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Penguin: US Government Gives Israel Too Much

08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Government, Military
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With respect to both Ignatius and Pincus lacking integrity, am inclined to give Pincus the benefit of the doubt. Here is one piece that certainly took integrity to develop and present.

Is U.S. going above and beyond for Israel?

Walter Pincus

Washington Post, 16 May 2012

Should the United States put solving Israel’s budget problems ahead of its own?

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, will meet Thursday in Washington with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta to finalize a deal in which the United States will provide an additional $680 million to Israel over three years. The money is meant to help pay for procuring three or four new batteries and interceptors for Israel’s Iron Dome short-range rocket defense program. The funds may also be used for the systems after their deployment, according to the report of the House Armed Services Committee on the fiscal 2013 Defense Authorization bill.

The Iron Dome funds, already in legislation before Congress, will be on top of the $3.1 billion in military aid grants being provided to Israel in 2013 and every year thereafter through 2017. That deal is part of a 10-year memorandum of understanding agreed to in 2007 during the George W. Bush presidency.

“Those funds are already committed to existing large-ticket purchases, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, C-130J transport planes and other items,” according to George Little, spokesman for Panetta. He also said the Israelis had increased their own spending on Iron Dome this year and the U.S. funds are to “augment” their funding.

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Review (Guest): Westmoreland – The General Who Lost Vietnam – Includes Second Review With Contextual Detail on Failure of Intelligence (Including Soviets Owning US Crypto)

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Biography & Memoirs, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle
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Lewis Sorley

A Man Promoted Above his Ability September 12, 2011

By Hrafnkell Haraldsson VINE™ VOICE

I grew up during the Vietnam War. I was seven years old when General William Westmoreland was sent to Vietnam by LBJ to take charge of things there. I was eleven when he lost his job and by then, had lost us the war. Vietnam was in the news the entire time, on TV, in the paper, in Time Magazine – as was Westmoreland's iconic chin. Being the son of military parents I'd early gotten the history bug and I was fascinated by what was taking place over in Southeast Asia, even if I didn't understand it well. As I grew older, and things over there grew worse, I began to wonder how we could possibly lose such a war (as I thought it was) against such a small country.

Lewis Sorely's “Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam” will tell you how. Sorely has the credentials for this book. He is himself a graduate of West Point. He served in Vietnam. He even served in the office of the Army Chief of Staff, General William C. Westmoreland, and taught at West Point. This isn't just a book by some journalist trying to get at the bottom of things. Sorely has been “at the bottom of things” and he has done the leg work over a period of years, talking to 175 people in his search for the events he here recounts.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Westmoreland – The General Who Lost Vietnam – Includes Second Review With Contextual Detail on Failure of Intelligence (Including Soviets Owning US Crypto)”

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Michel Bauwens: Creating Sustainable Currencies with Open Source Software – No Printing, No Banks, No Government Abuses…

Money
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Michel Bauwens

Your thoughts: Helping sustainable currencies to scale

For the forthcoming International Social Transformation Conference on energy currencies, Community Forge is preparing a paper on grass roots strategies for sustainable currency implementation.

2012-05-18 Helping-Sustainable-Currencies-to-Scale 1.0

Phi Beta Iota:  Good ideas overly complicated.  The core idea is that software eliminates overhead — no printing of money, full transparency (end to end accountability, e.g. “your” money can be tagged to never fund prisons, wars, or political action campaigns…).  The authors fail to review the Open Money source literature, do not link to the many examples they do provide, and completely miss the vital fact that with software, you have both a Global to Local Range of Needs and Gifts Table, and a Global to Local sparse matrix of mixed forms of currency–labor, reputation, location, time convergence, etcetera.  While critical of gold, the authors do not make the point that you cannot eat gold, and that the ultimate sustainable currency is one that is immediately and without risk exchangable for goods and services that support a sustainable life.  Precious metals do not do that.  Right now the money system is optimized for the concentration of wealth, the allocation of funds to pay for wars, weapons, prisons, and many other things that are not needed, and the blockage of needed capabilities such as honest locally-engaged agriculture, energy, and health.

See Also:

The End of Money and the Future of Civilization

The Lost Science of Money: The Mythology of Money, The Story of Power

Mini-Me: US Dollar Out, Yuan, System D, and Open Money In + Meta-RECAP

Open Source Anonymous Banking….Here Now!

Open Source Governance, Open Source Funding — End of Earmarks, Fraud, Waste, and Abuse

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Winslow Wheeler: The F-22, Toxic Stealth, Secrets Screw Sick…

04 Inter-State Conflict, 07 Other Atrocities, Corruption, DoD, Government, Military
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Winslow Wheeler

Dina Rasor and Pierre Sprey have collaborated on an important and informative piece on the F-22.  It expands the publically available thinking about the nature of the toxicity problem facing F-22 pilots, and–just as importantly–it probes the nature of one of the prime suspects for the problem: the F-22's “stealth” coating.  Note at the end of the piece: for all the astronomic cost, low sortie rates, and aerodynamic mis-shaping of aircraft those stealth coatings have caused, they bring little meaningful tactical advantage against an enemy who knows how to deal with them.  Case in point: not mentioned in the brief but important discussion of radars that see “stealth” aircraft is the antiquated Soviet era radar and SA-3 missile system that was used by the Serbs in the 1999 Kosovo air war to shoot down one “stealthy” F-117, as was widely reported, but also damaged a second F-117 seriously enough that it never flew again in the conflict–giving the F-117 the highest casualty rate of any US aircraft in that conflict.

Consider also, as Rasor and Sprey make clear, the values of a system that places the continued operation of a hardware system above the health, well-being and confidence of the pilots operating it.  It literally reminds me of Upton Sinclair's “The Jungle” when nothing, not even workers' severed body parts, were permitted to stop the sausage machine.

Find the important and informative Rasor authored piece at Truthout at http://truth-out.org/news/item/9195-pilots-as-lab-rats-the-reprehensible-risk-taking-on-the-f-22-raptor and below:

Pilots as Lab Rats: The Reprehensible Risk-Taking on the F-22 Raptor

Thursday, 17 May 2012 09:58 By Dina Rasor, Truthout | Solutions<

Full article and comment below the line.

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Penguin: Cataloging Wounds of War to Help Heal Them — Not Big Data, Not Small Data, But Rather Integrated “Smart” Data

IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, IO Sense-Making
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Cataloging Wounds of War to Help Heal Them

By

New York Times,  May 17, 2012

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. — To those unfamiliar with a battlefield’s bleak routine, Col. Michael D. Wirt’s database could be read like a catalog of horrors. In it, more than 500 American soldiers are subjected to characteristic forms of violence of the Afghan war.

Faces are smacked with shrapnel, legs are blasted away near knees, bullets pass through young men’s abdomens. Vehicles roll over, crushing bones. Eardrums rupture. Digits are severed.

Dozens of soldiers die. Hundreds more begin journeys home, sometimes to treatment that will last the rest of their lives.

Each was listed in a small but meticulous computer entry by Colonel Wirt, a doctor intent on documenting how soldiers were wounded or sickened, how they were treated and how they fared. For those seeking to understand war and how best to survive it, the doctor on his own initiative created an evidence-based tool and a possible model.

His database is one part of a vast store of information recorded about the experiences of American combatants. But there are concerns that the potential lessons from such data could be lost, because no one has yet brought the information together and made it fully cohere.

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Sepp Hasslberger: Air-Powered Car Coming to India

03 Economy, 03 India, 05 Energy, 11 Society, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Earth Intelligence, Hacking
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Sepp Hasslberger

Air-powered Car Coming to India

Analysis by Jesse Emspak

Discovery, Wed May 9, 2012 09:09 AM ET

This car runs on the ultimate emissions-free fuel: air.

In 2007, Mumbai, India-based Tata Motors signed a licensing deal with Motor Development International, a French design firm. The idea was to build a car that could run on compressed air. Now Tata says it has tested two cars with the engines. The next step is setting up the manufacturing plants to actually build them.

 

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Michel Bauwens: New Books – Open Source Model for Nanotechnology

Hardware, Knowledge
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Michel Bauwens

New books advocate ‘open source’ model for nanotechnology

Franco Iacomella16th May 2012

Source: UTS

Nanotechnology and Global Equality, by Dr Donald Maclurcan, and Nanotechnology and Global Sustainability, edited by Dr Maclurcan and Dr Natalia Radywyl, build the case that global prosperity now demands innovation without economic growth, and nanotechnology shows such innovation is possible.

“Practices like ‘open source nano-innovation’ offer game-changing avenues for bypassing inhibitive start-up costs and ensuring scientific knowledge is freely shared,” said Dr Maclurcan, an Honorary Research Fellow with UTS’s Institute for Nanoscale Technology.

“For the first time in modern history, the right ingredients have surfaced for us to seriously consider innovating without economic growth,” he said.

A US $254 billion market in 2009, recent data – outlined in the books – shows an expected rise to $2.5 trillion by 2015. More than 60 countries are engaging with nanotechnology research and development at a national level, including 16 ‘developing’ countries.

“Nanotechnology research around the world is largely focussed on creating unnecessary products that ensure big gains for multinational corporations and bigger losses for our ecosystems,” Dr Maclurcan said.

“In a world with biophysical limits and vast injustices, our survival depends on the redirection of science towards human need, not human greed.”

The books were officially launched last week by Dr Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis, former head of nanotechnology at the CSIRO.