Sunday, August 20, 2023

Iron and Corn



Maryland has recorded its first case of locally acquired malaria in four decades, setting off concern among public health officials about the mosquito-borne disease known as a major global killer.

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Who is this man?


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Wait. The Chinese gave Janet Yellen hallucinogens without her knowledge?


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Trochilic

MEANING:
adjective: Relating to the wheel or the rotary motion.

ETYMOLOGY:
From Greek trochos (wheel), from trechein (to run), which also gave us troche (lozenge) and the metrical trochee. Earliest documented use: 1570.

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Iron and Corn


In an interview with Salon, [Warren] Hern, the author of Homo Ecophagus: A Deep Diagnosis to Save the Earth, doesn’t just argue that humanity is a cancer on the planet. He also advocates treating it with a similarly therapeutic regimen. After all, Hern told his interlocutor, “the human species now has all of the major characteristics of a malignant process.” As his book’s title suggests, humanity has evolved to the stage at which it has become the devourer of worlds.

Hern heaps praise on the ideas, if not the methods, adopted by the eco-terrorist outfit Earth First!, whose values were “very romantic.” Indeed. At least as a disposition, these laments are all a form of romanticism familiar to students of Rousseau. For that 18th-century philosopher, “it was iron and corn which first civilized men and ruined humanity.” The inescapable logic of economic specialization brings with it “the dissolution of morals,” Rousseau observed, because “the necessary consequence of luxury brings within its turn the corruption of taste.” Among the corrupting tastes to which we’ve succumbed is the affinity for modern conveniences like air-conditioning, which is credited with saving hundreds of thousands of lives every year.--Rothman

'Corrupters of men' is an ancient religious concept and is always amusing to hear from the mouths of anti-religious revolutionaries. Tearing the culture down to the studs implies some studs and what they are. Somehow those specifics get very fuzzy.

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Answer: Fetterman

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