this is work in progress or homilies or miscellaneous items

that don’t warrant a page by themselves

or seem to fit better here

pending poems  index

chronological order is from the bottom to the top of  the page

audio files can be complemented by listening to them with the eyes closed

what get carried

generation to generation

an unholy mix

that

goes

forward

folic acid is not the same as folate ,  problems   with the current supplement regime

in actual fact they are saying that it causes a higher rate of fetal death

men

lost in thought

fancies

run

riot

options branching out

left and right

dead ends

going

nowhere

the imagined magic

absent

ed.  a chekovian theme !

the difficult life of homeless  orphan children  in lithuania in the post WW2 period

the stalinist "terror" was unique in the way it was on such a scale it selectively breed for a more docile, gullible and talentless population

itchyboots and a rural  afghanistan  scene that would have been familiar to alexander the greats armies as they marched through

one of the things about the web is you have a lot of contrast between people speaking their own  (incomprehensible to you)  language and speaking in english, with a language you don’t understand they look very alien, but when they speak english you realise their concerns and thoughts are very familiar to you

the exception to this is some african american dialects where any dialogue has an element of trying to "work" the listener for some gain, there’s a whole culture behind this that is hard to fathom, even in african countries you don’t seem to get this to the same extent

this is  a viral clip260 million views with a song composed and sung by "D4VD"  (david burke), the woman looks like  (but isn’t)  burke’s girlfriend, celeste hernandez, a fourteen year old whose dismembered body was recently discovered in burke’s abandoned tesla in the hollywood hills

“ billions of streams on spotify, where he has amassed 33 million monthly listeners ”

benign prostatic hyperplasia  (which has no correlation with prostatic cancers !)  is an almost certain conditon for men as they get older 70% for ages 60 t0 69 and the usual treatment intially with drugs and when they stop working, the "turp" operation is done, which is basically successful, though it has some side effects you might want to read up about

in my view the current practice of drug treament is misguided and the turp operation should be done much earlier, in particular  finasteride  is of concern, i’ve been following the research for several years now, to me its problematic on several fronts

like cataract surgery, the operation is way less invasive compared to what it used to be, i do think historically BHP did kill a lot of men, these two operations have made getting older a much more benign state of affairs for men

a chechen dance

a strange afternoon

after getting most of the fortnighly shopping done in town i drove out to the park east-side of the river-mouth and slept in the car for an hour under the shade of a large gum, when i woke i felt somewhat weak and with what was to develop into a migraine, but it was sunny and bright, so wearing sunglasses i headed across the park to the beach and breakwater via the side of the river

i don’t drink nor have ever taken drugs but on getting to the beach which was at the bottom of a low spring tide, the vista was extraordinary/ surreal, the distant ranges further east, bluey and cascading down in a long line to the sea, the tide exposed sand and small waves breaking looked like another land and felt unreal, an altered state    .    .    .

walking along the beach i followed some dog prints whose gait had lengthed into running

there were two young people in the distance on the rocks seemingly searching for something and later as i walked back and elderly couple training a young labrador up by the breakwater, but apart from them and myself, nobody

people look for heaven, nirvana, god, peer approval with no sense of how they are wasting their time

the wind was so cold and strong i turned back from walking out on the rocks or breakwater and followed the track back to the car

bamboo is on  a 120 year timer  !

i had no idea that high blood pressure  damaged  the kidneys

we get a very filtered version of horatio nelson; his involvement with emma hamilton, neapolitan politics and warfare is a   drama " in its own right

i remember in my first year at secondary school being tackled particularly hard at a rugby practice and not liking it, so i switched to hockey, a wise decision  (if you can avoid getting a ball to the head)  in retrospect

having hunted for food and eaten a lot of brains, they are just lumps of semi-set jelly with a bit of connective tissue to hold the shape, its a cultural insanity to have any sport that has knocks to the body or head, what i suspect is there are individual differences in this connective tissue that makes some people very susceptible to CTE

a good new zealand herald  video on the subject

dreams

the nightly shattering of our reality

transitioning with that death called sleep

other worlds peep in

some frenetic

some benign

or

very occasionally

mystical

ed.  i dream as much as i have ever have which is only a little, but on the "mystical" side nothing for years, i’m not sure what to put that down to but it is a loss i feel and likely a sign of changed interests and an aging brain

what doesn’t reslove

tells you something

it doesn’t resolve

fatalism

takes its place

by

force

continuity after discontinuity

life after death

dreams walk on

in the land of forever

the balm of existence

without

annihilation

one thing about writing that has taken forever for me to pick up is good writing has a transcendental semantic overlay/ quality that only comes from reading what was written and may not be decipherable from the overt sense of the words at all

this is in the area of "gift" and far from being understood is discriminated against by those who claim authority in the relevant areas

successful writing

needs to be not stretched too far

talent

is required to

come naturally

timeless wisdom

the "mystosphere"

trash so thick

you can’t avoid

tripping

over

it

what’s gone

is

gone

should it come back

=

unlikely

phantoms

faces in our dreams

we would never otherwise see

one step away from this limited world

yet  how do we see outside of that ?

Work and Thoughts

one obscures the other

sleep and dreams

you want more than this

an emotionless life

paradise before the fall

but it can’t exist

the apple is too tasty

the weirdest thing about south korea is it  christian-ness ,  china’s and japan’s historical suppression of christianity was fundamental to maintaining their isolation from the western world, not to mention a dysfunctional xenophobia that remains problematic until today

drinking or smoking away your sorrows

creates

or rather

transmutes

the sorrow

the

wrong

way

self

injury

of

your

life

does

not

get

forgiven

first impressions

second

third

constancies

and changes

wrrdgirl writes

“ Zen ”

Three letters

A place holder

For

Something universal ?

( Another stand-in )

my  reply

"god" is another three letters

and "dog"

all is confusion

except

dog

the link i had of mary oliver reading her poem "one question leads to another" got taken down, a pity because she speaks well, perhaps better than what is written appears

anyway,   the poem

my  reply

making sense of the word

“ soul ”

but to start

is to get caught

in the crossfire

between

material

and

immaterial

trench warfare

i have

lost interest

in

making sense of the word

“ soul ”

but to start

is to get caught

in the crossfire

between

material

and

immaterial

trench warfare

has

no

appeal

making sense of the word

“ soul ”

but to start

is to get caught

in the crossfire

between

material

and

immaterial

trench warfare

has

lost

its

appeal

tears of beauty

the by-product

of

tragedy

loss

outweighs

gain

happy endings

double null

one

eviscerates into the other

unbuilding each

as it goes

the general standard of professional musicianship is so high these days that two player pieces like brahm’s hungarian dance  no. 5 doesn’t raise eyebows, but the synchronisation requires virtuosity on the part of both players

lang lang and gina alice

well, their son ought to be talented !

suphil lee park   :   "end of  a journey "

translations  of hwang jini and kim wooncho

what the geomungo  sounds like ,  very rhythmic, you can see the relevance to hwang jini’s poem

views  of the kaipara harbour from mosquito beach out at south head

well, there’s always c or k drama, emotional pain in thin air

don’t forget exercise to remodel the cardiovascular system to help offset its age related decline

flowers in a vase

beautiful things in your grasp

will leave any way they can

flowers wilt and die

to stay lovely forever

is against nature

who cares about transience

more than beauty

so many things i thought were so

aren’t

so

and others

are so

there is no-one alive

not like this

i think language is an extension of cognitive abilities present in all animals, its not some be-all and end-all in itself

pack and unpack

crystal vistas

extending indefinitely

ed.  an old poem, i feel like i was a different person when i wrote this, today, i might do it differently

packing and unpacking

the

toil

is

worth

something

maybe

mother teresa, from once being a glorified catholic icon is now, in my view, unfairly demonised, judged as she is by the money hungry, highly sophisticated standards of modern medical care, for all her successful fundraising, the church may have taken the lion’s share

she was just some-one caught in a system with no options outside it having to make the best of her situation

interestingly, there is evidence she became somewhat atheistic in later life, hardly a surprising result living in that land of a multitude of gods, india

peter the great personally tortured his eldest son to death, don’t wonder why russia is like it is

bubbles that come into being

then collapse

ourselves

"the colour  of pomegranates " is not such an old film  (1969)  but highly original with the storyline being conveyed in various visual sets rather than the usual what are in effect novelistic monologues, the lazy writing of modern scripts

its a biography of 18th-century armenian poet and troubadour sayat-nova

interestingly the director  (sergei parajanov)  ended up imprisoned for five years by the soviets for becoming an icon in the ukrainian and armenian independence movements

blue light activates the brain to be awake, of course most blue light we see is in white light and the new technology of white leds is aggravating societal-wide sleep problems by taking what the brain assumes appears to be daylight, too close to bedtime

to everything turn, turn

there is a season  turn turn

the lyrics to the well known song and  ecclesiastes 3  passage, are, i would say "apologetic" in nature with a subtext of there is an underlying order to the world and everything is in its proper place

yet the tone of  ecclesiastes 4  is different, so different it must be by some-one else, really very nilhilistic and an admonishment and i think interestingly, the truth is somewhat between them

"clickbait outrage"

i think this refers to the entitled indignation you can get in response to certain reddit posts or tiktok videos, really in the area of mental illness, its so "head in the sand" like, a volunteer troll farm embedded in the public psyche

however, this is the world, you have to know what you are  dealing with

“ as the children aged, the tendency to avoid information grew stronger

though five and six year-olds still actively sought information, seven to ten year-olds were much more likely to strategically avoid learning something if it elicited a negative emotion ”

a film  of christian moullec  (a pioneer of ultralight flying with birds)  who parents some hatchlings through to training for their wild life, and then to his and their separation

it completely changed my view of geese

i think unfortunately the gulags etc in russia removed a lot of the genes for people prepared to stand up to the ruling regime, a population bred to be docile, not a black and white effect, but all the same, there

what’s gone is gone.  no use in complaining about it

its not a good idea to use silicon-based bakeware because of the migration of  cyclic siloxanes  into food and air during cooking

google AI

“ Siloxanes can be toxic, especially cyclic compounds like D4, D5, and D6, due to potential endocrine disruption, reproductive toxicity, and damage to the liver and immune systems.  While some siloxanes have been considered safe for human contact, chronic low-level exposure and persistence in the environment raise serious health and environmental concerns ”

i think "enlightenment" is like "holiness", you’ve got something to live up to, they can’t be sustained in any sort of real life

i remember a video of mother teresa being told she was holy, i can’t recollect if she denied it, but she said he should look for it in what he does

approximations

not half-truths

but the full

being process

and

not

stasis

yesternight a very large trunk of a macrocarpa by the yards across the road fell, it always had a lean of about 20° and with the high winds and rainfall its demise wasn’t unexpected, when i saw it yesterday breakfast time, i thought of going across for a closer look, but i delayed and five minutes later another massive trunk fell, almost on top of the first trunk, there was a good possibility that if i had gone over when i first thought about it, i could have been killed or injured by the second fall

i don’t think we really feel these close brushes, a fair portion of the rest of the day was taken up with chainsawing and cleaning up

how does order emerge from chaos ?

well its quite simple, chaos necessarily includes order, it doesn't so much emerge as its always there, possibly or even usually, masked

the

world

is

ideas

implemented

daybreak

full version

undulations

perturbations

in the fabric of reality

storms with white waves

this ocean

we

are

always

on

a comment i made in the "itchy boots" vblog, she was being  a bit conventional  in her views as she was about to enter afghanistan

don’t be too negative on the taliban, they provide order and the recent wars were deeply misguided, you can’t take a medieval culture and transform it overnight, it has to be allowed to build institutions and evolve over many generations, a far better approach would have been to introduce the benefits of western medicine and dentistry and let societal changes work around facilitating that, i think that’s happening anyway now

the next life

the sweetness of repairing

what cannot be repaired

the being

that arises from non-being

is the mystery

that is

or

isn’t

edges leak

naturally

or

can

cut

the one

when grasped

turns into

two

three

four

five

and

there

never

was

one

in

the

first

place

a mother can dislike a child

as much as others

are liked

shangguan wan'er

killed by your friends

for being a woman of exceptional abilities

poetess

administrator

strategist

yet a childhood companion

left a mark

of regret

in stone

love alone

doesn’t cut the ice

neither does friendship

some mix of both

and a complementation of skills

is

required

for a degree of happiness

in

life

wrong combinations

are too burdensome

not to

fly

apart

but what time shows

has yet

to

be

known

well written drama/ stories/ novels need more than a dash of "magical thinking", otherwise, what is the point, non-magical reality is all around us

absence

of love

is

absent

looking

but not finding

you conclude

its not there

but somewhere else

but its not there

because there’s nothing there

even

death

is

not

there

dishonesty

those who claim words fail

when its

their words fail

mine

don’t

lipid encased mRNA was initially tested as a form of gene therapy, but was found to be too toxic in more than one dose, but it was then put forward as suitable for vaccines because only one dose was needed

dr. craig

antigen specificity is a known problem with flu vaccines, why health authorities thought covid vaccines shouldn’t have the same problem i don’t know ?

constant

microscale

jarring

a

bad

poem

the

bottom

turtle

barfs

constant

microscale

jarring

a

bad

poem

the

bottom

turtle

of

awfulness

making nouns

out of

adjectives and verbs

empty categories

"the void"   "nothingess"

anarchy replete

absurd echoes

sound

with

nowhere

to

go

“ In summary,   we introduce  a general principle governing neuronal evolution and suggest that the exceptionally high prevalence of autism in humans may be a direct result of natural selection for lower expression of a suite of genes that conferred a fitness benefit to our ancestors while also rendering an abundant class of neurons more sensitive to perturbation ”

in english   :   in evolutionary terms and genetic design our brains are on the "bleeding edge", highly oriented to "distinctive human traits" but as a consequence, very susceptible to "perturbation"

a video with animations of how the covid mRNA vaccines  cause cardio problems

another  video  on the vaccine trials

this work is by the filmmaker erik tangsoo

reason reaches

past its definitions

to run aground

on the reefs of the abstract

taking it no further

than from where it started

some mistakes remain mistakes until remedied, others turned out to not be mistakes in the longer term, and many are such a mix of mistake and benefit its hard to tell what is what, one of life’s conundrums

A. I. is a form of quantum computing that is implementable in today’s technologies, this cutting edge will be driving a wave of change comparable to the industrial revolution

deaths and damage during wars

forgotten in two generations

a blank slate

in

three

china’s current problems are not just xi jinping but a whole class of people within the ccp, historically, china has always been prone to this sort of insanity, though the boxer rebellion would have to be amongst the top of the list and that ideology is what the CCP is modelled on, so its not going to go away, but perhaps will modify to become more functional

“ Some people are like an open grave

You give them the thing you love most

And then get nothing in return ”

   ―   Abu al-Ala al-Ma'arri

what it looks like on  comet 67P ,  cliffs, rocks, snow, the streaks are ice liberated by solar heat and the dots in the background are stars, photography by "philae" who is still there

"experts say"

some pothead journalist

inserting his opinion

he who rules

in this low information world

minds tangled in nonsense

with its tendrils

they

try

to

snare

you

"deeming"

a pivot

sense turns on

or rather

anti-sense

since

it

is

deeming

"deeming"

a pivot

the sense turns on

or rather

anti-sense

since

it

is

deeming

i notice everyone is a bit wary as you might expect with raids by taliban militants, its still a war zone and there seems to be a shortage of men of a certain age

an excellent  portrait

“ Later breakfast time was consistently associated with having physical and mental health conditions such as depression, fatigue, and oral health problems ”

“ Study finds  mealtimes  may impact health, longevity in older adults ”

hmmm, "chrononutrition", a new word

enlightenment and holiness

fictions

justifying

religious hierarchy

amateurs

live on potential

rarely

realized

percy bythe shelley’s drowning was an accident waiting to happen, the design of the boat was flawed for the conditions it was going to be in, his friend williams who oversaw the building of the "don juan" refused to listen to the advice of the builder in contrast to captain roberts and lord byron’s boat

edward trelawney’s  account  of shelley’s last days

a great loss to literary history and what might have been that late summer, however, its hard to believe  any life  could be so personally traumatic

interestingly he had written an entirely fictional account of a poet getting in "a shallop" and being driven through a storm in his poem  alsator ,  something in the style of coleridge’s famous lyric about the ancient mariner but not as successful

As one that in a silver vision floats

Obedient to the sweep of odorous winds

Upon resplendent clouds, so rapidly

Along the dark and ruffled waters fled

The straining boat   —   A whirlwind swept it on

With fierce gusts and precipitating force

Through the white ridges of the chafèd sea

The waves arose

the humanities are exiting the university institutions and migrating to the web, a good thing as this is broadening their general appeal and escaping them from the clutches of the neo-marxist claptrap and politicisation of the "higher education" departments with their cultural siloing, "low information" censorship, purblind stupidity and "anti-talent"

milton writes

god as worthy

and satan as unworthy

i would

have rebelled

too

apophasis

i’m going to

not

not

already

the curtains of confusion

have come down

the "ensamble oikos" sing the latin hymn  ubi caritas  arranged by the norwegian composer ola gjeilo

the same  song  by voces8

i had a late lunch in town at a small and faded restaurant run by a chinese woman in her fifties?, i don’t think its changed for decades, sort of run-down seventies in style, $14.50 for a roast lamb and vegetables, a reasonable meal and not the usual undercooked so common nowadays

anyways, while i was eating it, i could clearly hear her talking over the phone since she spoke loudly and there was only one other customer, she was saying she would send money in a week or so to a third person and the conversation degenerated into effusive praise  (princess etc)  of the person she was talking to and then warned her about typhoon ragasa and it being dangerous to go outside   .    .    .    .

that last bit of information suddenly clicked for me because i knew about the "super-typhoon" so the woman was likely talking to her granddaughter, who, since the grandaughter spoke english was odds-on to be in hong kong, so the whole thing was somewhat stereotypically "drama-ish"

i have been eating there occasionally for years, but it was hearing this conversation that gave me my first glimpse below the surface of this strange, starved of cash, venue

years ago in the same  (main)  street i remember talking to a rather decrepit old man and discovering he had spent the war in changi prison and the one comment he made about it was having to work together with the other prisoners to survive was a great equalizer

maybe i saw him once or twice again soon after, but then he disappeared

what ends

and doesn’t end

life gets split

into the possible

and

impossible

to

resolve

an afterlife

mystical this life

machinations

of a different reality

remedying unbalanced odds

ha !

if you believe that

the song of the cold spirit  from henry purcell’s opera "king arthur" with lyrics by john dryden sung by gérard lesne, contre-ténor which are as follows

What power art thou, who from below

Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow

From beds of everlasting snow ?

See’st thou not how stiff and wondrous old

Far unfit to bear the bitter cold

I can scarcely move or draw my breath ?

Let me, let me freeze again to death

another instance of the inexplicably siloed world of french music showing a pearl

odoardo borrani ,  most of his paintings have a relaxed or almost idyllic tone, and actually a surreal edge you can trace in later italian painters, that sense of  stand-alone space  and personal isolation

anyway, papal control over the arts is totally gone, he is quite european

“ A new clinical trial suggests  magnesium supplements  may boost gut bacteria that help block the development of colon cancer  —  but only for some people, depending on their genes and sex ”

if you read the article and study closely, its the role of magnesium in promoting gut bacteria that facilitate vitamin D , ie vitamin D is the actual anti-cancer agent of benefit

i have taken 3000 iu of the blackmores vitamin D and 90 mcg of caruso’s vitamin K2/MK7 for years and have yet to get cancer  ;  o  )

a poem by "useful-hour" called "new ways"

The light of the moon is deeming

The single clapping hand was cut

The soulless has become immortal

Even the karma is somehow stuck

We need to die more often !

my reply

the light of the moon is demonic

our hands and feet are cut

the man in the moon winks at us

he has always been like this

i think this "radical islam" ie highly literalist is a nineteenth and twentieth century reinvention, historically you can see it was more tolerant

Al-Ma'arri

an elegy  by him i liked, you can see the overblown style which was the medieval middle eastern islamic norm and actually was a strong influence on victorian era writing with its overwrought sentimentality

quotes

you cannot shake hands with a clenched fist

quote by indira gandhi

a poem that is really a short story because of its induction of the universally known context

jesus got up one day a little later than usual

he had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head

what was it ?

a nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off

but he wasn’t afraid of that

it was a beautiful day

how ’bout some coffee ?

don’t mind if i do

take a little ride on my donkey, i love that donkey

hell, i love everybody

written in 1970 by james tate and called "goodtime jesus"

modern advertizing

treacle thick

sentiment

low information

taking

ignorance

to

new

levels

an abeyance of the explanation of utility

costing

some multiple

of the

R&D

never

put

in

a short poem by gunther hammell

How often do you

wait a beat before you give

Your thoughts out as words ?

my  reply

do not wait

when the words flow

when they dry up

wait

one of the beauties of the past is it cannot be changed, though our perspectives on it can

colourized film  of the sinking of austro-hungarian battleship SMS szent istván in june 1918 after being hit by an italian torpedo boat, it took 3 hours and if you look at the crew trying to balance the ship by being lined up on the portside and a cutter and lifeboats still on it, the captain was entirely clueless, something out of "the good soldier svejk", the one thing they had going for them is all the crew were required to be able to swim and so the losses were relatively low at 89

what i love about comments sections is you sometimes get an extraordinary connection with the actual event, in this case some-one’s great-grandfather served on it and another writes

“ i was mowing the lawn at an elderly couple in austria and i saw a picture, hand drawn of that ship.  i asked the woman who is in her 80s what that ship is, and she told me that her father was on it while is sunk, but he survived, and he made the drawing.  that was last year ”

ed.  dates and age check out, her father would have been about 18 when the ship was sunk

my walk

a peopleless ganges

layers of hills

in the distance across the estuary

rocky shore to be clambered over

ocean

walking out

then running back

in

the

dark

track replete

with

pademelons

another AI pearl

when mowing the lawn is your physical horizon and  you see this

i can’t see the future

i can’t shed the past

somewhere in this conundrum

what is hidden

resolves at last

what jennifer lawrence does well is a reflective  self-honesty  that is in a class of its own in terms of a public figure, you supposedly see this in stand-up comics, but in my view that context is usually tainted by fiction

rearrange our lives

time doesn’t go forwards but backwards

biting that loss

of who we are

as a teenager we used to paddle out to an island  (now a wildlife sanctuary with restricted access)  with  tuatara  on so i have seen them in the wild, they really do look a bit different from lizards and the conventional story at the time was they were a living dinosaur, i have always wondered about this, but just researching it now, they are a lizard-like reptile, the only surviving member of the order of sphendontia and  branched  from lepidosaurs, its not a dinosaur at all, only somewhat contemporaneous with them

i think art is really representing something in a way that breaks and resets the relevant theories of mind we have on the subject in question in a meaningful and useful, though often upsetting manner

you could say the same about good poetry and writing, but i’m not sure its true for song lyrics which just push for emotional heft

“ Hi, can you explain to me how  (ed. you know)  concentrating and calming the mind can be harmful ? ”

well, from practical experience meditating, but also theoretically "mind" is just a misguided construct so "concentrating" and "calming" are spurious illusions and miss the point of meditation entirely which is, in large part, to become familiar with the way your brain works  (the soto zen practice known as shikantaza)

a big social change is how you can’t trust any drink you buy not to have the potential to be adulterated, if australian police can seize ,  2000 liters of a   GHB precursor ,  you have to ask where this is going ?

methanol  in alcoholic drinks most often is an unintended fermentation by-product, so its not necessarily sold to give harm, but to make money with "bootleg production" and actually a reason for the high degree of regulation in its manufacture and sale

i do think there is a way too casual approach to drinking and drug use by the younger generations who simply haven’t seen the harm that can result, youthful naivety of course is an unpleasant fact of life covering so many of its aspects and an area when the education system could take up a lot of the slack of parental shortfalls

takapuna grammar school, the leonessa assemble sing  te iwi e

clichés

move

backwards

reversal

and the stern fuss

are

the

clue

weird

time

space

landscape

being

there

insta poets

touching something

but going no further

their audience

emotional leeches

fussy

about

their

fluids

so much

these days

slick marketing

but

basically

empty

a poem by sheila winfield

i think odysseus, as he dies, forgets

which was calypso, which penelope

only remembering the wind that sets

off mimas, and how endlessly

his eyes were stung with brine;

argos a puppy, leaping happily

and his old father digging around a vine

a relevant summary of the homeric story

odysseus was the king of ithaca who fought in the trojan war for ten years, then suffered an enormous number of misfortunes that made his journey home take ten years

penelope was his wife, who had just borne him a baby son when he left and who stayed faithful while he was gone despite many men thinking odysseus was dead and wanting to marry her

calypso was the goddess of the island of ogygia, which odysseus washed up on after his ship sank.  she fell in love with him and kept him imprisoned there for many years

argos was a hunting dog who was young when odysseus left, and he waited for his master to return for two decades before dying in peace after seeing him one more time

odysseus’s father, laertes, had begun to go mad when odysseus was young and gave up the throne of their island to him. He was still alive when odysseus returned but his sanity had fully gone

an interesting  video  on a young transgender woman who solved, or rather disproved a basic mathematical conjecture

i do have a thesis that the top ranks of intellectual power do require a blend of male and female thinking

a lack of this "integration" also explains the generally shitty thinking of the normative world, the way it is, is the price of its own continuity

in her own words the demolition

the problem with "complexity", is not simply all the threads are difficult to handle in a meaningful ways, but that things are put together wrongly/mistakenly

so you inevitably are going to come up with wrong conclusions

unless

less

of

useless

question and answer

a never ending spiral

into

obscurity

useless liturgies

conceal

the ground

question and answer

a never ending spiral

into

obscurity

useless liturgies

obscure

the ground

a northern hemisphere poem written in september by tiny_porch_light

The theme is only a suggestion

Falling leaves are giving way

To the coming of winter’s great silence

The wind carries their brown and yellow

Scattering with quiet violence

my  reply

from the upside down

spring is coming though frosts still appear

summer is looked forward to

may the winds disappear

ed.  "roaring forties" here

in my view, there’s only one point to being "fit" and that’s to enhance or even permit longevity and quality functioning in the immediate and later life

however the media seems to obsess on extreme endurance memes like marathons etc whereas the reality is to engage in this sort of thing is to triage the body into minimising stress damage so other things, like immune action  against cancer  necessarily are shortfalled

“ A groundbreaking new study has revealed a potential link between extreme endurance exercise and increased risk of advanced colon cancer in younger adults, raising new questions about screening for high-performance athletes ”

so with exercise and fitness you are looking for health benefits not transiting into problems and this point is, i would say reached in being somewhat better than moderately fit and no further

another issue is imposing professional sports level damage on children’s team games

there’s something about new zealand short stories, i know the landscapes, people and culture i guess, but three islands in the middle of nowhere have their own glow of a strangeness and beneficent solitude that comes through

the ten  finalists of the 2025 catherine mansfield short story contest, the ones i thought had promise were keiana roffey’s  māhina’s bridge  and elke bartlett’s  land of the great white cloud  (though the plot was jejune the style was totally readable) ,  and that’s the gift that cannot be taught

of course, new zealand’s greatest poetic talent for a generation, laura ranger has disappeared off the map, no idea what happened

with competitions i notice choices are somewhat political and the better entries may not be first or second

mathematical ability is just one type of intelligence, people can be very good at math and related problem solving and be severely lacking in other areas

i really question the notion of a "universal intelligence" and "one size fits all"

rather knocks "pantheism" on the head as well !

its a fractured world with the usual chasms and cracks

scroll down to a bit more than halfway

motherhood 1951  by ai-ogawa

gaslighting myself

a developed

expertise

some

wrong minded

inner compass

realised

putting together oneself

loose ends suddenly tying up

a different more gentle picture of failure

emerges

not fitting

is a deep current

“ it depends whether you want peace or prosperity, the two rarely go together in the theater ”

a quote from  star quality  by noël coward, i think noël presided over some sort of peak of high-calibre popular theater that has long since disappeared, perhaps because the audience has also vanished to be replaced by the intellectually downsized rom coms of the current  mass media

is driving to work in heavy traffic or living in an area with fine particulate matter air pollution  setting you up  for dementia ?

are angels afraid of death ?

just a random thought

the political idealist

the future is going to be right

enough

to justify

the trauma

of

the necessary

transition

ed.  i was reading about  qin jin  and it seemed to me that her becoming a martyr steemed from a lack of scepticism about her own thinking

an interesting life

reasons are many, what happens in fact is the answer

quote from "the gaslighters nightmare"

a leisured life

once aristocracy

landed and ruling classes

now the wealthy

spend time

as the leisured classes have always done

in

their

own

entertainment

ed. not entirely true,   prince albert  being one of many interesting exceptions, and actually it was a bit of an historical misfortune he died so young

the female bubble

their cocoon of support

while providing for it

men are outside it

children are inside

light

each hue

an answer

to

a

different

question

wow ,  made the headlines  at last, taken years to get past the media self-censorship

let me say again, i am not  anti-vaccine,  its just there are problems with mRNA vaccines  (that can be solved with time no doubt)  and the covid spike protein which is unusually troublesome, you don’t want to be manufacturing a synthetic, persistent analogue broadly over the body’s cellular base the way the pfizer and moderna vaccines do

in fact the health authorities have tacitly recognised the problem in some countries by not using the moderna vaccine  (more antigen)  anymore and being much narrower in advice as to who they think might benefit from boosters

the USA with its very poor "normative" health got hit worse which is why robert f. kennedy jr. was appointed as US health secretary, but it will be like japan’s fukushima disaster, the people who made the bad/ignorant decisions will walk away almost scot-free

in actual fact one pfizer jab was probably optimal at the start of the pandemic, the right/risk reward, but the moment it became apparent that the virus was an off the charts mutator  (facilitated by so many immune supressed individuals in the population); alternative, more conventional vaccines should have been progressed, but the cash machine of mRNA/modern monetary theory had apparently an unstoppable momentum

i think the real damage was done by the boosters trying to chase immunity for a virus that mutation-wise was always several steps ahead of what the existing vaccine was trying to target

oddly, i don’t think i have ever had covid, its not super contagious despite the claims and i had two pfizers well spaced apart  (3 months)  and had a needle used for babies and young children which restricts the depth of the injected material to the muscle  (one of the benefits of reading the research)

also i have also been taking 3000iu of vitamin D3 and 90mcg of K2/MK7 a day for years

i do think my second dose of pfizer hurt my kidneys for quite a while and kidneys are a hotspot for internal vaccine action, i have never had kidney pain before and six months after the last vaccine it went completely away

its so long ago it seems like a dream, all the fuss and mania, what saved it from being more of a disaster is, as per normal for viruses, it almost immediatly lost its virulence, but there was no real adjustment of health advice to this change

suppression of  frontal lobe brain  function is what makes people "under the influence" so dangerous, they are just operating on unmodified automatic responses

dialogues of no meaning

libraries of unreadable books

recipes of infinity

the ouroboros can swallow its own tail

so what ?

men and women look for what is not them

the

results

are

futile

"daoisms"

an infinitude of

pretentious

nonsense

meaning

flapping around

gasping for the oxygen of sense

that it cannot take in

the wise do not fall in love

contemporary chinese saying

dr. mikolaj raszek makes  the interesting point  about "trolling" of the general population by public health authorities, you can see it in this notion of "evidence based medicine" which assumes that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence which can of course be the case but is not necessarily, this contradiction leaves gaping holes in the adequacy of the "evidence only" based medical theorem

however i would say this is a relatively normal facet of information in public life, oversimplification supposedly based on notions of "public good" which is to some extent valid but "one size" doesn’t fit all and often it turns out no size fitted, it was just a bad idea in the first place

the mental life

versus the physical

some mistakes

are

like

a

bodily

assault

and

as

damaging

the monks

meditate

on "emptiness"

being empty themselves

they

rattle

away

unable

to key into

the changes

that

come

from

effective

introspection

rules

about

process

only

blind

sarah lamb, lukas braendsrød and william bracewell dancing in  requiem  choreographed by kenneth macmillan

those that can see

those that can’t see

mix them up

you have one person

those that can’t see

those that can see

mix them up

you have one person

wrrdgrr replies   :

Mix up one person

They will be

One that can and can’t see.

Asleep or awake,

Asleep or awake.

No real, no fake.

my reply

Mix up one person

and they will be

more mixed up

than one person

can be

life

book-ended

by

beginning

and

ending

there

is

nothing

outside

this

“ Lense replacement is now the easiest procedure ever !  When I was a young nurse in the 70’s, patients were hospitalized for several days, sandbags on either side of their head, we had to feed them, couldn’t get up to the bathroom. Oh how things have thankfully progressed ! ”

to be a good author you need to be "intellectually trans", so  the vehemence  of such an author against "physical trans" is somewhat amusing

trans has always been part of the colouration of homosexuality, the problem is the degree with which it is tinged with schizophrenia because the hormone treatments and operations are not safe, they disrupt a physical growth developmental pattern/process, so at a functional substrate level there are inevitably going to be ongoing and cumulative health problems from the clash, and i use the word "schizophrenia" because the physical transformation is not a rational decision, rather like those who have a healthy limb removed or even lasik which runs into problems from the disruption and loss of developmental neural programming in the cornea

incidentally castration is the historical "trans" operation and stretches back to the foundations of civilization and the political roles eunuchs filled as supposedly less bound by family ties

i don’t want what i write here to be misunderstood, i’m not "anti-trans", in fact i think histories most talented individuals got their intellectual power by crossing the gender boundaries, its just i am of the opinion that today’s medical attitudes underestimate the negative consequences of drastic changes to fundamental developmental progressions, the permissive use of corneal reshaping being a less emotionally loaded example of this, you could even include the mRNA covid vaccine as another example through its extreme and total cellularly invasiveness which all of us vaccinated are now marked by

medical procedures always require a risk/reward evaluation and the imposition of ideologies or conceptualizations about how things should be impede its accuracy, for example, even such a "safe" operation as lense replacement for cataract has a very good risk reward if the cataract is well on its progression to blindness, but to have the lenses replaced just so the patient can be "glasses free" has a much worse ratio value

i don’t think artificial intelligence is that much of a mystery, rather its just a computational advance in heuristics, in particular it is able to go a step more basic with patterns and at that level recombine to generate new alternatives which apparently is pretty much the way the human brain works, hence "i intelligence" which is exactly what it is

alphafold

seeing too much

knowing too much

still the kaleidoscopic shuffle

what doesn’t close down

but opens up

hard to say the benefit

it confuses me to think about the past

for it seems like the present

but its the past

"itchy boots" films  an amazing view  as she leaves the skardu valley located in the region of gilgit-baltistan in northern pakistan

its so scenic in this isolated area it makes me wonder if its the real origin of the shangri-la legend ?

henry james

the father of today’s  dramas 

who would know ?

marriage

marr-age

oil and water do not mix

the vinegar

should be

no surprise

the above came to me after reading  a poem  by the new zealand poetess kristen warner and feeling it had a certain level of hypocrisy

consistency

the

search

for

the resolution

of

inconsistencies

yet

the

truth

can

be

inconsistent

with

itself

the unenlightened

talking about enlightenment

the geese fly

squawking across the sky

complaining of fuss

when making fuss

some reflection

unveils the absurdity

but that doesn’t happen

until we strike adversity

“ what is god ? ”

a word

“ meaning what ? ”

what words mean

this is the  craziest AI shit  i have seen

religions of course are in a constant state of internal ferment known as "schisms", only kept down by various mechanisms of repression, however they no longer have any sort of control of publishing so what might have been regarded as the "intellectual property" of the religion is now thrown into the public domain for anybody’s use as they see fit and authors tap into the material without regard to the reputational damage they do, its another variant of "the tragedy of the commons", but maybe not such a tragedy ?

medieval religions revolved around censorship and when you see this sort of thing you can see why, a few videos like these brings the whole edifice into question

one of the interesting confusions about covid and the mRNA vaccines is the role of the spike protein itself, that is as a pathogenic influence it is "off the charts" toxic and problematic having manifold negative effects on the body, this is unusual and points to mRNA being not an appropriate technology for a covid vaccine because it "soaks" the body in this damaging protein, ie, you want a vaccine technology that minimises the bodies exposure to the peptides in it

an interesting video on the negative arterial effects as well as being informative about the problems of high blood pressure and look at what the spike protein does  to the kidneys  !

these problems must have been apparent to the developers of the vaccine and its interesting that in effect the health of the young was sacrificed for the benefit of the elderly, a deliberate social decision that tells you a lot about life since you can find historical parallels like wars with murderous attrition rates that are age selective

layman pang’s being predeceased by his daughter, wife and son is typical patriarchal confucianism

why people cannot see it is just a story with a "moral" purpose like jesus talking to the samaritan woman i cannot guess

religions attempt to validate themselves by claiming their stories are historically real, quite an successful technique, but in effect being a politically motivated distortion of reality designed for social control of subject populations is its real historical basis

not saying its wrong from that point of view because it worked, but as individuals we don’t have to be taken in

the problems with BPA and it substitutes are like a farce, out of one frying pan  into another

“ label-printing chemicals like bisphenol S (BPS), a BPA replacement, were leaching through plastic wrap into the food

Several of the chemicals, particularly TGSA and D-8, caused a buildup of fat droplets in the cells and changed the activity of genes that help cells grow and repair their DNA ”

a good visual explanation of the design  of the flag  of the united kingdom

medieval english history occasionally has instances of a king requiring permission from the pope to marry a distant cousin, it may seem surprising to us that the church had such a wide prohibition  (4 then 7 degrees of consanguinity) ,  but in fact it was a crucial act of social engineering preventing the creation of siloed communities as per say the pakistani problem in this respect in the UK now

you can view the "woke" movement as some sort of attempt to recreate siloed communties again and perhaps the whole movement arises out of existing cultural siloing ?

an interesting reddit post  on the subject

there’s no putting toothpaste back in the tube

contemporary english  (UK)  saying

feeling sorry for ourselves

the most sincere tears

we ever shed

feeling sorry for myself

the most sincere tears

i ever shed

i have always been interested in history and what is noticeable is that in the last twenty or thirty years there has been a step improvement in its ability to be accurate, because the usual records just about always reflect a significant bias, but these days, archaeology, textual discovery, dissemination of information via the web and an increase in people working in the area are enabling much more nuanced views to emergence

a good example is most "bad" roman emperors turn out to be much more competent and rational, but their histories were written by men indebted to their replacements or usurpers or just plain writers who disliked them

however for history in general in the "low information" public discourse, everything is pretty much twisted again

dominic sandbrook  gives his view  which is history teaches an amorality, deep scepticism and uncertainty

my own reading, well youtube viewing is that history is plagued with constant warfare, the importance of "great men" in changing it or incompetents in positions beyond their ability to be effective  (nicholas II ! )  and the inevitable cycling of intended effects with unintended consequences

"low information" limping from poor decision to poor decision  (or inaction when action is needed)  is unfortunately the human norm

silent

in a mirror

our dead

beckon to us

to

join

them

when you see  those hills  you know are somewhere really different

nonsense converted to nonsense

exegesis at its best

explication

is

not

elucidation

the end of pyotr tchaikovsky’s piano concerto no. 1 ,  a dazzling  and virtuosic section that resolves the third and last movement

ali and nino ,  a kinetic statue in the georgian city of batumi created by tamara kvesitadze in2010   the story

i have always "admired" the ability of the japanese population to self-harm with insanely bad decison making at top administrative levels, from world war 2 to fukushima and now, exceptionally high repeat covid  vaccination rates

i wonder if the root issue is its island/ isolationist culture being too "tight" and cultural aspects start to dominate decision making overwhelming rationality and competence

its a pity, because artistically it "outperforms"

this "performance" seems to be more of a theme in french art than in the english speaking countries, there does seem to be a surprising degree of cutural isolation between these linguistically different worlds

yoann et marie bourgeois  —    celui qui tombe

i do think this is influenced by samuel beckett, but he was basically domiciled in france for the later half of his life, he was even awarded two medals for his WW2 role in the french resistance

you still don’t sound sceptical enough about people, short of family, there’s nobody that really cares, fame is a magnet for very slick con artists, female singers/musicians have the same problem, just look at their lyrics !

look up charles bukowki’s poem "the sharks"

ed.  my reply to a woman who has become "middling famous" as a type of influencer and having lost money and some personal relationships as a consequence of being a bit naive about how people can behave

a well known quote from eihei dogen’s genjokoan

“ To study the Buddha way is to study the self.  To study the self is to forget the self.  To forget the self is to be actualized by the myriad things ”

in english   :

a bit of self-reflection goes a long way

i-n-t-r-o-s-p-e-c-t-i-o-n

staying

silent in the mirror

our

dead

women

ovaries with a brain

of course

the

ovaries

shape

the

brain

women

ovaries with a brain

of course

the

ovaries

shape

the

brain

your reading age, apparently, is too low to grasp what i am saying !

your reading and writing age is too low to grasp what i am saying !

because languages can be so different, people have trouble getting to grips with noam chomsky’s notion of them being learnt as an evolutionarily inbuilt function of the developing brain, but its just a system of representation like say an abstract painting, so in the end you have parametrized system, its exact content can vary, but its still within the parameters

“ I didn’t say there was no zen, just that there are no teachers ”

ed. the above a famous huangbo quote, my reply below

secret : there’s no zen, its just a drift in from t'ang poetry

exceptions fool the rule

there’s something about rules and their limitations, they are necessarily incomplete and the exceptions show that

shakespeare/ sir henry neville and wolfgang goethe’s last works’  (the tempest and faust part 2)  are unusual peaks being totally fantastic, yet believable other worlds, something very characteristic of their genius’ is the continued development into very strange areas

a vocal percussion wall

“ Huangbo uses “unborn” and “unending.”  Within his text, are those terms relational, or intrinsic ? ”

ed.  the text in question is page 29 of the blofeld translation from the ch’uan hsin fa yao/  傳心法要/ “ essentials of the transmission of mind ”

any translated work is just the translator’s opinion, if you do some work you will understand what i am saying, mandarin is particularly open-ended semantically

then you have the whole pandora’s box of philological changes

its not even known what language or dialect huangbo spoke in and i don’t accept the reference text as unaltered since it is so blatantly neo-platonic, there is a scribe or scribes with an agenda somewhere in the mix which is entirely usual historically, could even be pseudonymous

you know the heart sutra, "light and dark are a pair", well likewise unborn and born and ending and unending are a pair and in fact even more, nagarjuna claims every word is a nexus of a vast web of cross associations

one of the themes that comes though in the "records" is a criticism of exactly what you are doing, creating conceptual systems of "understanding"

“ every time the ground shifts you change the subject ”

because the ground shifts, the subject changes

the "teachings" of zen master huangpo seem surprisingly neo-platonist, but in fact nestorian christinaity was alive and well in china for most of his life, that is until the repression of 845

i think you can argue that gnostic christianity is a reification of plotinus/ neo-platonism

i’m not a fan of neo-platonism, there’s something to it, but its more a consequence of a certain vocabulary and now dated way of looking at the world, its as much a product of christian thought as contributing to it

  this popular song , taken to be "inspirational" is actually a very good description of the manic state

you can see how dangerous it is

so much of what passes as philosophy or theology is just text and too incoherent to say anything meaningful

“ All philosophies are mental fabrications.  There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things ”

nagarjuna 

"rain in the mountains"  fourth edition  (1956)  woodcut print  by gustave baumann  (south-west new mexico)

one of the secrets of music is that conventional notation is not that prescriptive resulting in an infinite range of interpretations that vary widely in musicality and why ,  i think, the best performers necessarily do better than composers playing their own works

“ They found the size of the sip the person took had more impact than how hot the drink was.  A very big sip  (20 millilitres)  of 65°C coffee increased the temperature inside the oesophagus by up to 12°C.  Over time, large sips can lead to sustained heat injury that can damage cells

The occasional small sip of coffee at 65°C isn’t likely to result in any long-term problems.  But over years, drinking large amounts of very hot drinks could very well increase the risk of oesophageal cancer ”

the above quote was taken from  an article  written by vincent ho, associate professor and clinical academic gastroenterologist, western sydney university, well worth a careful read imo

when the east is wet

and the west is dry

look i up

for pigs in the sky

ed.  south island, new zealand weather

unalived

as if

a euphamism

changes

reality

i look forward to being undead

only

one is possible

and the other

not

groupthink   :

“ A psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome

Cohesiveness, or the desire for cohesiveness, in a group may produce a tendency among its members to agree at all costs

This causes the group to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation ”

honestly history is full of this and groupthink’s toxic "mindguards"

these earrings that move with the head tugging on the earlobe, doesn’t this bother the wearer ?

like high heels i suppose or young women with flawless skin wearing makeup ?

there’s a certain level of insanity in all this

the whole problem with the western translation of buddhism and zen is its christianization of zen making mind/buddha etc     =     god

the culture just can’t think outside "monotheism"

i remember being interested in this song by the who back when i was a teenager, listening to it again for the first time for decades i can see its quite metaphorical

pinball wizard

getting old

being old

this strange space

of existing

as rip van winkle

every day

we wake up to

the world

that is gone

there's something close to "bullshit", but is several steps well above called "voynich" after the famous "voynich manuscript" which is nonsense crafted to appear profound, a category a lot of religious literature would fit into, but also things like the covid mRNA mania where bureaucratic health advice became became an irrevocable truth and that its wisdom about an untested totally new vaccine technology that was going to save humanity from a species extinction threat became a legally enforceable view

voynich by itself is amusing, but so much of human history is full of the voynich backed by an iron fist

i think that "bullshit" always carries the seeds of its own decoherence, but voynich doesn’t, hence its persistence over even millennia

the media world

friction

amplified

narratives

full of holes

an illusory comfort

of non-involvement

the vulnerability

of spectators

ed.  observation without participation is a minefield of misjudgement, i’m not sure i can say the reverse is true, maybe it is ?

“ Mainstream medicine, like other academic fields, is shaped by prevailing paradigms and the dominant narratives they create

Over the past half-century, these paradigms have increasingly reflected the growing commercial influence of the pharmaceutical industry

Dominant narratives are closely tied to groupthink, to which medical journals are often subject

In addition, more “prestigious” medical journals tend to have further financial conflicts of interest with the pharmaceutical industry

These dynamics limit scientific progress by suppressing awareness of the iatrogenic aspects of industry products and the benefits of alternative non-patentable and unpatentable medical products and therapeutic interventions ”

look up "iatrogenic"

the covid response was  groupthink  in spades

dr. john campbell gives  a commentary

for homemade kefir i think there’s a black art in keeping the grains with the right microbiome, it was beyond me, yogurt is much easier to keep control of what’s in the microbiome

the other difficulty is that the grains are in fact not simply a microbiome but a "biofilm" and biofilms are very problematic in terms of gut health

store bought kefir is more like a yogurt imo and its worth experimenting with pasteurizing (just heat to 68°C) with the store bought, even pasteurized has a useful probiotic effect and the technique is a useful "skill" anyway

“ Great mountains fell down

On soft pink cherry petals

All crumbling to dust ”

analogies clash

similes falter

this writer then

should halter

analogies crash

similes falter

this writer then

should halter

IQ only measures the type of intelligence that is good at the test questions

if you have met any "mensa" people, you will understand this

what is a characteristic of savancy, preternatural skills in some or one area and deep deficits in others

a cultural time warp, the "breaking news  polka " composed and conducted by alma deutscher at the rathaus in vienna

music from her ballet  the euterpides

interestingly her lyrical "popular" style draws criticism from the more academically oriented musical establishment because of the contrast with their promotion of "discordance"

she has collared a niche that is dangerous to them

interview ,  an oxford accent ?

megaliths

hieroglyphs

no mystery

ancient peoples

are the same as we

academic poets

banality

fused

with

ideology

oblivion

of

the

wrong

sort

the zen soto meditation "practice" is called "shikantaza" which is just observing thought

concentration, following the breath, calming the mind etc are a waste of time or even harmful

to be honest i could never meditate by myself and only did it when required to by whatever group setting and i don’t think i was wrong in that

dignity does not bring you bread

contemporary chinese saying

what is appropriate to the season

may not be appropriate

bear that in mind

sense and nonsense

are a pair

what can exist

and what can’t exist

when the door swings open

and we step

into the garden of infinity

tended by who knows

and rush out again

the memory

remains

glittering seas

heave forever

within a world

outside worlds

the illusion of permanence

inside evanescence

take things

for what they are

while they are

reality isn’t reality

the bottom turtle

gets dizzy

looking down

ed.  a reference to hindu cosmology and its western philosophical  intersects

if you think about it, sunscreens, because they are plastered all over the body have the potential to have significant effects beyond their function as a sunscreen and actually there is research literature raising concerns about endocrine and other disruptions, i have never liked them, preferring a broad rimmed hat, long sleeved shirt etc

the brain will pick up its developmental pathways, even decades later if the physiology eg gut and diet improves

“ That’s crazy ”

yeah it is and actually can be inconvenient

what exists

what doesn’t exist

this interplay

we

call

being

an interesting comment to this  youtube  on global warming

“ Thermodynamically based on first principles, we are at +1.59 C here in 2025.  We are committed to +2.89 C.  In 2030 those numbers are: +1.94 C amd +3.54 C.  2040: +2.68 C and +4.92 C.  Yes _4.92 C committed.  2050: +3.41 C thermodynamic and committed +6.33 C.

The key factors are declining albedo and loss of aerosol masking, combined with CO2, Methane, nitrous and trace warming gases.

Today we are at about 429 ppm CO2.  Add methane and other gases and we are at ~533 ppm CO2(equivalent).  Add albedo decline and declining aerosol masking and we are at ~756 ppm CO2(e).

In simple terms   :   we are toast.  It is now far too late to do anything meaningful. ”

intention upends

effect

those who pursue life’s meaning

end up

with

nothing

ed.  my attempt to restore "philological loss" to a line of the xin xin ming quoted below

歸根得旨 隨照失宗

“ Return to the root to attain the meaning ,  (but if you)  chase attention  (you)  will lose the archetype ”

repeaters of words

the mad do it a lot

that’s how you can tell

a greyed out dusk

two women riding by

the clip clop of horseshoes on asphalt

one woman

talking

a lot

worlds of thought

that thinking makes real

transfixed by this hypnosis

we slowly fade away

koans

puzzle me

puzzle you

but to solve it

write a poem

“ Write a poem

Is it still a puzzle ?

Does the puzzle

Still matter ? ”

unpack

to pack up again

repeat

repeat

no

wiser

than

before

“ And no wiser than tomorrow ”

tomorrow’s wisdom

what happened yesterday

it knows

UFO’s are a violation of  the fermi paradox

a more subtle aspect to the fermi paradox is that while in terms of a galaxy, the chances of the emergence of a civilization are vanishingly small, in terms of the large scale of the universe where galaxies are as numerous as stars within a galaxy, the probability increases to being likely, but of course communication between distant galaxies does not appear to be practically possible

so all science fiction violates the fermi paradox, of course you could have a story about two non-communicating civilizations whose theme would have to be parallelism, actually hats off to vladimir nabakov, i think his novel "ada" works that way

a wedding

that interface

between

fantasy

and

reality

a wedding

that interface

between

reality

and

fantasy

life

uncertainties so big

that

start

with

the

improbability

of

your

existence

for all the bravado and fighting of action films, we are extraordinarily fragile as a species which is why we are physically so timid and cautious, this is just sensible and to be otherwise is a form of insanity, which actually we see a lot of, drugs and alcohol don’t put people in their right minds

the art world

money first

frames

its

limits

literary magazines

to much group-think

to be real

or have quality

reading a poem

requires a qualification in life

disillusionment

clocks

before digital

showed time as it was

angles of being

loneliness

the illusion of nothing

but since there is always everything

then its a fiction

i would say to charles bukowski’s famous gravestone epitaph "don’t try" ,  rather "don’t force it"

a poem by the zen monk lingyun zhiqin

for thirty years i searched for a master sword

how many times the leaves fell, how many the blossoms came

since one glimpse of peach blossoms, i have never doubted again

my reply

i can’t say i was ever wrong

i can’t say i was ever right

but what unfolds is its own unfolding

searching for more is fruitless

ed.  my restatement of the lingyun zhiqin poem, my first two lines corresponding to the "thirty years" line, my third line to the second line and my fourth to the third

serena williams  gives her take on the advantage men have in tennis

“ men are a lot faster, they serve harder, they hit harder, its just a different game ”

mary queen  of scots was a bit female for her own good, lacked that male blurring so common in successful female rulers to give more objective judgement rather than relying entirely on men

nb:   bloody mary  and mary  queen of scots  are different people, if you read the wiki, those lives are traumatic and not to be envied

eternities

in love

out of love

motives for being

that is all

the madness of advertizing

happy face

feel good

dissembling

what i have noticed is that some not particularly religious individuals like handel, tchaikovsky,  rachmaninov , andrew lloyd webber and  samuel barber  have no trouble writing outstanding religious music, so i guess in fact its just a style

its better you think about it, rather than i give an answer

“ I’ve thought about it and I still can’t see why not ”

there’s actually a bunch of reasons, so give it time and you will come across them, all i will say is some clichés like its not a black and white world and the road to hell is paved with good intentions

maybe you can come up with some as well ?

eternity

the mystics answer

is limited

to

eternity

the mimesis of acting

rarely leaves

these thespians

untouched

today’s world

the preponderance of mimesis

creating

a new type

of

“ low information ”

person

“ non-antibiotic drugs also  disrupt the microbiome ”

this adds a whole new dimension to considering side effects to drugs

looking back to what was alive 24 million years ago, it doesn’t seem possible, but  visual evidence

“ physical work is a daily death ”

simone weil who made the above quote, although upper middle class, worked in a factory for a while to get a broader social perspective

my own view is what she is saying and perhaps not such an issue now with mechanised assistance for everything is that hard physical work is at the expense of "thinking", you can’t really do both, labour drains the intellectual energy and capacity

this does explain societal division in history, arisotcratic and ruling classes and the like and the soviet union’s ruthless extermination of intellectuals in countries they invaded

the reality of where health problems and conditions interface with the medical world is that some navigation and agency on the part of the patient is needed and the net is today's research library

some questions are better not answered so the questioner is forced to think more about the problem or assumptions they are making, same for the potential answerer too now i think about it

optimism   :   expecting the tree to fall the opposite way  it was leaning 

the two worlds

men and women

male and female

oblivious to each other

avantgardey doing a  dance routine  to the abba song "money money money"

“ What do you wish you’d known going into literary studies ? ”

i don’t think "academia" will suit you, it is very patriarchal for a start, but also its dull and doesn’t align with your literary interests

you can actually teach yourself and follow your own enthusiasms better on the web

also, and i think you will pick this up, "reading "and analysis of the reading is not writing, yet what is prior ?

publishing is a hybrid machine  —  human reality because you have the simultaneous existence of text in what now with the internet can be a billion different places at once and in the early days of printing might have been only a few hundred or thousand

although i think you can argue the same for DNA which in its abstract form is text

if you have to persuade somebody of something

you have already lost

love, attachment

bonds that break

bonds that keep

would i know

what we seek ?

love, attachment

bonds that break

bonds that keep

would i know

what i seek ?

why are the japanese duplicating what already exists  (ed.  building a 2nm chip factory in hokkadio),  this is another example of "fukushima syndrome" ,  japan’s amazingly incompetent strategic decision making due to a society overly invested in seniority and now compounded by low or zero population growth

tie chui er  singing the rihanna/sia/blanco/stargate song "shine bright like a diamond"

i think this is what is called a "douyin cover", the chinese equivalent of tiktok

a mills and boon type film, but more to it than meets the eye

One Night in Tokyo (2024) directed and written by joshua woodcock

dr sabine hazan with a wide ranging discussion of the  fecal microbiome  and how it relates to various health conditions

“ .   .   .   .  two to four times more likely to suffer  serious harm  from taking the covid mRNA vaccine than to be hospitalized for covid when everything is corrected for from the original trial data ”

in the middle of my life journey

i wandered disoriented in a dark wood

having lost sight

of the straight road

the above is a quote from the beginning of dante’s inferno, below is my response

lost but not lost

the straight road

was

an illusion

the full dante alighieri quote

“ In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost.  Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, and stubborn wood this was, which in my thought renews the fear ! ”

the himalayas doesn’t look so strange, but the andes sure do

the  ojos del salado

this solo  contemporary dance  with seehyun kim opens with a pendulum which sets the theme

zen  =  greek philosophy (via the bactrian kingdoms)  +  buddhism  +  daoism  +  nestorian christianity  +  chinese literature

any religion is the complex product of such a diverse summation, christianity is similarly eclectic owing a surprisingly substantive amount to ancient egyptian religion and myth

modern attitudes are comparably syncretic, discordant shards bundled up into who knows what, the "low information diet" so prevelant now

the people most unsuited to being mods are the ones that end up being mods

that’s the "law of message boards"

joshu asked nansen

what is the way ?

nansen replied/asked

what are you talking about ?

joshu was nonplussed

afraid to sleep

its not that i am afraid not to wake up again

but that sleep itself is death

what ceases and comes to be again

is extraordinary

afraid to sleep

its not that i am afraid not to wake up again

but that sleep itself is death

the moment you see a requirement or claim for "deep understanding", run a mile

literature courses just fill you up with other people’s useless opinions, dulling the mind, why should people paying to be made more stupid be surprising ?

100 years of solitude

there’s a huge body in the style of  yayoi kusama art out there, an oeuvre of its own actually and more aesthetically palatable

her own art  is bleaker and more abstract

all in all, an interesting contrast

japanese zen is in continuity with ch’an, however since ch’an was a religion of the chinese administrative class and japan didn’t have anything similar, the way it was taken up in terms of social hierarchies was different

the world is confusing because, itself it is confused and in a constant process of the discovery of conclusions it doesn’t like and so, rejects

a monk asked joshu   :  because i am new here, please give me a few pointers

joshu asked   :  have you eaten ?

the monk replied   :   yes

joshu replied   :   then you had better wash your cutlery and tableware

since no one seems to understand the meaning, joshu is saying, reflect a bit on what you do

why people seem to write tomes of clichéd nonsense about such simple things, i don’t know

there is this way of looking at neural networks as functionally quantum even though implementing on what are essentially turing machines

so large LLM’s in a sense know the answer before the the question and i think you can generalise that perspective to all neural networks, you are discovering the answer in a vast data bank the the question elicits a selection from and like quantum, the answer can be wrong because of the naturally high error impingement

AI is all over the media and that might warrant its dismissal as a meme, but following the logic of above it is fundamental, however it has an achilles heel which is that it , like our own cognition is error prone, so one needs to be alert for this

P = NP, maybe : o )

  shoes on display  from auschwitz

brings home the sheer scale of what happened

a real life  story  that puts "the wolf of wall street" into the shade

i can’t say i am a fan of the art  (leonid afremov) ,  but it is a great story and unfortunately somewhat illustrative of the portuguese character

the simplest nutritional intervention you can make

reduce your sugar intake

the basic philosophical conundrum

the good don’t receive in kind

“ Alcohol is now linked to seven types of cancer, and is a major risk factor for heart disease, stroke and mental illness ”

“ Experts say  alcohol’s health risks  are downplayed in Canada due to outdated science and widespread public misinformation ”

not just canada i think

a woman diagnosed with parkinsons at 32

a family man with mid life dementia

a girl paralysed at 14

doom scrolling

shows you

doom

observation without interaction

interaction

without observation

symmetric extremes

without symmetric effects

the au lushan rebellion ran from 755 to 763 and zen master mazu would have been 46 to 54 which was a formative period in chinese history akin to the the cultural revolution

as i understand it, "a successor" was really some sort of political action to give a credential for about to be newly appointed abbots

the "history" of zen has been substantially "rewritten" in the light of recent research, zen itself is a political creation and moves in and out of favour and i think owes a lot to the support of empress wu  (a remarkable woman)  with the aim of using buddhism to keep her empire on an even keel

as to what constituted buddhism and zen and other cultural habits and religions, i think the boundaries where much more blurred than the western way is accustomed to think of them

imperial china is very different and has deep cultural asynchronicities from western narrative projections

just follow what interests you and read around, often there are obscure academic papers that give the best insight

surface impressions

they may not deceive

but require

deeper digging

to

substantiate

or

nullify

A monk asked Yunmen, “What is the teaching of an entire lifetime ? ”

Yunmen replied, “An appropriate statement ”

my  reworking

“ what has life taught you as you get older ?" ”

i get older

my gardener

who is not my gardener

likes

pruning roses

and mulching and taking the dead stalks out of the raspberries

but when the grass needs cutting

he’s not there

fortunately

i

am

good

at

mowing

the

lawn

ed.  my response to mary oliver’s poem "the gardener"

“ A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip ”

the unfortunate truth of the matter

tatiana kurtukova singingi loved the falcon

another  version

Матушка , beautiful lyrics, yet that last line, slavic craziness

Holy Rus’  —  my home, my temple, yet to some, a stubborn thorn

this stuff is much more powerful than you would think in shaping public opinion

the point i am making is that "conceptual opposites" is not a "well formed" category

you are welcome to wander in these desert wastes that millions have died in before and more millions will die later

what you write reads like american university literature speak

pompous and idiotic

marylin munroe, amplified female

no wonder she was so vulnerable and unliveable

i think that is what her appeal was, in effect an unusual genetic "magnification"

waiting for god

or an angel at least

i don't think i want a devil

but for any evidence of the supernatural

i would be grateful

so good versus bad is not a trifling cypher

and living not just the turning wheels of dispassion

however

this is the perspective

i best relate to

thumb arthritis  exercises

huh, the japanese WW2 greater east asia co-prosperity sphere had its origins in "the  empresa  de china"

no wonder the ming dynasty was so hostile to foreign influence !

the tambopata river of the eponymous  national reserve  in the peruvian amazon

the lens was worth the money

“ The ripening of bell peppers involves  the breakdown of chlorophyll  and the accumulation of carotenoids, including provitamin A

This transformation is not just visual   —   it marks a metabolic shift from energy production via photosynthesis to antioxidant accumulation via pigment synthesis ”

i became interested in this question because when i buy vegetables i often will put them in the sun  (overcast and damp weather is best  —  i keep them wet but let them dry before putting away)  for a while to refresh their nutritional value since the green chlorophyll is still active and i wondered if this would also apply to colours, but from the above research i don’t think there is much or any  benefit

a tyrolian choir steps through  the registers

i wonder if before the anschluss we would have seen some jews in the choir ?

my experience is a lot of "self reporting" on health matters on the net is total misinformation or confusion

humans just do not think straight about health problems and solutions, so much you have to work out for yourself

NAC has a chelation-like action which can mobilise heavy metals in a negative way, ALA is a more extreme example of this, contrary to what its proponents declare, chelation is damaging

taurine would be the gentlest sulfur supplement

i would hope in this day and age, no-one is getting mercury amalgam fillings put in anymore

personally, with a few exceptions, i haven’t been at all impressed by the american liberal arts phds i have come across

hardly surprising when you can teach yourself better on the web than through conventional academia with their opinionated blinkering

there is nothing quite as strange

as getting old

the past i am

clashing so discordantly

with

the new

generations

who can’t grasp

the depth

of

the

dissimilarity

there is nothing quite as strange

as getting old

the past i am

clashing so discordantly

with

the new

the problem with  (real)  kefir is its a yeast/bacteria brew and makes polysaccharide structures within it, the uncontrolled nature of the yeast and bacteria make it extremely problematic

the supermarket kefir is much more like yogurt

"activa" contains bifidobacterium which i also don’t like

the view  from the top of mount everest

my interest in everest must come from sir edmund hillary’s house always being in view from the boarding school i was at, on a height just across a valley, we were taught he was a demigod !

100 miles of  sexual hypocrisy

i was wondering what the nuns were doing, but they are altering the dress position so it doesn’t outline the bum

its so off the wall i did try and identify if it was AI, but i don’t think it is, the same leg colouring is a bit suss, but they could be wearing skin toned stockings, yeah, i think its real

the language is vietnamese and vietnam has always had a strong catholic presence

newspaper

opinion pieces

on the net

new lows

of

idiocy

ed.  why newspapers and media outlets pay for these "low information" types to waste screen space is beyond me, they do nothing but propagandize their own sub-cultural values, in effect a very expensive political subsidy by the publisher

what doomed carthage was rome’s supremacy on the seas, in fact hannibal’s lauded crossing of the alps and victorious battle of cannae were strategically wrong minded, carthage would have been far better to put their resources into regaining their ability to defeat rome on the water and let the mediterranean be their "moat"

brilliant generals do make necessarily make good strategists, in fact to have both skills is rare, julius caesar is one of the few examples of that dual skill set and now i think about it, the mongol rulers in their heyday

charles the XIII of sweden was an almost unbeatable general, but totally unable/unwilling to see the overall geo-political picture and in that sense became a european pest

real life p.g. wodehouse

the rector of stiffkey

the light of multiplicity

is not a unitary orb

the light of multiplicity

not

a unitary orb

the sun

its fires

split into multiplicity

only through this

are they seen

julian of norwich

love is not a monolith of god

rather

what has no explanation

is the monolith

the fact of writing is it is a slowly developing skill over a lifetime

a face seen

in the crowd of memories

one

of

a

few

julian of norwich

love itself  is the meaning

we rise and fall

initially in life

and then finally in death

cycles in cycles

but then

when all spins apart

we

rest

Longer wavelengths in sunlight pass through the human body and have a systemic impact which  improves vision

video

i have a wood heater that needs constant refilling and stoking, so i am exposed to a lot of these longer wavelengths and i swear my vision has been getting better, clearer, a better sense of space, improved contrast and colour and good long distance

i am not suggesting you look directly into fires and infrared can damage the cornea, retina and lens, remember, sight is precious, so be ultra cautious and i would include attention to eyelids as part of that caution

if i have a migraine, i find the heat from the transparent ceramic window  (they are not glass !)  helpful on my face and use a pair of dark tanning goggles to provide eye protection

same to dry hair after washing it

photobiomodulation  is a coming thing

so many

explanations

without

substance

now

being

the

norm

on

the

net

so many

explanations

without

substance

now

being

the

norm

there’s a lot of freedom in being a committed tee-totaller, it gives an ironic disposition as you watch others destroy their brain cells and contribute to their early dementia and for what ?

the so called pleasures of inebriation ?

what sort of a world is this ?

life never looks the same, i can tell you : o )

hilarious, one of those rare occasions when a camera was wished for, i was driving to town and in a paddock close to a bridge over a river was a resting brown nanny goat with a big black stripe along the spine, peacefully chewing its cud surrounded in a complete circle by about 28 "little egrets" glaringly white in the sun and even one standing on the nanny’s back

i have always been prejudiced against airbags, but they  do work

AI knows about AI

chat gpt on "diffusion models"

“ Diffusion models are a type of generative AI model that creates new data samples by learning to reverse a process that gradually adds noise to an initial data point.  They work by first progressively adding Gaussian noise to training data, effectively destroying the original data structure.  Then, they learn to reverse this process, gradually denoising a starting point  (often pure noise)  to generate new, high-quality data samples ”

in other words its modelling the noise so it can improve the signal to noise ratio, there’s nothing new about this except its application to neural networks

why the monarchy is essential to the functioning of the political system you could roughly call "the english constitutional monarchy" is because you need to provide an ongoing emotional connection to the government which by its nature, in a personal sense is transitory

what it prevents is the other extreme which is "presidents for life" and the disasters that entail

the english system neatly solves what you see in places like russia, belarus or china ,  an entrenched power clique that acts only in its own and not the countries best interests

imo russia becoming a constitutional monarchy was a possibility after the break up of the soviet union, unfortunately the closest living romanovs were on the verge of being what you would call "disturbed"

yeltsin i think was moving a bit in that direction, but of course his alcoholism and health problems doomed russia to putin

“ Anyways, I’ve lived largely in vain and wasted almost 40 years. What does it mean not to ? ”

are these terms and even the base conceptualisation meaning anything at all ?

vocal music sung by  ekaterina shelehova

"ordinary mind" itself is an artificiality/cliché

a phrase to hate

“ out of an abundance of caution ”

i think it means "we might now do something we should have done in the first place"

why it jars as a phrase is the contradiction between abundance and caution, the nature of caution precludes there being an abundance of it, at least if it is to remain functional

the passions of bonding

something needs to be built

before it falls apart

what worked for my acne was 40% hydrogen peroxide, just be cautious, only do small areas and keep the vapour away from the eyes  (this applies to iodine tincture as well)

wipe down the area with alcohol first, or even put iodine tincture on the day or a couple of days before the HP

just remember these are poisons and hydrogen peroxide looks like sparkling water

word games

nets of meaning

webs

that catch

the unwary

galaxies of association

then

more galaxies

then

universes

and

it

still

doesn’t

stop

women

what they feel

will happen

will

happen

henry miller on not getting  too far ahead  of yourself

los angeles now has areas that are like something out of  mad max

i was just thinking how different it was for the poet  charles bukowski  back in the 1970s/80s when he lived the life of a genial drunk there

besotted

be  —  a  —  sot

anne sexton

a man could not be that type of insane

that drag me down everything ruinous with me

and then

to end it all

on

such

a

cold

plate

i think a lot of accidents from a height or speed occur because the equation for kinetic energy is not understood, a doubling of the height or speed is four times the energy, not twice

kinetic energy (joules)   =   ½ the mass times the velocity squared

in zen you get a lot of "stories" where a monk asks a "master" a question and the master gives at the least a highly ambiguous or apparently nonsensical answer and i think, philosophically this translates to saying the question is not "well formed"

the stumbling block of philological loss in these recitations however makes them doomed to problems of formation both in answers and questions

but this is religion all over, this sort of inconsequential informational nightmare carried down through the ages as though it means something, you get it in state propaganda as well as various cultural absurdities

what ceases

does it cease ?

we cease

what arises

did it ask to arise ?

and

cease

this ceaseless ariseless churning

we

have

no

voice

in

ed. cease/ ceaseless arise/ ariseless can be permuted to create different versions of the "poem", and other words too, so in turing terms it doesn’t halt semantically though the combinations are finite, it is in effect, computationally infinite

what ceases

does it cease ?

we cease

what arises

did it ask to arise ?

and

cease

this ceaseless arising churning

we

have

no

voice

in

the web

unhinged

so many spiels of entirely unreal speculation

recent research is showing that the adult brain still can create neurons  (neurogenesis)  and this facility varies widely from individual to individual and explains why people differ so greatly in their ability to recover from strokes or learn and integrate new material

i am sure you have met people who are as rigid as inscribed headstones and others who conversely can adapt and move intellectually with what you are saying, these differences at their core have this physiological basis

roger penrose still going strong at 93 is a positive, indeed, somewhat unbelievable example of this

interestingly, those with higher levels of neurogenesis may be more susceptible to epilepsy

we must know, we will know

the above quote is by the famous mathematician, david hilbert who greatly contributed to the formalization of mathematics

my reply

i don’t know and never will

i think the problems with the mRNA covid vaccines masking cancer in the body from our own immune systems is not trivial, an ex-neighbour of mine now has terminal bone cancer from many years of being on cortisol (an immunosuppressive), a known problem with the drug, so the body’s own cancer detection and elimination is an important mechanism in our remaining "cancer-free"

you see media reports of very significant increase in cancer rates, but not a word of a portion of that due to the mRNA vaccines

its not just dictatorships that manipulate public opinion through "misinformation", but subcultures in any society

there's nothing like watching a soap or two from a country to understand it, china, turkey and south korea, surprisingly, south korea is the most terrifying with its level of violence, but knowing something about the  imjin wars , perhaps with that history its not so surprising

this of course  is fiction ,  but there is a reality behind it, the most famous samurai, miyamoto mushasi, didn’t actually fight with a sword, but used a wooden staff and killed his opponents by hitting them on the head, a staff was what he trained with as a child

winter

with its yellow light and long shadows

that frighten me

for i think

that is how we go

the shadows enlargen

and eventually

become

all

the great way

is difficult

the usual exponential hyperbole

when

it

is

nothing

at

all

ed.  the first two lines are an inversion of the opening of the "xinxin ming"

dried flowers

still in the vase

once a living bouquet

two seasons ago

dried flowers

still in the vase

once a living bouquet

a season ago

similar and dissimilar

the plot of life

has its holes and traps

which we know

when the smooth synchronicity

is disrupted

in the end

dissimilar wins

what is unlike

fractures

and we

along

with

it

the real and unreal

we prefer the latter

to the detriment of the former

ease to work

its not wrong

just leads to problems

i don’t say

the real

is

right

either

“ Finally, because dialog ”

you mean unsubstantiated opinionated monologue !