Joel's humanistic blog

While tickets are available for the Queens Drive-In's screening of Men in Black, I may as well blog my letter to the editor  from back in April about the cosmic classic, and how the real-world Queens borough hopefully is more exemplary of its populism than its simultaneous distrust of the populace.

Today's film-industry headlines, as foreseen by Premiere magazine 21 years ago:

Alex P. Keaton's favorite economist with Leonard E. Read favorite tool Someday, I'll get around to elaborating on how everything wrong with American politics is that it's in the image of All in the Family  rather than  Family Ties , but for now, I have a letter  championing Alex P. Keaton over Archie Bunker that made it to the editorial pages of the Queens Chronicle .

My "Small Business Versus the State"  went up over the weekend at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism .  This is the first time I've contributed a column to comrade Thomas L. Knapp 's news commentary project since 2018, but we're gearing up for more to come.

Before Doug Henwood announced  yesterday that his venerable mailing list described as a " forum for the discussion of economics, politics, and culture from a broad left perspective " was shutting down, I admit that I was unsure whether lbo-talk was still going, with so few messages hitting my inbox that I was genuinely unsure whether or not it had quietly vanished. (The website for the Left Business Observer it was named after tersely notes that periodical ceasing its increasingly erratic publication seven years ago, and the actual content hasn't been updated since Barack Obama's  candidacy .)  Yet while he insists that "lbo-talk has said enough" and is enough of a Marxist to quote Karl that "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough" I am enough of a foolish Bakuninist to note that, as moribund as it was in its later years, its extensive archives offer a lively chronicle of the early-Internet left through the Battle of Seattle, 9/11

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 econom

"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.