Cyber Assets Register Restack: You Knew There Had To Be A Catch

“The best education will not immunize a person against corruption by power. The best education does not automatically make people compassionate. We know this more clearly than any preceding generation. Our time has seen the best-educated society, situated in the heart of the most civilized part of the world, give birth to the most murderously vengeful government in history.”
~Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

“Power always thinks it has a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak.” John Adams, letter to Thomas Jefferson, February 2, 1816 ... read more

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IN THE 21st CENTURY IMITATES MONTY PYTHON: Watch Monty Python Eviscerate The Women’s March 38 Years Before It Happened.

Investigation: social welfare cheats targeted while corporate welfare elite runs amok

An Assets Register, including cyber and telecommunications infrastructure
Critical Infrastructure Register

Security test puts heat on foreign bids outsourcing and offshoring in a spotlight
Security test puts heat on foreign bids

Artificial intelligence is growing so fast, even Google’s co-founder is surprised Chicago Tribune. Sergey Brin thinks Davos is like Burning Man. And it is! It is!

 PWC: Independent review ATO outage begins

Let’s Talk Candidly About How Much Writers Make

“Writers know so little about how other writers make ends meet that it’s difficult for them to have much perspective on their own ability to do so.” 

How Do You Remain Civil In An Uncivil World?

“For better or worse, we must accept that civility ‘does not exist outside of politics as an independent force,’ … but rather is just as much the ‘subject of political struggle’ as everything else.”

Love That Irish Brogue

by Jan Herman

Are there any video promos for a play as inviting as this one for "The Pigeon in the Taj Mahal"? An exchange of comments: To my ears, Irish is the most beautiful English, an impression reaffirmed by three long bicycle trips through the West of Ireland. How did a country with half the population of NYC produce Yeats, Synge, Wilde, Joyce, and Beckett, and all within about a 50 year period? -- William Osborne I don’t know whether Jonathan Swift spoke with a brogue. Seamus Heaney did. Maybe his poem “Digging” explains all that great … [Read more...]

In a late collection, Rovigo (1992), Zbigniew Herbert includes another of his elegies, “To Piotr Vučič” (trans. Alissa Valles, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, 2007). In the poem’s final lines, he both echoes the trio cited above and adds a characteristically terse and acerbic coda:

“I once heard an old man recite Homer

I have known people exiled like Dante

I saw all Shakespeare’s plays on stage

I was lucky

You might say born with a silver spoon

“Explain that to others

I had a wonderful life

“I suffered”

At least in translation, Herbert echoes Whitman: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.”

I had wonderful life

We don’t talk anymore, San Francisco  

Why is California so closely connected with melancholy?  Here is a smart, critical review of La La Land, but I think it misses the point: the movie is a critique and indeed subtle reflection of what is (supposedly) an all-pervasive mediocrity of contemporary life and art.  Setting the opening musical number in a traffic jam plays up the contrast with the older, “more glorious” musicals quite deliberately.  At the same time, the movie questions whether the past was ever so glorious after all

Teaching Science Through Dance

This is the way way partner artists (have to) talk when they’re working in elementary schools: “Dance offers a fun way to learn science. Young students want to move around. Dance will represent what things mean in weather science and complement our core curriculum.”

Librarians report on what is the strangest thing they have found in a library book

 SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. and SAN DIEGO, Jan. 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — The number of U.S. data breaches tracked in 2016 hit an all-time record high of 1,093, according to a new report released today by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) and CyberScout(formerly IDT911). This represents a substantial hike of 40 percent over the near record high of 780 reported in 2015. This raises the question: are there actually more breaches or is it because more states are making this information publicly available?


Project MKUltra – Ways of killing a person without leaving evidence of murder the unbalanced evolution of homo sapiens (ChrisSp). Cf.