War is not the answer, Marvin Gaye once observed, and only love can conquer hate. Now Citizens for Global Solutions is trying to translate this into policy by asking everyone to sign an electronic Valentine’s Day card to the Syrian people.  

I was going to write more, but I’ve decided to let the image speak for itself.

With apologies to Global Dashboard readers who don’t live in New York (bad luck you!) here’s an invitation to an event at NYU next week.  On Friday 10 February, the Center on International Cooperation is hosting a launch for ECFR’s European Foreign Policy Scorecard from 9.30am-11am at the NYU Law School.  Speakers include:

• Scorecard co-editor and Brookings Senior Fellow Justin Vaïsse!
• Former head of UN peacekeeping and foreign affairs guru Jean-Marie Guéhenno!!
• James Traub, superstar essayist for the New York Times and Foreign Policy!!!
• Me.

This is an open event.  Fuller details and an address for RSVPs are available here.

Our colleague and friend WPS Sidhu has written a thought-provoking column about recent revelations of nuclear proliferation - from a most unusual source:

Playboy magazine is not the most obvious choice for those preoccupied with nuclear proliferation. Yet, Joshua Pollock’s article on “The Secret Treachery of A.Q. Khan” in the January/February 2012 issue has proved to be as titillating as the all-revealing photos that made the publication infamous.

The article, written in the whodunit oeuvre, uncovers that in addition to the three known customers of the Khan network—Iran, North Korea and Libya— there was a fourth hitherto unknown customer and reveals the “last country on the list: India, Pakistan’s foe.”

It’s worth reading the whole column.  But I want to know whether the publication of Pollock’s piece resulted in a big rise of sales of Playboy in news agents around the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Vienna headquarters.  Was some aspiring Hans Blix sent out in a grubby mack to purchase copies of the top shelf magazine for his superiors?   Did IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano have to flick through pages of poorly-clad minor celebrities to find the article (curiously, there is no mention of it in his “Director’s Corner”)?  Is the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has a slightly stronger pedigree on nuclear issues, going to change its approach to illustrations now?

These are all puerile questions.  But you know you want them answered.

The Sun is up to all sorts of interesting things this week, with unusually high sunspot activity leading to a series of solar flares (or coronal mass ejections, CMEs, in the jargon). One was launched on Sunday night and arrived here only 34 hours later, a good deal faster than the usual average of 2-3 days. That led to some pretty stunning aurora borealis activity; the shot below was taken in Tromsø in Norway (h/t Bjørn Jørgensen, via the excellent SpaceWeather.com).

As it turns out, though, Sunday’s solar flare was just a warm-up. Another even larger one – scoring 9 on a strength scale that runs to 10 – set off towards us at about 4am GMT yesterday, which means it will be arriving in about 4 hours’ time (2pm GMT on 24 January).  The image below is from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory; see also this movie from SOHO, NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Does this mean we’re in for a Carrington Event? Doesn’t look like it - 95% of the CME is going to miss us, so we’ll only catch the edge. Had it hit us square on, we’d be looking at very substantial disruption to internet, GPS and telecoms. But if you live in a northern latitude and you have a clear evening, then certainly worth keeping an eye on the sky – could be pretty spectacular.

From XKCD, via Tim Harford.

Have you lost all hope given the onslaught of bad news these past few years? Well, now you have a backup plan.

A new index published in the journal Astrobiology scores planetary bodies on their suitability for life. As the Economist explains,

Tipping its hat to the possibility that aliens could have dramatically different biochemistry from earthlings, the index confines itself to measuring big-picture factors such as the presence of a solid surface, the average surface temperature, the strength of a planet’s magnetosphere (which helps shield it from cosmic radiation) and the like.

Unsurprisingly, Earth comes top of the list. Interestingly, though, Titan, a Saturnian moon covered in hydrocarbon lakes, takes the second spot in our solar system, ahead of Mars. And with a decent score too. Time to start packing?

It’s so hard to know which global threat to worry about most these days. Global warming? Weaponized bird flu? WMD? Well, now you can add the Death Star to your list. Viewers of Star Wars will of course recall the planet-sized spaceship that could blow up planets, but they may have dismissed it as entertainment.  The fools…

Such an act of destruction would seem impossible to us–it seemed so to many of the movie’s characters until it happened. But perhaps not, say three students at the University of Leicester in England who last year published a study on the subject in their university’s undergraduate physics and astronomy journal.

The study’s authors start off by making some simple assumptions: The planet being fired upon doesn’t have some sort of protection, like a shield generator. And it’s about the size of Earth but solid through and through (Earth isn’t solid, but the planet’s layers would have significantly complicated the math here). They then calculate the planet’s gravitational binding energy, which is the amount of energy required to pull apart an object. Using the mass and radius of the planet, they calculate that destruction of the object would require 2.25 x 10³² joules. (One joule is equal to the amount of energy required to lift an apple one meter. 10³² joules is a lot of apples.)

The energy output of the Death Star isn’t given directly in the movie, but the space station was said to have had a “hypermatter” reactor that had the energy output of several main-sequence stars. For an example of a main-sequence star, the authors look to the Sun, which puts out 3 x 10²⁶ joules per second, and they conclude that the Death Star could “easily afford to output [the energy required for an Earth-like planet's destruction] due to to its tremendous power source.”

Fantastic.  The only good news is that the Death Star probably couldn’t take out Jupiter without self-destructing.  Perhaps the need to get to larger planet explains China’s recent burst of enthusiasm for manned space flight?

[H/t: Vanessa Parra.]

Whatever you think of French politics – or ratings agencies – this is a super front page:

After all last year’s excitement about social media’s role in the Arab revolutions (“Think what Trotsky could have done if only he’d had a twitter feed rather than an armored train, blah, blah”), I’m delighted to see that protestors in Lagos are adopting a lower-tech but highly effective tactic.  To wit, spreading their message via cute animals:

(H/t Teju Cole’s always-excellent twitter feed.)

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the War of 1812, which kicked off when America made a  grab for what is now Canada.  There then followed a range of battles that nobody can remember properly, except that British redcoats torched the White House and Andrew Jackson won a historic victory in New Orleans (but a bit late, as a peace treaty had already been signed).  All very exciting, and there’s a super monument near the Niagara Falls to General Sir Isaac Brock, who came all the way from Guernsey to get shot and become a great Canadian hero (that’s him above).

But, let’s be honest, this war is pretty obscure to most people.  But now Ottawa is going all out to celebrate the war’s anniversary.  As the Economist notes in a wry piece this week, Canada arranged a symbolic exchange of cannon fire with the U.S. near the site of Brock’s death to celebrate the New Year.  And now the Ottawa Citizen reports that the government is attempting to buy up antique military equipment…

As part of the Harper government’s push to promote the War of 1812, the Department of National Defence wants to buy 20 complete uniforms with accessories and weapons to costume a War of 1812 Re-enactor Team at the Royal Military College. The re-enactors will be dressed as historically accurate representations of soldiers of a Battalion Company of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment of Fencible Infantry, from the period of 1812 to 1814. All of the uniforms, accessories and weapons must be delivered by March 30, 2012.

So what is the Canadian taxpayer’s money about to be spent on?

a.) Musket, India Pattern (Brown Bess), proofed safe to fire black powder as follows: A good quality, well made, accurate replica of the India Pattern (3rd model Brown Bess) Musket . . .

b.) Musket Sling: Leather sling, adjustable, of sufficient length to fit the sling swivels on the India Pattern musket.

c.) Brown Bess bayonet – Socket bayonet: fluted, triangular sectioned blade, approx. 16-17″ in length, sockets to fit snuggly over India Pattern musket barrel.

d.) Whisk and Prick: Cleaning tool- Hard, bristle brush and metal spike.

And so on, until you get to:

o.) Trousers (or Pantaloons): Drop-front trousers made from grey wool (Melton cloth, same weight as for tunics).

This is a little obsessive… if I were Barack Obama I’d be worrying that Stephen Harper was about to come and burn the White House again…

So I try to be very professional and only blog about numbers and Big Global Issues and the like.  But, you know, I do have a life too and sometimes it intrudes.  Like yesterday. For most of the day I was at home being quite delighted at the coincidence of two unlikely sources – the President of the USA and the OECD – bewailing rises in inequality.  In case you hadn’t heard, the OECD wants to tax the rich and redistribute to the poor, and the President thinks that inequality ‘hurts us all’ and ‘distorts democracy’.  Just a normal day at the office for us seekers after truth and light.

Then off I went in my Mummy guise to an exhibition in my daughter’s class at school, where each child had chosen a family member and written about their lives.  We’re talking an ordinary state primary school in a pretty affluent part of North London, where the parents include journalists, a tv exec, bankers, a chef, a social worker and a dustman.  Most of the children had written about their grandparents or great-grandparents, and I was AMAZED, really astonished, to be reminded of the different stories that had brought everyone to that place. 

Children wrote about their grandparents who left school at 12 and went to work, or about relations who were post-war refugees in Europe and came here with absolutely nothing, or people who grew up in houses with no electricity or running water.  These are children who now live in nice houses, assume they’ll go to university and get good jobs, and many of whose parents now run things.  My own story is about a combination of migration and education: my grandfather was born in a village in Eastern Europe, and saved his family from extermination by the Nazis by migrating to South Africa.  My father then travelled to the UK to study, and here I am. 

People like me get to do the kind of great jobs and live the lovely lives we do thanks to pretty impressive social mobility.  No one I know lives the same lives as their grandparents.  Ours are better in every way – we have more education, more money, more health care, better jobs, better everything. 

What the OECD report and the Obama speech reminded me was that the opportunities that opened up in recent generations are closing down as inequality rises.  We are the lucky ones who have benefited from the good education, new jobs and the possiblity of migration open to our parents and grandparents.  But the door is being closed behind us.   Surely we owe it to the memories of our own families to do everything we can to keep it open for those who follow?

[Ahem.  Thanks for indulging me.  Back to normal service with facts and stuff shortly.]

What do you look for in good political commentary?

I’m in favor of a mix of moral clarity and realistic judgment, topped off with an  incisive turn of phrase that sticks in the memory.  So I find it hard to top this observation on the recent attack on the UK embassy in Iran, culled from today’s Financial Times:

“I do not like Britain and I know it is evil, but a savage attack on their embassy not only makes us look uncivilised but means we have to pay for its consequences, which will be more sanctions and maybe a war,” says Saeed, a 42-year-old government employee.

100% crystal clear analysis.  Love it.

Few journalistic cliches are as irritating as the trope of describing some war-ridden country as “the size of Texas” or “three times the size of France”.  I recall being taught at school that an area of rain-forest “the same size as Wales” was being burned every year in Brazil.  Some wit asked if it would be possible to burn Wales instead.

Most of these comparisons are pretty meaningless because it’s reasonably hard to keep exact data on the size of France, etc., in your head.  Now, however, the BBC has come up with a useful graphic to prove that the Democratic Congo is “around two thirds the size of Western Europe.”  Nasty choice of color-scheme, though…

Spain’s general election campaign, which concludes next Sunday, has been a pretty dull affair. The Partido Popular, led by Mariano Rajoy, has maintained but failed to widen its substantial opinion poll lead over the governing (I use the word loosely) PSOE. A televised debate between the two main candidates – Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba is the PSOE’s chosen lamb to the slaughter – produced few fireworks. And the general apathy towards politics has been accentuated by the apparent predictability of the result.

Fortunately, there have been a few moments of levity. For it turns out that Mr Rajoy, generally a grey, awkward figure whose strategy is based not on enthusing the electorate as a whole but on avoiding statements that might give PSOE supporters a reason to get off their sofas and vote, is something of a ladies’ man. While he lacks the smooth charm of a Clinton – your average cricket bat is less wooden than Mr Rajoy appeared in last week’s debate – and the filthy lucre of a Berlusconi, Spain’s Prime Minister in-waiting has developed an idiosyncratic but highly effective method of appealing to the fairer sex: the Rajoy Head-Clamp.

Mr Rajoy has learned quickly. In order to avoid embarrassing rejections like this -

- the candidate has taken matters – literally – into his own hands. When I was at school, a fellow pupil who had little success in love was often accused by scurrilous peers of grabbing girls by the head in order to obtain a kiss. Mariano Rajoy uses a similar technique. Hardly a day goes by without some new picture appearing in the newspapers showing his vicelike grip on any woman who crosses his campaign trail. Here is an early example, in which he embraces a supporter despite her attempts to push him away:

And here he is – his grip firmer this time – with one of his party’s candidates for a local election:

You can see the evolution of the technique in this shot of Mr Rajoy with another supporter. This poor woman, her neck seized, has very little prospect of escape:

Even those closest to him – Mr Rajoy claims that most of his most valued advisers are women, and has said he is “comforted” that “they” [women] are playing an increasingly important role in public life – cannot escape his clutches. Here he is about to land a smacker on Esperanza Aguirre, the President of Madrid and one of his staunchest allies. Again, the Head-Clamp is deployed to devastating effect:

You might be surprised to hear that despite his easy way with women, Mr Rajoy’s gender policies have sometimes been criticised. He seems likely to take a firm line against abortion, for example, a policy many see as a denial of women’s rights. Some women are worried that he might repeal the PSOE’s gender equality laws. Here, too, however, the Head-Clamp has come in handy, for Mr Rajoy, obviously growing in confidence as more and more women succumb to his new seduction technique, has begun to use it to win round opponents. Celia Villalobos, for instance, is a rare Partido Popular figure who is in favour of abortion (and of gay marriage too, which her party strongly opposes). When Mr Rajoy met her in Málaga last week, this champion of feminism, undaunted by her radical stance, did not shrink from trying out the Head-Clamp:

There is only one line Mr Rajoy will not cross, having evidently concluded that some audiences are not yet ready for the trusty Head-Clamp. When he shows his tolerance of other religions by kissing Muslim women, he keeps his hands firmly behind his back:

Mariano Rajoy once said that “When a Spanish woman kisses, she really kisses.” In the Head-Clamp method, which it must be said gives the Spanish woman little choice, he has found a reliable tool for testing his theory.

Politico reports that Eighties muscle god Fabio thinks that President Obama is too European.  Sure, that’s not a new accusation.  But Fabio has an insider’s take:

“I come from Europe.  I don’t want this country to go the way Europe went. I believe in the American people, I don’t believe in the politicians. The politicians already ruined the rest of the world. This is the only country on the face of the planet where still things work. We don’t want to ruin it, we want to keep it the way it is. It’s called the American dream. It’s not called the European dream.”

When Fabio says that “things still work” in the U.S., we must assume he’s giving Congress a free pass.  Well, we’re glad he’s got all that off his mighty chest!