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The US government, working tirelessly to bring new opportunities to criminals worldwide:
Thanks Uncle Sam!  March 7th, 2015 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Well ok, Han Solo was not flying the Millennium Falcon when he crashed yesterday, more like the Millennium Budgerigar, but I wonder if this was what brought him down? March 6th, 2015 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)
So the Indian government has defiantly banned a BBC documentary about rape in India, presumably because it makes them look bad. So they are trying to hush it all up, which of course just makes them look ever worse. Rather than using this as a call to action in which they make themselves look good, they end up making themselves look really terribly unbelievably bad. As if the problem with endemic rape is not rape but people highlighting and talking about it. Well a libertarian Indian chum of mine has been saying for some time that Modi’s brain is vastly overrated, and I must now conclude he was quite correct. Oh you gotta laugh. I take it they have never heard of the Streisand effect and have no conception of how the internet works. March 5th, 2015 | 38 comments - (Comments are closed)
Unfortunately, this is not what many Greeks (or Spaniards) believe. A large plurality of them voted for Syriza, which wants to reallocate resources to wage increases and subsidies and does not even mention exports in its growth strategy. They would be wise to remember that having Stiglitz as a cheerleader and Podemos as advisers did not save Venezuela from its current hyper-inflationary catastrophe. There are several things in this article that I think are very debatable and damn I hate seeing people describe spending less of other people’s money as “austerity”, but this is an interesting piece nevertheless. March 4th, 2015 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
At some point tomorrow, the samizdata server is going to be rebooted whilst various arcane rituals are preformed and the hamsters that make it all spin are fed and rested. So if Samizdata is off-line for a while, that is why.  March 4th, 2015 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
From the end of a BBC news article:
Wat. March 4th, 2015 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
Nope, it was not decades of murderous repressive Ba’athist socialism under the Assad family that caused the civil war in Syria, it was…  And what is more, climate change has caused my cat to sing Sondheim at night. Climate change has made my tea taste bitter if brewed after 8 am. Climate change has created inequality amongst llamas in the Atacama Desert. Climate change has caused Putin’s man-boobs (daddaries?) to itch so much it drove him to invade Crimea. I defy anyone to prove scientifically these things are not true because the science is settled. Or something like that. March 3rd, 2015 | 24 comments - (Comments are closed)
“Privilege” is a get-out-of-thinking-free card that validates its owner’s prejudices. March 3rd, 2015 | 13 comments - (Comments are closed)
Like so much electronic chaff dropped out of the back of a Tupolev bomber to confuse an incoming heat-seeking missile, the idea that there are multiple interpretations of the truth has become the founding philosophy of state disinformation in Putin’s Russia, designed to confuse those who would seek out the truth with multiple expressions of distracting PR chaff. The tactic is to create as many competing narratives as possible. And, amid all the resultant hermeneutic chaos, to quietly slip away undetected. It is a tactic straight out of Mr Putin’s KGB playbook from the 1970s. Generate a plurality of narratives, so the truth can be obscured. – Guardian editorial. Yes I know, chaff only confuses radar-guided missiles, you need flares for heat-seekers, but hey, this is the Guardian after all. Mangled metaphor aside, this is a very good editorial that will enrage all the right people. March 2nd, 2015 | 18 comments - (Comments are closed)
Boris Nemtsov was gunned down on the northern end of the Moscvoretsky Bridge, directly in front of the second closest to the camera of the green lamp-posts. In the background: St Basil’s cathedral on the right, the wall of the Kremlin on the left, Red Square in the centre. A more dramatic backdrop for an assassination in Moscow is hard to imagine. March 2nd, 2015 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
In his first six years in office, President Obama has performed well for those who wrote those checks. He brought in Wall Street insiders such as Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers to concoct his economic policy, which brought a recovery to the financial plutocracy before virtually anyone else. Wall Street was back by 2009; the rest of us have had to wait for 2015. Obama and the Democrats in Congress also handed the big banks a nice gift in the form of the Dodd-Frank Bill which helped them achieve that “too big to fail” status and has accelerated the growing consolidation of the American financial system. Indeed, since Dodd-Frank was passed smaller banks’ share of banking assets has dropped twice as quickly as before, notes a recent Harvard Kennedy School of Government study. Smaller and community banks – historically more likely to loan to small businesses – have seen a 50 percent drop in their share of lending while the the five largest banks now control over 40 percent of lending, twice their share 20 years ago. March 2nd, 2015 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
… and twenty years ago today, TV journalist Vlad Listyev was also murdered in Moscow. No one was ever convicted. And there was investigative reporter Paul Klebnikov in 2004, no convictions. Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, with the alleged murderers convicted but not whoever ordered the hit. No doubt opposition leader Boris Nemtsov‘s assassination will be put to good use though. Perhaps some expendable dupes can be found and somehow linked to the Ukraine because, well just because. I expect we will soon see arguments appearing like “Putin is so smart he would not have a political enemy killed in a well policed area near the Kremlin, so therefore it must be the March 1st, 2015 | 59 comments - (Comments are closed)
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