— Marguerite Duras, who died on this date in 1996
NSW election: On St Patrick's Day Armenian Berejiklian more popular The Australian Financial Review
We Fight Now or the Socialists Win.
WORST CASE OF SUICIDE I EVER DID SEE: Ex-Putin adviser found dead in D.C. hotel had complete neck fracture.
COLLUSION, HIGHER-ED FOREIGN AGENT EDITION: Two in three colleges with Confucius Institutes violated the law by not reporting Chinese funding.
The impact of the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 brought an end to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy
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WHY IS EUROPE IS PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939?
“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.”
~ George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
https://thenewdaily.com.au Premier Gladys Berejiklian would be thrown into a minority government if polling is repeated in ... MP Geoff Provest will go up against Labor's Craig Elliot, the husband of federal Labor MP for ...
Gladys Berejiklian's parents on why their daughter is best for the job
Daily Telegraph
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To hear Premier Gladys Berejiklian's biggest fans tell it, the race ... their Liberal party leader and Labor's Michael Daley is not ... up to be the first woman Liberal Party Premier of NSW.
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Daily Telegraph
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https://www.afr.com The problem with Gladys Berejiklian: why the NSW Premier is failing to find her way ... for November, it means the ALP will hold power in four states – NSW, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia, ...
We Fight Now or the Socialists Win.
WORST CASE OF SUICIDE I EVER DID SEE: Ex-Putin adviser found dead in D.C. hotel had complete neck fracture.
COLLUSION, HIGHER-ED FOREIGN AGENT EDITION: Two in three colleges with Confucius Institutes violated the law by not reporting Chinese funding.
- The Brexiteers are getting rich off Brexit (15 Mar 2019)
- Time to trim the UK's army of financial watchdogs (15 Mar 2019)
- UBS sets aside $516 million for French tax case (15 Mar 2019)
- Rich Brits Give Up Almost Nothing Under Final Chance Tax Program (15 Mar 2019)
- Bankers should pay their fair share of tax for society's sake (15 Mar 2019)
- HMRC wins battle to tax Lehman Brothers interest payments (15 Mar 2019)
- HMRC boss accused of evading questions over contentious tax (15 Mar 2019)
- EU tax haven blacklist triples to include 15 countries (15 Mar 2019)
- Tax avoidance crackdown on businesses looms, warn lawyers (15 Mar 2019)
- Fair Taxation: EU updates list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions (13 Mar 2019)
- Questions and answers on the EU list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions (13 Mar 2019)
- EU adds UAE, Bermuda to expanded tax haven blacklist (13 Mar 2019)
- Israel's Mizrahi Tefahot to pay $195 million in US tax case settlement (13 Mar 2019
- HMRC in line for £1bn windfall from Lehman Brothers collapse (13 Mar 2019)
- HMRC's first probes into corporate tax evasion facilitation (13 Mar 2019)
- EU on path towards whistleblower protection (13 Mar 2019)
- When Elon Musk Tried to Destroy a Tesla Whistleblower (13 Mar 2019)
- HMRC worker claims six suicides are linked to UK tax charge (13 Mar 2019)
- Unilateral Introduction of Destination Based Cash Flow Taxation (13 Mar 2019)
Radiation fear in death of model witness at Berlusconi 'bunga bunga' trial
In January, Imane Fadil told a court she had paid a heavy price for coming forward and that "the truth would come out" in a book she was writing.
Slovakia indeed declared its “independence” (in fact, complete dependence on Germany) on March 14, 1939, with the threat of invasion squelching all debate within the Czech province.
● “Volkswagen’s chief executive has apologized for using a phrase that echoed a Nazi-era slogan, ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ or ‘Work sets you free,’ that was emblazoned on the gates of Auschwitz and other concentration camps, saying the connection did not occur to him at the time.
As David Harsanyi writes at the Federalist, To Understand The American Left’s Anti-Semitism, Look To Europe
The internet: optimised for hate, terror and chaos
Perhaps more than any other evil act of our time, the Christchurch attack was born of the internet and engineered to exploit its obvious vulnerabilities.
'On nobody's radar, anywhere' terrorist escaped Australian authorities
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has demanded answers from Australian and New Zealand police as to how the terrorist escaped the watch-lists of either country.
On the death of my family’s dairy farm Abe Voelker (Reify99). Excellent long-form report. (I had no idea that “manure pipeline” was a thing. Big Ag!)
War Happens in Dark Places, Too Contingent Magazine
As C.S. Lewis observed:.
Of
all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be
the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than
under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may
sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those
who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do
so with the approval of their own conscience.
QUIETLY ARMED: Of wolves and sheepdogs. “I protect my flock because I am part of the flock, and I leave the sheepdogging to others. My goal is to quietly live my life and to be sheer bloody hell on anyone who would cause us harm. I’m not a sheepdog outside of the flock, I’m a ram who’s inside the flock, looking to butt heads with the best of them, should the need arise.”
Abracadabra: Lendlease magic tricks come home to roost
The Australian Tax Office would also acknowledge privately that there is room for improvement. And it's not just the fact that, despite its billions in government ...
100-Year-Old Holocaust Survivor Helen Fagin on How Books Save Lives
Starting when she was 21, Helen Fagin was imprisoned in the Radomsko and Warsaw ghettos in Poland. Her parents were sent to Treblinka and murdered there, but Fagin and her sister eventually managed to escape and, after a long journey around Europe, made it to the United States. Fagin has offered lengthy testimony about her experience of the Holocaust (for the USC Shoah Foundationand US Holocaust Memorial Museum), but in this short video, she reads a letter she wrote about how reading and stories gave a spark of hope to those under the Nazi boot in Warsaw.
Between 1917 and 1923, anti-Semitism mutated into something new: the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. It was a toxic gloss on an ancient hatred. It made Adolf Hitler
PEGGY NOONAN: Get Ready for the Struggle Session.
The Chinese Catholic Margaret Chu, a medical-lab assistant, was dragged into the office of her labor camp in 1968 and made to answer invented charges. “Their real motive was once and again to force me to admit all my alleged crimes,” she wrote decades later. “ ‘I did not commit any crimes,’ I asserted.” She was accused again, roughed up. She denied her guilt again. “Immediately two people jumped on me and cut off half my hair.”The notion that the left’s overculture has an increasingly Maoist taint.
She was tortured, left in handcuffs for 100 days, and imprisoned for years. While being tortured she sometimes prayed for death so her suffering would stop.
The Cultural Revolution lasted roughly a dozen years and died with Mao in September 1976. In time a party congress denounced it as what it was: ruinous.
So I ask you to entertain an idea that has been on my mind. I don’t want to be overdramatic, but the spirit of the struggle session has returned and is here, in part because of the internet, in part because of the extremity of our politics, in part because more people are lonely. “Contention is better than loneliness,” as my people, the Irish, say, and they would know.
The air is full of accusation and humiliation. We have seen this spirit most famously on the campuses, where students protest harshly, sometimes violently, views they wish to suppress. Social media is full of swarming political and ideological mobs. In an interesting departure from democratic tradition, they don’t try to win the other side over. They only condemn and attempt to silence.
PATTERICO: Meet Two Men Whose Lives Were Ruined by Socialism.
The Most Important Law Review Article You’ll Never Read
“No! Stop! Go back! Reading the abstract is like taking the red
pill in the Matrix. In this article we discuss “the game.” “The game” is
the quest for measuring scholarship success using metrics such as law
review ranking, citation counts, downloads, and other indicia of
scholarship “quality.” We argue that this game is rigged, inherently
biased against authors from lower ranked schools, women, minorities, and
faculty who teach legal writing, clinical, and library courses. As
such, playing “the game” in a Sisyphean effort to achieve external
validation is a losing one for all but a few. Instead, we argue that
faculty members should reject this entrenched and virulent hierarchy,
and focus on the primary purposes of writing, which are to foster
innovation in a fashion that is both pleasing to the author and that
improves society. We discuss this rigged game, and seek to reframe our
academic life to focus on enhancing innovation and discourse. We would
start by skipping abstract writing. Now go back to your life. Don’t even
think about downloading and reading this. It’s too dangerous.”
MARTINA NAVRATILOVA IS AT A POLITICAL CHANGE CROSSROADS, WHETHER SHE REALIZES IT OR NOT:
BLUE ON BLUE: Lesbian Feminist Defends ‘Misgendering;’ It’s Not ‘Inhumane’ to Tell the Truth. “It’s actually inhumane to force women to share intimate spaces with males.”
You can feel her confusion and hesitation; it’s real and it’s painful. It’s somewhat like what #WalkAway founder Brandon Straka said in the video where he told his change story. At the beginning of Straka’s voicing of a single mild non-PC possibility, he wondered something like why are my friends treating me like that? I thought they were my friends. Why are my enemies treating me nicely? Does that mean I’ve gone over to the Dark Side?Navratilova does have one advantage in making her decisions going forward: as a former citizen of communist Czechoslovakia, she’s seen plenty of leftist gaslighting before. Or as Rod Dreher writes in a post titled “Beating The Cultural Revolution,” “A friend in DC told me this week that he was recently at a dinner party where one of the other guests said to him, ‘Growing up in the Soviet Union, my parents taught me never to believe a thing I heard in the media, and to be very careful what I say out loud. Now I find myself telling my children the same thing.’… Those people know how to live. They have wisdom for us. So do others who came through communism. They can help us beat the Cultural Revolution.”
Or maybe it’s not the Dark Side?
BLUE ON BLUE: Lesbian Feminist Defends ‘Misgendering;’ It’s Not ‘Inhumane’ to Tell the Truth. “It’s actually inhumane to force women to share intimate spaces with males.”
KAMALA HARRIS:
“It is a fact that we can change human behaviors without much change to
our lifestyle and we can save the future generations of our country and
this world.”
I always get very nervous when leftists discuss “changing human behaviors.” What could go wrong?
Topic.com: Forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs are using DNA databases to solve cold cases faster than anyone could have imagined. But how will their techniques hold up in court?…
Millions of online photos scraped without consent NBC News – People’s faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say. “Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores. The technology — which is imperfect but improving rapidly — is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique. To do this well, the algorithms must be fed hundreds of thousands of images of a diverse array of faces. Increasingly, those photos are coming from the internet, where they’re swept up by the millions without the knowledge of the people who posted them, categorized by age, gender, skin tone and dozens of other metrics, and shared with researchers at universities and companies…”
Google user data collection is extensive, massive and lucrative Google Data Collection, Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Vanderbilt University August 15, 2018: “Google is the world’s largest digital advertising company.1It also provides the #1 web browser, the #1 mobile platform,3and the #1 search engine4worldwide. Google’s video platform, email service, and map application have over 1 billion monthly active users each.5Google utilizes the tremendous reach of its products to collect detailed information about people’s online and real-world behaviors, which it then uses to target them with paid advertising. Google’s revenues increase significantly as the targeting technology and data are refined.2.Google collects user data in a variety of ways. The most obvious are “active,”with the user directly and consciously communicating information to Google, as for example by signing into any of itswidely used applications such as YouTube, Gmail, Search etc. Less obvious ways for Google to collect data are “passive” means, whereby an application is instrumented to gather information while it’s running, possibly without the user’s knowledge.
I always get very nervous when leftists discuss “changing human behaviors.” What could go wrong?
Topic.com: Forensic genealogists at Parabon NanoLabs are using DNA databases to solve cold cases faster than anyone could have imagined. But how will their techniques hold up in court?…
Millions of online photos scraped without consent NBC News – People’s faces are being used without their permission, in order to power technology that could eventually be used to surveil them, legal experts say. “Facial recognition can log you into your iPhone, track criminals through crowds and identify loyal customers in stores. The technology — which is imperfect but improving rapidly — is based on algorithms that learn how to recognize human faces and the hundreds of ways in which each one is unique. To do this well, the algorithms must be fed hundreds of thousands of images of a diverse array of faces. Increasingly, those photos are coming from the internet, where they’re swept up by the millions without the knowledge of the people who posted them, categorized by age, gender, skin tone and dozens of other metrics, and shared with researchers at universities and companies…”
Google user data collection is extensive, massive and lucrative Google Data Collection, Professor Douglas C. Schmidt, Vanderbilt University August 15, 2018: “Google is the world’s largest digital advertising company.1It also provides the #1 web browser, the #1 mobile platform,3and the #1 search engine4worldwide. Google’s video platform, email service, and map application have over 1 billion monthly active users each.5Google utilizes the tremendous reach of its products to collect detailed information about people’s online and real-world behaviors, which it then uses to target them with paid advertising. Google’s revenues increase significantly as the targeting technology and data are refined.2.Google collects user data in a variety of ways. The most obvious are “active,”with the user directly and consciously communicating information to Google, as for example by signing into any of itswidely used applications such as YouTube, Gmail, Search etc. Less obvious ways for Google to collect data are “passive” means, whereby an application is instrumented to gather information while it’s running, possibly without the user’s knowledge.
