Saturday, April 22, 2017

Meaning of Life and What Constitutes Work

But the one thing that has power completely is love, because when a man loves, he seeks no power, and therefore he has power.
  — Alan Paton, who died around this date in 1988

Common hatred unites the most hetrogeneous elements. To share a common hatred, with an enemy even, is to infect him with a feeling of kinship, and thus sap his powers of resistance.
It’s easier to hate than to love.
Hate is primal like a dog salivating at the sight of meat.
Hate gives people a reason to stop looking at flaws in themselves. Hate is democrats vs liberal, democracy vs communism, good vs evil, Jew vs goy etc.
Hate gives people a sense of superiority and unites them into a common cause.
Do not appeal to reasons and logic but rather emotions – specifically, hope for the future.
“If we get rid of the ______, the world would be a better place.”
“If you join the army, you get paid to travel the world, have friends and fight for your nation.”

 In 1961, a B-list Hollywood figure sought out J.D. Salinger to secure film rights to Catcher in the Rye. Their encounter reads like a "one-act play bound for the theater of the absurd"... Absurd  

As Tax Day approaches and Congress considers long-overdue tax reforms, the report is intended to highlight loopholes that create fake markets for unnecessary or unwanted goods and services; encourage more borrowing, spending, and taxing by local governments; and shift the tax burden to the middle class. ...



 The Realities of Research Data Management Part One: A Tour of the Research Data Management (RDM) Service Space. Rebecca Bryant, Senior Program Officer; Brian Lavoie, Research Scientist; Constance Malpas, Strategic Intelligence Manager & Research Scientist.
Local Edition: What do journalists need to stop doing to survive?







What makes a good leader in a mass movement? (Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Stalin etc)


Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor desirable.
The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck.
A capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness.

Never show your weakness.

People are attracted to winners and stray away from losers.

Confidence (even when it’s faked) is attractive because it shows competence. A confidence leader can lead the mass of frustrated people into a promise land.

Moses lead people through the sea.  Hitler lead desperate Germans out of economic depression.


What it takes to wield the awesome power and responsibility of being a judge. [Katz Justice]
With one in four of all patent cases going to a single federal judge in east Texas, forum-shopping is a menace to judicial impartiality [Jonas Anderson, SSRN]
 When the “safe” career choice is no longer safe. [Law and More]

 According to management consultant and best-selling author Deborah C. Stephens, who studies the human side of business, including the pastimes of executives, I am one of a dozen CEOs she's interviewed over the years who both write and employ poetry as a regular part of staff management and customer relations. … Viewpoint: Making the business case for poetry during National Poetry Month



Five Ways Reading Fiction Can Help You In Your Job



“To run a business, you have to be deeply involved in all the minutiae, from strategy to product to hiring. Diving into the story, identifying with the characters, and trying to solve the mystery has two effects on me. First, it is a very efficient way to disconnect from all the problems I face in the business. Second, it immediately unlocks my creativity. My mind has no limits while I’m reading, and it shouldn’t while I’m conducting business.” 


World Economic Forum: “A great deal has been written in recent years about the perils of automation. With predicted mass unemployment, declining wages, and increasing  inequality, clearly we should all be afraid. By now it’s no longer just the Silicon Valley trend watchers and technoprophets who are apprehensive. In a study that has already racked up several hundred citations, scholars at Oxford University have estimated that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at a high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in the next 20. “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame,” notes a New York University professor. “But a century from now, nobody will much care about how long it took, only what happened next.” I admit, we’ve heard it all before. Employees have been worrying about the rising tide of automation for 200 years now, and for 200 years employers have been assuring them that new jobs will naturally materialize to take their place. After all, if you look at the year 1800, some 74% of all Americans were farmers, whereas by 1900 this figure was down to 31%, and by 2000 to a mere 3%. Yet this hasn’t led to mass unemployment. In 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes was predicting that we’d all be working just 15-hour weeks by the year 2030. Yet, since the 1980s, work has only been taking up more of our time, bringing waves of burnouts and stress in its wake. Meanwhile, the crux of the issue isn’t even being discussed. The real question we should be asking ourselves is: what actually constitutes “work” in this day and age?..” 


'The closest to suicide I've been'


—The Huffington Post, February 9, 2016.
—The Kansas City Star, yesterday.
And note these mocking paragraphs in the Star’s article:
College spokesman Stephen Johnson said that starting this fall, both recreational classes and for-credit exercise classes that once taught yoga will likely still be taught the same way, but instead will be rebranded as “lifestyle fitness.”
“We’re changing the name,” Johnson said. 
The move to recast the practice of yoga, with positions like upward dog and downward dog, into classes of more generic stretching and breathing exercises has landed the college of 2,000 students in something of a doghouse.
Yes, to borrow a line popular at Faber college, they f***ed up; they trusted the SJWs, hoping that appeasement would sate the beast.
Related: “The greatest threat to the liberal international order comes not from Russia, China, or jihadist terror but from the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture.”
AS a father of six weeks, Jonathan Miles looked at his son in his wife's arms and told her he wanted out. The new dad, who had been so excited about having a baby, was now convinced the two most important people in his life would be happier without him

Three $5000 no-strings-attached grants available Medium 

Private Equity Winces as Companies Do the Splits Bloomberg


Sean Spicer gives swampy explanation for keeping White House logs secret


This tool (which the rest of the world is already using) can help you protect your sources 


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