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Started by Thurnez Isa, December 29, 2006, 04:11:55 PM

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minuspace

Quote from: Cain on March 05, 2014, 01:59:12 PM
Easy solution:

All banks can have help from the central government, on the condition that their commercial and investment arms are split up, and the bank itself is broken into smaller regional and commercial operations to prevent it posing a systemic risk to the economy again, and legislation is passed to prevent super-mergers.

Half the problem is bank size.
And the rest is manipulated and leveraged by morbidly low and lecherous reserve requirements, even if only less than half the legal age of consent previously worked just fine as an accepted minimum for lending practices,  when sex is not concerned.

Trivial

Sexy Octopus of the Next Noosphere Horde

There are more nipples in the world than people.

The Good Reverend Roger

" It's just that Depeche Mode were a bunch of optimistic loveburgers."
- TGRR, shaming himself forever, 7/8/2017

"Billy, when I say that ethics is our number one priority and safety is also our number one priority, you should take that to mean exactly what I said. Also quality. That's our number one priority as well. Don't look at me that way, you're in the corporate world now and this is how it works."
- TGRR, raising the bar at work.

Cain

Initial verdict on the Malaysian plane crash?

Suspicious.

Two stolen passports were found to be on the plane.  While there are a non-negligible amount of fake and stolen passports in that part of the world, whoever used them to book tickets for the flight:

a) booked them consecutively, and
b) booked the flights to Beijing and then onto Amsterdam the day before the flight.

You can already fly direct from Kuala Lumpur to Amsterdam, so why the unnecessary 10 hour layover in Beijing International?  I'm sure it's a very nice airport, but it's not that good.

Either way, something stinks.  Remember, Malaysia was the site of the "2000 Al-Qaeda conference" where 9/11 was planned in detail.  Malaysia also had active cells for Jemaah Islamiyah, the Al-Qaeda linked SE Asian Islamist movement, though that has taken a beating since 2007 or so.  Nevertheless, cells are still active in Indonesia and the Philippines.

LMNO

If it was planned, wouldn't some group have claimed responsibility by now?

Cain

You'd think so, it is a fairly major attack after all.  But not always.

The sarin attacks in Tokyo and the original WTC bombing were never claimed, IIRC, and some researchers have posited that a lack of claims is a hallmark of the "new terrorism" (a notoriously abused phrase) and of religiously motivated terrorists in general.  After all, God knows you did it.

It also helps ramp up the FUD factor, and it's possible the only planners were the two on the plane, and they didn't make plans for announcing the attack/expected authorities to ID them sooner (sometimes a letter of repsonsibility can be left at an apartment or similar), that the attack was claimed but the authorities are keeping quiet in hope of tracking, say, IP data from the site it was announced on, that there were multiple claims and police are following up on all of them or that it's policy that any credible looking threats are not released to the press until the cause of the crash can be positively identified.

I mean, the Malaysian security forces hardly covered themselves in glory by letting people on passports that were reported stolen get onto the plane in the first place.  The KGB or NSA they aint.

LMNO

Any evidence of a Xanatos-level political assassination?

Cain

If it was Xanatos-level then there wouldn't be any evidence.

But to be serious for a moment, I don't think so.  Malaysian Air are a second-tier carrier.  Don't get me wrong, they're pretty good, but they're not Qantas or SIA.  Not something an important person used to the more comfortable things in life would use.

Cain

I'm also waiting for someone on Twitter to shout at me for calling people who immediately assumed, or went to great lengths to float the suggestion that this was Uighur terrorism are idiots or disingenous security contractor shills.

No bites so far, sadly :(

LMNO

While I do note the above suspicious things, I'm going to ascribe a higher probability to an accidental than intentional crash.  Call it a gut feeling.

Cain

Crash is still more probable, yes.  However, a confluence of oddities like that do certainly raise the chance of terrorism from its negligible baseline rate of occurence.

LMNO

But it could be that the people with the fake passports, et al, were merely en route to something else.  A nefarious something else, but not connected with the crash itself.

Wait, or was that what you've been saying, and I'm being dense?

Cain

That is also a possibility.  However, I don't assign that as a high probability explanation for that behaviour, as you wouldn't add unnecessary security checks by taking a route through China, and certainly not via Beijing, where checks are much more stringent if your aim was, for example, drug smuggling or similar.

LMNO

Hm.  Good point.  More data needed.

Trivial

Two people from my company were on that flight.  That's all the info the internal site gave.
Sexy Octopus of the Next Noosphere Horde

There are more nipples in the world than people.