It's been a while since my last confession and I've had to drag myself back to the keyboard like a stroppy teenager.
Wars are not fought for territory, but for words. Man's deadliest weapon is language. He is as susceptible to being hypnotized by slogans as he is to infectious diseases. And where there is an epidemic, the group-mind takes over.
~Arthur Koestler, born on this date in 1905
Kevin Rudd on Australia as the Complacent Country.
They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind”, according to the Book of Hosea in the Old Blogging Testament
Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues, September 22, 2019 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles Four highlights from this week: Secret F.B.I. Subpoenas Scoop Up Personal Data From Scores of Companies; A facial recognition ban is coming to the US, says an AI policy advisor; Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Errors; and Privacy Tips That Do Less Than You Think.
UK PM Boris Johnson 'shut down parliament unlawfully', court rules
Kevin Rudd on Australia as the Complacent Country.
They that sow the wind, shall reap the whirlwind”, according to the Book of Hosea in the Old Blogging Testament
MARK BUCKLEY. Booing is for Babies
In VFL/AFL football there is a time honoured tradition of the crowd being vocal during matches. Most of the watchers know the game, many have played the game, or aspired to do so. Many who watch, or listen, know the intricacies of the game, and how demanding and merciless it can be. Continue reading
Kenneth Hayne on royal commissions and democratic institutions
A speech on the mechanisms of royal commissions delivered at a conference on constitutional law would generally not gain much attention outside the legal profession, but Kenneth Hayne’s speech On Royal Commissions, delivered at the Melbourne Law School late last month, is directed at all who are concerned with the state of Australia’s politics and policy-development processes.
He covers the function of royal commissions – what they can and cannot do, and where they should fit in the policy development process. The first five pages of the transcript cover that ground. The rest of his speech is about failures in our political institutions, particularly executive government and our political parties. “Reasoned debates about issues of policy are rare”, he says. “Three or four-word slogans have taken their place”.
TONY SMITH. CEO remuneration and socio-economic decline
Superannuation investors are keenly interested in income distribution patterns. They also monitor the ethics of companies in which they might invest. Recently they published a report of research into the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 100 Chief Executive Officers. The report found that CEO salaries and bonuses continue at obscene levels and that their remuneration has little correlation with performance.
ALLAN PATIENCE. Complacency is the opiate of the Australian masses.
So, QANTAS CEO Alan Joyce’s annual salary is now some $24 million dollars. This is over three hundred times the average Australian salary. Other CEOs are also being paid well into the tens of millions of dollars. Meanwhile the wages of the vast majority of Australian workers are flat-lining as the cost of living relentlessly heads upwards.Continue reading
The world’s most-surveilled cities
Comparitech: “Cities in China are under the heaviest CCTV surveillance in the world, according to a new analysis by Comparitech [along with the companion spreadhseet]. However, some residents living in cities across the US [like DC and Chicago], UK, UAE, Australia, and India will also find themselves surrounded by a large number of watchful eyes, as our look at the number of public CCTV cameras in 120 cities worldwide found. Closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras serve many purposes, ranging from crime prevention to traffic monitoring to observing industrial operations in environments not suitable for humans. The digital age has boosted the prevalence of CCTV surveillance. Cameras are getting better and cheaper, while live video streams can be remotely accessed, stored on the internet, and passed around. The adoption of face recognition technology makes it possible for both public and private entities to instantly check the identity of anyone who passes by a CCTV camera. Depending on whom you ask, the increased prevalence and capabilities of CCTV surveillance could make society safer and more efficient, could trample on our rights to privacy and freedom of movement, or both. No matter which side you argue, the fact is that live video surveillance is ramping up worldwide. Comparitech researchers collated a number of data resources and reports, including government reports, police websites, and news articles, to get some idea of the number of CCTV cameras in use in 120 major cities across the globe. We focused primarily on public CCTV—cameras used by government entities such as law enforcement…”In 1979, Ian Hamilton issued a trenchant warning of the difficulties for any new paper: “The appalling thing about our literary culture at the moment is that a large section of its representatives seem to get more of a kick out of seeing things collapse than they do out of seeing them survive.” In an introductory essay to the anniversary book, Mary-Kay Wilmers suggests that things have changed: that the world is now “much more friendly to us”. Let’s hope, in an ever more bilious culture, that lasts.
The London Review of Books is 40 this month. The paper, which has always considered itself something of a red rag, celebrates its ruby anniversary with a handsome anthology of articles, letters and manuscripts from 1979 to the present day: Julian Assange, Alan Bennett, Iraq, a cartoon by Kurt Vonnegut. Described as a scrapbook, this “incomplete history” looks sumptuous. It also looks secure. Who would have thought it in 1979? Not I. Who, for the first 13 years, was there. (LBR @ 40)
The road to dictatorship is depressingly predictable. But there is one quality that distinguishes modern tyranny: the cult of personalities
How juries are fooled by statistics - TED Talk – “Oxford mathematician Peter Donnelly reveals the common mistakes humans make in interpreting statistics — and the devastating impact these errors can have on the outcome of criminal trials.”
A Brief History Of Being Famous
There are two ways of telling the story of celebrity, and both are true. The first narrative holds celebrity to be a modern invention. There were always famous people, but they made their names through great deeds and works and with an eye to posterity. – Times Literary Supplement
Bipartisan Report Shows Recent Government Shutdowns Cost Taxpayers Nearly $4 Billion, 56,938 Years of Lost Productivity
“U.S. Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Tom Carper (D-DE), the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI), today unveiled a new bipartisan report that documents the cost to American taxpayers of the last three government shutdowns and the impacts they had on the economy and core government functions. The largest direct cost of these shutdowns is lost productivity, work not performed by furloughed federal employees. Over the past five years, the federal government has been fully or partially shut down for 52 days, costing taxpayers nearly $4 billion—$3.7 billion in back pay to federal workers who were furloughed and prohibited from going to work, and at least $338 million in other costs associated with the shutdowns, including extra administrative work, lost revenue, and late fees on interest payments. Moreover, the total amount of combined employee furlough days represents an estimated 56,938 years of lost productivity…”
