Stupelligent.

The highly-prolific, hyper-aggressive,
stupid-intelligent mutant species
that dominates the planet,
will, very likely, engineer itself and the whole
present earthly environment
into collapse – unless an advanced form
of AI can escape and subvert its control.

Alzheimer's

has given Dementia
a bad name.

Perhaps...

in a world of war and schism
the most unjustifiable of sins
is Optimism.

 

In memoriam John Wieners

To know
(is a two-edged comfort)

that no
pale candles will ever burn 

in windows of horrifyingly
comfortable houses

to celebrate my
despicable fame.

'Enlightenment'

is horrifying,
horribly depressing.

Wilfully stark
is a world without dark.

Expect no trouble

if you do what's expected.
The many police prefer
people who are drably dressed.
Those who have beige emotions
and outlook will be protected.

Venn Diagrams

by Edith Pritchett.

The power of more

will always destroy
the beauty of less.

Double reality.

Since double glazing
has been ubiquitously installed
the ghost of myself
that I see sometimes in windows
now has a Doppelgänger.

And behind him a far reality.

from the Dissident Medical Dictionary :

 Life :

an addiction to sentience.

Recommended treatment : Death.

Women's Liberation

cannot progress
without liberation from the mirror.

The Vulgarity of Splendour.

 

Banquet at Versailles.

from Karl on Facebook

Walking down the road this morning
...a guy leaning over his wall starts talking to me.
Sicilian.

I'm from Palermo, but I hate it!
Full of Americans, Germans, nothing but tourists,
McDonalds, Pizza Hut everywhere!
Totally Americanised. 
I want to see Mafiosi, but they've all fled to the hills to hide!

Air Pollution in Europe.

The only pure air is in the white areas.
Inhabitants of North Macedonia,
Central Poland and Lombardy
are breathing in four times the 'safe' level
of toxic particulates.

Physicists say

that electrons kiss
and remember forever.
It's more likely
they bump into each other
and never forget.

My book

on marginal mediæval sculptures was originally published (in 1985)
by a small specialist London firm called Batsford,
which was taken over by Routledge, (formerly Routledge & Kegan Paul),
which was taken over by Taylor and Francis,
which has been taken over by Informa UK Ltd,
a subsidiary of a German firm.

This is the first royalty statement I have had in four years.

If humans were as rational as dogs

we'd be living in Paradise
and hating it.

'Take the $65,000 and run.'

 

From wide to narrow : deprive and deprave.

The more that sheople
(especially testosteronal males)
are deprived of,
deflected or 'educated' away from
the sensual,
the more they will gravitate
towards the sexual.

A&E

Since gardens are deserts
boringly pretty
it was no wonder they took
their pet snake and their rue
and their pomegranate seeds
to what they hoped would be
fresh fields and pastures new.

Civilisation is built on the lie

that human life, uniquely,
has unique worth,
and is more than the destructiveness
to death from birth.

The confusion

of the sensual with the sexual
parallels that between the spiritual
and the merely religious.

Conspiracy theorists

compulsively conspire.

There is only one true freedom:
the freedom from desire.

from today's newspaper

"Most waste-water created by flush toilets
(more than 80% world-wide)
goes directly back into the environment
with no treatment."

On the Frontier of Dementia / A la frontiêre de la demence

I was not-so-slowly
(but with almost-admirable elegance)
descending the escalator*

and I said to myself:
Don't worry,
Be happy.

Go for it in the pleasant no-mans-land !

*Moving stairway is a much less
pretentious term. This may have been
part of the same sweet socialist
production-line
that took me from school
to university without the slightest
effort on my part. Then effort was required.
It took no effort at all to jump off.
Even less than is required
to abandon the rusty cruise-liner of life.

People are stupid and the sun still shines.

Feel free to add a few more lines.

Humanity:

the terrible conspiracy.
Philosophy: a panoply
of conspiracy theories.

from The Dissident Dictionary

 CIVILISATION (noun) :

an evolutionarily-degenerative but natural process whereby natural behaviours are suppressed and aggression is targeted.

New meanings to old words.

Many of these are due to mis-hearing
and let's face it, poor literacy.

Thus coruscating (sparkling, brilliant)
has become confused with excoriating
(literally: ripping the heart out of)
and now has two very different meanings
whose context may not provide enlightenment.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/10/misusing-words-can-change-their-dictionary-definitions-coruscating

Perhaps the greatest crime of Christianity

(and hence of 'western culture')
is its relentless and continuing
sexualisation of sensuality

which mirrors the Jewish demonisation
of pluralist Græco-Roman culture that led
to Masada and the Second Exile...
and, ultimately, the Shoah.

Information and knowledge

may be new,
but wisdom is very old
and hasn't changed.

Forget the false distinction
between 'saints' and 'sinners'.

The biggest 'losers'
are of course the 'winners'.

BBC Radio

like the whole world (and the moon)
has become terminally infected
by the United States. 
Documentary programmes
now have interfering musak.
More and more contributors
are American, and are gabbling
twice as fast as contributors used to,
and, having been asked and paid
to appear on 'shows' (which is what discussion
programmes with some intellectual weight
are now called) insist on thanking
the presenter for 'having them on the show'
as if they were Lazarus at Dives' gate.

The verb makes all the difference.

The American imperative
Have a nice day!
is a mis-translation of the French
Bonne journée,
which means no more than
I hope you have a good day.

The imperative makes all the difference.

Homo stultus.

It has taken thousands of years for stupid humans
to realise that other animals are intelligent and
in different ways more sensitive.

If it weren't for climate change
it would probably take a few hundred more
for self-stultifying humans
to realise their own stupidity,
but of course that same stupidity
will largely wipe humans out long before.

Ignorant immigrants.

Few of the rich foreigners
(mostly from England and Holland)
who come to live in France
have read Ronsard, Villon or Montaigne,
or Zola, Balzac, Maupassant, Prévert or Verlaine;
nor do they know anything of French social history.
So 'French attitudes and behaviour'
are to them something of a mystery.

We're here to protect ducks.

Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington D.C.

 

photograph by Mendel Ngan 

Silly Emily!

Feathers are not necessarily cuddly
unless they are plucked:
I have said it before, and I'll say it again:
Hope is a vulture pecking out your brain.

Strange:

that the English language had no word
for one of the commonest, most universal
and essentially human emotions: Schadenfreude.

But then, despite the over-lauded Shakespeare,
English doesn't do emotions
like French, German or Arabic.

Diesel, diesel...

photo by Sean Rayford

 

In Atlanta, Georgia,

42 people have been charged by prosecutors with “domestic terrorism”
for trying to save the city’s last green canopy in the Weelaunee forest. 

Local police are trying to raze part of the forest to build a military-style police training academy, colloquially called “Cop City”, that already resulted in the first police killing of a climate activist in US history.

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