Global Warming is just a liberal conspiracy

See the changes in what are termed "Hardiness Zones" - areas where specific types of trees grow best, based on overall temperature trends. The link will bring you to the 2006 numbers. Then press "reset" and "play" to see how tha that has changed in the past 15 years.

http://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm

Also, I've been catching up on news pieces I missed this year, as I tend to read the news rather than watching it. Read the transcript of this elegant piece by Keith Olbermann on NBC - you can click to watch the video, as well.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15147009/

There's something wrong with the world today

I don't think additional text will help this story:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2511686,00.html

Ramallah Burning?

I suppose, logically, it was only a matter of time before the violence in the Gaza Strip spread outwards to the West Bank, and thence to Ramallah. But it is both heartbreaking and maddening to hear that it has finally happened. The irresponsibility of the world in failing to resolve this conflict (or even to take steps in the direction of resoution) will wind up with much farther-reaching consequences than I think anyone sees today. The Times has more detail than WashPost today.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2507122,00.html

I know I've said before that answering the question of Palestine is a necessary condition for so much else in the Middle East, and that answer is more needed now than ever. There is a very tightly woven political web, and the question of the Palestinian Territories and Israel is central, if not to practicality, to the hearts and minds of the entire region.

To do this, though, the question of Israel must move from a fruitless (and moot) debate about existence, and into a more productive one of coexistence. There is a seeming aversion to real debate on both sides of the aisle - with a few significant exceptions, who deserve commendation. The terrorists, the hawks and the lobbyists, by choosing to use blunt instruments instead of subtlety, have lost the ability to listen, and have let the chance for peace elude them.

If people don't stop and listen to each other, they will continue to spiral downwards, and violence benefits no one. Not the Palestinians, not the Israelis, nor Egypt or Jordan, and ultimately not even Iran or Syria. And not the US.

Git'n Into Gitmo

This is a very interesting piece from Seton Hall Law School outlining and analyzing the criteria used by the government to determine enemy combatant status for Guantanamo detainees. http://law.shu.edu/news/guantanamo_report_final_2_08_06.pdf

Their analysis, as well as the WashPost article that references it, is rather frightening. http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2006/11/abbott_and_costello_go_to_gitm.html

On an unrelated note (as much as anything is unrelated today), I had the chance to listen to Tom Friedman come speak at our offices today. Check out his column in the NYT tomorrow, as I think it'll be interesting (not about us, but interesting nonetheless).

Eat your heart out, John Le Carre

So, I haven't had much chance to post lately, which is why I haven't written about the new twisty, turny, cold war-evoking spy drama that is unfolding in London lately. For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, Alexander Litvinenko, the one-time Russian spy, was poisoned with a rare (i.e. government-sponsored?) radioactive isotope about a month ago.

Following his death last week, all sorts of interesting new connections have developed between Litvinenko, the FSB, the Italian SISMI, and another former Russian intelligence officer. To add to the already complex mix, Yegor Gaidar, the former Russian PM, is also a suspected victim of poisoning.

I just can't wait until someone puts all this in a book...

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-2481876_1,00.html

It's not like it's hard

When I was in 8th grade, our substitue math teacher, who had once fought in WWII, taught us all how to build an atomic bomb. Yup, that's right. It took about 45 minutes, and he drew it on the chalkboard.

At the time, you could find the theoretical instructions in textbooks. When I was a freshman in college, you could look it up online - and I did (for a class). By the time senior year rolled around, I again needed to write up a discussion (historical) about different types of nuclear material, what is used for weapons, what for fuel, etc. To my surprise, all the websites (generally from other universities) had been pulled off the web.

Now, I'm not arguing in favor of nuclear proliferation. But seriously? Once information is in the public domain, we do no one any favors by removing it. Being able to understand the makeup and consequences of dangerous substances allows us to make better decisions about when, how, and why to use them. These websites don't show you where to buy nuclear material, or how to finance such a project, or even the mechanics of making it work. They articulate the science and theory behind a very politically sensitive source of energy. Limiting information limits the effectiveness of democracy, and lowers the tone of political debate. And we all know how I hate that.

In the meantime, as a corollary to some interesting constitutional musings, Japan's foreign minister noted that Japan "has the technological know-how to produce a nuclear weapon but has no immediate plans to do so." Um, ya think? Who's surprised that a nation so focused on science, mechanics, etc, has the ability to make a bomb? I think it'd be a pretty fair assumption that Japan probably figured it out a while ago.

What's interesting is their choice not to build one. There is history there, and politics, and a whole host of other factors. I just hope they don't let North Korean belligerence and American incompetence change their minds.

In any event, here's the WashPost article about it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/29/AR2006112901641.html

This has the best title of any article I've read recently:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/14/AR2006111401228.html

Cupid or DaVinci?

I've been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the onslaught of world events (20 women and children killed in Beit Hanoun, 150 Iraqi civilians kidnapped by "police," Japan's PM aiming to redraft their constitution, etc.), and thought I'd escape with another episode of quirky science. In the Washington Post today, there is an article about what makes humans see each other as beautiful.

Interestingly, Stephen Marquardt posits that beauty, like so many other neat things in nature, such as the spiral, and I think the organization of the spines on a pinecone, is determined by the golden ratio. In mathematical terms, this is expressed as: (a+b)/a = a/b = 1.618, where 1.618 is the only positive solution to the equation. This is also called the golden section or the golden mean, depending on who is talking about it. Wikipedia has a good explanation of the math: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_ratio.

The article even manages to give us a bit of poetry:
I thought Cupid aimed his dart
Deep into my fevered heart;
Instead, the arrow's lusty path
Was predetermined by . . . math.

I can't find a citation for the verse, but I know I've heard it somewhere before... Meanwhile, here's the link to the article - enjoy!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/08/AR2006110801477.html

A New Broom Sweeps Clean(er)

Yeah, yeah. I'm still a cynic. I'm not going to claim moral victory for the Democrats, but I AM going to claim electoral victory. And we all know that's what really matters. But I was going to title this post "Suck it, Santorum" so at least I'm being polite about our SWEEPING victory in the house. Not that my politics were much of a secret, but now my true-blue roots are showing through.

Now, if the Virginia election officials can get their act together and do a quick recount, let's hope Webb triumphs over Allen in that race. I'd even give 'em Burns in Montana if we can just get Allen out of VA. He's just the epitome of eveything I hate.

And now, since I'm in the best mood I've been in (politically) since 2000, here's my 2006 Midterm Election Roundup:

Serves 'em Right - I disagree with these three on pretty much everything they stand for, and I'd be lying if I said I was sorry to see them go:
Santorum (R-PA)
De Lay (R-TX)
Hostettler (R-IN)

The Times They Are A-Changin' - Can't say I'm too sorry to creep closer to a majority in the Senate, but it's a shame it had to come at the expense of Lincoln Chaffee. I think his loss is a loss for the legislature.

Welcome to the Club! Here's a list of some new arrivals I find interesting:
Deval Patrick - Governor of Massachusetts
Bob Casey - Senator, D-PA
Bernie Sanders - Senator, I-VT (our only Socialist, I believe)
Bill Nelson - Senator, D-FL

You Can't Win 'Em All - Someday, these guys will get ousted from office:
John Doolittle - Rep, R-CA (this one's for you, Dad)
Bob Corker - Senator, R-TN
Dennis Hastert - Rep, R-IL

And, on a final note, the race with the best name? The incumbent, now re-elected in Texas' 9th District is... Al Green. Gotta love it.

No Exit Polls? No Problem!

From "The Plank," a blog posted on the New Republic's website, this is almost as good as the idea of terrorism futures:

"For political junkies suffering from data deficit disorder because the exit poll folks are being kept in a locked room and will not be let out until 5 p.m. today--there is a source of relief: The political futures market. Three websites offer the chance to buy into or against virtually every contested Senate, House, and Governor race, and to bet on which party will control either branch of Congress, by what margin, and even to make longer-shot parlays, betting, for example, on the Democrats taking both (or neither) branch.

"The appeal of these websites is that they are constantly changing, so that statistics nuts who don't want to bet can still watch their favorite and hated candidates move up and down, just as if they were a stock or commodity.

"At this writing, 2:46 p.m., you can put $59 dollars on Claire McCaskill to beat incumbent Missouri Republican Senator Jim Talent with a chance to get back $100, or you can put $35 on Talent and get back $100 if he wins. In other words, the market on intrade.com clearly favors McCaskill. Political folks have recently described the Montana Senate race as neck and neck, but the people who put money on it disagree, clearly favoring Democrat Jon Tester over Sen. Conrad Burns by a $70-$25 margin. If you believe the experts' claim that the race is even, putting money on Burns is clearly worth the return."

http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank (you'll need to scroll down the page)

In addition, this is just absurd, and it makes me actually thankful for the fact that voters have been so inundated with political ads that they can't possibly mistake candidates' parties:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/07/AR2006110700740.html

Color-coded chaos

Gee, maybe my company should start judging our activities on color-coded sliding scales. Regardless of how you measure it, though, we're all doing better than the US Military:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/01/world/middleeast/01military.html?ex=1320037200&en=62235052af3eb067&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

And then, from the Washington Post, we have Tony Snow: "You can't say, I support the troops, but I hate the cause, because that's why they signed up. And you've got men and women who are risking their lives for what they consider a noble cause, which is not only defeating al-Qaeda and defeating terrorists abroad, but also creating conditions that are going to allow people in that part of the world to brush aside terror as an unnecessary distraction to building a better life through free and democratic society."

I'm barely going to give a moment's credence to the first half of that quote, because it's so blatantly ridiculous. You've got men and women who signed up years ago, are stuck in the military on a stop-loss order, and others who signed up because they needed work (thanks to the contraction of the economy), or help paying for tuition (due to the recent increases far in excess of inflation). There are some very noble soldiers out there, but arguing that a military fights only for the "cause" is naive and silly.

But let's get to the meat of the matter. In what world do we consider terrorism an "unnecessary distraction"? Is that what the military might of America has been deployed to do? Counter "unnecessary distractions"? I'd like to see certain members of the Administration "brush aside" an IED. Or maybe a landmine.

What will be the next "distraction" we go after? I shudder to think.

Also, this is unrelated, from the Washington Post today:

"In recent days, Bush has said Social Security remains one of the 'big items' he wants to tackle next year and he continues to 'believe that a worker, at his or her option, ought to be allowed to put some of their own money . . . in a private savings account, an account that they call their own.'"

Um, has anyone noticed that we already have a system like this? It's called banking.

Party on the Mason-Dixon Line?

An op-ed piece in the Washington Post today notes the departure of Northern Libertarian-leaning voters from the Republican Party, and the consolidation of the Republicans as the party of "Southern values." The traditional geographic dispersal of the Democrats began to shift northward when the party espoused the idea of civil rights in the 60s. Then, the parties began (continued? I don't know enough about US politics...) to align along social issues. In every region, you find people who don't want "big government," or who "support our troops," but does that really matter?

Could it be that the age-old question of North vs. South is still applicable? This is not to suggest that either bloc is, well, a bloc, but does pose the question of whether people vote on issues, or on cultural perception. Or do we just vote the way the people around us vote? Do we create the "popular" crowd in politics the same way we do it in middle school?

If the parties' support bases really have been shifting over the past 40 years, they've certainly supported a North-South divide. Just take a look at a red-state/blue-state map from the last Presidential election. Are our cultures really so different that we respond to starkly divergent political messages? Or do we just vote what we know?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/31/AR2006103101312.html

The News From Lake Wobegon

Garrison Keillor, master of the quirky, Midwestern fable, writes this article, which is just too good to pass up. Maybe not as good as "The Living Flag," but, I think, just as patriotic.

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.keillor26oct26,0,7238007.story?coll=bal-oped-headlines

Betcha Didn't See This One Coming

An interesting piece in The American Conservative (surprise! my news-reading extends to both sides of the aisle!)...

http://www.amconmag.com/2006/2006_11_06/feature.html

...and an interesting companion to it from Al-Jazeera.

http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/review/article_full_story.asp?service_ID=12030

For the record, both Breaking the Silence and B'Tselem are official, above-the-radar NGOs, based in Israel. It takes a lot, in the current political climate, to stand up for the truth (as it's not pretty on either side), and the two organizations should be applauded.

Although I think Walt and Mearshimer could have done a better job with carefully choosing source material and playing a bit of devil's advocate in their paper, I look forward to buying their book. Whatever your position on America and Israeli foreign policy, raising the level of debate in the US will result in a better outcome for us all.

Unoriginality, at least

Now, I don't claim that the Washington Post reads my travel blog, but note the similarity here between their discussion of the US border "fence" and my comments on the Israeli occupation wall (March 24, 2005):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/26/AR2006102601826.html

http://ririaroundtheworld.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_ririaroundtheworld_archive.html

Unfortunately, the Post's article talks all about walls, and doesn't even mention Israel, the land of borders, walls, and fences. Writing about walls isn't really quite as effective when you hide behind them.

Dean Gallucci must be pretty pissed off

Interestingly, the Dean of Georgetown SFS was the US Ambassador that negotiated the deal w/North Korea under the Clinton administration. It would have been very interesting to talk to him in the past few days - I didn't expect NK to actually test a bomb quite so quickly - I figured they'd see what they could leverage first. I haven't found a response/analysis piece from him posted anywhere yet, but I'm looking.

Anyway, now that my assessment (and, I'd bet, a lot of other people's, but maybe I'm just making myself feel better) is proven wrong, here's the text of the draft UN resolution:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2397543,00.html

The Washington Post, which has recently pulled its investigative journalism credentials out of the closet, today ran an editorial/analysis piece about the Axis of Evil and how the situation with each country has rapidly deteriorated since the Bush Administration took office. Here's the link:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/09/AR2006100901130.html

The Crumbling Difference Between Wrong and Right

Here in Ramallah, everything is quiet. However, news reports are starting to sound sharper. The Times cites growing evidence of civil war, whereas Al Jazeera mentions only a Hamas rally, and their repeated declaration that they will refuse to recognize Israel.

Who, then, is correct? It would be naive to assume that there won't be confilct in Gaza, but I would be surprised if it spread so rapidly to the West Bank. At the moment (possibly not for too much longer, but at the moment), the opportunity cost of civil war is too great.

However, when it comes to principle, who's right? Hamas is holding rigidly to an untenable position. The West refuses to recognize a government that, while distasteful, was elected in what even the US concedes was a free and fair election. So who's right?

If people spend too long battling over ideas, living conditions deteriorate, coping strategies are exhausted, and that opportunity cost suddenly doesn't seem so high. There's no civil war yet. This isn't Iraq. But another actively unstable linchpin in the Middle East will further weaken the tenuous hold on law and order that currently exists. Watch out.

In case the world looks too depressing, take a look at this: http://improbable.com/

The Great Game

Now, I don’t usually turn my focus to East Asia, as I know least about the politics of that region. Kim Jong Il’s intent to detonate a nuclear* weapon, however, is newsworthy enough that even my narrow focus will be diverted to North Korea. I spent a little bit of time in college studying the Cold War, debating the virtues or the futility of nuclear deterrence, articulating how and why countries act, parsing politics down to game theory.

In this instance, even the universal seems not to apply. What does Mr. Kim gain by a nuclear test? Let’s think it through. In early July, the world found out that, although North Korea does possess long-range missile capability, the results of the tests do not exhibit consistent capacity to reach the intended target. We know, and have known for quite a while, that North Korea possesses the capability to build nuclear weapons, and now we know that they have done so. Again, not a surprise.

So, given limited delivery capability, and the general consensus that, no matter how many weapons North Korea has, the US has more, spread within a wider territory, how does this test change the political balance? If anything, Mr. Kim has created a weapon that he cannot use, for North Korea has no second-strike capability. If he were to detonate a weapon in a context other than a test, the world would react, either with nuclear or conventional weapons, obliterating significant sections of both his population and his infrastructure. My personal money would be on well-placed tactical nukes, particularly if it were to happen in the next two years (before the US administration changes), but that's beside the point. Overall, regardless of the method, overt war would be good for no one, and even in the most simple game theory matrix, an option to be avoided.

Instead, what Mr. Kim has achieved by announcing this test is a new phase of detente between China and Japan. After nearly two years of silence between the two powers, the change in Japan's political landscape, coupled with North Korea's disregard for the Nuclear NPT, has led to a summit in Beijing. This, now, is a most interesting development. With the economic strength of China and Japan improving (despite rocky financial indicators for Japan this summer), and that of the US on the decline, Mr. Kim's action, if it leads to more comprehensive cooperation between China and Japan, could be the precipitating moment for an economic power shift rather than a political or military one.

Given the relationship between China and North Korea, this would be no small achievement on Mr. Kim's part. The world could, then, rant, rave, and declare sanctions. But in terms of significant investment, North Korea's nuke could result in a short-term economic decline with the potential for far greater growth over the next twenty years. Not, perhaps, such a poor round of the game after all.

*note, please, that this is nu-cle-ar, not nu-cu-lar!

Maybe I should go into journalism

Did I call this, or what?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/04/AR2006100402006.html

Mom! Ismail stole my constituents!

I once had the pleasure of a short, impromptu debate with Bob Woodward over whether opening Iraq as a second front in the GWOT was a strategic blunder (I argued yes, seeing as how Afghanistan wasn't finished yet, and still isn't; he argued no, with the dodgeball theory). Although I've yet to win him to my side on that score, at least it appears that we may be in accord on the tactical:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2387604,00.html

In other news, I was watching CNN today (one of my 3 English channels here in Ramallah), and they had a dramatic headline announcement about how talks between Fatah and Hamas have broken down, saying that Fatah was no longer talking to Hamas, and Abbas voiced fears of civil war. Now, I hate to disparage CNN, particularly when it's giving me about 40% of my news lately, but, seriously? First of all, I believe Abbas was quoted as saying that civil war would theoretically be a big problem, and should be avoided at all costs. It's dangerous to equate that statement with the fear that civil war is imminent.

In addition, it's naive to say that the two parties aren't speaking (granted, Abbas is not having an official meeting with Haniyeh, but who are they, a pair of teenage girls?), just fighting.

I'd wager both sides are more clever than that. Look at the last week: Ongoing cycle of closures, lack of money, and rocket attacks leads to unrest in Gaza. Said unrest spreads to the West Bank. Talks break down. Rice comes to visit, with pledges to talk to Israel about easing travel restrictions.

If I were in charge of the Palestinian Territories, and my economy was being strangled, I think I just might turn to the one person with influence (military and economic) over my strangler. But I wouldn't want to give up my position of being powerless, yet. At the moment, I can plead for help with little tit-for-tat. If I shoulder the weight of government, I have much more international responsibility.