Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features The King of the Blues, B.B. King. Enjoy!

“Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms."
- Philip K. Dick

Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Foundation has named four transgender women who should be declared International Heroes for Women's History Month.

Just as we can’t limit the celebration of women across the world to just a single day, we can’t limit the great potential of women to boxes. Today, we do more than just celebrate the great women trailblazers who fulfilled roles historically dominated by men. Today, we also celebrate the women who created their own roles and bettered life for their own communities from the inside out.

--Nicolas Seip for True Colors

I’ve been on Team Gandalf ever since he first visited the Shire. It was so nice to see a wizard who was truly a wizard of the people. The kind of wizard who wouldn’t even throw you in a dungeon for smoking a little Longbottom Leaf or Old Toby. Here was a wizard who didn’t have a big fancy tower. His staff and cloak were rather plain and grey. And he had quite a dream, didn’t he?

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Saturday December 18, 1916
From The Masses: "Do You Believe in Patriotism?" Part II

In the March issue of The Masses, various Socialist writers responded to the question, "Do you believe in Patriotism?" Yesterday Hellraisers featured the answers to that question from two prominent Socialists women, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Sara Bard Field. Today's edition features the responses of John Sloan and Charles Erskine Scott Wood:

From John Sloan

If I had to love a country I could love no country but this, nor could I find a fitter one to hate.

I put Patriotism with the other isms,-Militarism, Anarchism, Capitalism, Individualism, Socialism, Dogmatism, Catholicism, Protestantism and Rheumatism (I had almost written Catechism), but I am answering your question. I hope that social progress will eliminate all isms-though in the case of Futurism we have a hard one to catch.

Patriotism licks the boot of capitalism and until the earth-worms get the latter's carcass, he will need patriots. As the wage system will never enable the people of any country to consume all their products with a profit to the owning class, foreign markets are a necessity to be fought for. Patriotism is a potent means of providing the fighters. Conscription is another powerful persuader and Our Country has both (see Dick military law passed by congress in 1903 and 1908).