Dual Loyalty

As writers and bloggers are so fond of saying; you couldn't make it up. You don't cross the Iron Curtain and come out without scars ...
· Jozef Imrich, Survivor of the Iron Curtain Crossing

Thursday, June 30, 2011



“To thine own self be true,” said Polonius. Timeless advice, but who are you, really, other than an enigma to yourself?...

Outrageous revenge plots when love between astronauts or a puritanical judge and his siren-like sister-in-law went wrong. The public humiliation of a bit player in the Clinton impeachment circus. A lurid misery memoir exposed as fiction. Do we gain anything from reading narratives of these personal unravellings apart from (guilty) pleasure at the pain of others? We might, but not by reading this new book on scandals Who put the Moravian born Freud into Schadenfreude?

The creation of a Southern Silk Road Prime Time for Liberty: Marx of the Media Age
The early bird gets the worm,
and the early worm gets eaten.

I duped the despot by crawling like a snake,” wrote Adam Mickiewicz. No one survives in a dictatorship without being compromised... In Search of Lost Meaning: The New Eastern Europe

There were moments reading this book when I was forced to shut it closed, an experience utterly alien to me. Like any reasonably historically-aware individual, I considered myself familiar with the carnage that overtook Europe in the earlier half of the 20th century: the gas chambers and the gulags, the mass shootings and show trials, the wanton disregard for human life and the heinous ideas which compelled people to, actively or passively, play a part in the deaths of tens of millions of fellow human beings. Reading about this period, there comes a point when the sheer scale and horror of the events which took place — the instant incineration of tens of thousands of civilians, for instance — desensitizes one from appreciating the sheer terror and physical pain that individuals endured.


The Butchery of Hitler and Stalin [Empty trash. Buy milk. Forge history; Dangerous minds Criminal Minds; Paul Theroux loathes luxury. He set off 50 years ago in search of miserable, difficult places; forbidden cities; and back roads...;
As a young girl, Arundhati Roy once raided her teacher’s garden in her native village in Kerala, the lush tropical state in the south of India. She dug up the carrots, removed the edible orange roots, then carefully replanted the green tops in the soil. It took four days for the greenery to wither and the crime to be discovered. The culprit was never identified There is romance in their resistance]
• · TWO MILLIGRAMS OF The Big B, the doctor will say not so long from now after you have come in for relief from the Theme Park Adventure that is your life. It will cure what ails your restless iPodded, iPadded, and Kindled existence. Boredom, which begins, as Walter Benjamin put it, when “we don’t know what we’re waiting for,” is now a solution, not a problem. The Uses of Tedium; Last requests. In death, John Ross wanted his ashes mixed with pot, rolled into a joint, and smoked at his funeral; Hard to say what’s more ridiculous: reading Ayn Rand or sitting through a three-part film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. Pick your poison
• · · Humans are natural-born storytellers, so lying is in our blood Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying, and lying a form of art... If you can lie, you can act - Promiscuous with his enthusiasms; Among the countless pleasures of profanity is versatility. Noun, verb, adverb, or adjective, four-letter vulgarities are indispensable Adverb; “The only way to write is well,” said A.J. Liebling, “how you do it is your own damn business.” Unless you’re Jozef Imrich... Heavy sentences
• · · · Marshall McLuhan is the Marx of the media age. But his Catholicism was no deadening opiate. It made him more ambitious and far-reaching...At the turn of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth there was Darwin in biology, Marx in political science, Einstein in physics, and Freud in psychology. Since then there has been only McLuhan in communications studies. Marx of the media age; Peter's classmate Greg Hywood; Where should the ABC sit within the changing media landscape? The Place Of The National Broadcaster
• · · · · The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be the beginning ... Saroeun with Sister; The story of the families who fled the killing fields of Cambodia to find safety in Australia, revisited nearly 25 years on. What are they doing? Did they find a home? And what does their experience tell us about the current debate over refugee arrivals? Where Are They Now?
• · · · · · China has been buying-up Australian farming land and mines. Does this represent a national problem? Selling off the farm?; China is not only Australia's largest trading partner, but is also an increasingly important supplier of capital. Indeed, Hong Kong aside, Australia is now China's top foreign direct investment destination. Chinese perspectives on investing in Australia; Southern silk road: Turbocharging "South-South" economic growth

Sunday, June 19, 2011



Our lives improve only when we take chances - and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.
-Walter Anderson

Chances are when you're wandering around your local store doing your weekly grocery shop there are brands you gravitate to. BBC food journalist Alex Riley recently dug deep into the emotional connection we have with our favorite food brands, and with two simple experiments he confirmed what we've known for some time... Familiar Faces
Lisa Lindblad is the au courant specialist to watch with one foot in the world of rarefied media dragons and the other in that get-there-first travel adventure as Linda is the source of amazing ideas and resource for the authentic, surprising experiences every sole survivor wants these days … Willing Foot: I am the Cold River, You are the Sea

Google for Media Dragons Giant Leaps for Mankind
So if you're hungry, don't just grab food, grab a book and chow down with Books & Nooks At Books & Nooks we have paired our two favourite pastimes ‘reading and dining out’ to bring you a delicious new book club experience.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to read more, then Books & Nooks could be your literary lifesaver. This is a book club like no other: they’ll deliver a beautifully wrapped title to your door and then tempt you to actually read it with the promise of intelligent discussion in fabulous surrounds with top food and the odd cocktail. Books are like children: after all the love and attention, they swim or fly the coop and have independent lives


Coda: Mirek saw a rather odd t-shirt stating – I do not need to google as my wife knows everything!
odd cocktail ; NASA is an ideas factory Giant Leaps for Mankind [If It Is Too Inconvenient, I'm Not Going After It: Research Links ; Convenience as a Critical Factor in Information-seeking Behavior ]
• · This is a series of posts highlighting people and projects that we encounter during our travels that are doing the hard work of changing the world for the better. Tash on her Publishing Journey: I am the Cold River, You are the Sea; Be the Change: Malachi Leopold and his story of reunited love; From Twitter to Facebook, from blogging to YouTube, his company is responsible for making sure the campaign maintains a. high profile on the Internet
• · · The US immigration story is different from Australia's but some political challenges are the same Immigration: the political elephant in Canberra and Washington; The population problem won't be solved until we break the capitalist paradigm Dick Smith on growth; emphatically yes...and no
• · · · "Information taken from this site should be cited as Alvaredo, Facundo, Anthony B. Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, The World Top Incomes Database, dd/mm/yyyy. We advise making explicit reference to the date when the database was consulted, as the statistics may change. The specific country chapters and papers should also be cited. (Select Countries, Select Years, Select Variables - populated as choices are made): The World Top Incomes Database; Kristinn Hrafnsson opened the case for the proposition ''WikiLeaks is a force for good' …. Suelette Dreyfus, a University of Melbourne academic who wrote Underground in collaboration with the website's founder, Julian Assange, said WikiLeaks was a necessary addition to the array of checks and balances on power. The evidence has shown that the watchdogs and the agencies of democracy aren't enough on their own The debate is over: we heart WikiLeaks as force for good; The WikiLeaks News & Views Blog -- Special Weekend Edition!
• · · · · In a catch-me-if-you-can explanation of why it has targeted the likes of Sony, the US Senate, an FBI affiliate, and online porn sites, the LulzSec hacking group says it plans to keep having fun until it gets caught 4 Things WikiLeaks Taught Us About Document Security ; The hacking free-for-all continued this week as Sega apparently became the latest victim of a network breach and none other than hacking group LulzSec offered to help the game company by taking down the responsible parties After Sega gets hacked, LulzSec offers to seek revenge; LulzSec leaks 62,000 emails and passwords ; Miller said that companies were rushing to put all of their information into the internet "cloud" without understanding that by connecting their databases to the internet they were exposing themselves to risks of serious attacks
• · · · · · There's no doubt that the ground is shaking underneath what we used to think of as journalism. The politics of literary boycotts; There's a thin line between sex and politics Journalism Shedding Its Old Mass Media Skin ; In fact, there are serious doubts as to her location and even identity, and many are suggesting her entire persona as an American-born Syrian blogging live from the revolution was an elaborate hoax. Male lesbians: just one type of creepy online fakery

Sunday, June 12, 2011



Heath Aston interviews Bruce Hawker who believes O'Farrell's team underestimates Secord at its peril: I think he will be a real front-footer. He's a big man but he's highly energetic. I'd be surprised if he didn't find his way into the shadow ministry very early on. Robbo and co. will be listening to what he has to say because there was no one better at dealing with the press gallery than Walt

He was creative, says Hawker. He could always muster up a [positive] story from virtually nothing. You need someone like that in government. He had the energy to trawl through the Government Gazette and find things others had missed. The Trolley of Truth; Patrick Low, the former press secretary to Education Minister John Aquilina, told the commission he was pressured by Mr Carr's press secretary, Walter Secord, to shore up a rumour the 15-year-old had access to a gun because it would make a better
story.


Who Feeds the Watchdogs Sources of Truths & Pravda: Crisis what crisis?
We need to keep the press from being absorbed into The Media. This means keeping the word press, which is antiquated. But included under its modern umbrella should be all who do the serious work in journalism, regardless of the technology used. The people who will invent the next press in America--and who are doing it now online--continue an experiment at least 250 years old. It has a powerful social history and political legend attached.

Mark Pearson and Roger Patching of Bond University have published a literature review, "Government media relations: A 'Spin' through the literature", a terrific resource for researchers and students interested in what, unfortunately, have become the dark arts of access to, and communication of, government information.


Dark arts of spin and related topics[ The perpetual development in technology creates a plethora of jobs for us media folk; the problem arises when we, as first years, must choose just one. So, after much deliberation and a bit of guesswork it appears I’m following in the family footsteps and choosing a career in Public Relations. Government media relations: A 'spin' through the literature; If I was down to my last dollar, I’d spend it on Public Relations]
• · Media Advisers - Shadow players in political communication; Crikey ; How does Wikileaks effect journalism? Crime ethics;
• · · When I say a huge army, I mean a really massive number of them. It feels like there are at least 50 PRs to each journalist; At first glance, I’m surprised anyone would question the value PR professionals provide for journalists. Do Journalists Need PR Professionals Anymore?
• · · · Journalists will always highlight the wrongdoings of anyone else in the society, but when it comes to their own community, they unite and act as mafia.; Media Coverage of Corruption
• · · · · New Manual; Wendy Bacon, a former journalist with Fairfax and now a professor of journalism, admitted in The Australian (24 January 1999) that Jim McClelland confessed to her and others that the late Lionel Murphy, Labor Party hero and High Court Judge, had been corrupt. Media lies and corruption
• · · · · · Investigative journalism; “Crisis what crisis?” was Fifa President’s reaction to a journalist’s question at a press conference called by the football’s governing body yesterday. Crisis what crisis?

Saturday, June 11, 2011



The prize is awarded annually to a journalist whose work has "penetrated the established version of events and told and unpalatable truth that exposes establishment propaganda, or 'official drivel', as Martha Gellhorn called it." Julian Assange wins Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism

Here’s a hot shot of inspiration: The New York Times deputy national editor Adam Bryant could be described as the "CEO whisperer." Bryant conducts regular interviews with CEOs and other leaders for his weekly Sunday Business feature called Corner Office. Among the many lessons Bryant has gleaned from top executives such as Gordon Bethune, Howard Shultz and Eduardo Castro-Wright is they tend to get misty-eyed when they speak about certain employees who exhibit a quality Bryant calls "fearlessness." Who are the fearless? They are rebels who refuse to accept the status quo when things are merely "fine." They advocate turning the system upside down and even breaking it in order to make it better. The fearless are also those who have made non-traditional and often risky career choices. According to Bryant, CEOs appreciate people who value experience and want to broaden their base of skills instead of simply climbing the ladder. every single day I try and do something that’s out of my comfort zone and I think that’s just a good rule for living

River of Shadows: And I mean it
My personal life, Ayn Rand says, ‘is a postscript to my novels; it consists of the sentence: “And I mean it.”’

If you try to find out about the legacy of Ayn Rand, your search engine will probably direct you first to aynrand.org, a website run by the Ayn Rand Institute in California. The ARI was founded in 1985, three years after Rand’s death, by Leonard Peikoff, her friend and heir. It runs a newsletter called Impact and, via the Objectivist Academic Center, undergraduate courses in the Randian world vision.


Your Voice in My Head, As Astonishing as Ayn ['m rather interested in the idea of reviewing nonfiction. Like, how up to the task should the reviewer be? How knowledgeable, how willing to call someone on their bullshit? (I obsess over this a little bit, actually, since I've been reviewing nonfiction exclusively at my books column for the Smart Set. One 60-ish man, a former Fortune 500–company administrator, bragged, Sergeant McKee says, that his retirement plan consisted of having sex with as many prostitutes as possible Smart Set ; We periodically have to give thanks for the existence of Rebecca Solnit, for pieces like "Men Explain Things to Me." And now, her piece on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, asking why the storyline has to be so goddamn obvious, so metaphorical.
What makes the sex scandal that broke open last week so resonant is the way the alleged assailant and victim model larger relationships around the world, starting with the IMF’s assault on the poor. That assault is part of the great class war of our era, in which the rich and their proxies in government have endeavored to aggrandize their holdings at the expense of the rest of us. Poor countries in the developing world paid first, but the rest of us are paying now, as those policies and the suffering they impose come home to roost via right-wing economics that savages unions, education systems, the environment, and programs for the poor, disabled, and elderly in the name of privatization, free markets, and tax cuts.]
• · Global Wealth Continues Its Strong Recovery with $9 Trillion Gain, but Pressures on Wealth Managers Persist ; FRANK Lowy is known as one of Australia's most successful businessmen, having co-founded the Westfield group and turned it into a global shopping centre empire. Mirja and Kevin Denlay, are said to be clients of LGT and Mr Kieber passed on their names to the tax office
• · · Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later Blogs Will Change Your Business ; We believe transparent government is better government. Twitter enables real conversation between lawmakers and voters, in real time. Find your representatives in Congress Twitter ; TweetCongress.org ; For many politicians, Twitter represents a Rumsfeldian "known unknown," an expansive tundra of technology that simply exists and is filled with strange language, bizarre communication concepts, and millions of fans of some child named Justin Bieber. The Ultimate Twitter Guide for Politicians & Other Really Important People
• · · · Ever wondered what goes through your mind when you choose where to sit on the train? Or in a waiting room? An interesting study by researchers for the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin has an interesting take on it all. Sit Still ; Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
• · · · · Each year media heavyweights like Monocle, Forbes and The Economist publish a list of the world’s most liveable cities – the very best places to live in the world ; Vancouver is Hollywood’s urban body double. It is famously the stand-in for New York, LA, Seattle and Chicago, employed when those cities just get too tough, too traffic-clogged, too murderous or too bureaucratic to film in Liveable v lovable
• · · · · · Leaders talk about holding large-scale public conversations, but they won't succeed if the methods are unsatisfying for participants, if an authentic conversation occurs at all. In this paper, Lyn Carson presents the World Café method, a viable way of involving large numbers of people in a meaningful, conversational exchange. She describes how a particular World Café event was designed, and then explore the value of the World Café method as a means to achieve social change. Professor Lyn Carson from the Centre for Citizenship and Public Policy at the University of Western Sydney talks about using deliberative democracy to solve the world's 'wicked problems' Designing a public conversation using the World Café method ; World Café ; Sydney Film Festivals and Cafes

Wednesday, June 08, 2011



I wish to goodness my life were not always a circle. I wish I were not always resting beneath the umbrella of my own personality.
-John P. Marquand, The Late George Apley

The whole lucky 13th floor was bushed out, and time fell away when I read this improvised way of looking at working life, though not because my working life is in any way behind the times:
I feel like I am hiding Anne Frank!
I feel like I've been told the secret but have sold it for a ride on Khassogi's yatch.
I feel like I have discovered the best icecream shop in Melbourne, but cannot share it with my friends
The burden of knowing this dark, tempting secret is prematurely ageing me (is their face-lift leave in the new agency agreement?).
I hold your career in the palm of my hand and it is a quivering dove.
What to do, what to do?
Misguided Hope of Literary Intelligence Analyst

Seekers Lovers Keepers of Poetry Poetry She Wrote
Smile, like you've got nothing to lose,
No matter what you might do
There's always someone out there
Cooler than you



I know that's hard to believe
But there are people you meet
They're into something
That is to big to be expressed
Through their clothes
And they'll put up
With all the poses you throw

And you won't even know
That they're not sizing you up
They know your mum messed you up
Or maybe let you watch
Too much TV
But they'll still look in your eyes
To find the human inside
You know there's always something
In there to see
Beneath the veneer
Not everybody made the list this year
Have a beer

Make me feel tiny
If it makes you feel tall
But there's always someone
Cooler than you


Now that I've got the disease
In a way I'm relieved
'Cause I don't have to stress about it
Like you do

I might just get up and dance
Or buy some acid-washed pants
When you don't care
Then you've got nothing to lose

And I won't hesitate
'Cause every moment
Life is slipping away

Make me feel tiny
If it makes you feel tall
But there's always someone
Cooler than you


No One is Cooler Than MEdia Dragon ;-) by Gannon TM © 7 June 2011 (Non Nag)
Publish Away - Diary as Sin ; [ Non Nag Family Tree on the Largest Island; Why poets and writers like treasure islands ]
• · Forget Facebook – our cognitive capacities max out at three to five intimate friendships. Time to shrink our social networks? ; Lying and art spring from a common impulse: to escape reality. Art is in fact a kind of lying, and lying a form of art. Truth Telling
• · · Ours is the age of the meme, in which information spreads faster and farther than ever before. But who’s in charge, us or our memes? Ideas, fads, hoaxes; Tina Fey has turned superficial self-deprecation into shtick. The lesson for female comics: Be unthreatening and men might let you join the show.. NEUROSIS AND COMEDY make a natural pair. The former is often a type of pathological self-awareness, and nothing breeds a sense of comic irony like obsessive doubt and social maladjustment. Woody Allen, Richard Lewis, Larry David: all Jewish men from whose brains you can almost hear the constant whir of anxious introspection The Neurosis Racket; >; By day, Stephen Griffiths pursued his doctorate in homicide studies, writing a dissertation on 19th-century methods of murder. By night, he employed 14th-century tactics on his victims Murder Most Academic
• · · · Paul Theroux loathes luxury. He set off 50 years ago in search of miserable, difficult places; forbidden cities; and back roads The places in between ; Poverty deepens and inequality grows. But the rich, says Deirdre McCloskey, are blameless: “Success in a commercial society is a victimless crime. The success of capitalism and the failure of central planning in improving the lot of ordinary citizens have not, however, diminished the clerisy’s attraction to government planning or its disdain for the market. Instead, the clerisy has claimed that the wealth of some in a world where others are poor is a sure sign of the sinfulness of the former and the innocence, if not sainthood, of the latter. An Obvious Secret
• · · · · From recruitment to employment law and from leadership development to career moves, HR covers the gamut ; Count on this blog to learn more about workers’ compensation, risk management and more ; There is no joy in saying "We told you so," when the price being paid is so high. This week's economic news of lowered growth forecasts, record housing lows, and increasing unemployment claims is truly tragic. But the silver lining is that this continuing evidence of the failure of Big Government is driving more and more people to think again. Prime Time for Liberty
• · · · · · Trefis breaks down the most important aspects of the LinkedIn IPO. Providing answers to pressing questions, this report not only helps investors determine the true value of LNKD, but can also serve as a guide for how to approach other splash IPOs, like Groupon’s impending offering. LinkedIn: 10 Things You Should Know Before Investing; Despite long professing the benefits of understanding happiness, the father of the positive psychology movement now believes it's overrated. According to Dr Martin Seligman's new book Flourish, happiness is just one of the components of true well-being. It’s Time to Flourish ; Museums by Google

CODA:
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
— Steve Jobs, June 2005

Tash the master/mistress photographer of the soul and character of individuals of diverse classes and callings is off on a foto - publishing journey of a lifetime Lens and Pixel e