Politics on blot.blog

Enablers of dirty Russian money in London + What's an 'Unexplained Wealth Order'?

elliot@clowes.me (Elliot Clowes) — Fri, 04 Mar 2022 09:18:15 +0000

French economist Gabriel Zucman estimated in 2014 that 52 per cent of Russian wealth was held offshore — surely the largest-ever exportation of elite money.

Kleptocrats appreciate Britain’s rule of law as long as it leaves them alone. The kleptocratic cycle is “steal, hide, spend”… Local beneficiaries range from accountants to sex workers, bankers to dog walkers, and bodyguards to universities.

Britain’s ruling party swims in Russian money °. Lubov Chernukhin, whose husband was a minister under Putin, has given the Conservatives more than £2.1mn ° since becoming a British citizen. In 2014, she paid £160,000 to play tennis ° with London’s then mayor, Boris Johnson.

February 26th, 2022

elliot@clowes.me (Elliot Clowes) — Sat, 26 Feb 2022 15:06:21 +0000

I don’t have an opinion on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Nor any knowledge on them. However, it’s so plainly obvious to me that there’s a media witch-hunt against them. I mean, I rarely read newspapers. And when I do I do my best to avoid the sections and headlines about things like celebrity culture and royal news. But even I’ve noticed the blatant witch-hunt. It’s glaring and not subtle in any way. I don’t know why they media have a bee in their bonnet about the couple. But they are openly bullying them. And it’s disgusting.

Stealing the word "Freedom"

elliot@clowes.me (Elliot Clowes) — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Isn’t it interesting how fascists always steal the word “freedom”?

I think about this line from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (2011) a lot for some reason.

See at the moment the Freedom Convoy.

'Woman Is Sentenced to 43 Years for Criticizing Thai Monarchy'

elliot@clowes.me (Elliot Clowes) — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The New York Times [c]:

The onetime civil servant’s crime was to share audio clips on social media that were deemed critical of Thailand’s monarchy. The sentence, handed down on Tuesday by a criminal court in Bangkok, was more than 43 years in prison.

It was the longest sentence yet for violating Thailand’s notoriously tough lèse-majesté law, which makes it a crime to defame senior members of the royal family, according to the group Thai Lawyers for Human Rights. The former civil servant, Anchan Preelert, was sentenced to 87 years, but her prison term was cut in half because she agreed to plead guilty.

The Parler U.S. Capitol Riot Video Archive

elliot@clowes.me (Elliot Clowes) — Tue, 19 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Before Parler was closed down (for now anyway) some hackers downloaded almost the entirety of the site. Vice has the story [c]:

Donk_enby had originally intended to grab data only from the day of the Capitol takeover, but found that the poor construction and security of Parler allowed her to capture, essentially, the entire website. That ended up being 56.7 terabytes of data, which included every public post on Parler, 412 million files in all—including 150 million photos and more than 1 million videos. Each of these had embedded metadata like date, time and GPS coordinates—unlike most social media sites, Parler does not strip metadata from media its users upload, which, crucially, could be useful for law enforcement and open source investigators.