NOTE TO SELF

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Where Did Our Strange Use of ‘Like’ Come From?
https://lexiconvalley.substack.com/p/ag ... n-material

https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?pli=1 ... TbmcnZkkDw

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the people of Alabama have adopted the “theologically based view” that “life cannot be wrongfully destroyed without incurring the wrath of a holy God.”

February 21, 2024
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON
FEB 22

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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/opin ... und%20Them

Habituation is one of our most basic biological characteristics — something that we two-legged, bigheaded creatures share with other animals on earth, including apes, elephants, dogs, birds, frogs, fish and rats. Human beings also habituate to complex social circumstances such as war, corruption, discrimination, oppression, widespread misinformation and extremism. Habituation does not only result in a reduced tendency to notice and react to grossly immoral deeds around us; it also increases the likelihood that we will engage in them ourselves.

A study conducted in Dr. Sharot’s lab, for example, showed that people habituate to their own dishonesty. In the study, volunteers were given the opportunity to lie repeatedly to gain money at the expense of another person. All the while, their brain activity was recorded.

At first, parts of the brain that signal emotion responded strongly in the volunteers when they lied, suggesting that people were uncomfortable with their own dishonesty. But with each additional lie, the emotional response in the brain was reduced; people habituated. Without the negative feeling, there was nothing to curb dishonesty, so people lied more and more.

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You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.
— Pirkei Avot (2:21).

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library ... er-fascism
Note

This zine is a communal effort, with advice gleaned from the following Jewish anarchists: alice, asher, cat, chanaleh, cindy, cindy barukh, hannah, jhaavo, lilli, mazel, scarab, simcha, and vicky.

“Don’t Just Do Nothing: 20 Things You Can Do to Counter Fascism — Yes, You! Yes, Now” is intended as inspiration for everyone who is striving toward a world without fascism — whether or not they’re Jewish or an anarchist. Please share this zine freely and widely. November 2024

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirkei_Avot

Title: Ship of Fools
Author: Ted Kaczynski
Topics: identity, post-left, progress, violence
Date: 1999
Source: Retrieved on August 2, 2009 from bigoil.gnn.tv and on December 10, 2010 from www.sacredfools.org

Trump has vilified George Soros. He just picked the Jewish billionaire’s protege for Treasury Secretary.
https://jweekly.com/2024/11/25/trump-ha ... secretary/

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As the Texas Floodwaters Rose, One Indispensable Voice Was Silent
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/opin ... s-nws.html

cut and paste

When a reporter demanded to know why the summer camps along the Guadalupe River weren’t evacuated before its waters reached their deadly peak on July 4, Rob Kelly, the highest-ranking local official, had a simple answer: “No one knew this kind of flood was coming.”

Why not? Kerr County, Texas, had lots of history to go on — as Kelly went on to explain: “We have floods all the time. This is the most dangerous river valley in the United States.” The National Weather Service had even brought in extra staff that night. Most important, the service had issued three increasingly dire warnings early that morning — at 1:14 a.m., 4:03 a.m. and 6:06 a.m.

What Kelly didn’t mention, but which has since become well known, is that the Weather Service employee whose job it was to make sure those warnings got traction — Paul Yura, the long-serving meteorologist in charge of “warning coordination” — had recently taken an unplanned early retirement amid cuts pushed by the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. He was not replaced.

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In Flash Flood Hotspots, Many Federal Meteorologist Positions Remain Unfilled

An analysis of National Weather Service vacancies found that in more than a third of offices overseeing regions that are particularly vulnerable to flash floods, one or more of three senior leadership roles, including chief meteorologist, are unfilled.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... ncies.html

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Wanda Gerschwitz: Let me correct you on a couple of things, okay? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not every man for himself.

How many fish have I poisoned today?

The effects of environmental levels of atorvastatin on the muscle physiology of largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides)

https://www.academia.edu/2997-6006/2/3/ ... EnvSci7895

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Men Explain Things to Me
Do we need a different word for 'mansplaining'?

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Key Perspectives on Person vs. Thing:


is a person a thing



Tools
AI Overview

While a person can technically be considered an entity or "thing" in a broad, physical sense, they are distinct from objects due to consciousness, agency, and inherent rights. Legally, people are subjects of law, whereas "things" are objects of property. Describing a person as a "thing" is generally dehumanizing, though it can be used colloquially in specific, non-derogatory ways (e.g., "poor thing").
Quora

Key Perspectives on Person vs. Thing:
Legal & Ethical Distinction: Traditionally, the law divides the world into "persons" (holders of rights) and "things" (property).
Consciousness & Agency: A person is typically defined as a self-aware, rational being capable of acting on intentions, rather than an inanimate object.
Biological vs. Philosophical: While science views humans as biological entities (animals), philosophy (personhood) focuses on self-awareness and moral responsibility.
Contemptuous Use: Referring to a person as "a thing" is often used to strip them of their human dignity.
Quora

In summary, a person is not a "thing" in the sense of being an object or piece of property, though they are a being existing within the material world.

So I probably should have replied, "Me too. All I seem to do these days is miss people and thingsRest in Peace Cecil Lee"

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Living in the time of Trump
I think about The War that ended Peace,
Weimar, and da da.

President John F. Kennedy once remarked that “in 1914, with most of the world already plunged in war, Prince Bulow, the former German chancellor, said to the then-chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg: ‘How did it all happen?’ And Bethmann-Hollweg replied: ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ If this planet is ever ravaged by nuclear war,” Kennedy went on, “if the survivors of that devastation can then endure the fire, poison, chaos and catastrophe, I do not want one of those survivors to ask another, ‘How did it all happen?’ and to receive the incredible reply, ‘Ah, if only one knew.’ ”

NYT

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Suddenly all the little rooms in my mind popped open at once, and the vision flashed through them like a comet. Every event in life can be ordered on a single continuum. All the diverse chronologies that had been complacently resting in the various rooms of my mind for years suddenly got up and started rearranging themselves. Until the vision, in one room there had been cavemen (who really came first), followed by Indians, Pilgrims, African slaves, and the Presidents. In another
room had been the Egyptians (who came first), followed by Queen Elizabeth, the Renaissance, and Napoleon. And in yet another room had been first Beowulf, then the Middle Ages, then Biblical Times (including the Arabian Nights), and ancient Greece and Rome—all mostly mythical. Not until after the No-Doz vision did it occur to me that they could all fit cozily on a single continuum together. Eureka! The American Indians and the ancient Egyptians on the same line not only wind up
nowhere near each other, but the Indians do not necessarily come first! Even when exams were over and I went off No-Doz, I fought to keep hold of my vision. It was too large to assimilate all at once. I believed it intellectually but it took a long time before I felt it in my gut; it required a habit of faith too new to serve me daily, and again and again I would come up short as I was struck with fact upon astonishing fact: There were slaves in America (slaves!) less than a hundred years ago!
Beowulf was composed after Deuteronomy; King Lear before the Declaration of Independence! Before long I noticed vast stretches of my line with nothing filled in. They made me uneasy. What happened between Ancient Rome and the Middle Ages? between Voltaire and Victoria? I wanted to fill it all in so I could see the line whole. I knew it would require diligent application over a very long time, but theoretically at least, it was possible. If one took the longest view, holding that simple Time Line clearly in mind, one could eventually fill in all the details and know everything. For someone starting, like me, from scratch, it was a breathtaking thought. Everything. So far I knew nothing; I believe I hadn’t yet even registered for the second semester. But spending my time in pre-law when instead I could be on my way to learning everything seemed a tragic waste. Perhaps I ought not even bother becoming a lawyer. People were always saying how silly it was—all that
work, when I’d wind up getting married anyway. Whereas, knowing everything could always come in handy. Not that I had any choice in my program. The freshman courses were all requirements anyway—no electives at Baxter until sophomore year. But I started applying myself to my studies with a special ardor. Any course was a good starting place. Western Civ.: Instead of examining cultures as discrete units, as the teachers taught, I examined them asmoments on a continuum and ignored the details. Though I scribbled down furiously the same notes as everyone else, coughing them back up on exams, to me the Renaissance was not a series of Italian names and dates constituting what-happened-in-Italy; it was a Time with a Character. Why, Elizabethan was Renaissance! I hoped that someday I would be able to stand back far enough to see all Western Civ. itself as a Time with a Character.
Survey of English Lit. I.: English Literature was a parochial flourish on a segment of my line. Beauty was Truth. French Grammar (otherwise loathsome): a blue chalk for coloring bits of my line. Intro. to Psych.: a sharp pencil for detail work. Classic, Romantic, Economic, Social, Cause, Structure—indispensable iridescent hues. I knew that only when all the colors blended together would I achieve
that pure white blinding beacon that would show me All. Getting the feel of my line, by semester three I found I could run quickly through it and pull out a little something from every epoch or a little more from just a few to make a neat subline, good for a term paper. I crammed for final exams by squeezing onto a single sheet of notebook paper, in perfect subdivided outline, every fact I had learned in the course: if I couldn’t comprehend the whole course in one glance, it was of no use to me. Since I had to list something, I chose History as my major, but wars and rulers, like conjugations, minor poets, and other particulars, were profoundly boring unless I could view them as reflections of something larger and more abstract. It was impossible for a notion to be too abstract for me. Abstraction was the key to seeing everything at a glance. It was in the second semester of my sophomore year that I accidentally stumbled onto that abstraction of

abstractions, History of Ideas, which opened my mind to philosophy and closed it to such comparatively trivial needs as food and rest. Offered for History credit by the Philosophy Department, the odd course was taught by one Professor Donald Alport, a hulking philosopher with strange intonations, a grey mustache, and thinning hair, who must once have had my very vision, so learned was he. My French verbs went unconjugated, the War of the Roses went unexplained, as under Alport’s
tutelage I contemplated the Great Chain of Being and the Idea of Progress. Too late for history or law, I was smitten. History itself was but an idea occurring in a mind: like Number, like Justice, like Truth. By the next semester, taking the ultimate abstraction, Logic, and both Philosophy of History and Professor Alport’s History of Philosophy, with each class I fell more desperately in love. A hopeless case. I didn’t even care that I was reading myself right out of the marriage market but gave myself wholly up to my new passion. I could hardly drag myself out of the library back to the dorm at night. Before long I began to see my onetime dream of knowing everything as foolishly naïve. Socrates was right: the more one knew, the more one must recognize one’s own ignorance. But he was also right that the unexamined life was not worth living. I plunged in, pursuing the ideas deep into ancient texts, losing myself among subtle distinctions. Nothing else mattered. I analyzed with Aristotle and flunked my French midterm. I synthesized with Augustine and stopped eating everything but Cheezits and black coffee. Discovering with Spinoza the connectedness of things, exploring with Kant the mind that thinks so, I stopped going to chapel or gym and eventually stopped sleeping at night. My brain was in a constant state of intoxication. With Schopenhauer I saw the world as pure will, until, with Bishop Berkeley, I saw it as pure idea. The more I studied, the less sure I was of anything—even of what I had sworn by the week before. My letters home grew enigmatic, alarming my mother. When I wrote that I planned to stay at school during Christmas vacation so I could study, she called up long distance begging me to come home. “What’s the matter Sasha? Are you in trouble? Are you falling behind?” “No, I’m not behind. I just want to read, that’s all.”

… I returned to the dorm and flung myself on my bed. Around my room at eye level I had run a strip of masking tape representing Time. It started at the door with prehistory and stretched, densely crowded with tiny writing, all the way around to my bed. There wasn’t room on it for one more entry, but I didn’t care. What I yearned to know could not be fit between a then and a now. It could not be numbered. It was simple and yet hugely complex, like a perfect circle and the Grosse Fuge. It existed outside of Time. If I were lucky it would come to me in another vision that would be so stunning as to obliterate forever the triviality of unlearned French and the pettiness of chapel.

Shulman, Alix Kates. Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen: A Novel (p. 129). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

Shulman, Alix Kates. Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen: A Novel (pp. 128-129). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2023/01/19


Kamakura Period zuihitsu, strongly rooted in Buddhist thought, typically contains the author’s musings on the impermanence of the material world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zuihitsu# ... rroundings.

For example, with the zuihitsu — the “following the brush“ essay — a form illustrated in the thirteenth century by Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (An Account of My Hut) or in the fourteenth century by Yoshida Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness) and practiced by Akutagawa himself