Public Intelligence Blog

The attack on science by the Theocratic Right and the corporate interests destroying the earth have done great damage, but finally science is pushing back. We’ll see.

Corporations Are Manufacturing Uncertainty About Scientific Findings. Now Scientists Are Fighting Back.
BILL MOYERS & COMPANY – The Raw Story

300 Million Talons…

Degrowth, Anti-Consumerism and Peak Consumption

Degrowth embraces the ongoing devolution of paid work and wealth that cannot be reversed.The anti-consumerism Degrowth movement is gaining visibility and adherents in Europe. Degrowth (French: décroissance, Spanish: decrecimiento, Italian: decrescita) recognizes that the mindless expansion of mindless consumption fueled by credit and financialization is qualitatively and quantitatively different from positive growth.

Degrowth is based on a number of principles:

1. Consumerism is psychological/spiritual junk food (French: malbouffe) that actively reduces well-being (bien-etre) rather than increases it.

2. Better rather than more: well-being is increased by everything that cannot be commoditized by a market economy or financialized by a cartel-state financial machine– friendship, family, community, self-cultivation–rather than by acquiring more. The goal of economic and social growth should be better, not more. On a national scale, the cancerous-growth measured by gross domestic product (GDP) should be replaced with gross domestic happiness/ gross nation happiness (GNH).

3. A recognition that resources are not infinite, despite claims to the contrary. Even if fossil fuels were infinite and low-cost (cheerleaders never mention costs of extraction and refining or the external costs), fisheries, soil and fresh water are not. For one example of many: China Is Plundering the Planet’s Seas (The Atlantic). Indeed, all the evidence suggests that access to cheap energy only speeds up the depletion and despoliation of every other resource.

4. The unsustainability of consumerist consumption dependent on resource depletion and financialization (i.e. the endless expansion of credit and phantom collateral).

Read full article with video.

300 Million Talons…

I’ll bet that this one didn’t get much air time, if any, on SeeBS, CNoNews, Faux News or any of the other lamestream media, and it’s yet another sign of geopolitical and economic realignment underway:

China to the rescue of Argentina with a 10 billion dollars equivalent swap

This is one that requires a lot of reading between the lines, and I’m probably not any closer to the tea leaves on this one than anyone else, except on one very important thing: Argentina, like the other South American countries, has been persistenly and consistently under the economic and geopolitical thumb of big brother to the north for a long time. Indeed, the USA and its financial oligarchs have been treating South America as a kind of second class collection of “states” or colonies for some time, and particularly since the end of World War Two. The emergence of the BRICSA nations, and Brazil’s central role in it, has begun the decoupling process, a process that will go on for a long time.

So that brings us to the other great South American power, Argentina, and to President Cristina Fernandez, and to this article. I suspect that the tea leaves one needs to read are most prominent in the first and last paragraphs:

This is good news. The military, perhaps because it is a centralized command structure, often adopts progressive positions before general society. The military integrated long before the rest of America. It became a gender, race, and religion neutral meritocracy — an evolution in which I played a role — well before this was the norm. So the military’s adaptation of noncarbon energy is the latest in a line of accomplishments.

The Army Goes Off the Grid
Jim Hightower – Nation of Change

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David Isenberg

The Financial Legacy of Iraq and Afghanistan: How Wartime Spending Decisions Will Constrain Future National Security Budgets Faculty Research Working Paper Series

Linda J. Bilmes, Harvard Kennedy School

Abstract:
The Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, taken together, will be the most expensive wars in US history – totaling somewhere between $4 to $6 trillion. This includes long-term medical care and disability compensation for service members, veterans and families, military replenishment and social and economic costs. The largest portion of that bill is yet to be paid. Since 2001, the US has expanded the quality, quantity, availability and eligibility of benefits for military personnel and veterans. This has led to unprecedented growth in the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense budgets. These benefits will increase further over the next 40 years. Additional funds are committed to replacing large quantities of basic equipment used in the wars and to support ongoing diplomatic presence and military assistance in the Iraq and Afghanistan region. The large sums borrowed to finance operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will also impose substantial long-term debt servicing costs. As a consequence of these wartime spending choices, the United States will face constraints in funding investments in personnel and diplomacy, research and development and new military initiatives. The legacy of decisions taken during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars will dominate future federal budgets for decades to come.

PDF 22 Pages

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Berto Jongman

This Is What Winning Looks Like – Full Length

VICE News

NEWS

This Is What Winning Looks Like

My Afghanistan War Diary

Amazon Page

By Ben Anderson

I didn’t plan on spending six years covering the war in Afghanistan. I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, underequipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict’s portrayal in the media and in official government statements.

. . . . . . .

In February 2013, on his last day at the helm of NATO forces in Afghanistan, General John R. Allen described what he thought the war’s legacy will be: ‘‘Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory, this is what winning looks like, and we should not shrink from using these words.’’ 

The US and British forces are preparing to leave Afghanistan for good (officially, by the end of 2014), and my time in the country over the last six years has convinced me that our legacy will be the exact opposite of what Allen posits—not a stable Afghanistan, but one at war with itself yet again. Here are a few encapsulated snapshots of what I’ve seen and what we’re leaving behind.

Read full article.

Jean Lievens

Revolutionize Corporate Learning: Beyond Formal, Informal, Mobile, Social Dichotomies

by Marcia Conner on May 10, 2013

A report for business decision makers interested in abolishing traditional corporate training functions, creating instead vibrant modern collaborative cultures. Why? The corporate learning field is in dire need of bravery, insight, creativity and boldness. It has been stuck in an antiquated rut for too long. Full classrooms and smile-sheet summaries only indicate employees can successfully sit through training, not that these strategies demonstrate value or engender growth in competitive organizations. With a nod toward early twentieth-century innovations, moving the art world toward natural forms, the corporate education function should aim to become learning nouveau. The people responsible for fostering education throughout organizations ought to consider becoming artists. Here’s how. [Additional information at http://www.marciaconner.com/learning-nouveau/]

Although those of us in the developed nations take potable water for granted the fact is for several billion people it is a major matter of urgent stress. Here is a new technology that may help relieve this problem.  Source: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Biopolymer-reinforced synthetic granular nanocomposites for affordable point-of-use water purification, PNAS, Published online before print May 6, 2013, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220222110

Nano-scientists Develop New Kind of Portable Water Purification System
BOB YIRKA – Phys.org

I have written extensively about the bias of the media and, particularly, the use of false equivalencies. (For a discussion of this see my esssay: False Equivalencies and the Mediocrity of Nonlocal Consciousness Research Criticism: http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900059-1/fulltext)! . Here is proof of my argument.   Click through to see the charts which accompany this piece. They will appall you when you see how incredibly compromised American corporate media has become.

How New York Times, NPR And Wall Street Journal Print Fossil Fuel Talking Points Without Full Disclosure
REBECCA LEBER – Climate Progress

Here in a very clear exegetic essay Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz spells out the whole sordid story of the attempt by corporations to patent and own life forms.

Lives versus Profits
JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ, PHD, Nobel Laureate Economist – Project Syndicate

Here in one essay the true dimensions of the corruption of The U.S. Department of Agriculture by Monsanto is made clear.

Monsanto Has Taken Over the USDA
DAVID SWANSON – Nation of Change

Berto Jongman

Sampling from Anthology:

Global Economic Crisis and the Coming/Current Depression

Book:

THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC CRISIS.  The Great Depression of the XXI Century