1) Message boards : Politics : Sarah Palin (Message 989739) Posted 17 Apr 2010 by Krisk Post: I can imagine a conversation between the members of the Banker's Star Chamber (the good folks who put a hit on the American economy) and their errand boy, Carl Rove, in which Carl is being directed to use the Faith-Based Charities fund to pay for the transportation, housing, signs, and training for the mindless constituents that make up the Tea Party. Perhaps the greatest expense being the palm-greasing for public gathering permits and Sarah Palin's transportation, wardrobe, and the manufacture of her book-sales statistics such that compensation for her continued appearances would appear to be earned from book sales. Today's political mischief and the creation of faux (FOX) constituencies would make Donald Segretti, Jack Abramoff, Harvey Pitt, and Tokyo Rose proud.

2) Message boards : Technical News : Working as Expected (Jul 13 2009) (Message 919532) Posted 19 Jul 2009 by Krisk Post: Without going back through pages of posts, it was once mentioned that the data highway from the main point of campus entry to SETI servers is the bottleneck. From more recent posts it appears installing a dedicated, multi-fiber cable and high-speed routers, thereby shoving the headache out to the street or the antenna, wouldn’t cure the bottleneck. Then there is the sense from some posts that campus Admin (1) places a low priority on the project, that there is a (2) factor contaminating incoming signal with radar pulses, (3) software is being rewritten by a single volunteer who is currently on a well-deserved vacation, and (4) correct me if I'm wrong, simply throwing more servers into the mix won't cure it either. Then, there is also the undertone that crunchers are somehow to blame and they need to go somewhere else to volunteer their multicores. That said, what's the chance of obtaining a comprehensive wish list outlining the specifics, an estimate of the damage to implement those upgrades, and some indication that if supplied, Admin won’t appropriate the money for something they consider more academically appropriate? Since crunchers are only going to expand their abilities to process, this seems a better choice than evolving toward an egalitarian, membership-only distribution based on single 286 core equivalencies. Perhaps a promising student from the business school might inspect this as a graduate analysis paper and evaluate the potential revenue stream before Google - bless their entrepreneurial talents - builds a 100 mile square of signal gathering ears, dedicates an inexhaustible supply of software engineers, and utilizes surplus crunching from their subscriber net for business analytics in lieu of user fees. If this is being taken as criticism, the whole point has been missed. The point is that the whole world participates in this project, has great interest in its success, simply wants empirical evidence that we're not alone, and, I believe, would pony up for costs directed toward meeting identified goals (like helping with volunteer tuition for a start). To see this project devolve before a world audience isn't an acceptable outcome and, as unfair as it might seem, failure to embrace challenges doesn't bode well for Berkeley.

3) Message boards : Politics : Obama - A New Hope? (Message 880294) Posted 29 Mar 2009 by Krisk Post: The media hunt for scapegoats is on. In its never-ending-quest to serve the public good, the media has focused the blame from itself to blue-eyed blondes for the consequences of Wall Street's rampant corruption. Yes, it's a leap, but bear with me here. In mid January of 2008, Faux News suggested that Al-Qaeda is likely to recruit from blue-eyed, Caucasian westerners with no criminal record (other than possibly voting democratic) as the next likely crop of terrorists. Ownership of this concept accrues to Brian Kilmeade and "Ex-CIA spook Mike Baker, whose company, Diligence LLC, apparently specializes in a steady supply of global unrest and terror hype," according to GlobalResearch.Ca. "The original story was based on a comment by a single MI5 source that was subsequently picked up in a Scotsman article claiming that Al-Qaeda have recruited 1,500 white Britons to carry out attacks in the UK." The concept seems infectious. Only a couple of days ago President (of Brazil) Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva now blames "white people with blue eyes" for the world economic crisis and said it was wrong that developing countries should pay for mistakes made in richer countries, [thus] sparking accusations of racism. Problem is . . . where did the whole concept start? If we begin with an examination of the biggest players thus far exposed in the developing financial fraud stories, the only blonde fingered so far is Ruth Madoff whose light hair comes from a bottle - and she's still free to roam. In Bernard Madoff's youthful years, not a one was spent as a blonde and the same is probably true for Hank Greenberg - AIG's former CEO with hazel/green eyes. Then, looking at Arthur Anderson's lobbyist appointed to head the SEC, Harvey Pitt, we have no blonde there either. Christopher Cox, the next in command of the deaf and dumb SEC, may have had blonde highlights in his youth, but never had anything other than brown eyes. No doubt, as the stories of banking fraud, media cover-ups, naked shorting, phantom share trading, and derivatives piled atop derivatives unfolds, the statistical incidence of blue-eyed-blondes will likely remain no higher than their count in the world population at large. Further, just to head off the thought that this might be tending toward blaming one group over another (as in money changers vs. Aryans - who's first to the blame game this time around), this essay will remain as racially unbiased as Madoff in that his quarry also included Israeli charities: no one was safe. Fie on you Madoff. Remember that Ken lay (grey hair - brown eyes) and Andrew Fastow (once blonde, but brown eyes), were first to be tried and hanged by the media for Enron. They were not really guilty of masterminding a conspiracy - ahhh the achievements of investigative journalism. Enron's collapse was later exposed as a failure of management to protect Enron from a financial conspiracy orchestrated by CitiBank, J P Morgan, S&P, and UBS Warberg. Citi later paid nearly $2 billion in fines for its complicity in bringing Enron down. Didn't hear about Citi's settlement? It's called conflict of interest when banks own media. They stopped in-depth reporting on financial crimes about 12 years ago. The point is this, the media once again demonstrates that even compounded wrongs don't make a right. They failed to report on the whistle blowers who were repeatedly complaining to the SEC of blatant fraud, they failed to investigate the mysterious resignation of Harvey Pitt from the SEC on the eve of the Bush II, Term II election when it was revealed that Pitt's No. 2 man at the SEC was under investigation for securities fraud. The media again failed to report on the mere $100 million dollar fine levied against Merrill Lynch (by Harvey Pitt) for nearly $2 trillion in bogus dotcom IPO's they brought to market in late 1998 thru 2000. The records were also sealed to protect Merrill from civil action by investors - part of the Bush Administration's desire to block "frivolous lawsuits". Only the government may run an approved restitution industry. Bear in mind that the SEC remains populated by former CEO's and denizens of Wall Street, and that the judicial system has been packed with "Street" friendly judges who regularly defend Wall Street's right to go unpunished. Further, the FCC's Kevin Martin has guaranteed the media will remain the lag dog of Wall Street - free to choose whether stories of financial fraud reach the front page or whether investigative journalism has come down to promoting racial profiling of blue-eyed blondes. To hang the 'New Hope on Obama' is to do what the media has done: ignore all the other parts of the system that have been deliberately broken in order to allow unregulated access not merely to corporate and investor liquidity, but to the next 50 and beyond years of taxpayer revenues siphoned into the pockets of those still laughing at the naiveté of the public who believe it to be the fault of partisan politics. The media continues to revel at the success of Divide-and-Conquer psychology at keeping the nation busy at political faction infighting rather than demanding the hanging of the guilty through a relentless expression of rage and demands for real law enforcement. The dam is broken - one man can't push the water back up the river. A mere token of goodwill toward Obama is a chant not yet picked up by a media who remains fully absorbed by its own "first 100 day report card". Only when we listen to rather than crucify the whistle blowers, can we begin prosecuting the guilty and only then will any Whitehouse occupant inclined to resurrect the great American experiment have the functional branches of government necessary to do so.

4) Message boards : Politics : The selling off of American Energy Companies (Message 865847) Posted 15 Feb 2009 by Krisk Post: Came across this article on the selling off of Puget Sound Energy to group of investors from Canada and Australia when is this for personal profit going to stop. Selling off A energy company with total disregard of peoples lives. State regulators OK sale of PSE to investors Are you referring to the possibility that the transaction was inspired by the investors' desire to gain access to the employees' retirement trusts? Something akin to corporate raiding and trickle down . . . or was there something more specific you haven't addressed such as breaking up PSE to keep the profitable parts and dumping the zero-return-on-maintenance bits? Did the article identify the members of this investment group - a term often used to mask identities for one reason or another? Something like Citi and JP Morgan orchestrating the downfall of Enron. Maybe an investment group shielding themselves from public sensitivities about the use of TARP funds. No doubt the State Regulators asked these questions and kept a record of responses possibly prior to approval. This is not intended as a hostile comment, I'm just looking for some specific substance which the authors of the article you reference should have included as a "meets-expectations" for investigative journalism. Please forward these questions back to them if you want, I'd like to know as well. Thank you for your post.

5) Message boards : Politics : Cannabis prohibition has failed. It's time for a new approach. (Message 865820) Posted 15 Feb 2009 by Krisk Post: Under current law as authored by some of our more enlightened state legislatures, there is a mandatory term of 15 years (higher in Texas/less enlightenment) for possession of an ounce of MJ. So much for letting the punishment fit the crime and if the crime is being inebriated . . . well, you know the rest. For as long as this testament to irrationality stands, why not make the best use of it? For instance, Madoff is about to walk away after having committed the crime of the century, rather, all of human history. He has enough money stashed away to buy Dershowitz for his defense and not have to return him to Harvard for the deposit. So why not plant an ounce of cannabis in Madoff's apartment and inform the DEA that he's still involved in questionable trading practices. This in itself may briefly trouble the courts as they avoid setting many new precedents. The problem with legalizing pot is not the threat it poses to the very fabric of the family; your neighborhood tavern; or the traffic of uninspected, military container freight; but rather it's the significant revenue stream for states and agencies strapped for cash. After all, the last 8 years has brought about a new interpretation of unlawful seizure as outlined by the Constitution. If you have pot or any other suspicionable substance (a line of Ajax), it's the checkered flag for seizure and sale of your assets by most any agency - without recourse or restitution. Cannibis is a cash cow, a justifier of breaking the law by its duly authorized enforcers, and an indication of how naive pot's proponents are as to the host of impediments to its legalization. As the image in post 845415 shows, your public servants have lined up against you and are extralegally helping themselves to your larder whenever your pleasures provide the excuse (smoking in public). Cannabis prohibition has not failed - it is riotously successful in every sense and underlines that evaporating separation between the practices of organized crime and government. If that's too much to digest, what about the whistleblower's testimony that the SEC was partnering with Madoff in his plunder of US corporate and investor assets? How much time before the character of the witness is marginalized by the media through sham sex scandal or worse, a Condit-style framing? After all, it's public knowledge that Wall Street does own the media: Rupert's empire includes NewsCorp, the Dow Jones, the Wall Street Journal, and DSS; and there are more. Perhaps Mission420 is an NPO founded in noble principles, but as with slaying any giant how much effect would David have had without identifying the precise target and being a hell of a marksman? Mission420 does not have a consolidated target, but rather a diffuse empire of established abuse.

6) Message boards : Number crunching : Game Over, Seti (Message 865287) Posted 14 Feb 2009 by Krisk Post: Yes, running 3 AP v5 5.03 WU's right now. Checked update status, everything seems in order. According to tech advice, these are not supposed to work w/out latest ware installed. Maybe there's something in that radar pulse causing the system to become bitstipated. Having a challenge uploading results at the moment. Noticed that the AP's on the faster cores run out at 42 hours and on the slower Core 2 are rated at 115 hours! Time to replace the 6 mo old Core 2 Duo with a faster Quad and a liquid nitro chiller. BTW, all those running tech support please accept my thanks for being able to keep such a large system up and running. I run a small business net and have faith that the day will come when I can utilize software apps and run the business rather than focus on beta testing for Microsoft.

7) Message boards : SETI@home Science : UFO's Over Sacramento California (Message 857703) Posted 25 Jan 2009 by Krisk Post: What's amazing about UFO's is their ability to elicit non-empirical opinion from the extremes containing those who have never seen them to those who are regularly intimate with their occupants. Like politics and religion, the subject of UFO's is replete with naysayers and fanatical proponents. Among the naysayers are Dr. Earl Condon, Philip Klass, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, and recent History Channel debunker of all: Dr. Schirmer. Hynek was the first to popularize "swamp gas" by using it to explain UFO sightings in Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan back in 1966. The original treatise on swamp gas was authored in Germany in the mid 19th Century (citation not immediately available). The treatise proposed that phosphine gas emerging from swamps as small bubbles produced diaphanous, glowing puffs that could be briefly observed on the darkest of nights. Hynek did not cite this reference in a book he later authored in response to endless ridicule received for suggesting UFO's were a manifestation of swamp gas. Neither did he suggest there has been more credentialled peer review for UFO's than for swamp gas. He did later relate that he was instructed to use this explanation by his employer: the USAF. I sense an episode of MythBusters. Hynek's book, "The UFO Experience - A Scientific Inquiry" (pre-ISBN) later became the foundation for Spielberg's movie, "Close Encounters". Hynek's book was a criticism of naysayers and the USAF's refusal to take a scientific approach to UFO investigation - he later appeared in Spielberg's movie. Looking back across the decades of shameless hoaxers (pre-photoshop manipulators at the Beseler) and hired guns (have credentials, will say what you want - for a check), it is a matter of assimilating the data and drawing your own conclusions. As for empirical proof - photography is questionable with the advent of 3D software. Schirmer says witnesses are unreliable and susceptible to spontaneous hysteria instigated by observed phenomena (is that an apparition in my flapjack?), so that leaves us with dragging a kicking and screaming alien to some destination where the case will receive legitimate acknowledgement - not ridicule, character assassination, or sequestration. So we listen and we wait. To that end, I've been trying to obtain a book/paper recently written by a Prof. Timofevev since the thread of the treatise could be extrapolated so far as to say that his studies of Anomalous Disturbances in Plasmas might indicate there are parent plasmas in the universe inducing the disturbances. Like the synching of clock pendulums within the same room, are plasmas possibly comm nodes to whom separation, D, is irrelevant and delta T something you brew in a cup? Time and inquiry will tell.

8) Message boards : Technical News : Hole in the Rock (Jan 22 2009) (Message 857333) Posted 24 Jan 2009 by Krisk Post: Haven't been able to upload since last night 1/23/09, 22.30 PST.

9) Message boards : Politics : Shoe throwing (Message 843074) Posted 21 Dec 2008 by Krisk Post: Ahhh . . . the importance of obtaining written loyalty oaths from all audience participants should never be underestimated. GW should have known that this audience, being different from his customary cameos on the deck of an aircraft carrier, the halls of Bob Jones University, or AIPAC Headquarters had to present some risks. The upside is that the shoes were not made with impact-detonating plastique soles. Ranking highly among the things we'll likely never see is GW's reaction to the shoe tosser that might have been scripted thus: GW quickly commands attention from the audience, points to the shoeless reporter and says, "Let no harm come to this man - I want him set free. There is no American who would not change the collateral damage of removing Saddam Hussein from power - including this one." GW waves to have the shoe tosser escorted from the audience. It's hard to imagine which nation would have been more astonished by such a genuinely faith-based charity. Abandonment of the situation left the war victim to further beating for failure to contain his frustrations at the violation of his community.

 
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