Who counts Stalin and Mao as "progressive"?

(aside from American conservative right, that is)

So you haven't actually starting digging into science (you know, the underlying physics and chemistry, climate models etc). Instead, you started digging into the scandals associated with that science, under the assumption that if you find sufficiently many, that would disprove the theory.

That's exactly what I meant by "What they should enforce is telling where the data is".

I am in US, sure. My parents and grandparents are not.

As for keeping the information, I wouldn't want to use a company that'd store my data on servers in Russian, but I don't think the govt should be in business of enforcing that. What they should enforce is telling where the data is, and let me as a customer decide if I'm okay with it or not.

Lack of due process to read my email is annoying, but not directly dangerous. Lack of due process if arrested for "extremism" or some such in Russia is what I'm more worried about.

There's no due process in my country. I don't care about theory, the practice is what it is. There's no-one to go to if things go wrong.

That's bullshit. If your argument were to fly, all American and European companies would have to e.g. comply with Saudi obscenity laws, which is obvious idiocy.

How do you fine a company that does not even operate in your jurisdiction?

Give one example of EU blocking servers of some American company, on the grounds that they're "operating in EU" because a EU citizen opened an email account there.

You can't, because there's no such thing.

Yet this is exactly what the Russian law purports to do.

Dude, I am Russian. There's no "nationalism" or "jingoism" angle in what I wrote, you're arguing with a strawman.

And yes, I would vastly prefer for my emails to be hosted in the US, for personal safety reasons. Not my own anymore - I'm already safely in US so I can wave a middle finger at the assholes in charge of ruining my home country - but my parents are still there, and they hold some, shall we say, unpopular political views. Which they don't blabber about in public, but now apparently it's not a good idea to do so in private email communications, as well.

And with $12 million, there's a lot of publicity to be bought.

It's not about medical records. It's about things like personal email.

They don't want to protect the users from NSA. They want to make it easier for themselves to play NSA.

This is completely different from EU directives. Those pertain to EU companies storing data. This one is about all companies storing data of Russian citizens. I am a Russian citizen residing abroad; by the letter of this law, if I create a GMail account, Google must host my inbox data on a server in Russia, even though neither of us two is there. If they do not comply, their servers will be blocked inside Russia.

This is not a privacy provision like EU directives are. It's about having the data on Russian soil, where it can be easily examined without a warrant, or even a notification that it is happening (see also: SORM-2).

They did believe it. My mother says that when she was in her 20s, she very much believed that she was living in the best country in the world. It took five years of Komsomol career to begin to notice the discrepancies in the message, and that largely because she got acquainted with some of the elite party kids and saw how they lived.

But therein lies the rub - he claimed to have build all those devices, but none were actually found (definitely not where he said he built them). He claimed to have gotten a recipe for chloroform and used it to prepare some, but again, none was found and no signs of preparing it, either. He claimed to have a secluded place to torture his victims in, but it doesn't seem to exist. He hired himself out to kill one of the targets to another guy... except that nothing happened on the supposedly scheduled day of the first hit. Nor the second hit. Nor the third one - they have already moved on to another "target" by then.

So, really, it all does seem like an elaborate fantasy, albeit one fueled by his contact with real world people. The information that he gathered - which was really the only part where he acted on all this - seems to have been for the purpose of fueling the fantasy further; he didn't share any of it with his "accomplices", nor worked it into the "plans" that he made and posted.