BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
MARCHING WOMEN & ENVISIONING A SURVIVABLE HUMAN FUTURE
In relation to a mass outpouring of doubt and discontent about Donald Trump’s now extant forty-fifth Presidency, a reflective article from New York Times writers that ponders what comes next, following the sense of social upsurge and solidarity on the day following President Trump’s America-first inaugural paean to social chauvinism and economic nationalism, one among many apt inquiries that marchers and their supporters, not to mention scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens generally, ought to be asking insistently, something that a very different Times segment addressed in a different fashion, pointing out that George Soros had provided substantial fiscal and logistical largesse in making the events of Saturday massive, something moreover that The Chronicle of Higher Education reported even more divergently, assessing how university and public intellectual thought leaders had incorporated learning and networking into building and learning from the activities that characterized the nation’s streets this weekend, something moreover that TruthOut contextualizes in terms of ongoing victimization of women that will very likely worsen under Trump administration oversight; all of which dovetails with The Hill’s announcement Sunday that the new President had already signed the Executive Order to undo the flawed but also insurance-company-friendly Affordable Care Act, and that ties into a Common Dreams prediction that Trump’s just-announced hiring squeeze could easily represent a first step toward an even more thoroughgoing ‘privatization’ of government operations, which amounts to nothing other than paying taxes directly into corporate coffers—the aggregate of which fits tragically with the briefing from Fusion about the roadside death-by-SUV of the climate activist who had been walking, barefoot, cross country to protest the incoming administrations rejection of scientific consensus about the sources and seriousness of global warming.
This Day in History
In an interesting historical wrinkle, today in the middle of the Pacific Ocean marks Bounty Day for the Pitcairn Islands, where mutineers absconded with themselves after setting loose Captain Bly and the rest of the ‘loyal’ crew of H.M.S Bounty; in that part of the world that was the primary source of ‘civilizations’ and imperial power for many many centuries after the fall of Rome, a thousand forty-six years ago, Song Chinese warriors used devastating crossbow fire to crush their opponents from the Southern Han, who battled while sitting upon their elephants; seven years less than three centuries along time’s path, in 1264, the ninth Louis of Norman France promulgated a decision in a dispute between his cousin, England’s third King Henry and his still –despite the Magna Carta-– rebellious barons, such a one-sided holding that the Second Barons War followed apace; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
Perhaps the most egregious instance of capital’s current tendency to regress to its far more predatory beginnings, in the event an imperial retrogression toward the entitled world that it once so staunchly opposed, at least in theory, at least rhetorically, is the fawning obeisance to the Saudi royal line, which especially in English publications does not receive even the ‘scrutiny’ paid to Britain’s aristocracy as a class, a proclivity to support a throwback in one way or another that, to say the very least, bodes ill for the vast majority of the world’s peoples.
mercenaries OR "military contractors" OR "private armies" OR "private security" militarism OR imperialism OR invasion OR coup abuse OR murder OR impunity OR criminal OR victims women OR children OR civilian protest OR resistance OR uprising investigation OR research OR analysis OR critique OR indictment OR accusation radical OR marxist history OR origins = 1,180,000 Links.
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
For scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens who insist on skepticism in regard to conspiratorial thinking, some challenging material today, from the ‘free-market’ fabulist Vin Armana, who, whatever his ideological slant, shares some important research about how ‘privatized intelligence’ has become a potent force within the U.S. Government, a practice, he reminds listeners, against which none other than Nicola Machiavelli warned half a millennium back; and from Australia’s Max Igan, who interviews grassroots journalist George Webb, via Forbidden Knowledge TV, regarding the evidence of criminality in both just-shuttered Clinton Foundation and in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, with the focal point in Webb’s work the disappearance of the Foundation’s chief executive, Eric Braverman, who has simply vanished into thin air so far as anyone can determine; and from the Russophiles at The Duran who present a segment of a George Soros interview at Davos in which the aged investor evinced a certain befuddlement about the new President at the same time that he predicted his failure and the wider ‘market’s’ fleecing as a result: the aggregate of which an astute observer might place in the investigative and documentary context that Jeremy Scahill not so long ago provided to an audience at Portland’s Powell Books about the depredations and impunity of Blackwater as exemplification of a growing phenomenon of subcontracted police state protocols and actions, the upshot of which is often enough murder and mayhem for hire with no consequences for the perpetrators.
Nearly Naked Links
From Friday and Saturday’s Files
Capitalism on Drugs – https://web.archive.org/web/20160602201641/http://contributoria.com/issue/2015-01/54559901083e5e7b1a0000b5/
Election Interference, Noam Interview – http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/39159-noam-chomsky-on-the-long-history-of-us-meddling-in-foreign-elections
Terror Time, Doomsday Style – http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/past-issues/issue-5/fear-and-time
EVENTS
Deadline: 11:59 pm February 6, 2017 for BA or MA application
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
BROOKLYN POETS FELLOWSHIPS
Each workshop season, we award fellowships to promising students in need to take our workshops for free. To be eligible, applicants must not have previously published (or had accepted for publication) a chapbook or full-length collection of poems. Applicants are limited to one fellowship every four years, two fellowships lifetime.
JOBS
Charlotte Observer Digital Audience Editor
The Charlotte Observer is looking for an experienced audience editor to help us aggressively grow our digital readership.
This is a senior leadership position in our newsroom for an editor who has a deep understanding of reader behavior and is skilled at teaching others to work in an audience-centered way.
Assessing Street Protest Impacts
A highly relevant post from JStor that addresses the age–old question that assails both protesters and its skeptics: “In 2012, Daniel Q. Gillion looked into the question of whether protests “work” in a very specific, quantifiable way: checking to see if they change how elected representatives vote. He did this by looking at civil rights protests between 1961 and 1995 and then considering the subsequent roll-call votes of the House representatives from the districts where the protests took place.
An IJ Net posting that provides good tips for security and online safety in this uncertain world: “For journalists anywhere in the world, a digital security plan is the first line of defense.
What are some of the best practices and how successful are they? Where should neophytes begin? Where can the tech savvy go to gain new skills?”
A Medium post that highlights that breaks down the mechanics of how the current media climate, trapped in the tragic necessity to acquire profits, perpetuates the ‘fake news’ and mistrust that threatens its existence: “Companies from Medium to The Washington Post to Mashable to Buzzfeed all eventually run into the same unthinkable truth: The methods used to fund modern journalism simultaneously undermine trust in the news outlets. …… Most outlets chasing reach leverage social media (mostly Facebook) to get content read by as many people as possible. This changes the reward from “quality” and “originality” to getting content to spread virally. This decreases trust. “
An Ecowatch article that looks at the political and environmental ramifications of current Trump appointee: “Some have demonstrated opposition to the particular agency and/or its mission in a professional capacity. Others have stated a desire to see the agency disappear altogether, suggesting the institution has no value.
Rick Perry‘s appointment to head the Department of Energy (DOE) is certainly consistent with this trend; in a 2011 presidential debate he famously forgot the name of the agency he would abolish. And now he’s been nominated to lead it.”
Don’t Throw The Baby Out With the Bathwater
A Consortium News reminder to look at whatever can be positive and redeemable about the current political situation: “Progressives and Democrats have every right and reason to express revulsion at Trump’s crude remarks about women, Mexicans and others — and to resist Trump if he pursues the failed environmental, economic and domestic policies of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. But there seems to be an attitude of rejecting everything associated with Trump.”