Over at Flickr, I ran across a photo by Jimmy O’Donnell featuring a beautiful woman in lingerie walking in a church. Maybe O'Donnell didn’t take this photo for any of the reasons I find it interesting—maybe he took it for the mere shock value, or because he simply liked the…
Huge securities trading spike occurs before it would be possible to even receive the information electronically, much less react to it after reading it.
"[T]he Fed news was certainly present in trading centers in Chicago and New York before 2pm. The evidence is overwhelming. It is unknown how many people had access to this information - for a timed news release, it would have been at least an administrator, probably Q.A. and others. What we do know is the resulting explosion of trading just 1 thousandth of a second after 2pm, was unprecedented in the history of Fed news announcements, and much of that trading was based on information obtained before the set Federal Reserve Board release time."I'm betting that there won't be any prosecutions.
Continuing the many ways in which the Surveiller-in-Chief is resembling George W. Bush, Obama is now pushing for military action in Syria, using the retread justification of Weapons of Mass Destruction (gasp!). [More]
Recurring haunting thought: A formal democracy is not at all inconsistent with a country trending toward dictatorship. Given our bizarre national priorities (I'm referring to the various planet-destroying and hyper-xenophobic policies where the aims of the two major parties INTERSECT), one could meaningfully advocate today for a revolution by which the control of the United States government should be handed to the People. I can imagine people scoffing at this idea: "Isn't that what we already HAVE?" Sure. On the books, that's what we have. How much things have changed in the U.S. that so many high-placed prominent government officials publicly construe common folks who want to be well-informed about government misconduct to be dangerous enemies. How far we've come, that a former President declares that "America has no functioning democracy at this moment." How far we've come that it's so difficult to get so many people to wrest themselves from their TV and sports obsessions in order that they can regain focus enough to see the danger of our policies divesting regular folks of any meaningful political power. If this seems like hyperbole, check out "Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America" by John Nichols and Robert McChesney.
Excellent work by Stephen Colbert: