“You should know that there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories which are impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures.”
― Gao Xingjian
From Soul Mountain
If one thing unites all Americans, it’s the conviction that paying taxes is a pain. Even those like myself who don’t mind contributing their fair share to keep seniors off the street hate having to fill out all of the paperwork, especially if our taxes are complicated. The Tax Foundation estimates that filling out tax forms eats up 6.5 billion hours of work a year, for an economic cost of something like $313 billion. There’s a better way—but for depressing reasons, the United States probably won’t take it.
Ex-FIFA Executive Jack Warner Financed “Election Engineering” Campaign in Trinidad
Disgraced former FIFA Vice President Jack Warner personally funded an ethnically divisive disinformation campaign in Trinidad and Tobago designed by an election engineering firm to discourage black Trinidadians from voting.
The McDonald’s Macbeth Sandwich
Suit Accusing YouTube of Tracking Children Is Back On After Appeal ars technica
Department of Homeland Security Can’t Even Secure Its Buildings Against People It FiredIntercept
Waze Tests New Alerts Warning Drivers About Roads With a ‘History of Crashes’ The Verge
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America’s culture warriors are going after librarians
.coda: “…It’s a tale playing out in cities and states across the country, as a book-banning fever courses through the country’s body politic. Nationally, attempts to remove books from school and public libraries are shattering previous records. The effort is being driven by a loose collection of local and national conservative parents’ groups and politicians who have found a rewarding culture war battle in children’s books about gender, diversity and sexuality. The majority of these groups were created during the pandemic as part of a broader “parents’ rights” movement that formed in opposition to Covid-related masking and remote learning policies in schools and that has since widened its focus to include challenging library and classroom books about race and LGBTQ issues. Some of these groups compile or circulate lists of “inappropriate” books, which can be used to agitate for book bans at schools and public libraries, using language about pedophilia, porn and grooming to gin up support for their efforts. As various factions lobby to get those books taken off the shelves, librarians like Jones have been swept up in what veterans of the field say is an unprecedented wave of hostility…”
FT.com $ – “The chief executive of one of Europe’s biggest insurance companies has warned that cyber attacks, rather than natural catastrophes, will become “uninsurable” as the disruption from hacks continues to grow. Insurance executives have been increasingly vocal in recent years about systemic risks, such as pandemics and climate change, that test the sector’s ability to provide coverage.
For the second year in a row, natural catastrophe-related claims are expected to top $100bn. But Mario Greco, chief executive at insurer Zurich, told the Financial Times that cyber was the risk to watch…”
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.”
― Saul Bellow
1976 Nobel Literature Prize Winner
― Saul Bellow
1976 Nobel Literature Prize Winner
