Why humans like pornography.

Mirror neurons are those that 'fire'
both when creatures act
and when creatures observe the same action performed by another or others,
Thus, the neurons "mirror" the behaviour of the other being(s),

as though the observer(s) were themselves acting.

[adapted from Wikipedia]

My almost-namesake,

Dennis Anthony Omar Weir

(DAO 道 for short) 

was at least once on the Most Wanted  (now 'Fugitive' List
of Offenders issued by
The Princess Anne Police Department
[11780 N Beckford Ave., Princess Anne, Somerset County, Maryland 21853 (410)651-1822]
in the USA
but is no longer.
I hope this handsome guy was arrested for no more
than smoking cannabis - and (of course) being a beautiful colour
in a world run by drab, dirty-pale ghosts -
and is on The Way
to being happy, free and stronger.


In computer software, a data access object (DAO) is an object that provides an abstract interface to some type of database or other persistence mechanism. By mapping application calls to the persistence layer, DAO provide some specific data operations without exposing details of the database.

A DAO is also a single-edged Chinese sword - as well as a philosophy, also known as Tao, which is a path of balance between ourselves and the natural world...

If Mr DAO Weir, feeling trapped by Afro-American history, would like (as would thousands) to flee the United States, and acquire EU (Irish) citizenship (while it still exists), he may contact me, so we can arrange a mariage blanc...with no strings attached...as did Britons and Americans for German Jews in the 1930s.

Nobody thinks about a cure any more

for "mental illness" or "behaviour problems"
or common unacceptability.
We are all expected to make drug companies ever richer
by staying sick and swallowing their expensive products
till we die.

Abd-ar Rahman III

 عبد الرحمن الثالث

Umayyad Emir and Caliph of Córdoba -
that is to say most of Spain and Portugal (al-Andaluz)
in the 10th century of the Christian calendar - wrote:

 Fifty years of my Caliphate have passed.
I have enjoyed riches, honours, pleasures and treasures
to the point of exhaustion.
 Princes admire me, fear me, fawn on me, envy me.
 "Everything a man desires" has been mine for the asking or the taking.
I have worked out just how many
days of happiness I have had during my enlightened rule,
and the number comes to just fourteen. 

 His full name was ′Abd ar-Rahmān ibn Muhammad ibn ′Abd Allāh ibn Muhammad ibn ′abd ar-Rahman ibn al-Hakam ar-Rabdi ibn Hisham ibn ′abd ar-Rahman ad-Dakhil.

No frog

ever wanted to become a prince,
nor any prince a frog.
It is a very long time since
our brains turned into fog.

Largely-invented by the Dutch

(who founded the first Stock Exchange in Amsterdam
at the beginning of ther 17th century),
capitalism is really the global outreach of a feudal warlordism
which hides behind tricksy ideas such as Democracy,
Freedom, Tolerance - and of course, Free Trade.

"A jug of wine,

a loaf of bread..."

"Some for the Glories of this world, and some
 sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come..."

click on the photo to enlarge.

'Western Culture' -

one big alcoholic power-trip -
unsparingly avoids depth,
subtlety, paradox
(of course A can also be not-A!),
corporeal incorporeality,
and, in the Final Analysis,
rationale - and rationality.

But, let me say to the bland unaware,
most 'culture' is merely bedizened despair.

A city

is a vast, four-dimensional,
polymorphous, collective psychosis,
in which, some time soon,
The Stalkers will have to shoot
their way through the impenetrable crowds
in order to be able to perambulate the streets -
thus supplying useful quantities of
internal (and male external) organs
for the trillion-dollar transplant trade.

'Principium Individuationis'

In his Seven Sermons to the Dead,
that is to say, his words to us,
the masses of "dangerous sameness",
dazed, dulled and unseeing,
Jung declared his thought that
"Thought estranges from Being".

The reason why Christianity

(like its monster-child Materialism)
evangelises like mad - like there is no tomorrow -
is that it is in permanent denial -
not just of its childish pseudo-magical mumbo-jumbo
and its adolescent obsession with blood and violence -
but also its fear of death, which it claims to have conquered.

Further indication that we are turning into zombies

or mutually-stupefying, animated stencils:
the rocketing sales of adult colouring-in books,
and the world shortage of coloured pencils !

To have no

sexual, social, tribal
nor political identity
bestows a freedom of thought,
a cognitive as well as physical liberation
which is far beyond mere neuroplasticity.
In any case, identities are fractious,
combative and often downright vicious.

For no reason other than obedience

we now refer to Beijing, Mumbai, Varanasi, Kolkata...
(instead of Peking, Bombay, Benares and Calcutta)
and even Tbilisi for Tiflis*
but nobody has told us to say København for Copenhagen
or Praha for Prague -
and the Thais are too polite to ask us to stop calling
Krung Thep Bangkok.
Not even Dubliners refer to their city as Ath Cliath.

*Final i in Georgian, as in Romanian (and as y in Hungarian) is not pronounced.

A Miracle

Yesterday - the first glorious Spring day this year - I got full sight back
after hi-tech YAG-laser treatment
in a very fine new "Wellbeing Centre" in Belfast.
A miracle! I now have better vision than at any time
since the Autumn of 2013, when I was diagnosed
as requiring cataract operations.
It has taken two-and-a-half years for the procedure to complete.

On my way back I took a 'shadow-selfie' at my mother's grave...

click on the picture to enlarge

(where also are buried my grandmother - who was a midwife -
my grandfather, a head teacher of the village school,
an uncle who died as a baby
and another unidentified child).
From there I went on to my badger-sanctuary (0.4 ha)
where I photographed my Pseudopanax ferox 
(a New Zealand rarity)
here seen behind tree-pæony and quince tree...

click on the picture to enlarge

and, from the other side, framed by a rare variety of Photinia.

click on the picture to enlarge

As you can see, I like tangles of plants, impenetrable wilderness
(of which there is so little left upon the Earth).
Badgers like the elder-trees (Sambucus nigra) for their summer fruitfulness.

Freedom of speech is valueless

where and when there is no latitude of thought
- as in arrogant, consensual democracies.

As with any religious or political creed
those who believe most in democracy
are those most betrayed by it.

from 'TV Times'

Considering the humble reality of the 'transcendental' :

Nothing worth-while is measurable.

Relaxing...after a lynching:

The Ku-Klux-Klan on a Full Dress Fun Ride.

Cañon City, Colorado.

Columnist Adam Gopnik on the normal and systematic abuse of children.

"...We take it for granted that waking children and teenagers early in the morning
and having them sit still and listen to [often ill-taught or pointless] lessons
for 8 hours a day, and then doimg 3 or 4 more hours of homework
is essential and even useful.
But all the evidence suggests that this is the worst way to educate anyone
aty any age, let alone the young, who need as much sleep, freedom of mind
and creative time as they can get."

Download his talk here.

Footnote: On Sundays and school holidays I often slept long and late - sometimes until noon.
But then I had often been reading Zola, Turgenev, Grass or Dostoyevsky the night before,
thus building up my freedom of mind.
   An eight-year-old I knew said to his mother: School is ruining my life.
   The destructive "education" (or brainwashing) of children is yet another reason to eschew reproduction.

Talking of Christians and art,

it is salutary to remember that the well-advertised destruction
of temples, art and shrines by today's Islamic iconoclasts
is as nothing compared with the devastation
carried out by Christians all over the world
in the 16 centuries since the conversion
of the emperor Constantine.

One gets the impression from Christian art

that Christian saints were happy to be martyred
as long as their loins were tastefully covered
and their halos bright and straight.

The secret of life

among humans:
treat everyone as no more
and no less than your equal,
and yourself with cheerful contempt.
One burdened womb is very much like another.

Abu Dhabi Airport

I am an epicentre of Now
and you are the Other.

My favourite piece of architecture

by my favourite (and recently deceased) architect:

Zaha Hadid: The Aliyev Centre, Baku, Azerbaijan.

Paracheilinus alfiani...

...is currently known only from the type locality on the northern coast of Lembata Island
in the Lesser Sunda Island-Group of Indonesia.  Probably soon to be wiped out.

[from here]

Even before I was born

a strange fog surrounded me
within which I banged my head before and through sleep
had rages, and stammered -
in which my body was awkward,
and hesitant, not even monoglot -
which I was not even aware of -
in which I tried to avoid the stress
I felt even within my cocooned sensibility - my life devoted
to banishing stress, yet eager for knowledge
which probably brought yet more  -
a cloud of unknowing unknown to me
which I (in my seventies)
have only just recently managed to dissipate -
so I now find myself unhurt and strong,
protected, happy and calm
- as maybe I was all along.

Anthropodendron

Our Reality

is largely the illusion
of supreme and arrogant
beings with just five senses
(four of which are largely lacking)
who seem pathetically earthbound to birds.
To beasts, we have our heads almost in the clouds
and certainly beyond reality.
But some parts of the illusion I have found
to seem to lessen slightly my stupidity.
Humility means closeness to the ground.

Cultural taboos

One must not admit to
being lonely
(or, on the other hand,
enjoying solitude),
disliking humanity,
considering suicide,
or hearing internal voices

It seems that most people
hear or overhear voices in their heads
which is why so many people write
(and can write good) novels, stories and plays.
Those who hear most voices
become either great writers
or very disturbed - or, of course, both.
I have never heard voices
nor even internal suggestions,
and thus don't have the imagination
or ability to fantasise which is required
to write novels, stories or plays,
and why my 'poetry' consists almost entirely of
statements or questions.

Descartes

thought that he was
because he thought.
He did not think that fantasy
could create fantasy, except
for the fantasy of God
or human intelligence.
He also thought that animals
could not feel pain.
Thus they were unlikely to have thoughts,
and so perhaps did not exist beyond his thoughts.
Such nonsense is typical of philosophers.
His charming, eager followers nailed dogs to doors
to show that animals were senseless
in their castrated sense of the word
without sense of the absurd.

Let us consider entropy which involves no loss of energy.
Perhaps it gains it, since we are told
by equally-constricted (if apparently bold)
modern thinkers that Black Holes
could be full of it.
Death is thus energetic entropy.
Entropic energy might be the "souls"
so dear to Descartes' mind
and others' of his heartless Deist kind.

Religions :

substitute-spirituality for the greedy non-spiritual (or spiritless)
who find that the miracle of a daffodil or a ladybird -
not to mention that of a permafrosted 12,400 year old puppy
- is not sufficient to fill the black hole of their consciousness.

see more at http://siberiantimes.com/

Godspeed

by Dorothy Parker

Oh, seek, my love, your newer way;
I'll not be left in sorrow.
As long as I have yesterday,
go take your damned tomorrow !

What my very old friend Sisyphus keeps saying :

'Onward and Upward !'
Woof !  Woof !
Ever your humble groin-sniffer,
Diogenes.

If Michelangelo

(who may not have known much about the great variety of marbles in Italy alone)
had carved in coloured stone (perhaps Rosso Elisabetta, Verde Malachite
or Blu Venato) instead of boring white Carrara (quarried by slaves
and carried by half-murdered mules), his grandiose
(not to say grotesque) statues might have been interesting
and good to look at.

Ah, The Good Old Days,

when the tops of buses
were filled with clouds
of delicious pipe-smoke
which I could enjoy for free!
  Erinmore
  St Bruno
  Three Nuns (curly-cut)
  War Horse (plug)
  Condor (flake)
  Walnut
  Whiskey
  Capstan (ready-rubbed)
  Murray's Mellow Mixture
  Mick McQuaid...
Pipe-smokers are now
much rarer than pædophiles,
and children's street-games
are no longer played.

Caini Vagabonzi

The fields of right
are just as barren as the fields of wrong
- for fields are wrong.

I'll meet no-one there.

Street dogs don't belong to anyone.
Like anyone,
they just want to belong.

"What is your real name,

Mr X ?"
"Nobody has a real name,
Ms Y."

Government decisions

says the wonderful ex-President of Uruguay,
usually amount only to choosing between a Presidential Jet
and a rescue helicopter for a rural area.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4GX6a2WEA1Q

I wrote about him before:
http://dsdnt.blogspot.fr/2013/11/i-also-love-this-man.html =>

Emotionally-dishonest people

who do not communicate
(almost the entire male population
and perhaps half the female population of the planet)
are very aggrieved to be misunderstood.

Religions

feed on most people's
fear of thinking for themselves.
Perhaps
Civilisation = Stultification.

British National Poetry Award: No Latter-day Yeats Need Apply

In the week in which we were reminded many times
of Yeats' great poem Easter 1916, without which
(and all the national revivalism of Yeats and Synge & co. which went before)
the Rising might not have acquired its legendary status,
the winner of the British National Poetry Award was announced:
O, Great Northern Mall, you dwindling oracle
of upstate New York...
                                      Jesus Christ! the grandiose bathos of it!

Thank you, Jindra!

Old-time Sports Days

used to feature
egg-and-spoon,
sack- and three-legged races,
thus offering me, once a year,
the only fun I ever had at school.

Since the outbreak of the "War on Terror"

are you freer now  as a woman, gay, a member of a religious minority, 
or someone who professes no religion 
in Iraq, Libya, or most of Syria 
than you were under the dictatorship of Saddam, Qaddafi, or Assad ?
asks John Gray [here].
And since the many declarations of War against 'Drugs'
from the beginning of the 20th century onward,
have transnationally powerful mafias and drug cartels diminished ?
In the 1970s I shared a prison cell with a young student
who was serving a nine-month sentence for mere possession
of a small amount of Moroccan hash, handed down
by a magistrate who bought cocaine and raped little girls and boys.

Grief

seems to be made up largely
of guilt and/or
a certain sense of failure.

Work

has come to be confused with
function
only because people have come to think
- distressfully for most -
that our only function
is work.

All over Europe

monuments to delusion
and statues to cruel and/or
delusional men
who claimed to be
humble before God.

We are the Dragon.

     with apologies to Ivar Arosenius.