Cryptogon Readers Contribute $100 and $20
October 23rd, 2007ES sent $100 and MW sent $20. Wow! ES is a new contributor and MW has been hitting that little, blue “Donate” button for years. Thanks guys.
Charles Riechers: Suicide Is Not Painless
October 23rd, 2007The New York Times has published an astonishing op-ed piece about Charles Reichers and the corruption industrial complex.
The crimes are… breathtaking.
I appended the full text to the Cryptogon post on Reichers (if you would like to comment on this, please do it there).
Via: New York Times:
Set against the epic corruption that has defined the war in Iraq, Mr. Riechers’s tragic tale is but a passing anecdote, his infraction at most a misdemeanor. The $26,788 he received for two months in a non-job doesn’t rise even to a rounding error in the Iraq-Afghanistan money pit. So far some $6 billion worth of contracts are being investigated for waste and fraud, however slowly, by the Pentagon and the Justice Department. That doesn’t include the unaccounted-for piles of cash, some $9 billion in Iraqi funds, that vanished during L. Paul Bremer’s short but disastrous reign in the Green Zone. Yet Mr. Riechers, not the first suicide connected to the war’s corruption scandals, is a window into the culture of the whole debacle.
…
As it happens, he was only about three degrees of separation from Blackwater. His Pentagon job, managing a $30 billion Air Force procurement budget, had been previously held by an officer named Darleen Druyun, who in 2004 was sentenced to nine months in prison for securing jobs for herself, her daughter and her son-in-law at Boeing while favoring the company with billions of dollars of contracts. Ms. Druyun’s Pentagon post remained vacant until Mr. Riechers was appointed. He was brought in to clean up the corruption.
Yet the full story of the corruption during Ms. Druyun’s tenure is even now still unknown. The Bush-appointed Pentagon inspector general delivered a report to Congress full of holes in 2005. Specifically, black holes: dozens of the report’s passages were redacted, as were the names of many White House officials in the report’s e-mail evidence on the Boeing machinations.
The inspector general also assured Congress that neither Donald Rumsfeld nor Paul Wolfowitz knew anything about the crimes. Senators on the Armed Services Committee were incredulous. John Warner, the Virginia Republican, could not believe that the Pentagon’s top two officials had no information about “the most significant defense procurement mismanagement in contemporary history.â€
Sarkozy’s “Committee of Wise Men” to Contemplate Long Term Plans for European Union
October 23rd, 2007Will masks and capes be optional?
Via: MSNBC/Financial Times:
The mishmash of opt-outs and compromises contained in the treaty shows how the bargain that underpinned the EU’s evolution over the past 20 to 25 years may now be obsolete. Under the old pragmatic arrangements, countries that wanted an ever more united Europe created the euro, set up a zone of passport-free travel across much of the EU and pushed the case for closer co-operation on foreign policy and judicial and home affairs.
Those less keen on the “abstract ideal” of European unity won the argument for expanding the EU into a bloc of at least 28 members (Croatia is expected to join in the next few years).
In the view of some leaders, notably Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, this two-track approach no longer works, because it fails to provide clear-cut answers to the burning questions of the day. Where, geographically speaking, does the EU end? And what will the EU look like and do, 20 to 30 years from now?
Mr Sarkozy wants the December summit to set up a “committee of wise men” to address such long-term questions. Other leaders suspect that his motives are less high-minded and that he simply wants to obtain a recommendation from the “wise men” that Turkey should never join the EU. That would clash with the EU’s position that Turkey is a candidate for membership.
Diplomats say Mr Sarkozy will get his committee but other countries will seek to neutralise it. “They’ll say, ‘Here’s your Jeep, put your wise men in it, drive to the swamp and have a nice day’,” one envoy predicts.
As the friction over the “wise men” proposal indicates, a successful Lisbon summit and the smooth ratification next year of the reform treaty will not by themselves guarantee a tension-free future for the EU. But the formal end of a difficult and debilitating phase of EU history is now in sight. For better or worse, the new battles are around the corner.
Related: Sarkozy Calls for “New World Order†at UN
Three Quarters of Adjustable Rate Mortgage Holders Don’t Know How Much Their Payments Will Increase After Reset
October 23rd, 2007Fantastic!
Via: CNN:
About $50 billion in adjustable rate mortgages reset this month, driving interest rates up for many borderline borrowers. And despite efforts to raise awareness, it doesn’t look like anyone is really prepared for what’s to come.
“I don’t know if there’s anything much [borrowers] can do,” said Keith Gumbinger of HSH Associates, a publisher of mortgage related information. “Hopefully, they’ve been prudent about preparing for it, building a nest egg or refinancing the loan.”
But most borrowers are likely to just scramble to pay the higher expenses – some of which will jump by 50 percent and come as a big surprise.
According to a survey conducted last month for the AFL-CIO by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, three quarters of borrowers have little clue about how much their payments will increase when their loans adjust. Nearly half don’t know how their loans actually reset.
“This survey shows that many homeowners simply are not prepared for the steep rise in mortgage payments that this market inflicts on ARM holders,” John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, said in a press release.
When asked whether they were confident or worried about making their monthly mortgage payments over the next few years, 41 percent of homeowners whose adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) had already reset said they were worried. Only 18 percent of pre-reset borrowers were concerned.
Evidence of Tax Evasion by Blackwater
October 22nd, 2007Via: U.S. House of Representatives:
New documents suggest that Blackwater may have engaged in significant tax evasion, failing to withhold and pay millions of dollars in Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and related taxes, and sought to conceal its conduct from Congress and law enforcement officials.
The Truth About Homework
October 22nd, 2007Via: Alfie Kohn:
There’s something perversely fascinating about educational policies that are clearly at odds with the available data. Huge schools are still being built even though we know that students tend to fare better in smaller places that lend themselves to the creation of democratic caring communities. Many children who are failed by the academic status quo are forced to repeat a grade even though research shows that this is just about the worst course of action for them. Homework continues to be assigned – in ever greater quantities – despite the absence of evidence that it’s necessary or even helpful in most cases.
The dimensions of that last disparity weren’t clear to me until I began sifting through the research for a new book. To begin with, I discovered that decades of investigation have failed to turn up any evidence that homework is beneficial for students in elementary school. Even if you regard standardized test results as a useful measure, homework (some versus none, or more versus less) isn’t even correlated with higher scores at these ages. The only effect that does show up is more negative attitudes on the part of students who get more assignments.
German-Based Energy Watch Group: Oil Production Peaked in 2006
October 22nd, 2007From the article:
“When I was an adviser to government, I proposed that we set up a taskforce to look at how fast the UK could mobilise alternative energy technologies in extremis, come the peak,” he said. “Other industry advisers supported that. But the government prefers to sleep on without even doing a contingency study. For those of us who know that premature peak oil is a clear and present danger, it is impossible to understand such complacency.“
It’s not impossible to understand at all, once you realize that energy scarcity is a big, fat red herring. It’s scarcity of everything else that’s the real problem, with top soil and water being the main concerns. Our general failure to grasp “the concept of enough” doesn’t help either.
Put yourself in the shoes of the elite for a moment.
What’s the easiest way to eliminate—or delay the onset of—all of the other scarcity issues while maintaining most of your status, privilege and control?
Kill off.
There appears to be no contingency plan because the people in polite circles who look at these issues refuse to see it.
They won’t roll out the clean technology because it doesn’t solve the other—very real—scarcity problems! Browse through the Kill Off category on Cryptogon. There’s a contingency plan, alright. It’s a combination of clean, green fascism and genocide.
Via: Guardian:
World oil production has already peaked and will fall by half as soon as 2030, according to a report which also warns that extreme shortages of fossil fuels will lead to wars and social breakdown.
The German-based Energy Watch Group will release its study in London today saying that global oil production peaked in 2006 – much earlier than most experts had expected. The report, which predicts that production will now fall by 7% a year, comes after oil prices set new records almost every day last week, on Friday hitting more than $90 (£44) a barrel.
“The world soon will not be able to produce all the oil it needs as demand is rising while supply is falling. This is a huge problem for the world economy,” said Hans-Josef Fell, EWG’s founder and the German MP behind the country’s successful support system for renewable energy.
The report’s author, Joerg Schindler, said its most alarming finding was the steep decline in oil production after its peak, which he says is now behind us.
Scientists Want to Steer Hurricanes with Industrial Slag and Directed Energy Systems
October 21st, 2007What could possibly go wrong?
Via: Telegraph:
Scientists have made a breakthrough in man’s desire to control the forces of nature – unveiling plans to weaken hurricanes and steer them off course, to prevent tragedies such as Hurricane Katrina.
The damage done to New Orleans in 2005 has spurred two rival teams of climate experts, in America and Israel, to redouble their efforts to enable people to play God with the weather.
Under one scheme, aircraft would drop soot into the near-freezing cloud at the top of a hurricane, causing it to warm up and so reduce wind speeds. Computer simulations of the forces at work in the most violent storms have shown that even small changes can affect their paths – enabling them to be diverted from major cities.
But the hurricane modifiers are fighting more than the weather. Lawyers warn that diverting a hurricane from one city to save life and property could result in multi-billion dollar lawsuits from towns that bear the brunt instead. Hurricane Katrina caused about $41 billion in damage to New Orleans.
Hurricanes form when air warmed over the ocean rises to meet the cool upper atmosphere. The heat turns to kinetic energy, producing a spiral of wind and rain. The greater the temperature differences between top and bottom, and the narrower the eye of the hurricane, the faster it blows.
Moshe Alamaro, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told The Sunday Telegraph of his plans to “paint” the tops of hurricanes black by scattering carbon particles – either soot or black particles from the manufacture of tyres – from aircraft flying above the storms. The particles would absorb heat from the sun, leading to changes in the airflows within the storm. Satellites could also heat the cloud tops by beaming microwaves from space.
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“If they’re done in the right place at the right time they can affect the strength of the hurricane,” Mr Alamaro said.
The theory has so far been tested only in computer simulation by Mr Alamaro’s colleague, Ross Hoffman. Mr Alamaro said: “With small changes to this side or that side of the hurricane we can nudge it and change its track. We’re starting with computer simulations, then will hopefully experiment on a small weather system.”
TSA Asking Civilian Travelers to Sneak “Fake” Bombs Through Airport Security Checkpoints
October 21st, 2007Do you get it yet?
Via: USA Today:
When covert agents test how well airport security screeners find homemade bombs, they pack a detonator, timer and battery inside a cluttered toilet kit, stuff it into a suitcase and carry it through a checkpoint.
Agents also hide fake sheet explosives in briefcase linings. They stash watch timers inside hollowed-out books. They cram detonators in back braces and smear plastic explosives on shoelaces.
The Transportation Security Administration’s special operations division devised the testing to raise the stakes for airport screeners and test whether they can spot bomb parts hidden as a terrorist might try to get them on an airplane, according to a classified TSA report obtained by USA TODAY.
…
At San Diego International Airport, tests are run by passengers whom local TSA managers ask to carry a fake bomb, said screener Cris Soulia, an official in a screeners union. “It’s nobody we would ever expect,” Soulia said.
Related: Terror Exercise Held on the Same Morning as the London 7/7 Bomb Attack
Cryptogon Reader Contributes $56
October 21st, 2007Thanks to Pookie for extending her reign as Cryptogon’s top contributor.
