thelogicalview.co.uk

Category: A Blog

  • Ukraine: where exactly do we stand in this geographical conundrum?

    President Zelensky, wearing a suit, in No. 10 Downing Street, with the leaders of the ‘UK’, France and Germany.

    In today’s discussions between the leaders of the four countries, Sir Kier Starmer said, ‘We stand with Ukraine.’ Who are ‘we’, what does it mean ‘to stand’, and where is Ukraine are three questions which jump out of such a woolly statement, and of course there are many others, so many and at such a complexity which is way beyond the ken of this simple pagan blog.

    After Downing Street President Zelensky has met the NATO chief, and the President of the EU, and then to Italy and Rome, all in a few days and at meetings at the highest leadership level of the many organisations, alliances, groupings, opinions, possible support giving and definitely opinionators in this strange patchwork of jurisdictions over the lands north of the Mediterranean Sea and to the borders with Russia, with NATO itself extending over the …. Atlantic Ocean …. to the USA and Canada.

    What does Zelensky want? Money, weapons, opinion to go against Russia, and troops, and to join NATO, and probably the EU as well. Everything from that looks into this strange patchwork as if these few days of discussions could yield a tangible result and within a month a large army of fit and well trained troops would head east and win the war for Ukraine. ‘UK’ politicians are keen on the idea of developing the arms industry, such is the economic plight going on here, and if someone would pay for them, there is probably a large stack of weapons which could be provided. If one weapon followed another, at astonishing monetary cost and destructive to human life, would that end the war and bring a long lasting solution to conflict in that region. News has it that Sir Kier has promised assistance worth £100bn to Ukraine, and that’s something the veterans in the UK wish that just a tiny weeny fraction of a fraction of that would be provided to give them a safe place to live, like other countries honour and care for those returning from traumatic combat. But £100bn can be promised to Ukraine.

    From an outside looking in everything looks simple and uniform – in the sense of that word being ordered and clear and its purpose obvious. From the inside, everything looks different. The grouping of Sir Kier Starmer, President Macron and President Steinmeier with President Zelensky fits no one piece of the patchwork. The ‘UK’ has left the ‘EU’, NATO has the word Atlantic in the title and only the west coast of France faces the Atlantic Ocean, its north coast faces la Manche (the sleeve of water and which it does look like a sleeve) and which the English call not surprisingly the English Channel, and the coast of Germany faces the North Sea. How far does a coastline stretch, even the coastline of a mighty ocean like the Atlantic? Well, a long way in NATO. The Atlantic facing countries of the ‘UK’, Republic of Ireland, France, Spain and Portugal, and Canada and the USA on the other side are not one particular grouping at all, and why does Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia not be included in the geographically named North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or at least down to Senegal? Because of course the regions down the west Atlantic coast of Africa have their own cultures, political systems, tribal matters and conflicts and violent wars going on, and are not included in the ‘western’ matters of the geography north of the Mediterranean Sea. And the Irish Republic neither is in NATO, because ironically of the war the ‘UK’ is waging over several centuries onto the land and people of Eire.

    If one unifying factor was to offer troops to Ukraine, would unify the patchwork of terms and acronyms and promises and confusions? There also it cannot be a uniform grouping, because of that matter of uniforms. Troops wear uniforms, it is how they are identified as being for one side or the other, and the uniforms show something of their national origin, and of course there is the flag. The Vexed question of Vexillology gets more and more intractable. Between the four leaders meeting in Downing Street today, Ukraine is undergoing the war with Russia, it’s soldiers are physically fighting, and Germany and France have announced that national service is going to be reinstated, on a voluntary basis, but movement is movement. Intention comes before the sign of movement, and physical movement has a direction. In the chain of four men, one in the east in an active fighting war, France and Germany in the middle, and over La Manche Sir Kier Starmer talking about ‘we stand with Ukraine.’ The problem is that it is the ‘UK’ which does not stand with Ukraine, only in social media and armchair opinions, but in reality, it is the ‘UK’ which cannot raise troops to send over to assist.

    What if tomorrow it was announced that all young people – males and females, and everyone in between in the legality of gender equality, – between 16-35 was to report to their local Forces of Army, Air Force and Navy and begin a quick programme of boot camp training to get into battle ready condition within 2 months, what would happen? Answer: Nothing. In the ‘UK’ we have no cohesion to raise a force. In France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, the young people are within an alignment of government, a functional police force able to do their job, a sense of citizen identity, and there is already the understanding that if mobilisation is necessary then physical readiness needs to be there. In the ‘UK’ where has that national citizen energy gone?

    The last 25 years of Tony Blair ‘uni’s’, the selling off of playing fields where schoolchildren used to run around, the dropping off the radar of national service where young men went through the training and learnt a lot of other things besides while females served the nation in the other equally necessary ways for the functioning of a society, the collapse of the NHS and ‘social care’ resulting in millions of workers being flown into the ‘UK’ to prop up the organisations set up by the Labour government and whose only allegience to coming here is for the salary and the benefits, and who many would not be at all happy if their children were now requisitioned into an army instead of living their new life in the ‘UK’ with all the amenities and ease of this still not too hot or climatically disastrous country. The countries who have one calendar with one predominant belief system, even if folks do believe it or not, but the society does hold together from it, the people move at roughly the same tempo. Here in the ‘UK’ now with so many religions and beliefs and allegiances with so many places on Earth, and so many different views on gender and family structure and cultural norms, it would not be possible to ‘raise an army’ because we have no cultural or societal cohesion.

    What if Sir Kier Starmer took back his offer of £100bn assistance and said sorry, we can’t afford it, and instead waved from the English side of La Manche and said good luck, not a great situation you’re all in over there, but here on the Atlantic we’ve got a lot of problems going on and after all, charity begins at home? It is not likely he would do that, but in the chain of events and the chain of people all meeting in these few days, someone talking about the relevance of geographical and oceanic terms would be such a welcome relief.

  • The Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) Bill in Westminster now

    Assisted dying: the Kindest thing that Life can offer

    Herein lies a great paradox, and possibly this current matter contains one of the greatest paradoxes of all ‘UK’ modern time. The Terminally ill Adults (End of Life) Bill – to repeat the full title, with the addition of ill written like that because Ill is actually a capital ‘i’ with two lower case ‘l’s’ which look like purely three capital ‘i’s’ which doesn’t mean a lot. Reversing upper and lower case to iLL equally works, but whether iLL or ill, the fact is the same, The Terminally ill/iLL Adults (End of Life) Bill is about one thing only, not general illness or serious illness, it is about terminal illness and to make it doubly clear End of Life has been included in the title. A terminus is the end of the line. In Eastbourne, East Sussex, Terminus Road outside the rail station is just that, the end of the train line and the beginning of the walk to the seafront. There are many terminus rail stations where the train will not go forward because it is the end of the line. Stranraer is another, as is North Berwick, and as is Tweedbank in the recent history of the resumed Borders Railway.

    Terminal is definite, factual, measurable, an overarching situation within which all the normal daily life events are relegated to that vastness of human birth and death of the physical life, and which we call a span. A span does end otherwise it would not be a span, it would just go on and on and be actually nothing.

    Certainly there are those few who are expected to pass shortly yet continue on months, even a year, or occasionally (very occasionally) even longer. In the scheme of things, which under this Bill is life and passing/physical death, terminal means terminal, the buffer is in sight and everyone knows it, primarily the person themselves.

    As Leader of the Opposition (and how different things look when you are in opposition and free to promise anything, challenge anything, opinionate on anything) Sir Kier Starmer promised Dame Esther Rantzen, herself terminally ill in the biologically factual sense of the word, that if his party gained power they would definitely give time to this issue. Esther Rantzen was talking biologically. Sir Kier Starmer was talking politically and after the sweeping Labour victory Sir Kier has not followed through on that. Probably the statement was made in the giddy whirl of celebrity, not realising that Dame Esther was talking biologically, real life, pragmatically.

    It has been, paradoxically, the Labour MP Kim Leadbeater’s Private Member’s Bill to bring the subject into the public legislative realm. and paradoxically again, Lord Falconer’s, a Labour peer, clear thinking and drafting in 2014 bringing this base matter into Parliament. Base as in basic, not base as in gross, which opponents view it, for the two-pronged religious opponents – the very religious Christians and now other religions which now have a power presence in the ‘UK’ but it is the Christians who turn out in front of Parliament to oppose the Bill and whose hatred of the supporters is scarily near wanting to do away with them (us) with no terminal illness present, and the politically religious who believe that ‘the State’ is heaven on Earth and is the one to give or take away, and any rejection of ‘the State’ is akin to aligning yourself with the political devil domain.

    And thinking about it, there has now appeared a third religious-type opponent, of the individuals who do not have full mobility and therefore need to use a chair on wheels to get around, and which must be a big trial every single day, but who have appeared as an equal right opponent to this Bill. Pam Duncan-Glancy in the earlier part of 2025 when Assisted Dying appeared in Holyrood and Tanni Grey-Thompson as a current member of the House of Lords where this Terminally iLL Adults (End of Life) Bill is currently being debated – having been passed through Parliament and to repeat, having been passed through Parliament – and the very personal and very public on radio and TV and social media that is said this Bill is trying to kill us does factually show more a narcissistic personality issue than being able to read the title of a Bill from which it is too obvious to even debate that n/a to them. And within the very personal opponents are those who say their loved one did survive a lot longer than expected, and it led to that closeness which inevitable death brings and which is a good memory for those, but only because the person could talk, was not begging to die, was not asking why their loved ones were not doing the kindest thing possible of ending the fear and horror of a very bad death. But because politics is now all about the individual, even a new ‘Cult of the Individual’, and the individual voice and experience rather than the function of governance, even in the inner workings of government under the ‘UK’ and in the devolved chaos left by Tony Blair, in a debate as baseline as bad and traumatic endings for a terminally ill person and all around them, the illogicality of someone who is not terminally ill being able to speak in a debate as if it is about them, well, such is the state of governance in the ‘UK’.

    Biology being biology, very many animal ‘owners’ or co-workers with animals however we define the various human-animal pairings can see when a bad ending is approaching and when that measurable point has appeared – like not able to eat or drink, being in obvious pain and distress, losing a lot of weight or bodily distortion of the part where the terminal illness is taking over – take the no-option decision out of care for the animal to either visit the vet or have the vet come to the animal especially for big farm animals, or the farmers of which there are still a few just have to act according to natural principles, which is to end mindless suffering. It is not legal in the ‘UK’ for a human to go to a vet, and this writer never understands this. Biology is biology and especially with End of Life Terminal iLLness, the principles are the same.

    The opponents – all three, the religious zealots, the State zealots, and the personal zealots who cannot read the title to know it would not apply to them unless they had a terminal illness – who have introduced in the HoL, House of Lords, and Ladies now, the very very long list of objections to this Bill which has already been passed through the Commons say that the Bill is not clear, all the grey areas will lead to abuse and coercion, and their list goes on and on. In logical thinking it is the opposite, and the current situation is the chaotic one.

    The title is as clear as could be, and all alongside this is the option for the person approaching the very bad end to ‘go to Dignitas’. The word Dignitas sounds very like Dignity, which of course is what it is. Dame Esther says she may consider that herself. It all stands as yet another avoidance in the ‘UK’ of the void – in food, in energy supplies, in education systems, in the apparently free NHS, in soft global power, in the ships which leave our coastline every night laden with tons and tons of recycling to be processed by some quiet arrangement with a sizable payment involved, and the option safely just outside the ‘UK’ of Dignitas where every opponent of this Bill in the Commons and the Lords/Ladies must know it exists. All the countries and USA states who have integrated Assisted Dying into their daily life governance systems, and now the Isle of Mann in 2023 Parliament now in law in 2025 and awaiting Royal Assent, are those who see a human as biology over sociology and politics, and whose government structures align with logical processes.

    Would the House of Lords opponents argue that those going for a Dignified passing at Dignitas are doing something illegal, because they are British citizens therefore should be bound by laws of Parliament? Their long list of ‘points needing clarification’ could easily be reversed by looking at facts, such as the Isle of Mann, our very near neighbours around the North Sea who take a very baseline approach to humans on the physical Earth, and also to those MPs who started off opposing the Bill from back in 2014 but who then saw physical reality in someone close to them, and that horrible, shocking, deeply inhuman and torturous last few weeks or months changed their mind, and the reality of this Bill became clear, and they this time voted for it.

    Yes, the process of this Bill, now passed through the Commons but being determedly held up by the Lords/Ladies does show almighty collision of all things biological, health systems, politics, religion and the new ‘Cult of the Individual’. If Dame Esther does decide to go for that uncomplicated, inevitable and clear ending out of ‘UK’ jurisdiction then maybe this would be the year of a watershed of common sense could reappear in ‘UK’ politics and a return to the real facts of life, and death, which are biology on a physical planet where everything has a span, and within which we are just very little cogs in a very big cycle.

  • Marketplace Money: Market and Oikos

    This blog, written from the perspective of the observable and measurable facts of life on Earth which are that Helios, Grian, Ra, Ri, Hvare-khshaeta, there are many names for the same fact, and that fact of Helios appearing and disappearing at the angle and therefore heat strength of latitude, is always measuring to that one baseline fact for all humans, regardless of subject, and not at all from a personal perspective. A personal perspective is about an individual but a group of 10 humans standing in the same place would be at the same latitude therefore Helios would rise and set at the same angle over all of them, and they would all see the same environs surrounding them, if they used their eyes not their phones.

    Marketplace Money: Market and Oikos will become a subscription blog upcoming, when the tech is navigated (navigated being yet another appropriation of an ancient word from entire history of human societies until the last 100 or 200 years when it had electricity, leaving apart this bizarre digital age which will fail in a second at a major Solar flare, including this blog of course because this blog is written from the perspective of these basic facts), while thelogicalview.co.uk in general will continue putting out apparently unrelated subject matter, except it is all looking at the same baseline facts, which is how human society fits into reality, which is Helios, Earth, Light, gravity, water, food, shelter, and all within a specific geography.

  • The Vexed question of Vexillology – Part 4

    St. Andrew’s Day in Scotland and Russia, 30th November 2025

    Lactantius (Lucius Caeclius Firmianus Lactantius), a Christian advisor at the court of Constantine I, wrote in ‘On the death of the Persecutors’ that Constantine had had a dream before the battle of Milvian Bridge to place the Chi Rho symbol of Christ’s name on his soldiers shields. Constantine did win at Milvian Bridge, against Maxentius, whose head was paraded through the streets of Rome and became sole ruler of the western Roman Empire, and after defeating the eastern Emperor Lucinius in 324, ruler of the entire Roman Empire, ending the complications under shared rule of the Tetrarchy and the geographical impossibility of cohesion between such a huge territory. The one Christian God instead of pagan practices and the pantheon of gods headed by Jupiter, Juno and Minerva was a novelty and one God, one Emperor sat well for Bishop Eusebius’ ambitions for the rise of Christianity.

    The Chi Rho as Labarum military flag under Constantine could be said to mark a divergence in Vexillology between function of humans on land, and manipulation of belief, Constantine as a Christian or Constantine as a follower of the Sun, the source of Light and Life for all of earth, and as Sol Invictus which from Aurelian in 274 had been the official Roman cult. The Persian cult of Mithras, coming into the Roman Empire from eastern territories, was the elite Army cult, with initiation ceremonies and secret practices, such as all elite groups have and need to have to perform their difficult function for their society. Mithras, a Sun-god, was the god of contract, truth and justice, because Helios is the ultimate measure of all life on Earth, at whichever latitude and by whichever name. What exactly Constantine I was referring to as the God in the sky, it was directed by those with the writings and those with the intent to interpret for the Christians.

    Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea in his ‘the Life of Constantine’ started in 337 when Constantine I died, and uncompleted at Eusebius’ own death in 339, wrote that Constantine had definitely told him that before the battle of the Milvian Bridge in Rome, 25 years before, he and his soldiers saw a vision of a cross in the sky, and the Christian god saying, ‘In this sign, conquer’.

    https://www.numisforums.com/topic/6146-what-if-constantine-had-seen-this-instead

    https://www.thecollector.com/constantine-the-great-christian-religion-or-pragmatist

    A mere 500 years later, in present day East Lothian, the battle now known as the battle of Athelstaneford, at the Peffer Burn, was recorded by Water Bower, b. 1380s in Haddington, (by that time in Scotland not Northumbria) in his ‘Scotichronicon’, written in his latter years in the 1440s as Abbott of Incholm Abbey, on a small island on the north coast of the Firth of Forth. Walter Bower studied at St. Andrew’s University, in the town which c.1200 had acquired some relics of St. Andrew and the town was named St. Andrews. The now major pilgrimage centre brought much money and trading activity to the town. St. Andrew was said to have been martyred on a diagonal cross at Patras in the 60’s CE, and his symbol of a white diagonal cross on blue background decreed as identification on soldiers uniform by the Scottish Parliament in 1385.

    A jurisdiction and a government needs to be identified, and the human as a biological animal uses eyes to identify images and physical objects. It has also the senses of touch, sound, taste, and various others, but sight is the definition of human societal groupings, ethnicity and territory.

    In Bower’s writing, the battle at Athelstaneford in 832 had Athelstan, King of the Angles, meeting (in the battle sense) the Picts under Angus mac Fergus in their incursion into the territory of Northumbria, aided by the Scots under Eochaidh, King of Dalriada. As the oral tradition went, the northern folks saw a white cross of St. Andrew in the sky before the battle, and the Saint aided them in a great victory against Athelstan and his southern army, after which like the Chi Rho, the cross of St. Andrew became the symbol of the new united Picts and Scots in Alba under Kenneth MacAlpin in 843, the grandson of Eochaidh, and so Alba became modern Scot-land, not Pict-land. Pict-land of the geography above the Firth of Forth, and the Scots to the west, above the Clyde, lived within the natural geographical demarcation of Stirling, the portal from north to south, and in times long gone by when the water level was higher, the only land travel place. Such are the conditions for the human created by geography.

    Walter Bower, in formalising real historical movements and battles between very different tribes and societal groupings in their very different geographies of north and south Britain, and west and east, wrote of the event around the Peffer Burn. Athelstan however was not born until the 890s and was the King of the Anglo-Saxons 924-927, and uniting by emerging as the victorious, King of a united England 927-939. There was a united Alba-land and a united England. The King Athelstan of the 900s did campaign (in the old sense of the word which meant a military excursion to create maximum destruction against the enemy) in the north, against Constantine and a combined forces from Dublin and Vikings, an almighty collision of different newly solidified powers within Britain. The site of this victory for Athelstan is put variously over middle Britain from the Wirral to Yorkshire to the present day Scottish lowlands, and far from the events in 832 in Peffer Burn.

    It is those events, even if now historically mixed up in Athelstan who has his name as the village of Athelstaneford even if he could not have been there. Eanred was King of Northumbria 810-841, so maybe it was he who met the Picts and the Scots at the Peffer. Who knows. But the Saltire of white diagonal cross on blue background nearly 1,200 years later is unchanged, and the feast day of St. Andrew on November 30th is marked throughout Scotland as flag and Saint combined. Russia also marks the feast day of St. Andrew on November 30th, under the Russian flag of white, blue and red horizontal stripes.

    Athelstaneford is in East Lothian, in Scotland, with the Scots and the English fighting all the way through the centuries and Berwick upon Tweed and Carlisle castles being captured, by both sides many times, bloody battles, prisoners and razing to the ground. East Lothian in then Northumbria, and the events around the Peffer Burn birthing the Saltire image of peoples beyond Stirling, to the Scotland-England border fights along the river Tweed, to English taking Berwick again and a now border of part geography of the Tweed, part England up to Eyemouth, the debateable lands subdued over west and the Solway forming the other end of the turbulent history, these latitudes of 55′-56’N, we contain here a microcosm of a complicated macrocosm and possibly with the cross of St. Andrew a flag of Christian belief and the cross of St. George a flag of Christian belief with St. Patrick added into the Union Jack in the 1801 ‘Union’, could there be a more comprehensive study of flags, land, belief, ethnicity, shifting territory, and the relationship of image to identity?

    A sketch from Trapain law overlooking East Lothian and Firth of Forth, AEMW 31.05.2025

  • A Budget Blueprint

    To bring society and economics onto the same page, on the same land

    This week is Budget Day in the ‘UK’ 2025 and was there ever a more complicated picture in the history of human society than the ‘UK’ in 2025?

    Someone might say yes of course there is, the war zones, the big global conferences trying to find something to publish afterwards of a consensus, the questions of space travel to find rare minerals to put into the endless expansion of the digital world, all these questions are put out as the big questions of 2025, and a load more besides.

    In Budget Week 2025, here in this little arrangements of geography, how radical would it be to refocus everything, not upwards but ….. downwards.

    What would downwards mean? Downwards would look at facts and write those facts on a small piece of paper, or no bigger than an A4, which of course does not exist in the natural world. What does exist in the natural world? The Earth does exist, and the Earth is totally dependent on the Sun. The humans who live on Earth are not just totally dependent on Earth itself, which is dependent on the Sun, but also on dry land, food source, water, shelter, and what is called ‘society’, fundamentally for procreation otherwise the human grouping dies out, but when it is procreating to sustain its society, then it is dependent on communication to enable that society to function. Economics is an aspect of semi developed societies, development used there in the modern sense of the word as being good and that every human must be looking to the Protestant ‘west’ to follow their trajectory of individual rights, consumer goods, freedom to holiday and assume that ‘the State’ will sort everything out.

    If Budget Week in the ‘UK’ took a different tack to the political situation since WWII, which is an ever increasing funding of non societal healthy organisations and punitive screws tightened on those who provide the connective tissue in maintaining societal health, what could a very simple blueprint look like on the A4 piece of paper?

    Here follows an example, and not under copyright or IP, so plagiarism would be welcomed:

    Treat every one pound (coin) as money, regardless of whether it comes from employee work, self-employment, pensions and – and – benefits (all the many different benefits). That would automatically bring every human onto the same page and automatically bring a link to a citizen and governance, on a physical land area.

    Abolish the personal allowance, it is somewhere around £12,500, and that’s a lot of money (not for high net worth individuals but for the average man in the street). Abolishing that stress point between personal money and what the State is ‘taking’ would automatically refocus the modern obsession with individual rights away from person -v- State and back to the function of governance. It could also be a useful tool to test out an individual’s psychology in whether they believe in society in Britain or not.

    Completely rewrite Council Tax as not linked to the size of the house, the ‘mansion tax’ but linked to consumer load. The consumer load has a direct effect on the systems which a government and a Council has to run, like waste collection, education, care of the elderly, upkeep of buildings. An elderly person living in a large house, which was worth virtually nothing before the massive bubble in the ‘UK’ in the last few decades, but who uses very little electricity, does not put out a huge and heavy crate of alcohol bottles each bin collection (which costs massive energy to deal with), who knew that local society when there were libraries and community centres and children had no option but to be outside in all weathers with the resulting health which comes from that, and who uses very little water because they know that watering the lawn is a complete waste, that elderly person would pay very little Council Tax, maybe just £25 a month. The households which consume massively, destruct massively, and cost millions of pounds a year to the now Empire of Social Services, they would pay the top rate of Council Tax, which would be very high.

    So a three point blueprint: put a sliding scale from tiny to reasonable on every single pound (coin), abolish the personal allowance, and rewrite council tax to reflect the cost a household causes to the council jurisdiction. Easy!

  • Q: COP30…what has changed?

    A: The Earth has got hotter

    In the next few days the aeroplanes will be lining up to carry (not ferry, that was the only long distance transport before aeroplanes) the c.50,000 humans attending this COP back to their home nations, all around the spinning mass of rock which is Earth. No doubt there is great anticipation for the next COP when surely the solution to the crisis on Earth will be found, and of course another great gathering of talking around ‘the table’, hearing latest research, eating and drinking, and of course buying things from local traders to show support for the global market we all now inhabit. Probably no delegates will be walking home, except for the local Belem civic leaders, and that does not dent the c.50,000 who will be setting off, jetting off, in aeroplanes, disrupting the atmosphere and adding a great burden to the the crisis of the natural world, who does not use aeroplanes, or air con, or imported food and drink, or digital tech, or electrical appliances.

    If a quick sketch on the back of an envelope was made, and of which this writer is such a great believer and user of, of the balance of global causation of this crisis, how would this look? The indigenous peoples who do not consume out of their local area, and do not need fridges, cars, and who observe the dictatorship of Helios the whole year round, and of natural water supply and simple biology, they would be on the bottom line – in the doodle. Above that, in the middle band, how about dividing two categories of broadly speaking, the consumers and the producers?

    Because China and India did not appear at this party gathering, they are put as baddies, and of course the USA is nothing but a baddie for all the leftie leaning political and social media and young people in the west. So those two huge blocks of jurisdiction were not there, and no doubt have many black marks allocated to them for that. But if the picture was switched around and producers who are blamed for this increasing CO2 and all the rest of the measurable collapse were on the righthand side and it was the consumers who were on the left, so Consumers = Production, then where does the balance of crisis causation lie?

    Because within the atmosphere is really all one unit, so a rising temperature will eventually affect everything, because the natural world is not confined or contained within one jurisdiction’s opinion, or behaviour, where is this crisis generating? People will say ‘the Industrial Revolution’ and yes sure, it did set off some pretty unnatural processes, although the initial coal and steam industry was still very localised because of the manual work involved, by men, like shovelling coal into the engine of a steam train, or pulling coal up from deep underground, and using water at useful places where it was running downhill from gravity meant the power was already there to enable the industrial processes.

    Using electricity in industry was a different scale altogether, and a different scale of damage to the natural environment, which the human has only as its survival, just like all other species. But now, in the last few decades, the mating of industry and digital, well, if that is put alongside the measurable crisis to life conditions, surely the correlation is too clear to ignore.

    If the ‘bad’ producers were behind the = sign instead of in front as the causation, and not the west opinionating about who is doing the damage, if consumer power was the measure, where does that come from? Since New Labour opened universities to all, and with the result every local college, tech college, tiny institution and even uni’s which had never existed in any form sprang into existence in the ‘UK’ like mushrooms after a spring rainfall, how many air flights are taken each year ferrying, in the modern sense of that word, international students to and from the ‘UK’? How many giant container tankers full of goods are being transported from China each week to ….. not France or Portugal or Spain, but to the ‘UK’? How much food is produced in regions which need their water and manpower to survive themselves, into the ‘UK’ requiring masses of power for cold storage and preservation to ensure perfection in supermarkets? How many Brits are now taking several air flights a year to hot countries, or even to see the Arctic ice before the last snowflake melts? Beyond the Consumer = Producer equation there is even another quick sketched line above – the absolutely absurd. With the USA now facing really difficult questions about borders and consumption and some sense of responsibility coming back into view, is it the ‘UK’ which sits at the peak of the digital era pyramid, alone and absurd?

    If a global scientific conference cannot or will not start at the absolute baseline, what is the point? The baseline has not gone away and there is further to fall the higher we go. Modern belief in science and ‘human rights’ to have consumer goods of 2025 which many young people have only known in their lifetime, it does not change facts in any way, only increases the divergence. Even the Emperor must be saying now, ‘Guys, can’t you see, I have no clothes!!’ But that point has passed, until the big digital collapse, and then no one will be looking to another COP to save the world.

  • ‘In Poverty’ and the upcoming Budget

    Finance in the ‘UK’

    It is Budget time again, and the intricacies of big finance is way beyond this blog in both knowledge and interest. However, being a baseline blog, never far from the surface of Earth and always – always – with the framework of facts that all aspects of an individual human and a human society can only ultimately be within the overarching facts, that Earth is dependent on the Sun, in both gravity and Light/heat, and that the life zone is dependent on conditions and food and water within the atmosphere, without which none of us would exist.

    Within the political zone, many eyes focus onto that entirely man-made and the now even stranger modern construction of big finance, and the two-way flow of money into the government, and out again to the citizens in all the various services and complications of the modern ‘UK’.

    Finance now in the ‘UK’ is all about up, and preferably up and up. Those who are fascinated by profit and wealth and high net value and the lifestyle that comes with that are a big feature in the ‘UK’ over last decades, but so also is the equally opposite bottom of the ladder – as seen comparatively – of ‘the poor’, those ‘living in poverty.’ A government in power covers all rungs on that ladder (a ladder as seen by the western Protestant finance societal model but not the societal base for some countries on Earth, and not anywhere existing in the natural world), and Budget time is the focal point of all that, even for laymen like this blog. This blog is written from the wider context.

    Over the last 10 years from the observer’s point of view, two major sections of life or society, or opinion, have come fully into being. One is the expanding benefit system, expanding in different benefits and expanding in numbers claiming and which numbers now include people from all over Earth and their family networks from all over Earth with 100s of different cultures, languages, view of society, and view of the ‘UK’.

    The other is the prominence of identity to ‘be in poverty’ which from organisations like the Rowntree Foundation is all about a monetary value and how one person or family compares with the average or the top earners, it is probably more specific like that, but this is a general blog and will never misquote or plagiarise, but is often speaking in general terms. The fact is that poverty is clear if complete destitution is obvious, but societal poverty is related to all sorts of things, even apart from the new financial requirements of tech and online games and Netflix and all the various digital medias which require subscriptions, and of course pizza. The takeaway bill for pizza in the ‘UK.’ In the interests of being vaguely specific, a quick Google search just came up with £2.5-3 billion a year spent on takeaway pizza in the ‘UK’. That’s a lot of money.

    It is a fact that the current Labour government talk a lot about not only ‘women and girls’ but children ‘in poverty’ and the poverty being a reason for not attaining what politics is promising every young person. The life of a schoolchild deemed to be in poverty has some pretty good aspects to it, one being the amount of holiday activities paid for by Councils and private organisations contracting into Councils to be able to provide the outdoors activities, the psychological activities, the wellbeing and the giving the feeling that the children in poverty are just as loved as those who live in households deemed not to be in poverty.

    A radio news programme last weekend quoted the welfare bill in its entirety as spending in two weeks what the Defence budget spends in a year. If the social media wars are to be believed, the ‘UK’ is going to have to muster an army in the near future, so this massive imbalance between x26 spent on societal issues, much of which is illness against x1 of the Defence budget as viewed from an Earth – society equation does not look good. The Chancellor needs to raise money, and raise it fast, yet a large proportion of the citizens in the ‘UK’ do not pay any tax at all, yet consume so much resources in finance, health, education, and Council services.

    Ten years ago in a gathering, sort of political, but definitely a discussion event, the economist Richard Murphy was speaking and this blog typer and he had a discussion on tax, and that it would be a good idea for every adult citizen to pay tax, regardless of what the income was, benefits or earnings. It was only those two humans in the room who thought that was a good idea. Everyone else thought it would be very unfair, and not even thinkable. To this blog which is deeply interested in the long history of belief and income to outcome, all under the facts of Earth and Sun and gravity, then how a society not just is governed but how it relates to each other is ultimately a question of survival, even if the comfortable existence in the ‘UK’ these days does not think of actual survival.

    This writer has observed since, and still, that alignment of the citizen – money – tax, it could be said to only have become more relevant, because of the new scale of events, and the scale of the problems. Still the question remains, and if in reverse logic the Chancellor turned round the spotlight away from the demarcated sections of society and looked solely at the bottom line of an all inclusive group of citizens of the ‘UK’, with all income as just a monetary income regardless of source, then what better way of levelling up (levelling down) and inclusivity than creating a new financial framework of income – tax. This human said to Richard Murphy what if there was no Personal Allowance? Why is it needed? In 2025, why is the government not consulting the tax philosophers such as Prof Murphy to open the possibility of a rethink of this horrible impasse. If the tax bands applied to every citizen of adult age so those in receipt of small benefits

    If tax bands applied from the first £1, say 0.5p in the £1 and rising through the income levels for every single adult citizen, regardless of source of income, how would that change society? Society, this blog believes, has its own identity, or does in a healthy group of humans with more chance of survival than when it is missing. The x26 amount spent on benefits compared to Defence would then soon start to even out, but as important, the frameworks within society would be of citizens, not politically enabled identities. The ‘UK’ would not be seen as such an Eldorado, and those families living entirely on benefits would gain an understanding of how a society works and of how difficult it is to balance a life and governance.

    Equal to that, if all Councils ran a holiday programme for pretty much every week of school holidays, and across the devolved governments, that every child is out at activity and education camps regardless of income or the ‘being on benefits means poverty’ mentality, because it can be the reverse meaning those ‘in poverty’ get a distorted view of entitlement and that such wonderful activities are a part of fundamental rights. If each county Council was tasked with activating all children in every holiday, with a few days off for Christmas, doing all sorts of outdoor learning, physically tough regimes and sailing and woodworking, and in the spare time helping the Council with litter picking, painting fences, thinking about making flood defences, learning how to shear a sheep and skin a deer, fish, and make bread, and practice technical drawing, then with all their parents paying tax and all adults on the same page, all children on the same page, how much would that automatically reset this societal collapse happening?

    In the offices of government it must be so easy to just adjust a few technical systems, issue a few new documents, send out the new Directive to all Jobcentres and to HMRC, that simply, every pound of income is under the same incremental tax bands. And it would be so simple to bring the young citizens onto the same page, and all have the same opportunity to experience holiday activity. What would the balance of voters be? Many young people would be probably an automatic vote against any party that did that, but how many would feel a sense of relief that society could ease down and onto the same page, all citizens, instead of this strange antagonism of income and tax? It is not too late, and might even be a vote winner if the upcoming Budget introduced something really really simple.

  • COP……how many?

    ………30?

    It’s 2025 by the western calendar, and Belem in Brazil, at c.1.5’South in latitude ‘is hosting’ a vast global conference of c.55,000 (and a few more) scientists, politicians, journalists of course, experts, environmental speakers of all ages, intergovernmental orgs, non-governmental orgs, leaders from within Brazil honoured, or at least appearing to be, chosen as the venue for this global event, and somewhere in the mix …. c.3,000 indigenous peoples from all over the spinning mass of rock with the tiny little atmosphere zone around it which we call Earth will be at this global event, and feted with the title ‘Guardians of Biodiversity.’ They must be delighted.

    This blog is not counter culture. It is not written by a hippy. Far from it.

    Belem, a city of human society, and the capital city of the state of Para (apologies, this writer is not clever with tech so cannot put the right accent above the a there) is pretty much on the Equator. The Equator is the place at which Helios shines constantly, because the Earth being a spinning mass of rock in space but held by gravity into an orbit has its poles further away from Helios and at an angle therefore the Light of the Sun falls obliquely not directly. This creates vastly different climatic conditions over the surface of this mass of rock spinning in space. In 55-56’N this morning it is fairly cold (not nearly cold enough for the time of the seasonal year) and very wet. In Belem it is probably pretty hot, because being on or near enough the Equator is either hot and dry or hot and wet.

    The city of Belem as everyone knows is at the mouth of the river Amazon, that vast, really vast, wilderness of earth meeting water, the fertility and scale and complexity and sheer wonder that has arisen out of this mass of rock spinning in space with an atmosphere around it. Belem is not ‘on the Brazilian coast’ because humans in the past knew their geography and knew that the sheltered places were just up the river at a suitable point where boats could tie up and humans meet on the river bank, with walkable routes leading to and from that river point. So, just a few miles up the River Amazon is Belem.

    Belem, like many places on Earth, was a major centre for the colonial period when the natural resources were endless. The not mouth but delta system of the Amazon, because these geographies are vast and complex and only make sense from the overall scale, contains the salt water, the fresh water, the precipitation which comes down in humid regions, the unmeasurable biodiversity of the rainforest – forest with a lot of rain – the habitation of so many millions and billions of living creatures from the too tiny to see to the visible animals and birds and spiders and of course trees, those giant trees which produced the sap which was required for the growing production of western rubber requirements ….. and of course, living creatures of humans, who are now called in the Amazon, indigenous. Belem is called the ‘city of mango trees’ so it’s in the name, there are many many mango trees around the delta of the Amazon river.

    A mango is now a favoured western but there are two ‘mango’s.’ One is the native plant of the delta system of the Amazon, and is part of the infrastructure (to use a modern word) with its roots holding together the underlying complexity in that liminal zone of salt and freshwater, land and sea. The other mango is a cultivated plant giving those wonderful fruits, now combined with words such as ‘smoothie’ in the west. The trading port on the site of Belem, over thousands of years a network of small trading between those who could make boats (from scratch, of tree trunks and animal skins), did as history knows, come then under the Portugese government – or Crown as things were then – and the scale erupted into trans-Atlantic trade, either willing or enforced, but still only along certain trade routes and involving a very difficult sea journey over the Atlantic Ocean – by the Portugese it must be reminded, for they were the first to cross that vast stretch of water to establish trade goods, and yes, to use humans from the west coast of Africa to work the new plantations. Portugal is far south of c.55-56’N. But still, all travel was by land and sea, and did very, very, very little damage to the overall life conditions within the atmosphere of this spinning mass of rock in space. It did not damage, because it could not, the life zone around Earth was vast, self-regulating, and assisted greatly by regions such as the Amazon with its unmeasurable array of water and flora, land and sea. The so-called indigenous people in the region, living in the nature-dictated societal groupings of tribe, were not even divisible from their ‘environment.’

    Fast forward to 2025, and a very recent in history event under the umbrella of the United Nations, an organisation which has many arms going into government, health, migration, education, human rights, and every nebulous zone of society possible, now at COP30 has these c.55,000+ humans in a vast conference for 10 days, speaking about …. about what? Well, it’s obvious what they’re there for, it is to save ‘biodiversity’, because biodiversity is the modern research subject, and everybody knows there is a problem. To complete the loop, the 3,000 ish of indigenous peoples who are being flown in as exhibits, they will be given the feted reception (and again, there would possibly be an accent on that French word but is beyond this writer’s capability) of ‘Guardians of Biodiversity.’ Not ‘Champions of….’, no, that would be just too obviously mad. Mad, illogical, nonsensical, and utterly hypocritical, and probably would be refused by any unoffficial spokesman for those indigenous people who would not recognise what a ‘Champion’ was. ‘Guardians …’ yes, a clever term to offer them.

    As long as there are those ‘Guardians of Biodiversity’ sitting at this massive global event all is well. The loop is complete and the work has credibility. Everyone is there to try and ‘save the planet.’

    If COP30 is read through the reverse logic, and the vast and minute data of science and the natural world is reversed into basic facts of heat, water, food, should not a conference like COP30 publish the facts of its own event and publish how many flights were taken, how many different linking flights from origin to Belem, how many litres of water have been used by delegates attending COP30, how much power has been required for air conditioning to ensure the delegates don’t pass out in the humidity, how much food has been flown in (weight on planes adds fuel requirements), how much each hotel has been required to provide in facilities and local workforce who will be ‘let go’ after the delegates have (flown) home, and how much money will have gone into the preparation, event itself, and in dismantling all the conference apparatus, and including that from the protestors who have also flown there, and the indigenous who probably feel they could not refuse this new western domination, and ….. how much hot air has been produced?

    Leaving aside the irony of a global company called Amazon (which it must be stated this writer has never used as it saw the outset of how it decimated the book trade and then went on to decimate everything else which includes The Amazon delta), and in the interests of data, why is COP30 not required to include itself in this data machine of research and concern over the collapse of the survival-support of everything including humans? Should it not quanitfy the amount of water used which requires power to get it to come out of a tap, the amount of flights, the amount of CO2 added, the amount of money paid to get it all going fine, and above all, the degree of temperature rise that it has added?

    If the ‘Guardians of Biodiversity’ collectively made their end of conference statement as ‘Stop COP31’ would anybody believe they meant it? Would it be absorbed into another protest slogan and another ‘we listened to everybody’ in the roundup of the successful COP30, as delegates look forward to the next extravaganza. Short of a global power cut in the next big Solar Flare, is there anything now which can return humans to a reason and common sense?

  • The Vexed question of Vexillology – Part 3

    Vexillology = vexillum + logia

    Vexillology is not a historic subject of study, it was not in the Trivium of grammar, rhetoric and logic, and it was not the Quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

    Vexillology as a distinct focus (and a focus is a looking towards, into, amongst something, not looking out and out and out)is pretty recent in history, though contains some finely focused minds, and here is the reference – https://fiav.org/the-origins-of-organized-vexillology/

    Because similar interests gravitate towards each other (gravity as the underlying principle of the whole of existence on Earth and without it where would we be?), within a few decades the focused interests had developed – https://fiav.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ICV20-28-Schmoger-The-Roman-vexillum.pdf

    In layman’s terms (the non-expert), the vexillum was the portable square red cloth hanging from a crossbar, so facing head on, therefore designed to be visible. Velum = sail in Latin. It was the only cloth flag of the Roman Empire and when there is only one, it is possible to define the meaning, or the message, or the point of it, or the function. The letters SPQR – Senatus Populusque Romanus – define a totality of geography, a place, governance, and citizens, but why would someone bother to go to the effort of making such an object? It was for military function, to define Roman jurisdiction and territory.

    The vexilloid, also a relatively recent term and from Whitney Smith, likewise did not create something new but the slightly different word defines the difference between the cloth flag and the staff with carved emblem. A vexilloid equally defines from within, and looking over the whole Earth (which a human cannot do, except through modern digital tech which is all going down at the next big solar flare) that symbol of a wooden staff with carved emblem and local relevance such as feathers is still a fundamental part of indigenous societies,

    The combination of language and physical objects arising from the ve – velum, the various vex’s, the focused knowledge within vexillology and the now Vexed question of Vexillology, are all from within the trajectory of the Roman Empire, to be still lodged within the ‘UK’, the further possible landmass (taking the Channel as not too hard to cross) of western Europe. In Europe we do not have vexilloids now, apart from ceremonial function of state and religion, and historical re-enactment societies, but we do have a lot of vexillums, as being a cloth on a pole.

  • The complications around royal sex

    The multi layered matter of Prince Andrew and Virginia Guiffre

    Global media now being mostly digital after the century or two of print media, (the newspaper purchased, unfolded and read), this week for regular citizens again it is Prince Andrew in the news because of the book of, or by, or about, Virginia Giuffre. There must have been other people in the meetups and the evenings at Tramp, with that name and maybe Annabel’s as well being the two, or two of the, places where a young lady looking for the highlife and rich men would have achieved that aim. And why not, because that is how society works and still works in the world of say football, where young men earning a small fortune each week have no shortage of females seeking their attention. It’s just life, isn’t it?

    Why is this so distorted the way Prince Andrew and Virginia Guiffre are taking the global digital media? If a young lady says she was sex trafficked then that is what she says, but surely there are so many more questions than that. One is the law, and what is the actual crime here? Under ‘UK’ law, the age of 16 is the legal age for consenting sex, and if someone – male, female, or anything in between – believes the other person is consenting then that is consent. If a two-week discussion was held then the moment would have passed, and that’s just sex isn’t it. Someone aged 16 is not breaking the law in the ‘UK.’ It is a different matter for gypsies, or travelling community under their new name, who still go on biology, and in biology males and females are in the reproduction or sex as leisure zone as soon as biology says so, and that’s probably about 12 or 13 in most cases, but ‘UK’ law does not apply to the travelling community. They conversely have protected rights, another anomoly of life in the ‘UK’.

    In this fevered climate of anti-Andrew, and the triumph of some females who have succeeded in getting his royal titles removed, it has to be asked, is this from the American love of all things British royal, and Andrew is seen as letting the golden image down where the royals can do no wrong? Or is it misanthropy at the most public? There is another question to ask, that as Virginia Guiffre wrote that she was trafficked, which implies duress and an almost hostage process and from just the news headlines over the year or so that reaches those of us who do not follow such things in depth the pair of Epstein and Maxwell were up to some pretty odd things, and that is the question of jurisdiction. Sorry about that long sentence, it might or might not make sense (dyslexia). In the USA the age of 16 is not legal to have sex, so surely this should be a matter for within the USA on the ‘underage’ question. It has become an America-royal family news level, but the actual legality surely is not underage in the ‘UK’, is underage in the USA?

    If the matter was turned round to also focus back down the line, even right back to the origin of the person, which is birth from two parents, childhood, etc., then the life of this unfortunate young lady was not very good all along, apparently. And in the natural world, the weak and unprotected are the ones likely to be consumed first by the predator (which in the natural world is a totally different thing, it contributes to overall health of the ecosystem, not detracts from it). In human society why is global sociology and media only going one way?

    The unfortunate young lady apparently had a bad father, and when there is a bad parent (male or female it has to be said), that weakens life for thereon, and can never fully be rectified. So, the fact she had a difficult life makes the story all the more emotive. However …. one thing is missing, and that is the mother. Where was she in all this? And in this global interconnectivity, why could a call not be made from the young lady to her mother to say she was in difficulty, and could she help get her out of it and back to the USA?

    News coverage has also been in the ‘UK’ in events of Rochdale, in a different level of social class, but these are all similar questions if seen from a wider focus. Why can the ‘UK’ and the USA not look the other way and ask what is so fundamentally and tragically wrong with society that these situations arise at all? It is a valid question to ask.