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

prepared for February... Historians may be forgiven for finding January 2020 more stuffed with signs and wonders, horrors and events, portents and peril, than the entire Game of Thrones arc; not yet over, this month has given us, unbelievably: - a week of thinking there'd be a World War 3 triggered by an American strike on Iran's top military leader; - the tragic downing of the airplane flying from Iran; - the crisis of the British Monarchy triggered by 'Megxit' and lingering concerns over Prince Andrew's lack of testimony; - Brexit (see next post); - ongoing fires and environmental disaster in Australia; - The Trump impeachment and the Republican failure to be non-partisan in the Senate trial; - the novel and deadly Wuhan virus becoming a global emergency. I know I am missing more memes, meaningful deaths, earthquakes, and accidents. The trend is not an arc towards justice, but to chaos, ethical duplicity, corruption, war, and environmental destru...

WE'D ALL BE BETTER OFF IF SHE WAS IN CHARGE A few days ago a person who was very angry at the state of the world, and who had determined to do something violent in the name of extreme views, went on a rampage outside of the British houses of parliament. A terror incident, and awfully, innocent people were injured, and killed, including an officer guarding the home of democracy in these isles. Images of an heroic MP bloodied and unbowed, and talk of the Blitz spirit, boomed across the globe.... Britain is strong, and unbeaten. Family members of the killer have apologised. Debates rage about his religious identity, and how someone "home grown" could end up so hate-filled - as if this was not also the country that gave us Cromwell and Jack The Ripper . Hate is often grown at home. The new PM, Mrs May , spoke eloquently, and in rather rhetorical fashion, about the greatness of democracy and Westminster. True, but painfully ironic. For, while the terrorist in Londo...

David Hockney - who I long dismissed as a graphic designer slash hedonist with a line in pools and big glasses - has grown into his 70s as a grand old man of painting.  His vast new exhibition in London is movingly brilliant. It confirms him as a genius, as, room by room, the sheer scale of his old-age vision blooms into visually splendid life.  Hockney has become an expert on seeing things with an eye unjaded by the camera, a master of perspective and its lack, and someone who, like Hardy , notices things.  His unabashed rural East Yorkshire empiricism is, to me at least, the best thing to happen in the arts in Britain in decades - it is so fresh, naturalistic, simple, and yet profoundly engaged, with the seasons, with time, with trees - one could hardly ask for a more universal theme.  Hockney, a superb draughtsman, is able to render thistles, twigs, leaves, grass, and shoots, as well as fields and hedges, lanes and blossoming or bare bows, with aplomb, flair, ...

Canada has changed.  No longer boring, it is now one of the richest countries in the world, with the largest reserves of oil after Saudi Arabia - alas, it is also becoming more conservative, in a Bush -like way.  The Canadian government has signalled it will not renew its Kyoto obligations.  Indeed, the decision (aided and abetted by the UK) to develop the Alberta Tar Sands, is horrific - if this goes ahead, dangerous global warming will be unstoppable.  I am not sure what to do, as an expat Canadian, except to say there is a new kind of international figure swaggering on the world stage: The Ugly Canadian - the Toxic Canuck.

The rustic English village where Mr. T.S. Eliot is buried is under threat - East Coker . It is synonymous with one-quarter of one of the greatest poems in English. Poet Simon Pomery is part of the campaign . However, there is an irony in this, as the poem in question seemed a little Zen in its acceptance of change, as well as prescient: Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.

The latest news from the BBC, that there is a nuclear meltdown  possibility in Japan, adds horror to the already humbling natural disaster of last week.  The people of Japan have endured much in their history - not least the atomic bombs the West dropped on them in 1945 - and they will come through this.  However, this is still a dreadful challenge for them - and an occasion of great national and international sorrow.  I wish Japan well at this terrible moment of crisis.

The Times has a good editorial today questioning the symbolic and practical value of the Tory-led government selling off the nation's trees.  I have to say, if this goes ahead, it will have one (unintended) positive result - it will render the Coalition unelectable in future.  Such a tone-deaf, myopic and small-minded bit of Gradgrindery is tantamount to the Sheriff of Nottingham's "cancel Christmas!" - but even he didn't strip Robin Hood of Sherwood Forest.

We have all noticed this, but somehow, inexorably, we don't stop it - the definition of a dream that is a nightmare: the very financial system that brought the West to the brink of collapse has now generated the crisis-as-excuse (national debt) that leads to the election of ever-more extreme right-wing, libertarian, and pro-capitalist parties and politicians - in the UK, Cameron-Clegg , in the USA, Tea Partyers to the Congress, to thwart the shellacked Barack .  Capitalism perpetuates itself, a cancer. I offer no immediate or short-term solutions, but it seems clear to me that the only way out of this circular mess is to break the cycle - we need a new system of governance and economic distribution.  Such a shift is epochal - think the Medieval Age moving into the Renaissance, the Renaissance into the Industrial Age of modernity - eggs got broken, millions died or suffered, empires collapsed, whole ways of life became extinct.  That sort of upheaval has to happen, surel...

Eyewear was - you may recall - scared mindless last year by the Swine Flu Pandemic - which today the WHO has officially declared kaput.  Good riddance.  The panic was worse than the disease.   Today's Guardian mentions two brewing media stories from reliable scientific and medical sources that promise disaster in ten years or less.  One reports that a new bacteria in the human gut carries genes that make it resistant to almost all antibiotics - in ten years the bug which 1% of people in India already carry - will apparently be 100% resistant, and bring about deadly pneumonia. Also, today, we are told that if the world warms by even 2% in the next ten years , which it may well do, the Greenland ice will melt, raising waters enough to wipe out low-lying coastal cities like New Orleans.  So - will 2020 see us dying of deadly stomach bugs in droves and drowning like lemmings?  History shows that bad things happen at a constant rate, and humankind manages t...

14 million people are affected.  Please donate to the DEC Pakistan Floods appeal if you can.

The poet Nick Asbury has sent along this poem as a response to Eyewear 's BP posts.  In 2008, he published a pamphlet called Corpoetics , made up of poems created by rearranging the words from corporate websites.  This is an addition to that project.  The link at the end he considers effectively part of the text. Beyond petroleum After the platforms, the ships, the refineries, After the solutions, the fuel and facilities, After the products, the light and the heat, After the pride and the corporate need, After today and what we do now, God and the world. God and the world. http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9028275&contentId=7051490

The ongoing odyssey of incompetence and arrogance at the top of BP has become incredible to behold.  And a reminder of how "big people" just don't give a brass darn about the small people of the world.  It explains a lot about British establishment culture - explains how Blair can swagger about after Iraq, and why, no matter what anyone says or does, the upper elites get away with virtual murder.   Tony Hayward should be the most hated man in Britain, not just America - his insouciance is appalling.  But then again, this is the nation that accepts nil-nil results from its playboy players.  What went wrong?  Why no revolution?  And now, wait for the budget on Tuesday.  More small people about to bear the brunt.

Eyewear is puzzled.  If BP stands to lose 20 billion or more dollars over this disaster-fiasco, why not spend £10 billion now, to invent some remarkable oil-sucking device?  Surely, ten billion thrown at some Nobel geniuses as a challenge, could yield a machine to do the trick.  I may be naive, but you have a hole a mile down gushing out oil under massive pressure.  Okay, that's bad.  But they got to the moon, yeah?  Why not build a huge dome or cone of some kind, lower it, and completely enclose a large swathe of the seafloor?  And send hoovering submersibles to capture the rest.  Last time I checked, they had one big pipe down there.  Why not put more down?  We're talking billions here - rather than waste that on mere pay-outs, spend it now, and get the eggheads to work!  Or, hire a hundred thousand people in small boats to each scoop oil up.  You could pay them each $10,000.

The BBC 4 morning radio programme today featured a brief discussion of the cultural language differences between the US and UK which have tended to exacerbate the current Gulf of Mexico Spill Disaster's impact.  It seems perhaps a sign of BBC-media-navel-gazing to think that language is the main spur of the rage around the crisis, when perhaps massive environmental, social and economic degradation has more to do with it.  Yet, as we now know, Tony Hayward , BP's hardhat-wearing bumpkin, has infuriated an entire nation, and is now almost as hated as Osama bin Laden .  According to this BBC discussion, the idea was mooted that Hayward's accent and way of speaking itself was a red rag to the Yankee bull.  I would not be surprised.  Sometimes, it is is possible to misread (from a NA perspective) English sarcasm / wit as mere rudeness, especially when expressed in the sort of accent one associated with Nazi villains from the movies.  However, most of us are sop...

The recent and truly horrific attack on young twins in their cot in London - apparently by a fox (subsequently caught and killed) - has raised an outcry, and a perhaps understandable desire to cull the more than 10,000 urban foxes who live in the city. Some animal experts claim foxes don't naturally hunt or attack humans, and this must have been an impossibly rare accident - perhaps caused by the young cub feeling trapped in the room. On the other hand, the parents describe a bold and fearless animal. The upshot is the mayor of London has discussed perhaps ridding the city of these animals. To lose the urban fox would be a shame. Not only has it inspired several excellent poems, from Ken Smith , and Robert Minhinnick , to others, but the urban fox is in itself a wonderful creature that adds much to the environment. Not vermin, then. One recalls the outcry against the Canadian Wolf, and Farley Mowat's book, Never Cry Wolf , in response, which "humanised" the beas...

I am just back from a very fine week in the Sultanate of Oman, trekking in the mountains, desert, and spending time by the sea reading. Oman is an exceptionally interesting country, a small nation on the Arabian peninsula connected by its historical, cultural, religious, and sea-faring ties, as much to Africa, Asia, as to the Middle East. A predominantly (moderate) Islamic country, it is not as oil rich as its neighbours, so it has had to diversify its economy. For the past 40 years it has been ruled, benevolently and intelligently, by Sultan Qaboos , who has won international awards for his far-seeing commitment to environmentalism. Oman is also a leader, in the region, in education, health, and eco-tourism. Oman is mainly a gravel desert, and mountainous, country, very hot and humid most of the year (it is bisected by the Tropic of Cancer), with some monsoons in the summer in the south, and a cooler breeze along its long coast (the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman). Politically,...

I Google, therefore Eyewear is. Hard not to, in this day and digital age eh? However, stop the presses. According to today's Times, to Google is to expend major carbon footprints. Forget about flying - lazy students and idle narcissists everywhere are killing the planet, one search at a time. What is a blogger to do? It may be curtains, soon, for the whole Internet thing. Meanwhile, let's face the music and dance.

Canada - often described by the British media as "boring" - has the second most important single geographical structure (the first is the Amazon rain forest) to protect the world from apocalyptic global warming - the "white parasol" - and news today has it that around 25% of that has been lost - this year alone - in extreme calving of the Canadian ice-shelf.