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anonymous

USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD - 1 views

www.antipope.org/...x-2011-keynote-network-se.html

whimsy technology longnow

shared by anonymous on 16 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • if we should meet up in 2061, much less in the 26th century, you’re welcome to rib me about this talk. Because I’ll be happy to still be alive to rib.
  • The question I’m going to spin entertaining lies around is this: what is network security going to be about once we get past the current sigmoid curve of accelerating progress and into a steady state, when Moore’s first law is long since burned out, and networked computing appliances have been around for as long as steam engines?
  • a few basic assumptions about the future
  • ...82 more annotations...
  • it’s not immediately obvious that I can say anything useful about a civilization run by beings vastly more intelligent than us. I’d be like an australopithecine trying to visualize daytime cable TV.
  • The idea of an AI singularity
  • the whole idea of artificial general intelligence strikes me as being as questionable as 19th century fantasies about steam-powered tin men.
  • if you start trying to visualize a coherent future that includes aliens, telepathy, faster than light travel, or time machines, your futurology is going to rapidly run off the road and go crashing around in the blank bits of the map that say HERE BE DRAGONS.
  • at least one barkingly implausible innovation will come along between now and 2061 and turn everything we do upside down
  • My crystal ball is currently predicting that base load electricity will come from a mix of advanced nuclear fission reactor designs and predictable renewables such as tidal and hydroelectric power.
  • We are, I think, going to have molecular nanotechnology and atomic scale integrated circuitry.
  • engineered solutions that work a bit like biological systems
  • Mature nanotechnology is going to resemble organic life forms the way a Boeing 737 resembles thirty tons of seagull biomass.
  • without a technological civilization questions of network security take second place to where to get a new flint arrowhead.
  • if we’re still alive in the 26th century you’re welcome to remind me of what I got wrong in this talk.
  • we’re living through the early days of a revolution in genomics and biology
  • We haven’t yet managed to raise the upper limit on human life expectancy (it’s currently around 120 years), but an increasing number of us are going to get close to it.
  • it’s quite likely that within another century the mechanisms underlying cellular senescence will be understood and treatable like other inborn errors of metabolism
  • another prediction: something outwardly resembling democracy everywhere.
  • Since 1911, democractic government by a republic has gone from being an eccentric minority practice to the default system of government world-wide
  • Democracy is a lousy form of government in some respects – it is particularly bad at long-term planning, for no event that lies beyond the electoral event horizon can compel a politician to pay attention to it
  • but it has two gigantic benefits: it handles transfers of power peacefully, and provides a pressure relief valve for internal social dissent.
  • there are problems
  • . In general, democratically elected politicians are forced to focus on short-term solutions to long-term problems because their performance is evaluated by elections held on a time scale of single-digit years
  • Democratic systems are prone to capture by special interest groups that exploit the information asymmetry that’s endemic in complex societies
  • The adversarial two-party model is a very bad tool for generating consensus on how to tackle difficult problems with no precedents
  • Finally, representative democracy scales up badly
  • Nor are governments as important as they used to be.
  • the US government, the largest superpower on the block right now, is tightly constrained by the international trade system it promoted in the wake of the second world war.
  • we have democratic forms of government, without the transparency and accountability.
  • At least, until we invent something better – which I expect will become an urgent priority before the end of the century.
  • The good news is, we’re a lot richer than our ancestors. Relative decline is not tragic in a positive-sum world.
  • Assuming that they survive the obstacles on the road to development, this process is going to end fairly predictably: both India and China will eventually converge with a developed world standard of living, while undergoing the demographic transition to stable or slowly declining populations that appears to be an inevitable correlate of development.
  • a quiet economic revolution is sweeping Africa
  • In 2006, for the first time, more than half of the planet’s human population lived in cities. And by 2061 I expect more than half of the planet’s human population will live in conditions that correspond to the middle class citizens of developed nations.
  • by 2061 we or our children are going to be living on an urban middle-class planet, with a globalized economic and financial infrastructure recognizably descended from today’s system, and governments that at least try to pay lip service to democratic norms.
  • And let me say, before I do, that the picture I just painted – of the world circa 2061, which is to say of the starting point from which the world of 2561 will evolve – is bunk.
  • It’s a normative projection
  • I’m pretty certain that something utterly unexpected will come along and up-end all these projections – something as weird as the world wide web would have looked in 1961.
  • And while the outer forms of that comfortable, middle-class urban developed-world planetary experience might look familiar to us, the internal architecture will be unbelievably different.
  • Let’s imagine that, circa 1961 – just fifty years ago – a budding Nikolai Tesla or Bill Packard somewhere in big-city USA is tinkering in his garage and succeeds in building a time machine. Being adventurous – but not too adventurous – he sets the controls for fifty years in the future, and arrives in downtown San Francisco. What will he see, and how will he interpret it?
  • a lot of the buildings are going to be familiar
  • Automobiles are automobiles, even if the ones he sees look kind of melted
  • Fashion? Hats are out, clothing has mutated in strange directions
  • He may be thrown by the number of pedestrians walking around with wires in their ears, or holding these cigarette-pack-sized boxes with glowing screens.
  • But there seem to be an awful lot of mad people walking around with bits of plastic clipped to their ears, talking to themselves
  • The outward shape of the future contains the present and the past, embedded within it like flies in amber.
  • Our visitor from 1961 is familiar with cars and clothes and buildings
  • But he hasn’t heard of packet switched networks
  • Our time traveller from 1961 has a steep learning curve if he wants to understand the technology the folks with the cordless headsets are using.
  • The social consequences of a new technology are almost always impossible to guess in advance.
  • Let me take mobile phones as an example. They let people talk to one another – that much is obvious. What is less obvious is that for the first time the telephone network connects people, not places
  • For example, we’re currently raising the first generation of kids who won’t know what it means to be lost – everywhere they go, they have GPS service and a moving map that will helpfully show them how to get wherever they want to go.
  • to our time traveller from 1961, it’s magic: you have a little glowing box, and if you tell it “I want to visit my cousin Bill, wherever he is,” a taxi will pull up and take you to Bill’s house
  • The whole question of whether a mature technosphere needs three or four billion full-time employees is an open one, as is the question of what we’re all going to do if it turns out that the future can’t deliver jobs.
  • We’re still in the first decade of mass mobile internet uptake, and we still haven’t seen what it really means when the internet becomes a pervasive part of our social environment, rather than something we have to specifically sit down and plug ourselves in to, usually at a desk.
  • So let me start by trying to predict the mobile internet of 2061.
  • the shape of the future depends on whether whoever provides the basic service of communication
  • funds their service by charging for bandwidth or charging for a fixed infrastructure cost.
  • These two models for pricing imply very different network topologies.
  • This leaves aside a third model, that of peer to peer mesh networks with no actual cellcos as such – just lots of folks with cheap routers. I’m going to provisionally assume that this one is hopelessly utopian
  • the security problems of a home-brew mesh network are enormous and gnarly; when any enterprising gang of scammers can set up a public router, who can you trust?
  • Let’s hypothesize a very high density, non-volatile serial storage medium that might be manufactured using molecular nanotechnology: I call it memory diamond.
  • wireless bandwidth appears to be constrained fundamentally by the transparency of air to electromagnetic radiation. I’ve seen some estimates that we may be able to punch as much as 2 tb/sec through air; then we run into problems.
  • What can you do with 2 terabits per second per human being on the planet?
  • One thing you can do trivially with that kind of capacity is full lifelogging for everyone. Lifelogging today is in its infancy, but it’s going to be a major disruptive technology within two decades.
  • the resulting search technology essentially gives you a prosthetic memory.
  • Lifelogging offers the promise of indexing and retrieving the unwritten and undocmented. And this is both a huge promise and an enormous threat.
  • Lifelogging raises huge privacy concerns, of course.
  • The security implications are monstrous: if you rely on lifelogging for your memory or your ability to do your job, then the importance of security is pushed down Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
  • if done right, widespread lifelogging to cloud based storage would have immense advantages for combating crime and preventing identity theft.
  • whether lifelogging becomes a big social issue depends partly on the nature of our pricing model for bandwidth, and how we hammer out the security issues surrounding the idea of our sensory inputs being logged for posterity.
  • at least until the self-driving automobile matches and then exceeds human driver safety.
  • We’re currently living through a period in genomics research that is roughly equivalent to the early 1960s in computing.
  • In particular, there’s a huge boom in new technologies for high speed gene sequencing.
  • full genome sequencing for individuals now available for around US $30,000, and expected to drop to around $1000–3000 within a couple of years.
  • Each of us is carrying around a cargo of 1–3 kilograms of bacteria and other unicellular organisms, which collectively outnumber the cells of our own bodies by a thousand to one.
  • These are for the most part commensal organisms – they live in our guts and predigest our food, or on our skin – and they play a significant role in the functioning of our immune system.
  • Only the rapid development of DNA assays for SARS – it was sequenced within 48 hours of its identification as a new pathogenic virus – made it possible to build and enforce the strict quarantine regime that saved us from somewhere between two hundred million and a billion deaths.
  • A second crisis we face is that of cancer
  • we can expect eventually to see home genome monitoring – both looking for indicators of precancerous conditions or immune disorders within our bodies, and performing metagenomic analysis on our environment.
  • If our metagenomic environment is routinely included in lifelogs, we have the holy grail of epidemiology within reach; the ability to exhaustively track the spread of pathogens and identify how they adapt to their host environment, right down to the level of individual victims.
  • In each of these three examples of situations where personal privacy may be invaded, there exists a strong argument for doing so in the name of the common good – for prevention of epidemics, for prevention of crime, and for prevention of traffic accidents. They differ fundamentally from the currently familiar arguments for invasion of our data privacy by law enforcement – for example, to read our email or to look for evidence of copyright violation. Reading our email involves our public and private speech, and looking for warez involves our public and private assertion of intellectual property rights …. but eavesdropping on our metagenomic environment and our sensory environment impinges directly on the very core of our identities.
  • With lifelogging and other forms of ubiquitous computing mediated by wireless broadband, securing our personal data will become as important to individuals as securing our physical bodies.
  • the shifting sands of software obsolescence have for the most part buried our ancient learning mistakes.
  • So, to summarize: we’re moving towards an age where we may have enough bandwidth to capture pretty much the totality of a human lifespan, everything except for what’s going on inside our skulls.
  • anonymous on 16 Aug 11
     
    "Good afternoon, and thank you for inviting me to speak at USENIX Security." A fun read by Charlie Stoss."
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    I feel like cancer may be a bit played up. I freak out more about dementia.
anonymous

A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...edman-crisis-political-economy

geopolitics politics economics

shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • A more penetrating look at the very slow recovery of the world’s largest economy points to systemic failure by the financial and political elites.
  • Can you put the last three years in perspective?
  • It’s not that it’s not soluble, in many of these countries, but you see it in a destabilization going on beneath the surface. In fact, the riots in London are kind of symptomatic of this, of the fact that some elements of society have lost such respect for the elites that they’re prepared to take extreme action.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Well you know, I think there’s a kind of model you could argue that people are deprived of things so they revolt. But it’s much deeper than that.
  • when criminality starts to look legitimate to large numbers of people, that’s when you have a social crisis.
  • I think it’s a mistake to look at what happened in London simply in terms of “well there were social cuts and so that’s why there was a rising.” That rising couldn’t have occurred if the elites themselves hadn’t appeared to be so corrupted, so compromised, and even one could say, so incompetent. That was the real issue that we faced there and I think if you simply say that if you do social cuts then people will riot, that’s not empirically true.
  • It’s when you wind up in a situation where you no longer know who’s in charge nor do you care, that opportunities are created for the criminal class.
  • You really have to distinguish between the constant comings and goings of the system and the silliness of Rupert Murdoch, who in the end turns out to be a very silly man in many ways.
  • People who were supposed to be experts in finance did inexcusably stupid things and also in the process, profited handsomely. People in the political system who were supposed to hold these people accountable and prevent them from doing these things, failed to do it.
  • But when the fundamental thing that legitimizes an elite, the financial elite’s ability to manage money prudently, is violated in two ways.
  • First, that they clearly can’t do it. And secondly that they profit from it anyway.
  • And the fact that they don’t seem to regard themselves as particularly having failed. I mean, this is what creates a crisis I think.
  • I’ll put it this way: this is a crisis in virtue — in the virtue of the political leadership, in the virtue of the financial leaders. There’s expected to be a certain degree of self-restraint and moral probity. You can’t substitute regulations for that, and you can’t worry about whether or not they’re going to be enforced in the future. The heart of the matter is that the integrity, the intelligence, the morality of these elites, have now been called into question.
  • The issue is: who are these people who are running things, what gives them the right to do so, and if that right does not somehow flow from competence, what does it flow from? So we have a crisis I think, not in corruption, but of sheer incompetence and indifference to incompetence, and that is something that is not necessarily unmanageable, but it’s certainly not a question of getting better regulations.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    "STRATFOR CEO George Friedman says the current economic problems in the United States, Europe and elsewhere are the result of systemic failure in two major communities: the financial and political elite."
anonymous

Agenda: The U.S. and China Find Common Ground - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...s-and-china-find-common-ground

geopolitics u.s. china

shared by anonymous on 19 Aug 11 - Cached
  • Joe Biden is saying that a close relationship with China is of the utmost importance. The Chinese side of the three-day talks appear to agree, drawing back from sharp criticism of America in recent weeks. But does the dialogue spell improving relationships between the world’s two biggest economies?
  • On the public front there certainly is a lot of apparent ups and down
  • Underneath it, there’s a fairly strong economic link between the two. That link doesn’t necessarily guarantee good relations between them.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • they’re both trying to get a sense of reassurance and a sense that at least there is an element of stability between what are now the world’s two biggest economies.
  • I think that the talk about pulling Chinese investment out of U.S. bonds out of U.S. treasuries is more rhetoric than anything, although certainly there are elements within China that are raising that up.
  • in the end, the Chinese really have two questions:
  • One, who’s going to buy their stuff if they yank all these savings out of the U.S. and if they contribute to the crash of the U.S. economy. And the second would be who in the world is going to buy all of these if they try to dump them on the market and sell them, there have to be buyers out there.
  • two other trends
  • There seems to be a significant drop in students from the provinces enlisting in the better universities. It also looks as if Beijing is planning a new crackdown on bloggers and social networks.
  • On the one hand, being able to allow their citizens to kind of display their frustration or express themselves through these social networks has been a way to reduce potentially some of the steam that would build up in China that could ultimately kind of explode out against the government.
  • anonymous on 19 Aug 11
     
    "Rodger Baker reviews U.S. Vice President Joe Biden's speech in Beijing and discusses China's dilemma over social networks."
anonymous

What Happened to the American Declaration of War? - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...pened-american-declaration-war

shared by anonymous on 29 Mar 11 - Cached
  • World War II was the last war the United States fought with a formal declaration of war.
  • the Constitution is explicit in requiring a formal declaration. It does so for two reasons, I think.
  • The first is to prevent the president from taking the country to war without the consent of the governed, as represented by Congress.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Second, by providing for a specific path to war, it provides the president power and legitimacy he would not have without that declaration; it both restrains the president and empowers him.
  • But that’s what the founders intended: Going to war should be difficult; once at war, the commander in chief’s authority should be unquestionable.
  • In understanding how war and constitutional norms became separated, we must begin with the first major undeclared war in American history (the Civil War was not a foreign war), Korea.
  • Truman’s view was that U.N. sanction for the war superseded the requirement for a declaration of war in two ways.
  • First, it was not a war in the strict sense, he argued, but a “police action” under the U.N. Charter.
  • Second, the U.N. Charter constituted a treaty, therefore implicitly binding the United States to go to war if the United Nations so ordered.
  • It was understood that if nuclear war occurred, either through an attack by the Soviets or a first strike by the United States, time and secrecy made a prior declaration of war by Congress impossible. In the expected scenario of a Soviet first strike, there would be only minutes for the president to authorize counterstrikes and no time for constitutional niceties.
  • Nuclear war was seen as the most realistic war-fighting scenario, with all other forms of war trivial in comparison. Just as nuclear weapons came to be called “strategic weapons” with other weapons of war occupying a lesser space, nuclear war became identical with war in general.
  • In Vietnam, the issue was not some legal or practical justification for not asking for a declaration. Rather, it was a political consideration.
  • Johnson did not know that he could get a declaration; the public might not be prepared to go to war. For this reason, rather than ask for a declaration, he used all the prior precedents to simply go to war without a declaration. In my view, that was the moment the declaration of war as a constitutional imperative collapsed. And in my view, so did the Johnson presidency. In hindsight, he needed a declaration badly, and if he could not get it, Vietnam would have been lost, and so may have been his presidency. Since Vietnam was lost anyway from lack of public consensus, his decision was a mistake. But it set the stage for everything that came after — war by resolution rather than by formal constitutional process.
  • All of this came just before the United States emerged as the world’s single global power — a global empire — that by definition would be waging war at an increased tempo, from Kuwait, to Haiti, to Kosovo, to Afghanistan, to Iraq, and so on in an ever-increasing number of operations. And now in Libya, we have reached the point that even resolutions are no longer needed.
  • The goal in war is to prevent the other side from acting, not to punish the actors.
  • One of the dilemmas that could have been avoided was the massive confusion of whether the United States was engaged in hunting down a criminal conspiracy or waging war on a foreign enemy. If the former, then the goal is to punish the guilty. If the latter, then the goal is to destroy the enemy. Imagine that after Pearl Harbor, FDR had promised to hunt down every pilot who attacked Pearl Harbor and bring them to justice, rather than calling for a declaration of war against a hostile nation and all who bore arms on its behalf regardless of what they had done
  • A declaration of war, I am arguing, is an essential aspect of war fighting particularly for the republic when engaged in frequent wars. It achieves a number of things.
  • First, it holds both Congress and the president equally responsible for the decision, and does so unambiguously.
  • Second, it affirms to the people that their lives have now changed and that they will be bearing burdens.
  • Third, it gives the president the political and moral authority he needs to wage war on their behalf and forces everyone to share in the moral responsibility of war.
  • And finally, by submitting it to a political process, many wars might be avoided.
  • The declaration of war is precisely the point at which imperial interests can overwhelm republican prerogatives.
  • I am not making the argument that constant accommodation to reality does not have to be made. I am making the argument that the suspension of Section 8 of Article I as if it is possible to amend the Constitution with a wink and nod represents a mortal threat to the republic. If this can be done, what can’t be done?
  • As our international power and interests surge, it would seem reasonable that our commitment to republican principles would surge. These commitments appear inconvenient. They are meant to be. War is a serious matter, and presidents and particularly Congresses should be inconvenienced on the road to war. Members of Congress should not be able to hide behind ambiguous resolutions only to turn on the president during difficult times, claiming that they did not mean what they voted for. A vote on a declaration of war ends that.
  • anonymous on 29 Mar 11
     
    "In my book "The Next Decade," I spend a good deal of time considering the relation of the American Empire to the American Republic and the threat the empire poses to the republic. If there is a single point where these matters converge, it is in the constitutional requirement that Congress approve wars through a declaration of war and in the abandonment of this requirement since World War II. This is the point where the burdens and interests of the United States as a global empire collide with the principles and rights of the United States as a republic."
anonymous

The Fault Line Within Iran's Political System - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-within-irans-political-system

iran geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 01 May 11 - Cached
  • It is essentially about the balance of power within the Iranian political system: Ahmadinejad is the first president of the Islamic republic to assert himself to the point where he has emerged as the main center of power in the complex Iranian political structure — a hybridization of the Shia notion of Velayet-e-Faqih, a state ruled by a jurist, and parliamentary democracy.
  • Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, is playing a shrewd game.
  • First, he is exploiting the supreme leader’s weakness and dependency on the president. Second, he is pushing the limits of his constitutional status, which gives the presidency much power and control over day-to-day governance.
  • anonymous on 01 May 11
     
    "The row between Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei over the country's intelligence czar has evolved into a serious standoff. Both sides have much at stake in attempting to preserve their share of the country's future balance of power. A compromise of sorts will likely defuse the current situation but will not represent the end of struggle that at its core has the potential to redefine the political system in which clerics have held sway for more than three decades."
anonymous

Question of Pakistani Cooperation in bin Laden Strike - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...i-cooperation-bin-laden-strike

geopolitics pakistan

shared by anonymous on 02 May 11 - Cached
  • The detailed version of what led to the hit and the extent of U.S.-Pakistani cooperation in the strike is not yet publicly known, but reports so far claim that bin Laden and his son were hiding in a massive compound with heavy security and no communications access when they were attacked.
  • Two key questions thus emerge. How long was the Pakistani government and military-security apparatus aware of bin Laden’s refuge deep in Pakistani territory? Did the United States withhold information from Pakistan until the hit was executed, fearing the operation would be compromised?
  • anonymous on 02 May 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama announced late May 1 that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is dead and that the body of the jihadist leader is in U.S. custody. Obama said bin Laden was killed in a firefight with U.S. special operations forces in Abbottabad, about 56 kilometers (35 miles) north of Islamabad. Prior to Obama's announcement, Pakistani intelligence officials were leaking to U.S. media that their assets were involved in the killing of bin Laden. Obama said, "Over the years, I've repeatedly made clear that we would take action within Pakistan if we knew where bin Laden was. That is what we've done. But it's important to note that our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden and the compound where he was hiding." Obama said he had called Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and that his team had also spoken to their counterparts. He said Islamabad agreed it is "a good and historic day for both of our nations and going forward it's essential for Pakistan to join us in the fight against al Qaeda and its affiliates." "
anonymous

The Tactical Irrelevance of Osama bin Laden's Death - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...levance-osama-bin-ladens-death

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 02 May 11 - Cached
  • bin Laden’s elimination will have very little effect on al Qaeda as a whole and the wider jihadist movement.
  • Because of bin Laden’s aforementioned communications limitations, since October 2001 when he fled Tora Bora after the U. S. invasion of Afghanistan, he has been relegated to a largely symbolic and ideological role in al Qaeda.
  • anonymous on 02 May 11
     
    "The killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden represents possibly the biggest clandestine operations success for the United States since the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 2003. The confirmation of his death is an emotional victory for the United States and could have wider effects on the geopolitics of the region, but bin Laden's death is irrelevant for al Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement from an operational perspective."
anonymous

Dispatch: A Palestinian Unity Government - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...h-palestinian-unity-government

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah held a ceremony May 4 commemorating a unity peace deal that in theory is supposed to end a very bitter four-year divorce between the two factions.
  • Islamist Hamas and secularist Fatah are longtime ideological rivals, split between Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip and Fatah-controlled West Bank. The two factions not only have deep personal and ideological differences, but also disagree on a number of different issues; for example, how to manage the security affairs of the state, how to divide funding and how to divide political power. The two factions couldn’t even agree on who speak first at the ceremony.
  • Israel now has to spend a great deal of energy lobbying governments around the world to refuse dealing with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, as long as Hamas refuses Israel’s right to exist.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Ironically, Palestinian unity does not bode well for the peace process. Unless Hamas fundamentally changes it political platform and recognizes Israel’s right to exist — in addition to renouncing violence — then Israel can refuse negotiations on those grounds.
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "Analyst Reva Bhalla examines the implications of a unity government between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah."
anonymous

Above the Tearline: Osama bin Laden's Safe-House - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...a-bin-laden-hiding-plain-sight

shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton examines the strengths and weaknesses of bin Laden's safe-house and discusses how the al Qaeda leader was able to hide for so many years in a populated urban area."
anonymous

Bin Laden's Death and the Implications for Jihadism - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...eath-and-implications-jihadism

geopolitics

shared by anonymous on 03 May 11 - Cached
  • a deep-seated thirst for vengeance led the United States to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 and to declare a “global war on terrorism.”
  • In spite of the sense of justice and closure the killing of bin Laden brings, however, his death will likely have very little practical impact on the jihadist movement.
  • the phenomenon of jihadism is far wider than just the al Qaeda core leadership of bin Laden and his closest followers.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • All of this has caused the al Qaeda core to become primarily an organization that produces propaganda and provides guidance and inspiration to the other jihadist elements rather than an organization focused on conducting operations.
  • As STRATFOR has analyzed the war between the jihadist movement and the rest of the world, we have come to view the battlefield as being divided into two distinct parts, the physical battlefield and the ideological battlefield.
  • While the al Qaeda core has been marginalized recently, it has practiced good operational security and has been able to protect its apex leadership for nearly 10 years from one of the most intense manhunts in human history.
  • anonymous on 03 May 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama appeared in a hastily arranged televised address the night of May 1, 2011, to inform the world that U.S. counterterrorism forces had located and killed Osama bin Laden. The operation, which reportedly happened in the early hours of May 2 local time, targeted a compound in Abbottabad, a city located some 31 miles north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The nighttime raid resulted in a brief firefight that left bin Laden and several others dead. A U.S. helicopter reportedly was damaged in the raid and later destroyed by U.S. forces. Obama reported that no U.S. personnel were lost in the operation. After a brief search of the compound, the U.S. forces left with bin Laden's body and presumably anything else that appeared to have intelligence value. From Obama's carefully scripted speech, it would appear that the U.S. conducted the operation unilaterally with no Pakistani assistance - or even knowledge."
anonymous

Dispatch: China's Approach to Social Harmony - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...chinas-approach-social-harmony

china

shared by anonymous on 05 May 11 - Cached
  • anonymous on 05 May 11
     
    "Two announcements this week on China are critically important for understanding their main policy of addressing social instability. The first came from Zhou Yongkang - who is China's intelligence chief - who reiterated his call for social control. The second announcement came from U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke - who is also tipped to be the next ambassador to China - who criticized Beijing for its policies against foreign investment, discouraging foreign investment and promoting domestic industries. These two issues highlighted Beijing's policy toward maintaining social harmony or in Chinese, hexie shehui."
anonymous

Obama's Announcement and the Future of the Afghan War - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...uncement-and-future-afghan-war

STRATFOR obama afghanistan

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In 2001, al Qaeda and the Taliban were distinct, yet necessarily intertwined.
  • Meanwhile — and especially after Tora Bora — al Qaeda was increasingly driven into Pakistan and, more importantly, farther abroad.
  • Thus began the deepening divide between the two groups.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • For al Qaeda, a transnational jihadist phenomenon with global ambitions, the logic behind setting up franchises from Yemen and the Maghreb to East Asia was readily apparent.
  • Meanwhile, the Taliban, an Afghan phenomenon, doubled down on their home turf.
  • For their part, the United States and its allies never wanted to occupy Afghanistan in the first place.
  • The war has helped prevent a subsequent attack of the magnitude of Sept. 11, 2001
  • Meanwhile, even the most serious observers wonder why the United States is so heavily committed in Afghanistan.
  • The noteworthy aspect of Obama’s speech is that it lays the groundwork for American domestic political rhetoric to circle back into alignment with military reality.
  • If military reality and military objectives are defined in terms of the Taliban insurgency, then Afghanistan is every bit as lost now as it was two years ago – if not more so.
  • But if they are defined in terms of al Qaeda, then the United States has good cause to claim victory and reorient its posture in Afghanistan.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    "U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday night made the most important political statement on the war in Afghanistan since the death of Osama bin Laden. In a planned statement, Obama spelled out his post-surge strategy, as the July 2011 deadline approaches that would mark the start of the drawdown of American and allied forces in Afghanistan. While Obama did not declare victory in his address, he laid the groundwork to do so."
anonymous

Portfolio: Russia Takes Advantage of the Eurozone Crisis - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...akes-advantage-eurozone-crisis

russia eu

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The key issue right now is whether Greek parliament will be able to pass the June 28 austerity measures vote. If it fails, it could lead to further panic throughout Europe. This has unsettled the markets and generally panicked investors throughout the world.
  • Russia has considerable opportunities opening up before itself because of the eurozone crisis.
  • First of all, Europeans are distracted and generally not unified on a number of issues but because the economic crisis has engulfed the eurozone
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The two greatest geopolitical interests are the upcoming privatizations in Greece and also the news that Russia is interested in Austrian banks.
  • One of the interesting assets that Athens is looking to sell is DEPA, its natural gas company.
  • if DEPA falls to Russian hands, Gazprom has been quoted to be interested in its privatization, it would really complicate European efforts of using Greece as an alternative to Russian natural gas routes.
  • Another appealing opportunity for the Kremlin is the rumored interest of Sberbank and VTB, Russia’s two largest state-owned banks and Austria’s ­Raiffeisen Bank and Fokus Bank.
  • The reason that Russia’s interest in Austrian banks is something to look at is because Austrian banks control quite a number of banks in Central and Eastern Europe.
  • there are opportunities for investment that Russia can parlay into geopolitical advantage.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    "Analyst Marko Papic examines how Russia is able to gain geopolitical leverage over Europe because of the eurozone's ongoing crisis."
anonymous

Why Free Markets? - 2 views

bleedingheartlibertarians.com/...why-free-markets

shared by anonymous on 30 Jun 11 - Cached
  • The short answer, which I will assert here and defend below, is that whatever the intent behind government regulation of markets, it almost always ends up working in the interest of the rich and powerful and does little to protect the interest of those with modest means and little access to power.  If a commitment to social justice demands that we care first and foremost about the least well off among us, supporting government regulation may well violate that commitment.
  • why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?
  • As Hayek made clear 66 years ago, the problem we face when try to “construct” an economic order is how to best make use of all of this knowledge, which is dispersed, contextual, and often tacit. 
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • Mises and Hayek also argued that because this knowledge is structurally dispersed, contextual and tacit, it cannot be aggregated by government planners and regulators (nor, it’s worth noting, by private actors).
  • So one problem facing regulators is that they lack the knowledge necessary to know what people value and how much, so in deciding what to regulate and how, they are acting on incomplete and often erroneous information.  By trying to override the market, they are substituting a less informationally-rich system for a more rich one.
  • In the face of these repeated failures, it’s very easy to imagine, and there’s plenty of evidence to support it, that regulators and the politicians who oversee them will start to act in their own political self-interest.  Without the ability to make reliable decisions on the objective merits, self-interest will slowly dominate.  Regulators will try to serve the needs of those who will keep them in power and supply them with healthy budgets.  So-called “Capture Theory” explains that it then becomes easy for regulators to be “captured” by the industries they regulate and then regulate in ways that favor the industry.
  • about 75% of antitrust cases are initiated not by the government but by private firms unhappy with how their competition has behaved.  Private actors constantly engage in lobbying and rent-seeking for regulations that will benefit them and/or harm their competition.
  • For me, as an economist, the argument against a great deal of regulation is precisely that it harms the least well off it is trying to help and provides unwarranted privileges for those who need them least. 
  •  Economic systems are inherent unstable, dynamically evolving things.   In studying them, we are always studying a moving target.  To my mind, that makes equilibrium models less generally applicable than is often held to be the case.
  • I have great sympathy for this line of argument, but write to make two points.
  • First, I think the danger of governmental regulation goes beyond the mere possibility of "capture" of the regulatory apparatus by the powerful. The threat is not just this, but that once the authority to regulate is well-established, the state can use this and other economic tools to "buy off" various constitutencies until the opposition to state authority becomes too weak to prevent a very dangerous concentration of power.
  • Second, there is also a purely moral, but non-consequentialist, argument against regulation.
  • That suggests that human institutions - complexity of parts notwithstanding - often exhibit various aggregate patterns of behavior that correlate with measurable variables, and that can be understood and predicted with reasonable degrees of confidence, and thus that the outcomes of various kinds of higher-level global interventions can similarly be predicted with some accuracy.
  • There is no fundamental theoretical difference between states and other large human organizations that would for some reason result in the inability of states to successfully regulate significant fields of aggregate economic behavior as a result of micro-level calculation problems.
  • This is not an argument for any particular regulatory action.  It is an argument that whether these treatments work is an empirical question that cannot be deduced a priori from the kinds of simplified toy models that are wheeled out in an Economics 101 classes or from the armchairs of either libertarian or socialist philosophers.
  • Philosophers are good at the logical and conceptual analysis of conundrums that occur in the theoretical levels of a science.   But when they venture too far into the way the actual world works, they easily lose their bearings due to their surfeit of rationalistic mental habits and intolerance of detail.
  • Property rights are not actualized in the real human world by philosophical ruminations on the state of nature.  They are actualized by courts, and lawmakers, and executives backed up by police and security services - people with guns and other means of enforcing the laws.  There has never been a durable form of human social life where the power to regulate was not "granted."
  • anonymous on 30 Jun 11
     
    "My first post this week led to some interesting discussion in the comments, which has in turn led me to this post. One issue that came up there was, and I paraphrase: "Okay, fine, markets really do benefit the poor, but the dispute between modern liberals and libertarians is not over 'markets' but over 'free markets.' Libertarians don't want the regulations that liberals do and saying that 'markets' help the poor doesn't help us resolve this issue." Fair enough. So why might libertarians, and bleeding heart ones at that, argue that markets should be free of government regulations?"
  • Erik Hanson on 02 Jul 11
     
    I don't know that free markets help the poor so much as they allow more opportunity to the poor. And where free markets lack is in actually funding the poor, where there's a presumption that they deserve poverty.
anonymous

Agenda: With George Friedman on Russia - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...-agenda-george-friedman-russia

geopolitics russia

shared by anonymous on 18 Jul 11 - Cached
  • Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.
  • And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.
  • So, STRATFOR was perhaps a little unkind in its forecast for 2011 when it said that Russia would play a double game, ensuring it can reap benefits from having warm relations with countries, such as investment and economic ties, while keeping the pressure up on them. It’s been a clever game, hasn’t it?
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Well, a double game is a clever game, particularly when no one realizes you’re playing a double game. I have to say that I don’t regard duplicity among nations as a critique of nations, it’s the lifeblood of international affairs.
  • They’ve become much more accommodating because they’ve achieved, within the former Soviet Union, the goals they wanted to achieve by and large.
  • Now they’re operating from a position of strength and therefore they don’t have to assert their strength.
  • Now they’re being courted by the Americans, they’re being courted by the Germans and this is the position that Putin wanted to get them into, and he did.
  • This Russian empire, the Soviet Union, were not accidents of history. They didn’t just happen. They were structures that grew naturally from the underlying economic and political relationships.
  • Russia is far too vast to simply be the whim of a given personality. In my view even Stalin represented the vast czarist and Leninist tradition, to an extreme perhaps, but still the idea of the personalization of rule.
  • The media tends to think of better and worse relations — I don’t think of that. Russia has its interests; the United States has its interests. There are times when these interests coincide; there are times when these interests diverge. There are times when one country or the other is too preoccupied with other things to be worried about the other.
  • anonymous on 18 Jul 11
     
    "A re-emerging Russia is restoring its global influence without taking on the burden of an empire. In the second of his series on global pressure points, STRATFOR CEO Dr. George Friedman applauds Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's achievements and examines the Russian-U.S. relationship."
anonymous

Salt: More confirmation bias for your preferred narrative - 0 views

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/...s-for-your-preferred-narrative

layscience salt criticalthinking

shared by anonymous on 21 Jul 11 - Cached
  • When it comes to health, it’s the hard outcomes we care about. We pay attention to measures like high blood pressure (hypertension) because of the relationship between hypertension and events like heart attacks and strokes. The higher the blood pressure, the greater the risk of these events. The relationship between the two is well established. So when it comes to preventive health, we want to lower blood pressure to reduce the risk of subsequent effects. Weight loss, diet, and exercise are usually prescribed (though often insufficient) to reduce blood pressure. For many, drug treatment is still required.
  • There is reasonable population-level data linking higher levels of salt consumption with higher blood pressure.
  • From a population perspective, interventions that dramatically lower salt intake result in lower blood pressure.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • the causality between salt consumption, and all of these negative effects, is less clear.
  • So does reducing dietary salt reduce cardiovascular events? That’s the key question.
  • When it comes to clinical practice guidelines, low salt diets are the mainstays of pretty much every set of guidelines on the management of high blood pressure.
  • The evidence supporting the relationship with hard outcomes is robust, but not rock-solid. We don’t have causal data, but we do have considerable epidemiologic evidence to suggest that reducing dietary salt consumption is likely to offer net benefits in the management of hypertension.
  • The vast majority of the salt we eat (75%) is from processed foods. Restaurants are a large source, too.
  • Few foods in their original state are naturally high in salt, and in general, we don’t add that much at the table.
  • Seven studies made up this meta-analysis, including 6,489 patients in total. Three studies looked at those with normal blood pressure, two included patients with high blood pressure, and one was a mixed population, including patients with heart failure. The overall effect? Interventions had small effects on sodium consumption, which led to small effects on blood pressure. There was insufficient information to analyze the effects on cardiovascular disease endpoints.
  • The authors go on to make the following point, which was ignored in the media coverage: Our findings are consistent with the belief that salt reduction is beneficial in normotensive and hypertensive people. However, the methods of achieving salt reduction in the trials included in our review, and other systematic reviews, were relatively modest in their impact on sodium excretion and on blood pressure levels, generally required considerable efforts to implement and would not be expected to have major impacts on the burden of CVD.
  • The authors did not conclude that reducing salt consumption is ineffective.
  • Despite the modest and equivocal results, the authors seem to have lost the narrative on their own research findings: Professor Rod Taylor, the lead researcher of the review, is ‘completely dismayed’ at the headlines that distort the message of his research published today. Having spoken to BBC Scotland, and to CASH, he clarified that the review looked at studies where people were advised to reduce salt intake compared to those who were not and found no differences, this is not because reduced salt doesn’t have an effect but because it’s hard to reduce salt intake for a long time. He stated that people should continue to strive to reduce their salt intake to reduce their blood pressure, but that dietary advice alone is not enough, calling for further government and industry action.
  • The true finding from the Cochrane review is that dietary interventions to reduce salt intake are largely ineffective at reducing salt consumption.
  • Until the data are more clear, you can find the data to support whatever narrative you believe. If you want to demonize salt and ignore other factors that contribute to poor cardiovascular outcomes, you can do that. And if you believe that interventions to reduce salt consumption are misguided and unwarranted, and symptomatic of an overreaching nanny state, then you can find data to support that position, too.
  • anonymous on 21 Jul 11
     
    "Judging by the recent press reports, the latest Cochrane review reveals that everything we've been told about eating salt, and cardiovascular disease, is wrong."
anonymous

Implications of El Chango's Arrest - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...implications-el-changos-arrest

mexico cartel

shared by anonymous on 22 Jun 11 - Cached
  • A year ago this time, the La Familia or, as we call them, “LFM,” (La Familia Michoacana), the LFM cartel was an up-and-coming cartel, it was rising in power and prominence, and it had banded together with two other powerful cartel groups, the Sinaloa Federation and the Gulf Cartel, to assist them in their battle against the Zetas and their allies.
  • Now one of the things that we’ve seen happen over the years with the Mexican cartels is that when any one figure — especially in the Sinaloa Federation — gets too powerful, they have a tendency to run into accidents, and that’s what we saw happen last July.
  • Ignacio Coronel had an issue with the authorities, was taken out
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • this created a vacuum
  • the LFM cartel saw that vacuum of power
  • and they decided to move in and try to assume control of Jalisco and Guadalajara.
  • This then initiated a war between the Sinaloa Federation and the LFM
  • As LFM began fighting with Sinaloa, we saw Sinaloa Federation becoming really dominant
  • that struggle culminated in the death, late last year, of the leader of the LFM, a guy by the name of Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, “El Mas Loco,” (the craziest one).
  • what we saw happen was that it devolved into two different organizations that were basically coalescing around different powerful leaders — lieutenants of El Mas Loco.
  • The first of these lieutenants was Jose Mendez Vargas, “El Chango.” The second one was Servando Gomez, “La Tuta,” (the teacher).
  • over the last few months, as these organizations have formed up, we’ve seen them locked in a very bloody battle for control of Michoacan.
  • we’re going to be watching for indications of which way this is going to be going: whether or not this LFM faction will be able to stay united, whether they’ll be able to be able to fend off the offensive of the Knights Templar, and whether or not they could become more closely allied with Los Zetas.
  • anonymous on 22 Jun 11
     
    "Vice President of Tactical Intelligence Scott Stewart looks at the implications of the arrest of drug cartel leader Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas or "El Chango."" (at StratFor)
anonymous

A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100 - 1 views

www.ribbonfarm.com/...f-the-corporation-1600-to-2100

economics predictions longnow

shared by anonymous on 23 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.
  • The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two.  They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.
  • this post is mostly woven around ideas drawn from five books that provide appropriate fuel for this business-first frame. I will be citing, quoting and otherwise indirectly using these books over several future posts
  • ...73 more annotations...
  • For a long time, I was misled by the fact that 90% of the available books frame globalization and the emergence of modernity in terms of the nation-state as the fundamental unit of analysis, with politics as the fundamental area of human activity that shapes things.
  • But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve been pulled towards a business-first perspective on modernity and globalization.
  • The human world, like physics, can be reduced to four fundamental forces: culture, politics, war and business.
  • Culture is the most mysterious, illegible and powerful force.
  • But one quality makes gravity dominate at large space-time scales: gravity affects all masses and is always attractive, never repulsive.  So despite its weakness, it dominates things at sufficiently large scales. I don’t want to stretch the metaphor too far, but something similar holds true of business.
  • On the scale of days or weeks, culture, politics and war matter a lot more in shaping our daily lives.
  • Business though, as an expression of the force of unidirectional technological evolution, has a destabilizing unidirectional effect. It is technology, acting through business and Schumpeterian creative-destruction, that drives monotonic, historicist change, for good or bad. Business is the locus where the non-human force of technological change sneaks into the human sphere.
  • Culture is suspicious of technology. Politics is mostly indifferent to and above it. War-making uses it, but maintains an arms-length separation.
  • Business? It gets into bed with it. It is sort of vaguely plausible that you could switch artists, politicians and generals around with their peers from another age and still expect them to function. But there is no meaningful way for a businessman from (say) 2000 BC to comprehend what Mark Zuckerberg does, let alone take over for him. Too much magical technological water has flowed under the bridge.
  • It is business that creates the world of magic, not technology itself. And the story of business in the last 400 years is the story of the corporate form.
  • There are some who treat corporate forms as yet another technology (in this case a technology of people-management), but despite the trappings of scientific foundations (usually in psychology) and engineering synthesis (we speak of organizational “design”), the corporate form is not a technology.  It is the consequence of a social contract like the one that anchors nationhood. It is a codified bundle of quasi-religious beliefs externalized into an animate form that seeks to preserve itself like any other living creature.
  • What was new was the idea of a publicly traded joint-stock corporation, an entity with rights similar to those of states and individuals, with limited liability and significant autonomy
  • two important points about this evolution of corporations.
  • The first point is that the corporate form was born in the era of Mercantilism, the economic ideology that (zero-sum) control of land is the foundation of all economic power.
  • In politics, Mercantilism led to balance-of-power models.
  • In business, once the Age of Exploration (the 16th century) opened up the world, it led to mercantilist corporations focused on trade
  • The forces of radical technological change — the Industrial Revolution — did not seriously kick until after nearly 200 years of corporate evolution (1600-1800) in a mercantilist mold.
  • Smith was both the prophet of doom for the Mercantilist corporation, and the herald of what came to replace it: the Scumpeterian corporation.
  • The corporate form therefore spent almost 200 years — nearly half of its life to date — being shaped by Mercantilist thinking, a fundamentally zero-sum way of viewing the world.
  • It was not until after the American Civil War and the Gilded Age that businesses fundamentally reorganized around (as we will see) time instead of space, which led, as we will see, to a central role for ideas and therefore the innovation function.
  • The Black Hills Gold Rush of the 1870s, the focus of the Deadwood saga, was in a way the last hurrah of Mercantilist thinking. William Randolph Hearst, the son of gold mining mogul George Hearst who took over Deadwood in the 1870s, made his name with newspapers. The baton had formally been passed from mercantilists to schumpeterians.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      So, Mercantilism was about colonizing space. Corporatism is about colonizing time. This is a pretty useful (though arguably too-reductionist) way to latch on to the underpinning of later thoughts.
  • This divide between the two models can be placed at around 1800, the nominal start date of the Industrial Revolution, as the ideas of Renaissance Science met the energy of coal to create a cocktail that would allow corporations to colonize time.
  • The second thing to understand about the evolution of the corporation is that the apogee of power did not coincide with the apogee of reach.
  • for America, corporations employed less than 20% of the population in 1780, and over 80% in 1980, and have been declining since
  • Certainly corporations today seem far more powerful than those of the 1700s, but the point is that the form is much weaker today, even though it has organized more of our lives. This is roughly the same as the distinction between fertility of women and population growth: the peak in fertility (a per-capita number) and peak in population growth rates (an aggregate) behave differently.
  • a useful 3-phase model of the history of the corporation: the Mercantilist/Smithian era from 1600-1800, the Industrial/Schumpeterian era from 1800 – 2000 and finally, the era we are entering, which I will dub the Information/Coasean era
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      I think it would be useful to map these eras against the backdrop of my previously established Generational timeline (as well as the StratFor 50-year cycle breakdown) in order to see if there are any self-supporting model elements.
  • By a happy accident, there is a major economist whose ideas help fingerprint the economic contours of our world: Ronald Coase.
  • To a large extent, the history of the first 200 years of corporate evolution is the history of the East India Company. And despite its name and nation of origin, to think of it as a corporation that helped Britain rule India is to entirely misunderstand the nature of the beast.
  • Two images hint at its actual globe-straddling, 10x-Walmart influence: the image of the Boston Tea Partiers dumping crates of tea into the sea during the American struggle for independence, and the image of smoky opium dens in China. One image symbolizes the rise of a new empire. The other marks the decline of an old one.
  • At a broader level, the EIC managed to balance an unbalanced trade equation between Europe and Asia whose solution had eluded even the Roman empire.
  • For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England.
  • The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC.
  • eventually, as the threat from the Dutch was tamed, it became clear that the company actually had more firepower at its disposal than most of the nation-states it was dealing with. The realization led to the first big domino falling, in the corporate colonization of India, at the battle of Plassey.
  • The EIC was the original too-big-to-fail corporation. The EIC was the beneficiary of the original Big Bailout. Before there was TARP, there was the Tea Act of 1773 and the Pitt India Act of 1783. The former was a failed attempt to rein in the EIC, which cost Britain the American Colonies.  The latter created the British Raj as Britain doubled down in the east to recover from its losses in the west. An invisible thread connects the histories of India and America at this point. Lord Cornwallis, the loser at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781 during the revolutionary war, became the second Governor General of India in 1786.
  • But these events were set in motion over 30 years earlier, in the 1750s. There was no need for backroom subterfuge.  It was all out in the open because the corporation was such a new beast, nobody really understood the dangers it represented.
  • there was nothing preventing its officers like Clive from simultaneously holding political appointments that legitimized conflicts of interest. If you thought it was bad enough that Dick Cheney used to work for Halliburton before he took office, imagine if he’d worked there while in office, with legitimate authority to use his government power to favor his corporate employer and make as much money on the side as he wanted, and call in the Army and Navy to enforce his will. That picture gives you an idea of the position Robert Clive found himself in, in 1757.
  • The East India bubble was a turning point.
  • Over the next 70 years, political, military and economic power were gradually separated and modern checks and balances against corporate excess came into being.
  • It is not too much of a stretch to say that for at least a century and a half, England’s foreign policy was a dance in Europe in service of the EIC’s needs on the oceans.
  • Mahan’s book is the essential lens you need to understand the peculiar military conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that made the birth of the corporation possible.)
  • The 16th century makes a vague sort of sense as the “Age of Exploration,” but it really makes a lot more sense as the startup/first-mover/early-adopter phase of the corporate mercantilism. The period was dominated by the daring pioneer spirit of Spain and Portugal, which together served as the Silicon Valley of Mercantilism. But the maritime business operations of Spain and Portugal turned out to be the MySpace and Friendster of Mercantilism: pioneers who could not capitalize on their early lead.
  • Conventionally, it is understood that the British and the Dutch were the ones who truly took over. But in reality, it was two corporations that took over: the EIC and the VOC (the Dutch East India Company,  Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, founded one year after the EIC) the Facebook and LinkedIn of Mercantile economics respectively. Both were fundamentally more independent of the nation states that had given birth to them than any business entities in history. The EIC more so than the VOC.  Both eventually became complex multi-national beasts.
  • arguably, the doings of the EIC and VOC on the water were more important than the pageantry on land.  Today the invisible web of container shipping serves as the bloodstream of the world. Its foundations were laid by the EIC.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jun 11
       
      There was an excellent episode of the original Connections series that pointed this out, specifically focusing on the Dutch boats and the direct line to container ships and 747 cargo planes.
  • A new idea began to take its place in the early 19th century: the Schumpeterian corporation that controlled, not trade routes, but time. It added the second of the two essential Druckerian functions to the corporation: innovation.
  • I call this the “most misleading table in the world.”
  • corporations and nations may have been running on Mercantilist logic, but the undercurrent of Schumpeterian growth was taking off in Europe as early as 1500 in the less organized sectors like agriculture. It was only formally recognized and tamed in the early 1800s, but the technology genie had escaped.
  • The action shifted to two huge wildcards in world affairs of the 1800s: the newly-born nation of America and the awakening giant in the east, Russia. Per capita productivity is about efficient use of human time. But time, unlike space, is not a collective and objective dimension of human experience. It is a private and subjective one. Two people cannot own the same piece of land, but they can own the same piece of time.  To own space, you control it by force of arms. To own time is to own attention. To own attention, it must first be freed up, one individual stream of consciousness at a time.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation was about colonizing individual minds. Ideas powered by essentially limitless fossil-fuel energy allowed it to actually pull it off.
  • it is probably reaosonably safe to treat the story of Schumpeterian growth as an essentially American story.
  • In many ways the railroads solved a vastly speeded up version of the problem solved by the EIC: complex coordination across a large area.  Unlike the EIC though, the railroads were built around the telegraph, rather than postal mail, as the communication system. The difference was like the difference between the nervous systems of invertebrates and vertebrates.
  • If the ship sailing the Indian Ocean ferrying tea, textiles, opium and spices was the star of the mercantilist era, the steam engine and steamboat opening up America were the stars of the Schumpeterian era.
  • The primary effect of steam was not that it helped colonize a new land, but that it started the colonization of time. First, social time was colonized. The anarchy of time zones across the vast expanse of America was first tamed by the railroads for the narrow purpose of maintaining train schedules, but ultimately, the tools that served to coordinate train schedules: the mechanical clock and time zones, served to colonize human minds.  An exhibit I saw recently at the Union Pacific Railroad Museum in Omaha clearly illustrates this crucial fragment of history:
  • For all its sophistication, the technology of sail was mostly a very-refined craft, not an engineering discipline based on science.
  • Steam power though was a scientific and engineering invention.
  • Scientific principles about gases, heat, thermodynamics and energy applied to practical ends, resulting in new artifacts. The disempowerment of craftsmen would continue through the Schumpeterian age, until Fredrick Taylor found ways to completely strip mine all craft out of the minds of craftsmen, and put it into machines and the minds of managers.
  • It sounds awful when I put it that way, and it was, in human terms, but there is no denying that the process was mostly inevitable and that the result was vastly better products.
  • The Schumpeterian corporation did to business what the doctrine of Blitzkrieg would do to warfare in 1939: move humans at the speed of technology instead of moving technology at the speed of humans.
  • Blitzeconomics allowed the global economy to roar ahead at 8% annual growth rates instead of the theoretical 0% average across the world for Mercantilist zero-sum economics. “Progress” had begun.
  • Two phrases were invented to name the phenomenon: productivity meant shrinking autonomously-owned time. Increased standard of living through time-saving devices became code for the fact that the “freed up” time through “labor saving” devices was actually the de facto property of corporations. It was a Faustian bargain.
  • Many people misunderstood the fundamental nature of Schumpeterian growth as being fueled by ideas rather than time. Ideas fueled by energy can free up time which can then partly be used to create more ideas to free up more time. It is a positive feedback cycle,  but with a limit. The fundamental scarce resource is time. There is only one Earth worth of space to colonize. Only one fossil-fuel store of energy to dig out. Only 24 hours per person per day to turn into capitive attention.
  • Then the Internet happened, and we discovered the ability to mine time as fast as it could be discovered in hidden pockets of attention. And we discovered limits. And suddenly a new peak started to loom: Peak Attention.
  • There is certainly plenty of energy all around (the Sun and the wind, to name two sources), but oil represents a particularly high-value kind. Attention behaves the same way.
  • Take an average housewife, the target of much time mining early in the 20th century. It was clear where her attention was directed. Laundry, cooking, walking to the well for water, cleaning, were all obvious attention sinks. Washing machines, kitchen appliances, plumbing and vacuum cleaners helped free up a lot of that attention, which was then immediately directed (as corporate-captive attention) to magazines and television.
  • The point isn’t that we are running out of attention. We are running out of the equivalent of oil: high-energy-concentration pockets of easily mined fuel.
  • There is a lot more money to be made in replacing hand-washing time with washing-machine plus magazine time, than there is to be found in replacing one hour of TV with a different hour of TV.
  • . To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources. To put it in terms of per-capita productivity gains, we hit a plateau.
  • When Asia hits Peak Attention (America is already past it, I believe), absolute size, rather than big productivity differentials, will again define the game, and the center of gravity of economic activity will shift to Asia.
  • Once again, it is the oceans, rather than land, that will become the theater for the next act of the human drama. While American lifestyle designers are fleeing to Bali, much bigger things are afoot in the region. And when that shift happens, the Schumpeterian corporation, the oil rig of human attention, will start to decline at an accelerating rate. Lifestyle businesses and other oddball contraptions — the solar panels and wind farms of attention economics — will start to take over.
  • It will be the dawn of the age of Coasean growth.
  • Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth. It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market.  That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
  • Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
  • How do we measure Coasean growth? I have no idea. I am open to suggestions. All I know is that the metric will need to be hyper-personalized and relative to individuals rather than countries, corporations or the global economy. There will be a meaningful notion of Venkat’s rate of Coasean growth, but no equivalent for larger entities.
  • The fundamental scarce resource that Coasean growth discovers and colonizes is neither space, nor time. It is perspective.
  • anonymous on 23 Jun 11
     
    This is a lay friendly, amateur, mental exploration of the Corporation. It's also utterly absorbing and comes with the usual collection of caveats that we amateurs are accustomed to rattling off when we dunk ourselves into issues much bigger than ourselves. Thanks to BoingBoing, via Futurismic, for the pointer: http://www.boingboing.net/2011/06/23/a-brief-history-of-t.html http://futurismic.com/2011/06/22/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/ "The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline - hopefully gracefully - into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene."
anonymous

Above the Tearline: Fallout from the bin Laden Operation - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...ne-fallout-bin-laden-operation

geopolitics Pakistan cia

shared by anonymous on 21 Jun 11 - Cached
  • When the CIA operates overseas, they are primarily focused on developing human assets, foreign nationals, in four categories. The first would be the intelligence services; number two would be within the military services; number three would be the diplomatic corps of that respective country; and the fourth being the police or security services.
  • In most cases, the CIA develops informants in foreign countries simply by paying them, giving them cash under the table to provide that information to them. I would also think that due to the highly compartmented nature of this case that the individuals that were being used inside the Pakistani government to provide information were used in an unwitting fashion, meaning they would have no idea that bin Laden was the target set.
  • Another aspect to this story would be it is highly probable that the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, conducted their own internal security investigation — some would call it a witch hunt — to identify two different things: one, who helped hide bin Laden, if anybody; and the second being who has helped the CIA.
  • anonymous on 21 Jun 11
     
    "Vice President of Intelligence Fred Burton uses the arrest of five Pakistani nationals for helping the CIA with the bin Laden safe-house surveillance to examine how the CIA operates in foreign countries."
anonymous

From Estonia to Azerbaijan: American Strategy After Ukraine - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...merican-strategy-after-ukraine

shared by anonymous on 25 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Whatever the origins of the events in Ukraine, the United States is now engaged in a confrontation with Russia.
  • At most, the Russians have reached the conclusion that the United States intends to undermine Russia's power. They will resist. The United States has the option of declining confrontation, engaging in meaningless sanctions against individuals and allowing events to take their course. Alternatively, the United States can choose to engage and confront the Russians. 
  • A failure to engage at this point would cause countries around Russia's periphery, from Estonia to Azerbaijan, to conclude that with the United States withdrawn and Europe fragmented, they must reach an accommodation with Russia.
  • ...44 more annotations...
  • This will expand Russian power and open the door to Russian influence spreading on the European Peninsula itself. The United States has fought three wars (World War I, World War II and the Cold War) to prevent hegemonic domination of the region. Failure to engage would be a reversal of a century-old strategy.
  • The American dilemma is how to address the strategic context in a global setting in which it is less involved in the Middle East and is continuing to work toward a "pivot to Asia."
  • Nor can the United States simply allow events to take their course. The United States needs a strategy that is economical and coherent militarily, politically and financially. It has two advantages.
  • Some of the countries on Russia's periphery do not want to be dominated by her. Russia, in spite of some strengths, is inherently weak and does not require U.S. exertion
  • Putin is now in a position where, in order to retain with confidence his domestic authority, he must act decisively to reverse the outcome. The problem is there is no single decisive action that would reverse events.
  • Whatever Putin does in Ukraine, he has two choices.
  • One is simply to accept the reversal, which I would argue that he cannot do. The second is to take action in places where he might achieve rapid diplomatic and political victories against the West -- the Baltics, Moldova or the Caucasus -- while encouraging Ukraine's government to collapse into gridlock and developing bilateral relations along the Estonia-Azerbaijan line.
  • The United States has been developing, almost by default, a strategy not of disengagement but of indirect engagement. Between 1989 and 2008, the U.S. strategy has been the use of U.S. troops as the default for dealing with foreign issues. From Panama to Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States followed a policy of direct and early involvement of U.S. military forces.
  • However, this was not the U.S. strategy from 1914 to 1989. Then, the strategy was to provide political support to allies, followed by economic and military aid, followed by advisers and limited forces, and in some cases pre-positioned forces.
  • Main force was the last resort. 
  • Because the current Russian Federation is much weaker than the Soviet Union was at its height and because the general geographic principle in the region remains the same, a somewhat analogous balance of power strategy is likely to emerge after the events in Ukraine.
  • The coalescence of this strategy is a development I forecast in two books, The Next Decade and The Next 100 Years, as a concept I called the Intermarium. The Intermarium was a plan pursued after World War I by Polish leader Jozef Pilsudski for a federation, under Poland's aegis, of Central and Eastern European countries. What is now emerging is not the Intermarium, but it is close. And it is now transforming from an abstract forecast to a concrete, if still emergent, reality.
  • A direct military intervention by the United States in Ukraine is not possible.
  • First, Ukraine is a large country, and the force required to protect it would outstrip U.S. capabilities.
  • Second, supplying such a force would require a logistics system that does not exist and would take a long time to build.
  • Finally, such an intervention would be inconceivable without a strong alliance system extending to the West and around the Black Sea.
  • If the United States chooses to confront Russia with a military component, it must be on a stable perimeter and on as broad a front as possible to extend Russian resources and decrease the probability of Russian attack at any one point out of fear of retaliation elsewhere.
  • The problem is that NATO is not a functional alliance. It was designed to fight the Cold War on a line far to the west of the current line. More important, there was unity on the principle that the Soviet Union represented an existential threat to Western Europe. 
  • That consensus is no longer there. Different countries have different perceptions of Russia and different concerns. For many, a replay of the Cold War, even in the face of Russian actions in Ukraine, is worse than accommodation.
  • The countries that were at risk from 1945 to 1989 are not the same as those at risk today. Many of these countries were part of the Soviet Union then, and the rest were Soviet satellites.
  • The rest of Europe is not in jeopardy, and these countries are not prepared to commit financial and military efforts to a problem they believe can be managed with little risk to them.
  • the Baltics, Moldova and the Caucasus are areas where the Russians could seek to compensate for their defeat. Because of this, and also because of their intrinsic importance, Poland, Romania and Azerbaijan must be the posts around which this alliance is built.
  • The Baltic salient, 145 kilometers (90 miles) from St. Petersburg in Estonia, would be a target for Russian destabilization. Poland borders the Baltics and is the leading figure in the Visegrad battlegroup
  • . Poland is eager for a closer military relationship with the United States, as its national strategy has long been based on third-power guarantees against aggressors.
  • The Dniester River is 80 kilometers from Odessa, the main port on the Black Sea for Ukraine and an important one for Russia. The Prut River is about 200 kilometers from Bucharest, the capital of Romania. Moldova is between these two rivers.
  • In Western hands, Moldova threatens Odessa, Ukraine's major port also used by Russia on the Black Sea. In Russian hands, Moldova threatens Bucharest.
  • At the far end of the alliance structure I am envisioning is Azerbaijan, on the Caspian Sea bordering Russia and Iran.
  • Should Dagestan and Chechnya destabilize, Azerbaijan -- which is Islamic and majority Shiite but secular -- would become critical for limiting the regional spread of jihadists.
  • Azerbaijan also would support the alliance's position in the Black Sea by supporting Georgia
  • To the southwest, the very pro-Russian Armenia -- which has a Russian troop presence and a long-term treaty with Moscow -- could escalate tensions with Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh.
  • Previously, this was not a pressing issue for the United States. Now it is. The security of Georgia and its ports on the Black Sea requires Azerbaijan's inclusion in the alliance.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 25 Mar 14
       
      I hope I can remember to revisit this and check his assertions.
  • Azerbaijan serves a more strategic purpose. Most of the countries in the alliance are heavy importers of Russian energy
  • The key to the pipeline will be Turkey's willingness to permit transit. I have not included Turkey as a member of this alliance.
  • I view Turkey in this alliance structure as France in the Cold War. It was aligned yet independent, militarily self-sufficient yet dependent on the effective functioning of others.
  • Turkey, inside or outside of the formal structure, will play this role because the future of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and southeastern Europe is essential to Ankara. 
  • These countries, diverse as they are, share a desire not to be dominated by the Russians.
  • This is not an offensive force but a force designed to deter Russian expansion.
  • In each case, the willingness of the United States to supply these weapons, for cash or credit as the situation requires, will strengthen pro-U.S. political forces in each country and create a wall behind which Western investment can take place.
  • There are those who would criticize this alliance for including members who do not share all the democratic values of the U.S. State Department. This may be true. It is also true that during the Cold War the United States was allied with the Shah's Iran, Turkey and Greece under dictatorship and Mao's China after 1971.
  • The State Department must grapple with the harsh forces its own policies have unleashed. This suggests that the high-mindedness borne of benign assumptions now proven to be illusions must make way for realpolitik calculations.
  • The balance of power strategy allows the United States to use the natural inclination of allies to bolster its own position and take various steps, of which military intervention is the last, not the first.
  • It recognizes that the United States, as nearly 25 percent of the world's economy and the global maritime hegemon, cannot evade involvement. Its very size and existence involves it. 
  • Weak and insecure states with temporary advantages are dangerous. The United States has an interest in acting early because early action is cheaper than acting in the last extremity. This is a case of anti-air missiles, attack helicopters, communications systems and training, among other things.
  • These are things the United States has in abundance. It is not a case of deploying divisions, of which it has few.
  • anonymous on 25 Mar 14
     
    "As I discussed last week, the fundamental problem that Ukraine poses for Russia, beyond a long-term geographical threat, is a crisis in internal legitimacy. Russian President Vladimir Putin has spent his time in power rebuilding the authority of the Russian state within Russia and the authority of Russia within the former Soviet Union. The events in Ukraine undermine the second strategy and potentially the first. If Putin cannot maintain at least Ukrainian neutrality, then the world's perception of him as a master strategist is shattered, and the legitimacy and authority he has built for the Russian state is, at best, shaken. "
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