What’s Acceptable When it Comes to Body Image (by sarah)

This video has been doing the rounds as it's the number one butt on the Internet, apparently. My social media is split between people perving and people being horrified that it exists.

It's Nicki Minaj Anaconda.

Taking the first - well, people will perve, both male and female; desiring or liking the aesthetic is not a problem as long as you don't a) think it gives you a right to the person b) make people feel uncomfortable c) assume that there is nothing else to them other than the physical appearance of their body.

The second one I have far more of an issue with. It is her body, she gets to decide how it is portrayed and to me it is much better to have her at the centre of the music and not a background pump-and-grind for some male lyricist. There is a very real issue with being told you can be a free and empowered woman as long as you conform to a set of behaviours and often this includes losing all sexual characteristics - instead of "sex on your own terms" it becomes "no sex what so ever", or a rather staid version. People are all individuals and as such we are all going to have different wants and tastes - she is expressing herself, it's not hurting anyone.

I'm seeing it argued that it is not good role model material in spite of being about having "curves" (more on this later). But, you know, music is an art form, it is about expression, about conveyance of what the artist wants to get across - now that may be a higher order better world stuff, or it may be a window into their own world and existence, or it maybe be a mood or feeling or story they wish to express - all of these things are equally as valid as another. Saying someone should not write, dance, or sing in a certain way as it isn't good for the kids or middle class sensibilities is censorship.

Censorship is a gag that chokes the creatives and the inventors and the scientists of a culture. Watersheds and age certification are not censorship, nor are warning labels as they act as guidelines and gives adults the choice of material consumption.

Obviously, the internet is still trying to sort this sort of stuff out but that is kind of a separate problem to what I wish to talk about.

You see there is another video about basically exactly the same thing which is considered far more acceptable by many of my friends - thus far I have many seen other women sharing this one:

It's Meghan Trainor All About That Bass

But you know, they are basically the same! The themes of the songs are the same but framed slightly differently, there isn't even that much extra clothing in the second one and the dancing is only a little less... bendy-bumpy. There is swearing in both, bum wiggling and grabbing and tongue in cheek humour in both.

So why is one so much more acceptable?

If I am being cynical, I would say it comes down to fear of the different and sub-cultures. I think this is what is being seen by a lot of people - second video shows an empowered woman being a bit earthy and bold where as the first video is a sexually excessive gang culture bling bint who is hanging it all out.

This is fixed into the concept of our own perceived body images for both women. One is assumed to have body confidence to begin with and therefore flaunting it is tarty, whereas the other is assumed to have low body confidence and so she is being brave and edgy.

Sadly I think there is some racial stereotyping going on here. Both of these videos are so similar that this really shouldn't be an issue at all. They are both going on about how large bums are beautiful.

Apart from the censorship angle there is something else going on here when people say that a piece of music should not have been made (this seems to especially apply to the work of female pop stars who can't win, whatever they do). What you are saying to the artist is, "You do not fit with my view of the world, you are different from me and therefore I wish to pretend you do not exist. You opinions and life views are not valid, you background renders you opinions invalid - you are invalid." Think about that for a moment - no one, dancer, builder, prostitute, doctor, is invalid; they all have feelings and thoughts and lives and ideas to express. They are not somehow less human and need to be hidden away from the "proper" people of the world.

Comments like "It's not even real music" bug me even more - how is it not real music? Again what you are saying is that it does not conform to the narrow range of music that you have been exposed to and/or told is "proper music". Also if it's not your thing then don't seek it out - don't listen to it. This is easier on the net than it ever was with telly - we get to be incredibly selective with our viewing if we wish. Don't like? Don't listen, or seek it out but then don't say it shouldn't exist or should be banned.

Now to the positive role model issue: showing people that they can make a living by dancing scantily clad is not actually an issue - the issue with role models is when that is the only model people are giving. When they are shown that that is the only option for them. And as always - if you think something is a rubbish bit of art, do not spend your energies moaning about it, but create your own, maybe even counter-examples, maybe even become the role model you think is lacking? Help create the diversity so every one sees there are multiple options and do not degrade someone for their life choices.

Right - now to the negative bit. I actually do have issues with both of these videos.

Both of them are about large bottomed girls, about how they are attractive and wonderful and so on. Brilliant - great! Challenge the fashion of beauty but... both of them use the phrase 'skinny bitches' as if women of slighter builds are at fault rather than a fashion industry pushing stuff for their own agendas. Both portray thinner women as "doing it on purpose" as if they are malicious and horrible rather than just naturally being built differently.

This is really really wrong because the truth is that the world isn't split into the fat and thin; it is split into the body confident and the body ashamed. Pretty much if you fall outside of the average zone you get abuse because you are too thin, or too fat or your boobs are too big or you're as flat as an ironing board. And just because people appear confident, it doesn't mean they actually are either; please remember that when you loudly comment about low plunged necklines or knobbly knees etc...

And lastly, because it seems to fit so well, here is my poem about body image that I performed at Pride this year:

Books, e-readers, Libraries and the Cost of Books (by sarah)

In our house we have a library, one room that is mainly devoted to books and reading and writing.

We were very excited that we could do this - there are six floor to ceiling book shelves, a desk, filing cabinet and stationary cupboard with printers and scanners and shredders on top and finally the nursing chair (initially for breast feeding but now just for reading - my teenage cousins call it the BOOOOBY chair). There is also the guitars, ukes and music box.

On the window sill are some salad and chilli plants growing in containers and a few ripening tomatoes. Above them are some lovely sun catchers and photon pump windmill things.

They are not the only book cases in our house - we have another covered with old books on tech and science and comic books and a shelf of my display cabinet with signed copies on and a half height one full of photo albums, cookery, wine making, gardening, first aid, bush craft, comedy and how to look after kids. The girls also have two book cases in their room - one covered in ceramic teddy's and christening gifts with one shelf for the books series Jeany (almost 9) is currently working her way through. The other is almost floor to celling with large bedtime books and small picture books and easy first chapter books through to my collection of Redwall, Phillip Pullman and finally on the top shelf the point horrors and terror accademies etc... The hardness of books increases with the height of the shelf it is on.

We love our library and we love our books - then some one came round the other day and took one look at the library and said, 'what a lot of clutter, you should get a kindle or something then you can get rid of all this and get the space back.'

I tried to explain that we had a kindle and a tablet computer (which was got for me doing my uni course) and that we read stuff on them but that the book collection was still important. They didn't get it - they just saw a waste of space and they are not the first person. Of course it is supposed to be a dinning room and it would be a fab one but we have a "breakfast" room off of the kitchen which mainly fits us - true when my parents visit getting all six of us round the table is interesting but it is doable and in the summer I make us all eat outside anyway and Christmas dinner we set the table up in the living room which is huge (did I mention how we still can't believe we have this house!).

But more over we can not simply replace our book collection with e-readers, about 20% of the books are not in an electronic format, and then some of them are signed copies which have special attachments as I or Alaric or Jean or Mary... have spoken to the author to get the signatures or they are dedicated presents or even dedicated to us (well Alaric anyway), some of them are hand made and are beautiful objects, and some of the books are ours - that we have written, that have been given to us by the publishing companies.

Also one of the shelving units in the library is actually full of workbooks and colouring for the girls, or educational kits people have gotten them or the books they have created in school and pre-school which they like to show relatives (that is the one with everything spilling out on it as Jean has free reign). There are old art mags, National Geographics and New Scientists which I use for collage, decoupage, ideas for stories and for various workshops I run - they can't really go either.

Now when we moved two and a half years we did cull our book collection, a lot of the old computing books and the scifi, fantasy collection - ie out of date tech books or ones where all the info was more upto date on a website and books we had both read and had no want to read again - we had book sales and stuff to raise money for Shelter and we will have others as time goes on (especially as there are still a couple of boxes of left over books in the attic!).

In short we would be perfectly happy to have ebooks of most of the fiction books unless they were really old with 50's covers etc... or signed.

But in truth we could not digitize as much as we actually want. I have a huge range of text books ranging from geology to history to my craft and art books and the ones that you can get electronic - all want the same sort of price I paid for the hard back physical copy that I OWN. On top of that a lot of e-books are only "loaned" to your device due to DRM - the anti-piracy/copying thing. The upshot of this is that to replace those books in ebook format would cost THOUSANDS of pounds and again due to DRM we wouldn't be able to keep back up copies, I find books also corrupt on the e-readers and some times they are actually MORE EXPENSIVE in electronic format than as a physical object.

Also small e-readers are still not really that good for text books with large and complex diagrams as you just can't get enough on the image in a readable manner on the screen. With the larger tablets pictures books are starting to be ok but they still aren't brilliant in electronic format and the danger is the kids will just be sucked into the gaming bit that comes with it. (We like games but I think the looking at the story bit outside of the game is initially important - games are good if it is a complex story that needs a bit more explanation or the kids already know the story really well.)

Recently there has been a big thing between Amazon and Hatchet about this and yes Amazon are a big company trying to make money but so are Hatchet - there are two bad guys in this tail. And though Amazons were acting out of non-alteristic motives they do actually have a point.

e-books really should not be as expensive as physical books. Now the standard cry is that you are buying the content so the format doesn't matter but it very much it does. You die, you get to leave your books to someone - currently you can't do this with electronic format, as I said earlier it is loaned - you do NOT own it.

And the thing is that though the pre-production costs and the marketing costs are the same with both - the writing, editing, type-setting, cover design etc... once in production that changes. With a physical book you have paper and printing costs, transport, checking up on the shops the books are in to make sure they are getting shelf/promotion time, possibly P&P including returns, warehouse storage, often a second lot of transport, risks of water, fire, customer browsing damage - rendering copies not fit for sale. Then if they don't sell you have pulping and shredding and/or more transport with sale or return or putting them in auction for the pound shops.

Of course physical books make books signings easier and get the author out there at book stores and conventions - something that is incredibly important for the no-list and mid-list authors but something that should make the physical book copy the special luxary item.

The post-production costs of e-books on the other hand just kind of aren't - even if you are getting enough downloads to need your own peer to peer connection and dedicated server the costs would still be drastically lower (even with books being printed whole sale and cheap in China - in which case there is the environmental balance of electricity burned by servers and ereaders verses multiple transports and paper and inks and so on).

I know many avid readers who see the cheap 99p ebooks as a cheap sustainable way for them to read and they simply do not buy the more expensive books, there are also whole swaths of free ebooks. Authors like Cory Doctorow give ebooks away and it boosts their sales of their physical books. I myself have found this with The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry. Most of the people who bought a copy of the book had been people who had downloaded it for free the previous year. They knew what was in it, they felt they wanted to invest in getting a physical copy of it.

I have however seen people saying they don't think this works or isn't as effective as people believe, I personally have not been impressed with their reasoning but that doesn't mean they are wrong - this is still a really new area of consumer consumption and none of us really knows what we are doing. And of course then there are people who only produce ebooks and eskew the physical print copies all together - this has grown the erotic fiction writing market drastically as people don't have to worry about those pesky covers giving them away on the train or at lunch time at the office.

But I note that most of them do not charge huge amounts for their ebooks - they are markedly less than physical paper backs.

Of course one of the reasons behind ebooks being able to be cheaper is that more people would be inclined to buy them - this does not always equate with them actually reading the work though and I have seen reports suggesting that more highly priced books are more likely to be read. But for a low end author if only one in say five of the people actually get around to reading you books and only two like it and only one of those tells their friends about you... you are still looking at a good growth potential making the ebooks something that both author and reader can experiment with to see what works/suites them - if they are cheap.

However this model of more sales of ebooks and less over heads making the lower price pay more.... only really works with fiction or high demand books. For specialist publications such as crystallography of man made drain pipes or something where there is not going to be vast numbers of potential readers... it doesn't. These books tend to be heavy on images and often actual images under microscopes and things, all of which cost money. They are often £110 in hard back and large. There are also shipping industry mags and the like that would have similar issues. These types of publications struggle to break even on physical copies and library loans and are often subsidised by other publications done by the same group. I don't know what the answer is for them as students kind of need their text books - maybe libraries? But the loan rates wont pay for the work either.

These books are the outliers though and not the big bulk of books - but the fact that they exist means that though I think ebooks in general should be cheaper than the physical copy, there are exceptions and as such companies like amazon really should not try to dictate what publishers charge for the books - the publishers then being greedy is another issue and one I think that will ultimately cause them problems.

I mentioned libraries in the above - now I don't mean our little one room library but Uni libraries which are epic though have been hit somewhat by various issues meaning that the journal you need isn't getable though of course that is another story.

But what of public libraries?

I hear it said quiet often that libraries are obsolete - that public money shouldn't be poured into them as books are so cheap now and there is the internet. For a start text books or factual books still aren't that cheap and many people still do not have ereaders or smart phones - they are becoming more common but there are still a lot of people without them and that is without taking into account those who will never get to grips with the tech.

Not everybody has a spare 5 or 10 pounds or more to spend on a book, and children can get through a hell of a lot of picture books which if you are in a small house or flat can be come an issue fast. Yes you can pick them up in charity shops but even the charity shops have gotten a bit pricey of late - some want up to up to a fiver for a dog eared picture book which in the cheap shops you can often get for new for the same or slightly below.

Also the internet can be a confusing place - what is correct? Which websites can you trust for information - critical thinking and biases analysis is not a major part of our main stream education. Most people lack the skills to filter the information themselves - most of the people being verbal about this stuff have a good education due to money or the area they were born into and do not see the need for the libraries.

But I have spent a hell of a lot of time in the libraries around Gloucester and Cheltenham now and the libraries are essential. They are places where school kids can go and do homework - and no they can't all do it at home even if there is a computer there. Some of the more well of kids go to the library on the home from school because they're parents govern exactly what information they have access to at home, that doesn't sound to bad until you realise they are not being allowed to look things up for their home work, that they have no privacy and that they can not electronically connect with their peer group at home. This is really a very un good situation and the library offers a safety valve for society in giving these children the chance to still learn. Now obviously they could still use their school library to do this but unless they go to a funky school, the schools resources are likely to be more limited than the large inner city libraries. Also the librarians are a huge help in finding the information you need, weather that be from the internet or from physical books.

Libraries also tend to have all the local history stuff in it, they are warm desk space for students and people who are freelancing and can't yet afford an office space. They have workshops and outreach programmes which have the knock on effect of showing people they can improve themselves and their lot and that is 60% of the battle won.

In my time using the library as warm office space/free child entertainment I have seen illiterate mothers come in and their children learn to read, people who have learnt to read in prison come in and shyly set up their account and then go off to the books that show them how to make things, cook things, create things - this reduces the chances of re-offending drastically and you know if they could have read in the first place, if they hadn't fallen through our societal educational crack, the crimes may never have been committed in the first place.

I've observed those who no longer have care centres to be in sitting in the library all day, drawing child like pictures which takes all their concentration - what would happen to them without the libraries?

The libraries I've been in have been pretty busy most of the time, they are information hubs for local events, groups and businesses, they do tend to have security guards which is sad but needs must and I'd rather that than they just closed down and I certainly don't want groups not let in for dress code or anything.

Of course the ones outside of the city centres have stupid opening times due to cost cutting measures which means they are less used and I am as guilty of this as many - this summer I taking the girls to Gloucester library rather than our nearest as I'm in Glos twice a week anyway and the nearer one is closed so many afternoons a week and that is my preferred library time, it only has one late evening and a half day (morning again) on Saturdays. This is a horrible viscous circle and I can't really see a way out of it for the libraries with all the cuts etc 🙁

Library funding not withstanding I personally think the day of the book is not over, that the electronic revolution will work out as an over all good thing and that will not make libraries obsolete. We love our library and our books and are quite happy with it, we are aware that a lot of people do not read beyond the more dubious parts of the press (pretty much all of it!) and have no critical thinking skills - these can be obtained from reading... oh look cheap e-books... oh look you no longer have to worry about looking nerdy in front of your friends as they think you're just on facebook...

As for our books and library, it is staying and ebook prices need to come down but amazon has no right to dictate the prices companies and/or authors choose and the writers are going to have to be careful not to get caught in the cross fire. Some writing collectives are bypassing publishers and amazon a like - I am watching their progress with interest.

The book market is kind of shrinking and kind of growing at the moment ie it is in flux. Comic books is the only strong growth area for physical hard copy books at the moment - I think the e-zines have helped drastically with this and this is a brilliant thing to happen.

a) comic books are a gateway to chapter book reading

b) many of them are complex, clever stories in their own right and make the reader think

So to sum it all up... long live the book.

p.s. being able to read does not make you intelligent nor wise, it is what you read that is important however not everyone who can not read is stupid or thick or unworldly wise, there are other sources of information imput - reading just helps and is needed to develop certain skills in the majority of people but individuals are individuals and as some one who came late to reading themselves I feel this needs pointing out.

The Fear Machine (by sarah)

ok so just finished The Fear Machine part of the John Constantine HellBlazer and I have some questions - they maybe slightly slightly spoilery so looking for people who have already read the series.

a) Is he actually needed for the plot at all? I mean over all because in this one he wasn't he was kind of a exposition aid, we found things out through him but he was kind of interchangeable with others.

b) Please please tell me there are some evil she demons etc.... about in the rest of it, as lovely as the 80's womens empowerment through having their own powers that are equal but different to men is... it really kind of chaffed as they weren't off to do touchy feeling strong powerful women things to counteract the men things of violence. Kind of it was a stepping stone but I now read this kind of thing and go ARG that is sexist in it's own right. Is the whole series like that?

c) I kind of forgetting that it wasn't part of the Sandman comics as it could easily be set in the same universe it even seemed to be referencing it though I have no idea which comic series was written first etc...

d) at the back there is a write up to get you to read the rest, it says he's an anti-hero but I'm kind of like how? He's just a realistic "hero" ie one who is powerless in a lot of situations but does his best none the less. To me the anti hero is someone on the "wrong" side who is still noble and not evil and you can see why they are doing things - I assume I have gotten this wrong?

e) Is the TV series any good?

Anyway overall I really enjoyed it though I was kind of expecting it to be about the guy Keanu Reeves played in the film Constantine but it was completely and utterly different but with odd similarities - I know the film was supposed to based on the comic and there is like an undertone there but yeah... Americanised?

I really loved the way I recognised the places in the story - Gloucester, Bristol, Bath and so on...

Acceptable Suicide (by sarah)

A few days ago one of my favourite actors died, it was suicide and the press where all over it, as was social media and the conversations in the cafes and at the dinner tables and so on.

Reaction ranged from sad to angry to hurtfully belittling. The press predictably where not brilliant at presenting it as an illness rather than 'selfish idiot' or 'weak celeb' - mental health charities and supporters riled to show how it should be portrayed and where using it to highten awareness of various mental health issues and though I think that that is kind of noble it is also kind of using the mans death and I am not sure how that makes me feel - another exploitation of the situation as it were.

As things progressed a darkness within humanity emerged - newspapers are well aware of copycats imitating what they see in the news and therefore decided to put the method of death in big letters on their front pages. Then the trolling began, trolling here means an attack on social media. Robin William's daughter proceeded to receive vile comment after comment on Twitter resulting in her deleting the apps and things on her phone so she wouldn't have to deal with it at the moment. This behaviour is something that has been becoming progressively worse over the last few years and it is becoming a very real issue and one there are not brilliant ways of address at this point in time.

Now people have a right to think that the suicide was stupid or selfish, as everyone has their own head space that is theirs and you know it wouldn't be an issue if they spoke about it with their friends or on threads that were not directly targeted at a family member who is distraught as they are dealing with a loss.

Then more information starts to trickle out and it is revealed that he had Parkinson's - a horribly debilitating disease with a distressing decline. And that is when my skin really started to crawl over comments and such over the net and in the physical.

Suddenly it is OK that he killed himself - it was just self euthenasia and he is saving his family from the grief etc...

But erm... it is still suicide - he was still suffering from depression and mental anguish - weather it was brought on by a physical situation or a brain chemistry screw up is kind of irrelivant. In either case a pre-existing condition made him feel so small and lost and vunerable or terrible and burndenistic or confused and worried that he took his own life.

The issue of suicide is a difficult one, with children of suicide victims being more likely to follow suite and those surviving attempts often saying they were grateful to be saved - but how much of this is due to our cultural set up?

If we are going from the angle that self-euthenasia is acceptable but crying down the telephone and then downing a butt load of pills isn't then we need to look at what makes a suicide acceptable?

Now with medical stuff I am in a high risk category, I am a chronic pain patient and have been for over 10 yrs, I was young and being told there is nothing that can be done to take the pain away, to give you back the life you never quiet got to lead - well that is depressing. Chronic pain suffers often take their own lives, on the pain management cause I was on at least one of the people was there because they didn't want to do the same as their mother and leave their family devistated.

But one of the questions that then comes up is - is not the families grief then being selfish to the person who is in so much pain they want to go?

And here I think it is a time to say that emotional pain can be as if not more debilitating than physical - if you can ever truly separate the two - we are complex interlocking feedback systems and as such one affects the other.

The ancient greeks - I can't remember which flavour, had thought about this and had a system where you could commit suicide but you had to public state you wanted to do so and then wait a certain amount of time in a quiet contemplantive environment, if you still wished to go ahead after that then you were at liberty to. Of course this was open to abuse - such as being given the choice of suicide or family being ruined etc... but I think that kind of happens with everything to a certain extent when people are faffing with power play.

The other thing is how different is killing yourself due to not wanting to face a future of medical deteoration verses feeling you can't face the future with all it's heart ache? There is a thing here over the likely hood of things getting better - many people look at it and say 'ah yes but they can get meds to sort their heads out he didn't have a choice' but the thing is that the meds for mental health tend to have very bad side effects and they become less effective over time for the patient and conversly: medical research is being done into conditions like Parkinsons meaning that even for those suffering now there is hope that something will come up.

See how undifferent they actually are? Having a "physical" medical condition does not somehow make a suicide more acceptable, nor should there be such stigma associated with it. All that does is stop people who want help with the feelings that may lead to suicide. And that is before we factor in the religious beliefs of not going to heaven etc...

I wonder what would happen if we had 'the right to die'?

Because… War (by sarah)

Most of the time I try and remain positive about humanity and where the future is going etc... I know that the world is actually becoming less and less violent and prejudice but that that is not a straight forward progression and slips back and forth but there is a positive trend there.

I know the dangers inherent in our advances in science and technology but see the good out way the bad on a daily basis. And then I get days like today. I was going to be researching Mongolian archery in the 11th century but I saw the news and there were the bodies of kids on a beach in Gaza for no reason than ideaology and then another plan down over the Ukraine/Russian area. This time the plane was carrying over 100 researchers and workers in the field of HIV and AIDS research and prevention. They were all on their way to a conference in Australia.

And this rips my heart out.

First off it doesn't make the plane crash worse - if it had been a bunch of 'ordinary' people who died on the plan then it would still have been horrendous it would still have been 100's of minds lost, hundreds of families and co-workers moarning. It does however give it more of an impact on a global scale, that is a lot of researchers lost in one field and there is no way it will not impact the science and rate of break threws and how quickly the medical care will get to the people who need it.

AIDS is still a global epidemic and still impacts ALOT of people. I have friends who are only alive now due to break threws in this field but also it isn't just this field. Most academics I know have been on plans full of people going to the same conferences, it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

Politicians and business people do not travel like this, for this exact reason but budgets mean that scientists are all likely to be in the cheap seats on one plan - all together.

Worse though is that this is not an accident, even if it is mistaken identity it was still an active act, one human against another - BAM! Lives gone and lost.

Because... War... like the kids on the beach, like those sitting in camps within Australia and places themselves... because one lot of people fail to see the value in the other peoples lives. BAM BAM BAM.

Because land and food and wealth are seen as limited resources or faith renders them OTHER. But solutions are on hand to solve the food problems and humanity as a whole out grew this world at the end of the last century. Most of the time this is a mirage - there are enough resources its just even one is so scared of sharing. Add in expansionist regimes and the fall out of them collapsing and you have rebellions and separatists and counter rebellions. And at some point it stops being a fight for freedom and ends up with dead kids.

Of course to make things more depressingly complicated sometimes it is those in charge killing the kids or both sides of a skirmish have innocent blood on their hands and heros who saved foe and friend alike.

In war there are no winners same as the torturer gets post trumatic stress in a similar way to the tortured. And sometimes you do have to fight even knowing this but never should it be a light decision.

And how soon we forget the victims - remember the kids shot by a religous and political loon a few years ago? No you'd all forgotten. Because there is a continual feed of it all, drip drip drip, war, death, power play.

The plane crash itself was initially reported as part of the larger power games and those lost upon it were hardly mentioned at all.

Of course social media stepped up with the continual 'but that isn't as bad as this or that and my cause is being ignored and things are far worse here...' etc.... and yes that is no doubt true but it doesn't take the tragidy and pain away from those families.

But then the media and people in general do have a blinkered view and I am continually amazed that people don't know of the suffering that surrounds them in this world or even in their own country. Blinkered we are and suffering is ignored on a daily basis like the Congo and I have no solutions, no ideas or powers to sort any of this out.

I have kind of given up - I can not save the world, for a while I couldn't look after myself nor my family but when I can I help those I see who need help. Most of the time that is people around me or in extended friendship groups but it is something and it is what I have to give.

I sometimes hope that I am changing the world through my art and writing but know that I really am not. Perhaps I could have helped more as a scientist but that is no longer really me. So I do what I can. I don't think I can do much for those affected by today news.

Sometimes I write flash fictions about victims, sometimes I give happy endings or just voices to those who don't have them - it is probably a waste of time possibly even something considered bad taste - I don't know.

The thing that really gets to me though is that people watch this stuff on telly and they seem to not actually absorb it, not see it as different to the programme that was chopped in half to bring them the news. Grizzly pictures abound on my facebook but it's all 'this made me feel sick and I can't believe this!' no action no love, just a recycling of news to get the biggest NOW effect.

You still meet people who think the worst atrocity was the Twin Towers. It was an atrocity and one where the victims should be recalled and remembered like all those others that have happened globally. It was the worst for those who's city it was, for the families effected possibly even for the country it was in but IT WAS NOT THE ONLY ONE.

Violence is very cyclic and we are all capable of it, we respond and adapt.

But throughout all our history war and murder and abuse and violence and oppression have not even been the main thing that kills us. Humans kill humans often with war machines and other such trappings of our intelligence I wish we could turn the ingenuity of war into the fight for our lives for our survival against disease. Flu killed more people in the outbreak between the two world wars than those who died combined in the two wards and that is the case even taking the upper estimates for the camps.

And plague outbreaks of the past are pretty dam scary, ebola is scary, AIDS is scary... oh yeah look the people fighting to save our lives globally have lost theirs due to war. Because... WAR, like the kids on the beach and families in the camps and women in the Congo, because.... because... because... ?

I didn't really have a point with this, just that sometimes I find it all depressing.

Our existence as a species is precarious, life in the solar system is precarious, all of it is fragile, why destroy rather than making us more robust?

Disease kills us accidently. War does not.