The Manichæans and the Cathars

believed that the world was created by the Devil.
It certainly seems that way...

The book of the Jews, the Christians
and the Muslims states:
 'GOD saw that the wickedness of man
was great in the earth,
and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually.
And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, 
and it grieved him at his heart.' (Genesis VI)

A man is thus a million times
more harmful than a slug.
So why are the priests of those religions
so irredeemably smug ?

__________


'For what has man of all his labour,
and of the vexation of his heart,
wherein he has labored under the sun ?'
- Ecclesiastes.

The strength of capitalism (as well as religion)

No amount of logic
can overcome belief.

'Gentlemen's Clubs'

were, I thought, places where
gentlemen went to smoke their pipes
read, snooze, drink port or brandy,
discuss philosophy or politics...

But now I learn that they are
Lap-dancing venues, where   The women
who work there are naked or nearly so,
though sexual stimulation is usually forbidden. 
The women keep what money men
(often also nearly or quite naked) give them.

A small bottle of water costs £6.
The profit goes to the establishment
and to fix the flics.
I think real gentlemen might have a better time
smoking pipes, browsing my website,
discussing philosophy or politics.

Revenge is for

psychopaths.

An interesting lacuna.

We can save and replay sounds,
take photographs, make videos...
but have made no effort towards
connecting with our animal selves
by analysing, storing, reproducing,
broadcasting smells.

Yet another wonder of the deep

click on the picture

For women

in most societies
the quality most valued
is kindness.
In men
the talent most praised
is violence.

A new genre: the poetic e-mail

(received yesterday)

"I remember entering Williston, North Dakota, the blackened, oily heart of the Bakken oilfield for the first time from the East.
The first thing I noted, other than the horrendous decay of the highway and streets,
was the town's Walmart store.
It looked like some macabre oasis.
Travelers of all persuasions and economic conditions stopped there for sustenance
or a moment's respite - but from what? 
It seemed more a leap from the frying pan into the fire..."

Many thanks, Willie.
- And for incidentally explaining what a Black Friday is.


* * *

Now read:
Less an aspiration, more a fantasy ->

Over twenty years after the fall of the USSR,

Moscow is host
to hundreds of Central Asian,
bruised and beaten slaves,
some of them, born in captivity,
who have never seen the light of day.
Russia is a New Democracy.

Thoughtful people died for Universal Franchise.

click to see the full zombie horror

So much for Democracy.

Modern Heroes

The more our civilisation
'advances',
the more that psychopathic behaviour
is praised and rewarded,
and the less value
is given to simple kindness,
the greatest, most beautiful of talents.

Dividing Lines

The lines between regret
 and guilt,



 between shame and guilt,

and between
pornography and sympathetic magic
are very vague and personal
and tragic.

Perhaps

and perhaps unfortunately
you need to taste romantic love
before you can properly
judge and then appreciate
friendship.

For the food !

- The only good reason to go to Jerusalem.
Especially if you're an eastward-looking
 vegetarian vasectomised
anti-natalist atheist.

Fifty years ago

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
was published in the USSR
as part of Nikita Khrushchev's
'deStalinisation process'.
That book was one of the principal
harbingers of the eventual
collapse of the pseudo-communist system.

In liberal democracies
what is unacceptable is ignored.
There is no need for censorship
or suppression when and where
freedom of speech is to be found. 
There is such a flood of mediocre words
that the good ones get drowned.

Totem and Taboo

People will talk
about almost anything
(even suicide)
except overpopulation.
And on the rare occasions
in their overpopulating lives
that they briefly touch upon the subject,
their own rôle in the appalling
process is not mentioned.

" Et miraris

quod paucis placeo cui cum paucis convenit,
cui omnia fere aliter videntur ac vulgo,
a quo semper quod longissime abest id penitus rectum iter censeo."

(Petrarch, Epistolæ de Rebus Familiaribus, Book XIX, Letter 7.)

A Short Sunday Sermon

On the one hand,
you might say that crime began
in the limbo of cities,
not in a garden, not with a woman,
not with a snake, but with
malnourished, deracinated
desperate men.

On the other hand,
you might say that crime began
with the fence around
the Garden of Eden.

Living

causes cancer.
Life
is ruining the planet.

Music of the Spheres

Incandescent bulbs, whose manufacture has been banned
within the European Union, will soon be as rare as hens' teeth...
The sublime is often criminalised.

Necessarily,

politicians are liars,
cheats, betrayers and frauds.

Armed forces are necessarily
well-organised bands of
thugs with expensive training
and very expensive weaponry.

The press is pervertedly infantile
when not an instrument of misinformation.
This is not necessary, nor inevitable.

The Christians killed simple Jesus
a long time ago, when they opted for autocracy.
This was maybe necessary but not inevitable.

Necessarily, it seems, politicians, military,
press, Christianity - and ourselves
through 'social media' -
all manipulate us - now, inevitably,
in the name of democracy.

An extraordinary observation ;-)

It is now considered insulting
to refer to ordinary people.
Which is why
there is no such thing as society.

Crime without punishment.

The most consistently
and spectacularly lucrative
form of capitalism depends on the ongoing
criminalisation of certain commodities;

and the money that keeps on flowing
from supplying (and fleecing)
and policing
keeps the whole system going.

'Social Capital'

The vast, towering machinery
of capitalism grinds anti-socially.

'Social Capital', judged by status,
ambition, acquisition,
is essentially unsociable.

Eleventh hour

At the eleventh hour
of the eleventh day
of the eleventh month
militarists, their lackeys,
and their dupes
briefly remember
cannon-fodder,
and congratulate themselves.

A nation-state without an army
would not now be considered
a nation-state, though Denmark,
probably the oldest European nation-state
had no army in 1940.

Now, at some eleventh hour,
nation-states are starting
to disintegrate.

For most of human life on earth

it was rare to find someone without
disfigurement, even among the rich
and powerful.  But in our culture
of mass-vanity,
a blemish is a kind of curse,
and the blemished
are seen as victims,
objects of pity.

Pause to consider :

 

reblogged from DogsDepicted.

On Sex

Pleasure rests on illusion,
but happiness lies in reality.

It is much easier

to legalise
than legitimise,
just as it is much easier
to condemn
than judge.

Systems and institutions
can't tell good from bad.

Sense of History

A generation has grown up which cannot imagine
a world without computers, the internet, cell-phones,
credit-cards...
How will people be able to imagine a world without plastic,
without radio, electricity, plumbing,
without coffee or tomatoes,
chimneys, forks or chairs,
without glass, cotton,  steel,
cotton,  paper,  cement, without stairs...
without even the potter's wheel ?

The beauty

of duty
is the apotheosis
of neurosis.

No-one's supposed to be single.

Just as the most boring people
are those who are frightened of boredom,
the loneliest
are those who are frightened of loneliness,
and those trapped by marriage.
But no-one's supposed to be single.

The Comfort of Age

As I get older
the 'sex' gets better
and better - and longer
and longer - with myself.
All that's missing
is kissing.

Anti-government Health Warning

Hypocrisy helps
to cause cancer.
(And medicine
is not the answer.)

Corporate

Capitalism (which we now know
will devour even itself)
offers heaven on earth -
and delivers
hell with Super-HD/3D movies.

Restricting men's sexual activity

makes them tense
and even dangerous.
So armies and patriarchies
came about simply by
restricting men's sexual activity
mainly through monogamy.
with the subtle help of alcohol.

Not only in the USA

is cast of mind
becoming caste of mind.

Some light relief.

A Stoplight-Loosejaw photographed by Alex Ries.
This deep-sea fish has a dislocatable jaw, teeth in its throat, and “night vision”
light-organs that illuminate a hapless victim unable to see the wavelength they emit.

An observation..

There is so little record of child sexual abuse
in historical documents - including show-trials
for heresy and witchcraft - including
even Stalin's show-trials - that either it
was so common and acceptable that
it deserved no mention,
or that it hardly existed before, say, the advent
of television and video.

For John Gray

The philosopher
who claims to be rational
is like the meat-eater
or the child-maker
who claims to be harmless.

Life is like a game of poker.

Yesterday I heard
a really good line
in a popular song:

'The best that you can hope for
is to die in your sleep.'

- Kenny Rogers, 'The Gambler'.

On the banality of evil :

The spineless are the drones
of evil.  They do more harm
than missiles.

- adapted from an aphorism of  
Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, known as Nicolas Chamfort.

A rational individual

can act only through power of reason -
which is why human beings
cannot call themselves rational,
and indeed are less reasonable
than almost any other creature.