I want to thank Brendan of I Hate Linux for notifying me that the Senate has voted to delay the digital television conversion.

This is good news. The Republican Party’s opposition to the roll-over is not junk a spit in the eye to one of the most loyal Republican constiuencies — rural America — but also an example of the corrupt, aristocracy of pull that defines the modern Republican party.

AT&T released a letter Monday night endorsing a three-month delay as a special, one-time event designed to aid consumers who could lose over-the-air TV service when analog signals are shut off at midnight on Feb. 17.

“From AT&T’s perspective, a smooth transition from analog broadcast transmission to digital is in the public interest and will ultimately inure to the benefit of all Americans,” AT&T senior executive vice president James Cicconi said in letter to House and Senate Commerce Committee leaders.

While AT&T is willing to accommodate the wishes of the new Obama government, Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg is concerned that any delay would do more harm than good and should be rejected.

The Republican Party has a nasty habit of leading the push to criminalize forms of entertainment. The War on Drugs under Regagan, John Ashcroft’s federal investigation of state prostitution charges in Louisiana, and now the GOP’s bizarre War on Analog (using the police power of the federal government to prohibit rural and low-income Americans from receiving the 5:00 news on their old equipment) are exampels of why those Americans who just want to be “left alone” should be deeply suspicious of the Republican Party.

Give James Fallows thanks — or blame — for that pun.

Lady of tdaxp and I celebrated Chinese New Year at HyVee, eating a delicious buffet (complete with “Beijing chicken”) after a misadventurous attempt to eat elsewhere.

If you are in the mood for watching some English-language Chinese Communist propaganda, check out The Children of Huang Shi. We did — to our regret. It’s not an awful movie, but as all the tropes one would expect

• The Communists are romantic, adventurous daring, wise, kind, and patriotic
• The KMT means well, but it’s bumbling and self-serving
• The landlords are thoughtlessly cruel
• The peasants are pure, but in need of strong leadership

etc. etc. etc.

Too bad, as the Chinese adventures of George Hogg are rather unusual.

Granted, it’s not a spy plane, but it’s not April 2001, either

Beijing – China’s central bank rejected allegations by a senior US official that China is manipulating the exchange rates of its currency, state-run media reported Sunday.

   Su Ning, vice governor of the People’s Bank of China, said the allegation could sidetrack efforts to track the real cause of the financial crisis, Xinhua news agency reported.

   ’Also, we should avoid any excuse that might lead to the revitalization of trade protectionism. Because it will do no good to the fight against the crisis, nor will it help the healthy and stable development of the global economy,’ Su said.

US Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner made the charge to the Senate Finance Committee last week. ‘President Obama, backed by the conclusions of a broad range of economists, believes that China is manipulating its currency,’ he wrote, in documents released Thursday.

   Yi Xianrong, a researcher with the financial research center of the CASS, told Xinhua on Friday if the US labeled China a ‘currency manipulator’, it would hurt the concerted action of fighting the global financial crisis.

via China rejects US charges of currency manipulation .

The Economist has joined the army of critics noting that such saber-rattling is insane.  It’s certainly a dangerously unilateral action designed to alienate allies while pandering to the know-nothing wings of Obama’s base.

Now, I realize that Obama promised this sort of thing:

I was just hoping that Obama knew better than to follow-through with it.

Update: James Fallows, deeply in the tank when it comes to Obama elsewhere, adds to the criticism.

As part of the roundtable on Clausewitz’s On War, Joseph Fouche makes this point regarding Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan:

One of Taleb’s main themes is the tendancy for specialists in any field to develop physics envy and attempt to reduce the horrifically complex phenomena that they are studying to a deterministic and mechanistic theory complete with complex equations. This doesn’t lead to a higher level of truth and accuracy. It leads to a higher level of systematic self-deception and delusion. It creates financial weapons of mass destruction such as an MBA armed with a spreadsheet and the belief that manipulating rows and columns bestows the ability to prophesy. Vain is the life of man.

Joseph’s mention of ‘physics envy’ is a common put-down against quantitative research by those who enjoy qualitative research. But there is another, better, way of framing the debate: exploratory research and confirmatory research.

Confirmatory research includes the tools that most researchers think of as “quatitative,” such as analysis of variance (ANOVA), multiple regression, chi-square tests, and so on. Confirmatory research is also what we might call Popperian science, after the famous philosopher of science Karl Popper. In confirmatory research, we begin by having a research question, we translate it into null and alternate hypothesis, we device our experimentals, and attempt to reject or fail to reject our null hypothesis, as the case may be. Confirmatory research can be thought of as the process of trying to infer the parameters of a population from the statistics of a sample.

Exploratory research, on the other hand, is an attempt to understand the world so that a sensible research question can be asked in the first place. Some exploratory techniques are also quantitative. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and exploratory Principle Components Analysis, for instance, are exploratory statistical techniques without any null hypotheses that allow researchers to examine the various rotations of the hidden factor structure in a data set. Other exploratory techniques may be called theoretical research. In this approach, a researcher goes through large body of research to tease out hidden themes and discover gaps in existing research. Lastly, the sort of qualitative research implied by the initial questions to this problem are exploratory qualitative research. The focus is on understanding a process, rather than estimating the parameers of a population from the statistics of a sample.

While not all quantitative resarch is confirmatory, all qualitative research is exploratory. Hence the intended gist of the questions in this problem. The difference between exploratory research and confirmatory research is that the former attempts to understand a process, while the latter seeks to estimate the parameters of a population from the statistics of a sample. The first of these is always true of qualitative research. The last of these is sometimes true of qualitative research. To phrase it more simply: confirmatory reseach (that is,some of quantitative research) is driven by theory, or should be; exploratory research (that is, all qualitative research, and the rest of quantitative research) drives theory.

Courtesy of an email from Catholicgauze: It’s a good day for Catholics all over the world, as Pope Benedict XVI has lifted the excommunication of several bishops in the Priestly Society of Saint Pius X… a group of catholics that until recently was schismatic.

Some breaking news on the even, from Damian Thompson:

• Bishop Fellay salutes ‘benevolent and courageous’ Pope Benedict
• Pope Benedict is taking a huge risk in lifting the SSPX excommunications
• Pope lifts excommunication on SSPX Bishops

Other schismatic churches, not yet reunited, include the Chinese Patriot Catholic Association (an open letter to congregates of which is on the Vatican web site) and the Church of England.

Courtesty of Tom, this brilliant piece by Henry Kissenger urging a close working relationshipw with China, a country (like the United States) which is in the functioning Core of the world economy.

From 'Threats in the Age of Obama'

From the article:

The Sino-American relationship needs to be taken to a new level. The current crisis can be overcome only by developing a sense of common purpose. Such issues as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, energy and the environment demand strengthened political ties between China and the United States.

This generation of leaders has the opportunity to shape trans-Pacific relations into a design for a common destiny, much as was done with trans-Atlantic relations in the immediate postwar period – except that the challenges now are more political and economic than military.

Such a vision must embrace as well such countries as Japan, Korea, India, Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand, whether as part of trans-Pacific structures or, in regional arrangements, dealing with special subjects as energy, proliferation and the environment.

The complexity of the emerging world requires from America a more historical approach than the insistence that every problem has a final solution expressible in programs with specific time limits not infrequently geared to our political process.

Interesting, while “core” countries like India, Japan, and Australia are mentioned in Kissenger’s piece, “Gap” countries North Korea, Russia, and Pakistan are excluded. (Indeed, this exclusion seems purposeful, as Kissenger simply said ‘Korea’ — rhetorically ignoring the Pyongyang regime out of existence.)

Related: Russia’s gap-style competition with other countries in Central Asia. Taiwan’s core-style cooperation with China against piracy.

In celebration of Mike Tanji’s new edited volume, Threats in the Age of Obama (out very soon), I wanted to share the cover art:

My chapter in the volume deals with 5GW, which is also the theme of an upcoming Nimble edition on 5GW. In celebration both of the chapter and the books, I share two amazing 5GW-themed pieces from Joseph Fouche: “Is 5GW Necessary for a Functioning Republic?” and “Neglected Strategists.”

I don’t agree with everything in this page by the Brookings Institution, but it makes the point that Russia was so disconnected from the world’s political and economic systems (that is, so deep in the gap), that it’s invasion of Georgia made sense.

Russia is a disconnected state that falls in the gaps of the world’s economy, similar to Venezuela, Iran, or Angola.

Reversing the Decline: An Agenda for U.S.-Russian Relations in 2009 – Brookings Institution
Building areas of cooperation not only can advance specific U.S. goals, it can reduce frictions on other issues. Further, the more there is to the bilateral relationship, the greater the interest it will hold for Russia, and the greater the leverage Washington will have with Moscow. The thin state of U.S.-Russian relations in August gave the Kremlin little reason for pause before answering the Georgian military incursion into South Ossetia with a large and disproportionate response. Washington should strive to build a relationship so that, should a similar crisis arise in the future, Russian concern about damaging relations with the United States would exercise a restraining influence.

Where I part company with Brookings is in the solution. Brookings seeks to build a liberal internationalist framework with Russia, in the same way that we created international institutions to help keep the peace in Europe. Unfortunately, this institutional or bureaucratic route to peace only works with countries that are already connected into the world economy, anyway.

You can add all the NATO-Russia, NATO-Iran, or NATO-Venezuela cooperation councils you want: without the harder structural and economic adjustments that help integrate markets, it’s all just words.

The call for chapters came out two weeks ago, and the provisional contributors list came out last week. So far, 13 contributors (including myself) have offered to contribute a chapter to an edited volume, tentatively titled 5GW: The Fifth Generation of War?. I want to again thank those who have expressed an interest:

• Aherring, of Red Herrings
• David Axe, of War is Boring
• Adam Elkus, of Rethinking Security
• Joseph Fouche, of The Committee of Public Safety
• Brent Grace, of Fear and Loathing in the Blogosphere
• Lexington Green, of Chicago Boyz
• Jay, of Soob
• Samuel Liles, of Selil
• Purpleslog, of Purpleslog
• Mark Safranski, of Zenpundit
• Seerov, commentator at this blog and elsewhere, and
• Francis Younghusband, of Coming Anarchy

This is a call for all authors interested in contributing to submit a tentative title for their chapter in the book. This title may change. In order to keep this project on track, however, I am requesting that all contributors submit a short-chapter to guide their thoughts and to allow the release of a tentativle table of contents. Please leave your tentative titles as a comment to this post, or email them to dan@tdaxp.com.

As editor, I will go first. My chapter in the volume will be titled “5GW: The Fifth Gradient of War.”