Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Crowd Funding a Movie Non-fiction such as Cold River

“Rock and Roll Philosopher” Grant Maxwell has compiled a list of the top 15 philosophical songs. I suspect many philosophers would give this list the other kind of “R and R,” namely a revise and resubmit ... Princip was the one who pulled the fatal trigger, leading to the first World War. As perhaps the most influential teenager in history, one might expect him to be the subject of an extensive literature (Gavrilo was two years younger than Milan and Ondrej)




This is where we are in the world today. We self-publish our own books. We can solicit our own funds for movies. We can circumvent the nightly news, if it still exists.

Here's a trio, who have made award-winning documentaries in the past, wanting to blow the lid off the media silence on the man they call the most prolific serial killer in America.

There are at least two angles on the media silence on this case. The biggest one is that Gosnell is an abortionist operating within the scope allowed by those who have argued they want abortions in our country to be safe and rare. This man's clinic was nowhere near safe, so the political agenda doesn't support exposing him at the risk of undermining the most scared battleground for the political left.

The second angle is not as politically defined as the first. It's what Ann McElhinney describes in the video below. The women who were murdered were poor, unseemly, and minority--the kind that gets killed everyday in some cities, so what's the news? You might think those who cry loudly about the rights of woman and minorities would cry out about this too, but perhaps their classism gets in the way. Maybe it just doesn't trump the first angle. Abortionists are priests in the Church of Ne're Do Ill. The blood on their hands is only red fruit punch.

If you have the funds to contribute to this, I encourage you to consider it.

The “art” in Sartre ...

“Poetry makes nothing happen,” Auden once wrote. But then he never got a chance to read “In Praise of Air,” a poem by Simon Armitage just installed on a building along a busy road at the University of Sheffield, England, and billed as the world’s first bit of air-cleansing verse.
Open Culture has posted the doodles of Jean-Paul Sartre (via Peter Gratton). While not as skillful as those of Jorge Luis Borges or as striking as those of Franz Kafka, they do have a certain whimsical air to them. Some research suggests that doodling enhances one’s concentration and memory, so if you see people doodling while you are giving a talk, don’t assume they aren’t paying attention. Just ask Jesse “During talks, I draw heads” Prinz.


Epictetus, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein — they’re just some of the philosophers known for putting big ideas into small packages. They are great to read, yet the aphoristic or epigrammatic style is not very common among philosophers today. Sydney Morgenbesser comes to mind as a more recent master of the philosophical quip (e.g., “Of course pragmatism is true; the trouble is it doesn’t work.”). Fans of this genre should be aware that Jerry Dworkin has put together Philosophy: A Commonplace Book, which is a goldmine of philosophers’ aphorisms, quips, jokes, insults, and the like.
There is probably more out there, given that we live in an age of a new literary art form, the tweet, and I imagine that there are good providers of philosophically-related insight or amusement on Twitter. For example, check out this article in the LA Times on @NeinQuarterly (“At Starbucks I order under the name Godot. Then leave.”). Of course you all already follow @dailynouseditor. But who out there in Twitterdom should philosophers follow for the occasional pause to reflect–or chuckle?


This is a very different kind of Game of Thrones spoiler. Francis Schmidt, associate professor of art and animation at Bergen Community College in New Jersey, was suspended without pay for a photo he shared on Google+, where it was seen by several colleagues. The photo? A picture of his daughter wearing a Game of Thrones t-shirt with the words “I will take what is mine with fire & blood” written on it. The quote is from Daenerys Targaryen, mother of dragons, rightful heir to the blah blah blah… in other words, a character on the show.  The dean of the college took the posting of the photo as a threat, and according to Inside Higher Ed, a security official at the school “said that ‘fire’ could be kind of a proxy for ‘AK-47s.’”
Are you familiar with Hanlon’s Razor? One version is this: never assume malice when incompetence will do. This is generally a good heuristic, I’ve found.
This case sounds like incompetence, right? Except for: “Schmidt believes he was targeted in part because he filed a grievance against the college a week before the post for being passed up for a sabbatical.” Hmmm.
There are other reports of the story at TechDirt and Gawker. (via Michaela McSweeney)

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Sarsha Simone Sings No More Drama Sarsha brought drama


Sarsha Simone Sings No More Drama

Sarsha brought drama to The Voice stage with Mary J Blige's R'n'B hit. Sasha

Sarsha Simone is hoping that she is that one voice he wants with her fierce performance of No More Drama – but will.i.am continues to hold out for that one thing, leading Ricky to ‘break the rules’ by offering to work with Sarsha on her career! There is a new book called The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, coming out on July 8th from Harvard Business Review Press...

allinacecover
A SINGING nun who has charmed audiences across Italy with romping renditions of Alicia Keys' No One and Cyndi Lauper's Girls Just Want To Have Fun heads into the finals of TV talent show The Voice as an unusual front-runner

My cousin Andrej Imrich is pleased


  • Ricky Martin he sings with The Voice Of Italy. Ricky ... - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2ipi4stzE0
    May 29, 2014 - Uploaded by HOTWORDPERU
    Ricky Martin he sings with The Voice Of Italy. Ricky Martin he sings with Suor Cristina Scuccia ...

  • “She has that perfect balance of soul and control and her voice is as highly individual as our
    own Kylie Auldist and Lanie Lane.” – John Hardaker, The Orange Press 
    Sydney Sarsha Simone the Septembers


    CODA: The Voice is a popular televised singing competition on NBC. The finale of its sixth season aired last night, and the winner is Josh Kaufman, who took part in the competition while taking a break from pursuing his master’s degree in philosophy at Northern Illinois University. You can watch Mr. Kaufman talking about his philosophy studies here, and see him singing Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” which may or may not have been about his master’s thesis.

    How much it costs to hire your favorite singer -  this story with some interesting numbers.
    Los Lobos and George Clinton and Bone Thugs and Harmony and Toots and the Maytals charge in the 20-35k range for appearances; that’s not so much considering what you get.  Fountains of Wayne (remember them?) goes for 20-30k.

    De la Soul goes for 15-20k, as do the Indigo Girls, and for Jefferson Starship it may go up to 25k.  The English Beat and PM Dawn (still underrated, apparently) cost only 5-10k.

    Bruce Springsteen is a million dollars and up.  Many artists I have never heard of go for 200k and up.

    Dave Matthews tribute band is 10k, while Dave Matthews is $1 million and the voice of Jozef Imrich is priceless ...

    Tax Is the Hottest Legal Practice - Marginal Rate 367K %


    Hawaii's Top Marginal Tax Rate: 367,100%

    Terrance Jalbert (Hawaii), Gary Fleischman (Texas Tech) & Mercedes Jalbert (Institute for Business and Finance Research), Marginal Tax Rates Around the Hawaii Itemized Deduction Cliff:
    HawaiiThe State of Hawaii allows paid State taxes as an itemized deduction on the State income tax return. The deduction is available only for individuals with Federal adjusted gross income less than $200,000. Hawaii also limits total itemized deductions to $50,000 for individuals with Federal adjusted gross income of $200,000 or above. These provisions create a tax cliff that implies extraordinary marginal tax rates. The added dollar of income from $199,999 to $200,000 triggers a loss of the entire tax paid deduction and caps itemized deductions at $50,000. We compute marginal tax rates for adjusted gross income levels around the $200,000 tax cliff. Results indicate marginal tax rates reach levels as high as 367,100 percent. The paper provides taxpayers with concise information regarding the importance of these Hawaii tax cliffs and suggests policy changes.

    WSJ: Tax Is the Hottest Legal Practice Area

    After years of relatively sluggish demand for legal services, there just might be a light at the end of the post-recession tunnel. An analysis of 2014 law firm financials thus far shows—wait for it—growth in demand for transactional practices, many of which were hit hard during the financial downturn.
    "Through the first quarter we’ve seen strength in M&A, corporate work, real estate, tax,” said Mark Medice, Senior Director and head of Peer Monitor, a division of  Thomson Reuters that tracks performance among about 150 large law firms. ... [D]emand for corporate work was up 5% in Q1 compared to the same time in 2013, and has risen three of the past four quarters. Growth in demand for tax work rose by 6.7%, while real estate was up 3.7%--its fourth consecutive up quarter.

    How Freud Infiltrated Everyday English


    How Freud Infiltrated Everyday English


    freud
    It goes far beyondOedipus complex, Freudian slip, and id – tofather surrogate, sublimation, libido, character trait, and beyond. (We’ll leave aside parapraxis. And don’t even start about you-know-what envy.)



    Why There Are Ghostwriters

    ghostwriter
    Jessa “Bookslut” Crispin considers the reasons that ghostwriters’ clients want to be seen as authors in the first place, why the ghostwriters themselves will do the job, and why the reading public calmly accepts the arrangements.

    Monday, May 19, 2014

    No one would dream of telling an adult that novels offer a better experience than history or biography

    How Smartphones Are Leading People Back To The ‘Great Books’

    stephen_king_kindle-620x412
    For a start, War and Peace isn’t as heavy to schlep around on an iPhone. But there’s also the growing phenomenon of “interstitial reading”.
    czech out Salon 

    Why Is There So Little Non-Fiction For Children?

    tiny-compos_2905460b
    “No one would dream of telling an adult that novels offer a better experience than history or biography. So why do we do this with children?”

    We read to know we are not alone ...

            At each street corner, looking back
    I see myself among the ruined squares,
    the cafés and the harbour bars, 
    repeating the identical mistakes.
    ~ jozef Imrich will never learn from his lessons ...


    In my play about C.S.Lewis, Shadowlands, I gave Lewis the line, ‘We read to know we’re not alone.’ That has been my own experience. It’s through books that people I’ve never met have reached out to me, saying, ‘This is what matters most to me. Does it matter to you too?’ This feeds something very different to the appetite for entertainment. It feeds, I suppose, the hunger for meaning.
    Orwell of Howell (Havel) Fame

    We seek the immortality of fame around the same time our bodies begin to seek the sweet peace of oblivion. Such is the contradiction of being human. – Jonathan Grimwood, The Last Banquet

    Computers didn't kill privacy.
    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg didn't kill privacy.
    So who killed privacy? We all did, of course. Accidentally, perhaps.
    Or maybe, like the fairies in Peter Pan, privacy only lived as long as we continued to believe in it. 
    ~ History like our stories repeat across generations as few of us avoid bulls or fools ...

    All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. 
    – Anatole France


    If hell is waiting for us, how can we not be afraid? And if there is no escape, what is the point of anything we do?
    ~ bear pit participants ...
    There was no plan B. And plan A leaked water all over the place. –Niccolò Ammaniti, Let the Games Begin