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Monday, November 18, 2019

FREE SPEECH IS ONLY FOR THE TODDS AND PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT




Banks disagree on how to pay for fraud refunds BBC News Robbie Buck an ABC presenter shared a story this morning about the way his credit card was used in Bankstown to purchase electronic goods and even to withdraw money from ATM ... Bank's algorithm picked the unusual behaviour and stopped some of the fraud ... 

$21m tax scheme forces ATO to make system changes

The Tax Office says it has now implemented changes to its system to prevent large-scale tax fraud, such as the Western Australia scheme where 700 taxpayers attempted to claim $21 million, from happening again.

Last month, reports from Derby, Fitzroy Crossing and surrounding areas in the Kimberley region in remote WA revealed a large-scale fraudulent tax scheme where promoters offered to help submit tax returns with a guarantee of a substantial payment.

What Can Americans Learn from Germany’s Reckoning with the Holocaust?



 When you think about it, an auditor and a good investigative journalist have a lot in common

From the people who brought you the Panama Papers:

"Datashare is free, open-source software built by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that helps users better analyze information, in all its forms. Datashare allows you to index, search, star, tag, filter and analyze the key content in your own documents – whatever the format (text, spreadsheets, pdf, slides, emails, etc). Datashare will automatically highlight and extract the names of people, locations and organizations in your documents, as well as email addresses.  
IC IJ - ICY  


Evolution of a protestor: resistance as an ‘occupation’ – “We must turn our grief into action.” We Are HKers. Interesting on the protesters’ support structure.


The Hong Kong Protesters Aren’t Driven by Hope The Atlantic. “China may have wanted to make an example out of [Xinjiang], but the lesson Hong Kongers took was in the other direction—resist with all your might, because if you lose once, there will be a catastrophe for your people, and the world will ignore it.”
FREE SPEECH IS ONLY FOR THE PEOPLE I CARE ABOUT: Empathy is Tearing Us Apart. Robert Wright on a new study showing that people who score high on the empathy scale are more likely to applaud efforts by protesters to silence a speaker from the opposing political party. They’re also more likely to be amused by reports that the protesters injured a supporter of the speaker.

Any guess on which party’s voters score higher on empathy? 


While by no means comprehensive, the “Democracy 76” list… provides specific and practical actions that we all can take to be an involved citizen. The list is broken into five actions that are essential components for engagement. It is expressly free from politics and partisanship and should be undertaken by all Americans—regardless of political perspectives or affiliation

76 things you can do to boost civic engagement 

Brookings: “The year 1776 was an auspicious year for democracy. The idea that a people could govern themselves was radical at the time. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that followed are for most Americans revered documents and a cornerstone of our democracy. Over the years, this idea of democratic republicanism has become central to American identity, and yet without citizen participation, the government of, by, and for the people will not last. Ben Franklin famously said, “A republic, if you can keep it,” when asked what form of government the founders had created. He was charging “we the people” with the responsibility of protecting self-government. The mix of dysfunctional politics and lack of emphasis on civic education has, among other things, led many Americans to be highly skeptical about the very foundations of our democratic form of government. In the 1960s, amid civil rights protests and the Vietnam war, Americans were deeply divided politically, but according to the Pew Research Center, the vast majority—almost 80 percent—trusted the government to do the right thing always or most of the time. Today, less than 20 percent of the American public trusts the government. And for many young people, the idea of self-government is no longer sacrosanct. Almost one in four Americans thinks a dictator, namely a “strong leader that doesn’t have to deal with Congress or elections,” could be a good way to run our country…” 
















Jean-Paul Dubois Wins Goncourt, France’s Top Literary Prize



Published in August, Mr. Dubois’s novel “Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon” (“All Men Do Not Live in the Same Way”) is a story narrated by a man languishing in a Canadian prison for an unknown crime. – The New York Times




“The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) expects to have face, fingerprint, and iris scans of at least 259 million people [Quartz – paywall] in its biometrics database by 2022, according to a recent presentation from the agency’s Office of Procurement Operations reviewed by Quartz. From the report: That’s about 40 million more than theagency’s 2017 projections, which estimated 220 million unique identities by 2022, according to previous figures cited by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a San Francisco-based privacy rights nonprofit. 
 Jon Meacham, Meacham, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, author of The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels – TIME: “Here we are … trapped in a time of demagoguery, reflexive partisanship and a Hobbesian world of constant and total political warfare. We know all the factors: the return of the kind of partisan media that shaped us in the 18th and 19th centuries; relentless gerrymandering that has produced few swing congressional districts; the allure of reality-TV programming that has blurred lines between entertainment and governance….We are now grappling with a new chapter in that struggle, one that includes the salience of the Constitution, the sovereignty of our elections and the possible impeachment of a President. At the Constitutional Convention, George Mason of Virginia asked, “Shall any man be above justice? Above all, shall that man be above it who can commit the most extensive injustice?” The answer was no; no man shall be above justice. What will determine that?
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