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Monday, July 17, 2017

Smoke and mirrors: the truth about Natalia Veselnitskaya

THE ONLY WAY TO BE FREE: Discovering Truth




Never before ... has  a candidate been so open and sincere about buying an election.

Who is Natalia Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Donald Trump Jr.? ABC

 Russiagate and the Magnitsky Affair, Linked Again Rolling Stone (Richard Smith). Matt Taibbi

 ‘A million miles per hour’: Inside Trump’s campaign when Trump Jr. met with Russian lawyer WaPo


 I like smacking around Donald Trump Jr. as much as the next guy — well,unless the next guy is his father. But I’m keeping my eye on the real prize, Jared Kushner. [Vox]

 Airbnb host was fined $5,000 for cancelling a reservation because the guest was Asian. Trump has made white people bold, man. [Business Insider]
"U.S. appeals court blocks release of HSBC money laundering report": Jonathan Stempel of Reuters has this report on a ruling that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued today.
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High-Profile Team Sues Trump Campaign, Alleging Role in DNC Hack (PDF) National Journal. Page 18: “By March 2016, the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (“GRU”) gained unauthorized access to DNC networks, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (“DCCC”) networks, and the personal email accounts of Democratic party officials and political figures. By May 2016, the GRU had extracted large volumes of data from DNC networks, including email accounts of DNC staffers.”
Trump’s Russian Laundromat The New Republic. If this pans out, it looks like David Warsh got it right; Water Cooler, March 29: “Summarizing Warsh’s informed speculation, the Trump+Russia story is more likely to be a New York real estate story starting back in the 90s.”


Kaspersky Lab Has Been Working With Russian Intelligence Bloomberg Bill B: “Government front men like to paint their state-sponsored actors as stalwart operators, hacking pro aris et focis. Yet this prosaic good-versus-bad narrative translates into ‘drunken brawl’ once readers have left the editor’s office at the New York Times and step out into reality. The truth is messy. With operators leaking tools, switching sides when it’s convenient, prevaricating, bragging, and generally looking out for the bottom line.”
IT’S A TRICK QUESTION: THEY’RE NOT COMING FROM ANYWHERE. Question: Where do Japanese babies come from?
Who knew how prescient the Vapors were in 1980, when they warned, “No sex, no drug, no wine, no women?”

 STONE AGE GRAFFITI: Ancient religious stones hiding secret message only visible at night



 The total market capitalisation of all cryptocurrencies is now a bit more than $US100 billion ($132bn), about the same as CBA - so, not all that much yet, but growing fast. There are apparently more than 700 of these blockchain seedlings now, sprouting at the rate of about 30 per month through what are called "Initial Coin Offerings". The oldest and largest is bitcoin - 42 per cent of the market - with ethereum at 30 per cent market share, and gaining. ICOs have overtaken IPOs in both number and popularity among the money-hungry; they have captured the fervour of the tech-spec world, in the same way as dot.com IPOs captured it in the late 1990s.

And having watched it for a while, and considered the matter carefully, I think the analogy is apt. That was a bubble then, and this is one now. In fact it's worse: it's a giant scam.
Smoke and mirrors: the truth about bitcoin








Potential corruption at Canterbury is bigger than Wollongong, but without the sex
As bitcoin’s value rises, so does criminal activity Nikkei Asian Review. Yves: “Prosecution futures.”

Worldpay emerges as a winner in the war on cash FT

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