It has been recently revealed that the TotalTerrorist Information Awareness Office (a department of the Pentagon) has spent somewhere shy of a million dollars developing a system that will allow people to wager on terrorist events and assasinations in the middle east: SF Chronicle: Pentagon to start futures market for terror attacks

It sounds jaw-droppingly callous, not to mention absurd: An Internet gambling parlor, sponsored by the U.S. government, on politics in the Middle East. Anyone, from Osama bin Laden to your grandmother, can bet over the Web on such questions as whether Yasser Arafat will be assassinated or Turkey's government will be overthrown.

If the bettors are right, they'll win money; if they're wrong, they'll lose their wagers. The site itself will keep numerical tallies of the current "odds" for various events.

Defenders of this unprecedented idea claim that it is based on a well regarded theory called Efficient Market Analysis which operates on the idea "the collective consciousness is smarter than any single person. By forcing people to put their money where their mouth is, the wagers help weed out know-nothings and give more weight to the opinions of those in the know."

Ignoring for the moment, the global political aspects of one sovereign nation running a government sponosored betting pool on such things as the assassination of the leaders of other sovereign nations, I found the implications of such a system alarming.

I recently finished reading the worlds first cyberpunk novel, The Shockwave Rider written by John Brunner in 1975. In this novel he describes a system called Delphi which taps into the national consciousness via a wagering and opinion polling system. Almost anything at all can be fed into the system. Opinion feedback is tracked and bets can be placed. The government uses the system to keep a grasp, effectively in realtime, on national opinions on any matter, allowing it to operate within what it knows are safe boundaries. The problem of course, is that the government and criminals are manipulating the system. In effect they were able to turn it back on itself so that what on the surface seemed like a tool for tracking the publics wishes, instead was a means to manipulate the public's belief system.

The parallels with this recently discovered TIA program are obvious. And in an era where there are questions about the US Intelligence Community's pre-9/11 knowledege and who is profiting from the war on terror, would it be wise to introduce a system that can both be subject to manipulation and manipulative itself? Just think of all of the parties who could benefit from manipulating such a system; everyone from terrorists, to corrupt politicians, to intelligence community insiders, to organized crime and so on....

Personally, my gut feeling is that the theory of this style market is probably sound. However I also suspect that the implementation of the market system will be clouded in secrecy making it easily controllable by powerful members of the American plutocracy. Much like the electronic vote counting systems in use throughout this country which have never been publically verified as secure because the company claims trade secrets on it. Basically the outcomes of U.S. elections are completely dependent on faith in the goodwill of the companies doing the counting. This terrorism futures market would probably be a closed secretive system along the same lines.

Actually though, I found the idea of Delphi in the novel exciting. The theory seems promising to me and I'd be curious to see such a system implemented. The only necessity is that it is developed and operated in full public view, with total public accounting of all inputs, outputs and workings of the system. I believe this could be done. I'll close off with a quote from The Shockwave Rider wherein the authoer introduces Delphi:

It works, approximately, like this.

First you corner a large - if possible, a very large - number of people who, while they've never formally studied the subject you're going to ask them about and hence are unlikely to recall the correct answer, are nonetheless plugged into the culture to which the question relates.

Then you ask them, as it might be, to estimate how many people died in the great influenza epedemic which followed World War I, or how many loaves of bread were condemned by the EEC food inspectors as unfit for human consumption during June 1970.

Curiously, when you consolidate their replies they tend to cluster around the actual figure as recorded in almanacs, yearbooks and statistical returns.

It's rather as though this paradox has proven true: that while nobody knows what's going on around here, everybody knows what's going on around here.

Well, if it works for the past, why can't work for the future? 300 million people with access to the integrated North American data-net is a nice big number of potential consultees.

Unfortunately the most of them are running scared from the awful specter of tomorrow. How best to corner people who just do not want to know?

Greed works for some, and for others hope. And most of the remainder will never have any impact on the world to speak of.

Rashômon (1950)
Took a break from work/packing to watch japanese movie Rashomon, the Best Foreign Film Academy Award winner of 1950. It's a classic film, so if you're inclined to see this sort of thing then you probably already have or already plan to so I don't want sell it too much one way or the other. I enjoyed it, although all the rain made me too sleepy to watch it on my first attempt. The moral of the story which I perceived is that it matters not what you are, but what you strive to be. That's not bad, as far as moral-of-the-story 's go.

The photo is probably too dark...sorry, the hiptop camera sucks.

I'm sitting in my car, ragtop down and sipping a horchata, in a downtown Oakland parking lot which normally at this time of night would be empty and dark, but tonight it is filled with cars and lawn chairs, all facing the windowless back wall of an adjacent building where a 40 foot tall indie documentary about Bay Area graffiti and hip hop artists is being projected.

Liberation Drive-In is a guy named Jeff with a station wagon, an LCD projector, a low power FM transmitter and an assortment of video equipment. He takes over empty downtown parking lots to show a mix of documentaries and music videos with a themes of social activism and/or underground culture.

Another film shown is a short based on the forthcoming feature documentary "A Rose from Concrete" which documents the struggles of a rising hip hop star Kev Kelley. The film follows Kelly's life in Hunter's Point, and was pitched to director Sam Diego by film maker Kevin Epps who created the acclaimed documentary "Straight Outta Hunters Point." Diego is here, armed with his camera, capturing the audience reactions. It looks like another excellent cinematic work and I'm looking forward to seeing the full final release.

People watch the films, listen to the music and walk around socializing, just like the drive-ins of yesteryear, but all with a grittier urban atmosphere. As the guy who just strolled by drinking malt liquor out of a paper sack just said, "this is the most happening place in the city right now.

--Dav via Danger Hiptop
http://AkuAku.org/

The Commonwealth Club has been running a new ad campaign all over San Francisco public transit for the past few months in order to encourage a new, younger membership. I'm actually a member of the club and enjoy it much, but the ad campaign is sort of silly.

The advertisements tout the clubs frequent guest speaker lectures and the ability for members to engage in Q&A with A-list lecturers (such as, famously, then-presidential-candidate Al Gore, or more recently Ted Turner). Each poster features a photo of a hip-but-not-too-hip hipster against a white background with a message along the lines of "I wanted to ask Daniel Ellsberg if he leaked the Pentagon Papers today, would he be tried for terroism? So I did." Another infamous one is "I wondered if success was ruining Larry Harvey's original vision for Burning Man, so I asked him" (I actually was at Mr. Harvey's lecture at the Commonwealth Club, it was a good one).

The ubiquity of the ads (they're simply everywhere if you're a public transit user) has inspired some comment, such as an article in the SF Weekly entitled So I Wrote a Snide Column and, my absolute favorite, a parody referencing San Francisco's perennial protester Frank Chu:

Tonight because I need to stay home and interview potential new housemates, I'm missing a visit to the club by Homeland Security director Tom Ridge. Also missing my chance for my own play on the ad campaign "I wanted to ask Tom Ridge if he was evil or just stupid, so I did!"

Toni called to let me know that they were talking on NBC Dateline about that all-fat diet that supposedly has remarkable success for children with severe seizures like Kai (to see all posts about Kai's medical condition click the Category: Kai link above). I turned on the TV and caught the last few minutes where they showed a 10 year old child who had beaten his seizures through the diet and is now living a normal life, even avoiding the mental retardation that usually accompanies severe seizures as a baby.

I found a web version of the piece on MSNBC Dateline's web site: Diet as possible epilepsy treatment?. It tells the story of the father of the child from the TV show, most interestingly there is a brief interview with the medical doctor who tried to convince this father to NOT try the fat diet, despite the fact that its success rate has been known for 70 years.

Larson: “You had some knowledge that this diet was probably working at Johns Hopkins and yet you dissuaded Abraham’s from attempting it. How come?” Dr. Shields: “Well because I don’t think we had exhausted all of the medical approaches yet. There were actually still other medications that we hadn’t tried yet.” Larson: “Dr. Freeman tells us that 50 to 70 percent of patients that come through his doors and get put on the diet have success. can you think of any drugs in these hard cases that have 50 to 70 percent success rate?” Dr. Shields: “Probably not that comes up to that level.”

So why are modern doctors ignoring this diet? Charlie’s own doctor has a surprising answer.

Dr. Shields: “There is no big drug company behind ketogenic diet and there probably can never be unless somebody starts marketing sausage and eggs with with cream sauce on it as a drug.”
Larson: “You are saying in a sense one of the reasons the ketogenic diet is not popular at this point is because there is not a big drug company behind it selling it to the doctors?”
Dr. Shields: “I think that’s probably true. I hate to say that, but it’s probably true.”

I happen to work within the pharmaceutical industry, as a software vendor. Like most people, I suspected that the pharmaceutical and medical industries were putting profits ahead of health care well before I got into this line of work, but my 2+ years of experience within the industry has only strengthened this view. It's terribly depressing how corporate greed is affecting our world, but that's a lament for another post.

Kai is having good weeks and bad weeks with the current medicine (the third prescription they've tried). He went a month with only a handful of seizures per day, and those only at night when he was tired. The bad weeks can be very bad though, a couple of weeks ago he had to be fed via a tube through his nose for days because of re-occuring stomach problems (which they think are related to his brain condition), and the seizures increased again.

The doctors had told Eva that he will probably be mentally retarded and possibly unable to ever learn to walk or talk, but when I visited him last week I was overjoyed to see that he is starting to learn how to walk! He took about six shaky steps toward me, it was really just wonderful. He still seems to be a long way from talking, but it is apparent that the seizures produce a lot of stress on him that makes it difficult for him to develop mentally, and that when the seizures are better under control he is capable of making serious progress. When I saw that boy on the TV segment swimming, playing the piano and walking around living a normal life, I could not help but project Kai into that picture. If there is something that can help him and it is being witheld or dismissed because of fucking corporate greed, well that just makes me angry.

Ran across a website for a british graffiti artist named Banksy. Really good art and commentary. I particularly liked some of the stencils and the quote "People seem to think if they dress like a revolutionary they don't actually have to act like one." I also liked the vandalized flea market oil paintings like the chopper addition above.

Found via Tom Ory's World

I met my friends Jessica and Toni at the Metreon tonight for a free sneak preview of Bugs!, a new 3-D Imax movie shot in the jungles of Borneo, which played to a packed house, 50% of whom were under 10 I think.

It was awesome! Tropical bugs in giant 3-D with 250,000 X magnification! It was funny, poignant and sexy just like Y Tu Mama Tambien, except with praying mantises, caterpillars and rhinoceros beatles. In 3-D. No, seriously.

I think my favorite shot was a tiny ant climbing into a droplet of water to take a drink.

Anyhow, you should see it if you can.