BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
An in all too many ways typical announcement of monopoly media collusion with–or even leadership in–invasive intelligence gathering, in this case a press briefing from the American Civil Liberties Union of California that alludes to new documentation that shows Facebook and Twitter and Instagram provided police ongoing updates about what ‘activists’ were up to in Ferguson, Missouri, Baltimore, Maryland, and presumably elsewhere as well, playing the part of an anti-social , more or less fascist media on the very same day that Hillary Clinton, complaining that Queen Ganders deserve different treatment from all the lowly geese, caviled that Russia was behind all the leaking e-mails that showed her involvement with rackets and plunder and warmongering and more, the fact that these e-mails–really from the account of Clinton adviser John Podesta–exist not at all in dispute, as a new release from The Hill makes clear, altogether a ‘fine kettle of fish’ for scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens to examine, inasmuch as they care about such trivialities as either democracy or survival.
This Day in History
Today presents multiple commemorations and celebrations, including Spain’s National Day, Venezuela’s Day of Indigenous Resistance, in the United States Columbus Day and National Indigenous Peoples Day and National Freethought Day, in England National Coming Out Day, and around the world, October twelfth is Spanish Language Day; in what is now Iraq twenty-five hundred and fifty-five years ago, – 539b- the fighting forces of the Persian Empire, under the tutelage of Cyrus the Great, completed the conquest of Babylon; two millennia and thirty-one years hence, in 1492, ships under the command of Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ a new hemisphere when they landed ashore the first island in the Bahamas that they visited; three hundred sixty-two years prior to the present pass, the new age of explosives made itself felt when a gunpowder warehouse in Delft, Belgium exploded and leveled much of the city, killing and injuring untold numbers; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
In many ways, the central conundrum of consciousness is the difficulty of matching the arguably undeniable, and in some sense objective, cosmic reality in which we operate—lucky travelers on a ‘green ship,’ drones for our royal overlords, random actors in an improvisational performance, whatever combination of metaphor and information one is capable of advancing—with the equally tangible inner states of awareness about the world and our part in it that each of us manifests in our brains and thinking and actions, an inevitably subjective conceptualization of things that is in fact part of the whole but only via inference about the implicit more or less actually mirrors the wider realm so as to interact seamlessly with it in service of something that we posit or want or seek—the only blade to slice through this intractable knot will ever remain that combination of collectivity and solidarity that insists on everyone’s participating in the scripting of our ongoing conversations about conflict and opportunity, conjunction and individuality, and so on and so forth.
― Robert Coles, The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination
Doc of the Day
objectivity subjectivity conundrum OR contradiction OR paradox OR opposition psychology OR epistemology OR sociology OR "social analysis" OR "social movement" "central problem" OR "centrally important" OR "key issue" OR "primary focus" revolution OR evolution OR reform OR progress OR transformation OR change = 258,000 Citations
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
A CLANDESTIME MASTERPIECE ON WHAT ELECTORAL POLITICS MEAN
http://www.spyculture.com/clan
The analysis of Tom Secker, who whatever his anarchist lens and radical political economy is a decent human being who is intellectually honest, about the current impasse that Western Capital faces, in the episodic eventualities of electoral farce that transpire in the United States, with a focus on deconstructing ‘Donald Gump’ and ‘Hitlerie’ Clinton and, respectively, their opportunistic nonsense and psychotic dribble, in so doing framing the madness as a Rorschach process in which the petty bourgeois neurotics of the ‘ten percent’ project their fantasies on ‘star candidates’ who are always neoliberal reactionaries who want only to further their profiteering and plundering clients, all of which permits him to examine the ubiquity of militarism and the policy-and-practice war crimes that flow from this current orientation of finance, and the ideological and psychological and epistemological results of these patterns among his listeners and the other folks who aren’t a part of the tiny minority who actually make decisions in the world, a brilliant collection of reasoning and rhetoric about theresentiment that encourages blaming instead of acting rationally, and with integrity, to solve our problems, a presentation to which every scrappy scribe and stalwart citizen ought to attend carefully and attentively and in a participatory fashion, keeping in mind that “a word, to the wise, is sufficient.”
EVENTS
The Lighthouse Works Fellowship
The Lighthouse Works offers residencies from March 13 to April 26, 2017, and from May 9 to June 20, 2017 to poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
NO ENTRY FEE.
Deadline November 1, 2016. The Jane Lumley Prize is awarded annually to a poet whose written work revels in the full spirit of creating a literary architecture that inspires the readers to engage with its being beyond the words and feelings that constitute it. The winner, judged in a blind review by a guest judge, will receive a prize of $300 and will be featured in the January 2017 edition of Hermeneutic Chaos. The winner will also receive a certificate, 10 broadsides of the winning poem, and three chapbooks from our press catalog. The Jane Lumley Prize will be awarded to poets who have not published more than one full length collection, and/or have only published chapbooks, and/or have published work in literary magazines and/or anthologies. Limit eight poems
JOBS
Seeking Copy Editors–IMMEDIATE START (Atlanta) hide this posting
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A post by an insightful political commentator who looks at the ramifications of Britain’s recent controversial vote as a function of political relationships: “In this post, I discuss the options for the UK in its relationship to the EU after the Brexit vote, particularly in light of the fact that Theresa May’s government has decided that freedom of labour movement is to be sacrificed on the altar of the hostility towards immigration that is held to have driven much of the support for Leave. It is also increasingly clear that the EU will take a harsh view of British attempts to separate trade access to the EU from the access of EU citizens to British work opportunities.”
A Brevity guide that discusses the usual issues in regards to edits and revisions to one’s work in hopes of finding a publisher: “What if you think an editor doesn’t “get” your piece? If you’ve received edits that make you think, Did you agree to publish the piece I wrote, or the piece you would like me to have written? How can you distinguish wounded author feelings from genuine incongruence of vision?”
Unbridgeable Dichotomy Between Money and Newsworthiness
A Monday Note look, with great detail and information, of a fundamental problem with journalism today, and with its ongoing fiscal viability if actual newsworthiness is pursued: “Some might object that a great journalistic piece might indeed bring more money to the publisher because it draws a larger audience. In theory, yes. Except that hard news perform poorly compared to cheap feature stories. For example, last week on Business Insider, a story about the new Facebook classified service said to sell drugs, animals, and adult services raked up more than 800,000 views; or the classic “10 must-have travel tech accessories” got more than 300,000 views. At the same time, very few tech or finance stories in BI reached the 10,000 mark that week.”
A Just Security article that looks at the imminent threat of war that looms ever closer: “After days of negotiations on the French-Spanish resolution, Russia tabled on Friday a competing resolution (S/2016/847) that would have established a ceasefire but not a no-fly-zone. The Russian resolution did not benefit from multilateral negotiations before it was put to a vote, which raised procedural objections among some delegations. The Russian resolution garnered only four votes (including from China) in its favor. (In order for a resolution to pass, nine votes are necessary plus no veto by one of the permanent 5 members of the Council).”
Red Cloud’s Victory Over U.S. Forces
A The Free Thought article that looks at one of the few events of the conquest of the American continent actually worth remembering and commemorating in a ‘Columbus Day’, for those who have long been alienated and misrepresented by the events the day ‘celebrates:’ “Columbus Day has rightly become the subject of disdain and sharp criticism given the altogether ridiculous idea he “discovered” a land already inhabited for aeons and wrought genocide against its population….
But in light of the stark reality of the conqueror’s brutal legacy, a few shining moments of resistance evidence the power of the indigenous to quash governmental usurpation — as is the innate right of humans anywhere.”