Saturday, April 02, 2016

Rooster One Day Feather Duster the Next

Fouan stepped back, afraid that they might catch sight of him at the door, like a beaten dog crawling back to its food-bowl.  He was so overcome by shame that he was filled with a fierce resolve to creep into a corner and die.  They’d see if all he thought about was his food!  He went down the slope once more and collapsed on the end of a beam outside Clou’s smithy.  His legs were giving way under him and he lost heart completely as he sat in the dark beside the deserted road.  There was not a soul to be seen, for the evening gatherings had already begun and bad weather was keeping everyone indoors.  The rain had made the wind drop and was now teeming down. He did not feel strong enough to stand up and look for shelter.  With his stick between his knees, and his bare skull streaming with.  After, he sat motionless, stupefied by his wretched plight.
~Bathroom Quote (Unfinished paintings)

“As happier men watch birds, I watch men. They are less attractive but more various.”
~ Evelyn Waugh, A Tourist in Africa (courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

@Happy Birthday Rachel as you sail to the new 40th (Memories of Dale et al)

From daredevil to chicken: Scientists find off-switch for risky behavior ars technica.  “There could be a big payoff from this research if it’s applied to Wall Street traders and keeps them from blowing up the economy.”

Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Hunter S. Thompson, and Mario Vargas Llosa ran for office. They all failed. Politics is unkind to writers... Writer one day feather duster ... 


MEdia Dragon Used to be a Rooster and Now ...
9 News reporter attacked by bird feather

Yellow Lines ... Mrs Ryan spoke to Triple M Brisbane’s Marto and Ed Kavalee for Breakfast and said if the council did try to move her car, she would be in it. "It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog,” she said. “I’m well into my 60s and haven’t protested in my life but I’m doing it for everybody.”

France: Exodus of 10,000 millionaires amid rising Muslim tensions International Business Times

Revealed: how Associated Press cooperated with the Nazis  Guardian

Historian and economic  historian William L. O’Neill has passed away

Employees who may seem emotionally intelligent and an asset to the workplace may also be emotionally manipulative and this may be detrimental to workplaces in the long run, preliminary findings of a survey show. The study has surveyed 351 people so far from different organisations, 81 who were managers. Employees in the survey admitted to using either malicious techniques such as making a colleague feel guilty or anxious or they turned on fake charm, for example giving compliments, to get what they want. Mandarin ...

Lonely Houses ...

Humor impairment is a lifestyle, not a crime! White-Collar Crime Watch: Polygamists, Fixed Tennis Matches, An Unfunny Accountant (Leona May, Going Concern)

The startling new banking records have been obtained as part of a Four Corners program that aired last night, and which resulted in the arrest of two members of its team, Linton Besser and cameraman Louie Eroglu












Michael Davey, a Rebels bikie member who was shot dead in the driveway of a Western Sydney home overnight, had spent time in jail over the killing of a 19-year-old in 2002 Bikie

Corruption Corrupts
A psychological study spanning 23 countries links tax evasion and political fraud to individual truth-stretching

Listen to the Victims of the Free Market Bloomberg  McArdle largely makes sense.

The story of Karadžić's manhunt is found in Julian Borger's new book, The Butcher's Trail: The Secret History of the Balkan Manhunt for Europe's Most-Wanted War Criminals.  Borger works for the Guardian as well, and lends his gravitas to the novel-like story of the investigation of three of the worst war criminals in our time. 
A startling fact was relayed in the foreword: "Two civilians were killed for every three soldiers who died in battle. The whole conflict was characterized by random brutality.  Psychopaths were made masters of the life and death or their former neighbors" (Borger xxv).
After five years of legal fighting, theInternational Criminal Tribunal in The Hague has convicted Radovan Karadžić of 10 of the 11 war crimes he was charged with.  He got a 40 year sentence.
Wait. What?  Forty years? For the massacre of somewhere between 6,000 to 8,000 men and boys in his efforts to ethnically cleanse the Balkans?  Sure, he'll die in prison. But even a token sentencing of 6,000 years of prison would feel more appropriate.
You won't find this on CNN today, or much of anywhere. The Guardian carried the article below, but it was one of the few outlets that did. The media has a short-term memory problem.
The Guardian's article on Radovan Karadzic 




The enormous power of the unconscious brain  A lot of the things we do in everyday life don’t need to involve our conscious mind. In many cases, the more we use it, the less effective we become.
 
“It’s Not the Zika Virus” — Doctors Expose Monsanto Linked Pesticide as Cause of Birth Defects Tree Thought Project

Water, water everywhere, And all the boards did shrink: Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.Coleridge
POTD-elephant_3601496k
Scope maker Olympus sought price hike amid superbug outbreak Los Angeles Times

Controlled chaos: How the U.S. empire infects other nations in its pursuit for total control South Front

In 1970, Kate Millett filed the dissertation that would become Sexual Politics. Reading it, an adviser complained, was like “sitting with your testicles in a nutcracker"

“A large majority of Americans seek extra knowledge for personal and work-related reasons. Digital technology plays a notable role in these knowledge pursuits, but place-based learning remains vital to many and differences in education and income are a hallmark of people’s learning activities. 

“One of our most difficult tasks was to find a good substitute for coffee. This palatable drink, if not a real necessary of life, is almost indispensable to the enjoyment of a good meal, and some Southerners took it three times a day. Coffee soon rose to thirty dollars per pound; from that it went to sixty and seventy dollars per pound. Good workmen received thirty dollars per day; so it took two days hard labor to buy one pound of coffee, and scarcely any could be had even at that fabulous price.”The alien becomes familiar with an understanding of the details. Coffee is a medicinal necessity. Life without its curative powers is unimaginable.
`Now Our Cause Was Lost'
chipmunk links
In an earlier post, Professor Bain argued that you can explain much of the Donald Trump phenomenon as a counter-revolution by what Peggy Noonan aptly called the "unprotected class" against what Christopher Lasch called the "new elite" (a.k.a., the "protected class," to use Noonan's terminology).
Few folks exemplify the new elite better than the tech folks of Silicon Valley:
In The New Class Conflict, Joel Kotkin argues that the socially and politically ascendant groups in contemporary America are the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and a complex of elite journalists, think-tank pundits, and academics that he dubs the clerisy. The nouveaux riches of the tech world are increasingly intent on remaking society in accordance with their own passions .... The clerisy, meanwhile, promotes and provides ideological legitimation for elite goals. The effect of the two groups' efforts, he concludes, is to concentrate wealth and power in a shrinking number of hands, leaving the middle class stranded and subject to ever more evident economic decline. Our tech overlords are unhappy that the proles are revolting against the new elite

Terry Teachout: “When you consider how completely the pundit class failed to get the primaries right, I’d be more inclined to seek political wisdom in the pages of a novel written by a poet-professor who looked 70 years into the future and foretold the coming of a populist demagogue who spoke the language of the plain people.” Wall Street Journal

“There are listicles of books or about books: there was even one recently about ‘The Top Ten Squirrels in Literature.’ There are interviews and aspirational how-tos. There are publicity statements, which are circulated and regurgitated into light critical opinion – as much as any book review. There is the relatively new phenomenon of the author self-testimonial: upon publication of his novel, the author will write a piece about writing the novel.”  Flavorwire



Nadja Dwenger, Tim Lohse, CESifo Working Paper No. 5805, March 2016. We study whether individuals in a face-to-face situation can successfully exert some lying effort to delude others. We exploit data from a laboratory experiment in which participants were asked to assess videotaped statements as being rather truthful or untruthful. The statements are face-to-face tax declarations.

Thomas Deckers, Armin Falk, Fabian Kosse, Nora Szech, CESifo Working Paper No. 5800, March 2016. This paper studies how individual characteristics, institutions, and their interaction influence moral decisions. We validate a moral paradigm focusing on the willingness to accept harming third parties.

“Each one of us has a secret, and the man with one he can admit to is fortunate.”

Hitler’s commando Lt-Col Otto Skorzeny ‘worked as an assassin for Israeli intelligence’ Telegraph

A $15 Minimum Wage Would Give Almost Half of American Workers a Raise. Is That Crazy? Slate. Ignore the scaremongering. In most parts of the US, that means people are being paid less than a living wage. And the author manages to overlook the fact that corporate profits are at a record share of GDP, nearly double the level Warren Buffet deemed the highest sustainable level in the early 2002, and that shift is due to both of the post 2000 expansions featuring the lowest share of labor income increases (hiring + wage gains) relative to all past post-WWII expansions. In other words, redistribution is overdue and would almost certainly be a plus for growth.

"We have 50 blissful days. 300 pretty good days. And 15 shockers," FitzSimons said of his 25-year partnership with Wilkinson.  Not so hallmark card relationship Andrew Tink's cousin Peter on his wife Lisa 

Campus Reform, American Univ. Profs: Saying ‘All Lives Matter’ Is ‘White Supremacy’:
Dozens of professors from American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) openly condemned an unknown student as a white supremacist for posting a sign with the catchphrase “All Lives Matter” on a faculty member’s door.

Friday, April 01, 2016

Unaoil raids Day Three (3)

Police raids and more revelations: the fallout of the Unaoil scandal Sydney Morning Herald (Richard Smith). Note:
Fairfax Media revealed on Thursday that the British police had teamed up with the Australian Federal Police, the US Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the vast cache of leaked Unaoil emails on which our stories have been based.
_______________________ Financial Times
_______________________ Washington Post
_______________________ Bloomberg
_______________________ Agence France-Press
Federal police investigate Australian companies over foreign bribery allegations Guardian. So the Guardian has deigned to take notice, but is treating this strictly as an Australian story.
As of this hour (6:10 AM), this is the sum total of non-Fairfax/HuffPo articles per Google News. Richard Smith found a minor Associated Press story that curiously fails to mention Halliburton that ran in the New York Times. There is also tiny Reuters story, but none of them by Google News. Bad algos or design
Unaoil Bribery Day NZ connection 
#The Bribe Factory Day Two ( 2 ) 
##[See also Unaoil The Bribe Factory Day One (1)]

*NZG may well be wishing they’d not just ignored early warnings of the scandal to come, back in 2012. The chickens, in the form of 11,000 NZ foreign trusts, are simply going to keep coming home to roost now.  There is going to be a large and noisy mess.
Naked Capitalism, March 18, 2016

 Millionaires’ 8 favourite places: Australia is top destination for the super-wealthy International Business Times (Dr. Kevin). Yours truly was ahead of the curve in wanting to move there in the early 2000s, but the flip side is this influx of the rich will accelerate the demise of its best features: the Aussies are (or at least were) insistently egalitarian and very community-minded

Big Banks Aided Firm At Center Of International Bribery Scandal HuffPo. Richard Smith: “Watch out for more big Mossack Fonseca stories next week – not from ME from the ICIJ.”



CODA:

Stop Crying About the Size of Government. Start Caring About Who Controls It. 

Rome gave the world the prototype of private law based on the most absolute conception of several property. The decline and final collapse of this first extended order came only after central administration in Rome increasingly displaced free endeavor. This sequence has been repeated again and again: civilization might spread, but it is not likely to advance much further, under a government that takes over the direction of daily affairs from its citizens. It would seem that no advanced civilization has yet developed without a government which saw its chief aim in the protection of private property, but that again and again the further evolution and growth to which this gave rise was halted by a ‘strong’ government. Governments strong enough to protect individuals against the violence of their fellows make possible the evolution of an increasingly complex order of spontaneous and voluntary cooperation. Sooner or later, however, they tend to abuse that power and to suppress the freedom they had earlier secured in order to enforce their own presumably greater wisdom and not to allow ‘social institutions to develop in a haphazard manner’ (to take a characteristic expression that is found under the heading ‘social engineering’ in the Fontana/Harper Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977) [Routledge edition p 32].

 Wikileaks on the IMF and Greece.  No huge revelations, but lots of egg on face, and a caution looking forward around the time of the Brexit vote


Fool's Day

“The more one suffers, the more, I believe, has one a sense for the comic. It is only by the deepest suffering that one acquires true authority in the use of the comic, an authority which by one word transforms as by magic the reasonable creature one calls man into a caricature.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard, Stages on Life’s Way At Three Williams
 
It's April Fool's Day this week, but some tricks are nastier than others. Money shows you how to protect yourself from financial fraud. Fools and His Money Do Part

Economics Professor Stephen Barrows (Aquinas College) has a strict cell phone policy:  if a student's phone rings in class, the student must answer on the speaker. 

Man loses leg shooting rifle at lawn mower packed with explosives Washington Post. Dr. Kevin: “Most recent candidate for the Darwin Awards.” 


“Rationally, said Mr. Irwin, “It’s too late to get upset about China.”” (NYT link here).

Watch a Local News Reporter Get Arrested While Requesting Public Records Gawker
Vansteenkiste says: “In former days, we had fake champagne, vodka, Johnnie Walker whisky. What we see now is day-to-day consumer goods, [things like] tomato juice and orange juice. You wouldn’t expect it for a low-priced item like tomato juice — for God’s sake, why would they fake it? The answer is people don’t expect it to be cheated, and the profit is very low, but people drink more tomato juice than champagne.”
Tomato juice is usually adulterated by diluting a famous brand name with a cheaper product. Chocolate, coffee and cookies are also targets, says Vansteenkiste.

One reddit user has sparked a chorus of criticism online after posting a ticket purchased via Ticketek for an event in Melbourne last night.
Despite the ticket costing just $25, Ticketek collected a “handling fee” of more than 30 per cent by charging an extra $8.75, even though the ticket was nothing more than an e-mail. The customer posted an image of the receipt to Imgur with some disparaging words for Ticketek. “$9.15 fees on a $25 ticket,” they lamented.
The post prompted a large debate, attracting over 240 comments on reddit

A private college that allegedly recruited illiterate, disabled students into thousands of dollars worth of debt is being pursued in the Federal Court for $210 million in taxpayer funding by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission AIPE: Sydney private college to be pursued for $210 million in federal court  
T.S. Eliot believed that to understand a writer requires reading her complete works. He overlooked the advantages of ignorance... more on the bliss  

That is from an excellent Natalie Whittle feature article at the FT

Via Bank for International Settlements – Updated 18 March 2016 – “The detailed data set of nominal residential property prices consists of around 300 series from 58 countries, collected from national central banks. The data set is updated monthly. Our data
Audit of fastfood outlets finds half exploit their ethnic workers

Sydneyasia story. Most migrants are from Asia and Middle East. Few French Frogs Few Bazilian Dancers ans some fro Zimbabwe. Nepalese-born Australians were the fastest-growing overseas-born community. Their numbers have swelled more than 11-fold over the past 10 years, from just over 3800 people in 2005 to more than 43,500 in 2015.
Overseas born Australians reach highest level since 1895

“There’s a lot of things that’s wrong with the whole thing,” says Dick, from Watford, in explicit and shocking British documentary Chemsex, screening around Australia next month.

“The World Happiness Report is a landmark survey of the state of global happiness. The first report was published in 2012, the second in 2013, and the third in 2015. TheWorld Happiness Report 2016 Update, which ranks 156 countries by their happiness levels, was released today in Rome in advance of UN World Happiness Day, March 20th. Leading experts across fields – economics, psychology, survey analysis, national statistics, health, public policy and more – describe how measurements of well-being can be used effectively to assess the progress of nations. The reports review the state of happiness in the world today and show how the new science of happiness explains personal and national variations in happiness. They reflect a new worldwide demand for more attention to happiness as a criteria for government policy.”

Mocked and forgotten: who will speak for the American white working class? Guardian. Lambert featured this in Water Cooler yesterday but consider DO’s observation: “Private equity is responsible for this too.”

Border Force deports co-founder of $1m start-up Disrupt


America to Establishment: Who the hell are you people ? McClatchy

Clinton Asks For $353K To Sit With The Clooneys Politico 


To be Shaw to be Shaw: Peta Credlin has joined sky news here is the email she sent to all staff this morning

Triple M’s Grill Team terrified by April Fool’s prank The hosts of Triple M’s Grill Team were on the receiving end of a great April Fool’s Day prank this morning. Gus Worland, Matty Johns and Mark Geyer were caught off guard before 6am as they were preparing for their Sydney breakfast radio show. For four years there’s been a bronze statue of Mark Geyer sitting just outside the Grill Team’s studio, but this morning the statue was replaced by a man covered head to toe in bronze body paint. One by one the hosts walked past the statue and got the fright of their lives when it came to life. It was not MEdia Dragon We sleep all night every night!
turtle-24mar16 links
Robert H. Frank and his forthcoming book title  Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.  The main point of this book is to illuminate the major role which luck plays in our lives and then to flesh out the social and policy implications of that fact. Is Bob Frank just rehashing the “lucky fool syndrome”

They gather each morning at 8:30 in a converted warehouse in Long Island City. What brings them together is a shared belief that the 20th century ruined art  

Neil Gaiman has unveiled two covers for his forthcoming nonfiction collection,The View from the Cheap Seats: A Collection of Introductions, Essays, and Assorted Writings. The famed author posted the covers on his Twitter page
Here’s more from Gaiman’s blog post: “It’s not every speech, introduction or article I’ve written, but it’s all the speeches that seemed important, all the articles I was still proud of, all the introductions that seemed to be about something bigger than just telling people about the book or author they were going to read. (Kat Howard helped such a lot: she went through the archives, read everything, and made an initial call about what should go in or go out. Then she sighed whenever I changed my mind or remembered a forgotten piece I’d written about something).”


Guante has crafted a moving poem called “Small Talk.” The video embedded above features his performance at Sierra DeMulder’s book release show. Click here to read the text of the poem. Follow these links to listen to three more of Guante’s poems: “REACH,” “Consent at 10,000 Feet,” and “Ten Responses to the Phrase ‘Man Up’.”


It is all about Love: "She pulled his trousers off, ripped the underpants off excitedly ..."
New photo leak of Perth women, girls online

Now There’s Proof: Doctors Who Get Company Cash Tend to Prescribe More Brand-Name Medications Pacific Standard  

Is someone impersonating you on Facebook? 

Terrorism by association: FBI files on Food Not Bombs MuckRock

Web of agencies at U.S. airports could hinder security overhauls Reuters