Monday, November 15th, 2010
Stephan: This is what the rest of the world has been doing while we have been squandering our money on wars -- America's military budget is greater than the rest of the world COMBINED -- and getting lost in anti-immigrant natavism.
Twenty years ago North America, Europe and Japan produced almost all of the world’s science. They were the aristocrats of technical knowledge, presiding over a centuries-old regime. They spent the most, published the most and patented the most. And what they produced fed back into their industrial, military and medical complexes to push forward innovation, productivity, power, health and prosperity.
All good things, though, come to an end, and the reign of these scientific aristos is starting to look shaky. In 1990 they carried out more than 95% of the world’s research and development (R&D). By 2007 that figure was 76%.
Such, at least, is the conclusion of the latest report* from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO. The picture the report paints is of a waning West and a rising East and South, mirroring the economic shifts going on in the wider world. The sans culottes of science are on the march.
GERD is good
Comparisons of the scientific prowess of countries frequently begin with spending. One measure of this is GERD, gross domestic expenditure on R&D. Globally, GERD amounted to $1.15 trillion in 2007 (the last year the UNESCO report measures). That was up 45% compared with 2002. Moreover, […]
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Monday, November 15th, 2010
DION NISSENBAUM, WARREN P. STROBEL MARISA TAYLOR and JONATHAN S. LANDAY, - McClatchy Newspapers
Stephan: Don't you love it. We can't find enough money to feed ourselves, or build essential infrastructure, but we have billions to just fling at Iraq and Afghanistan for building there. As this and a hundred other stories like it demonstrate most of this money produces nothing, and no one is even quite sure where the money has gone. General Petraeus, beloved by neocons, doesn't seem to have much interest in investigating.
You can be damn sure it is flowing into the pockets of a small group of individuals and corporations, who just get richer by the month. As this investigative report says, 'Most of the U.S. contracting dollars goes to U.S. or multinational contracting giants. Only 22 percent of U.S. development assistance funds reached the local Afghan economy, according to a study by Peace Dividend Trust, a nonprofit working with the U.S. government. The reverse was true for Great Britain, which didn't funnel most of its aid through international companies. As a result, more than 70 percent of British aid reached the Afghan economy..'
Meanwhile one in eight Americans are on food assistance. And nobody, least of all the Obama Administration with its obsession over bi-partisanship, seems to be able to stop the gravy train. Every time I read these stories and look at the pot holes in the roads, I ask myself, when did the American middle class decide to destroy itself?
SHAHRI BUZURG, Afghanistan – For more than a year, Afghan police chief Rajab Mohammed and his men have worked out of a dark, cramped mud home in a remote corner of Afghanistan while waiting in vain for construction workers to finish building the U.S.-funded police station across the street.
With winter fast approaching, some of the men, who’d been sleeping in a dirt courtyard, recently took over the idle construction site and set up cots inside the half-built station after they learned that the U.S. government had fired the Afghan company responsible for the project.
The U.S. is spending billions of dollars to build facilities like the one in Badakhshan for Afghanistan’s expanding national police and new garrisons for its army. The ambitious program is a linchpin of President Barack Obama’s strategy to strengthen Afghan security forces so 100,000 U.S. troops can come home.
However, like much of the wider Afghan reconstruction effort, it’s faltering, according to current and former U.S. officials, Afghan and American contractors, and contract documents.
Dozens of structures across the country either were poorly constructed or never completed at all. Tens of thousands of Afghan soldiers who were supposed to be living in garrisons by now are still housed in […]
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Monday, November 15th, 2010
JUSTIN GILLIS, - The New York Times
Stephan:
TASIILAQ, Greenland - With a tense pilot gripping the stick, the helicopter hovered above the water, a red speck of machinery lost in a wilderness of rock and ice.
To the right, a great fjord stretched toward the sea, choked with icebergs. To the left loomed one of the immense glaciers that bring ice from the top of the Greenland ice sheet and dump it into the ocean.
Hanging out the sides of the craft, two scientists sent a measuring device plunging into the water, between ice floes. Near the bottom, it reported a temperature of 40 degrees. It was the latest in a string of troubling measurements showing that the water was warm enough to melt glaciers rapidly from below.
‘That’s the highest we’ve seen this far up the fjord,
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Monday, November 15th, 2010
Stephan: In today's email I got one from an SR reader telling me about how medical marijuana has meant so much to his sister, who had previously been 'a strong anti-marijuana Christian.' Little by little good senses is prevailing.
PHOENIX — Arizona voters have approved a measure that will legalize medical marijuana use in the state for people with chronic or debilitating diseases.
Final vote tallies showed Saturday that Proposition 203 won by a tiny margin of just 4,341 votes out of more than 1.67 million votes counted. The measure had started out losing on Election Day by about 7,200 votes, but the gap gradually narrowed in the following 10 days.
‘Now begins the very hard work of implementing this program in the way it was envisioned, with very high standards,’ said Andrew Myers, campaign manager for the Arizona Medical Marijuana Policy Project. ‘We really believe that we have an opportunity to set an example to the rest of the country on what a good medical marijuana program looks like.’
Arizona is the 15th state to approve a medical marijuana law. California was the first in 1996, and 13 other states and Washington, D.C., have since followed suit.
The Arizona measure will allow patients with diseases including cancer, HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and any other ‘chronic or debilitating’ disease that meets guidelines to buy 2 1/2 ounces of marijuana every two weeks or grow plants.
The patients must get a recommendation from their doctor and […]
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Sunday, November 14th, 2010
Stephan: I personally would not go through these scanners. Flying itself exposes one to heightened radiation, just because of the altitude, and this would add another dose I don't need. My intuition tells me that these scanners are going to be like the X-ray machines they used to have in shoe stores back in the 40s and 50s -- a great idea at one level, and a health risk at another. I also object to the growing intrusion and corruption of civil rights this represents.
A growing pilot and passenger revolt over full-body scans and what many consider intrusive pat-downs couldn’t have come at a worse time for the nation’s air travel system.
Thanksgiving, the busiest travel time of the year, is less than two weeks away.
Grassroots groups are urging travelers to either not fly or to protest by opting out of the full-body scanners and undergo time-consuming pat-downs instead.
Such concerns prompted a meeting Friday of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano with leaders of travel industry groups.
Napolitano met with the U.S.Travel Association and 20 travel companies ‘to underscore the Department’s continued commitment to partnering with the nation’s travel and tourism industry to facilitate the flow of trade and travel while maintaining high security standards to protect the American people,’ the department said in a statement.
Federal officials have increased security in the wake of plots attributed to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Industry leaders are worried about the grassroots backlash to Transportation Security Administration security procedures. Some pilots, passengers and flight attendants have chosen to opt out of the revealing scans.
More of the units are arriving at airports, with 1,000 expected to be in place by the end of 2011.
‘While the meeting with Secretary Napolitano was informative, […]
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