The China Caucus in the House: that's ALSO all about money

■"China's Rising Clout Splits Republicans: In U.S. Congress, One Faction Stresses Benefits of Trade, While Other Fears Military Threat," by Murray Hiebert, Wall Street Journal, 27 October 2005, p. A4.

Interesting profile in WSJ on the struggle between the "realists" in the China Congressional Caucus, led by China hawks, and the Norman Angell types ("Great Illusion," 1910 and Nobel Peace Prize 1933) who believe peace comes through trade (U.S.-China Study Group). Both are House groups. Rummy favors the hawks, and John Snow favors the traders.

But the real "realism" unites the two sides far more than the hawks would care to admit. The Caucus is chock full of House Armed Services Committee types whose districts are chock full of defense contractors threatened by our growing economic alliance with China (can't wage war if we get too tight), and their economic self-interest differs not one whit from the traders whose districts are commensurately benefiting from China's economic rise. The leader of the Caucus (Randy Forbes) naturally hails from the Navy's major shipbuilding center, located in Virginia. Guess what his answer to China's rise is? Lots and lots of naval ships built in his district. The bigger and more high tech the better, and if they have no real use in the GWOT and don't do a damn thing to keep Americans alive on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan and all the other places we'll wage war in the future, well that's just too damn bad. The man's got jobs to protect in his district, our soldiers' lives are somebody else's business.

But of course, I say something like that and certainly I'm "soft on defense." I'm "naÔve" because I believe wars are to be waged in the Gap instead of the Taiwan Straits.

Yes, yes, I've got nothing on these "realists."

This is trade winners and losers, plain and simple. The hawks just dress their version up as "national security" when it's really all about the all-mighty buck in the end.

Both sides want to profit from China's rise. It's your job as voters to decide which route makes more sense for America in the long run: public-sector defense spending and arms trafficking (.e., we sell abroad what we can't use here in the Pentagon) versus moving our economy on to new levels of high technology that keep us competitive versus the rising manufacturing powerhouse that is China, and finally investing in the SysAdmin force that will create lasting victories in the GWOT instead of simply waging driveby regime change.



But don't kid yourself. Money makes the world go around, especially in Congress. This is not a serious discussion of national security, which in Asia would focus on Taiwan and North Korea. This is all about who makes the most money off China's rise. One side is honest about their greed, the other is not.

And don't get me wrong. I don't have a problem with greed. I prefer it to racism and nationalism and hatred any day of the week.

I just like mine unvarnished, minus the hypocrisy and the flag-waving dress-up by national security "experts" who are simply in-House lobbyists for defense contractors.

But has PACOM read my China piece in Esquire?

As my old boss Hank Gaffney likes to muse, "Mebbe, mebbe not."

I snipped a bit in Pacific Command's direction in the China piece, but frankly I really like seeing Fox Fallon in that post. Having the Navy guy talk about mil-mil cooperation with China is serious "Nixon goes to China" stuff, so the man has a chance to make some real history here, and who doesn't want to do that?

Anyway, despite recently ratcheting up my speaking fees to cut down on the frequency (did same thing when PNM came out), the invites don't slow down. In fact, it only gets better/worse, depending on whether you're my accountant or my kids.

Not all offers come with offers, so to speak, and you get the private sector mostly to pay for the public one. But in certain situations the public side can make offers too (they have their ways), and so I get an invite from PACOM recently with modest fee attached.

Long way to go when you can make same or more much closer to home, but truth be told, PACOM is awfully hard to turn down no matter what, given what good and/or bad it could do in coming years with China.

Real issue here isn't money but time. Going to Hawaii is a lot of time, no mattter how you do it. Invite to CENTCOM or SOCOM in Tampa is a snap, because it's just 24 hours. But Hawaii is a commitment.

But here's how it works out so cool!

We had planned a family vacation in Hawaii the very same week of the invite! So we work something out that's fair to all sides: I get a great talk in, they get a great talk out of me, my family still gets me on vacation, and so on.

Life is rarely this fair to all involved, and I already look forward to this trip. Hawaii is a stunning place. Some of the coolest hiking you'll ever do.

Some transitions from the Cold War military go well, others stuck in a time machine

■"Army/Navy Specials: Once Spurned by Developers, Shut-Down Military Bases Are Now Sought-After Sites," by Michael Corkery, Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2005, p. B1.

■"When The Army Gets It Wrong: Wounded soldiers often--too often--find themselves having to battle the Pentagon over pay mistakes," by Alex Kingsbury and Julian E. Barnes, U.S. News & World Report, 24 October 2005, p. 24.

Winning the Global War on Terrorism, as I say in the current issue of Esquire, is all about moving off the Cold War stance and accepting the reality of what it will take, in terms of force structure change, to generate lasting victories (i.e., winning the peace and not just the wars).

We in the national security community do this well in some instances, quite badly in others.

We've had a hard time reducing our basing infrastructure, in large part because so many in Congress fight this process tooth and nail, keeping open facilities in their districts that are no longer needed but provide jobs to their constituents.

Here's the painful rub on that one: time and time again when bases close, the local economy does better in the long run without them. Huge tracts of new land enter the market, both residential and commercial (to include industrial), and our private sector knows no bounds in its cleverness in generating new wealth from these opportunities previously held off-limits. Smart communities welcome base closures, knowing the short-term pain will be surpassed by the long-term gain.

So, sometimes the world's last centrally-planned economy, known as the Pentagon, gets it right (privatization of unneeded infrastructure).

And yet, sometimes it still gets it so wrong, like the horribly stove-piped information systems that so routinely screw up or delay salary payments, medical payments, travel voucher reimbursements, equipment purchase reimbursements, and basically any payment you can name.

If you're a defense contractor with a lot of money on the line, then you adjust and simply waste a lot of time and effort to make sure you get paid. But if you're rank and file, either uniform or civilian, you just suffer the slings and arrows.

When I worked for the government I got routinely shafted on travel, nickled and dimed like you wouldn't believe. Then every so often you'd get dramatically overpaid, and God help you if you pointed that out, because fixing the overages is even harder than fixing the shortfalls.

Here's the description of the pathetic state of affairs today in the Defense Department:

The problems result in part from the military's reliance on separate finance, medical and personnel databases. The current system, designed in the 1970s, is so antiquated that sometimes data on a particular soldier must be manually extracted from one database for use in another. The Defense Department is trying to create a combined system, but the project has fallen behind because of the sheer complexity of the task.

Yes, yes, combining databases in the Fed is SO much more complicated than doing it anywhere else.

Isn't it always amazing how we make changes far more easily in the realm of "stuff" than in the realm of people? Need to divest infrastructure. That works decently. But need to makes things work more efficiently for personnel? That's just SO complex!

But the same thing is true on strategy. Show me a strategic opponent that gets you lotsa stuff and that's a good enemy! But show me one whose defeat will demand mostly manpower. Oooh! That's SO complicated and complex!

The transnational-patriotic gap in America

■"Spurning America: Liberal elites see the world differently from other Democrats and Americans as a whole," by Michael Barone, U.S. News & World Report, 24 October 2005, p. 28.

Interesting Barone piece on the transnational elites separating culturally over time from the rank-and-file patriotic Americans, the former can't understand this Global War on Terrorism while the latter end up waging it.

Barone cites the same sort of analysis from Sam Huntington that I used from Who Are We? in BFA.

It's a challenging article, and Barone makes good points, but you have to ask yourself if this split is not the breakdown between our definitions of national security and international security. These two were made one by the bomb, MAD, and the superpower rivalry with the Sovs: to attack America was to risk blowing up the world, so the concepts of national and international security were made, for all practical purposes, identical.

That identity is shattered by the collapse of the Cold War. Now, Osama kills one million in Chicago and we can't hold anyone hostage with our nukes, so deterrence disappears and the strong linkages between national and international security are severed. The creation of the Dept. of Homeland Security is an expression of that split, and that's why I consider it such a mistake, not just bureaucratically but as a signal of intent to the rest of the world.

So we see transnationalism and patriotism (our version of nationalism, and yeah, there's a huge difference between the two) at odds in the GWOT, with each side calling the other "naÔve" and declaring itself "realistic."

And it's that having to choose sides that I have so much trouble with, so I try to split the difference, especially in Blueprint for Action, and quite naturally, I will be accused of being flippant for doing so, because compromisers and deal-makers are always viewed with suspicion by those who confuse the inability to learn and change their minds with fortitude and character.

And yet the way that connects the two ends of the spectrum, that middle ground, is where all the wiggle room is found, as well as most of the solutions. BFA comes off, in many ways, as one big statement that says all-in-one solution sets don't work, that they never work.

The UN cannot do it all. Nor will Sachs' huge push of aid, nor Bono's debt forgiveness. Nor can SOCOM pull it off on its own, as Kaplan would have you believe. Nor the Marines with the three-block-war. Nor the Army.

Nor the G-8. Nor the International Criminal Court. Nor that prize-winning IAEA.

Not even the all-mighty U.S. Leviathan force that suffered its 2000th casualty recently.

No, just bits and pieces that require a rule set to rule them all, and in its transparency bind them.

The middle way. A blueprint for moving ahead instead of just decrying the present.

Media connectivity and content in the Middle East: the balance is tilting

■"Rockin' In Iraq: Locals embrace escapist fare as TV biz rises from ashes," by Ali Jaafar, Variety, 24-30 October 2005, p. 1.

■"At Mipcom, Al-Jazeera fights for global acceptance," by Elizabeth Guider, Variety, 24-30 October 2005, p. 6.

■"Homer sobers up for Mideast," by Ali Jaafar, Variety, 24-30 October 2005, p. 19.

The reality shows in Iraq are just like ours, but instead of revamping "this old house," they rebuild "this old bomb site." And Iraqi "Idol" contestants need to risk more than their egos to get up on stage.

But despite the dangers, there is no doubt that media connectivity in Iraq has emerged as the untold success story of Saddam's fall:

As the Western media focus on the uncertain results of last week's national elections, there's one story that has flown below the radar: The success of the Iraqi TV business.

Since the April 2003 ouster of Sadam Hussein, the area has seen the birth of 30 TV stations, the same number of radio stations and an estimated 180 newspapers.

The quality of the programming may be uneven, but Iraq's new media moguls have one thing in their favor; When your audience is afraid to go outside, it's good for ratings.

The immediate goals are prestige and entertainment. Entrepreneurs want to reach the people without government interference or propaganda. It's a boom town and folks are moving in.

The best bit on this: one station backed by the U.S. is repurposing Uday Hussein's vast collection of Western movies and soap operas for domestic consumption (soaps are loved the world over).

Each of Iraq's 18 provinces has its own TV station, as does "each ethnic community from the Kurds to the Assyrians to every political party." Then there's the extra dozen or so satellite providers.

As one government spokesman (Iraqi) puts it, "There is hardly a house without a satellite dish and there is hardly a neighborhood without some kind of local broadcasting."

What changes? Everything. As the article notes, "While heavily controlled state media and cultural institutions previously pushed pro-Hussein propaganda, the order of the day now is unprecendented freedom of expression."

No sat dishes were allowed under Saddam. There were 7 million sold in the first year after the invasion.

Most interesting is how young Iraqis have gone wild with text messaging.

Here's the best argument in the piece:

The long-term effects on a generation of Iraqis glued to their sets and cut off from their communities is an open question. But most Iraqis have displayed a remarkable ability to absorb cultural influences from the Middle East and the West, while retaining a uniquely Iraqi flavor.

So the revolution will be televised after all.

Watching Al-Jazeera try to go more global is fascinating, because if it wants viewers, it will have to open up its coverage and take off the ideological blinders. Lotsa Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. that the station wants to capture, but these young viewers, growing up with Comedy Central, "prefer their news delivered with tongue in cheek rather than with earnest advocacy."

Curse that Jon Stewart!

Mipcom refers to a global conference of TV nets coming together to make distro deals. Al-Jazeera wants into the U.S., but how much will it have to change to accomplish that? Well, how much did CNN have to change to become CNN Turkey (where I've appeared)?

Yes, yes, the coming Reformation will be televised--back to the Middle East.

And I, for one, will be watching.

But it's not all love and death. Watching the Simpsons invade the Middle East is equally fascinating. A Dubai-broadcaster gives Homer (now Omar Shamshoon) a make-over: no beer and no pork. Bart is badder, or should I say Badr. Oh, and no satirical references to religion-anybody's.

As always, they want the connectivity, they just want to censor the content somewhat. Inconceivable to us, but very reasonable to them. Our response should be patience. Nobody likes the fire hose when it comes to cultural change.

DC Area? RSVP now for Nov 2nd

Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005

Dr. Thomas Barnett

The Pentagon's New Map:

War and Peace in the 21st Century

6:00-8:00PM (1800-2000)

Marriott Residence Inn, Arlington, VA

550 Army-Navy Drive



Dr. Barnett (biography) will discuss a developing global perspective integrating political, economic, and military elements in a model for the post-September 11th world. He will argue that terrorism and globalization have combined to end the great-power model of war. He will also describe the types of transformation required to bring the out-dated Cold War military to a position where it can deal with new and expanding threats.

Full text: http://www.jhuapl.edu/POW/rethinking/events.htm

RSVP: By COB, Friday, 28 October to peggy.harlow@jhuapl.edu / 240-228-7427

Tom Barnett in his element

Presenting Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action

NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART I

Second Life makeover

NEW WORLD MAPMAKER: THE SECOND LIFE OF THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, PART I

Presenting Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action

Tracy McCray

So, Tracy. . . which venue do you prefer? Westwood One? Or, Second Life?

Tom (stage right, your left) presenting Pentagon's New Map and Blueprint for Action at Second Life.

Let's do lunch

I have an upcoming day in DC wide open, except for the dozen or so offers of coffee, chats, lunch, breakfast or dinner.

You want to accomodate all, but that get's awfully unrealistic. So how to prioritize?

One is a foreign government. Is that just national PR or something real to pursue?

Another is a big national association, but not one that deals with security affairs really, except it's a retired three-star that's asking.

Then there's the think-tank types and the impassioned mid-level officers. In some instances I'm sure it would lead to something, in others I'm sure it would go nowhere. At what point do I stop the just-talking-to-anyone-who-rings-me-up thing?

On some level, if it's not pushing the vision or creating a business opportunity (which gets me money so I can keep pushing the vision in non-paying venues that count), then it gets awfully hard to keep justifying the time on the road. I don't want to sell retail one-by-one. High-end, yes.

These are tricky decisions and rule sets. You want to focus your time and use what you've got for maximum impact, and that means, if you're successfull, that your threshold for interactions should be getting higher over time.

But at what pace does that climb unfold?

And no, these are not self-indulgent or self-congratulatory notions to ponder. I take the visionary thing very seriously, because my guys (and gals) are never out of power and their lives are always on the line--somewhere, somehow. If I'm going to do the vision thing, I'm going to pursue it as a real deal, one in which interior strategizing is as valid as anywhere else.

I'm not interesting in gliding. I'm interested in getting somewhere right as quickly as possible.

You either get busy saving or you get busy wasting.

Glossary: PNM and Blueprint for Action

The glossary from Pentagon's New Map and updated glossary included in Blueprint for Action.

Seems a solid pick on the Fed chairman

■"Bush Names a Top Adviser To Be Chairman of the Fed: Bernanke Pledges to Continue Greenspan's PoliciesóEconomists Laud Choice," by Edmund L. Andrews, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A1.

Bush, unable to afford another Miers, picks another Roberts instead to replace Greenspan. Arguably, this is the single most important nomination of his entire presidency.

I honestly mean that. Pick a Supreme and we're talking one of nine whose impact will be limited largely to the United States.

But the Fed chairman is arguably the single most important economic player in the global economy. How that person steers our monetary policy influences the entire economic and trade agenda of the Core and--by extension--the Gap.

The key attributes summed up:

A former professor of economics at Princeton University and a former Fed governor, Mr. Bernanke is a leading authority on monetary policy but a comparative outsider in partisan politics and ideological warfare.

He's written loads on classic money issues but has shied away from stuff like tax cuts and Social Security--, a real John Roberts.

The early praise for the choice indicates he will be approved with no hassles.

And the world breathes a whole lot easier. Great choice.

New Core sets the New Rules on guns?

■"Gun-Happy Brazil Is Hotly Debating a Nationwide Ban: Referendum Is Set To Settle the Matter," by Larry Rohter, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. A3.

Clipped this one last week. A fascinating story that should already have played out (vote was 23 October, or Sunday).

Brazil is the only country in the world where you're more likely to get killed by a gun than the United States (see, I keep telling you we've got more in common with New Core pillars than old ones, and my bit on being more like Brazil than gun-careful Canada only drives the point home!). 40k killed by firearms each year, with a total population of only 180m. We're 280 and have roughly º that amount (and yet we kill so many more people than that using things other than guns, but if we didn't, then "CSI" wouldn't be such a hit!).

So the government's plan to ban guns in Brazil is up for national referendum, and in Brazil, if you no vote, you pay fine, so people turn out (a new rule we should adopt).

Natch, all this killing reflects Brazil's regional role as gun merchant extraordinaire (again, just like us!), as nearly 80% of the guns they make they send abroad (which is why Latin America is such a safe placeóno wars, mind you, just unsafe on an individual basis).

There will be more and more attempts in the New Core to ban guns, and across the world in efforts lead by New Core pillars. Count on it.

Calcutta or Kolkata: it's connecting baby!

■"Bengal tiger: Calcutta is transformed from Marxist redoubt into India's latest hotspot," by Jo Johnson, Financial Times, 20 October 2005, p. 11.

Too interesting not to clip, because I mention how Calcutta, or what the Indians now call Kolkata, is becoming a new high-tech magnet center in India in Blueprint for Action.

This para captures it all pretty well:

The first capital of the British Raj, with its slums and its floods, is still a far cry from Shanghai. But under the rule of this highly pragmatic politician, known as Buddha [Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee], from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Calcutta increasingly aspires to be seen as a little piece of China in India, a place where money has no ideology and foreign investment is welcome. What Beijing thinks today, the saying goes, Buddha thinks tomorrow.

Way cool on so many levels: the pragmatic Marxist (hmmm, I almost would like that title for myself!), the focus on FDI, the lead goose effect of China, that NAME!

Q: What did Buddha say to the hot dog vendor?

A: "Make me one with everything!"

Well, Buddha makes Kolkata (isn't it cute how the Brits can't give up their colonial names for former holdings?) "one with everything" by keying on three things: 1) an educational differential that sees local university producing a lot of humanities grads that are great for call centers and engineers good for software development; 2) more room for IT parks with less traffic congestion (an oldie but goodie); and 3) the "commies" love to make foreign investors feel comfortable (why not in this post-ideological world?).

I would love to go back to India. Someone over there invite me!

Rumsfeld calling the kettle black in China

■"Rumsfeld Chides China for 'Mixed Signals,'" by Philip P. Pan, Washington Post, 20 October 2005, p. A16.

■"Gingerly, U.S. and China Plan To Strengthen Military Ties: Wary friends have diverging views of China's role in Asia," by Thom Shanker, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. A6.

Rumsfeld wonders why China's reticent to cooperate with a U.S. whose national security establishment plots war against it in the Taiwan Straits, measures it's R&D against it as the inevitable "near-peer competitor," asks Japan to join its defense guaranteer on Taiwan, and plans a missile shield that will put it on the wrong side with North Korea.

Hmmmm, that is strange.

I mean, who could see mixed signals in the U.S. asking for mil-mil exchanges while it publishes a report every year chronicling China's military developments. Do we have such reports for any other Core power? No. Any power in the Gap? No.

Just China.

Yes, says Rummy, "We see mixed signals" from the Chinese, and "we seek clarification."

And we wonder about their role in regional stability!

Enough bashing, though. Rummy does the right thing and so do the Chinese, and so the cooperation grows a bit more, seeming to bypass all the idiotic and frantic reviving and hyping of the Chinese threat this summer by elements in the U.S. military who felt they'd lose out in the Quadrennial Defense Review without it.

And when Bush visits China next month, things could get even a bit more better.

Rummy also got to the speak at the Central Party School, where I delivered a talk last year as well.

Not bad for the old Cold War hawk, not bad.

Rummy, I mean.

Four more data points on locating China in history

■"Christie's Going, Going to China to Hold Auctions," by Carol Vogel, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. B1.

■"China Builds Its Dreams and Some Fear a Bubble," by David Barboza, New York Times, 18 October 2005, p. A1.

■"South Korea Becoming a Big Asian Investor," by James Brooke, New York Times, 20 October 2005, p. C1.

■"China puts forward its definition of democracy," by Mure Dickie, Financial Times, 20 October 2005, p. 3.

I write this in Blueprint for Action (BFA): when you join the Core it suddenly rediscovers your history, like you were lost for a while and now are found again. This is happening big time in China, and nowhere is that process seen more than in China's art and antiques (even antiquities) scene.

So Nixon goes to China thirty years ago and Christie's goes now. The usual deal: to get around Chinese gov regs, Christie's must partner with local dealer.

So China's growing up all right, right through the sky. Four-thousand skyscrapers in Shanghai alone. In BFA I wrote something I wasn't sure was true until I read this piece: I said that China's skylines routinely rival anything we have here, and even surpass our biggest ones (like NY). Well, NYC has about 2k skyscrapers.

China's building boom is like our 1920s. This year they lay a world-record 4.7 billion square feet of construction. Experts say no country has ever built so much so fast, like a mall twice the size of the Mall of America (take that Minnesota with your hated Vikings!).

Key line:

The building boom is a principal reason that China is searching around the world for energy and natural resources: it needs the raw materials to build new cities, and the energy to power them. That is helping drive up world commodity prices and threatening global environmental damage.

New Core, new rules, new everything. Old China is being destroyed like crazy, and preservationists decry it, but with mortgage rates at 5%, there's no stopping the crushóand I do mean crush.

Seventy-five million farmers will move from the rural areas to the cities in the next five years, the biggest migration ever witnessed on the planet. It's one of the six simultaneous revolutions I cite in BFA.

Obviously, China can't finance all that building on its own, so South Korea, maturing quite nicely itself with true pluralistic politics, becomes what many estimate is the largest single foreign investor now in China, to the tune of $6B more or so a year. The 11th largest global economy got that way by declaring it way patriotic to invest only at home. Now it says it's patriotic to do so abroad ("Ask not what you can finance in your country, ask what your country can finance abroad," their version of a JFK might say).

So South Korea has a mere 650 FDI projects in China in 2002, and now it has almost 5,000. Investing in one another has always been an Asian thing. It becomes a New Core thing as well over time (China, Brazil, India, and Russia all investing in one another).

So China is rocketing through time, in all dimensions but what we would call representative democracy on a national scale. China becomes increasingly democratic, in a direct voting sense, throughout the countryside (where tiny villages of . . . oh, several hundred thousand, get to vote for their leaders directly), but China the grand conglomeration of states-within-states remains a dictatorial union, and that's unlikely to change for a while.

No, as I say in BFA, the internal integration process in China will dwarf the country's external integration with the global economy.

When that integration process moves from building nets to running them, then watch the private sector demand more and more from the centeróin effect slowly pluralizing it over time.

Seriously, China will look an awful lot like South Korea politically in 20 years.

Hard to believe?

Hell, South Korea was a pretty dictatorial one-party state 20 years ago too. Now it's the number-one foreign investor in one several times its size.

I speak not of possibilities, but inevitabilities.

Don't piss off the Canadians!

■"Canada's Smiles for Camera Mask Chill in Ties With U.S.," by Joel Brinkley, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A8.

Canada is still super-pissed about those tariffs we laid on their soft lumber. It was stupid for the Bush administration to do, and even stupider of them to not respond to the NAFTA panel's judgment that we need to pay it all back pronto.

Meanwhile, as noted earlier, Canada talks openly of shifting its energy exports from the U.S. to China.

Yes, yes, do whatever the House of Saud says, but be my guest and piss off the world's second largest holder of oil reserves (when you count shale and sands).

Condi needs to tend to her garden, and talk to the Iranians, and lock in China, and . . . oh the list is too long to name and too much to hope for now that we'll soon have a lame-duck president crippled by scandals (that makes four in a row for two-termers: Nixon with Watergate, Reagan with Irangate, Clinton with Monicagate, and now Bush with whatever we're calling this latest one).

The brain drain does not cause poverty in the Gap, and the only cure is connectedness

■"Study Finds Small Developing Lands Hit Hardest by 'Brain Drain,'" by Celia W. Dugger, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. A9.

The brain drain happens to states where there is no economic opportunity to keep people home. These places don't have to be rich, just full of real opportunities. China and India and Indonesia and Brazil, all big teaming New Core pillars (Indonesia right on the verge), they don't suffer this even as all suffer big chunks of their population still mired in extreme poverty.

The brain drain is not a cause of poverty but a symptom. Establish enough vibrant economic connectivity with the global economy and your people stay home. Everyone really wants to stay home.

Greenland will be green in 5005! (No, really)

■"No Escape: Thaw Gains Momentum," by Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times, 25 October 2005, p. F1.

The unfolding story (and it will unfold, inevitably, over the many years and decades ahead) of the melting of the Arctic ice cap will--as I've noted before--trigger a host of new rules among the states bordering this area, as well as open up a portion of the world to transportation and resource exploitation that's been, up to now, pretty much off limits.

What it does to the planet, of course, is even more profound. But again, this is all already a fait accompli. Nothing will stop this now, not even stopping all CO2 production. This train has left the station, and so we'll adjust, over the course of this century we'll end up seeing the emergence of a completely ice-free Arctic ocean in summertime.

But here's the kicker: visit Greenland now because by 5005, virtually all the ice will be gone there--just like that! Of course, 60% of it will still be there for another 600 years, so you've got a bit before it's all gone for good. Still, you say you're going do it and you promise you're going do it and all of a sudden, you're five-thousand years old and you just don't have that get-up-and-go anymore.

I tried to put a reminder in my Treo, but it only goes up to 2031 (try it and see).

As a futurist, that pretty much pissed me off . . ..

Phil Windley to interview Tom for IT Conversations

Phil Windley is going to interview Tom for IT Conversations in a few weeks. If youíve got anything youíd like him to ask him, let him know.