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I thought this was a joke when i first heard about it. Apparently not:
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.
So, the United States Government is now running a dead pool to help them figure out how to prevent terrorist attacks.
I swear on my grandfather's grave I am not making this up.
This fetishization of markets is getting to be ridiculous. The election future market, for instance, isn't based on some deep understanding of the electoral process unavailable to all of us - its based on reading the bloody polls and looking at the electoral map. The idea that somehow insiders are going to reveal their information by buying dollar futures on a Pentagon web site is the kind of thing only someone completely disconnected from reality could think up.
I wont even get into the morality of the issue, because, frankly, people who think dead pools are an appropriate use of government resources are probably not going to be swayed by moral reasoning.
Oh, and just to add icing to the cake, the accounts are anonymous. So if you are a terrorist, you could buy short, kill the person, and clean up! Talk about government financed terrorism!
Its official. we are now living in a twilight zone episode. And a bad one at that.
