Happy Halloween

Good piece by Fareed Zakaria on Iraq in current issue of Newsweek

SPECIAL REPORT: "Rethinking Iraq: The Way Forward," by Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek, 6 November 2006, p. 26.

Solid reasoning throughout. I especially like the comparison to the kissing-your-sister ending that was Korea in 1953. I've always thought Iraq would feel like that in the near term, only being treated with more kindness by history many years from now, when its place as the initial great battlefield in the Long War can be placed in some significant context.

Sad to say, but we were always slated--by temperament and by tradition--to suffer some sub-optimal outcome in Iraq. Our first time out of any new box seems predetermined in that way.

The system just wasn't ready for it and didn't want to be ready for it, nor was the public. Bush & Co. compounded all those errors of bias by being consistently incompetent in operational execution, even as the military has adapted itself reasonably well and still suffers from fighting under the worst strategic circumstances.

Fareed's option is well presented here: reduce and redeploy our troops and force the Iraqis toward some deal.

What is missing most here is more discussion on Iran. Fareed says, talk to them but nothing more. He wants Kurdistan secured but mentions nothing in the way of deals with Iran on that or to gain its useful role in mentoring the Shiia population in Iraq. He also makes no argument on Iran's WMD pursuit.

So the argument is Iraq-centric to a fault, in my mind. Still, accepting that bias, which BTW kills virtually every peace plan we ever dream up for the region, Fareed's overall presentation here is more solid than most, so worth a good read.

Still, I long for the great article on making some effort toward a regional security agenda and accompanying forum that brings together all the region's players and concerned outside great powers. I honestly believe that's the cover we need to forge an acceptable outcome in Iraq.

But absent a stinging Democrat win next week, I feel such an overarching approach is highly unlikely from this administration. It won't really talk and it won't really deal. So we won't really succeed.

Wrote my column for the weekend today. It's titled, "United we stood, but divided we'll stand taller."

I can see clearly now . . . with glasses on

DATELINE: on the kitchen island in Indy, 30 Oct 2006

When I had to drive home from Oak Ridge last Thursday in a one-way rental (flights canceled, so that's how my big China trip wound down), my night-time fatigue double vision (why I wear prisms on my glasses) got so bad I had to drive with one eye shut the whole way from Louisville.

That's about as scary as I care to drive.

So the next day I went to the eye doc's to pick up my glasses and the distance ones felt okay, but they struck me as being as weak as my current distance glasses (I actually still see close to 20/20, it's the misalignment of my eyes that haunts me as I get older, as my left eye is substantially higher, thus my distinctive head tilt). Meanwhile, the reading glasses totally freaked me out, because when I put them on, everything went super double vision. I simply couldn't believe the prescription was right, but it was the heavy prism correction I was promised, so I was confused.

Right on the spot I get a follow-on second appointment with the shop's owner (I had seen the other eye doc the previous time) to check me out a second time.

So today I went and had the prism confirmed on the reading glasses, to my amazement. The problem with the distance ones was that I needed the same strong prism correction there but didn't get them (how they got that confused, I don't know, because it makes sense you need the same alignment correction whether you're talking up close or distant).

Still, I was a bit taken aback, as that meant I somehow had to get used to these glasses that seemed to make my world go crazy visually.

Well, first thing we corrected the panoramic position of the lens so I looked through the middle of the lens (the usual correction for head shape), and then I wore the glasses for about 5 minutes. I was told this correction would take time to get used to at first, because I'd been self-correcting through eye strain for so long that I'd naturally fight having that done by the glasses themselves.

So I waited the five minutes, and amazingly, my close-up vision became incredibly clearer than it's ever been--stunning really.

The problem then becomes, what happens when I take my reading glasses off? Well, I'll need to put my distance glasses on, or relearn to squeeze my head like crazy to do the re-alignment physically myself.

In other words, the more I wear the stronger prisms for both distance and close, the more dependent on them I'll be, meaning the more I'll need to wear my glasses period, which, quite frankly, I don't do that much now (just for movies, driving, intense bouts of reading).

A sign of aging, for sure, but a bit intimidating to feel the dependency grow.

Still, wearing my reading glasses now is really quite stunning in terms of how different my head feels. I no longer have to squeeze it so to make everything focus. I can relax my skull all I want, including my usually aching right eye (I suspect much of my perceived sinus pain of the past decade or so was really eye strain). It's quite liberating really, but it also means I'll inevitably end up briefing and appearing places with glasses on, which will be weird, because most people don't know I wear glasses.

But the trade-off is just too good to turn down. I'll simply get addicted to the lack of strain and pain, plus I have new super-light distance glasses which don't even feel like you're wearing anything, so that will help with my usual disdain for them.

Still, humbling to join the ranks of those who basically see a very fuzzy world without glasses.

Then again, better to have lived long enough to suffer this problem.

Tom around the web

+ The Devil Wears Polo linked You can't access the intra-mural politics in Iran until you start the conversation and linked Epidemiology meets Dr. No.

+ ZenPundit linked My own personal 5GW dream and uses Tom's definition of system perturbations in today's exploration of super empowered individuals.

+ Dreaming 5GW used Tom's concept as a key idea in Sysadmin U.

+ 2006 Middle East Deployment linked Iraqi parliament votes to stop pretending it's going to be a unitary state.

+ Cal Poly MBA Trip links The normalization of China proceeds apace and A “responsible” China is a self-interested China.

There's a quick 5k...

Now on to the Halloween decorations...

And the Pack is cruising toward 3-4! Checking the sked, I believe 8-8 is a real possibility.

Where the strategic bankruptcy meets the budgetary bankruptcy

TECHNOLOGY: "Military Repair Work Booms: 'Reset' Contractors Reap a Bonanza Amid Effect of Iraqi Conflict," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal, 23 October 2006, p. B8.

NATION & WORLD: "The Third Battlefront: Money; Wars and modernization force a stressed Army to fight for $25 billion more (The question now becomes how much money the Army will get--and who pays)," by Anna Mulrine, U.S. News & World Report, 30 October 2006, p. 42.

The first story makes the point I've argued many times in the past (even as some persist in the notion that wars make for good long-term business for defense contractors who build platforms):

More than three years of operations in Iraq have strained budgets and resources, leaving the Army scrounging for money to develop a new generation of high-tech weapons. But for now it is flush with funds to patch up existing equipment...

To quote a SECDEF: you fix the Army you have in war, not buy the Army you want for the next one.

Rumsfeld looks very bad letting Schoomaker go to Congress to ask for the $25 billion he hasn't been able to free up because he refuses to stop overfeeding the Leviathan while starving the SysAdmin.

I mean, this is exactly what his job is all about. By sending Schoomaker to plead, Rummy's basically saying, "I'm not up to this task. I don't know what to do. You guys free me from the burden of matching strategy to tactics budgetarily. Help me. I've fallen down conceptually in this Long War and I can't get up!"

Schoomaker wants 50k new soldiers, but they cost $100k to find, train and equip. And that just gets them in the game.

Meanwhile, we're begging the same Chinese this administration still holds out as the near-peer competitor excuse for continued high spending on the Leviathan to help us out on North Korea, Iran, Sudan, and wherever else we can't go because of the Iraq tie-down.

Strategic bankruptcy meets budgetary bankruptcy. Is this not clear evidence that the Bush post-presidency has long been in full swing? When a SECDEF basically abdicates his job?

Frankly, no matter how bad the Dems will be back in power on the Hill, it would be better for the troops, the country, the GOP and the world if Bush's administration was thoroughly repudiated in this election. Two more years of this stuff will simply cost way too much--in blood, in treasure, but most of all in strategic opportunity.

Remembering what's really at stake upon entry into China's markets and industry

ARTICLE: "Bill Ford Jr.: For Auto Makers, China is the New Frontier," by Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 27 October 2006, p. B1.

ARTICLE: "Airbus Move to Build in China May Pose a Longer-Term Risk," by Daniel Michaels and Bruce Stanley, Wall Street Journal, 27 October 2006, p. A6.

EDITORIAL: "America drops, Asia shops: Thanks to the vigour of Asia's consumers, it is a good time for the American economy to slow," The Economist, 21 October 2006, p. 11.

For Western firms, getting into China seems both obvious and dangerous. So much cheap labor to exploit. The danger? Being co-opted into building up China's own industries, which means the holy grail of capturing the booming domestic demand there will likely be a partial victory.

And yet, it is likely to be the only sustainable victory there. A total capture couldn't work, because the CCP would simply lash back eventually, so better to capture some of a huge market than none.

Plus, as Ford points out here, getting in bed with the Chinese will put American firms more in tune with the tastes of Asia and--by extension--Europe. In cars, that means smaller and more fuel efficient.

So accessing China isn't just accessing labor or market, it's accessing the emerging dominant global design mindset. Get left behind and watch the world get very small for you.

Risky? You bet. But either you tolerate the risk or you guarantee yourself failure. Those 3 billion new capitalists will not be denied.

And thank God for them. Now we finally have a decent counterweight to the American consumer. Just in time given all the debt our "fiscal conservatives" have--yet again--built up a huge national deficit.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and black hole North Korea is just that

ARTICLE: "Sanctions Don't Dent North Korea-China Trade," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 27 October 2006, p. A1.

THE WORLD: "Tension, Desperation: The China-North Korean Border," by Norimitsu Onishi, New York Times, 22 October 2006, p. WK14.

LINK BY LINK: "The Internet Black Hole That Is North Korea," by Tom Zeller, Jr., New York Times, 23 October 2006, p. C3.

ARTICLE: "In '97, U.S. Panel Predicted a North Korea Collapse in 5 Years: Difficulties in gleaning intelligence from a closed society," by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, 27 October 2006, p. A6.

For now, China's not really cut anything off to North Korea. Everything I heard in Beijing said they would pursue a slow motion approach. But they readily admit they have little idea where this will take them. There is this vague--and rather naive--hope that bilateral talks between the U.S. and North Korea will make this problem go away. But most experts can't sustain that line of reasoning for more than a moment or two of debate and then their words trail off.

There is a clear desire for this whole mess to go away, but in both capitals there is the dominant belief that it's more the other guy's duty than their own. China feels not yet up to it, whereas even the Cheney-Bush White House recognizes the need--ahem!--for "diplomacy."

This symmetrical perception of asymmetry is so commonplace throughout the Sino-American relationship right now, but officially, up on top, my sense is that the dialogue remains horribly laden with officialeze. Official positions abound, but little shared truth is discovered, and that's too bad, because all these circumstances (North Korea, Iran, Africa) should be the basis for building this strategic relationship up right now.

But perhaps just as well. Stuck with Hu and Wen on their side and Cheney and Bush on ours, we simply lack the talent to make this happen right now. But the questions remains, How bad can this opportunity cost grow over the next two years?

Meanwhile, China will fortify its border and prepare for the worst, which I told them is the best they can hope for given our approach and their inability to pick up the job for themselves (Kim's disposal at their hands seems beyond their imagination at this point, though no one shies from the discussion, which is telling in that we seem firmly in reel #1 of this film noir, where Barbara Stanwyck is just beginning to rope in Fred MacMurray for the nasty task ahead [or think "Body Heat" if that reference is too far back]).

If we do the slow squeeze, which I think we will and should do in the meantime, then Kim will suffer and survive, and that estimated 300k of refugees already in China will only continue to grow at a faster rate.

The more we squeeze, the more likely Kim will do something the Chinese simply can't stomach. At that point, either the Chinese and ROK invade, along with our stationed troops, and China has the refugee problem big time, or the Chinese wait for the U.S. to strike and if that happens, it will be a barrage (Cheney can't abide any comparison to weak-kneed Clinton and cruise missile strikes) that likewise sets off the big flow.

Either way, China gets it big flow, on top of whatever flow occurred slo-mo across the sanctions.

We've predicted the DPRK's collapse for a long time, but our intell community doesn't have a clue. We're the drunk who looks for his car keys under the street lamp instead of over near his car "because the light's better over here." North Korea is a real black hole. Either it will be filled by a reluctant ROK and a slightly less unrealistic PRC, or it will draw their forces in at the time of its choosing.

But one thing is for sure: so long as China refuses to take control and America simply can't, control of this situation has been handed over to Kim.

The taming of China proceeds on many fronts ...

ARTICLE: "Retail's One-China Problem: Immense, Fragmented Market Poses Problems for Wal-Mart, Other Chains Seeking to Expand," by Mei Fong, Kate Linebaught and Gordon Fairclough, Wall Street Journal, 28 October 2006, p. B1.

OP-ED: "Chinese checks: A protectionist backlash in Beijing," by Harry Harding, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2006, p. A18.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: "EU to Get Tougher on China Trade: Strategy Shift Aims to Quell Protectionist Sentiment, Strengthen Hand at Table," by John W. Miller, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2006, p. A8.

WEEK IN REVIEW: "The Chinese Go After Corruption, Corruptly," by Jim Yardley, New York Times, 22 October 2006, p. WK3.

China is huge population-wise, but crammed into a country the size of the United States (continental). It is hugely fragmented. Six major dialects of language which are more different from one another than French and English (so why do we still call them "dialects"?). You've got tropics and sub-artic. And you don't have an integrated nationwide logistics network, so tastes are incredibly local.

No wonder you need to bribe everybody and their brother to get anything done in China.

Also, no surprise that as China opens up to globalization, the protectionist backlash there will be both local and national, with Beijing incredibly desirous of making sure it's Chinese companies that ultimately unify the nation economically the way the party unified it politically.

But smart Harry Hardin puts it right: "China's economic nationalism is a marginal adjustment to, rather than a fundamental repudiation of, Beijing's broader embrace of globalization."

Simply put, the force overcomes the friction here. Rarely pretty, but good enough to deepen its status in the Core.

Naturally, the Old Core will constantly push China on this point, and the EU's role here is indicative of the sort of "regulatory superpower" role I see Europe assuming in coming years.

Internally, we can expect the CCP to continue to treat anti-corruption campaigns as more political sport than serious economic reform. The phrase, "some accounts [of corruption] seem out of Dickens" is very telling. That's exactly where China's political system stands in relation to its economic development, which is why "Deadwood" is the best American media presentation of capitalism in China today.

What will drive serious Chinese government reform will be a serious economic shock. When that shock inevitably comes, the question will be, Does the CCP strike outward politically in order to deflect its own guilt or does it move the pile forward internally?

For us, the question will already be decided by then--as in, Did we do enough to deny China that enemy image that we forced that fear inward toward productive change?

Either way, the tipping point is coming. China's slide on corruption cannot continue indefinitely. Eventually, the cost will simply outweigh the pain.

American idols

ARTICLE: "America's Next Top Pundit," by Jeffrey Zaslow, Wall Street Journal, 20 October 2006, p. W1.

Great piece on why the vast majority of "experts" we suffer on TV are just plain crap.

The basic logic of the B-listers who are constantly pushing themselves on TV shows, the vast majority of which are likewise crap, is that the harsher the opinion, and the more pithily put forward, the better the chance for reappearances.

All circus and no bread.

Here's a great bit that sums up the piece completely:

Last year, Jason Alexander was on Howard Stern's show pitching a children's book he'd written. Ms. [Debbie and Ann Coulter-wannabe] Shlussel called in and berated the "Seinfeld" actor for supporting OneVoice, a group that advocates nonviolent conflict resolution in the Middle East. Ms. Shlussel charged that the organization has ties to Hamas. Mr. Stern got laughs saying he'd like to create a "Six Degrees of Separation" game based on her ability to connect any person to terrorists in six links or less.

After much arguing, and repeated impersonations of a raving Ms. Shlussel by Mr. Stern's sidekicks, Mr. Alexander lamented on air that he "came in to talk about a children's book and ended up being branded a terrorist."

Ms. Shlussel thought the segment made great theater. And she's thrilled that, even as a B-lister, she has the power to reach millions of people with information they're not hearing elsewhere.

Hmm. Joe McCarthy said the same thing.

One academic observer put it well. Wannabes feel the only way to succeed is to be an ideologue with no sense of self-doubt and "that there are only two positions in the world, yours and wrong."

Then there's the requisite quote from the CNN producer saying he's constantly searching the web for the "great American 'centrist pundit.'" Yes, I can see that one coming. That's why Glenn Beck has his own hour every night on Headline News.

After a recent talk someone in the audience told me how great it would be for me to go on Beck's show, and that it would make great theater to see the two of us together. A couple of weeks ago I got a call from the show asking me to go on the night before Pop!Tech, to talk about the Egypt piece I wrote in Esquire. I passed. I really don't want to have my vision reduced to "good theater."

That's not me being snobby. I am good theater. That's why I do so much public speaking. But you're just fodder on the vast majority of these shows, which are mostly just about making the host look good. Most of the time when I've had intermediaries arrange an appearance, the host knows nothing of your work and wants you to perform like some circus freak. Chris Matthews was my worst experience in this regard. I found his style so patently self-aggrandizing that I simply checked out of the segment. I just couldn't bring myself down to his level and it showed. The segment never ran, and I was supremely relieved. The experience just snapped something inside me, making me realize that this was not the way to go.

And that from a person who thinks as he speaks! Meaning, I normally always welcome a chance to talk, because that's how I develop my material first and foremost. But I simply walk away from most shows feeling dumber than before, and to someone who thinks like I do, that's a horrible sign that it's not for you.

That's why I limit myself now, turning down a lot more than I accept. I have to be asked on for something I've already argued, meaning its the argument and not just the "street meat" that they want. The host has to know who the hell I am and has to want me specifically for what I represent in terms of vision. Otherwise it's a waste of time.

My wife summed it well the last time I went on Larry Kudlow's show. She said, "You can really tell he likes having you on."

Does that mean I only go on shows where I'm liked? Yeah, for the most part. It's the same reason why I never ask to brief anyone, only going where they ask me. Life is too short to bang your skull against walls, and relishing that "fight" simply for fame... well, I just don't dislike myself that much that I need to pretend that fame will somehow fill the gap.

What I've learned with minor celebrity is that it's pretty much meaningless outside your immediate circle. And if its cost includes damaging your standing in that immediate circle, then it's completely worthless. And if your immediate circle lives off that crap, then you're completely screwed as a person to begin with, so I guess you might as well run with it to occupy your time before obscurity overtakes your sense of self-worth.

Truth be told, I watch almost no network news or news channel shows. I can just feel my IQ dropping, as I wrote in PNM, with each passing minute.

I rarely feel better after a TV appearance, but almost always feel smarter after being on the radio (for example, even with Larry, I like being on his radio show a lot more). It's got to move the pile for you, because if it isn't, you're not passing along material that people need anyway, so why bother?

In the end, I find that I rarely win any converts on TV, often on radio, and that I rarely miss when I get them live, in a theater or conference room. Since I get paid a lot for the latter and none for the former, it's a pretty easy choice. One pays the bills, makes me smarter, and wins converts. The other does none of the above--on average.

Scarcity still sells.

China, the unprincipled SysAdmin, willing to invest anywhere, actually helps our strategic interests

ARTICLE: "War in Sudan? Not Where the Oil Wealth Flows: Just 600 Miles From Darfur, BMWs, Flat TV's and Cafe Life," by Jeffrey Gettleman, New York Times, 24 October 2006, p. A1.

ARTICLE: "China Hosts Africa Summit as West Watches Warily," by Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2006, p. A8.

Sudan's getting rich on an oil boom and a real estate boom. Meanwhile, just hundreds of miles away, thousands die in gruesome ethnic cleansing.

Please, save me from the insensitivity argument. I spent a month in Austria at the height of the genocide in Bosnia, and all the cafes were full there too. No one seemed too anguished about that incongruity either.

Absent the oil and real estate booms (related, of course), where is Sudan?

Remember, Sudan was Osama's hideout for a chunk of the 1990s. Before that, it was a wannabe client state for revolutionary Iran.

So now it's got the best of both worlds: genocide and FDI. And everyone wants to get down on the Chinese for the latter "facilitating" the former--which, of course, it does. But it also dampens the conflict, containing it from those who: 1) don't give a damn and 2) have no desire to intervene.

Ah, that would the West and the U.S. in particular.

Offends you, this argument? Please, take out an ad in the newspaper and call it a day. Better yet, push American corporations to boycott.

People don't want to hear this, but China's investment presence inside the Gap limits our liability there. The Chinese "unilaterally" engage in SysAdmin just like we unilaterally engage in Leviathan work. Each side limits the other's liability. We just don't recognize yet the symbiotic nature of this relationship.

China brags that it doesn't "foist" its models on anyone, but of course it does. By taking such a mercantilist approach to the Gap, it fosters pale versions of itself--bread before circuses, or economics before politics. But it does this so narrowly that the legacy of Chinese trade is wealth, but not development. Notice the two booms at work in Sudan: oil and real estate. Which of those two lasts? Which empowers Sudanese to any appreciable degree?

This is old-style dependencia, much like the security dependencies that the U.S. generates in places like Iraq, Israel and Egypt.

Our chocolate, China's peanut butter. We give each other some morals on things where they're missing: security for us, and economics for them.

Last week I told the Chinese in Beijing: soon they will come looking to kill and torture and drive off the Chinese in order to drive off globalization. The backlash is just beginning. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.

And once we get past Cheney, we might yet again have an administration that realizes that on our side too.

Two pipers, neither gets paid. Neither finds true success either.

Egypt, stressing out, wants a Deus ex machina to make Islamism go away

ARTICLE: "Egypt, Under Stress, Sees U.S. as Pain and Remedy: A plea to promote Palestinian statehood," by Michael Slackman, New York Times, 22 October 2006, p. A3.

Egypt's feeling the weak man of the Middle East, which isn't particularly new. A "rising Islamic movement at home and diminished influence throughout the region" are cited as sources of official angst. So the dream of the effective Palestinian state is pushed as the answer.

And we're told that experts on Egypt see no serious future risk of regime collapse?

Sounds pretty pathetic and illusory to me. Meanwhile the vast majority of the 70 million population live in "deep poverty" and a local poli sci prof says "there is a feeling the ruling team does not have a good vision for dealing with the problems of the country." And we're told the military may or may not go along with Gamal as Hosni's genetic replacement, and that the government is upping its domestic repression as a means to "blunt the rising popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood."

Gamal's big vision breakthroughs? He wants nukes. He wants to be like the Chinese. Oh, and he may change the constitution so that it's okay for only one candidate to appear on the presidential banner, lest some MB candidate emerge.

And somehow a better Palestinian state would fix all this?

This is why planners in the Pentagon worry about Egypt, and that's why I wrote the "Country to Watch" piece in Esquire a bit back.

The CPSU yields to the CCC on environmentalism in Mongolia

ARTICLE: "To Stop Dust Bowl, Mongolia Builds 'Great Wall' of Trees: Planting Project Aims to Quell Gobi Sandstorms; Critics Cite Threat From Salt," by Patrick Barta, Wall Street Journal, 24 October 2006, p. A1.

Mongolia, China's "near abroad," is too close for comfort on the subject of dust storms. Mongolia spent most of the 20th century under the Sovs' thumb, but it's basically on its own now following that collapse, falling increasingly under Chinese economic domination (all that resource desire). And with the dust storms increasingly reaching China, Korea, and even the U.S., Mongolia's under some pressure to stem the problem of growing desertification, which can be explained somewhat by global warming but even more so by local human behavior (good example: more livestock to satisfy China's needs puts more pressure on local vegetation).

So now we're watching a network of funding sources come together to help Mongolia build a "great wall"of trees to stem the dust bowl effect, much like FDR's CCC did here in the States (you see those lines of pines all over the Midwest still). The UN and some other major donors have declined to participate, but Rotary Club chapters in Mongolia and South Korea are leading the charge.

For now, the effort seems puny and pathetic, underfunded and unlikely to succeed. Yet it's a sign of the sort of efforts we'll see time and time again in environmentally stressed Asia, which will become a center of gravity in global environmentalism--out of necessity.

Intelligent content, not infringed copyright

ARTICLE: "We're Google. So Sue Us. For a Company on the Cutting Edge, It's Part of Doing Business," by Katie Hafner, New York Times, 23 October 2006, p. C1.

A rather self-satisfied story about lawyers working for Google who think they're cutting edge because they run around creating run-arounds on copyright infringement. Google thinks that stockpiling stuff, inert content really, is what's going to make them the 21st-century equivalent of Microsoft, but I think it's misguided.

The real content worth stockpiling is intelligent content--something that does something, reports something, senses something, organizes something, determines something. In a super-connected world, it's the rules that are the most most important--and thus the most intelligent--content.

Google should be about creating real value and serious connectivity--in short, empowering people. Simply trolling the web for everything they think they can snatch and get away with ("We rely on the same safe harbor that YouTube relies on, so we're fairly familiar with the issues.") is not the strategic leadership they imagine it to be. Google should simply aim higher than YouTube. This is bottom feeding. It has too much money and too much talent to be defined by this effort.

Key words I get, but simply appropriating every book in history I don't get.

"Just do it" can't become "just steal it."

Living la vida na levo in Tehran

OP-ED: "Iranian Moolah," by Farouz Farzami, Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2006, p. A18.

Sorry, but had to zone out a bit after China. Caught up to my reading last night, thanks to the extra hour (God, I wish that were every weekend!).

This description reminds me so much of the summer I lived in Leningrad in 1985 (the summer of the great crackdown on vodka, which never bugged me, because I liked chatting up Russians while standing in line) and spent every night I could with the blackmarketer "Big Al" and his constant stream of customers. My big impression from all those nights: the populace had so effectively opted out of political life and simply made their own "house-arrest" style economic life na levo ("on the side," or literally, "on the left" in Russian) that it was like they lived in their own little universe of close friends, treasured objects, and media content from the West (everyone in Leningrad seemed to live on American VHS tapes dubbed by a screaming Finnish guy who did every voice the same--it was mesmerizingly bad!). Of course, the most treasured objects were forbidden books, which I brought in numbers with fake dust jackets.

The author of this piece is--natch!--a journalist who is "forbidden to publish in Iran" (Sound familiar? Everyone I knew in the Russian ex-pat community in the 1980s was a forbidden author. It was a modest accomplishment, which is what made it so sad.).

Great story. He talks of coming upon a special stand of imported American books (authorized by the mullahs, no doubt) in Tehran and notices one about cocktails. Then he launches in:

I live in a country where alcohol is officially banned, but where the art of home-made spirits has reached new heights. Sharing my astonishment about the cocktail book with some friends with better connections to the Islamist regime, they explained the government had a silent pact with the educated and affluent in Iran's big cities, who render politics unto Caesar, provided that Caesar keeps his nose out of their liquor cabinets.

In other words, the well-to-do Iranian drinks and reads and watches what he wishes. He does as he pleases behind the walls of his private mansions and villas. In return for his private comforts, the affluent Iranian is happy to sacrifice freedom of speech, most of his civil rights, and his freedom of association. The upper-middle class has been bought off by this pact, which makes a virtue of hypocrisy.

The accommodation runs both ways. A friend who had made a small fortune in the pharmaceutical business told me that recently the enforcers of Islamist law appeared on the roof of his condominium in the northwest Tehran suburb of Sharak-e-Qarb to seize all the satellite dishes. Every household received an order to attend a hearing of the revolutionary court, where the magistrate--typically a mullah--will levy fines. The fines help feed the friends of the courts, while for my wealthy pharmacist friend, erecting another satellite dish is as easy as refueling his car--and even the inconvenience of replacing the dish will not be necessary for long. Technology is more than up to the challenge posed by the morals police. "I have heard there is a state-of-the-art dish made of invisible fiberglass that I can install on the window pane of my apartment," my friend told me. "I'm going for it."

Many Iranians believe the occasional crackdowns are being organized by corrupt officials who secretly own interests in the new generation of satellite dishes. The confiscations just create markets for new products.

Sound unbelievable? It isn't. It's exactly what you found in Moscow and Leningrad back in the 1980s: a huge social network of hypocritical enforcers and two-faced citizens, and everybody exchanged money in the process. It's just that no wealth is truly generated, and the people get stupider and more ambivalent and lazy and disconnected from the future. It's all so sad and pathetic. I remember crying myself to sleep one night from thinking about how everyone in the USSR felt like they will just living in some weird prison and all they could claim for themselves was whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. It was supremely depressing to see all that talent wasted, and their profound sense of injustice.

This guy describes the workarounds, but that's not a life, and no one trapped in that existence pretends it is.

But, of course, this rich guy is trapped by nothing. It's only the lower classes who really are disconnected from their desires. This rich pharmacist vacations 2-3 months abroad each year, putting him more in the category of the KGB general (who, frankly, never had it THAT good).

The saddest part here is that the rich guy expects the revolution will come only when the masses are disillusioned enough to take matters into their own hands.

Sounds to me like Iran's rich are about as cynical as the mullahs.

Still, the larger point is this: this is not robust authoritarianism. It's weak. It's flabby. It hypocritical to a fault. It's not going anywhere. It's not accomplishing anything.

In short, it's ripe.

Tom on KnoxNews today

A bigger definition of 'us,' a better nation at heart

Three years ago this week, my adopted daughter Vonne Mei was born deep in the interior of China. The very next morning she was left in a basket outside the gates of a provincial government building. Nine months following that fateful choice by her birth parents, Vonne Mei landed in Minnesota, my wife and I at her side, and immediately joined our United States.

As America celebrates its 300 millionth citizen - quite possibly an immigrant - let me tell you how we came to this life-changing decision. [read on]

Map sighting

jrdano4 wrote in to say:

I was reading a college textbook: "Diversity Amid Globalization". I found your "Gap" map on p.111 of the text and there was no reference to you, only "military strategists." I don't know if it means anything, did you create the map with others?

My weekend column comes early this week, thanks to distributor Scripps Howard

Working with Knoxville News Sentinel, I've gotten an agreement set with Scripps Howard to distribute my KNS weekly column. That agreement was to be in place starting in early October, and as such, I had great hopes that either my "Dr. No" column of two weeks ago or last week's "China/North Korea" column would start appearing in Scripps network of 400 or so news outlets, but I've yet to find any examples of this happening, which depressed me some over the past two weeks.

Even so, my gut instinct was that something bureaucratic was holding things up.

So I ego surf today (getting the Steyn hit, for example) and come across the column "A journey worth taking" on the Scripps website under the commentary file. My submitted title was "A bigger definition of 'us,' a better nation at heart," which--quite frankly, wasn't so hot, so I like Scripps' title better (or maybe it was KNS'). The direct page link is http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/15166.

Google's hit dates it as 23 Oct, which is weird, because I didn't turn the piece in to KNS til the 24th. At Scripps, the date is 25 October, or yesterday.

Now, I'm hoping this appearance doesn't suggest that I can only crack Scripps when I do an Erma Bombeck/sensitive Tom column. If so, then expect me to note that the crab grass is always greener in the other yard.

But seriously, I expect to find out that this one was the first to appear because it just took this long to get all the ducks lined up with Scripps.

Now, here's what I don't know:

First, is this all there is in terms of Scripps distribution? Being posted on their web site? I know that's not the usual case, as the whole point is to fill newspaper pages. So I'm guessing that anytime Scripps distributes a column that it also posts them on its website. Maybe this will be the usual drill: my "weekend" column goes on Scripps and on this basis is made available to papers for printing at that point. At least that's my hope here.

Second, if Scripps is going to post like this, does that dilute the utility of KNS's printing its hard-copy version in the Saturday or Sunday edition? Or will we have to control the timing of our sharing of columns with Scripps to avoid premature publication in the future?

Either way, I see this as a neat step forward that I'll do my best to exploit on behalf of Oak Ridge and Enterra and my general role as thought leader.

Argument by anecdote, fueled by extrapolations without context

Mark Steyn's book is excerpted by MacLeans under the title (The future belongs to Islam). It is worth reading because I think it gives you a very accurate sense of what Steyn's book is all about (America Alone: the end of the world as we know it).

I bump into the online article because in this excerpt he obliquely cites BFA, noting that I read Robert Kaplan--unlike he, apparently, because otherwise I assume he'd cite Kaplan directly. The cite on Kaplan is just the reference to the phrase "Injun country," which he dissects very narrowly in its historical context, noting that the Sioux never ravaged New York City (although, I might add, the Irish did when sufficiently provoked, a la "Gangs of New York"--but again, Steyn likes to use his imagery very narrowly, so pointing out stuff that like is meaningless here).

Since Steyn focuses on "them" coming here (actually, arguing only Europe instead of the West at large) instead of noting the far more profound global flow of "us" going there--in the form of globalization--he only describes Islam's potential for cultural invasion here while ignoring the powerful effect of the West's cultural penetration of the Middle East (where does he think all this nationalism/Islamism is coming from?).

So, Steyn's basic technique is much like a Lou Dobbs or a Pat Buchanon: anecdotes that scare, compounded with some today data extrapolated to tomorrow's frightening inevitabilities. This is a technique often used by fear-meisters, especially in the realm of the environment, and it betrays an "all things being equal" assumption that just never holds true in the real world. A good example of this was all the "population bomb" logic from my youth, which has simply fallen apart on a global level. Now we're getting a "clash of civilizations" version of that from Steyn with reference to Europe, which is apparently the center of his universe.

But here's some limits to this logic:

1) The simple extrapolation approach on population in Europe is unlikely to unfold, as time and time again we find that those baby-crazy immigrants simply don't maintain that fertility rate the longer they live in an advanced economy. Strangely enough, they become subject to all the same pressures on family that everybody else does. We hear this argument on Hispanics here in the States, except we already find that birth rates are dropping as Hispanics get more wealth and opportunity--go figure! Just like everybody else who's come to America in the past.

2) If the amazing did come true in Europe, making it unique in human history, then what would be the difference to global history? Answer is, not much. Either Europe gins up its demographic vitality through the effective integration of Muslims or "Eurabia" simply becomes an extension of the loser Middle East. Meanwhile, the rest of the world simply wouldn't hang around. It would move on. To some, the "end of the world," but to others who "know" more of the world than just Europe, no big deal. Not big for America, whose allies will lie in the East and South, not in Europe. Not big for the East or the South either.

3) But if it did come true in Europe, it would constitute no more than a strange migration of the problem set from the Middle East to Europe, because the Middle East isn't slated for rapid expansion as a population indefinitely. Indeed, the baby boom of the 1970s, associated with oil wealth in many instances, has ended already throughout the region. Weirdly enough, as globalization increasingly penetrates the region, fertility rates have dropped throughout the region, as Olivier Roy noted in Globalised Islam, a book I used plenty in BFA. If Steyn worries so much about aging Europe, I am plenty optimistic about a middle-aging Middle East, where today's youth bulge becomes tomorrow's middle age spread. So if Steyn expects a neverending flow of population from the Islamic Middle East and North Africa to fuel his invasive species fears in Europe, that's simply not in the cards. As for the processing of that youth bulge in the Middle East, two outcomes are possible: 1) lotsa violence as politics and economics remain unchanged and 2) politics and economics in the region change a lot. If the former occurs, the Middle East will be as disconnected from globalization's Core as central Africa is today. With some pain, the world will simply learn to get along without Middle Eastern oil, as the tumult there will push the Core down the hydrocarbon chain even faster than it will proceed on its own natural course, which has been quite steady throughout human history. If the latter occurs, then just watch the flow of humanity from the Middle East to Europe dry up. Impossible? We've seen that occur on a state-by-state basis plenty with Latinos here in the States over the past 40 years. If it hadn't, then America would have been overrun by Puerto Ricans a long time ago, based on logical extrapolations you could have made in the late 1950s and the early 1960s. But no matter.

4) Steyn assumes that the invasive Muslims will simply pervert democracy in Europe, rather than avail themselves of democracy's avenues to press their economic and political demands. In effect, Steyn's making the same glum assumptions about market-democracies that Karl Marx once did about a different proletariat, yielding the same sort of decisive assumptions that will be just as powerfully disproven as his ultimately were.

5) Of course, Steyn's (and others') counters to that last argument is to say that the intense religious-cultural coherence of Islam will transcend all those changes that tamed such past threats--like say, the immigrant Irish in America who were described in all the same ways then (in the mid-1800s) as Muslims are described by Steyn today in Europe. But do we see that coherence throughout the Middle East? Hardly. When given the chance, Muslims throughout the region seem to move into an acceptance of modernity that looks suspiciously like that of every other culture on the planet. Can it be done en masse? Check out East Asian Muslims. Can it be done in Western democracies? Check out America. But these are unfair arguments to someone as fixated on Europe as Steyn, as he displays the same fatalism on culture and civilization as Osama and others do regarding the Middle East. Neither's gloom is justified. Globalization won't warp the Middle East beyond all recognition, although it will kill Osama's nostalgic dream of turning back the clock there to a time he finds more comforting. And the Islamization of Europe won't warp Europe beyond all recognition, although it will kill Steyn's nostaglic dreams for turning back the clock there to a time he finds more comforting.

There is much intellectual danger in Steyn's form of reasoning, which I believe betrays the course of his life education and experiences. Coming from the rather narrow and self-absorbed world of theater, he really doesn't have the chops to do good horizontal linkaging of trends and driving forces associated with globalization, and that's too bad, because if he understood his biases better, his arguments could be a lot more powerful, although they'd also be far less frightening, and since he works his gallows humor in this vein, I guess that's just a choice he prefers making. But this is not seriously systematic thinking about the future. Steyn's futurism betrays the usual myopic problem of the pessimists going all the way back to Malthus and Marx: they simply refuse to acknowledge the enduring ingenuity of mankind to change and adapt, plus they ignore the obvious power of markets to take advantage of both good and bad, treating all churn as simply an opportunity for new sales of new goods and services to new customers. In short, the "bad" that Steyn describes for Europe will not occur in some vacuum. Wherever Europe fails in this respect, others will exploit, and I'm not just talking about his invasive Muslims. I'm talking about the rest of this flat world.

Bruce calls it the New World Disorder

Pop!Tech brief will be available online within a few weeks, according to Andrew Zolli

Andrew sent me an email thanking me for speaking this year, and promised the talk would be posted online as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, here's a nice shot from the cheap seats posted by Bruce Sterling on his Wired blog. Thanks to reader Larry Y for making us aware of Bruce's nice photo.