Eisenhower’s Worst Fears Came True: We Invent Enemies to Buy the Bombs
June 19th, 2011Via: Guardian:
Why do we still go to war? We seem unable to stop. We find any excuse for this post-imperial fidget and yet we keep getting trapped. Germans do not do it, or Spanish or Swedes. Britain’s borders and British people have not been under serious threat for a generation. Yet time and again our leaders crave battle. Why?
Last week we got a glimpse of an answer and it was not nice. The outgoing US defence secretary, Robert Gates, berated Europe’s “failure of political will” in not maintaining defence spending. He said Nato had declined into a “two-tier alliance” between those willing to wage war and those “who specialise in ‘soft’ humanitarian, development, peacekeeping and talking tasks”. Peace, he implied, is for wimps. Real men buy bombs, and drop them.
…
It is not democracy that keeps western nations at war, but armies and the interests now massed behind them. The greatest speech about modern defence was made in 1961 by the US president Eisenhower. He was no leftwinger, but a former general and conservative Republican. Looking back over his time in office, his farewell message to America was a simple warning against the “disastrous rise of misplaced power” of a military-industrial complex with “unwarranted influence on government”. A burgeoning defence establishment, backed by large corporate interests, would one day employ so many people as to corrupt the political system. (His original draft even referred to a “military-industrial-congressional complex”.) This lobby, said Eisenhower, could become so huge as to “endanger our liberties and democratic processes”.
I wonder what Eisenhower would make of today’s US, with a military grown from 3.5 million people to 5 million. The western nations face less of a threat to their integrity and security than ever in history, yet their defence industries cry for ever more money and ever more things to do. The cold war strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented.”
Russia Orders Stalin-Era Leather Coats for Putin Guards
June 18th, 2011Via: AFP:
Russia’s federal guard service, in charge of protecting President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, may soon sport black leather overcoats harking back to the era of Stalin’s purges. The elite service known by its Russian acronym FSO has launched a tender to purchase 60 leather trenchcoats on the official site for government purchases, instantly drawing tongue-in-cheek criticism from Russian bloggers.
Long leather trenchcoats are infamously associated with uniforms of Soviet NKVD secret police, worn by its low-ranking officers at the height of Stalin’s pre-war purges in the late 1930s.
The coats ordered by the FSO appear to be nearly identical to the NKVD coats, according to the tender documentation and images uploaded on the website zakupki.gov.ru last week.
Research Credit: cptmarginal
An Idea for the Billionaires Who Claim to Love New Zealand: How About an Electric Water Kettle?
June 18th, 2011The economy in Northland is in a state of collapse:
The recession in Northland has had most impact on young people, with 29 per cent of the region’s 18- to 24-year-olds now on welfare, and on Maori, with an extraordinary 48 per cent of Maori aged 18 to 64 on benefits.
Now, in New Zealand, what’s the one appliance that people have the most (apparent) choice with regard to which one to buy? I was in our local Farmer’s department store and, even here in Kaitaia, at the tail end of the supply chain of the developed world, there were dozens of electric water kettles on the shelves. I went through and turned every one upside down to see if I could find one that wasn’t made in China. Nope, they were all made in China, dozens of them. The closest thing I could find to one not made in China was, “Designed in Australia.”
Ok, so:
* Most people in New Zealand use electric water kettles.
* How many types of electric water kettles are made in New Zealand? None. (I found a 1930s newspaper reference to hot water kettles that were made in New Zealand.)
* There’s an unemployment crisis in Northland.
Now, most of the electric kettles for sale here are total garbage and will only last weeks or months before breaking. I see them going into the landfill all the time. We’re using a higher end stainless steel model that has lasted for two years, but it’s starting to fail. The retail price was NZ$139 for this one, but we bought it during a half off sale. So, the nicer kettles, which are still garbage, cost over NZ$100.
I was thinking: How about a premium quality, stainless steel, Made in New Zealand electric water kettle? Yes, there are higher labour costs in New Zealand than in China. However, dear billionaire, you could eliminate parasitic middlemen (wholesalers) and sell directly to customers through a website (in the same manner that Dell sells computers to people). Word would soon spread and people around the world, noting a similar lack of not-made-in-China hot water kettles in their countries, would be placing orders for this premium, Made in New Zealand kettle. I bought kettle.co.nz, which I will be happy hand over to any Buy New Zealand Made member company that agrees to manufacture a stainless steel, electric water kettle in New Zealand.
Design the thing to last and give it an industry leading warranty period. Get New Zealanders off the dole by building a high quality appliance that would be in high demand at home and abroad. I can’t imagine a New Zealander doing this, since people here are (wrongly) convinced that very little can be manufactured here. But, I’d love to be proven wrong about this.
If this guy can park an almost 3 million dollar automobile in a bunker, there should be a way to make an electric water kettle in New Zealand. And if not, well, I’ll let you do the math on where that leaves us.
Puerto Rico: Banker Shot Dead, Professional Hit
June 17th, 2011Via: Business Insider:
A banker was gunned down in Puerto Rico on Wednesday and at least one Puetro Rican news agency suspects that it might have had something to do with an audit he had recently launched.
The banker, 56-year old Maurice J. Spagnoletti, was Doral Financial corporation’s executive vice president of Mortgage and Banking Operations. He had only been working at Doral for 6 moths when he was killed.
Lawsuit Alleges Whole Foods Sold Frozen Vegetables from China Grown in a Polluted Region by Prisoners and Certified as Organic
June 17th, 2011Ahh, imagine my shock.
Rant mode: On.
We buy some organic foods in bulk from wholesale distributors here in New Zealand. Increasingly, if we want to buy these ‘certified organic’ bulk foods, the country of origin is China.
We refuse to buy any food from China, regardless of which organic certification it has. We’ve indicated this to the distributors (Ceres and Chantal) and they said that they hear it all the time, but, according to them, they are just buying what’s available, and apparently, that means the only option is China for an increasing number of foods. (Becky orders thousands of dollars worth of products from these places for a co-op we’re in with other families.)
Now, that’s the organic stuff, where we can at least find out where the food originates. What happens with the supermarket duopoly here?
Part of New Zealand’s take over by Chinese interests is related to country of origin information on food labels. In New Zealand, there’s no requirement to indicate where food is from on the packaging. All kinds of nonsense reasons are given for this, but the main one (now) is that seeing “China” on so many food labels would cause difficulties for the politicians who exist to sell New Zealand down the river. People would really start to wonder, “WTF is happening here?” Why is a country like New Zealand, so easily capable of producing an abundance of food locally, importing F*@^!%$ beans from CHINA!? Nobody in polite circles will discuss this.
The short answer is that New Zealand is a company town, and that company is Fonterra. New Zealanders use a Fonterra Milk Buck as a national currency. You may know it as the New Zealand Dollar. The largest component of the agricultural sector involves maximum output of dairy products for export. Why grow food for consumption here when you can make more money by milking cows for Fonterra… As a result of this, we get the ubiquitous, “Packaged in Auckland,” on a lot of things, which just means “Made in China” almost all of the time. That food is cheap, cheap, cheap. High quality dairy products go out, and garbage from China comes in. The change is paid to foreign creditors, which is never enough, and the deficit grows by the day. The End.
Almost all fertilizer used commercially in New Zealand has to be imported. This is a company town, forget it. Water pollution? Never mind. Soil erosion? What’s that? Deficit getting worse all the time? More milk solids! MOOOOOORRRRRRE! “Packaged in Auckland”? Look away, and be a happy Kiwi.
In other news: Fonterra Selling Yuan Denominated Bonds in Hong Kong:
Fonterra Co-Operative Group Ltd. is poised to become the first company from New Zealand to raise funds in the offshore yuan bond market with a 300 million yuan (US$46 million) bond it aims to price later Friday.
The dairy giant’s treasury manager, Stephan Deschamps, said the company hopes to sell more so-called “dim sum” bonds in the future. The decision to raise funds in Hong Kong, the center of the rapidly growing international yuan bond market, reflects the growing importance of China to Fonterra’s business operations, he said.
Look at the Hell on Earth that the Chinese regime has created in their own country. Now, they want us to eat it, in, “Clean green New Zealand,” and everywhere else.
Not me. Not my family. No way.
Via: Bloomberg:
A Florida judge allowed a lawsuit to proceed that claims Whole Foods Market Inc. (WFMI) violated the state’s deceptive trade-practices law by selling frozen vegetables from China grown in a polluted region by prisoners and certified as organic.
Miami-Dade County Circuit Judge Amy Steele Donner yesterday denied the grocery chain’s motion to dismiss the suit filed on behalf of the Southeast Consumer Alliance Inc., a non-profit organization based in Boca Raton, Florida.
The suit claims that Whole Foods knew that its Silver River supplier, based in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, was actually a front company for a network of farms where Chinese prisoners are forced to work and that the farms are irrigated from a highly polluted river.
The suit also claims that Austin, Texas-based Whole Foods knew that the company providing the initial organic certification is owned by the Chinese government, which also owns the farms, creating a conflict of interest.
“They’re doing everything they can to conceal this bogus or shaky certification,” Bruce Baldwin, the group’s attorney, said. “Whole Foods brags about its social accountability audits of all of its foreign suppliers. So either they knew about these forced labor camps, or they didn’t actually check.”
A spokeswoman for the grocery store chain didn’t immediately return a phone call seeking comment. Whole Foods attorney Christopher Wayne Wadsworth said he wasn’t authorized to comment on the case.
Research Credit: JH
NSA Allies with Internet Carriers to Thwart Cyber Attacks Against Defense Firms
June 17th, 2011Oh sure.
Via: Washington Post:
The National Security Agency is working with Internet providers to deploy a new generation of tools to scan e-mail and other digital traffic with the goal of thwarting cyberattacks against defense firms by foreign adversaries, senior defense and industry officials say.
The novel program, which began last month on a voluntary, trial basis, relies on sophisticated NSA data sets to identify malicious programs slipped into the vast stream of Internet data flowing to the nation’s largest defense firms. Such attacks, including one last month against Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin, are nearly constant as rival nations and terrorist groups seek access to U.S. military secrets.
Related: NSA, AT&T and the NarusInsight Intercept Suite
‘Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind’
June 16th, 2011Via: Al Jazeera:
Scientific experts believe Japan’s nuclear disaster to be far worse than governments are revealing to the public.
“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.
Japan’s 9.0 earthquake on March 11 caused a massive tsunami that crippled the cooling systems at the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) nuclear plant in Fukushima, Japan. It also led to hydrogen explosions and reactor meltdowns that forced evacuations of those living within a 20km radius of the plant.
Gundersen, a licensed reactor operator with 39 years of nuclear power engineering experience, managing and coordinating projects at 70 nuclear power plants around the US, says the Fukushima nuclear plant likely has more exposed reactor cores than commonly believed.
“Fukushima has three nuclear reactors exposed and four fuel cores exposed,” he said, “You probably have the equivalent of 20 nuclear reactor cores because of the fuel cores, and they are all in desperate need of being cooled, and there is no means to cool them effectively.”
TEPCO has been spraying water on several of the reactors and fuel cores, but this has led to even greater problems, such as radiation being emitted into the air in steam and evaporated sea water – as well as generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive sea water that has to be disposed of.
“The problem is how to keep it cool,” says Gundersen. “They are pouring in water and the question is what are they going to do with the waste that comes out of that system, because it is going to contain plutonium and uranium. Where do you put the water?”
Even though the plant is now shut down, fission products such as uranium continue to generate heat, and therefore require cooling.
“The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”
Pentagon in Search of ‘Secret’ Farmers for Afghanistan
June 16th, 2011Via: National Journal:
The Department of Defense is looking to hire agriculture specialists to send to Afghanistan. That’s nothing especially new — Afghanistan’s economy is heavily agricultural, the health of the country’s economy is directly tied to the mission of rolling back Taliban influence, and the U.S. has been sending farming consultants there for years. But writer (and former civilian contractor in Afghanistan) Joshua Foust noticed something unusual in reading the job listing, which had been posted to recruitmilitary.com by a defense contractor. The job requires “secret” security clearance.
Airspace Over Flooded Nebraska Nuclear Power Plant Still Closed
June 16th, 2011Via: Business Insider:
A fire in Nebraska’s Fort Calhoun nuclear power plant briefly knocked out the cooling process for spent nuclear fuel rods, ProPublica reports.
The fire occurred on June 7th, and knocked out cooling for approximately 90 minutes. After 88 hours, the cooling pool would boil dry and highly radioactive materials would be exposed.
On June 6th, the Federal Administration Aviation (FAA) issued a directive banning aircraft from entering the airspace within a two-mile radius of the plant.
“No pilots may operate an aircraft in the areas covered by this NOTAM,” referring to the “notice to airmen,” effective immediately.
Since last week, the plant has been under a “notification of unusual event” classification, becausing of the rising Missouri River. That is the lowest level of emergency alert.
The OPPD claims the FAA closed airspace over the plant because of the Missouri River flooding. But the FAA ban specifically lists the Fort Calhoun Nuclear Power Plant as the location for the flight ban.
The plant is adjacent to the now-flooding river, about 20 minutes outside downtown Omaha, and has been closed since April for refueling.
Why Your Money-Market Fund Could Be Hit by Greek Default
June 16th, 2011Via: CNBC:
Some of the safest, plain-vanilla investment accounts in the U.S. could be challenged if Greece defaults on its sovereign debt.
Forty-four percent of mutual fund assets in the U.S. are invested in the short-term debt of European banks, according to a report from Fitch.
A separate report from Moody’s noted that 55 percent of those holdings are in the commercial paper of French banks, such as Societe Generale, BNP Paribas and Credit Agricole. French banks are some of biggest creditors to Greece, with over $53 billion in outstanding loans to the Greek government and private sector.
While fund managers have had plenty of warning of the potential of a default in Greece, many would likely still be caught off guard. Many fund managers assume that a bailout will prevent a default by Greece.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers similarly caught money-market fund managers off guard, famously causing the Reserve Fund to “break the buck.”
The debt of these French banks is still very highly rated and Moody’s says the risk of default on the short-term debt is very low. But the high ratings assume that the probability of a default by Greece is very low.
