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Russia and Tsar Vlad the Journalist Impaler

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

“Tens of thousands of Russians flooded downtown Moscow on Saturday to demand an end to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's rule, casting a strong challenge to his bid to reclaim the presidency in March. The massive protest -- which drew 120,000 people, according to organizers -- reflected a mounting opposition to Mr. Putin's 12-year rule that has badly dented his father-of-the-nation image, even though he's expected to win the vote that would extend his rule by another six years. The protest leaders hope to stage another rally a week before the March 4 election to raise the heat on Mr. Putin. The previous rallies -- the second of which also drew an estimated 120,000 -- were the biggest in Russia since the protests 20 years ago that paved the way to the collapse of the Soviet Union.” WSJ

Vlad and friends will just smile through the protests, stuff ballot boxes on March 4 and win '80 %' or some such number of votes cast. Not much changes in Russia. Yet as the Russian elite becomes further distracted and distanced from the population, ideas of reform and rebellion will spread throughout society. Rulers evincing 'stability' including Charles X of France [post Napoleon]; Franz Joseph in Austria; Cromwell; and even the Romanovs, eventually had their regimes overturned by events, punctuated by a general feeling that the ruling elite or 'strong man', was completely disinterested in, and dissociated from the mass and their real world problems. Nepotism, 'powerism' and 'greedism' might be the theologies of the ruling cohort. They ring hollow with people earning an average wage of less than $1000 per month, and who are pessimistic about their futures. Russian birth rates are spectacularly low for example. A sure sign of general pessimism and cultural decline.

Can Russia and its usually apathetic subjects tear down and replace the Putinistas?

Is Tsar Putin ready to relinquish power and return Russia to change and as he would put it, instability? More likely is 12 more years of Tsar Vlad the Judo lover. There will be consequences. Reduced foreign investment. Further nationalisation/Kremlinization of the economy. More corporate fascism. More deaths of journalists who oppose the regime. Few liberalizing measures. Exportation of young people. A declining birth rate - why have babies if you have a negative view of your future ? A larger share of Moslems as a % of the population - already at 25%. More funding of Moslem and Arab regimes as threats to Western interests in the Muddled Yeast. At least the Great Peter and the Romanovs knew that Russia was better off with the US, the UK, Holland, and France as partners. Not Vlad the Journalist Impaler.

Russia will get little out of a new Judo-lovers dictatorship. There are risks to any 'change', but Nemstov et al. or the 'Liberals' who are at best half-hearted reformers; are hardly radical orthodox Conservative-Bolshevik types out to recreate '10 days which shook the world', and turn Russia into a libertarian paradise. But the big wits will call the Judocracy of Putin, 'stability'. Sure Russia might be stable - especially when most of its Euro population leaves and most of its assets are owned by a small group of late middle-aged white men in the Kremlin. Stable indeed.

The Russophiles will disagree with the above and say that Vlad is the greatest leader since oh I don't know, Robespierre perhaps, or maybe Honecker in East Germany. Maybe he is even as big as the O'Goda in the US ?

Look at Russia now vs. 1998 they scream ! Richer, fatter, happier, stable. One of the worst decisions made by Yeltsin was to trade rocky Russian development and the uneven road of economic and social development for his own safety and to keep his corrupted $5 billion in stolen dollars. He handed Russia back to the KGB. A simple fact. But for the Russophiles Vlad the Journalist Impaler will be the greatest Russian leader since Trotsky. A man for all seasons. The embodiment of strong, sober, great-man rule. Competent. Inscrutable. Looking good in swim shorts. Screw the people. All hail the King! Bow to Vlad and be glad. Stability is the cry. Order is the new freedom.

Nota bene;

The Russiaophiles will not like these articles:

Revolution if Putin wins?

Nemstov organizes anti-Putin protests?

Crocker's 'Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire', part 2. Africa

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I couldn't help but wondering what Niall Ferguson, whose 'modest, unpretentious' book I am reading is called 'Civilization', and who makes the often, implausible and unsourced claim that the Chinese invented pretty much of everything, would make of the following phrase by Crocker, in his 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire', [reviewed here]:

“The irony of the British Empire in Africa is that while it started with slave ships tapping into the millennium-old slave trade of the Dark Continent, Britain became the most powerful force in the world for ending slavery and the slave trade, and the anti-slaving campaign drove the expansion of the British Empire.” [p. 189]

Rather obvious. This fact sends the cultural self-loathing Obamatrons into limp wristed hissy fits of spitting and self-flagellation. How dare the British Empire do anything right? Ending slavery! Oh please didn't the Chinese do that first pace Ferguson?

The British conquered Africa because they had better technology, vaccines, medicine, modern organizational methods, private capital, a market system, independence of character and initiative; a cultural superiority and a supremacy in institutions and political-economic governance. Not to mention self-confidence and a modernizing, industrializing economy. If Ferguson's list of apocryphal Chinese inventions [the usual tired list, blast furnaces circa 10.000 B.C., iron smelting (he might have forgotten about the iron age in Europe), printing, toilet paper, golf....] was really true, it would have been the 300 foot junks of Admiral He and not the literally hundreds of British ships and sea captains, which would have mapped and then quested to conquer a huge, forbidding land-mass. Something in Ferguson's narrative does not make sense. Any society that created 'everything' would also be the first to explore and develop Africa. It is a lot simpler given the monsoon rains and winds to sail from east to west to reach Africa, then to brazen it out going north south and then south to north east to reach the Zanzibar coast, the most hospitable landing point on the Dark part of that Continent.

It wasn't the Chinese 'mining' genius which unearthed diamonds and gold, it was the British who began to use their technology and techniques to turn the African backwater hinterland, into a part of civilisation:

“In addition, in southern Africa the British unearthed diamonds and gold; in eastern Africa they established farms and ranches; in northern Africa they took command of the Suez Canal; and everywhere in Africa they were motivated by something else: a desire for discovery – most famously, to find the source of the Nile.”

Fancy that. Self-confident men and women searching for profit, adventure, personal and social gain; to convert the 'natives' to cvilisation; and to find out truth and reality, such as the main spring of the Nile. According to Ferguson the Chinese had already done this is Africa, at least 2500 years before the hairy, stupid Briton, in his small raft stumbled on the beach at Cape Town gaping in stupidity at the cultural magnificence of local Zulu society.

Crocker goes through a small list of British individuals who changed the course of history and brought a superior civilisation to Africa. A fact which offends everyone who 'knows' that the British Empire was nothing but an evil imposition of an inferior form of social development on superior native customs and mores:

-Wolseley in 1873-4 leading a small force of British regulars and defeating the Ashanti along the poorly named Gold Coast or West Africa securing naval bases, free trade with the Ashanti and access to the Niger. The Gold Coast was formerly annexed in the 1890s.

-Lugard brought serious and honest Victorian governance as well as investment to the Gold Coast. Hospitals, roads, railways and mines were developed under Lugard and the British greatly benefiting both the ruled and the rulers. The area was governed through local councils and elections – something unique to the West African experience.

-Livingston in central Africa, preaching the gospel of commerce, Christianity and civilization. One of the most interesting and avid of Britain's cultural heroes in Africa.

-Chelmsford destroying the Zulu state which had preyed upon both Dutch and British farmers and possessions and had engaged in a long litany of unprovoked and savage attacks on both civilian and military targets. Chelmsford's victory removed the only obstacle between a Dutch and British clash in Southern Africa.

-Cecil Rhodes and others who both forced Britain into the Boer war, and helped her win it. Rhodes was the quintessential imperialist who believed in Britain's divine right to rule and in her civilizing mission. I doubt he is taught anymore in school.

-General Gordon stopping slavery in Egypt and the Sudan. He was murdered by Moslems in Khartoum. A crime paid back by the decisive British victory in 1898 at Omdurman by Kitchener against the Moslem Dervishes [the Dervishes were Sufists who followed a 12^th century Afghan-Moslem cult of superstition and mysticism which included dancing in a trance].

Most don't know that in Southern Africa Britain defended the rights of Blacks to both own land and vote in Dutch and British territory. This was something that the Dutch Boers wanted no part of. The British were great agriculturalists which benefited the local population, many of whom worked as free men on the estates and would later become proprietors. In Kenya and Rhodesia, for the first time in African history, large well managed and irrigated plantations started to produce a variety of saleable and even exportable crop. Tea, coffee, vegetables, fruits and other products were grown en masse.

Throughout Africa the British invested about 5% of their GDP annually into infrastructure. Schools, hospitals, roads, rail-lines, government buildings, law courts, and the infrastructure of a modern political-economy slowly developed on the Dark Continent. One supposes that the Chinese had done this long before the era of Rome. After all they must have invented the infrastructure of the modern world.

Crocker goes into some detail about the British involvement in Africa. It is hard to make the claim that Africa is better off without Britain has the colonial master of must of its territory. Moslem 'extremists' are now in power in North Africa and Egypt. Arab Moslems slaughter darker-skinned non-Moslems in the Sudan – something a modern day Gordon would not tolerate. Somalia is a Moslem wasteland as are vast tracts of Nigeria, Mali, and central Africa.

Only a few states in Africa are 'normal' and function to modern standards. African troubles have little to do with Western or whitey-imperialism. Corruption, the wrong culture, violence, intolerance, tribal hatreds, Islam and other distortions have wasted the $2 Trillion sent by the White world to the Dark Continent. This is the fault of Africa post colonialism.

The post-modern paternalistic racism namely; send Blacks money out of guilt and because 'we' the Western elite feel that they are too ignorant to understand how to build a modern political-economy, has no echo in British imperialism. The Victorians had a mission but not a racist theology. They ended slavery, had a belief that Africans were just as good as anyone else if given a chance at civilization, and developed Africa as much out of a mission to bring a better world to the Dark Continent, as from the baser motives of profit, greed, blood-lust and power. Africa since 1965 has not improved. Witness Zimbabwe or Rhodesia. Maybe there is something good in imperialism after all. Even Niall Ferguson might agree with that. This is why Crocker's book is such a good read.

Venture Capital and Fairness. Do you support thousands of people?

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Do you contribute your 'fair share' ? Did the average worker imitate the much maligned venture capitalist Mitt Romney and achieve the following in the past tax year? On his circa $4 million in paid taxes Romney financed, carried and supported the following. Did you do the same?:

-300 elementary school children

-300 seniors on Medicare

-200 military personnel's salaries

-250 people on food stamps

-200 people on other government welfare

-ex of his tax payments some $4 million was sent to various charities helping literally thousands of people

This says nothing of the tens of thousands of jobs 'saved' or 'created' [to use the OGoda's phraseology]. So the question is – what did you do that was comparable?

VC investment management is an exercise in futility and frustration. Imagine if you had $100 million of your own money and you had to earn a return on it by investing in businesses. Most likely 3/4 or more of your investments would fail. Maybe 1/4 might have some level of success. None would be 'guaranteed'. Out of every 5 deals you structure you would probably lose capital on 4 and hope to earn back your lost money on just one deal. Without such investments many firms and jobs would simply vanish. For your troubles you are vilified by the media and the geniuses of the Socialist-Marxist cult; who to quote the Koran 5:33, would like you to be 'executed, humiliated and crucified'. Nice.

In post-modern Socialist Utopias there is lots of love expressed for 'heroes' [police officers with $90.000 a year pensions and unlimited power]; the 'little guy' [now defined as a government worker who will only get $60.000 a year for life after age 55]; the Earth Mother; or the 'disadvantaged' who collect free-housing, free health and dental care, disability payments and housing support. Not much compassion is expressed towards anyone who actually creates a business or engages in job hiring. Poof. So bourgeois. Such types are demonized and spoken of with whispers in polite social groups. Surely you don't want to be one of 'them' now do you?

So a fair question on the meaning of fair. Is it fair that one man supports literally thousands of people? Is it fair that half the population pays no income tax – a tax which supports the functioning of all the duties of a Federal Government including health care, border security, the military and sundry transfers for sundry purposes to the population at large ? Is it fair that venture capital money has created behemoths ranging from Apple to various manufacturing firms, and in the process millions of new jobs, yet the entire industry is calumnied and looked upon by the bien pensant as unworthy? How many jobs do the 'fair' commissars in government, or the union elite so obsessed by 'fairness' create ? None is the answer. They create welfare cheques disguised as jobs.

The reality is clear. The deployment of capital into business ventures is entirely fair and subject to a fair return. So too is the creation of profit and millionaires from such investments. These are fair returns for a risk fairly taken. In a thinking-rational world you would want more venture investments and venture financed millionaires. They pay a lot more than their 'fair share'. In fact the entire edifice of welfare and public transfers, not to mention thousands of worthy charities would not exist without both venture capital and its capitalists.

How is that for fairness?

State of the Stalinist incompetence of Barack Hussein Obama

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The Dear Leader has certainly disappointed. The great man was going to unite America. He is of course the most divisive, negative President in history. A man who sat in a racist church for 20 years. Whites cling to guns and bibles according to the great 'healer'. If you criticize this Dear Leader you are a racist. Islam is peace and if you disagree you are a redneck who should be jailed, so says the former Moslem. The great man was going to resuscitate the economy and create or save 4 million [or was that trillion?] jobs. He has lost close to 3 million and killed the only 'shovel ready project' he droned on about at length for one year – the Keystone pipeline. The tax and regulation system continues to push firms offshore – along with eco-cult legislation in which the EPA is now almost a sovereign state. Real unemployment is 20%. Oppressive legislation and union friendly favours, pours out of Washington. Regulations strangle development. Billion dollar green tech and eco-fraud programs bound and caper like monkeys on a see-saw. He has supported a Moslem Brotherhood takeover of Egypt and Libya. Iran can do what it likes. The great man's socialized health care plan is both Unconstitutional and plainly irrational. The US health system is almost completely controlled and distorted by government and both Medicare and Medicaid, socialized systems are bankrupt. So the obvious conclusion is more government control of health care?

On the positive side the Dear Leader did promise to save us helpless idiots and our dear Earth Mother from non-existent rising temperatures and force back the sea levels with magic waves of his divine arm. In the past 3 years both have fallen, but even his acolytes will admit that these decreases were achieved without the great man's intercession. But don't worry mankind's greatest problem is GloblaoneyWarming combined with too much 'capitalism'....both of which can only be solutioned if the Dear Leader is re-elected. So moan the elite and media.

I don't know what people get out of the cult of the Stalinist Obama. Bumper stickers, t-shirts, posturing at the bingo hall? Statism has always failed. Europe is an on-going tragi-comedy attesting to that reality. The great men at Davos will no doubt intone that all is well and the Europe and the Euro will 'survive'. They are wrong of course. But reality does not usually impinge itself on the elite, self-absorbed and self-righteous that they usually are. The Dear Leader Obama was and always will be a radical Marxist, wedded to ideas of income redistribution, class warfare, hatred of the US Republican experiment, a disdain for white European and Christian civilization, mixed with an elite's contemptuous sneer towards the 'little people' who are too stupid to decide much for themselves. Ergo he or someone like him must rule.

The key point of the political economy and the key factor in history is this theme; the struggle of the individual against the collective power of the state. Communalization and collectivization are the 'enemies' of civilized advance. History is the unending story of the fight for freedom, free-will, self-determination, responsibility, and the pursuance of life, liberty and personal happiness defined as living in safety and pursuing what is lawful, accepted and rational. State power opposes these ideals. From Sargon the Great through to the National Socialism's of the 20^th century [German, Russian, Cuban, Venezuelan, Korean, Chinese....]; and the Globalist-International Socialism of the past 20 years; the state in its many forms, guises and vices is diametrically opposed to what makes a society – and an individual – prosper.

"The key lies in understanding that "politics" isn't just about choosing one candidate or another, or even about choosing one party or another. Politics is the relationship between the individual and the State. And it is this relationship we humans have been struggling to get right for thousands of years. We've tried everything -- kingdoms, empires, left-wing dictatorships, right-wing dictatorships, socialist models, models based on religion, and all sorts of democracies and republics.

When our country's constitution went into effect in 1788, the U.S. established a relationship between the individual and the State that was unique in history: the individual was in charge, the State would serve the individual, and there would be an arm's-length distance between the two. It is this unique relationship -- not our continental size, or our natural resources -- that propelled the U.S. into becoming the strongest, richest, freest, and most opportunity-oriented country the world has ever known.” [Herbert E. Meyer writing on American Thinker. Meyer was Vice Chair of CIA's National Intelligence Council, under Reagan].

All true. Under the Dear Leader and Prophet Obamed, the individual now serves the State. Statism is always manifested by debt; deficits; corporatism in which friends of the State including Green energy firms benefit; corruption; and patronizing patronage. National Socialist Germany was bankrupt due to the above by 1939, making a war inevitable. As with any statist cult the average person loses. Incomes shrink, inflation proceeds apace [denied by the government, the media and 'experts'], welfare blossoms and families fall apart. All of this has accelerated in the past 3 years. Bush II was derided as a 'Conservative'. He wasn't. He was a statist who expanded the powers of the Federal Government. Under his successor the State is now master of all. It is clear that this most incompetent, negative, and inconsequential President in history deserves to be fired. If this does not happen in 2012 America will deserve its fate.

Book Review, 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire', by H.W. Crocker III

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This is a necessary book in an age of self-loathing. The British have done more good for humanity than any imperial people in history with the exception perhaps of the Romans until internecine civil wars; inflation; bureaucracy, taxes and a narcissistic culture killed it. One doubts that Crocker is being feted in British Universities, or that his book is de rigeuer reading for the elite, themselves so preoccupied with converting to Islam and the prostrations and minstrels of the eco-climate fraud cult. There is no historical parallel for the descent into virulent self-loathing now endemic in Britain and the West. If you hate yourself, you probably won't succeed in life. When nations and empires are infected with the bacillus of self-hatred it leads to self-immolation and the usurpation by ideologies – even ones vastly inferior – who are sure of themselves. Civilizations don't last forever. They can recede rather quickly:

“Alas that day is here, ushered in by United Nations bureaucrats, liberal internationalists, native kleptocrats, liberated Islamists, and Third World Communists and National Socialists, all of whom emerged as Europe's empires retreated. The retreat of the British Empire was not progress – either for Western Civilisation or in many cases for the countries achieving independence.”

Churchill's great mistake – the UN. The UN via the GlobaloneyWarming scam seeks the power of universal governance and massive international transfers of money from 'White states' to the Third World. The UN is largely a Moslem-Third World mafia responsible for the initiation of giving $2 Trillion to Africa in guilt money since 1965, with nary a positive result or dividend to show. During this same period Africa has generated plenty of tribal wars, carnage, social dislocations and the eradication of once functioning political-economies in 'colonial' states. All blamed on Western states. Jubilee. The Moslem bloc runs the UN and we have indeed liberated Islam to quote Crocker, and reinvigorated the Salafist-Wahabbi theology of intolerance one finds in the Koran through our blood money [oil payments used to fund Islamic terror]; and the withdrawal of empire [leaving Iraq in 2011, will give us the same poor sets of results as the 1932 withdrawal]. The drawing down of empire does have its consequences – few of them noble or moral.

The first 190 pages or so of this book reference the early British empire with its nascent beginnings in the 12^th century under Edward I, to the British Raj and the violent dismemberment of the Indian subcontinent between the Hindus and Moslems. In today's commentary, the entire British enterprise, instigated by the English, was a disaster. Nothing good came of the English experiment in empire. All was disaster, racism, slavery, hate, war, pillage and the imposition of crude English non-civilization, onto the advanced, civilized, wonderful, peaceful, multicultural nirvanas elsewhere. I would imagine that today Rudyard Kipling would be tried for thought crimes in England. Pace Crocker on Kipling:

“..Kipling frames the white man's burden rather differently. It means binding your best men to serve another people, to take up what he says will be a thankless task, yet one that a mature and Christian people must do – to banish famine and sickness, to provide peace and order, to build roads and ports, to seek the profit of another rather than oneself....The British Empire of the twenty-first century academic lecture hall, however, is something utterly different. The idea that the British Empire was a white man's burden is treated with scorn, contempt, and ridicule....the Empire was a vehicle of rapacious, self-serving capitalists responsible for racism, slavery, and oppression on a global scale.”

Indeed. Kipling was born in India of course and was an Orientalist. He knew that the 'White Man's Burden' was the spread of civilization. This is why he welcomed American involvement in the Philippines and Asia. Today of course he would be called a neo-con Fascist, and probably would be summarily beaten in the public square by tender, cross-dressing, Koranic quoting British police 'men'.

I wonder how many Brits know anything about the characters that Crocker introduces including; Sir Francis Drake, Sir Henry Morgan, Sir Charles Cornwallis [for his successful governing of India and Ireland], Sir Walter Raleigh [an Irishman], the Duke of Wellington and the sundry other characters who could not exist in today's world. Crocker does not even go into the vast corpus of English-British genius in the fields of science, literature, the arts, engineering and other domains. Pity, but that would require 4 or 5 volumes. He only mentions a handful in the sphere of the political and military. Yet even this bifurcated and reduced list is most impressive. No other nation state can match it.

This only highlights an obvious point. Today, the mediocrity of the welfare state is all too obvious. Once society becomes a quest for the holy grail of benign paternalism, the devolution to the lowest common denominator becomes inevitable. I can't imagine a personality like Drake in today's Western state with its all powerful bureaucracy. Max Weber was right. It is not Marx's alienation of labour from production and ownership of 'making something' which causes social discord and revolution. It is the imposition of unaccountable layers of bureaucracy which dissociates people from the real world, from living, from trying, failing and trying again; and from real culture. Weber's analysis from 1890 is eerily prescient and applicable to the leviathan of today's state.

The small government structure of Britain only achieved; a scientific revolution, the Industrial 'revolution'; an agricultural revolution; engineering wonders, the creation of modern sewage and water systems; modern orphanages, hospitals and welfare systems; constitutional democracy; and the defence of freedom in 3 world wars. Not bad. Add to this the destruction of slavery – the only time in history a state has warred against the oldest profession, that of capturing other humans and putting them to work. As Crocker elucidates, the British war against slavery was a major impetus for colonialism. The British spent in today's money, tens of billions of pounds and lost upwards of 10.000 men in fighting human slavery from Brazil, to the Moslem states; to India. It took the British most of the 19^th century to stop the cargo in humans. In the mid 1830s as Crocker relates, almost 1/3 of a British national budget was spent to free slaves in the West Indies by buying their freedom and paying off their owners. I don't remember a Moslem state doing the same.

“..between 1530 and 1780, roughly concurrent with the Atlantic slave trade, the Muslim Barbary pirates enslaved more than a million white Christians Europeans. In Africa, slavery was a long-standing domestic industry, and Europeans slavers tapped into it.”

In actual fact some 10 million Whites were taken into slavery over 1000 years by Arabs, and Moslems, including the Ottomans. No one cries over this today. No one is asking the Moslems and Arabs for reparations. Why is that?

One of the best parts of the book is Crocker's history of the British in India. An enterprise which any objective observer knows, benefited India rather grandly. The terms of trade for the English were negative by the high point of Victoria's reign. Huge quantities of capital were invested by the English in railroads, roads, schools, hospitals, the civil service, ports, agriculture and manufacturing. The once profitable trade with India was dry by 1880. The Indians were exporting vast cargoes of cotton and calicoes, along with other items such as spices and lower cost manufactures back to the mother country. Given this reality India was 'growing up' and at some point would assume independence. Some of the personalities involved in the 'conquering' of India include:

-Sir Robert Clive [the first conqueror of India]

“In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the British population in India hovered at about 100.000, compared to more than 250 million Indians. The British believed they ruled in India not only by power...but by force of personality.....and British justice, decency, and fair play, which justified the entire endeavour.”

-Sir Charles Napier [an Irishman who conquered the Sind]

“Imposing the British Christian value on women...was not easy: 'There is only one crime I cannot put down – wife killing! They think to kill a cat or dog is wrong, but I have hanged at least six for killing women: on the slightest quarrel she is chopped to pieces..I will hang 200 unless they stop.”

-George Curzon

“Curzon wanted to leave the Indian civilisation alone and govern through the British Raj and the native aristocracy. In this, he felt, there was stability, order, and a hope for continuity and permanence...He built more railroads than any other governor-general...He advanced agrarian reforms...He promoted massive new irrigation projects....He toured every hospital he could find, generally pleased at the efforts of British doctors and civil servants and unimpressed by the fatalistic attitude of native Indian officials.”

The British controlled India because their civilization was superior. India today would be far worse off without the British legacy. When India was carved up between the Moslems [Pakistan] and the rest [India]; slaughter and war was inevitable.

“Winston Churchill had warned that an independent India would degenerate into communal carnage: he was right. Hardened British officers....found themselves unable to stomach the sadistic mutilations and mass murders that followed independence and partition....not even Gandhi survived the chaos he helped unleash; he was assassinated by a Hindu nationalist.”

True enough. Millions were killed and displaced. Today, Pakistan's main geo-strategic imperative is the reduction of India and the demolition of Hindus. Maybe empire is not so bad after all. The most successful states in the world follow the British model with Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand being former colonies. So much for 'failure'.

More on Crocker's important work to follow.

Water Management in China

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Water, the world's most important commodity and the largest future market. Clean-up, reuse, information gathering, work-flows, river redirection, watershed management...hardware, software, services, solutions of all varieties will be deployed. Some surmise that wars will be fought over water scarcity. China's northern region might be a desert by 2030. Over 100 projects are redirecting water into northern China from southern China. We might see more of this across the world.

1) Famed investor and China-'Bull' Jim Rogers:

“I don’t mind if China has civil war, epidemics, panics, depressions, all of that. You can recover from that. The only thing you cannot recover from is water … China has a horrible water problem in the north. India has a worse water problem, there’s no question about that; America, in some places, has water problems. If China doesn’t solve its water problems then there’s no China story … I’ve been around the world a couple of times, I’ve seen whole societies, cities, countries that disappeared when the water disappeared.

They’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars … they’re spending staggering amounts of money trying to solve their water problem. I am presuming that they will. Now, maybe they won’t, and if they won’t, in twenty or thirty or forty years, the whole story’s over.”

2) BusinessWeek:

“The country that has a long history of devastating floods and droughts arguably faces an even bigger water crisis today. After almost 30 years of double-digit economic growth and the migration of hundreds of millions of villagers to the cities, China has been barely able to meet the spike in demand for water. Its resources were scarce to begin with and pollution has made clean water even scarcer......

The scale of the challenge is enormous. Every year, on average 15.3 million hectares of farmland—13% of the total—faces drought. Today some 300 million people living in rural areas, or nearly a quarter of China's population of 1.3 billion, don't have access to safe drinking water. And among more than 600 Chinese cities, 400 are facing water shortages, including 100 that may see serious shortages, says Ma Jun, director of the Beijing-based Institute of Public & Environmental Affairs and author of China's Water Crisis. The country would need another 40 billion cubic meters of water a year—about a tenth of the volume of Lake Erie in the U.S.—to meet the needs of all of its city dwellers fully. "China is facing a dire situation in its water supply," says Ma.”

3) Ken Pomeranz, Environmental Historian:

“Rice, for instance is a very thirsty crop, but China’s rice production has been moving steadily North for many years for a number of reasons: expensive land in the South being taken out of agriculture, pollution, climate change (rice needs warm days, but also benefits from cool evenings), new varieties that are a bit less thirsty, etc. How much more of that will happen? Where are the limits? What are the prospects for a real breakthrough with drought-resistant GMOs? Or an environmental disaster with them? To what extent will very water-intensive industries, such as chemicals, relocate in response to actual or feared water shortages? What about the effects of electrical blackouts (partly due to low water levels in dams’ reservoirs) on industrial location decisions?”

4) Nature News:

“Since the 1950s, China has constructed 86,000 reservoirs, drilled more than four million wells, and developed 58 million hectares of irrigated land, which generates 70% of the country's total grain production. Efforts to conserve water have lagged far behind. The largest threat to sustainable water supplies in China is a growing geographical mismatch between agricultural development and water resources. The centre of grain production in China has moved from the humid south to the water-scarce north over the past 30 years, as southern cropland is built on and more land is irrigated further north. As the north has become drier, increased food production there has largely relied on unsustainable overuse of local water resources, especially groundwater. Wasteful irrigation infrastructure, poorly managed water use, as well as fast industrialization and urbanization, have led to serious depletion of groundwater aquifers, loss of natural habitats and water pollution.”

The biggest market in China is not infrastructure or 'consumer goods'. Demand management and the idea that the consumer is 70% of the economy is a myth. Without water there is no industry. The largest future market in China will be the commodity named water. At some point not only will water be priced on a market system for usage; but entire sectors and new technologies will be developed to manage water; clean it; redeploy it; service watershed areas and collate information around the most precious resource on the planet. China might be facing a 'water disaster' but it will be resolved with technology and brains.

Stop Online Piracy Act. More government.

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Big government, the nanny-mommy state is really your friend. Or so the bureaucrats and career politicians with nice pensions proclaim. The US Congress and Senate is contemplating yet another 'regulation' to save us from ourselves. SOPA or the Stop Online Piracy Act, is redundant and a Trojan horse for the mommy-state to control Internet content. It will destroy jobs, distort information and give government more powers to see what people [via Domain Name Servers and eventually IP addresses connected to the DNS servers] are either doing, or what information they are accessing. No thanks.

The purported concern is that 'foreign' sites are 'stealing' copyright. Boo hoo hoo. In the US alone there are no less than 13 'Acts' regulating and protecting copyright. Why the heck do we need more regulation around this issue ?

Copyright Act of 1790 - established U.S. copyright with term of 14 years with 14-year renewal
Copyright Act of 1831 - extended the term to 28 years with 14-year renewal
Copyright Act of 1909 - extended term to 28 years with 28-year renewal
Universal Copyright Convention - ratified by the U.S. in 1954, and again in 1971, this treaty was developed byUNESCO as an alternative to the Berne Convention
Copyright Act of 1976 - extended term to either 75 years or life of author plus 50 years (prior to this, "[t]he interim renewal acts of 1962 through 1974 ensured that the copyright in any work in its second term as of September 19, 1962, would not expire before Dec. 31, 1976.");[1] extended federal copyright to unpublished works; preempted state copyright laws; codified much copyright doctrine that had originated in case law
Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988 - established copyrights of U.S. works in Berne Conventioncountries
Copyright Renewal Act of 1992 - removed the requirement for renewal
Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994 - restored U.S. copyright for certain foreign works
Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 - extended terms to 95/120 years or life plus 70 years
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 - criminalized some cases of copyright infringement

Key international agreements affecting U.S. copyright law include:

The above already protect copyrighted material from 'theft'. There is no point to SOPA. As Wired Magazine wrote:

“The International Intellectual Property Alliance—a kind of meta-trade association for all the content industries, and a zealous prophet of the piracy apocalypse, released a report back in November meant to establish that copyright industries are so economically valuable that they merit more vigorous government protection. But it actually paints a picture of industries that, far from being “killed” by piracy, are already weathering a harsh economic climate better than most, and have far outperformed the overall US economy through the current recession. The “core copyright industries” have, unsurprisingly, shed some jobs over the past few years, but again, compared with the rest of the economy, employment seems to have held relatively stable at a time when you might expect cash-strapped consumers to be turning to piracy to save money.”

Let's view SOPA for what is – another power grab by unelected bureaucrats.

The platform named the 'Internet' has created 10s of millions of new jobs, most of them unknown to the apocalyptic forecasters and sundry Marxists of the 80s and 90s, who were annually predicting the end of the world, or at least the end of all meaningful jobs. IT accounts for 17% of the US economy – the biggest industry by size of GDP. SOPA is just another national and transnational attempt to distort the market; regulate content and create a Trojan Horse so that in the future, a 'SOPA 15' circa 2020, will allow the bureaucrats to actively manage content and compile lists of what you are reading via DNS and IP traffic reporting. From such lists punishments can be meted out. The state has every vested interest to control everything you read and every thought you process. SOPA is another lame attempt by Mandarins to isolate, divide and conquer the peasant mass. Go away.

European Mayans. The not so new Neolithic.

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Euro, soon to be a Zeuro. Europe has long been infected with the disease which first appeared with some force in the mid 19^th century from the revolutionary slogans of 1848 to the mindlessness of Nietzsche's sad little writings which attempted to create 'supermen' out of a culture which was becoming socialist. All people, cultures, ideas and nations are equal. Fairness means everyone is the same. Equality is where all people and states are equally poor and miserable. Any 'gaps' in wealth, productivity, talent or initiative must be 'reduced' by government. If you try hard you are a criminally liable idiot, a threat to the state. Life is a large vacation punctuated by periods of unproductive, unsatisfying labour. The tenets of Christian civilization – rationality, gratitude, humility, hard-work, the reduction of the ego, the Golden Rule – are all relics of superstition and stupidity. Narcissism, self-absorption, 'free' benefits, TV and cults are the coveted idols of sophistication.

When your society is built upon the foundations of Rousseau and modern cultural Marxism it is bound to fail. When a currency is created to 'hide the decline', and allow governments more unfettered access to printed money currency, regulations, taxation, and power, the end is only a matter of time. Of course European 'leaders' now 'demand' a fiscal union. That is after all the whole point of the Euro exercise. Create a monetary disaster which implodes fiscal reality, and then offer 'solutions' which involve more government centralization and unfettered power.

The Mayan prediction that December 21 2012 will herald the end of the world, might only be about Europe. Europeans, or at least their elite, are fond of neolithic fetishes after all [Globaloneywarming, hating the human, mindless TV, Islam etc.]. Maybe the Mayans were predicting the Mayanization of Europe? Europe reduced to a post-war, or post-Euro sea of ashes and devastation. Maudlin the investment-guru writing on the Zeuro-zone. It elicits a chuckle or two:

“After much deliberation, I have come to this astounding insight: The Mayan academics who created the code were not in fact astronomers or even astrologers. No, it is clear they were another breed of even more dubious forecasters, called economists. Once you approach the glyphs with that understanding, it becomes clear they are not predicting the end of the world, merely the end of Europe. One symbol clearly shows the Greek flag dipping to the ground. Another depicts the Italian flag with its wheels coming off. Oh, and you don't even want to know what they have prognosticated for the French.”

Maybe the star-gazing Mayans had insight into the black magic produced by the insemination of socialism, with cultural Marxism. It is an ugly beast indeed. Why is the Zeuro-zone bankrupt? 3 easy reasons:

“There are three main problems in Europe. The first is that most of the banks are massively insolvent, because they have 30 times their capital invested in the second problem, which is the sovereign debt of countries that are going to have trouble paying that debt. If the banks have to mark down the debt to what its real value is – or to what it will soon be – they will be bankrupt on a scale that makes 2008 look like a waltz in the park.

....For most of the past two years, European leaders have tried to deal with the problems as though they were short-term liquidity problems: "If we just find the money to buy some more Greek bonds, then Greece can figure out how to solve its problems and then pay us back. Given enough time, the problem can get solved."

They have now arrived at the understanding that it this not a short-term problem. Rather, it's a solvency problem of the various governments, which of course creates a solvency problem for their banks. They are now addressing the problem of solvency and providing capital until such time as certain countries can get their budgets under control and the bond market sees fit to provide the capital they need.”

Solvency crises don't magically disappear because the Mandarins running Europe yawn over their sumptuous banquets that they will 'do everything' they can to save the Zeuro, before devouring their second main course and running back to their palaces post digestion. Not even the divine magic hand of the 'Great Man' Obama can wave away the ills of Europe. The Zeuro project was always a political-social project. The Euro's destruction is however, an opportunity to impose more 'union' including the eradication of fiscal and the remaining political independence of the 27 nation states that make up the bloc.

I don't see what the average person gets from all of this. The elite get an empire – impoverished, riven by divisions and corruption; infiltrated by Islam or 'Islamism' if you prefer; unproductive, ageing, culturally and fiscally bankrupt and decrepit. But the new Mayan elite get the power, based on their loyal union elite and governmental-working elite. But for the average person not connected to the unions and the neo-politburo, it is hard to fathom what they get from the Euro socialist-Marxist experiment. Peace ? Good bread ? Unlimited time off ? Penury ? A stultified coddled life ? Thought police ? No freedom ? The eradication of their savings ? A low standard of living ? The cults of Islam and GlobalWarming? This seems to be a pretty lousy trade-off. You get peace for an existence unworthy of the name.

Or maybe the Euros are simply trading in reality for the culture of the Maya. Shamans and priests running the society. Everyone afraid, superstitious, uneducated, and supine. Science and rationality non-existent. The earth and celestial cults erasing cognition. Freedom unheard of. Sacrifices made daily to the elite's 'gods' including the human. Maybe this is what Europe wants – a return to the Mayan neolithic. And maybe that is what the December 21 2012 prediction is really about. Europe imploding and becoming Mayan.

Offshoring, Inshoring and the Government-Union nexus

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The usual lament is that 'we don't build anything anymore' in advanced economies. This is not true. 15 % of GDP is in manufacturing and if one adds in software and technology development – which is a manufacturing process – the number is 30%. IT accounts for about 15% of US GDP making it the single most important industry. There are three factors about manufacturing which the mainstream media never reports.

The first is that high taxes, ridiculous regulation, labour rigidity through governmental laws and 'rights', and the total cost burden per worker have all risen by more than 50% in the past 30 years. This is a real cost solutioned in part, by offshoring some aspect of manufacturing overseas.
The second fact is that unionization has in large measure added to the problems of the above. Unions are literally forcing firms to go bankrupt. See GM, Chrysler, and now Hostess [detailed below] as prime exhibits.
Offshoring leads to Inshoring. There are over 10 million inshored jobs in North America, created in the past 15 years. The manufacturing process is not monolithic. Inshore jobs include retailing, distribution, creative design, high quality production, client management, and ancillary product creation. It is simply untrue that nothing is made in an advance economy.

If you want to increase 'Inshoring' reduce the burdens of government and of labor. Reform or eradicate unions. Hostess the maker of the Twinkie is a classic example of union created bankruptcy. Its sordid tale can be summarized: [see also the WSJ for a summation though unions are not blamed]

-2009 filed for Chapter 11

-$500 million in losses the past two years

-20.000 unionized workers

-No flexibility from the unions about the use of technology, better processes or productivity enhancing reforms.

-Post 2009 the Unions would not lessen their rules about work. Drivers could not unload their trucks. Trucks could not service more than one large store at a time. Hours and over-time, not to mention worker numbers strictly regulated.

-$100 million per annum paid out to retired workers, or even workers who did not work for the company in benefits.

-$150 million per annum in welfare state costs [health care etc.]

-High prices due to labor rigidity and costs. [Sounds like GM]

The Hostess firm made more than just the fat enhancing Twinkie. But thanks to union greed, 20.000 people will be without jobs. The only way to salvage the assets is for a private capital firm to buy Hostess, fire the union, hire non-Union labor and return the firm back to reality. But that is unlikely to happen. In 2009, the firm was bought by a venture capital firm who decided to 'play nice' and appease the unions. Within 2 years its $350 million buy-out was in ruins, the firm a shambles, and the entire workforce disbanded.

In a normal market without government and union distortion there will be a mix of offshored and inshored processes and job creation. This should be encouraged. But when governments and unions view firms, capital and humans as fodder and plunder, the result is predictable. More job losses, more laments about 'the greed of those who offshore', and more demands that 'government must do something'. It appears that government is already doing more than enough to encourage job destruction – along with their union friends.

Why the Blackberry will survive – and do quite nicely.

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The Apple cult. We can add as well the Google cult. Great firms to be sure. Apple was near dead in the 1990s – its operating-system closed to the Microsoft platform, its development eco-system limited to what Apple would approve, and its management arrogant and short-sighted. Times change. Businesses develop in spurts and have to suffer downturns [or recessions], in order to improve themselves. If building products and services was so easy, everyone and every business would grow to Applesque or Googleian proportions. This rarely occurs.

RIM's stock price has declined in 4 years from $75 per share to $15. Yet the poorly named products with funny numbers continue to do well. RIM has 75 million clients and is deeply embedded in the corporate market – unlike Apple. It is very profitable firm generating over $200 million in quarterly profits. It has proprietary and world leading technology in network delivery, security, wireless email and mobile application development. The Playbook is a very good tool and much more appropriate for business than the larger iPad – which needs a separate contract to be ubiquitously wireless making it more expensive than the RIM product. RIM's QNX's OS is going to be embedded into auto computers and the mobile-auto market has plenty of future potential. Traveling living rooms which are computerized activated by voice running on the embedded QNX OS.

There is plenty of time left to revitalize the BB eco-system. Personally my BB devices have proven themselves to be excellent in all aspects. I would never join the Apple cult and pay out the cult dues on new over priced units.

RIM's first problem is lousy marketing and the fact that the media drools over every Apple device. Apple could coat a stick with cow manure and wrap it in a box and the Media will chant that this is the greatest product ever. Apple did not invent any of its consumer products, Jobs et al improved on what existed. Good for them but the game is far from over. RIM's second problem is that they need new blood at the top. Basillie and Laziridis are great leaders but the firm has grown too large and is now in unfamiliar territory for the entrepreneurs. Never underestimate your competition - RIM will learn and grow.

Jenkins in the WSJ makes some excellent points about Apple and RIM:

“Open and closed were never the absolutes they appear to be. Remember, the Web and Web browser saved Apple as much as Steve Jobs did. And the iPod and iPhone would not have been so conquering if Apple had not been prepared to make iTunes available on Windows. The iPhone now wouldn't be clawing its way into corporate America if Apple weren't prepared to entertain email clients other than Apple's.

Today's ecosystem wars are in many respects just a revisitation of yesteryear's operating-system wars. Those wars also seemed to have a winner-take-all flavor—until Netscape came along to deliver access to a Web-based cornucopia of information and applications that didn't need Windows.

There's another reason for future openness we hesitate to mention: Antitrust regulators at some point will likely add their weight to the competitive pressure if they see the public being locked into a choice of only two ecosystems, Apple's or Android's, for all their TV, etc.

So the future may be friendlier to BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Phone than it now appears. People don't want to dress the same. They don't want to carry the same device. The market may soon become welcoming to manufacturers making a multitude of gadgets for a multiplicity of tastes and preferences without requiring users to forgo membership in the Apple or Android clouds or both.”

There is more than enough market space for a RIM to survive and thrive. As Jenkins also suggests, it would help RIM to have an office in Silicon Valley. They need to fire whoever does their marketing. Management needs new ideas and energy. All of RIM's problems – product delivery, client expectations, rising costs, poor marketing – are soluble. It might be a brave man who predicts a RIM Renaissance, but it or more likely to be a foolish man who orders RIM's tombstone in 2012.