I can't really say 'my heart bleeds' because -, can't wring blood from a stone, right?
But I was walking through the city here last evening, and watching all the things that I like, despite that the city itself is now just your typical mess of mixed themes, and slovenly people - and yet knowing what will not be there more or less 'tomorrow.'
Tomorrow creeps up on you soon enough.
As far as the local people go, the one thing you can say about them is that they are truly slovenly. The city office workers are barely a touch above that description and the rest of the population, resilient, seemingly to Covid or anything else, look weathered and always attired in hardly my old t-shirts and god-only-knows what other salubrious ideas they have about clothing styles...
Yet, without giving too much away there are a couple of world-class features to this place down here. And I mean you will not get the standard of whatever it is I am talking about anywhere else, and nowhere near the prices even if you are able to get it. Whatever 'it' is because the last thing I am going to be doing right now is risk - not even just risk - sparking a stampede to here from the rest of the godforsaken world.
So I don't like to think about 'houses burning down' but this is, I'm afraid, where the world is heading now.
There have been a number of things recently that not even here have I been willing to talk too much about.
For one thing these now - some of them - verge right onto the completely sinister to government, governments, and to the World 'Rules-Based' Order of things.
To give an example at least, which will make some kind of sense, is simply to say that if you take a place like Taiwan, there is compelling reason there for people to concentrate and focus their attention on technologies that get around state-controlled communication, for example.
We all use the internet these days but it is just another place where forceful interests not working for the people at large, can manipulate things, seek to exert control, and indeed, have quite a lot of control.
...So it is simply not the case to think, to assume, that the only leading edge technology which exists is what you are going to be heavily marketed this Christmas.
Governments of course, totally fear the ability of people to communicate and to connect and to organize, in absolute secret from government's ability or capacity to interdict.Very expensive...
It's a pointless exercise here to do what many others do and have done for a while now, which is to restate that not for a long time have any modern Western nations been run along actual democratic free, open and transparent lines. The fact is everyone already easily acknowledges that Beijing is a controlled, totalitarian regime, and that Taiwan is not - and these two have serious historical, political, dynamic tension between them.
It is not so clear to the general public or the corporate media who the 'opponent' of modern Western government is in any organized sense.
And god forbid that governments ever find out now until it is far too late for any of them.
Certainly no great historic changes like this kind of thing - the collapse of national systems - can occur without tremendous upheaval and in a way, self-destruction.
These governments are of course well beyond being able now to pull themselves back from the trajectory over the cliff.
Like the Biblical 'herd of pigs' they are going over the cliff.Also very expensive.
Pigs may have wings too of course, but they make very unlikely birds. Whether P. G. Wodehouse concocted this aphorism or whether he simply lifted it, I do not know.
Governments and peoples will 'fly' only in the sense of their force of trajectory over said cliff/s.
Government security arms thrive on the usual fact that it takes a large number of people - like it did in Canada with the truckers' activism - who are then also organized, in order to be able to cause real trouble to the prevailing rulers. And this 'big target' is easily aimed at.
I am not about to give the 'heads up' to anyone who might counter such things, but suffice to say that you should be abundantly aware that negative changes are coming over the very next short period of let's say 12 months as the more obvious beginnings of it. And so don't cling onto things that are passing away.
Don't get too emotionally attached to the seeming modern smoothness of society to run, to function, to deliver services, all that type of thing. That much at least seems perfectly obvious even from an outside perspective.
This world is going down.
And with the rise of the machines, the intelligent machines, from 'elsewhere' we who are left, will have an ally that we can rely on.
The only machines I like are those that are more art than mechanism...
LOL
'Help me Obi Wan. You are my only hope.'
'Okay Obi Two. No problemo.'
So don't worry, I'm not talking about Taiwan AI or anything like that at all. ...I'm talking about the little devices that shine laser images and stuff - can 'talk' using laser switching.