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 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?
This is the latest on an important downward trend: the collapse of American media. A healthy Fourth Estate is essential to the running of a healthy democracy. I have written about this a number of times in the past, but this trend is gaining momentum, and should be of concern to every citizen.
This is the best assessment of the distorted behavior of Washington corporate media I have seen in some time. It explains why it is almost impossible, when you turn on the television, or open your paper, to get serious substantive news from American reporters, particularly those within the Beltway of Washington. And why I get so many of the reports I use in SR from overseas sources.
The tale of what is going on in Syria reads something like this: an insurgency active since March 2011 has been funded and armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and allowed to operate out of Turkey with the sometimes active, but more often passive, connivance of a number of Western powers, including Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. The intention was to overthrow the admittedly dictatorial Bashar al-Assad quickly and replace him with a more representative government composed largely of Syrians-in-exile drawn from the expat communities in Europe and the United States. The largely ad hoc political organization that was the counterpart to the Free Syrian Army ultimately evolved into the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces (Syrian National Coalition) in November 2012, somewhat reminiscent of Ahmad Chalabi and the ill-starred Iraqi National Congress. As in the lead-up to regime change in Iraq, the exiles successfully exploited anti-Syrian sentiment among leading politicians in Washington and Europe while skillfully manipulating the media narrative to suggest that the al-Assad regime was engaging in widespread atrocities and threatening to destabilize its neighbors, most notably Lebanon. As in the case of Iraq, Syria’s possession of weapons of mass destruction was introduced into the indictment of al-Assad and cited as a regional threat.
If there was a model for what was planned for Syria it must have been the invasion of Iraq in 2003 or possibly the United Nations-endorsed armed intervention in Libya in 2010, both of which intended to replace dictatorial regimes with Western-style governments that would at least provide a simulacrum of accountable popular rule. But the planners must have anticipated a better outcome. Both Libya and Iraq have become more destabilized than they were under their autocrats, a fact that appears to have escaped everyone’s notice. It did not take long for the wheels to fall off the bus in Syria as well. As in Iraq, the Syrian exiles had no real constituency within their homeland, which meant that the already somewhat organized resistance to al-Assad, consisting of the well-established Muslim Brotherhood and associated groups, came to the fore. Al-Assad, who somewhat credibly has described[1] the rebels as terrorists supported by foreign governments, did not throw in the towel and leave. The Turkish people, meanwhile, began to turn sour[2] on a war which seemed endless, was creating a huge refugee and security problem as Kurdish terrorists mixed in with the refugees, and was increasingly taking on the shape of a new jihad as foreign volunteers began to assume responsibility for most of the fighting.
(1) Tragic that this is being tried as non-capital case; IMHO, Manning deserves to be executed; (2) for those readers not currently in government and thus not dealing with government computer systems on daily basis, it's impossible to adequately convey how much Manning's treachery has cost us in terms of lost functionality, lost access to information, and increased hassle; (3) further IMHO, Manning is worse that Jonathan Pollard and deserves the worst law permits us to do to him, which is maybe consign him to solitary confinement in supermax facility for rest of his life.
Perhaps the biggest battle in what is expected to be a 12-week trial will be over the prosecutors’ attempt to prove the rare charge of aiding the enemy — in the words of the charging document, that Private Manning did “without proper authority, knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means.” That charge can carry the death penalty, but since prosecutors have ruled that punishment out, he would face a maximum sentence of life without parole if convicted.
Great right up to the line where he says nothing will change (emphasis added).
Phi Beta Iota: We agree with Brother Marcus — the line he has emphasizes tells us that Hagel will not be a change agent, he has agreed to support business as usual, and clearly has no close aides with the intelligence and integrity to get him on the right path. DoD will be a total loss for the next four years, continuing to be part of the problem instead of part of the solution.
Message to the Department from Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
As Written by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, The Pentagon, Wednesday, February 27, 2013
