The Winners of The Ukraine Revolution: Austerity, Fascism, and the EU

Activist Post
Brandon Turbeville

To anyone who had a passing knowledge of the nature of color revolutions and destabilization efforts in years past, the recent protests in Ukraine were an obvious example of foreign meddling in the domestic affairs of yet another Eastern European nation.

From the initial spates of violence coming largely from the direction of the protesters to the pro-EU and pro-IMF demands, it was clear from the very beginning that the Ukrainian people were being callously pulled back and forth between two world powers indifferent to any interests but their own.

These powers, the United States and Russia, have been covertly jockeying for more and more control over Ukraine, a strategic location for both countries, for the last several years. Yet, as the United States’ power and influence begins to wane and Russia’s begins to increase on the world stage, the risk of both powers clashing over Ukraine in a direct fashion becomes a bigger possibility by the day.

 
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Chicago PD Believes It Can See The Future, Starts Warning Citizens About Crimes They Might Commit

 

Pre-Crime Software Moves One Step Closer to Reality

 Tech Dirt

We've talked a lot over the years about the attempts to get out "ahead of crime" by using computer programs and algorithms to try and predict who might commit a crime. Predictive computing can then either target specific areas or specific people that might be in need of some extra law enforcement attention. Except as we've noted repeatedly, these programs are only as valuable as the data they use. Garbage in, garbage out, but in this case you've got a human being on the other end of the equation whose life can be dramatically impacted by law enforcement holding what they believe is "proof" that you'll soon be up toc no good.

With that in mind there's growing concerns about efforts in Chicago to use predictive analytical systems to generate a "heat list" -- or a list of 400 or so individuals most likely to be involved in violent crime. The Chicago efforts are based on a Yale sociologist's studies and use an algorithm created by an engineer at the Illinois Institute of Technology. People who find themselves on the list get personal visits from law enforcement warning them that they better be nice. The result is a collision between law enforcement that believes in the righteousness of these efforts and those who worry that they could, as an EFF rep states, create "an environment where police can show up at anyone's door at any time for any reason." 

Law enforcement and the code creators, as you'd expect, argue that it's only the bad guys that need to worry about a system like this:

"A press liaison for the NIJ explains in an email: "These are persons who the model has determined are those most likely to be involved in a shooting or homicide, with probabilities that are hundreds of times that of an ordinary citizen." Commander Steven Caluris, who also works on the CPD's predictive policing program, put it a different way. "If you end up on that list, there's a reason you're there."

Unless law enforcement makes a mistake, your data is wrong (which it often will be), or we decide to expand the program significantly, right? Another concern bubbling up in Chicago is that the programs are effectively using racial profiling to target already-troubled areas where crime naturally would be greater due to poverty, without anybody bothering to perform a deeper analysis of why those areas might be having problems (aka targeting symptoms, not disease):

"...how are we deciding who gets on the list and who decides who gets on the list?" (EFF staff attorney Hanni) Fakhoury asks..."Are people ending up on this list simply because they live in a crappy part of town and know people who have been troublemakers? We are living in a time when information is easily shareable and easily accessible," Fakhoury says. "So, let's say we know that someone is connected to another person who was arrested. Or, let's say we know that someone's been arrested in the past. Is it fair to take advantage of that information? Are we just perpetuating the problem?" He continues: "How many people of color are on this heat list? Is the list all black kids? Is this list all kids from Chicago's South Side? If so, are we just closing ourselves off to this small subset of people?"

Chicago PD denies that there's any "racial, neighborhood, or other such information" being used in their heat list calculations, but a FOIA request to actually confirm that was denied, under the pretense that releasing such information could "endanger the life or physical safety of law enforcement personnel or any other person." So yeah, there's great transparency at work here as well.

Predictive computing is excellent for a good many things, from improving traffic congestion to designing sewer networks, but calculating the future movements of highly complicated and emotional human beings is a bridge too far. It's not particularly difficult to imagine a future where law enforcement (not always known for nuanced thinking or honest crime stat record keeping) starts using their belief in the infallibility of mathematics as the underpinnings for bad behavior, with the horrible experiences of the falsely accused dismissed as anecdotal experiences ("well shucks, most of the time the system is right, so its existence is justified"). It might just be time for a re-watch of Terry Gilliam's Brazil with an eye on reminding ourselves what a simple clerical error can do to the Archibald Buttles of the world.

UK spy agency intercepted webcam images of millions of Yahoo users

 

The Guardian

Britain’s surveillance agency GCHQ, with aid from the National Security Agency, intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of internet users not suspected of wrongdoing, secret documents reveal.

GCHQ files dating between 2008 and 2010 explicitly state that a surveillance program codenamed Optic Nerve collected still images of Yahoo webcam chats in bulk and saved them to agency databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.

In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery – including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications – from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

Yahoo reacted furiously to the webcam interception when approached by the Guardian. The company denied any prior knowledge of the program, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

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'This is not Rocky IV': Kerry tells Russia to be 'very careful' as Putin puts country on war footing

Comment: So, the war machine wants to make money and  new Cold War is just what it needs.

-------------------------

The Independent

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Wednesday that Russia must be “very careful” in the decisions it makes on Ukraine, and that the country’s President should remember “this is not Rocky IV”.

“I think Russia needs to be very careful in the judgments that it makes going forward here,” he told US TV network NBC News.

“We are not looking for confrontation. But we are making it clear that every country should respect the territorial integrity here, the sovereignty of Ukraine.

“Russia has said it would do that and we think it’s important that Russia keeps its word,” he added.

Mr Kerry said that Russian President Vladimir Putin should “listen carefully to Ukrainians who have voiced their desire for change,” and reiterated that the US does not view its relationship with Russia as a “sort of continuation of the Cold War.”

“This is not Rocky IV,” he said, referring to the 1990 film depicting a battle between East and West, in which Rocky Balboa fights then-Soviet Union boxer Ivan Drago.

“Believe me. We don’t see it that way", he added.

His comments come after Mr Putin ordered an urgent drill to test the combat readiness of its military forces amid tensions with the West over Ukraine.

According to the Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu, the manoeuvres commencing on Friday will last four days.

He added the exercise will involve ships of the Baltic and the Northern Fleets and the air force.

Shoigu's statement made no reference to Ukraine, where tensions remain high following the ousting of Russia-backed President Viktor Yanukovych.

Mr Kerry said he would “decline to speculate” on the whereabouts of Mr Yanukovych or whether he should be prosecuted for war crimes.

"We need to work together in what does not have to be a zero sum game to provide the capacity of the people of Ukraine to choose their future,” Kerry said. "That's all that's at stake."

Read more: Ukraine is not involved in an East-West battle, say US and Britain

Ukraine crisis: Parliament calls for ousted President Yanukovych to face trial as ethnic Russian secession fears grow

Europe and the US must build bridges with Russia over Ukraine’s future. The alternative is in none of our interests

The Dark Power of Fraternities

"Lawsuits against fraternities are becoming a growing matter of public interest, in part because they record such lurid events, some of them ludicrous, many more of them horrendous. For every butt bomb, there’s a complaint of manslaughter, rape, sexual torture, psychological trauma. A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses."

A yearlong investigation of Greek houses reveals their endemic, lurid, and sometimes tragic problems—and a sophisticated system for shifting the blame.

---

 

Caitlin Flanagan 

The Atlantic

February 19, 2014

ne warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West Virginia, and was struck by what seemed to him—under the influence of powerful inebriants, not least among them the clear ether of youth itself—to be an excellent idea: he would shove a bottle rocket up his ass and blast it into the sweet night air. And perhaps it was an excellent idea. What was not an excellent idea, however, was to misjudge the relative tightness of a 20-year-old sphincter and the propulsive reliability of a 20-cent bottle rocket. What followed ignition was not the bright report of a successful blastoff, but the muffled thud of fire in the hole.

Also on the deck, and also in the thrall of the night’s pleasures, was one Louis Helmburg III, an education major and ace benchwarmer for the Thundering Herd baseball team. His response to the proposed launch was the obvious one: he reportedly whipped out his cellphone to record it on video, which would turn out to be yet another of the night’s seemingly excellent but ultimately misguided ideas. When the bottle rocket exploded in Hughes’s rectum, Helmburg was seized by the kind of battlefield panic that has claimed brave men from outfits far more illustrious than even the Thundering Herd. Terrified, he staggered away from the human bomb and fell off the deck. Fortunately for him, and adding to the Chaplinesque aspect of the night’s miseries, the deck was no more than four feet off the ground, but such was the urgency of his escape that he managed to get himself wedged between the structure and an air-conditioning unit, sustaining injuries that would require medical attention, cut short his baseball season, and—in the fullness of time—pit him against the mighty forces of the Alpha Tau Omega national organization, which had been waiting for him.

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These Photos Being Shared From Venezuela Are Fake

policymic.com

There have been some powerful images coming out of Venezuela over the past week. 

Massive anti-government demonstrations have clogged the streets of major cities, and clashes between law enforcement and protesters have resulted in injury and even death. Shocking photos of the violence and unrest have quickly disseminated under hashtags like #SOSVenezuela and #PrayforVenezuela.

But all is not what it seems. A slew of phony images has emerged since the protests began, some of which have been shared thousands of times. 

Though it is impossible to know the extent to which these hoaxes have fueled the conflict in Venezuela, they demonstrate that social media are fertile ground for spreading rumors and hysteria.

Of the fake photos in circulation, many are of police oppression in places like Brazil, Spain and Chile that are being passed off as images of Venezuela. Even a picture from a porn site has reportedly been used as an example of sexual violence by the police.

 

In other cases, images of Venezuela’s past demonstrations are being recycled.

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See also: Documented: US Coup Plan for Venezuela 2013 and Venezuela: Regime Change, Destabilization and the Hidden Hands of U.S. Capitalism

Private prisons hold 18% of America’s federal prisoners

Center for investigative Reporting

Private prisons hold 18% of America’s federal prisoners, but aren’t subject to open records laws.
A new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calls for increased transparency in the public’s access to information on private prisons.

Comcast’s Deal with Netflix Makes Network Neutrality Obsolete

Washington Post

For the past two decades, the Internet has operated as an unregulated, competitive free market. Given the tendency of networked industries to lapse into monopoly—think of AT&T’s 70-year hold over telephone service, for example—that’s a minor miracle. But recent developments are putting the Internet’s decentralized architecture in danger.

In recent months, the nation’s largest residential Internet service providers have been demanding payment to deliver Netflix traffic to their own customers. On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Netflix has agreed to the demands of the nation’s largest broadband provider, Comcast. The change represents a fundamental shift in power in the Internet economy that threatens to undermine the competitive market structure that have served Internet users so well for the past two decades.

The deal will also transform the debate over network neutrality regulation. Officially, Comcast’s deal with Netflix is about interconnection, not traffic discrimination. But it’s hard to see a practical difference between this deal and the kind of tiered access that network neutrality advocates have long feared. Network neutrality advocates are going to have to go back to the drawing board.

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The Banker Purge Continues: Global Banking System is Now Operating at DEFCON1

Lebanon’s Illegal Arms Dealers

"With Lebanon’s security situation worsening every day, business is booming for the country’s illegal arms dealers. With a porous border with Syria next door and vast stockpiles of weapons left over from the country’s civil war, anyone with enough cash can buy any weapon they want, no questions asked - so VICE News went window shopping to see what’s available."

The Surveillance State is Metaphorical: They’re Already in Your Head

Disinfo.com

Now, I’m not saying I’m a supporter of the surveillance state or anything like that. It’s hyper creepy as all get out. As a matter of fact, before I even get into that level of sketch I’ll first focus on the bright side. One thing that no one seems to philosophically contemplate nearly enough these days is how quickly we’ve plunged ourselves into increasingly fantasy centric lifestyles. Why is that? Our lives are cripplingly boring and we’re forced into these alternate dimensions of thought as a reflex. I mean, how many of us actually find any sort of fulfillment in our supposed “careers”. Like 2% optimistically? I think I’m being generous with that. I mean, increasingly intertwined mind rape corporations are currently taking home record profits, and who the fuck grows up thinking, “I want to work at the Pizza Hut corporate office one day.”

Fucking no one….ever…and yet, uber boring places like that are where a crap ton of us end up, gladly, because the alternative is further selling our lives down the rabbit hole of higher education, which may or may not make things better for us and costs an ass ton of money. Oh wait, I’m supposedly talking about the good things in life here aren’t I? Well, the good news is that this consumerist culture we’ve created has given us the tools to completely implode into our own little micro-verses quite effectively.

It is so odd to think about the fact that I was one of the first generations to grow up addicted to video games and that the video games I grew up with basically sucked. I barely even used the internet until I was in college. Seriously. That’s how quick this shit is moving. I have my entire music collection at my fingertips at all times these days. It took me years of obsessively combing CD stores to find half that stuff. Just mindblowing potentialities here but we’ve got to pull our shit together. More importantly, we’ve got to ask ourselves why we’re increasingly fleeing inwardly into the realms of our wildest imaginations? I mean, TV is a relatively new invention. When you think back on most of human history, it was plays and books, occasionally. It used to be hard to find decent entertainment in most places in the world. We’re now consuming a constant stream of exotic information all day every day.

I suppose magick has a lot to do with regulating that intake to your distinct advantage, but it also has a lot to do with looking at these things subjectively and metaphorically rather than in the objective literal way we’re trained by our culture. There’s only so far you can go with that. We’ve created enough bizarre wasteful techno knick knacks to power our lives for another trillion centuries. At what point do we break free from the idea that we should continue churning them out and start making them turn us in. 

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Another Sudden Death of JPMorgan Worker: 34-Year Old Jason Alan Salais

Comment: The last paragraph summarizes the situation. And as I wrote a couple of years ago quoting financial commentator Hans Schicht who described his experiences of working with power-brokers in international commerce: 

... he believes that the banking systems have become so centralized and concentrated that it is now under the control of “an inner circle of men.” He calls their financial warfare “spider webbing” where the concentration of wealth is made invisible; control is consolidated through “take-overs, mergers and chain share holdings where no companies hold shares of other companies” and where “conditions annexed to loans.” They also exercise: “tight personal management and control with a minimum of insiders of front men who themselves have only a partial knowledge of the game.”  - Cartel Economics

 ------------------------------


Wall Street on Parade

On the evening of Sunday, December 15 of last year, six weeks before the onset of the latest rash of tragic deaths of young men in their 30s employed at JPMorgan, the Pearland, Texas police received a call of a person in distress outside a Walgreens pharmacy at 6122 Broadway in Pearland. The individual in distress was Jason Alan Salais, a 34-year old Information Technology specialist who had worked at JPMorgan Chase since May 2008.

A family member confirmed to Wall Street On Parade that Salais died of a heart attack on the same evening the report of distress went in to the police. The incidence of heart attack or myocardial infarction among men aged 20 to 39 is one half of one percent of the population, according to the National Center for Health Statistics and National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, based on 2007 to 2010 data, marking this as another unusual death at JPMorgan.

A person identifying himself as Dave Steiner wrote the following about Salais in the online condolence book provided by the funeral home: “My condolences to your entire family at the sudden passing of Jason. When I had the pleasure of interviewing Jason to be a part of the team at J.P. Morgan back in 2008, it was clear to me within just a few short minutes that he was a man of character, intelligence, work ethic, kindness and integrity. In the years that followed, and until the sad news of this week, I was witness to his hard work, the friendships he built, stories of his beloved family and of course baseball…”

According to the LinkedIn profile for Salais, he was engaged in Client Technology Service “L3 Operate Support” and previously “FXO Operate L2 Support” at JPMorgan. Prior to joining JPMorgan in 2008, Salais had worked as a Client Software Technician at SunGard and a UNIX Systems Analyst at Logix Communications.

Six weeks after the sudden death of Salais, Gabriel Magee, a 39-year old Vice President who was also engaged in Information Technology at JPMorgan, this time in London, died under extremely suspicious circumstances. A Coroner’s Inquest into the matter will be held on May 15 in London.

Family and friends report that Magee was a happy, healthy, vibrant young man who emailed his girlfriend on the evening of January 27 to say he was finishing up at work and would be home shortly. When he did not arrive, his girlfriend notified police and called local hospitals. According to the Metropolitan Police in London, at around 8:02 a.m. the next morning, workers looking out their windows saw Magee’s body lying on a 9^th level rooftop that jutted out from the 33-story JPMorgan building in the Canary Wharf section of London.

London newspapers immediately called the death a suicide, initially suggesting that thousands of commuters had seen Magee jump from the 33^rd level rooftop. When Wall Street On Parade pressed the Metropolitan Police on the issue of actual eyewitnesses who had seen Magee jump, the Police backed away from the suggestion that the fall had actually been observed by eyewitnesses.

Magee worked in the European headquarters for JPMorgan at 25 Bank Street in the borough of Tower Hamlets. Drawings and plans submitted by JPMorgan to the borough after it purchased the building for £495 million in 2010, show that the 9^th floor roof is accessible “via the stair from level 8 within the existing Level 9 plant enclosure…”

According to Magee’s LinkedIn profile, his specific area of specialty at JPMorgan was  “Technical architecture oversight for planning, development, and operation of systems for fixed income securities and interest rate derivatives.”

Two young employees engaged in computer technology dying in such a short span of time might seem bizarre at a bank. But JPMorgan is not just any bank when it comes to computer technology. According to Anish Bhimani, the Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview published at the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon, JPMorgan has “more software developers than Google, and more technologists than Microsoft…we get to build things at scale that have never been done before.”

Let that sink in for a moment: a bank that has “more software developers than Google.” The growing concern in Congress is that America’s biggest bank by assets is now so complex in terms of derivative risks on and off its books and software programs that are incomprehensible to its regulators, that it could pose systemic risk to the U.S. economy in a replay of the Citigroup debacle of 2008.

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See also: 

JP Morgan $13 bn Record Settlement
Another JP Morgan Banker Leaps to his Death  

 

Drug routes expanding in Asian region

ANN

Drug syndicates are expanding regionally, hence countries should hold discussions with each other to tackle drug-related issues, said Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau Director Ng Ser Long on Wednesday.

“One of the big trends we have seen in the past, is the movement of drugs from the Golden Triangle to other parts of the world. Now we are seeing drugs from other parts of the world moving to our (Asean) region,” he told The Brunei Times.

Ng led a six-member delegation from Singapore to Brunei for the 6th Bilateral Meeting between Brunei’s Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) and Singapore’s Central Narcotics Bureau (CNB).

Ng believes the drug movement trend is a reflection of the region’s economic growth.

“Countries in the region are doing well, their economies are growing, therefore there is larger consumption. So in some way, you see drug movement increasing in the region. The way forward for all of us is good cooperation and sharing of intelligence,” he said.

“At one point, we were all worried about a certain African drug gang making use of local ladies as drug mules/couriers. Three countries (Brunei, Singapore and Malaysia) organised joint operations and shared intelligence, and through that, we managed to bring them (the gang) down,” he said.

Brunei and Singapore have a long history of bilateral cooperation.

The CNB team also visited Al-Islah Rehabilitation Centre in Kg Kupang, Tutong, which began operations on Feb 1, 2010.

The director lauded the centre’s success, and said that knowledge gained from their visit will be used to increase their own standards of quality.

NCB Director Hj Jasmin Hj Jamudin described the working visit as beneficial for both parties, noting the CNB’s legal and investigative aspects as key areas of interest for Brunei.

“Brunei and Singapore share similarities in our approaches and practises in curbing drug abuse. We are also looking forward to implementing some of the new technology used by Singapore (such as using hair to test for drug abuse),” he said.

Concerns over border control at immigration posts was also among the issue brought up during the meeting.

How the Bankers Stand to Profit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership

Susan Posel
 
Concerning the future of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the president is expected to accelerate talks and negotiations to play import/export with other nations to ensure profits for rich countries and control one-third of global trade.

Payoffs for successful positioning regarding the TPP have left some bankers just a little bit richer.
Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan & Chase, Blackstone Group, Fannie Mae, Northern Trust and Northrop Grumman extend financial kickbacks for government service.

Stefan Selig, investment banker for Bank of America (BoA) has been paid an estimated $9 million in bonuses and $5.1 million in incentives to work on international trade with the Department of Commerce.
Citigroup will offer executive contracts for “full time high level positions with the US government or regulatory body.”

Michael Froman, former Citigroup banker and current representative for US Trade has been given more than $4 million to join the Obama administration; while still receiving millions in investment funds.

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Why Banks Are Doomed: Technology and Risk

Charles Hugh-Smith   

It's not just that banks are no longer needed--they pose a needless and potentially catastrophic risk to the nation. To understand why, we need to understand the key characteristics of risk.
 
The entire banking sector is based on two illusions:
 
1. Thanks to modern portfolio management, bank debt is now riskless. 

2. Technology only enhances banks' tools to skim profits; it does not undermine the fundamental role of banks. 

The global financial meltdown of 2008-09 definitively proved riskless bank debt is an illusion. If you want to understand why risk cannot eliminated, please read Benoit Mandelbrot's book The (Mis)Behavior of Markets. 

Technology does not just enable high-frequency trading; it enables capital and borrowers to bypass banks entirely. I addressed this yesterday in Banks Are Obsolete: The Entire Parasitic Sector Can Be Eliminated. 

Unfortunately for banks, higher education, buggy whip manufacturers, etc., monopoly and propaganda are no match for technology. Just because a system worked in the past in a specific set of technological constraints does not mean it continues to be a practical solution when those technological constraints dissolve. 

The current banking system is essentially based on two 19th century legacies. In that bygone era, banks were a repository of accounting expertise (keeping track of multitudes of accounts, interest, etc.) and risk assessment/management expertise (choosing the lowest-risk borrowers). 

Both of these functions are now automated. The funny thing about technology is that those threatened by fundamental improvements in technology attempt to harness it to save their industry from extinction. For example, overpriced colleges now charge thousands of dollars for nearly costless massively open online courses (MOOCs) because they retain a monopoly on accreditation (diplomas). Once students are accredited directly--an advancement enabled by technology--colleges' monopoly disappears and so does their raison d'etre.
 
The same is true of banks. Now that accounting and risk assessment are automated, and borrowers and owners of capital can exchange funds in transparent digital marketplaces, there is no need for banks. But according to banks, only they have the expertise to create riskless debt. 

It's not just that banks are no longer needed--they pose a needless and potentially catastrophic risk to the nation. To understand why, we need to understand the key characteristics of risk. 

Moral hazard is what happens when people who make bad decisions suffer no consequences. Once decision-makers offload consequence onto others, they are free to make increasingly risky bets, knowing that they will personally suffer no losses if the bets go bad. 

The current banking system is defined by moral hazard. "Too big to fail" also means "too big to jail:" no matter how criminal or risky the bank managements' decisions, the decision-makers not only suffered no consequences, they walked away from the smouldering ruins with tens of millions of dollars in personal wealth. 

Absent any consequence, the system created perverse incentives to pyramid risky bets and derivatives to increase profits--a substantial share of which flowed directly into the personal accounts of the managers. 

The perfection of moral hazard in the current banking system can be illustrated by what happened to the last CEO of Lehman Brother, Richard Fuld: he walked away from the wreckage with $222 million. This is not an outlier; it is the direct result of a system based on moral hazard, too-big-to-jail and perverse incentives to increase systemic risk for personal gain.
 
And who picked up all the losses? The American taxpayer. Privatize profits, socialize losses: that's the heart of moral hazard. 

Concentrating the ability to leverage stupendous systemic bets in a few hands leads to a concentration of risk. Just before America's financial sector imploded, banks had pyramided $2.5 trillion in dodgy mortgages into derivatives and exotic financial instruments with a face value of $35 trillion--14 times the underlying collateral and more than double the size of the U.S. economy. 

In a web-enabled transparent exchange of borrowers bidding for capital, the risk is intrinsically dispersed over millions of participants. Not only is risk dispersed, but the consequences of bad decisions and bad bets fall solely to those who made the decision and the bet. This is the foundation of a sound, stable, fair financial system. 

In a transparent marketplace of millions of participants, a handful of participants will be unable to acquire enough profit to capture the political process. The present banking system is not just a financial threat to the nation, it is a political threat because its outsized profits enable bankers to capture the regulatory and governance machinery. 

chart courtesy of Market Daily Briefing

The problem with concentrating leverage and moral hazard is that risk is also concentrated. And when risk is concentrated rather than dispersed, it inevitably breaks out of the "riskless" corral. This is the foundation of my aphorism: Central planning perfects the power of threats to bypass the system's defenses. 

We can understand this dynamic with an analogy to bacteria and antibiotics. By attempting to eliminate the risk of infection by flooding the system with antibiotics, central planning actually perfects the search for bacteria that are immune to the antibiotics. These few bacteria will bypass the system's defenses and destroy the system from within. 

The banking/financial sector claims to be eliminating risk, but what it's actually doing is perfecting the threats that will destroy the system from within. Another way to understand this is to look at what happened to home mortgages in the runup to the meltdown of 2008: the "safest" part of the financial sector ended up triggering the collapse of the entire pyramid of risk.
 
Once we concentrate risk and impose perverse incentives and moral hazard as the foundations of our financial/banking system, then we guarantee the risk will explode out of whatever sector is considered "safe." 

Once you eliminate the "risk" of weak bacteria, you perfect the threat that will kill the host. 

The banking sector cannot be reformed, for its very nature is to concentrate systemic risk and moral hazard into breeding grounds of systemic collapse. The only way to eliminate the threat posed by banks is to eliminate the banks and replace them with transparent exchanges where borrowers and owners of capital openly bid for yield (interest rates) and capital. 

Bankers (and their fellow financial parasites) will claim they are essential and the nation will collapse without them. But this is precisely opposite of reality: the very existence of banks threatens the nation and democracy. 

One last happy thought: technology cannot be put back in the bottle. The financial/banking sector wants to use technology to increase its middleman skim, but the technology that is already out of the bottle will dismantle the sector as a function of what technology enables: faster, better, cheaper, with greater transparency, fairness and the proper distribution of risk. 

There may well be a place for credit unions and community banks in the spectrum of exchanges, but these localized, decentralized enterprises would be unable to amass dangerous concentrations of risk and political influence in a truly transparent and decentralized system of exchanges. 

Of related interest:
Certainty, Complex Systems, and Unintended Consequences (February 14, 2014)
Our Middleman-Skimming Economy (February 11, 2014)
  

Robots will be smarter than us all by 2029, warns AI expert Ray Kurzweil

The Independent 

One of the world’s leading futurologists and artificial intelligence (AI) developers, 66-year-old Kurzweil has previous form in making accurate predictions about the way technology is heading.

In 1990 he said a computer would be capable of beating a chess champion by 1998 – a feat managed by IBM’s Deep Blue, against Garry Kasparov, in 1997.

When the internet was still a tiny network used by a small collection of academics, Kurzweil anticipated it would soon make it possible to link up the whole world.

Now, Kurzweil says than within 15 years robots will have overtaken us, having fulfilled the so-called Turing test where computers can exhibit intelligent behaviour equal to that of a human.

Speaking in an interview with the Observer, he said that his prediction was foreshadowed by recent high-profile AI developments, and Hollywood films like Her, starring Joaquin Phoenix.

“Today, I’m pretty much at the median of what AI experts think and the public is kind of with them,” he said.

“The public has seen things like Siri (Apple’s voice recognition software), where you talk to a computer. They’ve seen the Google self-driving cars. My views are not radical any more.”

Though credited with inventing the world’s first flat-bed scanners and text-to-speech synthesisers, Kurzweil is perhaps most famous for his theory of “the singularity” – a point in the future where humans and machines will apparently “converge”.

His decision to work for Google came after the company acquired a host of other AI developers, from the BigDog creators Boston Dynamics to the British startup DeepMind.

And the search engine giant’s co-founder Larry Page was able to convince Kurzweil to take on “his first actual job” by promising him “Google-scale resources”.

With the company’s unprecedented billions to spend, and some of humanity’s greatest minds already on board, it is clearly only a matter of time before we reach that point when robots can joke, learn and yes, even flirt.

Why Is A Former Monsanto Vice President Running the FDA?

political blindspot.com

Political Blindspot

Former Monsanto Vice President Michael R. Taylor is the current Deputy Commissioner for Foods at the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA). He was promoted from US Food Safety Czar to Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of the FDA after spending years lobbying for the Genetically Modified Foods giant.

Since his appointment for the position with the FDA, by the Obama administration in 2010, very little protest has been raised. When he was appointed to the post at the FDA, the job of Deputy Commissioner for Foods was custom-crafted to suit his interests and those of Monsanto.

The position affords Taylor the ability to sign off of any cancer-causing, or otherwise harmful agent produced by the giant biotech company Monsanto.

While Taylor served as the Safety Czar for the FDA, Genetically Modified Organisms were ushered into the US food supply without undergoing a single test to judge their safety or risks.

In an article from The Ecologist’s “Monsanto Files”, Jennifer Ferrara said that the FDA’s approval of Monsanto’s genetically engineered cattle drug rBGH – which failed to gain approval in either Europe or Canada – was directly linked to Taylor’s schemings with the FDA.

“Michael R. Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for policy,” at the time “wrote the FDA’s rBGH labelling guidelines,” Ferrara writes. 

“The guidelines, announced in February 1994, virtually prohibited dairy corporations from making any real distinction between products produced with and without rBGH. To keep rBGH-milk from being ‘stigmatized’ in the marketplace, the FDA announced that labels on non-rBGH products must state that there is no difference between rBGH and the naturally occurring hormone.”

“For those concerned about the health and environmental hazards of genetic engineering,” Ferrara continued, “the revolving door between the biotechnology industry and federal regulating agencies is a serious cause for concern.” 

The real question is, why is there so little serious discussion of this conflict of interests in the mainstream media? If you believe this is important information, SPREAD THE WORD and help wake people up to the corruption that put the former Monsanto Vice President in the position he now holds with the FDA.

(Article by M.B. David)

Obama administration launches devious FCC plan to control all news sources in America and FAILS

Natural News

The first amendment of the Bill of Rights states that "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom... of the press." The words are clear and understood, but what if it's not Congress trying to control the press? What happens when the President and departments of the executive branch go around the Bill of Rights and begin controlling the news stories that the free press presents to the people? 

FCC gathering information to 'ascertain the process by which stories are selected'

New documents reveal devious controls to be carried out through the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). In an attempt to control freedom of the press, the FCC has authored an investigation called the "Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs" (CIN) initiative.

Proposed last May, the CIN initiative was proposed to gather information from television and radio broadcasters "to ascertain the process by which stories are selected." Additionally, the information is collected to be used to designate "station priorities" to monitor content production quality and the populations served. Furthermore CIN initiative is designated to eliminate perceived station bias and regulate "perceived percent of news dedicated to each of the eight [critical information needs] and perceived responsiveness to under-served populations." This plan could result in FCC agents visiting newsrooms.

The FCC has identified what they believe are eight critical information needs, or key topics that the government thinks should be covered by news outlets.

The slightest idea that the federal government gets to suggest topics for media news coverage is blood curdling. If the feds control the topics of the press, then the truth can be watered down and discarded, as free press accountability dissolves. 

There's a war going on to control information, to control minds

Massive federal control is real. It's no conspiracy. It's already being witnessed through the implementation of federal common core standards that are being forced into the public education system. The government is gaining control of what is taught to public school children, changing minds, sculpting lives.

Imagine what a takeover of the free press might look like, with agents looking over the shoulders of reporters, deeming what is appropriate to report?

While the FCC claimed that the study is "voluntary," they are the ones who issue licenses to the broadcasters that they seek to monitor. Compelled to comply, media outlets may go along, threatened by the thought of penalties and license revocation. 

Truly free press is rising

This is where the truly free press comes in to keep liberty alive. Using the internet, the new media can completely expose the lies dished out through controlled FCC-regulated media sources. Truth in media is growing fast at places like NaturalNews.com, among others who don't feed the people a bunch of fluff.

Considering that the Department of Justice has been caught tracking the movements of reporters and bugging their phone lines, it's obvious there's a federal goal to control the press with intimidation and coercion.

Watch Judge Andrew Napolitano speak out against the FCC's new plan here. In his words, "If the FCC shows up here... throw them out!" 

Even local reporters intimidated by authoritarian demands

It's apparent that some major media outlets already comply with authoritarian demands and information controls as the truth is twisted and hidden behind curtains of coercion. Even local media can cave to local pressure. A small town reporter may be absolutely frightened to report the truth on how a fellow couple in the community were harassed and targeted by the town's police, for fear that they too may be persecuted, labeled or targeted.

Hopefully more reporters and free media journalist will start standing up to speak the truth of what's really going on in this country. While the FCC was positioning for its next move -- to get in the newsroom and dictate the stories that can be reported to the people, public outcry has halted their devious plans. Free speech and the free press has given the federal government no option but to back down. 

Free speech, free press prevails as controlling FCC plan falters

In the words of commissioner Ajit Pai, who has been a huge critic of the new press - suppression plan, "This study would have thrust the federal government into newsrooms across the country, somewhere it just doesn't belong. The Commission has now recognized that no study by the federal government, now or in the future, should involve asking questions to media owners, news directors, or reporters about their practices. This is an important victory for the First Amendment."

He added: "And it would not have been possible without the American people making their voices heard. I will remain vigilant that any future initiatives not infringe on our constitutional freedoms."

Sources for this article include:http://pjmedia.com

http://foxnewsinsider.com

http://www.foxnews.com

Which Corporations Control the World?

A surprisingly small number of corporations control massive global market shares.
Banks and Finance, Media, Big Oil, The Global Food Conglomerates,
The World’s largest banks hold a total of $25.1 trillion in assets

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hannah Williams
RINF Alternative News


A surprisingly small number of corporations control massive global market shares. How many of the brands below do you use?

It's a Small World at the Top

Banking

Largest banks hold a total of $25.1 trillion:[1]

1.) ICBC, China, $2.95 trillion in assets, over 18,000 outlets, 108 branches globally
2.) HSBC holdings, UK, $2.68 trillion in assets, 6,600 offices in 80 countries, 55 million customers
3.) Deutsche Bank, Germany, $2.6 trillion in assets, 2,963 branches, 70 countries, 46 million customers
4.) Credit Agricole Group, France, $2.58 trillion in assets, 60 countries, over 21 million clients
5.) BNP Paribas, France, $2.51 trillion in assets
6.) Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Japan, $2.49 trillion in assets
7.) Barclays PLC, United Kingdom, $2.41 trillion in assets
8.) JPMorgan Chase & Co., U.S., $2.39 trillion in assets
9.) China Construction Bank Corp., China, $2.36 trillion in assets
10.) Japan Post Bank, Japan, $2.12 trillion in assets
Enough to fund the federal U.S. government for over 7 years.[2] Or roughly $3500 per person on earth.

Media

1.) Comcast Corporation: $62.5 billion revenue, $6 billion in profit
Owns:
MSNBC
NBC Universal
MLB Network
E! Entertainment
Golf Channel
Xfinity
AT&T Broadband

2.) The Walt Disney Company:$42 billion revenue, $5.5 billion in profit

Owns:
ABC
ESPN
Pixar
Marvel Comics
Touchstone Pictures
Lucasfilm
Walt Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Disney Music Publishing
The Baby Einstein Company
50% of A&E Networks

3.)Time Warner Company

Owns:
HBO
Time (Southern Living, Sports Illustrated, Time, Golf Magazine, Health, Entertainment Weekly)
IPC Media
Grupo Editorial Expansion
Turner Broadcasting (TNT, TruTV, TBS, TCM, NBC, Cartoon Network, March Madness, CNN)
Warner Bros. Picture Group

4.) Viacom $15 billion revenue and $2 billion profit

Owns:
Paramount Pictures
MTV
VH1
BET
Nickelodeon
Spike
Comedy Central

5.) News Corporation, $34 billion revenue, $1.1 billion profit

Owns:
Fox
Wall Street Journal
Times of London
Barron’s
Harper Collins

Food and Beverage Companies

1.) PepsiCo Inc

Makes:
Gatorade
Propel
Pepsi
Aquafina
Sobe
Mountain Dew
Sierra Mist
Cheetos
Doritos
Frito Lay
Funyun’s
Lay’s
Ruffles
Tostitos
Quaker
Amp Energy
Lipton
Rockstar Energy
Seattle’s Best Coffee
Starbucks: Doubleshot, Frappucino, Iced Coffee

2.) Tyson Foods Inc–World’s largest Chicken Processor

Supplies:
KFC
Taco Bell
McDonalds
Burger King
Wendy’s
Wal-Mart
Kroger
IGA
Beef O’Grady’s

3.) Nestle (U.S. And Canada)

74 brands of water
38 brands of ice cream:
including Haagen-Dazs
Dreyer’s
And Nestle Drumstick
Frozen food:
Stouffers
Lean Cuisine
Hot Pockets
Tombstone Pizza
DiGiorno Pizza
California Pizza Kitchen
Candy:
Wonka brands,
Baby Ruth
Chips Ahoy!
Goobers
Icebreakers
Pet Food:
Alpo
Beneful
Fancy Feast
Friskies
Gourmet
Mighty Dog
ONE
Pro Plan
Purina
Tidy Cats
Cosmetics:
30% share in L’Oreal, Garnier, Maybelline, and Lancome, and The Body Shop Stores

4.) JBS USA–Subsidiary of the world’s largest beef processor

Beef Brands:
Swift
G.F. Swift 1855 Brand Premium Beef
Aspen Ridge Natural Beef
Swift Black Angus
Cedar River Farms
5 Star Beef
Chef’s Exclusive
Showcase Premium Ground Beef
Chicken Brands:
Pilgrim’s
Pierce Chicken
Wing Dings
Wing Zings
Speed Grill
Country Pride
To-Ricos
Pork Brands:
1855 Premium Pork
Swift Premium Dry Rubbed Pork
Swift Premium Natural Guaranteed Tender Pork
Swift Premium Natural Pork
Swift La Herencia Natural Pork

5.) Anheuser-Busch InBev

Over 200 beer brands made in 30 countries
Sold in 130 countries
Including:
St. Pauli Girl
Stella Artois
Spaten
Rolling Rock
Michelob
Hoegaarden
Busch
Budweiser
Bud Light
Beck’s
Bass

Oil

The top five oil producing companies produce almost twice what the US’s refined petroleum product consumption per day is.

1.) Saudi Aramco

Saudi Arabia
12.5 million barrels a day
$1 billion plus in DAILY revenue

2.) Gazprom

Russia
9.7 million barrels per day
$40 billion a year profits
3.) National Iranian Oil Co.
Iran

6.4 million barrels per day
State owned

4.) ExxonMobil

America

5.3 million barrels per day
$40 billion in profit

5.) PetroChina

China
4.4 million barrels per day
$21.93 billion in profits

Citations:

1. Bankrate, 10 largest banks of the world
2. WIkipedia, 2013 United States Federal budget
3. Wikipedia, ICBC
4. HSBC
5. Deutsche Bank
6. Deutsche Bank at a Glance
7. Assets Owned by Comcast
8. Assets Owned by Disney
9. Assets owned by Time Warner
10. Assets Owned by News Corp
11. Food processing Top 100
12. Tyson Acquisitions
13. Nestle Brands
14. JBS US Beef Brands
15. JBS US Pork Brands
16. JBS US Chicken brands
17. InBEv Brands
18. Forbes, top oil producers
19. US Oil Consumption
20. What Corporations Control Almost Everything You Buy Infographic