A Thought for the Day   

The capacity to dominate other people, though it may ultimately, at least in large measure, reside in bodily fitness and a well-maintained fighting trim and combative practice, also consists of psychic and intellectual abilities, on the one hand forceful beliefs that one is in the right about something that matters and not just picking fights to demonstrate one’s predominant capability to rule whatever roost is in question, and on the other hand mental functioning that shows superior awareness of the melange of dynamics and polarities and paradoxes and desires that underlie a particular interactional conflict or dispute, instances of which crop up as unavoidably as attraction and repulsion characterize every particle that participates in the cosmic dance—that said, at least among beasts of one sort or another, from tarantulas to orangutans and the big apes’ seven billion human cousins, many of the more raucous rumbles and bumptious battles result from the daunting dialectic of pairing and mating, of flirting and coupling, of uncoupling and dissolution, so that a science or biologyof fighting would in some huge proportion come down to deconstructing people’s defending their partners from depredation or incursion from other than their most intimate and significant others, whom they would often enough die rather than risk losing or alienating.

  Quote of the Day  

“Before discussing professional standards in English poetry, which are the general topic of these lectures, let me emphasize an important point.  Unlike stockbrokers, soldiers, sailors, doctors, lawyers, and parsons, English poets do not form a closely integrated guild.  A poet may put up his brass plate, so to speak, without the tedious preliminaries of attending a university, reading the required books and satisfying examiners.  Also, a poet, being responsible to no General Council, and acknowledging no personal superior, can never be unfrocked, cashiered, disbarred, struck off the register, hammered on ‘Change, or flogged round the fleet, if he is judged guilty of unpoetic conduct.

The only limits legally set on his activities are the acts relating to libel, pornography, treason, and the endangerment of public order.  And if he earns the scorn of his colleagues, what effective sanctions can they take against him?  None at all.

This difference between the poetic profession and others may seem platitudinous, but I shall insist on it all the more strongly; because what English poets have always been free to enjoy, if they please, is the privilege of not being formally enrolled as such.  Where is there any official roll of poets, analogous to the Army and Navy Lists, the Medical Register, or Crockjord?  This general privilege, as I understand it, implies individual responsibility: the desire to deserve well of the Muse, their divine patroness, from whom they receive their unwritten commissions, to whom they eat their solitary dinners, who confers her silent benediction on them, to whom they swear their secret Hippocratic oath, to whose moods they are as attentive as the stockbroker is to his market.”  Robert Graves: The Crowning Privilege

 This Day in History  

Today in Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia is Simon Bolivar Day; in Netherlands, five hundred thirty years ago, aficionados of beer and free trade struck against a ban on imported beer and ale; three years less than half a century subsequently, in 1534, explorer Jacques Cartier claimed the Gaspe Peninsula in present-day Canada for France; three hundred sixteen years before the here and now, another Frenchman took credit for founding a trading post at Fort Pontchartrain, which became the city of Detroit; eighty-two years later, in 1783, East across the Atlantic and almost all of Europe, the Kingdom of Georgia and the Russian Empire signed the Treaty of Georgievsk; MORE HERE

     Doc of the Day    

"collective ownership" OR "the commons" capitalism undermining OR destroying OR impossible essential OR necessary "social justice" OR "social democracy"  = 130,000 Results.

  Nearly Naked Links  

Armageddon Draws Nigh – http://thebulletin.org/multimedia/know-the-time

Physics Oddities – https://aeon.co/videos/how-the-identity-agnostic-neutrino-exists-in-three-states-all-at-once

DU Dark Secrets – https://forbiddenknowledgetv.net/depleted-uranium-natos-dark-secret/

MORE HERE

 Interesting People Places Things of Note 

The Norm of Dictatorial Work

A Vox look at the tyrannical underpinings of the normal workplace, by an interesting and insightful correspondent: ” How should we understand these sweeping powers that employers have to regulate their employees’ lives, both on and off duty? Most people don’t use the term in this context, but wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in some domain of life, that authority is a government.”

 Writers Tools Issues 

Writing and Editing

A Lit Hub look at the writing and editing realms from the purview of the late and great Hunter Thompson, a thought piece which will be of interest to all scribes: “Conrad introduced Cardoso, Thompson, George Plimpton and Norman Mailer to Muhammad Ali, and put them in ringside seats. His idea was that if you get important journalists to cover the fights, the rest takes care of itself—especially after a toke or two.

All of the writers mentioned above wrote careful, crafted pieces that came in clean. Unsurprisingly, not Hunter. Likewise those same writers helped to speed the editing process while Hunter turned it into theatre, saying that there were far fewer good editors than good writers, and that he had learned some nasty lessons from their incompetence. He had a riff about it, about how he would suck editors into his pieces as conspirators, all of us wanting to prove ourselves good enough—hip enough—to edit him.”

 General Media & ‘Intellectual Property’ Issues 

Viewing Sic-Hub As Hack

A Scholarly Kitchen look at a complicated publishing issue of the day: “Earlier this month Alexandra Elbakyan sallied forth to chastise Wikipedia for not getting the facts right about Sci-Hub. Her diatribe can be read here. You’ll need popcorn. A couple of things positively leapt out at me upon reading her article, things that got me thinking in all seriousness, about whether we publishers have been systematically hacked.”

 Recent Events 

More WSWS G-20 Analysis

A WSWS look at the recent summit, and all the complicated issues raised there: “In the wake of the protests and violent state repression during the G20 summit in Hamburg, the SPD, Left Party and Greens are showing their true colours as parties of bourgeois order. They have lined up with the CDU, Free Democratic Party (FDP) and ultra-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) behind the brutal police crackdown, and exploited the events to wage a law-and-order election campaign.”

 General Past & Present Issues 

Tolerance & Intolerance

A Consortium News post that looks at the perils of tolerance in the current context: “As intolerance under the leadership of Republicans and neo-Republicans (Trump, Bannon, Tea Party types, etc.) becomes more widespread, those institutions that value tolerance come under pressure. This sometimes comes from right-wing media, sometimes from special interest donors and lobbyists, and sometimes, in the case of college and universities, from pockets of students (both right and left) who have decided that some outlooks are so unacceptable that they must be silenced. Whenever reasonable this last action should be avoided.”