WASHINGTON — When Eric Smith, 26, returned home after his second tour in Iraq serving as a Navy medic, he didn't expect to have a difficult time finding work.
While on tour, Smith had worked as a physician's assistant in the intensive care unit (ICU), caring for patients undergoing everything from cancer to recent brain surgery. At times, he served on the front lines treating infections. He never thought the expertise he had developed in the field wouldn’t amount to a job back home — but when he returned he found that he couldn't get a job in medicine without the right certifications.
SANYA, Hainan, April 14 (Xinhua) — Leaders of five BRICS countries, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, released on Thursday a joint document, Sanya Declaration, at the BRICS Leaders Meeting in south China's resort city of Sanya.
The following is the full text of the document.
Sanya Declaration
(BRICS Leaders Meeting, Sanya, Hainan, China, 14 April 2011)
Phi Beta Iota: Posted with permission. We strongly recommend the Intelligence Online offerings. We have received a number of commentaries around this topic, and they boil down to the situation being much, much worse than depicted here:
2. Nose-dive to the lowest common denominator, completely destroying regional and country expertise and having no linguistic capabilities or grasp of history and culture (CIA, DIA)
3. Completely out of control procurement, rotten requirements definition, no full life-cycle planning (e.g. buy collection, do not buy processing), and generally disconnected from reality (NSA/Cyber-Command)
4. We are reminded that there are 1,200 distinct “organizations” wasting money and going through the motions on counter-terrorism–meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security gropes little girls, confiscates aftershave, and is generally on the underside of institutionalized tyrannical idiocy.
Peter Thiel (Paypal and other ventures) has been making some waves for his position that higher education in the US is the next bubble. In short, he's right. Given what we now have available in terms of tools, it should be possible to get an Ivy league education for $20 a month.
Instead we are getting a stagnant product that is so out of date that it doesn't deliver much social and economic value. Even worse: it's undergoing hyper-inflationary price increases.
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The solution to this problem is to help create employment opportunities (like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don't use a degree as a gating mechanism. A solution that creates its own educational modules if needed (from scratch using modern tools and techniques). A solution that delivers something better than an Ivy league eduction and then backs it up with economic and social opportunities that exceed what you get in the global econonomic and social sprawl.
Fair warning: This article will piss off a lot of you.
I can say that with confidence because it’s about Peter Thiel. And Thiel – the PayPal co-founder, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist – not only has a special talent for making money, he has a special talent for making people furious.
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Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.
Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels.
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But Thiel’s issues with education run even deeper. He thinks it’s fundamentally wrong for a society to pin people’s best hope for a better life on something that is by definition exclusionary.
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Thiel’s solution to opening the minds of those who can’t easily go to Harvard? Poke a small but solid hole in this Ivy League bubble by convincing some of the most talented kids to stop out of school and try another path. The idea of the successful drop out has been well documented in technology entrepreneurship circles. But Thiel and Founders Fund managing partner Luke Nosek wanted to fund something less one-off, so they came up with the idea of the “20 Under 20″ program last September, announcing it just days later at San Francisco Disrupt. The idea was simple: Pick the best twenty kids he could find under 20 years of age and pay them $100,000 over two years to leave school and start a company instead.
Phi Beta Iota: Read the chapter “Paradigms of Failure” in ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (EIN, 2008) to understand that the depth and breadth of the integrity failure in the USA. “Credentialling” is a form of top-down sub-prime scam, selling a credential instead of an education. As Thiel suggests, time for change at the top is long over-due.
Cards on the table. I’ve been a “truther” since early 2002 when I came across the first major challenge to the official 9/11 story in the shape of the wonderful “Hunt the Boeing” site created by French researcher Thierry Meyssan. Until then I’d accepted the standard “Left” version of the government account – that a group of daring Muslims acting on behalf of the victims of US foreign policy had struck back at the great tyrant. The photographic and other evidence presented by Meyssan demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that whatever it was that had caused the damage to the Pentagon, it certainly wasn’t a large Boeing jet. If the government’s story was a lie on that major point, then the whole story was brought into question. I knew at once that I had to find out as much as I could about the event which everyone was saying had “changed the world”.
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Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territories, hit the headlines just recently. He’d committed the cardinal sin of expressing doubts about the official story of 9/11 in a personal blog. The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, rushed to condemn him and demanded he be sacked. UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, joined in, saying that Falk’s remarks were “an affront to the memory of the more than 3000 people who died in that tragic attack”. Someone needs to remind the Secretary-General of the affront which gullible acceptance and repetition of the official lie of 9/11 causes to the memory of the more than 3 million dead and mutilated Afghan, Iraqi and now Pakistani men, women and children sacrificed on the altar of neo-imperialism as a direct consequence of the phoney ‘war on terror’ – based on the lie of 9/11 and the other false-flag crimes perpetrated for and/or by agencies of western governments.
FROM Electronic Frontier Foundation: On Monday, April 11, 2011, we launched a petition to the largest Internet companies asking them to stand with their users and be transparent in their practices. Here's a chart showing how we think each of the companies is doing right now — a gold star indicates that the company is doing a stellar job, a half-star indicates they are taking steps in the right direction. This page will be updated as companies change their practices in response to public demand.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Phi Beta Iota: Visit the EFF page to view a rather extraordinary chart that shows NONE of the major digital service providers to be anywhere near an acceptable standard of privacy before a government that has used the false war on terrorism as an excuse to both grow in unwarranted size and corporate vapor ware services, and to set aside centuries of legal protections rooted in the Constitution. We recommend regular visits to the EFF page to see how, if at all, these services of common concern respond to public interest. This could be a dry run for Electoral Reform!
From Afghanistan for ACOS: I have not seen so much BS in a while. The 10th Mountain deployed to Afghanistan without the proper equipment to operate in the mountains. They lacked adequate cold weather gear and our lift capability does not fly well here either. With the exception of 40 year old Chinooks, most can't climb over the lofty peaks that permeate this country.
I attended a farewell for a friend of mine, there were 33 people there, 11 of them in the rank of 06, two in the rank of 08. What these guys did everyday is beyond me, but little work gets done in the palace of King David I can assure you. There are Green Berets out in villages that depend on their families to help them with the Hearts and Minds that Petraeus so often says he is trying to win, but doesn't support. That type of warfare does little to increase the coffers of the MICC….
Chuck Spinney–we read all your stuff and his–has it right: this guy lives in a palace, Versailles on the Potomac, and is totally out of touch with reality.
Phi Beta Iota: It is not at all clear that the new Army Chief of Staff (ACOS) understands that the standard issue weapon is worthless beyond 300 meters, or that his force in combat (4% of the total force) takes 80% of the casualties while receiving 1% of the total military budget. We know what our troops are fighting for–what is this guy fighting for on behalf of his troops?
Full text of Sanya Declaration of the BRICS Leaders Meeting
