WhirledView

The Benefits of Engagement

By CKR

Michael Northrop, of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, gives some facts and figures about the benefits industry is deriving from the Kyoto Treaty in a Washington Post op-ed. With the small quibble that alternatives to burning fuels that produce carbon dioxide may have their problems too, this is a good example of the benefits of engagement.

Opponents of the Kyoto Treaty have used extrapolations of current trends to argue that only economic damage can result to the developed countries from the restrictions the treaty imposes. However, for a very basic change in the way business is done, simple extrapolations may not be accurate predictions.

Kyoto regulates carbon dioxide emissions. Before Kyoto, "emissions" usually applied to low-level amounts of dangerous chemicals, like nitrogen oxides from cars or mercury from coal-fired power plants, that were not essential to producing power. The production of carbon dioxide is not an option in combustion, whether the fuel is coal, natural gas, or biomass. It's also the natural product of animal metabolism: what you breathe out is carbon dioxide. The use of the same word for both types of product masks that fundamental difference. Another big carbon dioxide producer is the cement industry, and there too the product is an essential part of the process.

Northrop notes that companies like IBM and DuPont have realized savings from increased energy efficiency and decreased carbon dioxide emissions, motivated by Kyoto. Britain is experiencing improved economic health due to its Kyoto-inspired energy plans.

There has always been a conservative tendency to regard all change as detrimental. But new technologies and new ways to order the world have more often been beneficial. Combustible fuels are finite, and the move away from them will come sooner or later. The signatories of the Kyoto Treaty have decided to make that sooner.

The United States, over the past decade or so, has decided to conservatively avoid such changes, particularly in the area of fossil fuels. The mindset extends to a magnificent isolation that will allow other countries to surpass the US technically and economically. This magnificent isolation diplomatically has the potential for much more damage.

The Troubles at Los Alamos

by CKR

The new seven-story Administration Building at Los Alamos is engulfing the old Ad Building. During my career, that old pile of glass and cinderblock housed some dramatic confrontations, intense meetings, and perfervid scheming. When the Lab’s library was housed in its basement, you could still drive up to the front door. Then they put a prefab badge office and large concrete planters in front.

The parking lot was chewed away. The row of cottonwoods went under the Robert Oppenheimer Study Center, to which the library moved. Now a parking garage will provide two or three times the parking. That may almost be enough to compensate for the parking lot on the other side of the Ad Building, which now holds the NISC (nonproliferation and verification, sorry, I can’t make the acronym fit) and Nicholas Metropolos (computational science) buildings.

And you can’t drive down Pajarito Road any more without a badge—the plutonium and criticality facilities are too close to the road.

For a number of years, the Lab’s requests for new buildings went unheeded by the Department of Energy and Congress. Portable buildings sprang up like boletuses in the ponderosas. Then the Cerro Grande Fire wiped out too many portables.

Another fire has been raging through Los Alamos, with no end in sight. This one has done a lot more harm.

Interview from the Orange Revolution

By CKR

Here's an interview with Dmytro Potekhin, who organized the Znayu (I know) campaign in Ukraine last fall. He talks about the sources of his funding and how the money was used. He also talks about how the experience of previous failed protests helped to develop his plans for the protests of last fall.

Nuclear-Weapons-Free Middle East

By CKR

You just never know what you're going to find on the Internet. When I was preparing the previous post, I checked out the latest issue of the Washington Quarterly and found that Claudia Baumgart and Harald Müller are also proposing [pdf file] a nuclear-weapons-free zone in the Middle East. It's a good article, with detailed strategies and a short history of the idea, which came up in the settlement of the first Gulf War.

UN Security Council Resolution 687, which terminated the Persian Gulf War in 1991, adopted the idea of both an NWFZ and a WMDFZ, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) extension conference in 1995 advocated an NWFZ in its “Resolution on the Middle East.” UNSC Resolution 687 renewed the call for an NWFZ and a zone free of all WMD in its preamble and noted in its 14th operational paragraph that Iraq’s disarmament represented one step toward such a zone that would also be free of “missiles for their delivery.”

And, cross my heart, I didn't find this article until just now. My earlier post on the subject was my own, for better and worse.

Reducing the Nuclear Threat: A Nonproliferation Workshop at Los Alamos

by CKR

A group of nonproliferation experts gathered in Los Alamos during this past week. The meeting was sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Los Alamos Committee on Arms Control and International Security.

I’m not sure there was much news in the workshop; we had some very good discussions, which is important, but not what the media covet. The Washington Post came up with some of the speculations making the rounds at the workshop, and a quote from New Mexico's Senator Pete Domenici might have come from his speech to us. The meeting between Bush and Putin produced less than workshop participants were hoping for, apparently owing to the difficulties in negotiations the WP mentions.

In Diplomacy Body Language Counts, Dubya

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I used to groom ambassadors and consuls general for photo ops and press conferences.

Like grandma’s etiquette for sitting and standing as ladies and gentlemen should, the rules were pretty simple: Don’t drum fingers or swing legs. Don’t grimace. Don’t point, pound your fist or gesture too flamboyantly. Don’t scratch, anywhere.

A recent photo of George "Dubya" Bush with French President Jacques Chirac in Brussels tells me our President has forgotten the most important of Grandma’s rules: don’t spread your legs.

Aside from neo-cons who demanded and didn’t get a bellicose stand on Iraq, no one has ever accused Jacques Chirac of being a wimp when it comes to promoting French interests. But study his posture in this photo. Very contained. Inclined courteously, confidentially, toward his interlocutor. There will be no need for raised voices in this conversation if he can help it. And his shoes are classic loafers, buffed to a high enough sheen for negotiations with the President of the United States, but with a soft Italian look to them, a symbol of ease. He is at home, in Europe, old and new. He looks relaxed, but one hand holds another; politesse notwithstanding, he is giving nothing away.

Dubya, I regret to say, puts me in mind of a sheriff in a Texas saloon, tense, hands on knees, courting trouble, ready to draw. The body language shouts cowboy boots, but the shoes are worse: thick-soled, tightly-laced, leather armor for the feet. The expression matches: skeptical, wary, a little anxious for all the bravado, the expression you’d expect for a body that’s claimed every inch of space it can occupy and plans to defend it. Bush turns his head toward Chirac, but his torso faces forward. Chirac looks up. Bush looks down. Hmmm. I've had another thought. Bush, planted so arrogantly, legs spread wide, has the posture of an emperor treating with a vassal, not a good stance for courting allies.

Maybe there’s reason to feel doubt and reserve when listening to Jacques Chirac. Maybe the U.S. should be insisting that France move closer to our position on many issues and not vice versa. But a seasoned diplomatic performer does not show it.

Someone should talk to George W. Bush. He’s not Dubya, the Governor of Texas, anymore. He’s George W. Bush, President of all these United States.

The old Dubya was the leader of the posse; the reelected Bush is programmed to be master of the powwow. This photo suggests he needs to work on his body language if he’s to make up for lost opportunities and get his agenda accepted by world leaders. Eastern or Western, they're more likely to fall in with his priorities, if the President adopts postures of respect and exhibits the good manners Dubya pretends he never learned from his mother and, no doubt, grandmothers.

Blogs: Time to End the "Self-Appointed" Name-Calling

by Patricia Lee Sharpe

The New York Times picked up an odd feature story from the International Herald Tribune today, a story about blogs “as press gadfly sites” keeping the mainstream press in Europe on its toes. I was happy to learn we American bloggers have counterparts abroad, but I found myself puzzled by one paragraph:

The Web is a sprawling space that has spawned new breeds of digital gadflies like the Rojos [publishers of Periodista Digital in Spain] and an assortment of self-appointed cyber-monitors of the conventional news media in Europe.

The word “self-appointed” is the odd part, especially if it’s meant to distinguish between bloggers and publishers of traditional newspapers or those who run the TV or even the film industry.

Deja vu is the phrase that comes to mind.

Back in the mid 1980s, when I was in Moscow stringing for RKO Radio and Cox News, the foreign correspondents who represented major US newspapers and big TV networks laughed at upstart CNN, which had opened a bureau in the Soviet capital. They laughed at Ted Turner, too, the “self-appointed” millionaire (or was it already a billion?) who had presumed to start a 24/7 TV news operation.

Then CNN scooped the rest of the media during the first Gulf War. The laughter stopped.

So far as I know, the print press in the United States is wholly in private hands, not licensed by government in any way. Many major newspapers are still controlled by the families of their founders, even where the heirs have been forced to raise cash by selling a carefully weighted percentage of shares. Publishers, editors, reporters–they’re all hired and fired by individuals who had enough money to found or keep on putting out a newspaper. It may take more capital to own a newspaper than a blog, but those who control the print press were and are “self-appointed.”

American TV and radio (with the noble but struggling exception of PBS and NPR) tend to be owned by larger corporations, often huge conglomerates, but their officers hold no official position in society. They haven’t been drafted. They haven’t been elected. In a very loose way, they are answerable to their owners, the shareholders, who in turn are also "self-appointed," in so far as they have simply bought into an enterprise that looks to earn them a good return.

That’s the whole point of private enterprise. You have an idea. You apply your entrepreneurial skills. You start small. You get big. You go corporate. Self-appointment all the way.

So there's a size difference, a capitalization difference, but not a "self-appointed" difference. Blogs like the rest of the media will stand or fall on the quality of their output.

The “self-appointed” label implies that some media have more legitimacy in the marketplace of ideas than others. It’s the equivalent of an ad hominem, a slight, an insult, an illegitimate though tempting and often effective way to eliminate competition.

It won’t work. Blogs of a zillion kinds are probably here to stay and will, I suspect, attract an ever larger readership by getting better and better. The technical term is market segmentation, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on which ("self-appointed") media theorist you are attending to. Only a superior news and entertainment product will marginalize blogs in the long run--or yet another, still unimaginable, technological revolution.

U.S., Europe & the Iranian Question

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s whirlwind trip to Europe and the Middle East needed to have happened – as Leslie Gelb, former head of the Council on Foreign Relations in New York recently observed. Rice was good. She hit an A-440, the exact pitch played by the oboe to tune a western orchestra before the concert begins. Her carefully crafted public speeches were non-controversial. Her characteristic frown was replaced with a heretofore scarcely seen attractive smile.

The Europeans reciprocated. The air badly needed clearing. The U.S. and Europe need to talk with, not shout at, each other over the next four years. For the first time, this administration – outside of Colin Powell – sounded as if it were treating its Western European counterparts with respect. George W. Bush is now following suit - publicly leaving behind the Old Europe/New Europe characterizations which the administration loudly proclaimed, exascerbated and exploited throughout its first term.

But how long this “kiss and make up” trans-Atlantic love-fest will last is an open question. Fundamental substantive differences remain the same.

The first one is Iran.

There are many people in the U.S. government who know a lot about Iran, just as many knew a lot about Iraq. Our specialists are not ignorant of the facts or of Iranian history, but is anyone in the Bush Administration listening?

WhirledView Finds Cosmos in Bhutan: A Picture Story

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

We needed a logo for WhirledView, something attractive, evocative and, above all, memorable. We considered the solar system, but the planets weren’t inspiring enough, so we expanded our scope. We thought of galaxies, those great swirling clusters of billions of stars that are mere smudges of brilliance against blackness to observers without a telescope.

We’d be the telescopes, of course, scanning the vast info array that dances around us, connecting dots to make constellations of sense from apparent chaos.

It was my job to contact an astronomer. “Where,” I asked my sky-scanning son, “can we find suitable images in the public domain?”

He suggested the NASA website among others that would have been obvious, if I were an astrophysicist, a cosmologist. “Piece of cake,” I thought, much too optimistically.

Googling as directed, I drooled over the star-studded images that arrive courtesy of the Hubble space telescope, which NASA has condemned to a premature death. Reduced to blog size, unfortunately, these logo candidates had all the pizzaz of mud smeared on a picture window. Science, it seemed, was letting WhirledView down.

But there are other sources for cosmology.

I’d visited Bhutan in September and October, the month before we started WhirledView, filling flash card after flash card with digital photos. Presciently I’d taken several shots of an intriguing wall painting I encountered during a visit to the ancient dzong in Punakha.

Punakha is an Eden of a valley toward the center of Bhutan. Thanks to its low altitude, about 4500 feet, it's stepped with rice paddies that were golden with ripening grain when I was there. The subtropical climate explains why Punakha was the winter capital of Bhutan for 300 years, which in turn explains the elaboration of older structures into the existing impressive dzong.

A dzong is a traditional administrative and monastic center. The one in Punakha, erected in 1637, stands at the confluence of the Pho and Mo rivers, an auspicious site traversed by Guru Rinpoche, also known as Padma Sambhava, when he brought Buddhism to Tibet and its neighbors in the eighth century.

Dzongs are lavishly embellished with ornamental woodwork. Symbol-rich painting adorns most every surface. One eye-catching wall painting at Punakha had, for its central element, a cosmological design or mandala that suggested the solar system.

Sadly for photographers lacking very very wide angle lenses, this huge painting faced a narrow porch fronting on a courtyard shaded by a sternly-pruned Boddhi tree with world-embracing ambitions. I perched on the railing, leaning back as far as I dared, camera in hand. I squatted in the courtyard below and aimed up. I tried to eliminate dark roof shadows. No matter how I positioned myself, I couldn’t capture the whole length and breadth of it in one bright, glorious shot.

So I nibbled away at the painting, photographically, getting the mountains, the clouds, the sky, the vegetation, along with, always, a portion of that fascinating mandala.

This was the painting I recalled, in a flash of delight and relief, while I sat staring glumly at the featureless reductions of space telescope images that had been so thrilling in larger sizes.

I scrolled through my picture files and voila! The Punakha mandala, very slightly cropped, was indeed just what we needed for the WhirledView logo. Had I experienced mysterious intimations of a logo-needing-blog-to-be the day I put myself through such physical contortions to focus my camera? The psychic stuff, I mean. Of course not. I’m just interested in science. I raised scientist sons. And yet, what a wonderful coincidence!

This shot of the logo-yielding painting at Punakha dzong shows the annoying railing, but, more important, it illustrates a highly cherished aspect of Bhutanese culture, the Tale of the Four Friends.

Here’s the story: an elephant, a rabbit, a monkey and a goose planted a seed which grew into a towering tree laden with luscious fruit. Unfortunately not even the elephant, with his long trunk, could reach the fruit. But four is better than one, according to Bhutan's Buddhist-based folk culture. Like acrobats, the friends climbed one on top of the other, the bulkiest at the bottom, the lightest at the top. When the topmost succeeded in plucking a mouth-watering fruit, he immediately shared it with his friends. So all the friends ate well and were happy.

Perhaps we should read this story to our own children and grandchildren.

Now, we of WhirledView are three friends, not four, but we hope you are enjoying the fruit we select for your delectation.

And here is one final painting from Punakha dzong. We'd like to think you savor our blog with a little serenity, a cup of tea perhaps, or a pleasant glass of wine at desk- or lapside. Though we aren't and never will be sages or gurus, we hope a little wisdom creeps in, off and on, in spite of ourselves.

(Clicking on images will enlarge them, though some cropping will occur.)

Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended

Reviewed by CKR

The photo on the dust jacket says something about this book. Glance at it once, and you see Ronald Reagan telling a joke to Mikhail Gorbachev, who seems to be anticipating the punch line with pleasure. Look a little longer, and you see two shadowy presences: the whisper-interpreters who make the conversation possible. Look again, though, and it’s clear that it is Reagan and Gorbachev who are carrying on the conversation; even the postures of the faceless interpreters mimic those of the principals: both feet flat on the floor for the Soviets, the left hand on the knee for the Americans.

The author, Jack Matlock, is a career diplomat, which means that he served both Democratic and Republican administrations with an ethos of allegiance to his country rather than to a party. He tells the story of the principals and the people who worked behind the scenes on, but he gives the credit for ending the Cold War to Reagan and Gorbachev.

Reagan and Gorbachev both possessed strong visions of a future. That future was one in which the arms race of the Cold War and the constant threat of world destruction were no more. Reagan and Gorbachev accomplished those goals to give us the world we now live in.

But other threats have arisen, and the goal that both men wanted, nuclear weapons abolished by the year 2000, is nowhere close. In order to make this a safer world, we need to consider how Reagan and Gorbachev defused the crises of their day.

It’s tempting to attribute large historical events to the individuals involved. We are fortunate to have had men like Reagan and Gorbachev in office when they were, but Matlock shows that it was not simply force of personality nor rhetoric nor the more memorable incidents—“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” or the apparent failure of the summit at Reykjavik—that propelled the history of the 1980s.

Matlock begins the story in 1981 and considers the Cold War to have ended when the Soviet Union gave up applying the idea of class warfare (expressed in the phrase “peaceful coexistence”) to foreign policy, a point he also made in his previous book, Autopsy on an Empire. He sketches events through the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, but these were consequences of the ending of the Cold War.

The contrasts with recent events are many. Reagan showed great patience and focus on his goals as events in the Soviet Union initially foiled his desire for a substantive dialog. He and Gorbachev needed time to understand each other, and there were many difficulties along the way. Movement toward disarmament was fitful and foiled by the bureaucracies on both sides. Both men had to pull their subordinates back to the paths toward their visions.

In his epilogue, Matlock makes some of these contrasts clear.

If there is a lesson in the outcome of the Cold War other than the fallacy of Marxist ideology and the bankruptcy of the Communist system of rule, it is that a country cannot for long guarantee its own safety by the military domination of others. Security in today’s world, as Mikhail Gorbachev came to understand, can be found only if countries cooperate to achieve it.

This is an outstanding book and a gripping read. I recommend it to those who believe that George Bush is following in Reagan’s footsteps, to those who believe Reagan was a dangerous fool, and to anyone who is interested in learning how to avoid war and move the world toward peace.