---

Ach, Bondi. Golden, pinkish sand beaches. Charming pastel Hungry Czech restaurants and kelly-green golf courses. Tiny cafes peppered everywhere …

Ideas can come from anywhere; the thing is to recognize them and give them shape. The global financial catastrophe has hit companies, families, and individuals

Do ideas sometimes pop into your head from, it seems, nowhere? Yes, and it’s because your brain actually operates on the edge of chaos
Fire exists in nature, a wild thing tamed by the mind of man. But when it first appeared, the wheel was an invention of something completely new.. Salute to wheels of ideas

Serving revenge Cold Communist secret police database goes online
Former dissident publishes list, rush of visitors crashes web server

Intense public interest saw a server collapse when databases kept by the Czechoslovak communist secret police (StB) were put online by former dissident Stanislav Penc. Within an hour of the data going online around 11 a.m. July 7, the server collapsed. Over the next three days, the Web site, Svazky.cz, registered 140,000 hits. It has since crashed again several times and was down as of press time.
Democracy needs to know the serious reading of books. Long books. Hard books. Books with which we have to struggle...

• The Dictator and I: Husak’s Émigrés and Exiles [Lessons of Charter 77 July 7 ; 2nd coming of Vacal Havel or Lech Welechsa ; Defining Slavic Dreams The Cold(est) War River]
• · US President Barack Obama has told Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin they may not agree on everything but they had an excellent opportunity to put ... In a polite atmosphere where both men seemed reserved, President Obama met Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin this morning at his dacha in Moscow. I think you just cut out Lech Waleza and Poles, cut out Havel and the Czechs. There were a whole bunch of people in eastern europe who showed courage. Important to acknowledge people who struggled for own freedom. Lift the Iron curtain. we don't have to diminish other people in order to recognize our role Obama, Russia 'reset' Cold War relations; Google Stories ; There are two different versions of the story of the end of the Cold War: the Russian version, and the truth. President Barack Obama endorsed the Russian version in Moscow last week. The truth, of course, is that the Soviets ran a brutal, authoritarian regime. The KGB killed their opponents or dragged them off to the Gulag. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of worship, no freedom of any kind Obama Rewrites the Cold War
• · Hugo Blick has written a deliciously enthralling triptych of comedy-dramas about people facing death Last Word Monologues ; The next train leaves from all platforms
• · · Even after our recent orgy of bailouts, and even as the culture of entitlement grips our country ever more tightly, Americans hunger for the assurance that we can do it for ourselves without a nanny state running our lives. Rediscovering Frederick Douglass in the Age of Obama ; Economic theory in meltdown: the biggest financial calamity in 80 years has left the reputation of economics in tatters. What went wrong with economics
• · · · To escape a 1930s culture war that soon turned into a shooting war, artists, writers and composers fled Europe for Southern California.. Hitler's Émigrés and Exiles ; Embrace individualism and reject stereotypes, says Tyler Cowen. Even look in a mirror. You may find far more talent than you expected. Talent
• · · · · It’s puzzling that such promising and prurient subject matter can lead to such flat, dull books. My Life In a G-String: A Round Up of Stripper Memoirs Stripper memoirs: Are all naked women pretty much the same? ; Language pervades the deepest domains of thought, shaping us from the nuts and bolts of perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions.. Ideas
• · · · · · The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite Capitalism's dirty secret ; What is the future for liberal democracy? This should be a pressing question. All around us, corporations rule the roost. They fund political parties and reward former and potential ministers with consultancies. They finance think-tanks, control newspapers and television and radio stations to mobilise particular kinds of opinion Corporate takeover of the state: What future for democracy when the private sector’s advance shows no sign of abating ; ANZ Bank has axed a further 248 jobs across the country as part of its strategy to slash the size of its Australian workforce

---

I believe that there is a fine line between freedom and authority and that we need both to maintain a reasonable society.
To much freedom brings chaos.
To much authority brings rebellion.
I say we need both and go back to the Greek city-states.

Nature is far harsher than the market: If you are not sustainable, you die. No second chances and no bailouts. Diversify across generations Nature’s 10 Simple Rules: Part


Let's throw caution to the wind ... but at what cost? Social Media and New Roles For Employees
Sadly this week Mr Greig Tillotson, NSW Parliamentary Librarian, announced his retirement. There are many Tears for Greig and David Clune at Macquarie Street. The global financial catastrophe has hit parliaments, families, and individuals. The crisis at library world is, in a word, complicated. The library has gone through a very difficult time in the last year and its two senior managers, David Clune and Greig Tillotson, have played a key role in ensuring that those difficulties have not disrupted our work. As a member of the Library Committee I saw this first-hand. I congratulate both of them on recently passing an important milestone 30 years of service as members of the library staff. {They are both much, much younger than me and much more intelligent than any of us …}

Regardless of your job title, social media allows you to help your organisation and get a little career protection for yourself. Governments and public services around the world are grappling with very complex issues. Looking for better and more innovative ways to perform our traditional public service role of providing policy advice to the Government. We need to be able to design smarter policy so that the policy instruments used, including regulation, information strategies, voluntarism, and the range of economic instruments, more effectively change the behaviour of those we seek to influence.need to work increasingly with others...the active participation of citizens, the third sector, business and local community groups.improving policy design in this environment of increasing complexity and interconnectedness."

• The train leaves from all platforms Social Media and New Roles For Employees ; [Just Czech with the one who must be obeyed the Shaw and unShaw creatures of the working world: We're trusted to do our own deals on groceries, but not on wages and conditions. We can be adult everywhere but the workplace; From a campaign that began almost four years ago to the day, Australian workers are set to have greater protection for their jobs, their conditions and their workplace rights. Employees enter a new era of rights; Executive power: unicameral parliaments cannot rely on watchdogs alone to guard against corruption Democracy has long odds in a stacked house ]
• · Why We Need Economics to Make Policy: An Introduction on How Not to Kill People. A citizen who casts his ballot without having to the best of his abilities studied as much economics as he can fails in his civic duties. Those fighting for free enterprise and free competition do not defend the interests of those rich today. They want a free hand left to unknown men who will be the entrepreneurs of tomorrow and whose ingenuity will make the life of coming generations more agreeable. They want the way left open to further economic improvements. They are the spokesmen of progress Free enterprise and free competition ; BARACK Obama's favourite television program is The Wire. The HBO series' title refers to electronic surveillance, a tool of law enforcement growing in favour not just in the US. In 2007-08, law enforcement agencies in Australia sought 3254 warrants for telephone intercepts. Ten years earlier the figure was 675 ; If any good has come out of Utegate, it brought into question the integrity and efficacy of adversarial politics. Of integrity, adversarial politics and a fake email
• · IN ITS obsession with property prices and housing affordability, Melbourne and Sydney have overlooked a startling fact: the cities are awash with empty buildings. They are Toorak's ghost mansions: grand houses that have sat unoccupied behind chained gates and boarded-up windows for years, even decades. Melbourne tycoon David Yu ; The number of unoccupied residential dwellings in Sydney counted by census workers in 2006 was 122,211 ; The number was up from 97,889 a decade ago. It begs analysis ; Map the number of empty buildings Daniel Cox Bubblepedia
• · · What image libraries like Getty and Corbis have done for still photography, YouTube and the proliferation of video sources have done for moving image. The spoils of tomorrow will go to the brands that take action to deepen emotional bonds with consumers today Roaring sounds; No one in their right mind would suggest that an economic collapse was just what we needed, but sometimes, tough times do throw up opportunities we don’t hear when the bulls are roaring. Opportunity knocks
• · · · Allowing commercial banks to create our money inevitably causes frequent booms and busts. Money from nothing: supplying money should be a public service; I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative – John Stuart Mill Why Tax Havens Are Bad;
• · · · · Two months ago G20 leaders pledged a crackdown on tax havens in response to the global financial crisis. But how much has changed? Global; The plans of a Swiss canton to attract the super-rich by offering them the chance to buy property in exclusive, previously out of bounds locations has sparked a political row and accusations that the country is encouraging apartheid of the rich and poor.Swiss offer millionaires a haven away from the poor
• · · · · · We have just been sent a most useful document: a really clear explanation of two highly important tax issues: transfer pricing and outward domestication. It's called Tricky Tax: Two Tax Avoidance Schemes Explained. The author has sent us these words to accompany it Alfred Hitchcock and Tricky Tax ; Offshore companies are exploiting their tax advantage, attracting capital to acquire U.S companies Supports bill to stop foreign insurers from avoiding US taxes

---

Twenty Nine (29) Years ago Today, the idea of the Bohemian Stranger and Media Dragon started to be formed and the Blogger.Com has made it possible Can a man who's warm understand one who's freezing inside Cold River?

Newsweekly’s last stand. Yes, the news magazines are in trouble in a digital age – all except The Economist. So why is it thriving?...
Media Weather Media Cloud is a system that lets you see the flow of the media. The Internet is fundamentally altering the way that news is produced and distributed, but there are few comprehensive approaches to understanding the nature of these changes. Media Cloud automatically builds an archive of news stories and blog posts from the web, applies language processing, and gives you ways to analyze and visualize the data. The system is still in early development, but we invite you to explore our current data and suggest research ideas. This is an open-source project, and we will be releasing all of the code soon. You can read more background on the project or just get started: Visualizations / What Are Your Research Ideas? / Keep Up-To-Date with Media Cloud. - Open Clouds

Interactive Clouds Mainstream Media Dragons Under Increasing Pressure
WSJ WSJ Interactive Map - Adverse events at top 100 newspapers, 2006-2009, this New York Times op-ed by Frank Rich - The American Press on Suicide Watch:

"Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Legendary brands from The Los Angeles Times to The Philadelphia Inquirer are teetering. The New York Times Company threatened to close The Boston Globe if its employees didn’t make substantial sacrifices in salaries and benefits. Other papers have died. The reporting ranks on network and local news alike are shriveling. You know it’s bad when the Senate is moved, as it was last week, to weigh in with hearings on The Future of Journalism. Financial Times: WSJ plans micro-fees for online articles - News Corp plans to introduce micro-payments for individual articles and premium subscriptions to the Wall Street Journal's website this year in a milestone in the news industry's race to find better online business models.

• Media ; [The American Press on Suicide Watch: "Newspaper circulations and revenues are in free fall. Tibute; Circulation ]
• · The Guidelines on Recruitment Advertising have effect from 1 July 2009 and apply to all agencies subject to the Financial Management and Accountability Act 1997. The guidelines govern a range of aspects of agencies' and departments' recruitment advertising in print media.
Internet: Guidelines on recruitment advertising; Isaiah Berlin disliked nature, linking love of the land with reactionary romanticism. People were his landscape...
• · Greed is good, up to a point. We must get straight on what capitalism offers the world, and know what its limits are. This means better knowing ourselves, says Fareed Zakaria... Greed is good ; Bitterness is so common and so deeply harmful that some psychiatrists are urging it be identified as a mental illness: post-traumatic embitterment disorder ... Bitterness