What price, regional stability?

Err, personally, I think Joel Kotkin has fallen into the same populist trap that seems to ensnare fiction writers and serious journalists alike, roughly every decade – a somewhat unknown but economically prominent non-American, non-European race is targeted as the lurking enemy that will surely ruin us [the west]. Japan is the most notable of these erstwhile enemies of the state – remember Michael Crichton’s “Rising Sun” from 1992? Kotkin’s article borrow’s liberally from the anti-Japanese tropes of 20 years ago, codifying our own economic insecurity, and reinforcing the tribalism that he himself decries.

With China’s new prominence in global affairs, the Han race, which constitutes 90 percent of the Chinese population, is suddenly the most dominant cohesive ethnic group in the world — and it is seeking to remain that way through strategic alliances, aggressive trade policy, and attacks on racial minorities within the country’s boundaries. The less tribally cohesive, more fragmented West is, meanwhile, losing out.

via Rise of the Hans – By Joel Kotkin | Foreign Policy.

“We all know Canada has problems with the future lines drawn on Arctic maps and we all know Canada lives in the shadow of its larger neighbour to the south. The abject cruelty shown by Canadian soldiers in international conflicts is scantily referred to, as indeed is the utter incapacity of this county to host a major international event, due to its inferiority complex, born of a trauma being the skinny and weakling bro to a beefy United States and a colonial outpost to the United Kingdom, whose Queen smiles happily from Canadian postage stamps.”

via Vancouver: Mutton Dressed as Lamb – Pravda.Ru.

“Yarynich is talking about Russia’s doomsday machine. That’s right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called “the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination.” Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.” [Wired]

“…try naming a U.S. city whose air quality is even remotely as bad as Beijing’s, or an American river as polluted as the Han: You can’t. America, the richer and more industrialized country, is also by far the cleaner one.

People who live in Third-World countries—like Mexico, where I grew up—tend to understand this, even if First-World environmentalists do not. People who live in oppressive Third World countries, like China, also understand that it isn’t just greater wealth that leads to a better environment, but greater freedom, too.” [WSJ]

So then, according to Bret Stephens, rational climate change policy would focus not on emission-capping third world nations (incensing their people and slowing their development) – but in fact on the opposite: trying to push those countries along the development industrialization curve as fast as possible.

I agree with the spirit of his point, but would argue that there is a middle ground to be found. While America may be clean and green today (tip: its not), the past century has seen its share of environmental atrocities, premature deaths from air pollution, etc. Many of those disasters – personal and environmental – could have been avoided without appreciably slowing the pace of development had the people of the time had access the technologies and knowledge that exists today.

It strikes me then that climate change policy should focus on building a green incentive framework that speeds development in the right directions – not a ham-fisted cap system that pitches east against west in the minds of the poor, and not the free-for-all regulatory vacuum that America has spent the last 50 years patching itself up from.

“Obviously much has happened since then and he wanted to make it clear that the problems that Africans face weren’t just a product of colonialism or past history,” Froman said, “that this partnership — whether it’s over food security or other development ideas — require local governments to take responsibility seriously. This wasn’t a time to make excuses. And that it was important to join together in a clear-eyed way.”

As the president put it, Froman went on, “his cousin in Kenya cant find a job without paying a bribe, and that’s not the fault of the G-8. And when companies can’t operate without paying, in some parts of Africa, without paying the 25 percent fee off the top in bribes, that’s not colonialism.”

[ABC News Blog]

The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s provincial results, the digit 7 appears 17 percent of the time, and only 4 percent of the results end in the number 5. Two such departures from the average — a spike of 17 percent or more in one digit and a drop to 4 percent or less in another — are extremely unlikely. Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers.

As a point of comparison, we can analyze the state-by-state vote counts for John McCain and Barack Obama in last year’s U.S. presidential election. The frequencies of last digits in these election returns never rise above 14 percent or fall below 6 percent, a pattern we would expect to see in seventy out of a hundred fair elections. [WaPo]

That’s on top of observations that intuitively point to something being wrong:

Others have pointed to the surprisingly poor performance of Mehdi Karroubi, another reform candidate, and particularly in his home province of Lorestan, where conservative candidates fared poorly in 2005, but where Ahmadinejad allegedly captured 71 percent of the vote. Eyebrows have been raised further by the relative consistency in Ahmadinejad’s vote share across Iran’s provinces, in spite of wide provincial variation in past elections. [WaPo]

I’m happy to see that Harper is taking an approach to the issue that speaks to Canadian’s desire to live-and-let-live — up to the point when doing so interferes with human rights.