Month: October 2005

Running on Fumes

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Bill Rice at Dawn’s Early Light recently considered Sino-Japanese energy geopolitics. While the disputes over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea are well-known, less well-known but, as Bill points out, equally contentious, are the disputes over gas fields in the East China Sea:

What is at stake is over 200 billion cubic meters of natural gas reserves. China already has developed stations at Chunxiao (Shirakaba), Duanqiao (Kusunoki) and Tianwaitian (Kashi) that are starting this month to produce natural gas. Japan had floated a proposal to jointly develop the sites, but only after China agreeing to stop drilling and submit to Japan its internal surveys of where the natural gas is coming from (See the Asia Times Online file for an in depth analysis).

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Greed Didn’t Work for Napoleon

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A&L links to Frederick R. Kagan’s “Power and Persuasion” in the Wilson Quarterly. Like most important balances (of tenderness, discipline & love in child raising or of customers, employees & profit in business), the one between the military, diplomacy & a certain humility in victory is obvious; nonetheless, finding the right proportions and being sure enough of those proportions – courageous enough – to persist is difficult. May we hope Bush is stubborn where it counts. If it achieves this balance, America’s non-imperial imperialism will not be an oxymoron but a paradox. Keegan argues:

For the United States, there is no path that will spare it criticism and even outright opposition, but its broad goals of spreading freedom and political reform are ones that a great many people in the Muslim world and beyond will be able to accept. The challenge is not only to continue balancing power and persuasion but also simply to continue—to persist in the face of adversity and despite arguments that the very exercise of power ensures that the United States will never persuade and never prevail.

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Smokin’ Hot

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I’ve highlighted what can go wrong with an investment. Here’s an example of what can go right: Novavax (NVAX), top gainer and most active for trading on Nasdaq today, up 33% on 51 million shares.

Novavax is an avian flu play. They have a potentially proprietary way of mass producing flu vaccines. I didn’t quite believe it, but vaccines are still made the same way as a century ago: “where the product must be incubated over months at a time using century-old chicken egg-based technology.” Novavax’s Virus-Like Particle (VLP)technology can cut that time down significantly.

If you’re into watching the market, the trading in NVAX is a sight to see. NVAX has 43.5 million shares outstanding. So today’s 51 million shares volume says a lot. What caused the jump? You name it: the avian flu scare in Europe, short squeeze, momentum traders, CNBC focus, shortage of flu vaccines last season from production problems, to name a few.

I smell a frenzy. Smokin’ hot.

Note: NVAX is a highly volatile small cap stock. Be careful. Do not construe any of the above as investment advice.

Religious Tolerance

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One of the persistent comparisons between the West and the Muslim world has been the place of religious tolerance. We in the West have become so accustomed to religious pluralism that a sizable minority feels safe in denigrating the religious background of the West by taking it out of context, while defending those who hijack yet another religion by insisting that the majority of believers of that other religion don’t share the views of those extremists. Goose and gander deserve different sauces. Yet, we tolerate these, and others less self-contradicted, because we have developed a respect for the freedom of conscience, without which we would still be experiencing the internecine brawls that rocked our ancestral societies in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

Observers of the Islamic world have noted the societal trajectories there. While the outlying societies, such as Indonesia and Malaysia, have been largely able to co-exist with other religions (although these relationships have been strained in the past century), the core of the Muslim world, the Arabian peninsula, has been home to an intolerant fundamentalism which denies the validity not only of other faiths, but also militates against coreligionists who happen to follow a different interpretation. The Sunni-Shia divide, although subtle in practice, has been politically exploited over the centuries.

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Annan’s Computer Tells All

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Taking a break from test-writing, I turn on C-span and hear Seymour Hersch say we will never know who killed Rafik Hariri. But I remembered the report named names. Next break, I turn to Instapundit who links this:

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.

(Ah – a certain order and clarity – for these are the President’s brother, brother-in-law & the Commander of Syrian intelligence) Of course, this has been known since Thursday and C-span taped Hersch before. But Hersch would have seemed more prescient if Annan’s editing had stood. (“The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.”) Perhaps just such moments make the UN more determined to control the net: It’s chaos when people know too much, isn’t it?