Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
“Use me!” Miss Peycroft cried in ringing tones. “I am absolutely ready. Pure, so to speak, and unsullied, ready and waiting to be the heroine of your next novel.”
–to Alma Porch, writer
Blind fear of death should not guide policy | Catholic Culture… certainly there are some things worth taking a risk for. As much as we admire bravery in the face of danger, we despise timidity. No doubt you would be safer if you spent your life cowering at home, but what could you accomplish? “A coward dies a thousand times before his death, but the valiant taste of death but once,” Shakespeare tells us. To risk nothing is to accomplish nothing “As rain forest natives like to say: A man steps into the universe because he is summoned. The spirits call. Motion begins. Fate ravels. Once he is in, there is no turning back: He is the spark between no being and being, between vacuum and life—between the silence and the story.” A pandemic is a time for rethinking everything, for changing one’s mind, for putting down books by fashionable theorists
“These are not the end times, I mean, but nor are they business as usual, and we would do well to understand that not only is there room for a middle path between these, but indeed there is an absolute necessity that we begin our voyage down that path. To the squealing chiliasts and self-absorbed presentists, indulging themselves with phrases like “the end of the world,” I say: “Did it never dawn on you that all of human history has just been one partial apocalypse after another?” And to the business-as-usual mandarins I say: “Thank you for your service in the glorious battles of the past.” – The Point
Australian Taxation Office chief operating officer Jacqui Curtis and the ATO COVID-19 Response Committee's Jeremy Geale told staff in an email on Friday there may be a need for tax officials to move teams and agencies, and change workplace arrangements, as the APS focused its attention on the pandemic.
"We have seen a significant example of this already through service delivery, with hundreds of staff mobilising to take on the high volume of calls we are receiving from the community," the email said.
More than 200 staff had already mobilised, and about 1500 people were in training to start taking calls in one week. More than 400 staff would be ready to take calls from the public in a fortnight.
ATO deputy commissioner Vivek Chaudhary told staff in an email on Wednesday that changes were coming to debt and lodgement work.
Tucker Carlson: ‘We aren’t very good at talking about death’ | Spectator USA … what bothered me, what enraged me, back in January was we had all these reports out of eastern China, out of Wuhan, that there was this kind of transformative thing happening. They shut down a city of 11 million people — bigger than New York. And they still couldn’t control it. And the obvious conclusion that anyone paying attention would draw is, if the most sophisticated authoritarian government in history can’t control the spread of this disease.
Stop the $6 Trillion Coronavirus Corporate Coup! Matt Stoller, BIG. Incredibly, the Democrats are cheerfully enabling disaster capitalism in exchange for a few tattered fig leaves for workers. Fighting for! Fighting for!
The Selfish Revelers Rod Dreher, The American Conservative. Dreher is Dreher, but: “Christian friends, I am not a proselytizer, but if your church or tradition is not teaching you how to orient yourself towards bearing suffering…. then it is all but useless, and will chewed up by the dragon that has us in its jaws. I’m not kidding.
