Archeologist Prophet

Nordic archeology student (they/them), non-binary, has the power of magic (unconfirmed), I'm blogging my uni notes, explaining my work to others helps me learn better, follow along if you're interested in archeology

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

stop using chatgpt!!!! take a bronze pin and carve your questions onto an ox scapula, then toss it into the fire!!!! use the cracks to divine the gods answer!!!!

[grand-theft-carbohydrates]

citations still have to be APA 7th edition though. if you plagiarise, the gods will flood the yellow river again. and you'll lose your academic standing.

[dkpsyhog]

(The Gods, personal communication, July 18, 2024)

[quinloki]

It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.

Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.

Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.

The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.

The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.

She didn't look scared. She didn't look guilty.

She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, "I thought you guys were coming."

She was booked into the county jail. The headlines wrote themselves. A grandmother running a pot bakery. It seemed like a joke to the legal system, a quirky local news story about an older woman behaving badly.

But Mary wasn't baking for fun. And she certainly wasn't baking for profit.

To understand why Mary risked her freedom, you have to understand the silence of the early 1980s.

San Francisco was gripping the edge of a cliff. A mysterious illness was sweeping through the city, specifically targeting young men. Later, the world would know it as AIDS. But in those early days, it was just a death sentence that no one wanted to talk about.

Families were disowning their sons. Landlords were evicting tenants. Even doctors and nurses, paralyzed by the fear of the unknown, would sometimes leave food trays outside hospital doors, afraid to breathe the same air as their patients.

Men in their twenties were wasting away in sterile rooms, dying alone.

Mary knew what it felt like to lose a child.

Years earlier, in 1974, her daughter Peggy had been killed in a car accident. Peggy was only 22. The loss had hollowed Mary out, leaving a space in her heart that nothing seemed to fill.

When the judge sentenced Mary for that first arrest, he ordered her to perform 500 hours of community service. He likely thought the manual labor would teach her a lesson.

He sent her to the Shanti Project and San Francisco General Hospital.

It was a mistake that would change American history.

Mary walked into the AIDS wards when others were walking out. She didn't wear a hazmat suit. She didn't hold her breath. She saw rows of young men who looked like ghosts—skeletal, in pain, and terrified.

She saw "her kids."

She began mopping floors and changing sheets. But soon, she noticed something the doctors were missing. The harsh medications the men were taking caused violent nausea. They couldn't eat. They were starving to death as much as they were dying of the virus.

Mary knew a secret about the brownies she had been arrested for.

She knew they settled the stomach. She knew they brought back the appetite. She knew they could help a dying man sleep for a few hours without pain.

So, she made a choice.

She went back to her kitchen. She fired up the oven. She started mixing batter, not to sell, but to save.

Every morning, Mary would bake. She lived on a fixed income, surviving on Social Security checks that barely covered her rent. Yet, she spent nearly every dime on flour, sugar, and butter.

The most expensive ingredient—the cannabis—was donated. Local growers heard what she was doing. They began dropping off pounds of product at her door, free of charge.

She packed the brownies into a basket and took the bus to the hospital.

She walked room to room. She sat by the bedsides of men who hadn't seen their own mothers in years. She held their hands. She told them jokes. And she gave them brownies.

"Here, baby," she would say. "Eat this. It'll help."

And it did.

Nurses watched in amazement as patients who hadn't eaten in days began to ask for food. The constant retching stopped. The mood on the ward shifted from despair to a quiet sort of comfort.

Mary Jane Rathbun became "Brownie Mary."

For over a decade, this was her life. She baked roughly 600 brownies a day. She went through 50 pounds of flour a week. She became the mother to a generation of lost boys.

She washed their pajamas. She attended their funerals. She held them while they took their last breaths.

She did this while the government declared a "War on Drugs."

By the early 1990s, the political climate was hostile. Politicians were competing to see who could be "tougher" on crime. Mandatory minimum sentences were locking people away for decades.

In 1992, at the age of 70, Mary was arrested again.

This time, the stakes were lethal. She was charged with felonies. The district attorney looked at her rap sheet and saw a repeat offender. He threatened to send her to prison.

One prosecutor famously whispered to a colleague that he was going to "kick this old lady's ass."

They underestimated who they were dealing with.

They thought they were prosecuting a drug dealer. In reality, they were attacking the most beloved woman in San Francisco.

When the news broke that Brownie Mary was facing prison, the city erupted.

It wasn't just the activists who were angry. It was the doctors. It was the nurses. It was the parents who had watched Mary care for their dying sons when the government did nothing.

Mary turned her trial into a pulpit.

She arrived at court not as a defendant, but as a grandmother standing her ground. The media swarmed her. Reporters asked if she was afraid of prison. They asked if she would stop baking if they let her go.

Mary looked into the cameras, her voice gravelly and firm.

"If the narcs think I'm gonna stop baking brownies for my kids with AIDS," she said, "they can go fuck themselves in Macy's window."

The quote ran in newspapers across the country.

The court didn't stand a chance.

Testimony poured in. Doctors from San Francisco General Hospital wrote letters explaining that Mary’s brownies were medically necessary. Patients testified that she was an angel of mercy.

The charges were dropped.

Mary walked out of the courthouse a free woman. But she didn't go home to rest. She realized that her personal victory wasn't enough. As long as the law was broken, her "kids" were still in danger.

She needed to change the law.

August 25 was declared "Brownie Mary Day" by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. It was a nice gesture, but Mary wanted policy, not plaques.

She teamed up with fellow activist Dennis Peron. Together, they opened the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club—the first public dispensary in the United States. It was a safe haven where patients could get their medicine without fear of arrest.

But Mary wanted more. She wanted the state of California to acknowledge the truth.

She campaigned for Proposition 215. She traveled the state, despite her failing health. She spoke in her simple, direct way. She didn't talk about liberties or economics. She talked about compassion. She talked about pain.

She forced voters to look at the issue through the eyes of a grandmother.

In 1996, Proposition 215 passed. California became the first state to legalize medical marijuana.

It was a domino effect. Because one woman refused to let her "kids" suffer, the public perception of cannabis shifted. The Economist later noted that Mary was single-handedly responsible for changing the national conversation.

She never got rich.

She had always joked that if legalization ever happened, she would sell her recipe to Betty Crocker and buy a Victorian house for her patients to live in.

She never sold the recipe. She never bought the house.

Mary Jane Rathbun died in 1999, at the age of 77. She passed away in a nursing home, poor in money but rich in legacy.

Today, over 30 states have legalized medical marijuana. Millions of people use it to manage pain, seizures, and nausea.

Most of them have never heard of Mary.

They don't know that their legal prescription exists because a waitress in San Francisco decided that the law was wrong and her heart was right.

They don't know about the 600 brownies a day.

They don't know about the thousands of hospital visits.

Mary didn't set out to be a hero. She told the Chicago Tribune years before she died, "I didn't go into this thinking I would be a hero."

She was just a mother who had lost her daughter, trying to help boys who had lost their way.

She proved that authority doesn't always equal morality.

She proved that sometimes, the most patriotic thing a citizen can do is break a bad law.

Every August, a few people in San Francisco still celebrate Brownie Mary Day. But her true memorial isn't a date on a calendar.

It is found in every oncology ward where a patient finds relief. It is found in every dispensary door that opens without fear.

It is found in the simple, quiet courage of anyone who sees suffering and refuses to look away.

Mary taught us that you don't need a law degree to change the world. You don't need millions of dollars. You don't need political office.

Sometimes, all you need is a mixing bowl, an oven, and enough love to tell the world to get out of your way.

Sources: New York Times Obituary (1999), "Brownie Mary" Rathbun. San Francisco Chronicle Archives (1992, 1996). History.com, "The History of Medical Marijuana." Weird Everything, FB december 12, 2025

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

Tags quoted from Previous:

#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma

Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of "A.I. slop" in the comments?

[redsixwing]

I'd be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named "Mary Jane," but also, that's a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.

What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren't AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.

Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.

The first thing I did was search for "Brownie Mary" and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.

Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don't want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.

The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.

Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn't have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)

Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.

...or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.

I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.

My search string of "Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun" hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!

She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.

The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I've now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.

The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let's hook onto that and see what we get.

Searching for "Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980" gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!

We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:

...wow. I should see if my library has that!

The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I'd already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.

There's a lot of information out there, and it's worth digging into. Otherwise it's altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.

[thechanelmuse]

Hazel Scott playing two pianos at the same damn time with ease

[erinbowbooks]

Hazel Scott was a musical sorcerer and a civil rights hero.   She:

 was admitted to Julliard at 8.  

was performing in top venues by 16.  

pioneered “swinging the classics” and made the equivalent of a million dollars a year doing it.  

was the first person of color to have their own national TV show.  

went to Hollywood but refused to be cast as a “singing maid.”  Demanded and got control over her casting, her wardrobe, and how footage featuring her was cut.  

refused to perform in segregated venues and led charges for integration in several northern cities, notably Spokane.  

She was brought down by the House Committee on Unamerican Activities, and has been largely forgotten.  But she was a sorcerer, and a hero.  

[domduongart]

@theladyragnell

[violent-darts]

Let’s un-forget her.

[dream-piper]

So I learned something new today!

[therottenkingsreckoning]

I hate current & historical colonization for all the obvious reasons of course, but also it makes me so fucking mad that we'll never get to see what a modern version of The Americas or Australia or the UK or Africa or any other places whose history was massively altered by slavery & foreign takeover would be like if they'd instead been left alone to develop and enter the global trade network as their own fully respected and sovereign nations. I wanna know how similar or different a fully Pictish modern Scotland would be, a surviving and prospering Caddo people still living on the Great Raft's ecosystem, what cool things the native people in Aoteoroa would've come up with if we'd just let them do it in peace and on their own terms. You get what I mean

[eepycreepydolls]

Historians are going to talk about “Folk songs from the twenty first century” hundreds of years from now and its just going to be Pentatonix

[ourrevolution-deactivated202202]

“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who told us that all men are created equal. To my mind, that is what’s known as being stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit.” - George Carlin

…PolitiFact going through history to fact check this guy was like that time CNN went through history to dig up dirt on Bernie, and all they found were videos of him planting trees, and telling kids that racism is bad.

[fierceawakening]

PolitiFact going through history to double check this is still a good thing though, because it means we can truthfully say they did.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/sep/10/arlen-parsa/evidence-shows-most-47-men-famous-declaration-inde/

[the---hermit]

"is it better to read non fiction or novels?" No. It is better to read than not to read full stop. That is the only argument. Let's not create yet another fake scale of who is a better reader. I am so fucking tired of this kind of discourse. If you only read graphic novels you are still reading and that is better than not reading. If you only read middle grade books despite being in your 30s you are still reading and that is better than no reading. If you read one single book a year it is still good because you are reading. And that makes you a reader.

[avelera]

I’m a big fan of reenactment archaeology. I think there’s a lot to be said for recreating a scenario to better understand decisions made in generations past. Usually there’s an inherent logic to them.

Which is to say, that now that I have a baby of my own, I understand so much better the common cultural practice in which unmarried women wear their hair loose and uncovered, while married women have their hair covered and/or bound back.

I doubt it was just for modesty, oh no. No, my friends, I see now that the reason for this common practice of mothers binding back their hair is because there is nothing, I mean nothing, a baby love more than YANKING EVERY STRAND OF HAIR THAT COMES WITHIN GRABBING DISTANCE OF THEIR STICKY, SWEATY, AND IMPOSSIBLY STRONG LITTLE HANDS.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Just seen miniminuteman's trailer for tomorrow's video on 'new conspiracy that there's a second sphinx buried beneath the giza plateau' and it reminds me of how last year I was inundated with asks about 'have you seen this?' I responded to so many of them with 'yeah it's the same bullshit they always put out, call me when they say something new' only to furiously rebutted with 'no this *is* new, idiot'

Fast forward a year and here we are again with 'hidden structure beneath the great pyramids redux: a sphinx this time' which is last year's one a little bit to the right. So when I say 'they do this every fucking year, stop falling for it' I do very much mean 'they do this every fucking year, stop falling for it.'

[mushroomofficial]

An Oven is a kind of European above-ground umu typically constructed from metal and ceramic. Originating in the 18th century, ovens are primarily used for preparing several kinds of Western-style hāngī, such as Sunday roasts, casseroles, and pies, which are cooked in various types of specialised poti. Ovens are usually constructed off-site in dedicated facilities before being installed in the whareumu, or kitchen, of a European whare. They are typically not able to be moved once installed, quite unlike umu which may be constructed anywhere and are readily deconstructed and moved as needed. Another limitation of ovens is that due to their small internal volume relative to their overall size, they are generally restricted in the amount of kai they can produce. An oven will produce only enough kai to feed a few people, whereas a hāngī cooked in an umu can feed an entire village.

[concerningwolves]

reading about the history of the cochlear implant and i just found these incredible descriptions of ways that deaf people in the 1800s made assistive/alert devices for themselves.

first, an alternative to the doorbell:

We cut the bell away, attached a spring to the wire and to this another piece of wire, which had a block of wood fastened to one end and the whole was so contrived that the least pull of the bell handle at the door woudl send the block of wood with a dull, heavy, thud, to the floor of the room and the ... vibration it caused never failed to attract our attention.

but the one that brought tears of laughter to my eyes was this alternative to an alarm clock:

We had one [alarm for waking deaf sleepers] in our house ... for a long time and it always worked perfectly. The simplest is a cord attached to teh alarm wheel of a clock, passing from the drum to a point in the cieling over the head of the bed, where a small spring or trap is fixed with a little wire, upon which a pillow or cushion can be hung. The alarm being set at the desired hour, when it strikes, the drum winds up the cord and the pillow ... drops upon the sleeper, who is aroused thereby.

deaf people (and other disabled people more broadly) have never been this miserable, helpless and inherently downtrodden group that hearing/abled society imagines. except when it comes to waking up on winter mornings. everyone, hearing or deaf, is miserable about this.

[draconym]

So many of the critters that take up residence in human homes are simply species that are cave-adapted. Spiders. Crickets. Millipedes. Isopods. Bats. Your house is a cave to them and they think you are also a cave-adapted organism.

[draconym]

Maybe they're in your house because they miss you. Did you ever think of that.

[rosslynpaladin]

In my tribal tradition we refer to all animals as the relatives. Ever since I got to know the spiders and other critters who share my house with me, it's been a much more friendly existence. We live here together.

(Pest control? The spiders do that. I keep an eye on them, and delight when I spot their newest babies. They're like tiny jewels. I learned about them from Travis McEnery on youtube, and now spiders do not scare me.)

Highly recommend getting to *know* your neighbors in your home- their species, their habits, their names, their behaviors, their intelligences. They stop being scary. They're not humans but they are our fellow beings and we can live with them around, not squash them for existing.

[draconym]

I like this. Here is my housemate who lives in the bathroom.

[what-even-is-thiss]

I hate I when I get an idea for a novel. Like oh no here starts the slow sad slip n’ slide to dissapointment again.

[what-even-is-thiss]

You ever been 30,000 words and hundreds of research hours into a project when you realize hey wait a minute. I don’t like this. This is bad.

[fassina]

Ok adding to this though that even though it is extremely relatable, this is a KNOWN thing with professional writing. 10k is often referred to as "having a pot boiling" or "having a stew" - it's the point where you often see an idea coming together and it's exciting! But THEN... 30k-50k is the point where that fun has to start coming together. In theatre, it's usually week 3 of a 5 week rehearsal period where you have to stop talking about the play and really get it all up on its feet and cohesive. In art, it's committing to what are going to be the final visible layers of colour and texture, in sculpture the moment where you're truly at the point of no return with carving out the shape.

It usually feels really bad. Because this is the point it becomes real craft. It's so, so difficult to really be able to identify if it's truly not going to be anything or you're just in the hardest part of the process, and really the only way to know is to... write through it. Write it badly. Or, if you really can't, put it in a drawer and come back to it after a few months of breathing space. Remember, you can fix so much in the edit, but you can't fix nothing!

(I say, fully looking at my latest draft of my book and considering throwing it in the bin. But my editor said exactly this to me, so I'm passing it along.)

[tjalexandernyc]

this is 100% true. I've written 6 complete novels at this point and every single time around the 40k mark I feel lost in the woods. Nothing seems to be working. I feel awful; I can't sleep. I keep going even though I'm convinced I'm going to fail. And then... It's like leaving a tunnel and getting back out in the sunshine. Stuff starts coalescing. Things that weren't working have obvious fixes. I "can write" again, except I was writing the whole time. It just felt hopeless in the moment. It's not. You just gotta get out of the woods.

[ariaste]

Ah yes the Slough of Desponds. Professional author with 13 books, and this is normal for me as well. (Checking for tension issues usually helps!)

[sainamoonshine]

Lmao I literally wrote a whole blog post abt it once.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/writing-advice-1-82451675

Writing Advice #1: The 90% project completion Dark Night of the Soul | Marie Blanchet

Get more from Marie Blanchet on Patreon

[necromancelena]

Die temu ad die

[necromancelena]

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

[chef-boy-ar-girl]

It accidentally is latin

[saanah]

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

[santapau]

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

[qqueenofhades]

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think "temu" is identical to "timor" (infinitive, "to fear"), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as "timeo" ("I fear"). "Temu" is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate's part to turn gibberish into... something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, "die" does mean "day," though nominative singular is "dies," i.e. "dies irae." It could be conjugated "die" if it was in ablative or locative case, but "die ad die" would mean something more like "day to day." "Ad" is in a "to" direction and "ab" is from, i.e. "ab urbis," and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, "by" is not really a way to translate "ad"; we might want "per" here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one "die" at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

[nudistcat]

@theshitpostcalligrapher

[sekkitsune]

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

[qqueenofhades]

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the "die"-s up that far, though "timeo" (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway ("die ad die timeo," "day to day I fear" if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don't super-hard quote me on this.

[sekkitsune]

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

[qqueenofhades]

....oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

[laurenthemself]

how dare you say we error on the scribes

[jtimu]

this is what happens when you buy your latin on temu

[blumineck]

It’s the final few days of the Bluminarmour Project! After some issues with Kickstarter let’s see how far we can get!

If you want to see fantasy tropes, historical movement and silly tricks tested in authentic full plate armour, please consider chucking a few quid over (or like and share this post):

The Bluminarmour Project

Blumineck is trying to fun a video series doing fun and serious historical and fantasy testing in fitted plate armour.

[victusinveritas]

An academic friend, JD (name redacted), writes this about today's encyclical.

"I just finished the new papal encyclical, "Magnifica Humanitas." I hope to do an op-ed on the piece for a major news outlet and I'd love some suggestions about where.

Some thoughts for now:

This is not quite as good (as concise or poetic) as Laudato Si. Pope Francis was one-of-a-kind. But, it does have the virtue of attempting a synthesis of all the Catholic Social Teaching (which he calls "Doctrine") since Rerum Novarum in 1891, and in most ways this synthesis is fair and even-handed.

The essay begins with a contrast between the "Tower of Babel" (which he says was a city built on a "claim to self sufficiency," and which "eliminated diversity," and the work of Nehemiah in using the practice of collaboration in rebuilding Jerusalem. His overall point is that we need to include everyone in the ownership and management of technological tools and we also should not use weaponize these technologies to extract profit, create unemployment, and thus deprive people of the human dignity of creativity and the opportunity to support themselves. (He could have said this much concisely.)

The introduction and chapter 1 are dedicated to a synthesis of previous social teaching for those who haven't been following. Here he wanders a bit from his thesis. He notes the necessity of caring for migrants and refugees, stands opposed to wiping out other nations, and acknowledges that it took the Church far too long to repudiate slavery and its own investments in systems of slavery. He reiterates previous statements on the value of ecological diversity, development of the Global South, widespread public management of essential public utilities. He especially emphasizes the importance of "subsidiarity," the idea that power should be pushed down to the lowest level and that we should not depend on "states" (ah hem, communist states) for managing welfare. Again, he could do more to connect these back to his main argument.

It's not until he is about half way through the essay that he gets to the point. His points:

1. "Work is not considered simply as a problem to be dealt with or as a means of generating income, but a fundamental good for the person, a principle of economic activity and the key to the entire societal question. Through work, human beings bring their freedom, creativity and capacity for cooperation into play, contributing to the cultural and moral elevation of society." (Paragraph 37) Yes, meaningful work is part of what makes us human.

2. The church has previously supported "private property" and free markets. But, the desire for profits should "remain subordinate to the moral law and guided by the principle of solidarity, without sacrificing the most vulnerable to the rationale of profit." (Paragraph 39) This is huge. I wish the last Leo said this in 1891. We might have had a much better twentieth century. Will this change the way we teach in "Catholic" business schools? I am not holding my breath.

3. He says that AI is not a morally neutral technology. It creates value through machine learning and many of the workers in this industry are poor people, especially women in the Global South, whose lives are not necessarily measurably improved through this work. This is a technology that, like all new technologies, should be studied and evaluated for its moral and social implications and handled well. He discourages the concentration of power through monopolization of access to the benefits of this technology.

5. He says he wants to "safeguard humanity" from "transhumanist" and "posthumanist currents," meaning that he wants to remind people that they need to make good decisions about how to use these new technologies. He supports the expansion of schools as a necessary safeguard to equip people to face the future and calls for communities to come together in support of excellent education in their communities. He says, "Schools are not called to follow the pace of the digital world, but to offer that which the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships." (paragraph 147)

6. He says that we need "an economy of dignity" that develops meaningful jobs and puts people to work. He sees forced unemployment as degrading to human community. He says, "It is important to move beyond current metrics of development--which for more than eighty years have been tied to the concept of Gross Domestic Product--since these metrics almost systematically neglect aspects essential to the overall wellbeing of people and the environment." (Para 159)

Overall, I'm glad for the encyclical but it's a little late. Too bad most of those "Catholic Social Doctrine" popes were so consumed with opposing "communism" that they wouldn't take on capitalism when it was forming the very foundation of Western Civilization. I guess it's never too late to become a Marxist, but I'd like an apology for the Catholic Century of Redbaiting."

[the-supernatural-atheist]

if theres one thing that really pissed me off from my 3 years of architecture i took in high school it's learning about how we used to have all these little techniques to maximize or minimize heat or warmth and now we just merrily abandoned all those to have the same copypaste style buildings everywhere that are often INCREDIBLY unoptimized to the local weather and climate so we can just throw more money at our heating and cooling bills

[the-supernatural-atheist]

where i live it is hot as balls approximately 80% of the year. i do not want a massive butt-ugly grey mcmansion with a huge echoey open-concept kitchen-livingroom-foyer-diningroom-staircase that has huge windows so i can have an hvac unit the size of a barge heaving and straining to keep it at a constant 72 the grees. i want a north indian traditional style home with small windows to force the airflow to cool, decorative grates to limit the amount of sunlight, and a COURTYARD with a POND *smashes unspecified large object*

[makaeru]

I hate learning about instances of "oh yeah we know how to do that, we just don't".