Cancer diagnosis.

 

Social costs.

The Nation State doesn't care
a tinker's fart for your welfare
even if you live in a shanty-town.

Costs and statistics are what.
The poor are expenses to be kept down.

Frankly,

many of the Bordeaux
and Côtes du Rhône wines
sold in French supermarkets
under €12 aren't worth
much more than this.

The corruption of queerness.

When I was young 'homosexuals' were
special people. Either they were
literary intellectuals like Joe Ackerley
(who, like me, was in love with a dog)

or they were 'working class', like Joe's
ill-treated lover, stocky and strong
and smelling of sweat or carbolic or both.

'Homosexuality' was forbidden, therefore exciting,
hence its attraction.  Now anyone
with neither brain nor brawn
nor criminality can be 'gay'. 
Homo-mediocrity is here to stay.

Today's photo

is by an Amazon courier.

I got it!

 

'The People', Fellow Republicans

or self-hating populace
bond desperately with populists
who so despise them.

POPVLVS MVLTVM OTIVM HABET
ATQVE MVLTI SVNT AVARI.

Rome became a republic, Athens a very limited democracy.

Eternal plastics.

Molecules
from my horrible, scorched
Terylene trousers from the 1950s
may be in your bloodstream.

 

A wasp's nest

pillaged by a badger.

photo by Mark Cocker

A brilliant term

to describe many 'liberals' :
COMMISSARS OF LANGUAGE.

But behind the language-commissars
are the Thought-controllers
of the Deep State of unmitigated morality.

 

TRUMP SET TO ABOLISH WWW

Not (yet) true.
But this is certain:

Concerning which, it is no surprise
that the world's chief supplier
and consumer of pornography
is the world's chief supplier and consumer
of cadavers (corpses) and body-parts...

[more on this on October 3rd]

British society is currently

getting its knickers in a twist again
about petty (not organised) shoplifting.
Retailers claim that it puts prices up
for those who pay.  But surely 
shoplifting by the poor consists of
minute and miserable attempts to remedy
grotesque inequalities in society ?

A painter I'd never heard of until today,

underclass,
queer pride
from Ayrshire :
Bobby MacBryde.

In theory, you cannot

in a Liberal Democracy
be coerced to be free.
Except in the USA.

Multiple

is a loathsome recent introduction
which means More than three.

It has replaced 'several' (more than 5),
'many' and 'a lot' (more than 10)
and 'a large number'.

Which is the original Vermeer

and which the copy
- which some think might also be by Vermeer ?

In Philadelphia

In London

The problem with language

is that so many experiences
from boredom to tragedy
are beyond words.
Language often trivialises,
or there's something missing.

And, anyway, the problem with talking
is that people do not listen.

Gaza, 2025.

She will become plunder for the nations,
and her settlements will be ravaged by the sword.

Trump plan for holiday resort for non-Palestinians.

read details

see more of today's photos

Most Heroes

are 'Poster Heroes'
and all are heavily unbalanced,
even more flawed than ordinary folk.

« Religious ecstasy

made people callous
(so did causes)... » 

- Virginia Woolf : Mrs Dalloway.

'Loneliest Continent' ?

Not Antarctica.

Epidemic of social isolation hits Africa.

Anti-sticker Sticker.

Geopolitics.

Trading and Financial sanctions rarely work.

They make regimes more resilient.

South Africa did not collapse because of sanctions
but, as with the USSR, the system became
politically, morally and socially unsustainable.

The only thing that will stop Putin's war
of destruction, war-crimes and terror
in Ukraine will be a geo-political or hubristic error.

Unbelievably revered,

(mainly in Catholic France)
the spongy spiritualism of Simone Weil
includes:

"The beauty of this world is Christ's tender smile coming to us through matter."

"Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

"There are only two things that pierce the human heart. One is beauty. The other is affliction."

"Everything beautiful has a mark of eternity."

and reams of similar tosh, possibly as bad as my own,
which almost makes me Groucho-glad that I'm not revered.

HOWEVER, she did write some excellent epigrams, such as:

It is much easier to imagine ourselves in the place of God
the Creator than in the place of Christ crucified.

 – Christians do it religiously.

* * *

A less sententious philosopher >

She was one of the most odious types of poster-hero :
a preacher, a career-martyr and a
dishonest suicide who was not even a cat-lover
- let alone a resister (even by stealth)
against the Catholic patriarchy of Pius XII.

I get the impression that she would rather have died in Auschwitz, had she known of its existence.

Just as Facebook is not the web,

and as the web is not the internet,
so intimacy is not love.

 

Penultimately,

the only justification of power
is power.

Grasshopper

hitch-hopping.

'Artificial Intelligence'

White men's
Dreaming.

Interesting account...

 

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle

 “Gay marriage is a contradiction in terms,” he said.
“If it’s a marriage, it’s not gay.”

also:

Note: I have been 'sexually inactive' since I was 80 !
Quite a relief ! - as musician and bon-vivant George Melly
remarked when he reached the same blessed state.

Arbor vitæ

My latest painting
with its title in Farsi.

Tree of Life

My 'studio'

Keeping our heads down.

I used to assume
that the reason why old people walked
with heads bent down was their arthritic
necks or shoulders.  Now I know that
at least some, like me, keep their heads down
to help them not to faint on the sidewalk or the street.

 

Susophily.

I love pigs.
So, when I read a Guardian recommendation
for an Aussie series on youTube
called Cooking for Seamus
(a very happy and highly-socialised bull),
and found this amazing hippy, happy video
of his almost-friend, an arthritic boar
called Danny Boy, I became a happy hippy
for eleven minutes - without grass or E
or psilocybe tea.

NB
There is a Pig-lovers group on Facebook.

What is he going to do with (or to) them ?

 

Meanwhile, in America,

I feel (even) older already.

 

'The Establishment'

is whoever calls the shots –
political or internet despots.

Brut

can be the best champagne
or almost-unacceptable art –

at any rate, remains apart.

Keeping Kool in Korea, and a Doorway in Sudan.

 (from 'The Guardian')

Couldn't get the people to move.

My nineteen-sixties.

I never turned on,
never tuned in,
because I was already
a drop-out who
listened to Sibelius. 

Death

(sui-cyanide)
The Deputy-Burgomeister's daughter (and parents) Leipzig 1945.

photo by the great Lee Miller

JAWS

 

Democracy

photo by Dean Lewins

"The stifling intrusiveness of Liberal Democracy
should not surprise us." – Ryszard Legutko,

The Demon in Democracy : Totalitarian Temptations

in Free Societies, New York & London 2006

"I have found from many observations
that liberals are incapable of allowing people
to have their own convictions, and immediately
answer their opponents with abuse or something worse."

– Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot.

Netanyahu's Blasphemy

On the same day that Ghislaine Maxwell
declared that the unstable president Trump
"always behaved like a Perfect Gentleman",

Israel's mad prime minister denounced
the UN's and other agencies' reports
of true famine and genocide in Gaza
as a New Blood Libel.

(With allies like these, Europe has,
Dear Mr Putin, no need of enemies.)

Books banned in many American schools

include Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five,
Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale & Oryx and Crake

Picoult's Nineteen Minutes
Khaled's The Kite Runner (made into a good film)
Morrison's The Bluest Eye & Beloved...

(I have read all these books
and found them superb.)

Jodi Picoult has said that her book was banned
(in a state awash with pornography) because
the word erection was printed on one page.
What a Spirit of the Age !

Common Sense

 
it seems to me pretty likely that it is due to
the Alimentary Industrial Complex, aka
Food Manufacturers replacing real ingredients
with plastic-packaged microwavable concoctions.

The limits, like the habits, are in your head.

 Not really practical.

Oh dear, I'll have no career

as a postie.
So it's back on the dole for me...

In Chains.

The legendary Australian 'bushranger' or bandit
made even more famous by Sydney Nolan,
here shown in (an improved) police photograph.

There is nowhere

without a McDonald's.
Not even delightful suburban Dudley,
Warwickshire, England. 

Music in the car.

Bach on the piano
can be as banal as a beach.

'Beefsteak Nazi' :

Brown on the outside,
Pink in the middle.

Times change.

Now we have Colonic Liberals
and Social-democrats:
transparent-pink on the outside
and shit-brown in the middle. 

If Zelenskyy and Putin meet in Budapest

(which is unlikely), here, for the Press Pack,
is a brief guide to Hungarian politeness.

 

and for my many Magyar readers, here
are my Maxims translated into Hungarian.