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It’s been seven months. it seems strange to come back to Sparrow Chat after such a long break. In a sense I never really went away, just never published my thoughts at the time. March 21st was my last post. I never anticipated it would be so when I wrote it, but it seemed fitting somehow, a sort of last plea to a deaf world.

I’ve grown a lot older in the last seven months. Grief has that effect. March 21st was just two days following the second anniversary of my beloved wife’s death from cancer in America. A death I could not be a part of, imprisoned as I was by Covid lockdowns in France, and a merciless America that refused my many pleas for a visa to be at her side as she took her final journey.

“US citizens and green card holders only, by order of the President,” was the continuing response as the number of my telephone calls  to the US Consulate mounted. Ah, yes, “by order of the President”:  Donald J Trump, America’s shame. The very name worthy only to be hated, despised, abhorred alongside Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Benyamin Netanyahou, and the other power-crazed and rising dictators who sense a human race in chaos and believe their time has come.

The western media is making much of Israel’s suffering at this present time.  Warfare  has already claimed too many lives on both sides. We’re told Hamas started it all. Israel is the poor victim.

When the fuse on a powder keg is ignited it inevitably explodes. Israel ignited the fuse of Gaza a long time ago. It has sputtered and smouldered over the years but grown ever closer to the powder keg that is Gaza. Two days ago it finally blew up.

Depending on how one’s ideals twist the situation to suit, Hamas is either a violent and bloody terrorist organization, backed by the murderous regime in Iran,  or freedom fighters for the very worthy cause of oppressed Palestinians.  It matters not. As always, the victims of this violent chaos will be the innocents, the expendables, the children.

There is no doubt Israel will exact a long and murderous revenge on Gaza. It’s unlikely there will be much left at the end of it. Meanwhile, western nations will sit back, do nothing, and search diligently through their mindsets to find the righteousness in Israel’s avenging slaughter. One can be sure they will find it.

_{10 Downing Street, London – 8th October 2023}

While many in Britain are forced to live out of food banks, suffer mountains of debt, and in many cases eviction from their homes, the UK’s Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has offered to send aid to Israel…

“…the fourth most successful economy among developed countries for 2022. The IMF estimated Israel’s GDP at US$564 billion and its GDP per capita at US$58,270 in 2023 (13th highest in the world), a figure comparable to other highly developed countries.”

Israel does not need British aid, Prime Minister Sunak, perhaps you could consider sending it to the innocent, poverty-stricken, soon to be homeless or dead, Palestinians of Gaza instead?

As the climate emergency worsens, economies stagnate and desperate citizens reach out to any political Messiah filled with a zest for power and full of  promises to lead the people out of poverty and into the Promised Land. The tragedy of Israel/Gaza will be forgotten, overtaken by far worse wars and acts of terror as the power-crazed dictators fight among themselves for the ultimate prize of King of the World.

I never really knew what it was to be, “…with no closure,” when a loved-one passed away. No proper funeral and just a lonely cremation. I know now that the grief never goes away. It stays locked inside, no matter the extent or even violence of the tears and emotional outbursts. I can never fully recognize my wife is dead. She will always be just, “somewhere else.”

I was not alone in my grief. Thousands, maybe millions worldwide, were denied closure after their loved ones died in that Covid-plagued world. So many, “somewhere else’s.”

The future is bleak. Ukraine/Russia, Israel/Gaza, Azerbaijan/Armenia, soon to be China/Taiwan, the  list will grow longer. The slaughters more prevalent. The “somewhere else’s,” more numerous.

 

 

 

^{A View of Venus taken by a Russian Veneras Lander in the 1970’s. It shows a dead, desolate, planet. It may have been once like Earth, but suffered catastrophic climate change.} 

There are still a few head buriers who refuse to believe in climate change, or that Homo sapiens is responsible for it happening. Most sane folk accept that the evidence is overwhelming.

Unfortunately, we are at a point in our history where not only are we faced with planetary catastrophe, but those who have the power to do what is necessary to prevent it, the politicians, are corrupted and controlled by the capitalist powermongers. These parasites (for that’s what they are) care only for money and the power it bestows on them. They have the power of life or death over us, and little concern for either.

Thirty-three years ago a spacecraft, Voyager 2, was passing the planet Jupiter while on it’s way out of the solar system. One man, Carl Sagan, a Nobel Prize winner who was heavily involved in the two Voyager missions, suggested the spacecraft should be turned around and it’s cameras point back the way it had come, some 6.4 billion kilometres (4 billion miles) from the planet we inhabit.

It was expected to photograph a dark and empty space, yet one photo took NASA by surprise. For in one of them, illuminated by a stray and diffuse sunbeam, was a tiny, tiny mote of light, Planet Earth!

Thirty-three years is a long time. Memories fade. The processes of life and living go on, and even momentous moments can be forgotten. In my last post I quoted John Naughton. His words:

“…the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic…”

Powerful, indeed. In the thirty-three years since Voyager 1 took that momentous photograph we have discovered that we are systematically destroying that minute dot hanging in a sunbeam. We don’t have to, we can save it and ourselves. It all comes down to choice. Whether, as a species we choose to, or not.

Carl Sagan named it the “Pale Blue Dot“. He went on to write what for me is one of the most moving pieces of literature ever to be put on paper. It defined what we are, who we are, but most of all, where we are.

In case you’ve forgotten, here it is. You’ll need to look closely or you’ll miss it:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— Carl Sagan, 1934 – 1996.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

How much longer will we allow the parasites* to destroy our world in their insatiable greed for power?

One thing is certain. If we do nothing, no-one will miss us.

“The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.” Oxfam.

^{*PARASITE: an animal or plant that lives on or in another animal or plant of a different type and feeds from it. A parasite is also a person who uses others to obtain an advantage without doing anything in exchange ~ Cambridge Dictionary}

Erratum: an earlier version of this post named the spacecraft that took the photograph of Earth as Voyager 1. It was in fact Voyager 2. The text has been corrected.

 

I remember travelling with my parents on the newly opened M6 motorway in 1959. My father’s Austin Ten motor car hurtled along this magnificent new road at a breath-taking forty miles an hour. To me in the back seat it seemed very fast, but still enabled me to spot something I’d never seen before. It was an old articulated lorry trailer parked in a farmer’s field adjacent to the new motorway, and on its side was a huge advertising hoarding.

I’d seen advertising signs before, of course, in towns and cities on the sides of buildings, but this was different. This farmer had seen the potential to make money by selling advertising space along what was to become one of the busiest roads in Britain.

I have no memory of what that hoarding was advertising, nor did I realise that what I was seeing that day was the beginning of a new era in the lives of the people, an age of mass advertising that would take over our lives and change them forever.

It was thirty-five years before the internet, and another few years after that before almost every home had its own computer connected to the WorldWideWeb. It was the wonder of the age. New providers and websites began to spring up and it was mostly all free to use. I met my American wife on Yahoo’s “Find a Friend”, the first dating site on the net. It was totally free,  both of advertising and for use. There was even a box that could be ticked, marked, “Pen Pals Only.”

The internet was like a child in those days, innocent, uncorrupted, virginal, a community like none ever before.

Then came the corrupters: Google, Microsoft, Apple and others. Small start-up internet providers were rapidly bought out by the bigger fish, until they in turn were swallowed up by the giant corporations who saw the dollar mounds of profit from large scale advertising revenues.

There’s a name for this degradation of the internet, “enshittification.” Coined by the tech critic, Cory Doctorow, the term is most apt for what has been allowed to happen to the internet over the twenty-odd years since its inception and corporatisation.

The child has grown up to be a monster.

John Naughton, a professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University and frequent Guardian columnist, wrote this week:

“Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that…”

He then goes on to give examples of such degradation, of which there are legion.

You are probably reading this on my blog site, Sparrow Chat. You can continue to read unhindered by any form of advertising whatever. I’m not here to make money. It’s a platform for my thoughts and feelings about the world and any comments that readers might like to share.

There are still a few of us left on the net. Most blog writers came from that yesteryear when the net was about community and fellowship, and global friendship. There’s not many around these days who can remember what it was like back then. Many of my old blogging friends are no longer with us today.

The net has been kidnapped by a relatively small group of huge corporates that now control it. Their sole purpose is to make money, and their customers are not you or I, but other giant corporations that pay them for vast advertising space.

They have changed our world and they have been totally free to do so, with little or no effective regulatory curbs.* They have become so powerful they control governments.

Yahoo’s “Find a Friend,” died a death many moons ago. Replacing it are a myriad of so-called dating sites, corporate owned, or by the mafia-style gangs who operate on them. Photos and descriptions of cute women or good-looking men, hide the real criminals who work these sites.  They coin vast sums by stealth and false pretences from lonely folk just seeking love and companionship. This, besides the grotesque fees charged for membership of these places, and the inevitable advertising revenues that accompany them.

“Enshittification” is an apt description for what has become of the internet today. Capitalism has gone berserk within it. There is no longer any sense of community. One has only to see what Facebook and Twitter, among other social media platforms, have become in the last two decades to comprehend the sheer enshittification that corporate greed has imposed on us via the ‘net’.

If you drive up the M6 motorway today, you’ll not see many old articulated trailers in farmer’s fields. Back in 1959, one farmer thought he had himself a winner. He was, perhaps, short-sighted. He never realised that in a few years time he would be superseded by one mammoth global advertising hoarding, known as the internet.

^{*Reading this link shows just how ineffective most government internet regulations are today.}