The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
KBR and Halliburton Can Be Sued For Iraq Toxic Burn Pits, Court Rules
by Fatima Hansia,
April 17th, 2014
KBR and Halliburton – two major U.S. military contractors – can be sued for the health impacts of trash incineration on U.S. soldiers who served in the war in Iraq, according to a new court decision that allows a series of 57 lawsuits against the companies to go forward.
Barry Schwartz makes a passionate call for “practical wisdom” as an antidote to a society gone mad with bureaucracy. He argues powerfully that rules often fail us, incentives often backfire, and practical, everyday wisdom will help rebuild our world.
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Barry Schwartz at TED on Our Loss of Wisdom”
Climate challenges us to reconnect to place, reality and reason
We are out of sync with the world and especially with “place”. We lack the insights and capacities that come from knowing a place deeply over generations and from conscious vulnerability to the real world. Our speedy technological consumer culture not only created climate change but undermines our ability to respond to it. Understanding this dilemma and the dynamics that generate it could help us redirect our endangered destiny.
Dear friends,
Naomi Klein’s Climate Change Is the Fight of Our Lives – Yet We Can Hardly Bear to Look At It offers a novel view of our climate dilemma. She notes how “warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.” She then notes how climate change is happening at a time in our social evolution where we are ill prepared to respond effectively: “The climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude.”
She adds, however, that it is not all bad news. “The good news is that, unlike reindeer and songbirds, we humans are blessed with the capacity for advanced reasoning and therefore the ability to adapt more deliberately – to change old patterns of behaviour with remarkable speed.”
I find the details of her analysis fascinating. Given its brilliance, however, I was surprised to find several essential ingredients missing. Perhaps the most glaring is that the climate crisis didn’t just “hatch” or “happen”. It was created by the very same political, economic and psychosocial forces and institutions that she identifies as being responsible for our inability to respond to it. It’s all one big ball of yarn, as the saying goes. Furthermore, our disconnection from the historic and now shifting eco-realities of “place” that she highlights as underlying our inability to respond has been developing for centuries if not millennia. Obsessive global consumerism is just a recent development in our ever-growing capacity to separate ourselves from “the elements”.
Why American Apples Just Got Banned in Europe
Back in 2008, European Food Safety Authority began pressing the chemical industry to provide safety information on a substance called diphenylamine, or DPA. Widely applied to apples after harvest, DPA prevents “storage scald”—brown spots that “becomes a concern when fruit is stored for several months,” according to Washington State University, reporting from the heartland of industrial-scale apple production.
DPA isn't believed to be harmful on its own. But it has the potential to break down into a family of carcinogens called nitrosamines—not something you want to find on your daily apple. And that's why European food safety regulators wanted more information on it. The industry came back with just “one study that detected three unknown chemicals on DPA-treated apples, but it could not determine if any of these chemicals, apparently formed when the DPA broke down, were nitrosamines,” Environmental Working Group shows in an important new report. (The EFSA was concerned that DPA could decay into nitrosamines under contact with nitrogen, a ubiquitous element, EWG notes.) Unsatisfied with the response, the EFSA banned use of DPA on apples in 2012. And in March, the agency then slashed the tolerable level of DPA on imported apples to 0.1 parts per million, EWG reports.
Here’s the Right Way to Build the Futuristic Cities of Our Dreams
Our technology-first approach has failed the city of the future. So-called “smart cities,” powered by technology, carry the promise of responding to the great pressures of our time, such as urban population growth, climate instability, and fiscal uncertainty. But by focusing on the cutting-edge technologies themselves and relying on private companies to move forward, we have lost sight of what we even want our cities to achieve with all that tech.
To date, smart city conversations mostly trade in optimism, focusing on images of cities without congestion and smart energy meters on every building. Global publications like this one devote space to specific solutions, while television commercials offer a visual taste of how our cities could look in the years ahead. Marketers fuel the fire by estimating a multi-trillion dollar market within a decade.
At what point do we prioritize the municipality–the actual governance of the city–to make great plans?
To help push the industry forward and achieve those trillion dollar market projections, we need to spend as much time and energy creating policy blueprints as we’ve spent researching and marketing new technologies. Smart policies must match smart technologies.
KEY POINTS ONLY::
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: WIRED on Right Way to Build Smart Cities”
In some places around the US, living in your car is now being criminalized. The war against the poor has hit an all-time low. Read the full article this episode is based on – http://bit.ly/Prwemh
My analysis of the new DOD data on the cost of the F-35 is at the Straus Military Project website at http://www.pogo.org/our-work/
While the media reports on these costs were out last week, there are some critically important elements of the DOD cost reporting that got little or no attention.
New F-35 Claim: Lower O&S Estimate More than Offsets Higher Acquisition Cost
Last week the Defense Department released its new Selected Acquisition Reports (SARs) on its major weapon programs. These annual reports are the Pentagon's effort at definitive cost analysis; they come in two forms: the summary data on all 77 of DOD's Major Defense Acquisition Programs (MDAPs) and separate reports on individual programs, such as the F-35-the latter put on-line without a pay wall by Breaking Defense.
As in recent years, the release of new data on the F-35 provoked press coverage, some of it quite thorough in summarizing much the new data and what the top F-35 defender, F-35 program manager Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, had to say about it all. However, there are some important points that did not get the attention they perhaps deserve, and one key point seems to have been generally missed.
Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: New F-35 Claims on Cost Highly Questionable”
