The best laid plans of mice and men, said someone somewhere in Shakespeare’s oeuvre, oft go astray. I’m not sure what role the mice play in the Bard’s world-embracing stage, where we’re all players, but it’s true that life rarely works out as tidily as one’s grand designs on the back of an envelope. Or in my case, on the back foot.

It would be neither meet nor seemly to disclose how things are happening differently than planned and perhaps better than expected. Nothing is yet engraved and I daren’t tempt fate, though I often come close. The possibilities are still just ephemeral sprays of ink in the wind. But there is a great virtue in letting that process happen to you. Gird up the loins of purposeful endeavour, and if it’s for the right reasons, there’s often an inexplicable and providential obviousness that infuses the life around you. read on »

The Neocrats should read them some Wendell Berry. The world now confronts the reality that the habits of the industrial age are finally showing their true colors. The world in which we Neocrats have all grown up is based on fundamentally flawed assumptions about what human activities the planet can sustain. Berry has things to say about this, and better words to prove it to you than I have. So read him. I’ll give you two good reasons.

First, you’ll never be able to figure out whether Berry is a liberal or a conservative. In one paragraph, he sounds exactly like the deepest green hippy in Arcata, CA. In the next, you’ll swear he’s more reactionary than the hardest line of the crazy fundamentalists bred only in the American South. But through it all, he maintains a consistency of position in his argument that would make a boulder blink first. This is a man whose underling philosophy is so stable and his identification with that philosophy so deep that even where you disagree with him, you can’t for a moment disrespect him. read on »

The sickness emanating from Babylon knows no reason, no measure.

In amongst the razzmatazz of super duper tuesday, of sarkozy boning bruni, of britney going doolally, a minor story may have passed you by. A story of a cowardice and horror unsurpassed in the cowardice and horror with which Babylon has become curiously synonymous.

On Friday in Baghdad two bombs exploded. Nothing new there. Strapped to two devotees of the Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him. Nothing new there. 99 innocents, market traders and shoppers died in the blasts. Nothing new there. The bombers were women. Nothing new there. They were mad. Nothing new there. No, they really were mad. Retarded. With Downs syndrome. Their bombs were detonated remotely, no doubt by some man standing at a safe distance from the decapitation and flesh. read on »

So, we earlier this week avoided global financial meltdown by about a day.

Isn’t everyone happy that some creeps in the US went around selling mortgages to people who couldn’t really afford them but who could be convinced that they could? Or, to put it another way, isn’t everyone happy that the spirit of individual responsibility is so alive and well in the US that people don’t know enough about what they can afford to say no to the creeps trying to sell them those mortgages?

Anyone who has followed the link to How the World Works at Salon.com will know that the current financial debacle has been predicted for at least some months, if not a few years. And though this week offers a great chance to point out just how little the US government seems to be in the business of protecting the interests of its people, I want to write about something else that the subprime crisis brings up. read on »

Neocrats.com is due for the renewal of its registration on the Internet. Should we bother?

S.

I beseech the Neocrats to write with greater regularity in these pages. For myself, I shall periodically contribute my “prose-poems”, guarding my longer projects to sheets of paper and my upcoming journalism to salvai.com. It is incumbent on the Neocrats to zealously remark on the world around, and to serve our readers, thereby increasing their number. Arise, damnit!

S.

I am the mute god of the blank stage. I am the imperiled waif hungering for nothing to say. By a spasm of my hand I write and instantly lapse back to null. These words carry the same pointless burden of everything: the city scurry for coin, the lustful grasping and panting, the wanton embrace of objects aging into landfills. My desire, grilling me like fattened pork, tricks the eye and I see the scale of a world not breathable. This realm hefts itself up from the couch of heedlessness and punches you full-bore in the stomach: the breath leaves you: there shall be no drawn air.

My soul is the monolith of certitude ringed by tripwire and barbed coils: confusion in my dance towards clarity. Obdurately and with malevolent stupidity I try negotiating with the fortifications. They answer without thought the blithe and bastard no of indifference. read on »

I am enveloped by a strange quiet. It is 3am and much too late to write. But I find myself strangely drawn to the old powerbook, and onto the Neocrats. I have perused some old postings, from long before I joined these ignoble ranks. Fantastic controversy, debate and reflection, it seems, were once just a day at the office for the Neocrats - yet these have sadly slipped through the cybercracks in recent months. Where to exactly? Facebook? Paper? Dimentia from time’s scythe? Have the Neocrats and co., against all odds, lost their muse and slipped into a stupor of creative lethargy, lethargy of conversation, of discussion? Or have they focussed their energy on bigger and greater things? If so, I want to read your novels and essays. And wither the friends? The likes of the Humble and oft Humane Owl, Sanisha and other subjects of this Neocracy are missed. I know that in my life I have experienced a quiet before the storm. Whether that storm be thunderous with roars of cyclonic winds and terrential rains, or one of those ‘partly cloudy days with light drizzle’ that forecasters vaguely predict, remains to be seen. Certainly some trough is troughing and some high pressure system is shifting.

Friends, where does your trough lie? Shall we discuss our commitment?