Reading

If you aren’t familiar with the tune, here it is, but be warned, it will be droning on in your head for the rest of the day.

“‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”
by Emily Dickinson

Hopey, hopey, hopey, hopey,
Feathered thing when I am mopey,
Perched in my soul—man, I hope she
Never stops singing at all!

Sweetest in the gale is heard,
Not even storms can stop this bird,
Keeps you warm, despair deferred,
I love my sister-in-law!

I think I’ll stay in tonight, my room rules!

Gettysburg Address
by Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln,
Eighty-seven years ago our forefathers were thinkin’,
We’ll bring forth a new nation; now it’s shrinkin’,
We’re in a Civil War!

The world won’t note what we say here today,
(I’m just being modest, okay?),
But can’t forget the price that they paid,
My wife’s middle name is Todd!

In the USA, you can’t break away. I’m gay!

- by Aeon Video

Watch at Aeon

- by Tom O’Shea

Read at Aeon

- by Molly MacMillan

Read at Psyche

Source - Patreon

Source - Patreon

I've been reading Leonardo Sciascia's The Moro Affair, for the second time, and finding it just as disturbing as the first time, though perhaps for new reasons.

I first read Sciascia's work when I heard about The Day of the Owl, a crime novel. A police-procedural, in fact, that knocked the usual police-procedural into a cocked hat. When published in 1961, I gather, it had some impact in Italy because it dramatised the connection between the Mafia and the Christian-Democrat (DC) government. Sciascia, a Sicilian who became one of Italy's major public intellectuals, wrote several other superb crime novels with a philosophical and political edge, a range of other books, plays, and a lot of political journalism. In the 1970s he was elected to the Italian parliament on the Communist (PCI) ticket, but left the party in disgust when its leaders proposed their 'historic compromise' with the corrupt Christian Democrat regime.

Tell me, what planet are we actually on? All these decades later, are we really involved in a “second” or “new” Cold War? It’s certainly true that, as late as the 1980s, the superpowers (or so they then liked to think of themselves), the United States and the Soviet Union, were still engaged in just such a Cold War, something that might have seemed almost positive at the time. After all, a “hot” one could have involved the use of the planet’s two great nuclear arsenals and the potential obliteration of just about everything. But today? In case you haven’t noticed, the phrase “new Cold War” or “second Cold War” has indeed crept into our media vocabulary. (Check it out... Read more

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – October 1, 2023

by Tony Wikrent

80 Years Ago Denmark Miraculously Saved 8,000 Jews From Nazi Murder

Harvey Wasserman, September 25, 2023 [downwithtyranny.com]

Strategic Political Economy