Long Game

Moscow has already had some success in consolidating control over what it considers the four most crucial countries, but it would like to push back against the West in several other countries if it has time to do so before Washington’s attention returns to Eurasia.

Moscow is making progress in its grand scheme to solidify its position as a regional power in Eurasia once again, reversing what it sees as Western infiltration. The question now is how far Russia wants to go — or how far it feels it must and can go — in this quest.

Russia’s defining problem stems from its geographic indefensibility.

Foreign forces conducting anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia have started targeting pirates’ “mother ships” — vessels used to increase pirates’ attack range — in a shift from defensive to offensive tactics.

The mandates of the anti-piracy missions have not changed, but the European Union and NATO have shifted their tactics to target key pirate vessels. As more mother ships are seized, pirates’ capabilities are expected to weaken since their attack ranges will shrink. If foreign naval attacks on mother ships continue, the number of pirate hijackings off the Somali coast could decrease substantially.

Disabling pirates’ offshore capabilities will have a short-term effect, but pirates’ ships and personnel are easily replaceable. (In fact, the pirates likely will respond to the foreign naval offenses by seizing more ships to use as offshore bases.) Anti-piracy missions do not address the underlying issue of the lack of governance and abundance of sanctuary for pirates in Somalia. Furthermore, pirate villages in the otherwise impoverished Somalia are awash with money. Until the underlying conditions that gave rise to piracy in the region are addressed, it will remain a challenge.

Managing the young generation of workers – sometimes called GenY, GenMe, or Millennials – is a hot topic, covered in the popular press and discussed in numerous books and seminars. However, most of these discussions are based on perceptions and anecdote rather than hard data, partially because no one had established that GenY differed in work values from previous generations.

Striking differences emerged for valuing leisure. GenY was much more likely than previous generations to say they wanted a job with an easy pace and lots of vacation time, and less likely to want to work overtime. They also saw work as less central to their lives and were more likely to agree that "work is just making a living." At the same time, they placed more importance on salary and status. In other words, the younger generation wants to have their cake (big salaries) and eat it too (work-life balance).

After Russia consolidates control over the countries it has deemed necessary to its national security, it will turn its focus to a handful of countries that are not as important but still have strategic value. These countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — are not necessary to Russia’s survival but are of some importance and can keep the West from moving too close to Russia’s core.

There are six countries — Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan — where Moscow would like to reconsolidate its influence if it has the opportunity.

Many folks in the biotech industry have repeatedly explained why biotech is different, how it is far more complex than digital stuff, requiring far more education to master, how the subject is far more delicate requiring far more precision in experiments, and the equipment thus far more expensive than anything computers use, meaning overall that garage biotech hackers were very unlikely. "You need a PhD and a clean room" they would say.

The influence of exponentially improving biological technologies is only just now starting to be felt. Today writing a gene from scratch within a few weeks costs a few thousand dollars. In five to ten years that amount should pay for much larger constructs, perhaps a brand-new viral or microbial genome. Gene and genome-synthesis projects of this larger scale have already been demonstrated as academic projects. When such activity becomes commercially viable, a synthetic genome could be used to build an organism that produces fuel, or a new plastic, or a vaccine to combat the outbreak of a new infectious disease.

As I will discuss in Chapter 6

Money, an item not necessarily intrinsically desirable or usable but serving as a stand-in for the complex wants and valuations of untold individuals, is an unnatural idea that required centuries to take hold.

Endism, especially when attached to the sort of nouns we were once prone to capitalize, can become a bad habit when used as anything more than a literary device to call attention to events worthy of it. The Great Depression was certainly worthy of its capital letters; even if nothing exactly ended, plenty changed. But what? And with what, if any relevance for present circumstances?

Whether we realize it or not, we are still reacting to those portrayals more than we are to the actions themselves. What really changed was the way the world’s elite thought of themselves and their institutions.

Russia is working to form an understanding with regional powers outside the former Soviet sphere in order to facilitate its plans to expand its influence in key former Soviet states. These regional powers — Germany, France, Turkey and Poland — could halt Russia’s consolidation of control if they chose to, so Moscow is working to make neutrality, if not cooperation, worth their while.

Moscow is working to cultivate an understanding with regional powers outside the former Soviet Union that are critical to its expansion: Germany, France, Turkey and Poland.

Russia throughout the 19th century coveted territory held by the crumbling Ottoman Empire — especially around the Black Sea and in the Balkans — and had plans for dominating Poland. Currently, however, Moscow understands that the two regional powers with most opportunities to subvert its resurgence are Poland (in Belarus, Ukraine and the Baltic states) and Turkey (in the Caucasus).

We often get stuck in arbitrary things. We make excuses. We try to find shortcuts, and we try to do all these things that in the end only prevent us from reaching our goals. If you're really serious about pursuing your dreams and making them real, then you may want to read on...

1. Stopping at Uncomfortable When you start something new, it will be scary.

2. Looking for Shortcuts

Collectively, the planet is plunging headlong into a deeply religious century, in large part because globalization is rapidly changing people's economic and social circumstances. When that happens, individuals naturally grasp for sources of stability in their lives, whether it be a more conservative political regime or a seemingly unshakable religious faith. It's simply a question of seeking balance in tumultuous times.

Here's the indisputable reality: All of the world's major religions were formed during the Malthusian era of human economics, before the Industrial Revolution shifted Western societies from a subsistence paradigm to questions of how to deal with abundance.

Why we rose to rule, while our hominin relatives died out, has long been a curiosity for scientists.

Today's youth are generally not the self-centered, antisocial slackers that previous research has made them out to be, according to a provocative new study co-authored by a Michigan State University psychologist.

-Today's youth are more cynical and less trusting of institutions than previous generations. But Donnellan said this is generally true of the broader population. -The current generation is less fearful of social problems such as race relations, hunger, poverty and energy shortages. -Today's youth have higher educational expectations.

"Kids today are like they were 30 years ago – they're trying to find their place in the world, they're trying to carve out an identity, and it can be difficult," Donnellan said. "But lots of research shows that the stereotypes of all groups are much more overdrawn than the reality."

Whether life exists elsewhere in our universe is a longstanding mystery. But for some scientists, there’s another interesting question: could there be life in a universe significantly different from our own?

There, I think, is a possibility of many kinds of life that might be radically different from what we’re looking for because we only know how to look for what occurs to us. And a large part of what occurs to us comes from what we see looking around the Earth. So we assume it’s carbon-based, we assume it’s water. Those might be good assumptions. I believe there is other carbon-based life elsewhere. I don’t know if it’s all that way. But when you come to the possibility of other chemical basis for life, if you think of life as just maybe some kind of self-propagating, evolving system that forms in certain conditions of complexity and flow and chemical interaction, then maybe it doesn’t have to be carbon-based – in which case I can imagine the possibility of life in much hotter, much colder places: on stars, in interstellar clouds, in comets, in the atmospheres of planets very different from our own. And then, if you want to get even farther out, maybe you can talk about life at very different scales. What about interactions amongst subatomic particles that somehow have some kind of complexity where civilizations rise and fall in a nanosecond that we never know about because they’re inside of our particles? Or on a huge scale, galaxies that are somehow living, orbiting, sandwiches of things forming complexity. You can get pretty far out there if you wanted.

When our distant ancestors sat around debating if to change locations, expel a troublemaker, or attack neighbors, they were often ambiguous about whether they were choosing what they wanted or what was moral; they preferred to pretend these were the same.  We similarly prefer ambiguity when we argue policy today.

Frameworks for finding win-win deals should also try to include as many things as possible that can have wants and participate in deals.  This includes racists, pedophiles, slaves-owners, robots, animals, distant past and future folk, and future folk who may or may not end up existing.  Yes many may be morally offended if racists get what they want, but that offense counts in what other folks want, and therefore enough offense will ensure that win-win deals will not give racists much of what they want.

The global system is undergoing profound change. Three powers — Germany, Iran and China — face challenges forcing them to refashion the way they interact with their regions and the world. We will explore each of these three states in detail in our next three geopolitical weeklies, highlighting how STRATFOR’s assessments of these states are evolving.

German strategy in 1871, 1914 and 1939 called for pre-emptive strikes on France to prevent a two-front war.

They harnessed German capital and economic dynamism, submerged Germany into a larger economic entity, gave the Germans what they needed economically so they didn’t have to seek it militarily, and ensured that the Germans had no reason — or ability — to strike out on their own.

Maybe not “worship” exactly, but at least great respect and deference.  By “efficient” I mean that it increases economists’ standard “cost-benefit” concept of welfare.  That is: as usually estimated, the benefits of deferring greatly to distant ancestors far outweigh its costs.  And while this does suggest that we should defer more to ancestors, it also shows just how much distorted prices can break economists’ favorite tools.

Our unthinkingly repugnance at being controlled by the dead, and our eagerness to grab their resources, prevents us from enforcing long-term win-win deals.  This refusal to enforce deals increases interest rates, which distorts all our trade-offs across time, bringing economic welfare estimates into stark conflict with intuitive moral judgments about time trades (as in global warming), which then encourages people to turn to non-economic frameworks for policy analysis.

According to the latest data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), imports of major conventional arms by Indonesia rose by 84 percent in the two five-year periods. For Singapore, the increase was 146 percent. And Malaysia imported an astounding 722 percent more arms between 2005 and 2009 than it did during the previous five years. The large volume of weapons purchased by Singapore has resulted in that country becoming the first state in Southeast Asia to rank among the world's top 10 arms importers since the Vietnam War ended in 1975.

Last year's stated figure was roughly $60 billion, a 17.6 percent increase over the previous year and more than a dozen times larger than the PRC's announced military budget for 1989.

The United States remains the world's largest arms exporter, with its $7 billion in annual military exports accounting for some 30 percent of all major conventional weapons sales during the last few years. Although Russia's share fell somewhat to 23 percent, it continues to occupy second place in global arms sales. Germany has advanced to the third-place position, with 11 percent, by doubling its weapons exports during the last five-year period. France is in fourth place, with 8 percent of all global arms sales. Britain's 4 percent share should rise after more of the 72 Eurofighter Typhoon aircraft purchased by Saudi Arabia are delivered during the next few years.

The heavy Atlantic swell and some of the world's strongest tides are to be harnessed by a breakthrough scheme to generate clean marine energy off northern Scotland, with predictions it will rival the output of a nuclear power station.

In most cases, the utility companies have formed joint ventures with four of the UK's leading marine energy firms, covering small areas of sea with up to 200 machines. They use a variety of techniques to capture the energy of the ocean.

Another tidal machine, SeaGen, features two underwater propellers attached to a tall column anchored to the seabed.

Forget banking and the automotive industry. Earth is the one system that is truly “too big to fail.”

Those fixes could slow environmental degradation but might not solve the underlying cause. That culprit, according to Middlebury College scholar in residence Bill McKibben, is the very driver of modern society: a relentless quest for economic growth. In an exclusive excerpt from his upcoming book, McKibben argues that we must give up growth and reorganize based on smart maintenance of resources. Critics say the idea is unrealistic; staff editor Mark Fischetti challenges him to respond.