Big Brothers Are Watching You

Per The New York Times,

"A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated [at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries] and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world . . . .

"R]esearchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved [because, as one of the researchers commented, 'this could well be the C.I.A. or the Russians.'] . . .

"Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information. . . .

"The malware . . . has not been merely “phishing” for random consumers’ information, but “whaling” for particular important targets . . . [and it] can, for example, turn on the camera and audio-recording functions of an infected computer, enabling monitors to see and hear what goes on in a room. . . ."

Still Think We Don't Need Paper Ballots?

By Greg Gordon | McClatchy Newspapers:

"WASHINGTON — The CIA, which has been monitoring foreign countries' use of electronic voting systems, has reported apparent vote-rigging schemes in Venezuela, Macedonia and Ukraine and a raft of concerns about the machines' vulnerability to tampering.

(snip)

"In a presentation that could provide disturbing lessons for the United States, where electronic voting is becoming universal, Steve Stigall summarized what he described as attempts to use computers to undermine democratic elections in developing nations. His remarks have received no news media attention until now.

"Stigall told the Election Assistance Commission, a tiny agency that Congress created in 2002 to modernize U.S. voting, that computerized electoral systems can be manipulated at five stages, from altering voter registration lists to posting results.

(snip)

"Stigall said that voting equipment connected to the Internet could be hacked, and machines that weren't connected could be compromised wirelessly. Eleven U.S. states have banned or limited wireless capability in voting equipment, but Stigall said that election officials didn't always know it when wireless cards were embedded in their machines."

(Emphasis supplied. More at McClatchy, one of the few decent print sources left.)

UPDATE: You can find an updated analysis of the stats from the last few national elections here.

Texas: the Other Canada?

Many don't realize, there actually is some cool stuff from TX (such as Southwest Airlines -- and remember, the Bushes are fake Texans).



A few more cool people, places, things from or that started (or got revived first) in Texas: Janis Joplin, Ornette Coleman, Barry White, Leadbelly, Michael Nesmith, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Buddy Holly, Willie Nelson, Roy Orbison, Buck Owens, Lyle Lovett, Meat Loaf, Dale Evans, ZZ Top (ok; but they're cool ironically), Wes Anderson, Owen Wilson, Luke Wilson, Richard Linklater, Farrah Fawcett, Tommy Lee Jones, Sissy Spacek, Ethan Hawke, Joan Crawford, Steve Martin, Tex Avery, Terrence Malick, Alvin Ailey, Molly Ivins, Ann Richards (can't resist including this quote from her speech at the '88 Dem. Nat'l Convention re- Bush Sr., just in case anyone hasn't had the pleasure: "Poor George, he can't help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth."), Walter Cronkite, Jim Lehrer, Katherine Anne Porter, Gene Roddenberry, the Dallas Video Festival, SXSW, and/or gallery, the Webb Gallery, Cadillac Ranch, regional theater (thanks to Margo Jones), Undermain Theatre, Julian Schnabel, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Judd, James Magee, James Surls, Vernon Fisher, Good/Bad Art Collective, Erick Swenson, The Art Guys, Robyn O'Neil, Trenton Doyle Hancock, lots of other cool artists and galleries, the Rollergirl revival (see the Texas Rollergirls), Kitty Wigs, the silicon-based integrated circuit, the microprocessor, Whole Foods, Austin ("more music venues per capita than any other U.S. city"), Chinati, chicken-fried bacon, fine tex-mex dining, and Big Tex!

List by no means complete; still, not bad for a state that's big but still pretty sparsely-populated.

Another NASA F-up (Not):

Per MSNBC, "NASA's online contest to name a new room at the international space station went awry. . . . The name 'Colbert' beat out NASA's four suggested options in the space agency's effort to have the public help name the addition. . . . NASA's mistake was allowing write-ins. . . . [The 230,539 votes for Colbert] clobbered 'Serenity,' one of the NASA choices, by more than 40,000 votes. . . ."

Any chance NASA secretly wanted Colbert to win? He certainly contributes to my serenity.

More at the link.

GREAT Article on AIG and the Bail-Out

in Rolling Stone.

(Seems like they and The New Yorker are among the few print media left in the U.S. doing real journalism anymore. Wonder if they're suffering as much as the print media owned/eviscerated by conservatives {i.e., most of the rest})?

Big Art Group's New Production, "SOS"

Absolutely brilliant.

The group's description says, "[t]his latest project explores futureness, survivalism, revolutionary movements, and contemporary rituals, examining the notion of sacrifice to make space for a new beginning within a supersaturated, hyper-acquisitive society. . . . A multi-camera and multi-screen set creates a nexus of environments that eventually . . . [transform] the stage into a celebration of chaos verging toward the freedom of annihilation."

The show opens with a bunch of human plushies with cameras strapped to their chests having a panic attack in a dark "forest." The photo shows part of what was left of the set after the show ended.

The use of technology was dazzling; the acting and writing were terrific, too. More about Big Art Group here.

At The Kitchen (NYC) through March 28.

Ongoing Consolidation of Organics in the Hands of Big Business

Great charts etc. here. Via HuffPo.

Could We PLEASE Get this Straight Re- AIG:

IT'S NOT THE BONUSES.

Ok, the bonuses are bad; but they're the LEAST of the problems with what's going on.

AIG is insolvent; it lacks assets or income sufficient to pay off its obligations to its existing creditors.

When you or I get into this situation, if we fail to file bankruptcy, our creditors can force us into it, to provide for an orderly liquidation of our assets and debts. We have to fully disclose all of both. Our assets are sold on terms reasonable under current conditions, and the proceeds are divided fairly among our creditors -- i.e., none of the unsecured creditors get 100% on the dollar owed them, but they all get the same percent -- there's no favoritism.

AND, if you or I get into this situation, NO new creditors come along to give us yet more money. New creditors are on notice that we're insolvent and, guess what, they don't lend us any more money! Our existing creditors can give us more or less time to try to work things out; but ultimately, THEY bear the brunt of their original and/or subsequently mistaken judgments -- not new creditors.

This is what should happen to AIG.

Instead, AIG is NOT in bankruptcy, because its existing creditors would like us taxpayers to step in as new creditors and throw enough new, bailout money into AIG so the existing creditors won't actually have to suffer any losses -- WE will be the losers, instead of them.

So, that's where our tax money's going: to save AIG's existing creditors from the consequences of their mistakes in acquiring debt obligations of AIG. THAT is what is happening right now.

The bonuses are TRIVIAL compared to the amounts being paid to AIG's existing creditors.

AIG is just a conduit. The real robbers are its creditors, Goldman Sachs -- surprise! -- being one of the biggest.

As usual, Elliott Spitzer's nailing it:

The Real AIG Scandal
It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.
By Eliot Spitzer Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 10:41 AM ET

Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?

For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

More at Slate.com; see also Newsday.

The bonuses are just a diversion.