BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
FALSE NARRATIVES ABOUT FOOD & HUMAN SURVIVAL
For scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens who don’t exactly fancy starvation as a lifestyle, a just-released report from the Environmental Working Group, as linked to and reported in today’s EcoWatch newsletter, an antidote to government and agribusiness–can anyone say, “Monsanto-Bayer?”–propaganda and horse manure about how their profiteering rackets in relation to genetically modified organisms will save us from a future of deprivation and deliver plenitude instead of creating food deserts around the planet and guaranteeing human dependency on ever more fragile, capital-intensive technofixes to stave off catastrophe, matters of such import that contextualizations of the current context that don’t address these matters are practically worthless.
This Day in History
Around the globe, today is both World Teachers Day and an International Day of No Prostitution; the conquest of what is now Spain by Roman imperial troops and Visigoth, Frankish, and Gothic allies one thousand five hundred sixty years ago began with an invasion of Iberia at the order of Emperor Avitus; four hundred thirteen years later, in 869, the modern meaning of byzantinebecame clear with the convocation of a council to determine what to do about Constantinople’s erstwhile ruler, Photius, who had been in and out of a leadership role for much of the previous decade and whose backers and opponents alike were likely to die from assassination or mysterious demise; five hundred sixty-six years in advance of this moment in time, Lower Bavaria’s ninth Duke Louis ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the Duchy; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
Any mandate to ‘keep it simple stupid’ or other similar advice, except in relation to trivially mundane tasks, poisons any chance of either comprehension or accomplishment, primarily because, first, such thinking precludes envisioning or strategizing or planning in sufficiently rich and complex detail what any even minimally monumental venture requires, and, second, this sort of simplemindedness inevitably elicits impatience and a willingness to accept both half-baked tactics and half-completed projects, so that, while seeking the nub or center that one can state clearly and quickly, the leader insists that advance contemplation is copious, that operational detail is intricate, and that feedback loops and proofs of performance are ubiquitous.
"manhattan project" "central intelligence agency" OR cia OR "national security act" "atomic energy agency" OR aec interconnected OR interdependent OR intertwined vannevar OR oppenheimer OR groves OR lilienthal OR szilard science OR nsf OR "endless frontier" "political economy" OR "hidden agendas" OR profit analysis OR explication = 3,040 Hits.
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
A POWERFUL ANTIDOTE TO PSYCHIATRIC & PHARMACEUTICAL BULLSHIT
Another requisite ninety-minute showing, minimum, in which the absolutely brilliant ethicist and science journalist Robert Whitaker creates a narrative–with absolutely tons of evidence and logic to support it, with very little persuasive data or reasoning to refute it–that actually explains, for example, how kids with an ADHD ‘diagnosis’ have increased by fifty times since 1980 or so, and, for instance, how the population of Prozac and other Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor ‘patients’ has grown fifty times since 1987, from under a million people to over forty million, and in the process establishes a context of corruption and public relations persuasion, all of which depends on telling a tale of a medical miracle, in which ‘imbalanced’ chemistry scientifically balances and thereby cures actual mental disease, which, as Whitaker shows close to dispositively has little or no correspondence to actual brain and mental functioning science–even the investigations undertaken by the drug companies themselves–as opposed to marketing and ideological research to support massive sales and profits, a take on the hideous viciousness of drug company efforts that fits with horrifying precision to various other assessments, including, first of all, this one about the ways that the popular Attention Deficit drug Adderall is extremely close in chemistry and action to crystal methamphetamine, the illegal and highly addictive substance that people on the street call speed, a type of contraband that has seen truly explosive growth in tandem with the administration of the supposed medicine to children who have absolutely zero say so in their imbibing these drugs, and second of all this one, about the way that the sugar industry has known of the causal connection between diabetes or other pathologies and loads of sugar in diets, the aggregate of which actual research and analysis–as opposed to the falsehoods and self-interested distortion that in sum amount to pharmaceutical company scientism–scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens ought to consider very carefully if they have even slim hopes of a human existence in the future, rather than a chemically-induced mass psychosis that becomes more clearly chronic as the usage of profitable ‘medication’ becomes more commonplace.
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
THE WRITER SHORT STORY CONTEST
ENTRY FEE.
Write a 2,000-word fictional short story using any nuance, definition or understanding of the word “dark.” Deadline November 15, 2016. Grand prize $1,000 and publication in the magazine.
THE LOFT SPOKEN WORD IMMERSION FELLOWSHIP
Deadline October 21, 2016. The Immersion Fellowship is for artists of color and Indigenous artists and provides writers financial support and professional assistance to develop and implement community learning and enrichment plans. Winners will be selected to receive grants of $7,500 to underwrite projects of their own design. At least one winner will be a Minnesota resident. Four winners will be selected.
JOBS
AXS.com is looking for EDM Music Writers
Are you a talented writer with a passion for live music or sports? If you’re looking for a great opportunity to attend live music, sports, comedy and theater events while building a portfolio to showcase your journalistic skills, you may be a great fit…
Technical Editor / Project Assistant (Columbia, MD)
A Lit Hub look at the ongoing saga of banned books: “Like small pox and vinyl records, book banning is something many Americans like to think of as history. But according to the American Booksellers for Free Expression (ABFE), the practice persists. ABFE, which from its headquarters in White Plains fights book banning across the country, keeps a list of books challenged each year by American public libraries and schools. In 2016, that list includes Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Emily M. Danworth’s The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Most of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and authors of color who write about life beyond white, straight, middle-class America.”
Origins of Electronic Records Archiving Protocols
A National Archives article that takes us back to the early days of seeking to create an electronics records archiving system that we can benefit from today: “In hindsight, the National Archives attempt to take the lead on this issue was extremely brave given the expense and complexity, and our limited resources and expertise. It was hard enough to save and preserve the new mediums let alone to devise ways for researchers to access the information stored on those mediums for years to come.”
Practicing Terrorism Against Syria
A Global Research post that contextualizes the dire circumstances created by western exceptionalism in Syria by example of a recent deplorable United Nations happening: “When Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations (“We the people of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations form the scourge of war …”) rose to speak at the UN to address Syria’s ongoing tragedy, on Sunday 25th September, US Ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, François Delattre, Permanent Representative for France and British Permanent Representative, Matthew Rycroft, metaphorically threw their toys out of the pram and walked out. Anything more infantile and further away from the UN’s founding aspirations would be hard to find.
They would have done well to hear Mr Churkin’s full address (1) it lays out home truths and the reality of international State sponsored terrorism – resulting in Syria’s living nightmare – in succinct detail.”
Wagering on Chance
A Farnam Street article that analyses common misconceptions on chance, in an aim to help readers make better decisions, innovate, and ‘avoid stupidity:’ “We expect the immediate outcome of events to represent the broader outcomes expected from a large number of trials. We believe that chance events will immediately self-correct and that small sample sizes are representative of the populations from which they are drawn. All of these beliefs lead us astray.”