“A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.”
– David Brinkley
Gladys Berejiklian hits out at Premiers refusing to open borders despite vaccination rate News.com.au
The organiser of dozens of anti-lockdown protests is believed to have encouraged them online from overseas.
Police responded to 69 protests across the state including at NSW Parliament House, outside Sutherland, Waverley and Hills council buildings, and in COVID hotspots like Blacktown and Dubbo.
Police believe foreign agitator behind dozens of lockdown protests across NSW
NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said the decision to escalate enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions was not directly based on health advice but has suggested community transmissions of the Delta variant would be 10 times the current level if not for police intervention.
Revealing police have issued about 18,000 fines over the past six weeks of enforcement of public health orders, Mr Fuller told a NSW Parliament budget estimates hearing on Wednesday that he had committed to “treating the virus like a criminal” to support the pandemic response.
Treat the virus like a criminal’: Police Commissioner defends COVID-19 enforcement
Gavin Newsom Praised Chinese Foreign Agent for ‘Journalistic Integrity.’
Blood, labs and fraud: Theranos’s Elizabeth Holmes is about to go on trial Washington Post,
PROFILES OF THE FUTURE: Someone found this 1976 interview with futurist Arthur C. Clarke and his predictions about the future were so accurate it’ll blow your mind (video).
In terms of technology (as opposed the hash people online are making with it), as James Lileks once wrote, “This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.”
Niccolò Machiavelli taught that politics is an alien universe, unstable and inconsistent – dominated by chance – in which appearance, not reality, defines success. It does not matter who politicians really are. What matters is how people perceive them. Because public opinion is fickle, politics a gamble and the political universe unstable, successful leaders need minds that change with “fortune and changing circumstances”. And because “people are ungrateful, fickle, feigners and dissemblers”, the politician must necessarily also be a “great feigner and dissembler”. Dishonesty – and indeed any other immoral conduct – is justified, for Machiavelli, provided that it leads to dominion over a powerful state. The end justifies the means (“accusandolo il fatto, lo effetto lo scusi”).
When the flawed succeed: Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings and the corrosion of morals Times Literary Supplement