Best of all he loved the fall
the leaves yellow on cottonwoodsleaves floating on trout streamsand above the hillsthe high blue windless skies...Now he will be a part of them forever.
~ Ernest Hemingway's behavior during his final years had been similar to that of his father before he killed himself;[161]his father may have had hereditary hemochromatosis, whereby the excessive accumulation of iron in tissues culminates in mental and physical deterioration. Medical records made available in 1991 confirmed that Hemingway had been diagnosed with hemochromatosis in early 1961.[163] His sister Ursula and his brother Leicester also killed themselves.
Amanda Vaill beautifully portrays three love affairs – including that between Hemingway and
Gellhorn – but her book is marred by its Cold War tone
Times of struggle — whether personal or collective, political or existential, or all of the above — can be humbling. We can orient our entire lives around action and results and still run up against the hard reality of that which we cannot control.
The Limits of My Empathy for Covid-DeniersTressie McMillan Cottom, NYT. “I still do not understand how we can be in community with people who, by withdrawing from their social responsibility, are actively harming others.”
You can now buy a $475 NFT ticket to see Beeple’s $69 million NFT at an IRL party. The ticket also includes one drink.
Friendly Jordies (Jordan Shanks) has launched an all out assault on the NSW planning system, claiming “property developers are the shadow government of NSW”.
Shanks claims Sydney is being destroyed by mass overdevelopment as thousands of ugly, tacky high-rise apartments mushroom across the city. In turn, Shanks blames the NSW Government, which he claims has been corrupted by the property development industry.
The slow death of Sydney
The Covid-19 regulations are draconian, inconsistent, obscure and inconvenient, but they are not unconscionable. They do not require me to do things that the state should never make its citizens do. They are proportionate to the threat that the virus poses to health services, and necessary to slow the spread of the disease and protect those services: or at least, they are arguably so. The law and the reasons for it make sense. The regulations are contained within statutory instruments. They alone are the law. They are the ‘rules’. They can be enforced with criminal sanctions. Guidance and advice are not rules and cannot be legally enforced.
A personal take on the collapse of the twin towers.
At the start of the third lockdown, I wonder: what if lockdowns suit me? And I worry: shouldn’t it be easier now to understand what they do to my thoughts? Every day, I go out to walk under the bare trees and listen to one of the two albums Taylor Swift made last year: folklore, which came out in July, and evermore, which came out in December. (I’m not the only one: evermore is currently the number one album in the US, and number two in the UK.) The songs are a product of lockdown – Swift wrote them in the blank space that opened up when a tour had to be cancelled – but they are also of lockdown in the way they use a trace of the life before, a line like ‘meet me behind the mall,’ to conjure a world.
‘That Alexey Navalny must be quite someone,’ went a joke on the Russian internet, ‘if he has the secret services washing his underpants.’ Earlier this month, the opposition politician prank-called one of his attempted murderers. The FSB man, believing he was talking to a colleague, explained how his team had smeared Novichok on Navalny’s underpants in August, and then picked up the murder knickers after the operation and washed them (twice) to get rid of the evidence. Not only had Navalny, with the help of investigative reporting by Bellingcat and the Insider, managed to find out the names of the FSB goons who had tried to poison him; he also got one to confess to the operation. It took 49 minutes for the FSB officer to ask if it was OK to be talking on an open line. ‘Look how stupid and corrupt the Kremlin’s system is,’ Navalny said on his YouTube channel after the phone call: another reason to get rid of the regime. The late John le Carré’s world of Soviet superspies, operating silkily in shadows within shadows, has been replaced with a quite different image of Kremlin espionage: bumbling putzes scrubbing a pair of Y-fronts in full view of the world.
20 Years After 9/11, U.S. Global Authority Is Weaker Than Ever Foreign Policy
The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11: U.S. Complicity in the Terror Spectacle and the Urgent Need to End It Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott Covert Action Magazine
A modest proposal: Fire all of the post 9/11 generals Andrew Bacevich, Responsible Statecraft. Why stop there?
9/12 Edward Snowden, Continuing Ed. Langley on the day.
The Falling Man Esquire
