the WORD which is unexamined is not worth READING

the WORD which is unexamined is not worth READING

I never cease to be totally astonished by the huge amount of absolute bullshit that goes on in the world especially on the internet and particularly on sites like Facebook.

Does anyone, and I mean ANYONE ever ever stop to think? I mean just to fucking think.

Many of the statements posted on there at times are mind-boggingly stupid and UTTER BULLSHIT.

There is no proof, evidence or remote rationality to back up the shit that comes out of some 'mouths' sometimes.

Life and the Universe having a will, being entities and other bullshit defying all the laws of randomness.

Statements impossible to prove or to back up are accepted as "gospel" truth and swallowed hook, line, and sinker.

Too many examples to quote but I should start to make a collection.

Bottom line is QUESTION EVERYTHING and I mean EVERYTHING. It is your given right and duty even.

Do not accept any statement at face value, no matter how wise or 'cute' it sounds at first.

Question MOTIVES and PROFITS, and especially PROVENANCE. 

 
WHO said it and WHY!

WHO? WHY? WHEN? WHAT? WHERE and HOW?

Here is an example often overlooked.

W5 is a custom marketing research practice. We focus on answering who, what, when, where and why people relate to products, services, and brands.

I mean FOR FUCK SAKE why oh why does everything HAS to be about money and capitalism and materialism.

Countries COUNTING the COST of illness and suicide in FUCKING DOLLAR$ $IGN$?

At other times it is a serious segment on local so-called news commentated by someone who PROFITS from the situation? Why bother? I mean why don’t you just tell us you are a whore to start with? I’ll tell you why because whores are much more honest than most of these vicious snakes anyway.

I wish I could bring thousands more of example but it would defeat the purpose.

The purpose is that YOU have to think for yourself. 

YOU have to question EVERYTHING for YOUR OWN SELF.

Without turning in some fucked up paranoid conspiracy theorist do not take ANYTHING at face value and always always follow the money trail.

Money talks and BULLSHIT walks.  Profits are most of the time synonymous with lies. 

Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.

·         The secret of great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, for it was properly done.

·         A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime."

Also BEWARE of numbers and statistics.

To throw a number like YOKO just did is devious and deceiving.

To say that

Over 1,057,000 people have been killed by guns in the USA since John Lennon was shot and killed on 8 Dec 1980. An average of 31,537 people are killed by guns in the USA every year. We are turning this beautiful country into a War Zone. Together, let's bring back America, the green land of Peace.

The death of a loved one is a hollowing experience. 

Is highly deceptive and LEADS the average person to ASSUME that most of these deaths are homicides like John Lennon was.

Some other numbers deny these by the way leaving 17,500 to 23,000 yearly deaths to ‘explain’.

But the propagandist, publicity hungry and greedy front person doesn’t really bother with explaining and yes the death of a loved one is a hollowing experience but it certainly does not leave one with an unbiased and balanced point of view.  

One only has to stand in a court of law to witness this fact.

I hope you burn in hell and so on when thousands of others have been killed every day, some children by your own government, and you don’t give a single flying fuck about them now do you?

Justice for All?

Yeah right!

Relatives wasting their lives away making sure that their hatred is propagated and that their criminal who killed their relatives remains behind bars and never get parole.  Sour and ruined Tate sister comes to mind here.

My Justice is no justice at all.

Naming too many examples would be offending to some but here is one anyway.

“Sometimes you just have to stop worrying, wondering & doubting. Have faith that things will work out, maybe not how you planned, but just how they’re meant to be.”

FOR FUCK SAKE AGAIN! What the fuck is all this and what the fuck do you think it “MEANS” altogether. Cheap words like faith and “meant to be” are delusionary when life is nothing but randomness.  A “snake eyes” is not anymore meant to be than a seven really or in fact maybe a seven is MORE “meant to be” than a snake eyes from a probability’s point of view and always remember that the house ALWAYS win and there is a perfectly good rational and mathematical reason for that.

It is all bullshit and a “mean nothing saying” posted by the same people who read the National Enquirer, the Daily Mail, forward chain letters, stand at Walmarts and watch soap ops all day while reading other trashy magazines.

It is one of the ‘tragedies’ of this Facebook we love to hate. Mass numbing par excellence.

I have mentioned other examples in the past, like Cherie Carter-Scott and others.

Why is it so hard to think and question everything I will never know but to me it seems the only logical way in this tortuous world  which brings me back to another tortuous being and saying:  Max Ehrman’s Desiderata.

Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. 

I’d phrase this one a bit differently changing business for daily (again not everything is about money)

But some of the rest of his stuff, as attractive and cute and spiritual as it wants to sound at times, is ALSO Utter Bullshit.

 You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

Puhlease!  Child of the universe!?!?!?!? RIGHT????? Come ONNN!

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Says Who? By what proof? What Evidence? How do YOU know?
What is your Epistemological Substantiation on this?
And furthermore and subsequently where the fuck did you fish that one?
What hat did it come from?

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, 

Here we go again, the foundation of every Anonymous group in THE WORLD.
Include more Gagging, Spitting & Coughing here.

The so devious wording that does NOT ALLOW you  NOT to have a god and not conceive one. What trashy evil lure that was.  What crap that is still prevailing in so many thoughts today. Devious! Devious! Devious! What a Diabolical Trap that one is, and a clever one I might add.

Hard to think BEYOND this one innit?
It makes it almost embarrassing to even QUESTION it.

Read at all cost but THINK and QUESTION every single letter at all times.

Walt Whitman seems to have been the last apostle of good sense at times.

 “Re-examine all that you have been told... dismiss that which insults your soul.”

Walt Whitman

False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.
~ Socrates

 and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living —(that you are still less likely to believe.)

~ Socrates

and that the WORD which is unexamined is not worth READING

~ Moi 

Epictetus Fullofshitus

I am so sick and tired of the god thing. 

I miss the ‘olden days’.

This is gonna be décousu I can tell!

First the god thing I guess.

Let’s start with Epictetus now.  I was kind of boiling in the bathtub where I was presumably sitting in in order to RELAX reading the golden sayings of Epictetus part of a much broader liberal education apparently called the Harvard Classics, assembled by a dénommé  Charles W. Eliot in 1909.

Well maybe in 1909 you could get a liberal education but I doubt one can get one these days because in 1909 it was a different world, a world with no television and no internet.  I read of people like Dickens and Mark Twain who have read Thomas Carlyle’s long (and probably very tedious) French Revolution not ONCE but MANY times over and over.   

Also back then many a scholar and polymath were well-versed into every single old Latin and Greek writing from Ovid to Homer, from Cicero to Plato, from Horace to Sophocles, Virgil to Aristotle.

Anyway back to Epictetus now the father of so-called Stoics.  Here is one thing I said yesterday about him:

I only have 2 words 

for someone who wants me to be 

a better slave, 

a better soldier:

FUCK YOU!

Assumptions like “so-called non-existent gods know better” piss me off.  Plus the deceiving translation of Zeus into God is to say the least misleading. 

God, Yahweh, Allah, and Zeus are all different MYTHS, different LIES, with different attributes and qualities.

Add on his all-knowing, all –present daimons here and we have a nice mixture of Greek and Christian mythological mash.  There is no such thing in the bible as the notion that each one of us has a guardian angel but it is a clear Greek mythological teaching that we all have a personal daimon, a spirit to look over us.

Nevertheless he has placed by every man a guardian, every man’s Demon, to whom he has committed the care of the man, a guardian who never sleeps, is never deceived. For to what better and more careful guardian could He have entrusted each of us? When, then, you have shut the doors and made darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone, for you are not; but God is within, and your Demon is within, and what need have they of light to see what you are doing?
Epictetus Discourses Chapter 14

So when I hear of how a proud US G.I. survived years of horrors in horrific Vietnam camps (insert visions of Deer Hunter here) I am not overly impressed to begin with since the horrors were somewhat self-inflicted, choosing a way of life I totally oppose.

And now again we have so-called science, psychology, fornicating with mythologies one more time where Epictetus is one of the champions of Albert Ellis and his therapy style.  

Some of you will still remember my rant on Marsha M. Linehan fornicating with Buddhism’s Mindfulness.
DBT, REBT and all the other bastards BT one can think of. Let’s not forget CBT now where your mind is apparently a computer: garbage in, garbage out.

If one tries to eliminate all possible myths and lies out of his life one is left with nearly nothing and utterly isolated from so-called normal society. I mean try so find some form of help somewhere that is not FORCING you to

Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be

Why Oh Why Can’t I conceive it/him/her to be non-existent now?

I mean it would be impossible to communicate without using some sort of mythological metaphors now like this is hell or it is a Sisyphean task etc.  It is a very concise way of communicating, much shorter than to explain the whole story of Sisyphus before using the expression anyway.

I do understand some Stoics principles and I do yearn for some stoicism at times the high and lows of my epicurean life get a little hard on the system at times, like going ballistic over dogs barking and such other disturbances in the force.  But the whole base of it is ruined now, totally ruined, because if the reason for acceptance is in order to properly

worshit some godhole 

somewhere, 

especially when one can fill the fucking hole 

with whatever he/she 

wants it, 

conceives it 

to be 

well it is all BULLSHIT then.

The way I see it I guess is Stoic equals flatline, Epicurian equals high mountains and low valleys of passions, burnings. 

What is moderation called then?

Know so much yet know so little

This has been my nature, my destiny, my curse, for as long as I can remember.

I always envy well-read people and always want to know more yet all those yearnings always remain unfulfilled.

Example: a friend posts a book on Bookface.  I know both authors by name, well kind of but could not tell you anything at all about them.  Can’t even remember the second bloke’s name without looking it up, Neil Gaiman, that’s it I know I have read his name lately and been interested in his stuff, can’t remember what or why. The other is the well-known, well well-known to OTHERS, Terry Pratchett.

And I read some commentary where someone says you can determine who writes what in that book easily by the author style.  Yeah I wish. What he actually wrote was:  There is no question as to the recognizability of both Gaiman's and Pratchett's respective styles here, but neither seems to add anything to the other. One of Gaiman's weaknesses is surely his general lack of humor. 

And I start the book and it says:

dedicating this book to the memory of G. K. Chesterton

A man who knew what was going on.

And there you go I feel even more ignorant for not only don’t I know what is going on I have no clue of what Chesterton ever said or wrote or even when he said it.

And here comes that eternal dilemma again.  I was thinking yesterday of asking my doctor for some Ritalin as I am still looking for that magic pill that will MAKE ME read. 

I want to read, I want to know but somewhere somehow that deep want and need has been broken and is rarely ever ‘repaired’.

There is always this part of me the “who I wish I was” from my old ‘Trinitarian’ view that everyone has three ‘me’, three ‘you’, three ‘ego’.

·         Who I think I am

·         Who I really am

·         Who I wish I was

Well the “who I wish I was” has a reading list somewhere let’s see

All the classic Greeks and Latin: Plato and Virgil and so much more
And the purist part of this “who I wish I was” ALSO WISHES he could read them in their original languages.

Now after that the list gets confused but I envy people like Stephen Fry and Rowan Willams.

Williams speaks or reads 11 languages: English, Welsh, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Biblical Hebrew, Syriac, Latin and both Ancient (koine) and Modern Greek.He learnt Russian in order to be able to read the works of Dostoyevsky in the original.

Dostoyevsky is certainly on that list even though as of today I haven’t read a single book of his.  I am still slowly determining in my mind if I ‘would” read him in French or in English.

So in my short time left on this planet I would like to think that my time would be well spent away in a book, in many books somewhere. 

Why? Well there is no why.  Just so I feel good one moment at a time until I feel nothing at all anymore which happens to all of us.  Just so I get transformed in a good way and maybe transform someone else.

One once said that selling is a transfer of enthusiasm and one is always selling something. So in my best non-capitalist way, I would love to sell ideas or a taste for ideas anyway: ideas that keep going for eons.  Mine and others mixed all together as I have said often that no one is his own man/woman but we are all the additions of billions of particles we picked up here and there.

One of the main procrastinating issues on this subject also would be the question of what is exactly a “profitable” list.  I have expressed earlier also that much reading is not only a “weariness of the flesh” it can also be quite a “vexation to the spirit” both expression of course (glanées) gleaned from two well-known readings.

O well all that reminded me of much wisdom in the Desiderata and also reminds me that even if it is not expanding my repertoire or list, rereading old proven wisdom or pleasure is also well errrrr pleasurable for lack of other word. J

As I was saying earlier selling is a transfer of enthusiasm so before I attempt any Dosto I should try finishing Mon oncle Benjamin from Claude Tillier, apparently a little unknown pearl read and reread by Georges Brassens, a favourite “author” of mind even if you don’t exactly read his clever words, you listen to them with affection and awe.  One thing I should be thankful for here is that I am able to read the original in two languages instead of whining about not being able to read Greek or Latin or Russian.

Speaking of capitalism one of the beauty of modern times is that once copyrights are over one does not have to pay a cent to some greedy publisher to read thousands of good old books now thanks to the Gutenberg project and many others.

One needs a tiny eBook reader a tiny tiny microchip and maybe a desert island with a “tiny” solar panel for recharging LOL and one could lie in a hammock and read for a lifetime or two.

As a matter of fact if one wants to ‘remember what peace there may be in silence’  one might NEED to move to a desert island and certainly not in any suburbs with a gazillion barking dogs.  J

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.
Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.
Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery.
But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals;
and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.
Especially, do not feign affection.
Neither be critical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.
Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings.
Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.