Public Service Projects Index

Capture, Killing of Zarqawi

The US Government had insisted on capturing or killing Osama bin Laden and Zarqawi almost immediately after 9/11/01, and they soon offered a $25,000,000 reward for anyone who enabled them to find either one of them. For four years, they had ZERO success, and rarely seemed to even have much of an idea of what REGION either of them were in!

On Apr. 25, 2006, I sent the following e-mail to half a dozen National News media organizations, including Charlie Rose, ABC Nightline, Think Tank, Foreign Exchange, Meet the Press:

Hi,

The video of Zarqawi today may have extremely important evidence in it!
For the past two years, I have been trying to get word to the CIA regarding
this regarding the many outdoor videos of bin Laden.  I know that you have
contact with people high in the CIA, so I ask that you inform them of the
following.

Around two years ago, our Intelligence demonstrated a "face recognition
system" at the Super Bowl game.  Each face scanned was quickly compared to
images of many terrorists and criminals.  I don't think the success of that
demonstration was ever presented, but the basic concept is what I see of
value.

I have recommended that UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) be flown at low
altitude up and down every valley of Afghanistan, with (two) side directed
cameras taking an image every second.  The result would be "a database of
background images from every location" (with around 150 feet spacing between
images, if the images are taken once per second and the aircraft flown at
100 mph).  Now that Zarqawi made a similar video (probably in Iraq), I
recommend the same be done there.

The existing "face recognition program software" could then be
used WITHOUT MODIFICATION.  Instead of hundreds of thousands of photos
of faces, the database would be filled with hundreds of thousands of
these UAV photos of backgrounds.  Then a frame of a bin Laden or Zarqawi
video could be entered as the "suspect face", to be compared with
all the hundreds of thousands of background images in the database.
The existing system should then be able to identify a "few"
reasonably possible locations which could have been the background of
Zarqawi.  Within seconds, our Intelligence could know EXACTLY where Zarqawi
was on last Friday when he allegedly made that video!  In any case, such
"evidence" seems extremely valuable to me!  I have never gotten any response
in any previous attempts to apprise our Intelligence regarding this concept.
I truly believe they might then capture or kill Zarqawi and/or bin Laden
within days!

I was educated as a Nuclear Physicist at the University of Chicago, so I
like to think that I have some idea regarding this working as described!

So I hope you will try to pass word along for me, and for our country's
security.

Carl Johnson

Forty-two days later, they found Zarqawi and killed him. The news reports in the first few hours (as on BBC) described that they had analyzed the videotape and figured out where he was, and they announced that that was how they got him. However, just hours later, they were announcing a very different story, where some local people had turned him in.

I can understand why they would have done that. They would clearly want to be able to use the same method in finding Usama bin Laden from the videotapes that he would regularly make outdoors. Obviously, they would not want UBL to know that it was a bad idea to do any more outdoor videotapes. So I understand that that would have wanted the news media to present a different story.

Still, they had chased Zarqawi for more than four years without finding him. Then I provide my method and 42 days later, Zarqawi is dead, and the initial news reports described essentially my exact concept! It seems to me that I deserve the $25 million reward that the US government offered for information toward the capture or killing of Zarqawi! Some how, I don't think I will ever be given it!

The Economic Stimulus Check that I was Denied because I had not earned enough money in 2007!

It is interesting to hear that the IRS is still sending out Stimulus checks. I am a Pastor of a Christian Church. The IRS had sent me the postcard in May that told me I was going to receive the $600 check, but when I looked at their web-site at the start of September, the page there said that I had been rejected because I had not made enough money! Our Church obviously failed me by not paying me enough to qualify for getting the extra Stimulus money!

Where's My Stimulus Payment

This table describes the status of your refund Social Security Number: ***-**-9715

You did not qualify for the Stimulus payment because your qualifying income was not high enough. Qualifying income includes wages and net earnings from self-employment that is includable in taxable income, Social Security benefits, certain Railroad Retirement benefits and Veterans disability compensation, disability pension, and survivors benefits received from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

I had truly been looking forward to receiving that $600, as it would have been immensely helpful at that time! But my concern about this is NOT regarding myself, but the very fact that the IRS had set a MINIMUM INCOME in order to qualify for receiving the Stimulus Checks! What a bizarre thing to do! And yet they are thinking about giving Exxon Mobil an additional $4 billion in tax relief each year! Politics and government is obviously WAY above my head, as I do not understand any part of that!

To FIX the Stock Market!

First, we must note that the ORIGINAL intent of the Stock Market was to provide a constant supply of money that is needed to support the many businesses which need it to operate. Fine. It provided the money for companies to use to start and build their businesses.

And as long as stock market transactions were SLOW, it seemed to work pretty well. Millions of INDIVIDUAL stockholders may or may not decide to buy or sell stock on a particular day, and CHANGES in the overall RATING (value) of any one company would or could rarely change by more than 1% in a week or a month. Fine.

But the PURPOSE of the Stock Market greatly changed, primarily about 30 years ago. It became a GAMBLING GAME for a very small number of people. Unfortunately, it was and is not an entirely FAIR gambling game, as those same people have the capability of MANIPULATING the market to their own PERSONAL ends.

The well-being of a company is no longer of any importance at all! And the value that stock trades at has often changed at fantastic speeds, where the (alleged) total value of a company sometimes DOUBLES in a single day, or HALVES! This has NOTHING to do with the actual company, and rarely has much to do with the company's sales or success. A simple RUMOR which is good or bad can cause EVERYONE to suddenly want to either buy or sell the stock of that company, and there is NO importance any more of whether the rumor was even true!

An example seems appropriate, which has been repeated EVERY DAY for many years! A stock is described as having a particular value, say $10 per share. One of those few powerful (and who have access to massive money) decides that he thinks he can make some money on the stock of that company. So he BUYS UP maybe 100,000,000 shares of that company, maybe in a series of purchases. ALL THE OTHER TRADERS AND INVESTORS SEE the enormous traffic in the stock of that company AND that the stock price is rapidly going up. So THEY want to buy in (with the intent of also getting very rich very fast). And everyone then sees that the traffic in that stock is growing even faster and the prices are shooting up even faster. So, maybe by the end of the SAME DAY, the price of a share of that company's stock has risen spectacularly to maybe $20.

And at THIS point, the people who STARTED this whole thing decide to SELL those 100 million shares they bought that same morning. But now they can SELL them at $20 per share when they had bought them that morning for $10 per share. In this single company's stock, in a single day, they first SPENT one billion to buy the stock, but then RECEIVED TWO billion later that same day!

And THEY are proud of themselves for accomplishing something!

But what did they actually accomplish? After they sell all their stocks, everyone else will see the massive selling (which is NEVER identified as being from ONE seller or a million sellers, which is incredibly useful in this situation for them!) and they will also sell. And the amount they could sell for will drop rapidly, possibly back to the original $10 per share.

Did the COMPANY benefit at all from this? No, because their total value of all their stock did not change after the whole day was done.

The Traders made their billion dollars. Where did that money come from? Was it printed up just to give to them? No. It actually came from the LOSSES of exactly one billion dollars by OTHER INVESTORS and TRADERS! Those are the large numbers of people who got in late, and had to buy that stock for $18 or $20 per share, but then quickly discovered that the price soon plummeted and they had to TRY to sell it for $14 or $12 or $10 per share, thereby losing money on EVERY share of it. EACH of them might have only owned a few hundred or few thousand shares, so their INDIVIDUAL losses might have been moderate. But COLLECTIVELY, they necessarily lost that billion dollars that day!

IF there was any sort of MEDIA REPORT which indicated that that particular company was ABOUT TO ANNOUNCE a cure for cancer or some super-efficient vehicle, it even gives the people who dream up such schemes a sort of CREDIBILITY upon which the herd of later investors would enthusiastically jump! And they KNOW that! In some cases, the Traders either KNEW some such fact BEFORE it was otherwise know, but that sort of Insider Trading was made illegal when a lot of them were cheating other investors in such ways. But it still happens every day, but the Traders are just far more cautious now to make sure not to leave any evidence that they had previously known of what was about to happen or be said.

They DON'T call that cheating each other, and essentially they ALL need to do such things just to be competitive with all the others who do it. And so there has developed an astounding tunnel-vision regarding ONLY looking for HUGE PROFITS TODAY, where no other considerations matter. Such as the effects on the company whose stocks are used for such trickery.

There is a slightly more legal variant of this, which is definitely used by every Trader, every day! Say that we see a Stock that is currently $10.00. And a Trader FEELS LIKE GAMBLING! He THINKS that stock will rise by 1%, up to $10.10 that day. So he buys the 100 million shares. It turns out that IF HE WAS RIGHT IN HIS GAMBLE, and he would sell all those shares at the end of the day, he would "earn" ten cents on each of those shares, or $10 million on that single stock in that single day. AND, of course, he knows that the EFFECT of his buying all that stock will be seen by all other traders and investors, which NEARLY GUARANTEES that his "gamble" will turn out to be true, and not actually much of a gamble at all!

This IS what the modern Stock Market is! It has virtually NOTHING to do with the initial reasons for stock markets! It is simply a giant game of Monopoly, where if you are big enough and have access to enough money, you can CAUSE self-perpetuating profits for yourself (but at the cost of the exact same amount of losses by other investors!)

The Stock Market is obviously a lot more complex than this simplified description, but the core of its operation is essentially as described here. MOST stocks are now bought and sold by DAY TRADERS, people who ONLY intend to own any particular stock for a very brief time. MUTUAL FUNDS have made this even worse, as the few individuals who operate such funds can buy and sell billions of dollars of stocks every day, and they do.

A significant point to be made here is that REALITY has very little place in this whole operation! The ACTUAL value of all the assets of General Motors is irrelevant! It is ONLY what the few handfuls of individuals who can buy and sell billions of dollars of stocks believe that matters! And, because of the rather incestuous arrangement, those people tend to follow each other's movements with similar movements of their own, because they do NOT want to be found to be the person who moved too slow and therefore caused his Fund to be left out of great profits.

Another amazing factor is an absolute lack of transparency. Absolutely no one seems to know WHO is buying or selling or HOW MUCH or even whether they actually have the funds to back such purchases! In fact, there have been MANY times when Traders officially BOUGHT massive amounts of stock when they did not have the available money to do so, ASSUMING that they would again sell it all within a few hours, at the expected profit, in order to provide the money that SHOULD HAVE EXISTED in order to even start the whole thing! There is a LOT of this sort of trickery which occurs every day related to the Stock Market, but since NO ONE EVER IS ABLE TO KNOW (due to the lack of transparency), they are all able to get away with such things! It is truly unbelievable that it can work at all! It is virtually ONLY a gambling game between a very small numbers of heavy hitters!

For at least five years, I have speculated about an even darker possibility that I see possible. I usually describe it about like this: Imagine that you have a roomful of people who all agree that the HEALTH of the stock market is critically important to their individual successes and wealth. Under NO conditions, could they ALLOW any really bad things to ever occur. These people would be those couple dozen people who each have the capability of buying or selling billions of dollars of stock at any personal whim.

So they see that some important stock seems to be dropping in price. One or more of them immediately offers to buy a billion dollars of that stock. Since all investors and Traders would immediately see that huge purchase, any public sense of panic would vanish, and PROBABLY millions of private investors might each then decide to buy a little bit, where the person would then be able to sell off the billion dollars of stocks, smoothly and INVISIBLY.

I often felt that such an incestuous relationship was the ONLY explanation for days when there was horrendous business news, but then the Stock Market shot UP by 400 points! Such things should NOT be possible! I remember one day a year or two ago when Ford announced a tremendous loss of billions of dollars, the unemployment figure had greatly risen, and two other pieces of major negative business news occurred, and yet the Stock Market shot up that day! I tend to think that COULD NOT have happened without some sort of collusion like what I had speculated. Of course, since there is no transparency, there could never have been any way to prove that my suspicions might have been true!

The Solution

That would ELIMINATE much of the INCENTIVE of the Brokers to be Day Trading to swipe some quick millions of dollars, because they would NOT be allowed to be buying or selling that large a fraction of their holdings ON ANY SINGLE DAY. It would inspire and require LONGER-TERM PLANNING on the part of Traders and Investors, getting back to the INITIAL REASON for the Stock Market to exist.

This is in total contrast to the current approaches of Washington, of PROVIDING hundreds of billions of (taxpayer) dollars to allegedly stabilize Wall Street. Washington can't seem to realize that by ENSURING plenty of money, with the current rules, it ENCOURAGES every Trader to make his best guess as to WHEN he should "buy absolutely everything!" Given the depressed level that they all believe the Market is now in, they each see an OBVIOUS way that they can make THEMSELVES many billions of dollars, by buying enormous amounts of stock when it is low and then selling it ALL a few days later. Why doesn't Washington see that they will be FEEDING such greedy people? That some of our taxpayer billions will DIRECTLY go into billions of personal profits, leaving the Market no better than before? And it is ALL because the Traders are ALLOWED to make fantastically huge purchases and sales of stocks every few minutes!

The ONE PERCENT PER DAY rule would also eliminate the tremendous surges and then personal incentives of Traders to be buying and selling obscene amounts of stock, just to be running with the herd! The Stock Market would NECESSARILY be based more on sanity, as it should be! The ACTUAL VALUE of the total assets (minus liabilities) of any company would be carefully examined before making any major stock commitment in that company.

As long as Traders can expect to be able to make billions of dollars in what they call daily "profit taking", nothing will really change! It would not matter much what the government might try to invoke, human nature would find a way to bypass it, because they can taste those enormous profits!

This simple concept would FORCE all investors and Traders to essentially adopt Warren Buffet's LONG view of the Stock Market. Of ONLY buying when there was ACTUAL perceived value existing, and no longer running thither and yon in buying and selling stocks as if they were simply scoring markers in a game of Monopoly!

I actually have a SECOND recommendation as well! I believe that if my friend Peter Jennings was still with us, he would have instituted the following, so if it should ever be adopted, my hope would be that it be called the Jennings approach!

I believe that Peter would have invited: Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Melissa Gates, President Sarcozy of France, Tony Blair, Robert Redford, Charlie Rose, Michael Jordan, Will Smith, Richard Petty, Bono, President da Silva of Brazil, at least one prominent Japanese and two prominent Chinese and two prominent Indian, and a few others; to a regular meeting in a remote location such as Mr. Redford's Ranch. There, with NO ONE ELSE than them present, they would have free-wheeling discussions about ALL matters that are critical to the world's people. NO politicians are in that mix (but Jimmy Carter seems a possible exception to that), and no bureaucrats.

The point would be that they would bring up all kinds of ideas and probably immediately shoot them down. And occasionally, if they felt they needed "expert advice" regarding the Economy or Nuclear Power or Global Warming or anything else, THEY could decide to invite SEVERAL experts in the appropriate fields (for only one day) where they would then be able to ask their questions.

The theory would be that they would FIND A CONSENSUS regarding what should be said or done. And THEN, EACH of them would return to their normal life and start to have Press Conferences, where they EXPLAIN TO THE PUBLIC WHY they feel confident that the solution they have adopted seems to make sense. A member of the public would therefore see Bono on TV describing the EXACT same plan that Tony Blair similarly presented, which is identical to the plan that Michael Jordan and Bill Gates would be saying.

The POINT of this is that THE PUBLIC would very quickly see that MANY of the famous people THAT THEY RESPECT all seem to be in complete agreement about what is needed to be done.

This is actually a modern version of what Franklin Roosevelt had done to INSPIRE CONFIDENCE in the American people in 1933. The people's lives had actually not materially improved, but they all FELT confident that FDR "knew how to lead them back to prosperity and happiness". (As it turned out, FDR made many bad decisions regarding things to try, but as long as the people BELIEVED in his leadership, they were all confident that the US would recover.)

So the final aspect of this suggestion is that the group of 20 people probably would KNOW when they needed to get together. If Peter Jennings was still with us, he certainly would have known, and he would certainly have simply called each of them and asked them if their schedules could include a Meeting for a few days at XX/XX/XX to XX/XX/XX. But it seems good that if the PUBLIC saw need for them to meet, THEY could somehow initiate the process for them as well!

PEOPLE would feel INVOLVED. They would feel CONFIDENT. And they would TRUST those people who they had earlier learned to have great respect for.

To FIX the American Economy!

A CENTRAL problem in coming years will be there there are few JOBS for the many millions of people who are out of work. A similar situation occurred during the 1930s, but it was actually BETTER then because there were millions of MANUFACTURING jobs in the US then. Now, there are not, because the NAFTA and GATT agreements had enabled and encouraged nearly all manufacturers to move their factories to countries where workers are ENTHUSIASTIC at working for 50 cents per hour, instead of American workers who were generally unhappy at being paid $30/hour for the same work.

A complicating factor is that, because BOTH men and women now work, there are essentially twice as many American people who will be searching for the few jobs which will be available. An interesting aspect of this is that it figures that there will be soon millions of workers who WILL BE WILLING to work for BELOW minimum wage, out of desperation to earn enough for food for their family! How will employers deal with that, as they will get into deep trouble if they ever pay any employee less than Minimum Wage!

In any case, I believe there is a really obvious AND WONDERFUL solution for much of this!

In the 1930s, FDR set up many work programs, where millions of people earned money (from the government) for manual labor, in building the road system of the country and other infrastructure systems.

Leaders seem to start becoming aware of how terrible the infrastructure of the US has become, because very little funding has been allocated for repairs for many years. So there is definitely a NEED for massive work on the intrastructure in the US.

It will be interesting to see IF the government chooses to approach this as they traditionally have, of HIRING giant contractors to do the repairs, ASSUMING those contractors would hire huge numbers of workers to do the work. This happens to be an extremely inefficient approach, I believe. An obvious example was when President Bush gave $100 billion (of our taxpayer money) to a handful of very large contractors (who also happened to be good friends of his!) and where it was found by Reporters later that only about $1 billion of actual work had gotten done. The other $99 billion sort of disappeared inside those giant corporations! Is THAT what they are going to do on a much larger scale this time?

It seems that the approach that FDR used in the 1930s was far wiser. The government DIRECTLY offered to hire millions of manual laborers, at modest pay rates, and those jobs were all rapidly filled. Those millions of workers did not have much Prosperity right then, but at least they had consistent income so that their families were able to eat.

I am mentioning this here for a reason! Around 1990, I had invented and (nearly) fully Designed an impressive NEW transportation system for the US. The transportation would NOT require any fossil fuels to be burned, a wonderful side benefit! Automobiles and (most) trucks would be replaced by a system where people and products traveled at 200 mph instead of the 55 mph on highways, with NO traffic jams or any other delays. Better yet, the system is so efficient that the fees for traveling from Chicago to New York should be around $5 (one way), less than 1/20 of the cost of an airplane trip (which would actually involve about the same total amount of travel time!)

When you have been at drive-through banks, you have seen the pneumatic tubes and canisters which transfer papers and money very rapidly into and out of the bank. In the late 1980s, I discovered a way where a large version of that concept could transport people and products in very large canisters (which I called pods), AND that it was possible to use a well-known Bernoulli Effect of Physics to enable the pods to essentially FLY inside of a system of fixed tubes. This results in very little friction, and extremely efficient operation. FAR better than the average 21% overall efficiency of modern cars!

HERE is where the SOLUTION arrives!

First, such a National system would require many MILLIONS of pods to be manufactured, either to transport products or to transport people. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler happen to already have many very large factories, which could easily be converted to making such pods rather than conventional vehicles. MILLIONS OF JOBS would be involved and VERY RELIABLE for many years!

Second, the system of the tubes themselves are designed as being EXISTING concrete culverts (of 5 foot diameter). My plan involved installing THREE of these concrete tubes down the Median of each Interstate highway (one each direction and the third to take the traffic when either needed any repairs). Many other locations of such tubes could be installed in other locations, as desired. MILLIONS OF CONSTRUCTION JOBS for several years would provide reliable income for other Americans.

Third, the infrastructure of the US would not just be REPAIRED, but REPLACED with an entire system that was GREEN (no fossil fuels), VERY FAST, and incredibly useful.

Fourth, hundreds of thousands of computer and electronics workers would assemble the computer control system for this system. Each pod would have a bar-coding pattern on its side, and as it passed scanners along the system, its exact position would always be known to the computer. When that pod needed to be diverted into a different tube path to get to the desired destination, the system would use all that information to divert just that one pod, leaving all the other pods ahead of it and behind it on their original path.

I trust you see that quite a few million people would be earning at least moderate amounts of income, for a number of years while the American economic system gradually recovered from its problems. And at the end, we would wind up with a wonderful NEW transportation system that was far BETTER than anything existing today.

Finally, NO NEW TECHNOLOGIES are necessary or involved! This could be started IMMEDIATELY!

WITHOUT something like this, the US is certain to have severe economic and financial problems for quite a few years. It seems extremely obvious to me that this concept SHOULD be at least carefully examined, and then probably IMMEDIATELY implemented!

A web-site which provides a more extensive overview of this TRANS system is at TRANS.