zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

You know, we talk a lot about Facebook and Twitter as technologies for change, but how about painted fingers?

Sources: Iraq — and she was too young to vote! — Iran

[ by Charles Cameron — cross-posted from Brainstormers on the Web ]

There are so many possible lessons to take here:

That a single image speaks louder than dozens of words. That we are more easily persuaded by images than by words. That FB and Twitter are clearly important to Egyptian youth. That dozens of words can convey nuances that a single image misses. That FB and Twitter were at best among the vehicles, rather than the drivers, of the events of January 25th.

That we’d do well to bear the Aristotelian distinction between material, formal, efficient and final causes in mind when talking about what “caused” or “becaused” those events – and elsewhere.

That the simple juxtaposition of two closely similar ideas can illuminate both, and perhaps create a spectral “third thing” which possesses the full detail of both with greater depth than either one in a single understanding, by a sort of stereo process not too different from stereoscopic vision or stereophonic sound.

That we live in exciting times…

My twitteramigo @ckras has put your tax dollars to work attempting to shatter the stovepipes of analytical excellence in the IC.

And it is pretty cool…..notice how issues of lines of authority and reliability of information are facilitated and made infinitely more efficient with off the shelf Web 2.0.

The nice thing about this project of @ckras is that his model can be generalized to any large organization or system where bureaucratic complexity and the territoriality of guarding tiny empires is gumming up the timely flow of information into the right hands.

A few comments on the proposed Whyte-Min-Barnett Grand Strategy Executive Agreement for a Sino-American partnership that Dr. Barnett has been deeply engaged with the past few months.

First, a caveat: while Tom has involved me in aa few of his past projects, I was not involved in this one and know only what I have read recently. Secondly, while I know a bit about China in an academic sense, it is not an area of research for me nor am I up to speed on the  current politics of China’s generational transfer of power/power struggle. Those readers who are avid China watchers should chime in with comments.

As an overview, I think the proposal’s specific terms should be viewed less seriously individually than the gesture itself, which represents in my view a very significant trial balloon signal from China’s leadership that they see a need to negotiate a successor to the long outgrown cornerstone of Chinese-American relations, the Shanghai Communique, signed during Nixon’s historic summit with Mao. A new agreement would provide some updated “rules of the road” that would defuse potential and existing tensions and allow the US and China to tackle some urgent problems in the global economy. By using a semi-official independent set of pundits ( Whyte and Min) and a maverick private sector American geostrategist ( Tom) with close ties to the Pentagon, China can advance it’s talking points and interest in negotiating without any loss of face that an official inquiry risks as a result of America’s fractious domestic partisan politics.

Read up on the secret diplomatic minuet that ensued between the US and China 1969-1972.

China’s leadership seems to have invested a sizable heavyweight participation in this proposal, Tom cites:

– Former Minister of Foreign Affairs;
  – Former UN ambassador,
  – Former U.S. ambassador,
  – Former Deputy Chief of the General Staff of the PLA,
  – Former Military Attaché to North Korea and Israel,
  – Former Vice Minister of Commerce,
  – President of Shanghai Institutes of International Studies,
  – China’s Central Party School Institute of International Strategic Studies,
  – Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs,
  – China Center for International Economic Exchanges,
  – China Institute For International Strategic Studies,
  – China Foundation for International & Strategic Studies,
  – Boao Forum,
  – China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

This has resulted in a document that unsurprisingly leans strongly towards China’s interpretation of a good Sino-American partnership but this proposal is not holy writ, it is a red flag ( pun intended) for bargaining to begin. A plea, really by a leadership craving greater certainty, medium term security and “recognition” ( i.e. “face” or “respect” – this is very much like Brezhnev and Kosygin deeply desiring that the USSR be seen as an equal to the US, except unlike the Soviets, China actually has a productive economy) Imagine a US doc shepherded by a comparable set of former and current powerbrokers, the Council of Foreign Relations, CNAS, Carnegie, CNA, SSI, Brookings, AEI, Hoover, the chairmen of the Republican and Democratic Parties and the president of Harvard. Would that catch the attention of foreign observers?

I am not sure if it is being received that way over here. My perception – and I freely admit to having large gaps of knowledge – is that US policy toward China is determined below the NSC level and not in a strategic fashion by a) Treasury b) the Fed c) PACOM in that order , pursuing contradictory policy goals and without proper coordination while State, which should be taking a lead role, is a quiet secondary voice relegated to managing lower level, day to day, routine problems in ad hoc fashion. Some carping and special pleading from Congress is erratically inserted into the mix. If someone in the Obama administration is the China policy “czar” it is obscure to me. It must be obscure to Beijing as well or they would be having their ambassador or foreign minister pushing these proposals to their American counterparts in a normal fashion instead of Tom.

Barnett, Whyte and Min devote a great deal of space to bilateral and global economics relationships. They should. The magnitude of the Sino-American monetary and trade relationship and it’s evolved distortions between two nations that are radically dissimilar, understand one another poorly and are not allied are actually scary. Immense quanties of locked up capital – and we are talking epic figures  that dwarf the interwar period European “dollar gap” or even that of the postwar era remedied by the Marshall Plan – ultimately create money scarcity elsewhere in the global economy until trade breaks down in political reaction or the ebb of a medium of mutual exchange.  That money needs to begin circulating via productive investment and Chinese policies creating this structural imbalance need to be phased out. How exactly this should be done is beyond my ken, but that something needs to be done is obvious.

Dr. Barnett, as I understand his strategic thinking, takes the long view and is willing to concede in the short term what would be impossible to sustain in the long term anyway (“locking in tomorrow’s China at today’s prices” ) and is concerned about defense contractors eager to make China the justification for hyperexpensive weapons mega-platforms ultimately inculcating over time thinking that carelessly slides the United States toward a needless great power war with China. A position mirrored by China’s own ambitious self-dealing military asshats.

Is Tom’s view the last word? No. but it is disturbing to me that a strategic relationship as we have with China is not being handled by American officials with the same attention and degree long term focus we give to Europe.

What do the Sinologists out there say?

[ by Charles Cameron ]

I for one am delighted to know that we can now play around with the iridology of the sciences, using the software available on the Science-Metrix Ontology Explorer site to view which fields have journals which cross-link to journals in other fields…

Seriously — that lower image is of the Field Citation Wheel that you can find, suitably enlarged for easy viewing, on that site.

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And it’s heartening for me to know, for instance — taking a closer look at the segment of that image that’s roughly east north-east — that scientific journals do have some links on their pages to works of theology or philosophy:

Engineering, you’ll notice, has more links than history, philosophy, theology, the social sciences (even counting them twice), economics, business, the arts and humanities combined.

My own field, theology, has to share its thin segment with philosophy, and you can guess how small the number of links to articles on Islamic apocalyptic probably are…

Which is, in part, why I wonder whether a project like the ETH’s Living Earth Simulator will really manage to map such things as, well, a possible outbreak of global jihadist Mahdism and its consequences.

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But then I look at another gorgeous graphic from the same source, focusing in on a part of the network of knowledge that interests me, and I can just faintly make out, lower left, entirely isolated, the field of music…

What splendid isolation! That’s all of Bach, mind you – and all the Beatles, too.

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Seriously, though:

• It’s fascinating to be able to see how the various branches of knowledge cross-reference each other.
• Visual data representation is a gorgeous, fantastic, field.
• Mapping the all-of-everything is an irresistable lure for keen minds
• I’m betting the humanities will prove to be at least as good at it as the sciences.
• And I recall, not without a pang of regret, the time when my beloved Theology was Queen of the Sciences, and one might converse with Abelard on the streets of Paris…