The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
YouTube: Jim Channon ” Old World Order” ?…Just walk away…!
YouTube: Jim channon On 2012 and the future part1
YouTube: One Minute Shift – Are You Ready?
YouTube: “Operation Noble Steward” by Lt. Colonel Jim Channon
YouTube: Combat of the Collective Conscience
YouTube: GOATS DECLASSIFIED: The True Story Behind The Men Who Stare At Goats
Tip of the Hat to Sumner Carter at Facebook.
“End of the Recession? Who's Kidding Whom?”
Immanuel Wallerstein<
Commentary No. 296, Jan. 1, 2011
The media are telling us that the economic “crisis” is over, and that the world-economy is once more back to its normal mode of growth and profit. On December 30, Le Monde summed up this mood in one of its usual brilliant headlines: “The United States wants to believe in an economic upturn.” Exactly, they “want to believe” it, and not only people in the United States. But is it so?
First of all, as I have been saying repeatedly, we are not in a recession but in a depression. Most economists tend to have formal definitions of these terms, based primarily on rising prices in stock markets. They use these criteria to demonstrate growth and profit. And politicians in power are happy to exploit this nonsense. But neither growth nor profit is the appropriate measures.
The 16 brewing conflicts to watch for in 2011.
Foreign Policy with International Crisis Group
December 28, 2010
Large photos with captions on each
and closer to home….
Officer won't sign order for troop indoctrination, asks to be relieved of command over repeal of ‘gay' ban in military
Worldnet.com,Posted: December 24, 2010
An Army lieutenant colonel has asked to be relieved of command rather than order his troops to go through pro-homosexual indoctrination following the repeal of the policy, which required homosexuals to keep silent about their sexual preference.
Afghanistan: Our mandate for action is finally exhausted
The withdrawal of our troops is not because we have won or lost in any conventional sense
Editorial
The Observer, Sunday 2 January 2011
This year will see the 10th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan and, according to current plans, the beginning of British troop withdrawal. A decade into the military campaign, there is no longer even discussion of winning. The initial objective to release the country from the despotic grip of the Taliban and prevent its use as a safe haven for al-Qaida was achieved within months. Since then, it has only ever become harder to discern what victory might look like.
There is some clarity on what would count as defeat. If Nato withdrawal leads to the total collapse of Hamid Karzai's government and a return to Taliban rule, there would be no disguising the humiliation to western powers, nor the increased security threat from jihadi terrorism. Not that President Karzai is an attractive ruler. His administration is corrupt and repressive.
Please don't underestimate how powerful this sentence is.
When you say this to a colleague, a new hire, a student or a freelancer, you've established a powerful norm, one that they will be hesitant to challenge.
This might be exactly what you were hoping for, but if your goal is to encourage innovation, you blew it.
Phi Beta Iota: In strategic and force structure studies (neither strategic nor studies) the code is “protect the shooters” when they really mean protect shooter command billets, never mind the shooters themselves or the desperate need for a 10% move from shooters to thinkers.
Graphic: Principles of War versus Principles of Peace
Graphic: Digital Learners versus Analog Teachers
Reference: 27 Sep MajGen Robert Scales, USA (Ret), PhD
Reference: Saving Defense from Itself
Review: The Power of Unreasonable People–How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World
The National Interest
From the Jan-Feb 2011 issue
December 16, 2010
Summary: The author discusses the intellectual but not the ethical underpinings of the failure of US foreign policy and national security since the first Clinton Administration. He touches on alternative policies such as isolationalism, offshore balancing, selective engagement, global dominance, and then settles on offshore balancing as the way to go: pulling back the Army and Marines from overseas, sharply reducing their budgets, and restoring budget to the Air Force and the Navy.
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He is on the Advisory Council of The National Interest, and his most recent book, Why Leaders Lie: The Truth About Lying in International Politics, was published in January 2011 by Oxford University Press. He is also the co-author of the deeply practical The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
Guardian, Sunday 2 January 2011
Sean O'Hagan
In downtown Detroit, the streets are lined with abandoned hotels and swimming pools, ruined movie houses and schools, all evidence of the motor city's painful decline. The photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre capture what remains of a once-great city – and hint at the wider story of post-industrial America
. . . . . . .
Cumulatively, the photographs are a powerful and disturbing testament to the glory and the destructive cost of American capitalism: the centre of a once-thriving metropolis in the most powerful nation on earth has become a ghost town of decaying buildings and streets. There is a formal beauty here too, though, reminiscent of Robert Polidori's images of post-hurricane Katrina New Orleans. “It seems like Detroit has just been left to die,” says Marchand, “Many times we would enter huge art deco buildings with once-beautiful chandeliers, ornate columns and extraordinary frescoes, and everything was crumbling and covered in dust, and the sense that you had entered a lost world was almost overwhelming. In a very real way, Detroit is a lost world – or at least a lost city where the magnificence of its past is everywhere evident.”
. . . . . . .
The Ruins of Detroit tells the city's story so far in one starkly beautiful photograph after another, all of which add up to nothing less than an end-of-empire narrative. Or as Sugrue puts it: “The abandoned factories, the eerily vacant schools, the rotting houses, and gutted skyscrapers that Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre chronicle are the artefacts of Detroit's astonishing rise as a global capital of capitalism and its even more extraordinary descent into ruin, a place where the boundaries between the American dream and the American nightmare, between prosperity and poverty, between the permanent and the ephemeral are powerfully and painfully visible. No place epitomises the creative and destructive forces of modernity more than Detroit, past and present.”
