The Law of Averages

I stopped off in London a couple of days ago and felt as if I’d landed on a lost planet. I only muttered the ‘B’ word briefly, but the echoes were clear—people are fed up, confused, and mostly numbed to the political mayhem.

As I traveled east, the picture changed from a Europe troubled by the rise of populism to nations where freedom of expression—and therefore of choice—varies from limited to radically curtailed. As the plane flew over the Mid-East, and then on to Southeast Asia, the dawn brought me a little clarity.

The rise of populism in the EU is inevitable, as it is (and was) in the US and UK. The reason became obvious as I wandered around London and observed ordinary working people—it crystallized when an English lady opened a restroom door for me in an airport lounge two days ago. She was one of two englishwomen who stood in the access corridor providing these services—the lady was charming and worthy of all my respect, and as I exited she once again pulled the door open for me, to my great embarrassment.

In the lounge itself the opulence of the extremely wealthy hid in plain sight, and therein lies the rub. Over the last fifty years, income inequality in the West has mushroomed—and that got me thinking about GDP.

If you want to make absolute comparisons, you use absolutes (duh). China is the most populous nation in the world. France is larger than the Netherlands. Brazil has more head of cattle than Belgium.

But to make relative comparisons, you need to normalize—express your data per unit area, or perhaps as a percentage, or an average—which is exactly what happens with GDP. If you want to rank nations by living standards, per capita GDP is the weapon of choice.

Norway? 71,800 US dollars per annum. Portugal, less than half of that.

That’s all well and good, but are these fair comparisons? The short answer is no. Averages are only appropriate if we’re looking at a bell-shaped curve, but the distribution of income in the West is now much better aligned with what you see in the East, or in South America—fifty years ago, as a rule of thumb income inequality increased as you traveled east and south.

The analysis of income inequality is not new. The work by M.O. Lorenz led to a paper, Methods of measuring the concentration of wealth, published in 1905, and the Lorenz curve is widely used to represent distribution of wealth. The Gini coefficient was published in 1912, and provides a numerical representation of income inequality.

The Gini index on a world map. East and south are still the unfairest places on earth.

Let me pick five numbers out of a hat. The first numbers are similar: one, four, two, three. But the last number is whoppingly different: nine hundred-ninety. By sheer coincidence, these numbers add up to one thousand.

Bell-shaped they most certainly aren’t—four low numbers jumping to a huge one. If we average them, the result is two hundred. Is that a fair representation of 1, 2, 3, 4, 990? Nope. What might be fair is the median, i.e. the middle number: three.

If this were a human population, eighty percent of the people fall into the one to four income bracket, and the remaining twenty percent are of the species Felis crassus—that’s Latin for fat cat.

The Triple Eye Income Inequality Index, as a simple ratio of median/average, for several European countries and the US. Values close to one hundred indicate a well-balanced nation.

My own Triple Eye calculation suggests the developed world falls far short of equality—low values mean that a few wealthy people hold much of the income, which skews the per capita GDP. Values higher than one hundred exist only in Utopia—a nation with a smattering of poverty and an abundance of wealthy folk.

Of course, the Triple Eye in many gated communities, airline lounges, and luxury resorts is at least one hundred—that is, if you exclude the help.

How does all this relate to populism? If a hundred percent of families can vote, and eighty percent of them are poor, it’s only a matter of time before they vote to disenfranchise the twenty percent that tower above them financially.

Which leaves only two paths.

The first is China, whose Triple Eye score is 14.2%, lower than any of the results graphed above. In an unequal system where votes don’t count, there’s little threat to the status quo.

If the China model is not your bag, then there’s only way democracy can beat populism—fair play.

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

Lost Nations

At the start of 2019, the world continues to be an absolute disgrace.

The refugee population from the six biggest crisis-countries totals over eighteen million people, more than the entire population of the Netherlands. The nations in question are the usual suspects: Syria, Congo, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Myanmar, and Somalia. An order of magnitude separates Syria (6.3 million) from Somalia, which has ‘only’ nine hundred and ninety thousand refugees.

‘Informal’ housing in the Congo, a nation where 4.5 million are internally displaced and seven hundred thousand are refugees in other countries.

Worldwide, UNHCR, the UN High Commission for Refugees, estimates the number to be almost sixty-eight million—the population of the United Kingdom. The worse thing about those refugee numbers is the way they’ve grown in the last ten years. What we are witnessing in 2019 is a doubling of the displaced human population.

If numbers are your thing, that’s an APR of 8.7%, so right now the refugee crisis is growing faster than the Chinese economy.

The Congo is an extraordinary example of the African curse. The country was massacred by King Leopold II’s occupation in the late XIX^th century—the Belgians, a most unlikely nation of conquerors, stayed until 1960. Since then, independence has brought nothing but suffering to the folks of this fabulously rich nation, on which the world depends to keep its cellphones running. Oh, and then there’s the diamonds and gold—none of this wealth filters down to the poor souls who live in the Democratic People’s Republic of the Congo.

Right now, the country is in post-electoral trauma, with hotly disputed results. After Mobutu and a couple of Kabilas, elections were finally held—a major stakeholder is the Congolese ‘Église de Christ’, the protestant Church of Christ. If you want to practice your French a little more, or just enjoy the retro animated gifs, praise the lord!

Change in refugees worldwide between 2008 and 2016.

The Congo provinces of North-Kivu and Ituri are Ebola hotspots—a report released one month ago counted five hundred cases, of which 452 were confirmed and 48 probable. 289 of these have died—241 are confirmed Ebola cases.  The health issue made voting in the provinces a challenge, and the election results reflect this omission.

Hemorrhagic fever, or Ebola, in full swing in the Congo. How long will it take to care enough?

But perhaps the most famous crisis you never heard of is Venezuela. I’m kidding, in a terrible sort of way—of course you’ve heard of it, but we don’t hear much. Occasionally there are shots of Nicolas Maduro, a man who cares more for his mustache than for his people, and the odd Trump rant, but that’s it.

Meanwhile, the IMF predicts a ten million percent inflation rate in 2019. When an economy collapses at that scale, we’re into chaos theory. It’s an extraordinary example of non-linearity, showcasing just how quickly a wealthy nation—Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world—descends from riches to rags, plunging a whole generation into despair. It’s an indictment of the command economy, and a dire warning of the consequences of saloon-door politics, where wild swings from left to right only ever benefit the opportunists.

In perspective, Europe, and even the United States, seem only mildly insane.

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

Resolution

It’s a thing at the start of every new year.

The italics highlight millennial-speak. Last weekend I was writing some dialog for ‘The Hourglass’ and since there are three teenagers involved I decided to improve my knowledge of the relevant vocabulary—do note that present-day teens are post-millennials—though I’m not sure if that’s, like, even a thing, said no one ever!

Take a pew—the boundaries among generations, as defined by the Pew Foundation.

In fact I even went to a party years ago where you were supposed to write out your New Year’s resolution on a yellow post-it for all to peruse after midnight. My resolution was to stop going to parties like that one.

Sorry not sorry!

So now I have to take a crash-course in millennial, because my teen dialog needs a makeover.

Moving right along… for many folks, the annual resolution is both obvious and recurrent—diet. Let’s face it, for all but the most monastic among us, there comes a time when it behoves one to lose a little weight—and January is often that time.

Alcohol, a mainstay of Western Christmas cheer, can take some of the blame, but not all. And yet, it’s a societal paradox that practicing Muslims from a comparable income bracket are no thinner than those of us who enjoy a nice glass of tinto—I guess it’s all those sodas—fat without the buzz.

I am fortunate not to have a battle with weight—but there is the occasional struggle. My approach is thermodynamic, but with a carb twist.

Let’s begin with the basics: food. Any creature on this planet should consider food on two levels—the first is what it needs (or wants) to consume, and the second is that it is itself in fact food. Humans don’t consider the latter, since we no longer have natural predators.

As an aside, the odd lion(ess) who does capture a human for the pot must despair at the preparation required, just as we do with a particularly bony fish. I can picture the young of the pride being instructed on the perils of accidentally eating the cellphone or the fly zipper.

Food can be represented by many indicators, including, mass, taste, smell, composition, and energy content. On that basis, the concept of losing weight along thermodynamic lines appears straightforward—since energy, like mass, can neither be created nor destroyed, you reduce energy intake. The zingy acronym is CICO—Calories In, Calories Out.

Food can be further split into fat, carbs, and proteins—the general objective of weight loss is to reduce the first two rather than muscle mass. As often happens in these articles, I start writing about something, and after a couple of sentences where I’m dazzled by my originality, my next thought is ‘I wonder who’s done this before.’

Oh, only about a million people. First off, one huge red herring is the gym. This is music to the ear of the majority of people in the world, who simply hate exercise. An article in the MIT Technology Review emphasizes the futility of working out.

Want to lose a pound of fat? You can work it off by hiking to the top of a 2,500-story building. Or by running 60 miles. Or by spending 7 hours cleaning animal stalls… Exercise very hard for one hour (swimming, running, or racquetball) and you’ll lose about one ounce of fat. Light exercise for an hour (gardening, baseball, or golf) will lose you a third of an ounce. That number is small because fat is a very energy-dense substance: it packs about 4,000 food calories per pound, the same as gasoline, and 15 times as much as in TNT.

I thoroughly enjoy sports, but I too did those calculations years ago, during one of my periodic weight tiffs. If you use a machine such as an elliptical cross trainer, you get through a few hundreds of calories in an hour—that’s a couple of ounces of fat, but there’s no guarantee you’re losing fat. A half hour on a cross trainer equates to a half bottle of tinto.

The Physics Diet provides support to CICO, and explains how the author lost thirty pounds in less than six months by cutting out lunch and snacks.

But the whole mass balance thing is questioned by the self-appointed ‘diet doctor’, who argues that the first law of thermodynamics has nothing to do with weight loss. The site exists to sell a book, but who am I to criticize that? However, phrasing such as “What the CICO people think it means is that if you reduce calories in, you will lose weight. Of course, it means nothing of the sort” never fails to irritate me, just as “Anyone in their right mind” + any verb, and similar fallacies.

The doc’s thesis is that insulin is the key—without low insulin fats are not mobilized. But the diet doctor diagrams are disingenuous—an all-or-nothing choice which dictates that without low insulin, reducing calorie intake reduces metabolism. If your diet is high in carbohydrates, that may be the case, although a 2018 article in the prestigious journal Cell suggests the hormone Leptin is also involved in weight loss.

I don’t like to be excessively prescriptive, so my first dietary step was doing a simple mass balance and finding out what could be cut without severely impairing my quality of life. Wine is a design criterion, but the golden rule was to cut my food intake by one third. Another way to balance the food and wine dynamic works if you only drink while you eat—by eating less, you drink less, or vice-versa.

Diets come in fads, just as skirt heights do, and the current whim is protein. Marketing takes this to a new high (low), frightening people about whether they are eating enough of it. The P word is running riot—you can buy protein-enriched cheese, protein coffee, and even protein water.

If you worry whether you’re eating enough protein, you’re eating too much of it. In an article published this week by the Guardian, the numbers are plain to see.

…the puzzle is not that we should crave protein, but that our protein anxiety has become so acute at a time when the average person in developed countries has a surfeit of protein in their diet – at least according to official guidelines, which recommend a minimum of 0.8g of protein a day per kilogram of body weight. According to 2015 data from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the average person in the US and Canada gets a full 90g a day, nearly twice the recommended amount (based on a supposedly normal adult weight of 62kg). The average European is not far behind with 85g of protein a day, and the average Chinese person consumes 75g.

Protein is the last of the three major food groups to be caught in the headlights. Fats are evil, carbs are nasty, hi-fat-lo-carb fans fight lo-fat-hi-carb champs, and we’ve lost sight of food and replaced it with molecules.

The Grauniad calls its piece the Long Read, and the article does justice to that name.

But it’s on fleek.

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

Deepfake

Manny is a French bulldog. Like thousands of other pets, he has an Instagram account—but unlike most of his fellow social media mavens, Manny can make up to fifteen thousand bucks for a sponsored post.

As we greet 2019, animals have social media accounts, cars dispense with drivers, and robots fight wars.

Human evolution is a slow process—it took two and a half million years for the genus Homo to appear—but we can expect stunning technological revolutions to continue at breakneck speed in the coming year.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote that ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ This became known as his third law—the other two are interesting also, as you would expect in a book entitled Profiles of the Future.

As an aside, I haven’t read this book (yet). Immediately after writing the sentence above, I searched for the title on my tablet app, but Kindle didn’t have it. I went onto Amazon—the UK site lists the book. I tried the US site. Hmm… that has it too. I bought it without realizing I was logged in with a different Amazon account. Weird. Since that account is not associated with my Kindle, the new purchase wouldn’t appear on the tablet. I canceled and got a refund. I logged on with my regular account. The book wasn’t available on US Amazon. The digiplot thickens…

Now, don’t ever change the email of your Kindle account without some deep thought—you lose all your library. So that’s out. Turns out my address for the account linked to the tablet was in the United States (the other wasn’t). Why? No clue. In fact, there was no address there, only a country (the US), but for copyright reasons that’s all it took to screw up my purchase—until I found this. I enjoy a little hackery, and everything worked great—the tab is now called Preferences, not Setttings. I love the guy’s made up address—I’ve often done that for other needs, but I always use the White House zip code.

The best thing about this trick is hopping digitally from country to country—I’m writing a chapter in ‘The Hourglass’ called Cheat the Robot, so this couldn’t be more timely. The point is that once a Kindle book is in, it’s in. If you change your country to effect a purchase, the Kindle library doesn’t delete past purchases that violate copyright due to your new location—I’ve just become a digital jet-setter.

Okay, back to Uncle Arthur. If you search for android on Google, it’s tough to retrieve the classic definition—a robot with human appearance—because Google just wants to sell you their operating system.

But in the field of communications, we are reaching an android stage—I speak, of course, about deepfake. Let’s start with a real peach.

The incredibly fast development of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, allows superb face mapping. What used to take months and millions now goes for virtually nothing—the implications for fake news are remarkable, since video is the last bastion of trust.

ACC3, Clarke’s third law, applies—a huge proportion of the lost souls out there, the Trump and Brexit bases, the Bolsonaro and Duterte disciples, will be perfectly fooled by this technology—to them, this will be real.

Libraries for neural networks are freely available—for instance Tensorflow, developed by the Google Brain team. The detail on the website is not for the faint of heart; if you skim it, you’ll see I’m right—the pace of human evolution is not keeping up.

The Tensorflow library was used to create a program called FakeApp, which in turn was used to map faces. Google gave us free libraries to apply neural networks to real world problems—humans rejoiced and applied it to pornography.

Homo sapiens has used every applicable form of art and science to further porn, whether as a simple static representation of sexual organs, objects, and acts, or as animations. Film allowed porn to penetrate, if you excuse the pun, into a new era, computers (to use another appalling pun) gave it a leg up, and the web became the democratization of pornography. The current rage is to replace the faces of porn stars with those of celebrities, which fulfills many a male fantasy—I underscore male, although women’s fantasies are also fair game.

If—and I boldly caution you with the word if—you wish to see the scale of the issue, just type deepfake porn into Google and then click the ‘images’ link. Do avoid trying this at the dinner table, or when explaining the internet to Auntie Ethel.

Several companies are (deeply) involved in deepfake porn—one of them, surprisingly enough, is Pornhub (I won’t link it). Among other things, it advertises the real sex video of Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels.

A word of advice: unless you’re that way inclined, don’t click on the site itself—instead, just google it with an (in)appropriate search term and peruse the results. Those kinds of sites may well plant malware on the machine you’re using, and we wouldn’t want Auntie Ethel’s new Christmas tablet to explode with a digital STD right before the year-end fireworks.

As we close out 2018, don’t forget it’s a dark and sinuous web out there—happy hunting and Happy New Year!

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

Fish Don’t Fart

A glib statement.

When I first made it, I had no idea whether it was actually true. In the words of Abraham the Astronomer, when he addressed the bizarre theories of Christopher Columbus in The India Road, ‘A set of opinions uncontaminated by facts.’

The motivation for the statement, and for this piece, was flatulence—specifically bovine farts, which make a substantial contribution to greenhouse gases.

When we look to 2050, at which point there will be ten billion souls on this planet, beef cattle presents a dual challenge—food supply and climate change.

Bovines are our most inefficient use of food resources—one pound of beef requires about seven pounds of feed—double the requirement for pigs, four times what’s needed for chickens, and six times less efficient than raising salmon.

A blueprint for feeding the planet in 2050.

The World Resources Institute, a DC-based think tank, recently estimated that we need 56% more food by 2050, and that greenhouse gas emissions must fall by two-thirds—meat and dairy are responsible for sixty percent of the emissions from agriculture. WRI states that in the US beef provides 3% of the calories and accounts for half the emissions.

In Brazil, 21% of all greenhouse gas emissions are due to methane, aka farts. A further 20% result from transportation of cattle. Of course, with Bolsonaro wanting to pull Brazil out of the Paris agreement, as he plays his childish game of ‘Tropical Trump’, this will all become fake news.

When compared to carbon dioxide, methane has a huge effect on climate—twenty-three times more, pound for pound. A cow releases about two hundred pounds of methane per year—high school chemistry tells us that equals a gallon of daily farting.

Raising a cow for one year is the same as driving close to eight thousand miles, so the case for reducing cattle farming is strong. As an aside, for climate deniers like the orange man, the only reason so many cows are farmed is because people eat beef and dairy products—if we accept the premise that methane is a powerful (and pongy) greenhouse gas, then cattle ranching equals man-made.

Eating less beef means a more energy-efficient food production system, and a simultaneous and substantial reduction in greenhouse gases—but I’ll bet there will be a grass roots revolution, if you excuse the pun, if anyone tries to take away your cheeseburger.

WRI mentions plant burgers, but there’s no reference to aquaculture. However, fish may be one of the solutions for climate-smart food. But what about fishy flatulence? Do our fin-furnished friends produce rectal turbulence, deliver anal salutes, answer the call of the wild burrito, or any of the other 147 synonyms of fart?

I’m always amazed by how many people are drawn to questions of this nature. The present consensus is that fish by and large don’t exhume the dinner corpse, but there is a notable exception.

The herring is a farter extraordinaire—apparently schools of herring excel at turd tremors, and scientists believe that these fish farts are used for orientation at night.

Herring farts have in the past been mistaken for enemy submarines, and nearly caused a war between Sweden and Russia.

The whole thing was first published by researchers from the Scottish Association of Marine Science in 2003. The paper is clearly tongue in (butt) cheek, since it defines the acronym FRT (Fast Repetitive Tick) to refer to the bubbly bonanza.

The authors were awarded an Ig Nobel in 2004. In their article they speculate that fish leading the school may use farts to guide the other fish at night—apparently no farting takes place during daytime, when visual cues are abundant.

Herring belong to a group of fish called small pelagics, which include sardines, mackerel, and anchovy. These fish form huge schools, cover great distances, and move up and down the water column in search of food and to avoid predators. None of these characteristics make them suitable for cultivation, but that still leaves a range of other species to grace your dinner plate.

Fart-free fish farms thus appear to hold great promise in our simultaneous quest to feed the world and stay cool.

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

Dog Bless

“Can an animal be a true Christian?” The question was posed by ‘True Disciple’, an associate professor at the Landover Baptist University, and cites Mark 16:15-16, where the new testament urges us to ‘preach the gospel to every creature.’

The website is a spoof of a fundamentalist Baptist university—a thinly disguised version of Liberty University, founded by Jerry Falwell.

This is an example of the ‘seriously but not literally’ conundrum. The hilariously anxious professor, who is neither fond of ‘cathlyck heresy’ nor orthography, ponders his dilemma. “Can a grasshopper even understand who Jesus is? Do jellyfish burn in Hell when they reject Jesus?”

I stumbled upon this general theme a couple of weeks ago, when I posed the hypothetical question ‘I wonder if there are Americans who baptize their dogs’. Yes, yes, I know I should get out more.

But the answer flew into my head. “I bet they do.” The devil found work for idle hands as they frenzied on the cellphone. Yes, dogs do get baptized. And christened.

I found the landover.net site worrying at first, then downright side-splitting.   Joining the discussion is a televangelist who pitches his stuff as: “Turn or Burn: Accept Christ or Go to Hell with Rev. Jim Osborne.” Unfortunately, he appears to have attended the same grammar classes as ‘True Disciple’, so his support, for lack of punctuation, guarantees your condemnation.

Well what if your parrot suddenly squawks ”I believe, I believe” should you -Take him to Church for Baptism
-Smite it as a familiar to Satan trying to deceive you
-Move his cage away from the TV when Rev. Jim is Preaching

But of course truth is stranger than fiction, and dogs do get baptized—have a look at the baptism of this chihuahua.

And that’s not the only canine getting a dunk. Pet baptism is on the increase, but bringing religion to animals is not new. St. Francis of Assisi started the trend back in the XII^th century, but the sermon below is from his contemporary, St. Anthony of Padua (1195-1231).

My brothers the fishes, you are bound, as much as is in your power, to return thanks to your Creator, who has given you so noble an element for your dwelling; for you have at your choice both sweet water and salt; you have many places of refuge from the tempest; you have likewise a pure and transparent element for your nourishment. God, your bountiful and kind Creator, when he made you, ordered you to increase and multiply, and gave you his blessing. In the universal deluge, all other creatures perished; you alone did God preserve from all harm.

At these words the fish began to open their mouths, and bow their heads, endeavoring as much as was in their power to express their reverence and show forth their praise.

There is a heated discussion on this topic in some Christian communities, and animal welfare is at its core. Traditionally, the Catholic church taught that animals have no soul—as a consequence, they cannot go to heaven.

Islam has a similar position—here, the justification is accountability—because the admission to heaven or hell is a reckoning and animals are not responsible for their actions, they have access to neither.

Pope Pius IX, who was pontiff in the mid-XIX^th century, strongly opposed the creation of the Italian ENPA, and although Pope John Paul II contradicted him in 1990 when he stated that animals are ‘as near to God as men are‘, his successor Benedict was swift to invert that position.

If animals have no soul and are seen only as ‘things’, religious men feel justified in their abuse of our four-legged friends. If they do have a soul, then they must be cleansed of their sins—they must be baptized.

Two philosophical questions arise. First, if animals are baptized so they can be saved, then there must exist (at least) two houses in the afterlife—animal heaven and hell. Second, does this apply only to mammals, or does it run through the animal kingdom?

I admit I hadn’t considered the possibility of marine fauna burning in hell—I envisaged a watery inferno that would torture the fishy sinners with pollution, nuclear waste, and climate change—oh, hang on! They already have that.

I’m guilty of barbecuing our fishy friends on a regular basis, since I am an inveterate piscivore, a chap of the ichthyophagous persuasion. To make matters worse, I am also an  invertebrate piscivore—but I digress.

The skinny, if you excuse the pun, is that I consign teleosts, elasmobranchs, cephalopods, and other pescatarian pearls—and the oysters that contain them—to the fires of hell with unsettling regularity.

From a theological perspective, marine animals are undoubtedly wanton and assiduous sinners. They certainly violate the first commandment, since they appear to have no god and no visible places of worship—neither do they possess a hierarchy that might lead them in prayer. The fourth is out, since the sabbath appears to be just another day—fish have schools on Sunday, but not Sunday School.

As for numbers V to VIII: ‘honor thy father and thy mother’, ‘thou shalt not kill’, ‘thou shalt not commit adultery’, and ‘thou shalt not steal’, what can I say? In many species cannibalism is endemic, which zaps V and VI.

When it comes to the Big Seven, we are, if you will, in even deeper water.

A number of fish species are hermaphroditic—if you hurl a grievous insult such as “Fuck You!” at a clownfish, it will reply “Gladly!” Fish can and do change sex to maintain ecological balance, and have no qualms about shagging everything in sight. If you discharge your sperm into water where millions of eggs await fertilization, it takes adultery to a whole new level—every fish is a son of a bitch.

Finally, in the animal kingdom, theft is widely practiced and punishable with death—it’s a kind of salmon sharia law. I come to the sad conclusion that fish are very unlikely to enter the kingdom of heaven. And if they do, given the historical precedent, St. Peter may very well have brought along his fishing rod.

Perhaps I am unconsciously doing god’s work, and I am in fact lucifertarian.

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

Salman Phishing in Yemen

Digital ink has rained down on the Kashoggi murder—not so much because a journalist was killed, which unfortunately happens all the time, but because of the modus operandi.

When it comes to special forces ops, this one may well be the cock-up of all time, but the United States administration will still give Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, a free pass.

We heard Trump, the bumbler-in-chief, make all kinds of bizarre comments, although in fairness they were no stranger than the tall tales put out by Saudi Arabia about the murder itself. We also heard Lindsay Graham bravely proclaiming that there would be no more business with MBS.

But let’s face it, we know this is bullshit.

A little-known publication called Canada Business News published an op-ed about the whole SNAFU. The gist is that calling out MBS would embarrass the House of Saud, and particularly the present king, and force the kingdom to turn to other willing partners for its supply of arms.

In addition, the US would lose a ready partner in its global oil game—when the Saudis flood the market with oil, the Russian and Iranian economies tank. Dollar for dollar, I bet it hurts more than sanctions. And right now, oil is cheap. The article also touches on the ‘our sonofabitch‘ policy, a mainstay of US realpolitik since the days of Somoza, almost a century ago.

Far worse than the Kashoggi murder, brutal though it was, is the endless proxy war in Yemen. The country straddles the gateway to the Red Sea—the Bab el Mandeb, or Gate of Tears, of The India Road.

The Portuguese never conquered Aden—a recent book by a Portuguese historian notes that in the early XVI^th century, Viceroy Albuquerque, a man given to violent excesses, wanted to secure the gates to the Red Sea—his ambition, shared by King Manuel I of Portugal, was twofold: to block the spice route through the Red Sea in order to consolidate the Portuguese monopoly on the spice trade to Europe; and to destroy Mecca, a longstanding ambition of the crusaders.

Albuquerque’s attempt was a disaster, and left seven hundred Portuguese troops dead—not in battle but due to illness, malnutrition, and the deadly heat.

Yemen, like Oman on the other side of the Arabian peninsula, has historically been a key strategic nation—Aden controls access to the Red Sea, just as Muscat guards the entrance to the Persian Gulf.

Crown Prince Salman, with the backing of both America and Britain, turned Yemen into a killing field, where visceral enemies battle it out on foreign soil—a war pitting Saudi Arabia against Iran.

At the last count, eighty-five thousand children had died in this geostrategic ‘exercise’. And that’s just of starvation—repeat for emphasis: as we enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend of 2018, eighty-five thousand kids in Yemen have now starved to death.

I could hardly watch this clip, but I got through it—you should too. And if you shed a tear, you’re human. The Saudi air force has destroyed much of the infrastructure, making aid delivery both difficult and dangerous—a good many of the Saudi bombs have been sold by the US armament industry.

I understand the geopolitical considerations, but I can’t reconcile that with Miriam’s suffering—a child of ten months who weighs the same as a newborn. The war itself, which MBS has pursued with gusto, appears unwinnable—the US and UK arm and support Saudi Arabia, while Iran backs the Houthi rebels.

Yemen has always been a nation of hopeless poverty—number 199 in the world GDP rankings. Like all other wars in the region, this one is a clash between Sunni and Shia, with the usual nuanced branches of those religions confounding the mix.

The sequence of events that led to the conflict is a mess, very much in keeping with the war itself—a nice account is provided by the Brookings Institution, which puts the war into a historical perspective, but is rather short on solutions.

The most obvious way to de-escalate a war is to disarm the parties, but while the armament industry plays such a key role in decisions taken in Washington, Moscow, Beijing, and the minnows, there’s no chance with that.

The road to hell is paved with UN resolutions.

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

The Hundred Years War

Today marks one hundred years since the armistice was signed at Versailles. Eleven o’clock of the eleventh day of the eleventh month—sounds like a blues tune.

The 1914-1918 war is possibly the greatest exercise in overreaction (the term overkill comes to mind) the planet has ever known. One guy got shot in an obscure Bosnian city and the world fell apart.

Many thought the war would be done by Christmas, but instead it lasted four interminable years. The First World War brought with it many innovations—the joys of chemical warfare were introduced, aerial warfare became a reality, and tanks entered the fray for the first time in the Battle of the Somme.

WWI was also a war where global finance gained prominence—the business of war was predicated on large loans to governments, and nowhere was that clearer than in Great Britain. Woodrow Wilson refused for years to bring the United States into the war—in fact he was re-elected in 1916 with a margin of four thousand votes running on precisely that ticket, with the slogan “He has kept us out of war.”

A century later, one over-arching message is that the US has a tradition of resisting involvement in European conflicts—ironically, Britain, France, and Spain historically illustrate the exact opposite.

But Wilson also actively promoted trade with Europe, particularly for armament. In this respect, US neutrality is questionable, since far more weaponry was sold to the Allies than to Germany. By 1915, the only way to sell arms to Britain was by loaning it money.

Enter the huge banking houses of New York and Philadelphia. Bankers with names like Warburg, Schiff, Brandeis, Rothschild, Baruch, Meyer, and of course J.P. Morgan, were at the ready—a war is a great business opportunity, but only if your side wins.

Bank of England posters for the purchase of war bonds during World War I.

If the Germans won, it was pretty clear that the Allied bonds would return pennies on the dollar, if that—they would be what became known in the 1970’s as junk bonds—potentially huge, but potentially ruinous.

After the US entered the war things rapidly changed, and the bankers were all smiles. They did, however, require Germany to lose, and in order for this to happen, an accommodation was undesirable. If an early cease-fire was negotiated whereby Germany would not have to make substantial reparations, the bonds were junk.

By 1917, the bankers had lent the Allies 2.25 billion dollars. In fairness, they also lent money to Germany—twenty-seven million, hardly a balanced book—it was pretty clear who the financiers wanted to win.

Early German overtures to end the war were refused and, by the time the armistice was signed, the so-called Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire) were forced to surrender on ruinous terms.

Many, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, attribute the Second World War to those terms. Undoubtedly, they contributed to the rise of fascism in Germany and to Hitler’s popularity. Some of the popular hatred against Jews will also have stemmed from the financial support given to the Allies—several of those US banking magnates were Jewish.

All those WWI ‘achievements’ have only made the world more dangerous: chemical and biological weapons, followed by nuclear warheads; open cockpit prop planes, followed by jets, missiles, rockets, and drones. Tanks are now in the world of robotics and can shoot down a commercial airliner full of innocent souls.

However, there is one achievement we can all be proud of in the West. The absence of civilian men during World War I forced women to take over male jobs—shortly thereafter, this led to women’s emancipation and the right to vote. That’s led directly to the landslide female representation in the US congress of 2018—absolutely unthinkable back then.

But on the world stage, where are we now?

When it comes to world leaders, I’ll let you be the judge. Instead of Lenin, we have Putin. Instead of Wilson, we got Trump. Instead of Asquith and Lloyd George, we have May. Clemenceau? Makron. Instead of Enver Pasha, we have Erdoğan.

At least three of the above are enthusiastic warmongers. Four generations after the war to end all wars, I wonder how well positioned we are for the start of World War III.

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

Trounced!

Last week I said that on November 10^th I would do a piece on the mid-terms.

I lied.

In these pages you read about Brexit before it happened, and you read about the rise of the orange man before that happened.

I believe in my ability to predict, so instead of writing a post-election analysis predicated on 20/20 hindsight, I’ll give you a pre-election prognosis—Trump will get trounced.

My (correct) prediction last week that Bolsonaro would win the Brazilian presidency doesn’t count—Paul the Octopus could do that! It was also predictable that one of the Brazilian army captain’s first tributes would be to the religious base that elected him—in Brazil, the IURD is as powerful as the Jesuits were in the century following The India Road, and the new president’s middle name, rather worryingly, is ‘Messias.’

Bolsonaro, known as the ‘Tropical Trump’, is yet another addition to the coterie of mini-dictators that democracies around the world are spawning. Brazilian scientists are already deeply concerned about the same three things that upset their northern counterparts: science, environment, and democracy.

Which brings us back to the house and senate elections on the 6^th of November.

In the 2016 election, Trump was sure he’d lose—but he won.

In 2018, he’s convinced he’ll win—but he’ll lose. Much like the method used by the soccer cephalopod seer, I base my prediction on a simple fact—the orange man is a very poor decision-maker, so it’s a sound strategy to bet against his predictions.

The US mid-terms are usually a protest vote against the president, and less than half of America votes. More importantly, state governors are elected, and senators and congressmen are chosen based on their service to the home communities—this includes what Americans call pork barrel politics.

But in these elections rides the future of Trump—not only in terms of possible impeachment, but more broadly with respect to policy decisions.

In November 2015, America didn’t really know Trump. To many, he was a buffoon, taken ‘literally but not seriously.’ Many people saw the Democrat win as a fait accompli and didn’t vote.

In 2018, America knows Trump. A people who have shown me nothing but kindness and encouragement, who  have shared with me their friendship, their time, and their home, have seen the image of a whole nation tarnished by one man.

America has seen filth on a hitherto unimaginable scale. It has witnessed the sniggering pseudo-apology of the privileged white male, the undertones (and overtones) of racism and xenophobia, the loud and brash claims—and although it has taken a while for the word to be used, it has heard lies. Lies. LIES!

Systematic and deliberate lies. Not factual inaccuracies, not misconceptions, not lack of information. Lies.

Americans know that in these elections they have a unique opportunity to show the world that a mistake was made, and that it has been redressed. This is very unfortunate for some republican senators and congressmen who have been doing a great job—because unless the republican voter is a diehard Trump voter, he or she will know that they’re not really voting for their candidate, they’re endorsing Trump.

Some good advice for next Tuesday, courtesy of the Boston Globe.

Democrats, on the other hand, have learned a huge lesson in complacency. Yes, Hillary Clinton was a terrible option, but this fellow makes Bush forty-three look smart.

Come senators and congressmen please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway don’t block up the hall
For he who gets hurt will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin’
It will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are-a-changin’

Democrats will win the house. It’s a longer shot, but I’m betting they also take the senate.

Let’s see what happens.

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

Bows and Arrows

The Anglo-Saxon world is consumed by the upcoming US mid-terms. The rhetoric has escalated to psychobabble, America seems more divided than ever, and for many, two years of Trump seem like two centuries.

I’m betting that on November 6th, US common sense will resurface and trounce Trump. But I’ll tell that story on November 10th.

There is, however, a far more important election for America in the upcoming days—tomorrow, to be precise—and that is the second round of the Brazilian presidential election.

To the gringos, as people of South American descent lovingly refer to US anglos, this election merits a brief shrug of the shoulders. Brazil? Weird language, weird music, weird ball game.

To South and Central America, and to the European originators of those societies, this is a critical juncture. In my book Clear Eyes, I describe how Columbus first reached the Indies, and just as important, what happened when he got back. In The India Road, the great circle route taken by Vasco da Gama is the same one Pedro Álvares Cabral sailed to discover the true cross—Vera Cruz was the first name given to Brazil. There is ample evidence that Vicente Yañez Pinzon, who had sailed with Columbus, made landfall in Brazil three months before Cabral, and then headed north to Venezuela—his voyage took him through the Amazon estuary, which he aptly named Mar Dulce, or Freshwater Sea.

However, there is also evidence as far back as the mid-1490s that the Portuguese were well aware that Brazil existed, but a country with 1.2 million people, overcommitted in Africa and focused on exploring the East, simply could not spare the manpower to colonize the Americas. The strongest circumstantial evidence for this was the Treaty of Tordesillas—the Portuguese negotiators forced a shift in longitude to the west, which placed Brazil into the Portuguese half of the newly divided globe.

The relationship between Brazil and Portugal is much stronger than the ties between the US and UK, perhaps because a war of independence was never fought—the tide of migration has oscillated between the two nations: in the nineteenth century, many Portuguese went west in search of fortune, in the late XX^th it was the Brazilians who fled east from a failing economy, then it was Portugal’s turn again during the 2007-2012 austerity period.

In 2018, the tables are again turned and Brazilians are fleeing the violence in their society, a reflection of the corruption and lawlessness of life in their home towns. They flock to one of the safest countries in the world—the fourth safest, to be precise. As an aside, the others are, in ascending order, Austria, New Zealand, and Iceland—out of the top five, eighty percent are European, and out of the top thirty, two-thirds are European.

Only two American nations make the top thirty-one: Canada and Chile. Those escaping from Brazil are doing so for the same reason that a caravan of Hondurans and Nicaraguans are headed for the US—they cannot deal with the (often state-sponsored) violence in their societies.

I asked a Brazilian waiter recently for his predictions—”estou torcendo por Bolsonaro,” he said, with a wry smile. Like many Brazilians abroad, he is backing the former army captain who publicly praised the imprisonment and torture of impeached former president Dilma Rousseff, and lamented in parliament that her torturers hadn’t finished the job.

Bolsonaro (best pronounced in English as ‘bows and arrows’) is running against a candidate from PT, the workers’ party. Lula, the historical leader of the PT is presently in jail on corruption charges, and his party is about to get hammered.

Bows and Arrows will be a president in the vein of the recent populist wave: Duterte, El-Sisi, Trump, you get the picture. For Brazil, which lives with the ghosts of military dictatorship, this is not good news—but it’s what you get when decades of lawless corruption translate into endemic violence and a fractured society.

The campaign for the second ballot has taken fake news to the ultimate level—Brazilians are big on chat, and they took to social media like a lush to bourbon. The internet holds many surprises, and one has been the astronomical growth of WhatsApp.

WhatsApp usage as a percentage of the population (graph courtesy of Statista).

China does its own thing, and (speculatively) Germany is on there because they have the tightest pockets on the planet, but over half of the 209 million Brazilians are on the app. Some of this is driven by cellphone charges, but a lot reflects the simplicity of combining video, audio recordings, text, and just plain chit-chat. Penetration in the US is only six percent—whereas Facebook penetration is sixty-two percent, which is why the Russians had so much fun with it in 2015.

The WhatsApp stats show how much developing countries use it: India, Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey… and Brazil—now that’s volume!

In Brazil, WhatsApp has been abused more often than a reporter at a Trump rally, and, rather like those rallies, much of the material that it circulates is fake. Each WhatsApp group can have a maximum of 256 members, but nothing stops those members also joining another group. If twenty members do that, the message will reach about five thousand people. And if those twenty were members of different groups, one hundred thousand people get the message.

Brazil has one hundred and twenty eight million registered WhatsApp users. A recent study by two Brazilian universities analyzed 347 public WhatsApp groups prior to the first round of the election. The groups were monitored over a one month period—overall they had eighteen thousand participants.

The study found that one hundred thousand images were circulated, along with seventy-one thousand videos, thirteen thousand audio clips, over half a million text messages, and ninety thousand links.

A Brazilian fact-checking agency called Lupa, which collaborated in the study, reviewed the fifty most popular images circulated among these groups.

Only four images were true.

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