Monday, December 21, 2020

Sandholme at Husky: “ FBI Under the rug”

Look at that Husky sunlight


Gracing that Federation building wall


A summer blessing. .  .


Sandholme Guesthouse is a sophisticated and fully-equipped Huskisson holiday house. Bookings directly with the owners Alan and Christine ...


Sandholme is certainly unique. Built in 2000 on a large block of land owned by Christine’s family since the 1950s, this federation-style building recalls the grand old guesthouses of Husky’s past. Back in the late 1800s and early 19th Century, guesthouses were about the only options available. Sadly, those classic colonial buildings are gone now, knocked down to make way for blocks of flats or motels.

*****Sandholme at Husky a place where the Christmas cake is soaked in Rum and Frangi Panni is salmon colour


Swedish: ornamental name from sand ‘sand’ + holm ‘island’. )


 Political Obituary for Donald Trump The Atlantic


‘Under the rug:’ Sexual misconduct shakes FBI’s senior ranks AP


The failure of Australian companies in Asia

Australian corporates are reluctant to enter into commercial relationships in foreign countries, particularly those in Asia, and this is at odds with our geographic location and our rhetoric. Continue reading 


Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide.  This year’s best travel book?  And do you get the joke in the subtitle?  It has an unusual flair, excellent photos, and will make the updated “best of the year” list.


Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis.  a very well-done book about mankind’s biggest problem and risk — what more could you want?  I didn’t find much shocking new in here, but a very good overview for most readers.


Stephen Baxter, Ages in Chaos: James Hutton and the Discovery of Deep Time.  Yes that is Baxter the excellent science fiction author and here is his excellent book on both the history of geology and the Scottish Enlightenment.  What more could you ask for?


 Diana Darke, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe.  Among its other virtues, this book makes it clear just how much valuable architectural the world lost in Syria.  I had not known that the Strasbourg Münster was the tallest medieval structure still standing in the world.  Good photos too.


John Darwin, Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam 1830-1930 (UK link only, I paid the shipping costs).  I felt I knew a good bit of this material already, still this is a well-researched and very solid take on one of the most important factors behind the rise of globalization and international trade, namely the fast steamship and how it enabled so much urban growth for ports.


 Charles Koch, with Brian Hooks.  Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World.  The best of the three Charles Koch books, interesting throughout, and much more personal and revealing than the generic title would imply.  I read the whole thing.

There is Deirdre Nansen McCloskey and Alberto Mingardi, The Myth of the Entrepreneurial State, a book-length reply to Mariana Mazzucato.  For me it was too polemical, though I agree many of Mazzucato’s claims are overstated.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Think, Write, Speak:Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editoris an entertaining read.  It is good to see him call out Pasternak’s Zhivago for being a crashing bore. And to call Lolita a poem, repeatedly.

Kevin Vallier, Trust in a Polarized Age, I agree with the argument, and it is a good example of a philosopher using social science empirical work.

And Simon Baron-Cohen, The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention.  OK enough, but underargued relative to what I was expecting.

I have only browsed them, but two very good books on Roman history are:

Anthony A. Barrett, Rome is Burning: Nero and the Fire that Ended a Dynasty.

Michael Kulikowski, The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantinople to the Destruction of Roman Italy.


Reith Lectures 2020 – How We Get What We Value Mark Carney BBC. JHR: “Mark Carney has already delivered the first two lectures, the third is this week.” From the BBC site:

Mark Carney’s Reith Lectures will chart how we have come to esteem financial value over human value and how we have gone from market economies to market societies. He argues that this has contributed to a trio of crises: of credit, Covid and climate. And the former Bank of England governor will outline how we can turn this around.


Beware The ‘Post-War Hangover’ From Misguided Government Belt Tightening Heisenberg Report