Loneliest Melting Cold War and the Forbidden Love invades Sydney 40th time

Do you believe in life after LOVE? Cher to headline Mardi Gras 40th ...

Daily Telegraph - 16 Jan. 2018

Cher, 71, Looks Like the Queen of Coachella After Landing in Sydney

Q&A: Polish Antipodean Magda Szubanski challenges Archbishop Glenn Davies ...

Why do Dykes on Bikes open Mardi Gras?

Sydney residents frustrated as Mardi Gras partygoers leave behind 'faeces and urine'

Putin family used Estonian bank for money laundering: report 


AUSTRALIAN POLITICIANS of a certain age were brought up watching the British political comedyYes Minister on the ABC.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that they so often seem to be acting out one of its scripts.

Who can forget the episode in which government minister Jim Hacker and his chief bureaucrat, Sir Humphrey, pressured and intimidated the BBC into suppressing a story the honourable Jim found to be an embarrassment?

In the episode, the BBC’s director of planning did exactly as he was told, all the while maintaining that “the BBC couldn’t possibly give in to government pressure”.

'Yes, Minister': Alberici, Morrison and the Turnbull tax comedy - Independent Australia

Wages have collapsed Malcolm Turnbull. Not necessarily for anything he has done or not done, but fixing it and...Read more 

How Victoria's Liberals went feral

Loneliest tree in the world serves as a perfect record of how humans have permanently altered Earth International Business Times

Melting Ice Could Release Hazardous Waste from Abandoned Cold War Site 

Melting Greenland ice will release chemical and some radioactive nasties from an old US Cold War base. Expect more of this sort of thing

Man crashes into river, drops F-bomb eight times in epic dashcam smash

Fran Obeid, Passport Revocation Begins for 'Seriously Delinquent Tax Debt,' 259 NYLJ No.19 1/29/18), here.

Jeremy Temkin, The Next Frontier: Civil Penalties for Undisclosed Offshore Accounts, 259 NYLJ No. 12 (1/18/18), here

Third Circuit Affirms Summons Enforcement for Client Identity Information 
In United States v. Martin, 2018 U.S. App. LEXIS 2526 (3d Cir. 2018) (nonprecedential), here, the Court of Appeals affirmed the district court's order enforcing an IRS administrative summons issued to a lawyer in a collection action to discover his income and assets.  The Court said that the scope of the summons was: 

Specifically, it sought to verify the income Servin generated through his law practice. The summonses requested two categories of information: (1) Servin's current client list, including the names and addresses of each client; and (2) a list of his cases that will be settling or have settled within a specified time period, including the parties' names and addresses. In response to the summonses, Servin appeared, but refused to disclose the requested information.

Congress Amends Tax Whistleblower Section, § 7623, to Clarify Broad Reading of the Award Base 

The district court ordered compliance, but limited the compliance to "only those cases that have settled, not cases that may settle[.]"  Martin then appealed.  There is no indication that the court held him in contempt for noncompliance with the order but that is the usual way that a summons enforcement order gets to the court of appeals.  In any event, the court rejected Martin's claim of attorney-client privilege and attorney-client confidentiality. Earlier this month, Congress amended the mandatory minimum tax Whistleblower award program to make clear that proceeds for purposes of the award base includes non Title 26 collections for fines, forfeitures and reporting violations (such as FBAR penalties).  See § 41108 of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, P.L. 115-123, here.  The change is effected by using the term "proceeds" rather than "collected proceeds and adding § 7623(c) to provide as follows.

Taxpayers with Failed Bullshit Tax Shelters Use FOIA to Try to Get Whistleblower, if any, Information 

In Montgomery v. IRS, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 26313 (D. D.C. 2/20/18), here, taxpayers were caught using partnerships to claim large tax benefits based on bullshit tax shelters.  "In fact, both partnerships were structured in such a way that they were able to report tax losses without the partnerships (and, by extension, the partners) experiencing any real economic loss." After the FPAA proceedings and resulting and related litigation resolved those cases, the taxpayers made FOIA requests and, upon denial, brought this suit for the requested information and documents.  Their goal is "to deduce who, if anyone, tipped off the" IRS as to their raid on the fisc.  In this FOIA suit, the Government moved for summary judgment, alleging that the earlier resolutions of the cases they brought over the bullshit tax shelters foreclosed their FOIA claims.  The Court denied the Government's motion for summary judgment, so the case will proceed to further proceedings.  The Court ordered the parties to submit a new proposed briefing schedule.

Latitude Autumn of Sweatshops

 Difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations....


Palantir Has Secretly Been Using New Orleans to Test Its Predictive Policing Technology


Truth and Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder  

Sydney nurse on life support with mystery virus after being coughed on by sick patient

What is the world coming to ... Our modelling careers are challenged like never before.  Why bother to get born tall dark and handsome when drones turn us into office slaves or unemployed boy soliciting on street corners ...“Dolce & Gabbana used drones to carry handbags down the runway instead of models.”

On a less ironic note, a recent paper by Mr. Hertel-Fernandez and two colleagues may foretell what Democrats can expect if Mr. Uihlein and his fellow philanthropists succeed. It found that the  Democratic share of the presidential vote dropped by an average of 3.5 percentage points after the passage of so-called right-to-work laws allowing employees to avoid paying union fees. That is larger than Democrats’ margin of defeat in several states that could have reversed their last three presidential losses.

That is from Noam Scheiber and Kenneth P. Vogel at the NYT.  You may have read that “…the Supreme Court [Monday] hears a case that could cripple public-sector unions by allowing the workers they represent to avoid paying fees.”  Yet the Democratic Party seems increasingly dependent on such funds.  By the way, the cited research paper, by Feigenbaum, Hertel-Fernandez, and Williamson, also reports this:

The weakening of unions also has large downstream effects both on who runs for office and on state legislative policy. Fewer working class candidates serve in state legislatures and Congress, and state policy moves in a more conservative direction following the passage of right-to-work laws.

So the stakes here are probably high

 … THE FORCE WAS WITH HIM: A Star Wars superfan wanted Jedi Stormtroopers to lead the way for his hearse at his funeral. His sister made it happen.

(Screen grab) 

Clarke: Sydney lawyer allegedly defrauded $10 million from TV client

The Washington Post: “For the second year in a row, spring has sprung early. In the Mid-Atlantic, cherry blossoms started to pop out of their buds in mid-February, and the crocuses have all but come and gone. Temperatures have dipped below freezing on only five mornings this February in the District, and nature is playing along — albeit, perhaps, grudgingly. As much as spring is welcome when it arrives, it seems to feel better after a long winter. This year, winter never really started. December and January both got off to a cold start, but that quickly changed through the end of those months. By mid-February, we saw March flowers pop out of the ground. Winter is dead. According to the National Phenology Network, spring is running 20 days or more ahead of schedule in parts of the Ohio River Valley and the Mid-Atlantic. That will soon be the case in the Midwest and the Northeast. This is not surprising. In fact, it is exactly what we should expect as the climate warms, according to myriad peer-reviewed studies summarized succinctly by the2017 National Climate Assessment. In technical terms, the growing season in North America is getting longer. You may also see it referred to as “frost-free” days, since the growing season is the span of time between the last frost and the first frost…”

Cole includes one of his own poems, “Time Piece,” a witty meditation on human vanity:

each doing what it should be doing,

and ignoring you completely.”

“This anthology is not trying to prove anything about trends, schools, or movements; it is simply claiming, `Here are a couple of hundred short, short poems, each of which has amused, amazed, or excited the compiler.’ To say more would be to bring suspicion on my praise of brevity. The last word is Alexander Pope’s: 

“`Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.’
”We repeat - Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.’”

Tweet trouble: John Quiggin the Mastermind of Emma Alberici’s seminal study on corporate tax

The ABC didn't always treat its reporters like this

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

  Will Comply with JDS on Approximately 13,000 Customers for Bitcoin Transactions

Jack Townsend of great Latitude fame has reported before about the IRS John Doe Summons issued to Coinbase, a digital currency exchange.  See Court Orders Enforcement of John Doe Summons Against Bitcoin Firm (12/1/17),here.  According to Coinbase's web site titled "IRS Notification," here, Coinbase has notified approximately 13,000 customers that, pursuant to the Court judgment, here, Coinbase expects to comply with the JDS.

The Coinbase web page has the contents of the letter notification.  Key points of the notification are:
Conbase expects to comply within 21 days of the notification (February 23, 2018).
Potentially affected customers may want to seek advice of counsel. 
Regarding the effect of the delay in compliance from the original issuance 

Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Inventor Accused of Swindling $5 Billion of Cryptocurrency 

Bloomberg. Bitcoin = prosecution futures –Yves Smith, 11/18/13

Hundreds lose New Zealand drivers licenses in ... - The FCPA Blog

So that’s why the squillionaires are moving there! It’s not the hobbits at all!   

Hackers see democracy as a weakness ripe for exploitation The US Justice Department's 
indictment of Russian interference in the 2016 US election makes for sobering reading
 and has direct implications for Australia. 
Its 37 pages forensically detail the audacious tactics employed by Russia to undermine 
the electoral processes of a sovereign state ...

Employees of the Russian-controlled Internet Research Agency are accused of fraud, deceit, identity theft,

 breaches of currency laws, falsely claiming to be US citizens, running covert intelligence operations, 

illegally controlling computer infrastructure and masquerading as social activists for the purposes 

of political and electoral interference.  

 

Burgess: Quaedvlieg lost on the tortuous road of administrative law.

Two cases of dangerous liasons in high office have played out differently.
 "Few public servants would be surprised that it may be easier to make an
 unwilling minister resign than force out a senior statutory officer," 
writes Verona Burgess.

     

We See Work How We See Ourselves

My first job was at a bakery.

 

“He went from being this cordial,   of three blog posts produced by the researchers at Texifter that outlines the contemporary phenomenon of Twitter bots. Bot accounts are a persistent feature of the user experience on Twitter. They can increase the influence of positive, negative, or “authentic” fake news stories; promote opinion posts from a variety of accounts (botnets); and circulate memes. Their ability to shape online political discourse and public opinion, however, is generating legitimate concerns. The significance of the bot effect stretches from the academic research community, to tech and platform companies, national regulatory bodies, and the field of journalism. One of the most  recognized examples of this involves the lead-up to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. During that period, over 50,000 automated Twitter accounts from Russia retweeted and disseminated political material posted by and for Trump, reaching over 677,775 Americans. Over 2,000,000 tweets and retweets were the result of these Twitter bots, accounting for approximately 4.25% of all retweets of Trump’s tweets in the lead-up to the U.S. election. These findings accentuate the larger issue of state actors using social media automation as a tool of political influence…”