Barack Obama has allocated £4.3billion to spend on maintaining the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile - £370million more than what was budgeted by George Bush.
The budget will also be increased by more than £3.1billion over the next five years.
The announcement comes despite the American President declaring nuclear weapons were the ‘greatest danger’ to U.S. people during in his State of the Union address on Wednesday.
The Defense Department needs to get better at lying and fooling people about its intentions. That’s the conclusion from an influential Pentagon panel, the Defense Science Board (DSB), which recommends that the military and intelligence communities join in a new agency devoted to “strategic surprise/deception.”
Tricking battlefield opponents has been a part of war since guys started beating each other with bones and sticks. But these days, such moves are harder to pull off, the DSB notes in a January report (.pdf) first unearthed by InsideDefense.com. “In an era of ubiquitous information access, anonymous leaks and public demands for transparency, deception operations are extraordinarily difficult. Nevertheless, successful strategic deception has in the past provided the United States with significant advantages that translated into operational and tactical success. Successful deception also minimizes U.S. vulnerabilities, while simultaneously setting conditions to surprise adversaries.”
Wednesday’s hearing described a secretive group deploying billions of dollars to favored banks, operating with little oversight by the public or elected officials.
Comment: Actual Bloomberg headline!
Just one day before the London Conference on Afghanistan is to begin, Taliban forces issued a statement condemning what is seem by many as the cornerstone proposal likely to come out of the meeting, the buyout strategy.
The nations at the conference will commit money to a “Peace and Reintegration Trust Fund,” aimed at bribing members of the Taliban into giving up the insurgency in return for cash and the promise of jobs with the Karzai government.
Police in the UK are planning to use unmanned spy drones, controversially deployed in Afghanistan, for the "routine" monitoring of antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves and fly-tippers, in a significant expansion of covert state surveillance.
The arms manufacturer BAE Systems, which produces a range of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for war zones, is adapting the military-style planes for a consortium of government agencies led by Kent police.
According to technophiles, experts, and that whispering voice in your head, 2010 will be the year that augmented reality makes a breakthrough. In case you don't know, "augmented reality" is the rather quotidian title given to a smart, gizmo-specific type of software that takes a live camera feed from the real world and superimposes stuff on to it in real time.
Being a gadget designed for people who'd rather look at a screen than the real world, the iPhone inevitably plays host to several examples of this sort of thing. Download the relevant app, hold your iPhone aloft and gawp in astonishment as it magically displays live footage of the actual world directly in front of you – just like the real thing but smaller, and with snazzy direction signs floating over it. You might see a magic hand pointing in the direction of the nearest Starbucks, for instance – a magic hand that repositions itself as you move around. It's incredibly useful, assuming you'd prefer to cause an almighty logjam by shuffling slowly along the pavement while staring into your palm than stop and ask a fellow human being for directions.
Comment: This is creepsylvania, the author actually wants to use devices to see a fantasy world - where bums are turned into delightful cartoons. Yeesh.
George Russell of Fox News has a very important report on a United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) plan “to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.” As Russell writes:
Such a scheme could raise “tens of billions of dollars” on behalf of the United Nations’ public health arm from a broad base of consumers, which would then be used to transfer drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities, among other things, to the developing world.
The multibillion-dollar “indirect consumer tax” is only one of a “suite of proposals” for financing the rapid transformation of the global medical industry that will go before WHO’s 34-member supervisory Executive Board at its biannual meeting in Geneva.
Thus, when I saw the title of his most recent column, "Bankers Without a Clue," I thought that this might be the day that I can read a Krugman column without cringing. Perhaps, I imagined, he might even use the "bankster" term that I have seen from so many libertarians and Austrian economists. Ah, hope!
Unfortunately, Krugman gave us his tired analysis, and in doing so, he also demonstrated that he was clueless himself about the stagflation of the 1970s. (After all, Krugman being a True Believing Keynesian believes that we should not have both inflation and rising unemployment, since he already has written elsewhere that almost any economic problem can be solved by…printing more money.)
The British Broadcasting Corporation has put its weather forecasting contract out to tender – the first time since its radio broadcasts began in 1923 – after taking heat from the public for a string of embarrassingly inaccurate long-range weather forecasts. The UK Met Office, the government-owned meteorological department that has had the BBC contract for almost 90 years, is a partner with the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University of Climategate fame. CRU and the UK Met Office jointly provide the climate change data that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relies on.
The BBC’s decision comes amid one of the fiercest winters in decades that has left the country unprepared for the snow-related chaos it has seen. In August, the Met Office had forecast a mild winter. Last summer, the BBC had again been embarrassed: Thanks to the forecasts it had received from the UK Met, the BBC had warned its audience of an "odds-on barbecue summer" that instead was cool and rainy. In both cases, the BBC has faced outrage from a public that had been misled by the information the BBC had provided it.
Until the mid-1990s, the term "nanotechnology" referred to the goal of creating vast arrays of nanoscale assemblers to fabricate useful human-scale products from scratch in an entirely automated process and with atomic precision. Since then, the word has come to mean anything from stain-resistant pants to branches of conventional chemistry — generally anything involving nanoscale objects. But the dream of a new Industrial Revolution based on nanoscale manufacturing has not died, as demonstrated most vividly by the work of NYU professor of chemistry Dr. Nadrian Seeman.
The World Health Organization is considering a plan to ask governments to impose a global consumer tax on such things as Internet activity or everyday financial transactions like paying bills online.
Such a scheme could raise "tens of billions of dollars" on behalf of the United Nations' public health arm from a broad base of consumers, which would then be used to transfer drug-making research, development and manufacturing capabilities, among other things, to the developing world.
The multibillion-dollar "indirect consumer tax" is only one of a "suite of proposals" for financing the rapid transformation of the global medical industry that will go before WHO's 34-member supervisory Executive Board at its biannual meeting in Geneva.
WHO's self-proclaimed "Expert Working Group" has suggested asking rich countries to set aside fixed portions of their gross domestic product to finance worldwide research and development.Boeing received the Oshkosh Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT) on Dec. 17 at the Oshkosh facility in Oshkosh, Wis.
Civilian deaths in Afghanistan climbed in 2009 to their highest number since the fall of the Taliban, the United Nations says in a recent report.
The rising number of innocent Afghan casualties constitutes a major failure for the American forces if judged by the standards set out by General Stanley McChrystal in the summer of 2009, when he testified before Congress.
A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
Comment: My God, not surprising but vexing - these people have been nothing but vicious towards skeptics but as time goes on we are vindicated over and over again. Science can never be at it's best when the conclusion is predetermined.
Chrysler will advertise its Dodge Charger in a 60-second commercial that will showcase "the passion of Dodge." A 60-second spot is the longest and the most expensive ad available during the Super Bowl.
The automaker was rescued by a $7 billion bailout from the U.S. government [or - more accurately, since the U.S. government has no resources of its own - the U.S. taxpayer].So-called progressives lined up behind him to generate one excuse after another as to Obama’s inexplicable conduct. Most apologia centered on the idea that their "can be only one president at a time", whatever that means in the context of needed moral courage, not military might.
The government of the Netherlands recently granted the US military use of its islands in the Caribbean, with the excuse that this is to help in the “war against drugs”. In reality, this is a direct threat to the Chavez government in Venezuela.
In the Dutch media articles have appeared about the “war-mongering” president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, who is “preparing a war against Colombia”. Now Chávez has accused the Netherlands of supporting aggression against Venezuela, because the Netherlands has given permission to the American armed forces to use the military bases on the Dutch Caribbean islands of Aruba and Curaçao[1].
He said about 600 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne would be in Haiti by Friday.
Separately, the Pentagon is also sending an aircraft carrier and three amphibious ships, including one that can carry up to 2,000 Marines.
Full StoryPART III – A global warming skeptic receives the leaked files from an anonymous “Deep-Climate” insider. Release of files exposes gatekeeping and leads to the maturing of a new science movement – that of peer-to-peer review. Last in a series. Please click for Part I and Part II.
Few outside the climate skeptic circle have ever heard of Steven Mosher. An open-source software developer, statistical data analyst, and thought of as the spokesperson of the lukewarmer set, Mosher hasn’t made any of the mainstream media outlets covering the story of Climategate. But make no mistake about it – when it comes to dissemination of the story, Steven Mosher is to Climategate what Woodward and Bernstein were to Watergate. He was just the right person, with just the right influence, and just the right expertise to be at the heart of the promulgation of the files.
Comment: Check out parts I and II as well - but this article speaks a lot of truth. The internet has aided us in circumnavigating structures of power in control of our State sponsored experts.
Fact 1: The next employment report will be worse.
When the Labor Department puts out the January employment figures on Feb. 4, they will include an assumption that a lot of companies went out of business.
This is something called the birth/death model that is used by the department. Last year it caused 356,000 jobs to be subtracted from the January job count.
So, the next employment figure should be shockingly bad.
WASHINGTON — After a recent attempted terrorist attack set off a debate about full-body X-rays at airports, a new McClatchy-Ipsos poll finds that Americans lean more toward giving up some of their liberty in exchange for more safety.
The survey found 51 percent of Americans agreeing that "it is necessary to give up some civil liberties in order to make the country safe from terrorism."
California assemblyman Tom Ammiano emerged Tuesday from a victorious committee vote to legalize marijuana proclaiming history was in the making.
The political theater Ammiano stirred in winning a 4-3 vote in the Public Safety Committee for pot's legalization raises the curtain on a near-certain November ballot fight and heated skirmishes in the Legislature over the future of marijuana use in California.
"I think the conversation is definitely gaining traction," Ammiano, a San Francisco Democrat, said after the bill passed the committee he chairs. "There was a time when the 'M' word was never mentioned in Sacramento."
Comment: If marijuana use - both medicinal and recreational - is legalized in California with success and incoming tax revenue, look for other states to quickly follow.
At an unidentified pizza shop visited by George H.W. Bush recently, one of the customers decided to give the former president a slice of his mind, replete with generous toppings.
NEW YORK, Jan 11 (Reuters) - It could take until November 2018 to get the full story behind the U.S. bailout of insurance giant American International Group (AIG.N) because of an action taken last year by the Securities and Exchange Commission.
In May, the SEC approved a request by AIG to keep secret an exhibit to a year-old regulatory filing that includes some of the details on the most controversial aspect of the AIG bailout: the funneling of tens of billions of dollars to big banks like Societe Generale, Goldman Sachs (GS.N), Deutsche Bank (DBKGn.DE) and Merrill Lynch.
Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Up to 200 doctors, nurses, firefighters, prison officers, police officers, forensic scientists and binmen say they have developed serious physical and mental health problems after injections essential for their work over the past 10 years. All have given up their jobs and some are now 60 per cent disabled.
Last night it emerged they are to miss out on payouts, prompting furore among campaigners. More than 150 MPs have lent their support to demands for a better deal for the victims.
Olivia Price, of the Vaccine Victim Support Group, said: “These people have given their lives in the service of looking after others and this is how they’re repaid. They’ve lost their careers and are a burden to their families. It is very degrading.”
Somewhat of a shocking development, considering the situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, and most of the “surge” troops won’t even arrive for several months, but General Stanley McChrystal today declared the Afghan surge was already a success with “turned the tide” against the Taliban.
The severity of the H1N1 outbreak was deliberately exaggerated by pharmaceutical companies that stood to make billions of dollars from a worldwide scare, a leading European health expert has claimed.
Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, has accused the makers of vaccines for the virus of influencing the World Health Organisation's (WHO) decision to declare a pandemic.
Jan. 11 (Bloomberg) -- The Federal Reserve asked a U.S. appeals court to block a ruling that for the first time would force the central bank to reveal secret identities of financial firms that might have collapsed without the largest government bailout in U.S. history.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan will decide whether the Fed must release records of the unprecedented $2 trillion U.S. loan program launched after the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. In August, a federal judge ordered that the information be released, responding to a request by Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News.
"The bottom line on this whole business has not yet been written."
Eighteenth-century German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel long ago developed, among other things, what he called the principle of "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" to explain the process of deliberately enacted social disorder and change as a road to power. To achieve a desired result, one deliberately creates a situation ("thesis,") devises a "solution," to solve the "problems" created by that situation ("antithesis,") with the final result being the ultimate goal of more power and control ("synthesis.") It is unsurprising Karl Marx and his disciples like Lenin and Trotsky, as well as the US government in its so-called War On Drugs, made this process a keystone of their drive for total control of all individual actions that, in their views, were not, in Mussolini s terms, "inside the state" and thus controllable by the same.
Although, according to recent surveys, they know an average of 40,000 words, they tend to favour a "teenspeak" used in text messages, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and in internet chat rooms like MSN.
One poll, commissioned by Tesco, revealed that while children had the vocabulary to be articulate, the top 20 words they used - including the Vicky Pollard lexicon of “yeah”, “no” and “but” - accounted for about a third of all the words they used.
