Saturday Morning After Friday Night Weirdness

 I have had a strange 12 hours. Fell sound asleep at 5:30 last night, woke at 12:30, went back to sleep at 4 am (check your email), and just woke up. Very, very strange dream - trapped in a movie. I am already forgetting the details except for the end, the world kind of dissolving as it get to its end. Rather awake, again. Hope your day started better than mine!

So what do I do?

Sent KH a pitch idea for a movie.

Started reading articles:

1. From Sub Club Newsletter: Sci-Fi Mags Are Fucking Killing It: The Middle Eastern Vegan Sandwich List (Maybe a place to drop "Exemplary Employee"?)
2. Same source: 49 Literary Magazines Closing for Submissions this Week (should have looked last week!)
   
3. Short Story - I keep flirting, $5 subscription, and do I not have enough to read that goes unread?
4. Literary Review: Seoul Stirring: The Penguin Book of Korean Short Stories - sounds like something I should read with my interest in the breakage between past and future, but again when?
5. The Millions: Criticism, Anyone?: An Ode to Martin Amis  (in these sentences, the reasons to read good writing as well as read Amis: "...Yet these days, a little older and without as much to prove, I read Amis less with an urge to light the same sort of firecracker myself than a general reminder to liven up the prose. Bury dead metaphors. If it’s boring, find another way to say it.")
6. Also, The Millions: “Writing Is Freedom and To Hell with Everything Else” (another appreciation of Martin Amis and his works ("That’s worth repeating as we remember Martin Amis. Writing is freedom. Writing is freedom. Writing is freedom.")
7. The Paris Review: On Cormac McCarthy - just read these clips, and you will either wish to read him, or remember why once you read one you needed to read more. 
8. Mary Morrisy's Blog, an example of her fiction: DRAG
9. The Indiana Capital Chronicle: Discover Madison, and other wonderful Indiana spots (the last time for me to be in Madison was 1995; it sounds even better.)
10. Huffington-Post: Montana Man Sentenced Over 'Mission' To Kill Local LGBTQ Community - homicidal homophobes going to prison should be a good story, but I cannot get away from my sentence being 151 months and this nutjob's sentence was 216 months.
11. Jacobin: Trump’s Kryptonite: How Progressives Can Win Back the Working Class - imitate John Fetterman? That's a no-brainer. It seems to me Democrats have forgotten how to talk to working-class types because they do not associate with them; then it seems to it is a more general problem of talking only to one's own.
12. The Guardian: ‘It’s 21st-century warfare’: on Ukraine’s counteroffensive frontline (Go Ukraine`)
13. The Guardian: Dictatorship? How Hitler, Stalin and Trump show it’s easier than you think (Why is it Republicans are slavish, bootlickers making a fetish of autocracy? Where did this kind of thinking come from - Goldwater, Nixon, Eisenhower, Reagan?)
14. The Guardian: Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Rural people are so angry they want to blow up the system’ (which might give an insight into #11).
15. The Guardian: Battle in the Channel: seigneur of Sark takes on Barclay dynasty - just pure curiosity.
16. Muncie Journal: Ball State University Board of Trustees Approves Development Agreement for The Village Project Wow.
17. The Muncie Star Press: Steve Buyer, former congressman convicted of insider trading, requests home confinement. Oh, that is where go to.
    

Also, from The Indiana Capital Chronicle is Hoosiers aren’t making enough to pay rent, report finds. Having just seen my bank balance, I should be even more exercised about this. 

“Indiana has twin crises of a shortage of affordable homes and too few good-paying jobs to afford them. This is a symptom of a lack of economic opportunity which prevents too many Hoosiers from achieving their true potential and leaves Indiana behind the curve of the Midwest,” said Andrew Bradley, policy director for Prosperity Indiana and board member of NLIHC.

Instead, I will just ask this question: why do we continue thinking Republicans can run the state's economy for the benefit of everyone? 

Having experience on both sides of the criminal justice system, I do not think deterrence works. The government wants us to think long, certain prison systems deter criminals. I was taught in law school, the rational actor looks at criminal punishments and abstains. I find governmental actions a fraud - imprisonment warehouses without rehabilitation. I wonder - based upon my own experience and observations - if the rational actor theory has any basis in fact. All this is preface, not rant, to two different articles on this issue.

Jstor Daily's Should Punishment Fit the Crime? Dr. Karl Menninger on the crime of punishment.:

...But why should the punishment fit the crime? As ideas of punishment were transforming prisons between the 19th and 20th centuries, and prison administrators were looking for tools to punish or rehabilitate prisoners, there were those who questioned this core tenet of criminal justice. One such prominent critic of the criminal justice system in the United States was Dr. Karl A. Menninger. Instead of asking how the punishment should fit the crime, Menninger asked how the punishment should fit the criminal.

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In The Crime of Punishment (1968), Menninger argues that all forms of punishment are cruel, and that criminal behavior should be treated, rather than punished, in much the same way that behavioral disorders and mental illness are treated. According to Menninger’s obituary in The New York Times, the book “contributed to penal reforms in a number of states.”

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Menninger’s idea of replacing cruel and unusual punishments, such as incarceration and capital punishment, with medical treatments for both physical and mental illnesses resonated with incarcerated people, if not with Americans at large. He received many letters from prisoners who read his book, The Crime of Punishment. “I don’t know how you found it all out, but you are telling it like it is,” wrote one incarcerated reader. “People don’t believe us; maybe they’ll believe you.”

But the first to come my way was from Public Orthodoxy, Boris Begović's Economists vs. F.M. Dostoyevsky The Role of Christ’s Church in Crime and Punishment (which has a table worth reading and thinking about)

The bottom line is that an individual who committed a crime for economists has only instrumental value, nothing else. By harsh and highly likely, almost certain punishment, the government/state signals that the crime does not pay; deterrence is achieved.

It is Dostoyevsky who deals, especially in Crime and Punishment, with the offender, offering him an opportunity for admitting the crime, for catharsis, redemption, rebirth, and new life, as on the last pages of the novel.

Economics does not deal with notions of guilt, redemption, atonement, and rebirth. It will not start soon.

From all I saw and did, criminals take prison as a cost of doing business. Deterrence is a sham - it presupposes a rational actor without considering the irrational actor might think their perspective is the rational one.

Finally, two articles on writing, probably gave too short a shrift: 

1. Imaginative Rebels: A Conversation Between Terese Svoboda and Jim Ruland; and
2. The Happy Life of an Overthinking Author ("Because there’s more than one way to write a novel. And every author has the right to find the way that works best for them")

They reminded me I need to do some writing of my own.

Also, this how I have spent the last 3 hours of my life, and I need a shower.

sch 9:51 A