Want to ship some liquefied natural gas to Japan from somewhere up north, but don’t fancy taking the circuitous southern route through Panama or the Suez? Try heading through the Arctic. But first, get yourself a good nuclear powered icebreaker.
That’s what Russia’s Gazprom did a few weeks ago.
It lined up two of the country’s atomic icebreakers to escort an LNG carrier from Norway’s port of Hammerfest to a gas terminal in Tobata, Japan.
The flotilla slammed right through the Northern Sea Route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans along the Siberian coastline, heading down through the Berring Strait.
“This strategic route reduces trip time from northern Europe to northeast Asia (by) almost 40 percent comparing with routes via the southern seas and oceans,” Gazprom’s website states.
Special NightWatch Comment: The most important finding of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) on the Benghazi tragedy is that al Qaida is alive and well and living in Benghazi. The rest is pretty much well known, with a few exceptions.
As harsh as the words of the ARB Report seem about high level failures in the State Department, no one is held accountable. The Board found that mistakes were made. The report is essentially a white wash. Three people at State resigned today, but that is not the same as facing legal proceedings for civil or criminal negligence in wrongful death. The Board gave everyone a pass.
A few things that are confusing in the Benghazi report.
1.The Board found that the ambassador was responsible for mission security and he should have pushed harder for improvements. The implication is the ambassador ultimately was responsible his own death. Hmm….The ambassador made at least three pleas for improved security, including the last on the day of his demise. Other parts of the report make clear that no amount of pushing to improve security would have made a difference with senior State Department leadership.
2.The Board found that mistakes were made. The use of passive voice means the Board refused to find anyone, except the dead ambassador, to blame for the mistakes. The message is that things went wrong; people were murdered, but it was no one's fault. This is the core of the whitewash. This viewpoint evades questions of causality, incompetence, negligence and blame.
My good good buddy Dr. Newk Mindshaftgap has written a juicy little report, attached below, in which he politely exposes the emptiness of the fact-free fiscal debate that is now electrifying the synapses of the pols, pundits, and courtiers in Versailles on the Potomac. To be sure, our nation has a debt problem, but, as the chart the below shows, the big elephant in the room is private debt, which must be paid off, or written off, or repudiated. This is not the case with federal debt, which can be rolled over in perpetuity, as long as the U.S. has a sovereign currency. The reality of the private debt bomb, particularly that of the financial institutions, may well explain why the Federal Reserve is busily struggling to dump private debt, especially the shakey debts undermining the balance sheets in the financial sector, onto the Federal Gov't (that is, on you, the public) via its policy of quantitative easing. Such is the nature of welfare in the neoliberal world where the mentality of Citizens United reigns supreme.
President Obama is on the verge of selling out Medicare and Social Security, punting on tax increases to the top 1 percent, while protecting huge and wasteful defense budgets — all to avoid the non-existent cliff. Maybe someone ought to show him Newk's handiwork. That won't happen, of course, but I nevertheless urge you to carefully read Newk's handiwork.
Chuck Spinney
Click on Image to Enlarge
The History of Budget Deficits and Economic Growth in Relation to Taxes and Unemployment
by NEWK MINDSHAFTGAP, Counterpunch, 19 December 2012
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
— George Santanyana
Over the course of the last few years, there has been much propaganda from politicians of all persuasions on what factors are conducive to economic growth and/or the emergence of budget deficits or surpluses. Regardless of the political viewpoint being represented, these claims have usually been supported by essentially no facts, and this absence of facts implies a lack of analysis in a political debate that has displaced by competing ideologies. The breakdown of reason is taking on great importance as the so-called fiscal cliff approaches, and with it, the increasing possibility of a full-blown constitutional crisis. My aim is to identify factors that have been associated with budget surpluses and/or solid economic growth (as measured by annual growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) in fiscal year (FY) 1931 through FY 2012 and to relate them to the emotionally-charged question of taxes.
Thomas Leo Briggs is a retired CIA operations officer with 3 years military experience in US Army military police, 3 years as a Special Agent in the Drug Enforcement Administration and 26 years in the CIA. He tried to make use of computer capabilities to aid and assist humint operations in a variety of ways throughout his last 18 years as an operations officer. He is also the author of Cash on Delivery: CIA Special Operations During the Secret War in Laos (Rosebank Press, 2009).
Intelligence Agencies Move Towards Single Super-Cloud by Heny Kenyon, Aol Defense, 17 December 2012
So, what we have here, according to Mr. Kenyon, is an effort to develop a pan-agency set of computer servers so that the analysts of all intelligence community (IC) agencies may share data and resources. One reported hope being that such a system will break down existing boundaries between agencies and change their insular cultures.
The first thing a reader notices is that the alleged motivations for this super-cloud are lower costs and higher efficiency. Secondly, the CIA already operates a cloud slightly separate from an NSA cloud consisting of five other intelligence agencies and the FBI. Is that like being slightly pregnant? Does that provide truly lower costs, higher efficiency, and shared resources and data? Wouldn't one expect to find different data and resources on each cloud, though some data and resources may be the same? Moreover, the NSA cloud incorporates the smaller organization-wide clouds of its partner agencies and, in addition, the National Reconnaissance Office has its own plan to build its own cloud. Seems all of that that does not make for lowest costs and highest efficiencies – nor one super-cloud.
Social media looks like a free and easy way to jump start sluggish sales or generate qualified new leads. That's probably why so many companies adopt the Nike slogan and “Just Do It.”
But random acts of social media can be expensive, wasteful and are usually ineffective. The typical impact of a weekly tweet or Facebook post, no matter how well-phrased, will be zero. In fact, poorly planned efforts can be counterproductive and, in extreme cases, even dangerous.
Perhaps you saw these stories in the news:
Fashion designer Kenneth Cole used Twitter to make light of demonstrations and social unrest in Egypt by linking it to his spring line. He later apologized on his Facebook page.
McDonald's asked Twitter users to share their favorite memories of the burger chain. Instead it got horror stories of bad food and shoddy service.
After a soldier in the Israeli Defense Forces posted a YouTube video of the attack that killed a Hamas leader, the Hamas military wing vowed to take vengeance on “leaders and soldiers wherever they are.”
“Most Americans, their minds focused at the moment on the tragic slaughter of 20 young children aged 5-10, along with five teachers and a school principal in Connecticut by a heavily-armed psychotic 21-year-old, are blissfully unaware that their last president, George W. Bush, along with five key members of his administration, were convicted in absentia of war crimes earlier this month at a tribunal in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
They are unaware because the US corporate media have ignored the story, just as that same corporate media have failed to note that the crimes of which Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and five White House lawyers, were convicted all could apply equally well to current President Barack Obama and his administration.
The shortest route: Russia ships gas to Japan via Arctic
