There are those who have been waiting to buy undilutable precious metals in response to a headline announcement from the Fed that it is starting to buy up hundreds of billions of Treasurys or MBS. This is understandable – after all that is precisely the trigger that the headline scanning robots which account for 90% of market action in the past year are programmed to do. And the worst thing that one can do is put on the right trade at the wrong time. Yet it may come as a surprise to some, that while the world was waiting, and waiting, and waiting, for Bernanke to hit the Print button, virtually every other central bank was quietly unleashing it own mini tsunami of liquidity. In fact, as Morgan Stanley puts it, “the Great Monetary Easing Part 2 is in full swing.” But wait, there's more: in an Austrian world, where fundamentals don't matter and only how much additional nominal fiat is created is relevant, it is sheer idiocy to assume that the printers will stop here… or anywhere for that matter. They simply can't, now that the marginal utility of every dollars is sub 1.00 relative to GDP creation. This means that by the time the Global Weimar is in full swing, we will see much, much more easing. Sure enough, MS anticipates an unprecedented additional round of easing in the months ahead. So for those waiting to buy gold et al at the same time as DE Shaw's correlation quants do, the time will be long gone. Because slowly everyone is realizing that it is not the Fed that is the marginal creator of fake money. It is everyone.
Will Mitt Romney's “victory” in the February 11 Maine presidential caucuses be taken away like his phony victory in Iowa? That now seems quite possible. The Maine GOP declared the former Massachusetts Governor the narrow winner of the state's presidential caucus February 11, but Romney's 194-vote margin of victory over Texas Congressman Ron Paul is being whittled away as more results have been reported.
Moreover, the state's rural Washington County — along with a few other communities that postponed their caucuses February 11 — will hold the final caucuses Saturday, February 18 and may decide the victor of the non-binding straw poll.
But GOP Party Chairman Charlie Webster insists that he will not release updated results from the additional caucuses, even as he comes under increasing fire from his fellow Maine Republicans and national Ron Paul campaign officials. In results in the three counties that have been released to the public, Ron Paul won more votes than were reported in the official results. Webster claims that the missing votes — when all of them are counted — will favor Romney, and that he is not going to give the press access to updated results. “No one has access,” he told the Daily Caller February 15. “There will be no access. We will give it to the committee on March 10. We are not going to release them [the missing votes]. People can whine and complain and plead, but I’m not going to make them public.”
In my opinion, one of the most important books written in recent years on the subject of the global arms trade and its corrupting effects is Andrew Feinstein's, The Shadow World, Inside the Global Arms Trade. This voluminous book is mind numbing in its detail, but it is thoroughly sourced and, I believe, it will become a standard reference over time. Anyone trying to understand the dark and dangerous corner of the global economy and its politics must read this book. (To be sure, I am biased because I was a minor source in this book and I consider Andrew a good friend.)
Naturally, the arms makers are not too happy with the Shadow World and want to keep it hidden in the musty stacks of your local library. I am attaching two recent essays to help you determine if this book should be forgotten. They were published on the Lexington Institute' Early Warning Blog. Lexington is funded in large part by defense contractors and is hardly impartial on all matters regarding defense spending, so the first essay is quite expected; the second, however, comes as a surprise, to Lexington's credit.
The first essay is a predictable critique of Andrew's book by Robert Trice, a retired Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin. Think of his effort as an attempt to move Andrew's book to a forgotten corner in the back room.
To understand the saliency of Trice's effort, consider his career. Robert Trice is a case study in the quintessential pattern of gorging oneself on cash flow pumped out by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex's big green spending machine. Holding a PhD in political science, he began his defense career in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, where he eventually became Director for Technology and Arms Transfer Policy — or in plain english, a resident shill in the Pentagon for promoting international arms sales — the subject painted in not so flattering terms by Feinstein. Trice then moved to Capital Hill and worked as the defense Legislative Assistant to Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) for about three years. I met him in this position because Bumpers was interested in the military reform work my colleagues (Pierre Sprey and John Boyd) and I were doing in the Pentagon. But Trice, as Bumpers' advisor, was clearly a reluctant reformer. (Although Bumpers showed initial and enthusiastic interest in our work, nothing came of it.) In the essay below Trice now slings a little mud, saying the three of us are not just wrong but wrongly motivated, because we are “anti-defense.” Soon thereafter, the presumably pro-defense Trice cashed out of Bumpers office to work in the Defense industry, serving first as a Vice President for Business Development at McDonnel Douglas (in plain english this is a marketing job and in the MICC, marketing, or business development, means greasing the skids in Congress and the Pentagon for your firm's tinker toys — which is a good position for a poly sci type, because he couldn't design airplanes at McAir or Lockheed). Trice then moved to Lockheed Martin where his business development portfolio including shaping L-M's new business strategies and operations for the global market, which of course is the subject of Andrew's book. Obviously a person with his background of bottom feeding so successfully in the MICC's money machine, especially in the international arms trade arena, comes to the reviewing table with … shall we say … a certain amount of bias.
The second essay is Andrew Feinstein's polite repost to Trice's bucket of grease. Andrew's background could not be more different than that of Trice. Whereas Trice gorged himself and became a wealthy ‘pillar of the establishment' by slopping in America's defense trough, Andrew put his ass on the line trying to rein in the excesses of that trough's South African equivalent. In the late 1980s, Andrew, a young white South African, joined Nelson Mandella's African National Congress (ANC), because he opposed Apartheid. In 1994, after the fall of Apartheid, he was elected in South Africa's first democratic election to be an ANC member of parliament. But Andrew took his parliamentary oversight responsibilities seriously, and while in parliament, he set up a kind of one man Truman Committee to investigate allegations of ANC corruption in some international weapons deals. And he hit pay dirt, but rather than shutting up when he was pressured by party elders to close down his investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption, he resigned in protest from Parliament. His political memoir, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, was published in 2007 and became a bestseller in South Africa.
With the backgrounds of these two protagonists in mind, I urge you to read Trice's critique of Andrew's latest book first (Attachment 1 below) and then Andrew's repost (Attachment 2 below) and judge for yourself who is closer to being a straight shooter — and read The Shadow World.
The Open Government Partnership is a global effort to make governments better. We all want more transparent, effective and accountable governments — with institutions that empower citizens and are responsive to their aspirations. But this work is never easy.
It takes political leadership. It takes technical knowledge. It takes sustained effort and investment. It takes collaboration between governments and civil society.
The Open Government Partnership is a new multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from governments to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance. In the spirit of multi-stakeholder collaboration, OGP is overseen by a steering committee of governments and civil society organizations.
I was asked a question by @mollsiebee from Fierce Government IT at the InformationWeek GovernmentIT Leadership Forum a couple weeks ago, that I didn’t do a good job of responding to. The question — as I recall — was why developers matter if people aren’t paying attention anyhow. Ordinary citizens need access to government data — isn’t that the point? And if nobody’s asking for it, then who cares?
Thankfully, my hairline (and other evolutionary traits) helps people to avoid confusing me with Steve Ballmer even though my message is similar. Though there’s probably a little less profit motive to it. I’ll explain.
Since the first information technology boom around 50,000 years ago with the invention of speech, there have always been information gatekeepers. Around 6,000 years ago at the dawn of writing, these gatekeepers were called scribes. Writing was a trade secret of professional scribes and understanding this technology led to great power in society. Some of the really good ones were eventually revered like gods. Check out what they have to say about Imhotep over in Egypt.
Fast forward a few thousand years and printers become the new scribes. While knowledge gets further democratized with the invention of the printing press, it still takes some capital to get your hands on a printing press. You needed not only to get your hands on a press, but even Johannes Gutenberg had to partner up with a paper mill to print his bibles. Printers become powerful folk and as literacy rates changed, the printers replaced the scribes as the gatekeepers of information.
Introduction to the concepts behind The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, a new book by Clay Johnson. The Information Diet makes the case that it's time we started being as selective with the information we consume as we are the food that we eat, then describes what a healthy diet and healthy habits look like.
Amazon Page
EXTRACT from one Review:
Johnson* makes a strong case that content farms are the media industry's equivalent of factory farms: producing cheap, low quality information to maximize profit. And if we don't educate ourselves as consumers, then we're basically doing the brain equivalent of eating at McDonalds every day… destroying our mental health and driving serious journalists, the organic family farmers of the media industry, out of business.
If the premise sounds a little depressing, it is. But a strong dose of humor and charming anecdotes make the medicine go down. And just like factory farms are depressing, the response — farmers markets, grass-fed beef, and HGH-free milk — can be empowering and delicious.
China-North Korea: China announced it will invest US$3 billion in the Rason special economic zone in northeastern North Korea. Under the deal, by 2020 China would build an airport, a power plant, a cross-border railway and improve the port facilities in the North's Rason economic zone bordering China and Russia. The 55-kilometre cross-border railway track will connect Rason with the Chinese city of Tumen. In return, China secured the right to use the Rason port for 50 years.
Comment: The development of the Rajin-Sonbong (aka, Rason) special economic zone was a Kim Chong-il experiment 20 years ago The location is ideal for trade because proximity to Russian and Chinese railroads would significantly reduce the costs and time of Japanese shipping to Europe. It never attracted investors because the area has almost no infrastructure. Plus, the North wanted investors to build the infrastructure as well as invest in the project. Thus it languished.
Chinese companies are prepared to make the extra investment as part of the national plan to develop northeastern China. They are undertaking projects of this nature in Afghanistan and Indonesia, among other countries. The aim in the Rason project is to pass on the costs ultimately to the Japanese shippers and consumers.
The timing of the latest update to the project obviously was calculated to coincide with the birthday of Kim Chong-il. China now has large economic projects on both ends of the North Korean border. The other is near Sinuiju in northwestern North Korea. North Korea's border areas are being developed as extensions of the Chinese economic system. North Korea has no other benefactor since relations with the South remain strained. That is tonight's good news on many levels.
