How to Handle Belarus

Russian natural gas colossus Gazprom plans to charge its ally Belarus market rates for natural gas when new contracts are negotiated in 2007. At current prices, such a move would more than triple the $47 per thousand cubic meters the former Soviet republic pays, effectively swinging a wrecking ball into the Belarusian economy.

Just don't expect Russia to follow through on Gazprom's threat. Putin wants to gain operating control of gas pipelines in Belarus, as he has gotten in neighboring countries. But yanking subsidies completely would trigger economic collapse in Belarus and breathe life into a democracy movement that had been badly defeated in the country's rigged March 19 presidential elections.

Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko, known as "Europe's last dictator," has bet the farm politically on his belief that Belarusians prefer sclerotic stability to the roller coaster capitalism in neighboring countries. In his 12 years of rule, the former collective farm director has implemented "market socialism," a fancy name for dodging badly needed structural reform at every turn.

This policy has spared his subjects the painful transition to democracy but left the economy mostly government-owned, uncompetitive, and money-losing. A quarter of the population is mired in poverty, an economic voucher system has failed, and inflation is brewing. Meanwhile, trade deficits and a lack of foreign investment foretell a grim future.

Despite this, a vote for Lukashenko has been a vote for subsidized decrepitude, whereas a vote for reform has carried the threat of freezing in the dark. It's a ratchet effect: the weaker the economy, the greater the threat. Yet Putin knows that threat goes away if Belarusians actually are freezing in the dark.

If Russia keeps gas subsidies in some reduced form in exchange for control of the gas pipeline network in Belarus, Lukashenko will retain power but come under increased economic pressure. This will not be good for the democracy movement in Belarus or for democracy movements around the world.

Belarus has a Soviet-era arms industry that earns hard currency selling to shady regimes that don’t want to pay a lot to fix their civilian or rebel problems. They also sell more advanced weaponry to rogue states that Putin would just as soon not be linked to. With increased economic pressure, Lukashenko would certainly test the industry’s surge capacity, raising the ability of rogue regimes to crush budding democracy movements around the world.

The United States, E.U., and many of Belarus's neighbors have reacted angrily to blatantly rigged March elections in which Lukashenko awarded himself nearly 83 percent of the vote (while leaving his nearest opposition candidate in single digits). Yet with Belarus isolated -- and insulated -- from the West, Lukashenko's future lies squarely in the geo-strategic calculations in the Kremlin, not in any privileges or memberships the West can remove.

The free world can best help the democracy movement in Belarus -- as well as others around the world -- by going beyond mere visa bans and asset freezes. The focus should be on imposing costs on the rogue regimes that source weaponry from the increasingly proliferation-minded Lukashenko.

*****

Note: Also posted earlier today at Human Events Online.

Now Make Him Wave

When Russell Feingold committed political suicide on the floor of the Senate, liberals' first impulse was to avert your eyes: "Move along, nothing to see here." The Washington Post respectfully buried the sad event on A8 (or was it A9? I can't remember). But when the feet sticking out from under the tarp didn’t go unnoticed, they quickly picked him up, applied some makeup, and -- hey presto! -- today he's a "maverick," right smack on the front page.

[Read the rest of the post at The Right Angle at Human Events Online]

Another One Jumps the Couch

George Clooney's a liberal, he'll have you know. A huge one.

In an obscenity-laden post at HuffPo (remember: profanity = passion), the activist-actor admits, "I am a liberal. And I make no apologies for it. Hell, I'm proud of it."

Well, I'm not so much proud of him as in awe of the career risk he's invited. After this, he won't so much as see a script in Aramaic. And imagine all the hurtful emails he'll get from the left-wing websites. They've been weaning people off of "liberal" for the relatively pristine "progressive," and with one post Clooney sets their exodus back a year.

A word of caution, though, George: They love you now, but they'll turn on you after they've used you up. They'll throw you away just like, um, just like…what's her name, um…Cindy Sheehan.

[Note: Originally posted at The Right Angle, a Human Events blog]

Quote of the Day (and perhaps month)

I think my paranoid schizophrenia has improved my ability to be a good ruler of my fellow Aztec citizens. - Anonymous

Still Stuck on Angry

I started reading The Democrats’ Real Problem by Bush critic E.J. Dionne with a sense of anticipation. Maybe, thought I, he could solve the paradox of the angry left. Alas, the piece doesn't deliver on its title, and just deposits the reader back at square one.

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show that their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward an alternative program.

Okay, in other words, they need to get off of angry. But anger is not only the central concept of modern anti-Bush lefties -- it has become an essential attribute that cannot be removed without destroying its host.

This failure has made it easier for Republicans to cast anti-Bush feeling (aka, ``Bush hatred'') as a psychological disorder. The GOP shrewdly makes the president's critics look crazed and suggests that opposition to Bush is of no more significance than, say, the loathing that many watchers of ``American Idol'' love to express toward Simon Cowell, the meanest of the show's judges.

With Gore yelling, Dean screaming, Kennedy blathering, and Hillary shrieking, who needs the GOP to make the president’s critics look crazed? The American People can diagnose each disorder by symptoms presented. But I guess if you’re crazed, marveling at The Scream amounts to dirty trickery on a par with forcing Dukakis into that tank with the big helmet on. Or making Kerry crawl around in that powder blue bunny suit. That Rove! He's behind it all.

The president's critics need to identify precisely why they oppose him, not only so they can make clear that they are not psycho basket cases, but also to convey that they know what needs to be put right.

But that gets right back to not having any ideas, doesn’t it? Dionne's conclusion that fighting bad policies can be constructive is fine, but in practice the Democrats' oppositionism is perceived as both reflexive and transparently calculated for political effect.

Thoreau’s Law in Action

Wes Pruden has a tragicomic piece you should check out. It appears the mayor of Ocean Springs, a town devastated by Katrina, approached FEMA to fund locally popular permanent housing for $60,000 (which incidentally is what it costs the agency to “ship and set up” a trailer).

FEMA said no. The law allows FEMA to provide housing only "on a temporary basis," and the Gulf Coast residents who qualify for one of the 10,000 trailers currently parked and going to rust and ruin on an abandoned muddy airstrip in Arkansas can have one for 18 months. So Ocean Springs will soon have a trailer park, with 600 trailers to replace the 700 houses destroyed by the storm. "FEMA," the mayor says, "is creating trailer trash."

Your community can’t have permanent housing it likes, but it can have rusting blight -- for 18 months. Rules are rules.

Read the whole thing.

Differently Abled Encryption?

Granted, it's a mere bump in the road to consumer acceptance of fingerprint-based authentication, but this is hardly Microsoft's finest moment.

From Engadget:

If you've got a Microsoft Fingerprint Reader hooked up to your PC and thought you had the latest and greatest in biometric security, you're out of luck. A Finnish researcher has discovered that the reader -- which Microsoft has said shouldn't be used to protect sensitive data (meaning, we assume, you should just use it to check out those wild whorls) -- sends fingerprint info to the PC unencrypted, which could enable anyone with the right tools to snag your fingerprint image, and use it to log into your PC. Strangely, Microsoft licenses the technology from another company, Digital Persona, which does encrypt fingerprint data. For some reason, however, Microsoft chose to disable encryption in its product, making it less secure than the passwords it purports to replace.

This is less secure than the passwords for another reason, as well: If consumers trust that an authentication product is secure, they may tend to relax about other security measures.

At the other end of the security spectrum, here's a laptop for somebody "who lives in a really bad neighborhood":

NEC introduced its Generation laptop for the education market, but it looks like it’s aimed at somebody who lives in a really bad neighborhood. It’s loaded with security measures that are so extensive they border on paranoia. First, the notebook is password-protected and login is done with via a hardware fingerprint security chip, great for schoolkids because they won’t have to remember a password. There’s an NEC security control panel, which allows administrators to disable USB or optical drives, keeping that unauthorized software out of the picture. Is also has a Kensington lock slot, a Stoptrack anti-theft label and Webtrack geographical tracking software. Of course, the thing is loaded with antivirus protection and to top it all off, it’s covered by three years of antitheft insurance. Just reading this feature list make you wonder exactly what awful thing happened to this notebook’s designer. Pricing starts at $1138.

Maybe the State Department should price a few, too.

Solar Maxed Out

The sun is currently in a quiet part of the solar storm cycle, but that will change beginning sometime around 2007.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) has developed the Predictive Flux-transport Dynamo Model to analyze past solar cycles. Based on its 98 percent accuracy in back-testing, scientists predict the coming sunspot cycle, number 24, could be 30-50% stronger than the last one.

This article touches on some of the mayhem that could be in store:

An 11-year epoch of increasingly severe solar storms that could fry power grids, disrupt cell-phone calls, knock satellites back to Earth, endanger astronauts in space, and force commercial airliners to change their routes to protect their radio communications and to avoid deadly solar radiation could begin as soon as this fall, scientists announced Monday.

When the solar cycle reaches its peak in 2012, it will hurl at Earth mammoth solar storms with intense radiation and clouds of high-speed subatomic particles millions of miles across, the scientists said.

A storm of that magnitude could short-circuit a world increasingly dependent on giant utilities and satellite communications networks. Such a storm in 1989 caused power grids to collapse, causing a five-hour blackout in Quebec.

Power grid disruptions such as the Quebec example above are caused when these storms introduce DC into AC power lines, tripping circuit breakers and/or causing transformers to overheat and fail.

In addition, these stronger geomagnetic storms, which have caused havoc in the past, will batter ever-finer electronic circuitry, which is correspondingly more sensitive to disruption.

Science trivia? Absolutely, but don't forget it.

I Say C2H6O; You Say C2H5OH

I take umbrage at the idea that I’m addicted to oil. I’m not. My SUV is the addict. But even with peak oil and Iran going nuclear, don’t you get a little nervous when politicians roll out tired energy schemes and pretend they’re the solution?

Take ethanol, which doesn’t sell without huge taxpayer subsidies, and can't spur private investment even with its avowed blue-sky potential. Unless you believe studies that play shell games with the system boundaries, it isn't economical, and won’t be in six years, if ever. But, hey, voters don’t know that.

There should be more articles like this:

Touting ethanol is certainly good politics - particularly in Midwestern corn-growing states that already welcome significant taxpayer subsidies for ethanol. But ethanol isn't necessarily good economics.

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of California-Berkeley analyzed energy input-yield ratios and reported last July that producing ethanol from corn requires 29 percent more energy than can be derived from the resulting fuel - the switch grass and wood chips ratios are worse (45 percent and 57 percent.)

An energy source can be promising without positive net energy, but to use politician-speak, we can do better.

So Close to a New Idea

Gary Hart thinks the Sunni Triangle is one sprawling Mogadishu. Sometimes the best thing to do is just return Blackhawk Down to the video store, pay the late fee, and move on.

"Our army is in danger," he said. "If all-out civil war breaks out, we could lose our army. If Sunnis and Shiites take to the streets by the thousands, it could literally be impossible to get [the soldiers] out. ... I know that sounds apocalyptic, but it's not out of the question. We need an exit strategy. We have no choice. We're making things worse. Ninety percent of the insurgents are Iraqis who don't like the fact that we have occupied their country. ...

The self-described “Renaissance man of new ideas” (Can anyone name just one? Anyone?) has a lot of experience with exit strategies, but evading Miami Herald reporters doesn’t add much to urban combat doctrine.

"I know we can't just pack up and leave right away, but we're still acting as if we hold all the cards over there. We don't. We're losing control of the situation. ... The British occupied Iraq for 35 years and finally had to leave because there was a constant insurgency against them. We haven't learned anything."

You’d think after 35 years, they’d have figured out that all they have to do is go outside by the thousands...

Easy There, Larry

The usually reliable and insightful Larry Kudlow has gone off the rails on the port deal:

Make no mistake about it. What is going on right now on television news channels, newspapers and the Internet is simple. It is called Islamophobia.

Kudlow should be able to take his shots at xenophobes without suggesting that people concerned about the deal’s oversight are racists. If the due diligence was sound (and I believe a second round will show that it was), let the arguments lead the undecided to that conclusion. No kicking should be necessary.

A Protectionist Under Every Bed?

Journalists have been quick to see the Dubai seaport controversy as evidence of a protectionist groundswell. While they are right that a scuttled deal will have a chilling effect on Middle East direct investment in the United States, this article observes that Middle East direct investment isn't all it's cracked up to be:

Despite soaring oil revenue in the Middle East and the uproar over the attempt by a Dubai company to control seaport terminals at several American ports, Arab countries have made little effort to acquire hard assets in the United States, confining their investment mostly to holdings in real estate, oil refining and financial services.

Middle Eastern countries account for less than 1 percent of the $1.5 trillion of foreign direct investment in U.S. businesses and real estate, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service. That lags far behind the largest foreign investors: Britain, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands and France.

Looking at this approximately $15 billion another way, the member nations of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) recorded $23.15 billion in oil revenues in the month of January alone.

Quote of the Day

Knaves imagine nothing can be done without Knavery.
- Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia. No. 3135

Both Sides Against the Middle

There’s an impressive Paul Saffo interview in the San Francisco Chronicle. Saffo’s a futurist, but don’t call him one (sensible thing to be touchy about, actually), has a blog he refuses to call a blog, and can probably filibuster about how a pencil is better than a PDA. Read the whole curmudgeonly thing. Excerpt:

Q: How does the speed of information and the way we obtain information impact our culture and politics?

A: As a global society we are performing a great experiment on ourselves. Half of the world population wants to race faster into the future. Go visit China and India. They're ready to go. And half of the world wants to drag us into the past. The problem is both sides have guns. I think there really is a reaction. A lot of people are saying enough is enough.

And my favorite:

Q: What else does technology force us to rethink?

A: Digital technology is the solvent leaching the glue out of all of our traditional institutions.

Iran's Ahmadinejad: 'Aim Right Here'

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has one rhetorical setting, all the time: Hair-on-fire crazy. He's always quick with a holocaust denial or a threat to wipe Israel from the map, which plays well on the Arab street.

His intended audience could be smaller however, if it turns out his purpose is to provoke an Israeli raid on Iran's nuclear assets. And his motives may not be as crazy as his rhetoric.

Under the Begin Doctrine, Israel will strike a hostile nation preemptively to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear bomb, and an imminent threat need not be present. The Israel Air Force (IAF) bombed Iraq's Osirak nuclear facility near Baghdad in 1981 when Iraq was by most estimates still years away from having a bomb.

Ahmadinejad, however, believes Iran's nuclear program could weather even a massive Israeli strike with acceptable losses. The country sits on the other side of Iraq from Israel, adding distance and the logistical challenge of hitting perhaps dozens of well defended and/or blast-hardened nuclear facilities and hide-sites dispersed around the country.

But how is a survivable attack better than no attack at all as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned?

The key may lie in the fact that the United States has scored a diplomatic win by getting China and Russia aboard the bloc of 27 (out of a possible 35) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) member-nations to vote to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council for trashing its nuclear non-proliferation agreements.

This leaves Iran more isolated than it had counted on being. Given the economic ties it enjoys with China and Russia, the Iranian regime had likely figured these trading partners would block any serious effort to stop its nuclear ambitions, especially when pushed by the United States.

But responsible nuclear powers are sober, deliberate, and unexciting. By contrast, nuclear-armed theocracies fronted by hate-spewing puppets can be too hot to handle, even for the Russians and Chinese looking to erode U.S. influence in the Middle East. Say what you will about the North Koreans, at least they understand that an enrichment program means you make crazy threats and the West will enrich you.

Now, if Iran continues to enrich uranium and advance its program, it faces the real prospect of years of sanctions and foreign efforts to encourage uprisings against the country’s unpopular ruling mullahs. The regime might not survive that, even with its windfall oil riches.

The IAEA meets again in March, at which point Iran may harden its bellicose position further. In the lull before then, the Russians are trying to restart stalled talks to perform uranium enrichment on Russian soil (ensuring enrichment does not exceed levels sufficient for peaceful use when it's sent back to Iran). In the meantime they don't want their trading partner shot up or bombed, even a little. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned that it is important not to make threats toward Iran.

Compared to a tightening noose of sanctions and resulting domestic unrest, an Israeli air strike could seem like Hanukkah for Ahmadinejad -- a different present every day.

Beyond retaliatory actions against Israel and U.S. forces in Iraq, such a strike would immediately cause Russia, China, and perhaps India to U-turn and back Iran, while uniting a population of 66 million in nationalist fervor against an external enemy. Also, given the Iranian regime's penchant for placing bunkers next to mosques and other civilian targets, even a surgically precise strike could yield enough propaganda footage to cause riots throughout the Muslim world.

As for further inspections of its nuclear program, a strike would allow Iran to claim that its nuclear power program had been completely destroyed, giving the regime an excuse to keep nuclear inspectors out of the country, there being "nothing left to inspect."

Even if Ahmadinejad is sincere about flaming nuclear death for Israel, an air strike that merely sets back his ambitions a year or three could be just what he, and the mullahs, hope for.


[Note: This first appeared here at Human Events Online]

Google-Mart

Just as Wal-Mart is the favored quarry of pack-hunting anti-capitalist groups, Google has become Big Brother for privacy advocates.

And brother, has Google gotten Big: The 207 million Internet users in the U.S. did 5.1 billion searches in December, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, with most of it via Google. December is a 31-day month, which makes that (tap, tap, tap) a rate of 1,904 searches per second. Even if you factor out bloggers, that’s still got to be several hundred…

But on its way to assimilating the planet, Google has detoured into a PR firestorm of Sony rootkit proportions. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (“Defending Freedom in the Digital World”) warns:

San Francisco -- Google today announced a new "feature" of its Google Desktop software that greatly increases the risk to consumer privacy. If a consumer chooses to use it, the new "Search Across Computers" feature will store copies of the user's Word documents, PDFs, spreadsheets and other text-based documents on Google's own servers, to enable searching from any one of the user's computers. EFF urges consumers not to use this feature, because it will make their personal data more vulnerable to subpoenas from the government and possibly private litigants, while providing a convenient one-stop-shop for hackers who've obtained a user's Google password.

Beyond some minor quibbles, EFF’s argument is sound. This makes you wonder how a feature with such high creepiness index could get signed off on by a sentient management biped. This won’t blow over right away and will likely win the company knee-jerk legislation for its trouble. Probably not what they had in mind.

Anyway, maybe Google and Wal-Mart could just coalesce into Google-Mart so every interest group could just hate one entity.

[I originally posted this at The Right Angle, a Human Events Online blog]

Another Day, Another Quote of the Day

"What is a drop of rain, compared to the storm? What is a thought, compared to the mind? Our unity is full of wonder, which your tiny individualism cannot even concieve..." - The Many, System Shock 2 (1999)

Help the Danes

Here's a website dedicated to helping Danish businesses recover from boycotts:

Because freedom of expression and freedom of speech are bedrock values in any true democracy. Because external forces that try to control what a Danish paper chooses to publish in Denmark are misguided. Because we all have a stake in protecting democratic freedoms.

It hasn't been populated with many companies yet, but check back. I'm going to buy a Lego set, have a nice cold Carlsberg beer ("Probably the best beer in the world."), and build a religious figure from history. Fun! Oh, wait, not fun. Very, very dangerous. This clash of cultures stuff sure takes some getting used to.

Step. Away. From. The. Car.

Ahh, journalists and test drives. The two go together like bulls and china shops. There are of course door dings, latte spills, and engine-demolishing 4-to-1 downshifts for car companies to deal with. But some things they just can't anticipate. Consider this Wired scribe's exploration of the 24-GHz Distronic radar on the 2007 S-class sedan:

The function took some getting used to. After setting the system to maintain a distance of about 170 feet from cars in front of me, it took a lot of nerve not to apply the brake manually when I was humming along at over 90 mph and saw that traffic had come to a dead stop just a few hundred feet away. But in time I learned to trust the Distronic system enough to force myself to keep my feet flat on the floor while the car gently decelerated from high speeds to a dead stop -- without plowing into the car ahead of me.

The feature is, um, designed to maintain a safe distance between you and the MOVING vehicle in front of you, not to execute panic stops from...90 mph.

For anyone who flunked physics, here's this from AutoTrader.com:

Of course the faster you go, the more time and distance it takes to stop. For example, at 70 mph, perception and reaction distance equals 154 feet, and braking distance equals 188 feet, for a total of 342 feet (5.2 seconds). And we won't even talk about 80 mph and above, since our readers are law-abiding citizens who never break the speed laws. It wouldn't interest you to know, for instance, that at 80 mph it takes over 422 feet (5.7 seconds) to bring your vehicle to a halt, and at 90 mph more than 509 feet (6.2 seconds) -- nearly a tenth of a mile.

Makes you wonder how the car "gently decelerated."

No Way Bove

Every time some dodgy leftist is denied entry into the United States, the anti-Bush websites claim the motive is political. Maybe he would spill the beans about our voting machines, see. Or maybe he once sold short 100 shares of Halliburton. Yeah, that's it.

Here's a fairly typical example, provided by Daily Kos. Kos writes:

French critic of Mosanto [sic] and genetically modified crops is denied entry into U.S. Apparently critics of Big Business are now considered terrorists as well.

Turns out his critic of Big Business is none other than Jose Bove, who has smuggled Roquefort into the United States, destroyed hybrid crops and vandalized a McDonald’s restaurant (The cheese alone argues for immediate deportation). I’m only surprised he didn’t claim Bove was, um, denied entry for being a sheep farmer.