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