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A devastating series by our colleagues at Bloomberg News shows that “the defense budget contains hundreds of billions of dollars for new generations of aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, tanks that even the Army says it doesn’t need and combat vehicles too heavy to maneuver in desert sands or cross most bridges in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East.”BusinessWeek also notes that redundancy wastes a lot of money:
“One need only spend 10 minutes walking around the Pentagon or any major military headquarters to see excess and redundancy,” former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said in September at an event organized by the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington. He should know. As defense chief in 2009, he culled 20 weapons systems he thought unnecessary or too expensive, including the F-22 fighter. One place to start thinning the bureaucracy: the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That office has more than tripled in manpower, to 4,244 in 2012 from 1,313 in 2010, according to the Pentagon’s annual manpower report. (Fewer bureaucrats means fewer memos and fewer meetings. Win-win-win.)BusinessWeek provides a list of cost-cutting measures which will not undermine national security. American Conservative does the same.
Why is sensible military budgeting so difficult? Because lawmakers, including small-government Republicans, protect defense business in their home states with the ferocity of Spartans. Even if the Pentagon offered up the cuts we’ve outlined here, Congress would almost certainly reject them. The senators and representatives don’t have the political courage to face voters and tell them that the republic simply does not need the weapon under construction in their hometown.American Conservative reports:
The cuts to the Pentagon budget will be only 7% or some $40+ billion, not the $500 billion they bandy about! Anyone who confuses the (unlikely) ten year cut with next year’s cut is just promoting lies. A good example is the Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Coming Defense Crackup,” warning that the cuts would create the smallest navy since 1914. It intentionally confuses next year’s cut with the consequences of 10 year cuts. [In reality, the size of the proposed sequestration cuts aren't really that big.]Of course, this just scratches the surface.
Ok, but when every smart bomb and missile hits its target, why does one need as many shells as the old battleships where most shots missed? During the Korean war the Air Force tried futilely for months to bomb a bridge over the Yalu River. Today destroying a bridge takes one cruise missile from a hundred miles away. In Washington we find all the big media opposed to cutting defense spending, waste and all, even the Washington Post. Politico, usually a leftist paper, publishes articles also intentionally confusing 10 years of cuts with a one year cut. Today’s congressmen can’t oblige future congresses on what they will spend; defense apologists use the 10-year number to try to stop the sequestration for one year, 2013. All the big Washington newspapers are full of costly ads from defense contractors.
We recently saw how [American politicians and military personnel] prefer to deliver bags of money to Karzai, buy Russian aircraft that Afghans can’t fly or maintain, or build huge buildings to be then torn down unused. Of course, no one is ever fired for constructing massive buildings that no one wants only to tear them down. After all, these are contracts going to powerful companies with friends in the government. Now, we buying huge planes at $50 million a pop only to roll them directly from the factories into mothballs because no one wants them. To make this even more incomprehensible, we are not even making the cargo planes. Like the Russian helicopters that the Afghans cannot fly, we are buying the cargo planes from Italy . . . and we are continuing to order more as we struggle to find places to dump them.(Even in the middle of the government shutdown, the CIA is ramping up covert training program for Syrian rebels.)
The dozen Italian-built C-27J Spartans have been shipped to an Air Force facility in Arizona dubbed “the boneyard.” We are ordering five more, which are expected to be immediately sent with the others into mothballs. The Air Force has spent $567 million on 21 of the planes which will join some 4,400 other aircraft and 13 aerospace vehicles at the boneyard — more than $35 billion of unused airplanes.
Why order planes to be immediately mothballed? Ohio’s senators, Democrat Sherrod Brown and Republican Rob Portman wanted them to give a mission for Mansfield Air National Guard Base and to save 800 jobs. So we will spend $567 million to save 800 jobs. Wouldn’t it have been easier to give half a million to each of their constituents and save the rest of the money?
Of course, with citizens rising up against the latest effort of the Administration and Congress to intervene in another war, we could have a pile up of unused weapons . . . until we find a use for them.
Now seems like an ideal time to turn the attention to the $716 billion elephant in the room. If we are going to shutdown non-essentials in our country, let us start by shutting down the waste and fraud in our military budget.And former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds wrote yesterday:
To give you an idea I am going to provide a few examples:
Afghanistan gets around $7 Billion= $7,000,000,000. Now, don’t mistake this for our money spent on our war in Afghanistan. That’s in the trillions of dollars. That’s a separate deal. No, this money goes to Afghanistan’s government – known for being crooks, criminals, heroin dealers, and terrorist breeders. ***
Of course Israel gets quite a lion’s share. That goes without saying. They get nearly $3 billion=$3,000,000,000, in military aid and another large sum as financial aid for …well, let’s put aside all the diplomacy and political correctness and call a duck a duck: They get all the military and foreign aid so that they can turn around and spend those dollars through their powerful network and lobby here, to make sure we are all screwed up in developing and implementing our foreign policy…. They get all those billions of dollars in foreign and military aid, come over here, get us into wars so that we go spend trillions of additional dollars in wars ….
Egypt gets its $1 billion of our tax money for … for what? Thank God it’s been in the news lately so even the mass ignoramus population in our nation is able to have an idea: guns and bullets to kill political dissenters, tanks and tear gas to be used against civilians, helicopters to fire at civilians below … bring about a coup de tat, and then bring about another one …Okay, so that one we get. We know what they use our money and military equipment for. No brainer. ***
Pakistan gets more or less $1 Billion. They get military aid to make sure they create desirable conditions so that our military can send its drones out there and bomb the hell out of them every day.
***
So, yes. Our government, somehow, amazingly, has plenty of money, thanks to its limitless money printing authority with zero oversight or accountability. They have trillions to spend on target practice, killing, butchering, torturing, kidnapping. They have billions and billions to spend on spying on you and just messing around with you and me for the heck of it-too much printed money gives them that luxury, you know. And of course, as we see, they’ve got billions of dollars to give crooks, criminals, tyrants, despots, heroin dealers and producers, terrorists, terrorist supporters …
The next time around when our government tells you we are miserably broke, believe them. It’s a no brainer: we are a broke nation. However, don’t let them give you bullsh.. about where they’re going to cut and snip to make ends meet. Do not let them tell you we must go on this way, and just keep printing the green in order to survive. Give them the amount in trillions spent on wars and target practice-shooting around the world.
Point to the billions of dollars yearly given to despots, torturers, criminals, and human target practice fields. Show them the hundreds of millions of dollars wasted by unaccountable agencies every single month. Just question, demand, and insist. Show that you matter and count. For once!
By Michael Snyder, on October 9th, 2013
Barack Obama is warning that if he does not get everything
that he wants that he will force the U.S. government into a devastating
debt default which will cripple the entire global economy. In essence,
Obama has become so power mad that he is actually willing to take the
entire planet hostage in order to achieve his goals. A lot of people
are blaming the government shutdown on the Republicans, but they have
already voted to fund the entire government except for Obamacare. The
U.S. Constitution requires that all spending bills originate in the
House of Representatives, and the House did their duty by passing a
spending bill. If the Senate or the President do not like the bill that
the House has passed, then negotiations need to take place. That is
how our system works. And the weak-kneed Republicans have already
indicated that they are willing to give up virtually all of their prior
demands. In fact, if Obama offered all of them 20 dollar gift
certificates to Denny's to end this crisis they would probably jump at
that deal. But that is not good enough for Obama. He has made it clear
that he will settle for nothing less than the complete and
unconditional surrender of the Republican Party."We are winning.... It doesn't really matter to us" how long the shutdown lasts "because what matters is the end result," a senior Obama Administration official told the Wall Street Journal last week.This is all about a political victory and crushing the Republicans. Obama doesn't really care how long this crisis lasts because he believes that he is getting the end result that he wants.
There is really nothing complicated about the facts. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives voted all the money required to keep all government activities going -- except for ObamaCare.Once again, the Republicans have already indicated that they are willing to fund Obamacare. They just want Obama to throw them a bone.
This is not a matter of opinion. You can check the Congressional Record.
As for the House of Representatives' right to grant or withhold money, that is not a matter of opinion either. You can check the Constitution of the United States. All spending bills must originate in the House of Representatives, which means that Congressmen there have a right to decide whether or not they want to spend money on a particular government activity.
Whether ObamaCare is good, bad or indifferent is a matter of opinion. But it is a matter of fact that members of the House of Representatives have a right to make spending decisions based on their opinion.
The U.S. Treasury always has money coming into its accounts. So its always got some amount of cash that it can use to pay interest on bonds. That's especially true right now because the government is partially shutdown and there's no cash going out from its accounts.And according to the Washington Post, Moody's has just issued a memo that also indicates that the federal government should be able to make all interest payments even if the debt limit is not increased...
In fact, when you look at it the U.S. Treasury should simply have no trouble making interest payments on bonds that it has issued.
And there's no restriction on the U.S. Treasury prioritizing interest payments. Why?
The obligation to pay interest is set by the 1917 Second Liberty Bond Act and laws that commanded the Treasury to pay interest on the debt. You can look this up in section 3123 of Title 31 of the U.S. Code and section 4 of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution and in Supreme Court precedent (Perry v. United States). It's all there in black and white.
So the only possible way the U.S. defaults on its debt is if Barack Obama, President of the United States, instructs his Treasury secretary Jack Lew to default on the debt.
In a memo being circulated on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Moody’s Investors Service offers "answers to frequently asked questions" about the government shutdown, now in its second week, and the federal debt limit. President Obama has said that, unless Congress acts to raise the $16.7 trillion limit by next Thursday, the nation will be at risk of default.Of course the federal government would have to stop throwing money around like a drunk gambler at a casino in Las Vegas in order for this to work.
Not so, Moody’s says in the memo dated Oct. 7.
"We believe the government would continue to pay interest and principal on its debt even in the event that the debt limit is not raised, leaving its creditworthiness intact," the memo says. "The debt limit restricts government expenditures to the amount of its incoming revenues; it does not prohibit the government from servicing its debt. There is no direct connection between the debt limit (actually the exhaustion of the Treasury’s extraordinary measures to raise funds) and a default."
The government shutdown may be keeping furloughed federal workers at home, but on Monday the U.S. Army contracted to buy a mechanical bull.So needless to say, there is some serious doubt about whether the federal government would be able to manage their money effectively in the event that the debt ceiling deadline passes.
The $47,174 contract was awarded on Oct. 7 to Mechanical Bull Sales Inc. of State College, Penn.
"A U.S. debt default would cause stocks to crash, would cause bonds to crash, would cause interest rates to soar wildly out of control, would cause a massive credit crunch, and would cause a derivatives panic that would be absolutely unprecedented. And that would just be for starters."Other nations that we depend upon to lend us money would stop lending to us and would start dumping U.S. debt instead.
There’s a cute little historic site just outside of the capital in McLean, Virginia, called the Claude Moore Colonial Farm. They do historical reenactments, and once upon a time the National Park Service helped run the place. But in 1980, the NPS cut the farm out of its budget. A group of private citizens set up an endowment to take care of the farm’s expenses. Ever since, the site has operated independently through a combination of private donations and volunteer workers.The Park Service told Claude Moore Colonial Farm to shut down.The farm’s administrators appealed this directive—they explained that the Park Service doesn’t actually do anything for the historic site. The folks at the NPS were unmoved. And so, last week, the National Park Service found the scratch to send officers to the park to forcibly remove both volunteer workers and visitors.Think about that for a minute. The Park Service, which is supposed to serve the public by administering parks, is now in the business of forcing parks they don’t administer to close. As Homer Simpson famously asked, did we lose a war?
The concept of political service has been replaced by that of masked exploitation. The public is no longer viewed as clients or constituents to be served. Instead they have become political prey. Politicians see the public as a collection of wallets and votes, fair game to be hunted as the means to expand power and wealth. Constituents are now the Soylent Green of the political food chain.Is there anyone out there that still does not believe that our system is broken?
The political class assumes the public exists to serve them, not the other way around. Public participation beyond the lightening of wallets or the provision of votes is unwelcome. It is considered “interference” that must be deterred by the ruling class.
The political class is now a huge, voracious parasite. Like the plant in the Little Shop of Horrors, its needs have grown to the point where it threatens anything productive. Its needs now exceed the willingness for continued sacrifice on the part of the productive. The parasite threatens the very existence of the host.
The political Ponzi scheme of tax, borrow and spend has reached its limit. Either it will die when citizens turn on it or it will kill the productive, ensuring its own destruction.
It perishes in the end. Whether it takes civilization with it is the bigger question.
By Michael Snyder, on October 8th, 2013
Do you know anyone
that has been able to get past all of the glitches and sign up for
health insurance using one of the Obamacare websites? Thousands of
applications have been “started”, but the mainstream media has been
desperately searching for someone that has actually been able to
successfully get enrolled and so far they haven’t been able to find a
single example. The Obama administration had been promoting the story
of one 21-year-old student from Georgia, but it turns out that his
“success story” was a fraud
and he was not actually successful in signing up for health insurance
yet. So exactly what in the world is going on here? Certainly a few of
the millions of visitors to these websites must have successfully
signed up for health insurance, right? In the end, whether a handful of
Americans have been able to sign up for health insurance or not is not
the real issue. The real issue is that the launch of the most highly
touted health law in U.S. history has been an epic fail.The 21-year-old student from Georgia was cited in multiple articles as being one of the few, the proud, the successful to signed up for insurance through a federal exchange.So how many Americans have actually enrolled in Obamacare at this point?
On his Facebook page, Chad Henderson bragged about being interviewed by “The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Chattanooga Times Free Press, The Huffington Post, Enroll America, and Politico,” along with several local TV affiliates.
His story supposedly was proof that for all their glitches and problems – and the ambivalence of young people – the new health insurance exchanges were working after all.
Except it seems like it was all a lie.
As of Friday, around 52,000 insurance applications have been started online on the sites of the 24 states that are operating their own exchanges, based on CNN’s own survey.And according to the Wall Street Journal, large health insurance companies say that only “hundreds” of Americans have enrolled so far…
So far, Web-traffic problems are allowing only a small trickle of buyers, said John Gorman, chief executive of Gorman Health Group, an insurance-industry consulting firm with clients selling policies on the exchanges.Incredibly, only about 1 out of every 100 applications being submitted on the Obamacare health exchanges contain enough information to get an applicant successfully enrolled in a health insurance plan…
Large insurers have seen enrollment figures totaling in the hundreds each, said Sumit Nijhawan, chief executive of Infogix Inc., a data-integrity firm that works with such insurers as WellPoint Inc., Aetna Inc. and Cigna Corp.
It’s a batting average that won’t land the federal marketplace for Obamacare into the Healthcare Hall of Fame.Talk about a colossal disaster.
As few as 1 in 100 applications on the federal exchange contains enough information to enroll the applicant in a plan, several insurance industry sources told CNBC on Friday. Some of the problems involve how the exchange’s software collects and verifies an applicant’s data.
“It is extraordinary that these systems weren’t ready,” said Sumit Nijhawan, CEO of Infogix, which handles data integrity issues for major insurers including WellPoint and Cigna, as well as multiple Blue Cross Blue Shield affiliates.
Jaye Watson of 11Alive News in Atlanta spent an entire workday trying to sign up online for Obamacare, and she, like millions of others around the country, encountered error messages, hold-ups and delays in the online marketplace.Another news organization has been detailing the nightmare that one person in Pennsylvania has been enduring in her attempt to get signed up for Obamacare. The following is what happened when she contacted “Live Chat” in order to get some answers to her questions…
While she waited, she called the 800 number for Obamacare and was asked to participate in a survey about her customer service experience. After being put on hold for several minutes without speaking to anyone, the automated survey kicked in and asked her how she would rate the time it took to reach a customer service representative.
“Well, I haven’t gotten through to one,” Watson said.
“Thank you again for calling the health insurance marketplace. Goodbye,” the machine said.
Watson laughed derisively.
[4:09:56 pm]: Thanks for contacting Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat. Please wait while we connect you to someone who can help.This kind of thing is not just happening to one person. All over the country, millions of Americans are experiencing these kinds of extremely frustrating technical glitches.
[4:09:59 pm]: Please be patient while we’re helping other people.
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[4:30:27 pm]: Welcome! You’re now connected to Health Insurance Marketplace Live Chat.
Thanks for contacting us. My name is PGSTX0534. To protect your privacy, please don’t provide any personal information, like Social Security Number, or any other sensitive medical or personal information.
[4:30:51 pm]: PGSTX0534
Hello, how may I help you today?
[4:31:12 pm]: Alice
My information is not recording correctly in the summary of my application
[4:31:35 pm]: Alice
I have tried to edit it multiple times and it is still wrong
[4:32:21 pm]: PGSTX0534
Thanks for your interest in the Health Insurance Marketplace. We have a lot of visitors trying to use our website right now. That is causing some glitches for some people trying to create accounts or log in. Keep trying, and thanks for your patience. We’ll continue working to improve the site so you can get covered
[4:32:40 pm]: Alice
what does that mean?
[4:32:52 pm]: Alice
It says my application is “in Progress”
[4:33:12 pm]: Alice
Does that mean it is not completed and I can continue to try to edit it?
[4:33:55 pm]: Alice
Hello??
[4:34:14 pm]: PGSTX0534
Thank you. One moment please while I look that up.
[4:36:19 pm]: PGSTX0534
The only way we can see your application is you will have to call The Health Insurance Marketplace Call Center at 1-800-318-2596. We are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to assist you.
[4:36:47 pm]: Alice
What does the Chat Service do then?
She received no response to her last question.
“I really don’t like the Republican tactics, but at least now I can understand why they are so pissed about this. When you take $10,000 out of my family’s pocket each year, that’s otherwise disposable income or retirement savings that will not be going into our local economy.”Have you heard from your health insurance company lately?
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TOR
is a free application that bounces communications through a distributed
network of relays around the world, which makes it hard to track
individuals. TOR lets people get around internet censorship tools and
remain anonymous. The latest revelations from Edward Snowden indicate that the NSA hates TOR.
Citing the Heath and Human Services website, a report posted Wednesday at the Freedom Outpost says that under Obamacare, government agents can engage in “home health visits” for those in certain “high-risk” categories.
Those categories include:
• Families where mom is not yet 21;
• Families where someone is a tobacco user;
• Families where children have low student achievement, developmental delays, or disabilities, and
• Families with individuals who are serving or formerly served in the armed forces, including such families that have members of the armed forces who have had multiple deployments outside the United States.
According to HHS, the visits fall under what is called the “Maternal, Infant and Early Childhood Home Visiting Program” allegedly designed to “help parents and children,” and could impact millions of Americans.
Constitutional attorney and author Kent Masterson Brown said that despite what HHS says, the program is not “voluntary.”
The Examiner
Turchin began thinking about applying math to history in general about 15 years ago. “I always enjoyed history, but I realized then that it was the last major discipline which was not mathematized,” he explains. “But mathematical approaches—modeling, statistics, etc.—are an inherent part of any real science.”
In bringing these sorts of tools into the arena of world history and developing a mathematical model, his team was inspired by a theory called cultural multilevel selection, which predicts that competition between different groups is the main driver of the evolution of large-scale, complex societies. To build that into the model, they divided all of Africa and Eurasia into gridded squares which were each categorized by a few environmental variables (the type of habitat, elevation, and whether it had agriculture in 1500 B.C.E.). They then “seeded” military technology in squares adjacent to the grasslands of central Asia, because the domestication of horses—the dominant military technology of the age—likely arose there initially.
Over time, the model allowed for domesticated horses to spread between adjacent squares. It also simulated conflict between various entities, allowing squares to take over nearby squares, determining victory based on the area each entity controlled, and thus growing the sizes of empires. After plugging in these variables, they let the model simulate 3,000 years of human history, then compared its results to actual data, gleaned from a variety of historical atlases.
Although it’s not perfect, the accuracy of their model—predicting the development and spread of empires in nearly all the right places—surprised even the researchers. “To tell the truth, the success of this enterprise exceeded my wildest expectations,” Turchin says. “Who would have thought that a simple model could explain 65% of variance in a large historical database?”
“Of course, there are limitations to viewing history through math—humans are more complicated than numbers. ‘Differences in culture, environmental factors and thousands of other variables not included in the model all have effect,” Turchin says. “A simple general model should not be able to capture actual history in all its glorious complexity.’”
