!= != != != != != != != != != != != != != !=

Mark Schapiro, “Nuclear [Intelligence] Fallout,” Muckraker blog, 29 Aug ’08): When we were conducting our final reporting back in March, I researched Urs Friedrich Tinner—the one of the three considered most deeply involved in [A. Q.] Khan’s illicit enterprise—through the electronic database Accurint. I was astounded at the time to see that his U.S. address [...]

According to Rebecca Abrahams (“White House Emails: The Missing Link?”, Huffington Post, 21 Oct ’08), Mike Connell, the architect and cyber keymaster of George W. Bush election websites including GeorgeWBush.com and GWB43.com, the site Karl Rove used for 95-percent of his email communication…is also the CEO of Govtech Solutions, the company responsible for building and [...]

Slate’s Ray Fisman (“They Made a Killing,” 29 Oct ’08) reports that forensic economists have discovered that “the Cabots, Dulleses, or other insiders were using their privileged information to profit personally from [the] future coup” in Guatemala by gaming the stock market. What’ll they discover next? Zero? Fortunately, the article is a pedestrian prologue to [...]

Misunderstood in a class today: user-degenerated content.

NYT head (29 Oct ’08): Intelligence Agencies Face Austerity Body: Spending on intelligence operations increased by some 9 percent last year, to $47.5 billion, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday. That figure includes most intelligence spending, including the budget for the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the operations [...]

(df)

Exaggeration, it seems. Dow, 9 Jan 1970 – 24 Oct 2008: Harvard Crimson (Vascellaro, “Faculty Tries to Combat Grade Inflation,” 6 Jun ’02): The [Boston] Globe story—which was picked up by news media nationwide—focused on the 91 percent of Harvard students who graduated with honors in 2001 compared to 51 percent of Yale and 44 [...]

Cognitive dissonance. At Wikipedia, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny: Does. Not. Compute.

AP (Watkins, “Feds Say They Drive a Stake into Mongols Gang,” 22 Sep ’08): But U.S. Attorney Thomas O’Brien has asked for an injunction that would seize the Mongols’ trademarked name. If the order is approved, any Mongol would no longer be able to wear a jacket displaying the gang’s name or emblem. “It would [...]

Andrew Sullivan points to “new McCain POW footage,” but the film is a longer cut (and much better ‘print’) of the footage included here. The longer cut shows much more clearly the degree of mobility in McCain’s neck, shoulder, and left arm (for example, when he tips his ash at 3:17). At 1:07, the interviewer [...]

Bailoutsleuth notes creeping secrecy in the bailout: The Treasury Department has hired two big accounting firms to help keep tabs on the government’s financial-industry rescue program, and once again certain basic elements of the deals are shrouded in secrecy. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP will provide internal controls for the government’s $700 billion bailout fund. Ernst & Young [...]

Rich Gold using Xeroc PARC’s ZombieBoard: More images here.

Roberto Saviano on the Camorra: But in reality, it is a life of s—. They are always shut inside their homes. They have the same women who they have to share because they do not trust anyone, so it’s not true that they are big playboys. An anthro thesis waiting to be written.

Said to be a Sequoia Capital’s “recent…presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn”: The how-to bit (slide 53) is a bit thin. (26econ)

except a stoner who made 866% off it: October 17, 2008 Today I write not to gloat. Given the pain that nearly everyone is experiencing, that would beentirely inappropriate. Nor am I writing to make further predictions, as most of my forecasts inprevious letters have unfolded or are in the process of unfolding. Instead, I [...]

It seems that public figures are fair game: In case you didn’t get the message, CNN ran it front and back: Embedded video from CNN Video Naming names is good; aiming guns at people is bad. (calculated risk)

Here: To: Nettime-l <nettime-l {AT} kein.org> Subject: <nettime> how to fix a liquidity crisis From: t byfield <tbyfield {AT} panix.com> Date: Thu, 13 Dec 2007 Until just a few months ago, received wisdom held that the “modern” global financial system had become so complex and intertwingled that it had developed a de facto ability to [...]

WSJ publishes a commonsensical defense of “piracy” by Lessig, who bridles: Sorry to disappoint, but my new book, Remix, is not “A Defense of Piracy,” whatever the Wall Street Journal’s headline writers may think. Note to Larry: “Piracy” is defined by the Content Cartels, not by WSJ headline writers—and, according to the CCs, you’re defending [...]

“When Republicans say that Democrats ‘just don’t get it,’ this is the ‘it’ to which they refer.” So what about when net-heads said it about bell-heads? (the muted horn)

Dan Froomkin (White House Watch column, “Bush Just Makes It Worse,” WP, 10 Oct ’08) Although Bush didn’t announce it this morning, there are signs that he will eventually sign off on a radical, but at least theoretically effective, next move—even though it violates his core political principles and is exactly the approach his administration [...]

Krugman (“What Happened Today?”, NYT, 9 oct ’08): On a separate note, one good thing is that there haven’t been any reports of people on Wall Street jumping out of windows. That’s because the windows in modern office buildings don’t open. Yet.

It’s been widely noted that the national debt clock, erected by NYC real estate magnate Seymour Durst to protest the now-quaint US$2.7 trillion debt in 1989, has run out of digits, and that “[a]s a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been replaced with an integer—the ‘1’ [...]

So says an A-list blogger: Pretty funny.

Wilson (op-ed), “The Swill Is Gone,” NYT, 29 Sep ’08): In China, journalists have known of the poison milk for months, but weren’t allowed to spread the news because of the Olympics. MacLeod, “Many Chinese Doubt Food Scandals Will End,” USA Today, 7 Oct ’08: The current scandal, which involves more than one-third of China’s [...]

Google layoffs. Contributing factors: advertising clients looking for lower expenditures and greater efficiencies; laid-off workers spending more time smurfing the net; broadband services cut off for nonpayment.