(So You Think You Know About the Velvet Revolution - LivingPrague)
Kottke who writes the living story of the web Is Twenty 20 XX ...
Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me...
- J.K. Rowling
If you must write, you must do it in the face of all opposition. […] Do not spend too much more time on culture & reading, these are traps. When everything conspires to make the thing impossible, when you are tired, worried, with no time, or money, it is then that things get done.
~ Samuel Beckett to Claude Raimbourg, 16 May 1954
This week AP
photographer Andrew Harnik was covering Rex Tillerson: “As Tillerson reached the end of the hallway I moved next to the
wall and photographed him with a zoom lens and framed him with his reflection
in the marble on the wall. Once I was back to my computer, I saw the exit sign
hanging above him.”
Kenneth Rogoff concerned by the dark side of the technology revolution Australian Financial Review
The Music of the Beatles | by Ned Rorem | The New York Review of Books
WHY are the Beatles superior? It is easy to say that most of their competition (like most everything everywhere) is junk. More important, their superiority is consistent: each of the songs from their last three albums is memorable. The best of these memorable tunes—and the best is a large percentage (Here, There and Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Michelle, Norwegian Wood)—compare with those by composers from great eras of song: Monteverdi, Schumann, Poulenc.
The Music of the Beatles | by Ned Rorem | The New York Review of Books
WHY are the Beatles superior? It is easy to say that most of their competition (like most everything everywhere) is junk. More important, their superiority is consistent: each of the songs from their last three albums is memorable. The best of these memorable tunes—and the best is a large percentage (Here, There and Everywhere, Good Day Sunshine, Michelle, Norwegian Wood)—compare with those by composers from great eras of song: Monteverdi, Schumann, Poulenc.
DAVID FRENCH: Civility Isn’t Surrender. Nope. And as Robert Heinlein observed, you can be a gentleman and still be a cast-iron son of a bitch when it’s called for.
But I think it’s a fair critique that too many conservatives have seen surrender as a form of civility.
In praise of profanity. Swearing helps us manages stress and build trust. In fact, with proper tone and timing, it’s an art
Long before Google
Tim Berners-Lee – It’s dangerous having a handful of companies control how ideas and opinions are shared. A regulator may be needed. “Today [March 12, 2018], the world wide web turns 29. This year marks a milestone in the web’s history: for the first time, we will cross the tipping point when more than half of the world’s population will be online. When I share this exciting news with people, I tend to get one of two concerned reactions:
- How do we get the other half of the world connected?
- Are we sure the rest of the world wants to connect to the web we have today?
Italy’s first black senator
ALP boss John Ducker a friend of the US - The Australian
UK cyber security certification pilot launched
Computer Weekly March 8,
2018
The London
Digital Security Centre (LDSC) has announced a pilot of the UK’s first
police-backed cyber security certification scheme. The national scheme is being
launched in partnership with Secured by Design (SBD), the national police crime
prevention initiative, and is supported by The Mayor’s Office for Policing and
Crime (Mopac), alongside The Metropolitan and City of London Police. At the
heart of the two-part certification scheme is Cyber Essentials, a
government-backed industry-supported scheme to help organisations protect
themselves against common online threats. Guy Ferguson, chief executive officer
at Secured by Design, said: “Police crime prevention initiatives have always
responded to developing and emerging crime patterns with innovation and
creativity. “We are delighted to be working closely with the London Digital
Security Centre to develop new techniques that will better support people and
businesses online,” he said.
The Washington Post March 6, 2018
The United Nations
panel enforcing trade sanctions against North Korea has been hacked repeatedly
by a “nation-state actor,” compromising the email accounts of four current or
former members of the panel and a “considerable number” of email messages, according
to a U.N. incident report. The Post reviewed a heavily redacted draft of a
forthcoming report from the U.N. Panel of Experts that includes the U.N.
account of the attack, elements of which had been previously reported.
Attempts at
digital espionage and online political manipulation in Europe are on the rise
both in number and in complexity, the Netherlands’ main intelligence agency
said Tuesday in its annual report. Adding its voice to fears around the world
of a rise in covert digital influence and espionage, the Dutch General
Intelligence and Security Service said in its 2017 report a growing number of
foreign powers are using cyber espionage “to acquire information that they use
for (geo) political gain.” It highlighted Russia, which it said is “extremely
driven in the covert digital influencing of (political) decision making
processes.” It added that the agency also has seen similar attempts by China.
Making up for lost time: the NYT’s ‘Overlooked’ projectDavid Beard brings you the new and notable.
“It’s sort of like the Virginia Woolf
quote, ‘Anonymous was a woman.’”
That’s Jessica Bennett of the New York Times, explaining the paper’s hard light on its own gender bias in obituaries since 1851 — and a first, small step taken Thursday to rectify that. Bennett helped start the “Overlooked” project, which launched with the obituaries of 15 women who should have had been recognized when they died. The Times is asking its readers for more suggestions.
Bennett’s goal: Anonymous no more.
These women “didn’t get their due in
the cultural framework, the cultural record,” she told the
WNYC-hosted public radio show, “The Takeaway.” Many of their
accomplishments, she said, were wrongly attributed to men.
The disparity in gender in obituaries has long been criticized
— and it’s a long road to ending that gap. This chart, based
on a Mother Jones study, showed the obituary gender gap in 2012. “If a
notable woman dies and a major national newspaper doesn’t report it,” writer
Dana Liebelson asked, “did it actually happen?”
NYT Obits editor Bill McDonald,
writing separately about why
most obits have been about white men, admits: “Perhaps the paper’s
selection standards in eras past unfairly valued the achievements of the
white, male mainstream over those of minorities and women who may have been
more on the margins.”
Take a moment to
bookmark the Overlooked page — or check out its “new” obits of
Ida B. Wells, Qiu
Jin or Diane
Arbus. The Overlooked project will be growing.
Now, pardon the interruption, here
are other stories, some of them overlooked, that you may need to know today.
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Quick hits
WHEN TRUTH DOESN’T
PREVAIL: False news moved through Twitter “farther, faster, deeper and
more broadly” than the truth, according to
a study of tweets from 2006 to 2017. The basis of the MIT study? The
Twitter rumor mill. Even the farthest-reaching true rumors rarely spread to
more than 1,000 people. But the top 1 percent of falsehoods routinely had
audiences of 1,000 to 100,000 people, the study authors reported.
LOCAL SCOOP GOES
NATIONWIDE: Last week, The Citizen Times, the local newspaper in
Asheville, North Carolina, obtained and published online the
bodycam video of police beating a black man on his way home from work. It
created an uproar. One police officer has quit, the police chief has offered to
resign and the FBI is now investigating the attack, which began as a
purported jaywalking stop. In last week’s story, the Gannett newspaper
knocked down the whole jaywalking angle, noting the “stop” took place near a
ballpark where “hundreds of pedestrians cross Biltmore Avenue without using a
crosswalk before and after baseball games.”
‘THE NEWS FORGETS, VERY
QUICKLY’: How Parkland students moved
beyond talk to action — on protests in Tallahassee, marches to Washington
and calls to boycott some of America’s biggest companies.
UNHOLY ALLIANCE:
Why do blue-collar voters like self-dealing billionaires who think of public
service as a profit center? Is there any consequence of greed in the Trump
coalition? Amy Chua examines the
connection between “the traditional, deeply rooted American dream and the
glitziest, celebrity-obsessed aspects of modern culture.”
UNHOLY EDITORIALIST:
He was, as Quartz once put it, “the Russian oligarch who paid Trump’s former
campaign manager to help Putin.” Oleg Deripaska, who agreed in 2006 to
pay Paul Manafort $10 million a year, seems an unlikely candidate to gain
an op-ed perch to criticize special prosecutor Robert Mueller’s probe into
Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election. Yet the conservative Daily Caller
gave the foreign agent and close associate of Vladimir Putin his own
mouthpiece for Mueller bashing. Both sides?
WHILE WE’RE ON THE TOPIC: Deripaska’s
former employee, Paul Manafort, pleaded not guilty on Thursday to tax and
fraud charges in the second Russia case brought against him by Mueller. Manafort
must wear a GPS monitor and be confined to his home until trial this
summer. His business partner, Rick Gates, has pleaded
guilty in D.C. to conspiracy and lying to the FBI.
IN RELATED NEWS: Russian trolls flooded social media in America to try to stop Trump from appointing Mitt Romney as secretary of state, the Wall Street Journal reported. Moscow also organized a protest of Romney outside Trump Tower to persuade the president-elect to choose someone friendlier to Putin’s ambitions, such as Rex Tillerson. // Also, mainstream media unwittingly amplified comments from Russian propagandists, believing they were merely Americans who supported Trump, CJR reports.  THE NOTTING HILL MOVE: Everybody wants to talk to Peter Thiel, a supporter of Trump in his 2016 campaign and Facebook board member during the Russia controversy. Recode’s Kara Swisher tried the Julia Roberts approach in inviting the Silicon Valley icon her tech conference in May. Adapting the actress’s key scene in the 1990s Hugh Grant romcom, Swisher tweeted:” I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to outdebate her at a fancy confab.” She pledged “frank hardball,” not this NYT “softball” or “knitting circle.” No word from Swisher nor from Thiel, who has tweeted once.
HAHA:
Now we know why Amazon’s Alexa is creeping out owners by a jarring cackling
at seemingly random moments. The voice-activated streaming speaker device
mistakenly “hears” an audio command it interprets as “Alexa, laugh,” the
company said. The solution? Changing the audio prompt to “Alexa, can you
laugh?) Slightly related fact: Alexa’s creator,” Amazon chief and Washington
Post owner Jeff Bezos, also has an unsettling laugh. His biographer, Brad
Stone, calls
it “a startling, pulse-pounding bray that he leans into while craning his
neck back, closing his eyes, and letting loose with a guttural roar that
sounds like a cross between a mating elephant seal and a power tool."
FOUNDING FATHER TWITTER
ISSUES: How can President Trump not be bothered by troublesome Twitter
followers but still be in the good graces of the First Amendment? A judge has
a suggestion: Mute,
don’t block, those tweets. Constitutional scholars: Is it really that
easy?
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