Parts to Wholes: the Socionomic Systems Nexus

Here's my collection of interesting articles and sites for the Week of 10/21. Our approach in these collections is to provide an apparantly eclectic collection that intends to actually follow a rather careful structure, based on our views about how society functions. And on how all the parts are actually part of a larger, integrated whole. Not necessarily intentionally however but often inadvertently. Accordingly the categories are Values (because people's assumptions and attitudes dictate how they decide and their reactions to challenges), International Affairs (because, willy-nilly, we are all citizens of a larger world system where what happens in China or the ME influences, even dictates how we live life tomorrow or the day after), Politics and Policy (because how we collectively conduct ourselves, the decisions and decision-making processes we use and the goals and means we adopt and adapt determine how we function in that world system) and Science & Culture (because ultimately science and technology define the foundations of our lives and culture reflects how we live it).

If there are over-riding themes we find, in these readings, week-to-week and over the longer-term it is Change and Adaptation, and the challenges, failures and opportunities thereof.

This is born out by three contrasting readings in the Values section, one that looks back to what were our Heroes, another that looks at attitudes today and another that looks at diet and obesity - which we take as a proxy for finding new grounds for discipline in a changed world as well as for it's own sake.

On the international front one can compare and contrast the rise of the BRIC nations and the resulting stresses and strains on the world system. The first is reflected in the recent meetings of the Chinese communist party which has delivered historially unparalleled growth over the last two decades and is now facing rising challenges to developing a new, more flexible, representative and just institutional framework in China. It's also reflected in the recent rapid growth of food kitchens in Germany as the new German economy struggles to adjust to a world where blue-collar jobs are scarce. 

But the question of Change and Adaptability are perhaps most reflected in deep structural pressures building up in the US. Two contrasting articles look at the enormous difficulties, one is tempted to say failures, of both Left and the Right to move beyond the failing shibboleths of the past and the lack of new ideas, constructs and policies to deal with this brave new world. Which is partly defined by the rapidly accelerating challenges to the US Middle Class. 

As Gandalf put it, "So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us."

The Culture section has a very interesting article on Ten Choice we faced in 1940-41 as the world struggled with an outbreak of "small wars" around the world which eventually became the conflaguration we know as WWII.

Reaching farther back are three Science articles on the history and evolution of human nature, that which underpins all the things we've been talking about. One our ancient history of shoreline dwelling and very early human history - a history which keeps getting pushed back farther and farther as we learn more. And two complementary articles - one on Music and the Brain and the other on the emergence and development of language.

Values & Attitudes

Fame's Fortune A forgotten museum of great men depicted in bronze. The Hall of Fame for Great Americans sits on a bluff in the Bronx overlooking the Harlem River. A sweeping 630-foot open-air colonnade, designed by Stanford White, on what is now the campus of Bronx Community College, the hall enshrines 103 great Americans, though the last bronze busts were added in 1973 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was voted in. The Hall of Fame's story tells much about America, something about the changing fortunes of the Bronx and a lot about fame. Jay Oliva, a former president of NYU, says the hall was in part "a hype job" by Mr. MacCracken to draw attention to NYU's campus in what was then the countryside. But it was also "an American idea," Mr. Oliva says, born from the Gilded Age notion that America was emerging as a great power and that its history should be carefully recorded and celebrated. Elections to the hall became "a huge deal," Mr. Oliva says, and the Bronx building became famous itself: The New York Times dutifully reported its elections and even its nominations, which came from the public. Senators and Supreme Court justices spoke at the unveilings. Now the hall, despite its history and its glorious architecture, sits unloved and scarcely visited. In part, this is because NYU sold the campus to the city and left the borough. But a larger reason is that ideals of fame current in the early 20th century have slipped from favor. The belief in transcendent glory is "a very Roman idea," says Leo Braudy, a professor at the University of Southern California and author of "The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History." The people who made it into the hall shaped history, like Roman generals and emperors, and were thought worthy of preservation in bronze. Today, the "great man" theory of history is itself archaic and "fame can be 100,000 Google hits," as Mr. Braudy says. Modern Americans seem much less willing to proclaim greatness in an all-encompassing sense.

grace not guilt, devotion not deprivation, expression not repression I'm not really sure what to say about "the environment" although I've committed to Blog Action Day today. I remember once an introduction to Zen comic book when I was becoming willing to be curious that maybe the world wasn't limited to my conceptions of it. In the comic, a swimming fish seeker ponders thoughtfully, "Um, so, what is thing they call the ocean?" Well, to be more accurate, and it may be harder to capture in a panel and thought balloons because of its Self-referential absurdity, it's more like the ocean asking, "What is the ocean?" We feel ourselves a mere drop in the ocean - distinct, disparate somehow from the ocean. Yet that very drop is the ocean, the waves, the raincloud arching toward the sky and back again. Nature and our nature: not two, not one, this. I don't believe guilt is going to save the world. I believe in grace. I don't believe deprivation is going to save the world. I believe in devotion. I don't believe repression is going to save the world. I believe in expression. The whole notion of "saving the world" is fraught with dilemmas too. But this post is getting  carried away as it is. So I'm cutting to the chase: Forget saving the world. Enjoy yourself and you cannot help but be re membered to your own nature which has always been inseparateable from Nature, from Universe, from Multiverse.

Diet and Fat: A Severe Case of Mistaken Consensus In 1988, the surgeon general, C. Everett Koop, proclaimed ice cream to a be public-health menace right up there with cigarettes. That was a ludicrous statement, as Gary Taubes demonstrates in his new book…The notion that fatty foods shorten your life began as a hypothesis based on dubious assumptions and data; when scientists tried to confirm it they failed repeatedly. The evidence against Häagen-Dazs was nothing like the evidence against Marlboros. It may seem bizarre that a surgeon general could go so wrong. After all, wasn’t it his job to express the scientific consensus? But that was the problem. Dr. Koop was expressing the consensus. He, like the architects of the federal “food pyramid” telling Americans what to eat, went wrong by listening to everyone else. He was caught in what social scientists call a cascade. We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong. If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong. Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better …

Int’l Affairs

Maseratis Show Asia Is 60-100 Years Behind U.S. Maseratis versus bicycles. It's not the most obvious lens through which to view Asia's boom. Yet to economist Ifzal Ali, few things better illustrate why the region's outlook should be viewed with skepticism. ``More people are riding in Maseratis, but most are still in the bicycle age,'' Ali, chief economist at the Asian Development Bank, said in an interview. ``It shows how Asia's rich are getting richer much faster than the poor are becoming better off. It's a bigger problem than people realize.'' Asia's widening rich-poor divide isn't something on which investors tend to dwell. The same is true of governments, which are too busy congratulating themselves for economic growth of 8 percent or faster even as the U.S. and Japan limp along. The problem isn't just festering, but worsening. ``There are two faces of Asia -- one is shimmering, the other is shivering,'' Ali said. ``Unless the problem is addressed, shivering Asia will totally eclipse the shimmering part.'' The risk is that Asia's shivering masses -- those left out in the cold as economies heat up -- cannibalize the future. Of developing Asia's 1.7 billion-person labor force, Ali says, at least 500 million are unemployed or underemployed (those working less than they would like to). Another 250 million will enter the workforce over the next decade. ``Asia needs to create over 750 million good jobs over the next 10 years, a challenge that is unmatched in mankind's history,'' Ali said. ``If your time horizon is the next two years, Asia looks fine, but if you are willing to look beyond that, there's far less reason for excitement.'' All this doesn't figure readily into bond yields or stock valuations. Poverty isn't the first thing currency traders think about when placing bets, nor do many central bankers ponder it seriously. Investors focus on how rising incomes will spur demand for cars, electronics, travel and other goods and services. Asians won't spend if growth doesn't reach them. Politics gets much of the blame. From Beijing to Jakarta, the desire to stay in power day to day takes precedence over long-term thinking. Spreading the benefits of growth would mean reducing corruption and increased spending on everything from infrastructure to job training. Politicians may be wary of increasing public debt.

Chinese Leaders Adapt to Sustain Power Chinese leaders are adapting their authoritarian rule to changing economic realities while toughening controls on political dissent. China is the only one of the world's 10 largest economies that isn't a multiparty democracy. As the Chinese Communist Party gathers this week for a key meeting, the leadership is fine-tuning its rule to make sure things stay that way. Over the past 30 years, the party's historic wager -- that delivering stability and economic growth would ensure acceptance of its authoritarian rule -- has largely paid off. But China is now a more complex nation, of homeowners and entrepreneurs protective of their new prosperity and in closer touch with the rest of the world. And a widening wealth gap, crumbling social services and environmental degradation have fueled public frustration, especially among the rural majority. The secretive group of about two dozen people that runs China, the Communist Party's Politburo, is responding by taking steps to make its rule more accountable to the public. It has also adopted a more-populist approach to government policy, expanding education and health-care programs while still pushing for fast economic growth. At the same time, the Politburo is toughening controls on outright political dissent. That strategy of gradual adaptation is on display this week at the party's 17th National Congress, which began Monday. The congress will ratify a platform of policies for the coming five years that emphasizes more-balanced economic growth and cautious institutional reform.

Germany Tries Food Handouts for the Poor For decades, Germany's welfare state kept the vast majority of people out of poverty. Even the unemployed could often live comfortably: The state paid them benefits worth over half of their last salary, indefinitely. That meant unemployed Germans were often better off than the lowest-paid workers in the U.S. Today, as in many other European countries, Germany's welfare state is in retreat. Europe's stuttering economic performance over the past decade has led governments to trim benefits, hoping to rein in public spending and push people who have become dependent on welfare back to work. For some, especially those without higher education, that means low-paid work or none at all. As the holes in Germany's social safety net grow bigger, more people are falling through. Germany gained poor residents when it absorbed the ex-communist East in 1990. But poverty is rising fast in the country's more economically developed West too. In 1999, 11% of Western Germany's population lived under the poverty line (defined as less than 60% of median household income). In 2005, that rose to 16%, according to the German Institute for Economic Research. In all of Germany, around 14 million people, or 17% of the population, live below the poverty line, which today corresponds to a monthly income of about $1,280 for a person living alone. Such poverty is far less acute than the destitution found in slums of developing countries or even in those of some U.S. cities. And in contrast to millions of poor Americans, all Germans have health insurance. Yet for Germans, the growing split in society is a jarring break with the postwar decades. Then, a "social market economy" spread affluence widely by combining industrial growth with a strong welfare state. "The poor always existed, but they used to be a narrower group of untrained workers with casual jobs such as cleaning," says Berthold Vogel of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Today, blue-collar workers are falling out of Germany's once-broad middle class, he says.

WEAPONS: The Perfect Storm The most powerful Internet weapon on the planet is hiding in plain sight, and no one can do anything about it. At least not yet, or not that anyone is talking about. The weapon in question is the Storm botnet. This is the largest botnet ever seen, and it is acting like something out of a science fiction story. The Storm network is now believed capable to shutting down any military or commercial site on the planet. Or, Storm could cripple hundreds of related sites temporarily. Or, Storm could do some major damage in ways that have not yet been experienced. There's never been anything quite like Storm.  The Storm computer virus had been spreading since early in the year, grabbing control of PCs around the world. By now, Storm had infected nearly 5-10 million computers with a secret program that turned those PCs into unwilling slaves (or "zombies") of those controlling this network (or botnet) of computers. Many of you may have noticed a lot of recent spam directing you to look at an online greeting card, or accompanied by pdf files. That was Storm, the largest single spam campaign ever. When you try to look at the PDF file, Storm secretly takes over your computer. But Storm tries very hard to hide itself. All it wants to do is use your Internet connection to send spam, or other types of malicious data.

Taxes in Developed Nations Reach 36% of Gross Domestic Product After dipping briefly in the first years of this decade, taxes are growing again around the world, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said yesterday.

Taxes in 2005 equaled the previous peak year of 2000, the organization said, when by one measure 36.2 percent of gross domestic product in 30 industrial countries, including the United States, went to taxes at all levels of government. The organization, which is based in Paris, said that when final figures are in for 2006, they will most likely show a new peak. The cost of government has risen by about 20 percent since 1975, when taxes accounted for less than 30 percent of the gross domestic product of the organization’s member countries. The increase in the ratio of taxes to gross domestic product since 2000 occurred despite cuts in tax rates in most of the countries, said Christopher Heady, head of tax policy for the organization. But even with reduced corporate tax rates, Mr. Heady said that worldwide corporate profits had risen so sharply since 2002 that the amount of money flowing into government coffers had increased. He attributed most of the long-term rise in taxes to expanded social insurance programs, like universal health care and pensions. Mr. Heady said two forces were at work in the rising proportion of taxes to economic activity. One was an upturn in world economic activity since 2002, and especially a sharp rise in corporate profits. The second factor, he said, was that while many countries cut tax rates, the cuts were made in a way that subjected more individual income to tax at the highest, albeit reduced, rates.

ME

Tangling With the Taliban NATO troops push into Afghanistan's high-threat areas. Afghan "ownership" is a nice idea and good P.R. Reality is another story. Governor Ezatullah struggles alone to run his district; the foreigners recently hired him a clerk, his first employee. Police lack regular salaries from Kabul, which irregularly sends cash down in bags, so live off bribes. As a result NATO troops, who claim to play only a supporting role, are forced to step in and provide basic services. The six British patrol bases near Sangin are "the equivalent of having a police station in your town," says one British officer. The troops clear irrigation ditches and get local bazaars up and running. "If we can't offer more than the enemy, we've lost from the start," says Helen Gates, the civilian deputy head of the "provincial reconstruction team" responsible for Sangin. "Our efforts to empower local government are in an embryonic stage." As it turned out, the experience that Gen. Craddock and his men got in Kosovo turned out to be very useful after 9/11. These post-conflict or, less P.C., post-modern colonial missions take time. The outside world is trying to construct -- not reconstruct -- a more or less functioning state. Yet time is a scarce resource given the attention spans and patience of people back home. Gen. Craddock pleads for it "to get the Afghan police, army, bureaucracy to stand up and get the job done themselves." "I don't think that we're losing," he said. "Question is, are we winning fast enough?"

AFGHANISTAN: Follow The Money While religion is a major factor in the Afghan unrest, the biggest cause of violence is money, or the lack of it. The booming heroin trade is doing more to keep the violence going, than anything else. This is the poorest country in Asia, and one of the most heavily armed. The Taliban arose in the 1990s to halt a civil war over money. The Taliban believed religion was more important. But that didn't last long, and the Taliban fell within two months of the U.S. attacking in 2001, with smart bombs and suitcases full of hundred dollar bills. Now it's the drug lords hauling around the fat stacks of hundreds. This cash enables the Taliban to hire gunmen (at several times what police and soldiers get paid). These lads try to protect poppy fields, and the labs where the poppies are refined into opium and heroin. The money also pays for the Taliban and al Qaeda suicide bomber teams. Technically, the Taliban are fighting for political power, but they cannot ignore what their paymasters want. But ultimately, control of Afghanistan goes to those with the most money. In ages past this was the tribes with the access to the most valuable resources. A thousand years ago, it was the trade route from China to Europe, that passed through. Today it's the heroin trade. Whoever controls that, or eliminates it, will control Afghanistan.

Politics and Policies

A Left-Handed Salute  Sociologist and radical activist Todd Gitlin, who has been a figure in the American Left since his Vietnam-era days in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), has made a serious effort to reflect on the failures of the American Left since the 1960s. The criticisms he puts forward here, which are inevitably self-criticisms in part, are unsparing and penetrating, made all the more memorable by his unacademic, direct, and often epigrammatic style. He sees a story rich with irony, in which it has been precisely the Left's most triumphant expressions in contemporary American life that led it into the spiritual wasteland in which it now finds itself. And for this lost condition, he believes, the Left has only itself to blame. Gitlin argues that the results may have benefited individual leftists, who have feathered their own nests quite nicely by fusing radicalism and academic careerism, but they have been unambiguously disastrous for the Left as a political force outside the academy. The Great Refusal turns out to have been little more than "a shout from an ivory tower," an advertisement of futility that was unable to conceal the despair, paralysis, and general contempt, including self-contempt, that lay behind it. The abandonment of patriotism, he says, was a sure recipe for political irrelevance: how can one hope to sway an electorate toward which one has all but declared one's comprehensive disdain? Now there is another reason. The events of 9/11 convinced him that the civilized world faces a deadly threat and that the exercise of American power in the world is not always an unmitigated evil—it may even be desirable and necessary.

Crisis on the Right  As conservatism rose first to prominence and then to power, and as the conservative counterestablishment became an establishment in its own right, I.S.I. plugged along, mostly in the background. Today, as conservatism staggers through its worst crisis in a generation (or two), I.S.I. is still there — now asking what went wrong. Nash identifies four braided but distinct strands of modern American conservatism. Traditionalists value continuity, order and hierarchy; libertarians prize personal freedom and social spontaneity; neoconservatives blend the New Deal’s idealistic spirit with conservatism’s muscular nationalism; and religious conservatives fight relativism, secularism and immorality. Given their differences, the surprise is that these four heads ever joined atop one political beast. Just as impressive, in a different way, is Anderson’s book, …. He concerns himself with politics in the Aristotelian sense: the study of how people best govern their societies and their souls. His 10 essays range in subject from judicial activism to the philosophy of John Rawls. The pieces stand independently and deserve to be savored that way, but common themes emerge. Like his intellectual mentor Alexis de Tocqueville, and unlike so many of today’s red-meat, red-state right-wingers, Anderson is no triumphalist tub-thumper for capitalism or democracy. Both, he recognizes, are far better than the alternatives; but both, unchecked, can set in motion cultural forces — anomie, dependency, ruthless egalitarianism — that corrode soul and society alike. Like Jouvenel, Anderson holds with a worldly-wise anti-utopianism whose lineage goes back to the very origins of conservative thought. If more of today’s conservatives had heeded its cautions, they might not have been so surprised to see Iraq’s unstructured liberation turn sour.

Income-Inequality Gap Widens Widening Gap: The wealthiest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and highlighting the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers. Behind the Numbers: Scholars attribute rising inequality to several factors, including technological change that favors those with more skills, and globalization and advances in communications that enlarge the rewards available to "superstar" performers whether in business, sports or ntertainment. Political Fallout: The data pose a potential challenge for President Bush and the Republican presidential field. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. Democrats may use the data to exploit middle-class angst about stagnant wages. The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers. The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.The bottom 50% earned 12.8% of all income, down from 13.4% in 2004 and a bit less than their 13% share in 2000.The IRS data, based on a large sample of tax returns, are for "adjusted gross income," which is income after some deductions, such as for alimony and contributions to individual retirement accounts. While dated, many scholars prefer it to timelier data from other agencies because it provides details of the very richest -- for example, the top 0.1% and the top 1%, not just the top 10% -- and includes capital gains, an important, though volatile, source of income for the affluent.The IRS data go back only to 1986, but academic research suggests the rich last had this high a share of total income in the 1920s.

·         Econ Blog: The Two Sides of Tax Cuts, Inequality's Roots: Wall Street, Not Board Rooms, Tax Shares for Rich and Poor

Life is harder now, experts say Why do so many middle class Americans with so much stuff say they feel so squeezed? If they are dogged by debt, isn’t it their own fault? Perhaps, some experts say, things are not as they appear. Bankruptcy law expert and Harvard University Professor Elizabeth Warren spent a lot of time crunching consumer spending numbers for her popular books, "The Fragile Middle Class” and “The Two-Income Trap.” In both, she makes this point: Despite all those $200 sneakers you hear about and the long lines at Starbucks, consumers are actually spending less of their income — much less — on discretionary items like clothing, entertainment and food than their parents did. In fact, after taking care of essentials like housing and health care, today’s middle class has about half as much spending money as their parents did in the early 1970s, Warren says. The basics, according to Warren, now take up close to three-fourths of every family's spending power (it was about 50 percent in 1973), leaving precious little left over at the end of the month — and leaving many families with no cushion in case of a job loss or health crisis. Warren's theories fly in the face of conventional wisdom and those crowded malls. But the premise is simple: Even though household incomes have risen about 75 percent from 1970, most of that is the result of a second earner — generally a woman — joining the work force. And that added income has been swallowed by rising fixed expenses, such as child care and housing costs, Warren argues. The average family pays at least twice as much for housing compared to its counterpart in the 1970s, Warren says, and in some competitive areas with good schools, housing costs have risen by as much as 600 percent.

• Who or what is the middle class?
• How much of my wages goes to health care?
• Life is harder now, experts say
• How you can cope with ‘middle-class crunch’
• Where a home of their own is an elusive dream
• A family banks on its human capital
• Tourist mecca squeezes the middle
• Tracking the middle class' missing cash
• Why money doesn't equal happiness
• Gut Check America Section Front

Opinion: Recession isn't an 'if' but a 'when' Housing prices are heading lower. Stock prices are heading down. And it's all systems go for a downturn in the U.S. economy, no matter what the bulls say. As I think about recent developments on Wall Street, I am struck by the absurdity of the current mentality. By that I mean: The latest run in the stock market, which peaked as the structured-credit problems made themselves known, had been powered by leveraged-buyout madness, which itself had been powered by lunacy in various forms of structured credit. What I expect to unfold is a recession and severe weakness in the equity market. To get a sense of the timing, I was therefore eager to hear the comments of noted speakers last week at a New York conference held by Jim Grant of Grant's Interest Rate Observer. To my surprise, it seemed most of them were not too terribly concerned about the stock market or the economy.

Do you think you're better off than your middle-class counterparts in the early-1970s?   

Yes. I have a house full of gadgets they could only dream of.         17%

About the same. I spend less on some things and more on others. 21%

Not even close. I'm busting my hump and barely hanging on.         62%

 
Plans for Coal Power Plants Scrapped At least 16 coal-fired power plant proposals nationwide have been scrapped in recent months and more than three dozen have been delayed as utilities face increasing pressure due to concerns over global warming and rising construction costs. The slow pace of new plant construction reflects a dramatic change in fortune for a fuel source that just a few years ago was poised for a major resurgence. Combined, the canceled and delayed projects represent enough electricity to power approximately 20 million homes. The U.S. Department of Energy's latest tally of pending coal plants, released last week, shows eight projects totaling 7,000 megawatts have been canceled since May. That's besides the cancellation earlier this year of eight plants in Texas totaling 6,864 megawatts. Utilities have also pushed back construction on another 32,000 megawatts worth of projects, according to the Energy Department report.

Science and Culture

Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That Changed the World, 1940-1941 Between October 3, 1935, when the armies of Italy invaded Abyssinia, and May 10, 1940, when German troops entered the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, war after war rocked the world. And yet all these bloody conflicts did not amount to a world war. That, as Ian Kershaw shows in this splendid and thought-provoking book, came as a result of decisions made in London, Berlin, Tokyo, Rome, Moscow, and Washington between May 1940 and fall 1941. It was then that the many local conflicts expanded and merged into a single gigantic struggle between, in the one camp, Nazi Germany, its minor European allies, and the Japanese Empire, and, in the other camp, much of the rest of the world. That the great strategic and political decisions taken in 1940 and 1941 assured the victory of the Great Allied Powers testifies to the wisdom of Churchill and Roosevelt as well as to the supreme viability of the democratic systems over which they presided. The decisions also exposed the fatal inefficiency of militaristic, authoritarian Japan and tyrannical, fanatical Germany. Still, ultimate success in this greatest of all wars was not a democratic monopoly: the country that contributed most to the defeat of Hitler was not the United States or Great Britain but the Soviet Union, a state based on unbridled terror, whose murderous leader invariably made the wrong decisions in the years 1940-1941.

Key Human Traits Tied to Shellfish Remains Almost from the start, it seems, humans headed for the shore. But this was no holiday for them. More than likely, it was a matter of survival at a perilous time of climate change in Africa 164,000 years ago. By then Homo sapiens had developed a taste for shellfish — much earlier than previously thought, scientists report in today’s issue of the journal Nature — as the species was adapting to life in caves on the craggy coast of southern Africa. Exploring a cave in a steep cliff overlooking the ocean, an international team of scientists found deposits of shellfish remains, hearths, small stone blades and fragments of hematite, some of which, the scientists believe, had been ground for use as the coloring agent red ochre that sometimes had symbolic meaning. Previous research had indicated that human ancestors had for ages depended solely on terrestrial plants and animals. Both fossil and genetic data show that modern humans evolved 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, but archaeological evidence for the emergence of modern behavior in technology, creativity, symbolic thinking and lifestyles is sparse. But six years ago, at Blombos Cave, near Pinnacle Point, archaeologists uncovered 77,000-year-old tools along with pigments and engraved stones suggesting symbolic behavior, a sign of early creativity. Now, at the Pinnacle Point cave site, the shellfish remains reveal another important innovation. Other coastal populations had been found exploiting marine resources as early as 125,000 years ago. Neanderthals were cooking shellfish in Italy about 110,000 years ago.

 This Is Your Brain on Music  But what is music? Why does it move us so? What does it have to do with memory or emotion or language? Was music a precursor or antecedent of language? Are we wired for it, or is it completely socially acquired? Those subjects and more are the focus of This Is Your Brain on Music. Levitin points out that we are all musical experts. Even if we don't know the names of scales and modes, we can tell them apart. Regular people can identify out-of-tune notes just as well as professional musicians. The first section of This Is Your Brain on Music deals with defining what music is, and how it differs from generic noise. Melody, contour, and rhythm all get their just due. The middle section (the largest part of the book) deals with what parts of our brain are involved with what parts of analyzing music. This was for me the most fascinating part of the book; we know a lot more about brain function than when I took a course in neural mechanisms of behavior almost twenty years ago. One interesting philosophical point that Levitin raises concerns the old adage about a tree falling in a forest. Levitin argues that sound only exists inside our minds, as does color. Sure, out there in the world there are air molecules vibrating at different frequencies, and photons of different wavelengths of light. But the color blue is simply a quality our brains assign to light of particular wavelengths; there is nothing actually "blue" about electromagnetic radiation of 455-490 nm. Likewise, sound is a quality constructed in our minds; a way our brain interprets mechanical vibrations.

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Lessons from the Great Depression As we enter an era of growing economic uncertainty, we could learn a lot from the last American generation to truly experience financial hardship. When people my age -- I'm 57 -- or younger bandy about worries of a coming recession or even a depression, and I've heard a lot of that talk lately, I think we're playing parlor games. We never lived through the Great Depression. Most of us have never even had an emotionally honest conversation with someone who did. I don't think we've got the foggiest idea what we're talking about when we worry about a global crash or glibly recommend stockpiling food and ammo. Like children who have grown up in secure homes, we can indulge in a love for scary stories because, in our heart of hearts, we know the monsters will never get us. What we need is an emotional understanding of how it felt to live with uncertainty and still get on with life, and still trust that hard work had a point and still believe that the future will be a time worth living in. I think the experience of a generation that faced a greater degree of uncertainty can teach us something about how to face our own economic uncertainty. Without that understanding, I think we're like the children so used to the sunlight that we tremble in scared delight at a passing cloud and yet fail to acknowledge the real power of the dark tornado on the horizon. I'd like to have known this history directly from people who lived it. I think I'd have a better appreciation for how precious economic security is. I'd better understand that fear about the future can be justified and perfectly normal. And I'd know how these people faced up to their fears and kept faith in their vision of a better future in times much more uncertain than our own.

Special & General

 The Hamiltonian Ground Alexander Hamilton was an ambitious young striver and created an economy where people like him could rise and succeed. He used government to rouse the energies of the merchant class, to widen the circle of property owners and to dissolve the constraints on commerce and mobility. Yet at the Republican economic debate in Michigan this week, there was no talk of that. The candidates declared their fealty to general principles: free trade, lower taxes and reduced spending. They talked a lot about the line-item veto and the Chinese currency. But there was almost nothing that touched concretely on the lives of the ambitious working-class parents who are the backbone of the G.O.P. Sometimes the candidates seemed more concerned with massaging the pleasure buttons of the Club for Growth than addressing the real concerns of the middle class. They talked far more about cutting corporate taxes, for example, than about a child tax credit for struggling families. At other times, they sounded as if they were running for a ceremonial post. In this way, the Republican Party has abandoned the Hamiltonian ground. It has lost intimate contact with the working-class dreamer who longs to make good. Instead this ground is being seized by a Democrat. Over the past few months, Hillary Clinton has issued a string of specific policy programs aimed directly at members of the aspiring middle class.

Nature: An Economic History  From humans to hermit crabs to deep water plankton, all living things compete for locally limiting resources. This universal truth unites three bodies of thought--economics, evolution, and history--that have developed largely in mutual isolation. Here, Geerat Vermeij undertakes a groundbreaking and provocative exploration of the facts and theories of biology, economics, and geology to show how processes common to all economic systems--competition, cooperation, adaptation, and feedback--govern evolution as surely as they do the human economy, and how historical patterns in both human and nonhuman evolution follow from this principle. Using a wealth of examples of evolutionary innovations, Vermeij argues that evolution and economics are one. Powerful consumers and producers exercise disproportionate controls on the characteristics, activities, and distribution of all life forms. Competition-driven demand by consumers, when coupled with supply-side conditions permitting economic growth, leads to adaptation and escalation among organisms. Although disruptions in production halt or reverse these processes temporarily, they amplify escalation in the long run to produce trends in all economic systems toward greater power, higher production rates, and a wider reach for economic systems and their strongest members.

Int’l Affairs

Zoellick Charts Inclusive Course at World Bank The World Bank's new president, Robert Zoellick, has put an end to a staff insurrection at the bank by styling himself as the opposite of his predecessor, Paul Wolfowitz, a former Pentagon official. Three months on the job, he has become the un-Wolfowitz. Where Mr. Wolfowitz relied on a few recruits from the Bush administration, Mr. Zoellick hasn't hired a single one. In short, Mr. Zoellick proposes to use free trade to try to spur economic growth and social cohesion in Arab nations, to re-energize efforts to rebuild impoverished nations emerging from civil wars and to boost environmental programs and regional development in China, India, Brazil and other fast-growing developing nations. His mantra: "Inclusive and sustainable globalization." Mr. Zoellick says he plans to focus more on the Arab world and encourage the kinds of reformers he met when negotiating free-trade pacts with Oman, Bahrain and Morocco and pushing for stronger trade ties among Egypt, Israel and Jordan. Boosting employment is a huge challenge in the Middle East, where the birth rate is high and economic growth isn't. Mr. Zoellick believes that focusing on labor-intensive export industries, like textiles, could help. His theory: The bank can help "create societal cohesion by giving people the chance to have opportunity and development."

Clear-Eyed Optimists I'm old enough to recall the days in the late 1960s when people wore those trendy buttons that read: "Stop the Planet I Want to Get Off." So imagine how shocked I was to learn, officially, that we're not doomed after all. A new United Nations report called "State of the Future" concludes: "People around the world are becoming healthier, wealthier, better educated, more peaceful, more connected, and they are living longer." But here they are: World-wide illiteracy rates have fallen by half since 1970 and now stand at an all-time low of 18%. More people live in free countries than ever before. The average human being today will live 50% longer in 2025 than one born in 1955. To what do we owe this improvement? Capitalism, according to the U.N. Free trade is rightly recognized as the engine of global prosperity in recent years. In 1981, 40% of the world's population lived on less than $1 a day. Now that percentage is only 25%, adjusted for inflation. And at current rates of growth, "world poverty will be cut in half between 2000 and 2015" -- which is arguably one of the greatest triumphs in human history

Hu Invokes Confucius to Appease China's Masses, Guard Communism's Survival The Confucian principles of filial piety and respect for social order now inform Hu's strategy for avoiding upheaval in the countryside, where China's relentless pursuit of economic growth has polluted the environment, corrupted local officials and left a quarter of the nation's people in poverty. Hu, the first Chinese leader in six decades who didn't participate in Mao's revolution, is searching for a new national myth after the Communist ideas that once held China together unraveled. He will try to impose his ``Harmonious Society'' agenda at next week's party congress in Beijing. If he fails, the army is waiting to quell protests that may threaten the regime. ```Harmonious Society' is an effort to ensure the survival of the Communist Party,'' said Laurence Brahm, author of ``China's Century: The Awakening of the Next Economic Powerhouse'' (Wiley 2001). ``Communist ideology is dead and there is a huge spiritual vacuum. Hu is trying to fill the void by returning the party to China's cultural values and beliefs.''

Look Who’s Mr. Fixit for a Fraught Age GEORGE W. BUSH, embattled at home, tied down in Iraq and watching the clock run out on his presidency, has found a diplomatic crutch in an unlikely place: China. Last week’s agreement by North Korea to disable its nuclear facilities — announced in Beijing, tellingly — showed just how much Mr. Bush’s foreign policy has come to rely, for better or worse, on the help of the Chinese. They might just be the administration’s best hope for peacefully resolving the next big crisis on the horizon, Iran’s refusal to give up the right to enrich uranium. Or so some in the administration are hoping. Mr. Bush, who spent most of his presidency with a swaggering, go-it-alone style, has increasingly turned to China on problem after problem: from North Korea to Darfur to the repression of pro-democracy demonstrators in Myanmar. Could China bring Iran around in a similar way? The two confrontations are different in myriad ways, but there are some signs that the answers could be yes. Experts also say China needs Iranian gas and oil for its economic growth — and while this has made it skittish about imposing tough sanctions, it also makes China eager to avert a war in the Persian Gulf that would disrupt energy supplies. Still, it would be wishful thinking to call China an ally or even a partner, given its historical and political divisions with the United States. China has proved unwilling to go along with much of what the Bush administration has asked of it, especially when it comes to punishing authoritarian regimes. On that score, China’s one-party rulers have always been cautious, calling such measures interference in the internal affairs of others.

MEXICO: Leftist Rebels on a Rampage The government now believes the Popular Revolutionary Army (Ejercito Popular Revolucionario, or EPR) has decided to  target the oil industry. Determining "why" they have targeted it is another problem. On one hand, there is  the so-called "Chavez conspiracy theory". There are many people, particularly drug cartelistas and various leftist organizations who would love to "sidetrack" Felipe Calderon's government. Statistics Say It Is War

ME

NATO Staggers in Afghanistan as Dutch, Canadians Want Out, No One Wants In NATO's campaign in Afghanistan is under threat from member countries on the front lines clamoring to get out and others on the sidelines refusing to go in. With military casualties on the increase this year, the Netherlands and Canada are weighing full or partial pullouts within the next 18 months. Meanwhile, leaders in Germany, France, Spain and Italy, mindful of polls showing a majority of Europeans oppose the conflict, are resisting calls to send troops to relieve them. The European reluctance to fight is making it harder for the 41,000-strong force to consolidate gains against the Taliban, which is battling on in the rugged terrain of southern Afghanistan six years after the U.S. drove it from power in response to the Sept. 11 attacks. It is also endangering the unity of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, raising the stakes for a meeting of defense ministers later this month. ``If NATO can't succeed with the task that it's been given, it's had it, it's lost all credibility,'' says Frank Cook, 71, a U.K. Labour member of Parliament who toured the war zone with allied lawmakers last month. ``Certain NATO members haven't fulfilled their NATO commitment.''

LEADERSHIP: Scarce Iraqi Sergeants Urgently Sought The biggest leadership problem the Iraqi military has is with NCOs (noncommissioned officers, or sergeants). In the Saddam era force, the Soviet style of leadership was used. That is, sergeants had much less authority and responsibility than they do in Western forces. The new Iraqi army was built on the Western model, and for that to work, NCOs were needed. During World War II, as Western armies expanded enormously and rapidly (the U.S. Army went from 150,000 to over nine million in four years). This worked because the United States had employed capable and responsible NCOs for over a century. It was part of the culture. Every kid had at least a vague idea of what sergeants did, and it was not difficult to create several million new corporals and sergeants in four years. Iraq did not have this tradition, so U.S. and NATO trainers had to start from scratch. After four years of effort

Politics and Policies

At an Army School for Officers, Blunt Talk About Iraq Fort Leavenworth, Kan., the intellectual center of the U.S. Army, has become a front line in the military’s soul-searching over Iraq. As the war grinds through its fifth year, Fort Leavenworth has become a front line in the military’s tension and soul-searching over Iraq. Here at the base on the bluffs above the Missouri River, once a frontier outpost that was a starting point for the Oregon Trail, rising young officers are on a different journey — an outspoken re-examination of their role in Iraq. Discussions between a New York Times reporter and dozens of young majors in five Leavenworth classrooms over two days — all unusual for their frankness in an Army that has traditionally presented a facade of solidarity to the outside world — showed a divide in opinion. Officers were split over whether Mr. Rumsfeld, the military leaders or both deserved blame for what they said were the major errors in the war: sending in a small invasion force and failing to plan properly for the occupation. But the consensus was that not even after Vietnam was the Army’s internal criticism as harsh or the second-guessing so painful, and that airing the arguments on the record, as sanctioned by Leavenworth’s senior commanders, was part of a concerted effort to force change.

Managing Up, Down and Sideways A historical view of the peculiarly circumscribed world of a White House adviser illuminates the political art of holding your tongue while thinking your piece. AH, the heartache of the presidential adviser. In 1966, White House aides found themselves precariously perched between apprehension of looming disaster in Vietnam and the need for candor with their boss, President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Disaster seemed a safer choice. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara was a logical candidate to speak the truth to his boss. Mr. McNamara told the historian and Kennedy confidant Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith in January over dinner and drinks that he regarded a military solution as impossible, according to Mr. Schlesinger’s diaries, which have recently been published as “Journals: 1952-2000.” A sensible objective, Mr. McNamara told them, would be “withdrawal with honor.” Seven months later, the defense secretary was still publicly urging a widening of the war.

For a Trusty Voting Bloc, a Faith Shaken AFTER the 2004 elections, religious conservatives were riding high. Newly anointed by pundits as “values voters” — a more flattering label than “religious right” — they claimed credit for propelling George W. Bush to two terms in the White House. Even in wartime, they had managed to fixate the nation on their pet issues: opposition to abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. Now with the 2008 race taking shape, religious conservatives say they sense they have taken a tumble. Their issues are no longer at the forefront, and their leaders have failed so far to coalesce around a candidate, as they did around Mr. Bush and Ronald Reagan. What unites them right now is their dismay — even panic — at the idea of Rudolph W. Giuliani as the Republican nominee, because of his support for abortion rights and gay rights, as well as what they regard as a troubling history of marital infidelity. But what to do about it is where they again diverge, with some religious conservatives last week threatening to bolt to a third party if Mr. Giuliani gets the nomination, and others arguing that this is the sure road to defeat.

Science and Culture

How Baboons Think (Yes, Think) Reading a baboon’s mind affords an excellent grasp of the dynamics of baboon society. But more than that, it bears on the evolution of the human mind and the nature of human existence. As Darwin jotted down in a notebook of 1838, “He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” Their conclusion, based on many painstaking experiments, is that baboons’ minds are specialized for social interaction, for understanding the structure of their complex society and for navigating their way within it. The shaper of a baboon’s mind is natural selection. Those with the best social skills leave the most offspring. Baboon society revolves around mother-daughter lines of descent. Eight or nine matrilines are in a troop, each with a rank order. This hierarchy can remain stable for generations. By contrast, the male hierarchy, which consists mostly of baboons born in other troops, is always changing as males fight among themselves and with new arrivals. Rank among female baboons is hereditary, with a daughter assuming her mother’s rank. For female baboons, another constant worry besides predation is infanticide. Their babies are put in peril at each of the frequent upheavals in the male hierarchy. The reason is that new alpha males enjoy brief reigns, seven to eight months on average, and find at first that the droits de seigneur they had anticipated are distinctly unpromising. Most of the females are not sexually receptive because they are pregnant or nurturing unweaned children. An unpleasant fact of baboon life is that the alpha male can make mothers re-enter their reproductive cycles, and boost his prospects of fatherhood, by killing their infants. The mothers can secure some protection for their babies by forming close bonds with other females and with male friends, particularly those who were alpha when their children were conceived and who may be the father. Still, more than half of all deaths among baby baboons are from infanticide. So important are these social skills that it is females with the best social networks, not those most senior in the hierarchy, who leave the most offspring.

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The Secrets of Intangible Wealth For once the World Bank says something smart about the real causes of prosperity. Two years ago the World Bank's environmental economics department set out to assess the relative contributions of various kinds of capital to economic development. Its study, "Where is the Wealth of Nations?: Measuring Capital for the 21st Century," began by defining natural capital as the sum of nonrenewable resources (including oil, natural gas, coal and mineral resources), cropland, pasture land, forested areas and protected areas. Produced, or built, capital is what many of us think of when we think of capital: the sum of machinery, equipment, and structures (including infrastructure) and urban land. But once the value of all these are added up, the economists found something big was still missing: the vast majority of world's wealth! If one simply adds up the current value of a country's natural resources and produced, or built, capital, there's no way that can account for that country's level of income.The rest is the result of "intangible" factors -- such as the trust among people in a society, an efficient judicial system, clear property rights and effective government. All this intangible capital also boosts the productivity of labor and results in higher total wealth. In fact, the World Bank finds, "Human capital and the value of institutions (as measured by rule of law) constitute the largest share of wealth in virtually all countries." Once one takes into account all of the world's natural resources and produced capital, 80% of the wealth of rich countries and 60% of the wealth of poor countries is of this intangible type. The bottom line: "Rich countries are largely rich because of the skills of their populations and the quality of the institutions supporting economic activity."

World Bank Study on Intangible Wealth and a related site on Doing Business.

Special & General

Why Democracy? "In October 2007, ten one-hour films focused on contemporary democracy will be broadcast in the world's largest ever factual media event. More than 40 broadcasters on all continents are participating, with an estimated audience of 300 million viewers. Each of the broadcasters - an A-Z which includes everyone from Al Arabiya to ZDF - will be producing a locally-based seasons of film, radio, debate and discussion to tie in with the global broadcast of the Why Democracy? films."

Values & Attitudes

The Mind and the Moment: Consider this mental state: Acceptance of what has happened combined with confidence about what will happen. That's the fascinating lessons on "conserving concentration" from tennis great Roger Federer that is very applicable to investors and traders. I got another sense, however: a sense that he was conserving focus.  Fed went through all his subsidiary responsibilities as the President of Tennis (as Steve Tignor calls him) without concentrating on anything, or at least on as few things as possible.  Concentration takes mental energy, as anyone who has fought off five break points before shanking a ball on the sixth knows.  And whenever I saw Federer on the grounds, he seemed to be using as little of it as possible.  Practicing with Nicolas Kiefer on Ashe a few days before the tournament, he mostly just messed around.  He would hit a few familiar Federer shots, the heavy forehand, the penetrating slice, then shank a ball and grin, or yell.  Either way, he wasn't really concentrating all that hard.  I think this "conservationist" ethic even extended to the matches.  Typically, only the loss of a set would elicit from Federer the kind of breathtaking play we saw against John Isner and Feliciano Lopez.  In the Roddick match, with Roddick playing as well as he ever has, Fed seemed to have reduced the number of points on which he was truly dialed in to just one per set: a crosscourt backhand pass in the first tiebreaker, and that reflex backhand return in the other.  It was as casual a dismissal of a opponent in top form as I've seen. 

Our Moral Footprint Larger changes, however, could have unforeseeable effects within the global ecosystem. In that case, we would have to ask ourselves whether human life would be possible. Because so much uncertainty still reigns, a great deal of humility and circumspection is called for. We can’t endlessly fool ourselves that nothing is wrong and that we can go on cheerfully pursuing our wasteful lifestyles, ignoring the climate threats and postponing a solution. Maybe there will be no major catastrophe in the coming years or decades. Who knows? But that doesn’t relieve us of responsibility toward future generations. Whenever I reflect on the problems of today’s world, whether they concern the economy, society, culture, security, ecology or civilization in general, I always end up confronting the moral question: what action is responsible or acceptable? The moral order, our conscience and human rights — these are the most important issues at the beginning of the third millennium.  We must return again and again to the roots of human existence and consider our prospects in centuries to come. We must analyze everything open-mindedly, soberly, unideologically and unobsessively, and project our knowledge into practical policies.

A Short Course in Thinking About Thinking Take a master class with Daniel Kahneman. Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman recently gave a two day masterclass on his work. It's now been made available on Edge as transcripts and video clips.Kahneman has done a huge amount of work on cognitive biases - the quirks of mind that make us deviate from rationality, sometimes in quite surprising and interesting ways. For example, with his colleague Amos Tversky, he discovered the availability heuristic, which is the process by which we tend to judge an event as more likely to happen in the future the more easily it can be brought to mind. This is why we vastly overestimate the chances of vividly spectacular but unlikely things like terrorism, but underestimate the mundane but consistently lethal things like driving.Kahneman has been involved in identifying many of these sorts of biases, and cleverly, applying them to economic decision making to inform economic models of financial behaviour. As a result, experimental psychology is now a key part of economics to understand how people actually behave as opposed to earlier models which assumed that people will always act more-or-less rationally to maximise their profits. The Edge 'masterclass' is quite a comprehensive guide to his work and covers work which has been influential in many areas of psychology.

Int’l Affairs

Quick & Dirty Guide to World Affairs: the single best goto site for tracking short, pithy, insightful and realistic statii and assessments of world affairs is StrategyPage.com. They were prescient in detailing internal details in Iraq literally years before the MSM or any other source I’ve been able to find. And if you want to know what’s really going on in odd corners of the world (Somalia, North Korea, et.al.) reviewing their frequent short statii updates is worth your time. Three recent short surveys are worthwhile in their own right and make that point exceptionally well.

• SOMALIA: Only America Feeds The Violence
• KOREA: The Firing Squad Game
• CHINA: Cyber War Blues, Chinese Brass Are Shaken and Stirred

War and Peace With Cultural Anthropologists The NSCC and other organizations began a "mosaic" peacemaking strategy among warring southern tribes. When appropriate, the NSCC used tribal peacemaking and reconciliation rituals to coax leaders into negotiating or help amenable leaders draw antagonized members of their tribe into the peace process. The ceremonial killing of a bull before a reconciliation forum where tribesmen share bitter examples of suffering is a compelling anecdote described in the handbook. Efforts like the NSCC's helped make Sudan's 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement a reality. A number of southern Sudanese leaders advocate a similar approach in Darfur. The NSCC strategy is an example of using "cultural contexts" or "cultural anthropological approaches" to achieve a political goal: ending a thicket of small wars with the ultimate goal of ending a large one. It also illustrates that a savvy understanding of local cultural traditions is not a new tool in the politics of war and peace.

What Makes a Monk Mad Myanmar has as many clerics as soldiers. If they march, it matters.AS they marched through the streets of Myanmar’s cities last week leading the biggest antigovernment protests in two decades, some barefoot monks held their begging bowls before them. But instead of asking for their daily donations of food, they held the bowls upside down, the black lacquer surfaces reflecting the light. It was a shocking image in the devoutly Buddhist nation. The monks were refusing to receive alms from the military rulers and their families — effectively excommunicating them from the religion that is at the core of Burmese culture. That gesture is a key to understanding the power of the rebellion that shook Myanmar last week. The country — the former Burma — has roughly as many monks as soldiers. The military rules by force, but the monks retain ultimate moral authority. The lowliest soldier depends on them for spiritual approval, and even the highest generals have felt a need to honor the clerical establishment. They claim to rule in its name. Begging is a ritual that expresses a profound bond between the ordinary Buddhist and the monk. The transition in leadership in the protests — from militant former students to activist monks — was well planned, he said, through secret meetings among young men sharing similar grievances and aspirations for their country. For the most part, it was not the elders who backed the protests. Over the years, the junta has worked to co-opt the Buddhist hierarchy, placing chosen men in key positions just as they have done in every other institution, angering and alienating the younger monks. After the military clampdown on the monasteries last week, the streets of Yangon were mostly empty of monks. But their gesture of rejection of the junta, and the junta’s violent response, had changed the dynamics of Burmese society in ways that had only begun to play out. The junta’s action “shows how desperate they are,” Ms. Jordt said. “It shows that they are willing to do anything at this point in terms of violence. Once you’ve thrown your lot in against the monks, I think it will be impossible for the regime to go back to normal daily legitimacy.”

Putin Signals Perpetual Power With Shift to Prime Minister From President Russian President Vladimir Putin unveiled a plan to adhere to the form of a democratic succession while dispensing with the substance. Putin, 54, signaled his intention to remain in charge after the end of his presidential term in March by announcing his availability to lead the pro-Kremlin United Russia party in parliamentary elections in December. The president, barred by the constitution from seeking a third consecutive term, said it would be ``quite realistic'' for him to become prime minister instead. With popularity ratings exceeding 80 percent in polls, Putin is likely to emerge from the parliamentary elections with enough support to push through constitutional changes to strengthen the role of prime minister if he chooses, analysts said.

Putin plan: more democratic? Mr. Putin, who has repeatedly pledged to leave office when his second term expires next March, this week hinted that he may seek to become prime minister after stepping down as president. Analysts say his immense popularity and his loyal political base would enable him to wield significant power in that post, while critics suggest he plans to modify the Constitution to weaken the presidency – effectively keeping his current role while switching titles. Ironically, the net effect of such changes may be to democratize Russia's top-heavy political system and give parliament more say than it has had under either former President Boris Yeltsin or his chosen successor – Putin. Under the current setup, the president nominates the prime minister and can dissolve the lower house of parliament, the State Duma, if it refuses to confirm his choice. If Putin claims the top government job as leader of the majority party in parliament, United Russia, this could create checks and balances where none have previously existed. Putin paved the way for such a move this week by announcing he would run on United Russia's ticket in the December parliamentary elections. Readings for the Backstory: To Fathom Putin, Think Like a Russian, The Accidental Autocrat (***)

Kremlin Extends Reach With New State Firms The Kremlin has begun creating a series of state corporations in sectors that include shipbuilding and atomic energy, increasing the government's role in the economy and sparking criticism that it is turning back to Soviet-style industrial policies. In recent weeks, plans to forge state conglomerates in arms trading, road building, the nuclear industry, drug manufacturing and the fishing industry have either been introduced as draft laws in Parliament or publicly discussed by senior government officials. Officials are selling the concept as a rapid way to diversify the economy from its dependence on exports of natural resources. Backers argue that the experience of the 1990s, when many companies were privatized but failed to thrive, shows that the government needs to take a greater role.

ME

Ahmadinejad Dinner's Main Course Is All Image In the flesh, Ahmadinejad is less powerful and comes across as far more rational than is his reputation. It is less what he says than how he says it that intrigues during the long dinner among some 50 scholars and journalists around a single, large table at New York's Intercontinental Hotel. Ahmadinejad throughout is self-possessed, calm, measured, articulate and sometimes even a bit humorous, ready to go on even longer when our Iranian hosts call a close. Through simultaneous translation, Ahmadinejad uses the first hour to take some 23 questions and comments (he stresses his preference for hearing others' opinions). He scribbles as he listens, then responds, each time repeating the interlocutor's name. Before his responses, however, the president gives what he calls theoretical context with a half-hour statement on the relationship between God and man. Which brings me to reflect on his power in Iran, as the carefully written speech is less for us than it is for a home audience that would see him bringing truth to heathens. When the question is asked who had what power in Iran, he ducks it. Yet his entire trip to the U.S. serves to shore up his domestic position, which has been weakened by poor economic performance. I leave wondering whether Ahmadinejad is the world's most dangerous leader -- or just the most hyped. But is he deranged? If so, like a fox.

(***) Palestinians Lose Another War For the first time, there was a notable lack of  Palestinians  holding  public celebrations for the anniversary of the start of their September, 2000 "intifada" uprising. The violence began because a peace deal with Israel had caused a split within the Palestinian community. Yasser Arafat, head of the Fatah party, and chief Palestinian leader since the 1960s, was being criticized by more extreme factions. Yasser thought that a little terrorism against Israel would improve his standing with Palestinian militants, and get the Israelis to sweeten the pot. It didn't work.

Politics and Policies

GOP Is Losing Grip on Core Business Vote Republicans are losing their lock as the party of business as deficit hawks defect and social issues take on greater prominence. The Republican Party, known since the late 19th century as the party of business, is losing its lock on that title. New evidence suggests a potentially historic shift in the Republican Party's identity -- what strategists call its "brand." The votes of many disgruntled fiscal conservatives and other lapsed Republicans are now up for grabs, which could alter U.S. politics in the 2008 elections and beyond. Some business leaders are drifting away from the party because of the war in Iraq, the growing federal debt and a conservative social agenda they don't share. In manufacturing sectors such as the auto industry, some Republicans want direct government help with soaring health-care costs, which Republicans in Washington have been reluctant to provide. And some business people want more government action on global warming, arguing that a bolder plan is not only inevitable, but could spur new industries. Already, economic conservatives who favor balanced federal budgets have become a much smaller part of the party's base. That's partly because other groups, especially social conservatives, have grown more dominant. But it's also the result of defections by other fiscal conservatives angered by the growth of government spending during the six years that Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress.

Republicans Grow Skeptical on Free Trade By a nearly two-to-one margin, Republican voters believe free trade is bad for the U.S. economy, a shift in opinion that mirrors Democratic views and suggests trade deals could face high hurdles under a new president. The sign of broadening resistance to globalization came in a new Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll that showed a fraying of Republican Party orthodoxy on the economy. While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care. Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports. That represents a challenge for Republican candidates who generally echo Mr. Bush's calls for continued trade expansion, and reflects a substantial shift in sentiment from eight years ago.

Obama's Curious Economic Adviser Goolsbee graduated from Yale and earned his doctorate from MIT before coming to the University of Chicago's business school… Is Goolsbee dismayed about widening income inequality? Yes, but with a nuanced understanding. The stagnation of middle- and working-class incomes, and the anxiety this has generated, is, he says, a most pressing problem, but policymakers must be mindful about trying to address its root cause, which Goolsbee says is "radically increased returns to skill." In 1980, people with college degrees made on average 30 percent more than those with only high school diplomas. That disparity has widened to 70 percent. In the same year, the average earnings of people with advanced degrees were 50 percent more than those with only high school diplomas; today it is more than 100 percent. The solution is to invest more in education, which will raise wages, reduce inequality and move toward equilibrium. The GI bill was, he says, so prolific in stimulating investment in "human capital" -- particularly, college education -- that for a while the return on it went down relative to high school. "Globalization" means free trade and various deregulations that supposedly put downward pressure on American wages because of imports from low-wage countries. Goolsbee, however, says globalization is responsible for "a small fraction" of today's income disparities. He says "60 to 70 percent of the economy faces virtually no international competition." America's 18.5 million government employees have little to fear from free trade; neither do auto mechanics, dentists and many others. Goolsbee's rough estimate is that technology -- meaning all that the phrase "information economy" denotes -- accounts for more than 80 percent of the increase in earnings disparities, whereas trade accounts for much less than 20 percent.

New York's Schumer `Won't Take No' as He Wields Political, Policy Clout For all the attention paid to the other political heavyweights, it's Schumer who is increasingly playing a central role as a party strategist and policy-maker. Schumer, 56, who's heading the drive to recruit Democratic senatorial candidates and raise funds for the 2008 elections, has drafted a raft of proposals to address the subprime-mortgage crisis, expand personal-savings accounts and impose higher taxes on executives in partnerships. He's further raised his profile in Congress by heading the chief economic-oversight committee. ``It's going to be one of those tectonic-plate elections, like 1932, like 1980,'' Schumer said in an interview yesterday. ``Why? Because fundamentally the world has changed and people's needs have changed.''  Meanwhile, Schumer is focused on recruiting candidates. He said he's confident the Democrats will retain all 12 of their Senate seats that will be on the ballot next year. Still, he said, the party's ability to do better depends on lining up strong candidates to seek slots held by such lawmakers as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and retiring Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

POTUS on SCHIP This past weekend the President signed a short-term extension of a program that finances health insurance for children, called SCHIP: the State Children's Health Insurance Program. We expect the Congress today will send the President HR 976, a bill that "reauthorizes" SCHIP for five years. The President has said he will veto this bill, and we expect the House will attempt to override the veto. This debate is generating much heat and little light. Our critics claim that, because he opposes this bill, the President doesn't want to help poor kids. That is of course untrue, so let's look at where we agree with this bill, where we disagree, and what we would do differently.

• Furman on SCHIP

High-Priced Student Loans Spell Trouble The near doubling in the cost of a college degree the past decade has produced an explosion in high-priced student loans that could haunt the U.S. economy for years. While scholarship, grant money and government-backed student loans -- whose interest rates are capped -- have taken up some of the slack, many families and individual students have turned to private loans, which carry fees and interest rates that are often variable and up to 20 percent. Many in the next generation of workers will be so debt-burdened they will have to delay home purchases, limit vacations, even eat out less to pay loans off on time. Parents are still the primary source of funds for many students, but the dynamics were radically altered in recent years as tuition costs soared and sources of readily available and more costly private financing made higher education seemingly available to anyone willing to sign a loan application. Students with no credit history and no relatives to co-sign loans (or co-signing parents with tarnished credit) were willing to bet that high-priced loans were a trade-off for a shot at the American dream. But high-paying jobs are proving elusive for many graduates.

Science and Culture

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century  Parker was to jazz what Picasso was to painting and Pound was to poetry: in Larkin's eyes, they all shared "a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century, known sometimes as modernism." In the 20th century, all of the arts suffered a version of the modernist crisis, sundering their connection with their traditional audience while becoming exponentially more complex. But none of the genres Larkin mentions, not even poetry, was more traumatized by this rupture than classical music. For 200 years -- say, from Bach to Shostakovich -- European art music was one of the glories of civilization. Music enjoyed new masters and new masterpieces in every generation, a devoted and serious audience, and a vital connection with the wider intellectual world. In his long-awaited first book, The Rest Is Noise, Mr. Ross brings his gift for authoritative enthusiasm to a whole century's worth of music. . Rather than delving deep into a particular composition, like a musicologist, Mr. Ross aims for synthesis, placing each work against the background of its composer's life and times. This is music history for readers who know more history than music. And as Mr. Ross shows, in the 20th century, the two could never be separated; each pressed against the other with terrible force. In an age of historicism, composers became extremely self-conscious about their place in the evolution of music. The pressure to make it new, to invent a technique or principle that had never been thought of before, could be constructive: Claude Debussy went to Javanese music for new harmonies, Igor Stravinsky mined Russian folk music for new rhythms. But it also prompted a kind of musical arms race, in which composers competed to make their works as harshly up-to-date as possible. By the last third of the 20th century, it seems clear that the pressure of history had driven composers a little bit insane. Much of the music Mr. Ross discusses in the later chapters of The Rest is Noise is strictly conceptual, noteworthy only for the ways it violates tradition or expectation.

Patience, fairness and the human condition Apes are patient, but only people are fair. That may help explain why people came out on top.In this game, two players, a proposer and a responder, divide a reward. It could be a cake. It could be cash. It could even be a bunch of grapes. The game is so named because the proposition is an ultimatum. The responder can either accept the division or reject it. If he rejects it, both players receive nothing. Homo economicus would accept any division in which his share was not zero. But that is not what happens. Scores of studies have run the ultimatum game across cultures and ages. Universally, people reject any share lower than 20%—apparently to punish the greed of the proposer. People do not act like Homo economicus. Instead, they are the arbiters of fairness. The result, which Dr Jensen reports in Science, is that chimps are simply rational maximisers—Pan economicus, if you like. Though proposers consistently chose the highest possible number of raisins for themselves, responders rarely rejected even the stingiest offers. This is a telling outcome. A number of researchers in the field of human evolution think that a sense of fairness—and a willingness to punish the unfair even at some cost to oneself—is humanity's “killer app”. It is what allows large social groups to form. Without it, free-riders would ruin such groups, because playing fair would cease to have any value.

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And now the final 30Sep Reader posting – sorry for the delay. The Special section has three very contrasting pointers. One to an interesting attempt to create structured maps of knowledge domains to begin to make a start on structuring the overwhelming flood of information and knowledge. Another on how close WW3 came to being a hot war and finally a live concert archive by the Greencards who are modern folk-Irish.

Special & General

Maps of Science (way, weigh cool as well as immensely valuable). Scientific Method: Relationships Among Scientific Paradigms.

1983 – Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov of the Soviet Union averted a possible worldwide nuclear war by deliberately certifying what otherwise appeared to be an impending attack by the United States as a false alarm.

Values & Attitudes

Darwin's Angel: An Angelic Response to the God Delusion THIS BOOK IS A PIECE of sheer heaven. It kicks Richard Dawkins’s self-aggrandising polemic, The God Delusion, into touch with featherlight footwork and is deliciously wise, witty and intellectually sharp into the bargain. John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly”. The seraph begins by politely nailing Dawkins’s first sleight of hand which, as loads of people have now pointed out, dishonestly bundles all religious belief and practice into one crude bag that supposedly equals fanaticism. This is rather like suggesting that all science is dangerous because it has brought nuclear weapons; or that all education is mistaken because children have been whipped by so-called educators. It is child’s play to denounce a subject by pointing to the myriad ways in which it may be misapplied; misuse and misapplication are rife in all areas of human understanding: politics, science, education, medicine, religion. But it is faulty logic to conclude that this is necessarily the fault of the set of ideas being traduced. I attended a primary school where the strap was still applied. Does it follow that I should not have attended primary school? Is psychiatry a bad thing because schizophrenics were once made to take bromide?

A Not So Starry Night In particular, Frayn proposes that he lead us through nothing less than the whole of our species' relationship to the universe, both in the 13.7-billion-years-old-and-born-in-a-Big-Bang and in the Michael-Frayn-chose-marmalade-over-honey-at-breakfast-this-morning senses of the word. He begins the tour with science, "a palace of thought," and in the first third of the book, he methodically walks us through rooms of an increasingly fundamental significance: first the laws of nature, then cause and effect, then space and time, and finally, the power of numbers to capture it all. At each stop he invites us to examine the tapestries on the walls, and then to look closer, and closer still, until we see not the pattern but the weave, not the weave but the thread, the now we can never definitively experience, the there that dissolves into Planck-scale discontinuity. Look closely enough, Frayn argues, and the laws of nature "have no existence independent of the concepts to which they relate," and "the supposedly universal causality on which the laws of nature depend has no more existence than the laws themselves," and so on, each subsequent seeming understanding of the universe finding expression "only in the context of human thought and human purposes." And so we leave behind the halls of pure science for the more interdisciplinary throne room of the mind. Frayn guides us through motivations; decisions; the fictions we tell ourselves in an attempt to make sense of the outside world; the words, syntax, and analogies we use to tell those fictions; the thoughts that give rise to the words, syntax, and analogies; the question of "how does a thought get thought." Here, too, Frayn pauses at each stop just long enough to point out the illusions that support our sense of reality, until at last he is able to ask: What claim can we make for the universe, other than that it exists in the mind, and vice versa?

Cheaters Cheat Assuming Everyone Is Cheating The decision to cheat in sports depends on far more than the likelihood of getting caught or even the gains of cheating, says the Boston Globe’s Drake Bennett. Research by economists and psychologists suggests that one of the most powerful inducement’s to cheat is the assumption that everyone else in the sport is cheating. Coaches and players can’t know for sure what their competitors are doing, but they assume everyone thinks the same way. Having thought of an underhanded way to gain an advantage, they assume their competitors did so as well and might be practicing it. Cheating then seems like a defensive strategy, designed to even the playing field and restore fairness, says Daylian Cain, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Management, who specializes in decision-making. Certainly, the academic research meshes with the most common real-world justifications of doping cyclists or New England Patriot coach Bill Belichick’s involvement in taping of opponents’ signs — everyone else is doing i

Science and Culture

Clash Of Evils "No Simple Victory" (Viking, 490 pages, $30), Mr. Davies's new book, is the latest installment in his project of illusion-demolition. This is a revisionist history of World War II, designed to shake the complacency of British and American readers who are accustomed to thinking of it as "the good war." It is not that Mr. Davies has uncovered any important new facts, or even launched any shocking reinterpretations. His purpose, rather, is to remind the world of two truths that, while well-established, he believes are not sufficiently reckoned with. The first is that, in military terms, World War II in Europe was predominantly a war between Germany and the Soviet Union; the contributions of Britain and America, while crucial, were not of the same order. The second is that, when Nazism and Communism fought over control of Eastern Europe, there was little moral difference between them. The Soviet Union was one of the Allies, but it had less in common with Anglo-American democracy than it did with Nazi tyranny.

Sumerian is the first language for which we have written evidence and its literature the earliest known. The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, a project of the University of Oxford, comprises a selection of nearly 400 translated literary compositions recorded on sources which come from ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) and date to the late third and early second millennia BCE. Not enough for you? Why not impress your friends (and confuse your enemies) by translating some english words into Sumerian?

Stone Age Rice Fields Discovered in China Swamp Stone Age paddy fields tended by the world's earliest known rice farmers have been uncovered in a swamp in China, scientists say. The discovery shows rice growing began in the coastal wetlands of eastern China some 7,700 years ago, according to a new study. Evidence of prehistoric rice cultivation, including flood and fire control, was found by a team led by Cheng Zong of Britain's Durham University. The team's research, which sheds new light on humans' critical transition from hunter-gathers to farmers, centers on the site of Kuahuqiao in Zhejiang province near present-day Hangzhou (see China map). The research follows previous excavations at the site that revealed a Stone Age community of wooden dwellings perched on stilts over the marshy wetlands. An 8,000-year-old dugout canoe, pottery made with wild rice as a bonding material, wood and bamboo tools, and the bones of dogs and pigs were also found.

Cribsheet #11: Plate Tectonics , Cribsheet #10: Photosynthesis

The Double Thinker  There are two ways to look at anything. That’s what I learned from reading Steven Pinker. Actually, I learned it from two Steven Pinkers. One is a theorist of human nature, the author of “How the Mind Works” and “The Blank Slate.” The other is a word fetishist, the author of “The Language Instinct” and “Words and Rules.” One minute, he’s explaining the ascent of man; the next, he’s fondling irregular verbs the way other people savor stamps or Civil War memorabilia. In “The Stuff of Thought,” Pinker says his new book is part of both his gigs. “The Stuff of Thought” explores the duality of human cognition: the modesty of its construction and the majesty of its constructive power. Pinker weaves this paradox from a series of opposing theories. Philosophical realists, for instance, think perception comes from reality. Idealists think it’s all in our heads. Pinker says it comes from reality but is organized and reorganized by the mind. That’s why you can look at the same thing in different ways.

To Mars and Beyond This coming January, Ad Astra Rocket Company will test the VX-200, a full-scale ground prototype of the variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket (VASIMIR), first conceived in 1979 by the company's president and CEO, astronaut and plasma physicist Franklin Chang Diaz. The rocket is an attempt to improve on current space-propulsion technologies, and it would use hot plasma, heated by radio waves and controlled by a magnetic field, for propulsion. Chang Diaz believes that the system would allow rockets to travel through space at higher speeds, with greater fuel efficiency. If the prototype demonstrates sufficient efficiency, thrust, and specific impulse on the ground, the next step will be the VF-200, a flight version of the rocket. Ad Astra plans to fly the VF-200 to the International Space Station, where it would help maintain the space station's orbit. If all this goes according to plan, Chang Diaz hopes to eventually build VASIMIRs that could travel to Mars and beyond.

Habitable Planets: A Splendid Isolation? Our assumptions about terrestrial planets seem pretty straightforward. We’re only now reaching the level where detecting such worlds becomes a possibility, with advances in ground- and space-based telescopes imminent that will begin to give us an idea how common such planets are. Hoping for the best, we assume Earth-sized worlds in relatively comfortable places are common and even extend our search from G and K-type stars to the much dimmer (and more numerous) M-dwarfs. But what do we mean by a terrestrial planet? Size is an obvious criterion, but so is placement in the kind of habitable zone we would find conducive to our kind of life. That means liquid water at the surface. So far so good, but keep a sharp eye on the wild card in all this: Orbital ecccentricity. It’s a measure of how far the orbit of a planet deviates from a circle, and we need to know more about it. Obviously a highly eccentric orbit could swing a planet through the habitable zone and right back out again, never allowing a stable and benign environment for life to develop. Many of the planets already discovered show fairly eccentric orbits. A short but intriguing paper by Daniel Malmberg (Lund Observatory, Sweden) and team now asks a provocative question: Is there a mechanism that ensures high values of orbital eccentricity, and if so, what does it tell us about planet formation in other solar systems? The assumption is that because most stars form in clusters, close encounters between young stars are fairly common. And that poses real problems. [NASA Imagines Earth-Like Worlds ]

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If the week before last was dominated by Iraq and the Petraeus/Crocker testimonies then the visit of the Pres. of Iran dominated this week’s. Coverage was extensive and largely unfavorable – which likely played into his hands. He wasn’t talking for us he was posturing for his domestic audience and very effectively and successfully.

There’s a lot of other Iranian and ME news the two most important of which were the secret airstrike by Israel on Syrian targets. Which nobody denies, is perfectly willing to talk about but not to tell anybody anything. “Informed sources”, i.e StrategyPage and StratFor are puzzled but think it likely that three things were going on. There was Nkorean nuclear equipment in Syria, messages were being sent to Syria and others and the key other was Iran. The rest of the news indicates that everybody’s loosing patience with Iranian posturing to the point where there are very…very public discussions of targeting methods and tactical capabilities. The Soviets call that Maskirova – or disinformation. One doesn’t discuss that sort of thing other than as part of such a Masque. What’s happening at minimum is that the pressures are being raised and the continued Iranian support for all insurgents inside Iraq is finally beginning to receive its’ just reward.

On a more hopefully note, and it is incredibly hopeful, Egypt and Saudia Arabia are making serious progress in reforming their institutions and how business friendly they. One can’t under-estimate, despite how much is left to do, how critically important the foundations of a stable, honest and free society is. So let me also draw your attention to the posting on which institutions are critical for economic growth and socio-political development.

Special & General

 Egypt, Saudi Arabia Rise in World Bank Rankings Egypt and Saudi Arabia, long considered bureaucratic mazes, changed their laws and regulations to make it substantially easier to start and run businesses, according to a yearly World Bank report that tracks business reforms globally. Among the top 10 "reformers" cited by the World Bank in its fifth-annual ranking were four countries from Central and Eastern Europe (Croatia, Macedonia, Georgia and Bulgaria); two from the Middle East (Egypt and Saudi Arabia); two from Africa (Ghana and Kenya); and China and Colombia. The bank has regularly lauded the Eastern European countries, China and Colombia for reducing barriers to business; the emergence of Saudi Arabia and Egypt is new. Egypt was listed as the top reformer, having made improvements in five of 10 categories affecting business tracked by the World Bank. Developing nations compete with one another to move up on the World Bank rankings of 178 nations, figuring a better ranking will mean additional investment and, ultimately, economic growth.The report also becomes a way for the World Bank's private-sector unit, International Finance Corp., to encourage economic ministries to press ahead with market-friendly changes. A computer simulation model on a World Bank Web site, www.doingbusiness.org, lets officials see how changes in, say, their bankruptcy or tax rules would likely affect their standings. [www.doingbusiness.org ]

·         Which institutions matter for economic growth?, by Liam Brunt, Vox EU Historical evidence from a natural experiment in South Africa suggests that changing particular institutions is really only tinkering at the economic margins. Establishing clear property rights, by contrast, facilitates almost all economic interactions and unleashes the full potential of the economy. Several developing economies – such as Vietnam and China – have recently been moving down this road, and history suggests that the economic gains are likely to be large.It is obvious that a country’s political, legal, economic and social institutions will affect its rate of economic growth. However, it is much more difficult to identify exactly which institutions matter and exactly how they matter. This is an issue of some practical importance. Countries are free to redesign their institutions in order to improve their economic performance. But, unless they can pinpoint the beneficial aspects of particular institutions, the only option is to import wholesale the institutional structures of another, more economically successful country. This happened in Japan in 1945 with respect to many US institutions and again recently in Dubai, which adopted the entire panoply of commercial law that regulates the City of London. However, in many cases it may be infeasible or inefficient to change the entire institutional régime, or it may be politically or socially unacceptable. For this reason, it would be useful if we had a better idea of exactly which aspects of which particular institutions were beneficial for stimulating growth. But the evidence on this matter is very mixed.

ME

Abbas, Bush Meet Amid Palestinian Skepticism at Progress Toward Statehood Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. President George Bush meet to lay the groundwork for peace talks with Israel later this year as even Abbas supporters question whether he will make any progress toward his goal of a Palestinian state.

Subversive Satellite Dishes Having promised to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, in return for massive financial and food aid, North Korea was apparently in the process of secretly selling off some of their nuclear weapons knowledge and bomb material to Syria. A September 6  Israeli raid into Syria recovered evidence of North Korean nuclear material at a research center. This week, a group of Syrian officials flew to North Korea for urgent meetings. North Korea condemned the Israeli raid, and denied any nuclear weapons deals with Syria.  North Korea has been supplying Syria with weapons for over two decades. This nuclear issue will be raised during upcoming negotiations. North Korea is expected to dismantle its nuclear weapons program by the end of the year, and account for all its nuclear material

Torn Lebanon Looks to Army Amid an escalating standoff between the U.S.-backed government here and opposition parties led by Hezbollah, the country's ability to hold together in the coming months appears increasingly dependent on an unlikely institution: the army. A political crisis deepened last week when a government-aligned parliamentarian was killed by a car bomb, the third killing of a lawmaker in the government since opposition members pulled out last fall. The assassination derailed a series of meetings between government and opposition leaders seen as crucial for allowing Parliament to open as scheduled this week and begin the process of selecting a new president. A split could have broad implications for the region, threatening -- in a worst-case scenario -- civil war. The hardening position of the opposition parties amid the assassinations is also worrying Washington, which would see its influence wane markedly if the current government collapses. Amid the political paralysis, the army is being seen as a crucial stabilizing force, but it is unclear how long that may last. The army's rising profile is also thanks to a fresh perception that its commanders and soldiers have risen above the sectarian strife paralyzing Lebanese politics. Lebanon is governed by a complex power-sharing arrangement brokered by its three most powerful sects. The country's president is drawn from the Maronite Christian community. The prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim, and the speaker of the house a Shiite Muslim.

IRAQ: The Choice Corruption, and the "culture of theft" is a major impediment to peace in Iraq. Too many Iraqis are eager to steal, and see this as a worthy way to achieve financial security. Most Iraqis profess to admire honesty and hard work. But for decades, there has been only Saddam's Sunni Arab thugs, stealing whatever they wanted. They even stole from each other, forcing Saddam to judge which thief would keep what. One nasty side effect of all this is the widespread belief that the Sunni Arabs are superior fighters and killers. This was all Shia Arabs saw for many years. Attempts to fight back were met with savage reprisals. Now, Shia Arabs see Sunni Arabs, even friendly ones, as a threat that must be eliminated. When Americans berate Iraqi officials for not getting Sunni and Shia to work together, it doesn't register. Most Shia want the Sunni Arabs dead, or gone. Reconciliation isn't even on the list of possibilities. Tell the Americans what they want to hear, and keep going after the Sunni Arabs

Iraq's Top Sunni Visits Shiite Cleric Iraq's Sunni vice president held a rare meeting Thursday with the country's top Shiite cleric to seek support for a 25-point blueprint for political reform, the latest effort by both Islamic sects to promote unity amid unrelenting violence. Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi said Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani praised his initiative during their two-hour meeting in the holy city of Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad. The reclusive Shiite spiritual leader has previously met with Sunni clerics, but it was his first meeting with a senior government official. "He generally blesses the initiative," Mr. Hashemi said, saying he found Mr. Sistani politically "neutral" and eager to promote national unity. Mr. Sistani has played a key role in shaping the political future of Iraq following the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime and wields considerable influence over Shiite politicians and their followers. The blueprint, which Mr. Hashemi called the Iraqi National Compact, stressed basic democratic principles such as respect for human rights, equality before the law, the sanctity of places of worship, prohibition of the use of force to attain political goals, filling government jobs according to merit and keeping the army and police above sectarian or political affiliations. It also proposed a blanket pardon for Iraqis who took up arms against the government and the U.S.-led coalition forces in exchange for laying down their arms and joining the political process. And it included a nod to Iraq's Kurds, stating that "pending" issues could be "resolved through compromise," a reference to the disputed Kurdish claim to the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk.

Why We're Winning Now in Iraq Many politicians and pundits in Washington have ignored perhaps the most important point made by Gen. David Petraeus in his recent congressional testimony: The defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq requires a combination of conventional forces, special forces and local forces. This realization has profound implications not only for American strategy in Iraq, but also for the future of the war on terror. As Gen. Petraeus made clear, the adoption of a true counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq in January 2007 has led to unprecedented progress in the struggle against al Qaeda in Iraq, by protecting Sunni Arabs who reject the terrorists among them from the vicious retribution of those terrorists. In his address to the United Nations General Assembly Wednesday, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki also touted the effectiveness of this strategy while at the same time warning of al Qaeda in Iraq's continued threat to his government and indeed the entire region. Yet despite the undeniable successes the new strategy has achieved against al Qaeda in Iraq, many in Congress are still pushing to change the mission of U.S. forces back to a counterterrorism role relying on special forces and precision munitions to conduct targeted attacks on terrorist leaders. This year has been a different story in Anbar, and elsewhere in Iraq. The influx of American forces in support of a counterinsurgency strategy -- more than 4,000 went into Anbar -- allowed U.S. commanders to take hold of the local resentment against al Qaeda by promising to protect those who resisted the terrorists. When American forces entered al Qaeda strongholds like Arab Jabour, the first question the locals asked is: Are you going to stay this time? They wanted to know if the U.S. would commit to protecting them against al Qaeda retribution.

Iran

IRAN: All Bluff and Bluster The new French government is talking openly of the possibility of war with Iran. This is talk, aimed at increasing European sanctions on Iran, in an attempt to convince the Iranian people to overthrow their Islamic dictatorship, and replace it with something more efficient, and less belligerent. War with Iran would disrupt, possibly for an extended period, oil shipments from the Persian Gulf. Iran may have a ramshackle and run down military, but they do have enough missiles and jets to seriously threaten Arab oil fields and shipping facilities, as well as use of the Straights of Hormuz, the only way in or out of the Persian Gulf. Cutting off oil revenue, and imports, would be catastrophic for Iran, and disruption of the oil supply would upset economies worldwide. The government recently showed off new weapons, including an Iranian made jet fighter and an extended range (from 1,300 to 1,800 kilometer) version of their  Shahab 3 ballistic missile. The new version puts all of Israel within range of these missiles, even if fired from deep inside Iran. Chemical  warheads (with nerve gas) are available for these missiles. But Israel has threatened to reply with nuclear weapons if the Iranians attack this way. Iran would probably get the worst of such an exchange, and the Iranians are aware of it. Not all of the clerics that run the country are eager to go to war with Israel, or even threaten it. But because the clerical factions do not want to appear at odds with each other in public, the more radical leaders are allowed to rant away about attacking Israel. All Iranians know that, while the Iranian clerics and politicians talk a tough game, they rarely do anything. Even Iranian support of Islamic terrorism has been far less effective than the rhetoric. The Iranians have always been cautious, which is one reason Arabs fear them. When the Iranians do make their move, it tends to be decisive. But at the moment, the Iranians have no means to make a decisive move. Their military is mostly myth, having been run down by decades of sanctions, and the disruptions of the 1980s war with Iraq. Their most effective weapon is bluster, and, so far, it appears to be working. But the Iranians know that nuclear weapons would make their bluff and bluster even more muscular. Even the suspicion that they had nukes would be beneficial. And that appears to be the plan.

• Ahmadinejad Defends Views in Face of Criticism From Columbia's President and
• Iran's paradoxical yearning for America
• Columbia Pres. Comments: Part I and Part II !!!
• Ahmadinejad declares Iran nuclear dispute 'closed' Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, said that he considered the dispute over his country's nuclear program "closed" and that Iran would disregard the resolutions of the Security Council, which he said was dominated by "arrogant powers." In a defiant 40-minute speech Tuesday to the opening session of the General Assembly, he said that Iran would henceforth consider the nuclear issue not a "political" one for the Security Council, but a "technical" one to be decided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear watchdog of the United Nations.
• Iranian leader suckered media
• Blogging Ahmadinejad in Tehran Here are excerpts of what Iranian bloggers had to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia University.

THE U.S. AND EUROPE are pushing for action to target Iran's nuclear program amid fraying U.N. support for more international sanctions.The U.S. and Europe appear increasingly likely to move in tandem to target Iran's nuclear program as signs of fraying support grow within the United Nations for another round of international sanctions. Despite heightened attention this week on Iran and its combative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the major powers remain undecided on when and how to squeeze Iran's economy with new restrictions. Among the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, China and Russia want to give Iran more time to suspend its uranium-enrichment work after two sets of sanctions were imposed since December. France, Britain and the U.S. want to move ahead swiftly on a third, much-tougher resolution that would impose an embargo on arms sales to Iran and a travel ban on key officials, and directly target the finances of a wider array of Iranian companies. The impasse has led the U.S. and France to push for increased actions outside of the U.N. In a speech before the U.N. General Assembly yesterday, French President Nicholas Sarkozy challenged other countries to face up to the idea of Iran becoming a nuclear power. "If we allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons, we would incur an unacceptable risk to stability in the region and in the world," he said. The new Sarkozy government has changed the diplomatic calculus toward Iran within Europe. If the U.N. effort runs aground, the French now argue that the 27-member European Union -- by far Iran's largest trading partner -- must impose its own restrictions on Iran. Mr. Sarkozy has begun to pressure French banks and oil giants such as Total SA to back away from all Iran business.

Sarkozy clarifies France's Iran policy Struggling to end speculation that France was prepared to go to war against Iran, President Nicolas Sarkozy took that option off the table, saying tougher sanctions eventually would change Tehran's behavior. In an interview Friday evening before departing for his first appearance before the United Nations General Assembly this week, Sarkozy contradicted the war talk of his foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner. Kouchner said in a radio and television interview on Sept. 16 that France was preparing for the "worst" scenario with Iran, "war," and spent much of his time since then declaring that he had been misunderstood. Breaking with traditional French policy, which has long resisted sanctions as a diplomatic weapon, Sarkozy laid out a far-reaching strategy to punish Iran economically - both through United Nations and European sanctions and by exerting pressure on French and other nations' corporations and banks not to do business there. Strengthened sanctions, he predicted, "eventually will produce results" in persuading Iran to curb nuclear activities prohibited under Security Council resolutions.

Iran's German Enablers Berlin, especially, should know better than to put business interests ahead of nonproliferation.

In fact, Iran's resilience is made possible in no small measure by Germany itself, which remains one of Iran's largest trading partners. Now Berlin is balking at international attempts to intensify economic sanctions against the Tehran regime for its nuclear program. Just how discordant Germany's Iranian policy is even within the European Union was made clear to me last spring, when I participated in a "roving seminar" on Iran and nuclear weapons that visited Paris, Brussels and Berlin. As the sole Israeli participant in the seminar -- jointly sponsored by the German Marshall Fund and the American Enterprise Institute -- I assumed that my role was to play the heavy, reminding naïve and self-righteous Europeans of the unpleasant truths of the Middle East. Instead, I encountered sobriety about the Iranian threat, loathing for the Ahmadinejad regime and sympathy for Israel's fears. The Europeans I met were keenly aware of the danger of a nuclear arms race in the Arab world triggered by fear of a Shiite bomb. In Paris, a senior French diplomat said that, while he opposes a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities, he well understands why Israelis see matters differently. In Brussels, a senior EU official went further, telling me how necessary it was for the U.S. and Israel to maintain the threat of a military option, which only strengthens European efforts at a negotiated solution. Everywhere our panel appeared, we met opinion makers who understood that the greatest threat to world peace was a nuclear Iran. Everywhere, that is, but Berlin. There, government officials spoke of giving the Iranians one more chance to prove their peaceful intentions.

Battles in the War With Iran While there's been no invasion of Iran, there has been a lot of Information War type operations against them. For example, all the leaks and punditry over imagined plans to invade Iran have had an impact on the Iranians. Not just the published remarks by Iranian leaders and journalists, but the private, often coded (and decrypted), messages by Iranian officials that get captured by the NSA or CIA. This kind of "information operation" is an ancient tactic, and it's getting more blatant, and interesting with regard to Iran. The best example of that are the recent interviews of U.S. Air Force planners about work being done on, well, how best to attack Iran. These interviews brought attention to an organization within the air force called Operation Checkmate. This was a Cold War era creation, whose job was to, as they like to say in the military, "think outside the box." If you can do that, you can gain the element of surprise. That often is a decisive edge in battle. On the other hand, surprise is best obtained by keeping your plans secret from the enemy. You want to hit your foe unexpectedly. Discussing openly that you are working on radical new techniques for attacking is giving the game away. Or is it? Maybe someone in the Pentagon has been paying close attention to what's going on inside Iran. The ruling clerical junta is composed of some very smart, and very insecure, people. There are also a lot of paranoid types. So bringing up Operation Checkmate, and its legendary capacity for creating unexpected tactics, is meant to freak out the easily frightened among the Iranian clerical establishment. Of particular interest will be what is said in private, and what Iranian military decisions that leads to. It is known that there is a major disagreement in the Iranian government over military strategy. On one extreme there are those who believe in, basically, guerilla tactics. Rather than fight the invader toe-to-toe, create a swamp of Islamic terrorists. At the other extreme are those who want to build up a conventional military force. The clerics have compromised, and given support to both camps. As a practical matter, the "modern military" crowd are just getting window dressings, as there isn't enough money to do it right. The "guerillas" are better liked by the clerics, because religious fanaticism is involved. But even the most pious Iranian leaders has a fear of what kind of surprises the Americans might come up with. So going public with Operations Checkmate is stirring the pot, and scaring the hell out of whomever would like all Americans dead.

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Now ‘tis the season of our discontents, with the suns of Left and Right rising to create darkness, obfustication and dis-array; or so it seems. As we accelerate into the ’08 elections more and more we’re learning that “there are serious problems for serious people” and “your 15 minutes are up”. By all of which I mean that things like globalization, national defense and security policy, healthcare, environmental and energy policy are getting to be things we need serious solutions for. Not opiates for the masses. Fortunately there are some interesting voices because these are not issues we can continue to duck. In some ways I think of the 90s as a combination of one long party and denialfest but the issues we put off dealing with are coming home.

In the Special section are two interesting postings on Globalization and trade policy plus a related one on the adaptation of American Muslims to the US, which they are doing at least as well considering the time, pressures and differences, as any other immigrant group (as a point of departure think about “Gangs of New York” or the historical fact that before the Civil War when construction work in the swamp was too dangerous for expensive slaves they sent an Irishman instead; you could always hire another but slaves were hard to replace).

The single best, comprehensive, idealistic and practical summary of proposed foreign policy along with a very realistic look  at not only how we balance hard and soft power is listed below; it also includes, praise the lord and pass the canapés, the first realistic look at the means of making it work. Related to that is one of the few accurate assessments of China’s major long-term problems – social stability and establishing a just, honest and rule-of-law based society.

There are also, among other things, chunks of articles on the coming rise in healthcare costs – which explains why it’s moving center stage and one of the few balanced perspectives on global warming.

Special & General

Can this woman save free trade? Susan Schwab, the U.S. trade representative, has channeled a personal tragedy into a nonstop crusade to keep globalization alive, writes Fortune's Nina Easton. Will she succeed? At last, after months of roller-coaster negotiations - and after the most painful year ever in her personal life - Schwab will be able to take credit for saving America from protectionism. Or will she? The Schwab story is not over - and this fall comes her biggest test yet. Powerful Democrats, under pressure from organized labor, have suggested they had crossed their fingers behind their backs last summer when signing off on the deal she and Rangel negotiated. Now the stage is set for a titanic fight on Capitol Hill. The main targets of dispute are agreements with four countries - South Korea, Peru, Panama, and Colombia - that promise to open new markets for agriculture, machinery, financial services, and other industries. More important, the outcome will signal to the world the direction America plans to take in writing the rules for a globalizing economy that promises riches for U.S. companies but uncertainty for U.S. workers. Schwab understands the stakes. But can one woman, working for a lame-duck administration, make a difference? So far she has exceeded all expectations. Part of the explanation is that Sue Schwab is getting the chance to campaign for a cause in which she passionately believes. But close friends know that her crusade to change the world is driven in part by something else: She's also getting a chance to open a new chapter in her life, moving past the troubles of a marriage she couldn't save and a husband's descent she couldn't prevent. Everyone has his own way of dealing with pain, but for Sue Schwab it has meant 250,000 miles of global shuttling to rescue trade talks, reassure anxious trading partners, and woo wary Democrats as she finds her footing in life again.

Let's Have a Real Debate on Globalization Will Democrats pander to the UAW, or acknowledge the benefits of trade. And yet, as the UAW-GM strike demonstrates so starkly, these gains do not flow to every single worker, family and community. This, then, is perhaps the paramount policy challenge facing America today. How can we continue to realize the aggregate gains of globalization and also address its distribution pressures? Concerns about distribution are not best addressed through trade barriers. Barriers are unlikely to stop the competitive pressures. They also impose large economy-wide costs and can trigger barriers abroad. The preferred course is to complement open borders with a mix of domestic policies to help those that are hurt. But is this what we hear being discussed on the campaign trail? No. It is about fair trade, not free trade. It is about pulling back on previous trade agreements. It is about new laws to hit "currency manipulators" with new trade barriers. Bring all this back to tonight's presidential debate. My dream question for the candidates would be the following: "Many regard the current UAW-GM strike in Detroit as a wake-up call to stiffen American policies against countries like China. Do you agree with this? How will you craft an American economic policy that both allows greater globalization and also spreads its gains as widely as possible?" If such a question is asked, we all should listen intently to the answers.

American Muslims Strive to Become Model Citizens Six years after Sept. 11, 2001, America and its Muslim immigrants seem to be on surprisingly good terms. They get along, they discover common interests, and it almost seems as if America's latest immigrants want to prove to everyone that they are the better Americans. Many recent Muslim immigrants arrived in the mid-1970s and came from Southeast Asia, Iran, Afghanistan, the Arab countries, Europe and Africa. They are responsible for making Islam a fixture in "God's own country." There are already an estimated 3 to 7 million American Muslims today. No one knows exactly how many, though, because the United States has no religious census and church registers are not used in Islam. Most of America's new Muslims adapted quickly, eager to become model citizens. Unlike other minorities -- the Chinese or Italians -- Muslims did not isolate themselves in distinct urban neighborhoods but tended to blend in. They were quiet and industrious, and once they had been granted asylum in the US, they stayed to make money. They wanted their children to have better lives, to go to school and earn degrees that would enable them to lead middle-class lives as lawyers, doctors and academics. They were not interested in politics. But then came Sept. 11. In the space of a single morning, taxi drivers, cooks and waiters suddenly became potential terrorists. Hate crimes against Muslims jumped by more than 1,600 percent in the following year. That September day in 2001 seemed to mark the end of a dream. Five thousand men were placed in preventive detention merely because of their Arab birthplaces and, a short time later, government agents questioned 170,000 Muslim men. Applications for citizenship were turned down and many Muslims were deported. But if there is an American answer to every problem, then America's Muslims provided the most American of all answers to Sept. 11. They saw the date as both a challenge and an opportunity. Six years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, American Muslims are now self-confident and more influential than ever before. They earn as much money as the average American, they go on talk shows to tell their success stories and they are beginning to run for political office.

Int’l Affairs

(5*) A Revolution In Diplomatic Affairs America needs a "revolution in diplomatic affairs." Even the State Department's chardonnay and brie brigade suspects we have entered a new era of grimy, street-level foreign policy. It's an era where effective diplomacy starts with long days in bad neighborhoods, as culturally-savvy diplomats identify the hopes, fears and trends that seed future crises, and -- preferably -- create American-influenced opportunities to positively shape events. America's current "interagency structure" frustrates even the best attempts to coordinate the elements of power and achieve "Unified Action." It's a Cold War antique designed to prop up governments (so often corrupt and ill-led), instead of helping individuals and neighborhoods become economically self-sustaining and self-securing. Winning war in the Age of the Internet and -- even better -- preventing crises by pre-emptive diplomacy require "street-level" political intelligence and the capacity to improve neighborhoods and individual lives. 

·         Toward a Realistic Peace Summary: The next U.S. president will face three key foreign policy challenges: setting a course for victory in the terrorists' war on global order, strengthening the international system the terrorists seek to destroy, and extending the system's benefits. With a stronger defense, a determined diplomacy, and greater U.S. economic and cultural influence, the next president can start to build a lasting, realistic peace.

• INTELLIGENCE: Spies Gone Wild While American intelligence agencies have been busy collecting information on terrorists, their counter-intelligence departments, which try to disrupt enemy spying efforts, have been swamped. Espionage efforts by Russia are back to Cold War levels, and increasingly active Chinese spies exceed the Russian efforts. In addition, there are powerful new spying tools, like Internet hacking, or simply making good use of Internet search tools to vacuum up all manner of useful information. Some would not consider that spying, but experienced spies will tell you that, for gathering information in the West, the many open sources there are excellent targets for uncovering "secret information."

(5*) The Elixir of Education? Many people see education as a cure-all. They believe that societies can be transformed by pouring money into raising educational standards. But, while it is right to believe in the power of education – indeed, many scholars are convinced that it creates healthier, more prosperous citizens – such enthusiasm doesn’t tell us how to get more children to stay in school longer, or how to ensure that they learn useful skills while they are there. Today, virtually every Latin American and Caribbean child enrolls in primary school, and most complete several years of secondary education – remarkable progress compared to a half-century ago. Yet Latin American and Caribbean children gain fewer skills in each year of school than students do in high-income countries – and even in some other developing countries. Indigenous children have a significantly lower chance of educational success. Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Paraguay lag behind even other Latin American countries. Despite the widespread enthusiasm for lifting educational performance in Latin America and the Caribbean, little effort has been devoted to working out how to maximize investments in education. Which policies work best?

Putin Staying Put to Lead Russian Reassertion In the past year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has morphed from a noisy irritant to the West who was reaching the end of his two-term limit to a swaggering antagonist who isn't going away.Under this system, a strong and unaccountable executive holds power over a pliable media and subservient legislature, judiciary and regional and local political structures. Former and current state security officers -- once known as KGB but now FSB -- have custody of everything from Russia's nuclear weapons to its oil wells and natural-gas fields. In foreign affairs, Putinism is brash and muscular, wielding Russia's energy weapon more effectively than it ever did nuclear weapons in order to influence neighbors and entice friends. Yet diplomacy is about dealing with what exists. Putin is here to stay, as is Putinism. Now the U.S. and Europe must adjust and form a robust response. One must avoid needless fights. But the West can't compromise on the spread of democracy or Western institutions. These changes serve Moscow's long-term interests --if only the West can manage a host of escalating short-term dangers.

Has the Kremlin Covered Kasparov’s Every Political Move? Has opposing the Kremlin in Russia become a symbolic act that only lends credence to the country’s false democratic facade? Many in Russia’s opposition are asking that question as chess great Garry Kasparov considers running against Vladimir Putin’s annointed successor in next year’s elections, reports David Remnick in the New Yorker. Few in the opposition expect anything to change with Mr. Kasparov’s candidacy, which probably wouldn’t even be officially registered by the government. Thanks to Mr. Putin’s popularity and the Kremlin’s stranglehold on political power and free speech, the Kremlin’s candidate should win easily.

Forget Dog Years -- We Are Living `China Years': William Pesek Well, welcome to the age of ``China years.'' That's the subject of a new report by Stephen Green, senior economist at Standard Chartered Bank Plc in Shanghai. His basic premise: Everyone lives through change, but not change at the speed Chinese are at the moment. Yes, welcome to the China of 2007, a place that seems to reinvent itself -- at least superficially – annually. According to Green's calculations, one American year is equivalent to one quarter of a Chinese year, or 2.8 months. One British year equals 3.1 Chinese months. In other words, an American or a Brit will experience as much change in China in the space of three months as he or she would at home. Life in China is roughly four times faster. Such speed of change is more routine for Asians. One Singaporean year, for example, is about six months in China years, while one Korean year equals about eight Chinese months. A year for folks in Botswana also is equivalent to eight months in China. China years work in the other direction, too. Take Malawi, which Green calculates has only grown 0.001 percent a year on average since 1980. Malawi is used to as much economic growth in a year as takes place in China every seven hours. Nigerians have seen things change as much in their economy over the last three decades as China has in the last 12 months. Using data on per-capita gross domestic product in local currency and in constant prices, Green calculated the average growth rates of about 60 countries. Next Green compared those GDP rates with China's and calculated how their experiences compared.

(5*) The Enemy Inside China's primary threat is not the United States, or any other foreign power, but internal disorder. There are more angry people in China every day, and the government knows that this could blossom into widespread uprisings. It's happened so many times before in Chinese history, and Chinese leaders are always looking over their shoulders at the past.  There are fewer tools available to deal with this, than there were a decade ago. The government has lost the most, but not all, control over the media because of cell phones and the Internet. Economic prosperity has been uneven, with the minority of Chinese living near the coast earning more than three times what the poor farmers in the interior make. The gap is growing. Because the government no longer tightly controls mass media, the 700 million Chinese of the less wealthy interior, are constantly reminded of their situation. Three million troops and security personnel may not be enough to deal with widespread unrest among this population.

WARPLANES: China's Plan To Destroy American Air Superiority American air power has dominated the skies for over sixty years. That's unique in the history of airpower, although similar to the two century run the Royal Navy had in dominating the world's oceans from the 18th century into World War II . America's air superiority also came first, from sheer numbers. The warplanes of the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines accounted for the largest air fleet in the world. In addition,  the pilots were also the best trained and equipped. When you have periods of long dominance, your opponents have an incentive to try harder, and be bold with new technology and tactics.The most dangerous area these days, for getting caught short, is high tech. U.S. warplanes depend a lot on stealthiness, and the use of missiles, software and electronic counter-measures. This is probably why China has announced that its military strategy seeks to exploit this angle. Future wars, nevertheless, will still come down to who has the most stuff, and who is best trained to use whatever they got. China is beginning to go down that road, obtaining first rate warplanes, and spending the money to let pilots fly often enough to become lethal.

China concedes Three Gorges dam danger China’s Three Gorges dam threatens to become an environmental catastrophe if the government does not act quickly, senior Chinese officials have warned in an unusual public nod to the massive project’s ecological impact. The comments, carried in state media on Wednesday, mark a rare Chinese admission that dire predictions of ecological destruction from international experts and domestic opponents of the world’s largest dam are coming true. Landslides, silting, and erosion above the dam are creating environmental and safety hazards that cannot be ignored, Wang Xiaofeng, director of the State Council Three Gorges Construction Committee, was quoted as saying. “We cannot exchange environmental destruction for short-term economic gain,” he said.

Wanted: A Japanese Reformer Now that we know Yasuo Fukuda will soon be Japan's new prime minister, attention is turning to what we don't know about him -- his economic plans. To judge by the consensus view in the media, the best economic reformers can hope for is stasis; the worst would be backtracking. Yet that's an oversimplification. Mr. Fukuda is indeed likely to avoid substantial new reforms. But previous reforms have taken on a life of their own and he cannot turn back the clock even if he wanted to do so. A host of economic and demographic problems will keep up the pressure for reform. No one doubts that Mr. Fukuda is smart and competent. But he lacks any clear vision for Japan's economic future. He personally favors reform and was even former prime minister Junichiro Koizumi's chief cabinet secretary. However, Mr. Fukuda is by temperament an arbiter between conflicting views and interests, not a bold initiator like Mr. Koizumi.

Having been selected as the consensus candidate by the quarreling bosses of the many factions within the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), Mr. Fukuda will be hog-tied by them. He makes no secret that he cannot decide policy without consulting those who put him in power.

• Japan’s Fukuda calls for change Earlier reforms are proving an electoral liability

·         Life Is a Party in Japan for All Wrong Reasons Yet there's already reason to doubt Fukuda will be the Japanese leader voters and investors expected. It rests in a statement that may seem innocuous, but is drenched with significance. ``Right now, the LDP is facing a big difficulty,'' Fukuda said Sept. 23, right after defeating Taro Aso to become president of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. ``First of all, I'd like to revive the LDP. And by regaining the public trust, I'd like it to be reborn to become a political party that firmly implements policies.'' What Fukuda should do ``first of all'' is articulate how he plans to spread the benefits of economic growth, reduce Japan's massive debt load, increase productivity, halt the decline in the population and fix a scandal-ridden pension system. There's also a little matter of maintaining living standards for Japan's 127 million people amid China's rise. Instead, Fukuda's priority is to help his political party. Now, for the son of a former LDP prime minister, Fukuda may think that's best for Japan's future. Yet herein lies one of the biggest inhibitors to Japan raising its economic performance: one-party rule.

NATO retreats from establishment of rapid-reaction force NATO is backing away from establishing a combat force that would be capable of moving rapidly into conflict areas because it lacks the money, the troops and the equipment, officials said Thursday. NATO's decision to rethink the Response Force is a blow for the 26-member alliance, which was seeking a way to alter a cumbersome and reactive organization of the Cold War era to field flexible units capable of being deployed within days to carry out a range of operations, including counter-terrorism. While NATO has changed significantly in recent years - seen in its involvement in combat in Afghanistan, for example - the way missions are financed and military equipment is procured has lagged. Moreover, analysts said, the future of the Response Force could send a signal to the European Union, which is establishing its own "battle groups" - units of about 1,500 troops that could be sent to a conflict zone within 10 days.

Europe wary of US-style capitalism Europeans have little faith their continent can compete economically with fast-growing Asian countries, but are even more convinced it should not become more like the US.

MEXICO: Statistics Say It Is War Mexico really is a country in the middle of a war. That's the real story behind recent statistical studies analyzing violence in Mexico which reported that "homicides, kidnapping, and arms trafficking" has increased this year within the country by 25 percent. Overall, "gangland" type executions have increased dramatically since 2001. It's not that these executions didn't take place in 2001 – around 110 were reported. However, for the January to June 2007 period, 1,588 took place.

Khalilzad's Charm Offensive Warms Up UN Audience for Bush's Speech Today United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon predicts George W. Bush will face a receptive audience when he addresses the world body in New York today. If so, the president will have Zalmay Khalilzad to thank for it. Khalilzad has promoted an expanded UN role in Iraq by going where his predecessor as U.S. ambassador, John Bolton, didn't: to a July meeting of envoys from 22 Arab countries. It ``was very unusual, and a positive step to try to establish a dialogue between the American ambassador and his Arab colleagues,'' Syrian Ambassador Bashar Ja'afari said. The episode is typical of Khalilzad's UN charm offensive. Envoys put off by Bolton's brusque style say his successor's ready smile and openness to compromise have improved U.S. relations during the past five months and increased the odds that Bush will get UN help on conflicts from Sudan to Afghanistan. Khalilzad, who previously served as ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, has yet to see his approach pay off on other issues. Russia, for example, continues to oppose a UN plan for Kosovo's independence. It and China, both veto-holding Security Council members, oppose the U.S. bid for a third round of penalties targeting Iran's nuclear program; they previously voted for two resolutions imposing sanctions on Iran, which Bolton negotiated. Still, former Iraqi deputy ambassador Feisal al-Istrabadi, who left the mission this month to become a visiting law professor at Indiana University, credits Khalilzad with breaking lengthy logjams at the world body.

Politics and Policies

Now it’s evident that if you want to understand the future of the Democratic Party you can learn almost nothing from the bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the “netroots.” You can learn most of what you need to know by paying attention to two different groups — high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington. In the first place, the netroots candidates are losing. In the various polls on the Daily Kos Web site, John Edwards, Barack Obama and even Al Gore crush Hillary Clinton, who limps in with 2 percent to 10 percent of the vote. Moguls like David Geffen have fled for Obama. But the party as a whole is going the other way. Hillary Clinton has established a commanding lead. Second, Clinton is drawing her support from the other demographic end of the party. As the journalist Ron Brownstein and others have noted, Democratic primary contests follow a general pattern. There are a few candidates who represent the affluent, educated intelligentsia (Eugene McCarthy, Bill Bradley) and they usually end up getting beaten by the candidate of the less educated, lower middle class. That’s what’s happening again. Obama and Edwards get most of their support from the educated, affluent liberals. According to Gallup polls, Obama garners 33 percent support from Democratic college graduates, 28 percent from those with some college and only 19 percent with a high school degree or less. Hillary Clinton’s core support, on the other hand, comes from those with less education and less income — more Harry Truman than Howard Dean. Third, Clinton has established this lead by repudiating the netroots theory of politics. Fourth, the netroots are losing the policy battles. As Matt Bai’s reporting also suggests, the netroots have not been able to turn their passion and animus into a positive policy agenda. Democratic domestic policy is now being driven by old Clinton hands like Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed. The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses. Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. This time they’re not going to self-destructively deviate from that.

Democrats Debate on Style at Dartmouth Eight candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination did little to shake up the race at a party-sponsored debate last night, despite mounting evidence that front-runner Sen. Hillary Clinton continues to pad her substantial lead in polls. Bickering over style but doing little to rise from the pack on major issues such as war, health care, Social Security overhaul and immigration, the candidates submitted to two hours of questioning in an event at Dartmouth College that was notable for its civility and scant fireworks. The debate, the third of six sanctioned by the Democratic Party, came on the same day that a poll was released showing that Mrs. Clinton of New York was consolidating her lead in New Hampshire, an early voting state long seen as a bellwether.

·         The Truth Squad Discussing the lack of specificity on social security during last nights Democratic debate, with CNBCs John Harwood (Video Link)

·         Bill Clinton Says He Had More Experience as Leader Than Obama at Same Age Former President Bill Clinton said he was far more experienced when he made his successful 1992 White House run than Senator Barack Obama is today.

Report Says Fixes Slow To Come at Walter Reed More than half a year after disclosures of systemic problems at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and other military hospitals, the Pentagon's promised fixes are threatened by staff shortages and uncertainty about how best to improve long-term care for wounded troops, according to a congressional report issued yesterday. Army units developed to shepherd recovering soldiers lack enough nurses and social workers, and proposals to streamline the military's disability evaluation system and to provide "recovery coordinators" are behind schedule, according to the Government Accountability Office report. Members of a congressional oversight committee, discussing the report at a hearing yesterday, said the effort to reform the medical bureaucracy has itself become mired in bureaucracy.

Surveillance Showdown For the first time in history our country is being asked to forego intelligence capabilities in time of war. Thank the "privacy" nut. Would any sane country purposefully limit its ability to spy on enemy communications in time of war? That is the question Congress must answer as it takes up reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) this week. Privacy activists, civil libertarians and congressional Democrats argue that both foreign and domestic eavesdropping must be subject to judicial scrutiny and oversight, even if this means drastically reducing the amount of foreign intelligence information available to the government, without ever acknowledging the costs involved. It is time the American people had an open and honest debate on the relative importance of privacy and security.

The True Cost of Fighting Terrorism The fight against terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, has seen a steady erosion in civil liberties by the very countries that regard themselves as freedom’s champions, says the Economist. Governments tend to claim that a dangerous new enemy who will stop at nothing requires a suspension of certain liberties. That argument is very powerful, the newsweekly says in an essay launching a series on civil liberties. It also echoes the ways in which governments throughout history have justified spying on their own citizens, imposing censorship and using torture to extract information. Governments that aim to foil terrorists without impinging on civil liberties are fighting with one hand behind their back. But that is exactly how democracies should be battling terrorists. Protecting civil liberties is all the more crucial in drawn-out wars such as the current one against terrorism, since the fight is likely to go on for decades. “Dozens of plots may have been foiled and thousands of lives saved as a result of some of the unsavory practices now being employed in the name of fighting terrorism,” says the newsweekly. “Dropping such practices in order to preserve freedom may cost many lives. So be it.” The Sept. 11 attacks have encouraged democracies to tolerate physical abuse of suspected terrorists, the newsweekly contends in a related article. Torture can’t rightly be opposed because, as some people contend, it doesn’t work. It is reasonable to assume that if those being tortured are terrorists, some of what they say will be true and thus useful to interrogators. But that, the Economist implies, is no justification.

Greenspan Cracks a Joke and Breaks It Down Alan Greenspan took his new book to Comedy Central’s Daily Show with Jon Stewart Tuesday night, explaining the impact of interest-rate cuts on the stock market, the development of central banking, and economic forecasting today compared with a half-century ago. The former Fed chairman walked through some of the basics of the economy, including Stewart’s straightforward question: “Why do we have a Fed? Why do we have someone adjusting the rates if we’re a free-market society?” Greenspan: “You’re raising a very fundamental question.” Stewart: “I am? Should I leave?” Greenspan: “No. Stay for a while. Since you got your Emmy, you’re qualified.” Stewart quickly forced Greenspan to defend big investors and hedge funds. “It seems to me that we favor investment, but we don’t favor work,” Stewart said. “The vast majority of people work — they pay payroll taxes, and they use banks. And then there’s this whole other world, of hedge funds and short-betting and — it seems like craps. And they keep saying, no no, no, don’t worry about it, it’s free market. That’s why we live in much bigger houses. But it really isn’t. It’s the Fed, or some other thing, no?” Greenspan: “I think you better re-read my book…. What a sound money system does is to stabilize all the elements in it, and reduces the uncertainty that people confront. And the one thing all human beings do when they are confronted with uncertainty is pull back, withdraw, disengage, and that means economic activity, which is really dealing with people, just goes straight down.” In a straightforward definition of market bubbles, Greenspan explained how euphoria leads to confidence “that everything is terrific” before a sudden realization that the good times won’t last. Greenspan: “I’ve been dealing with these big mathematical models of forecasting the economy, and I’m looking at what’s going on in the last few weeks. … If I could figure out a way to determine whether or not people are more fearful or changing to more euphoric, and have a third way of figuring out which of the two things are working, I don’t need any of this other stuff. I could forecast the economy better than any way I know. “The trouble is that we can’t figure that out. I’ve been in the forecasting business for 50 years. … I’m no better than I ever was, and nobody else is. Forecasting 50 years ago was as good or as bad as it is today. And the reason is that human nature hasn’t changed. We can’t improve ourselves.” Stewart: “You just bummed the [bleep] out of me.”

The Social Security Challenge The U.S. Treasury released a report yesterday called Social Security Reform: The Nature of the Problem. Here is the summary:

• Social Security faces a shortfall over the indefinite future of $13.6 trillion in present value terms, an amount equal to 3.5 percent of future taxable payrolls. Looking at the gap over a shorter horizon provides only limited information on the financial status of the program.
• Social Security can be made permanently solvent only by reducing the present value of scheduled benefits and/or increasing the present value of scheduled tax revenues. Other changes to the program might be desirable, but only these changes can restore solvency permanently.
• Delaying changes to Social Security reduces the number of cohorts over which the burden of reform can be spread. Not taking action is thus unfair to future generations. This is a significant cost of delay.
• By itself, faster economic growth will not solve Social Security’s financial imbalance—realistically, there is no way to “grow out of the problem.”

Marked increase in health-care costs coming in 2008 A study shows that health-care cost increases are down to their lowest level in nearly a decade, but they're forecast to rise at a much faster rate again in 2008. The study from Hewitt Associates says that total health-care costs to employees will jump by double digits next year, and that point-of-service and-preferred-provider-organization coverage -- which have seen growth rates in the low single digits during 2007 -- will jump by a high-single-digit percentage. Those increases will more in line with health maintenance organizations and traditional indemnity plans. Hewitt researchers say that this year's price increase was artificially low since many employers have been socking away extra cash for health care of late. "In '06 and '05, employers were budgeting too much so they had overall surpluses in the plan," said Bob Tate, chief actuary for Hewitt's health-management consulting business. "They didn't have to budget so much [this year]." Tate adds, however, that insurers also will be upping their price increases by a percentage point or so, to about a 9% gain -- roughly triple the rate of inflation. Employers generally already have lined up their health-care plans for the coming year and are feeling the extra pinch.

California sets stage for national debate As the U.S. gears up for its first serious look at national health reform since 1993, California's bumpy progress toward statewide change may amount to a prelude. After months of political wrangling, California lawmakers passed a reform bill two weeks ago, which Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said he wouldn't sign With 36.5 million residents, California represents 12.2% of the U.S. population, according to the latest Census Bureau figures. Its efforts to expand coverage to more of its 6.7 million uninsured serve as a harbinger of the kind of thorny questions the U.S. can expect in the coming years as it moves from gathering consensus on broad ideas to crafting policy details that win passage. Among them: What will heath reform cost government, employers, health-care providers and individuals? How do you ensure coverage for people who are sick, older, unemployed, self-employed or between jobs? How much insurance is a reasonable baseline and how do you make it affordable? How do you transition to a new system without forcing people with good coverage to lose it?

A Turning Point for Health Care The labor agreement reached by General Motors Corp. is the most striking example of a bigger trend sweeping U.S. health-care: employers renouncing their decades-old role as chief health-care buyer. The auto maker's iconic status in American industry, and the example it sets as one of the biggest U.S. employers, is likely to speed this shift -- and drive discussion in the presidential campaign about overhauling the health system. Polls find health care is the top domestic issue for voters, as more Americans are on the hook for getting their own coverage. Maneuvers such as GM's are "driving greater insecurity among the middle class, who are employed but feeling like their health care is not secure," said John Rother, policy director for the seniors group AARP, which favors government action to secure universal health coverage. The portion of firms offering health benefits fell to 60% this year from 69% in 2000 because of small employers' retreat from providing coverage, according to a survey released this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Benefits packages are getting stingier, too. Last year, 38% of workers had deductibles of $500 or more, up from 14% in 2000, the foundation says.

Global Warnings But we should hear both sides of any story. Consider a tale that has made the covers of some of the world’s biggest magazines and newspapers: the plight of the polar bear. We are told that global warming will wipe out this majestic creature. We are not told, however, that over the past 40 years – while temperatures have risen – the global polar bear population has increased from 5,000 to 25,000. Campaigners and the media claim that we should cut our CO2 emissions to save the polar bear. Well, then, let’s do the math. Let’s imagine that every country in the world – including the United States and Australia – were to sign the Kyoto Protocol and cut its CO2 emissions for the rest of this century. Looking at the best-studied polar bear population of 1,000 bears, in the West Hudson Bay, how many polar bears would we save in a year? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? Actually, we would save less than one-tenth of a polar bear. If we really do care about saving polar bears, we could do something much simpler and more effective: ban hunting them. Each year, 49 bears are shot in the West Hudson Bay alone. So why don’t we stop killing 49 bears a year before we commit trillions of dollars to do hundreds of times less good?

‘Feel Good’ vs. ‘Do Good’ on Climate After looking at one too many projections of global-warming disasters — computer graphics of coasts swamped by rising seas, mounting death tolls from heat waves — I was ready for a reality check. Instead of imagining a warmer planet, I traveled to a place that has already felt the heat, accompanied by Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist and scourge of environmentalist orthodoxy. The lesson from our expedition is not that global warming is a trivial problem. Although Dr. Lomborg believes its dangers have been hyped, he agrees that global warming is real and will do more harm than good. He advocates a carbon tax and a treaty forcing nations to budget hefty increases for research into low-carbon energy technologies. But the best strategy, he says, is to make the rest of the world as rich as New York, so that people elsewhere can afford to do things like shore up their coastlines and buy air conditioners. He calls Kyoto-style treaties to cut greenhouse-gas emissions a mistake because they cost too much and do too little too late. Even if the United States were to join in the Kyoto treaty, he notes, the cuts in emissions would merely postpone the projected rise in sea level by four years: from 2100 to 2104.

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