Joe Biden says the US won't try to stop secession in Iraq?

Quoteth the New York Times:

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. told Iraqi leaders on Friday that he and President Obama were committed to helping them resolve their political differences, but he warned that the United States would be unlikely to remain engaged in Iraq if the country reverted to sectarian violence, American officials said.

First of all, I doubt this is true. Even if the American public would not tolerate another over internvetion in the case of possible secession, I have no doubt that the Obama administration would pick sides and try to throw money and guns at whoever is promising to keep Iraq whole.

But besides that – what kind of message does Joe Biden think he's sending, exactly? I assume he intended it towards Malaki and his parochial interests, but it sounds like something that would please the Sunnis and Kurds (and even Malaki's rivals among the Shiites, like Ayad Alawai).

The reason I think that Joe Biden's promise of nonintervention is hollow is that the secession of the Kurds – who would likely be the first to split if the US declared a hands-off approach – would greatly offend US ally Turkey, which is doing everything it can to keep hold on to its own restive Kurdish region. The US would lose a rare friend in the Middle East, and Europe might lose the opportunity to break Russia's monopoly on transiting natural gas from the Caspian Sea with the Nabucco pipeline (though admittedly the Russians have already all but killed the deal).

I imagine that the inspiration for Joe Biden's remarks are his own personal convictions – back in 2006, when he was on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, his play for Iraq was to split it up into three autonomous regions loosely bound into one nation. That was probably the most intelligent thing I'd ever heard Biden say, though I wish he'd gone further and called for three totally independent states, Turkey be damned.

The Seattle PI doesn't seem that dead to me

My work this summer involves an hour or two of scouring the internet for energy-related news articles, and once or twice a week I ask myself the question: was it the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that ceased print publication in March? I had the feeling that it was, but it seemed odd that I was still finding so much news from them – certainly more so than still-printing big city secondary papers papers like the New York Post and the Daily News, and even more than the papers of record in large cities in, say, Texas. I understand that a lot of people lost their jobs and local coverage may have suffered, but at least they cover national news well enough for me to decide that an article or two each week covered whatever energy topic better than any others.

White firefighters case may have implications for college enrollment and affordability

In January, I blogged about a paper that argued that the rise in college graduates was due to a specific Supreme Court case, Griggs v. Duke Power, decided in 1971. The ruling implied that that any test given by employers to prospective employees was liable to be found illegal under anti-discrimination laws, unless the results were proportional to the racial makeup of the candidate pool. Without tests to determine the caliber of applicants, the study's authors suggest that employers began using college degrees to determine whether or not to hire an employee, which caused the the college boom – both in enrollment and cost – in the late '70s, which has continued up until today.

The Supreme Court, however, has just recently overturned Griggs v. Duke Power, in the controversial "white firefighters case," Ricci v. DeStefano. The media has been up in arms about it mostly because Obama's Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor, was part of the lower court which dismissed the case out of hand, finding for the city and against the white (plus one Hispanic) firefighters. But after the nomination battle is over, I'll be very interested to see if there's an uptick in aptitude testing on the part of employers, and if that results in a decline in college enrollment...and if so, if anybody even realizes why it happened.

Clampdown on cocaine in Mexico yields violence in Canada

The LA Times gets it:

Authorities trace the violence to the recent government crackdown on cocaine traffickers in Mexico, which has squeezed profit margins for cocaine north of the U.S. border.

Canada's outlaw retailers are fighting to the death over market share, police say, a situation exacerbated by personal vendettas and power vacuums left by the arrests of gang leaders.

"The war in Mexico directly impacts on the drug trade in Canada. . . . There's a complete disruption of the flow of cocaine into Canada, and we are seeing the result," said Pat Fogarty, operations officer for the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit, British Columbia's main law enforcement agency targeting organized crime.

Ron Paul's economic adviser Peter Schiff probably running for Chris Dodd's Senate seat

Learned this one on the Daily Show last night, confirmed by the Wikipedia article. Peter Schiff, Ron Paul's former economic adviser, is leaning towards running for Chris Dodd's Senate seat.

Schiff is probably best known for his prescience about the state of the American housing sector and economy, and for having enabled a cottage industry of Peter Schiff-was-right best-of YouTube videos of him getting laughed at on cable news shows as far back as 2002 for calling out the housing bubble.

Chris Dodd and his eyebrows, on the other hand, have made every possible mistake regarding the financial crisis. He's got a pretty long rap sheet, being fingered by his copiously cited Wikipedia article in multiple different scandals related to Country Wide, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, AIG, and Bear Sterns. Back in 2003 he was among the Congressional Democrats who blocked Bush's proposed reforms of Freddie and Fannie, and in 2007 he blew off his job as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee to pursue a hopeless presidential campaign.

The attack ads just about write themselves. Dodd's been blathering on camera for decades, and there's no shortage of 5-second pithy clips of Schiff being right. Peter Schiff's probably got deep pockets – he is, after all, the investor who got it right – so I expect a fierce campaign from him. I'm not sure that voters are going to look that deeply, but he'll be in a much stronger position if the dollar drops by November 2010, since he's been predicting it for years.

Unfortunately for Schiff, he's not the only one who wants the Republican nomination. He'll be up against Rob Simmons, member of the US House from Connecticut who narrowly lost his seat in 2006, and Sam Galigiuri, a state senator. But if elected, I'm pretty sure Peter Schiff would be the only believer in Austrian economics in the Senate.

Why Russia supports Iran's nuclear program

This is exactly why Russia is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons - so that Tehran and Washington will never normalize relations, and Russia will maintain its grip on natural gas flows westwards from the Caspian:

Iran can participate in the EU backed gas Nabucco pipeline if Washington normalises relations with Tehran, the US Secretary of State's Special Envoy for Eurasian Energy said today.

Bits on patents

From the Southeast Texas Record the notoriously patent plaintiff-friendly court, venue the US Eastern Texas District of Texas, has long some of its fangs:

The country's most active patent docket, the U.S. Eastern District of Texas, took a swing toward defendants when The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a powerful writ of mandamus against the East Texas court for its lack of consideration for forum convenience.

The ruling, according to legal experts across the country, has already changed the pace of patent case filings in East Texas, a small legal outpost known for its expertise in patent legislation, but also known for its plaintiff-friendly juries and courts.

"The rocket docket engine has either slowed down or shut off completely," Strand said. The East Texas court was a famed "rocket docket" for the rapid pace that it processed cases, most favorably for plaintiffs.

Though patent experts don't think a court as powerful as the Eastern Texas District will reemerge, the author notes that Delaware is pretty friendly towards plaintiffs in patent cases. Interestingly enough, it looks like the Delaware Attorney General's office is a Biden property, and the Bidens sure love cramming intellectual property down people's throats:

Delaware has emerged in recent years as a very popular venue for plaintiffs' attorneys in a variety of civil cases, particularly since Democratic Attorney General Beau Biden took office.

A USA Today story in 2008 noted Biden worked for a large plaintiff firm before becoming attorney general. His father, now Vice President Joe Biden, has a long history of backing plaintiffs' rights to try their case, often working to kill tort reform legislation.

The Bidens' campaign accounts have both benefited from large donations by trial lawyers and their related political action committees. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, employees at three law firms that specialize in asbestos litigation were among Beau Biden's top 10 all-time contributors.

In other not-so-unrelated patent news, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Bilski case, which would revisit the question of whether software and business methods are patentable. Likely future Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor has a largely pro-intellectual property rights history, and her decisions seem to lean towards favoring IP rights holders. And there's this disturbingly idiotic conclusion that she once reached:

As a federal trial judge in New York in 1997, Judge Sotomayor sided with producers of the "Seinfeld" TV show, ruling that a book of trivia based on the show effectively stole the show's material.

" 'The Seinfeld Aptitude Test' seizes upon the notion which lies at the very heart of 'Seinfeld' that there is humor in the mundane, seemingly trivial aspects of everyday life," Judge Sotomayor wrote. "Simply put, without 'Seinfeld' there can be no 'Seinfeld Aptitude Test.' "

I'm not sure of the source on this, but I remember hearing that the perennial Patent Reform Act of [current year] might be put on the back burner pending a Supreme Court ruling. I'm not sure which would be a more pro-reform venue – the Supreme Court or Congress – though the movement does seem to have a bit more momentum this year than I remember it having, so we'll see.

Belarus' quiet economic liberalization

...but political liberalization is still off the table. Radio Free Europe reports:

Lukashenka said, "We have done a lot in this direction [of liberalizing the economy]. We have lessened the tax pressure."

But he warned that people must be aware "liberalization is not a one-time act," and said "some charlatans and boneheads" understand it as allowing them to do anything they want.

Lukashenka said that is "a road to chaos."

As for political liberalization, he said "we have had enough of it."

The World Bank's business regulation survey "Doing Business" named Belarus among the top 10 reformers worldwide. This really long Euromoney article says that the regime is liberalizing the banking sector at a pretty fast clip. Investors include foreigners (excluding foreign managers has been a big mistake of the Russian privatization schemes), but unfortunately this includes Russian investors along with West European banks like Austria's Raiffiisen. The fear with Russian banks is that rather than profit-seeking rational actors, they will act as a Russian foreign policy apparatus, much like what happens every winter for Belarus and/or Ukraine when Gazprom finds a pretext to shut off gas for a couple of days.

The Twitter Revolution

So I got an article about Moldova's would-be "Twitter Revolution" published on Splice Today. You can read it here in its entirety.

How farm subsidies led to swine flu

Though scientists have not found the "smoking pig," as one person put it, Wired reports that at least some scientists seem reasonably sure that its fast mutation was the result of factory farming practices:

Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. Experts warned then that a pocket of the virus would someday evolve to infect humans, perhaps setting off a global pandemic.

The new findings challenge recent protests by pork industry leaders and U.S., Mexican and United Nations agriculture officials that industrial farms shouldn’t be implicated in the new swine flu, which has killed 176 people and on Thursday was formally declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization.

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” said Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production, and a long-time critic of the so-called “contained animal feeding operations.”

It's worth mentioning that factory farming gets a huge boost from US crop subsidies [pdf], since the largest input in raising animals is the food necessary to feed them. Obama has claimed to be against farm subsidies, but in reality his call to end $100 million worth of them is nothing compared to the tens of billions that the federal government spends every year to subsidize big agriculture, the meat industry, and fast food restaurants. When you think about it that way, swine flu is actually one of the more benign outcomes of farm subsidies.