I was about to do a cartoon showing a lot of grey areas... and then little Johnnee would have said with a sigh "I wish things were still in black and white.." But then the Chinese spies story broke out and I went for this confusion of topics with Johnnee dreaming about a childish little house and a whitish picket fence... something like back to the future in 1952 ... Uncomplicated little world... As you may have noticed I do a lot of recycling... I recycle a lot of images, bits of this and bits of that... It saves a lot of time. As well as lazily recycling pictures for the cartoons of this site, I do recycle kitchen scraps and garden clippings, and I have a beautiful compost heap of nearly three cubic metres in the side of the back garden... I'm very proud of this smelly and rotting pile of... but I lament that in our modern life, there is hardly any room for something so close, rotting so nicely like that in a Paddington or Woollahra terrace or worse still in an apartment block like the Horizon... Nature at work is amazing... Full of little bugs and worms all working to decompose the stuff and an army of little lizard making sure the lazy bugs coming to the surface for a breather get gobbled up or go back to work in the pile... Bacteria make the thing hot like a radiator inside. Beu-diful... Yesterday, I was amazed to see an ant's nest splitting into several hubs... Many new queens had been born and workers were looking for new allegiances with these new comers. A big wall was crawling with many huge dense black dotted lines and surfaces... Specifications were distinctive: Queens, males and an array of clones from armed guards to workers. Social structures that have existed for more than 300 million years... all being rearranged in a small spec of time to suit its evolutionary position. Humanity's social structures are still being designed for better of for worse, while as individual we can be freedomised from these to some extent, we still participate to the smaller components of being there. Sure, ultimately we don't need ourselves or others and this little planet does not need the human species... So we have devised a purpose for our own existence, a variety of purposes which presently are not all that good at maintaining a happy future for the Earth... But this little sidereal stone in the fluxing cosmos has seen worse in its its 4.65 billion years history... I am thus worried to read some blogs here, on this site, talking of giving up... But then it's only about giving up activism... No problem there... as long as one does not cut down on real activities. Gardening, walking, conservation participation, gazing at the stars, breathing, all are still small but essential forms of being alive. Whether what the future is or is not, we should nurture the dreams of what it should be... And our personal dreams, just for our own sake. I can sense a lot of baby boomers at the keyboard here, frustrated by the moronic dangerous dictators who regurgitate all the syntax and the vocabulary of honesty and ethics to suit the most vile of action. We wished the world be better, we were hippies, we went to Woodstock, we loved and had sex with everybody with great abandon, we climbed barricades, we got arrested while shouting at cops, we fought for better employment conditions, and for a while it improved a bit, although during most part of the fifties right till the seventies, the advice posted on public walls was that in case of nuclear emergency, put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye... Remember those times? But we've survived all that, didn't we? And the movie Waterworld is a good indication of a future when there will still be people on boats pissing into a recycling unit living for drinking water, under an eternal blue sky, all fighting for nothing left... We are not there yet and we can't let the bastard win our minds and labour without a fight, can we? Come on, get this anger back into the system, this fire of our youth that most of the pissy young little runt of today do not have... They are too comfy... They have no sense of change except in the value of the stock market and the dollar... I can remember this cartoon by a master cartoonist in the US where a couple of old decrepit hippies living in an untidy room, still smoking pot from a large bong are seeing their offspring—a smartly dressed Harvard graduate executive on a 150K plus salary— as a great disappointment... Life's weird... and we should still fight the bums who are trying to do bad things in our name. We've got to stop them doing that because they give us a bad reputation as well, especially if we give up... And in the end, just fight it... It will make you feel thirty years younger...

Well spoken Gus .... only way to go!!

Cheers.