Pillage and predation

continue, of course, everywhere,
including Gabon.

When there are riots and looting

(resulting from peaceful demonstrations)

it has been usual and convenient, since before the 1920s,
to blame "the extreme left". 

However, as Naomi Klein (amongst others)
points out, chaos now benefits the ultra-rich,
not the poor.  Socio-statistically, I count as poor.

Although the price of local lettuce has recently doubled
while the price of coffee has not,
I live comfortably on my 1,050 euros a month,
in green rurality, waiting for a war.

Comment by First Dog on the Moon >

After Descartes

belief in the Power of Reason
seems childish.

Thinking does not precede feeling.
I feel, therefore I exist.

 

Yesterday in the middle of France.

 

I am even farther from the French ructions
than I was from the Northern Irish ones.
But there's probably unrest in Toulouse.

My contribution to political life in France
was to buy five pansies at the Sunday market.

Politix.

"Centre-left" inevitably means
right-wing : socialism for the rich
and austerity for the deprived,
as Yanis Varoufakis has described.

– Vercingetorix

'Selfish genes'

do not make selfish humans. 

Selfishness is taught and learned,
so greed can thrive and strive.

Scrapings from today's newspapers.

Who remembers cardboard discs on top of [thick glass] milk-bottles ? 

“You can show two men killing each other at three in the afternoon in any country in the world on public television,” said photographer Wolfgang Tillmans in an interview in 2022. “But you can’t show two men kissing each other.” 

...a world in which capital moves freely but people do not.

Socrates relates a legend of the invention of writing, and the warning that accompanied its creation: “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.”
“scratching many deadly signs on a folded tablet”, according to The Iliad...

Sleeping Tesla driver using self-driving mode crashes into police car injuring officers.

Perhaps,

dying alone,
you are so taken up by dying
that you neither notice or care
that you are on your own...

Happy days.

 

Museum architecture.

The National Museum of Qatar, Doha.

The Pterosaur Museum in the middle of the Gobi Desert.

I bet you didn't know

Ireland's Great 9th century
Gift to the World :
the space between words in written text.

So if it weren't for Irish monks
youdhavetoreadsentencesandwholepageswrittenlikethis.

which could leave you a bit perplexed.

The Waste Land

Received and popular Ideas are usually wrong.

 

Well worth reading.

Drink for Thought.

Cold blackcurrant-leaf tea
tastes rather like red wine.

Which is why some wines
are described as blackcurranty.

Maybe I should try wine generously laced
with cooled tisane of leaves
of Ribes nigrum (cassis in French)

to dilute the alcohol content,
since I have always been very

sensitive to its effects
(wooziness and headache)
and I drink wine mainly for the taste.

And have never much cared for
the fizzy flatness of beer*.

I tried this experiment, but the quantity
of tea necessary spoils the zing of the wine;
and adding a dash of wine to the tea
would not result in anything like kir. 

*(as opposed to silky draught Guinness).

'You can take a good photo of anything.'

 William Eggleston: Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973.

from today's Guardian

...talking of which, from the same publication, a good photo of a road less than a mile from where I lived for my first 20 years - without the mural:

Edward Carson was Oscar Wilde's nemesis,
and a separatist Ulster protestant 'loyalist'.

Our future may depend

on this little fella in

Looking forward

 to soon being famous !

Islam and Christianity.

War-lords such as the Prophet M'hamed had been,
tend not to offer the other cheek,
though some might have been crucified.

It may thus be fair to say
that the presentation of Christianity today
is a horrible display of hypocritical rot
whereas Islam, largely,
and mainly among the masses, is not. 

I wonder when

Donald Trump will, by fake-regal decree,
declare the re-naming of English
(the language) to American...

It would be vastly expensive
but maybe not complete insanity...

I often feel

 that my brain is boiling 

– but there's nothing to cook.

Prison Art of America.

 

The much-invoked/touted Armageddon

 will not be caused

 – The Guardian, 1st October.

The best of Man is his ruins.

The Northern Lights
the other night,
behind a Scottish castle.

And behind the standing-stones of Callanish,
Isle of Lewis.

Catastrophe שואה

 

A crime against humanity,
like a pogrom,
does not require gas-chambers
or even a concentration-camp.

النَّكْبَة

The 14th century expulsion of Jews
from England.

Politics, insanity, catastrophe...

 

How we welcomed

the WWW as if it was Liberation
for Western Europe in 1945....

Until around 2009 when it became
like the 'Liberation' of Poland in 1944,

or Cambodia under Pol Pot :
another prison to add to the indomitable prisons
of our minds, inescapable until there comes
along another existential, dictatorial juggernaut.

from today's (London) 'Independent'

 Female beauty in Britain.

I find them so scary that I would, literally,
get away from them as fast as I could.

In a morally primitive country like that, with

capital punishment aka the death penalty
and cruel years on 'Death Rows,' plus
all sorts of human rights abuses, including

I think that executions should be televised
rather than performed in conniving
and hypocritical secrecy.

Q & A

Asking questions
is much more enjoyable
than receiving answers,
which are, of course,
only as good as the questions asked.
Civilisation has proceeded
through stupid questions
and catastrophic answers
which we have blithely, blindly heeded.

Here is a very long and amusing

Symposipoem

on Alkibiades' love for Sokrates
by Anne Carson, 
winner of the 2026
Nobel Prize for Literature. 

And here is Édouard Louis' encomium.

What a leaf!

found in the forest. 

Victoria colombiana,
recently discovered.

And what a plant/creature!

Mandrake,
from the Voynich MS

Definitions

 'Prosperity' depends on property.
Joseph Goebbels announced that
"Prosperity depends on ferocity."

The world is a dictatorship of property.
The first Biblical property was Eden,
and belonged to a flawed
and ferocious dictator-god.

Really, it's no surprise

that the USA elects a president like Donald Trump :-

A city council meeting in Iowa opened with a prayer to Satan,
sparking heated reactions from some members.

Former council member Matt Dalbey gave the Invocation to begin Tuesday’s (October 6) gathering of the Ottumwa City Council, ending with ‘hail Satan!’

It prompted New Life Center pastor Rick Bick to break protocol
to ask for time to pray to “reverse the curse that was put on our city.”
The mayor allowed a 30 second period of silence.

The city approved its Invocation policy in January.

Three contrasting photos.

Flower-carpet, Bradford, England.

 

Carpet long gone,
West Bank, Palestine.

No carpet ever,
Nashville, Tennessee.

Queer sexual behaviour

used to be (and in many places still) denounced
as a Crime Against Nature.
But because of overpopulation
we now know that 
reproductive sexuality
is a crime against the planet,
and, of course, impossible
to discourage, let alone to ban it.

Universal Pornification.

 “We live in a world where as many people have instantaneous access to free porn as to clean water."

Patricia Nilsson:
Guilty Pleasure: The Pornification of the Internet, the Economy, and Everything Else, 2026.

But it's more likely that fewer people have access to clean water
than to 'dirty pictures'.

The beautiful, peaceful Strait of Hormuz

photo by Amirhosein Khorgooi

Who would have thought it !

The first "talkie" –
shown a year before The Jazz Singer,
made in Scotland, with dialogue
in lowland Scots.

Well, I was a foetus and a baby

at the right time for good nourishment:
1940-1942, when sugar was rationed.
My mother didn't take sugar in tea, either.
I never liked sugary or fizzy drinks.
I have never been overweight, though
I now have high blood pressure
(probably due to laziness).
My generation tends to be long-living,
and I look many years younger than my age.

Music to conquer

the murderous sound

of string-trimmers and leaf-blowers
(which of course should be banned)
recommended by writer
Ruth Ozeki :

Bransle de la Torche
(Dances from Terpsichore)

 by Michael Praetorius 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfYBvIHg_Q4

Cosmic and personal.

A black hole rings like a struck bell,
then subsides into silence,
forgetting almost all its history. 
I'm sure you didn't
hear my belling.

A black hole rings like a struck bell, then settles into silence, forgetting almost everything about its history. Why?

A crow caching snacks.

from kavohh707 on Tumblr

Swimming.

photo by Tianhang Zhang

 

I had never heard of her

until I listened to a recent
BBC interview.

Works by Lilian Lijn.

Greek Beauty in War.

This is the cheekpiece
of an ancient Hellenic helmet.
Warfare has definitely
lost its æsthetic.

We can be

only as we end up,
as ashes or slime.
But human humbly to humus
will never harmonise.

*

 

The kids are burning the bins in France.

They should be burning
the dustbins of history.
They should be burning the banks. 

Demolishing the abattoirs,
and sacrificing the servants

of the bond markets.

Burning bins is childish,
and it's impossible
to burn out the banks
as if they were Gazans.

Askeophobia

My favourite activities
are eating (with wine), reading, planting,
continuing my researches
on the world-wide web,
and going to bed.

With no aches, pains or handicaps
at the age of eighty-five
I find that moving from chair to chair
is excellent exercise.

The Rape of Albania.

Paranoid Enver Hoxha
covered Albania with concrete bunkers,

some of which have been converted
(even into bars and dwellings),
but most of which are ruined or have disappeared.

Albania's new ruler is doing much worse.

Proposal for concrete towers
on the beach in Lezha.