Tuesday, July 04, 2017

Predicting and Reniventing Future Cities for the Lucky and Rich: Imrich Nepotisms

We are  always in the field when luck is on the road...

This is the affirmation on which democracy rests … [W]e can all be responsible … We become what we do. So does the world we live in, if enough of us do it — whether “it” be good or detestable. This is the burden of freedom: that it is all our fault or our credit.


Herbert Agar (1897-1980)


“Good books in bad times (for all loyalty ends)

Can turn their backs on you, like close friends

Who don’t know half the truth, and from the shelf

Cut dead the miserable anorexic self 

That’s lost its appetite for words, that finds        

Print inflicts snow-dazzle, and the mind’s   

Capsized by logic, and one paragraph 

Of the funniest man on earth can’t raise a laugh. 

To stop loving, or being loved, is to stop

Reading, is to stop. Woodland becomes backdrop

And weather mere performance. Then books stare

Like stuffed predators with a blameless air

Of enmity.

        Men, women, you dog-eared lovers

With wine-stained pages and much drabber covers

Than when you were brightly bought, before you secede
From the old union, reread, reread.”




It may be James Lasdun's New Yorker opus, "My Dentist’s Murder Trial." The subhed? "Adultery, false identities, and a lethal sedation: A baroque courtroom drama unfolds in upstate New York."


A tangled tale of bank liquidation in Venice Bruegel

Exclusive: Morning mail: Medicare card details for sale on darknet

The Guardian 

Step by step how to get medicare card The medicare machine patient details of any Australian for sale on Darknet

NTA 2National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson has released her FY 2018 Objectives Report To Congress:

Ms. Olson states that the IRS ran a generally successful filing season. But she says taxpayers who require assistance from the IRS are continuing to face significant challenges obtaining it. While taxpayer services and enforcement activities are both essential for effective tax administration, Ms. Olson says taxpayer services require more emphasis than they are currently receiving. She recommends the IRS expand its outreach and education activities and improve its telephone service and that Congress both provide the IRS with sufficient funding to provide high quality taxpayer service and conduct more oversight to ensure the IRS is spending the funding as intended.




The company's buzziest product is all thanks to Toni Reid and her female-driven team.




Just as Media Dragon, it's hard not to like Alexa also known in Slavic circles as Sasha. She's quirky—her celebrity crush is Benedict Cumberbatch, and she sings auto-tuned songs with impressive accuracy.
Sweet 16 wall it was all about Sasha ...

Meet the Women Behind Amazon's Alexa aka Sasha ...


"Privacy in the Cellphone Age": This editorial appears in The New York Times.


The World Might Be Going To Hell In A Handbasket, But These Designers Are Trying To Make It Look Pretty


For instance, at the London Design Biennale, “Guatemala, which ties for sixth place in the Global Emotions Report, will show an installation   
about the community action taking place in Santa Catarina Palopó. This town on the volcanic shores of Lake Atitlán is reinventing itself as a kind of conceptual art, using the paintbrush to boost civic pride and tourism. Its residents have become involved in a two-year scheme in which they are painting their houses in bold Mayan patterns, with a strict but vibrant palette of five colours sourced from local textiles.”

Our editors pick the 50 companies that best combine innovative technology with an effective business model. Each year we identify 50 companies creating new opportunities by combining important technologies and business savvy. Some are large companies that seem to be growing ever larger, likeAmazon and Apple. Others, like IBM, or General Electric are old-guard giants betting on technology renewal. And the list is full of ambitious startups likeSpaceX, which is changing the economics of space travel with reusable rockets; Face ++, a pioneer in face recognition technology; and additive-manufacturing firms Carbon andDesktop Metal. For additional perspective on the list, which starts here, please see our essay, “It Pays to Be Smart.”

Cities for the rich Le Monde Diplomatique


Fighting Fascism in France, 1936 v. 2017 Corey Robin


Russian youths are taking to the streets, but let’s not over-hype the revolt of the “Putin generation” just yet Open Democracy


Vancouver Mansion Lists for Record $48 Million Bloomberg






The invective flies


"Vicious," "vindictive," "bullying," "pig" and "disgusting" were among the words used on "Morning Joe" Friday as a show and a co-host that has been the target of the president's ire fought back after his instantly notorious tweets.


They were among the words.


In what has curdled into a nasty soap opera, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough opened the formal counterattack by writing an op-ed for The Washington Post that opened, "We are both certain that the man is not mentally equipped to continue watching our show, 'Morning 'MEdia Dragon' Joe.'”

It cited an array of factual inaccuracies, including confronting his most unseemly declaration.
"Putting aside Mr. Trump’s never-ending obsession with women’s blood, Mika and her face were perfectly intact, as pictures from that night reveal. And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift."
The duo alluded very indirectly at the end of their op-ed to their de facto about-face on Trump. They seemed to be snuggling up to him not that very long ago and, especially Scarborough, underscoring access to him. Now they are a daily rhetorical firing squad, rebuking him incessantly and calling him mentally unstable.
"Perhaps that is why we were neither shocked nor insulted by the president’s personal attack," they concluded. "The Donald Trump we knew before the campaign was a flawed character but one who still seemed capable of keeping his worst instincts in check."
The show's first hour was a rhetorical warm-up act for the engaged co-hosts, who start a vacation today and surfaced at the top of the second hour for comments. The show didn't take any particularly high road initially.
There was blowhard ad man Donny Deutsch wearing dark shades and making a bad joke about cosmetic surgery. He then made an irrelevant point about his not being an NBC employee, so "I'm going to go thug."
He called Trump "a pig...physically disgusting...obviously not well. A misogynist...he's not mentally OK...he's disgusting to look at." It wasn't C-SPAN.
Willie Geist, subbing as host, asked whether such a response "doesn't lower political discourse?" Deutsch didn't care.
Journalist-historian Jon Meacham offered a more contemplative precis devoid of the inflammatory. Trump "punches when he feels cornered...He punches and lashes out." He spoke of the public implications of such behavior, the violation of norms and questions about whether such a person was fit to deal with truly important matters, like nuclear arms.
He also noted the potentially depressing reality that none of this rhetorical fusillade would impact Trump's political base. "No. They will see this broadcast and this network as part of the problem."
The duo surfaced on their New York set. She said, "It's unbelievably alarming that this president is so easily played by a cable news host. What is this saying to our allies, saying to our enemies?"
By being played, she referred to jokes she made Thursday about a Washington Post story that Trump had put up phony Time magazine covers of himself at various Trump properties.
Scarborough said he'd received emails, calls and texts from around the world "expressing shock." And he asserted, once again, that his White House sources claim that they are anxious about Trump's mental state.
He said it "would be better if he (Trump) turned his 80-inch television set on 'Fox & Friends' and stayed there." He claimed that the Trump he knew "for 10 or 12 years" was a different person and "in on the joke."
The couple also asserted that the National Enquirer sought to "blackmail" them, as Scarborough put it, unless they made up with Trump. They did not, and what they deemed an innocuous story then ran. The supermarket tabloid and Trump are well known to have a cozy relationship.
So once again, we assume that Trump has gone a bridge too far, crossed a line of decency or political viability. Remember the other times? Arab-Americans allegedly cheering 9/11, John McCain not being a hero, nastiness toward Megyn Kelly or running his sexist mouth on "Access Hollywood."
And the press calls him to account, whether it's fact-checkers working overtime or an army of columnists, pundits or TV hosts venting. But Trump proceeds apace, appealing to his base and not heeding the traditional players.
He is, he seems to forget, the president. He could just not say a word. But he is so needy and vain, he fights back.
A caller on Wisconsin Public Radio asked me Thursday why the press doesn't focus on "important things" like the economy. He's right, even if Friday morning again seemed like a Trump-inspired, rush-hour gapers block one just can avoid. So you slow down and stare.
What Tim Cook really made

"Don’t be fooled by Tim Cook’s 2016 reported pay of $8.75 million, which ranked the Apple Inc. chief executive officer in the bottom third of all CEOs in the S&P 500. Cook, 56, actually took home $145 million, almost all of it from awards granted back in 2011." (Bloomberg)


May you grow like a carrot- with your head in the ground!










  • Walk softly but carry a big stick. Theodore Roosevelt 1900 in letter relating an old African proverb[27]
  • Walnuts and pears you plant for your heirs[1]
  • Waste not, want not[1]
  • What cannot be cured must be endured[1]
  • What goes around, comes around
  • What goes up must come down[1]
  • What you lose on the swings you gain on the roundabouts[1] 
  • What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander[1]
  • When in Rome, do as the Romans doSt. Ambrose 347AD[28]
  • When it rains it pours.
  • When the cat is away, the mice will play[1]
  • When the going gets tough, the tough get going[1]
  • When the oak is before the ash, then you will only get a splash; when the ash is before the oak, then you may expect a soak[1]
  • When three women gather, it becomes noisy.
  • What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over[1]
  • Where there is a will there is a way[1]
  • Where there is muck there is brass[1]
  • Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right.[1]
  • While there is life there is hope[1]
  • Whom the Gods love die young[1]
  • Why keep a dog and bark yourself?[1]
  • With a responsibility comes great power
  • Woman is the root of both good and evil[1]
  • Wonders will never cease[1]
  • Work expands so as to fill the time available[1]
  • Worrying never did anyone any good[1]

Y


  • You ain't seen nothing yet[1]
  • You are never too old to learn[1]
  • You are what you eat[1]
  • You can have too much of a good thing[1]
  • You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink[1]
  • You cannot have your cake and eat it too[1]
  • VYou cannot get blood out of a stone[1]
  • You cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear[1]
  • You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs[1]
  • You cannot make bricks without straw[1]
  • You cannot run with the hare and hunt with the hounds[1]
  • You cannot teach an old dog new tricks[1]
  • You cannot judge a book by its cover[1]
  • You cannot win them all[1]
  • You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar[1]
  • You pay your money and you take your choice[1]
  • Youth is wasted on the young[1]
  • You must have rocks in your head[1]
  • You've got to separate the wheat from the chaff[1]