September 3, 2026 • Misanthrope Index: 7.6 — Salute the Wreckage
Three quarters of the money bought no art at all — it bought the deliberation that preceded the art, which is the only part of the transaction a council genuinely values, because it is the only part that can be attended in a meeting. The bus shelter is a pretext; the meeting was the product.
Source: New Zealand Taxpayers' Union
The saving was measured against a price that existed only in a document, which is the modern retailer's great discovery: you need not lower a price if you can raise an imaginary one behind it. Frasers' defence was that everybody knows this — an argument which, if accepted, would establish that the advertisement conveyed nothing at all.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
A company that sells containers for one's possessions was unable to accept that a word is also a container, and that 'everything' will not hold a schedule of exclusions. The defence — that customers were better off anyway — is the reasoning of a man who lies to you and then demands credit for the outcome.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
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Note the direction of travel: the drug came first and the ailment was commissioned afterwards, described in terms vague enough that any reader who has ever felt tired qualifies. A company that must invent your disease before it can sell you the cure has told you everything about which of the two it is actually in business to supply.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
A man employed by one of the four great auditors of the world's documents relied on an approval for which he could produce no document. He had grasped the principle of working from anywhere and mislaid the smaller principle of telling somebody.
Every lifting accessory in Britain is stamped with what it may be asked to carry, precisely so that no one need form an opinion. Somebody formed one anyway, and the beam, which holds no opinions, settled the matter.
Source: HSE Media Centre
Ratepayers are charged twice: once for the council, and once again for the body that petitions the government on the council's behalf for more money from the ratepayers. A third of one council's staff are in management or communications, which is to say a third are employed to describe the work of the other two thirds.
Source: New Zealand Taxpayers' Union
Small claims is the one room in the courthouse built for people who cannot afford a lawyer to speak for them, which is precisely why a certain kind of judge finds it restful: nobody there can answer back. Having been told once, in public, exactly which habit to abandon, he elected instead to appear before the commission and defend it.
He was not ignorant — ignorance would at least have required nobody to have told him. He had been told, in writing, by two separate sets of people he was paying, and he responded with assurances, which are cheaper than scaffolding and take no time at all to erect.
Source: HSE Media Centre
From the library — 26 special editions
More Scandalous Authors: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Read, Vol. IIThe private conduct of literature's great names, continued — the debtors, deserters, duelists, and one… When Settled Science Was Wrong: Eight Confident CatastrophesThe expert consensus of its day — confident, credentialed, peer-approved, and catastrophically wrong. Artists Behaving Badly: 13 Great Painters Who Were MonstersFrom Cellini's dagger to Picasso's queue of the heartbroken — five centuries of immortal art made by men…Daily misanthropy by email — free.
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