Hasta La Gadget!

“We stand at a critical moment in the life of our nation. The policies of the last six years have left America diminished and weakened. Our enemies no longer fear us. Our allies no longer trust us… Threats to America’s security are on the rise.”

Dick Cheney is back. He is not running for anything, he assured Charlie Rose, so he is free to speak his mind. After six years of the Obama presidency, Cheney sees America’s power and prestige declining across the globe, and he wants to do something about it. He has created the Alliance for a Strong America.

This is not new for Cheney. Last time a Democrat was in his second term, Cheney was a signatory in the founding of the Project for the New American Century, the seminal organization created to promote the neoconservative agenda in foreign policy. Both organizations were created in the second term of Democrat Presidents. Both organizations sought to spearhead the promotion of American power and leadership in the world. Both sought to build support for rebuilding American military power.

But Cheney is no longer mincing words and has cast aside the “Neo” label that connoted a commitment to the promotion of economic and political liberty. Cheney never really put his heart and soul into the neoconservative ideology. Spreading “political liberty” and bringing democracy to the Middle East might have been important in the minds of Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol, but never for Cheney. For him, the democracy rhetoric was always a red herring. It may have been useful as a rationale for removing Saddam Hussein from power, but social and political reform was never the point. Cheney was always more Neo-Maoist than Neo-Conservative: forget ideology, power is about power.

Dick Cheney shares the concerns of our “friends” that America is turning away from its historic relationships in the region. Cheney’s friends–our guys, to use his jocular rhetoric–are the Gulf monarchies. “Our guys” are the Saudis, whose Wahhabi partners have long been proselytizers of the most extremist branch of Sunni Islam and the lead funders of modern terrorist movements.

But Americans are no longer so sure who our friends are, as it was our guys who funded the Saudi terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks. In time, we have come to grasp the complexity of the region, the depth of the animosity for the west–and for America in particular–and the duplicity of the Saudi game.

What we do know is that Cheney took America to war once before. He blithely assured us of the dangers we faced and who was behind them, all the while assuring us that we had friends in the region that would rally to our side. Over the decade of war that ensued, we learned the hard way that there are deep historical roots to the conflicts there, and we have to think long and hard when we take sides. Friendship in the Middle East is transactional, and it not as simple as the aphorism “the enemy of our enemy is our friend” might suggest.

No doubt many Americans would agree with Cheney that our policies seems to lack coherence. In Iraq, the US and Iran are now effectively allied in opposition to the Sunni ISIS insurgency. While in Syria, where the Iranians are fighting alongside the Shi’a allied Assad regime, the US is determinedly on the other side, allied with the Syrian opposition and tacitly with their Sunni jihadist allies. Yet even as he decries that incoherence, Cheney suggested to Charlie Rose that although Iran is our mortal enemy, perhaps it is time to switch sides in Syria and consider that Assad may not be the worst threat after all.

In his broadside against President Obama, Dick Cheney fails to grasp the central irony of his situation. Cheney wants us to respond to his cries of “fire,” but does not understand that all we see when he speaks is the arsonist. Speaking to Charlie Rose, Cheney admonished those fixated on how we got into Iraq and, despite repeated prodding, he refuses to amend or apologize for a single word of an historical record on his watch that has been so deeply contradicted. Even as he scorns the President in a manner never seen before by one administration toward a successor, Cheney is a man with no sense of accountability for his own actions and his impact on the world around him.

The debate that led up to the Senate war resolution, like the campaign to build public support for war, was built on a deliberate campaign of misinformation. That debate laid the groundwork for a deepening mistrust across the political spectrum of the use of intelligence that sowed the seeds for the Snowden affair and the elevation of Snowden to heroic status on the right and the left. The residue of the lies and dissembling in the run-up to the Iraq war is the hallmark legacy of Cheney’s Vice Presidency. The poisoning of the public square and the political climate change it helped to engender has contributed to declining faith in the ability of our government to honestly deal with problems that we face at home and undermined the credibility of our efforts to promote democracy abroad.

Cheney demands that we heed his warnings, but evinces no awareness of why his credibility is suspect, or why Americans might feel burned for having trusted his words and followed his lead before. He is the poster child for the lies and duplicity of an era, the effects of which continue to ripple forward. Republicans and Democrats alike would rather Cheney just go away. He has become a parody of himself, and if America is at risk, the last way to get Americans to hear that is for Dick Cheney to tell them. He simply fails to recognize that the man he scorns in the White House came to office not because of that hope and change thing, but because Americans had been lied to by their leaders who took the nation to war, and they wanted out. Dick Cheney may have nothing but contempt for Barack Obama, but the irony is that Cheney is one of the reasons Obama was elected.

Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously observed that our politics stop at the waters’ edge, that foreign policy was the realm of national consensus. If America was to go to war, the nation had to be of one voice and to understand and believe in the cause. Perhaps Vietnam marked the end of that national consensus, but the manipulation of information in the promotion of war in Iraq, in order to steep public opinion and stifle democratic debate, is a legacy for which Cheney bears responsibility. All of Cheney’s words now are colored by that poisoned discourse, which contributed so much to what now remains a deeply damaged nation.

American students’ knowledge about managing money is downright unimpressive, according to a study released Wednesday.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study chronicles how students around the world scored on a Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) financial literacy exam in 2012. Of the students from 18 countries and economies who took the exam, American students scored solidly in the middle. On the other hand, students from Shanghai, Estonia and the Flemish Community of Belgium led the pack, while Italy and Colombia’s scores trailed at the bottom.

The results are unsurprising, given how American students have performed on other PISA exams. In a 2012 PISA test on problem solving, American students scored barely above average. They were similarly mid-pack on PISA’s reading, math and science assessments. Students from Shanghai scored higher than Americans in all cases.

According to the OECD report, the exam –- which was taken by approximately 29,000 15-year-olds — was designed to measure if teens had the financial skills to manage money effectively and make sound financial decisions. Approximately one in 10 American students –- or 9.4 percent — earned a top score on the exam, while 17.8 percent did not reach a basic level of financial literacy.

Comparatively, an average of 9.7 percent of students in 13 OECD countries earned a top score, while 15.3 percent of students across OECD countries did not reach a basic level of proficiency.

However, the report did not necessarily point to the type of financial education taught in schools as a reason for students’ scores.

“Financial education is relatively new if it’s present at all in schools, whether it’s cross curricula or as a specific subject,” said Michael Davidson, the OECD’s head of early childhood education and schools, on a conference call with reporters Tuesday afternoon. “When we look at the relationship between the availability of financial education and the performance of those countries in financial literacy, then you see a very scattered picture. … It’s too early to say whether different models of financial education are effective or not and clearly there are external influences that are important as well.“

The report also cited several external factors that could contribute to higher scores.

Students around the world who have bank accounts tended to perform better on the exam, even compared to students of similar socioeconomic backgrounds. In the United States, 17 percent of the variation in scores is associated with a student’s socioeconomic background — similar to the OECD average. In America, there was also strong correlation between students’ scores on this exam and previous PISA math and reading exams.

In every country, students who reported higher levels of perseverance tended to perform better.

Interestingly, female and male students had similar scores in most countries. This differs from previous assessments taken of men and women later in life which show that men generally have higher rates of financial literacy.

The graphs below display the new data on gender similarities:

The report builds on previous ideas that American schools are not providing students with the same skills as its international competitors. However, education experts in the past have warned about jumping to conclusions based on PISA results.

“These kinds of studies are really good at describing where we stand and maybe looking at trends,” Jack Buckley, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told Education Week of previous PISA results. “They’re not good at all at telling us why. The study design is not one that supports causal inference.”

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It goes without saying that the military with the most advanced technologies would have an advantage in any war, although the terrain of battle might somewhat negate such advantages, ala in-city fighting. Well this does not do away with the fact that progress needs to be made in the field of warfare, and BAE Systems, a UK aerospace and defense contractor, has shown off a concept that they call The Transformer. The Transformer stealth aircraft is made up of three different airplanes, and when joined together, they end up as as a large, diamond-shaped model. Sort of like a modern day Transformer, actually, except that it is still in the primitive form.

On paper, the Transformer is able of going through longer flights while conserving fuel, as the entire design will do its bit to reduce overall aerodynamic drag. The entire form factor of the Transformer will require a lower number of mid-air fueling runs, which in turn, will help it expand its range. Now, is it going to be good only as a surveillance aircraft, or does it carry some sort of payload of its own as well? That would be a huge tactical advantage for sure. Do you like the way it joins together and moves as one?

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