Passport disaster.
In case you’ve ever wondered why only 20% of Americans have passports, Bruce Reed has at least part of the answer…
Summer reading: The Upside of Down
If you’re off on holiday shortly and casting around for some readable tome, try Thomas Homer-Dixon’s outstanding The Upside of Down. Homer-Dixon’s 300 page essay on global risk trends and the prospect of a multidimensional ‘perfect storm’ is a real page-turner that skips neatly from the decline and fall of Rome to the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, seeking to extract the key lessons from each to apply them to the current predicament.
The book’s recurring theme is that resilience is all about being able to make creative use of moments of breakdown so as to turn them into processes of renewal – rather than sliding into outright collapse (a la Jared Diamond). So, for instance, after we’ve had Homer-Dixon’s epic description of the city fathers of San Francisco enlisting heavy artillery pieces to blow up one of its more well-heeled avenues – this in a last, desperate, and ultimately successful attempt to create a firebreak – we learn that the earthquake and fire led to the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Christian China, takes on Islam, Oh Good.
Here’s a purported future trend that has some on the right salivating – a rapidly Christianizing China acting as a natural counterweight to Islam. According to National Review’s, Mark Krikorian (bio):
Christianity has much better prospects in Red China than in Taiwan or Hong Kong (or Japan). It’s not just cultural characteristics that determine how receptive a people might be to the Gospel (or any other religious or political message), but also the political and historical circumstances. Koreans were uniquely open to Christianity, for instance, because it wasn’t the religion of their oppressors (the Japanese) and its adoption could be seen as a patriotic act (kind of like sticking with Roman Catholicism in Ireland or Poland).
After being suppressed by the ChiComs for so long (something that didn’t happen in Taiwan or Hong Kong), Christianity may well have succeeded in earning real credibility among a significant number of Chinese, and could well be appealing to modernizing people in the big cities looking for something to believe in.
While I wouldn’t place any bets on a Chinese army razing Mecca, it seems perfectly plausible that China could have 200 million Christians in the not-too-distant future.
Read the article that started the discussion off and dissent from old-style Tory, John Derbyshire.
Climate decider
Some few months ago, I had dinner with a State official who tried to convince me that George Bush was a ‘thought leader’ on climate change – yes really. Time will tell what the Decider thinks we should do about the problem. But in the meantime, Steve Clemons has a useful briefing on what the US President hopes to get out of his climate change summit…
How to be a terrorist.
Freakanomics author Steven Levitt has been…
“…thinking about what I would do to maximize terror if I were a terrorist with limited resources. I’d start by thinking about what really inspires fear. One thing that scares people is the thought that they could be a victim of an attack. With that in mind, I’d want to do something that everybody thinks might be directed at them, even if the individual probability of harm is very low. Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.
Also, I’d want to create the feeling that an army of terrorists exists, which I’d accomplish by pulling off multiple attacks at once, and then following them up with more shortly thereafter.
Third, unless terrorists always insist on suicide missions (which I can’t imagine they would), it would be optimal to hatch a plan in which your terrorists aren’t killed or caught in the act, if possible.
Fourth, I think it makes sense to try to stop commerce, since a commerce breakdown gives people more free time to think about how scared they are.
Fifth, if you really want to impose pain on the U.S., the act has to be something that prompts the government to pass a bundle of very costly laws that stay in place long after they have served their purpose (assuming they had a purpose in the first place).”
It’s a good list – but surely you’d also want to mount one-two attacks – hitting survivors as they flee the scene of the first atrocity. The unfairness of it all would really freak people out…