What it comes down to is this: Iran is the most powerful and stable country in the Middle East -- a country the United States must either fight in a new thirty-year war or come to terms with.

So writes twenty-year veteran CIA field operative Robert Baer in a new book titled The Devil We Know: Dealing with the New Iranian Superpower.

Last week he had a remarkable interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air in which he argued for a radical reconsideration of Iran as the pre-eminent power in the Middle East that the United States must engage as an "equal partner" -- or else risk debilitating conequences.

Despite its status as the only "real military power" in the Gulf region, Iran does not want war: it wants to secure its position of dominance.

The U.S. needs to acknowledge this new reality and make the necessary drastic changes to do what is best not only for the Middle East, but for itself.

I've been thinking about my parents more and more over the last few weeks and especially the last several days, but when I read this headline and these paragraphs in the International Herald Tribune yesterday --

The week that dashed baby boomers' dreams

Of all those who watched the swooning graphs of the marketplace describe the parabola of their fortune's decline, perhaps the legions of the baby-boom generation were the most rueful, the least likely to believe they had time to recover, the most likely to ponder the validity of the promise after the Great Depression and World War II that things would only get better. ...

But that assumption began to look questionable - to say the very least - as the crisis began to spill its toxins from the arcane mysteries of high finance into ordinary people's pocketbooks.

By depending so much on stock-based savings, the baby boomers were exposed to the prospect of their golden years being straitened or even canceled: paradise deferred indefinitely.

-- I said, "That's it.  I need to start getting some serious advice and information about what they should be doing with their savings, because things are starting to look more than ugly; they're starting to look scary."

Lots of things bothered me about Dostoyevsky's novel about a "positively good man" living amidst a decidedly not positively good society.

But -- and perhaps it's just the sheer bulk of the thing, and the way he manages it to keep it together, even as it leaks and groans precariously -- I acknowledge that there is something momentous, even masterful about it.  (Actually, when my first reaction to something -- or someone -- is negative, it very often means I will eventually end up not only liking it, but saluting it.)

Well, I just wrote an informal "review" of the book for my friends, and though it is completely quick and dirty and unedited, and no doubt I will be embarrassed later about some things I write in it, I put it out here for ET in case anyone else has read The Idiot and/or knows a thing or two about Dostoyevsky and his Zeitgeist to correct my own impressions, remind me of points and aspects of the book that I have forgotten or may have escaped my notice in the first place, or simply to share yours about this book, which though I gripe about it, nevertheless has left its mark on me, if only through those characters who broke my frikking heart.

Update [2008-9-10 1:2:54 by marco]: I changed the original title of this diary, as the original one was pointlessly provocative.

And do people need such relief?

A trash collection service is coming clean.

Waste Management of the Inland Empire has debuted five garbage trucks that run on compressed natural gas, or CNG, which is cleaner-burning than diesel. The trucks will be used in residential Beaumont and Banning.

The trucks are quieter than their diesel counterparts and emit less pollution, company officials said.

Cleaner, greener garbage trucks hit Inland road | Inland News | The Press-Enterprise

There's a messenger from province to province who writes it up in beautiful calligraphy, chops it and goes to the village and puts it on the wall and all the people come and read it. And whatever it says, the people have a habit of taking it as the truth. Nobody ever questions what the emperor said.

So given that as a tradition, the state media apparatus has a great responsibility in what they say. Because it is so easy for them to hype up something and that's why the gag rule is because, you know, they're kept on such a short leash because people actually -- unlike in the United States -- believe what they read in newspapers in China. And that's frightening.

<...>

We know how to make money in that way but we don't really know how to generate a modern value system so the world will accept us, and that's the problem. And this is the crossroad where we're at right now. We're very practical, we know how to make money, we don't know how to communicate our values to the rest of the world. In fact, we don't even know what our values are. And that's the problem because you need free thinkers. You need people, philosophers to think about these subjects and to be able to publish it and to be able to talk about it. You need a free press that can discuss these subjects. You need to look into our national history, our psyche, the darkest hours, to find what we have to avoid as a people. You know, the way that the Germans have searched their soul, the way that we're pleading and asking the Japanese to do, we have to do the same.

Online News Hour: Magazine Editor Hung Huang (aired May 30, 2008)

I was going to title this "China's Oprah Winfrey on Nationalism", for that is one of the eponyms she is commonly referred to as.  But the extraordinary Hong Huang deserves to be considered on her own merits, and not in relation to someone else.

She is no heroic human rights activist or political leader or artist.  She is basically a very successful fashion media entrepreneur turned mogul turned blogger/Internet celebrity.  But I say "extraordinary", because of all the commentators I have heard on China -- both in the media and in person -- she strikes me as far and away the most insightful, candid and articulate.

I do not agree with everything she says.  In particular, she sometimes makes overstated generalizations.  But overall, what she says resonates very well with my own impressions of China, and if you are not able to come to the country itself, she would serve as a very good "virtual guide" to it.

I am not sure if I am allowed to add a diary to the Socratic Economics series at will, but since I have a question and it is about economics, I figured I'd throw it up there.

Some friends and I are having a debate about the moral justification for progressive taxation, as opposed to a flat tax, a consumption tax, and even no taxes.

Personally, while I understand the pragmatic arguments for progressive taxation and on balance am decidedly in favor of it, I have always felt rather ambivalent about its moral justifiability.

The strongest moral argument I find in favor of progressive taxation is that based on compound empowerment.

... an entire encyclopedia written by unedited amateurs, not to mention ignoramuses, seemed destined to be junk.

Everything I knew about the structure of information convinced me that knowledge would not spontaneously emerge from data, without a lot of energy and intelligence deliberately directed to transforming it. <...>

How wrong I was. ... Both the weakness and virtues of individuals are transformed into common wealth, with a minimum of rules and elites. It turns out that with the right tools it is easier to restore damage text (the revert function on Wikipedia) than to create damage text (vandalism) in the first place, and so the good enough article prospers and continues. With the right tools, it turns out the collaborative community can outpace the same number of ambitious individuals competing.

In his response to the Edge question: "What have you changed your mind about?", Kevin Kelly's remarks have a direct bearing on EuroTrib's current discussions about how to get our message to the wider world, in particular, via an ETpedia.

More provocative -- and debatable -- is what he says about the wider social and political dimensions of Wikipedia's transformative potential as a model for collaboration, productivity, even political organization.  I wonder if he is idealizing how Wikipedia really works by minimizing the amount of oversight and grunt-work that actually gets put in "behind-the-scenes" (despite his implication that Wikipedia eliminated the need for "a laborious process of top-down editing and re-writing" which existed in Wikipedia's antecedent version, Nupedia).

Diary rescue by Migeru

A young American guy I know has been living in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, China, for the past three years and has been blogging about the earthquake from there.  Here is his latest post, "China handles business" (re-printed with his permission):

President Hu Jintao made it to Dujiangyan today and shook hands with Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

Today I took a ride with a civil engineer and a security and infrastructure assessment expert around the northwest suburbs of Chengdu. We visited Chongzhou, Qingcheng Mountain and the outskirts of Dujiangyan.

(originally written as a comment in response to the article Fran posted on Britain's energy problems in this morning's Salon).

a very obvious idea, and i am sure it has been considered already in one of the creative jam sessions about how to get our message out more, making EuroTrib a virtual think tank, etc., but just in case...

can we create a section on this site which contains "position papers" on various issues that we often discuss, in language, style and over-all presentation that is aimed at:

• quickly and crisply informing and persuading the general public about our points of view

• getting ranked highly on Google

the idea is to have a well-articulated, well-argued, and readily applicable set of "positions" or "views" or "proposals" on various issues that people can find easily online and "seize" if and when the proverbial doo-doo hits the fan with respect to energy, healthcare, global warming, unemployment, etc.

-- and it's not the one with Chinese characteristics.

Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles (2002), has a new book out, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century, which Niall Ferguson thinks so highly about that he has "no doubt"

it will be garlanded with prizes. It deserves to be. It is more important that it should be read, marked and inwardly digested by all three of the remaining candidates to succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States.

Ferguson's effusive praise (particularly as it is so prominently positioned in this morning's New York Times "Sunday Book Review") makes it likely that it will get a lot of attention from media talking heads and more significantly from politicians (including, as Ferguson hopes, the U.S. presidential hopefuls).  As such, the book may be worth getting familiar with, in particular since it (at least as characterized by Ferguson and other reviewers) boldly announces and advocates the superseding of the obsolescent "nation state" structure in favor of the new "market state", the use of "preclusionary warfare" against terrorist enemies, the need for a new US-EU, post-Westphalian market-state "G2" pole, and the curtailing of civil liberties in the "epochal war" that Bobbitt asserts the world is embroiled in.

Could Bobbitt's work do for the word neoliberal, even for the word neoconservative, what Ferguson's Empire and Colossus did for the word empire, i.e. resurrect it from stigma to respectability?

Diary rescue by Migeru

Putting aside questions about the merits, morality or effectiveness of the positions, tactics, objectives and message of the torch relay demonstrators in London and Paris for the moment, I was pretty disturbed by two things which stank of over-accommodating the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games by the British and the French authorities:

• those blue tracksuit wearing Chinese "flame attendants" with their secret service sunglasses (in Paris at least) who supposedly had no "executive power" in the UK, but nevertheless seemed to be applying "executive power" to protect the torch in London (could not find much commentary on them in the French press yet)

• reports of French authorities forcing people to put away or hand over Tibetan flags, anti-Olympic/anti-China signs, etc., while allowing Chinese flags to be waved

Can anybody explain what law or regulation or other legal device justified the role and actions of the blue flame attendants in London and Paris, and the selective banning of flags and other expressions of protest in Paris?

Hi, following up on this diary  few weeks ago about a possible "meet-up" in Tokyo, just wanted to give a shout-out to anyone in Japan, in particular the Kanto area, who wants to join me and Zwackus this Friday evening for dinner and chit-chat for the first, albeit modest, EuroTrib meet-up in Japan, and if I am not mistaken Asia.

Tentatively I've proposed the Pink Cow in Shibuya at 7:00 PM.

Any EuroTribbers in Japan these days interested in getting together for a meet-up in early February?

I'll be in Tokyo over winter break from January 28 to February 14, and while planning the trip, I thought it would be worth a shot to see if anyone in Nihon would be up for going to an izakaya or somewhere to chat over nabe, unagi, sukiyaki and/or a few cups of nihonshu.

After February 3, I'm pretty open on possible dates, but since I figured a Friday and/or Saturday would be most likely to work for most people, I'm throwing out February 8-9 as a first suggestion.

Traipsing through Metaphysics of the coming age, I stumbled out onto a comment I wrote just over a year ago under "Edge of Chaos" Economy, which comment I found somehow complementary to Gaianne's diary as it talks about cognitive breakthroughs that transform the way we experience and understand reality.

My comment was in response to ATinNM, who wrote:

To PN a bit, "spontaneous" in regards to information emergence is based on aquired knowledge assembled, with greater or lesser degrees of coherence, into varying structures.  Under certain circumstances and triggers these structures shift in a Accomodation [see Piaget, et.al.] forming new knowledge structures (or patterns) -- a kind of Ta-DAH! -- during which information is re-associated, accepted, and Something New pops out.

There are different degrees of 'Ta-DAHness' affecting the entity in different ways.  At the most extreme, a conversion, the process results in a profound cognitive/pyschological shift.

Along these lines, the following actually happened to someone I knew:  After serious dental surgery she was groggily coming out from the anathesia when her dentist leaned over and told her, "You know, flossing is the answer."  For several days after she was a real pain in the ass as she kept walking up to her friends, looking them straight in the eye, and in total dedication saying, "You know.  FLOSSING is THE answer."  She was, for those few days, a Born Again Flossist.  Fortunately, she soon snapped back into reality where flossing only had import in dental hygiene not a metaphysical certainty.

Finals season starts tomorrow, so I need to check out for a couple of weeks, but below fold is the parting dollop of woo-woo.

So yesterday we had a pretty interesting day in conversation class (I am studying Mandarin at the International College of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China with foreign students from all over the world.)

The chapter we were studying was "Talking about China", and the vocabulary list included words like "nationality", "population", "capital", "flag", "national anthem", "national flower", etc.

The teacher asked each of us to give a short presentation about our respective countries using words from the chapter (or, if we preferred, about one of two previous themes we had been asked to prepare: what we did last weekend, or some news item we read or heard.)

In Sunday's Le Monde there was an interview with veteran priest and activist Christian Delorme, titled "Thirty Years of Despair in the Banlieue".

He said things in there that really struck me, not least for the forthrightness with which he said them.

Among them:

• he blames racism and unemployment matter of factly as the roots of current discontent and violence in the banlieue

• he wonders at the lack of discussion about the disproportionate chronic unemployment among banlieue youth.

• he asserts that French people have not lost their "colonial schemas" that "undervalue" North Africans and blacks.

• he singles out France as the only European country that uses ethnic profiling to control young people on a mass scale.

• he recommends that France apologize for its "colonial crimes" in order to improve the "social peace".

Doth he protest too much?  If not, then how representative is his take on this issue?  And how can this situation be ameliorated?

Paul Krugman concludes a column he wrote recently:

... we [in the U.S.] should be able to discuss the role of race in American politics honestly. We shouldn't avert our gaze because we're unwilling to tarnish Ronald Reagan's image.

I think his piece is a little too optimistic in its assessment that "we have become a more diverse and less racist country over time" and that as far as campaign politics go, "America has changed for the better" (we have, but we still have a LONG way to go).  Nevertheless, I am glad that he raised the issue so squarely, and I felt the same thing reading this Delorme interview.

(Incidentally, are there any figures on the frequency and severity of these uprisings and/or crime in the banlieues over the years, and if so, do we see a drop in them during the "emploies-jeunes" & "police de proximité" period under Lionel Jospin?)

Translated portions of the interview (below fold) originally posted as comment in Sunday's Salon, but afew was right that a diary is a much better forum to get feedback in.

Promoted by Migeru

McKinsey & Company has come out with a report (PDF) on a project started early in 2007 to look at different options on how to "reduce or prevent [greenhouse gas] emissions within the United States over a 25-year period".  Their "CENTRAL CONCLUSION" is:

The United States could reduce greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 by 3.0 to 4.5 gigatons of CO2e using tested approaches and high-potential emerging technologies.¹  These reductions would involve pursuing a wide array of abatement options available at marginal costs less than $50 per ton, with the average net cost to the economy being far lower if the nation can capture sizable gains from energy efficiency.  Achieving these reductions at the lowest cost to the economy, however, will require strong, coordinated, economy-wide action that begins in the near future.

¹ CO2e, or "carbon dioxide equivalent", is a standardized measure of GHG emissions designed to account for the differeing global warming potentials of GHGs.  Emissions are measured in metric tons CO2eper year, i.e. millions of tons (megatons) or billions of tons (gigatons).  All emissions values in this report are per-year CO2e amounts, unless specifically noted otherwise.  To be consistent with U.S. government forecasts, the team used the 100-year global warming potentials listed in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Second Assessment Report (1995).

I am not able to comment on the analysis of the growing emissions problem nor of what they call "abatement potentials".  However, it struck me that such a report from McKinsey, management consulting firm par excellence, and treated with some attention and sympathy in the media, might signal a new level of acceptance of concern and engagement by major corporate players.  Indeed, the almost simultaneous publishing of this report and that of the The Bali Communiqué (see below), reinforced this impression.

Promoted with slight edit by afew

GDP is the best-recognised measure of economic performance in the world, often used as a generic indicator of progress. However, the relationship between economic growth as measured by GDP and other dimensions of societal progress is not straightforward. Effectively measuring progress, wealth and well-being requires indices that are as clear and appealing as GDP but more inclusive than GDP--ones that incorporate social and environmental issues. This is especially important given global challenges such as climate change, global poverty, pressure on resources and their potential impact on societies.

Is anyone already slated to attend the conference "Beyond GDP" in Brussels on November 19-20, co-hosted by the European Commission, European Parliament, Club of Rome, OECD and the World Wildlife Fund?

[editor's note, by Migeru] Some content moved below the fold for the front page

Registration is closed, but it is still possible to make a Late Registration Request.

Promoted by Migeru

This is a lazy quote diary spun off from an article Fran posted in yesterday's Salon.

The plutocrats supposedly running the show at NBC's Office for Manufacturing Consent must have forgotten to give former anchor Tom Brokaw an injection of neoliberal truthiness serum before his interview with billionaire investor American heartland poster boy Warren Buffett for a piece on NBC Nightly News Monday, in which he gives Buffett a high profile forum and helps him to criticize tax policies that favor the rich, supply side economics (implicitly), hedge fund lobbyists, estate taxes, and golden handshakes.

Money quote:

Tom: Will you put some money on the table on this one?

Warren: What--

Tom: You said-- you said you'd pay a million dollars to somebody.

Warren: I'll-- I'll bet-- I'll bet a million dollars against any member of the Forbes 400 who challenges-- me that the average [tax rate] for the Forbes 400 will be less than the average of their receptionists. So, I'm-- I'm-- I'm-- I'll give 'em an 800 number. They can call me. And the million will go to whichever charity the winner-- designates.

I would be curious to read what people here think of his comments on a "progressive consumption tax" as a form of tax that "makes the most sense".

Promoted by Migeru

"Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."

"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."

"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Also sprach second in command of the Nazi Third Reich and commander of the Luftwaffe Hermann Göring in a private interview with Gustave Gilbert during the his trial in Nuremberg, as excerpted by Snopes.com from Gilbert's Nuremberg Diary.

Now we have a recent exemplar of sorts of this kind of political thinking, brought to you by the Washington Post in an article about how former U.S. secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld issued 20 to 60 dictated memos, nicknamed "snowflakes", every day as a central part of his work.