Friday, May 19, 2017

It Takes A Village

Dostoevsky said it: “Man gets used to everything–the beast!”

 “I remember my surprise at suddenly finding myself in my kitchen, in exactly the same attitude…that I had carried out in just the same way the morning before (and the morning before the morning before), and for a moment I had the feeling that it was the same morning and I was the same man, a man who like the undead, was doomed to repeat the same sequence again and again.”
–Peter Handke  Exquisite Corpse

General election 2017: Six reasons politicians always row over tax

Andy Grewal (Iowa), The IRS Gets Handcuffed by the Congress, Yale J. on Reg.: Notice & Comment (May 3, 2017):

The House and Senate recently reached agreement on a comprehensive spending bill and expect to pass it soon. Regarding the IRS, the bill freezes the agency’s budget at $11.2 billion and thus does not, as some feared, make substantial cuts to its funding. Nonetheless, the IRS may face hardships, because its funding remains significantly below its 2010 level ($13.6 billion) while its responsibilities have greatly expanded in recent years, especially because of the Affordable Care Act.


Not to be sniffed at: human sense of smell rivals that of dogs, says study Guardian 

How local governments keep poor people in jail just because they’re poor Rare 

  • “Global press freedom declined to its lowest point in 13 years in 2016 amid unprecedented threats to journalists and media outlets in major democracies and new moves by authoritarian states to control the media, including beyond their borders.


Publish

“Ever since finishing my last book, I’ve been thinking of how to begin the next one. Beginning is everything and needs to contain, like the seed of a tree, the work as a whole. And so, what I see is the figure of a man descending (from the sidewalk?) five or six steps to a basement apartment, and he’s halfway there. I know it’s a love story. And maybe there’s a woman in the basement apartment. It’s probably November.” –from Moods, Section [1]


Social media sucks: when shocking misconduct is not sackable


Public Service Research Group takes flight at UNSW Canberra





How A New Amazon Selling Tweak Is Cutting Out Many Independent Book Sellers



“I finally clued in to how problematic this policy is a couple weeks ago when one of my authors emailed me to inform me that her book was no longer being listed on Amazon—at all—as available from her publisher, in this case SparkPress, one of my company’s two imprints. When you typed in the title of her book, the only listings that came up were from third-party sellers. Amazon’s policy states that “eligible sellers will be able to compete for the buy box,” but in this case, we had abeen completely wiped off of Amazon as an eligible seller in any capacity, without being notified.” 
Addicted to opium and always in debt, Thomas De Quincey fled his own child’s wake to escape a creditor. And yet he maintained a curious optimism... Rosy  optimism  
On View: Mary Beach’s Witty ‘Illaminations’

Mary Beach deserved to be an art star. Her collages are in a class with Richard Hamilton’s. But she was incapable of bullshitting her way to the top. She also submerged whatever ambitions she may ... read more

Law Prof Blawg, Why Do Law Professors Write Law Review Articles?:

Publish or perish, but is there a point to it?

Why do I write law review articles?  Other professors are starting to ask the same question of themselves.  Or more precisely, others are trying to measure who is making a “scholarly impact.”  ...

This whole quest started with another bad idea.  Publish or perish.  The whole game of academia is to publish articles so that one can get tenure, get promoted, and be on top of the world.  This means publication in student-run law reviews, preferably at the highest U.S. News and World Report ranks. ...








Culture of bullying, harassment, poor leadership at brand new Bega hospital, report finds

Posted by at