A Library List
Inspired by
stripe
Paul Krugman (Nobel prize) https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/paul-krugman-nobody-understands-debt.html?mcubz=3
Paul Romer (chief ec at world bank) https://paulromer.net/trouble-with-macroeconomics-update/
Romer cites Feynman https://paulromer.net/stigler-conviction-vs-feynman-integrity/
And Romer cites Krugman https://paulromer.net/what-went-wrong-in-macro-overview/
If you like romer, he’s now moved to
http://wb-ce.org/
https://www.ft.com/content/46a1ce84-bf2a-11e3-a4af-00144feabdc0
by Martin Wolf of ft (at bottom of page)
Series : Cracker, Mad Men
Films : memento, being john Malkovich, dr Zhivago (film not book) my left foot
Films and books:
To kill a mockingbird, Fight club
Books
Doris Lessing The Fifth child
The good terrorist or short stories esp To room 19 and The Temptation of Jack Orkney (my favourite is out of the fountain)
Slaughterhouse 5 Kurt Vonnegut (or cat’s cradle)
Kundera Unbearable lightness (or short stories)
Fitzgerald Tender is the night, Diamond as big as the ritz
Nathanael west day of the locusts
Raymond Carver short stories
Catch 22
https://biblioklept.org/2014/02/07/our-friend-judith-doris-lessing/
http://www.dorislessing.org/stories.html
http://www.dorislessing.org/thejack.html
http://www.shortstoryguide.com/doris-lessing-short-stories/
https://biblioklept.org/about-you/
Feynman
http://www.earth.northwestern.edu/~amir/files/Richard_P_Feynman-Surely_Youre_Joking_Mr_Feynman_v5.pdf
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!
www.earth.northwestern.edu
"Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" Adventures of a Curious Character by Richard P. Feynman as told to Ralph Leighton
http://search.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/8773894-Meaning-of-It-All-by-Feynman-Nobel-Laureate.pdf
The Meaning of it All Richard Feynman - chadpearce.com
search.chadpearce.com
The Meaning of It All Richard P. Feynman Contents I.The Uncertainty of Science II.The Uncertainty of Values III.This Unscientific Age These lectures, given in April ...
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Feynman-Uncertainty.pdf
The Uncertainty of Science - Freie Universität - Informatik
www.inf.fu-berlin.de
THE MEANING OF IT ALL - Page 5 - I The Uncertainty of Science I WANT TO ADDRESS myself directly to the impact of science on man's ideas in other fields, a subject
Aaron Swartz
Raw Nerve (August 18, 2012)
Confront reality (September 9, 2012)
Lean into the pain (September 1, 2012)
What are the optimal biases to overcome? (August 29, 2012)
Look at yourself objectively (August 18, 2012)
http://gladwell.com/
sandel http://www.justiceharvard.org/
Jordan Peterson rules http://highexistence.com/jordan-peterson-rules-living/
Business titans
Ray Dalio
More ec
Strip private banks of their power to create money
The giant hole at the heart of our market economies needs to be plugged
Martin Wolf
Image of Martin Wolf
APRIL 24, 2014 by: Martin Wolf
https://www.ft.com/content/7f000b18-ca44-11e3-bb92-00144feabdc0
Strip private banks of their power to create money - ft.com
www.ft.com
I explained how this works two weeks ago. Banks create deposits as a byproduct of their lending. In the UK, such deposits make up about 97 per cent of the money supply.
Printing counterfeit banknotes is illegal, but creating private money is not. The interdependence between the state and the businesses that can do this is the source of much of the instability of our economies. It could – and should – be terminated.
I explained how this works two weeks ago. Banks create deposits as a byproduct of their lending. In the UK, such deposits make up about 97 per cent of the money supply. Some people object that deposits are not money but only transferable private debts. Yet the public views the banks’ imitation money as electronic cash: a safe source of purchasing power.
Banking is therefore not a normal market activity, because it provides two linked public goods: money and the payments network. On one side of banks’ balance sheets lie risky assets; on the other lie liabilities the public thinks safe. This is why central banks act as lenders of last resort and governments provide deposit insurance and equity injections. It is also why banking is heavily regulated. Yet credit cycles are still hugely destabilising.
What is to be done? A minimum response would leave this industry largely as it is but both tighten regulation and insist that a bigger proportion of the balance sheet be financed with equity or credibly loss-absorbing debt. I discussed this approach last week. Higher capital is the recommendation made by Anat Admati of Stanford and Martin Hellwig of the Max Planck Institute in The Bankers’ New Clothes.
A maximum response would be to give the state a monopoly on money creation. One of the most important such proposals was in the Chicago Plan, advanced in the 1930s by, among others, a great economist, Irving Fisher. Its core was the requirement for 100 per cent reserves against deposits. Fisher argued that this would greatly reduce business cycles, end bank runs and drastically reduce public debt. A 2012 study by International Monetary Fund staff suggests this plan could work well.
Similar ideas have come from Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston University in Jimmy Stewart is Dead, and Andrew Jackson and Ben Dyson in Modernising Money. Here is the outline of the latter system.
First, the state, not banks, would create all transactions money, just as it creates cash today. Customers would own the money in transaction accounts, and would pay the banks a fee for managing them.
Second, banks could offer investment accounts, which would provide loans. But they could only loan money actually invested by customers. They would be stopped from creating such accounts out of thin air and so would become the intermediaries that many wrongly believe they now are. Holdings in such accounts could not be reassigned as a means of payment. Holders of investment accounts would be vulnerable to losses. Regulators might impose equity requirements and other prudential rules against such accounts.
Third, the central bank would create new money as needed to promote non-inflationary growth. Decisions on money creation would, as now, be taken by a committee independent of government.
Finally, the new money would be injected into the economy in four possible ways: to finance government spending, in place of taxes or borrowing; to make direct payments to citizens; to redeem outstanding debts, public or private; or to make new loans through banks or other intermediaries. All such mechanisms could (and should) be made as transparent as one might wish.
The transition to a system in which money creation is separated from financial intermediation would be feasible, albeit complex. But it would bring huge advantages. It would be possible to increase the money supply without encouraging people to borrow to the hilt. It would end “too big to fail” in banking. It would also transfer seignorage – the benefits from creating money – to the public. In 2013, for example, sterling M1 (transactions money) was 80 per cent of gross domestic product. If the central bank decided this could grow at 5 per cent a year, the government could run a fiscal deficit of 4 per cent of GDP without borrowing or taxing. The right might decide to cut taxes, the left to raise spending. The choice would be political, as it should be.
Opponents will argue that the economy would die for lack of credit. I was once sympathetic to that argument. But only about 10 per cent of UK bank lending has financed business investment in sectors other than commercial property. We could find other ways of funding this.
Our financial system is so unstable because the state first allowed it to create almost all the money in the economy and was then forced to insure it when performing that function. This is a giant hole at the heart of our market economies. It could be closed by separating the provision of money, rightly a function of the state, from the provision of finance, a function of the private sector.
This will not happen now. But remember the possibility. When the next crisis comes – and it surely will – we need to be ready.
martin.wolf@ft.com
Only the ignorant live in fear of hyperinflation
Failure to understand the monetary system has made it more difficult for central banks to act
Martin Wolf
Image of Martin Wolf
APRIL 10, 2014 by: Martin Wolf
Some years ago I moderated a panel at which a US politician insisted that the Federal Reserve’s money printing would soon cause hyperinflation. Yet today the Fed’s main concern is rather how to get inflation up to its target. Like many others, he failed to understand how the monetary system works.
Unfortunately ignorance is not bliss. It has made it more difficult for central banks to act effectively. Fortunately the Bank of England is providing much needed education. In its most recent Quarterly Bulletin, its staff explain the monetary system. So here are seven fundamental points about how it really works as opposed to how people think it does.
First, banks are not just financial intermediaries. The act of saving does not increase deposits in banks. If your employer pays you, the deposit merely shifts from its account to yours. This does not affect the quantity of money; additional money is instead a byproduct of lending. What makes banks special is that their liabilities are money – a universally acceptable IOU. In the UK, 97 per cent of broad money consists of bank deposits mostly created by such bank lending. Banks really do “print” money. But when customers repay, it is torn up.
Second, the “money multiplier” linking lending to bank reserves is a myth. In the past when bank notes could be freely exchanged for gold, that relationship might have been close. Strict reserve ratios could yet re-establish it. But that is not how banking operates today. In a fiat (or government-made) monetary system, the central bank creates reserves at will. It will then supply the banks with the reserves they need (at a price) to settle payments obligations.
Third, expected risks and rewards determine how much banks lend and so how much money they create. They need to consider how much they have to offer to attract deposits and how profitable and risky any additional lending might be. The state of the economy – itself strongly affected by their collective actions – will govern these judgments. Decisions of non-banks also affect banks directly. If the former refuse to borrow and decide to repay, credit and so money will shrink.
The act of saving does not increase deposits. If your employer pays you, the deposit merely shifts from its account to yours
Fourth, the central bank will influence the decisions of banks by adjusting the price it charges (the interest rate) on extra reserves. That is how monetary policy works in normal times. Since it is the monopoly supplier of bank reserves and since the banks need deposits at the central bank to settle with one another, the central bank can in this way determine the short-term interest rate in the economy. No sane bank would lend at a rate lower than it must pay the central bank, which is the banks’ bank.
Fifth, the authorities can also affect the lending decisions of banks by regulatory means – capital requirements, liquidity requirements, funding rules and so forth. The justification for such regulation is that bank lending creates spillovers or “externalities”. Thus, if many banks lend against the same activity – property purchase, for example – they will raise demand, prices and activity, so justifying yet more lending. Such a cycle might lead – indeed often has led – to a market crash, a financial crisis and a deep recession. The justification for systemic regulation is that it will, or at least should, attenuate these risks.
Sixth, banks do not lend out their reserves, nor do they need to. They do not because non-banks cannot hold accounts at the central bank. They need not because they can create loans on their own. Moreover, banks cannot reduce their aggregate reserves. The central bank can do so by selling assets. The public can do so by shifting from deposits into cash, the only form of central bank money the public is able to hold.
Finally, quantitative easing – the purchase of assets by the central bank – will expand the broad money supply. It does so by replacing, say, government bonds held by the public with bank deposits and in the process expands the reserves of the banks at the central bank. This will increase broad money, other things being equal. But since there is no money multiplier, the impact on the money supply can be – and indeed has recently been – modest. The main impact of QE is on the relative prices of assets. In particular, the policy raises the prices of financial assets and lowers their yield. The justification for this is that at the zero lower bound normal monetary policy is no longer effective. So the central bank tries to lower yields on a wider range of assets.
This is not just academic. Understanding the monetary system is essential. One reason is that it would eliminate unjustified fears of hyperinflation. That might occur if the central bank created too much money. But in recent years the growth of money held by the public has been too slow not too fast. In the absence of a money multiplier, there is no reason for this to change.
A still stronger reason is that subcontracting the job of creating money to private profit-seeking businesses is not the only possible monetary system. It may not be even the best one. Indeed, there is a case for letting the state create money directly. I plan to address such possibilities in a future column.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696
BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?
www.bbc.com
Europe is struggling to find a way out of the eurozone crisis amid mounting debts, stalling growth and widespread market jitters. After Greece, Ireland, and Portugal ...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2015/09/24/repeat-after-me-quantitative-easing-did-not-go-to-the-banks/#7896864f3d91
http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/how-banks-create-money/
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-15748696
BBC News - Eurozone debt web: Who owes what to whom?
How Banks Create Money
positivemoney.org
97% of money in the modern economy is created by banks when they make loans. The government only create 3% of money.
onathan Haidt, who I think has a question.
25:48
Jonathan Haidt: Thanks, Yuval. So you seem to be a fan of global governance, but when you look at the map of the world from Transparency International, which rates the level of corruption of political institutions, it’s a vast sea of red with little bits of yellow here and therefor those with good institutions. So if we were to have some kind of global governance, what makes you think it would end up being more like Denmark rather than more like Russia or Honduras, and aren’t there alternatives, such as we did with CFCs? There are ways to solve global problems with national governments. What would world government actually look like,and why do you think it would work?
26:22
YNH: Well, I don’t know what it would look like. Nobody still has a model for that. The main reason we need it is because many of these issues are lose-lose situations. When you have a win-win situation like trade, both sides can benefit from a trade agreement, then this is something you can work out. Without some kind of global government, national governments each have an interest in doing it. But when you have a lose-lose situation like with climate change, it’s much more difficult without some overarching authority, real authority.
27:00
Now, how to get there and what would it look like, I don’t know. And certainly there is no obvious reason to think that it would look like Denmark, or that it would be a democracy.Most likely it wouldn’t. We don’t have workable democratic models for a global government.So maybe it would look more like ancient China than like modern Denmark. But still, given the dangers that we are facing, I think the imperative of having some kind of real ability to force through difficult decisions on the global level is more important than almost anything else.
27:47
CA: There’s a question from Facebook here, and then we’ll get the mic to Andrew. So, Kat Hebron on Facebook, calling in from Vail: “How would developed nations manage the millions of climate migrants?”
28:00
YNH: I don’t know.
28:02
CA: That’s your answer, Kat. (Laughter)
28:04
YNH: And I don’t think that they know either. They’ll just deny the problem, maybe.
highlighting a question that’s really been bugging me the last few months more and more. It’s almost a hard question to ask in public, but if any mind has some wisdom to offer in it, maybe it’s yours, so I’m going to ask you: What are humans for?
36:45
YNH: As far as we know, for nothing.
have created — nations and gods and money and corporations — they now control the world. So just to even think, “Oh, this is just all fictional entities that we’ve created,” is very difficult. But reality is there.
42:17
For me the best … There are several tests to tell the difference between fiction and reality. The simplest one, the best one that I can say in short, is the test of suffering. If it can suffer, it’s real. If it can’t suffer, it’s not real. A nation cannot suffer. That’s very, very clear. Even if a nation loses a war, we say, “Germany suffered a defeat in the First World War,” it’s a metaphor. Germany cannot suffer. Germany has no mind. Germany has no consciousness.Germans can suffer, yes, but Germany cannot. Similarly, when a bank goes bust, the bank cannot suffer. When the dollar loses its value, the dollar doesn’t suffer. People can suffer. Animals can suffer. This is real. So I would start, if you really want to see reality, I would go through the door of suffering. If you can really understand what suffering is, this will give you also the key to understand what reality is.
43:16
CA: There’s a Facebook question here that connects to this, from someone around the world in a language that I cannot read.
43:22
YNH: Oh, it’s Hebrew. CA: Hebrew. There you go.
43:24
(Laughter)
43:25
Can you read the name?
43:27
YNH: Or Lauterbach Goren.
43:28
CA: Well, thank you for writing in. The question is: “Is the post-truth era really a brand-new era, or just another climax or moment in a never-ending trend?
43:40
YNH: Personally, I don’t connect with this idea of post-truth. My basic reaction as a historian is: If this is the era of post-truth, when the hell was the era of truth?
43:50
CA: Right.
43:51
(Laughter)
43:53
YNH: Was it the 1980s, the 1950s, the Middle Ages? I mean, we have always lived in an era, in a way, of post-truth.
But I don’t think there is anything essentially new about this disseminating fictions and errors. There is nothing that — I don’t know — Joseph Goebbels, didn’t know about all this idea of fake news and post-truth. He famously said that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will think it’s the truth, and the bigger the lie, the better,because people won’t even think that something so big can be a lie. I think that fake news has been with us for thousands of years. Just think of the Bible.
from Cameron Taylor on Facebook: “At the end of ‘Sapiens,'”you said we should be asking the question, ‘What do we want to want?’ Well, what do you think we should want to want?”
53:56
YNH: I think we should want to want to know the truth, to understand reality. Mostly what we want is to change reality, to fit it to our own desires, to our own wishes, and I think we should first want to understand it. If you look at the long-term trajectory of history, what you see is that for thousands of years we humans have been gaining control of the world outside us and trying to shape it to fit our own desires. And we’ve gained control of the other animals, of the rivers, of the forests, and reshaped them completely, causing an ecological destructionwithout making ourselves satisfied.
https://charlierose.com/videos/14730
wolves.11:13Charlie Rose: But if, in fact, he raped her in that hotel roomregardless of whether she came there, you think that he shouldhave been convicted and then should have gone to the slammer?11:20Donald Trump: He to this day denies it. I don’t know that it happened. I think that as they said if he didn’t testify, he would have been exonerated totally. The jury said that. Mike was arrogant. He was a horrible witness from what I understand.I’m not surprised. I would say that generally speaking, you don’t put Mike on as a witness but he was a horrible witness. To get 4, 5, or 6 years, I think that there was just too many circumstances. Again, she was in a beauty contest. She was dancing with a big smile on her face at 8:00AM.11:48Charlie Rose: Yeah but the jury sat there. They listened to her too. They had an opportunity to hear her and test her credibility as they heard it and also to face questions. This guy’s not a bad lawyer. He might have handled this case bad but he’s the same man that represented John Hinckley and others and had an extraordinary reputation in a very good Washington firm.12:02Donald Trump: I watched Mike. I’ve been with Mike. I’ve seen him. People really take advantage of this man. I want to tell you something. I think this is one of those examples. Now I know we have a system of juries. We have a system where if you’re found guilty, you’re guilty but somebody like me and maybe who has a little bit more independent streak can say, “Hey, Mike Tyson in my opinion should really be given another break.” They put him in jail before he was even guilty as far as I was concerned.12:26Charlie Rose: Do you believe he’ll fight again? Do you believe he’ll ever be the heavyweight champ again?12:31Donald Trump: I think he’ll fight again. I don’t know that he’ll be the heavyweight champ again. In the prison that he’s in, they don’t allow boxing. That’s a long way off. Some of the young fighters that are coming up in the heavyweight division are great.12:41Charlie Rose: But Ali came back from years (crosstalk ).12:42Donald Trump: Ali came back. He was totally unique. He was a unique man. Maybe Mike will come back. I think Mike probably will be the champion again but you have some young fighters coming up, heavyweight fighters like Llenox Lewis who is absolutely phenomenal.12:55Charlie Rose: Do you think Holyfield’s going to lose.12:57Donald Trump: I think Holyfield .. I’m not sure if he’s going tolose now but I think the next champion’s going to be Llenox Lewis.13:03Charlie Rose: He sure did a number on —13:04Donald Trump: I know. He was incredible.13:07Charlie Rose: — in London.13:09Donald Trump: He knocked out –13:10Charlie Rose: First round, wasn’t it?13:12Donald Trump: Second round.13:13Charlie Rose: Or second round.13:15Donald Trump: This gentleman went 18 or 20 rounds with Mike.13:17Charlie Rose: But that was his claim to fame, that he survivedbeing in the ring with Tyson.13:20Donald Trump: Llenox Lewis is probably the real thing. He could be the first real thing since Mike. It will be interesting.He’s younger. He’s this and that.13:27Charlie Rose: What is your fascination? Are you an athlete?13:31Donald Trump: I am pretty much of an athlete.13:33Charlie Rose: A scratch golfer or close —13:34Donald Trump: Scratch golfer.13:35Charlie Rose: You mean like you do par 72, 73?13:37Donald Trump: Yeah.13:39Charlie Rose: On good courses?13:40Donald Trump: On good courses.13:42Charlie Rose: Up against good players?13:43Donald Trump: Up against good players.13:45Charlie Rose: For money or not for money?13:46Donald Trump: I like playing for money because it gives you an interest. It really does. Golf was something that really helped me through a period. When I was when I was really – There’s a point at which you can’t push. You have to sit back and wait and see how the chips are falling.13:58Charlie Rose: Duri
Aggregator
AUGUST 14, 2017LEAVE A COMMENT
RF
http://search.chadpearce.com/Home/BOOKS/8773894-Meaning-of-It-All-by-Feynman-Nobel-Laureate.pdf
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/pmo/eng/Feynman-Uncertainty.pdf
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~feynman/plenty.html
orwell http://orwell.ru/library/index_en
Aaron Swartz
Raw Nerve (August 18, 2012)
Confront reality (September 9, 2012)
Lean into the pain (September 1, 2012)
What are the optimal biases to overcome? (August 29, 2012)
Look at yourself objectively (August 18, 2012)
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-dream
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/archive
http://gladwell.com/
Why Elon Musk invested in Deepmind.
Data analysisOn the other hands https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21672076-honest-disagreement-about-methods-may-explain-irreproducible-results-other
It sounds like an easy question for any half-competent scientist to answer. Do dark-skinned footballers get given red cards more often than light-skinned ones? But, as Raphael Silberzahn of IESE, a Spanish business school, and Eric Uhlmann of INSEAD, an international one (he works in the branch in Singapore), illustrate in this week’s Nature, it is not. The answer depends on whom you ask, and the methods they use.
Dr Silberzahn and Dr Uhlmann sought their answers from 29 research teams. They gave their volunteers the same wodge of data (covering 2,000 male footballers for a single season in the top divisions of the leagues of England, France, Germany and Spain) and waited to see what would come back.
The consensus was that dark-skinned players were about 1.3 times more likely to be sent off than were their light-skinned confrères. But there was a lot of variation. Nine of the research teams found no significant relationship between a player’s skin colour and the likelihood of his receiving a red card. Of the 20 that did find a difference, two groups reported that dark-skinned players were less, rather than more, likely to receive red cards than their paler counterparts (only 89% as likely, to be precise). At the other extreme, another group claimed that dark-skinned players were nearly three times as likely to be sent off.
Dr Uhlmann and Dr Silberzahn are less interested in football than in the way science works. Their study may shed light on a problem that has quite a few scientists worried: the difficulty of reproducing many results published in journals.
Fraud, unconscious bias and the cherry-picking of data have all been blamed at one time or another—and all, no doubt, contribute. But Dr Uhlmann’s and Dr Silberzahn’s work offers another explanation: that even scrupulously honest scientists may disagree about how best to attack a data set. Their 29 volunteer teams used a variety of statistical models (“everything from Bayesian clustering to logistic regression and linear modelling”, since you ask) and made different decisions about which variables within the data set were deemed relevant. (Should a player’s playing position on the field be taken into account? Or the country he was playing in?) It was these decisions, the authors reckon, that explain why different teams came up with different results.
How to get around this is a puzzle. But when important questions are being considered—when science is informing government decisions, for instance—asking several different researchers to do the analysis, and then comparing their results, is probably a good idea.
http://jackcanfield.com/blog/visualize-and-affirm-your-desired-outcomes-a-step-by-step-guide/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_human_rights_activists
https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/women-activists-female-human-rights-killed/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dian_Fossey
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Corrie
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_women%27s_rights_activists
We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. … It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.
Purported remarks at a Bilderberg Group meeting in Baden-Baden, Germany in June 1991, as quoted in Programming, Pitfalls and Puppy-Dog Tales (1993) by Gyeorgos C. Hatonn, p. 65 and various nationalist tracts. The ultimate source for the quotation (i.e. the person who passed it on to the public) is never identified.
Honest disagreement about methods may explain irreproducible results
Print edition | Science and technology
Oct 10th 2015
Michelle Simmons
sandel
http://www.justiceharvard.org/
Jordan Peterson rules http://highexistence.com/jordan-peterson-rules-living/
chomsky
https://chomsky.info/
amis
http://www.martinamisweb.com/
https://achillesandaristotle.com/2014/06/14/dismal-news
hitchens https://www.theatlantic.com/author/christopher-hitchens/
http://www.buildupthatwall.com/
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks09/0900821h.html
http://www.historicjournalism.com/mark-twain-1.html
eliot
http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/
http://michaellewiswrites.com/index.html#top
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5zomtk/ama_request_jordan_b_peterson/
dogme
http://docshare01.docshare.tips/files/22143/221434541.pdf
overton
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/what-overton-window
permaculture
David Holmgren explains how you can change the world with permaculture
David Holmgren tells Robyn Rosenfeldt, editor of Pip Magazine how we can use permaculture to change the world. Pip Magazine is a showcase of all the great …
https://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes
https://www.ted.com/talks/roger_doiron_my_subversive_garden_plot
https://www.ted.com/talks/tristram_stuart_the_global_food_waste_scandal
https://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_what_we_eat
https://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches
https://www.ted.com/talks/ellen_gustafson_obesity_hunger_1_global_food_issue
La ferme du Bec Hellouin
permaculture principles in practice
prisoners dogs
prisoners training dogs for the disabled
http://www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/news/1161693/first-nursery-at-care-home-unveiled
thiel
https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2015/11/the-single-best-interview-question-you-can-ask/
Peter Thiel: ‘My own answer to the contrarian question is that most people think the future of the world will be defined by globalization, but the truth is that technology matters more. Without technological change, if China doubles its energy production over the next two decades, it will also double its air pollution. If every one of India’s hundreds of millions of households were to live the way Americans already do— using only today’s tools— the result would be environmentally catastrophic. Spreading old ways to create wealth around the world will result in devastation, not riches. In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable.’
Gender
romer mirror salaries
The type of number that often surfaces in discussions about gender equality:
77%–the overall ratio at the Bank of women’s wages to men’s
The surprising number from a new working paper by Jishnu Das, Clement Jobert, (both from DECRG) and Sander Florian Tordoir (from HR):
96%–the ratio of women’s wages to men’s among staff who entered the Bank at grade GF and have worked here for 15 years
http://wb-ce.org/
On Economics and Management
wb-ce.org
This Mirror Site (updated) (29 May 2017) This is a mirror of a blog that I have been updating periodically to communicate with World Bank insiders.
principles- hedge funders, red cross, fbi best truth
https://inside.bwater.com/publications/principles_excerpt
boys girls gaming chess clothes
Girls boys
The white stripes. Meg’s drumming skills. Jack downplayed criticisms of her style, insisting:
“I never thought ‘God, I wish Neil Peart was in this band.’ It’s kind of funny: When people critique hip hop, they’re scared to open up, for fear of being called racist. But they’re not scared to open up on female musicians, out of pure sexism. Meg is the best part of this band. It never would have worked with anybody else, because it would have been too complicated… It was my doorway to playing the blues.”[7]
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/white-on-white-20050908
It’s admirable that Americans’ first instinct when disaster occurs is to open their wallets and volunteer their time. Since this has never been a nation that relies wholly on government to take care of those in need, citizens’ first impulse is to pitch in, whatever their politics or faith.
As the first images of suffering emerged from Houston, the flow of cash, food, clothing and rescue equipment into Texas seemed to rise in tandem with the floodwaters. Yet it’s inevitable that not all this largess will reach Harvey’s victims, or be well spent. For that reason, it is important for Americans to be as discerning with their money as they are philanthropic, avoiding scams and asking for greater accountability from trusted charities like the American Red Cross.
The Red Cross is the flagship of charitable institutions. It is also a master of promotion. After every disaster, its ads, celebrity testimonials and distinctive logo are everywhere, beseeching Americans to donate blood and money. This week Barack Obama became the Red Cross’s latest Twitter pitchman, urging Americans to make a $10 donation by texting “HARVEY.” During President Trump’s televised update on the response in Texas on Tuesday, a Red Cross representative sat front and center. Corporations find donations to the Red Cross a ready way to demonstrate they care: The organization has already raised millions from JPMorgan, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Dow Chemical and others for its Harvey efforts.
This is all to the good, assuming the money flows to the right places. But after years of media reports documenting the Red Cross’s disaster relief failures — including after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina, Hurricane Sandy and the Haiti earthquake — some Americans instead are giving to smaller, local charities with a track record in Texas.
A 2015 investigation by ProPublica and NPR documented the Red Cross’s glaring failure to account for how it spent the $488 million it raised in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake in 2010, including such basics as how many people were assisted and how much money was spent on overhead.
In the aftermath of Hurricanes Sandy and Isaac, Red Cross officials in Washington “compounded the charity’s inability to provide relief by ‘diverting assets for public relations purposes,’” ProPublica and NPR reported in 2014, citing an internal Red Cross report. During Isaac, a Red Cross relief truck driver named Jim Dunham described how supervisors ordered trucks usually laden with aid to drive around empty, for appearance’s sake. Mr. Dunham characterized the Red Cross’s relief effort as “worse than the storm.” During Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, the organization was plagued by delays in distributing aid, amid profound disorganization on the ground.
The Red Cross is working to provide shelter and other aid in Texas; it is too early to gauge how well it is doing. The Red Cross is not, however, saying what specific steps it has taken to make sure that this time around donors can be certain that a vast majority of their contributions will go to the people whose plight moved them to give.
In response to multiple questions on Tuesday, including about what new accountability measures it has put in place, it issued only a brief statement that it was not “seeing any backlash” from donors.
Despite the Red Cross’s enormous size and revenues ($2.7 billion in 2015), most of the disasters it responds to are relatively small, like single-structure fires. Its record on large-scale operations is spotty, and given the enormous amount it collects from Americans, the scope of its ambitions and the fact that a chunk of its budget comes from government agencies, there has been less accountability than Americans might expect emanating from its grand marble headquarters in Washington. In its most recent assessment, Charity Navigator, a nonprofit organization that evaluates charities based on their Internal Revenue Service filings, gives Red Cross three of four possible stars based on its 2015 filings, but only two stars for financial performance.
Everyone who responds to a disaster learns invaluable lessons that can or at least should be carried forward to the next one. Emergency crews fine-tune their operations; governments reassess funding priorities; home and business owners better protect their property. So it should be for charities, too. Groups like the Red Cross are stewards not only of enormous budgets, but of a more precious commodity: Americans’ willingness to give.
Scott Thornbury
‘The numbers speak for themselves: the IELTS test, for example, was taken by nearly 3 million candidates in 2016 – at around $200 a go, this is big business. It is also a nice little earner for language schools, with the result that many teachers feel that they are now simply in the business of test preparation.
‘Teaching-for-the-test’ has also seen the rise of standards-based, or competency-based teaching (also known as mastery learning), where the syllabus consists of an inventory of bite-sized ‘competencies’, each one taught and tested in isolation, on the assumption that all these bits will magically coalesce into a whole. (These bite-sized learning chunks also lend themselves to [teacher-less] online delivery). This has led to a culture of testing that is the despair of many educationalists, Diane Ravitch (2010, p. 16) being one of the more vocal: ‘How did testing and accountability become the main levers of school reform? … What was once an effort to improve the quality of education turned into an accounting strategy’. And she adds, ‘Tests should follow the curriculum. They should not replace it or precede it.’
Will the tide turn? Will teaching and learning reassert their rightful place in the curriculum? Don’t hold your breath.’
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/2017/09/03/p-is-for-predictions-part-1/
Tucker Max On Gender Wars, Parenthood, And Waiting For Boomers To Die Off
The author of “I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell” and “Mate” sounds off on masculinity and tribal signaling.
Jordan Peterson,
http://highexistence.com/jordan-peterson-rules-living/
https://www.lifewire.com/political-news-aggregator-sites-and-apps-2015-2653989
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/america-enters-world-war-i
https://www.reference.com/history/did-united-states-enter-world-war-1-cc857279faaa16ce
economist broke code
http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21683975-man-who-made-edward-snowden-inevitable-black-chamber
Britain, America’s putative best friend in Europe, was already reading the president’s telegrams and much more. So were the other major European powers, to whatever extent they could manage. Britain’s military code-breaking operation, Room 40, helped usher the United States into the war, without American leaders having any idea of its precise role. The unit made copies of every message that went over America’s trans-Atlantic telegraph cable by tapping into all traffic that passed through a relay station at Porthcurno, on the western edge of England, before they travelled across the ocean.
In January 1917 Room 40 intercepted a coded telegram sent by Arthur Zimmermann, the German foreign secretary, promising support for Mexico to take three American states in exchange for allying with Germany against the United States. In a telling indication of how little was thought of America’s intelligence prowess, Germany had trusted that a hostile telegram sent over America’s own communications lines would be secure; it was indeed safe from American eyes but not from Room 40. British officials handed the “Zimmermann telegram” to the American government, inventing a cover story about how they had got it. Its publication caused a national furore, and the United States was finally jolted out of its neutrality and into the Great War.
http://home.uchicago.edu/~npope/crowdsourcing_paper.pdf
http://home.uchicago.edu/~npope/crowdsourcing_paper.pdf
wiseman
lessing
http://www.dorislessing.org/interviews.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/115287/doris-lessing-rip-golden-notebook-review-irving-howe
blaise Agüera y Arcas http://styleisviolence.com/about/
https://kencaldeira.wordpress.com/2016/12/11/solving-the-coffee-and-climate-problems/#comments
https://kencaldeira.wordpress.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
UK’s 60-year property boom: House prices ‘have risen more than 100 times’ since Coronation
By HARRY GLASS
Climbing onto the property ladder required just £1,520 that year.
And in the Silver Jubilee in 1977, the average price was still only £9,737 – today’s £160,000 average is 16 times higher than that.
Terraced housing: Property has proved a sound long-term investment according to these figures
At a time when the nation is gearing up for a weekend of street parties and celebration, research from Hamptons International also found that the average price of a home in London has risen 134-fold since 1952 and 21-fold since 1977.
In 1952, the average price of a London home was £2,650, and in 1977 it had risen to £16,493, compared with the average price of £354,300 today.
‘This profit is inflated even more in London, where price growth represents £16 a day over a 60 year period, representing a rather healthy return on investment.’
Soaring: Over the 60 years the Queen has reigned, house prices have rocketed, but most of that has come since 1980. This chart plots Nationwide’s figures of how they have risen.
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UK Housing Market Stats and Graphs | Economics Help
A look at the main UK housing market data. House prices; Affordability of housing; Interest rates; Supply of housing; House price inflation. Nationwide data
Education spending: how does the UK compare? | News | The …
Students in Madrid attend a demonstration against government cuts to education spending in Madrid. Protests have taken place across Europe after similar measures.
UK Central Government and Local Authority Spending in 2016 – Charts
Table of Public Spending in the United Kingdom by function , including Central Government and Local Authorities, from HM Treasury data.
In 2016, the three biggest government programs are health care (i.e, the NHS), state pensions, and welfare.
UK government expenditure 2016 – Pie Charts Tables
Charts and Tables of Government Expenditure in the United Kingdom, including Central Government and Local Authorities, from HM Treasury data..
wiseman
Banking
AUGUST 14, 2016LEAVE A COMMENT
the site is not my own work, it’s a list of articles and links. Please type a word in the search, such as Libor, Krugman, gdp, convergence, bilderberg, insider trading, to access the info.
This bit is my work.
Factbox: How Goldman’s ABACUS deal worked http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/16/us-goldmansachs-abacus-factbox-idUSTRE63F5CZ20100416
Sun, Apr 18 2010
NEW YORK | Fri Apr 16, 2010 4:30pm EDT
(Reuters) – The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is accusing Goldman Sachs Group Inc of committing fraud in a complicated transaction involving securities known as collateralized debt obligations.
The particular deal that Goldman entered into with Paulson and others was called ABACUS 2007-AC1.
Here’s how the deal worked, according to the SEC’s complaint:
1) Hedge fund manager John Paulson tells Goldman Sachs in late 2006 he wants to bet against risky subprime mortgages using derivatives. The risky mortgage bonds that Paulson wanted to short were essentially subprime home loans that had been repackaged into bonds. The bonds were rated “BBB,” meaning that as the home loans defaulted, these bonds would be among the first to feel the pain.
2) Goldman Sachs knows that German bank IKB would potentially buy the exposure that Paulson was looking to short. But IKB would only do so if the mortgage securities were selected by an outsider.
3) Goldman Sachs knows that not every asset manager would be willing to work with Paulson, according to the complaint. In January 2007, Goldman approaches ACA Management LLC, a unit of a bond insurer.
ACA agrees to be the manager in a deal, and to help select the securities for the deal with Paulson. In January and February 2007, Paulson and ACA work on the portfolio, coming to an agreement in late February.
Goldman never tells ACA or other investors that Paulson is shorting the securities, and ACA believes that Paulson in fact wanted to own some of the riskiest parts of the securities, according to the complaint.
4) Goldman puts together a deal known as a “synthetic collateralized debt obligation” designed to help IKB and Paulson get the exposure they want. IKB takes $150 million of the risk from subprime mortgage bonds in late April 2007. ABN Amro takes some $909 million of exposure as well, and buys protection on its exposure from ACA Management affiliate ACA Financial Guaranty Corp in May 2007.
Goldman’s marketing materials for the deal never mention Paulson’s having shorted more than $1 billion of securities. Goldman receives about $15 million in fees.
5) Months later, IKB loses almost all of its $150 million investment. In late 2007, ABN is acquired by a consortium of banks including Royal Bank of Scotland. In August 2008, RBS unwinds ABN’s position in ABACUS by paying Goldman $840.1 million. Most of that money goes to Paulson, who made about $1 billion total.
(Reporting by Dan Wilchins and Karen Brettell; Editing by Richard Chang)
Goldman Sachs, Fabrice Tourre and the complex Abacus of toxic mortgages
At the centre of the US regulators’ fraud charges against Goldman Sachs and employee Fabrice Tourre is a CDO – a parcel of sub-prime mortgages – called Abacus 2007-AC1.
Fabrice Tourre, Goldman Sachs vice president
By James Quinn, US Business Editor, in New York
11:41PM BST 16 Apr 2010
On January 23, 2007, Fabrice Tourre sat down to write what is likely to go down in the annals of the financial crisis as one of the most memorable emails to have found its way out of Wall Street.
Typing in French and in English to a friend who may never be named, the Goldman Sachs banker shared his apparently true feelings on the state of the US housing market: “More and more leverage in the system. The whole building is about to collapse anytime now … Only potential survivor, the fabulous Fab[rice Tourre] … standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implication of those monstruosities [sic]!!!”
But a month later, on February 26, French-born Tourre produced another document, a 65-page “flip book” that contained details of a $1bn investment fund, designed to be given to potential investors.
The fund was no ordinary fund, however, but a synthetic collateralised debt obligation (CDO) – a parcel of sub-prime mortgages – to be called Abacus 2007-AC1.
In other words, it was jam-packed with the types of “highly leveraged, exotic trades” he had previously criticised.
Tourre’s role in Goldman Sachs’ scandal – which yesterday saw the bank and Tourre charged with two civil counts of securities fraud – is central to understanding what exactly happened in the marketing of the Abacus fund, and why the world’s biggest bank is now effectively on public trial.
The Securities and Exchange Commission’s 22-page court filingdetails what it portrays as an orchestrated attempt by Goldman and its junior employee to allegedly deceive clients in order to profit twice – once from structuring the Abacus fund, for which it earned $15m, and once from Paulson & Co, the New York based hedge fund run by John Paulson, for which its profits are not known.
Under the SEC’s version of events, Paulson came to Goldman in January 2007, asking it to help buy protection against what it believed would be a fall in US residential mortgage-backed securities, and then “discussed with Goldman possible transactions in which counterparties to its short position might be found.” Those counterparties were to be “found” in Abacus 2007 AC-1 – a new CDO which was part of a wider programme of CDOs structured by Goldman.
Unlike other CDOs, however, the SEC allege that this one had been constructed under the influence of Paulson – which is not itself accused of any wrongdoing.
Having decided to create a CDO to allow investors to invest in a potential increase in the value of sub-prime mortgages – which Paulson would then short – Goldman needed independent validation that what it was selling was kosher. Step forward ACA Management, a specialist in analysing credit risk owned by ABN Amro, the Dutch investment bank.
But although ACA was recruited as the ultimate “portfolio selection agent” of the mortgages within the Abacus derivative for its “credibility”, unbeknown to it – or future investors – Paulson is alleged by the SEC to have initially handed Goldman a list of 123 residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) to be considered for inclusion.
The 123 RMBS were based on Paulson’s selection criteria of those most likely to default – and so included mortgages from borrowers with low credit scores, and from states which had seen high rates of house price appreciation, states like Arizona and Florida which have since seen high repossession levels.
After discussion with ACA, the SEC alleges that ACA and Paulson together selected 90 RMBS in which Abacus would invest, but only after Paulson allegedly “kicked out” a number of Wells Fargo mortgages which were “generally perceived” to be of higher quality.
Paulson, in a statement, points out that ACA had “sole authority” over the selection of RMBS in the CDO, and stresses that it did not market Abacus to investors.
Of course, once Abacus had been constructed, it was up to Tourre to market the issue, and market he did.
The SEC alleges Tourre misled ACA into believing Paulson invested up to $200m in the equity of Abacus, and told IKB, the German bank which invested $150m, that the mortgages were selected by ACA, as the bank had previously informed Goldman it was not interested in investing in CDOs that hadn’t been selected by a third party.
But Tourre also allegedly misled investors by not telling them – either verbally or in the CDO’s marketing documents – that Paulson was all the while shorting the RMBS within Abacus.
Goldman for its part categorically denies any wrongdoing, pointing out that it lost more than $90m in Abacus, that investors knew the risks, and that it did “not structure a portfolio that was designed to lose money.”
Some six months after Abacus’s fundraising closed on April 26, 83pc of the mortgages within had been downgraded.
On January 29 – a year and six days after Tourre wrote his original prescient email, and ten days after his 29th birthday – 99pc of the portfolio had been downgraded, leading investors to lose more than $1bn, and Goldman – and Tourre’s – reputation to be left open to question.
Investors Are Again In Love With An Apple Product Nathan Vardi Forbes Staff
Paging David Einhorn: Apple Pads Buyback Steve Schaefer Forbes Staff
The company reportedly raised $17 billion in a heavily-oversubscribed offering, with all six tranches at narrow spreads to their benchmarks: three-month Libor for three and five-year floating rate notes and the similar-maturity Treasuries for three, five, 10 and 30-year fixed-rate notes.
In fact, at a reported 75 bps above the corresponding Treasury, Apple’s 10-year unsecured notes would carry a lower rate than the stock’s dividend yield (~2.40% vs. 2.75%). That might seem surprising, but it shouldn’t in a world where 280 members of the S&P 500 carry dividend yields above the current rate on the 10-year Treasury. And Apple is hardly the only company that has borrowed extremely cheaply — IBM IBM -0.53% and Microsoft MSFT -0.87% issued 10-year paper last year at 1.875% and 2.125%, respectively.
Apple has not yet confirmed the results of the debt offering. The company is borrowing to fund an upsized capital return program intended to deliver $100 billion to shareholders by the end of 2015, and to do so without having to repatriate cash held overseas and pay the requisite taxes. (See “Paging David Einhorn: Apple Superzies Buyback.”)
Scott Rostan, founder of TrainingTheStreet and an adjunct professor at the UNC’s Kenan-Flager Business School, said the incredible demand for Apple’s offering “dramatically highlights the new reality of this low interest rate environment.”
Even in that environment, with the rates on Apple bonds so low isn’t the stock a better bet?
It could very well be says Rostan, but after a months-long stretch where it yo-yoed from $705 to $385 back up to the current level near $450, he’s more confident in the bonds as a safe parking spot than the stock as a guaranteed winner.
So who might be buying the Apple offering? Well there is probably no shortage of investment-grade managers interested in diversifying their holdings, and adding a blue-chip name like Apple to the portfolio probably looks attractive, even at just an incrementally higher yield than the relatively few AAA-rated issuers out there. (S&P and Moody’s assigned Apple the equivalent of a AA+ rating, while Fitch said it merited a rating at the high end of the A range.)
“This could be a trade up,” Rostan says, “the risk of capital loss is close to zero and you get another few basis points, which in this market can be meaningful.” And don’t underestimate the inclination to stick with the crowd.
“For a professional fund manager owning Apple’s bonds won’t make you look stupid, because everyone will own it,” Rostan says. More importantly, there won’t be any real concern of getting stuck in Apple’s debt, given that the size of this offering should lead to an extremely liquid market at a time when the toxic asset lessons of 2008 are still fresh in the minds of many fixed-income investors.
For those concerned that the proceeds of the bond offering are going to fund a share repurchase program that the company recently increased by $50 billion, it’s worth remembering that even amid concerns that its dominance in consumer technology has eroded Apple still throws off billions in cash every quarter, adding nearly another $8 billion to its cash pile in the first three months of 2013 alone.
At $17 billion, Tuesday’s deal, led by Goldman Sachs Group GS -1.38% and Deutsche Bank , is the largest non-financial corporate offering on record, ahead of last year’s $14.7 billion deal from AbbVie ABBV -2.38% — in connection with its spinoff from Abbott Laboratories ABT -2.16% — and a $16.5 billion bond sales by Roche Holdings in 2009.
France Government Bond 10Y
France’s Government Bond Yield for 10 Year Notes declined 9 basis points during the last 30 days which means it became less expensive for France to borrow money from investors. During the last 12 months, France government bond yield advanced 0.10 percent. From 1985 until 2013, France Government Bond 10Y averaged 5.9 Percent reaching an all time high of 11.8 Percent in February of 1985 and a record low of 1.7 Percent in May of 2013. Generally, a government bond is issued by a national government and is denominated in the country`s own currency. Bonds issued by national governments in foreign currencies are normally referred to as sovereign bonds. The yield required by investors to loan funds to governments reflects inflation expectations and the likelihood that the debt will be repaid. This page contains – France Government Bond 10Y – actual values, historical data, forecast, chart, statistics, economic calendar and news. 2013-09-25
Cost-Benefit Analysis
One of the tools that Ford used to argue for the delay was a “cost-benefit analysis” of altering the fuel tanks. According to Ford’s estimates, the unsafe tanks would cause 180 burn deaths, 180 serious burn injuries, and 2,100 burned vehicles each year. It calculated that it would have to pay $200,000 per death, $67,000 per injury, and $700 per vehicle, for a total of $49.5 million. However, the cost of saving lives and injuries ran even higher: alterations would cost $11 per car or truck, which added up to $137 million per year. Essentially, Ford argued before the government that it would be cheaper just to let their customers burn!
The other side of the equation, the alleged $11 cost of a fire-prevention device, is also a misleading estimation. One document that was not sent to Washington by Ford was a “Confidential” cost analysis Mother Jones has managed to obtain, showing that crash fires could be largely prevented for considerably less than $11 a car. The cheapest method involves placing a heavy rubber bladder inside the gas tank to keep the fuel from spilling if the tank ruptures. Goodyear had developed the bladder and had demonstrated it to the automotive industry. Ford Motor Company ran a rear-end crash test on a car with the rubber bladder in the gas tank. The tank ruptured, but no fuel leaked. On January 15, 1971, Ford again tested the bladder and again it worked. The total purchase and installation cost of the bladder would have been $5.08 per car. That $5.08 could have saved the lives several hundred people.
In February of 1978, a California jury created a nationwide sensation when it awarded the record-breaking sum of $128 million in a lawsuit stemming from a into accident (Weinberger Romeo, 45). This one lawsuit was three times what Ford executives and engineers had estimated their final cost would be.
“The Pinto was not to weigh an ounce over 2,000 pounds and not cost a cent over $2,000.”
During design and production, however, crash tests revealed a serious defect in the gas tank. In crashes over 25 miles per hour, the gas tank always ruptured. To correct it would have required changing and strengthening the design.
Many studies of reports and documents done by Mother Jones on rear-end collisions involving Pintos reveal that if you ran into that Pinto you were following at over 30 miles per hour, the rear end of the car would buckle like an accordion, right up to the back seat. The tube leading to the gas-tank cap would be ripped away from the tank itself, and gas would immediately begin sloshing onto the road around the car. The buckled gas tank would be jammed up against the differential housing (that big bulge in the middle of your rear axle), which contains four sharp, protruding bolts likely to gash holes in the tank and spill still more gas. Now all you need is a spark from a cigarette, ignition, or scraping metal, and both cars would be engulfed in flames. If you gave that Pinto a really good whack?say, at 40 mph – chances are excellent that its doors would jam and you would have to stand by and watch its trapped passengers burn to death.
In pre-production planning, engineers seriously considered using in the Pinto the same kind of gas tank Ford uses in the Capri. The Capri tank rides over the rear axle and differential housing. It has been so successful in over 50 crash tests that Ford used it in its Experimental Safety Vehicle, which withstood rear-end impacts of 60 mph. So why wasn’t the Capri tank used in the Pinto? Or, why wasn’t that plastic baffle placed between the tank and the axle – something that would have saved the life’s hundreds of people.
President Semon “Bunky” Knudsen, whom Henry Ford II had hired away from General Motors, and Lee Iacocca, a spunky Young Turk who had risen fast within the company on the enormous success of the Mustang. Iacocca saying was that the Japanese were going to capture the entire American subcompact market unless Ford put out its own alternative to the VW Beetle. Bunky Knudsen said let them have the small-car market, but he lost the battle and later resigned. Iacocca became president and almost immediately began a rush program to produce the Pinto.
Lee Iococca wanted that little car in the showrooms of America with the 1971 models. So he ordered his engineering vice president, Bob Alexander, to oversee what was probably the shortest production planning period in modern automotive history. The normal time span from conception to production of a new car model is about 43 months. The Pinto schedule was set at just under 25.
When it was discovered the gas tank was unsafe, did anyone go to Iacocca and tell him? “Hell no,” replied an engineer who worked on the Pinto, a high company official for many years, who, unlike several others at Ford, maintains a necessarily clandestine concern for safety. “That person would have been fired. Safety wasn’t a popular subject around Ford in those days. Whenever a problem was raised that meant a delay on the Pinto, Lee would chomp on his cigar, look out the window and say ‘Read the product objectives and get back to work.”
The product objectives are clearly stated in the Pinto “green book.” This is a thick, top-secret manual in green covers containing a step-by-step production plan for the model, detailing the metallurgy, weight, strength and quality of every part in the car. The product objectives for the Pinto are repeated in an article by Ford executive F.G. Olsen published by the Society of Automotive Engineers. He lists these product objectives as follows:
A Ford engineer, who doesn’t want his name used, comments: “This company is run by salesmen, not engineers; so the priority is styling, not safety.” He goes on to tell a story about gas-tank safety at Ford: Lou Tubben is one of the most popular engineers at Ford. He’s a friendly, outgoing guy with a genuine concern for safety. By 1971 he had grown so concerned about gas-tank integrity that he asked his boss if he could prepare a presentation on safer tank design. Tubben and his boss had both worked on the Pinto and shared a concern for its safety. His boss gave him the go-ahead, scheduled a date for the presentation and invited all company engineers and key production planning personnel. When time came for the meeting, a grand total of two people showed up – Lou Tubben and his boss. “So you see,” continued the anonymous Ford engineer ironically, “there are a few of us here at Ford who are concerned about fire safety.” He adds: “They are mostly engineers who have to study a lot of accident reports and look at pictures of burned people. But we don’t talk about it much. It isn’t a popular subject.
More on bubble spotting
Jan 15th 2010, 16:08 by The Economist | WASHINGTON
SCOTT SUMNER has written a long post defending Eugene Fama and the efficient markets hypothesis. In a nutshell, he thinks that I’m gravely mistaken if I believe that bubbles can be spotted ahead of time, that The Economist‘s correct calls of the tech and housing bubbles were just a magnificent stroke of luck, and that if we’re so bloody confident in our ability to predict bubbles why aren’t we making billions running mutual funds?
I feel like this is the sort of critique that sounds lovely so long as one remains comfortably in the realm of abstract intellectualism. The price-to-income ratio has risen above its long-term trend, but how can we know that it’s a bubble? Fundamentals? Well, perhaps they’ve shifted. And if you’re so confident, why aren’t you ringing up your trader and telling him to short housing?
In The Economist‘s recent Briefing on bubbles, the author of the Briefing outlined a few key signs that a bubble may be growing. One is high asset values relative to historical trends. If price-to-income and price-to-rent ratios are well above trend levels, that is a sign that things may be amiss. At the very least, you ought to be able to tell a compelling story about why things have changed. These markets are, after all, grounded in physical supply and the demand for housing. What story about massive increases in price-to-rent levels was available to explain the shift, its development around the world, and most importantly, its sustainability?
Secondly, the author warned that bubbles typically involve rapid private credit growth and market enthusiasm. If this were all a matter of making predictions based on big upward swings in a set of asset values, well, Mr Sumner might have a point. But it’s a little strange, is it not, that writers at The Economist and elsewhere didn’t just identify the bubble but correctly pointed out the specific dynamics that were creating this unsustainable state—a heedless expansion of the credit available to those willing to buy homes? It’s one thing to be right about a guess that it may rain tomorrow. It’s another to identify the approaching low pressure system and specify the moisture content of the airmass and then make the prediction on that basis.
But then there’s the billion dollar question—can you reliably make money on it? In theory, you should be able to, if what I’m saying is true. But in theory, you have complete markets. You have the ability to borrow as much as you like for as long as you like. You have a range of financial products availabe that don’t actually exist.
As Robert Shiller has pointed out a number of times, it’s difficult to short housing markets. It’s not impossible, but it’s not easy. But for a real sense of what it’s like to trade against an inflating bubble, it’s worth reading this, from Felix Salmon:
[A]ny hedge fund manager playing a version of the negative-carry trade has it much worse than most of his peers. Warren Buffett says that the first rule of running other people’s money is don’t lose it; the second rule is “don’t forget the first rule”. One of the reasons Taleb gave for giving up running money day-to-day was precisely the incredible toll it takes when you’re losing money almost every day. Andrew Lahde, another huge winner from the subprime crisis, also quit the business, citing the way in which the stress of the job destroyed his health…
Paulson was not actively trying to burst the bubble, in the way that George Soros pushed the pound out of the European exchange-rate mechanism with his legendary1992 negative-carry trade. Instead, he was just the biggest of a long line of investors who saw that there was a housing bubble and tried to find a way to go short. Those who were right but too early disappeared into the footnotes of finance — if they were lucky to get even that. They learned the hard way that “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent”. Paulson was like them: he felt certain that the bubble was going to burst, but he didn’t — couldn’t — know when, and he simply had to pr—ay that it would happen before his investors deserted him.
What’s more, there was no guarantee that even if the housing bubble did burst, that Paulson was going to make lots of money. To be sure, he had a lovely model, put together by his colleague Paolo Pellegrini, showing that if house prices stopped rising, subprime mortgages were going to suffer enormous losses. But on the other hand, all the banks and credit-rating agencies also had models, showing that the bonds that Paulson was betting against had almost no chance of defaulting. When your model shows one thing, and everybody else’s models show something else entirely, there’s a very good chance that your model is flawed.
Markets are efficient in the sense that it’s hard to make an easy buck off of them, particularly when they’re rushing maniacally up the skin of an inflating bubble. But are they efficient in the sense that prices are right? Tens of thousands of empty homes say no. And despite the great extent to which markets depart from the theoretician’s ideal, people did manage to put together models predicting the fall, bet on those models, and make a great deal of money off of those bets.
And now we find ourselves in a situation where these people, having set up a model explaining what would happen which was subsequently verified by events, are being told that they suffer from cognitive illusion. That in fact, this testable hypothesis, which passed a test against real world events, is no good.
The LIBOR Scandal
Law of the lend
A federal judge throws out much, but not all, of the rate-setting case
Apr 6th 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition
FEW financial scandals have had more implications than the one tied to the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). A number used in the pricing of at least $300 trillion in securities was found to have been manipulated for years. Three banks have paid serious fines: RBS, UBS and Barclays. Careers have been shattered. Yet an unresolved question remains: was there a violation of law?
The answer is, largely, no, according to a 161-page opinion released on March 29th by Naomi Reice Buchwald, a federal judge in the southern district of New York. Most of the American civil litigation has been consolidated in her court and the sheer scope of the opinion is an implicit acknowledgment that the conclusions will be carefully reviewed. In part, this is because it encompasses so much: the structure of an international component of domestic financial markets, the limits of American law and the time constraints for filing claims. But a larger factor is simply the size of the potential claims, which are substantial.
Ms Buchwald’s most important ruling was to dismiss claims that banks conspired to manipulate rates, violating competition law. That may seem surprising. Traders acknowledge submitting false prices; they had financial incentives to do so. But nothing is entirely obvious when it comes to LIBOR because of the odd way it is set.
During the period between August 2007 and May 2010 covered in the litigation, 16 banks participated in a panel under the auspices of the British Bankers’ Association, providing daily estimates of what their own borrowing costs would be, even if they never borrowed. The highest and lowest sets of prices were thrown out; the rest averaged. This was not, Ms Buchwald wrote, a competitive market—the price was not a bid and nothing was bought. It was a co-operative process and thus competition laws did not apply.
With that decision, Ms Buchwald in effect dismissed claims brought by three of the four core groups of plaintiffs: holders of LIBOR-linked bonds, of mutual funds and of over-the-counter securities. That left only those who traded LIBOR-linked contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange as the focal point for litigation. Retaining even these claims was no sure thing. Ms Buchwald rejected the notion that LIBOR manipulation occurring in London was covered by American law. But she accepted that LIBOR alleged to have been used to manipulate prices of contracts traded in Chicago was. This is the second big case to touch on the issue of how American law affects financial products traded elsewhere, and more are coming.
Still, even these plaintiffs did not fare particularly well, as Ms Buchwald dismissed many claims for having been filed beyond the two-year limit from when news reports of LIBOR problems first appeared. “We recognise”, she wrote, “that it might be unexpected that we are dismissing a substantial portion of plaintiffs’ claims, given that several of the defendants have already paid penalties to government regulatory agencies reaching into the billions of dollars.”
The reason, she says, is that public and private enforcement can differ, with the government actions tied to “broad public interests” such as the integrity of the market and competition, and private actions hinging on whether a particular plaintiff deserves compensation. Her exoneration of the defendants rests in large part on the premise that the real problem was not in fake data but in a fake market. Maybe in the next go-round plaintiffs should take a crack at whoever promoted such a market in the first place.
From the print edition: Finance and economics
Farage on Rompuy
http://news.sky.com/story/1100183/bilderberg-conference-watford-too-secret
(Meacher)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_Davignon
More Bilderberg
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/6582837/EU-Presidencycandidate-Herman-Van-Rompuy-calls-for-new-taxes.html
By Bruno Waterfield in Brussels
4:42PM GMT 16 Nov 2009
Belgium’s prime minister made the controversial proposal, leaked to a Flemish newspaper, during
a secret dinner to promote his candidacy hosted by the elite Bilderberg Group.
The comments have added to a backlash against Mr Van Rompuy who, while still the favourite,
has been identified as a federalist who is being championed as part of a Franco-German “stitch
up” ahead a summit dinner that will appoint an EU President in Brussels on Thursday.
Mr Van Rompuy told an audience of industrialists and politicians that new European
environmental and financial taxes, levied by Brussels, should fund the EU to replace resented
national contributions being cut by governments because of the recession.
“The possibilities of financial levies at European level must be seriously examined and for the first
time the large countries in the union are open to that,” he said, according to the newspaper De
Tijd.
The idea of using VAT, fuel duties and aviation taxes to give the EU a direct and independent
source of income has long been demanded by the European Commission. Proposals currently
circulating in Brussels could mean that all airline tickets, shopping and petrol station receipts in
Britain list the amount of aviation tax, VAT or fuel duty that goes directly to Brussels as an “EU
tax”.
Federalist politicians support the plan as a way of giving Brussels autonomy from national
treasuries, who begrudge EU contributions, and to provide the Commission with its “own
resources” to further expand European integration.
But any plans to give the EU any direct claim or power over national taxation, including VAT, are
opposed by Britain, Denmark and other more traditionally Eurosceptic countries.
“This speech is not going to do him any favours at all,” said a European diplomat.
Mr Van Rompuy attended the Bilderberg dinner last Thursday at the invitation of the Vicomte
Davignon, a former European Commission vice-president and a leading EU federalist.
The setting was the highly symbolic Castle of the Valley of the Duchess, or Chateau de ValDuchesse,
where the EU’s founding Treaty of Rome was negotiated in 1957 and later the venue
for the first ever European Commission meeting.
Among the diners was Henry Kissinger, the former US State Secretary and Nobel Prize winner
who started the debate that led to the creation of an EU President after he famously asked: “Who
do I call if I want to call Europe?”
Mr Van Rompuy eclipsed Tony Blair at an EU summit two weeks ago, with French and German
support, to become the hotly tipped favourite to become EU President, a post created by the
Lisbon Treaty.
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/06/my-brush-bilderberg
In 2008 the Bilderberg met in Chantilly Virginia. The same weekend both Obama and
Hillary disappeared for a few days. Obama press team told the media he was going to be
in Chicago and they actually flew the press to Chicago where the press later discovered
that Obama was not around. Reports out of Virginia claim they were both really at the
Bilderberg meeting in.
Ironically, just a couple of days later, Hillary announced that she was dropping out of the
presidential race. Several months later she was ironically appointed as the Secretary of
State under Obama.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Ashton
Ashton lives in London with her husband, Peter Kellner, the president of an online polling
organisation, YouGov.
[12] She has two children and three stepchildren.
Career
United Kingdom
Between 1977 and 1983, Ashton worked for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as an
administrator and in 1982 was elected as its national treasurer and subsequently as one of its vicechairs.
From 1979 to 1981 she was business manager of the Coverdale Organisation, a management
consultancy.[13][14] As of 1983 she worked for the Central Council for Education and Training in Social
Work.
[15] From 1983 to 1989 she was director of Business in the Community, working with business to
tackle inequality, and she established the Employers’ Forum on Disability, Opportunity Now, and the
Windsor Fellowship.[citation needed] For most of the 1990s, she was a freelance policy adviser.[10][16] She
chaired the Health Authority in Hertfordshire from 1998 to 2001, as well as her children’s school
governing body, and she became a vice-president of the National Council for One-Parent Families.
She was made a Labour life peer as Baroness Ashton of Upholland in 1999, under Prime
Minister Tony Blair. In June 2001 she was appointed Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in
the Department for Education and Skills. In 2002 she was made minister for Sure Start in the same
department., and in September 2004 she was appointed parliamentary under-secretary in
the Department for Constitutional Affairs, with responsibilities that included the National Archives and
the Public Guardianship Office. Ashton was sworn of the Privy Council in 2006, and she
became parliamentary under-secretary of stateat the new Ministry of Justice in May 2007.
She was criticised by Daniel Hannan, a British Conservative MEP, who said that she had “no
background in trade issues at a time when the EU is engaged in critical negotiations with Canada,
Korea and the WTO”.[24
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Hannan
Hannan criticised what he termed a deviation from the rule of law. He continued speaking after his
allocated time had ended by quoting Edmund Burke, but was interrupted mid-quote and had his
microphone cut off by Luigi Cocilovo, one of the 14 Vice-Presidents.
[21] He then responded by
damning, without vocal amplification, what he claimed were Parliament’s deviations from its own
rules:[22][23]
An absolute majority is not the same as the rule of law. I accept that there is a minority in this house in
favour of a referendum. That there is a minority in this house against the ratification of the Lisbon
Treaty. But this house must nonetheless follow its own rulebooks. And by popular acclamation to
discard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my
regard for you Mr. Chairman and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to
the Ermächtigungsgesetz of 1933 which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.
You cannot spend your way out of recession or borrow your way out of debt. And when you repeat, in
that wooden and perfunctory way, that our situation is better than others’, that we are well placed to
weather the storm, I have to tell you, you sound like a Brezhnev-era apparatchik giving the party line.
You know, and we know, and you know that we know that it’s nonsense! Everyone knows that Britain
is worse off than any other country as we go into these hard times. The IMF has said so. The
European Commission has said so. The markets have said so, which is why our currency has
devalued by thirty percent. And soon, the voters too will get their chance to say so. They can see what
the markets have already seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued
government.[25]
The final phrase, “the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government”, was a quote from a speech
by Labour Party leader John Smith criticising then-Prime Minister John Major in 1992.[26]
A video clip of the speech went viral on YouTube that evening,[27][28] attracting more than 630,000
views in 24 hours.[24][29]
paul lewis 10.26
http://blog.ted.com/2013/08/14/since-the-ted-talk-the-guardians-paul-lewis-talks-citizen-journalism/
Fbi gunfights
Extremists, notes Jon Ronson, don’t like being called extremists. They prefer to say that it is members of “the western liberal cosmopolitan establishment” who are the real extremists. “I like it when they say this,” he remarks, “because it makes me feel I have a belief system.” The whole book is captured in that thought — wry, paradoxical, mocking, ambivalent, uneasy, self-aware and deprecating. The postmodern liberal aspires to accept everything and yet believe nothing. But then he finds himself confronted by people — extremists — who believe one thing and can accept nothing else. To them, the liberal is tyrannical and his tolerance is thinly disguised oppression. The liberal posture being, by definition, weak, he does not fight back. Instead, sadomasochistically, he muses on the possibility of being comforted by faith. Because they hate me, he reasons, I must believe. But in what?
One way to confront this conundrum is to think about it; another, better way is to act upon it. Ronson acts. The result is a funny, superbly controlled account of his wanderings through the wonderland of fanaticism and delusion. This may be one more example of the “cool hack meets weird people” genre, which was already looking jaded in the late 1960s. But it is lifted out of the ordinary: first, by the quality of Ronson’s writing; second, by the carefully disguised seriousness of his intent; and third, by his Jewish identity.
http://www.jonronson.com/them_fave.html
Bryan Appleyard
http://www.jonronson.com/them_fave.html
ronson from .29
jim tucker
from 3.05 120 people from sport/Hollywood…
you’d bust your butt
P 23 ronson calls British Embassy
P 31 Rockefeller
P32 Conrad Black
P 40 Thatcher
Vicki Weaver
he next day, August 22, 1992, HRT sniper/observer teams were deployed on the north ridge overlooking the cabin. Randy Weaver, Harris, and Weaver’s 16-year-old daughter Sara were seen outside the cabin. Weaver went to view the body of Sammy Weaver,[8] which had been placed in a shed after being recovered the previous day. Weaver’s back was to FBI HRT sniper Lon Horiuchi. Horiuchi aimed to sever Weaver’s spine for an instant kill. Weaver moved in the last split second as Horiuchi fired and the bullet entered Weaver’s right shoulder and exited the armpit.[11] As the three ran back to the house, Horiuchi fired again at Kevin Harris as he ran away, but this time hit Weaver’s wife Vicki in the head as she held their 10-month-old daughter Elishiba at the door.[12] Vicki Weaver collapsed on the floor, dying instantly with her bloody but uninjured daughter in her arms. Harris was hit in the chest by the same bullet. A Justice Department review later found this second shot was unconstitutional and the lack of a request to surrender was “inexcusable”, since Harris and the two Weavers were running for cover and could not pose an imminent threat. The task force also specifically blamed Horiuchi for firing at the door, not knowing whether someone was on the other side of it, and criticized those who had decided on the special rules of engagement allowing shots to be fired with no previous request for surrender.[8] Much later, a robot vehicle approached the cabin and announced the presence of law enforcement. According to the Weavers, this was the first announcement of the source of the violence.[citation needed]
A stand-off ensued for 10 days as several hundred federal agents surrounded the house, in which Weaver and his three surviving children remained with Harris and the body of Vicki Weaver, under a blood-soaked blanket.[3] During the stand-off, the government force, which numbered 350 to 400 men, had named their temporary camp “Camp Vicki”.[13] The negotiators who later claimed they did not know Vicki was dead would call out in the morning ‘Vicki, we have blueberry pancakes.’ To Sara Weaver inside with her dead mother’s body, they were deliberately taunting the survivors.[14][15][16] A vigil was maintained at the Ruby Creek Bridge by protesters who believed the government actions were heavy-handed. James “Bo” Gritz, then a third-party presidential candidate who had formerly been Weaver’s commanding officer during the Vietnam War, served as a mediator between Weaver and the government. Eventually, Weaver elected to abandon the stand-off and surrender.
Aftermath of the Ruby Ridge incident[edit]
Weaver was charged with multiple crimes relating to the Ruby Ridge incident, a total of ten counts including the original firearms charges and murder. Attorney Gerry Spence handled Weaver’s defense, and argued successfully that Weaver’s actions were justifiable as self-defense. The judge dismissed two counts after hearing prosecution witness testimony. The jury acquitted Weaver of all remaining charges except two, one of which the judge set aside. Weaver was found guilty of one count, failure to appear, for which Weaver was fined $10,000 and sentenced to 18 months in prison. He was credited with time served plus an additional three months, and was then released. Kevin Harris was acquitted of all criminal charges.[17]
In August 1995, the US government avoided trial on a civil lawsuit filed by the Weavers, by awarding the three surviving daughters $1,000,000 each, and Randy Weaver $100,000 over the deaths of Sammy and Vicki Weaver.
Bbc
We don’t do god
1. en charge du fonctionnement de l’ordre mondial, ce n’est pas …
2. The world’s water-coolers | The Economist
www.economist.com/node/17928993
o
o
21 janv. 2011 – Bilderberg Owned Publication The Economist: Yes, Powerful “Globocrat” Elites Are Running Things, It’s Not A Conspiracy …
3. The Economist: Powerful Elite are Running Things in Secret but …
vigilantcitizen.com/…/the-economist-a-powerful-elite-…
o
o
Gibbs press officer to press
o
o
30 mai 2012 – Our man at Bilderberg is back for a fourth year and has touched down in… This week’s Economist ma
February 28[edit]
The ATF attempted to execute their search warrant on a Sunday morning, February 28, 1993. Any advantage of surprise was lost when a reporter who had been tipped off about the raid asked for directions from a U.S. Postal Service mail carrier who was coincidentally Koresh’s brother-in-law.[22] Koresh then told undercover ATF agent Robert Rodriguez that they knew a raid was imminent. Rodriguez had infiltrated the Branch Davidians and was astonished to find that his cover had been blown. The agent made an excuse and left the compound. When asked later what the Branch Davidians had been doing when he left the compound, Rodriguez replied, “They were praying.” Branch Davidian survivors have written that Koresh ordered selected male followers to begin arming and taking up defensive positions, while the women and children were told to take cover in their rooms.[22] Koresh told them he would try to speak to the agents, and what happened next would depend on the agents’ intentions.
Despite being informed that the Branch Davidians knew a raid was coming, the ATF commander ordered that the raid go ahead, even though their plan depended on reaching the compound without the Branch Davidians being armed and prepared.[22]While not standard procedure, ATF agents had their blood type written on their arms or neck after leaving the staging area and before the raid, because it was recommended by the military to facilitate speedy blood transfusions in the case of injury.[40][41] Agents approached the site in cattle trailers pulled by pickup trucks owned by individual ATF agents.
ATF agents stated they heard shots coming from within the compound, while Branch Davidian survivors claimed that the first shots came from the ATF agents outside. A suggested reason may have been an accidental discharge of a weapon, possibly by an ATF agent, causing the ATF to respond with fire from automatic weapons.[42] Other reports claim the first shots were fired by the ATF “dog team” sent to kill the dogs in the Branch Davidian kennel.[43] Three National Guard helicopters were used as aerial distraction and all took incoming fire, but they did not return fire.[44] During the first shots, Koresh was wounded, shot in the wrist.[45] Within a minute of the raid starting, Branch Davidian Wayne Martin called emergency services, pleading for them to stop shooting. The resident asked for a ceasefire, and audiotapes record him saying, “Here they come again!” and, “That’s them shooting! That’s not us!”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waco_siege
http://listverse.com/2009/10/14/top-10-most-audacious-shootouts-in-us-history/
The PPD was sued and forced to pay $1.5 million to a survivor and relatives, due to using excessive force and unlawful search and seizure.
Ramiro Martinez and Houston McCoy flanked Whitman, and Martinez emptied his revolver at him, wounding him. McCoy then fired two rounds of 12-ga 00 buckshot into the head, neck and left side of Whitman, killing him instantly.
Martinez then grabbed the shotgun from McCoy, ran up to Whitman’s body, and shot him again in the upper left arm, point blank. There is a photo of Whitman’s dead body on Wikipedia. He was subsequently found to have a glioblastoma, a brain tumor that could have caused his erratic mentality, as he had not always been homicidal.
After graduating from high school, William Cooper joined the U.S. Air Force and later the U.S. Navy. He served in the Vietnam War and then worked for Naval Security and Intelligence. Cooper gained notoriety after publishing a book titled Behold a Pale Horse. The text documents various UFO and paranormal activities he encountered while serving for Naval Intelligence. It examines government corruption, secret societies, and a collection of conspiracy theories. In the 1990s, William Cooper became a popular speaker on the UFO lecture circuit. He was the host of a worldwide shortwave radio show named Hour of the Time.
William Cooper was the first person to provide evidence of explosive material inside the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. He publicly identified the type of explosives used in the Oklahoma City bombing. In his early writings, Cooper was convinced that the United States was hiding evidence of alien technology. Towards the end of his life Cooper turned his attention towards covert government programs and the militia movement. He became an outspoken critic of U.S. government abuses. William Cooper felt that the UFO phenomenon was a misinformation campaign organized to hide secret military operations. He asserted that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is actually the same organization as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Cooper felt the two organizations were involved in a broad, premeditated conspiracy to defraud the Citizens of the United States of America.
In June 2001, three months before 9/11, William Cooper warned publicly about an important terrorist attack on United States, that would be blamed on Osama Bin Laden. During his June 28 broadcast, William Cooper said “I’m telling you be prepared for a major attack. But it won’t be Osama Bin Laden. It will be those behind the New World Order.” On 9/11 Cooper said “what we’re witnessing today is most probably the herald of the, at least, the redefinition of freedom, and probably its death.”
William Cooper was charged with various crimes in his lifetime, including tax evasion from 1992 to 1994, and bank fraud for giving false information on a loan application. In July and September 2001, Cooper was accused of brandishing a handgun near his home in Eagar, Arizona. On November 6, 2001, two months after September 11, William Cooper was fatally shot by a large collection of Arizona deputies who were attempting to serve him an arrest warrant. According to police accounts, Cooper, who was physically disabled, fled officers and pulled out a weapon. A gun fight ensued and William Cooper was killed. A deputy was critically injured in the incident.
Kenneth Johannemann
Witnessed Event: Collapse of the Twin Towers
Kenny Johannemann worked as a part-time janitor in the World Trade Center when it was attacked and destroyed on September 11, 2001. He was in the North Tower waiting for an elevator when the first explosion occurred. The blast created a fireball that engulfed the elevator shaft. Johannemann responded by saving the life of a man that was badly burned in the event. He was in a similar position as William Rodriguez, who was also a janitor in the WTC North Tower, and who became internationally recognized for his heroic efforts on September 11. Rodriguez was the last person to leave the collapsing North Tower alive.
Following the events of September 11, 2001, Kenneth Johannemann and William Rodriguez provided a detailed account of their experience. One aspect of their stories is similar, but contradicts the official report presented by the 9/11 commission. Both men reported that they heard loud explosions in the basement of the North Tower immediately before and after the plane impacted. Kenneth Johannemann was adamant about the fact that he heard explosions not associated with the crash. William Rodriguez also claimed to have heard a massive rumble in the basement of the North Tower, seconds before the plane hit.
On August 31, 2008, Kenneth Johannemann committed suicide by way of a gunshot wound to the head. Mr Johannemann’s suicide note stated that he was depressed after being evicted from his residence. The testimony given by Kenneth Johannemann and William Rodriguez are identical in the fact that they describe large explosions in the WTC towers. Before his death, Johannemann regularly told his story to public crowds. His death was a surprise to everyone and instantly raised suspicion amongst 9/11 researchers.
An undercover police officer posing for years as an environmental activist co-wrote a libellous leaflet that was highly critical of McDonald’s, and which led to the longest civil trial in English history, costing the fast-food chain millions of pounds in fees.
The true identity of one of the authors of the “McLibel leaflet” is Bob Lambert, a police officer who used the alias Bob Robinson in his five years infiltrating the London Greenpeace group, is revealed in a new book about undercover policing of protest, published next week.
McDonald’s famously sued green campaigners over the roughly typed leaflet, in a landmark three-year high court case, that was widely believed to have been a public relations disaster for the corporation. Ultimately the company won a libel battle in which it spent millions on lawyers.
Lambert was deployed by the special demonstration squad (SDS) – a top-secret Metropolitan police unit that targeted political activists between 1968 until 2008, when it was disbanded. He co-wrote the defamatory six-page leaflet in 1986 – and his role in its production has been the subject of an internal Scotland Yard investigation for several months.
At no stage during the civil legal proceedings brought by McDonald’s in the 1990s was it disclosed that a police infiltrator helped author the leaflet.
Lambert, who rose through the ranks to become a spymaster in the SDS, is also under investigation for sexual relationships he had with four women while undercover, one of whom he fathered a child with before vanishing from their lives. The woman and her son only discovered thatLambert was a police spy last year.
The internal police inquiry is also investigating claims raised in parliament that Lambert ignited an incendiary device at a branch of Debenhams when infiltrating animal rights campaigners. The incident occurred in 1987 and the explosion inflicted £300,000 worth of damage to the branch in Harrow, north London. Lambert has previously strongly denied he planted the incendiary device in the Debenhams store.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/jun/21/mclibel-leaflet-police-bob-lambert-mcdonalds
Undercover: the True Story of Britain’s Secret PoliceRob Evans and Paul Lewis
The Guardian’s revelations about undercover police from the Special Demonstration Squad (and more recently the National Public Order Intelligence Unit) have unfolded rather like one of its other great exclusives, on phonehacking. The steady drip of unsavoury information has culminated in the allegation that the Met Police used undercover officers to smear the family of the murder victim Stephen Lawrence.
Nearly every officer described in the book had passionate, long-term relationships with women from the groups they were investigating. At least one, Bob Lambert, went so far as to get a woman pregnant. Shortly afterwards, Lambert, with whom this woman had expected to live for the rest of her life, faked his emigration and left her a single parent, bereft of any kind of emotional or financial support.
Lambert, who was a special branch detective between 1980 and 2006, later became a tweedy academic (he is now a lecturer in terrorism studies at St Andrews University). Like many officers, Lambert was married with children while the affairs were taking place. Yet it’s hardly the only morally questionable decision that these officers made. They took on the names of dead children to protect their identities. Some committed crimes and lied in court. Many seemed to be not only movers and shakers in the ecological and political circles in which they were embedded but instigators of direct action.
During the “McLibel” trial (a multi – million-pound libel suit filed by McDonald’s against the environmental activists Helen Steel and David Morris, which this book alleges was at least in part instigated by Lambert), there were sometimes more spies among the activists’ group than there were activists, as a result of the combined efforts of McDonald’s and the police.
The process of infiltration, repeated for nearly 40 years, seems more often than not to have severely damaged both the police officers’ mental well-being and that of the friends and lovers they gained and discarded. Throughout this period, there was a pattern of officers who had infiltrated groups returning to desk duty and then threatening to go rogue – or doing so.
At one of the most significant trials mentioned here that resulted from the actions of these officers (that of the Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station protesters who were arrested in 2009 because of the work of Mark Kennedy, a notorious undercover operator), the guilty were spared jail. The judge declared that the protesters had acted “with the highest possible motives”.
The phrase “domestic extremism” is, as the authors point out, “as meaningless as it [is] useful”. At various points here, the police apply it to the anti-roads movement, the Lawrence family, activists exposing allegations of police corruption and a 69-year-old retired physicist campaigning to protect a local beauty spot. The women with whom these officers had affairs hardly seem major threats to national security. Indeed, many seem to have done nothing illegal at all.
http://www.newstatesman.com/2013/07/insider-trading
icke
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/feb/23/usa.iraq1
project for the new american century
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jun/09/andrew-neil-alex-jones-sunday-politics
chomsky http://www.social-europe.eu/2013/11/arab-spring-three-years/
Levin huffington
http://www.alternet.org/story/19579/bernard_levin_remembered