Grab a coffee this morning and please read this exhaustive argument against Michele Flournoy for Secretary of Defense by Pierre Sprey (who spent decades in the DoD) and Winslow Wheeler (decades in Congress budget staff) for @POGOBlog : https://t.co/P6yJn0zbRL
— Kelley B. Vlahos (@KelleyBVlahos) November 21, 2020
Xtra! Xtra! Three Rivers Press, a division of Random House, is re-releasing "Barefoot Running" on September 20th! To celebrate the book launch and our Fall Tour, we put together this fun book tour trailer. Follow our adventures this fall as we stop in every major city - Phily, NY, Boston, LA, San Fran, Atlanta, Chicago, DC, Miami and many more! A full schedule on www.runbare.com coming soon. Pass the word along!
The real crisis is what has been happening to our forces. With a $300 billion increase in funding, the Navy's "battleforce" shrank from 318 ships in 2000 to 287 in 2010. With more than $300 billion added to its budget, the Air Force shrank from 146 combat squadrons to 72. The Army burned another $300 billion to increase brigade combat team equivalents from 44 to just 46. According to data from the Congressional Budget Office, this includes not a smaller, newer equipment inventory, but an older one.
Worse, the Pentagon can't track its own inventory, financial transactions, or even what it has paid out to contractors and received in return. Despite the accountability clause of the Constitution, the General Accounting Act of 1921, and the Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990, the Pentagon has maintained itself in a state where it cannot be audited.
Had Don Regan and I known that the high speed Internet was in our future and that American corporations would use it to destroy the jobs traditionally filled by US university graduates, possibly we would have decided to save the regulated telephone monopoly and to deliver the economy over to stagflation.
The reason is that sooner or later something would have been done about stagflation, but nothing whatsoever has been done about offshoring. Saving the economy from offshoring would have been a greater achievement than saving the economy from stagflation. However, in my time stagflation, not offshoring, was the problem.
I regret that I did not have a crystal ball.
Deregulation proponents will say that the breakup of AT&T gave us cell phones and broadband, as if foreign regulated communication companies and state monopolies do not provide cell phone service or high speed Internet connections. I can remember attending corporate board meetings years ago at which the European members had digital cell phones with which they could call most anywhere on earth, while we Americans with our analogue cell phones could hardly connect down the street.
What deregulation did was to permit Wall Street to push the deregulated industries-- phone service, airlines, trucking, and later Wall Street itself-- to focus on profits and not on service. Profits were increased by curtailing service, by pushing up prices and by Wall Street creating fraudulent financial instruments, which the banksters used America’s reputation to market to the gullible at home and abroad.
Within the body of Transition movement literature, I don't often see references to the Simple Living or Voluntary Simplicity movement. Perhaps the Voluntary Simplicity movement is less active in the places that Transition founders Rob and Naresh have lived. Perhaps it is because at its origins, Voluntary Simplicity focused more on individual choices and individual changes than on community-centric and societal-transformation ones. I can only speculate.
Acres and pains (original)There is a delightfully droll old book by that name lamenting the ways that nature humbles and humiliates farmers every step of the way from planting to harvest. I have been a victim of nature’s whims (my whims really) this spring and I’ve got the acres and the aches to prove it.
The doomer's curse (original)This is the Doomer's Curse: to wallow in despair, to sneer at the happiness of others, to revel in schadenfreude and to believe that he has humanity's best interests at heart. The Doomer honestly thinks that a universal depression (in the emotional sense) would lay the foundation for a better world, but this belief is rooted in his own selfishness, not in a rational socioeconomic analysis.
Gene Logsdon writes that his inspiration for home wine making is not the large industrial-scale wineries of California or the commercial cellars of Europe, both of which produce high-quality wines, but the back yards of German and Italian immigrants in American cities from the late 1800s through much of the 20th century. They would make wine out of “everything from rhubarb to dandelions, but especially Concord and Delaware grapes” (Logsdon 78). I believe Logsdon has observed something valuable and useful that will allow the production of quality wines to continue in eastern North America after cheap energy is no longer available. I want to explore this idea here in Part 3.
