Sweden Turns Its Twitter Account Over to the Great Unwashed

anders chicken.jpgSweden has surrendered its official Twitter account, @sweden, to the hoi polloi. The project, Curators of Sweden, signs up Swedes to tweet a week at a time. It started December 10 with Jack Wermer, a writer and marketing specialist. The second tweeter was Hasan Ramic, a Bosnian immigrant

Currently, the position is filled by the moose-hunting, oral tobacco product enthusiast Anders Dalenius.

anderstweet.png

According to psfk, "The campaign was conceived by the Stockholm agency Volontaire for the tourism group Visit Sweden and then green lit by the government."

The idea seems to be that normal Swedes will do a better job at representing their country to the outside world (the tweets are in English... or variants thereof) than either their government or an advertising campaign.

However, the "curation" is hardly random. Upcoming participants include a teacher, a priest and a lady truck driver. No doubt an attempt is being made to show a wide-spectrum picture of the country. (Most Swedes are neither Bosnian nor non-traditional laborers.)

So it might be more accurate to say the experiment is to use social media to present a picture of Sweden at its best and most diverse. There's nothing wrong with that - social media allows us to present a picture of ourselves of our own choosing. It has the immediacy of voice, but that doesn't mean it has unmediated authenticity.

Still, the dude is tweeting about moose hunting. That strikes me as full-bore whole-cloth Swedish weirdness. So, mission accomplished.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/0KgpSI4lu68/sweden_turns_its_twitter_account_over_to_the_great.php

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Fire rips through church in San Diego's Old Town

SAN DIEGO -- A fire has ripped through a church in Old Town San Diego, causing at least $500,000 in property damage.

City News Service reports that the blaze broke out Monday morning at Old Town Community Church.

San Diego Fire-Rescue crews extinguished the blaze in 20 minutes.

No injuries were reported. Property damage at the evangelical Christian church was estimated to be at least $500,000.

The cause of the fire was under investigation.

Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5665703673&f=378

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Kim Jong Il's son strengthens power with new post

In this Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011 photo released by the Korean Central News Agency and distributed in Tokyo, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011, by the Korea News Service, Kim Jong Un, center, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's youngest known son and successor, visits at Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, North Korea, to pay respect to his father. At far left front is Jong Un's uncle Jang Song Thaek. (AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service) JAPAN OUT UNTIL 14 DAYS AFTER THE DAY OF TRANSMISSION

In this Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011 photo released by the Korean Central News Agency and distributed in Tokyo, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011, by the Korea News Service, Kim Jong Un, center, North Korean leader Kim Jong Il's youngest known son and successor, visits at Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang, North Korea, to pay respect to his father. At far left front is Jong Un's uncle Jang Song Thaek. (AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service) JAPAN OUT UNTIL 14 DAYS AFTER THE DAY OF TRANSMISSION

In this Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011 photo released by the Korean Central News Agency and distributed in Tokyo Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011 by the Korea News Service, North Koreans pay respects to their late leader Kim Jong Il in front of his portrait in Chagang, North Korea. (AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service) JAPAN OUT UNTIL 14 DAYS AFTER THE DAY OF TRANSMISSION

In this Friday, Dec. 24, 2011 photo released by the Korean Central News Agency and distributed in Tokyo Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011 by the Korea News Service, Kim Yong Nam, president of Presidium of North Korea's parliament, center, and other officials lay wreaths to mark the 94th anniversary of the birth of Kim Jong Suk, mother of late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, in Pyongyang, North Korea. (AP Photo/Korean Central News Agency via Korea News Service) JAPAN OUT UNTIL 14 DAYS AFTER THE DAY OF TRANSMISSION

Visitors stand beside banners hanging on the wire fence, wishing for reunification of the two Koreas at the Imjingak Pavilion near the border village of the Panmunjom (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas since the Korean War, in Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/ Lee Jin-man)

Visitors look at a map of demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the Imjingak Pavilion, near the border village of the Panmunjom (DMZ) that separates the two Koreas since the Korean War, in Paju, north of Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011. (AP Photo/ Lee Jin-man)

(AP) ? North Korea identified Kim Jong Il's son as head of a top ruling party body Monday, a post that gives him authority over political matters in addition to the military control attributed to him in recent days.

Kim Jong Un has rapidly gained prominence since the death of his father on Dec. 17, with the state media showering new titles on him almost daily.

On Saturday, state media referred to the younger Kim as "supreme leader" of North Korea's 1.2 million-strong armed forces and said the military's top leaders had pledged their loyalty to him. On Monday, the Rodong Sinmun newspaper described him as head of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party ? a post that appears to make him the top official in the ruling party.

Kim Jong Il, who ruled North Korea for 17 years, wielded power as head of three main state organs: the Workers' Party, the Korean People's Army and the National Defense Commission. His father, North Korea founder Kim Il Sung remains the nation's "eternal president" long after his 1994 death.

The Kim family has extended its control over the country of 24 million people to a third generation with Kim Jong Un, who is in his late 20s and was revealed last year as his father's choice among three sons for successor.

He was named a vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party, but was expected to ascend to new military and political posts while being groomed to become the next leader.

Monday's reference to his new title was in commentary in the Rodong Sinmun newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Workers' Party, urging soldiers to dedicate their lives "to protect the party's Central Committee headed by respected Comrade Kim Jong Un." The editorial called on the people to become "eternal revolutionary comrades" with Kim Jong Un, "the sun of the 21st century."

The language echoed slogans used years ago to rally support for Kim Jong Il, and made clear the son is quickly moving toward leadership of the Workers' Party, one of the country's highest positions, in addition to the military.

North Korea refers to Kim Il Sung as the "sun" of the nation and his birthday is celebrated as the "Day of the Sun," and state media have sought to emphasize Kim Jong Un's role in carrying out the Kim family legacy throughout his succession movement.

His titles are slight variations of those held by his father, but appear to carry the same weight. It was unclear whether the nation's constitution had been changed to reflect the transfer of leadership as when Kim Jong Il took power after his father's death.

A day earlier, state TV showed footage of Kim Jong Un's uncle and key patron, Jang Song Thaek, in a military uniform with a general's insignia. It was the first time that Jang, who was promoted last year to vice chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Workers' Party along with Kim Jong Un, was shown on state TV in military garb.

Mourning continued, meanwhile, despite frigid winter weather, in the final days before Kim Jong Il's funeral is set to take place Wednesday and a memorial Thursday.

People continued lining up Monday in central Kim Il Sung Square, where a massive portrait that usually features Kim Il Sung has been replaced by one of Kim Jong Il, to bow before his smiling image and to lay funereal flowers. Heated buses stood by to give mourners a respite from the cold, and hot tea and water were distributed from beverage kiosks.

South Koreans were among the mourners in Pyongyang. The widow of former President Kim Dae-jung, who held a landmark summit with Kim Jong Il in 2000, and Hyundai Group Chairwoman Hyun Jeong-eun, whose late husband had ties to the North, each led delegations that drove across the heavily fortified border to Pyongyang.

They were greeted by North Korean officials during a stop at a factory park in the North Korean border town of Kaesong, according to footage from AP Television News in North Korea. North Korea sent delegations to Seoul when the women's husbands died.

Meanwhile, a South Korean activist was also in Pyongyang to pay respects to Kim Jong Il but without South Korean government permission, her colleagues said in a statement. For South Koreans, making unauthorized trips to North Korea is punishable by up to three years in prison, according to Seoul's Unification Ministry.

The Korean peninsula remains in a technical state of war because the three-year Korean war ended in a truce in 1953, not a peace treaty.

___

Associated Press writers Foster Klug, Hyung-jin Kim and Jiyoung Won in Seoul, South Korea, and AP Korea bureau chief Jean H. Lee, contributed to this report. Follow AP's Korea coverage at twitter.com/newsjean and twitter.com/APKlug.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2011-12-26-AS-Kim-Jong-Il/id-7270b423aaab4135b8bdacc367aaf67f

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EFF's @RaineyReitman talks to Bloomberg's @emilychangtv about why #SOPA will hurt jobs and Internet innovation eff.org/r.M6U EFF

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interfluidity ? Why is finance so complex?

Lisa Pollack at FT Alphaville mulls a question: ?Why are we so good at creating complexity in finance?? The answer she comes up with is the ?Flynn Effect?, basically the idea that there is an uptrend in human intelligence. Finance, in this view, gets more complex over time because financiers get smart enough to make it so.

That?s an interesting conjecture. But I don?t think it?s right at all.

Finance has always been complex. More precisely it has always been opaque, and complexity is a means of rationalizing opacity in societies that pretend to transparency. Opacity is absolutely essential to modern finance. It is a feature not a bug until we radically change the way we mobilize economic risk-bearing. The core purpose of status quo finance is to coax people into accepting risks that they would not, if fully informed, consent to bear.

Financial systems help us overcome a collective action problem. In a world of investment projects whose costs and risks are perfectly transparent, most individuals would be frightened. Real enterprise is very risky. Further, the probability of success of any one project depends upon the degree to which other projects are simultaneously underway. A budding industrialist in an agrarian society who tries to build a car factory will fail. Her peers will be unable to supply the inputs required to make the thing work. If by some miracle she gets the factory up and running, her customer-base of low capital, low productivity farm workers will be unable to afford the end product. Successful real investment does not occur via isolated projects, but in waves, forward thrusts by cohorts of optimists, most of whom crash and burn, some of whom do great things for the world and make their investors wealthy. But the winners depend upon the existence of the losers: In a world where there was no Qwest overbuilding fiber, there would have been no Amazon losing a nickel on every sale and making it up on volume. Even in the context of an astonishing tech boom, Amazon was a pretty iffy investment in 1997. It would have been an absurd investment without the growth and momentum generated by thousands of peers, some of whom fared well but most of whom did not.

One purpose of a financial system is to ensure that we are, in general, in a high-investment dynamic rather than a low-investment stasis. In the context of an investment boom, individuals can be persuaded to take direct stakes in transparently risky projects. But absent such a boom, risk-averse individuals will rationally abstain. Each project in isolation will be deemed risky and unlikely to succeed. Savers will prefer low risk projects with modest but certain returns, like storing goods and commodities. Even taking stakes in a diversified basket of risky projects will be unattractive, unless an investor believes that many other investors will simultaneously do the same.

We might describe this as a game with two Nash Equilibria (?ROW? means ?rest of world?):

If only everyone would invest, there?s a pretty good chance that we?d all be better off, on average our investments would succeed. But if an individual invests while the rest of the world does not, the expected outcome is a loss. (Colored values wearing tilde hats represent stochastic payoffs whose expected value is the number shown.) There are two equilibria, a good one in the upper left corner where everyone invests and, on average, succeeds, and a bad one in the bottom right where everybody hoards and stays poor. If everyone is pessimistic, we can get stuck in the bad equilibrium. Animal spirits are game theory.

This is a core problem that finance in general and banks in particular have evolved to solve. A banking system is a superposition of fraud and genius that interposes itself between investors and entrepreneurs. It offers an alternative to risky direct investment and low return hoarding. Banks guarantee all investors a return better than hoarding, and they offer this return unconditionally, with certainty, without regard to whether other investors buy in or not. They create a new payoff matrix that looks like this:

Under this new set of payoffs, there is only one equillibrium, the good one on the upper left. Basically, the bankers promise everyone a return of 2 if they invest, so everyone invests in the banks. Since everyone has invested, the bankers can invest in real projects at sufficient scale to generate the good expected payoff of 3. The bankers keep 1 for themselves, pay their investors the promised 2, and everyone is made better off than if the bad equilibrium had obtained. Bankers make the world a more prosperous place precisely by making promises they may be unable to keep. (They?ll be unable to honor their guarantee if they fail to raise investment in sufficient scale, or if, despite sufficient scale, projects perform more poorly than expected.)

Suppose we start out in the bad equillibrium. It?s easy to overpromise, but harder to make your promises believed. Investors know that bankers don?t have a magic wealth machine, that resources put in bankers? care are ultimately invested in the same menu of projects that each of them individually would reject. Those risk-less returns cannot, in fact, be riskless, and that?s no secret. So why is this little white fraud sometimes effective? Why do investors? believe empty promises, and invest through banks what they would have hoarded in a world without?

Like so many good con-men, bankers make themselves believed by persuading each and every investor individually that, although someone might lose if stuff happens, it will be someone else. You?re in on the con. If something goes wrong, each and every investor is assured, there will be a bagholder, but it won?t be you. Bankers assure us of this in a bunch of different ways. First and foremost, they offer an ironclad, moneyback guarantee. You can have your money back any time you want, on demand. At the first hint of a problem, you?ll be able to get out. They tell that to everyone, without blushing at all. Second, they point to all the other people standing in front of you to take the hit if anything goes wrong. It will be the bank shareholders, or it will be the government, or bondholders, the ?bank holding company?, the ?stabilization fund?, whatever. There are so many deep pockets guaranteeing our bank! There will always be someone out there to take the loss. We?re not sure exactly who, but it will not be you! They tell this to everyone as well. Without blushing.

If the trail of tears were truly clear, if it were as obvious as it is in textbooks who takes what losses, banking systems would simply fail in their core task of attracting risk-averse investment to deploy in risky projects. Almost everyone who invests in a major bank believes themselves to be investing in a safe enterprise. Even the shareholders who are formally first-in-line for a loss view themselves as considerably protected. The government would never let it happen, right? Banks innovate and interconnect, swap and reinsure, guarantee and hedge, precisely so that it is not clear where losses will fall, so that each and every stakeholder of each and every entity can hold an image in their minds of some guarantor or affiliate or patsy who will take a hit before they do.

Opacity and interconnectedness among major banks is nothing new. Banks and sovereigns have always mixed it up. When there has not been public deposit insurance there have been private deposit insurers as solid and reliable as our own recent ?monolines?. ?Shadow banks? are nothing new under the sun, just another way of rearranging the entities and guarantees so that almost nobody believes themselves to be on the hook.

This is the business of banking. Opacity is not something that can be reformed away, because it is essential to banks? economic function of mobilizing the risk-bearing capacity of people who, if fully informed, wouldn?t bear the risk. Societies that lack opaque, faintly fraudulent, financial systems fail to develop and prosper. Insufficient economic risks are taken to sustain growth and development. You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.

A lamentable side effect of opacity, of course, is that it enables a great deal of theft by those placed at the center of the shell game. But surely that is a small price to pay for civilization itself. No?

Nick Rowe memorably described finance as magic. The analogy I would choose is finance as placebo. Financial systems are sugar pills by which we collectively embolden ourselves to bear economic risk. As with any good placebo, we must never understand that it is just a bit of sugar. We must believe the concoction we are taking to be the product of brilliant science, the details of which we could never understand. The financial placebo peddlers make it so.


Some notes: I do think there are alternatives to goat-herding and kleptocratically opaque semi-fraudulent banking. But adopting those would require not ?reform? but a wholesale reimagining of status quo finance.

Sovereign finance should be viewed simply as a form of banking. Sovereigns raise funds for unspecified purposes and promise risk-free returns they may be unable to provide in real terms. When things go wrong, bondholders think taxpayers should be on the hook, and taxpayers think bondholders should pay. As usual, everyone has a patsy, someone else was supposed to take the hit. Ex ante everyone was assured they have nothing to fear.

I have presented an overly flattering case for the status quo here. The (real!) benefits to opacity that I?ve described must be weighed against the profound, even apocalyptic social costs that obtain when the placebo fails, especially given the likelihood that placebo peddlars will continue their con long after good opportunities for investment at scale have been exhausted. By hiding real economic risks from those who ultimately bear them, status quo financial systems blunt incentives for high-quality capital allocation. We get capital allocation in bulk, but of low quality.

Update History:

  • 26-Dec-2011, 10:15 a.m. EST: Flipped around a sentence: ?You can have transparency and herd goats, or you can have opacity and an industrial economy.? becomes ?You can have opacity and an industrial economy, or you can have transparency and herd goats.?

Source: http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/2669.html

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US mom, 2 daughters die in Mexico attacks

Three U.S. citizens traveling to spend the holidays with their relatives were among those killed in a spree of shooting attacks on buses in northern Mexico, authorities from both countries said Friday.

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A group of five gunmen attacked three buses in Mexico's Gulf coast state of Veracruz on Thursday, killing a total of seven passengers in what authorities said appeared to be a violent robbery spree.

The Americans killed were a mother and her two daughters who were returning to visit relatives in the region, known as the Huasteca, said an official in the neighboring state of Hidalgo, where the mother was born.

Hidalgo state regional assistant secretary Jorge Rocha identified the dead U.S. mother as Maria Sanchez Hernandez, 39, of Fort Worth, Texas, and the daughters as Karla, 19, and Cristina, 13. Rocha said all three held dual U.S.-Mexican citizenship. A 14-year-old Mexican nephew traveling with the three was also killed.

A U.S. Embassy official confirmed the women's nationalities, but could offer no information on their ages or hometowns. The official, who was not authorized to be quoted by name, said consular authorities were offering assistance to the victims' relatives.

Story: Mexico disbands entire police force in top port of Veracruz

While funeral plans were unclear, Rocha said Sanchez Hernandez's mother wants her daughter to be buried in Mexico.

Three other Mexican citizens were killed in the Thursday attacks on the three buses.

The five gunmen who allegedly carried out the attacks were later killed by soldiers.

Earlier in their spree, the gunmen shot to death three people and killed a fourth with grenade in the nearby town of El Higo, Veracruz.

'Exercise caution'
On Thursday, the U.S. Consulate General in Matamoros, a Mexican border city north of where the attacks occurred, said in a statement that "several vehicles," including the buses, were attacked, but did not specify what the other vehicles were.

The consulate urged Americans to "exercise caution" when traveling in Veracruz, and "avoid intercity road travel at night."

While the specific area where the Thursday attacks occurred is not frequented by foreign travelers, other parts of the Huasteca ? a hilly, verdant area on the Gulf coast ? are popular among Mexican tourists and some foreigners.

Story: Mexico makes huge meth precursor chemicals seizure

The attack occurred near the border with the state of Tamaulipas, an area that has been the scene of bloody battles between the Zetas and Gulf drug cartels.

Meanwhile, the tortured bodies of 10 people were found in northern Veracruz, local media reported Friday, as attacks in the region intensify between the rival cartels.

In September, 35 bodies were dumped along a downtown highway in the Veracruz city of Boca del Rio.

More than 45,000 people have been killed in cartel-related violence since President Felipe Calderon took office in December 2006.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45780933/ns/world_news-americas/

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Donald Robert Deatherage, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Donald Robert Deatherage, 76, a life-long resident of New Mexico, passed away Wednesday, December 21, 2011. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Helen Deatherage of Albuquerque; children, Sharon Davis and husband Mac of Denver, Co; Audrey Bernard of Denver, CO; Curtis Deatherage and wife Amy of Albuquerque; grandchildren Scott Davis and Mac Davis of San Diego; John Bernard of Hobbs, NM; Kelsey Bernard of San Marcos, TX; Jackson Bernard of Dallas, TX; Brittany Lovato and husband Martin of Albuquerque; Zachary Gruen of Rio Rancho; Spencer, Jake, and Bronson Deatherage of Albuquerque; great-grandchildren Martin and Mastin Lovato of Albuquerque. Mr. Deatherage was preceded in death by his parents, Arthur and Wilma Deatherage, four sisters and one brother. Don served in the Navy from 1952 to 1957. He was employed as a staff associate at Sandia National Labs from 1957 to1990. He was actively involved for many years in Mile High Little League and Big Brothers of NM, and was one of the co-founders of AYBL. Services will be held Tuesday, December 27, at French Mortuary, 10500 Lomas Blvd NE. Viewing from 10:30 - 12:30, service at 12:30 pm. Interment will take place at the Santa Fe National Cemetery. Pallbearers will be, Jim Church, Mac Davis, Zachary Gruen, Martin Lovato, Jr., Tony Montford, David Sanchez, and Jerrold Ward. Memorial donations may be made to the Alzheimer's Association, NM Chapter, 9500 Montgomery Blvd, NE, Suite 121, Albuquerque, NM.

Source: http://krqe.tributes.com/show/Donald-Robert-Deatherage-92978683

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the_str: Video - Forehead: The Pope, Prophet and Buddha of the GOP Wants to Sabotage Economy - Rush Limbaugh http://t.co/VFqLORDM

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Steven Bravo

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