Saturday, November 04, 2017

Pound of Flesh Barrowing Men

Three kinds of souls, three prayers: 1) I am a bow in your hands, Lord. Draw me, lest I rot. 2) Do not overdraw me, Lord. I shall break. 3) Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break
— Nikos Kazantzakis, who died in 1957 when MEdia Dragon was conceived

 Motto: 'I always know enough to be dangerous.'

Classical Triguboff


I imagine that Harry Triguboff, as a good classical scholar, will be recalling these words from one of Terence's Latin plays as he reads the  letters of November 4-5: The public hiss at me, but I cheer myself when in my own house I contemplate the coins in my strong-box.


Theodore Dreiser tried just about everything to succeed, even working for a publishing house whose motto was “The worse the swill, the more the public will buy”  Motto 

Thousands mourn Australian mafia's 'don of dons' - Antonio "Tony" Sergi  ...


Disgust in Rome at mafia don's glamour funeral...

Newly-Released Diary Shows Bin Laden Was Radicalized After Visiting Shakespeare’s Birthplace


A summer trip to the UK as a teenager and visits to Shakespeare’s birthplace convinced Osama bin Laden that the west was “decadent”, the late leader of al-Qaida and architect of the 9/11 attacks wrote in his personal journal shortly before he was killed by US special forces in 2011. … [Read More]


Apple has been cataloguing women's 'brassiere' photos

 Sarah Huckabee Sanders Explains the Tax System in Beer Charles Pierce, Esquire

 Surprising monkey study finds bad times do not cause group members to change behavior PhysOrg


Autonomous robots gain foothold as private security guards McClatchy

"Public conversation is overpoliticized and undermoralized,” says David Brooks. "Relationships and mercy and how to be a friend — these are the big subjects of life, and we don’t talk about them enough"... Hesitant radical age



Woodpecker Has Been Attacking Car Mirrors in Snellville, Georgia Atlas Obscura via Malchkeon


Study: Musicians Have Better Memories Than We Do


A new meta-study concludes musicians tend to have stronger short-term and working-memory skills than their non-musical counterparts. The research, published in the online journal PLoS One, finds they also appear to have a small advantage in terms of long-term memory. … [Read More]
Mark Twain had one goal: Make money. By the age of 50, he was rich. “I am frightened by the proportions of my prosperity,” he said, and he was right to be afraid... Imrich Mark his words  

Goudeket seems to endorse Spinoza’s great challenge (Ethics, Part 4, Prop. 67): “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation, not on death, but on life.” I have meditated on this proposition since I first encountered it as a teenager, and that may be the point. We know we are mortal. How does that knowledge change our manner of living? Neither morbidity nor mindless hedonism seems the appropriate response.

`The Contrarieties of Spring and Winter'







And just when you thought being happy was intuitive, the science of happiness contradicts many people's understandings of how to find joy.




    William Gass’s tediously admonishing 1996 essay “Ezra Pound” begins with associative wordplay on the poet’s name. “If used as a verb,” Gass writes, “‘pound’ means to beat. If used as a noun, ‘pound’ signifies a unit of weight, a measure of money, pressure of air, or physical force.” This “free” association of Gass’s mind predictably turns to Shakespeare, Shylock, and the infamous “pound of flesh.” It’s unclear what this associative gambit is meant to definitively prove, other than that the word “pound” has multiple meanings. The intended effect, however, is obvious. It’s meant to suggest that Pound’s notorious anti-semitism is an essential and unavoidable element of both his identity and poetry. Gass means to show that evil is baked into Pound’s namesake as a pastiche of associated synonyms, each symbolically resonating with Pound’s obsessions: force, power, drama, and money. It’s an evocative example of Pound as cipher, of his identity as a man and value as a poet being reduced to a series of negative associations. And, ironically, it mirrors the same banal, paranoid tendencies that Pound himself exhibited. Unfortunately, as Daniel Swift shows us in The Bughouse: The Poetry, Politics, and Madness of Ezra Pound, projecting onto his subject overly simple ideas about politics and art, scapegoating him in the Girardian sense, is de rigueur. And it’s something that was happening long before his death.

     Home Security Designs for Billionaires Core77

     Via Klever SKAN:




    Today, I’d like to start with something close to many of our hearts, figuratively and literally – health.
     
    No, this will not be a piece about the merits or de-merits of appointing certain individuals as Goodwill Ambassadors (though it might be interesting to find out what exactly the staffers in WHO were thinking when they put up that submission).




    Instead, I’d like to refer to something Libyan Dr Alaa Murabit talked about at a recent Wired Security event in London. There, she highlighted the risks of bio-terror and genetic engineering, naming a specific technology called CRISPR as a potential concern. 


     Not that she’s the first.  Former U.S. Director for National Intelligence James Clapper already called CRISPR a “weapon of mass destruction and proliferation” as early as 2016, up there with North Korea and nuclear weapons.




    Just what is CRISPR? It’s a technology (yes, not all technologies involve your smartphone) which, in essence, allows users to “scissor” away unwanted pieces of DNA, and replace them with others. Great if you want to cure diseases, improve crops, etc. Not so great if you happen to be on the receiving end of a bio-weapon created using the technology.
     

    Now, the less paranoid among you might ask, what’s the big deal? CRISPR has been around for years, and don’t you need like a PhD and all sorts of fancy lab equipment to use it to splice and dice DNA? Well, yes, and… maybe not.  One article from foreignaffairs.com says that a DIY CRISPR kit is available for $150. I did my own quick check and found something going for $159 (no, I did not buy it, really).
     

    Now, using the CRISPR kit to generate weapons still needs raw materials, a dispersion mechanism, etc. But I think this little nugget is enough to keep me up, for at least a few minutes at night – for less than a sixth of the price of the iPhone X, someone out there can be out creating mutant DNA. Hopefully this remains more sci-fi than evening news.

    The terror within.
    WHAT WE'RE READING: "How can you tell the difference between a terrorist and a schizophrenic person who is off medication?"





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