Time's Battleland: MILITARY SPENDING On Cyber Warfare, the American Public Is Constantly Being Played by the Pentagon

From a Washington Post piece describing “Plan X,” the Pentagon’s new push to develop cutting-edge offensive cyber weapons:

It makes sense “to take this on right now,” said Richard M. George, a former National Security Agency cyberdefense official. “Other countries are preparing for a cyberwar. If we’re not pushing the envelope in cyber, somebody else will.”

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: SYRIA When Military Intervention Makes Sense

Gideon Rachman at the Financial Times says that “diplomacy is still better than bombs” and that “moral outrage is just the starting point for a decision to intervene.”  He then goes through all the major powers in his piece Tuesday and cites reasons why each one is either holding back or holding things up. It’s one of those great ass-covering op-eds that’s supposed to make you look smart when the intervention does comes and it — gasp! — leads to more death and destruction.

Let me tell you why great powers intervene:  they don’t care about moral outrage and they don’t care about stopping the killing.  Moral outrage is a headline and nothing more, while the killing is either made faster or slower but never really “prevented.”

Great powers intervene when they can.  It’s as simple as that.  Good and bad don’t play into it.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Time's Battleland: NATIONAL SECURITY Death to “Resource Wars”!

Nice Washington Post piece on Saturday about how the “center of gravity” in global oil exploration and production is shifting to the Western hemisphere.  No, the bulk of global conventional oil reserves still sits in the Persian Gulf, but the larger point is worth exploring: we no longer project global futures where East and West logically fight over Middle East energy reserves.  Those expected long-term dynamics are collapsing right now before our eyes.

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

My 50th b-day declared national holiday

At the 500 today

Tower Terrace seats, close to the Finish Line, and behind Pit Row (which means we are inside the track).  Twenty-seven rows up, which is ideal for getting some perspective.

Wife got em in a raffle, so they go to me and my eldest son - the only two in the family able to withstand the near-100-degree heat over a VERY long day.

Should be fun, though.

Never been.

ADDENDUM:  Hottest 500 ever - temp-wise, but we did well by hydrating throughout and covering up from the sun.  Second record set:  most lead changes ever.  This was ascribed to the new car design that makes sling-shotting much easier to do.

Romney's fundamental opportunity

Peggy Noonan interview in the WSJ today:

Before rallies and town meetings, Mr. Romeny always tries to have private, off-the-record meetings with voters.  "I sit down with five or six couples or individuals and just go around the table, and I ask them to tell me abou their life.  And the stories I hear suggest a degree of anxiety which is not reflected in the statistics."

More than anything else right now, what I sense when I travel the country giving speeches (Dallas two days ago) is that people don't think their kids will have better lives than they have had, and that is a fundamental shift in US thinking.

Subjective, yes?  But subjective matters in elections.

Egypt: you knew it was going to come down to this

A Muslim Brotherhood candidate versus a holdover from the old regime.

This is the essential question for the Egyptian public: stick with what they know or let the Islamists try to do better with the economy.

In the end, you want them to choose the Islamists, because the same old, same old won't work any better than the Mubarek version did. The trick is, the military needs to let this experiment run itself out.

Yes, there are many in the West that see a Muslim Brotherhood taking over the Middle East.  This sort of overwrought hysteria is not useful.  We've seen several would-be national liberation movements link up regionally over time, but as any of them get actual opportunities to rule, expect them to be total nationalists who completely backburner any alleged transnational solidarity.

This is not a new dynamic (nor a new misdiagnosis by the strategic community in the West): we've seen it throughout history.

But, in the end, letting the Islamists try-and-either-fail-or-succeed is essential to the Arab Spring process, and since that dynamic is overwhelmingly characterized by the empowerment of Sunni masses, that means the MB now face their moment in the sun.

Again, the Brotherhood can either meet this overwhelmingly economic challenge and succeed (the Erdogan dynamic in Turkey) or they can go all social conservative and self-destruct just like the GOP here in the fiscally f--ked-up States.

Pakistan: the energy corridor, comes (back) into focus?

WSJ story on how India and Pakistan came to recent - and reviving - agreement on pipeline to connect India to Afghanistan and Turkmenistan beyond (so-called TAPI pipeline for the countries linked).  This is in addition to the proposed pipeline linking Pakistan to Iran (terminating in Karachi).

The trans-Afghan pipeline project is much-delayed, despite US backing, but it gets a new breath of life with this agreement, which, of course, now unfolds against the backdrop of NATO's accelerating departure.  Naturally, the US wants the Iranian pipeline to fail, but I think it's positive if both succeed. Both India and Pakista are starved for natural gas.

In both instances, don't expect Westerners to invest, due to security concerns, but such things don't necessarily stop Chinese and Indian money.

And that is how it should be - and should have been all along.

Why I don't see a future of robots

WSJ story on how wearable glasses become the new computer interface.

A couple of generations after that (or maybe faster), all this hardware goes inside - and simultaneously losese its metal and becomes biological in content. Once you can surf the web from within your head, all sorts of fun and bad stuff follows, as hacking becomes its own threat of mind control.  But people will augment their own bodies because that's the next evolution.

That reality, combined with nanotechnology allowing for more and more nets to be interwoven with our landscapes, is the primary reason why I don't see a future where such technology is housed within "serving" robots who, per the sci-fi genre, eventually turn on us.  I think that whole concept is misguided.

That's not to say that robots won't matter, because they will in all sorts of ways.  They just won't infantilize us by their presence, and they won't be the receptical for the really intimate technologies, which we will take into our bodies.

China: some genuine stake-holding behavior

Interesting FT half-pager a bit back on how Beijing's plans for carbon trading are "attracting interest from around the world."  Especially interesting to me because back when I did the NewRuleSets work with Cantor Fitzgerald and that company had just started its carbon trading subsidiary, they were very interested in using our environmental "economic security exercise" to start influencing Chinese thinking on the subject (alas, the Chinese reps were denied visas because this was the EP-3 "spy plane" timing in the summer of 2001).

Anyway, here we are, years later, and the Chinese may well revive an industry that's been faltering in the West.

I will admit, I haven't studied things enough here to understand why the carbon cap-and-trade mechanisms haven't worked the same magic as the NoX and SoX versions that Bush the Elder passed. Actually, I think I used to know why there was a difference and I just have forgotten it.

The point of the piece:  despite the sluggishness of the carbon markets in the West, there is now great hope that a Chinese success in this realm could revive things globally.  China is indeed aiming for a national model that begins with pilot projects in seven major cities.  Word is China will be shooting for much lower targets than even California.

The downside, of course, is, if it doesn't work in China - biggest CO2 emitter in the world, then who cares about side efforts in Australia, South Korea, California and Quebec (recent adoptees)?  The biggest market sits in Europe, and its success has been so-so.

And that alone is what attracted my attention back in 2001 and today: the notion that something so profoundly global hinges on a good effort from China. But this is the world we helped created and it's most definitely the world we will live with going forward.

This is the part that I don't think the US national security establishment has a clue about - still.  We are engaged in this "strategic pivot" that claims bigger fish are to be fried in East Asia than in Southwest Asia/Middle East.  I think this is a terribly misguided reading of history and globalization.  Globalization has "won" in East Asia, and now we're ironing out the details - to include China's inevitable democratization (along Chinese lines, mais oui). But in the Middle East, North Africa, and Southwest Asia, the globalization struggle is in high gear.

So, in my opinion, the bigger-fish-to-fry argument is all wrong.  Yes, we have bigger fish to fry in East Asia - it just ain't about warfare, despite the vigorous (and patently backward) efforts of players on all sides to keep that the primary issue.

But don't kid yourself: the great "strategic pivot" to East Asia is more about the Pentagon finding a budgetary floor than about genuine requirements (easily met through arms exports and a certain enduring presence). It is a Beltway snowjob of glorious dimensions - the kind of thing the Boomers are geniuses at pursuing and promoting.

Here comes Chinese FDI in a very public way

This NYT story today really jumped out at me, and the Chinese just bought, in a signature Foreign Direct Investment move, the second-biggest movie chain in the US:  

The Wanda Group, a Chinese conglomerate with extensive interests in the entertainment business, has agreed to acquire AMC Entertainment, North America’s second-largest movie theater owner, in a deal that is valued at $2.6 billion, including roughly $2 billion in assumed debt, the companies said Sunday.

Enlarge This Image

David Gray/Reuters

Gerardo I. Lopez, AMC’s chief executive, left, exchanged documents with Zhang Lin, vice president of the Wanda Group, during a ceremony in Beijing on Monday.

The acquisition creates the world’s largest theater group, the companies said. It also represents a significant expansion of Chinese influence in the American film industry. The industry has been looking to China for a vast new reservoir of ticket buyers for Hollywood movies, while joining Chinese investors to produce films like the planned “Iron Man 3” and teaming up to build studio facilities and a new Disney theme park in China.

The usual motives apply:  Chinese firm looking for know-how in an industry that's booming across China but isn't being as monetized as it could be - by Western standards.  For the US company, a crucial sub-plot emerges a few paras down the story:

In addition to the $2.6 billion value assigned to AMC’s debt and equity in the deal, Wanda is expected to invest $500 million for what the companies called “strategic and operating initiatives.” Mr. Wang said that the money would generally be used for renovation and other needs, but that specifics were up to Mr. Lopez and his team. Mr. Lopez said there was no plan in place for the money. But, he said, it might be used to retire debt, acquire new theaters or fix up old ones.

To me, this is a very positive development, and it's one we're going to read about countless times over the next decade. And yes, it will look and feel like Japanese money "buying up everything!" across America in the late 1980s/early 1990s.

But, of course, America has "suffered" these invading waves of FDI throughout our long history as a multinational economic union.  Chinese money will be just as good and useful as those of the other countries that preceeded it, and the further intertwinning of our economies will mitigate the craziness out of the Beltway crowd as they pine for a "near peer" competitor to justify the dropping floor of the defense budget.

You know, the Chinese were going to be the featured villain in the remake of "Red Dawn," but then Hollywood realized they'd be shutting themselves out of the Chinese box office, so they subbed in the North Koreans, which - of course - makes the film a complete and utter fantasy.  But it just goes to show you what all this financial connectivity leads too - cooler heads prevailing everywhere save among those fiercely dedicated fear-mongers in DC.

The counter-intuitive truth: fatherhood makes men happier, but motherhood does little for women

Economist story on U Cal-Riverside prof, Sonja Lyubomirsky, looking at World Value Survey, which gathers vast amounts of polling data from people all over the world.

She looked at US answers to four particular questions:

1. How many kids do you have?
2. How satisfied are you with your life?
3. How happy are you?
4. How often do you consider the meaning of life?

What was interesting is that children corresponded to significantly more happiness for men, but not for women.

The prof then followed up with several hundred more NorthAm volunteers to whom she gave pagers. Controlling for all the usual aspects, she would ring them randomly and give them a sort of happiness poll. She did this to control for nostalgia among older subjects (i.e., they remember the child-rearing more fondly later than at the time they did it). She found that her data supported the World Values Survey completely:

Parents claimed more positive emotion and more meaning in their lives than non-parents, and a closer look revealed that it was fathers who most enjoyed these benefits. Moreover, further analysis revealed that this enhanced enjoyment came from activities which involved children rather than those (such as watching television alone, or cooking) that did not.

The Economist's conclusion is rather interesting as well:

It looks, then, as if evolution has bolted into men a psychological mechanism to keep them in the family.  

Women, it is surmised, don't need this additional tether.

I will attest to all of this.  I work away all day at a table just off our kitchen (only place my Skype works consistently in our house), and it's mostly solitary labor.  

Then, at the end of the day, I run with my son Jerry and daughter Vonne Mei, pushing the two youngest girls in a buggy.  Eldest daughter home from college roller-blades alongside. Then Jerry and I usually toss football and talk NFL for a bit.  Then I pull the girls on my bike and ride with Vonne Mei to a gas station about 2&1/2 miles away for candy.  After dinner, I often rebraid Metsu and Abebu's hair, and then we'll watch a movie together.

My work day is mostly exertion and tension, my after-workday is mostly fun and enjoyment.  If I do just the first and skip the second, Jack becomes a dull boy.

The LNG export play

Nice FT story on what Shell is saying about natural gas in the US.  Current Henry Hub price has been hanging around $2.25-2.55, which is about 3-4 times cheaper than Europe MMBTU (millions British thermal units) and bizarrely cheaper than most Asian countries are being quoted right now (more like $14-15 and moving north for the summer to almost $20 - by some predictions).

Think about that for just a second.  Natural gas in the US at something like 1/8 the price in Asia.  How long do you think that lasts?  Why should it?

To me, that's a huge LNG (liquid natural gas) market waiting to be captured by US producers.  Selling LNG ain't like moving 100,000 metric tons of diesel or jet fuel or 2 million barrels of crude in one large tanker.  Those transactions are the equivalent of one-night stands and leave your money on the dresser.  Selling LNG is more like getting married: the buyer has to have a relationship with a regasification terminal nearby.  There must be pipes that connect the end-user to that LNG terminal (only so many in the world, but plenty being built).  If no regasification terminal, then buyer needs to rent himself a regas ship ($50m a year), park it somewhere, and then connect that by pipes to the end-user.  All very complex. 

Of course, the seller must have liquefaction facilities at ports, with pipelines connecting fields.  

America is piped up like crazy and adding more pipe all the time.  We're just getting our first for-export liquefaction facility set up in Louisiana by Cheniere, which is leading the effort here to gear up for export.

All very exciting stuff, as we could be exporting - within a few years - upwards of 1/4 of our production.  Then you factor in all the coal displaced in electricity generation, and we can be exporting that high-quality stuff to Asia along with the LNG -  a win-win on trade balance and energy security.

Back to the FT piece:  the currently depressed US prices are just too low, reflecting that we're running out of storage after a mild winter and a continued production boom.  Shell's prediction?  US NG prices will double by 2015.  Expect the petrochem industries to hawk that fear like crazy, but in truth, it's a reasonable rise to just $4-6 MMBTU.

[Shell, BTW, has done a lot of exploratory drilling on NG in China and says it thinks the reserves can be developed economically.]

Shell is also "examining plans to liquefy US gas for export - which would allow it to attract higher prices, particularly in Asia - transform it into clean-burning transport fuel through gas-to-liquids technology, and use it as a feedstock for petrochemicals."  That's a quick rundown of the range of economic opportunities - in addition to displacing coal in electricity.

All good stuff and an integral part of America's coming industrial renaissance.

The race card cannot work on Obama, or really any national candidate going forward

WAPO story on Romney rightfully steering clear of those within GOP who, in their desperation, consider racially motivated election attacks against Obama.

The problem with this approach is that it is magnificently self-defeating - that's how America has evolved in its racial make-up.

Obama is carrying Blacks, Hispanics and Asians - plus the "minority-majority" that are women (historically far less welcoming of racially tinged messages than men, to include white women versus white men).

All three of those major minority groups tilt decisively toward Dems, and racially-tinged political messages simply reinforce that reality and perhaps lock it in for the longer term.  Simply put, as a polity, America is past all that nonsense.

And the fact that the Republicans are considering it - even among just their fringe hardcore elements - signals just how bereft of ideas and leadership and vision they really are.

And that is a very sad day for this republic, because, quite frankly, Obama does not deserve a second term and it won't be any better than the first.

But I do take comfort in this reality, being the father of one Asian female and two future African-American women.

Time's Battleland: SYRIA Obama Cleverly Leading from Behind — Again

The quiet coalition has come together to reverse the decline of the opposition rebel forces in Syria, according to this nice front-pager in Wednesday’s Washington Post.  Much like in the case of Libya, the Obama Administration is hanging back and letting the local “market” determine his military response.  He simply refuses to take the strategic lead, which is frustrating to many and yet decidedly clever on his part.

To me, this is the Obama Doctrine: respond to local demand for U.S. crisis-response services rather than — in typical American fashion — pushing our way to the front of the line, bossing everyone, and then finding ourselves alone on the postwar backside.

 Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Iranians not unique in democratic aspirations

Interesting op-ed in WSJ by Israeli political researcher who explains his rather sophisticated attempts to surreptiously measure democratic attitudes across Iran.  It's a very impressive effort, really.

Left scale says Iran is terribly undemocratic, but bottom scale says Iranians are middle of the pack on democratic aspirations, meaning the argument that says "Iranians get what they deserve/want/etc" is absolutely wrong.  It's not an authoritarian society - just an authoritarian government.

Yuval Porat's final words

Our findings demonstrate that Iranian society as a whole is characterized by a pro-liberal value structure that is deeply at odds with the fundamentalist regime.  This presents considerable potential for regime change in Iran and for the development of liberal democracy.

You can read that statement two ways:  

1. If you take the kinetic route on regime change, you will ultimately be rewarded; or 
2. The soft-kill approach is the way to go.

While I have written that I think Israel will be hard-pressed not to attack in the end, I still maintain - as I have since 2005 - that the soft-kill on Iran will work.  To me, the soft-kill is the detente here, just like it was with the Sovs.  Open up ties, admit the regime is valid, blow off the nuke pursuit (which grants Iran nothing in terms of leverage with anybody - including already nuked-up Israel), and let the connectivity that results do the rest in terms of regime delegitimizing from within leading to eventual democratization.

Ultimately, this strategy - and not Star Wars - brought down the Sovs, and it can do the same on Iran - in far faster order.

Not a risk-free path, nor one that obviates unpleasant developments along the way (Russia, for example, is still a pain in the neck), but it does work.  It dismantled the Soviet system and it can do the same with the IRGC-dominated mafia-system in Iran.

Find Porat's full report at www.iranresearch.org.

Time's Battleland: PIRACY How America Settles Down Somalia (And, By Extension the Piracy Problem)

Nice Washington Post story about how the U.S. is training Ugandan soldiers (along with some from Burundi, Sierra Leone and Djibouti) in Uganda on how to do battle with Islamic extremists in Somalia – namely the al-Shabaab group affiliated with Al-Qaida. 

Read the entire post at Time's Battleland blog.

Take that! All the girls I was afraid to date in high school!

Found here.

Red Dawn! Chinese state banks to enter US market

You just want to summon your inner Yakov Smirnov:

In America, banks loan you money.

In China, you loan banks money!

WSj front-page lead on "Chinese banks get nod in U.S."  The Fed Reserve okayed 3 state-run banks to enter and apparently didn't stop the first ever acquisition of a U.S. retail bank by one of them.

The goal of Chinese banks?  Initially, to service Chinese companies operating overseas and those foreign investors looking for "exposure" to the renminbi.

Exposure is the key word here - in both directions.  But, in general, I heartily approve.

China is the biggest saver in the system these past couple decades.  So yeah, access is crucial for an economy with shakey finances.

Of course, China's financial system has its own dangers, but - again - in general I greatly approve of even more financial interdependence.  

It'll help keep the China crazies inside the Pentagon on a leash.

Chart of the day: Why GM and SAIC naturally decided to pair up

Pretty obvious, actually. 

Far short of merger, but the same logic holds:  you are weak where I am strong and vice versa.  Why not ally and crush all opposition on global basis.

This would-be globally integrated enterprise as a preview of globalization's coming attractions.

From an Economist story on Chinese carmakers.