Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 11:59AM Tom will be on Hugh Hewitt's radio show tomorrow night.
Looks like you'll be able to go to Hugh's Talk Radio Online page to listen on the Internet.
Or go to this page to (maybe) find where to listen locally.
Tom thinks he'll be on around 6:20 or 6:35 pm.
Be sure to tune in!
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 11:56AM Pretty sure this is our first Trackback in Italian.
And when he calls his weblog The Right Nation, he's not kidding (judging from the banners).
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 5:46AM ARTICLE: The Bishop from Beijing: Rome must be wary of China’s meddlesome puppet priests, By Doug Bandow, The National Review, January 4, 2007
Good story on the struggle of the Catholic Church in China. As I wrote near the end of BFA, China is on the pathway to once again becoming a very religious society.
This naturally scares the Party, especially given China's long history of "cults" (as pretty much all religions are called officially) triggering political unrest (good example, the Boxers).
The Party fears religions for the same reasons it fears the Interent: uncontrollable horizontal connectivity that can theoretically be mobilized against the state.
This thing works itself out in the end, though. As China's consumeristic middle-class grows and demands more protection from an arbitrary state, freedom of religion enters that dialogue. It does so because, as Chinese move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, they naturally want more spirituality in their lives.
China's religious scene is already too diverse for the Party to try and co-opt one "official faith" (the sad problem of the Middle East--including Israel), but the CCP may well try that path eventually.
But expect the CCP to continue to try and control church leadership selections (like it does with Catholics). Will this grant them control over the faithful? Didn't work for the dictatorial John Paul II with American Catholics (okay, most American Catholics), so why would we expect it to go any better with Beijing?
Religion is about group control only in hard economic times. Once you go from Gap to Core, then it becomes increasingly about individual fulfillment.
That's the Pope's problem with Americans.
That's Israel's problem with its secular, post-Zionist citizenry.
And that'll be Beijing's problem with Christianity eventually.
Thanks to Rod Montgomery for sending this.
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 5:33AM I wrote this in response to an email from a supporter of Israel who believes I'm getting the story all wrong on Israel and Carter's book and who's trying to correct my perceived mistaken analysis by sending me critiques of Carter's book.
My reply indicates that I'm taking a rather orthogonal approach to the usual Israeli-Arab conflict description, by focusing on Israel's problem of trying to maintain the racial identity of its state in a globalizing world. My reply:
The point I make in supporting Carter's argument (versus the book in whole) is that defining a nation by race and preserving that character through systematic discrimination is not viable in a globalizing world.
Won't work for anybody (and plenty of other nationalities feeling the same fear as Jews on this subject--all over the planet). The only reason why it matters more with Israel is the overlapping claims to the territory, which makes the argument for a race-majority state harder to sell.
Plus, the endemic conflict with the squatters (Palestinians) who simply won't give up, especially after winning partial control over Gaza and the West Bank. Otherwise, this story is no more unique or fantastic than the plights of Latvians, or countless indigenous nationalities getting squeezed the world over.
It all boils down to this question: can anybody become a full citizen of your state? Or are they restricted by reasons of race and/or religion?
If any state's answer rationalizes the second choice, then there is a fundamental falsehood associated with the state's definition of liberty.
This isn't an argument won by rehashing the original rationale for the creation of Israel. That story also isn't particularly unique in its long tale of immense suffering--just the concentrated scale of murdering associated with it (and the amazing documentation of it). Look the world over, and you will find similarly sad tales of targeted ethnic cleansing leading to lengthy and often successful efforts at national self-determination (for example, does any nationality deserve its own nation right now more than the Kurds?).
My argument is about what Israel can or cannot survive as--state-wise--in a future, increasingly globalized world. France can't survive or thrive in that future as just white French, unless it discriminates consistently to maintain that end. If it does that, the Paris riots are only the beginning and soon enough France will stop resembling a democracy as we define it. Israel's problem is not different from that, nor is Japan's, with it's rapidly aging demographics, nor Ireland's, which for the first time in its modern history is grappling with non-European immigrants.
Eventually France will have a north African-descent leader. Eventually Ireland will have a non-Irish one. Eventually Japan will have a non-Japanese one (after all, they gave Peru one). Soon enough America will have a Hispanic one.
And eventually Israel must have an Arab one, or it must chose to systematically prevent that pathway from emerging.
In all of these countries and in every country, many will argue that losing that original racial-religious core dominancy will "ruin" the country, because, in all such cases, the country began precisely to protect that identity.
Israel argues a special status for its case. I think that argument holds up well in the 20th century, but will get lost in the shuffle of the plethora of similar claims arising--the world over--in the 21st.
So, again, comparing to the US or any state with a dominant race doesn't work. What matters is how that state seeks to preserve that dominance and why. European-descent whites will be in the collective minority is the US within my lifetime--unless we make laws to prevent it. But I don't want to live in a US that is forced down the path of such discrimination, so I accept that America will be increasingly Latinized, no matter how much the Anglo-Protestants don't like that.
Israel faces a similar demographic squeeze with non-Jews, which will inevitably outnumber Jews in Israel within our lifetimes, unless Israel takes extraordinary steps to prevent that. I think Israel is taking and will continue to take those steps (much as many Israelis yearn for a post-Zionist identity to emerge, believing peace is impossible without it--something I agree with), and in that path lose much of its democracy and thus support from the United States.
That's my call, or my analysis. Offering it doesn't mark me one way or the other regarding Jews or Israel. It means that's simply the way I see it. Carter's book, with its many flaws, does force that conversation and those realizations more out into the open, and that's a good thing for everyone--including Israel.
Demgraphics is destiny. Pretending otherwise in inadvisable.
Thanks for the note.
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 3:25AM ARTICLE: Intelligence Chief Is Shifted to Deputy State Dept. Post, By MARK MAZZETTI, New York Times, January 4, 2007
On Negroponte's shift to State: to me this is desperate cannibalizing of talent that should not be moved. What Negroponte has begun in the IC has the potential to revolutionize everything there, and frankly, that should matter more than this administration's current myopic fixation on Iraq. Bush is neglecting the Long War by focusing too much on this one battle, giving us a presidency more trapped by circumstances than other since Nixon.
Our only hope in this shift (which I do not see correcting any significant imbalance in the correlation of bureaucratic forces on the subject of Iraq: so Condi's got Negroponte, Cheney's still Cheney), is that McConnell's past working relationship with Gates positions him well to keep the pile moving at DNI.
Thursday, January 4, 2007 at 3:15AM ARTICLE: N. Korea escalates 'cult of Kim' to counter West's influence: In a time of famine and poverty, nearly 40 percent of the country's budget is spent on Kim-family deification, By Robert Marquand, The Christian Science Monitor, January 03, 2007
Great piece that highlights the crucial difference between Iran's soggy authoritarianism and North Korea's over-the-top Stalinist totalitarianism.
The former is breachable by the soft kill of connectivity, but the latter is too determined to topple slowly, because it's so brittle and so top-heavy that when the emperor is finally seen in his nakedness, this thing collapses much like Ceausescu's Romania.
Naturally, Kim will do everything in his power to prevent any such slippery slope from beginning, and this article points out his extreme willingness to do just that: as famine still ravages parts of the countryside, 40 percent of the visible (we're only guessing at the take from his vast criminal enterprises) government budget is now spent on maintaining and expanding the Kim cult of personality (actually not that much beyond Stalin, as many just never realized how vast that cult became by his death in 1953). In 1990, the cult share of the budget was one-fifth. Now it's 40 percent.
Kim has no future in any Korea other than this one dominated by his cult, which is why we won't be able--in all likelihood--to talk him down (now the Chinese...). Instead, we'll likely need to force him out (and the Chinese...) and there all this cultism works in our favor. No need to de-Baathify or de-Nazify. Just get rid of the man on top.
It isn't quite realized [in the West] how much a threat the penetration of ideas means. They [Kim's regime] see it as a social problem that could bring down the state," says Brian Myers, a North Korean expert at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea.
Kim's replacement of the party with the military as his main structure of regime support, combined with the new reliance on religous tie-ins and racial superiority, say to me that the meltdown scenario with Kim, where he takes as many of us as he can when he realizes it's all falling apart, is very real.
It's not that I don't think the soft-kill option can ultimately work on Kim, it's that I fear too much that route can only end badly, as in war triggered and nukes flying.
Thus with Kim, but not with Iran, I see the need for some preemptive action by the most incentivized player--China.
History will, I believe, judge us primarily on the possibility of this desired scenario and what we did--or did not do--to make it happen in a timely fashion.
Thanks to Wesley Fredericks for sending this.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 3:14PM ARTICLE: "War Costs, Loosely Defined: Pentagon Measure Stretches Concept of Emergency Spending," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal 3 January 2007, p. A5.
When big defense contractors start stuffing in small buys and extra funding for ongoing development programs (like ballistic missile defense) in supplementals, some smell a feeding frenzy, and certainly, there are elements of that. Oversight on these bills is limited, because the main subject is ongoing operations, not all the extras stuffed in, so inappropriate stuff (like those ballistic missiles we're using in Iraq?) slips by.
But I smell something more long term and profund. Everyone inside the Pentagon knows that budgetary spending will level off--by necessity--with whoever follows Bush (Mr. I-care-not-about-budget-deficits), and as we move out of Iraq, so will the opportunity for emergency spending. That combination, along with an inevitable and much needed shift in long-term spending from air assets to ground assets, or from smart weapons to smart soldiers, means the current squeezing of the "out years" (beyond the current stated plans, typically presented in five-year increments) is likely to grow worse with time. The losers in this struggle wil naturally call it a "procurement holiday," but the beneficiaries will call is matching assets to the environment.
Either way you want to describe it, I see this as another sign that the big programs are in greater danger, so contractors are grabbing what they can from the supplementals in the meantime to get as much produced as possible before cuts come, or to push programs along far enough as to make them harder to kill when the time logically comes.
This is a game being played in many dimensions.
Wednesday, January 3, 2007 at 11:30AM Some mental health time, a lot of personal strategic planning, and then there's the weekly column (Enough of the hedgehog, bring on the fox).
Getting back into the gear, though, especially as the children disappear again to school (God love 'em!).
The quiet time did me much good though. I clearly needed to recharge the batteries.
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 12:29PM Netscape's new Digg-esque home page is new to me. The important thing is Weblogs can push the intelligence community is on there right now. Here's the link to the entry itself. Thanks to okitech for putting us up there.
If you've got a Netscape login, please go over and vote for this post. Heck, maybe you're even willing to create a login to vote (but then you'd be going even beyond me ;-)
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 7:46AM Well, I don't have everything the way I want it yet, but that's probably a permanent condition ;-)
Comments are now back on. Please do read the comment policy if you haven't before. I will quote it below for your convenience ;-)
Happy New Year.
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[Moving down from latest and greatest to oldest and least ;-)]
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Monday, January 1, 2007 at 6:40AM ARTICLE: "Middle Stance Emerges In Debate Over Climate: Scientists Espouse Measured Response," by Andrew W. Revkin, New York Times, 1 January 2007, p. A16.
Great opening sequence:
Amid the shouting lately about whether global warming is a human-caused catastrophe or a hoax, some usually staid climate scientists are speaking up.
The discourse over the issue has been feverish since Hurrican Kattrina. Seizing the moment, many environmental campaigners, former Vice President Al Gore and some scientists have portrayed the growing human influence on the climate as an unfolding disaster that is already measurably strengthening hurricanes, spreading diseases and amplifying recent droughts and deluges.
Conservative politicians and a few scientists, many with ties to energy companies, have variously countered that human-driven warming is inconsequential, unproved or a manufactured crisis.
A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.
They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging...
Many in this camp seek a policy of reducing vulnerability to all climate extremes while building public support for a sustained shift to non-polluting energy sources.
Make that last sentence "least polluting" or "less polluting" and you've got me sold, because then you're just stating the obvious trend of the past half millennium--that of humanity moving progressively "down" the hydrocarbon chain (wood to coal to oil to gas to ...). This was our basic operating concept when Bradd Hayes and I put together the "economic security exercise" on environmental challenges in Asia with Cantor Fitzgerald back in the spring of 2001, which set the stage for our last NewRuleSets.Project conference atop World Trade Center 1 in June of that year.
Our operating premises were: 1) there's no turning back the enlargement of the global economy (the rising New Core); 2) that New Core's rising energy consumption would shape global foreign direct investment for decades (our first two workshops on energy and FDI); 3) that growth would send both regional pollution (the sort we've basically conquered) and global pollution (the CO2) jumping; 4) following our cap-and-trade schemes on regional pollution, Asia would logically surmount its problems (like all developed states before it), but in that growth trajectory, new opportunities would arise for solution sets to deal with global pollution problems, with global warming (the driver of the game) providing the impetus; 5) and that solution set would logically lie somewhere between the extreme positions of panic and denial (already clearly in view by 2001).
We had a great workshop, which, quite frankly, I never wrote the final report on, because just as I started briefing the results, 9/11 intervened and killed the project for all practical purposes. We had the head of the international UN climate change group, execs from major energy firms, and senior researchers from big environmental groups.
We played a game that predates Bjorn Lomborg's "Copenhagen Consensus" effort, basically using "Survivor" to vote off environmental problems in order of proportional plausibility of response-versus-apparent gain. Like Lomborg's current work, global climate change came in last place, with the winning spot going to clean water, followed by marine habitat, then land loss from population growth, then deforestation and diversity loss, and then acid rain/global climate change (there were two ties).
What was interesting about the ranking?
The ones that came out on top were the ones most currently (and in the near-term future) affecting the New Core (especially India and China).
What that told me was that the New Core would likely set the new rules on this subject, and that the serious roadblock in that emergence of--and the Old Core's cooperation with, and encouragement of--a suitable global rule set would be the wildly divergent discussion here on the subject: a debate of extreme positions.
Once the middle ground began to emerge, I believed serious cooperation with the New Core would be possible. I see that middle ground finally emerging, and it's timing couldn't be better, so long as generational shifts in leadership continue apace in both the West and the New Core East.
To me, then, this is very positive news. The faster we break down East-West mistrust, the faster the appropriate solution sets emerge on the environment.
So when I argue for Sino-American alliance, I argue not just in terms of preventing the loss of lives on our side in this Long War, but the preservation and betterment of life long-term. Put the U.S. and China together and you have the ultimate head-and-body superpower, capable of tackling the world's biggest problems in the context of shared vulnerabilities and desires (not the same values, mind you). Put them at odds because that's the only world your upbringing allows you to imagine, and watch the opportunities for positive global change evaporate in the same stupid stew that we were subjected to by the European empires over the past 500-plus years.
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 4:27AM POST: The Blogosphere at War
With so much uproar over Joe Rago's op-ed condemning blogs in the WSJ, this is an interesting and well-reasoned (albeit implicit) reply. Not Wretchard's ambition, I suspect, but that's how I read it.
What Wretchard describes is essentially the competition the unclassified blogs are already offering the classified world of the intelligence community, which is why the IC is replicating this function from within (problem being, it's still the same isolated, self-selecting community inside the IC, just armed with different conversation tools).
Can the same be said about the blogosphere? Sure. It's just a bigger and more diverse community, far more so than even the world of MSM journalism (also highly insular and self-selecting).
That opponents already actively target this realm says several things: 1) the blogosphere is more immediate and responsive than the IC to both pulsing from without and self-correction on bad analysis (the blogosphere is nothing if not cruelly self-critical,and gleefully so); 2) this gap is likely to widen, thus making the blogosphere the more natural target for information operations (which means we should meet this challenge symmetrically, and yes, the IC considers this option very seriously, but I suspect it will be terrible at it (and already is) for all the usual cultural reasons (it's just not the personality they attract, not in the individual skills, but in the confident capacity to act en masse, although a generational shift within the IC may fix that with time); and 3) shaping hearts and minds goes both ways (an essential reality of 4GW).
Many in the U.S. national security establishment will want to go symmetrical on this score, but I think that would be a mistake and probably fruitless. I believe the blogosphere will evolve and grow in such way as to allow it to handle this field of perceptions battle quite nicely, making it within a decade or so to be more important than the IC itself in the Long War.
Thanks to Lexington Green for sending this.
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 4:25AM Great to beat the Bears, reinforcing their lack of a championship QB in such spectacular fashion, also extending his personal mastery of the Big Cubs at Soldier's Field.
I expect Favre back another season, and I expect to be in my seat for the second home game when he passes Marino's TD career mark of 420.
Again, Happy New Year.
Monday, January 1, 2007 at 3:31AM + The Moderate Voice linked The mother of all Gap takedowns?
+ Dean Barnett of Hugh Hewitt's web site, links Tom as a good source for opinion on military sizing.
+ Chris Vadnais links Tom as the website he checks when he wants objective information.
+ I, Hans links Good article on the damage created by our ag subsidies
+ Dave Porter linked A system perturbed is a rule-set awakened and also linked China's motives: sane as ours.
+ So did Draconian Observations.
+ Valley Jew linked Saddam is dead (but who benefits?).
+ Seat 1A links Tom as one of his 12 favorite weblogs.
+ nosuchblog linked USA nails the ISG, ISG charade and Big change from very small base.
+ Two more column sightings
TimesDaily.com (Northwest Alabama)
The Cincinatti Post
