David Walker, head of the Government Accountability Office, along with Diane Lim Rogers, of the Brookings Institution, and Alison Acosta Fraser, director of the Heritage  are campaigning to raise awareness about the major deficit challenges ahead:

Entitlement Programs - Healthcare: 
Medicaid and Medicare have continues to grow more expencsive and is expected to continue for at least the next 10-20 years. This will be further exacerbated by demographic pressures as baby boomers become eligilble for Social Security in 2008 and for Medicare in 2011.

Interest Payments
United States has accumulated significant debt over the last few years to foreign lenders - primarily the central banks of China, Japan and other big U.S. trading partners. Current debt is $8.5-trillion and will grow by $2 trillion to $3 trillion a year.

Social Security is a much less serious problem.
The program currently pays for itself with a 12.4 percent payroll tax, and even produces a surplus that the government raids every year to pay other bills. However, Social Security will begin to run deficits in the near furture and “ultimately would need an infusion of $8 trillion if the government planned to keep its promises to every beneficiary.”

Solution:
“Calculations by Boston University economist Lawrence Kotlikoff indicate that closing those gaps - $8 trillion for Social Security, many times that for Medicare - and paying off the existing deficit would require either an immediate doubling of personal and corporate income taxes, a two-thirds cut in Social Security and Medicare benefits, or some combination of the two.”

Source: Associated Press

“The challenge is simply this: how do we restore the creative balance between liberalism and conservatism: between compassion and prudence, between idealism and skepticism, between inventing the future and learning from history?”

Source: geoffarnold.com and andrewsullivan.com

 John Robbs new book Brave New War is listed on Amazon.com:

Amazon Book Description:
“system disruption lies at the heart of the agenda. Instead of symbolic, or deadly attacks, we should be on the lookout for economically devastating attacks. Our enemy will be looking for gaps in the system where a small, cheap action–say, on an oil pipeline–will generate a tremendous return. It may not even make the evening news, except as a report on spiraling gas prices. Because of the open source nature of the enemy, they don’t all need to be smart. In fact, none of them need to be smart. They’ll just keep trying random acts until one really works, and then they’ll all copy it. That doesn’t take genius, just flexibility. Is this all just theoretical? No, it’s exactly what we’re seeing in Iraq, as their IEDs improve, their targeting abilities expand, and their networks become more invisible. But isn’t Iraq sui generis? Hardly. From Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Chechnya and beyond, it’s spreading. Right now, the West is not prepared for it, and worse, we never can be truly prepared. No one can predict what the next catastrophic attack will be, because even now it’s beyond the imagining of those who will perpetrate it.

What’s the solution? What Robb refers to as deep resilience. We need to make our economic and communication systems more decentralized.  If we can’t stop an attack in advance, we can mitigate it. Right now, we’ve left ourselves too open to attack, with all our resources too concentrated. A simple, successful attack in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, or New York could shut down the world’s oil, high-tech, or financial markets, costing millions. We have too few energy sources, too few shipping routes, too few companies making the components for all the things we need. Until Americans start seeing the world as John Robb does, we’ll spend all our resources preventing the last attack, rather than the next one. “

Robert Cox argues that conservatives are conceding control of the Internet at their peril

“It may not matter who manufacturers your radio since all points on the dial are equally accessible and the choice is tiny compared to the number of Web sites, but on the Internet, where popularity is often directly proportional to technological acumen and popularity, once achieved, breeds more popularity, who builds what means everything. ”

Source: When will the right recognize the cost of conceding Web 2.0?

Basic definition from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology:

the engineering of functional systems at the molecular scale. This covers both current work and concepts that are more advanced. In its original sense, ‘nanotechnology’ refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, high performance products.

Keywords: nanotechnogy, molecular manufacturing, grey-goo

Source: Center for Responsible Nanotechnology