Thursday, March 10, 2016

“Drunk with Power and Satire"

 “I love the smell of establishment desperation in the morning...”

The real hero is always a hero by mistake; he dreams of being an honest coward like everybody else 
~ Bathroom quotes


The people who can’t stop making puns

Making drunken hay while the sun shines:
Botany Bay Council told about suspect invoices in 2009, ICAC hears
A DRAGRACER has admitted paying a “sling” to Botany Bay Council’s former CFO Gary Goodman to secure work for his businesses at Sydney Airport.
Zoran Gajic, director of Cube D & C and Hyland, said he loaned a couple of hundred thousand dollars to Mr Goodman over a period of time and believed the only way he could recover the money was to submit false invoices to the councilDragracer admits a cash ‘sling’ to Botany Bay Council’s former CFO to secure work at Sydney Airport
Malcolm Foo was sitting in the ICAC witness box at 2.32pm on Monday, the moment his 18-year career with Botany Bay Council came to an abrupt end...
Botany Bay Council: what happens in the business unit stays there, inquiry told

"Increasingly, we're seeing that we the public – we, the people – are becoming more and more transparent to government, but at the same time it is becoming more and more opaque to us."We, the people – are becoming more and more transparent

Border force uses allegedly to describe experiences of Nazi Germany as it attempts to debunk myths about its detention centres

A PRO-GUN activist has been shot in the back by her four-year-old son a day after boasting about the tot’s shooting skills Gun lover shot by 4 years old

Good morning. No surprise, it's at a Trump event TIME contract photographer Chris Morris clearly exited the media holding pen that Donald Trump enforces (unlike other presidential candidates) at his rallies as a Black Lives Matter protest erupted. Video shows a Secret Service agent grabbing him by the neck and slamming him to the ground.  (Poynter) TIME said that Morris did at one point curse the agent and kicked at him after being slammed to the ground. (TIME) "The photographer was trying to get a good angle to cover the protesters without leaving the press pen and the Secret Service agent kept asking him to back up." (Washington Examiner) Morris replied with an obscenity … Secret service agent time photographer brawl

Power elites, blinded by hubris, intoxicated by absolute power, unable to set limits on their exploitation of the underclass, propelled to expand empire beyond its capacity to sustain itself, addicted to hedonism, spectacle and wealth, surrounded by half-witted courtiers—Alan Greenspan, Thomas Friedman, David Brooks and others—who tell them what they want to hear, and enveloped by a false sense of security because of their ability to employ 
massive state violence, are the last to know their privileged world is imploding.
“History,” the Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto wrote, “is the graveyard of aristocracies.”  The Graveyard of the Elites Chris Hedges, TruthDig 

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation (VOC) has announced a new film award “to highlight Hollywood’s feats of cluelessness, naïveté, and deceit when telling the history of socialism, communism, and the Cold War.” The Duranty Award is named for reporter Walter Duranty, who took what Stalin said as gospel and used his reports as PR for the Soviets.
“With each passing year, Hollywood’s historical amnesia about communism and the Cold War grows more disturbing,” said Marion Smith, VOC’s executive director. “The film Trumboportrayed Hollywood’s most influential communist as an American martyr for free speech, ignoring the fact that communist regimes were—and from China to Cuba, still are—serial abusers of human rights and freedom of conscience.”

U.N. Rights Chief Says Unlocking Gunman’s iPhone Could Open ‘Pandora’s Box’ New York Times

Gui Minhai, a naturalized Sweden, originally Chinese, has worked with four other men in “publishing books about political intrigue among China’s Communist Party leaders; now they are in the custody of mainland Chinese authorities, apparently charged with selling illicit books.
What is the name of the phenomenon by which someone who is an acknowledged expert in one area is led to be overconfident about his or her knowledge in other areas? It’s a specific version of illusory superiority, and it may be related to the Dunning-Kruger effect (a product of the correlation of overconfidence and lack of skill), but I’m wondering if it has its own ...


“As the Congressman arose, I calmed the tremor in my gut. I was in close quarters with some representative members of the most dangerous creature in the history of the world, the white man in a suit.” (Former Big 4 executive)


WSJ.com – What Percent Are You? A detailed look at where you fit in our vast nation of income-earners…”here’s a more detailed look at where you fit in our vast nation of income-earners.”

All satire exists in the gap between what ought to be and what is, and therefore remains a powerful skewer against the shortcomings of an all-too-human church. “The hard and sordid things of life are too hard and too sordid and too cruel to touch them year after year without some mitigating influence, some kindly veil to draw over them,” Mark Twain wrote in a 1905 New YorkTimes essay. Laura Turner reviews a book on religious satire, attempting to tie together the truth and the self-righteous
What happened to breaking ranks? Thinkers have grown wary of movements. They prefer to be parties of one. Intellectual life has become atomized  Power of One ...

Career Corner. Is Our Productivity Obsession Counterproductive? (Megan Lewczyk, Going Concern). What is this “productivity” of which you speak?

“There are other less metaphysical reasons for preferring strictness of form: the fact, for example, that subtle variation is unrecognizable without the pre-existence of a norm; or the fact that form, in slowing and complicating the writing-process, calls out the poet’s full talents, and thereby insures a greater care and cleverness in the choice and disposition of words. In general, I would say limitation makes for power: the strength of the genie comes from his being confined in a bottle.” Limitation makes for power

On the ethics of self-publishing or: Can a convicted serial killer publish his version of the story?

“A country where John and his brother and friends wouldn’t always be on the outside looking in, and wouldn’t constantly live with the fear of racialized violence – a country where they, too, would feel powerful, and fully a part of the cities that glowed before them. Incidentally, these are the same things that are repeatedly promised to new generations of John Grimeses in every election cycle, only to lead to some degree of disappointment later on." The New Yorker 


Italian mobsters make as much money trafficking narcotics in Italy as Fiat does selling cars, but without having to pay taxes, the anti-mafia prosecutors office said on Wednesday. Citing estimates by the United Nations Office on Narcotics and Crime, anti-mafia prosecutors said that the narcotics trade earns more than 32 billion euros ($34.70 billion) annually for organized crime, which controls Italy's drug trade. Italian mafia earnings from drugs rival Fiat with cars

SW Cottontail rabbit for NH WAP links
Like Marco Rubio, Thomas Jefferson Also Cracked Dick Jokes About His Opponents Charles Pierce, Esquire 

The Dynamics of Retreat Jacobin (Chuck L). A 
Arguably a case study of the thesis outlined by Richard Kline in Progressively Losing. However, the depiction of the 1970s is not right. If you look at Fed Flow of Funds data, corporate profits after the 1974-1975 recession abated were strong. But the overall level of growth was mediocre, and American companies were losing ground to German and Japanese competitors. The issue wasn’t corporate profits per se, but that executives resented how much was going to employee benefits and social welfare programs, and they were convinced that workers were only going to keep asking for more unless they were disciplined.

The great land rush – Ethiopia: The billionaire’s farm Financial Times 

How the 1% Gardens Texas Observer



The Race Goes to the Grift
While the means may be constantly changing, the human impulses that motivate con men (and con women) haven’t changed much. They prey on the unrealized dreams of their targets, selling them the future they desire and secretly believe they deserve.


A NSW government politician has used a formal Parliamentary debate to argue for people’s right to perform dangerous sex acts and get their eyeballs tattooed Parliamentary Debates ...