cryptogon.com

WHO’S THERE ALREADY?

* The vast majority of the forces announced for Haiti have not yet arrived, but the military has flown in hundreds of rescuers and has advance teams and assessment teams on the ground. Air Force special forces were among the first military relief workers to arrive. The Coast Guard has deployed four ships as well as air support for evacuation efforts. The Navy destroyer USS Higgins, with about 320 sailors on board, arrived on Thursday.

MORE THAN 5,000 MARINES, SOLDIERS

* Up to 3,500 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg will be deployed in Haiti by Sunday. An advance group of about 125 troops were due to arrive on Thursday and 800 more will arrive on Friday.

* Another 2,200 Marines from the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Lejeune, N.C., may arrive this weekend or on Monday for what initially is expected to be about a 90-day deployment.

AMPHIBIOUS GROUP, FLOATING HOSPITAL

* An amphibious readiness group with three ships — the USS Bataan, the USS Fort McHenry and USS Carter Hall — will take the Marines to Haiti. This group can produce its own purified water.

* A U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the USS Carl Vinson, with a crew of between 4,000-5,000 sailors on board, is on the way and will arrive in the area by Friday, with 19 helicopters on board. It has three operating rooms, several dozen hospital beds and can produce fresh water.

* The much-anticipated hospital ship, the USNS Comfort, will not arrive until around Jan. 22. It has 12 operating rooms and 250 hospital beds. The Pentagon says the Comfort is a slow-moving vessel and will need a week to arrive in Haiti.

Much like the days after Hurricane Katrina, looting has become a problem very quickly.

The looting appears to be isolated to Port-au-Prince’s old commercial center. It’s an area that under normal circumstances would be filled with many shops, markets and a few homes. But on Wednesday it was a completely different scene.

It looked like a war zone.

Some of the buildings were on fire. Smoke was everywhere and there were bodies in the streets, many just quake victims lying where they were when the magnitude 7.0 blast hit.

What made the situation that much more tense was sightings of gangs of young men with machetes. On Wednesday they were seen getting into stores and taking all the supplies they could carry. The armed men were seen marching up and down the streets with machetes raised and the competition among the gangs turned quite fierce.

Fights between gangs were seen on the streets. Machetes were flailing and it was impossible to predict what would happen next.

There was no sign of police or any kind of law and order.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Food is often scarce. Now, with this tragedy, desperate people are doing whatever they have to do to eat. People were seen going into stores and rubble and taking anything they could find with them for their trip back to wherever they were camping out.

There was not a single sign of relief on Wednesday. No workers, packages or bottles of water have arrived from relief agencies. There was just nothing.

And with no running water or electricity, people are getting hungry and thirsty.

That’s because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press. “Right before Christmas, it was, ‘Holy s***, this malware is accessing the internal intercept [systems],'” he said.

The countries most likely to blow up this time around are the “PIIGS”: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. One ore more of them, Faber says, will likely default in the next couple of years. And, that could result in the death of the Euro currency.

“It has got to be done. It will be done some day. It may be done with enormous pain. Or it may be done more rationally,” said Rudolph Penner, a former head of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget office who co-chaired the 24-strong Committee on the Fiscal Future of the United States.

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The national debt has risen above 50 percent of GDP (gross domestic product) from 40 percent two years ago, and within 20 years will blow past a previous record above 100 percent of GDP set after World War Two without stern official steps.

The extra $33 billion in 2010 would mostly go toward the expansion of the war in Afghanistan. Obama ordered an extra 30,000 troops for that war as part of an overhaul of the war strategy late last year.

Military officials have suggested that the 2011 request would top $700 billion for the first time, but the precise figure has not been made public.

Cass Sunstein, a Harvard law professor, co-wrote an academic article entitled “Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Cures,” in which he argued that the government should stealthily infiltrate groups that pose alternative theories on historical events via “chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups and attempt to undermine” those groups.

As head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Sunstein is in charge of “overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs,” according to the White House Web site.

Sunstein’s article, published in the Journal of Political Philosphy in 2008 and recently uncovered by blogger Marc Estrin, states that “our primary claim is that conspiracy theories typically stem not from irrationality or mental illness of any kind but from a ‘crippled epistemology,’ in the form of a sharply limited number of (relevant) informational sources.”

In an e-mail message to select clients, Thomas C. Mazarakis, the head of Goldman’s fundamental strategies group, acknowledged that his unit often provided investment ideas that the firm had already traded on. Sometimes Goldman has even taken the opposite approach, betting against particular instruments that the group has recommended.

“We may trade, and may have existing positions, based on trading ideas before we have discussed those trading ideas with you,” he wrote.

The statement comes as the firm faces growing criticism over its role in the financial crisis, and is a rare acknowledgment of Goldman’s conflicts with certain of its clients.

“The way that the business is evolving is that it is laden with conflicts of interest,” Anant K. Sundaram, a professor of finance at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said.

Last month, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Congress began investigating how Goldman and other firms had created bundles of mortgages known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s, that were sold to investors at the same time that the banks had privately bet against the instruments. Some of these C.D.O.’s later fell in value, creating losses for those clients who bought them — and profits for Goldman.

Goldman also prevailed upon ratings agencies to assign the C.D.O.’s high investment grades, even as it planned to short, or bet against, the securities.

The e-mail message is a blunt acknowledgment of what often appeared in the fine print of Goldman’s marketing materials. Lucas van Praag, a Goldman spokesman, said in a statement: “We have been providing this disclosure, which we think is best practice, for a number of years and there is nothing new in the disclosure you were sent.”

And after my 4-year-old niece received the very hot Zhou-Zhou pet hamster for Christmas, I pointed out that the toy was essentially a robot, with some basic obstacle avoidance skills. She replied matter-of-factly: “It’s not a robot. It’s a pet.”

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Children my daughter’s age are also more likely to have some relaxed notions about privacy. The idea of a phone or any other device that is persistently aware of its location and screams out its geographic coordinates, even if only to friends, might seem spooky to older age groups.

But the newest batch of Internet users and cellphone owners will find these geo-intelligent tools to be entirely second nature, and may even come to expect all software and hardware to operate in this way.

Here is where corporations can start licking their chops. My daughter and her peers will never be “off the grid.” And they may come to expect that stores will emanate discounts as they walk by them, and that friends can be tracked down anywhere.