274 soldiers' remains were thrown in Virginia dump site
Total comprised 976 ‘body fragments', says mortuary records
Gavin Allen
MailOnline, 8 December 2011
EXTRACT:
The scandal at Dover Air Force base began after complaints by three whistleblowers – civilians who worked as embalmers or technicians – who sparked an 18-month investigation by the Air Force Inspector General.
A separate probe was carried out by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative agency which looks into claims by whistleblowers.
A report for business decision makers interested in abolishing traditional corporate training functions, creating instead vibrant modern collaborative cultures. Why? The corporate learning field is in dire need of bravery, insight, creativity and boldness. It has been stuck in an antiquated rut for too long. Full classrooms and smile-sheet summaries only indicate employees can successfully sit through training, not that these strategies demonstrate value or engender growth in competitive organizations. With a nod toward early twentieth-century innovations, moving the art world toward natural forms, the corporate education function should aim to become learning nouveau. The people responsible for fostering education throughout organizations ought to consider becoming artists. Here's how. [Additional information at http://www.marciaconner.com/learning-nouveau/]
Although those of us in the developed nations take potable water for granted the fact is for several billion people it is a major matter of urgent stress. Here is a new technology that may help relieve this problem.Ā Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Biopolymer-reinforced synthetic granular nanocomposites for affordable point-of-use water purification, PNAS, Published online before print May 6, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220222110
I have written extensively about the bias of the media and, particularly, the use of false equivalencies. (For a discussion of this see my esssay: False Equivalencies and the Mediocrity of Nonlocal Consciousness Research Criticism: http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900059-1/fulltext)! . Here is proof of my argument.Ā Ā Click through to see the charts which accompany this piece. They will appall you when you see how incredibly compromised American corporate media has become.
Here in a very clear exegetic essay Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz spells out the whole sordid story of the attempt by corporations to patent and own life forms.
Lives versus Profits JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, PHD, Nobel Laureate Economist – Project Syndicate
Here in one essay the true dimensions of the corruption of The U.S. Department of Agriculture by Monsanto is made clear.
I have been reflecting on the past twenty years, and the remarkable resistence of the US Intelligence Community, seemingly impervious to all manner of reform recommendations, be they presidential, congressional, or public.Ā Reform is not transformation.Ā This from Dr. Russell Ackoff, a pioneer in systems thinking and reflexive practice:
Reformations and transformations are not the same thing.Ā Reformations are concerned with changing the means systems employ to pursue their objectives.Ā Transformations involve changes in the objectives they pursue.
And now this from Ada Bozeman:
(There is a need) to recognize that just as the essence of knowledge is not as split up into academic disciplines as it is in our academic universe, so can intelligence not be set apart from statecraft and society, or subdivided into elementsā¦such as analysis and estimates, counterintelligence, clandestine collection, covert action, and so forth. Rather ā¦ intelligence is a scheme of things entire. (Bozeman 1998: 177):[1]
The recent NATO Innovation Hub initiative in leveraging social media is a tiny but potentially potent transformation starting point.Ā It reflects clarity, diversity, and integrity.Ā After an open brainstorming session that identified 32 opportunity areas, enablers, and concerns, the team nurturing the NATO Innovation Hub settled on three areas for focus where concept papers will be developed:
-Āā Education and Training through New Media
-Āā Alternative Command and Control
-Āā Social Media Users Training
As one of the early invited participants contributing to the process, I offered the below comments toward the first draft of the concept paper for Alternative Command and Control, and am now adding to that a section on four forcing concepts or functions for transforming strategy, policy, acquisition, and operations via the alternative command and control concept.
It is a brutal fact that no country benefited more from war during in the 2oth Century than the United States. World War I enriched and invigorated the US economy, and the self destruction of the 19th Century European state system left the US as the world's mightiest industrial power. Ā World War II ended the Great Depression, put the US on a pathway to unparalleled world military power, and set the stage a long economic boom that created a rich middle class that, not withstanding its recent hardening of the arteries, remains unprecedented in world history.Ā Pearl Harbour excepted, neither war visited any significant destruction on the American homeland.
While we think of war in terms of our sacrifices, it may surprise readers to learn that the United States suffered fewer military deaths in WWII than Yugoslavia, an allied country not usually thought of in the NASCAR mentality of the United States as being a major player that war. In fact, hundreds of millions of people — mostly civilians — died in the wars (and their aftermath) of the 20th Century, while the United States in comparison paid a relatively minor price in lives lost and a vanishingly small price in terms of material destruction wrought at home.
Indeed the most traumatic material destruction and highest number of civilian deaths suffered on the US mainland since the dawn of the unprecedented state violence of the 20th Century were caused by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in September of 2001 (the nearby NYSE was closed for only a week and the Pentagon never shut down). Ā While horrific and psychologically devastating in themselves, these attacks were a horrendous crime, not an act of war.
Moreover, when viewed in the grand sweep of the preceding 100 years, the material and human destruction of 9-11 was pinprick compared to that visited on the trenches in Flanders, the Somme, and Verdun, the cities of Nanking and Warsaw, London and Coventry, Hamburg and Berlin and Dresden, Ā Leningrad and Stalingrad and Minsk, or in the fire bombing raids on Ā Tokyo, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the now forgotten destruction of every city in North Korea, of millions of civilians killed by bombing (and sanctions) in North Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Ā Even casual readers of history know this summary just scratches the surface of carnage wrought by 20 Century warfare — carnage which, by the grace of good fortune, pretty much bypassed the people and land of the United States. Ā Perhaps some American even think this good fortune is a kind of entitlement. Ā Is it not surprising that President Bush's call on the American people to keep consuming and living the good life when he asked Congress to authorize a global war of terror in our national response to the crime of 9-11 was so well received?
None of these facts denigrates the bravery and sacrifice of the American soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen who fought and died in the wars of the last 100 years, but they are facts nevertheless, and they provide a backdrop against which the strength our national character is measured by others.
Nor should we be surprised, given this history of good fortune, that many leaders and opinion makers in America, especially strategic wannabees like Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina or the armchair strategists in the Heritage Foundation (which receives a lot of grant money from arms merchants who benefit from war), treat war as a cavalier endeavor. Ā Nothing typifies this cavalier attitude so much today as the loose talk about bombing Iran's nuclear reactors (unless it be an intervention in Syria). Ā The attached essay puts this kind of warmongering talk into a perspective appropriate to those who, unlike most Americans during the 20th Century, would be on the receiving end of such an attack.
āā¦I think it [intervention] is a mistake in Syria, even if we had intervened more significantly a year or six months ago. We overestimate our ability to determine outcomes.āĀ ā¦former Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates
America sank down another foot this week into the Syrian quicksand. Israel is putting the next stage of the conflictās tactics on display, not only to the world but to the Syrian military with its last two strikes.
As the rebel assault has ground to a halt, and the superior manpower of the Syrian army having shown it can conduct search and clear operations, the Free Syrian army is in a war of attrition it cannot win.
It is much easier to recruit when you are winning and casualties not too bad than when the tide turns to stalemate and losing ground.
The al-Nusra Front has been bleeding fighters away from the FSA. They are paying better and the AN brigades now have access to weapons the FSA does not. The al-Nusras had strategically focused on key infrastructure acquisition including some of the oil revenue prizes. Win or lose, Assad or no Assad, or even with a negotiated settlement, they arenāt leaving.
Free of shelf-space limitations, the web's ability to make ‘golden oldies' accessible to everyone forever will force us to reassess the importance of ‘newness'
EXTRACT:
So, in the not too distant future, “the newest” may not be the most attractive. It's going to change the equation of value and quality.
Owning the rights to “classics” ā great music or film or video libraries ā means an annuity in perpetuity. Ā Think of this as buying Rembrandts. They stopped making them years ago and so the value only continues to appreciate.
We are, all of us, the products of our life experience in the linear world. This is what we grew up with. We have a natural expectation that the “new stuff” is going to be better and much more desirable than the “old stuff”. We would rather have a 2013 Mercedes than a 1987 one. Ā We would rather see the “new” Great Gatsby than the “old” one.
But in the future, this may not be the case. The value may be much more for the “old” stuff than the “new”. Ā (What is worth more, an “old” Rembrandt or a “new” one?)
