Monday, December 09, 2019

Kindness: ATO awards recognise the ‘best of’ its staff, and a schoolyard rap video

“Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.”
– Mark Twain
 
"This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it."
 Psalm 118
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Alcohol may have saved humanity from extinction, scientists claim
How to train your brain to like people who annoy you - Fast Company
https://www.fastcompany.com 
No matter how much you try to like people, there is always someone in your work life who annoys you. You see them coming down the hall and your skin crawls. Invariably, they say something that rubs  ...

 The genius of Philip Larkin’s poetry was his gift for somehow sublimating our appreciation of life by amplifying its ordinariness  


Martha Minow (Harvard), When Should Law Forgive? (2019):
When Should Law ForgiveThe potential power of forgiveness in an age of resentment.
Crimes and violations of the law require punishment, and our legal system is set up to punish, but what if the system was recalibrated to also weigh grounds for forgiveness? What if something like bankruptcy―a fresh start for debtors―were available to people convicted of crimes? Martha Minow explores the complicated intersection of the law, justice, and forgiveness, asking whether the law should encourage people to forgive, and when courts, public officials, and specific laws should forgive.
Who has the right to forgive? Who should be forgiven? And under what terms? Minow tackles these foundational issues by exploring three questions:
What does the international response to child soldiers teach us about the legal treatment of juvenile offenders in the United States?
  • Why are the laws surrounding corporate debt more forgiving than those governing American student and consumer debt, and sovereign debt in the developing world?
  • When do law’s tools of forgiveness, amnesties, and pardons strengthen justice, peace, and democracy (think South Africa), and when do they undermine law’s promise of fairness (think Joe Arpaio)?

Australia’s Prime Minister Eliminates Arts Ministry


“The Arts, already an addendum to the Department of Communications and the Arts, will be merged along with the rest of the department into a new one with the unwieldy title of the Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Communications.” What’s more, Prime Minister Scott Morrison did not consult department head Mike Mrdak — and only notified him the afternoon before the announcement. –Limelight (Australia)


 I cannot see what I have gone through until I write it down. I am blind without a blog and a pencil
How do we know that Adam and Eve were Soviet citizens? They had one apple between the two of them, they had no clothes, and they believed they were living in paradise. 



Why do the KGB thugs always walk around in threes? One can read, one can write, and the third keeps an eye on the two intellectuals. 


The death of Camus. Did the KGB rig his car to make it crash at high speed  
5 ways to eat acorns for survival Outdoor 

Two issues have hit the company in the last week—they are unrelated but share a common theme: Total Dependence on China to ride out the U.S. blacklist, it seems, may not be such smooth sailing after all. Huawei needs to keep Beijing and China’s consumers onside—and that may be harder than it once seemed.

Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues November 30, 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 and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Go Google free: We pick privacy-friendly alternatives to every Google service; Alexa, Siri and other voice systems are raising security worries; Canada’s use of Huawei 5G would hamper its access to U.S. intelligence – U.S. official; Law enforcement can plunder DNA profile database, judge rules.

 The War For Kindness - Building Empathy In A Fractured World – “This book reviews the science of human kindness and empathy, drawing largely from psychological research.  In recent years, high-profile findings in this field (and others) have proven to be less robust than we once thought.  Psychologists have responded by making sure we are as transparent as possible about how much evidence supports each claim we make.  In this spirit, the author and a colleague teamed up to produce an appendix in The War for Kindness, titled “evaluating the evidence.”  It provides readers with more information about the work underlying claims made in the book.  On this page you can find more details about what went into this appendix…”

2020 Guide to Web Data Extractors – This guide by Marcus P. Zillman is a comprehensive listing of web data extractors, screen, web scraping and crawling sources and sites for the Internet and the Deep Web. These sources are useful for professionals who focus on competitive intelligence, business intelligence and analysis, knowledge management and research that requires collecting, reviewing, monitoring and tracking data, metadata and text. 

Albanese warns 'complacent' Facebook putting democratic values at risk


In his third "vision statement", the Labor leader will urge all sides of politics to "step back" from social media and return to "rational discussion".


It’s Way Too Easy to Get a .gov Domain Name - Krebs on Security – “Many readers probably believe they can trust links and emails coming from U.S. federal government domain names, or else assume there are at least more stringent verification requirements involved in obtaining a .gov domain versus a commercial one ending in .com or .org. But a recent experience suggests this trust may be severely misplaced, and that it is relatively straightforward for anyone to obtain their very own .gov domain…” 

One more time – “For all of you that used the FaceApp to see what you would look like in old age, the FBI just told @SenSchumer that “the FBI considers any mobile application or similar product developed in Russia, such as FaceApp, to be a potential counterintelligence threat…” [via Frank Thorpe – producer and off-air reporter, NBCNews – his Tweet includes a copy of the FBI’s letter to Sen. Schumer. 

The Guardian UK – Nestlé cannot claim bottled water is ‘essential public service’, court rules. “Michigan’s second-highest court has dealt a legal blow to Nestlé’s Ice Mountain water brand, ruling that the company’s commercial water-bottling operation is “not an essential public service” or a public water supply. The court of appeals ruling is a victory for Osceola township, a small mid-Michigan town that blocked Nestlé from building a pumping station that doesn’t comply with its zoning laws. But the case could also throw a wrench in Nestlé’s attempts to privatize water around the country.

On the defensive on human rights, China’s ambassadors go on the attack South China Morning Post  
With People in the Streets Worldwide, Media Focus Uniquely on Hong Kong FAIR 

Hong Kongers mark half year protest anniversary with huge rally Agence France Presse 

China has its own Hong Kong protest game that lets you beat up activists Abacus 

There's nothing left I'm afraid of': Citizen journalist deported from Hong Kong

A 10-year resident of Hong Kong, domestic worker Yuli Riswati, is deported after expressing her sympathy for the pro-democracy movement and reporting on the protests in her spare time.

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