Here are a couple of riddles for you: When is a coup not a coup? And why is the White House not like Humpty Dumpty?
In Through the Looking Glass, Humpty tells Alice: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
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The White House press secretary, Jay Carney, doesn't have that luxury. If he called the Egyptian military's intervention in the democratic process a “coup”, it would clearly mean the huge amount of aid the US gives to Egypt would have to be cut off.
Because that's what it says, in black and white, in the US Code:
In a unanimous vote last month, the Regents of the University of California created a corporate entity that, if spread to all UC campuses as some regents envision, promises to further privatize scientific research produced by taxpayer-funded laboratories. The entity, named Newco for the time being, also would block a substantial amount of UC research from being accessible to the public, and could reap big profits for corporations and investors that have ties to the well-connected businesspeople who will manage it.
Former Navy SEAL Eric Prince faces ghost writer's lawsuit
Jeff Stein
AND Magazine, 11 July 2013
The author of The World's Most Dangerous Places is threatening to take Eric Prince, founder of the notorious Blackwater private security firm, to court.
It has been a pleasure for me to support some of the bright minds at NATO ACT (Atlantic Command Transformation, the old SACLANT), and it has also incentivized me to familiarize myself with where NATO is today and where it might go in the future.[1]Ā As one who has decades of experience with the US system that absolutely does not want to change, I have a healthy respect for the ability of the NATO bureaucracy in Europe to drown out any common sense that may come its way from the NATO bureaucracy in the USA, so I thought to have a go at making a case to NATO directly and SOCOM indirectly for coming together with the other regional and type theater commanders to ask of the Secretary of Defense an Open Source Agency (OSA) and all that can offer, including a Multinational Decision Support Centre on the shores of the Mediterranean focused on Africa, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, with a second in Tampa focused on the Americas and everywhere else.
NATO 4.0: Key Challenges AND Solutions
Mindful of all that has already been said or written on this topic ā including the implementation concepts of Smart Defense and Connected Forces and the issues of the day (cyber-security and missile defense)[2] ā I humbly submit that NATO has yet to address the substance of what Admiral James Stavrides calls āOpen Source Security.ā [3]Ā NATO can strengthen partnerships globally by achieving intelligence with integrity.Ā NATO, in alliance with USSOCOM, can claim pre-approved money (IOC 125M FOC 2B) for an Open Source Agency (OSA).
In my view, the three challenges that must be addressed with a transformation mind-set are:
01 DESIGN: Learn how to say ānoā to the Americans, āyesā to the EU, and āletās talkā to everyone else. This requires a transformation of how NATO thinks of itself, how it organizes, and how it makes decisions.
02 MONEY: Integrate at the staff level with the EU and become the hub for any other combination of nations so as to use intelligence (decision-support) to both spend smarter, and harmonize resources globally.
03 EFFECT: Create a technical and human factors model attractive to the BRICS and the regional associations, one that can be used to substitute local to global informed consensus for violence, wealth, time, and space.
Phi Beta Iota:Ā A good first effort but spectacularly off on the USA and completely lacking in total life cycle costs and in operational test & evaluation — most systems cost far more than they should, do not work as advertised, have huge logistics tails and intelligence needs that are rarely met, and so on.Ā A good start, a long way to go.
Wastewater, increasingly injected into deep disposal wells amid the energy boom, appears to be the culprit in an increase in U.S. quakes.
EXTRACT:
In a study out today that provides the strongest link to date between wastewater wells and quakes, seismologists and geologists say U.S. earthquakes have become roughly five times more common in the past three years. They warn about inadequate monitoring of deep wastewater disposal wells that are setting off these small quakes nationwide.
There are more than 30,000 such deep disposal wells nationwide. They're increasingly used as mile-deep dumping grounds for fluids left over from the more shallow hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” wells responsible for surging U.S. natural gas production. The earthquakes have been linked to the wastewater wells but not the fracking drilling wells themselves.
Researchers at Columbia University have conducted the first exhaustive study into kinetic energy harvesting ā the harvesting of āfreeā energy from common human activities, such as walking, writing with a pencil, taking a book off a shelf, or opening a door. Surprisingly, except for those living the most sedentary lifestyles, we all move around enough that a kinetic energy harvester ā such as a modified Fitbit or Nike FuelBand ā could sustain a wireless network link with other devices, such as a laptop or smartphone.
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Energy harvesting is expected to play a very important role in the future of wearable computing and the internet of things, where direct sources of power ā such as batteries or solar power ā are cumbersome, expensive, and unreliable. At its most basic, a kinetic/inertial energy harvester is a small box with a weight attached to a spring. When the spring moves, the mechanical energy is converted into electrical energy, usually by means of piezoelectrics or MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). If the spring moves with more force, or it bounces back and forth rapidly, more energy is produced.
