No Half Measures

As The Marquis de Sade
is never known to have said,
but would surely like credited to him
'A pleasure shared is a pleasure halved.'
and he was never one to accept half measures.
  

A Sense Of Our Proportion Is Important To How We See The World

And then there is the biggest fish of all
who is invisible to the visible fish.
The visible fish just don't know
whether he makes the world fair,
or whether he makes 'justice' 
more like himself-invisible. 

Why Communism Is Impossible (And Capitalism Is Worse)

It is not just that 'property is theft'
but even when people consent
to share the rewards of their labours,
the matter on which they do it
make their production skills
theft from Mother Nature,
on which they are dependent. 

The Wisdom Of Misanthropy

applies to all, but particularly applies to the living from the departed
who knew better all a long and patiently waited long enough
to discover whether what seemed unworthy in this life
might also prove to be unworthy in their afterlife.   

Perversity Inc

Nothing turns me off
and makes me stop listening
faster than being told
that I am taking part
in a consciousness raising exercise. 

The United Tribes Of America

When they were united by conflict with each other
but local conflict were their idea of diversity.
And their tribal wars gave the land more chance
to recover from the ravages of humanity
than the present total war on nature.

Seventy Seven Years Ago This Week In Poland.....

Sept 19th 1942 

'Mother lies on her mattress all day long; she is so starved that she just cannot move. Anne [my sister] is like a shadow and my father is terribly thin, just skin and bones. I just grit my teeth when the gnawing feeling in my stomach begins. At night I begin to wait for next morning, when we are given four ounces of bread and the bitter water that is called coffee. Then I wait for lunch at noon, when we bought our first soup, a dish of hot water with a few grains of kasha. Then again I wait impatiently for the evening, when we get our second dish of hot water with a potato or beet.  The days are endless, and the nights even more so, and full of nightmares. The shootings continue, hundreds of people perish daily. The ghetto is drenched in blood. People are constantly marching along Dzielna Street towards the Umschlagaplatz on Stwki Street. No Job or occupation is a complete protection any longer. Recently even the families of those employed have been deported, mostly the women and children.

 A few weeks ago the Nazis began to round up the wives and children of the men working at Toebens and Schultz. Those who are not working are ruthlessly dragged away. Parents now take their children with them to work, or hide them in some hole.

Food is now cheaper in the ghetto. Recently a pound of bread cost forty zlotys, but now it only costs twenty zlotys. There are fewer mouths to feed.'

An entry from 'The Diary of Mary Berg', first published  in 1944 in New York and still a remarkable document and monument to human durability in the face of fierce odds against survival.   

Cold Comforters

Anyone can be comforted by pietism.
Sentiment is just that, common beyond comment
and many resist accepting it at face value.

Such sentimentality also avoids recognition
until it has to surface, then it is obvious.
What becomes even clearer after that
are the limits attached to such comfort.
It always fails the spirits of the truly afflicted.

That is when we feel that our support
is like that of those who comforted Job
who failed him when they could not prove
to him the truth of what knew was his virtue.

The T Shirt I Failed To Live Up to

Not that I did not try. I made two attempts.
But I could never be a canine mind reader
-least of when their minds were troubled. 

No Need To Shout

I remember when the nearest
most citizens got to seeing their leaders
was on one of the three or four channels
of the analogue television that the UK gov't
regulated between 1964 and 1991.

When the viewer disliked the speaker
they did not do what it was logical to do;
mute the sound or change the channel,
or even better turn the set off for a while
the better to do something more engaging.

The politician made the viewers anger
alive enough for the viewer to forget
that these speeches were pre-recorded,
and if they had read it as later as a script
they would be calmer in their disagreement.

Thus the British shouted at recordings
of leaders who they disagreed with,
with a predictability that were it not so normalised
-their predecessors had shouted at the radio-
it should have been seen as more alarming.

The public did not care that their
television set could not hear them,
once set off  they could not stop
behaving profoundly irrationally.

Now we have other means
of venting our spleen
and renting our bile out
to whoever might want it,
like twitter and facebook.

But recycled bile has very little flavour.

Politics Is A Soul-Rotting Business

The works of the world, the flesh and the devil
have always been consistent tempters for humans.
Animals are exempted from being tempted.
That temptation should reshape elections 
and how they are run should be predictable.
 
If you think the above is a theological absurdity
as a comment on popular Democracy
then the above change is innocence personified
compared to the sophistry that politicians 
and their advisers have to sign up for
before getting anywhere close to fulfilling their sense
of their vocation and their manifest destiny.  

Why New Blogs Entries Are Hard To Write

Kafka wrote about many self-referential worlds
where for the individual all authority was centralised
and it had no single reference point for open access.
But he never knowingly wrote about whole countries
caught up in chasing the tale of 'liberty' unable to see
the circular motion it had set up for itself. 

My First Selfie

In the longer term I have changed very little,
since I took this picture.
The information I store now is much the same
as I first held, back then....

Old News Worth Repeating

I can never get over my surprise
every time I am told lies
about sex and power
by men who I hoped knew better.

When men lie their lies seem so sexy
to them in them that from there
it is a short step to tell more lies,
but this time about sex
to their captive audience,
and this multiplies
the imagined effect of the sexiness.

The deeper they go into these routines
the bigger the least recognised effect
-how they deceive themselves-becomes.

I wish they would learn the hard way,
without their fantasy erections,
the purpose for human affections.

Drugs For Everyone

Television tells people at length
about how dangerous drugs are,
how addictive they can become,
and how drugs will push people
into lives that feel like blind alleys.

But when I compare the lives
they tell me that are full of despair
with the joy of a television viewer
I find it hard to tell the difference,
or say who draws most satisfaction
from being dependent on what they are.

I have yet to watch the documentary
about an individual who relearned
how much fuller their life might be
from stopping watching television.