It is peculiar to “ressentiment criticism” that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil. The evil is merely the pretext for the criticism.
— Max Scheler, born in 1874
“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”
—Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
“I’ve now reached the stage of being in two minds about whether one ought to be in two minds about things or not; and an infinite regress beckons.”
~ Ronald Knox, letter to an unnamed priest, July 1949 (quoted in Evelyn Waugh, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox)
Fallout revealed: panic sparked Labor's deadly domino effect
Dastyari, ICAC and the Chinese 'agent of influence'
Former Labor Senator Sam Dastyari has told a corruption inquiry that billionaire Huang Xiangmo may have been an “agent of influence” for the Chinese government.
Prague Grapples With Over-Tourism
In the years since the 1989 Velvet Revolution, a rising tide of visitors has flooded in, up from 2.62 million in the year 2000, to just under 8 million last year, drawn byPrague’s reputation as home to stunning baroque and gothic architectural gems – and cheap beer. Numbers this year are forecast to reach just under 9 million. – The Observer (UK)
On Samizdat, Tamizdat, Magnitizdat, and Other Strange Words That Are Difficult to Pronounce
The Trump secrets hiding inside Deutsche Bank
ATO says hiding income offshore is 'pointless'
Books Are Forever. Is Reading?
“It was never the books as objects that people worried would vanish with the advent of e-readers and other personal devices: it was reading itself. The same change was prophesied by Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the movie age. People fretted again with the advent of the radio, the TV, and home computers. Yet undistracted reading didn’t perish the moment any of these technologies were switched on.” – The New Yorker
Revelations alleged African axe murderers were living secretly in Australia rocked the dying days of the federal election. What it triggered was the unearthing of an alleged shadowy network of spies and their efforts to silence dissent.
I Am, I Am, I Am
The book’s subtitle is “Seventeen Brushes with Death,” and that’s
exactly what it is: essays about seventeen times O’Farrell faced death,
sometimes very immediately and dangerously, sometimes in a more
distanced but still real and frightening way. O’Farrell has lived a
pretty exciting life, with lots of travel and serious illness, and she
has a certain recklessness that leads her into trouble sometimes. But
still it seems to me like seventeen brushes with death is a particularly
unfortunate record. O’Farrell writes about these experiences simply, in
a straightforward manner without much direct philosophizing about life
and death. But she still manages to be evocative and to inspire
reflection even as she sticks to the story at hand. The experiences
build on one another, later stories inspiring memories of earlier ones,
hospital experiences contrasting with one another, childhood dangers
helping us understand adult ones. The essays are not in chronological
order, but they still add up to a full sense of the person that
O’Farrell is. The book is labeled a memoir, and it feels like one, even
as the individual essays can stand alone as well. The last chapter is
the most wrenching, and it brings the book together beautifully.Kafkaesque parable …
Sarah Ruden's Mistakes | Mark Bauerlein | First Things
The factual errors start with the phrase “anoints Whitman America’s greatest poet.” This isn’t true. Edmundson didn’t do this. It’s been done 100 times before by countless poets, writers, critics, and professors (Harold Bloom: “If you are American, then Walt Whitman is your imaginative father and mother”).
The spy in your wallet: Credit cards have a privacy problem - Washington Post: “I recently used my credit card to buy a banana. Then I tried to figure out how my credit card let companies buy me. You might think my 29-cent swipe at Target would be just between me and my bank. Heavens, no. My banana generated data that’s probably worth more than the banana itself. It ended up with marketers, Target, Amazon, Google and hedge funds, to name a few. Oh, the places a banana will go in the sprawling card-data economy. Despite a federal privacy law covering cards, I found that six types of businesses could mine and share elements of my purchase, multiplied untold times by other companies they might have passed it to. Credit cards are a spy in your wallet — and it’s time that we add privacy, alongside rewards and rates, to how we evaluate them…”
The Restaurant of Mistaken Orders: A Tokyo Restaurant Where All the Servers Are People Living with Dementia | Open Culture.
“I had not noticed how the humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, minds, praised most, while the cranks, misfits and malcontents praised least” (C S Lewis).
Well, we’d better learn how to praise others then. And that’s where Sam Crabtree’s book, Practicing Affirmation, is so helpful. I needed this book and have to say that it’s been the most influential book upon me so far this year.
The burden of financialisation: a case study of a Scottish police training centre
Much of what I am noting in this blog comes from a recent submission that John Christensen and Nick Shaxson of the Tax Justice Network have
Read the full article…
Companies House is failing the UK and the business community by ducking its responsibilities to provide decent data to all stakeholders of UK limited companies
A consultation on the future of Companies House procedures closes this morning. It says the consultation is about a series of reforms to limit the risk
Read the full article…
Dodgy operators helped by lax company registration checks |
| The Daily Telegraph by Jennifer Sexton |
ATO officer says scrapping work-related deductions would be like setting off a ' nuclear bomb' .... “An ATO officer participated in a debate yesterday at an event held by the Tax Institute on the ...
anna_novikova @anna_novikova
Who are you really and where’re you from?
Oh, how foolish am I:
You must’ve picked by mistake this home,
Avenue, city, and time.
#Okudzhava