FREE MARKET

The dirty secret of the bailout

A critical - and radical - component of the bailout package proposed by the Bush administration and reserve chief Paulson is nothing short of outrageous. It includes no oversight of his own closed-door operations.
It merely gives congressional blessing and funding to what he has already been doing, ad hoc.

Section 8 of this legislation is just 32 words but it represents a significant consolidation of power and an abdication of oversight authority. It reads, in its entirety:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

THOUGHT CRIME

Can a government remotely detect a terrorist's thoughts?

The US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places. The DHS says recent tests prove it works.

IMAGINE the scene. You arrive at New York's JFK airport, tired after a long flight, and trudge into line at passport control. As you wait, a battery of lasers, cameras, eye trackers and microphones begin secretly compiling a dossier of information about your body.
Project Hostile Intent as it was called aimed to help security staff choose who to pull over for a gently probing interview - or more. Last week, the DHS science unit gave an update on the project, now dubbed the less-hostile-sounding Future Attribute Screening Technologies (FAST) program.

The trial technology was installed in a trailer because it is planned to be easily transportable, so that FAST trucks can appear at any sports or music event as required. They look set to become as regular a sight at such events as mobile toilets and catering trucks.

HATE CAMPAIGN

Without wanting to condone irresponsible drink driving (which I discriminate from responsible drink driving) I have to say the South Australian Government's latest ad campaign is utterly vile.
Our noble leaders have been telling us since "9-11" that the world has changed ... and that it has changed because of unrestrained HATRED.
Keeping in mind that hatred of the Jews was Government policy in Nazi Germany, here we have the kernel of more of this toxic mentality.
Hatred is the enemy of society. For that reason I sadly (again) conclude that OUR ALIEN MASTERS are in fact a pack antisocial creeps.

POLICE STATE

Jury retrace Menezes' last steps

Jurors are due to retrace the final journey of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes who was shot dead by police marksmen three years ago.
He was shot by two police officers who mistook him for failed suicide bomber Hussain Osman.
Taking the inquest jury through events leading up to the electrician's death, Sir Michael listed a number of occasions where officers were unclear whether or not they thought they were pursuing a bomber.
He said that as Mr de Menezes entered a Tube station at Stockwell, no member of the surveillance team had positively identified him as Osman - the man they were looking for.

Two marksmen had jointly fired nine rounds, seven of which entered the Brazilian's head at point blank range.

There have been five inquiries relating to the death and its aftermath, including a criminal trial. In 2007, an Old Bailey jury found the Metropolitan Police guilty of breaching health and safety laws, after hearing about the events leading up to Mr de Menezes being shot.

CLOAK AND DAGGER

Mysterious Activity at Marriott Hotel Islamabad by US Marines

After the blast, mysteriously fire was started at the fourth and fifth floors.

Those flours were housing the mysterious steel boxes under the heavy guard of United States marines and no one including the Pakistani security forces and the security men of the hotel were allowed to go near with the them. These boxes were shifted inside the hotel when the Admiral Mike Mullen met Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and others in Islamabad.

A member of parliament Mumtaz Alam who belongs to the PPP, the ruling party was an eye witness when the white truck of US embassy came to the gate of Marriot Hotel and US marines unloaded the steel boxes and shifted them to the fourth and fifth floors without passing through them the scanners at the entrance of the hotels.

When the truck was there, all the entrance and the exit passage way to the hotels were closed.

STONEHENGE ROCKS ON

Dig pinpoints Stonehenge origins

For centuries, archaeologists have marvelled at the construction of Stonehenge, which lies on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.
Mineral analysis indicates that the original circle of bluestones was transported to the plain from a site 240km (150 miles) away, in the Preseli hills, South Wales.

MORAL OVERLORDS

Suicide note targets 'bully boy' prosecutor

A voluntary euthanasia campaigner who was facing a jail term over a man's killing has used her suicide note to accuse New South Wales Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi QC of harassment. Caren Jenning's suicide note was read out by Exit International director Dr Philip Nitschke to a voluntary euthanasia conference in Sydney this morning after she took her life last Thursday.

Jenning was due to face a sentencing hearing next month for being an accessory to manslaughter after the fact. She had imported the drug from Mexico that was used in the 2006 death of former Qantas pilot Graeme Wylie, who she and his wife maintained wanted to die.

"During the trial, I felt persecuted and harassed by Crown prosecutor Mark Tedeschi," she wrote. "He is a bully boy."

STASI STATE

US schools pay classroom informants $1000

Under an incentive scheme at Scripps Ranch, a large San Diego high school, students can call a special "tip line" - 888-580-TIPS - to report suspicious activity on campus.Callers whose tips lead to arrests or charges can earn themselves rewards of up to $1000.

POLICE STATE

Secret' police to use fake IDs

POLICE will have the power to create false identity documents for undercover operatives under new laws to be introduced in South Australia.
And for the first time, the identities of the undercover police officers will remain secret during court processes to prevent reprisals from criminals they help to apprehend.
Attorney-General Michael Atkinson, who will introduce the legislation into Parliament this week, said the new laws would help police fight organised crime "from the inside".

BACK IN USSRA

USA transforming into USSRA

An economic analyst says by buying out investment giants, the USA had transformed into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America).

"This transformation of the USA into a country where there is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street (i.e. where profits are privatized and losses are socialized) continues today with the nationalization of AIG,” Nouriel Roubini said.

"This latest action on AIG follows a variety of many other policy actions that imply a massive - and often flawed - government intervention in the financial markets and the economy," Roubini added.

"the bailout of the Bear Stearns creditors; the bailout of Fannie and Freddie; the use of the Fed balance sheet (hundreds of billions of safe US Treasuries swapped for junk toxic illiquid private securities); the use of the other government sponsored enterprises GSEs (the Federal Home Loan Bank system) to provide hundreds of billions of dollars of "liquidity" to distressed, illiquid and insolvent mortgage lenders; the use of the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC to manipulate the stock market (restrictions on short sales); the use of the US Treasury to manipulate the mortgage market (Treasury will now for the first time outright buy mortgage-backed security agency to manipulate and prop up this market);…." Roubini elaborated.

GOD BOTHER

Sarah Palin’s links to the Christian Right

The religious background of Sarah Palin is not unrelated to her bid to take the nation’s second highest office. She herself has been extremely vague about that background. Given the details, it becomes clearer perhaps why.

Sarah Palin has spent more than two and a half decades of her life as a member of an Alaska church which is part of a fanatical Christian-named cult project that is sweeping across America.

Palin comes out of the most radical stream of US Born-Again Evangelism known as ‘Joel’s Army,’ an offshoot of what is called Dominionism and sometimes also called the Latter Rain cult or Manifest Sons of God. The movement deliberately attempts to remain below the radar screen.

Theocratic Sect Prays for Real Armageddon

Todd Bentley, the 32-year-old, heavily tattooed, body-pierced, shaved-head Canadian preacher has been leading a continuous "supernatural healing revival" in central Florida.

Tattooed across his sternum are military dog tags that read "Joel's Army." They're evidence of Bentley's generalship in a rapidly growing apocalyptic movement that's gone largely unnoticed by watchdogs of the theocratic right. According to Bentley and a handful of other "hyper-charismatic" preachers advancing the same agenda, Joel's Army is prophesied to become an Armageddon-ready military force of young people with a divine mandate to physically impose Christian "dominion" on non-believers.

GLOBAL WARRING

Russia threatens to seize swathe of Arctic

Vladimir Putin, now Russia's prime minister, has said global warming is good for Russia – melting its vast icy territories to reveal previously inaccessible oil and gas reserves.
President Dmitry Medvedev said that Russia should unilaterally claim part of the Arctic, stepping up the race for the disputed energy-rich region.

With oil production declining – and Russia's oil-fuelled power rising – it is keen to grab ever more.

NEW WORLD DICTIONARY

RECESSIONISTA: A person who manages to look fashionable despite being on a tight budget.

NUDE AND LEWD

Thousand of Balinese rally against anti-porn bill

About 1000 Balinese have rallied to protest against a controversial anti-pornography bill that critics say could hurt local cultural traditions.

The anti-smut bill contains provisions that could jail people for kissing in public and criminalise many forms of art or traditional culture that hinge on sensuality.

The bill has been in parliament for over three years because of criticism it would threaten Indonesia's tradition of tolerance.

But one Islamic party's lawmaker has said the bill's passing would be a Ramadan gift.

"We in Bali see the body as aesthetic, but the pornography bill sees the body as an object of sin," said Sugilanus, one of the protesters at the rally in Denpasar, capital of the predominantly Hindu island of Bali.

Nude sculptures and paintings are common in culturally-rich Bali, which earns most of its income from domestic and international tourists.

BIG BROTHER

Covert tagging and tracking

Earlier targeted operations, such as the attack on Al Jazeera in Kabul, depended on electronic monitoring of cell phones and satellite uplinks, while the Israelis have found their targets with the help of both electronic intercepts and spies on the ground.
The Pentagon's latest plans for CTTL go far beyond, and include everything from covertly tagging suspects with microscopic radio chips to tracking them by the way they walk and even they way they smell.

But beyond CTTL's wizardry, both real and imagined, the obvious question is no matter how brilliantly done, does targeted killing work in the long run against a popularly supported resistance to colonial rule?

NB. The Pentagon has explicitly committed itself to make its new tagging, targeting and locating technology available for use within its own borders.

INSANE IN THE MEMBRANE

The Army's Totally Serious Mind-Control Project

Soldiers barking orders at each other is so 20th Century.
That's why the U.S. Army has just awarded a $4 million contract to begin developing "thought helmets" that would harness silent brain waves for secure communication among troops.

Ultimately, the Army hopes the project will "lead to direct mental control of military systems by thought alone."

PRIMAL SCREAM

Counting RSA-integers

In the RSA cryptosystem integers of the form n=p.q with p and q primes of comparable size (`RSA-integers') play an important role.

It is a folklore result of cryptographers that C_r(x), the number of integers n<=x that are of the form n=pq with p and q primes such that p<q<rp, is for fixed r>1 asymptotically equal to c_r*x*log^{-2}x for some constant c_r>0.

Here we prove this and show that c_r=2log r.

About the logic of the prime number distribution

There are two basic number sequences which play a major role in the prime number distribution. The first Number Sequence SQ1 contains all prime numbers of the form 6n+5
and the second Number Sequence SQ2 contains all prime numbers of the form 6n+1.

All existing prime numbers seem to be contained in these two number sequences, except of the prime numbers 2 and 3.

PRIME SPIRAL

Prime Spiral

The prime spiral, also known as Ulam's spiral, is a plot in which the positive integers are arranged in a spiral with primes indicated in some way along the spiral.

This construction was first made by Polish-American mathematician Stanislaw Ulam (1909-1986) in 1963 while doodling during a boring talk at a scientific meeting.
While drawing a grid of lines, he decided to number the intersections according to a spiral pattern, and then began circling the numbers in the spiral that were primes.
Surprisingly, the circled primes appeared to fall along a number of diagonal straight lines or, in Ulam's slightly more formal prose, it "appears to exhibit a strongly nonrandom appearance" (Stein et al. 1964). The spiral appeared on the March 1964 cover of Scientific American magazine.

MATH MUSIC

"Geometrical Music Theory," by Rachel Wells Hall. Science, 18 April 2008, pages 328-329.
"The shape of Beethoven's Ninth," by Davide Castelvecchi. ScienceNews, 24 May 2008, page 13.

Math in the Media

Recent research by Clifton Callendar, Ian Quinn, and Dmitri Tymoczko---all three of whom work in academic music departments---shows a novel way of using geometry to map out a musical score.

Using mathematics, and even geometry, to study music is not new, but the three authors present a way to look at each moment in time in a musical score, like a vertical snapshot of the written music, as a point in n-space, where n is the number of "voices," or instrumental parts, in the piece.

Callendar’s work also demonstrates how the mathematical concept of equivalence classes---a group of objects sharing a single property---can be applied to music.

According to the reviewer, the new research may lead to new methods for teaching and visualizing music.

(The research article, "Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces," starts on page 346 of the same issue.)
At left: Musical orbifold, ordered pairs of pitch classes, courtesy of Rachel Wells Hall.--- Lisa DeKeukelaere.

POLICE STATE

The Pentagon’s alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine

There is alarming evidence accumulated by serious scientific sources that the US Government is about to or already has ‘weaponized’ Avian Flu. If the reports are accurate, this could unleash a new pandemic on the planet that could be more devastating than the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic which killed an estimated 30 million people worldwide before it eventually died out. Pentagon and NIH experiments with remains in frozen state of the 1918 virus are the height of scientific folly. Is the United States about to unleash a new racially selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination with an alleged vaccine "against" Avian Flu?

There is reason to believe that sections of the international pharmaceutical industry cartel are acting in concert with the US Government to develop a genetically modified H5N1 virus substance that could unleash a man-made pandemic, perhaps more deadly than the 1918 ‘Spanish Influenza’ pandemic claiming up to 30 million lives.

POLICE STATE

Cities Would be Locked Down, Quarantined Under Pandemic Flu Response Plan

How would an authoritarian regime implement a lock-down of its civilians ... break open a vial or two of one of their "military grade" superbugs.

The federal government would need to quarantine infected households and ban public gatherings to contain pandemic flu, according to a computer simulation study conducted by researchers from Virginia Tech and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"You wouldn't go out to the movies. You wouldn't congregate with people," said researcher Stephen Eubank. "You'd pretty much be staying home with the doors and windows battened down.
"The consensus among health experts is that a pandemic, or global epidemic, of influenza is inevitable. The last such pandemic, in 1918, killed between 40 and 100 million people.

CASHLESSNESS

Shoppers to use fingerprints or eye scans to pay for goods

A "contactless payment" technology, called OnePulse, allows customers to use everyday items they carry around with them - such as mobile phones, key fobs or even their eyes or fingerprints - to make payments. It means shoppers will no longer have to rely on cards.
Barclaycard, which is part of Barclays Bank, has already introduced a new-style cash machine in the United Arab Emirates enabling people to use their fingerprints to withdraw money and shoppers in the UK may soon be able to use the same technology.

STASI STATE

Eight-year-olds recruited by councils to spy on neighbours who drop litter

Children are being offered money by councils to spy on neighbours and report petty offences such as 'bin crimes' and dog-fouling.
The youngsters are among 5,000 residents encouraged to photograph or video neighbours in the act of 'environmental crimes'.
In some cases children as young as eight, are being bribed with rewards of £500 for passing on the names of neighbours or taking down their car registration numbers.

For a reminder of what the Stasi was, start here.

BIG BROTHER

Anti-terrorism laws used to spy on noisy children

three quarters of local authorities have used the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) 2000 over the past year.

The Act gives councils the right to place residents and businesses under surveillance, trace telephone and email accounts and even send staff on undercover missions.

The findings alarmed civil liberties campaigners. Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, said: "Councils do a grave disservice to professional policing by using serious surveillance against litterbugs instead of terrorists."

OUR ALIEN MASTERS

Hypocrisy of the Authoritarians

It appears that, when it comes to one of their own, the religious right can adjust, twist and fit anything into their set of values. If that fails, they just deny the facts and call them "a smear campaign". You would expect them to think Palin a "bad mom" for returning to work when her baby was only three days old, or for failing to instill the values she preaches into her daughter. But no, she is a "good mom" because she supports her daughter, and because abortion wasn't an option in their family. There are many other examples of such thinking. McCain had an affair with a lobbyist? Unsubstantiated rumors; this simply cannot be, and who cares anyway. George W. Bush used drugs and alcohol? He has found Jesus since then and is forgiven. Etc, etc.

These people, incidentally, are the ones claiming to have absolute moral values, unlike the "liberal" moral relativists.

RED MENACE

Russian Opposition Blogger Murdered by Police

The owner of a website opposing the Kremlin-backed leadership of Russia's troubled Ingushetia region—scene of a recently failed separatist uprising—was shot and killed by law enforcement officials there today. Magomed Yevloyev, who ran the site www.Ingushetiya.ru, had just touched down at the airport after a trip to Moscow when police took him into custody and drove away with him in a Volga. Inside the car, Yevloyev was shot in the temple. The authorities don't even deny it, coming up with an excuse that will be quite familiar to film fans.

Using the "Vincent Vega Defense" the Prosecutor General's Office in Moscow claims that the gun accidentally went off inside the car, and just happened to hit Yevloyev directly in his brain. Though that doesn't explain why, as his friend contends, the police tossed his body into the street near a local hospital and sped off. "It was in no way a mistake," says the friend.