Resources for April 15, 2014

Baker, Dean. "The Hedge Fund Managers Tax Break: Because Wall Streeters Want Your Money." Truthout (April 14, 2014)

Harvey, David. "17 Contradictions of Capitalism." London School of Economics and Political Science (April 2, 2014)

Boyd, Andrew and Jonathan Matthew Smucker. "Recapture the Flag." Beautiful Trouble (2014)

As a teacher, I'm not interested in just reproducing class after class of graduates who will get out, become successful, and take their obedient places in the slots that society has prepared for them. What we must do--whether we teach or write or make films--is educate a new generation to do this very modest thing: change the world. (15)
-- Zinn, Howard. "Stories Hollywood Never Tells." The Sun #343 (July 2004): 12-15.


[Michael Benton: This poem goes good with the latest episode of Cosmos I watched last night -- both expand my mind while bringing me down to a perspective that often escapes my notice.]

Spring Cress by Wesley Houp

No pollinator,
no mason,
orchard,
or honeybee,
no wasp,
no fly,
needs more
than two sips
to get to the shallow heart
of a Spring Cress blossom.

They go insatiably
from one flower to the next,
rapt in magnetism
that spurns
vagaries of wind,
sun,
shadow,
each bloom,
pointed with light,
providing scant sweetness,
but each white cross
an infinitesimal portion
to be multiplied by a billion
to comprise the whole
of the world.

Two statements of fact:
A single bee
will kill itself trying
to take in the whole,
one bee
after another
all spring,
but this world
has given up
on death for now.





Dialogic Cinephilia: Resources for April 15, 2014)

Schlosser, Eric. "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety." Book TV (October 6, 2013) ["Using recently declassified documents, Eric Schlosser details the ease with which an accident can occur when handling nuclear weapons and how little control military leaders and missile designers have over them. He speaks with Lynn Davis, the former U.S. undersecretary for arms control and the director of the RAND corporation's Washington office."]

Fadiman, Dorothy. "Motherhood by Choice Not Chance." Making Contact (March 11, 2014) ["Before it was legal in the United States, some doctors would risk arrest to provide women with access to safe abortions. When that wasn’t possible, some sought abortions from unsafe providers, often with deadly consequences. The Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, and the numbers of people dying after having an abortion dropped, but are we now seeing a return to the past? ... what can the time before abortion was legal tell us about the dangers of restricting access to abortion today? We’ll hear a special radio adaption of “Motherhood by Choice not Chance” a documentary produced and narrated by Dorothy Fadiman.

"It was my job to report what those in power were doing or thinking . . . That is all someone in my sort of job can do." -- BBC Political Editor Nick Robinson (2014); Glenn Greenwald responded on Twitter: "That'd make an excellent epitaph on the tombstone of modern establishment journalism." (2014)