Qatar's North Field

In 2006 Qatar quietly announced the development of natural gas refining facilities in their North Field which is also part of the South Pars gas field which belongs to Iran (there is no geological separation; the split occurs at the Qatar - Iran maritime boundary). Here is a map of the area:
The North Field is expected to supply approximately 14% of the world's gas supply; South Pars is expected to contain 10%. Adding to the already LOADED area; this area is non-associated natural gas which means it contains little crude oil and requires less processing.

Iran and Qatar currently have a good relationship despite Qatar's willingness to host US troops. Qatar and Iran cooperate on OPEC, the Non-Aligned Movement, and Organization of the Islamic Conference. Together they hold 24% of the world's natural gas supply which may hold the key to relieving the world's reliance on oil.

One More Won't Hurt

I found this too interesting to not post:

Jeffrey over at ArmsControlWonk came into possession of some DPRK bank-notes and had them scanned onto his blog. You'll notice the 5 is nuclear themed, very interesting!

It's Been a While

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, it's been a busy past week and a half...

Just a quick post for tonight, I'm not going to be able to post until next Friday likely.

I do not know how many of you subscribe to the Economist; every year they put out a "Pocket World in Figures," and I have marveled at this little invention for a while. This book takes a wide variety of statistics and puts them into a small but easy to use handbook. Flipping to a random page I find that:

70% of Cameroon's employment is in the agriculture sector.

or

Macedonia has the highest percentage of unemployed labor in the world at a mere 36.0%, that's pretty incredible.

Other statistics include defense spending and total attendance to cinemas per country (India has the highest in 2006 at 1,473.4 million attendees).

If you are a statistics nut (which I am though I am terrible at any sort of mathematics) this is a must have, it just packs so much information into such a small space.

In the next week I'll be reading Zbigniew Brzezinski's The Grand Chessboard and the newest Economist which is labeled, "Waking from its sleep: A 14-page special report on the Arab world"

Until next time keep abreast on world issues and read some books!

My Response to Mr. Richard Butler

Today's post will be cut short a little, I intended on composing a much more lengthy post on cars and oil, but that will be saved for another day. I will be responding to Mr. Butler's view of nuclear weapons.

If you did not get a chance to watch his interview, I still would recommend you at least watch the first ten minutes. The claims which Butler makes about nuclear weapons (obsolete, unnecessary, outdated; among other claims) I find far too idealistic. I prefer a bit more realist point of view.

"Speak soft but carry a big stick" -- Teddy Roosevelt

Nuclear weapons are far from a thing of the past; rather, they are the weapon of the future. It is sad, both in my view and in Mr. Butler's view that this is true; but it is...

Nuclear weapons are not going away anytime soon. Currently there are nine nuclear weapon states:

1. United States
2. Russia
3. China
4. United Kingdom
5. North Korea
6. Israel
7. Pakistan
8. India
9. France

President Barack Obama and President of the Russian Federation, Dmitri Medvedev just held talks on the status of nuclear weapons and decided on a goal of reducing the number of deployed nuclear weapons. This goal hardly accomplished anything as I noted a few days ago.

As long as there are countries pushing for a military edge the world, there will be nuclear weapons. That is the truth, I invite anyone who disagrees to email me and we can continue that discussion. Last time I checked, India and Pakistan still have disagreements over Kashmir; Iran is still threatening to wipe Israel off the map (and vis versa); and North Korea is still threatening war against South Korea and the US....Nuclear weapons are not going away.

The simple fact is that nuclear weapons give us the "Big Stick" that Teddy Roosevelt spoke about many decades ago. Until the world realizes how bad a nuclear attack would be, there will be no elimination of nuclear weapons.

The need for them comes from the "macho" posturing that dominates international politics. There is no way to threaten a state that has a nuclear weapons when you have an army and some rifles. The fact is strategic competition on the world stage is composed of "I have more nukes than you." We need to focus our efforst not on eliminating nuclear weapons, but on having more control.

Here is a link to a post I wrote about a month ago about nuclear weapon safety. Enjoy.

Interview with Richard Butler of Penn State

Big thanks to Penn State Public Broadcasting for submitting this video. This is an interview with former Ambassador and current Professor Richard Butler. In this interview he shares his views of nuclear proliferation, foreign aid, and freedom of expression.

While I do not agree with some of the opinions presented in this video, I think Butler does give some excellent analysis about pressing issues in the world today.

We've Been Had!

President Obama recently finished negotiations with Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev over nuclear weapons stockpiles. Both leaders came out of the negotiations confident the meetings went well and also came out with an agreement to reduce the amount of deployed nuclear weapons by each country.

The grand total each country must reduce their deployed nuclear weapons by:.......25.

Yes, that's right, 25 nuclear weapons. Out of the near 1500 deployed nuclear weapons we're going to reduce the amount by twenty-five nukes. That's not much of a deal. The US and Russia can still bomb each other back to the stone age, what's the difference with 25 warheads?

Along with the miniscule reduction of warheads; Medvedev and Obama agreed to create a joint data exchange center. My question is, what happened to the one Clinton and Yeltsin set up in 1998? As far as I can tell they are working on the same thing...(Image reproduced from http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070423/070423_yeltsin2_hmed_7a.hmedium.jpg)

Obama, did you accomplish anything worthwhile?

Can Capitalism Be Effectively Resisted?

This topic struck me the other day when I was Blockbuster and saw a two-part documentary on Che Guevara, the Marxist/Socialist revolutionary himself. I thought to myself at that instant, would Che Guevara support a documentary on himself on the shelves of a Blockbuster? I concluded he probably would not be too pleased.

I have contemplated whether resistance to capitalism is futile at many points in the past couple years. Here's a couple of examples:

1. Slavoj Zizek -- Slovakian professor and theorist extraordinaire. All around capitalist hating badass if you ask me. He's got multiple books about everything from Socialism to ethics of the Real. His "brand" if you will is now a sign for everything capitalism hates; yet capitalism touts Zizek as the ultimate resistance to itself. In my opinion it just proves how much you cannot stop capitalism.

2. China -- Yes China. This isn't breaking news for those of you who pay any attention to the news in the past decade. I believe it was 1994 when the PRC opened its first "Special Economic Zone" (SEZ). These zones essentially were areas of free market capitalism surrounded by rest of communist China.

China still sometimes decides to play the communist card in the international arena; but any semblance of true communism (they never actually made it to true communism) died years ago.

in the Summer of 2008 many critics predicted the fall of capitalism after the collapse of many US financial institutions. It seems now capitalism has withstood the worst of the recent recession and is rebounding. Marx predicted that capitalism was susceptible to periodic recessions; but he did not predict how incredibly durable capitalism has become. Through multiple long term and short term recessions it has been modified to whatever the situation necessitates.

Capitalism simply coops anything that stands against in its way. It seems that to truly stand against capitalism, you must truly stand against human nature, or at least democracy. Zizek writes that capitalism and democracy are so intertwined that you must fight against democracy to fight against capitalism; separating them would be impossible. But in order to fight against democracy you must fight against the largest purveyor of democracy: the United States. No state or terrorist organization seems to have been able to destroy the US yet, good luck at defeating capitalism.