Happy Eid

Eid Mubarak to all my demented Muslim readers, of whom there are a few. I wanted to say thank you again to the kind Bengali gentleman who shared generously the samosas his wife had made, and his companionship and conversation with me today. I will reciprocate with Mince Pies....

One more time....

Here is the order of battle in the current depression. Please refer back to every other post here since 2007

1) Derivative markets will fall, which will panic governments
2) Money will move into stocks and shares after banks are 'stabilised'
3) Stocks and shares will slide as global imbalances and bank weakness are revealed
4) Treasury bonds and government securities will rise irrationally
5) Defaults by governments will panic remaining investors into gold and commodities
6) Analysts and politicians will use transport costs, energy costs, or perceived exchange imbalances--or 'climate change'- and the threat of social breakdown to tout protectionism
7) I wish you all Good-Bye and head for Donegal with a bag of platinum and a year's supply of meat.

Peak oil, peak globalisation, and food problems will complicate matters and make them more volatile, as will the exact length of time it takes for lagged unemployment to hit, and for monetary base inflation to wreak its damage. These waves are coming.

We seemed to slip into stage four today. The flexible retreat is quickening, but of course it is controlled and will merely be the precursor to the use of a wunderwaffe against Stalingrad....

Momentous Are Those Things That No One is Listening To

We'll listen to bankers saying that the ten-billion costs of refunding unfair charges would have meant that they would charge for all accounts and ATMs, even though they now say that the cost would have been much lower. We'll listen to members of the political media class lying about global warming, and we won't haul them up over peak oil or when their lies are exposed. We'll listen to the Governor of the Bank of England saying that two banks he saved were on the edge of collapse--and not mentioning others.

We'll listen to social workers saying the grotesque child abuse and largely unremarked destruction of working families they perpetrate regularly is unimportant compared to the good that their schemes do. We'll pretend civil unions are really only gay unions and that the idea of a pact of solidarity and equal treatment was never implied into the sale to the electorate of them--even though the House of Commons Library thinks that it originally was. We'll ignore millions of abortions, and pretend that protocol and respect are trivial and that they don't matter. Noise after noise after noise--all this we will put up with.

But--what's this? NASA announcing that there probably was once life on Mars? The Vatican holding conferences on extraterrestrial life, and coming to terms with it? Some Bulgarians in charge of their space agency claiming Aliens have been here a long time and that all they want in us is love?

I would hastily add that a nasty dispute between the President and Finance Minister has developed in Bulgaria over the Academy of Sciences, which may be off, out on the range, as the Texans used to say, when it comes to believability at the moment. The President thinks that the Finance Minister has nicked all his money, basically; it is at once more human and less serious than the dispute in Japan between the Finance Ministry and the Central Bank, which threatens us all.

I wish aliens were here and that they were running LloydsTSB. The strange celestial reasons and behaviour of the visitors would at least explain my bank's delusional psychosis, and those of other financial institutions with which I am connected. One of the reasons I am working seven days a week, teaching and lecturing and paying down my debts, is how unreliable they have become--I'd far rather be blogging, though I do love teaching undergraduates and A-level people. How odd life is. Still, I used the great boom to have a good time and to make myself a Doctor and a Barrister. I really cannot complain.

Mad, I know, but how mad? How much more mad than the determined belief in, say, stock markets, which of course are markets in nominal certificates for stock since no one has ever actually seen or claimed to have seen a share? More mad than the love in the eyes of women I know, or more mad than a bottle of wine?

Oh, who knows. They're here. Go and raise a glass to them, and ask them about Katie Price, or travel via black holes, or whether Jesus really visited Glastonbury before Bruce Springsteen did. These are things that our media think important.

The following song is for an old friend, and the wife of a good friend, whom I have known in death and life and who is in hospital again tonight, waiting for her son and fighting with all the strength of Jewish and Irish and Polish and Scottish blood. I love all of you.

People

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?

The picture is by Blake, and depicts Pity and the child of Los, the blacksmith of the heart and fallen prophet who gets her 'up the duff'.

People are such an odd blend of culture and learned behaviours. I'm growing increasingly suspicious of any opinions in themselves, by which I mean--and you'd expect someone who was trained as an historian more than a barrister to write this--that none of us ever really leave the matrix of experiences and context that exists behind our eyes. Me and my multiple identities....

I write that after turning over two things on a long walk back from a small seminar job in Marylebone the other night. Past the Dorchester, past the homeless tents near the toilets in the tunnels beneath Marble Arch. Past the shops shifting volume and not value as they hurtle towards rent day and deflation or stagflation.

Many are blaming the present banking crisis, which I think has a long way to run, on President Clinton's initiative to include the poor in sub-prime mortgages, for instance. It is a way of identifying an absurd recipient of largesse, and seems to be a litmus test for particular sorts of conservative. However--and people should always bear this in mind--the crisis we find ourselves in, and which indirectly has just fired a woman who has been running her store for twenty six years with her husband who I have just been talking to whilst buying a bottle of wine--is a banking crisis.

Banks misused derivatives. Bankers turned offices into shops for mortgages and loans, which they used as raw material for derivative operations that allowed them to leverage and evade rules about capital. They then hid how much they had abused the concept of mixed collateralised obligations, which were meant to blend risky, safe, and so called 'mezzanine debt', or spread it regionally. If banks had been telling the truth about their debts and not hiding in shadow investment vehicles out of greed, the hundred billion or so of sub-prime debts would easily have been contained by the apparent half a trillion of bank capital that they said they had, but which we now know doesn't exist.

So why do people still blame the American poor for taking loans? The loans were mad--ponzi-scheme mad. But the way the derivatives market was apparently working, they made sense, and there was a certain sort of wisdom in the crowds who responded by apparently buying their homes for a short time. People want that sort of thing. It's a tic of humanity--to want the legal appearance of ownership even if a bank actually has it. I suppose some thought that that was better than spending their precious, short lives renting. I really wish a system would develop, however, in which people would see that a mortgage mostly means that a bank owns your house unless you have sufficient equity to fend them off when they 'over-exuberate'.

The second thing I thought was telling this week, and my friend Martin Kelly has published on it with a more instant humanity than I, was the condition of those caught in the Cumbrian floods. As Martin points out, BBC types will launch an appeal for foreign countries, some of whom are now nominally richer than us, who are inundated by floods at the drop of a hat. They'll wave the canard of sea level rises in Fiji to justify taxing the little people with aplomb.

But why do the media take one trip to Cumbria, hastily survey those who have lost everything, then head home and blame people for wanting houses that were built near flood plains or feel satisfied in some way that what they at their dinner parties falsely term climate change is hurting someone other than them?

Is it because many of the houses and flats in London now purchased come surrounded on surveys by drawings of waves to symbolise flood warnings that make plans look like pirate treasure maps? Is it because they escaped and the working people didn't?

There is a local Cumbrian Appeal, by the way--it isn't getting much coverage, but you can obtain details of how to do something for it here, if you wish.

Oh, I know. Facts are facts, and floods happen, and our housing policies have been flawed for years. I still feel for those who have lost everything, though. I have friends in Carlisle, whom I telephoned last week, so as to check that they were safe, and they tell me that the people are determined up there but still shocked.

I wonder. We're told people are so heartless in an atomised, broken Britain. I sometimes near, but I hope don't slip into, that valley myself. Yet I read today in the Evening Standard about people of all ages, sexes, and conditions in Peckham who woke up to find their flats burning and who, instead of simply running, made sure that their neighbours woke up and escaped too. The kindness and fellow feeling seemed instinctive, but made me glad of the invented community I feel with them as a Londoner. I'd prefer there were not disasters, but they sometimes seem to bring out the best in the people of these islands.

The story in the Standard was accompanied on the same page by a tale of a massive fine to a major fashion chain which had locked its basement and marginalised its staff so that, when a fire broke out, insured stock might be sacrificed and people might die, but at least theft would be minimised. It made me think of the London Monster and Calico cloth, and since the Standard is the house magazine of feudal banksterism, I'm sure that the irony was unintentional.

People. The strangest human beings I know are all so...well, human. We can follow logic and understand reasons and see opinions, but anyone who spends any time just listening to people will know that the idea of people uncovering the true Reason and philosophy of the universe is an idea best buried beneath a large pile of commonsense and experience. It takes some years to learn that.

Choose Life

Time will Reveal All

The painting is by Heeremans, and depicts a winter scene on the walls of Amsterdam. I like the Dutch painters, and would happily direct readers not just to this site on Heeremans--who was a dealer-entrepreneur as well as a painter-- but to Jonathan Israel's great works on the Dutch republic and the Enlightenment as Christmas reading.

As I and many other bloggers have been writing for some years now, the dogma of global warming is just that. Dogma. A belief system, and not a particularly impressive one at that, upheld by scientists whose grants and incomes depend upon toeing the line and a vociferous group who are more than prepared to play the game of personal destruction. Those many scientists who have expressed serious doubts about the mechanism of carbon-dependent anthropogenic global warming have been traduced, ignored or dismissed. In part, that has been because mainstream journalists are what EU Referendum has called 'parti pris' to the warmist endeavour.

I have no scientific credentials. Science is not, however, a sacramental church. If a fact or a process is posited, it can be explained and evidence can be adduced for it. Evidence that tends to undermine it can be explained. A person with a reasonable education should be able to see this, and to understand what is being said. I do not know the mathematics behind the idea of particles and gravity that lie contained within folded space-time, for instance, but I have had people explain that idea to me lucidly.

Those who believe in global warming cannot tell me why the earth is presently either stable or cooling in temperature. Their reliable records are only decades old. They cannot explain to me clear evidence of past warming. They cannot explain to me the working of the mechanism by which the earth heated in the 1990s, along with many other planets in this solar system. They cannot tell me the effect of the sun or of the sea on global temperature, and they seem unable to explain the extent of the radical urbanisation experienced under globalisation on temperature.

On the other hand, I see those who question global warming, on scientific grounds, traduced and sneered at. I see absurd comparisons made with holocaust denial. I see assumptions--like an infinite atmosphere, and a general calculation of atmospheric penetration by what is really a small amount of CO2--and no one explains them. And, this week, I see a concerted series of e-mail releases, which appear to be genuine, suggesting the sort of personal destruction and political co-ordination many suspect. I see illiterate politicians jumping on a bandwagon for narcissitic purposes, and I see people suggesting that truth is about some sort of consensus, as if one could vote on a fact.

All of this is tragic. We are facing peak oil, though perhaps not as soon as I originally anticipated. We are facing a vast extension in the use of global resources that is unsustainable. Vast numbers of young people in mad countries are out of work and out of any realistic prospect of work, a pattern being replicated in rich countries where unemployment figures are seriously understated. Resource competition accompanied by extreme exchange rate volatility will soon be with us. We need to be pouring money, through markets or government, into new technologies, and into efforts to expand global food supply whilst securing present supplies (a more difficult job than just cutting tariffs).

I'd also argue that a viable strategy would be to cut global government deficits and make taxes much lower, spending much lower, and markets much freer, but I would find that the feudal banksterism of financial institutions would now get in the way of such a recommendation. Even then, it would seem to me symptomatic of the snake-oil nature of the banks that the only people now promoting carbon trade markets are the people who promoted derivatives, as a way of indebting European companies and governments yet further.

None of this is being addressed, though the substantial evidence that the world is now cooling is beginning to be assimilated. A cooling world means food problems, energy problems, and climate problems of an unanticipated sort. It has happened before, and bloody revolutions followed in its wake the last time it was seriously extended, in the Dalton and Maunder minima.

All of this was avoidable. But, in a west characterised by economic crisis and delusion, magic realism has become the matrix of policy. There's a reason despair is a sin, but sometimes flirt with it--and then, I think, 'truth will find a way. Time reveals all'.

God help us in the meantime, though.

Bugs Bunny

Elmer Fudd finds gainful employment in the Mounties and begins to pursue Bugs, in a manner of which the French revolutionary cahiers de doleance that wanted to kill all 'rabbits, pigeons and monks' would have approved. I have no good reason for putting this up. It ends badly.

What powers global growth?

The picture is Guercino's Et in Arcadia Ego, which is often sidelined in the popular bourgeois mind by Poussin's picture of sheperds which Dan Brown, Henry Lincoln, and others have turned into a travesty of art-as-something-useful in recent years. Guercino's painting is about the contrast of opposites, and has been seen as a play between harsh reality and dreamy innocence.


I live in a decaying, if not undead, part of the west, which is nevertheless used to high standards of living. In it, students of macroeconomic policy are told that their heritage of economic domination has emerged in one of three ways, though economists are divided on and, frankly, disinterested as to, which one.

A line emerging from a theorist of business and an imperialist holds that the accumulation of capital, and its association with population, technology, and productivity, is the key to growth. This ideological strain can be traced over the years in the economics of the solow and rostow models, and was augmented in the nineteen seventies and eighties by thought-experiments in which individuals were rational, markets were information systems, and risk could be derived, alienated, and sold.

A second group, associated with the likes of Keynes, Kalecki, Kaldor and Minsky, believed that aggregate demand powered growth, which was accelerated by investment or by powers derived from the distribution of income and the ownership of assets. They held that growth was a given if governmental institutions stabilised the complex mechanisms of demand and investment, though they disagreed on how individual assets could overcome the complacency of success and the ineluctable forces of depreciation without government. Kalecki's very much mid-twentieth century premonition of a corporate economy driven in part by war spending, the control of capital, and periodic crashes, has made him very popular in an underground way lately.

A third line, deriving from Schumpeter, were treated mostly as astrologers. They thought that entrepreneurs rode the surf of convergent cycles that were stretched over different times, which traced the arc of a technology, the life cycles of products derived from it, and the inventories of firms eager to profit. Occasionally, the surf turned and they were destroyed, but society was left with their knowledge and with what they had learned. Somehow, Schumpeter--an unhappy Austrian theorist of capitalism's future suicide--has become a name to drop when devotees of a particular cult of Hayek want a reference to useful apocalypse to strengthen their exegesis.

Economists tend to pick and to choose which of the theories of growth they believe corresponds closely to the world depending on the type of world that they would like to see. I find myself wondering, though, what this all comes down to. Is it possible, in any synthetic way, to see where global growth comes from, and where it is going, through such lenses?

Some 136 new states have emerged since the San Francisco conference of the mid-twentieth century. Earth has seen a sort of Napoleon in reverse; a reconstitution of bizarre and small entities rather than their confederation. Multinational companies and banks, on the other hand, have become stronger than the corporations of the medieval church.

Even after the depredations of the last year, the top ten global companies seem to have values that are higher than the combined GDPs of the bottom one hundred countries. Terms such as 'quadrillion' have been invented for global bank products, and technology has created a level playing field for the rich and an undulating, swamp-ridden landscape for others.

I can't gainsay that there has been global growth. For the first time that I can recall, and indeed for the first time in the modern era, Africa is not being crushed under debt or starved in a western recession. It is being denuded of resources; but resource loss is being accompanied by the accumulation of capital, and anyway, over dependence on one or two commodities controlled by small elites has been one of the curses of Africa. I notice that the end of oil is, bizarrely, diverting monies to African and South American countries as the search for fuel goes deeper, and as replacement fuels are experimented with.

The huge and stable growth of India, and the rise of the south and east Asian nations are not just benefits to Australia, or a risorgimento of a zone burned by imperialism. They benefit us all. There are days when I look at the euro-zone, which I've thought ought to collapse in the past, and seen strong, savings-based economies with governments like those of Germany and France not run by a skittish, self-interested political class, and admire them. I as a human being grow because other humans are happy; I as a human being am weakened because others are lost.

So there is more than enough scope for predicting that growth is developing from accumulating capital and a new distribution of wealth and assets and monetary stability in the east. There may be deflation, Pakistan and China may implode, Japan might slip into a long poverty--but ultimately I think that they are going to be alright because they have families and work and children who can think.

What strikes me is that the west, and particularly the UK, is negatively proving the ideas of economic thinkers. Here is a society that did not save; that made life easy for credit oligopolies and their feudal view of repayment; that hollowed out its manufacturing; that is massively accelerating its government debt and crowding out capital; that ignored monetary economics and that refused chances to hold back and to stabilise.

Here is a society whose bankers now purport to find themselves shocked that secretive colleagues were more driven by money's rant and bonuses than by the rational scaling-back of risk in the derivatives markets a few years ago. Here are people who believe their rules about growth, and harder work, and reasonable behaviour, are for the little people. Here are corporate socialists who expect subsidies and bail-outs whilst they plot ways of paying their cleaners less.

Many things come back to an individual's prejudices and experiences. I recall touring the middle temple's archives, for instance, and seeing Christopher Wren's handwritten account of the way he stiffed his workers so much that the Inn awarded him a silver service, once he had ensured the construction of St Paul's. Why not, I wondered, give those long dead working men a little more of the bread and ale that they had earned? How many sleepless nights in the long-ago had been caused by that remarkable demonstration of Wren's capacity to appreciate the marginal control of costs, and the low marginal cost of an award to him after a large average reward to capital?

I went off blaming Protestant corporatism. Had I been in Rome, I would of course have looked at St Peter's, as I have done, and felt it a monument to human achievement, and the only rebuke would be a tut from that psychotically alienated part of the self we all need to keep ourselves in check, the internalised 'Tu es Pulvis' who only shuts up when we find ourselves enough in love with another to listen to their proper restraint of us.

We get influenced by ourselves; no surprise there. But one of the west's signal achievements after the fall of Rome was to establish that we as intelligent men and women could understand objective facts that were outside of us. I look at Britain's economic and political situation now and I wonder if this is true. People are clearly not educated properly.

Those who could understand have been brainwashed by a career of privileged schools and institutions into not seeing the precarious and indeed awful state of their own country, and when they seek facts they cling to pseudoscience like global warming rather than to realities close to home but away from their own class. Those who cannot understand have been failed by a state education system, and a populist media, and a conniving, stupid, or disinterested political class from equipping themselves with the intelligence and courtesy that would allow them to see.

So I find myself asking about global growth, and the economy, and wondering at how confused the picture is. This economy is revaluing worth; it is removing some things from people on the basis of their shrinking disposable incomes and the hardening of credit, just as it is inflating others through a combination of cost-push and monetary pressures. People are deprived of the real assets, or faith, or understanding of their common condition, and education has failed them.

Those who think themselves agents of change are actually upholding a system that serves a sort of radical capitalism. The rest of the world is decoupling, though it may crash into deflation soon. And the grammar schools that could have taken and directed talent have been thrown away, so those in charge paid for everything from credit or assets from an early age, and in life spent their time locking others out.

Into this, we have slipped. It has been accompanied by the rise of a sort of undemocratic, regional and global political governance which is the only accompaniment possible to the medieval corporations who run the world. Those corporations spend some of their time reifying, pricing, and destroying culture; indeed, such destruction is fundamental to their present success. It diverts intellects, unleashes greed, and its loss isolates people from each other.

It is a thing of amazement to me that those who consider themselves progressive and expansive people should help, should celebrate this destruction as liberating to women and minorities. Liberating into what? debt slavery? Abortion?

The papacy recognised this familiar picture emerging decades ago. Neoconservatives, in their way, saw the possibility within it for the validating violence they crave; the more futile of the liberal left seem to have seen it as an opportunity to wring their hands a little harder, once their fingers had left their best-selling angst-ridden books and presentations on their macs.

And into this Arcadia, we go. Is there no one who can stop the collapse that is clearly coming to England? Should anyone even try?

Genki Sudo

The accompanying film is one I found on Andrew Sullivan's blog, but which is in the process of appearing on blogs around the world. It is of Genki Sudo and a backing crew of dancers. Genki Sudo is a practicing Buddhist and a practitioner of 'mixed martial arts', or at least he was. That he could combine a philosophy of peace with earnings from a living involving such moves as a 'near naked choke', 'a flying leg triangle choke', 'a heel hook', and 'punches' does tend to suggest an admirable ability to hold two completely contradictory ideas at once.

My increasingly flabby red-haired 外人 self sympathises; I haven't been to the gym in two weeks, but feel it is still important.

In The Economy of Hesperations.....

Hy-Brasil was noted on maps as early as 1325, when Genoese cartographer Dalorto placed the island west of Ireland. On successive sailing charts, it appears southwest of Galway Bay. On some 15th century maps, islands of the Azores appear as Isola de Brazil, or Insulla de Brazil. After 1865, Hy-Brasil appears on few maps since its location could not be verified.Regardless of the name or location, the island's history is consistent: It is the home of a wealthy and highly advanced civilization. Those who visited the island returned with tales of gold-roofed towers and domes, healthy cattle, and opulent citizens."--Fiona Broome

And thus did Atlantis merge with stories the Vikings and Romans told of Iceland and New England, and who knows what else. People will believe just about anything if it takes them away from the present; if it brings them back by serving their purposes, all the better. The person who put the four-way mona lisa on his blog, for instance, believes that it encodes some truth about the Fibonacci sequence and the Egyptians, and the now-solved 'mystery' of Rennes-le-chateau. I find it difficult to agree, but I can't help observing that the very clever matrix of shysters and credulous who built the derivatives market were working with similar materials on the same logical, but irrational, lines.

There was no mystery of Rennes-le-Chateau, beyond a country priest overselling masses and a taste for reactionary tale-telling on the part of some fourth republic jetsam that a science fiction writer and a medievalist jokester picked up on. I'd direct readers here if they wanted a proper treatment of the 'Priory of Sion' and its creepy antisemitic monarchists.

I was thinking of Hy-Brasil (no relation to the real country, even in the naming of it) this week, when looking at the obviously over-excited economic predictions of imminent recovery.

Why is it that people will just not see? There is a massive global imbalance--but it isn't the imbalance between the dollar and renmimbi. China, after all, is a creditor nation with the US, and in a surplus with the west, but has a trade deficit with Asia and is still wreaked by enormous income differentials inside its borders. It is not surprising to me that it seeks to hold the RMB more or less where it is--what is, is that the US should think it a good thing to drive a debtor currency like the dollar down.

The real imbalance, surely, is emerging around the desire of the west for energy and credit, and the increasing cost of those things as oil runs down and the derivatives market proceeds to senescence; followed, not too shortly, by the real and existing imbalance between living standards even in a recession west and just about anywhere else in the world.

Perhaps I am just depressed by England's parochial politics. A hung parliament, when none of one of the more ridiculous of the western world's political-media class could actually do much damage, would seem to me to be likely and welcome. Yet are people concerned with that? Nope, Conservative 'blue Labour' have already been shooed in. Don't bother looking for any real policies or any real understanding of imbalance; there is there, as they say, an asymmetry of cognitive assimilation with regard to reality. And they couldn't find their own with both hands neither.

In the bubble, meaningless attempts to expand some sort of Stasiland, invented by Malvolio and C.S.Lewis, into people's families and businesses and schools are threatened to 'smoke the tories out'. Tories respond by pretending that they will be able to do anything substantive that differs from EU policy.

Meanwhile, the possibility that the EU could regulate health care through competition law, or that banks in this country will deepen their role as malign cartels under the eye of the European commission, proceeds. Why, I even saw a story this week from the hopelessly compromised office of national statistics that heralded a downward pressure on inflation because 'bank charges had fallen'. Well, that's news to me. Who are the average household that the family expenditure survey enquires into so assiduously for the inflation statistics? Are they citizens of their own private Hy-Brasil?

Here's what seems to be happening. A massive revaluation of society and money is entering a second forced phase on either side of the Atlantic, but particularly in the United Kingdom and the USA. People are struggling, with low central lending rates, to make ends meet and to pay off credit bills. For more than a year now, this has massively lowered their disposable income and made some things much more expensive in relative terms, whilst the price of some headline goods has fallen because of a fear on the part of retailers that nothing will otherwise be sold.

A grossly distorted picture of incomes and prices has emerged. This is being licked and bitten by oil prices which, even if speculatively increased, are largely driven by the first tastes of peak oil. No one is interested, no one wants to follow the connections, and too many people are either under the cosh of charges and debt or following the global warming religion to see the problem underway.

When the French Revolution broke out, an insulated and wasteful governing class were met with a combination of destructive factors. A food crisis, partly powered by disease and partly by global cooling, was matched with state bankruptcy after an era of needless and destructive wars. Members of elites had convinced themselves that they represented a people whom they never met and whom they basically caricatured. Urban middle classes believed themselves to be agents of reform and enlightenment but their high ideals masked a commitment first to the market and then to the guillotine; and peasants, when they viewed those who constituted what passed for an intellectual class in the clergy, moved with an increasingly warm contempt against the licensed thinkers and institutionally caged who took their brighter children.

What followed was a detonating, and destructive, horror. Why is it, though, that we cannot ever envisage some of its energies now lapping at us? Our leaders are insulated; our peoples are under intense pressure from banks run with their money and which pursue a basically narcissistic agenda of guaranteeing a high quality of life on 'hock' to fewer and fewer people, whilst torturing those who fell for it. Some of them do not deserve it. We are systematically lied to by insurance companies, and railway firms, and financiers, and universities, and politicians, and the media, on either side of the Atlantic. Lying, in fact, is the thing we do best to ourselves.

Surely something has got to give? Or perhaps people will be happy to let the press simply sail them to their very own Hy-Brasil, whilst those mad enough to have opened their eyes just wait for the wave that has already over-run that particular chimerical Atlantis.

'For God and Saint Patrick'

My Grandad used to love this song and I like it too. I like the way Frank Patterson looks elegant, crisp, and as though he would happily 'lamp' someone, albeit with a smile.

Who Owns Taiwan?

A remarkable law case earlier this year in the United States was recently dismissed by the Supreme Court. I thought that I would draw my one demented reader's attention to it. In doing so, I should note for the equivalent people who sometimes read in East Asia that I mean no offence to anyone in doing so.

The case concerned the formal status of Taiwan. Japanese claims to the island were renounced in the treaty of San Francisco. The United States, in World War Two, essentially drove them out. The remains of the Kuo MinTang--Chiang Kia Shek's Nationalist Chinese--claimed the island as part of the Republic of China, and then moved there when Mao established the People's Republic. The ROC developed a military presence via which it governed after 1945, at one point suppressing an uprising in 1947 with some 30,000 casualties.

The US, in theory, moved out, though in 1955 it established a unified military command with Taiwan which was maintained until 1979. The United States has a very heavy presence in surrounding waters, and in clandestine bases. At one point during the Indo-China Wars, had as many as ten thousand CIA advisers on the island. In 2003, the US still had a large Signals Intelligence base there.

The official US position on Taiwan is that it is part of China, that mainland China is China, but that the United States has no position on who is sovereign over both. However, it has tended to put itself between the ROC and the PRC militarily at different times.

Hence the lawsuit. Roger Lin and another, who will be important in a moment, recently argued before the US Court of Appeal that, since there was no ROC government on Taiwan when the US liberated it from the Japanese, the USA owned Taiwan. It was absurd, they suggested, that a US military government should be seen as acting on behalf of a government that did not then exist and which was not based there, any more than the US occupation of Germany was really done in the name of the Weimar Republic.

Yet the United States does say that anyone in a possession of the United States is entitled to national, but not citizenship, rights. Taiwan, occupied by the US and liberated by it, could be seen as a possession of it; if its independence is still guaranteed by the US, the court could have taken a line on it.

That argument makes some sense, as nutty points that ought to be left to moots often do. It led to a new chain of legal logic, however.

Since there is a category of non-citizen US national which was last recognised before 1957 in the Phillippines, as a person under the control or authority of the US, and since this was recently upheld in the recent Boumedienne case involving the Bush administration, it followed that Taiwanese people could in theory apply for US passports. So Lin and others did. They were turned down.

That was sufficient to get the case into a Federal Court of Appeal. I was very interested in the final judgment there, which refused to have anything to do with the case on the basis that the court should not interfere in American foreign policy regardless of any rights involved, especially if the foreign policy was in appearance deliberately ambiguous. Lin took the case to the Supreme Court, which last month affirmed that it would have nothing to do with reopening it.

What if the Court had? The US economy in the nineteen nineties became one in which the standard of living that Americans in theory enjoyed was based on three premises. One was cheap oil; another was cheap credit; and a third was cheap immigrant labour. Together, these more or less constituted the pillars of globalism. In the twenty-first century, this false miracle of productivity and endogenous technological growth began to slow.

It was kept from complete collapse by a huge and uncounted reserve army of immigrants working below the minimum wages, and Americans were kept from confronting the reality of what happened to pensions and to companies guaranteeing pensions, and to asset values, after economic decline by the hidden contributions of those immigrants. In the meantime, the US used its apparent new wealth to fight wars rather than rebuild itself.

Now that game is up and the swelling US unemployment figures should be supplemented by all those in the country illegally without gainful employment, or for that matter all those who were part of the US economy and under its direction and control now unemployed.

What if Iraqis, Afghanis, Taiwanese, Cubanos, Mexicanos, and various Latinos had actually been made American citizens last month by the extension of a Taiwan doctrine? It's a mind game, but could have happened. They would have had access to US national rights by virtue of being in a possession of the US or simply by being in the US.

I can see a number of previous supreme courts having accepted the argument; it is a measure of how (properly) conservative the court has become that this one dismissed it as the equivalent of a mind game.

A mind game to me, anyway. The situation for Roger Lin is more serious. His lawsuit attracted very unfavourable publicity back in Taiwan. He is potentially up for the death penalty for treason, and many of his former supporters are backing away.

I think ultimately that Taiwan is going to have to accomodate with China because business investors and the situation suggest that this is all that it can do, but I would not be surprised at some future occupation that advanced the assimilation. After the failed Phillippine colonial experiment, and after Hawaii, could the US ever really have added another Asian state?

Spaced Out

I've been thinking about space quite a bit this week in my sickbed. It was partly the effect of the cocktail of flu drugs and stomach pills and so forth which I was ingesting--at one point I drifted in and out of sleep to the sound of Monty Python's Life of Brian playing in German on a laptop, fairly high in a legal way. Partly, I suppose, I wished to 'scape some of the more tedious and obvious thoughts about Britain's economic crisis.

That last line probably reads as typically pompous, but I was for a time caught in the credit crunch myself, until the video tutorials (which a surprising number of undergraduates seem to want) stepped in and began a little thousand-point reflation, as it were.

Anyway, three odd events have come together in my mind. The first is the Vatican's conference on evolution, life, and the universe which was held under the aegis of the pontifical academy. The conference debated astrobiology, and attracted many famous physicists, including Stephen Hawking. It has been, inevitably, reported by the more excitable in the media as a conference on Extraterrestrials. If you believe what you read in the press you really shouldn't be on this blog.

Bishops and science fiction tend to run together sometimes. It was Bishop Francis Godwin, after all, who wrote one of the first sci-fi stories, musing on how morning dew might transfer the mysterious essence by which it flew to its carrier and thereby allowing flight.

At the time, an Aristotelian delusion of essence was perfectly respectable, as was the later but contingent idea of ether. Godwin was around at just the right time, though, to know enough of gravity (and, probably, the still somewhat shady calculus that the likes of John Locke kept quiet about too) that he could joke about the inverse rule of gravitational attraction to distance. He really was between worlds, except that they were behind his eyes.

Godwin made me think of Josef Schumpeter. He was a somewhat bitter man, though he concealed it a little, who'd been ruined once, exiled twice, and who unsurprisingly came up with the idea of creative destruction in economics. I thought of him because Schumpeter thought that the most interesting people, and those who drive growth, stood in the overlap of convergent waves of change and time. Mad as he may sound, he makes in the twenty first century a better case for where growth comes from than, say, the Swann-Solow, Kaldor, or Keynesian models that were once so dominant.

There's an intellectual history to be written of the twists and turns of economic philosophies at the end of the last millennium, though how many would see the utility of allusions to episcopal whimsy I do not know. Many, if this flu gets round.

Other, and of course catholic, priests followed the Anglican Godwin with slightly more serious science. Between 1700 and 1750, Vatican observatories sprang up, which eventually had a great hand in the invention of the spectrograph, and by 1930, it was a Belgian catholic priest who came up with the idea of the 'big bang' theory of universal evolution.

Journalists, especially in English speaking countries, often don't realise these things, trapped in a post-protestant or anticatholic mindset as many of them are. Of course, what may be running through yours, as you read, are notions that Giordano Bruno was killed because he believed in many worlds, or that Galileo suffered because of some nonsense about a flat earth that Washington Irving made up after the event.

That's not true. Both suffered because they defied the iron logic of Rome, which is of perceived loyalty and overt obedience. Not even the worst version of Torquemada or Savonarola, however, could ever be said to be good catholics if they consistently defied physical truth.

I'm going to try and read the papers of the pontifical conference online, and if you have time you may wish to as well. They include Stephen Hawking on origin and destiny; Rudolf Muradian on numbers; Fotis Kafatos on evolution in the insect world; discussions of digital intelligence; and an intriguing set of papers on evolution culminating in one on the appropriate level of silliness to assign to the idea of intelligent design.

The second 'space story' that caught my attention and which made me think was this one. It suggests that the increasingly open, but not world-toppling rivalry between India and China in Space might ultimately be fruitless. Both countries have explored an idea which really appeals to me, of mining the regolith of the moon for helium-3, and then using it for fusion power.

Unfortunately, there seem to be serious doubts about the possibility of doing so with a tokamak reactor, and other reactors under perform or have not yet even been tested. It's absurdly early to call time on an intriguing idea, but it may have just slipped further away.

The third space story was a neato one; a couple of fridays ago, we all missed a collision with a largeish asteroid by the cosmic equivalent of a hair's breadth. It wasn't as big as Tunguska and wouldn't have done that much damage, but the news, coming as it did after the recent explosion of a meteor with nuclear force over Indonesia made me think. If Tunguska's 1000-Hiroshima object had entered the atmosphere a little later in the morning of June 30 1908, and hit Moscow, or Berlin, or London--what would the twentieth century have been like?

All good fun when you're ill. Here's a video with some serious people and some others. Mmmm crunchy nut.