The bill comes due by Sabine Fischer

Nepal has brought a very inconvenient truth to the United Nations, the climate bill is arriving, and the people receiving it are often not the people who wrote it.

The catastrophic Bhotekoshi-Trishuli floods and landslides have killed more than 1,400 people, with thousands still missing. Recovery requirements are estimated at roughly a tenth of Nepal’s GDP. Prime Minister Balendra Shah stood before the UN General Assembly and asked the question that comfortable governments would rather keep buried beneath diplomatic language: who pays when a country that contributed almost nothing to the climate crisis is repeatedly forced to pay for its consequences?

Nepal contributes less than 0.1 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet its mountains are becoming more unstable, glaciers are retreating, rivers are becoming less predictable and communities are being forced to rebuild what they have barely finished building.

This is climate injustice stripped of the PowerPoint presentation. For decades, climate politics has been a remarkable exercise in postponement. Governments announce targets. Ministers fly to conferences. Corporations publish glossy sustainability reports. Diplomats negotiate commas in declarations while communities negotiate survival.

Then comes the flood. Then the landslide. Then the funerals. Then the reconstruction loan. And finally, another climate summit where everybody solemnly promises to do better. This is no longer good enough.

Shah's demand for grant-based assistance rather than another mountain of debt deserves attention because there is something grotesquely absurd about financing climate destruction by lending money to those already suffering from it. A poor country loses roads, bridges, homes, farms and energy infrastructure because of a rapidly changing climate and the international response effectively tells it: congratulations, here is your loan.

The climate crisis has created a particularly cruel accounting system. The powerful industrial economies accumulated wealth while burning enormous quantities of fossil fuels. The vulnerable countries are increasingly being handed the repair bill.

And nature, unlike international diplomacy, does not respect borders. The Himalayan disaster crossed from Nepal towards India and affected areas on the other side of the Nepal-China border. Water does not stop at customs posts. Glaciers do not recognise sovereignty. Atmospheric carbon certainly does not carry a passport.

That is why Shah's proposal for greater Himalayan cooperation matters. Satellite information, early-warning systems, glacial-lake monitoring and disaster coordination should not become victims of geopolitical rivalry. If three nuclear-armed neighbours can share mountains but cannot share warnings, then humanity has achieved the extraordinary feat of being technologically advanced and politically primitive at the same time.

But climate justice must become more than another beautiful phrase in a UN speech. The Loss and Damage Fund and other climate-finance mechanisms cannot function as bureaucratic waiting rooms while people are buried under mud. Money must arrive before reconstruction becomes another generation of poverty. Adaptation must be financed before disaster, not compassionately after the television cameras have left.

And perhaps the most important point is this: Nepal is not asking the world to rescue it from nature. It is asking the world to recognise responsibility. There is a difference.

The Himalayas are not simply Nepal's problem. They are part of Asia's water system, supporting hundreds of millions of people. What happens there will eventually travel downstream, through agriculture, electricity, migration, food prices and political instability.

The flood is therefore not merely Nepal's tragedy. It is a warning delivered in water, mud and corpses. The question is whether the world will finally listen or wait for the next mountain to collapse before discovering that climate justice was never supposed to be charity. It was supposed to be responsibility.

The Moroccan warning by Solomon Mensah

Morocco has counted its votes and the arithmetic is remarkably clear even if the politics behind the numbers are considerably less comfortable. The Authenticity and Modernity Party, PAM, has emerged as the largest force in the new 395-seat House of Representatives with 97 seats. The National Rally of Independents follows with 66, Istiqlal with 65 and the Justice and Development Party with 54. The final figures confirmed by the Interior Ministry were unchanged from the preliminary results.

But 97 seats is not a mandate to rule alone. It is 97 seats in a parliament where fragmentation remains the political language. And that may be the most interesting message of this election. Because elections are not merely about who wins. Sometimes they are about who bothers to participate. Only about 38 percent of registered voters turned out. That is a brutal number for any political system that wants to present itself as a vibrant democratic conversation. Turnout had been 50.86 percent in 2021 and 42.27 percent in 2016. The decline is therefore not a statistical footnote; it is part of the story.

A parliament can be perfectly legitimate under the law and still confront a more uncomfortable question outside the law: how many citizens actually believe it matters?

That is the question Morocco's political establishment should be asking. PAM's victory is particularly significant because the party was created in 2008 by a figure close to the royal palace and has long been regarded as a political counterweight to the Islamist Justice and Development Party. Its rise therefore cannot simply be read as an ordinary European-style alternation between left and right, government and opposition. Morocco's political architecture is different, with the monarchy retaining a central role in national decision-making.

That makes the election's mathematics almost more interesting than its winner. PAM needs partners. Everybody needs partners. RNI, which dominated the outgoing governing arrangement, has been pushed into second place. Istiqlal is almost tied with it. And PJD, after collapsing to only 13 seats in 2021, has returned with 54.

That comeback should not be ignored. It demonstrates that political parties do not die merely because commentators declare them dead. Voters can bury a party one election and resurrect it the next. Politics has an irritating habit of refusing to follow the funeral arrangements.

And perhaps this is where Morocco's new parliament becomes genuinely interesting. The country is simultaneously presenting itself as a modernising economy, a regional power, a major investment destination and an increasingly important diplomatic actor while wrestling with problems that cannot be solved by glossy development statistics. Youth unemployment reached 37 percent in 2025, while concerns over jobs, wages, housing, education and healthcare remain central among younger Moroccans.

There is the Morocco of new infrastructure, foreign investment, tourism, football stadiums and preparations for the 2030 World Cup. And then there is the Morocco of the young person who cannot find a decent job. Those two Moroccos cannot be kept in separate rooms forever.

The government can build highways. It can attract factories. It can sell Morocco as a gateway between Africa and Europe. It can celebrate economic growth and international recognition. But eventually the citizen asks the most primitive question in politics: what does any of this do for me?

That question is particularly dangerous when nearly two-thirds of registered voters stay away from the ballot box. The Moroccan authorities emphasise that the election was conducted under normal conditions, with thousands of observers and mechanisms designed to protect the electoral process. The Interior Ministry reported 3,006 observers, including civil-society, national human-rights and foreign observers.

Those safeguards matter. But democracy is not merely the absence of ballot-box fraud. Democracy is also the presence of political belief. A citizen who votes because she believes her vote can change something is participating in democracy. A citizen who stays home because every party appears to be another variation of the same political furniture is expressing something too.

Silence has political meaning. The new Moroccan parliament therefore inherits something considerably heavier than a coalition puzzle. It inherits a credibility problem.

PAM may have won the numbers. The real challenge is winning attention, trust and participation. And those cannot be counted by the Interior Ministry. They have to be earned.

Morocco has built much of its modern political identity around stability. That stability has real value in a turbulent region. But stability without political renewal can eventually become stagnation, while political competition without public participation becomes theatre.

The danger is not that Morocco has too many political parties. The danger is that too many citizens may conclude that none of them matter. That is the warning hidden inside those 97 seats. The ballots have been counted. Now Morocco has to convince the people who stayed home that the next ballot is worth casting.

Scarcity returns by Jo Anne Kamansky

For a brief, glorious moment, the art world convinced itself that ownership had become a file format. The NFT boom promised to liberate art from the tiresome physical world. No canvas, no gallery wall, no auction-room velvet rope: just a token on a blockchain, certifying that somebody owned the “original” of an image that could still be copied, downloaded and displayed by millions. It was an extraordinary technological achievement wrapped around an increasingly strange cultural proposition.

Then the market sobered up. The collapse of NFT speculation did not kill digital art. It killed something more interesting: the fantasy that digital art needed artificial scarcity to become culturally valuable. The great lesson of the post-NFT era is almost the opposite. Digital artists are increasingly discovering that the most compelling thing about their work may be precisely what NFTs tried to escape, the physical object.

This is not a return to nostalgia. It is a rejection of the idea that technological novelty automatically produces artistic progress. For centuries, scarcity was built into art. A painting occupied one wall. A sculpture occupied one room. A print had an edition. Even a photograph, theoretically reproducible, acquired value through the history of its negatives, paper, printing process and provenance. The physical world imposed limits, and artists learned to turn those limits into meaning.

Digital technology removed many of those limits. That was its revolutionary strength. But the art market, predictably, panicked. If something could be copied infinitely, how could it be sold as an object of prestige?

The NFT answer was ingenious and absurd: create scarcity around something that was intrinsically abundant. It worked until people stopped believing it. What comes after the NFT experiment is more interesting. Digital artists are beginning to treat the screen not as the final destination but as part of a larger artistic ecosystem. Digital works become installations, projections, printed editions, sculptural objects, books, physical archives and hybrid experiences. The code remains important, but the object returns.

And perhaps that is because humans remain stubbornly physical creatures. We still want to stand before something. We want scale, texture, imperfection and presence. We want to see how light falls across a surface rather than merely adjust the brightness of a screen. We want the strange intimacy of knowing that an artist touched the thing hanging on our wall.

This does not mean digital art has failed. Quite the opposite. It has finally escaped the burden of pretending to be a financial instrument.

The post-NFT artist can say: here is the digital work; here is its physical manifestation; here is the process; here is the edition; here is the history. Scarcity becomes meaningful again because it belongs to the artwork rather than being imposed by a speculative marketplace.

There is also a useful cultural correction here. Art does not become important because a blockchain says it is unique. It becomes important because somebody, somewhere, eventually cares enough to preserve it.

The irony is delicious. Technology spent years promising to make the physical original irrelevant, only to discover that the original was never merely about ownership. It was about presence. The digital revolution did not kill the original. It reminded us why we missed it.

Trekking Chat #016 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

They trek across surreal cartoon streets, armed with quirky sarcasm
and boundless humor. They map uncharted valleys, befriend bizarre creatures
and find the real adventure in their square frames.

For more Trekking Chat, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The quiet north by Robert Perez

For decades, the Western world treated the United States not merely as its leader but as the load-bearing wall of the entire house. Europe could argue, Canada could prosper quietly, Japan could innovate, Australia could follow the strategic weather, and smaller democracies could sleep reasonably well because Washington was assumed to be awake.

That assumption is becoming harder to sustain. And somewhere north of the American border, Canada has been rising almost apologetically. This is not the dramatic rise of a superpower. Canada is not assembling an empire, building aircraft carriers by the dozen or announcing a Canadian century. Its rise is quieter and, precisely because of that, potentially more consequential. Canada possesses what the West increasingly needs: political stability, natural resources, educated populations, enormous territory, Arctic access, sophisticated institutions and a deep familiarity with both European and American political cultures.

It has something else that cannot be manufactured overnight: trust. For generations, Canada was the sensible neighbour. The country with the maple leaf, universal healthcare and a reputation for apologising even when somebody else had walked into its door. That image was never entirely fair, but it concealed a more serious strategic reality. Canada sits on immense reserves of energy, minerals, freshwater, agricultural land and critical resources while sharing the world's most commercially important border with the United States.

Now geography is becoming destiny again. A post-USA world does not necessarily mean an anti-American world. It means a Western system in which Washington is no longer automatically assumed to pay the bill, provide the security umbrella, arbitrate every crisis and ultimately rescue everyone from their own strategic laziness.

That distinction matters. Europe has spent decades talking about strategic autonomy while periodically discovering that autonomy is considerably more expensive than speeches about it. NATO made European security easier; American power made it cheaper. The result was politically convenient and strategically addictive.

Canada offers a different possibility: not replacing America, but helping prevent the West from collapsing whenever America turns inward.

Yet Canada cannot simply inherit Washington's chair. Its economy is deeply intertwined with the United States, and its security architecture has been built around that relationship. Ottawa therefore faces the delicate task of becoming more independent without becoming hostile to its largest neighbour. That is less a revolution than an exercise in geopolitical balancing.

Europe faces an even more uncomfortable question. What happens when the West is no longer a pyramid with Washington at the top? Perhaps the answer is not another pyramid. Perhaps it is a network.

Canada, Europe, Britain, Japan, Australia, South Korea and other democratic partners could increasingly share responsibilities that were once disproportionately carried by the United States. Canada could become particularly important because it connects several strategic worlds at once: North America, the Atlantic, the Arctic and the Pacific.

The Arctic alone should destroy the old habit of thinking of Canada as America's polite northern appendix. Climate change is transforming the region into a strategic frontier, bringing resources, shipping routes and military calculations into sharper focus.

But Canada's greatest contribution may be psychological. The West needs to learn how to function without assuming that American leadership is permanent.

That is not an insult to America. It is an admission that countries mature, alliances evolve and history occasionally changes the furniture while everyone is still sitting in the room.

Canada's rise is therefore less about replacing the United States than exposing an uncomfortable weakness in the rest of the West: too many countries built their strategic imagination around the assumption that somebody else would always be there.

The maple leaf is not replacing the stars and stripes. It may simply be reminding the West that there are other flags on the table. And perhaps the real question is no longer whether Canada is ready for a bigger role. It is whether the rest of the West is ready to grow up.

It's So Quiet #Poem by Strider Marcus Jones

it's so quiet
our eloquent words dying on a diet
of midnight toast
with Orwell's ghost-
looking so tubercular in a tweed jacket
pencilling notes on a lung black cigarette packet-
our Winston, wronged for a woman and sin
re-wrote history on scrolls thought down tubes
that came to him
in the Ministry of Truth of Fools
where conscience learns to lie within.
not like today
the smug-sly haves say and look away
so sure
there's nothing wrong with wanting more,
or drown their sorrows
downing bootleg gin
knowing tomorrows
truth is paper thin

at home
in sensory
perception
with tapped and tracked phone
the Thought Police arrest me
in the corridors of affection-
where dictators wear, red then blue, reversible coats
in collapsing houses, all self-made
and self-paid
smarmy scrotes-
now the Round Table
of real red politics
is only fable
on the pyre of ghostly heretics.
they are rubbing out
all the contusions
and solitary doubt,
with confusions
and illusions
through wired media
defined in their secret encyclopaedia-
where summit and boardroom and conclave
engineer us from birth to grave.
like the birds,
i will have to eat
the firethorn
berries that ripen but sleep
to keep
the words
of revolution
alive and warm
this winter, with resolution
gathering us, to its lantern in the bleak,
to be reborn and speak.

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Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x4 and Best of the Net x3, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.

Zero hour by Flo Schofield

On Sept. 26, the world marks the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons, an annual ritual of hope in a world that has become remarkably good at postponing catastrophe. We speak about disarmament, repeat the vocabulary of peace and then return to the machinery of deterrence, modernisation and geopolitical brinkmanship. The contradiction is almost too large to comprehend: humanity has built weapons capable of ending civilisation and then persuaded itself that possessing them is responsible behaviour.

Imagine the clock. It is seconds before midnight. Not metaphorically. Not as a warning in a policy paper or a headline after another crisis, but on the night when the nuclear disaster clock actually reaches zero. There is no dramatic soundtrack. No cinematic countdown heard around the world. There is simply a command, a malfunction, a miscalculation or a decision made by someone convinced that history will reward courage.

And then there is no history. That is the uncomfortable truth beneath nuclear deterrence. Its success depends not merely on rational leaders but on rational leaders remaining rational indefinitely. It depends on perfect communication, reliable technology, accurate intelligence, disciplined militaries and the assumption that nobody will ever make a catastrophic mistake. Human civilisation has never demonstrated such a record of perfection.

Yet nuclear weapons remain embedded in the architecture of international power. Governments modernise arsenals while insisting they have no desire to use them. Military planners develop increasingly sophisticated systems while politicians assure citizens that these weapons exist precisely so they never have to be fired. The logic resembles keeping a loaded gun on the dining table because everyone promises to behave.

The most frightening part is not that nuclear war is imaginable. It is that nuclear war has become normalised.

Generations have grown accustomed to missile tests, nuclear threats and leaders casually invoking escalation. Words that once belonged to the vocabulary of apocalypse have become part of ordinary political theatre. The extraordinary has become background noise.

That should worry us more than any particular missile. The total elimination of nuclear weapons is often dismissed as naïve, especially in a world where trust between major powers is deteriorating. But perhaps the naïve position is believing that a permanent nuclear balance can survive permanent human imperfection. Deterrence is not a law of physics. It is an arrangement maintained by people, institutions and assumptions. Those things fail.

The International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons therefore should not be another ceremonial exercise in diplomatic language. It should be a reminder that the objective is not to manage the apocalypse more efficiently. It is to remove the possibility of the apocalypse being triggered by human hands.

The clock has always been ours. So are the hands moving it forward. And if one day they reach zero, there will be nobody left to congratulate ourselves on how successfully we managed the risk.

Absurdity Woke 26#013 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Our top story; common sense has left the frame, the inmates are running the asylum
and the asylum is now identifying as a luxury resort. This is Absurdity Woke.

For more Absurdity Woke, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Carpond #021 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

For more Carpond, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Who gets to be Turkish? By Fahad Kline

There is a dangerous question hanging over modern Turkey and it is not whether President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has supporters. Of course he does. The more uncomfortable question is whether citizenship still means having rights when you do not support the president.

A democracy is supposed to make disagreement ordinary. In Erdoğan’s Turkey, disagreement increasingly looks like a security problem.

The distinction matters. A government can defeat an opponent at the ballot box, criticise a newspaper, prosecute a politician or defend a controversial law. But when courts, prosecutors, police, regulators and administrative authorities repeatedly become instruments through which political opposition is constrained, citizenship begins to acquire conditions.

The experience of Ekrem İmamoğlu has become emblematic. The Istanbul mayor and Erdoğan’s principal political challenger has spent prolonged periods in detention while facing extensive legal proceedings. Human Rights Watch has described the broader campaign against the Republican People’s Party as threatening political association and meaningful electoral competition.

This is where the argument becomes larger than one politician. What happens to the student who protests? The journalist who investigates? The lawyer who represents an inconvenient defendant? The mayor who belongs to the wrong party? The citizen who refuses to applaud? What happens to the Kurdish activist, the secularist, the feminist, the LGBTQ+ demonstrator or simply the Turkish citizen who thinks the government is wrong?

The answer increasingly seems to be: first prove that your disagreement is not a crime. That is an extraordinary reversal of democratic logic. In a healthy democracy, the government must justify restrictions on citizens. In an increasingly authoritarian political system, citizens find themselves having to justify their innocence to the government.

The machinery is familiar. Protest becomes “public disorder”. Journalism becomes “misinformation”. Political criticism becomes “insult”. Opposition becomes suspicious association. Human-rights advocacy can become a legal liability. Amnesty International has documented intensified prosecutions and detentions involving journalists, opposition politicians, lawyers and human-rights defenders, alongside restrictions on peaceful assembly and association.

And then there is the press. A country does not need to formally abolish newspapers to destroy press freedom. It can make critical journalism financially dangerous, legally hazardous and professionally exhausting. It can fine broadcasters, prosecute reporters, restrict platforms and frighten editors until self-censorship does the government's work for it. Reports on Turkey describe extensive pressure on independent and opposition media and prosecutions of journalists for criticism of the government.

The genius of authoritarianism is often not that it silences everybody. It is that it teaches everybody to calculate the price of speaking. And yet Erdoğan's supporters have rights. That is precisely the point.

Their freedom to organise, vote, demonstrate and express political loyalty should be protected just as fiercely as the freedoms of his opponents. Democracy is not supposed to punish people for supporting the government. Nor is it supposed to punish them for opposing it.

The problem begins when political loyalty becomes an unofficial passport to full citizenship. Turkey is not a country without elections, opposition parties or citizens capable of resisting political pressure. It is more complicated and therefore more troubling than that. Millions of Turks continue to contest power, protest, publish, organise and vote. The question is whether the institutions around them will permit those rights to mean what they are supposed to mean.

A state does not prove its democratic character by protecting the people who agree with it. It proves it by protecting the people who do not. That is the uncomfortable test facing Erdoğan's Turkey. Not whether Erdoğan can command loyalty, but whether a Turkish citizen can look at the president and say, “I disagree with you,” without first wondering whether the state will come looking for him.

The oil spoils by Timothy Davies

There is something revealing about the language surrounding Venezuela’s oil. It is presented as a deal, an agreement, an opportunity for reconstruction, even a triumph of American energy policy. But strip away the diplomatic wrapping and a simpler picture emerges: pressure was applied, power was displayed, and suddenly the world’s largest proven oil reserves became considerably more accessible to the power applying the pressure.

That is not how imperialism used to announce itself. There were flags, occupations and governors in colonial uniforms. The modern version arrives with contracts, investment packages, sanctions waivers and the reassuring vocabulary of “partnership”.

Washington’s policy toward Venezuela has undergone a remarkable transformation. After years of sanctions and economic pressure, the Trump administration has moved towards opening Venezuela’s oil sector to American business and securing extensive American access to its reserves. In August, Trump announced an agreement involving 65 billion barrels of proven reserves and described it as the biggest oil deal in history. The administration portrays the arrangement as beneficial to both countries.

Perhaps it will benefit Venezuela eventually. A devastated oil industry desperately needs investment, technology, infrastructure and competent management. Venezuelans need jobs, functioning refineries and an economy capable of producing something other than political slogans. But the question is not whether Venezuela needs investment. It is how that investment was obtained, who controls the resulting wealth and who possesses the leverage to determine the terms.

That distinction matters. For years Washington used Venezuela's oil industry as an instrument of economic pressure. Now the same resource has become an instrument of economic opportunity, for American companies and American strategic interests. Sanctions are eased, contracts become possible, oil begins moving more freely and companies rush towards the Orinoco Belt. ExxonMobil is reportedly considering a return; Continental Resources has already signed a memorandum concerning an oil block.

There is an almost comic symmetry here. Venezuela was told that its government was unacceptable. Its economy was squeezed. Its oil exports were restricted. Then, when the political circumstances changed, the door opened and the oil industry suddenly became an attractive investment destination.

The oil, apparently, had not become more democratic. It had simply become more accessible. This is where the rhetoric of “America First” becomes particularly revealing. Energy security is a legitimate national interest. So is encouraging American companies to invest abroad. But when military power, diplomatic pressure, sanctions policy and commercial access begin operating in the same direction, the distinction between foreign policy and commercial extraction becomes dangerously thin.

Venezuela should not be expected to surrender its natural wealth merely because it has been politically weakened. Nor should Washington pretend that enormous economic privileges acquired after extraordinary pressure constitute an ordinary commercial transaction.

There is another danger. If Venezuelan oil becomes the prize at the end of intimidation, other governments will draw their own conclusions. The message will not be subtle: resist Washington and pay a price; accommodate Washington and your resources suddenly become negotiable.

That is not a sustainable international order. It is a hierarchy dressed as a marketplace. Venezuela deserves reconstruction. Its people deserve the benefits of their oil. American businesses deserve the opportunity to invest. But none of those propositions requires the powerful to confuse leverage with ownership.

Oil beneath Venezuelan soil belongs first to Venezuela. If prosperity follows, it should be because Venezuelans have gained a functioning economy, not because the bully discovered that intimidation comes with an exceptionally profitable receipt.