Sunday Morning Reading

Back from spending time with the grandkids and back for some Sunday Morning Reading. There’s an interesting context to the many issues we face that evolves while watching the little ones grow and learn. Things are happening that will affect their lives in the years ahead. Yet there’s a blissful innocence cocooning them from it all. At the moment.

In my reading, and in my sharing of that reading, I find I’m doing so mostly for the thousands of tomorrows they have in their future, much more so than for anything that will happen in this week’s tomorrows that might affect me in the moment. Read on.

Neil Steinberg’s Meet My Metaphors #5: ConAgra is about so much more than the agricultural giant moving to Chicago years ago. If you like metaphors, it’s a must read. If you’re approaching the last leg of the journey, it’s a must read. If you’re concerned about what you may leave behind, well, it’s a must read.

JA Westenberg posits that it’s all a loop. Joke’s on us, I guess. Check out The Loop: Everything Has Happened Before, And Everything Will Happen Again. 

Ky Decker wonders, Do I Belong In Tech Anymore? I find if you’re asking that question about anything, you already know the answer.

Wesley Hilliard thinks we should Stop With The Tech Celebrity Worship. I concur. AND I’m for knocking down all the pedestals we erect for celebrities to ascend in any and all fields of human endeavor.

Timothy Noah takes a look at How The Tech World Turned Evil. Pop the bubbles. Tear down the pedestals. Endless loops.

Meanwhile, Makena Kelly examines how Palantir Employees Are Talking About The Company’s Descent Into Fascism. 

Follow that up with Jasmine Sun’s piece, Silicon Valley Is Bracing For A Permanent Underclass. 

The previous four links speak to a much darker future in one way or the other. Read them. Then go back and re-read the first two links by Steinberg and Westenberg. Looping context.

Closing out this week, here’s a couple of links that feel a bit more uplifting. First up, check out Mat Duggan’s Boy Was I Wrong About the Fediverse. 

Then follow that up with David Todd McCarty’s Becoming A Local. Sometimes the horizon is much closer than you think.

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links. 

#iphone forçando usuários a se identificar. Aqui no #brasil essa #leifelca tem que ser modificada.

"Verificação de idade tem se tornado uma desculpa universal para obrigar que todos os usuários se identifiquem, uma injustiça para usuários de qualquer idade."

https://stallman.org/archives/2026-jan-apr.html#1_April_2026_(iMonsters_in_UK_demanding_proof_of_age)

#ageverification #1984 #darktimes #evilcorp #eviltech

Illumination in dark times
A genealogy of modern Western selfhood and a post-Western world

"Smith ... outlines a genealogy of modern Western selfhood: a radically individual, hypermasculine character that was formed during the rapid nineteenth-century expansion of the white man’s world. “Bold, conquering, and altogether assertive,” it was “dedicated to action,” hostile to reflection, indifferent to community and the environment, and guilty of possessing, Smith writes, an “undeveloped heart,” a term borrowed from E. M. Forster’s assessment of the British elite." "

" “We must alter our very relations with the world around us.” This means giving up the exalted and exaggerated idea of the West that boosts a masculinist self-image but severely constricts thought and feeling. “We should welcome our era’s uncertainties,...the not-knowing of how the post-Western story will come out.” Smith’s final warning—that “we will not survive the Western notion of the individual much longer”—should resonate today, as nineteenth-century individualism reasserts itself in the degraded Nietzscheanism of Peter Thiel and Stephen Miller." >>

* Mishra, P. (2026, April). "The Authority of Thought". Harper's Magazine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2026/04/the-authority-of-thought-pankaj-mishra/

* Somebody Else's Century: East and West in a Post-Western World by Patrick Smith. 2010 >>
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/169395/somebody-elses-century-by-patrick-smith/
#TheWest #WhiteSupremacy #masculinity #ImpulseControl #EthnoNationalism #WesternCivilization #AngloAmerican #parochialism #individualism #subjectivity #SettlerSociety #Culture #RacialInequality #war #EastWest #PostWesternWorld #DarkTimes #illumination #narrative #environment

Image: Double Bay War Memorial, Steyne Park, Sydney

A dawn of new times

Do you see the light on the horizon?
Through all the gloom and all those clouds,
a tender ray of hope breaks through -
can’t you feel that spring is coming?

As deep as this winter seems to be,
its darkness milked from our blackish sorrow,
still - a gentle string of hope remains,
uniting you and me with others.

However violently this sadness
tears at our hearts with its claws,
biting into our souls with its teeth;
it will not remain this way for all eternity.

No matter what has been and what is yet to come,
today we are setting out for better times,
letting ourselves be guided by our love
and facing each new day with it.

#TranslationThursday #translation #poetry #poetryisnotdead #weltschmerz #darktimes #hope

Translation of my poem 'Aufbruch zu neuen Zeiten' from yesterday. Self-translated. Tried to capture the essence of the feeling.

Dark times

We wander in darkness alone,
surrounded only by gloom,
as we encounter each other,
we feel the deep rift between us.

Nothing but fear and anger surround us -
penetrating, squashing, tormenting us,
almost suffocating our last bit of courage,
and leaving us barely unable
to choose anything lighthearted anymore.

Neither light, nor a drop of hope left,
and yet we do not give up.
We long for a new tomorrow, full of solace,
while looking up at the stars.

With tears of anticipation on our faces,
with love songs on our lips.
For this darkness cannot break us,
nor can it void our yearning for peace.

Feel the lightlessness,
and the depth of the gloom,
meet your friends' hands
through the dusk,
trust in our togetherness with each other,
and all the walls will fall.

#TranslationThursday #translation #poetry #poetryisnotdead #weltschmerz #darktimes #hope

Translation of my poem 'Düstere Zeiten' from yesterday. Self-translated. Tried to capture the essence of the feeling.