ARTICLE: "World's Assets Hit Record Value Of $140 Trillion," by Joanna Slater, Wall Street Journal, 10 January 2006, p. C8.
McKinsey report generates map of financial assets flows and holdings among world's great regions.

One missrepresentation, IMHO, is showing Singapore and Hong Kong like some isolated offshoot of Euro/UK (colonial habit, one imagines), when all that money flowing into both also overwhelmingly flies right out again to developing Asia and especially China (something the map seems to ignore, but I know happens in bulk because FDI flows outward as a percentage of GDP in these two financial hubs is virtually as high as the inward flow percentages).

Other than that weird bit, a cool map very much like ones I drew for the FDI "economic security exercise" with Cantor Fitzgerald atop the World Trade Center back in 2000 (see here for details).

Factoid of note: America attracts 85 percentage of all money put on the table by asset-exporting regions.

The future? Asset flows are expected to grow 50 percent faster than goods and services in coming years.

Total financial flows in 2005 were $6T, twice the flow in 2002 and significantly higher than in 1999, the height of the bubble.

Yes, yes, globalization is "in retreat" and soon to "end." Light up your doobie on that one, because as you know (he pauses while holding his lungs for effect), "those damn terrorists are running everything maaaaaaaaaan!"

There are those who understand the force and those who only see the friction.

There are those who see only war and those who get the "everything else.

Want to be a grand strategist?

Or do you want to live out your lives in fear, letting others define your nightmares while you give up on your dreams?

Morning glory indeed. Globalization's greatest push is just beginning...

On the Hunt in Somalia
By Jacob Laksin
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 10, 2007

An increasingly popular prejudice holds that the United States, by involving itself in Iraq, has handicapped the larger war against Islamic terrorism. Al-Qaeda operatives in southern Somalia would likely disagree. On Monday these operatives found themselves on the receiving end of apparently successful U.S. airstrikes.
Launched from a U.S. Air Force gunship, the attack capped a broader regional campaign that has seen an American Navy fleet policing the country’s ports -- a favorite transit point of the international terror network -- while special intelligence operations, carried out in concert with neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia, identify and search out terrorist suspects in the country’s volatile south. James Phillips, a foreign policy specialist at the Heritage Foundation who has written extensively about al-Qaeda in Somalia, told FrontPageMag.com yesterday that the “the recent air strikes in Somalia show that U.S. forces remain capable of striking at al Qaeda from far away at a moments notice.” Reports of American weakness, it seems, have been greatly exaggerated.

For many Somalia is, if anything, a painful memory. It is indelibly linked to the October 1993 operation in which 18 American Army Rangers were gruesomely slaughtered while tracking Somali warlord Muhammad Farah Aidid -- a tragedy first chronicled by Mark Bowden in the Philadelphia Inquirer and later dramatized in the film Black Hawk Down. For U.S. military strategists, however, Somalia has long held another significance: as a key battleground to thwart the export of Islamic radicalism into the African continent and beyond.

It is in this context that this week’s airstrikes should be seen. Early reports indicate that the targets of the strikes were Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Saleh Nabhan, two terrorists with probable ties to al-Qaeda. Mohammed is believed to be the mastermind of the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya, which resulted in the deaths of 225 people. In addition, a failed 2002 attempt to shoot down an Israeli airliner, and the car bombing of a Kenyan hotel that claimed the lives of ten Kenyans and three Israelis, are said to bear Mohammed’s fingerprints. Saleh Nabhan is also wanted for the 2002 attacks. Kenyan investigators have reportedly discovered bomb-making materials in his home and local police have fingered him as the owner of the vehicle used in the hotel attack.

Rap sheets like these have only endeared the detonative duo to Somalia’s radical Islamic Courts Union. An umbrella of hard-line Sharia law courts that, in defiance of the official U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government, affects to be the country’s true source of authority, the ICU is believed to have offered protection to both Mohammed and Nabhan. This would be entirely in keeping with the unions’ past history, which includes its documented links to al-Qaeda. Of the 11 courts affiliated with the union at least two are suspected to be terrorist training and recruitment centers, and at least one is led by an al-Qaeda operative, Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys, the onetime head of al-Itihaad al-Islamiya, a now-dissolved Somali Islamist group affiliated with al-Qaeda. Although the ICU styles itself as the voice of Somali believers, it is on closer inspection a tribal interest group -- it mainly comprises the Hawiye, a Somali clan that makes up about a quarter of the country’s population -- whose main “achievement,” apart from courting foreign al-Qaeda fighters, has been to impose a particularly severe form of Islamic rule on those parts of Somalia unfortunate enough to have come under its ambit.

Menacing to its host country and the region at large, the union thus deserves the brunt of the blame for precipitating Ethiopia’s recent invasion. One might not know it from the pronouncements of groups like Human Rights Watch and untold numbers of “Africa experts,” who condemned Ethiopia’s military for acting on behalf of U.S. interests -- a grave offense for the high minded -- but the invasion served two vitally useful purposes: routing the gathering Islamist forces and preventing the takeover of what by all the evidence would have been the Somali equivalent of the Taliban.

Yet it would be a mistake to think that Somalia is now rid of its terrorist problem. By all accounts, the country remains a hotspot of Islamist activity. Equally dubious is the notion that an African peacekeeping force can serve as a buffer against Islamic ascendance in the country. As usually happens when the idea of such forces arises, African countries prove unwilling to provide the necessary troops. The upshot is that it’s left for the United States to do the job -- striking down terrorists and safeguarding civilization -- that, with some honorable exceptions, African states and the remainder of the international community won’t do.

Encouragingly, the U.S. military is more than equal to the task. As documented by the journalist Robert Kaplan, lost amid the constant barrage of bad news from Iraq is that the U.S. military remains on unwearied offensive against al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers. In Africa especially the military has hunted down the terrorist group and trained local forces to carry on the fight. It has done all this, moreover, with little fanfare and even less recognition. Perhaps that’s to be expected. In the age of global media, waging a war on Islamic terrorism was never going to be a glamorous vocation -- only a necessary one.

The Rise and Fall of a Murderous Dictator
By Paul Kengor
Washington Times | January 10, 2007

I expect to die a violent death, with nothing but the tip of my pinky finger remaining behind.
-- Saddam Hussein

Saddam Hussein grew up barefoot in a mud hut in the town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad on the Tigris River. He never met his father. His mother, Subha Tulfah, was deeply disturbed -- suicidal and homicidal. She repeatedly tried to kill the child in her womb. In one episode, she jumped in front of a bus, where, according to an apocryphal account, the deranged woman screamed: "I am giving birth to the devil." Some witnesses recalled the pregnant woman banging a door against her distended belly.

Against all odds, the child survived his mother. When he was born, she gave him the name "Saddam" -- meaning "the one who confronts."

Abandoned by his mother, Saddam was raised by a politically active uncle, who became his role model, and taught him to be a genocidal racist. When the budding despot was an adolescent, his uncle wrote a pamphlet titled, "Three Whom God Should Not Have Created: Persians, Jews, and Flies." Saddam later turned the title into a credo, etched on a plaque on his office desk.

Upon taking power, Saddam transformed Iraq into a monument to himself. The megalomaniac sought to rebuild the Biblical city of Babylon -- a $200-million project in which every 10th brick was inscribed, "Babylon was rebuilt in the reign of Saddam Hussein." This would be his apotheosis, but it was never completed, stopped by the man Saddam hated as much as Jews: George W. Bush. By dispatching U.S. troops to Iraq in 2003, Mr. Bush ended 2½ decades of nonstop terror by Saddam, including the widest use of chemical weapons by any nation since World War I.

As part of the 1991 Gulf war cease-fire, Saddam agreed to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to dispose of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, which he claimed he did not possess. As the inspectors soon learned, however, his arsenal was staggering, including bioweapons like anthrax and botulinum toxin. His country remains the only in history to weaponize aflatoxin, a substance that gradually causes liver cancer and has no battlefield utility whatsoever; it could be used to give cancer to certain ethnic groups.
U.N. inspectors also uncovered an enormous Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Spread among 25 facilities, the $10-billion program employed 15,000 technical people. Based on a Manhattan Project bomb design, Iraqi scientists pursued five different methods for separating uranium.

The world feared how Saddam's clandestine support of WMD might be coupled with his open support of terrorism. The final terrorism report of the Clinton State Department devoted more words to Iraq than any other country. In April 2002, Saddam publicly offered $25,000 to families of Palestinian suicide bombers who blew themselves up while killing Jews. Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, the two most wanted terrorist ringleaders of the last 20 years, both lived with safe haven in Baghdad.

Saddam operated his own terror camps. One of the most chilling was a facility south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, where terrorists (prior to September 11, 2001) had conducted training missions on a 707 fuselage, where they practiced the art of hijacking an aircraft without guns, using only knives and utensils. Just like the September 11 hijackers, these terrorists were mostly of Saudi origin.

By 1998, the watchful eye of the global community had frustrated and enraged Saddam, and he did his best to further obstruct U.N. inspectors. That December, inspections stopped. The world wrung its hands over how to get Saddam to comply.

Then came September 11, which, as George W. Bush said, "changed everything." The Bush administration responded by first removing the Taliban government that harbored Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Estimating the next devastating attack could be ordered by Saddam, Mr. Bush decided the Iraqi dictator was an unacceptable danger in the post-September 11 world. He judged the only way to disarm Saddam was to dislodge him.

Sure, the Bush administration had other reasons for removing him -- human rights, the objective of creating a "democratic peace" in the Middle East -- but Saddam's history with WMD and sponsorship of terrorism were the two primary factors in the 2003 invasion.

The wisdom of these goals continues to be hotly debated. Yet, one thing is now certain: Saddam Hussein's ability to perpetrate violence against his nation, his neighbors and the world is finished -- moribund. He was executed Dec. 30.

Saddam stands almost alone among modern tyrants in that he received due justice. He is dead as a result of American intervention, as are the two thugs we once feared as his heirs: his sons, Uday and Qusay. This is a magnificent achievement, unthinkable five years ago.

Contrary to popular perception, we did find some WMD in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, though we did not find the stockpiles we expected. Importantly, as former U.N. chief inspector David Kay reported, we did discover "intent and infrastructure" by Saddam to again "ramp up" WMD production once a tired, divided international community threw in the towel on the inspections process.

Thanks to a simpler process -- a hanging -- Saddam will never realize his nuclear ambitions. His prophecy of dying a violent death was realized, but, mercifully, not in the giant explosion we all long feared. The Bush administration's daunting long-term task in Iraq outlives him, far from completed, and dangerously unstable. Yet, the danger posed by Saddam Hussein is finally over. That's a big, big deal -- one worth celebrating.

January 10, 2007
Editorial
My Favorite Green Lump

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Colstrip, Montana

All environmentalists have their favorite “green” energy source that they think will break our addiction to oil and slow down climate change. I’ve come out to Montana to see mine. It’s called coal.

Yes, yes, I know, you thought I was going to say corn ethanol or switch grass or soybean diesel. Well, one day they all might reach a scale that can get us off oil. But the cheap, available fuel that China, India and America all have in abundance today — and are all going to burn for the next decade — is coal. So unless we can burn coal in a cleaner way, you can kiss the climate goodbye — we’ll all be wearing bikinis and shorts in Manhattan in January.

When it comes to what it will take to “green” coal, there’s no more informed or intrepid tour guide than Montana’s Democratic governor, Brian Schweitzer. The governor, a bulldozer of a man, met me in Billings in his little prop plane, we flew into a winter gale that tossed us around like salad pieces, and then we set down on a makeshift runway in Colstrip, on the edge of a coal strip mine. On the way back, after flying through another howling storm that caused me to dig my nails so deeply into the armrests I left my fingerprints in the leather, I thanked the pilots profusely. The governor simply bellowed, “I’m glad we had our best interns flying today!”

When it comes to cleaning up coal, though, Governor Schweitzer is dead serious.

“Here in Montana we make our living outside,” said the governor, an agronomist who got his start building farms in Saudi Arabia, “and when you do that, you know the climate is changing. We don’t get as much snow in the high country as we used to ... and the runoff starts sooner in the spring. ... The river I’ve been fishing over the last 50 years is now warmer in July by five degrees than 50 years ago, and it is hard on our trout population. ... So when Exxon Mobil hires someone who calls himself a ‘scientist’ to claim this is not true, you don’t have to get The New York Times to know the guy is blowing smoke.”

But here’s what the governor also knows: Montana has one-third of all the coal deposits in America — 8 percent of all the coal in the world. Montana’s coal is roughly equivalent to 240 billion barrels of oil. “That’s enough to replace all our imported oil for 60 years,” he noted.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that because of global warming — fueled in part by carbon dioxide emissions from coal-burning electricity plants — the only way we’ll be able to use all those coal reserves is if we can burn coal without emitting the CO2. Otherwise we’re cooked, literally.

So Governor Schweitzer’s crusade is to get the coal-burning industries to take the lead on this, in partnership with government. The governor recalled a recent conference of coal-dependent industries, held in Phoenix, at which he held up a lump of coal and warned: “You are the people who represent the companies who will decide whether I’m holding up the future of energy or the past. Take a look at all the other people sitting at your table. You know who you see? You see the last remaining people on the planet who don’t believe CO2 is a problem. ... The only way you will make this the energy of the future is to recognize C02 as a problem and that you have to be part of the solution.” And by the way, he added, “there is a lot of money in it for you guys. You can sell this technology all over the world.”

Governor Schweitzer has a plan for Washington: 1) Set a floor price for crude oil in the U.S. at $40 a barrel forever. That will tell Wall Street that if it invests in new, clean coal technologies — which can be run profitably at the equivalent of $40 a barrel — OPEC will never undercut them. 2) Set up a European-style cap and trade system rewarding companies that buy clean coal technologies and punishing those that don’t. 3) Have Washington co-invest in a dozen pilot gasification and liquefaction technologies — which already exist — for cleaning coal and sequestering the carbon dioxide. Then we’ll identify the best technologies quicker and move down the innovation curve. 4) Write the regulations now for how we will manage carbon dioxide that is removed from coal and stored underground.

As we talked, four smokestacks from the coal-fired electricity plant in Colstrip, which helps power Portland and Seattle, were belching CO2.

“For the last 100 years we built plants like this one,” the governor said. “It takes crushed coal, ignites it to heat water that produces steam, and that turns a turbine and produces electricity. ... You build that smoke stack real high so that nasty stuff goes to someone else’s backyard. Well, we’ve run out of backyards.”

Few U.S. hospitals and doctors use information technology in delivery of care. This must change.
By: Newt Gingrich and Janet Dillione 
The Philadelphia Inquirer, January 9, 2007  

Philadelphia has a proud history of leadership in health care. Philadelphia is home to the nation's first hospital, first medical school, and first medical society.
 
Over the last 250 years, those seeds have grown into a $2-trillion-a-year system, with more than 800,000 doctors and 6,000 hospitals. But far too often, today's doctors and hospitals are using tools and technology that, relatively speaking, are from a distant age.
 
From ATMs and instant messaging to Travelocity and eBay, technology is second nature to us. But when Americans step inside the health-care system, we step back to a time of paper-based medical records and color-coded filing systems. That is why getting health information technology into the hands of health-care providers must be one of our nation's top priorities, and we must act now.
 
The technological gulf in health care isn't just inefficient and costly; it may also be involved in costly inefficiency and the persistence of a high error rate in medicine. Last year the Institute of Medicine issued a startling report, stating that 1.5 million Americans are injured or killed every year because of medication errors, costing at least $3.5 billion. This follows the institute's landmark 1999 report that concluded that up to 98,000 Americans are killed every year by other types of preventable medical errors. As for costs, some experts believe that as much as 40 percent of health-care spending - $800 billion a year - is waste.
 
Health information technology, from electronic prescribing to electronic health records to clinical decision support, is a critical part of the solution. And medical practitioners in Pennsylvania are leading the way.
 
These include the caregivers at Chester County Hospital in West Chester, who implemented a workflow solution to identify every patient with a known superbug infection so he or she was managed and isolated properly, protecting staff and other patients from possible exposure. Richard Baron heads Greenhouse Internists, a four-doctor practice in Philadelphia, which implemented electronic health records and saved $65,000 a year in transcription and staffing expenses. Seventy-eight of Baron's patients were taking Ortho-Evra, a contraceptive patch, when new dangers were announced by the Food and Drug Administration, and they were notified the very same day. Greenhouse's electronic health record identified them in seconds.
 
Unfortunately, these are the exceptions. Only a quarter of all hospitals and less than 15 percent of all physicians use information technology in the delivery of care. So how do we change this?
 
Consider incentive options for physicians and other health-care providers to encourage them to adopt information technology. Payment models should not be changed for the sake of technology itself, but for the better-quality care it would help deliver. Baron and colleagues invested nearly $140,000 in their electronic health-records system, streamlining the care of their patients, but they received zero additional payments from any insurer - not Independence Blue Cross, not Medicaid, not Medicare. In other words, Baron and colleagues are paid the exact same rate as a practice that uses a paper-based system.
 
Break down legal barriers to the adoption of technology. Think of the federal Stark Law and anti-kickback statutes, which until last fall imposed an outright ban on virtually any information technology collaboration between doctors and hospitals (such as giving a doctor electronic access to the hospital's IT system). The federal government relaxed the restrictions a bit, but made the hoops so onerous that few hospitals would go through the trouble to wire their communities. From Medicaid regulations to antiquated statutes from decades ago, all of them should be broken down to expedite the adoption of IT.
 
Ingrain the use of health information technology into the curriculum of our nation's medical schools. Jefferson Medical School requires that interns and residents use a computerized physician-order-entry system to help with medication prescribing, and they use personal digital assistants to track their patients' status electronically and to assist with information transfer during shift changes. Other medical schools have begun to split their curricula between clinical and IT education. This is a long-term strategy that can teach a new generation of doctors and other providers who will demand these tools.
 
Physicians and other health-care providers are eager to use health information technology. According to a physician survey by Manhattan Research, 99 percent of doctors surf the Web, 95 percent use search engines to find medical information, and 90 percent have a high-speed Internet connection. The sad reality is that most physicians put down their laptops and pick up their clipboards when they walk into a patient's room. For the health of our citizens and the future of our country, that's a reality we must change. In the words of Ben Franklin, "You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again."