Mark Byron

Cash for Junckers

It appears that Ireland and Portugal are financially a bit edgy, as Irish government debt has a 5.37% default risk premium over German debt; I would assume that the Bloomberg writers were using the Germans as the near-risk-free baseline. Portugese debt has a 4.14% premium.

So far, the Irish and Portugeese haven't asked for help, but those high default risk premia make a lot of observers nervous.

Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean- Claude Juncker, who chairs the group of euro-area finance ministers, said he doesn’t expect imminent agreement on a bailout for Ireland because Dublin hasn’t asked for support.

“I don’t think we’re nearing an agreement because Ireland didn’t put forward a request,” Juncker told Bloomberg Television in an interview in Frankfurt today. “The Irish think that they can keep the problems they’re facing under their control. They are not near the point where they would ask for external help.”

The Irish needed to extend FDIC-like insurance on the large Irish banking industry when we had the financial meltodown of late 2008; those gaurentees are becoming more expensive than origionally planned and have caused those Irish interest rates to rise.

North of the Southern Border

Here's an interesting story that can get lost in some snippy comments. A bit of a border war is brewing between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and that has some interesting implications. Nicargua is a country of the left at present, having voted the reformed-Marxist Sandinistas back into power a few years ago. However, they haven't reformed that much and are in Chavez's camp for regional geopolitics.

The news item has Google putting part of Costa Rican territory as part of Nicaragua on the south side of the San Juan River that is the general border between the two. However, rivers do move from time to time; US maps are full of quirks along the Mississippi where the river moved after the border was made, putting parts of, say, Missouri on the east side of the river and parts of Tennessee on the west side.

There are emerging plans for a canal there to supplement the Panama Canal, one where the regional progressives would have their own canal independent of the big, mean, capitalist gringos and their lackeys. The only problem is that Costa Rica tends to be one of those "lackeys", leaning to the center in their geopolitics and away from the left in their politics. They don't have a military, relying on police and border security to handle things; that gives them a Switzerland type international peace cred, but doesn't help with the Sandinistas want to play hardball and send troops to the south side of the San Juan.

The blog-kicker was the headline on the piece "South America Still Battling Over Google Maps Error." Minor problem, the border between North and South America is officially down at Panama and Columbia, with this dispute well inside Central America, which is a subset of North America.

You could say Latin American, or Central American, but it's sloppy geography to make everything south of the Rio Grande be South America, which is probabaly what the headline writer at either Fox of Reuters did; it's a Reuters piece, but I'm not sure who gets the "epic-fail" tag.

However, there is a bigger geopolitical story here that could keep Foggy Bottom and the UN busy for a while. Hopefully, world opinion won't get railroaded to the Bolivarian world-view like they did in Hounduras, where a heavy-handed legal impeachment got seen as a coup in diplomatic opinion.

Small Aircraft Only Need Small Aircraft Carriers

Here's some trouble brewing in Iran. They have unveiled a version of our Predator drone-

The 4-meter-long drone aircraft can carry up to four cruise missiles and will have a range of 620 miles (1,000 kilometers), according to a state TV report — not far enough to reach archenemy Israel.

That assumes that you launch it from Iran. There is nothing to say that they couldn't put in on a freighter and launch it from, say, the Red Sea; you could easily fit that in a standard 20-foot shipping container; eight of them could fit in a 40-footer if you could put them in two high and two wide and two long. Then, the 620 mile range would be just fine to drop whatever payload it wanted on Israel.

If they don't want to launch it from sea, they could take that container and send it to Lebanon and let their friends in Hezbollah send it south. Unless the Israelis know what ship it's coming in on, you could land it anywhere and have it ready to rock in hours if not minutes after unloading.

The folks at Get Religion have an interesting catch on the eschatological nature of the drone via the Telegraph

The words “Ya Mahdi” were written on the side of the missile, referring to Imam Mahdi, one of the 12 imams of Shiite Islam, who disappeared as a boy and whom the faithful believe will return one day to bring redemption to mankind.

The Mahdi has a messianic flavor to him in Shiite lore, similar to the Revelation imagery of Jesus kicking butt and taking names. So, when combined with the Iranian nuclear plant going on-line, we have Ahmadinejad getting his Armageddon on.

Trash talk or a low-grade World War III? One can only hope the former, since Ahmadinejad is known to wax eloquent and not back it up. However, he's working up an arsenal that can create some havoc in the near future if managed well.

 

Having a Sacred Cow

Here's a brain-dead thought experiment from The Corner. Would the Saudis appreciate a Christian outreach center in Mecca after Christian terrorists trashed the Kaaba site, the focal point of the Haj that good Muslims have to do one a lifetime?

Of course not, but that has nothing to do with the Cordoba House.

Last I checked, good Americans had no requirement to visit the World Trade Center to keep their patriotism card in good standing. Nor was is a religious site that Christians were expected to visit once a lifetime.

Nor has it become such a site in the nine years post-9/11. Ground Zero has become one of those "must-see" things if you visit New York these days, but it isn't sacred. Not in a religious sense at least.

It housed a number of key financial futures markets and a number of high-powered business offices, but it wasn't a holy site to say the least. Unless money and international finance is your god.

It has become a memorial for the people who died there, but it is sacred only to the American civil religion that blends generic Ten Commandments-style theism with patriotism. A bit of free-market economics gets folded into that faith as well, so that the Word Trade Center's demolition-by-plane was seen as a jab at American neoliberal economics.

It might be a place set apart for that civic religion with a generic, impersonal deity, but it isn't set apart for the real living God.

Christianity, especially the evangelical side of the tribe, doesn't have any real sacred sites. There are significant places in church history, and a few places in the Holy Land that might have been where Jesus was born and rose again, but none that would be considered Kabba-level sacred.

Jesus ran the money-changers out of the Temple. Modern patriots are trying to make the modern money-changers HQ into a new temple and want no ideological competition in the neighborhood, especially from seeming fellow-travelers of the folks who trashed the Twin Towers.

It's an important place of remembrance, yes. But it isn't worth trashing the Constitution to keep competing visions from that part of Manhattan.

Memorial for an Ongoing War

There's a heated thread over the Cordoba House over at Connexions. Here's my contribution on the nature of Ground Zero to the American psyche-

Kim- I don’t know if hallowedness or sacredness can be quantified, but it is a site where thousands were killed by radical Islamic terrorists and has become a memorial site not unlike the Alamo or Pearl Harbor and appealing to a similar patriotism.

In that odd mingling of a generic God and country of American civic religion, it is a sacred site, and the thought of people who are somewhat ambivalent about the attack around the corner hits a lot of folks the wrong way.

The Cordoba house folks have the right to do their project; stopping them makes any questionable church fair game in the future so First Amendment fair play is called for. However, it is judged to be in poor taste by a majority of Americans.

The one thing that struck me after I posted it is that Ground Zero is a memorial not for a past war but an ongoing war.

We don't have a major gripe with the Mexicans a century and a half after they trashed the Alamo and killed its defenders in Texas' war for independence. We have a free trade agreement with them and only complain about drug gang violence spilling over into the US and too many folks trying to sneak into the US without authorization.

We have even less of a beef with the Japanese nearly 70 years after Pearl Harbor. We're big trading partners, allies on big-picture items and have few beefs with them, most of them being fairly minor trade disputes and how to manage unruly servicemen based in Japan.

Ground Zero is a memorial of a war that is not over. There are still factions of the amorphous group that arranged for the 9/11 attacks in play; since they stand for an ideal rather than a country, they can't be conquered, only contained and retarded. The militant form of Islam that they rally around is anathema to the American emphasis on liberty and will be a foe as long as both exist.

Note my mention of "militant form of Islam." I felt perfectly safe with the Muslim students and faculty I dealt with at Sullivan U the last three years. Individually, the Muslims you meet on the street or doctor's office or convenience store counter are probably less of a threat to you than the average non-Muslim on an American street. On many social issues, they can be an ally of conservative Christians in the political arena; quite a few are more interested in the "greater jihad" against sin.

Those folks aren't plotting Sharia for the US in 2011 any more than Baptists have plans for theocratic law nationwide next year. Both might not might see it happening some time in the distant future and might preach it as a eschatological goal, but both are grudgingly comfortable being in a country that doesn't share those values fully.

However, there is a minority within Islam that wants to go to war today for those goals; the same can't be said for the theocon right, Hutaree notwithstanding. There is an even larger group within Islam that will passively cheer on those folks even if they aren't going to actively grab an AK-47 or strap a belt of plastique on.

Some of the second group may be involved in that Cordoba House project. The lead organizer has made some touchy statements that might warrant the title "terrorist sympathizer."

Yes, that does have echos of commie-symp from the McCarthy era and not every Muslim needs to get the eagle-eye. I strongly recall one of my Iraqi-American MBA students talk about Flying While Muslim and recognize that erring too much in that direction is toxic. 

Yet, given the nature of what the average American thinks about Ground Zero and some of the Cordoba House people seemingly having dogs in both sides of the fight, it's going to create some raw nerves.

They have the right to do so, but they're going to (and have) piss a lot of people off in the process. I'm not one of them, but I understand those who are.

Get the Heck out of Dodge... and Haiti

Here's an interesting international survey on people's preferred locals. Over half of Haitians would rather be someplace else. About 43% of the Dominican Republic wants out as well, so there would be a buyer's market for real estate and baseball bats on Hispaniola if you had free immigration.

It might not be a bad idea to take a page out of Wall-E and evacuate Hispaniola for a generation and start over, but that won't happen.

Latvia is an interesting case-

[Latvia] would lose around a quarter of its population of 2.3 million if migrants were allowed to come in and go out as they wished.

"High unemployment, low wages and a rising cost of living have driven many Latvians out of the country," University of Latvia migration specialist Aija Lulle told AFP.

It might also be that a quarter of the country(27.5%) is ethnically Russian. There have been a lot of Russian-Latvian friction in local culture since the Latvians regained independence in 1990 from their former Russian overloads, so it could well be both upwardly mobile Latvians and disgruntled Russians tired of being put upon that want to leave.

GI Jo

That's not a typo, it's the Obama-era spelling. It's phonetically the same and uses one less character, so it saves in costs and should make sense for the Obama military.

There are some things in this next budget that will make sense, like trying to reign in "brass creep" where positions are filled by someone a rank or two higher than needed and thus giving people a bit higher salary than needed.

Two areas of concern is the scrapping of the Joint Forces Command and getting rid of a centralized Business Transformation Agency.

The former's scrapping is opposed by former Secretary of the Navy Jim Webb, now one of Virginia's senators. How much of that is the fact the JFC is based in Norfolk and that it is constituent jobs getting axes and how much is that the proposal is a bad idea in general is a good question. The other VA senator, Mark Warner, is also apposed, so there is discontent on the president's side of the aisle on this one, albeit in the VA delegation.

The JFC seems a bit redundant, since it isn't part of any foreign command; it keeps troops ready if needed. However, that robustness might come in handy if an additional front opens up overseas, like if a Columbia-Venezuela war breaks out or Korea starts to get ugly. It might be the fire department that rarely gets used but you don't want to be without.

An area that might ruffle some feathers is a 30% cutback in DoD service support contractor contracts over three years. That will mean more work done inside the DoD, possibly by unionized workers. Contractors are always a big Democratic bugbear, but the ones who build ships, tanks and airplanes have too big a following to trip easily. The smaller printers, laundries, custodians and other civilian jobs that get farmed out are often small enough to cut without a senator raising a stink.

The BTA's scrapping would seem to make it easier to go back to $10K toilet seats, as a centralized purchasing agency could get better deals on supplies than individual bases or commands could and make oversight a bit easier to do. On the other hand, such centralized oversight could make for good bribery targets, or less-obvious revolving-door deals, where buyers who are nice to XYZ Corp get a job in XYZ management when they leave the service.

Bad Ad Timing

Here's a little bit of irony. I clicked through to this piece on Mexican cartels putting a million dollar hit on over-the-top Phoenix sheriff Joe Arpaio. That's not good news, even if you think Arpaio is a world-class redneck jerk, since the drug war is starting to spill into this side of the border.

The irony is the banner ad on the page was from Discover-"Discover what it would be like to win $1 million." Not that way, I hope.

It wasn't the web site's fault. I refreshed the page and it had a Meijer ad, which means that the banner ad is national in scope and was plugging a Great Lakes area store on a Arizona web site.

T.G.I. a Donation?

Matt Yglasias questions the merit of putting a T.G.I. Fridays at the Kandahar air base.

Are American efforts in Afghanistan achieving some humanitarian purposes? Sure. Is building a T.G.I. Friday’s at Kandahar Air Base a better way of undertaking a humanitarian mission than increasing appropriations to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria? It’s almost silly to even ask the question.

On one level, he's off a bit. It doesn't cost much more to have a name-brand restaurant there than a generic PX-type restaurant; other than some slightly snazzier decor, most of the rest of the physical plant of a TGIF would differ little from a Air Force-run restaurant. One precedent to note is that the large Canadian contingent in Kandahar prompted them putting in a Tim Hortons, the coffee-and-donut shop that is ubiquitous north of the 49th (and increasingly in Michigan as the cutting edge of World Canadian Domination^TM).

However, there is a ministry question laying behind Yglasias' observation; what if we as Christians took a harder look at how we spent our money? I'm not a big TGIF fan, but I've been known to frequent similar restaurants. What if we took the $25 that a dinner for two at such a casual eatery and ate in instead, taking the $20 difference and applying it to the ministry of your choice? For the secular folks in the crowd, you can swap in the charity of your choice; Yglasias' pick doesn't sound like a bad idea.

Or, to put the sacrifice down a notch, trade the $9.99 chicken finger basket and $2.29 soda for a $5 combo at a good fast-food place and donate the $7.5 post-tip difference.

That would require stewardship and stepping out of a suburban sense of entitlement. It's not a vow of poverty, but it's something we might want to consider.

Information on the Lam

Here's two tech stories from this week, one you have undoubtedly seen unless you've been in a media cave for the last week.

Let's start with the other one... the UAR is looking at banning Blackberrieson security grounds. Since the data is stored out-of-country (Blackberry's parent RIM is based in Canada), it makes it hard for the authorities to censor things that disrupt their worldview. There could easily be a split on that issue within the UAE, as relatively free-wheeling Dubai might not want to have PDAs put under the control of the morals police or other regulatory body.

The UAE isn't the first to be nervous about that; the French banned Crackberries from their defense ministry a few years back, possibly as a way for then-new president Sarkozy to look anti-Anglo-Saxon after running as a pro-American guy.

Would you want your data under government supervision?

For the civil libertarians out there (or righties who trust the Obama team as far as you can throw them) that said "No" to that, may I present the other big tech story of the week, Wikileaks. A free Internet with pockets with light regulation will have renegade sites on any number of issues, whether it be jihadi sites, purdy dirty pick-ture sites, Napster 2.0 sites and the one from our friendly Aussie leftist who wants to tweak the nose of the Not-Quite-New World Order.

The current Afghani data-dump is a mixed bag, with some possible dirty laundry from the US side coupled with confirmation that the Pakistani ISI is playing both sides of the fence with the Taliban; the ISI has been strongly rumored to be a long-standing backer of the Taliban but had to be seen as fighting them when being pro-Taliban became toxic as of 9/12/01. The Obama team is making the right noises about security leaks, but since the material was '08 and back, they can say that that was then (with the bad Bushies in charge) and not now.

When you have a free Internet, with data that can move from server to server and country to country (I started this post at home, draft-saved it, then am finishing it at the library while Eileen browses), information has a way of getting free, especially if there is a political or economic reason for having it become unfettered. When the data can be shepherded out of the country in milliseconds, governments have little power to suppress runaway information.

This Wikileaks story is oft compared to the Pentagon Papers of the Vietnam War era; back then, the Nixon team tried to keep the NYT and WaPo from publishing the unflattering info. That was technically doable (but unconstitutional per the Supreme Court) at the time. However, with Wikileaks setting up server shop in Sweden, the horse is out of the barn and out of the country before the powers that be knew about it.

Security hawks would like to string up the Wikileaks people along with their abettors at the NYT and other newspapers in on the story. There is most likely some espionage charges that can be brought, but the horse is out of the barn; if Mr. Wikileaks is arrested, someone else will pick up the mantle in short order. That's the nature of the Internet and modern politics.

The Oil Tanker Two-Step

Caesar Chavez is running his mouth as usual, pledging a oil embargo on the US if Columbia goes after rebels on his side of the border.

If there is an attack from Colombia, Chavez said Sunday, Venezuela would stop supplying oil to the United States, "even if we have to eat rocks" because of the repercussions.

Brain food, eh?

No, even with Chavez's bad management, don't expect the Venezuelan people to starve. The tankers that take the oil to the US can take the crude to Europe, then some other oil from elsewhere that had been going to Europe will go to the US instead.

Before  Venezuela>US....... Persian Gulf>Europe

After     Venezuela>Europe... Persian Gulf>US

Everyone gets their oil, just a little later than otherwise, since the ships will take a bit of extra time to get there. European customers will get things a little cheaper and American customers will get things a little pricier (tacking on the difference between going from Venezuela to NOLA versus say, Rotterdam to NOLA), but the big picture won't change much

Oil is fungible, sir. That won't work well, even if it sounds good.

Yuanna Change the Peg?

China's central bank has ruffled some feathers by proposing their semi-fixed exchange rate for the yuan be based on a basket of currencies rather that the US$. The public logic is that since trade isn't just a US thing, that the exchange rate should reflect a broader range of trading partners.

The private logic might be that they are nervous about how much US debt they hold and want to slowly back away from the US, given the sluggish nature of the US economy; a Chinese bond-rating firm has giving US debt a less-than-AAA rating, possibly an initial shot across the bow that Beijing may start dumping dollar-denominated assets. They also might want to distance themselves from the US if expansionist policies draw the ire of a future US government.

That might be of a greater long term importance than North Korea's saber-rattling this week over a South Korean-US exercise. Dear Leader and his posse are nervous about that 90,000 tons of diplomacy called the USS George Washington and are threatening to “legitimately counter with their powerful nuclear deterrence." Whether that means an all-out war or just another missile test remains to be seen; probably the latter, for they aren't in position to win a war with the US.

Doing the Splits at the ICJ

The International Court of Justice gave Kosovo the thumbs up on their 2008 independence, ruling that international law doesn't get in the way of their declaration. Of course Serbia, who Kosovo was a part of until the UN stepped in during the Clinton years to stop Serbian oppression of the Muslim majority there, doesn't like it.

So far, 69 of the UN's 192 member countries have recognised Kosovo as independent - they include the US, UK, neighbouring Albania and Croatia.

Those opposed include Russia, China and Bosnia. EU nations with separatist movements of their own - including Spain and Greece - have also not recognised Kosovo.

All the countries mentioned in the last paragraph have areas that, left to their own devices, would want to go their own way. Chechnya, Tibet and the Uighurs, Serbian and Croatian segments of Bosnia, the Basques and Catalonia are potential spin-offs of the first four on the last list. Greece is still steamed about an independent Macedonia that usurps Alexander the Great from them and makes them nervous about ethnically Macedonian territory in Greece.

Throw Quebec, Ache, Kurdistan, some eastern Indian provinces, a possible division of Belgium and a number of other ethnic minorities and the ramifications are rather large. Even the Scottish and Welsh might perk up their ears.

For the Russians, the news can break both ways, as a number of pro-Russian segments of the "near abroad" like South Osettia could benefit from such a ruling.

The US normally doesn't like the ICJ much, as they're afraid of having soldiers or officials called up on charges from foreign wars, but this one proved to be useful. It doesn't mean that everyone's going to be BFFs with Kosovo (lots of folks don't like Israel but it legally exists nonetheless) but it clears up some legal hurdles that will encourage making Kosovo a normal place to do business.

The East African Front

Uganda is in the news for something other than anti-gay legislation; Somali terrorists bombed two restaurants earlier today in Uganda. One of them was at an Ethiopian-themed restaurant; since it was Ethiopia who went in and installed a non-radical government in the southwestern part of the country, the jihadists they ousted have Ethiopia on their manure list.

That sounds more like Hamas than al Qaida, hitting restaurants. That's not a good sign; it will not only give the Ugandan government more reason to be reactionary but it shows why having a dysfunctional Somalia is bad news for the rest of the world. From pirates basing themselves out of independently-run parts of the country to fresh jihadis, this might make the Horn of Africa the next target for western military action.

Here's one thing to note after my earlier post- security is one area where conservatives flipping the bird to Washington and packing it in from the US wouldn't help; 50 separate states would be hard pressed to organize a force that could stop terrorists from having safe havens.

Here's an interesting paragraph from the AP piece; Al Shabab isn't the cool eatery that just open up in Lexington, but the likely source of the carnage (italics added)-

Al-Shabab is Somalia's most dangerous militant group, one that militant veterans of the Afghan, Pakistan and Iraq conflicts have helped train, according to international officials.

The writing made the leap that the battle between the Pakistani government and Taliban-al Qaeda forces in NW Pakistan is part of the bigger picture for the jihadis.

380 Tons of Diplomacy?

The bon mot about aircraft carriers is that they are "90,000 tons of diplomacy." It seems like the Obama administration is taking such a view about the space station, which weighs in at 759,222 pounds.

The news item of the early week was that NASA boss Charles Bolden had outreach to Muslim nations as one of three main bullet points tasked him by the president. That's not a bad thing in and of itself, since there is some cash to be had in that corner of the world and a few Muslim astronauts would be good PR in our ongoing scuffle against Islamic hard-cases.

That's the good news. The bad news is that PR is about all NASA seems to be good for. Here's the money 'graf from Bolden's al Jazeera interview-

When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering.

NASA is supposed to sell science to kids and suck up to the rest of the world, especially when they're bowing towards Mecca five times a day. Exploring space, finding out about the universe and our solar system and looking at ways that space-based science can help mankind aren't on that list.

Getting kids juiced about space and getting them into math and science is part of NASA's mission; that PR is important. However, it's not enough in itself. If all the Obama administration see NASA as is a big photo-op, we can find cheaper props that can deliver a bigger bang for the buck.

Space might best be left to the private sector, since the public sector seems clueless. Republicans, don't want to spend the money and Democrats would prefer spending it on terrestrial pet projects, save a few visionaries on both sides of the aisle.

Steele but not Steel

I can not recall a party leader who has gone from one faux pas to another in the way that GOP chair Michael Steele has in this past 18 months. I propose that we hereby set up a Steele-Watt Silver Foot Award for the political figure who puts his foot in his (or her; Ann Coulter would be a perennial on the leader-board) mouth the most in a given year.

One Beltway joke of longstanding is that a faux pas is an accidental telling of the truth; Steele was guilty of that when he was critical of Rush early in his tenure. His critique was largely true, but a GOP chair dare not tick off the legion of GOP donors who like El Rushbo if he likes his job.

His latest (at least I think it's the latest, you never can tell with Steele) misstep was to label Afghanistan "a war of Obama's choosing." He is about two-thirds right there, in that Senator Obama made regular mention that we had spent too much time and treasure in Iraq and not enough in Afghanistan and that the current surge in southern Afghanistan is Obama's baby.

Conservatives, (like Caleb Howel did at Red State) are quick to point out that this war is one that is chosen for us by al Qaeda and their Taliban allies; as long as they are on the loose and a force to be reckoned with, taking the battle to them rather than sitting back and letting them take the battle to us is prudent policy, even for a liberal politician leery of using military force.

What Steele is likely doing is one of the sneakier tricks of the opposition-party political book. When things are going poorly overseas, make the war the President's war and have "concerns" and "misgivings" about the policy. Republicans did that in Kosovo to their discredit, with John McCain being one of the few Republicans to back Clinton on the policy.

Such an undermining of Afghanistan policy might appeal to some of the paleos in the GOP (paleolibertarian and paleoconservative) who don't want to waste money throwing our weight around where we're not overly welcome. It also seems a bit tit-for-tat, returning the pleasantries sent Dubya's way by the left over the late 00s. Payback is always a she-dog and unbecoming of Steele.

Steele's days at the RNC are numbered. He is sure not to be reelected chair and is likely to be making a good paycheck as a TV pundit where such shoot-from-the-lip persona will draw viewers.

Meanwhile, we may have to have a debate on whether we have the steel and fortitude to do what needs to be done if the goal is to civilize Afghanistan to the point where the Taliban is unwelcome by the Afghani street. Obama and the conservatives who are strangely coming to his defense may have to fight off a liberal-paleocon coalition that may be joined by a few Tea Party budget hawks wondering what exactly we're springing for in the defense budget and why

Time to Deep Six NATO

The current flap over Hamas fans trying to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza has shown a major geopolitical problem for the US- Turkey is not helpful on that issue. They are taking the Hamas-fans side of the story to the point of talking about sending Turkish warships to escort the blockade-runners.

That would essentially destroy NATO, for the US government would have to tell the Turks that they take on the Israelis at their own peril and that we'd not have their back. If anything, we'd be rooting for the Israelis on that one.

Blogger Andy Jackson proved to be right about the Turkish government; they are more nastily Islamic than I thought as it plays out in anti-Jewish thought. That might not lose points with people in Europe, but it will in the US.

This will make getting Turkey into the EU harder and might be the final straw of NATO. Without a major Russian threat to fend off, NATO has little purpose in the 2010s other than being a non-UN way to get the developed-world's armies to band together for an international project. When a NATO member is this close to getting shot at by Israel, it's time to pull the plug, even if it makes Iraq a bit more problematic without Turkish airfields.

Non-Binding Constraints

It looks like the Copenhagen climate summit ended without any binding agreements, partly due to the fact that President Obama can't deliver any and part due to the developing world being POed that the rich countries aren't forking over enough money and being stingy on how much they can emit.

Even among the things that they agreed on, it doesn't seem to be much of a binding constraint. They're shooting to hold global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius; given that we only saw a three-quarter-degree rise in the 1900s and have seen a modest decrease in the 00s, that shouldn't be a problem. If that is the case, the only “long co-operative action” needed will be to sing Kumbaya at a summit every few years.

The other good news, at least in the Times of London piece is that British PM Gordon Brown is making China out to be the heavy of the piece; he's probably giving Obama a pass since he can't deliver a serious CO2-reducing treaty through the Senate. The bad news is that Brown wants a UN that is more majoritarian, something the US won't sign onto.

Leading From the Rear

The Australian Senate voted down a cap-and-trade bill earlier today after the Liberal Party (their main conservative party, for liberal is in a European context of libertarian-leaning) switched gears under a new party leaders and opposed the bill. The Labour-led government of Kevin Rudd doesn't have a majority in the Senate

Rudd had wanted the legislation passed before he attends next week's U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen so he could portray Australia as a world leader on the issue.

Australia is a leader on the issue, leading people away from unneeded and costly change. Rudd is a but a follower of climate change conventional wisdom, but the Aussie opposition is actually leading.

Sending a Video

We're looking at the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall today. What's wrong with the following passage?

German Chancellor Angela Merkel was joined at the Brandenburg Gate by Russia's Dmitry Medvedev, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and UK PM Gordon Brown.

In a special video address, US President Barack Obama said Berliners had rebuked tyranny on 9 November 1989.

Is Air Force One in the shop? Did the president get so tied up in watching the health care debate that he forgot to RSVP?

I'm reminded of the pro-lifer's critique that conservative presidents would merely sent a taped message to their January marches on Roe's anniversary but wouldn't show up in person; their support was more talk than action.

The Dirty Dozen

That's the difference between the G8 and the G20, which is set to supplant the smaller grouping as the main annual powwow of world economic powers.

Back in the 80s, it was the G7, which had the US, Canada, Japan, Britain, France, Germany and Italy. An earlier version was the G5 which lopped off Canad and Italy. Then, post-Cold-War, Russia was added, even though it wasn't nearly the economic powerhouse that the G7 economies were; a lot of big security questions were being discussed and the powers that be wanted them inside the room rather than outside.

The G20 includes the other three of what international economists call the BRIC countries besides Russia: Brazil, India and China, three key developing countries that have increasing clout in international trade and finance.

In addition, the G20 gives the EU a seat as well as the ones going to the four G7 Europeans as well as Argentina, Australia, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

Here's a quick rundown of the 12 newbies plus Russia as far as where their political systems are at.

Argentina	Young Democracy
Australia	Functional Democracy
Brazil	Functional Democracy
China	Autocracy
EU	Young Democracy
India	Functional Democracy
Indonesia	Young Democracy
Mexico	Young Democracy
Russia	Autocracy
Saudi Arabia	Autocracy
South Africa	Young Democracy
South Korea	Functional Democracy
Turkey	Young Democracy

I'm not sure there is a definition to be had, but Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey and South Africa are less than two decades into a fully democratic electoral system and are still working out the kinks of the system, as is the EU. Russia is nominally a democracy, but the Putin clique run things just about as tightly as the Chinese Communist Party and the house of Saud.

The rule of law is still a work in progress in many of those young democracies and very stochastic in the autocracies. That's going to make the G20 somewhat problematic, as there is a lot of authoritarian tendencies in a majority of the countries.

For instance, many countries have a history of government-run banks, so straight-jacket regulations of banks isn't that much of a leap from their recent pasts or present. Other countries have a small number of large banks that are well connected with governments and act more as financial utilities than commercial, competitive outfits . That tendency towards centralization and regulation might not bode well for the future.

However, the world economy is bigger than the old G7. It's time to bring the teenagers up to the adult table. Just be careful of what their values are.

Golden Rules

It's UN General Assembly week, and as usual, we have a truckload of foreign leaders coming to have their 15 minutes in the limelight, including the usual rogue's gallery of malcontents and bad actors. Today, Caesar Chavez was acting somewhat polite, but only somewhat. However, he was breathing the vapors of the left in accusing the US military of arranging the "coup" in Honduras.

Their new president, Roberto Micheletti, was one of the few foreign leaders not welcome; the US wouldn't give him a visa. Ousted president Jose Manuel Zelaya, a Chavezesque figure, wanted to get rid of the term limits he was under but their constitution has that as an unamendable part; discussing amending it is an impeachable offense per the Constitution, and their Supreme Court did just that.

Given that Micheletti is more moderate than Zelaya, the left is up in arms, and the world diplomatic community is treating it as a coup; dumping Zelaya out of the country didn't help matters, but this is more like (forced analogy alert) the world trying to get Nixon back in power after Watergate than what normally passes for a coup in the developing world.

Other than that, everyone else is welcome to say their piece this week. That is one of the good points of the UN, the less-than-straight-shooting nature of some of the apparat notwithstanding; as Churchill put it, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. The bozos of the world community get to play the clown; it's better to let them talk and be seen for who they are than to give them some martyr status by shutting them out.

Do under others as you would have then do unto you. That applies to Chavez and Ahmadinejad as well as the folks we like.

Pay Me Now or (Maybe) Pay Me Later

Here's an interesting BBC piece on various scientific fixes to excessive CO₂ and climate change. Instead of working to control CO₂ , we could either extract it from the athmosphere or do other things to mitigage global warming, like add extra salt water to the clouds to make them more reflective.

Here's the conversation-starting quote from chair of the study cited in the article, Dr. John Shepherd-

He said: "It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing CO2 emissions, we are headed for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future.

"Geo-engineering and its consequences are the price we may have to pay for failure to act on climate change."

I added some italics. Such terraforming of Terra may be needed. Then again, it may not.

Putting a bib on a messy kid is prudent, but if bibs cost $1000 each, I'll be happy to clean up after the kid, especially if there's a high likelihood that he won't make that much of a mess.

If we're going to spend multiple billions of dollars to speed up the process of weaning us from fossil fuels (it will happen eventually anyway as things run out) and we're not really sure it will make a dent, why not save the money to take care of other pressing needs and use the terraforming stuff if we need to later on?

A Lack of History

Here's an interesting story on the Indian environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, basically giving the middle-digit-salute to the global-warming crowd. Climate-change mavens will point to melting glaciers that feed India's main rivers, but Ramesh has another view-

“We have to get out of the preconceived notion, which is based on western media, and invest our scientific research and other capacities to study Himalayan atmosphere,” he said.

“Science has its limitation. You cannot substitute the knowledge that has been gained by the people living in cold deserts through everyday experience.”

Mr Ramesh was also clear that India would not take on targets to cut its emissions, even though developed countries are asking only for curbs in the growth of emissions, rather than absolute cuts.

...

Mr Ramesh said the rate of retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas varied from a “couple of centimetres a year to a couple of metres”, but that this was a natural process that had taken place occurred over the centuries. Some were, in fact, growing, he said.

The glaciers – estimated by India’s space agency to number about 15,000 – had also been affected by debris and the large number of tourists, he said.

Climate change hawks point to warming tempertures and melting glaciers as evidence for the need to do something now. However, glaciers have a history of coming and going, something that Himalayan culture understands but modern scietific culture that has locked onto the global-warming meme doesn't.

A colder-than-normal summer in the northern US doesn't disprove global warming; the warming is rather small and if weather patterns can go plus-or-minus 10 degrees within normal times, if things warm up a degree, we than have +11 to -9 from our old normal as our range.

Likewise, if we have a +7 somewhere, it doesn't show global warming, or a -7 in glacier size.

Em-PHA-sys on different Sy-LA-buls

This piece on Sec. of State Clinton's (that still sounds like something out of a sci-fi near future piece circa 2000) India sojourn shows the folly of tackling climate change alone.

India won’t bend to demands from the Obama administration or threats from the U.S. Congress to adopt legally binding caps on its carbon emissions, the country’s environment minister told visiting U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton yesterday.

“There is simply no case for the pressure” the U.S. is exerting, considering India produces among the lowest per capita emissions in the world, Minister Jairam Ramesh told Clinton during an unexpected discussion of climate negotiations during an event intended to showcase U.S.-Indian cooperation on clean energy at a “green” office building outside New Delhi.

The buzz word among the properly-caring folks in the global North is "Sustainable Development." However, when you're in the North, the emphasis is on Sustainable, that you not endanger either the micro-environments of the South or the world environment with excessive use of carbon-based fuels.

In the South, the empahsis is on Development, getting better off. How they do that is of secondary concern; they may say the right things to visiting ecodiplomats, but they'll do enough of the green stuff to make sure they bring in that other kind of green, the kind that comes off printing presses in ones, fives and twenties.

We're most likely to be better off to not go off on a climate-change kick and just slowly and naturally wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and spend the money we'd be spending on cutting CO2 emissions on fighting poverty and disease and/or mitigating any problems caused by climate change. For the largest part of the problem (if it is a problem at all, but let's concede the problem for the moment) of CO2 will be areas like India and China growing and starting to have more American-style lifestyles. That will mean more cars, more air conditioning, more electricity and most likely more than a bit more carbon going up in smoke.

Sustainable Development in a stricter northern form means slower growth both for northerners and southerners. When you're fairly well off, slow growth isn't all that bad, but if you're living in a shantytown on the edge of a developing country's capital, slow growth means staying in that shack rather than advancing and having a house or an apartment. Thus, "Third World" (as we used to call it) leaders will err on the side of development and growth rather than greenness, thus kicking extra stuff into the air for the whole world to deal with.

That means that we're either going to really clamp down in the North or just go with the flow and accept that we'll have a bit more CO2 in the air and may have a bit extra warmth in the system. Emphasis on may; we only saw about a 1-degree increase as the story goes in the 1900s, and should be able to handle any minor changes that may occur as things increase.

Extra CO2 may be like the Epscopalians going further left; there may not be much we can do with it. The problem with the latter is that it is far more corrosive and may well effect more people's lives than some extra plant growth agent in the air.

 

Trained SEALs

Well trained at that. It seems more like a denouement of a JAG episode than real life, but the Navy freed the captive captain of the Maersk Alabama, Richard Phillips. They had the lifeboat that had the captain and four pirates within 30 yards, and when the pirates were looking like they were about to us an AK-47 on Phillips, SEAL snipers got off three head shots and three kills on the pirates.  The fourth pirate became compliant and will get tried somewhere, while Phillips is in Navy hands and safe and sound.

SEALs are the Navy's commando bad-asses (excuse the French, but nothing else quite fits) and they earned their keep today-here's Central Command's Admiral Gortney's take

“We pay a lot for their training,” Gortney said of the snipers. “We got a good return on their investment tonight.”

These are trained SEALs that don't go HARP, HARP, HARP; a good Boo-Yah is what we get to hear today; I may be off on military branch jingo, but they deserve some hearty hooray. It isn't the kind of news you want to see on Easter, but it is good news.

Make the Prints a Bit Less Gaudy

"Fidel Castro asks US lawmakers how to improve ties." However, I'm not sure if a group of congressmen is the best test market; they often have funky tastes in neckware.

You in the back right.... "Dye"... if it covered up that ut-bugly parrot, that might work... Oh, "Die". That wasn't nice. It would improve relations, but it still isn't nice.

March MADness

I was fortunate as a MSU alum to having to be busy with professorial duties last night and didn't get to see North Carolina's dismantling of the Spartans in the finals. By the time I got home about 10PM, UNC was already up 20 and things were all but over for MSU.

However, it's another dismantling that is on my mind, it's President Obama's U2 remix of How to Dismantle an Atomic Arsenal.

Mr. Obama specifically outlined U.S. plans to support treaties banning the production of weapons-grade materials, as well as the testing of atomic weapons, efforts backed by President Bill Clinton but largely ignored by Mr. Bush.

Speaking at Prague's Castle Square, Mr. Obama told the audience his administration was committed "to seek the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons."

"We have to insist: 'Yes, we can,'" he said, reprising a campaign theme recognizable to a crowd a continent away from his election victory.

Is that a goal that we should shoot for? If I can borrow from NRA rhetoric, if nukes are outlawed, only outlaws will have nukes.

Let's play Obama's dream out, and all the major and minor nuclear players sign off to destroy all their nukes by say 2030; contrary to conservative fears, the rogue states honestly play along and allow all their nukes to be destroyed.

Two problems with that scenario.

(1) Did they get all the nukes? It is hard to prove a negative, and a secretive state might have a few contraband nukes kicking around in a very secure and very undisclosed location. Worse yet, the contraband might be in non-governmental hands, ready to be used or sold to the highest bidder who's willing to go outlaw.

(2) Once the nukes are gone, the first country or interested party to get back in the nuclear game is king. A 2050 Dr. Evil or Osama 3.0 might have the money, the security and the nuclear engineering savvy to have their own nuke factory. Couple that with some homemade inexpensive rocketry (at least much more affordable than today) that might be off the shelf in 40 years, and we're one mad scientist (or madman with a scientist on his payroll) from some serious terrorism.

If that madman is a country, they can cow whole countries into submission who have no good response to a nuclear attack. Even a well-armed US might be hard-pressed to take on a foe that might have stashes of well-hidden baby-ICBMs in unfriendly territory. Once the madman shows that they are willing to use their nukes, they rule all but the most gutsy countries.

The old Cold War meme of Mutual Assured Destruction or MAD still has some impact on national actors. If you parking lot us, we'll parking lot you; as Joshua in War Games put it, "the only winning move is not to play."

MAD doesn't deter folks who don't mind dying or terrorists who might count on something other than a nuclear reply from a one-off nuke attack. However, a small tactical nuke might be one way to take out a Dr. Evil base if he's nuke-packin' and well fortified.

I don't see the US replying in kind to a terrorist nuke with one of their own; we have enough conventional weapons to rain hellfire down upon any party deemed responsible without going nuclear ourselves, baring the nuclear bunker-buster scenario above.

However, there are enough bad actors in the world and would be tyrants who would like to rule the world with a batch of nuclear ICBMs. Being able to tell such a would be emperor to think again might well be worth passing on Obama's dream.

"Center-Right" Sighting

Here's an interesting sentence from a piece on former Israeli president Moshe Katsav going up on charges of rape and sexual assault; he makes Bill Clinton sound like a choir boy.

Katsav, of the center-right Likud Party, was president from 2000 to 2007

It is rare for any conservative party to get a "center-right" label from the media. A quick Google has "center right Likud" with 2980 references and "right-wing Likud" with 77,100. Compare that with "'center left Labor' Israel" and you get 18800 hits; I had to add the Israel modifier, for I'd get references for various Labor parties elsewhere.

However, when you consider that Likud is now the political center, where there is no workable coalition to the left of them, that they are now center-right.

Have they changed? I don't think so. However, the Israeli electorate has, puttling Likud towards the center of Israeli thought. The grinding sound you hear are the foreign diplomats wearing down their teeth.

Aggressive Negotiations

Somewhat good news out of Georgia; the Russians have stopped shooting and have signed off onto terms of a peace plan. WWIII has been put off, and both parties have signed off on "international talks about [the] future status of South Ossetia and Abkhazia."

That's a two-edged sword for the Russians. Agreeing to those talks is in Russia's advantage, since they'd prefer either to annex both territories or to see them independent rather than as part of an unfriendly Georgia. However, it does create the precedent of having international talks on breakaway regions, something that could come back to bite them in places like Chechnya.

Essentially, we're back to the status-quo-ante, with the exception that the Georgian military has taken it in the neck and the current Georgian government has some egg on its face for provoking such a violent response from Russia. It will be interesting to see whether Georgian voters will be cowed into voting for a more pro-Russian government or be made more nationalistic and anti-Russian.

The Russians probably figured that the world could accept the fait accompli of their declawing of the Georgian military and ouster from South Ossetia, but not a wholesale takeover of Georgia. Anything more risked WWIII, but the Russians got most of what they wanted.

Future lesson for the west. If we want to avoid such clashes in the future, bring the countries we want to protect into NATO; if Russia had to tangle with the whole West, they'd likely pass on such an invasion.