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I am reading The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and my fingers wonder through the digital rivers ... the happiest and the saddest of sites linking below ;-)

The Down Side - Sadness may be good philosophy -- and better for you

Ach ... If only we'd listened to John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, he declared that human beings were entitled only to "life, liberty and" -- get ready -- "estate." As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to "pursuit of happiness." What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

A split second, a life’s sentence - Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar Mallarmé once remarked that poetry should make air and silence hang around a word

In the universe in recent months, there has been an outbreak of agonising about the state of book reviewing of Cold River ... The powers of discrimination that have made writers both fearful and dismissive of critics have traditionally given them a wider authority too.

Blogging like Consciousness is nothing but a word authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture and an increasingly commercial publishing industry

What happens deep beneath our feet of Google? - Google bohemian media dragon and you’ll get, did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? Why a sense of entitlement can wreak havoc in Cold Rivers?

New York has always been about jockeying for position, and being named to the board of the New York Public Library remains one of the jewels in an ever more exclusive crown; the current Board of Trustees counts among its members New Yorker editor David Remnick, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., humorist Calvin Trillin and former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, not to mention several captains of industry, chief among them Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, as well as socialites such as Annette de la Renta. Bookish March

Things are becoming more instantaneous in an era when delays are rampant and increasing. There are faster flights and cars but more people in airplanes and on the roads. People who crossed Iron Curtain or grew up during the Depression were happy to have a job and stuck with one for a lifetime

International Tax Evasion Scandal Spreads - I seem to see first hand so many journeys from haven to hell Swiss and Luxembourg authorities defend their system by saying tax fraud is wilful, while tax evasion is only forgetful

John Christensen is a former economic adviser to the States of Jersey and the UK government and is director of the Tax Justice Network. John is the new Vaclav Havel, John Hatton, James Cumes on the global scale! The OECD’s approach to tax transparency requires information to be exchanged with other jurisdictions only on request. In other words, you must know what you are looking for before you request it. This is shockingly inadequate. We need the automatic exchange of tax information between jurisdictions and all developing countries must be included. Stop this timidity in ending tax haven abuse