Thursday, November 24, 2016

"Tell Me Something I Don't Know"

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Yet everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides. Also, you can’t save, fix or rescue any of them, or get any of them sober. But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world. When people responkd by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea... Anne Lamott  on being broken in lots of places


“I’m going to plead with you, do not cross us. Because if you do, the survivors will write about what we do here for 10,000 years.”



“I don’t lose any sleep at night over the potential for failure. I cannot even spell the word.”

~ James Mattis (San Diego Union Tribune)




 “Demonstrate to the world there is ‘No Better Friend, No Worse Enemy’ than a U.S. Marine.”




Rumour Mills .... Quit Social Media Dragon .... Your Career May Depend on It. New York Times


How to reconcile our stubbornly held view of Kafka as an unworldly neurotic, an "uncanny man bringing forth uncanny things," with his knack for slapstick and punch lines 

Why The Mega-Rich Are Getting Bodyguards Daily Beast
Second Chinese Firm in a Week Found Hiding Backdoor in Firmware of Android Devices Bleeping Computer

Hacker Program Bank ATMs to Spew Cash Wall Street Journal 


Unprecedented’: More than 100 million trees dead in California SFGate. One third of the trees in national forests are dead.

This is a game show only a fact-checking nerd could love. "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" is a WBEZ podcast featuring fascinating tales and an on-air, live fact-checker. Listen to an episode and become addicted

Lefties fret that the police might be reading their tweets

An olfactory artist recreates the smell of 35 cities

Australia's health trackers reveals huge health gaps between Sydney suburbs

The great tobacco settlement of the 1990s certainly is the scandal that keeps on giving, isn’t it? “On Tuesday, federal prosecutors…. charged that [influential former Chicago alderman Edward] Vrdolyak worked out a secret deal with other attorneys to collect as much as $65 million even though he’d done no work on the tobacco case [for the state of Illinois]. The indictment did not make clear just how much the former alderman actually pocketed. … The [Seattle-based Hagens Berman] firm has denied any attempt to conceal payments.” [Chicago Tribune]

By the time my book The Rule of Lawyers came out in its 2004 softcover edition, enough was known about the multistate tobacco settlement for me to call it a “gigantic heist.” More stories have emerged since then. How many more still haven’t come to light?

Another reason to ditch brain training: A declining mind may make you wiser Ars Technica


Inspector General: IRS Exposed 28 Million Taxpayers To Identity Theft By Sending Unencrypted Email



giraffe-links
Steve Bannon Trump Tower Interview: Trump’s Strategist Plots “New Political Movement” Hollywood Reporter

Goodbye, American neoliberalism. A new era is here Cornel West, Guardian

Trump picks conservative loyalists for top security, law enforcement jobs Reuters 

Rep. Mike Pompeo wants to revive mass surveillance program 

Three in five Australians will not have enough money to retire 

Facebook popularized the idea of a “graph” (specifically social graph) to describe the relationship between you and the web of people and interests that surround you, and to help figure out what kind of content you like to see. That’s proven to be a somewhat problematic concept when it comes to social graphs, but it turns out to be an effective concept for how to tackle a number of business problems. 
Neo Technology, whose database platform powered the Panama Papers, nabs $36M