Reality is retroactive, retrospective and illusory.

 

"I think that you've already made your contribution," you say. I laugh, but I'm not laughing. You point out that a few years back a prominent Russian dissident named Sergei Magnitsky claimed to have received nearly $230 million in a tax exemption for a lifeboat he built to save himself from arrest for tax evasion. "Of course . ." You continue "What happens to the rest of the money? I have to spend some of it. That's my fault. I didn't know there were laws against money in this country, not really, I guess, until now." You have to go through several hoops to get that money, but you have to pay it. "I don't have the money." A few months later, they arrested you for taking $100 from your bank account. In 2010 you became a high profile person on the Internet with the explanation of going to jail for taking $100 from your bank account. He took more than that, he was caught. The FBI arrested your friends, you and several others. The Russian government seized your personal data on your computer. That information is now in the hands of a handful of federal authorities. Some of them are just trying to learn what's really going on. One of those authorities said you and others in the Russian financial community should stop communicating with others in the United States who would make large, illegal payments to you. A lot of this will likely take years to unravel . The Russian criminal system , while it's trying to catch up with the American criminal system, has repetitively re-established itself over the last decade in a number of other countries . There are no regulations . The rules are not always followed, and it costs a lot to obtain your money. You could get caught at airports in countries that have no laws about payments to the United States. You will be arrested there many times over. You could get caught in China and detained for years without trial, as in the case of your friend Sergei Alekseyev, the blogger and blogger-activist who went dark during the 2008-2009 recession. The authorities could charge you with hacking into the computer systems of Chinese banks or