The Blindspot Archives

Lincoln Creek Lumber workers in Washington state sit on logs in the 1900s.

Werner Herzog on psychoanalysts: They are a disease of our time. They should all be put on an airplane and flown to an island. They profess to be a science and a profession but in actuality have no real knowledge or scientific basis for their claims.

Memling, H. (ca. 1470–1475). Portrait of a man [Oil on panel]. The Frick Collection. https://collections.frick.org/objects/223

Dutch and German emerged from a shared West Germanic dialect continuum rather than from clearly distinct languages separated by modern national borders. In the medieval period, speakers across the Low Countries and German-speaking regions used related vernaculars, and terms such as Diets, Duits, and Deutsch all derive from a common root meaning “the language of the people.” One of the most important developments in their divergence was the High German Consonant Shift (ca. 500–800 CE), a series of sound changes that affected many southern German dialects but largely bypassed the Low Countries. As a result, Dutch often preserves forms closer to English, such as maken (make), water (water), and appel (apple), whereas German developed machen, Wasser, and Apfel. Another distinctive feature of Dutch linguistic history was a strong tradition of creating native vocabulary rather than borrowing extensively from Latin and Greek. The sixteenth-century scholar Simon Stevin promoted Dutch as a language suitable for science and scholarship, helping establish terms such as wiskunde (“mathematics”), aftrekken (“subtract”), and evenwijdig (“parallel”). These developments illustrate how Dutch and German evolved from a common linguistic landscape into distinct languages while retaining their close relationship within the West Germanic family. Donaldson, B. C. (1983). Dutch: A linguistic history of Holland and Belgium. Martinus Nijhoff. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/dona001dutc02_01/ Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). High German consonant shift. https://www.britannica.com/topic/High-German-language Encyclopaedia Britannica. (n.d.). Simon Stevin. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simon-Stevin Super, C. W. (1893). A history of the German language. Hann & Adair. https://archive.org/details/historyofgermanl00supeiala Young, C., & Gloning, T. (2004). A history of the German language through texts. Routledge.

Tawny owl

Phillip Tourney, one of the USS Liberty survivors speaks and says we are occupied. He says israel controls all facets of our government, and he’s tired of it. This whole country should be tired of it.

Saw everything.

One horse is trying to leave. The other is enforcing workplace policy. The bronc wants out. The pickup horse and rider have a different assignment. Their job is to block the escape route, redirect the movement, and get everyone safely back to the pens. What looks like aggression is actually a split-second negotiation between a determined bronc and a highly skilled horse-and-rider team.🔥

The penultimate Western ideal according to Goethe: never cease striving.