Sunday, July 10, 2016

Creative Processes: Time for some new shoes...


My creative process involves that old saying: It's 90% perspiration and only 10% inspiration...
~ Ms Kanter 

Claudia Sahm now has a MacroMom blog

Aretha Franklin still has it

The Guardian turned to its audience on Wednesday for help telling a huge story: New, bombshell disclosures about the UK's flawed involvement with the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The revelations, contained in a lengthy report by government adviser John Chilcot, point to a British government that relied on faulty intelligence and was overly hawkish when there were non-military alternatives to war. But there's a lot more detail in the report, which is 2.6 million words long. For comparison, that's four times longer than "War and Peace," Leo Tolstoy's mammoth novel about the French invasion of Russia. If you want to help The Guardian sort through the Chilcot Report, you can do so here
How do you trawl through a 2-6 million word report the guardian is asking its readers for help

Kudos to Colin Miller (South Carolina), editor of our EvidenceProf Blog, whose blogging (and Undisclosed Podcast) on the Serial Podcast on the 1999 prosecution of 17 year-old Adnan Syed for murdering his ex-girlfriend, 18 year-old Hae Min Lee, was cited by Maryland Judge Martin Welch in granting Syed a new trial on Thursday. See National Law Journal, Blogger's Obsession with "Serial" Case Leads to Retrial for Adnan Syed

Yay! You can sing “happy birthday” in public! Thank you plaintiffs’ bar! [TMZ

* Got a parking ticket? Maybe this robot lawyer can take care of it for you. [The Mirror

Cambridge academic stages nude protest over Brexit in front of 30 economists during faculty meeting Independent

The Canadian government is considering gender-neutral ID.  And Toronto is better than you think.  And “Angus is the first certified dog in Canada enlisted to detect the bacteria in hospitals 

Washington Post, Donald Trump Used Money Donated for Charity to Buy Himself a Tim Tebow-Signed Football Helmet:
Did Donald Trump violate IRS rules, by using a charity's money to buy himself a signed football helmet?

 The Goettingen Journal of International Law (GoJIL) has recently released the first issue of its seventh volume. The 7.1 edition is a special issue on the exercise of International Public Authority. It emerges from a fruitful collaboration with scholars who participated in workshops on this topic at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg.  www.gojil.eu 
The International Law Programme at Chatham House Rules will be hosting a meeting on ‘Challenges to Freedom of Expression’ on 20 July 2016 at Chatham House. For further details and to enquire about registering see here

The first area is with respect to office gossip. Anyone who has spent a day working at a law firm knows that law firm halls are rife with office gossip. And that nearly everyone participates in some fashion, from the most powerful partners to the most junior employees.  The Power Of Gossip and Speech

Picasso created more than 13,000 paintings and drawings. Defoe wrote 500 published works. When it comes to creativity, how much is too much?...  Never Enough


Picasso created more than 13,000 paintings and drawings. Defoe wrote 500 published works. When it comes to creativity, how much is too muchProlific  


Against stupidity the very gods
Themselves contend in vain.

(Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.)
~ Friedrich Schiller, Die Jungfrau von Orleans (trans. Anna Swanwick)
The brainy segments of society fetishize smarts, glorify intelligence, and embrace the idea that giftedness is the primary yardstick of human worth. It's not ...

Trading Places: Neocons and Cockroaches Common Dreams 

Beauty tips, stock tips, a defense of anorexia, a breast augmentation at 73.Helen Gurley Brown wasn't exactly an intellectual, but she was a philosopher 

Bräuning, Falk and Ivashina, Victoria, Monetary Policy and Global Banking (June 21, 2016). Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2801304


For the first episode in the Multi-blog series on the Updated Geneva Conventions Commentaries, the Humanitarian Law & Policy Blog has published Locating the Geneva Conventions Commentaries in the International Legal Landscape, by Jean-Marie Henckaerts.

How a Generation Lost Its Common Culture:
My students are know-nothings. They are exceedingly nice, pleasant, trustworthy, mostly honest, well-intentioned, and utterly decent. But their brains are largely empty, devoid of any substantial knowledge that might be the fruits of an education in an inheritance and a gift of a previous generation. They are the culmination of western civilization, a civilization that has forgotten nearly everything about itself, and as a result, has achieved near-perfect indifference to its own culture.

SCREWING THE MUSICIANS, EVEN THOUGH THEY’RE MOSTLY DEMOCRATS:U.S. Dept. Of Justice Deals Crushing Blow To Songwriters.

Don McLean forever memorialized Feb. 3, 1959—the date of the plane crash killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson—as “the Day the Music Died” in his song “American Pie.” If you ask most songwriters or music creators, June 30, 2016—the date the Dept. of Justice ruled on music licensing consent decrees—may go down in history as “the day the music rolled over in its grave.”
How severe are the rulings by the Dept. of Justice? “This would create Armageddon in the professional songwriter community,” Nashville Songwriters Association (NSAI) Executive Director Bart Herbison said in a press release. “I am stunned and sickened [by the ruling],” NSAI President Lee Thomas Miller added. “DOJ did not take the impact on songwriters into account when issuing this ruling.”


“There Are Conservative Professors. Just Not in These States.”

Stylish writing: Sitting in a BarcaLounger in Marv's den, Bob remembers how, "as a kid, he'd liked this room, but as the years passed and it stayed exactly the same except for a new TV every five years, it felt like heartbreak to him. Like a calendar page no one bothered to turn anymore."
The way life itself can so often seem

*Alvin Toffler, R.I.P.