as to who they thought is the greatest threat to world peace,
27% of Australian respondents chose the Russian president.
The same number chose the Chinese president.
Thirty-one per cent chose the US president...
but opinion-polls are not 100% reliable.
tend to like being with other
vulnerable people, because they feel
less vulnerable. Some of them are bullies.
is that people say silly, stupid things;
and I, through fault of character,
reply with silly, stupid things.
The USA will become an oligarchic state.
Not under Trump, but his vengeful successor
JD Vance, who, with his soul-brother,
Vladimir Putin, will have arranged Trump's death
by Ukrainian assassin.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, said yesterday that he
“would never have believed that we would one day
have to protect Ukraine from the USA”.
But who is capable or bold
enough to protect the planet
against the enveloping Russo-American-Chinese
consumer-capitalist slime-mould ?
considered, sneered
that the Romans had an anti-culture
(or at best a sub-culture)
and they were not being too judgemental.
The Romans (fairly feared)
ran the southern European,
North African and Near-eastern world
thinking themselves invincible –
until they ran out of lead-poisoned
anti-culture,
as the Americans (like the British
and the French, though less revered)
are doing now
(sugar is the modern poison).
The Chinese, like the Ancient Greeks,
have an 'authentic'
indigenous culture
(that values tiger-penises but not tigers)
now lightly but fatally veneered
with American vulgarity.
*
The thinking Greeks also knew
that religions are crimes
against philosophy.
A question of translation, both philosophical and kinematic.
Psalm 39:6-8
1599 Geneva Bible
Man walketh in a shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain.
1611 King James Bible
Man walketh in a vain show and disquieteth himself in vain.
can savour High Culture,
but they are no more capable
than any of the multitude
of distinguishing good from
bad and mediocre
than those whom they exclude.
as rarely before,
'evil' is expanding exponentially,
while 'good' increases incrementally,
at best.
Except in the bureaucratic sense,
nobody, not even presidents or priests,
are entitled to anything,
not even dominion
over the beasts.
Civilisation depends
on our belief that we are
intrinsically superior
to all other life upon the planet,
and that life is superior to non-life.
To dispute this is insanity:
you will exile yourself
beyond the cruel Pale of Humanity.
Not forgetting, I hope,
the outrageous stupidity
of Hamas' Palestinian-annihilating action
of October 2022,
Healthcare Workers Watch (HWW),
a Palestinian medical NGO,
said it had confirmed that 162 medical staff
remained in Israeli detention,
including some of Gaza’s most senior physicians,
and a further 24 were missing
after being taken from hospitals during the conflict.
*
There may once have been beaches on Mars.
Paul Klee: painter
of happy and amusing pictures
who liked to take a line for a walk.
"Le Corbusier", actually called
Charles-Édouard Jeanneret: architect
of machines for living in,
who effectively herded tens of thousands
of people to depression in depressing,
oppressive buildings that invited
vandalism and demolition.
To be an enemy of the USA is dangerous;
to be a friend is fatal.
Nelson Mandela famously said:
When two neighbouring countries fight each other,
just know that the USA visited one of them.
Jeffrey Sachs recently said:
In America, if you don't like 'the other side',
you don't negotiate with them,
you try to overthrow them.
If you can't do it covertly, you do it overtly.
Mr Sachs is, infamously, the great proponent
of Disaster Capitalism, which brought
misery to millions and Putin to power.
Digital Twinning.
In the absence of a father
one might apply for
a Digital Father
that I could (digitally)
kick in the balls.
climate change and other problems
caused by technology:
"human ingenuity usually arrives too late
to solve the specific problem
for which it was intended."
~ Robert D. Kaplan: The Coming Anarchy (2000)
I've always wondered what it was.
I wouldn't recognise one
if it bit me in the balls.
But I think it may mean a suit
worn by a rich obese person
or diplomat
which somehow makes him
seem less obviously fat.
I like them.
This is how 'primeval temperate'
European forest looked
and still looks
in a tiny remaining fragment
somehow surviving
in the West of Ireland.
Ever since e-mail got going
internet users have been prey
(not only to spam and scams, but also)
to internet-induced brain-rot.
I'm pleased to announce that I have
only three or four e-mail correspondents
plus the occasional message from my bank,
and I don't use anti-social media.
As for the smartphone, I turn it on
once a day, with lowered pants
during a Bowel Movement,
to check on forecasted temperatures
on behalf of my rewarding plants.
have, for reasons of social differentiation
and cohesion been very important to human groups.
On watching Antonioni's excellent and enigmatic Blow-up
the other evening I realised why
I opted out of the 1960s: I hated the 'pop-music'
and couldn't bear to have my hair long.
I was happy that I so soon went bald.
I like buzz-cuts with beards on males.
Or else long tresses, the other extreme.
I was happy that I grew a beard.
I don't like pony-tails.
by the statistic that a woman is murdered
every three days in their republic.
But that just shows how nice Italians are:
in Germany a woman is killed every day, usually by her partner or ex.
by Richard Flanagan, Tasmanian
author of The Long Road to the Deep North.
Once I had the idea of writing the book [Question 7]
as a chain reaction that begins with Rebecca West kissing HG Wells and leads to 100,000 people dying in Hiroshima,
my father living and me being born – once I understood
that without that kiss, there would be no bomb and no me –
then disparate things that had haunted me for so long fell into place.
of the Dark Enlightenment
inhale Dark Oxygen
for their Voodoo.
Meanwhile, in Europe alone,
farmers are abandoning
one million hectares
(2.4 million acres; 10,000 square kilometres)
every year – to what ?
belong in museums...
where they soon will
scorch and flood and crumble
in the sad museum of the Earth.
 |
| 'Paule Vézelay': Landscape 1946. |
 |
| ? by Rimantas Izdelis |
 |
| Jerzy Durczak: Autumn in a Polish Forest |
is so beyond-words
bizarre that I would not be surprised to learn
that there is a thriving market for his
preserved and authenticated turds.
in his unreliable gallery. But
for even a small space
they are not 'appropriate'.
They are too intimate.
 |
| Prophetic self-portrait, 1988. |
Many paintings look uncomfortable
in galleries, especially Van Goghs
in Amsterdam, permanently tortured
in a vicious concrete box.
But alas, poor prisoners!
there's nowhere else to place them.
give thanks to Thee
for the invention of L.E.D.
because we
in our advancing senility
have an unfortunate tendency
to leave lights on
from dusk to dawn
and even longer.
Last night, lying in bed
listening to ABC Classic's
thrown-together
early morning programme,
I calculated
(using my fingers and my
ever-pullulating head
and my bedside clock,
plus the not-too-competent
continuity-announcements)
that Adelaide
(for a while, at least)*
is 10½ hours ahead
Then switched to
the occasionally-excellent
Medi-1 (ميدى1 طرب)
DAB radio Tarab instead.
*depending on unsynchronised time-tinkerings
in different hemispheres according to season.
in The Christian World, now, near The End,
alcohol* is a friend, not an enemy;
and The Government is an enemy,
not a friend.
*or similar easily-obtained mind-comforter
of a 'Welfare State'.
"It's not so much that I
'would like to die'
as that I feel that I
am lacking liveliness
& would like to slip
forever and conveniently,
easefully into soft emptiness.
