Friday, December 06, 2019

The rising river tide that lifts all boats

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people.
— James Baldwin, who died in 1987
Ha. God. For someone who does not exist He has caused me a great deal of trouble


“Hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

Dozens of cheap inner west eateries caught underpaying staff

A sting at eateries on Newtown's popular King Street after anonymous tip-offs found close to half were underpaying staff.


Paving Lachlan Murdoch's smoky Christmas drinks attract a who's who of Sydney elite


Boats etc ... The International Transport Forum.OECD: “…This report presents a new urban accessibility framework. It identifies which destinations can be reached on foot, by bicycle, public transport or car within a certain time (accessibility). It then measures how many destinations are close by (proximity). The comparison between accessible destinations and nearby destinations show well each transport mode performs (transport performance). These three indicators are calculated for destinations such as schools, hospitals, food shops, restaurants, people, recreational opportunities and green spaces in 121 cities in 30 European countries..”

France braced for biggest national strike in years BBC


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.




                                  The word sets us free.

                                  And I think of Allen Ginsberg

                                 And what he said about taking someone’s hand

                                 Cause we’re all in this together.

                                 We’re pullin’.  We ain’t pushin’

                                 We’re lettin’ it be.

                                 We realize that when one is lifted up

                                 We’re all lifted up

                                And I realize that Poetry is life

                                And life is poetry

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.



Ok math whiz: a $85k 30 year mortgage with 12% interest in 1985 actual total cost was $315k. A $315k 30 yr mortgage today at 3.8% is $525k total. $315,000 in 1985 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $751,664.36 in 2019. So it’s cheaper today to buy a median price home🤷🏼‍♂️https://t.co/W0tXSMUjmS

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) November 10, 2019

Since Donald Trump was elected and tweeted about “fake news,” more than 40 foreign governments have used that phrase to discredit journalists. So The New York Times editorial board asks, “Who Will Tell the Truth About the Free Press?”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The road to riches is this simple: Drive a crappy car

Hey Congress, How's That Privacy Bill Coming Along?



Law.com – “Navigating social media isn’t quite so straightforward when you’re a lawyer. Lawyers must consider any confidentiality or professional conduct rules before they post, making such networks too time-consuming for some to maintain…”

The book of the first 200 of these sonnets is now available for purchase. Click here:
“Never liked the ‘cards as fate’ metaphor,”
Thinks the painter, though that is what he paints.

He’d watched this game played out the night before.

Its drama of poverty, he thinks, taints

The composition’s careful symmetry.

The young father staking all on three threes

As the two sharpers wait for him to call.

His daughter’s afraid he could lose it all

And more, while the man watching, pipe smoking,

Knows the game is rigged — he’s in on the sting.

Twice the painter draws the golden section,

Vertically, on each side of the dupe,

But mars the composition’s perfection

By revealing the faces of the group.

Why are highly qualified people not getting job interviews?

 

“Be a Force of Good in the World. You can't change everything.”
― Phil Mitchell, A Bright New Morning: An American Story

'We're sitting ducks': Jacqui Lambie warns of 'existential threat' of China's interference

  Jacqui Lambie has declared Australia is a "sitting duck" to Chinese foreign interference, saying our economy and democracy is exposed.
Four NSW integrity agencies face audits and a parliamentary inquiry that covers the auditor, too
INTEGRITY INQUIRY (II): The auditors will have three main questions to answer, while a parliamentary committee has received 50 submissions and has its first hearing next week.



DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE MEMORY HOLE:Educational Earthquake: ‘Disappearing’ the Great Writers From Schools.

It is hard to overstate the alarming implications of this educational earthquake. Deliberately withholding Shakespeare from young minds is a form of aesthetic starvation, but depriving them of Orwell is a moral crime. It is from Orwell’s “Animal Farm” that young minds first grasp the nature of totalitarian evil, whether it arises from the left or the right, and understand the preciousness of their freedoms.
Evil arising from the right today, such as the neo-Nazi movement, is instantly recognizable and universally deplored. But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not shame left-wing intellectuals into embarrassment for their ideology. The utopian dream of human perfectability and equality of outcome under an all-powerful state persists and grows in the West. Today, on the 70th anniversary of its 1949 publication, Orwell’s novel “1984,” which exposes the inherent perils of Marxist ideology, is as worthy of study as it was at the height of the Cold War.
“1984” was not meant as prophecy, but as warning. “I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive,” Orwell said, “but that something resembling it could arrive.” Has “something resembling it” arrived in the West? Is progressivism that “something”?

Yes. Next question?



His friend and fellow satirist P.J. O’Rourke marvels at James’ way with a phrase, no matter what he was writing.
“He was that rare person who could do any kind of writing,” O’Rourke said. “His memoirs … are wonderful and very un-self-indulgent, unlike the modern version of that genre. He was a good novelist. Brrm! Brrm! is lots of fun. He’s an excellent poet, one of the best living poets in the English language. And of course, he was a critic.”
O’Rourke — who is not a regular TV viewer — even delighted in James’ reviews of that medium.
“His television criticism was so good that I have read all of it, even though I haven’t the likeliest idea what he’s talking about, because I’ve never seen any of the shows,” jokes O’Rourke.
Among the flood of tributes to James, Veep creator and movie director Armando Iannucci tweeted: “I used to practically hug The Observer in spasms of laughter reading Clive James’ TV reviews; ‘The Crystal Bucket’ is one of the funniest books around. And ‘Cultural Amnesia’ is an amazing book for reminding you that thinking can be joyful. His influence is incalculable.”
James didn’t just observe from the sidelines. He spent plenty of time in front of the camera, hostingvariety shows and interviewing fellow writers and other artists on Talking In The Library.
“Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.” The Crystal Bucket, 1982
On Brezhnev – A Short Biography: “Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.” From the Land of Shadows, 1982
“In The Bob Hope Golf Classic (LWT) the participation of President Gerald Ford was more than enough to remind you that the nuclear button was at one stage at the disposal of a man who might have either pressed it by mistake or else pressed it deliberately in order to obtain room service.” Glued to the Box
“I still haven’t forgiven CS Lewis for going on all those long walks with JRR Tolkien and failing to strangle him, thus to save us from hundreds of pages dripping with the wizardly wisdom of Gandalf and from the kind of movie in which Orlando Bloom defiantly flexes his delicate jaw at thousands of computer-generated orcs. In fact it would have been ever better if CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien could have strangled each other, so that we could also have been saved from the Chronicles of Narnia.” BBC Radio 4: A Point of View
On a South Bank Show interview with Harold Pinter: “It was exactly like getting blood from a stone, except that stones do not smoke. Pinter smoked all the time. You could tell that the interview was edited down from hours of film because in every shot Pinter had a fresh Balkan Sobranie in his hand. In the tight head-shots there was so much smoke pouring up from the bottom of the screen that you began wondering if his trousers were on fire.” The Crystal Bucket
Heh, indeed. Read the whole thing.™






 Swiss asylum-seeker results: “Our baseline result is that cohorts exposed to civil conflict/mass killing during childhood are 35 percent more prone to violent crime than the average cohort.”





 “Powell will serve 10 years in prison, Davies will do 8½ years and Wicks will spend five years behind bars for failing to report Viking treasure.”  Also coins!






 Splitting up the World Series pie


Polar Bears’ Diet Is 25% Plastic, Russian Scientists Say Moscow Times  

“We are strengthening by different experiences in life;
Sad times, happy moments.
Poverty, riches.
Failure, success.
Troubles, good times.
Losing, winning.”
― Lailah Gifty Akita, Think Great: Be Great! 

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