Skip to main content

Home/ Long Game/ Group items matching "india" in title, tags, annotations or url

Group items matching
in title, tags, annotations or url

Sort By: Relevance | Date Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
9More

How Myanmar Liberates Asia, by Robert D. Kaplan - 2 views

www.stratfor.com/...liberates-asia-robert-d-kaplan myanmar asia
shared by anonymous on 21 Mar 12 - Cached
  • Geographically, Myanmar dominates the Bay of Bengal. It is where the spheres of influence of China and India overlap. Myanmar is also abundant in oil, natural gas, coal, zinc, copper, precious stones, timber and hydropower, with some uranium deposits as well. The prize of the Indo-Pacific region, Myanmar has been locked up by dictatorship for decades, even as the Chinese have been slowly stripping it of natural resources.
  • Think of Myanmar as another Afghanistan in terms of its potential to change a region: a key, geo-strategic puzzle piece ravaged by war and ineffective government that, if only normalized, would unroll trade routes in all directions.
  • if Myanmar continues on its path of reform by opening links to the United States and neighboring countries, rather than remaining a natural resource tract to be exploited by China, Myanmar will develop into an energy and natural resource hub in its own right, uniting the Indian subcontinent, China and Southeast Asia all into one fluid, organic continuum.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The salient fact here is that by liberating Myanmar, India's hitherto landlocked northeast, lying on the far side of Bangladesh, will also be opened up to the outside.
  • But while the future beckons with opportunities, the present is still not assured. The political transition in Myanmar has only begun, and much can still go wrong. The problem, as it was in Yugoslavia and Iraq, is regional and ethnic divides.
  • Myanmar is a vast kingdom organized around the central Irrawaddy River Valley. The ethnic Burman word for this valley is Myanmar, hence the official name of the country. But a third of the population is not ethnic Burman, even as regionally based minorities in friable borderlands account for seven of Myanmar's 14 states. The hill areas around the Irrawaddy Valley are populated by Chin, Kachin, Shan, Karen and Karenni peoples, who also have their own armies and irregular forces, which have been battling the Burman-controlled national army since the early Cold War period.
  • Worse, these minority-populated hill regions are ethnically divided from within.
  • Myanmar, it is true, is becoming less repressive and more open to the outside world. But that in and of itself does not make for a viable institutionalized state. In sum, for Myanmar to succeed, even with civilians in control, the military will have to play a significant role for years to come, because it is mainly officers who know how to run things. But given its immense natural resources and sizable population of 48 million, if Myanmar can build pan-ethnic institutions in coming decades it could come close to being a midlevel power in its own right -- something that would not necessarily harm Indian and Chinese interests, and, by the way, would unleash trade throughout Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
  • anonymous on 21 Mar 12
     
    Myanmar's ongoing liberalization and its normalization of relations with the outside world have the possibility of profoundly affecting geopolitics in Asia -- and all for the better.
5More

A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm geopolitics global warming
shared by anonymous on 02 Apr 12 - Cached
  • The Middle East's oil reserves have served as the flashpoint for conflicts, and military leaders are keeping a close eye on Yemen these days, as the country suffers through instability related, in part, to water shortages, which are expected to worsen with climate change.
  • Corell said Asian countries, including China and South Korea, are already plotting new navigation routes and building cargo ships that can push through seasonal ice. The shift would eliminate some travel that now passes through the Straits of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia, where piracy remains active, but it could also enable Asia to take firm control of global trade.
  • Long-term drought in Sudan contributed to the ethnic cleansing in Darfur, he added. The conflict also exposed how poorly prepared the international community is to respond to such scenarios.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Navy's Task Force Climate Change fears that floods or food shortages in Bangladesh could trigger mass migrations to India, increasing ethnic conflict and repression in the region as families compete for resources and survival.
  • anonymous on 02 Apr 12
     
    Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world. Some scientists have linked the Arab Spring uprisings to high food prices caused by the failed Russian wheat crop in 2010, a result of an unparalleled heat wave. The predicted effects of climate change are also expected to hit developing nations particularly hard, raising the importance of supporting humanitarian response efforts and infrastructure improvements. Here's a look at several geopolitical hotspots that will likely bear the unpredictable and dangerous consequences of climate change and current energy policies.
35More

Recognizing the End of the Chinese Economic Miracle - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...g-end-chinese-economic-miracle
shared by anonymous on 23 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • A crisis can exist before it is recognized.
  • The admission that a crisis exists is a critical moment, because this is when most others start to change their behavior in reaction to the crisis.
  • First, The New York Times columnist and Nobel Prize-recipient Paul Krugman penned a piece titled "Hitting China's Wall." He wrote, "The signs are now unmistakable: China is in big trouble.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • Later in the week, Ben Levisohn authored a column in Barron's called "Smoke Signals from China." He wrote, "In the classic disaster flick 'The Towering Inferno' partygoers ignored a fire in a storage room because they assumed it has been contained. Are investors making the same mistake with China?"
  • Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs -- where in November 2001 Jim O'Neil coined the term BRICs and forecast that China might surpass the United States economically by 2028 -- cut its forecast of Chinese growth to 7.4 percent. 
  • The New York Times, Barron's and Goldman Sachs are all both a seismograph of the conventional wisdom and the creators of the conventional wisdom. Therefore, when all three announce within a few weeks that China's economic condition ranges from disappointing to verging on a crash, it transforms the way people think of China.
  • Now the conversation is moving from forecasts of how quickly China will overtake the United States to considerations of what the consequences of a Chinese crash would be. 
  • Suddenly finding Stratfor amid the conventional wisdom regarding China does feel odd, I must admit. Having first noted the underlying contradictions in China's economic growth years ago, when most viewed China as the miracle Japan wasn't, and having been scorned for not understanding the shift in global power underway, it is gratifying to now have a lot of company.
  • One of the things masking China's weakening has been Chinese statistics, which Krugman referred to as "even more fictional than most."
  • China is a vast country in territory and population. Gathering information on how it is doing would be a daunting task, even were China inclined to do so. Instead, China understands that in the West, there is an assumption that government statistics bear at least a limited relationship to truth. Beijing accordingly uses its numbers to shape perceptions inside and outside China of how it is doing.
  • The Chinese release their annual gross domestic product numbers in the third week of January (and only revise them the following year). They can't possibly know how they did that fast, and they don't. But they do know what they want the world to believe about their growth, and the world has believed them -- hence, the fantastic tales of economic growth. 
  • China in fact has had an extraordinary period of growth. The last 30 years have been remarkable, marred only by the fact that the Chinese started at such a low point due to the policies of the Maoist period.
  • Growth at first was relatively easy; it was hard for China to do worse. But make no mistake: China surged. Still, basing economic performance on consumption, Krugman notes that China is barely larger economically than Japan. Given the compounding effects of China's guesses at GDP, we would guess it remains behind Japan, but how can you tell? We can say without a doubt that China's economy has grown dramatically in the past 30 years but that it is no longer growing nearly as quickly as it once did.
  • China's growth surge was built on a very unglamorous fact: Chinese wages were far below Western wages, and therefore the Chinese were able to produce a certain class of products at lower cost than possible in the West.
  • China had another essential policy: Beijing was terrified of unemployment and the social consequences that flow from it. This was a rational fear, but one that contradicted China's main strength, its wage advantage.
  • Growing the economy is possible, but not growing profitability. Eventually, the economy will be dragged down by its inefficiency. 
  • As businesses become inefficient, production costs rise. And that leads to inflation. As money is lent to keep inefficient businesses going, inflation increases even more markedly. The increase in inefficiency is compounded by the growth of the money supply prompted by aggressive lending to keep the economy going. As this persisted over many years, the inefficiencies built into the Chinese economy have become staggering. 
  • The second thing to bear in mind is the overwhelming poverty of China, where 900 million people have an annual per capita income around the same level as Guatemala, Georgia, Indonesia or Mongolia ($3,000-$3,500 a year), while around 500 million of those have an annual per capita income around the same level as India, Nicaragua, Ghana, Uzbekistan or Nigeria ($1,500-$1,700).
  • China's overall per capita GDP is around the same level as the Dominican Republic, Serbia, Thailand or Jamaica.
  • Stimulating an economy where more than a billion people live in deep poverty is impossible. Economic stimulus makes sense when products can be sold to the public.
  • The Chinese have maintained a strategy of depending on exports without taking into account the operation of the business cycle in the West, which means that periodic and substantial contractions of demand will occur. China's industrial plant is geared to Western demand. When Western demand contracted, the result was the mess you see now.
  • The Chinese can prevent the kind of crash that struck East Asia in 1997. Their currency isn't convertible, so there can't be a run on it. They continue to have a command economy; they are still communist, after all. But they cannot avoid the consequences of their economic reality, and the longer they put off the day of reckoning, the harder it will become to recover from it.
  • The Chinese are not going to completely collapse economically any more than the Japanese or South Koreans did. What will happen is that China will behave differently than before. With no choices that don't frighten them, the Chinese will focus on containing the social and political fallout, both by trying to target benefits to politically sensitive groups and by using their excellent security apparatus to suppress and deter unrest.
  • The Chinese economic performance will degrade, but crisis will be avoided and political interests protected. Since much of China never benefited from the boom, there is a massive force that has felt marginalized and victimized by coastal elites. That is not a bad foundation for the Communist Party to rely on.
  • The Chinese are, of course, keeping a great deal of money in U.S. government instruments and other markets. Contrary to fears, that money will not be withdrawn. The Chinese problem isn't a lack of capital, and repatriating that money would simply increase inflation.
  • Had the Chinese been able to put that money to good use, it would have never been invested in the United States in the first place.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 23 Jul 13
       
      I'm having a hard time following all the econ stuff, but I understand this to mean that the U.S. is 'old reliable': Not an investment of last resort, but an investment to run to when you don't have a sure thing.
  • Rather than the feared repatriation of funds, the United States will continue to be the target of major Chinese cash inflows.
  • In a world where Europe is still reeling, only the United States is both secure and large enough to contain Chinese appetites for safety. Just as Japanese investment in the 1990s represented capital flight rather than a healthy investment appetite, so the behavior we have seen from Chinese investors in recent years is capital flight:
  • money searching for secure havens regardless of return. This money has underpinned American markets; it is not going away, and in fact more is on the way. 
  • The major shift in the international order will be the decline of China's role in the region. China's ability to project military power in Asia has been substantially overestimated.
  • Its naval capacity is still limited compared with the United States. The idea that it will compensate for internal economic problems by genuine (as opposed to rhetorical) military action is therefore unlikely.
  • In our view, the most important shift will be the re-emergence of Japan as the dominant economic and political power in East Asia in a slow process neither will really want.
  • China will continue to be a major power, and it will continue to matter a great deal economically. Being troubled is not the same as ceasing to exist. China will always exist. It will, however, no longer be the low-wage, high-growth center of the world. Like Japan before it, it will play a different role.
  • anonymous on 23 Jul 13
     
    "Major shifts underway in the Chinese economy that Stratfor has forecast and discussed for years have now drawn the attention of the mainstream media. Many have asked when China would find itself in an economic crisis, to which we have answered that China has been there for awhile -- something not widely recognized outside China, and particularly not in the United States."
25More

Huntington on Upheaval - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...huntington-upheaval
shared by anonymous on 31 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • The very first sentences of Political Order have elicited anger from Washington policy elites for decades now -- precisely because they are so undeniable. "The most important political distinction among countries," Huntington writes, "concerns not their form of government but their degree of government." In other words, strong democracies and strong dictatorships have more in common than strong democracies and weak democracies.
  • hus, the United States always had more in common with the Soviet Union than with any fragile, tottering democracy in the Third World. This, in turn, is because order usually comes before freedom -- for without a reasonable degree of administrative order, freedom can have little value.
  • Huntington quotes the mid-20th century American journalist, Walter Lippmann: "There is no greater necessity for men who live in communities than that they be governed, self-governed if possible, well-governed if they are fortunate, but in any event, governed."
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • Huntington, who died in 2008, asserts that America has little to teach a tumultuous world in transition because Americans are compromised by their own "happy history."
  • Americans assume a "unity of goodness": that all good things like democracy, economic development, social justice and so on go together. But for many places with different historical experiences based on different geographies and circumstances that isn't always the case.
  • many countries in the developing world are saddled either with few institutions or illegitimate ones at that: so that they have to build an administrative order from scratch. Quite a few of the countries affected by the Arab Spring are in this category. So American advice is more dubious than supposed, because America's experience is the opposite of the rest of the world.
  • For the more complex a society is, the more that institutions are required. The so-called public interest is really the interest in institutions. In modern states, loyalty is to institutions. To wit, Americans voluntarily pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service and lose respect for those who are exposed as tax cheaters.
  • For without institutions like a judiciary, what and who is there to determine what exactly is right and wrong, and to enforce such distinctions?
  • What individual Arabs and Chinese really want is justice. And justice is ultimately the fruit of enlightened administration.
  • How do you know if a society has effective institutions? Huntington writes that one way is to see how good their militaries are. Because societies that have made war well -- Sparta, Rome, Great Britain, America -- have also been well-governed. For effective war-making requires deep organizations, which, in turn, requires trust and predictability.
  • The ability to fight in large numbers is by itself a sign of civilization. Arab states whose regimes have fallen -- Egypt, Libya, Syria -- never had very good state armies. But sub-state armies in the Middle East -- Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Mehdi Army in Iraq, the various rebel groups in Syria and militias in Libya -- have often fought impressively. Huntington might postulate that this is an indication of new political formations that will eventually replace post-colonial states.
  • Huntington implies that today's instability -- the riotous formation of new institutional orders -- is caused by urbanization and enlightenment. As societies become more urbanized, people come into close contact with strangers beyond their family groups, requiring the intense organization of police forces, sewage, street lighting, traffic and so forth.
  • The main drama of the Middle East and China over the past half-century, remember, has been urbanization, which has affected religion, morals and much else. State autocrats have simply been unable to keep up with dynamic social change.
  • He writes that large numbers of illiterate people in a democracy such as India's can actually be stabilizing, since illiterates have relatively few demands; but as literacy increase, voters become more demanding, and their participation in democratic groupings like labor unions goes up, leading to instability. An India of more and more literate voters may experience more unrest.
  • As for corruption, rather than something to be reviled, it can be a sign of modernization, in which new sources of wealth and power are being created even as institutions cannot keep up. Corruption can also be a replacement for revolution. "He who corrupts a system's police officers is more likely to identify with the system than he who storms the system's police stations."
  • In Huntington's minds, monarchies, rather than reactionary, can often be more dedicated to real reform than modernizing dictatorships. For the monarch has historical legitimacy, even as he feels the need to prove himself through good works; while the secular dictator sees himself as the vanquisher of colonialism, and thus entitled to the spoils of power.
  • Huntington thus helps a little to explain why monarchs such as those in Morocco, Jordan and Oman have been more humane than dictators such as those in Libya, Syria and Iraq.
  • As for military dictatorships, Huntington adds several twists.
  • He writes, "In the world of oligarchy, the soldier is a radical; in the middle-class world he is a participant and arbiter; as the mass society looms on the horizon he becomes the conservative guardian of the existing order.
  • Thus, paradoxically but understandably," he goes on, "the more backward a society is, the more progressive the role of its military..." And so he explains why Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa underwent a plethora of military coups during the middle decades of the Cold War: The officer corps often represented the most enlightened branch of society at the time.
  • Americans see the military as conservative only because of our own particular stage of development as a mass society.
  • The logic behind much of Huntington's narrative is that the creation of order -- not the mere holding of elections -- is progressive.
  • Only once order is established can popular pressure be constructively asserted to make such order less coercive and more institutionally subtle.
  • Precisely because we inhabit an era of immense social change, there will be continual political upheaval, as human populations seek to live under more receptive institutional orders. To better navigate the ensuing crises, American leaders would do well to read Huntington, so as to nuance their often stuffy lectures to foreigners about how to reform.
  • anonymous on 31 Jul 13
     
    "In 1968, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington published Political Order in Changing Societies. Forty-five years later, the book remains without question the greatest guide to today's current events. Forget the libraries of books on globalization, Political Order reigns supreme: arguably the most incisive, albeit impolite, work produced by a political scientist in the 20th century. If you want to understand the Arab Spring, the economic and social transition in China, or much else, ignore newspaper opinion pages and read Huntington."
6More

F'd: How the U.S. and Its Allies Got Stuck with the World's Worst New Warplane - War is... - 0 views

medium.com/...5c95d45f86a5
shared by anonymous on 20 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • Lockheed’s F-117 stealth fighter was developed in a breakneck 30 months by a close-knit team of 50 engineers led by an experienced fighter designer named Alan Brown and overseen by seven government employees. Brown said he exercised strict control over the design effort, nixing any proposed feature of the plane that might add cost or delay or detract from its main mission.The F-35, by contrast, is being designed by some 6,000 engineers led by a rotating contingent of short-tenure managers, with no fewer than 2,000 government workers providing oversight. The sprawling JSF staff, partially a product of the design’s complexity, has also added to that complexity like a bureaucratic feedback loop, as every engineer or manager scrambles to add his or her specialty widget, subsystem or specification to the plane’s already complicated blueprints … and inexperienced leaders allow it.
  • Instead of revitalizing the Pentagon’s air arsenal as intended, the JSF is eating it — and putting future war strategy at risk. In 2012 an embarrassed Frank Kendall, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer, called the F-35 “acquisitions malpractice.”
  • Jet design like any engineering practice requires disciplined choices. The JSF is the embodiment of ambivalence — a reflection of the government and Lockheed’s inability to say that some things could not or should not be done.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • By contrast, the Chinese J-31 does not appear compromised at all. Surrounded by rivals with powerful air forces — namely India, Russia, Japan and U.S. Pacific Command — and with no grudge-holding Marine Corps to hijack fighter design, it would make sense that China prioritized the air-combat prowess of its new jet over any historical score-settling.
  • Ward said any future warplane should have clear and narrow requirements, as opposed to the F-35's broad, incompatible guidelines. Development timelines should be fast, budgets should be inexpensive, the overall concept should be simple and hardware should be as tiny as possible, Ward recommended. “What you don’t do is hold up complexity as a desirable attribute,” he said.
  • anonymous on 20 Aug 13
     
    "The price tag -currently an estimated $1 trillion to design, build and operate 2,400 copies-is steadily going down. Production of dozens of the planes a year for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps is getting easier. Daily flight tests increasingly are hitting all the right marks. Or so proponents would have you believe."
17More

Central Asia and Afghanistan: A Tumultuous History | Stratfor - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...afghanistan-tumultuous-history
shared by anonymous on 26 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Contrary to popular perception, Central Asia is not likely to see an immediate explosion of violence and militancy after the U.S. and NATO drawdown from Afghanistan in 2014. However, Central Asia's internal issues and the region's many links with Afghanistan -- including a web of relationships among militant groups -- will add to the volatility in the region. 
  • Central Asia is linked to Afghanistan geographically; Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan share borders with Afghanistan that collectively span more than 2,000 kilometers (about 1,240 miles).
  • the topography of Afghanistan's frontiers with Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan is largely desert. 
  • ...13 more annotations...
  •  Afghanistan is an ethnically diverse country, with more than a dozen ethno-linguistic groups represented substantially in the country's population of slightly more than 31 million.
  • The Pashtuns are the largest such group (42 percent), with Tajiks (27 percent), Hazaras (9 percent), Uzbeks (9 percent) and Turkmen (3 percent) constituting significant cohorts as well.
  • Historically, Afghanistan's borders with the Central Asian states did not exist in a modern sense; rather, they consisted of frontier areas that constantly shifted hands, given that warfare in the region was the norm.
  • Russia's imperial expansion into Central Asia coincided with the growth of the British domain over India, and the result was the establishment of a buffer zone in what is now Afghanistan.
  • This set the borders of Afghanistan as we know them and -- with the transition from the Russian Empire to the Soviet Union in the early 20th century -- led to a closing off of the borders between Central Asia and Afghanistan for the first time in history.
  • The ensuing 70 years of Soviet rule in Central Asia created significantly different political and cultural identities among the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Turkmen in the Soviet Union and those within Afghanistan, given the vastly different governing structures.
  • Because of the geography of the border areas, interaction and movement between the peoples of Central Asia and Afghanistan was difficult to stop.
  • The Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the Soviet Union only two years later created a dramatically new environment both within Central Asia and within Afghanistan.
  • In 1991, the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan (along with Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan farther north) became independent states for the first time in modern history.
  • Beginning in 1994 and starting from their stronghold in Kandahar, the Taliban were able to spread their influence and control over much of Afghanistan. It took the movement only months to take control of most southern provinces from various Pashtun warlords, and they quickly made progress in capturing regional centers in the west and east of the country like Herat and Jalalabad.
  • The rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan coincided with a number of significant developments in Central Asia. The post-Soviet regimes in the region had no experience of ruling their territories directly. Moreover, Central Asia faced immense economic and political challenges as Russia withdrew subsidies and the Soviet military-industrial complex with which the Central Asians were so integrated collapsed.
  • Tajikistan descended into civil war almost immediately, when groups from the Kulyabi and Khujand regions known as the Popular Front were pitted against an array of opposition elements including Islamists, democrats and the Pamiri clan from the east collectively known as the United Tajik Opposition. 
  • Outside groups got involved in the civil war, supporting the different sides along political and ideological lines. Russia and Uzbekistan supported the secular and neo-communist Popular Front, while many Tajiks in Afghanistan supported the United Tajik Opposition, particularly the Islamist elements of the Islamic Renaissance Party of Tajikistan. 
  • anonymous on 26 Sep 13
     
    "This is the first installment of a two-part series on the relationship between Central Asia and Afghanistan and the expected effects of the U.S. drawdown in Afghanistan on Central Asian security."
15More

This Is the Man Bill Gates Thinks You Absolutely Should Be Reading - 0 views

www.wired.com/...vaclav-smil-wired
shared by anonymous on 25 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why? In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.
  • You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation. Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.
  • American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that? Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Restoring manufacturing would mean training Americans again to build things. Only two countries have done this well: Germany and Switzerland. They’ve both maintained strong manufacturing sectors and they share a key thing: Kids go into apprentice programs at age 14 or 15. You spend a few years, depending on the skill, and you can make BMWs. And because you started young and learned from the older people, your products can’t be matched in quality. This is where it all starts.
  • You claim Apple could assemble the iPhone in the US and still make a huge profit. It’s no secret! Apple has tremendous profit margins. They could easily do everything at home. The iPhone isn’t manufactured in China—it’s assembled in China from parts made in the US, Germany, Japan, Malaysia, South Korea, and so on. The cost there isn’t labor. But laborers must be sufficiently dedicated and skilled to sit on their ass for eight hours and solder little pieces together so they fit perfectly.
  • But Apple is supposed to be a giant innovator. Apple! Boy, what a story. No taxes paid, everything made abroad—yet everyone worships them. This new iPhone, there’s nothing new in it. Just a golden color. What the hell, right? When people start playing with color, you know they’re played out.
  • Let’s talk about energy. You say alternative energy can’t scale. Is there no role for renewables? I like renewables, but they move slowly. There’s an inherent inertia, a slowness in energy transitions. It would be easier if we were still consuming 66,615 kilowatt-hours per capita, as in 1950. But in 1950 few people had air-conditioning. We’re a society that demands electricity 24/7. This is very difficult with sun and wind.
  • What about nuclear? The Chinese are building it, the Indians are building it, the Russians have some intention to build. But as you know, the US is not. The last big power plant was ordered in 1974. Germany is out, Italy has vowed never to build one, and even France is delaying new construction. Is it a nice thought that the future of nuclear energy is now in the hands of North Korea, Pakistan, India, and Iran? It’s a depressing thought, isn’t it?
  • You call this Moore’s curse—the idea that if we’re innovative enough, everything can have yearly efficiency gains. It’s a categorical mistake. You just cannot increase the efficiency of power plants like that. You have your combustion machines—the best one in the lab now is about 40 percent efficient. In the field they’re about 15 or 20 percent efficient. Well, you can’t quintuple it, because that would be 100 percent efficient. Impossible, right? There are limits. It’s not a microchip.
  • So what’s left? Making products more energy-efficient? Innovation is making products more energy-efficient — but then we consume so many more products that there’s been no absolute dematerialization of anything. We still consume more steel, more aluminum, more glass, and so on. As long as we’re on this endless material cycle, this merry-go-round, well, technical innovation cannot keep pace.
  • What is the simplest way to make your house super-efficient? Insulation!
  • Right. I have 50 percent more insulation in my walls. It adds very little to the cost. And you insulate your basement from the outside—I have about 20 inches of Styrofoam on the outside of that concrete wall. We were the first people building on our cul-de-sac, so I saw all the other houses after us—much bigger, 3,500 square feet. None of them were built properly. I pay in a year for electricity what they pay in January. You can have a super-efficient house; you can have a super-efficient car, a little Honda Civic, 40 miles per gallon.
  • Your other big subject is food. You’re a pretty grim thinker, but this is your most optimistic area. You actually think we can feed a planet of 10 billion people—if we eat less meat and waste less food. We pour all this energy into growing corn and soybeans, and then we put all that into rearing animals while feeding them antibiotics. And then we throw away 40 percent of the food we produce.
  • So the answers are not technological but political: better economic policies, better education, better trade policies. Right. Today, as you know, everything is “innovation.” We have problems, and people are looking for fairy-tale solutions—innovation like manna from heaven falling on the Israelites and saving them from the desert. It’s like, “Let’s not reform the education system, the tax system. Let’s not improve our dysfunctional government. Just wait for this innovation manna from a little group of people in Silicon Valley, preferably of Indian origin.”
  • anonymous on 25 Nov 13
     
    ""There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil," Bill Gates wrote this summer. That's quite an endorsement-and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world's biggest challenges-the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing-with nuance and detail. They're among the most data-heavy books you'll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)"
9More

Middle-Aged Columnists Think America Is In Decline. Big Surprise. - 0 views

www.tnr.com/...ica-in-decline-thomas-friedman history politics society
shared by anonymous on 07 Oct 10 - Cached
  • A Google search for the phrase “America’s decline” turns up 42,500 hits. Comparisons to Rome and other once-powerful empires abound, as in Cullen Murphy’s popular 2007 book Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America. From the Tea Party right comes the constant, screeching cry that President Obama and the Democrats are “destroying America.” The National Intelligence Council itself, a few years ago, predicted the “erosion” of American power relative to China and India. Clearly, the most popular classical figure in America today is that high-strung Trojan lady, Cassandra.
  • Twenty-two years ago, in a refreshingly clear-sighted article for Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Samuel P. Huntington noted that the theme of “America’s decline” had in fact been a constant in American culture and politics since at least the late 1950s.
  • What is particularly fascinating about these older predictions is that so many of their themes remain constant. What did our past Cassandras see as the causes of America’s decline? On the one hand, internal weaknesses—spiraling budget and trade deficits, the poor performance of our primary and secondary educational systems; political paralysis—coupled with an arrogant tendency toward “imperial overstretch.” And on the other hand, the rise of tougher, better-disciplined rivals elsewhere: the Soviet Union through the mid-'80s; Japan until the early '90s; China today.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • What the long history of American “declinism”—as opposed to America’s actual possible decline—suggests is that these anxieties have an existence of their own that is quite distinct from the actual geopolitical position of our country; that they arise as much from something deeply rooted in the collective psyche of our chattering classes as from sober political and economic analyses.
  • nations do not in fact behave like individuals.
  • But the psychological impulse to see the country in decline leads writers again and again to neglect these differences, and to cast the story of a huge, complex nation as a simple individual morality play.
  • Would Rome not have fallen if a group of clear-sighted, hardheaded Roman commentators had sternly told the country to buck up in the late third century, lest the empire share the fate of Persia? Was Great Britain’s decline in the twentieth century a product of moral flabbiness that a strong dose of character-building medicine could have reversed?
  • We would do better to recognize that calling ourselves “the new Romans” is really just a seductive fantasy, and that our political and economic problems demand political and economic solutions, not exercises in collective moral self-flagellation.
  • anonymous on 07 Oct 10
     
    "Yet again this Sunday, Thomas L. Friedman used his column in The New York Times to issue an ominous warning about America's decline. Quoting from Lewis Mumford about the moral decadence of imperial Rome, he commented: "It was one of those history passages that echo so loudly in the present that it sends a shiver down my spine-way, way too close for comfort." He ended the column with a call for a third-party candidate in 2012 with the courage to say to the voters: "I am going to tell you what you need to hear if we want to be the world's leaders, not the new Romans."" By David A. Bell on October 7, 2010.
2More

Climate Change and Systemic Volatility - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...e-and-systemic-volatility.html geopolitics environment
shared by anonymous on 22 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • What struck me about this chart, though, is the amount of blue in two of the world's emerging great powers (China and India). The next three to four decades seem likely to witness challenges to the political status quo by at least two rising powers just as those nations are experiencing extreme domestic socio-economic volatility caused by the compounding effects of climate change. To me, this is extremely worrying, because it means that the ruling regimes of those nations will be under intense domestic pressure, leading to potentially volatile and risky foreign policy behavior in order to either preserve domestic unity or seek the resources and geostrategic position to mitigate internal difficulties. Doesn't bode well for those who hope for those states to rise in non-disruptive ways.
  • anonymous on 22 Oct 10
     
    "There are a few obvious reactions here. One is to note how many of the worlds major emitters of greenhouse gas (so far) are in the "low risk" zone, proving definitively that mother nature has no sense of justice. Another good point is made by Yglesias, who notes that despite reasonably direct lines of causation (greenhouse emissions cause climate shifts which further immiserate already-desperately-poor farmers in already-desperately-poor parts of the world), "free market" boosters seem willfully blind to the negative externalities of polluting behavior; morally this is very weird. " Matt Eckel at Foreign Policy Watch on October 22, 2010.
9More

Some Horsemen - 0 views

www.foreignpolicy.com/...some_horsemen
shared by anonymous on 09 May 11 - Cached
  • Mayan mythology enthusiasts, Christian evangelicals, and assorted conspiracy theorists all have their reasons to believe the world is going to end the Saturday after next, May 21.
  • half of all news stories concern violence, conflict, and suffering, according to Roger Johnson, a professor emeritus at Ramapo College.
  • A disease that killed more than a third of the population of Europe in its heyday is now defeated by a simple course of antibiotics.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Famine only affected three-tenths of a percent of Africa's population between 1990 and 2005, according to William Easterly of New York University -- reflecting a growing global availability of food and increased agricultural trade.
  • the number of wars ongoing worldwide fell from 24 to five between 1984 and 2008.
  • average heights in India (and a lot of other places) are increasing
  • Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now.
  • In 1990, nearly 12 million children worldwide died before they had reached their fifth birthday. Today that figure is below 8 million.
  • anonymous on 09 May 11
     
    "Apocalypse buffs and international development types have one thing in common: They're both wrong. "
5More

Wanting Foreign Governments to Have Different Preferences is Not a Strategy - 0 views

fpwatch.blogspot.com/...reign-governments-to-have.html geopolitics duh
shared by anonymous on 15 Jun 11 - Cached
  • In the case of Israel, it's been obvious for decades that unconditional American support for Tel Aviv complicates U.S. policy in the rest of the Middle East, and that some kind of deal on Palestinian statehood is a practical means of dulling the contradiction inherent in America's approach to the situation.
  • It's clear that Israeli and American preferences just don't align, and hoping for that to suddenly change is not a coherent policy.
  • Likewise with Pakistan. America would like Pakistan to stop caring about the threat posed by India, be less concerned with gaining "strategic depth" in Afghanistan, abandon its quixotic fits over the status of Kashmir, and thus be less inclined to openly and tacitly support Islamic militant groups that complicate American policy.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • But, obviously, those in Pakistan's government have different preferences and priorities. And hoping for that to change isn't a strategy.
  • anonymous on 15 Jun 11
     
    "For those who missed them, check out Andrew Sullivan's piece this morning on the bind into which the eventual UN vote on a Palestinian state has put U.S. foreign policy, as well as Josh Foust's post on the inanity of accepting further Friedman unit extensions to the war in Afghanistan. Stepping back a bit from the specifics of each situation, it's notable just how much crucial American policymaking seems to be based on asking/hoping/praying that foreign governments realign their policy preferences to better sync with U.S. interests. Not their policies, their preferences."
87More

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.
59More

Global Economic Downturn: A Crisis of Political Economy - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...nturn-crisis-political-economy geopolitics criticalthinking politics economics u.s. crisis
shared by anonymous on 15 Aug 11 - Cached
  • For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics.
  • The use of the term “economy” by itself did not begin until the late 19th century.
  • For classical economists, the political and economic systems were intertwined, each dependent on the other for its existence.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • The current economic crisis is best understood as a crisis of political economy.
  • Moreover, it has to be understood as a global crisis enveloping the United States, Europe and China that has different details but one overriding theme: the relationship between the political order and economic life.
  • the origin of the current financial crisis was the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States.
  • To be more precise, it originated in a financial system generating paper assets whose value depended on the price of housing.
  • From the standpoint of economics, this was essentially a financial crisis: who made or lost money and how much.
  • From the standpoint of political economy it raised a different question: the legitimacy of the financial elite.
  • Think of a national system as a series of subsystems — political, economic, military and so on.
  • Then think of the economic system as being divisible into subsystems — various corporate verticals with their own elites, with one of the verticals being the financial system.
  • A sense emerged that the financial elite was either stupid or dishonest or both.
  • Fair or not, this perception created a massive political crisis.
  • There was a crisis of confidence in the financial system and a crisis of confidence in the political system. The U.S. government’s actions in September 2008 were designed first to deal with the failures of the financial system. Many expected this would be followed by dealing with the failures of the financial elite, but this is perceived not to have happened.
  • This generated the second crisis — the crisis of the political elite.
  • The Tea Party movement emerged in part as critics of the political elite, focusing on the measures taken to stabilize the system and arguing that it had created a new financial crisis, this time in excessive sovereign debt.
  • Its argument was that the political elite used the financial crisis to dramatically increase the power of the state (health care reform was the poster child for this) while mismanaging the financial system through excessive sovereign debt.
  • The sovereign debt question also created both a financial crisis and then a political crisis in Europe.
  • What had been a minority view was strengthened by the recession.
  • The European crisis paralleled the American crisis in that financial institutions were bailed out. But the deeper crisis was that Europe did not act as a single unit to deal with all European banks
  • There are two narratives to the story.
  • One is the German version, which has become the common explanation. It holds that Greece wound up in a sovereign debt crisis because of the irresponsibility of the Greek government
  • The Greek narrative, which is less noted, was that the Germans rigged the European Union in their favor. Germany is the world’s third-largest exporter, after China and the United States (and closing rapidly on the No. 2 spot). By forming a free trade zone, the Germans created captive markets for their goods.
  • Moreover, the regulations generated by Brussels so enhanced the German position that Greece was helpless.
  • Which narrative is true is not the point.
  • The point is that Europe is facing two political crises generated by economics. One crisis is similar to the American one, which is the belief that Europe’s political elite protected the financial elite. The other is a distinctly European one, a regional crisis in which parts of Europe have come to distrust each other rather vocally. This could become an existential crisis for the European Union.
  • The American and European crises struck hard at China, which, as the world’s largest export economy, is a hostage to external demand, particularly from the United States and Europe.
  • The Chinese government had two responses.
  • The first was to keep factories going by encouraging price reductions to the point where profit margins on exports evaporated.
  • The second was to provide unprecedented amounts of credit to enterprises facing default on debts in order to keep them in business.
  • This led to a second crisis, where workers faced the contraction of already small incomes.
  • The response was to increase incomes, which in turn increased the cost of goods exported once again, making China’s wage rates less competitive, for example, than Mexico’s.
  • China had previously encouraged entrepreneurs. This was easy when Europe and the United States were booming. Now, the rational move by entrepreneurs was to go offshore or lay off workers, or both.
  • In the United States, the first impulse was to regulate the financial sector, stimulate the economy and increase control over sectors of the economy.
  • In Europe, where there were already substantial controls over the economy, the political elite started to parse how those controls would work and who would benefit more.
  • In China, where the political elite always retained implicit power over the economy, that power was increased.
  • In all three cases, the first impulse was to use political controls.
  • In the United States, the Tea Party was simply the most active and effective manifestation of that resistance.
  • In Europe, the resistance came from anti-Europeanists
  • It also came from political elites of countries like Ireland who were confronting the political elites of other countries.
  • In China, the resistance has come from those being hurt by inflation
  • Russia went through this crisis years ago and had already tilted toward the political elite’s control over the economy.
  • Brazil and India have not experienced the extremes of China, but then they haven’t had the extreme growth rates of China.
  • But when the United States, Europe and China go into a crisis of this sort, it can reasonably be said that the center of gravity of the world’s economy and most of its military power is in crisis. It is not a trivial moment.
  • Crisis does not mean collapse. The United States has substantial political legitimacy to draw on.
  • Europe has less but its constituent nations are strong.
  • China’s Communist Party is a formidable entity but it is no longer dealing with a financial crisis.
  • It is vital to understand that this is not an ideological challenge.
  • Left-wingers opposing globalization and right-wingers opposing immigration are engaged in the same process — challenging the legitimacy of the elites.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 15 Aug 11
       
      This is why so much of American life seems like that proverbial puppet show. Politicians, at their basest, have a vested interest in portraying this as a problem between us-vs-them. It reflects heat.
  • The real problem is that, while the challenge to the elites goes on, the profound differences in the challengers make an alternative political elite difficult to imagine.
  • This, then, is the third crisis that can emerge: that the elites become delegitimized and all that there is to replace them is a deeply divided and hostile force, united in hostility to the elites but without any coherent ideology of its own.
  • In the United States this would lead to paralysis. In Europe it would lead to a devolution to the nation-state. In China it would lead to regional fragmentation and conflict.
  • These are all extreme outcomes and there are many arrestors.
  • But we cannot understand what is going on without understanding two things.
  • The first is that the political economic crisis, if not global, is at least widespread, and uprisings elsewhere have their own roots but are linked in some ways to this crisis.
  • The second is that the crisis is an economic problem that has triggered a political problem, which in turn is making the economic problem worse.
  • The followers of Adam Smith may believe in an autonomous economic sphere disengaged from politics, but Adam Smith was far more subtle. That’s why he called his greatest book the Wealth of Nations. It was about wealth, but it was also about nations. It was a work of political economy that teaches us a great deal about the moment we are in.
  • anonymous on 15 Aug 11
     
    Classical political economists like Adam Smith or David Ricardo never used the term "economy" by itself. They always used the term "political economy." For classical economists, it was impossible to understand politics without economics or economics without politics. The two fields are certainly different but they are also intimately linked.
5More

Hiding in Plain Sight - The Problem with Pakistani Intelligence - 0 views

www.stratfor.com/...roblems-pakistani-intelligence
shared by anonymous on 04 May 11 - Cached
  • Clearly, Pakistan is coming under a great deal of pressure to explain how authorities in the country were not aware that the world’s most wanted man was enjoying safe haven for years in a large facility in the heart of the country.
  • It is no secret that Pakistan’s army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants – both local and foreign, from the early 1980s until at least the events of Sept. 11, 2001 – as instruments of foreign policy.
  • the policy of backing Islamist militants for power projection vis-a-vis India and Afghanistan had been in place for more than 20 years, and was instrumental in creating a large murky spatial nexus of local and foreign militants (specifically al Qaeda) that had complex relations with elements within and close to state security organs.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One of the key reasons for this situation is that while the stakeholders of the country (civil as well as military) are engaged in a fierce struggle against local and foreign Islamist insurgents, significant societal forces and sympathetic individuals from within the state are providing support to jihadists. But it’s more problematic that there are no quick fixes for this state of affairs. Further complicating this situation is that the U.S. objectives for the region require Islamabad to address these issues on a fast-track basis.
  • anonymous on 04 May 11
     
    "The fallout continued Tuesday from the revelation that until his death at the hands of U.S. forces on May 2, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden been living in a large compound not far from the Pakistani capital. A number of senior U.S. officials issued tough statements against Pakistan. President Barack Obama's counterterrorism adviser John Brennan said that while there was no evidence to suggest that Pakistani officials knew that bin Laden was living at the facility, the possibility could not be ruled out. The chairwoman of the U.S. Senate's Select Intelligence Committee, Diane Feinstein, sought more details from the CIA about the Pakistani role and warned that Congress could dock financial assistance to Islamabad if it was found that the al Qaeda leader had been harbored by state officials. CIA chief Leon Panetta disclosed that American officials feared that Pakistan could have undermined the operation by leaking word to its targets."
‹ Previous 21 - 34 of 34
Showing 20▼ items per page