While it is unquestionable that Barack Obama made the war in Afghanistan “his” war, it also is true that it was served to him on a platter and with a gun pressed against his back.
It was in fact the Pentagon’s chosen war. Had he refused to fight it, Pentagon insider stories, the opposition press and the Republican Party would have attacked him and his new administration for demonstrating incompetence in dealing with world affairs, naive and pacifist inclinations, and a willingness to “surrender” to terrorism.
Phi Beta Iota: There is an information-intelligence race going on, between the “establishment” that thrives on information asymmetries, and the collective intelligence of the public, that is very very rapidly learning how to share information and make sense about all manner of topics. We're betting on the public.
Where Wind and Solar Power Make Sense
GOOD Blog > Andrew Price on February 15, 2010
How much energy we can generate with wind and solar power projects depends, of course, on the wind and the sun. So being smart about where we put solar panels and turbines is pretty important. A company called 3TIER has made a business out of providing “prospecting tools” for renewable energy.Here's their latest map for where solar power can be harvested in the western hemisphere:
Charles Wyly Jr. and Samuel Wyly, Texas businessmen and brothers who are among the nation's most generous campaign donors to Republican political candidates and causes, were today hit with a Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit accusing them of fraud worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The SEC accuses the Wylys of pocketing $550 million in undisclosed money over 13 years.
“The cloak of secrecy has been lifted from the complex web of foreign structures used by the Wylys to evade the securities laws,” Lorin Reisner, the SEC’s deputy enforcement director, said in a statement this afternoon. “They used these structures to conceal hundreds of millions of dollars of gains in violation of the disclosure requirements for corporate insiders.”
Beneficiaries of Wyly brothers cash together compose a who's who of the decade's most notable Republicans, with dozens of top GOP partisans' campaign coffers touched by Wyly money.
See the graphic and the process by the Beehive Design Collective
After two years of collaborative research, storysharing, metaphor crafting, and meticulous illustrating, the bees have completed an epic illustration about mountaintop removal coal mining.
See the graphic and process by the Beehive Design Collective
Syria-Saudi Arabia-Lebanon: Syria and Saudi Arabia pledged to support efforts to stabilize Lebanon and preserve its security and unity, Reuters reported 29 July. A joint statement from Saudi King Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al Asad also called for better inter-Arab relations, praised Turkey's support for the Palestinians and called for the formation of a government in Iraq to preserve the nation's Arab identity and security.
NIGHTWATCH Comment: The King has undertaken another strenuous trip through Arab lands to build an Arab front that blocks Iranian influence in Syria and inroads in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. The Syrian Alawites, the Sunni Palestinians of Hamas and the Shiite Arabs of Lebanese Hezbollah have afforded the Persians unprecedented access to Arab lands and business.
The Saudi King continues to try to limit or reverse the damage to what passes for Arab unity from Iranian subversion. Thus far his energies have been misspent. His initiatives have not weakened Iranian influence in any of the three target entities.
Phi Beta Iota: With the utmost respect for both the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (C/JCS) and the Secretary of Defense (SecDef), their “outrage” is nonsense–nothing more than political theater. On BBC, the moderately intelligent evening news, this is right up there with the French mom who murdered eight babies.
1. The Taliban knows all its needs to know about our tactics and procedures because we have been running through our training for the last decade, not knowing how to distinguish them. Does anyone really think they are going to waste reading 90,000 pages that are 99% noise?
2. Anyone who puts a “source” name into a message is either criminally negligent if an intelligence professional, or insanely naive if a diplomat or defense attache or military tactical commander. The fact that names and addresses are bandied about in any message anywhere is a stake in the heart of the chain of command in Afghanistan, and reminds us of the negligence surrounding Abu Ghraib.
3. Afghanistan is a side show for some, a loot-fest for others, and mission impossible for all the rest. Like Iraq, American troops were sent there on a foundation of lies by the Bush-Cheney Administration that the Obama-Biden Administration has been happy to continue because “the establishment” (as opposed to the public) wants to be there using up every borrowed and printed dollar they can.
4. Between the Wall Street bail-out and the three-four trillion dollar elective global war, we have broken the national treasury (which was officially bankrupt in 2006 to begin with). Anything that helps get foreign troops out of Afghanistan and national policymakers focused on domestic challenges, is good.
Transparency. That's what our secret government needs. Bring it on! Yes We Can!
“The 10th annual Trafficking in Persons Report outlines the continuing challenges across the globe, including in the United States. The Report, for the first time, includes a ranking of the United States based on the same standards to which we hold other countries. The United States takes its first-ever ranking not as a reprieve but as a responsibility to strengthen global efforts against modern slavery, including those within America. This human rights abuse is universal, and no one should claim immunity from its reach or from the responsibility to confront it.”
Phi Beta Iota: The Department of State has so much potential, if they could just get a grip on the fact that the only thing standing between them and owning the Open Source Center with the Multinational Decision-Support Centre embedded, is the fact that her gate-keepers are blocking every piece of paper on this 9-11 Commission recommended new agency because CIA “claims” it and no one at State is willing to stand up to them. Human trafficking, like other kinds of smuggling including narcotics and arms and blood diamonds, cannot be addressed in stove-pipes. It can be represented by stove-pipes, but the collection and analysis must be REGIONAL. Neither CIA nor any other part of the US get that yet–the Joint Intelligence Centers at the theaters are travesties, just look at the travesty of USSOUTHCOM pretending to help Haiti. The Nordics and the Netherlands have it right–Multinational, Multifunctional Information-Sharing and Sense-Making Centres is the only way to go–Centres that do both the all-source integrated processing the secret world cannot do, and do not lose sight of the human factor working in 183 languages the US secret world, at least, does not speak.
