Tuesday, December 17, 2019

Propaganda: Who Was Thomas Edison? A Genius, Of Course, But Beyond That…

“Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.”
― Andy Warhol


Your days are numbered. Will you pass them half awake and halfhearted or will you live with a sense of urgency?” 



As a 'ferocious' bushfire reached his farm, 12-year-old Lucas grabbed his dog and drove to safety


The father of a 12-year-old boy who was rescued while driving to escape a bushfire in a Wheatbelt town north-east of Perth says he is proud and relieved to be reunited with his son.


Rare Loch Imrich




Perhaps the year’s best movie …

Review: 'Jojo Rabbit'
… when I tell you that Waititi actually uses whimsy as a storytelling tool in Jojo Rabbit to confound our expectations as his film offers a deepening portrait of a naïve child in a small town in Nazi Germany becoming aware of the inhuman monstrousness of his everyday world, you can trust me when I say I was gobsmacked. After half a century of moviegoing, I'm almost never surprised at the cinema, but Jojo Rabbit surprised me, amused me, touched me, devastated me.


NSW mobile phone detection cameras nab 3,300 drivers in first week of operation

IT’S ON! Scientists Say They’re Sick of Quantum Computing’s Hype. “A Twitter account called Quantum Bullshit Detector reflects some researchers’ angst about overhyped claims and other troubling trends.”


I hope she is just overhyped ... Greta Thunberg tells cheering crowd ‘we will make sure we put world leaders against the wall’ if they do not tackle global warming as she attends climate protest in Turin


Octopus and eagle square off at Canadian farm BBC




Who Was Thomas Edison? A Genius, Of Course, But Beyond That…


“On a single day, when he was 40 and full of innovative fire, he had jotted down 112 ideas for ‘new things,’ among them a mechanical cotton picker, a snow compressor, an electrical piano, artificial silk, a platinum-wire ice slicer, a system of penetrative photography (presaging radiology by 12 years), and a product unlikely to occur to anyone else, except perhaps Lewis Carroll: ‘Ink for the Blind.’ ” – Washington Post



Journalists imprisoned in 2019

“The number of journalists imprisoned globally for their work in 2019 remained near record highs, as China tightened its iron grip on the press and Turkey, having stamped out virtually all independent reporting, released journalists awaiting trial or appeal. Authoritarianism, instability, and protests in the Middle East led to a rise in the number of journalists locked up in the region — particularly in Saudi Arabia, which is now on par with Egypt as the third worst jailer worldwide. In its annual global survey, the Committee to Protect Journalists found at least 250 journalists in jail in relation to their work, compared with an adjusted 255 a year earlier. The highest number of journalists imprisoned in any year since CPJ began keeping track is 273 in 2016. After China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, the worst jailers are Eritrea, Vietnam, and Iran…”


Julian Assange: A Court of Star Chamber — cruelty beyond belief








What A Movie About Jordan Peterson Says About Today’s Arts World



The Rise of Jordan Peterson is not a propaganda film. It’s a film about propaganda. It’s about the way facts have become helpless in the face of distortive framing. Whereas we once entrusted our arts institutions to highly trained specialists whose authority lay in their expertise and taste, today’s cultural arbiters often find themselves going along to get along. In the process, they risk defeating the very purpose of their job, which is to discern good art from bad art and to know what’s propaganda and what’s not. – Medium

Your data has been sold to websites like MyLife and WhitePages
USA Today – “If you think your privacy is at risk when it comes to social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter, they’re nothing compared to the “people search engines.” We’re talking WhitePages, MyLife.com, BeenVerified and the like. Here’s the deal: States sell their data to brokers, who in turn feed court and criminal records, housing information, automobile details and more to these websites for a fee. You never asked for your real estate prices to be posted online, your address, age or other personal details, but they are there. 
The good news: Most of the sites will let you remove the data through an opt-out click, although it’s not easy. For example, MyLife requires you to call in and make the request personally. And it’s really a game of whack-a-mole because when you remove info from one site, it can reappear on some new site…”

THE POLICE AREN’T THERE TO PROTECT US FROM CRIMINALS. THE POLICE ARE THERE TO PROTECT CRIMINALS FROM US. After shop burglarized, owner kidnaps suspected thief and smashes hands with hammer.






264 Episodes, Decades Of Reruns, And 50 Spin-Off Novels — Why ‘Murder, She Wrote’ Endures



Sure, it’s because of Jessica Fletcher, both an independent woman and a nice old lady who fights crime with a sharp eye instead of a gun. And the TV scripts were solid. Yet, observes Jon Land (who wrote that 50th novel), what made the franchise different from earlier crime series was the setting of Cabot Cove, Maine, “the kind ofcozy place where nothing bad ever should happen, but always seems to.” – CrimeReads






Song Lyrics Website Says It Caught Google Stealing Material ‘Redhanded’, Sues For $50 Million



“Lyrics site Genius on Tuesday sued Google and LyricFind for $50 million, alleging they have been misappropriating its transcriptions for years. … [Genius] used a digital watermark to see if other sites were copying its product — and it spelled ‘redhanded’ in Morse code.” – The Hollywood Reporter


Visualizing the Worst Air Pollution Days of 2019 - The New York Times – See How the World’s Most Polluted Air Compares With Your City’s – “We visualized the damaging, tiny particles that wreak havoc on human health. From the Bay Area to New Delhi, see how the world’s worst pollution compares with your local air. …Outdoor particulate pollution was responsible for an estimated 4.2 million deaths worldwide in 2015, with a majority concentrated in east and south Asia. Millions more fell ill from breathing dirty air. This fine pollution mainly comes from burning things: Coal in power plants, gasoline in cars, chemicals in industrial processes, or woody materials and whatever else ignites during wildfires. The particles are too small for the eye to see — each about 35 times smaller than a grain of fine beach sand — but in high concentrations they cast a haze in the sky. And, when breathed in, they wreak havoc on human health.





What I’ve Learned About Arts Journalism In The Past Decade



Diep Tran: “When I was first hired atAmerican Theatre, I thought arts journalism was two things: reviewingshows and interviewing celebrities. But as I’ve grown in my career, I realized that it has become something else for me: Journalism is an act of service. The theatre industry, like most industries, is notoriously tight-lipped in many sensitive areas: compensation (or the lack of it)race and power dynamics, and sexual harassment, to name just a few. Those in power would rather you, the reader and the viewer, look at the art and not look too closely at what’s going on behind the curtain.” – American Theatre


This Author Did Eight Years Of Research On A ‘Quiet Little Book’ That Became An Immediate Sensation


Lisa Taddeo thinks her success is partially luck, and partially that she really digs into the nuances of women’s desire, and their relationships with men, at least before the Weinstein scandal broke. – The Guardian (UK)



Little Women, The Book, Was Radical And Feminist In Its Day


And Greta Gerwig’s new movie version of it makes an attempt to reflect that. “We may these days … be surrounded by books containing extraordinary girls – Lyra, Hermione, Katniss – but it is striking that they are exceptions, and often alone; groups of girls in, say, the Gossip Girl books are toxic and destructive. Little Women is about ‘a world of women, of value in and of itself.’ It is also, Gerwig has said, ‘one of the few books about childhood that isn’t about escape. There is bravery, but it’s a hero’s journey contained inside the home.'” – The Guardian (UK)