Winter is a terrible time of year for the homeless, and public transport is one of the few warm areas that provide shelter. Shortly after that, I was wondering around the Hauptbahnhof, or central station, the heartbeat of any German city. What I was doing, was taking photographs of security cameras, storage areas, and other bits and pieces that are required for the closing scenes of my new manuscript. Behind me, at one point, were two policemen from the Deutsche Bahn. I thought the two cops, who together would add up to my exact age and to triple my height, might remonstrate, or ask what I was doing, in these terror-infested days. 

Perhaps even more so, because I was loitering at the Steindamm Straße exit. About ten minutes walk down that street, on the left, over what is now a gym of the nightclub steroid doorman persuasion, was the mosque where Mohamed Atta & Co. planned the September 11^th attacks, during Islamic Year 1422, according to the Hijri calendar. I had been down there yesterday evening, past the Afghani travel agent and the Kabul restaurant, to ground-truth some stuff for the book. I took plenty of snaps there too, and got some dubious looks from the locals in return.

But the railway cops didn’t give a damn about me. They zeroed in on a poor guy who was sitting on a step, oblivious to my pictures, cradling his head in his hands. They berated him, and he groaned. He said something in incomprehensible German, to the effect that he was doing nothing wrong, but the police were unmoved.

“AUFSTEHEN, RAUSGEHEN! Get up, get out,” shouted the cop, with the implacable arrogance of youth.

There but for the grace of god go I.

Precise instructions in a German bathroom. The imaginative use of the toilet brush is surpassed only by the prodigious length of the title word.

Sovereign debt in Europe is prone to contagion. Apparently. A couple of decades ago, Robert May came up with a model for disease called SIR, highly appropriate since May has since been knighted. SIR stands for Susceptible―Infected―Recovered (or Removed, i.e. dead). What that means is if you are not susceptible, you do not get infected. And the whole of Europe is susceptible. Oh, if only we weren’t all such pigs! Worries increase about Eastern Europe, which tumbles Austria, and as Europe falls, so will Germany.

One of the issues that isn’t talked about much is the relationship between the European recovery from recession and bond prices. Because interest rates are near zero, buying bonds is a huge risk, whether or not debtors default. The reason is that when rates are at 1%, you need to put up five hundred grand to get five grand interest per year. If the rate goes to two percent, you only need two hundred fifty thousand to get your five grand. The intrinsic value of the bond you owned is therefore halved. I wouldn’t put money in it. If base rates were higher, bonds would be more attractive, despite the risk.

But there is another area in Europe which is highly contagious, and largely already infected. And that is unemployment. Shortly before leaving for Fuhlsbüttel, an area that housed a concentration camp for Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals during World War II, I watched a TV interview with an unemployed British architect. The poor man railed when he had discovered that his car insurance premium had been substantially increased because he was out of a job.

The anchorman grilled an insurance executive about this, and delivered a well-deserved trouncing. Apparently your premium goes up because statistically, unemployed people have more accidents. This is because they drive more in search of jobs, and they are less likely to have well-maintained cars, since they can’t afford it. Undoubtedly higher motor insurance premiums are a huge help!

The world’s informal economy. The colors show the parallel economy as a percentage of GDP.

What all this means is that the economy has shifted, in many parts of the world significantly, to what is quaintly called the informal economy. This is the subject of a new book called, surprisingly enough, ’The Global Rise of the Informal Economy’. The only reason I haven’t bought it already is that I’m on a plane, and the net isn’t.

The size of that economy is conservatively estimated to be ten trillion dollars per year. Puts EU sovereign debt to shame. However, the interesting thing is that this corresponds to a global job market. Asia, Africa, South America, and yes, Europe and the United States, are all well represented. Economics is a zero sum game. So who gets the ten trillions?

Funnily enough, a good slice goes to legitimate business. As long as it is prepared to do illegitimate things. Procter and Gamble’s largest customer is Walmart, but it sells more to the combined slums of Nigeria, Cape Flats, Favela do Vidigal, and Jakarta. The informal buyers don’t pay tax, so somewhere down the supply chain there is a tax cut―as in zero tax. The sellers, maybe two or more links up the food chain, also don’t pay. The manufacturers do, but somewhere on that chain is the cutoff. See no evil, hear no evil.

The products are wonderfully diverse: purified water bags in sub-saharan Africa, dual-sim cell phones to keep costs down for the immigrants of this world, knock-off luxury brands for Chinese people who can’t read western alphabets. The more u’s in Gucci the better. The dual-sim knock-offs were apparently an innovation generated by the infomal market.

But even if half of those ten trillion is soaked up by big business (who knows exactly what’s going on, and how to profit from it), and we discount that contribution to worldwide employment, this still leaves five trillion’s worth of informal income. Let’s be generous and say each player averages five dollars a day (I like easy math). How many jobs is that? Well, it’s a trillion divided by the number of days in the year. So er… three billion jobs, or seven times the whole population of Europe. The downside of all this is that it completely erodes the tax base, which is supposed to pay for education, health care, and other services.

The author, interviewed in Wired magazine, says the informal economy accounts for half the world’s jobs. There are six billion souls in the world today, and although you might be excused for thinking there’s a discrepancy here, because kids go to school and old folks retire, think well out of the box. In most of the world everyone works.

Or they die trying.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

Contrary to the parent police, I encourage kids to play video games. I don’t think it’s a waste of time; games taught me keyboard skills, got me interested in machine language, which is the last frontier above the computer hardware itself, and helped me learn about the stack, heap, registers, and the difference between an 8-bit and 64-bit operating system. These are things I still know and use today. Whatever else they learn, your kids need to know three things: English, IT, and Economics. Without those, they will be fooled by language, defeated by technology, and fleeced by financiers.

 Those early video games taught me the difference between a peek and a poke, which I’m sure you will agree is an important part of any adult’s education. And if you clicked the link, hoping for a salacious site, you’ll have noted that there’s a bit of a learning curve on that one.

Like books and movies, games have genres. Action games include much of what you see today, things like Guitar Hero or Call of Duty (Black Ops). On the other extreme are thought games, or logic games. Chess, whether computerized or not, is the best example here. The one genre which became immensely popular when computers turned mainstream, but has no equivalent in the analog world, is the platform game.

Platform games disguise themselves, but one of the main traits is that the player takes on a role and accumulates points, or gold coins, or whatever, while leaping about trying to destroy things or collect them. Back in the day, Super Mario Bros was the classic, just as Angry Birds is now. My favorite from the dawn of home computing was called Impossible Mission. I finished it a couple of times, killing the evil doctor―it’s not clear why he’s evil, but he definitely is. And revisiting the retro site that describes it, I came across the word Joystick. Then F1 and F2 ports. Scary!

By the time PCs came along, cranking the DOS black screen and the lonesome cursor, another well-known offering was Prince of Persia, where a dashing young man went around saving princesses and blitzing bad guys. Except that somewhere along the winding path of history, PCs turned into tablets, Persia turned into Iran, and thirty years later, there’s a new elephant in the room. And now Persia is the bad guy. Well, let’s be accurate. There’s nothing evil about Iran, but there is considerable evil in Iran.

Oil, computers, and the mutual hatred between Sunni and Shia all have a good deal to do with this, as does the second Iraq war. With Obama’s troop withdrawal comes Iranian supremacy, compounded by the western negotiations with the Taliban, and the clear realization that Pakistan is ungovernable. Mitt Romney is keen on firing people, Obama wants to bring the troops home and cut the armed forces, both of which will add to unemployment, and no one in the US is up for attacking Iran in an election year.

In the Mid-East, the countries that are wearing the brown underpants are Israel and Saudi Arabia, who may well presently be allies of convenience―is there any other kind? To the Iranian fundamentalists, the Saudi royal family is seen as an usurper of holy places, a corrupt den of nepotism, and an exploiter of the poor Shia laborers. Perhaps even worse, as friends of the Americans. Maybe that’s the only thing that Iran and Al Qaeda have in common. No comments are needed with respect to Israel: Ahmadinejad’s stunning views on the holocaust, and on September 11th, are self-explanatory. perhaps the fact that the name contains both the words mad and jihad provides a clue here. 

On Thursday 12th of January, a sticky bomb was used to kill an Iranian nuclear scientist. The M.O. is well established: a motorbike pulls up to the victim’s car; the pilliion rider sticks the magnetic bomb on, the biker guns the engine, and the button is pushed. The date was symbolic, about two years since another scientist was killed. Both scientists were connected to Natanz, one of two nuclear power facilities that are reputedly working toward an Iranian atomic bomb. This is the fourth assassination in two years, and I would imagine enrollment in the atomic physics course at Tehran Technical University may be sparser than usual.

The Natanz nuclear facility, about one hundred and sixty miles south of Tehran

In parallel, there was the deployment of the Stuxnet worm, which I discussed some months back, to target Siemens Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC).  The Iranian regime needs computers to do their thing, and the West is doing its utmost to use that against them. Echoes here of the first Iraq war, where viruses went into Baghdad’s missile launch systems disguised as printers―a printer is a good choice because it usually has system-level access permissions for communicating with a computer.  

2012 is the ideal year for the Iranian regime to thumb its nose at the U.S., which is exactly what they’re doing. Among western nations, the Portuguese were the first to flag the strategic importance of the Strait Of Hormuz for the trade route between Europe and the Indies. The India Road spy Pêro da Covilhã discusses it with one of King John’s emissaries, and ten years after Vasco da Gama sailed, the Portuguese commander Afonso de Albuquerque secured the gateway to the Persian Gulf. The Strait was in Portuguese hands from 1515 onward, until a joint Persian-British force took Hormuz in 1622, during the Spanish occupation of Portugal.

The Iranian push in 2012 will be to finish what they started, and build their atomic bomb (I had written the first Arab atomic bomb previously, but was kindly corrected on that―Persians are not Arabs. Clearly a common western foible). The Israelis, with all the help the U.S. and Saudi Arabia can covertly put their way, will be trying their utmost to obliterate the Iranian ambition. When the 32 year old nuclear scientist was blown to bits last Thursday, it was a five minute item on Western television, mainly to report the incident, the suspicion of Israeli involvement, and the painstaking U.S. denial. The Iranian Press TV provided live coverage of the Peugeot 405 being hoisted away, and poignant reports from witnesses.

All in all, a superb storyline for a thriller. The thing is, in order to sell the book, the goodies have to win. RIght now, it really can go either way. My great grandfather used to say:

Quem aposta ou é parvo ou é ladrão

If you bet you’re either a thief or a fool. For me right now the odds are sixty percent for Iran, even counting the oil embargo. If Iran gets da bomb, we’re in for New World Order 2.0 in the Mid-East, and you won’t hear another squeak about the Eurozone.

All in all, it’s just another platform game.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

Since it’s pretty stupid to argue with machines (they always win, because they won’t budge), it takes a good deal of emotion out of some sports, and ruins Monday morning quarterbacking. John Mcenroe-style tantrums on bad (and good) line calls are a thing of the past. Years ago, the ‘stupidity’ of computers was illustrated with a joke. A computer established that a watch that was stopped was preferable to one that lost a second a week. The one that was stopped hit the correct time twice a day.

Much of the stockmarket trading these days is determined by computer, which is an inevitable consequence of competition. Like performance-enhancing drugs in sports, the first time anyone used a computer to speed up trading, the others were left with no choice.  Like running in flippers. I was searching for a quote here and I came across Robin Williams doing his thing on Broadway. Couple of years back, when Michael Jackson was still around. I think it’ll start your day off properly. I love the comparison between New York tits and Las Vegas tits, but then I would. From the serious part, my favorite is Williams’ take on George W. Bush:

George came back from Japan and went: “I went to the Coyote Conference”

 - No, it’s Kyoto. – That’s a very good car.

Okay, now you’ve wiped the tears away, back to 2012. Modern warfare is not only mechanized, but thoroughly digitized. The enemy is literally getting droned to death. You can get a Masters Degree on the internet, and even in the internet. Of course, it has a virtual open day. The old academic concept of a sabbatical leave, where you would spend time at a laboratory in another country, meeting and working with people you would normally not have access to, has fallen by the wayside. The concepts of meeting, and of working with, have become digital. In many fields: music, art, science, warfare. I guess in warfare it’s more like working against.

I took a sabbatical to write The India Road, because it was the only way I could find the time, and it was a long-standing ambition. As you get older, you don’t want to delay your burning ambitions too much. You either do the damn thing, or learn to forget about it. Otherwise you’ll be a miserable old person. And it’s bad enough to be old without being miserable as well. I’ve been struggling to write a second book, but only on weekends. The first draft for the preface was written in April 2010, and over the Christmas break I hit 90,000 words. That’s about the same length as The India Road, but this one will have more pages, because it has much more dialog. And a very different subject matter.

The thing I learnt when I finished the first book was that there are always two drafts. Paraphrasing Churchill, the first draft is the end of the beginning. So now this first one is finished, I have the second draft to deal with. When that’s done, it’ll be the beginning of the end. Then will come the interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of ‘may you live in interesting times’) part of finding a publisher who thinks it’s worth it. Maybe it’ll become an e-book. I just don’t know.

And 2012 will bring some realizations to Americans and Europeans which I don’t believe are yet part of our way of thinking. In Portugal, most people have never believed in an El Dorado, The Wizard of Oz’s Yellow Brick Road. Despite what the Germans think, Portugal, like Ireland and Italy, is used to hard work. That’s why the Portuguese immigrants, who lived in the slums of Paris euphemistically known as bidonvilles, were prized for their productivity and their craftsmanship.

The Portuguese post-war diaspora. People were running from poverty, and later from the African wars. Clockwise from top: dockworkers in Austerlitz (1950), ironworkers at the Tour de Montparnasse (1972), bidonville family (1964), immigrant bedroom in a Paris slum (1956)

The Portuguese blog from which the pictures were taken also shows the men lining up for water, and other images which the Europe of today associates only with developing countries. And anyone from Ireland or Italy can find similar pictures. New York was built with Irish hands, Italian hands, and many others. All the big cities in the world were built by slaves. It’s always been a giant pyramid scheme (sorry).

Around Christmas time last year, a friend told me he had figured out what the European issue was. In particular, he thought Portugal would only recover when people in this country earned the same as the Chinese. And he heartily supports Chinese wage increases. European countries are all discovering they share the same problems. Just like with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease or BSE, the only countries that didn’t have it were the ones that didn’t look for it. Contrary to what the CNBC pundits say, there is no contagion.

The prion is already there; in some cases, it just hasn’t been discovered yet. But it will be. In Europe, including the U.K., and throughout the developed world. In nature, the trade concept doesn’t exist, much less global trade. Fat crocodiles don’t import fish to their particular lake at the expense of poorly fed crocs elsewhere. By definition, human carrying capacity on this planet is a global concept, because globalization is a complex highway interchange, not a one-way street.

What 2012 will bring is an increased understanding that western life is unsustainable, because we always want, and already have, too much. The only practical ways we can change that is to reduce our needs, or to take what we want from others. We can do that by borrowing or stealing it, which is what happens now to differing degrees, or by killing and seizing―a well established human tradition, from Genghis Khan to the Belgian Congo.

We will also slowly understand that corporations are vastly more important than governments, and now very much control government. Lobbying is only one of several mechanisms used for that purpose. Even in democratic countries, ordinary citizens are electing only those who are part of interest groups, and therefore the deck is already stacked. Think Santorum. What an excellent name!

Finally, we will begin to accept that the new balance in affluence and living standards is here to stay. Knowledge is a positive sum game. So is love.  And laughter, when you laugh with someone. But economics is just resource management applied to human beings. Like sports, it’s a zero sum game. Someone wins, someone loses.

2011 was like losing a lover―or losing a leg. Everyone was confused,  disbelieving, and angry. In 2012 we’re going to learn to enjoy hopping.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

I was going to paraphrase him, telling you that New Year’s Eve is no excuse not to blog, except we should take a moment to consider the day itself.

First off, this day is of interest to less than 0.3 percent of the earth’s biomass. The bit that is human. Ok, and to a few dogs who howl at fireworks. Not a problem in China, since on this day there are few fireworks, and even fewer dogs. If I had to have a quick go, I’d say that six billion people times fifty kilos would work, so three hundred million metric tons. There are a bunch of answer.duh sites out there―in passing, that wouldn’t be a bad domain to consign idiots to. The net is badly in need of a bit of pruning, and now the leaves are off the trees…

I was on one of those answer sites yesterday and found out that a flight from JFK to Amsterdam took two days and three minutes. They must be practising for the go slow carbon tax. Or maybe it’s  via Samoa. Some good answers are to be found to that classic question ‘how long is a piece of string?’ Apart from the old saw ‘How Long is a Chinese man’, I like:

does it really MATTER?!go find something productive to do rather than ask stupid questions.
GO OUTSIDE.
MAKE FRIENDS.
and ignore the string.

I don’t care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.

The traditional oven at the Cozinha Velha restaurant, where meals fit for a king were once prepared.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

It is the eve of Christmas, and throughout Portugal the eve is the important day, not Christmas Day itself. Because of the India road, the same applies to Brazil. I’m guessing that Angola and Mozambique follow suit. As do a number of small African islands. With Portuguese globalization such traditions voyaged. As did music. Portugal played a major role in world music (a term I loathe for its planetary banality), and a vast proportion of the best music is sung in this language.

In Portugal itself, Fado is king. Recently voted UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (a substantial mouthful), along with Chinese Shadow Puppetry, Fado is dirge music, mournful and sad. It sings of unrequited love, faith lost or stolen, the longing and the leaving.  And some of that sadness has found its way to the music of Cabo Verde, a group of ten islands off the West African coast. The people of Cape Verde are musical giants. Like the Jamaicans, they punch above their weight: Cape Verde has a population of half a million, a classic Portuguese melting pot of European and African, both in color and in dialect.

Caribbean reggae is better known, for two reasons: Bob Marley, and the fact that it is sung in English. But the Mornas and Coladeiras of Cabo Verde are an amazing blend of Fado and Negro spirituality. The matriarch of Cape Verde music, who had the quintessentially Portuguese name of Cesária Évora, died exactly one week ago at the age of seventy. This song is called Sodade, a Creole version of the word Saudade. There is no translation in any other language for this word. In The India Road, King John’s spy Pêro da Covilhã attempts to define it when he stops at Rhodes, on his journey east:

On the pier, two friar-knights warmly greeted the emissaries of King John. “Benvindos,” the elder knight spoke, welcoming his fellow Portuguese adventurers. As always when far from home, they anxiously asked for news. As they entered the cool rooms of St. Angel’s Tower next to the wharf, still chatting busily, the younger friar, Frey Fernando, exclaimed, “Ai que saudades!” tears brimming in his eyes. The spy smiled wistfully, knowing that in his many languages there was not one with an equivalent word. A mixture of pain, longing, and love, that one word made you want to laugh and cry at the same time.

I don’t know why, but just writing that brought a tear to my eye. And I’m perfectly happy.

This year places Christmas as a truly digital experience. A flirt with Google this morning lures me into following Santa on Christmas Eve on Google Maps. Clicking that link takes me to NORAD, where I’m presented with NASA imagery, and an invitation to “Track Santa on Google Earth.” And from that page you can follow NORAD as they track Social Santa on Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter. OMG, Santa 2.0!

I guess NORAD (for it is she, the North American Aerospace Defense Command) has a little less to do now that Iraq is done and dusted. 2012 will reveal just how done, and how totally dusted, old Babylon really is. Much like Belgium in the First World War and the Pacific Rim in World War II, Iraq will be the stage of the showdown between Saudi Arabian finance and Iranian fundamentalism. Coming soon to a theater (hopefully not) near you.

That part of the world is getting hotter than the sideways samba sex position (thanks for that, Cosmo), and even uncle Bashar (good name!) Assad’s mates are deserting (sorry) him.

Old friends become foes.

Because it’s Xmas, I’ll end today with an extra gift. The Mama of Mornas in a duet with the Brazilian singer Marisa Monte. An Afro-Fado tune performed in Portuguese by a Cape Verdian and a Brazilian. Three continents, one culture. If that isn’t global nothing is. The song is called Morrer no Mar, To Die at Sea. The first lines are:

É doce morrer no mar (it is sweet to die at sea)
Nas ondas verdes do mar (under the green waves of the sea)

If this song doesn’t move you, I have a suggestion for 2012. Get your neurons rewired.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

A river is a good metaphor for many things, including the progress of life and the passage of time. It’s easy to see your life with its origin at the source, sprouting up from the darkness of mother earth. And to contemplate how those same rivulets and tributaries contribute to shaping you: some bring sparkling clarity and happiness; others, dark and polluted moments. In this way life flows irrevocably toward the sea, where the river finally dies.

If, like my rabbit mother, you believe in reincarnation, then the hydrological cycle obliges by transporting you elsewhere and laying you down to begin all over again. At this time of year it is usual, at least in the Judaico-Christian tradition, to celebrate the end of the year as the end of a cycle,  and to start afresh. It is somewhat bizarre that we often choose to enter this fresh new cycle with a gigantic hangover.

None of the religions seem to have hit on the end of the year correctly, and it’s a measure of human stubbornness that we are unable to converge. To me it would make sense that the shortest day of the year, i.e. the winter solstice, should mark the end of the year. That would place Christmas on January the 4th, and invert the order of hangovers. But instead we observe the New Year one week after, for reasons that presumably date from the Romans, and are rooted in a thoroughly imperfect calendar.

In The India Road, Ana de Mendonça, mistress of King John II of Portugal, tells Florbela the story of the Roman calendar.

Ana remembered a story the Perfect Prince had told her. John had an undisguised admiration for greatness, and had explained that Julius Caesar had reformed the chaotic old Roman calendar, increasing the number of months from ten to twelve.

“In the process,” the king had said, “Julius renamed the fifth month, Quintilus , to July, for himself, and made it the seventh month in the year. The twelve calendar months now alternated between thirty-one and thirty days. But then came Caesar Augustus, grand-nephew of the murdered Julius; the same relationship as Henry the Navigator and myself. And in his honor, Sextilis was renamed August.”

Ana repeated the story to Florbella, trying to brighten her up. “Of course, Augustus was not to be outdone by his great-uncle—he too needed thirty-one days. So they stole a day from February!”

The Chinese and the Arabs both define the calendar around the moon, which means their calendars must necessarily run on cycles that are a multiple of 29.5 days, the lunar period. In fact, there are twelve lunations in a solar year, which work out to 354.37 days. The Arab Hijri calendar is based solely on the moon, and therefore loses around 11 days a year. It started with the journey of the Prophet from Mecca to Medina, and it wraps around every thirty-three Islamic years.

Thirty-three was the age of the Prophet Isa when he was killed, so for the kabbalists out there, there is a symbolic link between the closure of the lunar cycle and the death of Jesus Christ. This is the stuff Dan Brown novels are made of: numerical mumbo-jumbo, breathless action, and a brainy hotty.

In 2012, the Hijra started in the evening of November 26th, and Islamic Year 1433 runs until the 14th of November 2012. Prophet Muhammad is thought to have lived between the years 570 and 630, and it was in the year 620 that he took his followers to Mecca. 1433 + 620 works out to 2053, 42 years more than the western calendar. Those 42 years are (roughly) accounted for by this annual loss of eleven days (1433 x 11 /365) between the two calendars.

The names of the months in Arabic are: yanāyir, fibrāyir, māris, abrīl/ibrīl, māyū, yūnyū/yūnya, yūlyū/yūlia, aġustus, sibtambir, uktūbar, nūfambir, dīsambir. Ring a bell? During the research for The India Road I was sometimes deeply immersed in Arab terminology, since it is inextricably linked to the astronomical component of the Portuguese discoveries, and to many navigational terms.

I became particularly fond of the Arab name for the Mediterranean Sea, Al-Baħr Al-Abyad Al-Muttawasit, the middle white sea, and I was delighted to find out that Boutros is Arabic for Peter. The name actually means rock, as does Peter (Petrus, Pierre). Names are great fun, and it was a revelation to me that the former secretary-general of the UN was actually Peter Peter, or Rock Rock. In fact, a quick look on the web shows up even more bizarre combinations, such as Dr. Boutros Peter Boutros, an OB/GYN from Houston, Texas. He definitely rocks. Another great example was a minister in Karzai’s government, also a medical doctor, whose name was Dr. Abdullah. The western press was obsessed with giving him a christian (sorry) name, so he told them he was called Dr. Abdullah Abdullah. Why not?

But far more peculiar than any of this are the descriptions of another side of Afghanistan, that focus on widespread homosexuality. There is a saying in that part of the world that ‘women are for babies, young boys are for pleasure’, which could probably be best translated as ‘eewww’. There are multiple stories of farmers in drag and make-up stalking the strapping young men of the US and UK armed forces in the fields of Helmand Province, as there are tales and photographs of the Taliban sporting eyeshadow and painted nails.

Kandahar is the center of homosexuality, more than a little ironic since this is the birthplace of the Taliban. Sex between two men is a sin in the Islamic religion,  punishable in one of three ways: being burnt at the stake, pushed over a cliff, or killed by a falling wall. From my perspective, only the middle option is at all practical, but it would be pretty tough in the Netherlands.

RPG at the ready, a smiling teen Taliban. Part of the men-only society.

 And the Taliban enforced the law. In fact, Mullah Omar’s rise to power was in part due to the outcry  over two warlords. These bearded family men were fighting each other in earnest over the favors (aka the sodomy) of a young boy, killing a number of innocent bystanders in the process. The hapless youngsters are known as halekon, early teenagers being a big favorite. Girls are of course entirely covered by the burka, so it’s almost impossible for young men to even know what a girl looks like. 

The saying goes that birds fly over Kandahar with one wing only, the other tucked behind them in shame. Personally I suspect it’s more caution than shame.

The India Road QR links for smartphones: point your camera and click.

Humans are different from other animals in various ways, some of which are such a paradigm shift that they justify the existence of a higher being. From the evolutionary perspective, our capacity for profound communication, tool building, and the development of knowledge systems (like this one) is remarkable. All this is a radical departure from the behaviour of other animals.

And it is baffling, even in evolutionary terms. One of the characteristics that regularly appears on the list is the female orgasm. No one thinks a man’s orgasm is wierd because it’s required for the delivery of sperm, and therefore has a reproductive function. Humans have an obsession with justifying stuff. And actually that whole delivery thing is down to circuitry. One of the potential complications of lower back surgery in guys is that the doc can mess up your wiring, which leads to a condition called retrograde ejaculation. Yup, it shoots backward―best birth control in the world.

So there are multiple theories that a woman’s orgasm developed in order to make the ladies more attractive to guys, or that it is an biological requirement. One of my favorites, from the feminist angle, argues that the lack of a “refractory” period (their quotes, and what an amusing way to put it) indicates that this is

…evidence of an almost insatiable sexual desire in women. For these theorists, monogamy is an unnatural instrument of political repression.

I agree that monogamy in humans is unnatural, which is why there are so many rules about not having sex, but no particular regulations about having it. But the repression isn’t political, it is moral and religious. It’s not as if the U.K. Prime Minister’s dissent this weekend was related to sexual issues, e.g. on the grounds that other European nations have sex, the English have hot water bottles. Although a connection might be made, since the clause was about the financial markets screwing everyone else. Blair turned England into London, and an agricultural and manufacturing economy into the square mile tertiary sector, so it’s unsurprising that the rest of Britain was subjugated by the financial services.  

But getting screwed by investment banks is very different from the real thing. The first case is a zero sum game, and is causing terrible hardship in many countries. When people have become desperately poor, they will reverse the procedure, and seize the money from where it has gone. The bank robber Willie Sutton famously explained why he robbed financial institutions: that’s where the money was.  But sex, if done properly (or perhaps improperly), is a positive sum game.

There are theories about face to face copulation in humans, about the clitoris being an evolutionary relic as the female penis, and a host of other things. Much of this stuff comes out of psychology journals. I read a number of papers from such journals when I was an undergraduate, and some were priceless. In one, some scientists wanted to test whether bird migration was controlled by the earth’s magnetic field.

The mysteries of bird migration have been investigated in various ways, such as tying the poor buggers to a platform in a planetarium and watching them turn to adjust to the changing night skies above. In this case, the researchers hung magnets on their feet to test the magnetic field theory. I wonder whether the birds were more concerned about true north or excess ballast.

Back in the day, I had to go to the library to have this much fun, but nowadays you have the net at your fingertips. If a clitoris is a female penile relic, then I would expect to find it in other animals. Searching for stuff like this is much more fun than finding it, and a snip from a book entitled Male and Female Circumcision asserts that

For over a hundred years, anatomical research has confirmed that both the penile and clitoral prepuce are richly innervated, specific erogenous tissue…

Well, thank goodness for sound science, that’s all I can say. The article reveals that all female primates are the proud owners of a clitoris, which kind of wrecks the theory that the human clitoris is close at hand, so to speak, for face to face intercourse.

Or for that matter, that the female orgasm evolved to attract the human male. Furthermore, the clitoris is a universal feature of mammals, although I was never taught that in school biology. In the case of dogs (well, bitches) it is located internally, which seems like a sensible place to put it. The rather overinformative Pet Care Gt tells us that in the canine example 

a red bunch as large as an average-sized tomato protrudes from the vulva… and can be as large as a small grapefruit.

What follows that may well be too much information. The site also deals with birds, reptiles, and fish, but I thought further investigation might spoil my appetite for lunch.

 In western society, the role of the female orgasm has increased, and can be seen as an indicator of a better balance in society, relationships, and increased human welfare. Which is definitely a good thing. Sex is a source of fun, and contrary to what I expected appears to become more prominent in people’s lives during tough economic times.

In fiction, sex is a good circuit-breaker, a way to shift the action or change the mood, prior to hitting the reader with a different situation. That’s all fiction is, smoke and mirrors.

Since it’s a dull day, with the Altantic storms rolling in from the west, and since most other topics promise nothing but angst right now, it’ll do us all good to lighten up a little.

I suppose a picture would be worth a thousand words, but for today I’ll have to stop here.

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During the Spanish occupation, Spain pointed the Portuguese navy at England, with disastrous results―first with the destruction of a part of the Spanish fleet at Cádiz, where Drake used fire ships to wreak havoc, and then with the defeat of the invincible Armada off the southwest coast of England. In Galway Bay, on the Irish west coast, lie the Aran Islands. Some of the vessels defeated in the battle made their way up the Irish coast, damaged and lost. The Spanish graves in the cemetery attest to the new found home of some of the sailors.

Early in the XVIIth century, the Dutch seized their chance and made inroads into the Portuguese empire, both in South America and in the Far East. Those sixty years were the most costly decades to Portugal, which paid an enormous price in strategic and political importance, lost revenue, and national pride. Apart from hostile trading, the Dutch protestant motivation was to dilute Spanish power by attacking overseas possessions, in order to overextend it. This led the way for the expulsion of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire  from the Netherlands.

The consequences of the religious fracture are still seen in Belgium today, an artificial country cobbled together as a federation of Dutch-originated Flemish, and francophone Waloons, who are collectively unable to form a national government since June 2010.

As the seventeenth century drew to a close, Portugal was left with its African colonies, Brazil, and a few eastern enclaves such as Goa, Timor, and Macau.

Had the 1640 restoration not taken place, it would be over three hundred and fifty years since Portugal existed as a country. The potential consequences would have included the participation in the Spanish civil war that preceded World War II, a total disconnect with Brazil and Africa, and the dilution and possible disappearance of the language itself, at least in its European version.

Last Thursday marked the final year that this national holiday is formally observed. Due to the claim by the IMF/EU/ECB troika that the country has an excessive number of public holidays, the government and the Church arrived at a compromise and erased four holidays by decree, two from each side. For a nation to give up the celebration of a memory of so much bloodshed and patriotic devotion is appaling. National celebrations are typically abolished by conquering nations to avoid reminders that might lead to rebellion of the occupied people. It’s like abolishing the Fourth of July; how many Americans would put up with that?

It’s disgraceful to lose this holiday as an appeasement  to third-rate technocrats. And apart from that, from the point of view of solving the underlying problem, it is plainly wrong. The problem of debt is an issue of money circulation, and the underlying trust that regulates the interest paid. That trust is really a trade-off between fear and greed. These days, the balance is on the side of fear.

There’s a joke doing the rounds about a businessman who wants to book himself into a penthouse suite in a swank hotel. He asks the manager if he can have a look around the suite, and the manager agrees, but requests a one hundred euro deposit. One never knows, these days. While the prospective client takes the elevator to the thirtieth floor, the manager pops out and pays  the electrician a hundred euros, owed from some work previously done on the suite. The electrician has an urgent debt to a prostitute, who is now denying him her favors. And he urgently needs to spark up his sex life. After she receives the hundred euros, she too liquidates a debt. A one hundred euro commission to the hotelier for use of the penthouse suite in the entertainment of discerning clients.  The young lady is exiting the hotel through the revolving door, just as the businessman arrives back in the lobby, collects his deposit, and bids farewell to the manager.

This joke only works if the cash can circulate (preferably with a little interest). If the electrician defaults on his debt, the circle breaks. If the interest is too high, one or more parties default.

When people are confronted with a problem they are unable to solve (let’s call it Problem A), they convert it into Problem B, which they are able to solve, and then solve that one. Does that solve the original problem? You tell me. The developed world suffers from a combination of profligacy, speculation, and moronic administrative procedures, which to a greater or lesser degree are common throughout Europe. The first two are driven by banks, the last is a consequence in southern Europe of Roman law and Napoleonic codes.

So let’s look at this cut in holidays, and how it might resolve the sovereign debt crisis. Let me put it bluntly: for every complex problem, there’s a simple solution. And it’s usually wrong.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development lists the hours worked per capita per year for a number of countries in this bizarre world of ours. These are averages, and of course, as every woman knows, statistics are like men. Properly manipulated, you can get them to do anything you want.

Excess in average working hours per year over 2000-2010. Data from OECD, displayed as a percentage relative to the Netherlands, the country with the least hours (click to expand).

So I got in touch with my feminine side and did a little manipulation. Ordering the table in descending order for the 2010 data is a good start. Thirty-five countries are analyzed; China and India are not included. I had to launder my list in Notepad, then do some search-replacing in Excel with obscure hidden ASCII characters, and I finally got a file I could work with. This was not manipulation, only foreplay.

I did three things to my list. First I calculated the average across the eleven years tabled (2000-2010), and then two other little things. One is called the coefficient of variation, and it tells us how much scatter the data have across the years. The second was to look at the trend in data; in other words, if people worldwide were working less in 2010 than in 2000.

Out of the thirty-five, South Koreans work the hardest, the Swiss work the least hours. In 2010. Italy is at number twelve. Then the United States, two places above the OECD average. Portugal is two places below the average, at number 17. Canada at 18. Then Finland. At 23 is Spain. Then the U.K. Germany trails in at 29. West Germany, evaluated separately, is at 31. Norway is the filling in the German sandwich.

Across years, there is not much variation. The guys who reduced most are the South Koreans, about 13% across the eleven years. Presumably they no longer have to get up before they go to bed, a reminiscence of the classic Four Yorkshiremen sketch―I’ve picked the version with John Cleese and the late Marty Feldman.

Finally, I did some rankings based on mean working hours over the eleven years, looking at the percentage difference among countries, with respect to the country that works least hours. Over the 11 year time period, it is no longer the Swiss that work least. The five at the bottom, in descending order, are France, Germany, West Germany, Norway and the Netherlands. Portugal is now only one position below the OECD average. Japan is one notch above the average. Italy still beats the U.S. by one position. The poor bloody Koreans are still number one, Greece comes in at number three.

Conclusion? Working hours are a piss-poor indicator of productivity. Work smart.

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Over the course of millenia, though the lenders have varied. Some have lent willingly, others less so.

If the king decided to go to war, or returned impoverished after a crusade, his subjects knew it was time to hide the grain. That is the story of Robin Hood.

War financing came from taxes, or loans from nations―sometimes subsidies from friendly countries, waging war by proxy for their own political ends. All the great powers have done that, fomenting conflict between small nations or funding ‘independence’ movements.

The repayment of the debt didn’t always occur. By definition it can’t, because war is not a positive sum game. When the debt was repaid, the source of the funds was always the same: the loser. In the process of paying the victor, the loser always defaults on his backers. The possessions of the loser become the spoils of war.

When the banking system developed, through the great banking houses of the United States and Europe, it became the job of banks to finance wars, through mechanisms that included direct loans, as well as the purchase of government bonds. The UK national debt went from £650 million in 1914, to £7,400 million (7.4 billion pounds) in 1919. Most of that was financed by American banks.

In Ken Follett’s most recent opus, called Fall of Giants, one of the characters, who happens to be Jewish, discusses this with a young lady who he is anxious to impress. he tells her that the daily cost of running Britain has increased from half a million quid in pre-war days to ten times that. That tallies with the numbers above, which show debt rising by an order of magnitude in the 1914-18 period.

I had a quick look at Ken Follett’s website, and saw that this book threatens to be the first of a trilogy, much like his Middle Ages tomes, Pillars of Earth and World Without End.  I found the latter book to be such a grind I called it Book Without End.

But there is an interesting link, modestly called Masterclass, in which the author explains his approach to writing. In essence, Follett makes it obvious that good writing is extremely hard work. His M.O. is to begin with an outline, that develops into a 25-40 page book summary, which is circulated, reviewed, and rewritten, usually twice. This is accompanied by much of the research for the story.

Work continues in the preparation of the first draft, which is itself reviewed. Follett then accepts or rejects his critics’ suggestions, and retypes the whole book again, rather than just making the edits on a digital file. His argument it that it helps identify the context and significance of all the words. He’s right, but it’s sweaty work!

In the prologue of  The India Road, there is an observation on Gama’s voyage, to dispel the notion that you can just embark and succeed.

Any successful journey has two parts: planning and execution. For each month Vasco da Gama spent at sea, twelve months of preparation had taken place. When the royal pilot Pero de Alenquer blew his whistle on the flagship on that hot July morning in 1497, leading the fleet into the vast waters of the North Atlantic, he knew that the great adventure had begun twenty-five years before, in the mind of the Perfect Prince, then a young man of seventeen. 

In Fall of Giants, Follett observes, through the mouth of Bernie, the Jewish boy (the setting is 1916, midway through the war), that World War I cannot end without the defeat of Germany. Amicable settlement is not an option―because without a victory, the U.K. debt cannot be repaid.

United Kingdom national debt as a percentage of GDP. The two major wars of the twentieth century are easily identified.

My curiosity about German reparation after the First World War led me to the treaty of Versailles. When I studied history, penned by English authors, in English schoolbooks, I learnt that the treaty of Versailles was signed to make peace among warring parties. It had other phrases that stayed in my mind: signing of the armistice, league of nations, war to end all wars.

I don’t recall the part about foreign debt, though I learnt that several bits and pieces of the Austro-Hungarian empire got carved up among the victors. So I did a little research. When you type Treaty of  in Google, the search engine suggests in sequence: Treaty of Paris, Treaty of Versailles, Treaty of Tordesillas. The Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783, and ended the American Revolutionary War. But I was most surprised to see Tordesillas there at number three. How suspiciously prominent! Maybe they do that specially for Iberia.

There is a saying in Portugal, quando a esmola é muita, até o pobre desconfia. The poor man bewares when alms are too generous. So I checked on Google through a U.K. computer, and the same search yields: Versailles, Rome, Lisbon. I guess the treaty of Paris is not too popular in England. The deeper message is that Google helps form (or inform) public opinion based on local preferences. I hope it’s nothing deeper than that.

Wikipedia states that, apart from the territorial concessions, the total reparation to Britain by Germany in the so-called ‘War Guilt’ clauses was a sum of 6,600 million pounds (£6.6 billion). In millions, 7400-650 = 6750 million. That’s a satisfying match.

Death toll numbers are always widely variable, but 700,000 British soldiers seems a rough consensus, which puts each life at ten thousand pounds. The UK pound is worth thirty times less now, so the 2011 equivalent is about three hundred thousand pounds.

John Maynard Keynes believed at the time that the reparation was excessive and would not be completed until 1988. He was right, Germany’s inability to pay the debt, the crisis of the mark that followed the war, and the rise of Hitler and a new wave of German nationalism were the practical consequences. And the Second World War. Stop me here if any of this sounds familiar.

In an unprecedented feat for an economist, Keynes was spot on. Even factoring in World War II, the Marshall Plan, The Berlin Wall, the European Community, and German reunification, which made it possible for the current German prime minister (though born in Hamburg) to be an Osti, the great man was right. For an economist. He missed by twenty years.

Germany completed its First World War reparation payments on October 3rd 2010,  twenty years after reunification, and ninety-two years after the war. The last installment paid was 59.5 million pounds sterling.

French soldiers leaving the trenches before the battle of Verdun, 1916

The sovereign debtstorm is raging, whipped up by unseen winds. The sandblast is taking everything in its path. As usually happens, the weak animals of the pack, the old and infirm, get picked off first; after that, we’re headed for the kernel, where the big pickings lie.

Almost three thousand years ago, the European age of empire began in Greece, then spread to Spain, to Portugal. With the Romans, Italy followed, and then headed north to Gaul and to the banks of the Rhine. So goes the sovereign debt advance. The most recent German bond auction only sold two-thirds of the placement. The politicians said they were not at all worried, which means they’re telling pork pies and wearing brown underpants.

Before Yalta, Stalin famously asked: how many divisions does the pope have? We now contemplate the first non-military European defeat. I guess we know where the reparations come from.

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Back in those days, drawing on the experience of older people I knew, I expected my life to become calmer and less chaotic with age. How wrong I was.

Thirty years ago information was a preciosity. What ten year olds now take for granted was simply unattainable. It’s difficult to read someone every week and not be curious about where they live, what they’ve done, how they look. As an example, suppose you wanted to find out where John Le Carré lived. Well, you don’t even have to know his name is David Cornwell in order to find out he has lived for forty years in the same village in Cornwall, called St. Buryan. And that he owns a mile of cliff there, near Land’s End.

And if I wrote him a letter addressed to John Le Carré, St. Buryan, Cornwall, U.K., it would be delivered. Like writing to Santa, North Pole. I’ve read every book Le Carré has written, usually finished it within a month of it coming out. But the internet let me find an essay he wrote in 2003 called The US has gone mad. I love the father and son conversation in it, vintage Le Carré. And his comments on Blair and the British involvement in the Iraq war are priceless.

Jeery Pournelle has a website, but it is somewhat unkempt. Partly that is in keeping with the notion of chaos manor, but it may well be because he was diagnosed with a brain tumour in 2008, and obviously that shifts your priorities pretty radically. In the 1980s, it was almost impossible to find accurate information about people, unless they wanted to give it to you. Now it’s almost impossible not to find it.

It would have been impossible to research and write The India Road in a one year period were it not for search engines, map engines, second hand book sites, crackpot blogs, and many other resources. Tide prediction algorithms, medieval units tables, and so much else. For instance, if you type 10 leagues in fathoms into Google, it will do the conversion.

The Apple IIe, a computer from thirty years ago. Apple's products were a little less sexy then.

In the 1980′s there was no talk of sovereign debt, and although computers were becoming more common, they were standalone tools, with the exception of email, which was clunky and slow. Phones were anything but smart. And China was wrapped up in the cultural revolution, rather than world dominance. Now the U.S. is printing money like there’s no tomorrow, China aspires to a reserve currency, and Europe is upside down. If it wasn’t, how could it have a German pope and an Italian central banker?

Apparently, Pournelle describes his politics as slightly to the right of Genghis Khan,  but I never read anything political from him, and I couldn’t really care. He did come up with a couple of laws, of which my favorite is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Stated in its original form:

In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

I have found this to be true in every organization I’ve been involved with. If you think about it, you have too.

In scientific research, this has become increasingly common―so much effort is forced upon scientists in order to satisfy the administrative demands of funding science, that very little science is actually done. In a truly Machiavellian twist, this increases bean counting rules and controls, since apparently the scientists are not doing much science at all. After all, this is public money we’re talking about.

Pournelle’s site includes a column that appeared in Byte in 1996, entitled How to get my job. Read it if you’re interested in writing, but at least retain this:

To be an author, you must first be a writer; and while it’s easy to be an author, being a writer is hard work. Surprisingly, it may be only hard work; that is, while some people certainly have more talent for writing than others, everyone has some. The good news is that nearly anyone who wants to badly enough can make some kind of living at writing. The bad news is that wanting to badly enough means being willing to devote the time and work necessary to learn the trade.

The secret of becoming a writer is that you have to write. You have to write a lot. You also have to finish what you write, even though no one wants it yet. If you don’t learn to finish your work, no one will ever want to see it. The biggest mistake new writers make is carrying around copies of unfinished work to inflict on their friends.

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that’s another story.

Among other gems, there is a link to an essay on writing, penned by none other than George Orwell. Five simple recommendations are made by the great man. And then a sixth.

(i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

(ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do.

(iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

(iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active.

(v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

(vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I can’t imagine a better primer for scientific writing, or for plain language. For me this all translates into a simple statement.

Writing is hard, so reading can be easy.

The internet has allowed anyone to be a published author, and one of the great obstacles to circulation, i.e. the printed book itself, with its dependent circuit of distributors, book stores, cafeterias, concert dates, and free wifi, is on its way out. You may not like it. I may not like it. But that won’t stop it happening. At home, kids are growing up without paper, except for schoolwork.

Amazon has been at the forefront of the paperless book. By converting the book into a digital product, it has completely shifted the goalposts of the business.

Think of a book that is not new, that you recall seeing in dusty library shelves at school, a classic forever (what an ephemeral word that is) associated with heavy leather binding. How about Tolstoy’s War and Peace? In some of the schools I attended it was used as a weapon by teachers, to bang you on the head if you talked. Which I did. Ah, schooldays, the best days of your life.

A weighty tome such as this Russian classic is easy to find on Amazon. I type in the title, and while I’m at it, I select in books.  That’ll narrow it down.

Here it is. Now let’s have a look. Maybe I could get a copy. Even if I have no patience to read it, I can conjure up a host of people I’d enjoy banging over the head. For pedagogical reasons, of course.

First two hits? Paperback. Now that’s not going to hurt anyone. Price? For the first one, $11.16. With the euro exchange rate, that’s less than ten euros. Great. I didn’t really mean to hit anybody anyhow. Oh look, there’s a Kindle edition. Funny, I thought I specified books.

What? It’s free? And I get it right now? A free download in under a minute? Surely you’re kidding, Mr. Bezos.

Scroll down. Next hit. The Kindle version is more expensive than the printed book. By eleven cents. But I need to pay postage if I want the old school version!

How about hit number three? A Kindle version for $3.44. And it has a bunch of extra features, too.

This edition has special Kindle enabled features, including interactive table of contents, text-to-speech capabilities which enable audiobook features, as well as words that can be looked up on the Kindle supplied built in dictionary.

Well, that’s tempting. Reading this on a smartphone is out of the question, but on a tablet? A Kindle, an IPad, a Galaxy Tab? That’s kind of paperback size. And look, it’s culture for the masses. War and Peace in Uganda. Or Burma. Instantly.

How about schools? I was educated in English schools where you put a deposit down for your books. You got it back if your books were not defaced at the end of the year. But in many countries, parents spend a fortune on schoolbooks. Every year. And every year the books keep changing. It’s not called a curriculum, it’s called a racket.

Publishers hedge their bets, because the book stores only accept books on consignment. So if a publisher prints 100,000 geography books and only half get sold, he’s left with a big pile of paper. Worthless paper, because next year it will be a different book. So he prints 10,000. They sell out. By the time the second edition comes out, your kid is half-way through term. And he still thinks geography is something to do with recreational running (sorry).

Kids might deface their books, but they won’t deface their IPad. They would in fact shed blood to defend it.

There is a small catch about these e-books. Although Adobe’s portable document format (pdf) is perfectly serviceable, these babies have a proprietary format. Amazon’s is called AZW. No guesses what the AZ bit stands for. But all the players (pun intended) have their different formats. It’s the VHS/Betamax, Windows/Android/Iphone/Symbian story. It’s dejá vu all over again, Yogi!

Oh, about that paperback thing?

I was lying. I’ll just bang ‘em over the head with a Kindle.

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