BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
From both The Hill and the ‘Amazonians’ on the Potomac at Washington Post, reports that ‘outlier’ and reputed outlaw President Elect Trump may already be turning toward rapprochement with the forces that opposing formed the basis for his entire campaign, though while he appointed the just-departed Republican National Committee Chairman as his Chief of Staff, the Donald did also present a plum to his more reactionary and rabid backers with the creation of a ‘chief-strategist’ and soulmate’s position for the publisher of Breitbart News, who led his campaign to victory a week ago, an eventuality that the Jewish Daily Forward speculates may define an anti-Semitic tilt to the entire administration, in the context of which a scrappy scribe or stalwart citizen should take careful note of Trump’s renewed vow , as is also available in The Hill‘s ongoing coverage, to overtake Barack Obama as the ‘deporter-in-chief,’ as soon as he’s had his inauguration and has a pen at hand in the Oval Office.
This Day in History
On this date, the nation that once owned Panama celebrates the Day of the Colombian Woman, while everywhere around the planet people mark World Diabetes Day; in Germany, where some of the Enlightenment’s most impressive advances came to pass, the magisterial thinker and cofounder of Calculus, Wilhelm Leibniz, precisely three centuries ago solved the final theorem that we all eventually face; tellingly, a European wanderer with imperial ‘interests’ of various sorts, James Bruce, fifty-four years subsequently, in 1770, discovered what he falsely believed to be the headwaters of the Nile River; just over six decades toward today, in 1831,the philosopher of idealism and dialectic and history, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, underwent his final synthesis; nine years after that, in 1840, to the West in France, a male infant bounced into the world who would become the impressionist painting genius Claude Monet; across the English Channel, a decade further along, in 1850, Dickens’ typically masterful David Copperfield first issued as a complete text, after he had already serialized the story; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
Just as in agriculture even the most verdant and fertile crescents of nature will experience periods of apparently intractable drought and poor harvests, in so doing afflicting the human creatures who have relied on the rain’s regularity and the soil’s sweet succor, so too in sociopolitical affairs even the most relationally equable and socially just communities will encounter sometimes seemingly interminable passages of bitter fury and vicious depredation, in so doing imposing on citizens and wayfarers harsh stresses instead of the comity and comfort on which they’ve come to count, in either instance inaugurating events that deform and discomfit and derange the inhabitants who must deal with whatever duration of downturn that nature and nurture force them to endure, and in any case providing those who are confronting these catastrophes plenty of opportunities on the one hand to ponder what part they themselves have played in fomenting unpleasant or even disastrous consequences and on the other hand to foster reformulations that might mitigate such periodic difficulties in the future.
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TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
THE END OF IDENTITY POLITICS AS A ‘DEMOCRATIC’ STRATEGY
Nearly Naked Links
Solving Facebook With Snopes
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A Lit Hub post by a perceptive writer who conflates the two event that, for many people, mark a sombre turning point, and showing how these tie together: “Leonard Cohen was never afraid of your darkness. He showed up to your darkness bearing gifts of sex, laughter and oranges. Despite his sterling international reputation for sadness I have never found his music depressing. But it doesn’t lie to you about the depth of darkness in the world.”
Judging Books by Their Covers
An MIT Technology Review lost that looks at the mecahnization of cover design, a phenomenom which paves the way for AI systems to design the covers themselves: “The idiom “never judge a book by its cover” warns against evaluating something purely by the way it looks. And yet book covers are designed to give readers an idea of the content, to make them want to pick up a book and read it. Good book covers are designed to be judged.”
Massachusetts Teachers Stop Pro-Charter Referendum
A Labor Notes post that looks at a recent educational triumph: “One of a few silver linings in an otherwise doom-and-gloom Election Day was in Massachusetts—where, despite being outspent by corporate education reformers, a teacher-led coalition beat back charter school expansion.
“We took on the corporate giants and won,” said Concord teacher Merrie Najimy, president of her local union. “We did it the old-fashioned way, by organizing and building relationships.””
A Rolling Stone piece that captures a seminal point of the 60s when two of the most iconic players, one dead shortly after and the other one with us till just recently, met: “Once inside, he was joined by a woman with wild hair and even wilder clothes. It was the resident of Room 411, a 25-year-old singer from Port Arthur, Texas, named Janis Joplin. She and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company, were in town recording their second album, later titled Cheap Thrills, at the same Columbia studio used for Songs of Leonard Cohen.
Cohen was suddenly less lonely and very intrigued. The elevator’s sluggish pace bought him time to strike up a conversation, which he’d recreate repeatedly in concerts for years to come.”