Tax professors and fact checking

Law Prof Blog Traffic Rankings

Below are the updated quarterly traffic rankings by page views of the Top 50 blogs edited by law professors for the April 1, 2013 - March 31, 2014 period, as well as the percentage change in traffic from the prior 12-month period.  As I previously announced, in response to several requests and in light of the continued degrading of Site Meter, I am now including the more accurate, stable Google Analytics data in these quarterly traffic rankings (marked with an asterisk).

Rank	Blog	Page Views	Change
1	InstaPundit*	137,555,358	n/a
2	Legal Insurrection*	16,085,516	+9.1%
3	Althouse	15,273,957	-23.2%
4	TaxProf Blog*	12,506,717	+264.4%
5	Volokh Conspiracy*	10,123,791	-14.6%
6	Leiter Reports: Philosophy	5,561,484	-2.9%
7	Patently-O*	5,029,535	+41.2%
8	Hugh Hewitt	3,705,278	-46.1%
9	PrawfsBlawg	1,922,508	-3.0%
10	Lawfare*	1,802,330	+62.2%
11	The Incidental Economist*	1,801,825	+42.8%
12	Faculty Lounge	1,360,941	+2.0%

Jenny Jones, the Green party's sole peer, has asked Theresa May, the home secretary, to investigate Cambridgeshire police after two of its officers visited a blogger who tweeted "fact checks" about Ukip policies.

In a letter to May, Jones said the incident raised interesting questions of how to deal with relatively new crimes committed on social media and how police react to them. Tweets and fact czeching

Budget Night: The Wisest Fools who Lie About Truth

"As my muse, I had those prisoners of Stalag Luft III. Their ingenuity and courage was outrageous. So you escape a prison camp, you escape obscurity, you escape genre and convention. It’s a prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. Most of us are prisoners of something."
—Andrew Steinmetz on This Great Escape (Montreal Gazette) via 5 year old blog - Whispering Gums as at May MMXIV AD

A man [a person!] only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people. – Will Rogers

Joe Hockey has sought to head off voters’ anger about higher petrol taxes and the deficit levy, arguing that his first budget would not break any promises because the Coalition had not said it would “never change a tax”.

Budget will not break any promises on taxes;  Axing of jobs another certainty in life

Everything that’s not you wants you dead. Outlaws, corrupt pollies, angry gamblers, disgruntled prostitutes, wild animals, the weather, disease—hell, even a trip to the dentist means taking your f****** life in your hands...

We are reading for confirmation of ourselves rather than to challenge ourselves and I think that is a real danger.

For those of you who aren't yet in the habit of checking in every Tuesday for weekly updates on the newly revampedBITSblog, we had a pretty cool feature this week. We teamed up with Chad Post from Open Letter and Three Percent to showcase single iconic or otherwise representative sentences from all 25 books longlisted for the2014 Best Translated Book Award. The sentences were posted unattributed, with embedded links to the books from which they were culled, so that readers could judge the quality of the writing and perhaps be moved to seek out a title they otherwise would not have gravitated towards. To read the compiled sentences click here. And if that wasn't cool enough, we were very pleased to learn in the immediate wake of the post that The Best Translated Book Award had just won the LBF International Book Industry Excellence Award! 

"As my muse, I had those prisoners of Stalag Luft III. Their ingenuity and courage was outrageous. So you escape a prison camp, you escape obscurity, you escape genre and convention. It’s a prisoner’s duty to attempt escape. Most of us are prisoners of something ..."
—Andrew Steinmetz on This Great Escape (Montreal Gazette)
The history of translation is full of big, bizarre ventures. Behold The Dictionary of Untranslatables – 150 contributors, 400 entries, 11 years in the making.  Grand translation schemes always flirt with absurdity. The mighty Septuagint—the first-ever translation of the Hebrew Bible, into Greek—is named for the 70 (or possibly 72) learned Alexandrian Jews allegedly pressed into service by King Ptolemy II back in the third century BCE. The King James Bible, named for its cagey sponsor (“the wisest fool in Christendom”), was the work of the 47 forgotten Anglican churchmen he deputized. The urge lives on today in Google Translate, whose gurus crunch their algorithmic way through endless error; the Phraselator folks, whose handheld gizmo is mainly used by the U.S. military and by Native American tribes; and SIL International, with its 5,000-plus missionary linguists busy rendering scripture into every human language. Absurdity

Black Tuesday: Democracy & Spectre of Marxism

THERE was a delicious juxtaposition at NSW parliament last week. While corrupt former Labor minister Tony Kelly was using his parliamentary pass to enter the building and gain access to a Labor frontbencher, Ron Hoenig to spend an hour at the bar with him, parliament’s presiding officers were putting in place the toughest restrictions I’ve seen on the media in my nine years working in state parliament.

Legislative Council President Don Harwin and Speaker Shelley Hancock are enforcing rules which state every cameraman, sound ­recordist, photographer or ­reporter who visits the state parliament even once a year must get a $22 annual pass...

Parliament is a bit of a club. Politicians from both sides protect each other from scrutiny on occasion and are concerned about skeletons in their own closets.t

NSW Parliamentary doors

Capitalism’s contradictions mean that the system will fail, says David Harvey. “The longer it goes on, the less likely that it will be a peaceful transition”... Interesting Times Ahead

The education of Eleanor Marx was conducted at her father’s knee. She was Karl’s creation, though a formidable intellectual in her own right... Each Marx Made A Mark

Myths & The Last Man at Nuremberg

If you think people in your life are normal, then you undoubtedly have not spent any time getting to know the abnormal side of them. 

~ Shannon L. Alder (bohemian observer)

Myth and fairy tale have definitely returned. First of all there’s a generation who have grown up on Dungeons and Dragons, Tolkien and Narnia, and now, Philip Pullman and Harry Potter. I haven’t read theTwilight stories so I probably shouldn’t talk about them, but I have watched one of the films, and it seems to me that it’s an example of the problem of attenuation: instead of getting richer, these stories are being told in a less rich way, and the vampires are being tamed! 

As for Biblical stories, it’s true that the Bible is probably even less read now than the Arabian Nights. When I was young I learned a lot of the stories from the Bible and classical mythology through paintings. I like wandering around looking at paintings, and I always have.

Homer or Imrich. Nobody now reads Homer in ancient Greek. There are people who learn it and can do it with a crib—I can, just—but only slogging through it in a total maimed way. But I know Homer from many translations and new versions. I love Alice Oswald’s poem Memorial, which is a version of the Iliad. It’s beautiful. And someone like Anne Carson has done strange, echo-chamber responses. Carson is probably one of the few people alive who do actually read ancient Greek fluently. She’s exceptional.

When I get messages about conferences and workshops that are going on, I see many of us are also obsessed with the question of translation, and increasingly curious about the idea that there’s no authentic text. Because, to go back to Shakespeare, although we’re nearly agreed on a definitive Hamlet, the fact is that you can’t really experience Hamlet except on the stage. And when you see it, it will be different every time. Even the same production is different every time. I think that we are increasingly accepting this instability, and the rich metamorphic quality of an artefact.

 Mythographer

The Last Man at Nuremberg

Via the Atlantic, by Emma Green: The Last Man at Nuremberg The life of 95-year-old Benjamin Ferencz, the only living prosecutor from the war-crime trials that followed the Holocaust

“Benjamin Ferencz was 27 when the Einsatzgruppen trial began in 1947. There were 22 defendants, all men, all members of the German SS. “One of the counsel has characterized this trial as the biggest murder trial in history,” the military tribunal wrote. “In this case, the defendants are not … charged with sitting in an office hundreds and thousands of miles away from the slaughter.… These men were in the field actively superintending, controlling, directing, and taking an active part in the bloody harvest.” Put simply, the Einsatzgruppenwere exterminators: Their squads traveled to towns throughout Eastern Europe, rounding up Jews and shooting them with mechanized efficiency. Some mass graves were filled with hundreds of bodies; others, thousands. Otto Ohlendorf, Paul Blobel, and almost two dozen others led these divisions of Hitler’s army; after the war, they were indicted for crimes against humanity. Benjamin Ferencz was 27, and he was the chief prosecutor responsible for convicting 22 men on trial for murdering 1 million men, women, and children…”

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers

"The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill."

~ W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up

“Very few writers thank their mothers for keen editorial insight; I'm happy to be the exception.” 

God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers ...

“A mother is always the beginning. She is how things begin.”
― Amy Tan, The Bonesetter's Daughter

Corporate Whistleblowers: From Gaijin to Chief

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." - ~ Uncle George [Orwell]

Christopher Joye on Keith Alexander unplugged:

The just-retired long-time NSA chief, Gen. Keith Alexander, recently traveled to Australia to give a remarkably long and wide-ranging interview with an extremely sycophantic “interviewer” with The Australian Financial Review. The resulting 17,000-word transcript and accompanying article form a model of uncritical stenography journalism, but Alexander clearly chose to do this because he is angry, resentful, and feeling unfairly treated

Whistleblowers can be difficult people and starkly uncomfortable colleagues. They may act from a number of motives, not all of them noble ...

Between rock ... & abuses of power

Michael Woodford champions a move to protect those who expose corporate wrongs.

He was the first gaijin ''salaryman'' who rose through the ranks to become the chief executive of a major Japanese company.

Now he has thrown his weight behind a push to improve corporate governance, not just in Japan or elsewhere in north Asia, where he has first-hand experience of the problems, but more broadly by seeking more support for whistleblowers, and also for more women directors to help change corporate cultures. But within a matter of months he was out the door - and then he blew the whistle on almost $US2 billion in corporate malfeasance. Sunlight is corporate disinfectant;

Latest evidence presented to the PAC by current HMRC chief executive, Lin Homer, shows that the HMRC rode roughshod over the Public Interest Disclosure Act and instead used RIPA legislation to obtain Mba’s belongings, details of his emails, Internet search records and phone records including those of his then wife. The legislation was used after initial searches by investigators into Mba’s computer hard drive and email traffic had revealed no apparent link to the leak UK Power over the Powerless

The potential rewards of exposing corporate wrongdoing have ballooned in America, where whistleblowers can now claim up to 30% of fines imposed. Bent executives can be forgiven for feeling that the only insider they can trust not to spill the beans is the company lawyer, bound as he is by strict ethics rules and the principle of “attorney-client privilege” Corporate whistlebolowers

It is little wonder that it was an Australian, Julian Assange, who set up the world's first secrecy leaking website, WikiLeaks. And it should be equally unsurprising that the world's greatest whistleblower is a US citizen, Edward Snowden.

The terms whistleblower and leaker are mistakenly used interchangeably. The difference is both large and instructive. The whistleblower makes a public stand. The leaker remains anonymous The silence of those lambs Leaks & whistleblowing in Australia

Kickstarting democracy

"Everything is what it is: liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience."

~ Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty"

Old institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts are giving way to new ones, like Kickstarter. But shall we trust culture to a digital “democracy”?...Charter of 2014 ~ MMXIV this time global

At the edge of anthropology is a push beyond the human, beyond the idea that meaning must originate with humans. In this world, a forest thinks ~ Forest thinks ....