Geopolitics

What is geopolitics?
Wikipedia's view;
see also
“The Return of Geopolitics” by Walter Russell Mead, 2014 Foreign Affairs.


Perhaps deserving a different categorization,
see the exceedingly interesting post, and the comments on it:

2016-12-04-Lang-SST-TTG-pass-me-by-ttg-OBOR-RCEP

"Pass Me By" - TTG
by "The Twisted Genius" (obviously a pseudonym)
Sic Semper Tyrannis (Patrick Lang's blog), 2016-12-04

“Everywhere we go today across Eurasia,
from the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea to Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and on to China,
there is a process underway for the first time
since the original Silk Road era of more than two thousand years ago,
of building up an entire new economic space, the Eurasian Heartland.
Were the Turkish government to join the OBOR [One Belt, One Road] project wholeheartedly,
the potentials for a Eurasian transformation would become enormous.
It remains to be seen what a USA with a Trump presidency will do or not do
to try to destroy this beautiful Eurasian build up.
If he is as wise as his sound bites make him sound,
he will recognize that this kind of development
is the only true future for his United States
other than bankruptcy, economic depression and wars of destruction.
If not, more and more much of the rest of the world
seems determined to go it without the “Sole Superpower.” “

—————————————

This is the last paragraph of an essay by F. William Engdahl entitled “The Iran-Russia-China Strategic Triangle” in the “New Eastern Outlook” electronic journal.
In the author’s bio, he doesn’t say what the F. means.
I bet a lot of Neocons say it stands for a synonym for copulating.
Old F. William lays how these three countries are steadily moving towards an integrated Eurasian market, not an EU-like single market,
but something beneficial to the economies of all sovereign members.
The entire essay is worth a read.

Beyond the “One Belt, One Road” that China envisions for the Eurasian land mass,
China is pushing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)
as an alternative to the withering and near dead Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal.

On the military side, there is the growing relationship between Russia and Iran.
Both countries are joined by the R+6 fight against the IS and their assorted jihadi allies.
Both countries face the persistent threat of the Wanhabi inspired jihadists.
In addition to the S-300PMU-2 air defense systems,
Russia is negotiating with Iran to build T-90S tanks and SU-30SM fighters in Iran.
Such a deal would draw these two countries very close together indeed.

How will the new Trump administration react to all this?
Perhaps he will negotiate bilateral trade agreements so the U.S. will not be shut out of a future RCEP free trade bloc.
That might not be a bad approach.
The sooner we realize we are not the center of the universe or the indispensable nation, the better.
As far as I’m concerned, we would be better off
with the attitude expressed in “Pass Me By” from the Cary Grant movie “Father Goose”
than than any further pursuit of the Neocon dream.
Even Cary Grant rose to the occasion when required.

[The marked-thru material above was in the original;
I marked-thru it to indicate I don't understand its significance,
so, while I agree with most of his other thoughts,
not necessarily with these.]


But I am most concerned about what Trump will do about
an Iran that is increasingly integrated into the Eurasian and Asian spheres.
Trump and the Republicans are death on the JCPOA deal with Iran.
Trump probably because he believes he can do better.
The Republicans because the JCPOA is part of the Obama legacy.
Flynn, Mattis and many others consider Iran to be the font of all evil in the world
and seek to vanquish this dire threat to all things good and American.
How does all this square with Trump’s desire to seek rapprochement with Russia?
Will he let the events in the far corners of the world pass him by?
Tis a puzzlement.

TTG

The Iran-Russia-China Strategic Triangle

APEC Leaders May Be Looking to China After Donald Trump's Win

Beijing's New Silk Road to Europe

US Congress losing mind over Russian Arms Sales to Iran

Will Iran Buy Russian Fighter Jets?

Father Goose

Health care research: too much?

2015

2015-08-18-WP-scientists-are-trying-to-figure-out-the-best-ways-to-spend-money-on-science

Scientists are trying to figure out the best way to spend money on science
By Carolyn Johnson
Washington Post WongBlog, 2015-08-18

A provocative new study by two biologists appears at first glance to highlight a worrisome paradox: As the nation's investment in the science that underlies new therapies has increased over the past half century, the output that we actually care about most -- advances in health -- appears to be slipping.

If the federal investment in biomedical research is really getting less efficient over time by yielding fewer new drugs and additional years of life, that would be a clear call to reexamine policy. After all, the goal of the roughly $30 billion spent by the National Institutes of Health each year isn't merely to provide jobs for scientists and create reams of erudite scientific papers, but to help people live longer and better. But the analysis, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, raises far more questions than it answers and may in fact reveal how little we know about how to measure the bang for our buck when it comes to funding the insights and innovations that improve health.

"I remember wondering if the pace of innovation from 1950 to 1980, when we only knew a certain amount [about biology], had been faster than the pace of innovation between 1980 and 2010," said Arturo Casadevall, chair of the department of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "Thinking of all the things that were found between 1950 and 1980: blood pressure medicines, antibiotics, heart transplants… and that had been learned with only a very limited amount of knowledge compared to what we know now. And I kept thinking, could things be slowing?"

Casadevall and graduate student Anthony Bowen used a pretty straightforward technique to try and answer the question. They compared the NIH budget, adjusted for inflation, with the number of new drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the increases in life expectancy in the U.S. population over the same time period.

Those crude health measures didn't keep pace with the research investment. Funding increased four-fold since 1965, but the number of drugs only doubled. Life expectancy increased steadily, by two months per year.

But Pierre Azoulay, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management who has spent several years trying to answer the same question said that although the study is well-intentioned, it is rife with limitations and assumptions. For example, new drugs or life expectancy improvements will lag the science that lays the foundation for them, often by years or even decades. So examining the NIH budget year by year and comparing it to the number of drug approvals in that same year isn't a good measure of whether the investment is working.

"The question is whether that’s an interesting thing and whether that’s a policy-relevant fact. I would say not," Azoulay said. "I would say it is possible the productivity of biomedical research expenditures has been going down over time. It’s not outside the realm of possibilities, but we’re not going to learn whether this is a fact from this study."

Azoulay pointed out a number of other limitations . Although the researchers adjusted for inflation, they didn't take into account the increased cost of doing research. They didn't look at investment by the private sector. The research team did acknowledge that gains in life expectancy are harder to make when the average lifespan has increased due to previous success. But what this study -- and a handful of others published over the past few years -- may bring to light is not a stark drop in the efficiency of the U.S. federal expenditure on biomedical science, but our stunningly imperfect understanding of how to measure the return on the investment.

"NIH agrees that it is critical to assess whether progress in biomedical research is achieving its ultimately desired outcome – better health for the nation and the world," Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, said in a statement. "That is, however, a challenging task, and previous published economic analyses of the return on investment for NIH-supported research have led to radically different conclusions."

For example, a 2009 study in the same journal that examined research funding over 50 years in separate categories. In four disease areas -- cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes -- as research money flowed in, the mortality rates decreased.

Casadevall and Bowen said in an interview that their data is too premature to shape policy, but both believe it is important for scientists to begin to use the tools of science to understand how to make the best possible investments.

One possible interpretation of their data, Casadevall said, is that it has gotten tougher to make gains in life expectancy or new drugs because the easier diseases have been solved, leaving the trickiest ones -- such as Alzehimer's and Parkinson's -- to be unraveled. That might suggest that more investment will be needed to make progress.

However, the broader question of whether the federal expenditure on research really leads to gains in health is a crucial and sometimes divisive one. Calls for an expansion in funding for biomedical research have become pervasive as scientists find their livelihoods threatened by years of flat funding from the federal government, and they passionately argue that funding cuts will ultimately stall advances in medicine. Some critics believe that the underlying premise -- that more research money means more breakthroughs and better health -- needs to be more scientifically examined.

"I think where we need to start is here," said Daniel Sarewitz, a professor of science and society at Arizona State University. " We’re still in the grip of this silly belief if you pour more money into knowledge creation, you’ll get more benefit. Let’s have a conversation about the kinds of institutions we really need."

The economics of Ebola

2014-09-24-WP-prioritizing-drug-development-to-fight-ebola

We must prioritize drug development to fight Ebola
By Editorial Board
Washington Post, 2014-09-24

...

Good public health practices —
locating and isolating the sick,
containing the virus with cordons to stop the chain of transmission —
are still the basic weapons against a disease for which
there is no cure, vaccine or therapeutic.
But as the WHO warns, the traditional approach may fail.
If that happens, vaccines and therapeutics will become essential.
Unfortunately, not a single drug or vaccine is ready.

Drug development is expensive and complex.
In the United States, much of the biomedical basic research
is supported by the government,
but the development of new drugs largely occurs in the private sector,
driven by the market.
Until this year, there was no market for Ebola virus treatments
because earlier outbreaks were all relatively small.
Although there are some experimental therapies against Ebola,
none have developed very far.
Some of these investigational compounds exist only because of
extensive investment of the U.S. government in biodefense preparedness over the past 14 years.
The worry was Ebola could be used as a bioterrorism weapon;
now Mother Nature seems to have pulled the trigger instead.

Intense development work on experimental drugs and vaccines
is underway in the United States and United Kingdom,
but it is not simple to create a new treatment,
put it through clinical trials and manufacture it.
Sensitive ethical and logistical questions surround these new remedies,
especially if there is a limited supply.
Although the need is urgent,
rigorous testing for safety and efficacy cannot be short-circuited.
But the government, researchers and the private sector
must make the quest for therapeutics and vaccines a high priority
in case the worst-case scenarios come true.

---

[Part of the WHO report is as follows
(but the emphasis is added by the author of the current blog):]

...

Because Ebola virus is spread mainly through contact with
the body fluids of symptomatic patients,
transmission can be stopped by a combination of
early diagnosis, contact tracing, patient isolation and care,
infection control, and safe burial.1

...


Conclusions

These data indicate that
without drastic improvements in control measures,
the numbers of cases of and deaths from EVD are expected to continue increasing
from hundreds to thousands per week in the coming months.

---