---

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.
-Johann von Goethe

I suppose that Sasha and Gabbie are experiencing the Easter of 2008 in London so Happy Easter girls wherever you happen to be



Flying with the past of fatherhood, away from the earth.
Forgetting the saddness of evening,
the paradise beyond the clouds,
Where a turtle travels only
when it sticks its neck out ...




Neither individuals nor nations become corrupt all at once, nor are they enlightened in a moment.

Arthur C. Clarke's assertion, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, comes to full fruition in cyberspace—a realm of avatars and instant messaging. And magical thinking may help us pluck the fruits of digital technology.

Though the rational mind knows what a picture is, it’s hard to hit a baby’s photo on a dartboard: our aim falls prey to deep intuitions... 2001 AD

CODA: Easter 2008 AD - Arthur C. Clarke, whose visions of the future became scientific fact, is dead at the age of 90 ...

---

Very few people wish me happy name day these March peppered days - well by confirmation name I am addressed as Patrick while my real name is Jozef - on 17 March I must celebrate my confirmation name day and today is St Jozef's name - My sister Gitka always remembers to send me a message even if she is busy in Prague helping my other sister Eva to get organised;-) This year I did not let this important excuse to have a drink slip by unnoticed among friends - well == this week lots of things from the past keep flooding back...

Including the idea of coming to Sydney, which was transformative. You would become a different person here. Many refugees tend to agree... The moral admonitions of Cold War that loom so large in the European memory are invisible to Australians. With time and distance, evil fades... Imagine you fall on hard times of isolation in exile and (it's hard, but try) imagine further that you never want to be right if the government is wrong …

As long ago as 1628, Sir Edward Coke suggested that legal materials should not be published in English lest the unlearned by bare reading without right understanding might suck out errors, and trusting in their conceit, might endamage themselves, and sometimes fall into destruction. Worries about sucking, endamaging, and destruction persist to this day, though the conceit is arguably heavily concentrated on the other side of the issue.

People — and by “people” I mean “lawyers” — generally believe that there are two consumers of legal information. The first is a “law person” — a judge, lawyer, academic, or student — who makes sophisticated professional use of caselaw, statutes, regulations, treatises. The other is the “man in the street”, someone who is having an episodic, traumatic encounter with the legal system: getting crushed by debt, getting divorced, getting arrested. This leads to a misconception: the idea that both the literature and the audience for it are sharply bifurcated. On the one hand, there is “legal information”, a specialist literature that the man in the street doesn’t want and couldn’t understand in any case. On the other, there is what I suppose one might call “advice to the law-lorn”, simply-written, presented in bite-size chunks via newspaper or television, and providing orientation for those participating in one of the episodes mentioned earlier, or perhaps trying to solve a consumer-protection problem.

He was no lover of the common law, which Blackstone put on a pedestal. On the contrary, he described the common law as a place of “dark Chaos”. He advocated substitution of the codification of law and its enactment in statutes passed by an elected Parliament which would take the place of the step by step accretion of common law principle, performed by analogous reasoning by judges of infinite variety. For him, codes and statutory principles would “mark out the line of the subject’s conduct by visible directions instead of turning [the subject] loose into the wilds of perpetual conjecture”. He had great powers of invective, often directed against ‘Judge and Co’ (ie the Bench and the Bar), whom he saw as a ‘sinister interest’ profiting from the operation at great cost to the public of an unnecessarily complex and chaotic legal system in which it was often impossible for a litigant to discover in advance his legal rights. .

Those words are a paraphrase of HLA Hart, taken from an address given by Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby at the Law via the Internet ‘99 conference Kirby’s talk still rings true now, painfully close to a decade later:

Providing undigested legal material is not enough. It is essential that we provide citizens with the tools of thinking through problems, finding the applicable legal rules and deriving from legislation and case law any principle that must be obeyed….Throwing onto the plate of people, with fundamental misapprehensions about their legal institutions, a huge mass of undigested legal data will not truly make the law free and more accessible. It is the duty of schools and universities to help the next generation, including the overwhelming majority who are not lawyers, to appreciate the way in which law is written, may be found and is applied - at least in those matters which are of greatest concern to the ordinary person. Otherwise, Bentham and his followers will have been outfoxed once again by Judge & Co.

In the years since Kirby’s speech, we’ve seen enormous progress in making law available. Courts, legislatures, and agencies have all provided online warehouses full of their work product (and indeed the e-Government Act of 2002 requires Federal courts to do so). More recently, interest from open-access advocates among the technorati has resulted in admirable projects like public.resource.org, AltLaw, and an important and exciting venture in cross-subsidy for open access, Justia . Nameless for now

I believe what happened to Mark D'arney, Alan Beverstock or David Draper is one of the more shameful episodes in this whole place called the NSW Parliament or the Bear Pit. There was much whispering in the back seat, dancing in the shadows, and searching for missing paper clips, but, obviously, none was found missing ...

Can we change the heart of politics? Rocking the Rivers of Mateships
The Iemma Government has been rocked by explosive claims that convicted paedophile Milton Orkopoulos was tipped off by senior parliamentary officials that police were investigating him. Ms Sneddon said she was told on February 8 by Elaine Schofield, the NSW Parliament employee services manager, that the new MP for Swansea, Robert Coombs, had not wanted her on staff.
Earlier in the morning, Orkopoulos had joked with journalists about what time the jury was likely to reach its verdict. As more than a dozen journalists entered a sweepstake on the time of the verdict, Orkopoulos jokingly entered, choosing Friday at 11.30am. He won the pool, but when the time arrived, the smile had long vanished from his face. The jury found he had sex with two boys after supplying them with cannabis and heroin while they were minors after 1995.

Gillian Sneddon, who worked as Orkopoulos's electorate officer in the Hunter seat of Swansea, said she feared she would be killed after learning that Russell Grove, the clerk of the Legislative Assembly, had met with Orkopoulos to tell him about the investigation. Soon after that Russell Grove from Parliament, the clerk of the Legislative Assembly, sat down with Milton and had a meeting with him to tell him about it. ... The Herald revealed on Saturday that Ms Sneddon's employment as an electorate officer was terminated by the NSW Parliament on February 22, the day she first testified against Orkopoulos.
Mrs Sneddon accused a senior parliamentary official of holding a meeting with Orkopoulos shortly after she phoned an officer at Parliament and revealed she was helping police. The official is now under pressure to answer whether he informed the then speaker and Labor MP John Aquilina about the allegations.
Ms Sneddon, Orkopoulos's former electorate officer in the seat of Swansea, said she helped collect evidence for police and told a parliamentary official about the investigation on September 11, 2006.
"Soon after that, the official from Parliament sat down with Milton and had a meeting with him to tell him about it," she told Radio 2GB's Ray Hadley. "This was a covert police operation and by Milton knowing about it, that was in fact endangering my life." Ms Sneddon, made redundant the day she began giving evidence in the ex-MP's trial, said Parliament had effectively protected Orkopoulos.
She showed The Daily Telegraph a statement from Parliament's employee and corporate services manager Elaine Schofield which was supplied as part of her worker's compensation claim. In part the statement said: "(The official) and I had a meeting with Milton Orkopoulos arising out of Ms Sneddon's absence and workers' compensation claim. "During that meeting Mr Orkopoulos acknowledged he was aware that a police investigation was being conducted in relation to him.
"He indicated to us that they were old matters that had previously been dealt with by police and they were being rehashed. "He indicated that the allegations were promoted by his wife's former husband and . . . they related to interference with a young male."
Ms Sneddon said colleagues at the Swansea electorate office told Orkopoulos of her role in the police operation, photocopying documents.
And what did Parliament do - they had the locks changed to keep me out. Because I was assisting police, Milton obviously conspired with Parliament to have me locked out. So in effect what Parliament was doing . . . they were protecting the subject of the police inquiry, they were locking out the police witness.Orkopoulos is awaiting sentencing after being convicted last week on 28 child sex and drug charges.

• Tip-off put my life in danger - staffer; [SMH 1; SMH 2; DT; ABC’ Courier
]
• · The internet’s instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all sectors in our economy. We need this gigantic copy machine... ; Children lie early, and often, for many reasons: to avoid punishment, bond with friends, gain a sense of control. And there’s another reason

---

We are in a fragmenting culture, where our certainties of even a few decades ago are questioned and where it is common for young men and women who have had years of education, to know nothing about the world, to have read nothing, knowing only some speciality or other, for instance, computers. What has happened to us is an amazing invention, computers and the internet and TV, a revolution. This is not the first revolution we, the human race, has dealt with. The printing revolution, which did not take place in a matter of a few decades, but took much longer, changed our minds and ways of thinking. A foolhardy lot, we accepted it all, as we always do, never asked "What is going to happen to us now, with this invention of print?" And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to change with the new internet, which has seduced a whole generation into its inanities so that even quite reasonable people will confess that once they are hooked, it is hard to cut free, and they may find a whole day has passed in blogging and blugging etc
-Acceptance Speech, Doris Lessing, Nobel Prize in Literature

According to a famous Cold River philosopher, there are three types of people: those who make things happen; those who things happen to; and those who say, what happened? In cyberspace, 15 minutes of fame becomes 15 certain seconds ... But the Guardian Newspaper in London ok, even if they do misquote! It's a Darwinian process - About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread. Warhola of 15 - 15 seconds and my Brissie connection Baden ;-)

If God made us who made God? In the end, the web is about connections
Websites link to resources, resources recommend articles, articles refer to experts.

Without links, websites are invisible. Social networks create links between people, forming connections based on interests, expertise, past employment or education, and friendships. Law librarians, while remaining aware of their pitfalls, can use social networks such as LinkedIn, Ning, Facebook, and even MySpace to promote useful websites and legal resources as well their own expertise and interests. "A survey of U.S. journalists by Brodeur, a unit of Omnicom Group suggests that blogs are not only having an impact on the speed and availability of news, but also influence the tone and editorial direction of reporting. The survey is part of an ongoing research project by Brodeur in conjunction with Marketwire to dissect and understand the impact that social media and blogs are having on traditional news delivery. The online survey was conducted among a random sample of North American reporters and editors, and was focused on understanding how social media and blogs influence their work."

• Head Report; [Tail Report has launched with the goal to map out how money is made in the blogosphere. Tail Report works by asking users to anonymously submit information about their site's traffic, rank and monthly revenue. In return, the user receives a custom report detailing what other websites are making and how their revenue compares based a number of factors, such as traffic, rank, number of RSS subscribers, age, number of employees, content, and ad networks. Tail Report ; ]
• · It's well known that kids influence family decisions. The Economist calls them Trillion Dollar kids, but the gist is that kids under 14 influenced almost half of American household spending in 2005. That's around $700 billion. Now imagine all that persuasive energy put behind sustainable enterprises and you've got a revolution underway... Dillhons: Out Of The Mouths Of Children;
• · What is it about tattoos? When I was young, having your skin marked with 'Mom' in a heart, a skull and cross bones, or a loved one's name was left to sailors and others tough enough to take the pain and the consequences when they changed girlfriends. Today, tattoos are fashionably mainstream... like Cold River Tattoos: More Than Skin Deep ; In Ezra Harel's first interview to the Israeli press, he declared that if bond-holders of Rogosin (TASE:ROGO), the company he controlled under Sunday, had been "rational, not greedy an arrangement could have been reached". Lessons in Greed
• · ·, By Charles Babcock, Thomas Claburn, John Foley, W. David Gardner, Antone Gonsalves, Nicholas J. Hoover, K.C. Jones, Elena Malykhina, Richard Martin, Paul McDougall, Marianne McGee, Chris Murphy, Cora Nucci, Art Wittman, and Serdar Yegulalp, InformationWeek, January 26, 2008
"Our guide to great blogs and Web sites worth adding to your bookmarks. The selection ranges from obvious picks like Technabob and Search Engine Watch to more obscure destinations such as Location One, istartedsomething, and GottaBeMobile Top 60 Little-Known Technology Web Sites; Once upon a time, in the great city of Milwaukee, lived a brilliant legal professional named Bella. Bella was part of the litigation practice group at Big, Bold & Smith, s.c. Every Monday the group met to discuss current issues. One Monday, a colleague named Greg informed everyone of a recent decision that could affect the outcome of a large case the firm was handling. After the meeting, Bella asked, "How did you hear about that case?" Greg answered, - I saw it on a blog I monitor. Bella is Bewildered About Blogs
• · · · Scientific American: Wikis, blogs and other collaborative web technologies could usher in a new era of science. Or not. By M. Mitchell Waldrop: "The explosively growing World Wide Web has rapidly transformed retailing, publishing, personal communication and much more. Innovations such as e-commerce, blogging, downloading and open-source software have forced old-line institutions to adopt whole new ways of thinking, working and doing business. Science could be next. A small but growing number of researchers--and not just the younger ones--have begun to carry out their work via the wide-open blogs, wikis and social networks of Web 2.0. And although their efforts are still too scattered to be called a movement--yet--their experiences to date suggest that this kind of Web-based "Science 2.0" is not only more collegial than the traditional variety, but considerably more productive. It's a Darwinian process = About 99 percent of these ideas are going to die. But some will emerge and spread ; French women d’un certain âge tend not to get fat and to stay lucky. They don’t see sex as a privilege for the young and beautiful...Women of France; It’s not just fads and fashions in the likes of shoes or music that spread through social networks. There are also states of mind – happiness, loneliness, altriusm... ; Show me a woman with a good three inches of cleavage on display, and I’ll show you a woman with little faith in her powers of conversation... Truth
• · · · · “Where is home?” asks George Konrád in his memoir of life under totalitarianism. We know the answer: Memory is home... WHERE?; Melancholia is a miraculous invitation to rise above the contented status quo and imagine untapped possibilities. We need sorrow to make us human, alive... Ask any soul-baring 40-year-old exile what he most longs for, and he likely won’t tell you it’s a better career or a more money: he wants freedom to search for meaning of death ;-) Sadness ; Yet another faked memoir: this one from a “mixed-race former child drug-runner” from South-Central
Fake memoirs are once again hitting the headlines. Only last week, Margaret B Jones’ ‘autobiographical’ account of growing up as a mixed-race foster child on the wrong side of the tracks in Los Angeles, Love and Consequences, was celebrated as a work of inspiration. One of America’s leading literary critics, Michiko Kakutani, said it was a ‘humane and deeply affecting memoir’. Now, however, the author has been unveiled as a very white Margaret Seltzer, and her story has been exposed as pure fiction. Auto lies; Memoirs ; Crying Wolf
• · · · · · Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals, the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context... With Cold River, whatever the rest is, it isn’t silence. The Cold War streams still dominate Central European literature and heart ; Terrorists: often sour, lazy nobodies, ugly, of febrile imagination and small talent, who can only become somebody by murdering others... Terror

---

NO ONE has ever accused Media Dragon of being shy when it comes to making its pitch for Cold River :-) Radio dreams come alive in the blog PR whistles a different tune

I am an optimist. I believe in our ability to shape the future, right wrongs, make life better and create new opportunities. That's why I am a huge believer in little people who pay taxes and who do make a difference … Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk ;-)

Jogging through the websites Waning influence
Media Dragons came across a recent US survey which notes that 90% of American leaders say dysfunctional behaviours have become acceptable in the workplace. Shifting blame, gossiping and harbouring territorial attitudes are three of the most destructive behaviours. Equally discouraging is the finding that 64% of leaders do little or nothing to change the pattern.

And then there is this - Engage. If you’re going to get the benefits of the Edge you have to spend time there, not just pop in for a quick visit. Anything that starts with “E” is always good by me. Energy, Education, Emotion, Experience and, yes, Edge.

• My wise friend June overcomes all her difficulty in life by imagining that she is like a cork on a huge wave ... Living on the Edge; [In our and/and world, definitions of all sorts are becoming blurred and no more so than the roles of writer and artist, filmmaker and ideas person. To me many people in advertising are stuck in the past, worrying about their ideas being taken seriously as creative contributions. Write STUFF;
As with word-processed files, a lot of metadata may hide in a digital photo. A.J. Levy highlights this fact and provides information about some tools that can help you find it. Finding Data Hidden in Digital Photos ]
• · Blogging the brand | Australian IT ; Hiring blogger ...
• · Blogging can help you feel less isolated, more connected to a community and more satisfied with your friendships, both online and face-to-face, new Australian research has found. News Corp Has Big Plans for MySpace.com; Blogging boosts your social life: research
• · · Mark Bahnisch deploys years of experience to doubting research showing that blogging boosts your social life, while Peter Black looks at Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales’ apparent dumping of his girlfriend on Wikipedia itself, and also contemplates the death of email. Missing Link Daily; Via Club Troppo and courtesy of Blogpond comes word of a Nielsen survey claiming that 2.3 million Australians have Media Dragons Media Dragons: How many Australian bloggers are there, anyway?
• · · · HAVING an onlife life revolving around sites such as MySpace, Facebook or Youtube does not lead to less time in front of the telly, according to a study. But it does cut face-to-face communication. Diggers Everywhere; Australians DO Blog - number of Australian bloggers
• · · · · It’s not what other people think of you that matters. It’s what they can find out about you on the Web that will affect your ability to get a job or promotion, rent an apartment, buy a house, be accepted into the school of your choice or find the love of your life. How to defend your online reputation: five tips ; Ian McPhee PDF The ANAO’s contribution to improving public sector administration
• · · · · · Gregg Keizer: Corporate executives should think twice about the information they disclose on social networking sites such as Facebook, a Hong Kong-based security company warned today after duping gullible CEOs and finance directors into revealing personal details that could be used for so-called spear-phishing attacks. CEOs on Facebook easy to dupe says researcher, ; Stephanie Overby: There are things you can do in just one third of an hour that can have a meaningful and, yes, even a long-term, positive effect on your life, your job and your enterprise. 20 things you can do in 20 minutes to be more successful at work

---

I am reading The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power and my fingers wonder through the digital rivers ... the happiest and the saddest of sites linking below ;-)

The Down Side - Sadness may be good philosophy -- and better for you

Ach ... If only we'd listened to John Locke. In his Second Treatise of Government, he declared that human beings were entitled only to "life, liberty and" -- get ready -- "estate." As in property. Leave it to Mr. Jefferson of Virginia to change that last item in the trinity to "pursuit of happiness." What he neglected to tell us was that, 230 years later, we would still be pursuing it.

Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy

A split second, a life’s sentence - Babble with Beckett: How foreign languages can provide writers with a way out of the familiar Mallarmé once remarked that poetry should make air and silence hang around a word

In the universe in recent months, there has been an outbreak of agonising about the state of book reviewing of Cold River ... The powers of discrimination that have made writers both fearful and dismissive of critics have traditionally given them a wider authority too.

Blogging like Consciousness is nothing but a word authority of critics is being undermined by a raucous blogging culture and an increasingly commercial publishing industry

What happens deep beneath our feet of Google? - Google bohemian media dragon and you’ll get, did you mean: the future of literature as we know it? Why a sense of entitlement can wreak havoc in Cold Rivers?

New York has always been about jockeying for position, and being named to the board of the New York Public Library remains one of the jewels in an ever more exclusive crown; the current Board of Trustees counts among its members New Yorker editor David Remnick, Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., humorist Calvin Trillin and former Harvard president Neil Rudenstine, not to mention several captains of industry, chief among them Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman, as well as socialites such as Annette de la Renta. Bookish March

Things are becoming more instantaneous in an era when delays are rampant and increasing. There are faster flights and cars but more people in airplanes and on the roads. People who crossed Iron Curtain or grew up during the Depression were happy to have a job and stuck with one for a lifetime

International Tax Evasion Scandal Spreads - I seem to see first hand so many journeys from haven to hell Swiss and Luxembourg authorities defend their system by saying tax fraud is wilful, while tax evasion is only forgetful

John Christensen is a former economic adviser to the States of Jersey and the UK government and is director of the Tax Justice Network. John is the new Vaclav Havel, John Hatton, James Cumes on the global scale! The OECD’s approach to tax transparency requires information to be exchanged with other jurisdictions only on request. In other words, you must know what you are looking for before you request it. This is shockingly inadequate. We need the automatic exchange of tax information between jurisdictions and all developing countries must be included. Stop this timidity in ending tax haven abuse

---

In 1906, the first Public Service Commissioner, Mr D McLachlan, observed that:
The great incentive, which is ever present to the businessman, is, by the very nature of things, absent in public administration. The department of the Civil Service which he administers (or assists in administering) is not his own; he suffers no personal loss; he enjoys no personal gain; and why should he bother? Why should he incur the odium of his subordinates by enforcing strict discipline and insisting on continuous and undivided attention to duty? Why should he addle his brain and burn the midnight oil in studying the literature of other nations for improved methods when he gets no special thanks for it, but probably finds himself in the end for little better off financially than if he had allowed things to drift along in the old way? These are the questions commonly put to himself by the perfunctory official and they constitute one very potent reason why Civil Service administration has not attained the high state of efficiency that the public interest demands'

On 01 Mar 2008 Alex Mitchell, New Free Kid on the Blog, writes | The Australian Financial Review | Alex Mitchell is the former state political editor of The Sun-Herald and former president of the NSW parliamentary press gallery. The Labor Party in NSW has bred a particular type of political animal, and they're running the show, argues Alex Mitchell. A state of disgrace

Beyond the surrealistic headline: Is Old South Wales: Ripe for a revolution? The battle to break Britain's crime lords
Career criminals used to treat a spell in prison as an occupational hazard, confident that they would soon be revelling in their ill-gotten gains. Now the police are seizing millions in assets, from racehorses to holiday homes. But are they making a dent in crime’s £18 billion annual bill?

Experienced policemen are hard to shock. You name it, they’ve seen it, bagged it or banged it up. In April 2005, however, squads from four Midland forces, making a crack-of-dawn “swoop” near Market Harborough, were treated to a sight which, as one officer puts it 2½ years later, “still makes my jaw drop”.
On the dot of half past six, 350 officers from Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire raided a number of local addresses, including seven on the Justin Park travellers’ site, where they had “reason to believe” some shady deals were being made. “Operation Lucky” was what they called it, and they couldn’t have chosen better. It didn’t take them long. In a scene reminiscent of Treasure Island, they dug into a traveller family’s garden and levered out a weighty, lozenge-shaped parcel trussed with gaffer tape. Their own video shows an officer tearing at it like a child on Christmas morning.

• Experienced policemen are hard to shock. ; [Trust the Charitable cuases? £234bn of mortgages put in trusts supposedly for the benefit of good causes ; The spectacle of tax inspectors pursuing Germany's richest citizens may bolster faith in the rule of law Specter of haven not; Liechtenstein Germany paid for tax secrets Story of tax lives ]
• · Wollongong - Conman 'can't recall' impersonating ICAC officer Allegations of sex and corruption take centre stage ; It has bold proportions, amazing performance and the jaunty lines of broad-shouldered good looks. It is the power that won't corrupt. Grunt in the Gong: it's not all about sex
• · · The owner of the kebab shop where Wollongong power brokers met each morning at a so-called "Table of Knowledge" just wants the media to go away 'Table of Knowledge' kebab man stews ; Whatever happened to the real news? It now seems to come with helping or two of what can only be described as trivia or gossip. Selling out political celebrities
• · The US is notable among major nations in how little it has suffered in foreign wars. Shedding blood for liberty; 'The Australian' wears its heart on its sleeve and remains an ideologically-driven publication with a long history of campaigning behind it. Advocacy or analysis? A retrospective on 'The Australian'

---

If you don't build your brand online, through either a blog, participation in social networks, or your own Web site, not only can people not find you, but you will have no way to portray your value and creativity.At the same time, he says that any job recruiter is likely to search for your online presence, and that means you want to make sure that your brand stands up to such scrutiny. Blog and be real - On the Job: Personal brand a big bonus in tough job time

For those who wish to understand the struggle in the Government's breast, Who Runs Britain is essential reading
They hadn't heard of hedge funds, monoline insurers or subprime mortgages, but Marx and Engels would have been unsurprised by the effects of the credit crunch and the market turbulence of recent weeks. In The Communist Manifesto's paean to the achievements of capitalism, they observed that its salient feature was "everlasting uncertainty and agitation" where "all that is solid melts into air" Spectrum of Spectrum on global scale

Who runs Britain?
The Super-rich and How They’re Changing Our Lives by Robert Peston

Surprise, surprise. As the bastions of the world financial system come crashing to the ground, a small voice cries from the ruin. It is that of the goddess, greed, assuring us she is still good.
In 2005, the retailer Philip Green paid himself £1.2 billion from his stores empire. He conduited it through his “offshore” wife to avoid tax and received a knighthood from Tony Blair. Last year, the 54 billionaires said to work in Britain were estimated to have paid just £15m tax on earnings of some £126 billion. Four thousand City employees received bonuses of £1m or more, and if any of them paid the 40% tax the rest of us pay they were mugs. Most will still receive the same bonuses today.

• Who runs Britain?? The Super-rich and How They’re Changing Our Lives by Robert Peston Is greed good for us? ; [Search and be real January 2008: Search Engine Land's Most Popular Stories; Eastern europe booming economy ]
• · Parliamentary Library Briefing Book; Key Issues for the 42nd Parliament. 1.Content Regulation; 2. Broadband Policy; 3. Media Ownership; 4. Communications overview: Media Dragon
• · Blog to note - Misconduct by Science
• · · Tax evasion is a global scourge. The "black" economy has, by some estimates, reached 10 percent of GDP in advanced countries and can top 70 percent in developing countries. And it is getting worse. Evading tax evasion

---

To steal the name of a popular blog, Media Dragon will do. The spell of history resides fully and virtually inside Media Dragon, in the immediacy of posts and attitudes so strange so tragic so defiant so otherworldly that we have to know more ;-) How to Live the Good Life For a Few Minutes a Day, Say Hello to the story of Eat, Pray, Love ;-)

Former Telecom New Zealand chief executive Peter Troughton has been detained in Australia after losing a court bid to return overseas because most of a A$5.6 million (NZ$6.4 million) personal tax bill remains unpaid Tax case dogs ex-Telecom boss

Hungry Media Dragon Road to riches
Wolseley Road, Point Piper, is the most expensive street in the most expensive suburb in Australia. Dugald Jellie walked along it, and paddled around the peninsula, to discover its secrets.

David Williamson's play Emerald City opened on January 1, 1987, with a line of self-congratulatory bravado:
What other city in the world could offer a view like this?
The Drama Theatre at the Opera House was full, the audience dressed in diamonds and pearls to watch a satire starring John Bell, Robyn Nevin and Ruth Cracknell about a frivolous society preoccupied with material success, TV ratings and waterfront real estate.
Due east across the glittering harbour, another drama played out on the knuckle of a point that since the days of Captain John Piper - the colony's "great buck, prince of hosts, leader of the world of fashion" - has been able to boast that it is home to some of Sydney's best houses, best views, best parties and best gossip-page scandal.
This tale was about location, about unfettered wealth and all the jewels and marble it could buy. It was about how the other half lived. It was a story of privilege - part soap opera, cabaret and tragedy, and its name was Wolseley Road.

• This seems to be the beauty of Sydney. It is their water as much as anyone else's . The silver skin of the harbour divides the city but it also brings us together; [ Macquarie CEO Moss to Retire, Moore to Take Helm; Tax havens lure super-rich; When the powerful can live beyond the law, corruption is never far away]
• · Maxine McKew's win left Labor planning to run ABC presenters in every seat in 2010 ; As certain as death
• · Addicts of Scrabulous, an online word game played by millions of office workers on Facebook, may soon have to go cold turkey because of a looming copyright battle with the owners of Scrabble. Mattel in war of words over Scrabulous ; Video is finally catching on with employers in a fairly big way," says Joel Cheesman, author of Cheezhead.com, a blog on Web recruiting. ... Web Advances Change the Landscape
• · · Divorcee gets day in court to claim share of £45m fortune As certain as Susan Rossiter Sangster Peacock Renouf …; Gossip Girl' producer reveals blogger's identity
• · · · On Saturday, Tyler Cowen posted a 62-word blog entry, of which 29 words constituted a quote from Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational. It was a throwaway "fact of the day" post, comparing the cost of robberies in the United States ($525 million) to the cost of employees' theft and fraud ($600 billion) Blogonomics: Even Great Commenters Can't Generate Wall Street Salaries; The last I heard, the right was feeling quite pleased with itself because there was some evidence to suggest the traffic for the top liberal blogs was trending down, while the traffic for the top conservative blogs was trending up. How the right explains the left’s online dominance
• · · · · Norman Sims has spent three decades studying literary journalism, a genre that is generally viewed in contrast to traditional newspaper journalism. But in his new book, "True Stories: A Century of Literary Journalism," Sims argues that literary journalism could be the very thing to boost newspaper readership. He recently discussed how even the earliest examples of literary journalism share aspects of one of the newest narrative forms: the blog. The Future of News: A Case for Literary Journalism; I love Gawker. Jezebel and Wonkette, two of my favorite blogs on the web, find a home under the media conglomerate's umbrella. Another reason to love Gawker Media; The 17-gigabyte file containing half-of-million photos pillaged from MySpace accounts made the Pirate Bay's top-ten list of most popular downloads over the weekend, beating out pirated copies of No Country For Old Men, Sweeney Todd and the sci-fi flick I Am Legend. MySpace's Leaked Photos More Popular Than Sweeney Todd
• · · · · · A year ago, the top stupid internet trend was the LOLcat (take picture of cat, add amusing, badly spelt caption, repeat). In 2008, the world economy is faltering and the happy LOLcat has been replaced with one ubiquitous word: FAIL. The first fail blog was Shipment of Fail ; E e-discovery field guide

---

The Russian entrepreneur Alexander Mamut has bought the US blogging website LiveJournal. Its many Russian users are worried that the Kremlin loyalist will use his ownership to censor the blog. Helen Womack and Will Stewart report Russian oligarch invades the blogosphere

Can we change the heart of literature? It is the power that won't corrupt: Authors experiment with online
Musicians are experimenting with downloadable tracks and “pay what you want” business models, so why not authors? At least one popular writer, Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, says that pirated versions of his books have caused sales of physical copies to soar, and several authors are experimenting with offering chapters or even entire books online.

The latest is author Neil Gaiman, whose books include Coraline and Sandman. According to Boing Boing co-founder Cory Doctorow, Gaiman's publisher has given him the green light to offer a freely downloadable version of one of his books, and now he’s trying to decide which one to offer. He’s asked readers and fans to vote for the book they want released on his blog.

• Neil Gaiman ; [The old journalistic standards still apply," Miller says. "Don't make bad decisions and you won't end up on the cover of the New York Times. Today, if a manager is a jerk, somebody will write about it on a blog. In the end, it could breed better management." [ at Dooce.com ; ]
• · When you think of blogs, you might envision musings about sports, politics, and the evening news. Taxes, assessment meetings, or local development probably seem a lot less suited to the blogosphereCity manager gets his word out on a blog; An uninhabitable world for women: the new era of mass pornography consumption.The digital age becomes a dark age for women
• · Tax Lady Roni Deutch is hoping to help taxpayers reduce their tax liabilities by blogging on five tax-free Valentine Day gifts. Ms. Deutch is also helping taxpayers stay informed on the tax difference between being single and married as thousands across the country are likely get engaged in the next few days. Tax Lady Roni Deutch Blogs ; The battle of the books has been lost; the revolution has already happened. Now we must teach teachers how to deal with the consequences. Playing catch-up with digital realities
• · · Well, we may not have the runaway double-digit inflation of the 1970s BUT … Blog Roll — If It Isn’t Stagflation, What Is It? ; Why is culture important? Is it because the cement of social cohesion, like friendship, is the bond of common experiences? Australia: a nation at risk
• · · · · It is ironic that the growth of one of the most powerful means of publication of human thought had largely remained unhyped untill "Salam Pax" appeared on the scene during the build up to the Iraq war in 2004. Salam Pax was an anonymous person who provided rather descriptive though journalistically imperfect and unconventional narratives about life on the streets of Baghdad. He published these Web logs (blog) on a rather non-descript website. Soon enough, the site hosting these blogs crashed under the stress of tremendous traffic. Then again, when the tsunamis struck in South Asia last year, a handful of blogs became rallying points for information collection, distribution and interaction. Within hours, people from around the world converged on the few blogs that were highlighted by major new channels, looking for information and providing updates to the community at large. Robert Scoble points to Fortune's article on corporate blogging -- "Why There's No Escaping the Blog." It's a pretty long piece and pretty well done, too. Some nice info on how Scoble's honesty is helping to improve Microsoft's reputation: Fortune magazine ran an article three years ago when Robert and Israel gave Cold River lots of oxygen, "Why there's no Escaping the Blog," calling out how freewheeling bloggers can boost a company's product, or destroy it. The article cites the blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati as estimating 23,000 new blogs are created each day! The author has cited numerous cases where large corporations have been influenced or impacted by the sheer force of public opinion expressed through blogs on public domain.
Why there's no Escaping the Blog ; So, if blogs can garner attention in theaters of war, natural disasters and public opinion, they can be put to use in the world of parliament Why Congress doesn’t blog
• · · · · · Metcalf’s Law posits that value of a network grows exponentially with the addition of connections. Left unfettered, network nodes reproduce like rabbits on espresso. Think, for example, of the hyper growth of the internet, the web, MySpace, YouTube, and FaceBook. Once business networks take hold, expect them to grow like topsy, too. Moreover, the denser a network, the faster its cycle time. More connections make it quicker to get from one node to another. Blogging Teams Together: Creating Interaction Vortexes; The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Stephen Colbert, the Manchester Guardian, Learning Circuits, and other leading voices can’t stop talking about Web 2.0. You’ve read the stories; the web is now the read/write web. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia of 9.1 million articles in 253 languages, written entirely by volunteers. Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr are growing faster than the web in its meteoric growth phase. There are 70 million logs online, and 120,000 new logs are created every day (that’s about 1.4 new blogs per second). These phenomena are global; only 35 percent of all blogs are in English. Media Dragons on Google

---

No Art Gallery For Old Men ;-)

---

Sugar and Spice for Valentine's Day at the Two Good Eggs and the KIKA Everyday Etiquette: St. Valentine's love is rooted in Slavic tradition
As Media Dragon hits Google ranking of Four – the hunger for high ranking is demystified in this alert ;-) Apparently several hundred thousand readers of this website have gotten lost online in recent days on their way to this bohemian blog and accidentally clicked instead on a long story item headlined: Orgasms,media and politics, the real choice Google Alerts Can Help You Detect Misuse or Abuse of Your Work

Second Love Breeds Books: Won't you be my Valentine? Blogging Do's and Don'ts
As a media dragon and a writer, blogging can be one of the greatest ways to connect with readers of your work and other writers. But blogging can be a tricky task if you're interested in building a great readership that lasts. To make the most of your blogging, use the following tips:
Do: Narrow down your target goal and readers for your blog.

A blog without a purpose that people can recognize as soon as they enter is a blog that probably won't hold long-term interest for any one reader. Although you might think that writing on various topics and subjects will hold everyone's interest and make them wonder what's coming up next, that's not to be said for the majority of readers.

• It strikes me that is it is our first Happy St Valentine’s – no longer living in SIN – MALCHKIN ;-) XXX; Modern Love Breeds Books Over to virtual love - Cold River and Media Dragon blogging life away; [ One Step Closer to Adapting Entire Cold Rivers of Novels on YouTube; Talking with the writer behind the new Captain America.]
• · As America argues with China about the new Cold War spying James Cumes has a good timing with his play ; The data allegedly provided to China outlined every planned US sale of weapons or other military technology to Taiwan for the next five years Several arrested in Chinese spy sweep ; Reaching - Surpassing Cold War ERA
• · Sleepless in S Irreverent writer for the young wants boys to know the joys of books; For Dr Cope: Letter-writing makes a resurgence
• · ·, Jay Cross, Learning Circuits, January 2008, 4p.
To take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies, managers need to know the opportunities and the pitfalls. Implementation 2-0; People are always looking for the most effective way to deliver training. Quite often, the answer is simply a matter of creativity. The author offers comment on five of the latest training ideas: 'laughing and learning', 'hit me with knowledge' (learning risk management via poker), 'you first' (collaboration), 'point of need learning' and virtual environments. See how they learn
• · · · Brian Wolfson & Andrew St George, 360º - the Ashridge journal, Autumn 2007, 4p. What differentiates successful from unsuccessful business is execution. This article explores the concept that business schools should not only teach students how to manage, but how to execute as well, particularly bringing in the discipline of project management. PDF version - Can’t manage / won’t change ; Managing the blogging news How news and politics plays on a popular social networking service
• · · · · President Bush's proposed budget calling for the elimination of Reading Is Fundamental's (RIF) Inexpensive Book Distribution program Reading Is Less Fundamental in Bush Budget; By utilizing pre-existing networks such as Face Book, MySpace, LinkedIn, and business forums, and even creating your own business blog, you can forge the numbers Where Does Your Local Members Go Online? Psst,
• · · · · · Niche bloggers: 7 income streams for your blog ; Being whispered from ear to ear today (well, blog to blog) is the rumour that HotOrNot.com, the eight-year old site where you rate the looks of submitted faces ;-) HotOrNot website acquired for $20 million, featured girls' looks ...

---

In a morning keynote session at the Tools of Change conference, Tim O'Reilly set out to explain why "free is more complicated than you think" but, for a company like his, an excellent driver of multiple revenue streams.

First O'Reilly reprised and extended some online posts that crunched numbers to show the easy path to business from free--advertising--is illusory given standard online advertising models. A hypothetical $50 million specialty publishing company (like his) will never generate anywhere even close to that amount of revenue through advertising-supported free content.

O'Reilly told the crowd we're facing all the same challenges as the rest of you--but I still think free is a good idea. But the key is that O'Reilly is already in a lot of different businesses in addition to print book publishing that free help to drive--their online reference/library joint venture; conferences; online courses; a magazine; and even venture capital. Significantly, they can be in all of those businesses because they are all targeted at the same focused community O'Reilly serves in all of their products. That's the important and resonant example more than the fact that O'Reilly uses free online content sharing to drive a variety of revenue streams. (For further relevant reading on this point, look back at Mike Shatzkin's speech on the End of Trade Publishing:

Much of the proof, acknowledged by O'Reilly, was right in the room. "In our business, sponsoring is a big part of what we do." Attendees paid to come to this conference, while over two dozen companies paid for sponsorships and bought speaking slots to address that group. O'Reilly on Free

What Everyone Else Is Reading Public Service Website Ripers: Top 10 intranet sites
Local farmers at NSW Department of Primary Industries / ComputerWorld, January 2008, 2p. Press release from DPI and a news article featuring a list of 10 best designed intranet sites from a world wide competition. NSW DPI was the only Australian site; the New Zealand Ministry of Transport also gained a mention for the antipodes.

San Francisco-based Nielsen Norman Group, which has organised the event for the past eight years, says the priority in intranet development has flipped "from information to people".
"It’s now a given to have basic features such as an employee directory on a company’s intranet,” usability expert and principal of Nielsen Norman Group Jakob Nielsen said in a statement.
"What’s new is the polish and sophistication that companies are giving them so that they serve even more useful purposes, which in the case of the directory means providing more than an employee’s name, rank and serial number, but also his subject-matter expertise, for example.”

• An overview of the report is available at ; [HarperCollins Publishers Promotion to Make Select Books Available Online for Free Harper Tries Full Online Access; For those books not provided free by publishers, there's a new scanner from Atix (selling for about $1,600) that the company calls a book ripper. Newsweek judges it more a thud than a snap, the device—an ominous three-foot high construction draped with a thick black darkroom-style shade—looks like a Goth puppet theater and weighs 44 pounds E-Z Book Scanner Isn't, Yet--But It Will Be ]
• · This article explains how a good writing style can help lawyers persuade judges Persuading Judges in Writing: Tips for Lawyers; Terrific writers: As a senator she has learned compromise and negotiation. She has gotten to know red America as well as blue. If she could win over the rednecks in upstate New York, she can win over any American. She knows this country is full of "security" moms as well as soccer moms. From Erica Jong - a terrific writer ; and more Election pundit
• · Wealth Report finds that a typical Australian family spends $537,000 on raising two children from birth to 21 years. Ach Sasha and Gabbie … Honey, I calculated the kids... it's $537,000: Australian child costs in 2007; A bittersweet and wise month-by-month account of the year in her life during which, upon turning half a century and confronted with his own mortality, he chooses to wake himself up, embrace the passage of time, identify what matters (and what does not) -- and finally decide to live Im Alive ;-)
• · · Good Question for Media Dragons How important are author sites?; Imagine saying hello to Kate Jones who was one of the most brilliant literary agents of her generation, and leaves behind an extraordinary list of devoted authors Kate Jones: Literary agent with flawless taste One of the brightest and best in the British book world: a rare and gifted reader, a dedicated and inspiring editor, and an exceptional publisher; Deron Douglas of wider Double Dragon World
• · · · · There used to be a time when the Republicans were known for their fiscal conservatism. Commentary: The Tax Reduction and Reform Act of 2007; The purpose of this Blog is to collate information about psychological research on deception, and the applications of this research. Criminal Resources: False Confessions

---

Here's a story alert for former parliamentary officers, (degreed and self-styled), sociologists, fashion mavens, woman's issue supporters and anyone who enjoys snapshots of the lives of powerful people. You keep a diary and share it with friends like Jack ... Steve and Kevin ....

The Government Domain: Journalists and Government Information: SLA-DGI/GODORT Joint Meeting Scott told the crowd that librarians probably see many more documents than he does, so please feel free to send any "smoking memos" to mshane@nytimes.com. Smoking Memos

---

These are the kinds of people who make a difference in the world, not just the saints.
—Joseph L. Badaracco Jr

One benefit derives from the literature itself. Through the novels, plays, short stories, and historical accounts students are brought much closer to life as it is really lived, certainly closer than in lecture learning and even closer than in a case discussion. That's because the authors lay out for us the full context of a situation: the fast friendships, bitter enmities, strong ambitions, and confused goals that the characters must navigate
Leadership is, in part, a struggle of flawed human beings, said Badaracco. And a huge amount of the struggle that the books' characters experience is with themselves. This becomes clear when students read about Jerry, the despairing salesman in "Blessed Assurance," and Okonkwo, a village leader in Nigeria in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, struggling against the arrival of the colonialists. It's also true in another book the students read, Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons, about Sir Thomas More and his long battle with King Henry VIII. The lessons we take from the stories become part of us Teaching The Moral Leader ; Here lately, worry over this takes a percentage of my sleep right off the top. — So I'm telling you, okay? Machiavelli, Morals, and You
; Why Leaders Need Great Books like Cold River ;-) - Word Power Independent Publishers will have strong presence at the THE 12TH EDINBURGH INDEPENDENT RADICAL BOOK FAIR 2008 AD

Shedding blood for liberty The BULLY

ACP Magazines announces closure of The Bulletin magazine, ACP media release, 24 January 2008, 1p. ACP Magazines Chief Executive Officer, Scott Lorson, today announced that weekly news and current affairs title The Bulletin with Newsweek would cease publication from the current issue of the magazine which went on sale on 23 January 2008. The Bulletin is Australia’s longest running magazine and was launched in 1880

• ; The US is notable among major nations in how little it has suffered in foreign wars. A brawl has erupted over a statement in the stump speech of Republican candidate Fred Thompson
• · Future directions in technology-enabled crime: 2007-09 ; War criminal Suharto is dead. Look for the tears from his Western supporters. In their hypocrisy they may recognise he was a dictator, but, they will rationalise, he was "our" dictator. Suharto - war criminal
• · · It is a politicised Howard-Federal public service that has run, and continues to try to run, government. If the cap fits wear it ; Holding on to the ridiculous mythology of the Aussie larrikin as being the definition of Australian spirit IS cause for a cultural cringe. Australia Day cringe
• · · · Chris Hammer, The Bulletin, 27 November 2007, pp.70-73. Judged by Alan Fels, the article looks at the ten individuals in ‘government’ segment of the Power 100 of 2007 – Peter Shergold, Murray Gleeson, Angus Houston, Terry Moran, Mick Keelty, Heather Ridout, Sharon Burrow, Peter Cullen, Ian Watt and Robyn Kruk. Power 100: government; My workspace, Brad Howarth, AFRBoss, October 2007, pp.56-57. They’re the new places to see and be seen, and the hottest social networking sites are also places to forge business. Article looks briefly at: FaceBook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, loop mobile, YouTube, Orkut, LinkMe, LinkedIn, Windows Live Spaces and Yahoo! 360º. Ironically, not availbale online ;-) AFR - the dinasaur

---

Brilliant James Cumes Petrov affair dramatises injustices
AUSTRALIAN plays are rarely performed in Europe. But this week a new Australian play, The Lovers The Outcasts, has been advertised throughout the Viennese underground, on billboards and on the sides of buses and trams.
Beneath a picture of a handsome young man stroking the belly of an equally handsome young woman is the declaration that the play, written by James Cumes, a former Australian ambassador to Austria, is about to have its world premiere.
The Lovers The Outcasts is a historical echo: the story of the Petrov affair that transfixed Australia in the 1950s and, in an era of anti-communist hysteria, contributed to making Liberal Party hero Robert Menzies the longest serving prime minister in Australian history.

The affair had all the elements to fascinate what was then an isolated culture: Soviet spies, a beautiful woman in the shape of Evdokia (Eva) Petrov, and scandalous accusations aimed at the highest reaches of the Australian government.
It also led to one of the most famous photographs of the Cold War era: the sight of Eva Petrov being manhandled on to a plane by Soviet agents aroused sympathy and outrage around the world.
The Lovers The Outcasts begins a three-day run tonight at the elegant Schlosstheater in Schonbrunn Palace, one of Vienna's prime tourist attractions, and the curious nature of the play has already attracted attention from Vienna's main media outlets.
Key to the interest has been the remarkable 85-year-old Cumes, who is still regarded with affection and referred to as Botschafter, or ambassador, wherever he goes.
Everything about Cumes is extraordinary. His conversation is dotted with tales spanning the decades from his years as a soldier in New Guinea during World War II to his many years as a diplomat with postings in West Africa, Paris, London, Geneva, Brussels and his beloved Vienna. Since retiring he has maintained homes in Vienna, Monaco, Canberra and Brisbane.
He is hoping The Lovers The Outcasts will soon be performed at Monaco's Princess Grace Theatre. He also hopes the play will be performed in Australia.
Cumes has long been obsessed, he says, by writing: he has written 15 books in all, including four novels and a blog he maintains on his website. His latest work, written while in his 80s, is an economic polemic called America's Suicidal Statecraft: The Self-destruction of a Superpower.
Five years ago Cumes sat down and recounted the Petrov affair, keen to get out a story that had been lurking in the back of his mind since the 1950s.
"Like so many others, I have always thought the Petrov affair was a great story that deserved more dramatic treatment than it has so far received," he says.
The bare facts of his project are interesting enough; that he managed to attract investment from the cultural establishment of Vienna for a story a half century old and from half a world away is even more remarkable.
The Lovers The Outcasts is being performed in English by the well-established Vienna Theatre Company and has attracted several prominent local actors.
Andrea Kunesch, who plays Eva Petrov, is well known to Austrian television audiences. Balazs Schallenberg, who plays Vladimir Petrov, has worked in films and TV, while Australian Brian Hatfield, who plays an ASIO career officer, has worked for the Melbourne Theatre Company. Vienna-born director Roman Kollmer has worked in radio, TV and movies.

• John Stapleton | February 01, 2008 Everything about Cumes is extraordinary.; [ His conversation is dotted with tales spanning the decades from his years as a soldier in New Guinea during World War II to his many years as a diplomat with postings in West Africa, Paris, London, Geneva, Brussels and his beloved Vienna. Since retiring he has maintained homes in Vienna, Monaco, Canberra and Brisbane. James withsHeidi in Vienna ; As James notes We should all be pursuing a lasting victory over world want]