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].

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.

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)

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” »

A multibillion-dollar high-speed atom smasher — an electron-ion collider that is capable of dissecting the mysterious subatomic material that forms the basis of everything in the universe — will be built at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, federal authorities announced Thursday.

The collider will be the first of its kind in the United States. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said it would create about 4,000 construction jobs, retain 1,000 existing jobs at the lab and generate billions of dollars in economic activity for Long Island.

Officials with the U.S. Department of Energy said construction of the federally funded collider — which would be 2.4 miles in circumference, or 60% larger than the 1.5-mile Belmont Park horse race track, and one story underground — would cost $1.6 billion to $2.6 billion and take about a decade.