“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”
~ John Steinbeck
Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it...
We who live after Calvary and Easter know that God did indeed act suddenly and dramatically at that moment. When today we long for God to act, to put the world to rights, we must remind ourselves that he has already done so, and that what we are now awaiting is the full outworking of those events. We wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come with a lighted candle, but like people in early morning who know that the sun has arisen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday. (Matthew for Everyone, Part 1, p. 170)
Australia’s major grocery retailers and department stores are celebrating the decision by the New South Wales Parliament to permit trading in NSW on Boxing Day. The Coalition legislation scraped through the upper house by just one vote when two Christian Democratic Party crossbenchers, Reverend Fred Nile and Paul Green, supported the unchristian legislation On the 2nd-day of Christmas Fred Nile gave to us er boxing day trading ...
“This is probably the first time in history that young readers themselves are demanding protection from the disturbing content of their course texts, yet reading has been seen as a threat to mental health for thousands of years.” Aeon
"There is no difference to the police trespassing on a Facebook page for four months and my steaming open my neighbour's mail in the hope of one day finding something, anything, to report to police ... How deep in police culture is this willingness to break the law? Even after they have been caught out, it would appear no adverse consequences are going to be suffered by those responsible because the illegal actions are supported by police at the most senior level." Private Facebook posts illegally hacked by nsw police
Exposing the Hidden Web: An
Analysis of Third-Party – HTTP Requests on One Million Websites.
International Journal of Communication, October 2015. Timothy Libert.
Woman blows herself up in raid targeting mastermind of Paris attacks
Lindt siege gunman Man Haron Monis: The lone wolf who cried wolf too many times~ John Steinbeck
Looking for a place to live. Looking for a job. You begin to doubt your judgment, you begin to doubt everything. You become imprecise. And that’s when you’re beginning to go under. You’ve been beaten, and it’s been deliberate. The whole society has decided to make you nothing. And they don’t even know they’re doing it...
We who live after Calvary and Easter know that God did indeed act suddenly and dramatically at that moment. When today we long for God to act, to put the world to rights, we must remind ourselves that he has already done so, and that what we are now awaiting is the full outworking of those events. We wait with patience, not like people in a dark room wondering if anyone will ever come with a lighted candle, but like people in early morning who know that the sun has arisen and are now waiting for the full brightness of midday. (Matthew for Everyone, Part 1, p. 170)
Australia’s major grocery retailers and department stores are celebrating the decision by the New South Wales Parliament to permit trading in NSW on Boxing Day. The Coalition legislation scraped through the upper house by just one vote when two Christian Democratic Party crossbenchers, Reverend Fred Nile and Paul Green, supported the unchristian legislation On the 2nd-day of Christmas Fred Nile gave to us er boxing day trading ...
“This is probably the first time in history that young readers themselves are demanding protection from the disturbing content of their course texts, yet reading has been seen as a threat to mental health for thousands of years.” Aeon
"There is no difference to the police trespassing on a Facebook page for four months and my steaming open my neighbour's mail in the hope of one day finding something, anything, to report to police ... How deep in police culture is this willingness to break the law? Even after they have been caught out, it would appear no adverse consequences are going to be suffered by those responsible because the illegal actions are supported by police at the most senior level." Private Facebook posts illegally hacked by nsw police
It’s Way Too Easy to Hack the Hospital Bloomberg. (This excellent article is JavaScript heavy and you may need to switch browsers to read it.)
Woman blows herself up in raid targeting mastermind of Paris attacks
Supreme Court Luis case: When can the government freeze your assets? Slate
Papantonio: Civil Justice System Taken Over By Corporations YouTube
Unacceptable behaviors Vox
Amazon debuts in Thomson Reuters 2015 top 100 innovators list Reuters. Lambert: “By innovation these guys mean extraction, period”
Bosses must face up to the issue of work anxiety Financial Times
It’s Not Just the Drug War Jacobin
Prosecutors Announce More Charges in Hacking of JPMorgan Chase: “Billing it as the largest hacking case ever uncovered, federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Tuesday described a global, multiyear scheme to steal information on 100 million customers of a dozen companies in the United States and use the data to advance stock manipulation activities, illicit online gambling and fraud. Prosecutors said they uncovered the complex scheme in their investigation of a computer hacking last year at JPMorgan Chase that involved the breach of contact information, such as emails, from 83 million customer accounts. Before long, investigators had uncovered a trail of 75 shell companies and a hacking scheme in which the three defendants used 30 false passports from 17 different countries. The group’s activity goes back as far as 2007, and it has reaped “hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds,” some of it hidden in Swiss accounts and other bank accounts, prosecutors said.”
Papantonio: Civil Justice System Taken Over By Corporations YouTube
Unacceptable behaviors Vox
Amazon debuts in Thomson Reuters 2015 top 100 innovators list Reuters. Lambert: “By innovation these guys mean extraction, period”
Bosses must face up to the issue of work anxiety Financial Times
It’s Not Just the Drug War Jacobin
Prosecutors Announce More Charges in Hacking of JPMorgan Chase: “Billing it as the largest hacking case ever uncovered, federal prosecutors in Manhattan on Tuesday described a global, multiyear scheme to steal information on 100 million customers of a dozen companies in the United States and use the data to advance stock manipulation activities, illicit online gambling and fraud. Prosecutors said they uncovered the complex scheme in their investigation of a computer hacking last year at JPMorgan Chase that involved the breach of contact information, such as emails, from 83 million customer accounts. Before long, investigators had uncovered a trail of 75 shell companies and a hacking scheme in which the three defendants used 30 false passports from 17 different countries. The group’s activity goes back as far as 2007, and it has reaped “hundreds of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds,” some of it hidden in Swiss accounts and other bank accounts, prosecutors said.”
JPMorgan’s
2014 hack tied to vast cybercrime enterprise
CRI, 12/11/15. The new allegations against the four, all previously charged, broaden dramatically the scope of a wide-ranging criminal enterprise with hacking at its core. In two indictments, prosecutors say the defendants targeted financial institutions, publishers, online stock brokers and software firms.
CRI, 12/11/15. The new allegations against the four, all previously charged, broaden dramatically the scope of a wide-ranging criminal enterprise with hacking at its core. In two indictments, prosecutors say the defendants targeted financial institutions, publishers, online stock brokers and software firms.
This could be the most awkward end to a Tinder date ever. British blogger Lauren Crouch, 28, decided to jump back into the dating game by using the app after “her man” moved back to America, she wrote her latest blog post
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| The Beauty on Kurrajong Tree |
“At a certain stage, I realized a life is written in indelible ink.” Jane Hirshfield made an appearance at Kepler’s Booksthis year – and I know just what she means.
“Certain doors close,” she said. “It’s too late to be a bronco rider” – not that she ever wanted to be, she quickly added.
I’ve tried explaining this realization to friends. It’s not that there won’t be big surprises, new beginnings, unexpected turns, but I know I’ll never be a neurosurgeon – not that I wanted to be. Or an astronaut. When one enters the harvest period of life, one will reap not only as but where one has sown – a lifetime of planting fields of wheat won’t yield cabbages and thyme. A life with a pen … or a computer screen … means one won’t be a ballerina. This is hard to explain to the young ‘uns, for whom life and hope and joy is a world of almost endless possibilities – they may have ten children, or none. And everyone of them can still be a president. Yet I think today’s youth suffers greatly from unlimited possibility, and the uncertainty and burdens it brings – especially in modern Western culture, where we task our children with the creation of a whole life by the time they’re twenty or so.
A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,
and the copper bowls balance.
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| Flowers on French Furniture and tablecloths Bohemian Dining |
“Acclaimed Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk (pictured) has received a steady stream of hate mail and even death threats after questioning her country’s view of itself as ‘an open, tolerant country.’ As one person put it in a post to Tokarczuk’s Facebook page, ‘The only justice for these lies is death. Traitor.'” And when translator Jennifer Croft set up and English-language Facebook page to support Tokarczuk, she found herself in the line of fire Asymptote
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| Two Elephants in A Room |
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.
One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.
It is still beautiful to feel the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.
Tomas Tranströmer