Male Orthodox Jews

wear big black hats
which are as intimidating to me
as military headgear. 

History's Roundabout.

We seem to be back in the 1930s.

Fascism (although watered down)
is rising yet again all over Europe
- and in the USA. Nasty and corrupt dictatorships 
rule far and wide across the world.

In the 1930s
people like me were aghast at
the terrible, stoppable rise of demagogues
backed by big businesses,
at the weakness and ineptitude of politicians
in quasi-democratic countries.
There was a widespread feeling
that another world war was coming or inevitable.
But they didn't foresee just how terrible it would be,
nor could they imagine the atomic bomb.

Since it was dropped we have poisoned the world
for our comfort. This time round the wars will be many
and long and appalling and linked to unstoppable
changes in climate and movements of people. 

Few of us realise that if the poisoning stopped tomorrow
the world would keep on warming, the oceans keep on rising
for centuries, if not millennia to come.

Only 'Apocalypse-mongers, Doomsdayers' like me
realise - or much care - that the tipping-point
has passed already in the brief period of the Anthropocene,
our short and bloody, vicious anthropo-obscenity.

The raving Revelations of St John were not so ludicrous and wrong -
except that there will be no second coming of a saviour,
and, because of a quirk of evolution
all the rough beasts will have long since gone.

With every successful human birth
yet more destruction of the earth.

Forensic details here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3ct2kyp

On the Shortness of Life, 49 CE, by Seneca.

'We actually live only a small part of our lives.
All the rest isn't life but the mindless filling of time.'

I will be 'outlived by' the socks I'm wearing,
which my mother knitted me six years before she died.

Corruption begins

with the desire to do well.

Three Cheers for Netflix !

Beneath the load of shit
they serve up to 'brainwashed' proletariats
and lumpenbourgeoisies
of the 77-year old Fourth Reich,
they sneak in excellent films from Romania,
Argentina, Iceland, Italy...and terrific documentaries
like this German one (may not be available in the USA).
(The subtitles are unusually good.)

There is a very fine line

(or a very fine lie)
between use and abuse.

The Miasma of Facebook.

So much rumour,
so little humour -

or, to put it more bluntly -

so much shit,
so little wit.

As the Israelis occupy the West Bank

so nation-states occupy our minds.

Armies need opponents.

The bigger the army
the more dangerous the enemy.

The more police there are
the more criminals there turn out to be.

Scary Steven Pinker.

The Panglossian Professor Pinker defines Rationality
as The use of Reason to Achieve Goals...
which tells us much about the acclaimed author
and the assertive, aspirational, greedy
and aggressive culture that is so rationally
melting the poles.

The Secret, the Truth and the Lie.

The Secret is that there are always other secrets.
The Truth is that there are always
further or older truths - and contradictions.
The Lie is that the secret is this
and the truth is that
and are here or there,
and that the Secret and the Truth
are anywhere.

Planet Earth : The Disaster Movie.

There was a moment
when cinema moved from merely imitating life
and life started imitating cinema.
Now we are all yawning or sleeping
or slinking our way through
the long, slow-motion disaster movie
into which we have turned the world.
And I feel guilty about drinking coffee.

More males than females, of course.

There are serial rapists,
and there are monogamous rapists.

'Unique events that led

to civilisation mean its demise
could eliminate meaning in galaxy for ever,’
says idiot scientist in today's newspaper.

Never mind the amazing biodiversity
which tragically allowed human civilisation
to arise, prosper and destroy
the amazing biodiversity!

(It hardly needs pointing out that meaning is a silly abstract construct
of the overheating human brain.)

Laughter

like smiling
can be aggressive
or defensive
or automatic
or all three at once.

Recently overheard in an English classroom

by Michael Rosen

"He doesn't speak English, Miss.

He comes from the Congo, Miss.

I translate for you, Miss.

He says that the bad men kill his grandfather, Miss.

He says that the bad men kill his grandmother, Miss.

He says that the bad men kill his dad, Miss.

He says that the bad men kill his mum, Miss.

He doesn't know how he got here, Miss.

He can't say how he got here, Miss..."

Slaves

not so long ago
wore shackles, anklets
or collars to signify their lack of status
if the colour of their skins was not enough.
Now, quasi-voluntary drones,
their multi-ethnic successors, much less tough,
must carry mobile phones. 

"Bag for Life"

If a plastic Bag for Life
lasts less than a month
in the countries of the rich
before being discarded
(because it doesn't look new
or has a stain or two)
we can deduce that - by the rich -
climate change is disregarded.

In praise of dandelions - and negritude.

Gardeners love exotic plants
and collect them from all over the world.
They are forever trying to suppress their native species -
dandelions, daisies, ground elder, brambles...

On the other hand, white gardeners tend not
to like exotic people from anywhere
(especially not richly-coloured ones).

In distant, former-colony Singapore, I read,
dandelions are not a 'weed',
but a glorious exotic species, tended carefully
and grown from carefully-imported and selected seed.

for Akala

Meaningless slogans.

 Liberty!  Equality!  Fraternity!

Liberty without equality
is tyranny.

Fraternity without equality
is hierarchy.

Hierarchy is essential
for capitalism.

           वृक

Thus Spake Swami Vṛka.

Resisters dispersed.

Weavers
were Cathars
then Huguenots
then Luddites.

At the beginning of the 19th century
more soldiers were ordered to advance
against hand-weavers in England
than against Napoleon's armies in France.

Poor cows :

their udders grotesquely,
painfully enlarged by humans -
some of whose females seek similarly,
weirdly to enlarge their (empty) mammaries!

European music

is totalitarian, subservient to a score.
All other musics are improvisational.
Yet Europe produced the doomed
liberal democracies. Might this be
a strange example of enantiodromia ?

Have a 'Sneak-Peek'

 at a poetic rebus...

I have always disliked the frequently-quoted

& meretricious line from a popular song :
'Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.'
Does it mean that you're only free 
when you are without food or home or shoes,
and so must beg on the street or be
or be locked up or raped as a refugee -
which is no freedom at all ?
Or is it another way of saying
that freedom comes with your last breath
when you rise or fall
into heaven or nothingness -
that liberty is death ?

(Or am I just obtuse ?)

It is a mistake

that many men make
to think of literary fiction
as frivolous or escapist.
On the contrary, it is often
a many-layered means of insight
into the racked complexities 
of human minds and cultures.
Good fiction is meta-truth
more penetrating than mere fact.

I am an Anne Tyler person.

 "Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things with which you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove."

- Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road, 2020.

...but even if there were a plan
it would, at best, be no more than
tinkering at the edges of apocalypse.

(More likely: it would be concocted by
the powerfully stupid and insanely rich.)

Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Balkhī/Rūmī,

simply known as Rumi,
said :
Never appear to be what you are not.

Unfortunately, this is difficult for sheople
because it runs counter to the ethos of almost
every civilised society, where compulsory pretence
and hypocrisy soon turn childish authenticity
to adult slime and slick and rot.

Rūmī also said:
                  Religions are like candles,
useful for finding your way in the dark.

But now we have LED torches and electric light
- until we burn the world up in our childish spite.

One of the few certainties

in the Christian Gospels
is that Jesus had no interest at all
in Family Values.

Backward / Late developer.

At the age of eighty
I have almost gotten used to
being in my late fifties.

 

Somebody must have said a long time ago

that stupidity
is an ingredient
of arrogance
and arrogance
breeds stupidity.

Dear Steven Pinker,

Regarding your latest, desperately upbeat book,
we are, unfortunately for the biosphere,
not 'rational beings'. We are cunning,
calculating, crisis-creating creatures,
who have not, by any stretch of the imagination
'made the world a better place'.

We use reason mostly for self-glorification,
destruction, denialism - and saving face.

« Comparisons are odious. »

A big mistake
that most of us make
is to compare ourselves
constantly with others.

The deepest principle in human culture
is the craving to be appreciated.

No-one ever told me that I was naive.

Indeed, I didn't realise it myself
until I was over seventy-five,
in fact nearly eighty.
Maybe they mistook my confident naivety
for a new kind of maturity.
Some may have simply decided
that my earnest innocence
should not be challenged or derided...

Dear Human Sheeple,

I am a not-very-happy
changeling/prisoner on your planet.
Because of Covid and lack of transport
I have not been able to get back
to Cynotopia Minor.
But thanks for your financial support
during my compulsory sojourn.

Yours sincerely,

Wofl

Canary Volcano.

They are saying that the countryside
has been destroyed by lava-flow -
but the countryside was ravaged
by humans long ago.

« Pablo Ruiz Picasso, you stand accused

of the dastardly crime of
Cultural Appropriation
from the late Paul Cézanne
and Juán Gris...» 

Nobody cares a bullock's fart.

Domestic strimmer,
deep-sea mining :
the war against the world
is not declining.

In a zero-sum struggle that nobody wins
we dump bits of the planet
in colour-coded bins.

Dodgy Questionnaires.

I recently volunteered to fill in a sociological questionnaire
with the typical 'tick the applicable box' questions.
Half-way through I was confronted with the question
Are you right-handed / left-handed / ambidextrous ?
I am none of these.  I am one of - possibly millions -
of people who were punished for being left-handed,
and, being right-handed in some tasks, left-handed in others,
can be defined as confused.
The stupid (and eminent and probably right-handed)
compiler of the questionnaire was evidently unaware
of this small - but important - demographic. 
I did not complete the questionnaire.  I wrote to its compiler
and received no reply. I conclude that the statistics
derived from box-ticking questionnaires are unreliable.

Coming across the word 'gabble'

in a book I was reading on a train to Spain
(though I alighted at Toulouse)
it occurred to me that it may have come
from  ¿ Habla [español] ?
Indeed a similar word with the same meaning
entered Middle Dutch at the time of the Spanish
occupation of the southern low countries...
Babble comes from Babel and its many-tongued tower,
and Greeks called non-Greek speakers [ba-ba-] Barbaroi.

A World War One song
(probably originating in Armentières in 1915)
starts:
Mademoiselle from Armentieres, parley-voo...

A World War 2 version of this began:
Two German officers crossed the Rhine, parley-voo
[repeat}
Two German officers crossed the Rhine
to fuck the women and drink the wine,
inky-pinky parley-voo.

from Wikipedia:
                            'Inky Pinky' was a Scottish children's name for parsnip and potato cakes, but it has been suggested that an onomatopoeic reference to the sound of bed-springs is a more likely soldier's ribald derivation.'

Another version has Inky-Dinky, which might be a jocular corruption of the German Ich denke.

Ich denke, also bin ich.

Comfortable

and comfortably-off sheeple
like to be 'moved', 'uplifted'.
The less-comfortable
would like a lift-up.

Past horrible and Present inconsequential.

Fifty-six years after the break-up
with my only female lover in Copenhagen
(who, astonishingly to me, took up with my 'best friend'),
I am still puzzling over what it was
that she found inadequate in me.
It was probably my blithe and aimless
immaturity.

Yesterday -
after reading two books set in 1930s USA -
I drank a Dry Martini for the first time in my life.

From the various recipes on the internet
I made it from 6 parts
of cold junipery gin, one part of
cold Noilly Prat vermouth,
and an olive (since I didn't have a lemon)
plus a couple of ice cubes.

It was quite pleasant, but I'd prefer
a glass of cold, light, dry white wine,
such as the local Gaillac Perlé.

I don't think I'll bother trying a Manhattan,
a Gimlet, Twister or Thunderbird. 

The Utilitarian Principle

of the greatest good for the greatest number
(which is the basis of majoritarian and coalition democracy)
was never applied to our fellow-creatures -
some of which we rear in misery for food
- and so they suffer for what we pettily presume
to be "the greater good".

And not just animals, either:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/20/science/cactus-trafficking-chile.html

Negative bias.

Once we could be ruly, couth, pecunious
mayed, ept, gruntled and so on,
but now we can only be their opposites.

Dear Sugar-saturated and Addicted Sheeple,

Milk does not go off or spoil.
Its sugar (lactose) simply converts
to lactic acid, which makes it taste just as good
as kefir, fromage blanc and various 'natural' yogurts.

It's not a joke.

Freedom of Ludicrous Expression,
Milan Fashion Week.

 Pietro D’Aprano/Getty Images

No prizes for guessing
what the Taliban would think

of this example of un-islamic decadence.

 

Supermarket shopping

is much more stressful,
much less satisfying
and barely more nutritious
than gathering food
in a tropical rain forest.

Unfortunately,
supermarkets are expanding
while rain forests shrink.

My 'artistic talent'

lies less in my poetry
or in my painting
than in my mastery
of elegant frugality.

"I amount to very little,
but that little is entirely mine."

- Swami Vrkha Baba