Masquerading in Conservative Garb

by Robert H. Kalk for www.SchoolOfStatesmanship.org

The professional politician has created an illusion for every situation. And for those constituents with an exaggerated sense of entitlement, privilege will always be made to seem like an open ended right. They have fully embraced a latter day “golden gimmick” to give themselves a highly subsidized lifestyle. And their political consorts, catering to every indulgence, give each special constituency the plausible deniability needed to help maintain a “healthy” public or self-image.
The original Golden Gimmick refers to a November 1950 deal that accorded the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), a consortium comprising Standard Oil of California (Socal), Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), Standard Oil of New York (Mobil) and Texaco, a tax break equivalent to 50% of their profits on oil sales. The other 50% was diverted to King Ibn Saud via the US Treasury.
King Ibn Saud agreed to this fifty/fifty splitting of Aramco’s oil profits instead of nationalizing Aramco’s oil facilities on Saudi soil. He was inspired by Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo of Venezuela who had cut a similar deal with Jersey Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell. Venezuela eventually led the effort in forming OPEC and Saudi Arabia gained full control of Aramco by 1980.
In the days when beneficiaries of the welfare scheme were mostly poor, some people objected to the use of subsidies, because subsidizing goods or services could lead to over consumption. Recently we’ve seen the highly distorted debates concerning agriculture and oil industry subsidies. The combination of long supply lines, competition for available oil, and limited refinery capacities affects everyone’s price at the pump for gasoline. Building passenger cars on truck frames to accommodate an obesity epidemic simply exacerbates both the effects of limited supply and the health problems.
Now that the most heavily subsidized among us are rich, the price of subsidized commodities is reduced for the “ultimate consumer.” This encourages guilt suppression through binge drinking, gluttonous eating and gas guzzling. Just as the uninsured pass on billions of dollars in costs to people who carry insurance, those with unhealthy lifestyles drive costs up for everyone.
To the extent they are content in having society carry them, the faux conservative enjoys conspicuous consumption together with an excuse to indulge in liberal helpings for one’s self. This occurs even while begrudging others the means to meet their most basic human needs. For the condescending elite, each heavily subsidized self-helping also feeds an unreal sense of self-reliance and an exaggerated sense of self-importance.
The sense around the world is that the United States is in terminal decline. In the case of our pampered executives, people rightly ask if we’re looking at the kind of inspired leadership that built the enterprise from scratch and taking it from one meaningful level of attainment to the next or, are we seeing the feel-good custodial whose talent seems limited to the selective amplification, contextualization, and filtration of facts sought by the hit and run short-term investor. The pretense of those corporations, waxing patriotic for political purposes and registered off-shore for tax evasion purposes, further pollutes the electoral swamp.
While the rich have come to live more and more on the public dole, the poor face servility to endless war. The elitist and corporate forms of welfare that are provided through new social insurance models are not, in substance, anything new. In 1834, on closing the Second Bank of the United States, Andrew Jackson had this to say:

“I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States. I have had men watching you for a long time and I am convinced that you have used the funds of the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the Bank. … You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

Recent observations about privatizing the gains and socializing the losses of the well-to-do barely scratch the surface of deceitful practices. In May of 2011, oil industry executives testified before the United States Senate on ending tax breaks for the largest multinational oil companies. And throughout the hearing, they addressed only those subsidies that were admitted to by politicians that appear to be wholly owned and operated by the industry. Yet over the years we have witnessed ample evidence pointing to a vast array of unacknowledged subsidies that inure to the benefit of the oil industry.
From the Truman era Golden Gimmick to the protection of Saudi oil fields, from the re-flagging of Kuwaiti tankers to the protection of shipping lanes on behalf of all countries by the United States through its Fifth Fleet. There is no commodity more heavily subsidized than oil. And yet, in the U.S., pandering politicians seek to divert the public’s attention to certain paltry subsidies concerning domestically produced alternative fuels.
While the corporate media runs oil industry public relations material on a continuous loop, there is no denying its complicity in squelching any honest debate on the true merits. There is no refuting the way the United States, since World War II, has undertaken a strategic redeployment of its military assets to keep the long, way too long oil pipeline open. It is largely for this reason, especially with respect to mid-east contingencies, that the U.S. military budget accounts for approximately 40% of global arms spending. Oh, if only the bleeding ended there.
In light of the history, it is clear that whenever a politician mentions the “strategic interest” of the United States in any particular country, it is undeniably a reference to that country’s oil. At the heart of the Carter Doctrine for example, was that president’s belief that the energy challenge is the “moral equivalent of war.” In 1980 he dramatically expanded the perimeter of the U.S. defensive shield by declaring:

“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Carter was well aware that the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in December of 1979 inched Russia closer to its long-held desire to reach the Persian Gulf. In the wake of the 2011 retirement of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, several witnesses testifying during confirmation hearings made desperate attempts to help the U.S. electorate overcome its abysmal ignorance concerning the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan. To these witnesses we would ask: Do you really expect them to watch a confirmation hearing when you can’t even get them to rent Charlie Wilson’s War?
During the time when the United States was a participatory democracy in the making, Sir Edmond Burke’s Report to King George described our forebears as attentive to the task at hand. Burke wrote:

This study renders men acute, inquisitive, dexterous, prompt in their attack, ready in defense, full of resources. In other countries the people are more simple and are of a less mercurial cast. They judge of an ill principle only in government, only by an actual grievance. Here they anticipate the evil and judge the pressure of the evil by the badness of the principle. They honor misgovernment from a distance and snuff out the approach of tyranny in every tainted breeze.”

Today, it’s as if we never learn. For even after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, an action designed to punish the U.S. for its support of Israel, the strategic interests of the United States are still rooted, not in any structured soil, but in sifting sand. You cannot build enduring legacies on a plane of unreality. And you will certainly reap what you sow when your seed stock is composed almost entirely of worthless derivatives.
Like those elected officials feigning surprise during the 2008 financial meltdown, it would seem military leaders only recently discovered there is no national security without a strong economy. Their betrayal of the doctrine which demands maintaining the industrial base was supported by a chicken-hawk administration intent on outsourcing nearly everything of value. The White House oilmen deliberately mislead their constituencies while industry executives mislead their consumers and their investors with import statistics that combine foreign oil imports with domestic natural gas in their reporting. This is done to lull people into a false sense of security based upon a skewed sense of just how much oil has actually been imported from unfriendly nations.
The price of gas at the pump is also misleading. For by the time you factor in the true cost of securing shipping lanes, re-flagging tankers, fighting well and refinery fires in war zones, protecting fields and pipelines, the disruption to military families, attending to wounded soldiers, and the payment of death benefits; you have expenditures that inure to the benefit of oil companies in ways that are not reflected at the point of sale. The loss of human life is apparently not a factor to be considered by those for whom saving a nickel on a gallon of gas is paramount.
There is one reason the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has not been tasked with determining the material cost of oil subsidies. And that is the unmitigated selfishness of those the politicians seek to gratify. Don’t expect the Boehner’s owners to be served by such a disclosure. Don’t look to a lemming-like press to expose their own compromising position. For just as the oil companies have come to expect they can foul the waters and move on, the political realm and the journalistic medium are every bit as polluted. The true enemies of this country are those that would pacify the electorate, thus serving their own narrow interests.
Native Americans, at least as far back as 1410 AD, had been harvesting oil for medicinal purposes by digging small pits around active seeps and lining them with wood. Spanish explorers in 1543 discovered the black, sticky tar found washed up on the beaches along the Texas coast could be used to waterproof their boots, European settlers also recognized the oil skimmed from seeps as a valuable source of lamp fuel and machinery lubrication.
No one of sound mind would argue that oil is not valuable. But the gamesmanship surrounding what counts as a subsidy, and what does not, distorts our view of the marketplace. The relative cost, within a wide range of energy alternatives, is simply not known because the government of the United States can not be relied upon for a set of honest numbers. As long as CBO tasking is determined by a self-serving group of politically motivated individuals those “term limits” some call elections become increasingly meaningless.
The tax code of the United States is an obfuscation device designed as part of a political payoff mechanism to perpetrate and perpetuate a fraud upon the electorate. Those who characterize themselves as both fiscal and social conservatives, who claim to believe in market economics, are betraying their very core as well as their constituents, if they are willing to accept the kind of market manipulations embedded in the code. It is clear the politicians, most boisterous about the folly of picking winners and losers, protect oil and other pet subsidies with the same kind of pseudo-religious fervor that those masquerading in conservative garb have recently come to embrace.
It is time to examine the motivations of so-called reformers who have put forth claims that a consumption tax would be un-progressive. A consumption tax would serve to remind consumers of what is and what is not subsidized with every transaction. The current system of taxing productivity effectively confuses and masks the sophistries of any elected give-away artist. With a corporate income tax rate of zero, manufacturing would return to the USA, workers would only pay taxes at the point of sale, the desperately poor could apply for rebates, and a small contingent of former IRS auditors could process the claims.
In the over the counter scenario corporations would continue to be exempt for domestically produced raw materials actually utilized in the manufacture of domestically produced finished goods. Their accounting burden would be reduced to focusing only on the same bill-of-materials scrutinized during the normal course of business. They would pay the exact same sales tax as their workers for items consumed through activities other than manufacturing.
Food, housing, healthcare and even stocks could be made exempt as a matter of public policy. The difference is that such above board transactions would promote the health of the State by ushering the self-serving politician one step closer to extinction.
 

Original Downloaded from www.ServingMammon.org © 2011 Robert H. Kalk — www.SchoolOfStatesmanship.org

Ming Tang’s beautiful origami-inspired Folded Bamboo Houses are intended for use as temporary shelters in the aftermath of a disaster. These shelters are constructed from a variety of renewable materials and can be folded into structurally sound shapes.
A system of bamboo poles are pre-assembled to form a rigid geometry thus allowing a range of lightweight modular structures to be quickly assembled in factories and transported to their destination. Once unfolded at the construction site, the frames are then covered by using available fabric or paper.
  Aevia — Consider the Source

To rapidly create shelter from materials in the local supply chain consider the hexayurt. The simplest hexayurt will last for years in most climates and cost less than $100. Make a wall by putting six sheets of plywood on their sides in a hexagon. Cut six more sheets in half diagonally, and screw them together into a shallow cone. Lift the roof on to the wall with a group of people, then fasten it down with more screws. Seal and paint it for durability. Your basic hexayurt is complete.
The World Cultures and Geography class at the Bonnie Branch Middle School in Ellicott City, Maryland built this hexayurt in response to a class discussion on designing and building low cost emergency shelters  for the earthquake survivors in Haiti. The school is planning to recycle the construction into Hexayurt scale model kits that will be sold as a fundraiser for emergency housing in Haiti.
To see the hexayurt under construction, visit the project website.
Hexayurts are sturdy and space-economical structures meant to temporarily house those in need. In less than two hours, a cardboard Hexayurt can be built and ready to move into. If you have a bit more time and money, Hexayurts can be built from nearly any building material available.
Aevia — Consider the Source

As a practical matter, if you’re engaged in construction with wood, the adhesive you use only needs to be as strong as the lignin that holds the wood fibers together.  Just about all of the commercially available glues exceed the strength of natural resins when properly used. Here is an overview of the most popular formulations:
Resorcinol: The marine standard. If you can get 70 degrees F or higher for an overnight cure and consistent and high clamping pressure with no gaps, you won’t go wrong using it. Cover it overnight with an electric blanket to make sure. Likes wood at 10-15% EMC, according to Navy tests. Long open time. Repairable with epoxy. Ugly red glue line.
3M 5200: A rubbery, polyurethane sealant in various colors with adhesive properties sometimes used as a glue. Fails as a glue under water saturation without high clamping pressure, and without the proper strength testing. It’s not recommended as a stand-alone marine glue. Repairable with epoxy.

Urea Formaldehyde Plastic Resin Glue: The old interior furniture standard, and in older marine applications that required well-blended glue lines. Still preferred by many, as it is a no-creep glue easily repaired using epoxy. Long open time, it needs tight fits and 65 degrees F or higher for an overnight cure…it doesn’t fill gaps. Best glue line among them all and moderate water resistance still make it useful for protected marine brightwork applications. A relatively brittle glue and UV sensitive, it requires protection….but its brittleness is an aid to repairability, as joints can be broken apart for repair. An inexpensive powder with a short, one-year shelf life.
The Titebond Family of Aliphatics: Convenient. No mixing, just squeeze. Short open times, fast tack, and short clamping times. Flexible in temperature and to a lesser extent in moisture content, but the bottled glue can freeze in unheated shops. A flexible glue, it has been reported to creep under load, sometimes several years after the joint was made. The latest “Titebond III” appears to be a stronger glue than its two predecessors. Difficult glues to repair, as they won’t stick to themselves and no other glues will except cyanoacrylates, which are too brittle for general use. Epoxy and fabric aren’t bonding to aliphatic glue lines in marine strip construction, compounding repair difficulties. While not definitive, the new PL Premium appears to bond well to Titebond III residue and is worth pursuing by those repairing old white and yellow aliphatic joints.
Aevia — Consider the Source

An unfortunate mix of drought, failed harvests and rising food prices have brought severe food shortages to the east and the Horn of Africa. The severe food crisis is already affecting around 10 million people in parts of Kenya, Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia. Rains have failed over two seasons, with a strong La Niña event having a dramatic impact across the east coast of Africa. Now that this year’s wet season has officially ended, there is little prospect of rain or relief before September.
Charities have launched the biggest ever campaigns to tackle what they call a ‘creeping disaster’ in Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Ethiopia. For Somali refugees arriving in neighbouring Ethiopia, rates of severe malnutrition are as high as 23%, according to Oxfam. A 4% incidence normally constitutes an emergency.
Up to 1,000 Somalis a day are also streaming across the Kenyan border to Dadaab, already the largest refugee settlement in the world, with 367,000 residents. Some 2.5 million people require food aid in Somalia, but access is tough, particularly in the south, where an Islamist insurgency has made it nearly impossible, for aid groups to operate. To the west, in Ethiopia, 3.2 million people require humanitarian assistance. Pastoralist communities there have seen 80% of their livestock die in some places, according to Oxfam, with the lost income making it extremely difficult for people to buy food.
In Uganda 600,000 people need assistance, and in Djibouti 120,000. But the greatest number of people in need, 3.5 million, are in Kenya’s arid northern regions, whose marginalisation by the government has magnified the effects of the increasingly frequent droughts. In Turkana malnutrition rates are more than twice the emergency level.
“High food prices, fluctuating rainfall, a rising population and ever dwindling natural resources have created the perfect storm,” said Leigh Daynes, director of communications for Plan, in the UK.
Aevia — Consider the Source

The Super 6 are the best medicine we have for preventing cancer and other chronic disease, and all are good for health anyway. The only real potential side effect of their use to prevent cancer is that you might also get healthier in ways you didn’t intend.
Regular physical activity is associated with weight control, reduced inflammation, enhanced immune function and reduced cancer risk specifically. Optimal diet exerts far-ranging effects on every aspect of physiology, and similarly stands to reduce the risk of all chronic disease. Combine eating well and being active with a commitment to never hold a cigarette, and the risk of all chronic disease declines by roughly 80 percent.
The list of health promotion priorities very reasonably extends to three more. The quality and quantity of sleep has profound effects on psychology, immunology and neurology. A linkage to cancer risk is suggested by a rudimentary connection of these dots. Much the same is true of stress, which can contribute to hormonal imbalances and inflammation that propagate cancer — or can be managed to prevent such effects.
And, finally, there is love. We are, from our earliest origins, social creatures much influenced by our relationships with others. While love may seem a “warm and fuzzy” topic, it is in fact the cold, hard scrutiny of clinical trials demonstrating that those with loving relationships are far less vulnerable to chronic disease and death than those without.
Combine all six salutary practices, and the evidence is clear that benefits reverberate all the way to our chromosomes, altering the behavior of genes in a way apt to reduce chronic disease risk in general, and cancer risk specifically.
Aevia — Consider the Source

The byssus of the mussel allows it to live in harsh conditions where it is constantly battered by crashing waves by allowing the mussel to latch onto the seaside rocks. This particular characteristic of the mussel is due to the unique structure and high adhesiveness of the mussel’s byssus.
KAIST’s Professor Hong Soon Hyung (Department of Material Science and Engineering) and Professor Lee Hae Shin (Department of Chemistry) and the late Professor Park Tae Kwan (Department of Bio Engineering) were able to reproduce the mussel’s byssus using carbon nanotubes.
The carbon nanotube, since its discovery in 1991, was regarded as the next generation material due to its electrical, thermal, and mechanical properties. However due to its short length of several nanometers, its industrial use was limited.
The KAIST research team referred to the structure of the byssus of the mussel to solve this problem.
The byssus is composed of collagen fibers and Mefp-1 protein which are in a cross-linking structure. The Mefp-1 protein has catecholamine that allows it to bind strongly with the collagen fiber.
In the artificial structure, the carbon nanotube took on the role of the collagen fibers and the macromolecular adhesive took on the role of the catecholamine. The result was a fiber that was ultra-light and ultra-strong.
Aevia — Consider the Source

Start with the basics
Questions that will guide your job search
• What am I good at?
• What do I really enjoy doing?
 
Define your skills
Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) tells a prospective employer why they would want to hire you. To define your UVP ask yourself:
• What are my core skill sets (i.e. team building, product development, closing sales…etc.)?
• How have I utilized these skills in the past?
• How transferable are these core skills?
• What value add can I bring to an employer?
 
Structure your Resume
A Resume is not a mere chronological list of jobs
• Your resume is not an autobiography.
• Make your resume relevant to the opportunity. Make it adaptable and modular to show how your core skills are appropriate for the role you seek.
• Build your resume using your career highlights while underscoring your core skills.
• Your resume is a ‘value proposition’ that demonstrates how you can add value to the employer.
• Seek out advice on your resume and be prepared to take criticism – your resume is a means to a desirable end.
• Never add anything in a resume that you are not prepared to demonstrate or elaborate on.
• Stick to the facts – not opinions.
• Include testimonials with your resume. This is particularly relevant for candidates who have come from a management environment where delivery was key.
 
Get the Interview
Your resume has but one purpose, to focus a prospective employer on your positive attributes. Approach each opportunity as though it were your first. Avoid the ‘negative spiral’ of a frustrated job seeker. This becomes increasingly important the longer the search goes on. Enhance your chances of obtaining your ideal role by staying focused on your abilities, their fit and their function within your prospective new role:
• What are your major career accomplishments?
• What were the ultimate ‘outcomes’
• How did you achieve these successes?
• Is the core activity replicable?
• What challenges did you overcome along the way?
• Which of your core skills were utilized?
Don’t forget to obtain testimonials and references to validate these achievements.
 
And finally
Listen to others. Always be prepared to take advice. Make yourself available for the best opportunities by being proactive and demonstrating tenacity.

“The natural model when you have a simple duopoly capturing the majority of the market is segmentation: maximize ARPU [average revenue per user] by artificially limiting service in order to drive additional monthly spending. But fundamentally this is the wrong model for a service provider like us, and we have looked to Europe for inspiration… I believe that removing the artificial limits on speed, and including home phone with the product are both very exciting.”
So says Dane Jasper, Sonic.net’s CEO. American ISPs have convinced us that Internet access is expensive—getting speeds of 100Mbps will set most people back by more than $100 a month, assuming the service is even available. In Chicago, Comcast’s 105Mbps service goes for a whopping $199.95 (“premium installation” and cable modem not included). Which is why it was so refreshing to see the scrappy California ISP Sonic.net this week roll out its new 1Gbps, fiber-to-the-home service… for $69.99 a month. The price includes home phone service.
Aevia — Consider the Source

Formaldehyde is a colorless, flammable, strong-smelling chemical widely used to make resins for household items, such as composite wood products, paper product coatings, plastics, synthetic fibers, and textile finishes.
In a report prepared for the U.S. Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), scientists warned that people with higher exposure to formaldehyde were more at risk for nasopharyngeal cancer, myeloid leukemia and other cancers.
“There is now sufficient evidence from studies in humans to show that individuals with higher measures of exposure to formaldehyde are at increased risk for certain types of rare cancers …,” the Report on Carcinogens said.
Aevia — Consider the Source