Mike West: Revealed: Australia’s Top 40 Tax Dodgers for 2021
PM Mark Rutte will stay on in caretaker capacity until general elections scheduled for 17 March
The Dutch government has resigned amid an escalating scandal over child benefits in which more than 20,000 families were wrongly accused of fraud by the tax authority.
Double Dutch Sandwich of Welfare
Effective leaders ‘rise to the occasion’: The Carlyle Group’s David Rubenstein World Economic Forum
See you in hell, punk London Review of Books
Moynihan Train Hall czar killed himself as pressure mounted for Cuomo’s jewel project NY Post
Who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger they come. . .
My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life," his younger brother Teddy said in the eulogy. "He should simply be remembered as a good and decent man who saw wrong and tried to right it; who saw suffering and tried to heal it; who saw war and tried to stop it."
Our answer is to rely on youth - not a time of life but a state of mind, a temper of the will, a quality of imagination, a predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. The cruelties and obstacles of this swiftly changing planet will not yield to obsolete dogmas and outworn slogans. They cannot be moved by those who cling to a present that is already dying, who prefer the illusion of security to the excitement and danger that come with even the most peaceful progress. It is a revolutionary world we live in; and this generation at home and around the world, has had thrust upon it a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.
~Transcript for June 8, 1968: Ted Kennedy gives eulogy at brother Robert F. Kennedy's funeral (via BC)
This Year’s Kennedy Center Honorees
The Kennedy Center Honorsannounced today that the lifetime artistic achievement recipients for its 43rd ceremony will be choreographer and actress Debbie Allen; folk singer-songwriter Joan Baez; country singer-songwriter Garth Brooks; violinist Midori; and actor Dick Van Dyke. – New York Magazine
Everything Is Different Now
The Atlantic – Tom Junod: The U.S. Capitol did not fall the way the Twin Towers did, but the American idea it embodies was brutalized. “We must remember 1/6 the way we remember 9/11….The attack on the U.S. Capitol was not a shock, because the people who perpetrated it did not come from out of the sky. They had been talking about their plans for weeks, and in broader terms for years; he, the most audible man in the world, had been talking about it, tweeting about it, ever since he lost the election—indeed, even before. A reckoning is coming, he said; the day is coming. He didn’t have to say that his people were coming, because he had made the pact between them explicit enough for their plans to be implicit. They all knew January 6 was going to be “wild,” as he put it, and that was the key word, the tip-off that the bacchanal of his rallies, indeed the liberation of his rallies, would now be visited upon the city where the buildings were—along with the American idea….The Capitol yielded easily to a horde of Americans—our brothers and sisters—in red hats and horned helmets and shirts proclaiming the persuasive triumph of the 17th letter of the alphabet. They were vandals in the halls where American Ciceros were supposed to have spoken, and yet now the halls were abandoned and, but for a brave few, bereft even of the dignity of resistance, while the vandals had the time of their lives. How could the idea that the Capitol is supposed to embody be perishable this way? My stomach turned and my hands trembled in fear and disgust, as I realized my prophecy for the day had been fulfilled not by the imposition of martial law but by the possibility of a stranger in a Camp Auschwitz shirt taking a shit in my house….”
Over 1500 political scientists call for Trump’s immediate removal via impeachment or the 25th amendment — “The President’s actions show he is unwilling or unable to fulfill his oath to protect and defend the Constitution”
“There are almost no consciousness deniers” — Andrew Brook (Carleton) is interviewed about cognitive science, consciousness, selves, and more
“Rather than viewing the granting of honorifics as settling a social question, we can see it as an imperfect way of inviting debate over what society ought to honor in the name of universal justice” — Eric Schliesser (Amsterdam) on the broader lessons of the controversy over Kathleen Stock’s OBE
“Political power accumulates across massive timescales, much larger than the ones folks usually use when evaluating the institutional arrangements that history makes possible” — an interview with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown)
“The film ends with much of the NYU philosophy department being attacked and turned into vampires themselves in a blood-soaked climax” — “The Addiction” (1995) starred Lili Taylor as a philosophy PhD student and Christopher Walken as a vampire, and was produced by Antony Blinken, Biden’s likely Secretary of State
“Quentin Smith was exactly the kind person who’s not supposed to exist in modern, ultra-specialized, ultra-professionalized academia.” — a beautiful and interesting appreciation of Smith, who died this past November, by Ben Burgis (Georgia State Perimeter College)
The ethics of publicly discussing public health strategies — the downside risks of openly floating some ideas should be taken more seriously, argues Matthew Smith (Northeastern)
