“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
~Anne Lamott
“It’s amazing how quickly someone can become a stranger; it’s even more amazing how quickly someone can become a treasured friend.”
~Unknown
ICAC to grill key Labor figures over Chinese donations and influence
Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo's relationship with former NSW Labor figures will be the focus of fresh corruption commission hearings next month.
- by Kate McClymont, Nick McKenzie and Tom Rabe
'Public humiliation of the worst kind': BuzzFeed apologises to Slavic Emma Husar
- by Michaela Whitbourn
EXCLUSIVE
WORKPLACE CULTURE
'It was very quick and very sudden': Liberal staffers allege sexual assaults
Two women say they raised the incidents with more senior party figures but were dismissed
'I've changed my mind': Kathryn Greiner calls for Liberal Party quotas
One of the Liberal Party’s most respected women has launched an excoriating attack on the party’s boys-club culture.
- by Eryk Bagshaw
This research estimates that more than $1 billion in profits was shifted out of Africa to tax havens by Australian mining companies in just one year (2015) – equating to up to almost $300 million in tax revenue that could have been used for vital services, such as schools and hospitals.
The Myth Of Robert Mueller, ExplodedMatt Taibbi, Rolling Stone. “This is just the latest disaster. They hyped Robert Mueller for two years as an all-conquering hero, only to have him show up under oath like a man wandering in traffic. Incredible. The losses continue.”
Mueller didn’t fail. The country did.Jennifer Rubin, WaPo. I remember liberal Democrats lamenting that Obama was just too good for us; I didn’t expect to see the equivalent from a Jennifer Rubin.
Scope of Russian Election Hacking Remains Unclear Foreign Policy. The deck: “Volume one of a long-awaited Senate report on Kremlin targeting of election systems finds all 50 states may have been targeted.” Holy moley. After three years of hysteria and the collective output of
a gaggle of IT grifters and bent intel community talking heads the best minds in the national security community [snort], “may have” is the best we can do? Froomkin: “If they make public persuasive evidence that ‘Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data’ then it’s a big deal. If it’s just more phishing on office networks, it isn’t.”
Amazon requires police departments to advertise Ring home security products to residents in return for free Ring cameras Business Insider. Where does Bezos think we live? Xinjiang?
The Firm Exemption and the Hierarchy of Finance in the Gig Economy (PDF) C Paul and Nathan Tankus, SSRN
New York Doubles Down on Tracking Empty Storefront Problem Bloomberg. Last time I was there, empty stores on every block, everywhere on the East Side.
John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” 1933 Marginal Revolution
Trump Stands Next to Photoshopped Presidential Seal That Reads ’45 is a Puppet’ in Spanish Gizmodo and Meet the man who created the fake presidential seal — a former Republican fed up with Trump WaPo I like the eagle holding golf clubs in its claws. OTOH, is this really the best the Never Trumpers can do?
The FOIA Charade: A Brief Case Study - Kelley Green Law Blog , Joseph Green, July 20, 2019: “With the release last month of proposed new EPA regulations on how the agency intends to handle responses to requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), critics have raised concerns about provisions that would give authority to senior management officials (i.e., political appointees) to issue final determinations, including on “whether to release or withhold a record or a portion of a record on the basis of responsiveness or under one or more exemptions under the FOIA, and to issue ‘no records’ responses.” While these critics question whether political appointees have sufficient knowledge of the scope of potentially responsive records as career staff supposedly do, this assumes that the current status quo is working to produce timely and substantive responses to FOIA requests. In my experience, that is simply not the case. The status quo is mere kabuki theater, with government officials going through the bureaucratic motions to dismiss FOIA requests without providing the requested data, even in circumstances in which the release of such data is mandated and clear under existing FOIA guidelines…”
The theme "Law in a Post-Truth Era" implies that law is facing a new intrusion of irrational thinking. But irrationality is an inevitable, permanent feature of human systems, including law. The legal community is merely becoming more willing to openly acknowledge it. I have taken this opportunity to call attention to "pseudolaw," the phenomenon of individuals and groups who deny that law as we know it exists. A complex ecosystem of pseudolawyers (such as sovereign citizens, tax deniers, neo-Moors, and many others) teaches laypeople to try to manage their legal affairs with diverse sets of elaborate and fictional rules. This Article considers what pseudolaw is, where it comes from, what it does to us, and what we might be able to do about it.
I draw much of my insight on this subject from personal experience, such as a week living among conspiracy theorists on the "ConspiraSea Cruise," a conference at sea for the kind of legal thinker who claims to be an interdimensional financier working with literal fairies to decertify the Federal Reserve by relocating the international date line. Such bizarre claims, discussed in more detail below, may make it tempting to disregard pseudolaw as a quirky and entertaining distraction from serious legal issues. But even such bizarre ideas have real and often severe impacts, ranging from diffuse costs on courts and the public to the destruction of individual lives. Despite its harms, pseudolaw has attracted relatively little formal scholarship. I hope these observations encourage and contribute to a more robust conversation about pseudolaw among academics and practitioners.
The FOIA Charade: A Brief Case Study - Kelley Green Law Blog , Joseph Green, July 20, 2019: “With the release last month of proposed new EPA regulations on how the agency intends to handle responses to requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), critics have raised concerns about provisions that would give authority to senior management officials (i.e., political appointees) to issue final determinations, including on “whether to release or withhold a record or a portion of a record on the basis of responsiveness or under one or more exemptions under the FOIA, and to issue ‘no records’ responses.” While these critics question whether political appointees have sufficient knowledge of the scope of potentially responsive records as career staff supposedly do, this assumes that the current status quo is working to produce timely and substantive responses to FOIA requests. In my experience, that is simply not the case. The status quo is mere kabuki theater, with government officials going through the bureaucratic motions to dismiss FOIA requests without providing the requested data, even in circumstances in which the release of such data is mandated and clear under existing FOIA guidelines…”
The theme "Law in a Post-Truth Era" implies that law is facing a new intrusion of irrational thinking. But irrationality is an inevitable, permanent feature of human systems, including law. The legal community is merely becoming more willing to openly acknowledge it. I have taken this opportunity to call attention to "pseudolaw," the phenomenon of individuals and groups who deny that law as we know it exists. A complex ecosystem of pseudolawyers (such as sovereign citizens, tax deniers, neo-Moors, and many others) teaches laypeople to try to manage their legal affairs with diverse sets of elaborate and fictional rules. This Article considers what pseudolaw is, where it comes from, what it does to us, and what we might be able to do about it.
I draw much of my insight on this subject from personal experience, such as a week living among conspiracy theorists on the "ConspiraSea Cruise," a conference at sea for the kind of legal thinker who claims to be an interdimensional financier working with literal fairies to decertify the Federal Reserve by relocating the international date line. Such bizarre claims, discussed in more detail below, may make it tempting to disregard pseudolaw as a quirky and entertaining distraction from serious legal issues. But even such bizarre ideas have real and often severe impacts, ranging from diffuse costs on courts and the public to the destruction of individual lives. Despite its harms, pseudolaw has attracted relatively little formal scholarship. I hope these observations encourage and contribute to a more robust conversation about pseudolaw among academics and practitioners.