When Facebook says it cares about security, I laugh. Every day I see bots, spammers and click-farm workers plague the site, and despite reporting them, Facebook lets them stay. It will make a statement saying it would no longer kick off drag queens and kings, then proceed to kick off drag queens and kings. So […]
Tag: Russia
A year of random thoughts: 2014 in review
For the last few years, I’ve looked back at the events of the year in a tongue-in-cheek fashion. (In fact, in 2009, I looked back at the decade.) Tumblr’s the place I look at these days for these summaries, since it tends to have my random thoughts, ones complemented by very little critical thinking. They […]
Vladimir Putin’s end-of-year conference: not as ‘crazy’ as The Independent makes out
I’m one of the few living in the occident who watched President Putin’s end-of-year press conference (all right, I listened to a good part of it while working). While the live translations coming through were distracting, it was better than not knowing what he was saying. It was a rare thing, to see a president […]
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Cuba’s automotive time warp
My friend Stephen Smith filmed the following in Cuba, looking at the pre-1959 US cars that are still running (mostly on non-original engines) there. It’s also interesting for the odd non-US car that you see: various Ladas (the original Zhiguli shape), a Volkswagen Gol in one scene, and an Emgrand EC8. Steve and his wife […]
The shame of Russia (courtesy of Facebook)
At the weekend, 40,000 to 50,000 took to the streets of Moskva—Moscow—to protest their government’s actions in the Ukraine, at the Peace and Freedom March. I understand that media called the country’s actions ‘the shame of Russia’. A friend provided me with photos of the protest that he and his friends took, which I […]
Russian mass media believe it’s the Putin right that counts
World Economic Forum, licensed under Creative Commons Vladimir Putin has won the first round in the presidential elections in Russia by such a margin that he won’t need to face rivals for a second-round run-off. But the one place where he scored less than half of the vote was in Moskva, the most educated and […]
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Wikileaks’ brand of transparency is the enemy of the establishment
There are probably two things, chiefly, that fuel support for Julian Assange. First, the idea that the mainstream media are not independent, but merely mouthpieces for the establishment. There’s some truth to this. Secondly, the fact that Wikileaks is revealing, this time, things that we already knew: that governments are two-faced. While […]
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How MG Rover mirrored the developments at Lada
I still have Adam Curtis’s The Mayfair Set, a TV series charting the decline of British power and the rise of the technocracy, recorded on video cassette somewhere. I consider him someone who can see through the emperor having no clothes, and in The Mayfair Set, he certainly saw through the Empire having no clothes. […]
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