BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW
COMPLEX TREACHERY AT STANDING ROCK & OTHER SOP OUTCOMES
In the grip of snow and arctic winds on the Northern High Plains in the lands of the Standing Rock Sioux people, astride the planned route for the Dakota Access Pipeline, reports of import for scrappy scribes and stalwart citizens of amplified police presence and plans to eject protestors and other denizens of diminishing carbon and bearing witness, in a fact-filled article from the Free Thought Project that makes the important point that Tribal Council elders are now in favor of the local authorities’ initiatives to ‘clear the camps,’ reporting that one may also view in an Activist Post account , eventualities that appear infrequently or not at all on monopoly media front pages, a nexus of dissent and official pushback that appears in obverse, so to speak, in unfolding developments in regard to Uber’s operations, its CEO’s relationships with the Trump transition, the company’s dependence of immigrants even as it has yet aggressively to condemn the new administration’s recent protocols in this realm, assessments in relation to which appear in a new item in The Hill that indicates that company founder Travis Kalanick has ‘respectfully’ withdrawn from Trump’s transportation transition team after threats among Uber users, a ‘delete Uber’ groundswell that in the Chief Organizer’s Blog Wade Rathke describes as a ‘goes around, comes around’ type of payback.
This Day in History
Today is World Wetlands Day and, in the U.S. and Canada, Groundhog Day; one thousand five hundred and eleven years ago, Alaric II of the Visigoths promulgated a compendium of Roman laws that helped him to hold on to a kingdom that included most of present-day Spain and much of what is now France; a thousand fifty-five years before this point in time, the twelfth Pope John appointed Otto Holy Roman Emperor after a lapse of four decades in imperial leadership, an appointment that preceded the new king’s conquest of Italy and extension of the Empire’s borders generally; in present-day Estonia and Latvia half a decade less than two and a half centuries subsequently, in 1207, the Pope ordered the creation of one of several Baltic principalities, in this case Terra Mariana, which soon enough became Catholic Church properties at the borders of the Holy Roman Empire; four hundred eighty-one years before the here-and-now, a Spanish conquistador led the founding of what became Buenos Aires, Argentina; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
To some extent, a primary—or even the central—aspect of present-day citizenship revolves around insistence on bearing accurate witness, a persistent election to notice and then truly ascertain the day to day operations of systems and relationships that serve to perpetuate the rule of plutocracy and plunder, of imperial imprimatur, a process of conscious perception, not shying away from seeing things as they truly are, that in turn can lead to a stalwart, civically minded participant’s becoming an honest broker for all her fellows, an interlocutor for all his comrades, of both the depredations and crimes against humanity, on the one hand, that transpire constantly amid the profiteering and exploitation of the here and now, and the opportunities and unselfish generosity that capital’s munificence permits even as its highly honed operators and grasping, greedy denizens seek to revert to a much more primitive and brutal interactional nexus, thereby maintaining control simultaneously as, paradoxically, they squelch the forces of liberation that bourgeois methods themselves have released: if one can circumscribe such a sense of awareness and then circumnavigate the treacherous passages that such clear vision brings in its wake, one may indeed aspire to, or even claim, the mantle of revolutionary midwife, assisting in the rebirth of humanity’s vast potential despite all the forces apparently arrayed against such a result.
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Nearly Naked Links
From Wednesday’s Files
An Investigator’s Obituary = https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/29/business/media/wayne-barrett-stephen-bannon.html
Internecine Conflict Among Trump’s Appointees
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U.S. journalists interested in environmental issues can apply for a nine-month fellowship in Boulder, Colorado.
The Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado is accepting applications for the Ted Scripps Fellowship.
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Medical Experimentation’s Ubiquity
An Aeon post from a medical advocate that introduces readers to the sober and frightening ways that the medical establishment toys with people: “The tenets of the Nuremberg Code were not meant only for Nazis. If Nazis presented the only danger to people being used for medical experiments, eliminating the Nazis would have solved our problems. The Nuremberg Code was written to guide all of us, because good intentions are not enough.”
A Scholarly Kitchen look at what the current climate has wrought for academia and scientific inquiry: “We live in strange times and in a bizarre political climate, unlike anything we have ever seen. Academic publishers can no longer assume they will be insulated from the shocks rippling through the system. From Brexit to Trump to white nationalists to hackers to anti-science groups, the global scientific community is under new pressures and tensions, which means its publishers are, as well, like it or not.”
A Vanity Fair look at the diminishing of the great media empire in the West, an industry whose end seems closer than it ever did before: “With theater attendance at a two-decade low and profits dwindling, the kind of disruption that hit music, publishing, and other industries is already reshaping the entertainment business. From A.I. Aaron Sorkin to C.G.I. actors to algorithmic editing, Nick Bilton investigates what lies ahead.”
A Mondoweiss article that views some of the newly forming Israeli American alliances with an eye to what lies beneath: ” Ali Abunimah has a piece up at EI saying that “Netanyahu’s support for Trump’s racist policies opens eyes of liberals to Israel’s real character.” Will that be the case? “
A Stanford entry that describes the process whereby an individual or society tends to inbue events with a sense of inevitability or fate, as one example of many of interpreting reality: “Causal determinism is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event is necessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the laws of nature. The idea is ancient, but first became subject to clarification and mathematical analysis in the eighteenth century. Determinism is deeply connected with our understanding of the physical sciences and their explanatory ambitions, on the one hand, and with our views about human free action on the other. In both of these general areas there is no agreement over whether determinism is true (or even whether it can be known true or false), and what the import for human agency would be in either case.”