Category Archives: Media

Climate-Gate: Summary

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I found this excellent summary posted by a contributor to the New York Times blog of the evidence of manipulation of data in the outed emails:

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)

• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)

• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709).

Analysis of impact here. Wow!

• Phil Jones describes the death of sceptic, John Daly, as “cheering news“.
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)

• Phil Jones says he has use Mann’s “Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series “…to hide the decline”. Real Climate says “hiding” was an unfortunate turn of phrase.(0942777075)

• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)

• Mann thinks he will contact BBC’s Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)

• Kevin Trenberth says they can’t account for the lack of recent warming and that it is a travesty that they can’t.(1255352257)

• Tom Wigley says that Lindzen and Choi’s paper is crap.(1257532857)

• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn’t matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)

• Ben Santer says (presumably jokingly!) he’s “tempted, very tempted, to beat the crap” out of sceptic Pat Michaels. (1255100876)

• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to ‘”contain” the putative Medieval Warm Period’. (1054736277)

• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Tom Wigley say that Keith Briffa has got himself into a mess over the Yamal chronology (although also says it’s insignificant. Wonders how Briffa explains McIntyre’s sensitivity test on Yamal and how he explains the use of a less-well replicated chronology over a better one. Wonders if he can. Says data withholding issue is hot potato, since many “good” scientists condemn it.(1254756944)

• Briffa is funding Russian dendro Shiyatov, who asks him to send money to personal bank account so as to avoid tax, thereby retaining money for research.(0826209667)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)

• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)

• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be “hiding behind them”.(1106338806)

• Overpeck has no recollection of saying that he wanted to “get rid of the Medieval Warm Period”. Thinks he may have been quoted out of context.(1206628118)

• Mann launches RealClimate to the scientific community.(1102687002)

• Santer complaining about FoI requests from McIntyre. Says he expects support of Lawrence Livermore Lab management. Jones says that once support staff at CRU realised the kind of people the scientists were dealing with they became very supportive. Says the VC [vice chancellor] knows what is going on (in one case).(1228330629)

• Rob Wilson concerned about upsetting Mann in a manuscript. Says he needs to word things diplomatically.(1140554230)

• Briffa says he is sick to death of Mann claiming his reconstruction is tropical because it has a few poorly temp sensitive tropical proxies. Says he should regress these against something else like the “increasing trend of self-opinionated verbiage” he produces. Ed Cook agrees with problems.(1024334440)

• Overpeck tells Team to write emails as if they would be made public. Discussion of what to do with McIntyre finding an error in Kaufman paper. Kaufman’s admits error and wants to correct. Appears interested in Climate Audit findings.(1252164302)

• Jones calls Pielke Snr a prat.(1233249393)

• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

Finished in next post …

November 21st, 2009
11:29 am
Continued from previous:

• Reaction to McIntyre’s 2005 paper in GRL. Mann has challenged GRL editor-in-chief over the publication. Mann is concerned about the connections of the paper’s editor James Saiers with U Virginia [does he mean Pat Michaels?]. Tom Wigley says that if Saiers is a sceptic they should go through official GRL channels to get him ousted. (1106322460)
[Note to readers – Saiers was subsequently ousted]

• Later on Mann refers to the leak at GRL being plugged.(1132094873)

• Jones says he’s found a way around releasing AR4 review comments to David Holland.(1210367056)

• Wigley says Keenan’s fraud accusation against Wang is correct. (1188557698)

• Jones calls for Wahl and Ammann to try to change the received date on their alleged refutation of McIntyre [presumably so it can get into AR4](1189722851)

• Mann tells Jones that he is on board and that they are working towards a common goal.(0926010576)

• Mann sends calibration residuals for MBH99 to Osborn. Says they are pretty red, and that they shouldn’t be passed on to others, this being the kind of dirty laundry they don’t want in the hands of those who might distort it.(1059664704)

• Prior to AR3 Briffa talks of pressure to produce a tidy picture of “apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data”. [This appears to be the politics leading the science] Briffa says it was just as warm a thousand years ago.(0938018124)

• Jones says that UK climate organisations are coordinating themselves to resist FoI. They got advice from the Information Commissioner [!](1219239172)

• Mann tells Revkin that McIntyre is not to be trusted.(1254259645)

• Revkin quotes von Storch as saying it is time to toss the Hockey Stick . This back in 2004.(1096382684)

• Funkhouser says he’s pulled every trick up his sleeve to milk his Kyrgistan series. Doesn’t think it’s productive to juggle the chronology statistics any more than he has.(0843161829)

• Wigley discusses fixing an issue with sea surface temperatures in the context of making the results look both warmer but still plausible. (1254108338)
• Jones says he and Kevin will keep some papers out of the next IPCC report.(1089318616)

• Tom Wigley tells Mann that a figure Schmidt put together to refute Monckton is deceptive and that the match it shows of instrumental to model predictions is a fluke. Says there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model output by authors and IPCC.(1255553034)

• Grant Foster putting together a critical comment on a sceptic paper. Asks for help for names of possible reviewers. Jones replies with a list of people, telling Foster they know what to say about the paper and the comment without any prompting.(1249503274)

• David Parker discussing the possibility of changing the reference period for global temperature index. Thinks this shouldn’t be done because it confuses people and because it will make things look less warm.(1105019698)

• Briffa discusses an sceptic article review with Ed Cook. Says that confidentially he needs to put together a case to reject it (1054756929)

• Ben Santer, referring to McIntyre says he hopes Mr “I’m not entirely there in the head” will not be at the AGU.(1233249393)

• Jones tells Mann that he is sending station data. Says that if McIntyre requests it under FoI he will delete it rather than hand it over. Says he will hide behind data protection laws. Says Rutherford screwed up big time by creating an FTP directory for Osborn. Says Wigley worried he will have to release his model code. Also discuss AR4 draft. Mann says paleoclimate chapter will be contentious but that the author team has the right personalities to deal with sceptics.(1107454306

Checking Back On Old Posts

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Delving into the archives is a lot of fun. It´s uncanny, how things turned out…

Check this post from October 9, 2008:

(Mind you, I hadn´t come across Deep Capture at that point. I started reading it in the spring of this year. I think I came across a link to it on Doug Boggs´blog – The Banterer)

October, 2009 2008

Do Statistics Back Claims of Complete Credit Freeze?

“Many commentators claim, however, that virtually no transactions are occurring in this market. These claims are completely false. For the week that ended October 1, which is the most recent week currently reported, total commercial paper outstanding amounted to $1,607 billion. Yes, this amount was down from the $1,702 billion reported for the previous week, but is a 5.6 percent drop a good reason to panic? If we go back to March 2008, when nobody was talking excitedly about the commercial market’s “freezing up,” we find that the total amount outstanding, on average, was $1,822 billion, or only 13 percent more than last week. In March, the market was working fine; now it’s “locked up.” This sort of hyperbole, with which we are being bombarded hourly around the clock, is totally without a basis in the facts…..”

Robert Higgs, suggesting that some people are fomenting panic. He asks why.

Comment:

The answer lies in asking yourself:

Who has benefited so far? How? What do they want to happen?

Paulson Plan Premeditated?

Here’s Bill Engdahl tying up the loose ends of my piece on Paulson on how Paulson’s plan benefits the three new super banks, Goldman, JPMorgan Chase, and Citi and how they would be used to dominate global, especially European, banking.

Interbank Wars – Latest

The latest in Citi’s fight with Wells Fargo is that Citi has terminated negotiations and is planning to pursue breach of contract against Wells, so Wells is going ahead with its deal. Citi has Goldman Sachs connections: Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and a former Goldman chief is a director.

Meanwhile, with regard to Bear’s demise, here is a piece arguing that JPMorgan was involved in gold price manipulation under cover of their bail out of Bear this spring. JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon sits on the Board of the NY Federal Reserve and as such was privy to the NY Fed’s actions re Bear Stearns.

Media Trix

Bill O’Reilly, not usually my favorite person, has been pretty good on standing up to the bail-out. This evening, he had a clip from an NBC skit on the sale of subprime mortgages to Wachovia by a couple, the Sandlers. It mocks Barney Frank’s role in eliminating oversight of Fannie and Freddie. Apparently the video was edited to remove the reference to Frank. The Sandlers had a long list of progressive groups they donated to (including Move On.org).

O’Reilly’s tack seems to be that the positions of those groups is undermined by the funding. That part is far-fetched, but it is time someone pointed out that not everyone affected by the decline in housing prices is an innocent. Many people made fortunes during the boom and are making more money from the bust.

Update – Market Moves Or CyberWars?

Another amazing day. I walked out of the house for 2 hours to buy a laptop for traveling, since my old one had mysteriously lost its internet connectivity. When I came back, the market was closing with a sell off, down 7% (679 points).

It began in the morning when
Paulson announced that insurance companies were in for trouble. That set off the selling in the bank and insurance stocks, including regional bank funds.

The whole thing was compounded by the fact that today was the day the ban on short-selling around 1000 financial and finance related stocks was lifted, so short-sellers were pouncing.

[Companies on the SEC’s list slid 18 percent on average during the ban, compared with 24 percent drop for all financial companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index].

Then, General Motors had a bad day: Standard &Poor threatened to downgrade it (as well as Ford) to junk. GM shares got beaten down under $5; Ford was down over 20% too.

You had to wonder at the timing.

1) It’s the Jewish holiday, Yom Kippur, today. Recall that the selling began the evening of Rosh Hashanah. Remember that old saw – sell Rosh Hashanah, buy Yom Kippur? Markets are weaker at the time…

2) The declines came on the one-year anniversary of the closing highs of the Dow and the S&P. The Dow has lost 5,585 points, or 39.4 percent, since closing at 14,164.53 on Oct. 9, 2007. It’s the worst run for the Dow since the nearly two-year bear market that ended in December 1974 when the Dow lost 45 percent.

3) The decline is 7 years from 9/11

Anyway, when I got back the damage had been done.

[I ended up buying my computer at a shop that sold refurbished electronics in a rather shady side of town. A cop car was pulling away just as I walked in. But having just been a spectator to one of the biggest bank heists in history, I suddenly found the grungy looking characters hanging around rather harmless].

James Altucher, a trader, has this to say at The Street:

“The single biggest reason the stock market has fallen in the past five days is hedge fund liquidations. Of the top 20 hedge funds in the world, something like 18 are down 20% or more this year. They are getting redemptions, they are liquidating, they are selling stocks with reckless abandon to raise cash. Our job as good investors is to give them liquidity and take their bargain-basement merchandise off of their hands. Let’s get their selling over with so we can make money.”

Well, that’s evident. There was big selling, especially at the end, the kind from sell signals going off in program trading.

Morton Kondracke on FOX News in the evening was telling us sagely that it’s not a liquidity issue, it’s a confidence issue, and (get this) the answer is to create a global central bank. Right. The solution to a confidence problem is to give the markets to the confidence-men.

A note on cyberwarfare might be apposite hear [sic]. I dig it up from an old article I wrote that references Laurent Murawiec’s now notorious power-point presentation in 2002 advocating seizing Saudi oil fields. Murawiec is connected to Donald Rumsfeld’s Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) which makes InfoWars central to the battle ground.

“In all these cases, IW involves creating phantom cyber-images, which can include phantasms of nonexistent trains, airplanes, stock market orders, and bank transfers; false impressions of the enemy’s troop strength and one’s own, of supplies and movements, of fake attacks and all-too-real defenses; and phantom images of the enemy’s leaders doing evil things on screen because one has video-morphed images of them doing them so.

“Information warfare is not about machines or even electrons. It is about people’s minds, society’s functions, and armies’ strategies. Cyberspace endows us — and our enemies — with new and extraordinary means with which to achieve our respective aims. “We have only begun to cyber-fight….”

More at “Tom Tancredo Takes Out Mecca: The Cyber Wars Playing Near You” (Dissident Voice, August 8, 2007)

Brown Calls Climate-Skeptics Flat-Earthers; IPCC Calls Hackers Sophisticated

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Gordon Brown, Britain´s PM and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, takes to peevish name-calling over the growing response to Climate-gate:

“The Prime Minister launched an outspoken attack on climate-change sceptics amid growing signs of public doubts about the scientific and political consensus on the environment.”

—  Telegraph, December 6

Apparently, it´s unwashed climate-bloggers who are anti-scientific, not the agitprop team masquerading as independent scientists that got outed at East Anglia for such trivial matters as manipulating professional journals, doctoring research, defying freedom of information requests, and conspiring to destroy vital records that correctly belong to the public.

No, no, that wouldn´t be unscientific says Brown.

The real villains of the story are the people who conclude from this revealing tableau that the science of global warming may need to go a bit further before it underpins a global taxation regime likely running to billions, if not trillions.

“With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics. We know the science. We know what we must do.”

In short, act first, think later.

Obviously, Brown is also taking a leaf out of the book of whoever it was who said, strength lies not in defence but in attack…..

At least, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) disagreed and said the matter could not be swept under the carpet; it would be investigated.

Meanwhile, some speculation here on something that at first bothered me —  whether this hack, which first showed up on Russian servers, is connected to Russian crime or even to the Russian government. The emails, posted over a 15 year period ending November 12,  were sent on October 12  to the BBC, which didn´t respond. Then,  realclimate (a pro AGW site) was hacked and the data uploaded there. But the site was quickly shut down by the owners. Then, a link was posted  via a Saudi computer on The Air Vent, a climate skeptic blog, with a link to a computer in Tomcity in Tomsky, Siberia.

“The server is used mainly by Tomsk State University, one of the leading academic institutions in Russia, and other scientific institutes, according to the Mail on Sunday.”

The vice chairman of the IPCC thinks the hack shows evidence of being sophisticate and wellfunded.

But frankly, so what if the hackers were Russian? Climate science is international and cap and trade is international. If there were repeated freedom of information requests that the researchers  blocked, then it´s vital for the data to be in the public domain.

So, the speculation is interesting, but essentially irrelevant….and at this stage, suspiciously misleading.

The hackers have the last word on this:

“We feel that climate science is, in the current situation, too important to be kept under wraps. We hereby release a random selection of correspondence, code, and documents. Hopefully it will give some insight into the science and the people behind it.”

Or as someone said: NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.

If we have a global government (and we have), then everyone all over the world has a right to the information behind that government´s policies.

Climate Chief Jones Steps Down

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The Winnipeg Free Press notes that chief climate book-cooker Phil Jones has announced he´s stepping down. It then comes out swinging in defense of the true scientific spirit, let the carbon footprints fall where they may:

“Many skeptics have had their doubts about the climate data championed by the IPCC and the CRU, but one of them, Steve McIntyre, a retired mathematician and policy analyst, decided to do something about it. McIntyre has been indefatigable in his efforts to get the raw data and computer codes from the climate science community so he could check whether or not their work was straight.

But the climate scientists at CRU and elsewhere have denied McIntyre’s information requests for years. Phil Jones, the head of the climate-change body at CRU, even emailed he’d destroy the data rather than let McIntyre have it. Jones has announced he is stepping down from his post….

… a tribe of incestuous climate scientists may have actively conspired to undermine the peer-review process.

The climate-change industry, along with people like Al Gore, has slammed skeptics for not publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. What the Climategate documents reveal is that this small group of scientists, who often peer-review each other’s work as well as skeptical articles, have discussed ways of keeping findings they don’t like out of the peer-reviewed literature as well as the IPCC reports, even if it required trying to oust editors, boycott certain journals, or to reclassifying a prestigious journal that publishes skeptical articles as a fringe journal unworthy of consideration. They also discuss their specific intention to exclude contrary findings from the IPCC reports, even if they have to redefine what the peer-reviewed literature is!

Science is vitally important for the operation of a highly technological society, and that science must be open, transparent and must adhere to the scientific method. The institution of science has no place in it for hiding data, hiding data-processing, shaping data to conform to pre-existing beliefs, undermining the peer-review process, cherry-picking reports in order to slant political IPCC reports or slandering critics by comparing them with flat-Earthers, moon-landing conspiracy theorists or holocaust deniers. Let the Climategate hearings begin.”

My Comment:

I hope this will make the lay public much more skeptical of the much touted academic process called “peer review.” Peer review, in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous “scientists,” turns out to be nothing much more than a PR gimmick to enhance the authority of certain points of view.

Of course, anyone who´s spent any time at all in academia already knows this.  Graduate students quickly find out that dissertations are written not because of any intrinsic scholarly merit in the project, but because professor x can get grant y, which will let student z graduate and perhaps get a foot into the tenure system at university abc, where professor x´s old buddy j needs someone else to support his agenda. And so on. The process, because it involves grubbing for money more than following the inherent worthiness of a project, naturally promotes the most political and street-smart operatives rather than the most scientifically gifted or creative researchers.

When academic work is driven by government funding, the end product is not science but propaganda for government programs. What a shock.

Climategate: Freakonomics Author Says Climate Models Driven By Funding

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“Freakonomics” co-author, Stephen J. Dubner weighs in on Climate-gate in The New York Times:

“The current generation of climate-prediction models are, as Lowell Wood puts it, “enormously crude.” … “The climate models are crude in space and they’re crude in time,” he continues. “So there’s an enormous amount of natural phenomena they can’t model. They can’t do even giant storms like hurricanes.”

There are several reasons for this, [Nathan] Myhrvold explains. Today’s models use a grid of cells to map the earth, and those grids are too large to allow for the modeling of actual weather. Smaller and more accurate grids would require better modeling software, which would require more computing power. “We’re trying to predict climate change 20 to 30 years from now,” he says, “but it will take us almost the same amount of time for the computer industry to give us fast enough computers to do the job.”

That said, most current climate models tend to produce similar predictions. This might lead one to reasonably conclude that climate scientists have a pretty good handle on the future.

Not so, says Wood.

“Everybody turns their knobs” — that is, adjusts the control parameters and coefficients of their models — “so they aren’t the outlier, because the outlying model is going to have difficulty getting funded.” In other words, the economic reality of research funding, rather than a disinterested and uncoordinated scientific consensus, leads the models to approximately match one another. It isn’t that current climate models should be ignored, Wood says — but, when considering the fate of the planet, one should properly appreciate their limited nature.”

Dubner´s piece reads Climate-gate as a kind of Rorscharch test for pundits. If you´re pro AGW, then all this is a tempest in a tea-cup (Paul Krugman). If you´re anti AGW, (James Delingpole), then it´s the greatest scientific scandal of the century.

Krugman:

“All those e-mails — people have never seen what academic discussion looks like. There’s not a single smoking gun in there. There’s nothing in there. And the travesty is that people are not able to explain why the fact that 1988 was a very warm year doesn’t actually mean that global warming has stopped. I mean, that’s loose wording. Right? Everything is about — we’re really in the same situation as if there was one extremely warm day in April. And then people are saying, well, you see, May is cooler than April, there’s no trend here. And that’s what — the travesty is how hard it has been to explain…”

Delingpole:

“If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW.”

Well, I think of myself as a critic, but I don´t see the scandal right now as definitively one or the other — either game, set and match…..or a fizzle. It´s obviously a well-timed and massive hit to AGW, but I can think of worse things done in the name of science….from experiments in mind-control on unsuspecting patients… to Lysenko…..

As for its impact on AGW, I´m afraid the spin-machine will quickly rewrite the significance of some of the language used by the rogue scientists.

Still, at the end of the day, it all helps to erode people´s trust in expert authority..and that is always a good thing.

The Devious Web (Correction)…

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I notice that Gary Weiss commented on Patrick Byrne’ post on this blog, describing the post as a sample of  obsessive behavior about naked short selling.

I have nothing to say to that, except that people who’ve had to battle a number of foes can sometimes become what’s called hypervigilant. I’ve certainly had the experience.

But that’s not my point here.  I bring up the post only because Weiss writes like someone who’d never come across me before, duly (and snarkily) noting the “obscurity” of this blog. Well and good. No offense taken. We like our obscurity…it keeps us meek. And we’re told the meek will inherit the earth…or at least, what’s left of it after our oligarchs finish raping it.

However, I bring this up not to air any wound to my amour propre but because Judd Bagley, the main reporter at award-winning business blog Deep Capture, has accused Weiss of using sock puppets on wiki, and has posted screen shots to prove it. [It’s not germane to this tale that  too uses sock-puppets].

One of Weiss’s alleged sock-puppets on wiki, says , goes by the name, MantanMoreland (other names used there and elsewhere include Samiharris – at wiki – and Tom Sykes – at Daily Kos and other places).

Now, it so happens that when I was trying to get rid of my web-stalker, Tony R, I ran into someone called Mantanmoreland on the message boards that he haunted. Was this Weiss? Or was it someone else? You judge.

Correction:  I have crossed out the section below where I have incorrectly identified Tony R as someone by the name of Villasenor, whose postings/m.o. seemed similar to me on many counts. He has denied it (see comment section). My post resumes after the crossed out section.
Interestingly, Ry__s also claims he is not Ry__s.

[However, V doesn’t deny that – like R__s he uses multiple aliases, some very similar, frequents the same message boards, and attacks similar things].

Fair enough. I’ve added a correction. It makes no difference to my claim about R__ls or about Mantanmoreland, only it leaves me still in the dark who this person Ry__ls is.


Since the suit lists multiple aliases for him and some of these aliases resemble the multiple aliases that R___ls uses, their targets are similar, and their venues and forums often identical, it is an understandable error, if it’s one.

In any case, I will use R__ls name and strike through V’s, to avoid giving offense/slandering the wrong person….although it’s clear that neither of these two mind slandering other people.

I’ve no axe to grind in the matter.

To recap: V is a one-time stock-dealer who was fined by the NASD. He’s also a small-time racketeer (http://mindbodypolitic.org/2009/09/27/blogger-credibility/e http://listsearches.rootsweb.com/th/read/ARIZONA/2005-06/1118951523) and a former groupie of securities fraudster, Amr Elgindy and his Anthony Pacific site. (http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=22945870). In whatever time is left over from that, he’s given to web stalking and harassing, for instance, of a (http://siliconinvestor.advfn.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=15095618mber)

Just to be clear, I am agnostic about the merits of any of his claims about, who might be doing something illegal, for all I know. I mention this just to show that has a history of this sort of thing.

[With no cause at all, Tony R has also libeled Georgetown University professor, James Angel, because of a financial film he made that that didn’t conform to his ideas (as far as I recall the subject).

Anyway, I approached a number of of sites (such as, Indymedia, KYCNews, and the SEC complaints board) to have them remove Tony R’s libels and to find out how to make him desist. It turned out he was in Guatemala, so it would be hard for me to do anything legally about him. I was also told he was likely to just switch aliases and ratchet up the harassment, if I went after him. In fact, whenever I mentioned his most common alias name, Tony R, he would show up like lightning on this board and spam me (that’s why I’m not using his complete name).

Now here’s the interesting part. While I was trying to find out more about Ry__s, I came across an irate exchange between him (under one of his many aliases http://www.chillingeffects.org/uncat/notice.cgi?NoticeID=1748) and someone called Mantanmoreland. Note: it was on a message-board (not on wiki).

I wrote to Mantanmoreland (it was in February 2008), asking if he knew anything more about Tony R. and we went back and forth about it for some two weeks, exchanging around two dozen emails, most of which I still have. Those emails went under my name. In them I explained that I’d become the unwitting target of this Tony R, solely because I’d been hired to write a book with the president of a company that Tony R. was fixated about.

Here’s my question. Deep Capture says unequivocally that Mantanmoreland is Gary Weiss. Weiss denies it equally flatly. Now, I exchanged dozens of emails only a year ago with Mantanmoreland about a situation that he could hardly forget, since he had his gripe with Tony R too. But Weiss’ recent blog post seems to indicate that he has no idea who I am.

That leaves only one possibility. Either  Weiss or Bagley is in error (to put it as mildly as possible)…

Which is it? And what would that mean? And does that have anything to do with the recent (thwarted) attempt to delete my wiki page?

Added: As a matter of fact, by assessing the various reactions to this post (who posted, where and on what forums), I clarified the answer to the above question to my satisfaction…

Rewriting of History Underway

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Taibbi on the tea-parties, being sloppy with his facts again, all in the name of rhetoric:

“It’s amazing, literally amazing to me, that it wasn’t until Obama pushed through a package containing a massive public works package and significant homeowner aid that conservatives took to the streets. In other words, it wasn’t until taxes turned into construction jobs and mortgage relief that working and middle-class Americans decided to protest. I didn’t see anyone on the street when we forked over billions of dollars to help JP Morgan Chase buy Bear Stearns. And I didn’t see anyone on the street when Hank Paulson forked over $45 more billion to help Bank of America buy Merrill Lynch, a company run at the time by one of the world’s biggest assholes, John Thain. Moreover I didn’t see any street protests when the government agreed to soak up hundreds of billions in “troubled assets” from Citigroup, a company that just months later would lend out a jet furnished with pillows upholstered with Hermes scarves to former chief Sandy Weill so that he could vacation in Mexico over Christmas.”

My Comment:

Er, Matt. It was the Dems who rolled over for the bail-outs. It was the Republicans, the Southern Republicans, who stymied it first time round…until they had their arms twisted.

Before you got your consciousness  raised on the subject several years late, it was right libertarians who were objecting most strongly to the financializing of the economy…..

The Penson video post wasn’t as big a deal as it was made out to be, to my mind. But this post and his debate on 9-11 with David Griffin (at Alternet) do betray some ignorance…

Update:

Louis Proyect has a review of “Dime’s Worth of Difference” (Cockburn and St. Clair) that has a precis that will disabuse anyone inclined to believe the Democrats are more people-friendly than the Republicans…

Taibbi’s Penson Video..(Correction)

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Correction:
(10/12/09, Monday)

I should have said “allegedly faked” video. I stand corrected. No weasel words, Mr. Byrne (see Byrne’s comment below).

I often post stories on which I have no comment or opinion one way or other, because I haven’t followed them, but think readers might like to. In my last several posts, in fact, I defended Deepcapture’s, Taibbi’s, and Zerohedge’s work, in spite of occasional alleged or real errors.

But the reason I linked to Wenzel’s blog is because Wenzel’s post is pretty funnily written, and I don’t follow Taibbi, except occasionally. I didn’t like his attacks on David Griffin, where he exposed himself as somewhat ignorant. Taibbi also doesn’t attribute people (apparently others have that complaint too). But arrogance and ignorance in one area don’t equate to being incorrect in another.

I’ll add a separate post with the rather long back and forth between Taibbi and his various critics and defenders. I went by Penson’s dismissal of the video, but I’ve since noted that Penson has some history that is troubling and tends to makes its dismissal less credible.

So what else might be construed as “weasel-worded” in my recent blogging?

Perhaps my rather neutral approach to the Byrne vs. Weiss feud, still going strong. Well, I’m neutral about it – who stalked whom, etc. etc. – because I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I had my own experience of being harassed, and can barely keep up with the details of that, let alone someone else’s stalking experience.

I also don’t know which of the two abuses of the market – “stock pumping and money laundering” (criticized by the Wall Street “captured” media) or “naked-shorting” (criticized by Byrne, Davidson “ “Bob O’Brien,” and many others, including Taibbi) – is the more momentous.

As a libertarian, I think naked-shorting is, but that’s only my opinion. Which is why I’ve been neutral. My sense is both abuses are real and extensive.

Likewise, I really don’t know enough about what the SEC’s investigation of Overstock is about. Could it be punitive?

Quite likely, given all we know about the SEC. But does that mean everything else the SEC does is incorrect? Unlikely.

Does that mean what Byrne wrote about “naked short selling” is incorrect? No.

Final point. I tend not to like shrill personal attacks.

That’s a deferral to civility and complexity, not weasel-wordedness.

ORIGINAL POST:

On Matt Taibbi getting suckered by a “faked” (quotes added for now) naked shorting video:

“Carney is a sharp guy, and he has Taibbi nailed on this one, but, I repeat, naked short selling, like a lot of Wall Street, is a very complex game. Carney in some of his other posts suggests there is nothing wrong with naked short-selling, he is off on that one. Some of it can be justified as simple market maker operations, but some of it is major league abuse by very clever insiders, which is the point Taibbi is taking, but doesn’t have the knowledge to back up properly.

Anyway, once you sit down an analyze the entire naked short selling thing, you realize that the bad naked short selling would go away if the SEC would stop issuing regulations that protect the bad guys. Basic common sense and commercial law would put an end to the bad naked short selling, real fast.

Bad naked short selling exists because there is a power source to manipulate, in this case the SEC, and the bad guys are running circles around the SEC.

What you want to understand naked short sales for yourself? Well pull up a chair, give yourself five hours and read this. It’s a great first step.

But, I tell you, it will be much more fun watching Taibbi attempt to pull the bayonet out of his brain.”

More by Robert Wenzel, at Economic Policy Journal.

UK Military Protocol for Security & Counter-Intel Ops

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An important document on how the British state deals with what it perceives as security threats:

“This significant, previously unpublished document (classified “RESTRICTED”, 2389 pages), is the UK military protocol for all security and counter-intelligence operations.

The document includes instructions on dealing with leaks, investigative journalists, Parliamentarians, foreign agents, terrorists & criminals, sexual entrapments in Russia and China, diplomatic pouches, allies, classified documents & codewords, compromising radio and audio emissions, computer hackers—and many other related issues.
The document, known in the services as the “JSP 440” (“Joint Services Protocol 440”), was referenced by the RAF Digby investigation team as the protocol justification for the monitoring of Wikileaks, as mentioned in “UK Ministry of Defence continually monitors WikiLeaks: eight reports into classified UK leaks, 29 Sep 2009.”

Read more at Wikileaks on UK protocols for dealing with security threats of all kinds, from investigative journalists looking for disclosure of official documents to Chinese officials seeking “influence” (there’s an extensive section describing Chinese intelligence gathering).

Letterman Targeted in Extortion Plot By CBS News Employee

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Update: Favourite Letterman-blackmail quote so far is by Stephanie Gutman, at The Telegraph, UK:

“But this follows on the heels of the Travolta family extortion affair, so it points out one of the pitfalls of fame and wealth, that one is continually surrounded with a mosquito cloud of predators trying to draw blood. And even the creepiest, snarkiest, fake-sincere liberal talk show host gets my sympathy for having to live with that.”

In the news:

“Three weeks ago, Letterman said, he got in his car early in the morning and found a package with a letter saying, “I know that you do some terrible, terrible things and that I can prove that you do some terrible things.” He acknowledged the letter contained proof.
He said it was terrifying “because there’s something insidious about (it). Is he standing down there? Is he hiding under the car? Am I going to get a tap on the shoulder?”
Letterman said he called his lawyer to set up a meeting with the man, who threatened to write a screenplay and a book about Letterman unless he was given money. There were two subsequent meetings, with the man given a phony $2 million check at the last one. Letterman joked it was like the giant ceremonial check given to winners of golf tournaments.”
He told the audience that he had to testify before a grand jury on Thursday.
“I was worried for myself, I was worried for my family,” he said. “I felt menaced by this, and I had to tell them all of the creepy things that I had done.”
He said “the creepy stuff was that I have had sex with women who work for me on this show. My response to that is yes, I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Yes, it would, especially for the women.”

My Comment:

What an irony (but not an oddity) that the comedian who was making vulgar jokes about Sarah Palin’s minor daughter – presumably, to prove how trashy the Palins are – has a history himself.

Letterman admitted to numbers of affairs with co-workers, while revealing a black-mail plot from another CBS news employee, whose name hasn’t been confirmed yet. It’s interesting that this critic of the Palins* – who’ve been married for years and who had children within their marriage – married his long-term girlfriend only in March this year, though he had a child with her in 2003.

This is not a judgment about Letterman’s lifestyle. That’s his business. It’s a judgment about his good sense and his psychological motivations. You’d think the man would zip up about anyone else’s family or sexual history.

File this away as another instance of the corruption of the media. In recent posts, I’ve talked about sexual blackmail as one way in which public figures are ruined or hounded out of office. We’ve had the example of Eliot Spitzer, most famously.

The other point to note is that the perpetrator is a newsman (and not just any newsman – an Emmy award winning CBS producer and crime reporter for “48 hours.”  Although this has nothing to do with the “deep capture” of the media in the financial story, it does add to the evidence that the media really is the problem, at every level. When reporters are so intent on making their names that they’re prepared to “out” public (or even less than public) figures over personal matters that are irrelevant to any public interest, why should we be surprised that one of them takes a more direct route and uses the information to make money from his target directly?

*Note: As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of Sarah Palin’s but dislike the way she was treated.