Our deepest thoughts

turn out to be
but shallow graves.

Fewer than ten sheople world-wide

are reported to have been killed by sharks
last year.  The number of sharks killed by sheeple
was nearly one hundred million. 
Only a small part (the dorsal fin)
of a single species is eaten
by a very small number of humans.
The rest were killed for the pleasure of killing.

Socialism - and social justice :

Instead of the poor having constantly
to prove their worth, the rich
should have to show
that they are not evil.

My French word

for Sheeple or Sheople* :

Moutgens.

*Badly-programmed human robots. 

Sex

Whittlesford church, Cambridgeshire, England.
www.beyond-the-pale.org.uk

 

should be 'happy ripples on the pond of life'
and not the monstrous demon in the groin.

Sunday Surprise.

Today for the first time in years I saw a public pipe-smoker,
and he was steering a bicycle with one hand
along a country road while holding his pipe in the other.

Marionettes.

For thousands of years
(maybe tens of thousands of years)
millions of men have conformed
to whatever labour, rules and rituals
are ordained by more powerful men
and retained by force,
in order to have permissible
and easily-available sex -
as well as shelter
and bad food, of course.

As for women...

Almonds, Bees and Climate change.

Spain and the south-west of France used to export
large quantities of almonds - until Californians
with their low-paid Mexican labour started planting
almond trees, for which they had to create
irrigation channels.  Every year bees were trucked
from North Dakota to pollinate the almond flowers,
and were trucked back again several hundred miles.
Now the water channels have dried up in California;
due to drought and starvation
fewer and fewer bees are flying
and almond trees are dying.

Fear of boredom

may be a symptom
of self-loathing.

 

The Intelligence of the Octopus.

Happiness
is unhappiness having
a good day.

The eye of the beholder.

I have started a list 
of mammals which are uglier than humans.
So far I have :

Hippopotamus
Rhinoceros
Warthog (Phacochoerus) 
some Bats
Naked Mole Rat or Sand-puppy
Star-nosed Mole
Proboscis monkey (?)
Elephant Seal (?)

and that's about all.
None of them invented the wheel.

It is thought

that the planet was populated
by natural selection
through adaptive mutation.
But now the world
is subject to the dictatorship
of the degenerate.

I understand, I understand.

The Taliban are a Terrorist Organisation
but the government of Belarus is not.

The meaning of 'wild'

is unwilled
by wilful humans.

What big teeth you have,

Cliome limacina, Sea Angel !
And what lovely ears...or are they horns ?

photo by Alexander Semenov

An Argument for Scottish Independence.

A country in which men may cheerfully
and publicly wear skirts
with nothing underneath qualifies absolutely
for nationhood - if not membership of
the United Nations' Security Council. 

In the City.

 “a one-legged pigeon
picking at a discarded chicken burger
beside a frozen dog turd
in a pissy bus shelter”. 

- Salena Godden

Remembering misery

is rarely all it's cracked up to be
unless you're intent on revenge.
Fortunately, I had little misery
and have worse memory.

"The educated assume

that they now know better than those of any other age."

Nietzsche - Daybreak, thoughts on the prejudices of morality.

The world -

even in its reduced state -
will always be imcomparably bigger
than our understanding of it.

But we plow on regardless.

Building other people's nations

doesn't work - especially when you try to build them
out of easy money, corruption, enticement
and hypocrisy.  The Taliban
have murderous patristic principles
we no longer adhere to and now loathe,
but they stick to them pretty well -
too well.
The truth is that we are just as intolerant as they -
with 'human rights' which we invented yesterday.

We do 'good things'

and we do 'bad things'
and we can usually tell the difference.
But between 'bad things' and stupid things
it is much more difficult.

On the resumption of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

"Americans,
while occasionally willing to be serfs,
have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925.

Among the many epigrams, aphorisms, maxims, apophthegms

and remarks by
Freddy Nietzsche is this:

I'm not upset that you lied to me,
I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you.

I'm glad that my mother didn't feel like that
when for years I lied to her
about what went on at school.

Since then, I have been almost-obsessively frank
and am upset that there's almost no-one I believe.

Death is the camel's back

awaiting a last straw.

In the United States, buffaloes* are not allowed to roam,

but in China...

*also known as bison.

(Irrelevant but topical question :

       How many Afghans are trekking the long way to Xinjiang
along the Wakhan Corridor ?)

Cowards' End in Kabul.

Every morning
I receive an e-mail from Expressio.fr
with the French phrase or expression of the day.
Today's, most appropriately,
but (of course) by chance,
was Ses carottes étaient cuites :

Their goose was cooked
on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception
(a public holiday in allegedly-secular France.)

Very rarely taught, or even recognised,

the most important "life-skill"
is a sense of humour,
preferably ironic
and irenic.

Naive and purblind Nietzsche.

"I call Christianity the one great curse,
the one great intrinsic depravity, the one great instinct for revenge
for which no expedient is sufficiently poisonous, secret, subterranean, petty - I call it the one mortal blemish of mankind."

- The Antichrist, 1888.

But he approved of marriage - not as love-match, but as institutionalised friendship and joint enterprise.

 

Banksy is 'on spraycation'

 

All humans are stupid,

but some are more stupid than others.

Weddings

are often staged examples of
Magical Thinking.

Homes and palaces

are illusions and lies
that people live in.

 

On Education - a Footnote.

My piano teacher almost killed
my love of music.  I might have fallen
into the popular anti-music void.
But by some miracle
I survived to relish Brahms and Schubert,
Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius and Pink Floyd.

read more about my education here >

On the medicalisation of our lives.

Wealth is a more serious condition
than poverty, which can so easily
be cured by mere volition.

Please put a penny in the old man's hat.

Theriophily.

I wish I'd met this dude in a gay bar.

I'm only assuming that he's a He.
I'm also assuming that the
lovely odalisque below
is a She, and I certainly prefer her
to La Maja Desnuda by Goya,
or Courbet's Création du Monde.

https://www.jillgreenberg.com/monkey-portraits

Mens sana ? Corpus sanus ? The latest insanity.

e-Sports !

- and doping, of course.

(Prize-money amounting to millions...
ah, yes:  Sport is about prizes and money...)

In Patagonia.

The Selk'nam people of the Northern Tierra del Fuego
archipelago no longer exist. They were nomadic hunters.
The white Christians got rid of them, of course,
for killing and eating sheep - after clothing them by force.

Generalising from the particular.

According to The Guardian newspaper,
'Dr Amia Srinivasan believes that there isn’t a person alive
who doesn’t have a sense of discomfort in their body,
and with how that body, especially the “sexed” body, is read.'

Well.. I, for one, haven't had a sense of discomfort in my body
since I left school (where I was a sports-hating 'weed'
who cowered in the showers),
nor in how my probably-"undersexed" body was read
by either man or woman.

There may be millions - many of them women - who are similarly content with their bodies.

Perhaps The Guardian misquoted from Amia Srinavasan's book, The Right to Sex.

Maybe greed is not

a  pernicious psychosis,
but a destructive addiction
to acquisition.

Lust is only
one of the many offspring of desire
- and maybe not the worst.

A famous (and sometimes pretentious) avant-garde film-maker

declared that art-galleries should be destroyed.
Certainly, art-galleries are often cemeteries*
of the very spirit which inspires art,
not least because of the obsession with category
and chronology and market value.  I agree
with Buñuel.  But we would have to start
by abolishing money and the
iniquitous right to 'real' (land) property.

* One of the worst being the brutalist van Gogh
   museum-mausoleum in Amsterdam.

Not so long ago,

women approaching thirty
were either 'on the shelf''
of spinsterhood,
or hanging from the hook
of matrimony.

An infantile question ?

How can Bad People
'fall in love' ?

Is there a subtle difference

between expatriate and émigré ?
Even if there isn't, I (like Joyce)
would rather that the latter were applied to me.

'Lethal Autonomous Weapons'

- just a euphemism for
humans. 

Remembering dead friends.

Dogs have a vastly-superior
sense of smell,
but lamentably mercifully-inferior
palates.

Henry Miller

is a Great American Author now totally out of fashion.
Possibly because back in the 1930s he wrote stuff like this:

"Our world is a world of things. It is made up of comforts and luxuries, or else the desire for them. What we dread most in facing the oncoming débâcle, is that we will be obliged to give up our gew-gaws, our gadgets, all the little comforts that have made us so uncomfortable...we are smug, timid, queasy and quaky."

- The Air-conditioned Nightmare.

In the same book he wrote:  We defend with our lives the petty principles which divide us.

But he could also have written: We defend our lives with the petty principles which divide us.