Wednesday, August 08, 2018

Losing Cold River and Earth

It's not always easy to tell the difference between thinking and looking out of the window
— Wallace Stevens, who died in 1955
If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
We all dream of escaping. If not in our waking lives, then subsumed, interred – to reappear in our dreamlives, in the whorls and ditches of lakndscapes where we run in the howling wind and hide. Hide. But imagine escaping as Steve M... did?
Old Roman Libraries


 Did it really have no meaning?
Well, I never thought I’d hear those words from you
Who needs a meaning anyway?
I’d settle any day for a very fine view.

Anger and tenderness. Adrienne Rich wrote little while raising her three sons, but the experience changed her: “Motherhood radicalized me” Anger and Love 

“It is a miracle that New York works at all,” wrote E.B. White. “The whole thing is implausible.” Is the city the apotheosis of America or a national outlier? Maybe both... Sydney Is A Miracle Too 

 Targeting people - German photojournalist Herlinde Koelbl
My days always followed the same route: downstream and back. I returned with photographs and small found objects such as feathers and stones, or the seed pods of withered flowers. Little by little the fluvial landscape took over my flat…The river itself would probably have been astonished.
















Coldest Hooks
Look past the tanned, laughing faces;
past the ease of friendship; past eyeliner
and braces, perfect skin free of worry lines.

The shadows around them say 11 a.m.,
hours since oyster boats slipped through the mouth
of the Potomac to dreg the bay’s beds.

In the corner you see empty docks,
gasoline pumps, a police boat swaying
chained to the pier, the waters much cleaner

than decades ago when industrial waste
and chemical froth choked out the rockfish,
suffocated the bivalves. Recovery can take years.

Now eagles and osprey swoop to snatch
any gleam of silver from the waters. You set a sweating
glass down on the table, slip into a kind of grace

you never see coming. Somewhere beneath the tides
a body floats out of sight, one of the boys
who jumped from a boulder on a dare,

or leap from the bridge out of despair, a lone figure
falling into the grey, swirling waters as miles
away skipjacks haul in nets heavy with mud,

shells, and eelgrass. What mother
could imagine her son lifted
by the cold hook as it drags along the bottom?

In the photograph, there’s no hint
of the tragedies to come, just the realization
the gates of suffering are always open and ready

to give birth—hair slick with womb juices, skin pearled
to a waxy smoothness, the body curled as it breaks
the surface, ready to sing out its wail of life.


The New York Times Magazine” is dedicated to a single article – Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change – We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves. A tragedy in two acts…This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.”

Peter Hardy, here, has the great posting:  The BSA Civil Penalty Regime: Reckless Conduct Can Produce “Willful” Penalties (Money Laundering Watch 8/1/18), here.  Peter discusses the developments in the FBAR civil willfulness penalty context (often discussed on this blog) but says

[T]he point of this post is that the case law now being made in the FBAR and offshore account context will have direct application to more traditional Anti-Money Laundering (“AML”)/BSA enforcement actions, because the civil penalty statute being interpreted in the FBAR cases is the same provision which applies to claimed failures to maintain an adequate AML program and other violations of the BSA.  Thus, the target audience of this post is not people involved in undisclosed offshore bank account cases, but rather people involved in day-to-day AML compliance for financial institutions, who may not realize that some missteps may be branded as “willful” and entail very serious monetary penalties, even if they were done without actual knowledge.  This may be news to some, and it underscores in particular the risks presented by one the topics that this blog frequently has discussed: the potential AML liability of individuals.



JOHN LLOYD SIGNS OFF

Tap future APS leaders who can avoid PC 'group think': Lloyd
PARTING ADVICE: Mandarins need ways to tap the public sector leaders of tomorrow on the shoulder rather than wait patiently for the cream to rise to the top, thinks the departing APS chief.
Why Lloyd's APS supporters will miss him
ANALYSIS: When the APS Commissioner leaves his Parkes office for the last time tomorrow, there will be more than few public servants who will be sad to see him go – including union members.

Time to fix the federal Public Service Act
VERONA BURGESS: It is an absurdity that the PM can merely pick whoever he wants to be the commissioner – with no specified competitive process.
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