, personality and some evidence that the institution understands ordinary human relationships. A family feud conducted through newspapers, documentaries, memoirs and lawyers is hardly an advertisement for emotional maturity.
Harry and Meghan returning to Britain offers the royals an unexpected opportunity: reconciliation without restoration. Nobody needs to pretend that the last six years did not happen. Nobody needs to rewrite history. Nobody needs to surrender.
They simply need to stop treating family life as a constitutional crisis. The palace has mastered pomp. Perhaps now it can master something much harder: forgiveness. And if Harry and Meghan can help remind the Windsors that, before they are a dynasty, they are a family, their return may prove rather more useful than anyone currently expects.
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Me My Mind & I #20: Great Green Lake #Cartoon by Patrick McWade
A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts! 'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade. For more ...
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