[ Wednesday, July 30, 2003 ]
Gambling on corpse counts
Thankfully, no futures trader will have to utter the words, “I can’t believe I lost all that money because those damn terrorists did not kill enough people by the end of the quarter.”
In a rare relocation of a collective backbone, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle and other members of his party actually stood up to a recent Pentagon proposal that put the government close to endorsing a gambling on death policy that could have led to such a comment. The idea was to setup a futures market based around potential terrorist attacks or other events like the possible assassination of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
It was recently stopped, though.
If Pentagon officials had their way, people would have basically wagered on the likelihood of an event occurring within a certain time.
The idea was for the Pentagon to gather information in order to possibly predict future events based basically upon seeing where the smart money went. Aside from all other arguments about devaluing human life to a gambling formula and the idea of profiting directly from death, the proposal forced the question of how bad is the current state of intelligence gathering if the military wanted to rely on 10,000 online investors to help form policy?
Sources:
MSNBC
YAHOO
CNN
WBAL
Dave Sutor [4:05 AM]
Oh yeah, they played a game, too, by the way
Okay, NFLHS.com did not want me to write a story about the skydivers who jumped into Hersheypark Stadium and the helicopter that maneuvered above the field prior to the Big 33 football game. That was too bad because those events provided more entertainment than the actual high school all-star football game between Ohio and Pennsylvania.
They just wanted a story about the game.
So, go read about Ohio’s one-sided victory here.
Dave Sutor [4:00 AM]
One less link
Probably nobody noticed the reduction of this site’s links by one in recent days. But it happened. I thought I found an interesting site that approached news from outside the mainstream and provided links to interesting perspectives. So I linked to it.
I do not believe a link means a 100 percent endorsement of a site. It’s just meant to provide easy access to sources that might feature material of interest to people who visit a site, like PhugIt. This recently deleted site, which shall go nameless here, was an aggregation website that seemed to raise some legitimate questions about current political situations and media negligence. Some of the stuff was farfetched and slanted toward one side. But there were some interesting questions raised.
Plus, it had a good conspiracy vibe going.
However, it also recently featured a few articles that seemed basically anti-Jewish in nature just to be anti-Jewish. Most notably, one seemed to basically support the idea that a Zionist conspiracy has controlled American politics, the media and the military since around World War I. Much of the supposed proof operated under the idea that if any Jew had a hand in making a policy, then it was part of a Jewish plot. Of course, it also explained in detail the belief that the 9-11 attacks were all part of the conspiracy. That was the heart of the story that suggested if somebody did not believe the ideas then they were just lemmings.
We here at PhugIt are all for digging beyond the easy answers. The same goes for reading about good conspiracy theories from UFOs to Skull and Bones. (By the way, Lee Harvey Oswald did not act alone and there is life on other planets ... but those are just opinions.) We also believe there is a lot of wagging the dog going on with the Bush Administration. But those towers sure as hell fell down. That wasn’t faked.
But back to the story.
The article just seemed hate-filled, though, and based around the idea of assuming a conspiracy and then looking for any supposed evidence whatsoever to prove it.
Unlike providing a sidebar link, this site provided a direct link to the article, which seemed to imply support for the ideas. The site and the anonymous author can support those ideas all they want. PhugIt also has the right to not endorse them.
This is not suggesting the work should be censored in any way. PhugIt just does not want to give the publication a hey-go-see-this-kind of plug.
Plus, it is not meant to be some thin-skinned reaction to hurt feelings. We’ll make fun of anybody here at PhugIt - Jews, blacks, whites, Asians, Muslims, conservatives, liberals, men, women ... whoever. I’m Slovak in my heritage. Slovak culture has had so little influence that it does not even have a stereotype associated with it - not even something like Irish drinking jokes or cliche Indian accents.
Dave Sutor [3:58 AM]
