another day, another pair of letters to the editor

The Russians were going to have come in 2010!

"U.S. and Russia in space" in the Queens Chronicle looks back at the little-discussed sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey, and how it envisioned less tense relations between the US and the then-assumed-to-still-be-Soviet-in-the-2010s Russia.  (I should also clarify that I am not now, nor have I aver been a member of the Russian conspiracy, though I technically can't truthfully deny association with "H.U.A.C." since the "House of Un-American Activities" was the unofficial nickname for the home of some college friends back in the day.)

This image is a rerun, but so is the content it's illustrating.

"Reducing costs" in the Queens Examiner (and the other outlets in the Queens Ledger/Brooklyn Star Newspaper Group) asks free-market advocates to stop brushing aside concerns about "materialism, social inequality and economic instability" and instead start pointing out how economic freedom can address them.  If you've wondered why your local paper doesn't have quotes from 19th century left-populist free market economists, it may be because you aren't writing them in!  (And yes, this letter is basically an abridgment of one of my old C4SS pieces, but since they haven't bothered to try to get newspapers to run their stuff since 2016, I may as well follow the wisdom of Abbott and Costello: "If there's anything else I want you to do, I'll do it myself!")

Yesterday...

"THE YEAR IS 2019. America's finest men don't run for President."

... my troubles definitely weren't far away, but it was a day of several significant milestones:

• all of the events of Akira, Blade Runner and The Running Man were finally all definitively set in the past of 2019 and before;
• it was the 9th anniversary of me joining Twitter;
• it was the 10th anniversary of my blog comrades Darian Worden and Tom Knapp getting hired/promoted to do good work at the Center for the Stateless Society (Darian wound up penning around 100 commentaries while I've only managed about a third as many, let alone Tom's 250+);
• the belated growth of the public domain that began (after a twenty-year hiatus imposed by retroactive copyright extensions) with the lapsing of 1923 copyrights a year ago continued for works published in 1924.