workers of the world

Today marks the fusion of the International Labour Organisation’s Workers’ Memorial Day with the United Nation’s observance to promote health and safety in the workplace.

Taking the occasion to mourn for those lives lost due to hazardous conditions and people maimed and made chronically unwell by comforts that could be easily and reasonably accommodated began with the Canadian passage of a comprehensive on-the-job injury compensation act a century ago, on the eve of Labour Day.  The UN’s piggy-backing on the holiday highlights ergonomics and focuses on fostering safer working environments.  Despite America’s efforts to thwart May Day celebrations—repackaging the day first as “Americanization Day” after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and then as “Loyalty Day” during the McCarthy-era in the 1950s before finally moving it to September to distance it from what was considered Communists' leanings—though the May Day roots are in fact American in origin, both holidays are still internationally respected and kept, at least by those they honour.

hyponym or litotes

The American Scholar presents its list—with no special or commemorative reason or fan-fanfare, of its come-by-honestly best sentences in English literature.
It, the list, seems thoroughly modern and familiar yet the choices are far from pedestrian and quite resounding and evocative. The selection certainly has reciprocated a lot of good feedback and other nominees to explore. What would you include? Do you find the choices to be heavily orientated towards bulwer-litany, purple-prose? There is a lot to be said for pithiness, as well as the edifying and complete. However—I am happy to be reminded that there are people yet as passionate and cuckolded by words.

logos, pathos, ethos

Through a revue of several studies on the subject, Brain Pickings' weekly digest presents an engrossing and thorough introduction to the Eastern concept of wu wei (无为 and literally English for non-doing).
In a social framework where performance, exception- alism, and perfection are the measures of success, this notion of adaptive effort- lessness—not detachment or doing by rote but rather acquired reflexes and instincts—is something akin to the idea of flow, only recently given a name in the modern West. Perhaps this reluctance, generally accorded to savants and the like, is due to the learned incompatibility, as one author suggests, among intuitive thoughts and cognition—sort of like the proscriptions on mingling faith and science. Governance may well be achieved by the evolution of regulation and institution for subjects to obey but a real sense of community, epitomized by the construction wu wei wu (effortless doing), is cultivated with a set of values, respect, rights and freedoms that are felt independently of the rules that chase after them.

peerage or content mill

The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) just made itself redundant by yielding to the whims of a few powerful industry-lobbyists and no longer being a good and conscientious steward of the frequencies, airwaves, ripples and what’s fit to print and abandoning key provisions in the concept of so-called Net Neutrality, which they were championing not so long ago (the reversal happening almost within the same breath of praise for relinquishing its control over the domain naming system).
Essentially FCC will grant license for service providers and major content providers—those with means and influence, like film-on-demand brokers and major labels in the entertainment business (plus, I imagine, clearinghouses holding the copyrights of popular or coveted images—leading to a lot of ugly watermark mark-ups), to negotiate arrangements to deliver their services with special priority.  This two-speed internet is a way of discriminating against the little to unknown, ensuring that it remains so, as there would be no chance to profit from its promotion.  This badgering of search results (I am feeling unlucky, auf gut Glück) prejudices what users and creators can find and learn, even if it is limited to specific partnerships whose affiliation are reviewed by the commission, and has the potential to render the internet as one big billboard, like some NASCAR vehicle.