Monday, November 19, 2018

Zuckerberg: Wall of Illusion

Kate McClymont's first job was manning her own 'insults booth' in Sydney's Kings Cross. As she tells Phillip, she was always a good talker and quick on her feet; traits which have stood her in good stead as an investigative journalist taking on some of Australis' most notorious and corrupt figures.
One of Australia's foremost investigative journalist talks about the highs and lows of bringing corruption to account.


Something went wrong': Facebook users in meltdown after social media site crashed


FACEBOOK CUTS TIES: The social media giant says it has ended a contract with a GOP consulting group that sought to tarnish Facebook opponents. The involvement was disclosed in a blockbuster NYT piece on Facebook. FB contended it had not hidden its contract with Definers Public Affairs and had not asked the group to spread false information about its opponents. Definers sought to link Facebook critics to George Soros and got a group to accuse the critics of anti-Semitism, the NYT reported.

Czechs rally against PM on Velvet Revolution anniversary

'If Peter was the answer, what was the question?': Turnbull's spray at Dutton


Security guards manhandled Fairfax Media's reporter on a public street in attempt to prevent the speech being heard.



The Sydney's aging infrastructure has become increasingly unreliable, from the Highways to the buses to commuters rails to train and bus stations.


Why Gladys Berejiklian threw convention out the window


The Premier’s intervention in the North Sydney pre-selection contest was more than unusual particularly as it increases the chances of Liberal defeat in 2019.

Hospital a basket case but it’s no real surprise




Mark Zuckerberg says he didn’t know Facebook hired a research firm that tried to discredit its critics by linking them to George Soros Business Insider

 Julian Assange has been CHARGED: Justice Department inadvertently reveals they have prosecuted the WikiLeaks founder under seal and US authorities are preparing to arrest him Daily Mail


Health Minister tells Northern Beaches Hospital operator to 'get it fixed', but won't step in


Health Minister Brad Hazzard says that he has spoken to senior managers at Healthscope after reports of a serious undersupply of critical supplies at the new Northern Beaches Hospital.



Giacomo Leopardi felt trapped by his reactionary father and penny-pinching mother. What emerged were his musings on thedarkness of the human condition 
Once Seen as a Local Issue, Affordable Housing Is Becoming a State Focus Governing

 Man who 'tried to recruit escorts in money-laundering scheme' charged over $1m cash haul
Vulnerable taxpayers would get free legal advice under Labor 'tax ...
ATO spoofed: Scammers use cloned tax office phone number to trick ...
The Australian Financial Review 

List of free GDPR resources and templates IT Governance: “The EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requires all organisations that process EU residents’ personal data to abide by its strict terms. We’ve produced five free resources to help you understand what the GDPR requires you to do…



    1. Webinars: Supporting you in your GDPR compliance project
    2. Green paper: EU General Data Protection Regulation – A compliance guide
    3. Video: What does the GDPR mean for your business in the UK
    4. Infographic: What the GDPR means in 1 minute
    5. GDPR templates: Documenting your compliance
    Another NYC cab driver deep in debt kills himself New York Post
      The Myth of culture and change

      Agents of Betrayal | Lapham's Quarterly



      A Bizarre Dance Craze Has Taken Over South Africa


      Limpopo-born musician King Monada's hit song Malwedhe, which means "illness" in the Bolobedu dialect of the Sepedi language, has inspired a dance unlike anything we've seen before. The dance sees fans falling to the ground at the chorus and words: ke na le bolwedhe bao idibala (I have an illness of fainting). … Read More

      Steven Wright's Sayings


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      Sunday, November 18, 2018

      The American Memoir tells a recurring story


      "A dazzling highwire act ... the sheer inventiveness and strength of his writing turn risk into triumph, drunken monologues into subtle satire, A.A. meetings into riveting dramas, and what in another writer might be bathos into brilliant comedy ... probably the most clear-eyed and moving—and certainly one of the most honest—books ever written about alcoholics."
               — The New Yorker

      Backlash after 'sexist' tweet about youngest congresswoman

      In Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's first two days in the nation's capital, she was mistaken for an intern and mocked for her clothing.

      The American Memoir tells a recurring story of personal responsibility and freedom from history. As Christopher J. Lebron explains, it is a lie  

      The Hottest U.S. Literary Trend Isn’t American Literature At All


      Nope. It's books in translation. Why? Maybe the internet, or cell phones, or something entirely different - but the National Book Foundation is about to add a National Book Award for Translated Literature, the first new prize for the National Book Awards in more than 20 years. … [Read More]

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      The war game that could have ended the world

      "Calling bullshit might be one of the most insidious forms of bullshit."— three articles on the anxieties, insecurities, and insights of the humanities, in light of the recent hoaxing, at The Point

       "Even if you work 60 hours a week and sleep eight hours a night, that leaves you 52 hours a week—a full seven hours a day—to do other things"— how a time audit can help academics


      Kim and Kanye hire private firefighters

       Podcast discussions with philosophers, economists, and others interested in altruism— at 80,000 Hours

       The war game that could have ended the world BBC



      The dirty truth: Australia's most polluted postcodes

      Australian Conservation Foundation
      AUSTRALIAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION
      The burden of air pollution rests disproportionately on the shoulders of poorer Australians. This report shows 90% of polluting facilities reported in the National Pollutant Inventory (NPI) are in postcodes with low-middle weekly household incomes.

       Why Does This Historian Say He Got Christianity Wrong? – HillFaith: Good News for Congressional Staff.

       "Compacted into this very, very small amount of writing was almost everything that explains the modern world … Concepts like international law, for instance, concepts of human rights, all these kind of things—ultimately, they don’t go back to Greek philosophers; they don’t go back to Roman imperialism; they go back to Paul,” Holland claims in an Unbelievable? interview.
      Automata of antiquity. Mythic Crete was the Silicon Valley of the ancient world, home of the cryptic maze, manned flight, self-guided arrows Mything Points  

      Malabar no longer on the nose with house prices sky high

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      Saturday, November 17, 2018

      Artworks


      Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why.
      ~Henry van Dyke

      You know how it is when you're reading a book and falling asleep, you're reading, reading... And all of a sudden you notice your eyes are closed? I'm like that all the time

       Pauline Kael Gets the Last Word in 'What She Said'
      I think that Kael, like most reviewers is right sometimes and wrong other times. I walked out of Nashville and thought Carrie was ridiculous. On the other hand, Blow-Up was the first Antonioni movie I liked. All of which proves nothing except that my taste and Kael’s were not always in sync. Reviewing is not a science 



      Data craft: the manipulation of social media metadata






      Missing from the Warhol Retrospective

      The historic Warhol retrospective at the Whitney Museum is “the biggest in almost 30 years.” And it is being swooned over with raves like Peter Schjeldahl’sin the current New Yorker, or as the headline ... read more



      The Artists Who Focus On The Aboriginal Men And Women Who Served Australia


      One of the artists says, "A lot of young Aboriginal men fought for this country, travelled overseas and never came home. Even those who did weren’t treated with dignity and respect in Australia at the time. Their stories remain hidden, camouflaged in history." He and other Aboriginal artists are trying to change that. … [Read More]
      “The Art Institute of Chicago has placed high-definition images of 52,438 public-domain artworks onto its website (with magnification tools) under a CC0 license (no rights reserved), including The Great Wave, A Sunday on La Grand Jette (unfortunately not magnifiable to this extent), Nighthawks, Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait, Warhol’s Mao, and Two Sisters on the Terrace…”



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      Fits and starts

      “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
       – President Abraham Lincoln, former U.S. President
      I’ve seen sports clothes that say, “Never, never, never give up,” but is that right? Never? Triple never? What if your dream is to win a marathon and your body with triple-never do that? It’ll finish, if you work at it, but it’ll never cross the line first and could fall apart trying. What if your dream is to be a movie star before you’re old, and it’s a million other people’s dreams as well? More than a million, actually. And some of them, lots of them, have perfect teeth and better luck than you.

       “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”
      – Steve Jobs
      Governance innovation for a connected world






      ‘KINDNESS IS NOT A SYNONYM FOR WEAK’: Poynter’s Kristen Hare on how Nikki Delamotte, the slain Cleveland reporter, had inspired a colleague to become better. For a project the two had planned, Delamotte had suggested: Why not include everything that we’re nervous to write about?




      CLEVER BIRTHDAY: Oxy.com turned 5, and celebrated its birthday with a clever donation ask, with suggestions ranging from $5, for the number of candles on its birthday cake, to $49, for the age of its founder, Carlos Watson (“who will kill us when he reads this”) to, WTH, $1 million (“If you don’t ask, you don’t get”). Another option: Just read the stories, and share them if you want. 



              They've announced that Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou -- the story of the Theranos-scam/fiasco --, has been named this year's Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year. 
             See the Knopf publicity page, or get your copy atAmazon.com or Amazon.co.uk. 


      Historians Have Revered This Book For 30 Years. It’s Only Now Getting Published


      “Over the years, it’s been passed around, first in photocopies and later as a PDF. … It’s made its way onto required-reading lists and been cited hundreds of times.” There has even been a scholarly conference devoted to it. Julius S. Scott completed The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution in 1987, and it’s only coming out in print this month. Reporter Tom Bartlett investigates why.
      Sex Doll Brothel Now Open in Prague





      The Crowd-Sourced Novel That Became A Publishing Phenomenon


      By the time Anna Todd wrote Chapter 90—of an eventual 295 chapters—her novel-in-progress had been read more than 1 million times. Multiple literary agents reached out to her, but she dismissed them as “crazy people,” figuring no legitimate professional would seek out One Direction fan fiction. Readers composed sequels starring After’s characters, uploaded video homages to the book, and—finally convincing Todd that she might have something big on her hands—chatted as Tessa and Harry on Twitter role-playing accounts.

      A Bizarre Dance Craze Has Taken Over South Africa


      Limpopo-born musician King Monada's hit song Malwedhe, which means "illness" in the Bolobedu dialect of the Sepedi language, has inspired a dance unlike anything we've seen before. The dance sees fans falling to the ground at the chorus and words: ke na le bolwedhe bao idibala (I have an illness of fainting). … Read More

      Brothers sell company they started in their parents' basement for $11 billion


      The tech industry's newest billionaires are a pair of brothers who started a software company in their parents' basement in Utah.
      Facebook Hired GOP Oppo-Research Firm to Link Protesters to George Soros: Report Daily Beast (furzy)
      Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis New York Times. “It also tapped its business relationships, lobbying a Jewish civil rights group to cast some criticism of the company as anti-Semitic.”





      If you expect the world to be fair with you because you are fair, you’re fooling yourself. That’s like expecting the lion not to eat you because you didn’t eat him.

       Biskup Andrzej Imrich, ks. Mieczysław Szlaga ze Sromowiec Wyżnych, ks. Józef Bednarczyk z Niedzicy, ks. Marek Kądzielawa ze Sromowiec Niżnych i Jerzy Regiec, prezes Polskiego Stowarzyszenia Flisaków Pienińskich   Biskup Andrzej Imrich, ks. Mieczysław Szlaga ze Sromowiec Wyżnych, ks. Józef Bednarczyk z Niedzicy, ks. Marek Kądzielawa ze Sromowiec Niżnych i Jerzy Regiec, prezes Polskiego Stowarzyszenia Flisaków Pienińskich 


      I DRINK TO FORGET: Are Your Drinking Habits Affecting Your Memory?


      NEWS YOU CAN USE: Six interesting benefits of kissing.
      NEWS I HOPE YOU DON’T NEED TO USE: 5 Ways To Start Having More Sex In Your Marriage.
      Related discussion here.
       



         

      Levoca
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