FWD from Quaker-P
snake_monkey
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> CONTRACTS US NAVY
>
> Electric Boat Corporation, Groton, Conn., is being awarded a $14,011,153,663 fixed-price incentive multi-year contract for construction of eight VIRGINIA Class submarines from FY 09 to FY 13. Work will be performed at various sites throughout the United States (45%). Newport News, Va. (25%), Quonset Point, R.I. (15%); and Groton, Conn. (15%), and expected to be complete by February 2020. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Washington, D.C., is the contracting activity (N00024-09-C-2104).
I would suggest we request three of these be converted to Quaker
boarding schools, like Sidwell Friends, one for males, one for
females, and one co-ed. We won't need the weaponry, but learning to
live at close quarters, far at sea, could be considered AVP training,
plus there's lots of science and math in this picture (good for future
careers, even as presidents of this or that). The Navy is nothing
more than a jobs program with thin excuses for this equipment in any
war-making sense, has been for a long time. If we can't have any of
these new ones, then maybe some hand-me-downs, converted to civilian
use. Quakers could share with Greenpeace, good for shadowing trawlers
that over fish illegally, destroy ecologies (what the Navy *should* be
monitoring, by satellite as well, but they're too busy making whales
crazy with their sonar experiments, hardly patriotic or intelligent or
in any way White House policy that I can determine -- just foolish
commanders, likely with drinking problems, like that Exxon guy,
performing out of habit and laziness, and leaving children behind).
Internal to said boarding school submarines, we could still teach 'em
Pentagon Math (as a topic), by which I mean to include the NCLB
Polynomial and Polyhedron. I know Obama is against NCLB as an
unfunded exercise in making teachers lock step to some test, probably
out of ETS near Princeton (enslavement to ETS is another edu-sig topic
for me). But if we actually pay teachers to get the necessary
inservice training, such that more young women like Michelle, with
chutzpah, drive, initiative, get the requisite skills (not just as
lawyers, but as engineers), then we'll be in some shape to provide all
that health care people feel entitled to (a huge engineering
challenge, requires industrialized medicine on a much more massive
scale -- even if more preventative in focus, less about poor diet and
heart disease than today).
Pentagon Math makes use of one saving feature of the Pentagon, that
it's an actual pentagon (cool!), and has our kids solving for Phi (the
ratio between a pentagon's diagonal and edge) the way ancient greeks
did, the Phi-based Pentagonal Dodecahedron being their model for the
universe itself, considered a deep teaching according to Pythagorean
lore (i.e., now that you know, you'll have to keep it a secret... or
else).
However, the NCLB Polyhedron is the Rhombic Triacontahedron, not the
Pentagonal Dodecahedron, for reasons I won't go into here.
This is work we did under Cheney, not sure Biden will stay with it,
although the outgoing team seems pretty confidant that a lot of these
policies have considerable momentum behind them.
Kirby
On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 8:14 AM, John Wilmerding
<wilmerding at earthlink.net> wrote:
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> Friends, are we doing enough to witness against war and structural economic injustice?
>
> -- John Wilmerding