Saturday, October 29, 2022

DAILY KOS CARTOON | Brian McFadden for Comics

Cartoon: Swing voters explain themselves

BrianMcFadden for Comics
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2022/10/28 · 14:50

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DOMAIN AWARENESS

Erich Hernandez-Baquero is the executive director of Advanced Ground Systems for Department 22 at Raytheon Intelligence & Space. Before joining Raytheon, he was the principal deputy director of the Ground Enterprise Directorate at the National Reconnaissance Office. Hernandez-Baquero served 27 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel, and holds a Ph.D. in Imaging Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

spacenews.com

Op-ed | Defending against near-peer adversaries requires a shift in collaboration between forces - SpaceNews

Brian Berger
7 - 9 minutes
An artist's impression of a sensor grid. Credit: Raytheon Intelligence & Space

Enhancing and protecting our military superiority from the ground to space is a collective effort. I know firsthand the power of collaboration from my 27 years in the U.S. Air Force. With our peer and near-peer adversaries accelerating their warfighting capabilities and becoming more aggressive, we need to reevaluate and rethink how to bring the capabilities of the intelligence community and the Department of Defense together to keep them at bay.

The need for persistent, responsive and resilient sensing from space has never been greater. This is a crucial capability needed to deter and defeat our adversaries. Our commanders have no chance of winning if they cannot establish domain awareness and do not have the timely, precise geolocation and identification needed to hold potential threats at risk.

In the U.S. Code, Title 10 and Title 50 embody the legislative foundation of our national security apparatus and its related agencies and departments. Both Title 10 – military operations and Title 50 – intelligence operations, are necessary for the security of our nation but are complex in their legislative and actionable structures. 

In contrast, our peer and near-peer adversaries are not bound by these considerations; the challenge for us is keeping the safety concerns of Titles 10 and 50 while also integrating a new standard collaboration that expedites mission execution and improves data sharing.

Historically, space-based sensing of relevant targets has fallen under the function of Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance and, therefore, under the authority of the intelligence community and, more specifically, its tasking national Overhead Intelligence Systems developed and operated by the National Reconnaissance Office. However, a military commander’s actions are governed by Title 10 authorities and follow the National Command Authority chain of command.

Thanks to heroic levels of collaboration between intelligence and military personnel, we have proven that combining resources across these authorities results in war-winning capabilities. However, while successful, past approaches do not scale to what we will need to defend against peer and near-peer adversaries. The expected scale and speed of operations demand more autonomy, faster timelines and simpler policy frameworks than those available today.

Currently, the adjudication for using Title 50 resources to meet Title 10 needs requires a slow and onerous process, often leading to suboptimal allocation of sensor tasking. Even when these processes are executed, the resulting data is rightly protected under intelligence authorities, which impedes use in many battle-management missions unless data is “minimized.”

Additionally, intelligence tasking is typically done through siloed functional managers such as GEOINT and SIGINT, each of which optimizes and prioritizes information needs according to their intelligence domain. This process often precludes optimization of multi-sensor and multi-modality collection, such as combining passive radio frequency, radar and infrared sensing. This scenario is particularly problematic when considering the real-time orchestration of sensors needed for large-scale moving-target engagement.

Any debate about Titles 10 and 50 and the proper roles and missions of U.S. military forces and intelligence agencies need to include innovative technology to reduce decision-making time. A broad-based end-to-end solution to streamline intelligence efforts must be nimble and quick to detect and neutralize threats before they strike.

Fortunately, the intelligence community has made significant advances in automated multi-intelligence orchestration of overhead systems in support of Activity-Based Intelligence. These advances have “wired” the tasking systems to rapidly decide collection needs based on dynamic events. The resulting event-driven architecture is more nimble, timely and tuned to sense where it is most needed, significantly improving the efficient use of overhead capacity.

That said, more digital technologies are needed to integrate Title 10 and Title 50 in support of large-scale moving target engagement via space-based architectures. Custody of hundreds of targets in a large area of interest can be achieved through automated logic or artificial intelligence technology designed to detect target state-changes using a variety of sensor modalities and without having to always maintain continuous tracks. 

Additionally, a capacity model should be developed to create a flexible framework for allocating sensor capacity to battle management authorities without requiring adjudication through intelligence priorities. 

Such a model would protect the minimum capacity required to meet critical intelligence and battle management requirements but fluctuate dynamically between these limits in response to world events. This permits rapid execution of missions within the confines of allocated capacity without the strain of navigating complex policy questions in a highly dynamic and fast-changing environment. Thus, the approach makes policy decisions more tractable as they are anchored on strategic considerations rather than tactical and highly fluid decisions. 

Once the data is collected, scalable track-and-track-fusion software will be needed to bring together massive amounts of data from multiple sources across different domains in real time to maintain the operational picture and inform battle management decisions. These solutions can be deployed rapidly and affordably to the emerging Joint All Domain Command and Control, or JADC2, infrastructure.

The alternative would be to create independent architectures for each mission. Such an approach would be unaffordable and likely to suffer the same fate Space-Based Radar did in 2000. That would likely set back space-enabled moving-target engagement another 20 years. Instead, leveraging industry’s latest digital technologies could avoid long, risky acquisitions and then meet near-term challenges affordably. Doing so will require less money but more collaboration.

I’ve personally seen what collaboration can do in the service of our nation. In every case, it took courageous people transcending bureaucratic prerogatives to deliver game-changing mission capabilities. Against near-peer adversaries, we will need to double down on this collaboration, but we should do so now, not while in the fight. 

Making the right investments in predictive technology, AI and smart policy today will help us deter aggressive action and, if needed, secure a path to victory in a conflict tomorrow.

Erich Hernandez-Baquero is the executive director of Advanced Ground Systems for Department 22 at Raytheon Intelligence & Space. Before joining Raytheon, he was the principal deputy director of the Ground Enterprise Directorate at the National Reconnaissance Office. Hernandez-Baquero served 27 years in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel, and holds a Ph.D. in Imaging Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology.

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Star Economist Roubini on the Global Crises: "World War III Has Already Effectively Begun"

About Nouriel Roubini

Nouriel Roubini, born in 1958, is one of the world's most well-known economists and a notorious pessimist: The professor emeritus at New York University's Stern School of Business predicted the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the crash  of the global economy right at the beginning of the coronavirus crisis. He grew up in Turkey, Iran, Israel and Italy, and is now a U.S. citizen living in New. York City.

An interview

www.spiegel.de

Star Economist Roubini on the Global Crises: "World War III Has Already Effectively Begun"

David Böcking, Tim Bartz, DER SPIEGEL
10 - 13 minutes 


" DER SPIEGEL: Professor Roubini, you don't like your nickname "Dr. Doom." Instead you would like to be called "Dr. Realist." But in your new book, you describe "ten megathreats" that endanger our future. It doesn’t get much gloomier than that.



Roubini: The threats I write about are real – no one would deny that. I grew up in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, I never worried about a war between great powers or a nuclear winter, as we had détente between the Soviet Union and the West. I never heard the words climate change or global pandemic. And no one worried about robots taking over most jobs. We had freer trade and globalization, we lived in stable democracies, even if they were not perfect. Debt was very low, the population wasn’t over-aged, there were no unfunded liabilities from the pension and health care systems. That's the world I grew up in. And now I have to worry about all these things – and so does everyone else.

DER SPIEGEL: But do they? Or do you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness?


Roubini: I was in Washington at the IMF meeting. The economic historian Niall Ferguson said in a speech there that we would be lucky if we got an economic crisis like in the 1970s – and not a war like in the 1940s. National security advisers were worried about NATO getting involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine and Iran and Israel being on a collision course. And just this morning, I read that the Biden administration expects China to attack Taiwan sooner rather than later. Honestly, World War III has already effectively begun, certainly in Ukraine and cyberspace.

DER SPIEGEL: Politicians seem overwhelmed by the simultaneity of many major crises. What priorities should they set?

Roubini: Of course, they must take care of Russia and Ukraine before they take care of Iran and Israel or China. But policymakers should also think about inflation and recessions, i.e. stagflation. The eurozone is already in a recession, and I think it will be long and ugly. The United Kingdom is even worse. The pandemic seems contained, but new COVID variants could emerge soon. And climate change is a slow-motion disaster that is accelerating. For each of the 10 threats I describe in my book, I can give you 10 examples that are happening as we speak today, not in the distant future. Do you want one on climate change?

DER SPIEGEL: If you must.

Roubini: This summer, there have been droughts all over the world, including in the United States. Near Las Vegas, the drought is so bad that bodies of mobsters from the 1950s have surfaced in the dried-up lakes. In California, farmers are now selling their water rights because it's more profitable than growing anything. And in Florida, you can't get insurance for houses on the coast anymore. Half of Americans will have to eventually move to the Midwest or Canada. That's science, not speculation.


DER SPIEGEL: Another threat you describe is that the U.S. could pressure Europe to limit its business relations with China in order to not endanger the U.S. military presence on the continent. How far are we from that scenario?

Roubini: It is already happening. The U.S. has just passed new regulations banning the export of semiconductors to Chinese companies for AI or quantum computing or military use. Europeans would like to continue doing business with the U.S. and China, but it won't be possible because of national security issues. Trade, finance, technology, internet: Everything will split in two.

DER SPIEGEL: In Germany, there is a dispute right now about whether parts of the Port of Hamburg should be sold to the Chinese state-owned company Cosco. What would your advice be?

Roubini: You have to think about what the purpose of such a deal is. Germany has already made a big mistake by relying on energy from Russia. China, of course, is not going to take over German ports militarily, as it could in Asia and Africa. But the only economic argument for this kind of agreement would be that we could strike back once European factories are seized in China. Otherwise, it's not a very smart idea.

DER SPIEGEL: You warn that Russia and China are trying to build an alternative to the dollar and the SWIFT system. But the two countries have failed so far.


Roubini: It's not just about payment systems. China is going around the world selling subsidized 5G technologies that can be used for spying. I asked the president of an African country why he gets 5G technology from China and not from the West. He told me, we are a small country, so someone will spy on us anyway. Then, I might as well take the Chinese technology, it's cheaper. China is growing its economic, financial and trading power in many parts of the world.

DER SPIEGEL: But will the Chinese renminbi really replace the dollar in the long run?

Roubini: It will take time, but the Chinese are good at thinking long term. They have suggested to the Saudis that they price and charge for the oil they sell them in renminbi. And they have more sophisticated payment systems than anyone else in the world. Alipay and WeChat pay are used by a billion Chinese every day for billions of transactions. In Paris, you can already shop at Louis Vuitton with WeChat pay.

DER SPIEGEL: In the 1970s, we also had an energy crisis, high inflation and stagnant growth, so-called stagflation. Are we experiencing something similar now?

Roubini: It is worse today. Back then, we didn't have as much public and private debt as we do today. If central banks raise interest rates now to fight inflation, it will lead to the bankruptcy of many »zombie« companies, shadow banks and government institutions. Besides, the oil crisis was caused by a few geopolitical shocks then, there are more today. And just imagine the impact of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, which produces 50 percent of all semiconductors in the world, and 80 percent of the high-end ones. That would be a global shock. We depend more on semiconductors today than on oil.


DER SPIEGEL: You are very critical of central bankers and their lax monetary policy. Is there any central bank that gets it right these days?

Roubini: They are damned either way. Either they fight inflation with high policy rates and cause a hard landing for the real economy and the financial markets. Or they wimp out and blink, don't raise rates and inflation keeps rising. I think the Fed and the ECB will blink – as the Bank of England has already done.

DER SPIEGEL: On the other hand, high inflation rates can also be helpful because they simply inflate the debt away.


Roubini: Yes, but they also make new debt more expensive. Because when inflation rises, lenders charge higher interest rates. One example: If inflation goes from 2 to 6 percent, then U.S. government bond rates will have to go from 4 to 8 percent to keep bringing the same yield; and private borrowing costs for mortgages and business loans will be even higher. This makes it much more expensive for many companies, because they have to offer much higher interest rates than government bonds, which are considered safe. We have so much debt right now that something like this could lead to a total economic, financial and monetary collapse. And we're not even talking about hyperinflation like in the Weimar Republic, just single digit inflation.

DER SPIEGEL: The overriding risk you describe in your book is climate change. Isn't rising debt secondary in light of the possible consequences of a climate catastrophe?

Roubini: We have to worry about everything at the same time, as all these megathreats are interconnected. One example: Right now, there is no way to significantly reduce CO2 emissions without shrinking the economy. And even though 2020 was the worst recession in 60 years, green house gas emissions only fell by 9 percent. But without strong economic growth, we will not be able to solve the debt problem. So, we have to find ways to grow without emissions.


DER SPIEGEL: Given all these parallel crises: How do you assess the chances of democracy surviving against authoritarian systems like in China or Russia?

Roubini: I am worried. Democracies are fragile when there are big shocks. There is always some macho man then who says »I will save the country« and who blames everything on the foreigners. That's exactly what Putin did with Ukraine. Erdogan could do the same thing with Greece next year and try to create a crisis because otherwise he might lose the election. If Donald Trump runs again and loses the election, he could openly call on white supremacists to storm the Capitol this time. We could see violence and a real civil war in the U.S. In Germany, things look comparatively good for now. But what happens if things go wrong economically and people vote more for the right-wing opposition?

DER SPIEGEL. You have become known not only as the crash prophet, but also as a party animal. Do you still feel like partying these days?

Roubini: I always hosted art, culture, and book salons, not just social events. And during the pandemic I rediscovered my Jewish roots. Today, I prefer to invite 20 people to a Shabbat dinner with a nice ceremony and live music. Or we do an evening event where I ask a serious question and everyone has to answer. Deep conversations about life and the world at large, not chitchat. We should enjoy life, but also do our bit to save the world.

DER SPIEGEL: What do you mean?

Roubini: All of our carbon footprints are much too big. A significant part of all greenhouse gas emissions alone come from livestock farming. That's why I became a pescatarian and gave up on meat, including chicken.

DER SPIEGEL: You used to be famous for being on the road for three-quarters of the year.


Roubini: I still do travel nonstop. But I will tell you one thing: I love New York. During the pandemic, I didn't flee to the Hamptons or Miami like many others. I stayed here, I saw the Black Lives Matter demonstrations, I volunteered to help the homeless. I saw daily the desperation of many artist friends who lost jobs and incomes and couldn’t afford their rent. And even if there is another hurricane like Sandy in New York that could lead to violence and chaos, I will stay. We have to face the world as it is. Even if there is a nuclear confrontation. Because then the first bomb would fall on New York and the next one on Moscow."

RELATED CONTENT

Nouriel Roubini - Twitter

twitter.com › nouriel
nouriel roubini from twitter.com
Duration: 2:54
Posted: Oct 18, 2022

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Friday, October 28, 2022

Rock 'n' roll's first great wild man, Jerry Lee Lewis — the singer and pianist nicknamed "The Killer" — has died.

 News in passing 



 

www.npr.org

Jerry Lee Lewis has died at age 87

Blake Farmer
12 - 15 minutes

Jerry Lee Lewis, in a photo taken during his infamous trip to London in June 1958, when it became public that he was married to his 13-year-old cousin. Evening  

✓ Born Sept. 29, 1935 in Ferriday, La., Jerry Lee Lewis grew up caught in a binary quandary over music and morality, perpetually torn between his religious upbringing and a burning desire to boogie. His mother was a Pentecostal preacher who disapproved of secular music; his cousin, the influential and eventually infamous evangelical preacher Jimmy Swaggart, was also fond of condemning "the devil's music." But when Lewis was just eight years old, his father (who had served time in prison for bootlegging), took out a mortgage on the family farm to buy young Jerry a piano. And he grew up sneaking into the black clubs, hiding under the tables until he got kicked out.

In a 1987 documentary called I Am What I Am, Lewis described the music he heard there: "Something different about it — it was blues and it was kind of rock. I just loved the blues. It was the real thing. I kinda always figured I was the real thing too."

He taught himself to play, combining the boogie beats from the Black clubs and some of what he heard on Sundays at his Pentecostal church. Religion influenced more than the music; this was a time when rock 'n' roll was deemed downright demonic.

✓ As a teenager, Lewis was thrown out of the school he was attending, Southwest Bible Institute in Texas, for playing boogie-woogie on a school piano.

In late 1956, Lewis was signed to Sam Philips' Sun Records, the Memphis record label that became legendary and where his labelmates included Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. At first, he was a journeyman side player to artists like Carl Perkins — but that proximity meant that he was also played in a legendary single session in December 1956 at Sun Studios. Playing alongside Presley, Cash and Perkins, Lewis was part the one-night foursome that became known as the "Million-Dollar Quartet," which inspired a Tony-nominated musical of the same name that opened on Broadway in 2010.

✓ When Lewis was 25, he struck gold with a career-defining hit: "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." It was a song first recorded in 1955 by a black artist, Big Maybelle, for Okeh Records (a side that was produced, notably, by a promising young man Quincy Jones). But it was Lewis' rockabilly version, released in 1957, that became a hit on the pop charts — and put a piano at the center of rock 'n' roll. . .

YouTube

In 2000, the late producer Jack Clement described that Sun Studios session to NPR: "All I did was turn the machine on, and we cut 'Whole Lotta Shakin' Going' On' in one take." Lewis would later say that he knew he had a hit if it came out in one take.

The tape was rolling during a whiskey-infused exchange between Lewis and Sam Phillips, who believed Lewis could do good with rock 'n' roll.

"You can save souls!" said Philips.

"How can the devil save souls?" Lewis replied. "What are you talking about? I've got the devil in me. If I didn't have, I'd be a Christian."

That was the session when his biggest hit was also captured on tape: "Great Balls Of Fire."

 . . .

Lewis started going out on the road alongside Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry — and before long, "The Killer" was the closing act. His performances were sexually charged; he'd suggestively work the microphone as he stood up and pounded the keys.


The adulation came to a screeching halt when the 22-year-old Lewis went to England in June 1958 on tour, and British reporters asked about the pretty young girl at his side. It was Lewis' new wife, Myra — who was just 13 years old. As the press went digging, they realized even more: not only was "Mrs. Lewis" still a child, she was his cousin. And this was already Lewis' third marriage — one which took place while the artist was still legally married to his second wife.

YouTube

Lewis made it through a just a few tour dates before succumbing to the press and public's censure, and retreated back to the U.S. That doesn't mean that he was ever publicly regretful. His marriage to Myra lasted a decade, and in Rick Bragg's best-selling 2014 biography, Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, Lewis says, "She looked like a grown woman, blossomed out and ready for plucking ... I thought about her being 13 and all, but that didn't stop her from being a full-fledged woman." Meanwhile, Lewis' own sister had reportedly married at age 12, giving credence to the idea that this was a cultural norm.

In later years, the former Myra Lewis alleged that her former spouse abused her, but more recently, appears to have created an affable relationship with her ex-husband, and has called their marriage "ten incredible, wonderful years." (Over the years, Lewis married a total of seven times.)

She told WHYY's Fresh Air in 1989 that her husband was a walking contradiction — a wild man on stage, boozing and womanizing, who wouldn't allow a drop of alcohol in his own home. "Jerry sat in judgment of himself continuously," she said, "because he could never get away from the raising and the teaching that he had. That first off, he wasn't supposed to be playing that kind of music. He was supposed to be living the life that he lived."

After that fateful trip to England in 1958, Lewis' career fell apart. Pretty much overnight, Lewis went from commanding fees of thousands of dollars per show to playing in bars and doing occasional tours to Europe, where he could only afford to perform with pickup players, not his own band.

"For ten years, Jerry's records were held off the air," Myra told Fresh Air. "He could not get a decent concert date. There were certain radio stations that would not touch him at all."

Even so, as The Guardian noted in 2015, "If anything, failure made him even more unrestrained," and his marathon-all-night shows became the stuff of legend. Still under contract to Sun, Lewis released a few more charting songs, including a cover of Ray Charles' "What'd I Say" in 1961, and "Good Golly Miss Molly" in 1963. Working under the pseudonym "The Hawk" to evade his Sun contract, Lewis also released a boogie-woogie version of "In The Mood," the Glenn Miller Orchestra's big-band staple — but there was no mistaking Lewis' instantly recognizable sound.

By the 1960s, Lewis' contract with Sun had come to its close, and he was foundering professionally. He signed with a label called Smash with hopes to reignite his career. It didn't work, but one great artifact from this era became legend: his 1964 album Live At The Star-Club Hamburg, recorded by the Dutch label Philips as part of a series of live recordings from the German venue, and about which Rolling Stone Magazine later raved, "It's not an album, it's a crime scene ... with no survivors but The Killer."

Even so, Lewis was desperate to get back into the public eye in the U.S. — which, between his child-cousin-bride reputation and the British Invasion upending the American pop scene, seemed more and more unlikely. He landed upon an idea that hearkened to his roots: to record as a country artist, beginning with the 1968 album Another Place, Another Time. The gambit worked. Within a little more than a decade, Lewis released 23 songs that became Top 10 hits on the Billboard country chart. . ."

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