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

slavery history OR origins evolution resistance OR revolution abolition "color consciousness" "class consciousness" = 129 Citations.

Submissions

OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS

Saker on Syria

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.”

Bilingual Brain Research

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.”