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Tuesday, February 23, 2016

In Case You Missed It ~ My Sudden Death

“Men act through self-interest; and if they do things you wouldn’t do, you’d better not assume it’s because you have a nobler character. There are noble and disinterested actions done every day; but I think most of them are impulsive. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a deliberate noble action. Deliberation always has half an eye on how it will look; it wants something, if only admiration, for what it does.”
~ James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust

You may have already seen this but I’ll err on the side of possible duplication ...

Former Crown Employee as in Legislature of NSW not Packer's Crown Mark Scott's farewell idea fewer channels shared ABC SBS  transmission


Men act through self-interest ...
Public servants' rights: 'not strictly enforceable'  

“…my father taught me never to take news as gospel truth. The newspapers lie, historians lie, now the television lies….And so I stuck to being a journalist and hunting out conspiracies.”
Introducing ‘In Case You Missed It,’ a look at all the news that’s fit to click

Mr Obeid's silk, Sydney barrister Braddon Hughes, SC, has told the jury that the former MP had an "indirect" interest in the cafes via a family trust but "no absolute right" to receive any profits.
Envelopes of cash marked dad given to Eddie Obeid's son 

In local government we trust ...For those looking for a front row view of Sydney's apartment boom, you couldn't get much closer than Darren Miller's place at Wolli Creek. A 14-storey tower is being constructed less than 30 centimetres from the balcony of Mr Miller's first-floor apartment – all with the blessing of Rockdale Council and local planning authorities The Wolli Creek apartment block so close you can touch it

Senate inquiries are multiplying like rabbits. Already almost a dozen new senate inquiries have been put on the books just a handful of sitting days into the parliamentary calendar.
Department of the Senate dealing with too many inquiries

A man has been held in a warehouse and tortured with a gun and tools including a drill, hammers and a metal hook, in a brutal episode lasting three days, a Wollongong court has heard. ( Almost like the torture at Nitra army barracks when it was tatoo time ) Man kidnapped tortured with tools in south coast warehouse

Most American novelists are not writing works like those of John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, or Ernest Hemingway—authors who confronted poverty, corruption, or battlefield carnage with realistic depictions of events that they witnessed. American writers have abandoned political fiction—what critic Lionel Trilling once described as the “bloody crossroads where politics and literature meet”—or that they are indifferent to the world at large and their place in it. Politics and fiction

Pillow talk is usually reserved for the more intimate, private times in life but a Sydney festival has convinced some of Australia's creative couples to open up about what makes the sparks fly between them. Not related to Senhor Hirschhorn Famous couples make their pillow talk public for Sydney's Spectrum Now Festival

“In a neighborhood that is wearily familiar with the closing of local fixtures (two recent blows were Sounds record store and De Robertis pastry shop), the demise of St. Mark’s Bookshop stands out as painfully, publicly prolonged — one former employee I spoke to compared it to ‘watching a puddle evaporate.'”  The New Yorker

"We all know that anything can happen at any time," said Tameshia Pratt, who works at the tax office

The new mind control Aeon Try to read beyond the clickbait-y headline all the way to the end. Leaders especially in Wild west perth take note ...

“The typical television scenario where a witness comes out of nowhere in a trial doesn’t actually happen much.”


Images of Myanmar
Antidote du jour. Times of India, Monkey Adopts A Puppy And Takes Better Care Of It Than Most Humans Would

War photography obscures death, destruction, and displacement. The images tend to be heroic, inoffensive -- and false  

“We are made immortal,” Emerson wrote, “by the contemplation of beauty.” Immortality may be too elusive a promise, but beauty does work us over with the piercing immediacy of concrete vitality: we come alive in beholding beauty, intensely immersed in the here and now. Beauty beckons us — from Bach to Blake to the dramatic limestone outcrop on a Basque beach that unravels a billion years our planet’s story as a solitary spaceship in a vast and mysterious universe.
That’s what the Irish poet and philosopher John O’Donohue explores in Beauty: The Invisible Embrace (public library) — an enchanting meditation on how beauty lays its claim on the human spirit in such disparate realms as music, love, imperfection, death, and desire.

“The road does not seem the same, and yet every road seems the same.”
Her journey comes to echo that of a religious allegory. The constant presence of death flattens reality into imagery:
“And yet another metaphor: the border.”

That reading is now a social activity again… might seem cause for optimism. Yet D.J. Taylor regrets the passing of critical arbitration in matters of taste, and is at his most curmudgeonly when describing the “enthusiastic online amateur who protests his inability to ‘relate’ to the central character of the novel under discussion and imagines this to be the fault of the book”.  Times Literary Supplement

The Master of the Day of Judgement  begins not with a murder but with a suicide. Actor Eugen Bischoff leaves the party he is hosting and wanders into the garden, though not before recounting the story of a mysterious suicide:
“It was completely unmotivated, there was nothing whatever to explain such an act of total despair. He had no debts or other money troubles, no love trouble, and no illness – in short the suicide could not have been more mysterious.”

Boris is a copper bottomed, double dealing hypocritical little shit. The press will destroy him Jerry Hayes ... My goodness East Latitude all over again!



 AMERICA AT BAY – EVADING DESTINY Sic Semper Tyrannis 

A former Canberra SES gives a stinging assessment of a “toxic mix of incompetence and politicisation” in the federal public service. Is it right, and do the positive signs reflect a turnaround Keane: after years of decline, who’ll rescue the public service?

ANTICHRIST’: NY Daily News slams Trump for lashing out at Pope Francis in new cover Raw Story

       Italian author Umberto Eco -- best known for his novel, The Name of the Rose, has passed away; see, for example, Jonathan Kandell's Umberto Eco, 84, Best-Selling Academic Who Navigated Two Worlds, Diesin The New York Times.
       (If for some reason you haven't read The Name of the Rose yet, you've missed something; get your copy at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk; there's also a niceEveryman's Library edition available.)
       Worth revisiting also: Lila Azam Zanganeh's 'The Art of Fiction'-Q & A with Eco in The Paris Review(2008).
       Only two of his titles are under review at thecomplete review (plus one review-overview):

       And I can't help but wonder/worry what happens to his wonderful, enormous library (but surely he made proper arrangements for it ...).