http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0516/p03s03-usmi.html?page=1 I’m still figuring out what I learned at the AFRICOM expo. I had brief discussions on STAR-TIDES with a lot of senior people, but placing infrastructure at the center of “winning the peace” is such a radical shift in perspective from the process-heavy approaches which have been at the core of the US govt. [...]
Read more →The situation requires a Jefferson. There isn’t one. For whatever reason, the strident, terrifying voices of eternal hostility to tyranny over the mind of man, of give me liberty of give me death, are stilled. The words are mouthed, but without the spirit to back them up. The cultural forces which produce that kind of [...]
Read more →The ‘Ndrangheta, the Italian organised crime group, does yearly business equivalent to some 3 percent of Italy’s economy and more than the total of that of some small European nations, according to a study on Wednesday. The crime group, which has overtaken the Sicilian Mafia for control of drug trafficking, was responsible for the slaying [...]
Read more →The United States is “stuck” with its war-on-terror detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba because it cannot figure out what to do with prisoners who cannot be charged or set loose, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT Gates told lawmakers that he still believes that the prison should be closed, but has not [...]
Read more →http://www.nbc5i.com/community/16330040/detail.html vs. about, what, $0.20 a mile for gasoline? it’s going to move pretty fast when it starts.
Read more →The crisis has focused attention on the obscene inequities of this era – the world’s 1,100 richest people have almost twice the assets of the poorest 2.5bn. http://us.ft.com/ftgateway/superpage.ft?news_id=fto051520081439544376&page=2 My contention has always been that wealth concentration of this kind requires and implies the political oppression, usually implying force, of those on the losing end of [...]
Read more →Mr. Hauser uncovered the means to answer these questions definitively. On this page in 1993, he stated that “No matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.” What a pity that his discovery has not been more widely disseminated. The chart nearby, updating the [...]
Read more →Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Even some of Egypt’s older, more disillusioned proponents of democracy had let themselves hope that a social networking Web site created by American college students could become [...]
Read more →not bad, not bad at all
Read more →At the same time, the success of China’s ravenous development creates its own challenges. Every rural village that is successfully razed to make way for a new project creates more displaced people who join the ranks of the roughly 130 million migrants roaming the country looking for work. By 2025, it is projected that this [...]
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