- Intelligence

Dr Michio Kaku - Fukushima and the Future

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:41:18 -0600

The Jungle Prescription (Film Trailer)

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 22:05:27 -0700

The jungle Prescription - Film Trailer from The Ayahuasca Project on Vimeo.

The Capitalist Network That Runs The World

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:11:42 -0600

One Ring To Rule Them All.

The Core Sorcery: Centralized Control of Fiat Money + Interest.

Source: The New Scientist - October 24, 2011

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

Libya - The Real Reason

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:58:33 -0600

Who Needs 'Aliens' When You Have Psychopaths

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:42:33 -0600

Excellent Analysis Of The Situation In Libya

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:05:50 -0600

Architects & Engineers - Solving the Mystery of 9-11

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 20:23:44 -0600

App For Google Android Smartphones Secretly Records Calls

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:41:52 -0600

Source: The Guardian - August 2, 2011

A mobile application for Google's Android smartphones can secretly record users' phone calls and transmit them to malicious hackers, security researchers have found.

Once downloaded by a user, the app – which the researcher has not named, but seems to have a name relating to "System Messages" – surreptitiously stores a recording of the user's incoming and outgoing calls to the phone's memory card, according to the New York-based security experts CA Technologies.

In a blog post unveiling the finding, researcher Dinesh Venkatesan said the so-called "Trojan app" is one of the most invasive they have ever uncovered. He also warned that there is an increasing trend targeting smartphones using Google's Android software, which allows developers to submit apps with little vetting.

Google had not returned requests for comment at the time of publication.

Venkateskan wrote on the researcher's official blog: "In one of our earlier blogs, we have demonstrated how a Trojan logs all the details of incoming/outgoing calls and call duration in a text file.

"This Trojan is more advanced as it records the conversation itself in 'amr' format [which is optimised for recording speech]. Also it has many other malicious activities that we have seen in many of the earlier malware incidents targeted for Android platform."

The app, which was not named by the researchers for security reasons, asks users' permission to intercept outgoing calls and record audio before it is installed. Once downloaded, all calls the user makes will be logged on the phone's memory – which can potentially be accessed by the app's makers. The sound is filed in a folder called shangzhou/callrecord, suggesting that its author is Chinese.

Venkatesan added: "As it is already widely acknowledged that this year is the year of mobile malware, we advise smartphone users to be more logical and exercise the basic security principles while surfing and installing any applications."

Only last month security experts warned over a new strain of the Zeus virus – known to be one of the most pernicious on the internet and which targets login details for banks – that specifically targeted Android smartphones.

Almost 52m Android smartphones were shipped worldwide in the second quarter of this year – almost a fivefold increase year-on-year – according to market researchers Canalys. The huge increase is attributed to the large number of manufacturers, including HTC, Samsung and Motorola, now making handsets using Google's software.

Media Warfare - Power Struggles Of The Global Elite

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 11:26:23 -0600

The Satellite Belt Around Earth

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 15:45:12 -0600

We Are Not Alone

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 21:13:57 -0600

This is NOT standard fare for the CBC, I was stunned by this piece, I'm still actually a little in shock at how the published interview finished, I was expecting the usual insertion of derision on the part of the CBC, but it just wasn't there. Something to think about maybe....

Source: CBC - June 30, 2011

Canadian Stanton Friedman is a superstar in the UFO world, a man who can walk into a conference about aliens and be recognized the way that golf fans recognize Tiger Woods prowling the fairways of the Masters.

Roswell, Area 51, UFOs, aliens — the New Brunswick resident can cite fine details about each.

A nuclear physicist by training, Friedman keeps busy writing books, doing interviews and attending numerous conferences (he's lectured in 18 countries so far), as well as appearing in documentaries, all geared to one of the great mysteries of the human experience: do aliens exist and have they visited Earth?

Friedman will quickly tell you they have, and he will quickly tell you it is being covered up on a grand scale. Doubters beware: he will also tell you he has not lost a debate yet about the existence of extraterrestrial life.

"I have had only 11 hecklers of whom two were drunk. In addition, I have appeared on hundreds of TV and radio shows, been involved in five books, numerous documentaries and won several debates, and lost none," Friedman responded in an emailed answer to questions from CBCNews.ca.

One of the main lecturers this year at the annual UFO conference in Roswell, which starts July 1, he clearly doesn't shrink from defending his great quest, more than 40 years in the making, as you can see in this interview with CBCNews.ca.

Do you remember the moment, or moments, that you looked at the skies and thought, 'There's life out there?'

There were no epiphany moment. I read a lot of science-fiction stories when I was young and pretty much assumed there was other life out there. I read my first serious book, The Report On UFOs by air force captain Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of United States Air Force project Blue Book, in 1958.

I was a 24-year-old nuclear physicist working at the General Electric Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion Department in Cincinnati. The USAF was co-sponsor with the Atomic Energy Commission and we spent $100 million that year and employed 3,500 people of which 1,100 were engineers or scientists. In the next three years I read about a dozen other books, some of which were trash.

Then, to my surprise, in about 1961, at the library of the University of California, Berkeley, I found a copy of a privately published version of the largest study ever done for the U.S. government — Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14.

It hadn't been mentioned in any of the books I had read and had over 200 charts, tables, graphs and maps about the more than 3,200 UFO cases studied.

Most astonishing was the widely distributed press release of Oct. 25, 1955, in which the secretary of the air force, Donald Quarles, flat out lied when he said: "Even the unknown three per cent could have been identified as conventional phenomena or illusions if more complete observational data had been available."

In reality, 21.5 per cent of the cases couldn't be explained, completely separate from the 9.3 per cent listed as "insufficient Information." Thus began my crusade in the early 1960s.

How do people react to you in a social setting when they find out what you do?

No, I don't get taken to be a nut. Many people have seen me on TV and heard me on radio. Some have even read one of my books. Most people agree with me once they hear the evidence.

Fewer than two per cent have read any of the five large-scale scientific studies on which I focus. I raise the objections of the debunkers and then demolish them. It is a complete myth that most people, especially professionals, think the subject is nonsense.

I have spoken to many professional groups. There is an entire chapter in my 2008 book Flying Saucers and Science about the actual opinion poll results.

Despite the false claims of a small group of nasty, noisy negativists, most people accept ET reality even though they think most others don't. I check my audiences and find at the end of my lecture that about 10 per cent of the attendees have had a sighting. But 90 per cent didn't report it because of a fear of ridicule.

I am trying to lift the laughter curtain.

What will happen to the Earth when we discover for certain that aliens exist? And will the aliens be friendly or will they do harm to us?

I have no idea how the world will respond. I believe it will depend entirely on how the information is presented.

If we are told the visitors are evil and plan to destroy us, that would give a very different reaction from what would happen if we find out they are here primarily to make sure that we don't go out there until we learn to behave in a civilized fashion.

Clearly, from an alien viewpoint, we are a primitive society whose major activity is tribal warfare. In the Second World War, we earthlings killed 50 million of our own kind and destroyed 1,700 cities. This year we will spend $1 trillion on things military, while more than 25,000 children die needlessly of preventable disease or starvation every day.

Roswell, Area 51 and other U.S. locations play a big role in what you and others are investigating. Are there any Canadian connections to the UFO mystery?

I am the original civilian investigator of the Roswell incident and will once again be there in early July for the annual festival.

Area 51 is not a primary focus at all despite a new book with an outlandish explanation for Roswell. [The book suggests the Russians were behind UFO sightings.]

There is real evidence from all over the world including more than 4,000 physical trace cases from more than 70 countries. The Mutual UFO Network receives more than 300 reports per month.

Some interesting (Canadian) cases include the Shag Harbor, N.S., crash, in October 1967. I will be there in early August for their conference. The Stephen Michalak case of Falcon Lake, Man., was an excellent case. Chris Rutkowski of Winnipeg collects reports from all over the country.

Seek and ye shall find.

When people doubt that there are aliens and doubt they have visited here, what do they say is needed to convince them?

There aren't many doubters. The four primary rules for the debunkers are: (A) Don't bother me with the facts, my mind is made up. (B) What the public doesn't know, I won't tell them. (C) If one can't attack the data, attack the people. (D) Do one's research by proclamation, because investigation is too much trouble. All together the attitude is to put down what one is not up on.

I deal with such silly objections as governments can't keep secrets, or one can't get here from there in Flying Saucers and Science and also in Science Was Wrong, co-authored by Kathleen Marden. We also wrote Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience. Marden is Betty's niece. Again, the skeptics haven't done their homework. Their disbelief is primarily a result of ignorance of the evidence.

There are some who insist that religion teaches there are no aliens. I refer them to Dr. Barry Downing's excellent book The Bible and Flying Saucers.

It seems more people believe these days that life is out there in the stars. Are they getting sucked in by the hype of popular movies or is it something more?

I think most people have come to realize that we live in an enormous universe, which is not only huge but billions of years old and there seems to be nothing special about Earth that would lead us to believe our situation is unique.

It is easy to forget that it was less than 90 years ago that we realized that there is more than one galaxy. It is less than 20 years since we discovered many exoplanets.

The Kepler spacecraft in just a short part of its life seems to have found more than 1,200 exoplanets in a relatively tiny portion of the heavens. Many more will follow. We didn't realize until less than 75 years ago that nuclear fusion provides 10 million times as much energy per reaction as does chemical combustion. I worked on a study of fusion rockets.

We are slowly beginning to realize that technological progress comes from doing things differently in an unpredictable way and the future is not an extrapolation of the past.

Until Copernicus, we thought we were at the centre of the universe and all the heavenly bodies including the sun revolved around the Earth. Now we know the sun isn't in the centre either, and we are clearly not the big shots we would like to think we are.

People aren't being sucked in by science fiction, but a growing awareness of our relative unimportance in the larger scheme of things.

Some say the world will change more than we can understand if aliens reveal themselves to us. Do you think this is true? How might things change?

Again I can't predict how people will react since it will depend upon how information about alien reality is presented and what facts are given.

It is easy to forget that from the viewpoint of many governments of alien visitation, there is a strong national security concern. Namely how can we duplicate the alien technology for military benefit and not permit our "enemies" to know what we have learned.

I talk about this in my paper to be presented at the 42nd annual Mutual UFO Network symposium in Irvine, Calif., on July 31.

'It is time for a wake-up call. We are not alone.'
—Stanton Friedman, UFO hunter

The biggest problem is with nationalism. No government wants its citizens to owe their allegiance to the planet instead of that individual government.

People in power want to stay in power. Governments have a past history of often not taking courageous steps for the benefit of their people, but rather looking out for themselves first. The wave of unrest in the Middle East suggests some things are changing and more freedom is being sought.

One more thing that certainly needs to change is for the press to do its job and dig out the facts. One of a dozen PhD theses about UFOs (By Dr. Herbert Strentz) has some strong comments to make about the inadequacy of the press efforts. For example, how could the New York Times blindly accept the crazy notion that crash test dummies dropped in New Mexico were the explanation for bodies supposedly seen in Roswell in 1947.

In fact, none were dropped until at least six years later and all were the size and weight of pilots (175 pounds and six feet tall) and were in pilot uniforms. Witnesses talked of short skinny guys with big heads. Hardly the same thing.

It is time for a wake-up call. We are not alone.

Germany: Corporate Espionage And 'Biscuit Tins'

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 21:32:36 -0600

Source: AFP/Google News - June 26, 2011

A German chemicals company said on Monday its managers have begun keeping their mobile phones in biscuit tins during meetings in order to guard against industrial espionage.

"Experts have told us that mobile phones are being eavesdropped on more and more, even when they are switched off," Alexandra Boy, spokeswoman for Essen-based speciality chemicals maker Evonik, told AFP.

"The measure applies mostly when sensitive issues are being discussed, for the most part in research and development," she said, confirming a report in business weekly Wirtschaftswoche.

Biscuit tins have a so-called Farraday cage effect, she said, blocking out electromagnetic radiation and therefore preventing people from hacking into mobile phones, not only for calls but also to get hold of emails.

The firm, with 34,000 employees and sales of 13 billion euros ($18.5 billion), is not alone in wanting to defend itself against what experts warn are increasingly sophisticated methods of industrial espionage.

Adrien Salbuchi Discusses Nato's Institutional Hypocrisy

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 21:40:16 -0600

Julian Assange: 6 Months Of House Arrest, No Charges

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 12:03:22 -0600

In Retrospect: George Green 2009

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 21:00:45 -0600