News Networking : From Physics to Geopolitics.
Being informed about the World is often made difficult for most people by the disparities found in the news. How are oil prices and politics related to advances in science and religion for instance? So when on some days information abounds, one picks up snippets to be soon forgotten and is no closer to a global view or an understanding. Today though, October 8th 2013 allows us to mate, to tie news items together. The matter is rich and the connexions numerous. It is time to play connect the dots.
Islamists all over the map :
http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/suspected-jihadists-attack-bridges-mali-20503367
There was an attack in Northern Mali that targeted bridges. Just as most folks where ready to forget the place as it recently held presidential elections and the war seemed to be a thing of the past. What does it tell us? It tells us that the French presence is not down to the levels that were considered possible until recently. 3 200 French soldiers are still active in Mali whereas the number was expected to drop to a 1 000 strong semi-permanent force by now. The first reason why this has not happened is because the MINUSMA force is taking a long time to deploy and the second is linked to the recent successes of the Russian-led agreement on Syria itself a UN related matter?! How is that for strange links? Well, the UN as we have often seen is an excellent post-crisis tool. That is to mean that it rarely allows for confronting situations and generally deploys to secure the aftermaths of wars or massacres! In Mali, the reactiveness was French as we all remember and the long-term is UN driven. By the same token, the absence of consensus in the Security Council on Syria has now produced the on-going effort of the chemical weapons disarming team. The good news of this apparently working on par with the best of expectations means that the civil war around Damascus will be stabilizing. Yes, US Secretary of State John Kerry managed to congratulate Bachar al-Assad on the speed and honesty ( so far ) of his part in the dismantlement of his WMD arsenal. Which means that the planned Franco-American strikes are avoided ( at least for now ) and that the regime will endure? Let us consider the consequences of that. The rebellion is at a standstill. The fight goes on but little is likely to change for a few weeks. The Gulf states that finance some of the rebels, each their own kind, are a bit disappointed. Iran is now busy with its developing international relations and likely welcomes the respite from supporting Assad. The US and France can, gladly I surmise, turn their attention back to their internal economic woes. Another place that can take that attitude is Tunisia. As the Ennahda party recognized problems such as recent murders of opposition figures and is agreeing to a transition, http://www.aawsat.net/2013/10/article55318492 some of the most extreme Islamists are in a bind. They have sent lots of “soldiers” to Syria and according to some sources even prostitutes for the djihadists. But if that war calms down and the authorities of Tunis don’t want them around to endanger a return to a peaceful society at home, it means rising unemployment for them! Well, the problem was solved by sending some to Mali where Tunisian fighters have been reported?
Since we also heard of raids by American troops in Libya and Somalia, we might go on with these. The one in Libya to capture a terrorist succeeded & was decried by the Libyan pseudo-government? The one in Somalia to capture an al-Shabaab leader missed & was welcomed by the Somalian government? Do you see my point? Same menace, same conditions ( neither govt is in charge of its land ), different results, different consequences?
By a combination of factors, the first of which is the internal feud that splits the Muslim world in factions, not only is the Islamic threat transient but the response to it also has to be with no guaranteed measure of efficiency. From what we have just seen, we can safely say that neither diplomatic gains nor military ones insure positive or definitive results, that similar causes bring about different results and that the identity of the principal actors does not really matter? The instability caused by the deep historic religious divisions in the Muslim Faith is a gift to the shape-shifting integrist menace allowing it to use the Islamic nations in a great communicating vessels game. Nowhere is that has evident than in Pakistan which is why I have so often defended that Nation against the simplistic views of some political simpletons in the West. Pakistan has to play a double and even triple game to even stand a chance to survive. Do you think its a coincidence that violence has risen there since the Afghanistan pull-out of the ISAF began? The whole Pakistani-Afghan tribal region border is more porous than a sieve for God’s sake!
Which brings us to the Talibans, a past action of theirs and our next subject.
Malala and Sweden.
Malala Yousafzai, the young girl shot in the head by the Talibans for advocating the right for women to an education is not in Sweden but in the UK, true! She is however on the short list of possible winners of the upcoming 2013 Nobel Peace Prize awarded in Stockolm however. If she was to win it, she would become the youngest winner ever. I would readily give it to her if it was not for the presence of Dr Denis Mukwege on the list. I mentioned this man in an outraged past Post :
http://definitivelapseofreason.com/2013/06/15/congo-children-rape-crisis-and-the-relativity-of-news-media/
His tireless work for the cause and plight of women victims of rape in war-torn Africa is well worth of the distinction. Both would make great recipients. Certainly better ones than Vladimir Putin? If the Russian political strongman was to win it, it would surpass the ridicule of Barack Obama having been awarded the honor for no other accomplishment than having been elected US President although black! Putin would be a peace maker for having put together the master plan that as we saw earlier probably condemns Syria to an on-going civil war for the next few years? Then again, the Prize itself is named after the inventor of dynamite? ( Why not the Hiroshima Fat Boy Peace Prize, while we’re at it? ) I hereby solemnly swear never to even mention that Nobel Prize again if Vlad triumphs over Malala or Denis!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24436781
Happily, this brings us to another link as there are less contentious Nobel Prizes and that of Physics was won today by Peter Higgs and François Englert. It does raise many questions about how the selections are made since the original team that devised the theoretical work numbered 6 physicists, 5 of which are still alive and thus eligible? I will attempt a piece at some point on the idiosyncrasies of the Nobel Prizes but for now, let’s explain this one. The Higgs boson is the particle that the work of these gentlemen predicted. The reason for the award now is that this particle was discovered at the CERN LHC in mid-March : http://press.web.cern.ch/
The Centre Européen de Recherche Nucléaire ( European Nuclear Research Center ) has its main tool, the Large Hadron Collider on the Franco-Swiss border. This is a huge circular tube ( 27 km in circumference ) surrounded by magnets that allows to speed up small bits of matter such as protons and neutrons that make up the nucleus of an atom and smash them into targets. By studying the results of the collisions, conclusions can be drawn as to what smaller particles exist within them ( quarks and beyond ) or mediate/regulate their relations ( hold them together ). Discovering the Higgs boson confirmed the Standard Model of physics consisting of General Relativity and Quantum Dynamics. This changes little in our macroscopic world for now but it allows us to research with confidence ideas such as Super Symetry which could actually explain the structure of the Universe and how yet to be discovered particles interact to create the forces that make it real? Look for a complete scientific post soon on the matter.
Physics also report an important advance of a more tangible nature in today’ news though.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24429621
For still in France is found one of the main sites for research for nuclear fusion. But it was from an American facility with a different approach that the discovery came. Nuclear fusion is what happens in our Sun. It is just about the opposite of what happens in our nuclear plants, reactors or bombs though. In these, we add a neutron to uranium atoms to break them up which produces more neutrons that themselves break up other uranium atoms and so on. Once that chain reaction is started, it must be controlled carefully unless the plant turns into a big bomb.
Fusion is safer as evidenced by the fact that our star the Sun has been doing it for billions of years without our supervision and hasn’t exploded yet? Another way to show how opposite the 2 processes are is that fission breaks up two of the heaviest naturally occurring elements Uranium 92/98 and Plutonium 94/98 whereas fusion binds 2 Hydrogen atoms, the lightest of them all, into the second lightest : Helium?
If we can easily start nuclear fission but have difficulties controlling it, again the opposite problem is found in fission. Whether one uses magnetic forces as the French or lasers as the Americans, the aim is to force the atoms together despite the forces that naturally have them repel each other. Our Sun does so on account of its stupendous mass ( 1.989E30 kg or more or less a 2 followed by 30 zeros in kilograms? ) which means that the pressure near its center is 10 billion times that which you feel at sea level? Say a million metric tons per square centimeter? If we reach that, we’ll have relatively free and relatively safe nuclear energy for pretty much ever?
While not leaving the US, this brings a comparison to another source of energy. It was found recently that shale gas and oil reserves in America would possibly make it independent of the Middle East’s sources of petrol. Of course shale gas comes by fracturing the rock in which it lays with water pressure and possibly contaminating your water supply in the process but that ecological consideration takes a lot more vision of the future than say the adamant disbelief in global warming and self-destructive anti-legal shutdown that a given portion of the US political class has made itself renowned for, right? Still, if that was the case ( shale source extraction on a large scale ), it would change the geo-politics of our world a lot. Less reliance on the region equals less interest in it? No need to bother with Syria and even Egypt since you do not have to keep the waterways open for the tankers, etc? Ah ha! You bet the shift to Asia would then take a whole new meaning, right? And it would have to?
Because if you don’t believe me as I keep trying to explain how almost everything is inter-related, check this out : http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24426881
Clear enough? For economic reasons, the Chinese Communist Party has more interest in the stability of the USA’s economy than the American Republican one? While the latter tries to invent links between a validated law made to serve the well-being of the American people and a fight over budgets that it could never regulate itself when it was in power, the former knows that the World’s economy cannot separate the health of its main competitor’s market as it also happens to be its main partner?
The shift to Asia already took place, I’m telling you!
As on Sesame Street, repeat after me :
The word of the day is INTERCONNECTED.
Tay.
Definitive Lapse of Reason 
Pingback: 2013 from A to Z : A saDcarstic review. | Definitive Lapse of Reason