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Wednesday, October 30, 2019

Hope springs eternal

Wolfe was in the office looking at television, which gives him a lot of pleasure. I have seen him turn it on as many as eight times in one evening, glare at it from one to three minutes, turn it off, and go back to his book.

— Rex Stout, The Golden Spiders
Google Accused of Creating Spy Tool to Squelch Worker Dissent Bloomberg

NSW FINANCE: It will examine NSW’s revenue system in relation to Commonwealth funding arrangements and sustainable funding options.



In the 1980s, Michael Milken embodied Wall Street greed. A swashbuckling financier, he was charged with playing a central role in a vast insider-trading scheme and was sent to prison for violating federal securities and tax laws. He was an inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the film “Wall Street.”
Mr. Milken has spent the intervening decades trying to rehabilitate his reputation through an influential nonprofit think tank, the Milken Institute, devoted to initiatives “that advance prosperity.”


O'Donnell shines in Joe Biden interview



CBS’s Norah O’Donnell interviews Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden for Sunday’s “60 Minutes.” (Photo by Eric Kerschner for CBS News/"60 Minutes")

The big interview of the weekend was Norah O’Donnell’s conversation on Sunday’s “60 Minutes” with Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden. While “60 Minutes” always has been a needle-moving TV news show, it’s this kind of interview that reminds us just how influential the iconic show remains.

The Biden interview was outstanding, thanks to O’Donnell. She touched on all of the pertinent topics, including Russian interference into the election, Facebook, and his main Democratic opponents Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.

But here were the most interesting parts:

Why has Barack Obama not endorsed him?

“I asked him not to,” Biden said. “He said, 'OK.’ I think it's better — I think he thinks it's better for me. I have no doubt when I'm the nominee he'll be out on the campaign trail for me.”

What would Biden say to Donald Trump after Trump has accused him and his son, Hunter, of being corrupt?

“Mr. President, release your tax returns,” Biden said. “Let's see how straight you are, OK old buddy? I put out 21 years of mine. So show us your tax returns, bud — wh-what are you hiding? You want to deal with corruption? Start to act like it. Release your tax returns or shut up.”

And, would he be OK with his legacy if he doesn’t become president?
“I'm not worried about my legacy,” Biden said. “What I am worried about is the country. Four years of Donald Trump will be very hard to overcome, but we can. Eight years of Donald Trump will fundamentally change the nature of who we are as a country. And it'll take a generation — a generation or more for us to get back on track.”

Kafka: The Years of Insight, by Reiner Stach



You have made me unhappy. I bought your "Metamorphosis" as a present for my cousin, but she doesn't know what to make of the story. My cousin gave it to her mother, who doesn't know what to make of it either.
So begins a letter to Franz Kafka written in 1917 by Dr Siegfried Wolff, a veteran of the trenches. He goes on to list other family members equally perplexed by the story and pleads for some help to protect his reputation: "Only you can help me". Apparently there is no evidence of a reply. Not that possession would help much: perplexity towards Kafka's fiction hasn't ceased despite the deluge of secondary material. Sometimes it is expressed with Wolff's politeness, sometimes with a journalist's boorish impatience. "Great antipathy towards Metamorphosis", was Kafka's own response. "Unreadable ending. Imperfect almost to its very marrow".



Starting a fight club with dementia patients and filming it.


The politics of bread. From the Roman cry of “bread and circuses” to the suffragettes’ “bread and roses,” flour has had a highly political role in history  




THE OBSERVER: There comes a point when every democratic government bureaucracy needs to remember why it is there, why it has outlived successive political leaders, and why it needs to put a stake in the ground from time to time.

Billionaire George Soros says Elizabeth Warren ‘is the most qualified to be president’ CNBC



WHOOPS: Home Affairs has issued an intriguing statement acknowledging it made an “erroneous” referral to the AFP earlier this year.















BBC News launches ‘dark web’ Tor mirror - BBC News: “The BBC has made its international news website available via Tor, in a bid to thwart censorship attempts. Tor is a privacy-focused web browser used to access pages on the dark web. The browser can obscure who is using it and what data is being accessed, which can help people avoid government surveillance and censorship. Countries including China, Iran and Vietnam are among those who have tried to block access to the BBC News website or programmes.
Instead of visiting bbc.co.uk/news or bbc.com/news, users of the Tor browser can visit the new bbcnewsv2vjtpsuy.onion web address. Clicking this web address will not work in a regular web browser. The dark web copy of the BBC News website will be the international edition, as seen from outside the UK. It will include foreign language services such as BBC Persian, BBC Arabic and BBC Russian…”