The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Obama signs defense bill despite ‘reservations'
Julie Pace
Associated Press, 31 December 2011
HONOLULU (AP) — President Barack Obama signed a wide-ranging defense bill into law Saturday despite having “serious reservations” about provisions that regulate the detention, interrogation and prosecution of suspected terrorists.
Great search, thank you. How “risk” is defined determines what countries are up or down. It is therefore essential to demand an itemization of assumptions, and to question those risk maps that are so conventional in nature as to ignore both rising sea levels and dropping drinkable water aquifers. Dun & Broadstreet has never been especially thoughtful about risk at either the enterprise or the country level. Similarly, Control Risks is focused on “old” concepts of risk rather than new concepts, or the USA and China would both be red zones. Here are a few links and images.
D&B: Germany and Switzerland share best country rating worldwide
Five unlikely shelters in the storm [Control Risks]
The Council on Foreign Relations preventive priorities map is fascinating, in part because it places no importance on Brazil, Canada, Chile, or Indonesia, four locatons that we consider of vital importance.
Preventive Priorities Survey: 2012
‘Risk Atlas’ assesses meridian vulnerability
London (CNN) — Some of a world’s fastest flourishing race centers in Asia and Africa are during biggest risk from a impact of meridian change, according to a new report.
A sum of 30 countries were personal as being during “extreme risk” with Haiti, Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and Madagascar creation adult a tip 5 many in peril, while Vietnam, Indonesia and India all ranked inside a tip 30.
Six out of a 20 fastest flourishing cities worldwide, including Calcutta, India, Manila in a Philippines, Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, were also personal as during “extreme risk” by a CCVI.
“How does a company respect local communities' right to water when operating production facilities that require high levels of water consumption and where the community suffers from an inadequate water supply by relevant government authorities, but where the business is welcome as a source of jobs and revenue?”
See Also:
2012 Reflexivity = Integrity: Toward Earth/Life 4.0
2011 Thinking About Revolution in the USA and Elsewhere (Full Text Online for Google Translate)
Connecting the Dots: ALL of Them
Reference: Strategic Analytic Model for Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
Reference: WATER–Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls
Robert Steele: Global Trends 2030 – Gaps + RECAP
Presidential campaign needs to get real on salvaging middle class
With the coming U.S. presidential election, 2012 offers voters, business leaders and politicians an opportunity for a joint debate over the fundamentals of capitalism in America.
Occupy Wall Street and its coast-to-coast spinoffs captured the headlines in 2011, but the economic debate it helped trigger should reverberate deep into 2012.
That’s the debate over the future of the American middle class. Rarely has its economic plight been an explicit issue in a presidential election, but candidates on both sides of the partisan divide are poised to make it the centerpiece of their campaigns in the coming year.
. . . . . .
Yet so far the lionization of the middle class has been largely rhetorical. The year just past was one in which the stagnation of income and wealth for the great majority of Americans continued — indeed, bit so deep that it helped fuel the Occupy movement taking as its constituency the “99%,” those left behind by the continued gravitation of economic bounty toward the top 1% of U.S. taxpayers.
. . . . . .
Confidence in the essential fairness of American life, including confidence in the social and economic safety net, underlies the optimism that fuels consumer spending. That has ebbed in recent decades. As Michigan’s Curtin put it, “For the first time since the 1930s, consumers no longer think that jobs and wages will spring back anytime soon, that the value of their homes will rebound, or that their retirement funds will soon be fully restored…. Their worsening finances were mainly attributed to job losses, reduced hours, wage give-backs, and reduced bonuses.”
Inspired by the extraordinary ignorance of all the Republican participants in the primaries, less Ron Paul, a FACT has emerged that is of such importance that I am moved to upgrade the Event Report I did on 27 September 2010, recording the wisdom and knowledge of MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret) PhD, speaking at the Brookings Institution. Notes taken and published with permission.
Memorandum (3 Pages)
Below: full text online
EVENT REPORT: MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret), PhD at the Brookings Institution, 27 September 2010
TOPIC: “The Next Generation of Small Unit Warfare [Posted with Permission of the Event Sponsor]
Robert H. Scales, Jr. is a retired U.S. Army Major General and former Commandant of the US Army War College. He now works as a military analyst, news commentator, and author.
Review: Firepower In Limited War addressed the disconnect between troops engaged in low intensity conflict, and the national and defense intelligence communities. He has also authored Future Warfare, Yellow Smoke: the Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military, and The Iraq War: A Military History.
Strategic Studies Institute Page
DuckDuckGo Results for General Robert Scales
Speaking to around 50 people under the auspices of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at Brookings, the presentation was summed up at the very end as General Scales offered his opinion on the essence of the four World Wars:
World War I: Chemistry World War II: Physics (especially radar)
World War III: Information (the Cold War) World War IV: Human Factors
His focus is on the reality that 4% of the “total force,” the engaged infantry, bear 80-81% of the total casualties, but receive less than 1% of the over-all acquisitions and training budget. He calls this, rather memorably, a “cosmic incongruity.”
The `K Street Clausewitz’ Remembered
By CHUCK SPINNEY | December 30, 2011
Mark Thompson's 27 December posting, “General Newt,” alerted readers of Battleland to Karen Tumulty's pastiche of mini portraits of Newt Gingrich's martial prowess. Mark highlighted one the few passages that zeroed in on the insubstantial essence of the K Street Clausewitz.
Unable to contain my mirth, I immediately forwarded Mark's posting to to my close friend, the noted military reformer, Pierre Sprey, who replied immediately, with his usual rapier wit:
Chuck,
…What no reporter seems to have tumbled to is that Newt is dumb as an old boot. John Boyd and I had several years of “working” with him in the Congressional Military Reform Caucus, years during which Newt found it advantageous to pose as a reformer.
Within a month or so, John and I both realized that Newt had almost perfect recall of other people's intellectual-sounding ideas and phrases–and could barf them back convincingly without understanding a shred of the content. At the drop of a hat he could string together a two hour lecture on anything from concocting new war-winning technologies to optimizing grand America's strategy the 21st century. For the listening layman, the entire two hours would flow seamlessly and every idea would sound newly minted and carefully crafted. But for those of us who knew the sources of Newt's cribs, it was perfectly obvious that not one of those ideas was his, nor did he have the shallowest comprehension of any of them.
Carne Ross
The Nation, 30 December 2011
It has been clear for some time that the conduct of the banking and financial industry is one very important cause of the 2008 credit crunch. Moreover, for-profit banks by and large fail to deliver services to the poor, deepening poor people’s marginalization from the mainstream economy. The banks’ relentless pursuit of profit, an intrinsic feature of the industry (as of the broader economy), continues to expose all of us to the risk of another banking crisis that would repeat the enormous harm done last time, above all to the world’s poorest. Sadly, it’s unrealistic to expect Washington to do much to curb the industry, given the banks’ enormous lobbying sway and privileged access to senior officials, regardless which party is in power.
Mexican Drug Cartels Recruit Young Latinos In Southern California
Mexican drug cartels, in a disturbing new trend, are luring young people from Southern California to smuggle drugs across the border and carry out other illicit work for the criminal enterprises, according to law enforcement officials and youth activists.
The result: More than 5,000 young people, most of them Latinos, have been held in San Diego County jails over the last two years, according to KPBS San Diego.
Phi Beta Iota: Crime in Southern California has been directly influenced by the US wars in Central America and Colombia, and by CIA and DEA sponsorship of strategic drug suppliers into the USA. The US Government consists of good people trapped in a very bad system, in which a two-party tyranny prevents the government from having intelligence and integrity–or a strategy–in the public interest. When citizens see that both the government and the major banks are corrupt, the benefits of participating in organized crime take on new alure. A rise in crime is a direct consequence of a drop in government legitimacy and efficacy.
