Boxing Day Holy Season: Hum If You Don’t Know the Words

Without mentioning Christmas, Eva Brann distills its spirit in eleven words: “If you love a child, the horrors of history come alive.” Becoming a mother or father changes everything, or ought to, especially in an age like ours. Suddenly we are vulnerable in a new and absolute way, for this is a world in which many revel in the murder of children. Selfishness is no longer an option. Petty sacrifices and irritations are not ignored but happily embraced Vulnerable People ...

Cameras capture never-before-seen footage of wild crows (and kangaroo) building tools WaPo

Poland’s constitutional crisis goes international Politico

Socialists reject deal with Spanish PMFT

Boxing Kangaroo

Economists Say ‘Bah! Humbug!’ to Christmas Presents WSJ

How the Nazis co-opted ChristmasBusiness Insider

The Tedium Twins Harpers (GU). A classic from 1982.

The Huron Carol Sic Semper Tyrannis (Carolinian). Xmas in Vietnam.

DC’s Hottest Christmas Gift This Year is Weed Alternet. You can’t sell it. But you can give it away! A new — and welcome — experience in the Beltway, I guess…

Malls Reel as Web Roars With Holiday Shopping WSJ

Netflix has built socks that read your body to understand when you fall asleep, and then automatically pause your Netflix show.   Big Socks

John Gallagher, who has reportedly been killed by a suicide bomber, was one of about a dozen Canadians to have volunteered to fight alongside Kurdish forces battling. Facebook  ‘We are all on the front lines’: Canadian reportedly killed fighting ISIL wrote essay about why he went to war 

 We are all on the front lines

We Love Lists especially at Christmas Meals

As usual Christmas time, we are sharing stories at Nanny June's with traditional roast and old fashioned storytelling ...

First, always remember that either a story carries love and mystery, or it carries nothing.  Second, outside of the broad themes determined by the story sticks, the trick is to make up everything out of whole cloth. Third, a story must not have a clean resolution.  That way you will keep your audience coming back for more.  Finally – and this is the most important thing – our craft demands discipline and hard work; a fertile imagination is not enough ...

Alègre! Alègre! Alègre! Que nostre Segne nous alègre!
S’un autre an sian pas mai, moun Dieu fugen pas men!

 Barry Sullivan (Loyola-Chicago), A Book that Shaped Your World: Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

The 2015 Hater’s Guide To The Williams-Sonoma Catalog Adequate Man. Scott: ” I Think You’re Enough of a Scrooge to Appreciate This.”

The biggest Pinocchios of 2015 Washington Post 

The Year in Guilty-Pleasure Movies: The Most Delightful Flops and Worst Trainwrecks of the Year Salon 

20 Best Lists of 2015 Rolling Stone

The 10 Best Lists of 2015 Vulture. The meta! It b-u-r-n-n-n-s-s!

2015’s Best TV: I Hate Top Ten Lists, but O.K., Fine, Here’s a List The New Yorker

What a year: The Top 10 moments in politics of 2015 McClatchy

Four Readings On Health Philanthropy: A Holiday Potpourri Health Affairs

“The point of the tale is this: Most people are irritating and selfish, especially around Christmastime. They march around in gaudy cheerfulness, braying good wishes to everyone within earshot, repeating the tiresome pieties of the season—Happy Holidays!—and pestering friends and relations and employers for all sorts of favors and boons and cash gifts."  The Wall Street Journal 

A Point of View: Have yourself a very Jewish Christmas BBC

People think that because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they cannot include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that.

— Anthony Powell, born on this date in 1905

Eve of Christmas: Memories of 13 Dishes Beyond Vrbov

“‘You see, the way I look at it, there are only two kinds of books: bedside and wastebasket. Either I love a writer fervently, or throw him out entirely.’

“‘A bit severe, isn’t it? And a bit dangerous. Don’t forget that the whole of Russian literature is the literature of one century and, after the most lenient eliminations, takes up no more than three to three and a half thousand printed sheets, and scarcely one-half of this is worthy of the bookshelf, to say nothing of the bedside table. With such quantitative scantiness we must resign ourselves to the fact that our Pegasus is piebald, that not everything about a bad writer is bad, and not all about a good one good.”
~ Vladimir Nabokov, The Gift (trans. Michael Scammell “with the collaboration of the author,” courtesy of Patrick Kurp)

“This is one of the disadvantages of wine and cognac. It makes a man mistake words for thoughts.”
~ Vaclav Havel with assistance of Chris and MD at Lidka's place during Vecera Vigilia aka Wigilia ...

Would Jesus Celebrate Christmas? VICE

History of the Christmas card

How a ‘thoroughly depressing’ Cold River ... Joni Mitchell song became a Christmas classic WaPo

I find it difficult to believe in Father Christmas. If he is the jolly old gentleman he is always said to be, why doesn’t he behave as such? How is it that the presents go so often to the wrong people? This is no personal complaint; I speak for the world. The rich people get the rich presents, and the poor people get the poor ones. That may not be the fault of Father Christmas; he may be under contract for a billion years to deliver all presents just as they are addressed; but how can he go on smiling? He must long to alter all that. We find it difficult to believe in Father Christmas ...

Marginalia's moment. The current fad for curating ink-and-pencil scribblings isn't mere nostalgia. It’s a mournful expression of something deeper ...

“I am very cold.”

“The parchment is hairy.”

“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.” And, the Vermont student gets a barroom buddy: “Now I’ve written the whole thing: for Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

Wine Cup Flower Malchkin the Botanist Joseph Banks

Huge plant that stinks of rotting flesh is set to flower for the first time in a DECADE Daily Mail

However stiff they may seem on the show, the cast of Downton Abbey can let down its hair and have some fun. Last Christmas, they put together a fun parody episode, where, borrowing from It’s a Wonderful Life, they asked us to imagine what daily life at the Abbey would look like if Lady Grantham spent her days cavorting with George Clooney rather than Lord Grantham.

“The Christmas tree is up in the Altmetric office and it’s Top 100 time again. We’ve queried the Altmetric database to find out which academic articles got the most attention from the mainstream media, blogs, Wikipedia and social networks, as well as amongst a more academic audience in post-publication peer-review forums and research highlights. Data was collected from the Altmetric database on November 16 2015 and a downloadable file can be found on figshare.  More information on how the Altmetric score is calculated can be found on the Altmetric support site.”

Lawyer’s advice: bosses face legal risk if they let their employees join in #ElderlyChristmasSongsTwitter levity [Jon Hyman]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was born in December  1918.

“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

From The Gulag Archipelago

– Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn (Dec. 11, 1918 – Aug. 3, 2008)

Who Are You? What Do Birds Want - Tracing Moravia Freud

On Dhillon's Tenager Day Hemingway observed that writing was easy:

All you have to do is sit down and bleed.

… Writing Is Not Hard Work | BREVITY's Nonfiction Blog

Thomas Mann wrote that "a writer is someone for whom writing comes harder than for anybody else." But it doesn't involve any heavy lifting.
The December issue of Words without Borders focuses on 'Knowing the Unknowable: Writing from Madagascar' -- great to see, since it's little-seen -- as well as a look at: 'After Inger Christensen: New Danish Poetry'. 

A BLIND mystic who reportedly foretold 9/11, the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear spill and the birth of ISIS also made dire predictions for 2016 and beyond. A Bulgarian clairvoyant who died 20 years ago warned of the rise of ISIS by claiming there would be a 'great Muslim war' in 2016, it has been reported. Baba Vanga died in 1996 at the age of 85 and was known as the 'Nostradamus of the Balkans' because of her success rate which was supposedly as high as 85 per cent. Here’s what blind prophet Baba Vanga predicted for 2016 and beyond: It’s not good 

American writer and philosopher Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) once said, “The world is moving so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.” At the time I have no doubt he was right, but if only he could have experienced the world now!

A chart that’s been doing the rounds on Twitter illustrates just how fast our world is moving, comparing the time to reach 50 million users between different types of mediums. In a nutshell: 

• 38 years for radio
• 13 years for television
• 4 years for internet
• 3.5 years for Facebook
• 9 months for Twitter
•  6 months for Instagram
• 35 days for Angry Birds 
• 1 day for MEdia Dragon ...

TaxGrrrl, How Answering A Simple Question Makes You An Easy Target For Identity Thieves

"Operation Drax" - Piles of fake "Medicare cards," drivers licences and credit cards are evidence of the increasing sophistication of   identity crime, Australia's most common crime.
The bogus documents, $60,000 in cash, printers and laminators were seized as police made four arrests in Sydney last week. The men were arrested when police raided six properties in Sydney suburbs Campsie, Carlton, Waterloo, Homebush West and Parramatta last week.
Police-chargefour men over highquality identity theft

Blue Tit Bird Asking Itself "Who Are You? "

"What if I told you that I put my whole life into Tintin?” asked Hergé shortly before he died in 1983. The man who revolutionized the cartoon strip and influenced the work of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol is the subject of a nice little exhibition at Somerset House,Tintin: Hergé’s masterpiece (admission free, until January 31, 2016). There is also a book to accompany the exhibition (published by Rizzoli). Tintintin

"One ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs,” Luttwak told Robin. “Because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency – love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."

As a playwright, Arthur Miller was confident of his talent.  As an essayist, he played interested amateur. It was an act ...

While we have characters like Marise in politics democracy is in a healthy state ....

Meet Marise Payne Australia"s first female defence  minister

Interesting NYT piece on how Israel is trying to restore domestic safety.  This story is an excellent example of insightful reporting, analytics, behavioral understanding, and real world relevance, all rolled up into one piece.  

“Even poetry, Sweet Patron Muse forgive me the words, is not what music is,” the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay exclaimed in a letter. “Without music life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche proclaimed in contemplating the singular power of music. 

A blur of a waterfall on moss-laced boulders

"Am I a zealot, a terrorist, out on my own limb?" asks Gordon Lish. "Yes, with a vengeance!" At least when editing other people’s writing ... 

What is an essay, anyway? An argument with a thesis?  Or “a way of entering and writing about disputed space?" 

Vibrations from “ridge-like” BMW motorcycle seat said to have had unwanted stimulative effect on male user [Marin Independent Journal]

Facebook’s open-sourcing of AI hardware is the start of the deep-learning revolution ars technica

Meet the lobbyists who work for the world’s worst human rights abusers. Slate 

How Martin Shkreli, Teen Wolf of Wall Street, Thrived New York Times

JPMorgan pays $307m over disclosure flaws Financial Times. Fraud is now “disclosure flaws”? Who came up with that one? 

Is anyone trying to set up some poor dragon with disclosure laws ...

Tales of Two Tax Amnesties

Greece has offered 11 "last chance" tax amnesties since 1978, which has demoralized compliant taxpayers without increasing tax revenue to expected levels, according to Tonia Pediaditaki, a special legal officer for the Greek government's Consumers' & Environment. Greek Tax Amnesties Erode Trust but Don't Dramatically Increase Revenue

Italy to Get $4.4 Billion in Proceeds from Tax Amnesty

India's offshore tax amnesty recovers just $575 mln - government

South Korea Amnesty for offshore tax cheats

Australian Taxation Office's tax amnesty to dig up $4bn stash

Thousands of students will be left in limbo next year after a private Sydney college had its registration cancelled by the federal government Mercedes of Training Colleges AIPE etc

DEFAULT ASSESSMENTS USING PRIVILEGED DOCUMENTS UPHELD: COMMISSIONER WINS APPEAL
FCT v Donoghue

Verrender how-our tax take has been royally scrooged

Martin Lobel (Lobel Novins & Lamont, Washington, D.C.; Chair, Tax Analysts' Board of Directors), The IRS Is in Crisis and the Tax Community Needs to Help, 149 Tax Notes 1407 (Dec. 14, 2015): We are on the edge of a precipice. Unless those who know the importance of the IRS take action, we are on the verge of losing the respect and, indeed, fear of the IRS that makes it such an effective revenue raiser. And, without sufficient revenue, we don't have a government that can meet our essential needs.

Time and time again we hear that government departments don’t have the data or information that they need to plan or evaluate their activities properly, despite them being responsible for setting up these projects or programmes in the first place

~ Meg Hillier, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee

• HMRC don’t prosecute the right people – and almost no one for corporate tax fraud 
• The National Audit Office fails to ask the right questions of HMRC on the tax gap 
• HMRC should do more to tackle tax fraud, says official report  
• Callers to HMRC helplines 'wait average of 38 minutes for an answer'  
• HMRC focuses on low-value tax prosecutions  
• Which of Australia's biggest companies are not paying tax  
• ATO report shows nearly 600 big companies paid no tax in 2013-14  
• Capitalism is running rings round democracy  
• Governments for Sale - Revealed: how Google enlisted members of US Congress it bankrolled to fight $6bn EU antitrust case  

Mates

Seattle Times, How Microsoft Moves Profits Offshore to Cut its Tax Bill

Robert Wood, #1 Tax Lady Found Guilty Of 27 Tax Felonies, Could Face 131 Years. “#1 Tax Lady” isn’t the same tax lady as former TV IRS debt settlement figure Roni Deutch

Richard Phillips, Tax Wars: 3 Lessons about Tax Policy from the Star Wars Universe (Tax Policy Blog). “The Star Wars universe has problems with corporate tax enforcement and shell companies.”

News from the Profession. Big 4 Firms Still Getting Used to This Whole Regulation Thing (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern)

Jim Maule, You Mean That Tax Refund Isn’t for Me? Really?. Judge Judy deals with a tax refund spent by an ex-girlfriend.

CFO, Socially Responsible Companies Pay Lower Taxes:
A new study debunks the common notion that companies with high CSR ratings do not practice aggressive tax avoidance.

Ireland: Tax expert and high-profile doctors on latest defaulters' list

Jonathan Barry Forman (Oklahoma) & Roberta F. Mann(Oregon), Making the Internal Revenue Service Work, 17 Fla. Tax Rev. 725 (2015)

We warned lawmakers about this renewed plunge into law enforcement for profit, but did they listen? “Congress Orders IRS To Use Private Debt Collection Companies” [Kelly Phillips Erb, Robert Wood, both Forbes] Earlier here, here, etc.

Who’s investigating fake Chinese goods?  Fake investigators

Bloggers are right to draw attention to the tax dodging practices of multinational companies (UK tax fraud costs government £16bn a year, audit report says, 17 December). But this staggering sum is dwarfed by the $200bn the IMF estimates developing countries lose to corporate tax avoidance every year.

Expected vs. unexpected innovations

News from the Profession. Don’t Worry Tax People, You Have a Lame Hashtag, Too (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern).

Every Bride dreams of this. Tax Profs Christine Allie  And Stuart Lazar Find Love At AALS, Marry At Tax Court (TaxProf)

Why deficit hawks are missing in action on budget, tax bills Christian Science Monitor

News from the Profession. Not Even ISIS Immune to Shortage of Accounting and Finance Talent (Caleb Newquist, Going Concern)

Wineries that ship to customers nationwide are among the latest targets of a Chicago attorney who has developed a lucrative freelance enforcement niche. Steven Diamond and his firm of Schad, Diamond and Shedden “have filed hundreds of suits against various companies in industries such as cookware, flowers and motorsports” and more recently beverage makers under “an Illinois law that requires businesses to collect sales taxes for the state, not only on what they sell, but on shipping-and-handling charges. A whistleblower rule allows anyone within the state to sue in the name of Illinois and collect any recovered funds.” [Wine Spectator] While a number of other states also tax shipping charges, Illinois authorities, unable to agree on how to interpret a relevant decision by their state’s high court, have given conflicting guidance on when taxes are owed. [Wines and Vines, Tom Wark, Schiff Hardin,WTAX] P.S. Related on the practice of tax farming in the Roman Empire and pre-Revolutionary France, and latter-day parallels, here, here, and here.

Kristin Hickman (Minnesota), Exploring the 'How' of Tax Legislation (Jotwell), reviewing:

• Michael Doran (Virginia), Tax Legislation in the Contemporary U.S. Congress, 67 Tax L. Rev. 555 (2014)
• Rebecca M. Kysar (Brooklyn), The ‘Shell Bill’ Game: Avoidance and the Origination Clause, 91 Wash. U. L. Rev 659 (2014)

Much of tax scholarship—past and present—focuses on the “what” of taxation: the substantive content of the tax laws, and what that content is or ought to be. As Leigh Osofsky recently observed in a delightful series of posts on PrawfsBlawg (see here, here, here, here, and here), a growing trend in tax scholarship considers tax administration, which one might describe as the “how” of taxation, or at least part of it. A separate, but related, strain of tax scholarship concerns the “how” of taxation from a different perspective, that of the tax legislative process. Two recent articles published last year offer interesting insights into this aspect of taxation: Michael Doran’s Tax Legislation in the Contemporary U.S. Congress, and Rebecca Kysar’s The ‘Shell Bill’ Game: Avoidance and the Origination Clause.

*8 Jaw-Dropping Tax Havens of the Filthy Rich  

*Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses Daily Sabah

What The Land Down Under is Worth

The gods seem to be conspiring against us as so called progress (different kind of progress) would seem as irresistible as arthritis. We are as helpless before its unrolling as a badger before a bulldozer...

What kind of weather makes Australians happy, or not :-)

IBISWorld: Australia’s total resources in mid-2015 were estimated to be worth $13.5 trillion, over eight times our GDP in 2014-15. After allowing for foreign liabilities of $3.0 trillion, our net assets were $10.5 trillion, or around $1.1 million per household. What Australia is Worth 

Top 10 countries to live in the world Norway and Australia

"INXS walked the streets of Frenchs Forest in their teenage years and Michael Hutchence lived a few doors away from my house."
Seven reasons why I love living in Antipodean Frenchs Forest

Canadian company sells cans of fresh air to China WMUR

Tassie Tulips

Politics and lipstick. An explosion of new cosmetics coincided with revolutionary demands for women's rights. Coincidence?  You are worth it 

“No author, I think, is deserving of much censure for vanity if, taking down one of his ten-year-old books, he exclaims: `Great Heavens, did I write as well as that then?’ for the implication always is that one does not any longer write so well and few are so envious as to censure the complacencies of an extinct volcano.”

Ford Madox Ford (unlike Carlos Ford did not stutter) is seldom given credit for possessing a vigorous sense of humor, but the decrescendo of that final phrase is a minor masterpiece of comedy. When I speak of envying my youth, I mean my ignorance before the world and the craft of writing, and the momentum it produced. I was a college dropout with few prospects, scared and naïve, and having a wonderful time editing a newspaper. Apprenticing one’s self is risky, but I blundered my way into competence. To paraphrase the auto mechanic quoted above, “I really like writing.” In his final book, The March of Literature (1938), Ford described himself as “an old man mad about writing.” If envy can be benign, I’m envious of that young man who was mad about writing. In The Rambler #183, published on this date in 1751, Dr. Johnson refers to envy as “a stubborn weed of the mind.” My favorite flower is the dandelion.

The Conversation: The government had acknowledged the need for Australia to transition its economy, but research from Tufts University suggests we have stalled. While we have achieved a high level of progress towards becoming a digital economy in the past, we are at risk of falling behind. Australia’s innovation problem explained in 10 charts


Productivity Commission: This report was released on 7 December 2015 and examines the domestic and international barriers to Australian service exports, with a focus on tourism, education, financial, professional, information technology and Service Exports: Research report
 Innovation statement: PM Bondi Iceberg Swimmer Malcolm Turnbull calls for 'ideas boom' as he unveils $1b vision for Australia's future

ABC, 7/12/15. The Federal Government will spend almost $1.1 billion in the next four years to promote business-based research, development and innovation.

See:

*Driving innovation through procurement, cyber security and open data – PM media release

*National Innovation and Science Agenda – PM media release

*National Innovation and Science Agenda – webpage

*Tax incentives for investors

*Insolvency laws reform

*PM&C contributes four key components to the Ideas Boom - DPMC

Despite economic challenges,new business births in Australia are outpacing the global average,with the number of new companies created last year jumping 41% since 2010, according to a new study by UHY, the international accounting and consultancy network.

Australia powers ahead in global growth league for new business creation

Size matters: just how big is Australia’s government? 

 
Sharing economy behemoth Uber is partnering with Australia's leading peer-to-peer lender SocietyOne to provide existing and potential drivers with loans to buy new cars, as the car-booking company looks to ramp up its workforce to put further pressure on the taxi industry

Uber partners with SocietyOne to deliver car loans to its drivers

Managing Compliance with Visa Conditions
ANAO, Dec 2015. The objective of the audit was to assess the effectiveness of the Department of Immigration and Border Protection’s management of compliance with visa conditions.

MH17 CORONER CONTRADICTS HIMSELF, IGNORES AUSTRALIAN FORENSIC EVIDENCE, RULES IN FAVOUR OF DUTCH SAFETY BOARD Dancing with Bears