A Thought for the Day
In relation to such absurdities as objecting to Black-and-White unions or other instances of ‘mixing,’ not only do these pretensions about ‘different’ human races make zero biological sense, as if we decided to outlaw and imprison Poodles that responded to Great Danes in heat, but the simple, basic, most elementary aspects of sexual reproduction, which is to say an inescapable inclination in the first place to promote the advantages of mixtures, also means that all of us with any proclivity to procreate ought to be keeping our eyes peeled for those who are as disparate from our own origins as possible, thereby promoting the most mellifluous melanges that are manageable in all the wild realms of creation’s crazy-quilt concatenations.
This Day in History
Today is an International Day in Support of Victims of Torture and, in an anomalous concomitant celebration, an International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking; MORE HERE
Doc of the Day
"existential dilemma" OR "existential crisis" existential OR existentialism opportunity OR necessity evolution OR development philosophy OR "belief system" OR worldview OR "world view" consciousness OR awareness = 462,000 results
Nearly Naked Links
Assange & Hacker Underground – http://www.gutenberg.org/cache
McChesney – http://bostonreview.net/archiv
Lecture by William Golding – http://www.nobelprize.org/nobe
Writers Tools Issues
Tackling Journalism’s Class Taboos
A Nieman Lab post that provides insight into a very important aspect of journalistic inquiry: “In all of the coverage of the aftermath of Trump’s election, “working class” is often synonymous with “white working class.” It’s a trap that Reed is trying very hard to avoid. “I was recently reading about how there are three million female cashiers in the U.S. — a lot of them non-white,” she said. “An awful lot of their jobs are threatened by automation. A lot of those women can’t make ends meet, and they’re caught in the two-or-three gigs economy. As for miners, a group we are reading about a lot since they are being used rightly or wrongly as shorthand for ‘Trump voters’ [most Trump voters were not working class] well…there are 80,000 of them by contrast. This really brings home, to me, how journalists who want to cover class should do it with a sense of scale.”
General Media & ‘Intellectual Property’ Issues
A Buzzfeed analysis on the reasons of the British rag’s failure to capture America’s audiences: “The Guardian’s US newsroom didn’t become the voice of the Bernie left during the election. It didn’t break huge campaign scoops. Years after winning a Pulitzer for the Edward Snowden story, Guardian US has slashed costs, leaving employees stewing about mismanagement, infighting, a sexual harassment allegation, and unrealistic business expectations.”
Recent Events
A TeleSur posting that looks at Iran’s position on US Cuba relations: “Calling Trump’s renewed sanctions “erroneous,” “useless” and “coercive,” Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Bahram Qasemi recalled the “black history” of U.S. leaders in their imposition of restrictions on “independent nations.””
General Past & Present Issues
A look at the history of a technology we all rely upon: “Historically, computers were human clerks who calculated in accordance with effective methods. These human computers did the sorts of calculation nowadays carried out by electronic computers, and many thousands of them were employed in commerce, government, and research establishments. The term computing machine, used increasingly from the 1920s, refers to any machine that does the work of a human computer, i.e. any machine that calculates in accordance with effective methods. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, with the advent of electronic computing machines, the phrase ‘computing machine’ gradually gave way simply to ‘computer’, initially usually with the prefix ‘electronic’ or ‘digital’.”