Extraordinary Age

1989 really did mark the end of ideology. Students can no longer comprehend fascism or fathom the allure of communism. This is a mixed blessing... Velvet Revolutions (Soviet unions secret erotica )

The art of the epigraph

The publication of Ulysses was a victory for linguistic freedom and sexual candor. Now anything goes, and not much matters. Literature lacks urgency... Fastest running Streams

Life at 60. Some thoughts on lights and mirrors (avoid them), health (“looms like a threatening monsoon”), and the stupidity of “60 is the new 40”... Life Begins @Sixty

At first under the pseudonym Septimus, then often while hung over, the young journalist Gabriel García Márquez showed a flair for narrative and a taste for the bizarre... Bohemians

Orwell at the ends of the earth. To finish Nineteen Eighty-Four, the writer moved to a desolate Scottish island. He slept with a gun under his bed...Some of us know the feeling ...

Black markets in everything, electronic medical records

Black markets in everything, electronic medical records edition

As health data become increasingly digital and the use of electronic health records booms, thieves see patient records in a vulnerable health care system as attractive bait, according to experts interviewed by POLITICO. On the black market, a full identity profile contained in a single record can bring as much as $500.

There is more here, none of it reassuring.

- via marginal revolution

Blackstone ~ KKK ~ TPG ~ law and disorder

SEC Investigating Group Purchasing Kickbacks by Private Equity Firms

You have to hand it to the private equity firm kingpins: they are skilled at financial sleight-of-hand which makes their already-lucrative investments even more attractive to them. But as the SEC has been exposing, too many of these tricks come at the expense of their investors.

The Wall Street Journal exposes the latest ruse tonight. While the dollar amounts aren’t earthshaking, the behavior is particularly shameless, and involves some of the biggest names in the industry: KKR, Blackstone, and TPG. It shows that these players are unafraid of engaging in out-and-out skimming as long as they dress it up in a way that is hard to ferret out.

The Wall Street Journal account, by Mark Maremont and Mike Spector, involves the use of kickbacks related to purchasing volume discounts. For instance, across its 74 portfolio companies, Blackstone bought more than 50,000 Hewlett Packard computers in 2011, and used bulk buying to obtain discounts. Blackstone, along with many other private equity firms, uses a company called CoreTrust Purchasing to negotiate these price breaks. Blackstone effectively skims a percentage of these haircut for itself:

Blackstone between 2011 and 2013 received roughly $7 million in fees from a company that negotiates discounts for its portfolio companies, according to people familiar with the matter….KKR and TPG similarly disclosed that they receive group-purchasing fees that aren’t shared with investors. KKR separately said such fees totaled $6 million over the past three years… TPG declined to provide dollar amounts.

A key provider of group-purchasing services to private-equity firms is CoreTrust Purchasing Group, an intermediary that negotiates special pricing for portfolio companies on items such as office supplies and package deliveries.

CoreTrust funds its business by getting “administrative fees,” or commissions, from vendors, which it says vary from 1% to 3% of the purchasing volume. In some instances, it says, it “may share a portion” of these commissions with private-equity firms “whose portfolio companies are purchasing members.” Both Blackstone and KKR confirm they receive those commissions from CoreTrust…

KKR participates in CoreTrust through its Capstone consulting group. A KKR spokeswoman said the arrangement “is a commercial one that reflects value added by both CoreTrust and Capstone, and has been disclosed both to portfolio companies and fund investors.”

SEC Investigating group purchasing kickbacks private equity firms

We’ve been chipping away at the bigger implications of information exposed via the release of a dozen private equity limited partnership agreements. The SEC warned in May that investors, as in limited partners, had done a lousy job of negotiating these documents and weren’t so hot at monitoring the general partners either. We wrote earlier about a major tax problem for the limited partners, and we’ve since come across information from an expert that works for private equity funds that confirms our original reading, which we will discuss in due course Wolf Righter private equity firms manipulate buy rent housing racket

Policy made by teenagers - says Terry Moran

 “I know some law. In fact, I know a lot of law. And I made me some money out of law. But I’m not a lawyer. That’s why I can see what the law is like. It’s like a single-bed blanket on a double bed and three folks in the bed and a cold night. There ain’t ever enough blanket to cover the case, no matter how much pulling and hauling, and somebody is always going to nigh catch pneumonia.”

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men 

~Nota Bene

Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s former public service chief has blasted “teenaged’’ ministerial staff members under Labor who he described as “unaccountable’’ and responsible for undermining sound policy decision-making.

Terry Moran, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet from 2008 to 2011, said Labor had adopted a “spoils’’ system when it won office where the number of people with public service experience was greatly reduced with the exception of foreign policy, which still required a diplomat with extensive experience.

Cult Of the teen adviser

We are happy to announce that Robert Cowley, 2nd Baron Ardwhallan, CEO of fake bank Investment Suisse, and occasionally fake Knight, and Earl, as well as Baron, whose bizarre fantasy life we glimpsed here, and whose ruthless scammery we also glimpsed, here, is on an extended career break, as of Wednesday 26th March, 2014.
 Cowley fake baron fake

Other Notes and messages Akin

The Coverup Is Usually Worse Than the Crime,

A new report from the Migration Policy Institute calculates that:

The US government spends more on its immigration enforcement agencies than on all of its principal criminal federal law enforcement agencies combined. In FY 2012, spending for CBP, ICE and US-Visit reached nearly $18 billion. This amount exceeds by nearly 24% total spending by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Secret Service, US Marshals Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) which stood at $14.4 billion in FY 2012.

In other words, the Federal government spends more on preventing trade than on preventing murder, rape and theft. I call it the anti-nanny state. It’s hard to believe that this truly reflects the American public’s priorities.

"Midge Rendell talks about life as a judge": This article will appear in Sunday's edition of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Tax Analysts Blog:  The Coverup Is Usually Worse Than the Crime, by Christopher Bergin:

[D]o we have a coverup at the IRS? Has a crime been committed? I don’t know. What I do know is that I am deeply disturbed by all this.

Maybe it’s just sloppy record-keeping, which would be bad enough. Most of the government’s business is now conducted digitally, and those records need to be properly handled. Or is it worse? Is the IRS deliberately keeping things from the public? Excuse my cynicism, but the IRS’s penchant for secrecy is what led Tax Analysts, using the new Freedom of Information Act, to sue the agency in the 1970s to force it to release private letter rulings. There have been several subsequent lawsuits to pry records that should have been public out of the agency’s hands. ...

[T]he real problem here is that the IRS can’t make this story go away, and that starts smelling like a coverup. I know tax professionals who are now starting to think the worst and who are having trouble getting behind the IRS. And I am one of them. ...

• Forbes, Paul Reddam's KPMG Tax Shelter Stunk In More Ways Than One, by Peter J. Reilly
• Mauled Again, The Contagiousness of Tax Noncompliance, by Jim Maule
• Newsweek, How Credit Suisse Got Off Easy, by Lynnley Browning
• Newsweek, IRS Will Now Accept an ‘I Was Clueless’ Defense for Offshore Tax Evaders, by Lynnley Browning

Matters of Character

Locavore, gourmet, artisanal Top Chef, MasterChef: We live in an era of crazed oral gratification. Why? We’re homesick. Ron Rosenbaum explains.. Pirozky by Mum :-)
~ How to make hard choices?

Different time periods form different characters, as do different nations, because people born in those times and places have different experiences.  The more synchronized events are, as Newberry has noted, the stronger this is.  In a mass media society with relatively fast technological and social change it makes sense to speak of generations.  The character of people born 20 or 30 years apart in modern societies will be different, and within cohorts similar experiences will tend to create somewhat similar patterns of character.

Society is nothing except people and their creations and interactions over time.  Walk down an old neighbourhood one day, and look at the buildings, the road, the trees and think about all the people who made everything you see, and all the people behind those people.  Read the laws, and know that people made those, and enforce those Different Characters

 “I shall now appeal to authority by quoting a philosopher who agrees with my premise, thereby wrapping my argument in the wisdom of the ages.” How to argue: a sadly accurate description

In a recent episode of his new show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver featured Australia’s new-ish right wing prime minister, Tony Abbott, in a segment devoted to “Other Countries’ Presidents of the USA.” The show highlighted Abbott’s long history of verbal slip-ups, including his unforgettable line: “Jesus knew there was a place for everything and it’s not necessarily everyone’s place to come to Australia.”  .... Why “American” Is a Bad Word in Australia

“War made the state, and the state made war,” historian Charles Tilly famously wrote. Why would kings and chieftains build roads and schools and fair legal systems for their people, or give their people property rights, when they could just plunder and pillage instead? Tilly’s answer: because of war. More productive citizens mean a richer country and more war-fighting potential. Gross domestic product wins wars and keeps the local top dogs on top Make good government not war

These are the richest artists David Choe Jozef Imrich at al ...

“Everything that is thought and expressed in words is one-sided, only half the truth; it all lacks totality, completeness, unity.”

~ Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha

Theories of the novel – whether all-encompassing or specific – struggle under scrutiny. Does the novel defeat the fox/hedgehog divide?...Cold/Hot Rivers

Who are the wealthiest artists?

Then there are a couple of names who are totally unknown to most people, even in the art world. These are the richest artists you’ve never heard of: graffiti artist David Choe painted the Facebook headquarters in 2007 and was rewarded with stock, which now makes him worth about $200m. The Welshman Andrew Vicari has made an estimated $142m from supplying portraits and paintings of horses, battle and genre scenes to Middle Easterners, particularly in Saudi Arabia.

The longer article, by Georgina Adam, cites the Thompson estimate that there are about seventy-five “superstar” artists who regularly earn in seven figures.  And here is the new Georgina Adam book Big Bucks: The Explosion of the Art Market in the 21st Century.

What can we learn from the odes ofPindar and Pelé? Sport isn’t about the athleticism of youth. It’s about morality ...
I was a digital best-seller
Art of the epigraph
Who needs poetry?
Word processing
Ancient Roman humor
Chris Hedges, plagiarist?
CIA and Dr. Zhivago
Ghostwriting
Origin of -ish
Humanities deathwatch
Pleasure of teh typos
Famous rejection letters
Penguin's penguin
Food for Bloomsbury
Literary insults
Missing smoke
Greenwald v. Kinsley

Putting Putin in Place: The Riot Act

PUSSY RIOT, EDWARD SNOWDEN, AND THE DISSIDENT FETISH

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina Are Determined to Bring Down Vladimir Putin

• 

  SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

  What Europe Can Learn from Ukraine

What Putin Wants

Respect, sure, but also money. How that shapes his relations with the West.

Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina, photographed in New York City.   

Though often called a punk-rock group, Pussy Riot is actually a Russian protest-art collective started by non-musicians a little less than three years ago. By the rules of the group as devised by Tolokonnikova, members are always anonymous: they are Pussy Riot only when wearing their trademark neon-colored balaclavas. Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova are two exceptions: they were unmasked and arrested two and a half years ago after performing what they called a “punk prayer” inside Moscow’s biggest cathedral. The song appealed to the Virgin Mary to “chase Putin out.” Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova were sentenced to two years in penal colonies and served 22 months in Gulag-like conditions...http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2014/07/pussy-riot-nadya-tolokonnikova-masha-alyokhina-photo

In June - June's Milestone: XC

Congratulations on this  sweet McSweney milestone! 

Wishing you all of the life's best as you celebrate your 90th. 

HAPPY 90th BIRTHDAY!

90 isn't old. It's classic! You look fresh and young with every passing year.  And as the Slavic saying notes the older the fiddler the sweeter is her tune ;-)

Thank you for holding us together throughout our lives, thank you for giving a true meaning to our lives. 

NINETY IS ONLY 9 in Scrabble ;-)

Style of Blogging

We must be in the wrong profession.

Top style bloggers are earning more than $1 million a year in appearances, promotions and partnerships with corporate brands, according to Women’s Wear Daily.

~ Blogging in Style


A Worldwide Guide for Coffee Places where you can not only work but also think!

Thinking Global Styles

Here is a north, south, east and west of the hottest cafes in Sydney, from some of the best new openings of the year to our established favourites. Sydney's Trendy coffee spots

~ Is robot journalism going mainstream?  And a Guardian survey piece on automation.

~ Which country has the best fans at the World Cup?

~ Has all politics become national?

~ The Piketty slides of Justin Wolfers

Beautiful Decay

 mike mellia's sentimental piece works along the lines of alienation and tension, however. It not only provides a glimpse into his father’s life but it also showcases Mellia’s hardships to accept his passing 

“In my photographs I negotiate and characterize the balance between my own vision and the unknown and often powerful potential given by each portrait’s subject. I am drawn to certain people for the simple reason that I know shooting them will give me an image I could never have created on my own, and because my camera can reveal something they may not have known was in themselves.  It becomes a synthesis of us both, captured in a single photograph. These connections with each subject are often too straightforward and immediate to be conscious, but rather they are something that is felt immediately, coming straight from the gut, which is the home of our instincts.”
Intensely personal portraiture shelly mosman


The mystery of human desire. Our Paleolithic libidos leave us in thrall to every unruly urge. How did we become such a downright kinky species?... LIterature tells us that our desires know no reason ...

Yardstick of history : ALP Malchkeon and Media 143829 ...

“A fool lifts up his voice with laughter, but a wise man scarcely smiles a little.”
"Ha Ha - Imrich 7:7"

Words and the Diminution of All Things:

All afternoon the leaves have scuttled
Across the sidewalk and driveway, clicking their clattery claws.
And now the evening is over us,
Small slices of silence
       running under a dark rain,
Wrapped in a larger.

Thornton Wilder’s Stage Manager observes in Our Town:

Y’know—Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about ‘em is the names of the kings and some copies of wheat contracts…and contracts for the sale of slaves. Yet every night all those families sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney,—same as here. And even in Greece and Rome, all we know about the real life of the people is what we can piece together out of the joking poems and the comedies they wrote for the theatre back then.

So I’m going to have a copy of this play put in the cornerstone and the people a thousand years from now’ll know a few simple facts about us—more than the Treaty of Versailles and the Lindbergh flight. 

Y’know— Vrbov once had almost two thousand souls

 Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bishop, Marguerite Duras: How is it that these women, so very bad at living, were so very good at writing about it? Best revenge in life is living well ...

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Sir Walter Scott popularized the clan tartan; Madonna the kaffiyeh. When is it OK to steal from other cultures?... Stealing Stories