Without losing, winning isn't so great

Eager souls, mystics and revolutionaries, may propose to refashion the world in accordance with their dreams; but evil remains, and so long as it lurks in the secret places of the heart, Utopia is only the shadow of a dream.

— Vernon Louis Parrington, born on in 1871

As that inspirational leader Alyssa Milano has said:

‘First, accept sadness. Realize that without losing, winning isn't so great.

Via Joyce, Rushdie, and Franzen, the modern novel is obsessed with competition. Yet the semantics of power are difficult  to trace 

 

Kafka and Nabokov gave great literary weight to the land-line telephone. Will mobile phones ever provide as much drama? 

Poynter: “…Sometimes, it’s easy to gloss over such numbers because they all start to run together and look the same. Such as when ABC once again points out that its nightly news broadcast, “World News Tonight,” is the most-watched show on TV. It has been that way for eight straight weeks, and for much of the past few months when the coronavirus took hold as a major news story. But just because it has become a familiar storyline shouldn’t mean that we gloss over it. Let me repeat: the most-watched show on TV. Not the most-watched news show. The most-watched show on TV — more watched than “The Masked Singer” and “The Bachelor” and “Survivor” and anything else. Last week, it attracted 8.822 million viewers…”

Psyche: “Life as an introvert is rarely easy. Ever since I graduated, I’ve been compelled to work in open-plan offices. It’s exhausting. Imagine being engaged in a task that requires high concentration, such as looking for a lost earing in the middle of a tennis court. Now imagine that an automatic ball launcher keeps shooting balls directly at you. Wouldn’t you get tired quickly, and be much less efficient in your search? This is how I feel during my work, when sudden and repeating distractions are ‘shot’ at or near my desk. The struggle of an introvert doesn’t end in the office. Networking at conferences, some with thousands of attendees, is a central part of an academic career. Picture yourself entering a huge hall, with bright neon lights, hundreds of people in each aisle, and a background din that forces you to yell to be heard. In a typical two-hour poster session, you’re expected to acquire the information you need while also efficiently introducing your own work to colleagues. As an introvert, the experience is equal to riding a terrifying rollercoaster while having to maintain a big smile on your face…Today, as a psychologist, I know that introversion is a commontrait. Unlike shyness, which is more about a fear of being judged negatively, introversion is defined as a preference for quiet, less stimulating environments. The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung was the first to propose differentiating individuals along an introvert-extravert axis. Writing in the 1920s, he describedintroverts as preferring to direct their attention inward, to their own feelings and thoughts, and how they lose energy during social interactions. Extraverts, by contrast, direct their attention outward, gain energy from social interactions, and lose energy during periods of solitude…”

ATOMIC BOMBINGS AT 75: John Pilger — Another Hiroshima is Coming — Unless We Stop It Now Consortiumnews

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: Media Silent As Christopher Steele ‘Hero’ ‘Spymaster’ Narrative Crumbles.

Steele did not personally collect any of the factual information in his reports. The “vast network” was instead a “social circle” of an American-based former Brookings Institute junior staffer, recently identified for the first time as Igor Danchenko. The friends didn’t have well-documented claims so much as rumors, drunken gossip, and outright brainstorming, conjecture, and speculation. Even that information was “multiple layers of hearsay upon hearsay” before it got to Steele, who then hyperbolically overstated it. And the damning claims of “collusion” appear to have been scandalously misattributed or invented out of whole cloth.

With such shoddy information collection and analysis methods, there was never any reason to give credence to any of the salacious allegations in the dossier, whether it was claims of secret deals with Russian oil concerns, secret meetings in foreign capitals, prostitutes urinating on Moscow hotel room beds, files of compromising information, or the careful cultivation of Trump, yes Trump, into the most effective Russian agent in history.

The media have a problem, then, given that they repeatedly led viewers and readers to believe Steele was a master spy.

Australian-first $3.6m DNA program launched to solve long-term cold cases

IDENTIFICATION ADVANTAGE: The program will be funded by money that has been seized from criminals under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.