Do you remember reading about the Futures Market on Terror Attacks? Here's an excerpt from a New York Times article by Carl Hulse.
WASHINGTON, July 28, 2003
"The Pentagon office that proposed spying electronically on Americans to monitor potential terrorists has a new experiment. It is an online futures trading market, disclosed today by critics, in which anonymous speculators would bet on forecasting terrorist attacks, assassinations and coups.
Traders bullish on a biological attack on Israel or bearish on the chances of a North Korean missile strike would have the opportunity to bet on the likelihood of such events on a new Internet site established by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
The Pentagon called its latest idea a new way of predicting events and part of its search for the "broadest possible set of new ways to prevent terrorist attacks." Two Democratic senators who reported the plan called it morally repugnant and grotesque. The senators said the program fell under the control of Adm. John M. Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser.
One of the two senators, Byron L. Dorgan of North Dakota, said the idea seemed so preposterous that he had trouble persuading people it was not a hoax. "Can you imagine," Mr. Dorgan asked, "if another country set up a betting parlor so that people could go in -and is sponsored by the government itself -people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?"
After Mr. Dorgan and his fellow critic, Ron Wyden of Oregon, spoke out, the Pentagon sought to play down the importance of a program for which the Bush administration has sought $8 million through 2005. The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events to be considered by the market that were visible earlier in the day at http://www.policyanalysismarket.org/ could no longer be seen.
But by that time, Republican officials in the Senate were privately shaking their heads over the planned trading. One top aide said he hoped that the Pentagon had a good explanation for it.The Pentagon, in defending the program, said such futures trading had proven effective in predicting other events like oil prices, elections and movie ticket sales.
"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," the Defense Department said in a statement. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results; they are often better than expert opinions."
According to descriptions given to Congress, available at the Web site and provided by the two senators, traders who register would deposit money into an account similar to a stock account and win or lose money based on predicting events.
"For instance," Mr. Wyden said, "you may think early on that Prime Minister X is going to be assassinated. So you buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each. As more people begin to think the person's going to be assassinated, the cost of the contract could go up, to 50 cents.
"The payoff if he's assassinated is $1 per future. So if it comes to pass, and those who bought at 5 cents make 95 cents. Those who bought at 50 cents make 50 cents."
The senators also suggested that terrorists could participate because the traders' 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 Admiral Poindexter, the director of the Terrorism Information Awareness Office, which the opponents said had developed the idea.
The initiative, called the Policy Analysis Market, is to begin registering up to 1,000 traders on Friday. It is the latest problem for the advanced projects agency, or Darpa, a Pentagon unit that has run into controversy for the Terrorism Information Office. Admiral Poindexter once described a sweeping electronic surveillance plan as a way of forestalling terrorism by tapping into computer databases to collect medical, travel, credit and financial records.
Worried about the reach of the program, Congress this year prohibited what was called the Total Information Awareness program from being used against Americans. Its name was changed to the Terrorism Information Awareness program.
This month, the Senate agreed to block all spending on the program. The House did not. Mr. Wyden said he hoped that the new disclosure about the trading program would be the death blow for Admiral Poindexter's plan.
The Pentagon did not provide details of the program like how much money participants would have to deposit in accounts. Trading is to begin on Oct. 1, with the number of participants initially limited to 1,000 and possibly expanding to 10,000 by Jan. 1.
"Involvement in this group prediction process should prove engaging and may prove profitable," the Web site said.
The overview of the plan said the market would focus on the economic, civil and military futures of Egypt, Jordan, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Turkey and the consequences of United States involvement with those nations. The creators of the market envision other trappings of existing markets like derivatives.
In a statement, Darpa said the trading idea was "currently a small research program that faces a number of major technical challenges and uncertainties."
"Chief among these," the agency said, "are: Can the market survive and will people continue to participate when U.S. authorities use it to prevent terrorist attacks? Can futures markets be manipulated by adversaries?"
Mr. Dorgan and Mr. Wyden called for an immediate end to the project and said they would use its existence to justify cutting off financial support for the overall effort. In the letter to Admiral Poindexter, they called the initiative a "wasteful and absurd" use of tax dollars.
"The American people want the federal government to use its resources enhancing our security, not gambling on it," the letter said.
source: NYT
The thing is, repugnant as this may be, I knew it would work. I recently had this corroborated in James Surowiecki's Wisdom of Crowds. Not that I needed it corroborated, being intuitive. But in this book, the rational mind of an economist put into words and developed a theory as to why it works where intuition just "knows" it will work.
How do I know? Because we psychics experience this phenomenon all the time. I often speak with cops, who do, too. We have this in common. We have years and years of experience with the real lives of people which others do not. We are not permitted to live on the surface of things. We never take anything at face value.
We know things about people eventually we wish we didn't know. This is a cause for burn out.
One day at work 25 years ago, someone "anonymously" posted a nasty cartoon about someone else on the bulletin board. We all knew who did it. One day a couple came for a reading, horrified that "someone" had disemboweled their pet cat on their front lawn. I knew who did it and excused them from my presence as soon as possible (the husband did it, don't ask me why). I don't spend a lot of time on crimes and murders but generally have a sense of who dunnit. And also why they did it. But then, so do you. If you'd let yourself know.
In big and little ways, everyone knows everything. We are trained for social reasons not to know. But we know. We can uncover this ability. It's the very instinct that used to keep us alive when we were closer to animals.
One night I was driving back from the desert with my daughter. We pulled into a cafe off the road. From the moment I sat down at the counter, the hair on my body stood straight up. I knew there was a killer in the room. I bought a cup of coffee and left without haste so as not to disturb the energy of the person, so he wouldn't know I knew. This is the residual animal pelt, our hide. Like the hairs on the back of a dog. It's s shame when we are taught not to trust our instincts.
I'm going to go way out on a limb here and suppose that most of the people who would participate in this thing are men. What motivates a man more than money? You'd be sure to get their best "bet" and it would be a good one. For hundreds of years, maybe a couple of thousand, men have been oriented toward money, providing, surviving, foraging, hunting. To get their best instincts, tying it into money is the natural path of least resistance to their best thinking. There's something right about this, not wrong. It just is what it is.
I wish there were some way to justify this morally. It cuts right through our conscious collective values at a number of awkward places. We don't like to talk about death in America. We deny most of what is going on in front of our own noses every day because it isn't supposed to be going on but it is. We ignore statistics in favor of platitudes and righteousness. Psychics don't/ can't do that. We are nonjudgmental, objective, neutral. We have been trained to look at what is really happening. Or perhaps we never got trained not to see it. This is called a gift? Most eastern religions describe this position of neutrality as the position of wisdom and power. It is the only way to see what is clearly going on and to react appropriately.
This is why I always wanted to be in the field I'm in. I wanted to be where real things were talked about, good bad or indifferent. I wanted a greater sense of reality, an expanded sense. This means being open to as much reality as I can possibly stand at any given time :-)
What if you asked everyone around you to bet anonymously on when you were going to die? That probably makes your skin crawl. But in a sense everyone knows. They know because of a million things you don't want to know and they don't want to know they know. But it could actually put years on his life if you knew. We can change the future.
My daughter, an infj introvert, is uncanny about this sort of thing.
There's one sentence I keep in mind, given me by the Archangel Rafael. It is the truth that heals and nothing but the truth. I have been warrior for the truth and this is why.
Here's my review from amazon.com
This book could be criticized for lack of analytical rigor but on the other hand, it is a terrific introduction to some of the more fascinating aspects of statistics, economics and human behavior. As an astrologer and psychic, I have often commented to my clients, "You think what I do is a mystery? Economics is the biggest mystery of all!"
I found this book one of the few books this year that really changed the way I look at things and think about things.
For example, a recent immigrant from another country known to often pull my leg told me about cars being "automatically driven" down the highway here in San Diego a few years ago. I thought he was making it up. But it really happened. Surowiecki explains they were testing traffic patterns.
Surowiecki also cleared up a matter that had frustrated me -- the government's proposed futures market on terror attacks. I knew when I heard about it would work because I'm intuitive. But I never could have put it into words like Surowiecki did.
This is a great, fun, readable book that makes economics more clear to the average person and it changed the way I think about the world around me, so I give it a big FIVE STARS. Actually, I couldn't put it down!
Nancy R. Fenn
