Called Fringe Whistleblower

It is believed to be the first time a majority government (Christopher Pyne blames stuff up for parliament vote loss) has lost a vote on the floor of the House in more than 50 years. Shock as Turnbull government loses three votes on floor of House of Representatives (once every 50 years event)

Sam Dastyari has pointed to his attendance at a Chinese film festival to justify using taxpayer funds to campaign for Labor, even though MPs are banned from using their travel perks for political work. Fresh questions ...
Sam Dastyari contradicted Labor policy backed China's position in sea dispute at event with donor

It looks like the United States isn’t the only country to have credentialism and corruption problems in its universities; or too few jobs chasing too much student debt...

Leith van Onselen is an economist and has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury, and Goldman Sachs. Originally published at MacroBusiness

How a toothless US watchdog, FinCEN, has largely ignored money laundering via Bitcoin and other digital currencies.
Liberty Reserve bitcoin

Federal investigators have now confirmed the findings of an Eyewitness News investigation  that created a firestorm for the Internal Revenue Service. The report, conducted by the IRS’s own Inspector General, calls on the agency to quickly reverse a secret policy -- exposed by 13 Investigates – that impacts millions of people. In its newly-released report, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) says the IRS could easily detect more than a million taxpayers were victims of employment-related identity theft, but the agency decided to keep that identity theft a secret rather than notify the victims.  
The 32-page document, titled “Processes Are Not Sufficient to Assist Victims of Employment-Related Identity Theft,” says the IRS’s controversial policy “can cause significant burden to innocent taxpayers, including the incorrect computation of taxes based on income that does not belong to them.” It also says “without proper notification, taxpayers are likely unaware that they are victims and will not know the additional steps they should take to protect themselves from financial harm.”

SEC Takes Victory Lap for Pathetic Performance of Whistleblower Program by  Jerri-Lynn Scofield, who has worked as a securities lawyer and a derivatives trader. She now spends most of her time in India and other parts of Asia researching a book about textile artisans. She also writes regularly about legal, political economy, and regulatory topics for various consulting clients and publications, as well as writes occasional travel pieces for The National (http://www.thenational.ae) SEC Takes Victory Lap for Pathetic Performance of Whistleblower Program

*Hungarian born George Soros’s campaign to elect better prosecutors 

Tax wars are looming and the US has fired a shot across the EU's bows

 HMRC secured 13 offshore specific prosecutions since 2009

Cookie Monster Searches Deep Within mHimself and Asks: Is Me Really Monster?

How the super-rich are making their homes ‘invisible’ FT


Don’t fall for tax identity theft tricks, even especially if ‘Revenue Agent Koskinen’ calls you (Kay Bell)

Exclusive: SWIFT discloses more cyber thefts, pressures banks on security Reuters

Tax Analysts reports: Impersonation Scams Making Public Wary of Actual IRS Agents ($link):

An unintended consequence of criminals posing as IRS employees in order to scam taxpayers is that actual IRS employees enforcing tax laws are often not taken seriously by taxpayers, according to Darren Guillot, director (field collection), IRS Small Business/Self-Employed Division.
Speaking August 25 at the IRS Nationwide Tax Forum in National Harbor, Maryland, Guillot said IRS revenue agents often encounter resistance from taxpayers who do not believe the agents work for the Service. “I have my employees being detained by police because they think we’re fakes because the perpetrators of these heinous crimes, these impersonators, are so darn good at what they do,” he said.

The economics of cyberextortion.  Piddling returns, maybe the cost is low too

UBS whistleblower exposes ‘political prostitution’ all the way up to President Obama International Business Times

Jim Maule, Would You Report Your Neighbor’s Unregistered Vehicle? “Because it is so close to Washington, D.C., Fairfax County experiences a high residential turnover rate. So to keep up with the influx of vehicles that are not registered, the county invites residents to report vehicles not bearing Virginia license plates”

“Law Firm Sues 20-Year-Old Waitress Over Unflattering Yelp, Facebook Reviews” [Meagan Flynn, Houston Press]

How Big Alcohol Is About to Get Rich Off California Weed Politico

Don’t let anyone tell you that our country is weak. We’re not. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t have what it takes. We do. And most of all, don’t believe anyone who says: “I alone can fix it.” Those were actually Donald Trump’s words [at the Republican convention] in Cleveland. And they should set off alarm bells for all of us. Really? “I alone can fix it?” Isn’t he forgetting? … He’s forgetting every last one of us. Americans don’t say: “I alone can fix it.” We say: “We’ll fix it together.” Remember: Our Founders fought a revolution and wrote a Constitution so America would never be a nation where one person had all the power. Americans [will “Stand Together” to build] a country where the economy works for everyone, not just those at the top. Where you can get a good job and send your kids to a good school, no matter what ZIP code you live in. A country where all our children can dream, and those dreams are within reach.

It Takes a Ruling-Class Village to Staff the White House  Truthdig 

Expecting an earth shattering kaboom:

Moscow's doing its biggest MILEX since right before the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. It's either 1 helluva demonstration of power, or…

— John Schindler (@20committee) August 28, 2016

TaxGrrrl, AT&T & Industry Leaders Promise Help In Fight Against IRS Scammers & Other Robocalls. “These fake calls, which often sound threatening, claim to be the last warning before legal action is taken.”

US awards $5 million to BHP Billiton whistleblower

Painted as EpiPen Villain, Mylan’s Chief Says She’s No Such Thing NYT. The latest face to join pharma’s wall of shame

Feds raid powerful Philadelphia construction union boss, allies [Jillian Kay Melchior, Heat Street, Philadelphia Daily News, NBC Philadelphia, earlier Melchior on role of John (“Johnny Doc”) Dougherty in enactment of city’s soda tax]

Petition: Send CNN’s Sally Kohn to live in Shariah-based country to teach right-wing a lesson.

Or perhaps even North Korea, which according to breathless CNN reports sounds like an equally swell place to live...

‘Human sacrifice’ staged at Cern, home of the God Particle Independent. “Geek humor out of control.”

Use of Social Media Dragons

There's been a lot of griping at Harvard Law School recently about political correctness, multiculturalism, and the usual left-liberal causes. Now Harvard Magazine notes (Corporate law is public interest law) that some are trying to extend the activist heat to Harvard's status as a giant of corporate lawyer training

Reflections on Twenty Years of Law Teaching: Remarks at the Rutter Award Ceremony (April 2008), which is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1122577 (Reflections on Twenty Years of Law Teaching: Remarks at the Rutter Award Ceremony)

Antlers Hunter S Thompson stole from Hemingway’s home returned to family

“Called Fringe Whistleblower, the site states it has become ‘dismayed at the state of the Edinburgh Fringe’ and claims many artists do not get paid. It adds that many venue staff ‘work in very difficult working, and sometimes unlawful, conditions’. It is now calling on people performing and working at the event to share their ‘stories of abuse’, which can be published anonymously on the site.” Whistleblower website to reveal ‘exploitation and abuse’ at Edinburgh Fringe

An Exclusive Look at How AI and Machine Learning Work at Apple – Backchannel

 BULLYING’S EVOLUTIONARY EDGE: According to the BBC “bullying has been observed in fish.” And “High-ranking spotted hyenas also bully their subordinates.” Indeed — we see that at the DNC. Later: “This seems to suggest a bleak conclusion. If so many creatures bully, perhaps bullying is innate in us, something we cannot escape.” Not necessarily. Ambush. Remember that term. It’s the sensible military man’s solution to bullying.

My dad used to say that big party/corporate thieves always managed to hang the little supermarket thieves... In this briefing David Ellis and David Whyte compare public attitudes to corruption committed by people in positions of power, with attitudes towards petty offending such as joyriding and shoplifting. The results are striking. When asked to compare police manipulation of evidence with shoplifting, 96 per cent said they considered police manipulation of evidence as on par with, or more serious than, shoplifting.
Redefining criminality Center for Crime and Justice Studies

Law and Disorder: Philippines war on drugs: ‘1,900 killed’ amid crackdown

Banned FOI lobby group will sit on new open government board 

Europe hit by yet MORE sex attacks: Now 22 girls assaulted at Stockholm festival

Canadians now spend more on taxes than on food, clothing and shelter combined, study finds  

“Facebook reveals every creepy bit of information that it stores on its users. There are 98 different things – including some of the most personal information there can be about a person…”

KUrt SCHLICHTER: The Inauguration Speech America’s Corrupt and Incompetent Ruling Class Will Make A Reality

With Moderate Drinking Under Fire, Alcohol Companies Go on Offensive Wall Street Journal. Another demonstration of the shortsightedness of reaching conclusions about health impacts by looking at one disease only. The obsession with cholesterol levels similarly is the result of a fixation on heart disease, as opposed to all factor death rates.

"Ex-soldier's case tests whether flirting is in eye of beholder": Michael Doyle of McClatchy DC has this report

RIP STEVEN HILL, STARRED ON ‘LAW & ORDER’ AND ‘MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE,’ DIES AT 94. The Times quotes Dick Wolf, Law & Order’s creator, who describes Hill as “the Talmudic influence on the entire zeitgeist of the series.”
But Hill paid a heavy price for his Orthodox faith: He was fired before the second season of Mission: Impossible and replaced with Peter Graves. “His refusal to work late on Fridays, because of his observance of the Jewish sabbath, was also reported to be a problem…Mr. Hill’s co-star Martin Landau is quoted as saying, ‘I felt he was digging his own grave,” the Times notes, adding later in their obit that “Hill gave up acting from 1967 to 1977 and, in the interim, took a variety of jobs, including real estate sales. When he returned to show business, he was welcomed back and appeared in a string of 16 feature films in the ’80s,” before joining Law & Order for the show’s first decade. That show’s classic early line-up, with Hill, Michael Moriarty, Jerry Orbach and Chris Noth was a riveting spin on the police procedural, set in the bad old days of Dinkins-era Manhattan, before what we now call Social Justice Warriors drove the show’s writing hard left.

W10 – The 10 wealthiest countries in the world

Credentialism and Corruption: Vile College Presidents Edition

Unilever  - Building an Insights Engine

Facilitator's Guide to Sharing Knowledge

Feds to share supply chain threat reports with industry

The role of the 'dark web' in the trade of illicit drugs

Germany’s new problem border: Poland Politico

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE TREASURY WHITE PAPER: THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION’S RECENT STATE AID INVESTIGATIONS OF TRANSFER PRICING RULINGS

Daniel J. Levitin, A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular

Abigail Tucker, The Lion in the Living Room: How House Cats Tamed Us and Took Over the World

Time to Say Goodbye Kevin Roberts: SpRing: Death is Scented with Birth

Life and leadership lessons from Kevin John Roberts:

Almost twenty years 20 years ago, I was invited to join Saatchi & Saatchi as Worldwide Chief Executive, with a view to resurrecting this famous company and saving it from a premature end. With Bob Seelert, Bill Cochrane, Bob Isherwood and Milano Reyna, we created a Purpose and Plan which our 7,000 people rallied around and executed.

Two short years later we met Maurice Levy and the Publicis Groupe and we merged the two companies, keeping the brands separate. Viva La Difference. Saatchi & Saatchi and Publicis thrived and great work, great ideas, great campaigns and great Lovemarks were created.

Last year I announced that May 1 2017 would be the day I would retire from the Groupe (20 years in this industry as a Network CEO is somewhat unusual) – and Saatchi & Saatchi was now in Robert Senior’s capable hands.

This plan was jolted by a controversial piece of communication by me a few weeks ago and I decided to bring my retirement forward by eight months, to today.

I leave proud of the progress Saatchi & Saatchi and Publicis Groupe made over this period and grateful for the many friends I’ve made along the way, colleagues, partners and clients. Amazing Kevin Roberts ( Blogger's Spilling Czech took Kevin and s at the end of Roberts )

The PEN American Center has posted audio of Paul Auster reading two poems by Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra's. The poems were originally published in PEN America 11: Make Believe. We've recently collected these poems (in slightly different versions), and many others, in Songs of Kabir.

Speaking of translation and the Pen American Center—don't forget that their annual world literature festival, PEN World Voices, kicks off today.

Paul Auster reads Kabir And what was yesterday a little mucus,
tomorrow will be a mummy or ashes.
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV. 48

Birth is scented with death.
—Bhartrihari (c. 5th century), v. 197,
trans. Barbara Stoler Miller

Friend,
You had one life,
And you blew it.

From sticky spunk
To human shape,
You spent ten months
In your mother’s womb,
Blocked off from the world
Into which you fell
The minute you were born.
A child once,
You’re an old man now.
What has happened has happened.
Crying won’t help
When death already
Has you by the balls.
It’s counting your breaths,
Waiting.

This world, says Kabir,
Is a gambling den.
You can’t be too careful.

KG 60

It’s a mess,
But you’re there
To sort it out.

Cock of the walk,
In great shape,
Keeping the best
Company:
That’s me.

Listen, says Kabir,
I have a prayer to make.
I’m handcuffed to death.
Throw me the key.

KG 44

Cradle...

Down Under Spring of Drama Critics: Crowdsourcing Austerity and Sawdust

If I am not having a fight with somebody,” Tom Wolfe told The Guardian  in 2004, “then you are not sure whether you are alive when you wake up in the morning.”

“‘You’re asking for advice?’ “‘I am.’ “‘It’s a dangerous commodity: people sometimes take it.’” ~ William Haggard, Venetian Blind

“Thyme, and cicadas in the grass

The white light of idleness.

Empty as a shin-bone, a hare

Or a bird from anywhere.”

Magazine|The Brain That Couldn't Remember

Take note, Tony Blair: why jewellery looks so bad on men Spectator

Is Jacob Neusner the most-published man?  Is Jacob Neusner underrated?

What the hell is wrong with you people? Germany: Former East to lag behind West for years to come

It's Good to See Hollywood Starting to Tell Different Stories

Taking on Storytelling as a subject has its risks ... As no one is born a writer: rather, you are shaped by experience, stimulus, ambition. You can’t teach hunger for escapes...

Most Of What We Think We Know About The Brain Is Wrong

Little People, Big Woes in Hollywood: Low Pay, Degrading Jobs and a Tragic Death Hollywood Reporter

The definitive answer to the question only Elie Mystal cares about -- Who in Game of Thrones would make the best lawyer? [LinkedIn]

Exclusive: SWIFT discloses more cyber thefts, pressures banks on security Reuter

Banking Regulators, Facing Criticism, Seek to Dispel Myths on Money-Laundering Rules WSJ

UBS hires psychologists to help revamp research reports FT

Back in July,  HSBC executive Mark Johnson experienced a not great travel delay, when federal agents showed up to JFK and arrested him. The way Johnson sees it, though, the surprise collaring was a huge waste of everyone’s time because he totally did not “participate in a fraudulent scheme to front-run a $3.5 billion currency transaction by one of the bank’s clients,” as has been alleged. So he pleaded not guilty today and here’s the detailed analysis re: that not guilty plea from this lawyer:

“He pleaded not guilty because he is not guilty,” the lawyer, Frank Wohl, told reporters after the hearing. “He’s done nothing wrong.”

No further questions.

HSBC executive pleads not guilty in U.S. over forex scheme [Reuters]

“We can write like the people we won’t be for many years. Wisdom, altruism and microsensitivity can blow through a hangover.” If only, mate. If only.

No one is born a writer. The vocation, emerging from a delusional desire, is honed by the discipline of "locking yourself away in a crucible of secret frustration"... Cold River Memory flashes: can you teach creative writing?

Avra Siegel, formerly Deputy Director of the White House’s Office of Women and Girls, has a scoop that’s garnered a lot of social media attention: Pregnancy entails unpleasant physical side effects that can make working hard. Really, she wants you to know, there’s this horrible thing called “morning sickness” but in fact it can make women feel nauseous all day! Another shocker from her recent article entitled “The Brutal Truth About Being a Pregnant Worker in 2016: It’s Pretty Awful”? Sometimes pregnant ladies get tired. And not just a little tired, but really, really tired ...
Really? Astonishing: Pregnancy Can Be Hard—and Other Shocking Life Lessons

“Nobody loves them, and rightly, for they are creatures of the night. Has anybody ever seen a dramatic critic in the daytime? I doubt it. They come out after dark, and we know how we feel about things that come out after dark. Up to no good, we say to ourselves.”
P.G. Wodehouse, Over Seventy (courtesy of Levi Stahl)

A great sentence makes you want to chew it over slowly in your mouth the first time you read it. A great sentence compels you to rehearse it again in your mind’s ear, and then again later on. A sentence must have a certain distinction of style – the words come in an order that couldn’t have been assembled by any other writer. Here’s an elaborate, Latinate favourite, from Samuel Johnson’s preface to his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). We have to train ourselves to read complex sentences like this one, but if it’s read properly out loud by an actor or someone else who understands the way the subordination of clauses works, it may well be taken in more easily through the ear:

When we see men grow old and die at a certain time one after another, from century to century, we laugh at the elixir that promises to prolong life to a thousand years; and with equal justice may the lexicographer be derided, who being able to produce no example of a nation that has preserved their words and phrases from mutability, shall imagine that his dictionary can embalm his language, and secure it from corruption and decay, that it is in his power to change sublunary nature, and clear the world at once from folly, vanity, and affectation.

“If we thinnk of a library as a city and a book as an individual house in that city, each sentence becomes one tiny component of that house. Some are mostly functional – the load-bearing wall, the grout between the bathroom tiles – while others are the details we remember and take away, perhaps recalling their texture and colour when we assemble our own verbal dwelling-place.”

Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece? 

“It’s difficult not to feel as though we, as a culture, have reached a dead end, that our quest for authenticity has bred nothing more than a series of postures and attitudes that, if they hadn’t sprung up by themselves, would have been invented by market demographers anyway. Perhaps we are stuck in the age of “cool,” when all roads to larger causes inevitably circle back to the adolescent project of exalting the self.” Are Culture And Cool Just Pretentious Constructs?

 How To Write Stories, According To A Hugo Nominee (Now A Winner)
“I live on these borders – and these borders that allow me to see from multiple perspectives and kind of take things in and then kind of process certain ideas and certain stories in a very unique way. And that has led me to write this strange fiction that I write, which really isn’t that strange if you really look at it through a sort of skewed lens.” Hugo Nominee Nnedi Okorafor: 'I Love Stories — And So I Write Them'

This Drug Could End America’s Painkiller Epidemic Bloomberg

Even low-wage Cambodia is automating

Why don’t hotels give you toothpaste? 

 “…we find that a surprising number of behavioral, demographic, and physiological measures (23 of 122), including fluid intelligence, reading ability, weight, and  psychiatric diagnostic scales, correlate with head motion.”  Very often I find that observing head motion is a good way to get better insight into people

Is Hitchcock’s Marnie underrated or overrated?  Is Andrew Wyeth underrated or overrated?

How researchers discovered the basketball hot hand  

A former IRA gunman and hunger striker tells his story

Last week the Brooklyn artist space National Sawdust announced it had hired away Steve Smith from the Boston Globe to start an ambitious new culture journal. Smith is a former NYTimeser, a serious journalist, and ... Who the Hell is Telling Your Story? (Storytellers Are Leaders) AJBlog: diacritical/Douglas McLennan

A look at online troll culture – were these awful people always among us?… Here’s who goes to choral concerts… A look inside the brain as it watches movies… Lin Manuel Miranda’s crusade ... This Week In Audience: Understanding Troll Culture

AJBlog: AJ Arts Audience

U.K. equity crowdfunding platform Crowdcube announced that it planned to raise £5 million ($7 million) from its members in July and attracted around £39 million ($51 million) in pledges on its preregistration site. This UK crowdfunding platform has broken a funding record

‘We will defend ourselves if we feel threatened’: Top commander warns Russia that US will fight back after attack near American forces operating in Syria Daily Mail. Tees up the no-fly zone.

"My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard" (Mother Jones, 150 minutes, July 2016). Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would no longer outsource prison administration to private companies. Many people I follow on Twitter are saying that this article was one of the straws that broke the camel's back there. I don't know if that's true, but the article is interesting.   

Report: Automated fact-checking is coming (and soon)

Internet Voting Leaves Out a Cornerstone of Democracy: The Secret Ballot MIT Technology Review 

Crowdsourcing Austerity Jacobin. NYU

Telling the story of Heaven meeting Earth...

Intelligence is not exactly the first quality you look for in a musical. Of course there have been a few intelligent examples of the genre – mostly by Stephen Sondheim, and I’ll concede that there are a few intelligent, or at least witty instances of musical theatre from Cole Porter, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Kurt Weill and the Gershwin brothers. Even Lord Lloyd Webber has exhibited intelligence in the form (e.g., Aspects of Love).  Groundhog Day, the (Buddhist) Musical

A Salute To Gawker, Which Is About To Die
“A media organization that is founded on hostility to the powerful and is run with almost no internal hierarchy will naturally be irregular. It will be invasive in ways that serve the public interest and in ways that cross a shifting public line.”

When You’re Rich and Famous Enough To Get Siri To Pronounce Your Name Correctly
Barbra Streisand: “And so what did I do? I called the head of Apple, Tim Cook, and he delightfully agreed to have Siri change the pronunciation of my name, finally, with the next update.”

This helpful chart reveals if a robot is coming for your job Business Insider

‘We’re just rentals’: Uber drivers ask where they fit in a self-driving future Guardian

Bookstore in tiny town

This Comedian Was Fined $42000 for Telling a Joke

Telling both sides of Bobby Sands' 
 
Watching an Ira Sachs film is a special type of experience. His work carries an air of authenticity, a naturalistic and unabashed look at characters and stories that don’t often get screentime in bigger studio movies.  In Keep the Lights On Sachs told a story about addiction and intimacy through the lens of two men’s long-term relationship. In  Love Is Strange  he looked at an older gay couple forced to move out of their Manhattan apartment after one is fired for marrying his partner. And in Little Men, Sach’s latest, two young boys’ friendship is compromised by their parents’ rent dispute.

Self published author Savi Sharma finds publishing success