An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for July 9, 2020

So, what do you think? I’ve been wondering, since it had been a while of doing these on Patreon, how it is going. Do you enjoy these here? Would you prefer them to be in a separate email list so you don’t get them through Patreon? Are these too little, too much, or just right? Like them the way they are, or feel there’s something that could be better? I enjoy putting these together, and hope you enjoy getting them and checking out some of the various things I’ve been finding related to my broad interests as librarian of the site. Anyhow, I wanted to check in with you all, and consider letting me know your thoughts about these, either in a comment, or via private message here or email.

Here’s a variety of notable things I’ve recently found that you may also be interested in checking out:

• “NSP & Tikkun Launch National Working Groups. Mark your calendars to join us for the launch of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun magazine’s National Working Groups. JOIN US MONDAY, JULY 13TH AT 4:30PM PT (7:30PM ET) ”
• “In Search of King David’s Lost Empire. The Biblical ruler’s story has been told for millennia, Ruth Margalit writes. Archeologists are still fighting over whether it’s true.”
• “History of Policing in America.” Also
• The Men Who Brought Political Radicalism to Oscar Wilde
• Philosophies of Distance and Proximity: Who Are We When We’re Alone?
• “How a Pandemic Shaped Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear’, The author of “Lady Romeo” on one of Shakespeare’s most confounding plays.”—”Legend has it that Shakespeare wrote King Lear while in quarantine from the plague. But the real story may be more complicated.”
• “Netflix’s ‘Mucho, Mucho Amor’ Captures Intimate Life Of Walter Mercado. In the new documentary, the famed Puerto Rican astrologer narrates the story of his life, fame and disappearance from the spotlight.”
• “Peaceful Protesters Targeted By Wave Of Vehicle-Ramming Attacks. ISIS has used vehicles to to intimidate, harm and kill for years. The tactic is being adopted by the far-right as well.”
• “Hopelessness Is A Heavy Feeling. Here Are 5 Ways To Help It Pass. One in five people feel hopeless because of the pandemic, new figures show. Don’t keep it to yourself.”
• Baby raptor discovered in Alaska may have been a permanent resident of the ancient Arctic
• ‘Nothing evil about it’ Local store owner two decades into practicing witchcraft
• “Chinese scientists reveal analysis of weird substance found on the moon’s far side by Yutu 2 rover. Surprise, it’s made of rock.”
• Astronomers have found the source of life in the universe
• The Girls Who Turned Green
• “The Dogs That Sniff Out 5,000-Year-Old Bones. Archaeologists are using canine assistants to uncover ancient remains.”
• How humans are altering the tides of the oceans
• Try Not to Land in Purgatory or Jail at This Abandoned Biblical Park
• “The Norman Conquest didn’t change ordinary people’s lives very much. A recent study suggests that after 1066, English food was as terrible but filling as before.”
• “How Google Docs became the social media of the resistance. Facebook and Twitter might have the bells and whistles, but the word processing software’s simplicity and accessibility have made it a winning tool.”
• “Giant flywheel project in Scotland could prevent UK blackouts. Trailblazing system would help to stabilise the energy grid’s electrical frequency.”
• Moon’s metal-rich craters challenge popular theories about its origin
• Alamut by Vladimir Bartol, trans. Michael Biggins—”Alamut was originally written in 1938 as an allegory to Mussolini’s fascist state. In the 1960’s it became a cult favorite throughout Tito’s Yugoslavia, and in the 1990s, during the Balkan’s War, it was read as an allegory of the region’s strife and became a bestseller in Germany, France and Spain. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, the book once again took on a new life, selling more than 20,000 copies in a new Slovenian edition, and being translated around the world in more than 19 languages. This edition, translated by Michael Biggins, in the first-ever English translation.”
• Tweet—”Antifa are now druids. I don’t make the rules, that’s just the way it is.”
• Tweet—”This is a poem about America.”
• Snail trail takes centuries off the chalk giant of Cerne Abbas—”a new study has unearthed evidence that he is not ancient or Roman but only a few hundred years old.”
• Tweet—”‘Defund the #Demiurge! Attack the #Archons!’ The #Gnostic Liberation Front.”
• “Jeff VanderMeer’s Young Adult Novel Is a Madcap Magical Mash-Up. Fans of his Borne trilogy, whether young or old, will find much to enjoy in “A Peculiar Peril.'”—”The alternate Earth they find themselves in, Aurora, is a war-blasted nightmare, one governed by Aleister Crowley, a magicked-up version of the early-20th-century English occultist who, with his dread familiar Wretch and the enslaved animate preserved head of Napoleon, is trying, “Pinky and the Brain”-style, to take over the world. Jonathan and his posse fall into company with the resistance, in whose ranks figure Aurora’s versions of Arthur Rimbaud, H. G. Wells and a peculiarly transmogrified version of William the Conqueror known to all as Bill. Bobbing around their efforts is a frightening entity with a mind all its own called the Golden Sphere. The previously mentioned death machine, the Burrower, is also at large, along with giant mechanical elephants and “human-sized Eiffel-tower golems.”” About A Peculiar Peril, The Misadventures of Jonathan Lambshead Book 1, by Jeff VanderMeer.
• “How J. K. Rowling Became Voldemort. The backlash against the Harry Potter creator is a growing pain of her fandom.”
• A Letter on Justice and Open Debate
• Tweet—”The signatories of this letter have bigger platforms and more resources than most other humans. They are not being silenced in any way”
• Tweet—”But that is transparently not what this is about. It is first and foremost about defending the right of powerful people (James Bennet, JK Rowling, Tom Fucking Cotton?!) to state odious views in public while maintaining the fiction that they’re not the villains.”
• Tweet—”The Letter is a subtweet to petty grievances by the least affected calling for open debate and public discourse in a media environment that routinely punishes the most marginalized for stating ugly truths, plainly.”
• Tweet—”Imagine looking at America in the Summer of 2020 and not seeing it as a landscape charged with impassioned, incisive, and often intelligent debate about every aspect of our daily life, our arts and culture, our laws and governance.”
• The Confused Myth of “Cancellation”
• “Freedom Means Can Rather Than Should: What the Harper’s Open Letter Gets Wrong. Gabrielle Bellot on How It Feels To Have Your Existence Up For Debate.”
• Tweet—”What 2020 has taught us is that a realistic zombie movie would show most people carrying on as normal, ignoring the shamblers in their offices and homes, while a large minority accuse the zombies of being crisis actors and a leftwing conspiracy to pollute their bodily fluids.” Also tweet—”As @clownf1st notes, if an anti-zombie-virus vaccine is developed, the anti-vaxxers will refuse to take it, and instead expose their infants to zombies at zombie virus parties in order to develop herd immunity ‘naturally’.”
• “William Lutz – Doublespeak.” About Doublespeak by William Lutz
• “The Ayn Rand Institute bootstrapped its way to a PPP Loan of at least $350K.” Also: “‘Big Government’ Critics Benefited From Government’s Coronavirus Aid. A group linked to well-known “big government” foe Grover Norquist got cash from the Paycheck Protection Program — as did an Ayn Rand advocacy organization.”
• Ayn Rand – How Is This Still A Thing?
• Something Wicked This Way Comes—”Though it has characteristics in common, this isn’t fascism. It is something else, something we have not yet named. But we should fear it and resist it as if it were.”
• Monumental Paintings Are Hung in the Site of the 1995 Srebrenica Genocide—”On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, the Bosnian painter Safet Zec is exhibiting his opus Exodus in a former battery factory in the village of Potočari.”
• The best policymakers are systems thinkers – here’s how to get started
• Why Gregory Bateson Matters
• “Mistakes We’ve Made. A conversation with George Kateb.”
• “Seamus Heaney’s Journey Into Darkness. In the deepest reaches of history, the poet found a voice for the troubled present.” About On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster, from Princeton University Press, due in August
• “A Guided Tour Into the Troubled Mind of Donald Trump. Mary Trump is a clinical psychologist and the president’s niece — and her new book peels back the layers of a dysfunctional family that shaped her uncle.” About Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man by Mary L Trump.
• “Mike Flynn swears allegiance to QAnon in Fourth of July video. Flynn tagged his lawyers and an organization founded by Charlie Daniels, who died two days later.”
• Plague Poems – The Sixteenth Week
• Warning of serious brain disorders in people with mild coronavirus symptoms. UK neurologists publish details of mildly affected or recovering Covid-19 patients with serious or potentially fatal brain conditions.”
• “Acceptable Risk.” Also.
• The Tenors – Who Wants To Live Forever ft. Lindsey Stirling

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