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18 Nov 09

Op-Ed Columnist - What They Really Believe - NYTimes.com

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But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.
My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.
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- Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.
- So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

28 Oct 09

Matthew Yglesias » Today in Afghanistan News

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Tom Friedman says we need a lighter footprint in Afghanistan, offering some arguments I disagree with, but an observation about costs and benefits that I endorse: “China, Russia and Al Qaeda all love the idea of America doing a long, slow bleed in Afghanistan. I don’t.”
Meanwhile, as I’ve observed before, Rep Jane Harman (D-CA) is normally a very hawkish Democrat but seems quite skeptical about Afghanistan. She elaborated on her view yesterday talking with Matt Duss:
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- Stan Collender also did a nice piece on why Fred Hiatt is out of his mind when he thinks that deficits induced by Afghanistan-related expenditures somehow don’t count in the budgetary scheme.
- Meanwhile, Dexter Filkins, Mark Mazzetti, and James Risen report that for all the shiny talk about counterinsurgency the CIA has been running an old-school operation in Afghanistan, paying bribes to Hamid Karzai’s opium trafficking brother “for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.” Leading COIN theorists do not approve but this raises, in a very pointed way, the issue of whether COIN-in-practice stands any realistic chance of resembling the theory and rhetoric.

Is a McDonalds-less Iceland now vulnerable to attack? | FP Passport

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16 Oct 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Teacher, Can We Leave Now? No. - NYTimes.com

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Which is why it was no accident that Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — spent half a day in order to reach Mortenson’s newest school and cut the ribbon. Getting there was fun. Our Chinook helicopter threaded its way between mountain peaks, from Kabul up through the Panjshir Valley, before landing in a cloud of dust at the village of Pushghar. Imagine if someone put a new, one-story school on the moon, and you’ll appreciate the rocky desolateness of this landscape.
He was surrounded by bearded village elders and scores of young Afghan boys and girls, who were agog at the helicopter, and not quite believing that America’s “warrior chief” — as Admiral Mullen’s title was loosely translated into Urdu — was coming to open the new school.
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- While the admiral passed out notebooks, Mortenson told me why he has devoted his life to building 131 secular schools for girls in Pakistan and another 48 in Afghanistan: “The money is money well spent. These are secular schools that will bring a new generation of kids that will have a broader view of the world. We focus on areas where there is no education. Religious extremism flourishes in areas of isolation and conflict.
- “When a girl gets educated here and then becomes a mother, she will be much less likely to let her son become a militant or insurgent,” he added. “And she will have fewer children. When a girl learns how to read and write, one of the first things she does is teach her own mother. The girls will bring home meat and veggies, wrapped in newspapers, and the mother will ask the girl to read the newspaper to her and the mothers will learn about politics and about women who are exploited.”
- It is no accident, Mortenson noted, that since 2007, the Taliban and its allies have bombed, burned or shut down more than 640 schools in Afghanistan and 350 schools in Pakistan, of which about 80 percent are schools for girls. This valley, controlled by Tajik fighters, is secure, but down south in Helmand Province, where the worst fighting is today, the deputy minister of education said that Taliban extremists have shut 75 of the 228 schools in the last year. This is the real war of ideas. The Taliban want public mosques, not public schools. The Muslim militants recruit among the illiterate and impoverished in society, so the more of them the better, said Mortenson.
- Where were they going to school before
- Mortenson’s Central Asia Institute and the U.S. State Department
- joined with the village elders to get this secular public school built? “The mosque,” the girls said.
- “The U.S. military has gone through a huge learning curve. They really get it. It’s all about building relationships from the ground up, listening more and serving the people of Afghanistan.”

11 Sep 09

Op-Ed Columnist - Our One-Party Democracy - NYTimes.com

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one-party democracy
It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power.
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- Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be whipsawed by its different factions.
- “China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,”
- And it is possible the president will seek to fund those subsidies, at least in part, with the idea John McCain ran on — by reducing the tax exemption for employer-provided health care.
- “Just because Obama is on a path to give America the Romney health plan with McCain-style financing, does not mean the Republicans will embrace it — if it seems politically more attractive to scream ‘socialist,’ ”
- The G.O.P. used to be the party of business. Well, to compete and win in a globalized world, no one needs the burden of health insurance shifted from business to government more than American business. No one needs immigration reform — so the world’s best brainpower can come here without restrictions — more than American business. No one needs a push for clean-tech — the world’s next great global manufacturing industry — more than American business. Yet the G.O.P. today resists national health care, immigration reform and wants to just drill, baby, drill.
  “Globalization has neutered the Republican Party, leaving it to represent not the have-nots of the recession but the have-nots of globalized America, the people who have been left behind either in reality or in their fears,” said Edward Goldberg, a global trade consultant who teaches at Baruch College. “The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer. In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”

09 Sep 09

Meet the Press's idea of a "debate" - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

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What an odd filtering standard for The Liberal Media to use.
The prime controversy in that debate is over the inclusion of a "public option," with large numbers of Americans supporting it.
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- What you had with the health care discussion, just as was true with the Afghanistan debate and the lead-up to the Iraq War, is one that -- by design -- completely excluded any views to the "left" of DLC Chair Harold Ford, even where such views are held by large numbers of Americans. With very rare exception, that is the spectrum of opinion typically allowed on Liberal Media shows like Meet the Press. The Liberal Media doesn't even pretend to include liberal views.
- Indeed. I even heard that, before the Iraq war, there were people on the Internet saying that Saddam Hussein had purchased aluminum tubes that were used to build nuclear weapons, and that was then repeated by other blogs without challenge. Some reckless bloggers even dismissed European objections to the invasion as "not Serious"; demonzied war opposition as coming from " knee-jerk liberals and pacifists"; justified the war with the demented desire to make Iraqis "Suck On This"; and called for France to be removed from the U.N. Security Council. Unfiltered Internet hacks uncritically repeated what they were told by the U.S. military to disseminate myths about Jessica Lynch's heroic firefight and Pat Tillman's tragic death at the hands of Taliban monsters. One particularly unfiltered blog spent a week screaming to the country that government tests showed Saddam was likely responsible for the anthrax attacks. In fairness, Friedman is right about one thing, as the Meet the Press panel demonstrates: outside of the Internet, there is an extreme amount of "filtering" that determines what one hears.

03 May 09

Open Left:: Living The Life We Ask Others to Live - Or At Least Trying To

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09 Mar 09

Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need ... - Google Book Search

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05 Mar 09

Thomas Friedman’s Five Worst Predictions: Barrett Brown | Vanity Fair

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15 Feb 09

Marginal Revolution: Buy a House, Get a Visa

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22 Oct 08

Thomas Friedman on Real Time • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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10 Sep 08

What Tax Cut?: Newsroom: The Independent Institute

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09 Sep 08

Tom Friedman slams "Drill,baby,drill". (2mins) • VideoSift: Online Video *Quality Control

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21 Jun 08

Dismayed Republicans emerge as Barack Obama supporters - Times Online

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14 Jun 08

The mystery of Obamacon-ism - How the World Works - Salon.com

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10 Sep 07

RConversation: Thomas Friedman gets the middle finger in the Middle Kingdom

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19 Jan 07

YaleGlobal Online Magazine

Consider this case of multiple identity disorder. In 2003, the state of Indiana put out to bid a contract to upgrade the state's computer systems that process unemployment claims. Guess who won? Tata America International, which is the U.S.-based subsidia

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