These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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The American laboratory for subjugation
Blogger, poet, activist, and memoirist Stephen Kuusisto has portrayed America as a laboratory, a place where experiments are run on large groups of people. After reading his new post, in that spirit, I thought of one experiment America has been running for decades: How long can you bring tens of thousands of rural people into poverty…
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Republican stealth government
“No more 1000 page bills passed overnight and signed into law the next day,” writes Dave Winer. Far-reaching items added and passed without being brought into the light of day for public consideration. That’s how the national Republican Party likes to do business. The Indiana Republican Party, having carefully gerrymandered themselves an unchallengeable supermajority in…
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Entering the linkblog dimension
More than two decades ago, my first blog posts appeared on the mchron.net domain whenever my copy of the pMachine web publishing software called up my newest pieces of text from its simple database. Guided by a templates with formats I chose for each page element (blog title, post title, author, date, etc.), pMachine assembled…
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Political struggle is an information problem
To have a chance for successful resistance, political leaders need to create the possibility of wide, unified response to crisis. This is, in part, an information problem.
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Books that serve mercy in a time of need
“All the books listed here are merciful. Please, start your own lists. Share them. The literatures of compassion are necessarily shared in a university without walls,“ writes Stephen Kuusisto. His list of books, his Syllabus of the Compassionate, is more than two screens long, plenty to start with in recentering our thinking on healthy terms…
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Don’t miss this!
The genius tip we wish we’d known sooner, the pro-level move the industry doesn’t want you to know, the classic insider’s method made super easy, the jaw-dropping advice that will change your work life forever, the exercise that will let you channel the truly great, the prefab lingo that will save you from having to…
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Stand beside me in your military uniform while I lie on camera to the American people
“President Trump directed the most complex and secretive military operation in history,” said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. That, of course, is nonsense. Think of the air and naval armada put in place for the invasion of Normandy, for example. Surely Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine knew it was bullshit when…
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No learnings
A new website urges us to say lessons when we mean lessons, instead of saying learnings. Say no! to learnings is the site . . . George Orwell made a similar point in “Politics and the English Language” back in the day. Back in the day is a lazy way of saying in 1946. Orwell was…
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Guess Your Age and Weight
When I first encountered her in the narrow corridor leading to the rest rooms, Marsha offered to guess my age and weight. "Excuse me?" I couldn't tell what kind of an offer this was meant to be. "I can guess your age and weight," she said. "I'm good at it, I really am." "Why would…
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Relentless
I visited two cemeteries when I was in St. Louis. One, I knew, was the resting place of several family members, though I could not have made a full and accurate list. The other was a mystery to me during childhood — not far away, but cloaked from the road by a tall embankment and…