Would Obama Declare 3 Days of Peace to Pay for Food for Starving Afghans? The most little-understood fact of war, in my opinion, is the sheer, mind-boggling, nearly incomprehensible magnitude of the money which is spent on a daily basis to keep the occupation and boom-and-zoom operations going. Former General Barry McCaffrey put the "burn rate" of US taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan at $9 billion per month, which is fully one-half the average yearly state budget for the 50 states. Two months of this kind of spending is the entire Pell Grant appropriation for 2010. More than one-third of that "burn rate" (and you have to hand it to McCaffrey for not caring how this sounds to the public, literally burning taxpayer money) is fuel costs, both aviation and ground. Time reports that: ...international accounting firm Deloitte puts the cost of fuel for the additional troops at nearly $1,000 a day per soldier — more than $350,000 per year. That's $350,000 per year, per soldier, each of the 100,000 or so of them. BBC reports: 2.5 million are in imminent danger.
PND - News - Lumina Foundation Announces Grants to Advance Degree Completion The Lumina Foundation for Education has announced nineteen grants totaling $14.8 million to help advance adult degree attainment through a series of interconnected projects that aim to engage, motivate, and help students to return to college to complete their degrees. According to the foundation, thirty-seven million adults between the ages of 25 and 64 (more than 20 percent of the working-age population) have not earned a degree or credential despite having attended a college. The grants, which range from $250,000 to almost $1.3 million, provide support for large-scale projects that aim to educate and retrain workers who need to improve their skills in order to compete for jobs that will be created over the next decade, most of which will require some form of postsecondary education degree or credential. For a complete list of grants, visit the Lumina Foundation Web site. Location: Indiana; Indianapolis; National
Follow The Money Handbook You've probably discovered already that if you're interested in following the money in politics, OpenSecrets.org has done most of the heavy-lifting for you. But if you want to dig around in Federal Election Commission data on your own--or maybe you want to research state- or local-level data, which the Center for Responsive Politics doesn't track--then you've found your guide. Do-It-Yourself Data-Digging Published by CRP in 1994, this handbook was written especially for journalists by our former executive director, Larry Makinson, who developed the system we use to classify campaign contributions while he was a newspaper reporter. The methods outlined in the selected chapters below apply whether you're vying for a Pulitzer Prize or just muckraking in your town. And if you just want to know more about how our hard-working staff produces the campaign finance research that's on this website, the "Follow the Money" handbook will fill you in.
SourceWatch Wall Street Journal Spins the Facts for Scott Walker Aide by Brendan Fischer The Wall Street Journal opinion page has a new installment in its campaign against Wisconsin's "John Doe" campaign finance probe, this time in an effort to resuscitate the image of Kelly Rindfleisch, a top aide to Scott Walker implicated in two John Doe investigations. In John Doe I, the 2010-2013 investigation into corruption in Walker's County Executive office that netted six convictions for Walker's aides and associates, Rindfleisch pled guilty to a felony for doing campaign work on the taxpayer dime. After Unprecedented Claim of Legislative Immunity, Vukmir Releases ALEC Records, Pays Damages After nearly a year of litigation, the Center for Media and Democracy has settled its open records lawsuit against American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) National Board member and Wisconsin State Senator Leah Vukmir. Meet the Plush GMO Mascot, Frank N. by Rebekah Wilce by Nick Surgey
A Predator State – the worst bits of Capitalism, Communism and Feudalism « forensicstatistician We live in a Capitalist country, right? We believe in the power of markets, don’t we? That’s what seperates us from the spectre of Communism that haunted us from the 1950s to end of the 1980s, isn’t it. And we understand the theory: a Capitalist country achieves the most efficient allocation of resources by facilitating trade & commerce by the practice of prices, and price only. But, just to soften the edges, we have a bit of a heart too. Sounds plausible doesn’t it. In the face of bank collapse our politicians ennacted sizeable bailouts. The consequence has been Austerity and Inflation. Yes we have a mixed economy, but one that is instead the worst of both worlds; privatised profits and yet socialised losses. It is a form of Crony Capitalism, and a slipperly route back to the retrograde structure of Feudalism. “What did the new class… set out to do in political terms? Predator State But this message isn’t being voiced by any policitician, or even any economic or political commentator.
Book review: The Map that Changed the World William Smith was born in 1769, as the industrial revolution was getting under way. Enclosures, coal mining, canal building and drainage work were building blocks to Smith’s maps; as a young man he became involved in surveying as a result of enclosures around his birthplace of Churchill, near Oxford. Following this experience in surveying he became involved in coal mining in Somerset. Here he saw directly the strata beneath the surface and learnt their individual character. A key insight was that the fossils found within a strata could be used to exactly correlate two distinct outcrops – in the absence of fossils two outcrops might look very similar but actually belong to different strata. Fossils had become collectors items around the time of Smith’s birth. William Smith was dogged by financial problems, he had taken up a mortgage to buy a substantial estate whilst surveying for a canal and was then promptly sacked.
GovTrack.us: Tracking the U.S. Congress 6 Shocking Revelations About Wall Street's "Secret Government" Photo Credit: john flanigan November 30, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. We now have concrete evidence that Wall Street and Washington are running a secret government far removed from the democratic process. These documents show how top government officials willfully concealed from Congress and the public the true extent of the 2008-'09 bailouts that enriched the few and enhanced the interests of giant Wall Streets firms. The secret Wall Street bailouts totaled $7.77 trillion, 10 times more than the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) passed by Congress in 2008. So what does this all mean? 1. As many of us suspected, all the big banks were on their knees begging for help – secretly – while telling their investors, the public and Congress that all was well. 2. 3.
Cloud-based IT failure halts Virgin flights A catastrophic systems failure at cloud-based software provider, Navitaire, a business process outsourcing (BPO) unit of Accenture, disrupted travel for 50,000 customers of Virgin Blue airlines in Australia. The situation offers important lessons for buyers of cloud-based outsourcing services. Related: Virgin's cloud failure: Rebuttal and a deeper perspective Virgin Blue provided details in a press release: Navitaire is the supplier of Virgin Blue’s reservation and distribution software platform and also hosts that platform on its own server infrastructure at a data centre in Sydney. According to travel technology website, tnooze, Virgin Blue recently transitioned from Navitaire's Open Skies platform to the same company's New Skies system. A Navitaire representative promised to contact me with additional details, but never did. The Virgin Blue situation raises several key issues for business buyers of cloud-based services: Implications for buyers.
GovernmentDocs.org -- Community Government Document Review System Freud puts capitalism on the couch - macrobusiness.com.au | macrobusiness.com.au A fascinating article has been written by Eliot Spitzer for The Slate which details the massive lying that went on during the GFC. It raises an intriguing question. What functions do lying and truthfulness play in financial systems? The assumption commonly made is that lying and deception are “bad” and truth telling is “good”. This is certainly true in a personal moral sense (with qualifications), but I do not think it readily translates into the corollary — that lying is a social “bad” and truth telling is a social “good”. Spitzer starts his critique by personalising the banks’ deception, a telling way of conveying moral outrage. Imagine you walked into a bank, applied for a personal line of credit, and filled out all the paperwork claiming to have no debts and an income of $200,000 per year. Due to some excellent research by Bloomberg journalists – yes, real journalism remains as achievable as it ever was, the MSM need not be asleep — a pattern of wholesale deception has emerged.
For the first time, monkeys recognize themselves in the mirror, indicating self-awareness Typically, monkeys don't know what to make of a mirror. They may ignore it or interpret their reflection as another, invading monkey, but they don't recognize the reflection as their own image. Chimpanzees and people pass this "mark" test -- they obviously recognize their own reflection and make funny faces, look at a temporary mark that the scientists have placed on their face or wonder how they got so old and grey. For 40 years, scientists have concluded from this type of behavior that a few species are self-aware -- they recognize the boundaries between themselves and the physical world. Because chimps, our closest relatives, pass the test, while almost all other primate species fail it, scientists began to discuss a "cognitive divide" between the highest primates and the rest. The finding casts doubt on both the relevance of the mark test and on the existence of a definitive cognitive divide between higher and lower primates.