Question arises as who will go to heaven ...
- Like Putin, Trump is helping billionaires and religious leaders who support them both ...
- Rising Tzar: Putin KGB Agent Who Stole Communist Treasures ...
- Mary Trump’s Too Much and Never Enough sold 950,000 copies
- Legal attempts to prevent book’s publication failed
- Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man, referring to Donald Trump, was published on Tuesday and had sold 950,000 copies by the end of the first day, including pre-sales, ebooks and audio books.
It’s about Ronnie Cameron of Little Rock, the billionaire head of Mountaire Poultry; his significant involvement in Republican politics (Huckabee, Cotton and most particularly Trump); the hundreds of millions he’s put in a private religio-political organization; the unflattering picture of his poultry operations (anti-union miserly, anti-regulation), and a whole lot more. A good dose of Little Rock family life is included, too, from his younger days as heir to the company created by his father.
It’s a book-length treatment of Cameron, but it’s also about how the poultry industry has gotten itself declared essential and gotten fat off foreign exports in the name of protecting the American food chain. It’s about the hotbed of COVID-19 the poultry plants have become and how Trump administration influence has been helpful to them all, not insignificantly Tyson Foods.
Tremendous reporting on a man who keeps a very low local profile while wielding an enormous amount of political influence.
Striking anecdote, in the course of relating Cameron’s religious conservatism. It was related by a Hall High School friend and open gay, Bobby Duffy, who went on to a longtime career in journalism in St. Louis.
Oh and there’s a spokesman for a union that represents Mountaire workers quoted (and showing a check stub) as saying the company deducted the cost of protective gear from workers’ paychecks. The company denies this.
Dark Towers review: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and a must-read mystery
Mark P. Gergen (UC-Berkeley), The Possibility for Stateless Dynastic Wealth and the Case of China:
Part I of this paper explains how wealth managers have modified the trust to create the possibility for stateless dynastic wealth. By this I mean wealth that is held by a family through a trust that is established in a haven state to eliminate the power of other states to regulate and oversee transmission and management of wealth and to make it very difficult for courts in another state to levy against wealth on behalf of private creditors. These structures also permit legal tax avoidance if income and wealth is not attributed to family members. And they facilitate tax evasion by not reporting foreign income and wealth. I use the relatively novel structure of a perpetual purpose trust to illustrate.
What To Do With Problematic Books? Read Them
The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate. – Washington Post
After producing over 220 art history videos in 6 years, YouTube channel The Art Assignment is going to take an extended break to “reassess what educational art content should look like in 2020 and beyond”. In the video above, creator Sarah Urist Green reflects on her experience so far and what’s happening next. I’m always interested in what people have to say about their projects at inflection points like this, but I was blindsided by the almost total resonance of Green’s remarks with my own thoughts about the advantages & limitations of how I’ve chosen to work here at kottke.org. Here’s an extended quote from the transcript of the particularly resonant bit:
I don’t actually enjoy being on camera, but individual authentic voices have always been at the core of what makes YouTube great. And I’ve been glad to be able to lend my own voice in the hopes of making art and art history more accessible.
Over time I’ve learned to appreciate the specificity of my own point of view — but also its limitations. I’m a person who’s more interested in art from the 1960s than the 1560s. I have a deeper background in art from North America than South America.
Making this channel has been a hugely rewarding way to stretch beyond my formal education and natural inclinations. But any channel on YouTube, and indeed any experience, is shaped by bias and perspective — both the content itself and the way that each of us interprets and responds to it. The fact that my voice sounds grating to some and comforting to others is a reminder of that.
I’ve also learned that these biases are often reinforced by the recommendation algorithms that govern the platforms we frequent. Whether we want to or not, we citizens of the internet work in collaboration with these algorithms to curate information feeds for ourselves. And even if our feeds feel objective, they never are.
The Art Assignment isn’t, and has never been, the history of art or an introduction to the art world. It’s always been my history of art and a glimpse into my art world. I hope that’s been part of what makes it good, but it’s also part of what makes it limited, subjective, and necessarily incomplete.
The more videos we make, the more aware I am of the vast amount we haven’t covered. Trying to make content on this platform that is both educational and also clickable can be a challenging task with many pitfalls.
We’ve used what I think of as a buckshot technique — making a huge variety of kinds and formats of episodes to see what might possibly stick.
In doing so, we’ve discovered that more people click on names of art movements they’ve already heard of, artworks they’ve seen before, and already famous artists (mostly male).
What To Do With Problematic Books? Read Them
The great reckoning now sweeping across pop culture has been working through the stacks of literature for far longer. The effects of time are twofold: Most books have fallen into dust, along with the racist values they imbibed. And those few texts that survive have been subjected to rigorous — and ongoing — debate. – Washington Post
This is delightful. Over the past few months of pandemic lockdown, the residents and staff of the Sydmar Lodge Care Home in Edgware, England have passed the time by recreating famous album covers
Vale Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020)
It is with sadness that I bring the news that Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020) has died in Sydney.
Until Text Publishing began reissuing her novels in their Text Classics series, most of us had never heard of Elizabeth Harrower, and yet her writing was greatly admired by notable authors such as Christina Stead and Patrick White. She had published four novels from 1957 to 1966, but then, by her own choice, her work lapsed into obscurity after she withdrew her last novel from publication shortly after her mother died. She then abandoned writing altogether.
