Princeling Jiang Mianheng, son of former leader Jiang Zemin, is spearheading a project for China's National Academy of Sciences with a start-up budget of $350m. He has already recruited 140 PhD scientists, working full-time on thorium power at the Shanghai Institute of Nuclear and Applied Physics. He will have 750 staff by 2015. The aim is to break free of the archaic pressurized-water reactors fueled by uranium -- originally designed for US submarines in the 1950s -- opting instead for new generation of thorium reactors that produce far less toxic waste and cannot blow their top like Fukushima. "China is the country to watch," said Baroness Bryony Worthington, head of the All-Parliamentary Group on Thorium Energy, who visited the Shanghai operations recently with a team from Britain's National Nuclear Laboratory.  "They are really going for it, and have talented researchers. This could lead to a massive break-through." The thorium story is by now well-known. It could do for nuclear power what shale fracking has done for natural gas -- but on a bigger scale.

A "rational optimist" like me thinks the world will go on getting better for most people at a record rate, not because I have a temperamental or ideological bent to good cheer but because of the data. Poverty, hunger, population growth rates, inequality, and mortality from violence, disease and weather -- all continue to plummet on a global scale. But a global optimist can still be a regional pessimist. When asked what I am pessimistic about, I usually reply: bureaucracy and superstition. Using those two tools, we Europeans seem intent on making our future as bad as we can. Like mandarins at the court of the Ming emperors or viziers at the court of Abbasid caliphs, our masters seem determined to turn relative into absolute decline. It is entirely possible that ten years from now the world as a whole will be 50 per cent richer, but Europeans will be 50 per cent poorer. As the Ming empire found out, the more government you buy, the less economic activity you get. A Fujian travelling salesman in 1400 was enmeshed in such a tangled bureaucracy that he could neither travel nor sell without bribes and permits, and he had to submit a monthly inventory of his stocks to the emperor. Sound familiar?

Peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Pacific Ocean are inseparable from peace, stability, and freedom of navigation in the Indian Ocean. Developments affecting each are more closely connected than ever. Japan, as one of the oldest sea-faring democracies in Asia, should play a greater role in preserving the common good in both regions. Yet, increasingly, the South China Sea seems set to become a "Beijing Lake," which analysts say will be to China what the Sea of Okhotsk was to Soviet Russia: a sea deep enough for the People's Liberation Army's navy to base their nuclear-powered attack submarines, capable of launching missiles with nuclear warheads. Soon, the PLA Navy's newly built aircraft carrier will be a common sight - more than sufficient to scare China's neighbors. That is why Japan must not yield to the Chinese government's daily exercises in coercion around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea.  The ongoing disputes in the East China Sea and the South China Sea mean that Japan's top foreign-policy priority must be to expand the country's strategic horizons. Japan is a mature maritime democracy, and its choice of close partners should reflect that fact. I envisage a strategy whereby Australia, India, Japan, and the US form a diamond to safeguard the maritime commons stretching from the Indian Ocean region to the western Pacific. I am prepared to invest, to the greatest possible extent, Japan's capabilities in this security diamond.

It's a brave scientist who dares to announce the turning point of a trend, the top of a graph. A paper published this week does just that, persuasively arguing that a centuries long trend is about to reverse: the use of land for farming. The authors write: "We are confident that we stand on the peak of cropland use, gazing at a wide expanse of land that will be spared for Nature." Jesse Ausubel and Iddo Wernick of Rockefeller University, and Paul Waggoner of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, have reached this conclusion by documenting the gradual "dematerialization" of agriculture. Globally, the production of a given quantity of crop requires 65% less land than it did in 1961, thanks to fertilizers, tractors, pesticides, better varieties and other factors. Even corrected for different kinds of crops, the acreage required is falling at 2% a year.  "Peak Oil" turned out to be 180 degrees wrong.  But Peak Farmland is now very real.

Many in the American Jewish community are aghast to discover that President Obama is planning to appoint former Senator Chuck Hagel to serve as Defense Secretary. If you want the skinny on how Hagel has come to be known as one of the few ferociously anti-Israel senators in the past generation, Carl from Jerusalem at Israel Matzav provides it. Meantime, all I can say is I don't understand how anyone can possibly be surprised. Shortly after word came out that Hagel is the frontrunner for the nomination, I read a quaint little blog post written by a conservative leaning commentator voicing her belief that Obama wouldn't want to risk his relations with Israel's supporters by appointing Hagel. But as Powerline pointed out yesterday (12/17), this is the entire point of the nomination. Obama wants to hurt Israel. He does not like Israel. He is appointing anti-Israel advisors and cabinet members not despite their anti-Israel positions, but because of them.

Watching the nightmare in Syria unfold, you have to ask yourself: Could the Obama administration have made a worse hash out of the situation if it had tried? Short of an outright Iranian victory that saw the Assad regime's power fully restored, it's hard to imagine a more dire set of circumstances for U.S. interests. The Syrian state is well on its way to imploding. A multiplicity of increasingly well-armed militias are rushing to fill the vacuum. At the forefront of the fight are a growing number of radical Islamist groups, including some affiliated with al Qaeda. The prospect that Assad' s demise will be accompanied by the use (and/or proliferation) of chemical weapons and massive communal bloodletting gets higher by the day. Libya on steroids is what we're looking at, only this time not on the distant periphery of the Middle East but in its heartland, a gaping strategic wound that is likely to threaten the stability and wellbeing of Syria's five neighbors -- critical American partners all -- for years to come. Does it require saying that it need not have been this way? Evidently yes.

The collapse has begun. Nihilism thrives in Europe. A new book written by Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe, El Suicidio Demográfico de España" (The Demographic Suicide of Spain - although in Spanish, here is a Power Point summary in English) delivers a death sentence for Europe. The German giant is also ditching.  The weekly Der Spiegel has a long article titled "A Land without Children."  The European Union, which offers its citizens every comfort, with first-rate health care, long holidays and sit-down lunches, protected jobs and generous welfare, has the world's lowest fertility rate (1.47 children per woman) and the highest percentage of a population that is over 65 years old (16.4 per cent of the population in the EU). Meanwhile, nearly one in three pregnancies in Europe is terminated by abortion, according to the Gutmacher Institute in the US, and all over Europe gay marriage is advancing (France and UK will soon approve it). The model is Spain, where you have no more "father" and "mother", but Parent (progenitor) A, and Parent (progenitor) B. In the Netherlands, you can order a mobile euthanasia van to your house. It's the first experiment in the world of door-to-door euthanasia and the insurance covers the cost of the operation.

I've been getting lots of questions on the Dubai ITU conference, which begins next Monday (12/03-14). There are a lot of misleading stories floating around. Each group in this fight has journalists that they control, and these "noble servants of the fourth estate" are dutifully raising concerns from several different angles at the same time. Now, before I explain what's happening, let me warn you that it's an ugly mess, and that none of the players are clearly "the good guys."  So here's a breakdown on the Players, the Fights, and What Will Happen.

These are times that try men's souls, wrote Thomas Paine in 1776, and so is the time that's upon us now. So, it is time to examine our core beliefs, very clearly and plainly. More than anything else, difficult times demand that we know what we believe - not with shallow slogans, but down to our depths. "Conservative values" are not a core belief - they are derivative, not primary. The term is, at best, a short-hand reference to a set of ideas. But unless you have a very clear grasp of what those values are, the slogan becomes a cheap imitation. We must know the real thing, not merely a group of words that stand in its place. Have you ever asked yourself what makes a government legitimate? Legitimacy in human government is far more important than force. Ruling humans by force alone is a losing proposition: The ruled will adapt; they'll hide their grain before it can be taken, or they'll just leave. In order to rule humans successfully, they have to be willing. This willingness can be attained either by manipulation or by convincing people that joining together provides better results. A government that convinces people to support it has a valid claim to legitimacy. A government that manipulates people into supporting it does not.

I may have awakened him.  The late James Jesus Angleton, once the chief of CIA counterintelligence, sounded kinda groggy to me after I got him-loud and clear!-on my famously untrustworthy ouija board.  Of course I have no idea whether he gets to sleep at all.  I don't quite know exactly "where" he is, after all, and he doesn't answer direct questions on the subject.  Anyway, there he was, and I started right in. ML:  So what am I supposed to think about Petraeus? JJA:  That you're living in a country where espionage is rampant. ML:  Huh? JJA:  Have you read those stories about the "software breakdowns" in the Romney get-out-the-vote program "Orca"? ML:  Sure, it didn't work, passwords didn't work, it was a gigantic snafu. JJA:  Uh huh.  And has anyone raised the possibility that the Romney organization was penetrated in order to introduce "fatal errors" in their computers?

The wonders of US shale gas continue to amaze. We receive fresh evidence by the day that swathes of American industry have acquired a massive and lasting advantage in energy costs over global rivals, demolishing assumptions about US economic decline. Some fifty new projects have been unveiled in the US petrochemical industry. A $30bn investment blitz in underway in ethelyne and fetilizer plants alone. This is happening just as other clusters of manufacturing - machinery, electrical products, transport equipment, furniture, etc - are "re-shoring" back from China to the US. A 16% annual rise in Chinese wages over the last decade has changed the game. PricewaterhouseCoopers calls it the "Homecoming: Why a resurgence in US manufacturing may be the next big bet." The revival of the chemical industry is a spin-off from the greater drama of America's energy rebound, though a very big one. The US Energy Department announced last week that the country will produce 11.4m barrels a day (b/d) of oil, biofuels, and liquid hydrocarbons next year, almost as much as Saudi Arabia. This is largely due to hydraulic fracturing - blasting rock with water jets - to extract shale gas and oil. Europe is going in the opposite direction, drifting towards energy suicide. So is Japan.