Lady Lazarus - Sylvia plath

Lady Lazarus

By Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it——


A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot


A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——


The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.


What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Social loafing The art of thinking clearly

An excerpt from the art of think clearly by Rolf dobellli

In 1913 Maxmillian Ringelmann, a french engineer studied the performance of horses.He concluded that the power of two animals pulling a coach did not equal twice the power of a single horse.Surprised by this result he extended the research to humans.He has several men pull a rope and measured the force applied by each individual.On average if two people were pulling together each invested just 93% of their individual strength when three pulled together it was 85% and with eight just 49%.

Science calls this the social loafing effect.It occurs when individual performance is not directly visible, it blends in to the group effort.It occurs among rowers but not in relay races because here individual contributions are evident.Social loafing is rational behavior why invest all of your energy when half will do especially when this little shortcut goes unnoticed.

When people work together individual performances decrease.This isn't surprising.What is noteworthy however is that our input doesnt grind to a complete halt.So what stops us from putting our feet up completely and letting the others do all the `hard work ,the consequences.

Social loafing has interesting' implications.In g'roups we tend to h'old back not only in terms of participation but also in terms of accountability.Nobody wants to take the rap for th'e misdeeds or poor decisions of the whole group.We hide behind team decisions.Th'e technical term for this is diffusion of responsibility.

In conclusion: people behave differently in groups than when alone.The disadvantages of groups can be mitig'ated by making 'individual performances as visible as possible.Long' live meritocracy!! Long' live th'e performance society!!

Becoming China

About Becoming China

One of the two most powerful states in the world, China continues to be seen as a mystery even after decades of an open door. How does China work, what does it want, why does it want it, and what does its rise to global power mean for the rest of the world? As the twenty-first century looks set to be the stage for a battle about competing geopolitical ideals, these are urgent questions for everyone with an interest in what the future might bring.

Epic in scope, this is the story of how China became the state it is today and how its worldview is based on what has gone before. Weaving together inspirations, ideas, wars and dreams to reveal the heart of what it means to be Chinese and how the past impacts on the present.

Despite decades of a relatively open door relationship with the rest of the world, China is still a mystery to many outside it. A world of its own, China isboth a microcosm and an amplification of questions and events in the wider world. China's story offers us an opportunity to hold a mirror to ourselves: to our own assumptions, to our values, and to our ideas about the most important question of all: what it means to be human in the world of the state

Mr Robot finale Season 3

It would be a sad day if this series was cancelled
Vox article on Mr Robot finale by Todd Vanderwerff

Mr. Robot’s third season was its best. It moved with the momentum and confidence that made season one such a hit, with the stronger character development that had marked season two. In season three, when a random associate of Elliot Alderson’s was threatened, it felt queasier, or when two of the supporting cast members hooked up, it felt more thrilling.

Mr. Robot is finally its best self in season 3
And I agree with something the Ringer’s Alison Herman recently suggested: Mr. Robot was only able to pull this off because almost nobody was paying attention to it.
On the one hand, the show didn’t have any major twists this season for audiences to second guess. That probably played a part in its relative obscurity, since the twists drove much of the discussion in the first two years. But on the other, the conversation had also moved on. Mr. Robot felt downright prophetic when it debuted in 2015, with its tales of angry, alienated young men and a political system rigged even in the case of revolution. But in season three, it felt a little like a prophet of doom warning you not to continue on your current course as you pass him in your car. You could still hear his shouts, but only barely, and the landscape was on fire up ahead.

What the season did have was a thematic unity that wedded Mr. Robot’s superheroic hacking exploits to its deepest character story, about an isolated young man slowly coming to realize he’s not an island. It revolved around Elliot (the still magnetic Rami Malek, whose performance remains one of TV’s best) attempting to shove the genie he loosed upon the world in the form of a massive economic hack back into the bottle, both because he realized it was the right thing to do and because he had forged stronger connections with those he cares about, from his sister to his former best friend to the imaginary man that lives in his head.

And that deeper, richer story benefited from having more space to unfold in a world that wasn’t so impatient for it to get where it was going. I’d stack the season’s last six episodes against any TV made this year. In season three, Mr. Robot pulled off almost everything it wanted to pull off in season two, but in far stronger fashion

I am, in general, a Mr. Robot season two apologist, but even I will admit that season two’s early episodes were lengthy slogs that spent way too much time on Elliot trying to reconcile himself with Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), a devilish alternate personality who took the form of his deceased father. It was infuriating TV — conceptually and thematically interesting, but never as gripping on a character level as it needed to be.
But this sort of slump is one that lots of TV shows, from Friday Night Lights to Homeland to Justified, have bounced back from, simply by better integrating their characters and their ideas. You could already see Mr. Robot starting to do this by the end of season two, but it ultimately had to abandon a lot of its “Elliot and Mr. Robot negotiate their relationship with each other” material to succeed. (It’s always been telling that season two’s best episode didn’t feature Elliot at all.)

Indeed, season three begins with the two men not speaking to each other, and Elliot doing his level best to hold off Mr. Robot and prevent him from taking over. He takes his meds. He goes to work every day. He makes himself a good worker bee, in hopes that if he can keep Mr. Robot at bay, the devastating cyberterrorist attack that Mr. Robot and the mysterious Dark Army are planning will never come to fruition.

But Mr. Robot is a TV show. And when you have Slater on the payroll, you’re going to have him do more than just leer menacingly at the camera for a few seconds every episode. So as season three hit its midpoint — where Elliot succeeds in stopping the terrorist attack, but neither he nor Mr. Robot see a far worse one coming — everything Mr. Robot has been about, for better or worse, began to turn itself inside out. Mr. Robot Indeed they do. Peter Kramer/USA Network
Mr. Robot learns he’s been played for a patsy by corporate overlords who unleashed a seeming economic revolution to line their own pocketbooks. Elliot vows to return the world to the way it was, as many of his colleagues and friends fall to the Dark Army. And then the two personalities finally start working together, to try to find a way to stop the Dark Army from furthering a plan that seems designed to turn planet Earth into an anarchic wasteland, ruled by super-corporations. Eventually, the finale ends with Elliot seeming to reverse the massive hack from season one, but its post-credits scene suggests that nothing is ever that easy when capitalism is involved.

The standard knock against Mr. Robot in its first season was that its main philosophy, espoused by Elliot, was basically a knockoff of Fight Club — anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist in a way that seemed reactionary at best and completely misinformed at worst. But I always felt that creator Sam Esmail had more up his sleeve. Elliot was right to be suspicious of the capitalist society he lived in, yes, but he was simply being played by different corporate overlords. And nothing is ever as simple as saying, “We need to do this one thing, and everything will be better.” There are always consequences, and there’s always blood in the streets.

Slowly but surely, Esmail and his writing staff have since built a story designed to give Elliot things to lose. He wants to take down the masters of the universe, who rule from their closed-off boardrooms, not just because they’ve built a cruel, exploitative world, but because he believes his sister and friends and imaginary father figure deserve something better. Saving the world can’t be done from behind a computer screen. It’s a movement that begins on the ground, and continues until walls come tumbling down.

Season three was obsessed with the idea of time travel, with the thought of going back in time to undo something, in much the way that Elliot wanted to undo his season one hack. His friend, Angela (Portia Doubleday), seemed, for a time, to actually believe that time travel was possible.

But it was all a red herring. As Elliot walked home to fix the hack, he passed a crowd of people, gathered outside in the rapidly crumbling New York street, to watch the movie Superman in a store window, specifically the scene where Superman flies opposite the Earth’s orbit so quickly that he turns back time and saves Lois Lane’s life. Elliot can’t resurrect anybody, but he can try to reverse time, just a little bit. He can put some things right, then get on to the work of building a better world.

In this way, I think, Mr. Robot sneakily rediscovered its relevance, and I hope as more people catch up with the series on streaming, they’ll spark to that (or maybe to the unexpected but welcome romantic tension between Grace Gummer’s Dom and Carly Chaikin’s Darlene, or maybe to the series’ welcome return to episodes that stand alone as episodes, or maybe to its still thrilling sense of cinematic self, or maybe just to Bobby Cannavale’s deeply weird performance as Dark Army specialist Irving). On Mr. Robot, political, social, personal, and professional awakenings are all the same thing. You can’t save the world, but you can rebuild it, brick by brick.

Mr. Robot season three is available on USA On Demand and will eventually be available on Amazon Prime. Season four arrives in 2018.

Mr Robot - Season 3

This season has been quite interesting and is dealing with complex subjects like the new cryptocurrency platforms, Time travel, or an extra dimensional world.Would like to see where is this all leading to

Here is the transcript of the latest episode .


I don't know what to say. Thank you. - You coming here personally - Yes, yes. Right, right.
But the direct purpose of my visit I felt it was important to share with you formally that the CTO title is nothing more than that.
You are a mere figurehead I inherited from a deal gone wrong.
It happens from time to time.
But I wanted you to understand the nature of your position in case you should have loftier designs. There'll be none of that.
Obedience will be your only task at my company.
I worry that could potentially get awkward if you thought differently, so I came here out of respect.
By your silence, I assume you accept this position? I know what this is.
You're embarrassed that you fired me.
There's no shame in admitting the truth.
You're out of moves and your company needs me
. E Corp needs my image, the face of a hero. That's why you're here.
Oh, Wellick, Wellick. It's not that I'm out of moves. It's that you're not worth one.
See you at the office, mm? Five/Nine, fsociety. You knew the entire time, didn't you? Five/Nine, yes. Well, not all the minutiae, of course.
But since the cyber bombings, the breadcrumbs haven't been that difficult to follow.
World catastrophes like this, they aren't caused by lone wolves like you. They occur because men like me allow them.
You just happened to stumble into one of them. No, no. I ran the operation.
I pushed the button.
- I am the one - There you go again.
"I, I, I" You're still thinking like a lone wolf. Why don't you tell me how I should be thinking? Like a leader! I am a leader! Then where are your followers? You can't force an agenda, Mr. Alderson. You have to inspire one.

Twin peaks - The final dossier

Got this amazing book right from the Amazon warehouse in Kentucky, USA


Blue rose - the paranormal division within FBI ala X Files



Mark Frost is the co-creator of Twin peaks along with David lynch and is probably the reason for the dramatic elements in the series as if it was left to Lynch we would be having a weirder and confusing series (as if it could get even more weirder).

Not many novels are written in the form of inter office memorandums. This is a complete compilation of FBI memos which hopefully explain the missing elements in the recently concluded season 3.

This starts with an autopsy report