Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

In 1990, Lithuania, a restive Soviet republic seeking independence, hired Summers to advise on that country’s economic transformation. … The results were literally suicidal: in 1990, when Summers first arrived, Lithuania’s suicide rate was 26.1 per 100,000 and falling. Just five years after Summers got his hands on Lithuania’s economy, life became so unbearable under the economic transition that the suicide rate nearly doubled to 45.6 per 100,000, worse than any other ex-Soviet republic in transition. In fact, it was the highest suicide rate in the world … Things got so bad that in 1992, after just two years of Summers-nomics, the traumatized Lithuanians voted the communist party back into power, the first East European nation to do so—even though just a year earlier Lithuanians actually died on the streets fighting communism.

I’m half inclined to say there should be neither truth nor reconciliation. Instead, George W. Bush should be kidnapped, drugged, flown to Spain in an unmarked plane, and wake up on the streets of Madrid tied up with a bunch of files and evidence pinned to his chest so Judge Garzón can sort the whole thing out. If anyone asks how that happened, deny knowledge and mention “executive privilege.” I dunno.

You don’t want to date me. I have very low self-esteem.

The weirdest (yet more predictable) aspect of Chinese Democracy is the way 60 percent of the lyrics seem to actively comment on the process of making the album itself. The rest of the vocal material tends to suggest some kind of abstract regret over an undefined romantic relationship punctuated by betrayal, but that might just be the way all hard-rock songs seem when the singer plays a lot of piano and only uses pronouns.

Pirate Attacks - Cambridge Consultants’ Holographic Radar Could Have Seen Them Coming

I’m sure that there’s a word for this figure of speech, probably coined by Robert Conquest (who gave us, in the course of his analysis of Communist apologetics of the 1960s concepts like “rhetorical questions to which the answer is clearly no”, and “words like ‘basically’ and ‘fundamentally’ used in contexts where ‘not’ would cleary be more accurate”).