Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
The Odyssey or, what if you did THE DARK KNIGHT in ancient Greece?
This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. Nolan is covering the same thematic territory he did nearly 20 years ago and more recently with OPPENHEIMER. And it is compelling! A kind of Burkean liberalism that sees the heroism of “great men” as a necessary bulwark against disorder and chaos but understands the great men as merely men — who themselves bear some responsibility for the chaos — and sees heroism as a terrible burden to bear, more akin to a curse than a crown. There are no parades or honors. In the end you bear the scars and fade away, an exile remembered in legend.
Anyway, I am glad Hollywood keeps giving the man hundreds of millions of dollars to make his didactic and idiosyncratic blockbusters. Keep ‘em coming!
Yeah, exactly. I feel like most pans of The Odyssey fell into two main buckets: 1) it wasn’t long enough — pacing off, didn’t include my favorite scene, etc. — which was entirely due to 3-hour runtime constraints of IMAX projectors, and 2) I wish Christopher Nolan hadn’t made a Christopher Nolan movie.
Debbie Millman again: Is the World Getting Uglier? First brand she mentions is a Tesla Cybertruck, a completely tasteless monstrosity designed by Elon Simpson that I still laugh at every time I see one on the road.
A Living Museum of the Comic. “A living museum of where the comic came from — its Western and Eastern roots, the women who drew the early funnies, the Europeans who invented its grammar, and the golden age of the American color cartoon. Every artifact is public domain, restored by us, and free to explore.”
The Dingo Fence | The Longest Fence in the World. “In the heart of Australia, the continent has been cut in two by the longest fence in the world in a bid to protect livestock from dingoes. Dingoes have divided the nation for the past 150 years, but with new research coming to light, is it time for this to change?”
The Deadly Legacy of HIV Truthers (2015). “Even as the medical community reached a consensus that HIV caused AIDS, a counter-movement was emerging, claiming that HIV didn’t exist, or that the virus existed but was harmless. The symptoms of AIDS, according to some of these people, were actually caused by HIV therapies themselves.”
Recent Howtown: So… did NASA find life on Mars? “Awkwardly, we’ve now collected the most promising extra-terrestrial biosignature in a tube that might spend the rest of eternity sealed inside a dead rover.”
Next Draft: “Trump faces little danger of prison. The U.S. Supreme Court has bestowed substantial criminal impunity on him, even assuming that he leaves office in 2029 as required by the Constitution. But an ex-president remains subject to civil liability, and the proceeds of bribery, extortion, insider trading, and market manipulation may be exposed to civil penalties. Other countries have shown the way.”
David Frum in The Atlantic (Gift Article): What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains. “As much as Americans may wish to forget the Trumps and their corruption after this presidency ends, the next generation of Trumps surely understands that political power is its surest defense against legal retribution.
This makes recovering the Trumps’ wrongfully obtained wealth not only a matter of justice but also a matter of democratic survival.” (I doubt the ill-gotten gains will ever leave Trump family pockets, but we can hope…)
Your boss, tech companies and police can read your chatbot conversations
A Washington Post review of public records and local news stories found a dozen instances of chatbot transcripts being cited in the public record in court cases over the past two years.
In many cases, the transcripts were unearthed from users’ devices when searched by a police officer or an opposing party during the evidence-gathering stage of a civil case. In a handful of instances, AI companies have reported disturbing content on their platforms to law enforcement.
“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version … [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no. You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private,” said Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Here’s what to know about the privacy of your chatbot conversations….”
Look around corporate Australia and you will see a panoply of these contrivances, where the secret to success is not to look at all.
Allens partners Ross Drinnan and Chris Kerrigan, plus managing partner Marc Kemp front the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services, in Canberra last month. Alex Ellinghausen
The KPMG audit scandal continues to reverberate through corporate Australia. Macquarie Group is only the latest to dump the firm as auditor. Macquarie non-executive director Michelle Hinchliffe – a conflicted former KPMG audit partner who concerned herself unduly with the company’s recent audit tender process – is now on professional deathwatch, likely to follow former Westpac director Peter Nash (and former KPMG chair) into the NED knackery. Macquarie chairman Glenn Stevens, meanwhile, is enormously diminished by his condescending dismissal of disquiet about the tender process as “silly talk”.
KPMG’s primary misconduct was, of course, the gross breaches of trust committed against the firm’s clients by its senior audit leaders. Yet the secondary – and, as always, more damaging – misjudgement was the attempted cover-up, and the egregious treatment of the internal whistleblower whose complaint has now been proven spectacularly factual.
The blockbuster parliamentary hearing three Fridays ago brought into sharp relief the critical enabling role played by law firm Allens last year in whitewashing the whistleblower’s complaint.
Despite agreeing with KPMG on a scope of work that included “targeted searches and extraction of emails and other documents stored on KPMG’s systems”, Allens’ investigating partners Ross Drinnan and Christopher Kerrigan elected not to conduct those searches at all.
After interviewing KPMG audit partners Eileen Hoggett, Paul Rogers and Kim Lawry (all of whom have now left – or are in the process of leaving – the firm in disgrace), Allens’ report found them to be “candid and credible”. On the explicit basis that all three admitted to Allens they had improperly shared Lendlease board papers, Drinnan “formed a view… that the forensic searches of [their] emails were disproportionate in the circumstances.” They admitted they were dodgy, therefore we can trust them. Say what?
The Seyfarth Shaw associates who trawled through Ricky Le Blanc’s WhatsApp photo roll are still on stress leave, undergoing groundbreaking PTSD therapies in Switzerland.
Drinnan is always forming a view, and isn’t it a terrific expression? To form a view is to imply the erudite outworking of a sage. It is to say Ross stroked his chin behind his mahogany desk and were you his equal – respectfully – you’d see things the same way.
In truth, when Drinnan professes to have formed a view, he is verbally overcompensating for his tendentiousness; that is, for arriving at his desired conclusion quite in spite of the entire gamut of information available to him.
Former KPMG chief operating officer Eileen Hoggett. Alex Ellinghausen
KPMG eventually got around to those forensic searches, and they turned up Eileen Hoggett’s immortal email inviting a colleague to “sensitively” inspect confidential Lendlease documents stored in her office locker “without letting too many people know”. What followed at KPMG closely resembled the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones.
The 360-degree feedback on Allens’ performance here is wholly bipartisan. Labor Senator and inquiry chair Deb O’Neill compared the firm’s partners to Pulp Fictioncharacter Walter Wolf (played by my old mateHarvey Keitel). She wondered, “I don’t know how this system… allows lawyers to be paid to come in and allow their names to be used as investigators when what you’re being asked to do is something totally at odds with what ordinary Australians think is an investigation.”
“It’s pretty clear that there were manifest inadequacies,” said Liberal Senator Dave Sharma, “and you failed to take steps that I would think a regular investigator would take in the ordinary course of affairs. What assurance can we have that we should ever accept an Allens investigation of this sort again as credible and trustworthy?”
“I regard those comments as unfair and I disagree,” Drinnan protested, though fell silent for the first time this millennium when invited by Sharma to make his case.
Unlike in other types of legal work, rarely is the methodology of these investigations unmasked. The Parliament has done us all an enormous favour here by laying bare Allens’ incurious workmanship, which would otherwise have remained obscured by legal professional privilege. It alone had the power to rub out the large sightscreen Drinnan had wheeled into place.
Sightscreen attendant: Allens partner Ross Drinnan at a parliamentary inquiry in June. Getty
Allens’ work for KPMG is only the latest unedifying case study of law firms’ lucrative sideline in the dark art of workplace investigations. Crane your neck around corporate Australia and you will see a panoply of these contrivances, all directed at the pretence of being objective and thorough, and of providing moral cover under the most important cover of all: LPP. Yet we can all plainly see they are less inspector general than Inspector Gadget.
Seyfarth Shaw was once doing a roaring trade, brought in by the Fortescue board to investigate the behaviour of executive chairman Andrew Forrest (“None of the matters [raised by the complainant] were substantiated”) before investigating the conduct of Richard White for WiseTech’s board. The Seyfarth Shaw associates who trawled through Ricky Le Blanc’s WhatsApp photo roll are still on stress leave, undergoing groundbreaking PTSD therapies in Switzerland.
White threatened to sue WiseTech’s independent directors for defamation if they released the report, so the directors all resigned. Even the sanitised summary of Seyfarth Shaw’s findings included that White misled the board about his sexual relationships with both an employee and a supplier, and with the latter consummated a service contract for services that to this day remain unascertainable to anyone but him. Can you imagine the full version of the report?
Seyfarth Shaw made the rookie error of looking properly, and that’s the last time its phone will ever ring. Don’t they know the secret to success in this game is not to look at all? The boys at Allens must’ve looked at them askance, saying, Strip them of their practising certificates, they don’t have the ticker for this kind of work.
The game that’s being played here by Australian companies – and being played very well – is, Let’s look like we’re doing something… *ruffles papers*… let’s announce an investigation by a prestigious law firm. Meanwhile, they’ve isolated the complainant and cut off their income.
These companies know corporate whistleblowers are not your typical unfair dismissal types. They are people with the photo negatives of misconduct but also people with bills to pay. Their consciences have been activated but they are deep in lifestyle creep with their multimillion-dollar mortgages and school fees. So along comes Mr Wolf and says, Which of my oppressive deeds would you like to sign in lieu of my thorough investigation?
Sometimes it all goes to shit and you end up with a highly credible complainant like Super Retail Group’s general counsel Rebecca Farrell, who says, F--- it, I’m professional toast, Super Sally Pitkin’s cadre is seeking to crush me, but I’ve got nothing to lose, so I’m going to stand and fight.
Brett Heading of Hamilton Locke – Super Sally’s fellow grandee of the Australian Institute of Company Directors' Queensland chapter – conducted a thorough investigation into the multiple whistleblower complaints that CEO Anthony Heraghty was having an affair with HR boss Jane Kelly. The pair was exonerated in a jiffy and Super Retail then engaged in outrageously aggressive legal tactics against Farrell and her co-complainant Amelia Berczelly (may I humbly commend to you my column on this for Rampart).
Honestly, what the f--- would these lawyers know about investigating anything? They’re not hard-bitten old cops who assume everyone is lying, even the people paying them. They’ve hung out their shingle Workplace Investigations R Us and it’s raining cash, but they certainly don’t know how to interview people. They don’t know how or where to look. Their principal objective is keeping sweet with the people who commissioned them.
Heraghty was lying through his teeth and Sally Pitkin concluded her pitiful career as a laughing stock. The affair blew up the board and management team of a $3 billion company and handed it $30 million in legal expenses, including the fees of Super Retail’s legal advisers – wait for it – Ross Drinnan, Sonia Millen and the team at Allens. Who ya gonna call?
Get Allens on the phone: Corporate Travel Management chairman Ewen Crouch and founder Jamie Pherous. David Rowe
Then there’s Corporate Travel Management, chaired ingloriously by former Allens partner Ewen Crouch. The company has been devastated by a slowly unravelling fraud (about which I’ve previously said plenty), but never fear, Crouch is on the case. He’s been Corporate Travel’s chairman for seven and a half years, and was warned at the outset about the gremlins in the company’s financial accounts, but today is a new day. When its shares traded for the first time in 12 months on Thursday – itself a miracle – 86 per cent of their value was incinerated.
Like clockwork, Crouch has commissioned a governance review. Who ya gonna call? Asking which law firm conducted that review is like asking which consulting firm Jayne Hrdlicka just brought in to shadow-run her latest company (hint: it rhymes with Jayne).
Allens’ findings on Corporate Travel were a masterclass in euphemism and even gaslighting. “A genuine commitment to governance uplift was evident,” it found, when the exact opposite has been overtly true for years.
“There was a gap between governance on paper and governance in practice,” was my personal favourite, and what Allens was really saying there about its star alumnus is that he doesn’t know the difference between substance and form. Ewen needs a little uplift.
The open secret here is that lawyers doing governance reviews and workplace investigations are completely out of their lane. A numerate lawyer is a rare lawyer. One who understands accounting is rare, one with commercial acumen is rare, and Ewen Crouch has shown the nation in technicolour that he is not a rarity. There is a case to be made for lawyers in the boardroom, but Crouch is not supporting evidence.
The worst lawyers are myopically enslaved to the process at the expense of their solemn commitment to the administration of justice. They form many a view, respectfully, when, in fact, they’ve never really been there at all.
Law firms are labour hire firms with influence operations across the top. They trade influence in large corporations and they flog warm bodies. That’s the model. The idea that this qualifies them in any way to appraise governance or conduct forensic investigations or form a view on workplace culture is complete nonsense.
When chairman Chris Roberts conducted his own investigation at Amcor, he chose a new CEO in Ken MacKenzie. Illustration: David Rowe
Here’s a little piece of contrast: when the Amcor board learnt from a whistleblower that its CEO and Australasia boss were potentially implicated in a packaging cartel in 2004, newly installed chairman Chris Roberts took a weekend to get to the bottom of it. He personally verified what had gone on and decided immediately to clean house, to go to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and fall on its mercy.
Roberts and the board accepted the immediate resignations of the CEO and his lieutenant because there had to be a better option than the blokes allegedly running side-deals to juice Amcor’s margins. He rummaged around in the cupboard for a replacement, found this young fella named Ken MacKenzie, and the rest is history.
I’ve said this too many times to count, but when you boil it down, governance is judgement, which is the only thing company directors are being paid for yet the only thing they never want to be judged on.
That is the job. It involves a little bit of work, getting your elbows out, and even forming a view – not asking Ross Drinnan to form it for you.
ICE Skipped Basic Checks in Rush for Recruits, Whistle-Blower Says
The New York Times gift article: “In the wake of a hiring surge last summer, an official in charge of evaluating new recruits to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a dire warning.
The Trump administration, he wrote in a memo, was cutting corners, violating the law and fast-tracking unqualified, “improperly vetted” candidates into ICE’s ranks, part of a dangerous move that exposed the agency — and its law enforcement operations — to “grave national security risks.”
Citing an “unprecedented lowering of standards,” the career ICE official said that “systemic breakdowns” had allowed applicants to receive job offers before they had passed basic fingerprint, identity or credit checks in a preliminary vetting process. Political appointees had unjustly skirted background investigations and received national security eligibility.
The official, a unit chief who directly oversaw more than 100 employees who evaluated thousands of ICE applicants, was so troubled by what he saw that he outlined these concerns not to his superiors, but in a formal whistle-blower complaint to the Office of Inspector General in the Department of Homeland SecurityIn the complaint, he asked for an independent, outside investigation into the matter. He was later interviewed twice by officials with the inspector general’s office and his concerns have become part of an ongoing audit into vetting practices.
The complaint, which has not been previously reported, underscores the rising worries about the suitability — as well as the tactics — of scores of agents who have been rapidly deployed across the country within the last year. It also outlines the extent to which ICE weakened its standards, and points to dissension among the upper reaches of the agency as it was pressed last year to carry out President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The whistle-blower, a 17-year ICE veteran who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of his claims, said the agency had cut corners in its rush to fill the ranks. “We chose as an agency to be more convenient rather than thorough,” he said, describing the agency’s decision to reduce scrutiny of recruits in order to expedite hires. “By doing so, there was a potential to put lives at risk and to jeopardize national security.” The whistle-blower complaint was obtained via a public records request. The concerns within it broadly mirror those made by other current and former ICE employees who said that the agency had abandoned best practices as it rapidly scaled up. An ICE lawyer who worked at the agency’s training center resigned earlier this year and went public as a whistle-blower, citing concerns about a “deficient, defective and broken” training program…”
Flock Taught Cops How to Surveil No Kings Protesters
404 Media: “Flock taught cops how they could surveil the No Kings protests and “small parades” using a mix of Flock’s technology and law enforcement’s own databases in a webinar last year. As Flock publicly downplays the power of its automated license plate camera network and highlights its use to solve violent crime, the company’s seemingly endless trove of webinars, training sessions, and blog posts show it offers far more invasive capabilities.
In the webinar, Flock’s director of market management Caity Peak explains how real time crime centers — which are police surveillance centers that utilize Flock cameras and other surveillance cameras — can be used for emergency response, but can also be used to surveil “established events” like 4th of July fireworks displays, parades, bike races, Mardi Gras, and protests. The webinar shows just how routine the idea of always-on surveillance has become, and how casually it is used during extremely innocuous events.
Peak explains that police can use FlockOS, a software platform that combines Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), drones, gunshot detectors, 911 data, and other surveillance cameras (including ones Flock does not own) into a “single pane of glass” or single piece of software to look at various types of surveillance in one place during both emergencies and relatively mundane events in a city or town…”
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Our database is connected to the Semantic Scholar Paper Corpus(licensed under ODC-BY). Their team has done an amazing job of compiling hundreds of millions of published papers across many scientific fields.
