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Thursday, February 03, 2022

A solar firm owner is sentenced to 30 years over a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme

 “Matthew may have even continued to manage his own wealth, even those of others, but he certainly did so with a different logic: that of service to the needy and sharing with the brothers and sisters, just as the Teacher taught him.”


Pope Francis: Tax evasion is part of a "structure of sin." He also quoted this article: "It has become evident that those who do not pay taxes do not only commit a felony but also a crime: if there are not enough hospital beds and artificial respirators, it is also their fault."


Pope Francis with the tax collectors: you have a thankless task and are seen as "putting your hands in other people’s pockets"

But “in reality, taxation is a sign of legality and justice” & ensures a free healthcare system: vatican.va/content/france


Now that’s a BIG shock! World’s longest lightning bolt lasted for 8.5 seconds and stretched more than 477 MILES across the skies over Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi – 37 miles longer than the previous record Daily Mail


Without the right to disconnect, “the result will be stress and burnout and this is the real disease of today,” said De Sutter, according to the Guardian.

Belgium’s minister for public administration, Petra De Sutter, said in a letter the measure was necessary to fight against a culture in which workers feel they always need to be available, which has been exacerbated by the pandemic as more people transitioned to remote work

Government workers in Belgium won’t have to field emails after hours, under ‘right to disconnect’ rule


For Francis, the Biblical figure of the taxman also has a personal meaning. Francis noted that Jesus summoned Matthew, a tax collector, to become one of his apostles in a scene made famous by Caravaggio’s “The Calling of St. Matthew,” which hangs in the French church in downtown Rome.

“He looks at him with mercy and chooses him,” Francis recalled, using the Latin phrase “miserando atque eligendo.”

That phrase is the motto that the former Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose for his episcopal seal when he was made a bishop, and decided to keep on his papal coat of arms when he was made pope.

[Miserando atque eligendo (Latin: "by having mercy, by choosing him"[1]]

Pope on taxes: A sign of equality, justice and legality

The Pope understands the significance of tax transparency: we just now need to get the world’s governments to do so as well

The Pope spoke to Italian tax collectors yesterday and had some important points to make, of which the most significant was, I think, this:

I would also add this:

Read the full article…


Pope blesses those everyone loves to hate - tax collectors


Pope Francis to Italy’s Tax Agency: Public Money Should Serve the Common Good


‘Our Democracy™’: Oligarchy With Democratic Trappings.

Over the past few months, it has become common for Democrats and progressives to invoke “Our Democracy”™ whenever they criticize efforts to ensure election integrity or condemn the perpetrators of the January 6 “insurgency.” On one level, the phrase is just another annoying example of debasing the language by the very people who have been working overtime to rewrite the Constitution.



Bookfeed.io – An RSS feed listing all newly released books from your favorite authors

 Likas Mathis – “Bookfeed.io is a simple tool that allows you to specify a list of authors, and generates an RSS feed with each author’s most recently released book.  I made this because I don’t want a recommendation algorithm to tell me what to read, I just want to know when my favorite authors release new books.”


A solar firm owner is sentenced to 30 years over a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme


Will Robots Agree To Pay Taxes? Further Tax Implications Of Advanced AI



Ahh, the 80s — when children were given much more freedom than today, an autonomy that two Irish boys used in 1985 to travel from their house in a Dublin suburb all the way to New York City — via two trains, a ferry, and then stowing away on a JFK-bound 747, with nothing more than a few coins in their pockets.


The Verge - White House instructs government agencies to beef up cybersecurity, adopt ‘zero trust’ in new memo

The Verge: “The White House released a new cybersecurity strategy Wednesday aimed at reducing the risk of cyberattacks against government infrastructure. The strategy outlines the administration’s vision for moving government agencies towards a “zero trust” architecture — a cybersecurity model where users and devices are only given permissions to access network resources necessary for the task at hand and are authenticated on a case-by-case basis. The key document was published as a memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the administration’s policy arm, and addressed to the heads of all executive departments and agencies. 

According to the memorandum, shifting towards a zero trust architecture will require the implementation of stronger enterprise identity and access controls, including more widespread use of multi-factor authentication — specifically hardware-based authentication tokens like access cards, rather than push notifications or SMS. 

Agencies were also instructed to aim for a complete inventory of every device authorized and operated for official business, to be monitored according to specifications set by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)…”


Dear Audience, The Author Is Not Always The Novel’s Main Character

Or perhaps ever. Rebecca Watson: "I really don’t believe there’s a correlation ... but people try to map the piece onto the novel and interpret it as confessional. This novel was never an act of catharsis. It was a joyful act of creation." - The Guardian (UK)