Long Game

much of what is being discussed dates back to two studies done in 2006-07 by the U.S. Geological Survey in conjunction with the U.S. Agency for International Development and Afghan geologists.

The Chinese experience shows that what little progress is being made in terms of foreign investment in Afghan mining projects is already slowed by problems relating to poor infrastructure, awkward logistics, security threats, and corrupt or opaque negotiations.

STRATFOR has been focusing and continues to focus on how these reports came about just in the past week. There is clearly a media blitz now under way, and it is important to understand why. Over the next few years there will be little meaningful impact on the ground in Afghanistan in terms of investing in and developing the country’s minerals. The key question at this point is how Washington will play this mineral-wealth story to serve its interests in the region, especially as the United States struggles to break a stalemate in southwestern Afghanistan and force the Taliban to the negotiating table. But local mistrust of U.S. intentions may counter any potential benefit of playing up Afghanistan’s economic potential.

The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place where politics and metaphysics meet, where metaphysical sentiment becomes political belief.

When it comes to the Tea Party’s concrete policy proposals, things get fuzzier and more contradictory: keep the government out of health care, but leave Medicare alone; balance the budget, but don’t raise taxes; let individuals take care of themselves, but leave Social Security alone; and, of course, the paradoxical demand not to support Wall Street, to let the hard-working producers of wealth get on with it without regulation and government stimulus, but also to make sure the banks can lend to small businesses and responsible homeowners in a stable but growing economy. 

Mark Lilla argued that the hodge-podge list of animosities Tea party supporters mention fail to cohere into a body of political grievances in the conventional sense: they lack the connecting thread of achieving political power. 

We have known for a long time that Prince Charles' empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant. He fell for the fake anthropologist Laurens van der Post. He was bowled over by the charms of homeopathic medicine. He has been believably reported as saying that plants do better if you talk to them in a soothing and encouraging way. But this latest departure promotes him from an advocate of harmless nonsense to positively sinister nonsense.

The heir to the throne seems to possess the ability to surround himself—perhaps by some mysterious ultramagnetic force?—with every moon-faced spoon-bender, shrub-flatterer, and water-diviner within range.

So this is where all the vapid talk about the "soul" of the universe is actually headed. Once the hard-won principles of reason and science have been discredited, the world will not pass into the hands of credulous herbivores who keep crystals by their sides and swoon over the poems of Khalil Gibran. The "vacuum" will be invaded instead by determined fundamentalists of every stripe who already know the truth by means of revelation and who actually seek real and serious power in the here and now.

Michael Lewis was a 24 year old Generation X Ivy League graduate who ended up on Wall Street at the outset of the Unraveling. He was flabbergasted by how clueless youngsters could pretend to know what they were doing while taking home phenomenal amounts of money. He was sure it would end in short order. But he was wrong. It built to a decadent crescendo two decades later. It took longer than he expected

They were a hollowed out oak tree and Reagan’s defense buildup was the gust of wind that blew the rotting tree over. His achievements were great, but his failure to reduce government spending will haunt the country for decades and planted the seeds of economic disaster.

The movie’s message was clear. Unrestrained free-market capitalism with no principles is destructive for society. The movie isn’t anti-capitalism. It distinguishes between the cynical, quick buck culture of the Boomers and the moral hard working culture which had built America.

World View

Boarding operations — known in naval parlance as “visit, board, search and seizure” (VBSS) — can be challenging even in the most permissive of circumstances. Actually closing the distance to the ship and getting on deck is an extremely vulnerable period of transition.

The problem is not that the activists were armed with firearms (though there have been some Israeli claims about weapons and hostile gunfire), but that a VBSS team is not large, and the first individuals to fast-rope down are at a profound tactical disadvantage if numerically overwhelmed. They rely on surprise, aggression and swift, overwhelming force to subdue the crew and passengers.

There is every indication from video footage and from reported casualties on both sides that the commandos had difficulty establishing control over the ships. Given the basic tactical situation that the Israelis were aware of before initiating the assault, as well as Israel’s long experience with pro-Palestinian activists and Palestinians themselves, it is difficult to imagine that the Israelis did not foresee this playing out as it did. There are reports of riot control agents such as tear gas being employed, which would have been intended to help manage the situation, though how extensively they were used and how effectively they were employed is unknown at this time.

The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) announced a plan to convert 45 billion euros from its foreign exchange reserves into dollars and gold, Iran’s state-owned news channel Press TV reported June 2.

while the euro rose from the “conclusion” of the financial crisis, the unfolding European debt crisis is now pressuring the currency again. As a result, in the last six months the euro has lost about 20 percent of its value relative to the dollar.

These losses are particularly painful for Iran, as its economy is already suffering from three decades of U.S.-led international sanctions that have led to the atrophy of its energy sector — Iran’s main revenue source.

There is no indication that this is more than rhetoric on the part of the Iranians — Iranian naval assets operating in the Mediterranean would be unprecedented and could be easily countered by Israeli naval forces.

It should be noted that Turkey appears intent to keep some distance from the Palestinian issue.

While Turkey may have no intention to become the defender of the Palestinians, the recognition it has received from other countries in the region is a worrying sign for Iran.

rising wages threaten to undercut China’s comparative advantage.

Top officials mostly have remained quiet about labor issues. President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have alluded to wanting workers to have proper work conditions and to live dignified lives, but no high-level officials have commented specifically on the recent spate of strikes.

The Russian Duma on June 11 voted in favor of expanding the powers of Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB).

The bill essentially would allow the FSB to take action against anyone without needing a legal reason.

For the Kremlin, the new law is about opening its doors to foreign firms and money while keeping an eye on foreigners’ moves and removing their presence if need be.

As a formal system, pure math exists only inside our heads. We can try to apply it to the real world, but if we are misapplying it, nothing in the system itself will tell us that we're making a mistake.

When someone says "correlation", they are most commonly talking about Pearson's correlation coefficient, which seeks to gauge whether there's a linear relationship between two variables.

Some 45 years after Wise found the private edition of the Sonnets, two British book dealers, named John Carter and Graham Pollard, decided to investigate his finds. They re-examined the Browning volume and identified eight reasons why its existence was inconsistent with typical practices of the era. For example, none of the copies had been inscribed by the author, none were trimmed and bound in the customary way, and the Brownings never mentioned the special private printing in any letters, memoirs, or other documents.

The 1847 edition had to be a fake.

According to Gladwell, those experts' intuitions proved correct, and the initial scientific tests that authenticated the statue turned out to have been faulty.

Among paleontologists, it's sometimes called the "Great Dying." Roughly a quarter of a billion years ago, 90-95 percent of all life on Earth died out. It took 30 million years for the planet to recover. What happened?

The era before the Great Dying - also known as the Permo-Triassic Extinction - is called the Permian, and it was a time of rapid animal evolution, including mammal-reptile hybrids called synapsids that looked sort of like giant lizards - some even had big sails on their backs.

there were actually three die-offs during the Permian, but the one at the end of the Permian and the beginning of the Triassic, 250 million years ago, was extreme.

While Ötzi wore the oldest known leather shoes prior to this discovery (his were grassy socks held together with straps of bear and deer leather), 7,420-year-old sandals made from plant material were previously found in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri. The newly discovered lace-up moccasin is thought to narrowly pre-date the first known slip-on shoe, which is 4,680 radiocarbon years old.

Talk about vintage footwear—an international team of archeologists has discovered the world's oldest leather shoe.