Someone should tell Teddy not to talk with his mouth full.

At the Foire aux Châtaignes, Laguépie (Rouergue) France

click picture to enlarge

The Second Amendment

is evidently more important to most citizens
of the flag-worshipping, politically-corrupt
USA
than the lives of their family and friends.

Other people's poverty

sometimes makes us generous.
Other people's misery
turns our hearts to glass.

Let us be immensely grateful

that there is no Nobel Prize for music.

"Love is never better than the lover"

wrote Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye.
But, given the numinosity around the word,
can there be good and bad kinds of love ?
Might it not be neutral, and the problems around it
due entirely to how it is or is not expressed,
is or is not experienced both by the lover
and beloved ?   How many shades of white are there ?

The legendary Daniel.

Of course he is a tribal fiction, but
I wonder why I and everyone else
have never queried the Lions' Den.
Were there lions 2,500 years ago
in Babylonia, Assyria and Persia ?
Do lions really have dens ?
And is it not more likely that Daniel
was tossed into a squalid lion cage (or pit)
in a royal Persian zoo ?
And is it really silly to ask such a question
about a hero-story
that is patently untrue ?

This is not happening in Syria, Yemen...or Moldova...or anywhere near you.

A team of astronomers has successfully crowd-funded a year’s worth of observatory time to investigate the hypothesised ‘alien megastructure’orbiting a mysterious star called KIC 8462852.
The team raised over US$100,000 in under a month for the study, and they hope it will buy them enough time to conclude once and for all what’s causing KIC 8462852’s light to dim in ways scientists have never seen before.
In case you’ve missed the controversy surrounding KIC 8462852 - an F-type star that lies 1,480 light-years away - here’s a quick rundown.
The story began in 2015, when Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian led a team of citizen scientists called the Planet Hunters in examining data collected by the Kepler space telescope.
KIC 8462852 - now nicknamed Tabby’s Star after Boyajian - was just one star out of hundreds that Kepler marked as abnormal after studying the night sky using the transit method. Astronomers use this method to identify exoplanet candidates by watching a star’s light until it flickers or dims as an exoplanet crosses in front of it.
During their analysis, things got weird. Normally, when Kepler spies a possible exoplanet using the transit method, the suspected star’s light only dims by about 1 percent, but Tabby’s Star dimmed by a remarkable 22 percent, and stayed that way for up to 80 days at a time.
Despite the lack of evidence, many hypotheses abound about the structure, including a massive comet swarm, which was quickly debunked.
One of the most intriguing ideas is that it could be a Dyson sphere - a hypothetical structure described in several science fiction stories that works like a giant solar panel, used by an advanced civilisation to collect energy from its host star. While there’s obviously no proof that such technology exists, it’s pretty cool to think about.
“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build,” Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University in the US, told The Atlantic last year.
Since this discovery, no one’s been able to come up with an explanation that can’t be adequately debunked. But now, thanks to the successful Kickstarter campaign, Boyajian and her team hope to figure it all out.

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The Happy Solitary's Masturbation-Inspiration

I think it's the faint top-note of piss
above the lush scrotal blend
of tea-rose and vetiver
that turns me on
when I up-end
and sniff my underwear.

There is much moaning about old age.

But there is little to complain about
if you can devote your declining
years to cannabis, alcohol,
masturbation, dog-admiration,
dinner, music, blogs and books
instead of hankering, wheezing and whining.

An early poem.

The beginning of wisdom
is knowing
That no-one is worth knowing

That only god is worth knowing
That there is no god

That only oneself
is worth knowing (sadly)

That self is an accident of language
(for some tongues have no word for 'I')

That therefore, apart from joy,
nothing is worth knowing
except that humans are probably
the only creatures without souls -

which explains too neatly
all the woes and destructiveness
of powerful beings
who are merely intelligent holes.

Human language :

at first a strategy,
then a weapon,
and finally
a defeat.

In our hypocrisy-democracies

we are peddled pale simulacra of enjoyment
and brief, superficial pleasures,
we are constantly kept well away from
even the thought of joyousness.

Hevile

Inside his Mother
Hevile grew
and slithered out
like a bloody stew,

clenched his
plump and fragile fists
stamped the vomit-splattered floor
with his sweet and tender feet
and shouted Whore!
Give me this!
Give me that!
Give me the lot!
Now give me more!
He stamped his feet.

Both parents smiled
and planted wheat.

France takes energy-saving half-seriously

by offering 10 LED light-bulbs 'worth 100 euros' free
to every household with less than a certain income.

Vote for Donald !

He is the best hope for destroying the noxious "New World Order" announced at the fall of the USSR.   He is committed to dismantling the instruments of globalisation, which can only be a Very Good Thing.  Americanisation has ineluctably resulted in global infantilisation.  Hence ISIS.

His opponent is a clapped-out cyborg programmed to maintain the current corrupt and complicated system. The whole 'globalised', robotic world (led by the military-industrial complex, the World Bank and millionaires other than Mr Trump) wants her to win, and the tide is inevitably turning against the unbelievably vulgar and straight-up, in-your-face, refreshing, depressingly-honest, loony 'loose cannon' Donald McStrumpf.

In 2012, he claimed that “the concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” During this election, he has alleged that Obama founded ISIS, that Ted Cruz’s father, Rafael Cruz, was involved in John F. Kennedy’s assassination, that the Department of Labor fakes its unemployment numbers... [read more]

Hillary Cyborg believes that people landed on the moon decades ago.  But y'all know that the moon is made of green cheese with white and orange stripes, and only leprechauns can live on it.

The United States does not have a direct democratic voting system. It has an antique indirect system based on that of the Holy Roman Empire, called the Electoral College. This is  a compromise between election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of "qualified" citizens.

To win the Presidency a majority of votes cast in the electoral college is required, not a majority of voters in the country.

The way the college works is that the two parties select the delegates that will serve as electors, and the electors pledge to vote for the candidates, depending on their party affiliation: Democrat or Republican. So, when people go vote, they are actually going to vote for electors that have pledged to vote for a specific party/candidate.

Each state is allocated a different number of electoral seats, and so not every state is truly worth the same given that every candidate is racing to secure 270 seats (the minimum required to win the election).

The electoral college is composed through a procedure which is an undemocratic winner-take-all vote in 48 of the 50 states, so that the candidate with the higher number of votes in a given state will get ALL of the seats in that state. This is one of the reasons why third party candidates are a wasted vote: they simply don't count.  It is also highly undemocratic.  But the US was not founded as a Democracy, but as a slave-owning, elite-ruling Republic - hence the names of the only two parties. Ironically, the system was designed to avoid the problem of a two-party state evidenced in the 18th century by the screaming, shouting Whigs and Tories of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Britain (the other great arms supplier to the world) also has the electoral flaw of establishing representatives by 'simple majority', so that a party might win two million votes, yet have no representative in parliament.

Because of its history, most States  in the USA have for some time been defined as either red (Republican) or blue (Democrat), because the majority of the people that go and vote in those states tend to stick tribally to either one or the other, no matter who is on the ballot. This has now created a polarisation of parties never hitherto known in a Western democracy since the 18th century.  However, there are a few "swing states" that determine the outcome of elections, for they tend to change depending on who is on the ballot, and what policies are advanced.

Third party candidates, who attract an intelligent but misguided protest vote, have never succeeded because 1. they are not written into every state ballot, meaning that there are states that don’t offer these candidates given that they did not qualify; 2. have rarely collected enough votes to be even considered for electoral seats . So they always end up hurting one of the two candidates, for, in close runs, they can cause one of the other two candidates to lose a Swing State.

The system is obviously very deeply flawed and horribly unfair - quite apart from the under-representation in the electoral registers of African- and Hispano-Americans (not to mention the marginalised and reduced original inhabitants).  Only a system of Proportional Representation would turn the US into something resembling a democracy.  Even the UK, which also has a Winner-takes-all system, can accommodate a third party - while its constituent parts (Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) all have assemblies which are elected by the proportional system.  Northern Ireland has at least 10 parties - though only three or four have an effect on the resulting local Assembly in Belfast.

It is ironic that the United States has an electoral system more unfair even than that pertaining in Northern Ireland before the Civil Rights Movement there, and the subsequent 30-year-long low-level violence that kept grabbing headlines, and massive financial support from white Americans who had little or no idea of what actually constitutes democracy - and for themselves probably don't really want one, anyway.

Needless to say, we humans

have more than one calamitous defect.
Apart from the vast weeping
sore called intellect,
we have another terrible affliction:
limitless addiction.

The Pseudoscorpion

has been around for about 380 million years
and is thought to be one of the first animals to leave the oceans for dry land.

There may be 700 different species,
all of them very small.
They don't impinge on us at all.

Homage to Allen Tate, American poet.

THE INNOCENT MANSION OF A PANTHER'S HEART

O mother of silences!
In the flying dark with sleep like falling leaves
we are the eyelids of defeated caves
deaf to the pathos circling in the air
(festered loves inviolate in their absences)
whether by Baghdad or Georgetown we go
while death sustains all nature, so. 

Diogenes said

(or to be truthful, might have said)
'Only fools compete.'

Does Santa Claus live alone in arctic Heaven ?

Dogs would be perpetually happy
in the eternal present of Paradise,

whereas humans would wipe themselves out
from sheer boredom.

So, if there is a Heaven,
it contains no human beings.

I am happy

because I love time
changing me.

Divine Intelligence

shines forth in
joyful silliness.

(from the Wholly Canine Canon)

Haiku

To write about the moon,
a moth, or cherry-blossom
is mere defecation.

Because the ability to read written things

uses that part of the brain which evolved
to enable us to read each others' body-talk and faces,
we who have learned to read letters, pictograms and characters
have difficulty in reading other creatures of our kind
and, just as tragically, others not of our kind, like dogs.
Thus civilisation corrupts the mind
already hacked to bits by language.

Bad news, good news.

The bad news is that this weekend
there is yet another Olympic competition.
The good news is that it is the Bionic Olympics
and involves pointful events, such as slicing bread
and hanging out the washing.

Luxury

is the only consolation
for the joyless
poor in spirit.

Hungary's Referendum

on whether or not to accept 1,300 refugees !

DON'T RISK IT- VOTE NO

The result: 98% of the 43% of those who voted
voted No.
57% of Hungary's electorate abstained.

Training a young elephant - in Europe.

"Addresses

are given us
to conceal our whereabouts."

- H.H. Munro, known as Saki.

Bread:

the first processed
and inadequate
convenience food,
based on the terrible tyranny
of wheat.

Every garden

is some kind of tidy desert
for not being opulent wilderness.
Eden was doomed to fail.

In his contempt for the over-scrubbed Athenian bourgeoisie

the Sinopian Diogenes was surely heard to yell:
You can't like yourselves if you don't like your smell!

In the Cosmic Court,

The Animals'  Depositions against Humans -

written down for the first time in Arabic in the tenth century C.E. by a Sufi sage and scholar, the history of this book is miraculous, being ancient Indian in origin, and surviving to the present day.

The story is that there once an island called Tsagone, where the animals lived happily and free from persecution by human beings, ruled over by Bersaf, King of the Spirits (Djinni). But a ship carrying human passengers was wrecked near its shores and (unlike Prospero's Isle in Shakespeare's play) a large number of them made it to the island. Quite soon and inevitably the humans began to use the animals and birds for food and labour, and utterly enslaved them: so for the animals, “eyes that were once  filled with trust began to be drowned in stormy oceans of fear.”   Eventually the animals, in desperation, met secretly and agreed to ask the Lord of Spirits for help.

This ineffable Being decided to summon the humans to court to answer the charges brought by the animals. The humans were strongly divided. Hochmah (Wisdom), a female sage, was in favour of  the animals’ case. Zadone (Malice)  however was the spokesperson for the humans and pled their case to the Judge. He argued, in relation to species other than  human: “We say they are our slaves  and we shall seize those whom we wish and treat them just as we would treat any other possession. Those who submit to us accept the notion that  the Creator set us to rule over them — but those who break our yoke and  flee — they are rebelling against Divine Ordinance ... and so they shall suffer.” 

The humans also maintained that  they were the only creatures who had souls, consciences and understanding, and that they had the most perfect bodies in all Creation.  The Lord of Spirits, after brief contemplation, ordered a full enquiry based on evidence, and asked both humans and animals to bring their submissions to the Court. The animals sent six emissaries to the different groups of animals to ask them to send a  representative. The Horse went to  the Lions, the predatory animals: the Ox went to the Phoenix, ruler of the non-predatory birds: the Sheep went  to the Osprey, ruler of birds of prey:  the Ass went to the Bee, ruler of the winged and swarming things: the Pig went to the Sea-Dragon, ruler of water creatures: and the Mule went to the Snake, ruler of the creeping things. 

Emerging as representatives of all animals judged best able to  present their case to the King were  the Dragon, the Nightingale, Parrot,  Queen Bee, Frog, and Cricket.  The Court was convened. The  arguments are timeless.  The Nightingale argued that,  “...even  the swarming and creeping creatures  have knowledge and understanding  and unique skills. We all do.  Therefore, since we all have a portion  of the Creator’s gifts, how can humans  glorify themselves over us and claim  they are our lords and masters?” She  argued that all animals share one soul and are unified, that humans, on the other hand have little, unformed, individual souls and are in constant  dispute between themselves and the  rest of the world. 

Humans and animals both gave their evidence at length and with eloquence. At the end, the Judge gave  his verdict. “By the grace of God, I find  myself in favour of the animals, for they  have been sorely tested and abused.”  He declared that humans must begin to treat all creatures with respect.  “Should you not, the animals will  begin to disappear, one by one,  forever, from the face of the earth; and the air in your settlements and citadels will become dangerous to breathe...the seasons will be reversed and your climates turned upside down...and the animals you devour but don't need to eat will bring sickness and death upon you...and you will  no longer rule the earth.” 

A dead bison. A billionaire with a gun.

"The greatest of the United States’ homegrown religions –
greater than Jehovah’s Witnesses,
greater than the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints,
greater even than Scientology –
is the religion of technology...."


[read on =>]

The only thing that binds the Anglosphere's "Alt[ernative] Right" together

is the pretence to the right
to be nasty,
ignorant,
selfish,
humourless
and vindictive.