Historical thesis for the day: classical Greece was a far more pervasively violent culture, on every level, than Viking-era Scandinavian cultures, and especially far more so than Viking-era Iceland. If you want to know why one has the reputation of unremitting berserker bloodlust whereas the other is constantly invoked as one of the fountainheads of enlightenment and culture in “The West,” the answer to that won’t lie in the facts, it will lie in the nature of our sources.

Guess I’m registered for 2/3 of my Spring classes. Next up: a trip down the rabbit hole to an advisor’s office.

http://ift.tt/1rlWhqm it’s true tho

Euripides, “Herakles” (translated by Anne Carson)

http://ift.tt/1supEfG it’s true tho

OK I am writing allusive poetry about the Great Soviet Encyclopedia now, time to actually finish these domming booklet covers.

Here’s a multimillionaire denouncing billionaires while raising millions more dollars from other billionaires. #AmericanPoliticsInOneSentence

Patents kill. Every single day that NewLink delays shipment of vaccines, in the interest of keeping “control over the development of the vaccine,” is an act of repeated mass murder. #AbolishIntellectualProperty #PatentsKill – – – cut here – – – At the center of the controversy is NewLink Genetics, a small company in Ames, Iowa, that bought a license to the vaccine’s commercialization from the Canadian government in 2010, and is now suddenly caught up in what WHO calls “the most severe acute public health emergency seen in modern times.” Becker and others say the company has been dragging its feet the past 2 months because it is worried about losing control over the development of the vaccine. But Brian Wiley, vice president of business development at NewLink Genetics, says the company is doing all it can. “Our program has moved forward at an unprecedented pace,” he says. Even if it took another few months, “we would still be breaking a record in terms of getting this into patients.” – – – cut here – – –

Fnished The Clouds. Damn, that was a bit darker of an ending than I was expecting.

Northeast US left-lib folks: are you or anyone out know interested in doing an ALL/C4SS/S4SS outreach / lit table at the upcoming New York SFL Regional (Saturday Nov. 15, Columbia University, NY NY)? The table would be free, I can make the arrangements, if we’ve got people down for the tabling.