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Back in the USA,

"Back in the 1960s, [New Economics Guru Milton] Friedman
envisaged a society in which we’d all be wealthy, thriving entrepreneurs.
What we got in reality was a pay cut, reduced holiday or sick leave,
a chronic skills deficit, credit-card debt and endless hours of pointless work.
If anything, the story of human capital theory in Western economies has been about
divesting in people, not the opposite."

continued in AEON >

The result is a fragmented, polarised society of loners
who are obsessed by the ethos of self-serving competitiveness.
Blindly attached to money, insecure and paranoid - no wonder
so many are so unwell today.

Bordeaux (where the wine comes from)

is starting to collect via dinky street-ashtrays
the 200 million cigarette-butts/ends
that have been dropped on its streets every year.
At present, however, they are being stored in a warehouse
until the authorities decide whether to use them entire as fuel,
or to divide up the components for separate recycling.

From Northern Ireland to Istanbul

a spectre is haunting Europe:
the spectre of neo-Fascism.

On Tortured (and torturing) Genius.

With great talent
comes great stress.
At last I realise that I am fortunate
in suffering from neither.

Found in my Midsummer Cracker:

Capitalism is also totalitarian.

The manipulation of the masses

through the manipulation of debt

is so much subtler

than concentration-camps or the Gulag.

'Grip and Grin'

is, I have discovered, the neat term
applied to important public handshakes,

and not to the 'genital grab'
practised by some societies - men to men
and women to women - and, like the handshake,
signifying friendliness.

Kids quite like it,
but not hysterical American mommas
who would, of course, associate it with
a sinister kind of fake friendliness,
or with President and Commander-in-Chief Trump.

Nor is it the same anthropological phenomenon as
the grabbing of one's own crotch to ward off bad luck.

My bright idea

for a trendy branded,
logoed or epigraphed T-shirt :

Two Haikai

Any time of year
full moon is like a disc of
pitted human skin.

月

Fluttering fly-past.
That old raku bowl is a
pleasure to drink from.


楽 raku = enjoyment, fun, entertainment, comfort...

On YouTube

the animals are much more beautiful
and life-enhancing than the humans.

On the mystery of the disappearance of the Neanderthals.

I don't think that they were all butchered
by homines 'sapientes' (and/or eaten),
but simply 'absorbed' (under pressure of rape, etc.)
by the craftier species - thus, perhaps, providing
an anti-ambitious, anti-competitive, unobsessive
(opt-out/dissident) gene, which, unfortunately,
is far too recessive.

I tend to think

that anyone famous
must be bogus
- but there are and have been
some exceptions.

Starry Night

- a grand galactic
and multi-galactic
moonlit party in the sky.

On the Planet of the Apes-blinded-by-Self,

the problem with Love
is not that it 'alters when it alteration finds'
but that it desires
- indeed, requires -
to be requited, and if unrequited
(oh, the horror!),
It and the Lover may seem worthless -
at least for a time.
This is a childish error.

"Suffer the little children..."

Interesting to compare these 3 photos:

"Honor thy Father and thy Mother..."

Statue of Baphomet in American Satanist "Church".

Lithuanian devil-figurine.

Wikipedia on the wonderful Michel Petrucciani

who was born with a debilitating bone disease:

In certain respects he considered his disability an advantage,
as he got rid of distractions like sports that other boys tended to become involved in.

And he hints that his disability was helpful in other parts of his life.
He said:
            "Sometimes I think Someone Upstairs saved me from being ordinary."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUxQLU_eqfU

One of the many useless bits of information

that the English do not know
is that nearly 99% of smashable
and effaceable religious (Catholic) art
(as well as a large number of churches,
abbeys and monasteries)
was destroyed by the recently-established
Church of England
(when Michelangelo and Cellini were alive, elsewhere)
in its hysterical, iconoclastic phase.

Yet the old liturgical musical tradition
pretty well - and uniquely - survived
and evolved to modern days.

In a world where people are defined by their employment

(or employment prospects),
the ludicrous category of 'nationality',
and the hue of their skins,
I am pleased to have rejected
my given 'nationality',
and never to have had a job.
For most of my life I've been paid to be poor
(which suits my innate frugality)
but have always regretted
my 'Caucasian' pallidness.

"...he knew that most elderly people

were not wise at all
but only wore a thin veneer of  cheap wisdom
as a sort of armor against the world."

- David Guterson: Snow Falling on Cedars.

In our culture of aggressive control

it is not surprising
that the word kind
so rarely features
when we describe others,
especially male others.

On genealogy,

leys, history, et cetera:
Straight lines don't exist.

Lightening the mood with a picture

taken at the famous cemetery of Père-Lachaise in Paris :
an elegant combination of two motifs
rich in antique symbolism: the snuffed-out lamp,
and the ouroboros of infinity or eternal flux
- in this case, perhaps representing immortality ?

There was a time when

amongst most of humankind
dalliances or long connections
between people of the same sex
evinced no more opprobrium,
no more excitement
than not-eating-meat.
That time, which expired less than two centuries ago
with the onslaught of European colonialism,
probably will not recur;  nor will
economic vegetarianism.

Always aposiopetic...

When I moved into this inexpensive house
on the edge of the mediæval village of  Caylus, south-west France,
mindful of all the warnings about old age,
I noted that there is no step from the street into the house,
no raised thresholds to impede a wheelchair,
and that if I had to I could live on the ground floor
which has a lavatory in both senses, kitchen,
living-room, balcony, and large study
which could easily accommodate a bed.
That said -

I could have a totally-incapacitating stroke
or massive heart-attack,
or fall off the balcony on my head...

Third morning at 'Dignitas' : Aporia.

Shall I, or shall I not, today,
have my teeth brushed ?
I'm on my way...
.
http://www.dignitas.ch/

Civilisation is enforced

delusion.

Our destructiveness

is much more enticing
than our intelligence
or reason.
We are the cunning
rather than the intelligent primate.
The toxicity of our reason, alas!
mostly overrides our kindness.
Understanding is (perhaps)
the opposite of cleverness.

Human consciousness

seems to me so widespread
and so fragile
that it must have little depth.
It is only narrative.

Not only is very little (in life)

as it seems,
but (moreover) very little
is as we deduce it to be.

Being wrong about most things throughout my life
hasn't stopped me going on being wrong
lurching from misapprehension to misunderstanding
until the very sweet end.

(It's best not to have opinions.)

Empires

generally do not "collapse"
(the Spanish Empire is a notable exception)
but slowly decay
and/or dismantle themselves
like the French and British empires
which limp on today.
The "Collapse of the Roman Empire"
is piffle. It began to degenerate
even before it reached
it widest limits and strongest sway -
while Rome was still, in theory, a republic.
The Ottoman empire took at least
two centuries to wither away.
Ebb and flow and ebb are more the norm
than complete destruction by a storm.

A Critique

Mind twists
and cannot untwist
and love is not
the most wonderful thing in the world.

Night-Haiku

Small smile in the sky:
the cosmos is amused by
the planet of pain.

Monotheism, monogamy,

monoculture, monopoly,
monoglossia, monomania,
etc.

'Popular culture'

"... is not the spontaneous expression of the people,
but a profit-driven industry –
it robs us of our freedom
and bends us to conform to its needs for profit."

- Owen Hulatt writing about Adorno. here.

Adorno: "Every visit to the cinema leaves me, against all my vigilance, stupider and worse."
The world-stupefying American cinema was, of course, perpetrated by other Jews-in-exile than Adorno.

Capitalism has morphed from wage-slavery and child-exploitation
to cheap bad food and very cheap thought-smothering entertainment for all.
Panis et circenses...

Wisdom

rarely comes before old age,
even to Dalai Lamas,
and lamentably few old people are wise.
Wiseness has need of very little knowledge,
education, or other costly hoo-ha.
You say dayta and I say dahta.
but they don't stop us telling lies.

Dissident

is an 18th century English term
borrowed by Russians in the early 1960s
and soon exported
shortly after the Russian word
Samizdat (самиздат = self-publishing)
was sent around the world.

Dissidents in the USSR

showed that, there, in that post-Stalin circumstance,

"the pen is mightier than the sword".
Under the tyranny of consumer capitalism, however,

dissidents can be safely ignored.

from "The Times" (London).

Juvenile offenders carried out
almost half of all sexual offences
recorded by the gardaí [Irish police] in 2016,
a report has found.

Go figure.

Too many haikai

are depressingly precious,
especially when written in English,
which, unlike Japanese, Russian, Latin,
Estonian, Lithuanian, etc.
is a language with definite and indefinite articles.
But here is a homage to Issa:

From a far cuckoo
comes a disyllabic
ventrilo-haiku.

A typical Facebook translation.

Airbnb

Spon

S

sored

S

 · 

En France, plus de 120 000 personnes complètent leurs revenus en partageant leur logement sur Airbnb.

In France, more than 120 people complete their income by sharing their accommodation on Airbnb.

 · Hide original · 

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Did I write this before ?

If so, it's worth writing again:
Museums are mainly décor.

Employment

is a function of property.
Without property-superiority
there would be no employment
- or slavery.

De combien est

le langage faux moins sociable que le silence.

Silence is much less anti-social than false words.

- Michel de Montaigne  (read more) 

It has taken me most of my life

to be able to have pleasure
- even joy -
without wanting
the bonus
of sharing it.

On the planet of the unseeing apes.

It is not often

that Ludwig van Beethoven is quoted.
He once said that, if he had known
he would go deaf, he would have been a painter.

Maybe better than Caspar David Friedrich,
or perhaps a dramatic fusion between him and Turner ?

My dog knows

that I appeared upon this Earth
mainly to make him happy.
He often seems to wish
that I could be better at it.

Mending a defective butterfly

which had sustained injury when transforming from a pupa.

(from tumblr)

from http://cloudhiddenwriting.blogspot.com

Yet another thing I can't get my head around :

Temporal Entanglement.

The irrefutable case for anarchy.

Almost nobody who wants power
can be trusted.