quercus

Simone Weil (1909 — 1943) was a French philosopher, labor activist, ascetic and mystic.

The author of the introduction, Gustave Thibon, shares the circumstances of his meeting Weil:

In June 1941 the Reverend Father Perrin, a Dominican friend then living at Marseilles, sent me a letter which I do not happen to have kept but which ran more or less as follows: ‘There is a young Jewish girl here, a graduate in philosophy and a militant supporter of the extreme left. She is excluded from the University by the new laws and is anxious to work for a while in the country as a farm hand. I feel that such an experiment needs supervision and I should be relieved if you could put her up in your house.’

Thibon later shares how he gained possession of Weil's writings which would become Gravity and Grace:

I saw her for the last time at the beginning of 1942. At the station she gave me a portfolio crammed with papers, asking me to read them and to take care of them during her exile. As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: ‘Goodbye till we meet again in this world or the next!’ She suddenly became serious and replied: ‘In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life. I watched her for a moment as she was disappearing down the street. We were not to meet again: contacts with the eternal in the time order are fearfully ephemeral.

The Philosophize This! podcast has a four part introductory series on Simone Weil (with transcripts). There are short videos from this series on their clips channel on YouTube.

The Talk Gnosis podcast hosted a discussion about Weil's work featuring two poets.

17 years ago, I was amazed by the incredibly loud pulsing chorus of cicadas in my backyard. I improvised this tune that I had to name "The Cicada Reel". I recorded the tune a year later on "Journey to the Heartland" (Maggie’s Music, 2005). And the cicadas are back in full force. Shortly after I recorded this video, they hit 93 dB’s. So here it is again: The Cicada Reel, played on a Dusty Strings D670 with dampers.

Interesting tidbit: the creator of this video was arrested in the 1990s during the Satanic panic.

Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Full text can be found on:

libcom.org | theanarchistlibrary.org | gitbooks.io

Join Iowa attorney and business professor Rosanne Plante as she explains what to do if the “Weed Police” knock on your door!

Most towns, cities, and other municipalities have weed ordinances (local law) concerning what is a weed, what is not defined as a weed in their jurisdiction, and what is allowed to be grown on the property of local citizens. How do you know if you are really in violation, or if your “flowers” just remind others of weeds?

Rosanne presents a handy checklist to use if you are ever accused of breaking a weed ordinance. Many times, citizens are not in violation at all, but can use the citation or threat of a citation as a teaching moment for local government officials.

As a past city attorney herself, Rosanne has extensive experience not only drafting city ordinances of all kinds but also prosecuting offenders. She truly knows what is needed to “prove up” a weed violation.

Download a Sample Native Planting Ordinance: https://wildones.org/resources/

In this episode we film more habitat destruction in South Texas, this time for the purposes of grazing cattle in a desert.

Echinocereus enneacanthus, Coryphantha macromeris runyonii, Ancistrocactus scheeri and others are prevented from being destroyed in this act of senseless bulldozing. Ecotourism possibilities abound here due to the presence of numerous rare birds and cactus species and an abundance of winter texans that would happily pay to see and protect this land, but ranching and cattle are the convention here, and human beings rarely break with convention unless forced to by unforeseen circumstances which are sure to arrrive to the region, eventually.

Monarch on rose milkweed, Asclepias incarnata.

I dug this out myself, roughly 6 feet in diameter and 4 inches deep. Given how fast everything is growing and self-seeding, I'll be able to expand closer to the street next year.

Southeastern USA Plains. This is the last stop for rainwater before the storm drain leading to the Chesapeake Bay.

This is in the Southeastern USA Plains.

The mature plants (seen on the left side) went to seed in the fall. I broke apart the seed heads over the right side in February.

In this revelatory work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. Work that doesn’t strangle the life out of people? Naive. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation. Imagination: A Manifesto is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable—but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems. Imagination: A Manifesto offers visionary examples and tactics to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is possible. This book is for anyone who is ready to take to heart Toni Morrison’s instruction: “Dream a little before you think.”

Institution: Yale

Lecturer: Professor Shelly Kagan

University Course Code: PHIL 176

Subject: #philosophy #death #metaphysics #valuetheory

Year: Spring 2007

Description: There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?

Course materials can be found on the Open Yale Courses website.

Joshua Citarella is a visual artist who studies the memes and culture of Gen Z teens radicalized on the internet.

Abstract

Critiques of intersectionality as an additive and simplistic model of understanding identity politics has led to calls for renewed concepts that better grasp the complexity and potential of shared struggle. In this article, we contend that the experiences of activists attempting to practice an intersectional human and animal rights politics are a crucial yet overlooked resource in the development of such conceptual imaginaries and ethical practice. Drawing on an historical case study conducted with activists involved in the 1990s anarchist collective ‘One Struggle’ in Israel/Palestine, we argue that an ethic of shared human and animal rights struggle cannot be separated from place-based and embodied politics. We show that activists cultivating intersectional politics in practice must negotiate affective forces of discomfort, alienation and exhaustion that wear down and constrain the potential for intersectional coalitions and joint struggles. These affects are generated through state disincentives, violence the cultural politics of nationalism and incommensurable differences. In this context, intersectional politics are a precarious achievement, dependent on the capacities of activists to continue to compromise and negotiate affectively charged encounters in everyday settings. To better capture the precarious, contingent and provisional nature of animal and human rights activism, we therefore propose the concept of ‘actually existing intersectionality’, illustrating how intersectionality is retheorised via emplaced, embodied activist practices. In so doing we make visible the work through which intersectional politics coheres through negotiation by actors in particular places and times.

So many flower buds!

This is full sun between a brick wall and concrete pathway. Sandy clay, soil is wet in the winter and turns into pottery during the summer. What was four pads four years ago now covers 6 sq feet! Doesn't get much higher than a foot tall and edible.

Here's some flowers from last June:

Eastern Prickly Pear, Opuntia humifusa, is native to Eastern North America. Best for people who enjoy playing the game operation!