The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Radical Middle Newsletter
Thoughtful Idealism, Informed Hope
The recent closing of this five year award-winning newsletter by Mark Satin, author of the book Radical Middle: The Politics We Need Now has yielded a marvelous “best of the best” series of links on a single page that we strongly recommend to anyone with a brain interested in democracy and the creation of a prosperous world at peace.
This article by two young scholars is a very good one, very provocative and persuasive. It lacks reference to other giants that have gone before, but stands as the best effort we have seen since WIRED did its own cover story on alternative and renewable energies in 2001, coming out the very week that Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon to discuss the elective war on Iraq. Also available from the lead author:
Online interactive version (link)
More detailed analysis (pdf)
E&ES article on ranking energy solutions to global warming, air pollution, and energy security (link)
Report on matching hourly and peak demand by combining different renewables (pdf)
October 30, 2009 Presentation (pdf)
Return to mark Jacobson's Home Page
Phi Beta Iota: We are often irritated by the young who represent their triumphant ideas as if arrived at by immaculate conception. No discussion of this topic is credible without reference to, at a minimum, Buckminster Fuller, Herman Daly, and Paul Hawken, among many others. Below are just three books among the many we have received pertaining to sustainable design, zero waste, and green to gold, and the most recent book to put all of this into proper perspective.
Review: Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Review: Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Review: The Resilient Earth–Science, Global Warming and the Future of Humanity
Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009
On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President's proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex ‘shadow' financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.
Phi Beta Iota: The illicit global economy is at least two trillion dollars a year against a seven trillion dollar a year legitimate economy, and the latter is both full of legal crime and legal tax avoidance, as well as focused on the one billion rich rathyer than the five billion poor. One of the many dirty not-so-little secrets about Wall Street is that it relies heavily on laundered drug money for its liquidity; another is that the banking community has been all too happy to manage the funds of dictators and war lords and others. Below are just three of the many books we recommend in this area.
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Hardcover)
Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)
Phi Beta Iota: Blessed commons sense from a Captain and intelligence professional in the U.S. Army. When we first entered Iraq we were told to avoid the immams and tribal chiefs, and this wasted at least four years of key leader engagement. Neither the secret world nor the military “Human Terrain Team” program have gotten a grip on cultural intelligence or a coherent holistic matrix for strategic, operational, and tactical exploitation of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic Essential Elements of Information (EEI). We still have not integrated provincial team civil reporting with military tactical reporting, and still have both hugh gaps and costly overlaps. This monograph, this captain, are the tip of the spear not just in leadership engagement, but in reconcilation–there is a reason why “truth” is included “Truth & Reconciliation Commission.” BRAVO ZULU.
Phi Beta Iota: Ethics equals effectiveness. This is the core message of this brillaint monograph by three authors deeply steeped in both ethics and the profession of arms. Put in other words, the truth at any cost and integrity above all else.
Chuck Spinney sends….
The Afghan debacle is becoming a case study of how political debate in Versailles drips in a naturally self-organizing way to protect the dysfunctional status quo.
As I indicated yesterday and in September, the fundamental flaw that set the stage for the current policy making fiasco was the unexamined analytical hole in General McChrystal's escalation strategy — namely, its dependence of the rapid expansion of the corrupt and ineffective Afghan national security forces. McChrystal did not analyze this corruption/ineffectiveness issue, but that crucial omission was ignored the hoorah accompanying the immediate leaking of report by his allies buried somewhere in the Versailles apparat.
Continue reading “Journal: Versailles on the Potomac Implodes…Again”
For over many years now Phi Beta Iota has been emphasizing both the inappropriate secrecy and obscurity contrived for our dead and wounded, and the almost total black-out on both amputees (many of them multiple amputees) and suicides.
We now know that Gulf I brought back over 250,000 disabled veterans, and that the toxic brew of depleted uranium that we brought to the battlefield, combined with the bio-chemical brew already in Iraq (Dick Cheney kept the receipts), and such prosaic incidentals as aspertain turning into formaldahide when soft drinks are stored in desert heat, are all partly to blame. What we did not focus on in Gulf I was the mental anguish, in part because Gulf I was a “good war,” a multinational endeavor blessed by the United Nations, and generally seen as justified by the invasion of Kuwait.
Gulf II is another matter entirely. We now know that CIA called it ocrrectly, based on both the defecting son-in-law of Saddaam Hussein and the 20+ line-crosses that Charlie Allen sent in, and that George Tenet prostituted his office–as Colin Powell prostituted his, both allowing Dick Cheney to get away with over 20 impeachable offenses in relation to foreign policy, and 935 documented lies related to the elective invasion and occupation of Iraq, an invasion made all the worse by the triumverate of Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz (go light), Cheney (fire Garner for wanting to get us out in 90 days) and Bremer (well-intentioned idiocy in disarming the military and police).
