Congressional Staffers as Stock Pickers
October 27th, 2010The point is that LOTS of people who aren’t corporate insiders know the news before the market does. They buy before the news comes out. This happens every day.
—Insider Crimes, Funny Money and Options Rackets
Via: Wall Street Journal:
The Journal analysis showed that an aide to a Republican member of the Senate Banking Committee bought Bank of America Corp. stock before results of last year’s government stress tests eased investor concerns about the health of the banking industry. A top aide to the House Speaker profited by trading shares of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in a brokerage account with her husband two days before the government authorized emergency funding for the companies. Another aide to Republican lawmakers interested in energy issues, among other things, profited by trading in several renewable-energy firms.
The aides identified by the Journal say they didn’t profit by making trades based on any information gathered in the halls of Congress. Even if they had done so, it would be legal, because insider-trading laws don’t apply to Congress.
A few lawmakers proposed a bill that would prevent members and employees of Congress from trading securities based on nonpublic information they obtain. The legislation has languished since 2006.
“Congressional staff are often privy to inside information, and an unscrupulous person could profit off that knowledge,” says Vincent Morris, a spokesman for Rep. Louise Slaughter (D., N.Y.), a leading backer of the “Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act,” or STOCK Act. “The public should be outraged there is no law specifically banning this.”
When the bill was introduced nearly five years ago, just 14 other lawmakers endorsed it. The current version of the bill has fared worse: Only nine lawmakers support it. There is no companion legislation in the Senate.
Related: They Made a Killing: The Use of Knowledge of Covert Operations in the Stock Market
Humiliate, Strip, Threaten: UK Military Interrogation Manuals Discovered
October 27th, 2010Via: Guardian:
The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.
Training materials drawn up secretly in recent years tell interrogators they should aim to provoke humiliation, insecurity, disorientation, exhaustion, anxiety and fear in the prisoners they are questioning, and suggest ways in which this can be achieved.
Large Number of 9/11 Reference Videos Going Up on YouTube
October 27th, 2010Update: New Video of Building 7 Demolition
I’m not absolutely sure that this hasn’t been out all along, but I’ve lost track of how many 9/11 documentaries I’ve seen, and I don’t recall ever seeing this clip.
Wow.
Along with this one:
—End Update—
I think that these are from the NIST dump the happened recently. A YouTube user must have downloaded the torrent and is adding hundreds of the clips:
http://www.youtube.com/user/911Crasting
I just had a brief look and I found a few scenes that I’d definitely never seen before.
Janitors With Ph.D.s
October 27th, 2010Via: AlterNet:
For politicians, boosting college graduation rates has always been a fairly uncontroversial goal to support. The Obama administration is doing so, rather relentlessly, through a number of initiatives designed to better prepare students for college and support them once they get there.
The assumptions are 1) that students who graduate from college have increased potential for economic mobility, and 2) the more students who earn college degrees, the more our economy will grow. But are either of those assumptions still true, in light of our new economic reality? Or are we wasting money investing in a sector that’s producing thousands of janitors with Ph.D.s?
One thing’s for sure: our higher education system has produced thousands of janitors with Ph.D.s or other professional degrees — about 5,057 of them, in fact, plus more than 8,000 waiters and waitresses. When you look at all college degrees, there are more than 317,000 over-educated Americans serving us our meals, more than 80,000 shaking our martinis and some 62,000 mowing our lawns.
In all, about 17 million people in this country have completed college only to end up working jobs that require a skill level below that of a bachelors degree, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Research Credit: ltcolonelnemo
Cryptogon Readers Sign Up for Hosting with BlueHost
October 27th, 2010Thanks to the owners of streetsick.com and 202elmstreet.com for signing up for hosting with BlueHost. Cryptogon received $180.
Introduction to Permaculture Design DVD
October 27th, 2010Via: Permaculture Research Institute of Australia:
Based on the 72-hour Permaculture Design Certificate Course as devised by Bill Mollison, join Geoff Lawton as he takes you into the world of Permaculture Design and introduces you to a new way of looking at the world. Learn how to apply your design skills by observing, analyzing and harmonizing with the patterns of Nature. Discover the theory and then see the examples in action in this unique DVD. Essential information for anyone interested in learning more about Permaculture and how they can apply it in their daily lives to create sustainable abundance.
Related:
PERMACULTURE: A Designers’ Manual by Bill Mollison
Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison
Glaxo to Pay $750 Million in Adulterated Drugs Case
October 27th, 2010Via: Reuters:
GlaxoSmithKline Plc has agreed to pay $750 million and plead guilty to manufacturing and distributing adulterated drugs from a now closed plant in Puerto Rico, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.
Failure Shuts Down Squadron of Nuclear Missiles
October 27th, 2010This is an extremely curious situation. I’m not even going to say which previous event this reminds me of.
Via: The Atlantic:
President Obama was briefed this morning on an engineering power failure at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming that took 50 nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), one-ninth of the U.S. missile stockpile, temporarily offline on Saturday.
The base is a main locus of the United States’ strategic nuclear forces. The 90th Missile Wing, headquartered there, controls 150 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles. They’re on full-time alert and are housed in a variety of bunkers across the base.
On Saturday morning, according to people briefed on what happened, a squadron of ICBMs suddenly dropped down into what’s known as “LF Down” status, meaning that the missileers in their bunkers could no longer communicate with the missiles themselves. LF Down status also means that various security protocols built into the missile delivery system, like intrusion alarms and warhead separation alarms, were offline. In LF Down status, the missiles are still technically launch-able, but they can only be controlled by an airborne command and control platform like the Boeing E-6 NAOC “Kneecap” aircraft, or perhaps the TACAMO fleet, which is primarily used to communicate with nuclear submarines. Had the country been placed on a higher state of nuclear alert, those platforms would be operating automatically.
According to the official, engineers believe that a launch control center computer (LCC), responsible for a package of five missiles, began to “ping” out of sequence, resulting in a surge of “noise” through the system. The LCCs interrogate each missile in sequence, so if they begin to send signals out when they’re not supposed to, receivers on the missiles themselves will notice this and send out error codes.
Since LCCs ping out of sequence on occasion, missileers tried quick fixes. But as more and more missiles began to display error settings, they decided to take off-line all five LCCs that the malfunctioning center was connected to. That left 50 missiles in the dark. The missileers then restarted one of the LCCs, which began to normally interrogate the missile transceiver. Three other LCCs were successfully restarted. The suspect LCC remains off-line.
Commanders at the Air Force Base sent warning notices to colleagues at the country’s two other nuclear missile command centers, as well as the to the National Military Command Center in Washington. At that point, they did not know what was causing the failure, and they did not know whether other missile systems were experiencing similar symptoms.
According to the official, engineers discovered that similar hardware failures had triggered a similar cascading failure 12 years ago at Minot AFB in North Dakota and Malmstrom AFB in Montana. That piece of hardware is the prime suspect.
The defense official said that there had not been a power failure, though the official acknowledged that that explanation had made its way through public affairs channels. Engineers working on the system presented a draft of their initial findings late this afternoon, the official said.
An administration official, speaking about the president’s ability to control nuclear forces, said: “At no time did the president’s ability decrease,” an administration official said. ”
Still, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, was immediately notified on Saturday, and he, in turn, briefed Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.
“We’ve never had something as big as this happen,” a military officer who was briefed on the incident said. Occasionally, one or two might blink out, the officer said, and several warheads are routinely out of service for maintenance. At an extreme, “[w]e can deal with maybe 5, 6, or 7 at a time, but we’ve never lost complete command and control and functionality of 50 ICBMs.”
The military contends that command and control — “C2” in their parlance — was not lost.
Sickening Boondoggle: The New and Improved Marine One Chopper
October 26th, 2010Via: Wired:
In this, the first in an occasional series examining tech influence in politics using MAPLight’s nonpartisan political-finance–analysis tools, the trail leads to a mind boggling, 10-year campaign in which three key defense contractors have funneled more than $18 million to the pockets of federal lawmakers, to win various military contracts, including one for what can best be described as the government equivalent of the Bat-copter.
Last year, under pressure from politicians citing spiraling expenses, the Pentagon backed out of a $6.5 billion deal with Lockheed Martin and AgustaWestland to provide 28 new, state-of-the-art birds. President Barack Obama described the procurement process as gone amok,” with the choppers projected to reach $400 million each, almost double the original price.
Now a detailed look at campaign finance records connected to the Marine One contracts, undertaken for the first time by Wired.com and MAPLight.org, shows a flurry of corporate contributions from Lockheed rivals to lawmakers involved in the decision-making immediately before and after the deal was grounded. And with a government call for new proposals for a revised contract expected next year, pay-to-play contributions to win the coveted deal continue to flow unabated, records show.
…
Specifications for the new Marine One chopper are classified. But public documents show the new craft must at minimum carry a sort of miniature Oval Office, with two independent communications systems, including encrypted video conferencing; have at least two engines, and be capable of flying with a failed engine; and be equipped with a missile-defense system and nuclear-fallout reflector capabilities. Together, these enhancements will make it the most advanced flying machine of its type in the world, should it ever arrive.
U.S. Superbase on Guam
October 26th, 2010Via: Telegraph:
The US is building an £8 billion super military base on the Pacific island of Guam in an attempt to contain China’s military build-up.
The expansion will include a dock for a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, a missile defence system, live-fire training sites and the expansion of the island’s airbase. It will be the largest investment in a military base in the western Pacific since the Second World War, and the biggest spend on naval infrastructure in decades.
