The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Pakistan’s Hand in the Rise of International Jihad
TUNIS — PRESIDENT ASHRAF GHANI of Afghanistan has warned in several recent interviews that unless peace talks with Pakistan and the Taliban produce results in the next few months, his country may not survive 2016. Afghanistan is barely standing, he says, after the Taliban onslaught last year, which led to the highest casualties among civilians and security forces since 2001.
The Life and Death of the Human Terrain System
Christopher Sims, Foreign Affairs, 4 February 2016
The U.S. government’s controversial effort to harness the social sciences in support of its counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, in an initiative known as the Human Terrain System, was one of the most ambitious and innovative efforts of the post-9/11 era to help warfighters make sense of conflict’s inherent chaos. . . . More than 1,000 personnel were deployed during its duration, from 2007 to 2014 at a total cost of nearly $750 million, making the Human Terrain System the largest investment in a single social science project in U.S. government history.
The Role of Technology in Modern Terrorism
Pierluigi Paganini is Chief Information Security Officer at Bit4Id, firm leader in identity management, member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security)Treat Landscape Stakeholder Group,
How Corruption Cripples America's Military
America’s military budget is roughly 7.2 times that of Russia ($610 billion compared to $84.5 billion), but even Western news-accounts are saying that the weaponry produced in Russia is superior overall to the weaponry produced in the United States.
Continue reading “Eric Zuesse: How Corruption Cripples US Military”
More Lies From Spies: the Tall Tales of Robert Gates
Former CIA director and secretary of defense Robert M. Gates, who served both Bush administrations as well as the Obama administration, has produced his third self-aggrandizing memoir. His most recent effort, “A Passion for Leadership,” is in the form of lessons learned, but there is no acknowledgement of any flaw or stumble, let alone mistake.
Shifting Plastics to a Circular Economy Could Generate Billions
Plastic packaging is a part of our lives. Just think of everything you buy that is packaged in plastic. But too much of it is just chucked into the garbage. Consider that 32 percent of plastic packaging never makes it into collection systems, according to a new report released by the World Economic Forum and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. That waste creates “significant economic costs by reducing the productivity of vital natural systems such as the ocean and clogging urban infrastructure,” the report’s authors wrote. The cost of thrown-away plastic packaging that isn’t recycled is “conservatively estimated” at $40 billion a year, which exceeds “the plastic packaging industry’s profit pool.”
