As bad as sequestration is now and is going to be — and that's much worse than some of you have told me you think — in the interest of truth, everyone should remember that the Chairman, before he was Chairman, before he was even Chief of Staff, Army, was railing, picking up the ADM Mullen line that deficits were the worst threat to national security and that DoD should be a part of deficit reduction. That, IMHO, undercuts his moral authority to do anything other than embrace sequestration, which is having impacts you wouldn't believe if we were allowed to discuss them with you. Folks, on a day to day basis, every day gets “suckyer” than the previous day. Sequestration is creating monumental diversions of key leader and staff attention from the real business of national defense. Most of the specifics are classified and/or “predecisional.”
Military officials are reassessing the national defense strategy in light of spending cuts that will force the Pentagon to reduce its budget by $500 billion over the next decade, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says.
The future of the Internet may lie in the past. And that's not a good thing.
Nearly 365 years ago, more than 100 warring diplomats and princes got together in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück, in what is now northwestern Germany. There they signed a set of treaties that became the basic framework for our modern world: the Peace of Westphalia. Thanks to these dignitaries, we have territorial sovereignty: nation-states, demarcated by borders.
In the intervening centuries, Westphalian sovereignty has been the basic ordering principle of our societies. Empires have risen and fallen, countries come and gone. The most successful states have established internal monopolies on information and resources and have exerted discretion on what trade, ideas, money, or people crossed their borders.
But 30 years ago, humanity gave birth to one of the most disruptive forces of our time. On Jan. 1, 1983, the implementation of TCP/IP — a standard protocol to allow computers to exchange data over a network — turned discrete clusters of research computers into a distributed global phenomenon. It was essentially the work of three men: two engineers to write the protocol, and one to carry out the plan. It was a birth so quiet no one even has a photo of the day; arecent post by one of TCP/IP's authors, Vint Cerf, was able to turn up only a commemorative pin.
Decades of class war leaves most Americans nearing retirement woefully unprepared.
Since the mid-1970s, real wages haven’t kept pace with inflation. Benefits steadily eroded. High-paying jobs disappeared. Improved technology forces wage earners to work harder for less.
So-called “free” markets work only for those who control them. A handful of winners benefit at the expense of most others. Conditions get progressively worse.
Wealth disparity extremes are unprecedented. Neoliberal harshness force-feeds austerity when stimulus is needed. Public needs go begging.
American inequality is institutionalized. Bipartisan complicity assures it. Class war rages. America’s social contract is targeted for destruction.
Both sides agree. They support giving bankers, war profiteers, other corporate favorites, and super-rich elites greater wealth at the expense of most others.
A template for the story of our mis-steps as it will be told for generations.
Phi Beta Iota: The complete story has been posted below. Technology is not a substitute for thinking. US policymakers, driven by the arm sales imperative and its 5% kick-backs, have refused to be educated by intelligence professionals that do know what they are doing, but cannot be heard. It is time we begin serving the public with public intelligence — an Open Source Agency (OSA) whose finished decision-support cannot be ignored precisely because it is public.
For the United States and its allies, the tribes across the Muslim world remain a mystery. Because they were outside the realm of globalization, they were easy to see as natural allies of al Qaeda. Without an understanding of these tribes' social and religious values, writes Akbar Ahmed, the U.S.-led war on terror will not end in any kind of recognizable victory.
Drone launched from the USS Lassen in September 2010. Credit: Roberto Ruvalcaba/US Navy-Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
By 2012, the United States, in a move typical for its propensity to opt for excess in any matter of security, had commissioned just under 20,000 drones. About half of these are in use.
Ignoring the moral debate, drone operators are equally infatuated with the weapon and the sense of power it gives them. It leaves them “electrified” and “adrenalized.” Flying a drone is said to be “almost like playing the computer game Civilization,” a “sci-fi” experience.
A U.S. drone operator in New Mexico revealed the extent to which individuals across the world can be observed in their most private moments. “We watch people for months,” he said. “We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We know their patterns, like we know our neighbors' patterns. We even go to their funerals.”
Another drone operator spoke of watching people having sex at night through infrared cameras. The last statement, in particular, has to be read keeping in mind the importance Muslim tribal peoples give to notions of modesty and privacy.
The victims of all drone attacks are, in effect, treated like insects. That description is not my invention, but a reflection of the military slang for a successful strike. The victim that is blown apart on the screen in a display of blood and gore is called “bug splat.”
Muslim tribesmen were reduced to bugs or, as David Ignatius put it in a Washington Post op-ed, cobras to be killed at will. Any compromise with the Taliban in the Tribal Areas of Pakistan, officially designated as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), is “like playing with a cobra,” he wrote. And do we “compromise” with cobras? Ignatius rhetorically asked. “No, you kill a cobra.”
Bugs, snakes, cockroaches, rats — such denigration of minorities has been heard before, and as recent history teaches, it never ends well for the abused people.
WARNING NOTICE. The latest printer update for HP OfficeJeg J4680 All-In-One immediately decommissions perfectly good, full, and genuine HP print cartgriges as being “incompatible” with your printer. It FORCES you to go buy a new one and start fresh.
Recommendation if this happens to you: pull the cartridge that has been incorrectly blocked, go buy an exact replacement, and work with the store to do an instant switch out. Staples etc loses nothing, and they can return it to HP for full credit. We need to FLOOD HP with the fruits of their ineptitude.
There really ought to be a quality control center outside of HP, they have lacked integrity on printer cartridges for over a decade. Generally when HP says your cartridge is low, you still have a third of the ink left.
Over 1 million unique users posted more than 2.7 million tweets in just 3 days following the triple bomb blasts that struck Mumbai on July 13, 2011. Out of these, over 68,000 tweets were “original tweets” (in contrast to retweets) and related to the bombings. An analysis of these tweets yielded some interesting patterns. (Note that the Ushahidi Map of the bombings captured ~150 reports; more here).
One unique aspect of this study (PDF) is the methodology used to assess the quality of the Twitter dataset. The number of tweets per user was graphed in order to test for a power law distribution. The graph below shows the log distri-bution of the number of tweets per user. The straight lines suggests power law behavior. This finding is in line with previous research done on Twitter. So the authors conclude that the quality of the dataset is comparable to the quality of Twitter datasets used in other peer-reviewed studies.
Researchers caution that plant growth in the north may not stay on its current trajectory because an amplified greenhouse effect will increase the frequency of forest fires, droughts and pest infestations.
Reporting in the journal Nature Climate Change, an international team of researchers writes that the northern latitudes have experienced a significant reduction in temperature and vegetation seasonality. They contend that vegetation growth at Earth’s northern latitudes is starting to look a lot like the green latitudes to the south. The study’s findings are based on a 30-year record of land surface and satellite data sets.
The researchers looked at the relationship between changes in surface temperature and vegetation growth from 45 degrees north latitude to the Arctic Ocean. The study’s findings reveal that temperature and vegetation growth at northern latitudes now appear like those found 4 degrees to 6 degrees of latitude farther south as recently as 1982.
Lead co-author Liang Xu, a Boston University doctoral student, says that increased warming in the northern latitudes above the Canada-USA border is lowering temperature seasonality because the colder seasons are warming faster than the summer.
