September 28, 2026 • Misanthrope Index: 7.7 — Salute the Wreckage
The whole architecture of commercial trust turns out to rest on a filing nobody opens and a name nobody rings — and the seven of them worked out that the cheapest way to buy an auditor's reputation is simply to type his name in the box.
Source: Insolvency Service (GOV.UK)
A firm that can find and retain a professional athlete to hold up its chicken cannot find a rule that has been in force since January, which tells you precisely which of the two exercises it considered work.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
The defence amounts to a claim that one may buy a thing and simultaneously disclaim any interest in what one has bought — a doctrine that would astonish every other department of commercial life, and which the company advanced in writing, to a regulator, about croissants.
Source: Advertising Standards Authority
Daily misanthropy by email — free.
The day's worst decisions, curated every morning, in your inbox by breakfast.
No algorithms. No engagement bait. Just the view from the abyss.
It takes a particular species of small authority to reach for a novelty hat as an instrument of discipline, and a particularer one still to defend the decision all the way to a High Court bench that then has to set out first principles of religious liberty on account of it.
Source: LiveLaw
He understood perfectly well that the information was significant — that is what the tribunal found, and it is also the only reason he withheld it; the man who hides a fact has already conceded everything the fact would have proved.
Source: The Law Society Gazette
Every excuse offered was a small ingenious effort, and the sum of them would have amounted to rather more work than simply maintaining the buses — which is the recurring discovery of the evasive, made too late and always in a hearing room.
A judge spends his working life instructing other people that the forum for a grievance is a court and not a scene; presented with a rule he disliked in a waiting room, he made a scene, and then, presented with a complaint about the scene, he reached for the one weapon the rest of us cannot afford.
Source: Mid Hudson News
From the library — 26 special editions
Famous Authors’ Scandalous Private Lives: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to ReadThe abominable private conduct of literature's and art's great names — the murderers, deadbeats, eccentrics,… Scholars Behaving Badly: The Greatest Academic Frauds in HistoryA century of professors, presidents and prize-winners caught manufacturing the very evidence they demanded… Business Blunders: Titans Who Confidently Declined the FutureTitans of industry, at the height of their power, confidently declining the future as it walked through the…Daily misanthropy by email — free.
The day's worst decisions, curated every morning, in your inbox by breakfast.
No algorithms. No engagement bait. Just the view from the abyss.