Russia was one of the two UN Security Council members responsible for greenlighting the Assad regime’s crackdown on dissidents. Now Russia is reportedly losing patience with the ongoing massacres, as if they couldn’t see this coming:

“This may be the last chance for Syria to avoid a protracted bloody civil war,” Medvedev told Kofi Annan, the U.N. and Arab League envoy to Syria, during a meeting in Moscow. “Therefore we will provide any assistance at any level.”

Syria has become an experiment in non-intervention to match Libya. Unfortunately for the do-nothings of international security, the Syrian experiment is not going well. Casualties are already lapping the death toll in Libya and will likely double or triple it before violence ends — and when that will happen is anyone’s guess, because thanks to China and Russia the actual “last chance” to stop a full-blown civil war passed months ago.

China’s Potemkin economic growth has produced vast, empty apartment buildings, malls, neighborhoods, factories, and other developments. A theme park advertised as the Disney of the Far East was never finished, and now faces the creative destruction of an older Chinese civilization:

Once outside again, I came across some farmers who originally owned the land and are now using it to once again to grow their crops. Their tracks and plantations can be seen running through and surrounding the uncompleted buildings. Walking further, I came across a rather farcical sight of some farmers digging a well next to a castle; a moment I will always savor as a photographer in a place like China where castles are not in huge supply. I explained this to the farmers and they just shrugged their shoulders, oblivious to a photographer’s happiness. I asked them what happened, and they simply answered the developers ran out of money, and they are getting back to doing what they do best. They are even slowly starting to plant trees and build shelters near the buildings, adding they think it is now safe to think the developers are never coming back. This I can believe, as the absence of any security (something very rare in China) leads one to think that even the developers have given up on what is already there.

Go read the rest here.

If I had an exciting, revolutionary new product that was going to change the world, help resolve critical problems, for which demand will only grow in the future, and that I wanted to manufacture right here in the United States for export around the world, it wouldn’t matter what the product was. Americans would celebrate by lining up to work for me.

Moreover, if I was one of several entrepreneurs looking to start up such a concern in a global marketplace, you wouldn’t be surprised if I or some of my competitors went out of business in the process. That’s supposed to be a normal part of the economy, right? Of course! For example, the Big Three automakers emerged from hundreds of companies that no longer exist. See above.

In this case, the industry is solar power — which already employs more Americans than steel production — and a solar startup, Solyndra, which recently laid off 1,100 workers and filed for Chapter 11 protection. That failure would have been back-page news if not for $535 million in federal loan guarantees, less than 2% of the Department of Energy’s Loan Guarantee Program (LGP) under the ARRA stimulus act and less than the $1.1 billion invested in Solyndra by a host of venture capitalists, including the heirs of Wal-Mart.

So if the federal government is a bad venture capitalist, it’s certainly no worse than the billionaires who kept giving Solyndra money. And really, is it surprising that Solyndra might have been lying to its investors? Hasn’t that become normal business culture in America?

But the Solyndra bankruptcy has also produced a lot of angry reactive press about green energy investment, and that’s a shame because the solar industry is actually going through a massive expansion. The solar market is wide-open for competing technologies, some of which will fail while others succeed. Solyndra was a victim of its product design:

(T) he firm’s central innovation, a thin film technology that avoided the use of silicon, proved to be far less important when refined silicon prices collapsed after Solyndra’s founding; the remaining installation cost advantages provided by the company’s cylindrical solar panels proved too small, and Solyndra was unable to capture the manufacturing cost reductions that have helped other U.S. thin film companies, like First Solar, thrive despite low silicon prices.

Indeed, Evergreen Solar — which also emphasized a low-silicon approach — went bankrupt earlier this year, as did SpectraWatt, where quality control issues played a role. Remember, in a free and fair market, firms live or die on their own. Investors take risks, and sometimes take baths. Taking a risk in Solyndra, or Evergreen, or SpectraWatt, is natural to the act of investing in them.

In the old days, they used to call taxpayer loan guarantees “industrial policy.” Nowadays, it’s often misnamed “socialism.” But it’s actually called democratic capitalism, and anyone who tells you different doesn’t know what they’re talking about. It’s when governments invest in promising industrial sectors to accelerate their development.

What’s more, it’s not like the White House picked winners and losers in the solar industry. That is the common complaint about federal investment in green industries like solar, and the attendant red-baiting that goes with it: the government shouldn’t be picking winners and losers. The market should do that — right?

But everyone would agree the government shouldn’t keep giving money to losers, which is why the DoE refused to refinance Solyndra a second time (Solyndra declared bankruptcy the next day). Meanwhile, other solar firms will also fail according to the immutable, natural laws of the market, and some of them will have federal loan guarantees. Others will go on to be the Fords and GMs of the American solar industry. It’s only picking winners and losers if the government doesn’t let them fail, or succeed, according to their ability.

Solyndra wasn’t able. Others are. It is natural for booming new markets to see lots of startups, and then see lots of them fail. The solar boom is no different from any other industrial boom that way. There were hundreds of solar startups in 2009, with more than a dozen startups in electric generation the year before. As one source put it while predicting a bloodbath in 2010,

Now that the business plans have been launched and funding has taken place, is there a way to pick winners and losers from this pool of solar entrepreneurs?  Only a few of these firms will survive – that’s not cynicism, that’s just VC start-up math.

[...]

Companies like Nanosolar and IPO-bound Solyndra have been at it for seven and five years respectively, have raised more than $1.2 billion dollars between the two of of them and have used every financial source available to fund their efforts – angel funding, venture capital, private equity, strategic funds, local and federal government grants and loans, etc.  Both of these firms set forth on a wildly innovative technology path and have executed well on that technology.  The proof of the pudding for these very different CIGS solar firms is going to be measured in their dollars per Watt and cost per Watt capex.  And those numbers are still either unproven (Nanosolar) or currently way too high, in Solyndra’s case.

The company that cannot control costs will not succeed. Price rules in a free market. PV (photovoltaic) systems — the panels and cells and films that create electric current from sunlight — are a buyer’s market commodity right now because (A) there are a lot of startups (B) China, which I’ll get back to in a moment.

So while solar manufacturers struggle, low costs are creating a dramatic increase in solar installations. This is the scaling effect that solar power’s champions have long predicted would happen as the price per kilowatt of solar became competitive with other energy sources. Look at residential installations:

Or better yet, total solar generation capacity:

As far as picking winners and losers, solar power is a winner. Samsung predicts the solar market will more than double in size in the next eight years. Solar is such a winner that domestic manufacturers also face stiff competition from overseas, competing with Germany, Spain, Japan and China.

Oh, yes — about China.

China provides far more financing to its solar industry than the United States. More than any of its competitors, China dares to have a strategy and invest real money in it, which is why much of the American solar PV manufacturing industry has already moved to China (though not all of it by any means). China now owns as much as three-fifths of global production capacity, with costs still plummeting.

The difference isn’t in wages, but cheap capital: China surpassed America in direct solar investment in 2009, and hasn’t looked back. America subsidized its fossil fuel sector to the tune of $70 billion from 2002-2006 (.PDF) but subsidized the entire renewable sector by less than $15 billion last year. China is spending more than two times as much, and winning the sector accordingly. Via ThinkProgress:

And that’s a shame, because solar manufacturing jobs are just that: jobs in manufacturing. We should have such jobs right here, in America, as their market balloons under market demand. The solar PV industry is shaking out, like any other industry, but God forbid American workers should earn wages building the global energy export of the 21st Century!

The White House and the Department of Energy are supposed to testify about all this on Capitol Hill today. Republicans are fishing for evidence of wrongdoing, but the awful truth about the White House’s support of Solyndra is evident in the excellent speech Obama gave at their facility:

THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you.  Everybody please have a seat.  (Applause.)  It is wonderful to be here and to see all of you here today.  And I would be remiss if I did not note the presence of your governor, give him a big round of applause, Arnold Schwarzenegger.  (Applause.)  I’m just going to go ahead and mention our district attorney, Kamala Harris, who’s here.  (Applause.) (Emphasis mine)

That was the end of the health care season; bipartisanship was in short supply. And it’s easy to see why Solyndra had so many big backers: the company offered an innovative design that solved what has been a raw material supply problem for the industry. But it wasn’t enough, just as any “connections” Solyndra had were not enough to convince the DoE to bail them out again.

Like the Hudson Hornet, Solyndra’s unique design was just one failed product in a rapidly-growing and successful industry. The United States built endless miles of pavement to foster the automobile, at a cost of trillions, without picking the cars that won or lost. Democratic capitalism creates both winners and losers because it is capitalism.

Between 1998 and 2010 there was a correlation of over 90% between changes in oil and wine prices. This encouraged the two economists to build an economic model to explain swings in the prices of crude oil and fine wine using the same variables: oil or wine production, growth rates in rich and emerging economies, and a measure of global excess liquidity.

Emerging economies have accounted for more than 100% of the increase in global oil demand since 2000, while oil consumption in rich countries has declined. Likewise, rising incomes in emerging economies have spurred wine drinking, whereas consumption in Europe, notably France and Italy, has fallen. China (including Hong Kong) overtook Britain last year as the biggest export market for Bordeaux wines. So for both wine and oil, emerging economies now account for the bulk of incremental changes in demand and therefore have the biggest influence on prices. (Emphasis mine)

Of course, the chief difference between wine and oil is the latter is a finite resource. You can keep growing grapes. The Chinese understand: they’ve cornered the world market in rare earth elements necessary for green energy and dominate the wind turbine industry. No wonder they’re gulping down Bordeaux; their chief industrial rival (America) has procrastinated for decades on its transition to a post-oil economy and shows no sign of altering course in the next two years. In their shoes, I’d celebrate too.

HuffPo reports on the hysteria:

A second China UFO sighting has residents on edge, just seven days after an unidentified flying object shut down a Chinese airport.

The new UFO sighting took place in Chongqing in eastern China on July 15. Witnesses told Shanghai Daily they saw the same thing: “four lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape that hovered over the city’s Shaping Park for over an hour.”

The “four lantern-like objects” is a reference to the glow of engines. The Chinese Long March-5 rocket comes in a four-engined design:

Not too much mystery here, I’m afraid. What is interesting, though, is that news of the sighting escaped China and wound up embedded at the Huffington Post. Admittedly, the time of day and atmospheric conditions absolutely lent themselves to video:

What’s happening here is standard authoritarian procedure: experiment without notice, deny failure, announce success. (Just so we’re clear, the same is true of contractors.) The only mystery is how the communist party continues to believe that formula is even possible in the world they have manufactured. It is almost impossible to keep a secret anymore.

What an average white guy might look like.

1. Be white.
2. Go to China.
3. Get hired as a “quality control” expert.
4. Profit!!!!

Companies in China will hire Americans to pretend to be business owners.

Apparently, “Having foreigners in nice suits gives the company face.”

See The Atlantic for more on this. I’m tempted to apply myself.

The internet is leaving China one company at a time as government efforts to erect a Great Wall of Technology repel investors. First Google, now Danica Patrick:

In December, China began to enforce a new policy that required any registrant of a new .cn domain name to provide a color head shot and other business identification, including a Chinese business registration number and physical signed registration forms. That data was to be forwarded to the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), a quasi-governmental agency. Most domain name registries require only name, address, telephone number and e-mail address.

“We were immediately concerned about the motives behind the increased level of registrant verification being required,” Christine N. Jones, general counsel of the Go Daddy Group Inc., told the Congressional-Executive Commission on China on Wednesday. “The intent of the procedures appeared, to us, to be based on a desire by the Chinese authorities to exercise increased control over the subject matter of domain name registrations by Chinese nationals.”

Until recently, Chinese authoritarianism seemed to be finding its way into the information age. No longer — the trend is away from cooperation with obsessive security and towards the exit door. This doesn’t necessarily mean the party is going to implode, but it does point to a future in which China’s internet doesn’t resemble ours.

The National Football League has tried and failed to build international audiences, but now they’ve set their sights on China with a new strategy: a reality show starring a Chinese rock band. WaPo buried the money quote on page two:

It was obvious after watching one taping that the reality show will not have the usual sheen of an NFL Films production. But then, it doesn’t have to. The intent is to produce a campy, lighthearted program that will convince Chinese children that if they want to learn the essence of America they must come to understand American football. (Emphasis mine)

They might have a point: George Will once described football as “a combination of the two worst elements of American life. Violence and committee meetings.”

Turns out the NFL’s strategy has as much to do with Sun Tzu as rock’n'roll: