Thank You For Your Service: Connotations

NPR: Here and Now

What do you say when you see a soldier in uniform, in an airport, say, or another public place?
Well, it might surprise you to know that some members of the military are uncomfortable with the phrase “thank you for your service."

A Hot Flash in the Cold War With Pakistan (updated)

An United States Airstrike Kills 24 Pakistani Soldiers:
Pakistan Gaves US the OK for Airstrike (update)

Pakistan Reacts by closing much needed borders to NATO military.
Read the article from the Atlantic.

Barney Frank Steps Down

Representative of Massachusetts, Barney Frank announces that he will not be seeking reelection. He cited political polarization and redistricting as key reasons for not running. Congressman Frank is 71.

Frank-Dobbs Act.

This historic piece of legislation has been one of the Republican's go to assaults on Obama and the Democratic Incumbents. Perhaps this is because most people don't know what it is.
It is actually one of the biggest financial regulation reforms since the Great Depression and was enacted in 2007 to provide the federal government with more oversight over private industry.


Quote:
"If you read the journals about [Fank-Dobbs] you will hear people complaining because they say, 'we can't do much.' But I think what we did was to restrict some of the activity that added nothing to the real economy. They were just trading paper back and forth.
I mean these people were engaged in economic transactions which had enough relation to the real economy as much as fantasy football has to Sunday afternoon, 
except they were making money of it."- Frank Dobbs on MSNBC's Hardball 12 October 2011


He was also the first openly gay Congressman to serve.
Here Frank discusses the "Radical Homosexual Agenda."

Occupy Wall Street: The Fear of Shame

This make me beyond angry but I put this aside. What was the purpose of this? Was it to clear the walkway? Surely not as evidenced by the police officer who steps over them to take better aim at the protesters. Was the purpose a decision made by the powers that be that the Occupy Wall Street protests have gone on for too long? Was it out of boredom?



The Atlantic Magazine, through a quotation of George Orwell puts it that the police officer pepper sprayed the protester not because he wanted to do so, but because he feared what other would think if he backed down. Having realized it would be a nightmare to shoot students to the sounds of chants of "don't shoot students" electing to pepper spray, to the officer at least, was an attempt to retain dignity.

A dignity which was certainly lost.

Occupy Wall Street 101

Read the latest from the Movement's Website

84 Year old activist pepper sprayed in Seattle.

Game Theory and Cyber Attacks lead to Military Conflict: TED

Good afternoon. If you have followed diplomatic news in the past weeks, you may have heard of a kind of crisis between China and the U.S.regarding cyberattacks against the American company Google. Many things have been said about this. Some people have called a cyberwarwhat may actually be just a spy operation -- and obviously, a quite mishandled one. However, this episode reveals the growing anxiety in the Western world regarding these emerging cyber weapons.

It so happens that these weapons are dangerous.They're of a new nature: they could lead the worldinto a digital conflict that could turn into an armed struggle. These virtual weapons can also destroy the physical world. In 1982, in the middle of the Cold War in Soviet Siberia, a pipeline exploded with a burst of 3 kilotons, the equivalent of a fourth of the Hiroshima bomb. Now we know today -- this was revealed by Thomas Reed, Ronald Reagan's former U.S. Air Force Secretary -- this explosion was actually the result of a CIA sabotage operation, in which they had managed to infiltrate the IT management systems of that pipeline.

More recently, the U.S. government revealed that in September 2008, more than 3 million people in the state of Espirito Santo in Brazil were plunged into darkness, victims of a blackmail operation from cyber pirates. Even more worrying for the Americans, in December 2008 the holiest of holies, the IT systems of CENTCOM, the central command managing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, may have been infiltrated by hackerswho used these: plain but infected USB keys. And with these keys, they may have been able to get inside CENTCOM's systems, to see and hear everything, and maybe even infect some of them.As a result, the Americans take the threat very seriously. I'll quote General James Cartwright,Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who says in a report to Congress that cyberattacks could be as powerful as weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, the Americans have decided to spend over 30 billion dollars in the next five years to build up their cyberwar capabilities.

And across the world today, we see a sort of cyber arms race, with cyberwar units built up by countries like North Korea or even Iran. Yet, what you'll never hear from spokespeople from the Pentagon or the French Department of Defence is that the question isn't really who's the enemy, but actually the very nature of cyber weapons. And to understand why, we must look at how, through the ages, military technologies have maintained or destroyed world peace. For example, if we'd had TEDxParis 350 years ago, we would have talked about the military innovation of the day -- the massive Vauban-style fortifications -- and we could have predicted a period of stability in the world or in Europe. which was indeed the case in Europe between 1650 and 1750.

Engineers and Bomb Makers: TED

Master storyteller Malcolm Gladwell tells the tale of the Norden bombsight, a groundbreaking piece of World War II technology with a deeply unexpected result.

Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. I last did a TEDTalk I think about seven years ago or so. I talked about spaghetti sauce. And so many people, I guess, watch those videos. People have been coming up to me ever since to ask me questions about spaghetti sauce, which is a wonderful thing in the short term -- (Laughter) but it's proven to be less than ideal over seven years. And so I though I would come and try and put spaghetti sauce behind me.

The theme of this morning's session is Things We Make. And so I thought I would tell a story about someone who made one of the most precious objects of his era. And the man's name is Carl Norden. Carl Norden was born in 1880. And he was Swiss. And of course, the Swiss can be divided into two general categories: those who make small, exquisite, expensive objects and those who handle the money of those who buy small, exquisite, expensive objects. And Carl Norden is very firmly in the former camp. He's an engineer. He goes to the Federal Polytech in Zurich. In fact, one of his classmates is a young man named Lenin who would go on to break small, expensive, exquisite objects.

And he's a Swiss engineer, Carl. And I mean that in its fullest sense of the word. He wears three-piece suits; and he has a very, very small, important mustache; and he is domineering and narcissistic and driven and has an extraordinary ego; and he works 16-hour days; and he has very strong feelings about alternating current; and he feels like a suntan is a sign of moral weakness; and he drinks lots of coffee; and he does his best work sitting in his mother's kitchen in Zurich for hours in complete silence with nothing but a slide rule.

Occupy Oakland: Raw Footage

Hollywood seems to surprisingly supportive of the growing concerns against Capitalism