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[Michael]

www.conservationeconomy.net/pattern_map/flash

<a href="http://www.conservationeconomy.net/pattern_map/images/pattern.swf" target="_blank">http://www.conservationeconomy.net/pattern_map/images/pattern.swf</a>

[Michael]

Message from John L. Petersen (Arlington Institute):
"It appears that the world in general and the United States in particular are on the edge of a major disruption in the global financial system. Here's the summary as we see it."

11/14/2007
Author: Ken Dabkowski

At a recent Board meeting of The Arlington Institute, Dr. David Martin, CEO of M&#8729;CAM and one of the members of the Board was asked for his assessment of the global financial situation in the coming months.

Here are my notes from his response:

            I stand by my commentary in July of '06.

• The next shoe to fall is consumer credit

Currently as reports came in on the 3rd quarter, foreclosures were up 470% this quarter alone.  They will be up over 500% this coming quarter (4th).  A foreclosure in our terms is when the bank has officially declared an account insolvent and tries to regain the asset (if it exists).  The person who is foreclosed upon can no longer secure any traditional consumer credit.  This in turn goes straight to the banks as no one will be able to get the store issued charge cards. 

A minority of people pay off their consumer debt every month.  When one considers the combination of consumer credit card debt and the compounded debt of "home equity" financing, we estimate that less than 20% of people actually carry no consumer credit from one month to the next.  Many of the ones who don't pay off their carried consumer debt have at least one credit card at its limit and therefore lack credit capacity.  Most have their paycheck directly covering bills and servicing the minimum balance due. 

Therefore people who are foreclosed upon will not be able to obtain credit and since their paychecks will be maxed out, there will not be extra cash left over from the paycheck to service a new debt.

Next, everybody buys things at Christmas.  As much as 40% of retail sales are done in the 4th quarter of the year – i.e. the retail miracle.  The purchase decline in retail goods this fourth quarter will occur because many credit-only consumers will lack the credit capacity mentioned above.  Frequently, people overcharge their limit and the banks (albeit a profit center for subprime credit users) levy a penalty by increasing interest rates and charging additional fees.  In the 4th quarter of 2007, the amount of people overcharging their limits will be too many for the banks to handle.  We do not have a system in place to deal with overcharge on that scale.  A substantial number of this December's purchases will go into an overdraft on credit limits.

CDO – Collateral Debt Obligation – Consumer Credit

Consumer credit pooled debt investment instruments (a form of CDO) are originated and rated based on underlying historical credit behavior and a complex series of predictive models for repayment dynamics.  CDOs have "strips" which are a combination of similar profile tranches within a larger investment product.  Based on the market's appetite for risk, investment performance guarantees (or credit enhancements) are packaged with the credits.  These credit guarantees are issued by insurance companies, reinsurance companies, and other specialty finance companies – many operating with extra-territorial jurisdiction rendering fiscal oversight more complicated. 

These strips come in several categories:

• Investment grade
• Almost investment grade
• Junk and
• Why did we give them a credit card?

All of these grades are priced on historical default rates.  The credit insurance companies (AIG, MBIA, Ambac, Financial Security Assurance, Channel Re, XL, Zurich Re and other reinsurers) have, from time to time, issued credit guarantees to the securities.  Banks sell debt in the form of a Collateralized Debt Obligation (CDO).

Minor shifts in default actuarial activity (+/- 25 basis points) from normative behavior is absorbed within pricing of these financial guaranty contracts.  However fundamental shifts (hundreds or thousands of basis points in one quarter) are not built into the model and result in credit enhancement insolvency on a major scale.  When the insurer cannot pay based on its own liquidity impairment, the bank is left with catastrophic (an insurance term for excessive loss outside of expected) exposure.

If in a single quarter we have an increased foreclosure rate of 400% (or 4000 basis points) the insurance contracts simply cannot handle that kind of drastic shift as evidenced by the write offs in the third quarter.  When we will follow the drastic third quarter with a loss of 500% in the fourth quarter, the trajectory becomes clear. 

Neither the banking nor the insurance industry has a historical experience in dealing with this type of challenge and neither has the liquidity linked to these contracts to support system wide collapse.

• Where was the announcement of this?  There was no announcement.

 

However Hank Greenberg is resurfacing in AIG leadership even during an SEC investigation because without him, no one else can remember where the counterparty risks are.  In order to save the insurance industry, shareholders have looked past alleged SEC violations as there is no one with Mr. Greenberg's awareness of the market and counterparty agreements who can hope to navigate the coming challenges.  In the 4th quarter, the US will have another record foreclosure announcement.  Once you're over 25% (25 basis point) foreclosure, all models are broken. 

Under a consumer credit melt-down, Capital One and/or Wachovia are likely going to put a massive foreclosure liability to an insurance company and the insurance company will not have liquidity to cover the exposure.

This is the problem we got into when we issued credit card debt on top of secondary mortgages – (inflated the value of the home) and gave out credit based on faux equity that no one really had. 

The reason why this problem is the second shoe to fall (subprime mortgage collapse was the first shoe) is because consumer credit has a different foreclosure frequency than traditional mortgage credit. 

December is when the maturity of the giant buyout of the economy moves.

By December, you'll have a second round of charge offs based on consumer credit.  The real big problem – when you foreclose on consumer credit, people stop buying things.  When people stop buying things, we don't have a tertiary way to pump liquidity into the market.  People won't have extra cash from their paychecks and won't have capacity on their cards.

Try this case study:

Go to the mall and stand in front of counter at Victoria Secret.  Watch what happens when someone wants to pay with cash. The clerk won't know how to ring up cash.  They will need a manager to come over to give change and unlock drawers.  When you don't have capacity on those cards, you don't buy things.  VISA credit cards actually denigrate using cash in their run-up-to-Christmas add campaign. 

Next, go to any savings bank data set.  If you were going to spend $1000 in cash this Christmas, can you do it?  For the most part, the answer would be "no" because we have had a net negative spending for the last 5 years.

Therefore there will be depressed consumer spending this Christmas but what is spent, people will overcharge.  This will take what used to be good investments in CDOs and will change the dynamic.  If you used to be a person who paid their bills on time, you will now only pay half.  If the credit companies are counting on the top two tranches to pay their card off in full and they don't, they won't have liquidity to cover the rest.  The banks cannot afford the top tranch paying half.

The estimates are out.  There will be at least $400B in the first round of charge offs in the CDO market. 

We're not going to be done with the subprime mortgage when the CDOs fall.  Therefore we will have an insolvency problem with the banks that are mentioned above. 

This is the kiss of death of a privately held Federal Reserve.  For the Federal Reserve to function, its stakeholder banks (like JP Morgan Chase) must remain viable and liquid.  When one of them, or any major bank in the U.S. (like Bank of America, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York, Washington Mutual, etc.) is impaired or ceases to exist, the architecture of the Fed's capacity to respond to systemic challenges is unsustainable.

If the banks have no money, they can't pump liquidity into the market.  Taking half of a trillion dollars out of market in a single distressed write down becomes problematic.  The US banking system does not have the liquidity to take the hit.

The actual solvency of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is relatively indecipherable due to the fact that their treasury management processes (and the risks of their own investment strategies) are not uniformly disclosed with sufficient transparency.  The FDIC was set up for isolated problems with a few bad banks but is NOT prepared to "insure" the system in an industry-wide crisis.  The actual liquidity reserve of the "insurance" that Americans view as their safety net is 1/100th the actual exposure of outstanding deposits.  The actual coverage ratio for the Bank Insurance Fund (BIF) fell below 1.25% in 2002, the same year that less stable credit practices were adopted by America's leading banks.

The funny part is that the Federal Government will be on holiday when all of this happens.  There will be no one to put freeze actions and moratoria on actions.  The only way you stop the cataclysm is to put together civil actions on deposit withdrawals.

As I discussed previously, the Chinese currency wild-card may become relevant far sooner than expected.  An effort by China to convert its $1.4 trillion U.S. Treasury holdings into euros is not viable for many reasons – not the least of which is the European Central Bank's inability to absorb such an event.  As China continues its rush away from supporting U.S. Treasuries and as Middle Eastern investors are buying them up in more diversified holdings, a new "currency exchange" is unfolding.  Realizing that they cannot liquidate their holdings, it appears that the Chinese are currently using their U.S. Treasury holdings as collateral for euro denominated purchases and long term infrastructure transactions.  In other words, they may be "liquidating" their holdings as collateral and, in so doing, effectively migrating to non-dollar value without ever having to officially dump their current Treasury holdings. 

Therefore, collateralize the credit in dollars – especially if you're long in dollars.  The lender/financier won't call the note because you have it structured in such a way to both allow it to perform and hold illiquid collateral that no one wants.  This essentially inflates euros.  Although you can't sell dollars, the whole purpose of collateral is that it is a second source of payment – collateral is there to down rate the risk of the loan.  Secondary becomes irrelevant. 

When February comes, the Chinese are going to do something as they will have to decide what the exposure is going to be with the treasury.  As I see it they have to just dump the treasury. They only keep it because they can use it – they have 43% direct/indirect of US treasuries so they'll dump them on the market.

The US Congressional pressures to decouple the RMB will work, but not in the way we want.  Our plan includes helping them hold on to the treasuries, it does not involve them not holding the dollar anymore.  The US wanted the tether to be part of the float.  This will cause disenfranchisement of the US electorate (during primary season). February is also when public (media) will realize we won't pull out of this. 

Side note: Mayor Bloomberg could enter the race at this point, being the savior candidate (at least economically), but has $1B dollars in non-liquid money so he may not be able to enter.

• March is when we realize that the dollar doesn't come back. 

 

OPEC price with the whole fluctuation of oil futures presages the event.  They are going to run the price of oil as high as they can get it on the dollar, while buying US treasuries from China with the money.  When the dollar does collapse, they'll flip denominations.  The wild card is long about March when the OPEC cuts spot oil off the dollar to the euro.  One can look at the current oil price at close to $100/barrel and fail to see that, as this premium price is currently turning around and investing in a weakening dollar, the effective price (less the dollar investment hedge) is probably closer to $50/barrel than the spot price reflects.

Currency problems will change the game – they are financially structuring themselves to take the hit.
 
When we can't afford to buy oil commodities on a spot market – it compounds the problem however the consumer that Saudi Arabia ships to is liquid ( China).  In the US it is a big problem.  There is still a market for oil; it just changes.  When you come out of Straits of Hormuz, turn left.



John L. Petersen

[Dimensions of the One Machine]

The One Machine

Dimensions of the One Machine

The next stage in human technological evolution is a single thinking/web/computer that is planetary in dimensions. This planetary computer will be the largest, most complex and most dependable machine we have ever built. It will also be the platform that most business and culture will run on. The web is the initial OS of this new global machine, and all the many gadgets we possess are the windows into its core. Future gizmos will be future gateways into the same One Machine. Designing products and services for this new machine require a unique mind-set.

What are the dimensions of this global Machine?

Today it contains approximately 1.2 billion personal computers, 2.7 billion cell phones, 1.3 billion land phones, 27 million data servers, and 80 million wireless PDAs. The processor chips of all these parts are feeding the computation of the internet/web/telecommunications system. So how many transistors are powering the Machine?

An Intel Pentium processor circa 2004 has 100 million transistors in it, while a Itanium processor inside a server has over 1 billion processors since 2005. More current models have more transistors of course, but these older models would be closer to an average count.

One thing to note is that there are just as many processing chips in the Machine (one billion from the one billion online PCs) as there transitors in an Itanium chip. The Machine is a super computer where each "transistor" is computer. A very rough estimate of the computing power of this Machine then is that it contains a billion times a billion, or one quintillion (10 ^ 18) transistors. Since only the newest servers have a billion processors, the figure is probably an order of magnitude smaller. When we add the transistors for cell phones, handhelds, it calculates out to about 170 quadrillion (10^17) transistors wired into the Machine

There are about 100 billion neurons in the human brain. Today the Machine has as 5 orders more transistors than you have neurons in your head. And the Machine, unlike your brain, is doubling in power every couple of years at the minimum.

Continued...

[Michael]

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

E8

An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which has received rave reviews from scientists.

Garrett Lisi, 39, has a doctorate but no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii, where he has also been a hiking guide and bridge builder (when he slept in a jungle yurt).

In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, Nevada, where he snowboards. "Being poor sucks," Lisi says. "It's hard to figure out the secrets of the universe when you're trying to figure out where you and your girlfriend are going to sleep next month."

Despite this unusual career path, his proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.

Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts. And it may even be possible to test his theory, which predicts a host of new particles, perhaps even using the new Large Hadron Collider atom smasher that will go into action near Geneva next year.

Although the work of 39 year old Garrett Lisi still has a way to go to convince the establishment, let alone match the achievements of Albert Einstein, the two do have one thing in common: Einstein also began his great adventure in theoretical physics while outside the mainstream scientific establishment, working as a patent officer, though failed to achieve the Holy Grail, an overarching explanation to unite all the particles and forces of the cosmos.

Now Lisi, currently in Nevada, has come up with a proposal to do this. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as "fabulous". "It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years," he says.

"Although he cultivates a bit of a surfer-guy image its clear he has put enormous effort and time into working the complexities of this structure out over several years," Prof Smolin tells The Telegraph.

"Some incredibly beautiful stuff falls out of Lisi's theory," adds David Ritz Finkelstein at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta. "This must be more than coincidence and he really is touching on something profound."

The new theory reported today in New Scientist has been laid out in an online paper entitled "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything" by Lisi, who completed his doctorate in theoretical physics in 1999 at the University of California, San Diego.

He has high hopes that his new theory could provide what he says is a "radical new explanation" for the three decade old Standard Model, which weaves together three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the electromagnetic force; the strong force, which binds quarks together in atomic nuclei; and the weak force, which controls radioactive decay.

The reason for the excitement is that Lisi's model also takes account of gravity, a force that has only successfully been included by a rival and highly fashionable idea called string theory, one that proposes particles are made up of minute strings, which is highly complex and elegant but has lacked predictions by which to do experiments to see if it works.

But some are taking a cooler view. Prof Marcus du Sautoy, of Oxford University and author of Finding Moonshine, told the Telegraph: "The proposal in this paper looks a long shot and there seem to be a lot things still to fill in."

And a colleague Eric Weinstein in America added: "Lisi seems like a hell of a guy. I'd love to meet him. But my friend Lee Smolin is betting on a very very long shot."

Lisi's inspiration lies in the most elegant and intricate shape known to mathematics, called E8 - a complex, eight-dimensional mathematical pattern with 248 points first found in 1887, but only fully understood by mathematicians this year after workings, that, if written out in tiny print, would cover an area the size of Manhattan

Continued

[Michael]

Trapped rainbow heralds computer revolution

Light can be slowed down so that a beam of sunlight can travel at a leisurely stroll, be brought to a standstill, or even stored for later use in the form of a rainbow.

Today, details of an exotic kind of material that can slow light from its top speed of around one million million metres per hour so that it can be trapped as a crescent of colour is published by a team that suggests if could mark a revolution in computing.
    
This remarkable feat could allow "broadband storage" for "broadband computing" capable of much greater power than conventional silicon chips because it can process information in the form of many light beams simultaneously, just as optical fibres can carry lots of conversations simultaneously. And it could also mark an advance in quantum computing, named after the strange quantum properties of matter at the atomic level, that could enhance the power of computers millions of times beyond anything available today.

The extraordinary feat of optical sorcery is described today in the journal Nature by Prof Ortwin Hess and Kosmas Tsakmakidis at the University of Surrey, working with Professor Alan Boardman from Salford University.

Once theory is turned into reality, the technique will allow the use of light rather than electrons to store memory in devices such as computers. The team predicts an increase in operating capacity of 1,000% over the use of conventional electronics by exploiting light's broad spectrum to lay down lots of different information simultaneously in the first "optical capacitor."

Slow light could also, paradoxically, be used to increase the speed of optical networks, such as the Internet. At major interconnection points, where billions of parcels of information from myriad phone calls arrive simultaneously, these materials could be used to slow, divert and allow through information, working in the same way as traffic congestion calming schemes do on motorways, when a reduction in the speed limit can lead to a swifter overall flow of traffic.

Continued...

[jimtzu]

great stuff michael.. 

it begs the question.. what will mankind do if they do discover the theory of everything?

and from the darker side of technology:

http://www.knowledgedrivenrevolution.com/Articles/200711/20071119_IOR_3_Fight_Net.htm

The Pentagon's Information Operations Roadmap is blunt about the fact that an internet, with the potential for free speech, is in direct opposition to their goals. The internet needs to be dealt with as if it were an enemy "weapons system".

The 2003 Pentagon document entitled the Information Operation Roadmap was released to the public after a Freedom of Information Request by the National Security Archive at George Washington University in 2006. A detailed explanation of the major thrust of this document and the significance of information operations or information warfare was described by me here.

[Jana]

It is becoming increasingly apparent that governments the world over are becoming a huge threat to human progress.

[Jana]

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXVLNUHqjeA  —Ø.U.R. Ecovillage, BC
www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NokGaYTTRA&feature=related
http://www.cat.org.uk/  —Center for Alternative Technology, Wales; innovation, education, design, research, living etc…

These are the types of model projects that need to be started in the US as research and educational villages.

www.latrobe.edu.au/quick/suzuki.html —Video-Can We Avoid the Looming Ecological Armageddon? 25 October 2007 from Vancouver, Canada, by Dr David Suzuki, award-winning scientist, environmentalist and broadcaster.


My Full current visionary links resources at:
http://forums.permaculture.org.au/sutra36600.php#36600

[jimtzu]

The Future Of The Corporation

By Robert Kuttner

11/22/07 "New York Times" -- -- LAST WEEK, superinvestor Warren Buffett, America's second richest man, testified before the Senate Finance Committee on the subject of why people like him can well afford to pay taxes. In fact, Buffett is ceasing to be among the very wealthiest because he is giving most of his fortune away to philanthropies while he is still alive.

"Dynastic wealth, the enemy of a meritocracy, is on the rise," Buffett told the senators. "Equality of opportunity has been on the decline. A progressive and meaningful estate tax is needed to curb the movement of a democracy toward a plutocracy."

Buffett also proposed higher taxes on the wealthy in order to give working people a break on their payroll taxes, which now cost three Americans in four more than they pay in income taxes. And he supports taxing hedge fund bonuses at the same rate as ordinary income, so that billionaire hedge fund managers don't pay taxes at a lower rate than the people who clean their offices.

The conservatives on the committee were somewhat nonplussed, since Buffett is a poster boy for capitalist entrepreneurship. He isn't supposed to hold such views. And indeed, few Americans of great wealth do.

Another one who does is William Gates Sr., who writes in the current issue of the magazine Politico with coauthor Chuck Collins that "Without our society's substantial investments in taxpayer-funded research, technology, education, and infrastructure, the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans would not be so robust."

The source of great wealth is not just private entrepreneurs, but the society they inhabit and the public resources on which they build.

Collins, a Bostonian who gave away an inherited fortune while still in his 20s, has organized a new group called Business for Shared Prosperity.

One of the leaders of that group is Jim Sinegal, chief executive of Costco, which offers a business model that radically contrasts with rival Wal-Mart.

Sinegal not only provides decent wages and health insurance for his employees, but was part of a small group of business leaders who actually lobbied for an increase in the minimum wage.

One has to admire citizens like Buffett, Gates, Collins, and Sinegal, patricians who look beyond their own personal fortunes to the fortunes of the Republic and who lay constructive civic roles beyond their business interests.

The problem is that there are not nearly enough of them. And their attitudes run contrary to the gospel of our era that the prime duty of a corporate executive is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, no matter what the cost to employees, communities, or the environment. I recently attended a conference called the Summit on the Future of the Corporation, which brought together enlightened corporate executives and their critics. Half the people attending were corporate leaders convinced that socially responsible businesses could solve everything from environmental degradation to uplift of the poor. As engaged consumers and informed investors reward benign corporations with their pocketbooks, they contended, more corporations will be socially virtuous.

The other half of the room responded that most corporations, even those that want to do the right thing, are largely undermined by the cutthroat competitive environment in which they operate.

Pay decent wages, try to keep good jobs at home, provide good health and retirement benefits, swear off dubious products like junk food for kids - and some competitor who takes the low road is likely to out-compete or underprice you.

Further, much of what passes for socially responsible behavior by large corporations is so much marketing and "green-washing."

It's nice that Wal-Mart promotes long-life light bulbs, but when is Wal-Mart going to pay a good wage?

Some businesses like Costco can perhaps do it all (and God bless them). But for the most part, standards need to be set and financed socially.

That project calls not just for discerning consumers and investors but for engaged citizens crusading for public laws and public funds.

Leaders like Warren Buffett should be prized, both as executives whose civic values shame their peers, and as advocates for better tax-and-spend policies generally. If society is to get the resources so that healthcare and secure retirement (not to mention child care and job training) are not left to the whims and public relations of corporations, Congress had better follow Buffett's lead on tax equity, and restore our ability to finance these benefits as citizens.

Robert Kuttner's new book is "The Squandering of America: How the Failure of our Politics Undermines our Prosperity."

© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
 

[Jana]

Don't give up, it is just the valium and prozac that they are spraying. I was thinking of that today, when someone tried to endorse my dream...I dissociated, thinking, no that dream is for others not me, I am finished. The amount of energy needed to construct anything in a dying world seems impossible...and for what? I think we have to grow incredibly fast, and start to see things not in terms of achievement, building, success or winning, but simply in terms of creative play, as the indominable Freeman Perpective suggests. We have to return to the sense of innocence of primates at play...innocent within a world so corrupt it is hard to wrap your neurons around it. We have to both be able to wake up, and move on, to live to the fullest...and to use the energy of our knowledge not to shut us down, but to propel us forward...letting layer upon layer of fallacy fall from our eyes. To go forth in Play, in the deepest sense of the word.


Best meta-world overview illuminati-type material!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVyCcSPp_mM&feature=related —Reality Check, Alan Watt, 9 parts.

www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/videos_Alan_Watt.html Check out the yellow drip video, which might be evidence of toxic aerial spraying in Canada…if you see such residue, get it chemically analyized. This yellow rain is probably sulfur from the tar sand oil production.

Alan Watt on The Freeman Perspective - Oct. 18, 2007 (Excellent)

[Jana]

Absolutist? No Totalitarian. If you watch The War on Democracy by John Pilger youtube.com you will see that politics is a game of international economic extortion...political ideologies will shift exclusively with the indocrination campaign that allows them to fulfill their economic, strategic and power goals.  They say they are concerned about security...protecting themselves from South American peasants or Arabs, whereas they are only concerned with forcably taking away the resources of these people. The only meme these people fit into is the criminal class.

Note that Freeman, Alex Jones, Michael Tsarion, Bill Deagle, Fred Bell, David Icke and Alan Watt have useful information but they do not give us much of an idea on how to proceed.

I do not participate in politics. I don't believe in a "top down" solution to problems. I believe that politics is a controlled "game"... (that doesn't mean that good people can NEVER get in. I'm just saying they will never be allowed to effect any real change). I think that people's belief in needing "governance", and looking to political leaders is a large part of the problem. The problems we have are mostIy due to the "programming" placed in our heads by our controllers. We truly live in a "matrix"... an illusion... a "box" for our minds.

Sometime do a search on "Lysander Spooner". I suggest you read his classic treatise, "The Constitution of No Authority" if you can find time. You will begin to see that the entire structure of the political system is based upon deception and false premises.

If we are to keep a "system", it needs to be a voluntary one

http://www.voluntaryist.com/

where we are free to "contract" with each other for needed services, rather than doing "business" with the entity called "government" that does business at the barrel of a gun... i.e. "you WILL use our services or else".


1. http://www.mind-trek.com/reports/cona.htm

This is an introduction to one of Spooners' works.


2. http://www.lewrockwell.com/shaffer/shaffer-arch.html

These are the collected works of Butler Shaffer... excellent "freedom" reading from a brilliant fellow.


3. http://www.mythoftheinnocentcivilian.com/

You can download this excellent booklet for free.


4. http://www.buildfreedom.com/path/readmefirst.htm

A site dedicated to moving away from "governance" to true freedom.

[Michael]

A really interesting Google development from coolmel's blog. This addresses a big problem with participatory media, that we recently mentioned in The Trap thread:

Integral Knol?

Google is "encouraging people to contribute knowledge" with a new service called "knol"--a unit of knowledge. Its goal is:

"...to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it.... The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors' names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors -- but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content."

This is Google's direct assault at the "walled garden" of knowledge like Wikipedia, Wikia, and Squidoo. Knol will attempt to solve the problem of chaotic collective anonymous editing (and vandalizing) of wikis and its unfriendly user interface by providing a more user-friendly editing tool for knowledgeable authors "who will put their reputation on the line."

Google will not handle the editing and checking of knols. Its job is to provide the tool and then rank the knols based on links, comments, reviews, and other citations. Knols created by authors with high reputation would bubble up above competing topics from less reputable authors (eventually ranking up higher than the Wikipedia counterparts created by less reputable and anonymous authors.)

Continued...

[Michael]

The future of media (flash video):
www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html
This could just as easily have gone in the Privacy thread.

[Michael]

Article published Dec 27, 2007, Washington Times

Police in thought pursuit


By Bruce Fein - The Pope had his Index of Forbidden Books. Japan had its Thought Police against subversive or dangerous ideologies. And the United States Congress and President Bush have learned nothing from those examples.

Congress is perched to enact the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 20007 (Act)," probably the greatest assault on free speech and association in the United States since the 1938 creation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman, California Democrat, the bill passed the House of Representatives on Oct. 23 by a 404-6 vote under a rule suspension that curtailed debate. To borrow from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, the First Amendment should not distract Congress from doing important business. The Senate companion bill (S. 1959), sponsored by Susan Collins, Maine Republican, has encountered little opposition. Especially in an election year, senators crave every opportunity to appear tough on terrorism. Few if any care about or understand either freedom of expression or the Thought Police dangers of S. 1959. Former President John Quincy Adams presciently lamented: "Democracy has no forefathers, it looks to no posterity, it is swallowed up in the present and thinks of nothing but itself."

Denuded of euphemisms and code words, the Act aims to identify and stigmatize persons and groups who hold thoughts the government decrees correlate with homegrown terrorism, for example, opposition to the Patriot Act or the suspension of the Great Writ of habeas corpus.

The Act will inexorably culminate in a government listing of homegrown terrorists or terrorist organizations without due process; a complementary listing of books, videos, or ideas that ostensibly further "violent radicalization;" and a blacklisting of persons who have intersected with either list.

Political discourse will be chilled and needed challenges to conventional wisdom will flag. There are no better examples of sinister congressional folly.

The Act inflates the danger of homegrown terrorism manifold to justify creating a marquee National Commission on the Prevention of Violent Radicalization and Ideologically Based Violence (Commission) in the legislative branch. Since September 11, 2001, no American has died from homegrown terrorism, while about 120,000 have been murdered.

In the so-called post-September 11 "war" against international terrorism, Mr. Bush has detained only two citizens as enemy combatants. One was voluntarily deported to Saudi Arabia; the other was indicted, tried and convicted in a civilian court of providing material assistance to a foreign terrorist organization. And employing customary law enforcement tools, the United States has successfully prosecuted several pre-embryonic terrorism conspiracies amidst numerous false starts.

Prior to September 11, homegrown terrorism consisted largely of Timothy McVeigh, Eric Rudolph, the Unibomber and the D.C. Metropolitan area snipers. The Act, nevertheless, counterfactually finds "homegrown terrorism ... poses a threat to domestic security" that "cannot be easily prevented through traditional federal intelligence or law enforcement efforts."

Twelve members of the commission will be appointed by the president and leaders in the House and Senate. They will predictably serve the political needs of their political masters.

The commission's Big Brother task is to discover ideas and political associations, including connections to non-U.S. persons and networks, that promote "violent radicalization, homegrown terrorism, and ideologically based violence in the United States." And "violent radicalization" is defined as "the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change."

Under the Act, William Lloyd Garrison would have been guilty of promoting "violent radicalization" for publishing the anti-slavery Liberator in 1831, which "facilitated" John Brown. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton would have been condemned for assailing laws disenfranchising women and creating an intellectual atmosphere receptive to violence. And Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fallen under the Act's suspicion for denouncing Jim Crow and practicing civil disobedience, which "facilitated" H. Rap Brown.

The commission will certainly hold choreographed public hearings. Witnesses will testify that non-Christian ideas or vocal challenges to the status quo promote "an extremist belief system" that facilitates ideologically based violence. Internet communications, the media, schools, religious institutions and home life will be scrutinized for promoting pernicious thoughts.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes observed in Gitlow v. New York (1925): "Every idea is an incitement. It offers itself for belief and if believed it is acted on unless some other belief outweighs it or some failure of energy stifles the movement at its birth. The only difference between expression of an opinion and an incitement in the narrower sense is the speaker's enthusiasm for the result."

Lengthy lists of persons, organizations and thoughts to be shunned will be compiled. Portions of the Holy Koran are likely to be taboo. The lives of countless innocent citizens will be shattered. That is the lesson of HUAC and every prior government enterprise to identify "dangerous" people or ideas — for example, the 120,000 innocent Japanese-Americans herded into concentration camps during World War II.

The ideological persecutions invited by the Act will do more to create than to deter homegrown terrorism. Mark Anthony's words in "Julius Caesar" are a fitting commentary on what Congress is prepared to enact: "O judgment! thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason."

Bruce Fein is a constitutional lawyer with Bruce Fein & Associates and Chairman of the American Freedom Agenda.

[jimtzu]

most people are unaware or don't want to know of the legislation that has been passed.  soon articles like this might be illegal and hazardous to your health.

Creeping Fascism: History's Lessons

By Ray McGovern

“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. ... Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later....”

12/28/07 "ICH" -- -- These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).
The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”

I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. ... This is almost unbelievable.”

More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”

Goebbels Would be Proud

It has been two years since top New York Times officials decided to let the rest of us in on the fact that the George W. Bush administration had been eavesdropping on American citizens without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

The Times had learned of this well before the election in 2004 and acquiesced to White House entreaties to suppress the damaging information.

In late fall 2005 when Times correspondent James Risen’s book, “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” revealing the warrantless eavesdropping was being printed, Times publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., recognized that he could procrastinate no longer.

It would simply be too embarrassing to have Risen’s book on the street, with Sulzberger and his associates pretending that this explosive eavesdropping story did not fit Adolph Ochs’s trademark criterion: All The News That’s Fit To Print.

(The Times’ own ombudsman, Public Editor Byron Calame, branded the newspaper’s explanation for the long delay in publishing this story “woefully inadequate.”)

When Sulzberger told his friends in the White House that he could no longer hold off on publishing in the newspaper, he was summoned to the Oval Office for a counseling session with the president on Dec. 5, 2005. Bush tried in vain to talk him out of putting the story in the Times.

The truth would out; part of it, at least.

Glitches

There were some embarrassing glitches. For example, unfortunately for National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander, the White House neglected to tell him that the cat would soon be out of the bag.

So on Dec. 6, Alexander spoke from the old talking points in assuring visiting House intelligence committee member Rush Holt, D-New Jersey, that the NSA did not eavesdrop on Americans without a court order.

Still possessed of the quaint notion that generals and other senior officials are not supposed to lie to congressional oversight committees, Holt wrote a blistering letter to Gen. Alexander after the Times, on Dec. 16, front-paged a feature by Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”

But House Intelligence Committee chair Pete Hoekstra, R-Michigan, apparently found Holt’s scruples benighted; Hoekstra did nothing to hold Alexander accountable for misleading Holt, his most experienced committee member, who had served as an intelligence analyst at the State Department.

What followed struck me as bizarre. The day after the Dec. 16 Times feature article, the president of the United States publicly admitted to a demonstrably impeachable offense.

Authorizing illegal electronic surveillance was a key provision of the second article of impeachment against President Richard Nixon. On July 27, 1974, this and two other articles of impeachment were approved by bipartisan votes in the House Judiciary Committee.

Bush Takes Frontal Approach

Far from expressing regret, the president bragged about having authorized the surveillance “more than 30 times since the September the 11th attacks,” and said he would continue to do so. The president also said:

“Leaders in Congress have been briefed more than a dozen times on this authorization and the activities conducted under it.”
On Dec. 19, 2005, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and then-NSA Director Michael Hayden held a press conference to answer questions about the as yet unnamed surveillance program.

Gonzales was asked why the White House decided to flout FISA rather than attempt to amend it, choosing instead a “backdoor approach.”  He answered:

“We have had discussions with Congress...as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.”
Hmm. Impossible? It strains credulity that a program of the limited scope described would be unable to win ready approval from a Congress that had just passed the “Patriot Act” in record time.

James Risen has made the following quip about the prevailing mood: “In October 2001, you could have set up guillotines on the public streets of America."

It was not difficult to infer that the surveillance program must have been of such scope and intrusiveness that, even amid highly stoked fear, it didn’t have a prayer for passage.

It turns out we didn’t know the half of it.

What To Call These Activities

“Illegal Surveillance Program” didn’t seem quite right for White House purposes, and the PR machine was unusually slow off the blocks.

It took six weeks to settle on “Terrorist Surveillance Program,” with FOX News leading the way followed by the president himself.  This labeling would dovetail nicely with the president’s rhetoric on Dec. 17:

“In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. ... The authorization I gave the National Security Agency after September 11 helped address that problem...” [Emphasis added]
And Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed NSA from 1999 to 2005, was of course on the same page, dissembling as convincingly as the president. At his May 2006 confirmation hearings to become CIA director, he told of his soul-searching when, as director of NSA, he was asked to eavesdrop on Americans without a court warrant.

“I had to make this personal decision in early October 2001,” said Hayden. “It was a personal decision. ... I could not not do this.”

Like so much else, it was all because of 9/11. But we now know...

It Started Seven Months Before 9/11.

How many times have you heard it? The mantra “after 9/11 everything changed” has given absolution to all manner of sin.

We are understandably reluctant to believe the worst of our leaders, and this tends to make us negligent. After all, we learned from former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that drastic changes were made in U.S. foreign policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian issue and toward Iraq at the first National Security Council meeting on Jan. 30, 2001.

Should we not have anticipated far-reaching changes at home as well?

Reporting by the Rocky Mountain News and court documents and testimony on a case involving Qwest strongly suggest that in February 2001 Hayden saluted smartly when the Bush administration instructed NSA to suborn AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest to spy illegally on you, me, and other Americans.

Bear in mind that this would have had nothing to do with terrorism, which did not really appear on the new administration’s radar screen until a week before 9/11, despite the pleading of Clinton aides that the issue deserved extremely high priority.

So this until-recently-unknown pre-9/11 facet of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” was not related to Osama bin Laden or to whomever he and his associates might be speaking. It had to do with us.

We know that the Democrats briefed on the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” include House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, (the one with the longest tenure on the House Intelligence Committee), Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, and former and current chairmen of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham, D-Florida, and Jay Rockefeller, D-West Virginia, respectively.

May one interpret their lack of public comment on the news that the snooping began well before 9/11 as a sign they were co-opted and then sworn to secrecy?

It is an important question. Were the appropriate leaders in Congress informed that within days of George W. Bush’s first inauguration the NSA electronic vacuum cleaner began to suck up information on you and me, despite the FISA law and the Fourth Amendment?

Are They All Complicit?

And are Democratic leaders about to cave in and grant retroactive immunity to those telecommunications corporations—AT&T and Verizon—which made millions by winking at the law and the Constitution?

(Qwest, to its credit, heeded the advice of its general counsel who said that what NSA wanted done was clearly illegal.)

What’s going on here?  Have congressional leaders no sense for what is at stake?

Lately the adjective “spineless” has come into vogue in describing congressional Democrats—no offense to invertebrates.

Nazis and Their Enablers

You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.

In his journal, Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933.

Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”

But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. Do you see any contemporary parallels here?

In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:

“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May, the party leaders sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.

The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship.

As for the right-wing conservatives and German nationalists: “Oh God,” writes Haffner, “what an infinitely dishonorable and cowardly spectacle their leaders made in 1933 and continued to make afterward. ... They went along with everything: the terror, the persecution of Jews. ... They were not even bothered when their own party was banned and their own members arrested.”

In sum: “There was not a single example of energetic defense, of courage or principle. There was only panic, flight, and desertion. In March 1933, millions were ready to fight the Nazis. Overnight they found themselves without leaders. ... At the moment of truth, when other nations rise spontaneously to the occasion, the Germans collectively and limply collapsed. They yielded and capitulated, and suffered a nervous breakdown. ... The result is today the nightmare of the rest of the world.”

This is what can happen when virtually all are intimidated.

Our Founding Fathers were not oblivious to this; thus, James Madison:

“I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations. ... The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.”
We cannot say we weren’t warned.