“Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Ooh, aah, mother, should I build the wall?
Mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Ooh, aah, mother, should I build the wall?
Mother, should I run for president?
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Ooh, aah, is it just a waste of time?”
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Ooh, aah, is it just a waste of time?”
Delmore Schwartz worried that he would be remembered as nasty, gauche, awkward — an overeager clown. The weight of his concerns, and his loneliness, hangs over his biographer... Biographer
The business of publishing is tough. Literary fiction is a tiny market in Australia. Most serious fiction and non-fiction books sell fewer than 5000 copies. The number of Australian literary authors who sell more than 20,000 copies can be counted on one hand. In the non-fiction universe, cookbooks, self-help, health and personal development books sell well, asi do memoirs by rock and sports stars. The Payne book has sold about 40,000 copies....
MUP is a small publisher that punches above its weight and its boss, Louise Adler, unashamedly admits to wanting to shape public debate, writes Sally Patten. I arrive at the restaurant early but the pocket rocket that is Louise Adler is already sitting at the table, having a pre-lunch caffeine hit. She jumps out of her seat, offers me her hand and a beaming smile and introduces me to the waitress, whom she clearly has known for longer than five minutes. The European, the perennially buzzing, heavily wooded cafe restaurant opposite Victoria's Parliament House, is an extension of Adler's dining room. And, as chief executive of Melbourne University Publishing, she has a fair bit of dining to do in an effort to convince politicians, journalists, sports stars and other would-be authors to write for her. MUP publishes 40 to 60 books a year, which Adler says is not many. In the next breath, however, she concedes she is no good at saying no, suggesting the publishing schedule may be somewhat crowded for an outfit with a staff of 16. "It's healthily busy," Adler says. "I'm a yes person. I'm an enthusiast."
Melbourne University Publishing CEO Louise Adler ...
Publisher be damned
SO I WAS GOING TO WAIT TO MAKE THIS PUBLIC, BUT IN LIGHT OF THE ARPAIO PARDON HERE’S MY LATEST PAPER: Congressional Control of Presidential Pardons. It’s quite short and readable. Download it early and often!
Via Moyers & Company – Steven Harper [Steven Harper blogs at The Belly of the Beast, is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University, and contributes regularly to The American Lawyer…] writes: ‘Explore our updated, comprehensive Trump-Russia Timeline — or select one of the central players in the Trump-Russia saga to see what we know about them…
“When it comes to Donald Trump, his campaign and their dealings with Russia past and present, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of all the players without a scorecard. We have one of sorts — a deeply comprehensive timeline detailing what actually happened and what’s still happening in the ever-changing story of the president, his inner circle and a web of Russian oligarchs, hackers and government officials.
Green finance for dirty ships The Economist. “By burning heavy fuel oil, just 15 of the biggest ships emit more of the noxious oxides of nitrogen and sulphur than all the world’s cars put together.”
WSJ, Companies Promote Corporate-Tax Overhaul:
Australian Business Lawyers, the law firm owned by NSW Business Chamber, went on a trip to the snow with Harmers Lawyers this week. Union heads and the Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission were also invited to visit the NSW ski resorts. The Chamber is a business advocacy group with $190 million in revenues but it also enjoys charity status. The trip to Perisher and Thredbo is therefore subsidised by taxpayers.
WSJ, Companies Promote Corporate-Tax Overhaul:
Large
companies, looking for every angle to prod Congress into making the
corporate-tax changes they have been seeking for years, are turning to
some in-house muscle: employees and customers.
Beyond
efforts by corporations’ lobbyists and a television-ad campaign run by
the Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs, companies are now
seeking to rally broader public support for business-tax cuts. They are
inviting senior lawmakers to their facilities this summer and
encouraging workers to contact their representatives in Congress.
Australian Business Lawyers, the law firm owned by NSW Business Chamber, went on a trip to the snow with Harmers Lawyers this week. Union heads and the Full Bench of the Fair Work Commission were also invited to visit the NSW ski resorts. The Chamber is a business advocacy group with $190 million in revenues but it also enjoys charity status. The trip to Perisher and Thredbo is therefore subsidised by taxpayers.
“We
believe this issue’s so important that you’ve got to get engaged. We
can’t ensure success. We can ensure that our point of view and our
customers’ point of view is heard,” David Abney, the chief executive
officer of United Parcel Service Inc., said in a brief interview Tuesday.
Business executives, though wary of direct connections with the White House after
President Donald Trump’s comments about white-nationalist protesters
last week, remain deeply involved in promoting one of his major policy
objectives.
Reclaim the Discourse on White Privilege Counterpunch
Octogenarians Rule the Rich Bloomberg
The Corruption of the Law Common Dreams
Condition of the workplace in the United States Real-World Economics Review (original RAND Corporation report).
‘Every Country Should Have a Cyber War’:
What Estonia Learned from Russian Hacking
In Estonia, people are not afraid of cyber warfare, nor are they afraid of sharing personal data across public and private institutions. Unlike an authoritarian state like the old Soviet Union, government transparency is built into the system. While all your private data is online, only you can give permission for any data to be accessed. And you can check who has accessed what. If a doctor you don’t know has viewed your records, it will be traceable, and you can have them sacked. As one software developer Quartz spoke to said, “You become your own Big Brother.”
In Estonia, people are not afraid of cyber warfare, nor are they afraid of sharing personal data across public and private institutions. Unlike an authoritarian state like the old Soviet Union, government transparency is built into the system. While all your private data is online, only you can give permission for any data to be accessed. And you can check who has accessed what. If a doctor you don’t know has viewed your records, it will be traceable, and you can have them sacked. As one software developer Quartz spoke to said, “You become your own Big Brother.”
HEADLINES FROM 2011: It’s Time To Take Bitcoin And Blockchain Technology Seriously
Going back two decades, James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg predicted cryptocurrency (and much more) in their fin de siècle peek into the future, The Sovereign Individual. Much of their work has held up frighteningly well.
SPENGLER: What Do We Say About Decent Men Who Died for a Wicked Cause?
Delmore Schwartz worried that he would be remembered as nasty, gauche, awkward — an overeager clown. The weight of his concerns, and his loneliness, hangs over his Biographer
Train stations were Tony Judt's cathedrals; timetables were his Bible. The two trains he cared about most took him
to places where he could avoid history
Alone And Adrift
CBS Sunday Morning featured A Speck in the Sea: A Story of Survival and Rescue by John Aldridge and Anthony Sosinski (Hachette/Weinstein Books; Blackstone Audio;OverDrive Sample) as their cover story this week.
In this harrowing but ultimately triumphant story, John Aldridge falls off his boat in the early hours of the morning while fishing in the Atlantic. After surviving sharks, cold, and twelve hours in the open ocean, the Coast Guard spotted him clinging to a rope. The rescue pilot told him they never find men alive, they just find bodies.
The story was widely reported, most notably in a 2014 NYT Magazine cover story. The Weinstein company bought both the book and the film rights.
The book came out in late May. Publishers Weekly calls it “hair-raising” and a “page turner.”
No word yet on when the film will premiere but it has some big names attached on the production side, including the producers behind Moneyball and Paranormal Activity.
Mara Revkin (Yale), The Non-Economic Functions of Rebel Taxation: New Data from the Islamic State in Syria:
Previous
studies predict that rebel groups with access to exploitable resources
will engage in looting rather than invest in building the complex
bureaucracies that are necessary for taxation. This claim relies on an
untested assumption that the sole purpose of rebel taxation is to
collect revenue. I challenge this assumption with granular
district-month data on seven types of tax policies from the 18 Syrian
districts that have been governed by the Islamic State (IS) since 2013.
The Internet's "Nazi Purge" Shows Who Really Controls Our Online Speech
FORGET IT, JAKE — IT’S THE TIMES: Red Century story makes me see red.
“Depending on whom you ask today, my grandfather’s story is that of a partisan, a traitor, a hero or a spy. The revolution asked a terrible amount of those who served it. Those who resisted paid a similarly awful price. It left in its wake countless lives, like my grandfather’s, that cannot be compassed by a single line.”
Such a statement doesn’t make up for the many facts omitted from his story, starting with the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact signed on Aug. 23, 1939, which directly led to Hitler’s invasion of Poland on Sept. 1. A secret protocol of the treaty called for the partition of Poland, with Germany getting the western portion and the Soviets the east. The Soviets invaded on Sept. 17 to grab their half of the spoils.
Also left out is what happened to Poland in the roughly 21 months of Soviet rule. Hundreds of thousands of Poles were deported to Kazakhstan, Siberia and other points east during the occupation. Even worse, more than 22,000 military officers, politicians, professors, priests and other civic leaders were executed in what is collectively known as the Katyn Forest massacres.
Mikanowski writes that the Nazis in 1939 captured his grandfather, then a Polish soldier, but he escaped and made his way to Minsk, the capital of Belarus. Curiously, he doesn’t explain why Jakub didn’t halt his flight in Soviet-occupied Poland instead of going hundreds of miles to the east. Maybe Mikanowski didn’t want to bring up all that awkward partition business and Nazi-Soviet hanky panky.
So Mikanowski says it depends on your perspective whether Jakub, a Soviet pawn, was “a partisan, a traitor, a hero or a spy.”
The Times won’t stop running Communist sympathizer pieces until they stop being sympathetic to Communists.
