A Thought for the Day
The contemporary management proclivity to define every range of human response to stimuli or input as an average, while laudable in terms of prescribing and dosing populations with substances that members must purchase, promotes an at best dangerous fantasy about how such ambits of consequential development actually operate in nature, which is to say as a manifestation of variety and not of the ‘central tendency’ so beloved to marketers and accountants and profiteers, who see in the close definition of any multitude the opportunity to impose an orderly unity that in turn makes manufacturing rubrics and production protocols much easier to mandate even as it ‘unintentionally’ subverts evolutionary processes and guarantees a weakening of the underlying organisms’ adaptability to the inevitable fluctuations of environments that are always in one state of another of transformation, rather than ever expressing the fixed locus that hegemons, who hope to regularize their output and sales according to secure formula, concomitantly adore.
This Day in History
Venezuela on this date commemorates Beginning of the Independence Movement not quite two centuries back, as, around the planet, everyone has an opportunity to tip their hats to Bicycle Day, truly a technology apropos to the human condition now; in the early and arguably first really venal days of Rome’s imperial sway, two thousand and eighty-one years ago, a freed slave, Milichus, turned against the plotters with whom he was associating and gave the entire conspiracy to kill Nero away, resulting in an upcoming opportunity to play strings while the city incinerated itself; five hundred ninety-six years subsequently, in 531, Persian fighters in what is now Northern Syria defeated Byzantine troops at the Battle of Callinicum; MORE HERE
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Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error.Mirth, and even cheerfulness, when employed as remedies in low spirits, are like hot water to a frozen limb.
- Benjamin Rush
4. Octavio Paz, 1991.

slavery history OR origins evolution resistance OR revolution abolition "color consciousness" "class consciousness" = 129 Citations.
Nearly Naked Links
Russian Revolution Lecture – http://www.wsws.org/en/
Syria Tragedies and Effects – https://consortiumnews.com/
Syria Catastrophe – https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-syria-catastrophe/
Submissions
- Our theme for the Summer issue, due out in June, is “Surrender” (see our website for more info).
- We consider new and previously published work on the theme of healing (emotional, physical, spiritual, community, etc.).
- Please tell us, if your piece was previously published and you own the rights, where and when it first appeared so we can note that.
- We allow and encourage simultaneous submissions.
- Please use our online submission portal to withdraw submissions. We really appreciate if you do this as soon as you know a submission is no longer available for publication.
- Send us no more than one poetry submission of 1-3 poems (no more than 5 pages total).
- We believe a writer should have full control of their work, so all copyright and publication rights remain with the writer at all times. However, we appreciate exclusive publication rights for three months after the issue has been published to ensure maximum impact.
- Reporting time is approximately one month. If you are a user of Duotrope, we appreciate you reporting your response times.
- Contributors receive a free online issue in which their work appears, along with an issue for up to three persons (you’ll have to send us their email address), and our deepest appreciation.
Creative Nonfiction
Ends on April 30, 2017
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- Our theme for the Summer issue, due out in June, is “Surrender” (see our website for more info).
- We consider new and previously published work on the theme of healing (emotional, physical, spiritual, community, etc.).
- Please tell us, if your piece was previously published and you own the rights, where and when it first appeared so we can note that.
- We allow and encourage simultaneous submissions.
- Please use our online submission portal to withdraw submissions. We really appreciate if you do this as soon as you know a submission is no longer available for publication.
- We ask for no more than one creative nonfiction submission of up to 4,000 words: 12pt text; set in Courier, Arial, Times New Roman; double-spaced.
- We believe a writer should have full control of their work, so all copyright and publication rights remain with the writer at all times. However, we appreciate exclusive publication rights for three months after the issue has been published to ensure maximum impact.
- Reporting time is approximately one month. If you are a user of Duotrope, we appreciate you reporting your response times.
- Contributors receive a free online issue in which their work appears, along with an issue for up to three persons (you’ll have to send us their email address), and our deepest appreciation.
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
The Metatron Prize for Rising Authors includes $500, a publishing contract, and a selection of the publisher’s books. An option for editorial feedback is available to all applicants.
An Information Clearing House post by a thoughtful political analyst, who discusses the tragedy unfolding in Syria currently: “The latest US cruise missile attack on the Syrian airbase is an extremely important event in so many ways that it is important to examine it in some detail. I will try to do this today with the hope to be able to shed some light on a rather bizarre attack which will nevertheless have profound consequences. But first, let’s begin by looking at what actually happened.”
An Aeon that explores the neurological virtues of knowing more than one language: “Despite all the fuss that has been made about the ‘bilingual advantage’, most researchers have moved on from the simplistic ‘is there an advantage or not’ debate. Rather than asking whether bilingualism per se confers a cognitive advantage, researchers are now taking a more nuanced approach by exploring the various aspects of bilingualism to better understand their individual effects.”
Asking ‘Cui Bono?’ About Syria
A listserve analysis of some of the political motivations of the recent attacks: “So who had something to gain? Well, half a dozen Syrian sects and militias who are fighting against Assad and against each other in the crazy civil war. Also their Sunni Arab allies, the Saudi and other Gulf Sheikhs. And Israel, of course. They all have an interest in arousing the civilized world against the Syrian dictator.
Simple logic.
A MILITARY act must have a political aim. As Carl von Clausewitz famously said 200 years ago: war is the continuation of politics by other means.”
Ideology, Revolution, ‘Timing’
A JHI look at a book that critically discusses the timing and lack of ubiquity of necessary revolutions: “As critical theory, Left-Wing Melancholia uses the history of socialism and Marxism over the last two hundred years and its defeat in 1989 in order to name the problem of the left today. As intellectual history, it may be found wanting, at least if one seeks in its tracing of left-wing culture some semblance of linearity. If, however, a reader is willing to follow, instead of context à la Skinner, or concept à la Koselleck, a feeling – then Left-Wing Melancholia will soothe, disturb, and offer an alternative: Traverso assures us that “the utopias of the twenty-first century still have to be invented” (119). Indeed, Traverso argues that Bensaïd “rediscovered a Marx for whom ‘revolutions never run on time’ and the hidden tradition of a historical materialism à contretemps, that is, as a theory of nonsynchronous times or non-contemporaneity” (217). Traverso’s own project could be read as part of this now-unearthed tradition.”