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I find myself growing more angry as I get older. Maybe it’s because I’ve been retired a while. I have more time to observe the world around me and those who inhabit it. In particular, the human race to which I belong.

Abuse of power is, above all, what makes me most angry. There have been abuses of power since Homo sapiens came down from the trees, and maybe even before that. Originally, it was survival of the fittest, the natural evolutionary process that guaranteed only the best, strongest, fittest, passed on their genes to their next generation.

It wasn’t until so-called civilisation took hold and mankind found he could rise above and control those around him, that true abuse began. The era of powerful dictatorial monarchs and emperors was upon us. It was here that the natural evolutionary process we call survival of the fittest, became warped in the brain of Homo sapiens and evolved into something we simply call, “greed.”

Millions were massacred by armies led by these power-hungry early dictators, greedy to enlarge their lands or to subdue their enemies and force them into new, fashionable, religions, from which they took hefty tithes.

Today, nothing has changed except the climate. Dictators are on the rise everywhere. They have charge of nations, governments, corporations. Their slaves are not just the workers. Whole governments now bow to the will of the corporate dictators and leave the lowly workers to suffer further deprivation.

In early history the weapons were sword and crossbow. Now, it is more sophisticated. While missiles and tanks destroy whole nations and kill millions, the internet and other media have become possibly even more powerful with their ability to propagandize and brainwash whole populations.  In Russia, a population initially opposed to Vladimir Putin’s tyranny in Ukraine, has now been effectively brainwashed via government media, to accept and even support the hideous crimes committed by their armed forces.

Survival of the fittest is no longer necessary. We go to great lengths to keep alive the more physically and mentally unfit of our offspring. Greed has become the acceptable face of Homo sapiens, greed for money, possessions, and power. So great is this factor in human life that we are now prepared to risk the very planet we inhabit in order to maintain our greed obsession.

Despite the warnings of climate scientists; despite the obvious and often deadly evidence of a planet in distress, we still continue as we’ve always done to rob and pillage our home for no other purpose than to satisfy our greed.

Throughout four billion years of evolutionary history, creatures have come and gone. Millions of lifeforms that never made it to a permanent place on Earth. For one reason or another they just weren’t suited to survive here. A number have made it, but only one has evolved an insatiable  greed that will determine its own demise.

Evolution is a natural process. When a part becomes un-natural it is discarded as unsuitable and becomes extinct. Unless, we radically change our ways very quickly, we will be the next to be discarded.

I grow more angry as I get older because the future becomes much clearer, and for Homo sapiens, much shorter.

^{An Illegal Waste Tip In Hartlepool, UK}

The war in Ukraine is still holding the headlines, at least in Europe, and rightly so, but there’s another, much bigger war being fought throughout the world. It’s a World War.

It’s the war to save the planet and those who inhabit it. It ‘s being fought by ordinary folk like you and me, against the might of huge corporations like the fossil fuel companies, the plastics industry, and almost every other organization that draws profit from wreaking havoc on our planet.

It’s not just the corporations. The Mafia and other large criminal gangs are cashing in on this giant wrecking ball pounding at the very heart of our planetary home.

Two articles in today’s Guardian highlight this.

“Buried” is a new BBC podcast investigating how criminal gangs are cashing in on the UK’s waste disposal industry and illegally dumping millions of tons of waste. In 2019, the National Crime Agency was aware of twenty organised crime groups linked to waste crime in the UK. At least one fifth of all waste in the UK passes through the hands of criminals at some point in the chain, according to the Environment Agency.

Mobouy Road, near Derry in Northern Ireland is one place where illegal waste the equivalent in weight to twenty Titanic ships has been dumped on a site which is in a special area of conservation. There are massive illegal dumps all over the UK. Satellite imaging can reveal them, ten or more in the Peak District National Park alone.

It’s an illegal billion dollar industry and not just in the UK. Criminal gangs operate world wide, doing deals with local authorities only to happy to have the weighty responsibility of waste disposal lifted from their shoulders, and happy to turn a blind eye to where it ends up.

Read more in today’s Guardian article HERE.

Highlighted again today in the Guardian was the sorry tale of the bio-bead, nurdle, and other similar tiny plastic beads that are being washed up on our beaches regularly. These beads are the basic building blocks of all plastic products and million of tons of them are shipped around the world every year. They are a lucrative off-shoot for the fossil fuel industry.

Unfortunately, they are not classified under the International Maritime Organization’s dangerous goods code for safe handling and storage. Hence billions of these toxic little beads are regularly lost overboard from ships, or in the case of bio-beads discharged from sewage treatment plants. Pollution of beaches is just one problem caused by this highly toxic waste, as highlighted by the Guardian’s article today on huge numbers of nurdles washed up on France’s Brittany beaches over the weekend.

Read more in today’s Guardian article HERE

And an earlier article from November 2021 HERE.

There’s a World War raging around the planet. On the one hand are the bad guys, on the other there’s us. In any war the object is to diminish the power of the opposing force, weaken them substantially.

It may seem an impossible task, a David versus Goliath situation. If the Ukrainians had viewed the might of Russia as an impossible fight, Vladimir Putin would be strutting around Kyiv right now, like the cock who had just shafted all the hens in the henhouse.

The Ukrainian people have proved that the true spirit and fortitude of the human species can be harnessed as a collective endeavour to fight evil. They are an example to the world in the fight to save their Homeland.

But there’s a bigger Homeland to which we all belong. Are we to settle for complacency and allow the powerful Goliaths to destroy it, just as Putin has tried to do in Ukraine?

If we do, if we allow these Goliaths to continue raping and pillaging the only Homeland we have, then we will all lose.

No doubt I risk being called a kill-joy, or possibly worse, but to see images of New Year firework displays from around the world brings two thoughts to mind.  The obvious one is the cost of it all when people all over the globe  are suffering depravation, famine, and severe cost of living rises way above what they can afford. The second thought is how Ukrainians feel, particularly refugees who suffer forced diaspora in these same countries. To see these pyrotechnic indulgences, the wild enthusiasm of their host people, while knowing the suffering and horror of their fellow countrymen back in their home nation, must be particularly galling.

Why is it we fill our minds with a pretence of joy and happiness when the miserable truth of the world is out there for all to see?  For a huge swathe of the world’s populace Christmas is a time of misery and loneliness, yet the media and capitalistic entities are able to whip up a false sense of peace and goodwill to all men, totally obliviating the horrors of Ukraine, Myanmar, Yemen, Burkina Faso, Iran, Ethiopia, Somalia, and lets not forget Syria and Palestine.

It’s the first day of 2023. Is this the year when Western nations are going to stop playing the “People’s Front of Judea”(Life of Brian) in one endless committee meeting, and actually stand up to the latest Hitler-type Russian gangster to try his luck on the world scene? NATO and the United Nations were supposedly formed to prevent further warfare. So far neither has been too successful.

“An attack on one ally is an attack on all allies.”

It took forty-six years from it’s inception for NATO to take any military action against an adversary, and that was in 1995 belatedly against Bosnia. Ukraine may not technically be a member of NATO. Zelenskyy never got the chance to sign the bit of paper, but does that make the innocent citizens of that country any less special than those in Poland, or Britain, or France?

Damn it, no it does not!

Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was an act of terrorism and a war crime. There have been many war crimes committed by the Russians in Ukraine since, and previously in Syria and Chechnya. Putin is now trying to repeat what he did in both those countries.

Ukrainians voted for democracy. Even before Putin’s invasion there was a majority in favour of joining both the EU and NATO. Just because Putin’s military shattered the possibility, is no reason for the West to sit on it’s hands and allow the atrocities of Putin’s henchmen to continue.

Back at the end of 2021 when Russian forces were gathering along the Ukrainian border and US Intelligence was predicting the invasion, NATO should have thrown all it had into the area around the Black Sea and warned Russia of a terrible reckoning if any invasion of Ukrainian territory occurred. Under such duress it’s very unlikely Putin would have taken the risk, and his “military exercises” would have remained as just that.

As it was, NATO sat on it’s hands and debated, like the People’s Front of Judea in the Life of Brian, allowing Putin to walk right in.

I wonder how many others, like the writer, feel deeply ashamed by the obvious reluctance of Western leaders to stand up for what is right and proper in the face of armed brutality and potential genocide?

Or maybe it’s just easier to sit in front of the TV screen, or out on the streets at midnight after a belly full of ale, watching the displays of fireworks and joining the crowd of revelers for whom, for a time at least, Ukraine and it’s beleaguered people no longer existed.

After all, it’s not happening to us, is it?