#nouswork

Conservative Party email: “While Labour are bankrolled by the trade unions, we rely on hardworking people like you”. They seem to forget about their millionaire supporters. And they choose to forget that Trade Unions are financed by hardworking people! - http://is.gd/lPxKjw

Today, we pretend shock that young men sometimes go abroad to fight for a cause, religious or otherwise, but compared to the mass insanity of World War I, what we see today is truly petty. The authorities everywhere then made great efforts to push young men, using songs, marching bands, slogans, shame and social pressure in many forms, and countless lies.

... time management renders a wide expanse of convivial activities as traps or annoyances best avoided. In this sense, GTD espouses asociality as superiority. It draws together troubling philosophical legacies of exceptionalism in the guise of successful entrepreneurialism. In the networked context, productivity’s mandate is to obliterate what remains of voluntary sociability in the otherwise coercive networking context of the modern workplace

The bill for corporate welfare is huge – and largely hidden. We know a lot about the people who claim social welfare: we know how much each benefit costs the public, the government sets strict rules for eligibility – and we even have detailed estimates for how much cheating goes on. Between them, Whitehall, academia and NGOs have churned out enough surveys on social welfare claimants to fill a wing of the Bodleian library. But corporate welfare? The government has itself acknowledged: “There is no definitive source of data about spending on subsidies to businesses in the UK.” The numbers are scattered across government publications and there is not even any agreement on what counts as a corporate handout. Instead, what you get on the issue is silence. A very congenial silence for the CBI and other business lobby groups, who can urge ministers to cut benefits for the poor harder and faster, knowing their members are still getting their bungs. An agreeable silence for Osborne and David Cameron, who still argue that the primary problem in Britain is that the public sector “crowds out” private enterprise, without ever acknowledging how much the public subsidises business. Most of all, a silence at the very centre of our democracy.

Forgive me, Mary, if I do not hail you as Queen of Heaven, if I hesitate to praise you as Mediatrix or salute you as Co-Redemptrix. Allow me to greet you humbly by the humble name your mother gave you. Mary, a peasant child. A poor girl from a little village. Mary, in whom the joy of heaven came down to dwell. Mary, the little hinge on which the hopes of all the ages turn. I greet you, Mary! If I do not adore your perpetual virginity, I will instead contemplate your perpetual humility, for all riches were laid up in your poverty. If I do not venerate your immaculate conception, I will strive nonetheless to imitate your immaculate fidelity, for through your faith the knot of human faithlessness has been undone.

mistaken assumptions perpetuate the belief that writing is merely a transparent means of documenting knowledge rather than a primary tool for generating thinking. As a result our focus is too often on the final product than on the process itself.