'Spiritus Rector' Guiding Light and Last Words

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
— H. L. Mencken born in 1880 how little has changed in human nature as always power corrupts ...


There is a scene in one of Leo Frankowski’s Cross-Time Engineer series in which his main character – a time-displaced engineer trying to prepare Poland for the Mongol onslaught – comes across a rampaging Mongol party and a bunch of merchants.

In this scene, the Mongols order the merchants to kneel and present necks. And then start beheading them.

Frankowski’s character intervenes and slaughters the raiding party of Mongols, saving the merchants, then asks the merchants why they obeyed the order to kneel, knowing they’d be slaughtered. “Because otherwise, they’d do something worse,” the merchants say.

ANALYSIS TRUE: Socialism Corrupts and Absolute Socialism Corrupts Absolutely, Sarah Hoyt writes.

WE SHOULD BE CONCERNED:  Internet <3 a="" censorship="">


"Could it be that art has the power to reveal death (even for rich families), as well as to document it? Every body of work comes to an end, and any work could be the last one. W. G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 after suffering a heart attack while driving. ‘‘Austerlitz,’’ a novel about the titular protagonist’s life after fleeing Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia on a Kindertransport, was his final book. It is nonsense to say that “Austerlitz” is haunted or fateful, but it is hard to shake the sense of something uncanny surrounding this novel that already circles Theresienstadt and is so haunted by death.

What Artists’ Last Works Say About Their Bigger Place In Our Lives

"When an artist knows he or she is dying, the last work that they put into the world comes to be something that is at once a bequest, a memorial and a breakup letter. It has a charge that surpasses reality." … [Read More]

Published in The New York Times on "09.16

One Thing Futurists Don’t Challenge In Projecting The Future (And Maybe They Should?)

No matter how radical these predictions are, they tend to take the long-term durability of capitalism utterly for granted: Responding to decades of stagnating wages and sliding labor force participation, the Institute for the Future’s report “10 Strategies for a Workable Future” (which is in many ways quite sharp and informative) acknowledges deep problems with our current labor ecosystem and digs into important issues of benefits, collective bargaining, and education. But it doesn’t even consider the idea that the challenges it identifies are inherent to a system whose primary objective and value is capital accumulation, not equity and the common good. … [Read More]

Some of the state's best-loved destinations, including the Sydney Opera House and Taronga Zoo, have been blindsided by an order to dump their distinctive branding and adopt the NSW government Waratah as their logo.  Like an episode of utopia cultural icons caught in dramatic rebranding exercise by NSW Government

Hackers breached US SECs Financial filing system

The idea of "white people" has a history, but it’s a short one. It was invented on October 19, 1613, the brainchild of the Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton... Bohemians with green blue eyes with hazel specks 

The Midlife Low in Human Beings

Are midlife blues an underrecognized feature of the human condition?

One of Prum’s takeaways is that, given all this, we have choices to make. All sexual selection, he says, is shaped by conflicts between male and female anatomy, physiology, and agendas. Prum argues that sexual species tend to evolve toward one of two responses to this conflict. One evolutionary response is for males to use greater size to control or coerce the female and curb her power over whether, with whom, and how often she will mate and reproduce. This approach is common in many duck species and gorillas, whose dominant males use the threat of force to command exclusive mating access to the females in their groups and often murder the offspring of their predecessors. The other evolutionary answer is the aesthetic route — the resolution of differences between male and female needs and desires by behaviors and rituals that respect the other sex’s priorities and their decisions about how to pursue them.UnLike books by Jozef Imrich, books by Charles Darwin number 25. Books about Darwin number 7,500, with 160 more titles each year. Is there anything new to say on the subject? Yes... For readers, Charles Darwin, born in 1809, apparently never gets old

The daily journalist has to go out, get the story, and write it in one day, a feat that leaves me breathless and beggars all comparison with the time involved in my projects—four months in the New York City Greenmarkets, three weeks with a flying game warden, two weeks with a Nevada brand inspector, months at a time across three years of trips to Alaska. I have no technique for asking questions. I just stay there and fade away as I watch people do what they do.

~ John McPhee

Ethical leadership is effective leadership.
Leaders who model ethical behaviour at every opportunity and develop a reputation for strong principles are also seen as more competent in general. Integrity expert Michael Macaulay will expand on the research behind this effect at the upcoming IBAC conference.

Verona Burgess: changing of the guard.
This week about 50,000 federal public servants across Australia got a new boss, after Martin Parkinson put his stamp on the Secretaries Board. Verona Burgess observes Canberra's latest round of mandarin musical chairs.

This is what it looks like when the White House itself plays in these waters. It’s the stuff of petty strong-man dictatorships for the President to pronounce an individual guilty of a crime without having to proffer any evidence, offer a legal theory, or convince a jury.   Abuse of Power: The White House Slimes James Comey—Again


Icebergs at Bondi ...

Government's unfortunate FOI secrets revealed...
A new internal report confirms half of federal FOI decisions don't survive appeal.

Will those selection criteria skills still be useful in a few years?
Want to stay employed when automation trims government? Translate those STAR secrets into tomorrow's essential skills without going back to school.