As states scurry to purchase new electronic voting systems and companies
vie to reap some of the 3.9 billion dollars the federal government is
offering the states for such purchases, citizens are meeting with officials to
demand transparency and a means of verification. Congressman Rush Holt has
introduced new federal legislation that would require the verifying paper trail.
To learn more on this issue or to read the Hopkins report yourself, visit
www.verifiedvoting.org or visit www.blackboxvoting.com. Reporting from KPFT in Houston,
this is Poki Anderson for Free Speech Radio News.
This is Free Speech Radio News. I'm Deepa Fernandez. And Free Speech Radio News
came to you on recording here on listener-sponsored WBAI New York 99.5 FM.
It is 7.01. Time now for Off The Hook.
But if they could, they would. Bondedly bound for the best, expect the worst. I hope that's understood. Bondedly bound.
All right, it is 7 o'clock here on WBAI 99.5 and you're listening to Off The Hook.
Our host Emmanuel Goldstein is currently overseas and we're going to try and
call him up right now. What we're going to do is we're going to dial a toll-free
800 number here in the States and you should be able to hear this system
connect. What we have is a forwarding service. Please wait while we dial your
phone number. The European ring. Hello, could I have room 419, please? 419, hold the line, please. Thank you.
Bi-lingual. Hello, Emmanuel. Hello. And are you there? Yeah, yeah. Hello. Hello. We are, we are here on the air.
Where are you? On the air, right, okay. Must have dozed off a little bit. It's 1 o'clock in the morning here in Paris.
Paris? Yeah, it caught me by surprise, actually. I somehow thought it would be
earlier. And this is Off The Hook? Yeah. Right? I think so. Okay, good, good. And yeah, the show
continues. We're spread apart in different parts of the world. I'm here in
Paris, you're there in New York. Jeff is in a truck somewhere on the road, so we
won't even hear from him tonight unless he calls in. And various other people are
scattered about as well. Next week's gonna be more interesting because you're
all going to be out here as well. In fact, I think we're going to be either in
Amsterdam or Germany, so I'm not quite sure how that show is going to sound. But
we're all getting ready for the Chaos Communications Camp, which is coming up
August 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th. And I can't stress enough, if people want to have fun
this summer, this is the only option. There's nothing else going on this
summer. There's no other fun to be had anyplace. If you want to have fun this
summer, you must go to the Chaos Communications Congress, or camp. It's
just as simple as that. That's pretty absolute. That's pretty depressing. I try
to make it simple. I've looked around, I've looked at the options, and this is
pretty much what's going on. I gotta say a couple of
things about Paris because, well, it's just such an amazing place. And if people
have ever had the opportunity to come to Paris and turned it down, they should
kick themselves because it simply is the most incredible city. I spent all day
today, literally all day, just walking around and was completely transfixed. So
transfixed I forgot to eat. I just kept walking and walking and looking at
everything that was going on, just all the sights and all the people. It's just
a very transfixable type of a place. And according to an article I saw in the
Herald Tribune yesterday, they say that the number of American tourists visiting
France has dropped dramatically by as much as 80% this year. And I gotta say,
you know, what kind of morons are these people who say, I'm not going to go to
France? Why? I mean, what do they expect is going to happen to them? Do they think
people are going to throw stones at them because they're Americans? Americans are
welcome here like anyone else is welcome here. And if you think you're
somehow supporting your government by not going to another country that
happened to disagree with us on something, that's a really silly way to
live your life. It's a really incredible place to be. You get a sense of the
history, you get a sense of all kinds of different cultures. France is a very
integrated society. You have all kinds of different cultures, different groups of
people getting along in ways I just don't see in the United States, not yet
anyway. I'd certainly like to. Every time I come here it's a breath of fresh air.
It's just so inspiring. So hopefully I'll be inspired by this and I'll do
something better as a result. Sounds good. Yeah, yeah. So what's going on in New
York? Any more shootings in City Hall or has the printers calmed down? No, there's
been a decline in the City Hall shooting rate this week. Okay, well that's a
relief to hear. The person who was shot is apparently lying in state in the City
Hall building. I heard that. I heard about that. That's the first time I think in a
long, long time. 1918 was the last one. 1918? Mm-hmm. Well that's a long time.
Anyone has, who was it then? It was Lennon? No, no, no. Lennon wasn't shot until
1980. Not that Lennon. Oh, you mean Vladimir Lennon? No, no. He wasn't in New York
when he got shot. He was in Russia and he died there. No, I think it was a former
mayor, but the number, the people who were lying in state in City Hall, it's
kind of an interesting mix. You have a couple of former mayors, you have a few
ex-presidents, John Quincy Adams, Abe Lincoln. Abe Lincoln made a tour
incidentally after he died, but that's another story. Ulysses S. Grant and
General Abner Doubleday in 1895 lay in state at City Hall. Oh gosh, that's
something to know. Anyone else joining us in the studio, Mike? No, it's just me and
Jim. Okay, a quiet night tonight then, I guess. Well, there's a lot going on, and
of course we'll be taking phone calls in just a little bit. I read something in
the paper today that really threw me for a loop, and I was wondering if maybe the
Onion is actually feeding stories to the International Hero Tribune, if you could
verify this actually is the case. But supposedly, according to this article
I got my hands on today, the Pentagon has proposed some kind of a, you're not going to
believe this, an anonymous speculating network that would bet on future
terrorist attacks, assassinations, and coups in what's known as an online
futures market. In other words, people would put money on a particular foreign
leader or a particular city being the victim of either an assassination or a
terrorist attack, and if they bet correctly, they make a profit. And
apparently this thing has caught the attention of a few politicians who
somehow came to the conclusion this is a bad idea. In fact, Senator John Warner, the
Virginia Republican who heads the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he had
conferred with the program's director at the Pentagon, and we mutually agreed
that this thing should be stopped. Have you guys heard anything about this? I've heard a lot about this, and in fact I know a little about this. It's not exactly the way you
describe it. It's more a futures market. Essentially what you would have is
traders, and they would, let's take a specific example, say the Eiffel Tower
will be bombed this year. Alright, I'm just picking it on a review in Paris. Thank you. And you would say that you put up so much money, and the people who say it will be bombed this year put up so much money, and then there are people who say it won't be bombed this year. And say ten people say it will be bombed this year, and a hundred people say it won't. If those ten people are correct, they will get the money from the hundred people who are wrong. So they will get ten to one on their money.
If it's the other way around, the hundred people who say it won't be bombed, they will get the ten dollars, we're saying every share is a dollar, of the ten people who said that would be bombed. And the reason that this thing is useful, they've thrown it out with the bathwater already, because it sounds horrible.
Yeah, this ought to be good. Tell us why this is useful.
Okay, you have an incident like this, and aside from speculators, who, you know, it's like the death pool, you know, who's going, what famous person is going to die this year? Aside from speculators who are just pure and out and out gambling, you're going to have as many of them as one side is on the other, because they don't know anything. You will have guys who are in terrorist cells saying, let's make a couple extra bucks.
Do you think they're that stupid?
Yes, because what you've got is hundreds and hundreds of people investing in this, I use the term investing loosely, participating in this, some of them will know something.
And you will also have people who, you know, visit the Eiffel Tower, they see that the security is, for argument's sake, lax, they see that there's all sorts of strange things going on, they see that there's a sudden influx of, oh, I don't know, Swedish terrorist-looking guys, or Muslim terrorist-looking guys, or Nigerian terrorist-looking guys, and they bet, hey, you know, I'll bet on the Eiffel Tower going down later this year.
Jim, I cannot for the life of me figure out what these people are thinking in the Pentagon to come up with some bizarre scheme like this. I mean, do they have too much time on their hands or something?
Well, they have too much money on their hands, you know that.
It's not going to cost them that much.
They're looking at ways of making more money here.
They don't pay off, no, no, no, the Pentagon doesn't make or lose any money on this aside from running a website, alright? It's a small amount of money.
The money put up to buy the futures or sell the futures is by whoever wants to, whatever citizen or non-citizen or anybody with a computer who, you know, pays by PayPal or their credit card or whatever.
Well, here's how they described it in the New York Times, reprinted in the Herald Tribune.
This is according to senators and other people who have studied this thing.
You may think early on that Prime Minister X is going to be assassinated, so you buy the futures contract for five cents each, which must make him feel really good.
As more people begin to think the person's going to be assassinated, the cost of the contract could go up to 50 cents.
Imagine if we started doing this with George W. Bush, you know, imagine if we started taking bets on him being assassinated.
I'll bet we'd get some visits from the Secret Service regardless of whether or not we were running a futures market, but never mind that.
To continue here, the payoff if he's assassinated is one dollar per future, so if it comes to pass, those who bought it five cents make 95 cents.
Those who bought it 50 cents make 50 cents.
The senators also suggested that terrorists could participate because the trader's identities will be unknown.
This appears to encourage terrorists to participate, either to profit from their terrorist activities, or to bet against them in order to mislead U.S. intelligence authorities.
They said in a letter to John Poindexter, who is the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office, formerly the, what was the former acronym?
Total Information Awareness.
Still spells out T.I.A. and still a really, really bad idea.
I really thought it was a joke when I read this. I really thought it was a joke.
Only this government could come up with something so bizarre and so distasteful and so ridiculous.
You leave the country for a week and already you think the U.S. government is going to make sense.
Yeah, you know, I guess I'm just an expatriate waiting to happen, this kind of thing.
Imagine, okay, imagine if, say, the Iraqi government had opened such a futures market.
What would we be doing to them that we haven't already done?
You know, or any other government.
Imagine if the New York City government had opened a futures market, and all of a sudden,
Othniel Askew had bet 10,000 bucks that James Davis was going to be assassinated.
Gee, if I was in the NYPD, I would have gotten a guy on Davis all immediately, and maybe he'd still be alive today.
Do you really live in such a fantasy world that you think the person who's going to kill somebody
is going to announce the fact and put all this money on it?
Do you really think that's how it works?
Once in a while, that sort of crap happens.
Once in a while, yeah, maybe. Once in a while, stars collide.
But I don't think it's enough to base a futures market on.
They're not generating this to make money in a futures market.
They're generating this to get more information through a number of sources, a consensus of information.
Alright, I'm sorry I'm not the math major I once was, so I could explain this more clearly.
Well, you know, there are ways of pooling intelligence.
We've seen how well that works.
Having people literally bet on who's going to be assassinated or where a terrorist attack is going to occur,
I just don't think that's the way to pool that intelligence.
You're pooling something, not intelligence.
Anyway, so that's the bit of humor for this week.
Unfortunately, the program was canceled.
The program was canceled because I guess the public got wind of it.
Most people realize just how silly this really is.
There's another story out of Iraq.
This is kind of interesting.
The Bahraini telephone company that set up a cellular network in Baghdad without getting permission from the United States
has been ordered to cut off the service.
Bahrain Telecommunication, known as Batelco, had begun service July 22nd,
carrying calls for people with phones on the GSM network standard common in the Middle East and Europe.
Rashid Al-Snan, Batelco's...
Sorry, something just blew up across the street.
Batelco's regional operations manager said executives at Batelco had not thought they would require a license to get started
and had planned to apply once licensing began.
The U.S. authorities formally began seeking bids for three mobile phone licenses in Iraq on Sunday,
telling prospective licensees they will be required to begin installation within 20 days of being hired.
I have this sinking feeling that they're not going to even allow GSM to be used in Iraq,
that they're just going to go with TDMA such as Sprint PCS or something like that
and just pretty much not allow companies like this Bahraini company to participate in the first place.
Well, why would they allow Bahrainis? This is an American profit machine, this war.
Yeah, and it's probably a threat to our interest to allow a foreign country to run a foreign telephone company.
Can't have that.
But regardless, Mike, I understand you have something from the head of the FCC.
He sent us a letter. Is that the case?
Not quite. He wrote an editorial in the New York Times.
Oh, that's close enough.
Michael K. Powell, not to be confused with his father Colin Powell,
wrote an article on July 28th, which was Monday maybe, called New Rules, Old Rhetoric.
And surprisingly, the old rhetoric is not him, according to his article.
He's criticizing Congress for trying to roll back the market share monopoly rules that his body recently relaxed.
Congress is looking at putting them back so that no entity can own more than 35% of the television stations.
He really thinks it should be more than that, 45%.
And so Congress is looking at changing it.
And he wrote this kind of strange editorial where he argues that,
well, we don't care who owns the television stations because we've got cable.
Yeah, you know, I actually saw this. It was reprinted out here.
And his logic was just kind of bizarre.
He was saying things like, well, there's 300 cable channels, and that's a lot more diversity.
What he doesn't seem to realize is that, you know, a cable channel or satellite channel
that's only seen in a potential of, say, 10,000 homes,
is not the same thing as something that's seen in millions of homes as a must-carry.
The fact is there's so much media concentration that everybody is pretty much forced to carry the same things.
You see the same influence everywhere.
Clear Channel is dominant in every single city, it seems, in the country.
And those alternatives just don't have the same means to get the word out there.
And this kind of thing just makes it a whole lot worse.
Michael K. Powell says that some say the problem is media concentration
and point out that only five companies control 80% of what we see and hear.
In reality, those five companies own only 25% of more than 300 broadcast, satellite, and cable channels.
But because of their popularity, he claims, 80% of the viewing audience chooses to watch them.
Maybe it's because those are the only channels people know about.
The monopolies, or not monopolies, as he argues.
And I think he says after that, it's not a good idea to regulate popularity or something bizarre.
He takes his leap in logic and expects the ball to go in the right.
A competitive media marketplace must be our fundamental goal,
but do we really want government to regulate what is popular?
That was never the case in the first place, but that's how you win these things, by crowding the issues.
Well, you also win it by being the commissioner of the FCC.
That helps, too. Yeah, it certainly does.
But, you know, it's gotten a good reaction, or a bad reaction for them,
but a good reaction for people like us that have been speaking out against this sort of thing for years.
I think people have finally had enough.
It would be nice if we could push this back even further
and go back to the days where it was possible to have alternative voices
and, you know, not the same conglomeration everywhere of media.
But that's going to take a lot. It's going to take a lot of effort.
You can listen to WBAI.
Yeah, well, there should be a BAI in every city, I think, or an equivalent.
Several, perhaps.
Sounds good to me.
So, okay, we heard from Michael Powell. Anything else?
That's all I have.
Okay, well, I should, I'd like to read some listener mail.
You know what most of the listener mail is about,
so I don't want to spend too much time on this.
But, lovely, for those of you who missed the show last week,
oh, boy, you missed a good one,
but you might want to pull up the archive and listen to our little debate.
And, of course, I'm talking about the button issue,
John Gilmore wearing the suspected terrorist button on British Air
and getting booted off the flight as a result.
Man, well, most of the listeners seemed to understand what I was trying to say,
but I don't think most of the people who wrote in got it.
And certainly most of the people that I talked to in person did not understand what I was saying.
I got, you know, it's amazing. I want you to try this.
I want you to try this as an exercise.
Try disagreeing with people around you to see how they respond to it.
And you may be very surprised by how people respond
when you disagree with something that they believe you should agree with.
You know, I don't arrive at conclusions by simply saying,
well, this is what I should say, so I'm going to say it.
I arrive at conclusions by thinking it through and arriving at a conclusion.
And sometimes that brings me to the same place as other people.
Sometimes it doesn't.
And this time it didn't.
I said that I understood, you know, why they reached the conclusion they did.
And I said it was childish and immature for John Gilmore to refuse to take the button off
and have the flight turned around and everybody's lives disrupted.
And boy, man, some of the responses I got in person were unbelievable.
People saying I've turned conservative, I'm no longer a liberal.
You know, basically very few people, Mike, I have to give you credit
because I think you're the only person I disagreed with who didn't turn this into a personal issue.
Wait a minute. I didn't.
You said that you were out liberalizing me, I believe.
That's not the same as saying that it's personal.
You see, what that's doing is that's making me think that maybe I'm not being, you know,
true to my liberal beliefs if someone like you can come along.
I was not excoriating you morally or as an image.
No, regardless.
All right, fine.
But the point is, I don't even think this is a liberal issue at all.
I think it's more a libertarian issue, but I'm not even going to get into that
because that's, like, it's crowding the issue.
The thing is, every one of these points should be thought out as, you know, an individual point.
You should reach a conclusion based on logic.
And I used the logic that was in my head to reach my conclusion,
and a lot of people just didn't like that.
And one person accused me of being afraid of terrorists.
Like, that's something unusual, but it's got nothing to do with what I was saying
because what I was saying was simply taking the situation that happened.
I was not injecting myself into that.
This is what happened on that airplane, and that's the result,
and this is what he should have done under that situation.
I never at any point said that I agreed with what the airline said.
However, most of the people who wrote in said pretty much that I agreed with it,
that it was me.
One person said I had to lighten up.
I never said I didn't think the button wasn't funny.
You know, if I was sitting next to somebody like that, I don't know.
I might have a very interesting conversation with them,
but the point is somebody was upset by it,
and the point is, the very true fact that I think a lot of people missed
is that when you're on an airplane and the captain tells you to do something,
you do it.
Simple as that.
You don't get into a debate because as soon as you do that,
you're jeopardizing everybody regardless of whether or not you're right.
And it's just very immature and childish to do anything otherwise.
You can argue about it afterwards.
If the person does something unreasonable,
if the captain does something unreasonable,
you argue about it then after the plane is touched down, everything is over.
You don't start a big debate while they're trying to get the thing off the ground,
or God forbid, while it's 35,000 feet above the ocean.
Now, you know, that was my perspective there.
And, you know, this whole week,
people have tried to convince me that I'm losing my mind.
They've come to me saying, oh, my God, you've gone crazy.
You're saying all these things.
And I had to actually go to complete strangers and ask them, am I losing my mind?
Does this make any sense?
And I looked at it on the Internet,
and I saw that a lot of people reach the same conclusions based on uncertain facts,
namely the fact that airlines can basically judge if you're causing a disruption,
and if that's the case, they can kick you off the plane.
Simple as that.
So the solution is don't cause a disruption.
It's got nothing to do with your freedom of speech rights
because you have every right to wear a button.
You have every right to wear a shirt.
But the point is when you're in a private establishment like a restaurant
or, in this case, an airplane,
they can set certain rules in that particular case,
and either you abide by them or you leave.
And the problem is when you're in an airplane above the ocean,
you can't really leave very easily.
And that's where, you know, lives become endangered if there's any kind of a conflict
or people are paying too much attention to something else.
One thing that happened, a pilot came out of the cabin.
This was incredibly stupid of British Air to do this.
But, you know, that's your typical diversion thing
where somebody causes a disruption, the captain comes out,
and all the hijackers burst into the cabin.
So right there, you see that, you know,
and this is probably British Air's stupidity,
that a situation of complete carelessness was...
Hello.
We seem to have lost you.
That service we went through, maybe they have a time limit.
Maybe.
It's about 25, 30 minutes.
Could be. All right, so...
Oh, there it goes.
So what we're going to do is we're going to hang up this phone, maybe.
But pressing the button doesn't work.
So hopefully Max will show us how to hang up the phone.
Thanks.
All right, and then what we're going to do is we're going to just dial direct.
So, Jim, if you could say something while I dial.
Oh, in order to mask the sound of the dialing?
Well, in order to mask the dead air that will occur while I'm dialing.
Well, I'll come up with a little semi-related tidbit.
Or at least I'll try to.
Actually, I think Emmanuel's argument, more thought out now, a week later,
is much more reasonable than the heated stuff we had going on last week.
Although I still disagree with him.
And I'm a little hurt that he thought I was personally excoriating him.
I didn't mean to.
If I gave that impression to the listeners, I'm sorry.
If I gave that impression to Emmanuel, I'm sorry.
A little tidbit to fill the dead air.
The current issue of Playboy, with the girls of Starbucks on the cover,
has a listing of just about every government 800 number you would want to call
in order to report your friends, your neighbors, your enemies,
and, oh, terrorists, to whatever federal agency you had in mind.
Of course, the infamous TIPS program, its current offshoot,
it mentions that their 800 number is no longer alive,
but you can still do it on the web.
And there's something to report truckers to the Interstate Commerce Commission.
There's something to report to the Coast Guard about suspicious activities
at the ports and rivers of our nation.
You name it, there's a phone number.
And the great part is if you're not into naked women,
it's at the front of the latest issue of Playboy
with the women of Starbucks on the cover.
So you can avoid the naked women and just, you know, look at these 800 numbers
and you can do your best to make this world a safer place.
And I think we have Emmanuel back.
If you could tell me how to get him back on the air.
We're playing with the phone, as we love most.
And the next voice you hear.
Okay, are you back there?
Yes, I am. After being mysteriously cut off, I have returned.
Hmm, sounds suspicious to me.
At what point in my diatribe was I lost?
I'm sorry, I was doing filler, so I don't remember.
You were talking about the cabin.
I'm not going to spend any more time on this.
Let me just conclude by saying that when people disagree on something,
they should stick to the issues and not try to define people.
I'm looking at letters here.
One person is saying I'm getting old and conservative.
I mean, that's not the case.
And it's really completely inappropriate to try and label people in that way.
If you disagree with somebody, stick to the facts.
Stick to the facts of the case.
Argue your points.
You might learn something.
You might not, or I might learn something.
But what I learned out of all this was that I know a lot of intolerant people
who do not accept anything that deviates from their expectations of you.
It's kind of sad to realize that.
But I also know a lot of other people who are more open-minded,
and they come from surprising backgrounds.
So it's an interesting exercise.
But regardless, it's been an interesting little case here.
I'm sure we'll hear more about it in the future,
as well as some of the other cases that have been going on,
including the one down in Atlanta,
the story which unfortunately we neglected because of this other story
about the guy who was questioned by the FBI for reading a particular article.
We got some mail on that, not nearly the same amount of mail, unfortunately,
which I think is a much more important story.
The mail that we did get about this was basically saying
that this has a lot of evidence behind it.
A lot of people are saying that, yes, this person is well-known.
This magazine that he printed the article in is well-known.
Nobody has gotten a comment from the FBI.
Of course, that's possible that we may never get a comment from the FBI
as to what exactly happened.
But the fact seems to be that that story really did happen,
and that's what we should be focusing on.
Well, you mentioned the button, and the phones just light up.
Well, bring them on.
But the funny thing is BAR listeners seem to get it,
and I think that's because they're listening.
They listen to what people say, and I think they realize what I didn't say.
I did not say that I agreed with what the airline did.
What I said was they had the right to do it.
When something like that happens, the time for arguing,
there is nothing to be gained from that
other than inconveniencing all these people and getting them against you.
I don't know why somebody would want to do that.
It doesn't make sense to me.
All right, shall we take some calls?
Our phone number is 212-209-2900.
So, yes, I guess we should take some calls.
All right.
Hello, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Oh, wow, I actually made it through.
I just wanted to say a good call, Emmanuel, on the airplane thing.
I agreed with you on that one.
I don't think you should necessarily explain yourself so much.
I did want to take issue with the, it seemed like kind of a featured reaction
against the ghoulish sort of futures market idea that the Pentagon came up with.
The math behind it is actually more of a sociological study,
that when people are asked something,
if you ask a large population of people something that they don't quite,
that nobody would really know the answer to.
I think the example I saw from Wired News was how many people died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.
Even though people have no idea what the answer is,
when you tally a whole bunch of information on it, a whole bunch of people's opinions,
generally it's going to be pretty close to the actual answer.
I think that's what they were going for.
How does that work?
I'm sorry?
I asked how that worked, and then we're getting this weird buzzing noise.
That's a GSM noise.
Sorry about that.
Probably just my crappy cell phone.
That's GSM.
Someone's making a GSM call near this phone, apparently.
Okay.
What we want to know is what's the theory behind a whole group of people who don't know something, somehow.
The theory is that many people have partial knowledge.
You'll have the outlying guesses will get filtered out,
and sort of the bell curve concept that there's enough people that know a little bit about something,
that if you average it all together,
the average is going to be pretty close to the answer if you get a large population.
So in other words, let's say that the number is like 60 million,
which I believe is close to the number,
and so you'll have some people who don't know anything saying like 3 million,
you'll have some people who don't know anything saying like 1 billion,
and those will average out,
and what you'll get is the people who actually know averaging around the right answer.
Is that the idea?
I think you're going to have a lot of people that have a little bit of an inkling,
and when you take all those inklings added together,
the outliers actually don't factor in as much as the people that do have a shred of information.
What if Donald Trump comes along and decides that he wants to bet against, say, Phoenix, Arizona or something,
and all of a sudden everyone's afraid to go there because there's all this possibility of a terrorist attack
because some idiot bet all this money.
You would see one guy betting all that money.
Yeah, but you don't know if it's one guy or a thousand guys because it's anonymous.
Okay, I see that.
Well, you can correct for that.
I just don't understand the need for something like this.
Is this what our intelligence has come to, that we have to rely on anonymous people betting on something?
It's an outside-the-box way of thinking.
We need all the thinking we can get.
I guess so with the kind of people running things.
All right.
Hello, you're on the air.
Yeah, I'd like to mention something like this betting thing, this happened back in the 40s.
Remember the guy they made up, Nostradamus, that person that they made up, that philosopher?
That's what they did back in the 40s.
Yes.
Thank you, Rebel.
Thank you.
Hello, you're on the air.
Yeah, hello.
Hello.
Well, I don't think people get the idea behind this Pentagon thing with the future.
You're basically privatizing assassination, in my view.
Oh, that's an interesting take on it.
That may be true.
Yeah, you just, you know, basically, who has the insider information?
So, in other words, if I'm sitting under my rooftop with a high-powered rifle and Hillary Clinton walks by,
I will quickly bet all my cash on she's not going to make it to the end of the week.
Well, who knows the information?
And, you know, like how much money is being contributed, you know, under the table.
Well, you know, like the example I came through in the heat of argument earlier,
if you suddenly spot a big bet, that tells you where to allocate your resources.
Right, yeah.
So, you know, all these scandals, you know, just attributed to the Pentagon,
which, you know, is into privatization these days anyway.
So, in my opinion, I don't know if I'm being, you know, sort of non-positive,
but, you know, if you look at it that way, it's a pretty dark thing, you know.
It's a dark thing either way.
Okay, thanks, man.
Thanks for calling.
All right, and let's try up here.
Hello, you're on the air.
Yeah, hi.
What's on your mind?
Okay, well, two things.
A, the first example that was given was that you get a bunch of people who don't know anything
and those that don't get filtered out and the cream rises to the surface.
That was one argument.
That might be true of something in which nobody really has a vested interest in,
but in terrorist attacks, obviously, the only people that would really know anything
and would be betting in this thing would be people who would have absolutely no knowledge
and the others would probably be terrorists themselves who would have some knowledge.
You know, as you started this, I thought that was the argument you were going to bring up
and I was trying to think of a counter-argument to that.
Suppose you owned a skyscraper.
Wait, just one other thing, okay?
Sure.
The other thing is, let's assume somebody wanted to make a pile of money
and said that the next target is Monaco, right?
And they planted some bomb there or something.
I mean, you actually create incidents to collect.
True.
Not something the U.S. government is new to.
Yeah, right.
You know, to me this says that we have absolutely no idea what's going to happen
and that we have to pretty much open it up to the public to help us find out what's going to happen.
Yeah, but the theory that the other person said, I can see it.
You know, you have a large pool of people.
Most of them don't have any idea, but a certain percentage do.
So they're the ones that don't get filtered out.
But this is a question of how many people died in Krakatoa or something.
Nobody has a real vested interest other than answering the quiz question.
In this scenario, obviously the only people that are going to know anything
are either government intelligence, which is doubtful, or the terrorists themselves.
Well, let me come up with my theoretical counterexample.
Suppose you own a skyscraper and you're really paranoid and you're like a militia type.
And you've equipped it with anti-aircraft guns.
Now, suppose that it comes up, is the building at 5 Main Street going to be attacked by a plane flying into it?
Hey, if I'm the owner of that building and I've just installed anti-aircraft guns, I'm going to bet heavily, no.
So you do have more than just terrorists betting on this.
Well, you can't put anti-aircraft guns in a skyscraper.
There's no one who doesn't know anything other than the fact that he's paranoid and has no particular knowledge
about whether he's going to be attacked or not, other than the fact that he's fearful
and has installed battleships and anti-aircraft guns.
So, I mean, he would be filtered out because he has no particular knowledge other than paranoia.
So that doesn't really counter that argument.
Well, the filtering out is not done by intelligent software or by people reading this and saying,
okay, let's filter this guy out.
What it is is it's just a mathematical sort of thing.
You've got so many people who are wrong on one side, they counteract the people who are wrong in the opposite direction.
Right, but this scenario that you gave of the guy who's paranoid, he doesn't have any knowledge.
He's just the same as anybody else who doesn't have any idea.
Right, but he knows it's going to be difficult because he's installed these guns, supposedly.
But you can't install guns like that secretly.
For no reason.
You never know.
For no reason.
All right, it's a theoretical argument.
Here's something that I think no one has really thought of.
Imagine that this system was in place before September 11, 2001.
And where would a lot of people have bet that a terrorist attack was going to take place?
A terrorist attack took place once before in the largest city in the world, the largest building in the largest city in the world.
Now, a lot of people would bet that something would happen there.
Tell me, what is the mood of those people on September 12?
Would they get paid double for hitting the jackpot?
They get paid a lot of money because they won.
What is their mood?
Are they celebrating now?
No.
What kind of people are we going to create out of this?
Well, you would have not only gotten the late terrorists.
You would not have only gotten the late terrorists betting.
You would have gotten a lot of people who actually died in the World Trade Center betting.
That one guy that was...
I doubt very many people would bet on their own building and show up to work.
It's a crazy, you know, it's a stupid thing, really.
It's really, you know, I'm amazed we're having this conversation, to be honest.
Yeah, I mean, it just shows how stupid these people are.
Because this does not have any basis, in fact, in mathematical reality that it would show anything.
It would show something only if terrorists were betting.
Then it would show something, sure.
Like Saddam Hussein says the Con Edison building is going to be blown up.
And he sends someone over and so...
Somewhere out there, there has to be a math major who has some sort of expertise on this.
So please come to the 2600 meeting this Friday in the Citicorp building.
I bet that it's going to be...
And explain this in some detail to us.
I'm going to place a bet that... No, I'm just kidding.
I mean, it's not a pure math question.
It's a math and sociology and all these other things.
It's not even because people betting...
And the first example that the caller gave was that, okay, how many people know how many light bulbs it took to screw in, whatever.
So there are a number of people that know these things.
Most don't.
Most don't.
So the people that know, their reality will come to the service and it will indicate some knowledge.
Now here, you have a vested interest.
And the only way you're going to get a knowledgeable result is if people with some knowledge are betting.
And who are the people with knowledge?
Mostly, you know, people with very good common sense.
Maybe like the WTC was pretty obvious because it happened before.
Or terrorists themselves.
Or government officials or all kinds of people with intelligence.
Listen, thanks for the call.
I want to read something before we go on to the next call.
If I can do that.
Go ahead.
Okay.
This is something a reader sent in about the Department of Homeland Security.
This sort of fits into the Keystone Cop mentality that we seem to be seeing everywhere.
As an unemployed recent college graduate, I've been exploring my options.
At a recent career fair at the University of Buffalo, a number of interesting companies and organizations were present.
Defense contractors such as Northrop Grumman, government groups such as DOJ, FBI, IRS, and the Department of Homeland Security were all present.
The DHS, Department of Homeland Security, had a sign on their table bragging about tremendous funding, outstanding career opportunities in all areas.
When I presented a resume for their consideration, this is what I was told.
Well, we're not allowed to accept any resumes right now.
You have to check the website.
So I asked, what are you doing hiring at a college career fair?
She responded, we don't know what we're going to be doing yet.
We don't know what we'll need in terms of staffing or who we'll need to employ.
We don't know what is happening yet.
You have to check the website.
This organization was created in 2001.
The question this reader has is, what have they been doing?
That comes from Steve C. Thanks very much for that letter.
You notice who's hiring these days.
Who's hiring these days?
The defense contractors, the Department of Homeland, whatever they're called.
Homeland, I can't believe I said Homeland on the air.
And no one else.
Department of Homeland Security.
Yeah.
Yeah, but you can't give them your resume apparently.
Well, maybe they're not hiring, but all the defense contractors are.
Yeah.
Anyway, let's take another phone call.
Hello, you're on the air.
Hello.
Hello.
Yeah, no one seems to have mentioned the huge short positions that were established
in American Airlines and United Airlines previous to 9-11.
These people had advanced knowledge.
They profited mightily.
They were investigated.
No one's mentioned it in this whole case.
Now, what exactly are you referring to?
Stock sales.
They were huge.
Hundreds of thousands of shares, millions of shares sold short in airline stocks.
United Airlines and American Airlines previous to 9-11 and the month before.
The two airlines that were affected.
Oh, yeah.
They were all just well known.
It's all in the papers.
All before 9-11.
And right after 9-11, they noticed it.
The SEC investigated it.
Maybe it's in that 28 pages.
But no one seems to have mentioned it yet.
You know, all this furor about this futures market.
Well, if no one's mentioned it, you say it's been in all the papers, but no one's mentioned it.
Oh, no.
It's been in the papers.
If you go back to 2001, if you go back in September, October 2001, you'll find it.
It's well reported.
You'll find people remembering it now.
No question about it.
Millions of shares.
It was, you know, and the Times has stories about it.
This was no hidden fact.
What was the explanation that they came up with at the time?
They were tracking these people down.
They wanted their identities.
They were going all over the world trying to find them.
Who had these short positions.
Major short positions.
They made fortunes.
The stock went to peanuts.
And what?
It just stopped?
They stopped investigating?
I don't know.
Maybe it's in those 28 pages.
It's probably Saudis.
The bin Laden family.
Probably Carlos.
Guys, we've got to get those 28 pages.
Well, beside that, I think people should comment on that.
No one, I've not heard anyone yet mention that.
It was of common knowledge.
I mean, it was in papers.
A lot of printers on it.
Anyone can prove it.
Okay.
Well, if you can point it to some articles.
You'll find out.
People will remember.
It was in all the papers.
The Wall Street Journal had articles in it.
It was in news stories.
I'm just surprised nobody remembers it.
I'll do some web searching.
Yeah.
Do some web searching.
Find some specific articles.
Huge, huge short sales in airline stocks that were discovered right before it.
And I think that's where the genesis of this idea is.
Those people had knowledge.
You noticed it in the markets.
So, bingo.
Two years later, somebody comes up with a brilliant idea.
DARPA.
Hey, the markets know something.
Well, the markets always know something.
The markets know earthquakes.
It was only United and American.
You realize people made money shorting the earthquake of 07?
Jesse Livermore shorted the earthquake of 07 and made a fortune.
He didn't know what was happening.
That would be the San Francisco earthquake of 1906?
Well, yeah, it was 06.
You're right.
Yeah.
He made a fortune.
It's in the book.
All right.
Well, we'll do our best to look into it.
Send information to OTH at 2600.com and we'll look this up.
All right.
Let's go over here.
Hello.
Hello.
You're on the air.
Speak up.
You're not on the air.
It was that one.
Let's try this one.
Are you on the air?
Yes, I'd like to recommend a book.
Go away.
Enough, Rebel.
I'd like to recommend a book, too, but I have nothing in mind.
Let's try over here.
Across the ocean, that voice grates on my nerves.
Yes, I have my voice being transported to France now.
But not like this voice does.
It grates on my nerves a whole different way.
How is the state of freedom of speech in France?
The state of freedom of speech isn't bad.
It's pretty good.
Because Nina Simone lived there and we just had a nice memorial for her this past weekend.
There are some issues.
I do have issues with the French government on certain things, but I'll get into that on a future show.
Yeah, well, good.
By the way, it would be nice if you wished Al Lewis the best, because he underwent some surgery on his heart.
And, you know, much as I'm an adversary in a way of him, I also care about him.
You know, I respect him as a human being.
You understand?
Hello?
I sure do.
He's one of the members of our BAI family.
Yeah, but I don't understand.
I had a report to listen.
I thought, well, for sure they'll start off saying, hey, he's okay.
And I don't know.
Sometimes I wonder.
Also, that wall and fraud, you know, program.
People question why it wasn't...
Okay.
Do you have anything to say about our program?
Well, I generally enjoy your program, except when you give me a hard time.
And I rebel for...
Well, we only give you a hard time when you talk about other programs instead of our program.
Well, I think freedom of speech is too important.
We're going to have a big seminar about it one of these days soon.
All right.
So you're invited.
We'll have it out then.
Okay, good.
I'll give you a call.
All right.
Hello.
You're on the air.
Hi.
I just want to confirm, yes, I remember very well the reports about people selling short.
But I think most of those short positions were not fulfilled.
That is, they didn't actually sell them because I don't think they wanted their names known.
So that's what I remember in the news report.
Okay.
That's even more suspicious, an uncovered short position.
There were a lot of shorts.
There were a lot of shorts against the airline stocks before 9-11.
But I don't think that it's the case that many of them were fulfilled.
My question is, is this something that happens on a normal basis?
Like, would you have found the same thing a year earlier?
Actually, a year earlier, I believe so.
It was not a good couple of years for airlines.
In fact, it hasn't been a good 15 years for airlines.
But I'm going to have to look this up to really substantiate this.
Look it up.
It was in the papers after 9-11.
It was part of the investigation.
We'll search.
If anybody has a specific website, don't forget to email it to OTH at 2600.com.
And I'll dig up what I can and report next week's show.
All right.
Okay.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Bye.
Hello.
You're on the air.
Yeah, I was ringing in about the short positions that were placed before 9-11.
And, no, statistically, it was unaccountable.
I mean, the positions were so large that the connection was undeniable.
And I believe that the positions were not covered when attention was focused on the fact that, you know, the positions had been taken.
So it sort of even gives more credence to the fact that it was the positions were placed by people with inside knowledge.
This is probably where Poindexter the genius got the idea.
But, you know, as far as, you know, finding out what's happening by getting the average of what people think,
I mean, if you got people to bet on, you know, the American public to bet in March on whether Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11,
I don't think you would have gotten a very good answer.
You know, you never, I say you should never underestimate the stupidity of the American electorate.
Or of any uninformed populace, really.
Pardon me?
And any uninformed populace, really.
The fact is, a lot of information is simply being kept from the public, and then the public is expected to make a rational decision based on no evidence.
Or the public is being disinformed, as it largely is in this society.
Things like BAI, of course, work against that.
I'd also like to say...
Oh, we try.
Yeah, say hello to Monroe.
If I see him, I will.
Okay.
Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Shall we take a couple more?
Yeah, we got a few minutes left.
Okay.
And you're the next caller.
Oh, dial tone.
That's a comment in itself.
Yeah.
Hello.
You're on the air.
Hello.
Hi.
I wanted to say, I'm a carpenter in New York City.
And just a few months before 9-11, I was looking around the city.
Now, this relates to these reports about somebody knew this was going to happen.
I went from job to job.
There'd be a brand new building going up.
Two or three carpenters in there.
Last I went to about ten buildings like this, I asked the foreman,
what's going on?
Why am I seeing all these buildings with just two or three carpenters?
There should be at least two dozen.
They said to me, without exception, the banks are holding back the money
because they expect this president to start a war.
Now, this is happening on a level where the foreman of a construction job
knows and is waiting and watching and giving us information that the banks
are waiting for this president to start a war.
I mean, it seemed that a number of people, including the governor of California,
had information that something was going to happen.
Okay.
All right.
How does the governor of California get into this?
He was coming to New York that day.
They told him it was a bad day to fly.
I heard that.
I heard that someplace.
Okay.
So what I'm saying is we had a conspiracy going right under our nose,
and we're walking around like conspiracies can't happen.
It's like they're against the law.
We're asleep.
We're asleep, and as American people, we need to get back on the case.
It's as if the 60s have revisited us, and they're saying, look,
you don't get it together, then it's going to be 1984.
That's going to be your reality.
And with the case with the FBI coming after a man for what he was reading,
I mean, if that's not 1984,
if we're not waking up into a Nazi Germany type-like situation, then what is this?
What do you think, Emanuel Goldstein?
Well, we have to look out for things like that because they happen so much more often
than people believe.
People are targeted because of the way they look, because of what they wear,
because of where they happen to be at a particular moment in time.
And every time that happens, we need to document it.
We need to follow up on it.
We need to let people know just how many times these things are going on.
I think we also have to let our own police know that you are not the police
against the people.
You are the police from the people.
It's all the people.
Exactly.
You know, I don't care if you're black or white,
and we know that they're really after black people.
We know this.
But we've got to tell our police because these police,
they are our brothers, our sisters, our dads, uncles.
We've got to say, look, y'all can't be instruments for this regime,
for wickedness.
What's the difference between, let's say, the NYPD, KKK,
or the Gestapo of Germany?
As a black man, I don't see a difference.
Well, it's interesting.
Traveling around in Europe, one thing I do notice,
and I've noticed this in many countries,
is that the police somehow do not, at least the local police,
do not seem nearly as intimidating as they do in the United States.
They don't seem to be heavily armed, if armed at all.
I mean, basically, these are guys I could probably take in a fight
if it came down to it.
In New York City, though, you're going up against soldiers virtually.
They have their battalions and all kinds of things that would protect them.
It's like they're not people anymore.
I think that's very scary when it reaches that state.
They're storm troopers.
Right, that's right.
Paramilitary units that occupy our communities rather than protect them.
It's not needed.
I know we're running out of time, so let me just make this quick.
When you're wandering around this culture here,
there are so many less barriers.
For instance, I was crossing a street that was literally ten lanes wide
in front of one of these major plazas.
There was no traffic light.
Cars just are understood that they're supposed to slow down
when pedestrians are crossing the street, and they do.
It's as simple as that, and everything kind of works out.
You don't have all these threats.
You don't have all these penalties.
People tend to take care of each other.
We don't trust each other in the States, unfortunately.
We don't, and it makes us really think about, well, what is freedom?
I think we're going to have to thank you for the call.
We'll be back at the same time next week.
If you want to send us an e-mail, the address is oth at 2600.com.
Anything else, Emmanuel?
Just next week, a bunch of us are going to be over here.
It should be an interesting show.
We'll update people then as to what's going on.
I'm here for the next five weeks after this in various parts of Eastern Europe.
We want to thank you.
We want to thank Max for engineering for us.
And don't forget, if you're not over in Europe,
this Friday is the 2600 meeting.
Check your local listings.
And I'll be at the one in Paris, so if anyone's in France, feel free to stop by.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.