Thursday, June 7, 2012 at 12:00PM 
From the Economist.
Described as the UN buffer line, but you know it's the divide between two religions.
It's basically been that way since the middle of the last decade.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012 at 10:14AM 
Cool image, mildly interactive at the WSJ site, that lists "years of minerals in reserve, at current production rates."
Story prompted by recent media coverage over proposals to mine asteroids, the basic argument being that the seabed reserves are vast and far easier to mine - assuming the continuing advance of technology (a very good bet).
BHP Billiton, a giant in the extractive industry, says it feels there are "10,000 more years of minerals left for civilization" - a wonderfully expansive statement. We can probably agree that the estimates on the left are too small and "10,000 years" is probably too optimistic.
My sense is that we won't run out of useable/manipulatable stuff here on Earth prior to taking to space in a big way, but yeah, we'll use that as a more practical driver than sheer exploration. So eventually we'll reach a point where - cost-wise - it seems a better deal to go off-planet than continue going deeper in-planet.
In the meantime, industry execs will tell you that there is a "crustal abundance" layer in the Earth that has been truly explored and mined only to about the first half-mile. The entire "abundance" measures between 3 and 30 miles - on average around the planet. So clearly we've got a ways to go - even on land.
Still, it's always good to learn how to ride a motorcycle, stock up on leather clothes and Spam cans, and expect the Armaggeddeon. Heck, I know one religion that mandates it (at least the food part).
Tuesday, June 5, 2012 at 11:17AM 
From the Economist.
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin) reports that a record six fed fisheries are re-certified as healthy last year.
After a decade of similar progress, 86% of America's roughly 250 federally monitored commercial fish stocks were not subject to overfishing; 79% were considered healthy.
The lesson: don't let fishermen run things and - even more importantly - keep the idiot politicians out of the mix. Instead, the ones who do the best management are . . . the scientists.
More evidence of the sheer stupidity of US politics - and the GOP in particular:
And the politicians are still interfering. On May 9th the House passed legislation forbidding NOAA from developing an innovative means of apportioning fishing quotas, known as catch shares. These are long-term, aiming to give fishermen a stake in the future of their fisheries; market-based, since they can be traded; and, in practice, good for fish. Sadly, the two Republican congressmen behind the ban consider they have been designed “to destroy every aspect of American freedom under the guise of conservation”.
This borders on Know-Nothing stupid, which tells you that history can roughly repeat itself under similar circumstances. But it's dumb stuff like this that has kept us from ratifying the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), which is really starting to hurt us as the Antarctic opens up.
Really stupid. It's like banging your head against a brick wall with these people.
Monday, June 4, 2012 at 12:54PM FT story on Marubeni, the Japanese trading house, buying US grain trader Gavilon - a major corn trader.
Why buy it? China's recent forays into the US corn market suggest the rise of a similar long-term relationship as did early Chinese forays on soybeans years ago. China now regularly imports massive amounts of US soybeans. A similar long-term transactional relationship now seems in the works regarding corn. Marubeni already has an agreement with Sinograin, a state-owned Chinese company that manages the country's strategic food reserves.
Military strategists of varying levels of economic awareness imagine the US, Japan and China fighting naval battles over the South China Sea. Meanwhile, truly deep economic/resources dependencies - such as these in food - are cropping up all over the place.
Guess which relationships prevail?
And no, comparing this to globalization-cum-1914 is too ludicrous a notion to process. It isn't comparing apples to oranges; it's comparing apples to mammals.
BTW, growing up on the edge of the US corn belt (SW Wisconsin), this issue is near and dear to my heart.
Sunday, June 3, 2012 at 12:04AM As of 1600 EDT Saturday:
I will admit that focusing more on Battleland is actually reviving my desire to blog in general.
Saturday, June 2, 2012 at 12:05PM 
A Case For Military Intervention In Syria
June 2, 2012
Host Scott Simon talks with former Pentagon analyst Thomas P.M. Barnett about the pros and cons of a military intervention in Syria. Barnett has written in support of military intervention in Syria on Time Magazine's Battleland blog.
Friday, June 1, 2012 at 3:20PM 
Just taped via my iPhone and NPR's funky IT-Report Enterprise Edition app, where my end of the interview is taped on my iPhone and then uploaded to their site so I sound like I'm in the studio.
I love that app. Alternative in the past was to drive all the way into Indy to tape at the local PBS. Usually ended up being about two-hour affair.
This way I took boys for annual check-ups, got home about five minutes before taping and will have the whole file uploaded by 30 mins past when they called me (they actually don't call me; I log-in via wi-fi to their site via the app).
Subject is Syria and my recents posts at the Battleland blog (see below for links).
I was my usual intervention-mongering self.
Go here for details on tomorrow's show or to listen: http://www.npr.org/programs/weekend-edition-saturday/
I'm told: "It’s set to air tomorrow (Sat, 6/2) around 8:06am, after an interview with spokesman for the UN peacekeeping department."
That would be EDT, I am assuming.
Friday, June 1, 2012 at 11:20AM
Check out this New York Times story about President Obama speeding up waves of cyber attacks against Iran. I personally have no problem with this, and prefer it to Israel’s imagined missile strikes.
But just remember this when next you hear about other countries’ “unprecedented offensive cyber attacks against the U.S.”
Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.
Thursday, May 31, 2012 at 11:34AM
From a Washington Post piece describing “Plan X,” the Pentagon’s new push to develop cutting-edge offensive cyber weapons:
It makes sense “to take this on right now,” said Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency cyberdefense official. “Other countries are preparing for a cyberwar. If we’re not pushing the envelope in cyber, somebody else will.”
Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.
China, Iran, US Military, cyberwarfare | in Time's Battleland | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article Wednesday, May 30, 2012 at 9:45AM
Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times says that “diplomacy is still better than bombs” and that “moral outrage is just the starting point for a decision to intervene.” He then goes through all the major powers in his piece Tuesday and cites reasons why each one is either holding back or holding things up. It’s one of those great ass-covering op-eds that’s supposed to make you look smart when the intervention does comes and it — gasp! — leads to more death and destruction.
Let me tell you why great powers intervene: they don’t care about moral outrage and they don’t care about stopping the killing. Moral outrage is a headline and nothing more, while the killing is either made faster or slower but never really “prevented.”
Great powers intervene when they can. It’s as simple as that. Good and bad don’t play into it.
Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.
Tuesday, May 29, 2012 at 11:34AM
Nice Washington Post piece on Saturday about how the “center of gravity” in global oil exploration and production is shifting to the Western hemisphere. No, the bulk of global conventional oil reserves still sits in the Persian Gulf, but the larger point is worth exploring: we no longer project global futures where East and West logically fight over Middle East energy reserves. Those expected long-term dynamics are collapsing right now before our eyes.
Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.
Sunday, May 27, 2012 at 12:01AM 
Tower Terrace seats, close to the Finish Line, and behind Pit Row (which means we are inside the track). Twenty-seven rows up, which is ideal for getting some perspective.
Wife got em in a raffle, so they go to me and my eldest son - the only two in the family able to withstand the near-100-degree heat over a VERY long day.
Should be fun, though.
Never been.
ADDENDUM: Hottest 500 ever - temp-wise, but we did well by hydrating throughout and covering up from the sun. Second record set: most lead changes ever. This was ascribed to the new car design that makes sling-shotting much easier to do.
Saturday, May 26, 2012 at 11:43AM 
Peggy Noonan interview in the WSJ today:
Before rallies and town meetings, Mr. Romeny always tries to have private, off-the-record meetings with voters. "I sit down with five or six couples or individuals and just go around the table, and I ask them to tell me abou their life. And the stories I hear suggest a degree of anxiety which is not reflected in the statistics."
More than anything else right now, what I sense when I travel the country giving speeches (Dallas two days ago) is that people don't think their kids will have better lives than they have had, and that is a fundamental shift in US thinking.
Subjective, yes? But subjective matters in elections.
Saturday, May 26, 2012 at 10:55AM 
A Muslim Brotherhood candidate versus a holdover from the old regime.
This is the essential question for the Egyptian public: stick with what they know or let the Islamists try to do better with the economy.
In the end, you want them to choose the Islamists, because the same old, same old won't work any better than the Mubarek version did. The trick is, the military needs to let this experiment run itself out.
Yes, there are many in the West that see a Muslim Brotherhood taking over the Middle East. This sort of overwrought hysteria is not useful. We've seen several would-be national liberation movements link up regionally over time, but as any of them get actual opportunities to rule, expect them to be total nationalists who completely backburner any alleged transnational solidarity.
This is not a new dynamic (nor a new misdiagnosis by the strategic community in the West): we've seen it throughout history.
But, in the end, letting the Islamists try-and-either-fail-or-succeed is essential to the Arab Spring process, and since that dynamic is overwhelmingly characterized by the empowerment of Sunni masses, that means the MB now face their moment in the sun.
Again, the Brotherhood can either meet this overwhelmingly economic challenge and succeed (the Erdogan dynamic in Turkey) or they can go all social conservative and self-destruct just like the GOP here in the fiscally f--ked-up States.
Friday, May 25, 2012 at 12:03AM 
WSJ story on how India and Pakistan came to recent - and reviving - agreement on pipeline to connect India to Afghanistan and Turkmenistan beyond (so-called TAPI pipeline for the countries linked). This is in addition to the proposed pipeline linking Pakistan to Iran (terminating in Karachi).
The trans-Afghan pipeline project is much-delayed, despite US backing, but it gets a new breath of life with this agreement, which, of course, now unfolds against the backdrop of NATO's accelerating departure. Naturally, the US wants the Iranian pipeline to fail, but I think it's positive if both succeed. Both India and Pakista are starved for natural gas.
In both instances, don't expect Westerners to invest, due to security concerns, but such things don't necessarily stop Chinese and Indian money.
And that is how it should be - and should have been all along.
Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 12:03AM 
WSJ story on how wearable glasses become the new computer interface.
A couple of generations after that (or maybe faster), all this hardware goes inside - and simultaneously losese its metal and becomes biological in content. Once you can surf the web from within your head, all sorts of fun and bad stuff follows, as hacking becomes its own threat of mind control. But people will augment their own bodies because that's the next evolution.
That reality, combined with nanotechnology allowing for more and more nets to be interwoven with our landscapes, is the primary reason why I don't see a future where such technology is housed within "serving" robots who, per the sci-fi genre, eventually turn on us. I think that whole concept is misguided.
That's not to say that robots won't matter, because they will in all sorts of ways. They just won't infantilize us by their presence, and they won't be the receptical for the really intimate technologies, which we will take into our bodies.
Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 10:54AM 
Interesting FT half-pager a bit back on how Beijing's plans for carbon trading are "attracting interest from around the world." Especially interesting to me because back when I did the NewRuleSets work with Cantor Fitzgerald and that company had just started its carbon trading subsidiary, they were very interested in using our environmental "economic security exercise" to start influencing Chinese thinking on the subject (alas, the Chinese reps were denied visas because this was the EP-3 "spy plane" timing in the summer of 2001).
Anyway, here we are, years later, and the Chinese may well revive an industry that's been faltering in the West.
I will admit, I haven't studied things enough here to understand why the carbon cap-and-trade mechanisms haven't worked the same magic as the NoX and SoX versions that Bush the Elder passed. Actually, I think I used to know why there was a difference and I just have forgotten it.
The point of the piece: despite the sluggishness of the carbon markets in the West, there is now great hope that a Chinese success in this realm could revive things globally. China is indeed aiming for a national model that begins with pilot projects in seven major cities. Word is China will be shooting for much lower targets than even California.
The downside, of course, is, if it doesn't work in China - biggest CO2 emitter in the world, then who cares about side efforts in Australia, South Korea, California and Quebec (recent adoptees)? The biggest market sits in Europe, and its success has been so-so.
And that alone is what attracted my attention back in 2001 and today: the notion that something so profoundly global hinges on a good effort from China. But this is the world we helped created and it's most definitely the world we will live with going forward.
This is the part that I don't think the US national security establishment has a clue about - still. We are engaged in this "strategic pivot" that claims bigger fish are to be fried in East Asia than in Southwest Asia/Middle East. I think this is a terribly misguided reading of history and globalization. Globalization has "won" in East Asia, and now we're ironing out the details - to include China's inevitable democratization (along Chinese lines, mais oui). But in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, the globalization struggle is in high gear.
So, in my opinion, the bigger-fish-to-fry argument is all wrong. Yes, we have bigger fish to fry in East Asia - it just ain't about warfare, despite the vigorous (and patently backward) efforts of players on all sides to keep that the primary issue.
But don't kid yourself: the great "strategic pivot" to East Asia is more about the Pentagon finding a budgetary floor than about genuine requirements (easily met through arms exports and a certain enduring presence). It is a Beltway snowjob of glorious dimensions - the kind of thing the Boomers are geniuses at pursuing and promoting.
Monday, May 21, 2012 at 8:58AM This NYT story today really jumped out at me, and the Chinese just bought, in a signature Foreign Direct Investment move, the second-biggest movie chain in the US:
The Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate with extensive interests in the entertainment business, has agreed to acquire AMC Entertainment, North America’s second-largest movie theater owner, in a deal that is valued at $2.6 billion, including roughly $2 billion in assumed debt, the companies said Sunday.
David Gray/Reuters
Gerardo I. Lopez, AMC’s chief executive, left, exchanged documents with Zhang Lin, vice president of the Wanda Group, during a ceremony in Beijing on Monday.
The acquisition creates the world’s largest theater group, the companies said. It also represents a significant expansion of Chinese influence in the American film industry. The industry has been looking to China for a vast new reservoir of ticket buyers for Hollywood movies, while joining Chinese investors to produce films like the planned “Iron Man 3” and teaming up to build studio facilities and a new Disney theme park in China.
The usual motives apply: Chinese firm looking for know-how in an industry that's booming across China but isn't being as monetized as it could be - by Western standards. For the US company, a crucial sub-plot emerges a few paras down the story:
In addition to the $2.6 billion value assigned to AMC’s debt and equity in the deal, Wanda is expected to invest $500 million for what the companies called “strategic and operating initiatives.” Mr. Wang said that the money would generally be used for renovation and other needs, but that specifics were up to Mr. Lopez and his team. Mr. Lopez said there was no plan in place for the money. But, he said, it might be used to retire debt, acquire new theaters or fix up old ones.
To me, this is a very positive development, and it's one we're going to read about countless times over the next decade. And yes, it will look and feel like Japanese money "buying up everything!" across America in the late 1980s/early 1990s.
But, of course, America has "suffered" these invading waves of FDI throughout our long history as a multinational economic union. Chinese money will be just as good and useful as those of the other countries that preceeded it, and the further intertwinning of our economies will mitigate the craziness out of the Beltway crowd as they pine for a "near peer" competitor to justify the dropping floor of the defense budget.
You know, the Chinese were going to be the featured villain in the remake of "Red Dawn," but then Hollywood realized they'd be shutting themselves out of the Chinese box office, so they subbed in the North Koreans, which - of course - makes the film a complete and utter fantasy. But it just goes to show you what all this financial connectivity leads too - cooler heads prevailing everywhere save among those fiercely dedicated fear-mongers in DC.
China, FDI, US, global economy, media | in Citation Post | Email Article | Permalink | Print Article Sunday, May 20, 2012 at 9:37AM 
Economist story on U Cal-Riverside prof, Sonja Lyubomirsky, looking at World Value Survey, which gathers vast amounts of polling data from people all over the world.
She looked at US answers to four particular questions:
What was interesting is that children corresponded to significantly more happiness for men, but not for women.
The prof then followed up with several hundred more NorthAm volunteers to whom she gave pagers. Controlling for all the usual aspects, she would ring them randomly and give them a sort of happiness poll. She did this to control for nostalgia among older subjects (i.e., they remember the child-rearing more fondly later than at the time they did it). She found that her data supported the World Values Survey completely:
Parents claimed more positive emotion and more meaning in their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis revealed that this enhanced enjoyment came from activities which involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone, or cooking) that did not.
The Economist's conclusion is rather interesting as well:
It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological mechanism to keep them in the family.
Women, it is surmised, don't need this additional tether.
I will attest to all of this. I work away all day at a table just off our kitchen (only place my Skype works consistently in our house), and it's mostly solitary labor.
Then, at the end of the day, I run with my son Jerry and daughter Vonne Mei, pushing the two youngest girls in a buggy. Eldest daughter home from college roller-blades alongside. Then Jerry and I usually toss football and talk NFL for a bit. Then I pull the girls on my bike and ride with Vonne Mei to a gas station about 2&1/2 miles away for candy. After dinner, I often rebraid Metsu and Abebu's hair, and then we'll watch a movie together.
My work day is mostly exertion and tension, my after-workday is mostly fun and enjoyment. If I do just the first and skip the second, Jack becomes a dull boy.
