XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 02/18/11

Friday, 18 February 2011

Jon Stewart decided to try and jumpstart the American version by making a pilot episode for the American “Qu’osby show.” -

Remember when Katie Couric asked a few months ago if America needed a “Muslim Cosby Show” in order get rid of “Islamaphobia?” Regular readers of this site know that one exists — in Canada.

But since our neighbors to the north are so far ahead of us, Jon Stewart decided to try and jumpstart the American version by having one of his Daily Show correspondents, funny man Aasif Mandvi, create a pilot episode for the American “Qu’osby show.”

The segment does included parts of an actual pilot, but also a focus group cleverly edited to fit Couric’s Islamaphobia stereotype. We’ll let you decide who Stewart and Mandvi are mocking more:

Grandpa picks up wrong toddler at Cleveland daycare - children were bundled up in their winter clothes -

In case busy parents weren’t worried enough about outsourcing daycare pick-ups, the story of a granddad picking up the wrong toddler should do the trick.

Cleveland police say a man picking up his 3-year-old grandson from day care Thursday was given the wrong child and didn't realize the mistake until he got the boy home, according to The Associated Press.

He high-tailed it back to the daycare and all was fixed. (There’s been speculation that the mistake stemmed from the fact that the children were bundled up in their winter clothes.

If you’ve ever seen a daycare playground in the winter, you can sympathize.)

More generalized, less heart-stopping, school pick-up angst was the topic of a Wall Street Journal blog post this week by writer Jennifer Merritt, who laments how few times she and her husband have managed to pull off the school pick-ups for their son. In the last school year, she managed it once, she writes.

She worries about the effect this has on her son:

“But there are still those days where he comes home and says, ‘All the other mommies where there at 2:35 but you were not there and I was missing you.’ Of course, I know it’s not entirely true–some of those ‘mommies’ were actually babysitters. But that doesn’t make it feel any better for me.”

She speculates that her absence also takes her kid out of the play date pool. So, she’s aiming to shift her schedule so she can be there a few times a month, at least. Her husband is aiming for once a month.

“This might only ease my own angst–but that’s a start,” she writes.

Don’t Be Evil? 10 Ways In Which Google Runs The World -

As far as mega corporations in bed with the government go, Google sits somewhere close to the top of the tree. The company was seeded with CIA money and is literally an a corporate arm of the intelligence community.

The following ten facts highlight how much influence Google has, and how the company has seemingly abandoned its own corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”.

#1 – Google has intimate and long standing connections to government spy networks.

The company has established a close working relationship with the National Security Agency, the government spy force responsible for warrantless monitoring of Americans’ phone calls and e-mails in the wake of 9/11. Google is supplying the software, hardware and tech support to US intelligence agencies in the process of creating a vast closed source database for global spy networks to share information.

Google’s partnership with the intelligence network is not new. As we reported in late 2006, An ex-CIA agent Robert David Steele has claimed sources told him that CIA seed money helped get the company off the ground.

Recent disclosures under the Freedom Of Information Act have also revealed that the federal government has several contracts with social media outlets, including Youtube which is owned by Google. The contracts are said to waive rules on monitoring users and permit companies to track visitors to government web sites for advertising purposes.

#2 – Google is one of the corporations at the forefront of the government’s drive to use cybersecurity as a pretext for restricting the openness of the Internet.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that government regulation of Internet service providers (ISPs) is necessary. In fact, he said he thinks the entire concept of the Internet marketplace relies on it.

#3 – Google is reported to have jointly invested with the CIA in an Internet monitoring projectthat scours Twitter accounts, blogs and websites for all sorts of information, and can also “predict the future”.

Google Ventures, the investment arm of Google, has injected a sum of up to $10 million, as has In-Q-Tel – which handles investments for the CIA and the wider intelligence network – into a company called Recorded Future.

The company describes its analytics as “the ultimate tool for open-source intelligence”.

#4 – The recent scandal involving the company’s street view roaming vehicles accessing the wi-fi details of internet users and mapping their online activities has also raised serious questions.

Google Earth and Street View are also being used by the government to spy on Americans in an effort to collect revenue and enforce ordinances on swimming pools without safety certificates, junk cars being stored without permission, unlicensed porches, and a myriad of other petty transgressions that the state is feeding off in complete violation of the Fourth Amendment to suck citizens dry of whatever income they have left after being looted of trillions of dollars in wealth that the state has transferred to foreign banks.

Google has admitted that its cars captured much more than just fragments of personal payload data.

#5 – Outgoing Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a regular special guest of the Bilderberg kingmakers, has on several occasions displayed a complete lack of respect for the right to privacy and the Fourth amendment.

In the past two years alone he has made the following statements in public:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

People who don’t like Google’s Street View cars taking pictures of their homes and businesses “can just move.”

“I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

“We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about.”

“What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.“

“The Internet of things will augment your brain”

“Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,”. Googleimplants, he added, probably crosses that line.

“Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.”

“It was a joke,” Schmidt said of the statement. “It just wasn’t a very good one…The serious goal is just rememeber when you post something, the comptuers remember forever.”

“…the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act. It is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

“If I look at enough of your messaging and your location, and use Artificial Intelligence, we can predict where you are going to go.”

“In a world of asynchronous threats, it is too dangerous for there not to be some way to identify you”.

Two nights in succession there has been a spike in the emergency cash that ECB is asked to provide to Euro Zone banks -

ECB Overnight Loans

June 2009	$28.7 Billion
Recently	$1.2 Billion
Wednesday	$15.8 Billion
Thursday	$16.0 Billion

The ECB reports that for two nights in succession there has been a spike in the emergency cash it’s been asked to provide Euro Zone banks.

Banks have an automatic right to seek overnight loans from the ECB if they discover an imbalance on their books at the end of the business day and need liquidity.

The last time requests for overnight funds totaled more than 10 billion euros was in the run-up to the Lehman crisis, peaking at 28.7 billion euros on June 24, 2009. More recently, it’s been around one billion. But around 16 billion euros was borrowed both Wednesday and Thursday nights this week.

The immediate question is whether a Euro Zone bank in trouble. The market does not believe that to be the case.

Traders I’ve spoken to point to the fact that there is no sign that Europe’s credit markets are beginning to seize-up as they did last spring, with banks worrying about each other’s counter-party risk. That’s evident from the fact that there is no spike in LIBOR, the interest rate at which banks borrow unsecured cash from each other on London's wholesale market.

"It’s completely out of the blue," Arturo de Frias at Evolution Securities tells me. "The banks have reported earnings and no one complained about experiencing issues over funding. But if you think about the funding pool of the entire banking sector, it’s still only a drop in the ocean."

3M US Dollar LIBOR, which is the most sensitive, is still down on the session. To me, this does not indicate that there are funding problems in the European market. Yields continue to rise on Portuguese debt, but continue to be ignored by the general market.

The most common explanation for the spike is that "fat fingers" are to blame. In other words, that one bank, perhaps, typed in too low a figure on its request to borrow at the ECB's weekly funding round on Tuesday. So it’s now making up the gap with daily borrowings.

Headline figures from the ECB’s weekly tender support the idea that a regular borrower may have been absent. Only 137 billion euros was borrowed on Tuesday, 19 billion less than last week and 23 billion less than the Reuters consensus.

If the fat fingers theory is correct, the spike will appear again in tonight’s borrowing figures, released just after 3am ET Monday.

Barclays Capital is alternatively speculating that the ECB might have forced one player heavily dependent on its loans to switch to marginal lending, as part of a wider effort to ‘clean’ the system.

But James Chappell at Olive Tree says that would surprise him. "For banks to be made entirely reliant on more expensive, overnight funding would create greater systemic risk and possibly panic in the market," he tells me. "The ECB is more focused in trying to get EU governments to buy their own peripheral debt as a way to reduce reliance on it as a lender of last resort."

Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that Euro Zone’s banks still borrowed 137 billion euros at the ECB’s weekly tender. "It’s indicative of how many individual banks have loans that exceed deposits," argues Chappell.

"Under normal circumstances that would make them structurally dependent on wholesale funding from the market. But the stress that still exists in the market means they are totally locked out from wholesale funding if they’re located in Greece, Portugal and Ireland."

U.S. Energy Lab Missing Cocaine, Amphetamine Samples -

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory failed to properly track cocaine, amphetamines, opium and black tar heroin that undergoes forensic evidence testing and other uses, leaving personnel unable to determine if the drugs had been misused or misappropriated, according to a federal report released Thursday.

Some drugs were missing, while opium and black tar heroin were found in greater amounts than lab records showed were

purchased legally, the Energy Department's inspector general said in the report.

"I don't think that the inspector general's office said there was anything nefarious going on here," lab spokesman Jim Bono said. "What they pointed out was less than stellar record-keeping. And we agree."

Employees at Livermore, one of the federal government's top science labs, handle as many as 42 different kinds of controlled substances. Illicit drugs are kept at the lab mainly to use as controls when testing whether drugs seized by law enforcement agencies are what they appear to be.

The lab is also officially registered to use drugs for biomedical research and in its health clinic. Workers are required under federal law to track the use closely, with penalties that can include fines up to $10,000 per violation.

The report, however, said employees failed to adequately monitor at least six of the 42 varieties of drugs on site. It noted

quantities of an amphetamine known as MDA had disappeared between 2004 and 2009, and that five times more opium and 20 times more black tar heroin was found at the lab than records accounted for.

"Livermore was in possession of additional quantities of high-risk, controlled substances without any documentation showing that they existed," the report said.

Sloppy record-keeping meant that "responsible personnel were not in a position to determine if controlled substances were purchased and then misused or misappropriated," it added.

The inspector general's report said records showed the lab had 12 milligrams of heroin on hand. But the actual weight of the sample was 244 milligrams.

Bono said scientists at the lab believe the dramatic weight increase may have simply resulted from the drug sample absorbing moisture from the air.

In addition, inspectors found records at the lab for one bottle of cocaine hydrochloride but no references to the amount inside. There were also references to two additional shipments of cocaine hydrochloride in 2006, but it was unclear if those shipments ever arrived.

Bono said the lab keeps a gram or less of all but two of the substances, and all controlled substances are kept in a safe. Meanwhile, drugs sent by law enforcement are immediately destroyed during the forensic testing, he said.

Officials with the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, which operates the labs, agreed that a more rigorous tracking system was needed at the lab.

Associate NNSA Administrator Gerald Talbot Jr. wrote in a letter that Livermore managers immediately began changing inventory procedures after the inspector general reported problems last month.

Talbot also noted that Livermore's analytical lab has not purchased any drugs for forensic science in at least two years, but inspectors said missing records meant there was no evidence that was true.

Lawrence Livermore has long served as one of the nation's key labs for nuclear research. More recently the lab has focused on measures to counter possible chemical and biological terrorist attacks.

The lab has faced criticism for lapses in the past.

In the 1980s, six Livermore lab workers were arrested and successfully prosecuted for making drug deals in in a restricted plutonium research building.

In 2005, the U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board found the lab was storing plutonium — the main material used for making nuclear bombs — in food and paint cans. The lab in 2007 was fined $450,000 after another federal agency found that a former scientist sent two open vials of anthrax across the country.

"Livermore Laboratory has a history of accounting problems with both nuclear materials and biological agents," said Marylia Kelley, executive director of Tri-Valley CAREs, a watchdog group that monitors the lab. "We're dismayed but not surprised that they have an accounting problem with the controlled substances."