Our beloved internet is the result of military research and development.

Unfortunately, there are some things that nothing can protect us from.

I hope Obama when he gives the big three cash gives this tech to them I wonder how much it would help SUV’s and trucks get better MPG?
I wonder how much it would help the Chevy Volt?

Indeed it is. The old ARPAnet, which Al Gore moved to civilianize. (So yes, folks, Al Gore was, if not the father of the internet, at least its godfather.)

Noooo! Not the stupidest bleeping man on the face of the earth! AIIIEEEE!

Oh ye of little Feith.

-G

gov sponsored r&d is a necessary component of any semi-sane industrial policy i’ve ever heard of. but putting more of it under the pentagon with it’s black budgets, stupidity, outright corruption and a leadership that likes to blow people up for kicks is a recipe for misguided priorities.

i’d rather transition the pentagon budget and organizations into civilian control. enough of our gov and culture is militarized. enough already.

It’s pathetic that we can only fund this research under the Pentagon because it’s such a third rail. I was arguing with someone about the F-22 who was telling me about all the fabulous non-military applications that they’d found for external materials they’d developed in that program. It doesn’t seem to occur to people that if we simply said “this would be a valuable thing to have” and funded it based on the need for those applications that we’d be spared the expense of building the fighter to slap it on.

Gorgeous calico tiger.

Okay, selise said the same thing but better.

The military is the single bigger user of fuel.

War is good for oil men.

Several years ago a military hummer was converted to a hybrid. The pentagon loved the idea that electric vechiles were quite and did not have a discernible heat pattern, that heat seeking weapons could ID.

If we convert military vechiles, to alternate forms of fuel, the price of oil craters.

I’m thinking if we make fewer bombs and bullets the rest will come both naturally and peacefully.

Imagine that.

selise and Jane – how right you are

Well, the MIT kids think this would be ideal for hybrids, as it would recapture enough otherwise-wasted energy to power the electrical system on a vehicle and maybe a few extra devices as well. If you click on the link to the article, it looks like it’s a really neat, elegant way to pick up some low-hanging energy fruit.

CAT-1 Anti-Vermin Attack Unit

OMG – too funny!

And I know people who ride bicycles like they were tanks.

I’m jus sayin’. /s

Good Morning PW and Firedogs,

wow. I was unaware of all of this – 08’s “more fight, less fuel, let alone the 01 Report – fascinating, all of it.

Wildly funny that it was all shot down amidst Rumsfeld’s claimed aspirations for a ‘leaner, more flexible fighting force’
thanks

How about new ways of gardening on the go. Some kind of large seeded carpet the soldiers could roll out, water and cultivate where ever they are “peace keeping”. Could save us a few halliburton bucks in feeding the troops. Trying to think outside of the box.

Every bullet represents a mouthful of food stolen from a hungry child.

Oh, exactly. It’s been the biggest chunk of our budget for decades, and there’s no need for it to have been once Stalin (who really was planning on taking over the world) kicked the bucket.

Look at Japan — the best thing it ever had done for it was when MacArthur and Truman took away its standing army after WWII. Now, it’s doing better than we are even though it’s in the midst of a two-decade-long recession.

Carpet seeding with daisy’s.

The sad thing is that the military contractors are about the only heavy-industry sector that the US didn’t cheerfully ship overseas in order to break the unions.

When troops move into an area and set up a camp they bring huge generators for power tankers to provide fuel for them. Seems like portable solar applications could be had. These would also be adaptable in areas hit by natural disasters etc. as well as those hard hit areas like Alaska.

There you go!

person buttons got pushed with this one. probably because, in various previous lives, i’ve worked on darpa projects and i’ve seen research priorities corrupted by the WOT. it’s beyond stupid.

Isn’t she?

I read a few years ago… Egypt manufactures our tanks. (And tortures for us on the side)

.
Actually, if all their vast facilities worldwide go solar, that will be major. And it’s already happening. IMAGINE their electric bill last summer!

Here’s some rhymes on the animal news. You know, just for the Hell of it.
.

Yeah. You can’t tell I’m lazy, right? I’m thinking, veggies. A person could put in a whole Survival Garden in their backyard in one afternoon.
Hmmm, if I were an entrepreneur, I might make some $$$.

This invention should be killed while we still have time. Otherwise, the Pentagon will send out soldiers in the middle of the night to create potholes on America’s streets. Dig, baby, dig! I think they’ve already been in my neighborhood.

Yeah. FDR and Truman weren’t afraid of going after war profiteers. (Then again, the isolationist Republicans, who were against our entry into WWII, were hollering loudly about such things. But when the focus shifted from Hitler to Stalin, suddenly the military budget they’d nitpick when it was used to fight Nazis became sacred and untouchable when it was used to fight Commies. As Dusty Foggo can tell you.)

Mine, too! Sherpas are establishing base camps in some of the potholes in our area.

even if there were no war profiteers, even if there was no political or financial corruption, it still makes no sense whatsoever because it corrupts priorities (weapons over people) and it adds an insane amount of cost (jane’s f22 example).

i’m now way too fired up for a sat morning. going to go clean something with all this energy. later pups.

There was a big push for just this sort of thing in Iraq — and it is being used there to an extent — but Bush resisted it for some reason.

Any reported sightings of Sir Hillary?

Sadly, humanity’s valuing martial over peacetime uses of a given thing is of long standing. The very first recorded use of solar energy was as a weapon of war — Archimedes had soldiers polish their shields and use them to focus sunbeams onto the ships of an invading fleet, thus setting them afire. For millenia, people thought this was a myth, but modern experiments using the tools and equipment he would have had at hand show that he could have started a boat blazing in under five minutes.

Nah — he’s gone to that great beehive in the sky. :-)

It’s brain chemistry by way of evolution. Threats are existential, whereas good stuff is just pleasant, or nice or fun or marginally improving. If we didn’t have that brain chemistry the species would have died out a long time ago.

By the way: While much of this article is a tweak at our rather interesting (to say the least) priorities, we really should consider (and Paul Krugman agrees) opening up the VA to all Americans. It would go a long way towards solving our health-care cost problems. But that would piss off the private insurance companies, who are the ones dominating the debate. However, a hopeful sign is the fact that the medical community, which for years had stood with the insurers on this, have suddenly realized that they were being screwed even harder under HMOs than they ever could be under ’socialized medicine’.

War is the father of invention?

Since NIH has been dismembered (it’s a dead man walking, like most of the real biomedical research in this country) support for various topics has been been parcelled out to other other government bodies. Case in point: breast cancer research proposals go to the U.S.Army to see if they are interested in funding them. Warning: the foregoing is a rehash of what I have heard from a researcher at Harvard; I may not have understood him correctly or completely. However, we’ve had the conversation a number of times, and it keeps coming out the same way.

Bush loves oil consumption.

We’d have to either build a lot more facilities or take control over existing private facilities. I don’t see a problem with either option.

Pretty much. War spurs medical advances tremendously, for starters. And NASA was set up as a quasi-military organization and a way to thumb our noses at the uppity Soviets, who’d put a dog into space; it was given mucho bucks right up until we finally got our back on the evil Commies by landing humans on the Moon; once that was done, it got scaled back considerably. Meanwhile, the Russians didn’t bother landing anyone on the Moon, but instead concentrated on studying the long-term effects of long-term stays in space, which is arguably a much more useful thing to do.

Extra points if you can find a “black budget/national security” related rationale — those programs are super-sacred.

I know that back in the ’90s there was a push within DoD for “dual use technologies” where DoD was attempting to come up with civilian uses for things to assure that the DoD side could continue to receive funding.

At least one area being explored at the time was to use a combination of Imagery Technology and Neural Nets for cancer detection. Breast Cancer specifically was covered.

The theory was that using Imagery to take the pictures, the Neural Nets could be “taught” to recognize shots that were obviously not a problem, saving the radiologist from having to read all pics. This would cover 60%-70% of all images, allowing the radiologists to concentrate on the images that were questionable and needed the human eye to verify problems.

Staffing could be a problem,

Is that snark? I thought we were having a jobs crisis.

I’ve heard much the same stuff, BTF, but didn’t mention it for the same reason you didn’t: My memory’s garbled much of it and Googling isn’t providing the links I want. Then again, I suspect that much of this is being kept off of the publicly-accessible parts of the ‘Net.

Not with doctors and nurses.

Just what I thought, arrested for filling in a pothole.

But then, just think of all the money we could save by not rebuilding and repairing roads…..

Hell of a lot of people gona need traning for new jobs and hospital work is good work that pays a decent wage.

What about those displaced because of hospitals closing? How ’bout a training program for health care workers. They wouldn’t all have to be brain surgeons.

They would have to put surge protectors on their vehicles to prevent huge current spikes driving on the roads around here.

Bad roads everywhere baby.

There is still a shortage now. They are attempting to gear up in many locations but at the present time they are only accepting a fraction of the applicants for training.

Did not know that. Wondering why they are only accepting a fraction.

The applicants far outnumber the training slots

Over the longer term if we can force the AMA to remove its cap on the number of med students allowed each year and make nursing a more attractive occupation, staffing shortages can be overcome. Nurses need to be more involved in the actual process of providing health care and doctors need to be more in tune with preventive medicine and stop relying on technology alone for diagnostics. Doctors also need to be taught more about nutrition and its relation to health. Medicine as practiced in our country is outdated.

Off my dead ass and out the door. Lotsa chores today.

Be good to yourselves, and all other living things.

Namaste

Over the years, I have written much about the Pentagon, and have also, advocated that the VA’s Medical and Hospital Systemic be “opened-up” for use by all of our fellow citizens.

Now, I write the Cactus Juice Commentaries for the Chicano Veterans Organization on their web site. And no, this is not an advert plug.

As an aside, I was going to write a commentary on Newt Gingrich, in a snark-fun fashion in response to his ‘advice’ to DOJ’s Holder regarding a ‘nation of cowards’ when it comes to addressing race in America. But then, as a military vet, ‘taking on’ Gringrich for his usual nonsense, would be a wasted effort on my part, and of course, Gringrich makes it far too easy for folks like myself to poke fun at him. Thus, an unfair contest, to my way of thinking.

Therefore, I will not go off on a tangent to rip Gringrich to threads. Consequently, I will remain within the framework of this thread.

So, when it comes to the Pentagon budget, I much prefer to see that ‘issues’ that are not in the budget but should be, and therefore, imposes far greater inflexibility for Pentagon spending makes my political juices flow and spread outward.

Thus, my notional for an “academic-military” Draft, meets my criteria for the inflexibility of Pentagon spending. If you have ever been subjected to a military draft and prior to 1976, defending our country was considered “american” and yet, in today’s political environment, and compared to “prior-1976″, the GI Bill was an American Godsend, by folks like me who had it available and took advantage of America’s “common-wealth”.

Simply put, my brand of an “academic-military” Draft would require three-year enlistment period in which each ‘volunteer’ would spend 50% of his or her time in uniform, attending a class room environment in order to achieve a two-year degree in General Studies or an Associate of Arts Degree. The remaining 50% would be spent attending to the military mission, from physical fitness to a physical self-defense regimen and to even include safety and survival tactics. And why the physical self-defense regimen? There would be a sizable drop in crime and safety, and far less legislative spending for having to build and operate prisons, as well as less assualt and rape, that is ongoing in daily life. (Now I am going off on a tangent, and my apologies.) But you can envision these intangible benefits, and done quite easily.

Now if you’re a parent, imagine if you will that the need for scrimping and saving a few dollars every week for your child’s college education, would not be an undue burden. As such, it would still be necessary if it were your intent to send your child off to a private educational institution, but if your druthers were to send this child off to college at at public institution, your financial burden would be removed since the cost for attending this inherent class room environment within the “academic-military” Draft would be effectively romoved and shifted to America’s “common-wealth”.

Consequently, you son or daughter would recognize that as a “volunteer”, you son or daughter would have disconnected himself or herself from Big Mama’ apron strings. To wit, you son or daughter would be ‘enabled’ for “standing on their two own feed” and without much further ado. As to completion of this ‘volunteerism’ institutions of higher learning would be standing three-deep in order to recruit them as students, and inclusive for the avialability for loans, grants, and scholarships, notwithstanding. In short, prior experience for discipline, competiviness and academic history, would make each person a shoo-in for being highly recruited, even by our private educational institutions, such as Harvard, et.al.

And after discharge, you son or daughter could walk down to the local office of a financial institution and borrow the monies to complete the third and fourth years of academics and in which the loan would be guaranteed by the Pentagon, as part and parcel to its budget allocation for spending our taxpayer dollars.

Now, I realize that this thread is one primarily focused on the ‘black boxes’ that are invariably found in the Pentagon budget, but this fails to address, the far important political behavior for creating “human capital” in contrast to crafting ‘widgets’ and in which these widgets lose their inherent value over time due to planned obsolences and transformation of technology to higher levels. And to reach these ‘higher levels’ requires added education, not less and the creation of ever more ‘human captial’ is required.

And which brings me to the point of my main ‘concern’ and the ever-increasing numbers of high-school dropouts. Among my community, primarily Chicanos and Native Americans here in Arizona and across the Southwest, the loss of any economic viability and future for these dropouts, is on the downside for Progress and integration, unless criminality is considered. And given the natiness and meanness of the Republicans for political disenfranchisement, high school dropouts, will have a rougher go than alomost anyone in our society, and being the Underdog requires defending the Underdog. And of course, being an Underdog without having to take a pill is the way to go. (Okay, this is a joke, and some might not get my reference to the cartoon character.)

In conclusion, an “academic-military” draft, discombobulates America’s political Right for their distaste for having to place themselves a “personal risk” for lacing up the combat boots and strapping on the body armor. And if the Right does not want to defend America, in good times and bad times, having Republican “volunteers” in our midst would lessen their political impact, given that once a person from the Southwest get’s to know a person from the Northeast, political skirmishes become the defacto mindset among those of us who recognize ourselves as Brethren of Share Experiences. And far less civil unrest, to my way of thinking.

And finally, as to paying for the cost of an “academic-military” Draft, the Pentagon either loses or wastes an approximate 20% of their Congressional allocation. So, paying ‘for it’ is easily do-able, nonethless. Furthermore, another stark choice to be made, “human capital” or “widgets”?

Jaango

Jaango

Guaranteed the military already uses solar power. The GPS satellite system is another public utility brought to you by the MIC. There are many good reasons to be unhappy with the MIC, but they are a good early investor in many new technologies. They are big and are not completely driven by the almighty dollar.

Actually, the Army Breast Cancer Research Program has been funding academic research since the Clinton Administration. I don’t know if it is still active, but back then it was a greater source of funds than the National Cancer Institute, which is part of NIH.

OK, use his photo to make the text line up. You know… justification by Feith.