Tuesday, May 07, 2019

Reminding Slaves Who The Master Is

Half of wisdom is learning what to unlearn.
Larry Niven 



“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
George Orwell, author and journalist


'Wrongful arrest': Alleged standover man to sue the state over extortion case

A Sydney lawyer claimed he had been stood over by some big underworld names over a $160,000 construction industry debt, but then changed his story.


Uber Sued By 6,000 Australian Taxi Drivers For ‘Illegal Operations’ International Business Times


Joyce sacked Ag secretary ‘to remind him where the authority starts from’South west Sydney is the meth production capital of NSW - Daily Telegraph
WATER BUYBACK: Barnaby Joyce is on video explaining why he sacked Paul Grimes, as the auditor-general confirms review of the department’s water purchasing


Transcripts reveal Ken Wyatt's office was subject to a secret inquiry into bullying allegations - Sydney Morning Herald


 Some seats are 'better' than others: Coalition sandbagging key electorates with taxpayer funds

Carparks, swimming pools and sport fields - how to sandbag a seat, Liberal style

BYRON YORK: “So now we know the FBI wiretapped Carter Page and used undercover informant Stefan Halper and investigator ‘Azra Turk,’ posing as a research assistant, to gather information on George Papadopoulos. Remember the anger when AG Barr mentioned ‘spying’ on Trump campaign?”

'That Little Murmur Wasn’t There Before'



I remember a little girl who was said to have a “heart murmur,” which conjured the image of a small internal voice forever nagging. She was deemed “delicate.” We shouldn’t yell around her or knock her down, and definitely don’t mention the murmur. It was all mumbo-jumbo, something adults told kids to make them behave. The Mayo Clinicattempts to clear things up for the lay audience:

“Heart murmurs are sounds during your heartbeat cycle — such as whooshing or swishing — made by turbulent blood in or near your heart. These sounds can be heard with a stethoscope. A normal heartbeat makes two sounds like ‘lubb-dupp’ (sometimes described as ‘lub-DUP’), which are the sounds of your heart valves closing.”

In other words, yet another illustration of nature’s fondness for iambic meter, and “turbulent blood” is awfully good. While recently writing an essay about light verse, I corresponded with a fine poet in Louisiana, Gail White, for whom humor and the more troubling human realities are conjoined twins. She wrote a poem titled “Heart Murmur,”which begins:

“‘That little murmur wasn’t there before,’
the doctor says, folding his stethoscope.
‘The valves are stiffening a bit with age.
It’s natural.’ So is the hangman’s rope.”


They were angry that he said it happened, because they knew it happened.




'Move to higher ground': Liberal MP's climate advice to Fijians


John Alexander, the sitting Liberal MP for Bennelong, has sought to downplay his comments at a public forum in his electorate.



Crowding worsens as more commuters pile on trains to Sydney CBD


The number of commuters travelling by train into Sydney's CBD during the busiest hour of the morning peak has surged by almost 8000 in a year, new figures show.





CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS: Eight Logan City Council members now face criminal charges and are suspended from office. 




'Millionaires' factory' chief's pay packet leaves big four rivals in the shade

Macquarie Group boss Shemara Wikramanayake was paid $17 million in the past financial year, more than the combined pay of the chief executives of the big four banks.

“Today, consistent with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA), as amended (codified in 50 U.S.C. § 1873(b)), and the Intelligence Community’s (IC) Principles of Intelligence Transparency, we are releasing our sixth annual Statistical Transparency Report Regarding Use of National Security Authorities presenting statistics on how often the government uses certain national security authorities. Providing these statistics allows for an additional way to track the use of FISA authorities and National Security Letters (NSLs). The statistics also add further context regarding the IC’s rigorous and multi-layered oversight framework that safeguards the privacy of United States persons’ information and non-U.S. persons’ information acquired pursuant to these national security authorities. This report goes beyond the government’s statutory duty of providing statistics by further providing the public with detailed explanations as to how the IC uses its national security authorities…”
TechCrunch: ‘The intelligence community’s annual transparency report revealed a spike in the number of warrantless searches of Americans’ data in 2018. The data, published Tuesday by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), revealed a 28% rise in the number of targeted search terms used to query massive databases of collected Americans’ communications…”




Too Damn Cheerful! Our Obsession With It Is Nuts


The Ancient Greeks named four virtues: temperance, wisdom, courage and justice. Aristotle added more, but cheerfulness wasn’t one of them. The Greek philosophers didn’t seem to care about how we felt compared with how we acted. – Aeon


CREEPING SHARIA: Subway removes ham and bacon from nearly 200 UK & Ireland stores and offers halal meat only after ‘strong demand’ from Muslims.

IN THE MAIL: An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.

JAMES LILEKS: How do we get rid of Facebook? 



Put it another way: how did it come to pass that the erection of these manufactured “communities” was performed by individuals who seem to lack the most elemental human skills, and prefer to deal with others through the prism of technology?
Are we going to put up with this forever?