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Zimbabwean billion-dollar note: A Zimbabwean one hundred billion dollar “special agro check” is going for US$0.99 on Fleabay. See also: “What’s a few zeroes between friends?,” “Currency design software,” “Like printing money.” (dibbell)

Alas: See also: “McCain’s modest proposal.” (salmon)

Myspace page attributed to recently assassinated Chechen strongman Sulim Yamadayev, with six friends, comments going back to 31 Jul ’07 (most from “♥your angel ♥,” pictured above) and misc pix. The “about me” section: My name is Sulim Yamadayev, i am from Gudermes and i belong the most powerful family in Chechnya. I command the [...]

The NYT unfurled a new banner: “Welcome to the new Global Edition of NYTimes.com. Learn More | Switch to U.S. Edition”—and, in the process, broke countless links accumulated over the last many years. The IHT’s publisher, Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, noted without a hint of irony: “I do hope you will enjoy exploring all that the new [...]

Word on the street is that the Pirate Bay 3 have left the building, for any value of building where building = Sweden. The TPB trial is a lose–lose proposition: lose the trial or win and provoke a furious political backlash—of the kind that might, say, lead them to find a safer harbor. Where? Culture-war [...]

Wark: The telegraph left its imprint in the book, in Hemingway’s prose, for example. It lent its name to many newspapers and radically transformed what newspapers do. The news story was an artefact of the telegraph era and is now finally passing with it. But notice that the book and the newspaper still continued to [...]

Ainger, “Once beaten for stating the obvious, our time has come,” Teh Grauniad, 26 Mar ’09): Ten years ago, the anticapitalist movement predicted this recession. (pr@nettime)

AIG EVP Jake DeSantis to AIG CEO Edward Liddy: I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in—or responsible for—the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. [...]

Doug Henwood: (By the way, the buzz is that some banks may participate in the bailout scheme, borrowing money from the gov to buy their own bad assets at ridiculously inflated prices. That renders them technically solvent, with Washington holding the bag. Nice.) Gangster.

Aram Bartholl’s “TV Filter”: See also: “T/F: ‘Digital copies are exact copies’.” (mh)

From Cryptome, “Soldier in black and white uniform to conceal him while climbing trees. He stands in front of a house camouflaged to represent a fence and trees. Co. F, 24th Engnrs. American University, D. C. November 14, 1917. Army Engineer Corps. (Army)” For a capsule history of camouflage that does something other than indulge [...]

Holbrooke’s statement on Karadzic is awfully crisply worded: No one in the U.S. government ever promised anything, nor made a deal of any sort with Karadzic. [...?] In subsequent meetings, as a private citizen, I repeatedly urged officials in both the Clinton and Bush administrations to capture Karadzic,” Mr. Holbrooke said. “I am glad he [...]

Worth noting. The comments, which include a back-and-forth about “the baseline frequency and size of protests,” suggest that we have yet to fully appreciate the importance of official underestimates of protest size. They also include this gem: The majority of the people at the event, besides being middle class, had never been at any kind [...]

Felix Salmon states the obvious: Chuck Schumer wants to tax “virtually all” of the bonuses being paid to AIG employees. The surtax being proposed by Gary Peters is 60%; presumably that comes on top of the regular federal income tax. But why stop there? If you set the surtax at, say, 150% of all bonus [...]

Gangster. Newsweek (Hirsh, “The Next AIG Scandal?”, 18 Mar ”09): Thomas Gober, a former Mississippi state insurance examiner who has tracked fraud in the industry for 23 years and served previously as a consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, says he believes AIG’s supposedly solvent insurance business may be at least as [...]

See also: “If we showed you, we’d have to pixelate you,” “performance.google.com,” “Proposed Google service,” “Google: ‘Privacy? Depends—where are you?’”

The Independent (Castle, “Brussels Stories: Playground craze gives Eurocrats’ offspring lessons in diplomacy,” 2005): Every parent knows about playground fads and the nightmare of having to track down that elusive, must-have toy. But for those with children at the European School in Brussels there is an added problem. The pupils here are sons and daughters [...]

A nightmare teetering on the edge between the past and the future.

Sy Hersh: “Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen. “Right now, today, there was a [...]

FT: The crisis in the car industry has led to a global shortage of a chemical solvent used for everything from checking the mould level in a chocolate bar to ensuring a tablet of aspirin is safe. Acetonitrile (a/k/a cyanomethane, methyl cyanide, ethanenitrile, ethyl nitrile, methane, cyanomethanecarbonitrile, ethanonitrile, acetonitril, ethane nitrile): Prices have spiralled. Few [...]

Arne Moll at Chessvibes: Last week, ChessBase was apparently ‘forced to cease Internet broadcasting of the Topalov-Kamsky match’. As we noted in our report on the first match game, live broadcasting of the chess moves in this match without permission was prohibited by the Bulgarian Chess Federation (although they didn’t seem to have a problem [...]

Jonathan Krohn, darling of conservatism: David Devore, dosed up: Just a coincidence?

Bloomberg: More than 8.3 million U.S. mortgage holders owed more on their loans in the fourth quarter than their property was worth as the recession cut home values by $2.4 trillion last year, First American CoreLogic said. An additional 2.2 million borrowers will be underwater if home prices decline another 5 percent, First American, a [...]

14.8% U1: Percentage of labor force unemployed 15 weeks or longer. U2: Percentage of labor force who lost jobs or completed temporary work. U3: Official unemployment rate per ILO definition. U4: U3 + “discouraged workers”, or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available [...]

WP quotes Mark Lipinski, the editor of Quilter’s Home magazine on its Jan/Feb issue (Hesse, “Uncovered! The Unseemly Side of Quilts,” 5 Mar ’09): Jo-Ann [Fabrics] “might be out of touch with their customer base…. When you consider that a 70-year-old could have been dancing naked at Woodstock and a 50-year-old could have been smoking [...]