How the Koch brothers and the super-rich and super-powerful are buying their way out of criticism Robert Reich, Christian Science Monitor
These power cliques are expert at preserving themselves. They are closed to refreshing themselves. They are stagnant, failing, largely invisible to the public, the slow-rotting foundations on which the public parliamentary structures stand... The machine gets 51 per cent of the power and bulldozes to 100 Aristocracies Rule inside Political Parties and Bureaucracies ...
One had to…strangle all dignity and kill all conscience, to enter the arena as a beast against other beasts…. Many were the ways devised and put into practice by us in order not to die…. All implied a grueling struggle of one against all…. The ones who did never returned, or if they did their capacity for observation was paralyzed by pain and incomprehension.” “Those who were ‘saved’ in the camps were not the best of us”; rather they “were the worst: the egotists, the violent, the insensitive, the collaborators…. The best all died. The worst got promoted!”
~Primo Levi on Reinventing the Mystery Wheel of Human Culture
This article discusses one of the shifts that has taken place in modern life: the dearth of adult friendships. I’m old enough not to entirely accept the author’s premise, that the decline in friendships is due to suburbanization. I contend the much bigger culprit is the change in employer/employee relationships Why friendship is not what it used to be
ID fraud: Other victims have told how their legitimate tax refunds had been siphoned off into bank accounts operated by the fraudsters after fake MyGov profiles had been built by the thieves.... The Australian Taxation Office has been targeted more than 11,000 times by identity fraudsters attempting to steal tax refunds in the 2014-2015 financial year. And a help-service for victims of identity crime says it is being inundated with taxpayers whose IDs have been hijacked and their tax returns robbed The Australian Taxation Office attacked 11000 times: ID Fraud
A convicted drug supplier whose friendship with Liverpool councillor Peter Ristevski is being criticised by mayor Ned Mannoun has hit back at claims the Liberal party rejected his donation at a fundraiser before the March election Ruling Numbers
Comments on the blockbuster Valeant conference call Bronte Capital aka John Hempton. Richard Smith: “Hempton amazing deep dive into US pharma bentness. One of his more exhausting reads but worth it.”
Hillary’s moved on since her pithy crack that ‘We came, we saw, he died.’ Now the troubadours sing about her exploits:
Campaign 2016 as a Demobilizing Spectacle TomDispatch |
| Aristocratic London 21 Oct 2012 Celebration ... |
THE SELLING OF TRUST — HOW RUSSIA’S LONGEST AND LARGEST BANK FRAUD HAS BEEN COVERED UP AS IT PASSED FROM ONE OWNER TO ANOTHER, STARTING WITH MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY AND ENDING WITH RUBEN AGANBEGYAN, ALEXANDER MAMUT, ET AL. John Helmer. Mark Ames: “Brilliant deep dive.”
“These days, digitization of the NYPL collections falls under the aegis of NYPL Labs – which began as a catchall name for a range of digital experiments, then became an in-house, prototype-building research and development group, and now is a full-fledged department that’s broadly responsible for both the digital and experimental sides of the library and its branches.”