Lifeboat Foundation

The Pentagon made $35 trillion in accounting adjustments last year alone — a total that’s larger than the entire U.S. economy and underscores the Defense Department’s continuing difficulty in balancing its books.

The latest estimate is up from $30.7 trillion in 2018 and $29 trillion in 2017, the first year adjustments were tracked in a concerted way, according to Pentagon figures and a lawmaker who’s pursued the accounting morass.

The figure dwarfs the $738 billion of defense-related funding in the latest U.S. budget, a spending plan that includes the most expensive weapons systems in the world including the F-35 jet as well as new aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines.

There is a hidden famine in north korea and mass atrocities are happening there.

Korean: 조선기근), also known as the Arduous March or the March of Suffering^[5] ( 고난의 행군 ), was a period of mass starvation together with a general economic crisis from 1994 to 1998 in North Korea.^[6].

It took us nearly 60 years after independence to achieve USD 1 trillion mark. It took 12 years to achieve our second trillion (dollar economy). And it has taken only five years, 2014 to 2019, to achieve the third trillion economy,” Indian Ambassador to the US, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, said in his address to the Indian-American community. Washington: India took only five years to move from a USD 2 trillion to USD 3 trillion economy, the Indian envoy to the US has said as he exuded confidence that the country would touch the USD 5 trillion mark in the coming years. In 2014, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office, India was the 11th largest economy in the world. Five years down the line, India is either the fifth or sixth-largest economy of the world, the Indian Ambassador to the US, Harsh Vardhan Shringla, said “This is a result of the leadership of the prime minister and the political stability in the country,” Shringla said in his keynote address to the 2019 Annual Gala of Asian Indian Americans of Central Pennsylvania. “It took us nearly 60 years after independence to achieve USD 1 trillion mark. It took 12 years to achieve our second trillion (dollar economy). And it has taken only five years, 2014 to 2019, to achieve the third trillion economy,” Shringla said in his address to the Indian-American community. The prime minister envisions an India that becomes a USD 5 trillion economy, meaning jumping by another USD 2 trillion in the next five years to come, Shringla said. “Soon, we will have the largest productive workforce in the world,” he said. Referring to the fact that India is only the third country to send a satellite to Mars, he said the average age of the scientists working on that mission was 29 years. Observing that India has developed unique ties across the world, he said New Delhi had extended its hand of friendship in its neighbourhood. India-US relationship is one of the paradigms of such co-operation, friendship, and partnership, he said. In last 10–15 years, this relationship has become very multifaceted and comprehensive. The United States, today, is not only India’s largest trading partner, but most importantly, the two countries enjoys excellent people-to-people contact, Shringla said. Indian-Americans, he said, have played a vital role in this relationship, he told the audience. Referring to the ‘Howdy Modi’ event in Houston on September 30, Shringla said that the prime minister addressing 50,000 Indian-Americans, along with US President Donald Trump, was a proud moment for the community. “It also reflects the partnership between the two countries,” he said.

Most people believe that modern day capitalism “does more harm than good in the world,” according to a new survey.

The closely-followed 20th annual Edelman Trust Barometer — an annual survey of 34,000 people across 28 countries that measures the public’s trust in NGOs, business, government, and media — underscored how a strong global economy and a booming stock market have failed to completely allay the public’s worries about their own economic prospects.

Edelman released the survey timed to the 50th annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. This year’s forum centers around the idea of stakeholder capitalism, proclaiming that a company’s purpose goes beyond generating wealth and instead should be measured by its environmental, social, and good governance objectives.

Continue reading “Survey: Capitalism ‘doing more harm than good,’ and technology is ‘out of control’” »

In 1948 Frank Wisner was appointed director of the Office of Special Projects. Soon afterwards it was renamed the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC). This became the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. Wisner was told to create an organization that concentrated on “propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world.”

Later that year Wisner established Mockingbird, a program to influence the domestic American media. Wisner recruited Philip Graham (Washington Post) to run the project within the industry. Graham himself recruited others who had worked for military intelligence during the war. This included James Truitt, Russell Wiggins, Phil Geyelin, John Hayes and Alan Barth. Others like Stewart Alsop, Joseph Alsop and James Reston, were recruited from within the Georgetown Set. According to Deborah Davis, the author of Katharine the Great (1979) : “By the early 1950s, Wisner ‘owned’ respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles.”

In 1951 Allen W. Dulles persuaded Cord Meyer to join the CIA. However, there is evidence that he was recruited several years earlier and had been spying on the liberal organizations he had been a member of in the later 1940s. According to Deborah Davis, Meyer became Mockingbird’s “principal operative”.

Cuba is the most sustainably developed country in the world, according to a new report launched on November 29. The socialist island outperforms advanced capitalist countries including Britain and the United States, which has subjected Cuba to a punitive six-decades-long economic blockade. The Sustainable Development Index (SDI), designed by anthropologist and author Dr Jason Hickel, calculates its results by dividing a nation’s “human development” score, obtained by looking at statistics on life expectancy, health and education, by its “ecological overshoot”, the extent to which the per capita carbon footprint exceeds Earth’s natural limits. [block: views=node_blocks-related].

Sandia National Laboratories pumped an all-time high of nearly $3.68 billion into the economy in fiscal year 2019 by spending on goods, services, payroll, taxes and other payments, Labs Director James Peery announced today.

Copyright © 2020 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Economists view the world economy and society, especially in the United States, differently from intelligence analysts, with varying degrees of skill and accuracy. In 2004, the year Facebook was founded, the U.S. was already wondering what the world would look like 16 years later in 2020. A 119-page report by the National Intelligence Council titled “Mapping the Global Future”, which was released in 2004, showed some of these forecasts.

First, the authors of the report sensed that the world in 2020 will be approaching an inflection point. Aware of America’s waning influence, they wrote: “At no time since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949 have the shape and nature of international alignments been in such a state of flux.” 16 years ago, they believed that by 2020, the trend would be one that “dramatically altered (America’s) alliances and relationships with Europe and Asia,” as European allies prioritized the European Union over NATO and Asian allies adjusted to the rise of China and India.

Second, the rise of the “America first” movement. The report stated that “a lot of Americans are getting tired of playing the world’s policeman” and shouldering the burden of securing allies is a rotten deal. Even leaving the United Nations (UN) in the United States is a bad deal. This prediction, made 16 years ago, now seems completely correct, because there are “America Firster” groups calling for the UN to leave New York, and the current U.S. president himself is a strong supporter of the “America First” movement.

No matter how cheap or fast paid internet service gets, the Internet of Things (IOT) won’t take wings until we have ubiquitous access to a completely decentralized, open-standard network that does not require a provider subscription. This month, we may be a step closer.

Let’s talk about internet connected gadgets. Not just your phone or PC—and not even a microwave oven or light bulb. Instead, think of everyday objects that are much smaller and much less expensive. Think of things that seemingly have no need to talk with you.

Now think of applications in which these tiny things need to communicate with each other and not just with you. Think of the cost of this “thing” compared to the added cost of continuous communications. Do so many things really need to talk in the first place?

First, there were Trackers…

Continue reading “IOT needs decentralized, long-range connectivity. It’s finally coming” »