Atomkraft

The Germans love a good compound word. Actually, back in the day they were also pretty fond of a good compound.

The young folks (and the not so young) are also partial to a good demonstration—being German, even youthful protesters go for it with supreme organizational skills.

I’m writing this in Tegel, which for a German airport is surprisingly poorly organized, but then this is Berlin—the city is probably the most un-German of them all, which also makes it the nicest.

I was here for a week, and then last Friday I marched east to Poland—it’s a local tradition. I’ll tell you about that next week, but meanwhile I’ll share two tidbits with you.

The first is that the Polish airwaves were full of martial speech over the weekend in preparation for today’s election, though I got the feeling many Poles were far more interested in tonight’s Euro 2020 qualifier against Macedonia.

The second is that I visited the birthplace of Catherine the Great—you are probably aware that she was a man-eater, and even at the ripe age of sixty (perhaps equivalent to eighty-five now) was still cavorting with sixteen-year-old boys (mind you, back then they were twenty-five, so don’t you me too me).

More on both of those (topics, not boys) next weekend.

Berlin was utter chaos, and my chosen means of transport was Lime—I’d tried them briefly in Spain, but by any standard I was a Lime virgin. In this flat city, I was occasionally the leader, or führer, as the locals say, of a posse of like-minded Limeys, linked together in a group ride—sharing is caring.

A little free publicity on account of all the fun I had with these babies.

But the chaos had merit—the city center was paralyzed by climate change activists. The meetings were called by an organization called Fridays For Future. Along the way, fellow travelers from the self-styled Extinction Rebellion also settled in for the duration.

By the time I left Berlin, at which point, for reasons I won’t go into, I had four guitars in the back of the car—Lime has its limits—the tents were everywhere.

The cops did their job, roads were blocked, traffic was infernal, and Liming your way through town was just the thing. And the demonstrations were pithy, colorful, and necessary.

I re-read one of my articles from 2009 and my conclusion is that ten years after, we are nowhere near where we need to be—in fact, the orange man and his gang of gut-feeling buffoons have made it worse.

Those kids out on the Berlin sidewalks, blocking Potsdamer Platz with the aid of couches and flowerpots, were only eight or nine back then—now they’re laden with righteous anger, bless ’em.

The last time I was here was during my pre-blog days, and evidence of the Berlin Wall was abundant, as were derelict five-year plan communist apartments, as vacuous and grey as Walter Ulbricht‘s ideology.

Now, the memories are spotty. But I was taking the autobahn daily to the Grenzallee exit—that means border alley, so you do the math.

Berlin is undergoing a frenzy of construction, roadworks, and general improvement—you’d think the Germans had a bit of cash to spare. The center was pretty glitzy, but the Grenzallee bit was rather different.

Gastarbeiter (there’s another of those compounds), or guest workers, are the norm, along with an abundance of kebab spots of dubious lineage. My gut survived those, although I did have a couple of gut feelings.

Not your regular campsite, five minutes away from the Bundestag, but maybe someone, sometime, will change something…

And because of my guitar escapades, I saw some truly dubious areas. The music guys I dealt with are serious gearheads—their clients include the Rolling Stones—but their compound (hmm…) features some pretty suspect establishments, including one stocked with old American limos, Caddy convertibles, and other unusually well-appointed vehicles.

All in all, Berlin remains a great place—head and shoulders above the rest of Germany.

In the immortal words of President Kennedy, I am a donut.

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

Giving Back

Whenever I start an article, I always do two things: I re-read my previous one (and often find a rogue typo to fix), and I look at the stats.

Statistics are  like a bikini—what they show is suggestive, what they hide is vital.

My blog stats usually spike the day I write and the day after, then they settle down. Roughly what statisticians might call a Poisson distribution—well-matched to my fishy nature—or even perhaps a Pareto curve.

Pareto is a darling of marketeers, and underpins the mantra that twenty percent of the products generate eighty percent of the sales. I’ve written on this previously, because of the way the internet flipped the distribution and produced the Long Tail.

Wired magazine published this image in 2004—it’s a wonderful illustration of the Long Tail, and explains why you can buy anything on ebay.

Vilfredo Pareto was born in the mid-XIX^th century, and is described as a civil engineer, economist, and sociologist—quite a guy. But my blog is testimony to his distribution, because I see random articles from the past showing up from time to time—this week, perhaps because of the events in Hong Kong, this amusing one popped up.

But today I went further and had a look at the people who follow my writings regularly, rather than the ones who drop by.

What I found is heart-warming, and I want to thank you all for making time to come here and read. There are two groups, the first of which uses WordPress to make a connection. The others are folks who signed up and ask for a notification whenever I hit Publish.

In that second group, there are a number of people I don’t know, and who have never commented on here. The first group is entirely filled with folks I don’t know, but who write.

I spent some time this morning trawling their blogs, looking at what makes them tick. There’s a guy in the Philippines who is studying journalism, another gal who blogs on food—one of her posts extolled the virtues of a meat restaurant, and that got me thinking.

The whole food thing is changing quite rapidly, and in particular beef cattle is coming under fire from climate change activists. The feed conversion ratio (FCR) for beef is 6.8, which means it takes almost seven pounds of feed to produce one pound of steak. This doesn’t compare well with the FCR for salmon, which is around 1.2 in Norway, Scotland, and Canada.

However, when it comes to the carbon footprint, things get worse: cows come in at thirty pounds of CO₂ per pound of edible meat, whereas salmon registers 2.9, one tenth of that number.

The high CO₂ emissions for cattle are in good part due to the methane released by ruminants—their diet is not particularly digestible.

The attack on meat, particularly red meat, has recently led to a review that contradicts the advice given by doctors and nutritionists over the past decades, i.e. an excessive consumption carries significant cardio-vascular risks.

The dynamics of the food system are fascinating—in several European and North American countries, 5-10% of the population is vegetarian, and out of the remainder, there is a proportion that never buys or eats fish.

One interesting consequence is that the data on per capita consumption of fish may underestimate rates by 10-20%, which means that a proportion of the population should be healthier than the numbers show.

Conversely, the rest of that meat must be supplementing meat-eaters’ diets—if you’re skeptical about the Johnston article, then that’s bad news.

Whatever you eat, wherever you live, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to share a few thoughts with you every week.

But writing can be a lonely business—if you ever feel like writing back, come on in.

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

Blonde on Blonde

Blonde on Blonde is one of Bob Dylan’s greatest records—with artists like Dylan, The Beatles, Clapton, or The Stones, it’s wonderful to be able to say that—there are enough great albums that you can’t choose the best.

The two blondes in this article are the exact opposite—they’ve done so much crap it’s hard to choose the worst in their record. And to cap it all, one of them isn’t even blond—he is in fact a dubious shade of orange—bring on the spectrometer.

I have strong ties to both America and Britain, and good friends in both countries—the image projected by those great nations at present reflects the worse that nationalism and populism can offer.

In the nineteen twenties and thirties, Europe was destroyed by National Socialism—almost one century later, the Western World is being destroyed by National Populism.

As usual, I thought I’d come up with a new phrase, only to find that an entire book, called National Populism: The Revolt Against Liberal Democracy, was published last year on this very subject. The authors are Roger Eatwell (really) and Matthew Goodwin, and the LSE blog gives it a positive, though somewhat mixed, review.

Eatwell and Goodwin (sorry, I love that) blame the ‘four Ds’. I appreciate appropriate alliteration, so here come the ‘D’s:

Distrust, destruction, deprivation, and de-alignment.

This is quite good, if self-evident: distrust in the political class; destruction of communal identity due to globalization; deprivation linked to class inequality (The Hourglass); and de-alignment of personal identity with political parties or brands.

So here we have the raw material for the likes of Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, or the late Pym Fortuyn.

The demagogue wallows in this fertile swill—it breeds an easy narrative of corrupt pols, job losses to China and Bangladesh, Goldman versus Burger King, and identity crisis—you know who you are because of Facebook and Instagram, and you drift in a current of posts, memes, and viral clips.

Suddenly you’re important—you have friends. You’re pulled along with the tide, but you’re in out of your depth, and only one thing can happen at that stage as you drift back and forth.

Go figure!

You start to sink, not at all sure how far the bottom lies—and at some point, along comes a nice blond (or potentially orange) man with a great idea, one that solves all your problems.

When that kind and generous hand is extended from above, you—who are maybe on benefits in Sunderland, England, or Ohio, USA—grab on to it with vigor, knowing that finally, there’s someone up there who gets it, someone who’s on your side.

And in this case, their background is so uncannily similar to yours! Why, one was born into a family of millionaires, skipped the Vietnam war, and has systematically abused immigrant labor and contracted manufacturing abroad to further his own ends; and the other, like most folks in Sunderland, is Eton and Oxford-educated.

What you perhaps didn’t know, and may garner a wry smile, is that Boris Johnson was also educated at the European School in Brussels. I suspect that on October 17^th he will be continuing his education.

Both men have ridden the same wave of National Populism, which I have just christened the NAPPI movement.

And in both cases, events have shown that chaos is the inevitable consequence of scheduling appointments for foxes inside hen houses.

In Trump’s case it took three years, Boris only took three months—but the consequences of this kind of ‘government’ are abundantly clear—it’s an experiment with one hell of a cost.

In the US, the office of president has been utterly debased, abused for personal advantage, and sunk, in the eyes of many Americans and of outside observers, to unimaginable lows. The kinds of conversations that have recently come to light may signal the end of this nightmare, and yet the current administration has ridden scandal after scandal using well-tested fallacies.

A letter signed by more than three hundred US national security professionals emerged this week, denouncing the exchange between Trump and the new president of the Ukraine. Out of all the signatories, all but two were either ‘former’, or ‘retd’—either those in active service think these are appropriate actions, or there is a serious lack of courage with respect to opposing the administration.

I suspect the latter—there’s a good deal of fear inside the federal government, because a witch hunt is undoubtedly going on—not of the president, as he constantly and falsely repeats, but of any who oppose him.

To an outsider, it’s incomprehensible how the Republican Party let itself get hijacked, and why at this stage, a majority of senate republicans, who clearly cannot abide Trump, should not simply support impeachment and get rid of him once and for all—hold their noses, vote with the democrats, and ‘Bye Felicia!‘

When it comes to Boris and Brexit, Churchill’s quote on Russia comes to mind: “a mystery, wrapped in a riddle, inside an enigma.”

All we can really forecast at present is that things will end badly, but no one knows how or when. After his trouncing by the British supreme court, Bojo was forced back from New York. The current state of play is as follows: (i) a Brexit deal by the next meeting of the European Council seems highly unlikely; (ii) the British PM will either ask for a delay, refuse to ask and accept the legal consequences, or resign; (iii) there will be a general election within the next three months.

A Bojo resignation is highly unlikely, so he would have to be forced out—also unlikely. A Labour victory in the election is unlikely, particularly with the LibDems splitting the vote, making a Tory plus Brexit party win a real possibility—an alliance conditioned by a policy decision on a no-deal Brexit will be the outcome.

The alternative scenario would be a Labour plus LibDem government, a second referendum, and further mayhem.

That’s what we know.

We also now know that remembering history is a good thing, and that experiments with combustible materials can burn the house down.

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

Formosa

The origins of the name Taiwan are uncertain, and may derive in part from a medley of the original Portuguese and Dutch terms for the island. Wan means bay in Putonghua—common speech, or Mandarin—so we could look for the composite phrase tai wan, which might mean platform bay, but we’d be chasing a red herring.

Chinese, like German, is built on composite words, but in this case each word matches a character. As an example, dian hua means electric speech, or telephone, and dian nao means electric brain, or computer. My favorite is da huo ji, or beat fire machine, which is of course a cigarette lighter.

Wan usually means bay. An example is Hau Hoi Wan, or Deep Bay, near Shenzhen (not to be confused with Schengen.) In the foreground, the mandatory marine cultivation—oysters, in this case.

Portuguese mariners apparently sighted the island of Taiwan in 1542, and christened it Ilha Formosa, or Beautiful Island—the Western world used the term for almost four centuries.

The first European to reach China by sea was a nephew of the Vice-Roy of India Afonso de Albuquerque, named Jorge Álvares. The Portuguese conquered Malacca in 1511, only thirteen years after Vasco da Gama first arrived in Calicut; given that a return voyage from Lisbon took about one year and a half, it’s astonishing how quickly the exploration moved east—two thousand nautical miles separate Calicut (Kozhikode today) from Malacca.

Álvares got to Lintin, an island in the Pearl River delta, in 1514, a further sixteen hundred miles from Malacca.

When I wrote Clear Eyes, I calculated the distances sailed by Columbus in his bizarre western quest to find Cipango. The numbers shown are the real distances, rather than the fake ones he logged to deceive his crew.

If we consider a (convenient) average of thirty-three leagues per day, or one hundred nautical miles, Álvares would have sailed for about two weeks, assuming he knew where he was headed.

Daily distance traveled by Columbus on his way across the Atlantic from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, to Guanahani. Note the central part of the image, when the fleet was becalmed in the Sargasso Sea, also known as the horse latitudes.

Taiwan is opposite Xiamen, in Fujian province, only three days sailing eastward from the Zhu Jiang, or Pearl River. I suspect the Portuguese got to Taiwan well before 1542—a twenty-eight year gap is a long time, and there were good reasons to keep discoveries secret.

Since the days when the island was named Formosa, it suffered many other occupations. First came the Dutch in the XVII^th century, profiting from the decline of the Portuguese empire following the Spanish occupation of 1580—they set up the typically unimaginative Fort Zeelandia.

Taiwan was ceded to Japan by the Chinese in 1895, and regained in 1945 by the Chinese Nationalists. After they lost the civil war to Mao’s communists, Chiang Kai-shek moved his capital to Taipei—ever since then, the separation of the two Chinas has been a thorn in the side of the PRC.

In the late XX^th century, Hong-Kong and Macau were handed back to China, but with a proviso—Deng Xiaoping’s one country, two systems. As an etymological parenthesis, xiao ping means little bottle.

The full text of the proviso is fascinating in its inclusion of Taiwan.

In recent weeks, the world has witnessed the mayhem in Hong Kong—if the chaos lasts long enough, China is sure to intervene. But far more interesting than that? Maybe the Trump trade talks will have a couple of secret clauses, such as reduced support for Taiwan from the US.

It’s well known that the orange man is totally hands-off when it comes to ‘internal business’ of other nations, from human rights to the annexation of Crimea, as long as it suits his self-serving goals.

It’s also well known that Xi Jin Ping (is that a bottle of gin?) wants to leave as his legacy the reunification of China.

Wouldn’t it be a thing if successful trade talks were followed a few years later by the annexation of Taiwan by the PRC, while America looks on, just as it is presently doing with Iran?

There is an apocryphal tale that comes to mind.

Deng was once asked, “What are the main consequences of the French revolution?”

He replied, “Too early to tell.”

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

Chemistry

Sir Ernest Rutherford once said, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”

That was a century ago, at a time when chemistry and biology were largely ‘catalog’ sciences—in many parts of the world they still are, whereas in the Western World, a systems approach is now the standard.

But Rutherford also said, “When we have found how the nucleus of atoms is built up we shall have found the greatest secret of all — except life.”

Those last two words destroy his previous aphorism—physics tells us how things work, chemistry tells us their composition, and biology separates life from death.

A further blow to Rutherford’s views was delivered by the Swedish Academy in 1908, when they awarded him the Nobel Prize for… chemistry.

The fact is that physics has less building blocks than both chemistry and biology, which probably explains why so much inventory was required to bring these two subjects to their present state.

The Linnaean classification system, despite its faults, was a watershed moment in biology—the fact that it was developed almost three hundred years ago is astonishing—it ushered in ecology, evolutionary theory, and genetics.

This means you can now get a full sequence of your genome for one thousand dollars, down from over one hundred million in 2001.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a Russian chemistry professor called Dmitri Mendeleev decided the way chemistry was taught was incorrect, and he formulated a better way—in so doing, he came up with the periodic table of elements.

When you look the man up on Wikipedia, the first line states, ‘Not to be confused with Dmitry Medvedev’. I should certainly hope not! Medvedev, or bear in Russian, was of course the man who did Putin the favor of allowing him multiple terms as president of the Russian Federation.

Mendeleev did his Ph.D. ‘On the Combinations of Water with Alcohol’, a subject which is very dear to my heart. He found that a 46% mass fraction of alcohol causes the maximum decrease of volume—this is typically the strength of highest quality vodka, but of course the beverage preceded the great chemist by at least five centuries.

One of the consequences of the periodic table, much like the Linnaean classification, was the transformation of chaos into order, a situation that is thermodynamically unstable—desks never tidy themselves.

The readiness of sodium to react with chlorine, or potassium with iodine, became obvious when you realized you were adding columns 1 and 7 of the table to obtain the full complement of 8. And the fact that carbon, silicon, and germanium live in column 4 reveals much about in vivo and in silico.

Yes, right there in the highly reactive center of the table, its genitals, if you will, sit all the elements that give us life—carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur.

A graphic from Bloomberg Businessweek, from this week’s issue exclusively dedicated to the periodic table.

One of the astonishing developments of the last fifty years is the use of obscure elements from the periodic table for a multitude of uses. The last century belonged to the internal combustion engine, we are now in the age of the battery. Ubiquitous in cars, laptops, and cellphones, hidden in appliances throughout my house, the battery requires, or will require in the near future, hydrogen, lithium, nickel, cobalt, zinc, and lead.

A raft of other metals, including ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium, drive the commodities markets crazy. Ruthenium, for example, was used in hard disk storage in the early years of this century, and spiked to 800 dollars per ounce in 2003-2004. After a crash, it now sits at $200 or so.

Rhodium was used in automobile catalytic converters, tumbled during the financial crash, and is now showing timid signs of recovery.

Rhodium, number 45 in the table, is a price rock ‘n roller.

One thing strikes you about any of these graphs—it’s much harder to climb the mountain than fall off the cliff.

Humans have found uses—often in highly sophisticated applications—for many of the elements that Mendeleev organized. Some of these elements are increasingly scarce, including helium, the second lightest element.

Helium is used in many applications, including MRI machines, and in a few decades, it will be in short supply. This is one of the paradoxes of the table as we move through the century: new scientific discoveries find more uses for obscure substances, but material scarcity moves them further from markets.

We’ve come a long way since Rutherford. The great man once said “An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.”

Atomic structure? I can think of far more interesting conversations to have with an attractive young lady dispensing my favorite libation, but the man had a point.

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

Double-Oh-Seven

I’m working my way through a Thomas Friedman book.

The book is called ‘Thanks For Being Late’. Weird title, and unconnected to the subject matter, except in one aspect—pausing lets you think.

This is a book my readers should read—I can tell you that right now, even though I’m only twenty percent through the story.

I’ll throw in a couple of stories from the text in this piece, but one of the key messages is that we need time to reflect, to concoct, and to combine—when we pause, we accelerate. Sleeping on problems is extremely useful because our brain atomizes issues, decomposing them into soluble globs that are, well… soluble.

Our racing society takes away our thinking time, accelerating us into continuous communication—as in music, sometimes less is more, our brain needs the space to expand its thoughts.

Sometimes, all of us is better than some of us, or one of us, but sometimes it’s not. Uwe Ross, the founder of Ross-Tech, which manufactures the VCDS VW diagnostic software, states “Meetings: None of us is as dumb as all of us.”

As a veteran of many meetings, I tend to agree.

Pause is key, and frenetic comms are a disservice—it becomes habit-forming to fire out questions you really know the answer to, if only you bother to pause and think.

I found this out many years ago—making myself less available made those (not) around me more self-reliant, and empowered them to think their way out of problems. Our discussions became centered on higher level issues, or on particularly thorny ones.

Friedman provides a rather lengthy intro, which is eminently skippable—the fun doesn’t start until page eighteen, when the focus on the year 2007 begins.

2007 did ring in many changes, including social media platforms, networking software that catapulted Big Data onto the world stage, and cellphone broadband data improvements.

However, rather than focusing on a particular year, the decade should probably be the highlight—I was using Skype to call China in 2005, but it didn’t work very well. Arguably, it still doesn’t—as soon as there are more than two people on, things can snarl up.

Let’s recall that the software was written by Estonians, Swedes, and Danes—not the most talkative of souls. When you aim Skype at a bunch of South Americans, Italians, or Turks, all hell-bent on talking at the same time, the app withers and dies.

Face it, Microsoft has done it no favors either—every time I use Skype, something new, and usually perplexing, crops up. Possibly, this is featuritis caused by a bunch of kids with spreadsheets who are devoted to brainstorming the hell out of monetizing the app.

Pause.

Pause.

Think. Alone.

Pause some more.

Stability. Features. Schedule. Those are the vertices of the iron triangle of software as I know it—nowadays, stability has been replaced by cost, and quality (stability) sits at the center of the triangle, but it’s not clear how it depends on the others. Quality is definitely a vertex, not a consequence—if anything, resources should be in the middle.

The iron triangle of software, drawn correctly. Why complicate matters?

The book’s theme is acceleration, drawing on three major forces: markets (globalization), technology, and environment. I’m keen to read the environmental component, and particularly to see it contextualized with the other engines of change.

I don’t believe technology will resolve the environmental issues we face on the planet, and I think the mantra of economic growth is incorrect, because it doesn’t follow the simple laws of thermodynamics.

Higher productivity ties into higher unemployment, as globalization and AI kick in, and anyhow job creation as a numeric metric is not the correct approach. As an analogy, many universities push for professors to teach a set quota of weekly hours—but if you’re a bad teacher, either because you don’t know your subject matter or can’t communicate it, then teaching less hours will cause less harm.

The subject of growth in human societies is far more complex than the magic numbers distilled by politicians, and change is the biggest challenge we face as a society.

Friedman points out that the social mechanisms we possess to cope with this upheaval are inadequate—he’s right, much of the world is wrapped up in Napoleonic law, and systems designed to accommodate change on a scale of multiple decades.

In medieval times, society didn’t change much from century to century, but now we see paradigm shifts every few years. This makes political systems inadequate and generates acute social imbalances because these changes are disruptive—a paradigm shift is by definition non-linear.

I think you should hear it from him, but read the book. It’ll give you pause.

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

Hourglass Politics

Six in the morning, in the middle of the Scottish lowlands.

A timid dawn casts a faint light over layers of cloud, and seagulls cry overhead—weird, because I’m equidistant from Glasgow and Edinburgh, about as land-bound as you can get in this country of highlands and islands.

But there you go—the seagulls, like the humans they poop on, live in interesting times.

The hourglass is an apt metaphor for the countdown to Brexit—the sand trickles steadily downward with sixty-nine days to go. A political segment of the UK is scheming and plotting to give the hourglass a sharp tap, just as the last grains of sand pass the isthmus, while another is hell-bent on running down the clock.

Here in Scotland, any Brexit conversation quickly shifts to the independence debate—the Scots don’t feel represented by the English, which is certainly justified when you study their history.

A pro-Brexit punter on the radio yesterday explained that Britain had two options—no hope and bob hope—a reference to Bojo, the current UK prime minister Boris Johnson, who is an incarnation of characters from the British comic Beano.

Johnson’s former employer at the Telegraph, puts Beano Boris into perspective.

He’s a sly fox, disguised as a teddy bear.

Bojo got himself photographed yesterday with a shoe plunked on Macron’s coffee table—a pose sure to find favor with the more xenophobic Englishmen—while Macron pointed out, as Merkel had done the previous day, that Europe is more than happy to accept a deal as long as the UK provides a solution to the Irish border question.

What Macron and Merkel don’t want to do is to give Boris an excuse to blame France or Germany before the British people for a no deal. Both were at pains to throw the door wide open, in the knowledge that there is no solution currently acceptable to the Irish.

The smaller nations in the EU smile upon this whole shenanigan, which binds them closer to Europe—after all, this is the first time in history the Irish are successfully thumbing their noses at Westminster without any loss of blood.

The Dutch, Belgians, and Danes dwell on Germany, the Croatians on Italy, the Portuguese on Spain. All the little guys know what it means to get fucked by large neighbors.

The most likely outcome of all this teletubby frolic is that the UK parliament will block no deal, forcing a general election. It’s difficult to see how this can take place before Halloween, but it’s easy to see that the Bojo game will not force a no deal at this time, but aims to win a strong Tory majority at the ballot box that legitimizes his actions.

A Beano-style depiction of Bojo, alongside another paragon of British esoterica, often spoofed as discussing the economics of Carthage.

The opposition are, to use a technical term, screwed, because the alternative to a parliamentary block is effectively a no-deal exit.

General elections it is, which promises a spot of Christmas chaos.

A pro-Europe win, somehow binding Labour and Libdems, brings the threat of a Corbyn government—many Labour voters don’t want that, and no one believes in Corbyn’s pro-Europe credentials—Britain would live the irony of having a remainer, Theresa May, trying to get them out, and a leaver, Corbyn, trying to keep them in.

A pro-Europe win, for many, will also mean a betrayal of the will of the people, as expressed in the Brexit referendum—a second referendum has the same effect, should Brexit be defeated.

A pro-exit win will create the conditions for government policy to be supported in parliament. The question is whether that will force the Tories into an unholy alliance with Farage’s Brexit party, whose success in the European elections earlier this year was largely due to a combination of Brexit-dithering by parliament and to proportional representation.

But the hourglass metaphor extends well beyond Brexit. The consequence of an ever-widening income gap between rich and poor, together with the steady erosion of the middle class, is political extremism.

The rotund, Humpty-Dumpty-like politics of the center, a bell-shaped curve with a narrow band of nutters at either end, has been replaced by a Dolly Parton distribution—twin peaks, if you will—with two separate mounds of fruitcakes.

This is the politics of Italy, Spain, Greece, Holland, Britain, and… oh yes, the United States. The opposite tends to happen in nations where that middle class is growing—even if the political systems do not allow democracy to thrive, Asian countries where the economic extremes are becoming less polarized will tend to a more rotund political landscape.

It’s unsurprising that the shape of wealth distribution will determine that of political preference, having itself at one time been molded by political choices. This is clearly a cyclical system, where those radical preferences will once again shift the form of the wealth curve—the problem lies in the fact that we are all sorcerers’ apprentices—like Dias and Columbus, we sail uncharted waters.

A further complication is that apparently well-behaved, linear systems can easily turn chaotic. In nature, than spells floods and typhoons—in humans, it translates to war and bloodshed.

History teaches us not to underestimate the consequences of our actions.

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

Jamon Everybody

I spent the last couple of weeks in southern Spain.

In the evenings, I tracked Napoleon’s progress through Iberia—it quickly became clear that his decision to invade Spain and Portugal was the start of his downfall. Everything looked rosy at the start—the invading armies were offered no resistance, the Portuguese royal family fled to Brazil.

Then, the great general discovered what Caesar had already found—in both countries, guerillas made life for the French impossible. Shortly after, Napoleon decided to invade Russia. The British marshal Montgomery told the House of Lords in 1962, “Rule 1, on page 1 of the book of war, is: ‘Do not march on Moscow’.”

Like Napoleon, I was in Spain for professional reasons—except in the final couple of days, when I joined the hordes of North European, American, and Chinese tourists.

About a nautical mile from shore, the twin-hull made fast to a cage holding three hundred thousand bass, and I gazed north at the small town of Altea. All along the strip are holiday apartments, including a large Norwegian area. Other ‘colonies’ are also typed by nationality.

Altea’s meant to be the cultural capital of the area—over to the west, there’s Benidorm, population one million, a city of high rises, built for low-end package tours, that holds no claim to culture whatsoever.

Like a number of other villages in southern Spain, this was traditionally an area of  almadrabas, tuna traps that date back to the Phoenicians, then to the Moors in the caliphate, until in 1925 it became popular as a tourist destination for Madrileños.

But in 1950, a humble man who had been a railway porter and a miner became mayor. The new alcalde set about promoting his town to the sun-seekers of northern Europe, and soon he was drawing in the crowds.

With the English came the bikini—the revolutionary two-piece was banned by the fascist dictators of both Spain and Portugal, and there were epic scenes of local Guardia Civil agents wrestling with scantily-clad young women.

Mayor Zaragoza turned a blind eye to the fashion statement but the higher authority, the governor of the autonomous community of Valencia, put his foot down and enforced the law.

In 1953, Zaragoza decided to take the matter to the caudillo, Spain’s supreme leader, the Generalissimo, Francisco Franco.

The former miner mounted his Vespa and rode eight hours straight to Madrid. Once there, he dusted himself off and appeared before the fascist dictator, his trousers spattered with oil from the two-stroke’s exhaust.

He simply said, “Necesitamos divisas y el turismo nos las trae.” Franco told him to bypass the higher authority, and keep bringing in the foreign currency. “Anything you need, speak to me.”

Pedro Zaragoza died in 2008, aged eighty-six. During his lifetime, Benidorm developed a skyline reminiscent of Miami, since the mayor knew it was cheaper to build upwards, and became the home of stag & hen. ‘Good girls go to heaven, bad girls go to Benidorm.’

The most prized species in the culinary pantheon of fish—aleta azul, or bluefin tuna, known to the locals as atún rojo.

The Spain I visited was the exact opposite of the North European fleshpots, a country of conservative, hard-working people, making the ocean work for them. Spain grows and sells fish all over the world, taking advantage of the warm Mediterranean waters.

In parts of the south such as Conil and Zahara de los Atunes, the almadrabas are still set, in a complex maze that draws the bluefin to the câmara de la muerte—the death chamber.

It is there that the nets are slowly hauled aboard, and their precious haul of tuna, worth over fifty dollars a pound, taken on board. A three hundred pound fish means fifteen thousand bucks, and bluefin can weigh five hundred pounds—the largest specimen ever documented weighed almost fifteen hundred pounds.

Bluefin are top predators, and play a key role in regulating the food chain, so capture is also carefully regulated—ICCAT, the International Commission for Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, keeps a watchful eye on fishing; the European Union sets quotas, and in some areas bans fishing altogether.

This has created a pressing need  for farmed bluefin—a Japanese company has now begun selling rojo reared completely in captivity.

But in the Spanish lonjas, you still see the big boys for sale, and I suspect they’re captured in the traditional way.

Otherwise, why would the signs say atún de almadraba?

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

Europe@War

Napoleon invented the concept of world war.

On reflection, I’m positive that sentence is true. If it is, then the Napoleonic wars of the early eighteen hundreds were a revolution—even in a Europe thoroughly accustomed to war.

Caesar was the first to secure European hegemony, following conquest with administration and widespread edification—including monumental temples, public offices, and highways. Furthermore, he enforced Roman law, the trappings of which still mark the legal systems of Southern Europe, South America, and much of Africa.

But the Romans fought their campaigns piecemeal, taking on the French, English, Huns, and many others in separate engagements. Caesar does have the distinction, together with the Vikings and the Normans, of invading Britain, something that has never been achieved since.

Napoleon, on the other hand, mainly through lack of choice, engaged all kinds of alliances, mixing Prussians, English, Italians, Russians, Czechs, Hungarians, and of course Austrians.

Austria was a particularly strong opponent, but the nation back then was huge, extending into Bavaria and eastward to Hungary—the Habsburg Monarchy had begun in the early XVI^th century and its head was often also the Holy Roman Emperor.

It’s obvious that Napoleon was not given much choice in selecting his opponents, but it’s also clear that he was unique as military tactician and strategist. The core of his story is war—an unending series of battles during which he systematically routed his enemies, often with deceit and ruse, always with courage, and in many examples with luck.

His skill at positioning troops, reading the mind of his enemies while disguising his true intentions, and the incredible speed with which he reacted to circumstances, are at the heart of his success.

The story of Napoleon is that of a man revered by his soldiers, a general who became an emperor, a man cuckolded by his wife but who only divorced her thirteen years later, leaving a trail of twenty mistresses in his wake.

Napoleon at the battle of Austerlitz, 1805. The great general was then thirty-six years old.

The maxims of war that Napoleon wrote are as relevant today as when they were first penned. Advice on war has in the past decades been seen as a proxy for business, as evidenced by the popularity of Sun Tzu’s ‘Art of War’ among the Wall Street fraternity, and although Napoleon’s military maxims are far less known, there are a few that are useful in a business context.

A well-established maxim of war is not to do anything which your enemy wishes and for the single reason that he does so wish.

Others are rather different, but no less of a lesson.

The first quality of a soldier is constancy in enduring fatigue and hardship. Courage is only the second. Poverty, privation and want are the school of the good soldier.

Napoleon’s practical lessons in battlefield tactics, and in military strategy, are widely taught at academies throughout the world.

Despite the fact that war has changed dramatically in the past two centuries, particularly when it comes to the concepts of line and front, as well as in asymmetric warfare, the great man could almost certainly outfight any modern-day general.

I fully expect that a commander who could do so much with so little, back in the days of flintlocks and ball muskets, would consider many of the modern-day engagement rules in a radically different light, and shift the paradigm dramatically.

Read over and over again the campaigns of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus, Turenne, Eugene and Frederic. Make them your models. This is the only way to become a great general and to master the secrets of the art of war. With your own genius enlightened by this study, you will reject all maxims opposed to those of these great commanders.

Frederick the Great was one of Napoleon’s heroes—after the capture of Berlin, Napoleon visited the tomb of the Prussian military genius. Turning to his entourage, he said.

Hats off, gentlemen, if he were still alive, we should not be here.

The story of Napoleon is the story of European war, of nations hurling themselves at each other, of many thousands of casualties, of untold pain and suffering. It shows how much France punished Prussia, Austria, and Italy, and how in turn it was punished back.

It highlights why such strife subsequently led to more European wars, of a scale that turned them into world wars. As we watch Brexit, Salvini, and so many other disasters happening in Europe, (mis)guided by the morons who ignore history, the silver-tongued Bannons of this world, let us not be fooled. Again.

I’ll leave the battle of Waterloo for another source, partly because of its speculation of what might have happened had the battle not been fought.

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that at the age of sixty, a man was only at two-thirds of his life.

He died on the island of Saint Helena, aged fifty-one, on May 5^th 1821.

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

Baked Alaska

If you’re familiar with UK cuisine—now there’s an oxymoron—you might know this as a type of ‘pudding.’ Bear in mind that puddings can be savory, as in steak and kidney pud, but in British vernacular, “Will you have pudding?” means will you eat dessert.

Brits have some bizarre names for their dishes—my favorite epithets include toad in the hole and spotted dick.

Baked Alaska is yet another one. However, given my penchant for puns, today’s title was driven by the picture below, which scared the crap out of me.

The European satellite Sentinel 3 shows the continent burning up, in some cases quite literally, on July 25th 2019.

The extreme west (Portugal) and Eastern Europe have dodged the bullet, but eastern Spain, the northern part of France, the Benelux countries, and the southern UK were a veritable frying pan on that day.

Little did I know that the English newspaper, The Guardian, had headed an article on July 3rd with exactly the same title—the topic is more confined, but the emphasis is the same—after years of political dodgems, the planet has finally hit us on the head with a giant frying pan.

At the present time, raging wildfires are lighting up the north—in latitudes where the Northern Lights are a wintertime event.

From Siberia to Alaska, the Arctic is ablaze. Most people don’t realize that different parts of the planet are warming at different rates—changes in the boreal regions are swift. The article in the Washington Post is from the Climate Weather Gang—at first I thought this had to be Trump & Acolytes, but no, these guys are worth listening to.

For the past week, a high pressure system has blocked the roaring forties, the high latitude westerlies that bring Atlantic storm systems to Europe—Bergen, Norway, a city known for its wet and generally chilly weather, sported ninety-one degrees.

Scientists were publishing research papers on the slowing or even reversal of the Gulf Stream well over a decade ago—the inference was that it would trigger more extreme temperatures. Citizens of Western Europe take the North Atlantic Drift for granted—twenty-three years ago I was on a beach in Qingdao, northeast China, watching the snow fall in December, marveling at some insane locals stripping down to their underwear and diving in.

Qingdao is at 36^o N, the same latitude as Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in northern Morocco, but has far more extreme weather—now we’re getting it here. As the land surface temperature rises, the flashpoint for forest fires is triggered, and the planet is hit with a double whammy—more fires mean more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and an increase in the greenhouse effect, but they also mean less trees, and less capacity to remove carbon dioxide from the air.

A rise in temperature massively increases evaporation of ocean water, which means more cloud, higher humidity, more heat-trapping, and ultimately more warming—positive feedbacks we could very much do without.

Baked Alaska, Fried Siberia, Poached Scandinavia… But that ain’t all. Marine plants are having a bit of fun as well—the star of the summer is a brown seaweed called Sargassum. The weed gives its name to the Sargasso Sea, and, for a seaweed, it has one very unusual characteristic—it floats.

The Chinese green tides are caused by the green seaweed Ulva, which loosely attaches to the bottom, but can also survive as it floats in the ocean—giant blooms are documented annually since the 2008 Olympics.

But Sargassum only floats, and now it’s escaped the confines that becalmed Columbus and gave their name to the Horse Latitudes. Scientists estimate there are twenty million metric tons of this species in the ocean, and have termed the event Great Sargasssum Atlantic Belt. I would have called it GASP, replacing Belt with Phenomenon, Proliferation, Problem, Peak…

I’ve worked with brown seaweeds like Sargassum, and it wouldn’t be unusual to have ten pounds in a square meter. Doing the math, the weed plague might occupy 4,000 km², which is downright scary.

Mind you, if you like stats, Siberian wildfires this summer occupy an area the size of Belgium.

Why has this seaweed suddenly been able to spread all the way from the Cape Verde islands to the beaches of the Caribbean? And more to the point, is this a one-off or a trend?

Tourist destinations in Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean islands are pretty concerned—humans have a very flaky relationship with nature—it’s okay to lard fertilizer onto crops, or to produce five hundred million chickens in the Chesapeake Bay, and thereby generate 500,000 metric tons of chicken shit.

All this adds nitrogen and phosphorus to the ocean—too much of that, mixed in with shifting patterns of global circulation, and we have a perfect storm.

Like the Chinese blooms, but on a grand scale, scientists have detected the Sargassum flare-ups since 2011. Every year except 2013.

We live too preoccupied with the latest Instagram post, and with extended navel-gazing, to see what hides in plain sight.

Citizens of the West, the chickens have come home to roost.

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