Wednesday, July 06, 2016

Burn What Will Burn: The Spy Who Stole the Crown Jewels

‘Signs Preceding the End of the World’ via Spade aka Le Shove l (buldozer) Keys to the Antipodean lodge

According to The Guardian, newish ABC managing director Michelle Guthrie is axing opinion website D'rum  aka The Drum (though theSMH says the decision was more news director Gaven Morris’). The TV show will continue. The site is currently edited by Chip Rolley, and its founding editor was Jonathan Green not to be confused with the ABC Psephologist aka Baba Antony Green, previously Crikey’s editor. The Guardian says the site is shutting this week.

“When they gazed at the sky — infinite, remote and existing quite apart from their puny lives — people had a religious experience,” historian Karen Armstrong wrote in examining our earliest myths. “The sky towered above them, inconceivably immense, inaccessible and eternal. It was the very essence of transcendence and otherness.”

The Library of Congress has published an updated list of the most influential books in America after hearing responses from the public.

“I have been wandering through mining country, a man in exile, a castaway, a snake wriggling out of its skin….I walk the landscape, I sit by the mine, in the cemetery, in the open fields covered with soot, unaware of the time, guiding myself only by the movement of the sun. I carry stacks of paper and occasionally sketch on my knees…Often, after I have done so, I tear up the paper and let the wind carry the strips away.”
—Vincent Van Gogh, letter to Theo, Prologue, 1879.

EXPECT FIREWORKS: Wikileaks publishes Clinton war emails. They’rehere.
Given that Wikileaks is widely regarded as a front for Russian intelligence, I wonder how they got them? . . . .

Senior Labour Party insider reveals plan to oust Corbyn was in play 10 months ago (EXCLUSIVE) The Canary


The author of a landmark report on making Australia a regional financial hub warns the rise of Nick Xenophon and Pauline Hanson threatens to reverse decades of market-opening reforms and take Australia back to the 1970s. The finance industry's hopes for reforms to boost Australia as a hub for Islamic finance and funds management were dashed by the electoral triumph of Ms Hanson. She has won at least one and possibly two senate seats and spooked the Asian business community

And Game of Thrones? As Clive James recently put it in The New Yorker, the show’s great lesson is that its shrewd, heroic, deep-feeling dwarf is “bright enough to see the world’s evil but not strong enough to change it.” 


POLITIFACT MISSES THE STORY OF THE YEAR, Jack Dunphy writes:
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Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom” and believed that it serves to power rather than hinder creativity. For Darwin, it was a paralyzing lifelong struggle — he accomplished his breakthroughs not because of anxiety but despite it. “Anxiety,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary, “makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you.”

In a New Yorker essay “Storyteller-in-Chief,” Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Junot Diaz wrote about how “one of a President’s primary responsibilities is to be a storyteller. . . If a President is to have any success, if his policies are going to gain any kind of traction among the electorate, he first has to tell us a story.”
 
Ajay Gupta, Brexit: When the Gods Wish to Punish Us, They Answer Our Prayers (Tax Analysts Blog). “Surely a country that has not been successfully invaded since 1066, that forged the concept and practice of parliamentary rule, and that as late as seven decades ago exercised sole dominion over a quarter of the world’s total land area and an equal proportion of its population would have left in its possession a few maps with which to chart its own sovereign course once again.”

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Supervising Editor Professor of Law Linda Beale and her team of outstanding ABA – Tax Section editors, Anne Dunn and Isel Pizarro, and staff have put together an exceptional June 2016 issue of the digital Tax Times. Features include . . . Terrence Cuff’s  The Tax Ghosts of Christmas Past, Christmas Present, and Christmas Yet to Come


Crumbling Roads? Let’s Build Bike Lanes! Plus this: “A Senate Transportation and Infrastructure Development Committee backgrounder from last July noted that ‘68 percent of California’s roads are in ‘poor’ or ‘mediocre’ condition, putting California behind 43 other states in road condition, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers.’” 

Property Rights, the Income Distribution and China Roger Farmer

Toastmasters - This Scenario Wasn't Covered in Anger Management

Hill on Grill - Good time had by all, including Drudge Report, maybe Bill Clinton 

Gumtree scammer arrestedIn the Age 

SeriAL fraudster Fatima Omar used Gumtree

First fatality with a self-driving carThe NYT article has more detail: “Neither autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor-trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied.”

San Jose Mercury News, California's Skyrocketing Housing Costs, Taxes Prompt Exodus of Residents:
A growing number of Bay Area residents -- besieged by home prices, worsening traffic, high taxes and a generally more expensive cost of living -- believe life would be better just about anywhere else but here.
Terrorists ‘actively seeking’ to build deadly army of intelligent killer robots, UN warns.


In works 40 years apart, both titled Between the Clock and the Bed, two great artists handled humanity’s twin concerns


As Michael Moynihan tweets, “This is pretty much the most patriotic story ever written.”

 
INDEPENDENCE DAY THOUGHTS FROM KURT SCHLICHTER: You Owe Them Nothing – Not Respect, Not Loyalty, Not Obedience.

Think about it. If you are out driving at 3 a.m., do you stop at a stop sign when there’s no one coming? Of course you do. You don’t need a cop to be there to make you stop. You do it voluntarily because this is America and America is a country where obeying the law is the right thing to do because the law was justly made and is justly applied. Or it used to be.
The law mattered. It applied equally to everyone. We demanded that it did, all of us – politicians, the media, and regular citizens. Oh, there were mistakes and miscarriages of justice but they weren’t common and they weren’t celebrated – they were universally reviled. And, more importantly, they weren’t part and parcel of the ideology of one particular party. There was once a time where you could imagine a Democrat scandal where the media actually called for the head of the Democrat instead of deploying to cover it up.

People assumed that the law mattered, that the same rules applied to everyone. That duly enacted laws would be enforced equally until repealed. That the Constitution set the foundation and that its guarantees would be honored even if we disliked the result in a particular case. But that’s not our country today.

The idea of the rule of law today is a lie. There is no law. There is no justice. There are only lies.
As more people think like this, the Coming Middle Class Anarchy won’t just be coming. It will have arrived, in consequence of the revolt against the masses.