Goodbye, Erica Garner: You need to be prepared to make enemies

            The world, violent full of sex,

            the movie’s zeitgeist, era after era, a new Bond

            double-o-sevening in

            (CARE PACKAGE, WITH RIDDLE AS MISSIVE)

...

            …This poem is made of me and I it. It doesn’t worry

            about irony or stance and only odd incidence and fact and doesn’t care

            if it tells the truth about what will happen to my face

            or behind my back….

Goodbye, Erica Garner Rolling Stone

 The rise of female whistleblowers. Oxford Bibliographies. Andrea Hickerson. January 1, 2018. [Andrea Hickerson is the Director of the School of Communication and an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology.] 
     

“Until recently, I firmly believed whistleblowers would increasingly turn to secure, anonymizing tools and websites, like WikiLeaks, to share their data rather than take the risk of relying on a journalist to protect their identity. Now, however, WikiLeaks is implicated in aiding the election of Donald Trump, and “The Silence Breakers,” outspoken victims of sexual assault, are Time’s 2017 Person of the Year…Historically, women wouldn’t have been likely candidates to report internally because they haven’t been listened to or empowered in the workplace  At work they are  undervalued,underrepresented in leadership roles, and underpaid compared to male colleagues. This signals to women that their concerns will not be taken seriously or instigate change. Therefore, many choose to remain silent. Whistleblowing comes with enormous risks, and those risks are greater for women….In today’s whistleblowing moment women are creating de facto public support organizations by coming out in groups. This signals to others with similar stories that it is okay to speak out and their stories can be believed…I’m hopeful that the media’s coverage and careful reporting on sexual assault whistleblowers can transcend politics and help further restore media trust so that more women will feel comfortable confiding in journalists, and believe that their stories can effect change…”

 “I’ve seen the future and it involves robot rationing of toilet paper…”

 Cowen’s Second Law: “…the findings indicate that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, are more demanding of others, and are more demanding of themselves.”  In other words, perfectionism is increasing over time.

Is land underrated as a source of wealth?

 “Every two years, the American valet-parking industry sends its best parkers—optimistically described as athletes—to compete in a head-to-head battle known as the National Valet Olympics.“

When there was no surrender in the war of words 

Unlike Churchill, modern politicians make meaningless speeches. That's why trust in them has evaporated.

Joe Hockey discussed Alexander Downer's Russia revelations with FBI

By David Wroe

Andrews Government leaders missing in action during African gangs crisis

Turnbull stokes fresh division by flagging plebiscite on republic model

The Pessimists’ Guide to 2028 Bloomberg  Some are silly, like “Bitcoin Replaces the Banks” and some are outcomes sorely to be wished, like “Corbyn Makes Socialism Great Again”.

Ecclesiastical control of universities, the Galileo affair, the Inquisition — what happens whenscience and religion clash? Dialogue is impossible; conflict, inevitable  Religion Will Win Any War  

       One of The Guardian's most-loved annual features is now out, as they get publishers to comment on the Best books of 2017: the hits and misses of the publishers' year. 
       Always interesting to see which of their titles they believe: "deserved to do better" -- and which: "I wish I'd published"

Third Parties, Your Time Is Now Truthout

RoseAnn DeMoro Has Political Enemies Everywhere. But the Nurses Union Chief Might Save Our Health Care. Mother Jones (MR).

What can machine learning do? Workforce implications. Erik Brynjolfsson and Tom Mitchell. Science 22 Dec 2017: Vol. 358, Issue 6370, pp. 1530-1534 DOI: 10.1126/science.aap8062

“Digital computers have transformed work in almost every sector of the economy over the past several decades. We are now at the beginning of an even larger and more rapid transformation due to recent advances in machine learning (ML), which is capable of accelerating the pace of automation itself. However, although it is clear that ML is a “general purpose technology,” like the steam engine and electricity, which spawns a plethora of additional innovations and capabilities, there is no widely shared agreement on the tasks where ML systems excel, and thus little agreement on the specific expected impacts on the workforce and on the economy more broadly

ONCE I BUILT A BLOCKCHAIN, MADE IT RUN; MADE IT RUN AGAINST TIME: New at Reason TV: Remy as “Bitcoin Billionaire.”

Who wants to buy the most expensive house in America New York Times Edward Jones-Imhotep: The Sentimental Machine Cosmological Magazine On the logic of the guillotine

 An ageing population and the end of inheritance FT

These charts show who you’ll spend your time with across your lifetime Quartz

Diary Alan Bennett, LBR. For 2017.

Ten Silver Linings in 2017 Council on Foreign Relations

Why things may be not be as bad as we think BBC. And then I tripped on the MagSafe-less powercord of my new Xmas MacBook Pro… Kidding!

Romain Gary was a clown prince of French literary life. Little of what he said was true, though he was essentially honest. He personifies the distinction between fabulist and fraud  

The Beatles pose for what is the last known photo of the group together in 1969 

Americans say they are worse off today than 50 years ago MarketWatch

  Among its many pleasures, poetry provides a furlough from narrative, from the causal basis of stories. 2017 was the year of the story: we’ve all been pinned to our screens waiting for the key predicates of various kinds of stories to be, at last, revealed. We’re living in some kind of kingdom of effects, dismal, paranoid, suspicious; we’re waiting to learn what roads brought us here. It’s a disorienting way of existing in time, waking every morning to a reality that   poems is a kind of theft in its essence and sometimes in the actual circumstances of its production. I’m stealing time to finish my next book from activities that might benefit me or my family or my students. Writing poetry is a form of confiscation, its returns always speculative. Usually its returns are paid to others, when the author is long dead Grateful Poetry