Archive for December, 2008

Whatever Happened to Municipal Wifi?

GMU Law Professor, and sometimes Reason contributor Thomas W. Hazlett looks at what happened to the myriad of “free municipal wifi” promises from cities a few years ago.

Sphere: Related Content

Calendar Girl

The 2009 Sarah Palin calendar has become the top selling office product on Amazon. Don’t bother trying to order, they’re already sold out.

Sphere: Related Content

Against Poodle

Count me among those who think it’s damned ridiculous for the president of the United States to have a poodle for a pet. While Bush’s Scottish Terrier’s personality was entertaining, who can forget Putin’s words to Bush when he introduced Koni, his aggressive black lab:  “Bigger, tougher, stronger, faster, meaner – than Barney.” Although Putin does apparently have a “secret poodle“, this only further illustrates what a truly bizarre man he is.

Sphere: Related Content

Frank Miller’s Geostrategic Theory

Frank Lovece sat down with Frank Miller for Newsday to discuss his upcoming film The Spirit. Toward the end of it Lovece asked Miller about remarks he’d made in 2007 in support of the Iraq War, and offered him an opportunity to clarify/retract. Miller was unapologetic:

Miller: When the U.S. was attacked at Pearl Harbor, we didn’t just declare war on Japan, we declared war on Germany. It was an international fascist effort. And so when I said that the attack on Iraq made sense, it was the same way we had to attack not just Afghanistan. Instead we had to attack the center of Islamofascism.
(Newsday)

(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

The New Republicans

Steven Lee relaunches his fine student political site The New Republicans.

Sphere: Related Content

Implications of the Pletka Purge

Roland picks up an interesting piece by Jacob Heilbrunn for the National Interest, describing an ongoing purge of neoconservative intellectuals from the American Enterprise Institute, allegedly instigated by Vice President Danielle Pletka. So far Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht are gone, with Joshua Muravchik soon leaving. Others are said to be soon in following.

This could signal the reemergence of an old conflict over machtpolitik and just war doctrine, which used to exist in Republican security policy circles (ie, coercion-for-values vs. coercion-for-interests). If Pletka is indeed purging with intent, we may even expect AEI to shift its attitude toward the Middle East, Asia and Africa, given how much more amenable authoritarian regimes tend to be to interest pressure.

And the idealism of the AEI departed is considerable. Gerecht for instance wrote a fascinating but bizarre book I read in the late 1990s under the pen name Edward Shirley, in which he smuggled himself into Iran in the trunk of a car, essentially for the romance of it.

(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

The Cult of Nutritionism Suffers a Setback


(photo: gualtiero)

In a fine blow to the pseudoscientific cult of nutritionism, an intensive study conducted by the National Institutes of Health applied the same laboratory standards to vitamin supplements as are routinely applied to pharmaceuticals. Unsurprisingly, the researchers found that the supplements exerted no preventive benefit against cancer, heart disease, or any other illnesses. Dr. Edgar R. Miller, professor of medicine and epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, puts it nicely:

“These things are ineffective, and in high doses they can cause harm. People are unhappy with their diets, they’re stressed out, and they think it will help. It’s just wishful thinking.”
(Los Angeles Times)

As Damian Thompson argues in Counterknowledge (his magnificent polemic against the rise of quackery and conspiracy theories in contemporary society), the alternative in ‘alternative medicine’ is to science and modernity, and has entirely predictable results.

(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

Questioning Obama on Blagojevich

Hypothetically imagining he had the power to subpoena the president-elect, Michael Isikoff identifies the top five questions the public requires answers to relative to Mr. Obama’s knowledge of, or involvement with, Governor Blagojevich’s criminal misconduct.

Sphere: Related Content

Eichmann Endures

Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University, has succeeded in partially replicating Stanley Milgram’s famous social obedience experiment, whereby test subjects torture strangers with electrical shocks when told to do so. Depressingly, mankind appears to remain as obedient to evil as he did during the Miligram experiment in 1961. In Burger’s new study, test subjects followed orders to inflict pain at maximum voltage 70% of the time.

Miligram’s original intent in devising his experiment was to test whether or not Adolf Eichmann’s defense –that he was only following orders as anyone else would– was credible. It was one of the more terrifying discoveries of the twentieth century that in his defense, Eichmann was at least speaking for the majority. Miligram argued in his agentic state theory, that the essential transformation Eichmann made was to perceive himself as an exclusive instrument to serve the wishes of another. Once he had done that, he was genuinely mystified how anyone could consider him responsible for his actions.

It’s always been even more troubling for me personally, that such high percentages of compliance could be achieved in the United States, using American test subjects. Historically, Americans tend to revere personal rebellion and individualism more than most cultures on Earth. If you achieve 70% obedience here, you should be able to achieve total social control elsewhere. It may be that man has not yet been visited by his worst and perfect despot.

Sphere: Related Content

How Fascism Happens

All it really takes to get you to ignore the concentration camps right in front you of your eyes and turn you into a robot, is to say “hey, look at this.” That certainly wasn’t the purpose of this video, but it’s a sobering byproduct.

Sphere: Related Content

Words in Congress

Over the past sixty days, Harry Reid has been the most vocal person in the congressional record. The top two words he has used are “Republican” and “Republicans.” Republican Jeff Sessions has been the second most vocal person, using the words “oil” and “energy” most. On the basis of this, a visiting alien might be confused about which party was actually in power in the congress.

Sphere: Related Content

Cool Image of Venus

NASA captures this small movie of the solar wind stripping away the atmosphere of Venus. Very cool looking.

(HT: Phil Plait)

Sphere: Related Content

John Elway for Senate

With Obama tapping Ken Salazar for the Interior Department, rumor has it conservative John Elway may step forward to run for his Senate seat in Colorado. This rumor –similar to one for Mike Ditka in Illinois– has come and gone before. This time however, the tectonically altered political environment makes it more credible. Party political defeats don’t tend to alienate good new candidates, but draw them in, as the rapid transformation of the Democratic Party between 2004, 2006 and 2008 demonstrates.

Sphere: Related Content

Jumping Ship

The naval nerds at Information Dissemination are unimpressed with Juan Garcia, Obama’s pick for Navy Secretary. They had been hoping for some substantial change in policy and strategic direction, and consider the relatively obscure Mr. Garcia a vote for the status quo. A lot of that going around.

Sphere: Related Content

Utter Insanity

Those are the only words I can think to describe this proposal.

The Hubbard-Mayer plan calls for the government to revive the moribund housing market by providing just about everybody with access to a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 4.5 percent interest rate. That’s almost a full percentage point lower than the average national rate of 5.47 percent currently.

Buyers could borrow as much as 95 percent of the value of the home they purchase. The plan might extend to those with existing mortgages, allowing them to refinance and get the same terms. When either type of deal is complete, the lender will place the loan with Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Anyone refinancing with positive equity in their home would be relatively easy to accommodate. For those with negative equity — meaning the dollar amount of their mortgage exceeds the value of their house — Hubbard and Mayer recommend that homeowners and lenders split the loss evenly and start over with a clean mortgage reset to reflect the property’s current market value.

The sheer cost, $3trillion is mind bogglingly scary (and when was the last time anything government run ever came close to it’s initial cost estimate?). And let me just say, I’m simply amazed at the poorly thought out reporting from Mr. Hassett here. No thoughts about what happens when huge numbers of people default on these govt mortgages? How ripe the plan is for fraud and gaming? To say nothing of the unintended consequences, waste, and opportunity for patronage ripe in everything Congress does. Is this shallow thinking what passes for reporting at Bloomberg? Government doesn’t just get to throw out economic reality. There’s a reason why private banks don’t offer this.

It seems like every other week I see a new plan come out of congress that makes me think, “This is the worst idea I’ve ever heard” and I think each time it’s true but each time I’m shown how wrong I was.

Sphere: Related Content

Penalty of Vision

One of the finer moments from Carl Sagan’s old Cosmos series, the .

Sphere: Related Content

How to Order a Hitchens


(image: Rational Response Squad)

Here’s a tip for the uninitiated: When you order a whiskey in a hip bar, request it “Whiskey, Hitchens.” If you’re already slightly sloshed, you might merely say “Hitch me.” What is a Hitchens? It’s not a cocktail, it’s a serving size. It means to fill a glass with scotch whiskey –preferably Johnny Walker– all the way to the rim, in the manner Christopher Hitchens does (see above). This is essentially like ordering a quadruple shot, so I take no responsibility for the state you’ll wander out of the bar in.

As a supplemental device, if a bartender fails to fill the glass to the rim, you can protest “Don’t Dinesh my Hitch!” A nod to Dinesh D’Souza, who is according to Hitchens, his most formidable debating opponent.

Jason adds via email that ordering a Hitchens is an evocative expression of a certain spirit and lifestyle attitude:

“The Hitchens”, in terms of a glass of scotch poured a certain way and to a certain height, embodies the spirit of Christopher Hitchens, a man who doesn’t give a rats ass about you, your feelings, or anything you have to say about his well formed opinions. He can be a great author, debater, commentator, whatever… yet he can still live his life the way you don’t want him to as he goes out every night and gets completely sh*tfaced and in your face. The Hitchens drink embodies that spirit…

Sphere: Related Content

The Abolition of Marriage

Having failed to legalize gay marriage almost everywhere by democratic means, a proposed new approach by its advocates is to revoke marriage rights for heterosexuals, in a kind of retaliatory equalization. In effect, the idea is to abolish the legal institution of marriage for all, if it is to be that some are excluded from its benefits.

Jack Balkin and Ann Althouse debate the merits of this and generally agree it’s a fine idea, if potentially constitutionally problematic. A spectator can only marvel at how one couldn’t have picked a stratagem more perfectly designed to infuriate defenders of traditional marriage arrangements, and provoke even further opposition to gay marriage.

(more…)

Sphere: Related Content

Amsterdam’s Fading Red Light

In a blow to social libertarians, the prodigal country of Holland is finally taking steps to scrap legal prostitution and drug sales, citing widespred social decay and crime.

Sphere: Related Content

Blagojevich’s Football

I was in no doubt that Rod Blagojevich was a troubled and exceedingly peculiar man. These past few days have seen a flood of revealing details from aides and Democratic Party insiders which cast even his sanity into question (potentially doing him a great legal service). But one of the oddest aspects of the governor that I’ve yet seen reported is his obsession with a plastic hair brush:

And yet, Mr. Blagojevich, 52, rarely turns up for work at his official state office in Chicago, former employees say, is unapologetically late to almost everything, and can treat employees with disdain, cursing and erupting in fury for failings as mundane as neglecting to have at hand at all times his preferred black Paul Mitchell hairbrush. He calls the brush “the football,” an allusion to the “nuclear football,” or the bomb codes never to be out of reach of a president.
(NYT)

Sphere: Related Content

Kiss the Girls

Georgie Porgie, puddin’ and pie.

I don’t think they were crying, but once I noticed, it just sort of stood out in this video of George Bush in Iraq, that he’s kissing the girls.

Usually on the temple.

h/t Instapundit.

Sphere: Related Content

A Leftblogger Veto

After the John Brennan experience, Obama is having trouble finding qualified intelligence experts who are ideologically acceptable to liberal bloggers. Pleased to see we have our security priorities in the right place.

Sphere: Related Content

Bail or Consequences

Joseph E. Stiglitz says bail out the poor, not the rich. It’s like a parlor game for abstractions to decide who can be the noblest thief. How about no one bails anyone out, and we all sustain the material consequences of our own poor investment decisions? Revolutionary, I know.

Sphere: Related Content

Joe the Plumber can read and write. Amazing!

I happened upon Mark Steyn’s web page today.   (I always mean to bookmark it and check it regularly but for some reason I never do.)    While there I found out something I didn’t know.    Joe the Plumber has written a book.   And not everyone is happy about that.

As an unpublished novelist who has been studying writing for a decade,  all I can say is that Timothy Egan is a twat.   (Trust me… it’s a literary term.)   He writes:

I have a question for Joe: Do you want me to fix your leaky toilet?

I didn’t think so. And I don’t want you writing books. Not when too many good novelists remain unpublished. Not when too many extraordinary histories remain unread. Not when too many riveting memoirs are kicked back at authors after 10 years of toil. Not when voices in Iran, North Korea or China struggle to get past a censor’s gate.

As a writer I was shocked when I read this.

Really and truly.

I’m tempted to post it (without the plumbing clue) on a writing newsgroup I frequent and ask the real, published, and even successfully so, authors what they think of this attitude.   The idea that any of those authors would ever express this sort of elitist tripe is impossible.   And why not?   Surely they view some novels and some books as more worthy than others.   So where does Mr. Egan fail so miserably?

He fails to respect *me*.

Not as a hopeful author, but as a reader. But it’s easy to see why. When your value and self-image is dependent on this noble profession, this higher calling, it’s necessary to dismiss the riff-raff. What do plumbers know? Housewives? Nurses? I recall a discussion long long ago, I think it was on misc.writing: “What is the best job to get if you want to write?” The answer, from writers, was that it was best to get a job as a laborer. Work with your hands, and your mind can consider the universe.

But Mr. Egan thinks that it’s more important to work at wordsmithing than to work at life.

He goes on to fantasize about an even greater horror:

Next up may be Sarah Palin, who is said to be worth nearly $7 million if she can place her thoughts between covers. Publishers: (…) can we set some ground rules for these hard times? Anyone who abuses the English language on such a regular basis should not be paid to put words in print.

Tim, sweetie, that’s what editors are for.

He’s equal opportunity in his disdain for people who buy books… he doesn’t say so, instead he names those unworthy authors of unworthy tomes. “Stop soaking up precious advance money.” he says. Perhaps people will read the worthy books, if only they have nothing else.

But one thing is true: People refuse to buy “literature” because “literature” disrespects them and their lives. With all the word-smithing and all the angst over the exact right sentence structure, pace and timing, it’s really all about exclusivity and driving people off, so only the worthy people remain to read those worthy tomes.

Sphere: Related Content

“Worst Waste of the Year” Report

Cato looks at Senator Tom Coburn’s “Worst Waste of the Year” report that was just released (pdf report here). Tad DeHaven on how nauseating it was to read through the projects in the report, including a ” $15,000 in HUD Community Development Block Grants for a voice mail service for the homeless” project. The report is defitely not light-hearted reading during these troublesome times, but we all must strike our own balance between blissful ignorance and jaded pessimism.

Sphere: Related Content

The Silent Man

If Rahm Emmanuel falls, it’s “what did the president-elect know, and when did he know it” time. You cannot get any closer to Obama. An ugly business. 

Sphere: Related Content

Method Music

Bassist Steve Benton of the aptly named metal band Drowning Pool, is pleased to learn his music is used as a torture device by military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay.

Sphere: Related Content

China’s Hurt Feelings

Blogger FangKC queried the archive of the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, and discovered that 19 countries and organizations have been officially accused of hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. You can anticipate some such as the Japan and United States, others are quite unexpected.

Sphere: Related Content

Found on Ebay

Illinois Senate seat for sale.

Sphere: Related Content

An Appointment with Defeat

Blagojevich’s senate appointment might not be as valuable to a political career as he seemed to believe. Nate Silver takes a systematic look at senators who were appointed to fill vacant seats by governors over the last fifty years, and discovers that a minority of 49% of them were eventually reelected. Well below the traditional 80%+ incumbent reelection advantage.

Sphere: Related Content

Less is Less

Can’t shake the impression that you’re running out of of your groceries slightly sooner than you used to? You are.

Sphere: Related Content

The Penalty of Touch

Your ominious police state technology news item of the day.

Sphere: Related Content

Day Without Pay Unpopular

Looks like the “Day Without a Gay” civil rights protest intended to send a message to the country about the importance of gay employees and consumers…had no effect whatsoever. Thus the congenitally counterproductive leadership of the gay rights movement can notch another embarrassing disaster onto their totem pole of failure.

Why can’t this movement find effective leadership? Flippantly shirking your presumably safe job for political messaging, when people of all sexual orientations are , was no way to inspire national sympathy for the cause. Would it not have been more logical and positive to have a ‘day with twice the gay’? Say, encouraging gay Americans to double their daily purchasing, or work twice as hard?

Sphere: Related Content

Bend [Over] Don’t Break

McQ on Obama’s health care “reforms”: “One of our commenters here says since it is inevitable we should try to influence its implementation instead of fighting it. Reminds me a bit about some discredited advice concerning rape.”

Sphere: Related Content

Nixon and Kissinger in Watchmen

The newish montage for the screen version of Watchmen, has a fine scene of the Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger characters about mid way through it (video). Looks like they finally found an actor who could do the nose.

Sphere: Related Content

Stimulus: Spending vs. Tax Multipliers

Greg Mankiw has a post today look at the real world studies of spending and tax multipliers. Keynesians might be surprised to learn that the tax multiplier appears to be much larger than the spending one. Studies put the Government spending multiplier at or around 1-1.4 while other studies have the tax cut multiplier at or around 3. This means that for ever dollar cut in taxes, we get a 3 dollar increase in GDP.

He ends with some good advise to President Elect Obama:

My advice to Team Obama: Do not be intellectually bound by the textbook Keynesian model. Be prepared to recognize that the world is vastly more complicated than the one we describe in ec 10. In particular, empirical studies that do not impose the restrictions of Keynesian theory suggest that you might get more bang for the buck with tax cuts than spending hikes.

I have a feeling we’re definitely going to see a spending increase though, so I’m not sure whether to hope for a tax cut or not.

Sphere: Related Content

Into the Memory Hole?

Hmm. It seems that media reports filed on November 5th explicitly stating that Obama met with Governor Blagojevich to discuss his Senate replacement, are suddenly disappearing from the web.

Sphere: Related Content

Banning the BCS

Aggie congressman Joe Barton has introduced a bill to abolish the BCS regime and mandate the creation of a playoff system for college football. I quietly place all my hostilities to government intervention in sports into a shoebox for this vote and hope it passes. President-elect Obama has already declared himself opposed to the BCS.

Sphere: Related Content

A New Age of Female Masturbation

Lesbian feminist Lily Tomlin once joked that the only reason cretinous men walked upright was to free their hands for masturbation. Fair enough, but the posture of the lady might soon lack for any better purpose. According to a new survey, 92% of British women between 18-30 now masturbate regularly. That’s up from 62% in 1953. And regularity is the key word. Today 2/3rds of British women masturbate more than four times a week. That’s quite a lot.

I suppose you could interpret these results as further evidence of a liberated femininity and/or behavioral equilibration between the genders. Or of course if you’re a social conservative sexually repressed prude, you could lament the finding as evidence of the corrosion of internal moral self-restraint.

But one might also suggest that it is an adaptive reaction to a newly hyper-sexualized external society. As Westerners we’ve already voted to live in a constitutionally protected, sexually intoxicated media environment. One which is thoroughly permeated with permissive sexual suggestion at almost all levels. Men and women are being bombarded with sexually stimulating media on a permanent basis, even for the purpose of advertising something as unstimulating as cheeseburgers. Living in this environment could only be expected to enhance the collective desire on the part of people, to achieve sexual gratification more frequently. One might even suggest that immersion in this environment mandates it for a young and largely unmarried demographic group.

Sphere: Related Content

Formula Zero

The Onion brutally satirizes Hollywood and its formulaic, politically correct, and downright cheap storytelling techniques.

Sphere: Related Content

Jon Henke for RNC Communications Director

A good look at how the RNC needs to restructure and how they don’t for the next generation of campaigning. Jon is mentioned as paradigm of what the RNC Communications Director needs to be, I’d agree. You need someone who understands the new media at the top not just a bunch of internet guys stuck on every staff.

Sphere: Related Content

Plumber Politics, the Finale

Joe the Plumber joins the party and throws McCain under the bus, describing him and his campaign as apalling, praising only Sarah Palin. Apparently he asked McCain some questions about his views on the federal bailouts and McCain responded like…well, McCain.

Sphere: Related Content

Fill in the Blanks

The NYT has a nice little interactive diagram of Governor Blagojevich’s web of criminal influence.

Sphere: Related Content

Through a Kristol, Darkly

Roland has some commentary on Bill Kristol’s recent return to advocacy for “national greatness conservatism.” You have to love Matt Welch’s assessment of this event in title: “Big-Government Conservative, After Helping Big-Government Conservatism Fail, Advocates Big-Government Conservatism.”

Roland is more sympathetic, but the political philosophy of the Bush administration is as dead as detente in the Republican Party. Apart from Kristol, no one in the party is looking longingly on the age of Nixon. Reaganism is in renaissance.

Sphere: Related Content

Rootless

Sure, it’s still only December 2008, but Wayne Allyn Root, the millionaire Republican Libertarian, is already running for president in 2012. I was seriously amused by some of the slanderous assessments posted by former Root employees Libertarian Peacenik found.

Sphere: Related Content

Leader of the Opposition

Whilst most elected Republicans are still preoccupied in pledging to work with (or for) the Obama administration, Sarah Palin isn’t having any of it.

This is significant criticism, because it is vitally important that a Republican leader emerges who can command a media platform, and will articulate regular opposition to the Obama administration on national policy. Naturally, whoever does emerge to shoulder this burden will be perfectly placed to continue that opposition in the next presidential election.

There’s certainly no point in looking to the decimated and newly submissive ranks of congress for this leadership. As in 1976, political reality mandates that it must come from outside Washington. Interestingly, Palin possesses an advantage over Reagan when he sought to become this kind of external leader of the opposition: she holds political office and can reinforce her criticism with independent action, as the new pipeline with Canada demonstrates.

Sphere: Related Content

Deep Political Time

When James Hutton, the father of modern geology, took his friend John Playfair to look at some stratified sedimentary rock, and Playfair realized that he was gazing into a chemical abyss recording the passage of hundreds of millions of years, he said the human mind went “giddy” at the apprehension. Genuine recognition of the titanic scale of geological time required to produce even in a lowly hill on the Earth’s crust, has always been a temptation to flirt with madness.

It happens that democracies can produce a political equivalent of this sort of experience of scale, due to their tendency to compile and preserve vast quantities of generational voting data over time, like strata for a human historical edifice. Thus consider the awful and incredible parity of nineteen presidential elections, producing one and one half billion votes, with a mere one hundred thousand to separate the two parties:

Total Democratic Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,407,082
Total Republican Presidential Votes Since 1932: 745,297,123
(Crossing Wall Street via Pundit Review)

As with geology, there is a buried volume and timescale to this enterprise which can be easily missed whilst standing in a November voting line.

Sphere: Related Content

Resignations for Radicals

Sadly, it seems Angela Keaton has finally resigned from the Libertarian National Committee. If you haven’t been following this little bit of salacious Libertarian Party drama, here’s the “Resolution of Discipline” against her from December 1st, which details many of her alleged injuries to the “public image” of the party. My personal favorite demand:

An apology [from Angela Keaton] to the Libertarian National Committee for offering sex to the LNC officers conditional on the performance of our Presidential candidate by stating in an Internet interview on June 26, 2008, “If Bob Barr breaks 1%, the officers of the national party can pass me around like a pu-pu platter.”
(IPR)

For the record, Bob Barr received 0.4% of the national popular vote in 2008, and thus Angela was spared the indignity of becoming a Chinese appetizer in a vorarephilic Libertarian orgy. That in itself is probably a source for some of the hostility by members of the LNC. It’s one thing to brutally mock your party, it’s something altogether more offensive to be proven accurate in your mockery.

Yet with the passing of the colorful and combative Ms. Keaton, there is once again officially no immediate reason to pay attention to the doings of the LNC that I can think of. Not that anyone outside the LP was paying attention to this either…which does call into question the integrity of the charges made by Angela’s critics. After all, a “public image” which is subject to injury, does tend to require a public audience.

Sphere: Related Content

The West as Nuclear Proliferator


(NYT)

The New York Times has a fascinating little chart today, illustrating the primary sources of nuclear weapons proliferation over time. In looking at the diagram, one cannot escape the overall impression that until recently the West has been the main and long-enduring source for most of the world’s nuclear proliferation. Given our traditional focus on authoritarian rouge states when it comes to proliferation threats –and our obsession with Russia and the former Soviet republics as potential proliferating agents– this might prompt us to reexamine some basic assumptions about where the sources of danger lie in technology transfer.

When considered, it shouldn’t really be surprising that the West is or was the top proliferator. There are several factors we could readily identify which would have made getting nuclear secrets in a Western democracy far easier than within the USSR. Among them might be:

  1. Unregulated communications make it easy to operate covert networks with little fear of detection.
  2. Relatively open borders facilitate easy transportation of personnel and material.
  3. Integrated trade alliances dedicated to industrial products make the shipment of advanced technology between countries relatively unremarkable.
  4. A cosmopolitan scientific community which publishes and socializes in a consolidated cross-cultural milieu, in which technical information exchange between countries is also unremarkable.
  5. An educational experience and civic culture that encourages individualism which can create rogue actors more easily.
  6. A shared lingua franca among an international scientific elite that makes it easy for them to converse and exchange ideas one-to-one, without need of translation services.
  7. Being the focal point for scientific and technology origination attracts attention from foreign intelligence services and black market operators.

Closed off and regimented societies prohibit or severely curtail most of these facilitating characteristics, and this fact might represent the disqualifying criteria that made a country like the USSR a virtual non-proliferator. Conditions more commonly associated with proliferation risk in policy debates such as malicious government, poverty and political repression, do not historically appear to be the primary risk points. Indeed, such characteristics might lead us to target the wrong societies for technology transfer such as Russia and North Korea.

But if the above list better reveals vulnerability points to proliferation, the country most likely to proliferate inadvertently or intentionally outside of the West would have to be China, with targets being her integrated East Asian and African alliance states. Increasingly China satisfies almost all of the requirements. Her massive communications architecture is becoming increasingly unmonitorable (even if the government tries), she is expanding her transportation links with the world at a rapid pace and making it easier to come and go, she has a large and increasingly cosmopolitan scientific community that is English speaking and mobile, she is a major commercial technology exporter and an origination point of primary scientific research.

Perhaps it should therefore not be surprising that the most recent proliferation vectors in the diagram above emanate from the PRC. Something to consider.

Sphere: Related Content

The Medicare Handgun

Medicare to Cover Prescription Handguns?

(HT Professor Volokh)

Sphere: Related Content

Get rewarded at leading casinos.

online casino real money usa