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A PROTESTING ATHLETE’S MOVE TOWARD POSITIVE ACTION

This Day in History
Today in Roman and Anglican churches marks the commemoration of All Souls Day, while in Mexico celebrants partake of a second Day of the Dead ceremony; in Tang Chinese environs thirteen hundred ninety-seven years ago, a Western Turkic leader dies at the hands of assassins, part of forces of Eastern Turkic rivals whom the Chinese had given a nod to carry out the murder; just six years beyond a millennium and a half century subsequently, in 1675, Plymouth Colony’s governor led forces against indigenous Narragansett in the bloodbath of King Philip’s War; two hundred eighty-two years ahead of our present moment in time, a baby boy was born who became the iconic hunter and early American nationalist, Daniel Boone; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
The basic rationale is simple to state that Only an organized and empowered citizenry can have even the slightest hope of addressing successfully any one of the individual crises that are each individually critically important: thus, before we worry about any seemingly most crucial group of predicaments—discrimination or bigotry; nuclear or conventional weapons proliferation; the ‘War-on-Drugs’ or the Prison-Industrial-Complex and their deleterious impacts on people; the Citizens United ruling or other forms of electoral fraud or theft or overreaching; anything—we must first address the dilemma of a disempowered, disorganized, inchoate populace, a mandate, of course, the reasoning of which in turn presupposes that democracy is a valid goal in its own right, either thinking along the lines of Churchill that ‘everything else is so much worse’ or in similar fashion as Jefferson in believing that majority-rule is the necessary state of civilized human existence, in any case an assumption that most readers would be willing to stipulate since even those who in their hearts despise turning over rule to the ‘unwashed masses’ presently find politic a nod in the direction of democracy, so that the conclusion to which this discussion leads is substantial in its scope and thrust, basically, coming down to this—without grassroots organization and empowerment, homo sapiens are either ‘toast’ or facing a future of concentration camps and mass slaughter,stakes that ought to make anyone want to achieve an understanding of the ‘rules of the game’ that are applicable in our present morass.
"wrongful conviction" OR "miscarriage of justice" OR "false confession" "police state" OR "prosecutorial misconduct" endemic OR ubiquitous OR omnipresent systematic OR purposeful OR "mass incarceration" OR intentional history OR evolution OR origins analysis OR explication = 6,960
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
Barking Sycamores seeks poetry, short fiction (1000 words or less), creative nonfiction (8,500 words or less), hybrid genre works (8,500 words or less), and art by neurodivergent (autistic, ADHD, bipolar, dyslexic, etc.) writers and artists for its unthemed Issue 11. Submission period: September 1 – October 31, 2016.
We also seek essays on the impact of neurodivergence on the creation of literary works(8,500 words or less) and book reviews (1,000 words or less).
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Audio Video Transcription Tool, Open Source
A Nieman Lab look at some very useful open source tools for scrappy writers and media creators: “Transcribing and then trying to edit audio or video makes me want to tear my hair out. While there are free tools out there to simplify the process — oTranscribe, Draft — finding the right quotes from a long speech or cleaning up a Q&A still feels interminable.”
Gawker’s Final Settlement For Truthtelling
A Poynter look at the last days of a brave media enterprise: “Denton formally disclosed an out-of-court, $32 million settlement which ends related litigation involving Gawker journalists.
He discussed the decision to settle in a note titled, “A hard peace,” which opened, “After four years of litigation funded by a billionaire with a grudge going back even further, a settlement has been reached. The saga is over.”
The money for the settlement came from the sale of Gawker Media to Univision and will be paid from the Gawker estate.”
Mass Ballot Initiative Targets Public Education
A Common Dreams look at a terrible initiative for a pro-charter school initiative designed to hijack public education: “to the financial industry’s backing of Question 2, the former presidential candidate said in a statement Tuesday, “Wall Street must not be allowed to hijack public education in Massachusetts.”
“This is Wall Street’s attempt to line their own pockets while draining resources away from public education at the expense of low-income, special education students and English language learners,” he continued.”
A Reflection on Kissinger’s Impact
A Process History look at the dubious legacy of empire’s favorite bully: “For Grandin, Kissinger is consistently craven, aggressive, and self-serving. For Ferguson, he is reliably strategic, statesman-like, and even idealistic. The last claim is hardest to swallow. Ferguson adopts Kant’s framing of human dignity and morality as the center of gravity for politics, but then finds “idealism” repeatedly lacking in Kissinger’s positions on nuclear weapons, wars, and coups that clearly violate those principles. When Kissinger departs from the expectations of an idealist, according to Ferguson, he is making tough trade-offs; when others (e.g. McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and Walt Rostow) do the same, they are hypocrites and sycophants. Grandin has the opposite double-standard.”