Warfare seems endemic to mankind. Nations around the world are driven by conflict. But is the impetus to war decreasing? Håvard Hegre finds statistical grounds for hope.
In my view, perhaps the most evident shortcoming is that our predictions ignore the importance of political systems – the institutions that regulate how leaders are recruited and how they make decisions. We leave this out since we have no credible forecasts for changes to political systems over the next 40 years, but it is evident that many internal armed conflicts are fought over the nature of the political system, in particular in non-democratic middle-income countries.
The future of high-speed rail in the U.S. remains anything but certain, but in the meantime one person has taken it upon himself to show us what it should look like.
Activist and artist Alfred Twu began working on the map in 2009, in response to President Obama’s plan for high-speed rail. The map has gone viral on Facebook, and a petition Twu created to ask the White House to fund a system like the one he proposed has already received 52,389 signatures.
Click on Image to Enlarge
In designing the map’s routes, Twu relied on studies from government agencies and advocacy groups. He said such a system could be built out like the Interstate Highway System.
“Some artistic license was applied to make it more elegant and have it be a series of distinct lines like a subway map,” he said. “Colors were selected to convey the idea of the U.S. being made up of several interwoven regional cultures that come together at major cities — like an internal melting pot.”
According to Twu, a rail system like the one he’s designed would cost $1 – $2 trillion to build. “Sounds like a lot,” he said, “but divided over four decades, that is around $25-$50 billion a year or 80-160 dollars a year per person. That’s one tank’s worth of gas money.”
Readers, should the U.S. be investing in high-speed rail? Or, considering the country’s persistent economic hardships, is this an unnecessary diversion that would distract us from more important issues?
“A More Than Questionable Bernanke Fed Monetary Policy.”
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issuance of their currency, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), 3rd US President
“It is well enough that people … do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” Henry Ford (1863-1947), American automobile industrialist
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men living together in society, they create for themselves, in the course of time, a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850), French economist
It is becoming increasingly obvious that the Bernanke Fed’s monetary policy of fixing short-term interest rates at close to zero percent, and (with inflation at two percent or so) of forcing negative real interest rates, was primarily designed not to help the U.S. economy but to shore up the super large American banks that were on the verge of bankruptcy when the investment bank Lehman Brothers failed on September 15, 2008. Indeed, with this policy, the Bernanke Fed has transferred hundreds of billions to these super banks at a huge cost to the rest of the economy and to international holders of U.S. dollars.
Just as the Greenspan Fed created the housing bubble and let the derivatives market explode, thus sowing the seeds of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, the Bernanke Fed, using faulty economic analysis, has embarked upon a policy of zero short-term interest rates for many years, —an open-ended QE3 policy of buying mortgages and other financial instruments with newly printed money, thus creating the largest bond bubble in U.S. history.
When the distortions it has created in the U.S. economy unfolds in the coming years, the true costs of this policy will become clearer. Indeed, when the Fed tries to unload the financial assets it has acquired from the near-insolvent super large American banks, in a not too distant future, bond prices will be in danger of collapsing and nominal interest rates could spike, with a very negative impact on financial markets and on the real economy.
Perception versus reality is truly frightening. Reality is much, much worse than perception. Average worker has to work for one month to earn what the average CEO earns in one hour.
Published on Nov 20, 2012
Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the difference between our perception of inequality and the actual numbers. The reality is often not what we think it is.
When DOD's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation released its annual report to Congress on the performance of US weapons in operational (battlefield) testing, an object of some attention was the section on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The report itself (at http://www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2012/) made difficult and cryptic reading, and the news reporting covered whatever highlights harried journalists could readily use in short articles. Little of it probed, in technical terms or otherwise, the meaning and implications.
Lee Gaillard has been writing about aviation, weapons and national security for decades and took it upon himself to analize the F-35 using the DOT&E report as the starting point. His analysis makes important and informative reading for anyone wishing to have more than a superficial understanding of the F-35 and its problems–rooted deeply in the DNA of the aircraft's insanely complex design and its disengenuous (bait and switch) acquisition plan.
The Cairo Review of Foreign Affairs, February 10, 2013
Speaking to diplomats, businessmen and journalists at the British Foreign Office in November, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia emphasized the need for “norms and principles” in resolving disputes in the South China Sea. Why did President Yudhoyono, who was spending a week in London at the invitation of Queen Elizabeth II as the first leader to visit Britain during the year of her Diamond Jubilee, feel that he had to bring up the South China Sea disputes at such a time?
After a member of the audience asked what Indonesia, the leading nation in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) could do if China did not share his views, President Yudhoyono recalled what he had said to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao at a summit conference in Bali and again to Chinese President Hu Jintao at a meeting in Beijing: without forward movement on a Code of Conduct (CoC) for the South China Sea, the whole region could “easily become a flashpoint.” He added that the two Chinese leaders had concurred with his assessment.
President Yudhoyono added, however, that he had become quite concerned after ASEAN foreign ministers failed to reach a CoC agreement at a meeting in Cambodia in July 2012. He did not mention the role played by China in getting the Cambodian government to sabotage the pact. He only said that since then, Indonesia has done its utmost to bring about a consensus among ASEAN nations on the issue. He also did not mention the fact that at an international conference on “Peace and Stability in the South China Sea and the Asia Pacific Region” held in Jakarta in September, most of the participants expressed pessimism as long as China continued to exert military and economic power in area within the U-shape line demarcating its self-declared zone of sovereignty.
The joint-service F-35 strike fighter is the Pentagon's largest program. In fact, it is the most expensive procurement program in the Pentagon's history. It is also an unfolding disaster that is well documented, but of almost unimaginable proportions. And yet, the F-35 is impervious to budget cutbacks in sequesterland. Not surprisingly, among the cognoscenti of gold-plated boondoggles, the F-35 is not only a source of cynical humor, it is rapidly becoming the mother of all case studies of the pathologies that fuel the Pentagon's gold-plated boondoggles.
Perhaps the most egregious of these pathologies is the practice of concurrent engineering and production, a practice from which all bad things flow.
Concurrency refers to the practice of placing a complex hi-tech weapon system into production, before it is completely designed. Known in the Pentagon as “buy before you fly.” It is the opposite of commonsens engineering, yet concurrency has been business as usual in the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex for many years, the problem-plagued F-111 and C-5 in the 60s, and more recently the V-22 tilt rotor and the F-22 fighter being cases in point.
Why do we repeat a madness that both robs the taxpayer and puts defective weapons in the hands of soldiers year after year?
