Warning :

To be a parasite

on the State
is much less demeaning,
much less debilitat-
ing than to be
a friend of the rich.

A gloss on R.W. Emerson

Congratulate yourself if
you have done something
strange and extravagant,
and splintered the crass
uniformity of a passive age.

Opinion polls suggest

that 'young people'
trust 'celebrities'
more than politicians -
but
would they ever prefer Diogenes
to the Oligarchs of Athens ?

Of course not.

What is it about testosterone

that makes men edgy when young
and grumpy when old -
though women have much greater cause
for complaint and misery through all the
trials of menstruation,
pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth,
child-rearing and menopause ?

Noblesse oblige

While she was scraping
my infected gums
my dentist mentioned
her dislike of slugs.
"I don't like them, either -
their tender sliminess,"
I said as I rinsed out the blood
in the bowl.
"But we should, at the very least,
be polite to animals."

Have you noticed

how drab people are
in the rich, 'individualistic'
parts of the world ?
And how their different shades
of dull and beige
are tastelessly combined ?

This is because they're frightened
of waving and of standing out against the
drab normality they've drowned in.

More destructive

than the world dictatorship of money
are nation-states and
nationality.

I see

through the eye of the skull
from the inside out
and the inside in
I see through the eye of the gull

to the world of those who look
from the outside out
and see nothing
but an unread book
and a trumped-up grin.

On the boiling of boots during famine

The main result of intelligence
is general and self-delusion.

Progress Report

The religion which taught mutual respect
and the spiritual wisdom of humility
became the civilisation in which people
try constantly to control each other,
are quick to condemn and scoff -
and in which almost everyone
tries to rip almost everyone off.

Be

tween Entropy
and Clinamen
sings the shaman.

All the world's 'Great Art'

is merely décor for
degraded consciousness.

Koan

Nothing is
as nothing does.

公案

A Koan is a paradox in the Buddhist intellectual tradition,
designed to help us think 'out of the rational box' and at an intuitional level, beyond words.

I suspect

that God did not wash His hands
before He made the Universe.
How perverse!

The second main function of schools

is so that mothers can
go out and work
to produce taxes
to provide schools...

Venite Odoremus

Sniffing myself
is the nearest I get
to being a dog.

Computers

are probably a curse upon the young
but a stimulating comfort to the old.

General George Armstrong Custer,

one of America's most celebrated heroes,
an enthusiastic practitioner of rape,
greed for gold, and genocide,
was not just a real ladies' man,
but a real white man's
real white man.

Happiness

If you're not selling,
you can keep it -
until we buy or crowd you out,
poison your wells,
or bomb you to bits.

'By each let this be heard...'

We rarely kill the thing we love;
more often we love
what tortures us.

The lures of Satan - n° 1

We are a dead-end species

because we constantly try to ensure
that species we compete or contend
with - or simply do not like -
come to a dead end.

In the city

watching the homeless
and the ungiving, unforgiving
employed, it occurred to me
that both are merely going
through the motions of living.

'Good sex'

is experienced
mostly by
the selfish -
mostly men.

Paradox

The only species which increases
its numbers dramatically
by eliminating child mortality
(but not world-wide)
is the only species to eliminate
millions of its members
through war and genocide.

მგელი - the wolf

is so admired that it is
a first- and family-name
world-wide: Wolf, Vuk, Úlfur,
Wilk[as], Varg, Vlk, Ujku, Lupu,
Lobo, Gurg, al-Dib, Farkas, گرگ
Otso, Vrk, Amarok, Blaidd, Susi,
MacIntyre, ተኲላ...
and so we've done our hellish best
to exterminate it.

Swahili, Amazigh, Lingala
(to name a few)
- but not Amharic -
seem to lack a wolf-word
- presumably
because so few wolves are left
in Africa.

Freedom

though cheapened
does not come cheap.
Those who pride themselves
on 'living in the real world'
sow much less than they reap.

Diogenes* observed

acutely
that culture turns the few
aware and incorruptible
humans into Dogs,
whom the hypocrites,
(who are no more than craven,
creepy mimics)
call Cynics.

* The only philosopher worthy of the name.

Eden ended

with the Ice Age.
(Go figure.)

Rural South-west France

with just the sweetest, neatest
blinkers* on your eyes
would very nearly pass for
semi-Paradise.

* USA = blinders

Each one of us

is a pretender
that life's not marked
'Return to Sender'.

The Bible is right

- at least in this respect :
at the beginning
of what we call time,
the first human invention
was crime.

The human zoo

In a culture in which depilating
women are (it seems)
repelled by hairy men,
what are hairy men to do
short of vicious hair-removal ?
They have no option but
look for other men who view
their like with strong approval...

The capitalists decree :

that which is not capitalist
is anti-capitalist.
We have no option but to
let it be.

Who can tell

whether capitalism is threatened
more by contentment

than government
is by discontent ?

"Our silent ambassador to the stars."

"Each Voyager probe is famously equipped with a Golden Record, literally, a gold-coated copper phonograph record. It contains 118 photographs of Earth; 90 minutes of the world's greatest music; an audio essay entitled Sounds of Earth (featuring everything from burbling mud pots to barking dogs to a roaring Saturn 5 lift-off); greetings in 55 human languages and one whale language; the brain waves of a young woman in love; and salutations from the Secretary General of the United Nations. A team led by Carl Sagan assembled the record as a message to possible extra-terrestrial civilisations that might encounter the spacecraft.

"A billion years from now, when everything on Earth we've ever made has crumbled into dust, when the continents have changed beyond recognition and our species is unimaginably altered or extinct, the Voyager record will speak for us," wrote Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in an introduction to a CD version of the record. Some people note that the chance of aliens finding the Golden Record is fantastically remote. The Voyager probes won't come within a few light years of another star for some 40,000 years. What are the odds of making contact under such circumstances? On the other hand, what are the odds of a race of primates evolving to sentience, developing spaceflight, and sending the sound of barking dogs into the cosmos ?

Not to mention trashing their planet out of sheer and stupid greed!

Question-marks rule!

- ?
- - ?
- - - ?

The problem with free speech

is the devaluation
of silence.

As zero to the infinite

light loses you
while darkness
welcomes you home.

Obscured

by the religion of employment,

between work and leisure,
lies life.

One of my fans

tells me that I remind him
of the Czech folk-tale character,
Děd Vševěd, the tattered
and Wise Old Man of the Woods.

I am very flattered.

The back of beyond :

no better place
to avoid the bond
and the race.

Let those who build houses
lament their destruction.

Disturbing :

the rejoicing
at the death of Odysseus-Loki
bin Laden.
I don't remember
cheering crowds in New York
when Stalin died:
he killed at least
ten million Soviet citizens
and starved ten million more.

Chairman Mao 'liquidated'
more than ten million Chinese.
Pol-Pot, Mobutu, Papa Doc
and others did away with
impressive numbers, too -

few of them American.

And since Iraq was raped
several hundred thousand
lives were snuffed -

few of them American...

The human skull

is not so much a madhouse
as a mad courthouse.

I cannot believe

that I am more
than a body of thoughts.

Most people seem to be
even less.

Lyrics for an unpopular pop-song

Always look on the bright side of doom.
You'll be warmed by hypothermia in the tomb.
We have turned this lovely planet into hell.
In everlasting 'darknesse let me dwell'.

Always look on the bright side of doom.
Some think that life is just a tiny room:
life on earth returning to one cell.
In everlasting 'darknesse let me dwell...'