Monday, 7 September 2009

Fueling Our Security: The Need for a Defense Energy Strategy

Defense Strategy, Energy Security, U.S. Military, Defense Budget, U.S. Department of Defense
Peter W. Singer, Director, 21st Century Defense Initiative
The Washington Examiner

Whether you believe global climate change is caused by human-driven carbon emissions or unicorn flatulence, it is inarguable that the issue of energy is an enormous national security concern. Our nation's dependency on nonrenewable and often foreign sources of energy does everything from bolster the power of illiberal regimes that control oil reserves to indirectly finance terrorist groups. Yet, even if none of these factors was in play, a new report out by the Brookings Institution, titled "Fueling the Balance," argues that our nation needs a defense energy strategy because of simple military pragmatism.
Our Department of Defense is the largest consumer of energy not just in America, but the world. It burns more petroleum in the course of its operations than any other private or public organization, as well as more than 100 nations, including Sweden, Pakistan and Iraq.
While some might weigh the environmental ramifications, we should think about this dependency in the way those in uniform must. Our forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are bound by what one Marine general called "the tether of fuel." Roughly half of these operations' logistics is solely the movement of fuel, most of which is not even for combat vehicles. Indeed, three of the four least fuel-efficient Army vehicles are trucks that haul fuel, echoing how Civil War armies had massive mule trains that followed them, ironically carrying mostly hay for the mules.
This doesn't just tie our forces down to long supply lines, vulnerable to enemy attack, but costs soldiers' lives. An Army study found that a mere 1 percent improvement in energy efficiency would mean that troops in Iraq would have to serve on 6,444 fewer convoy missions, a role considered one of the most dangerous in the operation.
The financial costs are also considerable. In 2007, the military consumed 5.5 billion gallons of petroleum at a price of $12.6 billion. This figure reached roughly $20 billion in 2008 and is rising. The same massive use happens at military bases, which burn more than 30 million megawatt hours of electricity per year, costing more than $2 billion. Ninety-eight percent comes from the civilian market, which also makes our bases highly susceptible to the increasing spate of large-scale outages (caused by accidents and over-demand, as well as cyber-attack).
These costs are best understood as severe lost opportunities. For instance, every $10 increase in the price of a barrel of oil costs our military $1.3 billion. This is equivalent to a loss of almost the entire U.S. Marine Corps' procurement budget.
In short, thinking "green" about military energy would make our forces more agile, save lives, and increase the part of the military budget that actually gets spent on troops and new weapons rather than lining the pocket of some foreign leader or oil speculator. But while the Pentagon has recently made baby steps with a few pilot energy savings programs, it doesn't have an overarching strategy that sets clear goals or policy for the years ahead.
The energy issue is of such importance that it should be established in the Quadrennial Defense Review, the document that determines the Pentagon's overall vision of strategy, programs and resources every four years. With the next QDR due to Congress in early 2010, a closing window of opportunity must not be missed.
This is not just a matter of recognizing the climate issue or lauding the few, already existing programs, as often happens in such documents. In order to drive real change, a defined target finally needs to be enunciated in Defense Department energy use, such as a policy goal to be a net-zero energy consumer at its bases by 2030. This will guide action, as well as help provide top cover to the innovative programs being worked on at lower levels to unleash our forces from the tether of fuel.
Underlying this should be goals to shift all bases to "smart" power grids, fully account for the costs of fuel in deciding which systems to buy (just like buyers are doing now in "Cash for Clunkers"), and support research competitions into technologies to help the force reduce its dependency, as well as benefit the civilian market.
The issue of energy has too long been looked at only through an environmental lens, and real action too often deferred. It is high time we address the long-standing irony of fueling our national defense from a source that threatens our nation's security.
@ 'Brookings'

William S. Burroughs - A Man Within (Trailer)

Beat Generation writer William S. Burroughs not only hung out with the cool kids in the 1960s, but he continued to collaborate and conspire with great musicians, artists, and directors up until his death in 1997 at the age of 83. Now an impressive group of said former friends and colleagues will appear in forthcoming documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within.

The film, which chronicles Burroughs’ life, including his childhood, death of his wife, the 1966 banning of his novel Naked Lunch by the U.S. government, and more, features exclusive interviews with past collaborators, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Throbbing Gristle’s Genesis P-Orridge, directors John Waters, Gus Van Sant, and David Cronenberg, Jello Biafra, and Iggy Pop. You seriously should check out the clip of Iggy’s insane commentary in the trailer above.

If that’s not enough to make you want to see this movie, what if I told you that Sonic Youth provide the soundtrack and it’s narrated by actor Peter Weller? That’s right, RoboCop himself.

Check out the trailer above or go here for the official site.

Via 'Twenty Four Bit'

William S. Burroughs: A Man Within - 5min Teaser Trailer

REPOST - Public Image Ltd.

Lydon reforms PIL

On Christmas Day 1978, almost exactly a year after the implosion of the Sex Pistols while on tour in San Francisco, the artist formerly known as Johnny Rotten unveiled his new band, Public Image Ltd, at the Rainbow theatre in London. The audience, John Lydon remembers with amusement, were "nauseated, because the bass frequency was so low your bowels started to vibrate". He lets out his familiar arch cackle. "Well, it's a different experience at Christmas."

@ 'The Guardian'

God! Was it that long ago?
I was actually at that gig at The Rainbow and well, it was an interesting Xmas day but to my ears the songs on that first album just were not that good, apart from obviously 'Public Image' itself, and I also always had problems with 'Belsen Was A Gas'.
Wobble WAS magnificent though.

Interview with John Coltrane (June 15th 1958)

Audio
Here

Sunday, 6 September 2009

Tupac in Kazakhstan!

How UK Government spun 136 people into 7million illegal file sharers

The British Government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry, the BBC has revealed.

The Radio 4 show More or Less - which is devoted to the "often abused but ever ubiquitous world of numbers" - decided to examine the Government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure comes from the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property, a Government advisory body. The Advisory Board claimed it commissioned the research from a team of academics at University College London, who it transpires got the 7m figure from a paper published by Forrester Research.The More or Less team hunted down the relevant Forrester paper, but could find no mention of the 7m figure, so they contacted the report's author Mark Mulligan. Mulligan claimed the figure actually came from a report he wrote about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. That report was privately commissioned by none other than the music trade body, the BPI.

As if the Government taking official statistics directly from partisan sources wasn't bad enough, the BBC reporter Oliver Hawkins also found that the figures were based on some highly questionable assumptions. The 7m figure had actually been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m. That 6.7m was gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software - in other words, only 136 people.

@ 'PC Pro'

You can listen to the BBC Radio 4 show 'More or Less' here or download it here.

This could make someone very HAPPY or very GRUMPY!

Statue in Rotterdam

Prohibition's failed. Time for a new drugs policy

IN JUNE 1971, US President Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs". Drugs won.

The policy of deploying the full might of the state against the production, supply and consumption of illegal drugs has not worked. Pretty much anyone in the developed world who wants to take illicit substances can buy them. Those purchases fund a multibillion dollar global industry that has enriched mighty criminal cartels, for whom law enforcement agencies are mostly just a nuisance, rarely a threat. Meanwhile, the terrible harm that drug dependency does to individuals and societies has not been reduced. Demand and supply flourish.

"It is time to admit the obvious," writes Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil, in the Observer today. "The 'war on drugs' has failed."

Earlier this year, Mr Cardoso co-chaired the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy with former presidents of Colombia and Mexico. They endorsed a collective shift in policy from repression of drug use to harm reduction. Last month, Argentina's supreme court declared the prosecution of individuals for the possession of small amounts of drugs to be unconstitutional. Colombia's constitutional court came to a similar conclusion in 1994.

The trend towards decriminalisation in Latin America is born of desperation. The continent is the world's largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana. Its economies and criminal justice systems have been corrupted by the trade; in some areas the power of the drug gangs rivals that of the state. Something had to change.

Something must change also in the countries that buy Latin America's biggest export. In Britain, more than half a million people aged 16-24 took cocaine last year, according to Home Office statistics. More than a third of all Britons aged 16-59 have taken drugs at some point in their lives; one in 10 in the last year.

Not all of those people are a menace to society. Most of them are not even a menace to themselves. Most who take drugs in their youth stop later on. A generation that has grown up with normalised recreational drug use now occupies the commanding heights of business, media and politics. They might not take drugs themselves, but they are not morally outraged by them.

That is a significant cultural change. The political fixation on drugs prohibition really took hold in the west in the 1960s as much from moral panic about a subversive counterculture as from analysis of the harm caused by particular drugs.

Since then, the law has tried to maintain a distinction between reputable and disreputable substances that neither users nor medical research recognise. Scientific attempts to classify drugs in terms of the harm they do – to the body and society – routinely place tobacco and alcohol ahead of cannabis and ecstasy. The point is not that the wrong drugs are banned, but that the law is nonsense to anyone with real knowledge of the substances involved.

One point of general agreement is that heroin is the big problem. It is highly addictive and those who are dependent – up to 300,000 in Britain – tend to commit a lot of crime to fund their habit. But then it is hard to tell how much of the problem is contained by prohibition and how much caused by it.

Leaving gangsters in charge of supply ensures that addicts get a more toxic product and get ever more ensnared in criminality.

Those arguments do not prove that the solution lies in legalisation, or even just decriminalisation. But as Mr Cardoso argues: "Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous."

The entire framework of the debate must change. In Britain, we operate with laws that start from the premise that drug use is inherently morally wrong, and then seek ways to stop it. Instead we must start by evaluating the harm that drug use does, and then look for the best ways to alleviate it; and we must have the courage to follow that logic wherever it leads.

Today's editorial from 'The Observer'

Former president of Brazil says hardline war on drugs 'has failed'

The war on drugs has failed and should make way for a global shift towards decriminalising cannabis use and promoting harm reduction, says the former president of Brazil, writing today in the Observer. Fernando Henrique Cardoso argues that the hardline approach has brought "disastrous" consequences for Latin America, which has been the frontline in the war on drug cultivation for decades, while failing to change the continent's position as the largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana.

His intervention, which will reignite growing debate in Europe about how to tackle drugs, was welcomed yesterday by campaigners for drug law reform who increasingly see the impact on developing countries where drugs are produced as critical to the argument.

@ 'The Guardian'