It is often tedious

to be with people
who like being with people.

The Dictatorship of the Will

is the imposition of a tidy garden
in the jungle of the mind - so brief
so brief, so fragile and so violent.

"If one tells the truth

one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out."
- Oscar Wilde

"Why tell the truth when you can get away with a lie ?"
- Jimmy Savile, entertainer, fixer, friend of royality and serial pædophile.

They start sexualising little girls

almost as soon as they can walk
and then are surprised, outraged
that almost one in four is 'molested' by an adult,
usually a relative.
For little boys the estimate
is one in every eight.

The aspiring

dream of winning The Prize.
Their chief god is
Lord of the Flies.

'The Night Watch'

and the phone-watch.

Some people think that 'wine-talk' is pretentious,

but the nine-year old Spanish
Cabernet-Sauvignon and Carmenere
blend which I drank recently
carried a definite, if subtle, hint of banana.

A wonderful word

which I heard on the radio yesterday:
operationalise.
This could, in turn, produce
operationalisation, 
and even

operationalisationally.

I used to wonder

if God had a conscience.

Floating in the blood-baths,

alongwith millions of raped and refugee
are the remnants of Babylonians, Sumerians,
Assyrians, Phoenicians, Canaanites,
Hittites, Nubians, Fellaheen, Jews,
Medes, Persians, Romans,
Greeks, Arabs, Turks...
all of them bruisers of landscape.

A fetching portrait

of a prostitute at a 19th century lumber-camp in Michigan
reminds me of the great orchestral conductor, Sir Simon Rattle...

How Ambi turned into Paisley

"It began as a teardrop in Babylon. Where the sunlight came from Astarte, shameless goddess of the fecund feminine. The boteh. Stylized rendition of the date palm shoot, tree of life, fertility symbol. It danced through Celtic art, until the heavy feet of Roman legionaries tramped over the Alps. Then it fled the wrath of Mars and Jupiter, dove underground as Empire rose.
"Some historians claim it travelled to Mughal courts from Victorian England, as the foliaged shape of the herbal. Evolved in the 18th century into a cone, then a tadpole. But a legend in Kashmir calls it the footprint of the goddess Parvati, as she ran through the Himalayas at the dawn of time.

"Ambi. Form of a mango – fruit that ripens and rots the dreams of all South-to-North immigrants...

read on >>>

Any delusion will do.

When we stop worshipping the elements,
spirits and gods, we don't stop worshipping.
We find something else to bow down before - progress
for example, education, acquisitive rationalism,
political systems, justice, truth, revenge :
material answers to spiritual questions
which are themselves deluded.

Christmas Shoppers

Behind the anxiously vacant faces
are not so much beings as demanding
tangles of unending pasta-brains
pushing the whole of Nature into a shrinking ghetto
and down compulsively-disinfected drains.

A brilliant intellect

  can often be the companion to a truly asinine personality.

- Kevin Myers on Susan Sontag >>>
 

Religions

really are no more
than elaborate conspiracy-theories.

Breadth, depth, age...

Now I realise the extent of my own stupidity,
having discovered the hidden depths of another's
after forty years !  As Diogenes said,
It takes a wise person to find another.
But wise people do not want to be found,
for they hate self-promotion and publicity.

“Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God."

Sixty people are involved
in a 'routine' operation merely to replace one knee
of an insured person in the USA,
an ordinary citizen in Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand,
and a rich person most other places -
while millions of the poor of the planet
have to shit behind bushes (where there are bushes)
and no clean water... 

Birds and Beasts.

A murder of crows

A muster of storks
An ostentation of peacocks
A parliament of owls
A party of jays
A peep of chickens
A pitying of turtle-doves
A rafter of turkeys
A siege or sedge of herons
A skein of geese [in flight]

A sord of mallards

A sounder of boars
A spring of teal
A tidings of magpies

A trip of dotterel

A busyness or feamyng of ferrets

A gaze of raccoons
A crash of rhinoceroses
A drift of swine

A wake of buzzards

A deceit of lapwings
A descent of woodpeckers
An exaltation of larks
A fall of woodcocks 

A dole of doves  

An unkindness of ravens

 [more]

A superfluity of nuns

and

A devastation of people.

Poets and politicians

The second-rate promote
the second-rate even though
they might slightly appreciate
the excellent
in an unengaged, bemused fashion...

...and mere extremity of fashion
is what the second-rate consider
to be startling originality.

There is nothing we create

which is so good that it cannot be
just as bad. 
e.g. the world-wide web,
and perhaps even contraceptives !

Thought provoked by Sam

and from now on
unknowing
every new nought
continue too
what wit to
not to renew

Global Insanity (blog number 3,500)

In your culture obsessed with employment and the work-ethic
most of you become lazier and lazier
through increasingly-sophisticated
'labour-saving' gadgets
which you work ever harder to possess -
amongst them exercise-bicycles.
You take out pricey gym-subscriptions
and seek therapy to cope with stress.

Howard's End.

Where better to die
than in the room where I was born ?
In the past it was not so rare.
But it's beyond the bounds of likelihood
that I'll breathe my last breath there.

Extract from a letter to a fellow-realist.

"I think that all we can do is take the long view. 
The planet/evolution produced humans, and now it is suffering the (inevitable) consequence, about which we can do nothing. 
Just think of the energy expended on saving human lives, developing drugs, running hospitals, improving childbirth – everything is geared to produce ever more people living ever longer and destroying the planet. 
More, more, more!

All you and I can do is count our own individual blessings and be as happy as we can, because our distress is not going to do anything to help the planet. 

In the end antinatalism is a kind of sad self-indulgent grieving, even less effective in the Great Scheme of Things than vegetarianism

Like most self-styled realists in all previous generations, I don't think humans will last much longer.  Thousands of species will disappear in the next 50 years.  But when the dinosaurs went extinct there was one little mammal on the earth, a mouse-like creature, which was the ancestor of all mammals.  So the earth will renew itself (probably) and evolution will occur, 'in a different direction’…and in half a million years everything will be hunky dory, and intelligent life self-generated from rotting plastic and sulphur dioxide will be on the up and up…"

A stupid and shallow Insular Poet

declares that Kafka simply (if masterfully) recounted his dreams.
But it is perfectly obvious even to the partially-sighted,
mentally-challenged (as well as  misunderstood
or oppressed minorities such as German-speaking Jews
in a nationalist Czech city)
that Kafka's accounts are accurate if fragmentary versions
of the underlying reality, not just of our culture,
but of civilisation itself.
Kafka was The Jungian Orwell.

For the souls of turkeys slaughtered by the soulless, and

for John Dillinger
in the hope that he is still alive

 

William S. Burroughs (Passionate Advocate of The Right to Bear Arms)

Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts — thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison —
thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger —
thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot —
thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes —
thanks for the AMERICAN DREAM to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through —
thanks for the KKK, for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches, for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces —
thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers —
thanks for laboratory AIDS —
thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs —
thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business —
thanks for a nation of finks — yes,
thanks for all the memories… all right, let’s see your arms… you always were a headache and you always were a bore —
thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.

I spent yesterday morning 'creating' this self-portrait

My Soul and I (in Van Gogh's Sherwood Green pea-jacket).

by adapting an animated gif file by or via tumblebuggie.
In due course I might be able to create an animated gif from scratch!

Almost every week

a new dinosaur species is identified.

Almost every week
we render yet another living species
extinct.

The Coming of the Singularity.

In late mediæval Western, Northern and Central Europe
most people, living mostly
in the squalid misery
of the Valley of the Shadow
fearfully believed in the eternal tortures
and stinking fires of Hell.
They were terrified
into religious adherence
even if it was only appearance.
Now most people believe in the shallow
and rarefied
feelgood abyss that is Silicon Valley.

click to enlarge

After the cosy, floaty wait for bloody birth

life is mostly waiting:

to be fed
to be cleaned
to be assessed
to be brought before the committee
or the court;

for Christmas
for buses
for the chauffeur
for the interview
for a house
for a taxi
for the post to arrive
for the concert to start
for him or her or it or them
for small-e enlightenment
or capital-e Enlightenment
for examination results
for the visa to come through
for the war to end
for the high to hit
for the corpse to come home
for the pain to stop
for the weather to improve
for the seedling to grow
for the fruit to ripen
for peace in your head
for peace in the world
for floaty death

Popular culture

has moved on from bear-baiting
via circuses and music-halls
to 3-D movies.  This is 'social progress'.
But the Pyrenean bear is now almost extinct
thanks to the still-popular culture
of extermination.

We now realise afresh

that just about every human institution
is corrupt - from the banks and the police
to intelligence services, NGOs and hospitals.
Universal corruption suggests that it is not just
the love of money that is the root of all evil,
but money itself, invented to create
inequality not just of opportunity
but of impunity.

Thomas Merton

(who, like me, lived a while in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val
where a little street is named after him) said
that "we are all full of Paradise".  Only the blind devout
can fail to notice that the Paradise Within is slashed
and burned by the Hells both within and without.

The Metaphorical and Anti-statistical Heart.

Individual acts of human kindness
tell you nothing about Human Nature.

If you never thought of Beethoven as cuddly,

...click here - and WATCH as well as listen.

On visiting a city.

Property
especially 'real estate'
makes us and our surroundings
monstrous.

On Human Achievement.

The theory of Natural Selection suggests
that what requires the most effort,
the most labour,
is the most unnatural.

'Cat Litter' :

like 'misgivings'
the memory
of civilisation.

Is it a sheep ? a porcine freak ? or a photoshop job ?

click for more.

It's a Mangalitsa pig, a rare breed from Hungary.

The childish perversion

and reduction of Darwin's work
to the poisonous mantra
'survival of the fittest' -
together with the missionary creep
of monotheisms - has led to a planet
overrun by the sick and starving,
Malthusiastic and infectiously unfittest.

Fashionable talk.

In the 1960s
we voiced our concern
about overpopulation
and the destructiveness of the Nuclear Family.
Since then the forces of Reaction
have made talk of these two evils
taboo. Terrorism as a topic
is not only sexier
but very much safer.

Children fighting

are men.
Men fighting
are not brave
but infantile.

Pope Francis orders showers for homeless to be installed close to the Vatican.

The origin of our evil

lies (at least partly) in our ability
to compartmentalise - not just the world
and our experience of it, but ourselves,
to separate our consciousness into parts
which do not interfere with - or even recognise -
each other.  Divided selves
divide the world, divide the spoils
of our divisiveness for gain
until there's nothing left but thirst and pain.

Dear Feminists

and others,
it is not men
who are out to get you,
turn you into mere vessels,
breeding-tools - 
but children.
Men are merely mules.

Doxastic Undecidability - I think I might be a 'Queer Reasoner'.

Raymond Smullyan defines the following types of reasoners:

• Accurate reasoner: An accurate reasoner never believes any false proposition. (modal axiom T)

• Inaccurate reasoner: An inaccurate reasoner believes at least one false proposition.

• Conceited reasoner: A conceited reasoner believes his or her beliefs are never inaccurate. A conceited reasoner will necessarily lapse into an inaccuracy.

or

• Consistent reasoner: A consistent reasoner never simultaneously believes a proposition and its negation. (modal axiom D)

or

• Normal reasoner: A normal reasoner is one who, while believing p, also believes he or she believes p (modal axiom 4).

• Peculiar reasoner: A peculiar reasoner believes proposition p while also believing he or she does not believe p. Although a peculiar reasoner may seem like a strange psychological phenomenon (see Moore's paradox), a peculiar reasoner is necessarily inaccurate but not necessarily inconsistent.

• Regular reasoner: A regular reasoner is one who, while believing , also believes .

• Reflexive reasoner:^] A reflexive reasoner is one for whom every proposition p has some q such that the reasoner believes .

If a reflexive reasoner of type 4  believes , he or she will believe p. This is a parallelism of Löb's theorem for reasoners.

• Unstable reasoner: An unstable reasoner is one who believes that he or she believes some proposition, but in fact does not believe it. This is just as strange a psychological phenomenon as peculiarity; however, an unstable reasoner is not necessarily inconsistent.

• Stable reasoner: A stable reasoner is not unstable. That is, for every p, if he or she believes Bp then he or she believes p. Note that stability is the converse of normality. We will say that a reasoner believes he or she is stable if for every proposition p, he or she believes BBp→Bp (believing: "If I should ever believe that I believe p, then I really will believe p").

• Modest reasoner: A modest reasoner is one for whom every believed proposition p, only if he or she believes p. A modest reasoner never believes Bp→p unless he or she believes p. Any reflexive reasoner of type 4 is modest. (Löb's Theorem)

• Queer reasoner: A queer reasoner is of type G and believes he or she is inconsistent—but is wrong in this belief.

• Timid reasoner: A timid reasoner is afraid to believe p [i.e., he or she does not believe p] if he or she believes       

What we call 'Progress'

is addiction to stress.

In 1941

while waiting to extrude me
in the expectation
of my adoption
my mother (a schoolteacher
in a village just beyond Belfast, Northern Ireland
from where it was difficult to travel
to Britain during World War II)
stayed at Wisteria Cottage,
Aldsworth, Berkshire (England) -
  
an even smaller village
whose crime rate in 2013 amounted to:

Anti-social behaviour : 1 offence
Bicycle theft    -
Burglary : 1 offence
Criminal damage and arson    -
Drugs    -
Other crime    -
Other theft    -
Possession of weapons    -
Public disorder and weapons    -
Public order    -
Robbery    -
Shoplifting    -
Theft from the person    -
Vehicle crime  :  1 offence
Violence and sexual offences    -
Violent crime    -
Total Crimes  :  3

My mother herself was the victim
of a fairly usual sexual-social crime
and, I regret to say, had not succeeded in aborting me.

I was born close by
at Folly Farm -

which I assumed was a kind of workhouse for 'unmarried mothers'
but was in fact an architectural pleasure/treasure -

and, as it happened,
in the end
she adopted me herself.

Bad Science.

'We' can land a robot on a comet
while flattening Damascus
and making orang-utans extinct.