Big Sur

Back when Felipe Gonzalez, a Sevillano, was the Spanish prime minister, a joke did the rounds about Morocco’s claim to Ceuta and Melilla. The North African nation could have them back, the prime minister said, if they took Andalucia as well.

Andalucia, the former caliphate of Al Andalus, and the bottom layer of the cake.

The Spanish autonomous regions are arranged like a wedding cake—Andalucia and little Murcia at the base. In the map, Portugal has disappeared, and the Spanish province of Extremadura has suddenly grown a coastline.

Andalucia is almost as large as Castile, and when you overlay the watershed of the Guadalquivir on the map, you realize the river defines the region. The Wadi al Kebir, as the Moors called it, is literally the great river, flowing west from the region of Granada until it turns south somewhere above Seville and flows into the Atlantic at Sanlucar de Barrameda.

It’s about sixty miles from the Guadalquivir estuary to Seville, and on the right bank of the river is the huge national park of Doñana, one of the largest bird overwintering areas in Europe.

Along the coast, to the west of the river, is the city of Huelva, but to travel there from Cadiz, the ancient Phoenician city of Gades, you need to go via Seville, at the apex of the triangle, because between the estuary and Seville there isn’t one single bridge.

Down in Sanlucar, the locals understand the need for a connection, and plans for a bridge at the southern tip of the river go back to 1947. Changing political agendas, government priorities, and economic issues mean that seventy years on there’s still no bridge, and no plan.

It also means that Sanlucar is isolated and remains little-known, except to the Spanish themselves. I was astonished to drive and walk the streets, eat and drink in the restaurants and bars, and never see a foreigner—remember this is mid-August, and tourism in Iberia is booming because of the terrorism concerns in Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, and elsewhere.

So I hesitated before sharing with you a jewel of this quality—a place where you don’t see an English newspaper on sale, no one gives a shit about trip advisor, and you hear nothing but the machine-gun staccato of Andalucia.

But my trust in your good taste is boundless, so here we are. After you see Chef Jose Andres describe it, all will be clear—except I had another couple of hot leads, from a Sevillian friend who makes the most beautiful lamps in the region.

Casa Balbino is great, but there are other secret places where the little tortillita de camaron is even better.

I expected Sanlucar to be more dangerous—I’ve written before in these pages about its links to the Moroccan hash trade. But there was no threatening vibe, and I calmly walked the alleys late at night—and I didn’t once smell dope or see anyone having a toke.

On the evening of the Assumption Day fiesta, mounds of earth were heaped in the streets, about thirty yards apart. Next to these brown hills, parents and children—every kid carried a beach bucket and spade,  and most of them banged on the buckets—a back beat for the scene that followed.

Near the castle, the mounds were white, and the kiddies had been let loose—they filled their buckets and poured the contents on the ground, while grown-ups with rakes spread the mixture evenly, until the whole road was white.

Salt adornments for the Virgin Mary, Sanlucar-style.

But early next morning, it had all turned into a magic display of color—and the heaps of the previous night weren’t earth at all, but salt—good sea salt from the mouth of the Guadalquivir, dyed blue, yellow, and red.

The blue of the ocean, and the yellow and red of Spain—always representing the blood of conquest, and eldorado, the gold that it brought.

And although Sanlucar now mainly boasts shrimp boats and hashish gomas, this remarkably understated spot bears the gravitas of history—in May 1498, Columbus departed from here on his third trip to the Americas, from which he returned in shackles.

As the ‘admiral of the ocean sea’ sailed west on another vain quest for Cipango, Vasco da Gama crossed the Indian Ocean to Calicut on the summer monsoon, and reached the real indies.

But Sanlucar was also the departure of another Portuguese sailor, called Fernão de Magalhães. Magellan, as he’s known to the world, left Sanlucar in 1419, sailing for the Spanish crown, and his expedition completed the first circumnavigation of the globe.

None of these events are celebrated locally, and there is no museum or historical residence which boasts of the town’s pride in these voyages and explorers.

But there is one famous palace, which now boasts one of the best private archives in Europe—the Dukes of Medina-Sidonia, the first Spanish dukedom, appointed in 1445, and a legend of Spanish nobility, have their ancestral home a few hundred yards south of the castle.

And in one of the rooms hangs a portrait of the seventh duke—a small picture, which shows a man punished by the sands of time. The man is Don Alonso de Gusmán El Bueno, who commanded the Invincible Armada.

It sailed from La Coruña in 1588, led by a man who hated the ocean and suffered terribly from seasickness—its ships were scattered and sunk by a combination of traditional British weather and the good offices of Francis Drake.

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

 

 

 

The World is your Oyster

Now there’s a strange expression, but it has a fine pedigree. As all you good literati know, it originates in Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’.

Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.
Pistol: Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.
Falstaff: Not a penny.

I first met Pistol when I was in my early teens, and my English teacher decided to torture the class with Shakespeare’s Henry V. In Act II, Pistol’s cock is up and flashing fire will follow.

Then as now, I was easily amused, and that’s one of the few lines of the immortal bard I can still quote. Some years later, when I lived in the English Midlands, I went on numerous occasions to the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford.

Before the performance, although we were all underage, we had a few libations at the Dirty Duck—one of my friends regularly tried to sell American tourists Shakespeare’s toothbrush.

During the performance, we waited until the theater-goers had deposited their half-finished drinks on the long shelf adjoining the bar, eager to return to their seats before the curtain rose, confident of being reunited with their glasses at the next interval.

Over that next magical half-minute, we drilled through the shelf like the army of Genghis Khan, then sat in the darkness as the thespians appeared, while our stomachs centrifuged a concoction of taste, color, and buzz.

The RSC has always boasted amazing actors—I watched them perform ‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’, and the rambunctious Pistol telling Falstaff that he would use his blade to prise open the oyster and take his due.

Oysters and men are inextricably bound, so that the history of both cannot be separated—I wonder, in fact, if the phrase shouldn’t be ‘the oyster is your world’. What binds them both is the sea, and the human propensity to settle next to estuaries.

Europe is reeling from an eggy uproar, a kind of yolk Guam—fire and fury soufflé. Of the many things that make a European proud, food quality is certainly in the top five, along with cathedrals and soccer.

This triggers strong views on hormones in US beef, chlorinated chicken, and shellfish microbiological standards—the latter resulted in a mutual trade ban, which deprives the old continent of such delicacies as geoduck (pronounced gooey duck), grown in the Pacific Northwest.

Incidentally, my article about geoduck in these pages remains by far the most viewed ever—size clearly does matter!

In the past, Europe was not so concerned about who ate what, but BSE (mad cows), scrapie (crazy sheep), and other scares have changed our attitude to food. If you go back to the nineteenth century, you find that Scottish trout were fed on oysters and horse meat—a blow indeed for your average pescatarian.

This is described in the history of ‘Howietoun’, one of the oldest fish farms in Scotland, now owned by the University of Stirling. The oyster side of the story is particularly interesting, because in the XIX^th century, the critter in question would have been the European flat oyster, known in France (and tony restaurants elsewhere) as bellon—it’s worth considerably more than its counterpart, the rock oyster, which is classed in Europe as an invasive species.

The internet has become an immense resource for scholarship—in a variety of languages, as I joyfully discovered when I researched Clear Eyes. Armed with the information that the oysters used to feed trout most likely came from Edinburgh, I embarked on a voyage that took me back the last quarter of the 1800’s.

Northern Europe and North America have a long-standing tradition of fisheries research boards, and it turns out that the annual reports of the Fishery Board for Scotland, published in the 1880’s and 1890’s, are available for histoysterical scholars.

In those days, oysters were consumed in copious quantities. Lewis Carroll makes the point in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’.

Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more–
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.

…

“A loaf of bread,” the Walrus said,
“Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed–
Now if you’re ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed.”

“But not on us!” the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
“After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!”
“The night is fine,” the Walrus said.
“Do you admire the view?

…

“O Oysters,” said the Carpenter,
“You’ve had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?’
But answer came there none–
And this was scarcely odd, because
They’d eaten every one.

The poem doesn’t tell us how many bivalves were scarfed by the walrus and the carpenter—it’s unclear whether carpentry as a profession is particularly conducive to an oyster diet, but the walrus chiefly feeds on molluscs—Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician, and thus a stickler for accuracy.

From the multiplication by four, it sounds as if we’re quickly into the bushels—and the walrus will have taken the (sea)lion’s share, because he cracked them open, whereas the carpenter needed to shuck. Nevertheless, the human opposable thumb is a limiting factor for both the pepper and vinegar, but I digress.

In the Firth of the Forth, next to the city of Edinburgh, the oyster grounds covered an area of one hundred and twenty square miles—impossible to imagine today. At the start of the XIX^th century, a boat working the Forth could dredge six thousand oysters in one day.

In the 1830’s, not long after the Napoleonic wars, Edinburgh exported about seven million oysters every year, and the locals consumed about a tenth of that.

The Scots were so profligate with their oyster beds that by 1895, the total stock in the Forth was estimated to be only 250,000 animals. Much of the decline was due to relaying, still a very common practice today—young oysters had been sold for decades to restock the depleted oyster beds of Holland and England.

A local fisherman commented:

It used to be a case of picking out clams (queen scallop) when dredging for oysters; now it is picking out an occasional oyster when dredging for clams.

It’s no wonder, with such an impetuous drive to destroy such an important natural resource, that oysters even found their way into trout ponds.

One of the most striking parts of these historical reports is the concern about overfishing. Even then, sensible and prudent recommendations appeal to the powers that be, underscoring the need for controlling fisheries for particular species, and on the importance of protecting salmon waters from pollution in rivers.

In those days, there was a general view that emptying waste into rivers was a reasonable thing to do, since rivers naturally function as conduits for human waste—the Scottish scientists emphasized that water unfit for humans is water unfit for salmon.

And six generations on from such profound wisdom, we still collect data, scratch our heads and wonder what can be done.

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

Rudolf

History is most interesting when paradigms shift. And paradigms shift in two ways.

The first is when something totally unexpected occurs. The discovery of penicillin, which changed the relationship between humans and disease, is a good example. The second comes about through non-linearity, my favorite process. Water slowly builds up behind the wall, the level gradually rising, unseen and unheard, and then one day the wall cracks.

This build-up translates an accumulation of potential energy into a release of kinetic energy—the myth of Sisyphus, perennially rolling a rock up a hill until exhaustion releases it to roll down again. The king of Corinth provides the kinetic energy, the rock acquires potential energy, and then releases it as it rolls downhill.

A similar shift occurs when anger, stress, or frustration builds up inside you until there is a release, and there is a societal parallel as a trend or wish develops in enough minds to cause a shift. Arguably, the US presidential election is an example of the latter.

Unquestionably, so is the recent decision in parts of Europe (not Germany) to do away with the internal combustion engine. France and Britain plan to do so by 2040, by banning the sale of new diesel and petrol cars.

Germany, where diesel is king, timidly wants a million electric cars on the road by 2020—in 2016, there were forty-five million registered.

Which bring us to Uncle Rudolf.

Rudolf Diesel: an amazing man, of whom hardly an English biography exists.

The inventor of the most successful engine in the world is a little-known man. The Franco-German engineer became very wealthy from his invention, but he was a prodigy in engineering, with a string of innovations to his name.

You may not like engines, so forgive me torturing you with the information that the man invented the compression-ignition engine, a very different beast from the internal combustion engine that drives petrol-fueled cars. These engines fire on their own, using basic principles of thermodynamics to inject fuel into a compressed air mixture—above a certain temperature the mixture self-ignites, so the engine doesn’t need the complex low voltage-high voltage rig that fires spark plugs.

Diesel is the only guy with an engine named after him. Well… there is Wankel, but I don’t want to lower the tone on a weekend—we already have trump tweets for that.

The remarkable thing about diesel engines is they run on just about anything, as long as it burns. Which means used cooking oil, even from McDonald’s, and everything from cane sugar alcohol to beet to peanut oil—the oils fall under the category of biodiesel, and you can run the most recent diesel engines on it. You can even use homemade oil, as long as you wash it.

Rudy was born in 1858, and disappeared mysteriously from a postal steamer called the Dresden in 1913. Somewhere between dinner and breakfast he vanished from the ship, in the middle of the English Channel, while en route to London. What is known is that the fifty-five year old millionaire had dinner on his own and retired to his cabin at ten o’clock, leaving word that he was to be woken at 06:15 the next morning.

His bed was found perfectly made, with his unused nightshirt laid out, and his hat and overcoat were neatly folded on the afterdeck. A terribly disfigured corpse was found in the North Sea ten days later, and his identity confirmed by his son Eugen, based on personal effects.

The corpse was found near Norway, but the ship had sailed from Antwerp to London, not exactly close—there was a report on October 11^th 2013 that Diesel’s body had first been found by a small Dutch fishing boat at the mouth of the Scheldt estuary in Zeeland, but cast overboard due to rough seas.

In the early XX^th century, the world was still the province of colonial powers, and at the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, the Otto company exhibited a diesel engine running on peanut oil.

The French wanted it for their African colonies, where petroleum fuels were not abundant. Diesel himself had a noble vision for his engine—he saw it powering the agri-industry in remote parts of the world, and imagined a world where farming became self-sufficient—farmers would go their own fuel, refine it using simple methods, and use it to power the engines that operated tractors and harvesters.

Rudolph Diesel became a strong advocate for biodiesel, which is understandable for three reasons. First, his engine was fuel-agnostic, and he saw no particular advantage in advocating petroleum products. Second, it was a huge untapped market, which could greatly increase his company revenue.

Finally, it made perfect sense to locally produce the fuels that would be used in farm areas—although no one spoke of carbon footprint back then, or terrorism in the Mid-East, hindsight can be revealing on the consequences for both.

Enter John D. Rockefeller and Big Oil. A biodiesel success would scupper Standard Oil of New Jersey, and the huge US business bet on petroleum hydrocarbons.

Or… enter the German secret service, worried that Diesel would help Churchill with his plans for the development of a British submarine.

Or…

The suicide theory is very unlikely, and in those days a problem could be created or resolved by one man with a briefcase.

And although they found the hat and coat, the briefcase is missing to this day.

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

 

 

 

 

Cats and Dogs

A recent article on chlorinated chicken featured Britain’s environment secretary, who resembles a plucked bird himself—that’s bad enough, but when delivered as a live feed by Andrew Sparrow, it becomes a punfest of the worst order.

In the US, a chlorine rinse is used to kill bacteria that thrive on the carcasses, whereas the EU impose rules that guarantee sterility in the slaughter process, dispensing with chlorine.

The British press, politicians, pundits, and other twerps, are up in arms about it all—there was an outcry a few days ago for the UK trade minister to eat a chlorinated chicken to prove it’s safe.

All this gets even sillier because the minister is called Fox, which leads us straight into another chicken punfest. Brexit, predictably, seems to be an exercise in complete confusion, and has turned into hours of harmless fun.

This is only true in the UK, however, where reporters fill pages with astoundingly amazing alliterations about bungling Brussels bureaucrats, whereas you will find it tough to see a byline on Brexit in Le Monde, Il Tempo, or Frankfurter Allgemeine.

But who cares, right? Most Brits couldn’t name a single foreign newspaper—the stupid things aren’t even written in English!

So it falls to the Maltese to assuage the masses and report on progress, since Malta currently holds the rotating presidency of the EU—and oh, how America envies a rotating presidency at this point, when what they have is a cabinet carrousel.

The Maltese prime minister went on the record with some interesting statements on the status of the EU-UK talks. He showed his political naivety by stating “I’m starting to believe Brexit will not happen.”

He compounded that by saying “the will of the people can have disastrous consequences, history teaches us; I could name some examples, but they’re so horrendous they’d raise the wrath of my British friends.”

Given the obvious reference to Nazi Germany, I’m surprised this wasn’t met with typical Etonian puerility, instructing the Maltese to go whistle, or worse than that, sing.

Spot the Bot. Another confused Brexiteer.

In any case neither statement does the process any favors—if there’s any chance of a rollback, it will be achieved by dilution. Britain justly earned its spurs as the perfidious Albion, and the only way to resolve this is through gentle amnesia.

The public memory is short, otherwise no politician would ever be re-elected, and the trick is to leave without leaving. A popular politician, and heaven knows they’re as scarce as the Yeti, can make that happen.

Since popular is a very different word to populist, let’s do a history check of some of the world’s great populists: Hitler and Mussolini, Amin, Saddam, Chavez, Pinochet, Mao. Unlike the US senate, I’ve tried to be bipartisan in my list.

Populism isn’t the path—the Trump, Farage, and Le Pen model is evidence enough, but a popular leader in the UK, which after all is the nation that gave us the phrase common sense, can persuade the country they will win by losing, rather than lose by winning.

Already, Philip Hammond, the UK Chancellor, has confirmed the cabinet is united on a three-year transition period, which would leave matters pretty much as they are until 2022. By then, who knows what Europe will look like, and what further dementia will have struck in the United States, the Mid-East, and the Korean peninsula.

Our man from Malta goes on to question reports that Britain is unprepared for negotiation. He states “A non-prepared British government official simply doesn’t exist”. I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Muscat, but in my time I’ve known more than a few.

He does however make another amazing statement.

The problem isn’t that London is prepared badly, but that the EU is prepared extremely well. That much became clear when Michael Barnier asked me, ‘Do you know how many cats and dogs travel from Dover to Calais every year? Do you know what’s to be done with the animal passport?’ Such detail! That’s when I knew: the EU is excellently prepared.

Apart from the fact the guy’s name is Michel, I believe everything Malta man says—the Brit love of animals, with or without chlorine, is not open to question.

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

 

The Smell Test

Like the rule of thumb, the smell test is one of those magical tricks that help you make a good decision quickly.

Why is this important? Because many people who make a quick decision regret it. Does it pass the smell test? If your heart screams ‘no’, believe it and don’t get sweet-talked—walk away.

In the West, our guilty conscience, environmental concern, and disposable income, have given a massive boost to the word ‘organic’. Organic once meant a molecule that contains carbon—not simple compounds like carbon dioxide, but complex proteins and polysaccharides—nowadays, in common English, it means free ‘of industrial fertilizers and pesticides.’

There is the small matter that without these we would all be starving, and the population of today’s world would be far smaller. But animal welfare, traceability, and local produce are all compelling values for Generation Y, which can afford them, so ‘organic’ is cash.

In the US state of Michigan, one company sells USDA Organic-labelled eggs—ten percent of the American market—from an agri-complex that packs hens at three per square foot. If you like  SI units, then it’s almost thirty of the poor things in every square meter.

Even worse, USDA Organic standards require that animals get fresh air, sunlight, and exercise. When I write these articles from home, my window is usually wide open—and through it come the noises of the chickens next door.

Unlike those sold by Eggland (sounds more like Eggjail to me), where the animals are confined in nine rectangular barns, the hens in the next yard come out of their coop in the early morning, advertising their freedom, and the cocks often color the day with their raucous sounds. Stray cats occasionally prowl the perimeter, causing avian mayhem—these are organic chickens.

In central Africa, the silliest, most benign, and defenseless creature is being barbarously hunted. It’s name may sound like a musical instrument, but the pangolin is a  nocturnal mammal that feeds off insects.

The animal harks back to an ancient time, since it is the only mammal whose body is covered in scales. And it has no teeth—to compensate for that, it swallows small stones that remain in the stomach and help it digest the ants and termites it eats.

Some pangolins are tree-dwellers, and some live on the forest floor. All have one defense mechanism in common—they roll up into a ball, leaving their hard scales on the outside as body armor—just like a woodlouse.

In India, a pair of lions are baffled by the pangolin’s scaly resistance.

For millions of years, this strategy has been a winner—enter humans, who just pick up the scaly ball and make off with it.

Pangolin meat is popular in central Africa, but above all, the poor creature is desirable in Asia. When China and Southeast Asia take an interest in an animal, conservationists shudder.

In this case, Orientals consider the meat a delicacy, and decided the scales have medicinal value. The Chinese grind the scales into a powder and prescribe them to nursing women and as a cure for psoriasis. In Pakistan, the scales are thought to have spiritual powers and ward off evil. The composition of the scales is well-established—keratin, which makes up fingernails and hair. How about saving your clippings instead, people?

As a consequence of these ludicrous myths, there is now a large export trade from Africa, since Asian stocks are dwindling rapidly.

Unsurprisingly, since ‘hunting’ pangolin is like shooting fish in a barrel, and since numbers in Asia are very low, the shy and inoffensive animal is protected.

Once again, like the greedy chicken farmer, illegal traffickers profit—the pangolin is the most widely traded species, with up to 2.7 million animals being killed every year. And as everywhere, there’s a human food chain, starting with the ‘hunter’ and ending with the politician—in fourteen central African nations where killing pangolins is illegal, the animals are mercilessly hunted. Techniques include digging out burrows, use of fire and chemicals to force animals to surface, and trapping with wire snares.

But we don’t just torture and kill animals, we murder entire ecosystems. The Yamuna river in Uttarakhand was described by a Moghal emperor in the XVI^th century as better than nectar.

The Yamuna is a sacred river, just like the Ganges, and on its banks sits the Taj Mahal. There are two hundred and fifty miles of Yamuna before it reaches Delhi, and in that upstream reach, the river is as beautiful as it was five centuries ago.

But as it wends through the Indian capital, its pristine waters are replaced by urban and industrial effluents, killing a river that is declared a living entity by the high court of Uttarakhand.

Hundreds of years ago, the Portuguese sailors, and those who followed them, were responsible for the extinction of the pássaro doido—the dodo. My nose tells me we haven’t learned anything since then.

Oooh, that smell.

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

BFF

In the Led Zeppelin song ‘Stairway to Heaven’, there’s a lady who knows sometimes words have two meanings. BFF means Best Friends Forever, which was my original intent, but it can also mean Big Fat Fuck, which fits nicely.

During the Korean war, Mao famously quipped that for the USA, one dead soldier is a tragedy, but for China, one million dead are a statistic—and at that time, the Middle Kingdom had only six hundred million people, forty percent of the current population.

It strikes me that one of the many reasons why business tycoons shouldn’t be trusted with the destiny of nations is that corporate deal-making is essentially bilateral.

CEO’s are ill-equipped to solve multilateral issues, whereas politicians can be pretty good at bringing parties together, generating consensus, and walking away with substantive agreements—Thatcher once said that consensus is the opposite of unanimity, and I would add that in world affairs, consensus is the art of the deal.

The US position on Korea reflects this blatant lack of understanding. In the first place, the position should be on Korea, rather than North Korea, because the problem can only be solved holistically. And secondly, it involves six nations at the very least.

Of these, the US is a superpower, and Russia and China are world powers. Japan is an economic powerhouse and a military eunuch. South Korea is relatively similar to Japan, and North Korea is the opposite.

If you check the historical Hate-O-Meter, then Japan and China hate each other, Japan and Korea likewise, the Koreas dislike each other, and US moods have shifted. And deep down, most all the Asian nations resent or dislike America.

In this six nations tournament, the teams are not all going for the same trophy. South Korea wants to stay wealthy and safe from the armed robbers next door; China wants to be the regional superpower, and will not accept nuclear weapons on its back porch—just as the US wouldn’t tolerate them in Cuba.

Japan wants to be rearmed or reassured, the US wants to be the lead and to be loved, and the Russians want to screw the Chinese, Americans, and Japanese, though not necessarily in that order.

Does this sound complicated enough? From a military viewpoint, this isn’t a theater, it’s a multiplex. As an example, increased commitment in the Korean peninsula weakens resources in the Mid-East, so there’s a trade-off in Syria, Iraq, and yes, the evil twins, which puts a smile on the face of the Russian bear.

Cartoon of a train wreck. Award-winning entry in a recent competition in Tehran.

And at the center of all this geopolitical mayhem is a little country with less that fifty thousand square miles, twenty-five million people, a per capita GDP under 600 bucks, and an insane, multi-generational dictatorship.

So the idea that there’s a deal to be made between the USA and China to solve this bilaterally is a monument to stupidity—and Xi Jinping sure ain’t stupid.

Somewhere between the golf course and the chocolate cake, the Chinese president must have realized he was talking to one of the resort’s signature idiots—a man, possibly even a BFF, who didn’t understand that insulting the celestials repeatedly, calling them currency manipulators and worse, would never result in them becoming BFF—to the Chinese, loss of face is like terminal cancer.

Examples of the Middle Kingdom buffering its borders are numerous—the China-India border is the mother of all disputes: Bhutan, Myanmar, Nepal, and India itself.

Vietnam is another example of a key buffer—a country the Chinese supported militarily until the USA finally lost that war.

China will not abdicate its perceived right to a Korean buffer, unless the trade-off is a sympathetic Korean peninsula and no American troops. In other words, ‘solving’ North Korea by turning it into part of a US-supported Korea is  a non-starter.

Japan certainly wouldn’t welcome an American pullout—it remembers its gigantic neighbor too well. Nor would Russia, who is quite happy tying Uncle Sam down in East Asia while making hay in Syria, and keeping an eye on Iran and Saudi Arabia, the evil twins.

Complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

What part of this problem does the BFF not understand?

All of it.

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

 

Old Europe

Old Europe is heating up again.

The disparaging term was coined by Donald Rumsfeld to vilify traditional European views that clashed with the Bush 43 administration’s vision of a new world order.

History is a wonderful leveler—this so-called order, fifteen years later, is a world in utter chaos. With one exception: Old Europe.

In mid-2016, the prophets of doom began predicting the end of Europe—Anglo-Saxon pundits repeated ad nauseam that the UK was the first nation to leave the European Union.

In the fall, a confused and fractured America elected Donald Trump, and the voices of isolation grew—a kind of nationalist autism (natautism) frenzy, where crazies with no historical grounding advocated a return to bastions of prejudice and hatred.

After Holland gave Europe its first sign of hope this spring, those same pundits said “with all due respect” that The Netherlands was small potatoes, France would be the game-changer.

And it was. The country whose motto is ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ scored a home-run for Europe. Twice, in the presidential and parliamentary elections—and shut the pundits up for good.

In the meantime, Trump steadily confirmed what better-educated Americans knew all too well: his boorish incompetence, singular lack of judgement, and moral turpitude—the latter manifested through multiple cheap accusations and childish threats, offending anyone and everyone who disagreed with him or dared question his ‘wisdom’.

And then came the Maybot debacle. It’s difficult to exaggerate the degree of confusion that currently plagues the British Isles, but it’s left an isolated England even more alone, and turned Old Europe into a haven of common sense when compared to the Anglo-Saxon alternative.

Finally, young Britons saw the light, and came out en masse to change the status quo. I’ve been railing in these pages for some time that apathy and amnesia are democracy’s greatest enemies—British youth suddenly awoke and put the fear of god into the Tory government.

The same seems to have happened in France, where Macron mobilized young people in ways that completely shifted the political spectrum.

In both countries, the change was for the good of all, and underscored a simple fact—what unites us is far more important than any divisions.

The U.K. is more isolated than ever, and has absolutely no idea on how to extricate itself from its present mess. Europe is left wondering who it is negotiating with, and what will actually be discussed—on both sides of the Channel, cool heads believe that the most straightforward solution would be to confess that the whole Brexit affair was simply a huge mistake—many affairs are.

Europe is running hot. The financial channels, which delighted in dissecting the break-up of the euro, are now busy discussing the vagaries of the pound and UK inflation.

The dollar, which was moving toward parity with the euro even as Trump was elected, and afterward flirted with values below 1.05, is presently nudging 1.15.

The greenback vacillates as Old Europe thrives.

The next test for Old Europe is the German election on the 24th of September. It seems unlikely that the Germans will undo the good things this year has brought.

Frau Merkel, whether you like her or not, is a steady hand at the helm, and has learned several important lessons about Europe—some of which, like austerity, made Southern European nations pay a spectacular price, but there is a far clearer vision now about what works and what doesn’t.

We have scary people like Le Pen, Trump, and Farage to thank for showing us all how not to do it, and above all for frightening the politicians and the young people of Europe alike into a return to common sense.

Beyond the borders of Europe lies chaos: the Mid-East inheritance of the Bush and Blair years, and the radical testosteronocracy of Russia.

We’re not out of the woods yet, but this good feeling that permeates the continent is a superb opportunity for Europe to consolidate further.

After all, many of the citizens of the Union will be happy to tell you they live in the best place on earth. And England can so easily remain a part of that, if it exercises one of its most prized virtues—common sense.

Good Old Europe.

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

 

 

Yum

The helicopter blades whirred, there was one jolt, and the little machine was underway—a mechanical insect under a perfect blue sky.

My destination was a small island in northern Biscay, ten nautical miles from the French mainland. There’s a ferry, but it runs infrequently. Squeezed into the chopper were a few other disciples—we were all searching for the holy grail: Food.

Islands, no matter what the size, always reflect a different mindset—this is true for Islay, Ireland, or tiny little Sark, a microdot in the English Channel.

This particular island has two defining characteristics: bikes and jalopies. As soon as the little helicopter settled on the big H and we extricated ourselves from the cabin, I understood that my jacket and tie would be nothing but dead weight on this trip.

There’s an endless supply of rented bicycles, and like escapees from the age of Henry Ford’s Model T, they’re all black. We used them to go to the beach, to the place where we assembled to discuss good food, and for dinner expeditions.

Last weekend there was a gibbous moon, and as the nights got progressively darker, the return rides between pitch-black hedgerows became increasingly perilous—only some bikes had lights, and our party was amply fueled by the local wine.

The woman who guided us on our returns had the navigation and night vision skills of Seal Team Six—I told her so in my dedication note after I left her house.

Every derelict vehicle seems to have hopped over from the mainland—the port boasted a collection of clapped-out Clios, clangy ‘quattrelles’, and other escapees from the golden age of French motoring.

Lest you disparage French engineering, consider this side-mounted barbecue.

Along with the rickety Renaults, innovation was at hand, by way of a vertically mounted barbecue for roasting an entire sheep. Never in my travels have I come across such a device, which allows wood and coal to be fired, flames licking skyward, while  the animal calmly rotates next to, rather than above, the heat.

Good food was the theme that brought us together, and what a motley crew we were: Chefs, company CEOs, scientists, venture capitalists, even a previous member of the Obama administration.

Legend has it George W. Bush once stated that ‘the trouble with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.’ Not so this group, young people fired with ideas on using insect meal to feed farm animals, radically changing the manufacture of spirits, or growing your own produce in the back room of your salad bar.

The common denominator was originality, and the understanding that millennials are revolutionizing food. The focus is no longer on big ag, but instead on the things that matter to Generation Y.

By 2020, the discretionary purchasing power of millennials will replace baby boomers, and Gen Y priorities are vastly different: sustainability, animal welfare, traceability, well being, and local urban agriculture.

These are areas where big ag is clueless, since their entire business model is based on the exact opposite of these concepts.

A hand at stage left underscores this critical new look at our planet.

We talked about regenerative agriculture, and about the powers of wild flowers and mushrooms to feed and heal. We consumed the products of this vast and exciting revolution, strange green concoctions of herbs that regenerate your liver cells after a night’s drinking, and other potions which reminded me of the brews prepared by the druids of old.

I spent a good deal of my time open-mouthed, even when I wasn’t eating. There was just so much going on, so many new ideas, and everyone had plenty to say.

Riding alongside me on his bike, my new friend George explained how he used wild plants to cure the horses of the Aga Khan. “I can repair a fatigue fracture in record time.” He told me that well before the appointed time, one horse was straining at the paddock, desperate to race again—the vet could find nothing wrong with his bones, and the stallion came in second.

George gave me one of his books to read, and wrote a page-long dedication to l’Homme Poisson. I’m half-way through it, struggling with French words I haven’t seen for years.

There’s a world of wonder and brilliance out there.

And you know what? Maybe god really is a mushroom.

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

Smart Kids

Sixteen months ago, in Las Vegas, it was easy to find Trump supporters. This time around, they’re harder to spot.

I did my usual straw poll, but any mention of the current president usually brought a heartfelt sigh, as if a rogue uncle had just wet himself in public.

‘This too shall pass’ seems to be the prevalent mood, but of course I missed out Middle America, where much of the support lies. I did canvas Uber drivers, oyster farmers, waitresses, Iraq and Afghan veterans—and heard not one kind word.

Basic services in Massachusetts, California, and elsewhere, are still in the hands of migrants, and Los Angeles FM radio is at least forty percent Spanish.

On the West Coast, I drove up 405, listening to Frank Zappa’s ‘I’m The Slime’, truer today than when it was first written.

Partly, this is because TV has morphed into an internet hydra, with multiple ‘channels’ that numb the brain—a collective digital lobotomy. As usual, I’ve been on planes—lots of them. That too, is mind-numbing, and right now, as I hide in a corner of Logan airport after a red-eye from LAX, and try to stay awake to type a few words,  I’m besieged by endless musak and relentless aircon—it’s the American way.

If you walk down any airplane aisle, just about everyone is watching soaps or playing games—hardly anyone reads, and when they do, it’s the in-flight magazine. And yet, I was privileged to meet two sets of kids, both preteen, and they impressed the hell out of me.

To be honest, I prefer to chat with kids, especially smart ones, than with grown-ups. And these children were super-smart—the great societal anesthetic has not yet struck.

One of them was fond of computers—most kids are, but the thrill stops at games and social media—but this one liked to build them. I’m sure you know that you don’t build laptops or tablets, that’s throwaway consumer junk.

This boy liked to scavenge parts and build machines from scratch, populating a motherboard with all sorts of weird and wonderful things. In The Hourglass, one of the heroes is a youngster by the name of Tommy (it may yet change), and he does exactly that, as he sidesteps the ‘New Society’ of President David A. Klomp—no prizes for guessing what the ‘A’ stands for.

“Do you program?”

“Yes.” A shy voice.

“What languages?”

“Java. Python.”

Wow! I asked a couple of questions. This kid really did know his stuff. As he devoured pizza like any other eleven-year-old, he began discussing the details of a cloud-hosted database with his father.

The parent procrastinated, as one does.

“Dad, you’re always saying that, but we need to do it.”

I hid a grin.

On the other side of the continent, up in the Santa Barbara mountains, I found another one. A twelve-year-old girl who wrote fiction.

Once again, all she needed was a little encouragement. I asked whether her characters sometimes grew all by themselves, in ways she never imagined. “Yes, definitely!” She reeled off her favorite authors, told me she read several books at once.

“Digital?”

“No, I like to turn the pages. And I like the smell of a book.” More enthusiasm.

Once you dig a little deeper, all the imagination and creativity that makes the US a great country comes to the fore. The girl’s father toured with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Foo Fighters a couple of decades ago—he mainly produces music now, and designs and manufactures his own brand of electric guitar.

We sat around the fire pit as the night air cooled, and I watched him put a block of Douglas fir on the embers.

“Unusual firewood…”

“Leftover from the house.”

He explained how he’d designed and rebuilt parts of his home, and then showed me some pictures. Before committing to the final design, he’d built a scale model out of styrofoam, and then placed his iPhone inside it and taken photos so the family could see the views, and how the shadows fell at sunset.

I met lots of smart people in the States. And they outweigh the dummies on the news.

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

C’est Chaud, Y’all

It’s been described as the land of the pines, but North Carolina is much more than that—although I’ve seen enough pine trees to last me a while.

This is agricultural countryside, and hog country at that, so there’s a good amount of pollution hitting the rivers and making its way to the coast. North Carolina used to boast more pigs than people, and it’s still close—8.7 million hogs, 10 million humans—these days, the pigs are raised in closed facilities, to minimize effluents, smell, and general upset.

It’s vacation time, and the small coastal town where I stayed practically triples in population—in the state, tourism is a twenty billion dollar business.

I brought the rain with me, and found myself stuck on the tarmac in Charlotte for over an hour on arrival. The airport was a zoo, with the board displaying delays from top to bottom, and I drove a rental east toward the coast—it was the smallest vehicle I’ve ever rented in North America, and it had the acceleration of a pregnant armadillo.

It rained all night, rained in the morning, rained all week. Mid-week I was out on an oyster farm, and everyone got soaked. The industry here is pretty small—overall it’s worth about five million dollars a year—and farmers grow their animals in small leases, around two to three acres.

I don’t know if it’s hogs or condos, but the coastal areas of the state have a real problem with water quality—now, water quality is a broad church, and the particular denomination (and there’s nothing like the States for cult denominations) at issue here is microbiology—pollution by bacteria and viruses.

Oysters are particularly good at filtering, and they accumulate these little beasties quite handily. I found myself discussing this with a local man, who started off by telling me about people from the north who come to Carolina.

“There’s Yankees, and there’s Damn Yankees,” he drawled. “The Yankees are the ones who visit, the Damn Yankees are the ones who stay”. And despite the political correctness issues, you certainly see confederate flags, particularly on redneck pick-ups.

The Venus Flytrap is native to North Carolina, and this little beauty is poised to eat the mosquitoes that were attacking me at sunset.

We ordered Philly cheese steak, an American classic. When the food came, my friend said, “I’ll just say a little grace, and we’ll get right to it.” Took me straight back to my schooldays—I bowed my head for the amen. I drank a lot of water in North Carolina, and occasionally some atrocious wine, but I managed to stay clear of the iced tea.

Some years back, when oyster leases became available on the shoreline, they were quickly snapped up by developers. These good ole boys built condos on the landward side of the leases, and then discharged waste into the water. They got a free sewage plant and a sea view, and they did the bare minimum on the leases to avoid losing them.

There’s no requirement here for impact assessment when you develop a large condominium, and as a result of this and other sins, many of the coastal waterways are unfit for raising oysters—well, that’s not strictly true—you can grow them to a certain size, but then the animals have to relayed elsewhere, to a clean environment where they can get rid of bacteria.

Funnily enough, in a nation that now imports ninety-one percent of its seafood products, it’s more difficult to get a license to grow shellfish than to build a string of condos. I guess those billions of tourist dollars can swing a lot of senators.

I wasn’t long on the boat before I struck up a conversation with one of the oyster growers. Turned out that once upon a time, he played guitar with the Allman Brothers—not just a quick jam, two hundred gigs all over the world.

We sat on the bow, opening oysters in the pouring rain. My shucking partner had a special knife, designed by a champion oyster shucker from Louisiana. It had a long curved blade, with a special angle at the end to cut the adductor muscle.

The rain kept falling, the oysters were sweet and salty. “Okay, now, can you taste the butter? Then you’ll taste the iron.” My rock star oyster farming friend was also a marketing wizard.

“Best oysters in the world. Ain’t they? Ain’t they?” I smiled as the boat steered the narrow channels. He grinned at my Santana t-shirt. “Played with him too, down in New Orleans.”

I told him how impressed I was with his knife.

“Keep it.”

So I did.

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