The clouds are gone. The heat is here. I’m busy with the usual things: preparing rooms for airbnb guests in our basement (this will be our last year doing that), remodeling and renovating the upstairs for one duplex (currently on kitchen backsplash tile, then closets and trim) and basement of another (totally gutted and need to start over; egress windows are in; I’m currently building the front deck), teaching organizational theory for U of People, busy with re-writing bylaws and restructuring policies for the Breadroot Natural Foods Cooperative and the Humane Society of the Black Hills, playing gigs with a great group every Wednesday night on a patio place, publishing several articles and reviews, including a review of the second volume of The Cambridge History of Socialism, two chapters for The Palgrave Handbook to Global Social Problems, a chapter for The Routledge Handbook to Cooperative Economics and Management, and a chapter for a Brill volume on the meaning of life. Also have to finish Religion and Cooperative Economics by September for Palgrave. I’m on track so far.
It was nice spending some time back with my parents in June, the best time of year in South Dakota other than September (in my experience). Green. No mosquitoes. Otherwise, no travels planned yet. Next summer Jessica and I will maybe try to attend the New Orleans Jazz festival, or visit friends in Italy again, or something. In the meantime, we get to Pactola to swim and paddle board. Life has been good in those ways.
Otherwise, terribly depressing waking up to new pictures of slaughtered children in Gaza, every morning. The genocide has gone as bad as we expected. Famine is spreading. 500-1000 kids are killed every week in the worse possible ways: dismemberment, buried alive, burned alive, or starvation/dehydration. The Lancet just published an article estimating deaths at 186,000 (“conservatively”). The unconditional support by the west for this settler colonial genocide is more than appalling. But its not surprising. As Chomsky said years ago, “Israel” is the last phase of the 500 year European colonial project. Canada, the US, Britain, and the others have centuries of practice exterminating indigenous peoples. This is old hat. They just have a new hired hand to do its dirty work now; and it has immunity.
Americans deserve the global and local humiliation they will receive in November – and that will occur regardless of outcome. As, also, our species deserves the punishments it will receive by Mother Nature in the next several centuries of catastrophic ecological breakdown. (Scientists are finally mobilizing and being arrested more regularly, and eco-terrorism is becoming more and more common.)
I’ve finished drafting fourteen amendments to the US Constitution that I plan to use for a movement that may take many years. But honestly, it just keeps me sane: imagining a better world. Working with a lawyer to re-write bylaws (I now drafted 3 different bylaws in the past year for different orgs) has made me appreciate different aspects of law but also the possibilities of a better future by radical change–without necessarily a full fledged revolution in this bizarre and seemingly hopeless settler colonial state founded by slave owners and land lords.
I’ve also drafted this chart helping colleagues get a grip on contemporary politics. It got over 40,000 views on LinkedIn within 48 hours, which is more than I expected.
I have a couple small self-published volumes in mind themed off this model, but not sure if they will materialize. I currently want to write a small volume Anarchocapitalism: A History from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to Javier Milei.
That’s all for now.