Tag: corpocracy

More haircuts on the way

I’m a little surprised at Mr. Evans-Pritchard’s dismay.  What else did he expect?

Another shameful day for Europe as EMU creditor states betray South.
So much for the denials. The Cyprus “template” for banking crises is to be eurozone policy for other countries after all.

Don’t be complacent if you’re on the other side of the Atlantic.  The same “bail-ins” are coming to the USA too.  In fact, two have already taken place there, compared to the one in Cyprus.  It’s already been determined by the courts that “your” money in the bank is not yours, it is merely an unsecured loan you have made to the bank… for what is effectively a negative interest rate.

Gambling is going on in here?

Fox contributor Tobin Smith apparently failed to realize that he was supposed to make his profit on the pump from price movements, not directly:

Most investors can’t tell the difference between “sponsored investment research” and independent analysis, and that’s exactly what the “sponsors” — typically small companies paying for a marketing campaign that will inflate their stock activity and value — are counting on.

The difference gets even tougher to figure out when the sponsor hires someone who is known for giving independent commentary colored only by their own feelings and research. Think of it like a big honking commercial, with a celebrity endorser.

Last week, that bought-and-paid for stock endorsement was a 20-page mailer about Petrosonic Energy, supported by an e-mail campaign, featuring Tobin Smith, a money manager who has been a fixture on the television news shows for 15 years, and who is a regular on the Fox networks, describing himself on Twitter as a “guest anchor.” According to Fox, he is “a contributing market analyst for FOX News Channel and a regular panelist on ‘Bulls & Bears.’” (Fox, like MarketWatch, is owned by News Corp.)

While investors might have ordinarily treated the “special edition” of the new Next Big Thing Investor newsletter — Smith’s latest, just-started investment newsletter — like junk mail or spam, Smith’s name and his smiling, personable countenance had some investors doing a double-take, at least judging from the e-mails I received on the subject.

The people who contacted me considered buying the stock entirely based on Smith’s say-so, and the credibility he exudes in his Fox appearances. They didn’t appear to read the disclaimers of the campaign; had they bothered, they would have quickly found it was paid advertising for which Smith’s company pocketed $50,000.

The thing is, there is absolutely no difference between what Smith did and what Kudlow, Cramer, Bartiromo, and all the other financial news analysts do.  They’re all paid to try to sucker people into the stock market and they all benefit from seeing prices rise as the suckers create churn. I’ve never seen a study on this, and it has been a LONG time since I bothered watching what purports to pass for the financial stuff, but I would assume that there are probably 10 “buy” recommendations for every “sell” recommendation.

It’s not analysis, it’s cheerleading, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with economic realities or what the purported purpose of a stock market is.  The whole thing is a Fed-inflated casino, which is why “investors” are all breathlessly waiting today to see if Helicopter Ben is going to keep the party going another quarter.

NSA whistleblowers back Snowden

More importantly, they note that his approach was more successful than theirs:

USA Today has published an extraordinary interview with three
former NSA employees who praise Edward Snowden’s leaks, corroborate some
of his claims, and warn about unlawful government acts….

In other words, they blew the whistle in the way Snowden’s critics suggest he should have done. Their
method didn’t get through to the members of Congress who are saying, in
the wake of the Snowden leak, that they had no idea what was going on.
But they are nonetheless owed thanks.
And among them, they’ve now said all of the following:

  • His disclosures did not cause grave damage to national security.
  • What Snowden discovered is “material evidence of an institutional crime.”
  • As
    a system administrator, Snowden “could go on the network or go into any
    file or any system and
    change it or add to it or whatever, just to make sure — because he
    would
    be responsible to get it back up and running if, in fact, it failed. So
    that meant he had access to go in and put anything. That’s why he
    said, I think, ‘I can even target the president or a judge.’ If he knew
    their phone numbers or attributes, he could insert them into the target
    list which would be distributed worldwide. And then it would be
    collected, yeah, that’s right. As a super-user, he could do that.”
  • “The idea that we have robust checks and balances on this is a myth.”
  • Congressional overseers “have no real way of seeing into what these agencies are doing. They are
    totally dependent on the agencies briefing them on programs, telling
    them what they are doing.”
  • Lawmakers “don’t really don’t understand what the NSA does and how it
    operates. Even when they get briefings, they still don’t understand.”
  • Asked
    what Edward Snowden should expect to happen to him, one of the men,
    William Binney, answered, “first tortured, then maybe even rendered and
    tortured and then incarcerated and then tried and incarcerated or even
    executed.” Interesting that this is what a whistleblower thinks the U.S.
    government will do to a citizen. The abuse of Bradley Manning worked.
  • “There is no path for intelligence-community whistle-blowers who know
    wrong is being done. There is none. It’s a toss of the coin, and the
    odds are you are going to be hammered.”

What a tremendous surprise to learn that the government isn’t telling the truth about Snowdon and his revelations!

Those dratted hackers

I exchanged a pair of friendly emails with the intrepid book reviewer “Icefog” this morning after my good friends at the NSA provided me with his contact information last night.  “Icefog” explained that his Amazon account had been hacked and he was quite happy to remove the fake reviews that had been posted on Amazon using it.  I’m entirely content to take his explanation at face value, and I would appreciate it if Mr. Kulkis would please remove his four reviews that were posted in response to the now-deleted fake ones.

Edward Snowdon’s liveblog Q&A

If there is any doubt that Snowdon is a hero, the fact that he is openly taking questions from the public and addressing them should settle that one.

1) Why did you choose Hong Kong to go to and then tell them about US hacking on their research facilities and universities?
2)
How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many
different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still
exist?


1) First, the US Government, just as they did with other
whistleblowers, immediately and predictably destroyed any possibility of
a fair trial at home, openly declaring me guilty of treason and that
the disclosure of secret, criminal, and even unconstitutional acts is an
unforgivable crime. That’s not justice, and it would be foolish to
volunteer yourself to it if you can do more good outside of prison than
in it.

Second, let’s be clear: I did not reveal any US operations against
legitimate military targets. I pointed out where the NSA has hacked
civilian infrastructure such as universities, hospitals, and private
businesses because it is dangerous. These nakedly, aggressively criminal
acts are wrong no matter the target. Not only that, when NSA makes a
technical mistake during an exploitation operation, critical systems
crash. Congress hasn’t declared war on the countries – the majority of
them are our allies – but without asking for public permission, NSA is
running network operations against them that affect millions of innocent
people.

And for what? So we can have secret access to a computer in a
country we’re not even fighting? So we can potentially reveal a
potential terrorist with the potential to kill fewer Americans than our
own Police? No, the public needs to know the kinds of things a
government does in its name, or the “consent of the governed” is
meaningless.

2) All I can say right now is the US Government is not going to be
able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and
it cannot be stopped.

Two great quotes:

“The consent of the governed is not consent if it is not informed.” 

“Citizens with a conscience are not going to ignore wrong-doing simply
because they’ll be destroyed for it: the conscience forbids it.”

Those are the words of a free man and a hero of human liberty.

The extent of Facebook spying

Or, at least, this is what they’re willing to admit to for the present:

For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of
user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government
entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including
criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000
and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local
sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a
fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national
security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of
Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the
entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000
accounts.

And, of course, the fact that they’re handing over about 40,000 accounts per year doesn’t eliminate the NSA’s widely rumored backdoor access.

Better there than the US “justice” system

Edward Snowdon makes it clear that he doesn’t trust the U.S. courts.  Nor should he.  Nor, for that matter, should you:

Edward Snowden says he wants to ask the people of Hong Kong to decide his fate after choosing the city because of his faith in its rule of law. The 29-year-old former CIA employee behind what might be the biggest intelligence leak in US history revealed his identity to the world in Hong Kong on Sunday. His decision to use a city under Chinese sovereignty as his haven has been widely questioned – including by some rights activists in Hong Kong.

Snowden said last night that he had no doubts about his choice of Hong Kong.

“People who think I made a mistake in picking Hong Kong as a location misunderstand my intentions. I am not here to hide from justice; I am here to reveal criminality,” Snowden said in an exclusive interview with the South China Morning Post.

“I have had many opportunities to flee HK, but I would rather stay and fight the United States government in the courts, because I have faith in Hong Kong’s rule of law,” he added.

His decision makes a tremendous amount of sense in light of the various travesties committed on a regular basis by the US courts.  Moreover, China is one of the very few countries that are not inclined to be cowed by US threats.

A hero of human liberty

Edward Snowden made the brave, self-sacrificing choice that hundreds of thousands of servants of the machine could make, but do not, every single day.  He informed the American people, and the people of the world, what the US government is doing to them.  I think it is entirely possible that he will one day come to be considered an American Solzhenitsyn:

 The individual responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history is Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell.

The Guardian, after several days of interviews, is revealing his identity at his request. From the moment he decided to disclose numerous top-secret documents to the public, he was determined not to opt for the protection of anonymity. “I have no intention of hiding who I am because I know I have done nothing wrong,” he said….

He does not fear the consequences of going public, he said, only that
doing so will distract attention from the issues raised by his
disclosures. “I know the media likes to personalise political debates,
and I know the government will demonise me.”

Despite these fears,
he remained hopeful his outing will not divert attention from the
substance of his disclosures. “I really want the focus to be on these
documents and the debate which I hope this will trigger among citizens
around the globe about what kind of world we want to live in.” He added:
“My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in
their name and that which is done against them.”

He has had “a
very comfortable life” that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a
girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a
family he loves. “I’m willing to sacrifice all of that because I can’t
in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with
this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.”

I know it is very difficult for most Americans to grasp this, but the US government are not the good guys here.  They are even worse than the bad guys from whom they claim to be protecting you.  Before you condemn Snowden as a traitor, remember, George Washington, Samuel Adams, and Thomas Jefferson were, from the perspective of the British crown, traitors too.

NSA and the absence of law

I’ve been saying this for a while now, so it’s interesting to see others openly observing it in the mainstream media.  The US government does not respect the Constitution or any law, it is not the Constitutional entity everyone assumes it to be, and the US justice system is one giant game of make-believe:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Friday that the US justice
system was suffering from a “calamitous collapse in the rule of law”, as
Washington reeled from the sensational exposure of vast spy agency
surveillance programmes. Speaking in an interview with AFP at Ecuador’s London embassy, where
he has been holed up for almost a year, the founder of the
whistleblowing website accused the US government of trying to “launder”
its activities with regard to the far-reaching electronic spying effort
revealed on Thursday.

Assange doesn’t know the half of it, but he knew enough to try to stay out of the clutches of a Big Brother machine that kidnaps people around the world, kills others with drones, and spies on everyone with Internet access.  It is somewhat astonishing, to the average person who grew up amidst the Manichean struggle of the forces of freedom and light versus the evil empire of the Soviet Union, to gradually realize that the evil empire of the USA is more insidious and pernicious, with a greater global reach, than the Soviet version.

Tyler Durden observes that the administration has been caught lying in all of its responses to news of the NSA scandal:

There’s one reason why the administration, James Clapper and the NSA should just keep their mouths shut as the PRISM-gate fallout escalates: with every incremental attempt to refute some previously unknown facet of the US Big Brother state, a new piece of previously unleaked information from the same intelligence organization now scrambling for damage control, emerges and exposes the brand new narrative as yet another lie, forcing even more lies, more retribution against sources, more journalist persecution and so on.

The latest piece of news once again comes from the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald who this time exposes the NSA’s datamining tool “Boundless Informant” which according to leaked documents collected 97 billion pieces of intelligence from computer networks worldwide in March 2013 alone, and “3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period.”

This is summarized in the chart below which shows that only the middle east has more active NSA-espionage than the US. Also, Obama may not want to show Xi the activity heatmap for China, or else the whole “China is hacking us” script may promptly fall apart.

As usual, the government is hiding behind the fact that it is hiring contractors to do what it is prohibited by that ever-so-effectual “law” from doing itself.  The government is entirely lawless; to the last two presidential administrations, “law” is simply another weapon in its war on the American people.

The Gatekeepers know the gates are crumbling

One of the chief beneficiaries of the crumbling system, James Patterson, makes a ludicrous pitch for a bailout of the publishing industry that is quite rightly ripped apart by Kenton Kilgore:

Recently, mega-author James Patterson took out an ad in the New York Times Book Review asking for the government to bail out libraries and the book publishing/selling industry….  In his ad, Patterson asks, “If there are no bookstores, no libraries, no serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors, what will happen to our literature?  Who will discover and mentor new writers?  Who will publish our important books?”

So, the three-headed serpent that is Big Authors + Big Publishing + Big Distributors–the same serpent that made Patterson and his partners rich by cranking out about 10 of his books every year–is eating itself.  Well, we can’t have that!  What would be our society be without the ”important books” that Patterson lists in his ad–as well as his splatterfests named after lines from nursery rhymes (Along Came a Spider, Kiss the Girls, Pop Goes the Weasel)?  And what about Twilight?  And the collected masterpieces of Danielle Steel?

It’s more than a little amusing to me that while a brilliant businessman – if shameless literary hack – like Patterson can see what is taking place in the publishing world, the idiot parasites who have taken over the SFWA remain totally clueless about those changes and are more concerned about chainmail bikinis and the fact that Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg referred to a woman they knew forty years ago as a “lady” rather than as an editor in the SFWA Bulletin. 

(Believe it or not, that is the urgent DEFCON 1 situation to which Rapey McRaperson was referring and pledging his name, fame, and fortune to address this weekend.  That’s right; the SFWA is going to deal with its “problem” of the old guard by silencing them and ensuring that no new dissenting voices are permitted to arise.  You will RESPECT fat old women writing dreadful books about warrior women and necrobestial love triangles or you will be SILENT!)

It is going to be so much fun to watch these awful people shriek and scream as the cold equations of the publishing business gradually penetrate their thick, empty skulls.  I’ve been asked, on occasion, why I remain a member of the SFWA considering that only about ten percent of the active membership appears to share my perspective on the ongoing developments and the majority of the membership can’t stand me or the intellectual liberty for which I stand.  To which I can only respond: “Give up my front row seat to the auto-bonfire of the witches?  Are you mad?”

Simply reading the litany of sob stories and complaints that make up the greater part of the SFWA Forum makes for a pure and unadulterated pleasure for anyone with a sense of either justice or humor. And it is only going to get more entertaining as the economy implodes and the more publishers go the way of Night Shade Books. It will be a delight to see proud editor/authors forced to resort to the very independent publishing they once scorned as being intrinsically inferior… and then watch them flounder and fail as they belatedly discover that their “popularity” was artificial and mostly the result of superior access to the chief distribution channel.

As one who was briefly permitted entry by the gatekeepers through a side entrance, I perhaps have a more accurate perspective on the situation than most who are either purely insiders or outsiders.  I still have access to a number of executives at several major publishers, although, as it happens, none at the genre publishers.  And I can testify that the mainstream executives understand very well that their conventional business appears to be terminal, as increasing ebook sales at steadily falling prices are not be able to make up for the combination of a) declining print sales, b) vanishing print outlets, c) competition from independents.  It should get very interesting indeed when Barnes & Noble either files for bankruptcy or is acquired by Amazon.

The Gatekeepers are desperate because they are standing on walls that are turning to sand beneath their feet.  But do not miss the confession that is implicit in Patterson’s corrupt appeal; without their structural advantages, “serious publishers with passionate, dedicated, idealistic editors” cannot compete on a level playing field with independents writing books of which they do not approve.

Note, in particular, the adjectives “dedicated” and “idealistic”.  Dedicated to what ideals?  Patterson’s plea is an implicit admission of the very bias that Standout Authors such as Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia have been describing, and which those who have benefited from it have so staunchly denied.