Sunday, February 21, 2016

People First? Sartre Second ...

“First we have to believe, and then we believe.”
 Martha Graham

Pity Sartre! He spent three years wooing Wanda Kosakiewicz. Then Camus turned up and within days slept with her. Sartre never forgave him....  French chasing Polish Princess 



Two surgically removed legs have been found protruding from a pile of rubbish at a waste management centre in Newcastle. According to the ABC, police said the incident was not being treated as suspicious but the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) is investigating the “inappropriate disposal” of the body parts.

Near Newyork Malachi A. Love-Robinson, 18, has been arrested and accused of practising medicine without a license after performing a physical exam on a patient that turned out to be an undercover agent, reports The New York Times.

Beware the ex-believer, the heretic, the zealous ideological convert. How their hothouse style shaped American politics...more-shaping  Shaping ...

Sporting apparel giant Nike has terminated its contract with Filipino boxing superstar Manny Pacquiao after he called homosexuals “worse than animals”.
“Have you seen any animal having male-to-male or female-to-female relations?” he said. “If you have male-to-male or female-to-female (relationships), then people are worse than animals.”

In two days, contact information of about 20,000 FBI employees and 9,000 DHS employees was published Hackers Obtain Nearly 30,000 FBI, DHS Employees' Personal Information


“A book. The memoirs of a journalist, the story of a year’s work setting up a newspaper that will never be published.”
The coroner said affairs were common in the police force and recommended major changes to the force's conflict of interest policy to include "ongoing intimate relationships". Affairs

The Behavioural Economics Oscars, widely known as the Becons, have become the most eagerly awaited of the year-end movie awards (even if the highly influential awards committee consists of just one person). Finally, the wait is over. A standing (and fully rational) ovation for the Becon winners of 2015…The year's best movies from a behavioural economist's perspective
 


2016

Social networks storm the workplace ...
5 Trends That Will Change How Companies Use Social Media In 2016
Fast Company, Dec 2015
Beneficial intelligence


5 Consumer Trends for 2016 Trendwatching. 

“Neither too wet nor too dry,
Neither too low nor to high,
Neither too loose nor too tight,
Neither too dark nor too bright,
Neither too mad nor too mild,
Neither too tame nor too wild,
Neither too thick nor too thin,
Neither too Out nor too In.”
The Writer’s Workbench: 50 Tools You Can Use 


Getting to the front door is a challenge. Picture courtesy of Seven News
Getting to the front door is a challenge. Picture courtesy of Seven NewsSource:Channel 7

“Walked out the front door this morning to find a good six-metre spread of tumbleweed across the front of the house — again,” local Jason Perna told the ABC.
Male Sellers on eBay Have an Edge Over Women, Study Finds New York Times. Um, why used a gendered handle on eBay

A quality not often recognized in Orwell is nimbleness, a gift for gracefully changing directions, switching tone and subject matter without forcing the issue or causing the reader undue vertigo. I speak here of his essays and newspaper columns, not his ham-handed fiction.Orwell’s “As I Please” column published in the Tribune on this date, Feb. 12, in 1947, opens with a letter sent to him by a rather overheated Scottish Nationalist, hardly a promising subject for an American reader in 2016. But Orwell preserves its relevance to our time by generalizing the subject, noting that attention is best paid to separatist movements and other bothersome or potentially violent cliques: 
“At any rate, I think we should pay more attention to the small but violent separatist movements which exist within our own island. They may look very unimportant now, but, after all, the Communist Manifesto was once a very obscure document, and the Nazi Party only had six members when Hitler joined it.”  It would almost be worth being dead


Before September 2011, there was no way for people to freely access paywalled research en masse; researchers like Elbakyan were out in the cold. Sci-Hub is the first website to offer this service and now makes the process as simple as the click of a single button BigThink 

New York Times Sunday Review:  Death, the Prosperity Gospel and Me, by Kate Bowler (Duke Divinity School): On a Thursday morning a few months ago, I got a call from my doctor’s assistant telling me that I have Stage 4 cancer. The stomach cramps I was suffering from were not caused by a faulty gallbladder, but by a massive tumor.
I am 35. I did the things you might expect of someone whose world has suddenly become very small. I sank to my knees and cried. I called my husband at our home nearby. I waited until he arrived so we could wrap our arms around each other and say the things that must be said. I have loved you forever. I am so grateful for our life together. Please take care of our son. Then he walked me from my office to the hospital to start what was left of my new life.
But one of my first thoughts was also Oh, God, this is ironic. I recently wrote a book called “Blessed.” [Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel (Oxford University Press, 2013)]

“If I were to write detective stories, he thought to himself, I would never leave the reader at sea.”
Jeffrey Harrison (Florida), Help! My Dean Won't Let Me Blog:
The handful of you who come to this blog may wonder why I have not been blogging (although I am sure my anonymous internet stalker is probably relieved).
It's my Dean. I used to have a nice hobby bitching about one thing or another. You know, stuff like getting a big payday for pimping out the students, side deals for everything from teaching a course to taking on the huge responsibility of being a Center Director when there are only about 8 students who care what the Center is doing, foreign programs for the privileged, vanity courses, and the "not technically a lie" culture.

 Furious George: monkey in Brazil drinks rum and chases bar patrons with knife Guardian 

Brian Wood spent seven years among hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, studying what they ate and how they got it. He also learned about naturefaking... Faking Life 


“Wouldn’t it be better to make your book stand out by giving it a more memorable title which didn’t seem like it was lifted from a dictionary of unusual words in a desperate attempt to sound unique?”  The Guardian (UK) 

Via Outlawyer: The news lighting up them social medias right now is the confirmation straight from the White House that President Obama is going to skip Justice Scalia’s funeral on Saturday at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Whether this is because noted Muslim Barack HUSSEIN Obama would burst into flame if he crossed the church’s threshold or because he cannot bear to attend the funeral of someone he smothered to death a week earlier is unknown.
Antonin Scalia Links