The cloud has a floor by Jiro Lambert

We speak about “the cloud” as though our data has escaped the physical world and floated into some weightless digital heaven. Photos, emails, bank records, films, medical files and the accumulated debris of modern life are said to be “in the cloud”. The phrase is wonderfully convenient and almost completely misleading.

There is no cloud. There are buildings, cables, cooling systems, electricity grids, processors, storage devices and an astonishing quantity of machinery. What we call cloud storage is not an ethereal place but a vast physical infrastructure distributed across the planet. Your holiday photograph may feel weightless when summoned from a phone, but somewhere it exists as a pattern of electrical states inside physical storage hardware. The photograph has not ceased to be matter. It has merely become extraordinarily easy to move.

This distinction matters because we have allowed the language of technology to obscure its material consequences. Digital data is best understood as information represented physically. A file is not a little object sitting inside a computer like a document in a filing cabinet. It is a pattern encoded in changing physical states electrical charges, magnetic orientations, microscopic structures or other forms of measurable difference. The software interprets those differences as words, photographs, music or spreadsheets.

So is data an object? Not quite. The storage medium is physical; the information represented by that medium is more elusive. It resembles a pattern rather than a thing. A book is physical, but its meaning is not identical to the ink and paper. Burn the book and the particular copy disappears, yet the words may survive in another copy. Digital information behaves similarly, except that copying can be almost instantaneous and virtually perfect.

Nor is data simply a process. Processes move, transform and interpret information, while storage preserves a particular physical representation of it. The cloud is therefore better understood as a system: information encoded in physical devices, maintained by machines, transported through networks and interpreted by software.

That system is remarkably impressive and remarkably hungry. Every supposedly invisible photograph requires infrastructure. Every streamed film requires data centres and communications networks. Every artificial-intelligence query requires computation somewhere. Servers need electricity; electricity produces heat; heat requires cooling. Buildings need land, equipment needs manufacturing, and hardware eventually becomes waste.

The great trick of the phrase “cloud” is therefore psychological. It makes infrastructure disappear.

This is not merely a semantic complaint. When something appears immaterial, we are less inclined to ask who owns it, where it is stored, how much energy it consumes, what happens when the machinery fails, or what legal authority governs it. “The cloud” sounds almost natural, like weather. In reality, it is an industrial achievement on a planetary scale.

And yet there is something genuinely strange about digital information. Unlike an ordinary physical object, it can be copied without the original being diminished. Move a photograph across the world and the photograph remains. Duplicate a file a million times and the information itself does not become thinner.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor persists. Digital data feels almost supernatural because it occupies an unusual territory between object and idea.

But the next time someone says your data is “in the cloud”, imagine the servers humming in the dark. The cloud has a floor. And it is made of metal, silicon, cables, concrete and electricity.

Humanitarianism in the age of the billionaire by Shanna Shepard

World Humanitarian Day arrives each year with the uncomfortable timing of an alarm clock nobody wants to hear. On 19 August, the world pauses to honour those who carry food into war zones, rescue children from rubble, treat the wounded and remain beside communities after the television cameras have moved on. It is a noble occasion. It is also an increasingly damning indictment of the world that requires such people in the first place.

Humanitarian workers are asked to perform miracles in places where governments, armies and international institutions have failed catastrophically. They enter Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar and countless forgotten crises carrying medicine rather than weapons, compassion rather than ideology. Increasingly, they do so at enormous personal risk. The very people trying to preserve human life are becoming targets in wars where the distinction between civilian and combatant is treated as an inconvenience.

And then there is the extraordinary spectacle of our age: the humanitarian crisis on one side of the planet, the billionaire spectacle on the other.

We live in a world capable of producing private fortunes so enormous that a single individual can accumulate wealth beyond the annual budgets of entire countries. Billionaires can spend fortunes on rockets, superyachts, private islands, vanity projects and the technological equivalent of medieval castles while humanitarian agencies struggle to finance food, shelter, vaccines and clean water.

There is something morally grotesque about this contrast. This is not an argument against wealth, entrepreneurship or technological ambition. It is an argument against a civilisation that has somehow decided that sending a billionaire into space is easier than ensuring a child on Earth has enough to eat.

The defenders of this system will insist that billionaires are not responsible for the world's wars. Fair enough. But responsibility is not confined to pulling a trigger. It also concerns what societies choose to value, reward and tolerate.

We have created an economic culture in which extraordinary accumulation is celebrated as evidence of genius, while humanitarian need is treated as an unfortunate expense. Governments announce vast military budgets with remarkable speed, yet humanitarian appeals are routinely underfunded. The weapons arrive. The food trucks wait.

That is not simply an economic contradiction. It is a political choice. Humanitarianism therefore deserves more than applause. It deserves anger. Anger at governments that invoke international law when convenient and ignore it when inconvenient. Anger at leaders who speak grandly about human dignity while civilians become statistics. Anger at wealthy societies that can mobilise billions for destruction but plead poverty when asked to finance survival.

Most importantly, World Humanitarian Day should remind us that humanitarian workers are not the solution to humanity's failures. They are the people trying to clean up after them.

The ultimate humanitarian achievement would be a world in which fewer people need humanitarian assistance.

Until then, we should honour those who enter the fire. But perhaps we should spend rather less time praising their courage and rather more time asking why we keep setting the world ablaze.

#eBook Dissociative identity disorder by Julia A. Girard

 

Adam woke to the sound of a door creaking. It was faint at first, like the whisper of an old hinge fighting against the weight of silence. His eyes blinked open, adjusting to the dim light of his bedroom.

Shadows stretched across the walls, long and twisted. The room felt strange. As if the air itself had thickened, pressing in on him. A suffocating stillness filled the space, so heavy that it made his breath feel shallow.

His heart was racing, thudding against his chest like something trying to claw its way out. He could almost hear it, a hollow drumbeat pounding in his ears. Sweat pooled at the back of his neck, his skin clammy.

"Not again," Adam whispered, half to himself, half to the darkness that seemed to choke the air around him.

Julia A. Girard is a writer who'd rather be caught dead than serious. Her stories and books are a delightful blend of witty observations, quirky characters, and laugh-out-scary moments that will have you hooked from the first page.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Dissociative identity disorder

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Puppi & Caesar #50 #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!  

For more Puppi & Caesar, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The war we forgot by Brea Willis

There is something revealing about the way modern governments prepare for catastrophe. They spend fortunes rehearsing wars that may never happen while quietly neglecting disasters that almost certainly will.

The distinction is politically convenient. War has uniforms, maps, enemies and ceremonies. It produces budgets with impressive names: missiles, drones, submarines, command systems. Earthquakes, floods, fires and landslides have none of these. They arrive without passports, ideology or diplomatic warning. They simply interrupt the morning.

Colombia’s earthquake is a brutal reminder of this asymmetry. A powerful tremor struck western Colombia on August 10, turning buildings into traps and exposing the fragile distance between a functioning society and a humanitarian emergency. Rescue workers now confront rubble, damaged infrastructure, disrupted communications and communities that cannot wait patiently for bureaucracy to catch up.

The uncomfortable lesson is not that earthquakes are unpredictable. It is that their consequences are often remarkably predictable. We know which buildings are vulnerable. We know that hospitals need backup power that communications fail, that roads can become useless, that water systems break, that emergency services become overwhelmed and that poor communities suffer first and longest. We know, too, that the first hours matter enormously. Yet preparedness remains the sort of policy that politicians praise after a disaster and postpone before one.

There is a reason for this. Prevention is politically invisible. A reinforced bridge does not make a dramatic television image. A school that does not collapse is not celebrated as a political triumph. Money spent strengthening hospitals, training volunteers or maintaining emergency stockpiles produces no ribbon-cutting spectacle comparable with a new military aircraft.

But the arithmetic of national security is changing. Security should not mean merely protecting a country from hostile governments. It should mean protecting citizens from whatever can destroy the functioning of their society.

A city without water is insecure. A hospital without electricity is insecure. A communications network that collapses during a crisis is insecure. A government unable to distribute food after a flood is insecure. These are not softer versions of defence. They are defence.

The obsession with hypothetical enemies has also encouraged a dangerous illusion: that sophisticated states can engineer their way out of vulnerability. They cannot. Technology can detect, warn, model and coordinate. It cannot repeal geology. Nor can artificial intelligence persuade a badly constructed building to remain standing.

The sensible response is not to abandon military preparedness. Nations need armies, deterrence and resilient defence. But resilience should be treated as one system rather than two competing worlds. The engineer reinforcing a hospital and the soldier protecting its emergency generator are working on the same problem: keeping society alive when normality disappears.

Colombia should therefore be understood not as an isolated tragedy but as a warning about priorities. The next great disaster may be an earthquake, a flood, a wildfire, a volcanic eruption or something we have not named. Nature does not consult strategic planners. It does not care whether a government is conservative or progressive, rich or poor, popular or exhausted. The tectonic plate has no interest in polling numbers, parliamentary majorities or election calendars. It simply waits, then moves without permission.

We keep preparing for the war we fear and postponing the disaster we know will come. That is not prudence. It is procrastination wearing a uniform.

This Concert Of Contours #Poem by Strider Marcus Jones

 

ear nibbles
neck kisses
sex ripples
mouth wishes
to arms and legs
with minds and heads
is a body ballet
of rock and sway.
this concert
of contours
that squirts
mine and yours
is never too far away
from broken loneliness to play.
your beauty's blushes
colour in my years
and time's rushes
are hands that paint like soft brushes
so unwanted darkness disappears.

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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.

The outfit that refuses to die by Marissa Washington

Fashion has always loved reinvention, but TikTok has turned reinvention into an industrial process. One week you are a Tomato Girl, radiating Mediterranean summer fantasies in linen and red; the next you are dressing for Corpcore, apparently on your way to fire somebody in a glass office tower. Then comes balletcore, coastal grandmother, mob wife, office siren, quiet luxury and whatever freshly minted “core” is waiting around the algorithmic corner.

The problem is not that these aesthetics are silly. Fashion has always been a little silly. The problem is that they are arriving and disappearing so quickly that dressing oneself increasingly resembles maintaining a subscription service. TikTok has compressed fashion cycles to the point where an outfit can become passé before it has even survived a wash.

And this is producing an intriguing rebellion; people are repeating their clothes on purpose. Radical outfit repeating may be the most quietly subversive fashion movement of the moment.

For decades, repeating an outfit could carry a faint social stigma. Celebrities were expected to appear in something new. Influencers built entire careers around the implication that there was always another parcel arriving. Fashion's traditional message was simple: novelty equals relevance.

TikTok has taken that message and multiplied it until it becomes absurd. If every aesthetic has a shelf life shorter than a carton of milk, then constantly participating becomes exhausting and expensive. The Tomato Girl needs the linen dress. Corpcore requires the pencil skirt. Balletcore wants the wrap cardigan. Suddenly a perfectly good wardrobe has become a graveyard of former identities.

The natural response is not necessarily to buy better. It is to buy less. Outfit repeating therefore becomes more than thriftiness. It becomes refusal. There is something wonderfully insolent about wearing the same jacket three days apart when the internet insists that your followers require a new personality every morning. The repeated garment says: I liked this yesterday. I still like it today. Deal with it.

More importantly, repetition restores something fashion has been losing, personal style. A genuine personal style is supposed to emerge from familiarity. You wear the same boots until they acquire your walk. You discover that one jacket works with almost everything. You learn that a particular pair of trousers makes you feel confident. Clothes become part of a biography rather than disposable props in a content strategy.

The irony is delicious. TikTok has made aesthetics more powerful than ever while simultaneously making many people suspicious of aesthetics altogether. When every look comes with a name, a shopping list and an expiration date, refusing the name becomes liberating.

The fashion industry, naturally, will try to monetise this rebellion. There will be “capsule wardrobe” trends, “rewear” influencers and probably a $300 cardigan marketed as an act of anti-consumerist resistance. Capitalism is remarkably talented at selling people the means of escaping capitalism.

But the impulse itself is real. Perhaps the next great fashion statement is not looking like the newest aesthetic. Perhaps it is looking unmistakably like yourself and wearing the same thing often enough that nobody can mistake it for a trend. The ultimate luxury may be owning an outfit that does not need replacing simply because TikTok has found something else to talk about.

2nd opinion! 26#14 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Seriously, a human hater self-centred agoraphobic in quarantine!
I think you’ll need a second opinion after this.

For more 2nd opinion, quarantined!, HERE!
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The skepticism trap by Jennifer Stephenson

Modern conspiracy theorists like to imagine themselves as the last adults in the room. While everyone else is supposedly swallowing official narratives, they are asking questions, connecting dots and refusing to believe what they are told. There is something flattering about this self-image. It is also profoundly misleading.

The problem with much contemporary conspiracy thinking is not an absence of scepticism. It is scepticism with the brakes removed.

Healthy scepticism asks: What is the evidence? What would prove me wrong? How reliable is the source? Are there simpler explanations? Toxic scepticism asks only: What if they are lying? The first is an intellectual method. The second is an attitude and attitudes are remarkably good at disguising themselves as intelligence.

The conspiracy theorist begins with suspicion and then treats suspicion as evidence. An unexplained event becomes proof of concealment. A contradiction becomes proof of deception. Missing information becomes proof that something is being hidden. And when evidence appears to contradict the theory, that evidence is absorbed into the theory itself. The more vigorously authorities deny it, the more convinced the believer becomes that the authorities must be involved.

This is not critical thinking. It is a closed circuit. There is, of course, a legitimate reason to distrust institutions. Governments lie. Corporations conceal wrongdoing. Intelligence agencies conduct secret operations. Powerful people collude. History is littered with genuine conspiracies. Scepticism is therefore not merely permissible; it is indispensable to a functioning democracy.

But precisely because conspiracies sometimes happen, the existence of one possible conspiracy cannot become a licence to believe every conceivable one. The great trick of conspiratorial thinking is that it converts uncertainty into certainty. Reality is messy, accidental and frequently boring. Institutions make mistakes. Bureaucracies contradict themselves. Politicians say stupid things. Scientists revise conclusions. Newspapers get stories wrong. Markets behave irrationally. Human beings are chaotic creatures.

The conspiracy offers something much tidier: somebody did it. That simplicity is intoxicating. Social media has turned this intellectual bad habit into an industrial product. Every coincidence can be assembled into a thread; every anonymous account can become an insider; every photograph can acquire a sinister caption. Algorithms reward emotional certainty, not intellectual humility. The result is a strange new hierarchy in which knowing less can produce greater confidence.

And confidence is increasingly mistaken for courage. The genuine sceptic must possess an unfashionable quality: the willingness to be disappointed. If the evidence destroys a cherished suspicion, the sceptic changes his mind. The conspiracist changes the explanation.

This distinction matters enormously. A person who questions authority can strengthen democracy. A person who regards every authority as inherently fraudulent eventually destroys the possibility of shared knowledge altogether.

The irony is delicious. Conspiracy theorists often accuse everyone else of being sheep. Yet they can become remarkably obedient to the narrative of their own tribe, repeating its vocabulary, accepting its authorities and dismissing outsiders without examination.

Critical thinking is not believing the opposite of what you are told. It is having no predetermined opposite. That is the harder discipline and the one modern conspiracy culture desperately needs.

Fortune cookie #Poem by Abigail George

 

Today I write about forgiveness, about having a forgiving heart

My mother
has turned into
a fire hydrant

She waters
the garden
with a boomslang
in her hand

Charles Bukowski
watches her
His eyes, two brown cells

He smiles at my mother, the fire hydrant
But she just ignores him
as if he isn’t standing there

He dips
a rusk
into the tea

There’s a tiny earthquake in the cup
Waves across the saucer

The tea spills into the verdant-green silence
Its perfume

The sound of the hosepipe, water gushing
out of it
Birdsong

We’re all free now, says Chris Hani
Bukowski nods

I don’t agree
But I don’t say anything

George Botha
and Stephen Bantu Biko
play a game of chess

If philosophy is medicine, what is poetry?
Albert Camus remarks

Frantz Fanon
turns his head
in the direction
of the cacti and says,

Philosophy is philosophy is philosophy
Fanon, who am I to disagree, says Camus

There’s a knock
at the front door

It’s another pilgrim
on a spiritual mission

They want to meet
The other pilgrims present

I make more tea
Bukowski says
that he wishes
he had been happier

I remark, how well I know that feeling

Anna Akhmatova
and I spoke about the men
that we had loved and adored,
and the men who had left us
We spoke about the women we became
as we lost our innocence
as we grew older
and the springtime
of our youth
faded away

Petya Dubarova is quiet
You’re a rebel, Hani says
She’s a poetess, Camus says

She’s a teenager
She wants to be left alone,
I want to holler
But I can’t seem to find the words

Petya stares into the distance
as if there are mountains gazing back at her

Look! The roses
The parsley, the mint
The flowers sparkling

Their mouths, rainbows
No spoiled identity here

No stigma
No fractured sensibility
Yes, no stigma

Look! Look!
There’s Patrice Lumumba
under the shade
of the guava tree
dancing
cheek-to-cheek
with his wife

Look! Look!
My father, my father!
A young man
before he had me

before my sister came along
then his namesake

He puts his arms around my mother
And kisses her cheek
And she laughs

She laughs
While I hand out fortune cookies

And the earth is still round
The glaciers are melting in the North Pole
There is still a hole in the ozone layer
They want to colonise Mars
They still send rockets to space
Babies are still being born in refugee camps

But my mother is laughing
My mother is happy
And my father is a young man
in the prime of his life

It is not too late to forgive you
No, it is not too late to forgive you my brother
It is like the feverish habitat of mitochondria
The primordial soup of forgiveness is a work in progress
It is a process that has the neverending potential
to die in the half-light
at the end of the day.

Classified, except for …democracy by Markus Gibbons

There is something almost quaint about the idea that the Pentagon might regard Congress as a team sport. One can imagine the scene: Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives on Capitol Hill carrying the usual Washington mixture of charts, talking points and an appetite for an enormous cheque. The number is extraordinary, $1.5 trillion in proposed defence spending. The briefing room, apparently, is where the truly extraordinary part begins, some members of Congress are invited in, others are left outside.

This is not merely bad manners. It is a peculiar misunderstanding of what Congress is. The Constitution did not create a legislative majority and a legislative minority so that one could be treated as the government and the other as a hostile foreign power. Democrats in Congress may be political opponents of the administration. They are not foreign agents. They are not an inconvenient press corps. And they certainly do not stop being representatives of American citizens when they walk through the doors of a classified briefing room.

Hegseth's defenders can invoke leaks, distrust, security concerns and the familiar Washington argument that discretion is sometimes necessary. Fine. Classified information should be protected. But classification is supposed to protect national security, not provide a convenient adjective for political exclusion.

That distinction matters enormously when the department seeking congressional approval is asking for a sum so large that it could make even Washington's accustomed relationship with the word “trillion” seem slightly embarrassed. Hegseth is not asking Congress merely to admire his budget. He needs Congress to authorise, appropriate and ultimately legitimise it.

And yet the Pentagon appears increasingly comfortable treating congressional oversight as something to be managed rather than something to be respected.

The irony is almost too perfect. An administration demanding extraordinary military power is simultaneously narrowing the circle of lawmakers permitted to scrutinise it. The larger the budget becomes, the smaller the audience apparently gets.

Even Republicans have begun to object. That should make everyone nervous, because when members of the governing party start complaining that their own secretary of defence is turning national security into partisan property, the problem has moved beyond ordinary Washington tribalism.

There is a deeper danger here. Institutions acquire habits long before they acquire names. Today it is Democrats excluded from a briefing. Tomorrow it could be Republicans who have fallen out of favour with the president. Eventually Congress discovers that the executive branch has quietly decided which legislators deserve information and which deserve explanations after the fact.

That is how democratic erosion tends to work: rarely with a dramatic announcement, usually through administrative decisions that are defended as temporary, practical or necessary.

The Pentagon is not a political campaign office. The Secretary of Defence is not the president's partisan enforcer. Classified briefings are not rewards handed to friends.

America's military strength ultimately depends on something less glamorous than missiles, drones or aircraft carriers: constitutional trust.

A Pentagon that cannot distinguish between secrecy and partisan loyalty risks weakening precisely the institution it claims to defend. The most alarming secret in Washington may therefore be the one nobody is bothering to classify: democracy requires witnesses.