China's price war on Christmas

According to Asia Times:

Some 70% of the world's Christmas ornaments and other paraphernalia now originate in officially atheist mainland China. Tinsel, Santas, mistletoe and artificial trees of every shape and hue are churned out at a relentless pace by thousands of factory workers in Guangdong, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces...
According to a recent report on globalsources.com, a sourcing information website that specializes in China, the over 1,000 suppliers of Christmas lights in China are releasing "unique designs in diverse colors, styles and effects with greater frequency, to remain competitive amid an intense price war". Laser crystals and holograms are being pressed into use in the unrelenting quest for novelty...
China's Communist Party banned public Christmas celebrations at one point in 1993. But today, rather than being judged as a vehicle for insidious ideological pollution, Christmas is seen by Beijing as an opportunity for encouraging consumer spending.

According to AFP, via Taipei Times:

According to Customs figures, China exported US$1.6 billion worth of Christmas products last year, of which more than half went to the US, including seven artificial trees erected in the White House...
In the US alone, unless your family purchased a natural tree, you would have had a 70 percent chance of celebrating your Christmas with an artificial tree manufactured in Guangdong's Shenzhen City.

Finally, according to The Washington Times:

Imports from China account for 81 percent of all toys sold in the United States, says J. Craig Shearman, vice president for public relations at the National Retail Federation, a trade group in Washington.

It stands to reason that it is in China's best interests to promote the celebration of Christmas worldwide.

Historical footnote

Archeologists have uncovered evidence of a Mesapotamian city destroyed by war aroud 3500 B.C.

"The whole area of our most recent excavation was a war zone," said Clemens Reichel, Research Associate at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Reichel, the American co-director of the Syrian-American Archaeological Expedition to Hamoukar, lead a team that spent October and November at the site. Salam al-Quntar of the Syrian Department of Antiquities and Cambridge University was Syrian co-director. Hamoukar is an ancient site in extreme northeastern Syria near the Iraqi border.
The discovery provides the earliest evidence for large scale organized warfare in the Mesopotamian world, the team said.

Several hundred sling bullets were found in the excavation. The ancient city was then apparently occupied by the invaders.

I can't help wondering how many other fallen cities lie buried in the region.

Integrated nationbuilding

According to The Washington Times:

The Pentagon yesterday announced a landmark change in the use of combat troops, elevating "stability missions" -- commonly called nation-building -- to an equal status with major combat operations.
The evolution in war-planning priorities underscores how the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terror network continue to fundamentally reshape how U.S. military commanders deploy the armed forces.
Not only are U.S. forces becoming more mobile to better counter Islamic terrorists, but the chain of command now will be trained in how to "build" nations by creating indigenous security forces, democratic institutions and free markets...
Among the goals and functions listed in the paper are to rebuild security forces, prisons and judicial systems; "revive or build the private sector"; and "develop representative governmental institutions."

For the sake of pride, they won't openly admit that stability in post-Saddam Iraq did not go according to plan. The country did not self-organize quickly along the lines of a stable democracy.

Still, this was 18 months in the planning. That means Rumsfeld officially initiated the change in mid-2004. Given the timing of the positioning of Rice at the State Department, Wolfowitz at the World Bank, and Goss at the CIA, this all fits within a coherent attempt to reorganize the various organizations to not only ensure stability, but export democracy and free markets.

It would appear that Clinton's wisdom was at least partially correct. While he too was in favor of regime change in Iraq, he was apparently concerned with nationbuilding to ensure stability in a post-Saddam Iraq.

The Clinton administration has been spending the money Congress appropriated to overthrow Saddam Hussein on contractors and consultants while withholding arms from the Iraqi opposition, experts said.
The latest example is a workshop proposed by the Conflict Management Group, a nonprofit offshoot of Harvard Negotiation Project at Harvard Law School. The subcontractor group describes its objective in turbid academic jargon: "To identify, diagnose, and enhance the ability of the Iraqi opposition parties, and the individuals within the parties, to discuss, design, and facilitate intra- and inter-organization dialogue, cooperation, and problem solving."
Translation: Pull Iraqi resistance fighters out of the field, bring them to Harvard, and teach them how to get along.

There's a lot of ambition evident in planning for democracy-in-a-box. Time will tell how effective this effort is.

A fuel depot and a back of the envelope calculation

An apparent accident at the Buncefield fuel depot in the UK has resulted in 180M gallons of fuel capacity being destroyed by fire. Given 42 gallons to the barrel, and assuming 50% capacity offhand, approximately 2.15M barrels of refined fuel was lost. While the authorities are quick to assure that no shortages will result, some slack has been removed from the system.

As a comparison, according to this precis, UK fuel consumption was approximately 1.7M barrels/day in 2001. Thus, a day or two of production was lost.

A culture of conflict

Much was made of the red-blue divide during the recent U.S. election. It's worth taking a look at work done by University of Michigan psychologist Richard Nisbett, who has examined cultural differences in cognition and published a book a few years back.

In another experiment described in the book, Nisbett and colleagues found that Americans respond to contradiction by polarizing their beliefs...

Polarization of the electorate would seem to have been eminently predictable.

The origin of rendition

There were some interesting points made regarding rendition on PBS.

CONDOLEEZZA RICE: For decades, the United States and other countries have used renditions to transport terrorist suspects from the country where they were captured to their home country or to other countries where they can be questioned, held or brought to justice.

The span of decades makes is less credible that the EU is as ignorant of the nature of rendition as they would officially make themselves out to be, implied by the move to for investigative probes into CIA flights.

Another interesting quote from the PBS piece:

REUEL GERECHT: Well, I think it was built upon the close relationships the agency built particularly with Egypt and Jordan in the mid 1980s. I mean, counterterrorism bureaucratically takes off at Langley around 1984-1985. And you have relationships develop.
I think the pivotal moment might be 1995-1996. I mean that's what you usually hear from people who work at Langley, that that's when a rendition came into the form more or less that you know it today.

That means that rendition came into the current form during Clinton's first term. Tenet was appointed deputy director of the CIA in 1995. It appears that elements that make up the current U.S. practice of the War on Terror were in place as early as a decade ago.

Unintended tainting of intelligence

The Pentagon reportedly had a program where it paid to ensure that positive news made it into the media in Iraq.

The Los Angeles Times quoted unidentified officials as saying that some of the stories in Iraqi newspapers were written by U.S. troops and while basically factual, they sometimes give readers a slanted view of what is happening in Iraq.

There's a more subtle problem with such a program. Tampering with the news feed also taints open source intelligence efforts. Emphasis mine.

OSINT is intelligence gained from open -- unrestricted, non-secret --sources, and it's one of the key forms of intelligence, alongside human-source intelligence (HUMINT), signals intelligence (SIGINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), among others. It is openly available intelligence, and its sources include all manners of journalism, whether broadcast, printed or blogged.