Sublime News #5

1. Sorry for being three days late with what is supposed to be the weekly news. I tend to get lazier during holidays, even though I get far more free time! Alternatively I could just be getting bored. We’ll see. I think I might have to cut down the length of these News posts down to 10 or fewer items, otherwise it may become an unwelcome chore rather than something I do out of interest.

2. Report: US shipping arms ahead of strike on Iran. “Scottish newspaper says US transferred ammunition containers with ‘bunker-buster’ bombs to Diego Garcia in Indian Ocean”. Fact or fear-mongering? The US still needs more time to develop bunker-busters capable of penetrating the deepest Iranian nuclear installations (they are slated for end-2010), so I doubt there’ll be a Gulf Inferno this year. Somewhat related: Hezbollah: Craving war, not wanting it (Nicholas Noe) – as I predicted, an Israel-Hezbollah war is a real possibility in 2010.

3. Russia attacks Georgia! Or so many Georgians believed following the airing of a “scenario” / fake news on a pro-government TV channel, in which President Saakashvili was killed and Russian tanks rolled into Georgia from recycled footage of the 2008 war.

The news station, Imedi TV, had once taken an anti-government line after its oligarch owner, Badri Patarkatsishvili, fell out with Saakashvili. Its offices were stormed during the November 2007 anti-government protests and soon after “democratized” to Saakashvili’s side. Patarkatsishvili, who was living in exile in London, died of a heart attack hours after meeting Berezovsky. (The circumstances remain very hazy. On the one hand, Patarkatsishvili had alleged that Saakashvili had sent hitmen to off him; on the other hand, he was obese and lived an unhealthy lifestyle, so a natural heart attack was entirely possible). But in any case, following Patarkatsishvili’s death, control of Imedi moved to shadowy ownership (“And the truth is we do not know who owns it, because the story we were told, that it was in the hands of a subsidiary of the state investment fund of the gulf emirate of Ras Al-Khaimah, has now been denied, in blunt terms, by that country’s rulers.” – Salome Zourabichvili). Anti-Saakashvili journalists and staff were replaced, and by the time it resumed broadcasting in early 2008 the TV station was firmly under pro-Saakashvili editorial control. (The affair was reminiscent of how Gazprom, an arm of the Russian state, took over NTV in 2001).

So what happened in this saga? Simple. After a brief warning that what would follow is just a possible scenario if Georgia “does not consolidate against the Russian plan”, there was a 30-minute program recycling archive footage of the 2008 war – bombings, Russian tanks, the weeping bereaved, etc. The government is evacuated and shortly afterwards Saakashvili is killed in murky circumstances, to be replaced by Nino Burjanadze, the opposition leader who had been reaching out to Vladimir Putin in an effort to resolve Georgia-Russia differences. This was a way of smearing the opposition as Russian stooges.

There was widespread panic and an abnormally high number of deaths from heart attacks. A day later, Saakashvili defended the hoax news as a robust way of defending Georgia against the Russia jackboot: “No matter the scenarios they have planned out for us, the scenario shown yesterday [on Imedi] was, unfortunately, realistic, and despite the nervous reaction [of Georgians to it], yesterday’s report will will become an obstacle to [Russia's] fulfillment of its plans [against Georgia]“.

• Saakashvili arms women and children against Russia
• The destruction of a Soviet monument to the fallen heroes of WW2
• Saakashvili’s endless meetings with Russia’s (discredited) “liberal” opposition
• Saakashvili pays US firms to lobby for him in Washington

This fits the general pattern of Georgia’s behavior under Saakashvili – a zealous, almost chiliastic, drive to unify the nation and “anchor” itself onto Western security institutions (primarily NATO), so as to escape from Russia’s growing sphere of influence. These actions have been symbolic, with little or nothing of substance… even most Western politicians now regard him as an unbalanced maniac, and are hesitant about dealing with him seriously. Well, there’s always PR companies to spruce up the tree, but you can only do it so many times before the sheen wears off permanently. Right?

4. The London Times comes out with its 2009 list of best world universities. I will take the opportunity to quickly say how stupid and ridiculous these lists are in general.

Let’s look at the Times list. UC Berkeley or the Ecole Polytechnique, known throughout the world, are both superseded by the University of Bristol in Britain, which is a respectable institution but not world-class. It gets stupider as one goes down. Lomonosov Moscow State University, full of world-famous scientists and Russia’s best students, is apparently comparable with British universities like Newcastle or Aberdeen, or Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which famously offers a major in Intimate Apparel. Part of the explanation is that far too much emphasis is placed on the staff/student ratio (UC Berkeley totally flunks this) and the International Student Score (whatever the hell that is), whereas the citation/staff score is not the best measure given the academic tendency to form their own mafia-like cliques (i.e. incessantly cite each other’s work).

The Chinese ARWU estimates are somewhat more accurate, but still lacking.

It would be great if some organization could conduct a real study, which instead of relying so much on subjective weighting of statistics, would test the skills and knowledge of graduates from each university on their subject. (After all, to applicants, that is the thing that matters most). I would suspect that a lot of universities that coast only on their reputations, or on their country’s reputation, will slip a lot. (One really annoying thing is that so many Third Worlders in a position of cultural dependency on the West have an irrational respect for a Western education, no matter how poor it is in practice – how much money they throw away into the wind sending off their students to British polytechs-renamed-as-universities!). I remember reading about a limited study which tested the math knowledge of math graduates from some of the world’s best institutions, the top three were all Japanese universities, fourth was Moscow State University, fifth was either MIT or Caltech.

5. The reader T. Greer sent me the article Regional Nuclear War Could Devastate World Population, Report Warns. Basically, the model indicates that the consequences of a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs, will cause a multi-year temperature plunge and could lead to the starvation of 1bn people.

I disagree with most of it (see my Thinking about Nuclear War). It is just the recycling of the discredited “nuclear winter” theory (see the section on “nuclear winter”). There will be a small temperature drop, but it will only last for a few weeks or months at most. Only in a global nuclear war between Russia and the US can widespread famine be expected due to the cessation of international trade / food shipments and the much bigger mega-tonnages involved (leading to far bigger temperature drops). In the regional war described in the report, only sub-continental Asia will be significantly affected – India will be substantially damaged, losing a few of its cities, but would recover within a few years; Pakistan, however, would probably collapse, and will lose any meaningful independent existence.

6. Serious Problems Emerge For The F-UK-De Group Of Countries by Ed Hugh argues that fiscal union is the only realistic way forward for the EU by this point due to the Mediterranean crisis.

Now, taking us back a bit nearer to that harsh and horrid reality, Daniel does in fact, in his ill-named Working Paper “Adjustment Difficulties in the GIPSY Club“, actually get to the heart of some very important matters… The core of Daniel’s argument is … that the kind of fiscal adjustment currently being proposed for some of the peripheral countries is going to have one, and only one immediate consequence: these countries are going to be sent off to the outer darkness of very, very (see his numbers) sharp GDP contractions, and these contractions run the risk of preciptating pre-Argentina 2000 type situations in one after another of the countries involved, since the contractions in nominal GDP are so large that they effectively take away with the one hand what was given (in the form of sacrfice) with the other, and will lead to a seemingly endless spiral of increases in the debt-to-GDP ratios, which will in turn lead to ever deeper short-term fiscal cuts, and ever stronger contractions, etc, etc. As Daniel argues, the only way to restore competitiveness, and avoid the dreaded Argentine spiral is to carry out some form of internal devaluation. …

… Another reason the F-UK-De group are in trouble if the GIPSYs [Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Italy] wander off to the outer darkness, is that they will have issues to resolve in their banking systems, as the chart below reveals. German banks may have little exposure to Greek debt, but their exposure to Spain and Ireland is enormous. … Another reason the F-UK-De [France, UK, Germany] group are in trouble if the GIPSYs wander off to the outer darkness, is that they will have issues to resolve in their banking systems, as the chart below reveals. German banks may have little exposure to Greek debt, but their exposure to Spain and Ireland is enormous. …

On the other hand, A Germany (or a Japan) which is not able to maintain a substantial external surplus (which is the only way a country with their kind of demographic profile can attain headline GDP growth, since internal demand is long gone as a “driver”) since without a surplus and without GDP growth the implicit liabilities of ageing populations (via health and pension commitments) will become unpayable, leading to default (or a huge slashing of public welfare commitments) in these countries too.

However, there are no signs that fiscal union is around the corner. Germany does not want to foot the bill, simple as, and instead it looks like Greece to going to turn to the IMF.

7. How Much Of The World Is In a Liquidity Trap? (Krugman) “Almost all advanced countries. The US, obviously; Japan, even more obviously; the eurozone, because the ECB probably couldn’t engage in Fed-style quantitative easing even if it wanted to, given the lack of a single backing government; Britain. Not Australia, I guess. But still: essentially the whole advanced world, accounting for 70 percent of world GDP at market prices, is in a liquidity trap.”

8. China To Connect Its High Speed Rail All The Way To Europe in an excellent demonstration of what the coming age of “scarcity industrialism” will be like.

China hopes to complete this massive infrastructure project within 10 years, which will include three major rail lines running at speeds of 320 km/hour. The first will go from King’s Cross Station in London all the way to Beijing (8,100 km as the crow flies) and will take approximately two days. This line will also then extend down to Singapore. A second HSR line will connect into Vietnam, Thailand, Burma and Malaysia. The last line to be built will connect Germany to Russia, cross Siberia and then back into China. …

Financing and planning for this monstrous project is actually being provided by China, who is already in serious negotiations with 17 countries to develop the project. China states that other countries, like India, came to them first to get the project rolling, because of their experience in designing and building their own HSR network. Financing for the infrastructure will be provided by China and in return the partnering nation will provide natural resources to China. For instance, Burma, which is about to build its link, will exchange lithium (used in batteries), in order for China to build the line.

China benefits because it will be able to transport materials cheaply into manufacturing centers inside its borders and the Eastern Hemisphere benefits by getting a fast, efficient, low carbon transportation system. Considering China has already become the global leader in HSR, their leadership in this new venture could reasonably shift the balance of power in their direction. Also, get ready for a huge influx of HSR station designs in the coming years.

The themes: 1) the rise of China, 2) China’s quid pro qua approach to international economic relations – as opposed to Washington’s which is based more on values, 3) a strategic project to ensure secure supplies of resources in both the medium-term / next decade (during which the US will keep its naval supremacy – hence China’s need for land-based routes as a backup) and in the long-term / next several decades (during which China’s domestic energy and REM resources will begin to peak and run down).

9. Putting the anti-Toyota witch-hunt and the lambasting of China’s currency manipulation into context – Obama is to create Export Promotion Cabinet in a bid to double US exports by 2015. Strategic trade is back in vogue.

Stratfor has an interesting take on this. Mercantile competition was one of the main triggers for pre-Pax Americana wars (i.e. struggles for raw materials and captive markets). The US-Japan war was a good example. The post-WW2 alliance structure linking the US to Japan, Germany, Western Europe, and the Asian tigers, was partly built on granting them access to the American market and thus enriching them, while they in return recognized and supported US hegemony. This pattern may fade away and present us with a host of unintended consequences as the US abandons this system.

10. Reaction of the Rest watch.

• Neo-Ottoman Turkey: A Hostile Islamic Power by Srdja Trifkovic (h/t Leos Tomicek who analyses it).
• Don’t Forget India (Nikolas K. Gvosdev)
• The Scary New Rich – The global middle class is more unstable and less liberal than we thought in Newsweek. 1) Not news to anyone remotely interested in looking at global opinion polls the last few years, 2) as usual the Western chauvinism is showing – why should non-Western civilizations be pro-Western or liberal?

11. Climate & energy blast.

• NASA: “It is nearly certain that a new record 12-month global temperature will be set in 2010. Furthermore, contrary to popular articles by some deniers or skeptics, warming did not slow down during the 2000′s, despite that solar irradiation has been declining to its cyclic minimum during the decade.
• This year is already setting all-new temperature records – warmest ever January, second warmest February, and almost certainly what is going to be the warmest ever March. Ironically, the major exception was the US mainland, which was cooler than average – and unfortunately the heartland of denier sentiment.
• ‘Peak Oil Demand,’ Yes… But Not the Nice Kind: Why There Will Be No Recovery. A good argument for permanent depression / “long emergency” in the OECD. “The fact is that peak demand in the OECD is not merely a function of efficiency gains and biofuels substitution, aided by a temporary recession… Instead, peak demand will be the result of a permanent state of increasing depression in which non-OECD countries not only more than make up for the loss of OECD demand, but outbid them for the marginal barrel. As we enter the post-peak phase of global oil supply sometime around 2012-2014, the price that heavily import-dependent countries like the U.S. would have to pay for that marginal barrel will become increasingly intolerable. In a weakened economy, $100 a barrel (or less) could be the new $120.”
• New study of Greenland under “more realistic forcings” concludes “collapse of the ice-sheet was found to occur between 400 and 560 ppm” of CO2. “A new study has lowered the carbon pollution threshold or “tipping point” for collapse of the Greenland ice sheet to 400 to 560 ppm.  We’re currently at about 390 parts per million atmospheric concentrations of CO2, rising about 2 ppm a year (and yes, total collapse would take a while).”
• Scientists’ IPCC Open Letter. As the commentators note, even though they are completely correct and conservative in their assessments (i.e. not alarmist, contrary to denier propaganda), the problem is that the scientists simply can’t get their point across. My eyes glazed over at the first paragraph.
• Presentation from Dr. Hayhoe on Global Warming: Separating Facts from Fiction, a “must-see” according to Lou at Cost of Energy. I agree that it is a good rundown of the issue, but disagree that it is a good presentation. FAR too much text, which is one of the first things you are told to avoid when counselled on how to make good PowerPoint demonstrations.
• Graduate Starting Salaries (in Engineering) and the Underlying Message. If you want a high salary straight out of grad school, study petroleum engineering (but opt for Computer Science if you want to get to work straight out of college). Not surprising. The industry experienced a big brain drain during the 1980′s-1990′s, and finding and exploiting the newer fields (which tend to be remote and dispersed) is much more challenging.
• Update on rising incidence of “freak storms”
• Bonanza for peakist geeks and collapse theorists – US Minerals Databrowser / data visualization tool unveiled.
• Back from September 2009, but I’ve decided to highlight it here nonetheless – UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon.”

12. Military & security blast.

• Navy Wants Lots of Lasers – from this great blog I found, Defense Tech. As I noted in my On Future War article, effective lasers *are* the holy grail of missile and air defense. The US Navy’s current research projects – 100kW+ Solid-State Fiber Laser that could fit into aircraft pods; shipboard point defense Free Electron Lase; High-Power Microwave Directed Energy Weapons to knock out enemy C&C; The Revolutionary Approach to Time-Critical Long Range Strike (RATTLRS) Program (Mach 3+ cruise missile); Next Generation Integrated Power Systems to power the all-electric warship; the Electromagnetic Railgun.
• Related – Boeing Completes Design of Shipboard Superlaser. I think it is safe to say that the US Navy will feature all-electric ships armed with superlasers, railguns, and hypersonic cruise missiles by the 2030′s.
• Not Enough Food For Too Many People in North Korea; Avoiding Another Pearl Harbor (from N. Korea) is not a problem thanks to US missile defense systems like THAAD and Aegis/SM-3.
• That Elephant’s Going To Do What? Where? – JSF costs spiraling out of control (not exactly news). In fact there are compelling arguments to abandon the project altogether and focus on the development of next-generation UAV’s.
• Anti-Missile Effort Edges Forward – more on the game-changing developments in BMD. Europe to be defended against IRBM’s, and to an extent against ICBM’s, by 2020. As I’ve been saying the days of ballistic missile preeminence are coming to an end.
• Cyber War = Space War – “Its becoming increasingly evident that any future war between modern militaries would be both a space war and a cyber war, in fact, they would be one and the same”.
• Mistrals from France, drones from Israel… and armored vehicles from Italy? This seems rather strange, since although Russia’s UAV and amphibious / sea-based C&C capabilities are weak, it has some of the best armored vehicles in the world. And indeed the Russian Defense Ministry dismissed this report.

13. Tech blast.

• Facebook creeps slightly above Google in numbers of visits. Quite impressive. The two now each account for about 7% of global Internet visits.
• Twitter goes anywhere – but keeps advertising plans under wraps. How Twitter intends to make its money is one of the biggest questions in the hi-tech community. For now, it will be expanding its integration possibilities with Facebook, Google, etc.

14. Texas Conservatives Win Curriculum Change, marks regress in reason and progress.

AUSTIN, Texas — A far-right faction of the Texas State Board of Education succeeded Friday in injecting conservative ideals into social studies, history and economics lessons that will be taught to millions of students for the next decade. Teachers in Texas will be required to cover the Judeo-Christian influences of the nation’s Founding Fathers, but not highlight the philosophical rationale for the separation of church and state. Curriculum standards also will describe the U.S. government as a “constitutional republic,” rather than “democratic,” and students will be required to study the decline in value of the U.S. dollar, including the abandonment of the gold standard. … By late Thursday night, three other Democrats seemed to sense their futility and left, leaving Republicans to easily push through amendments heralding “American exceptionalism” and the U.S. free enterprise system, suggesting it thrives best absent excessive government intervention.

Also from Texas Freedom Network

… the board stripped Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. In Jefferson’s place, the board’s religious conservatives succeeded in inserting Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. They also removed the reference to ‘Enlightenment ideas’ in the standard, requiring that students should simply learn about the influence of the ‘writings’ of various thinkers (including Calvin and Aquinas).

Though, perhaps better than closing half your schools altogether, as in Kansas City. Apart from that, I would venture to guess that these Texan history-politicisers would also probably be the first and loudest to condemn Russia’s “rationalization” of Stalinism in a few of its textbooks.

15. Liberast & Russophobe watch – quite a productive week!

• I like many of Peter Lavelle’s Crosstalks, but he made a complete hash of the burqa debate. His “9/11 hi-jackers were not fundamentalists” comments was unrelated and totally wtf. I do not deny the evidence of Western Islamophobia / racism, unlike the guests, but likewise Lavelle totally glosses over Muslim immigrants’ less savory characteristics. Though Douglas Murray made the much better impression, unfortunately he went on to unfairly tarnish all of Russia Today for giving voice to “anti-American” nutters (who are to other people, “marginalized dissidents”). Nikolaus von Twickel – who happens to be a member of an anti-Lavelle Facebook group (wish I had one!) – wrote a largely unsympathetic review of the television station in the Moscow Times. For balance, read Peter Lavelle’s Challenging the Western media hegemony about RT’s mission.
• A Good Treaty has to sit through a one and a half hour talk by Yulia Antoinette, otherwise known as Latynina. The poor man deserves a gold medal for socialist endurance! He also translated the “Putin Must Go!” Petition, which can be summarized as 1) Get rid of Putin, 2) Give the people more stuff, 3) ???, 4) pro-Western, prosperous Russia! Nothing new, move on.
• Leos Tomicek has an excellest 2-part series on liberast hypocrisy and anti-Russianness: The Unholy Alliance and Looking West.
• Eugene Ivanov deconstructs Keith Gessen’s account of the Orange Revolution as “no complicated facts, no sophisticated interpretations – [just] conclusions”.
• Bad Russia journalism. The article Russia corruption “may force Western firms to quit” (Reuters), about Russia’s ostensibly catastrophic levels of corruption: “Berlin-based NGO Transparency International rates Russia 146th out of 180 nations in its Corruption Perception Index, saying bribe-taking is worth about $300 billion a year”, and reprinted in Johnson’s Russia List #51, #19. The 300bn $ figure actually comes from a 2005 report by Indem, which I summarized here. This figure is almost certainly exaggerated by at least an order of magnitude.
• Alexandre Latsa, whose wrote Les 25 mythes Russophobes (based on my Top 50 Russophobe Myths), is condemned as a “reincarnation of Walter Duranty” in the Ukrainian paper Den’.
• Mikhail Gorbachev’s self-serving propaganda piece in the New York Times. No wonder that even twenty years on, only 13% of Russians have a positive opinion of him, while 34% are negative (I am firmly in the latter category).

16. A documentary on North Korea – a ”fascinating” country indeed, a totalitarian ice cavern.

17. Ever wanted to see how a typical Russian face looks like? The researchers Darya Laane and Sergei Petukhov compiled a composite image five years ago and wrote up an article on it.

[Typical representatives of the Vologda-Vyatka zone].

PS. Here is a composite pic of the average Japanese, Chinese, and Korean woman’s face.

18. In Crimea, ethnic Russians burned Ukrainian history textbooks. In Lviv, Ukrainians collected Russian history textbooks for pulping / recycling. Just goes to show 1) how riven the country is, and 2) that the Westerners are more “with the times”, so to speak, in their hatred, while the Crimean Russians are so 1930′s. (h/t @Ukroblogger)

19. Inspirational quotes of the week. Citizenship in a Republic, Teddy Roosevelt.

It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Thought-provoking quotes from Yukio Mishima (see link for more).

We are ignoring the fact that bringing death to the level of consciousness ic an important element of mental health…Hagakure insists that to ponder death daily is to concentrate daily on life. When we do our work thinking that we may die today, we cannot help feeling that our job suddenly becomes radiant with life and meaning.

20. Humor and interesting flotsam and jetsam:

• Chess Art (in Russian)
• Very cool walking man text-animation
• Girls with Guns 1 / Girls with Guns 2

Related posts:

1. Sublime News #8 – #9
2. Sublime News #3
3. Sublime News #4
4. Sublime News #6
5. Sublime News #1