Powerful, humanlike traits

Deception and divinity. For a thousand years, God’s power was linked with a powerful, humanlike trait – the ability to tell a lie... Even birds do it

When it came to self-destruction, Edgar Allan Poewas without peer. Liar, plagiarist, drunk, he died in a gutter wearing another man’s clothes... Brother Edgar

 “I want to create a mystery, not to solve it.” Still, without trying to “solve” these compositions, we can at least examine their construction. 

Letter from Saul Bellow

Questions for Camille Paglia

Uneducated nose

René Magritte, comedian

Busts

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Philip K. Dick, I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon

The phrase "he's a bit of a tit" ...
Miriam Margolyes on QA

Asset bubbles in shares and property could burst in the next six to 18 months, according to one of the country's more bearish investment experts, who is warning baby boomers that their retirement savings are at risk Boom is about to go Bust

The simple imessage apolitical trick

“And, above all things, never think that you’re not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you very much at your own reckoning.”

~ Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington

Dramatic Lives & Indian Recipes

World’s oldest barmaid dies aged 100: Dolly Saville pulled pints for 74 years Independent (Chuck L). She outlived her children.

Orphan tourism may do harm.  And barter markets in everything.  And markets in everything perfectly spherical chicken egg edition

British Airways ‘spying’ scandal: How the world’s most famous airline spied on its own staff Independent 

What do we learn from data mining Indian food recipes?

Under U.S. Pressure, PayPal Nukes Mega For Encrypting Files TorrentFreak

Governance of Online Intermediaries: Observations from a Series of National Case Studies Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2566364 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2566364
Online intermediaries in various forms – including search engines, social media, or app platforms – play a constitutive role in today’s digital environment. They have become a new type of powerful institution in the 21st century that shape the public networked sphere, and are subject to intense and often controversial policy debates

This thing can be done: NSW Elections of Prodigal Sons and Daughters

Mr Foley, a staunch Catholic, said his party was like the prodigal son.
"For NSW Labor, the last four years has been a journey back to the people, a journey back to our origins, to find our best self" Thinking Differently ; These days, Tony Abbott only comes to NSW to collect the mail and put out the bins, Shorten said as 700 party faithful assembled in the Campbelltown Catholic Club erupted in laughter. Bob Hawke, Neville Wran's widow Jill, Barrie Unsworth, Bob Carr and Kristina Keneally


Andrew Constant plays the man  "I note today Luke Foley's campaign launch didn't mention public transport once and didn't mention congestion once" Michael Daley Alternative Treasurer Displays the New Appproach Of playing the cricket ball the man

A Southern Courier exit poll revealed 74 per cent of last night’s panel audience would vote for Maroubra MP Michael Daley at the March 28 election.
Greens candidate James Cruz won 13 per cent of the vote, and Liberal candidate Brendan Roberts gained 11 per cent
Light rail and overdevelopment in Botany Bay were the hot topics of the night. Michael Daley

Putin and Russia are rolling into the abyss

Life is cheap in Russia

In his last tweet, Mr Nemtsov sent out an appeal for Russia's divided opposition to unite at an anti-war march he was planning for Sunday.

"If you support stopping Russia's war with Ukraine, if you support stopping Putin's aggression, come to the Spring March in Maryino on 1 March," he wrote.

Speaking earlier this month to Russia's Sobesednik news website, he had spoken of his fears for his own life.

"I'm afraid Putin will kill me," he said in the article (in Russian) on 10 February.

Violent deaths of Putin opponents

April 2003 - Liberal politician Sergey Yushenkov assassinated near his Moscow home

July 2003 - Investigative journalist Yuri Shchekochikhin died after 16-day mysterious illness

July 2004 - Forbes magazine Russian editor Paul Klebnikov shot from moving car on Moscow street, died later in hospital

October 2006 - Investigative journalistAnna Politkovskaya shot dead outside her Moscow apartment

November 2006 - Former Russian spyAlexander Litvinenko died nearly three weeks after drinking tea laced with polonium in London hotel

March 2013 - Boris Berezovsky, former Kremlin power broker turned Putin critic, found dead in his UK home

Nitup of Evil

Afterlife: 50 Shades of reincabation inside memories

“We are lonesome animals. We spend all our life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say — and to feel — ‘Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.’”

So wrote Nobel prizewinner John Steinbeck - Stanford’s most illustrious drop-out

God is love, we are told. But Exodus tells us that God Himself says only that "I Am Who Am."
Self-criticism is integral to our sense of self. What does this unrelenting, unforgiving, internal nag want? That hazards question... I am Rich?

The biographer: glutton for anecdote, scavenger of detail, prisoner to tired conventions of chronology and storytelling ...

Mom’s hands 

bleed in the deep dishwater

she’s been immersed in 

for thirty years,

serving food to schoolchildren. 

She used to tell me,

“My son, look at my hands, 

so much time in dishwater,

imagine what you can accomplish 

with your mind.”
Maria Imrichova school cook Vrbov

From Gilgamesh on, theafterlife has taken many guises. Our view is an incoherent projection of needs and impulses, irreconcilably at odds
 Literary history is male-dominated. Literary journalism, too. But rest assured it is  History of winners

Elephants of Tax Analogies

“Old poets regurgitate

Pellets of chewed-up paper

Packed with shrew tails, frog bones,

Beetle wings, wisdom.”

~ Snow Water

Smothered by a Boom in Banking Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times

What Is Money And How Is It Created? Steve Keen, Forbes. Important. Why you must have banks to have money.

... the tax office has begun to acknowledge the presence of the elephant in the room that is the billions lost to the nation's budget by multinational profit shifting. Albeit, they are still patting this elephant rather than proactively shooing it out of the room.

The very funding of our hospitals and schools is at stake here, our children's future, but the committee's modus operandi was more of a fireside chat than a grilling. It was apparently a matter for pride for the ATO that only one suspect was left on its "high-risk" list of corporate taxpayers (from 14 earlier). Westfield enshrines another challenge to revenue. It has restructured and shifted its tax base offshore and pays no tax here. Besides its $US2.3 billion in related party loans, loans to itself offshore that is, it lumped in income tax in the same line in the cash-flow statement as withholding tax, in apparent contravention to AASB107. Profitshifting tax office settles for-patting the elephant in the room

Mr Jordan claimed the culture of paying sources from banks or ­financial services firms meant there was an incentive to expose individuals with offshore accounts and those that facilitate them.

“You have to realise you can’t trust anyone any more. You either have disaffected employees or you want to sell information for money,” he said. “There was one European bank employee who sold data information to the US a few years ago and he got $102m.” Sunlight ; Ali Noroozi on uncertainties in tax treatments

15 year old makes 500k a year in the babysitting business

Markets in everything.

Robert Wood, New IRS Scandal Hearings Reveal 32,000 More Emails, Possible Criminal Activity:

But in what was the most disturbing revelation, House Member attendees were told that the IRS had not even asked for the backup tapes when the ‘hard drive crash’ excuse was first used. That contradicted the prior testimony of IRS Commissioner John Koskinen. He had testified to the effect that recovery efforts had been thorough, and that the tapes couldn’t be accessed.

 Andrew Lundeen, Corporate Tax Cuts Increase Federal Revenue in the Long Run (Tax Policy Blog):

It’s important to note that this increase in revenue would be in the long run, after the economy has fully adjusted (probably about 10 years in the future). In the early years, federal revenue would fall before investment and growth pick up fully as the economy adjusts to a better tax system.

However, tax policy—all public policy, in fact—should be made with a focus on the long-term.

Fear Business & Sensors and Journalism

“Schoolboys, like other primitive people, ill-treat those who scorn them and those who shrink from them.”

- David Cecil, Max: A Biography of Max Beerbohm

“CBS is in the fear business. Terror is one of their most reliable profit centers.”

Tow Center for Data Journalism – December 3, 2014. Sensors and Journalism: “This report you have opened is not monolithic. You can match its sections to your needs. The first section introduces our topic. It starts by describing the landscape where sensors and journalism combine, and continues on to define necessary terms for understanding this area of research. Reporters are using sensors in an era when the rapid development of technology is moving data into the mainstream of journalism. The increasing ubiquity of sensors, their increasing capability and accessibility are on the supply side, while investigative reporters, computer aided reporters and journalist/technologists are on the demand side.

 

Australia's 20 Best Business blogs: 2015, Broede Carmody, Eloise Keating and Kirsten Robb, SmartCompany, 17 February 2015. This annual list of Australia's Best Business Blogs are ones SmartCompany thinks offer the best free advice for small business owners. From avoiding insolvency to using big data, there's something for everyone. Business Bloggers DownUnder

Retired at Dirty 30 - Blogger Wisdom
 

Certainties of Life and Work

• L.A. Times:  As I Lay Dying, by Laurie Becklund (L.A. Times reporter who sadly died on 9th Feb 2015)
• NY Times:  My Own Life, by Oliver Sacks (Professor of Neurology, NYU Medical School)

Watch out, coders — a robot may take your job, too InfoWorld

 "The structure of routine comforts us, and the specialness of ritual vitalizes us," explains Maria Popova. "A full life calls for both — too much control, and we become mummified; too little excitement and pleasurable discombobulation, and we become numb. After all, to be overly bobulated is to be dead inside — to doom oneself to a life devoid of the glorious and ennobling messiness of the human experience."
She rejoices over a book by Anne Lamott on organizing our chaos with hope

cbsnews on hsbc investigation-60-minutes

“`Write shorter epigrams’ is your advice.

Yet you write nothing, Velox. How concise!” 

The incredible decline of American unions, in one animated map Washington Post

Why a Flat-Rate Tax is Unfair: A Quick Overview of America’s Wealth Inequality and Tax Structure Daily Kos

maptitude1 "Walled world" - the uneven distribution of population and wealth worldwide - Theo Deutinger
observe that the hard red lines indicate some of the most heavily policed borders on earth. that’s not an accident. Walled World via starlingsongs:

San Francisco Chronicle, Here’s Why Uber and Lyft Send Drivers Such Confusing Tax Forms:

Uber and Lyft say their drivers are independent contractors, not employees. But when it comes to income-tax reporting, they are treated as neither. Uber, Lyft, and the IRS

Blog of the Legal Times, Suit Accuses Feds of Unlawfully Seizing Tax Refunds

BuzzFeed, These Professors Want Parents Who Don’t Vaccinate To Pay A Tax 

Samizdat of Breathing

In a prologue letter to her readers Hawkins says we are all voyeurs, gazing through windows on our morning commute, speculating about the lives of those whose homes and streets we pass  The Girl on the train

We rarely in life say exactly what we mean, or what we want. In real speech, our humour and our pathos comes out in the longing beneath our words. Sometimes this is expressed in non sequiturs, the side-slips of conversation that reveal our lack of attention... He doesn't just show you what these people say and do; he shows you how they breathe. Breath. Dialogue, and its undercurrents, are always about breath. We breathe in, and on the outward breath we speak. Beneath the breath is the pause, the ribcage full of longing. We hold our breath with desire, with shock, expel it with fury. In the rhythm of breath is the secret of dialogue. A writer learns to listen to the words, but also to the silence, the pauses, the hesitation and the longing – the subtext – that lies beneath. All of that is in dialogue that pulls you not just along, but under. But it all begins with that first act, that careful moment of listening. Art of Dialogue

Notes from Underground by Roger Scruton (Czech history, Communism, samizdat)

Notes from underground

 Under Cold River"...attempts at difference had the opposite effect to the one intended. For they emphasized that, in the midst of this randomness, you saw only the one identical expression: eyes staring into the distance, and lips held firmly shut as though against some pervasive infection Our people had collectively solved their shared problem, which was how to keep the mask in place, while showing that it is only a mask. People collaborated in the great deception, so as not to be deceived."

Scruton's book examines Prague life under the unrelenting pressure of communism, and it's desire to create sameness and eradicate personal opinions and choices.  Seen most in the world of literature, where writers were commonly arrested and jailed, sometimes executed, the lack of freedom of expression was so controlled as to prevent personal thoughts.  Just the idea of waving at someone insinuated a further connection, a nefarious plan under way.

The police were calculating and cold in their efforts to cool any uprisings by suppressing everything written, even harmless works of literature. In result, much more harmful (to Communism at least) works were perpetrated in secret in opposition to the force of evil. Dissident authors and writers wrote secretly, as their work (or even having it in possession) could land them into jail.  But they did not quit, and if anything, while its exposure may have been limited to the literary few, it probably saved them mentally.

The novel begins with a woman being arrested who was secretly known for copying dissident works into books. Her son involved, she takes all the blame and is jailed. Lost for what to do, he himself a writer as well, wanders the underground (both literally and figuratively) trying to figure out what to do.  Soon he meets an attractive woman who leads him on a path to produce his literature but with a theory: become famous in the outside world so much that Czech officials can't touch him without political repercussions.

But who is she, and what is her intentions?

"A curious thought entered my mind: that she had quite separate lives. The thought no sooner occurred than it became a knife of jealousy.  The girl who cultivated dissidents, what was exploring the world of the samizdat, who was in some strange way excited by the opportunity to recreate me as a hero and a martyr, was the holiday version of another being entirely."

Filled with beautiful and nuanced sentences, the novel contrasts the barbaric stomping out of words with the subtlety and pleasure of well-written prose. The author contrasts these so clearly that one can't help but feel the tension between the political forces at play and the hearts behind the written word.  It's not idealistic, some of the samizdat writers were jerks too, not to be trusted and often arrogant.  But their opposition, in whole, to the entire movement to destroy them only makes them more fascinating.

Scruton's writing is unusual.  A narrator who thinks wisely and yet makes naive assumptions, who loves and yet distrusts; a complicated man in every sense.

Advance review copy provided by Amazon.

Wendy Bacon

I imagine, therefore I belong and am free.

— Lawrence Durrell, born on this date in 1912

“I rate it as the best board for the best road project in Australia," gushed NSW Roads Minister Duncan Gay of his own handiwork to the Sydney Morning Herald in November 2013. He was talking of the board for the Westconnex, a $12 billion 33-kilometre loop of motorways, tunnels and tolls that will link Parramatta in Sydney's west with the suburbs in the inner west and back out to south western Sydney Man behind men behind westconnex

Shining a light on injustice and corruption isn’t an easy job, but it’s a critical aspect of journalism and democracy. Walkley award-winning journalist Wendy Bacon has done just that, examining official corruption in NSW, miscarriages of justice, police corruption, indigenous issues, environmental issues and a plethora of other topics in her several decades as an investigative journalist. She’s a Professor of Journalism at UTS in Sydney and involved with its Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at wendybacon.com

Resistance Songs: Mobilizing the Law and Politics of Community

Alfieri, Anthony Victor, Resistance Songs: Mobilizing the Law and Politics of Community (February 24, 2015). University of Miami Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2015-09; Texas Law Review, Vol. 93, Forthcoming. Available for download at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2569159

“In 1925, the City of Miami built a trash incinerator in the de jure segregated Afro-Caribbean-American community of Coconut Grove Village West (“the West Grove”) amid rows of shotgun style houses and Jim Crow schools. Commonly known as Old Smokey, the incinerator discharged airborne carcinogenic chemicals (e.g., arsenic, benzo(a)pyrene, cadmium, and lead) and produced residual toxic waste (e.g., ash, liquefied plastic, and melted glass) for 45 years until Florida courts finally ordered it closed in 1970. In 1978, notwithstanding community opposition, the City of Miami converted the 4.5 acre Old Smokey site and incinerator building into its Fire-Rescue Training Center which continues to operate today. In 2013 and 2014, West Grove residents working in collaboration with faculty and students from the University of Miami School of Law learned from a whistleblower-leaked municipal environmental report that long-term exposure to Old Smokey’s airborne carcinogens and toxic waste dump sites had caused extensive soil and possibly groundwater contamination of homeowner properties and public parks in Coconut Grove and across the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County. This Essay investigates the historical absence of civil rights- and environmental justice-incited legal and political mobilization around Old Smokey in light of Professor Lea VanderVelde’s important new book Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott. 

For the record, I strongly believe that bona fide harassers should be chemically castrated, stripped of their property, and hung up by their thumbs in the nearest public square. Let no one think I’m soft on harassment. But I also believe that the myths and fantasies about power perpetuated in these new codes are leaving our students disabled when it comes to the ordinary interpersonal tangles and erotic confusions that pretty much everyone has to deal with at some point in life, because that’s simply part of the human condition. - See more at: http://m.chronicle.com/article/Sexual-Paranoia-Strikes/190351/#sthash.onvwDxDX.dpuf

Professors How Paranoia Strikes

Whiskey: 15 Seconds of Fame is the basic demand of our age

“Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.” 

Fame is the basic demand of our age. Attention must be paid to tweets, posts, pictures. Literary fame is a different beast, though no less grubby ...

       In The Korea Herald Joel Lee profiles the The Republic of Užupis-author, in Seoul Literary Society hosts novelist Ha Il-ji (or, as Dalkey Archive Press transliterated the name, Haïlji).
       Among the information of interest:

When writing a novel, he has to finish it within 40 days due to his limited time off from teaching at a university, Ha said. "I finish a bottle of whiskey every two or three days to keep total concentration on my work."

The history of literature is not tidy, and the path of the modern novel is particularly long and improbable. Can its origins be traced to Iron Curtains of Protestantism

“Take those demons, for example. For some of us, writing is not a matter of being driven by them, but casting them out. Difficult family relationships? Sort them out on the page. Horrible love life? Write it again with a better ending. Feeling your age? Slip into the skin of a 20 year old and go off and have some fictional adventures. It’s not a horrible, exhausting struggle; it’s therapeutic.” The Guardian: Writers

       In the Wall Street Journal Jennifer Maloney previews a new site, suggesting Literary Hub Is a New Home for Book Lovers, which: 'aims to carve out a central online space for books'.
       This 'Literary Hub' is scheduled to go live 8 April and -- scroll down -- given the "partners' involved (a really nice mix) should be able to offer some interesting content.
       Apparently:

Focusing on literary fiction and nonfiction, it will present personal and critical essays, interviews and book excerpts

       (Maloney observes parenthetically; "Organizers are still discussing whether it should publish its own book reviews".) 

To Keep or Not to keep A Diary Of Parliamentary & Taxing Times

“A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.”

~ Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”

Cold River was a first roll of the dice for me as a memoir writer...

At 81, John Hatton is learning to ski and has returned from six weeks in New Zealand, which is why he missed the ACT Supreme Court’s reference last month to Mafia involvement in Colin Winchester’s murder. Organised crime figures who believed they had been double-crossed were said to have a motive for killing assistant federal police commissioner Winchester, but police had been unwilling to reinvestigate Mafia links. John Hatton

Former judge John Dowd Resigns from allegedly corrupt firm lifese pty ltd

Political satire with Mike Baird on tweets

Neil Gaiman explains one of the easy ways to become a writer. You just wake up one day, after having tasted the fruit of a certain tree. You'll see what I mean. Do Not Cite or Circulate

Authors publishing through both traditional and independent methods earned $7,500-$9,999 per year, thousands more than authors who published with either method exclusively.
“While some scholars may shun such developments, others are embracing them, leveraging analytical tools and techniques to account for a landscape of authorship and reading that is no longer confined to simple geometries and lines of influence, and no longer served by the established critical schools.”
~ Can You Really Know An Author If You Don’t Follow Him Social Media Dragon? Los Angeles Review of Books

14 Reasons why you shouldn't dream of being a full time author

“I realize I don’t want any record of my days. I have the kind of brain that erases everything that passes, almost immediately, like that dustpan-and-brush dog in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland sweeping up the path as he progresses along it. I never know what I was doing on what date, or how old I was when this or that happened – and I like it that way.” Why Zadie Smith Will Not Keep A Diary Ever  Rookie

“We often know very little about those who live closely and share the lives of the writers about whom we apparently know so much. Part of this is wilful mythologizing. We like to think of the writer as indestructible as the text, preferring not to imagine who might make them breakfast in the morning or help them put on their shoes when they are too old to manage it by themselves.” A look at “Miss Alice” Lee, Ted Hughes, John Bayley, Leonard Woolf, and Valerie Eliot. Malchkeons Who Stay: The Lives Of Writers’ Companions  Melville House

Why it is better to read on paper

The power to spread and transform the alphabet — once concentrated among medieval scribes, British and French printers, or Christian missionaries spreading words to spread the Word — has been democratized. Now with tablets and smartphones, “the smallest building blocks of the shared written language (i.e. print) are more in your hands . . . than they have ever been.  Washington Post

“The research suggests fantasy stories — or at least those good enough to hold our interest — produce neural reactions that are above and beyond those created by other narratives — even ones that are just as exciting, involving, or humorous.”
Fantasy X Stories subtitled: Parliamentary Library Stack on Level 6 Pacific Standard

“What does this movement in travel writing bear for the genre as a whole? What can the graves of dead poets in Vrbov and Venice, a boat ride down the Amazon to the coast of Brazil, or a visit to the homes of D. H. Lawrence and George Eliot tell us about life, about living?”
Los Angeles Review of Books


“This idea Franzen posits that literature teaches us you’re not the ‘heroic figure you think of yourself as, that you might be the very dubious figure that other people think of you as’ is as deeply embedded in many big YA novels as it is in Munro stories. To say these books are simplistic is to mistake grandness, ease of narrative, and breathless pace for mere shallowness.”

Latitude East Flavorwire

“Getting an author booked on ‘The Daily Show’ was often the Holy Grail for book publicists,” says Kate Lloyd, Scribner’s associate director of publicity. Her authors loved Stewart, she says, because “his audience is made up of smart, book-buying readers who respond to the thoughtful treatment and authentic passion he customarily expresses for the books he features.”

~ Washington Post

Digital Book World’s new survey of just under 1,900 authors found fairly low annual earnings. Dana Beth Weinberg tells the Guardian, “We see for the third year in a row – even though we made a strong effort to get representation in the survey from successful indie authors – that most authors aren’t making much money and most books sell very few copies. We also find that traditionally published authors and authors who combine traditional and indie publishing have higher annual incomes on average than indie-only authors. Last year, we took a lot of heat for these unpopular findings, especially from the indie community.”

The Birth of Politics: Eight Greek and Roman Political Ideas and Why They Matter