Quotulatiousness

September 23, 2009

Watch the collector value of M1 rifles drop now

Filed under: Asia, History, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

The South Korean government is planning to sell off its large holdings of M-1 rifles and carbines, according to this BBC News report:

South Korea has come up with a novel way to boost its defence budget — by selling a vast stockpile of old Korean-war rifles to collectors in the US.

The guns were originally sent to Korea as military aid, and some were also used during the war in Vietnam.

For more than five decades, they have been kept mothballed in warehouses.

Most of those on offer are M1 rifles — a weapon once described by US General George S Patton as “the greatest battle-implement ever devised”.

I recall when the Canadian Forces retired the FN C1 rifle . . . the government freaked at the thought of thousands of “assault rifles” being sold to civilians, so they changed the regulations to move the FN into a more restricted category (which most casual gun owners didn’t qualify for).

September 18, 2009

US tariff on Chinese tires “a colossal blunder”

Filed under: China, Economics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:14

I don’t read The Economist regularly these days, having given up my 20-year subscription about five years back. Their steady drift away from free markets towards statist models made the publication less and less interesting (and much more live most other financial publications). This article, however, at least covers the situation in an even-handed way:

You can be fairly sure that when a government slips an announcement out at nine o’clock on a Friday night, it is not proud of what it is doing. That is one of the only things that makes sense about Barack Obama’s decision to break a commitment he, along with other G20 leaders, reaffirmed last April: to avoid protectionist measures at a time of great economic peril. In every other way the president’s decision to slap a 35% tariff on imported Chinese tyres looks like a colossal blunder, confirming his critics’ worst fears about the president’s inability to stand up to his party’s special interests and stick to the centre ground he promised to occupy in office.

This newspaper endorsed Mr Obama at last year’s election in part because he had surrounded himself with enough intelligent centrists. We also said that the eventual success of his presidency would be based on two things: resuscitating the world economy; and bringing the new emerging powers into the Western order. He has now hurt both objectives.

Several sources mentioned that yesterday’s announcement about cancelling the ABM systems that were to be installed in Poland and the Czech Republic was an attempt to cozy up to Russia. This move can only be interpreted as an attempt to look tough against the Chinese — which would just be dumb — or (even more disturbingly) solid proof that Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue on international trade.

September 16, 2009

An appreciation of the life and work of Norman Borlaug

Filed under: Environment, India, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

September 3, 2009

Was Fukuyama correct after all?

Filed under: China, Economics, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 18:28

Scott Sumner has an interesting post up about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thoughts of the late 1980s:

So the obvious choice for most successful prediction is Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 claim that “history was ending,” that the great ideological battle between democratic capitalism and other isms was essentially over, and that henceforth the world would become gradually more democratic, peaceful, and market-oriented.

[. . .]

I get very annoyed when I see people say “the Chinese case proves that economic development doesn’t inevitably lead to political liberalization.” There are so many problems with this sort of statement that one hardly knows were to begin. China has seen incredible political liberalization since 1978, indeed even some progress since 1998. But what about western-style democracy? To answer that question, consider the list above. I would argue that China most resembles Thailand. Both have similar per capita GDPs, both have a huge split between the urban elite and the rural poor. My hunch is that consciously or subconsciously, the urban residents of China are not thrilled by the idea of a pure democracy that would effectively turn the country over to the rural poor. But wait a few decades, when China goes from being 60%-70% rural, to 60%-70% urban, and from mostly poor to mostly middle-income, and from mostly undereducated to mostly educated. Then let’s see how Fukuyama’s thesis holds up.

History is still ending. Or maybe I should say “his story” is ending, the story of war, revolution and voyages of discovery. The Illiad and the Odyssey. And “her story” is beginning. A world focused on improving education, health care, cuisine, leisure time, the arts, communication, animal rights, the environment, etc.

August 6, 2009

China soon to be capable of settling the “Taiwan question”?

Filed under: China, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

According to a recent report from RAND Corporation, unlike the last time they ran the simulation (in 2000), their current projections have the Chinese able to win an air battle over Taiwan:

In 2000, the influential think thank RAND Corporation crunched some numbers regarding a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan, and concluded that “any near-term Chinese attempt to invade Taiwan would likely be a very bloody affair with a significant probability of failure” — especially if the U.S. raced to the island nation’s defense. But nine years later, a new, much-updated edition of the RAND study found that China’s improved air and missile forces “represent clear and impending dangers to the defense of Taiwan,” whether or not the U.S. is involved.

“A credible case can be made that the air war for Taiwan could essentially be over before much of the Blue [American and allied] air force has even fired a shot,” the monograph notes.

I’m not sure if this comment was intended to forestall the cancellation of the last part of the F-22 order, or if it’s a marker for a future “We told you so” debate:

It’s a potentially controversial assertion — and one that might have fueled the (now-resolved) debate over whether the U.S. Air Force should buy more F-22s. RAND found that F-22s flying from the relative safety of Guam could be surprisingly effective in blunting a Chinese air assault.

Remember that the air battle would only be part of the military equation . . . fighters and bombers still can’t overcome ground forces by themselves. A seaborne invasion would still be necessary, and the PLAN does not (yet) have sufficient lift tonnage to ensure a chance of success. Amphibious attacks are the hardest to accomplish (despite the Allied string of successes from 1942 to 1951), and always depend on both command of the air and command of the sea. China could, according to RAND’s latest study, win the air battle but still does not have the necessary preponderance of force to win control of the sea.

But the century is yet young . . .

H/T to Jon for the link.

July 31, 2009

Cue up the ominous music . . .

Filed under: Asia, Science — Tags: — Nicholas @ 12:58

. . . ’cause it’s the return of Krakatoa:

Krakatoa_July2009(Detail of image from the article)

With an explosive force 13,000 times the power of the atomic bomb that annihilated Hiroshima, the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa killed more than 36,000 people and radically altered global weather and temperatures for years afterwards.

The eruption was so violent and catastrophic that no active volcano in modern times has come close to rivalling it, not even the spectacular eruption of Mount St Helens in the U.S. in 1980. Now, almost a century-and-a-half on, are we about to experience the horrors of Krakatoa once again?

‘Volcanic prediction is getting better,’ says Professor Jon Davidson, chair of Earth Science at Durham University and a volcanologist who has studied Krakatoa first-hand. ‘But we are never going to be able to fully predict big and unusual eruptions, precisely because they are unusual.’

Yet there is little doubt that if Krakatoa were to erupt again with such force and fury, the impact would be far more devastating than that which was experienced in the 19th century.

H/T to Nick Packwood.

July 21, 2009

iPhone prototype loss leads to suicide?

Filed under: China, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 16:53

A very disturbing tale from The Register:

A Chinese engineer committed suicide after he was allegedly roughed-up by company security services when one of the iPhone 4G prototypes entrusted into his care went missing.

Twenty-five-year-old Sun Danyong, a recent engineering graduate, was employed by Foxconn, manufacturer of Apple’s iPhone and iPods. According to reports from China Radio International (Google translation), VentureBeat, and others, Sun leapt to his death from the 12th floor of his apartment building on July 16th, a few days after the iPhone 4G prototype disappeared.

The reports indicate that on July 9th, Sun received 16 of the prototypes, but a few days later, he could account for only 15 of them. After searching the factory, he reported the missing iPhone to his superiors on Monday, July 13th.

Two days later, his apartment was allegedly searched by Foxconn security who, according to CRI and others, beat Sun during their investigation.

Although the beating is unproven, what happened at 3:00 am on Thursday the 16th is not in dispute: Security cameras in Sun’s apartment building taped him leaping from an open window.

« Newer Posts

Powered by WordPress