Tuesday, July 07, 2015

The Act of Being Born Twice: two birthdays and two Name Days

James Bond once said, 'You only live twice.' Once when you are born and again when you face death.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could somehow steep yourself in the sordid details of our dystopian authoritarian surveillance state — but in a totally fun way?

Charter 77, 7 of the 7, is filled with a number of strictly symbolic acts and  events in post communist Czech and Slovak Republics and it is a special day Down Under as Antipodean Dorrigo born and bred Tyson is celebrating another juggling milestone ...

To feel born too late, and to find that an ennobling failure, are very Czech emotions. And they permeate the work of a very Czech writer, Bohumil Hrabal

The government and the media may want to talk ad nauseam about Q and A, but the host of the show has had enough ... Is Tony Abbott becoming the Antipodean Benito Mussolini? Benito was also studying to be a priest and had a tendency to pepper his speeches with colourful and unintentional jokes and humour Tony Jones on Democracy in Action Questions Without Answers


Once the redoubts of abstruse and jargon-heavy monographs, university pressesare now the last great hope for serious nonfiction... nonfiction

Journalists now compete with spooks and spies, and the spooks have the home-field advantage.
A spy's guide to protecting whistleblowers

Venus and Jupiter almost collided around 7 of 7 in a spectacular nighttime showQuartz

roos in Queensland links

“The love song, whether from Shakespeare or his lessers, is to the currency of our feelings what the dollar bill is to our economy, the dining-room table to our family life – the necessary, inevitable thing"...


What we’re reading and recommending this summer. Classic nonfiction, novels set in India and Africa and the American South, political biographies, war chronicles, and studies in the psychology of totalitarianism and pervasive surveillance round out the list.
The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin
By Steven Lee Myers
Every Man Dies Alone
By Hans Fallada
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
By Michel Foucault
Cold River: A Survivor's Story
By Jozef Imrich ;-)
A Bell for Adano
By John Hersey
Wild Seed
By Octavia Butler
Inside Out
By Barry Eisler
The File: A Personal History
By Timothy Garton Ash
A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal
By Ben Macintyre
So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government
By Robert G. Kaiser
Firstlook at the Intercept summer reading list