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Importing a lovely poem from the bird site by Robinson Meyer, who claims that the Long 2010s ended last Tuesday

New report from InfluenceMap: The 25 most influential companies blocking climate policy action globally

1. Chevron
2. Exxon-Mobil
3. BASF
4. ConocoPhillips
5. Sempra
6. American Electric Power
7. Southern Co.
8. Nippon Steel
9. Gazprom
10. Toyota

influencemap.org/EN/report/Cor

@nicole If it makes you feel better, I learned “opsimath” ten seconds ago and I’m 44!

@nicole nooo! Um, at least we don’t have a limit on chlorine?

This case came into English through D.T. Suzuki, who rendered it, "Think not of good, think not of evil, but see what at
this moment thy own original face doth look like, which thou
hadst even prior to thy own birth."

Yeats, the big kook, loved Suzuki's essays and made this out of them. (This was in his late sixties, around the same time he submitted to a "Steinach operation," aka a vasectomy thought to increase rejuvenating hormones.)

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60 hours till the operating room.

Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate) case 23. What's translated here (by Blyth) as "Original Self" is 本來 "original" plus 面目 "face," a phrase also in the Platform Sutra attributed to the Sixth Patriarch. Google wants to translate 本來面目 from modern Chinese as "true features" or "true colors."

@zunguzungu That’s right, it’s Paolo and Francesca really early on. He has no idea what bummers are coming!

transition stuff 

OMG the Soylent is versioned. Do they patch it for vulnerabilities??

@nicole My house is full of bagels, every time I walk past the fridge they lean out and say “yoo hoo” 🙁

@zunguzungu Does Dante actually get a nap at any point in the Commedia? That’s like a really long day

If the date on the flyleaf is accurate, the European war had just started or was just about to start. Either way, young Don's own country would have a couple more years in the Spartan position of standing by.

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Young Don's notes on Thucydides are more philological, but he wrote "cf. Nazi Germany" next to the Corinthians warning the Lacedaemonians about the Athenian national character:

"Thus they toil on in trouble and danger all the days of their life... to them laborious occupation is less of a misfortune than the peace of a quiet life. To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that they were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others." [1.70]

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Young Don's notes on the Oresteia:

Woman like man
night like day
tragedy like joy
fire + darkness

Eumenides: Orestes saved because matter is not blood. Cf. Aristotle's idea of form & matter.

Orestes goes mad: the charioteer image p. 261

Appearance & Reality, p. 67
Depends upon assumption that there's a dichotomy.
Ulysses, p. 69, again, 123

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In 2006 I decided that instead of studying what I was supposed to be studying, I wanted to learn ancient Greek. I went to Black Oak Books in north Berkeley and found a Loeb Oresteia and an Oxford Thucydides; Berkeley is a good town for this. On my way to the register I opened the covers and, there on the flyleaf I saw "Don Davidson," Harvard '38 and '39.

This is what happens to the libraries of eminent philosophers after they change state.

Queerphobia, transphobia, U.S. Politics 

Over on the bird site Tennessee Representative Gloria Johnson points out that TN Republicans, who have a supermajority at the moment, have taken the opportunity to immediately introduce two bills (both sponsored by Senate Majority Leader Jack Johnson):

1. Senate Bill 1: banning gender-affirming care for children.

Bill here, hosted by WKRN news:
wkrn.com/wp-content/uploads/si

medical transition stuff, grammar 

Reviewing the appeal letter I just sent Anthem in our ongoing tussle over coverage, discovered I had hyphenated "up-to-date" despite it not being in noun-preceding position, God DAMN it I feel like I let down the whole team

@semidetached Those look like they’d have the power to turn any vista into an opera, if focused just right.

@lexipenia I don’t think I’ve heard Szeryng before and would like to check out more!

@nicole It is so not a commonly reported side effect that I was tempted for a while to file indifference to video games under “not trans enough,” but really I think I was just following too many Twitch streamers on Twitter.

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myna.social

Basic models of flocking behavior are controlled by three simple rules: 1) separation: avoid crowding neighbours (short range repulsion); 2) alignment: steer towards average heading of neighbors; 3) cohesion: steer towards average position of neighbors (long range attraction). With these three simple rules, the flock moves in an extremely realistic way.