Monday, June 06, 2016

Troubled Rivers: Why Our Rich Families Complain

“The sole means of ridding man of crime is to rid him of freedom.”
~ Yevgeny Zamyatin, We (trans. Natasha Randall)
Visiting the Coogee Surf Lifesaving Club with his deputy Tanya Plibersek, Mr Shorten said: “In the worst of times, we see the best of Australia. “I want to acknowledge the volunteers and the professionals that I have met, from the SES, from the club, from the police, from the fire department. “It sometimes takes a disaster to bring out the best in people, but I’ve got no doubt that what we will see here is this club will rebuild.
How can anyone forget this weekend weather and Matt Thistlethwaite's election launch tide at Maroubra Beach? Maroubra Under Attack During Wild Storms

TO'R is invading Sydney from Brissie... To Discuss - The Rich Are Different, and It Matters Bloomberg

Dudge points out that #1 - NUMBER ONE on the AMAZON River Bestseller List is the forthcoming Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate

Dr Madden adds: "Organizations that succeed in this are more likely to attract, retain, and motivate the employees they need to build sustainably for the future, and to create the kind of workplaces where human beings can thrive."
See http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/what-makes-work-meaningful-or-meaningless/?utm_medium=pr&utm_source=release&utm_campaign=featjune16 for more information
*Meaningful work not created, only destroyed, by bosses, study finds ScienceDaily

"We don’t learn much of anything from the past," says David Rieff. The crimes of then provide no prophylactic against those of now...  Art of Forgetting 


Why They Died: The Motivations of American Soldiers in 12 Great Wars

TELLING THE STORY OF WORLD WAR II IN 10 MOVIES: I’d add the Longest Day to this list; even after Saving Private Ryan, it holds up quite well

Via Pacific Standard: Troubled Water: A Map of Tomorrow’s Thirsty Future A survey of regional water crises: community stress and political standoffs
“North America – The Ogallala aquifer provides nearly one-third of the groundwater used for irrigation in the United States. In 2013, researchers estimated that, at current rates, farming in places like Kansas is set to peak in the 2040s, declining thereafter from water stress…”

Glyphosate Found in Urine of 93 percent of Americans Tested EcoWatch

World War III will be fought over water Quartz

“I remember, I remember,
The fir trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
But now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heav’n
Than when I was a boy.”
Tweet of Note: Taxes and Trump 

A new prophecy is needed, and the nature of the new prophecy, like the old, will be shaped by bohemian language 

The one thing rich parents do for their kids that makes all the difference Washington Post 
“One strategy I sometimes recommend to people is that early in their career they live in the place where their industry is headquartered. Bay Area for tech, New York for finance and publishing, LA for movies, Michigan for furniture and cars, Nashville for country music, etc. Soak up everyone’s expertise. Study. Learn. Even if you don’t want to start the next Google, you’ll learn a lot by way of “network intelligence” from physically living in Silicon Valley. But feel free to leave and join a lower-cost-of-living secondary market if and when you begin to feel perpetually not-quite-good-enough. This doesn’t mean moving to the boonies, but to a place where there’s plenty of industry activity but less happiness-hurting status jostling.
Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich

pies_black_and_white_on_fllor
Evolution and loneliness

THINGS FALL APART; THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD: David Solway on “Excluded Middles.”
  
THE MIRACULOUS EXPLOSION OF HUMAN PROGRESS IN THE PAST TWO CENTURIES:
“The Great Enrichment of the past two centuries has one primary source: the liberation of ordinary people to pursue their dreams of economic betterment.” How very odd then that the Progressives are so sure that the only route to a better world is for enlightened leaders like themselves to control and regulate the economy, and the people. (As I just said, they really don’t understand cause and effect).

Here is more from Ben Casnocha.  Here is an email I wrote to Ben about related themes:
Talk, though, I think is in this case deceiving.
Take non-billionaires.  They (like billionaires) gossip an enormous amount.  Yet it is still ultimately a self-centered activity.  It is a way of processing the self. I am not saying there is *no* concern for other people involved, but talking about other people is very often mainly a way of talking about the self.
Now, if one billionaire says “isn’t XXXX a bigger billionaire than I am?,” I think this is often somewhat similar.  It is still a way of consuming being a billionaire.
It’s a bit like how people enjoy complaining.  When people complain about events on their vacation, that is very often (not always!) their mode of enjoying.
It’s as if being a billionaire isn’t real until you complain about it, and compare yourself to the others.  Think of “manufacturing vividness” as what is going on here, in the ultimate anthropological sense, more than just mere status games.  A Life-cycle theory of status seeking billionairs ...

 Want to end corruption? Crack down on tax havens. Nicholas Shaxson, Washington Post

Study: Men Underestimate How Much Their Wives and Girlfriends Want Sex. Note that this could be framed as a story about females being poor communicators, but that would violate the rule that all sex differences must be portrayed in a way that makes women look good

Over 1 Million Russians Are Modern Slaves — Report Moscow Times

A little while ago, it was revealed that the Queensland taxpayers were picking up the bill for Campbell Newman’s indefensible defence in a defamation action brought against him and Jarrod Bleijie (aka Boy Wonder) for accusing two Gold Coast lawyers of being bikie criminals, apparently on the sole basis that they were fulfilling the professional obligation of providing some bikies with a defence. The bill amounted to $0.5 million, and was greatly increased because Newman and Bleijie refused to mitigate the damages by apologising.
Now, thanks to the Oz, we learn how we are paying for the new State Executive Building, which Newman and then-Treasurer Tim Nicholls assured us we would get for nothing as part of a complex land deal. In reality, it turns out Newman left us on the hook for a 15-year lease at above market prices. Of course, the Oz being the Oz, this is presented as the fault of the current Labor government, which denounced the deal at the time and has continued to do so. John Quiggin on Newman

"For Gawker, Legal Issues Beyond Hogan": Katie Rogers and Danielle Ivory have this article in today's edition of The New York Times. Also in that newspaper today, Stephen Marche has an op-ed titled "Gawker Smeared Me, and Yet I Stand With It."

It will be pointed out—and is true—that only a tiny fraction of Europe’s migrant population represent this kind of threat. But with machine guns and bombs, just a few bad actors can kill hundreds. If there is another attack like Paris, European public opinion will not coldly calculate the statistical relationship between refugees and terrorists. Unlike their elites, who derive a psychic benefit from seeing their countries be so generous, the European public sees this not as the “cost” of an otherwise-desirable “refugees welcome” policy, but an added downside to a situation that increasingly they deplore to begin with. 
Europe’s elite has an unspoken but increasingly clear plan for dealing with all of this: give the security services wide latitude (often much wider than their counterparts have in the U.S.) to chase down the bad guys, don’t say anything more than is absolutely necessary to the public that suggests that immigrants or Islam might have anything to do with it, police the public square and keep the far-right down (including online), and pray it all passes quietly. The main focus is to prevent a backlash against Muslims and/or immigrants on the one hand, while preventing terror on the other—two concerns seen as balanced poles to be avoided.
But there’s a problem—or rather two. Firstly, as long as Europe doesn’t have answers either to the root of the refugee problem—Syria and Libya—or to the enforcement situation at its borders (other than “pray Erdogan doesn’t alter the deal any further), then the elites have no real idea how long this will persist, while the strain wears away on the fabric of European politics. And the second is that, as an older generation of terrorists once said, “[R]emember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”


Written evidence from Professor Prem Sikka (PPF0009) The accounts of BHS and Related Companies 


Has a Hungarian physics lab found a fifth force of nature? Nature

THE PERILS OF “PERFECTING:”
“A Spectre is Haunting Europe” – again. Now, as in Marx’s proclamation, an idea generated in Europe has had consequences elsewhere that threaten modern civilization…

LISA DE PASQUALE: Hollywood Boobs: Actresses Beg to Be Taken Seriously, But Can’t Quit Temptation of the Flesh


Note this the summary statement on witchcraft in 2016 AD, together with  the full article.  As well as related papers by Gershman

 (Man Is an Onion: Reviews and Essays, 1972). Enright takes his title from “Valuable” (The Frog Prince and Other Poems, 1955):   
“Why do you not put some value on yourselves,
Learn to say, No?
Did nobody teach you?
Nobody teaches anybody to say No nowadays,
People should teach people to say No.”
~ Georgina Edaw  and Inc ;-)
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