From Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century to President Obama’s new foundation, the next American century is often described vaguely. Here’s why. November 9, 2010
Phi Beta Iota: In a very generic sense, what David Brooks proposes is perfectly aligned with the concept of a Smart Nation and the need to nurture a World Brain and Global Game.
British-based men of Afghan origin are spending months at a time in Afghanistan fighting Nato forces before returning to the UK, the Guardian has learned. They also send money to the Taliban.
A Taliban fighter in Dhani-Ghorri in northern Afghanistan last month told the Guardian he lived most of the time in east London, but came to Afghanistan for three months of the year for combat.
“I work as a minicab driver,” said the man, who has the rank of a mid-level Taliban commander. “I make good money there [in the UK], you know. But these people are my friends and my family and it's my duty to come to fight the jihad with them.”
“There are many people like me in London,” he added. “We collect money for the jihad all year and come and fight if we can.”
Dowd says it pretty well. My guess is that because CIA connsiders ISI an “asset”, they insist that no one including themsleves target the ISI. This of course means that ISI can continue using CIA and the U.S. as pawns in thier undeclared cold war against India.
Op-Ed Columnist
And we wonder why we haven’t found Osama bin Laden.
Though we’re pouring billions into intelligence in Afghanistan, we can’t even tell the difference between a no-name faker and a senior member of the Taliban. The tragedy of Afghanistan has descended into farce.
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Just as with Saddam and W.M.D., or groping and the T.S.A., we get no satisfaction for the $80 billion a year we spend on intelligence. Or we get fake information like Curveball that leads us into spending trillions more on a trumped-up war. Last year, seven top C.I.A. officials were fooled by a Jordanian double-agent who got onto an American base in Khost and blew all of them up. Our agents in the “wilderness of mirrors” may not be up to le Carré, but can’t they learn to Google, or at least watch “The Ipcress File”?
Who knows? Maybe we’ve been dealing with bin Laden all along. Maybe he’s been coming and going under a different moniker. As far as our intelligence experts are concerned, a turban and beard are just a turban and beard.
Phi Beta Iota: What is not properly emphasized above is that most of the budget is spent on technical collection and beltway bandit vapor ware, with no one held accountable for massive failures, be they by Lockheed, SAIC, CSC, or what-have you. CIA is at best $10 billion, of which at least 75% is sheer waste, fraud, and abuse. What it does in the way of “intelligence” we could do for $100 million a year, and we could do it faster, better, cheaper and for 1000 times more individual consumers. Neither are intelligence officials held accountable for failure (96% of the time) by Congress or the White House because both the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon are nothing more than pork gone rancid. Leon Panetta could have been the greatest director of CIA in history with his unique background as White House Chief of Staff, Director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Representative. Similar Jim Clapper could have been the first real Director of National Intelligence. The lack of vision, initiative, accountability, and productivity at the top of the US secret world is quite extraordinary. This is how the White House and Congress want it to be. This is “blessed dysfunctionality” profitable for those who feast at the taxpayer's expense, and most assuredly not in the public interest. That's how it is. That is how it will remain absent President Obama choosing to remake himself, or America demanding Electoral Reform, a Coalition Cabinet, and a Balanced Budget in 2010. We are in the Dark Ages of modern American faux-governance.
St. Petersburg, Russia – China and Russia have decided to renounce the US dollar and resort to using their own currencies for bilateral trade, Premier Wen Jiabao and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin announced late on Tuesday.
Chinese experts said the move reflected closer relations between Beijing and Moscow and is not aimed at challenging the dollar, but to protect their domestic economies.”About trade settlement, we have decided to use our own currencies,” Putin said at a joint news conference with Wen in St. Petersburg.
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Premier Wen Jiabao shakes hands with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on a visit to St. Petersburg on Tuesday.ALEXEY DRUZHININ / AFP
The documents covered cooperation on aviation, railroad construction, customs, protecting intellectual property, culture and a joint communiqu. Details of the documents have yet to be released.
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Wen said at the press conference that the partnership between Beijing and Moscow has “reached an unprecedented level” and pledged the two countries will “never become each other's enemy”.
Mr. Kreylos, who specializes in virtual reality and 3-D graphics, had just learned that he could download some software and use the device with his computer instead. He was soon using it to create “holographic” video images that can be rotated on a computer screen. A video he posted on YouTube last week caused jaws to drop and has been watched 1.3 million times.
Philipp Robbel combined an iRobot device and the new Microsoft controller that can recognize gestures. He calls it the KinectBot.
Mr. Kreylos is part of a crowd of programmers, roboticists and tinkerers who are getting the Kinect to do things it was not really meant to do. The attraction of the device is that it is outfitted with cameras, sensors and software that let it detect movement, depth, and the shape and position of the human body.
Mehmet S. Akten uses the system to draw in 3-D.
Phi Beta Iota: Microsoft took a few days to “get it” but their “final answer” is exactly right: “Anytime there is engagement and excitement around our technology, we see that as a good thing,” said Craig Davidson, senior director for Xbox Live at Microsoft. “It’s naïve to think that any new technology that comes out won’t have a group that tinkers with it.” Kudos as well to the New York Times for a lovely piece of useful inspiring reporting.
In her newest book, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin sharply criticizes the record of President Barack Obama while defending her own, in the process offering an unapologetic vision of conservative politics that strongly suggests a forthcoming presidential run.
“America by Heart,” which will be officially released on Tuesday (The Huffington Post obtained an advance copy), exhibits Palin in a variety of roles: culture warrior, presidential critic, committed mother and political provocateur. Clocking in at roughly 270 pages, it reads, at times, like an episode of Glenn Beck's Fox News show. Lengthy quotes and historical research is threaded, often, around contemporary political debates. In the mind's eye of the former governor, the founders, were they alive today, would be nothing short of Palin devotees — and they would certainly be shocked by Obama.
The president makes infrequent appearances in Palin's book, but when he does surface it is in an unflattering light.
“There is a narcissism in our leaders in Washington today,” Palin writes. “There's a quasi-religious feeling to the message coming from them. They are trying to convince us that not only are they our saviors, but that we are our saviors… as candidate Obama proclaimed on Super Tuesday 2008, ‘We are the ones we've been waiting for, we are the change that we seek.'”
Obama, as Palin posits, is neither providing the change that was sought nor fulfilling the role of savior he supposedly promised. Instead, he is cast as a wealth re-distributor, a sly practitioner, and, above all else, a politician with policies antithetical to American values. This is true, she argues, on matters large and small.
