hypermegaglobal.net

A while ago, while doing research for my blog about the economic crisis in Luxembourg¹, I went to the ABBL's website and was greeted with a big headline which read:

"Luxembourg does not exploit poor countries"

Would you eat at a restaurant which prominently announces that it "does absolutely not use rotten meat"? Doesn't it make you wonder why they'd feel the need to mention this?

It turned out a study by the Luxembourgish NGO Cercle de Coopération had accused Luxembourg of "siphoning off considerable amounts of money from developing countries by illegal or at the least illegitimate means". I made a bookmark in order to have a closer look at the study another day².

Unfortunately, as I learned (again) today, the world doesn't wait for me: The NGO has distanced itself from the study and a critique of the study by Luxembourg for Finance CEO Fernand Grulms was taken down form the ABBL's and the Tageblatt's website.

Which, of course, is why I now have to blog about this stuff. I can't write about Kaupthing's leaked secret document and the censorship in Icelandic media³ while ignoring this case of potential censorship right here in Luxembourg.

So what happened?

I have no idea, but I since I'm a blogger I'll just speculate:

1. The NGO realized its study wasn't that great and took it down while Fernand Grulms realized his critique of the "study"⁴ wasn't that great either and took it down, too. And peace was once again restored in the Grand-Duchy. Of course, this explanation is boring, which is why I present no. 2:
   
2. Some powerful and rich person with a strong interest in keeping things under the rug (maybe an African warlord, South American politician or your average Luxembourgish house owner) gave a lot of money to everyone to STFU.

I like the second explanation because it involves money. I like money and my Lux-MRT project has not really taken off yet, most likely due to a lack of funds (please note there's a donation button on the right). So yes, I'm speculating this mysterious person is going to give me a lot of money to delete this post, too. I'll then simply claim it wasn't really that great to begin with, which wouldn't even be a lie (genius!).

Now please excuse me, in order to prepare for my upcoming sudden increase in wealth I have to go watch season 9 episode 14 of the Simpsons again. You know, the one where Homer starts his own dot-com company, Compu-Global-Hyper-Mega-Net⁵, which is later bought out by Bill Gates. That's how you do it.

¹ A serious topic, which is why that blog is available in the world's most serious language only.
² I wanted to deal with that other study accusing Luxembourg of having a per-capita ecological footprint in the same league as the UAE first. Wow, Luxembourg sure is some evil place.
³ I didn't actually mention the censorship but - for the sake of my argument - let's just pretend otherwise.
⁴ That's how he wrote it, with quotation marks.
⁵ Yes, that's where I got the inspiration for my domain name. Some moron actually registered hypermegaglobal.com later and tried to sell it to me (a .com always being worth more than a .net).