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This Day in History
Reactionary though its roots may be, nonetheless, today round the world is International Talk Like a Pirate Day; in the ever-volatile and conflict-ridden Levant, the ancient city of Damascus changed hands thirteen hundred eighty-two years ago, in 634, when Byzantine armies succumbed to the onslaught of the Rashidun Islamic forces; a thousand forty-two years more in the direction of today, in 1676, the ‘rebel’ Nathaniel Bacon joined together indentured servants, slaves, and genocidal frontiersman in burning Jamestown to the ground in his eponymous uprising;sixteen years later, in 1692, a brave colonial in Salem, Massachusetts refused to plead to the absurd charge that he was a witch and died under the weight of thousands of pounds of stones that sought to force him to say something; MORE HERE
A Thought for the Day
That yesterday affects today is no more in doubt than is the fact that the mother’s experience of gestation influences the birth and future development of her child: truly the past authors the present in similar fashion as the rains of Spring induce the growth of Summer and Autumn’s bounty, or lack thereof—to ignore or decry history, at best, represents a profoundly suicidal lunacy.
psychosis OR delusion OR lunacy OR dementia characteristic OR ubiquitous OR omnipresent OR widespread "present day" OR "contemporary period" OR "current history" origins OR evolution OR development explanation OR analysis OR explication OR overview OR summary radical OR marxist = 817,000 Linkages.
In-Depth Look
In the context of a nation with less than five percent of the world’s population that simultaneously boasts of the ‘bottom-line’ benefits of having as much as a quarter or more of the Globe’s imprisoned people, when police state protocols and mass arrest have become ubiquitous in the United States, a recent gem from Roar Magazine that in one fell swoop reveals the fraudulence, hypocrisy, and distortions that are de rigeur in corporate media and delineates key points of recent happenings that these fake news companies have literally ignored, to wit a well organized and extensive strike by prison workers at the behest of the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee and others, MORE HERE
TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, & AWARENESS VIDEO
THE ORDINARY MADNESS OF THE HERE-&-NOW & HOW TO HANDLE IT
EVENTS
OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS
FreshPaintMagazine is pleased to announce an open call for the December 2016 international issue.
Both emerging and established artists are welcome to apply with works in any medium: painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media. Artists from all countries are welcome to submit.
JOBS
The Montana Book Festival is hiring!
MBF is seeking a Missoula-area, short-term Project Assistant for 1.5-2 months. Roughly 100 hours of work total, with variation based on proximity to the fest. Primary responsibilities will include volunteer coordination, editorial support, digital and print promotion, outreach, and event management. The right candidate will have immediate (and flexible) availability.
Perils of Professorship and Free Speech
A blog post by a powerful observer of the plight of faculty, and discusses the censorship conditions summed to substandard living conditions that professors experience must put up with: “The following is an excellent commentary on the characteristic high-handedness of US higher education oversight. University management today has much in common with the corporate sector, complete with the obligatory mealy-mouth (but underlying contempt) toward free speech. Further, college administrators tend to propagate by finding new positions and pay raises for each other with wild abandon. In this instance an adjunct faculty member teaching media arts at a small state college criticized administrators’ policies on his personal blog. This must have been recognized as a threat to management’s ‘safe space’ because the poo-bahs began a malicious rumor campaign against the prof and issued him a ‘no trespass order ,… to protect our students, faculty and staff.’ The ACLU filed the lawsuit late last winter.”
A Brain Pickings article that shares with readers some of the things that some of the most celebrated writers have to say about the creative process and how to overcome creative blocks: “For writers, there can be a particularly disorienting disconnect between knowing this correlation intellectually and being petrified by facing the blank page. Much of that psychoemotional paralysis comes from our pathological perfectionism, the antidote to which Jennifer Egan captured perfectly in her advice on writing: “You can only write regularly if you’re willing to write badly… Accept bad writing as a way of priming the pump, a warm-up exercise that allows you to write well.””
A Jacobin piece that discusses the inherent contradictions of capital and the commons in regards to media and our most important media access point of the current moment through a current development: “The actual impact is likely to be small. The trademark protection measures that police DNS on behalf of corporations will remain in place, for instance. And the fact that ICANN is located in Los Angeles and incorporated under US law means that the US government will continue to exercise influence, if somewhat less directly.
But the symbolic significance is huge. The October handover marks the last chapter in the privatization of the Internet. It concludes a process that began in the 1990s, when the US government privatized a network built at enormous public expense.”
A Tele Sur posting discussing the trouble a filmmaker who wishes to explore the truth regarding Brazil’s dictatorship is experiencing: “Wagner Moura says financiers don’t want to back his film about Carlos Marighella, who fought against Brazil’s military dictatorship.
Wagner Moura, best known for his portrayal of Pablo Escobar in Netflix’s “Narcos” series, says he is having trouble securing financing for his directorial debut film: a biopic about Carlos Marighella, a communist lawmaker turned guerrilla who was assassinated by Brazil’s military dictatorship. “
A Huffington Post posting that discusses ways to utilize the mind in the most optimal ways possible: ”Synthesize new ideas constantly. Never read passively. Annotate, model, think, and synthesize while you read, even when you’re reading what you conceive to be introductory stuff. That way, you will always aim towards understanding things at a resolution fine enough for you to be creative.”