A Barbaric Boer had "holism" down

Jan Smuts fought with my great, great grandfather against the English. Using guerilla tactics, the formidable but unfashionable afrikaners took the English imperialists to tea in the early part of the 20th Century.

But gold lust drove the English to desperate measures - a combination scorched earth policy and concentration camp program robbed the Afrikaners of their homes, their livelihood, their wives and their children. Almost 70 000 afrikaners were killed.

Jan Smuts is South Africa's Lester B Pearson, but not really because he was a whole lot more. He was the only signatory to have been both at the forming of the League of Nations and the United Nations. He went from studying in England to fighting against England to being a member of the British Prime Minister's Imperial War Cabinet during World War I. And he also was twice the president of South Africa.

And on top of that, Smuts coined the word "holism" - an idea where the whole is seen as greater than the sum of the parts.

He died on September 11, 1950 at his family's farm in South Africa.

Moritorium on mayhem

I like how the word for death and custom/habit/morals can be the same word in latin, mori.

mori - present, infinitive, active for "die, expire, fail, decay"
while:
mori - masculine, dative, singular for "custom, habit, mood, manner, fashion, character, behavior, morals"

mori also happens to be the name of the fruit from a black mulberry tree.

Maybe it wasn't apples that Adam and Eve indulged in, maybe it was black mulberries!

And in Genesis 22:14, Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac on mount Moriah.

That's funny because my whole ordeal over the word came up while trying to translate a story in Latin about two pious individuals who almost sacrificed a goose that was really the gods.

Could Isaac have been the superman that Nietzsche alluded to? Could Isaac, following Kierkegaard's train of thought about Abraham and Isaac, have been the perfect sacrifice bound down, looking up into the eyes of the patriarch: "Father, why have you forsaken me?"

Homo homini deus

What one positively ought

"I say, gentlemen, hadn't we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to send these logarithms to the devil, and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!"- Dostoevsky

Paleolithic participants

A start with fright
I wish I drank through the night
Now I sit immersed
in juice though I thirst
Wanton wackos slap my face
They pounce on me as I pace
Look at me! Look how I bore
Stay tuned, man. There is more