1. Invest in America's Infrastructure . 2. Create 21st Century Energy Jobs . 3. Invest in Public Education
4. Offer Medicare for All . 5. Secure Social Security . 6. Return to Fairer Tax Rates . 7. End the Wars and Invest at Home . 8. Tax Wall Street Speculation . 9. Strengthen Democracy
I got hold of a few truths, and could not help remembering the Phi Beta Iota quote:
Fedor Dostoevsky:A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else.
Here are some facts:
1) Saydabad is one of the worst districts in Wardak
2) Chinook loss should be attributed to American hubris.
3) July reporting shows US patrols increasingly timid.
4) Current rate for Afghan Army defectors is 30,000 rupees, around US$650, which appears to include their bringing over their weapon and other gear.
5) Crash killed 38, including 22 members of the elite SEAL Team 6 and their support element. Seven were Afghans so we are at 29, there was a crew of three. So, did we send in 22 SEALS and a crew of three, plus the Afghans to rescue six Rangers? The numbers on the Chinook do not add up. There is something seriously fishy about the government story.
6) Sure feels like Viet-Nam deja vu, where the public could not trust the government or the media to report accurately on anything having to do with our presence therer.
The government's relentless pursuit of people suspected of mishandling or leaking classified information underscores the need to combat the misuse of classification authority, wrote J. William Leonard, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times today.
“The Obama administration, which has criminally prosecuted more leakers of purportedly classified information than all previous administrations combined, needs to stop and assess the way the government classifies information in the first place.”
“Classifying information that should not be kept secret can be just as harmful to the national interest as unauthorized disclosures of appropriately classified information,” he wrote. See “When Secrecy Gets Out of Hand” by J. William Leonard, Los Angeles Times, August 10.
Mr. Leonard recentlyfiled a complaint with the new ISOO director, John Fitzpatrick, based on his assessment that a document that served as a basis for criminal prosecution in the case of Thomas Drake should never have been classified at all.
LOGAN — Imagine being able to put your fingers on the pulse of America's biosphere — keeping real-time track of weather, water/soil temperature, animal populations and much more. Armed with this information, scientists would be able to detect sudden shifts in climate, perhaps even predict them, allowing the nation to prepare for potential disasters.
Click on Image to Enlarge
The National Science Foundation has given the financial go-ahead to begin construction of the nation's first coast-to-coast network of observatories, including one in Utah, to measure real-time climate changes.
The National Ecological Observatory Network, or NEON, is designed to gather vast amounts of data, every second, from around the country using satellites, observation towers, aircraft sensors, mobile motorized sensors and field work by scientists. From insect samples to weather data, the information will be fed into a central lab to build a picture of the nation's ecological health.
What scientists will keep an eye out for are “threshold events,” or sudden changes in climates, that can lead to droughts, floods, even the spread of diseases, said James MacMahon, dean of Utah State University's College of Science and chairman of NEON's board of directors.
Phi Beta Iota: The most righteous thing the White House has done in our view, starting under Clinton-Gore and continued by Bush-Cheney, has been the Earth Science information-sharing initiative. The above article neglects the importance of the same initiative being carried out across the oceans, 75% of the Earth's surface. This particular initiative would do well to adopt the four fundamental opens: Open Source Software, Open Data Access, Open Spectrum, and Open Source Intelligence.
Phi Beta Iota: This report, while responsible (unlike the current food fight a year later), does not go far enough. It allows the borrowing of one trillion a year to continue, while observing that interest on the debt could reach one trillion a year by 2020. The principle recommendations, all sound but insufficient, are listed in the Overview section.
Washington: The Pentagon's top intelligence official has ordered the Air Force to set up a new intelligence unit to analyze the behavior of foreign-based commercial aircraft and integrate intelligence from the combatant commanders as the planes move through American airspace.
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Mike Vickers has tasked Air Force Secretary Michael Donley to hand pick a chief for the new intelligence cell.
While USD(I) will be the “focal point in DoD for intelligence on foreign civil aviation-related entities associated with illicit activities or posing a threat to the United States, its allies or its interests,” the Air Force will handle day-to-day operations through the Civil Aviation Intelligence Analysis Center, according to a July 29 memo from Vickers.
The rhetoric of people rushing to rescue Pentagon spending from “completely unacceptable” cuts is quite hysterical. Leading the chorus has been Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta. He termed the possible defense budget cuts (about $850 billion over 10 years according to most) a “doomsday mechanism,” if the automatic sequestration trigger of Obama’s debt deal with the Republicans in Congress is pulled. Some think tank types, opining in the Washington Post and the New York Times, have deemed these reductions “indiscriminately hacking away” at the Pentagon’s budget and something that could “imperil America’s national security.” Their defense spending allies, including multiple generals and admirals sitting atop various Pentagon bureaucracies, confirm it all with descriptions like “very high risk” and “draconian.”
It should be pointed out that these people are underestimating the size of the potential cuts the new debt deal could theoretically cause. The $850 billion supposition measures the reductions against an artificial “baseline” from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) that does not include the actual budget growth the Pentagon had scheduled for itself. Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments tells us in a useful analysis (“Defense Funding in the Budget Control Act of 2011”) that the debt deal’s automatic sequesters, if implemented, would mean $968 billion in cuts over ten years from the DOD budgets heretofore planned – over $100 billion more in cuts.
