When I was a child

I sometimes went to bed,
banged my head a bit,
and asked God to ‘take me’ in the night.  

I didn’t believe in God for very long.

The good thing about Germans

(generally speaking)
is that they don't keep on talking
about how they 'civilised' the world

– unlike the English, the French,
the Americans, the Russians...

PS – not quite à propos – According to Victor Klemperer, Jews in Nazi Germany found the many public expressions of sympathy as painful as racist abuse.

PPS – 'Civilise' is hypocri-code for 'shamelessly exploit for commercial gain'.

On Autocrats and their Imitators*.

The grim truth is that, too often, the only people who can bring down these terrible men are the ones who put them there in the first place. 

– Jonathan Freedland

* Putin, Assad...Erdoğan, Netanyahu, Trump, Modi...Johnson, Macron...

The Tragedy of Marx and Engels

is that, though their analysis
of capitalism was (and continues to be)
largely correct, their (and their followers')
suggestions for changing it were
transparent recipes for totalitarianism.

Flimsy

people deceived by bad actors
do evil things for short-sighted reasons. 

'Good nature, or what is often considered as such,
is the most selfish of all the virtues.
It is nine times out of ten mere indolence of disposition.'

– William Hazlitt, On the Knowledge of Character, 1822.

Dead or dying

plants in supermarkets
are one of several reasons
why I visit them briefly
and only for food that I can't get elsewhere.

No comment possible.

 

A remote kissing device called “Long Lost Touch” 
displayed on the table at its owner Jing Zhiyuan’s home, in Beijing, China. 
Photograph: Tingshu Wang/Reuters

read more >

Human Beauty is less

'in the eye of the beholder'
than in the narrow imagination
of men in power, now especially
the pale, mostly male, dictators of
the Unnaturalness Industry.

Totalitarian Medicine

You need to be in good health
(especially good mental health)
to navigate and jump the hurdles
of the stressful and stressed
French healthcare system.
Or you need a secretary.

One reason for this is that
most people in the lucrative
French Medical Industry
regard themselves as bosses
of patients rather than servants.

It is no surprise to me that,
despite the loveliness of living
in rural France, so many rural
French kill themselves.

Footnote: when you get a prescription medication from a snooty French pharmacie, it will be as supplied by the manufacturer, without your name, the date, the dosage or anything else to spoil the packaging.

"Some stupid woman!"

I sometimes heard my mother cry.
She was more masculine than I.

The saddest education

is learning the depths
(or shallow extent)
of other people's ignorance
and gullibility.

al-ICC-e in Blunderland

It's so satisfying to see a Queen of Tarts indictment
slapped on to  a bogeyman
who will never be brought before any court,

when you yourself (George Bush, Tony Blair,
Gordon Brown, Condoleeza Rice
and other smug Green Zone
Creeps Against the Bogeyman) 

committed a greater crime than any (so far) of Vladimir Putin.

Lo! Babylon the great is fallen, and is become
the habitation of devils
and the home of every foul spirit...

Today's great neologism:

 Just-out-of-reachness.

– from Dr. Mary Beard (verbatim)

One of hundreds

of great lines by the great writer Mick Herron,
whose political thrillers are an hallucinogenic amalgam of Le Carré, Chandler, Kesey and Waugh, with some Gerald Seymour and 
Last Exit to Brooklyn for added (and deliciously-addled) atmosphere :-

...the only other customer was buried in an almost tangible fog of misery, staring into an abyss masquerading as a teacup.

Gosh!

 

Sand dunes on the surface of Mars.

Wrong way round.

To call someone a savage
has been designated
a racist slur.

Proud to be a
vegetarian cannibal,
missionary is the greatest insult
that I can confer,

ranking even baser
than entrepreneur.

Sexy Missionary (left) and Loin-licking Cannibal (myself)
Paris, 1993.

Where your toilet-rolls come from ?

 

Stripped forest, Făgăraş mountains, Romania.

Who, entering Buchenwald

in 1945, would have imagined
that, fewer than 80 years later,
there would be a self-proclaiming fascist
Jewish apartheid state in Palestine ?

The Oldest Crime Against Humanity:

The inculcated Fear of Nakedness
and its sexual exploitation.

Interestingly, there are no decent photos of
Masaccio's Expulsion on the Web,
though there are plenty in books and even postcards.
Below is the (advertisingly) best I could find.

Just as interestingly - indeed, significantly,
A&E are pale-skinned in European art.

Nakedness in Mexico will bring the curse
of Santa Muerte (or worse).

Three Cheers for Albania*,

 Europe’s first Wild River National Park 

River Vjosa, Albania >

*and the tireless Edi Rama.

There is a Great Big Book

to be written about the Irish –
as Colonised by the English
from the 12th century onwards (and still),
then as Savages, Sub-humans,
Papists and traitors,
then as colonisers and slave-owners,
brutal policemen and gangsters,
not to mention enthusiastic
eradicators of ‘Abos’ in Australia.

The Stupidity of A.I.

In 1964, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
developed a chatbot called Eliza,
modelled on a “person-centred” psychotherapist:
whatever you said, it would mirror back to you. 

If you said “I feel sad”, Eliza would respond with:
“Why do you feel sad?”, and so on. 

Weizenbaum actually wanted his project to demonstrate
the superficiality of human communication,
not to be a blueprint for future products. 

source >

Against Normality.

The most unpleasant work
in any civilised society is endured
by those who are paid the least
(or are slaves).

Has any culture deviated
from this Norm ?

Until the world is finished

by Christianity's and Islam's
prudery and intolerance,
their sexual and sensual oppression
will never end.

The ignorant smugness of the BBC.

The BBC becomes less and less literate
with basic spelling mistakes/errors on its website,
and ignorance of history in its programmes.

Recently, on a history programme I heard a presenter
express horror that a queer man was sentenced to 14 months'
imprisonment in Buchenwald in 1943 "for being gay".

(The German law specified soliciting, not just being a Warme Brüder.)

Queer men were likewise sent to prison in 1940s Britain|
and Ireland and the Channel Isles, Gibraltar
and throughout the British Empire,
for inviting (or appearing to invite) others  to 'physical intimacy'.

Some. like Alan Turing, killed themselves.

Why do BBC presenters not know this ?

Dolls from Rio rubbish-tip,

and crumbling Old Havana.

Julian Assange

has given the lie to
the stupid assertion that
'knowledge is power'.

 

Anti-biotic.

Never trust men
(especially those with blue eyes)
who wash their hands
after touching their cocks.
They are suffering from
a psychological pox.

Why

(Diogenes might have asked)
is achievement good ?

Not exactly a surprise.

'Phosphogeddon'.

   Toxic algal bloom from fertiliser run-off in the Baltic.

On David Attenborough.

The technology that televises
Nature destroys it.

Oh, what a wonderful evening

by my bright, cheering fire!
I have a horrible feeling
that I may live pretty healthily for
for another few years
at least another short year.

What is the point

of 'trailers' on radio
and podcasts – unless
you have a pen and notepad
(or dictation app.) to hand ?

and another thing...

how can women tolerate
high heels ? I have to exchange
ordinary male footwear
for moccasins when I get home.

Tiny Danish island hits world headlines.

A report in Der Spiegel claims that a six-person crew
took a yacht from Rostock to Christiansø
in order to sabotage the Nordstream 2 pipeline
running nearby from Russia to Germany.

I spent part of the harsh winter of 1962-3,
and part of the summers of 1963 and 1965 on the island,
which is half a mile long by a quarter of a mile wide,
off the east coast of Bornholm.  The sea froze. 

In summer it is a holiday destination for day-trippers.

It's such a pity that Belfast

(my "home town") did not arrange
town-twinning with Vladivostok
in the 1990s.  Maybe Vladivostok refused.

Too late. 'Times change'. 

Not much 'Conceptual Art'

has much by way of concept.

It may seem strange

that I find it easier to write my thoughts
than speak them. But no, because of
their repeated, senseless, Ça va? and How's it going?
I don't speak to people any more.

I have become a non-misogynistic Schopenhauer:

A man can be himself only so long as he is alone; and if he does not love solitude, he will not love freedom; for it is only when he is alone that he is really free.

=======================

More from Schopenhauer:

It is difficult to find happiness within oneself, but it is impossible to find it anywhere else.

The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

We can regard our life as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness.

A high degree of intellect tends to make a man unsocial. [This is patently untrue, witness Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Dostoyevski, etc.]

Education perverts the mind since we are directly opposing the natural development of our mind by obtaining ideas first and observations last.

The shortness of life, so often lamented, is probably the best thing about it.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of Animal Training, for it trains people how to [think that they] think.

There is not a grain of dust, not an atom that can become nothing, yet humans believe that death is the annhilation of being.

Nobility of character is proportionate to the lack of pleasure in the company of others. [This is a bit tendentious, but could be true!]

A man can do what he wills, but cannot will what he wills.

https://www.azquotes.com/author/13133-Arthur_Schopenhauer

Had Schopenhauer been a bit
more modern in expression, he might have written:

Civilisation has sliced and chewed us up,
every one of us a piece of shit.

Never a Joiner.

I would not want
to be 'successful'
as a poet or painter
(or joiner) and join
so many people
(and their admirers)
that I despise.

 

On International Women's Day.

Male to female transexuals
don't wear burqas...
or do they ?
If not, why not ?

If I were a woman I'd want to hide
a lot of the time in a nice
anonymous item of clothing.

As a man, the nearest I've got
is a Berber djellaba – which
in rural France is more outrageous
than anonymous.

Growing Older

Imperceptibly  Fleetingly.

Thoughts and good ideas
for blogs and poems
so fleeting that
they vanish from
my addling brain
within six seconds
irretrievably and perceptibly
every day
sometimes every hour

But if I can keep them
for thirty seconds
they will be retained

and often rejected.
But not this one.

The Crime of Kissing.

As the BBC becomes less and less literate
with basic spelling errors on its website,
it reveals an ignorance of recent history in its programmes.

The other day, on a history programme I heard a presenter
express horror that a queer man was sentenced to 14 months'
imprisonment in Buchenwald in 1943 "for being gay".

The German law specified soliciting, not just being queer.
That law lasted until the 1970s.

Queer men were likewise sent to prison in 1940s Britain|
and Ireland, and throughout the British Empire,
for inviting others to 'physical intimacy',

which might only have been a kiss.

Some. like the now-celebrated Alan Turing, killed themselves.

I solicited and allowed myself to be 'solicited for sex'
(though not to penetrate or be penetrated anally)
when it was still a crime in the nasty British Isles.
I was not apprehended nor imprisoned for it –
only for shoplifting groceries.

The home of the kestrel.

 A common kestrel (Falco tinnunculus) in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria.

photo by Vladislav Tadev

The British interior minister,

whose rich Hindu-Tamil-Mauritian
Goan-Kenyan parents bought their
entry into Britain 'through the proper channels'
and arrived by air, first-class, in the nineteen-sixties, 
speaks very plausibly in favour of her government's
proposed refusal of refugee status to,
and deportation of, the cruelly-treated and hounded poor –

as plausibly as Joseph Goebbels in 1934.

In Exile.

I love leafiness –
and so as soon as
I had the chance
I left the terrorised
landscape of Ireland
to live happily in France.

The Weather Conspiracy.

Consistently,  for at least the last three yearswhen I first noticed the failure in its forecasts
the French government meteorological service
has over-predicted rainfall,.

I (like anyone who is interested) can read
the satellite images of weather,
and, from them, consistently,
I can (like any farmer)
predict the weather in the next few days
more accurately than Metéo France,

which, consistently, predicts rain.
Consistently, it does not rain -

as I have predicted from the satellite images.

What is going on ?  Governments tell lies all the time,
but in predicting weather ?  What can they possibly gain
– or be hiding ?

There is drought in the part of France I live in.
There has been no 'proper rain' for at least 18 months.

There have been no suggestion that people should stop bathing
and showering compulsively
and washing clothes after just one wearing,
and flushing toilets after just a piss,
and buying dishwashers, garden hoses, etcetera.

Does the meteorological service tell lies simply because
it is programmed to, just as we all are programmed
to be mendacious throughout life ?
Or has it been instructed to be 
pluviallly optimistic in its forecasts ?

No wonder that conspiracy theories are rife.

Opposing Temperaments.

Surely brief shouting
is better than long sulking.

The cruelty of cats

is inchoate.
The cruelty of humans
knows no bounds.

 

Home Improvement.

 When we were little boys
Sam and I played Houses
in the garden shed.
I am still playing Houses
in a Real House of my own
by myself.

Draft U.N. Treaty on Law of the High Seas.

 No fish were present.

We should register

surprise and gratitude
when bureaucracies act with competence.