One bird down

Back in October I speculated that Musharraf might be playing off militants and Bhutto against each other. Now that Bhutto is down, that leaves only the militants as a viable threat to his rule.

Musharraf has now set the stage for nuclear blackmail. The USA has little choice but to back and fund his regime in order to prevent Pakistan's nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of militants should Musharraf's regime collapse and individual military commanders be left to pursue individual ambitions. Yet it's worth noting that Musharraf has been diverting billions toward conventional weapons better suited to fighting India than militants.

In interviews with The New York Times, U.S. officials, commenting on the more than $5 billion of funding to Pakistan, ... admitted most the money is being diverted to help finance weapons systems to match those of India, Pakistan's traditional foe.

A potential mechanism for taser-related death

Recently I ran across the account of a coroner puzzling over how tasers could be linked to heart attacks:

Dr. David Evans, the Toronto regional supervising coroner for investigations, says that while there's no proof to say the shock could make things worse, "I agree potentially it could." But, he adds, "why aren't they dropping dead immediately?"

That would seem to rule out the scenario that the electrical shock of the taser is directly destabilizing heart rhythms.

This two-year old report out of John Hopkins University may hold the key to the underlying mechanism:

Dr. Wittstein and his research team found that some people may respond to sudden, overwhelming emotional stress by releasing large amounts of adrenalin and other chemicals into the blood stream. These chemicals can be temporarily toxic to the heart, effectively stunning the muscle and producing symptoms similar to those of a typical heart attack: chest pain, fluid in the lungs, shortness of breath and heart failure. However, there are no further similarities between "broken heart" syndrome and cardiac arrest. Closer inspection using blood tests and magnetic resonance imaging scans failed to show the typical heart attack signs, such as irreversible muscle damage and elevated levels of certain enzymes...
Wittstein cautioned that even a stress-induced heart attack must not go untreated.

Stress from being tasered along with the trauma of being taken into custody could lead to temporary a hormonal response that is toxic to heart function.

US Air Force aims for zero carbon

Already planning a switch to blends with alternative fuels, the Air Force announced the ambition to reach zero carbon emissions, as well as jumpstarting the commercial viability of greener fuels thanks to purchasing power.

"We can get ourselves very close to a zero carbon footprint," said Anderson ahead of talks on the issue with counterparts in Britain and France next month.
"Not today. Not tomorrow. But maybe a decade or so down the road," he told a briefing at the State Department's Foreign Press Center..

.

Though it's the bottom line that's driving this, with high fuel costs, environmental concern seems to have been added on. Zero carbon would likely rule out coal liquefaction without appropriately balancing carbon sequesterization.

For Pentagon planners, it appears more and more that Peak Oil is a reality.

A new study ordered by the Pentagon warns that the rising cost and dwindling supply of oil -- the lifeblood of fighter jets, warships, and tanks -- will make the US military's ability to respond to hot spots around the world "unsustainable in the long term."

Iran has little choice but to remain committed to nuclear power

Recently, Egypt became the thirteenth Middle Eastern state to seek nuclear power. Iran is now surrounded by Arab, Sunni-led states with nominally peaceful nuclear ambitions. It's hard to see how Iran could possible call a halt to its nuclear program without fearing eventual regional eclipse by a future Sunni-led nuclear-armed state. Pakistan (though not officially Sunni-led) is preoccupied with India and Afghanistan, and is thus cannot afford to be particularly intent on containing Iranian hegemony, but the same cannot be said of countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Tunisia and the UAE.

On the diplomatic front, Arab concerns about Iranian nuclear capability were no doubt raised further by inflammatory commentary out of Iran earlier this year:

A close advisor to Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei recently wrote that the country of Bahrain was a province of Iran. Hossein Shariatmadari, editor of the hard-line, state-approved Iranian newspaper, "Kayhan," made the claim in an editorial. "Kayhan" is widely regarded as a mouthpiece for Mr. Khamenei.

Without trust in the region, Iran is squarely caught up in a regional nuclear race which it cannot easily back out of.

Possible pipe bomb origins

In Arizona, a nuclear plant was locked down after a pipe bomb was found in an employee's vehicle. The employee does not seem to be directly involved. As well, it's not a particularly difficult task to attach a pipe bomb to a truck.

"So, the mystery is how did that pipebomb get into his truck? Arpaio said. "What's the motive to someone to put this in his truck? I don't know. Was it a disgruntled employee? I don't know. Were they trying to target him?"

Given the timing of the pipe bomb, I can't rule out a failed Halloween prank as a reason for the pipe bomb.

Two elementary schools and a high school in the area were locked down briefly when a plant employee notified the district, Superintendent Robin Berry said.

Alternately, this could be a feasibility test, a mild attack to determine if defenses are soft or not. If so, clearly it was a failure.

Denial machine

Orson Scott Card recently lost it over climate change:

Global warming is, in other words, somewhere between Piltdown Man and cold fusion on the scale of fake science. But when I say this, the true believers become angry. Not because they can contradict my statements -- they can't. Every word I just wrote is consonant with the evidence as it now stands. They become angry because Global Warming has become the vengeful, punitive deity of a new fundamentalism: Fanatical Environmentalism. Global Warming is rather like the idea of biblical infallibility or creation science -- impervious to evidence or logic.

He's wrong, of course. Climate "truthers" have to rely on manufactured evidence and spin to bolster their claims.

The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real ... It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science behind climate change, providing funding for some of them, their organizations and their studies.

Big Oil recycled Big Tobacco naysayers into climate naysayers.

Conspiracy theorists on the left in the US deny that Saudi hijackers were responsible for 9/11, and conspiracy theorists on the right in the US deny that global warming is happening. Both of them are railing against authorities, be it government or scientists, that they both discount and distrust. It's as if they are merely collectively disagreeing over which threat to deny, be it the global warming or terrorism.

Two birds with one stone for Musharraf?

After al-Zawahiri has declared war on Pakistan over the Red Mosque attack, Pakistan apparently declared war in return.

According to a top Pakistani security official who spoke to Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity, the goal this time is to pacify the Waziristans once and for all. All previous military operations - usually spurred by intelligence provided by the Western coalition - have had limited objectives, aimed at specific bases or sanctuaries or blocking the cross-border movement of guerrillas. Now the military is going for broke to break the back of the Taliban and a[l]-Qaeda in Pakistan and reclaim the entire area.

If militants are indeed targeting Bhutto, Musharraf could come out a winner if the Taliban et al kill Bhutto and Pakistani forces successfully suppress Islamic militants. Two rivals for power would be eliminated at the same time.

At least 136 people were killed and more than 387 wounded around midnight Thursday in a suicide bombing near a motorcade carrying former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, who returned to the country earlier in the day after eight years of self-imposed exile, according to hospital and police sources.

Alternately, perhaps Bhutto is flypaper. While she's alive, she's a more attractive target for militants than Musharraf.

Spin via omission

This is far from a representative sample, but the LA Times report on Sanchez' speech contained:

Sanchez lashed out specifically at the National Security Council, calling officials there negligent and incompetent, without offering details. He also blasted war policies over the last four years, which he said had stripped senior military officers of responsibility and thrust the armed services into an "intractable position" in Iraq.
"The best we can do with this flawed approach is stave off defeat," Sanchez said in a speech to the Military Reporters and Editors' annual conference in Arlington, Va. "Without bipartisan cooperation, we are destined to fail. There is nothing going on in Washington that would give us hope."

That doesn't quite parse right. What's this about bipartisan cooperation? The CBC report carries an extra portion entirely omitted from the above report, Sanchez' conclusion that the USA must stay in Iraq:

While he was pessimistic about current U.S. strategy, he also said withdrawing all troops is not an option.
"The American military finds itself in an intractable situation … America has no choice but to continue our efforts in Iraq," he said.

That last bit certainly isn't aimed at (most) Republicans.

Controlling US strategy

Is Osama Bin Laden "virtually impotent"? It seems all his group can directly do is issue videos. However, given their increasingly media-oriented actions, al Qaida remains virtually potent as an ideological vanguard.

On the noopolitical front, al Qaida can still:

• Inspire jihadi groups and provide strategic focus.
• Appropriate arguments used by domestic opponents of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and thus diminish their influence within Western political dialogue.
• Focus and maintain American concern and efforts on Iraq, thus deflecting assets that could have been directed instead toward his capture or elimination.

Bin Laden may even have been prompted to take the risk to make his recent video because of concerns that at least one Presidential hopeful might send troops to hunt him down. From August 1st:

“Let me make this clear,” Obama said in a speech prepared for delivery at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “There are terrorists holed up in those mountains who murdered 3,000 Americans. They are plotting to strike again. It was a terrible mistake to fail to act when we had a chance to take out an al-Qaida leadership meeting in 2005. If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”

Bin Laden has to survive in order to be declared mahdi.

Fox News manufactures weapons-grade uranium?

A red flag went down when I read this Fox News revamp of an AP story about 8kg of missing uranium in China:

Authorities said that 17 pounds of weapons-grade uranium disappeared and that a verdict in the trial of four men accused of trying to sell the radioactive material will be delayed until it is found, state media reported Friday.

That's a big loss of face, so much so that I'd have to believe that China had developed a free press in order to believe that an official said "weapons-grade", as well as more government transparency in order to try such thieves publicly. As it turns out, the state media claim was worded differently:

Jiang Chaoqiang, director of the Guangzhou No 12 People's Hospital, told China Daily: "The radioactive substance uranium does not explode when it is in its raw state, but it is very harmful to people's health."

That's "raw" as in "unrefined". On the other hand, "weapons-grade" is typically 90%+ U-235. Unrefined uranium is mostly U-238, which isn't useful for bombs. It has to be refined to be "reactor grade". I turned to MSNBC for some actual numbers about uranium:

Uranium enriched to between 3.5 percent and 5 percent is used to make fuel for reactors to generate electricity. It becomes suitable for use in nuclear weapons when enriched to more than 90 percent.

There's a big difference between 5% and 90%. Assuming that the uranium was indeed being illegally sold from a mine as purported by state media, I'd expect it to be reactor grade at worst; weapons-grade refining would almost certainly be performed at government-controlled facilities in China and under tight scrutiny. A paltry 8kg is far from critical mass, weapons grade or no, but it could make for a hefty dirty bomb payload.

There's another odd aspect to the case, people allegedly falling sick.

More than 20 people had fallen sick after being exposed to the radioactive material, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said, citing an official involved in the investigation.

It also appears that the "weapons-grade" claim originates from democratic opposition (single source), not a state mouthpiece.

Regardless of whether the uranium is reactor-grade or weapons-grade, the people stealing it were apparently ignorant of how to guard against radiation if some accounts are to be believed. It's not hard to shield even enriched uranium, given this example:

Had the 15-pound uranium cylinder been weapon-grade highly enriched uranium instead of depleted uranium (which is not suitable for nuclear weapons), the dose rate at the surface of the highly enriched uranium would have been more than 100 times higher. However, nearly all of this increase would be due to alpha radiation, which can be shielded with a sheet of paper. Meanwhile, the beta-ray dose rate would be about the same or lower and the gamma-ray dose would be ten or more times higher. At the surface of the shielded container the dose rate would be be about one to ten times higher. The dose rate of the highly enriched uranium cylinder could be easily reduced to that of the shielded depleted uranium container (i.e., 0.5 mrad/hr) by adding an additional 1/8 inch of lead (one-third of a centimeter) around the cylinder. This would add only about 6.6 pounds (3 kilograms) to the mass of the lead shielding.

If people did come down with radiation sickness, then this wasn't a knowledgable outfit trying to fence uranium.

An Australian newspaper carries an additional claim:

Police have recovered only 35 grams of uranium from the four men. They claimed a fifth partner, Zhang Xinfang, had disappeared with the bulk of the uranium and had since become seriously ill, presumably from exposure to the radioactivity.

I can't tell if that's a cover story agreed on by the thieves or not, but I wouldn't put a lot of trust in them. For all I know, they might face swift execution if the uranium is found in toto.

When climate, technology, and greed collide

Regarding the recent Chinese coal mine flooding disaster, Bruce Sterling writes:

There's not a coal mine in the world that could avert nine inches of sudden Greenhouse rain. Those miners were digging their own graves.

It seems from later reports that there was in fact a simple way to avoid disaster, though not flooding. Just stop working.

After unusually heavy rains lashed the area around the small city of Xintai, 370 miles southeast of Beijing, last week, at least two other mines stopped production Friday, hours before the Wen River smashed through the dike ...
Wang Dequan, a government official in the city of Tai'an, which oversees Xintai, said, "Smaller mines stopped work during heavy rains because they lack the safety equipment that larger mines like the Huayuan mine have."

Undue trust in technology may even have been key in leading to this disaster.

Early indoctrination

In the spirit of DoubleQuotes, take the children's show "Tomorrow's Pioneers":

The show, along with paramilitary-style summer camps for Gazan boys, reveal a key element in Hamas's long-term strategy.
Like Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, which spawned Hamas, the group takes a patient approach to tapping religious conviction to build political support. It is the movement's youth focus, critics say, that sets it apart from Hamas's rival, Fatah, which controls the West Bank and enjoys US and Israeli support.
The basic unit of the Hamas organization isn't cells or political committees – it's families. The organization has shown that by introducing children early enough to Hamas's hard-line Islamic thinking, it can recruit lifelong supporters.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0820/p01s03-wome.html

Contrast with a report from the movie Jesus Camp:

Pastor Becky Fischer, effervescent and focused, recruits for Kids on Fire, a Pentecostal summer camp in Devils Lake, N.D. There campers pray to a cardboard standup of George W. Bush, weep and speak in tongues, writhe on the floor clutching little fetus dolls and perform Cultural Revolution-style musical numbers in camouflage face paint.
Think of it as boot camp for the future army of God. Fischer cheerfully admits to borrowing techniques used by other extreme religious factions (Islamic fundamentalism is a particular favorite) in her jihad against abortion, liberals and godless secularism. Counselors at Kids on Fire do not use war as a metaphor, but a sincere and formidable call to arms aimed at "taking America back for Christ."

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/09/29/DDGH8LDU6M1.DTL

Who is making cameras for China?

Recently, there was a piece in The New York Times on Chinese plans to track people in Shenzhen.

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity...
When a police officer goes indoors and cannot receive a global positioning signal from satellites overhead, the system tracks the location of the officer’s cellphone, based on the three nearest cellphone towers. Mr. Huang used a real-time connection to local police dispatchers’ computers to show a detailed computer map of a Shenzhen district and the precise location of each of the 92 patrolling officers, represented by caricatures of officers in blue uniforms and the routes they had traveled in the last hour.

So who might be providing those 20,000 cameras and the software behind them? A bit of digging around revealed that NEC already has cameras in Shenzhen.

On July 19, electronics giant NEC announced it has developed the world’s first automated border control system that uses facial recognition technology capable of identifying people inside their automobiles. The system is already in operation at checkpoints on the Hong Kong - Shenzhen border.
Built around NEC’s NeoFace biometric face recognition system, as well as NEC’s electronic passport technology, the system is designed to boost the speed and efficiency of Hong Kong Immigration Department operations by allowing residents with microchipped national ID cards to remain in their vehicles while automated cameras verify their identities. Hong Kong residents aged 11 or over are required by law to carry a national ID card (HKID), and the recently issued “smart” IDs are embedded with chips that contain biometric and personal data.

This seems to line up with China Public Security Technology, Inc.'s press release from May 1.

China Public Security Technology, Inc., (OTC Bulletin Board: CPBY.OB - News; "China Public Security" or "the Company"), a leading provider of large-scale high-tech public security information technology and a Geographic Information Systems ("GIS") software service operator in China, today announced that it has completed performance of its contract for automation of the Sha Tau Kok Station of Exit and Entry Frontier Inspection in Shenzhen City, China.

Admittedly, they're not the only possible game for facial recognition in town, and suppliers could change.

Not a prelude to a military strike on Iran

The official rumor is that Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps may soon be designated a terrorist organization.

White House and State Department officials declined to confirm the reports, saying it is not appropriate to discuss actions that may be under consideration.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, senior U.S. officials say there still is an internal debate whether to target the entire Iranian corps or only its al-Quds wing.

Note State Department involvement. The goal is sanctions. For example, the US Treasury could be brought to bear. It is within their mandate to (among other things):

• Freeze the assets of terrorists, drug kingpins, and their support networks
• Cut off corrupt foreign jurisdictions and financial institutions from the U.S. financial system
• Promote the international adoption and implementation of counter-terrorist financing and anti-money laundering standards
• Trace and repatriate assets looted by corrupt foreign officials ...

Furthermore, the US administration has quietly found that sanctions are having some effect at pressuring the Iranian regime, though not yet enough to force a change in policy. According to a July report in The Economist:

Two months ago [Iranian President Ahmadinejad] astonished the central bank by ordering banks to slash interest rates below the rate of inflation. Some Iranian economists think this was a favour to the Revolutionary Guards, who have borrowed heavily to expand their commercial activities since his election...
Iran, in short, has some serious economic troubles. Might a few well-aimed kicks persuade the regime to give up its nuclear plans? In themselves, the two sanctions resolutions passed so far by the Security Council do not amount to much: they mainly ban trade in some nuclear and military equipment...
So are sanctions “working”? The punishment so far, and the fear of more to come, has scared off foreign investors and pushed up the risk, cost and inconvenience of doing business in Iran...
Nonetheless, it is not clear that sanctions are even close to imposing the sort of pain needed to alter the government's nuclear behaviour.

From this balancing act, it appears that the US administration is trying to focus financial pressure on Iran's military-industrial complex while limiting the inevitable collateral damage to the remainder of their economy. Squeezing Iran too hard might provoke retaliation. It's also worth noting with regard to military posture that the USA recently reduced their naval presence in the region from escalated levels. From August 1:

The U.S. Navy, scaling back its force in the Gulf, said on Wednesday it had sent a fresh aircraft carrier to the region to replace two carriers deployed there since early this year amid tension with Iran.

China's war on kissing?

Sometimes I get some pieces when scanning foreign news that make me laugh. Take this piece out of People's Daily:

Signs of "black eye" will be put up next month in camera monitored venues in Beijing, accompanied with words in Chinese and English "you are entering a camera monitored zone".
According to the municipal public security bureau, suspicious acts or objects detected by the cameras will be automatically reported to the command center.
Intimate acts of lovers may be initially categorized as "kidnapping" or "robbery" by the computers, which are programmed to be sensitive to violations of "safe distance", and reported to the command center.

So kissing or possibly holding hands would be flagged for human review? Looks like the morality police aren't giving up any time soon.

Dietary defense against a dirty bomb

A Canadian federal study recently investigated the impact of dirty bombs. The scenarios included cesium and americium.

This old Wired piece, however, mentioned that cesium behaves chemically similar to potassium. It follows that increasing one's intake of potassium after exposure could compete for chemical absorption. A quick check of the periodic table suggests that iron is likely the most tolerated competitor for americium.

Even if one doesn't dose up, apparently the personal risk from initial exposure is small. This may explain the lack of such recommendations.

The risk is actually pretty minimal, replied Steve Koonin, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology.
"Long exposure to low-level gamma radiation, if you do the numbers, produces a miniscule increase in cancer rates -- one extra cancer per 100,000 people," he said.

On a side note, the FAS projected that a contaminated zone would increase the risk to residents by one cancer per 10,000 people. Perhaps a reason for the paranoid not to invest in real estate downwind of potential targets.

Looking forward at China's planned lift capability

China recently announced plans to develop a next-generation rocket capable of lifting 25 tons per launch. The ostensible reason was to carry a payload for a Chinese space station construction module.

Assuming they're out to match Russia's capability as a next step, it's worth noting the weight of the Zvezda (Star) Service Module, 21 tons. It's also significantly heavier than the Hubble, which clocks in around 12 tons, meaning that China would also be capable of putting high resolution spy satellites into orbit.

Possible tribal revenge in Afghanistan

We've heard lately that Mullah Dadullah's death in Afghanistan is a setback for the Taliban.

Dadullah had escaped death so many times that, to dispel any doubts, Afghan authorities displayed his blood-splattered corpse to reporters in the southern city of Kandahar.

I'm thinking that maybe Dadullah went too far in permitting a young boy beheading an alleged spy.

Ghulam Sakhi, confirmed his [dead] son's identity ...
"The Taliban are not mujahedeen. They are not fighting for the cause of Islam," the 70-year-old said. "If I got my hands on them I would kill them and even tear their flesh with my own teeth."
... his son called at the end of January to reveal that a tribal council had sentenced him to death on charges of tipping off U.S. forces about Osmani's movements, despite his denials.
His son passed the phone to Dadullah, but the militant leader ignored his pleas for clemency, Sakhi said.

Maybe Sakhi got his revenge. Perhaps tribal vendetta led to someone informing the West as to Dadullah's location. It would be ironic if vengeance over a presumed tip-off lead to an actual tip-off in retaliation.

Dreaming of a Cold War

Last week I woke up from a dream in which I was experiencing a geopolitical analysis. In it, I concluded that a major rationale of the preemptive invasion of Iraq was grounded in the Cold War, a move to keep it from falling into Russian influence.

At first I was incredulous of my dream, but I decided to google a bit, and quickly encountered some mainstream media stories (a few of which I had seen before in some form or another) which backed my dream's conclusion.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/04/13/MN20786.DTL

The documents found Thursday and Friday in a Baghdad office of the Mukhabarat, the Iraqi secret police, indicate that at least five agents graduated Sept. 15 from a two-week course in surveillance and eavesdropping techniques, according to certificates issued to the Iraqi agents by the "Special Training Center" in Moscow.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20041229-113041-1647r.htm

A Pentagon official who publicly disclosed information showing Russian involvement in moving Iraqi weapons out of that country has been dismissed.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/IraqCoverage/story?id=1734490

Two Iraqi documents from March 2003 -- on the eve of the U.S.-led invasion -- and addressed to the secretary of Saddam Hussein, describe details of a U.S. plan for war. According to the documents, the plan was disclosed to the Iraqis by the Russian ambassador.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0820/p01s03-woeu.html

Amid uncertainty about US war plans toward Iraq, Russia is poised to sign a $40 billion economic cooperation deal with the regime of Saddam Hussein ... The Moscow daily Kommersant wrote yesterday that if sanctions against Iraq are lifted, Russia is set to renew arms sales to the regime.

So, in the end, plenty of documented links between Saddam and Russia, yet no links to al Qaida that have withstood scrutiny. I suppose this narrative will be obvious to historians decades from now.

Keeping ethnic Russians Russian

According to the Christian Science Monitor, Russia has slammed a bureaucratic door on foreign-based adoption agencies. The article posits anti-Americanism as a reason. However, they hint at an underlying rationale.

For US adoptive parents, Russia ranks third (after China and Guatemala) as the country of origin for the most orphans adopted. American families adopted 3,706 Russian children in 2006, down from 4,594 and 5,865 in the past two years...
A year ago, there were 89 accredited foreign-based adoption agencies; this week, the last of them saw their accreditation expire...
Kremlin-sponsored efforts to increase adoptions by Russian families are beginning to work, some experts say. For the past two years the numbers of domestic adoptions have exceeded foreign ones, though both combined remain a tiny sliver of the total number of Russian orphans.

Nationalists could not be sponsoring Kremlin-backed action against foreign-based adoption agencies to embarrass Putin, as Kremlin backing implies that consent on the part of Putin, given his successful concentration of power. Instead, the more like rationale is Putin is acting to stem the population decline in ethnic Russians, as he promised last year.

Russia's postcommunist demographic woes ... have become such a hot topic of late that President Vladimir Putin made it his highest priority during his May 10 state-of-the-nation address...
Fears over potential consequences are wide-ranging -- that the country won't be able to generate enough young men to fill the ranks of its military, that the economy will not be able to sustain itself, and that immigration could drastically alter the country's ethnic and religious makeup...
... Putin prioritized the steps the state must take to rectify the problem.
"First a lower death rate; second, and efficient migration policy; and third, a higher birthrate," Putin told the nation during his address.

Therefore, keeping Russian children out of the hands of American adoptive families is surely being framed as a matter of national security. Blocking foreign adoptions dovetails right into "migration policy".

Wal-Mart as 4GW actor

Recently, some news came out regarding Wal-Mart's intelligence program.

A former Wal-Mart Stores Inc. worker said he was part of a large surveillance operation that included snooping on employees, stockholders and others, according to a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday.
Security worker Bruce Gabbard was fired last month after 19 years with the company for intercepting a reporter's phone calls, the paper said...
Gabbard said that as part of the surveillance, the retailer infiltrated an anti-Wal-Mart group to determine if it planned protests at the company's annual meeting last year and deployed monitoring systems to record the actions of anyone connected to its global computer network.

It's clear that the nation-state no longer has a monopoly on intelligence and security operations. It's not impossible that Wal-Mart or similarly capable organization may in the future gain the direct capacity to engage in fourth generation warfare. The example of Chiquita may serve as a warning of what multinationals risk if they do not acquire such capability: having to pay protection to regional 4GW actors.

... federal prosecutors said the Cincinnati-based company and several unnamed high-ranking corporate officers paid about $1.7 million between 1997 and 2004 to the [AUC].
The AUC has been responsible for some of the worst massacres in Colombia’s civil conflict and for a sizable percentage of the country’s cocaine exports. The U.S. government designated the right-wing militia a terrorist organization in September 2001.
Prosecutors said the company made the payments in exchange for protection for its workers. In addition to paying the AUC, prosecutors said, Chiquita made payments to the [ELN], and the leftist [FARC], as control of the company’s banana-growing area shifted.

Iranian nationalism as a defensive tactic

It's been claimed that nationalism drives national policies in Northeast Asia.

One common characteristic of nationalism in Northeast Asian countries is that it serves to soothe the inferiority complex of people in the region, a South Korean scholar at a Chinese university claimed on Tuesday...
Korean nationalism is a unique combination of an inferiority complex and national chauvinism, according to Park.
``Korean nationalism is conservative and self-defensive due to its past experience of being invaded and suppressed by other nations,'' he said.
``But on the other side, Korean people are also proud of their long history including its heritage from the three kingdoms period, and the fact that it was the only ancient tribe of Northeast Asia not to be integrated by the Chinese,'' Park said. He added its economic success since the 1960s has intensified that pride.

By extension, it's worth observing how much Iran's apparent inferiority complex is driving their current foreign policy.

The Foreign Office is said to be considering offering Iran a way out without losing face over the crisis...
Attempts have backfired in recent days to "shame" Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime into admitting it was in the wrong after the Ministry of Defence released co-ordinates of where the UK team were picked up...
Mr Ahmadinejad, the Iran president, said on Saturday that Britain had not reacted in a "logical or legal" way. "The British government, instead of apologising and expressing regret over the action taken, started to claim that we are in their debt," he said...
Sir Malcolm Rifkind, MP, the former foreign secretary, called for pressure on the Iranians, but said the threat of sanctions should have been put "privately" first, "because otherwise the Iranians are pushed into a humiliating climbdown".

Nationalism seems to be key to maintaining support for the current Iranian presidency despite the weak employment conditions and the burgeoning economic growth demands of a population boom entering early adulthood.

A report commissioned by the Management and Planing Organization (MPO) and Iran Youth Organization (IYO) released on Sunday predicted that if the annual unemployment rate of 13.2 percent holds up then the jobless rate among 15-29 age group will reach 52 percent within two years [i.e., by 2006].

The US administration should not have been surprised by the effectiveness of their economic offensive.

More than 40 major international banks and financial institutions have either cut off or cut back business with the Iranian government or private sector as a result of a quiet campaign launched by the Treasury and State departments last September...
The financial squeeze has seriously crimped Tehran's ability to finance petroleum industry projects and to pay for imports...
Iranian importers are particularly feeling the pinch, with many having to pay for commodities in advance when a year ago they could rely on a revolving line of credit, said Patrick Clawson, a former World Bank official now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The scope of Iran's vulnerability has been a surprise to U.S. officials, he added.

My current prediction is that the U.S. administration will take advantage of the current crisis to intensify the economic offensive against Iran in the hope that disaffected Iranian youth will set effect regime change. It's less clear how nationalism will complicate that, aside from the usual risk of any opposition being identified with the U.S.

Pet food as biosecurity early warning for China

A recent tainted pet food recall has pinned aminopterin as the contaminant.

Aminopterin is used as a rat poison in some countries, but is not registered for that purpose in Canada or the U.S...
The company and investigators at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had been focusing on wheat gluten, a source of protein in the pet food...
ABC News reported the chemical was on wheat imported from China. Menu Foods has neither confirmed nor denied it uses wheat from China.

Aminopterin prevents the body from using folic acid. Deficiencies in folic acid can lead to neural-tube defects (NTDs) in children. Is China unintentionally poisoning its own? The NTD rate in Northern China is troubling.

Rates of anencephaly in Asia have been reported to be comparable to those of other regions outside the British Isles, while spina bifida prevalence was lower in Asia than elsewhere (Little and Elwood, 1991). However, NTD prevalence in northern China has been reported to be among the highest in the world (Moore et al., 1997).

That's geographically coincident with the major wheat production region in China.

Most of China’s wheat production is in the North China Plain in the central and eastern part of the nation, where three provinces — Henan, Shandong and Hebei — produce more than 50 percent of the national crop.

Sustaining surges

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported on recently approved troop increases.

The president agreed to send 4,700 troops to Iraq in addition to the 21,500 he ordered to go in January, mainly to provide support for those combat forces and to handle more anticipated Iraqi prisoners. He also decided to send a 3,500-member brigade to Afghanistan to accelerate training of local forces, doubling his previous troop increase to fight a resurgent Taliban.
... the latest troop increase in Afghanistan had not been known and will bring U.S. forces there to an all-time high.

A recent article in Wired parenthetically mentioned intended long-term troop increases.

The Bush administration wants to increase the overall size of combat forces by 92,000 people over the next five years.

Given that the projected increase (92,000) is significantly larger than the combined surges (26,200 net for Iraq; 7,000 net for Afghanistan), the intent is apparently to be able to better sustain counterinsurgency operations on a scale comparable to what is going on currently, since it will better enable timely rotation of troops.

Will we see a petrodinar?

A recent Credit Suisse piece discusses the prospects of the planned Gulf currency.

... the GCC (union of the countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates) is also planning to implement monetary union. It is hoped to launch the "Gulf currency", which will be linked to the US dollar, by January 2010.
... A study by the Gulf Research Center in Dubai concludes that the Gulf currency could play a very prominent role and therefore raises the question of a possible dependency. According to this study, the Gulf currency could replace the US dollar as the invoicing currency for oil products, serve as an Islamic currency, and even mature into a reserve currency. However, Credit Suisse views this assessment critically and considers it unlikely...

There are plans afoot in Dubai. The ambition is clear: to enable a break from the system of the petrodollar while avoiding mere replacement by a petroeuro. Whether they will eventually achieve a viable petrodinar is an open question.

Bush engages in multilateral diplomacy with the Axis of Evil

We've seen the recent success of multilateral talks with North Korea, apparently building on Clinton's legacy. From February 14:

The accord struck by the U.S. and its partners to limit and eventually dismantle North Korea's nuclear program resembles one signed in 1994 by President Bill Clinton, a deal President George W. Bush denounced...
The deal has created some strange bedfellows for Bush. Bill Richardson, a Democratic presidential candidate and former United Nations ambassador under Clinton, was among the first to praise the new accord, while Bush's most recent UN envoy, John Bolton, was one of the first to attack it.

No apparent direct talks with the remaining two countries in the Axis, but the US could meet with Syria and Iran at an Iraqi regional conference.

The head of Iran's National Security Council, Ali Larijani, says senior officials and ministers are reviewing the situation and will decide on whether to go to the meeting, which has been called by the Iraqi administration as a way of coaxing more money and support from Iraq's neighbours and international partners...
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that American delegates would be at the gathering, even if Syria and Iran were represented.

There's still some brinkmanship in play over Iran's nuclear program, but it would seem that the corollary of "all options being on the table" is that diplomatic channels must remain open.

Fear and loathing and global warming

Why did Exxon pay millions to fund global warming skeptics? And via a think tank offer $10,000 to scientists and economists who would publish anything critical of a recent UN climate report? A likely reason is that demand destruction is real.

While demand is still rising in countries such as China, though at a lower rate than recent years, demand in developed countries is actually down. The International Energy Agency, whose members include countries such as the United States, Germany, Japan and Canada, said in January that oil consumption in the group fell 0.6 per cent in 2006, the first significant slip since the 1980s.

If this trend were to continue, we'd hit Peak Demand in the West before Peak Oil.

A slow start to Panopticon 2.0

I'd posted earlier about harvesting Web 2.0 for facial recognition. The first steps have been confirmed.

Shah, who is also chief executive of Riya (riya.com), the first photo sharing site to use facial recognition technology, thinks faces are still beyond computers' reach. "We tried the same algorithims that are used on Like.com for faces on Riya. We downloaded 50m faces from MySpace, and we brought in 100 users to test both the shopping and the faces. The face stuff got 2.5 out of 5 on average, the shopping stuff got 4.2 and up.

Fifty million faces. Perhaps their algorithm was thrown off by all the false pictures of celebrities and porn stars, as well as stolen images from other users.