China's coming around

OP-ED: Beijing strains to hear the voice of the people, By David Pilling, Financial Times, September 9 2009

This is well-written and worth reading. It speaks about how Beijing is becoming responsive, in its own crude way, to people power.

Key bit:

The authorities' responsiveness - even hyper-sensitivity - to public opinion is not exactly democratic. There are no regular soundings in the form of elections. Rather, there are eruptions of anger in the street or, increasingly, on the internet. That makes for a crude barometer.

Arthur Kroeber of Dragonomics, a research company, says that, in some instances, the authorities actively encourage the press to dig up information. When controversy first flared in June over a proposal to install Green Dam filtering software in all personal computers, the media were given a one-week grace period before reporting restrictions came crashing down. The information unearthed persuaded Beijing to water down its plans. The government also expends considerable effort on surveys and investigations. Not unreasonably, it does not trust local officials to inform party bosses about scandal, corruption and catastrophe in their own backyard.

Yet if there is a conscious effort to seek out, and respond to, popular opinion, the outcomes are arbitrary at best. In the absence of elections and free speech, the government's ability to uncover the true state of public opinion is limited. For every victory of people power, there are dozens - perhaps hundreds - of cases that never come to light.

To me, this is a ton of change in the right direction. How fast will it go? It will go as fast as it can and no faster (reminding me of a favorite note from the composer in a piece I once played in my HS orchestra: "Play as fast as possible, but no faster!").

(Via WPR Media Roundup)

More energy heresy

jdongweck writes in to say:

Your post about the BP oil find in the Gulf is the perfect chance for me to recommend this book. It concerns the vast amounts of energy available in the world, and how we will go about harnessing it. It also discusses how drilling 100 feet 100 years ago cost about the same per barrel as it does now to drill 35,000 feet. One of the first things early coal mines did upon mining coal was to use that coal to mine 'even more coal' Or something to that effect.

THE BOTTOMLESS WELL
The Twilight Of Fuel, The Virtue Of Waste, And Why We Will Never Run Out Of Energy

By Peter Huber and Mark P. Mills

The long pole in the tent of SysAdmin ops

SCOPE: "Not-So-Special Forces," by Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 28 September 2009.

Same old, same old: the key constraint is fixed rotary, aka helicopters.

We love our jets, but we need our copters--in far greater numbers and with much more maintenance and support.

Empower Iranian youth

ARTICLE: Tech-savvy Iranian youth take aim at Ahmadinejad, By Joshua Schneyer, Reuters, Sep 24, 2009

I approve of this approach. It should be facilitated.

(Thanks: Michael S. Smith II)

Simply brilliant

If true, the promise by Iran to run some uranium through Russia for enrichment appropriate for medical use is simply brilliant: a symbolically powerful "give" on a meaningless subject.

Sacrifice another pawn, Tehran, I double-dare you!

Fevered or feverish?

Blogged for about six hours straight, iPod blasting off the speaker wedge I stick it into in my office.

Sean can provide the total, but it was MASSIVE.

The beast known as the hungry blog retreats into its cave, sated for now and the foreseeable baseload.

I must yoga!

(Ed: 80 posts bringing the total in the queue to 149. Going to take me a long time to dig out ;-)

Ailing (but how exactly?)

Not sure I have swine. Weird damn night, like those kids had preceding.

But I am still struggling with sinusitis and flew twice yesterday, so who knows?

Will blog til I drop today, just in case.

10 Reasons Why Sanctions on Iran Won't Work

SIPA via Newscom

Team Ahmadinejad may walk out of Thursday's diplomatic showdown in Geneva with a slap on the wrist, but Tehran will almost certainly keep the upper hand. A few important reminders for Obama and Co. on the impotent politics of ganging up on a nuclear rebel right now.

Continue reading this week's World War Room column at Esquire.com

Already a must read at Real Clear Politics

Cordesman's CSIS report on Israel's attack plans digested for the WSJ

WEEKEND JOURNAL: "The Iran Attack Plan," by Anthony H. Cordesman, Wall Street Journal, 26-27 September 2009.

I read and blogged the original report. This WSJ piece is a nicely digested version.

Cordesman hasn't changed his thinking at all: hard to pull off, and unlikely to achieve anything more than a delay that can be largely erased if Iran redoubles its efforts as a result.

There are no surprises in Iran's pursuit of nukes, just revelations

WORLD NEWS: "U.S. Knew About Site For Years," by Siobhan Gorman, Wall Street Journal, 26-27 September 2009.

There are very few secrets left in this world, but never any shortage of revelations!

Major spy services have been interested in the Qom site for years, and as we know, anything the West knows, the East ends up knowing too.

So if we knew, they knew, the Israelis knew, and--by extension--the rest of the Big Five knew, for whom was this a revelation?

Why, the approving or disapproving public, of course.

There is a lot of PR going on with this whole dynamic, and it impresses me as little as the diplomacy. It's like the entire world needs to wrap its head around the reality that Iran's getting nukes and there's next to nothing that can be done about it, except for delaying it--possibly--for a bit with air strikes.

So we're moving through the anger and denial and heading toward the real bargaining and acceptance. Helen Kubler-Ross would be proud.

Asian student market

ARTICLE: Asian Universities Court Students Nearby, By LIZ GOOCH, New York Times, September 22, 2009

Inevitable and healthy.

We've passed oil's peak, but...

ARTICLE: Oil Industry Sets a Brisk Pace of New Discoveries, By JAD MOUAWAD, New York Times, September 23, 2009

Unbelievable. Price + technology = new finds!

The oil industry has been on a hot streak this year, thanks to a series of major discoveries that have rekindled a sense of excitement across the petroleum sector, despite falling prices and a tough economy.

These discoveries, spanning five continents, are the result of hefty investments that began earlier in the decade when oil prices rose, and of new technologies that allow explorers to drill at greater depths and break tougher rocks.

"That's the wonderful thing about price signals in a free market -- it puts people in a better position to take more exploration risk," said James T. Hackett, chairman and chief executive of Anadarko Petroleum.

More than 200 discoveries have been reported so far this year in dozens of countries, including northern Iraq's Kurdish region, Australia, Israel, Iran, Brazil, Norway, Ghana and Russia. They have been made by international giants, like Exxon Mobil, but also by industry minnows, like Tullow Oil.

Weird how that works.