Long Game

Any war is a two-way struggle. The Taliban’s perspective and their information and propaganda efforts are important both in shaping the direction of the war itself, and in understanding it.

There is a clear rationale behind the thrust of American efforts to undermine the Taliban’s base of support. But as recent developments in southern Afghanistan attest, the Taliban are not passively accepting those efforts.

the Taliban’s tactics and measures of success will be profoundly different than those of the United States.

We act in the hope that the world will continue into the 21st century much as it is now. Few travelers would go to sub-Saharan Africa, or Bosnia, with such insouciance. They would at least take antimalarial and other drugs and check on the state of local wars. By comparison, we are amazingly unprepared for our journey into the future.

We see ourselves as sensible and do not agonize over hypotheses of doom. We prefer to assume that global disasters will not happen in our lifetime.

We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million years, but there have been 30 civilizations in the past 5000 years. Humans are tough and will survive; civilizations are fragile. It seems clear to me that we are not evolving in intelligence, not becoming true Homo sapiens. Indeed there is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through the 5000 years of recorded history.

IT APPEARS TO STRATFOR THAT THE RELATIONSHIP between Moscow and Washington is — despite public successes of the START negotiations — becoming increasingly complex.

That the American president is choosing to meet with the Central and Eastern European leadership en masse in the same venue that is supposed to be dedicated to the pomp and circumstance of the signing of the new START treaty will not please Moscow. This is particularly true since Russia had originally planned for the signing of the treaty to be a minor stop on Medvedev’s own tour of the region, and because the event was designed to highlight Russia’s status as a superpower worthy of the United States’ undivided attention.

Putin’s visit is more than symbolic; Russia and Venezuela are expected to discuss a wide range of deals in the areas of energy, security, industry and defense.

In the electricity sector, an area where Venezuela is feeling acute pain, there is not much Russia can offer.

Russia reportedly looks to expand its automobile production industry into Venezuela.

American politics now seems condemned to an extended period of intense polarization, with an expanding army of aroused conservatives fighting to halt and reverse what it sees as the deplorable Europeanization of our economy and society. I doubt that a politics so configured will be able to address our long-term economic problems—until a crisis forces us to. I hope I’m wrong.

It remains the case that Washington is more polarized than the nation as a whole. The most recent analysis using the standard political science scoring system  found zero ideological overlap between Democrats and Republicans in either chamber of Congress. Which means that in both the House and the Senate, the most conservative Democrat is more liberal than is the most liberal Republican. In the electorate, Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative still overlap with similar Republican identifiers. But as Republicans have shed liberals and moderates over the past generation, the overlap has diminished.

Regardless of whether China feels ready to appreciate its currency, its fixed exchange rate is a blatant violation of international financial norms, and the United States has signaled it will no longer allow China to be an exception.

beneath the general comments about “working together,” a confrontation is brewing.

the United States is worried that continued unemployment and high levels of debt will prolong a lackluster U.S. recovery, which is a political liability for the Obama administration in a year that will see midterm elections.

It is also worth pointing out that there are likely well over a billion people on earth who currently don’t interact with formal economies or technological society at all.  They will be very well adapted to a post collapse world, you should find some and make friends.  They will likely be far more helpful than a manual on restarting the internet, because they know how to gut a deer.

Over the years these proposals have been in different forms; create a book, set of books, stone tablets, micro-etched metal disk, or a constantly updated wiki.  I really like the idea of creating such a record, in fact the Rosetta Disk project was our first effort in this direction.

They could be staring us in the face and we just don’t recognize them.

The earth is currently surrounded by a 50 light year-wide “shell” of radiation from analogue TV, radio and radar transmissions. According to Drake, digital TV signals would look like white noise to a race of observing aliens.

Milan Cirkovic of the Astronomical Observatory in Belgrade, points out that the median age of terrestrial planets in the Milky Way is about 1.8 gigayears (one billion years) greater than the age of the Earth and the Solar System, which means that the median age of technological civilizations should be greater than the age of human civilization by the same amount.

Some scientists are calling for more study of technological interventions to forestall catastrophic global warming. Why?

When a report on climate change hit the U.S. president's desk, the suggestion was not to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Rather, scientific advisors counseled intervention via technology in the climate system itself—a practice now known as geoengineering. And the president was not Barack Obama, George W. Bush or even Bill Clinton—it was Lyndon Johnson in 1965.

Typically what people call geoengineering is divided into two major classes.

for the first time, archaeologists can excavate broad areas of an Ubaid temple town to understand how a proto-urban community actually functioned in the sixth-fifth millennia B.C.," Stein said.

"The two-millennium-long occupation spans four key periods: two phases of the late Copper Age on top, the Ubaid period in the middle and the Halaf period at the bottom," Stein said.

"The existence of very elaborate seals with near-identical motives at such widely distant sites suggests that in this period, high-ranking elites were assuming leadership positions across a very broad region, and those dispersed elites shared a common set of symbols and perhaps even a common ideology of superior social status," he said.

In her [1969] book The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs makes the controversial claim that city-formation preceded the birth of agriculture.

To my mind the main datum needing explanation is the fact that within a few (or at most tens of) thousands of years, human population doubling times went from many tens thousands of years to just a thousand years.

On-line advocates need to stop trying to confirm quality of instruction and begin to address the community and civic dimensions of education, which I think give rise to most of the qualms. 

The Cato Institute's boilerplate description of itself used to include the line, "Since [the American] revolution, civil and economic liberties have been eroded." Until Clarence Thomas, then chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, gave a speech at Cato and pointed out to us that it didn't seem quite that way to black people.

Has there ever been a golden age of liberty? No, and there never will be. There will always be people who want to live their lives in peace, and there will always be people who want to exploit them or impose their own ideas on others.

I said that white Americans probably considered themselves free. But in retrospect, were they?

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America’s indigenous Aymara people indicates a reverse concept of time.

“Until now, all the studied cultures and languages of the world – from European and Polynesian to Chinese, Japanese, Bantu and so on – have not only characterized time with properties of space, but also have all mapped the future as if it were in front of ego and the past in back. The Aymara case is the first documented to depart from the standard model,” said Nunez.

no one had previously detailed the Aymara’s “radically different metaphoric mapping of time” – a super-fundamental concept, which, unlike the idea of “democracy,” say, does not rely on formal schooling and isn’t an obvious product of culture.

Scientists have found the first multicellular animals that apparently live entirely without oxygen.

The creature's cells apparently lack mitochondria, the organelles that use oxygen to power a cell. Instead they are rich in what seem to be hydrogenosomes, organelles that can do a similar job in anaerobic (or oxygen free) environments. The find could help scientists understand what life might have looked like in the earth's early oceans, which also had very little oxygen.

This is all well and good, but what happens when the situation changes?  Say you suddenly have a widely applicable technology that is halving in price and doubling in power every 18 months and continues to do so for decades.  There will be ramifications to this that the existing institutions will not be prepared to take full advantage of.

Walk with me through the following thought experiment: you have a society that faces the same situation for five hundred years.  There are no disruptions through war or political uprising, technology does not improve, and the environment remains, for the most part, the same.

We are still living in the very early days of the coupling of the microchip revolution with the internet revolution.

Certainly I don't think Tom Friedman makes a great foreign policy analyst, but I'm not willing to write off the profession's ideas any more than I'm willing to write off those of IR scholars or other political scientists or anthropologists or sociologists or soldiers or career diplomats or intelligence officers or, for that matter, business people or philosophers or graduate students who blog.

The key, then, isn't so much for publications to stop asking journalists to do their foreign policy analysis, but to get a better mix of people from all kinds of relevant professions to help enrich their content.

I think future generations might like to have most of the things we're investing in, such as infrastructure, healthcare, schools, a clean environment, energy sources, and freedom, to name just a few. No one wants to inherit a country full of sickly, uneducated hobos, on the verge of being conquered by Cuba.

political ideology, like most ideology, is a lot more about who should get respect than it is about abstract principles of governance.