Re: Dead Body Theatre
At 06:33 PM 07/25/2003 -0700, Steve Schear wrote: At 16:33 2003-07-25 -0700, you wrote: On 24 Jul 2003 at 9:16, Eric Cordian wrote: Now that the new standard for pre-emptive war is to murder the legitimate leader of another sovereign nation and his entire family, an artist's rendering of Shrub reaping what he sows would surely be an excellent political statement. You are a moron. If today warfare means wiping out the family of the enemy ruler man woman and child and showing their horribly mangled bodies on TV, this is a big improvement on the old deal where the rulers had a gentlemen's agreement that only the common folk would get hurt, and the defeated ruler would get a luxurious retirment on some faraway island. Here, here! Steve, did you mean Hear, hear!? Or were you calling for it to happen here? :-) Back when we had a First Amendment, that was probably legal, but since Bush inherited the presidency, it might not be... Perhaps we may even become as smart as some Pacific Islanders whose wars were fought by surrogates, the logic being that the death of one man can serve as well as the death of many in determining the outcome of a disagreement between heads of tribes, states, etc. European feudalism did that also, though Europeans were less likely to eat the bodies of the losers. Trial by Combat was tossed out of British law in ~1850, but hadn't been used for a long time before that, though dueling was still around in the early 1800s.
Re: Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools
Re: Pentagon pulls their AP plans.. It was simply too obviously free feedback (marketing data) for their domestic PSYOPs people. Now they'll have to go back to interpreting CNN (etc) polls to find out which way the sheeple are stampeding.
RE: GPS blackbox tracking
Harmon Seaver[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Before this, AFAIK, we only had to worry about getting a GPS transmitting device planted on our vehicles, which would be bulky enough to spot fairly easily by anyone checking out the cars underside, etc. Here's one that doesn't transmit, just records where you go, and that info can be retrieved later ala bluetooth from 30 feet away. http://www.blackboxgps.com Harmon Seaver Of course, if you have one of the newer 'enhanced 911' cellphones, you've done their work for them. Peter
Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storycid=514e=6u=/ap/20030729/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/terror_market_10 WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits. -j -- Jamie Lawrence[EMAIL PROTECTED] The strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. - Judge Stewart Dalzell
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 04:20 PM, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Too bad, as he should have seen the shitstorm which would materialize as soon as this actually reached the public radar screen. Now that's gone public and been deep-sixed less than 24 hours later, it will likely be the end of this particular thing. An official, above-board version is likely to be ipso facto illegal for the same reason office baseball pools are illegal: illegal gambling. If the Pentagon can run a betting pool for its employees on when some event will happen, office workers can bet on the outcome of the World Series, and anyone can bet on the numbers revealed by the Mob. --Tim May
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
On Tuesday, July 29, 2003, at 03:24 PM, Steve Schear wrote: At 16:20 2003-07-29 -0700, John Young wrote: Tim May wrote: Yes, a bunch of ideas futures markets have existed for nearly a decade. An acquaintance of mine, Robin Hanson, was actively promoting such things in the late 80s and may have been involved in some of the Extropians-type markets which arose a few years later (I recollect several efforts with varying degrees of success). Yes, Robin Hanson worked on DARPA's PAM program. Here's his e-mail about it in May 2003: Looks like Robin may have to concentrate on a commercial venture if he wants to see his ideas put into practice. And use an offshore nexus, and good anonymity and digital cash tools...just as predicted many years ago. Doing this aboveboard, and doing it with the collusion of the actors who can alter the outcome, is asking for trouble: * violation of gambling laws...as I said in other articles, betting on the death of the King of Jordan is not different from betting on the winner of the World Series. * distortion of markets by players who see more benefit in adjusting the expectations than in spending some relatively small amount of money (If Chances that weapons of mass destruction being found in Iraq by Nov. 1 is being de-rated, in a relatively thin market of a few dozen players, then someone with an interest in altering the odds can probably do so with relatively little money...especially if the money is from a Black Budget and comes from money taken at gunpoint from taxpayers.) (I can't resist mentioning that I was able to massively distort/sabotage the market in reputations that the Extropian list experimented with in 1993. I did this by buying play money (extro-dollars or whatever they were called) from other players in an out-of-band transaction. A mere $20 in U.S. money gave me a huge amount of additional spending money in this reputation market. Naturally, my reputation rose. Likewise, if Paul Wolfowitz wants the market to assess a grave danger that Norway is financing terrorism, he can use out-of-band methods to get a bunch of ringers (cut-outs, co-conspirators) to start bidding up the market. As the penalty for not guessing correctly is not clear until the outcome, and inasmuch as the money is provided by agencies, the opportunities for mischief are obvious.) * Insider trading. Letting government employees benefit from their inside information is like letting IBM or Intel employees engage in a wagering system based on KNOWLEDGE THEY ACTUALLY HAVE. (Not that insider trading is unknown in commodity or stock markets, including futures markets. But these markets have traditionally been heavily regulated and insider trading is forbidden, at least nominally. In the case of this DARPA market, the players are by definition the insiders, with various amounts of very non-public information about plans and contingincies. Duh.) And so on. So many attacks on this system. Anyway, there _already_ are very real, hard to manipulate markets in information. We call them markets. Markets for real estate, for corn, for copper, etc. If a lot of residents of Jordan think a collapse is coming, real estate prices in Amman will fall. If a lot of technologists think a return to copper wiring is coming, copper prices will rise. And so on. Betting on contrived propositions with relatively small amounts of money (toy systems) and/or with play money is not very interesting. --Tim May
Re: Someone at the Pentagon read Shockwave Rider over the weekend
Also, NYT Article was http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/29/politics/29TERR.html?th But it sounds like they've chickened out, because various people freaked about the implications. (And they only got as far as it being an incentive to commit terrorism, without getting to a funding method for terrorism or to Assassination Politics.) July 29, 2003 Pentagon Said to Abandon Plan for Futures Market on Terror By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday. Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped. Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism. Warner made the announcement during a confirmation hearing for retired Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, nominated to be Army chief of staff.
