Tuesday, March 27, 2018

The Joy and Necessity of Driving madmen and madwomen nuts Amen

Even a thief takes ten years to learn his trade. 
~ Japanese Proverb

ACTUALLY, SOME HAVE A LOT OF EMPATHY, AND USE IT TO MANIPULATE PEOPLE: It Might Turn Out Psychopaths Aren’t Completely Devoid of Empathy After All.

'You are always better the second time around': Tony Abbott launches Pauline Hanson's book 

Mark Zuckerberg Thinks We're Idiots. – Monday Note


Chronicle of Higher Education, The Professor Is In: The Sham National Search:
We’re in the process of hiring a new faculty member right now and everyone in the department (and everyone in the administration) knows that it’s basically a sham search. There is an inside candidate, and the job ad was written specifically for them. But of course we have the other finalists coming to campus, and everyone in the department is expected to do all the things you would expect — go to the job talks, the teaching demos, and the dinner meetings.
It seems like such a waste of everyone’s time, and I feel bad for the candidates who think they actually have a shot at this job. Is all this really necessary?


·        Nate Silver: "This Is True, I Think. Everybody Who's Interested in the Stormy Daniels Story Is Interested in It for the Sex/gossip. Which I Don't Have Any Problem With. But the "Actually, I'm Interested in the Story for the Campaign Finance Violations!" Claims Aren't Too Convincing...…"



WHAT BOOK SAYS DENMARK?: "Atonement?" "Freedom At Midnight?" "The House of the Spirits?" "A Hundred Years of Solitude?" Oh, it’s "Smilla’s Sense of Snow." Ambassadors pick the one book that visitors to the nations should read.


Man Out of Time The Baffler. Pete Peterson obit by Doug Henwood.




ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”

That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT.  You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture.  In her article I also enjoyed this part:

Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, sometimes feels his hand doodling as he contemplates a political decision. The art pours out to center and steady him. In 1998, Rama left a promising career as an artist in Paris to become Albania’s minister of culture. Now the country’s leader, he shows his loose, improvisatory drawings and sculptures in galleries around the world. “I found myself drawing almost all my working time whilst interacting with people in my office or on the phone,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I began to understand that my subconscious was being helped … by my hand to stay calm while my conscious had to focus on demanding topics.”

Australian cricket in crisis: How did we get to this?



'Maggots,' 'morons' and 'dogs': building union boss unloads on Labor 


Construction union leader John Setka has savaged Labor and the candidacy of Wayne Swan as its national president, calling him a "maggot" and a ... at 5:23am on March 10, the email, leaked to The Age, contains Mr Setka's reaction to the news that Mr Swan would be Labor's right-faction candidate for ALP Presidency

 Razer: Wayne Swan is the closest thing Labor has to a Bernie Sanders - Crikey

Peter Dutton denies employing au pair he granted a visa to – as it happened


Porn star Stormy Daniels to reveal all about relationship with Donald Trump on US 60 Minutes

 

IS IT LOVE?: Well, is it love if it’s not on Instagram? That’s the question Krista Burton asks in the NYT. “I love love,” she concludes. “Just not, you know, every single time I unlock my phone.”



IT ACTS AS A GREAT MELT FOR SNOWFLAKES:  In Defense of Dark Humor

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Should we be doing more to expose paternity fraud? “Genetic counsellors are the professionals who advise on the results of tests for hereditary conditions, often after samples have been taken from foetuses in the womb as well as from the parents. Consequently they are often the first to know that the father isn’t the father. A study in America found that more than 95 per cent of them would not tell a man that the child wasn’t his. (Around 95 per cent of genetic counsellors are female, and you have to wonder if more men would be informed if more counsellors were male.)”



The Economist – Editorial – “Facebook faces a reputational meltdown: This is how it, and the wider industry, should respond.”

“Facebook is not about to be banned or put out of business, but the chances of a regulatory backlash are growing. Europe is inflicting punishment by a thousand cuts, from digital taxes to antitrust cases. And distrustful users are switching off. The American customer base of Facebook’s core social network has stagnated since June 2017. Its share of America’s digital advertising market is forecast to dip this year for the first time. The network effect that made Facebook ever more attractive to new members as it grew could work in reverse if it starts to shrink. Facebook is worth $493bn, but only has $14bn of physical assets. Its value is intangible—and, potentially, ephemeral.”

  • “Facebook needs a full, independent examination of its approach to content, privacy and data, including its role in the 2016 election and the Brexit referendum. This should be made public. Each year Facebook should publish a report on its conduct that sets out everything from the prevalence of fake news to privacy breaches…”
  • “Next, Facebook and other tech firms need to open up to outsiders, safely and methodically. They should create an industry ombudsman — call it the Data Rights Board. Part of its job would be to set and enforce the rules by which accredited independent researchers look inside platforms without threatening users’ privacy…”

 BLASTS FROM THE PAST, PART ONE: 10 Songs From the ’90s That We Still Love To Hear


Dan Cohen is a history professor and administrator at Northeastern University; he was also the executive director of the Digital Public Library of America, and has been a general public smartypants in the field of digital humanities.

Dan recently wrote a blog post titled “Back to the Blog,” which muses on a microtrend I’ve seen as well. Friends and writers, not thousands or probably even hundreds, but solid dozens, returning to old-fashioned weblogging as a way to get their thoughts in order, take ownership of their intellectual property, get away from the Twitter hubbub, stick it to Facebook, or any one of a dozen other reasons to write a blog.

Now, a lot of the professional infrastructure of blogging that once was is broken. The ad networks that supported people don’t exist or don’t work the same way. The distribution, via RSS and then Google Reader, was monopolized and then fractured. Some of the blogging networks take as much of a walled-garden approach to their sites as Facebook does.

But, if you just want to blog (which is different from making a living as a blogger), it’s probably easier to start and host your own blog than it ever was. What’s holding people back, Cohen writes, isn’t really technical:

It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

The metaphor suggests that blogging either needs its own mechanisms of ambient humanity — which it’s had, in the form of links, trackbacks, conversations, even (gulp) comments, all of which replicated at least a fraction of the buzz that social media has — or it needs a kind of escape velocity to break that gravitational pull. Gravity or speed. Or a hybrid of both.
Experts got it wrong: the Great Pacific Garbage Patch isn’t the size of France. It’s the size of three Frances.
↩︎ Quartz
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: De Blasio Donor Says He Steered Thousands in Bribes to Mayor’s Campaigns. “Mr. Singh also suggested for the first time that Mr. de Blasio not only knew of the illegal arrangement, but that the mayor encouraged it and actively helped the restaurateur

The darkest hour of the American Revolution played out along this stretch of ground. Now, it’s a place to remember the brave men who gave everything up in an attempt to win freedoms unthinkable to the rest of the world. Freedoms that are still alien to much of our modern nations. If you ever get the chance, take the time to visit the Valley and shiver in the wind, remembering the patriots who bled for your ability to live like you do. Without those freezing, pitiful soldiers, our country would be a very different place. REMEMBERING WHERE FREEDOM CAME FROM:  Valley Forge.

The Joy and Necessity of life 
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