McClatchy has the story U.N. calculations of poison rockets’ paths implicate Syrian guard unit.

“If the U.N. inspectors correctly calculated the trajectories, it certainly seems to indicate that the chemically armed rockets were fired from government-controlled land,” said Peter Bouckaert, Human Rights Watch emergencies director and weapons expert. “It’s clear and convincing evidence.”
.
.
.
Austin Long, a security and weapons expert at Columbia University, said his back-of-an-envelope tabulations since the U.N. report came out indicated that the Republican Guard, which is thought to control the chemical stockpiles, very likely moved one rocket system to a secure location near the base and launched.

I have given you links to the biographies of the experts quoted in the article.  Perhaps this will help you to figure out if these are trustworthy experts.  In this house of  cards it is hard to figure out whom to believe.

The Daily Show has an interview with Robert Reich ion two parts.

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 2

In a previous post, Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy, you got to hear Robert Reich interviewed by a “serious” journalist. Comparing the two interviews you will see that both interviews were very good at eliciting different pieces of information. Each interview added to our store of knowledge.

I would have loved to have heard Robert Reich explain to Jon Stewart not only what was done to solve similar problems in the past, but explicitly how it was done then. What happened that allowed a political force to gain enough power to rein in the previous robber baron’s? Let us talk about that history.

Some of the alternative news sources are really getting pathetic with their begging and pleading for support.  I tried to send the following message to one such source, but they are not accepting responses to their pleas.

Seriously, people, you just do not know how to monetize your content in the digital age. You just can’t seem to figure out why your readers are unwilling to make even the smallest monthly payment for a subscription.

Some people choose from hundreds of sources over a month. If they had to pay $1, $3, or $10 for a monthly subscription to each one, that would be anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month.

I have a blog post  Monetizing Internet Content that explains how to solve the problem while recognizing what the real roadblock is.

Basically, all you alternate media folk, The Daily Kos, The Real News Network, Reader Supported News, Consortium News, Truth-Out, etc. need to get together and create a clearing house that will take in a monthly subscription and provide the subscriber with access to thousands of news sites.

The clearing house distributes micro-payments to all news sources in their service for each article that a subscriber reads.

This distributes the subscriber’s payment in a way that represents the value that the subscriber actually gets from the articles that she or he reads.

Hundreds of times more readers would be willing to pay a substantial monthly fee to get access to an unlimited number of sources than would be willing to pay a very small fee to get access to only one source.

I offer this idea to you, gratis. I want nothing more out of this than a way for me to fairly pay for the value you provide.

It is so frustrating to have the solution to a problem, but no means to get the sufferers of the problem to hear about the solution.  If any of you readers know how to tell internet content providers how to solve their funding problem, I would be really grateful to you for passing this idea along.

The Daily Kos has the article Watch this ex-congressman leave everyone speechless on Meet The Press featuring the video below.

One of the panelists was described by The Daily Kos as CNBC mouthpiece and apologist Maria Bartiromo. That is probably nicer than the words I would have chosen.

Some of the rebuttal that The Daily Kos provided is quoted below.

Most of the segment was the standard blabber of nonsensical statements on the economy.
.
.
.
Secondly, of all the jobs that are being created or that would be created, the wages are normalized because of policies that allow outsourcing and because of the decline of the power of unions. In other words, the American worker is working for less and with little recourse or representation. This increases profits for the titans of capital which adds to income and wealth disparity even further. The American worker has not benefitted from their increased productivity. It has almost entirely gone to the top 1 percent.

You have to wait to see the final zinger by the ex-congressman, who I have not named in order to leave you in suspense until you see it.

As it turns out, I just heard a report on NPR’s Marketplace that said the banks were not lending because they were keeping excess reserves at the Fed. Excess meaning reserves not required by law in contradiction to what David Gregory, the bankers he spoke to, and Maria Bartiromo said. So much for getting actual facts from the Sunday “news” shows.

Perhaps the bankers were saying the poppycock that they did to David Gregory because they figured that he knew so little about what is going on in the financial world that he would not be smart enough to object to what they said. Of course, if you are a reporter who only talks to the self-interested bankers, you aren’t going to learn a darn thing. Thus, you do not even have to feel guilty about unknowingly spreading your ignorance to your audience.

Inequality For All is a movie that will be playing in Kendall Square, Cambridge (search for “inequality” on the page) starting September 27, 2013.

Democracy Now has an interview Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy.

The video covers a number of topics. Here are just a couple of excerpts to whet your appetite.

ROBERT REICH: Let me just be clear. In the late 1990s,1999, Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, others in the administration, did agree to support Republican bills to get rid of the Glass-Steagall act, which as I said, had separated investment from commercial banking. They also opposed the move a by the Commodity Futures Trading Corporation to regulate derivatives. That is what got us into trouble, the lack of oversight from derivative trading. These are bets on bets. Wall Street was making a fortune on them, certainly by 2007. And those bets were out of control. So, let’s just put it this way. Bob Rubin is also a friend, but I spent a lot of time in the administration battling Bob Rubin because, Bob, again I like him, his view of the economy is through the eyes of Wall Street. Those eyes — the Wall Street’s view of America, is not where most people live. It is just not — it doesn’t take account of the problems, the challenges, the realities faced by most people. It views the economy as sort of a bunch of assets to be moved around wherever they can get the highest use and best use. And people are not simply assets.
.
.
.
ROBERT REICH: It is very interesting to examine who the great economic criminals are. It is interesting you mentioned the Pinochet coup because two years after that, Milton Friedman came down to Chile to meet with Pinochet to urge economic reforms that were basically quite brutal and brutalized a great number of people. Milton Friedman was not necessarily a supporter of Pinochet, but certainly hated Allende, was very supportive of what Kissinger and Nixon had both done and that is helped Pinochet take over eventually

AMY GOODMAN: Interestingly, this week, Kerry met with Kissinger to get advice on Syria, on September 11th.

ROBERT REICH: On September 11th. There are these unfortunate parallels. So in defining an economic criminal, I think it would be interesting to see the interactions between economics and politics. The criminal actions to me, around the world, particularly in the United States, are the underminings of democracy. That is, if we cannot have a democracy that controls, that limits the excesses of capitalism, the brutality of capitalism, then we don’t have any hope of a just economy. And the people who are making it difficult for our democracy or any democracy to function—again, very poignantly reflected in this Fortieth anniversary of the coup in Chile—are those people who could very well be defined as economic criminals.

The Real News Network has a replay of the video Pepe Escobar on Pipeline Politics and what was really behind the U.S. wanting to bomb Syria?

You may need a program to figure out who’s who in this program. I also do not know who the players are and what their reputations and ulterior motives may be. Sometimes I just have a need to hear the same story told to me over and over by different people before I can really get a grasp on it.

See my previous post Syria intervention plan fueled by oil interests, not chemical weapon concern for my first installment.

The Wall Street Journal has the story Summers Withdraws Name for Fed Chairmanship.

First the good news.

Lawrence Summers pulled out of the contest to succeed Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Federal Reserve after weeks of public excoriation, forcing President Barack Obama to move further down the list of contenders to head the central bank.

Then the bad news.

One leading candidate is Janet Yellen, the Fed’s current vice chairwoman, who has garnered substantial support among Democrats in Congress and among economists. But the public lobbying on her behalf appears to have annoyed the president, say administration insiders, and may lead him to look elsewhere.

Then the ugly news.

Administration insiders say Timothy Geithner, the former Treasury secretary, also is a possibility,

and perhaps a sigh of relief.

though a person close to him reaffirmed Sunday night that he doesn’t want the job.

It almost gives me a sense of power to read:

after weeks of public excoriation, forcing President Barack Obama to move

Perhaps all my itching and moaning did some good.

If President Obama does appoint someone like Geithner, I will start to think that the President doesn’t like us anymore.

RT has the article Footage of chemical attack in Syria is fraud.

There is proof the footage of the alleged chemical attack in Syria was fabricated, Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib, mother superior of St. James Monastery in Qara, Syria, told RT. She says she is about to submit her findings to the UN.

Mother Agnes, a catholic nun, who has been living in Syria for 20 years and has been reporting actively on what has been going on in the war-ravaged country, says she carefully studied the video featuring allegedly victims of the chemical weapons attack in the Syrian village of Guta in August and now questions its authenticity.

See, isn’t this what I have been telling you.  To add to the credibility of this story, let me fill in some of the missing pieces.  RT did or  does stand for Russia Today.  (I used to work for RCA, the former Radio Corporation of America, that put on all its written press releases something like, “The name of our company is RCA.  The letters do not stand for anything else.”)

Mother Agnes Mariam el-Salib is concerned about the Christian minorities who have been attacked by the rebels. She also mentions “the brutal killing spree in Latakia on Laylat al-Qadr” carried out by by Jabhat al-Nusra according to the interviewer from RT.  In a question about some hostages taken by the rebels Mother Agnes says:

A total of twelve Alawite villages were subjected to this horrendous attack.

According to the reports I read Jabhat al-Nusra is related to Al Qaeda, and Bashar Assad is from the Alawite tribe.

So, clearly Mother Agnes is a disinterested party, as is RT, a Russian news organization.  We have every reason to take these sources at their word as opposed to believeing anything that President Obama has to say.

All kidding aside, it is very difficult to sort out the truth from the propaganda or how much of either type of journalism may or may not appear in any news source you read.  Stay skeptical, keep your wits about you, and try not to be blind-sided because of anything you heard, read, or saw.

The heading I used when I cross posted this article on Google+ and on Facebook was the following:

Do not kid yourself into thinking that if you read the news from both sides, you can take the average and come up with the truth.  The truth may be way off in the distance of the line handed to you by either side or the line that runs from one side to the other.

For those of my fellow DEC Alumni and Alumnae who are not in the area, you may not have seen this.

The Boston Globe has the article Intel to close Hudson plant, lay off 700.

Intel also operates a research and development facility in Hudson which employs an additional 850 workers. This facility will continue in operation and its workers will not by affected by the job cuts.

The MetroWest Daily News has the article Intel to close Hudson plant – 700 jobs lost.

So it is not a total loss, but still, it comes as a shock to me.  One of the things that has changed with the times is how engineering can be distributed around the globe independently of manufacturing.

When I first started at DEC, the engineering was in Maynard and the manufacturing was in Shrewsbury (or was it Worcester).  The Hudson plant was built to house the manufacturing and by this  time the engineering had wandered to temporary quarters in Westboro.

The managers of our group thought that engineering and manufacturing were still not close enough.  So another building was added in Hudson, and engineering moved to be close to manufacturing.  Our Computer Aided Design (sometimes  called Design Automation) group was able to serve circuit design engineers and manufacturing process design engineers.  The circuit design engineers were able to design circuits while the process with which the circuits would be manufactured was being designed.

The circuit design tools that the circuit design engineers use can be updated for millions of dollars, but the manufacturing equipment update is more in the billions of dollars range.

I was having an interesting online conversation with someone who was telling me about a number of historical coincidences that I might not be aware of.  I wanted to use an example from a noted physicist, but, in a senior moment, I could not remember his name.  I remembered enough of the story to convey the idea, though not as well as the original story did.

A little later the name popped into my mind, and I was able to find this reference online.  I want to record it here for my future reference.

There is a blog article Richard Feynman, Erik the Red, Earl Henry Sinclair, and Cristopher Columbus:

The mind sees what it wants to. It is an excellent detector for patterns in seemingly random data, but it also excels at making patterns where none exist. It’s built to do that. It’s how we learn. And that often gets us into trouble.

Dick Feynman had a very interesting teaching trick to illustrate this problem – he used it several times in different situations, ranging from his freshman physics lectures at Caltech to his lectures during trips after his Nobel Prize award. Feynman would suddenly interrupt himself in the middle of a statistics lecture, and excitedly say something like: “On my way to campus today, I saw a car with the licence plate XRT-375 in the parking lot – isn’t that amazing? What are the odds of seeing that exact licence?” After letting the class wrestle with exactly what he was asking, he would make the point that there is a HUGE difference between calculating odds before the fact and after the fact. The chance of seeing that particular plate is simple to calculate: 1/26*1/26*1/26*1/10*1/10*1/10, or about one in eighteen million. And it really would be amazing if you picked a number out of the air, and then found it in the lot. However, Feyman’s point was that having seen the plate first, it is unremarkable that you then ask the question about that particular number. The chance is unity. You can’t use a set of data to make a hypothesis, and then turn around and use that same data to test the hypothesis!

I hope the lesson learned is that you cannot poke through history, discover a number of items that are similar, and then say, “That’s an amazing coincidence.  What are the chances that all these things in this list would happen?”  If you search for random things and create a list of things that did happen, then the chances are 1 out of 1  that they did happen.

Here is a great example of the problem,  Lincoln–Kennedy coincidences urban legend.

The coincidences between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy are a piece of American folklore of unknown origin.

You see the same logical fallacy in stock market systems and roulette wheel systems.  You might also want to look at one of the most popular posts on this (my) blog,  Diversion–Highway Fatalities and Lemons, by RichardH.

Of course, if I cannot remember the name of the physicist, it won’t help me to record this story here. See Feynman in the blog post Bad Science: Quacks, Hacks, and Big Pharma Flacks. The funny thing is that I thought I did search for “quack”, but I did not find anything. (Accidentally had “match case” checked.)