Abby Martin on The Future of The Empire Files & Social Media Censorship

I love this righteous and eminently true-speaking young lady, and believe what she says (except her quite wrong, I believe, negative opinions about the Russian re-annexation of the Crimea): especially her visible and audible disdain for Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), who is a creepy, incredibly shallow, over-funded neo-con twat, if you ask me.

Venezia 75% sommersa

Shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu

Fucking wonderful.  There aren't enough stars for this sublime true story and all its manifold historical and psychological (Leyasu Tokugawa being, among other things, gay) implications and consequences. Exquisitely high production values, stunning historicity. Bravo!

Well, having consulted with my vascular surgeon,

I understand that what's making it so painful for me to walk is, simply, diabetic neuropathy--for which the only palliative (and possible cure) is THC.  Now to get my PCP on board.

Truth to tell...

In a way that nobody understands--so it's safe for me to say so--I am Confucius.

Only it's no longer the music of the Shang Dynasty that I think we ought to imbue ourselves with and play and listen to in behavior-modifying rituals, but, in general, the music of Western European and American Civilization, from about the thirteenth ('Sumer is a-cumin in') century, through the nineteenth century, maybe as far as Aaron Copland--but pretty much as prescribed

by Johann Joseph Fux.

And it's not parents and the Emperor that I think we ought to be especially mindful and respectful of, but children and animals.

5 Things I Wish I Knew Before Going Into Massage Therapy

You mean, of course,  5 things you wish you had known.  Silly of you, but not, alas, uncommon.

Jonathan Legg does foot reflexology! Road Less Traveled Season 2 with Jo...

Is this bullshit, or, if you will, horseshit, quackery still with us? What stupid, stupid, stupid nonsense.

Bernie Sanders, speechifying today, called el Trumpo, repeatedly, "a pathological liar"--

To which all anyone can think to reply is: ¿And your point is?

Talking with Phil tonight...

He, being married (to a very nice French woman, as it happens, whom I have had long conversations with, and whom I like), almost can't bear to hear me say, "Rape is no big deal unless it causes physical harm and injury to the victim." But we agree that the confirmation of Kavanaugh is an unmitigated disaster.

Abortion

is an unpleasant subject about which I do not like much to think, but it keeps being brought up to me, and, for what my thoughts on the subject are worth, I'd like to set them down: In the first place, I believe that life begins with conception  (which explains, I think, the bitter and poignant grief that women feel when they miscarry).  Secondly, whenever and however conception occurs (but, let us say, hopefully before the second trimester), women have absolute right, as over their own bodies, to abort, or to bear to term, the fruit of their womb. After the second trimester, the right of the nearly conscious foetus to exist probably ought to be held pre-eminent.  Adequate and complete care, nurture and education ought to be provided by the state to infants and children through the agency of  their parents and godparents, or, in default of these where these are not found, through agencies and institutions of the state.

And the Answer to the latest Accusation of Rape, brought against Cristiano Ronaldo:

Even greedy sluts who are trying to get raped can scarcely be raped with a turkey baster--speaking of the fact that Ronaldo's only heretofore known form of sexual contact with women has been gestational surrogacy.

Goodness, how these proto-Existentialists lose themselves in vagaries of Essence, Ens and Ontology--

My private joke with myself is that, in making a word/thing of something-behind (substantive-in) the random flickers on the cave wall of phenomena, our earnest Indo-European grammarians have mistaken Oncology for Ontology.  It's not a nice joke.  The point is that what's really wrong with Occidental civilization is the utter failure of its philosophers and thinkers to understand themselves or the species that they so wrongly reflectingly stand apart from.

Which is why lately I've been immersing myself in the floating world of Ihara Saikaku, and other non-judgemental but scrupulously clean neo-Confucianist/Buddhist/Shintoists. I've concluded that the great environmental boost-up for Japanese sensibilities and spiritual refinement (which makes the Japanese approximately as far ahead of the rest of humanity, as we Homo Sapiens Sapiens are of Homo Neanderthalis) is/has ever been their volcanic hot springs.  Seriously.  Getting clean, staying clean makes you smart. And I would say, now that I think about it, that that's why Horace, and Catullus, and Ovid and Virgil are such wonderful poets: bathing four hours a day.

Let's just say, about Being, and about Being in the World, and Being in Time (with a nod to George Pattison):

Twaddle.  There is no proof that the Being which you think so big a deal--however you qualify it--is anything but an elementary, and perfectly silly, mistaking of linguistic peculiarities and oddities of grammar for material (In-the-Universe) realities.  Like, for example, "God."  And that's really all (except for the obscure pleasure you take in mystifying yourself) there is to it. . . Apart from the pernicious habit that you seem to have acquired from St. Thomas Aquinas of making a predicate of existence.