Don't Tell Me, Just Be

Twenty years ago I had a friend
who liked being outrageous.
He would discomfort me
and made me laugh at the same time,
with the same comment.

He encouraged me a lot as well.

I remember well how I felt
when he first joked
about wanting his doctor to be
the then infamous serial killer
Dr Harold Shipman.

Stories of what Shipman had done
horrified straight society,
though it was the quietness
and charm with which he killed
that appalled them most.

They could not accept
how charm turned toxic.

Now I understand much more
about how my friend wanted
his final escape from this life
to be so quiet that even the signs
of the preparation for his departure
were kept outside of his awareness,
as he was unknowingly done away with.

Now I want the same thing too.
I have the courage to live alone,
and I know the fear of loneliness
is worse than loneliness itself,
but for somebody to quietly
fulfil my final departure
would be most welcome.

Disbelief Beyond All Proportion

It is only when human egos
become the size of small planets
that we realise why our planet
and it's contents are worth saving,
by which time more is gone
than was ever known to be there.

Even then many would deny
that their ego is a zero gain sum
where it's actual value is zero.

Pour Your Own Tree Trunk

Modern Art is at it's best when it confines itself to natural materials
in a natural landscape,  and shows skills that surprise people.

'Your Life Is On Hold, Your Life..... '

Being made to wait
will always have it's uses,
but rarely is the use
the waiting time is put to
as valuable as the task
that was meant to be completed
in the time we allotted to it.

Modest Living

The only item on my bucket list
is a bucket....

The Good News About Bad News

is that when it is news to you
and it is bad then it is surely happening
to somebody else, somewhere else
and there are so many places
that are far away from you
where it will be taking place
that you can't be witness to it.

100 Years of the Theramin

And this is one of more melodic uses to which it has been put, with a suitable 'outer space' origin to the tune. When Lenin was first shown this instrument in 1920 he got a tune out of it, 'The Skylark' by Glinka, Leo Theramin toured classical music halls with the instrument in the 1920's but was brought down by the Wall St Crash, further disasters ensued, which made him end up working for the Soviet Military. Leo Theramin died aged 97 in 1993, and was playing this instrument to the end of his life.

Language Control

Why does the French 'tele commande'
sounds so much more stylish,
than the English 'remote control'?

It is surely more than a difference in tone.... 

The Spirit Of W. Heath Robinson Lives On

An image drawn recently for The New Scientist
 magazine by author/cartoonist Tom Gault.
  Here is his artist profile with his publisher 
with his publisher Drawn & Quartered.

Unnatural Philosophy

The word 'scientist' was first coined in 1839,
but for decades after conservative people
used the older term 'natural philosopher',
as if that alone would limit the changes
that the discipline of hypothesis-test-result wrought
by antiquating the language around the process.

Then in 1859 Charles Darwin reluctantly published 
'On The Origin of Species', to narrowly beat his rivals
in the scientific world from publishing their own theories,
as if the speed and sequence of publication itself
were a further part of the evolutionary process.

What Darwin said caused him trouble enough
for it being published in a society that justified hierarchy
by reference to the history of a Christian faith
which put faith in men, however badly they behaved.

Enter Darwin's country cousin, Herbert Spencer,
a breeder of animals for competitive shows.
Before Darwin was dead Spencer took over.
He coarsened the science and elided natural evolution
with the human intrusion on the natural world
known as  'eugenics' through his phrase
'the survival of the fittest' where his became the hand
that sped the evolution of plants and animals.
Under him the fitness to survive were proven
by his sadistic control over all he owned,
whilst he was opaque and selectively observant.

Now we have taken eugenics to the level
of poisoning the skies we live under
whilst we want them to be clean
with no change in our behaviour
no reduction in human population
and no lowering of our place in the food chain.

How Much Is Anyone Worth?

The ego is a zero gain equation
where when the sum is balanced out
the actual value of the ego is zero
and every other symbol was worth more.

But by the time the ego has been extracted
that extra value is much too late to score.

Ungrounded

With every new public ideal,
from 'going green' to civil rights,
gay rights, trans rights, and the choice
of every legal and social permutation
of social bonding humanly possible
there will always be the short film
made about the issue concerned
that points towards the Utopian ideal
of what we would all achieve
if we all pulled together as team.

The new Utopia is to be found
only in the editing of the film
which also makes it clear
that Utopia is ungrounded.

Bag A Bargain

They would be cheaper and more healthy at half the price
but that would be lead people away from the Primrose Path
that is all consuming, modern turbo-capitalism.

Putting The 'Dis' Into 'Connection'

Because most people are dishonest with themselves 
and others, as they attempt their disconnections. 

Death And The Supermarket

I was carrying the basket for a friend
as we walked round her local supermarket,
and we passed the self checkout
where no cashier is required.

I could not help but say to her
'Is that the check out where people go to die?'
Naturally she corpsed with laughter.

She corpsed again
as I wondered aloud
when people died there,
who collected the club card points
on the bereaved's behalf.

Then she bought some cigarettes
and I said 'If the tobacco companies
want to change trades en masse
should they go into devising
insurance plans for cremations?'.

Waving Not Drowning

But I don't know how much longer we will all still able to wave. 

Conceptual Art

is renowned for the concept

being stronger than the artwork itself.

All that happened was a critic put an empty drinks can
near the art work as a comment on it
and the work shattered spontaneously.

Read the full story, and more here. 

Be Very Afraid When You Notice How The Soundbites Have Got Shorter

The above was written in 1995, shorter soundbites
are not just proof of a shrinking attention span,
on the part of advertisers and the mass of the public.
They are the sign that science and analytical thought
are dying, from misuse within the wider culture.

On today's media Science and analytical thought
don't even get the time to say 'Hello' and 'Goodbye'....

Catching The Silence

Apparently men speak 7000 words a day,
and women speak 20,000 words a day,
each speaking as much as they need to
in a world where busyness is the watchword.

What researchers have not yet discovered
is who listens properly to all these words,
and how much when people are well heard
their daily number of words decreases
as people lose the need to speak
for finding a final understanding.

Bad Fences Make Bad Neighbours

But that is the way the world is run
-nothing else gives a population
confidence as much as a gun
and a self righteous religion.

Shedding The Past

With age, misery becomes retrospective
and however much of a past we have
we know that living there is restrictive
and we may have little time left.

Loaded

and ready to kill, slowly if it is from fumes,
faster if it is the aim becomes more direct,
and the threat is not just to life for humans
 but to life every other other species as well.

A Brief History Of Lies

With modern methods of recording
what we now call false news,
(it used to be called 'propaganda')
will be all that will be remembered
of what was said about the deals
that national leaders cut with each other
for the good of their respective countries.

Today's propaganda
will be tomorrow's history
and future peoples
will be none the wiser
about what really happened
-not even when they try
to read between the lines.

The Primrose Path To Perdition

I recently learned that there were eight steps
that governments take when they commit others
to the path of collective death, or genocide.

The first step is making the otherness
that makes up a natural diversity
officially a cause for division,
through classifying the population.

In itself this act is not murderous.

The second stage is forcing citizens
to wear outward signs of difference
in public, to make difference
more easily identifiable.

In itself this step is not murderous,
but it makes public places less inclusive,
and unsafe for groups that are not labelled.

The third step is to write new laws
built around the established signs
of outwardly different citizens
which limit their citizenship.

In itself this step is not murderous
but with an unstable and skewed media
characters who are personally unstable
will see these laws as an entitlement
to bully minorities and the weak.

The fourth step is is to popularise
verbal abuse towards minorities
via abusive and sly sleight-of-word
government announcements.  .

This step is nearer manslaughter
than citizens are prepared to admit
-when the machinery of government
toes the new line citizens lives
get shortened but mostly 'by accident'
when they are denied basic support.

The fifth step is to make 'state security'
a rhetorical argument backed by guns and laws
where creeping militarisation
takes the 'civil' out of civilian life.

Such weaponisation seems safe
when it is against a discredited otherness
but when that otherness is actually false
than the weapons could soon be against us.

The sixth step is hate groups
'spontaneously' forming themselves
to defend/act out a piece of propaganda
that was a fiction and is now the motive
for a polarising unthinking hierarchy
to defend the streets and a false 'freedom of speech'.

This is where open murder starts,
even if it is more in the heart than in actions.
In the heart it is defended and disguised
by the theories of exceptionalism,
'one apple rotted, everyone else is sane'
while the whole barrel promotes the rot.

The next two steps are only possible
when a government systematically hides
as much as it plans what it is doing.
When governments act in secrecy,
and act against democracy,
their actions cannot be undone.

Purpose built buildings securely imprison
those the state deems 'without purpose
for the new reordered/improved society'.
There people cease to be citizens
and the previously-open media have no access.
Lawyers are hamstrung at every turn
and the gov't department who are in control
issue euphemistic public statements
full of managerial bromides and plain lies.

So far so British, and it was the British
who invented the concentration camp
and led the world in creating architecture
that divided families and isolated people.

What the British started the Nazis refined,
for them 'room to roam' (lebensraum)
country by country, across all of Europe,
included the sacred duty to kill the weak,
the less favoured, and the innocent.

Read all you need to know about it here.

Picture Set Of The Month - February

The grain a piece of wood grows into 

is as individual in character 

as the human being viewing it 

and it should be seen as equally engaging.....