People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness

I could be walking down the street one minute and get a handshake and then get spat on the next. I'm never sure whether to wear gloves or a helmet.
 -- Chris Martin


“People are mostly layers of violence and tenderness wrapped like bulbs, and it is difficult to say what makes them onions or hyacinths.”
― Eudora Welty, Delta Wedding



“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

Virtual reality continues to make people sick Economist

LAURIE PATTON. Catch 22.0 – we wouldn’t need inquiries if public administration wasn’t so broken

On ABC Insiders host Fran Kelly asked health minister Greg Hunt why the Government didn’t have an immediate response ready on the aged care royal commission report just released. “It wasn’t a surprise to anyone, was it”, Ms Kelly observed with obvious frustration. Continue reading →

Internet Companies Prepare to Fight the ‘Deepfake’ Future The New York Times – Researchers are creating tools to find A.I.-generated fake videos before they become impossible to detect. Some experts fear it is a losing battle…”For internet companies like Google, finding the tools to spot deepfakes has gained urgency. If someone wants to spread a fake video far and wide, Google’s YouTube or Facebook’s social media platforms would be great places to do it…”


Australian Timothy Weeks lands in Australia after three years in Taliban captivity

An Australian teacher who spent more than three years being held hostage by the Taliban has arrived home.

Key points:

• Timothy Weeks was freed earlier this month along with his American colleague as part of a prisoner swap
• Foreign Minister Marise Payne said Mr Weeks and his family were relieved he was home
• The Wagga Wagga teacher was working at a university in Kabul when he was kidnapped at gunpoint in 2016

Timothy Weeks and his American colleague, Kevin King, were released earlier this month as part of a prisoner swap deal.


 

ANDREW MORRISS REVIEWS “THE LAUNDROMAT.” It’s unrealistic, he says, but I like this:

The film’s conclusion (spoiler alert, but it is really no surprise) is that Nevis, Panama, and Delaware (and presumably other similar places) are sinkholes of corruption and fraud. Streep ends the film by walking out of the Mossack Fonseca office and removing the costume that enabled her to play the role of one of the firm’s employees while reciting part of the (still unknown) Panama Papers leaker’s “manifesto”, morphing into Ellen. She then takes off a wig and transforms herself into Meryl Streep, to deliver a final lecture on the immorality of tax avoidance, shell companies, etc. Along the way, she admits the film director and producer themselves have Delaware companies, which they don’t appear to be giving up.

Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds makes a regular call to “repeal the Hollywood tax cuts.” As Reynolds notes, our moral betters in Hollywood regularly lecture the rest of us about the evils of tax avoidance while engaged in some of the most egregious tax and accounting gimmicks to avoid taxes. I’m not holding my breath waiting for Hollywood’s elite to practice what they preach or get back to making movies that actually entertain, but that would be a happy ending.

Rita De La Feria (University of Leeds School of Law) presented Tax Fraud and Selective Law Enforcement at Toronto yesterday as part of its James Hausman Tax Law and Policy Workshop Series:

This article presents a new conceptual framework for research into tax fraud. Informed by research approaches from across tax law, public economics, criminology, criminal justice, and regulatory theory, its proposed analytical framework assesses the effectiveness, and the legitimacy, of current approaches to combating tax fraud. The last decade has witnessed significant intensification of antitax fraud policy within Europe, with an upsurge in both legislative and administrative measures that purportedly target tax fraud. Using VAT as a case study, it is argued that these measures display a fundamental misunderstanding of the phenomenon of tax fraud, and in particular of the various costs it carries, by concentrating upon combating the revenue costs of fraud, rather than the fraud itself. Whilst measures deployed to combat revenue costs, and those deployed to combat the tax fraud, will often coincide, this will not always be the case. In those cases where they do not coincide prevalence is consistently given to enforcement measures addressing revenue costs, rather than combatting the fraud itself, even where the effect is to aggravate other costs of tax fraud, such as distortions to competition, or tax inequity, or to create an incentive to future non-compliance.

Private Equity Under the Hot Lights Today at House Financial Services Committee Hearing, “America for Sale?”

Private equity gets some long overdue scrutiny.

When it comes to families, it’s about people, not problems

FAMILY POLICY: Tasmania Uni’s Kathleen Flanagan granted $395,495 to research ‘Problem families in the 21st century: policy, practice, outcomes’.

SADHBH WALSHE. How Brexit Put a United Ireland Back on the Map (The New York Review of Books 22-10-19)

The Irish have long been said to have a way with words—and there has been no shortage of them expended in the argument over the possibility of a Brexit-induced reinstatement of a border partitioning the island of Ireland. Since the 2016 referendum, numerous books have been published on the subject; thousands of newspaper articles have been written; famous Irish actors have taken to reciting poems to plea on the border’s behalf; and the border itself has a popular Twitter account, providing daily commentary—sometimes wry, sometimes raging—on the debate about its future. Continue reading →

MIKE SCRAFTON. The Speech Albanese should have given

No! No! No! The headland speech given recently by Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, was just more of the tired old evidence that he doesn’t get it. His are the economic and political priorities of another time when people still believed resolutely in the worth of neo-liberal economics and unfettered globalisation. It was not the bold speech for a time when the natural environment and ecological systems that sustain all of human activity are collapsing, and global warming threatens not just more and worse storms, droughts, and floods, but also climatic shifts with unpredictable consequences for, inter alia, agriculture, public health, and the viability of existing urban infrastructure.

Continue reading →