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.

Thought for the Day

From Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, translated by William Scott Wilson:

One should be wary of talking on end about such subjects as learning, morality or folklore in front of elders or people of rank. It is disagreeable to listen to.