Some of today's headlines.

 

A soft warning.

I am living proof
that old men on their own
(probably in any society)
go more insane than others,
quietly.

Serpent Rescue Service

While tidying my cellar yesterday
I looked into an old bucket
and saw an exhausted snake.  

There are none where I come from.

The only snake I've seen in Africa
was a  beautiful green mamba.

It looks like Natrix natrix - but it doesn't have a collar. 

Is anyone surprised ?

 

Jeezer the Geezer

said, it is writ :

Rich people wash themselves in showers and bathtubs,
but behold! the Poor must make do with each other's spit.

The Bougainville Resistance Army.

"The most extraordinary aspect of the BRA’s resistance was the use it made of Bougainville’s erstwhile staple crop: the coconut.

Islanders ate its flesh, drank its milk and sealed their wounds with its leaves. They wove it into baskets and homes, burned it to ward off mosquitoes and even made music from the husks. 

They cooked with it and cleaned their guns with its oil, boiled it into soap, and when they fermented and cooked it, they distilled a fuel that yielded double the mileage of regular diesel.

Being Known.

Although an 'artist' whose name is familiar
is, in effect, already pretty passé, 
he or she can command tens
or hundreds of thousands
of pounds/dollars/euros for a single
work or piece, especially
if it has been shat upon
and pecked at by hens.

Meanwhile, in Central Ukraine....

 

doctors perform an endoscopic ovariectomy
on an adult female bear, named Lyubochka.
She was showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder,
which vets found was linked to her hormones.
She now faces two weeks of post-operative rehabilitation.

There are always tears from The Faithful

to mingle with the crocodile secretions of the cynical.

Unlike France, no part of the smug Anglosphere has a popular or honest and clearsighted 'left-wing' newspaper like the bold and doughty Libération in France, which yesterday published a sober assessment* of the late Pope, which I paraphrase:

« With his ambiguous messages and political contradictions, especially concerning the role of women in the church, the acceptance of non-heterosexuals, and institutional sex-abuse, Pope Francis was neither humanist nor 'progressive'.  

« His reign was a neat sliding of a fundamentally reactionary Catholic church behind a slick multi-cultural neoliberal image. » 

Britain's Guardian was unsurprisingly reverent. The Americanised and pseudo-multicultural BBC devoted several slobbering hours to covering the funeral, mostly praising him as much as it, in the past, eulogised Nelson Mandela...and Princess Diana...

I remember the funeral of Juan Perón.

*Avec sa communication ambivalente et ses contradictions politiques, François, pape, ni très social ni très humaniste, a été un symptôme du glissement du néolibéralisme multiculturel au fondamentalisme national catholique.

Многоуважаемый Владимир Владимирович

Most Estimable Vladimir Vladimirovich,

'A study shows...'
that half of the world’s CO₂ emissions come from
36 fossil-fuel exploiters...
and a quarter come from standing armies,
uprisings and wars.

And almost none from whores. 

As evil triumphs almost everywhere,

a pathetically small piece of good news:

Hot Historical Topic.

 « Historians dispute Bayeux Tapestry penis-tally after lengthy debate.

« Two Bayeux scholars at loggerheads over whether dangling shape depicts dagger or the embroidery’s 94th phallus. 

« George Garnett announced six years ago he had counted 93 penises on the embroidery but Christopher Monk believes he has found another...» 

...and some people complain about my website's obsession with the obscene!

Like Ambrosia, divine.

Back in the 1980s when I first encountered kumquats
in a posh shop in Holywood, county Down,
I grew a handsome and prolific bush from seed.

Now, small kumquat bushes are for sale in supermarkets.

They are too expensive for the lumpenbourgeoisie,
so they sit there, in the dark, unwatered,
and drop their kumquats...which I collect, take home
and eat with a square or two of chilled 8o%-cocoa chocolate, 

(which sits in my refrigerator for months and years),

and almost faint with pleasure...rise to heaven,
as befits an ageing Ulster Prod*.

Add a dollop of pistachio ice-cream
and you are happier than God.

*a non-Catholic in or from Northern Ireland,
the last British Colony of more than 100,000 hectares.

Sex-crimes and Art in France

have been getting full media attention.

The daughter of the French prime minister, François Bayrou,
has admitted that she was brutally beaten
at her (of course) private Catholic school
at the centre of a 'growing sexual abuse scandal'.

Mr Bayrou faces questions over what he knew
about the institution and it decades of depravity.

The man who organised regular weekly parties
to gang-bang his drugged wife has,
along with a couple of dozen of his pals,
been 'put away'.

But the fashionable and celebrated plasticien 
(installation/mixed-media artist) Claude Lévêque
has yet to face trial for assault and rape of minors
(delightfully called pédocriminalité) 
whom he involved in his Neon œuvres,some of which featured in the French Pavilion
of a Venice Biennale.

Protected, of course, by the putrefaction of the Art World,
he has more class but fewer victims
than England's rip-roaring but now
unlamented Jimmy Savile.

Francophone analysis        

Voices and numbers.

"There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’
There are only the deliberately silenced,
or the preferably unheard."

~ Arundhati Roy

In a world of seven billion, 99% of us are voiceless.
Not because we're silenced, but because big,
crude, crass voices drown us out -
even if we have the temerity to speak.

   https://wearenotnumbers.org/category/poems/

Those Chosen by God are 'numbered'.
Battalions are numbered. 
Victims are numbered - and divided into classes. 
It goes without saying that
40 killed in self-glorifying Paris
is much more shocking
than 40,000 in Sudan.

Graves are numbered
(mine, so far empty, is 1-C-64,
though I might well be cremated))
even when they are (that horrible expression)
"mass graves" beyond number containing the unnamed
once known only to a few, and the unnameable police.

I am a living, breathing little group of numbers - social security, passport, tax authority, smartphone, house number -
all these have to be quoted and produced,
and all but the last I forget, 

and then I have to go to an office
with my passport and birth certificate.

I have written 8876 blogs and they are 'preferably unread'.
On the 15th of April I got 850 views.
Good news! I won't even be a number when I'm dead.

All over the world they have burned and poisoned the earth,
are killing the sea and confiscating the sky.
Today is a good day for the weapons manufacturers,
God, guns and individualism.
Tomorrow is always another day
for the numberless to die.

https://wearenotnumbers.org/tunnel-for-hamas/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/still-stuck/

https://wearenotnumbers.org/shattered-serenity/

Human communication.

"Don't get me wrong," he said. Alas!
I get everyone wrong.
And/or they do the same to me.

This beautiful Greenlandic woman

was among thousands of 13-year-olds
who were compulsorily (if not forcibly)
made infertile by the insertion of an Inta-uterine Device
by the Danish authorities between 1966 and 1975.

It is, of course, not Greenlanders who have been
overpopulating the planet.

Only the best

liars are perfect.

Like 'Jesus on the Cross'

'History' shows
that 'Morality'
is self-defeating.

Stagnant Ponds

of 'crocodile tears' have just been shed
at the death of His Holiness, The People's Pope
(à la Princess Diana),
especially from such caring people
as Her Not-Quite-Ultra-Right Venality
Marine Le Pen of France
and Her Astuteness the not-quite-fascist
Prime Minister of Italy.
Maybe also not-quite-dictator Viktor Orbán of Hungary.

Lovelock would agree

that 'Nature' is neither
beneficent mother
nor savage opponent,
but WHAT IS  –
which is what human beings
are loath to accept.

Photo of the Day

enhanced, but not by me:
a public convenience in Tokyo.
Maybe Ladies Only ?

'Enlightenment'

is a fancy and fanciful word
for the realisation
that language, like money
is only a token of communication.

Perhaps

the only supernatural phenomenon
is human stupidity.

It is possible

that the reason why Diogenes left
no writing or scripture was that
he did not think much of language
as a means of communication, although,
of course, like all of us he thought
linguistically.  He also had no
writing implements, while Socrates
was shadowed by the idolising Plato.

Rotten Lambs.

While shepherding is now a rather rare occupation,
and wool no longer the staple fibre,
Christianity stays sheep-obsessed, 

though, as time passed,
rabbits, chickens and eggs have been introduced
to the Easter Stew.

Jews and Muslims will not eat pork or ham
because pigs (like us omnivorous) eat shit.
Christianity's fuzzy demigod is frequently called The Lamb
because the Israelites (aka Jews) were sheep-herding
nomads (like many in Central Asia and Baluchistan today)
who eventually descended from overgrazed hills
'Like wolves on the fold',

and took hold of a part of Palestine
until the latest wave of conquerors
threw them out for refusing to accept
the deity of Roman Emperors.

In modern times, groups of Lamb-worshippers
commit appalling acts
against other Lamb-worshippers, especially children.

These include Holy Orders, such as:
Opus Dei and the

Christian Brothers
Sisters of Bon Secours
Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul
Sisters of St John of God
Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd
Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary
Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy
Legion of Mary -

to name only the Irish gangs
guilty of kidnap, violence, torture and infanticide.

The long slow, bleating death of ritually-slaughtered lambs,
plus the reported long slow death of the Lamb of God,
has led Christians to prefer and praise
messy, tube-infested, terminal suffering to neat,
quick and assisted death, or planned suicide...
and is one ingredient of the Abrahamic
mountain-nomadic
(now world-wide)
obsession with eating meat.

The United States' Execution Racket

A doctor willing to participate in an execution
is a precious commodity, and states will pay dearly for it –
up to $20,000 in cash per execution in some places. 

read more >

Two photos

of the shallow Wadden Sea,
UNESCO-registered
and bounded by Denmark,
the Netherlands and Germany.

 

Deep in the rainforest of Sumatra,

one clever orang-utan has been observed making
and then applying a plant-based medicinal paste
to a painful wound – a paste which was anti-bacterial,
anti-fungal, and analgesic, thus enabling him
'to heal in record time'. 

Orang-utans are not unique.
Rakus the Clever was not a freak.

Neo-Jungian thoughts : Holiness and Happiness

The truly holy
are unappreciated.

Holiness is not religious. 

Nor can happiness
come from seeking,
or from application;

it's not a state
nor an emotion
but a realisation.

Scratch my card!

I guess I'm no longer
one of your deadbeats.
I won a million dollars
at Sandy's liquor store
in San Luis Obispo
and I can't wait
to get off the streets. 

Not the frontier of tourism :

a fairground rocket ride

to the end of the atmosphere

and the trashing of feminism.

Except

at the most enigmatic level,
language is lies.
But so also is communication
by touch and by eyes.

Tongues

in barbed wire.
Eyes in pale blinders.
Ears scared of silence.
Brains in the pickle
of taboos and desire.

 

The Antinatalist's Tale.

"A man goes into a tobacconist
and gets a packet of cigarettes....
Warning: smoking causes cancer.
No, give me a different pack...
Smoking causes impotence.
That'll do, thanks very much."

"Almost heaven, West Virginia...

Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River...

Life is old there, older than the trees,
younger than the mountains, blowing like a breeze..."

Whitaker family, Odd, West Virginia

Prehistoric cave-painters

might regard art exhibitions
as outrageous and blasphemous.

On the other hand, the out-of-doors
rock engravers might not.

Just the sort of thing the Nazis would have done.

Israel’s military is organising hiking tours for civilians in newly occupied Syrian territory during the Passover holiday, local media has reported.

Holiness and Happiness,

Jungian thoughts. 

The truly holy
are unappreciated.
Holiness is not religious. 

Nor can happiness
come from seeking.
from application;

it's not quantifiable,
not achieved,
not a state,
nor an emotion,
but a realisation.

Probably, but too late.

Will the intelligence manufactured
by power-hungry, nuclear-fired
iron man become aware of the
inorganic irony of its existence ?

"the most distressful country"

It's the most distressful country

that ever yet was seen;

they're hanging men and women there

for the wearing of the green.

Ireland has barely escaped
from the blood-curdling clutches of the Catholic church,
only to fall victim to vampiric American employers
such as Facebook, Apple and (literally) hundreds
of other 'transnationals'.  Serve it right
if Donald Trump pulls the plug...and the rug...

Self-medication.

Deep in the rainforest of Sumatra, 
a wise orang-utan whom humans call Rakus
has been observed making and then applying
a plant-based medicinal paste to a painful wound. 

It was anti-bacterial, anti-fungal, and it numbed his pain,
helping him to heal "in record time.
"This might be one of the more blatant
and sophisticated examples out there,
but Rakus is far from the only one."

Obviously,

happiness
should be communal,

though for me it is
hermetic.

For the economic system
it must only be cosmetic.

Would President Trump like to buy

Northern Ireland, which, according to
a British Government Committee

“recently held the world record
for prescribing the most anti-depressants
per head of population” ?

It has the highest public spending per person in the UK,
yet raises the least revenue per person...

but it's going for two songs,
and the USA would then own a scrap of Europe.

Perhaps it's due to diet ?

Primary-age child constipation rates
up 60% in England and Wales.

One small cheer for President Trump.

Having had, like any intellectual, some sympathy
with the writings (but not the actions)
of The Unabomber, I applaud The Great Donald's
brave attempt to dismantle Satanic Globalism
and the Evil Axis of Globalisation.

"...the blessing

which rests on humility :
an easy-going nature."

~ Sylvia Townsend-Walker, Mr Fortune's Maggot, 1927,
first page.

On page 32 is another splendid line :

"The air was thick with taboos." 

A Cat called Donald.

 

Poets should not be piffle-mongers

dispensing clichés of petty comfort,
descriptions of beauty,
or gobbets of private pain
to the normals. Poets should rage
against the evil of our species,
its bad judgement,
its monstrous brain, and the mad
perpetuation of our insane rampage.

A Theropod Walked

on the Isle of Skye
a Very Long Time Ago.