BREAKING NEWS RIGHT NOW          

                    This Day in History                  

In a favorite observance of many scrappy writers, today is International Coffee Day, and for the World Heart Federation, the 28^th is World Heart Day; in Persia twenty five hundred thirty-five years ago, in a sign of the longstanding depth of conflict in the region, a ‘Great’ Darius led troops that killed the then usurper of imperial leadership, Gaumata; two thousand seventy-seven years before today, Pompey the Great celebrated his third triumph for victories over the pirates and the end of the Mithridatic Wars on his 45^th birthday; MORE HERE

                A Thought for the Day                

Whenever we have about the ways of the world a complaint or a desire that views or conceives the present pass as wrong or deficient or, despite all advice to ignore such issues, unfair, a multitiered process must develop if we ever hope to have a positive impact on society’s affairs in this and related arenas, at a minimum the first of which involves locating our own complicity in what we disparage or despise and the second of which entails noticing, and redressing, how we ignore or undermine the possibilities for mutual service and enriching interdependence in managing our relations with this and similar matters.

"political economy" OR "leading indicators" OR "socioeconomic conditions" crisis OR collapse OR stress deflation OR depression OR decline "monetary conflict" OR "currency war" OR "trade war" history OR cycle OR "cyclic development" analysis OR explanation marxist criticism OR deconstruction = 21,200 Connections.

              TODAY’S HEART, SOUL, &                                  AWARENESS VIDEO                  

SPECIAL DELIVERY, WRY & OVER EASY, OF AN APOCALYPTIC ENDING

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55gw-lWblEs
From one of YouTube’s myriad providers, a fully operational clip of the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, which in farcical exchanges and deadly dead-pan tells of the lunacy that would end human life in the form of thermonuclear warfare, a film that for decades militarists and so-called ‘strategists’ treated derisively and dismissively as propagandistic fantasy that had zero basis in reality, but which recently declassified documents prove ineluctably, about which a two year old New Yorker article delivers a briefing that scrappy scribe and stalwart citizens should read very carefully indeed if anything other than mass collective suicide is their lifestyle choice, a contextualization of the actuality of the military industrial complex’s necessities that one might examine in relation to Evo Morales’ recent speech at the United Nations and its warnings to all humanity, imprecations that echo what Fidel Castro said in the same venue fifty-six years ago  when he too demanded that the death sentence of empire and war would eventually, one day, truly execute humankind unless the world’s peoples, and at least some of the world’s leaders, stood up for and showed a willingness to fight for a different set of eventualities, choices that, like it or not, we still face today.

EVENTS

OPPS/SUBS/CONTESTS

JOBS

Fulltime Editor – Social Justice Online Magazine hide this posting

compensation: $55-60K
employment type: full-time
telecommuting okay

Daily Progressive is seeking a full-time Editor, based in the United States, who will help manage all stages of our online magazine’s publication process.The Editor will be supervised by the Publisher and will manage freelance contributors and staff writers. This position is compensated with a $55,000-$60,000 annual salary with benefits. As we become more financially sustainable, we are committed to making this and other salaries at Daily Progressive more competitive. Since we are a virtual organization, the Editor works from home and attends meetings via Google Hangouts or conference call.

Creative Circle New York

An international technology company is looking to bring on a Product Copywriter to work directly with product managers in creating product descriptions for digital and print.

In this role you will be responsible for writing B2B content on products for the company website, brochures, powerpoints and supporting product launches.

Economics as an Evolutionary Science

An Evonomics piece by a powerful thinker who places the discipline of economics into an evolutionary framework that actually has something value to offer the viability of humankind: “In my 2004 book entitled The Evolution of Institutional Economics, I outlined what I called “the principle of evolutionary explanation”. This is the idea that any behavioural assumption, including in the social sciences, must be capable of causal explanation in evolutionary terms, or at least be consistent with a scientific understanding of human evolution. This principle is found in Veblen’s work.”

Moonlighting With  Another Job

An LA Review of Books offering that extols the virtues of ‘keeping your day job’, not just for the sake of financial and emotional stability, but so as to have experiences that help improve a writer’s craft: “While having a day job is clearly good for your financial well-being and mental health, I would argue that it can also be good for your art. Because my writing is separate from what I do to make a living — because no one expects it, or assesses it for promotion or retention purposes — it makes the writing itself an escape, and a joy. Without the burden of external pressure, I can take all the time I need to get it right.”

Arts Participation v/ Reading

A Melville House posting that releases results to a National Endowment of the Arts posting that looks at the dismal state of reading in America in the context of general arts and culture consumption: “As one might imagine, there’s good news and bad news regarding the cultural health of America’s body politic. The good news is that, after a decade of striking decline in gallery, theater, and live music attendance, things seem to have leveled off. In 2015 American adults went to museums, art exhibits, and concerts at roughly the same rate as in 2013.

The bad news is that nobody is reading. The survey shows that across all populations, the percentage of adults who read “literature” (defined as poetry, plays, short stories, or novels) fell from 47% in 2012 to a shade over 43% in 2015.”

Toxic Trade Deal Leaked

A Common Dreams post that looks at some of the unsavoury circumstances inside of a recently leaked trade deal document: “Greenpeace Netherlands exposed the threats to democracy and climate action contained within the little-known Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) on Tuesday with new leaks divulging several chapters of the clandestine global trade agreement. 

“It’s a sad day for democracy when ordinary people are dependent on leaks to learn about the far-reaching consequences of toxic trade deals that are being cooked up behind closed doors,” said Nick Dearden, head of the U.K.-based Global Justice Now.”

Financially Induced Ruination

An Atlantic report on the fact that our entire civilization is victim to the cancer of finance capital from a fairly establishment, if liberal, media outlet: “These two towns have different fates in part because of two distinct dynamics in the American economy. Yet there are economists who believe that there is a link between the improving prosperity of the wealthy and the eroding bank accounts of everyone else. The reason? It’s two-fold: First, there is the rise of the financial industry, which has fueled extraordinary wealth for a very few without creating good jobs down the line, and, second, a tax policy that not only fails to mitigate these effects, but actually incentivizes them in the first place. It’s probably not surprising, then, that the 10 states with the biggest jumps in the top 1 percent share from 1979 to 2007 were the states with the largest financial service sectors, according to the Economic Policy Institute analysis.”