SEC Knifes Its Whistleblower Program
Just when you think the SEC can’t possibly to more to demonstrate how toothless it is, it reinforces its sorry reputation in by gutting its Dodd-Frank mandated whistleblower, and worse, in a manner that Commission Kara Stein suggest is illegal.
Why we need joy in government
"Chelsea Lei and Larisa Benson explain why humans flourishing inside government enables humans flourishing outside government." (Centre for Public Impact)
Decoding Global Talent 2018
"What 366,000 people in 197 countries tell us about job preferences and mobility." (BCG)
Brian Stelter is known for media scoops, but sometimes, he can bring the insight too. On CNN and in his nightly newsletter, he briefly outlines what I think anyone has to agree is an unusual symbiosis of the Presidency and a single news outlet, Fox News. (Trump hiring Fox News’s Bill Shine to run his communications shop is just one symptom of the bigger entanglement.)
— No president has ever endorsed a network to this degree before: Promoting it, telling people when and where to tune in, while trashing all of its rivals…— And no network has ever propped up a president quite like this before…— The back-scratching benefits both sides. Trump benefits from the friendly segments and softball Q’s. Fox benefits from Trump’s preferential treatment and constant promos…— The beating heart of this relationship is Sean Hannity, who reportedly golfed with Trump on Sunday. Hannity is an adviser, a booster, an attack dog, a friend. No TV host has ever had this kind of alliance with a US president…— And no president has never treated a TV channel like it’s an intelligence agency the way Trump treats Fox…My point: This is new. And weird. And we shouldn’t get used to it. There’s been almost a merger between a culture war TV station and a culture war president. In the essay, I asked, rhetorically, “What would Trump do without Fox?”
Is this the weirdest thing about the Trump presidency, or the most dangerous? Probably not. But it’s one of the legs that props up all the other legs. And it’s definitely weird, and I’d argue, dangerous.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Women more attracted to dominant, successful men than to good-looking ones
Spiders can fly. Here’s the story from an excellent piece by Ed Yong in The Atlantic.
Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.
Boris Dralyuk closes his latest samizdat pamphlet with two poems written by Russian émigrés, the second answering the first. Here is “I still find charm. . .” by Georgy Ivanov (1894-1958):
“I still find charm in little accidental
trifles, empty little things—
say, in a novel without end or title,
or in this rose, now wilting in my hands.
“I like its moiré petals, dappled
with trembling silver drops of rain—
and how I found it on the sidewalk,
and how I’ll toss it in a garbage can.”
And a response, “Bouquet,” from Julia Nemirovskaya (b. 1962):
“No, I won’t throw it out, for the sake of that tulip:
still fresh and so white, that satiny curl—
a sea-captain’s collar folded over his tunic,
a theatrical backcloth, like a windowless wall.
Its petals are like cupped and half-turned palms,
Its bloom a head, a gleaming cherry in its mouth.
“. . . if it must go, let somebody else throw it out—
As God will say of me when my turn comes.”
For Poles, Zbigniew Herbert was more than a mere poet. He represented defiance and uncompromising rectitude, a refusal to acknowledge Soviet domination of his country:
“be courageous when the mind deceives you be courageous
in the final account only this is important”
On July 28 we will observe the twentieth anniversary of Herbert’s death. Michnik is a Polish essayist and longtime dissident, during and after Communism, and is probably best known as a writer for his Letters from Prison and Other Essays (trans. by Maya Latynski, 1986). Between 1965 and 1986, he spent six years in Polish prisons. Michnik used to claim the only place he could concentrate and write was in a prison cell. He wrote his tribute to Herbert shortly after the poet’s death. In his 1985 interview with Anna Poppek and Andrzej Gelberg, Herbert said:
“Michnik and I were friends once. Today this is a closed chapter of my life. Why are we friends no more? I ceased to understand the meanderings of his mind. I used to believe in his intellect and honesty. I was wrong on both counts.”
`Enchantment and Meditation
"It Is No Wonder that Children Go Mad'
Like the extremes slogans of the rare bear pit club that only lonely lunatics let contemplate, Dr Johnson’s mockery is barbed but never off-color:
“Of all the Griefs that harrass the Distrest,
Sure the most bitter is a scornful Jest;
Fate never wounds more deep the gen’rous Heart,
Than when a Blockhead’s Insult points the Dart.”