Russian associate threatens Finland and Sweden with a nuclear strike - Confronting Misinformation in the Age of Cheap Speech

The secret and criminal world of off shore companies and trusts need to be abolished in every jurisdiction including the US. The super rich should not be allowed to evade tax and hoard their wealth, the world cannot sustain this criminality any longer.

Russian oligarch secretly recorded saying Putin is 'very ill with blood cancer,' report says

Russian associate threatens Finland and Sweden with a nuclear strike

Putin’s Road to War 

When Russia began its invasion of Ukraine in February it came as a shock to many. 

Why would Vladimir Putin want to overturn decades of stability by sparking the biggest security crisis in Europe since the end of the Cold War?

For those who have studied Putin for decades, this war has been long in the making.

Four Corners traces Vladimir Putin’s rise to power from his days as a KGB counterintelligence officer to his emergence as a global power player in the post Cold War era.

Overall, as much as $1 trillion in Russian wealth is stowed in offshore companies, according to economic studies, representing a significant share of the Russian economy.

THREE DOZEN TYCOONS MET PUTIN ON INVASION DAY. MOST HAD MOVED MONEY ABROAD.

Confronting Misinformation in the Age of Cheap Speech - LawFareLawFare: “In 1995, Eugene Volokh published a law review article in which he predicted that the rapidly growing internet would “dramatically reduce the costs of distributing speech” and that “the new media order that these technologies will bring will be much more democratic and diverse than the environment we see now.” The concept, which Volokh dubbed “cheap speech,” would mean that “far more speakers—rich and poor, popular and not, banal and avant garde—will be able to make their work available to all.”  

To say that Volokh’s article was prophetic would be an understatement. More than a quarter-century later, the cheap speech that Volokh predicted has upended commerce, art, politics, news and community. Many volumes can and should be written about the effects of the rapid evolution of cheap speech on discrete areas of American life.  Fortunately, Rick Hasen has done just that. In “Cheap Speech: How Disinformation Poisons Our Politics—and How to Cure It,” Hasen takes on the lofty task of examining the impact of cheap speech on American elections, politics and democracy. Hasen has written an extraordinary, thorough and fair examination of the impact of misinformation on democracy.

 He examines the costs and benefits of cheap speech and presents carefully crafted proposals that attempt to address the harms without straying from core First Amendment values or from falling into a moral panic about misinformation. Hasen expands on Volokh’s concept of “cheap speech,” defining it as “speech that is both inexpensive to produce and often of markedly low social value.” 

Hasen devotes the first part of the book to an even-handed evaluation of the impact of cheap speech on American democracy. Hasen does not villainize the internet as the source of all that is evil about modern politics. 

“There is no doubt that the rise of the Internet has had many free speech benefits,” Hasen writes. “We worry much less about media consolidation and scarcity of information than we did when there were just three main broadcast television networks and a handful of local newspapers in each area.” …