Friday, May 24, 2019

Noelchad and Unstable world 🌎 Chernobyl


Memento mori: Not: remember that you must die, but: don't forget to die, remember to die (before it's too late).

 Summers span decades. Winters can last a lifetime. And the struggle for the Iron Throne begins


Why did so many working class suburbs back the Liberals?


The startling fact about last Saturday’s election, a fact that has shattered the Labor dream and confounded the unions, is that so many working-class suburbs like Riverwood backed the Liberals.

 ANZ bank's plans to thwart one of Australia's biggest-ever financial investigations - ABC News


Horse 🐎 racing identity charged with importing 50kg of cocaine





Werner Herzog’s latest film is called Meeting Gorbachev, in which he sits down with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a series of interviews about his life, political career, and his role in ending the Cold War. From a review in the NY Times:
The two men appear to like each other immensely — in narration, Herzog calls Gorbachev “one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century” — but Gorbachev can be a cool customer. He sometimes seems guarded in his assessment of what he might have done differently. He says he believes the Soviet Union should have given its republics more rights instead of dissolving entirely. As for Boris Yeltsin, who became the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, he says, “I should have sent him off somewhere.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interviewed Herzog about the film.
It’s not easy to speak of what I tried to accomplish. I think as a natural concomitant you get the feeling that there should be better times between the West and Russia. The demonization of Russia is a great mistake of the Western media and Western politics, and we should try and seek a climate that was created by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the most improbable characters you could ever put together in one room.
Meeting Gorbachev is out in theaters now, but just barely. Probably best to catch this streaming in a month or two.
EDITED BY LARRY CORREIA AND KAYCE EZELL:  Noir Fatale.

The silky note of a saxophone. The echoes of a woman’s high heels down a deserted asphalt street. Steam rising from city vents to cloud the street-lit air. A man with a gun. A dame with a problem . . 


As Raymond Chandler said, “Down these mean streets, a man must walk who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Because, as these stories prove, doing the right thing doesn’t necessarily mean you get the big bucks or the girl. But you do the right thing anyway.


There was a funny comment the other day that what makes an American a patriot is not paying tax (the reason for their uprising against the brits) so trump is arguably the most patriotic American of all time (TaxProCL)

Jared Diamond: There’s a 49 Percent Chance the World As We Know It Will End by 2050 (interview) New York Magazine (OregonCharles). “49%” is an obvious case of spurious precision, oddly unquestioned by the interviewer, David Wallace-Wells. But it’s still interesting.













This Ancient Art Form Is Practiced Every Morning In Front Of Houses All Over South India



“A physical form of prayer and symbol of protection, a daily exercise, and a moment of intense concentration and meditation, drawing kolam is an important household ritual that has a lot more to it than may first meet the eye. Two very different women living in Chennai explain their shared passion for kolam, and their involvement in the local kolam competition.” (video) –Yahoo! (BBC)



The Endless Discussions Of Game Of Thrones Won’t Stop Tomorrow


The show, which has earned a lot more viewers in its contentious final season, “was a mass-market hit for the era of no social consensus. … It divided its audience from start to finish, right down to the matter of what a happy ending would even constitute. It gave its intense fandom multiple angles to debate as well as to enjoy: whether it kept faith with the popular novels it was based on; whether it reveled in brutality in the name of critiquing it; whether it well-served its female characters or exploited them; and whether it lost control of its story as it sprinted to the finish.” – The New York Times




The Chernobyl Disaster May Have Also Built a Paradise

Wired – “…The Soviets ended up evacuating 300,000 people from nearly 2,000 square miles around the plant. The bulk of that area is now called the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, and the old power plant is now encased in a giant concrete sarcophagus. But what happened to the Exclusion Zone after everyone left is the subject of disagreement in the scientific community. For decades, research in the area said that plant and animal life had been denuded, and the life that remained was mutated, sick. Newer research says otherwise—that plants have regrown, and animal life is even more diverse than before the accident. The Exclusion Zone hasn’t been rewilded so much as de-humaned, more unmanned in folly than anything Lady Macbeth ever worried about. It’s a living experiment in what the world will be like after humans are gone, having left utter devastation in our wake…”



GERMAN RAIDS



German officials have searched the offices of dozens of banks, financial advisers and wealthy individuals as part of a criminal probe into suspected tax evasion. It’s suspected these people used offshore companies – including a “former subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands of a major German bank” – to evade taxes.


The bank is understood to be Deutsche Bank and the former subsidiary Regula Ltd. Officials also said the “trigger” for the investigation were findings from our 2013 investigation, Offshore Leaks.


MEDICAL TRANSPARENCY



Today we’ve added an extra 16,000 records to our International Medical Devices Database. We built the database with the hope it would make things more transparent for patients and people considering a medical implant.


EUROPEAN MEA CULPA



Time heals all wounds… right? European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker has called his slow reaction to our 2014 Lux Leaks investigation one of the “biggest mistakes” of his presidency. Interesting, given the Commission’s first official response to the investigation came just a couple months ago – launching their first probe into a Luxembourg tax deal. Better late than never, right?


TRADER, PREACHER



Still in Europe, and our reporter Simon Bowers spoke with Karlijn Kuijpers about life as a reporter in the Netherlands. It seems she’s quite accustomed to defending her work – which is often criticized for damaging economic growth. She explains the clash between economic gains and morality is referred to in the Netherlands as “the trader and the preacher.”


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