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I feel the need to sin Quelle façon de parler

I am perennially on the verge of leaving, but the hypocrite from WildWest may serve, among other things, as a deformed ambassador of the truth.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS BOOK PLEASE CONSIDER LEAVING A REVIEW. THANK YOU.

Is that too much to ask?

Ach， The influenza season draws to a good start on level 12 … [U]sers are selfish, lazy, and ruthless – Jakob Neilsen, definition of the online reader in ‘Information Foraging: Why Google Makes People Leave Your Site Faster’ The responsibilities and duties of being a MediaDragon reader in the 21st century -- I wonder what kind of person would come out if I ever did erase all my inhibitions at once, what kind of being is bottled up inside me now. Would I like him? I think not. There’s more than one of me, probably. There’s more than just an id. I know that I could live with my id if I ever looked upon it whole, sort of snuggle up and get cozy with it. [..] Deep down inside, I might be really great. Deep down inside, I think not. Things They Don't Teach You In Tax Law School

Deliverance from Evil Swedish Lessons
Here in Sweden – as, I believe, in other Scandinavian countries – everyone has access to everyone else’s tax returns on the internet. I’m sure it’s sometimes circumvented, but not in most cases, and it seems to deter dishonesty and greed. People really do feel that they are ‘all in it together’ (whatever ‘it’ is). Steve Jobs rolled around in old Volvo estate when he was young, forming his thoughts, listening to Bob Dylan.

A private equity manager receiving, say, $600 million as a capital gain would pay $90 million in tax. If the same income were treated as income from salary, it would be taxed at 35 percent (and also be subject to a 2.9 percent payroll tax), bringing the private equity manager’s tax bill to $227.4 million — almost $140 million more. The ostensible purpose of the lower capital gains rate is to compensate investors for the risk they take in investing their capital. But private equity and fund managers aren’t investing their own capital. They’re investing other people’s capital. They’re simply money managers. By claiming capital gains treatment, they are passing off regular income as capital gains, simply to save themselves taxes.

• When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead ; How billionaires destroy democracy ["Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity an anthology for anyone who's been broken-hearted ; Rosencrans Baldwin, author of Paris I Love You But You Are Bringing Me Down and co-founder of The Morning News, was on NPR’s All Things Considered’s “You Must Read This” segment and raved about Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado. When people asked how much of the book was biographical, Dundy responded, All the impulsive, outrageous things the heroine does, I did; all the sensible things, I made up How autobiographical ]

• · One of the greatest magazine stories of the past generation, republished in Slate The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician; Everyone loves a success story and the electronic age would not be the same without the extraordinary contributions of Steve Jobs, a brilliant, but misunderstood man. Steve Jobs ；You made us all want to be better people. We wanted to not only learn more, and improve ourselves, but we wanted to share it with others。 My laptops and iPhone allow me to work. To write. They help me navigate the world, take me to places I’ve never been and allow me to learn about things I never knew before. They allow me to walk through history, and to create history. They allow me to think, to learn, to laugh, and to cry. They have helped me to expand my world You made it possible for other people to get published
• · · I am rich and I am the man Whose name is mud But what’s in a name To shame one who knows Mud does not stain Clay he’s made of Dust Adam became— The dust he was— Was he his name Exile Is always Green with hoe The river We cannot cross Flows forever The main character in Jozef Imrich stingingly sad story, “Cold River,” isn’t a person. It’s a location: along the Morava River, a very short river with a big, bizarre place in history. Freud was born on the banks of this river … THE ESCAPE OF SIGMUND FREUD ; Janet Malcom’s In The Freud Archives is the story of conspiracy, obsession, intrigue, and scholarship. ; Those who believe that Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is a great novel are the same people who think “Titanic” is a great film… But all my friends are homeless They do not even have tents
 Were I to seek a safe place I would run nights lost Ice pelting my face 
Sent the wrong way Whenever I ask —
 Afraid to run back,
 Each escape the last How do we amplify the effect of our common experiences and attenuate the everyday within a matrix of philosophy and art, language and its intervals. In my stories Havel rubs shoulders with Marx, Dubcek with Gorbacov, Zummer with Freud, Brunovsky with Hamilova. And its message is clear. We are all in this together. How much better if we see it sooner rather than later. Escape of Jozef Imrich
• · · · It's because in the print world, books are returnable, which means that if a bookstore doesn't sell all their copies of something they return it to the publisher for a refund. Ebooks Really Are More Profitable Than Print Books； All these Murphys, Malloys, and Malones do not fool me. They have made me waste my time, suffer for nothing, speak of them when, in order to stop speaking, I should have spoken of me and of me alone… I thought I was right in enlisting these sufferers of my pains. I was wrong. They never suffered my pains, their pains are nothing, compared to mine, a mere tittle of mine, the tittle I thought I could put from me, in order to witness it. Speechless: Beckett's Trilogy ; The central characters are Estrella, the fish-hair woman who uses her 12-metres-long hair like a net to retrieve the dead from the river (“trawl another victim of our senseless war”); her older “sister”, Pilar, who joins the communist insurgents; and Tony, the Australian journalist whom both had loved Merlinda Bobis, Fish-hair woman
• · · · · A poem often has a moment or a movement or an image, to deal with, not a whole series or interrelated and elaborated sequences, nor that sense of duration and vicarious experience that the novel brings. The best a novel can do is use its superstructure, all those cumulative bits of housekeeping, to achieve poem-moments Music to write to (part one) - What is wrong with this world. How is it that so few spend their lives doing things they love and so many do [what] they hate for something they do not need. I want to shout to the masses but [s]o few would listen. I would not have listened. This is it. Do it now. You will not be here again. In living there is always the terror of being stung of something coming for you on the unavoidable wave Unavoidable wave - The Important Thing That Has Gotten Lost ; Monday musings on Australian literature: Louisa Atkinson, and indigenous Australians Local Gandangara people
• · · · · · Imagine: How Creativity Works ； For a second I am mist For a second I am water For an instant I am orange flames If only the moon holds me If only the moon hugs me = Šrut was awarded the 2012 Karel Čapek Prize for his lifetime achievement in literature and has been one of the most important voices in Czechoslovakian literature in the generation after the 1968 uprising ; UK Home Office website went offline for seven hours. The hacker group Anonymous took it down, they said, as a protest against the government’s planned new surveillance legislation How to Snoop

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Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay “Politics and Conscience” as “the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.”
When a genius dies, trouble ensues. Those charged with protecting the maestro’s legacy so very often screw it up. We know the story. Like Jozef Imrich, Van Gogh died having only sold one creation during his lifetime Afterlife of an artist
We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us. He might also have said: We shape our media dragons, and afterwards our dragons shape us World’s, Amerikan, Bohemian ongoing experiment in democracy and economic freedom is to endure

Cold War River : The Specter of Havel
Almost universally hailed today as an intellectual visionary and transformative political leader, Vaclav Havel actually struggled to live up to both of those expectations, an essay in honor of the man appearing in The Nation reminds us. He was something of a reluctant crusader, and took an approach rather nearer to postmodernism, preferring to critique “automation” by inverting maxims, dissecting social situations, and showing the absurdity of totalizing state power. His approach to philosophy came not out out of one easily-identifiable school but was more eclectic:

“I approach philosophy somewhat the way we approach art,” Havel once confessed. Despite his lack of method, he took a reading of Heidegger and a handful of homegrown metaphors and set forth in his writing powerful ideas about politics, truth and human nature. Havel believed that under communism and capitalism, people are threatened by what he described in his 1984 essay “Politics and Conscience” as “the irrational momentum of anonymous, impersonal, and inhuman power—the power of ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages, and political slogans.” This did not make him nihilistic or even anti-traditional, though his sharp eye for linguistic laziness and intellectual deception did impart a sort of existentialist tinge to his faith. It also led him to support a nonideological, bottom-up ‘antipolitical politics’:
The last horizon might be called God, though Havel didn’t insist on the word. He did, however, insist that “responsibility establishes identity.” Responsibility is “the knife we use to carve out our own inimitable features in the panorama of Being,” he wrote. In Havel’s case, he came to a critical sense of responsibility through the ambiguous letter he wrote in 1977, appealing for release from jail. The authorities had claimed that it represented an abandonment of his dissident commitments, and although that hadn’t been his intention, after long self-questioning he nonetheless acknowledged the failure as his own. “We all tried to talk him out of it,” one friend later recalled, but as another explained, once Havel was convinced that the error was his, he set out to “provoke the police to arrest him again,” which they did. Much of his special charisma in the dissident movement stemmed from this decision to get rearrested. He acted as if such a sacrifice—in atonement for a failing that few people blamed him for—held meaning, thereby reclaiming the power to determine the meaning of his life, even in his errors. “Whether all is really lost or not,” Havel explained in one of his letters to Olga, “depends entirely on whether or not I am lost.” He meant the proposition to be true of everyone. He believed that change would come to Communist Czechoslovakia when ordinary people across the country began to insist, as he did, on living fully human lives. His faith in the effect of this “antipolitical politics” was like his faith in art; though such a politics is “hidden, indirect, long-term, and hard to measure,” he was sure it would prevail.

• Whether all is really lost or not ; It wasn’t meant as a compliment. But Vaclav wore it like a badge of honor Hidden, indirect, long-term, and hard to measure [ Václav Havel's enduring ideas about politics, truth and human nature ; Rise of the gutless novelists. Where is today’s Tagore or Orwell? Wedged too tightly behind their laptops, have literary writers given up on politics? Kundera's novels are a magnificently rich blend of philosophy, psychology and politics relating to Czech Republic and France Why are English and American novels today so gutless? ; Havel tackled free will, Tolstoy the meaning of life, Imrich practiced what they preached. We all need to acquire a knack for finding beauty and charisma in the ordinary and familiar. Start reading Cold River on your Kindle in under a minute ； Criticism of a book is criticism of its author. The sting can linger for years. Kingsley Amis, however, took it in stride. A bad review could spoil breakfast, he said, but not lunch； Should Writers Reply to Reviewers? - Keith Ash]

• · To be first is everything in science and art. Immortality is at stake. Nobel Prizes, too. Originality is a grand, ignoble, fruitless pursuit... Patrick Victor Martindale White - first shot in the culture wars in The Wonderful Land of Oz； Robert Caro has spent thirty-eight years writing the biography of one man. Pencil-stained perfectionist. Robert Caro’s is a productive, wonderful mania, his epic biographies a window into how publishing used to work The Big Book ; The Titanic is about more than morbid fascination: technological hubris, race, class, gender. Our obsessions were in place long before she set sail. The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown “like a gentleman”—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing “what if”s: for me, there was no better story The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Cold War, and the Titanic
• · · The world’s most typical person is a 28-year old Han Chinese man with no bank account who earns less than $13,000 a year. Marx would not be surprised. About much else, he’d be shocked... Kapital Style is substance ； Fifty years from now, there will be only 10 universities in the world delivering higher education. Sebastian Thrun explains The Stanford Education ; However, good slavicintoxication is making a comeback. Ecstasy and LSD treat PTSD. Pot shrinks tumors. Mushrooms relieve depression. Why the change?. Oscillatory zeitgeist
• · · · Have fiction and philosophy parted ways? Novelists used to take abstract questions and make them real. Now, it seems, writers don’t even try. What’s the big idea? ; If we are among the romantic who are longing to hold the magnificent philosophical novel in our hands and our hours, it is possible that we will, like Miniver Cheevy, miss it.； From “Aaron’s rod” to “zydeco,” the DARE is a monument to a man who had the temerity to undertake a gigantic task – and not worry why... Native Tongues
• · · · · Margaret Fuller was brilliant and obsessive and dreadful company. “The upper lip habitually uplifts itself,” Edgar Allan Poe said of her, “conveying the impression of a sneer” A Double Inheritance: On Margaret Fuller ; From psychoanalysis to neuroscience, Eric Kandel has been driven to ask: How could people listen to Mozart one day and beat up Jews the next?.. he Age of Insight
• · · · · · As the national economy continues to struggle toward recovery from the Great Recession, 2011 was a year of grim headlines.. The federal Library of Congress lost about 9% of its budget and 10% of its workforce ; Libraries are transforming lives by providing patrons the tools needed to compete and thrive in a 21st century market place You belong @ your library as libraries transform lives through technological literacy: ; FTC - April is Financial Literacy Month News release: "April is Financial Literacy Month, and the Federal Trade Commission, the nation's consumer protection agency, has information to help you make the most of your money whether you're a student, young adult, parent, older person, or military service member Financial Literacy

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… Did you know that scientifically, there are two main differences that have been proven between those that ‘have’ and those that ‘have not’. Firstly, people with tertiary qualifications will generally earn more money during their careers. Secondly, the chances of these people being dishonest and deceitful during their careers are doubled. Source: A study conducted by Oxford University during the late 1990s. - SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS Courtesy of HM

Gabbie knows that Melbourne boasts some wonderful old universities, theatres, rich in history, fame and infamy. There is always something on … With most actors working in film and television in Australia, 16th Street offers programs exclusively in screen acting. Indeed, 16th Street Actors Studio developed Australia's first full-time training program for screen performance Good Luck with the Sweet 16nth Street Gabbie; These are some of Australia's busiest and most recognisable stars of the stage and screen, yet going back to school isn't beyond them I was in Villawood and Gabbie hopes to get to this Hollywood ; THE Most VITAL Audition Tip You will EVER Need to Know Scholarship for Actors IF YOU’VE ever wondered why Melbournians often complain bitterly about the dearth of live music far from home, here is the answer: there is lots of it where they come from. Melbourne has more live music venues than any other Australian city. Born to be loud

16th Street on Lucky Black Friday Poetry is not a luxury
For women . . . poetry is not a luxury It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we can predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. - Audre Lorde

Blogs are sometimes overlooked as a significant source of online buzz in comparison to social networking sites, yet consumer interest in blogs keeps growing. By the end of 2011, NM Incite, a Nielsen/McKinsey company, tracked over 181 million blogs around the world, up from 36 million only five years earlier in 2006. People are churning out more content than ever, and blogging remains an important avenue for consumer expression, according to an NM Incite report. Consumer-generated blogs have continued a strong upward trend since the company began tracking them in 2006, according to the U.S. Digital Consumer Report State of The Media: Q3-Q4 2011. While Facebook continues to be the social media juggernaut, don't count blogging out. Combined, the three major blogging platforms -- Blogger, Wordpress and Tumbler, in that order -- account for 80.5 million unique pairs of eyeballs in October 2011, NM Incite said today. (Facebook had 139.1 million unique that month.)" [a hat tip to all my blogging colleagues whose tenure is moving into a second decade - You're the beast!]

• Buzz in the Blogosphere: Millions More Bloggers and Media Dragon Readers [Amazon £7bn sales, no UK corporation tax. Theguardian, 4 April 2012. Amazon.co.uk, Britain's biggest online retailer, generated sales of more than £3.3bn in the country last year but paid no corporation tax on any of the profits from that income - and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities Amazon River ; Two days into leaving, / the river's outer frond flushes worms imagined in the fire / onto the embankment of rust, / mud deep when imagination became an asterisk in the mine How is this possible? How could a book from a first-time author — with English as a second language — hit bestseller lists and stick for a decade and counting? The odds seem impossible: there are more than 200,000 books published each year in the US, and less than 5% ever sell more than 5,000 copies. Cold River: Luck and timing play a (always big) part ; Indie Bestseller Lists let you know what indie readers are buying right now Just because they say it can’t be done doesn’t make it so. Just because it’s labeled “impossible” doesn’t make it even remotely impossible. Do your homework, micro-test like a mother, and trust your conclusions. You could be wrong, and you often will be, but… what if you’re right? Indie Bestsellers | IndieBound]

• · "Some scientists claim that hydrogen, because it is so plentiful, is the basic building block of the universe. I dispute that. I say there is more stupidity than hydrogen, and that is the basic building block of the universe." Frank ZappaPlastic people of the bohemian universe; Did you know that there is a mathematical formula in Western music? A team of researchers from McGill and Stanford analyzed over 2,000 pieces of music by more than 40 different composers over the last 400 years and found that it's the rhythm in the tune that people respond to and enjoy... Rhythm & Response; While constant access to information enabled by digital devices has done much to improve our lives, it also exacts costs with respect to our attention and productivity that are especially harmful in a knowledge based economy. Increased public awareness of the impact of our information consumption habits—and ways to develop a healthier “information diet”—will help mitigate the negative impacts of constant connectivity Restoring Contemplation: How Disconnecting Bolsters the Knowledge Economy
• · · Bruce Hawker has withered in the full glare of publicity, so who can take his place? Before becoming a self-appointed political strategist and media commentator Bruce Hawker was the former Chief of Staff for the new Foreign Minister Bob Carr when Carr was New South Wales Premier. His links to Carr continue as he fades from the political scene and he seems to have set up Mark Arbib as his successor as the next Labor strategist. Bruce Hawker passes the Labor baton to Mark Arbib; In the most explosive evidence at Monday's hearing by the state's gaming authority, a lawyer for The Star read three texts that Peter Grimshaw, Mr O'Farrell's communications director, sent to his partner in 2010. Peter Grimshaw ; Peter Grimshaw quit following two days of sensational testimony at an inquiry by the Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority into whether he or others attempted to undermine Sydney's The Star casino and the position of its former boss, Sid Vaikunta. One year and one week into Barry O'Farrell's government and the first scalp is one of his most powerful aides, the Premier's communications director Peter Grimshaw. worse It has all the sordid feel of a Labor scandal. Maybe, in some ways, it is ; Peter Grimshaw ; It took a wide boy with a tax-haven tan and a big mouth to tell us what’s really going on • Those of us who try to care about this country sink from distaste to disgust to revulsion, till in the end there is nothing left to do but laugh. • Every so often (it happened three times last week) someone says to me that I should find something cheerful to write about. They’ve come to the wrong shop. All the political parties employ battalions of professional liars who can provide you with all the happy falsehoods that you want. • And the power-worshippers and courtiers of political journalism proudly pass on this tripe as if it were their own work Talk about having no shame
• · · · In the last decade, financiers have speculated billions of pounds in food, helping to make prices dearer and more volatile. Speculation by large investment banks is driving up food prices for the world's poorest people, tipping millions into hunger and poverty. Investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen from $65bn to $126bn (£41bn to £79bn) in the past five years, helping to push prices to 30-year highs and causing sharp price fluctuations that have little to do with the actual supply of food, says the United Nations' leading expert on food. The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out ; The Gujarat high court has ruled that banks cannot freeze accounts nor can they stop issuing cheque book or providing ATM facility where the account holder has not supplied KYC ( Know Your Customer) documents. The court has further ruled that presence of the account holder was not a 'must' for production of documents required for KYC. The ruling was given by division bench of Justice Jayant Patel and Justice Paresh Upadhyay last week while hearing a petition seeking temporary bail filed by one of the convicts of the 2008 Patan gangrape case, serving a life term KYC ; An examination of the web of “shell” companies shows that its main ownership leads to Liechtenstein through a company called Deswa Holding Establishment which owns 99 per cent of Venus Projects Ltd in which too Rishi has a stake. As of December 2009, the ownership of Tatra Sipox was between one Mrs Bozen Durdovicoca, Slovakian citizen, who owned 50 per cent shares and Venus Projects (Hong Kong) Ltd which also had 50 per cent stake. Inquiries revealed that Tatra Sipox, which was originally incorporated in 1994, was promoted by one Jozef Majsky of Cervenova in Bratislava, Slovakia and Venus Projects UK Ltd, a fully owned subsidiary of Venus Projects Hong Kong. Venus Projects Ltd’s address has been shown to be 2 Brentford Business Centre, Brentford Middle. TATRA ; Playing with fire Financial innovation can do a lot of good, It is its tendency to excess that must be curbed
• · · · · A whistle blower inside the ATO says it has abused its power and wasted money in a crackdown on highly wealthy people. 7:30 Report These papers (available via the link above) are a follow-up to a roundtable that reviewed the Australian tax system, the Henry Review recommendations and the extent of their implementation, and last year's Tax Summit at Parliament House. In October 2011 the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia, in partnership with the ANU and the Australia New Zealand School of Government, convened a roundtable event examining the tax and social transfer systems. Tax and social security
• · · · · · · Israeli fraudster fights UK attempt to seize assets British police want to confiscate the property of a lawyer who swindled Holocaust survivors CACT ; Eugene O’Neill never staged Long Day’s Journey during his lifetime. It was too painful. Rarely has a playwright stripped himself so bare Blood, sweat and tears
• · · · · · · An overmodest timidity has taken hold among high-style, personality-driven essayists like John Jeremiah Sullivan, who plays the doofus on the page. Why? It sells. The Son Shines Bright ； Thanks to disruptive innovations, much of our world today looks radically different than it did just a decade or two ago. Remember flying in the old days? Air travel used to be inevitably expensive and cumbersome — until Southwest Airlines. Trips to the video store and looming late fees are now a distant memory, thanks to Netflix. In industry after industry, disruptions deliver more for less and change everything from how we communicate with one another to how we work and shop. But, there's one major economic sector where disruptive innovation remains as rare as a sunny day in Seattle: the public sector Disrupting the public sector

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Hundreds of mourners filled St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney today for a state funeral led by Archbishop George Cardinal Pell, 10 days after Mr Bowen's death at age 89. Even the Sydney sky shed tears for its amazing son. Few were as kind as Lionel Bowen and even though he was not a tall boy Lionel Bowen stood head and shoulders above the rest in any situation. Indeed, like no other person I met in parliamentary life, he was respected and admired across all factions and the parties and loved by all of his staff – this man had it all. I was one of the parliamentary staffers who admired the way he shared his wisdom, stories and witty joke … he really was a working class hero who represented the real labor party and let the country party to represent the peasants …
Mike Steketee at his best - "UNASSUMING" and "politician" are not usually uttered in the same breath, but they epitomised Lionel Bowen, who died this month aged 89. He rose from poor family circumstances in Sydney to become deputy opposition leader to Bill Hayden and deputy prime minister to Bob Hawke. But high office seemed to leave him unchanged: he continued living in the same modest house in Kensington, in Sydney's eastern suburbs, that he had first rented, then bought, and in which he and wife Claire raised eight children. The deputy prime minister was spotted once patiently waiting in a long queue at a Sydney bank in pre-ATM days, largely unrecognised. Bowen was a perfect foil for Hawke: solid, not flashy, a willing ear for backbench grievances, never overawed by Hawke or Gough Whitlam, the first Labor prime minister he served, but loyal to them both. His appeal to colleagues and voters was as a traditional, down-to-earth Labor person.

Mr Bowen was a member of the powerful NSW Right but was not regarded as a strong factional player. His personality was very humble, he was the ordinary person’s representative in parliament. ‘He could talk to the president of the Soviet Union in just as reasonable and. commonsense a style DIFFERENCES were put aside as Australian political heavyweights gathered in Sydney to pay tribute to Lionel Bowen, a "unique and remarkable" former deputy leader of the Labor Party. Political heavyweights unite to mourn 'decent and humble' Lionel Bowen ; Lionel Bowen a civilised and dignifying force Lionel, thanks for the memories
THE Irish surnames Brazil and Brassil are -- in the words of our correspondent, Jim Brassil -- "almost interchangeable and they both come from the Gaelic word for strife." Which is not inappropriate, given we spelled his name with a Z the other day. We were on a roll, running an anecdote related to us about Brassil accompanying Lionel Bowen on a flight in the US, only to be seated beside disgraced former US vice-president Spiro Agnew. Oops -- wrong LB. Prudently, we'll hand over to Brassil: "The man I was travelling with in January 1974 was Lance Barnard, then deputy PM to Gough Whitlam. Not that I would not have been pleased to travel with Lionel Bowen, who had been a friend since 1950. In 1974, we were both included along with Barnard among the owners of a racehorse, 'Anglos', in Launceston, Tasmania . . . Before we got on the plane for Washington in San Francisco, I was approached by one of the US security guards offering to get my gun on the plane. When I said I did not have a gun, the guard rejoined: 'The security guy for the vice-president of Australia and he does not have a gun! God help ya." Hey, we were right about Agnew. Bowen in the wind - Lionel Bowen is dryer than a bird bath in the Simpson Desert

According to some of the stories at the wake, Lionel Frost was christened as Joseph in the Catholic Church as the local priest found it very hard to accept this kind of name especially the frosty bit ... Saying goodbye to Lionel Bowen: the soul of pure crystal

Errol Simper noted where Mr Bowen found real friends - outside politics certainly not inside NSW Parliament sadly even details about certain parliamentary repoertes and managers tend to unfold like the petals of a particularlky poisonous blossom ... Few pews in this broad church

Blue Mountains of Easter

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There are people who will ask you why you love Blue Mountains on Easter Friday ... And there are stories that that make our hearts move faster than our brains ...
Readers have been snapping up the books, eager to get a glimpse behind the fog of cold and hot war and ready to embrace stories that accentuate heroism instead of the often dreary developments reported in daily news accounts. Seeing some of these books rise to the top of best-seller lists, publishers are rushing to sign up similar titles, to be released in the next year. Got A Military Memoir? Now's The Time To Publish - And Sell Today’s technologies have also failed to defeat homesickness even though studies by the Carnegie Corporation of New York show that immigrants are in closer touch with their families than before. In 2002, only 28 percent of immigrants called home at least once a week; in 2009, 66 percent did. Yet this level of contact is not enough to conquer the melancholy that frequently accompanies migration. A 2011 study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry found that Mexican immigrants in the United States had rates of depression and anxiety 40 percent higher than nonmigrant relatives remaining in Mexico. A wealth of studies have documented that other newcomers to America also suffer from high rates of depression and “acculturative stress. The New Globalist Is Homesick： A Priest Dies Craving for a Sight of his Motherland
Victim of Nostalgia: But Better to be over the hill than burried under it Havel's Specter: On Václav Havel
A specter is haunting Eastern Europe,” the Czech playwright Václav Havel wrote in 1978, “the specter of what in the West is called ‘dissent.’” In echoing the opening salvo of the Communist Manifesto, Havel was thumbing his nose at the regime he lived under, but his words had an earnest intent as well as a satirical one. Like Marx and Engels, he was trying to call an intellectual force to arms. He hoped to convoke a new kind of human organization, ad hoc and by design temporary, accruing no power in itself, and led not by designated authorities but by individuals who happened to have charisma.

Timely writing often grows stale, especially if it’s about politics. Havel knew this. Many politicians “play a key role at a particular moment,” he wrote in his memoir To the Castle and Back (2007); “a long, dull life can sometimes erase the memory.” Yet Havel’s judgment has been contradicted by his early protest writings, which have gained new relevance as the specter of dissent has returned to haunt much of the planet, from the Chinese town of Wukan to Wall Street, Cairo and Moscow. In addition to being a playwright and a politician, Havel, who died in December, was a philosopher, and his insight into how humans in groups understand themselves still speaks to the way we live in the world.

• A few years later, Havel and other banned Czech writers felt they had little to lose [H avel had been repeatedly tortured by the Czech police. He was punished for demanding democracy and human rights. But perhaps Havel's experience of torture and imprisonment blinded him to how great life under Marxist dictatorship actually was. Or perhaps many Western writers are so desperate to blame capitalism for the world's problems that they're willing to forgive, even support, non-capitalist tyranny.Someone is always saying something nice about the worst totalitarian states. After Margaret Chan, Director-General of the World Health Organisation, visited North Korea in 2010, she told the media she'd seen few signs of malnutrition. Mind you, she only visited Pyongyang and had been escorted the whole time by North Korean officials. Repeat after me: all tyranny is evil and wrong ; The world’s most typical person is a 28-year old Han Chinese man with no bank account who earns less than $13,000 a year. Marx would not be surprised. About much else, he’d be shocked... Marx at 193 ； While we're all talking about the definition of "truth" again, thanks to Mike Daisey and John D'Agata, we might as well revisit Truman Capote's famous "nonfiction novel" In Cold Blood and the seizures it must have given his New Yorker editor W. Shawn.It's the subject of a new investigation, Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood, but Jack Shafer does a little extra digging around n Cold Blood ]
• · Some things are too complicated to study. When a question stumps the physicists, chemists, biologists, and psychologists, says Noam Chomsky, it ends up with the novelists Everything Was a Problem and We Did Not Understand a Thing ; Hilton Kramer didn’t fear making enemies. The champion of high culture, an implacable foe of the trendy and the fashionable, is dead at 84 Combative temperamen他 ; A few writers have the kind of power that believers attribute to gods: they create men and women and children who seem to us to be real. But unlike gods, these writers do not control the lives of their most famous creations. As time passes, their tales are told and retold. Writers and dramatists and film-makers kidnap famous characters like Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman; they change the characters’ ages and appearance, the progress and endings of their stories, and even their meanings. there have been scores, possibly hundreds of dramatizations and condensations, prequels and sequels and spinoffs
• · · I don’t envy you! I would start with Louis Begley’s wonderful Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters. He makes brilliant links to whistle-blowing, rendition, forms of state autocracy in the U.S. today. I think I would say that the question of individual freedom, miscarriage of justice, the ugly side of nationalism—that none of these questions have gone away and that it is one of the first and most startling demonstrations of them in all their force. But also perhaps say how moving and significant it is that this one Jewish Army officer, sent to Devil’s Island, should have the power to split a country down the middle, that, as with the psychoanalytic symptom, you do not know where the most revealing things about a nation and its history might suddenly erupt. So a dude wrote a treasonous letter, and a Jew got blamed for it and then suddenly everyone in France was freaking out ；Many memoirs, even some of the transfixing ones, are full of 10 kinds of crap. No one's life plays out with a tidy moral. No one remembers conversations verbatim from when they were 7
• · · · Secrecy News, 12 March 2012. The Watergate scandal was a formative episode in American political culture that powerfully reinforced public scepticism towards government and fostered a heroic image of the intrepid reporter aided by his truth-telling source. But the reality, as usual, is more complicated than the received narrative. Leak: A new look at Watergate’s Deep Throat AllClear ID: Get notified when hackers get your data MIT Technology Review, 14 March 2012. A new service lets the FBI or other investigators alert you if your data is found in the wrong hands. A new iPhone app launched today will add a serious – but hopefully infrequent – note to the notifications that set your handset buzzing. AllClear ID will let you know when the FBI or other investigators have found your data in the hands of cyber criminals. Stories like the spectacular data breach that befell Sony last year mean that most of us now understand that cyber criminals actively access and trade our personal data. A less well-known consequence is that increasing volumes of it – credit card details, social security numbers and online accounts – are also passing through the hands of investigators from organizations like the FBI. FBI
• · · · · Often when an organizational problem occurs, the typical response is to create regulations to prevent that problem from happening again. For example, in a machine shop where safety gloves often went missing, the company centralized access to new gloves; required request forms for new gloves, with supervisor approval; and had auditors check for compliance. As expected, the number of lost gloves was significantly reduced. However, the new rules cost more than the gloves themselves, negatively affected morale, and reduced productivity. In many cases "controls" imposed to fix a problem become so complex that they create new problems. This eventually leads to an increasingly bureaucratic cycle of further breakdowns, more complex fixes, and more breakdowns. Too Complex

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As you may be aware, today is April Fool’s day — and while we won’t be playing any childish pranks here at Flavorpill, we do enjoy a good practical joke or two, especially when said joke is fictional and thus lacking in real-world consequences. Found today instead of yesterday, but still worth a look: the 10 Best Practical Jokes in Literature Kurt Vonnegut said, “All of fiction is a practical joke

On a business front, the Rinehart family feud continues to be played out in the public eye – more proof perhaps that ‘money does not buy happiness’.

We live in a digital life stream. A forever 'now-or-never' world built on instant expectation, instant availability and instant feedback. This week has seen the explosion of a global social media campaign around Ugandan LRA leader Joseph Kony – it has attracted world wide attention, the 30 min video receiving100 million hits in six days and garnered mass support (and some criticism). Social media also keeps tripping people up with the recently announced Miss Seattle coming under fire for a 3 month old comment where she tweeted “Ew….I am seriously hating Seattle right now” – agreed, not something you would want to be caught out saying as an ‘ambassador’ for your city! I’m more witty, worldly, on-the-go, in-the-know than you.
I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Media Dragon on the Web. Who are these companies and what do they want from me? A voyage into the invisible business that funds the web. This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when the news about North Korea and James Murdoch appeared on your screen. Data from this single visit was sent to 10 different companies, including Microsoft and Google subsidiaries, a gaggle of traffic-logging sites, and other, smaller ad firms. Nearly instantaneously, these companies can log your visit, place ads tailored for your eyes specifically, and add to the ever-growing online file about you A voyage While Google is often criticized for having a Wikipedia bias, it isn’t the only search engine that has one. When you conduct searches on Bing, you’re actually more likely to see Wikipedia prominently in your search results than for the same search on Google, namely the No. 1 spot, one of the top three spots, and on the first page of search results, according to a new Search Engine Watch study. Read on for the full details and breakdown Study Supports Bing Favoring Wikipedia More Often Than Google A secret unit within Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation promoted a wave of high-tech piracy in Australia that damaged Austar, Optus and Foxtel at a time when News was moving to take control of the Australian pay TV industry Media Dragons, Hackers and Code-cracker claims hit Murdoch firm
Dark side of digital age … If your company employs an Indian call centre, today you should be thinking twice. Reports of a widespread black market in Britons' personal data could destroy all confidence in customer services operations outsourced to the subcontinent. A Sunday Times investigation last weekend revealed that IT consultants working across the call centre industry in India are offering up the most sensitive personal details on thousands of UK residents. Worse still, British companies know it is happening but are turning a blind eye for fear of negative publicity. That strategy has now backfired Call centres are a $A7 billion industry in India

Courtesy of Judi H - Four Fazes of Life (4 Phases of Banking Life)


Nothing succeeds like excess Toxic Kapital
A toxic relationship business media, Goldman Sachs reveal bottom line on business morality
The Conversation, 16 March 2012. The worst damage to the Goldman Sachs franchise from the extraordinary attack on its corporate culture by a mid-level former employee comes from its clinical execution. With exquisite timing, Greg Smith’s opinion piece for the New York Times coincided with the early release by the Federal Reserve of stress test reports into the American banking sector. They appeared to show a sustained if patchy recovery.

Reducing capital requirements at this stage remains hotly contested. It also reopened debate on whether ostensibly stricter regulatory oversight has effected lasting change on Wall Street. Smith certainly didn’t think so. “I can honestly say the environment is now as toxic and destructive as I’ve ever seen it,” he wrote. “To put the problem in its simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money.

• Poor witnesses for people are eyes and ears if they possess barbarian souls Kapital; THE narrative of Margin Call unfolds quickly and inevitably, even if what lies behind it has been building for a time. It is set in a Wall Street investment bank in 2008, at the beginning of what we have come to know as the global financial crisis. It is told crisply, made with a powerhouse cast and an intriguing combination of restraint and directness. It has the outlines of a race-against-time thriller and the impact of a cold shower. Almost like level 13, where the mad Scotsman great ideas of madness get darker, the ironic euphemisms become coated with free-floating obscenities, scapegoats find themselves staked out, the rich protect their backs and get richer, and the public gets screwed Money Never Sleeps & The awful thing is this. Everyone has his reason [Two days into leaving, / the river's outer frond flushes worms imagined in the fire / onto the embankment of rust, / mud deep when imagination became an asterisk in the mind "The Mind is a Metaphor, is an evolving work of reference, an ever more interactive, more solidly constructed collection of mental metaphorics. This collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind serves as the basis for a scholarly study of the metaphors and root-images appealed to by the novelists, poets, dramatists, essayists, philosophers, belle-lettrists, preachers, and pamphleteers of the long eighteenth century. While the database does include metaphors from classical sources, from Shakespeare and Milton, from the King James Bible, and from more recent texts, it does not pretend to any depth or density of coverage in literature other than that of the British eighteenth century. The database was assembled and taxonomized and is maintained by Brad Pasanek. The Mind is a Metaphor ; Sydney Life ]
• · Challenge sessions, brainstorms and debates can be great ways to get the creative juices flowing. Most of us enjoy working as part of a team, so it comes as no surprise that group thinking is a good way to foster creativity because it gets people to consider new ideas and gather inspiration from places they would not normally look. Many of us are more creative when we are teamed up including PWC ; Jonah Lehrer wrote a book called Imagine: How Creativity Works Imagine; What allows some people to create the iPod, produce Star Wars, or develop Twitter? Is it in their genes? In an excerpt from his upcoming book, “Imagine: How Creativity Works”, Jonah Lehrer argues that creativity is not inherited or innate, but learned and developed. Lehrer also explains how researchers are exploring the science of creativity and how anyone can use their findings to learn to be creative. How to spark creativity; Cross Continent with IMANUGinative Man
• · · LLRX.com - Fiction is harder than fact, but the Web helps Via LLRX.com - Fiction is harder than fact, but the Web helps - Nicholas Pengelley's wide ranging global career spans law librarian, lawyer, law professor and analyst for a major international NGO. Now as the author of a new political thriller he explains why writing fiction is much harder to write than fact, based on comparison to work accomplished to publish academic articles in his fields of expertise, and opinion pieces on political issues. He attributes the success of aspects of this project to effective and expansive Web research for sources and information to facilitate fact checking and information gathering, as well as to the use of a manuscript editing software, AutoCrit Fiction is harder than fact ; THERE must be a Sir Humphrey Appleby clone in Canberra, someone telling any meddlesome new minister or incoming administration, ''whatever you do, don't lay a finger on that golden goose!' It seems no one wants to upset the ASIC apple cart to enforce disclosure laws.
• · · · HBR blog If you're a digital native, you should be aware that the internet may have partially rewired your brain in such a way that when you meet people face to face, you're less capable of figuring out what they're thinking.Digital natives are slow to pick up non-verbal cues; Follow up to New 'HTTPS Everywhere' Version Warns Users About Web Security Holes see the following from privacy researcher Christopher Soghoian - Firefox switching to HTTPS Google search by default (and the end of referrer leakage). "A few days ago, Mozilla's developers quietly enabled Google's HTTPS encrypted search as the default search service for the "nightly" developer trunk of the Firefox browser (it will actually use the SPDY protocol). Referrer header ; The current standard method for validating a user’s identity for authentication on an information system requires humans to do something that is inherently unnatural: create, remember, and manage long, complex passwordsActive Authentication
• · · · · Ahead of, or behind, the game The govt's public service legislation, though not without its strengths, is more a redrafting than a reform Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote, counselled those with writing ambitions: ''Do but take care to express yourself in a plain, easy Manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent terms … study to explain your Thoughts … labouring as much as possible, not to leave them dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.'' Cervantes, creator of Don Quixote ; Diamonds are forever: Book launch by ATINK plain language etc
• · · · · · . Google is apparently poised to launch its own third-party Net commenting platform in direct response to Facebook, which is increasingly being used as a commenting gateway on many sites 3 Ways That Google Is Searching To Secure Its Future ; Last week three of the biggest companies in technology were busy positioning themselves for the future. Collectively, their actions tell you a lot about the kind of turmoil headed for the rest of the business world. Cloud ; Predicting the future shape of the technology industry is a risky business. The future of technology…who knows?

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Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. -Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia of Cold Morava River fame

The Many Meanings of The Ides of March & His and Hers ... In the middle of March Media Dragon has acquired a cheeky piece of photography by Natasha Murray (Tash) who is an emerging documentary/art photographer who lives and works in Sydney. Falling on the 15th of March, May, July, and October, or the 13th day of any other month, the ides signified the middle of the month on the Roman calendar. But Media Dragon is guessing that’s not the only context that you’ve heard it in before.

His & Hers a Story of our Life in Congested Sydney

Tash has exhibited in group shows in Sydney and Melbourne, and her work is held in private collections in Australia and New Zealand.
Tash is a finalist in the 23rd Muswellbrook Photographic Award. Amazing ... The View from Mandalay Hill

Bohemian Coda: The most legendary Czech rock band is reviving one of their seminal pieces of music for a performance that promises to be one of the highlights of the year. The Plastic People of the Universe will perform their rock suite The Passion Plays with the Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra of Pardubice and special guest Filip Topol, formerly of the Czech group Psí Vojáci, during a special one-night concert at Archa that will bring the Czech underground out from, well, underground. The concert is a fitting, if belated, cap to the "Week of Charter 77," which celebrated the 35th anniversary of the legendary political document, in which The Plastic People of the Universe played an important role.Legendary Czech rockers play with an orchestra: Charter 77

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In December 2011 The Czech Republic has lost one of its greatest sons in the passing of Vaclav Havel and In Australia Antipodeans lost an amazing daughter in Margaret Whitlam who passed away in March 2012. Both had the greatness to bend history itself. I had the fortunate life as I was lucky enough to meet both and whilst Vaclav was very shy and short, Margaret was tall and talkative like the Media Dragon. Even in the parliamentary lifts at Macquarie Street she was like an oasis of light, chatter box and commonsense. When she spilled into the corridors of power at the Mother of Parliament (NSW Parliament House) every corner was filled with the sound of her deep melodic voice … Margaret even remembered that a certain Czechoslovak who slaved for Dr Cope at the parliamentary library had a sister by the same name Margareta (Gitka) and the motherly Mrs Whitlam cared very much for the sad story of my sister Agnesa aka Aga. Margaret loved people. She was endlessly curious. Margaret Whitlam was the wise unshockable woman locked in conversation with strangers, listening and laughing, offering her brand of spare, no-nonsense advice.
In a National Trust poll in 1997 to choose the nation's 100 ''living national treasures'', Margaret and Gough were the only husband-and-wife team elected. Like John Hatton, Margaret and Gough deserved to be declared national treasures … Tim Freedman sang it all the way only songs lend their power to describe people between the lyrical lines "Come over have dinner with me, we'll play chess and drink claret Walk slowly down my little street, you can bring Margaret" To this day I remain in awe of what Margaret achieved in such a short space of time Indeed you can bring Margaret
So many tributes Oasis of Peace; Life of the party, but she was a woman of simple pleasures Commonsense Life's twists and turns Story of Margaret; WAVERLEY Council will honour the late Margaret Whitlam by naming a park or council facility after her. Mrs Whitlam was born and raised in Bondi and spent much of her life in the east. Council to honour Bondi girl Margaret Whitlam; Love is not an easy feeling to put into words. Nor is loyalty, or trust, or joy. But she was all of these. She loved life completely and she lived it intensely. Vale Margaret Whitlam AO, 1919-2012 ; ; Links by google

Mrs Whitlam's daughter Catherine Dovey spoke movingly in St James's church. Catherine used her own tribute to speak touchingly of her parents' seven decade relationship - which Gough himself has proudly referred to as “the longest prime ministerial marriage in Australian history". She spoke of her parent's "perfect match", describing how her mother's relentlessly positive outlook on life "made her a perfect foil” for Gough". "We called it 'thinking of fruit and flowers', a phrase she would use when she tired of anything she saw as unpleasantness, for instance what she called family arguments and what we called robust discussion" My mother had an enthusiasm for life and an interest in people that was unequalled It was Margaret who once noted: "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned, but a woman scorned has nothing on a mother protecting her young..."

Some believe there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world's ills. Yet many of the world's great movements, of thought and action, have flowed from the work of a single man a single woman - Amen

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Happy St Jozef's name to Media Dragons everywhere ;-)



Searching for Saint Jozef in Sydney

What’s the difference between story-truth and happening-truth? Where’s the line in nonfiction between cheating and distilling, artfulness and fabrication? What does it mean when a day of story-truth goes missing from history? It happened on 7/7 across the Morava River, where the soviet arrow of time was arbitrarily bent ... Fact Czechers

Has ever a fictional character so laid bare the horror of mortality as Ivan Ilych? Tolstoy was preoccupied with death – and his insights are now cropping up in medical journals How Tolstoy’s obsession with mortality became a teachable moment ; The Cold War warrior hypothesis. Men commit 90 percent of murders. The brutality is biological, in part. But power, not gender, determines belligerence...

Intellectual life in the Internet age. How to explain TED? It’s where the smart and the rich pretend they have something in common... Those Fabulous Confabs Surfing the Internet, says William Gibson, is like rummaging in the collective global mind. Somewhere there must be a site that contains everything we’ve lost...

The idiosyncrasies convey everything - Writers are “dildos for rent”; punk rock was a time before the “furry testicles of disco descended”: Has James Wolcott met a sexual allusion he doesn’t like?...
How does a fatalistic, damaged man cope after surviving a massacre? By embracing satire, and flashing a smirk at the absurd... Memoirs of a Voyeur - A firsthand account of the second-rate

“I will hate you till the day I die,” the thin-skinned Alain de Botton once told a reviewer. Now things are looking up. His self-help philosophy is catnip for the well-heeled in search of meaning.. No fire, no brimstone

Are you a mysterian? The more we know about the brain, the less we understand how it creates consciousness, says Colin McGinn. Maybe the mind is a puzzle that can’t be solved. All machine and no ghost?

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In Kezmarok and Vrbov there is a reference to an Irish based confirmation name so may the green and taxing colours fly everywhere on St Patrick's Day. St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, may well have been a tax collector for the Romans who fled to Ireland where he could have traded slaves to pay his way, according to new research by a University of Cambridge academic published on Saturday.

'Life is trouble,' Zorba continued. 'Death, no. To live--do you know what that means? To undo your belt and look for trouble!'
-Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

How does a fatalistic, damaged man cope after surviving a massacre? By embracing satire, and flashing a smirk at the absurd... Black & Cold Irony of life

Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you're not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote

High Tatra Mountains, once a byword for soviet ski sanitarium, has been transformed into a welcoming tourist destination. The section on High Tatra Mountains in my local bookshop Berkelouw in Sydney is not promising, not even Ariel is able to oblige. Other countries offer travelogues with evocative titles – Italy, for example, has Under the Tuscan Sun, Spain has Driving over Lemons and France has Return to the Olive Farm. Old Czechoslovakia, by contrast, has My Cold War River, The Trial (Der Prozess), The Castle (Das Schloss), Amerika and The Metamorphosis . All of which have rather less of a holiday feel to them. The only certainty in some parts of the old Czechoslovakia is the way words are formed entirely or mostly of consonants, such as the term for the certainty in life Death which SMRT.

Soeaking of death, If I were dying, my last words would be: Have faith and pursue the unknown end.

Slov-what-ia? Aren’t they at war? Ok, so wee, peaceful Slovakia isn’t among the most-touted destinations. Big mistake. Here, you can climb alpine peaks in East Slovakia like the High Tatras, explore a clifftop castle in Trenčín, ski in Malá Fatra National Park and sit in as many old-town cafés as your rear can stand in Bratislava. Having emerged from its frumpy, communist-era chrysalis in time to welcome a horde of low-cost carrier junkies, the increasing numbers of flights and EU membership have pushed costs up in the capital. Outside the city and you’ll find traditional villages, terrific trails and prices a fraction of those in Western Europe. The High Tatras is the highest mountain range in Central Europe outside of the Alps. There is also a high density of bears in the region. The Tatra is also the name of a Czech vehicle manufacturer
-Lonely Czech Mates
Friends read all about Freud Born and Bread along the banks of Morava River

Want to understand the states of the former Soviet Union? Scrap political science and get acquainted with Gogol, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky... and Imrich, the “broken-windows” theorist

Extreme skiing: Quelle catastrophe! In High Tatra witches too came to dance and play their pranks
The Tatras are the highest part of the Carpathian range of mountains that sweep through Central Europe. They run for 53km along the boundary between Poland and Slovakia, although the majority of the range is in Slovakia. The Tatras are not that high and only cover a relatively small area, but in terms of the beauty and diversity of the landscape, they are hard to beat...
In a letter to a friend, Windham spoke of sheer drops “terrible enough to make most people’s heads turn”, of bottomless crevasses, ice blocks “as big as houses”, and of witches who came to dance and “play their pranks” on the ice.

That letter, and its evocation of a landscape that was thrilling and threatening in equal measure, helped change our relationship with the mountains for ever. When published in London, it sparked a fascination with the Alps and made them an essential stop on the Grand Tour. Soon, artists and poets, including Byron, Wordsworth and Goethe, were flocking to Chamonix. Mary Shelley was so impressed by the Mer de Glace she used it as the “awful and majestic” location where Frankenstein meets his monster. Her husband Percy described the edge of the Bossons glacier as “the most vivid image of desolation that it is possible to conceive”. In his poem “Mont Blanc”, he looked up past the glaciers, creeping “like snakes that watch their prey”, to their source in the high peaks, a “city of death, distinct with many a tower, and wall impregnable of beaming ice”.

• Ice of Tatras is a world unto itself - Upon death, Christopher Hitchens was greeted by Orwell. Hitchens didn’t believe his eyes. “This is all a delusion, my dear boy,” Orwell told him, “but enjoy it while you can”... 'I know myself,' he cried, 'but that is all.' [The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere. The debate about promoting democracy should be a practical one, so here’s the practical reality: Policy makers and scholars don’t know what they’re doing... ; Am I or am I not going to have a martini?” Charles Murray will have a martini. Wine, too. Why not? Sobriety isn’t a “founding virtue”Jozef Imrich Will have a Martini too ]
• · The advice of the elders to young men is very apt to be as unreal as a list of the hundred best books. One day an ebullient and prolific hacker vanished from the Web. Blog, Twitter feed, open-source code: gone. It’s called infosuicide ; Quelle catastrophe!, Beckett’s wife exclaimed when she learned that her husband had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She knew her man... Quelle catastrophe! ; Jeanne Proust was a nice lady, polite to her son. But she could also be niggling, infantilizing, and passive-aggressive. Yes, Marcel had mommy issues...
• · · So you want be a historian and reach a wide audience? Be like Barbara Tuchman and skip grad school–which would ruin you as a writer.. Media Dragon of Popular His Story ; Our mental lives depend on the brain, says Anthony Gottlieb, but our behavior is not best understood by looking inside it. NEURONS V FREE WILL
• · · · If art, culture and wisdom have taught us anything over the millennia – and cinema over its short, spectacular century – it is that we are all bewitched by what we shouldn’t be bewitched by. The attraction of human beings to the forbidden was established in the Garden of Eden and has thrived ever since. Look at us mortals today. Loving a safe and peaceful life, we look for the vicarious experience of danger and violence. We don’t want crime or murder in our lives, yet insist on them in our stories and movies. We hate or fear air travel, but thrill to screen stories about doomed airliners. Or doomed travel of any kind, including that by land or sea. Coming Soon ... ; For a moment, film criticism excited, surprised, and astonished. Think Ebert and Kael, both learned, literate, and smart, but never academic... When Critics Mattered
• · · · · · Everything can be bought and sold. As a result, society is more affluent – and more debased, says Michael Sandel... What Isn’t for Sale? ; Sales of two cities: how attitudes to buying and selling property vary in London and New York Sales of two cities ; The second last straw in affordable housing market rankings worldwide. Perhaps most remarkable has been the shift in Australia, once the exemplar of modestly priced, high-quality middle-class housing, to now the most unaffordable housing market in the English-speaking world Sydneyrella ; The choices that you make
Aren't all that grim.
The worlds I'll never see
Still will be around,
Won't they?
The Ben I'll never be,
Who remembers him? Overheard in Sydney
• · · · · · · Every week, Martin Kemp hears from people convinced they’ve found a lost Leonardo. One day someone really did. “I experienced a frisson”... Leonardo da Vinci ; The moral significance of people eating people. Cannibals are mental deviants, revolting curiosities. But they were once central to views of human nature. People who Eat People - Who is in 21st century cooking human flesh? The killing graph. A 46-year old statistician’s ability to quantify mass atrocities has launched a data revolution in the human-rights world.. The Body Counter

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Sometime in 1979 or 1980, a new phrase entered the Australian lexicon. Originating somewhere in the fertile imaginations of the Sydney legal or accounting professions, the evocative expression bottom of the harbour became known first in business circles, and then in the broader community, as a jocular euphemism for what later was determined to be the most formidable series of frauds committed in Australia in recent years. Twenty years later another phrase invaded the lexicon packed in Packer's Lunch tale . The Wickenby brand has been increased in the light of the Judge Bruce Lander founding that ANZ Vanuatu's customer information was transmitted to the parent bank's digital database in Australia, known as the global information warehouse (GIW). Therefore, the two notices to produce information sent to ANZ under s264 of the Income Tax Assessment Act sovereignty did not infringe Vanuatu's ; Two recent Project Wickenby-related court cases have reinforced community expectations that serious tax fraud should be treated sternly and appropriately, Tax Commissioner Michael D'Ascenzo said today. "Two appeal cases last week in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal have resulted in successful outcomes for Project Wickenby, with even tougher sentences imposed and reaffirming the seriousness of tax fraud and evasion"

Over the barrel Media Dragons Under Fire
Bloggers Under Fire "tracks instances of bloggers , Internet users being threatened, arrested, harassed, harmed Bloggers Under Fire: "As activists and ordinary citizens around the world are increasingly making use of the Internet to express their opinions and connect with others, many governments are increasing their surveillance and censorship capabilities and taking legal or extrajudicial actions against bloggers and social media users. The threats to netizens are increasing. The Committee to Protect Journalists found in 2008 that 45% of all imprisoned journalists were arrested for activities conducted online. In their 2012 press freedom barometer, Reporters Without Borders cited 123 incidents of imprisoned "netizens" in twelve countries. Though the motivations of governments vary from country to country, the goal—to silence "threatening" voices—is the same.

EFF supports the principles of free expression laid out in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and believes that those principles must extend online. While our domestic work focuses on helping bloggers in the United States understand their legal rights, our international work focuses on the legal and bodily threats to Internet users in countries around the world. To that end, we have partnered with Global Voices Online's Threatened Voices project, which tracks individual cases of bloggers under threat or detention, to help shed light on this global phenomenon."

• Apart whilst still a part ; Writing, offered a form of therapy [Am I crazy? Perhaps.
However, three things generally happen as a result of their questions:
1. I learn in the process, usually in the pursuit of the correct answer
2. My perspective shifts and changes
3. We both end up with more questions, built on a rich set of shared experiences.
Three reasons why asking risky questions reduces risk ; The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages - English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian It's not all Greek to this student ; In contemporary media's never-ending mission to remind us how unexceptional our own children are, BBC News recently introduced us to a personable young super achiever named Alex Rawlings; Claims that it's all Greek to minister George Souris ]
• · Zeljko Ranogajec annually bets $1billion Secrecy surrounds his global operation He says his wealth a big exaggeration ; In 2007, Punting Ace.com estimated he outlaid $500 million on Australian racing every year, and accounted for nearly 5 per cent of total tote turnover across the country. ''That gives Zelyko essential control of tote prices in this country … he plays percentages and find [or creates] value. He is a numbers man, through and through.'' And he thrives on rebates ; Certainly they lived up to a personal interpretation of the title that came to pass at the Bondi Icebergs, the pool of turf wisdom. Warwick, Timmy and Lofty are life members of the Punt-Drunks Protective Association and Neil, the Betfair player, is perhaps more cerebral without the pokies bent
• · · We've all been there: trapped in pointless meetings where participants are afraid to speak honestly. We twiddle our thumbs through diplomatic PowerPoint presentations, waiting for the meeting to end so that the real conversations-which usually happen in private-can begin. 3 techniques to help coworkers at all levels interact more directly: break meetings into smaller groups; designate a 'Yoda'; teach 'caring criticism' Candor criticism teamwork ; By breaking down a meeting into its component parts and applying one of management's most recognized models, the author turns the art of a meeting into a science and offers constructive steps for that will turn any meeting into a true, value-creating exercise Smart workplace conversation: the knowledge economy's (new) organizational value chain ; The relentless "always on" work culture created by modern technology and job insecurity mean that most people (80%) continue to work despite being ill, with damaging effects on productivity and health Technology encourages work presenteeism claims research
• · · · The sum of virtues, values and traits equals good character, which, in addition to competence and commitment, is one of the 3 ingredients that make a leader effective and respected Developing leadership character ; Every leader needs to have smooth, productive relationships with those around him or her. But what makes for a rewarding relationship - and its opposite - has long been unclear or unknown until now. Neuroscience and the link between inspirational leadership and resonant relationships ; Specific skills executives should cultivate to tackle the challenges of the diversity of employee groups, technology and collaborative organisational structures: code switching between cultures; wielding digital influence; dividing attention deliberately 3 skills every 21st century manager needs
• · · · · Technology is shaping the way we live and interact with each other, but as it becomes an increasing central in daily life, researchers have begun to wonder about the affect it has on the happiness and emotional development of the next generation. Unfortunately, according to a recent study from Stanford University, it's not looking good... they're less happy and socially comfortable than their less connected peers ; IT'S a clock so accurate you need only reset it once every 14 billion years ; Days away from being billionaires, Gina Rinehart locks trust
for half a century
• · · · · · Judith Lucy is always glad when the new year starts. For many reasons, the festive season is, as she says, ''as enjoyable as an incontinent relative''. On a purely physical level, she might have one or two alcoholic drinks, so there are the hangovers to contend with. Life as a Bondi Beach babe; Judith Lucy ; What’s the meaning of monsters? They’re a moral compass: testing our ethics, shaping our politics, spurring science, and piquing our curiosity... Moral compass

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Inside every older person is a younger person wondering what happened.
- Jennifer Yane

Wishing you your happiest birthday yet
A birthday too special To ever forget Yullis or San Remo Renaissance Chef & Curator Dinner
So many wishes
So many smiles
Too many memories
Too few words
Like that ad in the FrenchFilmFestival - No wonder the world stops after all it's the golden age of French cinema ;-) To the world, you may be one person. But to me, you are the world ; Happy birthday to a person who is smart, good looking, and funny and reminds me a lot of myself ;-) Our birthdays are feathers in the broad wing of time. To the nation's best kept secret; Our true age because we identify with the kids who are crafty and retro-adorable, the morals sound and the rural nostalgia impeccably groomed in War Of The Buttons (La Guerre des boutons) a harmlessly old-fashioned tale of youthful rivalries between two Slavic and Sikh villages in the 1960s. War Of The Buttons

Only in High Tatra Mountains - Is this the ‘coolest’ cinema in the world

Is this the ‘coldest’ story in the world?

CODA for Malaysian, German and British - Sharm: [By Peter FitzSimons aka THE FITZ FILES] Last year, TFF's cousin, Andrew Tink - the former parliamentarian who triumphed over throat cancer - told his wife, Kerry, that he was going to dedicate his new book Lord Sydney to her. She replied: ''That's very nice but I'd rather have a diamond.'' This year, when the book began selling very well, he told her the dedication would most likely outlast us by many years. Her reply was: ''That's still very nice but I'd still rather have a diamond.'' So at the launch at Parliament House on Thursday - with those present including the Governor, Marie Bashir; ministers Hazzard, Berejiklian, Souris, Smith and Parker; the lord mayor, Clover Moore; and Andrew's old sparring partner Paul Whelan, who drove down from near Maitland in atrocious weather - he presented her with a diamond. And she was gracious enough to say that she didn't need to put on her glasses to be able to see it. A rare jewel ;
Lord Of Sydney - Book Launch in Chatswood

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First day of autumn in Sydney and we are at an inflection point in history, a shift not just in our politics but our consciousness. revolutions

Many of us would admit that we spend too much of our time in cinemas watching French Film Festivals … Most of us would prefer to find a more efficient way to manage our time in life, but we love the way time passes while we watch others showing us how to live, laugh and lament …. During a time where cinema is focused on being bigger and louder than ever before, it's refreshing to come across a film like The Artist where telling a great story remains at the heart. Director Michel Hazanavicius stripped the film back to basics, preferring to film in black and white to 3D; using music to tell the tale in place of dialogue and sound effects… The Art of Storytelling The war of the Buttons; Presumed Gulty; A separation

Someone Like You Challenges for Real Bob Carr
Wiping clean and reinventing his personal slate is just the first of the tasks foreign minister Bob Carr must undertake.

Bob Carr will not only need to bridge the yawning chasm that opened up between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd and their respective offices, but he will alsoface a number of major and immediate challenges.
In trying to reconcile his blogging “baggage” with Labor’s formal foreign policy, Mr Carr should resist the temptation to emulate the Hawker Britton style of political spin and distraction that he mastered during his time as NSW Premier.
Already Mr Carr has sought to airbrush from history a number of his now rather inconvenient views. His description of the Dalai Lama as a “cunning monk”, and his warning that Australian politicians should not be intimidated into meeting “this theological politician” on his “too frequent visits”, have been removed from his website.
Mr Carr has also implored us to ignore his strident criticism of the Libyan intervention, considered by Prime Minister Gillard and former Foreign Minister Rudd to be among their finer foreign policy moments. His opinion that it was a “wrong headed amateur-hour intervention” of “towering stupidity” is now replaced by an admission that he was “completely wrong”.

• Only time will tell - The Carr coup [Carr felt qualified to talk about everything from National Gallery exhibitions of Renaissance art to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks ; Citizens and journalists are concerned about the prevalence of misinformation in contemporary politics, which may pollute democratic discourse and undermine citizens’ ability to cast informed votes and participate meaningfully in public debate. Academic research in this area paints a pessimistic picture—the most salient misperceptions are widely held, easily spread, and difficult to correct. Misinformation and Fact-checking: Research Findings from Social Science; Maria and I sang; danced at National Gallery during the Renaissance Appoggiatura ]
• · Scars and Stories is, at once, a beautiful and intensely irritating record. This music can be gorgeous, human, haunting, and affecting – and it can also be first class, self-indulgent nonsense Scars and Stories ；Poverty. It's a word at the root of much debate. What causes it? Who's accountable? How can we solve it? Now after twenty years of research, scientists are suggesting that 'toxic stress' in early life may be to blame, and preventing poverty may be as simple as giving a child a hug... HUG ;
This fraud begins around the birth of Charter 77. In 1977 a litre of diesel was free in the army of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic (Mark V also did not pay anything for his diesel or petrol in the hottest spot on earth the army barracks of Townsville) , "Star Wars" opened in theatres across the US, the maiden Apple II computers went on sale, a 25-hour black out occurred in New York City and 365 day blackout continued to place in Soviet Union. And, according to a SeattlePI.com article, that also was the year two men were in a bar fight in Baltimore, Maryland – and one man stole the other's wallet. He then proceeded to use the man's identity for the next 30 years. So, one guy stole another guy's wallet 30 years ago. You may ask: "How bad could it be?" Pretty bad, when you think that the victim's identity in this case is now tied to that of a career criminal Man who lived, committed crimes under stolen ID for 30 years sentenced
• · · In From Carr to Keneally respected experts analyse the four terms of Labor government in NSW: the premiers and their ministers, the political parties and their electoral fortunes; the role of independents; policies in all key areas; and changes in the bureaucracy, cabinet and parliament. From Karr to Keneally ; edited by David Clune ; Welsh heritage of Russell Grove Clerk Emeritus of the Legislative Assembly of NSW ; AS Barry O'Farrell approaches the first anniversary of his election victory, one thing appears to have survived the discredited Labor government: a political culture in which the loyalty of "mates" to each other trumps the public interest The casino scandal that blackens the Premier ; It has been a bruising week for the New South Wales Government as it approaches the anniversary of its first year in power The curious case of the Casino affair ; Questions about the characteristics of Members of Congress, including their age, education, previous occupations, and other descriptors, are of ongoing interest to Members, congressional staff, and constituents. Some of these questions may be asked in the context of representation, in efforts to evaluate the extent to which Members of Congress reflect their constituencies and the nation at large. In other instances, questions arise about how the characteristics of Members have changed over time, which may speak in part to the history of Congress. Representatives and Senators: Trends in Member Characteristics Since 1945
• · · · Ms Hesford helped write a book called NSW Legislative Assembly Practice, Procedure and Privilege and is regularly on hand during parliamentary debates to advise on procedure Procedural matters; The Rise and Fall of Nick Petroulias St Michael Investigations ; Ms Lorbek, the former lover of the disgraced Tax Office lawyer Nick Petroulias, had requested about $2000 in government child support this year. Instead, she received $2 million. And she spent it. Love child ; Other Scandals • · · · · · The suggestion that the best seller from Hornsby is based on former or current officers of the Crown is widly exaggerated ; Not a good look - Women keep looking in the 'wallpaper' and it is turning them off! Connecting the dots