E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Had this year been only about good songs, TV shows and movies, plays, concerts, evening meals, seeing friends, swimming, reading and holidays, it might rank among my top ten favourite years since I was born. However, three major factors make me consider 2025 one of the worst years in my personal experience, and probably one of the very worst years of the past century (easily in the top 12% of worst years since 2000) geo-politically. 1. My mother died. I won't write more here about this, but as you can imagine, this has been the saddest and most upsetting personal life event since the death of my father 20 some years ago. Then three family members died (an uncle and aunt). Very sad. 2. Trump, the war against Ukraine, and war and suffering in the Middle East, not to mention other wars and tragedies and terror attacks, led to a geo-political instability "at home and abroad" - with American democracy being undermined as perhaps never before, not even during the Nixon period,...

As readers of my Swift Report 2025 will see, when it is posted, this was not what I'd consider a "great year" - for me personally, or for the world, ecologically and politically. However, just as 1941 WAS a great year for movies from Hollywood, in the depths of WWII, so too, 2025 offered some of the best popular/indie music, TV shows, and movies of the century so far. I won't be discussing theatre, opera, art, orchestral, or other works here, nor books. As a publisher that always seems awkward. Though I am on record as praising the posthumous collection by Irish poet Kevin Higgins from Salmon as a necessary book. And I found If anyone builds it, everyone dies a brilliant and thrilling propaganda work, sort of like The Communist Manifesto meets Terminator:2 . If it is even 25% true, as the authors put it, the world will likely be destroyed by superintelligent AI (ASI) by 2047, maybe even in the next 3 years. If accurate, the book is maybe the most important one ever...