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.
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.
Molecules
from my horrible, scorched
Terylene trousers from the 1950s
may be in your bloodstream.
to describe many 'liberals' :
COMMISSARS OF LANGUAGE.
But behind the language-commissars
are the Thought-controllers
of the Deep State of unmitigated morality.
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]
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 ?
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'.
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.
She will become plunder for the nations,
and her settlements will be ravaged by the sword.
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.
(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:
– 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.
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.
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.
I never turned on,
never tuned in,
because I was already
a drop-out who
listened to Sibelius.
photo by Dean Lewins |
"The stifling intrusiveness of Liberal Democracy
should not surprise us." – Ryszard Legutko,
"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.
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.)
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 !
The legendary Australian 'bushranger' or bandit
made even more famous by Sydney Nolan,
here shown in (an improved) police photograph.
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.
(which is unlikely), here, for the Press Pack,
is a brief guide to Hungarian politeness.
Rami Kaminski thinks everyone is born an otrovert,
but some resist the barrage of cultural conditioning
that makes kids 'social' and fit in with
various groups and identities,
thus retaining intellectual and emotional independence.
He has written a book about it
(very nice cover).
Toads don't have jewels in their heads,
nor, ensorcelled, will they go back
to being princes if you kiss them, but
one species of toad secretes
a defensive poison which contains
the 'powerful' 5-MEO DMT,
an illegal substance taken for Astral Journeys.
.
I must order up a few hundred thousand
heavy 'for-life' shopping bags-for life
to throw around the countryside
and do my little bit for the planet.
Tajikistan used to be home to wolves,
leopards, tigers, bears and the almost-eliminated
gorgeous-eared striped hyena.
Hyæna hyæna |
Roman Empire, around 90% of its population
lived outside towns and cities,
thus leaving few traces in the archæological record.
Today, most of the human species is crammed
into cities.
the printing-press, and about a month later
pamphlets such as A true and most horrifying account
of how a woman cruelly murdered her four children
and then killed herself at Weidenhausen
near Eschwege in Hesse were circulated.
About a week after the World Wide Web got going
pornography appeared.
(Perhaps I exaggerate a little bit.)
that has probably cost
thousands of dollars
and, seemingly beheaded,
is flaunted as Beauty
to millions of crawlers.
...that Donetsk in Ukraine was,
in the bad old days
re-named Stalino, just as Tsaritsyn
(now Volgograd) was re-named Stalingrad.
[I am like Oliver Goldsmith's rural schoolmaster in the poem
The Deserted Village in which people marvelled
that one small head could carry all he knew !]
by The President of the United States.
"I got rid of – just one I got rid of the other night, you buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the faucet the water doesn’t come out. They have a restrictor. You can’t – in areas where you have so much water they don’t know what to do with it. Uh, you have a shower head the shower doesn’t uh, the shower doesn’t, you think it’s not working. It is working. The water’s dripping out and that’s no good for me. I like this hair lace and [sic] – I like that hair nice and wet. Takes you – you have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a, a thing – and it sounds funny but it’s really not. It’s horrible. And uh, when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You’re washing whole – water barely comes out it’s ridi – this was done by crazy people. And I wor – wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can’t just change it.”
from The Guardian.
'A nation without religion
is like a man without breath.'
~ Josef Goebbels, Minister of Public Enlightenment
and Propaganda, Germany, 1933-45.
graveyard is near,
less than ten miles
...and more than one year ?
Maybe five. Maybe five days.
I was tired
of life a decade ago. A decade
before that, I chose
and planted my grave
almost out of reach
in the furthermost corner
in deep shade.
As a child I loved to visit
old graveyards and ruins.
I built ruins instead of sandcastles
on the beach.
One can be "dead tired"
but not dead.
Can one be "born tired" of life,
a dried date in the desert ?
It certainly isn't self-refreshing.
But nobody "dies of boredom".
One has to make an effort.
The sexualisation of affection
and
the romancing of lust;
factory farming
and
mass extinction.
to create a blog consisting only
of details of famous pictures.
Here is a detail of a begging-bowl
from one of the first masterpieces
I ever saw (in reproduction): Bruegel's
The Blind leading the Blind.
I remember that there was a book of songs
kept in the Piano Stool in the Front Room
(along with the scores of Chopin Nocturnes)
which included Sowannee River, Old Black Joe
(which made me weep),
Won't you buy my pretty flowers ?
(which made me weep),
a bowdlerised version of Hinky-Dinky-Parley-Voo
which was quite jolly,
and Little Brown Jug, which was sung
by many (including Bing Crosby) right up to WW2.
I was reminded of this by learning the other day
that the Dutch equivalent of a Kneipe in Germany
and an Estaminet in France
was called a Bruine Kroeg or Brown Jug.
The first verse as I remember it was:
My wife and I lived all alone
In a little log cabin we called our own.
She loved gin and I loved rum
I tell you we'd lots of fun...