Cropped

 Just a slightly cropped version of something I did.

Strange

“You know who I felt most sorry for during Covid?”

“Who?”

“The homeless.”

“Why’s that?”

“Living in squalor, malnourished, addiction issues, unvaccinated - they must have been wiped out. What chance had they? That’s actually why I stopped watching the news and all that stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well obviously with the relentless focus and bombardment of the whole thing, the news was going to be full of sights every day of trucks full of the dead bodies of the homeless that they were picking off the streets of all our major cities. They could hardly have just left them lying there dead. I just couldn’t have faced watching that over and over. It must have been devastating.”

“Well no, there was nothing like that.”

“Really?! Oh you mean they decided not to show it because it would have been too traumatic for the viewers?”

“No, no. Obviously the attitude for the media would have been the more traumatic the footage the better. I think they mostly didn’t show it cos it just didn’t happen.”

“That’s strange.”

Cross

 

I think this is a powerful little video.

Saccharine

Kings and queens of the musical industrial complex, the group Toxic Blandness have a new song out titled Saccharine Depravity. Some lyrics below:

You make me feel dirty and safe at the same time

So I’ll be your slave forever

Or at least until you grow tired of me

After I grow up a bit 

And you pick someone else

But I’ll always have our memories

Such beautiful memories 

Of saccharine depravity 

This is my reality 

Who needs gravity

When you can have

Saccharine depravity

Saccharine depravity 

Saccharine depravity . . .

The Inn

 The Inn at Montaigne-les-Cormeilles by Camille Corot, c.1825-1831. It may not be a thing of great beauty but I do like it, and to add, it strikes me as very fresh and informal, humble or outside of the tradition and mores of Western or “academic” art, for a picture from that period. 

Sackcloth

 

I don’t think there’s too much to get excited or impressed by in much modern art, and their extensions of the limited and quickly uninteresting reserves of their inner worlds of their artist creators, but certainly at times I find myself much more in sync with works of the 20th century Italian Alberto Burri, and who simply has at some deep level a natural resonance with “truth and beauty” and  to which his works can then genuinely attain and aspire!

Andrei

 

From Andrei Rublev by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Dad

 Just click on the picture if you need to see the writing enlarged.

When the Soul

When the soul conspires with the body in wickedness, then together they build a city of vanity and a tower of pride, and they people them with unholy thoughts.

Included in The Philokalia from from the writings of St Hesychios the Priest, dating probably from the 8th or 9th century. Not too difficult to equate to modern intellectual derangements.

Reverse

“If you had to go forwards but you could only go backwards, what would you do?”

“Turn around.”

“Very good.”

birds?

 

towards

 Something I’m trying to get towards a finished state I’m happy with.

Words of

Words of the wise, spoken quietly, should be heard

Rather than the shout of a ruler of fools

Ecclesiastes

Lost Cause

 

This is the other side of the sheet of the picture below this one, which I’d given up on, and hence just started messing about with the other side of the sheet, but now I see that was a stupid thing to do as I’ve gone back to it and, however it yet ends up, maybe it wasn’t such a lost cause!

image1

 Whether I’ll try to work on it or not, this is this as of when the photo of it was taken.

Neuro - Paradigm

 

A track I just came across, dating from 1994.

Two Boats

Two boats were moored by the shore, and both began to drift. The first naturally enough though only drifted a little before the limits of the rope were reached, and so within those confines it drifted no more. For some strange reason though the rope of the second boat appeared to go on forever and so on the boat drifted far out of sight. I suppose the best that can be hoped for, with its pointless and useless rope - maybe they were proud of its length- is that some day it might drift back.

Mistake

“You know what’s very hard for me to understand:  how come the same people who would do anything to defend us against Covid, take any measures, take away all kinds of liberties, are also willing to do everything to fund and push war, even to the point of risking nuclear war? How are they the same people?!”

“And they’ll also do everything apparently to protect the environment but be very relaxed about opening the possibility of nuclear war which, apart from its effect on us, isn’t really that good for the environment.”

“I was forgetting that yeah. So how do we explain it?”

“You don’t know what the answer is to all this schizophrenic behaviour?”

“No.”

“It’s that they’re a cabal of pathetic, lying, deranged and psychotic freaks who think everyone else are just stupid dumb animals far beneath them.”

“Oh right, I didn’t think of that. That explains it. I was all confused because I was assuming they were sane and decent.”

“That was your mistake.”

West East

“You know how if you keep going farther and farther west, you end up in the east?”

“Yeah.”

“Well is that similar to how with the political far right and the far left, if you keep going in either direction you end up in the same place?”

“Maybe it is yeah.”

Left Right

“You know a good way of looking at the far left and the far right - especially the left’s obsession with the bogeyman of the far right?”

“Tell me.”

“Satan is always playing games, obviously warped games with warped goals - you can look here at Satan as real or else if that’s too foreign a notion, as some kind of imaginary embodiment of falseness as a whole. So anyway he divided himself ideologically into two supposedly distinct halves, left and right, and each half justified the other.”

Insurrection

 

Viewer discretion is advised. 

three

 

Angelos Akotantos

 

Three paintings or icons by Greek artist Angelo Akotantos (1390-1457).

Right Wing

“Anything alternative to the censorship model they’ll talk of as right wing.” Because as I think I quoted Engels a few posts ago, anyone who opposes the cult of Progress, and its materialistic heaven on earth via communism/wokeism or Brave New Worldism, is by definition an enemy of the good and simply deserves to be annihilated. So you label anyone who doesn’t bow down as right wing, i.e. an enemy of the god of Progress, and from there therefore this enemy of truth and goodness is necessarily and justifiably “cancelled” - this cancelling, depending on the achieved  totalitarian status of the state in relation to the individual - ranging from the individual being silenced to being executed or worked to death in the slave labour camps.

And in this short clip, Joe Rogan and Russell Brand are laughing at the disingenuous idiocy of someone like Brand being labelled and dismissed as right wing. But the thing to remember, as happened with endless Bolsheviks under Stalin, is that under the god of Progress, the goalposts are by definition always being moved as if Progress doesn’t keep progressing, how can it be Progress?! And therefore it’s the easiest thing in the world to accuse anyone of being a traitor to the cause, however devoted they may have been to the cause at an earlier stage of its development, since that cause is never static but always progressing! “You were a committed feminist, lesbian leftist, and ten minutes ago this was great. Perhaps you were a lawyer who valiantly prosecuted abusive husbands who physically battered their wives in their own homes. This was wonderful. But wait a minute, now you don’t think a man can call himself a woman and be paid to beat a woman senseless in a boxing ring - maybe even one of these wife battering husbands? Traitor! Gulag!” Sadly she failed to continue to progress, and so turned out to be a right wing traitor to the cause.

So the true disciples to the ideology of Progress have by definition no psychological, cultural or spiritual integrity, since integrity implies and involves being static or steadfast in one’s relation to a fixed point, such as one’s family, that one will not compromise and progress away from it. Again, if Progress isn’t always progressing, it is a traitor to itself! And so here the ideal for the loyal follower is to lack any such integrity and instead to be “fluid”, i.e. to have no inner core and thus no resistance to constantly shifting one’s ground in sync with the progressing times.

bird, water

 

Zelensky Regime Before and After

 

I’ll leave out the After bit, but above is a sample of Before regarding Zelensky and his regime’s portrayal in the West a short time ago. In case it’s hard to make out, someone put together this little montage, and we have The Guardian saying Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in Europe

NEW EUROPE leads with Ukrainian president’s rule becomes increasingly corrupt, authoritarian; while from elsewhere we have Ukrainian President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right; REUTERS has Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem 

and INTELLINEWS informs that Ukraine has more politicians in Pandora Papers than any other nation in the world. 

Just lifting this from the BBC about the Pandora Papers in case the memory of it is a bit hazy: “Pandora Papers is a leak of almost 12 million documents that reveals hidden wealth, tax avoidance and, in some cases, money laundering by some of the world's rich and powerful.”

trees sails?

 

more ink and water

 

Evil Does Not…

Evil does not and cannot exist of itself but must live as a parasite on the body of good. Evil must find a justification, must appear as good, and often the highest good. Evil always and inevitably contains an element appearing to have a positive value, and it is this which seduces man. Evil strives to present its positive facet as a jewel so precious or desirable, that all means are justified to attain it.

Each of us must and can comprise all mankind in our own personal being. Thus we shall accept all the evil in the world not as something extraneous but as evil in which we too have our part, and contend with evil, with cosmic evil, beginning in our own selves.

From The Monk of Mount Athos by Archimandrite Sophrony.

Environment

This is just a relaying of a point someone made to me a few days ago.

“You know the people who are making the most noises about the terrors of impending climate change and its impact on the environment and what we have to do to combat it: how did they respond to the weird recent environmental catastrophe in Ohio?”

“I wasn’t really keeping up. Tell me.”

“They didn’t want to know about it. So much for their passion for the environment.”