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Dragon years in the 12-year Chinese zodiac are typically popular for births because the icon of China's emperors symbolizes power and wealth …

This is my personal blog. It does not reflect the views of any organisation I work for, have previously worked for, or may work for in the future. In my day job I put crumbs of bread on the table. Here I comment on the bread and the table. Most people understand that difference… This year is the year of the Media Dragon and it is not difficult to argue that blogging has done more to spread scary knowledge and even scarier ideas than any other publishing innovation since the printing press. Printer and photocopier salesmen of the late 20th century frequently peddled their wares with the pitch that a personal printing device could turn anyone—schools, neighborhood associations, churches, individuals with a message to get out—into small time publishers. Yet the revolution they hinted at didn't come about on their watch

A brilliant article in Quarterly Conversation offers a fresh take on Lev Loseff‘s much-discussed Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life. Marbled with impressive insights, it represents the finest standards of literary journalism, and should establish a new highpoint for the rapidly disappearing genre … let me dissemble no further, dear reader, I myself wrote the review ; Joseph Brodsky

Watch Out: Year after year, these literary gems and websites deliver the goods Feeling rejected? Read these
Take heart, rejected writers everywhere!
This is too delicious to pass up: Flavorwire has 10 nasty rejection letters to eminent writers. (We wrote about famous rejection letters some time ago here.)
Here’s a 1912 rejection for Gertrude Stein by publisher A.C. Fifield:
Dear Madam,
I am only one, only one, only one. Only one being, one at the same time. Not two, not three, only one. Only one life to live, only sixty minutes in one hour. Only one pair of eyes. Only one brain. Only one being. Being only one, having only one pair of eyes, having only one time, having only one life, I cannot read your M.S. three or four times. Not even one time. Only one look, only one look is enough. Hardly one copy would sell here. Hardly one. Hardly one.”
Sincerely Yours,
A.C. Fifield
Here’s another for the manuscript that eventually became Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s The Estate and The Manor, rejected by Knopf editor Herb Weinstock in 1959:
It’s Poland and the rich Jews again.
With endless editorial work and endless serpentine dealings with Moshe Spiegel, the willing translator-adapter, this might be turned into an English novel nearly as good and nearly as salable as The Family Moskat. I honestly do not think it worth Knopf’s time and effort … Personally, I’d reject.
"You are scum."
Have to agree with the Guardian Books Blog on this one, which isn’t technically a rejection letter. It’s Hunter S. Thompson‘s letter to his biographer, William McKeen, following the biography’s publication in 1991. It opens: “McKeen, you shit-eating freak.”

• The Guardian blog noted that McKeen now has the letter, framed, on his wall: That’s one way to deal with rejection [It’s January 6th – the epiphany. According to folklore, La Befana visited all the little children in Italy last night, bringing toys and candy to the good ones, and lumps of coal to the bad ones. (Yeah, I know. We get a kindly fat man dressed in red, and Italian kids literally get an old hag. On the plus side, they get to live in Italy, so don’t feel too sorry for them). While I search my home for some lumps of black carbon (surely she wouldn’t forget Italian Americans, right?), you enjoy these links. According to Italian folklore, ; Good King Wenceslas In Prague, Father Christmas is known as Mikulas and he’s usually flanked by the devilish Cert and an angel. According to Czech folklore]
• · One of the best blogs out there on white-collar crime is the White Collar Crime Prof Blog ; Annual blog extravaganza features 25 fresh picks, from politics and pop culture to travel, tech and beyond The Time ; Some tech blogs are fueled mostly by snark and rumor. AllThingsD, by contrast, is powered by old-fashioned hard work. A Web-based spin-off of the Wall Street Journal's swanky annual conference, it features Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg, ace investigative reporter Kara Swisher and a growing lineup of writers who specialize in meaty, dependable coverage of consumer gear, Web trends, mobile communications, business computing and more The Best Blogs of 2011
• · · This is not good enough Media Dragon Seen As too Bohemian rather than Antipoedian ; Kim's writing is insightful, informed and topical. She also has an acerbic wit and is not afraid to criticise the media in Australia The news with nipples
• · · · The mainstream media isn’t giving us the information we need. It is giving us what they think is good enough for people like us, gathered by people that mainstream media organisations regard as competent; but this is not the same thing at all. George Megalogenis; Kevin Donnelly has written for ABC’s The Drum for the last two years, regularly warning us of the dangers posed by: the Gillard government, poor people, Islam and textspeak. He’s a former teacher as well as serving as senior Liberal Kevin Andrew’s chief of staff. Most of the time he’s inspired derisive snerking from me. Occasionally he’ll draw a ‘yoooou idiot’ (articulate, I know) from a piece. Usually, however, I’m content to leave him alone. That is until today’s piece, in which he advocates that the Bible be included in the National Curriculum. It is so bone-headed, wilfully ignorant and petulant that I just had to say something.; THE competition watchdog has banned imported biscuits which use logos featuring a koala, gum leaves and an Australian flag to disguise their Indian origin Ozdownunder Super Sandwich Cream Cookies ; The land of surfing, barbies... and dope ;
• · · · · Alexa Global Traffic Rank, and U.S. Traffic Rank from both Compete and Quantcast."*#*" ; E leventh Annual Weblog Awards
• · · · · · thebattleoftheblogs ; Sara Shaw and Sam Jewler met while living at Occupy D.C. in McPherson Square. They have been dating for six weeks and even moved in together, sharing a tent on the north side of the park 99% of Love; Collection

"The doers cut a path through the jungle, the managers are behind them sharpening the machetes. The leaders find time to think, climb the nearest tree, and shout 'Wrong jungle!' Find time to climb the trees."
-Peter Maxwell, director of the Leadership Trust, writing in the "Guardian", 6 October 1999

Now it's time for real cultural, ethical, governance and management reform at HMRC
Dec 162011
A little over a year ago UK Uncut began its protests, and the world looked on, bemused. Unsurprisingly, I wasn’t: I knew they’d hit the zeitgeist, although they and Occupy have done so in ways I could never have imagined. It’s been my pleasure to support both movements in the last year.

Tomorrow is a mass day of action by UK Uncut. Vodafone remains a rightful target. And the pressure is working. As the Mail reports:

Deals struck with the tax authorities to wipe billions of pounds off company bills are to be investigated by a former high court judge.

Sir Andrew Park will scrutinise the tax settlements of ten companies – including Vodafone and Goldman Sachs – following allegations that agreements were made between the firms and Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to write off unpaid tax bills.

That’s the good news.
And it’s the right news we need to hear.
But we need do more than that. I’ve been interviewed a number of times this week on this them and my message is always the same. HMRC has been corrupted from the top down.

It’s been corrupted by neoliberal corporate thinking. It’s been corrupted into thinking taxpayers are customers. They’re not.

It’s been corrupted as a result into thinking that tax law is just a contract for services. It’s not.
It’s been corrupted into thinking that a contract can be varied by consent of the parties, so the operation of tax law is optional at its whim. It’s not.

It’s been corrupted by people who do not know about tax but do come, especially in the case of some non-execs, from environments where tax abuse is normal, and even rewarded.

It’s been corrupted by a cult of personality around Hartnett, that he came to believe.
It’s been corrupted by cowardly politicians who do not believe in the state and its right to tax.
And it has to be reclaimed, from the top down for the people of this country so it does its job properly.
So that it collects as much as possible of the missing £95 billions that could pay for the services we need.
So that it creates a level playing field so that all businesses can compete in this country knowing their competition can be expected to pay tax and not undercut them by tax abusing, unlike now where a deliberate competitive advantage is given to the tax cheats.

So that it is seen to offer fair play, and have enough staff to ensure that this is seen to be done in the communities it serves and supports.

So that never again is it captured by big business in its interests.
So that never again does it try to avoid its duty to parliament.
So that never again does it serve the interests of its board.
This can be done.
The question is – will it be done?
The answer is key to our economic, social and cultural future in this country.
It’s a choice between prosperity, ethics and fairness and living in a criminogenic state

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They both seemed to have arrived there with an extraordinary innocence as though a series of pure accidents had driven them together, so many accidents that at last they were forced to conclude that they were for each other. They had arrived with clean hands, or so it seemed, after no traffic with the merely curious and clandestine.
-Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald (Book Cover Love)



Does Facebook spell the end of human interaction as we know it? Or is it just bad news for psychics, dating services, and women’s magazines? Henry Alford hopes some of Mark Zuckerberg’s romance-spotting superpower will rub off on the rest of us.

Get Outta River 'Where the River and Dogs Runs
It is no exaggeration to say that Trixie was the hand of God for Koontz. He recounts his difficult childhood, his dysfunctional father, and the many challenges that he had to overcome on the road to becoming a world-famous novelist. But with that fame came commercial caution: telling stories in the same old familiar way and a consequent dulling of his creativity.

Like all great writers, Koontz has the ability to transform the ordinary--his daily life with Trixie--into the funny, the moving, and the sublime. Trixie’s accidentally gashing him while they play fetch turns into one of the great set pieces of medical comedy as Koontz ends up in the emergency room with a lacerated hand. On another occasion Trixie’s saying “baw” for “ball”--straining to say it, but saying it nonetheless--becomes a memorable recounting of all of our attempts to communicate with beings from another species. And Koontz’s simply watching Trixie move, her lithe golden body shimmering and flashing in the sun, takes on the quality of the divine as he expresses what so many of us have subconsciously thought about our own dogs: “The more I watched her, the more she seemed to be an embodiment of that greatest of all graces we now and then glimpse, from which we intuitively infer the hand of God.”
Then came Trixie. With “baws” and balls, with warning him of fires and intruders in the house, with humor, with stoicism, and with unflinching love, she restored his diminished sense of wonder and impelled him toward taking new risks with narratives, themes, and characters, the very ones millions of us now enjoy.“Some dog, huh?” he says. “Some dog, yes,” we must agree, also concurring when he adds, “The only significant measure of your life is the positive effect you have on others.” For all of us who have had our lives made better by our dogs, or for that matter by any loving being, A Big Little Life is a welcome reminder of the power of love to turn our hearts into mirrors, reflecting compassion back into the universe--as Trixie most surely did for Koontz and Koontz now does for us.

• Trixie ; [Like Bessie of Cold River fame, Trixie is unique. She is a literary dog Two Girls ; Cold River tells the oldest story in the world, a story familiar to anyone who has read the Old Testament, Greek myths, or Shakespeare's tragedies. It's the story of full-force collision between an older generation's best intentions and a younger generation's intractable resistance ]
• · Faye Dunaway had a great line in the movie Chinatown. She said:
I don’t get tough. My lawyers do ; The economic blog Naked Capitalism has a fascinating post looking at some breathtakingly murky company business, in an investigation, via Panama, of New Zealand. We have known about New Zealand's role as a secrecy jurisdiction for some time, but have not yet researched it in any detail. That time will be coming soon enough. Before reading that post, take a look at this company registered at 9/22 Curran Street (pictured): Trillion Private Wealth Management Ltd. What does it offer? Well, for one thing, "protecting" your assets
• · · 10 Worst Horrible Movie bosses!; The death of News of the World is Rupert Murdoch’s current big trouble — but just the latest in decades of big trouble that haven’t noticeably harmed him. While his current scrape may look bad at first glance, chances are good he’ll escape unscathed yet again It's like Al Capone getting caught for extortion instead of tax fraud Welcome to the world of Nineteen Eighty Four: The U.K. scandal and Australia Is an independent inquiry and an independent regulator needed in Australia? In his brilliant novel Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell depicts a nightmare world of the future. The State is all-powerful
• · · · Simon Johnson, a leading U.S.-based intellectual, has written an excellent piece in the New York Times with the above headline. It concerns an issue we've written about several times in the past: that the tax system in many countries has encouraged a bias towards debt, rather than equity financing. The resulting indebtedness made the financial system more dangerous, and we are now finding out the consequences of this. The simple reason is that borrowing is, in many cases, tax-deductible, whereas equity financing is not. So instead of raising money through the stock market, say, they borrow it. And banks, of course, are among those over-borrowers. And this creates risks to society - a form of economic pollution. Johnson notes:
It is also ironic — perhaps even bizarre — that while we try to constrain how much banks borrow through regulation, we give them strong incentives to borrow more through the tax code ; What is your local or regional council doing?
• · · · · Inspiration ; Gooogle Loove ; Ah
• · · · · · I don’t know of any history of pulp fiction publishing in Australia in the sixties and early seventies 80s yes; The planet's booming population is a mega trend reshaping everything. Over coming decades our growing presence and rampant appetite for resources will shake up every form of life on earth. Writing for The Guardian, Robert Engelman paints a grim picture of what population acceleration means for the planet... Population Acceleration

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I used to be an atheist until I realized I am God

Now he discovered that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the most perfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other
-Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Precise in focus yet epic in scope and ambition , Mr. Bezmozgis’s novel takes place over the half-year the members of the Krasnansky family spend in limbo outside Rome, awaiting visas that will permit their passage to North America. The temporary Italian setting has been appropriately chosen, for it represents a passage between two worlds, much like the state of the Krasnanskys themselves, who have left their status as outsiders in one land to become outsiders in another. And in representing three generations of this family, Mr. Bezmozgis is able to condense more than a half-century of the pre-glasnost Jewish experience. an oasis of culture ;

Lives of Others We're all spies now: Life's voyeuristic twist
Surveillance is now a multibillion-dollar global industry, and an increasingly pervasive part of our daily lives.

IN THE late 1940s, George Orwell wrote his nightmarish novel 1984, depicting a future world where an all-seeing but unseen tyrant, Big Brother, ruled over his citizens by watching their every move. In this paranoid dystopia, surveillance was purely a ''top-down'' affair, a government tool for controlling the hapless masses: privacy was a crime, the Thought Police punished dissent and history was rewritten daily for political ends.
More than half a century later, it is worth considering how Orwell's fictional prediction weighs up against reality. If Big Brother's gaze dominated that imagined future, who's watching over us now?

• Bezpecnost KGB and Stasi of the Modern Ages [ Bond Stories; Thesis ]
• · Readers Digest; Congratulations! Your richly imagined novel – or memoir, or vampire trilogy – is about to be published. But here’s some tough love: Don’t expect glory, or even respect. You’ll get none A Sea of Words - Cold River Words； Grief is a lonely yet enticing place. Burrow in too far, however, and sorrow becomes all you know. Write about it and risk being branded a solipsist The Solitude of Grief
• · · MOST STORIES ABOUT inequality in America miss an important point: rising disparities are not just about investment bankers versus auto workers. They’re about entire communities of “winners” and “losers.” And as these communities continue to diverge, the idea of “an American economy” looks more and more like an anachronism How income inequality is fracturing our economic landscape ; An ambitious study, detailed here for the first time, finds that the super-wealthy—of all people—are isolated, unhappy, and brimming with anxieties. Why Secret Fears of the Super-Rich
• · · · We know all the old arguments about the faults of the new media. But as coverage of the Egyptian uprising shows, the digital landscape is also alive with possibilities. We should make our peace with it now–while we have a choice. Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable) New Media ; Those who talked loudest about the ideals of the “new” organization, as it turned out, had the least love in their hearts. How many tons of pig iron bars can a worker load onto a rail car in the course of a working day?
• · · · · Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses." Hell is other people at breakfas ; Unhappiness, in other words, may be a bit like second-hand smoke The Poison of Unhappiness
• · · · · · But literary journals — a long-tail publishing phenomenon before the Internet made other niche offerings accessible — are thriving. Literary Journals Thrive, on Paper and Otherwise; Maybe a rising tide does lift all boats. Or maybe you’re a heartless crank for thinking so. Joseph Stiglitz v-v Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%

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Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.
-E.B. White, letter to Mary Virginia Parris

Wikileaks can't ethically dump anything it feels like, as a publisher there are constraints and limits There is nothing to do today except bow our heads and hope and pray and send our love These three books are essential reading for anyone who really wants to understand the WikiLeaks phenomenon: Rate Inside WikiLeaks; Underground; Inside Julian Assange's war on secrecy: Inside WikiLeaks

Throwing the book at the WikiLeaks story

-Has WikiLeaks information served humanity?

Galaxy: Anna Bligh approval up 35 per cent Exotic Delights- By a Nose
To expand the mindset, Kevin Roberts keeps a look out for anything far out on the edge, thoughts that run a mile from the ordinary and thoughts that look to the brighter side of life and was quite taken by Encyclopedia of the Exquisite – An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights for its many gems

Running a global creative enterprise throws out challenges that travel across strategy, innovation, imagination, operation and execution (on a slow day!).

The most satisfying work is voracious for unconventional blends of insight and ingenuity. To expand the mindset, I keep a look out for anything far out on the edge, thoughts that run a mile from the ordinary, thoughts that can connect disparate strands, and thoughts that look to the brighter side of life.

Literary morsels are good for this, and I was quite taken by Encyclopedia of the Exquisite – An Anecdotal History of Elegant Delights by Jessica Kerwin Jenkins. This delectable compendium weaves curiosity, obscurity, luxury and story to uncover small pleasures down through time.

• Subjects range extraordinarily; Ach Anka Captain Bligh [The strong feeling in NSW is that any change will do - we want people to think about what kind of change they want Real change but little difference in campaign slogans ; Reports that public service jobs will be at risk if the coalition wins government at the NSW election in March are "rubbish", an opposition spokesman says. "(NSW Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell) has said we will need more public servants, not less, to fix NSW so the report is rubbish," the spokesman said on Sunday. But the man behind the sacking of more than 50,000 public servants during the Greiner and Fahey Liberal state governments, Garry Sturgess, and the head of former prime minister John Howard's department, Max "the Axe" Moore-Wilton, are both advising Mr O'Farrell, Fairfax media claimed on Sunday. NSW opposition denies it would cut jobs ; Opinions flow from his tongue in torrents, aided and abetted by a pair of hands in constant movement. Lunch with ... Mark Textor, strategist ; O'Farrell is now like a bloke on a bicycle at the top of the last hill before the finish line. He does not need to pedal much, just grip the handlebars, refrain from lairish behaviour and ignore cheers or taunts from the kerb. O'Farrell will be made to earn it ; Political strategists Bruce Hawker and Grahame Morris, along with program host (and politics wonk) Janine Perrett, will try to answer some of these questions in Sky's newest offering, So, You Want to Be a Politician? Reality show to revel in political dark arts ]
• · The NSW Liberals kicked off their election campaign while angry protesters screamed their concerns over party plans. THE Coalition's $400 million household energy rebate plan was quickly derided by Labor yesterday as 'Fairness for Families-lite ; Forget the vision, just smell the pork
• · · "We don't renegotiate our commitments, we deliver on them," said Mr Albanese, adding that Mr O'Farrell might have a change of heart. NSW Labor election strategy 'destroyed': Opposition; The time will come very shortly where the leader of the opposition and the Liberal Party will have to make a decision whether they are going to simply continue to oppose every health reform that we deliver for patients or whether they will act in the national interest to back this plan Despite talk of renewal, unions maintain stranglehold on NSW Labor
• · · · No devil dealing with the Greens in NSW election - Barry O'Farrell ; Labor's plan: let's just make it all up
• · · · · In terms of national success honesty and transparency do not necessarily bring reward Corruption and economic success can cohabit; Many on the move are young, smart and searching for a dream that has evaporated. In Southern Europe, A whole generation - the best educated in the history of the Mediterranean - is fearing for their future. Says one young jobless women with a law degree, a masters, and fluency in five languages: I have everything except a death certificate...
• · · · · · When speeding laws say one thing and a large majority of people demonstrate they have a different view, it’s time to recalibrate Let the people decide how much; This year the first of the baby boomers will hit retirement. They’re the wealthiest generation in history, the first mass market, and in many ways the main shapers of the world as we know it. The Media Dragon Generation is coming of age

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Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men -- the other 999 follow women.
-Groucho Marx

The NSW state elections are on the 26th March. If you believe in the old two party paradigm you have the choice of total incompetence on one side and no policies on the other. A salutory reminder that there are other options, greens independents etc. Multi party governments work quite successfully in other parts of the globe. For instance Swedens multi party government has given rise to the most social and economic success story in Europe.
‘Politicians are the same all over – they promise to build a bridge where there is no river’ Time to get political...

NSW Legislative Assembly speaker Richard Torbay backs the People's Parliament NSW People's Parliament Initiative

A tale is told of a man in Paris during the upheaval in 1948, who saw a friend marching after a crowd toward the barricades. Warning him that these could not be held against the troops, that he had better keep way, he received this reply, " I must follow them. I am their leader."
-A Lawrence Lowell, 1856-1943, President of Harvard University,Conflicts of Principle
Whither the revolution?

New Year, same politics? Stopping that sinking feeling Quick Sand: You can't explain real estate bubbles by zoning controls
The Age reports that Wendell Cox’s Demographia has released a study showing Melbourne to be 321st on a list of 325 most affordable world property markets. Decreasing land taxes is the real villain creating land and housing bubbles …

In other words, we’re almost the world’s most unaffordable market: almost the world’s dearest city. Incredibly, London, with a population of 7.6 million is said to be cheaper than the city of Geelong which is home to a population of only 200,000 souls. Amongst more important things I’ll mention later, it could be argued that homes and sites in Geelong are generally larger than those in London, but that’s not mentioned by Cox. Instead, he shoehorns Melbourne’s astronomical residential property prices to square with the extraordinary claim that they're a result of its zoning regulations. Perhaps this means Melbourne also has the 321st worst residential zoning regulations in the world?

• The Ship is Sinking: Leaders and the Tough Decisions [Malcolm Mackerras who unlike Anthony Green tends to get the pendulum right All the signs continue to point to a historic rout for Labor in March ; WHEN Julia Gillard announced on Monday her chief of staff, Amanda Lampe, was leaving her job at the end of March there was plenty of talk in the national capital about her role in the Government and what her departure might mean PARTY GAMES: Wisdom in short supply ; In the eyes of many foreign journalists, India is a nation of Gatsbys and Babbitts engaged in a manic quest for status and wealth Time for a reality check ]
• · Speaking to Lindsay Tanner at this Wheeler Centre event, George Megalogenis considers what has happened to political leadership in Australia. In a brilliant analysis, ( Quarterly Essay "Trivial Pursuit: Leadership and the End of the Reform Era" ) Megalogenis dissects the cycle of polls, focus groups and presidential politics and explores what it has done to the prospect of serious, difficult reform and the style of our leaders. He argues that politics-as-usual has become a self-defeating game and mounts a persuasive case for a different model of leadership. He shows clearly why and how politicians are losing, or have lost, their will to reform due to incessant polling and the 24 hour news cycle. It touches on the Green vote at the last election, and the creeping dichotomy of red states and blue states in Australia. Talk-back radio in the 90's, and how this encouraged newspapers to "shout" more ; They also cover how the shift of the medium of the media affects the pre-existing quality of journalism and coverage on issues. For example, the shift of evening newspapers to the 6 o'clock news. Talk-back radio in the 90's, and how this encouraged newspapers to "shout" more. And of course, the rise of the internet.; It is not a new criticism that today’s poll-driven politics is not delivering policies in Australia’s long term national interest. However, George Megalogenis argues that the hung Parliament resulting from the 2010 Federal Election should be a wake up call to politicians: the current model is not serving the interests of Australia’s major political parties either.
• · · The WikiLeaks cables read like good literature. Both diplomacy and fiction, after all, feature plots, moral ambiguity, and casual deception ; The Czech political funding system is so opaque, it would be amazing if it were not corrupt. Behind the Curtain
• · · · The real story of a biographer in a celebrity culture of public denials, media timidity, and legal threats Unauthorized, But Not Untrue: Opraholics” and “Winfreaks” ; Sadly, mentally ill IBRAHIM Siddiq-Conlon has a message for Australians, whether they want to hear it or not. Full-bred Aussie with a longing for sharia law
• · · · · Leaders in a revolving door... state governments falling... the machinations of the machine men... politics over policy - and the opinion polls holding up score cards like judges at a diving contest so we can all keep track ; Blaming Palin will not help the healing in Tucson
• · · · · · GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian. I'd describe him as belonging in the centre of the political spectrum, perhaps tending to mild conservatism. Oversensitivity can only compromise debate ; The removal of our advertising should not be viewed as a violation of free speech; it's simply that we choose not to advertise on blogs that do not align to our organisational values Troppo bullied by corporate thugs; Wanted - new financial backers

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I wish for all of you the happiest and most hopeful of new years. May you laugh often, cry only when you want to, and never be bored in MMXI! Happiness seems an unintended side effect, like hives or a dry cough, the occasional byproduct of right living ;-)
And men go about to wonder at the heights of the mountains, and the mighty waves of the sea, and the wide sweep of rivers, and the circuit of the ocean, and the revolution of the stars, but themselves they consider not…
Is happiness ever unmixed, a pure state like pain or terror? And doesn’t it tend to evaporate as we become conscious of its presence? It’s not synonymous with pleasure, though like some pleasures it seems dependent on self-forgetting. Aquinas says happiness is rooted in "goods of the soul." Davis’ idea that being in a Haydn symphony may constitute uncomplicated happiness is suggestive. Being in implies not passive hearing but engaged listening – but listening to what? Music that is elegant, ordered, intelligent and spirited, with an impression of unlikely inevitability. Davis’ friend Edgar Bowers put it like this in From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791):
I carry one small memory of his form
Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease,
To bring one last enigma to the norm,
Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.
Many ideas we once thought were true turned out to be hard to unlearn...
History should never be used to inculcate virtuous citizenship. Yet it offers the richest imaginable source of moral examples – The essence of great fiction, drama, and life itself

The old year passeth Earlier the roadside dust was sweet. The fermented fruit, the brandy, is sweeter still, carried into the world on the walker’s boot
This has been quite a year for Mrs. MD and me, in some ways challenging, in others gratifying.

We've seen a hundred movies, dozen of plays, read every Vanity Fair magazine (the Spectator or the Financial Times if time permitted,) taken a full-fledged vacation, driven up to Kings Canyon and Uluru, spent a wonderful month in the red center reading books and more books ....
What Mrs. MD and I won't do is take our good fortune for granted, starting with the astonishing fact of our being together. It is, I suspect, exceedingly rare for two people in the middle of life to make a marriage as close as this one has become. When you survive Iron Curtain, every day is a surprise and a blessing. Like Theodore Dalrymple we have never been a one-book reader, devoting attention to a single volume at a time:
Often I read more than one book at a time. When I tire of one I fly to another. This is because the world has always seemed to me so various and so interesting in all its aspects that I have not been able to confine my mind to a single subject or object for very long; therefore I am not, never have been, and never will be the scholar of anything. My mind is magpie-like, attracted by what shines for a moment; I try to persuade myself that this quality of superficiality has its compensations, in breadth of interest, for example
Like Dalrymple, we are no scholars of anything but enjoy learning something about almost everything. Shakespeare was the keenest of cullers, and in that we also recognize ourselves. To cull is to select with discernment, whether the sweetest blueberry or the tartest book.
No one doubts that an ordinary man can get on with this world: but we demand not strength enough to get on with it, but strength enough to get it on. Can he hate it enough to change it, and yet love it enough to think it worth changing? Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist?
-G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (May John Hatton Movement rocks in 2011)

• ... Turn the clock to zero, honey [How AK-47, more than A-bomb, changed history: If somebody were to tell you that the long tragedy of human warfare entered a new and deadly phase in the fifth decade of the 20th century, the historically literate mind almost certainly would jump to the invention of the atomic bomb, which ushered in an age of anxiety and the long balance of terror between the United States and the Soviet Union. Avtomat Kalashnikova - How the rifle I used in Czech Army change the history of the world ; The man of science, like the man of letters, is too apt to view mankind only in the abstract, selecting in his consideration only a single side of our complex and many-sided being. Hopes for 2011]
• · Father Dionigi recognized in his charge’s spirit a state similar to that of St. Augustine in his youth. He gave Petrarch a pocket copy of the Confessions, which the poet had not read. The book was Petrarch’s cherished companion for forty years. It journeyed with him to a mountain top, and once, in its owner’s pocket, it was near drowning with him in the sea. The Nativity of Our Common Adam; As Much as Can Be Made of Life Here’s a profound hole, yet no deeper than a coffin
• · · “To light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of men when, at the winter ingress, the curfew is sounded throughout nature. It indicates a spontaneous, Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, ‘Let there be light.’” Voltaire possessed an endless appetite for putting himself in harm’s way: duels, insults to nobility ; We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life. When we look in fiction for what is missing in life, we are saying, with no need to say it or even to know it, that life as it is does not satisfy our thirst for the absolute -- the foundation of the human condition -- and should be better. What makes music sad
• · · · Art as Empathy,” David Foster Wallace noted in the margins of a Tolstoy essay. Wallace’s archive shows he was not such an abstruse postmodernist…While many children are capable of conjuring imaginative tales, the grade-school Wallace has an unusual empathy for the adult double-bind of finding purpose in a job that also brings misery Art as Empathy ; On the eve of a pivotal academic year in Vishal Singh’s life, he faces a stark choice on his bedroom desk: book or computer? Cold River or computer?
• · · · · With Amazon, publishing is now beholden to one profit-obsessed company. What happens when you sell a book like it’s a can of soup?...Where once a publisher had to worry about competing for shelf space, now its entire list of books could be available to customers. Amazon; Depressing Russian Literature
• · · · · · Describing the paintings in words risks sentimentality or banality, which they never possess And thus abstract art is brought to shame, Even if we do not deserve any other; Ever dream of quitting your job and moving to a farm? This book will make you rethink that dream. The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

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You do something wrong, FATCA shoots your neighbor
- As Seen on Google

Google has grown from an idea generated by two students at Stanford University in 1998 to one of the world’s most well known and successful companies. Liane Hornsey, Director of People Operations for Europe, the Middle East and Africa says that the company would not have been able to innovate as quickly as it has, nor create the products it has in such a short space of time without highly valuing employee engagement ;
- The Wikileak video spread like wildfire across the internet and what next this week?
I'm not a wealthy man, but I'm rich in my convictions The West Needs a Good Dose of Perestroika -‎ Nothing Beats Helen Womack ‘s Analysis
During the Cold War, oppressed political dissidents around the world often had an easier time getting human-rights groups to advocate for their freedom. Today, however, it seems that dissidents often fail to garner the international spotlight they previously held. The reasons are manifold--ranging from the politicization of human rights to economic globalization to moral relativism.
Launching the Labour manifesto for the recent British election, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stood against the backdrop of a golden cornfield and promised a future fair for all. As I watched, I was struck by a powerful sense of deja vu. Where had I seen and heard all that before? Yes, of course, the Soviet Union circa 1980 — the old propaganda that spoke of bumper harvests and five-year plans fulfilled and overfulfilled.

A fresh page was turned in Prague on April 8 when Medvedev and the US President, Barack Obama, signed a treaty to reduce Russian and American stockpiles of strategic nuclear weapons. Before that, Obama had cancelled a Bush-era plan to deploy ballistic missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, a prospect that had unsettled Moscow. The treaty was seen by some defence experts as a "one up" to Russia, but others saw wider benefits for the West in the politics of win-win and the new goodwill wafting from the Kremlin.

• Back in the CCCP - USSR ; Moscow Times [It was the greedy free market, supposedly, that created both the housing bubble and the housing bust and led, inevitably, to the “great recession.” Capitalism, according to most liberal pundits (and even Alan Greenspan in a bad mood), is an inherently risky and unstable system that requires government regulation to correct its flaws and moderate its excesses. Crony Capitalism Is NOT Capitalism ; Faking It Won't Make It ]
• · Nothing beats a quiet Sunday afternoon in the traditional book store. Last week I whiled away a couple of hours at two of my favorites – Daunts and Hatchards. Daunts is the best travel bookshop on earth, while Hatchards has five floors of imaginative, beautifully selected, beautifully laid-out books... Nothing Beats Book Stores ; George Clooney and Up in the Air have a lot to tell the employers about the downside of reducing face-to-face contact. Efficiency and savings are often illusory when it comes to computerizing and centralizing businesses. Sydney Expo and Up in the Air ; You thought only conservatives got mad about taxes? Tea partiers, eat your hearts out: A group of liberals got together Tuesday and proved that they, too, can have a tax rebellion. But theirs is a little bit different: They want to pay more taxes. ; Law students and the consumers of legal services like to think that professors are hired by law schools on the basis of pure intellectual ability and achievement. No doubt, individual intellectual ability and achievement play significant roles in law school faculty hiring. However, another important dynamic is overlooked, wealth
• · · Chris Masters in the Telegraph writes about gang violence in Melbourne and Sydney in a story headlined 'Why Sydney's hitmen are deadlier'. Under the usual pictures of the Ibrahims, Morans and the late Michael McGurk, he explains various motives behind the violence and deaths, including the practice of an underling serving jail time for a superior but not being properly rewarded after release. ; hitmen Underbelly 3 - The Golden Mile, set in Kings Cross, debuts this Sunday, Channel 9 8.30. It gets a rave review plus some great site Kings Cross footage on The Australian
• · · · THE Sydney underworld's war without end, the ongoing battle for temporary supremacy, has in recent years featured the most visible members, bikies. The clearest evidence that the jungle rule book of old has been torn up comes from the prisons. Chis Master; Hell on Wheels; Underbelly; I HAVE a particular affection for my Australian friends of Middle Eastern background - they seem imbued with a special generosity and. zest for life
• · · · · The reframe is powerful; arguing in favour of envy would appear as difficult as opposing hope, faith or charity The politics of envy ; Planning laws and lobbying NSW Inc
• · · · · · Founded on a growing evidence base that working is good for health Arbeighcht; It is a fitting coincidence that this new chapter in our tax history coincides with our centenary and in preparing ourselves for entering our new century of tax and superannuation administration! tax history ; Well, it's a good thing I'm rich and famous on google

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Happy Mothers Day to Dial, June and all the wonderful women in this amazing world

Every year we gaze enviously at the lists of the richest people in world. Wondering what it would be like to have that sort of cash. Global Rich List

A Boy with Double Dragon Tattoo is now on the Global list . A list, very few Czechs make it Bohemian Media Dragon
or Australians ( Dangerous Journeys)

Creating a healthy happy world Matters of Amazing Grace
Having looked at history and done theory on happiness in recent blogs, here’s a top 10 from Dr Mike Pratt to pin to your wall Happiness – 10 Key Things We Know

Creating a healthy happy world is a worthy pursuit which we all have a stake in. It’s something academic colleague Dr. Mike Pratt has been working on to evolve Peak Performance theory. This week I have three posts based on Mike’s recent work, and for starters here’s some historical ground from the deep delvers:
BC 384-322: Greek Aristotle strikes it long and deep: Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence
• BC 341-270: Greek Epicurus hits the pleasure button (Epicureanism), and gets tagged as a supporter of hedonism. To his credit, he said you have to draw the line somewhere.
• On sweeping levels, Buddhism and Islam develop powerful paths to happiness.
• 13th century, the Italian Roman Catholic priest Thomas Aquinas weighs in with: “Every man necessarily desires happiness.”
• 1711-1776: the Scot David Hume high five’s Aristotle’s view.
• 1776: The American Declaration of Independence includes the pursuit of happiness as an unalienable right.
• 1748 – 1832: Englishman Jeremy Bentham defines happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. An advocate of utilitarianism, he describes natural law and natural rights as “nonsense upon stilts.”
• 1806 – 1873: John Stuart Mill works up utilitarianism with Jeremy, and focuses on actions that generate pleasure. He says OK to different types of pleasure, and pumps ‘higher pleasure’.
• 1818 – 1883: Karl Marx sees happiness as the ultimate destination, achieved through crashing the lead vehicle.
• 1844 – 1900: Friedrich Nietzsche says happiness is something for British Shopkeepers. Ronnie Barker’s sitcom alter-ego, the grocer Arkwright, to double negative, wouldn’t disagree.
• 1879 – 1955: Albert Einstein compares moral aims like well-being and happiness to the ambitions of a pig.
• 2000 – 2010: Happiness gets pondered, indexed, studied, measured, blogged and tweeted about.

• Stand by for more about his happiness… [The tax bar is commonly referred to as a "special priesthood," and it is only slightly more tolerant than the Catholic Church in ordaining women tax priests. -- Paul L. Caron
Special priesthood; FORMER independent MP John Hatton has called on the Southern Highlands to be awake to political corruption and incompetence. Mr Hatton, who in 1994 led the push for the Wood Royal Commission into police corruption, which will see him played by John Waters in the latest Underbelly series. Corruption buster, John Hatton, to give talk on empowering communities ]
• · It's wonderful to unexpectedly stumble upon a kindred spirit – or at least a person who holds a worldview eerily similar to your own. This happened recently when I came across the work and writings of Gunter Pauli, who is about to release the English language version of his book, The Blue Economy ; 15 April 2010 marked the 6-year anniversary of TaxProf Blog
• · · Sarah Palin's contract discovered by two students to speak at Stanislaus college includes private jet and expensive hotels…MUST BE a r larger for West Coast Events; or, a Hawker 800 or larger for East Coast Events and both are subject to the Speaker's approval Lear 60 ; NYU Hosts Reading Today of Dan Shaviro's Getting It Following up on my prior post, the NYU Graduate Tax Program is hosting a reading and discussion today of the new novel by Tax Prof Daniel N. Shaviro (NYU), Getting It (iUniverse, 2010): Bill Doberman is a liar. He's also a conniver, a phony, a hypocrite, and a cad -- and those are his good points... Evelyn Waugh meets John Grisham. Hilarious and gripping
• · · · The 3 most critical skills for managing a remote team, Wayne Turmel, bnet.com, 1 March 2010. The author suggests that managers of 21st-century teams need the ability to: create human connections quickly, know what tools to use when - and how to use them, and create loyalty; A blog launched today provides the public with an opportunity to participate in the development of the Rudd Government's Standard Business Reporting (SBR) program...the blog provides a online forum for businesses, reporting professionals, software developers and the broader public to discuss SBR issues Lindsay Tanner ; Standard Business Reporting Open for Comment ; The new social media policy recognises the widespread influence that blogs and wikis have within the community, and that of course includes our staff whom we want be alert to the potential risks of identity fraud and other threats. DIAC Use of the web New social media policy to guide staff online activities; It's all the rage for ministries and agencies to have a Facebook or even MySpace page these days. Governments are going where their citizens are. So why bother having a web site at all? Will Facebook profiles replace govt web sites?,
• · · · · Arkadi Kuhlmann, Ivey Business Journal, March-April 2010. Arkadi Kuhlmann, Chairman and CEO of ING Direct USA (America's largest direct bank), describes the steps that he took, and that other leaders can take, to build a distinctive and dynamic culture Culture driven leadership ; Over the last eighteen months of economic turmoil, leaders, and their ethics, morals and judgement, have been scrutinised and questioned. Leadership and its role in business, politics and wider society has been the subject of great debate. Leadership challenges ; In the new movie Date Night, Steve Carell plays tax lawyer Phil Foster, who is married to Claire Tina Fey
CODA: The ninth edition of "As Certain as Death -- Quotations About Taxes," the collection that I have assembled and published in Tax Notes over the last 16 years. It contains 1,577 quotations, a 426 percent increase over the 300 quotations that made up the first edition in 1994....
No matter how cynical you get, you can never keep up. A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can depend upon the support of Paul …
[T]axation, in reality, is life. If you know the position a person takes on taxes, you can tell their whole philosophy. The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.
A fine is a tax for doing something wrong. A tax is a fine for doing something right.
As Certain As Death -- Quotations About Taxes

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Some bad news is not new; it's made worse by the fact that it's caught in a long-term trend that shows no sign of reversal ... Dragon’s writing on the wall tend to attract trouble...



Our Bronte neighbour wrote in mid September a letter to Australian regulators which detailed his concerns about a fund manager in Australia known as the Astarra Strategic Fund – formerly known as Absolute Alpha.
This letter resulted in regulatory action against a cluster of related funds (almost twenty), however my letter was almost entirely about only one fund in the group. I did not make any major suggestions in the letter about other funds in the Astarra complex. My involvement was detailed today in the Sydney Morning Herald (see stories here, here and here, with the first story on the front page below the fold). There was no genius in my letter – everything could be found (fairly easily) on the internet – and the original tip-off came from a reader of my blog – who noticed links with a story I wrote up in March 2009


Fear 'We did it ourselves!
As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honour and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate ... When the best leader's work is done the people say, 'We did it ourselves!
--Lao-Tsu

An obsessive routine in carrying out the details begets conformity and complacency, which in turn dulls everyone's mind. That is why even as they pay attention to details, they continually encourage people to challenge the process. They implicitly understand the sentiment of CEO-leaders like Quad/Graphic's Harry Quadracchi, Oticon's Lars Kolind and the late Bill McGowan of MCI, who all independently asserted that the job of a leader is not to be the chief organizer, but the chief dis-organizer.

• chief dis-organizer Leaders of capital and social funds [THE corporate regulator has expressed no concerns about two men owning Australian financial services companies, despite questions about the men's role in a British broker involved in a penny stock scandal.
BusinessDay revealed last week that Jeffrey Revell-Reade, based in Austria, and James Sutherland, based in Hong Kong, owned Australian companies that received three financial services licences from the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. ;
The Association of Independently Owned Financial Planners (AIOFP) has received unconfirmed reports that $85 million of the missing $118 million of assets within the Astarra Strategic Fund (ASF) are safe AIOFP finds $85m of Astarra Strategic assets ; Google i ; Google ii ]
• · The ever expanding volume of information we face on a daily basis - and the wide range of issues in relation to the concept of information overload, ranging from concerns about information fatigue, information interruption, information access and information transparency that require attention to the costs and benefits of faster and more voluminous flows of data, knowledge and decision management Overloaded ; The establishment of the Senior Executive Service (SES) in 1984 sought to create a Service-wide strategic leadership in ideas, management, and ethics in accordance with the Westminster principles and conventions of public administration as they operate in the Australian model of government. The 25th anniversary of the creation of the SES provides an opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate the achievements made during this time, and to focus on the challenges ahead The Senior Executive Service 25th Anniversary,
• · · Data losses to incur fines of up to £500,000, BBC, 12 January 2010. The UK Information Commissioner's Office will be able to issue fines of up to £500,000 for serious data security breaches. The new rule is expected to come into force in the UK on 6 April 2010. The size of the fine will be determined after an investigation to assess the gravity of the breach. Other factors will include the size and finances of the organisation at fault. Individual cases will also be assessed on whether the breach was accidental or deliberate and how much distress the leak of information caused ; Reinventing management
• · · · The art of management ; The heroic leader, media dragon, the charismatic, goal-scoring superstar who doesn't mind carrying the team on his back, is out. Enter the post-heroic leader, the quieter, engaging team player who brings every player into the decision-making process. In fact, today's complex business environment requires a leader who combines the best of both styles Is heroic leadership all bad?,
• · · · · Australia's first taxes were levied to meet the challenges of those early days. They may also have been relatively efficient, equitable and simple, particularly since most of the revenue for the gaol came from import duties on alcohol – 'the more the citizens drank, the more money there was to control them' If we were able to ask Governor Hunter of the new colony of New South Wales why he introduced the very first taxes in Australia – taxes applying to imports – I suspect his answer would be, simply, that the colony had to finance the building of a new gaol because the old one had 'inexplicably' burnt down, private subscriptions had proved insufficient and Britain had refused further subsidies. Ken Henry the VIII ; Individual income tax returns [electronic resource] : necessary or not? : Toni Balik Australia : CPA Australia, 1998 TAX OFFICE IS NOW ON MEDIA DRAGON, FACEBOOK, TWITTER The Tax Office has advised that it is now on social networking site Twitter providing "tweets" (much in the style of an SMS message - 140 characters or less) on the latest updates on new measures, changes to legislation and reminders of upcoming due dates. The ATO says those keen to take a look without signing up to Twitter can go to http://www.twitter.com/ato_gov_au [http://www.twitter.com/ato_gov_au http://www.twitter.com/ato_gov_au
• · · · · · Nicknamed the “Pirate of Prague” for his bargain-basement purchase of post-Soviet privatization vouchers in his native Czechoslovakia, Kozeny, 46, got in trouble with U.S. authorities when he tried to pull off a similar maneuver in the Caspian Sea nation of Azerbaijan in the late 1990s. Bohemian Pirate; As researcher Alan Block described the metastatic growth of the tax-haven phenomenon in his groundbreaking work, Masters of Paradise: Organized Crime and the Internal Revenue Service in the Bahamas, "professional criminals were those who took it upon themselves to organize crime. Their true work was the process of organizing crime itself."GAO reports that CSC has 21 subsidiaries "in jurisdictions listed as tax havens" by the federal government. Some of the firm's global operations are located in tech manufacturing powerhouses such as Bermuda (1); British Virgin Islands (4); Costa Rica (1); Hong Kong (5); Ireland (2); Luxembourg (2); Macao (1); Singapore (4); Switzerland (1). Masters of Paradise; Alexander Zvygintsev, Russia's Deputy Prosecutor-General, said Britain and Israel harboured more Russian criminals than any other countries. He told the newspaper Rossiiskaya Gazeta: "It is no coincidence the capital of [Britain] is often called 'Londongrad'. It seems that London, as a major financial centre, is turning into a giant laundrette for laundering criminally sourced funds. Britain called crooks' haven
Scots like Jock agree

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John Brockman’s Edge question for 2010 asks over a hundred intellectuals, “Is the Internet changing the way you think?” the go-to site for the world’s procrastinating intellectuals


Timothy Garton Ash Cut This Story!
Newspaper articles are too long, encrusted with conventions that don’t add to your grasp of the news

George Orwell’s diaries attest to his deep dread of rats. Perhaps not the only thing he shares with characters in Nineteen Eighty-Four... All day clearing out strawberries, which have not been touched since last year. It seems one plant will put out anything up to 12 or 15 runners ...
Promote a conspiracy theory, and your phones will be bugged, your office burgled (but not robbed), your hard drives fragment, and your emails vanish Or so you’ll think. This season's fashion in conspiracy theories—for those out of the loop of enlightenment—concerns health. The Web sites, marginal cable shows and radio phone-ins are full of tales about how Big Pharma and Bad Government are deliberately spreading diseases or manufacturing scares in order to sell us expensive drugs, gull us into dangerous vaccinations or just simply to create an atmosphere of panic which will allow "them" to take over.

• George Orwell’s diaries
[During the Cold War, when Pete Seeger coaxed classrooms full of kids to join him in folk songs, no one saw America’s “singing left” as much of a political threat.
The law of unintended consequences gave a quirky twist to the relation between the Old and New Left and, in the process, lent peculiar accents to America’s musical and political culture that we can’t seem to get rid of even today. The folk revival—a fad sandwiched between the beatniks and the hippies—may have been brief, but it was also the baby boomers’ coming of age, and its echoes have been lasting. Bruce Springsteen made a splash in 2006 with his Seeger Sessions. Ry Cooder paid homage to Woody Guthrie in the 2007 release My Name Is Buddy. Sheryl Crow told Billboard magazine that her song, “Shine Over Babylon,” is “very environmentally conscious, in the tradition of Bob Dylan. Where Have All the Lefties Gone?
; Sovietology was a powerful force in Cold War history, giving the West a better understanding of its adversary. Today, we need a jihadology
In 1945, the United States faced a dire threat. The rising power of the Soviet Union and the spread of communism in Eastern Europe -- and, soon enough, worldwide -- represented a new enemy that imperiled postwar hopes for a peaceful and prosperous world. The United States was poorly equipped to comprehend, let alone respond to, this emerging global danger. The federal government had few experts who spoke Russian or had a deep knowledge of Russian history and culture; universities were barely better off. The field of Soviet studies emerged as a response and became the catalyst for a network of area studies programs that would soon follow.
Sovietology was a powerful force in Cold War history ]
• · Formulaic book-beat stories: how Writer A struggled and made it big, how Writer B’s novel is marketed, or Writer C’s huge advance. Bob Thompson tries to avoid the formulas... The opening piece, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” begins with a description of the San Bernardino Valley, east of Los Angeles, and of “the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves.” Three pages later, with an October Santa Ana bearing witness, a dentist’s wife named Lucille Miller watches her husband burn to death in the family Volkswagen. By the time I emerged from this sinister dreamscape I had overshot my bus stop by a mile.; The French Resistance continues to excite the imagination because of its sheer drama and mystery – embodied perfectly in the story of Jean Moulin... As we approach the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle's historic broadcast from London on 18 June 1940 that inaugurated the French Resistance, interest in the story remains undiminished. It is, though, increasingly difficult for the French to fit the Resistance into their collective memory of this difficult period. There is a prevalent British misconception that the French exaggerate their glorious Resistance exploits-everyone claiming a "resister" in the family-in order to gloss over the darker aspects of the Occupation. In truth, those darker aspects are as present in public discussion today as the Resistance. Every school in Paris has a plaque reminding people of the role played by the Vichy state in the deportation of the Jews. The Resistance continues to excite the imagination because of its sheer drama and mystery
• · · Timothy Garton Ash’s technique lies in a mixture of reportage and judgment, circling and deepening, as the one reinforces the other.
Promote a conspiracy theory, and your phones will be bugged, your office burgled (but not robbed), your hard drives fragment, and your emails vanish. Or so you’ll think. The problem of evil and the origins of the devil, who has inspired Goethe, Heine, W. S. Gilbert, Paul Valéry, Berlioz, Gounod, Turgenev and Randy Newman, to name a few Strange footnote ; Upper mismanagement. Why can’t we make things anymore in America? Two words, says Noam Scheiber: business school
• · · · As tattoos go mainstream, it becomes hard for criminals to signal their devotion to crime. They look more and more like ordinary citizens.. It is a truth universally acknowledged that messing with a guy who has facial tattoos is a really bad idea. Getting dirty words tattooed on your eyelids—a popular choice, judging from the mug shots available online—is a serious commitment. It is, as social scientists say, a “signal that is costly to fake.” The bearer of a facial tattoo announces to the world: I expect to be in prison for most of my life, or to hang out with people who consider prison experience a character reference.; The moral triumphs and failures of leaders carry a greater weight and volume than those of non-leaders. In leadership we see morality and immorality magnified. Leaders are human. That is their strength and their weakness. As humans, they are unpredictable creatures, capable of extraordinary kindness and cruelty
• · · · · Toys for Boys; Bankers

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Not every blogger would begin a history of the 2010s with a vignette in which the oldest house in King Street is peppered with stories from the dream team Peter, Linda and the richest man in the world. Big Night Out fireworks filled with an F- 18 flyover, a 100-gun salute, a new tax crackdown or gala ball?

2010 is not any old year. It marks the centenary year for the Australian Taxation Office, a silver anniversary of the introduction of capital gains tax and a ten anniversary of GST (31 January 2000 to be exact - according to Phil).
Australia Post will honour our centenary with a commemorative stamp that will be circulated among our public. It will be co-designed by tax office staff and launched before November 11, 2010.
The Royal Australian Mint will honour our centenary with a circulating 20 cent coin. It will be designed by tax office staff and released in 2010.

Indeed, GST has been with us for nearly 10 years. This time ten years ago, there was talk of riots in the streets and fears of a consumer strike as prices went up and the threat of price policeman Alan Fels waving his stick. But as it turns out that was the least of our worries. Dr Ken Henry - I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization

Recent Survey: Taxpayers giving the rich a cheap ride: survey - Most Australians believe high-income earners do not pay enough tax, and nearly all think low- and middle-income earners pay too much

Taxation is the price we pay for civilization. A Taxing Year to Remember
Michael D'Ascenzo who is widely recognised in Australia and globally for his expertise in taxation and superannuation. (Note - Michael D'Ascenzo is not related to a Canadian actor who is known as Rainbow "Rain" Papadakis in the children's television show Naturally, Sadie.)

Michael D’Ascenzo took up his role as antipodean Commissioner of Taxation on 1 January 2006. When Michael D’Ascenzo joined the Tax Office in 1977, during the bohemian Havel’s Charter 77, he was captured by the exciting work associated with challenging the tax avoidance schemes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly trust stripping and ‘bottom of the harbour’ schemes.
"This tax haven project (Wickenby) is one of the big success stories of the G20," the OECD's head of tax policy, Jeffrey Owens said. "This is not a numbers game. We have seen a real change in attitudes towards compliance."

*The Canberra Times captured a few interesting snippets about the Commish - John Hatton, AO also likes the quote from the Amerikan Oliver Wendell Holmes:

Few children nurse a desire to become that legendary figure of hate, the tax man.
And when young lawyer Michael D'Ascenzo applied to join the public service more than three decades ago, he admits he had little wish to stay at the Australian Taxation Office he now leads.
"The ATO was the first to ring back. I came here with the intention of being here for a few months until I got a better job," he said.
Yet, Mr D'Ascenzo's passion for tax issues grew and he has now been Australia's Taxation Commissioner for more than four years.
The 56-year-old, whose expertise is sought-after worldwide, has been made an Officer of the Order of Australia for his service to public administration and the tax profession throughout his career.
He says his enthusiasm for his work springs from its crucial contribution to the community. During his 33 years with the agency, the Tax Office's work has grown beyond collecting public revenue to protecting workers' futures by administering sttperannttation law and helping cut red tape for businesses.
"I like the phrase that [American jurist] Oliver Wendell Holmes usually used, that `tax is the price we pay for a civilised society' ... You really are making a great contribution to the community and to Australia." He agrees the Tax Office will always need to battle to win the community's affection. That's the light at the top of the hill. It's the aspiration we go for ... If we can take a few steps forward, then that's progress," he said. "At the end of the day, you're trying to redress thousands of years of stereotyping. while people might not boast about it, deep down, most people appreciate the work we do on behalf of the community." He said the Australia Day honour was not his award alone, but one he would share with the Tax Office and its staff.
But today's achievement clearly means a lot to the Italian-born Mr D'Ascenzo, whose pride was clear when he reflected on how much the award would have meant to his recently deceased mother. "My only regret is that my mum's not here for this moment."

• Minister Congratulates Tax Commissioner on Australia Day Award ; Italian-born Mr D'Ascenzo ; Our ABC [The Historian, Leigh Edmonds, is to capture the official history of the Tax Office recognising our past, present and future Tax Office Centenary significant memoir; Official history ; The Federal Court has dismissed an application by 3 taxpayers seeking an interlocutory injunction to restrain the Tax Office from carrying out an examination of the taxpayers under s 264 of the ITAA 1936. Daniels v Cranston [2009] FCA 1412, Federal Court, Lander J, 20 November 2009 From Bottom of the Harbour to Wickenby Tax Havens;]
• · Australia could have had a goods and services tax (GST) 20 years sooner, had John Howard had his way. GST on John Howard's agenda in 1979
10 years of GST - The trials and tribulations - Memories of Lara Dunston ; Treasury boss Ken Henry has set himself an ambitious goal: he wants to shake up how we all think about rivers and roads A New Tax System In 2009 Jeffery Owens, the head of the OECD’s Centre for Fiscal Affairs remarked, Who would have thought 25 years ago that the ATO would be so highly regarded internationally?; Praise for ATO war on offshore tax cheats
• · · A Flood of leaks from the government about its plans for superannuation and tax reform are causing distress and confusion in the business community and among pre-retirees trying to plan long-term savings and investments. Tax reform leaks are causing concern; Ken Henry report: Contact us before we contact you.
• · · · For weeks – no, months – I have suppressed the dark thoughts. As the new year dawned, the twinges of panic became more persistent, yet I remained paralysed by doubt and guilt. With each passing day, the pressure grows more unbearable… I really must find out where the money goes ... You can help by supporting a piece of US legislation called the Energy Security Through Transparency Act, which would require oil, gas, and mining companies to publicly disclose payments made to governments. Follow the money," which shows just what happens when you buy gas every day ; The macroeconomic arguments for the GST I think were, and remain, watertight. Remember, in the 1980s as Treasurer Keating was for it before he was agin’ it as PM in the 1990s?. The GST introduced a broad-based, growing revenue stream for government and ensured that the wealthy couldn’t avoid paying tax on their (large, and growing) expenditures, even if clever accountants meant they could largely avoid paying much on their income. A particular innovation of the Australian model was to reserve GST revenue to the States, ostensibly making it available for service delivery (schools, roads, hospitals) to the communities that had paid it. We can quibble over how much in % terms each state pays and gets, the competence of the state governments as service providers, and the difficulty businesses face in complying with their collections and remittance obligations — but still I think the macroeconomic argument has proven its validity ten years on. still I think the macroeconomic argument has proven its validity ten years on.; The excise legislation is more than 100 years old as excise has been levied on a number of commodities since 1901. 1901 - that means even older than the oldest Public Accounts Committee in Australia
• · · · · Over the past ninety years the High Court has been divided in its approach to the definition of 'duties of excise'. Initially such duties were confined to taxes on the production or manufacture of goods. This definition was gradually extended to include taxes on goods imposed at any point in the distribution process. Over time the Court came to accept that exceptions should be made for taxes on alcohol, tobacco and petrol, and hence the States have been permitted to tax these goods. The plaintiffs were charged under the Business Franchise Licences (Tobacco) Act 1987 (NSW) with selling tobacco in NSW without a licence. The Act provides for a licence fee, which includes a set amount, plus an amount calculated by reference to the value of tobacco sold during the 'relevant period'. The 'relevant period' is defined as 'the month commencing 2 months before the commencement of the month in which the licence expires'. The plaintiffs argued that the licence fee imposed by the Act was an excise and hence invalid due to section 90 of the Constitution. A majority of the High Court (Brennan CJ, McHugh, Gummow and Kirby JJ) agreed. - The case that made GST possible What is an excise duty? Ha and Hammond v NSW ; The states have been urged to undertake their own Henry-style reviews of their tax systems and act on the findings, rather than blame Canberra for their economic woes States urged to review tax
• · · · · · Accountability, flexibility and transparency have become, in recent decades, the mantras of management in Australia and New Zealand as the public sector attempts to become more like the private sector. Driven by economic rationalism, by managerialism, by the election of right-of-centre governments and the movement of left-of-centre governments to the right, and by a different expectation of what governments can and should do, public administration has morphed into new public management (NPM). Governing the Government: The Paradoxical Place of the Public Accounts Committee; Back in 2002 my old Public Accounts Committee celebrated centenary and its courageous chair Andrew Tink knew how to deliver a speech ... When Lieutenant James Cook arrived at Botany Bay at the end of April 1770, he brought with him two future Parliamentary Committee witnesses who would turn out to be crucial to the British Government’s decision to settle Australia. Those future witnesses spent their short time at Botany Bay examining everything in sight and making copious contemporaneous notes of whatever caught their eye. They were of course, Joseph Banks and James Mario Matra who along with Captain Cook himself wrote in their Journals about the sandy soil, strange vegetation and even stranger animals. The Role of Parliamentary Committee Witnesses in the Foundation of Australia, Mr Andrew Tink MP

CODA - STUART WASHINGTON - blast from parliamentary past writes well. It reads like an airport spy novel: an unsolved murder in a Tokyo red-light district, exotic tax havens around the world, and thousands of defrauded investors in Britain. Add to that some $118 million tipped in to Astarra Strategic Fund by Australian investors which, almost three months after authorities blew the whistle, is still not properly accounted for. The investigation by regulators is understood to include every possibility - from the $118 million being "misplaced" to misappropriation. "misplaced" to misappropriation. Authorities were alerted in September in a letter from the Bronte Capital blogger, John Hempton, about the improbably smooth returns achieved by Astarra Strategic, which advertised itself as an investor in hedge funds.