Icons are Powerful: Byzantine Array of Grassroot Involvements

Icons are a powerful White Beauties
A recent article in the New York Times provides a few justifications for cities and designers to embrace scent ... (Microsoft trivia as its suggestion for "IMRICH" in its dictionary happens to be "EMBRACE") Embrace scent...
Charles Krauthammer flirts with the metaphysics in his new book, Things That Matter. An organized approach to human affairs is an ethical duty, each generation tasked with the unending work of maintaining a sound constitutional order. All things eloquent and beautiful need a foundation to thrive. But "get your politics wrong and everything stands to be swept away."
Right enough, though it's also true that this platform, however impressive, is ultimately insignificant. A Kalahari bushman, uneducated, lacking material trappings and a sophisticated body politic, has the same inward moral capacity to advance Everything Else as a cosmopolitan type at a Park Avenue soirée. Spectacular achievements notwithstanding, the mediating power structures of late-capitalist society cannot satiate the human longing for transcendence. As Krauthammer notes, the lasting glories of a successful politics "lie outside [politics] itself." Properly understood, politics is thus something of a paradox, crucial and yet also utterly impotent. Though not necessarily in that order. Community Precincts; By 2030, it's estimated that five billion people will be pounding the concrete caught up in the hustle of urban living. Over the past two decades, urbanisation has been swift and sustained. There's no sign of it slowing. The rationale is obvious. Cities provide opportunities. We're flocking to where we can find work. The secrets of the world's happiest cities; NSW Public Service Commission, 2013. As well as reviewing world-leading management practices within innovative organisations, the PSC met with people across the spectrum of government service delivery, from chief executives of agencies through to those involved in face-to-face interactions with NSW citizens. This has helped to identify some of the barriers that prevent agencies from providing the best possible services to the people of NSW. Ideas at work: creating an innovative cities and public sector
Our attachment to the Christmas story may be the greatest act of self-deception in Western history, and that might not be a bad thing Beautiful lies?; Thanksgiving in America lends itself to taking stock of the good in our lives. There are many things that make us human. Compassion, grace, love. The ability to forgive. Gratitude is more than simple sentiment; it is the motivation that can save the world
Only through mistakes can we see where we’re lacking, where we need to work. But we hate mistakes so we play it safe. Advice with a musical flavour. Ben Zander on performance and transformation
Being a leader, or even just a do-er, requires stamina and mental strength; the ability to blow-off the personal element of criticism while applying it into your work constructively, ignoring the noise, and identifying your weaknesses so you can become stronger is all part of it. Ann Morin, a psychotherapist and college psychology instructor, provided LifeHack.org with 13 attributes deficient in the mentally strong Fail fast, fix fast, learn fast

Amerikan Polish BuKowski

“when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we'd like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we'd all like to die f****** (although none of us had done any f******)

and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we're ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have f***** our lives away.”
― Charles Bukowski, You Get So Alone at Times That it Just Makes Sense

Peoples rescued from financial gurus might cry, as did the boy whom Don Quixote de la Mancha had saved from beating by the muleteers but who was thrashed by them not long later, nevertheless — ‘In the name of God, Don Jorge de la Casablanca, don’t rescue me again!’ "

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street is all about excess. From orgies on a plane to cocaine and cash (or “fun coupons” as Leonardo DiCaprio’s character calls them), the financial drama thrives in taking it up a notch Making Sense of Walls Academics who study business love to talk about the power of incentives and the importance of full information to enable the most effective and efficient decisions. Unless it applies to them Who Pays the piper follow the self interest

Jeff Bezos: A lawyer with his brief case can steal more than a hundred men with guns

In the 1970s, Christian singer Larry Norman made popular the Apocalyptic song lyric, “A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold” based on Revelation 6:6

A lawyer with his brief case can steal more than a hundred men with guns. The former librarian was in early 1990s looking for a name for his company and at a forum I suggested Cold river instead Jeff chose Amazon river Should Amazon have disclosed CEO Jeff Bezos' kidney stone attack?

True change takes persistent radicalism and constant optimism. It takes the will to lift your head up, look around and realize that happiness and success are ALWAYS within your control. In his new book Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm and Confidence, neuropsychologist at Berkeley University, Dr. Rick Hanson, contends that this phenomenon can be explained. Hardwiring happiness

.. The legal trade, in short, is nothing but a high-class racket.

Austin Mitchell and Prem Sikka outline just how much a drain on the public purse the private sector actually is ... Clear water is at last emerging between the Conservatives and the Labour Party. New Labour’s enthusiastic endorsement of Thatcherite free market economics made it very difficult to tell which party was which until it led directly to the 2008 crash and the great recession. Now differences are at last emerging as Labour learns the lessons that the party of the people has to regulate energy companies and markets for the benefit of society as a whole Government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich

Were you alone or by yourself? Kudos to legal eagles

“Books aren’t made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids, There’s some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it’s back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands like that in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.”

– Gustave Flaubert

Apparently it's okay in polite society to say that the Supreme Court has too many Catholics, as Jamie Stiehm does in the US News: The Catholic Supreme Court’s War on Women

Court Jesters records this question asked by a Vancouver lawyer: "what colour were the blue jeans?" As well as the Canadian lawyer who single-handedly (or mouthily) asked these immortal questions:

Q. How long have you known your brother?
Q. Were you alone or by yourself?
Q. How long have you been a French Canadian?
June 1992 - Of the Rankest Sort From Robert Finlay of Honolulu, HI, this testimony from "a hotly contested murder trial" involving a difficult, albeit zoological, point of evidence:
Prosecutor: On the photograph, what are on the brown, blood-like smudge?
Mr. Heu: From my zoological background, I keyed in on it because it had ants on it. [This was significant because it] indicated to me that it was fresh material rather than something that was days or weeks old.
Prosecutor: First of all, is there a difference between worker ants and soldier ants?
Mr. Heu: Yes. The soldier ants have large heads and the worker ants have small heads. The worker ants go out to forage - to find something. If it's a large find, the word will go back to the ant nest. The ants will send out more workers and if it's a big find, they'll send soldiers along.
Defense Attorney: I object to the materiality of the witness' statement.
The Court: Your objection is on the grounds of relevance?
Defense Attorney: Yes, sir. It's also hearsay as to what the ants tell each other.
The Court (wisely): Objection overruled.

I love David Hyman's new essay Why Did Law Professors Misunderestimate the Lawsuits against PPACA? It starts off with a bang:

Law professors love hypothetical questions. So, let’s try a few. What if, in the highest profile case to hit the Supreme Court in the last generation on an issue of central importance to the scope of federal power, virtually every constitutional law scholar was wrong about how the Court would decide the case? And not just a little wrong, but “not remotely in the ballpark” wrong (i.e., declaring that an argument the other way was “frivolous, and deserving of sanctions”)? Worse still, what if when it first became apparent that they might be wrong, what if these law professors threatened that the Supreme Court would lose its legitimacy if it decided the case the “wrong” way? And, when it finally became irrefutable that these scholars were completely wrong, what if they did not do what any rational person would do (apologize, and try to figure out how and why they got it so wrong), but instead condemned the Supreme Court for failing to adhere to their view of what the law required? Finally, what if this behavior was not limited to law professors who actually do constitutional law? What if law professors with no obvious expertise in constitutional law signed petitions and made public statements declaring that the arguments of those challenging the constitutionality of PPACA were frivolous?
Of course, these are not hypothetical questions, but instead reflect the performance of the nation’s law professors before, during, and after the Supreme Court resolved the constitutional challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“PPACA”).  The Story gets better as taxing humble pie is served...

Tough Teachers: A little lesson in history is good for us

I had a teacher once who called his students "idiots" when they screwed up. He was our orchestra conductor, a fierce Ukrainian immigrant named Jerry Kupchynsky, and when someone played out of tune, he would stop the entire group to yell, "Who eez deaf in first violins!?" He made us rehearse until our fingers almost bled. He corrected our wayward hands and arms by poking at us with a pencil.

Today, he'd be fired. But when he died a few years ago, he was celebrated: Forty years' worth of former students and colleagues flew back to my New Jersey hometown from every corner of the country, old instruments in tow, to play a concert in his memory. I was among them, toting my long-neglected viola. When the curtain rose on our concert that day, we had formed a symphony orchestra the size of the New York Philharmonic. Chamilova & Malinic Agree ;-)

The Time magazine person of 2013 is a soul of many firsts (the first to take the name Francis, the first Jesuit, the first from the Americas) was ready with a number of surprises of his own. For those of us who follow the papacy, Pope Francis provides a constant stream of material for reflection. sees the Church as a field hospital after a battle.
“The thing the Church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful,” he said. “It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about everything else. Heal the wounds.”
Heal the wounds, yes. And then awaken society to the greatest resource of all: the human person. That is the path out of poverty ...The joy of teacher Francis

Granted, I haven't read every opinion article written in 2014, but this article by Jesse Myerson really is pretty damned stupid by any teacher who had to endure communism. My sister Gitka was sacked by soviet regime for going to church during the painful time when our sister Aga dies. The combination of democracy and capitalism is a poor system. But all the others are worse. This is hardly a ringing endorsement. But the real world is no utopia, and utopias have had a very bloody history in this century Teaching children about history ; Last but not least as lessons need to be learned ... Teaching children about tax

Nostalgia of Lost Youth and all that Specter of Approaching Death

“The Greek word for "return" is nostos. Algos means "suffering." So nostalgia is the suffering caused by an unappeased yearning to return.”
― Milan Kundera, Ignorance

“Nostalgia is like a grammar lesson: you find the present tense, and the past perfect!”
― Owens Lee Pomeroy

When the surviving members of the cast of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," which originally ran on the BBC between 1969 and 1974, announced plans to give their first public performances as a group since 1982, tickets for the opening-night show sold out in 43.5 seconds. It's not known whether the comedians will be doing any new material, but I doubt it. That's not why people come to this kind of event, after all. They come for much the same reason that they came to Broadway in 2005 to see Eric Idle's musical stage version of "Spamalot": to applaud their lost youth. Hence they don't want to see anything new, though they'll put up with it if absolutely necessary Terry Teachout

“Some say that time is like water that flows around us (like a stone in the river) and some say we flow with time (like a twig floating on the surface of the water).”
― Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur

"They must hunger in frost that will not work in heat."
John Heywood, Proverbs

Random Reading

As 2013 came to an end, various media outlets began awarding their annual Person of the Year Award. Forbes magazine, for instance, voted Russian President Vladimir Putin as the most powerful man in the world while Time Magazine chose Pope Francis as the man that most influenced the world this past year.  While the Gawker suggest the best stories read in 2013 ...

Australian John Hempton recently wrote a long letter to Deloitte about a company audited by Deloitte in which  he thought there was a possibility that the accounts were fake. Deloitte whistleblowing story from Bronte

Amerikan  Kim Ukura  writes Sophisticated Dorkiness Currently kicking off 2014 right

Love in Literature

Sex Without Rhythm Is Like Poetry Without Words

“Literature about sex should never be seen as a guide for the uninitiated, she warned; the choices for her Penguin anthology were driven by literary merit, not instructional value.”

If God loves you, he will make you rich

Money – and the unfairness of its distribution – is much on our minds at the moment. Particularly, it boils the minds of the “sod politics” generation of those aged 20 to 30 – the pinched generation, as David Willetts, the universities minister, has called it.
It is not the first place they would look (the cogitations of comedian Russell Brand would probably be top of the list) but they could, I think, pick up some useful insights by reading fiction of the 19th century – the golden age of the novel. Behind every great fortune, declared Honoré de Balzac, lies a crime – a grim view of humanity that he depicted, at monumental length, in his Comédie Humaine series. Russian novelists of the 19th century had a different view on money and its unfair distribution through the world. That view is articulated in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. If God loves you, he will make you rich. End of problem.How to win, lose and use money in a novel way (via Fin Times) 

"The good things in life still exist" is both the word and deed of Germany company Manufactum, which sources purposeful objects that are made using traditional manufacturing methods and materials.The brand was started in 1988 by the former managing director of Germany's Green Party, Thomas Hoof. Although it is now part of a larger conglomerate (with nine physical stores in Germany) it strives to remain true to the ethos of its founding father.Now to the products – geeze, where do we start? There are over 1500 carefully chosen objects online, which have scored top marks for workmanship and composition. These include sturdy cardboard suitcases, leather footballs, barometres, altimetres, model toys, fire-lighters, shears, sickles and fruity things like this woollen kneeling pad. (What is this for? We are not sure, but we would like one.) Each object comes with a detailed synopsis about its origins and use... and a price. It's not always cheap, but bygads it's quality.  Manufactum : the good things in life still exist via Imrich aka Smith Journal and Dwell of bohemian designs

Dream Time of Living

One of a writer’s most important works—perhaps the most important of all—is the image he leaves behind of himself in the memory of men, above and beyond the pages he has written.

~Hand written note on yellowed piece of paper circa 1980 

Man of steel. As a young man, Jorge Luis Borges sought the company of knife fighters. He even carried his own blade, later inspiring some of his finest fiction Iron Curtains

Hemingway, wary of distraction, focused on essentials: “fighting and eating and drinking and begging and stealing and living and dying” Dreaming

Philip Roth met Primo Levi in 1986. Months later, Levi was dead. “It hit me like the assassinations of the 60s,” Roth says Survivors

Revolution is often a messy, bloody, drawn-out affair. Indeed, exhaustion and disillusionment are what allow democracy to take root The memories of Velvet

Jay Rosen on the Lessons Learned from the Snowden Effect

“In the battle with the security state, those who might commit acts of journalism have three choices: acquiesce, push back or step away.”
~Philip Bump at the Atlantic Wire

Investigative reporting has impact. It exposes wrongdoing, sparks reform, changes minds, and changes lives... "Before the year ended, Jay wanted to capture a few points that stand out for him about what is unquestionably the biggest news story of 2013" Jay Rosen on the Lessons Learned from the Snowden Effect

The journalist behind, perhaps, the biggest story of a generation had strong words for Western media outlets and journalists who bow to those in positions of power. Rolling Stone turning its eyes on leakers Snowden and journalist Glenn Greenwald - An extended analysis of Greenwald's background and motivations The Men who rewrote James Bond movies

The New York Times editorial said Mr Snowden "was clearly justified" in his leaks given that current whistleblower laws do not cover private contractors. The editorial listed several ways the NSA had violated the public trust, saying it broke federal privacy laws "thousands of times a year", undermined the internet's basic encryption system and breached the communications links of data centres around the world.
Mr Obama, who has called on Mr Snowden to return to the US, should instead give him "an incentive to return home", it said. Edward Snowden, Whistle-Blower: Editorial of real note; The NSA, which has as many as 40,000 employees, has 1,000 system administrators, most of them contractors. [Note: Reuters reported NSA is eliminating 90% of its system administrators.] How Snowden Did It

Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” inevitably stirs a robust debate –as that honor has gone to people infamous for evil as well as famous for good. Last year's pick of Pope Francis has stirred a mischievous strain of debate, suggesting that an agent of good has seized the spotlight from a villain/hero (freedomfighter/terrorist) who had a remarkable impact on the world in 2013: vice person Edward Snowden
“If journalism is to matter, we can’t just raise big topics. We have to spread them, and then sustain them.”In 2014 and beyond, journalists should be inspired by the Snowden effect. They should focus more on critical mass — how to achieve it and how to sustain it. If journalism is to matter, we can’t just raise big topics. We have to spread them, and then sustain them Dan Gillmore digs deep into trends and what really works and why

Interview with Jay Rosen. The Atlantic 3 December 2013
"The third upside is news with a human voice restored to it. This is the great lesson that blogging gives to journalism. NewCo (First Look Media) is trying to learn it" A News Organization That Rejects the View From Nowhere;

It’s true! The FT – and social media – really do move markets
By John Authers Wikipedia visits and Google search linked to swings, research says Newspapers report the news. They should never aim to be part of the story themselves. But in the stock market, that division is hard to sustain. A rigorous statistical study by a group of academics at Warwick Businss School has now shown that we at the Financial Times regularly move the markets we write about. (A similar exercise for our best-known competitors would surely yield the same result; it happens that this study covered the FT.)

The research is part of a growing effort to understand how to interpret people’s use of data, and the trails they leave on the internet through search engines and social media, to predict how they, and markets, will behave. The study looked at 1,821 FT issues published in the six years from 2007 to 2012 – years that included a historic stock collapse and a subsequent dramatic rebound. The researchers counted all mentions of the 31 stocks that were part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average during this period and linked their mentions in the paper to their share price performance the next day. It showed a strong correlation – a mention in the morning’s FT meant a greater volume of trading. Interestingly, their study involves the printed edition when much of the news on which the FT reported would already have appeared online the previous day. So the news continued to have an impact on the next day. As there are now many sources that should move markets more swiftly than a printed newspaper, this also implies that it was the news itself, rather than any editorial choice about publishing stories, that moved prices. Financial stocks, led by Bank of America, were most likely to be news-driven during a period when markets were driven by the financial crisis.
So working out how to use social media is hard but the conclusion of Tobias Preis, who led the research, is robust: “Increasing information-gathering in financially relevant information on Google and Wikipedia is linked with subsequent stock market losses.”
...In 2014, we should watch how sentiment is moving – and also read the news ...Power of News

How Truth Is Getting Lost

How Truth Is Getting Lost In The New Publishing Reality "The media has long had its struggles with the truth--that's nothing new. What is new is that we're barely even apologizing for increasingly considering the truth optional. In fact, the mistakes, and the falsehoods, and the hoaxes are a big part of a business plan driven by the belief that big traffic absolves all sins, that success is a primary virtue." 

One Day In The Life Of A Bookstore Clerk"I'm looking for a book." "Would you happen to have the title?" "It's a long shot, but I was in my car about a month ago and heard an author on the radio. Sounded really interesting."

2014 (MMXIV) will be a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar, the 2014th year of the Common Era (CE) and Anno Domini (AD) designations, the 14th year of the 3rd millennium, the 14th year of the 21st century, and the 5th year of the 2010s decade Fireworks

New Every Thing Even New Trillionaire

"The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes." ~ G.K. Chesterton, Lunacy and Letters

I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever. ~Media Dragon of Neil Gaiman caliber

A taxing blog called "Other Words" by Amerikan tax attorney Bob Lord makes an interesting prediction: if you're under 60 years of age, you're likely to witness the emergence of the world's first trillionaire - yes TRILLIONAIRE - within your lifetime: 'A fortune worth $1 trillion — $1,000,000,000,000 — would today be enough to buy every square foot of real estate in Manhattan. A trillionaire could take everyone on the planet out for a $100 steak dinner, if we had a restaurant that could hold 7 billion people. A $1 trillion fortune would equal the wealth of a million millionaires.' Media Dragon is heading to be the world's first TRILLIONAIRE?

"The nicest thing about being happy is that you think you'll never be unhappy again." ~ Manuel Puig, Kiss of the Spider Woman

Simple Uncomplicated Happy New Year 2014

Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering 'it will be happier'...
~Alfred Tennyson

Reg Mombassa, the artist behind Sydney's 2013 New Year's Eve, said he wanted to use this year's fireworks to look inside people's heads Sydney and its aboriginal history of Boatswan

“A jest,” said Freud, “betrays something serious.” Chaplin, Pryor, Belushi, Grimaldi the clown. Are comedy and happiness incompatible? Split lives

Reading is to the art of writing as experience is to the art of living in the world and knowing about other people and other things,” the very experience of reading him confirms the observation Making the sun stand still