Policy is formed by preconceptions, by long implanted biases. When information is relayed to policy-makers, they respond in terms of what is already inside their heads and consequently make policy less to fit the facts than to fit the notions and intentions formed out of the mental baggage that has accumulated in their minds since childhood.
Australian man pleads guilty in $US90m cryptocurrency scam case
LΓ©na Situations shot to fame in France by sharing fashion advice and tips for living a positive life with millions of her followers on social media.
As a 23-year-old social-media influencer tops the best-seller list in France, the old guard fights back: “147 pages of emptiness, 19.50 lost euros” French Type
Who Is Aleksei Navalny? NYT Once Knew, but Has Since Forgotten FAIR. Greenwald comments
Former CIA Director John O. Brennan is an angry man, and his anger mismanagement issues emerge not in the preface to his memoir but in its title, which reads Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, at Home and Abroad. The CIA is an executive branch organization focused on foreign intelligence, intentionally headquartered across the Potomac in McLean, Virginia, separated from the White House, State Department, Congress, and all the other policy and partisan bodies. So, who are a CIA director’s domestic enemies—terrorist sleeper cells? Russian illegals? Shady companies aiding Iran’s nuclear procurement efforts? These would be valid targets for joint FBI-CIA attention, and probably anger too.
Four hundred pages later, the reader finds that Brennan’s list contains none of these but it is long, and he exhausts his thesaurus of abusive language against them: Arlen Specter, Richard Grenell, Devin Nunes, Lindsey Graham, Donald Rumsfeld, Michael Pompeo, Trey Gowdy, Michael Scheuer, and Gina Haspel (on and off; she didn’t invite him to CIA holiday parties), and the CIA’s Directorate of Operations generally. Pride of place goes, of course, to Donald Trump. Before Brennan has even met the newly elected Trump, but is en route to brief him in early January 2017, he records that the “mere thought” of the meeting “jarred my very soul.” Brennan’s meetings with, say, Yasser Arafat evince no such dread, and in fact are recounted pretty jauntily.
Brennan’s outbursts are a consistent theme in this memoir. They are often blamed on his “Irish temper,” as if his rage is something external, like an unruly Irish setter that jumps on strangers. Trump is “evil despicable, and vile,” with bad qualities—“incompetence, dishonesty, and cravenness,” especially when Andrew McCabe was fired from the FBI, on St. Patrick’s Day no less, when “my Irish dander was more easily ruffled.”
They often come at a cost: In late 2006, a hot-tempered draft op-ed piece attacking President Bush, while never published, found its way to the White House and would cost Brennan the job of deputy DNI a year later. His famous anti-Trump meltdown when McCabe was fired cost him a gig at Booz Allen Hamilton, and his implausible threat of a lawsuit when his clearances were pulled cost him a consultancy contract with Kissinger Associates.
This Flower Is Really a Fungus in Disguise Scientific American
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It’s A Sh*t Show Out There The Brockovich Report. Yes, that Brockovich.
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“Solving ‘pipeline’ and institutional culture problems requires creativity, long-term culture building, and sometimes will require creating brand new things out of nothing” — Alex Guerrero (Rutgers) on something his recently retired colleague, Howard McGary, created
A detailed report on whether British Columbia should adopt a universal basic income makes use of the works of several philosophers — you can read the full report and a summary here (via Stephen Tweedale)
“What always fascinated me about historical studies… was the fact that one learns as much about oneself as about the past” — Martin Lenz (Groningen) brings this lesson to bear on the teaching of Medieval philosophy
“Faculty that are well-liked by students—and thus likely prized by university administrators—and considered to be easy have particularly pernicious effects on subsequent student performance” — new research finds that “teaching to the test” boosts subsequent student perfoemance
The host of Philosophy Tube, a public philosophy show on YouTube with over 800,000 followers, comes out as a trans woman — Abigail Thorn discusses it in her latest episode of the show
The annual Brooklyn Night of Ideas, featuring philosophical discussions, readings, and music performances took place online this year — if you missed it, you can view it at this link
“While non-traditional, non-mainstream views are instantly recognized as views… the opinionated or perspectival character of conventional views often goes unnoticed” — an interview with David Detmer (Purdue Univ. Northwest)
Fake migration agent forged Home Affairs documents to lie to visa applicants
A Perth woman who posed as a registered migration agent is jailed for six-and-a-half years after a joint investigation by the ABF and DFAT.
