Category: Politics, Power and Profit
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Deafening silence is the sound of a thousand silent screams
You hear that? It’s the sound of thousands of silent screams. When news breaks and people who know a thing or two about the subject aren’t saying anything it’s the deafening silence that results. Sometimes we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. The best we can do…
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Mother Nature issues Consecutive Disorder prohibiting list of words
In a remarkable turn of events, Mother Nature has issued a Consecutive Disorder in which she has identified a list of words that now appear to be prohibited from being used. The courts are scrambling to establish whether or not this is legally enforcible with many businesses and politicians nonplussed…
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Digital Genocide
I have been an academic throughout my career. I am shaken to the core by what I have just read. A researcher in the US federal system has just had an opinion piece published in the BMJ (one of the world’s oldest general medical journals – formerly called the British…
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The Gulf of Fragile Masculinity
It’s like being forced to watch the second series of a poorly produced Netflix drama. I had a look on Google Maps and it currently says ‘Gulf of Mexico (Gulf of America)’. I found the meme below on Bluesky. And the four-year period is barely underway. Today is a day…
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Avatar – an allegory for colonialism
I’ve just watched Avatar. It hit me hard between the eyes compared to the last time I’d watched it. Having just read a book on colonialism I now appreciate its purpose as an allegory (a story with hidden meaning). Greedy humans – corporate and military together – have found a…
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The Nutmeg’s Curse
The humble nutmeg precipitated a colonial atrocity in the 1600s. A massacre that forms part of the dirty rapacious history of appropriating nature as a resource for exploitation that bred capitalism and modernity and trampled over indigenous peoples. I’ve just finished reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse – Parables for…
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Looking for the light in a dark age
This is a personal post in an awful week. Today my contribution to Local Transport Today’s 2025 ‘deep thinking’ initiative is published. I’m sorry to say fellow transport planners that it is a sobering take on our problems or predicament. It’s called ‘Looking for the light in a dark age’.…
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Lighting a candle
You can listen to this video here. Or it is available via the LinkedIn Post. Dear friends and colleagues, 20 January is nearly upon us. This is a personal post in which I just wanted to reflect some brief thoughts for this particular day. When I’ve been engaged in public…
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What the Zuck?
Hey – what do you think of my Zen Diagram? There is so much to learn from billionaires these days. I can see what the problem is now. We’ve let truth get out of control. Maybe we’ve become too godly. A quick scan online of the Ten Commandments brings me…
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as an antidote to maga-madness
As self-parody consumes inept billionnaires playing games with society, and as I read about the horrors of colonialism, my brain has found solace in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I’m reading Amitav Ghosh’s book ‘The Nutmeg’s Curse’ (Parables for a Planet in Crisis) at the moment. In talking of…
What the hell is going on? 