Thursday, July 18, 2019

Praesis ut prosis (lead that you might serve)

Disgusting Abuse of west or east leader's power come as no surprise  to many ... Permission to smile 😀 or even linklight 💡 images ...

 

JFK's hard-driving IRS chief revived the agency - The Washington Post

What's fact and what's fiction when it comes to FaceApp?

The age changing app is going viral again but so are concerns about its approach to privacy.



Well-designed team-building should target and strengthen relationships that are for some reason too weuak. Such weaknesses can disrupt communication networks by stopping critical information from getting to the people who need it.

We have used what is called social network analysis to map relationships in project teams.

Social network analysis is used in economics, marketing and management to study the structures of relationships between people and organisations. The focus is on the structural patterns of relationships within the entire team
YEAH. BECAUSE THE CURRENT ART WORLD IS A VEHICLE FOR MONEY LAUNDERING AND CORRUPTION. IT’S WHO THEY ARE, IT’S WHAT THEY DO. WELL THAT AND FUTILE, STUPID ATTEMPTS TO SHOCK THE SQUARES:  Disgraced Billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s Art World Connections.


Anti-extradition Hong Kong protesters march in Shatin Asia Times


Manufacturers Move Supply Chains Out of China WSJ


China economy reports lowest GDP growth on record for second quarter as US trade war bites SCMP



Dick Smith received $500,000 of franking credit refunds in one year

 'Betrayed by a mate': Man stunned after house guest arrested over 100kg of ice in ute

The drugs, valued at $35 million, were in storage containers in the tray of the Toyota Hilux, which was parked in a driveway in Malabar, police allege.



In a stunning essay on freedom and power, “What to an American Is the Fourth of July?”, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi writes the following:

[P]ower comes before freedom, not the other way around. Power creates freedom, not the other way around. We can’t be free unless we have power. Freedom is not the power to make choices. Freedom is the power to create choices.

This gets at the heart of what we’re fighting for in the United States today: power for all of us who are not wealthy white men so that we, too, can have real freedom. In a society in which women’s reproductive rights and health are governed by men, in which African Americans remain at the mercy of the people who are hired to “protect and serve,” in which we cage those who come to us in need instead of helping them, it is important to recognize that many of us lack the power we need to truly be free.

Kendi is talking about political power, but in addressing the struggle of those raised as girls in particular, I want to take this into the realm of personal power. One of the lies that keep women from claiming power in their daily lives and in the fight for real political power is the one that says women lack, and will always lack, the ability to protect themselves from male violence.


More on Litigation and IRS Raising Civil Fraud New Matter


I posted this blog entry on my Federal Tax Procedure Blog, here.  I posted the predicate blog entry on both Blogs, so I thought this follow-through should be on both blogs because it deals with the consequences of tax fraud, albeit civil tax fraud which gives rise to a potential civil fraud penalty and an actual unlimited statute of limitations (albeit the IRS may never know about it).  So, here it is: 
My last post involved the IRS raising the civil fraud penalty as new matter by amended answer and prevailing. IRS Raises Fraud In Tax Court Amended Answer and Prevails (Federal Tax Crimes Blog 7/9/19), here.  The key point of the blog entry was the danger of unspotted issues after an audit and the risks of petitioning the Tax Court for redetermination. 
First, on that issue, I offer the relevant portion of the working draft of my Federal Tax Procedure Book will be published on SSRN in early August 2019 (footnotes omitted


The UK behavioural Insights team is building an evidence base of business nudges. Part of this research involved working with the UK Companies House to test different ways of communicating with businesses to encourage adoption of new technologies.

Glenn Greenwald has faced pushback for his reporting before. But not like this. WaPo

“At Daily Infographic we strive to curate the most interesting infographics on the web. We scour the internet for data visualizations [on more than two dozen topics] with the best content and design to bring easily consumed facts and figures to our users. For seven years Daily Infographic has provided the web with knowledge and know-how on a plethora of subjects. From cooking tips to sporting events, marketing techniques and breaking news, we pride ourselves on helping to make you smarter Everyday…”

National Taxpayer Advocate Publishes 'Subway Map' Of Taxpayer’s Journey Through The Tax System


Subway
National Taxpayer Advocate Nina E. Olson today released a special report on the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), which makes recommendations designed to increase the participation rate of eligible taxpayers and reduce overclaims by ineligible taxpayers. Also today, the Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS) published a subway map that depicts a taxpayer’s “journey” through the tax system to help taxpayers and policymakers better understand the tax administration process.
Neil H. Buchanan (George Washington), The Law of Taxation Is the Lynchpin of Civilization (JOTWELL) (reviewing John Snape (Warwick) & Dominic de Cogan (Cambridge), Introduction: On the Significance of Revenue Cases, in Landmark Cases in Revenue Law 1 (John Snape & Dominic de Cogan eds. 2019):
John Snape and Dominic de Cogan, two legal scholars from universities in England, have provided a significant contribution to the emerging scholarly discussion in many different countries about the nature and limits of the law—not just tax law, which is their nominal domain in this chapter and book, but of all law. Without being at all polemical, and although they give a fair hearing to those with whom they disagree, they make an undeniable case for the claim that the study of tax law is ultimately the study of, to be honest, everything. ...
Snape and de Cogan’s edited volume is part of the Landmark Cases series, an analogue (which the editors readily acknowledge) to the Law Stories series in the United States that began with Tax Stories. Like its American counterpart, a Landmark Cases volume can serve as an avenue for understanding an area of the law through the study of a small canon of foundational legal decisions that continue to shape our understanding of that particular area of the law. ...

FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY COMMUNISM—A REVIEW.
[Author Aaron Bastani] claims that “communism” has never existed, because “communism” is defined as a post-scarcity economy, in which people no longer need to work for a living. Public ownership of the means of production is not enough; on its own, that is just socialism, not communism. This is, of course, technically correct, but it is a technicality just the same. Bastani knows as well as anyone that we sometimes informally describe systems (the Soviet Union, Maoist China, North Korea) as “communist” when the technically correct term would be “socialist.” But linguistic pedantry does not save his case.
Bastani’s argument is not that we should wait for another 100 years or so until the technology is sufficiently advanced, and then move straight from capitalism to communism. He wants the transition to start today—or, better still, yesterday—and he envisages a long transition period, during which our economy would no longer be capitalist, but not yet communist either.
There is a word for this: socialism. Like almost every other communist before him, Bastani wants to reach communism via socialism. Thus, the fact that socialism has already been tried more than two dozen times, and failed every time without exception, should be somewhat relevant to this book. But on that issue, Bastani has next to nothing to say. Like most socialist manifestoes, FALC ultimately boils down to “next time will be different, because I say so.”
As blogger Moe Lane once wrote, “Marxism is intellectualism for stupid people; it tends to attract the sort who can’t understand that an economic system that cannot feed its own population reliably has failed at the game of Life. Literally.” Read the whole thing.

Truth and Consequences = The Hedgehog Review – Untruth has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect. “Conventional wisdom has it that for democracy to work, it is essential that we—the citizens—agree in some minimal way about what reality looks like. We are not, of course, all required to think the same way about big questions, or believe the same things, or hold the same values; in fact, it is expected that we won’t. But somehow or other, we need to have acquired some very basic, shared understanding about what causes what, what’s broadly desirable, what’s dangerous, and how to characterize what’s already happened.


" More than $1.28 billion has been clawed back by governments around the world after the Panama Papers investigation in 2016. In Australia alone, the figure is $92,880,415 with 53 audits and reviews in progress as of Feb 28 2019 "
Counting The Panama Papers Money  ....