The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.— Witold Gombrowicz, who died in 1969
Protecting enablers: attorney-client privilege is just the tip of the iceberg in facilitating illicit financial flows
'Do you want me to kill myself?' Lawyer faces court over allegedly interfering with witness
Protecting enablers: attorney-client privilege is just the tip of the iceberg in facilitating illicit financial flows
But what Sydney lawyer Eidan Havas now considers an "error of judgment", NSW Police say is a criminal offence punishable by up to seven years imprisonment.
It’s easy to get caught up in the hype of our technological era. Much of the modern experience, brought to us courtesy of the internet, feels miraculous: one-click same-day delivery, distributed cryptographically-enabled currency, on-demand video and audio content, and much more. Beyond that, innovators and entrepreneurs pitch their visions of a future that seems even more fantastic every day.
The Legal Future is Here… And It’s Distributed Law Practice Today –
Germany refuses to return family's land seized by Nazis after Hitler assassination attempt
When the plot to blow up Hitler failed, Prince Friedrich signed away everything he owned to the Nazis in exchange for his life. His grandson says it's his life's mission to win it back.
I bet this resonates with more than a few of you.
I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.
This quotation is often attributed to Frida Kahlo, but Quote Investigator tracked it back to a woman named Rebecca Katherine Martin.
Law.com – “A group of four law firm library directors walked through the results of the study—one that found no winner, but a number of issues and potential improvements for current analytics platforms…”
BT boss warns 16-min walk from current HQ to newLondon base 'just the tip of the iceberg'
It's also the 'largest
workplace transformation programmes the UK has ever seen'
15 Comments Law.com – “A group of four law firm library directors walked through the results of the study—one that found no winner, but a number of issues and potential improvements for current analytics platforms…”
In the early 1990s, there was a mini-boom of films made by black filmmakers. Spike Lee and John Singleton led the way, but there was also Ernest Dickerson (who’d been Lee’s director of photography), Julie Dash, Matty Rich, Darnell Martin, and more. The New York Times talked to a good-sized group of these directors about their careers, and how each of them, separately, found themselves in “director jail,” unable to get new projects or find new collaborators. It’s a pretty riveting conversation.
Dickerson is a favorite of mine — in addition to directing Juice and working as DP during Lee’s great period, from She’s Got To Have It to Malcolm X, he’s done terrific work for television. Here’s his story:
I made a movie called “Bulletproof,” with Damon Wayans and Adam Sandler. Working on that film was the only time I ever got mad enough to punch a hole in the editing room wall. It was supposed to be a raunchy, R-rated comedy slanted more for an adult audience. But I could see we had trouble when they were giving out tickets to 15- to 16-year-old kids at the first preview. Afterward, I had to really sanitize the relationships. It meant savaging the movie.It still opened at No. 1, but I got the worst reviews of my career. I was criticized for not having everything I was told to take out. I had several projects lined up — I had been developing “Blade,” with Wesley Snipes. The whole idea of where “Blade” went was mine. But the producers looked to “Bulletproof” and thought I had completely lost my street cred. After that, nobody would touch me. I think I’m still in jail, in a way, because I’m doing television. [Dickerson — like many of his peers, including Martin and Dash — has found work on the small screen, with credits on “The Wire” and “The Walking Dead.”] I consider myself a filmmaker who’s working in television.
A common thread through all of the stories is articulated by Ted Witcher:
White people get more bites of the apple. That’s just true. You can fail three, four times and still have a career. But if you’re black, you really can only fail once.
The NY Times convened a group of curators and artists to decide on a list of the 25 artworks made since 1970 “that define the contemporary age”. At various times, the panelists objected to the futility of such an exercise, but eventually ended up with a list that’s highly subjective, grossly incomplete, and full of great work.
Nan Goldin, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Kara Walker all made the list. Jeff Koons is listed, somewhat reluctantly both by the panel and himself: “The artist did not grant permission for the named work to be published.”
Perhaps just as interesting as the artworks is the panelists’ discussion, a mini-tour of recent art history. Artist Martha Rosler said of Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby”:
“A Subtlety” made lots of people furious because it was about the history of labor and sugar in a place that was already about to be gentrified. It was this gigantic, mammy-like, sphinxlike, female object, and then it had all these little melting children. “A Subtlety” is part of a very longstanding tradition that began in the Arab world that had to do with creating objects out of clay but also out of sugar. So it’s the impacted value of extractive mining, but it’s also the impacted value of the labor of slaves. And it’s also on the site where wage slavery had occurred — sugar work was the worst. The Domino Sugar factory was once owned by the Havemeyers, and Henry Havemeyer was one of the main donors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The sugar king was the art king. So it had all of these things — and then there’s the idea of all these people taking selfies in front of it. It was extremely brilliant without having to say a thing.
Taking advantage of inexpensive and easy-to-use software, deepfake artist Ctrl Shift Face has replaced Jack Nicholson’s face with Jim Carrey’s face in several scenes from The Shining. If you pay close attention it looks a little off — it’s not as good as the Bill Hader / Arnold Schwarzenegger one — but if you were unaware of Nicholson or The Shining going in, you probably wouldn’t notice.
These Shining videos are clever and fun and we’ve talked a little bit about how deepfakes might affect our society, but this Hannah Arendt quote from a 1974 interview is likely relevant:
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie — a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days — but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
This is the incredible and interesting and dangerous thing about the combination of our current technology, the internet, and mass media: “a lying government” is no longer necessary — we’re doing it to ourselves and anyone with sufficient motivation will be able to take advantage of people without the capacity to think and judge. (The Shining Starring Jim Carrey)
Oklahoma City is an intriguing place to write about politics.
Its congressional district is represented by a Democrat, yet the state of
Oklahoma is mostly red with two Republican senators and a Republican governor.
Earlier this week, Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt, a Republican, showed his
support for immigrants in the wake of Trump’s tweets. Holt is the first Native
American mayor of that city and tweeted,
“I suppose I could go back to my country but I would have to leave some of
myself here. It’s all messy & complicated but made simpler when we exercise
empathy, grace & love and we welcome all.”
Ben
Felder, news director at The Oklahoman, wrote about Holt’s comments and
ended up drawing the ire of many readers when he described Trump’s tweets as
“repeating racist rhetoric that nonwhite citizens are not Americans.”
In a phone interview Tuesday, Felder told me, “I’ve written a
lot about politics. I’ve written a lot about the president. I’ve written a lot
about race. I’ve probably gotten more hate mail (on this) than anything I’ve
ever written.”
Felder guesses that about 90 percent of the pushback he has
received is because he used the word “racist” in his description of the
president’s tweets. Felder said he went through the times the word “racist” has
appeared in the paper, but could not find any instances where he had called
someone or their actions “racist” and pointed out that he didn’t call Trump a
racist in this case. Neither did the mayor. Felder said he didn’t want to make
a statement one way or the other about Trump, and added that he doesn’t think
journalists have a role to definitively say whether or not Trump is a racist.
“So what was important to me,” Felder said, “was (that) I wanted
to be very specific about what part of his tweet was being seen as racist. And
I wanted to provide a little bit of explanation of why. So I thought by saying,
‘repeating racist rhetoric’ brought some context to the whole idea of telling
someone to go back to their country or go back to where you came from. I mean
that is pretty historically racist thing to say. I felt comfortable saying
that.”
Robert Glazer, via
LinkedIn
How does UK.gov fsck up IT projects? Let us countthe ways
Report suggests outsourced
project management, new committee and more
