Justified in the guise of brutal facts as something eternally immune to intervention, the social injustice from which those facts arise is as sacrosanct today as the medicine man once was under the protection of his gods. Not only is domination paid for with the estrangement of human beings from the dominated objects, but the relationships of human beings, including the relationship between individuals and themselves, have themselves been bewitched by the objectification of mind. Individuals shrink to the nodal points of conventional reactions and the modes of operation objectively expected of them. Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.

—-Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment

dumbassfils.

I don’t believe in the value of social welfare programs because we owe people anything. Owing is irrelevant. I believe in social welfare because I choose the civic decency that it represents.

Maybe accurate or maybe not, but I’d rather be posting this than doing what I actually have to do:

Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing… . Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all. 

Mark Kingwell. As quoted in “Later: What does procrastination tell us about ourselves?,” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker, October 11, 2010

“When I came to Rome I always wondered why there were books with photographs on all the artists of my period and I was only in one! I thought: where was I? But I never was there. I was somewhere else.”

– Cy Twombly

1.  a. An act of witchcraft performed with the intention of causing damage or injury; the resultant harm; (also) the power of Satan (rare). Now hist.

?1613    G. Abbot in T. B. Howell Compl. Coll. State Trials (1816) II. 795,   I hope that those, who have embraced the gospel, should be free from this maleficium. 

1908    Mod. Lang. Notes Mar. 84/1   The ‘maleficium’ consists in the pact with the devil and the submission to his sovereignty.

1930    Mod. Lang. Notes Apr. 258   The broadspread human belief in maleficium—‘the working of harm to the bodies and goods of one’s neighbours by means of evil spirits or strange powers derived from intercourse with such spirits’.

1963    N. E. Whitten in A. Dundes Mother Wit (1973) 404/1   Maleficia refer to misfortunes, attributed to evil.

1964    Jrnl. Hist. Ideas 25 342   The anxious ecclesiastical authorities could think of but one cause as relevant to all this disorder, this bad Faith, significantly labelled ‘maleficium’, the power of the Evil one himself.

1980    N. & Q. Apr. 151/1   The implication of the plea of maleficium in the divorce proceedings was that Essex had been bewitched by some unknown external agency.

1991    Shakespeare Q. 42 328   The witches plot to cause the magical kinds of harm to others conventionally associated with witches’ maleficium: interference with livestock, weather, and male sexuality. 

 b. A potion or poison, used esp. in witchcraft.

1965    J. T. Noonan Contraception 156   Pseudo-Bede asks: ‘Have you drunk any maleficium [L. bibisti ullum maleficium], that is, herbs or other agents so that you could not have children?’ (Pseudo-Bede, ‘The Order for Giving Penance,’ 30). In this sentence maleficium is not the sterilizing magical act, but the sterilizing magical potion.

1996    Nature 31 Oct. 782/2   Insidious anti-heroines worm their way into the homes of respectable America and then, witch-like, callously fill them with maleficium, poisoning family relations and even the dessert. 

 2. Civil Law. An act of wrongdoing which causes harm, injury, or loss to another party; the result of such an act.

1830    U.S. Rep. (U.S. Supreme Court) 28 231   ‘Barratry must be some breach of trust in the master ex maleficio’, in which, I presume, maleficium must mean some wilful and injurious act.

1944    All Eng. Law Rep. 1 658   Assuming the section to be one of a penal nature, a lex poenalis, it is a little odd to find it applied in cases where there is neither delictum nor maleficium.

1969    Jrnl. Amer. Hist. Oct. 200   Massachusetts law developed the concept, as did English law, that, while witchcraft itself might be punishable, condemnation ordinarily occurred only if maleficium—a harmful act—was perceived.

1992    N.Y. Rev. Bks. 28 May 42/1   Witchcraft without a proven element of maleficium seems to have been regarded as harmless.

Pronunciation:  Brit.  /malᵻˈfɪʃɪəm/ , /ˌmalᵻˈfɪkɪəm/ , U.S. /ˌmæləˈfɪʃiəm/ , /ˌmɑləˈfɪʃiəm/

Inflections:  Plural maleficia.

Etymology:  < classical Latin maleficium evil deed, injury, sorcery (the latter sense is increasingly common from Apuleius (late 2nd cent.) onwards, especially in phrase maleficium magicum) < maleficus (see malefic adj.) + -ium-y suffix4.

Spot on!

It is perhaps no coincidence that “Go the F*** to Sleep” follows hard on the heels of Amy Chua’s “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”, another book in which children are portrayed as obstacles to the fulfilment of a pleasure-craving, ego-famished parental will. The impression you get from both books is that their authors are new personalities trapped in an old social paradigm. They are creations of an unprecedented contemporary culture of narcissism and ultra-competitiveness, who are at the same time beholden to older ideas of childbearing and family. Fanatically devoted to their children, they are also trapped in a prison of self-obsession.

Lee Siegel, “GIVE ME A F***** BREAK,” More Intelligent Life.

Franz Kafka, born July 3, 1883…

The Emperor—so they say—has sent a message, directly from his death bed, to you alone, his pathetic subject, a tiny shadow which has taken refuge at the furthest distance from the imperial sun. He ordered the herald to kneel down beside his bed and whispered the message in his ear. He thought it was so important that he had the herald speak it back to him. He confirmed the accuracy of verbal message by nodding his head. And in front of the entire crowd of those witnessing his death—all the obstructing walls have been broken down, and all the great ones of his empire are standing in a circle on the broad and high soaring flights of stairs—in front of all of them he dispatched his herald. The messenger started off at once, a powerful, tireless man. Sticking one arm out and then another, he makes his way through the crowd. If he runs into resistance, he points to his breast where there is a sign of the sun. So he moves forwards easily, unlike anyone else. But the crowd is so huge; its dwelling places are infinite. If there were an open field, how he would fly along, and soon you would hear the marvellous pounding of his fist on your door. But instead of that, how futile are all his efforts. He is still forcing his way through the private rooms of the innermost palace. Never will he win his way through. And if he did manage that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to fight his way down the steps, and, if he managed to do that, nothing would have been achieved. He would have to stride through the courtyards, and after the courtyards through the second palace encircling the first, and, then again, through stairs and courtyards, and then, once again, a palace, and so on for thousands of years. And if he finally burst through the outermost door—but that can never, never happen—the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him, piled high and full of sediment. No one pushes his way through here, certainly not someone with a message from a dead man. But you sit at your window and dream of that message when evening comes.

He felt, at least this once in his life, the inner tempest of deep sensations, gigantic dreams and intense delights, the desire for which enabled him to live, the lack of which forced him to die. He was not a mere dilettante; he was not content to taste and enjoy; he stamped his mark upon human thought; he told the world what man is, and love and truth and happiness. He suffered, but he imagined; he fainted, but he created. He tore forth with despair from his entrails the idea which he had conceived, and he held it up before the eyes of all, bloody and alive. That is harder and finer than to go fondling and gazing upon the ideas of others. There is in the world only one achievement worthy of a man: the bringing forth of a truth to which we give ourselves up and in which we believe.

Hippolyte Taine, describing Alfred de Musset, as quoted in Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station

There are just so many ways for global weather instability to kill us all.

“Missouri River floodwaters lapped at a nuclear power plant north of Omaha, Nebraska on Tuesday and have cracked more defenses downstream after weeks of sustained pressure on levees running hundreds of miles.”

“Nebraska Nuclear Power Plant Beset By Floodwaters,” Reuters, June 28, 2011

“A large wildfire moving across northern New Mexico Tuesday had authorities watching for a potential release of radiation around the nation’s main nuclear-weapons lab in Los Alamos.”

“Wildfire Pushes Toward Nuclear Lab,” The Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2011