BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
http://abovethelaw.com/2016/12
From the reportage that emanates from the realm of litigation and the judiciary at Above the Law, a hideous briefing about an Islamic immigrant law student, unarmed and unaggressive, whom Cleveland area police shot through the head and killed, providing those abroad in the world–inasmuch as the young fellow’s family and friends were appropriately respectful and held a funeral service for the murdered barrister-in-training back in Southwest Asia–further cause to doubt the moral integrity, or even the very existence of ethics, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, a recounting that scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens might do well to contrast with another new report that gives a precis of a different sort of student outburst, the just-passed seventy percent margin of victory among Columbia University graduate assistants to affiliate as a union with the United Auto Workers , all of which serves to define ‘higher education’ in the here and now.
This Day in History
The State of Alabama celebrates itself today, though the Neil Young song’s lyrics pose questions in that regard, while Bangladesh commemorates Martyred Intellectuals Day, and around the world, December 14th is Monkey Day; in Central Tang China one thousand one hundred and eighty-one years ago, an emperor unsuccessfully conspired with his generals against the power of court eunuchs, the upshot of which was both the annihilation of all the plotters save the emperor himself and the consolidation of the eunuchs’ central role in Tang China at that juncture; four hundred fifty-two years later, and half a world away in 1287, during another bout of global warming, a Netherlands seawall collapsed in St. Lucia’s Flood, killing 50,000 people or more; two hundred fifty-nine years later, in 1546, the baby boy entered our midst on his way to becoming Tycho Brahe, the gifted astronomer and chemist; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
One would find difficult contradicting an argument that under ‘normal’ circumstances injunctions against “rocking the boat” make at least a sort of sense; at other times, however, equally so, as when our common craft is full of holes and sinking of approaching other dire or dooming straits, a failure to mutiny amounts to insanity, both tactical and strategic lunacy, since thriving, or even survival, under such circumstances, hinges on ‘making lots of waves.’
Workingmen and Workingwomen of Newark:
That the Trades Union Question is a burning one is obvious from the space it fills in the public mind, the acrimony of the discussion and the wide divergence of opinion on the subject.
Obvious also is the conclusion that a subject that can draw upon itself so much attention, that can produce so much acrimony, and on which opinion takes so many shades”running from extreme and unqualified support through all manner of gradations across the gamut, to extreme and unqualified opposition”cannot choose but be a vital one, and certainly must have a latent something about it that will not down.
MORE HERE from Daniel Deleon “The Burning Question of Trade Unionism”
resistance OR rebellion OR revolution OR uprising OR insurgency "working class" OR "lower class" OR "oppressed people" OR radicals OR proletariat necessity OR inevitable OR unavoidable OR inherent contradiction OR dialectic OR crisis history OR origins capitalism OR bourgeoisie = 12,300,000 Results.
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
Nearly Naked Links
From Tuesday’s Files
Imploring to Avoid Nuclear War
Letter on the need for urgent measures to avert a nuclear war
Deadly Economic Manure – http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/12/michael-hudson-economists-deadly-but-innocuous-seeming-proclamations.html
FBI & CIA Splits Over ‘Hacks’
FBI Rejects CIA Claim that Russia Assisted Trump in Presidential Election as “Fuzzy and Ambiguous”
EVENTS
http://schumanities.org/grants
Fast Track Literary Grants are intended to support new or existing public literary programs such as (but not limited to) writers series, festivals, conferences, workshops, or writer’s residencies at schools. Fast Track Literary Grants are accepted quarterly. Awards are $3,000 or less. The next deadline is Monday, November 14, 2016. Submissions are accepted by email until 5:00 p.m. on the deadline.
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
THE FICTION DESK GHOST STORY COMPETITION
http://www.thefictiondesk.com/
£8 ENTRY FEE.
Most of the stories we publish at The Fiction Desk are more or less realistic, but we try to stray outside that from time to time: Some genre fiction should be part of any balanced reading diet. One genre that we particularly like to feature is the ghost story. This year, there is a first prize of £500, a second prize of £250, and a third prize of £100. The deadline is Tuesday, January 31, 2017. All stories must be written in English, and be entirely the author’s own work. All entrants must be aged 16 or over at the time of entry; there is no upper age limit. Entries must be between 1,000 and 7,000 words in length.
JOBS
101 HOLIDAYS
http://www.101holidays.co.uk/w
If you are a travel writer, or hoping to get into the industry, we offer a number of ways you can contribute to 101 Holidays. Writers can submit travel articles to our team of editors. We pay between £50 and £100 per article published, depending on its length and complexity. Although we do not have strict word counts, most articles we publish are between 800 and 1,500 words. 101 Holidays runs an internship programme, allowing you to write for us on a part-time remote basis with regular interaction with our experienced editors. Many of our interns have gone on to staff jobs in travel journalism.
A Naked Capitalism look at what happened to everyone’s favourite would-be-president: “So what’s up with Sanders these days? And what’s up with the organizations that spun off from his campaign? Oddly, or not, there’s very little coverage of those topics. (Politico, for example, covers the stop in Boston, but not the tour as such.) So in this post, I’m going to lay out what I was able to find in a few hours of online research; I’m not making any claim that this material will be exhaustive, because that doesn’t seem to be possible right now. I’m going to start out by aggregating reports on the Sanders book tour, supplemented with a little material on other Sanders events. Then I’ll look at the one of the two spin-offs from the Sanders campaign: Our Revolution; unsurprisingly, it gets virtually no coverage either. “
Newmark & Poynter & Monopoly Media’s Usual Suspect
A San Francisco Gate look at the ongoing fake news agenda, and the different establishment media outlets who are invested in this issue: “Craigslist founder Craig Newmark is putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to fighting fake news.
On Monday, The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism education and advocacy organization, announced it had received a $1 million grant from Newmark’s San Francisco charitable foundation to create and fund a new initiative focused on promoting and standardizing ethics in journalism.
“I’m a news consumer, and I just want some news I can trust,” Newmark said in an interview Monday.
The donation — the largest Poynter has received from an individual since its founding in 1975 — will be put toward hiring a new faculty member to combat media misinformation and hold the industry to the highest standards.”
DeVos & Tiers of Public Education Destruction
A Hechinger Report look at the dismal prospects for education thanks to new appointees: “The billionaire DeVos family, without a doubt, inhabits a world a million miles away from the overstuffed classrooms, lack of credentialed teachers and crumbling state of American public schools. But Betsy DeVos and husband Dick, eldest scion of the pyramid sales dynasty Amway Corporation, represent something different. They have made the destruction of public education an ideological crusade.”
Globalization & Uprising & Democracy
A Social Europe article that expounds a pro-globalisation framework that raises alarm in regards to recent developments, which show that the globalisation project failed to deliver: “It is time to rethink the last great bastion of open and tolerant societies: Europe. A Europe battered by the effects of the economic crisis and in a process of deconstruction, haunted by the same ills and tics that affect many western democracies. The Italian referendum demonstrates again the cholera associated with ballots – and the elections in France in April/May 2017 will be our acid test. But it is urgently necessary to reconstruct the European Project, dealing with the causes which have led us to this mess, as Trump’s victory certifies the death of the neoliberal consensus (both geo-strategic and economic) which emerged after the fall of the Berlin wall.”