420 day in California in recognition of marijuana safer than Big Pharma aspirin and healthier to boot. On this 420 day I went out looking for a plant to fit into my garden and finding none decided after coffee and a locally owned bakery for a bagel to find a book or two for the shelf and finding none came home and took a plant from my flat to plant in the garden. Then after indulgence in 420 I took a stroll to the Main Library to buy a couple books from the Friends of the Library bookstore that cunningly priced big and small non pulp paperbacks at $4.00 each.
My three titles cost $12.00. “Finding Wisdom in East Asian Classics” and two books by the Egyptian poet Edmund Jabes. “The Book of Questions” and “ The Book of Dialogue.”
I also scrolled into the information pool but grew weary quickly.
Events are in the saddle and ride us so event perception management is crucial. Spin the spin. Spin Israel. Spin Iran. Spin Russia and the Spin US. The wheel of fortune spins for nations and for men. Without Uncle Sam is Israel really a Great Power as they like to project? Can Israel afford less than 100 atomic weapons and Dolphin Class submarines from the new normal Reich able to launch on command unless Uncle Sam foots the bill?
https://enoughisenough14.org/2021/01/15/marginal-notes-on-the-epidemic-as-politics/
What does the scenario that world politics sets before us look like in the twilight of the Agamben’s interventions? Spectacular domination by mass media, iatrocracy of doctor-priests, sovereign policing controlling the streets: this is the image of a world in which the means — conceived as respective exclusive monopolies: monopoly of language, monopoly of health, monopoly of violence — now assert themselves as ends unto themselves. In fact, the spectacle is nothing but a stage of capitalism in which our linguistic nature, which has now attained its extreme alienation, advances menacingly towards us, radically inverted. The same is true of our conception of health care and policing, where our specifically human capacities for healing and violence, long since alienated, now loom over us as dangers. Thus, our muteness encounters language through the words of the media, our illness meets health through the health meted out by doctors, and our powerlessness encounters violence through the violence of uniformed men. Our singularity everywhere encounters its own natural capacities in forms that are alienated, separated, and hypostatized: in the media, medical institutions, and the police.
This is the world of economic-theology, wherein — according to the model described by Nicolas Malebranche in his Traité de la nature et de la grâce — from out of a state of exception (the miracle) a general law confers on executive power (the angels) special powers of government, including legislative power (divine sovereignty), and fragments it into a hierarchy of ministries, a bureaucracy of officials and offices. Providence, the governance of the world, thus becomes a self-sufficient sphere with respect to mediately or immediately sovereign organs, establishing itself as the relative locus of sovereignty [16]. A curious characteristic of our institutions is that, today more than ever, secularized theological concepts secretly operate in them. A strange clue in this regard is offered to us more or less consciously by the notion of the patron saint, or protector, which belongs to some Christian denominations. As is well known, the patron saints of law enforcement, health care workers (pharmacists, nurses, doctors) and those who work in communications are the Angels Michael, Raphael, and Gabriel, respectively. This is not just a coincidence or mere convention, but a consequence of the parallelism that, in theological circles, at least from Athenagoras onwards, and with an increasing consensus, affirms the structural analogy between heavenly bureaucracy and earthly bureaucracy — in the words of Thomas Aquinas, “sacred rule, which is what the term ‘hierarchy’ means, exists among men and among angels” (S. Th., q. 108, a. I, arg. 3). Indeed, we must attend to the theophoric names of the three angels: Michael comes from the Hebrew Mi-ka-El, meaning “Who is like God?,” Raphael from Rafa-El, meaning“God heals,” and Gabriel from Gavri-El, meaning“Mighty God” or, also, “Wonderful Advisor.” The first is responsible for leading the heavenly armies in the war against the fallen angels, the second for bringing healing and health, and the third for delivering the divine announcement. Each of them, in his celestial function, recalled by the theophoric name, is opposed to a specific fallen angel: Michael to Satan (the original angelic couple), whose sin is precisely to have rebelled by equating himself to God; Raphael to Asmodeus, to “he who causes to perish”; Gabriel to Mammon, that is, to money and wealth. If, however, the observation of George B. Caird is correct, if the demonic is nothing more than the isolation and exaltation of angelic and legalistic power in an independent religious system (the angelic fall), it is possible to affirm that Satan, Asmodeus and Mammon are not separate entities but only the other face of Michael, Raphael and Gabriel, that is, the danger into which violence, medicine and divine communication are always on the verge of slipping by absolutizing themselves, erasing their relationship with the sovereign and transcendent dimension, considering themselves self-sufficient. In other words, the devil is the ownmost possibility of the angelic being. If the gubernatio mundi of the angels (mal’akim, messengers) is affirmed as the absolute and eternal locus of sovereignty, or as an end in itself — if the messenger is affirmed as the message itself (or in the words of the critic Marshall McLuhan, “the medium is the message”) — its eminently infernal face is revealed. In other words, to angels there belongs a constitutive ambiguity, and the familiarity between angelology and theories of power is here reversed into the familiarity between theories of power and demonology. This means that a ministerial, police, sanitary, or media power, which absolutizes itself as its own end, severing every link of “service” (ministerium) with the organs of direct or indirect sovereignty, is nothing but a demonic power and, as such, illegitimate, whose goal is to subdue the population through fear, abolishing in it the memory and the exercise of any legitimate mediality (Che cos’è la paura?; Si è abolito l’amore). Such a power therefore seeks “at all costs to seize hold of the bare life it produces, and yet, no matter how hard it tries to appropriate and control it by means of every available apparatus — no longer simply those of policing but also those of medicine and technology — this life always escapes its grasp, because it is by definition ungraspable” (When the house burns). Only absolute immanence, the being of all in all, to which bare life is now irreparably consigned, enables bare life to become its own unique form, the ungovernable that tirelessly escapes capture by every economic-governmental strategy of power.
And so what.
The wheel is turning ……
I can mail you a couple 420 seeds if you like. Remember how to gestate them on a wet paper towel?
Coffee, bagel and new books - sounds good.