Long Road Home

Last Thursday was the fiftieth anniversary of the Portuguese revolution.

Just by chance, I was reading about the Nazi gold that the dictator Salazar squirreled away during World War II. Speaking of rodents, Salazar was a funny bunny—not at all how you’d expect a dictator to be.

Not a nutcase like Hitler or Stalin, a firebrand like Saddam, a general like Franco, or even a generalissimo like Mussolini—Salazar was celibate, and every picture I ever saw of him showed an avuncular soul. His speeches were tedious and he had the charisma of a poached egg, but he had the low cunning of a village priest—he was educated at seminary school.

In 1939, Portugal’s gold reserves were at 63.4 metric tons. By the end of the war, they had risen to 356.5 tons, roughly a six-fold increase. The narrative is that one third of that gold came directly from the Reichsbank—the central bank of Nazi Germany.

Portugal’s gold reserves, stored in a fortified vault in Carregado, photographed in 2022.

At the present time, Portugal’s gold reserves are estimated at 382.5 tons—not much more that eighty years ago.

The great sources of gold during the Second World War were the wolfram mines that produced tungsten needed by the German arms industry. Salazar was happy to sell tungsten to the Nazis, but only for gold. A complex financial web was set up involving Germany, Switzerland, and Portugal to deliver payments—not least because a good part of the gold was stolen from Jews, many of who were later killed in concentration camps.

Antonio Robalo, now 87 years old, who worked in the wolfram mines during World War II

The dictatorship continued to fill its coffers with gold—by 1974, when the Portuguese revolution toppled the Salazar regime, by then headed by a former university professor called Marcello Caetano, gold reserves were at a monstrous 865.9 tons.

So, somewhere between then and now, 480 tons of gold were sold to offset public spending—and this has been kept very quiet.

During the austerity period between 2011-2013, the country came under substantial pressure from the EU to sell its gold—it refused, but desperate citizens sold two hundred million euros of gold—anything from wedding rings to necklaces was melted down and made into ingots that were sold to Germany.

Fifty years on from the revolution, Portugal is a very different nation—in 1974, much of the country couldn’t read and write, the previous fourteen years it had been fighting in multiple African wars of independence, and there was no national health service. Elections were of the Putin variety, people were imprisoned for their political beliefs, and it was extremely unwise to express an anti-government opinion.

Records by all the sixties bands that I learned to love were banned, jeans were a rarity, and long hair was, well… short. Salazar’s motto was Deus, Pátria, Família (God, Country, Family), which the wags promptly translated into the three F’s: Fado, Futebol, e Fátima.

No publication, no radio show, no TV program could be presented without prior censorship, and inventive reporters found a thousand ways to dodge the blue pencil of the censor—now known as redaction.

Practically no bullets were fired in anger on the 25^th of April, 1974—the exception being the secret police, who fired at the crowd from their headquarters. The same building where on the 31^st of July, 1958, a man was thrown to his death from a third-floor balcony. The murder was witnessed by the Brazilian ambassador’s wife, who reported it to the cardinal of Lisbon. Days later, Salazar’s ministry of the interior sent her a note, explaining that ‘there was no reason to be so concerned, it was only a communist of no importance.’

The carnation revolution happened on a Thursday. Fifty years later, the date fell again on a Thursday.

Two generations is a long time, and children growing up in Portugal today should be excused for not knowing or caring much about all that happened back then. They also can’t relate to the events of the previous forty-eight years—that’s how long fascism lasted in Portugal: longer than Spain, Italy, or Germany.

How can kids know that Hitler’s Gestapo was modeled on the PVDE—Salazar’s secret police—rather than the other way round? Or that Portugal kept a concentration camp in Cape Verde, where political prisoners were kept in atrocious conditions?

It’s unusual for a Portuguese song to appear here—but this is a classic protest song of April.

No, the kids that pass me in the street don’t need to know.

Freedom is all about being free.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Fish Eye

I got embroiled, if you excuse the pun, in a fishy discussion.

Hardly surprising, since I was running a mara-thon (excuse the French pun) of tuna—fourteen dishes, no less, including oddities such as bluefin tuna heart. But then, this is Barcelona, the most eclectic city of Spain.

Not your ordinary Christmas decoration—in fact a pretty shitty one, if you excuse the pun—El Caganer is a well-known Catalan refinement of Christmas, where the poop doll is hidden with the shepherds and other figurines, aka the crapper in the crib.

The topic was Artificial Intelligence, the venue was the Barcelona Seafood Fair, and the guy in front of me was explaining how AI is used to recognize fish—facial recognition, that is. Why would you want to know if Fred Fish just went by? Well, it’s all about traceability, fish welfare, and economics.

When you have two hundred thousand salmon in a cage, there’s ten million bucks swimming around in there—food for thought.

The AI story became really interesting for me when we turned to energy—in California there are serious concerns about the demands of AI on the power grid. This is becoming an issue in various parts of the US and elsewhere—in Virginia, the Dominion Energy electricity company stopped connections to new data centers for three months in 2022.

I found it fascinating because electricity production is limited by thermodynamics—unlike money production, which is limited by credulonamics. I’ve often called out the money game as a seriously abused artificial construct, comparing it to food systems and suggesting that when the caganer hits the fan you won’t be able to trade a golf course for a cheese sandwich—but I digress.

Utility companies are discussing supply problems and this drives alternative energy sources for the greedy grid—solar and wind are paramount.

Projected power expansion in the US as data centers mushroom in Arizona, Texas, and Virginia (courtesy of Reuters).

As electricity production nears capacity, limits to AI growth will become increasingly clear—a new take on Moore’s law. Even with renewables, space for panels and turbines presents a challenge.

The fair itself blew me away.

From Estonia to Equador, China to Chile, people buying and selling, exploring technology, and displaying wares—everyone busy with planetary food security.

Most amazing of all, I didn’t see a single stall that contained the word aquaculture. That means the battle has been won. Mauritania, the US, and other nations almost devoid of aquaculture showed wild catch, but by and large the theme was good fish, as it should be—and at least seventy percent of that is grown all over the world.

If you go to a food fair, then you would expect… food. And I wasn’t disappointed—oysters from France, tuna jamón from Spain, and of course beverages to help it all down.

I was enchanted by the scale of what I saw, heard, ate, and drank.

But at the back of my mind, I kept wondering about that AI convo, and whether when you did all that energy footprint math, the numbers worked out.

You see, there’s all sorts of stuff that’s neither artificial nor intelligent making it’s way onto the bandstand.

It might be a tailoring challenge in the emperor’s most recent outfit.

Or it might just be a case of mistaken AIdentity.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Straightjacket

Sometimes I have absolutely no clue what to write about, and it shows, but usually something catches my eye and ends up on paper.

Today I have my subject, but I needed a title.

After that, I wanted a nice image to convey the message. Rather than hunt around, I asked ChatGPT to draw me a picture.

draw a picture of donald trump in a straightjacket

ChatGPT

Sorry, I can’t help with that.

I thought the AI bot might be developing some political bias, but I realized it doesn’t do images. I tried one more time to probe its sensitivities by asking it, “What do donald trump and a straightjacket have in common?”

Ever the pedant, Jeepers (for it is he) replied, “That’s a play on words! Donald Trump and a straightjacket don’t really have anything in common in a literal sense, but it could be interpreted as a commentary on his behavior or political stance. Both could be used metaphorically to imply restriction or containment, either physically or metaphorically.”

zzz…

In any case, if I can reverse-pedant you, it’s not a play on words—it’s a question, at best a riddle. When is a Nelson not a Riddle might be a play on words.

I wandered a little at this point, taken back to my late teens and the exams I had to sit. My teachers told me that the shorter the question the harder the answer—a life lesson.

I went for the jugular.

“A cow has four legs, a stool has three. Discuss.” The Jeepers riposte was an exercise in virtual vacuous vagueness—it wouldn’t even have tickled the pass mark in biology A Level, the UK university entrance exam.

I gave up my quest, relieved that Jeepers still has some way to go towards lateral thinking, and found my image on the net.

There’s no shortage of material of this kind, including AI-generated fakes, apparently often recognizable due to missing fingers. Who knew?

Back in 2016, I called Brexit and the US election—a visit to Las Vegas in August convinced me the orange man would win. This year, I am firmly convinced he will not.

There could be a number of reasons, but I think one is outstanding—women. There’s an unmissable irony here, after all the hurt the orangutan has caused. It’s not the court cases, although it’s becoming clear they don’t help—it’s the double-R conflict between the religious right and the reproductive right.

The orange man has changed positions on abortion more times than a lobster molts. But somewhere along the line, the judges he placed in the supreme court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark federal ruling on abortion. In so doing, they opened up the current can of worms.

The consequences of overturning Roe v. Wade are already clear, with numerous states denying women the right to choose.

Female voters are in the main unhappy about this state of affairs. When asked, Trump took the whistling past the graveyard option and said it was up to the states. The religious right folks were most unhappy—they want a federal ban and a president who supports it.

Women were equally unhappy—those who live in the southern states don’t want their rights taken away, and they know that hard-line conservatives will ban abortion at the state level. The prospect of a potential federal ban would make everything even worse—the remaining options would then be Canada, and with some complications, Mexico.

In summary, the orangutan knows this is a taboo subject, but no one is letting him forget it. Arizona’s supreme court recently resuscitated a law from 1864 that essentially bans abortion. Trump was forced to comment. Straight after saying it was up to the states, he had to say Arizona went too far. True to form, he said, “that will be straightened out”—leaving out the bit where he explains how.

And there you have it—he’s lost the confidence of the female voters, except for the prosyletizers, but then they’d prefer a federal ban.

Forget Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, or the Rio Grande—It’s the women, stupid!

Michael Jordan was once asked if he supported Democrats or Republicans. He replied, “Republicans also buy sneakers.”

Republicans also have abortions.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

After the Gold Rush

I’d heard of Dutch Elm Disease, but not about the elmless one.

As a concept, it’s something I’ve often wondered about, particularly during my forays in Africa.

Imagine a nation with an abundance of natural resources, where everyone should thrive and live happily; and yet the people are starving, sick, often at war, the economy in tatters…

It’s the paradox of wealth—the curse of Venezuela, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Zimbabwe, Iraq, and at various periods in history, Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands. And perhaps one of these days, Saudi Arabia.

Assets—the human equivalent of the squirrel’s nuts, as it were—are fascinating to us all. Even if you don’t rationalize it, everyone always wants more. Poor people want to be rich, rich people want to be richer, and the envy wealth creates is one of the most destructive forces of humanity.

People and families are ruined by it, as are cities and countries. Throughout history, asset envy has been the major cause for persecution of the few who accrue. The endgame is always the same: steal the assets from those who possess them, banish or kill those who accrue.

But fortune and fame (and the reverse) bring their own hardships—this quickly becomes evident to lottery winners.

GDP of the great empires (and Sweden) over five centuries. Data are 3-year averages except for Spain (11 years, which explains why it’s less noisy). Source: Our World In Data.

Spain won the lottery during the age of the galleons, bringing in silver and gold from the Americas. And during that period, the economy changed. The nation was flush with cash, the Spanish eight reales coin—the legendary pieces of eight of Treasure Island’s parrot—was a portent of stable currency, and yet… the influx of precious metals from America, which at one point accounted for 25% of the revenue of King Philip II (Philip I of Portugal) had profoundly negative consequences for the economy of Castile.

The currency over-appreciated, Spanish exports became less competitive, and the economy shifted to a much more import-dependent model. This led to the collapse of Spanish businesses that were not riding the galleon wave.

The arrogance wealth brings is astounding.

Let London manufacture those fabrics of hers to her heart’s content; Holland her chambrays; Florence her cloth… Milan her brocades, Italy and Flanders their linens… so long as our capital can enjoy them; the only thing it proves is that all nations train journeymen for Madrid and that Madrid is the queen of Parliaments, for all the world serves her and she serves nobody

Alonzo Nuñez de Castro, 1675

The same disaster occurred in Portugal after the discovery of the maritime route to India, leading to the decline in GDP in the first half of the XVI^th century. History repeats itself in the XVIII^th century, when the influx of gold from Brazil leads to a rise in GDP and then a steady decline until the end of the century.

Dutch Disease is named after the economic crisis that followed the discovery of the Groningen natural gas field in 1959—the term was first coined by the Economist magazine, but the Dutch were by no means the first to suffer from it, neither was it their first rodeo, since Dutch colonies is Asia and South America had a similar effect on the economy to other colonial powers.

The resource curse is the better name—you see evidence of it in Aberdeen, Scotland, where the weakening of the offshore oil industry has left behind the potholes of progress—the city provides clear evidence of ‘dethriving’. A recent paper by Udemba and Yalçıntaş analyses Norway and Algeria, where the drivers are once again oil and gas, and finds evidence of the resource curse in both.

Norway now also has the salmon industry, which it dominates on a global scale, and I have been repeatedly told that NORAD, the Norwegian aid agency—not to be confused with its bellicose US sister—is in the business of giving away as much money as possible, among other things to mitigate the resource curse.

Put simply, Norway doesn’t want Norwegians to become too rich.

The Portuguese researcher Nuno Palma describes the ‘cross of gold‘ from Brazil in detail and argues that the gold was responsible for the subsequent decline of the Portuguese economy, which dragged through the XIX^th century, languished through the twentieth, and is hobbling into the new millennium.

There is another aspect of all this that gives us pause. Could it be that Southern and Eastern Europe are going through it all again?

Only this time, Dutch Disease has a new name: European convergence funds.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

All Rise

Easter celebrates the most mystical of events.

Sooner or later, we’re all confronted with death; I don’t mean the realization that someone we love has died—a grandparent, a parent, a sibling—I mean the physical presence of death.

After the suffering that often precedes death, the deceased is tranquil and at peace. When you touch the face or hands of the corpse, or perhaps the head, they are cool and dry, and it seems as if at any point that inanimate form might rise again.

The eyes will open, blink once or twice, an arm will extend, and as you reach out, a set of fingers will clasp your own and the prostrate form will sit up. A shy smile might follow, half-apologetic for the intrusion, and the mouth will then open to offer a few words of comfort.

The next moments are ones of mutual disbelief, as the two hands clench more tightly and the two forms embrace. Tears follow, but they are tears of joy. Of course, the person who has returned shows no sign or symptom of the pain and passion that felled them—in the tradition of Judaico-Christian miracles, the cripple can walk and the blind can see.

I’ve gone through those motions as family members have died, incredulous that the body I watch, the cheek I caress, is inanimate. Even if the flesh is still, or perhaps because it is so, I feel an overwhelming presence in the room—it is the soul of my father, my mother, my brother… they are comforting me, whispering softly that they are in a better place, no longer tortured by the bonds of earth.

They are telling me not to grieve.

Later this week the tomb sweeping festival takes place in China. Humans are the only animals who honor their dead.

But Easter is fù huó—in Mandarin that literally means repeat life, or resuscitate, and that’s a pretty special trick.

And this was no ordinary resuscitation, because Jesus was publicly crucified—that part of the Christian narrative is difficult to question—the ordeal of the Calvary, the journey bearing the cross, and the subsequent crucifixion, is too detailed to seriously question. It is, if you excuse the pun, not crucifiction.

The subsequent part of the story—the removal of the body from the cross in Mount Calvary, wrapping it in a linen shroud, anointing it with oils and herbs, and the burial in the rocky tomb of Joseph of Arimathea—also seems to me perfectly credible.

There, the plot thickens. The apocryphal gospel of Nicodemus asserts that Joseph saw Jesus rise from the dead and ascend to heaven. There are then reports in the gospels of Jesus appearing to his disciples, and to a crowd of five hundred, before finally returning to heaven on Ascension Day, the fortieth day after Easter.

If you don’t believe, the narrative slips to the theft of the body, but if you do, then somehow Jesus was transported skyward as soon as he went to his grave, and it becomes strange to imagine him coming back down—presumably having been treated for his injuries.

Whether all or any of this happened is uncertain, but the promise of repeating life is a heady potion—it’s unquestionable that monotheism, as postulated by Judaism and Islam, is easier to grasp than the holy trinity of the Christians.

However, the narrative of the resurrection is the killer app, if you excuse the pun, of Christianity.

A god that can do that is truly divine.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

A Brief History of Gaza

This is a very dangerous topic.

Put simply, I don’t see any solution for er… a two-state solution, lasting or otherwise. What we do have in place is one nation, artificially created in 1948, propped up by the West, and in particular by the United States.

The 1948 Israeli declaration of independence led to a ferocious war, superbly described in the book ‘Oh Jerusalem‘. The book was published in 1971, and I read it soon after—I reread it a few weeks ago, horrified by the present-day massacres.

As I reviewed the atrocities that took place back in the late 1940s, allied to the hindsight of all the dramatic conflicts in the region since that time, I became ever more certain that this problem has only extreme ‘solutions’—largely based on mass extermination.

The ‘From the River to the Sea’ chant of the Palestinians is every bit as radical as the Israeli objective of elimination of Hamas, and Jerusalem—thus the title of the book—brooks no compromise, so there is no room for anything.

Should the Jewish people be entitled to their own nation? Of course. After millennia of exodus, persecution throughout Europe and elsewhere, the inquisition, the ghetto, the holocaust… Of course. And history is not short of proposals, from Uganda to Alaska, by way of Japan.

After World War Two, at an extraordinary meeting between Roosevelt and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, the Saudi king proposed the Jews be given the best of Germany—to the victor the spoils, while simultaneously ‘solving the Palestine issue.

Private Eye magazine hits the nail on the head, as always.

The proposal was not accepted, and history continued its sinuous path.

Since October 7^th, 2023, one four-letter word has taken over from the usual expletives, and that word is Gaza—which we know little about.

It’s helpful to start with the fact that Gaza has a history of four thousand years. That’s one hundred and sixty generations. It originated as a Canaanite settlement—Canaan was a Semitic civilization, the most frequent ethnic term in the Old Testament, and referred to in the bible as The Promised Land.

That was around 2000 BC.

Ancient map of Canaan, known for millennia as the promised land.

After the Canaanites, the Egyptians, Philistines, Assyrians, Alexander the Great, the Romans, and then the Christians—we come to the year 420 AD. The transition to Christianity took twenty-five years, i.e. one generation, and the destruction of eight ‘pagan’ temples—perhaps you see a pattern emerging here.

The prophet Muhammad began receiving divine messages in 610 AD, Islam was born, and in 637 AD the Muslim general Amr Ibn al-‘As conquered Gaza.

And so it goes—the Cathedral of John the Baptist, which had been the Temple of Marnas, became the Great Mosque of Gaza.

Thirteen centuries of altercation, alternation, and alienation passed, and we come full circle to 1948—Egypt is in control of what is by then called the Gaza strip. The artist formerly known as Canaan, aka The Promised Land, is full of Arab refugees.

The Egyptian king Farouk is replaced by Nasser, and Gaza becomes a hotbed for the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s nemesis to this day. And if you google ‘Muslim Brotherhood Gaza’, the first hit simply says… Hamas. As do the next half-dozen.

In 1967, Israel won the Six-Day War—one of various occasions on which Arab coalitions of varying stripes tried a spot of ‘from the river…’—and found itself in charge of Gaza. At this point, the only people that like Gaza less than Israel are the Egyptians—so much for the promised land.

Time passes, and in 1993 come the Oslo accords, which hand Gaza over to a Palestinian administration. These are the days of Yasser Arafat and Fatah, but in 2006, Hamas wins the election.

Ever since, it’s been a river of blood. Some days, when the rain dries, it turns into a stream.

Others, when the heavens part, it turns into a torrent.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Horse Latitudes

When I set the tags for this article, I unchecked ‘Humor’ because the topic is not funny.

Then I rechecked it, because we must put a smile even into the saddest situation.

Horse latitudes is an old sailing term—it comes up in Clear Eyes and refers to the drowning of horses in the Sargasso Sea when sailing ships were becalmed.

The horses—a necessity for the conquest of the Indies—were kept belowdecks, suspended on slings to avoid leg fracture in the hold of the galleons and caravels, as the vessels bucked and pitched in the wild Atlantic sea.

The Houthi attacks on Western shipping, widely seen as retaliation for American support for Israel, have laid bare not only the human price the world is paying for the current insanity, but the price paid by animals.

The Red Sea is the vagina of the Mid-East, with a narrow channel at the top—the geographical cervix—called the Suez Canal.

It is at the labia of the Red Sea that the Bab el-Mandeb, or gate of tears, is situated. In anatomical terms, it might well be called the gate of joy, but I won’t labor the point (sorry). On the east side of the strait is the Yemeni town of Murad, and on the western coast is Fagal—referenced in Wikipedia with half a page describing it as a ‘location’—in Djibouti.

The Iran-backed Houthi strikes have severely disrupted shipping and highlighted the suffering of live animals shipped by sea—a topic no one hears about, a modern day nightmare reenactment of the drowning horses in the age of sail.

In early January, the MV Bajirah, a livestock carrier, loaded fourteen thousand sheep and two thousand cattle at an Australian port and set sail for Israel. As it approached the Red Sea, it was ordered back by the Australian government. The outbound journey took about two weeks, but by the end of the month the ship was moored off Perth—the animals stranded on board due to Australian quarantine laws.

Australia’s live animal export industry sells about one million animals every year—split evenly between sheep and cattle. If this figure sounds high, it’s peanuts compared to the European Union, which exports 1.6 billion animals annually.

A cow peers from inside a truck after being auctioned at a livestock market—picture courtesy of The Guardian newspaper.

The European livestock export market is a broad church: chicken, pigs, sheep, goats, and cattle; not all of it by sea, since there is substantial cross-border movement by road.

In late February, Cape Town awoke to a hideous smell of sewage—the source was the Al Kuwait, a livestock vessel transporting 19,000 head of cattle from Brazil to Iraq. The poor animals had already spent a number of days at sea, standing and sleeping in their own feces and urine, and the ship projected a pungent smell of decayed organic matter and ammonia. The stench was so powerful it engulfed the eastern part of the city.

The ships are mostly converted container ships or bulk carriers, with no conditions for humane transport of live animals. The vessels are old and decrepit—in 2019 the Queen Hind, a Romanian livestock carrier, sank, resulting in the death of fourteen thousand sheep, with nary a whisper about the disaster from Romanian authorities.

In these times of green deals, blue economies, and red lines, it’s astounding that live animal transport is so poorly regulated. A few of our four-legged friends have been unfortunate enough to attract our attention and become part of our diet, whereas others slipped beneath the radar. Nevertheless, our species has harnessed, if you excuse the pun, most of the animals that surround us for one purpose or another—food, burden, company, we use them all or persecute them as pests—an unequivocal trait of the human race is that it doesn’t play well with others.

Humans are omnivores, so eating meat is part of our heritage, but the need to first transport it half-way around the world is highly questionable. A further confounding factor is that animals are often the product of several nations—piglets from Denmark may go to Spain for part of their life and finally end up in a third country for slaughter. Germany specializes in exporting chickens—over three hundred million in 2019.

Apart from the suffering that our four-legged friends bear on the livestock vessels—weeks of sleeping standing up, overcrowding, mired in their own waste—the poor souls are often destined for a most cruel fate, since destinations such as North Africa, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq are bound for religious reasons to halal meat. Halal, or permitted, meat must be slaughtered in a particular way.

Slaughter for production of halal meat has a clearly defined set of rules, but the most important are that an animal should be killed with one cut in the front of the neck—”The esophagus, trachea, two jugular veins and two arteries must be cut“—and that it must subsequently be bled to death, since blood is not halal.

Out of the three major religions, only Christianity does not impose on its followers rules on what can and cannot be eaten. There are stipulations on these matters in the old testament, but none of that nonsense on what can be eaten and how it should be killed endured to the present day.

Judaism, on the other hand, defines the concept of kosher, which is rather similar to halal. The interpretation of long-obsolete norms in light of today’s technology leads to bizarre rules such as “Administering electric shock to an animal prior to shehitah [ slaughtering] is prohibited, because it incapacitates the animal and renders it a trefah [animal unfit to eat].”

It is both sadistic and hypocritical that Western nations so preoccupied with animal rights and animal welfare should not only encourage shipping of livestock under conditions that clearly qualify as extreme cruelty to animals, but simultaneously accept that the poor creatures they are sending to their death will be slaughtered in the most inhumane manner, to satisfy hopelessly outdated abnorms based on food standards and societal practices that lost their relevance many centuries ago.

In researching this article, I had the misfortune of reviewing pictures and film that depicted both the mute suffering of innocent animals and the men with sharp knives slitting the throats of sheep and cattle—live animals mixed with corpses, blood everywhere, a pantheon of savagery.

Some years ago, I was told a story about a slaughterhouse—the building has long been decommissioned and is now a luxury condo—catering to a very different kind of beast.

There was a policeman on duty at the abattoir every night the cattle were trucked in for slaughter.

As the cows were prodded from the pen to be killed, the cop swore they had tears in their eyes.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Triumvirate

Part I

The Queen’s Pawn

In 2024, three things changed the course of history.

The first was a declaration by a US presidential hopeful with respect to NATO.

The man invented a conversation with a NATO member to tell the world America would not lift a finger to fulfil its NATO obligations—in particular, it would not honor article 5 of the treaty, the clause on collective defense—if other members were not fully paid up.

The putative candidate went further, stating that he would actively encourage an invader of a NATO member to send in the troops.

Buoyed by this rhetoric, the president of the Russian Federation seized the opportunity and murdered the main leader of the opposition, a 47 year old lawyer imprisoned in the Polar Wolf Arctic penal colony. He did so at the start of the Munich Security Conference—the message of defiance was crystal clear.

The Russian czar had an election to win—although the outcome had never been in doubt—and he was in a protracted war with his southwestern neighbor. The war was about to enter its third year—the Russians had thought it would last three days—and foreign aid to Ukraine was seen as the main reason the ‘special operation’ had not yet succeeded.

The opposition leader was vocally anti-war, making him a traitor to the Russian state.

“Kill that person, and ordinary people will live in fear,” the president said, always unable to utter the name of his nemesis. “Let’s see who will oppose the special military operation then!” The ageing dictator smiled coldly. “Now, comrades, let us win this war. But let us also prepare to strike at the soft underbelly of Europe.” He stared at his generals, seated at the massive table. The group, veterans of Afghanistan, Africa, and Crimea, applauded the great man.

“But first, we must elect this полезный идиот—our useful idiot— president of the United States. Now, get me the director of Sandworm.”

Sandworm—the paramount hacking unit of the Russian Federation—is based in the Moscow suburb of Khimki. To the GRU, it is unit 74455, a department specialized in digital dark arts, including massive denial-of-service attacks, ransomware, and internet worms designed to destroy key data.

***

The events of the past few days got me thinking about the Third World War. I was going to write an article about it—a quasi-fictional three pager to stimulate the mind, where a newly-elected US president opts to abandon Europe, gets dragged into a war in Asia, and the economic powers of the old continent find themselves subjugated.

After writing the draft above by way of introduction, I realized I like the idea of developing that into a book—whether I can find the time to write it and how long it would be remains to be seen.

As I wrote those paragraphs, I toyed with the idea of writing some form of online novel, publishing a few pages here every week. That way, both you and I could follow the progress of the book as it developed.

It’s an interesting thought, but two things stand in my way. The first is that a book inevitably goes through changes, and publishing it here episode by episode takes away that flexibility, The second is that by creating a book trajectory here I would be hard pushed to squeeze in articles about anything else, and there is much else to write about.

Since this site has always been a place for free thought, I would be taking that away—no more travel writing, random craziness, or the other weird and wonderful things life has to offer—and which I endeavor to share with you.

So I’ll try to do this as a parallel track rather than a monorail, keeping in mind that this week moved the planet further along a sinister and extremely dangerous path—it’s a chess game, where several pieces play their parts on the board.

Three-person chess played on a 96-square board rather than 64. Since the natural colors for the Russians and Chinese are evident, I guess the United States is playing black.

But unlike chess, which has only two sides—as has been the case in practically every war fought on the planet—here we have a three-sided board. On it play America, China, and Russia. It’s difficult to imagine what the board looks like—there are circles, hexagons, and other more creative variants.

I was unfamiliar with the concept of three-army chess—and basic research doesn’t much clarify things—but it seems that the game can rapidly turn for one of the players if the other two gang up on him.

The times are indeed a-changin. It’s been sixty years since Dylan first sang this anthem of warning and hope.

I guess in the end, if Russia attacks Europe, China attacks Asia, and America is toothless and vulnerable, our three-army model falls back to two.

The way things are going in the US, it almost seems as if the nation may implode on its own.

The whole world seems to have lost faith in Uncle Sam.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Ebony and Ivory

The plane touched down in Abidjan.

But there was a small problem—I didn’t have a visa.

If you live in the European Union, travel within the EU is seamless—just as it is in the United States—and the whole border-customs shenanigan is a thing of the past; but you don’t need to go far to discover the ubiquitous need for a visa—and you need one (or a waiver) to get into either of the destinations above.

A visa serves two purposes. The first is to give national authorities some form of triage for folks traveling to their country—this becomes a weapon used to permit travel into certain nations, particularly those worried about immigration, i.e. all the rich countries. Air travel in particular enforces this, since airlines don’t want to be fined for breaking visa regulations.

The second is to deter would-be immigrants by making visa approval as painful as possible. This reminds me of an old joke rendered as a pseudo-Chinese proverb.

Man who get sent to doghouse too often, often end up in cathouse.

In other words, if you really want to go and can’t do so legally, you’ll go anyhow—as an illegal immigrant.

My route to Côte d’Ivoire—the Ivory Coast—had first taken me to Accra, in Ghana—the Gold Coast. This was the first part of West Africa colonized by the Portuguese, back in 1482. I had no visa for Ghana either, but as luck would have it, the government approved a visa-on-arrival scheme over the Christmas period to promote tourism, so I was allowed in.

The flight to Abidjan the following day would be a greater challenge but I took comfort in one thing—Elmina, the fort of São Jorge da Mina, Saint George of the Gold Mine, is a three-hour drive west of Accra, and if I was grounded I’d go visit all my friends from The India Road: Bartolomeu Dias, Christopher Columbus, and the fictional and sinister Álvaro.

At the airport, I wasn’t allowed to board.

Behind the scenes, feverish negotiations were taking place—I was on the phone to someone high up in Abidjan immigration, speaking in French, the lingua franca of Côte d’Ivoire.

Minutes turned into hours. The check-in counter closed.

Finally, when the plane was already boarding, the word came through, barriers were opened, and I got on the flight—it’s possible that the delayed departure of the aircraft had some tenuous link to my visaless predicament.

Abidjan is next to Ébrié, a fifty-mile long lagoon, clearly visible from my starboard window as the plane went into final approach. Accra left no pleasant memories—arid, dangerous, crap food, expensive wine.

This looked so much more promising, but there was one small matter—I was above the city, but I still needed to get into it.

Immigration directed me to the visa section—I thrust my cellphone at the official. At first he was reluctant to take the call, then he launched into a series of ‘oui, je comprends‘—clearly, the guy on the other end had clout.

At the passport booth I had a repeat performance, but this time the man in the booth personally escorted me to retrieve my bag, hustled me through security, and escorted me into the bowels of the terminal, up the stairs where only smugglers and criminals go.

I sat inside the tiny airport police office—on the wall a notice instructed officers that anyone placed in ‘le violon’ (a great euphemism for a jail cell) must undergo a cavity search—the sign expanded, if you excuse the pun, on les orifices.

A large man sat at a desk beneath a lazy fan. Cops wandered in and out while he painstakingly wrote out a credential. He multi-stamped the document and handed it to me—a passepartout—then he dumped my passport into a drawer. Suddenly I was in a movie.

The thought of leaving my little magic key behind was a little unsettling—in a couple of days my visa request would be granted and all would be well. Hmmm…

Outside, chaos reigned—but at least my orifices were intact.

As rain fell in the dry season, a troupe of dancers wearing very little gyrated opposite the airport entrance, welcoming the teams arriving for the African Nations Cup.

The welcoming dance troupe struts its stuff. Behind them, the football mascot of Les Elephants, the national team, trumpets approval.

Football in Africa is an obsession and in Abidjan it was vuvuzela week. And shirt, wig, and any other soccer accessory week. All sold by street vendors marching up and down the Pont Général de Gaulle, using the white lines as their guide and causing monumental traffic jams.

The Nigerian team arrived at my hotel on Wednesday and things got even worse. Management cleared the prostitutes out of the bar area, players and staff lounged around the main hall while fans sang and screamed outside, and a small posse of dancers reenacted the moves of their airport colleagues.

Nigeria has a Portuguese manager, and one of the fitness coaches told me that no one actually lives in Nigeria—the players are dispersed through various European teams, and the trainers are all based in Portugal—ebony and ivory at its best.

The host nation plays Nigeria in the final tomorrow, so this is delirium weekend.

As with almost every African nation, the Celestials are thick on the ground—they even have a special immigration booth at the airport. The highway network was built by the Chinese, along with soccer stadiums and other urban infrastructure—the usual trade-offs apply.

Like Nigeria and other West African nations, the Ivory Coast is a religious watershed, with Islam pushing it’s way south from Burkina Faso and Mali, and Christianity pushing its way north from the Gulf of Guinea.

As in other parts of the world, the Portuguese—and later the French—evangelized the south and the Muslims from the Maghreb evangelized the north. The minimum wage is 60,000 West African francs, or $95, per month. Three bucks a day speaks for itself—a white man does well to keep his watch and cellphone out of sight—and yet I felt a lot safer in Côte d’Ivoire than in Accra or Dakar.

In my wanderings I came across a middle-aged American lawyer who did a bunch of work with African governments—rich pickings.

It was a Sunday, and his day alternated between Zoom meetings and trying to pick up women by the pool. He told me about a particular hotel where a group of four prostitutes assiduously did the rounds.

One of them approached him and said, “We know it’s your birthday, my friends and I drew lots, and I was chosen to give you a ride for free.” The lawyer thanked her and graciously declined the offer. “But you should take me, up on this,” she smiled. “Every time I see you, I notice you’re always working.”

The lawyer smiled back.

“It’s a funny thing, I’ve noticed exactly the same thing about you.”

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones

Leg Godt

The two words mean Play Well in Danish, so I’m guessing you can fill in the gaps.

Billund is a small town in Jutland, population seven thousand.

It is in unremarkable in every way but one—two-thirds of the population works for Lego.

I headed to Billund to eat at the Lego restaurant, attracted by its bizarre description—your order is placed using Lego bricks, which a robot at your table then decodes to send your selection to the kitchen. As I drove to legotown, the GPS reported my route was mostly flat—either Google has grown a sense of humor or they have a new AI line in Dansk oxymorons.

The meal was okay but not brilliant, and although no Lego wine (oh lord…) was on offer, I did get a Tuborg beer—a blast from the past. Outside, the rain pattered incessantly, adding to the dull winter landscape.

An unusual dining experience at the Little Chef restaurant in Billund. As far as I can tell, this is unique, but I wonder if Lego could make some money and globalize by franchising the Lego House experience.

A bottle of homemade wine was the prize offered by Ole Kirk Kristiansen for the best name for his new business—kiddie bricks. Uncle Ole ended up winning the prize (second prize, two bottles of Danish wine) but the Lego epiphany only arrived after Ole had been through a bunch of other stuff, including building furniture, houses, and even a church.

He settled on toys in 1932, and since he was an expert joiner, produced a wide variety of wooden blocks, cars, trains, and assorted figurines, as he waded through the uncertainty of the depression years and two world wars. Then in 1949 came the plastic bricks.

The origin of the bricks was a British company called Kiddicraft, created by Hilary ‘Harry’ Page, who patented the new toy in 1940. Kristiansen saw the blocks when he bought his first injection molding machine, and proceeded to develop his own building bricks.

Have you no faith? Can’t you see if we do this right we can sell these bricks all over the world?

The Lego House museum tells the story of this remarkable man and the company he created. The original molding machine is still there, a handle-operated green monster for pressing bricks. Perhaps because of the turmoil his world went through—we seem to be headed for the same fate at present—Ole placed his trust in the simple fact that children will always play, and saw the mission of the company as providing the best toys for kids to do so.

Giant dinos grace the top floor of Lego House, itself roofed by the largest Lego brick in the world—just visible top right.

At its heart, Lego is not only a simple idea, but a simple block. Simple to copy, so Lego has spent decades reinventing itself.

There is no other toy like it—I don’t know a single person who didn’t play with Lego as a child.

Children have a prodigious imagination—they can build a story out of anything and live it out in their own world. At some point in early life we lose that, and more’s the pity. What Lego brings to a child is the possibility of making something complex out of simple materials and then using that as a springboard to allow the mind to soar.

The keyword is make. No other toy empowers a child so much, so the little bricks perform the most special trick in the world—they educate kids by teaching them design, mathematics, engineering, and esthetics, yet all the while the children think they’re just playing.

The steel molds for producing the billion-dollar blocks (USD 9.3 billion turnover in 2022) are the secret sauce. Kristiansen refused to throw them away in case some sneaky purloiner made off with them—Uncle Ole came up with a suitably creative solution.

He buried them in the foundations of the new buildings he made.

The India Road, Atmos Fear, Clear Eyes, and Folk Tales For Future Dreamers. QR links for smartphones