My Bad Relationship With The NHL

I feel like I'm writing a letter to Dear Abby... See, I'm stuck in a bad relationship, I love her, but she takes off months, even a year, for no good reason, then comes back and expects that we'll pick up like nothing ever happened...

Her name is the NHL.

Let me say that I am a big hockey fan, I have been since I was about 10 years old. Growing up, my family had season tickets to the New Jersey Devils; I've ridden buses to Montreal to see a game; when I became the Sports Editor of my college newspaper, I quickly claimed the hockey beat for myself, even though my school had only a club-level team and they were, honestly, fairly bad; in short, I love the game. So you would think that I'd be overjoyed by the news that the NHL's latest labor stoppage came to an end late last week, just in time to salvage part of the 2012-2013 season.

But I'm not. Some of it is anger and frustration with the league over its third labor stoppage in 18 years, a largely pointless fight between millionaires and billionaires over how to carve up league revenues that last season topped $3 billion. But in a bigger sense, my lack of enthusiasm comes from the realization that getting back together after a breakout often seems great as an idea, though the reality is usually disappointing.

People are joyful over the idea that the last-minute labor agreement saved the 2012-2013 season. But let's not kid ourselves, the season is already lost.  Sure, the teams will take to the ice in an ersatz 48-game schedule, as they did in 1995, but this season will be looked at as far from legitimate. The New Jersey Devils won their first Stanley Cup following the shortened 1995 season, but the only reason that championship has any validity today is because the Devils went on to make the playoffs every year for the next decade and win two more championships in 2000 and 2003; without them, the Devils 1995 Cup win would be in the record books with a very big asterisk.

Nor am I looking forward to seeing the quality of the product on the ice this year. Getting ready for a full NHL season is usually a month-long affair of training camps and exhibition games; this year that process is being compressed down to a week – players will report to their teams this weekend and begin play on Jan. 19^th, not in exhibition games, but to launch the 48 game season.  Some players will be coming to these mini-camps from professional leagues in Europe, others from stints in the minors, others still with no playing time since their seasons ended last April or May. The teams won't gel as cohesive units, injuries are far more likely because of poor physical conditioning; in short, the 2013 season promises to be a sloppy one.

And even more disturbing are some of the moves the league is discussing for the future. Lost in the hubbub of the labor crisis were two proposals floated by the NHL: expanding the playoffs to 20 teams and expanding the league itself to 32; both are awful ideas. A 20-team playoff format will likely add another round to the playoff structure and will stretch the season deeper into June, considering that the 2011-2012 playoffs didn't end until June 11^th, another round could push the end of the Stanley Cup finals almost to the official start of summer – kind of silly for a “winter” sport. It also makes the regular season more irrelevant since 20 out of 30 teams, or 2/3 of the league would be guaranteed a spot in the post-season. Expansion is also a terrible idea, especially since part of the reason for this year's labor lockout was the league's contention that roughly 2/3 of the teams were losing money. Seattle and Quebec City have emerged as the frontrunners in the expansion talks, and while both would be fine additions to the NHL, it would make more sense for them to host teams relocated from some of the NHL's weaker cities like Phoenix or Columbus, OH than to add more teams to what many fans consider to be an already bloated league.

The rationale for these moves is money – expansion franchises must pay a fee to the league, which results in a few million dollars being funneled into the coffers of every NHL team, a hallmark of the Gary Bettman era; while more teams in the playoffs will give four more owners a chance to earn a little more revenue by hosting additional home games for their teams. Whether these moves are good for the quality of the league or the sport is irrelevant if there's a quick buck to be made. And that brings me back to my point about being stuck in a bad relationship. The NHL is never going to change, but in terms of hockey, they are the only game in town, and, unfortunately, the NHL knows that too.  

What The United States Could Learn From Ghana About Elections

In case you missed it, we had a presidential election in the US last month. After a seemingly endless campaign, President Barack Obama defeated his challenger Mitt Romney in a race that wasn't all that close – Obama won just over 50% of the vote to Romney's 47.3%. Of course this didn't stop the opposition from alleging that Obama “stole” the election: Romney himself claimed that Obama only won by promising lower-income voters undefined “free stuff”. Meanwhile, groups of Americans across the country (but primarily in the South) responded by starting petitions encouraging their respective states to secede from the Union, with the Texas petition gathering more than 100,000 signatures.

Perhaps that's why with piece on the BBC last week about reactions to another hard-fought presidential election, this time in the African nation of Ghana, stuck with me.  In Ghana, incumbent President John Mahama of the NDC party defeated opposition leader Nana Akufo-Addo of the NPP.  Even though Ghana is one of Africa's most stable democracies, the election was marked by technical glitches which caused long delays at some polling places.  This, in turn, led the NPP to allege that the election was “stolen” from them.

That's where the BBC piece comes in.  The BBC interviewed five Ghanaians, including supporters of the NPP. What's noteworthy is that rather than join in their party's call to contest the election, the NPP supporters seemed rather embarrassed by the party's stance, with both saying that the party should just accept the results of the election and one voter questioning whether he made a mistake voting for the NPP if this was the way they were going to react.  Another voter explained that the reason the NPP lost was not due to fraud, but because of the party's inability to realize their message wasn't resonating in several of the country's key swing states (and doesn't that sound like an explanation that could apply to the US Republicans as well?)

It was refreshing to see voters not blame their political party's loss on some poorly-defined notions of fraud, or call for unrest, but to accept the results of the election and to blame the loss on the shortcomings of the losing party.  Perhaps the United States could learn a thing or two from the way that Ghanaians practice democracy.

Red Dawn Redux: A Shaky Parable For Our Times

The Guardian has taken a first look at the trailer for the remake of the 1980's-vintage action flick Red Dawn, and it raises a few questions much deeper than you'd expect from a movie this vapid.

Just in case you're not up on your late Cold War cinema, the original Red Dawn was the story of a bunch of high school pals in rural Colorado turned guerrilla fighters after the Soviet Union, with an assist from Cuba, decided for some reason to invade the United States in 1985.  The 2012 remake pretty much sticks to the original script, swapping rural Washington state for Colorado and China for the now-defunct Soviet Union in the role of the antagonist.

Or maybe it is North Korea? As I wrote when the Red Dawn remake first went into production, the film's creative team pulled back from the logical substitution of China for the Soviet Union – possibly fearing a political backlash, a loss of Chinese distribution rights, or both – and instead substituted North Korea as the resident bad guys. Though the producers seem to have later decided that the idea North Korea, a nation of 25 million that struggles just to feed its own citizens, could stage a large-scale invasion of the United States stretches credibility too far even for a Hollywood action film (though Hollywood also recently decided that a movie version of Manimal is somehow credible), so now, according to The Guardian, the antagonists are from a “unidentified Asian” country.

Near the end of The Guardian's demolishing of the Red Dawn trailer, writer Stuart Heritage raises a good point: the original Red Dawn was released in the mid-1980s, at a time when the United States was offering moral and material support to the mujahadeen of Afghanistan as they tried to repel the mighty Red Army of the Soviet Union.  The original Red Dawn offered up a kinship to be drawn then between our plucky band of Colorado high schoolers and the scruffy Afghanis, who each took to the hills to fight the foreigners who invaded their lands.

Fast forward 27 years though and America's perception of Afghan insurgents has morphed from the heroic mujahadeen into the dastardly Taliban jihadi; the foreigners they fight are no longer the evil Soviets, but rather good red-blooded American boys and girls in uniform.  So while the new Red Dawn is still making the same visceral appeal to the audience to identify with the tragically over-matched band of fighters who want only to free their homeland from an invading foreign military force, the underlying role of the United States in the world has flipped – rather than supporting the insurgents on the sly as we did in the 1980s, we have become the invading heavies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  In reality, Red Dawn is now asking us to emotionally identify with the very people fighting against American troops today. (If the producers of Red Dawn wanted to keep the emotional and subtextual consistency of the original, then instead of fighting, the high school kids in RD:Redux would join a local reconstruction team headed up by a government official from the unnamed Asian nation that might be North Korea).

It does beg the question of what exactly the producers of the Red Dawn remake were thinking in dredging up this largely forgotten bit of 80s pop culture? Why ask an American audience to identify with a band of local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power, when at that very same moment American troops are being attacked a half a world away by bands of local insurgents fighting against a vastly superior military power, which, in this case, just happens to be the United States.

Or maybe I am giving the Red Dawn producers too much credit for being able to make these intellectual connections in the first place. After all, their choice to play the All-American lead in this film was Chris Hemsworth, a British actor best known for playing a Norse god. 

CNN Charged With Censorship Over Mid-East Documentary

Last week media critic Glenn Greenwald of the UK's Guardian newspaper/website published a pair of hard-hitting articles aimed directly at CNN that received surprisingly little coverage in the United States given the severity of their charges, namely that CNN is engaging in acts of censorship to protect the patronage paid to them by foreign governments.

Greenwald's charges center around a documentary made last year about the democratic uprisings in the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain called “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring”.  The documentary, which Greenwald describes as “unflinching”, centered on pro-democracy activists in the tiny kingdom and was highly critical of the heavy-handed government response, which ultimately put down the democratic uprising.  The Bahraini regime was criticized internationally for their methods, which included the mass arrests of protesters (including doctors who were attempting to help injured demonstrators) and the use of deadly force against unarmed and peaceful protesters.  The CNN documentary crew themselves were even detained at gunpoint by pro-regime forces intent on disrupting their attempts at telling the story of the pro-democracy activists.

“iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring” would go on to garner critical praise along with a number of journalism awards. Yet despite this praise, CNN's domestic network would air the documentary only once, while CNN's international broadcasting arm, CNNi, the outlet for which “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring” was originally produced, would not air the documentary at all.  The lead journalist on “iRevolution”, Amber Lyon, complained to CNN's upper management about the network's refusal to air the documentary.  Despite being groomed by CNN to become one of their star on-air personalities, Lyon was laid off by CNN earlier this spring after her complaints about CNN's internal censorship became public.

CNN, of course, has denied any attempt at censorship, noting that they have aired many stories about the uprising in Bahrain (just not “iRevolution” apparently).  But it is here, and in a companion piece, that Greenwald lays out his most serious charge against CNN – that CNN has entered into a number of paid partnerships with governments around the world and that CNN is allowing these partnerships to color their reporting from and about these countries.

The CNN “partnerships” with the governments of countries like Kazakhstan, Georgia and Bahrain has led to the production of a series of quasi-journalistic fluff pieces: reports that are meant to look like genuine CNN reporting – using CNN journalists/personalities - but that in reality are public relations spots that allow the “partner” countries to put their best foot forward, with no contrasting viewpoints offered by CNN's stable of journalists. For example, a series of paid reports aired under the “Eye on Lebanon” banner were touted by Lebanon's Tourism Minister not for their journalistic merit, but rather as a way “to market Lebanon as a tourism destination.”   

It's not surprising then to note that CNN has a long-standing partnership arrangement with Bahrain though the Bahrain Economic Development Board, the governmental agency responsible for promoting Bahrain to the world. CNN has included Bahrain in their “Eye on...” country series, among other paid-for network programming. It is not surprising then that CNN has been reluctant to air a documentary that is so critical of the Bahrani royal family.

There is an inherent tension between advertising and journalism, with the open question always being if the news organization will shy away from coverage that could reflect negatively on their sponsors.  But what Greenwald describes at CNN is something different, the countries in question aren't merely buying commercial spots on CNN, they are, in effect, directly paying for positive coverage of their countries. Worse still, the shelving of “iRevolution” and the subsequent dismissal of Amber Lyon is troubling evidence that CNN is willing to let these sponsorships affect their journalistic judgment beyond the paid-for beauty spots.  It is a troubling accusation to make against what has long been one of the most-trusted names in modern journalism, and is a sign of how far CNN has fallen from their own glory days.

Floating A Trial Balloon For The Worst Experiment In The History Of Science

According to the New York Times, two Harvard professors are working on a proposal for a small-scale experiment in geoengineering.  The professors, James G. Anderson, who works in atmospheric chemistry, and David W. Keith, whose field is applied physics, are proposing to send a small balloon aloft to release microscopic amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to see how they react with naturally-occurring ozone and water vapor.  The researchers stress that the experiment will be small-scale and its effects highly-localized, or in Dr. Anderson's words: “this is an experiment that is completely nonintrusive.”

The good professors are laying on the qualifiers because the field of geoengineering aims to do nothing less than to change the climate of the entire Earth in an attempt to stave off the negative effects of global warming.  As we discussed earlier, geoengineering is basically an attempt to hack the climate.  Based on observations that volcanic eruptions can have a temporary cooling affect on global temperatures as volcanic dust shot high into the atmosphere reflects some of the sunlight falling on Earth back into space, geoengineerers proposed shooting massive amounts of sulfate particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect a portion of the sunlight on a global scale. The idea is that if the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth's surface is reduced, the resulting drop in temperature will offset the global rise in temperature due to the growing amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which prevent heat from naturally radiating off into space.

Sounds simple, even logical, right? Sure, except for the fact that it is the worst idea in the history of mankind.  Geoengineering has a few flaws. For one, there's the matter of this slight potential side effect: a permanent whitening of the skies.  Those particles meant to reflect some of the sunlight, also will likely diffuse it, meaning the sky will take on a white, washed-out appearance; in other words, so long blue skies... An even bigger problem is that once you start geoenginnering in a large scale, you can never, ever stop.

The reason is simple: geoengineering doesn't reduce the amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases being pumped into the atmosphere, it just tries to offset this gain with a corresponding reduction in temperature on the other side.  Those sulfate particles will eventually settle out of the atmosphere, meaning more will continuously have to be pumped in to take their place.  Stop pumping and the cooling side of the geoengineering equation goes away, leaving you with a runaway greenhouse effect that will cause global temperatures to spike upward.

Unfortunately, this crackpot idea has attracted the backing of some serious (and seriously rich) people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson.   But let's remember we've gotten ourselves in this greenhouse gas mess by pumping a lot of things into the atmosphere that shouldn't be there, pumping more things in at this point seems like a pretty bad idea. 

   

A Biocoal Steamer And The Problems Of Green Hype

This odd little story caught my eye: apparently a team from the University of Minnesota, along with a group called Sustainable Rail International (under the banner “the Coalition for Sustainable Rail”) are planning to rehabilitate a 1930's-vintage steam railroad locomotive as a showcase for biocoal technologies.

In case you've never heard of it, biocoal is a supposedly “green” and sustainable fuel source made from cellular plant that has been processed and compressed into a stable, solid fuel – hence the name “biocoal”, since the resulting fuel looks and acts like your traditional mined carbon coal.  Advocates claim that biocoal is green since the carbon it contains was fixed from the atmosphere when the source plants were growing and that it does not contain the heavy metals, like mercury, found in traditional coal.  Getting more biocoal simply involves harvesting more plants.

So far, so good with the story.  The choice of a test-bed – a 1930's vintage 4-6-4 “Hudson”-type locomotive, which has spent the past few years languishing at a museum in Topeka, Kansas is an interesting one, and a choice sure to net the Coalition for Sustainable Rail some added publicity if/when the project ever does hit the rails.  But it is at this point that the claims being made by the project's backers start to get a little ridiculous.

Engine 3463 during its working days.

The steam engine project is being called Project 130 by the Coalition for Sustainable Rail, since they plan for the resurrected Hudson to race down the rails at 130 mph.  This idea is utterly ridiculous.  The recognized speed world record for a steam locomotive is 126 mph, and that was set by a highly-streamlined loco, not the boxy Hudson selected for the project.  The Coalition for Sustainable Rail also claims that the steamer will cost less to fuel and maintain than a modern diesel freight engine; this claim is also dubious.  It is impossible right now to compare the economics of diesel fuel to biocoal, since the latter is not being produced in anywhere near the levels of diesel; but higher maintenance costs were one of the key factors that doomed steam engines, they are simply more labor-intensive than diesel engines.

And that gets to the “green hype” issue.  The Coalition for Sustainable Rail couldn't leave well enough alone by merely making the already impressive claim that the steam engine test would show biocoal's viability as a sustainable, less-environmentally impacting fuel, but one that could be substituted for traditional coal without modification to existing equipment; instead they have to dress their claim up will all sorts of impossible-to-execute frills, like claiming this museum refugee will fly down the rails like a formula-1 race car.  This is a trap that green advocates seem to fall into all too often – it is not enough to offer a substitute to existing energy technologies, they have to insist their new green tech will be better, not just incrementally better, but revolutionary better, and in the process they make promises they can't keep, which ultimately makes even successful demonstrations of their technology look like failures.

Russia's Paranoid Air Disaster Response

Three weeks ago the future of Russia's civil aviation industry took a major step back when their showpiece Sukhoi Superjet 100 slammed into a mountain in Indonesia while on a six-nation publicity tour of Asia to drum up sales.

The stakes couldn't be higher, and the accident more costly, for Russia's civil aviation industry.  The Superjet is the first civilian jetliner designed since the collapse of the Soviet Union; in addition to bringing a new product to market, Sukhoi also had to fight widespread perceptions that Russian aircraft are inherently unsafe, a reputation earned by Russia's generally lousy civilian aviation record, and not helped by the high-profile crash of a passenger jet last October, which killed the entire Yaroslavl Lokomotiv hockey team.

Perhaps it is for these reasons that the GRU, the intelligence wing of the Russian armed forces is offering up this explanation for the Superjet crash in Indonesia on May 9: it was an act of industrial sabotage on the part of the United States meant to cripple the Russian aviation industry.  The GRU is apparently serious about this story, explaining in the pages of Moscow's Komsomolskaya Pravda that the “most plausible” explanation for the crash was electronic jamming that interfered with the Superjet's onboard navigational equipment, jamming apparently done by the United States.

The problem is that this is not the “most plausible” explanation, what's more plausible is that the still unexplained crash of the Superjet was due to error on the part of the pilot Alexander Yablontsev. The doomed flight of the Superjet was suppose to be a simple flight departing and returning to Jakarta, flying over the mountainous interior of Indonesia. But roughly midway through the flight, the aircraft ran into thunderstorms.  Yablontsev, who is regard as one of Russia's most-experienced test pilots, for some reason requested permission to fly below the storm, where pilots are typically trained to try to fly above such adverse weather.  Because of his years of experience, Yablontsev's unusual request was granted by air traffic controllers, according to Time magazine.  The Superjet soon flew into the side of a mountain.

It is possible then, that flying over unfamiliar terrain, Yablontsev simply did not know there were tall mountains ahead of him when he made his request, and couldn't see them due to the stormy conditions.  But there should have been an audible alarm warning of a possible collision.  Crews recovered the Superjet's flight voice recorder but have heard no sounds of an alarm in the cockpit.  It is here that Time offers two possible explanations: one that Yablontsev deliberately flew into the heavy weather to show off the Superjet's handling to the planeload of dignitaries; and that the alarm systems may have been shut off because guests on these show flights were freely allowed to enter the cockpit to get a better view of the Superjet in action.  These allegations are based in large part on Russian travel blogger Sergei Dolya who reported on the Superjet's trip, but who missed the fateful flight.  Pictures from an earlier flight show Dolya dressed as Poseidon performing a mock ceremony with the flight crew as they flew over the Equator (an old naval tradition for sailors crossing the Equator for the first time).  It is a clear example that the typical regulations regarding guests in the cockpit were not being followed during the Superjet's tour.

Time's explanation is frankly far more plausible than what's being offered up by the GRU, which seems like nothing more than spin to cover up a very embarrassing accident.  It's worth noting that some in Russia also tried to offer American sabotage as the reason for the failure of their recent attempted Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars.

How The US Media Gets It Wrong On Africa

Foreign Policy has a great piece of journalism critique currently up on its website that's well worth your time to read.  In it, author Laura Seay discusses the generally lousy state of reportage coming out of Africa, though her critique can be extended to the entire way that the profession is currently practiced in America.

Part of her critique is quite familiar: that the US media only turns to Africa during times of outright disaster/war or when there is an “American” angle to a story: the viral media sensation of the KONY2012 campaign being an example of the latter.  And African reporting tends to quickly fallback on to outright ethnic stereotypes – comparing events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Joseph Conrad's book Heart of Darkness, for example.

But the why of this situation is where the story really starts to get interesting.  Seay lays the blame on American press outlets trying to do African reportage on the cheap and accuses American journalists of frankly being rather lazy in their duties.  Most major US media outlets rely on only two or three correspondents to cover the entire vast African continent.  Based in some of Africa's most metropolitan cities – Nairobi, Johannesburg – they are expected to parachute (figuratively, not literally) into hotspots as the need arises, even if that hotspot is on the other side of the continent.  Imagine if a foreign news outlet expected their New York City-based reporter to run out to Iowa to cover a sudden blight of the corn crop, a topic well outside their expertise, and you get an idea of the point Seay is trying to make.

Meanwhile, those journalists who do find themselves in Africa, tend to be rather lazy.  Seay gives the example of reporters headed to the war-torn borderlands between Sudan and South Sudan.  With no knowledge of the local situation or language, reporters tend to rely on locally-based “fixers”.  In South Sudan, one prominent fixer is an American expat named Ryan Boyette, who was the subject of several human interest profiles by outlets like NBC and the New York Times in the span of just a few weeks.

It wasn't always this way, once outlets like NBC or the Times maintained extensive networks of locally-based foreign correspondents.  But these positions have been a victim of cost-cutting measures.  The result has been a noticeable decline in both the quality and quantity of foreign affairs reporting by US media outlets.  All of which reminds me of a recent discussion I had with a friend whom I hadn't seen in a long time.  We talked about the world, and the media coverage of it.  For world news, it turns out we both relied primarily on a selection of foreign sources: the BBC, al-Jazeera English, even the occasional program on Russia Today; given Seay's critique, perhaps that's no surprise.

ExxonMobile Bets Big On Oil Deal In Russia

When is an oil deal more than just an oil deal?  Maybe when it is US-based ExxonMobile teaming up with Russia's state-run oil firm Rosneft.  The two companies announced a series of joint ventures on Tuesday that will give ExxonMobile access to Russian oil reserves in the Black Sea as well as the remote and frigid Kara Sea in Russia's far north.  The Arctic is widely believed to be the site of the world's last remaining major untapped oil fields; early surveys indicate that the Kara Sea field in question could by itself hold 36 billion barrels of recoverable oil – more oil, the New York Times notes, than in all of ExxonMobile's holdings in the United States. 

But the deal is even more interesting from the Russian side since it gives Rosneft a share in an ExxonMobile-owned shale gas field in Texas.  Thanks to hydrofracking and other advanced drilling techniques, shale gas and oil fields that were long thought to be near worthless due to the limitations of older drilling equipment have sparked an energy boom in the past few years.  The glut of natural gas now coming to the world marketplace were enough to prompt current Russian Prime Minister and soon-to-be President Vladimir Putin to discuss the “threat” shale gas posed to the Russian energy sector during his annual address to the Russian Duma (parliament) last week, and order the Russian energy sector to “answer this challenge”.  Rosneft seems then to be taking the “if you can't beat 'em, join 'em” approach with their partnership in ExxonMobile's Texas shale gas field.  They become the latest in a line of foreign companies who have invested in similar American fields as a way of gaining practical experience in using hydrofracking, horizontal drilling and other advanced recovery techniques to access their own domestic shale gas and oil reserves.

There's also a sense of going back to the future for ExxonMobile in the Rosneft deal.  In 2003, ExxonMobile was on the verge of signing a similar agreement with Russia's then-largest oil conglomerate, Yukos, when Yukos' chairman Mikhail Khodorkovsky was arrested on charges of tax evasion.  Khodorkovsky had hoped that the partnership would literally provide him with a krisha (Russian slang for “protection”) in his increasingly hostile personal relationship with Vladimir Putin.  Khodorkovsky was arrested before the Yukos-ExxonMobile deal could go through.

The Khodorkovsky affair could serve as a cautionary tale about doing big business deals in Putin's Russia, as could the Kremlin's forcing of Royal Dutch Shell to sell half their stake in a $20 billion natural gas project on Russia's Sakhalin Island to Russia's Gazprom.  But Russia is jockeying for position with Saudi Arabia as the world's top oil producer, which means that despite the risks, the rewards could be huge for ExxonMobile.

What About CNN's Role John?

There was an odd moment at Wednesday's Republican Presidential Debate (number 386 in the series, I think), moderator John King of CNN posed a question by beginning with the statement: “The American people don't often pay attention to what's going on in the world until they have to…”  Politico picked up on the comment and wrote this brief piece that included this photo illustration of the covers of different regional editions of Time magazine from two different weeks:

Time Covers USA vs. The World

The US version is clearly out-of-sync with the rest of the world, and focuses on “fluff” pieces while the global editions feature hard-news stories.  While it would seem to bolster John King's point, there is a certain chicken-and-egg quality to this story: does the US media tend to shy away from coverage of international affairs because Americans don't care that much about them, or do Americans not closely follow international affairs because the US media gives them so little coverage?

It wasn't always this way, historically, and especially in the post-World War II era, major media outlets would maintain bureaus in major cities around the globe with full-time staff dedicated to providing coverage of their particular region.  CNN, the world's first cable news network (hence the name “CNN”) made its mark by providing in-depth, intensive coverage of global events.  But times have changed, budget-cutting has meant that outlets like the Associated Press, New York Times and even CNN have drastically cut back on the number of foreign bureaus they operate.  The result has been a corresponding drop in the amount and quality of international affairs reporting in the American media.  We can infer that this has also led to Americans being less informed about the world outside their borders.

And this brings us back to John King.  He's likely right about Americans lacking knowledge about international affairs, but what about his own role in the affair?  King is one of CNN's featured personalities.  This is the same CNN that spent a solid week of doing almost wall-to-wall coverage on the death of Whitney Houston, a pop singer whose career, for all intents and purposes, ended over a decade ago.  Perhaps Mr. King, Americans wouldn't be so poorly informed if CNN had actually dedicated some of the time and coverage wasted on Houston to actual global events that matter: unrest in Syria, possible conflict with Iran, elections in Russia, take your pick, there's not a lack of stories out there, that is if you're willing to look for them. 

Russia To US: Let's Go To The Moon

According to Russian media last week, Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency Roscosmos, is proposing that the United States and European Union join forces to build human colonies on the Moon.  Popovkin's vision would include a series of outposts in lunar orbit, along with human exploration of the Moon's surface and using deposits of ice at the lunar poles as a source of water.  Russia also has two unmanned missions of their own on the drawing board, set to fly before 2020.

Popovkin's comments are surprising for two reasons; first is that NASA seemed to be unaware of his desire to team up on a lunar mission.  “We believe Popovkin may be referring to the work of the International Space Exploration Coordination Group (ISECG) and its Global Exploration Roadmap,” NASA spokesman J.D. Harrington told SPACE.com in response to an inquiry about Popovkin's suggestion.  NASA went on to explain that the ISECG was more of a framework for ideas rather than setting down plans for man's conquest of the Moon.  The other reason why Popovkin's comments are so surprising is that just a few weeks ago Popovkin was all but accusing the United States of sabotaging Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars, which ended on January 15^th with an inglorious crash into the Pacific Ocean.  According to Popovkin, the probe – which was suppose to land on the Martian moon Phobos, grab a sample of soil and return it to Earth – was vulnerable to “foreign influences”, building on speculation in some Russian media that Phobos-Grunt was blasted by a radio signal from an American radar installation either in Alaska or the Pacific (take your pick) that rendered it inoperative.  You would wonder then why Popovkin would want to team up with the country that he thinks ruined Roscosmos' most high-profile exploration mission since the end of the Soviet Union.

In other space news, another Russian scientist is out with a  bold claim of his own – that he has detected possible signs of life on Venus.  The second planet from the sun has long been ruled out of the search for life in the solar system because of surface temperatures that are hot enough to melt lead.  But now Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute at Russia's Academy of Sciences contends that he has seen evidence of what he thinks could be life by reexamining a set of 30-year old photographs from a Soviet space probe that survived the hellish conditions on the surface of Venus long enough to snap a few photographs.   Ksanfomaliti identified structures within the photographs that resembled a disc, a black flap and even a scorpion.

“Let's boldly suggest that the objects' morphological features would allow us to say that they are living," Ksanfomaliti wrote in a scientific journal.  Lacking any other proof, or evidence of life from other probes that have studied Venus, NASA analysts suggest the items are just data artifacts in the images beamed back from Venus combined with an active imagination.

More Than Just Bad Apples

By now you've probably seen, or at least heard about, the video showing a team of US Marine snipers urinating on the bodies of several Taliban militants whom they had just killed.  Predictably, the Afghan government is outraged at the incident, so too is the leadership of the Pentagon, which has already identified two of the Marines from the video, and is promising to punish the entire team.  Thursday morning on CNN, their resident military analyst, retired Gen. Spider Marks, tried to chalk the incident up to the actions of a few bad apples; it seems like this will be the official line on the matter.

Unfortunately it's not true, the video cannot simply be dismissed as an act of misplaced bravado by a few rogue soldiers.  Rather it is a symptom of the kind of psychosis that comes along with the long-term occupation of a land and its people.  The United States is ten years into its Afghan mission.  We went to Afghanistan to avenge the barbaric acts of 9/11; we were indoctrinated to think that this land hosted individuals with no regard for human life, who would happily kill innocent men, women and children to further their own twisted view of religion.  Al-Qaeda became conflated with the Taliban, who in turn, became conflated with the Afghan people.  We can run all of the feel-good stories we want about American soldiers helping to open medical clinics or schools for girls in Afghanistan, but at home we continue to promote the idea that if we don't continue to fight “them” over there, terrorist acts will return to our shores, just look at some of the rhetoric from the presidential campaign that supports this very idea.  For our soldiers on the ground, they are told of the need to constantly be on guard, that any Afghani they meet could be one of “them”.

The surprise then shouldn't be that a group of US Marines decided to dehumanize a group of enemies they had killed, the surprise should be that this sort of thing doesn't happen more often since it is the natural progression of any long-term occupation – the trend, perhaps the psychological need, to dehumanize those you are occupying, since how could you control every facet of someone else's life, down to their very right to have life at all, if you consider them a human being equal to yourself?  The history of the 20^th century offers ample evidence to support this idea.  Members of the Israeli political left and peace movements decry their nation's occupation of the Palestinian territories for this very reason, adding that Israeli soldiers' dehumanizing of the Palestinians also has a corrosive effect on Israeli society as well; one can also look at the occupations of various European nations during World War II, or Japan's brutal treatment of those in the regions of China they occupied; and, of course, there is also the entirety of Europe's Age of Colonization to consider as well.

Viewing the occupied as something less than human is a natural outgrowth of occupation as the Marine video reminds us.  It should also serve as a powerful example of why it is time for the United States to end its Afghanistan mission once and for all.

Russia's Space Paranoia

The Russian space program faced a massive and embarrassing setback at the end of 2011 when their centerpiece Phobos-Grunt mission to Mars got stuck in low Earth orbit shortly after launch, destined for a fiery re-entry into the atmosphere sometime later this month.  Now the head of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos' Vladimir Popovkin, says he knows what went wrong - “foreign forces” interfered with Phobos-Grunt, sabotaging its mission.  “I wouldn't like to accuse anyone, but today there exists powerful means to influence spacecraft, and their use can't be excluded,” Popovkin said.  His comments seem to echo an allegation made by a retired Russian general back in November, shortly after Phobos-Grunt ran into problems; he cast the blame on a high-power radar array operated by the US military in Alaska.

Popovkin told Russia's Izvestia newspaper that “some Russian [space]craft had suffered 'unexplained' malfunctions while flying over another side of the globe beyond the reach of his nation's tracking facilities.”  While meant to blame foreign powers, Popovkin's comment gets to the heart of what really seems to have doomed Phobos-Grunt (along with explaining several other recent Russian space program failures), rampant cost-cutting in the Russian space program.  During the heyday of Russian exploration during the 1960s, the Soviet Union maintained a network of ground tracking stations and specially-outfitted communication ships so that Russian space missions were in near-constant contact with Russian ground controllers.  Today that network is gone.  When something went wrong with Phobos-Grunt, Russian controllers could only attempt to talk to the probe in blocks of time just a few minutes long when it was orbiting directly over Russia; Russian controllers later borrowed the use of a few radio-telescopes around the world to better their chances of reaching Phobos-Grunt.

Today though the once mighty Russian space program is being hit by budget cuts and a loss of experience as older engineers retire, without younger ones to replace them.  The result, predictably, has been a series of mission failures during the past year.  Still, according to noted space analyst James Oberg, “the urge to shift blame seems strong.”    

The Grinch Who Stole The UN

I heard about this story while out with some friends last Friday.  It is nice to think of the United Nations as a serious place where diplomats and experts sincerely try to come up with mature solutions to the world's most dire problems.

And then there's Mark Kornblau, the spokesman for the United States' Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice.  In response to an ongoing feud between his boss and Russian UN Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, Kornblau tweeted this picture of Churkin photoshopped into an image of the Grinch Who Stole Christmas.  Glad to see that the US is sending mature boys and girls to represent our interests at the United Nations...

Rice and Churkin have recently had an increasingly testy round of exchanges over Syria and Libya.  Basically, the United States is angry with Russia over that country's opposition to increased pressure on the Assad regime in Syria over their brutal crackdown of pro-democracy demonstrators.  Russia, which has long-standing political and economic ties to Syria, is reluctant to punish the country any further. But Churkin has framed Russia's position as one of opposition to another US-led attempt at regime change in the Middle East/North Africa region, citing the NATO-led, US-backed campaign that led to the ouster of Moammar Gadhafi in Libya.  Rice responded to Churkin's latest position statement against further sanctions in Syria by saying of the Russian position “it is duplicitous, it's redundant, it's superfluous and it's a stunt.”  Churkin took a dig at Rice by saying those were the kind of big words one learns at Stanford, Rice's alma mater.

Of course a better tack for Churkin would have been to bring up Bahrain.  While Rice is making an impassioned case for intervention (politically at least) in Syria by stating: “Welcome to December. Is everybody sufficiently distracted from Syria now and the killing that is happening before our very eyes?,” just as the United States had made a similar case for action in Libya once that regime started killing its own citizens, the US position towards Bahrain was quite different.  When the small Persian Gulf state launched its own brutal crackdown against its own pro-democracy movement, which included the shooting of unarmed protesters and the arrest of doctors who tried to treat the wounded, the US was silent beyond a few bland calls for “restraint”.  The difference is that Bahrain is the home to the United States Navy's Fifth Fleet, the Bahrani royal family is closely allied with the Saudis and that the protesters were largely Shiite Muslims (like their large neighbor to the east, Iran).  Of course, if the United States is going to be the passionate supporter of human rights around the globe, then we should also call out our allies for their transgressions – a good point for Churkin to make.

Getting back to the Grinch thing.  Not only was it stupid, it was childish.  Given the beating the United States' image took at the UN during the term of Dubya Bush-era Ambassador John Bolton, who had all of the grace and diplomacy of a pit bull, there is a real need for the representatives of the United States now to appear mature and professional, Mark Kornblau has shown he is neither of these things.  Firing Kornblau would be a good step in the process of rebuilding the United States' stature as a glopbal leader at the UN.   

Durban FTW?

The latest round of negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (or UNFCCC) wrapped up over the weekend.  Actually the talks, meant to strike an agreement on a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocols that limit global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, were suppose to end on Friday, but went on for an additional day and a half to allow delegates to hammer out a final agreement.

This is being spun in a lot of the media coverage of the talks as a win for the environment, since for the first time all of the 195 nations in attendance agreed in principle to be bound by legally-binding caps on future greenhouse gas emissions.  But you need to read past the headlines on what was actually agreed upon for the full story: first a three-year band-aid was slapped on Kyoto, extending the provisions of the soon-to-expire treaty out to 2015; then the UNFCCC parties agreed to “discuss” a legally-binding pact that would impose emission caps on major GHG emitters that would kick in by 2020.  String that all together and you get an agreement with more wiggle room than a six-year old's front tooth.

The parties in the UNFCCC were to have spent the past two years negotiating a replacement for the Kyoto Protocols to go into effect in 2013, once Kyoto expires.  But the negotiating sessions – Copenhagen, Mexico and now Durban – have all been exercises in delaying action until the next round of discussions.  There's no reason to think this pattern is now going to change during the next three years of “discussions”, especially since the core disagreements remain: the big polluters of the developing world, China and India, argue that it is not fair that they be held to the same emissions standards as the developed world, while the developed world's top emitter, the United States, ably assisted by our less polluting, but more vocal sidekick, Canada (which just pulled out of Kyoto entirely), argue that any future agreement is meaningless unless it binds all top emitters – be they developed or developing – to the same standard.  It's hard to see either side moving from their position during the next three years, not to mention that even if President Obama, in a second-term effort at legacy-building, were to sign onto a binding agreement, it is unlikely Congress would ratify it since some Congressmen view Global Warming as something akin to voodoo and/or a Commie plot to enslave America.  Durban also established a $100 billion fund to help developing nations to offset the costs of climate change (another reason why it is viewed as a “win”), though one country who feels that they may be entitled to payment from the fund is mega-wealthy Saudi Arabia, who argue they should be compensated for possiblefuture reductions in crude oil sales as the world moves on to greener sources of energy.

Frankly, I have a hard time then viewing Durban as anything more than another kick of the proverbial can down the road.  As a friend said, when it comes to the topic of climate change, there are no adults in the room to make the hard choices necessary to actually accomplish something.  Countries will talk about the need to mitigate climate change, but will stop short of any action that could impact the quality of life at home (and thus reduce their leaders chances of staying in power).  And until the day comes that nations/leaders can act in the global interest rather than their own self-serving ones, we'll see more Durbans and more empty promises of change “sometime” down the road.

Real Housewives of the Kremlin

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has long been the United States' official journalistic voice to the world, and a source of quality reporting, which makes the appearance of this rather tabloid-y (but still interesting) story about Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rather interesting.  In it, journalist and German intelligence expert,  Erich Schmidt-Eenboom makes the claim that during Putin's time as a KGB agent in East Germany, a West German counter-agent was able to penetrate his inner circle and become a close confidant to Putin's wife Lyudmila, and that's where the juicy details come in.  According to the report, Lyudmila Putina confided to the agent, identified as a woman called “Lenochka”, that Putin was a womanizer who regularly beat her.  Lenochka herself was later removed from the assignment after falling in love with the KGB colonel who ran Putin's unit.

It is a description of the Putins relationship at odds at least with the carefully-crafted public image of the couple.  Shortly after Putin quickly rose from obscurity to become President Boris Yeltsin's handpicked successor, a biography of personal anecdotes from Putin's early years called First Person was published; one of the stories it contained was how in the early days of his marriage Putin nursed Lyudmila back to health after she was badly injured in a car accident.  However, as RFE/RL notes, Putin has otherwise been fiercely protective of his private life, with his daughters never appearing in public or the press and, as RFE/RL wryly notes, public appearances with Lyudmila “have become as rare as Siberian yeti sightings.”  Now it is one thing to keep his daughters out of the public eye, but politicians wives are expected to pubicly support their husbands, which makes Lyudmila's absence all the more unusual, fueling rumors that the couple had in fact divorced or that Putin was keeping a girlfriend on the side, possibly (according to Russia's version of gossip columnists) former Olympic gold medalist, gymnast and current member of parliament, Alina Kabayeva.

Beyond the sleazy salaciousness of the Putin story, I also find it interesting that RFE/RL chose to run such a gossipy piece in the first place.  You have to wonder if this is part of a subtle media campaign to undermine the public image of the once and future President of Russia, since the column has appeared shortly after Putin announced that he, rather than current President Dmitry Medvedev, would be representing the United Russia party in next year's presidential election.  And then there is the sinking popularity of United Russia itself.  While still the dominant party in Russian politics, United Russia's own popularity is waning.  In a recent poll, only 51% of Russians said they would support United Russia, a drop of 9% from the previous poll.  In an effort to boost their profile ahead of parliamentary elections in December, United Russia released an edgy TV ad designed to appeal to young voters: in it a young woman exchanges glances with a young man before stepping into the voting booth, her hand then shoots out from behind the voting booth curtain, grabbing him and dragging him inside.  After a few seconds, the two disheveled voters emerge from the booth with the tagline “Let's Do It Together” then appearing on screen (y'know, vote).  The racy ad is being roundly criticized by opposition politicians who note that voting is something one is suppose to do alone.   

Now Here's A Reason To Oppose The Keystone XL

The Keystone XL pipeline project, which would bring bitumen down from Alberta's Oil Sands region to refineries along the United States' Gulf Coast, has been in the news a lot lately.  Opponents are trying to block approval of the US portion of the pipeline since they argue that Oil Sands crude production is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, destructive to the arboreal forests in Alberta and that the pipeline puts the American heartland and the massive Ogallala Aquifer at-risk since bitumen is highly corrosive, making pipeline leaks more likely, and difficult to clean when it spills.  Late Thursday they may have won a partial victory as the Obama Administration requested an additional review on the potential impacts of the pipeline which will likely punt any final yea or nay decision out past the 2012 presidential elections.  Of course a delay is not a denial and it's quite likely the pipeline could get the green light late next year or early in 2013, especially if a Republican wins next year's presidential elections, so the protests against the pipeline continue.

In an earlier post, I was critical of the protesters, not so much because I whole-heartedly support the pipeline idea, but because I find a lot of their rationale incredibly parochial – if we Americans refuse to build the Keystone XL, those silly Canadians will stop ruining their environment.  Of course Oil Sands production began before the Keystone XL project was even thought up and Canadians have a couple of Plan B's in mind in case Keystone XL is blocked.  One is to build pipelines west to the Pacific, where the bitumen can be shipped off to always energy-hungry China; the other is to build “upgraders”, a kind of refinery that converts heavy, lower-value into light, valuable synthetic crude oil (SCO) that can be processed like natural crude oil and which fetches a premium on the open market. In fact, some Canadians are wondering why they're even shipping out the lower-cost bitumen and not the higher-value SCO in the first place.

In a column in The Guardian, Sen. Bernie Sanders hits on a much better reason to oppose the Keystone XL – namely that little, if any, of the Oil Sands bitumen will actually be used in the United States.  The Oil Sands are being touted as a hedge against more unreliable sources of imported oil (i.e. the OPEC nations).  But internal documents from Valero, the refining company most invested in seeing Keystone XL completed, show that the company plans to convert the Alberta bitumen into gasolene and diesel fuel that they will then ship out to Latin America and Europe.  The reason is that their refinery in Port Arthur, TX is in a special enterprise zone where no export taxes are charged, so shipping the gas/diesel abroad is more profitable than selling it in the US, plus Europe has a much larger market for diesel than does the United States.

That argument knocks the legs out from the Oil Sands argument in the US – namely that they will provide America with a source of imported oil from a stable and trusted ally.  It also makes opposition to the pipeline a lot more palatable - why should the United States put its environment at-risk so a private company can make profits selling products from our “domestic” oil abroad – than some fantasy that if we “tell” the Canadians to stop exploiting the Oil Sands they actually will.

Update: According to Toronto’s Globe and Mail, Canadians are pissed about the delay decision.

Today's Editorial Cartoon

Pretty funny editorial cartoon today by way of Facebook:

Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan

Newly-minted top-tier Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain actually injected foreign policy into the seemingly-endless Republican nomination battle this past weekend; of course the way he chose to do it was pretty sad indeed.

When asked about so-called “gotcha” questions put to presidential candidates – those questions that the candidate really shouldn't be expected to know the answer to, yet by not knowing they look unprepared for the job – Cain said, basically, that in running for president he doesn't really need to know who the leader of Uzbekistan is; his reply referencing a question posed to George W. Bush that started the whole “gotcha” campaign question phenomenon. Now in a broad sense, I think Cain has a point. There are 193 member-nations in the UN, I don't think it is right to expect someone running for the US presidency to know the leaders of them all, though I would expect a candidate to know, in broad terms at least, what kind of relationship the US has with the country in question and the larger regional issues surrounding it. Unfortunately Cain didn't make that simple point, rather he said it didn't matter if he knew who was the president of “Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan”. Way to make a valid point while sounding like a jackass there Herman...

I suppose it would come as a surprise for Mr. Cain to learn that Uzbekistan is an vital ally in our War on Terror operations in Afghanistan: the Uzbeks operate a link in the Northern Supply Route that ships material into Afghanistan, so if the Uzbeks were to decide to drop out of the Route, we'd have a really, really hard time keeping our 100,000 troops in-country clothed and fed – you would kind of think that makes Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan at least worth a little of his attention (the president, by the way, is Islam Karimov).

And Cain's pithy answer illustrates at least a partial answer to that oft-asked US foreign policy question: “why do 'they' hate us?” In part, it is because of the stunningly arrogant view some (or many) Americans have towards the wider world; that not much of it really matters, so why should we care how others feel? We Americans think nothing of chest-thumping exhibitions of patriotism, yet we never seem to think that other people from other countries might be just as proud of their homelands as we are of ours; even folks from Uzbeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan. On a personal note, a friend of mine was recently traveling to Central Asia and told me she'd be traveling on Uzbekistan Airways; the image that immediately popped into my head was of Borat and a biplane. But she assured me Uzbekistan Airways was a modern operation, and a quick check on Wikipedia showed that indeed it is – their fleet is made up almost entirely of Boeings and Airbuses, most of which are newer than those aircraft flown by domestic US airlines. I felt appropriately chastised.

But I'm also not running for president. If the current crop of Republican candidates, Mr. Cain included, are truly the best our nation has to offer for the most-important job in the land, maybe we shouldn't feel so proud.

R.I.P, Al Davis

Al Davis, the iconic leader of the NFL's resident bad boys, the Oakland (nee LA, nee Oakland) Raiders passed away this weekend. That reminded me of my own memorable brush with Al a few years ago, a story my friend Dan said was too good not to share, so here it is:

I was taking a Southwest Airlines flight from LA to Portland, via Oakland. Southwest's policy at the time was that there were no assigned seats on their flights; instead you got a number at check in, boarded the plane in order and took any available seat, all of which I dutifully did when my number was called. I took an aisle seat in a three-seat row. I noticed that the older man sitting at the window was kitted out, head-to-toe in Raiders gear, and thought to myself “Wow, that looks like Al Davis.” I decided that it couldn't really be Al since a) I didn't think he'd so blantantly advertise by dressing like an advert from a Raiders gear catalog and b) why would Al Davis fly Southwest? So I settled into the little self-imposed cocoon I go into when I fly and got ready to endure the next few hours of travel to Portland.

A few moments later a boarding passenger noticed my aisle-mate and said “its great to meet you Mr. Davis,” they shook hands. A second passenger soon did the same. I noticed Al glance at me like he was expecting me to also pay my respects. I looked at my magazine instead, though I did notice that along with all the Raiders catalog gear, he was also wearing a huge bracelet with “AL” spelled out in diamonds on an onyx background – the Raiders colors, of course. As the plane filled a third, fourth and fifth person all paid their respects to Mr. Davis, who kept glancing at me, expecting me to do the same. By this time, I was feeling pretty self-conscious; I also would have felt like a real tool saying “Oh hi Mr. Davis” at this point, so I kept silent instead.

During the flight a few more people stopped by to say hello, talking to their icon over this strangely mute guy on the aisle who had the honor of sitting one seat away from Mr. Davis Himself (Al had announced earlier to one boarding passenger that he had in fact bought two seats for the flight so he could have the one directly next to him empty). When we landed in Oakland, Al got up to leave but not before our eyes locked and he gave me this long look that said, YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW WHO I AM?!?

And thus was my brush with the man, the legend, Al Davis, in the world of football, he will be missed.