Every British crop-field

receives, on average,
twenty different kinds
of toxic agri-chemical.

What has happened to our minds ?

The Xenophobes of Europe

would do well to consider Lebanon,
where one quarter of the recently-inflated population
is Syrian refugees.
Multicultural, multi-religious,
multi-factional Lebanon
has not been brought to its knees...

yet...

Nothing

is the only thing
that we don't do
to excess.

Which is why
the poor planet is
under so much stress.

Most pleasures

are more fun
with two
rather than one -
except sex,
which so easily can
turn us into
emotional or
physical wrecks.

The only exhibit

in the Museum of Stupidity
is...
          (...you've guessed it !)

If you think this guy is a naked drunkard...

Corbel on the 12th century church at Rubiães (Minho), Portugal.

...think again. 
He is playing the DOLIO,
also known as a barrilete...

On a crowded beach

the bluest ocean
acquires the special quality
of much-used bathwater.

There is no such thing as Sexual Reproduction.

There is only sexual production
which in humans is destruction.

Not minding their Pees and Queues

the gawpers
and the gawkers.

The one great English quality

is diffidence.
Such a pity that it is not exportable,
for exporters and colonists
are - almost by definition - brash
and bumptious.

There are some principles

which are not worth having
unless you are prepared to forgo them
for purely sensual reasons.

At night

sounds of owls:
Saint-Antonin.

Deep Philosophical Question Very Relevant Today

Is it better to live for small and delicious pleasures
or die for big and demanding ideas ?
It is not easy to do both.

New Poems of the Month

by Robert Hernandez
can now be read on my
Dissident Website.

In Florida, charity doesn't even begin at home.

90-year-old Florida man charged for feeding homeless people...>>>

In the war waged by buying on sharing

buying always wins.
After all, shares are for sale.

The fastest-growing cities are the most violent.

Though  nearly 60,000 people die in wars every year,
an estimated 480,000 are killed - mostly by guns - in cities,
according to an United Nations report.

I've said it before

and I'll say it again:
Human problems
and the problems we cause
are problems of scale -
which is why we, as a species,
will shortly fail.

The tragedy and curse of Africa

is not Ebola, not HIV or any mere disease,
but overpopulation, energetically encouraged by
Oxfam, Médecins sans Frontières,
War on Want, Caritas...
and hundreds of apparently do-gooding NGOs who are, in fact,
the agents of evil, misery, famine and despair.

read how >
                                read more >

Popular Music and The Work Ethic.

Even the greatest effort
can end in failure...
and little effort, even little talent,
can produce 'success'.

In modern global mythology

zombies are
the poor
while the rich
are vampires.

The Death of Diversity.

Unlike polytheism
monotheism has no sense of humour.
Jehov'allagod has never even smiled,
and certainly cannot 'take a joke'.
He must have been a dismal child.

A coconut octopus

inside a coffee mug.
Lembeh Strait, Sulawesi, Indonesia - (Macro Wide-Angle) by Christian Loader on Flickr.

Why do we have to keep making and creating ?

- asked my internet friend.
Because we are the only bored species,
I replied, and have to keep actuating.

Fools can be gauged

by the frequency of their washing,
but the unwashed are not necessarily wise.

Have I said this before ?

The mind-numbing, labour-intensive oppression of optimism
too often leads to the unforgivable bleakness of prosperity.

If Northern Ireland

was England's Alcatraz
Scotland is
her Canada.

A Nasty Old Man

click to discover her revenge

and his long-suffering wife.

Ars Longa

Most people are more horrified
by artistic fakes
than by (other) human ones.

A quest

usually
involves
a man
obsessed.

Hope.

It was this last little sprite
in Pandora's urn

which ensured
(just as much as our spite) 
the Sixth Extinction
much, much more than Nostalgia.

The problem with "Living in the Moment"

is that moments change
(from moment to moment)
and we do not.

Electro-convulsive Therapy

Close the shutters
Go to bed
End the chaos in your head
Nothing matters when you're dead

Many young Americans

(whether in their hundreds or in their thousands I don't know)
were sent to 'Psychiatric Hospitals' in the nineteen-sixties

(and possibly later)
at the Center of the Free World 
at the height of the Cold War
after telling psychiatrists that they admired
Allen Ginsberg's ranting poem Howl!
Some of them were given electro-convulsive therapy
and never recovered.

Love

is a contraction
which seems like an expansion,
a contract which seems like liberation.

Philosophically speaking,

I guess that everything worth saying
has already been said, and mostly unheard,
ignored or unread.
Saying (or writing) is, of course, not necessarily communicating,
and what seems really worth communicating cannot be said.

To "live each day as if it were your last"

is not possible
until your last day actually arrives
and you are fully aware that you'll be dead the next.

If the human mind has evolved

(as we think it has)
according to the imperatives of survival,
what reason is there for thinking that it can acquire knowledge of 'reality',
when all that is required in order to reproduce and multiply our species
is that our errors and illusions are not fatal ?

(I read this somewhere recently, but can't remember where.)

In other words, how can we know that what we see and think we understand
is not a grand illusion ? 

Moreover, within this grandly-human illusion of understanding,
it seems that the more we know - the more information that we amass -
the less we can rationalise, much less control our actions as a species.

Which is the lesser of the two evils ?

The religion that Islamic State opposes
calls itself a political system - representative democracy.
Based on desire for things, comfort and will to power,
it is an inherently evil religion,
whose priests preach faith in technology,
inevitable moral improvement
and economic growth.

Both evils together in context in Raqqa. Photo by Reuters

The subtlest form of evil

is not so much the idea that evil is
a terrifying banality outside and separate
- but that it can be eradicated.

The Meek

are the microbes
who inhabit our bodies,
inherit our corpses,
and teem in the soil and all imaginable
and unimaginable places in this
and other planets.

Might this possibly be true ?

'...a senior Polish official has alleged that Russian President Vladimir Putin suggested partitioning Ukraine with Poland six years ago in a conversation with Donald Tusk, who was Poland's prime minister at the time.'

Or is it just another accusation in the centuries-long struggle between Poland and Russia ?

Despite our individualist illusions

there is no such thing as autonomy,
for we have simply moved from
kinship- and community-networks
or added to them our reliance
upon gadgets and machines
which also break down and have to be replaced.

'What is life ?'

For humans it is mostly
and increasingly
post-traumatic stress disorder
caused by culture crushing nature.

There is over a year left to listen...

...to an excellent talk by journalist Adam Gopnik.
In it, he admirably and entertainingly illustrates a corollary of Jung's theory of enantiodromia: people are bad at what they most enthuse and bang on about.
Thus the English are bad at soccer; very few readable novels come out of France;
Isis are more anti-Islamic than Hitler;
and the United States is constitutionally anti-democratic.

listen >>>

Your support is urgently needed.

The Bad Art Museum of Ohio needs a new home.
The obvious new location is France, which already is feverishly producing more bad art than all the Americas put together.

There are two obvious French locations:
1. The Eiffel Tower, a hideous and vulgar pile of ostentation.
2. The Palace of Versailles, a hideous and vulgar (but squatter) pile of ostentation.

The runner-up is in Belfast, Northern Ireland: City Hall, a nauseatingly hideous and vulgar, though smaller pile of ostentation.

link to another Museum of Bad Art >>>

'Social Media'

(Facebook and the like)
have at the same time reified
and phantasmagorised friendship.
There will be no such thing as friends
when friends are only things.

Increasing my vocabulary.

I heard two great expressions yesterday:
Pity-party
and
Sa'udi America.

I suggest that at least 95%

of human verbal exchange
is insincere banality,
and much of the rest
is toxic gossip and false witness.
Language is such a wonderful invention!

My window-sill this morning.

On the right, a flower of one of the hardiest of the many species of Caralluma,
a succulent which gives off a smell of rotten meat to attract certain flies and wasps.