PSA: Watch The Daily Show and Steven Colbert at Hulu

Just saw on G4 that Hulu.com is now hosting full episodes of The Daily Show and Steven Colbert. I’ve never heard of Hulu.com before, so, before I forget, I’m archiving this little fact here.

Enjoy.

Suck it, Jack Thompson

I found this video clip on Kotaku.com about a new book called Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games. It makes the argument that video games are actually good for children.

In the video, X-Play’s Adam Sessler interviews the book’s authors, Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson. Among other points, they said their research demonstrates that both playing exclusively Mature rated and violent videos games, and playing them for extensive periods of time, is a marker for a statistical increased chance of bad behavior (although, still a minority), and, in the case of boys, not playing any video games at all is also a marker for having more trouble in school or getting into fights.

Makes sense to me. Watch it.

J.P. Morgan promotes insider trading

You may have heard of the website Wikileaks already.

Last month it was in the news when a U.S. judge - ridiculously, even comically - ordered it’s U.S. based domain registrar to take down its .org address… an order which he later rescinded.

Whelp, they’re back in the news!

This time, a whistleblower used the site to release a confidential memo demonstrating how the JP Morgan company uses a loophole in insider trading law to not only sidestep, but actually promote insider trading by their wealthiest customers. Wikileaks describes how the scam works:

Documents obtained earlier this month by Wikileaks from JP Morgan Private Bank, which subtitles itself as “World class solutions for wealthy individuals and families”, show the firm has a dedicated ‘10b5-1 Selling program,’ along with a ‘dedicated 10b5-1 team’ to help its clients take advantage of the loophole.
 
Here’s how it works:
 
1. An insider client transfers all or a portion of their company stock into a JP Morgan Securities Inc. brokerage account.
 
2. The insider then develops, in conjunction with the 10b5-1 team, a ‘phased, pre-planned sales program to be executed at either market or specified prices’.
 
3. Depending on the information available to the insider (but not the public), the insider can decide whether to execute the sale or not.
 
By gaming the system this way, JP Morgan teaches insiders how to use their knowledge to create a rigged market, one in which it is the “house” that always wins, and the small investor that always loses.

They have dedicated teams working to promote insider trading. Wow.

John Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) was a leader among the ‘money trust’ that brought us the banking cartel known as the Federal Reserve System. It shouldn’t be surprising that the company that is his namesake continues his deceitful, avaricious legacy.

I’m just glad that technology (not to mention the people behind it) has provided a platform such as Wikileaks to force some transparency on these folks.

22 Terrabytes across 6500 PCs in 4 hours

Torrents aren’t just for stealing movies and music (anymore). Ars Technica reports how it’s simply the new way to move large amounts of data across a large number of users:

A Dutch university has some 6,500 desktop PCs in ten locations, which on occasion need to download 3.5GB worth of different types of updates. That’s a handsome 22.2TB in total. In a traditional client-server world, that’s some modest lifting.
 
In fact, INHOLLAND University’s IT department used to have almost two dozen servers distributed over the university’s locations to serve up these downloads. The school was able to retire 20 of them after adopting a new way to distribute updates: BitTorrent.
 
The peer-to-peer protocol allows PCs to download most of the updates from each other—the remaining servers are mostly needed to send out the first few copies and then coordinate the up- and downloading. One of the advantages of the BitTorrent protocol is that it uses bandwidth where it can find it: faster links are automatically used more.
 
Using this technology, updating all 6,500 PCs can be done in less than four hours. Previously, this took four days. Four days down to four hours for the same needs!

British History Timeline

Check out BBC’s interactive British history timeline.

I wish I could do that…

Some chick shows off 21 different accents:

Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve: the Complete Transcript

The Mises Institute recently posted the complete transcript of it’s informative video, Money, Banking, and the Federal Reserve. It begins:

“The Federal Reserve System virtually controls the nation’s monetary system, yet it is accountable to no one. It has no budget; it is subject to no audit; and no Congressional Committee knows of, or can truly supervise, its operations.“

While it’s heavily biased towards a gold standard - especially at the end of the piece - it’s a real good introduction to “how and why” the Fed “was founded and operates.” Most folks are surprised to learn that it’s neither a [fully] public institution, i.e., Federal, nor has any real “reserve,” and/or simply assume that it’s the way monetary policy has always worked in the US.

So, print this sucker out and take it with you on your next trip to the can… or, if you have a spare 42 minutes, you can just watch it here:

Nation of Criminals: 1% of U.S. population behind bars

So the N.Y. Times reports:

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.
 
Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Wow, that’s a whole lot of people. With the relative population of “dangerous criminals” rising so high, there must either be something about the American people’s character that is rotting away or else there’s some kind of hidden motivation out there - an invisible hand if you will - that is encouraging the increase.

Of course, this disproportional rise in prison populations doesn’t come cheap:

In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the federal government included, total state spending on corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the report said, states are on track to spend an additional $25 billion.

A sluggish economy and rising debt may just force the type of policy changes that collective common sense couldn’t enable on its own:

The number of prisoners in California dropped by 4,000 last year, making Texas’s prison system the nation’s largest, at about 172,000. But the Texas legislature last year approved broad changes to the corrections system there, including expansions of drug treatment programs and drug courts and revisions to parole practices.
 
“Our violent offenders, we lock them up for a very long time — rapists, murderers, child molestors,” said John Whitmire, a Democratic state senator from Houston and the chairman of the state senate’s criminal justice committee. “The problem was that we weren’t smart about nonviolent offenders. The legislature finally caught up with the public.” [...]
 
The Pew report recommended diverting nonviolent offenders away from prison and using punishments short of reincarceration for minor or technical violations of probation or parole. It also urged states to consider earlier release of some prisoners.

Indeed, cost benefit studies have previously demonstrated it would be more cost effective to just treat non-violent drug offenders rather than incarcerate them.

John King is a douche… Mike McConnell & the PAA suck, too

Yesterday was the second time - I’m aware of, anyway - that Glenn Greenwald has blasted CNN’s John King for his meager, suck up brand of journalism.

Back in January, Greenwald first mocked King for the softball questions he threw at McCain regarding his presidential campaign.

Now, in a new article posted yesterday, Greenwald chastised King for his meager effort in interviewing DNI Mike McConnell regarding the issues around the Protect America Act (PAA) update to FISA law. During the interview, King admitted ignorance of the subject up front and pretty much allowed McConnell to spout all the unchallenged rhetoric he could fit in. Hollow journalism on the campaign trail is one thing; but, sandbagging an interview with one of the government officials at the heart of pushing Congress into legislating ex post facto laws in order to hide illegal activity, and weakening civil liberties in the process, is quite another. Greenwald exasperates:

Still, it’s pretty extraordinary that CNN — the most trusted name in news — would invite a high government official onto its news program to invoke his authority and claimed expertise to scare Americans into believing that we’re all going to be killed by Terrorists unless President Bush gets what he wants, and have the “journalist” conducting the interview admit upfront that he knows nothing about the topics. What’s the point of the exercise? Why allow a government official to come onto your show and make statements that the interviewer — due to total ignorance about the subject — has no ability to analyze, scrutinize, or subject to critical inquiry? Providing a platform to government officials to make controversial claims with no scrutiny is (by definition) called “propaganda,” not journalism.

Emph mine. But, what I really wanted to draw some attention to was some background info on McConnell that Greenwald quotes from a Salon article by Tim Shorrock:

With revenues of $3.7 billion in 2005, Booz Allen is one of the nation’s biggest defense and intelligence contractors. Under McConnell’s watch, Booz Allen has been deeply involved in some of the most controversial counterterrorism programs the Bush administration has run, including the infamous Total Information Awareness data-mining scheme. As a key contractor and advisor to the NSA, Booz Allen is almost certainly participating in the agency’s warrantless surveillance of the telephone calls and e-mails of American citizens. . . . .
 
Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, CACI International and a few other corporations, is one of the dominant players in intelligence contracting. Among its largest customers are the NSA, which monitors foreign and domestic communications, and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, an amalgamation of the imagery divisions of the CIA and the Pentagon that was established in 2003. . . .
 
And in a relationship that has been completely missed in media coverage of his appointment, McConnell is the chairman of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, the primary business association of NSA and CIA contractors. As INSA chairman, I’ve been told, McConnell is presiding over an initiative to enhance ties between the intelligence agencies and their contractors and domestic law enforcement agencies.

Isn’t that something? Nah, there are no conflicts of interest, there… move along. More of Greenwald’s flair:

When it comes to claims about the need for telecom amnesty, you can’t get more conflicted than Mike McConnell. How can McConnell ever go into an interview, demand telecom amnesty on behalf of his industry, and not be asked about this? What’s the answer, John King? “To a guy like me who’s spent most of his time, in the past several months, out covering a presidential campaign, this is highly detailed stuff that’s pretty hard to follow.” Not only is McConnell never asked about this — I’ve literally never once heard any journalist question him about this — but worse, our journalists go out of their way to depict him as the opposite: the supremely objective, dispassionate straight-shooter whose only goal is Keeping Us Safe.

Well, the establishment media might not be up to the task of cutting through the Administration’s line of BS on the issue; but at least someone is. Check out The Carpetbagger Report’s evisceration of the White House’s official “Myth vs Fact” sheet on the surveillance and telecom immunity issues surrounding the PAA.

CNN Producer Fired for Blogging

His side of story is told on his blog, Deus Ex Malcontent. After being fired:

When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, “We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees.”
 
Jesus, we have a Gestapo?
 
A few minutes later, I was off the phone and out of a job. No severance. No warning (which would’ve been a much smarter proposition for CNN as it would’ve put the ball effectively in my court and forced me to decide between my job or the blog). No nothing. Just, go away.
 
Right before I hung up, I asked for the “official grounds” for my dismissal, figuring the information might be important later. At first they repeated the line about not writing anything outside of CNN without permission, but HR then made a surprising comment: “It’s also, you know, the nature of what you’ve been writing.”