When people offer to help on the adoption

Simplest and best route is to offer to buy supplies for the orphanages involved.

My spouse Vonne suggests the following:

The ideal donations are new, long-lasting clothes like Hanna Anderson, sizes 80-140 cm. Lands' End also has long-lasting kids clothes (to be bought in the same size range).   No winter clothes, just the summer variety.

An important donation to improve the medical diagnostic process would be stethoscopes and/or otoscopes like the Littman Master Classic II Stethoscope and the Pro-Fiberoptic LED Otoscope (Amazon links).  

If you want to help us out, the process would be to buy them directly yourself and ship them to us (c/o Barnett Consulting LLC, PO Box 970, Franklin IN 46131). We'd then carry them over in our luggage on either the early-mid June or early-mid July trips, dispensing them to the orphanages via our highly-reputable agency.

I'll put this post on the FAQ page as well.

Thanks to anyone who chooses to pitch in.

Feel like look-and-feel finally set

The tale goes as follows:

I start with the "empire" template (don't even comment on that . . .) and first thing I do is create the banner in PPT, using the map, the two globes figure and my fave portrait of me.  Going back to layout design, I decide for wide main column sided by two nav bars where I'll put all widgets (search, archives, Twitter, etc), and top nav bar under the header.  I saved original banner as tiff file (mistake) and eventually shifted to PNG with help of Bradd Hayes.  Over time I cut the pixel width down to 800, which is max size suggested by Squarespace for any web image.  Original one was 1248, and I think the size was mucking up some presentations for people (hoping that's fixed).  I made everything originally to fit my big iMac screen, but now have it shrunk down to point where it comes up on my 13" MacBook with about 1 inch grey margins on each side.  Looks good also on my smart phone (BB Storm).

When I get banner down to 800px today, it was aligned left on page and looked off-center.  After a support ticket query, I was able to center by maxing the internal pad on the left, and then maxing the border and making both the same color, which I approximated to match the bulk of the landforms in the map on the right.  The border approximated the blue ocean on the globes.

Once I got the basic look and feel of the front page set, I imported the old blog.  By doing so, I automatically created a "journal" (blog) inside the site.  When I started making up new posts within the site, I unthinkingly created a second journal.  I have since merged them so the archives would be whole--and singular.  I did this by reclassifying the 50 or so posts as belonging to the larger, archived blog journal, and then I renamed that "globlogization" (it was originally called "imported-20100505########/"--a truly charming URL).  I have since created two additional "hidden" journals (not appearing on the top navigation bar):  one for my Blueprint for Action htm-pages-turned-now-into-simple-posts and one for my Naval War College project pages-now-being-turned-into-posts.  I will likely create one for media, the New Map book, and ultimately for Vonne's poetry (which I made into a series of hidden pages).  Ultimately, I want as few pages as possible and to put as much as possible in hidden journals.  Size doesn't matter much here (except in pricing) because it's all cloud computing (for example, all of my old images are now stored in this manner).

Style-wise, I did make almost everything too big at first (some complaints), which--again--was superb on my big-screen iMac at home but bad on my small laptop.  Scrunching things down a bunch, I've now decided on 16pt text for the body, 14pt for all links (a compromise, because I'm simultaneously sizing the ones in the navigation bars and the posts' body), 28pt for post titles and most everything else (small stuff on margins) 12 pt.  Only two fonts used:  Times New Roman for titles and section headers and Lucida for everything else.  Putting the banner aside, only five colors are used (besides the background white):  

1. True black for top nav bar background, Twitter background, day banner background and basic post text
2. A dark, navy-ish blue for post titles
3. A slightly purplish blue for all links, date-stamp on posts and sundry post details at bottom, plus all borders and underlines and dark backgrounds
4. A dark grey (matching for side background panels) for all highlighted (and backgrounded) text.
5. An off-white for all text that's highlighted by dark backgrounds and for all light backgrounds.

So, basically black, white, grey and blue--sticking with the empire template but altering the colors slightly and then making them uniform throughout (amazing how many little formats you have to alter for true consistency throughout).   So if you forget the extra color in the banner and stipulate that you'll have black and white as basics, the site is really blue and grey, my two favorites colors.

Actually, come to think of it, my entire dress wardrobe (setting aside ties) basically equates to the site's color scheme, right down to the rare use of the tannish brown.

Once I figured out how to do backgrounds for the quoted text, I ditched the terrible idea of italicizing them instead.  I really prefer a light color background, especially when you excerpt at length.

So, that's my story and I'm sticking to it--unless my Aunt Mary still has problems reading the blog on her WebTV, but I'm hoping that's fixed now that I got the banner down to max suggested width.

A conversation joined: I reply to Ian Bremmer's response to my review of "The End of Free Markets"

My original review at WPR triggered Ian's request to cross posts for the obvious reason that he's trying to generate as much buzz as possible about his book, The End of Free Markets:  Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations?  Gist of my review:  Bremmer delivered more a solid defense of free markets and less a celebration of state capitalism than implied by his title, which I found highly misleading--but a clever packaging of current fears by his publisher.

Here's Ian's post Tuesday at "The Call" (Foreign Policy.com) :

On Thursday, my new book makes its debut. It's called The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War Between States and Corporations? Here's the book in a nutshell:

A generation ago, the collapse of communism made clear that government can't simply mandate lasting economic growth. To fuel the rising prosperity on which their long-term survival will depend, political leaders in China, Russia, the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf and other authoritarian states have accepted that they have to embrace market-based capitalism. But if they leave it entirely to market forces to determine winners and losers, they run the risk of enriching those who will use their new wealth to challenge the state's power.

Instead, they have embraced state capitalism. Within these countries, political elites use state-owned and politically loyal, privately owned companies to dominate entire economic sectors -- like oil, natural gas, aviation, shipping, power generation, arms production, telecommunications, metals, minerals, petrochem icals, and other industries. They finance all these institutions with the help of increasingly large pools of surplus foreign cash known as sovereign wealth funds.

In the process, the state uses markets to create wealth that can be directed as political officials see fit. The ultimate motive is not economic (maximizing growth) but political (maximizing the state's power and the leadership's chances of survival).

And with Europe in turmoil, a politically paralyzed Japan, and high unemployment with rising public anger in America, state capitalist China's robust recovery from the slowdown is looking awfully attractive for would-be imitators across the developing world.

The first reviews are in, and I want to draw attention to a really interesting piece written by my colleague Tom Barnett for World Politics Review. It raises some issues I'd like to go into further. Here's what Tom said about the book:

What should America do amid China's continuing rise? It should continue to believe in itself and free markets, says Ian Bremmer in his misleadingly titled, "The End of the Free Market: Who Wins the War between States and Corporations." .... Bremmer's slim volume is anything but an obituary for free markets. Indeed, his caveat-laden celebration of the "emergence of state capitalism" only underscores the inevitability of its eventual demise, as he explicitly makes clear throughout the text. 

After all, this "whole new kind of challenge" appears only in states that have never sustained democracy. That, though, is a tipoff for state capitalism's biggest weakness: It chooses the political survival of the regime over economic efficiency and innovation. Thus, according to Bremmer, "in the end, it's much more likely that the Chinese leadership will have to reconsider core assumptions about government's role in an economy than that the leaders in the United States will retreat fundamentally from free-market principles." 

Indeed, the weakness that characterizes Bremmer's list of "threats" posed by state capitalism should energize America's free marketers all the more: China drives up global commodity prices by paying above-market prices; Beijing's desperate race to lock down resources around the planet forces it into patron-client relationships with the world's most unstable, corrupt and needy regimes; China's amoral approach to trade and investment helps insulate these bad regimes from Western criticism; and, in its gross inefficiencies, China's state capitalism might prevent the global economy from reaching its productive potential just as the emerging global middle class needs it most.

That's it. China's state capitalism risks ghettoizing its economy and beggaring both itself and those regimes it manages to suck into its mercantilist orbit, while making the rest of the world a little bit poorer in the process: so much for the "war between states and corporations."

In the end, one should emerge from reading Bremmer's excellent, if grossly mislabeled, book with even more confidence in the future of free markets. Clearly, it's not our job to ape China's state-heavy economy, but rather to maintain -- as much as possible -- our own free market environment here in America, while continuing to champion that model's utility in unleashing and leveraging human ingenuity in the decades ahead."

Tom and I agree on a lot, including on the idea of sharing a few thoughts on this subject on our respective blogs. But it's most interesting to focus on those issues where I think we disagree.

So Tom, let me first address the question of the book's title: The End of the Free Market.  I'm actually a bit more circumspect here than I think you're giving me credit for. My view is that for the past several decades, it's pretty safe to say we've been living in a largely free market world. Multinational companies based in free-market economies became dominant economic actors on the global stage by profiting from increased access to capital, consumers, and workers in both developed and developing countries around the world. Governments seemed less relevant as ideas, information, people, money, goods and services crossed international borders at unprecedented speed -- and on a scale that makes these processes qualitatively different than anything that came before.

I think we've hit a tipping point with the rise of state capitalism -- particularly, but not exclusively, in China -- a trend compounded by the lasting damage that the financial crisis has inflicted on the free market model and the crisis of confidence we're seeing in America, Europe, and Japan.

I'm not arguing that the free-market world is gone with the wind. Ultimately, as Tom acknowledges, I believe that its core strengths -- and state capitalism's built-in problems -- will probably decide the outcome of the conflict between them. But that's a long-term process, and the outcome is far from certain ... which is why the full title ends in a question mark.

What comes next?

I believe that things are going to get worse for free markets before they get better. China might be sitting on a bubble, but it's not the one that James Chanos is pointing toward, one that will pop as soon as China's real estate boom goes bust. Nor is it the scenario described by Gordon Chang in which the Chinese people rise up to challenge the Chinese government. I could mention the labor bubble (200 million Chinese men with no hope of finding spouses), the environmental bubble (no water, no arable land, no breathable air), or any of the dozens of other bubbles floating ominously across the Chinese landscape. All of them are serious. None are certain to threaten China's state capitalist system anytime soon. I'd bet confidently on strong state-led Chinese growth over the next decade. Intensified national pride will only strengthen the system in the near term.

Second, the situation will get much worse for free markets because anemic growth and high unemployment in the developed world will feed a backlash against free market sentiment. We're already seeing more support for protectionism and a tougher stance on immigration in both Europe and the United States. In America, Goldman Sachs is today's scapegoat, but China is next in line, whether the subject is currency policy, cyber-security, trade imbalances, product safety, or something else. 

All of that makes the recommendation that you and I share -- strong government support of basic free market principles -- one that looks increasingly vulnerable to populist politics within free market democracies.  The problem is even larger in Europe and Japan than in America.     

It's encouraging that state capitalism isn't really exportable. In Stefan Halper's otherwise excellent book, The Beijing Consensus, he implies that lots of countries are going to join with China to support this model. I don't think so -- and it looks like you don't either. 

State capitalism isn't an ideology. It's more a set of management principles. It can never match the hold that communism once had on the popular imagination, because it wasn't born as a response to injustice. It was created to maximize political leverage and state profits, not to right historical wrongs. The system is not the same from one country to another, because the ruling elites in Beijing, Moscow, and Riyadh use it to meet distinctly different sets of needs. And no two state capitalist governments can ever fully align their interests. By its very nature, it's exclusionary; like mercantilism, it promotes one state at the expense of others. That's why there can't really be any kind of "state capitalist consensus."

Instead, you get client states -- mainly smaller Asian countries in China's shadow and energy exporting governments in Africa and Latin America badly in need of friends with deep pockets. Brazil, India and other big emerging markets that have elements of both free market and state capitalist systems have seats at the G20 table alongside some serious free market skeptics. The developed states don't have much to offer them at the moment that looks attractive for their economic stability.

In short, it's possible that I'm only an optimist on this subject because I'm an optimist about most things. Looking at the world more analytically, the global economy we can expect looks quite different from the one we've known these past several decades.

In reply, Ian, I would simply say that you're a bit guilty of trying too hard to sell the "unprecedented" nature of state capitalism's rise (a small editorial sin, considering you're selling a very good book).  I think it's misleading to suggest that the "past several decades" were some golden age for free markets and Western multinationals, because it's not like OPEC's national oil companies or China's state-owned/-dominated enterprises came out of nowhere--they've been there all along.  The rising relevance of these companies is real, but we're talking a matter of degree and only in states that have historically featured authoritarian governments, so the structural impact on the system is, in my mind, not as significant as you make it out to be (so it's taking longer than the optimists declared regarding political pluralism in recently marketized regions--big deal!). 

The vast bulk of wealth in the system remains in private hands; sovereign wealth funds control a mere fraction of that.  So I just don't recognize the "tipping point" that you do between a free-market-dominated global economy of yesteryear and one that's increasingly steered by single-party states, especially when, as you note both here and in your book, those regimes really don't share any truly exportable ideological consensus.  

I do see the world moving through an extended period of frontier-integration, and in such periods, the role of the state naturally grows, especially following a period of globalization's stunning expansion as part of three decades of progressive deregulation. I think we were fortunate to add all the democracies that we did during that rapid expansion, but I wasn't particularly surprised that most former socialist states didn't complete the journey, given their respective political histories and the pervasiveness of their poverty.  For most of those states, I think the usual historical expectations apply, meaning we're looking at single-party states (with elections or not) for 2-to-3 generations (or 4-5 decades).  That means we should expect a fourth great wave of democratization in the 2020s and extending into the 2030s--or 40 to 50 years after the great expansion of globalization began in the 1980s (opening these states up to wider market connectivity).

As you note, we don't see the world all that differently (I will note that you are--just like me!--another expert on globalization who began his career in the Soviet studies sphere).  I think we just have different comfort levels regarding how long it takes for these things to work themselves out. You spot a disturbing critical mass of state capitalism that portends a more uncertain future for free markets (i.e., an upper-hand argument), where I see a more natural course correction (i.e., more yin-yang) based on globalization's growth--namely, a period of expansion through deregulation and less state involvement followed by a period of consolidation through re-regulation and more state involvement.  But we both retain the same faith in the superiority of free markets accompanied by political pluralism, so it's a question of the journey's length and not of its final destination.

Again, I congratulate you on a most excellent book and I hope it does well.

You stay classy, globalization!

Entertainment Weekly blurb saying the sequel to "Anchorman" (2004) has been scuttled for now.

Primary reason:  first movie cost $25M and grossed $85M domestic but only $5M overseas.  Paramount is apparently concerned about that.

Kind of stunning to read.  Usual rule:  if movie costs $X, then--worst case--you double that figure for promotion and that's how much you need to earn for a profit. So the first movie should have cleared $40M.  Not huge, but a moneymaker.  

Still, if the movie did the usual overseas box office (equal or better than domestic), then the profit would have been more like $120M.

The sequel is expected to cost round $50M, so if it got the same BO, it would lose money--unless the overseas take somehow saved it.

Thus the logic of fearing low international appeal.

So we already see globalization placing some new rules back on Hollywood.

Basel banking committee chairman says no to bank tax

slide found here

FT story in which Basel committee on banking reform chairman Nout Wellink says the bank tax idea must wait until capital and liquidity rules are toughened, something the committee expects to have passed by year's end.

Of the tax idea, Wellink says:  "I doubt whether this is a good idea.  It's born out frustration.  There are strong political motives behind it."

Wellink's committee is the group that passed the landmark Basel II accords on banking in 2004.

Will the post mid-term paralysis be far worse?

Yes, says Fred Barnes in the WSJ, thus the Democrats' urgency in shoving through legislation, insinuating that Obama will be forced to concentrate on foreign affairs after 2010, because that's what you do when you can't get any domestic agenda moving.  The wild card?  Shoving a value-added tax or VAT through a post-election lame-duck Congress.

Meanwhile, The Economist laments the "perverse impact" the looming elections are having on immigration.  Wild card there?  Harry Reid pushing an amnesty bill through the Senate so he can tap the 15% Hispanic voting pool in his state.  This may backfire.

Drought-resistant GMOs: a key to managing the impact of global warming

Chart found here

Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece on Monsanto and Dupont working on drought-resistant GMOs.  Dupont predicts 150m acres of such drought-resistant corn will eventually be planted worldwide, or 10% of the global seed market and one-third of corn grown globally.

Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant says, "The biggest single issue in farming going forward is . . . water availability."

Monsanto hopes to be marketing the world's first drought-resistant seed in 2012.  It is also working on a cotton variant, which is crucial because of the large water requirements.

Global warming's impact on ag will be mostly about droughts, so this work is very important stuff to making farming sustainable in the Gap in coming decades.

Our broken low-wage labor market

Bloomberg BusinessWeek story says our immigration system isn't broken nearly as much as our low-wage labor market.

Russell Sage Foundation says that the US has the highest advanced-economy share of low-paying jobs (defined as less than 2/3rds the median wage) at 25%.  France and Denmark sit down at around 10%.

How do they do this?  

In other developed nations, nannies, sale clerks, and waiters are well-trained and earn living wages.

The example of Europe here is explained in more detail:

Investing in employees to upgrade their skills and put them on a path to promotions and higher pay is good for employers as well as workers. In Denmark, meatpacker Danish Crown pays relatively high union wages and competes successfully with American meatpackers that have turned to immigrants to keep wages low. In the U.S., companies like CVS, the drugstore chain; Staples, the office-supply chain; and Nypro, an employee-owned plastics maker, have shown the profit potential in hiring low-skilled workers and training them for advancement. "It's not the border that's broken, it's our low-wage labor market," says John Schmitt, an economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington. Schmitt co-edited a book called "Low-Wage Work in the Wealthy World" based on the Russell Sage-funded research.

You can't have high unemployment and high immigration at the same time, but as the piece points out, when there's a huge disparity between supply and demand, prohibition doesn't work either.  It simply drives up the criminal delivery system, whether you're talking booze in the 1920s or people smuggling today.

We can either continue to bring in "indentured servants," as one academic calls them, or raise the living wage to the point where the jobs work for "more Americans who have drifted away from gainful employment."

Good argument, especially when the job recovery arc on this last recession looks dramatically different from recent ones.

Big Pharma goes upstream--to China

WSJ piece on how Charles River Laboratories International is buying one of China's largest drug research firms, WuXi AppTec Company for $1.6B.

Charles River is a big US research firm (i.e., drug developer) that works with the Big Pharma producers.  Buying WuXi allows Charles River to access a lot of cheaper PhDs in China.  

Research costs continue to go up.  Meanwhile, one-third of all drug patents in the world will expire during the next few years, so Big Pharma and its partners have little choice but to access China's growing pharmaceutical industry.

I think this is a wave that will benefit the US:  exposure to, and integration with, a large but cheaper medical market.   We need the infusion of cost discipline and a rethinking of our very expensive methodologies, plus, quite simply, access to cheaper drugs and devices and--as is shown by "medical tourism"--procedures, which China will be pioneering or just redesigning as it seeks to extend more and better care to all its people.

Is Clinton in danger of becoming another symbolic SECSTATE?

Newsweek cover story celebrates Clinton's toughening up of Obama administration positions, but I find the piece uninspiring.

Clinton, we are told by Leslie Gelb,  "doesn't pretend to be, nor is she, a strategist.  She doesn't bring that to a table."  NSC adviser General Jones says she has "strategic vision," but we don't hear any in the piece.  To date, we live on her early speech about having lots of partners in the world.

Officials admit the first year was all brand-rebuilding.  Hirsch says, correctly, that "Clinton's and Obama's various policies do not yet add up to anything like a doctrine on America's place in the world."  In reply, Clinton bristles that "trying to have a very clear approach to actually dealing with those problems" (inherited from Bush-Cheney) and simultaneously trying promote American leadership "is about as big an idea as you can get."

So Clinton brags about not being able to focus on any one issue because her agenda is "enormous."

Sorry, but this sounds like the second coming of Condi Rice--always the chasing of events instead of triggering them.  And the "bad cop" bit comes off like a redux of Colin Powell's stint:  the great influencer and balancer who actually never gets her way.  But, oh boy, is she is admired for her "strength"!  

One NSC official puts it this way (anonymously, of course):

She has no real strategic vision.  But she'll get done what she has to do.  She's the good little Methodist girl.  In the end she'll have her list of the nine or 10 things she has to do and check them off one by one.

So what are we left with in this administration?  The Gates-Clinton axis that balances Obama's idealism and helps him unwind Iraq and Afghanistan, Jones keeping the training running at NSC, etc.

We've seen the magic of rebranding, but now we get this sense of caretaking, unwinding, and responding to the "enormous" agenda, at the top of which sits this dream of a world without nukes.

When Clinton let slip, early in the administration, about extending a nuclear umbrella over the Mideast, I thought, maybe she'll be the real foreign policy leader of note, somebody who thinks structurally.   But she drew back after catching flack for that, and so we're left with Obama's mushy nuclear vision and nobody--to date--even coming close to articulating anything substantial or even new.

But yeah, the crossing-off of items on the list continues  . . ..

Israel should resist any Obama bid to rid the Middle East of all nuclear weapons

WSJ piece says Obama administration is negotiating with Egypt to co-present a proposal to make the region an nukes-free zone at the UN's month-long nonproliferation conference that began on 4 May with Ahmadinejad's speech.

The goal?  To prove the US isn't unduly forgiving re: Israel's known-but-unacknowledged nuclear arsenal.

Not the first time this tried:  done also in 1995 review of non-proliferation treaty (NPT), but the non-binding designation meant nothing.

The zone is meant to include Israel and Turkey, as well as Iran and Arab states.

Israel, of course, supports a freeze on nuclear developments, just like the nuclear powers do WRT world.

According to the WSJ, the Egyptian proposal aims to put Israel's program under the "auspices" of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency.

I see this going nowhere, and constituting a useless gesture on Obama's part.  Then again, his nuclear policies have been full of such symbolism-equating-to-no-real-change.

The Economist piece points out that a lot of second-tier powers cannot be counted upon to fall in line behind the US anymore.  Brazil, for example, renounced nuclear weapons years ago but still won't let IAEA inspectors view its enrichment sites.  Like Turkey, Brazil has sought to insert itself in the West's dialogue with Iran as an intermediary.  Then there was the US strong-arming the Nuclear Suppliers Group on its special deal with India.

Any rising power has to be left with the impression that, if you're a friend of the US, you can have nukes, and if you're not, you can't.  Friendship, as we know, comes and goes, so why commit yourself to never being able to access such a hedge?  The US can change its mind about your regime at any time.

To me, this is an attempt to reshape the entire global security structure simply because Iran's getting nukes and may trigger a couple more states to do the same (Turkey, Saudi Arabia).  Since we won't backtrack for real on Israel and India--and shouldn't, we won't really get anywhere on Iran, thus logically Saudi Arabia and Turkey should be ready to arm up.  Better to work these four powers (Iran, Israel, Saudis, Turkey) in their own region than all this showy effort to rewrite the global rule set.

Chart of the day: visualizing U.S.-world trade

Found here at Visual Economics.

Big news, bigger decision-point

Got a referral today (two hours ago, actually) for two Ethiopian sisters.  Won't offer any more details than that.  We started this particular process 9 months ago, but we have been in various processes for close to five years now, so disappointment and patience have been our watchwords for so long that this news--this possibility--comes at us like an Indiana tornado.

We have days to make a decision, which will include remote consultation with an international adoption specialist physician.

If we say yes, we travel for the first time--probably--in June for the initial court date.  We would then return within weeks, following the completion of local legal proceedings.

They are distinctly beautiful children, with lovely names.

We are decidedly forward-leaning on this decision, but this is our fourth country try after being ruled out--by new rules--passed in China shortly after we adopted Vonne Mei.  

That just means we know what it's like to have it all work out, and what's it's like to have it all fall apart.

You don't just adopt two sisters, you bind your family to a number of Ethiopian relatives for the rest of your collective lives.

It is a big decision, then.

So we are guarded but optimistic--excited yet mindful.  International adoptions are--by definition--a collision of significant tragedy and supreme hope.

Welcome to the new site!

 

Thought I'd welcome you with the classic glassy-eyed, grizzled and casually-dressed blogger pose. 

Boy, looking at the shot, you can really that my right eye's significantly higher than my left.  All my life I wondered why binoculars never worked for me!

The process of moving the blog and site was a lot smoother than I had hoped.

Last weekend I got all my posts teed up on the old site through yesterday.  Then I the first part of the week's spare moments getting my account set up at Squarespace.com and going through all the tutorials.  Then I designed the blog page and all the linking architecture that will appear throughout the site (top nav bar, and side bars).  Spent a bit of time designing the banner on PowerPoint and then having my colleague Bradd Hayes clean up and size it correctly in Photoshop.  By very late Tuesday night I was ready to transform my trial account into a real one.  I then exported my entire blog from the old site into a TXT file (37GB) in a matter of seconds, and then uploaded that to Squarespace in a matter of minutes.  Then the site took over the job of importing everything into the new site--entries, comments, pix and all links.  I woke up Wednesday morning to find it all in place and working fine.

So Wednesday, during breaks, I teed up the first posts for today.  I took my time because I was just getting used to the system here, and I'm categorizing all posts for the first time (basically, citation posts versus What Tom is up to posts versus WPR columns versus Esquire Politics Blog posts, etc.) and using tags for the very first time (trying not to accumulate too many or use more than three per).

What I love about the site?  The WYSIWYG post-entry window, where the pics go right into the body without you having to make all the code happen somewhere else and then copy it over.  The uploading function is very neat and easy to use.  I can also embed video (although I will have to learn how), something I will consider off the phone on trips, or maybe--under the right special conditions, right out of my office.  I can also set up to blog off my phone, which is making the Droid look more attractive by the day for its physical keyboard.

Something also new and different (meaning an adjustment), but which I think we'll both enjoy:  the post entry format comes with a reference field that allows me to type in the URL, title, author, date and pub very quickly.  It appears at the bottom of the post now, meaning you'll have to click on it to look it up.  That means I need to offer some scant reference in the body so you know what I'm working off, but it presents a cleaner look and it's an easier entry process, much like the graphics now (which I will provide a link on if they don't come from the referenced piece--as before).

Three other new things:  1) recent comments will be listed in the left sidebar; 2) since my quotes won't be highlighted with background but just indented, I'll italicize those; and 3) most important to me, I can actually sked posts into the future on this site, which is essential for my traveling (old site didn't allow).

As before, all comments will be moderated.

Anyway, so that was Wednesday night mostly, and then I spent time getting the left and right sidebars populated--into Thursday.  Then Thursday and Friday were non-stop page recreating as I could find time.  Watch the top navigation as new pages come online.  I'll be at this for weeks before everything's done.

Anyway, here we are and here we'll stay for now.

Feedback appreciated.  Just understand that a shake-out cruise is inevitable.

Oh, and note that I did not import any comments made between 5 May and 10 May inclusive.  Those are lost to the wind.

About Twittering . . .

First BB Storm I had came with it on the main menu.  So I tweeted a lot and liked it.  Then I had to ditch the phone and next one didn't have it, so I got out of the habit.

Now that I'm in the new digs and playing blogmaster to myself, I found myself wanting to go back to the micro-blogging for stories I felt some desire to comment or quip on, but not enough desire to log in and make the posting effort.  So I get it on my latest BB Storm, which I don't love and will soon turn in for a Droid, methinks, because I want the mechanical keys back, plus I add the Twittering widget at the top left on the new site, displaying the last five tweets.

My promise:  Once the site fully up and I get all caught up on my regular sources, I will work hard to tweet more, using it, often, to clear my in-box faster.  This way, you have the main blog in the middle, where I won't try to stay that terribly current, and the micro-blog on the left, where I can sound off more in real time.

Best of both worlds, I'm hoping.  Especially as Steve and I gear up to do more consulting as Enterra's technology continues to mature and thus allows us a bit more scheduling freedom, it'll be helpful to have both cylinders firing in terms of mental output.

Your choice:  follow the widget's postings as you come to the blog on your sked, or follow me on twitter directly (see the link above at the base of the Twitter widget).

Keeping the A Types coming to America

Lexington column in The Economist.

IMMIGRANTS benefit America because they study and work hard. That is the standard argument in favour of immigration, and it is correct. Leaving your homeland is a big deal. By definition, it takes get-up-and-go to get up and go, which is why immigrants are abnormally entrepreneurial. But there is another, less obvious benefit of immigration. Because they maintain links with the places they came from, immigrants help America plug into a vast web of global networks.

So it's not just enjoying all those A Types coming over and interbreeding with us; it's the connectivity they bring.

Bill Easterly likes to write about the "bamboo network" that links countries with large Chinese immigrant pools back to China, something we see with Indians and Chinese, respectively, in Africa today.

America is unique, says Lex, because we don't have much of an expat population abroad but we own "by far the world's largest stock of immigrants, including significant numbers from just about every country on earth."  The all assimilate eventually, "but few sever all ties with their former homelands."

It is a huge advantage, our demographic make-up, in a globalizing world, but it speaks to why we, among all the world's nations, rose to our level of power and prosperity and freedom, and THEN chose to spread that economic model around the world in the form of an international liberal trade order-cum-the West-cum-the global economy-cum-globalization.

Classic story told here of Peruvian immigrant to US who builds a biz and then wants to expand it into South America.

To me, this is a no-brainer reason why we want to continue to attract these people, who, on average, are far more entrepreneurial than native borns--and far more networked globally to do something about that ambition.

Lex puts it well:

Immigration provides America with legions of unofficial ambassadors, deal-brokers, recruiters and boosters.  Immigrants not only bring the best ideas from around the world to American shores; they are also a conduit for spreading American ideas and ideals back to their homelands, thus increasing their adoptive country's soft power.

Piece ends with Lex asking Obama to follow through on his campaign promise to make America's "cumbersome immigration rules" more efficient in operation.  Would take some real courage, but something worth spending political capital on.

Interesting on this score how easily one can lump the US with China and India.  It's an old theme of mine:  as globalization grows, we find that we have a lot more in common with New Core pillars than Old Core allies, because we remain young at heart, and we're natural globalizers in this age by way of being such an immigrant nation.

China considers US-style property taxes

WSJ story (Fung) on China thinking through what it will eventually take to control the housing market, which is booming along the coast (see chart below) and presumably increasing the coastal-interior divide.

China has real estate taxes now, and is considering jacking them up, says Fung.  But the real rule-set reset would be to shift to US-style annual taxes, which "would mark a significant escalation of its struggle to cool down a booming property market now widely being described as a bubble."

My guess:  it'll take the bubble bursting for China to make this bold move. Developers vehemently oppose the move, and nobody wants to piss them off as construction is a bright spot right now.  Sticking in the new type of taxes now might just prick the bubble.

Still, expect the government to do this eventually (Chongqing's city gov has proposed it to Beijing), with the first targets, according to the piece, being second homes (luxury tax really designed to tamp down on flipping or speculation).  The leadership fears the rising sense of coastal-interior/have-have-not divide, but is adamant about encouraging individual home ownership--a very middle-class-empowering status.

Millennials: plenty spiritual, just not religious

Pic Found here

USA Today story about Christian research firm surveying 1,200 18-to-29-year-olds, with almost three-quarters declaring their spirituality trumps their religiosity, meaning they belief--just not in churches.

If the trends continue, says the report, we'll see churches close as fast as bankrupt car dealerships.

Hmm, makes me wonder about my last trip to the Netherlands and speaking to a community group at a defunct church (I spoke from the sacristy--of course).  

Fits with Stephen Prothero's Religious Illiteracy:  the notion that most Christians (two-thirds of Americans) are, in the words of the president of the research firm (LifeWay Christian Resources), Thom Rainer, "either mushy Christians or Christians in name only."  

Most are just indifferent.  The more precisely you try to measure their Christianity, the fewer you find committed to the faith.

Prothero, whom I used in Blueprint, made the basic point that, throughout US history, our faithful have become more intense in their idiosyncratic belief-systems while becoming less knowledgeable about their actual religions to which they claim to belong--more religiosity with less religion.

I see this as the ultimate way ahead for religions the world over as globalization succeeds in spreading development.  The competitive religious landscape allows for everyone to pick or craft their faith in the end, resulting in infinite variety and infinite direct connections to that which you hold dear.

Oh yeah, there will be some new rules in the Gulf of Mexico

Realize I'm behind the curve on this one in terms of latest developments (last week saw me focused on setting up this new site), but I like the map and the WSJ illustration so much that I felt the need to capture.

Plus, whenever there's a crisis like this, I usually clip anything until somebody mentions new rules or regs, which will most definitely result.

If the Times Square bomber was great timing for Obama on Iran and Af-Pak (not to mention the fact that the attack was prevented by those always wily New Yorkers), then the timing here is an absolute bad, given Obama's recent commitment to drilling offshore.  With predictions being that the eventual accumulated spill will overtake Valdez '89, the accident definitely perturbs the system all right.

But no, I don't see a moratorium on drilling in the Gulf.  Mississippi's governor Haley Barbour was quickly trying to kill that notion, as were the smarter Gulf coast senators (Sessions from AL was particularly goofy in this manner, declaring on TV that the US should bankrupt BP if that's what it takes).  The region's just too important to our domestic production.

So we wait and see about those new rules . . ..

A society under stress, with mental health patients who go untreated

Two Sky Canaves stories in the WSJ.

Makes you realize that American who got killed at the Olympics by a mentally-ill knife-wielding Chinese was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Two knife attacks in two days at Chinese schools (44 kids and 4 adults wounded!), following an equally bizarre attack in late March that left 8 kids dead.  Second story says a total of five attacks have unfolded in the past six weeks for a grand total of 11 dead and 70 injured.  Police fear the usual copy-catting effect.

But the attacks highlight a sense of growing social unease and the undeniable reality that most mentally-ill people in China are on their own.  Estimates run to almost 175 million, "and the vast majority of them have never received treatment," according to a Columbia U study.

Why go after kids?  In this upwardly mobile society, they are the ultimate status symbols.

You know how much American parents would freak out if similar events were happening here, and the Chinese are no different.  I know a lot of Chinese with the classic one kid to worry over, and the amount of attention that kid gets is stunning--even by obsessive US standards.  And if you cross them on the subject, they will get very mad--very fast, as we saw with the recent earthquakes.

So China orders police patrols, etc., but that alone won't calm parents when three-year-olds are being knifed in their school.

Again, the unease is larger than just these crimes.  It's a sense of accumulated ills amidst all this tumultuous development:

China's remarkable economic growth over the past three decades, while bringing hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, has been accompanied by the emergence of complex problems that tend to undermine the ideals of a "harmonious society," which Beijing sees as necessary to maintaining the legitimacy of the ruling Communist Party. Official corruption, rising income inequality and a frayed social-security system are among the most pressing issues, and now violent crime may be added to the mix.

"These attackers basically belong to the category of suicide attackers," says Ma Ai, a professor of criminal psychology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing. "They can't expect that they can get away from police after they commit the crimes." To prevent future outbreaks of violence, Mr. Ma says it is necessary "to gradually eliminate the breeding grounds for their hatred toward society."

The motives for the attacks are confused. But the sense of rage toward society, and the way it is targeting children, has thrown a spotlight on the changes that have swept through China. Much has been made of the widening gap between the urban rich and the rural poor and the resentments engendered by corrupt and high-handed officials who hold sway over the lives of ordinary Chinese.

Beyond that, China's dash toward prosperity has placed huge psychological strains on those striving to stay ahead and on those unable to keep up. The mentally ill are among the most vulnerable members of a society that struggles to provide basic health care for large sections of the rural population.

China hasn't seen the kind of random street violence that blights urban life in some Western countries, but the school attacks point to a growing problem among individuals who nurse deep grievances against society and are ready to blow at any moment.

You have to go back to America's 1890s to find similar stress:  the previous 25 years following the Civil War were so stunning in their growth and discombobulation, and government services--corrupt as their were until civil service reform kicked in--simply failed to keep up with the growing needs.  Dealing with crime in major cities?  Hell, NYC didn't get the NYPD really going until the mid 1840s and it's not until the mid-1890s, when Teddy Roosevelt becomes a police commissioner, that you start to see the serious reforms begin.

My sense of the cops in China whenever I see them out and about is that they deal with numbers we can't begin to imagine.  They always look stressed and overworked and a bit behind events.  Far from impressing me as a police state, I find myself usually thinking that they should be more cops around--given the constant crowds everywhere you go.