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Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success:
Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High!
Richard Tan
MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM
The spacecraft carrying the Peregrine, a commercially built American lunar lander, may be facing a critical failure after its launch Monday. Derrick Pitts, the chief astronomer at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, joins CBS News with details on the spacecraft's apparent fuel leak.
Damaged Peregrine moon lander beams back photo, time running out on power
An historic commercial US mission to the Moon will fail after suffering a critical loss of fuel, organizers admitted Tuesday, ending for the time being America's hopes of placing its first spacecraft on the lunar surface since the Apollo era.
Fixed to the top of United Launch Alliance's new Vulcan rocket, Astrobotic's Peregrine Lunar Lander blasted off Monday from Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, then successfully separated from its launch vehicle.
But a few hours later, Astrobotic began reporting malfunctions, starting with an inability to orient Peregrine's solar panel towards the Sun and keep its battery topped up, owing to a propulsion glitch that also damaged the spacecraft's exterior.
The company said it had "no chance of soft landing" on the Moon.
Peregrine has about 40 hours of fuel remaining and Astrobotic said it planned to operate the spacecraft until it ran out of propellant.
NASA had paid the company more than $100 million to ship scientific hardware to a mid-latitude region of the Moon to answer questions about the surface composition and radiation in the surrounding environment, as it prepares to send astronauts back to Earth's nearest neighbor later this decade.
The United States is turning to the commercial sector to stimulate a broader lunar economy and cut costs, but Astrobotic's failure could increase scrutiny about the strategy.
Astrobotic however said it was continuing to receive valuable data to prepare for its next contracted mission, sending the Griffin lander transporting a NASA rover to the lunar south pole, later this year.
It is the latest private company to have tried and failed to achieve a soft lunar landing.
Israel's Beresheet lander, the first attempt by a non-government entity, was destroyed on impact with the Moon in April 2019, while Japan's private Hakuto mission, operated by iSpace, crashed in April 2023.
For now, the feat has only been accomplished by a handful of national space agencies: the Soviet Union was first, in 1966, followed by the United States, which is still the only country to put people on the Moon.
China has successfully landed three times since 2013, while India was the most recent to achieve the feat on its second attempt, last year.
The next commercial attempt will be by Houston-based Intuitive Machines, which is launching in February, bound for the Moon's south pole.
In addition to its scientific instruments, Peregrine is carrying more colorful cargo on behalf of its own private clients. These include a physical Bitcoin and cremated remains and DNA, including those of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, legendary sci-fi author and scientist Arthur C. Clarke and a dog.
The Navajo Nation, America's largest Indigenous tribe, had objected to sending human remains, calling it a desecration of a sacred space. Though they were granted a last-ditch meeting with White House and NASA officials, but their misgivings failed to change matters.
2024 AFP
Related:
Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success:
Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High!
Richard Tan
MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM
 |
Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success:
Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High!
Richard Tan
MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM
US ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield abstains during a vote to approve a resolution that "demands" all sides in the Israel-Hamas conflict allow the "safe and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale" at UN headquarters in New York on December 22, 2023.
On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another -- Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.
In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders.
Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.
What gives?
The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.
As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.
The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.
Yet to describe these gargantuan costs is also to explain the twisted “rationality” of US foreign policy. The $1.5 trillion in military outlays is the scam that keeps on giving—to the military-industrial complex and the Washington insiders—even as it impoverishes and endangers America and the world.
To understand the foreign-policy scam, think of today’s federal government as a multi-division racket controlled by the highest bidders. The Wall Street division is run out of the Treasury. The Health Industry division is run out of the Department of Health and Human Services. The Big Oil and Coal division is run out of the Departments of Energy and Interior. And the Foreign Policy division is run out of the White House, Pentagon and CIA.
Each division uses public power for private gain through insider dealing, greased by corporate campaign contributions and lobbying outlays. Interestingly, the Health Industry division rivals the Foreign Policy division as a remarkable financial scam. America’s health outlays totaled an astounding $4.5 trillion in 2022, or roughly $36,000 per household, by far the highest health costs in the world, while America ranked roughly 40th in the world among nations in life expectancy. A failed health policy translates into very big bucks for the health industry, just as a failed foreign policy translates into mega-revenues of the military-industrial complex.
The more wars, of course, the more business.
The Foreign Policy division is run by a small, secretive and tight-knit coterie, including the top brass of the White House, the CIA, the State Department, the Pentagon, the Armed Services Committees of the House and Senate, and the major military firms including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon. There are perhaps a thousand key individuals involved in setting policy. The public interest plays little role.
The key foreign policy makers run the operations of 800 US overseas military bases, hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, and the war operations where the equipment is deployed. The more wars, of course, the more business. The privatization of foreign policy has been greatly amplified by the privatization of the war business itself, as more and more “core” military functions are handed out to the arms manufacturers and to contractors such as Haliburton, Booz Allen Hamilton, and CACI.
In addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars of military contracts, there are important business spillovers from the military and CIA operations. With military bases in 80 countries around the world, and CIA operations in many more, the US plays a large, though mostly covert role, in determining who rules in those countries, and thereby on policies that shape lucrative deals involving minerals, hydrocarbons, pipelines, and farm and forest land. The US has aimed to overthrow at least 80 governments since 1947, typically led by the CIA through the instigation of coups, assassinations, insurrections, civil unrest, election tampering, economic sanctions, and overt wars. (For a superb study of US regime-change operations from 1947 to 1989, see Lindsey O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change, 2018).
In addition to business interests, there are of course ideologues who truly believe in America’s right to rule the world. The ever-warmongering Kagan family is the most famous case, though their financial interests are also deeply intertwined with the war industry. The point about ideology is this. The ideologists have been wrong on nearly every occasion and long ago would have lost their bully pulpits in Washington but for their usefulness as warmongers. Wittingly or not, they serve as paid performers for the military-industrial complex.
There is one persistent inconvenience for this ongoing business scam. In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth. (A similar contradiction of course applies to overpriced healthcare, government bailouts of Wall Street, oil-industry perks, and other scams). The American people rarely support the machinations of US foreign policy when they occasionally hear the truth. America’s wars are not waged by popular demand but by decisions from on high. Special measures are needed to keep the people away from decision making.
In theory, foreign policy is carried out in the interest of the American people, though the opposite is the truth.
The first such measure is unrelenting propaganda. George Orwell nailed it in 1984 when “the Party” suddenly switched the foreign enemy from Eurasia to Eastasia without a word of explanation. The US essentially does the same. Who is the US gravest enemy? Take your pick, according to the season. Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Hugo Chavez, Bashar al-Assad, ISIS, al-Qaeda, Gaddafi, Vladimir Putin, Hamas, have all played the role of “Hitler” in US propaganda. White House spokesman John Kirby delivers the propaganda with a smirk on his face, signaling that he too knows that what he is saying is ludicrous, albeit mildly entertaining.
The propaganda is amplified by the Washington think tanks that live off of donations by military contractors and occasionally foreign governments that are part of the US scam operations. Think of the Atlantic Council, CSIS, and of course the ever-popular Institute for the Study of War, brought to you by the major military contractors.
The second is to hide the costs of the foreign policy operations. In the 1960s, the US Government made the mistake of forcing the American people to bear the costs of the military-industrial complex by drafting young people to fight in Vietnam and by raising taxes to pay for the war. The public erupted in opposition.
From the 1970s onward the government has been far more clever. The government ended the draft, and made military service a job for hire rather than a public service, backed by Pentagon outlays to recruit soldiers from lower economic strata. It also abandoned the quaint idea that government outlays should be funded by taxes, and instead shifted the military budget to deficit spending which protects it from popular opposition that would be triggered if it were tax-funded.
It has also suckered client states such as Ukraine to fight America’s wars on the ground, so that no American body bags would spoil the US propaganda machine. Needless to say, US masters of war such as Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, and McConnell remain thousands of miles away from the frontlines. The dying is reserved for Ukrainians. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) defended American military aid to Ukraine as money well spent because it is “without a single American service woman or man injured or lost,” somehow not dawning on the good Senator to spare the lives of Ukrainians, who have died by the hundreds of thousands in a US-provoked war over NATO enlargement.
This system is underpinned by the complete subordination of the U.S. Congress to the war business, to avoid any questioning of the over-the-top Pentagon budgets and the wars instigated by the Executive Branch. The subordination of Congress works as follows. First, the Congressional oversight of war and peace is largely assigned to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, which largely frame the overall Congressional policy (and the Pentagon budget). Second, the military industry (Boeing, Raytheon, and the rest) funds the campaigns of the Armed Services Committee members of both parties. The military industries also spend vast sums on lobbying in order to provide lucrative salaries to retiring members of Congress, their staffs, and families, either directly in military businesses or in Washington lobbying firms.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon.
The hacking of Congressional foreign policy is not only by the US military-industrial complex. The Israel lobby long ago mastered the art of buying the Congress. America’s complicity in Israel’s apartheid state and war crimes in Gaza makes no sense for US national security and diplomacy, not to speak of human decency. They are the fruits of Israel lobby investments that reached $30 million in campaign contributions in 2022, and that will vastly top that in 2024.
When Congress reassembles in January, Biden, Kirby, Sullivan, Blinken, Nuland, Schumer, McConnell, Blumenthal and their ilk will tell us that we absolutely must fund the losing, cruel, and deceitful war in Ukraine and the ongoing massacre and ethnic cleansing in Gaza, lest we and Europe and the free world, and perhaps the solar system itself, succumb to the Russian bear, the Iranian mullahs, and the Chinese Communist Party. The purveyors of foreign policy disasters are not being irrational in this fear-mongering. They are being deceitful and extraordinarily greedy, pursuing narrow interests over those of the American people.
It is the urgent task of the American people to overhaul a foreign policy that is so broken, corrupted, and deceitful that it is burying the government in debt while pushing the world closer to nuclear Armageddon. This overhaul should start in 2024 by rejecting any more funding for the disastrous Ukraine War and Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Peacemaking, and diplomacy, not military spending, is the path to a US foreign policy in the public interest.
Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success:
Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High!
Richard Tan
MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM
Joint effort: Fourteen companies helped put 18 water tanks – each able to hold about 2,000 litres – in strategic locations in Relau, the south of Penang island, for residents to get water during the scheduled water cut from Jan 10 to 14. — LIM BENG TATT/The Star
GEORGE TOWN: With three days to go before 70% of Penang residents will be without water supply, Chief Minister Chow Kon Yeow says the repair work at the Sungai Dua treatment plant is necessary to prevent a more unpleasant situation during Chinese New Year next month.
He said the Penang Water Supply Corporation (PBAPP) had no choice but to shut down the plant to carry out two urgent repairs.
“The two large control valves in the plant are leaking. These valves must be replaced.
“If these valves are not replaced soon, they may fail or cause a pipeline burst during the Chinese New Year, or Hari Raya celebrations, or any time in the middle of the night,” he told The Star.
It is estimated that 590,000 consumers would be impacted by the four-day water supply disruption starting Wednesday.
More than 100 PBAPP personnel will be working round-the-clock over 96 hours to ensure everything runs on schedule during the water cut period.
The corporation plans to complete the works at the water treatment plant within the first 24 hours.
For the next 72 hours, the focus will be on “water supply services recovery” and to re-start and pump treated water through thousands of kilometres of pipelines to the affected consumers.
Out of the nine water treatment plants in Penang, Chow said the Sungai Dua plant is the most important because it produces 80% of the treated water for the state daily.
“As the Chief Minister of Penang, I admit that water supply here is one of the issues that sometimes keep me up at night, especially when thinking about the future.
“We are aiming to steer the state towards the holistic goal of becoming ‘a family-focused green and smart state that inspires the nation’ by 2030.
“We need sufficient water supply to fulfil this goal. We have a plan to reduce Penang’s water risks and address future water demand and PBAPP is implementing its Water Contingency Plan 2030,” he said.
Under the WCP 2030, the corporation will implement eight key water supply projects starting last year till 2028 to ensure water supply sufficiency in Penang until 2030. The total cost is projected to be RM1.184bil.
As for current progress of the Perak-Penang Water Supply Plan, Chow said a committee would be formed soon to monitor the overall progress of the work from the preliminary stage to the end of this project.
For the water shutdown starting this Wednesday till Sunday, PBAPP said it had sent out notices and reminders to consumers about the scheduled disruption in advance and also advised them the need to stock up water at home.
Most MPs and assemblymen in the state have also distributed water tanks at strategic spots, especially in high-rise buildings, and held discussions with residents to explain the situation and remind them to store enough water.
A check revealed that most hawkers and food outlet operators here will be resorting to disposable cutlery during the water cut.
A total of 60 static water tanks will be placed at targeted areas while the PBAPP will deploy a fleet of 99 tankers to supply water – according to fixed schedules – to affected folk.
The corporation has explained that this week’s water shutdown will be quite similar to the water cut in Selangor in October last year when Air Selangor shut down the Sungai Langat treatment plant for upgrading works.
Millions of people in 162 areas were affected by a four-day water supply interruption then.
As for the Penang folk, they would have to put up with the hot weather during the shutdown with temperature expected to be between 26°C and 34°C.
For urgent assistance, the public can call PBAPP’s 24-hour call centre at 04-255 8255.
By ALEX TENG
Related:
Rightways - Sowing the seeds of Success:
Think Global, Act Local; Change & Grow Rich; Sow as You Reap & Soar High!
Richard Tan
MBA(UK), BCA(NZ), AMA(USA),MMIM
