this week i

visited the aquatic gardens during a windy winter.  bridges to nowhere

ate newton street last supper

fail.ed

clapped cecilia accompanying chapati chef

consider the power of love by huey lewis and the news to be an exceptional song held back by its sterile genre

wonder what the social life is like for foreign actors working in j.a.v.  the loneliest expat circle of them all

suppose i'm still amazed this garbage is the president.  this is not normal.  pence voted for carter.  good material though

harriet tubman doing wakanda forever on a visa card

not on my month, bro

who were ya'll praying to?  the ghost of blackface past?

black people can't get the coronavirus

charred the damn steak.  upstairs to apologize for the fire alarm going off, he was snoring.  next evening found a mound of pistachio shells


read..

(1) funding the apocalypse

humans have released more carbon dioxide since hansen's congressional testimony than in all of history before

a million syrian refugees to europe (driven in part by the deep drought that helped spark the civil war) and a million central american refugees to our southern border (driven in part by relentless drought in honduras and guatemala) have unhinged the politics of both continents



(2) the oppressive city

why cities only emerged some five millennia after the first crops and herds were domesticated


many crops - such as grains, potatoes, taro, and breadfruit - can support high human population densities.  but it was only in the grain-based societies that the world's first cities arose..grain is the perfect crop for taxation.  it is storable, allowing for the accumulation of wealth; it matures simultaneously and predictably and is impossible to hide before harvest, making the tax collector's job easy; and because grain is divisible, rulers can maximize their take, leaving the grower with only enough for bare subsistence.  compare that with a crop, like potatoes, that grows underground.  a portion of any root crop can easy escape the tax collector's notice, providing the grower with a measure of independence.  for a ruler, that can be dangerous: a well-fed and economically independent people are less likely to be induced to labor on monumental buildings, or indeed to accept any impositions from above

mesopotamian scribes used identical marks for laborers as they do for "state-controlled herds of domestic animals"


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