Egoistic Leaders Divide Us But We are One Humanity on Earth by Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD

Truth is one but reason needs challenging enemies .Most feared and hated so-called elected leaders fast become ruthless purgers of basic human values and aspiration for global peace, human unity and sustainable future-making. It is a collective responsibility to understand as moral beings to think of One Humanity for the good of all on this planet. Warmongers and proponents of crimes against humanity and genocide cannot be legitimate leaders of global communities aspiring for peace and law and order. You have too many imposters across the globe violating basic human norms, civilized laws of governance, sanctity of life, moral and spiritual values, global unity for peace and conflict resolution. We could oppose them with reason and  unity but lack force and material strength to stop them from committing crimes and wars against us- One Humanity.

Did you not feel a tormenting pinch when watched the glacier flashing in Himalayas-Nepal and Tibet killing and displacing thousands of fellow human beings? Likewise, earthquakes in Venezuela and Colombia and volcanic eruptions in Indonesia deserve our immediate sympathy and help. No matter what warmongers perceive, we remain one humanity to enjoin strong passions of human bonds, unity, glory and peace.

Ignorant and Egoistic Leaders Bomb the Earth to Destroy our Unity

We are human beings born of physical and spiritual components and LIFE continues on this planet (Earth) floating by the Will of God – certainly not by any man-made legislative procedures. The planet Earth embodies all the necessities to maintain and support life (all kinds of life-known and unknown), and human beings are the chief creation of God enriched with wisdom and ordained with a choice to be or not to be, a moral being different from other beings-animals, given the NATURAL TRUST to live in harmony within the compound of natural settings.

DO YOU SEE THE EARTH FLOATING IN THIS PICTURE WITHOUT ANY PILLARS? IT IS MEANT FOR YOU – THE HUMAN BEING - Day changes into night (otherwise, life will cease to exist), sun and moon in your service, oxygen and climate changes, water to drink, seas to travel, mountains, oil, gases, it has all the minerals needed in all the times, in case you forgot, it has uranium to make weapons (bombs dropped on fellow human beings, recall Hiroshima and Nagasaki too), and now Gaza and Ukraine in daily reports, the originality of human origin is the same as it has been all the times as we know it, and indeed, We, the People are accountable to God - The Creator of Heavens and Earth (whether you believe in Him or not), time will continue to move forward. Those dropping bombs on earth are not NORMAL beings, they have no microscope to read their minds – human beings acting like wild animals as if others are not EQUAL STATUS HUMAN BEINGS and something else.

(Thanks to NASA- American astronaut on on Moon in view of the spacious Earth)

Frankly, while working in the Arab world, I have walked through the extended ancient grave sites of people of AAD (some 4,000 years earlier) claiming to be more powerful than anything on this earth. Please see their pictures of dead bodies - some 12- 14 feet tall and powerful in their time span, now just dry bones, they committed massacres/ bloodbath and ended-up by natural causes of storms, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and sound blast – nobody cries for them because they victimized mankind by wars and violence and disobeyed the commands of God who created them with a moral responsibility.

These are some of the narratives explained and shared in this book

(https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/global-humanity-and-remaking-of-peace-security-and-conflict-resolution-for-the-21st-century-and-beyond-mahboob-a-khawaja/1147150197?ean=9798317619374),without any claims or rewards but surely truthful and rational statements based on facts of life not fictions to impress anybody on this planet, so We, the People could THINK intelligently and if needed to make a navigational change when facts of life warrant a change to be normal and responsible human beings living in complete accord within the Universe and fellow human beings for our unity as people for a sustainable future. The Divine Message (The Quran:40:64), clarifies: It is God Who made for you the Earth as a resting place and the sky as a canopy; And has given you shape and made your shapes beautiful, And has provided for your Sustenance, of things pure and good; Such is God your Lord. So Glory to God, The Lord of the Worlds.

Our Moral and Intellectual Unity is Our Strength

Truth and reason profess that knowledge and learning from history lead to conscientious rethinking and intelligent choices for mankind. Life and time blend the character of rational choices and accountability. From Pharaoh to contemporary leaders- are they accountable to the consequences of their own wrong thinking, crimes against humanity and genocide?  Would you call George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Netanyahu and Trump as leaders of moral consciousness and integrity? A decade earlier, in one of the articles, I made the following comments: The mankind continues to be victimized by the cancerous ego and cruelty of the few global warlords. Animals do not commit massacre of their kind and species, nor set-up rape camps for the war victims, the Western led wars against the humanity have and continue to do so at an unparalleled  global scale without being challenged by any global organizations or leaders. Torture and massacres of innocent civilians are convenient fun games to be defined as “collateral damage” and a statistic. Perhaps, they view humanity just in digits and numbers, not as the living entities with social, moral, spiritual and intellectual values and progressive agendas for change and development. Every beginning has its end. It is just that most powerful nations have failed to learn from the living history- a slap to EH Carr’s precious thoughts of human history. (Mahboob A. Khawaja, “Global Peace and Conflict Management:   Man in Search of New Thinking.” The Peoples Voice. Org, USA: 03/19/2012).

Eric Bogle wrote “The Green Fields of France”, and it was sung by Fureys:

Did you really believe, when they told you the cause,
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame,
The killing and dying it was all done in vain
Oh Willy McBride it all happened again -
And again, and again, and again, and again.”

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs-global security, peace and conflict resolution and has spent several academic years across the Russian-Ukrainian and Central Asian regions knowing the people, diverse cultures of thinking and political governance and a keen interest in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including: Global Humanity and Remaking of Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution for the 21st Century and Beyond, Barnes and Noble Press, USA, 2025 https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/global-humanity-and-remaking-of-peace-security-and-conflict-resolution-for-the-21st-century-and-beyond-mahboob-a-khawaja/1147150197 and We, The People in Search of Global Peace, Security and Conflict  Resolution. Kindle Direct Publishing-Amazon, 05/2025 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6V6CH5W

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Check Mahboob A. Khawaja, PhD. eBOOK,
Wars on Humanity:
Ukraine, Palestine and the role of Global Leaders
HERE!

Ovi History #eMagazine #23: The Blitz begins

 

On September 7, 1940, the German Luftwaffe unleashed a devastating assault on London, marking the beginning of the Blitz, a sustained bombing campaign against British cities. This attack represented a significant shift in German strategy during World War II.

Frustrated by the Royal Air Force's resilience in the Battle of Britain, Adolf Hitler changed tactics from targeting RAF airfields to a campaign of terror against civilian populations. On that afternoon, nearly 1,000 German aircraft, comprising over 300 bombers escorted by 600 fighters, crossed the English Channel in the largest aerial formation ever seen at the time. The first wave targeted the London docks, but many bombs fell on the densely populated residential areas of the East End, igniting firestorms that acted as beacons for a second wave of bombers that evening.

The human cost of that first day was immense, with 430 civilians killed and 1,600 seriously injured. Despite the destruction and the British government's initial belief that an invasion was imminent, prompting the code word "Cromwell" to be sent to military units, the attack failed to break the nation's will. Instead of succumbing to terror, the British people demonstrated remarkable stoicism and resolve.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill captured the nation's defiant spirit, declaring that Hitler had "lighted a fire which will burn with a steady and consuming flame until the last vestiges of Nazi tyranny have been burnt out of Europe". This first day of bombing was only the prelude; the Luftwaffe would continue its nightly assault on London for 76 consecutive nights, beginning a campaign that would ultimately claim over 40,000 civilian lives across Britain.

For this issue of Ovi History, a historical fiction short story from Mike Nomads and a new book review.

So, turn the pages and ...take cover.

Read the Ovi History eMagazine online HERE!
View, read it online or download it in PDF/epub format HERE!
And enjoy viewing & reading it online or download in PDF format HERE!
All eMagazines and eBooks downloads are FREE!

You can find it in the Ovi Pedia pages, HERE!
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With the hope that you will read and learn from the articles,
so take cover and ...do read this historic chronicle

Thanos Kalamidas

The Trumpian supermarket of pardons by Kingsley Cobb

Donald Trump has turned presidential clemency into something increasingly resembling a political supermarket, convicted criminals walk in with a record and walk out with a presidential eraser. Last week, Trump granted clemency to 30 people, including a former drug offender who later became a business executive, a longtime Philadelphia union leader convicted of bribery, and a former Navy sailor convicted of federal firearms offences.

Thirty pardons and commutations in a single announcement is not merely an exercise of constitutional power. It is a political statement about what Trump believes justice should look like when the person holding the pen is the president.

And the statement is deeply troubling. The presidential pardon exists for exceptional circumstances. It is supposed to provide mercy when justice has become excessively harsh, correct genuine miscarriages of justice and recognise extraordinary rehabilitation. It was never intended to become a revolving door through which political favour, celebrity, connections or presidential whim can allow criminal convictions to disappear.

Yet under Trump, clemency increasingly looks less like an instrument of justice and more like another extension of presidential power. The argument that Trump is legally entitled to issue these pardons misses the point. Of course he is. The Constitution gives the president extraordinarily broad authority over federal offences. But legality is not the same thing as legitimacy, and constitutional power is not a licence to turn justice into personal patronage.

There is nothing inherently wrong with pardoning someone who genuinely deserves another chance. A former offender who has rebuilt his life, served his sentence and demonstrated genuine rehabilitation can present a compelling case for mercy. That is precisely why a pardon system exists.

But mercy becomes dangerous when it loses standards. The central question should always be simple: Why this person? Why now? And what principle justifies the decision?

Americans deserve answers. Otherwise, the pardon power begins to resemble a presidential loyalty card. Collect enough influence, political usefulness, public attention or presidential goodwill and perhaps the criminal conviction becomes little more than an administrative inconvenience.

For millions of Americans who have encountered the criminal-justice system without access to political connections, that is a particularly ugly message. They do not have a president waiting at the end of the process. They have judges, prosecutors, probation officers, prison officials and a sentence.

That does not mean every conviction is just or every sentence fair. Quite the opposite. The American justice system has made mistakes, sometimes catastrophic ones. But the answer to an imperfect justice system cannot be to replace judicial discretion with presidential favour.

That simply moves the problem from one institution to another. There is an even larger danger here. When presidents repeatedly pardon people convicted of serious crimes, the symbolic damage extends beyond the recipients. It tells the country that criminal accountability is conditional, that the law may apply with full force to ordinary citizens but become surprisingly flexible for those who reach the president's political orbit.

That is poisonous for public confidence. Trump has spent years presenting himself as the champion of law and order. Yet law and order cannot mean enforcing the law when it suits the president and overriding it when it does not.

A republic cannot function on the assumption that justice ends where presidential preference begins. The United States does not need a president who behaves like a merciful monarch handing out royal pardons from the palace balcony.

It needs a president who understands that clemency is a solemn constitutional responsibility, not a political vending machine. The pardon supermarket may be open. But Americans should be asking who is behind the checkout counter and who keeps getting waved through without paying the price.

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 'Me My Mind & I' HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Worming #136 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A family of worms and all their worm friends worming in new adventures.

For more Worming, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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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.

Berserk Alert! #115 #Cartoon by Tony Zuvela

 

Tony Zuvela and his view of the world around us in a constant berserk alert!
For more Berserk Alert! HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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Ghostin’ #135 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

They are like neighbours we are aware of,
except we are NOT aware of and
they have absolutely nothing to do with Halloween.

For more Ghostin’, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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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.

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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.