this week i

published on privately-administered special needs plans for americans eligible for both medicare and medicaid, on medical debt across all families

proudly donate to edf, seen here investigating bad climate actors.  jon stewart never left.  is your generation the last of the natural intelligences?

 

wonder if a reddit and hackernews-style up or down voting system could be incorporated into public comments in the federal register

discard books as i read them, but not songbooks.  is evolution: the series of replications that went wrong in just the right way ?


listened fewer times than i'd like, but still, you know, more than a hundred.  the music makes me feel full the way that food makes me feel full

added a sex scene to the complete persepolis by marjane satrapi.  the calf of mrs. robinson, the relaxation of marge simpson, the hands of morpheus




read..

(1) global petroleum dependency

seven weeks touring the stockyards and slaughterhouses of chicago and interviewing workers.  its publication made him a household name at the age of 27.  meat consumption in the us is said to have dipped for several years after the novel appeared

the power of ninety horses - think of that!  suppose you had ninety horses out there in front of you, forty-five pairs in a long line, galloping round the side of a mountain, wouldn't that make your pulses jump?

when you try to shut oil off from production, it's like you tried to dam niagara falls

his only tender feelings appear to be for oil.  at the height of the teapot dome scandal, the real doheny tried to persuade cecil b. demille to make a movie about his life.  it's safe to say there will be blood wasn't what he had in mind


(2) the lively andean dead

the smithsonian institution currently holds bones from at least 481 peruvians


(3) palaeoentomologist

the cradle of humankind world heritage park northwest of johannesburg

a microscopic pompeii

as long as a fossil isn't blasted into space, it can be handed down to future generations to explore


(4) hobbes at the end of behemoth: 'i have seen in this revolution a circular motion of the sovereign power'

anarcho-punk

as jean-claude juncker, an architect of austerity, put it in a moment of candor: 'we all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we've done it'

the decade that started with the arab spring ended with tawdry insurrectionists high on conspiracy theories storming the us capitol

joe biden put it in an apparently off-the-cuff remark at the end of a press conference with boric - the ex-protester - in november last year: 'there comes a time . . . where the world changes in a very short time . . . . i think what happens in the next two, three years is going to determine what the world looks like for the next five or six decades'

 

(5) the invisible hand of the market can actually bring you a burrito

tech billionaires often seem more interested in surviving the apocalypse than preventing it

i have never to my knowledge seen any of these billionaires, but by necessity i use their platforms and software and move among their employees.  i live in a city and to some extent in a world that has been radically reshaped by their urges and ideas, which are not my urges and ideas

when i use cash to buy something in a shop, i sometimes joke to the cashier that this stuff is more secretive than crypto

 

(6) the poem forms a cataphatic theology

married to the moon

temple hymns

interest in edheduana remained confined to the sumerologists, though from the late 1970s feminist writers occasionally pointed out that the world's first author was a woman

lapis lazuli

it is in enheduana's poems . . . that authorship was born

our literary eve

'text' and its cognate 'textile', from the latin texere, 'to weave' 


(7) many years of sailing against the prevailing winds of the amyloid hypothesis

we become unmoored

interfere with the tangles of tau

neurodegeneration is a very hard problem, probably harder than clogged arteries

a drug is not always the only option


(8) there is only one true confrontation: that between the romano-germanics and all other peoples of the world

bolshevism owes as much to russian messianism as to marx

the byzantines had, at the council of florence in 1439, recognized the pope to secure western aid against the turks, thereby betraying the orthodox faith, which is supposedly why they succumbed to the ottomans in 1453.  from that point on, moscow, the capital of the only independent orthodox country until the nineteenth century, became the "third rome," the heir to both rome and byzantium as the seat of christendom.  russians were destined to save the world because, as the monk philotheus explained, "a fourth rome there will not be"

linguist roman jakobson could speak russian fluently in six languages

eurasianism

 

read cliffs notes of when a man is old, he should do more than when he was young johann wolfgang von goethe's faust by robert milch

napoleon bonaparte was among his most famous admirers, and remarked when they first met, "vous etes un homme"

after a painful struggle with himself, faustus is carried off by the devil at the end of the play

a mysterious black poodle following them

the primal sin is to absolve oneself of the responsibility for motion and activity

with a drink like this in you, take care -
you'll soon see helens everywhere.

helen of troy, the legendary paragon of womanhood

margareta (usually called gretchen, her nickname in german)

the church has an excellent appetite.
she has swallowed whole countries and the question
has never risen of indigestion.
only the church...can take
ill-gotten goods without stomach-ache!

she sits at her spinning wheel and sings

 the poem also illustrates the great influence which the works of shakespeare had on goethe

homonculus (i.e. "little man")..floats to his side and eavesdrops on his dreams

the reclamation of land from the sea

the joy of participation in the continuous constructive activity that permeates the universe

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