Was the recent era THAT bad in terms of innovation? Will the next be different?

FEATURE: "Innovation Interrupted: During the last decade, U.S. innovation has failed to realize its promise--and that may help explain America's economic woes," by Michael Mandel, BusinessWeek, 15 June 2009.

ALMOST ON THE NEXT FRICKIN' PAGE IN THE SAME ISSUE!!: "Cloud Computing's Big Bag For Business," by Steve Hamm, BusinessWeek, 15 June 2009.

First piece with a good but depressing list of "disappointments," to include: cancer treatments, cloning, fuel-cell-powered cars, gene therapy, improved drug development, miniaturized silicon-based machines, satellite-based internet, speech technology and tissue engineering.

You can't blame the bulk of those disappointments on the cheap dollar or cheap gas (like you can with the fuel-cell-powered cars).

The argument here is that, outside of high-profile IT advances, innovation in the U.S. has really lagged in the last decade.

A lot of the problems, we are told, had to do with commercialization, meaning turning the technology into products that people wanted to buy.

A big clue on this failure: we now import more high-tech than we sell abroad, something that wasn't the case in the late 1990s. College-degree earners' wages have also not risen as one would expect in a great period of innovation, nor have death rates improved much--despite all the money spent on health care.

None of these indicators are perfect captures, but they all tell us something worth hearing, says the article: we are not maintaining our edge--by any stretch of the imagination.

Still, on almost the very next page, we're told that cloud computing, seemingly pushed by American innovation, will become the next big thing (shifting us from a network-centric paradigm to one centered on people and information). Then again, we're still talking that same narrow IT sector.

We shall see . . .

The discipline afforded by a global market is applied against the U.S. dollar--for the good

WORLD NEWS: "Malaysia, China Consider Ending Trade in Dollars," by Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 4 June 2009.

WORLD NEWS: "China Willing to Buy As Much as $50 Billion in IMF Bonds," by Andrew Batson, Wall Street Journal, 6-7 June 2009.

FRONT PAGE: "Rising Interest On Federal Debt May Sap Growth: Downside to Stimulus; Worldwide Borrowing by Governments Is a Cause of Concern," by Nelson D. Schwartz, New York Times, 4 June 2009.

The "phasing out" of the dollar that lots of countries are said to consider is driven by fears of inflation. It's a logical fear.

Thus all our calls for China to convert their currency are now being drowned out by Beijing's calls for a global currency based on more than just the dollar, arguing, with great validity, that that's just too much temptation for the American consumer to bear.

True. Of course, no such temptation over the past couple of decades and you can forget about China's "rise"--yes?

And the off-line argument about using yuan is a bit disingenuous, is it not, so long as the yuan is tied to the buck?

Still, all this signaling is good stuff and it needs to be done, whatever the risks for poisoning U.S.-Chinese trade relations, because all this government spending eventually starts to choke off non-public investments by gobbling up every loose bit of money out there, meaning too much stimulus has the opposite of the desired effect.

Scary to some, inevitable to others. Better this discussion than a host of others.

Iranian election aftermath

ANALYSIS: Muted Response Reflects U.S. Diplomatic Dilemma, By Scott Wilson, Washington Post, June 15, 2009

It'll be interesting to see how the U.S. gets definitive evidence of fraud independent from the losing candidate. Pretty tricky, and yet there was enough polling done this time to suggest the mullahs strenuously sought to avoid an either-or, second run-off election.

That alone tells us a lot: we are unlikely to get very far talking with Iran.

That's not an argument for not talking, because not talking + sanctions will accomplish even less, unless you think an isolated, pissed-off nuclear Iran is more appealing/handle-able than a more connected and more internally conflicted nuclear Iran is. Me? I see no reason to abandon or write off the Iranian people that casually.

As an aside, Romney's dumb-ass quote continues to mark him as a brand-dead partisan. No American president can--by some speech or willingness to talk--prevent an authoritarian regime from defrauding an election. John McCain would be in the same position, no matter what tough talk or threats he offered.

And no, Obama's Cairo speech didn't defeat Hizbollah in Lebanon, please.

Let's keep it far more real than that.

What hath America wrought

ARTICLE: America sneezes and the world is germ-free, By Anatole Kaletsky, (London) Times Online, May 28, 2009

Turns out to be a far more resilient global economy than imagined. Nice overarching piece that says, if America's grand strategy was to spread markets and globalization, then the result is we've created a global economy that's finally far bigger than ourselves.

And that is a very good thing.

(Thanks: jdongweck)

America's strange diversity

POST: Is Part of the United States in the Third World?, The Map Scroll, May 5, 2009

Anybody who's lived and traveled extensively around America and the world won't find this listing surprising. In fact, the "comparables" according to list proximity are often quite poetically matched.

Ah, but America is completely homogeneous, signaling the homogenizing future that is globalization.

Or maybe it's a multinational union where strange amounts of diversity persist!

Sri Lanka as pearl

ARTICLE: Chinese billions in Sri Lanka fund battle against Tamil Tigers, (London) Times Online, May 2, 2009

A natural and expected way in which China shrinks its neighboring Gap region.

No more "expansionistic" than the U.S. military bases scattered throughout southwest Asia. It's simply China's emerging version of an "open door" policy--as in, China aims to protect its route to Middle Eastern energy.

Just as the U.S. has for decades--with no apologies.

(Thanks: Louis Heberlein)

Drones and the Re-symmetricized Battlefield [link fixed]

The skyrocketing use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan has generated intense debate about how useful they are against insurgent/terrorist networks. Some prominent counterinsurgency experts have decried the "siege mentality" among non-combatant locals caused by collateral damage from the drone strikes. But despite the charge that drones represent a technology (i.e., a means) in search of a strategy (i.e., end goals), there's no question that: 1) drones are here to stay, and 2) they're truly re-symmetricizing the battlefield in a much-needed manner.

Continue reading Tom's New Rules post at WPR.

Ahmadinejad aftermath

ARTICLE: Ahmadinejad Vows New Start As Clashes Flare, By Thomas Erdbrink, Washington Post, June 14, 2009

That is an impressive first-round win that means: 1) the nuke program goes ahead; and 2) the Supreme Leader is nowhere near ready to reform the economy, so no desire to deal externally.

My hope had always been that this was a regime far enough along in understanding how screwed-up its economy is (USSR circa 84-86), but we are clearly still in the early 1980s/Brezhnevian clueless phase when belief in external enlargement of influence is held to be a strong counterweight to internal decline.

I would expect Tehran to offer more of the same. Ahmadnejad, I don't think, was promoted by the SL for any Nixon-like opening.

Hence, Israel is highly incentivized to attack this year.

Progress in Pakistan

ARTICLE: Gains in Pakistan Fuel Pentagon Optimism for Pursuing Al-Qaeda, By Joby Warrick and R. Jeffrey Smith, Washington Post, June 13, 2009

In retrospect, the Swat deal is looking better and better as the triggering mobilizer of serious Pakistan move into the FATA.

Jeffersonian India doesn't do cities well

FRONT PAGE: "Megacities Threaten to Choke India," by Patrick Barta and Krishna Pokharel, Wall Street Journal, 13 May 2009.

China seems very serious about getting its cities right, because it's actively encouraging the flow from rural to urban--very Hamiltonian. Screw that whole Maoist BS on the joys of being a peasant.

India, because it reifies the village and farmers (so Gandhian), doesn't seem to do cities that well, and yet it's accumulating mega-cities at a scary rate.

And believe me, plenty of slumdogs and plenty of millionaires (by number, India has the most in the world), but rarely do the two worlds meet, much less mesh well.

My one time in India (Mumbai) was eye-opening: so long as I stayed with the political elite, I could look everybody in the eye (I'm just 6'2" in shoes) and their skin tone was not much darker than mine. But head out among the masses and everyone is eight inches shorter and much darker in skin tone. It was stunningly clear that I was living in a highly segregated world.

What I like about China is the strange egalitarianism that still persists. Yes, China has its elite like everybody, but when you move about, everybody talks to everybody else with few apparent airs. It actually reminds me of the U.S. in that way.

China still dirtier, but working to clean up faster too

FRONT PAGE: "China Far Outpaces U.S. in Building Cleaner Coal-Fired Plants," by Keith Bradsher, New York Times, 11 May 2009.

China now uses more coal than the US . . . and Europe . . . and Japan . . . COMBINED!

So the great sinner is also the most prolific peddler of partial salvation: cleaner-burning coal plants.

While we debate, China builds at a rate of one per month.

No, not exactly leap-frogging in an aggregate sense, but yeah, leading the way in its own, particularly Chinese way.

The beginning of the monster age

FRONT PAGE: "In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein: Using Mail-Order DNA and Iguana Heaters, Hobbyists Brew New Life Forms; Is It Risky?" by Jeanne Whalen, Wall Street Journal, 12 May 2009.

This is an eye-opening glimpse into the future all right. As I like to note in briefs nowadays, most good science fiction today revolves around the same basic plot: the scary and wild West biological future arrives and it's too much for the political systems, so a scary corporatist authoritarianism has to arise (TR's stationary state?) because otherwise it's haves versus have nots and the "having" is all about drugs and biological products.

Anyway, it'll start in the garages.

It's not protectionism when we do it, it's simply antitrust enforcement

MARKETPLACE: "U.S. Signals More Scrutiny Of Mergers, Antitrust," by Elizabeth Williamson and Matthrew Karnitschnig, Wall Street Journal, 12 May 2009.

Just thinking back over the recent similar articles on China and how all that gets cast as protectionism when it doesn't seem anything of the sort when we pursue it.

Somebody educate me as to the fine differences.

AFRICOM can help nations punch at a higher weight

ARTICLE: Arms for peace: U.S., Brits give $9M in equipment to Tanzanians for peacekeeping in Darfur, By John Vandiver, Stars and Stripes, May 15, 2009

An example of AFRICOM's promise as a partnering/peace-enabling player on the continent.

(Thanks: Ricardo Marquez)

Swine fl(u/ight) precautions

The temperature drill on plane @ Shanghai.

The Chinese web-filter brouhaha

FRONT PAGE: "PC Firms Face China Decree: Beijing Is Set to Require Web Filter That Would Block Government-Censored Sites," by Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal, 8 June 2009.

TECHNOLOGY: "New China Web-Filtering Rules Still Murky: Researchers Caution 'Green Dam' Censorship Could Extend Beyond Pornographic Sites," by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Ben Worthen, Wall Street Journal, 9 June 2009.

WORLD NEWS: "China Reacts To Criticism Of Web Filter," by Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2009.

WORLD NEWS: "Tests Show Political Side of China Web Filter," by Loretta Chao, Wall Street Journal, 12 June 2009.

EDITORIAL: "China's Computer Folly," New York Times, 12 June 2009.

Interesting to talk to Chinese scholars about this during my recent Shanghai trip. Nobody seemed to think it was going to work very seriously long term.

The basic description:

China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.

Although not yet officially announced to the public, everybody I met seemed aware of it. The effort is allegedly designed solely to protect young Chinese from pornography--a very clever rationale.

The software doesn't have to be pre-installed. It can be sent along with the PC on a disk, giving users the choice to install. Hmm.

If installed, IT experts outside of China, having examined the software, say it could transmit personal info, screw up PCs, and expose them to easier hacking.

Nice.

The software is called "Green Dam-Youth Escort," and is likened by the government to parental controls on cable TV. The creator company says it is designed for parents to block certain sites.

Details:

The software works similarly to models long used by companies that sell security and parental-control software. Such programs come with a "black list" of Web sites that have previously been categorized as pornographic, violent, or containing hate speech, as well as words or combinations of words that appear on such sites.

Company founder says that the software could be used to block other content, but that the company has no reason to do so. The company, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, is a contractor to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

The Berkman Center at Harvard has tested the software and says that it does what it is designed to do, but that the list of blacked-out sites could be expanded by the company through updates delivered directly to the computer while online.

The list can also be expanded or decreased by users with password, sysadmin control, which logically isn't extended to kids, except by parents whose kids are smarter than they are about computers--a tiny minority at best.

The Chinese ministry in charge says users will have a choice whether to install or not, and that it won't be used to collect personal data, like every company in the U.S. does (nah, I can't see China's government stooping to such behavior).

Meanwhile, the "backlash in China has broadened from the initial outburst on online forums." China Youth Daily has already panned the idea. Damn kids.

Further testing by Berkman (12 June WSJ Chao piece) is said to show that the Green Dam data files "have a broad range of political content." Do tell. Naturally, your 6 better not be followed by a "-4." The software also appears to communicate with a centralized server.

Other tests at U Michigan say the software is perfect for rendering PCs as zombies.

The NYT, like me, remains unimpressed by the effort. The decision is described as "particularly self-destructive and foolish" WRT China's economic future, especially since it's not clear the software will work and not end up crashing a lot of computers. The PRC's government, the NYT points out, has already fielded a ton of recent accusations of incompetency.

Petraeus on Afghanistan

ARTICLE: Petraeus: 'Tough Months' Lie Ahead in Afghan War, By Ann Scott Tyson, Washington Post, June 12, 2009

Petraeus on the months ahead in Afghanistan.

Key bits:

Two-thirds of all the attacks in Afghanistan are concentrated in about 10 percent of the country's districts, areas where more than 20,000 new U.S. soldiers and Marines are flowing in to pursue insurgents and provide greater security for Afghans, Petraeus said at a conference here of the Center for a New American Security, a defense think tank.

The current troop buildup will increase the number of U.S. forces in Afghanistan from about 31,000 at the end of 2008 to 68,000 by the fall. The new forces include Marine and Army combat brigades as well as an Army aviation brigade that will double the number of helicopters available for missions in southern Afghanistan, he said.
The strategy draws upon, but does not attempt to duplicate, lessons from the troop "surge" in Iraq, where attacks have dropped from 160 a day at the peak of the fighting in 2007 to about 10 to 15 a day during the past six months, he said.

In one significant difference, Petraeus said that in combating the largely rural insurgency of Afghanistan, it will not be possible for U.S. forces to move into neighborhoods the same way they did in Iraqi cities.

"You don't live among the people in Afghanistan," he said. "First of all, there's no empty houses. Second, the villages particularly in the rural areas tend to be small." Instead, he said, U.S. troops will establish outposts on high ground from which they can oversee nearby villages as well as roads leading in and out.

This approach, which Petraeus called both "culturally and operationally correct," will reduce the likelihood that the presence of U.S. forces will draw the fighting into rural communities, which would lead to more civilian casualties.

So you see the similarities and the differences.

The review copy I would have welcomed

QUESTIONS FOR: "Robert Wright: Evolutionary Theology," by Deborah Solomon, New York Times Magazine, 31 May 2009.

THE TAKE: "Let's Talk About God: A new book redefines the faith debate," by Lisa Miller, Newsweek, 8 June 2009.

The only thing I want for Christmas is Robert Wright's "The Evolution of God."

My God! I just had the Discovery Channel send me 25 hours of their historical coverage of American warfare on the hope I'd write something on it. If DVDs are being passed around like so much candy, why hasn't anyone sent me an advance copy of Wright's book?

I whine.

I actually had the distinct pleasure, not long after Blueprint for Action came out, to sit down with Wright in Princeton (I believe my manager Jennifer set it up) and we had coffee and chatted for about an hour. I was deeply impressed with the guy, but then again, he had me at Nonzero, which I used in BFA.

Now he's got a book coming out that is sort of a response to attacks he received (from the religious and non-religious wings) regarding that book (that he was either going out of his way to ignore God or that he was working out a non-religious logic for intelligent design).

Some bits from the interview:

I don't think it's a coincidence that the new atheists really got traction in the years after 9/11. The rise of fundamentalism in Islam, but also in Christianity in America, has so highlighted the dark side of religion that people denouncing religion as a whole have a receptive audience . . .

Do you have to make Christianity sound like a pre-electronic Facebook? Institutions thrive when they can serve the interest of a bunch of people, and there's no reason to think the church is different. None of this is to say Paul didn't feel divinely inspired . . .

Well, I wind up arguing that the drift of history, however materially driven, has enough moral direction to suggest that there's some larger purpose at work, and I guess you can call that transcendence . . .

Southern Baptists don't fool around. At age 8 or 9, I chose to go to the front of the church in response to the altar call and accepted Jesus as my savior . . .

When did you begin to doubt? I think it was roughly sophomore year in high school. I encountered the theory of evolution, and my parents were creationists . . .

Do you have any insight into President Obama's spiritual life? No, except that he seems to have the self-assurance of someone who believes that God is on his side.

That can be dangerous. Thinking you're doing God's work is fine if you actually are serving humankind. And I think Obama has a better chance of doing that than most ....

From the review in Newsweek:

[Wright] argues that the scriptures of the three Abrahamic faiths were written in history by real people who aimed to improve things--economic, social, geographical--for their constituencies. But he never argues that what he calls a materialist view of scripture disproves God. Instead, he takes another approach: as our societies have grown more complex and more global, our conceptions of God have grown more demanding and more moral. This is a good thing, for religion "can help us orient our daily lives, recognize good and bad, and make sense of joy and suffering alike."

The best compliments I ever got on my books are, "You've written exactly what I've been thinking and arguing for years--just better organized than I could!" I love the compliment because it means I kept it accessible and real and tapped into logic already there.

I read this description of Wright's logic and I think anyone who's read Great Powers will sense the similarity in approach.

I really like Wright's combination of youth-born belief and adult skepticism and his desire to find some logic that connects the two in an acceptable manner.

I know some--hell, a lot of--people consider such philosophical attempts to be so much nonsense in this day and age, but I consider it a quintessential quest for any thinking person.

The Romanian scenario for the DPRK

WEEKEND JOURNAL: "How To Deal With a Dictator: North Korea's recent nuclear test is the regime's latest act of dangerous defiance," by Robert Joseph, Wall Street Journal, 6-7 June 2009.

Guy argues for a far tougher and more aggressive effort on the part of the U.S.

Why?

Kim Jong Il understands that the very survival of his regime, particularly as it transitions to his young heir, is dependent on his country being isolated. If he or his successor opens it up, they could well suffer the fate of Romania's Nicolae Ceausescu, who was deposed and executed in a violent overthrow following the collapse of communism. In fact, reports suggest that Kim was almost fixated as he watched those fatal events unfold in real time.

Kim is smart enough to be scared and he should be. China's security agencies spent some time in recent years interviewing key participants in Ceausescu's fall, to include Soviet KGB operatives who helped engineer it on Kremlin orders.

True, we could have a defense budget that's half as large--if all we did was defense

OPINION: "My Advice for Obama," by George McGovern, Wall Street Journal, 1 June 2009.

An old briefing bit of mine going back many years--the starting point of my "transaction strategy" argument. If all we wanted to do was "defend" America directly, that's a $200-300B job--max.

Why we spend twice that amount is because America's defense establishment became about more than just defending America decades ago. Allies were encouraged to outsource their Leviathan demand to us and burden-sharing was largely a joke.

Now, for a lot of structural and debt reasons, we've come to the end of that era; there's just no good reason for the U.S. to hog that function as it pertains to lower-end conflict and stability enhancement (the SysAdmin function, as I call it). There's just too many frontiers undergoing integration at one time. There's no logic in curtailing globalization's advance to this one great resource constraint.

McGovern, good soul that he is (and one helluva bomber pilot in WWII), recognizes the lower-end requirement and suitably begs off any upper-end responsibility, preferring to divert the resources to domestic spending.

My argument, as always, is that there is a logical balancing between caring only for ourselves and caring for the global security environment as a whole.

Why? No one really wants to find out what this world would look like without a clear Leviathan.