this week i

wonder if a baguette would fit into those poster session tube carriers, but specifically salvador dali's inventions of the monsters baguette.  in atlanta

 

ate at michelle's.  she prepared goat as it's meant to be.  beto said extended grace, yelled on speakerphone and tell that man don't touch my food

 

 

politely critiqued national academies recommendation 3.2 for its difficult calculation, 3.3 for available ma-pd premiums nearly always zero at appam

we assume people who consume more are better off
 
consumption provides the best measure of economic well-being
 
almost half of income that goes into the official poverty measure is imputed for nonresponse
 
there's actually no statistically significant difference in income underreporting in any age group under 65


 
we used a snowball sampling approach

the uninsured are misclassified as not poor in the spm


visited high museum, il baciccio (giovanni battista gaulli)'s abraham's sacrifice of isaac, ca. 1700 perhaps my favorite abraham's sacrifice of isaac.  giovanni battista tiepolo's roman matrons making offerings to juno, ca. 1745-1750 of course my favorite roman matrons making offerings to juno




copied cézanne with the distortion of a kindergarden game of telephone.  not attempted: elephant as motorcycle: the hells angels crossing the alps













crossed watershed for afghani dumplings and traffic disputes with the hugheses, michelle up in arms to miss anne schuchat at the apha megachurch

 



 
learned there's a word teledentistry.  poster sessions feel like antiques roadshow without oh shit i'm rich moments.  campus conferences >==~ hotels.  worldwide average life expectancy has increased by ten years in my lifetime.  atlanta arguably the largest metro area between new york and miami
 

read collected fictions by jorge luis borges, translated by andrew hurley.  a metaphysician, a creator of universes, fluent at clarifying reality, "why yes, i follow your tale, and yes indeed, the gods structured metaphysics [this way] for [these reasons]."  santiago is saint james, espinosa ("thorny")

the man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amusement in writing it; it is to be hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach its readers

now he could research the gentle ghost of roger charles

street brawls when a man would be as lost as if he'd drowned

the buffalo's huge babylonian face

he moved to kiôto, a city unparalleled throughout the empire for the color of its autumns..he consorted with prostitutes and poets, and with persons even worse

paradise was less concrete:
it is always night, and there are fountains of stone, and the happiness of that paradise is the special happiness of farewells, of renunciation, and of those who know that they are sleeping

he is now a servant to demons

instruments of war and music and surgery

mirrors and copulation are abominable, for they multiply the number of mankind

the impersonal verbs, modified by monosyllabic suffixes (or prefixes) functioning as adverbs.  for example, there is no noun that corresponds to our word "moon," but there is a verb which in english would be "to moonate" or "to enmoon."  "the moon rose above the river" is..upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned

a "lean and evil mob of moon-coloured hounds" emerges

a novus ordo seclorum, a necessary stage of history

i belong not to art but to the history of art

"great literature" is the commonest thing in the world

the universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.  in the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing.  from any hexagon one can see the floors above and below - one after another, endlessly.  the arrangement of the galleries is always the same: twenty bookshelves, five to each side, line four of the hexagon's six sides

i see that the compassionate hsi p'eng has undertaken to remedy my solitude.  you will no doubt wish to see the garden?

 [the title is "funes el memorioso"..the beauty of the spanish is that the entire long phrase is compressed into a single word, a single adjective, used in the original title as an epithet: funes the elephant-memoried.  (the reader can see that that translation won't do.)  the word "memorist" is perhaps the closest thing that common english yields up with out inventing a new word such as "memorious," which strikes the current translator as vaguely lewis carroll-esque, yet "memorist" has something vaguely show business about it, as though funes worked vaudeville or the carnival sideshows.  the french title of this story is the lovely eighteenth-century-sounding "funes ou la mémoire"; with a nod to jlb's great admirer john barth, i have chosen "funes, his memory"]

 cyrus, the king of persia, who could call all the soldiers in his armies by name; mithridates eupator, who meted out justice in the twenty-two languages of the kingdom over which he ruled

villa triste-le-roy

he completed his play; only a single epithet was left to be decided upon now.  he found it; the drop of water rolled down his cheek  he began a maddened cry, he shook his head, and the fourfold volley felled him

the crucifixion of god has not ended, because that which happened once in time is repeated endlessly in eternity.  judas, now, continues to hold out his hand for the silver, continues to kiss jesus' cheek, continues to scatter the pieces of silver in the temple, continues to knot the noose on the field of blood

man lives in time, in successiveness, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant

on both sides of the train, the city unraveled into suburbs; that sight, and later the sight of lawns and large country homes, led dahlmann to put aside his reading.  the truth is, dahlmann read very little; the lodestone mountain and the genie sworn to kill the man who released him from the bottle were, as anyone will admit, wondrous things, but not much more wondrous than this morning and the fact of being.  happiness distracted him from scheherazade and her superfluous miracles; dahlmann closed the book and allowed himself simply to live

monkeys deliberately do not speak, so that they will not be forced to work

the last night of 1894.  that night, the men of el suspiro eat fresh-butchered lamb and drink bellicose liquor.  somebody is infinitely strumming at a milonga that he has some difficulty playing..when the twelve strokes of the clock chime at last, he stands up like a man remembering an engagement..the woman tries to resist, but two men have taken her by her arms, and they throw her on top of otálora.  in tears, she kisses his face and his chest.  ulpiano suárez has pulled his gun

her eyes were that half-hearted blue that the english call gray

the most solemn of events are outside time

emma zunz's tone of voice was real, her shame was real, her hatred was real.  the outrage that had been done to her was real, as well; all that was false were the circumstances, the time, and one or two proper names

forty days must a kafila [caravan] travel before catching sight of its towers, and another forty, men say, before the kafila stands before them

these ships carried contraband, and if they were carrying outlawed ivories or liquors, why not the ghosts of dead men?

he gestured at them to wait, and he turned over and faced the wall, as though going back to sleep.  did he do that to awaken the pity of them men that killed him, or because it's easier to endure a terrifying event than to imagine it, wait for it endlessly - or (and this is perhaps the most likely possibility) so that his murderers would become a dream, as they had already been so many times, in that same place, at the same hour?

india is larger than the world

it was only out of concern that he might create an army of implacable and powerful enemies, he told me, that he did not fearlessly publish the poem

yawns a bored skeleton

then he was off on another tack, inveighing against the obsession for forewords, what he called "prologomania," an attitude that "had already been spoofed in the elegant preface to the quixote by the prince of wits himself"

an aleph is one of the points in space that contain all points.."it's mine, it's mine; i discovered it in my childhood, before i ever attended school"

"beatriz, beatriz elena, beatriz elena viterbo," i said.  "belovèd beatriz, beatriz lost forever - it's me, it's me, borges"

endless eyes, all very close, studying themselves in me as through a mirror

[argentines are "cadaver cultists" who honor their most revered national figures not on the date of their birth but of their death]

i set it in india so that its improbability might be bearable

as i sleep i am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly i realize that it's a dream.  at those moments, i often think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since i have unlimited power, i am going to bring forth a tiger

in a hallway i saw a sign with an arrow pointing the way, and i was struck by the thought that that inoffensive symbol had once been a thing of iron, an inexorable, mortal projectile that had penetrated the flesh of men and lions and clouded the sun of thermopylæ and bequeathed to harald sigurdson, for all time, six feet of english earth

police officers love to show off their lunfardo, like fourth graders

he's like greased lightning

it was the weapons, not the men, that fought.  they had lain sleeping, side by side, in a cabinet, until hands awoke them.  perhaps they stirred when they awoke; perhaps that was why uriarte's hand shook, and duncan's as well.  the two knew how to fight - the knives, i mean, not the men, who were merely their instruments - and they fought well that night.  they had sought each other for a long time, down the long roads of the province, and at last they had found each other; by that time their gauchos were dust

when you're approaching a house there's no reason to gallop

they fish with their hands.  they hide themselves when they eat, or they close their eyes; all else, they do in plain sight of all, like the cynic school of philosophers.  they devour the raw flesh of their witch doctors and kings in order to assimilate their virtue to themselves.  i upbraided them for that custom; they touched their bellies and their mouths, perhaps to indicate that dead men are food as well, or perhaps - but this is no doubt too subtle - to try to make me see that everything we eat becomes, in time, human flesh

they count on their fingers thus: one, two, three, four, many; infinity begins at the thumb

yes.  when you reach my age, you'll have almost totally lost your eyesight.  you'll be able to see the color yellow, and light and shadow.  but don't worry.  gradual blindness is not tragic.  it's like the slowly growing darkness of a summer evening

curiosity got the better of fear, and i did not close my eyes

in time, one inevitably comes to resemble one's enemies

idiarte borda took a few steps, fell forward to the ground, and said very clearly, "i've been killed"

i considered fire, but i feared that the burning of an infinite book might be similarly infinite, and suffocate the planet in smoke

"it is, i am sure, my last dream," he gestured toward the empty bottle on the marble nightstand.  "you, however, shall have much to dream, before you come to this night.  what date is it for you?"

a man's fist can counterfeit a tiger's prints

english has (to its credit) two registers - the germanic and the latinate

the wish of all things, spinoza says, is to continue to be what they are


11/30

this week i

landed in best city west of the mississippi.  your fave country delicious, scrumptious, outstanding, just one flaw: it's not mexicodead bread across panaderias, jerry garcia would've loved these desfiles, reckoning my album, my permanent social media status: dodgin' lions and wastin' time.  or maybe move fast and kintsugi things? ✨ orwell, hemingway both wrote uno libro spanish civil war, but unlike my unadorned self afaik neither declined neon-roped ossuary double-dutch amid sidewalk jams and popup makeup stands and an immortal middle-aged woman with flashing bunny ears roller skates past me into 7-eleven to buy kindest bueno, this día sure is.  i am saddest at mao for el gran salto adelante but i am angriest at mao for la revolucion cultural.  elevator eight button as sideways infinity sign indicates how many tacos i consume seated by afuera thoroughfare to watch costumed cdmx conga toward zocalo, zenithed by behemoth inflated eight foot beige t-rex (sans saxophone to shred) instead vested mourning black & white skelosaur bones bowed toward extinction's throne we and our contemporaries'll share and inshallah our descendants'll correspondingly celebrate.  benditos y'all y especially the horseman uno mesa away as i count to diez (mississippi) he shakes salt into pozole. the cancion del peyote:

las flores azules
las flores azules
que estan
atras de las montanas
que estan hablando
que estan hablando
ustedes
que dicen saberlo todo
interpretenlas
interpretenlas



read a moveable feast by ernest hemingway

i've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if i never see you again, i thought.  you belong to me and all paris belongs to me and i belong to this notebook and this pencil

good and severe discipline

when i was writing, it was necessary for me to read after i had written.  if you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing that you were writing before you could go on with it the next day.  it was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved

"huxley is a dead man," miss stein said.  "why do you want to read a dead man?  can't you see he is dead?"

if you brought up joyce twice, you would not be invited back

"i don't know, tatie.  there are so many sorts of hunger.  in the spring there are more.  but that's gone now.  memory is hunger"

hunger is good discipline and you learn from it

"don't be a silly ass," my friend said.  "that's alestair crowley, the diabolist.  he's supposed to be the wickedest man in the world"

soothing as the noise of a plank being violated in the sawmill

"hem," he said, and i knew he was a critic now since, in conversation, they put your name at the beginning of a sentence rather than at the end, "i have a tell you i find your work just a little too stark"

"after chez les vikings?"  he grinned with his hat on the back of his head.  he looked more like a broadway character of the nineties than the lovely painter that he was, and afterwards, when he had hanged himself, i liked to remember him as he was that night at the dôme.  they say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure

"we need more true mystery in our lives, hem"

a full morning of work to write a paragraph

while i had been angry i had demoted him from scott to fitzgerald

i rang for the waiter.  he didn't come and i rang again and then went down the hallway to look for him.  scott was lying with his eyes closed, breathing slowly and carefully and, with his waxy color and his perfect features, he looked like a little dead crusader.  i was getting tired of the literary life, if this was the literary life that i was leading, and already i missed not working and i felt the death loneliness that comes at the end of every day that is wasted in your life.  i was very tired of scott and of this silly comedy, but i found the waiter and gave him money to buy a thermometer and a tube of aspirin, and ordered two citron pressés and two double whiskies.  i tried to order a bottle of whiskey but they would only sell it by the drink

"i learned one thing."
"what?"
"never go on trips with anyone you do not love"

11/23

this week i

updated our medicare advantage and prescription drug coverage plan availability for twenty twenty four.  still taking pictures of people at rest

attended bigsurv23 (survey methodologists in the changing room trying on off-the-rack cyborg parts) at harry potter u.  two algorithmic failures: [lack of representivity / inaccuracy of labels].  on ai learning from ai: the extent to which we get recursivity. gpt: generative pre-trained transformers. 


learned https://gesis.org/ pronounced geezus.  more charmin' than a roll of toilet paper

listened to nancy cordova describe exit poll accuracy then rafael correa's gov't raid of her wapor-affiliate office (computer systems still not returned)

enjoyed aleia clark fobia's burden, benefit, consent, and control findings: slightly more than half think the government shares data, slightly less than half think the government should share data.  no yes for me.  can ai pass the marshmallow test?  decisions, decisions, quotes i heard, a good tattoo

a computer learns if it improves its performance on a task over time based on experience

if you connect the dots, you are overfitting

the entire thing is just a predict the next word algorithm

captchas are training automated driving algorithms

we put a person on the moon before we put wheels on your luggage

the first word in openai is a lie

john snow, but not the guy from game of thrones

ice cream sales are correlated with drownings

k-means only works with numeric variables, k-prototypes work with categorical variables

census tract may not be the way they think about life

these two yellow ones?  or are they green?  i'm colorblind

single-letter words don't exist in the german language

there's some latin american band called census, so you can't just use the word

the elephant in the room is data quality

my data are bigger than your data

our total survey error comfort zone


title first wish it was just books.  a cat with a prehensile tail would be unstoppable








 

awaited hamburgesa after conference. downstairs tv on a 5 second delay from the upstairs screen, ecuadorian fans downstairs crossed fingers for penalty kick, heard upstairs cheers, looked toward sky, celebrated, watched penalty kick block, celebrated once more.  ¡campeonas! ¡hijo de puta!

 

read..

(1) the defeat of cleopatra and mark antony..quickly led to a fivefold increase in the shipping heading to india

deposits of rice, dal, coconuts, coriander, tamarind, and huge pots containing several thousand black peppercorns from india show that the merchants who arrived in first-century egypt preferred their own deliciously spicy cuisine to that of egypt, much as their successors still do today

customs taxes on the red sea trade with india, persia, and ethiopia may have generated as much as one third of the income of the roman exchequer.  the principal source for this striking figure is the muziris papyrus, a remarkable document of unknown provenance that was probably found in the celebrated trash dumps of the egyptian town of oxyrhynchus - the city of the sharp-nosed fish

the ptolemies had established the ports..to facilitate the import of elephants for warfare

"pepper" and "ginger" are both loanwords from tamil 


(2) we could afford it if we designed our welfare state to expand opportunity and not guard fortunes

poverty did not increase during the worst economic downturn in nearly a century

franklin roosevelt..in 1935 called welfare a drug

in 1980 the american psychiatric association made "dependent personality disorder" an official diagnostic category

compiling spending on social insurance, means-tested programs, tax benefits, and financial aid for higher education, the average household in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution receives roughly $25,733 in government benefits a year, while the average household in the top 20 percent receives about $35,363

americans who rely on the most invisible programs (namely tax breaks) are the least likely to believe that the government has given them a leg up

"taxes should hurt," president reagan famously said

 

(3) piranesi's view of the pronaos of the temple of concordia - majestic columns above, drunken wastrels below

 scenes that would startle geometry

 

(4) the dangers of the sundarbans

"on land a tiger, in the water a crocodile" (dangay bagh, jale kumir), a much livelier version of our "between a rock and a hard place"

should any person fail to appreciate your poem in the proper manner, my tigers will slay every member of his lineage

even as a tree, she weeps

we should really call arabic numerals indian numerals

 

(5) neither the vessels nor the rituals surrounding the iced tea ceremony are as scrutinized and codified as their japanese counterparts

i wonder where is all my relation
friendship to all - and every nation

ghostly kaolin

concatination..from the latin catena (chain)

many highly regarded japanese pots were apparently made by enslaved people..forcibly removed from korea to japan around 1600, after the so-called imjin war

idiosyncrasy does not necessarily constitute rebellion 

 

(6) johann wolfgang von goethe

he queened it in weimar.  he withdrew as much as he could - as behind a veil, ergo highly visible - from his political capacities, wrote, developed his theories on color, on plant growth, on aesthetics.  he had a bone named after him

when a man is old, he should do more than when he was young



(7) c&o canal's supreme court justice

the c&o canal national historical park remains to this day the only national park dedicated to a single individual

in 1969, he wrote an article for playboy denouncing the corps under the title "the public be damned."  mincing no words, he declared, "the corps has no conservation, no ecological standards....and when it finishes, america the beautiful is doomed"


(8) if a slave auction doesn't make you uncomfortable, please seek help

charleston, where omar ibn said was first enslaved

i had a mother once

giddens captures the language barrier with a clever device: sometimes characters sing gibberish, their scat vocals and echolalia signifying incomprehension



(9) the economic radicalism of the civil war

i will go back to washington, and issue notes for circulation; for it is certain that the war must go on until the rebellion is put down, if we have to put out paper until it takes a thousand dollars to buy breakfast

the nation owed around $65 million at the time of abraham lincoln's election - a sum roughly equivalent to one year's federal expenditure.  by the time the war was over, the united states would owe nearly $3 billion, and its annual expenditure would be close to half that sum.."the yankees did not whip us in the field.  we were whipped in the treasury department"

confederate officials didn't need to conquer the north, but simply to exhaust its resolve

the british approach to abolition had been to preserve enslavers' wealth by expanding the national debt; the union approach was to destroy the fictive $2.7 billion of white southern wealth and to liberate four million human beings who had been brutally commodified


(10) one of six people in africa

although more than 93 million nigerians registered to vote, only about 25 million cast ballots

the largest country in the world that they know the least about

the median age today is seventeen, half that of the us

prior to 1820, four times as many people were brought across the atlantic from africa as from europe

nigeria - inspired by the name of the niger river, which may have berber origins ("river of rivers") but whose echo of latin suggests "a land of the blacks"

the second-largest slave society around 1800, surpassed only by the united states

british marching into heavily forested areas and employing a tactic of "clearing volleys" with their maxim guns, which they fired indiscriminately wherever their route took them


(11) futarchy is a repackaging of nineteenth-century political systems that allocated votes proportionately to wealth

buterin thought the system could replace judges

imagine a blockchain containing your medical records or electoral rolls hard-forking and one of those forks hard-forking again

crowdsourced hedge fund

ethereum's attempt to invent economic democracy through the blockchain showed yet again that constitutional legitimacy is difficult to secure and can lead to political schisms

"whales" can rewrite the rules

"neoliberal reason...is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy's constituent elements into economic ones."  it reconfigures elements of democracy, including "vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries," into market calculations

peter thiel..has written that he believes freedom and democracy are incompatible

proof of work is environmentally disastrous thanks to the huge amount of electricity expended doing redundant calculations, and proof of stake rewards and increases inequality

there is nothing to salvage here

 

11/16

this week i

can think of no time life more peaceful than when my father was reading.  unlike duluth to quebec, east african hydrology every which way: lake tanganyika flows to the congo river, so atlantic ocean.  lake victoria to the nile, then mediterranean sea.  lake malawi the zambezi, indian ocean


 
increased major tectonic plate visit count to 12 (taipei, galapagos) out of 16 in 2023.  chifa like peru, chivas like colombia, national fauna gargoyles














 

laugh after orgasm, i think that makes me the chuckliest fuck.  is lacrosse the original air hockey?  "lots of wavy hair like liberace" notably not true

 
see gaza as prison riot not a war, therefore oh so predictable.  but he did not say where he expected residents of the enclave..to go.  the masses of humanity are, in fact, your friends.  "darling hisham," she said, as a relative held her steady. "do you hear me? come back to me in my dreams, because i will miss you" and a warm shanghello across the eurasian plate: "heaven is looking at what humans are doing.  the firmament has eyes"


diversify masturbation techniques as i age.  and i confess i think about the roman empire every seven seconds.  picasso's arcimboldo period:


read..

(1) for god is an aesthete

a divine hulk stretched out on a cold marble slab; traces of human blood remain beneath his toenails, from stamping on populations as if they were grapes

here we meet a god who eats several of the ark animals when they are grilled after the flood

we do not believe that there is any hope for a race of people who do not believe that they look like god

a flowing beard, a symbol of sovereignty so ubiquitous in the ancient world that queens were known to wear prosthetic ones to mark their own power

in mesopotamian myth, gods were said to "gather like flies" around sacrifices of meat

god preferred to eat his meat not only well-done but still on fire

 who circumcised god?  an ancient phoenician myth, preserved by the second-century-ce writer philo of byblos, reported that el (like abraham) took matters into his own hands

yahwey..was "the paradigmatic alpha-male," but the alpha male is only a figment that sprang out of zoology into mass consciousness about forty years ago

in the evenings he would relax with his pet sea monster


(2) hollywood, once america's most persuasive evangelist, remains beholden to another country

such fevered reveries were reminiscient of the nineteenth century, when british industrialists dreamed, as one put it, that if only they "could add an inch of material to every chinaman's shirt-tail, the mills of lancashire could be kept busy for a generation"

panda hugger

 

(3) the son of an english pirate captain and a malagasy princess

daniel defoe compared the pirate settlers of madagascar to the founders of rome, and montesquieu claimed that the greeks, too, were originally pirates; graeber suggests that tales of pirate politics would have been well known to many writers and thinkers of the day.  as a roughneck utopian committed to liberty from all existing laws and governments, the pirate was 'just as much a figure of the enlightenment as voltaire or adam smith' 

 

(4) in 2020, some 400,000 seafarers were stranded on their ships

the ever given, one of the world's largest container ships, was operated by the taiwan-based shipping company evergreen, which had chartered it from its japanese owners, shoei kisen kaisha.  it flew the flag of panama; its agent was a dubai-based firm; and its indian crew and officers worked for the german company bernhard schulte ship-management.  it also had multiple insurers.  the ever given's hull, machinery and cargo were insured in the japanese market, while claims for injuries, accidents and pollution were covered by the uk protection and indemnity club.  the suez canal authority, shoei kisen kaisha, uk p&i and all of their lawyers negotiated in public and behind closed doors for the next three months, and finally took their case to egyptian courts.  after a settlement was forced on the parties, the ship was released on 7 july 2021

 from northern somalia to the offices of lloyd's of london

 

(5) the golden grape's cargo

only if a ship was fully abandoned or the crew had all perished would the vessel and everything on it become res nullius, the property of no one.  at sea these things were classified as flotsam (any floating object), jetsam (cargoes deliberately thrown overboard) and lagan (sunken goods marked with buoys).  but once something made landfall it became wreccum maris, wreck of the sea, and open to the competing claims of salvagers, coastal landlords and crown officials

so many barrels of brandy were unloaded from the wreck that..soon 'near halfe the town, men, women, and children lay drunk upon the sands'

dozens of deaths among the salvagers - some from exposure, some shot as looters, and others simple 'country people' who drank from the wrong barrel

 

(6) an ethical train wreck

"you would like to put abu zubaydah in a cramped confinement box with an insect" is how yoo and bybee describe one of the cia's proposals - a proposal that they go on to endorse


(7) impunity - the ability of some privileged actors to get away with causing harm - is a core feature of modern capitalism

by about 1720, impunity for all but the most fraudulent speculations was well entrenched within the emergent financial and legal system

nine nations - including colombia, peru, and chile - went bankrupt in the 1820s, failing to pay their debts

somehow, between about 1690 and about 1830, financial crises stopped being crimes and became natural disasters


(8) peat's importance to climate stability and human survival

today, peatlands cover about 3 percent of the planet's land surface, but scientists estimate that they store twice as much soil carbon than all the world's forests - which are about ten times as extensive.  just six years ago, researchers announced the discovery of peatlands in the congo basin that store as much carbon as the burning of fossil fuels worldwide emits in three years

the long-standing human penchant for draining swamps

95 percent water but fibrous enough to stand on


(9) the anarcho-syndicalist symbol of a caterwauling black cat, spine and tail raised high

perhaps you are one of the millions of people for whom the pandemic stirred a fascination with logistics

a robotic ballet

this ritualized "shape-up," bridges observed, resembled an old-world "slave market."  (it still exists in cleaning and construction.  just visit a home depot at 6:00 am, where immigrant day laborers haggle for work)

immigrants still must repudiate communism to stay in the us

why couldn't the ilwu represent people doing software development?


(10) we suck, in other words

the death of god at human hands - a crime so vastly ramifying that we needed to become gods ourselves to be worthy of having committed it

antinatalism

the great cosmic operating system upgrade


11/9