Drinking Green Tea On A Regular Basis Could Help Extend One’s Lifespan
Longer lifespan linked to green tea consumption in study
Pope Francis: Corruption is Worse than a Sin
Sydney's water demand drops as reservoir inflows dwindle to a trickle
No one is perfect... Sad to hear of Sir Roger Scruton’s passing. From his support for freedom fighters in Eastern Europe to his immense intellectual contribution to conservatism in the West, he made a unique contribution to public life.
Historian Timothy Garton Ash said he was "a man of extraordinary intellect, learning and humour, a great supporter of central European dissidents, and the kind of provocative - sometimes outrageous - conservative thinker that a truly liberal society should be glad to have challenging it".
Roger Scruton (1944-2020)
Some Aspects of Memory Get Better As We Age New York Times. Also a lot of what looks like memory loss in old people is poor hearing. Hearing aids, even really good ones, have limitations, and many old people are reluctant to keep asking for things they didn’t hear well to be repeated. They nod as if they got it when they didn’t.
Depressive realism Aeon. Of course, this fits my priors…..
- Was Camus murdered by the KGB? -- a new book makes the case: “They rigged the tyre with a tool that eventually pierced it when the car was travelling at high speed”Via T D and P J
Ricky Gervais Proves Pompous Hollywood Can No Longer Take a Joke,” John Nolte writes at Breitbart.com, quoting from Ali and other DNC-MSM Hollywood sycophants. “The media have literally become the Celebrity Ego Protection League. And this is why both Hollywood and the media have fallen so out of favor with the American people. Instead of informing and entertaining us, they instruct, lecture, and shame us. Instead of good-natured laughs or the passing on of information, it’s self-righteous sanctimony from humorless prigs who have deluded themselves into a sense of unearned superiority and importance to the world. God bless Gervais. His only goal was to entertain those of us watching on TV, and he knows nothing is funnier or more liberating than mocking a room full of people who can’t take a joke.”
The Secrets of Successful Female Networkers -HBR – “…But some female leaders do establish strong networks—and they win greater influence and more-senior positions as a result. What are they doing differently? A new study sheds light on their strategies. “I was talking with many women about how to improve their networks, the challenges they face, and what they and their organizations could do better, and I realized that all the studies on the issue were pretty old and narrow,” explains Inga Carboni, a professor at William & Mary’s Mason School of Business and the study’s lead author. “I couldn’t answer their questions.” The researchers analyzed data collected from 16,500 men and women in more than 30 organizations across a range of industries over the past 15 years. Then they interviewed hundreds of female executives. This led them to identify four characteristics that distinguish the networking behaviors of more-successful women from those of their peers. In some cases those matched the behaviors of high-performing men; in others there were subtle but important differences. When shaping their professional networks, top women were…”. 
The Coalition government has spent $25m worth of public funds spruiking its landmark tax plan over the past 18 months.
This includes more than $150,000 on focus group research to market its tax package to the public, which was paid to two marketing agencies to sell policies from both the Turnbull and Morrison governments.
The government secured passage of $144bn worth of income tax cuts in June 2018, which were extended by Josh Frydenberg in last year’s budget, transforming the reforms into a $300bn income tax reduction package.
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As part of its “Better Tax” advertising program, which included websites, videos and other public notices, the government ran two campaigns from January to October last year.
The cost of the second leg of the campaign, after the Treasurer unveiled a suite of low-and-middle-income tax offsets in the budget, has already risen to $8.4m since the start of the 2019-20 financial year.
Many of the issues that consume legions of public servants and media management time would be a non-event in the US, argues Craig Dalton.
“How NOT to Piss Off a Community”
John Menadue – Pearls and Irritations | Pearls and Irritations
Tom Peters, who talks abou the value of Acknowledgement and Connection
Have you been plogging, are you a slashie or have you been sadfishing? Language expert ADAM JACOT DE BOINOD reveals the latest weird and wonderful words to enter the lexicon in 2019 Daily Mail
"How can a double success be a failure?" -- a variant on one of Parfit's thought experiments forms the basis of the Netflix show "Living With Yourself"
Complaining, done well, can bring us closer together -- Kathryn Norlock (Trent) defends complaints, be they about large scale political issues or "quotidian whinging"
"Modesty involves breaking out of a way of experiencing life rooted in comparing yourself with others" -- an insightful take on modesty from Nicolas Bommarito