Let Them Eat Chips

'The American dream' masks very well
the permanent division between rich and poor.
By shouting to all 'You can all can make it to riches' 
nobody gets to escape the advertising pitch.
The message lumps the fool get in with the wise.
Those born with money feel sure they will keep it,
those born with less will see money as attainable.
What both refuse to guess is how much growth,
and new wealth, takes away from old money.

The last U.S. election campaigns cost $18 per person,
or $6 billion dollars overall. The U.K. and Canada
spent £0.50 and $8 canadian dollars per person
on their elections, considerably less.
But then Americans spent $7 billion
in the same election year on potato snacks,
and $8 billion on Halloween. The dream
of continuous conspicuous consumption
may be better value,
compared with choosing leaders, than we thought.

The Second Amendment Never Looked More Healthy

With thanks to thisisnthappiness

Progress And Reason

'The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable man persists in trying
to adapt the world to himself. Therefore
all progress depends on the unreasonable man.'
-George Bernard Shaw, 1903.

  

In The Truth Olympics

the gold medal for honesty was claimed by many, but awarded to none.
Everyone who tried for it had to be refused by the sponsors.
The only contestant fit enough to receive the prize,
who had trained his soul to be lighter than a feather couldn't enter the event.
If he accepted being put forward then the award would be too heavy
for him to own, and for him to have the life he'd trained for afterwards.

In The Age Of The CD And MP3

This is what modern music seems to be reduced to.

A Choice Of Dystopias

Are fairytales the original rural dystopic narratives
that we cannot avoid living out,
in spite of our being tamed by city life?
Discuss....

Better still, make that what we discover
through reflecting on living.

The Ease

with which we cease
to feel each others pain
continues to astonish me.
Still, I count my surprise
as proof I am still alive.

How Like God

to make his Omniscience appear to be multi-tasking.
And then niavely ask man to do like him,
look after the stock in the garden.
How like man, for whom it proved too much.
For all he knew he knew and wanted nothing-beyond obedience.
How like Satan, God's chief of secret police,
who with his fellow rebellious angels,
to take so well to the idea of knowing more
than everyone except God, for them to try to imitate God.
Though Satans act was similarly multi-tasking.
Like all secret police down the ages,
the nearest Satan and Co got to genuine omniscience
was to have others, like Eve, do their bidding.
Which gives them sound alibis
to cover for the time when the crime was committed.

Signs Of Greater Age (12)

1)Going into record shops, and seeing
on the racks CD reissues of albums
popular in the counter-culture of your youth,
40 years ago. As records back then
they were poorly distributed and hard to find,
available only on easy-scratch vinyl.
Now they are remastered to sound clearer
than ever before, and to fill out their
78 minutes they are stuffed with extras.

2)Looking at copius sleeve notes
of the reissued disc to rediscover
what you are buying, only to find
you need a microscope to read the writng.

The Christmas Decoration That Will Find A Ready Home

With thanks to thisisnthappiness

That Other Queens Speech

'Life is a funny thing that happened to me
on the way to the grave'-Quentin Crisp

Quentin Crisp born Dec 25th 1908-died 21st November 1999

Genetic Modification;

war engineered between genes-intensified.

Some Old New Years Resolutions Worth Renewing

'Don't be reckless with other people's hearts,
don't put up with people who are reckless with yours.
Don't waste your time on jealousy,
sometimes you 're ahead, sometimes you are behind.
The race is long, and in the end it is only with yourself. 
Remember the compliments you receive,
forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how."

- Kurt Vonnegut

My Last Christmas Card Of 2012

It came with a pleasing round-robin and six ways to reply. 

Where Fascism

takes root it first inhabits the flag.
In Christian countries it hides behind the cross.
It is equally calm inside David's star,
and the crecent moon and pentagram.

Make Do And Mend

I learned very well how to make do and mend,
to repair the splinters of adulthood my family left me.
But by the time I was done we had all moved on-
making amends with them after was beyond me.

What God Thought

of Adam and Eve and the rebel angels
as he expelled them from Eden....
'They treated this place as if it were a hotel'.

The Wisdom

that comes from learning
how easily I misunderstood myself in the past
improves how much I misunderstand myself in the present.
And helps me forgive more of the misunderstanding.

Hubris Heights, As Seen From Below

Often, when young, I was told 'know your place'
by the people who owned the physical space
I was forced to exist in.
As their property I went where they wanted me.
What I misunderstood in the past, and see now,
is how my instructors were talking not about the ground  I took up,
but about my lack of social class, my zero status.
As a child I had no value, therefore no place around them.
Even though they were my, yes my, parents.

I was their adjunct, and as an adjunct
I was to be talked at, without being heard.
At the time I thought that I was being addressed,
albeit incoherently, and therefore I had value.
I was blind to how I was unesteemed.

Now I can count that lack of sight as a blessing,
as a life my past felt like a very hard very long falling down.
Had I seen and known in full how I was actively devalued
sooner than I did, it would have hurt much, much, more.

Things are better now. If I am to be the object of derision
I know it is better to honestly deride myself for my limits,
before my tormentors begin, and to be firmer with myself
than my tormentors could ever know how to be with me.
That is the power of Self Knowledge in action.
It stops me passively absorbing other peoples cheap anger .

The Freedom

of free spirits-and their familiars-works
because they like to appear to be self reliant
whilst discreetly accepting gifts.
This is not a paradox,
this is respect enhanced by distance.

Optimism (1)

is that immaturity of being some way off the fulcrum
-not yet seeing how, in the longer term,
that gain has to match loss on the scales of life.

We All Host Ghosts

when we are young and unaware.
They are the source of our zest for life,
our restless. Even as we think we alone
will change in the world, it is their fight
against being inside us that causes us hope.
With maturity the flesh thickens
and improves how it imprisons and hosts.
Our guests kick less against the pricks of their containment.

The more they settle the less they dance,
and the less we dance and change with them.
Until the flesh wears so thin that the ghosts
find release, inviting their former host
to join them in their quests and travels.
To find other bodies to be give life to.    

Signs Of Greater Age (11)

1)Approaching ticket machines at railway stations with caution,
as if they were like the fruit machines you never played when younger,
because for the life of you, you could never win against them.

2)Learning that working slowly is not just the only way you know
how to work, but enjoying being at ease with what you do, for being so slow.

3)Seeing others having 'senior moments'
and being patient with the person having them.
These moments are prophetic.
You know that you are going to face similar times.
Your hope is that the empathy you show now
will be shown to you, by observant others, then.     

An Argument Towards Improving Democracy

The Ancient Athenian view of citizenship
was that mostly adult males who completed military service
could have it, though there were exceptions.
But it was absolute that in that direct democracy
that every vote represented the voter, nobody else.
Some women and children were citizens
without the vote. Slaves and foreigners
took part in nothing beyond their chattel-dom.

In my city state the right to vote,
implied in  full citizenship, would not
be about what one can take for oneself,
nor based on the anatomy and status you were born with.
But it would be built on how much rubbish you remove
from public view, how many trees the citizen has planted,
for the betterment of the area, and beyond.
What support anyone gives to the most poor
and needy, and lastly how much anyone contributes
to positive public debate. This is voting by doing and living,
and makes the actual act of voting a token well paid for in advance.

The Plastic Life

It is common to western societies to accept money
being lent with interest, it is as if advanced usury
was integral to The Enlightenment.
Just as easily accepted is seeing the currency reduced
to a plastic card with a code, as if the card defined
the social mobility. But each card is backed by a legal
agreement written in very small print.
Often this text is only available online, and its length
will be between 10,000 and 30,000 words.
The user has to sign to say they have read
and accepted the terms thereof.
Few read what they have signed up to,
in full or in part, and far fewer than that few learn
what those words mean, and appreciate
how the words offer less support to the customer
than they appear to.

The collected writings of St Paul clock in at about 30,000 words,
but even with all his tautologies and legally buttressed arguments
his summary of the plasticity of life that credit cards is brief-
'The love of money is the root of all evil'.
Because behind the love of money is the love of comfort,
and behind the comfort is our dis-ownership of the process
of how, materially, what we have comes to own us.
In our attempted dis -ownership of what we are owned by
lives our sloth, our incuriosity, our lack of integrity.

The Cruelty Of Choice

It is frequently said of foie gras
that cruelty is integral to how it is made,
by forcing open the beaks of ducks
and geese, feeding them through a funnel
until their livers swell with unhealthy fat.
Recently I learnt that only the cheapest foie gras
is made this way and the best, most costly,
 foie gras does not involve the use of funnels.
Still, can it be fun, funnel or none,
that animals lose choice and quality of life this way?

But then I see how employees do the most demeaning jobs,
for the least amount of money and the weakest job security.
They stick at their work in spite of the shrunken reward
and the inherent instability of 'the market for work'
into which they are entered, practically captive.
I note how with the drive and talk of full employment,
that the virtue of cheapness is how well it pays employers
to pass so little on of what they make.

Turn On, Tune In, Fade Out....

As I ate out last night I marveled at the couples.
At how whilst waiting between courses
they detatched from where they were,
and from each other, with such ease.
They both looked into their blackberries
to see what news the world had sent them,
as if it had changed since they had last turned them off,
Or more likely set them to 'silent'.
It certainly set the couples to silence.

When I was young I knew the level of disdain
my father had for whoever knocked at the door,
whilst he was watching television.
If the caller had no call on him,
say they were my social worker
or Jehovah's Witnesses he would lean against
the door and brusquely slur 'Not Today Thanks'.
As if another day he might have regard for them-
as if he could say which day he might be recieving.
If it was money was owed he would let people in,
but the television sound would be reluctantly turned down.
But never off. E.g. for people like assurance agents.
But for his family who were in all the time,
and his for the owning, the television was there
to screen us out of his existence.
He turned off the set for his brothers
as we were shoo-ed out of the house,
the better for them to share bitter nothings.

On seeing these unknown couples tuning out
of each other via mobile phones I wondered
at the ease of detachment in 'liberal democracy'.   

My Fifth Christmas Card of 2012

Ferdinand Hodler, Lake Thun 1905, Geneva Museum of Art.

In Light Entertainment

there is no pain, and ultimately no pleasure.
The scale of audience to performer dictates
that all the life in the presented act stops at the recording.
In our media saturated age the entertainers
become 'legends', almost minor secular saints,
through the repetition and distribution of their faces.
Real people know each other by sharing their foibles,
in the process of ageing, but actors, dancers and presenters
only live after their death, when their foibles can be picked over.
Because their lives are dedicated to the art of freezing
pleasing media moments that will live forever,
in moments that empty with repetition.
These entertainers in light become pale ghosts
who whiten with age, just like their audience, for watching them.

Long Sightedness....

....means accepting unhappiness as the gift above all gifts.

For The Best Relief Of Executive Stress

And the best of it all is that in depressions it works even better
 at benefiting the few, and disadvantaging the many. 

The Good News

is that poverty is highly survivable
if you have the right neighbours.

In God We Rust

The paradox of the apocalypse is
that whilst it once appeared to be widely believed,
because it was central to the churches
message of healing and respite, it did not happen.
Not because it could not, or would not-
it still could happen if we could be genuinely
indifferent enough towards each other.
It did not occour because whilst the churches
saw the mote of Hell blinding it's enemies sight
in an eternal suffering they could not stop,
they missed how the beam in their own eye
obscured their view of the true light of Heaven.
When the blind lead one another both will fall into the pit.
A millennium later, and the pitfall we are in is our plans
for the planet, in which our unawareness
is the seed, the greedy weed of contrariness,
in the mix. Ours is the iron will to be 'free',
by destroying all contentment..

For The Heaviest Smokers Only

The packaging looks more attractive than the new Australian
 cigarette packs but the effect of lighting up is just as lethal.

Doublespeak

is the elusive concept of saying
less than you mean through false optimism.
It defines the ambiguity that has made the mass media
successful for the last century.
We see it easiest when it is spoken
through individuals (usually politicians)
whom we know to disbelieve
before they open their mouths.
Otherwise it hides behind blandness.
Generalities, legalese, and statements
written in the 3rd person impersonal
where who is doing what to whom,
and how, is hard to determine.

Detachment In Communication

In the U.K.the young are now more likely
to text each other than listen to each other
on the phone or want to see the person they text.
With their multiple functions the newest mobile phones
are the swiss army knives of modern communications.
Their users can navigate the (digital) world, via satnav,
then get poked by facebook, or twitter away,
then fill their sound world with an ipod,
and finally fob other people off with emails,
rather than welcome one another as sentient live examples
of the same species as themselves.
After pressing that many buttons
and doing all the machine lets them do,
the users are too tired to care.

Signs Of Greater Age (10)

1- finding it is not heart disease
to find the pleasure in hope deferred,
instead it seems natural, almost mature,
to delay the gratification of the senses.

2-finding music that is more melodic
and quieter than the music you grew up
with is easier on the ear than you expected,
and the music you once knew seeming noisy.

3-Finally finding the joy of shared silences.

Patriotism Is The Father Of Schadenfreude

The absence of war does not mean
the outbreak of calm.
Since World War II (1939-45)
and the end of rationing (1939-57)
the U.K. has had a financial crisis once every decade.
Each crisis was reported as if there had never
been financial shrinkage before, except during war.
Hindsight has taught me how patriotism
is the father of schadenfreude, thus combining
press and public ill will towards other peoples abroad
and the poorest at home who end up being scapegoated.
It took me a long time to mistrust the message,
but far longer to mistrust the messenger.

Lord Justice Leveson announced through his public
enquiry into the devalued morality of the British press
that there has been seven public enquiries into press values
since the 1950's. If ever the press offered the public
more than fake prurience about sex in lieu of morality
(which used to be the job of The Church, no wonder
the churches feel put out), then they would tell the public
about the inherent instability of post-war economics,
and put the demos back into democracy, rather than report
with blind purity the virtue of the accumulation of wealth.    

Who's Policeman Do You Want To Be?

I have heard it said by self described 'gay atheists',
never the happiest of souls in their qualified shades of indifference
towards others, that their main reason for proclaiming
'There is no God' is because they believe the church
'wants to police their sex life' and they want to resist that.
They talk as if sex is their greatest freedom
ever to be had, and for that to be free at their point of want
they have to police themselves.
I would empathize more with their fear
of external coercion if I felt that sexual technique
mattered more than the ability to form a bond.

As it is, I don't.

I see life for rich rich liberal atheists as the right
for others to have no god or guide but them,
which is like the emperor claiming the right
to censor everyone, whilst dancing naked
before his courtiers, and denying he is doing so,
dishonestly forbidding them the same choice.

Asbent Leadership

is  what teenage boys accuse adult males of
when the boys hope of adulthood
becomes the parental fear of adultery,
and youth rebels against the emptiness that formed it.
These accused un-leading men collude with women
who prefer detachment over co-dependence.
Thus inertia consistently avoids directing
its offspring. The young from gangs
to 'compensate' and 'lead themselves'.
That the majority skin colour in this errant
self leadership is not white
is a merely observing the obvious.

I was always pale,  now I am bald,
and I was never gang material.
But I felt my father disconnecting from me
well before my words struggled to explain him.
I now see my absence of being lead
as my having arrived. There is nowhere further
to go and nobody else to take me there.
Wherever I go I must lead myself.

Filibustering As Life

The  first rule of Fascism is to talk
at length about everything except Fascism.
The first rule of Communism was to take
evidence against everybody,
for use against them later,
and lie heroically about how the state was founded.
The first rule of a democracy is to talk
about choice until the electorate
no longer know how to think, choose,
or even breathe, without the direct
intervention from the corporate/nanny state.

Christmas Shopping Can Be A Stressful Experience

Der Simpl: Kunst, Karikatur, Kritik
 with thanks to  interior with mirror

I Live In A Ghost Village

where locally there is no work
and not much community,
not even a public house or meeting place.
The houses are here merely because
they had to be somewhere.
What life here is proving to me
is that where there is life elsewhere
there is noise, sound that is conflicting
and random that parallels the random conflict
inherent in human attempts at life.

Nearly all that noise is generated electrically,
and entertainment is distraction regenerating itself.
What the white noise discredits is how outside of it,
in the organically generated quiet,
there is so much more happening
than people are able to hear.

With Its Rising Walls

and 5000 years of self belief,
in spite of so many enemies,
Israel is the worlds largest
and oldest gated community.
Its strength comes from
the original gated garden. Eden.
Such an eternal pity then,
that like every community
where biology is destiny-
backed by force, that the force
defines the lack of empathy
through which it sucks the life
out of it's neighbours.

The Secret Of Preserving Youth

in old age is to loosen stiffening humors, with laughter.
If we can't laugh with our selves, we can't humour others,
and a life without laughter is the beginning of rigor mortis.

My Third Christmas Card Of 2012

Erich Buchholz, Untitled, 1920
 (printed 1984) with thanks
 to interior with mirror

Wake Up Through Work

And if you let your dreams
 lead your work ethic then
 it might be lighter work.

Proof Of Life Is Hard To Find

Centenarians are often interviewed for television news.
They are asked when they reach their 100th birthday
'What  is the secret of your longevity?'
I would like their answers to be more than talk
of some minor peccadillo. I would prefer them to mention
the health service they rely on, the reliability of their community
or family, the profound simplicity of their philosophy,
as if living slowly was living more fully,
and greater age has expanded them.
I would also like the camera to level with them,
and be still, so they can look clear eyed into the lens
as they speak, as if what they said mattered.

But the perhaps light entertainment
is the wrong place to look for proof of life.

Cars And Votes

'Democracy' is one of those words
that should have a warning in front of it,
an impediment equivalent to the red flag
that slowed down the earliest cars.
Cars and votes both suggest a sense
of individuality/autonomy that needs
to be more qualified then it usually is.
Whether a large car or a block vote,
both put the brakes on transparency
and co-equality in representation.

Small countries adapt democratic ideas best.
Their size makes them homogeneous
and diverse enough that the polity can cohere
around 'the community' which is usually singular.
Social mobility works best when the extremes
of wealth, poverty and status, are limited.

The larger the country, the more community
becomes communities, detached.from each other,
the more wealth numbs it's holders and puts the greed
into agreed, at the expense of all connection.

The Recipe For War

Take a region with several weak governments,
who are covertly co-dependent on each other.
Add to it a strong international armaments industry,
and out all of the above form several rebel factions
who consistently disagree with one other.
Blend so they constantly catch against each others
local values, in a self-tightening Gordian knot.
Finally spice it up with some late
and fatally weak shuffle diplomacy.
Then wait for the inevitable natural disaster
where the weakest die and next weakest
flee as refugees across the nearest border.

Apply The Red Cross,  Doctors Without Borders
and other charities as sticking plasters
over the whole sorry mess and make promises
/pledge lots of money. But take no further action.

Never Enough

If you live for having it all
you will never have enough,
and other people will always
have too much of you for their comfort.

Existentialism For Dogs

With thanks to brainpickings

Is This Where Extinction Started?

And once we started pointing there we could not stop
ourselves pointing everywhere. So not only has Heaven
 shrunk and divided itself, from our pointing at it, but
 everything on earth we have pointed at since, except
 our own species, has shrunk too. Shrunk beyond
 our capacity to measure. Reason is the tool that
 shrinks all it touches, including itself.  

Equality Made Easy

How I Feel On My Best Days

With thanks to dangerousminds. As if any
 human mind was safe for living. For an alternative
 version of this illustration click here...

The Emperors Old Clothes

Any society that is deaf to its whistle blowers,
sidelines it's prophets and shoots disagreeable messengers
in the foot, out of mere loyalty to the present oligarchy
is sowing the weeds of its own demise.
For as long as the regime enjoys being sold
as the emperors new clothes,
it makes every day the emperor's birthday.
Belief in the party is contingent on flattery of him,
relying on his telling lies in plain sight to the whole
wide world as he nakedly presses his suite
on his followers.

What will happen when the emperor loses office?
When he has to put on his old ordinary clothing?
Power will affect its holders, and is rarely kind
to those who, having clung to office, leave it behind.

Soft Hearts, Sharp Tongues

Saints were renowned as triggers for healing
in the lives of their followers.
Saints were conduits, 

their untidy lives birthed miracles.
Their imperfection was what allowed
the hoped for, but unexpected, to happen.
As the saints' lives were falsified through hindsight,
so the miracles attributed to them were glossed into hagiography.

Not everyone with a soft heart, a sharp tongue
and a talent for untidiness will become a saint.
Very little of what we do today will become the means
for hoped for but unpredicted, which miracles appear to be.
But from here, and for now, I will practice my imperfections.
If I am patient for the fruit they bear,
then without any over-neat account of my life
I too will find a yield of my disorder-
my private communion with the saints.

Armchair Christianity

This chair comes as one of a set of three,
 and the seat of the Faith is one
 that you can sit down in, to enjoy.

Misremembrance Day In America

But instead of the above you can
always have the human cost of resisting
propaganda, which remains as constant
as the price of eternal vigilance . 

The Uninclusive Society

Any Society can build on how it threatens others,
and how it fends off threats too.
But to build fears out of fantasies,
however old or new,
 is to be hoist on one's own petard
and lose all your grounding.

What is 'Love'?

I don't know but I have experienced
what it is like when one person walks
into the life of another from out of nowhere
and they both find that their lives
never worked as well before.
It was a good start for me, well worth
trying to repeat, with variations.

E Plurbus Unum

The higher you climb the more 'democracy' means earning enough
  to make legal tax avoidance a profitable international pursuit,
 whatever the country. The more government costs
 to run, the more the process of setting a vote up
becomes about restricting the questions the voters
 can publicly put to their putative leaders......

My Third Christmas Card of 2012

With thanks to interior with mirror

 

Headlines And Soundbites

I dislike elections, not because I don't or won't vote,
nor because the candidates are insufficient
to fix the difficulties their voters face,
though some candidate's weaknesses are obvious.
It is more that the media mediate the consultation
process because now nobody else can.
They continuously supply headlines and sound bites,
with a regularity which is meant to reassure us.
I dislike how the press buttress the inadequacy
of the candidates and avoid thoughtful analysis
of  how government might work differently.
The press make meaningless all sense
of the value of thinking who to vote for.

Optimism With Charley Brown

Of course this has been the taxation and spending
 plans for the western world for the last thirty years.
 But when the futures we create become the problem
there is only so far anyone can run....

Voting Advice

But you knew that already, without me saying so. 

Now Wash Your Hands

However much we wash our hands to clean them
they remain dirty. As the above shows
our choice comes in measuring the dirt
 and aspiring in our awareness to choose the level
of dirt we can live with. 

On All Saints/All Hallows Eve

what we celebrate is so suffused with commerce
that it simply can't be true, the least we can do
is to make our altruism more genuine.

The Dark Light Laboratory

With it's positive knowns, logic, and affirmation
of the nature of Nature science seems
to be the light of the modern world.
But what dark light is behind it?
Man is so clear about otherness to himself,
yet so unwilling  to know the path his own race.
With its view of  human history and religion
as 'an irrationality', from which it exempts itself,
secular science is surely, merely, a fresh twist
on Manichaeism where the cosmogony is reversed-
knowledge of otherness is the material of  light,
and spirituality, built on faith, is the darkness.
The division between the two remains as of old.
The stewardship of seeking the knowledge
of other species makes Man to retreat from himself.

Idleness And Resolve

New Definitions

-counselling is the new vampirism-
only those with the spleen to spare need seek it out.

Signs Of Greater Age (9)

It is a sign of greater age
that whilst being mildly entertained
by some sporting diversion
you find the simulation of spontaneity
that you used to enjoy has morphed
into some tired dis-simulation of humanity.
The lesson being that to be awoken,
by waning interests requires an older process
than you would have wanted to credit possible.

Hope

would be imagining, for lack of proof,
that I have an agreeable afterlife.
Despair would that in that time-outside-time
I would become a candidate for canonization.
I could not cope the debate that is part of being chosen.
The only cause for whom I would want be
a sign of hope, or a patron saint,
would have to be for the perpetually unemployable.

Comfort Eating

When cannibals prepare the dead
for consumption I wonder-
what is the emotive effect of their preparations?
It seems to me that boiled down the responses
reduce to two kinds of comfort; affirmation
of the kinship of your own community
or vengeance upon some enemy tribe.
Though straightening times like siege, war
and famine will equally inspire sufficient
desperation in our appetites to turn
us into what we fear on Halloween Night.

Heads/Tails

Self control is a dog wagging it's tail for joy,
in waiting in clear sight for the cause of it happiness.
Lack of self control is the tail manically wagging it's owner,
as they chase each other in a circle, tormented. No end-point in sight.

Cheese, Saints And Scholars

Early in his presidency Charles de Gaulle asked,
'How do you govern a country which has 246
varieties of cheese?' to reflect his wonder
at the diversity of France. Would that the English
could have had a similar reflective lightness
with their historic deforestation  and their creation
of settlements in the land of 179 saints and scholars.
I trust the saints scarred the invaders with nightmares.

The Diary Everyone Wants, Really....

I have mine and already there are confirmed
 dates on which I am to be disappointed.

Initiative

is a word that people use
to describe the actions of others
when an action praises them,
without them asking for the flattery.
Nothing wrong with that.
But when the flattered take so well
to being surprised by praise,
that they think to themselves
that the sea bed is their universe,
the world is their oyster
and they are the object of tribute,
to be polished by praise
then others, plain as they are,
will disappoint them in the end.
Even as it seems too late
we have to be our own grit,
and resist the tidal shift
of ungraciously consuming
other people without their consent.

Affirmative Reflections

It seems strange to me how I have grown as person
 for having a buddy to reflect and who reflects me...

New Hope For 'The Poor' In Rich Countries

We all know what recession means-
the end of a cycle of economic growth.
Whether the cause of the end
is false corporate accounting coming to light,
bank loans running out and debts being called in,
or some final decline in an area of manufacturing,
does not really matter.
Everyone ought to know that progressive
economies crash once every decade.
Instability is inherent in the system.
But a short sighted media won't look back,
or ahead, though they might look abroad
to see the new growth through the old dead trees.
What we are told instead
is that 'downturns don't happen often'.
Headlines tell us that the measure of a recession
is a few utterly grossly rich people,
people who make money out of money,
suffering a big loss of income,
a small loss of property, but no loss of life.
The loss is mostly of some affected style than anything more.

For those whose lives go unreported,
because they are too near the botom
of the system to matter to the media
there is no real loss, what they lose
in delusory lifestyle aspirations
they more than regain in involuntary,
but self improving, self discipline.

Time

does not wear a watch,
and admire itself.
It gets on with it's task,
-measuring out life
not through wealth, poverty,
or any other relative terms
or abstractions,
but by being the presence within the hands
that change moments of consciousness.

The Posthumous 'Outing'

of Jimmy Savile as a serial paedophile
has shocked a lot of people,
not least because his presence
brightened light entertainment for decades.
What the shocked would prefer
to not contemplate, with their taboo-
ridden family values is how over the years
their taboos created in non-heterosexuals
a sense of being damaged and invisible-
especially to each other,
and making amongst themselves a culture
of 'Don't ask, don't tell' for their invisibility in the media,
which was a mirror in which
we all hoped to see ourselves.

For myself and others I will always prefer
sex of every sort to be both negotiable
and consensual. When a person can't tell,
fantasy from reality, for being blinded
by the light entertainment industry, it is Hell.

Advertising

is the levy upon truth
which consumers are led to believe
pays for growth and choice in the economy
of the near future.
But actually  the adverts shrink the present
tense and add to our debts, by fore-shortening 
the longer term possibilities,
the better to make life-through-choice more vertiginous.  

Meaninglessness

is the dark matter in an intelligent universe,
and humans-in their self belief as the planet's
most creative beings have the earth's greatest
capacity for it, in how it discounts the creativity
of the planet that made them. All history is human.
It all reads as if our inventiveness was designed
to expand the sense of 'something missing'.

Invisible Means?

An atheist is somebody who disbelieves
 in invisibility because he can't see it.

The Military Imagination

In the Gary McKinnon hacking story
it was revealed that many of the supposedly
secure Pentagon computers that Mr Mckinnon
breached to find evidence for extra terrestrial
life had no password, and therefore no security.
Where there was a password it was, umm, 'password'.

Now Mr McKinnon is free from the request
to tried in the U.S, he may still be sued in the UK
for $100,000s to compensate for the effects
of his security breaches,
when he repeatedly tried to warn
them but they took the warning as proof of a breach.
It seems the preferred security the U.S. military
is to hound foreign hackers in the civil courts
of the country they control.

It was not Mr McKinnon's choice
to have aspergers, but it is ironic,
and part of that condition, that what
gave him the skill to hack also denied
him the recognition that intelligent aliens
in full awareness of their otherness
to humans are unlikely to leave evidence
of themselves in so unimaginative
and insecure a place as The Pentagon.

The United Colours Of Eucalyptus

The rainbow eucalyptus

Patches of the outer bark are shed anually

showing a bright green inner bark

This then matures to a dark green that gives way
 to blue orange and maroon tones.  

Dying Is Easier Than Living If You Pay Tax

Death and Taxes have been part of every society
that has had a currency since time began.
The rituals for registering and dealing with death
have evolved,
but legally the process remains relatively simple.
The departed depart and their effects, mortal remains
and property are legally disbursed.
When the departed depart they are not even there.
With their departure
they cannot witness any dispute or sense of loss.

Whereas the modern tax system is a miracle
of self-compounding nests of catch 22 logic.
Forty years ago the american tax code
was 1000 pages long.
Because of modern case law-
led by lawyers and lobbyists-
it is now 75,000 pages long.
'Every time they [central government]
try to simplify it they add 10,000 pages...
 ...even eliminating the loopholes creates
more regulation ' -Lionel Shriver
on ''Start The Week' 12th Oct 2012

Modern Disability

'Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind.'
-Albert Einstien

Seeking Compensation Means Living In The Past

I would love to say that I find life totally meaningless,
and because life means nothing then there is no rationale
for any part of what I have learnt that sustains strong scrutiny.
But I can't.
I have found that life works better without a grande scheme.
The pleasures of the moment are always simple,
and work fine for no over-arching plan because
they are uncomplicated by the need for grand reason.
I know very well that there is suffering in the world,
but this suffering is perpetuated by all the grand scheme
I have known which have at their roots the idea
of particular status-led human beings as highly possessive,
'victims', seeking compensation, from the present and future.


If you want to live in the present don't seek compensation,
or expect relief your own suffering. Recompence is addictive,
and leads to living even more in the past,
where people get ever more tightly wrapped
in the roles of  victim/rescuer/persecutor
that pass for modern culture.
Most of all, if you still have a choice
don't start a family-be replete in commensality in yourself.

The Myth Of Sisyphus, Modernised

Autumn

Winter

Spring

Summer

Why People Riot

'Evil exists in the world
not create despair, but activity'
-Thomas Malthus  

I Could Only Be Anti-Homophobic

if I was against all phobias
and against every mental health problem.
I could only say I was against them
if I did something about it.
As I am, I am against anti-homophobia
campaigns for their humourlessness,
black or other-which may be in the nature
of campaigns or about the universal affliction
that is human sexuality.
Inaction is what leads to a lack of empathy
towards affliction, generally,
which leads us also into waging war
against the very ground
we and every other living creatures live upon.

Cleanliness Is Next To Forgetfulness

For thirty years I have known
of St Anlem's ontological proof
for the existence of God,
and for all that time I doubted it's wisdom.
'greater' seemed so bland a term,
it made belief bland in it's turn.

But today I realised what was missing
from the argument for me.
It is not that God is greater than me,
or as great as I can see him to be-
that limits him to the weakness
of my vision. It is more that God
has seen it all, could remember all.
But he chooses to forget by forgiving. 

The New Potential

Presently society says to the mentally ill,
the morally defficient and other non-conformists
from hyper-bland normality,
that they have to change their disabilities
to become the moral and moneyed
to be the successes their lecturers are.
Suppose instead that social incapacity
were to be marketed, rebranded
as 'the new potential for an economy
that is on the retreat from the brink'.
Would employers follow the argument,
and believe their government?
Or think instead that marketing
had become the new insanity?

For The Fashion

that won't offend on the beach
and will conform to every man made
religious law-it is always men
that draw up these laws, even when
women decide to uphold them
on behalf of men-try the all new lyrca hijab.
Ride the waves whilst wearing it
and see for yourself how well
you stay atop, without being provocative.
Then you too can successfully surf
the Islamic dress code. 

The Unacceptable Truth

is that taboos are presented as communal truths,
and have been used so since who knows when.
Taboos are a community's most acceptable aspects
presented as Total Truth, a monoculture
where vanity rewrites human history
as being a narrative about community.
This is truth as a partial lie,
with the unacceptable known but hidden,
thus 'The Apocrypha' means the sub-standard,
the esoteric, the not worth pursuing
because it won't/didn't reap reward.

Acceptability does not improve anything,
least of all truth. Ease is the primrose path
to depreciation. Thus taboos normalise
the partial lies of what goes unsaid,
and justify the weakness of a weak people.
Taboo is the weakening of community
through the approval of weakness.

Solving The Problem Of The Moment

'So Long as you have food in your mouth
you have solved all your problems for
the time being'-Franz Kafka

Leading People Away From Fact

Advertising is a form of creativity that aspires
to fool all the people all the time
(particularly state regulators)
through discursive arguments
that lead the viewer away
from the most important details
about the product being sold.
The more to make the whole of life
like the advert to consumer
-a fantasy product controlled by the advertiser.

In preliterate christian societies
the weekly speech that mattered most
was the sermon in the church before
the giving of the tithe, where the priest
had more power modern advertising now has.
Whether the priest knowingly lied
or not people would still give.
Their charity, like their community,
was as genuine as their heart's desire for life.
Where as the consumers misled by modern
advertising into conumerism
as an imitation of life are solely
conditioned by company profits.

The Good News

from modern humanists
is that they have proved to themselves
that life is pointless.
They have learned that the liberal belief
in free speech was founded in a myth.
The belief was that progress
was towards somewhere, when the reality
(not as grand as a truth)
our only place to go was nowhere
and we were already there.

If only we would build an economics
on this reassurance-then we can
deliver ourselves and the animals
and habitats we cruelly lord it over
from the progress of evil,
the evil of progress,
and the burdens of wealth.
Finally we could deliver ourselves
from how power corrupts.
If only we could make life and law
naturally nasty and brutish, self limiting by design
-we would be much happier being indifferent and poor.

Post Modern Capitalism Quotes Nature

You don't have to be cynical to understand adverts, but it helps....

Street Art Just Got More Viscera

With thanks to http://thisisnthappiness.com