There are weather and climate records, and then there are truly exceptional events that leave all others in the dust. Such has been the case across Earth’s high latitudes during this last quarter of 2016, on track to be the planet’s warmest year on record. Sea ice extent and area have both plummeted to record lows for this time of year in both the Arctic and Antarctic. Such dramatic losses rarely occur at the same time, which means that the global total of sea ice coverage is phenomenally low for this time of year.…

Breakfast at Tiffyany’s (movie). Emotional values are facts, not intellectual suppositions that may be altered until a convenient situation is arrived at, not airy trivialities to be ignored without consequences. Love is a fact, if you’ll acknolwedge it.

Phoenicia is really a Classical Greek term used to refer to the region of the major Canaanite port towns, and does not correspond exactly to a cultural identity that would have been recognised by the Phoenicians themselves, vaguely comparable to the Hanseatic League. The term in Greek means ‘land of purple’, a reference to the valuable murex-shell dye they exported. It is uncertain to what extent the Phoenicians viewed themselves as a single ethnicity and nationality. Their civilization was organized in city-states, similar to ancient Greece. However, in terms of archaeology, language, life style and religion, there is little to set the Phoenicians apart as markedly different from other Semitic cultures of Canaan. As Canaanites, they were unique in their remarkable seafaring achievements.…Phoenicia

Wallace Stevens (New England Verses X):

Ashen man on ashen cliff above the salt halloos

William Shakespeare, Coriolanus (I.viii.7):

If I fly, Marcius,/Halloo me like a hare.

Halloo:

Hello is alternatively thought to come from the word hallo (1840) via hollo (also holla, holloa, halloo, halloa). The definition of hollo is to shout or an exclamation originally shouted in a hunt when the quarry was spotted: Fowler’s has it that “hallo” is first recorded “as a shout to call attention” in 1864.

When Freddie Gray was 22 months old, he had a tested blood lead level of 37 micrograms per deciliter. This is an absolutely astronomical amount. Freddie never even had the slightest chance of growing up normally. Lead poisoning doomed him from the start to a life of heightened aggression, poor learning abilities, and weak impulse control. His life was a tragedy set in motion the day he was born.… Kevin Drum (4.30.15)

……q……g
.au………..ra
lia…..P……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
.BubbsaltpanBubb..
..BubbetycooBubb….
………..edirbong…….mohanneyillsuion
……………….hane……….pibocontinental
aos benth ici…
.au………..ra
lia…..P……vel
swin…ang…ines
ging..siron.. sand
Maryof Egypthami
rrida bashitru Mar
gUAr dnnelS o-da
.BubbsaltpanBubb..
..BubbetycooBubb….
………..edirbong…….mohanneyillsuion
……………….hane……….pibocontinental
aos benth ici…
esse l.eess..
.saltpa n..
..ty.oo….

“You may not like what Democrats stand for, but they aren’t engaging in widespread official vote suppression, chanting that should their candidate win her opponent should be tossed in jail, promising to prevent any Republican president from filling vacancies on the Supreme Court, suggesting that they’ll try to impeach their opponent as soon as he takes office, cheering when a hostile foreign power hacks into American electronic systems, and trying to use the FBI to win the election.

“Only one party is doing all of that. And we should all be very worried about what Republicans will do after November 8, whether they win or lose….” Paul Waldman

The See’r
The See’r
The See’r
r.nhu pro
r.m… h.n
e..o…….. i………..n
h……r……… p….e
T………d………. a…j
E……..r……….. p……..c
G…..i………… e…….c
*……….O……h………. r..t……….*
*……….*……….t……………*…………*
mirror not made of glass but of other people’s remarks

……………

“And does he not, said I, also live out his life in this fashion, day by day indulging the appetite of the day, now winebibbing and abandoning himself to the lascivious pleasing of the flute and again drinking only water and dieting, and at one time exercising his body, and sometimes idling and neglecting all things, and at another time seeming to occupy himself with philosophy. And frequently he goes in for politics and bounces up and says and does whatever enters his head. And if military men excite his emulation, thither he rushes, and if moneyed men, to that he turns, and there is no order or compulsion in his existence, but he calls this life of his the life of pleasure and freedom and happiness and cleaves to it to the end? That is the perfect description, he said, of a devotee of equality.”

~The Republic

*

Spanish demonstrative pronouns this morning— throughout my endeavoring through an introductory Spanish grammar book I consistently conflated este and ese in my written exercises. Now I wrote them repeatedly on a sheet of paper, este, esta, esto/ ese, esa, eso,/ aquel, aquella, aquello/– the stubborness with which I would not, could not understand; the stubbornness with which I nevertheless attempted understanding –looked again, looked again, wrote down–; and these two resolves, one intentional and one not, one supposedly intelligent one supposedly idiotic, never meeting to form an actual understanding of basic Spanish — not any understanding at all. —I lived in Peru for a year/ I was living in Peru for a year. —

*

What are the criticisms of the character of the writer as expressed in The Cain Mutiny (the movie) (1) the writer speaks of what he does not really know (or “knows” in some amateur way — in this case, about psychology); (2) the writer misleads others by doing this; (3) the writer doesn’t stand with those he has mislead, but hides behind ambiguity, his “mights”, “may haves”, and other such disingenuous qualifying remarks. … (Brings to mind somewhat the falsifying journalist of The Wire.)

Interesting, the use of ‘ground zero’ was in the ascendant well before 9-11. (n-gram viewer)

Idea that instead of contrasting Nietzsche with other philosophers, especially those he speaks of most often, he is to be best contrasted with the literary figures of around his time –Joyce, Kafka, Proust, I’m thinking of (perhaps a generation after)– in being “autobiographical.”

But where Joyce, Kafka, Proust, etc. are (you could say) “autobiography plus the novel” (their lives and manners and situations are the subject, the novel is their means or form or excuse) (that is a debatable proposition yet it’s at least clear that their novels resemble their own biographies more than they do some other person’s biography and it may well be asked why should that be?), Nietzsche is –and perhaps just as explicitly as they are– “autobiography plus the philosophical treatise.”

Idea that he was giving us first and foremost a personal philosophy, a return to something more like Montaigne; a philosophy about his person; that it is his christianity he addressed; his Kant (“Kant qua Nietzsche”), his Christ, Stendhal, and so forth; — the idea that Nietzsche never actually addresses a thing outside his own thought or a person who is not himself.
*

The String Quartet in D major is the only string quartet composed by César Franck… String Quartet in D major (Virtuoso Quartet, 1925)

Dreams. John Latta at his computer (he’s cheerfully erasing material that seems to me very good) — an extraordinary cliff face and a palace or carving upon it — Jacopo curled up in the round cat litter box — he fits there perfectly though way too large — looks sheepish and shakes the litter off as I order him to get out. No, Jacopo, no!

Agamemnon, 92-96 [Chorus]:

….. ……… ἄλλη δ᾽ ἄλλοθεν οὐρανομήκης
….. ……… λαμπὰς ἀνίσχει,
….. ……… φαρμασσομένη χρίματος ἁγνοῦ
….. ……… μαλακαῖς ἀδόλοισι παρηγορίαις,
….. ……… πελάνῳ μυχόθεν βασιλείῳ.

Smyth:

“Now here, now there, the flames rise high as heaven, yielding to the soft and guileless persuasion of holy ointment, the sacrificial oil itself brought from the inner chambers of the palace.”

….. ………

Je savais très bien que mon cerveau était un riche bassin minier, où il y avait une étendue immense et fort diverse de gisements précieux. Mais aurais-je le temps de les exploiter ? J’étais la seule personne capable de le faire. Pour deux raisons : avec ma mort eût disparu non seulement le seul ouvrier mineur capable d’extraire les minerais, mais encore le gisement lui-même […] Le Temps Retrouvé (wikisource.fr)

***

Andreas Mayor: “I knew that my brain was like a mountain landscape rich in minerals, wherein lay cast and varied ores of great price. But should I have time to exploit them? For two reasons I was the only person who could do this: with my death would disappear the one and only engineer who possessed the skill to extract these minerals and — more than that– the geological formation itself.” (Time Regained, pp. 458]

……..x
……….xX
……….xXX
……….Cin a
………bs…world awash
……..No…. in savings,
…….r…..a world in
……Gl ……..which someone who
………..iei ………..decides to spend less
………..>us………….and save more makes
………..E………..the whole world poorer. That’s
………..ἣ μὲ 63 23 90 (0); 100 54(1)not the
…………..ν γά 37 1) ;; 99 (090 **0normal….
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“It ill befits anyone to make himself known save him who has qualities to be imitated, and whose life and opinions may serve as a model.” (Montaigne, Of Giving the Lie — trans. Frame)

Excerpt from the Pope’s encyclical on climate change from a bit ago, — I’ve put in bold some few items of it, probably more or less randomly.

Our goal is not to amass information or to satisfy curiosity but to become painfully aware, to dare to turn what is happening in the world into our own personal suffering…

People may well have a growing ecological sensitivity but it has not succeeded in changing their harmful habits of consumption which, rather than decreasing, appear to be growing all the more. A simple example is the increasing use and power of air-conditioning. The markets, which immediately benefit from sales, stimulate ever greater demand. An outsider looking at our world would be amazed at such behaviour, which at times appears self-destructive.

As often occurs in periods of deep crisis which require bold decisions, we are tempted to think that what is happening is not entirely clear. Superficially, apart from a few obvious signs of pollution and deterioration, things do not look that serious, and the planet could continue as it is for some time. Such evasiveness serves as a licence to carrying on with our present lifestyles and models of production and consumption. This is the way human beings contrive to feed their self-destructive vices: trying not to see them, trying not to acknowledge them, delaying the important decisions and pretending that nothing will happen.

The best way to restore men and women to their rightful place, putting an end to their claim to absolute dominion over the earth, is to speak once more of the figure of a Father who creates and who alone owns the world. Otherwise, human beings will always try to impose their own laws and interests on reality.

Jesus worked with his hands, in daily contact with the matter created by God, to which he gave form by his craftsmanship. It is striking that most of his life was dedicated to this task in a simple life which awakened no admiration at all: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” (Mk 6:3).

This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. This subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation. It is as if the subject were to find itself in the presence of something formless, completely open to manipulation. Men and women have constantly intervened in nature, but for a long time this meant being in tune with and respecting the possibilities offered by the things themselves. It was a matter of receiving what nature itself allowed, as if from its own hand. Now, by contrast, we are the ones to lay our hands on things, attempting to extract everything possible from them while frequently ignoring or forgetting the reality in front of us.

It becomes difficult to pause and recover depth in life. If architecture reflects the spirit of an age, our megastructures and drab apartment blocks express the spirit of globalized technology, where a constant flood of new products coexists with a tedious monotony.

from encyclical

[*]

Saddam Hussein’s removal would have “enormous positive reverberations on the region,” Netanyahu told Congress in 2002. … POST

Frustration aside, Rimbaud’s procurement of weapons for Menelik II may have been his greatest contribution to modern African history. Scholars reckon that the guns he sold in 1887 likely helped the emperor defeat Italy in 1896 when the country’s troops tried to invade Ethiopia. As a result of the rout at Adwa, Italy signed a treaty recognizing Ethiopia as an independent nation.… TIMES