As Libya’s revolution appears to stall both militarily and politically, Turkey is emerging as the new dominant middle power in the Middle East. Turkey has long had the largest economy in the region, but what appears to really be driving its growth is its unique status as a successful moderate Muslim democracy. Both Iran and Turkey have claimed to represent the people of recent “Arab Spring”, but the Tunisians, Egyptians, and Libyans have all expressed a desire to model their countries on Turkey. At the same time Iran, though talking big, appears isolated and struggling while its puppet Syria burns.
Tunisia has just announced its time table for drafting a new constitution and new elections. We should have a good idea whether the region is trending towards fundamentalist theocracy or liberal democracy in a year.

Though it has been largely out of the news lately Iran is still engaged in an arms race to contain its people. Iran found a way to block traffic through the Tor network (a network designed to anonymize web traffic). The people who run the network rapidly found a fix and patched the network within a day, enabling Iranians to again penetrate the not-so-great firewall of Iran.

“China is losing its edge as the world’s cheapest place to manufacture goods, a new report suggests.” As you probably already know, I am very skeptical of China’s seamless emergence as a world power. I think China is going to run into serious trouble once its economy shows even the slightest hint of entering a recession. While obviously that hasn’t happened yet I think this is going to be kind of like the Soviet Union falling kind of surprise.

Nobel prize winning physicist, Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned from the American Physical Society over its statement regarding global warming that “the evidence is incontrovertible”. He wrote “In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

It looks like a Greek default and exit from the Euro is imminent. I believe that this is the true cause of the US market’s recent plunge. A Greek default could cause the kind of cascading liquidity problems that Lehman Brother’s caused. but it is becoming increasingly difficult for the EU and especially Germany to sustain them both politically and economically.

In a great irony, it has been reveled that FEMA has over the past several decades transferred a significant amount of wealth from Connecticut, 47th in disaster declarations, to Texas, 1st in disaster declarations. This is how FEMA “helps”.
“I took a break and walked down a block, and there was the Statue of Liberty,” Tibbitts said. “It was like a dream. I didn’t know everything was so close together.”

“We were disheartened we couldn’t do more but the federal government had to take control,” Tibbitts said. “
If the money that pays for this program was not taxed at the federal level and instead taxed by the individual states, states would be better able to handle their own problems. We would also immediately save the cost of the double bureaucracy. Unless you forgot that states have their own disaster response agencies. The only thing that we might need something like FEMA for is fixing interstate infrastructure.

While not absolutely confirmed, the latest generations of dark mater detectors do seem to have found evidence to support dark matter’s existence. If this turns out to be true, it will still be quite some time before we can say what these things actually are in terms of each particles individual mass and where they fit in the standard model. Nonetheless this is very exciting after years of stumbling around in the dark trying to find this unaccounted for mass to finally have spotted it on earth.

The US government has released/leaked quite a bit of data about the terror threat for 9/11. It appears that there might very well be a terror attack in New York or Washington DC. Though I have to say a car bomb is a big step down from flying planes into a building, even if they manage to pull this attack off I have trouble seeing it as a major threat.

Following up a little on my previous news post, it does appear that the globe has or at least did stop warming for the past decade. While the cause of this is hotly debated, and new computer models have been produced that can account for it I think that it is important that we’re at least aware of it.

The Obama administration is planning to withdraw more combat troops from Iraq, possibly bringing troop numbers down to about 3000. This brings the administration closer to its campaign promise of withdrawing from Iraq, though obviously it is too late to make their “within 18 months” timeline.

Ron Paul has written an article explaining his unusual position on FEMA. I think it is well worth a read, I’ll let you form your own conclusions.

A city in Italy has declared independence and started printing its own currency.

As requested by a friend, NASA’s global land-ocean temperature index.

If you went back in time to the mid 90s you’d notice that everyone was talking about was the GDP. Per Capita GDP was then briefly in vogue. Today unemployment figures feature prominently in the news, while the ratio of government debt-to-GDP is sometimes used in more financially savvy circles. These measures still miss the mark, they’re easy to manipulate without changing anything. Which is why you hear that the US has both 10 trillion and 14 trillion dollars in debt.

Let’s start with GDP, as one might expect a nation’s gross domestic product is the total value of everything, all goods and services, produced within it per year. This figure is trivial to increase without benefiting anyone; simply build a lot of things that no one wants. Perhaps more interestingly, and we’ll find later more relevant, only produce things which can be used to produce more things. One could imagine a dystopian world where everyone works in mines and factories used to produce materials to build more mines and factories while all the workers live in absolute squalor. High GDP, wouldn’t want to live there. Clearly, GDP isn’t everything.

Unemployment is more difficult to mask. You can hire people to do useless work, like houses that no one will live in. A more subtle approach is to allow the work force participation rate to fall; this allows you to mask unemployment with steadily unemployed.

Of course we wouldn’t want to maximize work force participation either. That would mean a return to having pregnant mothers, children, and the elderly working, with little time for anyone’s education. In fact human civilization itself has been on a steady path to lower work force participation for thousands of years. We work shorter days, fewer days, spend more time learning, and enjoying life, we normally call this progress. One could easily imagine a utopian Star Trek like future where we have near unlimited energy and resources with most manufacturing automated in which most people devote their time to “improving themselves”.

If we peek back at GDP for a second, the reason it didn’t work was because it “didn’t benefit anyone”. We’ll that’s easy; lets maximize consumption! We’ve been trying that for years now, are you wondering why it isn’t helping yet? But clearly, consumption is part of the answer, what we really want to do after-all is improve our standard of living.

Which brings us to our next measure of economic prosperity, equality. There has been a persistent movement towards measuring a nation by how evenly it divides up its wealth. After all if you took our GDP, 14.7 trillion and divided it evenly by 312 million people we would each have about 47,000 dollars each year to live on. In practice this model has proven to be unsuccessful, most people will blame corrupt governing officials, and lack of innovation, both of which are true, but are not the real fault of this system. The real fault, is that much of that 14.7 trillion GDP does not get consumed by rich people living extravagant life styles though some of it certainly does, it gets consumed producing the next 14.7 trillion.

If we consider the sum total of all of everything we’ve built: buildings, cars, computers, roads, and power plants, we take them and do three different things with them:
First, we use them to replace things that we broke or consumed while building them. We drive on those roads to work, replace broken machinery, and old buildings. People vastly underestimate the percentage of our economy devoted simply to keeping our economy running.
Second, we take most of what is left over, and consume it. That is use it for things that don’t produce anything new, we live in some buildings instead of using them for work. Sometimes we drive not to work, but to a friends house, or a ball game. This is our standard of living.
Third, we take what is left, and use it to make more things than we could make before. This is where real economic progress comes from.

When we start “living beyond our means”, we start consuming things that otherwise would have gone into producing a better future. When we start consuming beyond that point we start consuming the things that make our present sustainable. That is what the US economy is doing right now.

I will continue this line of reasoning in another blog post, but I’d like for readers to ponder this question and post any ideas or reactions in the comments.

Unaffiliated voters are rising rapidly America may finally be ready to consider options outside of the “core” of the two primary parties.

Looks like Turkey and Israel will not be rebuilding their relationship after all. Though all the military ties were already suspended so that part is not really new.

Another bad month for jobs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-14757926