7/8/11
Ron Paul Should Be the Next President
Certainly, the Fed will likely give QE3...QE4...QE5, a shot if the economy becomes completely unglued, but similar to what has occurred in Japan for the last 20 years, it will not work. We have already seen what Mr. Bernanke's money printing in the form of QE2 has wrought - it has robbed the middle class blind, while benefitting the entrenched corporate, banking, and political elite, along with wealthy Americans. The vast majority of Americans do not have sufficient financial assets such as bond, stock, commodity and hedge fund portfolios to offset the rise in food and energy prices that Bernanke has unleashed on the country due to his policy of Dollar devaluation through money printing.
The entire burden of a falling Dollar as a result of QE2 and the United States' exploding debt has been placed on the middle and working classes, while the elite have benefitted from rising prices for financial assets. It is a scam. Furthermore, it hasn't provided one iota of benefit for the vast majority of American citizens. The unemployment rate continues to hover at 9.1% and very likely could hit double digits by next year.
Furthermore, home prices hit a new low in May. This is the one asset that matters most to the majority of Americans, and things are getting worse. The creator of the Case-Shiller Home Price Index, Robert Shiller, recently said that he was optimistic that home prices could fall for the next 20 years. In all likelihood, there will be no economic recovery whatsoever when the dust settles. The bailouts, federal deficit spending, and quantitative easing programs that were enacted to attempt to reflate asset prices and spark the job market will be viewed by historians as failures. The entire Keynesian orgy's real result is likely to be an even more devastating financial collapse.
The toxic debt that was held by the private sector before the crisis has now been transferred to sovereign balance sheets as well as those of global central banks. Furthermore, many private corporations have taken advantage of the Fed's historically low interest rate policy to lever-up their balance sheets once again. These facts when combined with the moral hazard that we have introduced into our economic system as a result of the bailouts (corporate socialism), similar problems in most of the developed world, and an unprecedentedly interconnected global economy have set the stage for a potential systemic meltdown.
All of this could have been averted if we had taken heed of Dr. Ron Paul's warnings years ago. This man has been fighting with absolute integrity and honesty for the values that this country was founded on for the last 30 years - sound money, balanced budgets, free markets, non-interventionist foreign policy and civil liberties. Most every other GOP Presidential candidate is an Establishment panderer who is beholden to entrenched special interests. Why should we trust another Establishment politician after being subjected to the lies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, not to mention nearly every other politician in Washington D.C.?
Obama's lies have been egregious and on par with those of President Bush. He lied about closing Guantanamo Bay. He lied about bringing the troops home. He resigned the Patriot Act after saying that he would not. Furthermore, Obama is targeting American citizens for assassination without due process. This is in addition to the socialist, big government, programs he has passed such as ObamaCare, which was opposed by the majority of the American populace. Domestically, our spending has gotten completely out of control. President Bush got the ball rolling, and President Obama has sped up the process of destroying the country through debt.
According to a recent Treasury report, the national debt will exceed the size of the economy this year. Just one year ago, the Treasury had said that the debt to GDP ratio would not break 100% until 2014. Can we really afford to elect Obama for 4 more years given that our debt/GDP level is estimated to hit 102% in 2012? Can you imagine what a U.S. default would look like? How about civil unrest, a collapsing Dollar, and unemployment rivaling the Great Depression.
Make no mistake, this country is on the precipice of crisis and we need to make radical changes. The 2012 Presidential elections may present one of the last opportunities for the American people to rise up against the oligarchy that has run this country into the ground for their own personal benefit at the expense of the majority of the citizens of this deteriorating Republic.
Amid the terrible domestic economy where another recession (depression?) seems likely, our politicians are still overseeing a disastrous foreign policy that is bankrupting us. We have been lied to repeatedly. We have been propagandized mercilessly by the mainstream media. We have been made to live in fear under the "War on Terror," yet we have not been given a clear message about how this war can be won. How do you win the "War on Terror" by invading and occupying a sovereign country that had nothing to do with Al-Qaeda, and killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians?
We are engaged in wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, and we are bombing Yemen and Pakistan all the while threatening Iran. How is this going to stop terrorism? Please tell me! We are creating more terrorists, while at the same time giving the extremists opportunities to kill Americans day in and day out. Why? If anything, we are galvanizing their cause in the eyes of other Muslims. Furthermore, we simply cannot afford more war mongering and militarism. Period.
Into this void has stepped a man whose reputation for integrity, honesty, and principles is unimpeachable. He has ideas that address nearly every single problem that this country faces. He wants to follow the Constitution, restore civil liberties, end the foreign occupations, downsize government, restore sound money and reform the Entitlement State. If we elected Dr. Ron Paul, would all of these things happen overnight? Of course not. Many of his solutions would take years to successfully implement, but the ideas are powerful and very important. Ron Paul represents the idea of a radical reformation of our country - based on the principles enunciated by the founding fathers.
These ideas were profoundly powerful when they were written down in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. If Ron Paul can sufficiently stir the American populace, his ideas will take root even if he does not subsequently win the GOP nomination. If this happens, U.S. policy and the entire course of our country could shift much faster than most people realize. Nothing is more powerful than an idea, and few ideas are as powerful as the concept of liberty. It is time that we finally tried something different. Ron Paul represents real change.
Police Are The Enemy
6/26/11
6/20/11
Downloads
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Com-Truise-2011-Galactic-Melt/4358e033200628a1d0dad48da0f2a4edbc48cde4b49f
http://www.vertor.com/torrents/2302937/Bon-Iver-Bon-Iver%282011%29-FLAC
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Amon-Tobin-ISAM-FLAC/435831c7f57955ed211f25679a2c7bf8686276745b90
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/The-Radio-Dept-Discography-FLAC/4239ae314a0bd5873592b161fd8fc218947731577c9f
http://www.monova.org/torrent/3294255/Miike_Snow_-_Miike_Snow_%282009%29_%28LosslessFLAC%29.html
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/My-Morning-Jacket-Circuital-2011-FLAC/43587d015a4907df5ec4e2550644e5ccf45ede249e08
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Metallica-Metallica-The-Black-Album-FLAC-tntvillage/43586dad9638119c5819cfc3371f59d36db495530f20
http://www.btmon.com/Other/Other/Battles_-_Ice_Cream_320_Kbps_.mp3.torrent.html
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Jonny-Greenwood-Is-The-Controller-2007-320kbps/44320515491d78b0c0014806e5fd1ff3355327abc625
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Jonny-Greenwood-Norwegian-Wood-OST/900071faaaa4329c3bedc9a3c62c06eb5bbc6eaf8678
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Jonny-Greenwood-There-Will-Be-Blood-OST-320kbps/44866b28f63afc1d4a7deff9d1a737befae34a466a78
http://www.torrentbit.net/torrent/1656668/Blockhead%20-%20The%20Music%20Scene%20%5BFLAC%5D.TPB/
http://www.vertor.com/torrents/2234277/Mildred-Pierce-Series-Complete-720p
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Slavoj-Zizek-The-Reality-of-the-Virtual-2004/39521d481a80ec090b77b6a594b48e4e149c50d755fd
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Harlan-County-USA-Xvid-AC3-MVGroup/3323d4ec50fbf8811d4980b5c16f6f0aa8578e084492
http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Visions-of-Light-The-Art-of-Cinematography/378075b29aeb0d93e73492cc805809b1d991c00662a4
6/1/11
RT on Bitcoin
5/28/11
Article from Emergent By Design. I only put about half of it here because I wasn't crazy about the way she answered the question she poses; but it's a good set-up for a good question. Something to think about.
I came across this post from Dave Pollard via Twitter the other day, and found it so provocative that I am compelled to crosspost. (I emailed Dave and he gave me his permission.) After I retweeted it, a few people wrote back saying it was overly pessimistic and doom-and-gloomy, but after looking through some of Dave’s other posts, he seems to actually be quite optimistic that the power of local community and resilience can “save the world.” Some other posts of his work checking out – A Framework for Personal Action, How to Save the World Reading List, and a really neat list of 65 Essential Abilities for a Relocalized World. Anyway, the below piece just made me go “hmmm,” so I wanted to share. The original can be found here.
—
Some things I’ve noticed lately:
- The NYT, and the few other mainstream media that still have a shred of credibility remaining, have recently been filled with Op Eds and editorials urging various powers (corporations, Obama administration, Supreme Court) to do (or not do) things. But these urgings have an increasing tone of hopeless wishful thinking, since to the informed reader it is almost absurd to believe that what they are urging will actually transpire, given that these powers have been doing precisely the opposite for years now and show no inclination to change.
- The progressive alternative media have become tedious reading lately. When Bush was in power, they were all about the need to overthrow that psychopath and undo all the damage he had done. Now it’s all whining about how terrible things are still. There is no action agenda, just a growing sense of hopelessness, anger, and despair. Will the anomie and disenchantment of the young build into anger, and a ’60s-style outpouring of generational outrage ? Will there be a new party of the left working to take over the Democratic party like the tea party of the right is striving to take over the Republicans? As the US continues to go bankrupt and its citizens give up on the ability of its federal government to work even at a rudimentary level, is there a tipping point here signalling the Soviet-style collapse of the US (Dmitri Orlov seems to think so), and if so will power devolve to communities, and how quickly?
- I have always believed, based on my study of history, that change happens only when (per Pollard’s Law) there is no alternative to change left, or when it’s easy to change, or when it’s fun. Times of great change seem to occur either at tipping points (when some seemingly-minor event is just enough to start an avalanche of people dramatically changing behaviours or beliefs, who weren’t ready to change before), or after “black swan” events (unexpected, unpredictable events with catastrophic consequences). But lately we’ve seen at least three “black swan” events (Katrina, the BP Oil Disaster, and the Japan Tsunami/Reactor leaks) that, rather than shifting the collective will, beliefs or actions, have caused us to retrench, and resist making any change that might avoid recurrence of such events.
- A lot of the political discussions of the day seems to presume that our civilization’s problem is one of power imbalance and collective political and social will (or lack thereof). Their premise seems to be that with the right people in power and the right re-balancing of power (political/legal, economic, police/military, and ideological/media, all could be right with the world. These arguments seem oblivious to the reality that, in our complex modern world, no one is in control. Not the government. Not vested interests of the left or right in the US. Not the global corpocracy. No one.
Put these things together — a tone of hopelessness in the mainstream progressive media, a largely useless outpouring of outrage in the indymedia, a giving up of citizens on the viability of centralized representative governments, reactionary responses to black swan events instead of constructive ones, the ratcheting up of existing systems to prolong the period before tipping points, and a naivete about the powerlessness of even the most powerful in modern complex systems — and what do we have?
In his book Beginning Again, David Ehrenfeld describes our civilization as a ragged flywheel, over-built, patched and rusty, spinning faster and faster and beginning to rattle and moan. He describes its coming apart in chilling terms:
There goes a chunk — the sick and aged along with the huge apparatus of doctors, social workers, hospitals, nursing homes, drug companies, and manufacturers of sophisticated medical equipment, which service their clients at enormous cost but don’t help them very much.
There go the college students along with the VPs, provosts, deans and professors who have nor prepared them for life in a changing world after formal schooling is over. There go the high school and elementary school students, along with the parents, administrators and frustrated teachers who have turned the majority of schools into costly, stagnant and violent babysitting services.
There go the lawyers and their hapless clients in a dust cloud of the ten billion codes, rules and regulations that were produced to organize and control an increasingly intricate, unorganizable and uncontrollable society.
There go the economists with their worthless pretentious predictions and systems, along with the unemployed, the impoverished and the displaced who reaped the consequences of theories and schemes with faulty premises and indecent objectives. There go the engineers, designers and technologists, along with the people stuck with the deadly buildings, roads, power plants, dams and machinery that are the experts’ monuments.
There go the advertising hucksters with their consumer goods, and there go the consumers, consumed with their consumption. And there go the media pundits and pollsters, along with all those unfortunates who wasted precious time listening to them explain why the flywheel could never come apart, or tell how to patch it even while increasing its crazy rate of spin.
The most terrifying thing about this disintegration for a society that believes in prediction and control will be the randomness of its violent consequences. The chaotic violence will include not only desperate ruthless struggles over the wealth that remains, but the last great violation of nature. What will make it worse is that, at least at the beginning, it will take place under a cloud of denial and cynical reassurances.
That, I think, is what is happening here.
The corollary to Pollard’s Law is: Things happen for a reason. If you want to change things, first understand what that reason is.
So what is the reason that, despite millions of people being aware that the “flywheel” of our civilization is starting to come apart, and wanting to change it, we seem unable to do so?
New Word: Degovernancing
Degovernancing: to reduce the need for governance in a situation, frequently by intentional structural change. To buy each child their own version of a toy to reduce fights about sharing is an example of degovernancing.
Relevant background material matrix government (highly relevant), infrastructure for anarchists and the Leashless Manifesto
Why is this necessary? The strategic complexity framework and the Goat Rodeo Index.
OneSwarm: Privacy Preserving Peer to Peer Data Sharing
The University of Washington may be proud of helping to create another BitTorrent application, named OneSwarm. Unlike other applications, this one promises its users to guard their confidential information, enabling people to share files anonymously. The application works with a web browser and available for three operating systems: Windows, Linux, and Mac.
As you might remember, in the past the pro-copyright outfits somehow managed to make the headlines and make fools of themselves at the same time by accusing a printer located at the University of Washington of copyright violation. The IP address accused by the RIAA and the MPAA of copyright infringement appeared to belong to a harmless unconscious device which couldn’t be used for downloading any copyrighted content.
The research conducted by the University of Washington proved that collecting evidence on BitTorrent downloaders can sometimes lead to deadlock. The OneSwarm project was developed by the same team as the research in question. In fact, the application was developed with help of PhD students Michael Piatek and Tomas Isdal.
The success of the application is determined by its ability to transfer information through multiple intermediaries. The developers of the software explained that almost every online user is a content producer, but currently the community has only one model of sharing information by signing over the rights to the content work to a site and hoping that the latter will respect the privacy of the creator. That’s why privacy is very important on P2P networks.
Michael Piatek admitted that OneSwarm was just an attempt to provide an alternative to the Internet users, because he believes that sharing private information is a vital service in free societies.
Currently the source of the application can be obtained from GitHub, with binaries and the source code available for three operating systems: Windows, Linux, and Mac. A team from TorrentFreak already tested the client and admitted it had reached quite reasonable download speeds, which was confirmed in one of the academic papers released by the developers. During the performance test, it was found out that OneSwarm proved to be better than such alternatives as Freenet and BitTorrent over Tor. Nevertheless, the developers remind us that the transfers performed in a “public” mode are still unsafe.
Thanks to TorrentFreak for providing the source of the article
5/25/11
Analysis of Schubert's Quartet No.14 "Death and the Maiden"
SchubertFranz Peter Schubert (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828) was an Austrian composer.
Although he died at an early age, Schubert was tremendously prolific. He wrote some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of his music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in Schubert's work increased dramatically in the decades following his death at the age of 31. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th Century. Today, Schubert is admired as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
1823 and 1824 were hard years for Schubert. For much of 1823 he was sick with an outburst of tertiary stage syphillis, and in May had to be hospitalized. He was broke: he had entered into a disastrous deal with Diabelli to publish a batch of works, and received almost no payment; and his latest attempt at opera, Fierabras, was a flop. In a letter to a friend, he wrote,
"Think of a man whose health can never be restored, and who from sheer despair makes matters worse instead of better. Think, I say, of a man whose brightest hopes have come to nothing, to whom love and friendship are but torture, and whose enthusiasm for the beautiful is fast vanishing; and ask yourself if such a man is not truly unhappy."
Danse Macabre
Dance of Death is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424-25.
Das Lied
Der Tod und das Mädchen (February 1817, published by Cappi und Diabelli in Vienna in November 1821 as Op 7 No 3), Death and the Maiden in English, is a lied composed by Franz Schubert. The text is derived from a poem written by German poet Matthias Claudius. The song is set for voice and piano.
The piece begins with an introduction in D minor; the first eight bars in the time signature 2/2. Both hands play chords. The section is quiet (pianissimo) and slow (mäßig), and presents the musical theme of Death.
The Maiden enters in the ninth bar on an anacrusis. This section is more agitated than the first; it is marked piano and "somewhat faster" (etwas geschwinder). The melody gradually increases in pitch, chromatically at points. The piano accompaniment is syncopated, playing chords of quavers alternating in the left and right hand. A diminished chord in the first bar of the third line (ich bin noch jung) creates an eerie mood. In the eighth bar of the maiden's song, on the word rühre ("touch"), the quavers stop and the rhythm of the opening section returns. Then an imperfect cadence leads to a rest with fermata. This brings the second section to a total of 13 bars in length.
The third and final section is Death's song. The music returns to the tempo and dynamics of the introduction. Death's melody has a narrow pitch range (save for the very last note where the singer has the option of dropping to D below the melody line). The key modulates to F major, the relative major of D minor. With the last syllable of Death's song, the key changes into D-major. The coda is almost a repeat of the introduction, except it is shortened by one bar and is now in the major key.
The Maiden:
Pass me by! Oh, pass me by!
Go, fierce man of bones!
I am still young! Go, rather,
And do not touch me.
And do not touch me.
Death:
Give me your hand, you beautiful and tender form!
I am a friend, and come not to punish.
Be of good cheer! I am not fierce,
Softly shall you sleep in my arms!
Quartet No.14
The String Quartet No. 14 in D minor, known as Death and the Maiden, by Franz Schubert, is one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire. Composed in 1824, after the composer suffered through a serious illness and realized that he was dying, it is Schubert's testament to death. The quartet is named for the theme of the second movement, which Schubert took from a song he wrote in 1817 of the same title; but the theme of death is palpable in all four movements of the quartet.
So strong is the association of death with the quartet that some analysts consider it to be programatic, rather than absolute music. "The first movement of Schubert's Death and the Maiden String Quartet can be interpreted in a quasi-programmatic fashion, even though it is usually viewed as an abstract work," writes Deborah Kessler.
The quartet has four movements:
1. Allegro, in D minor and common time
2. Andante con moto, in G minor and divided common (2/2) time
3. Scherzo: Allegro molto, in D minor and 3/4 time
4. Presto, in D minor and 6/8 time
First movement: Allegro
In the 14-measure introduction, Schubert establishes the elements that will carry through the entire quartet. The quartet begins with a unison D, played fortissimo, and a triplet figure, that establishes the triplet motif. Three and a half measures of fortissimo break off into a sudden, pianissimo chorale, the first of the many violent shifts of mood that occur throughout.
Second movement: Andante con moto
The second movement is a theme and five variations, based on the theme from the Schubert Lied. The theme is like a death march in G minor, ending on a G major chord. Throughout the movement, Schubert does not deviate from the basic harmonic and sentence structure of the 24-measure theme. But each variation expresses a profoundly different emotion.
Third movement: Scherzo Allegro molto
Cobbett describes the third movement as the "dance of the demon fiddler". There is indeed something demonic in this fast-paced scherzo, full of syncopations and, like the other movements, dramatic leaps from fortissimo to pianissimo.
Fourth movement: Presto
The finale of the quartet is a tarantella in rondo-sonata form, in D minor. The tarantella is a breakneck Italian dance in 6/8 time, that, according to tradition, was a treatment for madness and convulsions brought on by the bite of a tarantula spider. Appropriately, Cobbett calls this movement "a dance of death."
Analysis of Second Movement: Andante Con Moto
In the first variation, a lilting violin descant floats above the theme, played in pulsing triplets in the second violin and viola that recall the triplets of the first movement.
In the second variation, the cello carries the theme, with the first violin playing the pulsating role - this time in sixteenth notes. After two relaxed variations, the third variation returns to the sturm und drang character of the overall piece: a galloping fortissimo figure breaks off suddenly into piano; the violin plays a variant of the theme in a high register, while the inner voices continue the gallop.
The fourth variation is again lyrical, with the viola carrying the melody under a long violin line in triplets. This is the only variation in a major key - G major.
In the fifth variation, the second violin takes up the theme, while the first violin plays a sixteenth-note arpegiated motif, with the cello playing the triplets in the bass. The variation grows from pianissimo to fortissimo, then again fades and slows in pace, finally returning to a restatement of the theme - this time in G major.
5/22/11
Websites Alert (Special Edition)
The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution - Hub and blog for all things Vinay Gupta. Go check it out if you don't know who he is.
Polytopia - The human species is rapidly and indisputably moving towards the technological singularity. The cadence of the flow of information and innovation in the infoverse demands a response. As hyperconnectivity increases, our minds are becoming progressively more coupled and cybernetically joined.
Polytopia offers itself to be the virgin ground upon which the newly born Cyberculture of openness and collaboration can be extended by those in pursuit of a combined interactive intelligence.
Polytopia is a mutually supportive habitat of sorts. A mind habitat for our multidimensional co-enhancing minds, for we are infonauts in search of a home.
World Food Garden - WorldFoodGarden.org is a map-based website whose mission is to connect all of the food gardens in the world onto one map to show the world for what it has the potential to be- one giant cross-pollinating ecosystem filled up with food gardens! In addition we provide location specific gardening information, networks and get started tutorials.
The word I would use to describe that project is hella-awsome.
Collaborative Consumption Hub - Hub and blog for all things "collaborative consumption".
Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in swapping, sharing, bartering, trading and renting being reinvented through the latest technologies and peer-to-peer marketplaces in ways and on a scale never possible before. MORE
There are thousands of examples of Collaborative Consumption across sectors from peer-to-peer travel, to social lending to co-working to service networking. Click here for a list of examples.
Check out the latest CC hot start-ups in the skill-sharing space with our CC Antenna Top 3, updated every fortnight.
P2PU - At P2PU, a study group gathers people who work together to learn a particular topic by completing tasks, assessing individual and group work, and providing constructive feedback.
Regenerative Design Institute - West Coast Permaculture school I'd never run across:
Our mission is to serve as a catalyst for a revolution in the way humans relate to the natural world. As we continue to develop Commonweal Garden into an educational center and demonstration site in permaculture and regenerative design, we serve as an inspiration of possibility for how people can live in a mutually enhancing relationship with the Earth. Through our programs and courses, we teach the skills and technology people need to become community leaders and create healthy solutions to the current environmental crisis.
We are centered in Bolinas California.
Blogs of untested potential:
PaulBHartzog.org - My name is Paul B. Hartzog. I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. I am pursuing an interdisciplinary degree in both the School of Information as well as Political Theory. I have an NSF IGERT fellowship from the Center for the Study of Complex Systems and an M.S. in Political Science for which I wrote “Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age.” I am currently working on a book manuscript about panarchy (http://www.panarchy.com).
I blog for Howard Rheingold’s SmartMobs.com, Many-to-Many, and MindJack on occasion. I work with Howard Rheingold off and on as well as do some consulting for The Institute for the Future.
I spent years working in the internet technology arena, and I’m fascinated by the notion that network technology is reconnecting the world. After a long period of distance and separation human civilization is returning to its tribal origins. Technologies that allow us to work together in new ways make possible an era of “do it yourself” cooperation. That means people being able to help each other without relying on hierarchies do things for them. These anarchical networks are best understood within the framework of complex adaptive systems.
So, this means we have to study new phenomena like open source, wiki, and social software, but it also means that we have to look back to the roots of civilization: tribes, gift economies, communities, and political theory.
Changeist - We are a design- and innovation-focused lab, experts in creating and leading teams that make the future happen. We are fluent in the global view, supported through local insights. Together with our network, we stay on top of emerging trends and driving forces around the world, in many languages and cultures. We believe in active futuring, immersing ourselves in, capturing and delivering insights that can be used to drive change today.
We are dedicated to practicing a human-centered view of foresight and innovation. We work extensively with organizations active in social innovation and humanitarian missions to enable better futures for all.
5/17/11
Adaptation (to Climate Change) of Human Society as Solution to Climate Change
The following is an interesting futurist speech redacted by Grinding.be that I thought was good enough to share.
This is a long, dense piece.. it’s Jamais Cascio’s speech to his Institute For The Future colleagues at their recent annual Ten Year Forecast event. It’s written in their native Futurist vernacular, but I’ve largely cut that in choosing the parts I’ve quoted here. I trust you’ll agree from this though that it’s well worth taking the time to digest and absorb it all:
..Now, I said a moment ago that this “unstable instability” is likely to last for at least another decade. I’m sure we could all spend the next hour coming up with reasons why that might be so, but one that I want to focus on for a bit is climate disruption. In many respects, climate disruption is the ultimate unstable instability system.
Climate disruption is something that comes up in nearly all of our gatherings these days, and I don’t think I need to reiterate to this audience the challenges to health, prosperity, and peace that it creates.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few Ten Year Forecasts looking at different ways we might mitigate or stall global warming. Last year, we talked about carbon economies; the year before that, social innovation through “superstructures.” In 2008, geoengineering. This year, I want to take yet another approach. I want to talk about climate adaptation.
I say that with some trepidation. Adaptation is a concept that many climate change specialists have been hesitant to talk about, because it seems to imply that we can or will do nothing to prevent worsening climate disruption, and instead should just get ready for it. But the fact of the matter is that our global efforts at mitigation have been far too slow and too hesitant to have a near-term impact, and we will see more substantial climate disruptions in the years to come no matter how hard we try to reduce carbon emissions. This doesn’t mean we should stop trying to cut carbon; what it does mean is that cutting carbon won’t be enough.
But adaptation won’t be easy. It’s going to require us to make both large and small changes to our economy and society in order to endure climate disruption more readily. That said, simply running down a checklist of possible adaptation methods wouldn’t really illuminate just how big of a deal adaptation would be. We decided instead that it would be more useful to think through a systematic framework for adaptation.
Our first cut was to think about adaptations in terms of whether they simplify systems – reducing dependencies and thereby hopefully reducing system “brittleness” – or make systems more complex, introducing new dependencies but hopefully increasing system capacity.
Simplified systems, on the whole, tend to be fairly local in scale. But reducing dependencies can also reduce influence. Simplification asks us to sacrifice some measure of capability in order to gain a greater degree of robustness. It’s a popular strategy for dealing with climate disruption and energy uncertainty; the environmental mantra of “reduce, reuse, recycle” is a celebration of adaptive simplification.
Adaption through complexity creates or alters interconnected systems to better fit a changing environment. This usually requires operating at a regional or global scale, in order to take advantage of diverse material and intellectual resources. Complex systems may have increased dependencies, and therefore increased vulnerabilities, but they will be able to do things that simpler systems cannot.
So that’s the first pass: when we think about adaptation, are we thinking about changes that make our systems simpler, or more complex?
But here’s the twist: the effectiveness of these adaptive changes and the forms that they take will really depend upon the broader conditions under which they’re applied. We have to understand the context.
…
Adaptation can take multiple forms, but more importantly, the value of an adaptation depends upon the conditions in which it is tried. Just because an adaptive process worked in the past doesn’t mean that it will be just as effective next time. But there are larger patterns at work, too. If you can see them early enough, you can shape your adaptive strategies in ways that take advantage of conditions, rather than struggle against them.
But here’s the crucial element: it looks very likely that we’re in a period where the large patterns we’ve seen before aren’t working right.
Instead, we’re in an environment that will force swift and sometimes frightening evolution. Businesses, communities, social institutions of all kinds, will find themselves facing a need to simultaneously experiment rapidly and keep hold of a longer-term perspective. You simply can’t expect that the world to which you’ve become adapted will look in any way the same – economically, environmentally, politically – in another decade.
As a result, you simply can’t expect that you will look in any way the same, either.
The asteroid strikes. The era of evolution is upon us. It’s now time to watch the dinosaurs take flight.
We’ve seen the writing on the wall for decades, but the Powers That Be have done little to stop it. Carbon trading won’t save us, no framing of it as a purely economic problem will. The sooner we start radically adapting our societies to face this new reality, the more hope we have. To use the terms in my recent essay, it’s past time for the Rescue Mission to begin.
Several Brilliant Essays by Kevin Carson - Read and Learn
History, since the agricultural revolution, can be usefully conceptualized as an offensive-defensive arms race between technologies of abundance and social structures of expropriation.
Until the appearance of agriculture, human society didn’t produce a large enough surplus to support much in the way of social organization above the hunter-gatherer group. Agriculture was the first technology of abundance sufficiently productive to support parasitic classes on a large scale. With agriculture came a superstructure of kings, priests, martial castes and landlords who milked the producing classes like cattle.
We now seem to be nearing the end of an interval of ten thousand years or so between two thresholds. The first threshold was the appearance of the first large-scale technology of abundance — agriculture.
Since then we have been in that aforementioned arms race. Sometimes technologies of abundance produce an increase in the social surplus faster than the class superstructure can expropriate it, and things become better for the ordinary person — as in the late Middle Ages, when the horse collar and crop rotation caused a massive increase in agricultural productivity, the craftsmen of the free towns developed new production technologies, and the decay of feudalism resulted in falling rents and de facto emancipation of large sectors of the peasantry. Sometimes the advantage shifts to the social structures of expropriation, and things get worse — as in the case of the absolute monarchies’ suppression of the free towns, what Immanuel Wallerstein called the “long sixteenth century,” and the Enclosures.
We’re approaching the second threshold, when the technologies of abundance reach a takeoff point beyond which the social structures of expropriation can no longer keep up with the rising production curve.
America's Peculiar InstitutionOnce upon a time, a major portion of the American economy centered on a peculiar institution, which depended on a certain bizarre “property right.” The peculiar institution was defended by preachers and politicians, by lobbyists, and by an army of editorialists, arguing that this peculiar form of property was property in the same sense as any ordinary form of property. Any violation of this form of property, they proclaimed, was “stealing” in exactly the same sense as taking away a person’s ordinary possessions.
The federal government resorted to censorship to protect this form of property, and an intrusive police state developed in order to carry out the federal government’s legal obligation of enforcing the peculiar property right that this peculiar institution depended on. Government was forced to become more and more authoritarian in defense of this peculiar institution, because it flew in the face of every human instinct for freedom.
On the other side, there was a proliferation of advocacy groups and public figures who condemned the peculiar institution, and called for the abolition of the peculiar form of property it depended on. They argued that this so-called “property” was utterly spurious and abhorrent, and was not in fact genuine property in the same sense as ordinary possessions. Further, there were organized efforts to ignore or defy these spurious property claims, and to evade government’s attempts to enforce them.
That time is now.
To Solve the Problem of Money in Politics, Just Get Rid of the Politics — and the MoneyTrying to put an end to such “continuing education” projects by regulating the money — by such expedients as McCain-Feingold or public financing — is futile. The people with the money are much better at finding ways around such restrictions than “progressives” are at creating them. Money, with apologies to Jeff Goldblum in “Jurassic Park,” will find a way. Money flows toward power like water flows downhill.
The only solution is to get rid of the power. Political power is, in fact, the source of the wealth concentrations that fund the industry lobbyists and the campaign contributions. The wealth of big business and the plutocracy is funneled to them by subsidies, protections, oligopoly markups on state-cartelized markets, scarcity rents from artificial property rights, etc., none of which would exist without the state.
The Defeat of the United States by Al Qaeda
It’s quite plausible that, given enough incompetent attempts, somebody will eventually succeed in detonating a bomb and blowing up a plane in the air. Enough monkeys with enough typewriters and enough time, and all that. But even if it happens, the damage will be limited to the passengers on one plane out of millions of flights in any one year. With hardened cockpits and passengers who understand that the goal of hijacking has changed, it will never be possible to fly a plane into a high-value target again. And it’s unlikely all the TSA security theater in the airports, aimed at preventing the previous attack, is good for anything except satisfying the “Well, we have to do SOMETHING!” idjuts.
The interesting thing, though, is that however poorly planned and executed the attacks have been, they were conducted in accordance with a brilliant strategic vision of maximizing bang for the buck in terms of the U.S. government stupidity they provoke. An attempt to smuggle explosives on a plane doesn’t have to be anything more than crude and ineffectual, because TSA’s knee-jerk overreaction — not blowing up the plane — is the real goal. The goal is to make the passenger screening process, the x-raying of all cargo, etc., so onerous, humiliating, expensive and time-consuming that air traffic shrinks radically and the U.S. economy takes a hit. The goal is for the American people to see their government as intrusive, arbitrary, and callous.
It Doesn't Matter What "the law" Is
If you’re willing to fight it out before judges or police commissioners, for weeks or months, you may or may not get a decision overruling the cop’s actions. But in the meantime you’ve had your camera (and maybe your nose) smashed, spent time in a holding cell, had your name dragged through the dirt, and maybe lost your job. And meanwhile, the cops just keep on doing it anyway. I mean, seriously, they can kill innocent people and wind up on paid administrative leave pending a wrist-slap, so how worried do you think they are about breaking a camera and roughing up some dirty effing hippie?
How to "Ban" Nuclear Power
The disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facilities, which turned the 8.9 earthquake and tsunami into a sort of Irwin Allen trifecta, has spurred new calls to ban nuclear power.
Certainly Japan’s recent experience suggests that attempts to plan for worst-case scenarios tend to err on the low side. Nuclear power plants designed to withstand quakes an order of magnitude less still managed to shut down as designed; nevertheless, the earthquake and tsunami also damaged the backup power for their cooling systems.
So given the high stakes of a nuclear meltdown, and the manifest inability of planners to anticipate what might go wrong, it would make sense to ban nuclear power, right?
Well, the actual problem is that governments worldwide have been actively intervening for decades to prevent the market from banning nuclear power. Precisely because the stakes are so high and there’s so much room for unforeseen things to go wrong, nuclear power is uninsurable on the private market.
Is Money Too Cheap, or Too Dear? Both
Knowing the Real Enemy
Beyond the Education Bubble
Mr. Obama, Tear Down This Wall
5/15/11
Discipline of Do Easy
Reminds me a lot of Way of the Peaceful Warrior - a really good book to spite its being aimed toward a young audience. Warning: under no circumstance should you watch the film adaptation of Peaceful Warrior. It an abomination to the book.
Dystopia
And then you watch this second one.
Did I see that right? Is Sony Ericsson trying to tell me that in the future our relationships to other people, our having to deal with the rejection of loved ones by communicating with them even when its painful, for example, will be overridden by our ability to have all of our base desires instantly sated by an autonomous and automatic artificial environment fined tuned to our subjective preferences, that offers no opportunity for confrontation with the Other and therefore self transcendence? And that this is a good thing?
5/9/11
Fallacious Reasoning Justifies Capitalism (Corollary: Capitalism Is Not Just)
Question for thought: What unquestioned impulse is holding sway in the essence of capitalism that renders the destruction of existing use-value for the sake of higher exchange-value and therefore higher profit margin reasonable?
I’ve brought up the story of the crippled Intel processor a few times now. I brought it up in my recent post on the Portal 2 DLC and managed to thread-jack my own topic. So, I scored an own goal with that one. Nice.Answer: "a strange and pernicious notion that has been foisted upon Western society by economists: you and I, they tell us, by giving free rein to greed, selfishness, competitive malice, and megalomania, perform a valuable public service. We can spend our days pitting ourselves against the welfare and livelihood of others, and then trust “the market” to transform our venality into a public good…. Somehow, through a kind of magic, the social value will automatically condense out of the numbers and percolate through society as a healing balm…." (actually have a source for this one)
If you missed it, here is the setup:
Back in the early days of PC processors, Intel used to use one factory to make all of their processors. Their expensive high-end processors were identical to the crap bargain stuff they sold, right up until the bargain ones rolled off the assembly line and they deliberately destroyed the math co-processor. It turns out it was cheaper to just make the good ones than to have two different factories. Then they would sell the crippled one to regular folks and the normal one to rich people. Some people were outraged at this. “Why did they ruin this processor!? It would have cost them NOTHING to give me the fully functional version!
Some people complain that this is an incredibly stupid system, or that it is unfair to the consumer. When I found out about this in my twenties (back in the 90′s) it drove me crazy. I suddenly knew that the CPU in my bargain computer had, for a fleeting moment, been a deluxe powerhouse until some jackass ruined it. On purpose. As an engineer, I dislike this sort of destruction.
But it’s actually not stupid or anti-consumer. It’s just really, really counter-intuitive. It’s a wonderful system that fueled the manufacturing explosion that gave us all of these amazingly cheap computers. Here is how it works:
Warning: These numbers are entirely fabricated for the purposes of this demonstration. Please focus on the system and do not nit-pick the numbers. Thank you.
It takes a lot of money to design a chip and set up a production pipeline around it. Let’s say ten million bucks. That pays the eggheads to design it, someone to figure how to construct it, and the money required to build the facilities to make the dang things. On top of that million bucks, each chip costs about $35 in parts and labor.
So if we only make one processor, we need to sell it for $10,000,035 if we want to break even. That one processor needs to recoup the entire set-up fee for the whole facility. But if we sell a million of them, then we can spread that ten million dollar set-up fee over a million units. Now we only need to charge $45 for each one to break even. I’m sure most of you are familiar with this idea. Economies of Scale are fairly common and apply to everything from cars to hamburgers.
(This gets more tricky when you realize that the producer doesn’t actually know how many they will sell. If they charge $45 each for processors and end up only selling half a million, then they are well and truly screwed and will go out of business. So, they need to speculate a bit. What is the minimum number we can expect to sell? Half a million? A quarter million? We need to set our price so that we can survive even if sales are lower than anticipated. It’s all speculation. If you over-estimate sales you’ll go out of business. If you under-estimate you’ll be charging too much and someone else will undercut you, which could also put you out of business. Have fun!)
Now, we’re going to assume you have perfect knowledge of the market. You know that there are a million people out there who will pay $50 for any damn processor. Let’s call these people Bargain Users. They just need something to make the computer go. You can sell your $45 chip to these people and make $5 apiece. That’s five million bucks in profit. You also know that there are about a hundred thousand people out there who will pay $100 for a processor, but these people want the best. Let’s call them Power Users. They’re simulation or graphics professionals and they want their computer to go as fast as possible. Time is money for them, and so they are willing to spend a lot of money to save themselves some time. If you sell them a processor for $100, you will make $55 each. That’s five and a half million dollars. There is ten and a half million bucks to be made here, but only if you can sell to both groups.
But!
If you sell all processors for $100, those million bargain users won’t buy. That’s too much for them. On the other hand, those hundred thousand Power Users aren’t just going to give you $100 out of the goodness of their hearts. If you try to sell the same processor to both groups, the Power Users will buy the $45 version because they’re not idiots.
So, we need to make a less-powerful processor to sell to the bargain users. Let’s talk about some solutions:
1. Design a slow processor to sell to the bargain market.
Now, you could just make a less powerful processor, but the cost of re-configuring the production facility makes this kind of expensive. If you were selling clothing, you would use higher quality raw materials. Cheap jackets are inexpensive polyester, and quality ones are a cotton/wool blend. But we’re making processors, which are all made from metal, silicon, and plastic. A processor made in 1990 has basically the same ingredients as one made in 2010. Likewise, the labor costs are the same. It costs the same to hire a guy to run the 1990 assembly line as it does to hire a guy to run the 2010 assembly line. (Ignoring inflation, obviously.)
The last thing you want to do is re-configure your assembly line. That gets expensive. You hammer out good processors. Then you re-configure the whole thing at the cost of thousands of dollars to make the weaker ones.
It’s like books. The same printing press can hammer out copies of Lord of the Rings or a similar-sized compilation of Smurfs / Trek crossover fanfiction. The cost isn’t what you’re printing, but in how many you can print at once. Changing print jobs is the expense you want to avoid.
2. Design the factory to be easily switchable from one state to another.
This would increase your setup costs, which is your single largest and most dangerous expense. It makes the system more complex to run, which can lead to expensive Human Errors.
3. Choose between the two markets.
You’ve only got one factory, so you can only make one chip, which means you have to choose between the bargain users and the power users. It’s best to go for the power users in this case. They’re more profitable, since your magin with them is much better. They’re also less risky, because they’re more reliable as customers.
Obviously this leaves bargain users out in the cold and keeps computers as a niche product only available to the elite.
4. Turn some of the processors into an inferior product after production.
Take those powerful CPU’s rolling off the line, break their math co-processor, and sell it to bargain users for $50. It turns out that this is the best solution that gives the cheapest hardware to the greatest number of people. This is the most efficient way of serving both markets.
You can think of this as an alternate way of going about solution #1. You are producing lesser chips. This is simply the most cost-effective way of going about it, since it lets you use the existing facilities and production pipeline. Rather than design a less-powerful chip and a configure the production line to make them, just take the good ones and convert them.
It’s strange, but it works.
5/8/11
Mother's Day Proclamation - 1870
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
Unser Taglich Brot (Our Daily Bread) Documnetary - Watch It
9/11, Bin Laden (Complicity, Imperialism) + Assange on Facebook
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”
We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.
Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.
There is also much media discussion of Washington’s anger that Pakistan didn’t turn over bin Laden, though surely elements of the military and security forces were aware of his presence in Abbottabad. Less is said about Pakistani anger that the U.S. invaded their territory to carry out a political assassination. Anti-American fervor is already very high in Pakistan, and these events are likely to exacerbate it. The decision to dump the body at sea is already, predictably, provoking both anger and skepticism in much of the Muslim world.
There’s more to say about [Cuban airline bomber Orlando] Bosch, who just died peacefully in Florida, including reference to the “Bush doctrine” that societies that harbor terrorists are as guilty as the terrorists themselves and should be treated accordingly. No one seemed to notice that Bush was calling for invasion and destruction of the U.S. and murder of its criminal president.
Same with the name, Operation Geronimo. The imperial mentality is so profound, throughout western society, that no one can perceive that they are glorifying bin Laden by identifying him with courageous resistance against genocidal invaders. It’s like naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk… It’s as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes “Jew” and “Gypsy.”There is much more to say, but even the most obvious and elementary facts should provide us with a good deal to think about.
Grain of salt might be admissible here:
Bin Laden Met With CIA In
July...And Walked Away -
Connect The Dots
By Michael C. Ruppert
11-2-1
FTW - On October 31, the French daily Le Figaro dropped a bombshell. While in a Dubai hospital receiving treatment for a chronic kidney infection last July, Osama bin Laden met with a top CIA official - presumably the Chief of Station. The meeting, held in bin Laden s private suite, took place at the American hospital in Dubai at a time when he was a wanted fugitive for the bombings of two U.S. embassies and this year s attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden was eligible for execution according to a 2000 intelligence finding issued by President Bill Clinton before leaving office in January. Yet on July 14th he was allowed to leave Dubai on a private jet and there were no Navy fighters waiting to force him down.
In 1985 Oliver North the only member of the Reagan-Bush years who doesn't appear to have a hand in the current war - sent the Navy and commandos after terrorists on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. In his 1991 autobiography 'Under Fire,' while describing terrorist Abu Abbas, North wrote, "I used to wonder: how many dead Americans will it take before we do something?" One could look at the number of Americans Osama bin Laden is alleged to have killed before September 11 and ask the same question.
It gets worse, much worse. A more complete timeline listing crucial events both before and after the September 11th suicide attacks, which have been blamed on bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of them and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution. It also makes clear that the events which have taken place since September 11th are based upon an agenda that has little to do with the attacks.
One wonders how these events could have been ignored by the major media or treated as isolated incidents. Failing that, how could skilled news agencies avoid being outraged, or at least even just a little suspicious?
1. 1998 and 2000 - Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No 7 The Best Enemies Money Can Buy http://www.copvcia.com/members/carlyle.html
2. Feb 13, 2001 - UPI Terrorism Correspondent Richard Sale - while covering a trial of bin Laden's Al Qaeda followers - reports that the National Security Agency has broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February it does not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been planned for years.
3. May 2001 - Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the Taliban regime. [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001].
4. May, 2001 - Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections and he is the recipient of the highest civil decoration awarded by Pakistan. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as 'an unusually long meeting,' also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001.]
5. July, 2001 - Three American officials: Tom Simmons (former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia), meet with Taliban representatives in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against Afghanistan in October. Also present are Russian and German intelligence officers who confirm the threat. [Source: The Guardian, September 22, 2001; the BBC, September 18, 2001.]
6. Summer 2001 - According to a Sept. 26 story in Britain s The Guardian, correspondent David Leigh reported that, "U.S. department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January." The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana.
7. Summer 2001 (est.) - Pakistani ISI Chief General Mahmud (see above) orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was according to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Mahmud recently resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI. [Source: The Times of India, October 11, 2001.]
8. June 2001 - German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists are 'planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001.]
9. Summer 2001 - An Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of September 9th. German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would not reveal any further information. [Source: German news agency - online.ie , September 14, 2001.]
10. August 2001 - The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key member of bin Laden's network and the FBI learns that he has been taking flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source: Reuters, September 13.]
11. Summer 2001 - Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots have been specifically training for suicide missions. This is reported in the Russian press and news stories are translated for FTW by a retired CIA officer.
12. July 4-14, 2001 - Osama bin Laden receives treatments for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official who returns to CIA headquarters on July 15th. [Source: Le Figaro, October 31st, 2001.]
13. August 2001 - Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government - in the strongest possible terms - of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. [Source: MSNBC interview with Putin, September 15.]
14. August/September, 2001 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock market crash is imminent.
15. Sept. 3-10, 2001 - MSNBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11.
16. September 1-10, 2001 - 25,000 British troops and the largest British Armada since the Falkland Islands War, part of Operation 'Essential Harvest,' are pre-positioned in Oman, the closest point on the Arabian Peninsula to Pakistan. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation 'Bright Star.' All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. [Sources: The Guardian, CNN, FOX, The Observer, International Law Professor Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois.]
17. September 6-7, 2001 - 4,744 put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) are purchased on United Air Lines stock as opposed to only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the UAL puts are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. 'Buzzy' Krongard. [Source: The Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, http://www.ict.org.il/, September 21; The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal.]
18. September 10, 2001 - 4,516 put options are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: ICT - above]
19. September 6-11, 2001 - No other airlines show any similar trading patterns to those experienced by UAL and American. The put option purchases on both airlines were 600% above normal. This at a time when Reuters (September 10) issues a business report stating, 'Airline stocks may be poised to take off.'
20. September 6-10, 2001 - Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re (insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the September 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above; FTW, Vol. IV, No.7, October 18, 2001, http://www.copvcia.com/members/oct152001.html. ]
21. It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden s possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; FOX News, October 16, 2001; FTW, October 26, 2001, - http://www.copvcia.com/members/magic_carpet.html; FTW, Vol. IV, No.6, Sept. 18, 2001 - http://www.copvcia.com/members/sept1801.html; FTW, Vol. 3, No 7, 9/30/00 - www.copvcia.com/stories/may_2001/052401_promis.html
22. September 11, 2001 - Gen Mahmud of the ISI (see above), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. [Source: MS-NBC, Oct. 7.]
23. September 11, 2001, For 35 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft, even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred - an event that has never happened in history. [Sources: CNN, ABC, MS-NBC, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times.]
24. September 13, 2001 - China is admitted to the World Trade Organization quickly, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts. [Source: The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001.]
25. September 15, 2001 - The New York Times reports that Mayo Shattuck III has resigned, effective immediately, as head of the Alex (A.B) Brown unit of Deutschebank.
26. September 29, 2001 - The San Francisco Chronicle reports that $2.5 million in put options on American Airlines and United Airlines are unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the NYSE after the attacks which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options.
27. October 10, 2001 - The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to the Pakistani coast, for the purpose of selling oil and gas to China, is now back on the table in view of recent geopolitical developments.
28. Mid October, 2001 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after having suffered a precipitous drop has recovered most of its pre-attack losses. Although still weak, and vulnerable to negative earnings reports, a crash has been averted by a massive infusion of government spending on defense programs, subsidies for - affected industries and planned tax cuts for corporations.
Now, let's go back to the October 31 story by Le Figaro - the one that has Osama bin Laden meeting with a CIA officer in Dubai this June.
The story says that, Throughout his stay in the hospital, Osama Bin Laden received visits from many family members [There goes the story that he's a black sheep!] and Saudi Arabian Emirate personalities of status. During this time the local representative of the CIA was seen by many people taking the elevator and going to bin Laden's room.
* Several days later the CIA officer bragged to his friends about having visited the Saudi millionaire. From authoritative sources, this CIA agent visited CIA headquarters on July 15th, the day after bin Laden's departure for Quetta.
* According to various Arab diplomatic sources and French intelligence itself, precise information was communicated to the CIA concerning terrorist attacks aimed at American interests in the world, including its own territory.
* Extremely bothered, they [American intelligence officers in a meeting with French intelligence officers] requested from their French peers exact details about the Algerian activists [connected to bin Laden through Dubai banking institutions], without explaining the exact nature of their inquiry. When asked the question, "What do you fear in the coming days?" - the Americans responded with incomprehensible silence.
* On further investigation, the FBI discovered certain plans that had been put together between the CIA and its 'Islamic friends' over the years. The meeting in Dubai is, so it would seem, consistent with "a certain American policy."
Even though Le Figaro reported that it had confirmed with hospital staff that bin Laden had been there as reported, stories printed on November 1 contained quotes from hospital staff that these reports were untrue. On November 1, as reported by the Ananova press agency, the CIA flatly denied that any meeting between any CIA personnel and Osama bin Laden at any time.
In the most ironic twist of all, FTW has learned that Le Figaro is owned by the Carlyle Group, the American defense contractor which employs George Bush Sr., and which had as investors - until they sold their stake on October 26 - the bin Laden family.
+ this gem:
Russia Today (RT) interviewed Assange, getting his viewpoint on political unrest in Egypt and Libya, particularly probing what the Wikileaks founder makes of social media’s roles in the recent revolutions in both countries. In his interview, Assange focuses particularly on Facebook calling it the “most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented”.
Explaining in more detail, Assange affirms:
Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United States, all accessible to US Intelligence.”
According to Assange, it doesn’t stop with Facebook. He believes the social network is joined by Google, Yahoo and other major US organisations that have “built in interfaces for US Intelligence”:
It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena, they have an interface they have developed for US Intelligence to use. Now, is the case that Facebook is run by US Intelligence? No, it’s not like that. It’s simply that US Intelligence is able to bring to bear legal and political pressure to them.
It’s costly for them to hand out individual records, one by one, so they have automated the process.
The Wikileaks founder then warns Facebook users, stating that if a user adds their friend to Facebook, they are “doing free work for US Intelligence agencies, in building this electronic database for them”.