Well before the collapse of Bernie Madoff's ponzi scheme -- the largest in world history! -- accounting investigator Harry Markopolos had publicly accused Madoff of running a scam; now he says that General Electric is "one recession away" from bankruptcy, with a "balance sheet in tatters." Read the rest

10-year mortgage interest rates in Denmark have hit -0.5% -- that is, the bank will pay to you borrow money. 20 year loans? Zero interest. 30 year loans now at 0.5% are headed negative. Translation: some people with a LOT of money think that we're heading for a depression so ferocious that they'll loan you money for 30 years at only 0.5%, just to lock in some kind of return during the decades-long bloodbath they foretell. (Image: Jimmy Baikovicius, CC BY-SA,modified) (Thanks, Kathy Padilla!) Read the rest

Banx sends us American Psychosis, a 15-minute short in which "Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and activist Chris Hedges (previously) discusses modern day consumerism, totalitarian corporate power and living in a culture dominated by pervasive illusion." Read the rest

A leaked recording of Facebook security chief Alex Stamos (who refused to help with an illegal NSA spying program when he was CSO for Yahoo) has him describing the company's IT culture as being "like a college campus, almost" while the company has the "threat profile of a Northrop Grumman or a Raytheon or another defense contractor." Read the rest

Massive infusions of cash by way of the central bank, combined with runaway mass panic-buying has stampeded Chinese people into buying into the property markets in boomtowns like Shenzhen, despite the insane prices that almost guarantee that they will default on their mortgages -- because they fear that rising property prices will shut them out forever if they don't buy now, and the new rentiers who've speculated on all that property are cranking up rents so fast that renting is worse than buying. Read the rest

BBC Asian Network raised a few eyebrows after tweeting "What is the right punishment for blasphemy?" While it's clear from watching the video all the way through that BBC's Shazia Awan is not taking a side, BBC Asia later apologized. Read the rest

Stanford history and classics professor Walter Scheidel writes in the Atlantic that the only reliable ways for unequal societies to become more equal is to suffer catastrophes that upend the order of things; Scheidel concludes that our modern, unequal state may not be able to avail itself of a convenient catastrophe for this purpose because "Technology has made mass warfare obsolete; violent, redistributive revolution has lost its appeal; most states are more resilient than they used to be; and advances in genetics will help humanity ward off novel germs." Read the rest

Address space layout randomization is an important first line of defense against malicious software: by randomizing where in memory instructions are stored, ASLR makes it much harder to overwrite memory with new code that will be jumped to as a program executes, offering significant protection against buffer overflow attacks. Read the rest

François Fillon is the French Republican Party's political candidate, the right-wing frontrunner against the neofascist Marine Le Pen. Following an investigation by the Canard Enchainé newspaper, French government investigators have announced an investigation into the period in the late 1990s and early 2000s when his British-born wife Penelope drew a salary of €7,000/month as his parliamentary aide; the newspaper alleged that Ms Fillon was not actually working in Parliament at that time and drew her salary for a "fake job." Read the rest

An anonymous reader writes, "After snap elections on December 11th in Macedonia, when designers united against a dictatorship, Nikola Gruevski, the leader of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE party gave a Milosevic-style speech declaring that foreign powers are interfering with the work of the SEC. VMRO-DPMNE won (for now) 51 seats, the opposition party won 49 of total 120 seats in Parliament. Yesterday, obituaries from the US and EU ambassadors to Macedonia appeared on IMGUR. Read the rest