Author of Seven Seconds and Maximum Impact (aka Circumference of Darkness in the U.S.)
Jan 1st, 2006 by Jack Henderson
In the course of writing and researching, as I run across things I’d like to share I’ll post them here.
Seven Seconds is on the shelves in the U.K.! For readers in the United States, the status of the book is still to be determined. (I’ll write a few paragraphs about that unfolding situation in a day or two…) I hope you love it.
Jun 24th, 2009 by Jack Henderson
Well, it certainly was at the time, but not anymore.
“The Biggest Scandal Ever” was the New York Times headline on May 29, 1990, referring to the Savings and Loan bailout. Half a trillion dollars was the high-end estimate of the theft from the taxpayers; that figure sounds almost quaint by current standards, doesn’t it?
It is scandalous, all agree, but unlike any earlier scandal. By any measure, it is the largest by far. Forget the relatively puny bailouts of Chrysler, Lockheed and New York City. (Even the Marshall Plan, which bailed out Western Europe 40 years ago, cost a mere $65 billion in today’s dollars.) A greater outrage is that most of the perpetrators will escape.”
Almost 20 years later, though, just as we’ve managed to make a modest dent in dutifully paying down the S&L bailout with our hard-earned tax dollars, we find ourselves on the receiving end of another fleecing, this one 20 times as large and maybe 20 times as scandalous.
Take a stroll through the numbers here at CNN’s Bailout Tracker. As we lose half a million jobs a month, as the virtual nationalization of banks and major industries continues apace, and as we realize that the real shock waves of this crisis are yet to hit us full-force, look through those 10.5 trillion dollars in commitments and see if you can find the part that’s supposed to get us out of this in one piece. If you find it, drop me a note and I’ll post an update. Good luck with that, though; as of a few months ago our elected representatives had “no idea” how your money was being used.
Speaking of those elected to represent us, US visitors can go here to find those names and numbers. It seems to me that it’s a good time to find out if they’re part of the solution, or part of the scandal.
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Jun 23rd, 2009 by Jack Henderson
General Ali Fazli, who was recently appointed as a commander of the Revolutionary Guards in the province of Tehran, is reported to have been arrested after he refused to carry out orders from the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei to use force on people protesting the controversial re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.”
Jun 4th, 2009 by Jack Henderson
May 24th, 2009 by Jack Henderson
Artificial intelligence is back in fashion, which raises the question: Will computer intelligence surpass our own?
Others who have observed the increasing power of computing technology are even less sanguine about the future outcome. The computer designer and venture capitalist William Joy, for example, wrote a pessimistic essay in Wired in 2000 that argued that humans are more likely to destroy themselves with their technology than create a utopia assisted by superintelligent machines.”
May 22nd, 2009 by Jack Henderson
The goal of this bill is simple: direct the Government Accountability Office to complete, before the end of 2010, an audit of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and of the federal reserve banks, and provide a detailed report to Congress. The bill also retains/reaffirms the power of the Comptroller General to conduct such an investigation. Dr. Paul’s bill currently has 175 co-sponsors, and considering the timid uptake on such efforts in the past, that’s very encouraging.
Read Joe Weisenthal’s summary of this legislation here.
For US visitors, if you feel like taking some action on this, show your support for HR 1207 by signing the petition here. Find out if your representatives are among the bill’s co-sponsors here, and let them know how you feel by writing to them here.
May 18th, 2009 by Digg_Post
Few science teams can match the flash and audacity of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Last week DARPA showed off 9 future projects that tackle building blazing, secure networks, longer-flying unmanned aircraft, faster vaccine delivery, and more.
May 17th, 2009 by Jack Henderson
I suppose the two books I’ve written (and the third that I’m working on now) are historical thrillers, in that there’s a lot of inter-mixing of things that actually did happen, with things that probably happened (though we may never be able to verify them), rounded out with some other exciting things that didn’t happen at all. They’re set in a very specific time, and my hope is that if these books are still around 20 or 30 years from now, they’ll in some small way provide an eye-opening look at the beginning of (I believe) one of the most pivotal decades in the history of the U.S.A.
I enjoy hearing from readers, and this is one of the things I enjoy hearing most: Occasionally someone will have found something in the text that simply stretches their suspension-of-disbelief a little too far, and then after some research they find that the detail that blew their mind is one of the things that really happened. Here’s a recent example, written up in an article from Alternet:
Things go missing. It’s to be expected. Even at the Pentagon. Last October, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the military’s accountants had misplaced a destroyer, several tanks and armored personnel carriers, hundreds of machine guns, rounds of ammo, grenade launchers and some surface-to-air missiles. In all, nearly $8 billion in weapons were AWOL.
Those anomalies are bad enough. But what’s truly chilling is the fact that the Pentagon has lost track of the mother of all weapons: a hydrogen bomb.”
May 16th, 2009 by Digg_Post
The Federal Reserve’s recent and unprecedented actions in the realm of monetary policy have provoked a backlash among the American people. Trillions of dollars worth of loans and guarantees have been provided to Wall Street firms, while Main Street Americans suffocate. It’s time to audit the Fed.
May 11th, 2009 by Digg_Post
from The Guardian
In 1946 Observer editor David Astor lent George Orwell a remote Scottish farmhouse in which to write his new book.
“The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell’s dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war.”
May 10th, 2009 by Digg_Post
from The Guardian
An MP who was involved in last month’s G20 protests in London is to call for an investigation into whether the police used agents provocateurs to incite the crowds.
Brake has produced a draft report of his experiences for the human rights committee, having received written statements from people in the crowd. These include Tony Amos, a photographer who was standing with protesters in the Royal Exchange between 5pm and 6pm.
“He [one of the alleged officers] was egging protesters on. It was very noticeable,” Amos said. “Then suddenly a protester seemed to identify him as a policeman and turned on him. He legged it towards the police line, flashed some ID and they just let him through, no questions asked.”
May 9th, 2009 by Digg_Post
Those behind the Zeus botnet recently decided to press the big red button, bluescreening 100,000 computers around the globe. Security experts aren’t sure why yet, although they have some ideas.
May 8th, 2009 by Digg_Post
from National Geographic
Thousands of miles above Earth, a cosmic chorus is filling the heavens with a mysterious, low frequency “hiss.” That’s the conclusion of scientists studying data from a set of NASA probes designed to monitor substorms — dramatic exchanges of energy among charged particles that spark the auroras at Earth’s poles.
May 5th, 2009 by Jack Henderson
from William J. Broad at The New York Times
Wardenclyffe
May 5th, 2009 by Digg_Post
The Torpig botnet was hijacked by the good guys for ten days earlier this year before its controllers issued an update and took the botnet back. During that time, however, researchers were able to gain a glimpse into the kind of information the botnet gathers as well as the behavior of Internet users who are prone to malware infections.
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