Late last month, something went seriously wrong in the underground tunnels beneath the Iranian nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz.  I don't know if it was an explosion, on-site sabotage, an accident, or a cyber attack, but eight people were killed, and several others are being treated for irradiation.  The tunnel leading to the damaged sector has been walled off.  And another disaster, several days earlier, took place at the heavy-water facility at Arak, whose existence has been public knowledge since the mid-nineties. Along with the explosion in a gas line leading to a new, secret, nuclear facility in a mountain near Fordow, this makes three setbacks to the Iranian regime's nuclear program.  Maybe their feng shui has gone negative in anticipation  of the oft-dreaded Year of the Snake, but whatever the explanation - no doubt the supreme leader sees the omnipresent satanic activity of the Jews hard at work - things are not going swimmingly for the terror masters in Tehran. Why, then, would Obama lead from his behind and support them?

The reason in a nutshell?  China's vast reserve of cheap workers in the hinterland is vanishing at a vertiginous pace. We can now discern more or less when the catch-up growth miracle will sputter out. Another seven years or so -- enough to buoy global coal, crude, and copper prices for a while -- but then it will all be over. China's demographic dividend will be exhausted. Beijing revealed last week that the country's working age population has already begun to shrink, sooner than expected. It will soon go into "precipitous decline," according to the International Monetary Fund. Japan hit this inflexion point fourteen years ago, but by then it was already rich, with $3 trillion of net savings overseas. China has hit the wall a quarter century earlier in its development path. The ageing crisis is well-known. It is already six years since a Chinese demographer shocked Davos with a warning that his country might have to resort to mass suicide in the end, shoving pensioners onto the ice. Less known is the parallel - and linked - labor drain in the countryside. A new IMF paper - "Chronicle of a Decline Foretold: Has China Reached the Lewis Turning Point?" - says the reserve army of peasants looking for work peaked in 2010 at around 150 million. The numbers are now collapsing.

You've probably heard of the spectacular migrations of hundreds of millions of monarch butterflies, which home in on one small region of Mexico for the winter then return as far north as Canada in a flight of thousands of miles that takes more than one generation. Clearly the insects have an inherited "map" of where to go, but what compass do they use? It seems they have at least two compasses. One is a "time-compensated sun compass," located in their antennae, which calculates bearings from the angle of the sun corrected for the time of day. But butterflies can also use the Earth's magnetic field to navigate. The butterfly antennae contain a protein molecule called cryptochrome, which can apparently act as a magnetic compass when exposed to blue or violet light. Human beings and other mammals also have a cryptochrome in their retinas, albeit in slightly different form, but until recently it was thought not to have magnetic directional properties. Recently Dr. Steven M. Reppert of the University of Massachusetts Medical School and his colleagues took the human version of the gene that's the recipe for cryptochrome and genetically engineered it into flies, replacing the flies' own version. They then showed that, presented with two routes in a maze, the flies could choose a magnetic direction they had been trained to associate with a sugar reward, and they did so just as well with the "human" cryptochrome as with their own. If it is at least possible to use our cryptochrome molecules to sense direction from the Earth's magnetic field, do we?

Who are the most unpleasant people on the internet? Obviously with so much competition, it is, to paraphrase Dr Johnson, like arguing the toss between lice and fleas. Disability rights activists would be a strong contender.  Thanks to them, money which could go to the genuinely needy is instead being hijacked by scroungers and fakes. Yet this doesn't just apply to disability rights, of course. It applies to almost everything in the political domain. Pick any issue - the environment, education, healthcare, the economy - and time and again you'll find the agenda has been successfully hijacked by a handful of zealots who are not remotely representative of the broader public interest. Why? Because politicians will do almost anything for a quiet life and find it much easier to buy off noisy troublemakers by capitulating to their demands, however unreasonable, than to take a principled stand. Also, of course, it's much, much easier for a lobby group to make a powerful, emotive case for more government spending on its favorite deserving cause than it is for the government to explain why it can't afford it. I don't know about you lot, but I've had just about enough of this apathy, ignorance, purblind denialism and culpable dishonesty.

Did you know that the Earth is getting greener, quite literally? Satellites are now confirming that the amount of green vegetation on the planet has been increasing for three decades. This will be news to those accustomed to alarming tales about deforestation, overdevelopment and ecosystem destruction. This possibility was first suspected in 1985 by Charles Keeling, the scientist whose meticulous record of the content of the air atop Mauna Loa in Hawaii first alerted the world to the increasing concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Mr. Keeling's famous curve showed not only a year-by-year increase in carbon dioxide levels but a season-by-season oscillation in the concentration. The latest and most detailed satellite data, which is yet to be published but was summarized in an online lecture last July by Ranga Myneni of Boston University, confirms that the greening of the Earth has now been going on for 30 years. Between 1982 and 2011, 20.5% of the world's vegetated area got greener, while just 3% grew browner; the rest showed no change. What explains this trend? Man-made nitrogen fertilizer causes crops to grow faster, but it is having little effect on forests. There are essentially two possibilities: climate and carbon dioxide itself. Warmer, wetter weather should cause more vegetation to grow. But even without warming, an increase in carbon dioxide should itself accelerate growth rates of plants. CO2 is a scarce resource that plants have trouble scavenging from the air, and plants grow faster with higher levels of CO2 to inhale.

Back in the mid-1920s, the head of the German Central Bank, Herr Hjalmar Schacht, went to New York to see Germany's gold. However the NY Fed officials were unable to find the pallet of Germany's gold bullion. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Strong was mortified, but to put him at ease Herr Schacht turned to him and said "Never mind, I believe you when you say the gold is there. Even if it weren't you are good for its replacement." But that was then and this is now. In the eyes of the Germans - and who can blame them? - America has lost its mojo to such a degree that it can no longer be trusted honor its debts, even in the unlikely event that it were financially capable of doing so. Which is why, following in the footsteps of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez (who may be an idiot but is definitely no fool), Germany is repatriating its gold from the New York Federal Reserve, which will now be stored in Frankfurt. Now, why in the world would they do that?  Don't they trust Obama with their gold?

The world is moving step by step towards a de facto Gold Standard, without any meetings of G20 leaders to announce the idea or bless the project. Some TTPers will already have seen the GFMS Gold Survey for 2012 which reported that central banks around the world bought more bullion last year in terms of tonnage than at any time in almost half a century. They added a net 536 tons in 2012 as they diversified fresh reserves away from the four fiat suspects: dollar, euro, sterling, and yen. Gone is the illusion that the euro would take its place as the twin pillar of a new G2 condominium alongside the dollar. That hope has faded. Central bank holdings of euro bonds have fallen back to 26%, where they were almost a decade ago. Neither the euro nor the dollar can inspire full confidence, although for different reasons. The euro is a dysfunctional construct, covering two incompatible economies (northern vs. southern Europe), prone to lurching from crisis to crisis, without a unified treasury to back it up. The dollar stands on a pyramid of debt. We all know that this debt will be inflated away over time - for better or worse. The only real disagreement is over the speed.

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.