Rooster One Day Feather Duster the Next

Fouan stepped back, afraid that they might catch sight of him at the door, like a beaten dog crawling back to its food-bowl.  He was so overcome by shame that he was filled with a fierce resolve to creep into a corner and die.  They’d see if all he thought about was his food!  He went down the slope once more and collapsed on the end of a beam outside Clou’s smithy.  His legs were giving way under him and he lost heart completely as he sat in the dark beside the deserted road.  There was not a soul to be seen, for the evening gatherings had already begun and bad weather was keeping everyone indoors.  The rain had made the wind drop and was now teeming down. He did not feel strong enough to stand up and look for shelter.  With his stick between his knees, and his bare skull streaming with.  After, he sat motionless, stupefied by his wretched plight.
~Bathroom Quote (Unfinished paintings)

“As happier men watch birds, I watch men. They are less attractive but more various.”
~ Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

@Happy Birthday Rachel as you sail to the new 40th (Memories of Dale et al)

From daredevil to chicken: Scientists find off-switch for risky behavior ars technica.  “There could be a big payoff from this research if it’s applied to Wall Street traders and keeps them from blowing up the economy.”

Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mario Vargas Llosa ran for office. They all failed. Politics is unkind to writers... Writer one day feather duster ... 

MEdia Dragon Used to be a Rooster and Now ...

9 News reporter attacked by bird feather

Yellow Lines ... Mrs Ryan spoke to Triple M Brisbane’s Marto and Ed Kavalee for Breakfast and said if the council did try to move her car, she would be in it. "It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” she said. “I’m well into my 60s and haven’t protested in my life but I’m doing it for everybody.”

France: Exodus of 10,000 millionaires amid rising Muslim tensions International Business Times

Revealed: how Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis  Guardian

Historian and economic  historian William L. O’Neill has passed away

Employees who may seem emotionally intelligent and an asset to the workplace may also be emotionally manipulative and this may be detrimental to workplaces in the long run, preliminary findings of a survey show. The study has surveyed 351 people so far from different organisations, 81 who were managers. Employees in the survey admitted to using either malicious techniques such as making a colleague feel guilty or anxious or they turned on fake charm, for example giving compliments, to get what they want. Mandarin ...

Lonely Houses ...

Humor impairment is a lifestyle, not a crime! White-Collar Crime Watch: Polygamists, Fixed Tennis Matches, An Unfunny Accountant (Leona May, Going Concern)

The startling new banking records have been obtained as part of a Four Corners program that aired last night, and which resulted in the arrest of two members of its team, Linton Besser and cameraman Louie Eroglu

Watch Four Corners: State of Fear 

Michael Davey, a Rebels bikie member who was shot dead in the driveway of a Western Sydney home overnight, had spent time in jail over the killing of a 19-year-old in 2002 Bikie

Corruption Corrupts

A psychological study spanning 23 countries links tax evasion and political fraud to individual truth-stretching

Listen to the Victims of the Free Market Bloomberg  McArdle largely makes sense.

The story of Karadžić's manhunt is found in Julian Borger's new book, The Butcher's Trail: The Secret History of the Balkan Manhunt for Europe's Most-Wanted War Criminals.  Borger works for the Guardian as well, and lends his gravitas to the novel-like story of the investigation of three of the worst war criminals in our time. 
A startling fact was relayed in the foreword: "Two civilians were killed for every three soldiers who died in battle. The whole conflict was characterized by random brutality.  Psychopaths were made masters of the life and death or their former neighbors" (Borger xxv).
After five years of legal fighting, theInternational Criminal Tribunal in The Hague has convicted Radovan Karadžić of 10 of the 11 war crimes he was charged with.  He got a 40 year sentence.
Wait. What?  Forty years? For the massacre of somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 men and boys in his efforts to ethnically cleanse the Balkans?  Sure, he'll die in prison. But even a token sentencing of 6,000 years of prison would feel more appropriate.
You won't find this on CNN today, or much of anywhere. The Guardian carried the article below, but it was one of the few outlets that did. The media has a short-term memory problem.
The Guardian's article on Radovan Karadzic 

The enormous power of the unconscious brain  A lot of the things we do in everyday life don’t need to involve our conscious mind. In many cases, the more we use it, the less effective we become.

 

“It’s Not the Zika Virus” — Doctors Expose Monsanto Linked Pesticide as Cause of Birth Defects Tree Thought Project

Water, water everywhere, And all the boards did shrink: Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.Coleridge

Scope maker Olympus sought price hike amid superbug outbreak Los Angeles Times

Controlled chaos: How the U.S. empire infects other nations in its pursuit for total control South Front

In 1970, Kate Millett filed the dissertation that would become Sexual Politics. Reading it, an adviser complained, was like “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker"

“A large majority of Americans seek extra knowledge for personal and work-related reasons. Digital technology plays a notable role in these knowledge pursuits, but place-based learning remains vital to many and differences in education and income are a hallmark of people’s learning activities. 

“One of our most difficult tasks was to find a good substitute for coffee. This palatable drink, if not a real necessary of life, is almost indispensable to the enjoyment of a good meal, and some Southerners took it three times a day. Coffee soon rose to thirty dollars per pound; from that it went to sixty and seventy dollars per pound. Good workmen received thirty dollars per day; so it took two days hard labor to buy one pound of coffee, and scarcely any could be had even at that fabulous price.”The alien becomes familiar with an understanding of the details. Coffee is a medicinal necessity. Life without its curative powers is unimaginable.

`Now Our Cause Was Lost'

In an earlier post, Professor Bain argued that you can explain much of the Donald Trump phenomenon as a counter-revolution by what Peggy Noonan aptly called the "unprotected class" against what Christopher Lasch called the "new elite" (a.k.a., the "protected class," to use Noonan's terminology).
Few folks exemplify the new elite better than the tech folks of Silicon Valley:

In The New Class Conflict, Joel Kotkin argues that the socially and politically ascendant groups in contemporary America are the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and a complex of elite journalists, think-tank pundits, and academics that he dubs the clerisy. The nouveaux riches of the tech world are increasingly intent on remaking society in accordance with their own passions .... The clerisy, meanwhile, promotes and provides ideological legitimation for elite goals. The effect of the two groups' efforts, he concludes, is to concentrate wealth and power in a shrinking number of hands, leaving the middle class stranded and subject to ever more evident economic decline. Our tech overlords are unhappy that the proles are revolting against the new elite

Terry Teachout: “When you consider how completely the pundit class failed to get the primaries right, I’d be more inclined to seek political wisdom in the pages of a novel written by a poet-professor who looked 70 years into the future and foretold the coming of a populist demagogue who spoke the language of the plain people.” Wall Street Journal

“There are listicles of books or about books: there was even one recently about ‘The Top Ten Squirrels in Literature.’ There are interviews and aspirational how-tos. There are publicity statements, which are circulated and regurgitated into light critical opinion – as much as any book review. There is the relatively new phenomenon of the author self-testimonial: upon publication of his novel, the author will write a piece about writing the novel.”  Flavorwire

Do Individuals Put Effort into Lying? Evidence from a Compliance Experiment

Nadja Dwenger, Tim Lohse, CESifo Working Paper No. 5805, March 2016. We study whether individuals in a face-to-face situation can successfully exert some lying effort to delude others. We exploit data from a laboratory experiment in which participants were asked to assess videotaped statements as being rather truthful or untruthful. The statements are face-to-face tax declarations.

Homo Moralis: Personal Characteristics, Institutions, and Moral Decision-Making

Thomas Deckers, Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, Nora Szech, CESifo Working Paper No. 5800, March 2016. This paper studies how individual characteristics, institutions, and their interaction influence moral decisions. We validate a moral paradigm focusing on the willingness to accept harming third parties.

“Each one of us has a secret, and the man with one he can admit to is fortunate.”

Hitler’s commando Lt-Col Otto Skorzeny ‘worked as an assassin for Israeli intelligence’ Telegraph

A $15 Minimum Wage Would Give Almost Half of American Workers a Raise. Is That Crazy? Slate. Ignore the scaremongering. In most parts of the US, that means people are being paid less than a living wage. And the author manages to overlook the fact that corporate profits are at a record share of GDP, nearly double the level Warren Buffet deemed the highest sustainable level in the early 2002, and that shift is due to both of the post 2000 expansions featuring the lowest share of labor income increases (hiring + wage gains) relative to all past post-WWII expansions. In other words, redistribution is overdue and would almost certainly be a plus for growth.

"We have 50 blissful days. 300 pretty good days. And 15 shockers," FitzSimons said of his 25-year partnership with Wilkinson.  Not so hallmark card relationship Andrew Tink's cousin Peter on his wife Lisa 

Campus Reform, American Univ. Profs: Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ Is ‘White Supremacy’:

Dozens of professors from American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) openly condemned an unknown student as a white supremacist for posting a sign with the catchphrase “All Lives Matter” on a faculty member’s door.