Notes: July 26, 2022

… 229.8 lbs…

… it’s a Gregorian chant morning…

… Heather Cox Richardson follows the lead of TV news in suggesting that 45 has been weakened by the 1/6 committee hearings… yesterday both the Wall Street Journal and the NY Post ran Op Eds that were negative on 45…

… yesterday, the thought that i lack courage to follow ideas through to their implied conclusions… to my truth… to the truth…

… i envision the apocalypse coming, but, what can I do about it?… we carry on with hope for the future even when we can see how bad things could be… we make modest changes when radical departures are called for… until big things happen… things that can’t be ignored… then we change…

… i try to enjoy each day in spite of fears about the future, the greatest of which is fear of death… there are so many ways to go sideways at the moment… H struggles with this, but she tries… the humming bird project is her trying… the garden is her trying… still, she gets more depressed than i do…

… speaking of apocalypse…

What Happens If the World Gets Too Hot for Animals to Survive… the title speaks for itself… though the attitude is that we especially need farmed animals to survive… farmed animals, particularly cows, are a big part of the problem… we need to eat much less meat than we do… H and i are trying, but when your idea of a proper dinner has centered around some form of meat for most of your life, it isn’t easy… still, we’ve done pretty well the past few days and will continue to do better…

… when knowledge costs too much…

You Can’t Stop Pirate Libraries… pirate libraries are a tool used by the public and research institutions to get around censorship and the unaffordable, to many, price of research literature… i have wondered about this myself… the higher the pay wall, the more elitist access to competent, peer reviewed literature is…

These libraries have found large audiences among academics in America and around the world, thanks to the high cost of accessing scholarly journal articles.

Such economic imperatives are just one part of the Sci-Hub ethos. “Any law against knowledge is fundamentally unjust,” (emphasis mine) Elbakyan tweeted in December 2021.

Many would reply that such piracy is just plain wrong, no matter how much trouble and expense copyright causes for authors and researchers. But copyright, according to some strains of libertarian thought, is not the sort of “property right” we ought to justly respect, given its historical genesis in propping up unjust monopoly by creating artificial scarcity.

… the idea of artificial scarcity again, not in the art world, but in the publishing world… make it scarce, even though it doesn’t have to be, and you make it valuable… copyright law?… a capitalist tool?…

… 45 is on his way out?…

Why Rupert Murdoch Is Finally Done with Donald Trump… hmmmm… i had not remembered that both the Wall Street Journal and NY Post were owned by Rupert Murdoch… while i detest Murdoch, it warms my heart to see him parting ways with DT… next stop, DOJ…

… out the door early… decide on the full Main Street loop… i run into the B of BJ’s who has lots on her mind about the renovation of Mr. Bell’s shop… and… the placement of dumpsters… and… the lack of permitting… and… when she and her mother do anything, they have to do it by the book, while he, a billionaire (which i somehow doubt but who knows), gets to do things without proper permits… she is exercised… i tell her i don’t blame her while wondering what the other side of the story is…

… i get to K&C and discover i don’t have my charging cable for the MBA… last two days have had little start of the day glitches… should i get in the habit of prepping my things at night?…

… i read a lengthy dot to dot passage in Sea and Fog… it treats western history as a churning sea… there is war and death and life and venality… the metaphor seems to work even if a little incoherent at times…

… when i write about venality i think about the aforementioned article on pirate libraries and the false scarcity that capitalism demands of producers of intellectual content on platforms where they don’t have to be scarce… i wonder if the beginning of the end of capitalism is the abolition of private property and copyright… what if all property belonged to the commons?… is that what socialism is?… how does China’s governmental and economic system work?…