Good on the Pope!! About time a religious leader made some sense!

Posted on by Opher

PopeMe too!

I never thought ‘d be agreeing with the Pope on anything but I seem to be liking everything he said about the climate!

Well done Pope Francis.

He called on all the world, all people, to stop their selfish ways and start to look after the planet. He said that humanity was responsible for the climate change and we should stop burning fossil fuels.

That’s a big step forward! Maybe everyone will start to listen now?

Perhaps the Pope’s next move might be to lift the ridiculous, outmoded ban on contraception. I don’t remember anywhere in the bible where Jesus tells everyone to stop putting condoms on their penises.

The ‘go forth and multiply’ stupidity is creating a crisis for all life on this planet. Between the Catholics and the Muslims there seems to be a race to flood the world with followers and ‘win’. That’s nuts.

Large families are a huge problem. We are seven billion heading for ten! It is not sustainable.

But good on Pope Francis – at least it is a step in the right direction!

The future and saviour of the world – Fusion energy!

Posted on by Opher

 

fusion fusion 2

No not fracking or burning fossil fuels. That way leads to climate change and the same old scene.

Not even solar, wind and alternatives.

The future lies in Fusion. Once we have created the technology to do this industrially we will have unlimited power. It will be unpolluting and transformative.

We can have unlimited electricity for transport, producing fresh water to irrigate, and power to light the world.

It will lead to an age of plenty, the end of fundamentalism, migration, poverty and war.

Fusion is the future.

This is where we need to be investing big-time right now.

Fusion is beautiful! The sun works on it. We will bring a little sun on Earth. The old Sun Gods will be worshipped all over again (in a non-religious way).

Science and education are the saviours of mankind just as fundamentalism and fanaticism are its major threats.

Give me the power of fusion any day! Free energy for all mankind!

(The one caveat is that we will need to reduce our population so that there is room for the rest of life on this tiny planet!)

Asteroids – perhaps a watch might be in order?

Posted on by Opher

asteroid

I’m presently reading Brian Cox’s ‘Human Universe’. I am enjoying it immensely and find it extremely interesting.

Towards the end is a sobering chapter on asteroids.

An asteroid weighing 12,000 tonnes and travelling 60 times the speed of sound hurtled in from sunward on February 15th 2013 at 9.13 am. It broke up high in the sky with a force of twenty Hiroshimas above the Russian city of Chelyabinsk. 1500 people were injured.

Alexei Pushkov – a Russian minister – said ‘Instead of fighting on Earth, people should be creating a joint system of asteroid defence.’

The Tunguska event in Siberia in 1908 went off with the power of a hydrogen bomb flattening 2000 square kilometres of forest. It would have easily flattened an entire city.

Events of that magnitude occur every 300 years.

Chicxulub which hit at the Yucatan peninsular in Mexico, carving out the bay of Mexico 66 million years ago, put pay to the dinosaurs and caused mass extinction. It is estimated to have had the force of 8 billion Hiroshima bombs!! That is a thousand times the whole world’s arsenal of atomic bombs!

An event on that size is estimated to hit every 100 million years or so.

It looks to me as if it is inevitable that we will be hit by a major city smashing asteroid, or bigger, sooner or later.

The sad thing is that we presently have the technology to be able to detect it coming and do something about it. Except that we neither have the will or the wit. We’d rather put our resources into warfare.

The salutary fact is that we could have an advanced asteroid watch system for as little as one third of what Wayne Rooney is currently being paid.

Sometimes I think we deserve all we get.

If we pooled our resources we could easily come up with a way of deflecting or breaking up incoming asteroids. That is not beyond us and probably not even very pricey.

The fundamentalists believe that god will protect them.

ISIS, along with a number of US evangelicals, probably think its a good idea because it’ll get them to heaven quicker.

I think the whole of humanity is seriously insane.

Poetry – Monkey Business – a poem about the population explosion on this monkey planet.

Posted on by Opher

Monkey Business

Making love to a monkey who doesn’t think she’s a chimpanzee

Floating through the dust with a baby on my knee

Leaving signals in the wind for the other folks to see

That there’s nothing quite as smart as your average monkey

 

Frowning with consternation at the cosmic flow

Streaming from the arse of the ‘big bang’ below

With a monkey brain to fathom the bottomless low

And a population set to endlessly grow,

 

Yet I’m making love to another chimpanzee

Populating paradise with big bald monkeys

We’re taking over – temporarily

Floating monkey droppings in the big brown sea.

 

Opher 20.11.00

 

This is the age of the monkey. It looks set to be a brief interlude in the history of the planet. Most of the monkeys don’t even know they’re monkeys let alone where their arse is. You think they would. They talk out of it most of the time.

We are the fourth major cause of extinctions of species. The others were comets. We shot out of evolution like a meteor though. We’re still crashing our way through the planet.

We love sex. We love babies. We seem to hate other adults though.

On one side we are doing our best to churn out huge numbers of offspring and at the same time we’re busy pouring lead into older bodies or applying blades to the jugular.

Crazy monkey brains!

The first person in this poem refers to the race as a whole.

The short message is that there’s far too much monkey business!

Poetry – I Can’t Breathe Without You – a simple love poem for my family.

Posted on by Opher

I Can’t Breathe without you.

I can’t dream without you

You are my world

Your smile – my beacon

My colours paled

 

I have no life without you

That is true

Your truth – my vision

With only you

 

I can’t breathe without you

I don’t know why

Your essence – my ambrosia

My earth, my sky

 

My heart won’t beat without you

I know it’s true

Your presence – my nutrition

I love you

 

Opher 29.5.95

In the final end it is your family that counts – my wife and my kids, my grandchildren and relatives. They are your DNA and pathway to immortality.

To love is what we do best. It is when we are at our best.

If you do not love you have not lived.

Your present is all about who you love. I am a lucky man. I have friends and family to give me nourishing sustenance. Who can ask for more.

This is my love poem to my widest family. In its widest sense it is all life on this planet but right now it is my loving family.

It needs saying more.

Love is all there is. There is nothing greater.

The Major Record Labels are strangling Rock Music!

Posted on by Opher

It seems to me that there have only ever been periods of great musical brilliance and innovation at times when the major record labels were not involved in producing ‘product’.
The Blues was all tiny home produced labels for the black population.
Rockabilly was small labels and then destroyed by the majors,
Beatles and Dylan – a law unto themselves.
British & American sixties Underground – so not understood that the majors left them to it.
Punk – a return to the minor labels.
Whenever ‘big business’ get their mitts on it they sanitise, overproduce, become formulaic, reduce to the lowest common denominator, try not to offend, dumb down and basically rip the balls out of it.
In the face of that you get the emergence of raw brilliance like The North Mississippi Allstars, White Stripes, Jake Bugg, or PJ Harvey who produce something raw and imaginative.
The great tunes have not all been written but they are getting very few and far between in this present age. I think the main thing is that the passion, idealism and political zeal are not there at the moment. We need a new cause for people to believe – something to unify and fight against. There’s plenty to choose from! There’s a whole planet out there needs saving; where’s the new Punk, the new Dylan?

Anthropocene Apocalypse – Malthus and the catastrophe of overpopulation.

Posted on by Opher

Overpopulation

Thomas Robert Malthus was a reverend from the eighteenth century who foresaw the effects of a huge burgeoning world population. He thought it would be a catastrophe. It would take room, use up resources and create famine and pestilence. He proposed that measures needed to be taken in order to restrict the population.

He was a man of vision.

Unfortunately Malthus’s ideas were aimed at restricting the increase of the working class! He was a trifle elitist.

Malthus is being proved right though. The population increase is building in pace, threatening food, water, mineral resources, the natural environment and most wild animals. It is changing the climate of the planet.

The answer does not lie in forcing poor people from breeding. It requires a much greater application of intelligence. We have to address the social issues that create the need for big families, the religious stupidity that is preventing people from regulating the number of progeny, the political policies that encourage big families and do not penalise  having too many children and the means to access contraception and use it effectively.

Education and social change is the answer.

Step 1 – recognise that we have a major global problem.

Step 2 – bring in social changes so that there is health care and pensions which remove the need for large families

Step 3 – Bring in contraception and education to limit children

Step 4 – begin an awareness raising campaign to highlight the need to reduce population

Step 5 – limit the places that humans can live, exploit nature or hunt and conserve the wilderness (50% for humans – 50% for the rest of life)

Step 6 – Stop religions going through their silly games to try to win through sheer weight of numbers by encouraging large families

Step 7 – Bring in political inducements and disincentives to encourage small families.

If action is not taken now we will be heading for disaster – a virus, a catastrophe, famine, starvation, emigration, climate change and the devastation of the wilderness.

I don’t want that. I want a beautiful world for my beautiful grandchildren. I want action!

Poem – You don’t own me – No you don’t – poem of individuality

Posted on by Opher

The politicians, advertisers, persuaders, religious leaders, friends, employers and colleagues all try to get your attention, change your mind, indoctrinate your thoughts, sway you over, get you to agree, urge you to change your mind, subliminally get in your head, convince you and tie you down.

People want you to be like them.

I’m me.

Ownership is only borrowing. We have to give it all back eventually. We need to ensure we do not damage it while it is in our possession.

Some people think they can buy people and do what they like to the planet. They need opposing.

Everything here is to share.

NO YOU DON’T

You don’t own the air

And you can’t buy the sea

And you can’t own me

 

You can’t own the land

And the sky’s always free

You can’t hold infinity

 

You can’t even cage an atom

In a redwood tree

You don’t have to wait an eternity

 

You’re just passing through

Borrowing to be

Owning nothing – indefinitely

 

You can’t own the air

You can’t buy the sea

And you don’t own me.

 

5.12.95  OPHER

Poetry – Angry – Let’s get things done!

Posted on by Opher

Chimp elitismstyle_chimpanzee

I am often dismayed by the vacuous nature of most people’s lives. Thoreau said that we lead lives of quiet desperation. Most of us get bogged down in narrow horizons of daily chores. We go through life like cattle chewing the cud in fields; without a thought for the future of life outside the field. I see a whole world the other side of the hedge and an abattoir just down the road.

I always promised myself that I would live life to the full, experience it and wring it dry. I promised myself that I would not sink into the rut that I saw my parents slide into. There was more than work, a routine and telly.

There is a world to engage in. There are huge issues to become involved with. There are things to create. There is a future to help build.

Once you start seeing what our glorious leaders are doing; the inequality, destruction and selfishness they instigate, and the level of hypocrisy that is involved, the insanity they preside over, it fills you with impotent fury.

I want a simple, happy life of enquiry, creativity, friendship and purpose in which we preserve the planet for our grandchildren and all manner of life that lives on it. I do not subscribe to endless growth, wealth creation and unsustainable destruction.

I am consumed with the desire to do something about it.

I want a positive zeitgeist!

ANGRY

My mind is crippled

My emotions crawl

My memory limps

My psychology stalls

 

Somewhere between the mindless and the mean

Between the leaders and followers

What is and might have been

Between the sickeningly sweet and the vicious kick

Between the awesome mystery

Religion and the sick.

Somewhere between the ageing and the end

Between the discovery and death

The laws to break and mend

Between the exploiting cynic and the devotee

Between the moments that matter

And the lives of you and me.

 

There must be more than this

There has to be a way

That gives a sense of purpose

With something real to say

 

Opher 23.10.96

Art – Nuclear Warhead – thought you might like another of my paintings

Posted on by Opher

IMG_0493

I painted this in the mid seventies.

I had grown up with the threat of mutual annihilation. I remember the Cuban missile crisis. We did not expect to go home again. The Russians were heading for Cuba with missiles and the USA promised to sink them. We all knew that if that happened there would be a nuclear conflict. Fortunately they backed down.

These were the days of the Cold War.

As a child and up until quite recently I lived with the knowledge that I was in the target area for a number of nuclear warheads. In the event of war we would be obliterated. I spent my life five minutes from atomic death.

All it would take is a mistake, a piece of nationalistic bravado, gamesmanship, or flawed strategy. Now we have to throw religious fanaticism into the equation.

Nuclear bombs, like biological warfare, is a nightmare. Sometimes I wonder at the tribal stupidity that creates nations, politics and wars. We need to grow out of it.

I wanted to present the sinister face of evil peering out from the midst of the explosion. I saw the nose first, fitted in the eyes and pictured the blast zone as a pair of lips. The broiling inferno became a livid brain.

Nations, religion and patriotism is all madness to me.

I stand for one global people, united, equal and with one planet to nurture. This painting means a lot to me.