“This is just a more volatile world. I mean, there really hasn’t been a global businessperson who has thought about Greece for 2500 years. And now it’s like, frigging Greece, you’ve gotta be kidding me! There’s something about the world we live that’s just more volatile, it’s interconnected.” — “Leaders must drive change”, Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric
Daily chart: which countries have the biggest debts? Judged by its towering sovereign-debt burden and budget deficit, Japan should be a concern for investors. Yet there are good reasons why the euro-zone countries are first in the firing line.
“Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places any more but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airport gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkman, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.”
-David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
“The colourful Vietnamese restaurants lining Victoria Street were created by the first wave of boat people - refugees who fled in thousands of rickety boats at the end of the Vietnam War in a desperate bid to escape the victorious communist regime.
The restaurants are their great gift to Melbourne, but they came at the cost of dreadful danger and suffering.
Countless Vietnamese boat people drowned or were murdered by pirates, but in stark contrast to today’s refugee policies, those who survived and made it to Australia were given a warm and sympathetic welcome.”
Buried deep inside today’s Sunday Age I found this wonderfully touching advertorial, “Delicious legacy of a grim journey”.
It made me ask myself some helplessly naive questions. Like, what has become of our country?
At what point did we allow such a cruel political agenda dominate both sides of our national discourse?
Who are the supposedly large constituency of Australians that fuel the cruelty and intensity of this debate? Where do these people live? For what lack of compassion and education do they hold these views?
And how is it that an advertising feature far from the front page has a more intelligent, humane, nuanced view of immigration policy than either of our major political parties?
Heartbreaking and brilliant. It’s “Nickle and Dimed” for the post-noughties age.
Play Spent - try and make it through the month as a low income American.
“Retro-fitting a prime minister with an identity is extremely tricky. Kevin Rudd put significant work before the 2007 election into which, cautiously, post-Howard Australia could snuggle with confidence: economic conservatism with a whiff of godliness, spruced up with a modern wife and a Chinese twist for the adventurous; sort of a bilingual crypto-Howard, sans tracksuit.” — Amidst endless critiques of Labor’s woes, Annabel Crabb’s analysis in The Monthly is the most compelling and incisive yet (sadly subscriber only, but it’s worth buying the print issue just for this article and Don Watson’s)
“The other possibility is that the wretchedness of Gillard signifies a more general upheaval in the social and political setting. The cliches, the tortured and oppressive cadences are habits of the language she was raised in. Demotic it may be, but this language carries only the shallowest meaning. The phrases are not to inform or inspire the audiences but merely to echo it to satisfy its narcissism. The spin the public loathes is made expressly for them.” — ‘The Nation Reviewed’, Don Watson in The Monthly
“
While passionate conviction and shrewd pragmatism are characteristics of great political leaders, what really distinguishes them is their detachment - not their proximity to the electorate but their distance from it. The natural posture for a politician has always been ‘chief amongst equals’. But modern media does not allow this. Now it is at best ‘equal among equals’ and commonly last or least among them.
Listen to talkback, watch Q&A, tune in to the internet and ask where the power and respect lies. Who lays the strongest claim to the record, the knowledge and the authority, charismatic or otherwise? Not the leaders. Most of what used to be theirs is shared between the host and the audience, for whom pretty well any opinion is as good as another. The politicians scramble for the residue.
” — ‘The Nation Reviewed’, Don Watson in The Monthly“A designer is trying to create order out of chaos, while an art director is trying to disrupt: competing for attention and empathy.” — John Hegarty, Hegarty on Advertising: Turning intelligence into magic. (via nextness)
“I asked him if he would come up with a few options. And he said, ‘No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution — if you want options, go talk to other people. But I’ll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that’s up to you — you’re the client — but you pay me.’” — Steve Jobs on iconic designer Paul Rand (via curiositycounts, STW Nextness)
(via nextness)
“Isaac Osei, who owns a taxi fleet in New York City with his wife, is also a Ghanaian chief who wears a crown and oversees five towns.”
- An African Chief in Cabby’s Clothing, The New York Times
Cannes, June 2011
“In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were ”in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ”That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. ”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
— Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush by Ron Suskind for NYT Magazine
October 17, 2004
(Source: sexartandpolitics, via underpaidgenius)
“Further confusion is created by equating strategy with success or with ambition. This was my problem with the Web-services CEO who claimed “Strategy is never quitting until you win.” This sort of mish- mash of pop culture, motivational slogans, and business buzz speak is, unfortunately, increasingly common. It short-circuits real inventiveness and fails to distinguish among different senior-level management tasks and virtues. Strategy cannot be a useful concept if it is a synonym for success.” — Good strategy, Bad strategy by Richard Rumelt