Hughes (1993), Ted, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Faber & Faber 1993 ' Synopsis In this momentous adventure in criticism, one of the leading poets writing in English argues that our profound response to Shakespeare's great late plays is prompted by a mythic, symbolic structure that inheres in each of them, and indeed binds the entire Shakespearean corpus into one huge, complex, ever-evolving work. Ted Hughes sees Shakespeare's early poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece as embodying two great myths of the archaic world, that of the hero who rejects the love of the Goddess and is killed in revenge by a boar; and that of the king, or god, whose crime is rape and whose punishment is banishment. These two complexes merge as Shakespeare's work develops into what Hughes calls the Tragic Equation, a flexible formula through which the poet was able to tap into the innate power of these myths to enliven his own imagination - and through him the imagination of Elizabethan England, in which the conflicts between Catholicism and Protestantism in the "living myth" of the English Reformation never lay far from the bloody surface of events. With his characteristic mixture of erudition and immediacy, Ted Hughes traces this idea in a close reading of Shakespeare's entire work. This text originally grew out of correspondence with dramatists, and anyone for whom intimate attention to the plays is important - scholar, student, actor, or common reader - will profit greatly from Hughes's loving, intensive, engrossing, and radical analysis of the greatest writing in the language.' 
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Lonergan (1992), Bernard J F, Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan : Volume 3), University of Toronto Press 1992 '. . . Bernard Lonergan's masterwork. Its aim is nothing less than insight into insight itself, an understanding of understanding' 
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Nicholls (2025), Jeffrey, Cognitive Cosmogenesis: a systematic integration of theology and physics, Austin Macauley 2025 ' The core idea of the top down theology devised by the Christian bishops for the Emperor Constantine is that the omnipotent and omniscient creator totally controls every moment of every event in the world. The imperial picture. Here we work from the bottom up. A key to the connection of physics and theology is symmetry with respect to complexity.
Although the difference in scale between fundamental particles and the people of an ideal democratic polity is immense, they are formally quite similar. Both democratic politics and quantum electrodynamics work in Hilbert space. Voting is linear, a form of superposition distributed by parties. Individuals and political parties are characterized by their directions in political space which may be modelled by vectors in a Hilbert space.
We may imagine a space with a basis vector for every person. Their sums in various combinations present us with a comprehensive picture of the political directions in an electorate. Such ideal democratic political systems have natural quantum mechanical support which gives us insight into the nature of the world.' 
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Wilczek (2008), Frank, The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces, Basic Books 2008 ' In this excursion to the outer limits of particle physics, Wilczek explores what quarks and gluons, which compose protons and neutrons, reveal about the manifestation of mass and gravity. A corecipient of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics, Wilczek knows what he’s writing about; the question is, will general science readers? Happily, they know what the strong interaction is (the forces that bind the nucleus), and in Wilczek, they have a jovial guide who adheres to trade publishing’s belief that a successful physics title will not include too many equations. Despite this injunction (against which he lightly protests), Wilczek delivers an approachable verbal picture of what quarks and gluons are doing inside a proton that gives rise to mass and, hence, gravity. Casting the light-speed lives of quarks against “the Grid,” Wilczek’s term for the vacuum that theoretically seethes with quantum activity, Wilczek exudes a contagious excitement for discovery. A near-obligatory acquisition for circulating physics collections.' --Gilbert Taylor  
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Albert Einstein (1936), Physics and reality, ' Physics constitutes a logical system of thought which is in a state of evolution, and whose basis cannot be obtained through distillation by any inductive method from the experiences lived through, but which can only be attained by free invention. The justification (truth content) of the system rests in the proof of usefulness of the resulting theorems on the basis of sense experiences, where the relations of the latter to the former can only be comprehended intuitively. Evolution is going on in the direction of increasing simplicity of the logical basis. In order further to approach this goal, we must make up our mind to accept the fact that the logical basis departs more and more from the facts of experience, and that the path of our thought from the fundamental basis to these resulting theorems, which correlate with sense experiences, becomes continually harder and longer.' back

Amin Saikal (2025_07_31), The Muslim world has been strong on rhetoric, short on action over Gaza and Afghanistan, ' When it comes to dealing with two of the biggest current crises in the Muslim world – the devastation of Gaza and the Taliban’s draconian rule in Afghanistan – Arab and Muslim states have been staggeringly ineffective.
Their chief body, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), in particular, has been strong on rhetoric but very short on serious, tangible action.
The OIC, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, is composed of 57 predominantly Muslim states. It is supposed to act as a representative and consultative body and make decisions and recommendations on the major issues that affect Muslims globally. It calls itself the “collective voice of the Muslim world”.
Yet the body has proved to be toothless in the face of Israel’s relentless assault on Gaza, triggered in response to the Hamas attacks of October 7 2023.
The OIC has equally failed to act against the Taliban’s reign of terror in the name of Islam in ethnically diverse Afghanistan. [. . . ]
The OIC is good at putting out statements. However, this approach hasn’t varied much from that of the wider global community. It is largely verbal, and void of any practical measures. [ . . .]
There are many reasons for the OIC’s ineffectiveness.
For one, the group is composed of a politically, socially, culturally and economically diverse assortment of members.
But more importantly, it has not functioned as a “bridge builder” by developing a common strategy of purpose and action that can overcome the geopolitical and sectarian differences of its members.
In the current polarised international environment, the rivalry among its member states – and with major global powers such as the United States and China – has rendered the organisation a mere talking shop.
This has allowed extremist governments in both Israel and Afghanistan to act with impunity.
It is time to look at the OIC’s functionality and determine how it can more effectively unite the umma.' back

Charlie English (2025_07_27), ' ‘1984’ Hasn’t Changed, but America Has, ' I traced a copy of George Orwell’s “1984” to the library of the social sciences department at Warsaw University, a literary treasure trove heavy with the scent of dust and old paper, and so jammed with shelves that in places the only way to move around was sideways. For months I had been searching for this particular volume, a book that had played, in my view, a small but significant role in winning the Cold War.
There are myriad reasons the Eastern Bloc collapsed in 1989. The economic stagnation of the East and the war in Afghanistan are two of the most commonly cited. But literature also played its part, thanks to a long-running U.S. operation conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency that covertly moved millions of books through the Iron Curtain in a bid to undermine Communist Party censorship.
While it is hard to quantify the program’s effect in absolute terms, its history offers valuable lessons for today, not least since some of the very same titles and authors the C.I.A. sent East during the Cold War — including “1984”— are now deemed objectionable by a network of conservative groups across the United States. [. . .]
What some Eastern European readers of contraband copies of “1984” suspected, but very few knew for sure, was that these and millions of other uncensored texts were not reaching them entirely by chance, but were part of a decades-long U.S. intelligence operation called the “C.I.A. book program,” based for much of its existence in the nondescript office building at 475 Park Avenue South in Midtown Manhattan. There, a small team of C.I.A. employees organized the infiltration of 10 million books and periodicals into the Eastern Bloc, sending literature by every imaginable means: in trucks fitted with secret compartments, on yachts that traversed the stormy Baltic, in the mail, or slipped into the luggage of countless travelers from Eastern Europe who dropped in at C.I.A. distribution hubs in the West. [. . .]
In the mid-2020s, “1984” is again being restricted, this time by conservative, Trump-aligned politicians in the United States. In May 2023, the Republican governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, signed into law Senate File 496, which according to the governor “puts parents in the driver’s seat” when it comes to their children’s education. In fact SF 496 forces Iowa schools to remove from their libraries thousands of books of which cultural conservatives disapprove. [. . .]
There are two lessons from the history of the C.I.A. book program that the book banners would do well to heed. One is that censorship — whether by Communists, fascists or democratic governments — tends to create demand for the works it targets. (That, and Mr. Trump’s Orwellian tactics, may explain why “1984” has been surging up the book charts in recent years.)
The other is that the totalitarians lost the Cold War, and freedom of thought won the day. The former Polish dissident Adam Michnik, whose own works were promoted by the C.I.A., presumably without his knowledge, said: “It was books that were victorious in the fight. We should build a monument to books".' back

Einstein to Max and Hedwig Born 29 April 1924, To Max and Hedwig Born, I canceled going to Naples by realizing, to my delight, that a defect in my health provided me sufficient excuse for that; instead, I am going again to Kiel for a lit- tle while. Bohr’s opinion on radiation interests me very much. But I won’t be driven into abandoning strict causality before entirely different defenses have been tried against it than hitherto. The thought that an electron subjected to a ray chooses of its free volition the instant and direction in which it wants to bounce away is in- tolerable to me. If so, then I would rather be a cobbler or even a casino employee than a physicist. My attempts to give quanta tangible form have nevertheless al- ways failed, but I haven’t given up hope yet, not by a long shot. And if it absolutely doesn’t want to work, then the consolation always remains that the failure lies with me alone back

Elizabeth Gibney (2025_07_30), Physicists disagree wildly on what quantum mechanics says about reality, Nature survey shows, 'Quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science — and makes much of modern life possible. Technologies ranging from computer chips to medical-imaging machines rely on the application of equations, first sketched out a century ago, that describe the behaviour of objects at the microscopic scale.
But researchers still disagree widely on how best to describe the physical reality that lies behind the mathematics, as a Nature survey reveals.
Quantum mechanics 100 years on: an unfinished revolution
At an event to mark the 100th anniversary of quantum mechanics last month, lauded specialists in quantum physics argued politely — but firmly — about the issue. “There is no quantum world,” said physicist Anton Zeilinger, at the University of Vienna, outlining his view that quantum states exist only in his head and that they describe information, rather than reality. “I disagree,” replied Alain Aspect, a physicist at the University of Paris-Saclay, who shared the 2022 Nobel Prize with Zelinger.
The responses — numbering more than 1,100, mainly from physicists — showed how widely researchers vary in their understanding of the most fundamental features of quantum experiments.'
To gain a snapshot of how the wider community interprets quantum physics in its centenary year, Nature carried out the largest ever survey on the subject. We e-mailed more than 15,000 researchers whose recent papers involved quantum mechanics, and also invited attendees of the centenary meeting, held on the German island of Heligoland, to take the survey.
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Farnaz Fassihi & Ephrat Livni (2025_07_31), Arab States Call for Hamas to Disarm Amid Push for a Palestinian State, ' The world’s Arab countries for the first time have joined unanimously in the call for Hamas to lay down its weapons, release all hostages and end its rule of the Gaza Strip, conditions that they said could help the establishment of a Palestinian state.
The surprise declaration, endorsed on Tuesday by the 22 member nations of the Arab League, also condemned Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks on Israel, which set off the devastating war in Gaza. The statement came at a United Nations conference in New York on a two-state solution to end the decades-long conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
“In the context of ending the war in Gaza, Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority, with international engagement and support, in line with the objectives of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state,” said the declaration. It was also signed by all 27 European Union states and 17 other countries. [. . .]
It remains unclear whether Hamas would heed the call of the Arab League. Hamas has so far demonstrated no willingness to voluntarily surrender its weapons or give up control over Gaza. Its initial response to the declaration was mixed but did not suggest a significant shift.[. . .]
At the United Nations, the high-level conference on a two-state solution, cosponsored by France and Saudi Arabia, unfolded as reports of starvation in Gaza continued to arrive. Images of small children and babies dying of hunger have set off global outrage against Israel for preventing humanitarian aid from entering the territory at the scale needed to avert severe food shortages. [. . . ]
Israel and the United States denounced the conference, saying that it was premature. The conditions on the ground — a continuing war, Israeli hostages still being held captive and militant groups still operating in Gaza and the West Bank — did not allow for a permanent peace or Palestinian statehood.
“No token recognition and no U.N. resolution will change the basic fact that there are those in the world who fight terrorists and extremist forces and then there are those who turn a blind eye to them,” said the Israeli Ambassador to the U.N., Danny Danon.' back

Feynman, Leighton and Sands FLP II_02, Chapter 2: Differential Calculus of Vector Fields, ' What it means really to understand an equation—that is, in more than a strictly mathematical sense—was described by Dirac. He said: “I understand what an equation means if I have a way of figuring out the characteristics of its solution without actually solving it.” So if we have a way of knowing what should happen in given circumstances without actually solving the equations, then we “understand” the equations, as applied to these circumstances. A physical understanding is a completely unmathematical, imprecise, and inexact thing, but absolutely necessary for a physicist. ' back

Frontiers in Political Science, , ' Frontiers in Political Science is a multidisciplinary journal that focuses on the theory and practice of governments and political systems at various levels, including local, state, national, and international. Indexed in Scopus, the DOAJ, and Web of Science (ESCI), the journal is led by Field Chief Editors, Prof Anastassia Obydenkova (Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish National Research Council, IAE-CSIC, Spain) and Dr Thania Isabelle Paffenholz (Inclusive Peace, Switzerland), and considers the societal and cultural factors that influence government operations and policy theories. Topics include, but are not limited to: comparative governance elections and representation peace and democracy political economy political participation political science methodologies politics of technology refugees and conflict. Manuscripts that purely focus on economic issues, such as economic theories or market dynamics, are not suitable for publication in this journal. Similarly, studies that are purely applying theories form natural sciences, pure mathematics, literary criticism, fine arts, and medical sciences are not appropriate for this journal. While political psychology is a subfield of political science, psychological research focused solely on individual or group behavior without a political context is also not suitable for this journal. It is important to note that interdisciplinary research can sometimes bridge multiple fields, and boundaries between disciplines are not always rigid. Frontiers in Political Science is committed to advancing developments in the field of political science by allowing unrestricted access to articles, and communicating scientific knowledge to researchers and the public alike, to enable the scientific breakthroughs of the future. back

Gabriel Appleby (2025_08_01), Governments are becoming increasingly secretive. Here’s how they can be made to be more transparent, Transparency is vital to our democratic system of government.
It promotes good government, spurring those in power into better practice. Even when what is revealed is pretty revolting, transparency means those transgressions are known, and accountability for them can follow.
Transparency is particularly important for people who otherwise do not have access to government, who are not “in the room” or “at the table”, whether that be directly or through lobbyists or other connections.
But recent data reveal government transparency in Australia is on the decline. Given the connection between transparency and a well-functioning democracy, this is deeply concerning.
The Albanese government’s compliance rate with Senate orders for documents is the lowest of any government since 2016, and the second-worst of any government since 1993. Disclosures under freedom of information laws have dropped dramatically over the past decade.
The problem isn’t a lack of solutions, but that governments appear perpetually unwilling to open up. [. . .]
The recent data show the government’s compliance rates with Senate orders to produce documents have fallen from 92% in 1993–96, to approximately 33% for the current parliament. [. . . ]The Albanese government’s performance on delivering transparency this way is a mixed bag.
First, the good news: the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is better resourced, first-instance processing times have improved, and more of the reviews received by the OAIC are being finalised.x
But the plaudits end there.
Whereas the proportion of requests granted in full stood at 59% in 2011–12, by 2023–24 it had fallen to just 25%.
Over the same period, outright refusals have ballooned from 12% to 23%.
The precipitous decline in the “refusal gap” (the difference between the proportion of requests granted in full and those refused) is alarming.' back

INXS, Beautiful Girl, Nicky's in the corner
With a black coat on
Running from a bad home
With some cat inside
Now where did you find her
Among the neon lights
That haunt the streets outside, she says
Stay with me

Beautiful girl (stay with me)
Beautiful girl (stay with me)
She wanna go home

From doorway to doorway
Street corner to corner
With neon ghosts in the city
And she says

Stay with me
Stay with me
Stay with me
Stay with me

(Stay with me, stay with me)

She's so scared
So very frightened
Anything could happen
Right here tonight

Beautiful girl (stay with me)
Beautiful girl (stay with me)
She wants to go home

Stay with me (beautiful girl)
Stay with me (beautiful girl)
Stay with me (beautiful girl)
Stay with me, beautiful girl
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Jessica Washington (2025_07_26), Israeli Parliament Votes for Making Apartheid Official. Fetterman: “I Haven’t Been Following It.”,
' When Israel’s parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of dropping any pretense that it wasn’t an apartheid state, some of the Jewish state’s most ardent American defenders couldn’t even be bothered to pay attention.
“I haven’t been following it closely,” said Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who’s made defending Israel a key part of his political career.
The response was one of a mixed bag among both Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill interviewed by The Intercept, but Fetterman’s tone was the most strident in its lack of regard.
Despite its most powerful ally and arms dealer’s stated preference for a two-state solution, Israel’s Parliament voted overwhelmingly in favor of a symbolic measure to annex the occupied West Bank on Wednesday. The nonbinding resolution, which was advanced by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition and passed 71-13 in the Knesset, won’t legally change the reality in the West Bank — but it marks an escalation in the Israeli government’s efforts to annex the territory. [. . .]
The resolution in the Knesset, or Parliament, called to apply “Israeli sovereignty, law, judgment and administration to all the areas of Jewish settlement of all kinds in Judea, Samaria and the Jordan Valley” — which is how most Israelis refer to the West Bank.
Currently, 3 million Palestinians reside in the West Bank, alongside over 500,000 Israeli settlers, who’ve established settlements in the occupied territory in violation of international law.' back

Joel Scanlan (2025_08_01), ' Industrial-scale deepfake abuse caused a crisis in South Korean schools. Here’s how Australia can avoid the same fate, ' Australian schools are seeing a growing number of incidents in which students have created deepfake sexualised imagery of their classmates. The eSafety Commissioner has urged schools to monitor the situation.
In 2024, the problem of deepfakes became a crisis in South Korea: more than 500 schools and universities were targeted in a coordinated wave of deepfake sexual abuse.
AI-generated sexualised images of students — mostly girls — were circulated in encrypted Telegram groups. The perpetrators were often classmates of the victims.
A new report from global child-protection group ECPAT with funding from the UK-based Churchill Fellowship takes a close look at what happened in Korea, so other countries can understand and avoid similar crises. Here’s what Australia can learn. [. . .]
The South Korean crisis holds several lessons for Australia.
1. Prevention must start early. Korea’s crisis involved children as young as 12 (and even younger in some primary schools targeted). We need comprehensive digital ethics and consent education in primary schools, not just in high schools.
2. Law enforcement needs AI tools of their own to keep up. Just as offenders are using AI to scale up abuse, police must be equipped with AI to detect and investigate it. This may include facial recognition, content detection, and automated triage systems, all governed by strict privacy protocols.
3. Platforms must also be held accountable. Telegram only began cooperating with South Korean authorities after immense public pressure. Australia must enforce safety-by-design principles and ensure encrypted platforms are not safe havens for abuse.
4. Support services must be scaled up. Korea’s crisis caused trauma for entire communities. Victims often had to continuing going to school with perpetrators in the same classrooms. Australia must invest in trauma-informed support systems that can respond to both individual and collective harm.
5. We must listen to victims and survivors. Policy must be shaped by those who have experienced digital abuse. Their insights are crucial to designing effective and compassionate responses.
The Korean crisis didn’t happen overnight. The warning signs were there: in 2023 Korea produced more than half the world’s celebrity deepfakes). This has been accompanied by rising misogyny online and the proliferation of AI tools. But they were ignored until it was too late. Australia mustn’t make the same mistake.' back

Luke Munn (2025_08_01), Friday essay: libertarian tech titan Peter Thiel helped make JD Vance. The Republican kingmaker’s influence is growing, ' The money is easy to trace. Scroll back through tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel’s political donations and you’ll soon hit US$15 million worth of transfers sent to Protect Ohio Values, JD Vance’s campaign fund. The donations, made in 2022, are a staggering contribution to an individual senate race, and helped put Vance (Thiel’s former employee at tech fund Mithril Capital) on a winning trajectory.
But if money matters, so do ideas. Scroll back through Vance’s speeches, and you’ll hear echoes of Thiel’s voice. The decline of US elites (and by extension, the nation) is supposedly a result of technological stagnation: declining innovation, trivial distractions, broken infrastructure. To make the nation great again, Thiel believes, tech should come first, corporates should be unshackled, and the state should resemble the startup. For Vance, who has now risen to the office of US vice-president, a Thiel talk on these topics at Yale Law was “the most significant moment” of his time there. [. . . ]
While difficult to pin down precisely, Thiel’s Christianity shapes his belief in a declining or even apocalyptic world that can only be countered with unapologetic interventions and technological innovations. God helps those who help themselves – but could always use additional help from ambitious tech elites. [. . .]
In Thiel’s view, the Enlightenment project – to advance knowledge, cultivate tolerance, and elevate humanity as a whole – rested on a naive understanding of human nature. Like Curtis Yarvin and other influential Silicon Valley political thinkers, he asserts that humanity is brutal and a shift from Enlightenment optimism to Dark Enlightenment pessimism is required. [. . .]
Thiel’s philosophy, which journalists have called techno-fascism, recalls philosopher Umberto Eco, who described fascism as a “beehive of contradictions” and “a collage of different philosophical and political ideas”. The radical right, in particular, has no problem mashing together many views that at face value should not fit: scavenger ideologies that are opportunistic in grabbing elements that work for them.
Instead of contradictions, these hybrid forms need to be understood as evolutions. They are tensions, held within the body and the mind of the subject, that push monolithic frameworks like conservatism beyond their existing limits. Thiel’s power – and his political blueprint for others – is insisting you can be a philosophical entrepreneur, an illiberal patriot, and a queer conservative.'
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Mallory Moench (2025_07_29), Israeli settler accused of killing Palestinian involved in Oscar-winning West Bank film, ' An Israeli settler shot dead a Palestinian teacher who helped film Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, according to the Palestinian education ministry and an Israeli-American activist who was at the scene of the shooting.
No Other Land co-director Yuval Abraham said on X that a settler shot Odeh Hathaleen in the lungs in Umm Al-Khair village in the occupied West Bank.
Residents allege the shooter was Yinon Levy, who is sanctioned by the UK.
Attorney Avichai Hajbi said he was representing a resident "who felt his life was in danger, was forced to fire his weapon into the air" after residents were "attacked by an Arab mob, along with foreign activists, with stones and violence". [. . .]
Levy, a leader of an outpost farm, was sanctioned by the UK in 2024, along with others, because he "used physical aggression, threatened families at gunpoint, and destroyed property as part of a targeted and calculated effort to displace Palestinian communities".
He denied the allegations to the BBC last year.
He was also sanctioned by the US under the Biden administration, along with others, last year, but President Donald Trump lifted those sanctions.
Gilad Kariv, a member of Israel's Knesset from the Democrats party, said on X in response to the video that "in the territories, armed Jewish militias operate unchecked".
Israel has built about 160 settlements housing some 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem - land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state - during the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.
The settlements are considered illegal under international law - a position supported by an advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last year - although Israel disputes this.
Settlement expansion has risen sharply since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in late 2022 at the head of a right-wing, pro-settler coalition.
Settler violence, which has also been on the rise for years, has surged since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.' back

World Bank Group, Who We Are, ' Our mission is to end extreme poverty and boost shared prosperity on a livable planet. This is threatened by multiple, intertwined crises. Time is of the essence.' back

World Bank Open Data, GDP (current US$), Country official statistics, National Statistical Organizations and/or Central Banks; National Accounts data files, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD ); Staff estimates, World Bank ( WB ) back