Only two Republicans voted against the measure while 142 Democrats crossed the aisle in approving it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLT3YUALJno

HBO’s The Leftovers is probably my favourite series. 2% of the world’s population disappears without warning or reason. The rest of society starts breaking down in response and it charts the psychosocial collapse. Fantastic acting, cinematography, and soundtrack.

If chess made you smarter, every Paradox grand strategy game player would be a genius. Victoria 3 is much more intricate.

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” (Laughs.) You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

Whatever subject I’m looking at is an active participant in its surroundings. I look for those contextual relationships where there’s some kind of dynamic evolutionary feedback loop happening between them.

If it’s a historical moment, I’m looking at the background reasons why. What were the economic, sociocultural, and sociopolitical things underpinning those people being in that place at that time? Did North Korea just fall out of the coconut tree or is it the product of a 70 year war which devastated and isolated it? How does its relationship to the US drive its development, and how does North Korea drive that same development in the US and Wrong Korea? What problems exist because of that dysfunctional relationship and at what point do they represent continuity of the relationship in its present state or rupture into something new? Does the material drive of North Korea’s mineral wealth power American ambitions more than the ideological rhetoric they use to explain their reasons? Does the material drive of North Korea’s isolation and poverty power its cultural identity and antagonism toward the west? I look for all of the roots from all of the angles I can find to explain why today is today and how tomorrow could be different.

If it’s Otto Dix’s Scat Players painting, I’m looking at the relationship between artist and environment. It’s 1920 Germany, he’s just survived a horrific war, and he’s come home to a broken state. He paints three mutilated soldiers trying to play a card game with their prosthetics. What are the economic, social, cultural, and political reasons why that painting exists? What trauma to the artist has been caused by his environment and how does his painted trauma then impact that environment as a dadaist? What contradictions exist between the present state and goals of dada versus Weimar Germany? What could that trauma represented in material and social terms- a lost generation of soldiers- become if the material and social conditions of Weimar Germany decline or improve?

If it’s a pollinator garden, I’m looking at the dialectics of plant-soil, plant-water, and plant-sky. How are the physical characteristics and social ecosystem of the soil going to impact that plant and how is the plant going to impact them? Is it going to fix nitrogen to a depleted soil or suffer iron chlorosis from an alkaline one? Will it improve those soil conditions over time- deeprooted grasses anchoring it and increasing organic matter- or degrade it by weakening that complex ground system? Will the tree I plant today thrive ten years from now or did I plant something that will deplete too much of the wrong mineral without metabolic reciprocation? Is the area too dry or too wet for the plant, and how will the plant impact the hydrology of that area? Will their relationship result in better drainage/water retention or worse because there’s a contradiction between the root system’s ability to retain water and the environment’s ability to supply it? Am I planting a sensitive plant next to a roadway where the atmosphere is polluted? Am I planting a light-craving plant in the shade or a sun-sensitive plant in an area with an exposed southern face? How will the plant’s growth impact the growth of surrounding plants and how will their impact on the atmosphere drive its growth? The decisions I make are years out and I build as much intersectionality into them as possible. I’m looking out for animal/insect/microbial life, for the natural features of the landscape, and the subject plant that’s interacting with all of them dynamically. I’m always conscious that what I do today will have ramifications for that space in the future so I chase minimising contradictions between organism and environment.

In general I try to always use historical materialism to dissect things.

In horticulture, I’m constantly using dialectical materialism for judging what I’m doing for a plant and its environment. Both drastically impact the other so it’s fun to plan out that change and unfuck the contradictions. I try to do things in a way that’s best for the whole ecosystem’s metabolism, and especially to boost that in animals/plants/natural features.

My t-shirt saying “I’m no fucking predator or paedophile” has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.

It will be Project 2029 if the Republicans don’t win and the Democrats will use that to justify running someone just as demonic as Genocide Joe.

During the last wave in Colorado, prisoners were used as slave labour for this culling. The first case of human transmission was from one of them and they go back to overcrowded prisons full of immunocompromised people. If this cull doesn’t use them, at some point enough farms will be impacted at once to overwhelm private contractors.

horticulturists horticulturists

Now sue the school out of existence.

I start a book > I buy three books because they’re cited in it > I start three books

Nature is the proof of dialectics. It’s easy to visualise the dialectic between a bee and a flower, with both of their lifecycles intrinsically dependent on the other and their material/social role. The bee exists through its metabolism, collecting pollen/nectar and supplying them to its complex hive society for use as honey. Its body evolved sacs to carry even more of it. If a flower can’t self-pollinate, it has evolved to attract pollinators. It will draw from its dialectical relationship to sky/soil and synthesise new chemicals, it will evolve its body to look like the female version of a particular wasp so the males try to mate with it, it will find new ways of attaching more pollen to each bee. As long as the material conditions exist for the flower and the bee, their metabolic interaction with them will sustain and develop their dialectic with each other and their individual lives as a result of it. Take away the flower and the bee no longer exists, take away the bee and the flower no longer exists. They are structurally interdependent and no individual bee can decide to take up farming or accounting instead because the material conditions don’t allow for that.

There’s also climate change, the organs of the human body, predators and prey, rocks and rain forming waterways over time, and the good ole Heraclitus’ “No man steps in the same river twice, for he is not the same man and it is not the same river.” with a breakdown of all the ways those two things have changed as a result of their other dialectics in-between swimming sessions.

Zoe Schlanger - The Light Eaters. Buy this yesterday. It’s so fucking good. All the current science on plant communication and neurology. The Factually podcast did a good interview with the author recently- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBToVPeuHX0

Michael Pollan - The Botany of Desire. Pollan is better known for his How to Change Your Mind book about psychedelics, but this a particularly good book on four materialist histories of plants.

Matt Candeias - In Defense of Plants. It’s kind of like a broader version of The Light Eaters with a focus on plant behaviour.

Richard Lewontin - The Dialectical Biologist. This and Biology as Ideology did more for me as a scientific horticulturist than any particular book about plants. To understand a plant, you need to understand the dialectic of organism and environment because a plant is intrinsically tied to one setting it mediates its whole existence around. The biggest thing that will hinder you in plant science is the way it isolates the subject into an object of study, trying to remove as many of the variables as possible. But plants exist as a product of endless variables and The Light Eaters shows that we’ve barely scratched the surface of their world or how it works. The more nuance you can build into how you approach plants- the ecology, the chemistry, the soil-atmospheric interfaces, the ethnobotany and anthropology, the environmentalist theory- the better you’ll understand them. Botany on its own is pretty narrow.

It’s such an obscene number that I want to write it on an artillery shell and fire it into Ukraine myself. Zelenskyy and the liberals who got us here should be forced to drink molten gold worth that amount just for saying it.

it’d be a real shame if we turned loose all these Nazi serial killers who know how to bomb people with cheap robots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg3Ztsw5FS4 It’s wild.

I saw one short where he has a transcript of a phonecall describing a place with blue carpet near a train station, bus station, and river where the person’s German is coming in handy. The guy finds the correct mosque in Belgium from that.

I can only imagine how many useful genes that saves.

It’s one of those things where he’s a shipping industry guy more than he is a politics one. Ideologically he’s always struck me as a radlib of some sort, but it’s a channel that normally covers logistics and economics run by a historian. The only way to frame the conflict if he isn’t getting into the politics of it is through the lenses he analyses a ship hitting a bridge. At least he’s been consistently pessimistic about the US winning since the start.

The Christopher Robin movie not being released in China was also not because of Xi’s hurt feefees as some people claim, but because only a certain amount of Western movies are released in China per year, and it’s not like Christopher Robin was exactly a smash hit.

Christopher Robin is the Barry Lyndon of the 21st century. You lack the intellectual to understand its subtleties and nuanced perspective.