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Monthly Archives: April 2016

Today’s Pirates – the Panama Papers

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Have you ever wanted to be a pirate? If being free on the high seas has an allure you may want to think again. Today’s pirates don’t have ships or parrots, nor do they take over other ships at sea. They’ve gone bigtime, making a lot more money off of the very lucrative practice of making money disappear even more surely than burying it in the ground.

That’s what has been shown in the “Panama Papers”, a huge stash of 11 million documents taking up about 2.5 terabytes of data. The leak of papers from Panamanian firm Mossack Fonseca is about ten times the size of Edward Snowden’s leak – and none of the secrets revealed are about security.

This is about money. Lots of it.

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Outrage

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Every day we are bombarded with information – far more than we can handle thrown at us from a perspective we don’t understand. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

Every day we find ourselves in situations we don’t understand – things that are going crazy around us.. The most common response is outrage – disbelief that this could possibly happen.

The officers responsible for the death of Jamar Clark on 15 November was one of these incidents, and the reports and (lack of) legal proceedings comes at us in much the same way. Everything about this makes no sense if you look deep enough into it yet everyone has an opinion about it. Let me tell you the simple, clear facts that we can be sure of:

Jamar Clark is dead. Any city that has been through this and wants to be known as “civilized” has to make sure that this does not happen ever again.

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On, Wisconsin!

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The big winner once this election is over will almost certainly be religious people, who will see their ranks swell by November. Nearly everyone in the nation will be saying, “Please, dear God, not Trump!” Some will even be on their knees, others will light candles at the cathedral. It will be a good time for religion everywhere as a cheeto-filled populace hooked on teevee pleads with the divine that they don’t get what they deserve.

Is that too harsh? Yes, it probably is. And it may not come to pass, either, if the good people of Wisconsin do their job. There is a good chance that they will be voting in large numbers for not-Trump, which will generally be Ted Cruz.

With their Democratic side up for grabs, the state that gave us Brett Favre’s NFL career might yet be the most exciting place in the nation, at least for a short time.

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