Dingo the Dissident

THE BLOG OF DISQUIET : Qweir Notions, an uncommonplace-book from the Armpit of Diogenes, binge-thinker jottings since 2008 .

Thursday, 10 September 2026

Good news for Misanthropes.

One worried man said:
“We really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

backing up what another Anthropic employee said about "superhuman systems".

AI has the capacity to “eliminate us in order to continue”,
said musicians Sheryl Crow and Maggie Rogers
(new names to me).

But will AI wipe out all life on earth, or just the hairless apes ?
and How ?
That is the question that hence will ever be.


~ Spider-lover

listen here >





Wednesday, 9 September 2026

WYSIWYG, an acronym popular at the turn of the century

I was brought up (if not actually born) to believe
that what you see is what you get.  I thought
that people with friendly faces were 'nice people'.

I thought that people meant what they said
(allowing for exaggeration) because I did so.

I am still trapped in this mind-set and cannot
'read' faces, except (often) those of dogs. 
In my culture,
when people were asked the banal and bovine
question How are you ? or How's it going ? 

they replied Not so bad, not so bad,
even when they were ill, in pain,
half-blind with migraine or terminally sad.
They never said they were fine.


I wouldn't accept them as a gift -

except to paint over !

Stolen from the Renoir museum, Cagnes-sur-mer.

 

Tuesday, 8 September 2026

Revelation.

Irredeemable

the decades

of tiny frustrations

and synaptic commotion  

before I saw

printed on a page

just five words:

Anger is a secondary emotion.


Word-truth.

Promiscuous
has been replaced
(in Permissive society)
by Polyamorous,

an ugly mish-mash of a word
made up because
the mellifluous
Polyerotic
sounds too Permissive.


Monday, 7 September 2026

Probably not Diogenean.

Inevitably,
with little squeals
Dissident AI
comes snapping
at AI's Achilles
heels.


Much too good for them !

 


Grey reef sharks

(Carcharhinus amblyrhynchos)
at a depth of 34 metres
in Fakarava Atoll, French Polynesia.
Very sculptural !

Photograph: Laurent Ballesta



Sunday, 6 September 2026

Saturday, 5 September 2026

A bus in my home town, 2026.


about a mile from where I once lived.

















Until the 1998 Good Friday Agreement
Northern Ireland was almost entirely white
and mostly native-born.
As sectarian violence eased and ceased
immigrants trickled in...



I have always loved maps.

Yesterday the U.N. approved the  'equal-area' world map.

Left: Old Mercator map of Europe and Africa.
Right: New Equal Area map.









1973 Gall-Peters world map.


Friday, 4 September 2026

Spike Island, county Cork,

 is inevitably known as “Ireland’s Alcatraz”
because of its intermittent use as a prison for 1,300 years. 

It includes a solitary-confinement cell
where a prisoner, sometimes a child,
was chained to the wall by an iron neck-collar for weeks.  

For at least the first five centuries of its use as a prison,
monks elsewhere in Ireland voluntarily sought solitude
and isolation, sometimes unsheltered on Atlantic islets
(kept alive by mussels and gulls' eggs);
sometimes deep in the primeval forests (none of which
has survived the Anglo-Norman-English-Scottish
incursions, invasions and extractions);
sometimes underground;
sometimes in corbelled stone or wattle-and-daub huts
which they built beside holy wells,
and in which no artefacts have been found...



 


Art & Reality ; Pose and Snapshot

Sarah Lucas

 








Anthony Weir


Thursday, 3 September 2026

How old is your Jellyfish ?

Turritopsis dohrnii 










Older than you think
but not as old as time.


The Glory of Romanesque.

Forget the fake 'Renaissance'.
ShaggyDog scratching her ear,
Santa Catalina in Ciriza, Navarre.



I can't believe these statistics on my blog.

Maybe I am wrongly reading them ?
2799 views yesterday ?  Can only be bots and/or American spies.
I don't think my mumblings would be of interest
to the Russians or Chinese.



Wednesday, 2 September 2026

Inertia :

my fraught equilibrium

between caring for plants

and wanting to die


Tuesday, 1 September 2026

Physarum polycephalum

I have probably got this wrong,
but I think I remember being impressed
when reading a Buddhist book
a long time ago by the statement

All is Mind.

And did not a Christian saint declare
that the world was or was in
in the Mind of God ?

Now it may be that all things living and dead
are or were part of the mind of Blob.

Slime Mould, Physarum polycephalum,
known in France as Blob.


A fine piece of fakery.

Tastier than Boiled Bagels.

 

So far, so good.

 


But Berlin, Ontario, was renamed Kitchener
after the outbreak of World War One,
while the Berlins of New Hampshire and Maryland
retained their names.