Money brings some happiness.
But after a certain point, it just brings more money.
-- Neil Simon
Tomorrow stared_ I can not afford to love Sydney
I give you private information on corporations for free, and I'm a villain ... Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money, and he's Man of the Year. Villain ; Man of the Year
- Julian Assange
Me fail? I fly! Read Annandale Blog Invest responsibly Hit the bottle of Cold River
Another great blog which deserves a wider audience in Annandale, Sydney Australia the world ….
Antony Beevor visited Sydney for the Writers’ Festival in 2007. His talk was interesting, and it evoked high-quality audience questions that came from a whole world of War History geekiness previously unknown to me. Although he’d recently published a book about the Spanish Civil War, it was Stalingrad that generated the serious senior fanboy passion.
We bought the book not much later, but didn’t start reading it until July 2008. Now here we are, in mid 2011 and it’s done! Notice I said ‘we’. The reason I took longer to read the book than Anthony Beevor took to write it is that I read it exclusively on long car rides, aloud to my regular driver, usually known on this blog as The Art Student. Apart from the reading being disrupted by our lamentable failure to do much travelling by car in the last three years (two return trips to Canberra, perhaps one southward, and just now north to Red Rock and surrounds), it was an excellent way to read this book.
The wonderful Barbara Ehrenreich said on her blog recently, ‘War has been, and we still expect it to be, the most massive collective project human beings undertake.’ Having just read about the sheer logistics of attack and counter-attack, siege and counter-siege at Stalingrad, I can only say, ‘True, that!’ ‘But,’ Barbara Ehrenreich continued, ‘it has been evolving quickly in a very different direction, one in which human beings have a much smaller role to play.’ If that’s so, we can only be glad of it. The human participants in Stalingrad endured almost unbelievable extremes of cold and hunger: men literally dropped dead from hunger, wounded soldiers froze to death by the cartload. They performed acts of understandable but almost unimaginable cruelty and callousness:
• Jonathan Shaw ; A tribute to a character who was a gracious presence in Annandale, and created a good bit of the visual environment for generations of Australians. Arthur Boothroyd [ Popular ; Media; Search; News ]
• · When we are headed the wrong way, the last thing we need is progress - The potential of human action to do good and evil is larger than it has ever been before. We might even be able to change human nature itself Perfection Is Not A Useful Concept ; I've worked with some serious slackers over the years. People who just could not, or would not, concentrate on the job they were being paid to do How Low Could Adrian eLBow?
• · · RARELY has Somerset Maugham's description of Monaco as 'a sunny place for shady people' seemed more apt ..." Ach, like many other Australian sport stars: Bernard Tomic will make a move to the fiscal paradise of Monaco … Tax havens are an affront against our sense of justice. It is unconscionable that the European Union accepts open tax dodging within its borders. Politicians are, at best, resorting to hand wringing. The highly publicized resolution of the G20 nations in 2009 has barely scratched the surface. Fairness is the most important and most elusive quality of taxation. Tax evasion is a clear breach of solidarity … and it was solidarity that brought down the elite monoculture, Berlin Wall … Iron Curtain Tennis ace Bernard Tomic seeks shelter in luxury tax haven ; FOR Pat Rafter it was Bermuda, and for Lleyton Hewitt it was the Bahamas, but could it be the Mark Philippoussis precedent Bernard Tomic is choosing to follow, along with his big cheque? Not by remaking the Poo's reality show, The Age of Love (there's some magic that can't be recreated), but by setting up camp in the tax haven of Monaco Slice of (tax) Haven
• · · · Chances are if you were born in the city you're not going to handle bad vibes as well as someone who hails from the country, according to a recent study. Get Outta Town; Liu has made an art form of disappearing by painting himself from head to toe so that he blends into his surroundings Hiding in the City
• · · · · The Prime Minister has today committed to publishing key data on the National Health Service, schools, criminal courts and transport. This represents the most ambitious open data agenda of any government anywhere in the world ; Search Glory of Media Dragon: the isveryimportant attribute Alexa the God of Search
• · · · · · We examine the international propagation of the financial crisis of 2008, and compare it with that of the crisis of 1931. MCMXXXI and MMVIII; An apology to Alastair Crook (sic) - A blog by Melanie Phillips posted on 28 January 2011 reported an allegation that Alastair Crooke, director of Conflicts Forum, had been expelled from Israel and dismissed for misconduct from Government service or the EU after threatening a journalist whose email he had unlawfully intercepted. We accept that this allegation is completely false and we apologise to Spectator makes spectacle of Mr Crooke