Sunday, March 27, 2011

"Waiting for Superman" Dodges an Obvious Source of Funding





This past week, I finally got around to viewing Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim's searing documentary on the shortcomings of urban education in the United States. Like so many stylish, well-intentioned efforts tackling the standardized test performance gap between predominantly white, suburban students and inner city, students of color; Waiting for Superman is long on critical description and short on answers.

Of course,  an elephant in the room that  Guggenheim never addresses is how our bloated military budget sucks money away from our urban schoolsFor example, though Guggenheim briefly alludes to the benefits of tutors working with failing students, he never wrestles with how we might provide such tutors to all underperforming students.





Do we really have to spend as much as we are spending on Cruise Missiles? (Anywhere from $600,000 to $1,500,000, depending whose cost quote you believe.)  And how about all of those other weapons systems? Surely savings can be found in our defense budget, which grossly outpaces those of all the other nations in the world. Through prudent defense cuts we can finance an army of retirees to serve as excellent tutors for our students who are performing below standards.





Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Have You Heard About the 1.2 Trillion Dollar National Security Budget?



My son, Phil, sent me this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon the other day.


The kid has a point; especially when - against the backdrop of the nation-wide budget and deficit  haggling - you read Chris Hellman's TomDispatch.com article  ( http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175361/  ) projecting U.S. national security spending for this coming year.  Hellman has been tracking military allocations for decades, as a Congressional aide and as a military analyst.  (He is currently Communications Liaison for the National Priorities Project.) When he systematically lays out the real defense amount for 2011,  revealing that it is in the 1.2 trillion dollar range, you can trust his figures.

       1.2 trillion dollars is over one third of the total federal budget, and breaks down to  roughly $3,800 for every man, woman and child in the United States.  For my family of five, that means $19,000 in tax dollars.

       Marshall McLuhan said something to the effect that we go hurtling into the future, while looking through a rearview mirror. I would add that while doing so,  we in the U.S. keep spending like addicts  on  military budgets no longer (and perhaps never) rational.

       We have to back away from this, my friends. We all have to begin insisting that our $3,800  be invested more wisely.













      













 

Carve Out Some of the Defense Budget for the Creator of the Super Soaker

Lonnie Johnson (pictured below) is an American inventor in the Edison mold with approximately 100 patents to his name.  He's the man who invented the Super Soaker squirt gun,  and now he's come up with the Johnson Thermoelectric Energy Converter, or JTEC (pronounced “jay-tek”) which may be able to turn solar heat into electricity, with twice the efficiency of a photovoltaic cell, by using temperature difference generated pressure gradients to force ions through a membrane.

This is the sort of technology that the United States needs to  invest in BIG TIME.  We can do so by cutting the excessive bloat out of the defense budget, but we have to develop the political will to do so. (Have you noticed how the current deficit reduction discussions so deftly avoid military cuts?)

To read more about Lonnie Johnson and the JTEC, click on the following link, which will take you to Logan Ward's November 2010 article in The Atlantic.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/shooting-for-the-sun/8268/

Shooting for the Sun

From his childhood in segregated Mobile, Alabama, to his run-ins with a nay-saying scientific establishment, the engineer Lonnie Johnson has never paid much heed to those who told him what he could and couldn’t accomplish. Best known for creating the state-of-the-art Super Soaker squirt gun, Johnson believes he now holds the key to affordable solar power.

By LOGAN WARD

IMAGE CREDIT: BEN BAKER/REDUX