Politics like any other institution relies on paradigm maintainence and collective acquiesence to authority and expertise, with inherited and unquestioned assumptions and game rules. The game will run so long as everyone agrees to acknowledge the validity and value of those rules, or until they get hungry.

Today is the winter solstice; the solar nadir in the northern hemisphere. This temporal event in Spaceship Earth’s rotations finds the sun take its lowest path through our sky and the daytime hours are least; the axis of light, flips; a planetary New Year. This is an event that many wise have encouraged us to recognise as the origin of our ‘modern’ festive experience.

Reality tellingvision 'talent' shows, aside from being another hastily buffed facet of the bread and circus, alpha-wave inducing media triviosphere, also, I believe, serve to substantiate and maintain an ugly and inevitably destructive cultural and social paradigm.

Photography is a curious art. It instills no surprise in me that 'unmodern' cultures used to find these instruments anxious; I myself am still mildly confounded by this technology even though I was born into a culture and time that has favoured it ubiquitously, whilst also becoming equally negligent of its power.

Today is the winter solstice, the solar nadir in the northern hemisphere, a temporal event in Spaceship Earth’s rotations where the sun takes its lowest path through our sky and the daytime is least: the astronomical New Year.

In the 'modern' world we take for granted our sinks and toilets, and their capacity to remove the manifestations of our indulgences, but how long have we had this fortunate technology? Archeologists have discovered evidence for one of the first flushing toilets in ancient China, but who can really know?

We at the Institute of Semantic Reindoctrination apologise for the postings of our patient 66601723. He has now been fully restrained and will no longer have access to the computer facilities. We are currently attempting to rectify his deconstructional dysfunction, although the illiterate alliterations are proving to be heavily embedded.

I feel compelled to write a short something in praise of a film that I was lucky enough to stumble upon the other day. The film is called 'Home'; a paean to our planet, directed by the photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, well known for his stunning and emotive aerial photography.