Eideard

Fishing in a seawater canal that leads to the desalination plant

Towering over the Bohai Sea shoreline on this city’s outskirts, the Beijiang Power and Desalination Plant is a 26-billion-renminbi technical marvel: an ultrahigh-temperature, coal-fired generator with state-of-the-art pollution controls, mated to advanced Israeli equipment that uses its leftover heat to distill seawater into fresh water.

There is but one wrinkle in the $4 billion plant: The desalted water costs twice as much to produce as it sells for. Nevertheless, the owner of the complex, a government-run conglomerate called S.D.I.C., is moving to quadruple the plant’s desalinating capacity, making it China’s largest.

“Someone has to lose money,” Guo Qigang, the plant’s general manager, said in a recent interview. “We’re a state-owned corporation, and it’s our social responsibility.”

In some places, this would be economic lunacy. In China, it is economic strategy.

As it did with solar panels and wind turbines, the government has set its mind on becoming a force in yet another budding environment-related industry: supplying the world with fresh water.

The Beijiang project, southeast of Beijing, will strengthen Chinese expertise in desalination, fine-tune the economics, help build an industrial base and, along the way, lessen a chronic water shortage in Tianjin. That money also leaks away like water — at least for now — is not a prime concern.

“The policy drivers are more important than the economic drivers,” said Olivia Jensen, an expert on Chinese water policy and a director at Infrastructure Economics, a Singapore-based consultancy. “If the central government says desalination is going to be a focus area and money should go into desalination technology, then it will.”

The government has, and it is.

You needn’t be as old as me to remember when we did things like this in the United States. Even apart from nuclear weapons.

Since the days of Reagan – nada, nuttin’ honey. Think we have the politicians, nowadays, to regain that kind of international and national competitiveness?

Saying it’s time to stop letting convicted killers “get off that easy,” a Florida state lawmaker wants to use firing squads or the electric chair for those on death row.

Rep. Brad Drake filed a bill this week that would end the use of lethal injection in Florida executions. Instead, those with a death sentence would choose between electrocution or a firing squad.

Drake, a Republican, said the idea came to him after having a conversation with a constituent at a Waffle House over the legal battles associated with the Sept. 28 execution of Manuel Valle.

Valle’s lawyers tried to stop the execution by arguing that a new lethal drug cocktail would cause him pain and therefore constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Courts, however, rejected that argument and let the execution go forward.

..The GOP-controlled Florida Legislature will consider the bill during the 2012 session that starts in January.

He said government is spending too much time listening to advocacy groups and instead should put in place a death sentence that forces convicted murderers to contemplate their fates…

Howard Simon, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, said Drake’s legislation would just cause embarrassment for Florida if it were adopted. “Just when you thought that public policy in Florida couldn’t get worse, along comes a state rep who develops proposed legislation from what he overhears at the Waffle House.”

Simon said, “Given all that former members of the Florida Supreme Court and the American Bar Association have said about Florida’s broken death penalty system, including the nation’s highest number of exonerations, this would be embarrassing – if our legislature were capable of embarrassment.”

Like most of the fools who pass for Republicans nowadays, Drake is another fossil whose brain is trapped somewhere mid-way through the 19th Century.

He could bring in IG Farben to build mass gas chambers. They probably still have the plans.

It seems to be a national obsession in India: measuring the country’s economic development against China’s yardstick.

At a recent panel discussion to commemorate the 20th anniversary of India’s dismantling parts of its socialist economy, a government minister told business leaders to keep their eye on the big prize: growing faster than China. “That’s not impossible,” said the minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram, who oversees national security and previously was finance minister. “People are beginning to talk about outpacing China.”

Indians, in fact, seem to talk endlessly about all things China, a neighbor with whom they have long had a prickly relationship, but which is also one of the few other economies that has had 8 percent or more annual growth in recent years…

“Indians are obsessed with China, but the Chinese are paying too little attention to India,” said Minxin Pei, an economist who was born in China and who writes a monthly column for The Indian Express, a national daily newspaper…

It might be only natural that the Chinese would look up the development ladder to the United States, now that it is the only nation in the world with a larger economy, rather than over their shoulders at India, which ranks ninth. And while China is India’s largest trading partner, the greatest portion of China’s exports go to the United States. China’s largest trading partner is the EU – even if it doesn’t fit the NYT editorial template.…

Evidence of the Indo-Sino interest disparity can be seen in the two countries’ leading newspapers. The People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s house organ, had only 24 articles mentioning India on its English-language Web site in the first seven months of this year, according to the Factiva database. By contrast, The Times of India, the country’s largest circulation English-language newspaper, had 57 articles mentioning China — in July alone.

There are other big gaps. Indian cities, large and small, are filled with Chinese restaurants that serve a distinctly ultraspicy, Indian version of that cuisine. But there are few Indian restaurants in Beijing or Shanghai, let alone in smaller Chinese cities.

RTFA. It rolls on through a chunk of anecdotal information. Useful as far as it goes. And it only goes as far as the NY TIMES habit of continuing the Cold War with China – even though it finally seems to have relented a little over Russia.

Frankly, the significant historic difference lies in handicaps which India retains. Much of the caste system is unrelenting regardless of lip service and law. China’s bureaucratic corruption siphons off a lot less opportunity and value. India’s cachet of wealth and power held by historically “important” families is closer to Japan’s Zaibatsu than anything in China. Ongoing commitments to religion in India – whether as a cultural anchor or dedicated political parties – hinders the growth of the economy as much as you would expect from theocratic ideologues in government.

The Israeli military is mustering battlefield rabbis in what it calls a campaign to promote religious values in its frontline ranks.

The move, announced in the latest issue of the military’s official weekly magazine, Bamahane, drew fire on Monday from one of Israel’s most popular newspaper columnists, who cautioned against creating a “God’s Army.”

Under the plan, a reserve army rabbi will be assigned to every battalion in the military’s northern command, whose areas of responsibility include the Lebanese and Syrian borders.

“The assimilation of religion into combat battalions is increasing,” said an article in Bamahane, which gave details of the program being implemented after a year-long pilot project…

Now, the Bamahane article said, “the commander of the Golani (infantry) brigade’s Battalion 51 does not move a meter without his rabbi.”

The rabbis’ roles were expanded in Israel’s Gaza war in late 2008 and early 2009, when military chaplains accompanied reserve battalions that invaded the enclave, in a conflict launched with the declared aim of halting militant rocket attacks…

…According to an army commander’s account at the time, some frontline rabbis mixed politics with religion, telling soldiers they were fighting a “religious war” to expel “the gentiles interfering with our conquest of this holy land.”

Just in case you forgot how a theocracy works.

“Money is not the problem,” the union leader tells me brightly — and for a moment I feel far from debt-stricken, austerity-obsessed Europe…

“Women,” says the union leader, Mie Opjordsmoen of the Norwegian Confederation of Trade, a mother of two. “Norwegian women work, pay taxes and have babies. That’s our secret.”

I am touring one of the world’s last functioning welfare states and finding preconceptions shattered one by one. Unions here peg their wage demands to the needs of the export industry. Employers lobby for longer parental leave for fathers. Parties win elections promising not to cut taxes.

And gender equality is treated as a competitive advantage: By law, 40 percent of Norwegian boardroom seats are filled with women. Two male cabinet members, Knut Storberget, the justice minister, and Audun Lysbakken, the minister of equality (yes, this position exists), recently took three and four months off, respectively, to look after their latest offspring. The cost of full-time toddler child care is capped at the equivalent of about two Big Macs a day thanks to state subsidies…

“One Norwegian lesson,” Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg said from his modestly sized office one afternoon, “is that if you can raise female participation, it helps the economy, birth rates and the budget…”

All told, family policy, including a system of child care from a guaranteed place for 1-year-olds to after-school and vacation care, costs the Norwegian government 2.8 percent of gross domestic product. “These policies are expensive, but their cost is offset by the return in terms of female labor supply and tax revenues,” says Danielle Venn, a labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Even excluding oil, Oslo’s deficit of 5.4 percent of G.D.P. is a percentage point below the E.U. average…

Every two years, her union calculates wage demands by closely examining the cost base and demand situation of Norway’s export industries and then working back from that. “We negotiate for exporters first. No other industry gets more,” she explained…

Economically literate unions and employers may be necessary ingredients of a 21st-century welfare state. But nothing works without an electorate willing to pay taxes, the prime minister notes. Tax revenue accounts for 42 percent of G.D.P. here, compared with a 35 percent O.E.C.D. average.

“Many European countries have been trying to achieve the tax level of the U.S. and the welfare level of Scandinavia. That’s not possible,” said Mr. Stoltenberg. “We won two elections promising not to lower taxes. Voters know: Tax cuts mean welfare cuts.”

Entirely too rational for the average American voter – illiterate in history and economics. And our Congress and the Christian right wing would shriek with claims of the imminent anti-Christ. Collecting taxes from all for the common good, education and opportunity would make our hypocrite puritans hide under the bed.

The quick description of this video is: Fareed Zakaria, editor-at-large at Time Magazine and host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” program, discusses his book “The Post American World” and the U.S. economy.

Zakaria, speaking with Tom Keene on Bloomberg Television’s “Surveillance Midday,” also discusses U.S. policy in the Middle East and the sovereign debt crisis in Europe.

Is that enough for your brunch plate?

One of the brightest facets in the life we share.

A Pentagon commission on diversity is recommending the U.S. military end its ban on women serving in direct combat roles — a restriction the group says is discriminatory and out of touch with the demands of modern warfare.

In its draft report, the Military Leadership Diversity Commission said the military should gradually eliminate the ban in order to create a “level playing field for all qualified service members…”

The draft report said the military’s “combat exclusion policies” do not reflect the realities of the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and create institutional barriers to women, who are prevented from getting key assignments that could lead to career advancement.

“Service policies that bar women from gaining entry to certain combat-related career fields, specialties, units, and assignments are based on standards of conventional warfare, with well-defined, linear battlefields,” the report said. “However, the current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have been anything but conventional.”

More than 200,000 women have served in the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since those wars began, 132 female service members have been killed, and 721 have been wounded.

Proponents of the commission’s recommendations agree that technology and circumstance have drastically altered modern warfare. They say it is difficult to distinguish between combat and non-combat roles on the front lines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Fourth and fifth-generation warfare long ago stepped aside from the conventions stuck in muddy brains trying to fight the battles of WW1 and WW2 all over again. Especially from the safe seats in Congress and the fantasy world of punditry.

Why should the United States be among the last to learn from history – and changing times?

The Obama administration decided on Tuesday to appeal a judge’s rulings that prevented the U.S. government from banning same-sex marriages, a move that could undermine support among President Barack Obama’s traditional liberal base ahead of a key election.

The Obama administration filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts in support of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, or DOMA, that barred gay marriages, even though Obama had previously opposed the law.

Although Obama opposes the law, a Justice Department spokeswoman said that the administration was defending the statute because it was obligated to defend federal laws when challenged in court.

Predictable hogwash offered up by the administration. The reality is that the rationales are designed to appeal to homophobes and reactionaries who want the DOMA to continue to be the law of the land.

That’s not leadership. That’s collaboration.

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While businesses worldwide cut their research and development budgets in the economic downturn, China invested heavily in innovation and sought more patents and trademarks…

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) said U.S. applications for patents protecting new inventions were flat in 2008 and 2009, when recession made capital harder to access and customers harder to find.

Filings for patents — which permit inventors to profit from novel developments for a limited time — dropped 7.9 percent in Europe and 10.8 percent in Japan last year, with filings from Germany, Britain and France also lower.

But in China, a growing engine of the global economy, WIPO said patent applications jumped 18.2 percent in 2008 and another 8.5 percent in 2009.

Chinese filings for trademark protection — affording rights to logos or distinctive signs on an indefinite basis — jumped 20.8 percent last year, when such applications fell 11.7 in the United States, 7.7 percent in Germany and 7.2 percent in Japan.

“The post-crisis innovation landscape will invariably look different from that of a decade ago,” WIPO Director-General Francis Gurry said in an introduction to the World Intellectual Property Indicators report.

“China is moving up the value chain and rapidly increasing exports based on domestic innovation, so inevitably it is filing an ever-growing number of patent applications,” the WIPO chief later told a news conference.

WIPO Chief Economist Carsten Fink said China’s ample cash reserves allowed it to continue financing innovation in a time when loans and venture capital were difficult to come by.

“There is a tremendous pool of finance for domestic investment in R&D and industrial design,” he said.

In the United States, the standout exceptions were in high tech – no surprise – Apple spent 20.2 percent more on R&D from 2008 to 2009 and Microsoft’s spending rose 10.4 percent.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Steve Jobs, who has been on medical leave from Apple Inc. since January to treat an undisclosed medical condition, received a liver transplant in Tennessee about two months ago. The chief executive has been recovering well and is expected to return to work on schedule later this month, though he may work part-time initially.

“Steve continues to look forward to returning at the end of June, and there’s nothing further to say,” said Apple spokeswoman Katie Cotton.

When he does return, Mr. Jobs may be encouraged by his physicians to initially “work part-time for a month or two,” a person familiar with the thinking at Apple said. That may lead Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, to take “a more encompassing role,” this person said. The person added that Mr. Cook may be appointed to Apple’s board in the not-too-distant future…

At least some Apple directors were aware of the CEO’s surgery. As part of an agreement with Mr. Jobs in place before he went on leave, some board members have been briefed weekly on the CEO’s condition by his physician…

The specifics of Mr. Jobs’s surgery couldn’t be established, but according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which manages the transplant network in the U.S., there are no residency requirements for transplants. Having the procedure done in Tennessee makes sense because its list of patients waiting for transplants is shorter than in many other states. According to data provided by UNOS, in 2006, the median number of days from joining the liver waiting list to transplant was 306 nationally. In Tennessee, it was 48 days…

During his leave, Mr. Jobs has remained involved in key aspects of the company and reviewed products and product plans from home. He has also been seen at Apple’s headquarters, according to people who have seen him there.

Get well and get back to work, Steve. I’d rather our nation had tech heroes to believe in – instead of politicians who think health care is only for the wealthy or media mouths who traffic in fear. You’ve lived up to the standards of American accomplishment better than most professional patriots.