Joseph Rowntree Report Trust report on the Database State

Of 46 Gov't databases investigated, about a quarter are likely to be illegal under human rights or data protection laws.

Madness.

death and questions

Much of what I fear is really about death (or perhaps being old). Things are not as they were. I am frightened that the brightness will go from my eyes. I am scared that my wonder and my questions will go.

Like this? -

"I can tell you, then, that I am afraid of death. Not of what we imagine about death, for this fear is itself imaginary. Nor of my death whose date will be recorded in the civic registers of the state. But of that death I suffer every moment, of the death of that voice which, out of the depths of my childhood keeps asking , as yours does: "What am I?" and which everything within us and around us seems bent on stifling. When this voice does not speak - and it does not speak often! - I am an empty carcass, a restless cadaver. I am afraid that one day it will fall silent forever, or that it will wake up too late - as in your story of the flies: when you wake up, you're dead."

- Rene Daumal, Mount Analogue, 1981 (taken from http://www.gardendigest.com/death.htm) bold added by me.

There's a Leunig cartoon that says just the same thing.

How do I stop it? Love?

gangs develop primarily in two contexts -

....gangs develop primarily in two contexts - first, in the slum or ghetto where privacy as a counterpart of the manor can't be had and a reversion takes place to the wild state, with pack hunting and the patrolling of an actual physical patch of ground; and second, in the armed services, where the gang is dignified by being called a 'regiment' or some other hifilutin dirty word but here the reversion to the wild state is deliberately fostered by deprivation of privacy (barracks accommodation) and deprivation of property (you don't wear the clothes you chose and bought, you wear a uniform which belongs to the US!!!).

p.76 of John Bruner's Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

love letter

I used to feel like this

I started to bud like a March twig:
An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.
From stone to cloud, so I ascended.
Now I resemble a sort of god
Floating through the air in my soul-shift
Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

from Sylvia Plath's Love Letter

Temporary victory on clause 152

Clause 152 is likely to be removed. Need to watch out for a disguised return.

Such a lack of squirrels and trees.

after such a fall as this

After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling downstairs.
From a very special version of Alice in Wonderland