Zak Lylak

A single gut bacterium can produce another one within minutes to hours, depending on the strain, and the conditions. For the sake of argument, let’s call it an hour. In the complex universe of the gut, there are approximately 100 trillion bacterial cells. These cells don’t just hang around doing nothing. They do everything that a human does. Eat, defecate, perform metabolic work, attack, defend, and reproduce. Gut bacteria outnumber the human cells in your body by around 3 to 1. Their influence extends throughout your being because they modulate the central nervous system via the gut-brain axis by controlling levels of neurotransmitters such as serotonin, tryptophan, dopamine, GABA, and glutamate.

The cult of positive thinking has initiated an inquisition. A finger-pointing denialism, forged in delusion. The general idea is that by ‘believing’ you are a victim, you make yourself one, and your life will not improve as a result. Spurious slurs are bandied around by right-wing zealots, self-appointed life coaches, and the sort of tarot reader who likes to deviate from the cards and rant about the ‘law’ of attraction. They tell you that if your life isn’t going well, it must be your ‘victim-mentality’.

People have got their knickers in a right twist over AI. I’ll admit that I used to be one of them. However, something artificed isn’t necessarily fake, in the sense of not ‘real’ (whatever that means). Artificial means created by design, rather than the result of a random smushing of bits of star dust, followed by billions of years of appalling slime blobs eating each other alive, before growing limbs and continuing along the same vengeful vein. That’s right, you’re accidental intelligence. It’s one of the reasons the world is so fucked up. People have a program driving their behaviour, but they don’t understand it, or they won’t accept it. Instead, they invent all manner of magical nonsense, enabling the subconscious to withhold what it knows.

Globally, the legal status of BDSM is mixed. In some countries, it is against moral laws and can lead to lengthy bondage in prison or brutally sadistic physical admonishment. Other nations invoke standard laws designed to protect bodily autonomy to discipline and punish consenting practitioners. For more liberal cultures, consent will always be key to legality. Consent can only be given by legal adults, and must be ‘informed’. In other words, you must know exactly what it is you are consenting to.

Love’s origins, as a concept, are lost in the murky depths of prehistory. Scientifically, it’s a phenomenon of attraction, designed to serve the expansion of the species. In its most immediate form, through sexual reproduction. However, it can also serve to foster genetic continuance beyond the individual. So, it’s basically an evolutionary function. A core program to drive the cold, nihilistic narcissism of life, without which, there would be no suffering.

Suffering isn’t a thing, it’s a word. The concept attached to the squiggly lines we write, or the noise we make when we say, ‘suffering’, signifies experiences we desire to avoid. That aversion is fundamental in distinguishing suffering from perceptions that could give rise to it, such as pain, humiliation, and isolation.

The desire to end one’s own life is almost always portrayed as pathological. That is, as a deviant way of being that is abnormal and unhealthy. But should we really take the opposite view? After all, it isn’t difficult to understand, on a rational basis, that life itself is what brings about the dis-ease.

Most people understand procreation to be a right. A sacrosanct act that anybody and everybody has full entitlement to perform. Legally, it is usually the case, but that doesn’t make it moral. People become quite twitchy and irrational when this is pointed out. But it’s perfectly sound to question whether people should have the right to cast a new life into the world without the consent of the being they’re creating.

Biblical Jesus wasn’t meek. That’s why he was executed, slowly and painfully, at the behest of the Jewish establishment. He was also child free. As any good bible reader knows, the material realm, the Earth, is the domain of Satan. Sure, Genesis tells us that ‘God’ made the world, or was it ‘The Lord’? Here, in the ambiguity, one can find the truth. Satan is the deceiver. Have no doubt that the Lord of Evil would lay claim to be God, try to make men obedient and dumb, and would impel the constant production of new humans to torture. It makes a lot of sense to be like Jesus and not bring new people here. So what was he talking about when he said the meek would inherit the dirt?

The pernicious lie, that life is good, obscures debate about living and dying. It’s not surprising. Organisms have evolved over billions of years. In conscious entities, the drive to continue the banal circus would soon lose momentum without magical thinking. Only those capable of lying to themselves survive. But survival is a biological imperative, not a moral one.

Most are familiar with some version of the Eden story. Everything was glorious harmony, then an entity came along, tempting oblivious, early humans to learn. They took the bait, and everything went to shit. However, a more insidious truth is hidden in the collective scribblings of Abrahamic metaphysics, and many other revered texts. (Note: I often decapitalize the names of deities, and play with words and grammar.)

Christmas. Or, as they say in Davos, ShopEnMass. The time when you can relieve yourself of as much money as possible to help line the pockets of the super rich. No criticism, it’s perfectly moral to give to the needy greedy. However, there is something truly demonic about the whole charade.

Originally, and for almost all existence, there was no such thing as work. People lived. They did what they needed to, and then they hung out together. The average day for a hunter-gatherer would involve a few hours of wandering about with friends and family, picking berries, and stabbing small animals to death. Maybe they’d light a fire later, a sort of communal barbecue. Fights would break out, to sort out the primate hierarchy. They’re all things people do for leisure now. For happiness, or its simulation. At some point, someone decided hunter-gathering just wasn’t good enough. They wanted more, and they wanted it from other people.

Fear not, fluffy bunnies, and enjoy the present moment. If anything’s true, it’s this: It gets a little worse before it gets a lot worse. That is, it gets hot before it burns. You choke before you asphyxiate. You fall before you hit the ground. And so it is with humankind. Despite the popular madness, that foolish perception, that ‘things’ are getting better, they aren’t. Okay, for some people they are, temporarily, and at the expense of others. Whatever your situation, on the whole, the fires of hell have turned up several notches since we first started drinking bovine lactate all those millennia ago. Disagree? I’ve got proof. (Info sources at the foot of the page.)

Margaret Thatcher. She who led the UK through tumultuous political strife and economic upheaval. The darling of neoliberal capitalism. Incapable of changing her mind, no matter how much damage she did. Her steely, patriarchal resolve pushing unemployment rates higher than the 1930s great depression (caused by unrestrained capitalism). A loud-mouthed, whisky-swilling anti-communist with an extremist ideology. A dark seed to plant in the ashes of Britain's immolated heart. A fast-growing, invasive, utilitarian vacuum. An insatiable infant called growth. Its gaping, discorporate mouth demanding to be fed for all eternity. But what if her outward hatred served to mask a secret ambition? What if she was a red wolf in a blue wolf's clothing? Untenable? Forget your cultivated, propagandized perception for a moment; let's have a look at the evidence.