Show Notes
Thursday night Show
10pm - Bush "gaffes" finally getting mainstream attention. Journalism professor Robert Jensen joins Mike.
11pm - Gay Marriage bashed by Bush and the Vatican (duh). The larger story we want to get into: The Growing Evangalism of the United States. Kirk Robbins of the Gay Log Cabin Republicans joins Mike
Midnight - Tribute to Sam Phillips and his Sun Label. What happened to '50s Rock and Roll? It seems to have fallen into the radio "black hole." There are formats for the 60s, 70s, 80s, soft rock, hard rock, urban, classic country -- everything but the FIFTIES. How come? Bring Back Buddy Holly, Elvis, Dion, Fatts Domino. Hey, rockers, you could win an exclusive Buddy Holly lives button with your trivia answers!
Iraq Coalition Casualty Count - click here
the Mike Webb show tonight - Thursday, July 30, 2003
10pm - Salon.com's Joan Walsh talks about recent criticism of Democrats going too left wing
11pm - Is Al Gore in the running...AGAIN? Can he be elected? (again?) Or is Dean the main man?
Midnight - The Carlyle Connection. We have scoured the net, discovering some interesting (and frightening)mainstream news items about Bush's meetings with Saudi business associates just prior to 9/11. Is this the "smoking gun" in the redacted sections of the 9/11 Report?
You'll see more stories and a link/snap of the website as you scroll down, and now a report that they have discontinued this insane idea of betting on the deaths of middleast leaders. But the mere IDEA that they DID this at all and quit only because they got caught HAS to make you wonder what else these people are doing.--
WASHINGTON (July 29) - The Pentagon will abandon a plan to establish a futures market to help predict terrorist strikes, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., said he spoke by phone with the program's director, ''and we mutually agreed that this thing should be stopped.''
Warner announced the decision not long after Senate Democratic Leader Thomas Daschle took to the floor to denounce the program as ''an incentive actually to commit acts of terrorism.''
Click For Link to DARPA's Obscene Futures Site--
White House - AP Cabinet & State
7/28/03
By KEN GUGGENHEIM, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
Two Democratic senators demanded Monday the project be stopped before investors begin registering this week. "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque," Sen. Ron Wyden (news, bio, voting record), D-Ore., said.
The Pentagon office overseeing the program, called the Policy Analysis Market, said it was part of a research effort "to investigate the broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." It said there would be a re-evaluation before more money was committed.
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as "a market in the future of the Middle East," the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea (news - web sites) missile attack.
That graphic was apparently removed from the Web site hours after the news conference in which Wyden and fellow Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record) of North Dakota criticizing the market.
Dorgan described it as useless, offensive and "unbelievably stupid."
"Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in ... and bet on the assassination of an American political figure, or the overthrow of this institution or that institution?" he said.
According to its Web site, the Policy Analysis Market would be a joint program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as DARPA, and two private companies: Net Exchange, a market technologies company, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the publisher of The Economist magazine.
DARPA has received strong criticism from Congress for its Terrorism Information Awareness program, a computerized surveillance program that has raised privacy concerns. Wyden said the Policy Analysis Market is under retired Adm. John Poindexter, the head of the Terrorism Information Awareness program and, in the 1980s, a key figure in the Iran-Contra scandal.
In its statement Monday, DARPA said that markets offer efficient, effective and timely methods for collecting "dispersed and even hidden information. Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."
The description of the market on its Web site makes it appear similar to a computer-based commodities market. Contracts would be available based on economic health, civil stability, military disposition and U.S. economic and military involvement in Egypt, Iran, Iraq (news - web sites), Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey.
Contracts would also be available on "global economic and conflict indicators" and specific events, for example U.S. recognition of a Palestinian state.
Traders who believe an event will occur can buy a futures contract. Those who believe the event is unlikely can try to sell a contract. The Web site does not address how much money investors would be likely to put into the market but says analysts would be motivated by the "prospect of profit and at pain of loss" to make accurate predictions.
Registration would begin Friday with trading beginning Oct. 1. The market would initially be limited to 1,000 traders, increasing to at least 10,000 by Jan. 1.
The Web site says government agencies will not be allowed to participate and will not have access to the identities or funds of traders.
The market is a project of a DARPA division called FutureMAP, or "Futures Markets Applied to Prediction." FutureMAP is trying to develop programs that would allow the Defense Department to use market forces to predict future events, according to its Web site.
"The rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise," it said.
It said the markets must offer "compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties."
Dorgan and Wyden released a letter to Poindexter calling for an immediate end to the program. They noted a May 20 report to lawmakers that cited the possibility of using market forces to predict whether terrorists would attack Israel with biological weapons.
"Surely such a threat should be met with intelligence gathering of the highest quality — not by putting the question to individuals betting on an Internet Web site," they said.
Wyden said $600,000 has been spent on the program so far and the Pentagon plans to spend an additional $149,000 this year. The Pentagon has requested $3 million for the program for next year and $5 million for the following year.
Wyden said the Senate version of next year's defense spending bill would cut off money for the program, but the House version would fund it. The two versions will have to be reconciled.
DARPA'S FUTUREMAP website: OBSCENE.
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FutureMap
Program Objective:
The DARPA FutureMAP (Futures Markets Applied to Prediction) program is a follow-up to a current DARPA SBIR, Electronic Market-Based Decision Support (SB012-012). FutureMAP will concentrate on market-based techniques for avoiding surprise and predicting future events. Strategic decisions depend upon the accurate assessment of the likelihood of future events. This analysis often requires independent contributions by experts in a wide variety of fields, with the resulting difficulty of combining the various opinions into one assessment. Market-based techniques provide a tool for producing these assessments.
There is potential for application of market-based methods to analyses of interest to the DoD. These may include analysis of political stability in regions of the world, prediction of the timing and impact on national security of emerging technologies, analysis of the outcomes of advanced technology programs, or other future events of interest to the DoD. In addition, the rapid reaction of markets to knowledge held by only a few participants may provide an early warning system to avoid surprise.
Program Strategy:
The DARPA FutureMAP program will identify the types of market-based mechanisms that are most suitable to aggregate information in the defense context, will develop information systems to manage the markets, and will measure the effectiveness of markets for several tasks. Open issues that will drive the types of market include information security and participant incentives. A market that addresses defense-related events may potentially aggregate information from both classified and unclassified sources. This poses the problem of extracting useful data from markets without compromising national security. Markets must also offer compensation that is ethically and legally satisfactory to all sectors involved, while remaining attractive enough to ensure full and continuous participation of individual parties. The markets must also be sufficiently robust to withstand manipulation. FutureMAP will bring together commercial, academic, and government performers to meet these challenges.
Planned Accomplishments:
TBD
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