Archive for February, 2026

The Boss thing (not Bruce Springsteen)

Posted: February 27, 2026 in Chat
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I thought here I’d play the analogy game.

I was re-reading The Iliad. I got to that part near the beginning, dealing with the squabbles of the gods and goddesses – mirroring the human squabbles.
Olympian totalitarianism and tyrant-run cities of ‘Homer’s’ period.

Zeus played his Zeus-the-invincible card.
The Olympians had fought against him before, but he was all-powerful; not one, nor all, could match him.
And so,
Hera had to swallow her fury and simper sycophantically to him, ‘give the goblet of amity’ or some-such.

It was the sense of nausea the scene produced, where all the Olympians had to tip-toe, smile, and simper around him, appease his wrath ie bad temper

for always.
Because these were immortals.

What was that infamous phrase in Orwell’s 1984 – ‘A boot stamping on a human face, forever.’?
That’s what I got from this scene.
It may be where Orwell got the basis for his idea from this, that along with the totalitarian systems of the time Germany, USSR.
China had not yet emerged.

Is this our
Iran?
Afghanistan?
North Korea?
You name them, our present political experiences.

Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War gives us as near as possible, human attempts at such autocratic barabarity. I’m thinking of the Melian Dialogue, another nausea-inducing episode:

‘The island’s history is also marked by the Athenian slaughter of its male population in 416 BCE, because the islanders remained neutral during the Peloponnesian War. This event inspired Euripides to write Trojan Women, an anti-war play. The historian Thucydides documented the negotiations preceding the military action in the “Melian Dialogue,” preserving the speeches exchanged between the Athenians and Melians.’
https://www.britannica.com/place/Melos

So, what is about males?

You’d be surprised what’s coming next:
– an observation of a troupe of baboons – it was quite invasive, taking blood samples (how’s that not stressful?) – noted how the alpha males were healthy, with weight equally deposited around their bodies, whilst the lower down the hierarchy health deteriorated remarkably, weight became mostly gut-weight, bodies more rounded.

TB went through the troupe, killing the alphas and others, and those that were left were reorganised by the females, a more egalitarian system came into being, overall health improved, along with proper fat retention. The troupe became more…the interpretation was… happier.
see The Nation of Plants, Stefano Mancuso, Profile Books, 2021

So, let’s rephrase that: what is about alpha males?
Are they the ones with wonky hormones? Would balanced medication settle them?

Which leads to Return from the Stars, by Stanslaw Lem.
Written in 1961 it concerns a space mission 10 years in space, returning to a world 100 years on (space time/earth time).
The population had changed their natures radically: ‘ Humans themselves … changed, having undergone a procedure called betrization, designed to neutralize all aggressive impulses
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars

It is a strange life that Lem depicts, a ‘luke-warm‘ world without any strong emotions, or sense of danger, but also no sense of adventure.
I do find his sense of masculinity very strange, though, his characters express it by eg having a boxing bout, driving fast cars. Is this what he saw as our ‘normal’?
If it is then it is a stranglingly narrow concept of the male.

We here have had court settlements on the definitions of ‘woman’ – ridiculous as it seems.
Is it about time then the same was done for what is a male? Maybe it would break open this crushing male stereotype foisted on all. It could maybe open up to allow all ranges of people to exist comfortably again.

Are male bosses ultra? Are female bosses never?
I don’t believe this for one minute.

To Monarch, or not to Monarch

Posted: February 24, 2026 in Chat
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for Virginia Guiffre, and the untold others

What if the monarchy ended up being down-graded or discarded?
There have been anti-monarchists as long as there have been monarchs.
But, this present calamity…!

What would there be in its place?
– Just look at that very strange outpouring at Diana’s funeral.
And the peculiar ceremonials of crowning the new monarch.
Unlike anything else in the British humdrum world.

What could possibly fill that hole?

Certainly not any politics or politicians.

What is the current mood in Britain on the monarchy?
How do you find out?
Not through social media. I doubt even through newspaper columns and letters. It’s bound to be in constant motion as the current catastrophe unravels.

Never a particularly bright one, Andrew; who knows the damage he has done though, to trade, but most importantly, to people

– Queen Victoria’s son, Prince Albert, had a very dubious reputation also – wasn’t there a peculiar type of male piercing named after him?

Elizabeth II had her memorable moments, not many, but they were there. On Trump’s first meeting she is reported to have said of Trump marriage, ‘She must have an ‘arrangement’.’
When Boris Johnson, political clown, was deposed, she was reported to have said’ Thank goodness, I didn’t want that idiot at my funeral’ (or something similar).
But she protected him, for years, gave him millions. The hushed-up doings and people connected to the present monarchy have been long known.

*

I had been indifferent to the Monarchy for quite some time, and then the Queen made a visit to the town I lived in. I was present, so had a gawp.
It was the mood of the place that affected me: carnival,
something almost unknown in that prosaic place.
That lift of the spirits – not just time off work – but a real lift; the effect was somewhere, an unused place, within people.

Make no mistake, it certainly was not nationalism.
It was something else entirely, something completely ‘off the board’, as the saying is.

No, the alternative to the monarch has to be non-aligned, capable of bridging a wide range of temperaments and opinions.

Of course we then come down to responsibilities of the incumbent.
Expense, and funding of the incumbent.

And not forgetting the strains and warping tensions, perceptions, dimensions, of anyone have to live that goldfish life.

Then we get to that repugnant sense of entitlement.
The one where other people’s lives are seen as ‘lesser’, where others can be made use of because the user deems himself protected, even ‘honoured’.

  • Yes, the concept of ‘honouring,’ and knighting, and peerages, certainly needs an overhaul.

*

I have often wondered whether it was possible to have a ‘European-style’ monarchy, where the members are part of (a larger version of) society. People involved in the world.
With still a sense of specialness.
Without specialness the dullness becomes overwhelming.

I have often wondered also, whether having a new, modern Parliament building, and no ceremony, would produce a more workable government.
The present building produces a particular mind-set; a new building could help smooth out transitions to more egalitarian, fairer, more stream-lined systems.

I have often wondered when I am going to gain access to the real world, where systems work, people have aspirations, and fairness, justice….

2026 Gull Screeching Competition

Posted: February 21, 2026 in Chat
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Set your calendar!

The 6th Belgian/international competition will be held on

26th April

The venue:
Adenkirke, Belgium

Competition admission price:

Free: Yes

Standard price: € 0 EUR

https://www.belgiancoast.co.uk/6th-european-seagull-screeching-championship-2026

Houses

Posted: February 17, 2026 in Chat
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More lomo Metropolis 35m film, vintage effect.

Interesting outward style – flat planes. I was surprised how small it all appears.
Flat roof – is that a good idea in this climate?

Next door to above. A more conventional type, but with spiral stair to upper/over-garage living quarters.
I like the round window in the apex.
The idea of upper living spaces I find appealing.

What really intrigues me about this house is… how do you get the furniture in?

Both are Show Homes.
Do people ever live in Show Homes?

The Golden Age of Games

Posted: February 14, 2026 in Chat
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This must truly be the Golden Age of games. 

I mean table-top board games, here, analogue games.

I am in awe at some of the incredible subjects that games now cover.
For example try

 Hansa-Teutonica, 

a game based on the medieval Hanseatic League

https://tabletopia.com/games/hansa-teutonica

Or,  

Viticulture, 

yes that’s right a wine-grower’s game-compendia.

But this is the one that truly caught my imagination:

The Great Library

https://tabletopia.com/games/great-library

A complex and incredibly detailed exploration of scribes, scriptoria and all the assets needed to become the fountainhead of a period’s knowledge.

For the Lovecraftians, there is 

The Arkham Horror

Not your thing? Then try 


Weather Machine, 


another complex game, the exploration of the theme of weather and how to manipulate weather-systems.

The knowledge systems games use are amazing. Here we become meteorologists, science-based players, gathering all materials in order to experiment with weather-change.

www.eagle-gryphon.com/products/weather-machine

The designer and illustrator Vital Lacerda and Ian O’Toole are particularly good.

But to be really up to date, pertinent, how about 

CO2 Second Chance 

by the same game designer as Weather Machine. 

‘In CO2 you will be utilising your money, workers, and market manipulation skills over CEPs to construct renewable energy power plants. These power plants will be built in the continents you decide on, and each area will have randomised stipulations. You will send your workers to work in your constructed power plants, gain knowledge in the different renewable energy sources and send them to energy summits to promote global awareness of the issues the world is facing. While engaging in these activities you will be checking off the requirements needed to beat the game. The less you have checked off by the end of the round, the more pollution that gets pumped into the atmosphere, and the more pollution that gets pumped out the more likely you are to fail the game.’

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/214887/co2-second-chance

These tend to be science-based games. And this one brings home how dire the present industrial thinking on transport and storage of CO2 really can be.

What is particularly impressive is the imaginative scope, coupled with great visuals – the  illustration level of expertise is very high.

The best games are not battle games but depend on outwitting your adversaries. 
Crafty-ness, skill, feint.

Last Thoughts on ‘Peacemaker,’ by Thant Myint-U

Posted: February 10, 2026 in Chat
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British journalist Nigel Nicholson wrote of U Thant:

“He seems to divide the world not into East and West, white and coloured, but into the different categories of temperament and behaviour that can be matched in every nation on earth.”
Now, is that not the best way to work?

Nigel Nicholson again, with a note on U Thant’s media presence:
‘… an “easy person” with an “effortlessness about him, a lack of self importance, which is most engaging.” But in public, there was often, Nicholson felt, “a stiffness about his phrases” which gave “quite a false view of his personality.”

A British diplomat wrote:
‘You know, the trouble with us is that, because we’re Westeners,we always assume that we speak directly and that because U Thant is Burmese, he is playing some clever, devious game. The truth is that too often we’re playing the games and he’s speaking directly and so we miss the point.’
(Wechsler, in Ordeal of a Peacemaker, Progressive, Aug 1967)

How easy it was to dismiss him as ‘Asian’, ‘Burmese.’
U Thant worked tirelessly in his second term in particular to lay the seeds throughout all his travels, in all his interventions, for a post-racist world.
What happened? We now find Trump copying Nixon’s disgusting racial imagery.

  • It is surprising how much of Trumpism has already been done by others, in the shameful enclaves of pre Civil Rights USA.
    There is very little that is original in Trump.

As for his way of working at the Vietnam catastrophe, when General-Secretary, and because those were times of newly-emergent states:

“He searched… for a quiet diplomatic mechanism, perhaps a group of non-aligned states working with him informally. He discussed options with the Yugoslavs’ (remember Tito, and his independence from the USSR?), ‘and several African governments Mali, Uganda, and Nigeria. He was also in contact with Ghana’s president Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah was an early stalwart of Afro-Asian solidarity… anxious to play a role… and prepared to travel to Hanoi and then Peking.’ (Beijing now).

A wholly healthy approach. But of its time.
How juvenile the ‘I can fix this!’ attitude: one man thinking he can take on the complexities of a country, never mind world relationships, and think they can grasp it. Even running their ideas through a Cabinet or Senate, is just echo-chamber politics.

Often what U Thant was looking for was a way of defusing a situation, allowing the embroiled parties space to come to their own accommodations.
This is what the big leaders couldn’t accept.
For example he used to describe the Vietnam situation as a civil war, a domestic crisis. He used the example of his own Burma, where a clash of communist and local politics was settled internally, without any intervention.
He was closer to understanding the East Asian way of working than any of the Western leaders.

Last words?

Nigel Nicholson again:
“He told me that when he was confronted by some particularly troublesome problem he would stand at the window and look down upon the little red and green lights of passing ships, deriving comfort from the “decent traffic of mankind.”

Very much a man of his time.

The book, Peacemaker, by Thant Myint-U concludes by showing how Western governments have tried to bury Thant’s work and legacy under their own lop-sided and aggressively ego-centric agendas, whilst the Afro-Asian non-aligned world he worked so hard to promote fell apart. In some cases his part in crises has been erased or negatively re-written/revised.
Utterly shameful.
His own Burma was overtaken by miiltary regimes in his own life-time. So much so that when he died his body returned, he had been discredited, sidelined, and reception of his coffin and its burial relegated.

It is time to re-appraise.

*

It takes belief in the United Nations for it to be effective.
In Thant’s time they were constantly being undercut, ignored, blamed, especially by the major powers… but always believed in.

Systemic problems build unchecked, as in all big entities, but they are resolvable.
It’s when people walk away the lack of agency becomes endemic, people cease to matter, corporate existence becomes the prime concern.

*

Looking forward, I would like to know a lot more about the idea of a kind of coalition of middle powers, that Canadian PM Mark Carney came up with.

Jacqueline Kennedy

Posted: February 6, 2026 in Chat
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What is your perception of Jacqueline Kennedy?
And what was your reaction when she married wealthy ‘Greek and Argentine business magnate’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle_Onassis) Aristotle Onassis?

The chances are we all were wrong.

Leaving college she became a roving photographer for the Washington Times-Herald.
To become ‘First Lady’ of America, and celebrated for her ‘gracious personal style’, her passion for history, and the arts. (from JFK Library).
To become The American Widow, on the assassination if her husband John F Kennedy. She worked hard to established her husband’s legacy.
It was a difficult time for her and her children, and she came to rely on Robert Kennedy (“the one least like the Kennedy brothers”), only for him to be assassinated also.
She began to fear for the life of her Kennedy children, wanted safety, security. The option was out of the USA, with Aristotle Onassis. She married him that same year.

Then to become almost a pariah of USA society, as Jacquie O, spendthrift, indicating ‘woman with few morals.’
Latterly she became The Wronged Wife, as revelations of the Marilyn Monroe fiasco became known.

Did you know, for instance, that
‘Following Onassis’s death in 1975, she had a career as a book editor in New York City, first at Viking Press and then at Doubleday‘?
(Wiki)

And there is the U Thant angle, of course – seeing as that is where my back-study is coming from.

She had met U Thant early on in his first term as General-Secretary of the UN. John Kennedy worked closely (though not always eye-to-eye) but successfully with U Thant on the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Her position at the top, though not active, afforded her insight into the personal cost of positions of power.

With Lyndon B Johnson taking over, and launching the USA wholly into the Vietnam conflict, she kept in close contact with U Thant. He invited her to lunches, and his meeting with the Pope in Rome.
What is important here, is that she wholly supported his tireless work throughout his part in the conflict to resolve it all by diplomatic means.

Vietnam was a hard job to negotiate, especially as all affected by it began to fall into line.
But the India-Kashmir conflict, then the Egyptian-Israeli 6-Day War erupted at the same time.
U Thant and his team were wholly engaged in them both, then became caught up in searching for ways to prevent, or failing that, limit, the other crisis.
This is an important point, because the UN’s job was/is not just to prevent conflicts where possible, but to remain throughout and constantly urge peaceful negotiation/resolution; to limit ongoing conflict.

U Thant came out of that very badly.

Why, after the positive outcome of Cuba, the Congo, the turning tide of support for Vietnam towards his position?
Do people forget so easily? Was it crisis-fatigue?

And all the positioning up and down of Jacqueline Kennedy/Onassis? Where did all this come from?
The press.

The press sets the social mood. The ones they set up they can also pull down.

It also trumpets the government line, even the opposition press engage with the government line, not alternatives. U Thant and the United Nations line is always non-aligned, not following any government line.
When all arguments are being martialled any body not falling-in becomes dubious, suspicious.

There was a huge backlash, based on very little more than prejudice.
Jacqueline Kennedy wrote to him in the middle of all this:

‘… handwritten on light blue stationery, “All the work which you do to keep this world from going up in flames must take its terrible toll on you.I can imagine how desperately tired you must be now. I hope the fatigue and discouragement which must always be yours, will not stop you from realizing the light and hope you are to everyone. How lucky we are that you are there, with your rare quality of spirit. I just wanted to tell you that… With my deepest admiration and friendship always.”‘

(page 226, Peacemaker, by Thant Myint-U)

What I especially like about the note is her scrupulousness of language.
There is no reiterating worn-out phrases of support, compassion, but something drawn from her own experience, expressed with care and delicacy.

Further notes from ‘The Ring and the Book’

Posted: February 2, 2026 in Chat
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In the Pope’s monologue Robert Browning has him peruse the nature of arch-villain Guido Franceshini

‘This is why Guido is found reprobate,
I see him furnished forth for his career,
On starting for the life-chance in our world,
With nearly all we count sufficient help:
Body and mind in balance, a sound future,
A solid intellect: the wit to seek,
Wisdom to choose, and courage wherewithal
To deal with whatever circumstance
Should minister to man, make life succeed.
Oh, and much drawback! what were earth without?
Is this our ultimate stage, our starting place
To try man’s foot, if it will creep or climb,
‘Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove
Advantage for the vaults from low to high
And makes the stumbling-block a stepping-stone?
So, Guido, born with appetite, lacks food,
Is poor, who yet could deftly play-off wealth,
Straitened, whose limbs are restless ’till at large:
And, as he eyes each outlet of the cirque,
……………………………………………………. pines
After the good things just outside the grate,’

This curious nominative catalogue of the basic human state surprises. Nowhere do we find a predestined path, but free will throughout. Or does it?
The message seems to be for a person to be wholly satisfied with what is within their grasp, no need to strive, aspire:
‘The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate/ The Lord made the high and lowly, and ordered their estate.’

And we all know how that ends up. This is the Church position at the time of writing, and like the role of the Victorian paternalist male, riven with double-think, hypocrisy. This is the real subject of the book.

That’s what intrigues me about this book, that nothing stated is ever what it appears, there are nuances, equivocations throughout.

And I do like that ‘life-chance’ phrase, it holds so much packed into it.

As the passage plays-out a tone of exasperation at Guido’s failures becomes more and more apparent.