tdaxp

I've written about South Korea's hateful nationalism and noncooperative behavior before, but now Seoul has gone another step in its bizarre, Arab-style retreat into the past:

This map was seen in the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the USA Passport Application page (accessed to verify a point for a debate over at The Korea Liberator and this blog). Among other weird aspects

• The map extends significantly north of the Korea-Chinese border, and emphasizes the topographic continuity of "Korea" through Eastern Manchuria.
• The map emphasizes irredentist claims against a fellow democracy, Japan
• The map makes no mention of the Stalinist regime which controls half of Korea's territory

More is available on Korea's bizarre "We love Dokdo" page, dedicated to Chosen's domination of the Liancourt Rocks.

During a time when North Korean refugees seek refuge in the United States, The Pyongyang Regime that is increasingly legitimized by South Korea devalues our currency, Secretary Rumsfeld is right to let South Korea defend herself. She is not an ally like Japan, and increasingly not even a partner like China.

The best idea moving forward?

1. The Israel Model: U.S. forces leave Korea, but continue giving it substantial assistance aimed toward a robust, independent self defense. This would require much larger capital and human investments by the South Koreans and an expansion of the South Korean reserves.

2. The Thailand Model (circa 1970’s): U.S. ground forces leave, except for regular exercises and relatively small units. A robust air component remains. This was sufficient to deter Vietnam at its apex after the fall of Saigon, Luang Prabang, and Phnom Penh.

3. The Taiwan Model: U.S. forces leave, U.S. assistance is tightly restricted, and the nation’s government, placing its faith in trade with its foes and hopes of an American rescue, allows its defense to gradually decline to a point of vulnerability.

..

7. Terminator V: U.S. forces leave Korea. Korea, with a declining human population, turns to a new race of super-intelligent warrior robots, programmed with nihilistic tendencies by a vengeful Dr. Hwang Woo-Suk. The robots, backed by their own robot air force, then conquer and subjugate both Koreas, except for a small band of ultra-nationalists on Tokdo. This band successfully defends Tokdo against the robot invasion, but starves to death a few weeks later because Tokdo is, after all, just a couple of godforsaken barren rocks.

Give Korea to the robots.

Note: This is an excerpt from a draft of my thesis, A Computer Model of National Behavior. The introduction and table of contents are also available

A.8 Mapper in Use

The following is a screenshot showing in use from May 26, 2004. The image shows the page output from Mapper in the Firefox web browser. The screenshot was taken and cropped with the GIMP. The map (green and red lines) was generated by MapMaker, a helper application for this thesis. The algorithm for determining the shape of the places is courtesy David Norman

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Computer Science Thesis Index

While I was in Fort Wayne, my friend Biz suggested that I calculate the states I had visited. He says that a state only counts as visited if one had mingled among the local people by buying some thing, and that airports did not count. I thus looked online for a clickable states visited map, and I was unimpressed with what was available. So I used a clickable electoral college map similar to the one I used for my analysis of the West Wing election

While I have an absolute electoral votes without them, I have included Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia as "undecided." Like every other American I have spent time in Atlanta's airport, I drove through Tennessee on my recent interesting adventure, and was previously in a bus in Mississippi.

May 22 (BEIJING) - Dan of tdaxp, a top-500 blogger, today announced the complete release of his noted web series, Redefining the Gap. Redefining the Gap is an innovative contribution to grand strategic analysis, combining the superb vision of New York Times best-selling author Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett with the power of hard numbers. Redefining the Gap, originally written for a graduate course in political science, was expanded and re-edited for the Internet. Redefining the Gap sheds new light Barnettian concepts, such as the "Functioning Core" and "Non-Integrating Gap," as well as ideas such as Thomas Hobbes' description of natural life as "nasty, brutish, and short."

"Basically," Dan remarked, "I took the description of 'the Gap' from The Pentagon's New Map, and applied simple statistical methods to see whether it worked or not." However, the analysis did not end there. "I was not content to see whether or not the model was good, but I wanted to see if it was actually better than existing models. So I used alternate and rival definitions of the Gap, from sources such as the United Nations, the Central Intelligence Agency, and others." Surprisingly, the main finding of Redefining the Gap was a politically sensitive criticism of Barnett's model. "If you merely define The Gap as nations that are either African or Islamic, the numbers say life in those nations is nastier, more brutish, and shorter than Barnett's broader definition." As Dan wrote in his prologue, "We are at war with Africa and Islam ... We are at war for Africa and Islam."

Redefining the Gap has already attracted interest throughout the blogosphere. "Of course, I was humbled when Dr. Barnett took interest in the project, even before completion," remarked Dan. "Yet equally humbling were comments and contributions by readers and fellow bloggers. I am delighted and honored by the response Redefining the Gap has received from the blogosphere."

On his accomplishment, Dan was philosophical. "I finished publishing Redefining the Gap the same day I visited a physically and spiritually abused cathedral, confiscated by the Communist Party decades ago. Every day during my visit to the capital of China, I am remanding what a disaster 'shrinking the Core' can be. A series of bad decisions led to the collapse of what Tom calls "Globalization I," and the worst genocides and outrages of human history. A firm knowledge of what the Gap, and the Core, really are can help prevent a repeat."

Redefining the Gap was published in 14 parts. It includes its original introduction and conclusion, as well as new prologue and results sections that are exclusive to electronic media. Redefining the Gap's literature review section covers geopolitics, early geopolitical theories, the Global South hypothesis, critical geopolitics, and Dr. Barnett's PNM Theory. The report also includes a research design as well as a section on methods and operationalizations. The series concludes with an extensive bibliography, the computer logic used in the research, and the resulting scaled data.

Redefining the Gap is part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06, a series of series that will continue as Dan reports from the People's Republic of China. Future installments include an overview of constructivist teaching methods including an interview with noted historical and educator Mark Safranski, an exploration of variations of USAF Colonel John Boyd's "OODA" Loop, and an analysis of the popular web-log Creative Anarchy from the perspective of Creativity, Talent, and Expertise.

The tdaxp blog is available online at http://tdaxp.blogspirit.com.

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Poverty will be measured by GDP per capita, measured by purchasing power parity (CIA 2006c). Estimates are recent, with most being from 2004 or 2005. The information is listed in US Dollars. My study will scale GDP per capita so that poorest value is 0 and the richest value is 1. For each state, it's value will be calculated by taking the difference between that state's value and the lowest state's value, divided by the difference between the highest state's value and the lowest state's value. The logic to read in and scale this data is included in the appendix, particularly in the function scaleData().

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Thomas P.M. Barnett defines the "non-integrating gap" as those "regions of the world that are largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule set that defines its stability" (T. Barnett 2004:xvii-xviii). Immediately he gives it a geographic description, "today, the non-integrating gap is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, virtually all of Africa, portions of the Balkans the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and most of Southeast Asia." Barnett writes that the "Gap" will be "the expeditionary theater for the U.S. military in the 21st century" (T Barnett 2003) of "failed states and feral cities" (T. Barnett 2004:151). The rest of the world, the “Functioning Core,” is in turn split “into the Old Core, anchored by America, Europe, and Japan; and the New Core, whose leading pillars are China, India, Brazil and Russia” (T. Barnett 2005:32).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

In the early 1990s, the political tilt of Global South discussions led to the emergence of critical geopolitics (Dodds 1994:275). While some have criticized the theory as appearing too soon for a valid “contexualization” of geography (C. Barnett 1995:417) others view critical geopolitics as necessary for explaining the contemporary world (Tuathail and Luke 1994:381).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

The theory of the Global North and Global South is a new geopolitical perspective. It is a new perspective that divides “the world into two blocs – the industrialized countries of the global North and the poor countries of the South” on the global level of analysis (Goldstein, Huang, and Akan 1997:242). While “Global South” is sometimes used as a synonym for the more familiar “Third World” (Hayes 1975:1261), the end of the Cold War has seen the term “Third World” and the politics behind it fall into disfavor (Pletsch 1981:569).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Political Geography (geographie politique) was defined in 1751 (Kristof 1985:1178), but it's modern study was invented by Friedrich Ratzel in his description of political geography (politische Geographie) in 1897 in terms of space and position (Kiss 1942:634). Rudolf Kjellen invented the term “geopolitics” (Agnew 1995:1; Tuathail 1994:259) shortly thereafter. Kjellen was primarily interested in how geography effects the power relations of states (Osterud 1998:191) – specifically, their land and people (Tunander 2005:548).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Geopolitics helped make geography a science by focusing on the political (Unstead 1949:47) and human (Dawson 1987:28) dimensions of geography. Halford Mackinder, an influential geopolitician, described his goal as not "to predict a great future for this or that country, but to make a geographical formula into which you could fit any political balance." (Hall 1955:109). Thus, geography is a "conditioning factor" in many parts of politics (Spkyman 1938:29). The internal (Williams 1927:142) and external (Enterline 1998:804) nature of states and how they go to war (Midlarsky 1995:224) are effected by their geopolitical position. Geopolitical analysis has survived changing constellations of great powers and technologies (Hooson 1962:20). Stable geopolitical concepts have emerged, even as academic debates on the specifics of geopolitics continue (Harkavy 2001:38).