Deep Sea Octopus, 2.

Females of Haliphron atlanticus are very large, reaching 400 mm ML or a total length up to 2m (Nesis, 1982). Body tissues are gelatinous; the mantle is short and broad and the head wide; the eyes are large and the short arms have a deep web. The funnel is embedded in head tissue. Males are [...]

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Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain

The goal of Daniel Lord Smail’s book is close to my heart, in that one of the various projects he outlines is to broaden the use historians make of other disciplinary fields (beyond say sociology and archeology usually connected to history) to include genetics and neural psychology as tools of historical analysis. This appeals to [...]

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Who the Hell Makes those Missiles

“I think progress is the biggest enemy on earth, apart from oneself… I think we’re gonna take good care of this planet shortly…there’s never been a weapon created yet on the face of the Earth that hadn’t been used. We’re run by the Pentagon, we’re run by Madison Avenue, we’re run by television, and as [...]

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Jean Paul Satre, Nausea

A classic, a Nobel-Prize winner, the literary work of existentialism alongside Camus’ L’Etranger. How is one to feel after Nausea?  How is one supposed to feel after existentialism?  This not between existentialism and marxism, ther is nothing but pitiuless withering contempt, for those who have not been enlightened, who have not had the awakening to [...]

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Two Brief Thoughts

Thoughts on Palestine and Hamas: Hamas is accused by Israel of hiding bombs and weapons amongst civilian populations and essentially using them as human shields; most famously, the Israeli government bombed a UN school, justifying this action by the same claim, that Hamas had secreted weapons there.  The UN catagorically denied this, and in this [...]

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Necrophiliac Lesbian Worms, Viruses Eating Viruses, and Deep Sea Pollution

Been reading Discover Magazine‘s Top 100 science stories of 2008, and some other assorted articles on the world that may naturally be ignored in the larger scheme of things.  A sample: “The microscopic aquatic creatures known as bdelloid rotifers are used to enduring dry spells—in more senses than one. In their common habitats of moss, [...]

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Deep Sea Octopus, 1.

The finned octopods are of medium to large size (up to 1.5 m total length, although there is a photographic record of one estimated to be over 4 m in total length: Voss, 1988). The body is usually gelatinous and strongly foreshortened. The mantle opening is reduced and swimming via jet propulsion seems to have [...]

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Gaza Forever

What can I possibly say about Palestine right now?  The words to keep speaking are there, of course, tangible almost by the sheer volume of texts, print and electronic, that havedeluged the world of bombs and ruined homes, rockets and helicopters blasting hsopitals.  It won’t do, it won’t: Thoughts of Xanadu points to a protest [...]

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The City in Revolt, 1: Andre Malraux, Man’s Fate (La Condition Humaine)

A deeply divisive novel, laying bare the troubled divide between the political and the philosophical aspects of existentialism.   It cannot resolve that divide, between the communal dream of a better world and the isolation of an individual being; it does not offer salvation from the latter in the former, save in the words of Kyo [...]

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The Incoherence of McCarthyism; An Aside, with thoughts for the present

The McCarthy era saw redoudled efforts to search out and punish “gender inverts.” Targets abounded: “egg sucking phony liberals,” East Coast intellectuals, and emasculated “pinks, punks, and perverts” were all part of government that was, in the words of one of McCarthy’s aides, “a veritable nest of Communists, fellow travelers, homosexuals, effete Ivy League intellectuals [...]

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Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930’s

Terry Eagleton wrote last year : “Christopher Hitchens, who looked set to become the George Orwell de nos jours, is likely to be remembered as our Evelyn Waugh, having thrown in his lot with Washington’s neocons.” Hitchens responded in a ‘Comment is Free’ piece on the Guardian website: “Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him [...]

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Triage: Dr. James Orbinski’s Humanitarian Dilemma, Dir. Patrick Reed

I saw the movie Triage the other night.  As always, difficult film to watch at times; footage of skeletal Somalis dying of hunger and neglect, pawns of warlords in ‘value-added’ machine-gun equipped pickups and of the theatrics of United States intervention, refugee camps whose chief component besides people is sqaulor, footage of bereted soldiers skulking [...]

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