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http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/146206

"...a new report from the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity says the battle for reform has been "a bonanza" for the lobbying industry. According to the Center's analysis, "About 1,750 businesses and organizations hired about 4,525 lobbyists, total -- eight for each member of Congress -- and spent at least $1.2 billion to influence health care bills and other issues.""

"... The website Politico.com reports that the reelection campaign of Tennessee Senator Bob Corker -- who's one of the key negotiators on financial reform -- sent an e-mail to Wall Street lobbyists and others soliciting contributions of up to $10,000 for a chance to meet or grab a meal with the senator."
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[psiga]

A long but solid article on the current state of America's war machine. Feel free to graze; I haven't read every word of it myself. Here are some nice pullquotes though:

The amount of private military contractors deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan is rarely reported on in the US mainstream press, but a Congressional Research Service investigation into this revealed that a record high 69% active duty soldiers are in fact private mercenaries.

..

each extra American soldier deployed will be at a cost of a million dollars a year, not including the added expense of training and maintaining a security force.

..

“Halliburton reported $4 billion in operating profits in 2008, while KBR recently said its first quarter revenues in 2009 were up 27%, for a total of $3.2 billion. Its sales in 2008 were up 33%, and according to the Financial Times, the company had $1 billion in cash, no debt, and was looking for acquisitions.”

..

As former CIA Station Chief John Stockwell explained: “Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn.”

..

“Until 1999 U.S. taxpayers paid the entire annual salary of every single Taliban government official.”

..

In 2000, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and several oil companies “founded the InterContinental Exchange (ICE)…. ICE is an online commodities and futures marketplace. It is outside the US and operates free from the constraints of US laws. The exchange was set up to facilitate ‘dark pool’ trading in the commodities markets.”

A Congressional investigation into this exchange found that these companies were fraudulently inflating the price of oil by executing “round-trip” trades where one company would sell shares in oil to another company who would then sell the shares right back. This would drive the price of oil to however high they wanted it to go to. “No commodity ever changes hands. But when done on an exchange, these transactions send a price signal to the market and they artificially boost revenue for the company. This is nothing more than a massive fraud, pure and simple.”

..

DMS Energy, when investigated by Congress, admitted that 80 percent of its trades in 2001 were ’round-trip’ trades. That means 80 percent of all of their trades that year were bogus trades where no commodity changed hands, and yet the balance sheets reflect added revenue…

Plenty of citations and good research. His opinions are a shade or three darker than mine, but if you can filter out the goods you may find it as interesting/damning as I do.

It's all just the usual human nature in echo chambers of unchecked power. If we don't find a dependable way to regulate power, it'll be abused. Duh. People aren't getting any more or less honest than they ever have been in comparable situations throughout history. Ah well.


Also worth reading up on SAIC:

SAIC has been awarded more individual government contracts than any other private company in America. The contracts number not in the dozens or scores or hundreds but in the thousands: SAIC currently holds some 9,000 active federal contracts in all.

..

To get some idea of the scale: contractors absorb the taxes paid by everyone in America with incomes under $100,000. In other words, more than 90 percent of all taxpayers might as well remit everything they owe directly to SAIC or some other contractor rather than to the IRS.

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[psiga]

Oh man. This is pretty amusing. A dude wandering around Jerusalem, interviewing people in bars to get their opinion on Obama. Apparently it has been removed from YouTube, so the guy who made the video uploaded it to Veoh...and it's been removed from there too. So here it is on some place I've never seen before: http://www.indybay.org/uploads/2009/07/14/3af0eee8_liveleak.flv

It's basically Dracko's avatar.
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[psiga]

[psiga]

Passing thoughts: wouldn't it be amusing if this were part of an attempt to discredit wikileaks by getting them to make a big deal out of disinfo? An intelligence agency equivalent of I'm not touching you. I'm not touching you. I'm not touching youuuuu.

More likely, it's just some random misinformation, the spook involvement was routine investigation of a report that somebody's decrypting military intelligence, there was no actual malice intended, and it's maybe unfortunate that some people are seeing this as what it isn't.

I'm glad that wikileaks is fighting the fight, though. Growing pains of civilization.

AND NOW A JOEK ABOUT THE ISRAEL:
how many jews get into a car ? 14 ! 10 into the ashtray and 4 into the car :)
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[psiga]

"more air marshals have been arrested since 9/11 (for crimes like smuggling explosives, domestic violence, drunk driving and human trafficking) than the number of people arrested by the marshals"

That is so beautiful.

Also this. Tell me if it is hotlink protected. I'll just assume that it's not.

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[psiga]

http://www.sec.gov/news/press/2010/2010-59.htm

"Washington, D.C., April 16, 2010 — The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged Goldman, Sachs & Co. and one of its vice presidents for defrauding investors by misstating and omitting key facts about a financial product tied to subprime mortgages as the U.S. housing market was beginning to falter."

Hooray, the SEC gave me a birthday present. How very thoughtful of them!
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[psiga]

Literal indeed. Thank you! Gonna see if I can be More Productive this year than in previous years.
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[psiga]

I watched the video specifically because you said all that, shrug.

By god, it's like the linguistic equivalent of an optical illusion.

Is that the second floor, or the basement? Is it even part of the same building?

Where am I? I don't even know what the color red is anymore.
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[psiga]

It's vaguely Lovecraftian to consider.
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[psiga]

Ooh, eye witness reportage of the now-infamous wikileaks heli footage, brought to us by Wired: http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/04/2007-iraq-apache-attack-as-seen-from-the-ground/
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[psiga]

As one of the commentators says: "The article is WRONG. WikiLeaks states, in the very first page of text in the video, that “While some of the men appeared to be armed, the behavior of nearly everyone is relaxed”."
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[psiga]

Verifiable executions, 2009:

China: Unknown (suspected to be in the thousands)
Iran: At least 389
Iraq: At least 120
Saudi Arabia: At least 69
USA: 52


Japan news: They've banned Yakuza, among other things. I hate April Fool's Day.

And the US is closing their base in Okinawa. I continue to hate April Fool's Day.

Aaand "Japan's rank in a World Economic Forum on the equality of sexes was recently lowered from 91 (out of 134) to 101."

AAaaaaaaaaaaaaaa the men's skirt fashion boom.
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[psiga]

Yeah, I realized this the next day. I recently set my RSS reader to sort by reverse dating, and so it didn't even occur to me that I should be vigilant for April 1st. FFffuck meeee etc.
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[psiga]

Amusingly the skirt thing is not a hoax.
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[psiga]

http://www.uq.edu.au/news/index.html?article=21034

Impressive from a Long Now perspective. Researchers have figured out how to make vaccination patches out of nanomaterials, in such a way that they use about one hundredth the amount of vaccine, obviate the need for multiple vaccinations, are painless, can be self-applied by non-professionals, don't require refrigeration, and whatever else.

This is one of those things that'll help the second and third world a hell of a lot.
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[psiga]

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Ooh. The DOW just spiked really hard below 10k for a moment. This could get interesting.

Edit: Weird. One random company spiked from $40 a share to 1 penny a share and then back again, in a flash. http://www.google.com/finance?q=acn

Some people are thinking that today's interestingness is due to algorithms going haywire, rather than any particular news. I'm hoping this ain't going to be blamed on hackers or something.
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[psiga]

Movie Studios Win Drive to Disable TV Features

May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Movie studios won U.S. permission to disable features on television equipment to prevent copying of films, clearing the way to send first-run films to consumers in their homes.

Temporarily restricting TVs and the set-top boxes used for cable service will “enable a new business model” that wouldn’t develop without such anti-piracy protection, the Federal Communications Commission said yesterday in an order.

My my my, these guys are going to learn some hard lessons.
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[psiga]

Hasn't the web bot been predicting alien shit for years now? It's weird to me how seriously Clif takes that topic. The predicty machine is awesome in that it does indeed seem to forecast trends in media reportage, but Clif says himself that it just forecasts what's reported, not the truth behind what's reported. So "ALIEN WARS" memes end up being the mass lulz about how NASA decided to "bomb the moon" in order to find water; and "NON-TERRAN SECRETS REVEALED" ends up being about the guy who thought he had a moon rock but turned out to have a piece of petrified wood. Much ado over gat dam nuttin'. And yet even in light of all that, Clif is a Believer.

Makes me think of what weather reports would be like if the meteorologist believed that Greek gods were responsible for various weather conditions, and reported accordingly...

And yae, mighty Alpheus brings
his baneful wrath unto those that
dwell throughout Louisiana

OK I am just thinking out loud here.
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[psiga]

Yeah, I'm still subscribed to that youtube channel which keeps track of Clif's interviews. I do wonder about the night vision goggle thing, but apparently not enough to look into it. It sounds fishy inasmuch as the sightings sound too fantastic and too frequent.

The bot forecasts that I've seen 'come true' end up being ambiguous yet uncannily close to home in retrospect -- which is great and all, but it makes me really suspicious when Clif starts talking about details of upcoming events very specifically, since from what I've seen, it just doesn't work "very specifically." It's still more art than science, so he can't help but apply his own bias to the interpretation of the data (hence my metaphor of the mad Greek meteorologist).

I kinda wish he'd be more earnest about that facet of things. I struggle to tell how much of his banter is about forecast data and how much of it is merely him getting a chance to wag chin at some radio hosts for a while.
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"According to human rights groups, tens of thousands of young women like Zavidova have been sterilised without their consent in the authoritarian former Soviet state of Uzbekistan." link

Oh my.
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[psiga]

Not back, but I wanted to pop in to drop off this li'l gem: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/07/01/is_al_qaedas_new_english_language_magazine_any_good

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Next Big Future is also worth a look as well. I haven't been keeping up with this one as much as I probably should.

"Position and momentum can be predicted more precisely than Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle and Provide a Measurement of Entanglement"

"Progress in Reverse Engineering Brains with Detailed Macaque Monkey Brain Map"

Such good stuff.

Not enough hours in a day! Info overload = inevitable. Beware, beware.

OK, I'ma go to sleep. Everyone have fun.
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[psiga]

Yahoo! NEWS
TRENDING NOW:
* blockbuster
* glenn beck
* iran
* britney spears
* mars hoax
* paris hilton

Fuck you, mediocre people.
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[psiga]

Apparently, from the twenty seconds I spent skimming the link (as I said the same thing you did), there is a recent email hoax going around that some day soon you will be able to see Mars in the night sky, appearing roughly the size of the moon.

As for the rest, I am not looking at the links but I'm pretty sure I can guess:
* Paris is being sued for thirty million dollars by a hair extension company (she violated a contract with them).
* Blockbuster is probably going bankrupt soon (and I am surprised at how happy this makes me).
* Glenn Beck is [insert new court jester skit to distract people].
* Iran has started its first nuke power plant (and it appears to be fully legit).
* Britters I think got Japan riled up after a photo shoot where she dressed like a sexy schoolgirl (of the 8 year old variety).
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[psiga]

Hey Mech, some things for you: Google is opening up its prediction API to people. http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/08/google-prediction-api.html (It still appears to be as I figured: not a real-world crystal ball of future history so much as a domain-limited and data-driven probabilistics calculator. {Surely something that will benefit super-greatly from that new probability calculating chip that was developed.})

And I made a hacked KeelyNet RSS thinger, if you're interested. It mostly works! One time it accidentally merged two news posts together, but in a few weeks of testing it out, it has worked really well otherwise. http://feed43.com/0885551083103313.xml

Speaking of KeelyNet, here is something for Adilegian (I won't describe it; it's a surprise): http://j-walkblog.com/index.php?/weblog/posts/journal_retracts_article/
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I noticed in my RSS feed today that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (one of the few basically-trustworthy economists) has finally gotten on board with the idea of thorium reactors. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/7970619/Obama-could-kill-fossil-fuels-overnight-with-a-nuclear-dash-for-thorium.html

As is typical, Karl Denninger (my A#1 favorite source of economics intel right now) talked about it months sooner, in greater technical detail, and with much more bile. http://market-ticker.org/cgi-mt/akcs-www?archived-post=2385-Energy-Are-You-A-Pig-And-A-Bigot.html

Since I don't think I've mentioned thorium reactors in this thread, I might as well now. Although, looking back in my RSS reader, the first thorium-related item that I ever hit the Share button for is here: http://nextbigfuture.com/2008/03/large-reserves-of-thorium.html

Take-away quote:

"Thorium Power, Inc. has told me that they already have the technology to “switch over” from uranium to thorium more than 60% of the reactors in use today in the world."

"They said that a switched over or built from the ground up thorium powered reactor has for the “blanket” a total of three times the life of a uranium powered reactor. This would mean that the savings during the first fuel cycles will pay for the changeover in the case of a “retrofit.” The core can be used to burn fissionable grade plutonium to non weapons grade material while the blanket will be made from thorium and uranium-233, not 238, so that no weapons grade plutonium-239 can be produced in the reactor."

Sounding good? There's this too: http://environment.change.org/blog/view/thorium_nuclear_energys_clean_little_secret

"Let's review some of the key benefits of thorium. It's abundant (because we've never used any of it); it doesn't require the costly and time-intensive refining process important for uranium, and the waste it produces becomes inert in one hundred years as opposed to hundreds of thousands of years. It's nearly impossible for terrorists to manipulate for weapons production. There's more: the annual fuel cost for a one gigawatt thorium reactor is approximately six hundred times lower than that of a uranium reactor, which requires 250 times more of the raw element."

Let's see how long it takes for thorium to catch on. I'm a little bit heartened that the senator in my own state is co-supporting it with an opposition-party senator one state over. Now we just need the dashing halfbreed upstairs to be a hero.
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GMTA. Was going to post that very link a day or so back, but told myself to shut up and go find something better to do than inflict that long (but interesting) read on busy people. It is a good piece, though; best write-up on the Koch empire that I've seen yet.

Nutshell: The Koch brothers are like a modern day Rockefeller, and they seem to have fully embraced lying, keeping nasty things secret, and lovingly supporting the neoconservative movement.
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Addendum to my post about thorium reactors: My good man Karl Denninger also noticed that Ambrose Evans-Pritchard was a bit late to the party. It's funny to see AEP consistently lagging, but still at least a good 80% on point. Considering most economists who work in the mainstream media are maybe 30% on point or less, I'm amazed that AEP even has a job.

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Hey Mech, I am listening to the latest radio thing from the web bot youtube channel thing, and the host of the latest program is totally Scottish as hell. (Only a few minutes into it so far; dunno what the gist of Clif's doom-saying this time will be.)

[psiga]

You're probably better off than LW, anyway. He's doing school too, but due to not-enough-cars in the household, he has to be dropped off at the campus six hours before his first class.


WEB BOT UPDATE:
I am one and one half video into this interview, and already he's going on about how the child-burning pagan lizard people running our country are disturbing the time stuff such that it escapes out like mosquitoes and you will experience less time even though it will feel like more time has passed. "If that makes sense."

And then his call cuts in and out (again), because apparently the spooky moon people have special wire tapping gear that makes it incredibly obvious that they're listening to your calls.

"What we'll do, guys, is we'll take a wee song break, and we'll be back in just a wee second." *cue Black Velvet*


Edit: He blames his addiction to caffeine on The Powers That Be.
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(Apologies to Toups; I'll gladly remove the link and/or not feel slighted if you edit it out.)

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Hey Adi! Let's see if I can formulate this well enough... Feel free to ask for clarification if I don't say things rightly.

Web Bot trawls through the internet, scooping up the vocabularies that people are using to communicate. Clif originally hoped that it'd be able to tell, from shifts in linguistic choices, how tense people were becoming in relation to certain companies/stocks, and that perhaps this would indicate future trends. It didn't turn out to work so well for stocks (apparently it gets tripped up on numerical figures a lot), although it worked really well at forecasting linguistically novel events of certain magnitudes of interest, that would show up in the news at specific times in the future. Everything else is loose... It can tell you the latitude of an event, but not tell you whether it's northern or southern hemisphere. It can tell you what might happen when, but not give you a figure of that event's probability. Weird foibles like that.

Since it's pretty much just Clif doing the design work, and his buddy Igor handling back-end stuff, I get the impression that these 'foibles' could be worked out if we had, say, teams of Google-quality engineers, or quant trading engineers or something, working on it.

I'm not sure if it can ever be used to forecast the actual "true" future, though. It forecasts what the news will be -- and if the news is a fabrication or mistake, yet people are talking about it anyway, then that's what will show up in the forecasts.

Anyway, the ~HOMG TWENTYTWELVE~ situation seems to be that Clif is detecting a 'data gap' coming up soon. This implies no internet chatter about any news events. When the gap closes and chatter resumes, it resumes at around one one-thousandth the magnitude that it is today. This implies ???


That's where we're at, and where Clif's color commentary starts getting in the way. I'll post more after I take a break...
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[psiga]

Alright. So, the reason why we are concerned about the data gap is that the magnitude of chatter seems to be a more objective thing to measure than the content. If we get a flatline of chatter, or a 1/1,000th reduction in chatter, then that implies the internet is down.

And again, Clif's commentary is getting in the way. Instead of being like a weather man, he thinks he's on the talkshow circuit. Now maybe that's just because I only hear him speak about this stuff when he is on the talkshow circuit, and if I wanted the straight data, all I have to do is buy the latest ALTA reports or whatever. As it stands, he is telling it like the lizard people are going to fly to the hollow moon while most of humanity perishes in a pole flip. Not really buying that, sorry.

Near as I can tell, there is a chance that we'll get some solar EMP storms which will fuck all sorts of shit out of our tech infrastructure. How good is that chance? Dunno. What should we do about it? Dunno.

Anything more I say would just dip into conjecture territory, so I'll leave it at that.
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Ah, very good point, actually. I don't think he has addressed how exactly he determines the volume of future chatter.

If it were simply picking up fears about censorship, then indeed that language would be showing up. The gap is implying no gatherable data at all, for some reason. Does it just mean that the bot is unable to access the data for a while, due to some sort of surprise international firewalling project that we haven't heard anything about yet? Does it mean EMPs will take out the electrical grid? Who knows.
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