The Pentagon and the Kyoto Protocol

According to a recent UPI press report, the Pentagon will cut greenhouse gas emissions 30 percent by 2010.

A Defense Department memo from November 2005 outlined energy management goals for the military, which included reducing energy consumption in facilities by 2 percent per year, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from facilities 30 percent by 2010.

Compare that with the Kyoto Protocol targets for 2010.

According to United Nations calculations, the protocol's targets represent a 30 percent reduction from the currently projected emissions by industrialized countries in the year 2010 under "business as usual" scenarios with no emissions cuts.

Islam's stop-loss program

Recently, it was reported that a former Muslim and convert to Christianity faces death in Afghanistan under sharia law.

Shariah law states that any Muslim who rejects Islam should be sentenced to death, according to Ahmad Fahim Hakim, deputy chairman of the state-sponsored Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Repeated attempts to impose a jail sentence were barred.
The prosecutor, Abdul Wasi, said he had offered to drop the charges if Mr Rahman converted back to Islam, but he refused. "He would have been forgiven if he changed back. But he said he was a Christian and would always remain one," Mr Wasi said. "We are Muslims and becoming a Christian is against our laws. He must get the death penalty."

In this short article, Mr. Sayyid Muhammad Rizvi explains that apostasy is deemed treason and thus punishable by death.

In Islam, the concept of treason is not limited to political and military affairs, it also has a spiritual and cultural dimension to it. In the Islamic order of sacredness, Allãh, then the Prophet and then the Qur'ãn occupy the highest positions. Tawhid, nubuwwa, and qiyãma form the constitution of Islam. Just as upholding and protecting the constitution of a country is sign of patriotism, and undermining it is a form of treason-in the same way open rejection of the fundamental beliefs of Islam by a Muslim is an act of treason.

Thus, executing apostates is deemed an act in defense of Muslim society. From a game theoretic standpoint, imposing the death penalty for apostasy serves to minimize the number of adherents defecting from the religion via deterrence. Thus, the policy acts to maximize the number of adherents.

The analogy that is drawn to nationalism, patriotism, and thus treason is illuminating with regard to underlying psychology justifying the policy. This 2004 brain-imaging study on revenge seems applicable.

The findings, reported in today's issue of the journal Science, may partly explain a behavior known as altruistic punishment: Why do we reprimand people who have abused our trust or broken other social rules, even when we get no direct practical benefits in return?
"A person who has been cheated is [left] in a bad situation—with bad feelings," said study co-author Ernst Fehr, director of the Institute for Empirical Research in Economics at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "The person would feel even worse if the cheater does not get her or his just punishment." [...]
Fehr and his colleagues suggest that the feeling of satisfaction people get from meting out altruistic punishment may be the glue that keeps societies together.
"Theory and experimental evidence shows that cooperation among strangers is greatly enhanced by altruistic punishment," Fehr said. "Cooperation among strangers breaks down in experiments if altruistic punishment is ruled out. Cooperation flourishes if punishment of defectors is possible."

Thus, the apostate individual is punished on this earth (rather than in any afterlife) in order to maintain social order. This implies acceptance of a communal value that the individual is less important than society at large, a value in conflict with individualism.

How sexist views of women lead to lower birth rates

The international edition of Newsweek had an article which finds that the EU undervalues its women in the workplace.

According to a paper published by the International Labor Organization this past June, women account for 45 percent of high-level decision makers in America, including legislators, senior officials and managers across all types of businesses. In the U.K., women hold 33 percent of those jobs. In Sweden—supposedly the very model of global gender equality—they hold 29 percent.
Germany comes in at just under 27 percent, and Italian women hold a pathetic 18 percent of power jobs. These sad statistics say as much about Europe's labor markets, lingering welfare-state policies and corporate leadership as they do about its attitudes toward women. It's not that European women are stuck in the house. (After all, 57 percent of women in the EU 15 work, less than the U.S. rate of 65 percent, but not dramatically so.)

Are these women a victim of a combination of traditional attitudes and social policies which are aimed at and failing to counter a below replacement birth rate? The above article further claims:

Europe is killing its women with ... cushy welfare policies that were created to help them. By offering women extremely long work leaves after children, then pushing them to take the full complement via tax policies that discourage a second income, coupled with subsidies that serve to keep them at home, Europe is essentially squandering its female talent. Not only do women get off track for long periods, many simply never get back on. Nor have European corporations adapted to changing times. Few offer the flextime that makes it easier for women to both work and manage their families. Instead, women tend to get shuffled into part-time work, which is less respected and poorly paid.

And yet, women aren't being sufficiently discouraged from work that they opt to raise families instead. Instead, they are being discouraged on both work and family fronts. From The Economist:

The list of explanations for why German fertility has not rebounded is long. Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer at the Sloan Foundation in New York ticks them off: poor child care; unusually extended higher education; inflexible labour laws; high youth unemployment; and non-economic or cultural factors...
If women postpone their first child past their mid-30s, it may be too late to have a second even if they want one (the average age of first births in most of Europe is now 30). If everyone does the same, one child becomes the norm: a one-child policy by example rather than coercion, as it were. And if women wait to start a family until they are established at work, they may end up postponing children longer than they might otherwise have chosen.

Keeping women in lower positions at work, presumably for fear they will leave work to raise families, means they end up putting off having families due to difficulties in getting their careers established.

When long memories become a liability

It appears that judgmental views can distort memory.

Viewing a person as dishonest or immoral can distort memory, a Cornell study suggests. So much so, that when we attempt to recall that person's behavior, it seems to be worse than it really was.
"In other words, our study shows that morally blaming a person can distort memory for the severity of his or her crime or misbehavior," said David Pizarro, assistant professor of psychology at Cornell.

The obvious result is that this leads to a self-reinforcing cycle, as memory may be distorted to reinforce existing judgmental biases. Similarly, I would not be surprised if viewing a person as honest or moral results also in polarizing distortions in a partisan manner.

Distorion of memory combined with the tendency of partisan ideologues to ignore problematic facts leads to the obvious conclusion that partisans are further at risk of creating flawed cognitive realities due to biased recall.

Social networking for terrorists

It was inevitable that al Qaida would attempt to recruit on social network sites.

Al-Qaeda sympathizers are using Orkut, a popular, worldwide Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Laden, share videos and Web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners, according to terrorism experts and a survey of the sites.

One goal is obvious: outreach to English-speakers. Al Qaida has long wanted to recruit Caucasians in order to bypass ethnic profiling.

Roche told the court how he traveled to Afghanistan in March 2000 where he met al Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, underwent explosives training, and agreed to identify U-S and Jewish targets in Australia for the terrorist network.
Roche carried out surveillance on the Israeli Embassy in Canberra and tried unsuccessfully to recruit Caucasian Muslims into a terror cell.

The first piece doesn't mention some obvious reasons besides free speech that such terrorist recruitment efforts are left to function. Having such sites in plain sight permits Western authorities to determine recruiting information flows and tactics. Videos posted on the web could be analyzed for forensic clues to the location and identity of terrorists. As well, it opens up the potential, given international cooperation, to track the recruitment network across cyberspace. Besides, if they weren't out in the open, they'd be on the net using hacked sites.

Port security past

In 2003, North Korea was the one to fear. Via GlobalSecurity.org:

Democratic Senators Fritz Hollings (South Carolina), Charles Schumer (New York) and Patty Murray (Washington) issued a press release March 6 urging the Bush administration to immediately boost security at U.S. border crossings and ports because of the threat posed by North Korean nuclear processing.
The release states that "as reports of North Korea's new ability to produce, and possibly sell, nuclear materials to terrorists have come to light," more resources must be provided to prevent these materials from entering the United States for use in terrorist activities.
"Failing to secure our ports from attack could result in a catastrophic attack on our economy and, ultimately, on the health of our nation," Hollings, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in the release.
The release states the Bush administration is "hampering congressional efforts to protect our seaports from attack" by refusing to adequately fund measures such as the Port and Maritime Security Act, which was signed into law December 2002.

Securing the US port may be irrelevant to such a scenario. According to this Customs & Border Protection Today article from 2003, terrorists could simply detonate a nuclear device while moored port, entirely bypassing homeland defenses.

...terrorists planning to trigger a nuclear device hidden in a sea container don't have to guarantee the container makes it through a U.S. port to be certain of its destructive effects; if one of these devices explodes, it can do just as much damage from the deck of a ship temporarily moored outside one of our ports or moving slowing along the U.S. coast. A "dirty bomb" doesn't have to make it all the way into a department store in LA to deliver its murderous payload. Five miles offshore, or anchored for a few hours outside the port of San Diego-it's still a perfect opportunity for terrorists to detonate a radioactive device and establish a "kill zone" extending hundreds of miles inland.

Although U.S. lawmakers seem fixated on homeland defenses, it's obvious that U.S. port security must begin overseas. Waiting until it gets near shore is too late.

Capturing more of the oil wealth

This piece from last year in Middle East Economic Survey explains a prime motivator in the now controversial ports deal.

Tightness is evident not only in the refining sector but also in the shipping sector. Last year, freight rates surged to levels not seen before in history. Seaborne trade increased by more than 7% last year while average vessel utilization surged to 92%. Longer transport distances, especially due to the world’s growing thirst for lighter grades, led to the increase. Due to high tanker scrapping as a result of stringent EU and International Maritime Organization rules, new additions are unlikely to keep pace with demand...
Rates for product freight are also likely to remain buoyant. The refined product market is becoming global with arbitrage possibilities rising...

Grabbing a larger share of the profits from shipping and refining means that OPEC would be better able to weather a downturn in the price of oil, should the price fall to more fundamental levels as indicated by the lower price of sour, heavy crudes.

Uncertainty over Iran's ambitions

Forget 700 centrifuges. Try 1500 centrifuges instead. Via Reuters:

Diplomats pointed out that Iran planned to start installing 3,000 centrifuges later this year. About 1,500 centrifuges running optimally and nonstop for a year could yield enough highly enriched uranium for an atomic bomb, nuclear scientists say.
''Their insistence on R&D seems to encompass the 3,000 centrifuges, so this was no basis for compromise as far as we could see," said one EU3 diplomat.

Assuming Iran's claim of 6 work units per centrifuge is sustainable for 1,500 units, sufficient material for a nuclear bomb could be obtained in approximately months. Factor in time to assemble the centrifuges and weaponize the result, and a timeline of a nuclear weapon by 2009-2010 is feasible.

Iran could in principle be underreporting, as it does them little good internationally to claim higher numbers than they hope to achieve. Consider their recent claim:

"When we were negotiating with the Europeans in Tehran, we were still installing some of the equipment at the Isfahan site. There was plenty of work to be done to complete the site and finish the work there. In reality, by creating a tame situation, we could finish Isfahan," said Hassan Rowhani, who headed talks with Britain, France and Germany until last year.
The speech [by Mr. Rowhani to the Supreme Council of Cultural Revolution], which lays out Iran's policy of nuclear deception in unprecedented detail, was published in an Iranian journal that circulates among the nation's ruling elite.

Still unfilled

China recently announced that construction of their strategic petroleum reserve depots could be completed by 2007-2008. They apparently have not yet started filling them, understandable given the current price of crude oil. The 33 million barrel facility at Zhenzhai in Ningbo is completed; an earlier report claimed it was on track to be completed last August.

The remaining depots are in Aoshan in Zhejiang, Huangdao in Shandong and Dalian in Liaoning. Total capacity would be 101.9 million barrels upon completion.

Not coincidentally, the filling of these tasks is unlikely to begin before 2007, when global refining capacity improves due to refining projects under way being finished. From last year:

Key Asian refinery projects that would help ease a shortage of global capacity this year have run into delays as Indian and Chinese firms facing steep losses on domestic sales see little incentive to rush plans. India’s new Essar Oil refinery has been pushed back again, while a major new crude unit at PetroChina’s Dalian plant will likely run at reduced rates into next year after a late-2005 start, a Reuters survey of expansion plans shows... More modest slippage in other projects has also pushed new capacity toward the end of this year, or from 2006 into 2007, keeping traders on edge over when the global refining industry will be able to restore a supply cushion to tight markets.