John Robb's Weblog

The ongoing bluster in many quarters...

over fears of a US attack on Iran (and there appears to be lots of it circulating) indicates that that collapsing Iran scenario I wrote in February of last year may actually play out as scripted.

Live traffic on Google maps

Nice. Now, how long before phones use Google maps to provide in car navigation? GPS is easy to add. Perhaps the iPhone will do it. It has the screen real-estate to pull it off. That way, the iPhone has the potential to replace an $800 navigation system.

The Black Swan

Working through the galleys of Nassim Taleb's new book, "The Black Swan," right now. Excellent.

Shifting alliances

Syed Shahzed of the AsiaTimes claims that Pakistan has cut a deal with a Taliban commander to support their insurgency in Afghanistan and disconnect a portion of the Taliban from al Qaeda.

Chinese "bubble" investing

WSJ: The market's rapid rise since mid-2005 has made stocks an increasingly important part of the lives of many Chinese. The gains have been fueled by millions of new investors -- from retirees to college students -- who have poured into street-level brokerage outlets to sign up for trading accounts. Online trading is gaining in popularity too. Since Chinese stocks rarely sell for more than a few pennies a piece, barriers to entry are low and as many as 90,000 accounts have been opened per day in recent weeks. It's hard to imagine China engineering a "soft landing." Too many years of excessive optimism. Too much investment. Too much corruption. Like 19th century economies, China is operating on the wire of capitalism without a net. This allows rapid gains, but it risks rapid and sometimes jarring tumbles. Yesterday was a taste of what is going to come given that the US is slowly edging towards some level of economic retrenchment. Remember, if the US economy sneezes, the Chinese economy gets pneumonia.

Mahdi Army housecleaning

IS: Sources in the capital say that Mahdi Army members have been disappearing or turning up dead in the Sadr City, Kadhimiya, and Baladiyat areas of the capital. However, the usual anti-Mahdi Army culprits of the US and rival Iraqi militias are not to blame for the deaths and disappearances, according to the rumor mill. These are said to be inside jobs. Going from loose militia to 4GW force...

Local production of advanced IEDs

On the ability of insurgents to build advanced IEDs: "Originally it was thought they were made out of country, now we just don't know," he said. "We originally thought these (bombs) came into Iraq already created," he said, adding that it now appeared militants were assembling the bombs locally."

PBCore

This PBCore metadata dictionary and XML schema is pretty cool. It would be a nice foundation for a PB platform if it ever gets built. As a stand alone, I'm not sure how much value it will provide (which means that adoption will be slow and irregular).

Selective potholes

Chris Allbritton in his 'Edition du Liban:'

I have my criticisms of Hezbollah, but they don’t want to take over the whole country. For one, they don’t want the responsibility. They want to be a resistance movement fighting the Israelis; they don’t want to be in charge of filling potholes in Tariq el-Jdeide. They want enough power within the current system to guarantee the south remains theirs, so they can move freely in and out of it and keep their weapons, which is the real base of their power.

Centrifuges

The IAEA states that Iran has nearly 1,000 centrifuges currently operating at Natanz. 3,000 are expected by May. Could it reach 6,000 by November/December with enough bomb grade material by January/February 2008 to build a nuke?

This seems much faster than the conventional analysis, but all the open source data appears to point to this. I think the error lies in trying to develop a "most likely" target date given all the potential pitfalls rather than a "worst case" date that extrapolates any recent acceleration in the trend line. It also may be due to 'out of date' analysis still reverberating through the media.

Regardless, the industrialization of this process is accelerating this situation faster than the politics. Crunch time is here.