There have been many comparisons of the Afghan escalation question to its equivalent question in Vietnam 45 years ago, but I think the most ominous similarity lies in the way each escalation debate devolved into intellectual incoherence and confusion, mutating into an exhausted disorder, bordering on a paralysis of the decision maker's critical faculties, and finally caving in to domestic political pressures.
Russia's once-mighty navy faces further dramatic decline after 2015, when most Soviet-built ships will have to be mothballed, a retired admiral was quoted as saying Friday. The warning follows comments by Russian officials they were planning to buy a French amphibious assault warship able to carry at least a dozen helicopters or to land forces. Russia currently has no big ship with the power to anchor off coast and deploy troops onto land.
It is called ‘Netra’. It’s a small eye zooming in the sky to gather real time intelligence on the ground. This unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), shaped like a spider and weighing less than 1.5 kg, is only a speck when flying at a height of 50 km but it can give real time inputs to the team that is controlling it on the ground.
TG Daily Andrew Thomas Wednesday, 25 November 2009
The US Congress could start an investigation into leaked emails which suggest climate change statistics have been consistently manipulated to make the case for anthropogenic global warming more credible.
The emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK – which claims to be the repository for the most comprehensive set of climate data on the planet – contain what many observers see as clear evidence that scientists have been altering that data to fit in with their man-made global warming beliefs.
Nov 13th 2009
From The World in 2010 print edition
By John Parker
Conflicts over natural resources will grow
In the world’s earliest written legal code, dating from 1790BC, Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, laid down rules governing the maintenance of irrigation systems and the amount of water people could take from them. Two generations later, his grandson abandoned this rules-based approach and used the river Tigris as a weapon against rebels in Babylon.
The world is charting a similar course, away from rules governing scarce resources towards conflict over them.
Phi Beta Iota: “Too Big to Fail” is industrial era idiocy. REALITY tells us that the more complex a system gets, the more it DEMANDS self-healing from the bottom-up. Feedback loops at all levels, each with their integrity intact. What all of the headlines above have in common is precisely the opposite: degraded feedback loops lacking integrity.
What is very interesting about this is that Mack is the only guy on Wall Street the Chinese leadership really trusts. There is no real difference between Goldman Sachs, Citi-Bank (the original Black Eagle Trust holder) and Morgan, although Mack does seem considerably more classy, and perhaps more able to get a grip on reality going into the future.
