Jack Henderson

The paperback of Seven Seconds will be coming out soon in the U.K.!

I just looked up at the calendar and realized that I’ve been fairly absent from the site for a little while. Time gets away from me, but I haven’t been idle. I’ve been working pretty obsessively on some new things for you, and I’ll pass along a little more useful information on that just as soon as I can…

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Evidence relating to the death of Government weapons inspector David Kelly is to be kept secret for 70 years, it has been reported.

A highly unusual ruling by Lord Hutton, who chaired the inquiry into Dr Kelly’s death, means medical records including the post-mortem report will remain classified until after all those with a direct interest in the case are dead, the Mail on Sunday reported.

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The quotation “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance“ has been attributed to a number of likely figures, including Jefferson, Lincoln, and Paine. (For you sticklers, there’s more on the probable original source here.) While I’m sure this thought occurred to each of them independently in their time, the sentiment is so enduring that it probably predates them all.

No doubt the people behind the LAPD’s iWatch program didn’t intend for their promo video to come off as Orwellian as it did to me, and I’m also sure the road they’re going down here is paved with good intentions.  Still, I don’t think this is the brand of vigilance being invoked in the quote above.

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Those of you who’ve read Seven Seconds will recognize this mental image from a scene late in the book. Coincidentally, Wired Magazine has just come out with an everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-HAARP article this week, and I thought you might find it interesting.

from Noah Shachtman, at Wired

Tomorrow, for one day only, the military will grant the public access to Haarp for the first time since 2007. Today, I’m getting a sneak peek. I say my name into a call box. The gate draws to the left. Ahead, against the slate-gray sky, resting on a small hill surrounded by trees, is a windowless six-story building: Haarp’s control and power center. Inside, five 3,600-horsepower diesel-electric generators, each powerful enough to drive a locomotive, produce the energy that Haarp channels into the heavens.”

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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.

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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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