The revenge of geography

That is the title of Robert Kaplan's essay in Foreign Policy. He writes there:

[Rather] than eliminating the relevance of geography, globalization is reinforcing it. Mass communications and economic integration are weakening many states, exposing a Hobbesian world of small, fractious regions. Within them, local, ethnic, and religious sources of identity are reasserting themselves, and because they are anchored to specific terrains, they are best explained by reference to geography. Like the faults that determine earthquakes, the political future will be defined by conflict and instability with a similar geographic logic. The upheaval spawned by the ongoing economic crisis is increasing the relevance of geography even further, by weakening social orders and other creations of humankind, leaving the natural frontiers of the globe as the only restraint.

So we, too, need to return to the map, and particularly to what I call the “shatter zones” of Eurasia. We need to reclaim those thinkers who knew the landscape best. And we need to update their theories for the revenge of geography in our time.

And then he goes on to discuss the "shatter zones." It is an interesting read, and he discusses MacKinder's thesis on heartland and rimland, and updates it for the 21st century. Of his descriptions and analyses of the shatter zones, I like the one about Iran the best:

It is not an accident that Iran was the ancient world’s first superpower. There was a certain geographic logic to it. Iran is the greater Middle East’s universal joint, tightly fused to all of the outer cores. Its border roughly traces and conforms to the natural contours of the landscape—plateaus to the west, mountains and seas to the north and south, and desert expanse in the east toward Afghanistan. For this reason, Iran has a far more venerable record as a nation-state and urbane civilization than most places in the Arab world and all the places in the Fertile Crescent. Unlike the geographically illogical countries of that adjacent region, there is nothing artificial about Iran. Not surprisingly, Iran is now being wooed by both India and China, whose navies will come to dominate the Eurasian sea lanes in the 21st century.

Of all the shatter zones in the greater Middle East, the Iranian core is unique: The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent Iranian nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it. The security provided to Iran by its own natural boundaries has historically been a potent force for power projection. The present is no different. Through its uncompromising ideology and nimble intelligence services, Iran runs an unconventional, postmodern empire of substate entities in the greater Middle East: Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Sadrist movement in southern Iraq. If the geographic logic of Iranian expansion sounds eerily similar to that of Russian expansion in Mackinder’s original telling, it is.

The geography of Iran today, like that of Russia before, determines the most realistic strategy to securing this shatter zone: containment. As with Russia, the goal of containing Iran must be to impose pressure on the contradictions of the unpopular, theocratic regime in Tehran, such that it eventually changes from within. The battle for Eurasia has many, increasingly interlocking fronts. But the primary one is for Iranian hearts and minds, just as it was for those of Eastern Europeans during the Cold War. Iran is home to one of the Muslim world’s most sophisticated populations, and traveling there, one encounters less anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism than in Egypt. This is where the battle of ideas meets the dictates of geography.

The hawks of Israel want a war with Iran ....

First the bad news was that Netanyahu became the prime minister. Even before the elections, back in September, I was rooting for Tzipi Livni, who I thought would then become the world's second most powerful woman. Alas, that never came to pass, and now we have to deal with an ultra-hawk.
Obama will have a tougher time with Netanyahu than with most Arab leaders. Israel is at some serious crossroads.

Meanwhile, here is an excerpt from a commentary in Haaretz (note that the commentary is written from the future, from November 2012):

Obama had no chance in the snows of Iowa in 2012. So with Oprah Winfrey wiping a tear at his side, the most promising president ever announced he would not run for a second term.

What went wrong? Where did Obama go astray? In retrospect, the answer is clear and simple. In the summer of 2009, the president had to make the most courageous decision of his life: to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Granted, opting for confrontation would have been incompatible with the DNA of the liberal Democrat from Chicago. Ironically, however, only such a decision could have saved his legacy and advanced the noble values he believed in. Only that decision could have led to a comprehensive peace in the Middle East. If Obama had decided three years ago to impose a political-economic siege on Tehran, he would have changed the course of history. The Roosevelt of the 21st century would have prevented regional chaos, a worldwide nuclear arms race and an American decline.

The war chant in Israel seems to be getting louder and louder. This is simply nuts! Imagine if Amedinajad gets re-elected. He will get bolder. Netanyahu then aims all his ammo at Tehran and the nuke-specific locations. Hezbollah starts lobbing whatever it can at Israel. Israel then blinks.

I suppose there is no point worrying about the swine flu virus now!

Want a real nightmare? Imagine if John "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" McCain had been elected prez ...... aaaaahhhhh!

Collegiality and work in higher education

Das war schön!

This entire month I have been following the NYRB's poem of the day, in celebration of the National Poetry Month--in April, which is ironical when viewed against TS Eliot's "April is the cruelest month" :-)

I liked the poem that NYRB has for today:

K. 453

By Karl Kirchwey

On May 27, 1784,
as he followed Vienna's back streets home,
Mozart paused, startled, by a pet shop door
and listened to the allegretto theme

from his own piano concerto in G-Major
repeated by a starling in a cage.
He'd written it only five weeks before—
had God given them both the same message?

He counted out thirty-four copper Kreutzer.
Pleasure was like the iridescent sheen
in the dark plumage: an imagination livelier,
perhaps, more fecund and ready than his own!

He entered this in his new quarto accounts ledger,
but where the price should go, he wrote the tune
instead—transcribed it a second time, rather—
and then, in his small hand, wrote Das war schön.

Economy DID NOT shrink by 6.1%

I was getting rather ticked off with media reports that the US economy shrank by 6.1 percent.
The 6.1 number is correct--but that is an annualized rate. It is a good thing I came across David Leonhardt's blog post, which means I don't have to re-create a post, but can copy/paste from his:

the official numbers describe the annualized rate of decline. The economy didn’t actually shrink 6.1 percent in the fourth quarter, despite what the government reported. It shrank at a rate that, were it to continue for a full year, would cause the economy to be 6.1 percent smaller at the end of that year.

Leonhardt does point out why this economic contraction is worrisome:

Here are the worst six-month declines in economic activity since 1947:

3rd quarter, 1957 - 1st quarter, 1958: -3.7 percent
3rd quarter, 2008 - 1st quarter, 2009: -3.2 percent
3rd quarter, 1981 - 1st quarter, 1982: -2.9 percent
1st quarter, 1980 - 3rd quarter, 1980: -2.2 percent
2nd quarter, 1953 - 4th quarter, 1953: -2.2 percent

The irony? Despite this news, and all the hoopla over the swine flu pandemic, the stock market was up.

According to Bloomberg:

“Most people are saying we could bottom out in the second half of the year, maybe in the third quarter, and then see positive growth again,” Christina Romer, the White House’s chief economist, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “We’re certainly looking for some positive news towards the end of the year.”

The Economist notes on the other news item about a rise in consumer confidence:

confidence is a fragile thing and can be undermined by random events (such as swine flu). It is also worth remembering that consumers have had two tremendous boosts to their pocket books in the form of lower oil prices and lower mortgage rates. Even those aids to sentiment have only lifted the confidence index by 14 points compared with the 86 point decline it previously suffered (according to Capital Economics).

I would like to see consumer confidence survive the test of some really bad news (like a major corporate bankruptcy) before I was confident that the bottom had been reached. After all, from here, rates can't be cut any further, wages won't go up much, unemployment has further to rise and taxes will eventually have to go up. Not the sort of environment to make most people rush out and buy a flat sceen TV.

Corruption, and the government NOT at work :-)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Your Government Not at Work - Jane Harman Scandal
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?

Some science writers are just awesome when it comes to explaining a fine science point to a lay audience like me. First, consider this sentence; isn't this a wonderful piece of writing?

It takes a special type of psychological scientist to tell the little old lady sitting next to him on a flight to Denver that he studies how people use their penises when she asks what he does for a living.

That sentence came from this essay on "secrets of the phallus" in the Scientific American.

according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution. You may be surprised to discover just how highly specialized a tool it is. Furthermore, you’d be amazed at what its appearance can tell us about the nature of our sexuality.

It is fascinating that some of the minor anatomical detail about something I see and use everyday was a result of the system adapting to various situations, and then evolving to the tool that it now is. Apparently, "in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does."

In addition to the human penis outsizing that of any other primate,

It turns out that one of the most significant features of the human penis isn’t so much the glans per se, but rather the coronal ridge it forms underneath. The diameter of the glans where it meets the shaft is wider than the shaft itself. This results in the coronal ridge that runs around the circumference of the shaft—something Gallup, by using the logic of reverse-engineering, believed might be an important evolutionary clue to the origins of the strange sight of the human penis.

So, what is the reverse-engineered evolutionary psychological explanation for this? Hey, don't be lazy; read the essay yourself :-)

The Democratic Supermajority

With Arlen Specter switching sides from the GOP to the Dems, and with Al Franken sure to be seated as Minnesota's junior senator, the Dems will have that magical 60.
One hell of a majority in the Congress, and with the President's approval rating at 68 percent, we have a possibility for real reform in the balance between market and state. Let us see how Obama, Reid, and Pelosi play the game. How the GOP plays is quite irrelevant--it is the Dems' game to lose.

It is interesting that even in this country politicians switch parties when it is convenient for their political future. In India, of course, it is quite common. These are referred to as "aya ram, gaya ram"
The Senate has a listing, and lots of details, of senators who switched parties while holding the elected position.

Torture timeline

Foreign Policy has a chronological listing, with all kinds of hyperlinks, starting from September 11, 2001.

From the President's speech: April 28, 2003

I thought it might be interesting to visit the White House archives web site, and scan through President Bush's speeches from six years ago--after the Iraqi invasion. I hope to do this often. Why? Simple: we should never have gone to Iraq.

Today's excerpt is from April 28, 2003:

Remarks by the President on Operation Iraqi Freedom
Ford Community and Performing Arts Center
Dearborn, Michigan

.... Already, we are seeing important progress in Iraq. It wasn't all that long ago that the statue fell, and now we're seeing progress. (Applause.)

Rail lines are reopening, and fire stations are responding to calls. Oil -- Iraqi oil, owned by the Iraqi people -- is flowing again to fuel Iraq's power plants. In Hillah, more than 80 percent of the city has now running water. City residents can buy meats and grains and fruits and vegetables at local shops. The mayor's office, the city council have been reestablished.

In Basra, where more than half of the water treatment facilities were not working before the conflict -- more than half weren't functioning -- water supplies are now reaching 90 percent of the city. The opulent presidential palace in Basra will now serve a new and noble purpose. We've established a water purification unit there, to make hundreds of thousands of liters of clean water available to the residents of the city of Basra. (Applause.)

Day by day, hour by hour, life in Iraq is getting better for the citizens. (Applause.) Yet, much work remains to be done. I have directed Jay Garner and his team to help Iraq achieve specific long-term goals. And they're doing a superb job. Congress recently allocated $2.5 -- nearly $2.5 billion for Iraq's relief and reconstruction. With that money, we are renewing Iraq with the help of experts from inside our government, from private industry, from the international community and, most importantly, from within Iraq. (Applause.)

Does this even need any editorial comment from me?

Iceland. Bankers. Photos. Urinals.

Yes, that is the plot outline. (click here if you want some background on Iceland's problems). And, the result? (thanks to Krugman's blog for this link; looks like he had way too much fun with the title of his post!!!)


Photographs of bankers who left Iceland after the financial crisis have a new use in the restroom of a bar in Reykjavik, the capital.

Republicans. Public interest. Volcanoes and pandemics.

Outsourced to Paul Krugman:

So Bobby Jindal makes fun of “volcano monitoring”, and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack.

What else did the right oppose recently? I just want enough information to take cover.

Watch out for "False dawn".... "green shoots" not to celebrate

It is one thing to talk up the economy in order to build up consumer and producer confidence. It is another to start celebrating the end of the Great Recession.

Krugman wrote about it. And so did a couple of others; I blogged about it a week-plus ago.

The Economist expands on this warning, and provides an assessment that is less rah-rah, and more pragmatic:

The worst is over only in the narrowest sense that the pace of global decline has peaked. Thanks to massive—and unsustainable—fiscal and monetary transfusions, output will eventually stabilise. But in many ways, darker days lie ahead. Despite the scale of the slump, no conventional recovery is in sight. Growth, when it comes, will be too feeble to stop unemployment rising and idle capacity swelling. And for years most of the world’s economies will depend on their governments.

Consider what that means. Much of the rich world will see jobless rates that reach double-digits, and then stay there. Deflation—a devastating disease in debt-laden economies—could set in as record economic slack pushes down prices and wages, particularly since headline inflation has already plunged thanks to sinking fuel costs. Public debt will soar because of weak growth, prolonged stimulus spending and the growing costs of cleaning up the financial mess. The OECD’s member countries began the crisis with debt stocks, on average, at 75% of GDP; by 2010 they will reach 100%. One analysis suggests persistent weakness could push the biggest economies’ debt ratios to 140% by 2014. Continuing joblessness, years of weak investment and higher public-debt burdens, in turn, will dent economies’ underlying potential. Although there is no sign that the world economy will return to its trend rate of growth any time soon, it is already clear that this speed limit will be lower than before the crisis hit.

Google's multinational work force

Tomorrow, my intro class will turn in their papers on immigration, in response to an essay titled "The international mobility of talent." Next academic year, I think I should include in the readings this report from the NY Times; here is an excerpt:

Immigrants like Mr. Mavinkurve are the lifeblood of Google and Silicon Valley, where half the engineers were born overseas, up from 10 percent in 1970. Google and other big companies say the Chinese, Indian, Russian and other immigrant technologists have transformed the industry, creating wealth and jobs.

Just over half the companies founded in Silicon Valley from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s had founders born abroad, according to Vivek Wadhwa, an immigration scholar working at Duke and Harvard.

The foreign-born elite dating back even further includes Andrew S. Grove of Hungary, who helped found Intel; Jerry Yang, the Taiwanese-born co-founder of Yahoo; Vinod Khosla of India and Andreas von Bechtolsheim of Germany, the co-founders of Sun Microsystems; and Google’s Russian-born co-founder, Sergey Brin.

But technology executives say that byzantine and increasingly restrictive visa and immigration rules have imperiled their ability to hire more of the world’s best engineers.

Click here for a slideshow

Facebook and world's leaders

Very funny; check it out

Nature re-models the landscape

Remember the nasty tsunami as a result of the Indonesian earthquake back in December 2004?
The Hindu has this photo-report

A beach, post-tsunami — Photo: Vipin Chandran

POSITIVE FALLOUT: A beach that has formed at Puthype in Vypeen near Kochi after the December 2004 tsunami. Prior to the tsunami this area was under water.

Of course, a similar thing happened at Mahabalipuram too