Russia blocks access to Facebook and TwitterGuardian. Surprised it took this long, but the crackdown also includes restrictions on domestic content.
War in Ukraine threatens the global financial system Gillian Tett, Financial Times. The Great War ended the gold standard. Peter Temin argued persuasively that the effort to restore it is what caused the Great Depression.
Dodgy Russian money has destabilised Britain’s democracy. We have to crack down on it Guardian (furzy). Right. In middle of Brexit, the UK is gonna have its prime residential real estate market collapse. However, the dirty money presumably went through offshore corps than can’t readily be traced. We’ve seen similar accounts from the US, the top Russian money can’t readily be found, so we and the UK will go after the small fry who leave footprints.
The Elephant in the Courtroom The New Yorker
Nature as a Mode of Accumulation: Capitalism and the Financialization of the Earth Monthly Review. Stylistically leaden, analytically well worth a read. “The project is a mad endeavor to create the institutional certainties of a smoothly-trading market where no such certainty is to be had.”
Lying Like A State (podcast) Death Panel. I’m rerunning this from yesterday, because it’s worth a listen. Frankly, I could use a transcript to dope this out, but if I understand it, the podcasters used CDC’s newly rejiggered “community levels” formula to determine the number of deaths that would be happening before CDC’s “High” level kicked in: 1000/day, or 350,000 per year. A fair description? Normalizing this would be useful when the Jackpot really gets rolling, I suppose. Readers?
Focused Protection From the Great Barrington Declaration Never Made Sense Gideon M-K; Health Nerd. Author’s qualifications.
Unfortunate But Not Surprising Court Blocks Maryland’s Library eBook Law
TechDirt: “Back in December, we wrote about how the major book publishers had teamed up to sue the state of Maryland over a fairly tame law concerning ebooks and libraries. As we’ve been detailing, over the last few years, the big book publishers have been working overtime to abuse copyright law to destroy libraries. Whereas, historically, a library could just buy a book like anyone else, and then lend it out, with ebooks, the publishers demand ridiculous prices for libraries and then put nonsensical restrictions on how libraries can lend out those ebooks. This is because publishers hate libraries — and, while they want to insist to you that copying a digital file is “theft,” they will also deny that those same digital files get the kind of first sale rights of physical books…”
Data on Russian crypto ownership, and government plans to regulate the sector. And “Train tickets for the short trip from St. Petersburg to Helsinki cost over 9000 euros yesterday.”
