Category Archives: international
Strawberry Fields, Cat’s Eye, Salt Pit, Britelite
Four names for US “black site” prisons. In his internal memo announcing their closure, CIA Director Leon Panetta said: Finally, let me take this opportunity to wish you and your families a Happy Easter and Passover.
Memo to Bernanke
Some financial type (attribution on request — maybe): Ben, there is real food for thought in the article below. The submarine in the picture below looks pretty crude. Given the global cash flows generated by cocaine, traffickers should be able to afford much better equipment. And I think we, Tim Geithner, and congress should seriously [...]
Also posted in crime, economics, government, idea, trend Tagged cartel, cocaine, drugs, Fed Leave a comment
Emission accomplished
An aside of rare bluntness from Reuters about one legacy of US military adventurism: The resort town has been known for its vibrant nightlife and sex trade since the days of the Vietnam War, partly due to its proximity to an American air force base at the time. The US pulled out of Vietnam in [...]
Also posted in LDCs, military, security, sex Tagged prostitution, Thailand, USAF, Vietnam, war Leave a comment
Add three zeros
(kw)
Also posted in design, government, military, security, trend Tagged China, spectacle, state Leave a comment
The New CDO
“Baseline Scenario“: One Goldman Sachs derivatives trader, who asked to remain anonymous because he is not authorized to speak about company strategy, said that the firm is planning to create a market for derivatives that airlines can use to hedge against the risk of having to return planes to the terminal or having to pay [...]
Also posted in economics, finance, government, network, trend Tagged airline, Goldman Sachs, regulation Leave a comment
Disclaimer
Xe: The joint audit by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction and the United State Department of State Inspector General released yesterday does not, as some press reports have suggested, allege that Blackwater was ever complicit in overbilling the United States government for work it performed in Iraq in 2006 and 2007. The audit [...]
Also posted in LDCs, crime, finance, government, law, military, security, trend Tagged Blackwater, corporation, mercenary, war, Xe Leave a comment
QOTD2
Paul Vixie: To underline our understanding of what DNS is, we must differentiate it from what it is not. The Internet economy rewards unlimited creativity in the monetization of human action, and fairly often this takes the form of some kind of intermediation. For DNS, monetized intermediation means lying. The innovators who bring us such [...]
QOTD
Grimmelmann: Your avatar’s arms are never going to be long enough to box with a game god whose software controls arm length. Or, as we used to put it: he who would snack with the Devil must needs use a long spork… ( jotwell | froomkin )
Synthetic sewage
“Pirates and Plants” @ Flickr, ULed 2009-07-15: Indeed: WiReD.
Carbon footprints
Trash. Albatross chick remains on the on Midway Atoll, Sept/Oct ’09, courtesy of Chris Jordan: Many more here.
KEI FOIAs USTR ACTA NDAs
Expanded: Jamie Love at Knowledge Ecology International has forced the Office of the United States Trade Representative to cough up the names of people who know what the US is secretly negotiating in the proposed multilateral Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. They are: People who’ve signed an NDA in order to see ACTA’s “internet text”: Emery Simon [...]
Also posted in LDCs, crime, digital, economics, government, knowledge, language, law, standards Tagged ACTA, IPR, multilateral, secrecy, US Leave a comment
Twilight of the idlers
NYTeims on the (game of chicken | prisoner’s dilemma | etc) faced by the *ffluent with undeclared offshore money: The whole issue has become a minefield for some wealthy families. Many offshore accounts are held in the names of several family members, who do not always agree on what they should do. Bruce Zagaris, a [...]
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Futuro-sovietica
Context for Tarkovsky: (ss)
Mechanical lions
From Cryptome:
“Think of us like a coast guard”
Jordan Zinovich and Hans Plomp: Before warlords toppled Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991, Somalia had a kind of stability recognized by the “community of nations.” As early as 1971, Somalia’s fishery was considered an increasingly promising economic resource. By 1982, Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, the UK, and the USSR had negotiated fishing [...]
Also posted in crime, economics, environment, food, government, law, media, security, trend Tagged piracy, Somalia Leave a comment
91101
NYPost: From the perspective of the CIA, the mission to Siberia, whatever its quirks, was a success. The soft bigotry of low expectations.
Rumbling Gates
WSJ (14 Aug ’09) The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [...] sold off almost all of its pharmaceutical, biotechnology and health-care investments in the quarter ended June 30, according to a regulatory filing published Friday. [It] sold its total holding of 2.5 million shares in health-care giant Johnson & Johnson in the quarter [as well [...]
Q&A
Q: To how many other problems can this point be applied? A: All.
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I’m from the Ukraine, and I’m here to help you
Bullitt County, KY, scammed by very detail-oriented Ukrainians. One small and surprisingly “human” part of a much more laborious process, documented by Brian Krebs: [T]wo of the 25 so-called “money mules” who were hired to act as intermediaries in this scam [...] were females under the age of 35 who initially were contacted after placing [...]
Journalistic ethics, NYT edition
Randy Cohen, who currently “writes the The Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine” and will write another weekly column (“Moral of the Story”) “examin[ing] a news story from an ethical perspective,” shows either (a) sloppy writing, (b) a complete disregard for national sensibilities, or (c) a sort of carpet-bombing ignorance of the arts and [...]
Also posted in architecture, art, economics, education, energy, environment, government, language, law, media, medicine, military, neighborhood, religion, science Tagged cemetery, France, history, nyt, Pere Lachaise Leave a comment
Einstürzende Neubauten
Building under construction in Shanghai collapses:
Also posted in architecture, design, security, standards, urban Tagged China, collapse, Shanghai Leave a comment
We have always been at nonpeace with Iran