Arguing Semantics

The Weirdness of Eastern Europe

I used to know a Czech at high school. He was always up for an argument. When I ran into him some years after high school, he wanted to take up on some argument that we had back at high school, as if only days had passed. He wanted to re-prosecute his arguments and then drive home some arcane conclusion that he wanted to push for back in the schoolyard.  

I knew another Czech. He played dungeons and dragons with us. He would drink quite heavily and by 8:30 pm, he would argue anything and everything. He once argued that there were no such things as medieval townships, just "potential cities". He wouldn't let that pass even when we begged him to. Like that guy in the meme who wants to be argued around a difficult point, he demanded we argue with him.

When I got to AFTRS, I kind of hit the motherlode of East Europeans. Hungarians, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians and so on - and they all loved a good argument. Even the laconic ones would be loquacious when it came to the true nature of Marxism or the unbearable lightness of one's libido. At some point you would find yourself in a deep argument with them. It just was the way it was.

What I did notice about the way they argued, was that they liked to argue semantics. In the English speaking world, we don't like to argue semantics. When somebody who is a native English speaker says "I'm not going to argue the semantics," it usually means "fuck off with your bullshit." However, if you ever found yourself in a surreal never-ending argument with an Eastern European, you usually found yourself arguing the nuances of semantics like they mattered. It doesn't to us, but to them, it seems to matter a lot.  

I don't know why Eastern Europeans love semantic arguments so much. Our disdain for semantics must seem barbaric or anti-intellectual to them, but there really is a divide in how and what we argue. My own theory about this is that Eastern Europe was so much more boring than the rest of Europe, so to devise some entertainment, East Europeans developed arguing semantics into an art form. To endlessly argue semantics is not only a virtue, it is also a great way to pass time living under tyranny and with no rock music, movies, or books. Arguing semantics endlessly is, a kind of performance art over there. I suspect that over time, Eastern Europeans have created a consciousness where arguing semantics endlessly is just the way life goes. It's a bit sad that this passes for philosophical thought in some parts of Eastern Europe. 

Take Alexander Dugin, the alleged ideologue of Contemporary Russia. He seems to be nothing but a demagogue selling tawdry race theory claptrap. And yet he lands in Vladimir Putin's orbit as a great thinker on the back of reams and reams of bullshit. And by bullshit I mean semantic crap woven into more semantic crap. Hardly any of Dugin's 'thought' would pass Philosophy 101 in the West, but there he is, advising Putin. It'a all semantics built up into something that it shouldn't be. 

And this phenomenon, more than anything else would explain Vladimir Putin's penchant for long speeches about nothing. They're "about nothing" to us exactly because a lot of what he's banging on about are semantic arguments which we dismiss instinctively, or as second nature. Putin on the other hand thinks he has crafted some incredibly intelligent argument arguing the most nuanced semantics. He would be dead wrong in thinking any of those semantics would persuade anybody in the West. And so he wonders why we don't understand him. It may well come as a shock to him one day when somebody explains to him that the great effort he puts into arguing semantics is totally meaningless to an anglophone world. 

The cultural schism is a lot bigger than people are giving it credit. 

End of an Era for Stupidity

And Boris Is... Going

So say the news. 

It truly is some kind of an end of era. First it was Trump not winning in 2020, followed by the January 6 Capitol mess. Arguably, it took a while but Australia corrected itself at the electorate and removed the mendacious Scott Morrison and his government of corrupt miscreants. Not importantly it marked the end of Australia's time that started with the election of Tony Abbott, the most incompetent PM in Australia's short history. Finally, we're seeing Boris Johnson being tuned out by his own party who can no longer abide his zero-governance style of government. 

What they all have in common is that they are all governments pushed upon us by the Murdoch press and TV. Any rational mind could see Tony Abbott had no idea - no fucking idea - about how to run a country, let alone a chook raffle, but somehow Australia ended up with him just so the hard right nut job brigade could run a solid defence against actually doing anything about Global Warming. Compared to the decade of travesty that followed, perhaps Boris Johnson is not as bad. But then a pile of steaming poo is not as bad as a lake of diarrhoea. As for Trump and his entourage of corrupt minions and family, hoo boy. 

Jeez y'know, it makes you wonder about all kinds of things like the efficacy of all that private school education and bullshit if it yields leaders like these. It's hard to tell where all that money went. It also makes you realise that you can deny reality only for so long. You can pray and make a song and dance out of your religiosity like Scomo but ultimately Black Summer Fires and a bunch of once-in-a-hundred-year flooding events will put you squarely in the context of not knowing what you're talking about. Equally, if 40 of your own side ministers quit on you, maybe you don't know just what the fuck you're doing as Prime Minister of UK. It begs all kinds of questions about a society that gives rise to a process that allows this kind of thing to happen. If it were only America or only Australia or only the UK, you're be forgiven for saying it's a cultural quirk. But for these 3 Anglophone countries to all be beset by this kind of anti-intellectual incompetent troglodyte governments does make you search of answers. 

And really, it's staring in your face if you're a news junky. It's the collective effort of the Murdoch press that delivers these terrifyingly stupid outcomes for so long. Perhaps it is the sign that demographics are shifting - the greying nut-job Murdoch-press-consuming dickheads are dying out, and this is creating just enough of an edge for sanity to prevail. I guess we'll see. 

The Other Stupid Keeps Hanging On

Goodness. What the fucking fuck are we going to do about Russia and Poo-tin? The unhelpful answer is that we should somehow come up with a way to talk him off the ledge of history. 

The West is “blindly” marching towards World War 3, one expert says, and warns one act could trigger a “disastrous” global war. 

Henri Guaino, a French politician and senior advisor to the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, says an “all-out” war could be triggered by treating Putin like Adolf Hitler – an act which would make Russia “the most dangerous country in the world”. 

"The moment we compare Russia to Nazi Germany and Putin to Hitler – we must be prepared for an all-out war,” Mr Guaino told Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom. 

“It is impossible to stop the war against Hitler. If we are facing someone like Hitler – we have to go all the way, at any price, and we will be walking into a disaster. Alternately – we must find ways out. This is the responsibility of politics.”

Look, I know it scares people to sobriety that Poo-tin might just go for the nuclear launch codes. It needs to be said that it's also true that whoever goes for the launch codes first invites the other to do whatever the hell they like, up to and including Mutually Assured Destruction. 

So the Russians bleating about how they have nukes and if they keep on getting mistreated by the world, they might just go for them, is just show. They keep talking about nuking London, but the moment they let off that sucker, it invites NATO to surge across the border and head for Moscow in a conventional war. And given how depleted the Russians are, the West can win that one without nukes. Therefore, the Russians can't just let off one as a warning or do proportionate damage if they go first. The only option once they decide to go nuclear is in fact Mutually Assured Destruction. Now, the Mutually Assured Destruction scenario is where everybody loses, but that everybody includes Russia at the front of the queue. Any World War III of the nuclear kind would guarantee Russia loses. The rest of it leading up to World War III is a pantomime to see if Poo-tin can be made to wear the responsibility all by himself. 

Poo-tin is not as stupid as say, Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison. He understands this calculation. This is probably why he is getting other mouthpieces that are not him to put these ideas out and about. Yet it still has to be said, the dumbest guy in 2022 isn't Boris Johnson or Scott Morrison - it's the guy who ordered his army to invade Ukraine. What an idiot. 

View From The Couch - 11/May/2022

The End of Globalism

Not so long ago - well it doesn't feel that long ago - Globalism seemed set as the way of the future. There would be more coming and going of goods and trade and ideas and education. Like it or lump it, we were all set to compete on a global stage and there was no escaping its tendrils as goods and services put together with global supply chains and global transportation made its way around the world. Globalisation looked like the kind of end point of history that say Francis Fukuyama might approve of; even allowing for these pockets of global players who didn't quite fit into the club of liberal democracies. You could argue Russia was coming along ever slowly towards seeing things the way the west sees them, and even China under the CCP seemed to prioritise making money over ideological purity thanks to Deng Xiao-Ping-ism.

Now in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the bellicosity of Xi Jinping's China, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some things have come into very sharp focus. The first thing on the list is that China under Xi - so China since about 2012 - has been a really crappy participant in the global order. The second is that Russia has also been a crappy participant in the global order. And between the two of them, their contributions have lessened to the point of making the first world wonder whether there is any merit in extending the welcome mat to these countries. 

To be sure, China is a big market that seemingly promises future growth except for the gigantic property bubble that has just popped. Russia, for its part is  tremendous exporter of oil, gas, wheat and fertilisers - so much so that the sanctions to remove Russia from the global markets is in a sense flirting with mass starvation scenarios. 

It's kind of amazing things have come to this, but the last decade has been to put it mildly a shit show for globalism. It is no wonder it is in retreat. For a while there, globalism looked so locked in, the people protesting against it in the late 1990s looked like ideological crazies. Now, globalisation is forced to being rolled back by the simple reality that you can't do business with countries with dictators like China and Russia. It may profit you in the short to mid term but in the long run, they're sure to screw you over. In that sense, there's not much daylight between Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping. 

The End of Deflationary Pressures

For some time we've been in this weird loop since the end of the Global Financial Crisis around March 2009. Governments have spent lots of stimulus money in the hopes of stoking inflation but all these quantitative easing and printing money did not lead to the kind of inflation they taught in schools. Part of the reason is that as the world went global, so did the money, so all the money printed by the US Fed or the RBA seemed to just flow out into the wider world and did not come back as inflation.

It's a complicated area but the bottom line is that even faster than the US was printing money, China had been exporting deflation to the world through its cheap labor. I think I've covered this phenomenon somewhere in the past so I'll skip going into it here. Suffice to say China's labor costs have been going up over the last decade, and so there probably has been less deflationary pressures that China was exporting, leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic. If the last 30 years of gentle economic growth for the first world was founded on Chinese manufacturing being so cheap and easy, that context is coming to a rapid end. 

Worse still China is the most indebted nation in history both in absolute terms as well as per capita, and for political reasons of the CCP needing to stay in power - or perhaps it's just Xi who needs to stay in power - they have blown up their property bubble. We have no idea how this is going to play out in global markets. Judging from the ructions of April and May, global markets do not like what is going down in China. Markets might approve and accept the US Federal Reserve raising interest rates, but it does not like the figures coming out of China. The supply chain issue that we have come to understand isn't just about the fact that China is in lockdown across its most productive cities. It's the fact that China itself has become this gigantic counter-party risk in the last few months. 

Some of the manufacturing the Chinese had been handed by foreign corporations is now being on-shored back to those very foreign shores. The reason we're seeing such stubborn inflation in the first world is simply because the deflationary pressure China brought to the world economy has been cut out of the loop. This means we can expect inflation to keep rising, and for interest rates to keep rising until those inflationary pressures are tamed. In turn this means we will be having that recession we had to have back in 2008-2009 that we didn't quite get because China took on the greatest debt in history to keep the punch bowl swirling. All of that, on top is about to get unwound out of China. 

Brace yourselves. This ride is going to be a bit rough.

Can Global Capitalism Even Be Fixed?

I'm sure people will make every effort to revive it, but right now, the forces are arrayed against it. 

  

How's It Going Vlad?

Well D'uh

This war thing isn't going as promised by Vladimir Putin. A friend of mine alerted to this bit floating around the internet:

Pulled this from Twitter - from a European parliamentarian named Riho Terras

Doesn't sounds promising for the Russians - in fact this could end in complete humiliation for them.

Intel from a Ukrainian officer about a meeting in Putin’s lair in Urals. Oligarchs convened there so no one would flee. Putin is furious, he thought that the whole war would be easy and everything would be done in 1-4 days.

Russians didn’t have a tactical plan. The war costs about $20 bln/day. There are rockets for 3-4 days at most, they use them sparingly. They lack weapons, the Tula and 2 Rotenberg plants can’t physically fulfil the orders for weapons. Rifles and ammo are the most they can do.

The next Russian weapons can be produced in 3-4 months – if even that. They have no raw materials. What was previously supplied mainly from Slovenia, Finland and Germany is now cut off.

If Ukraine manages to hold the Russians off for 10 days, then the Russians will have to enter negotiations. Because they have no money, weapons, or resources. Nevertheless, they are indifferent about the sanctions.

Alpha Spec Ops have been near Kyiv since the 18th February. The goal was to take Kyiv and instal a puppet regime. They are preparing provocations against innocent civilians – women and children – to sow panic. This is their trump card.

Russia’s whole plan relies on panic – that the civilians and armed forces surrender and Zelensky flees. They expect Kharkiv to surrender first so the other cities would follow suit to avoid bloodshed. The Russians are in shock of the fierce resistance they have encountered.

The Ukrainians must avoid panic! The missile strikes are for intimidation, the Russians fire them at random to “accidentally” hit residential buildings to make the attack look larger than it really is.

Googling the text got me this. Who is Riho Terras? Looking at the Wikipedia entry at least, he seems to be somebody who would know a thing or two about the Russian military machine. Last night the news was how Kyiv (got to get used to that spelling now LOLz) had not fallen, and a quick glance through the headlines shows it still hasn't fallen as I write this entry. 

What's amazing is that the Russians seem to have blundered into Ukraine thinking they might be welcomed by the panic-ed arms of its citizenry. Just the formulation of that idea seems incredibly stupid, but it seems that was what they were expecting. How wrong were they to be facing fierce resistance?

What is also astounding is that in this day and age they went marching in without a great deal of thought given to logistics. There are reports the tanks have run out of fuel. They had this issue in the Chechnya  war in the 90s. 20 years later under Putin, they haven't improved upon their weaknesses in the least bit. It is a complicated thing to run a modern war with all these components. Doing it without the requisite logistical support is impossible. What on earth were they thinking? 

We had the report the troops were selling off their small arms and ammo for vodka during the long encampment, and there are even reports in the NY Pot no less, that these low morale troops are also trying to hook up with Ukrainian women on Tinder. I mean, that, in isolation, is no big deal; however it seems to indicate the months of training at the border hasn't instilled a tremendous sense of mission in the invading troops. There going in with the mindset of The Abduction of the Sabine Women, rather than say, Ride of the Valkyries.   

So to Ukraine we say hold on, hang in there and fight for as long as you can. Putin can't keep this up. The world is with you. We just can't send troops in fear of outright nuclear war, but short of that, we're with you in spirit.   

And Now The War Is On

Vlad The Imperialist

In the end Vladimir Putin couldn't pull back from his own rhetoric. I don't think he's exactly drunk on his own words, but he's certainly dancing to his own misshapen tune as he sends in his forces over the borders into Ukraine. 

The global markets were a bit perturbed by all this. Why wouldn't they? Everybody thought a shred of sanity would prevail, but no. Vladimir Putin is doing the kind of thing we haven't witnessed since the middle of the last century - an ideologically framed war with zero regard to collateral damage. 

Because he denied his intent to invade Ukraine for so long as he amassed his troops along the borders, it is actually quite hard to figure out how he sees the endgame. If he wants Ukraine to come back to the fold as a nation that is part of a greater Russia, he's sure failing to win friends and influencing people in Ukraine. If he is hunting down his political enemies who would see Ukraine join Western Europe, then he might be in for a lot of resistance. For every historic reason Putin might cite as to why Ukraine belongs with Russia, the Soviet experience has been plenty for a lot Ukrainians. Can you really blame them? 

As the history of capitalism amply demonstrates, if you start a war against the capitalist hegemony, your reputation suffers greatly and maybe even get whacked. No matter which way you dice it, invading Ukraine was the worst option for Putin, no matter how much he might try to spin it otherwise. And let's not forget he lied about his intention for months so what credibility does he have left anyway?

The Spy Who Can't Come In From The Cold

Having watched Russia turn into this rather silly caricature strongman state over the last 25 years has been a bit of a drag. It's not like it's the fault of the Russian people. They're as much a hostage to history as anybody living under a tin pot tyrant. It's just that it's kind of weird to see what once was the high-minded Soviet Union reduce itself to the kind of state Saddam Hussein was running in 1991 when he invaded Kuwait. 

Now, we're not putting together a big coalition to push Russian forces out of Ukraine like we did with Kuwait, but we likely will send weapons and supplies to the Ukrainians and we have no idea how this all plays out. In light of that, one has to wonder ho all this came to pass, and essentially, it comes down to the inability of the US led hegemony to talk Russia off the cliff edge when the Soviet Union collapsed. Somehow we didn't manage to shepherd Russia back in to the fold of a capitalist Europe. We didn't woo Russia back to civilisation - we let it wander off like an orphan, still equipped with nukes. Essentially, the West let Russia meander into this dictatorship and let the paranoia fester. That very paranoia has now manifested itself as this political will to take Ukraine like some re-run of World War II. 

So there's Vlad Putin, the ex-KGB guy who just can't get rid of his ideological framework and mindset. He climbs to the top of Russian politics and he's still largely informedly his experience as a spy. For years and years he was presented as this weird Russian guy who may or may not be a psychopath. it turns out, he was exactly the kind of bad guy you would expect from an ex-KGB spy allowed to run a country. Wo's fault is it exactly that Russia ended up with him as their de facto dictator? I sure don't want to pin that on the Russian people. Some of that responsibility lies with the west.

And so here we are today. 

When A War Is Not A War

Putin's Shuffle Step

As soon as I put up the last post, Vladimir Putin went and delivered a speech decrying Ukraine's role in its own self defence. He then declared Donetsk and Lugansk as independent People's Republics, which is a bit like declaring the Eastern Suburbs and North Shore of Sydney as 'independent people's republics'. With that he proceeded to move troops into the Eastern parts of Ukraine which have been in dispute since 2014. 

Ukraine decried - because decrying is the verb of the day - that Russia's declaration was verbatim the one they used when Russia invaded Georgia. 

Mr Kyslytsya says the Russian statements of independence for Donetsk and Luhansk are word-for-word copy and pasted from Russia's statement preceding it occupation of Georgia in 2008.

"The United Nations is sick. It has been hit by the virus spread by the Kremlin. Will it succumb to this virus? It is in the hands of the membership.

"Who is next among the members of the United Nations?"

Pretty funny if you have a dark sense of humour. I can hear Vladimir's evil laugh all the way from the Kremlin. 

By Mid-morning over here, Russian troops were finally on the move and arrived in the freely declared peoples' republics of Donetsk and Lugansk. Surely that's war, now that Russian troops were officially inside Ukraine. Even the secretary of Health in the UK thought it was an invasion:

The UK Health Secretary Sajid Javid says "the invasion of Ukraine has begun".

Speaking with Sky News UK, Mr Javid said people were "waking up to a very dark day in Europe".

"President Putin has decided to attack the sovereignty of Ukraine," he said.

But no. Joe Biden demurred and said the Russians were merely in territories they had taken by subterfuge already. He's ready for his summit. t's enough to make one wonder how many more hairs he intends to split with Putin. The script is supposed to show this is the bit where Biden and Boris impose heavy sanctions on Russia. The fact that hasn't seems to indicate that Biden wants to have the threat of sanctions as a bargaining chip that is still alive. One tends to think that perhaps Putin does not care about the sanctions. Putin has had to hold still while the Olympics rolled on in Beijing. now that they're over, he has a free hand. 

Does Biden really think the threat of sanctions is still a viable negotiation card?

Maybe This Is Just A Dance?

Going back about 10 days, it appeared that Putin was readying his army to march into Ukraine en masse on the 16th February. When the news broke from America that their intelligence apparatus had identified that date, it quickly became a joke that Putin would do exactly as predicted. For whatever reason - probably many - the Russian army did not invade that day. In the six days since, Vladimir Putin has essentially had two endure the speculation of when exactly he would order his army into Ukraine. If he started out trying to bluff Zelensky, he might have over-reached already. Instead he found himself being goaded by the world's press into invading Ukraine. 

Consider for a moment the troops Putin has amassed is about 190,000. The Ukrainians have 200,000. It's not like they have a significant advantage over the Ukrainians. While they are spread right across the north and eastern border, they don't have the best lay of the land to take on 200,000. If I were running this on a computer game, I don't think I would want to be sending in my 190,000 against 200,000 who know I'm coming. 

I also covered the general low discipline and low morale of the Russians army in Belarus in the previous post. They're not exactly the best, even on their best days. If you add in the general lack of desire to engage in a fratricidal war amongst the Russian officer corps, maybe invading Ukraine is not an action they want to take. While Putin might rant on about how Ukraine belongs to a Greater Russia because they share slavic roots in ancient Rus, it sort of rings hollow when you have your troops on the border trying to put together a Russian Anschluss. 

It's all enough to make you wonder if Putin in fact wants to follow this trajectory. Maybe, just maybe this has become all too much. So yesterday I had this thought that what Putin might go for was a quick PR victory for his own people, declare a 'Mission Accomplished' moment for himself and just send his troops home after all. How could he do that? Well he might just send his army into Donetsk and Lugansk, declare the crisis over and make himself appear victorious. So far, he seems to have gone in that direction. 

Shadow Boxing History

I've also been thinking there's something of a re-run of the Cuban Missile Crisis in all of this. It essentially starts because Russian generals get this idea that maybe JFK is a very weak President because he's so young, and America could be pushed around with the threat of an all out nuclear war. So they send missiles to Cuba and of course the CIA spots the missiles and this precipitates a blockade of Cuba by the Americans. 

This time Vladimir Putin has got it into his head that maybe Joe Biden is a weak President because he is so old, and so perhaps he could be pushed around. Putin could try throwing his weight around and re-annex Ukraine with the threat of World War III on the European continent. So he amasses his troops on the border with Ukraine and of course the CIA spotted it and told the world. 

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, it turned out Khrushchev himself did not want to go to a Mutually Assured Destruction scenario, and so back-channeled his desire to defuse the crisis to the White House. This is not to say somebody in the Kremlin today is definitely back-channelling to the White House, but it seems likely that somebody on the Russian side with some influence might want to de-escalate this mess. 

Here's something for Vladimir Putin to think about. He's already one of the richest men on the planet. He's been running Russia across 3 decades. For better or worse, he's even had an Olympics in Sochi, he's run a few wars, and he's still standing. He might be looking for a big win that would put him in the history books as some kind of national hero, but he's already in the history books as another strong man leader of Russia to rival Stalin. Does he really want to risk going down like Hitler, fighting the Americans and the British and the assorted countries of Europe? Or worse still, lose access to his bloated Swiss bank accounts over all this Ukraine business? Is Ukraine really worth risking all of it? 

I'd be a bit leery of losing all of it over Ukraine. I'd also be leery of a coup. 

View From The Couch 22/Feb/2022

Happy Palindrome Day

That is, if you're into this thing and you go by DD/MM/YYYY format. If you don't, it is not. 

The next palindrome day would be 23/02/2032 and we'll have one every decade up to 29/02/2092. That last one is kind of amazing because we get a leap year exactly where we need it to get that palindrome day. One hopes civilisation does not wipe itself out in the 2040s so that we can get there. Heck, I'm hoping they cure death and ageing so that I myself can see that day. 

You certainly hope Putin doesn't start World War III and wipe us all out. Speaking of which...

Putin In The Boot?

It's been a few weeks now of this will-he-won't-he business of Ukraine. It's hard to miss, but Vladimir Putin has been running training camps for his troops all along the North and East borders of Ukraine, perhaps to send the not-so subtle message that he still considers Ukraine to be Russia's bitch. 

The reports seem to swell the numbers of the Russian troops each day and by now there are between 140,000 and 190,000 depending on whom you count amongst the military, all amassed along the border. Joe Biden even announced last week that 16 February was the most likely date of invasion, but obviously, announcing it took out the sting from that plan. 

His troops according to the Belarus press does not appear to be in good nick:

"The first thing that catches your eye is the situation with COVID-19, which, according to official statistics, is breaking all sad records, and Omicron has begun its “victory march” around the country, everyone has already begun to infect each other.

Russian and Belarusian officers and soldiers are getting sick, followed by local residents; and so on in a circle. But a particularly alarming situation is observed in the Gomel region, and not all military men end up in hospitals, some of them are treated in field camps, especially if the case is mild.

In addition to the possibility of getting sick, there is fear among local residents, and not even war, but firstly, occupation, because no matter how much they say that the Russian military will leave the country at the end of the exercises, doubts about this still remain."

Right. So Covid-19 seems to be subtracting form the sum total of that mighty force. The article goes on to deride the Russian troops as being mostly horny drunks from who one must keep one's daughters and pets safe - even if they are ostensibly on their side. Worse still, the demographic of the Russian troops is described as resembling the Mongol and Tartar horde of old which indicates the units were pulled out from the Far East. The article goes on to conclude:

"Against this background, you believe more reports that you don’t want to believe at all, that “under the guise” of exercises, now you can get hold of weapons, allegedly even a Kalashnikov assault rifle can really be bought, you just need to know how and to whom to approach. And the fact that they sell rations, diesel fuel, uniforms is no longer news, it is already a business, including barter for alcohol and cigarettes.

And - it's true, with such a number of troops, equipment, equipment that is now in Belarus, no one will notice the loss of any pistol or machine gun, hundreds of boxes of rations and several tons of solarium, how can this be written off as expenses during the exercises? The “rear front” knows perfectly well, there is definitely no doubt about this.

In general, the mood in Belarus now is approximately the same: everyone is waiting for the end of these exercises, which look more like a Mongol-Tatar invasion. And in any case, one thing can be said: this has definitely not happened in our country yet, and it would be better if it did not happen."

It doesn't sound like the Belarus are terribly excited about the prospect of the Russian army staying or for them to wade across the border into Ukraine. It just doesn't sound like General Norman Schwarzkopf assembling a force of 400,000 in Desert Storm - the picture of a modern, integrated, technological military might - if they're getting compared to the Mongol horde of yore. And that leads one to suspect that maybe the invasion will be beset by the same kind of bungling friendly-fire-filled nightmare that was the Georgian excursion back in the 1990s. 

Of course, one thing that can be said about Vladimir Putin is just how stupid he looks if he lets this circus continue. You either do this with the full knowledge your moves have been telegraphed, or you cut your losses before you lose even more in the debacle that is about to break loose. By now the Ukrainians are ready for the Russian drive towards Kiev. If that drive gets bogged down, the Russians are really going to be like that monkey with its fist in the jar holding a cookie, but unable to pull out. When that happens, there would be no sugar-coating the mounting death toll.

As Dirty Harry says, a man's gotta know his limitations. At this point, it's more like "make my day."

That Weird Interest Rates Discourse

The markets this year have been a bit of a bumpy ride, thanks to the above Ukraine business, but also the looming interest rises that are expected to be made by the US Fed. I've explained before how it is unlikely in the context of global supply chain issues that raising interest rates will be taming the price spikes. A lot of them are because oil has shot through prices unseen in a very long time. Of course, in normal times, when oil gets closer to $100 a barrel, the US shale oil business starts looking viable again, so the OPEC price manipulation tends to head that off. Now with the pandemic, perhaps it has become a bit harder to keep oil prices low for Russia and Saudi Arabia, the two biggest fish in OPEC.

Even so there are other people who are not fans of the US Fed raising interest rates - like Xi Jinping. Having started his own property market debt bubble pop in China, the markets are in a precarious state in China. Considering the towering debt that is out there in property and elsewhere, just trying to deleverage has been a nightmare of defaults from major firms in the property development sector. As such Xi issued a warning that the US Fed raising the interest rates would be a terrible thing for the world market. Of course he woulds ay that because China would have to service its debt in US Dollars and they would become more expensive. In the olden days it used to be, America sneezes and the world catches a cold. Xi is saying if China sneezes we'll all catch COVID. Which, essentially, we have.  

Jokes aside if the US Fed wants to make it their thing to target inflation once more, then 7% inflation probably needs rates to go as high as 14%. That's kind of what Paul Volcker did as Chairman of the US Fed in the early 80s in order to tame inflation. Let's say Jerome Powell is not as hawkish and lifts interest rates to only 5%, that would still be a right punch in the face of the debtors out there in the emerging economies. I'd love to see him do it, but I don't think the global economy can take it. There's a reason why interest rates got so low even before the pandemic and thanks to the 'Taper Tantrum' of 2013, came back down again. 

All of this is to say, if Jerome Powell raises rates and China's economy goes into reverse, the world will suffer and the world economy outside of the US is now big enough that America would suffer from that event and so Jerome Powell will be back to lowering interest rates just to protect the US economy. It's almost not worth going through the dance of raising rates, only to lower them within 3 months. Perhaps it's this kind of damned-if-you-do- damned-if-you-don't nature of things is contributing to the market volatility.  

 

   

There's Something About Donald

On The Eve of Trumpageddon

Nothing about a world given over to billionaires is all that comforting or comfortable. We underestimate just much the 0.1% enrol the wealth of the world and by extension the media and information flow. In most instances we choose not to look into it because in most cases a misguided sense of modesty forbids us to compare ourselves to the stupendously wealthy. but then of course Donald Trump comes along an pecan't but help compare our commons sense against the man and find him wanting. And so it is with his choices for education secretary and chief of EPA and so on. The amazing thing is that the trump Presidency hasn't yet begun as of this writing and already it is feeling like a tired, failed administration.

In that spirit, I'd like to show you a small paper trail on the internet that's been bothering me for the last fortnight.

Here's the first link, sent to me by somebody who reads Russian. I know it's all in Russian, but one can resort to Google Translate and thesis what we get:

Взятка на 10,5 млрд. евро? Путин и Сечин подарили Трампу 19,5% акций «Роснефти»? 

Google Translate: Bribe to 10.5 billion. Euro? Putin and Sechin gave Trump 19.5% of shares of "Rosneft"?

The other entries go:

Доклад отдела разведки, 2016/134, 18 октября 2016, с. 30:
2. Что касается содержания разговоров, то помощник СЕЧИНа сообщил, что президент «Роснефти» настолько заинтересован в снятии западных личных и корпоративных санкций, наложенных на компанию, что он предложил помощникам ПЕЙДЖа/ТРАМПа в обмен брокеридж на 19 процентов (приватизированного) пакета акций в Роснефти. ПЕЙДЖ выразил интерес и подтвердил, что если ТРАМП будет избран президентом США, то тогда антироссийские санкции будут сняты.

Google Translate: The report of the Intelligence Department, 2016/134, 18 October 2016, p. thirty:
2. With regard to the content of conversations, the assistant Sechin said that the president of "Rosneft" is so interested in the removal of personal and corporate Western sanctions imposed on the company, he suggested assistants Paige / Trump exchange brokerage by 19 percent (privatized) stake in Rosneft. PAGE expressed interest and confirmed that if TRUMP will be elected president of the United States, then the anti-Russian sanctions are lifted.

Company Intelligence Report 2016/134, 18 October 2016, p.30:
2. In terms of the substance of their discussions, SECHIN’s associate said that the Rosneft president was so keen to lift personal and corporate western sanctions imposed on the company, that he offered PAGE/TRUMP’s associates the brokerage of up to a 19 per cent (privatised) stake in Rosneft in return. PAGE has expressed interest and confirmed that were TRUMP elected US president, then sanctions on Russia would be lifted.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984-Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.html

If that's not interesting, here's another block:

Москва, Кремль, 7 декабря 2016 г., 22:00:
В.Путин: Игорь Иванович, хочу Вас поздравить с завершением приватизационной сделки по реализации крупного пакета нашей ведущей нефтегазовой компании «Роснефть» – 19,5 процента. Сделка совершена на восходящем тренде стоимости нефти, соответственно, это отражается на стоимости самой компании.
В этом смысле время очень удачное, да и общий объём сделки значительный – 10,5 миллиарда евро. ...это крупнейшая приватизационная сделка, крупнейшая продажа и приобретение в нефтегазовом секторе в мире за уходящий, 2016 год.
Очень рассчитываю на то, что приход новых инвесторов... приход в органы управления будет улучшать корпоративные процедуры, прозрачность компании и, соответственно, в конечном итоге будет приводить к росту капитализации.
В целом это очень хороший результат. Хочу вас всех, ваших коллег, которые работали по этому направлению, поздравить с этим результатом…
Мы с Вами знаем, что у компании «Роснефтегаз», которая в конечном итоге и должна перечислять деньги в бюджет, есть значительные ресурсы в рублях.
В.Путин: И наших инвесторов, новых участников и акционеров компании «Роснефть», пригласите в Россию, мы их примем на высоком правительственном уровне.
<…>
http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431

Google Translate: The Kremlin, Moscow, December 7, 2016 22:00:
Vladimir Putin: Mr Sechin, I want to congratulate you on the completion of the privatization process for the implementation of a large block of our leading oil and gas company "Rosneft" - 19.5 percent. The transaction was executed on the upward trend in oil prices, respectively, is reflected in the value of the company.
In this sense, time is very good, and the total amount of the transaction significantly - to 10.5 billion euros. ... It is the largest privatization deal, the largest sale and purchase of oil and gas sector in the world in the outgoing year 2016.
I very much hope that the arrival of new investors in the coming ... controls will improve corporate procedures, transparency of the company and, accordingly, will ultimately lead to an increase in capitalization.
In general this is a very good result. I want all of you, your colleagues, who have worked in this area, congratulations with this result ...
We both know that the company "Rosneftegas", which ultimately must transfer the money to the budget, there are significant resources in rubles.
Vladimir Putin: And our investors, new members and shareholders of the company "Rosneft", was invited to Russia, we will take them to the highest levels of government.
<...>
http://www.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53431

Anyway, the fragments are leaks from inside the Kremlin according to this journalist Andrey Illarionov:

On 3 January 2005 Illarionov resigned from his position as presidential representative to the G8.[2] On 21 December 2005, Illarionov declared "This year Russia has become a different country. It is no longer a democratic country. It is no longer a free country". The Washington Post reported that he had cited a recent report by the U.S.-based and government sponsored Freedom House.[3] On 27 December 2005, Illarionov offered his resignation in protest against the government course, saying that Russia was no longer politically free, but ran by an authoritarian elite. "It is one thing to work in a country that is partly free. It is another thing when the political system has changed, and the country has stopped being free and democratic," he said.[4] He also claimed that he had no more ability to influence the government's course and that Kremlin put limits on him expressing his point of view. Illarionov was openly critical to such elements of the Russian economic policy as the Yukosaffair, increasing influence of government officials on large companies such as Gazprom and Rosneft, and at last the Russia-Ukraine gas dispute and the energy policy of Russia in general.[1] Illarionov has also been a proponent of secession of Chechnya.[5]

You get the feeling he's trying to get all this stuff out. According to the original person who sent me the Russian link, Illarionov's contention is that based on the leaks, the Kremlin has had Donald Trump as an asset going back 5 years. It may not have been purely Donald Trump's sea to run for President, and that the 19.5% stake in Rosneft is ear-marked for the Trump family business should he succeed in lifting sanctions on Russia - a sanction designed to hit Putin and his cronies.

Since the new year, this business Trump's dossier has grown, but what seems to have gathered the most traction is not that Trump might be in the control of the Kremlin but that he is being blackmailed by a bit of video showing him participating in Golden showers with Russian prostitutes. Vladimir Putin himself has dismissed the dossier (and also told us that Russian prostitutes are undoubtedly the best in the world) which further muddies the already murky puddle.

All the same, there's a carrot (10.5billion euros from the 19.5% sale of Rosneft); there's stick (the KGB have something on Donald Trump); and the likely cui bono of Putin getting his sanctions lifted. In other words, this is serious boys and girls. Now, maybe Trump was coerced into running, but didn't want to win -which would explain the bizarre flip flops on all the things that would have killed other candidates' chances like the support of the KKK or denigrating a disabled journalist on nationwide TV. They're not things a candidate wants to win goes about doing. but the purpose was not to win, then it makes more sense.

I ran all of the above past somebody else who has Russian links, and they came back with this link which is a compendium of various links that seems to point at shady dealings surrounding Rosneft.

Even with all the conflict of interests going on and the likelihood of early impeachment (what an amazing phrase to be typing I tell you!) Donald Trump may go full steam ahead with lifting sanctions on Putin and his mates in order to collect that 10.5billion euros, just waiting to be paid into Trump Corporation's Swiss bank accounts or wherever he has a tax haven bank account.

I'm telling you, we've never seen anything like this. The world will not end with a bang but amidst laughter from all the gallows humour this man will beget.

View From The Couch - 9/Jan/2017

"The Government Totally Sucks"

Song of the day (again)!



Yeah I know it sounds totally gratuitous to say that the government totally sucks, but hey, we actually have a government that's stinking it up pretty badly.

Here's something from Pleiades as a followup, coming off the pages of Crikey:

The latest global economic news is mostly excellent, though better for some countries. We now have figures on most of the world’s economies for the last quarter of the 2015-16 financial year. This enables comparisons with earlier periods, including Australia’s last three years (almost) of Coalition rule with the previous administration.
For the entire period 2009 to 2013 Australia’s economy was the best performed in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Alone in that club of 34 wealthy democracies, Australia maintained positive growth, kept most workers employed and increased productivity, incomes and wealth. Australia was the toast of the economic world. 

Three years later, Australia is the stand-out economy again, but for the opposite reason. Australia is the only OECD member not to record improvement over the last three years in any of the six key indicators of economic health.

And the article tells us our jobs are down; our wages are rising the weakest of the group; our trade is in a disastrous slump thanks to the commodities tanking; the budget deficit is ballooning; our gross debt is climbing when other nations are cutting theirs; and our GDP growth is merely okay.

That leads us to this bit:

Of the 34 developed OECD countries, no fewer than seven have advanced on all six variables. Leading the pack are Germany, Ireland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Another six have gained in five areas — Denmark, Iceland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Italy and, surprisingly, Greece. Seventeen economies have improved in three or four areas, bringing to 30 the countries enjoying the fruits of the current sturdy global recovery.
That leaves just four laggers. Three nations have advanced on only two of the six variables — Chile, Finland and, perhaps another surprise, Canada. Just one country — Australia — has failed to advance on any indicator, keeping GDP growth steady and declining in the other five.
The conclusion thus seems highly probable: Australians have swapped the best economic administrators in the developed world for the worst.
Perhaps the one success the Coalition can claim is that the mainstream media has no desire to report what is actually happening.

So when I say the government sucks, I actually mean, the idiots in power who brought about this dismal, pathetic turn of performance. We always knew this bunch of conservatives were talentless, unprincipled hacks, but when you see their handiwork in numbers, it sure puts the bleak future into sharper focus.

Bromancing The Oil

When it gets down to the cui bono of the alleged Russian tampering of the US elections, and the subsequent good will between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, you would have to say Vladimir got his man, because his man Trump is the most likely to ignore climate science and give Putin's Russia a break from all the sanctions.

Let's face it, Russia's main export is oil. Without it, there's really just arms exports with Russia, something President Obama pointed to. These sanctions are hurting Russia, and so one shouldn't underestimate the motivation to get out from under these sanctions. A Trump Presidency essentially puts it on the table.

It's a scary thought because if Trump lifts the sanctions, then Russia effectively gets away with the Crimea annexation as well as the odd bit of military adventurism into Ukraine. Whatever one thinks of those places, it remains true that Russia simply grabbed hold of those places without contest. If Trump sells out the sanctions, he's effectively selling out NATO - and this would be disturbing in the extreme because it would mean he's at least rolling back America's commitment to keeping security in Europe.

One can indeed conjecture a whole lot about how all this plays out in say, eastern Europe, but the more compelling point might be that for Trump, it's all about money. Effectively the United States has just elected a President who may be willing to sell out on its most important strategic positions - gained over decades of hardworking and sacrifice - just to enrich his own billionaire coffers. It's actually a sick kind of joke that things have turned out the way they have. So, uh, their government is going to totally suck as well.

The Mathematics Of History

There was this interesting article in Wired.

Turchin — a professor at the University of Connecticut — is the driving force behind a field called “cliodynamics,” where scientists and mathematicians analyze history in the hopes of finding patterns they can then use to predict the future. It’s named after Clio, the Greek muse of history. 

These academics have the same goals as other historians — “We start with questions that historians have asked for all of history,” Turchin says. “For example: Why do civilizations collapse?” — but they seek to answer these questions quite differently. They use math rather than mere language, and according to Turchin, the prognosis isn’t that far removed from the empire-crushing predictions laid down by Hari Seldon in the Foundation saga. Unless something changes, he says, we’re due for a wave of widespread violence in about 2020, including riots and terrorism.

You could'a fooled me. Cyclical theories of history are interesting heuristics that come and go. I think the one I read recently - and this is a decade ago - was by a guy called Harry S. Dent Jr. who wrote an extensive book about how the market behaves in different cycles of economic expansion and debt accumulation. In as much as it was empirical in that a whole lot of data went into it, you still had to take it with a grain of salt because even as Dent was predicting all kinds of things, there was the calamitous GFC going on. You could easily argue the events of 2007-2008 were a cyclical thing or a total breakdown of an old system or a restructuring we had to have.

So in that light, let's have a look at what Turchin is offering:

In the simplest of terms, Turchin and his colleagues will build a mathematical model using one data set and then test that model against other historical data sets they’re unfamiliar with. That way, they can see if the model holds. This isn’t exactly the psychohistory described by Isaac Asimov. “For the most part, we don’t predict the future. It’s too far. We can’t wait 200 years to see if something’s right,” Turchin says. “I’m not a prophet.” But cliodynamics moves in that direction — and it’s not science fiction. Though traditional historians are often wary of the practice, others very much see the value. 

“It’s very important to do. It should force traditional historians to respond,” says Yale historian Joseph Manning. “Most people in my field just publish documents and don’t go behind them.”

What Turchin and his colleagues have found is a pattern of social instability. It applies to all agrarian states for which records are available, including Ancient Rome, Dynastic China, Medieval England, France, Russia, and, yes, the United States. Basically, the data shows 100 year waves of instability, and superimposed on each wave — which Turchin calls the “Secular Cycle” — there’s typically an additional 50-year cycle of widespread political violence. The 50-year cycles aren’t universal — they don’t appear in China, for instance. But they do appear in the United States. 

The 100-year Secular Cycles, Turchin believes, are caused by longer-term demographic trends. They occur when a population grows beyond its capacity to be productive, resulting in falling wages, a disproportionately large number of young people in the population, and increased state spending deficits. But there’s a more important factor, one that better predicts instability than population growth. Turchin calls it “elite overproduction.” This refers to a growing class of elites who are competing for a limited number of elite positions, such as political appointments. These conflicts, Turchin says, can destabilize the state. 

Many of these issues persist in industrial societies. Although population growth is no longer likely to result in mass starvation, it can push the supply of labor beyond demand, leading to increased unemployment.

And there you have it - the kind of conclusion Harry S. Dent Jr. came up with, which leaves you going, "yeah sure mate". I'm not sure how predictive these kinds of heuristics can be, given the kinds of parameters being lined up. Also, it does seem to have a deterministic underpinning that utterly fails to explain why the 1970 peak was so low, for instance. And while terrorism is indeed way up, lynchings are way down, so you wonder if lynchings is even a relevant term to be including in such an analysis.

One of the best ideas to come out of quantitative analysis of baseball was the notion of "replacement level". That is to say, if you state that something is good, or bad the natural question is "compared to what?" And that leads to the notion of an arbitrary mathematical straw man we can call the replacement level player. In a sense if we're going to put up stats and give them qualitative assertions, we need to at least have a framework of comparison - are 100 murders/riots/terror acts a year good or bad? Compared to what? It's this kind of benchmarking that is completely lacking in these numbers.

Still, I thought some people might be interested in this stuff.

Syria Is The Apocalypse

'Reductio Ad Absurdum' Of State Power

The modern state monopolises power, and with it the capacity for violence. Yes it's true that in the USA there is an ardent belief that their constitution allows citizens to bear arms in order to confront this monopoly of power and violence, but strangely enough the kinds of people who subscribe to this view are also the most likely to support the kind of state power being exercised against minorities. That is to say, we would believe the protestations of the NRA more about the Second Amendment, if they were jumping up and down in support of black people getting shot by the police, and not the police. Still, this entry is not about that topic.

The ultimate state control of monopolised power is the modern military junta. Military juntas exist as proof that a stable state is not necessarily democratic or pleasant. People go on about stability ("vote Tony Abbott for Stability," the SMH said! Ha!) Many military juntas come into being at the end of civil strife, and enforce the military power as policing in order to keep a lid on the civil strife. This is true of Franco as it was of Pinochet, Saddam Hussein's or Bashar Assad's regimes. We in the democratised 'developed' world view these political arrangements with a great deal of contempt, but as the experience of Iraq has demonstrated, there are far worse things than the stability assured by a military junta.

Similarly, Syria is turning out to be the second recent case whereby our own idealism for democracy has brought to an end a stable junta government. In writing that sentence, I am overcome with a cultural revulsion, for I - in no way in hell - support military juntas anywhere on this planet. It is hard for me to write a sentence that even vaguely validates their existence. Yet the historic evidence is pretty clear that some of these juntas are sitting on great fissure lines of civil conflict and once unleashed, the state cannot even survive. This is a terrible state of affairs, where on one extreme you have the Orwellian regime and Room 101 and the torture never stops; and when we remove this horrible state that keeps the populace in a social stasis of uncomfortable peace, we end up with Bosnia and Kosovo, the battle of Fallujah, or the Islamic State which is an attempt to reconstruct a state, but around religious laws instead of common laws.

All of which is to say, military juntas come into being to stave off a slide into complete chaos, but then overstay their welcome as it goes through its own paranoia phase, torturing and killing people to maintain this uncomfortable stability. Again, I'm not writing this in praise of these horrible arrangements; I'm simply pointing out that in the absence of strong democratic credentials and traditions, a military junta ends up being the compromise arrangement to keep civil peace. You have to think of Tito's Yugoslavia as the shining example - but all these nasty regimes exist because of necessity. Nobody likes this stuff. And when they fail, they tend to fail spectacularly as they descend into chaos.

The refugee exodus of Syria isn't just an issue of Assad and his brutal regime or the fact that Vladimir Putin will not give-up his ally facing the Mediterranean Sea. To that end, Putin has now stationed his own warplanes in Syria. In the mean time we have Tony Abbott trying to engineer a 'request' from the President of the USA to enter into bombing runs on ISIL-held positions in Syria. Not only is Tony Abbott exacerbating the problems inside Syria which is already a war-torn post-apocalyptic landscape, he is adding to the reasons for residents to flee as refugees, while risking coming to blows with Russian warplanes. The people are running because civilisation has collapsed around them. Their civilisation collapsed because it was held together by the military might of the state, and then the state wasn't there any more - just the violence. And we want to ad to the violence.

The Syrian Collapse

Syria came to this collapse because of the Arab Spring. The Arab Spring of course was prompted by high commodity prices, which led to staple foods being too expensive to buy. Not even the long-standing regime of Muamar Gaddafi could hold on in the face of the high commodity prices. Similarly, in Egypt, the high commodity prices drove people into the streets to protest and that brought down Mubarak's regime which had stood solid since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The irony is that the commodity prices surged because oil prices surged, and the oil prices surged because these very same OPEC regimes opted to make a killing out of surging oil prices thereby creating the conditions for their own demise. Oh the irony!

All the same, what is not well known is that Syria underwent a crippling drought between 2006 and 2011. This was such an historic drought that it decimated longstanding farming operations and communities. The drought pushed whole populations into urban areas without any means of survival. And the military junta remained locked in its rigid "maintain-order-at-all-costs" sort of thinking, which made things worse. The historic drought was most likely (nobody ever gets to prove these things) due to Global Warming and Climate Change. Again, these countries that export oil for combustion created the conditions whereby they strangled themselves. Oh the double irony!!

Today, Bashar Assad is in charge of his military, but Syria itself has collapsed as a civilisation. It is every bit like a failed state - much like Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan and on the same trajectory as Iraq and Afghanistan. As Global Warming and Climate Change continue, there will be more and more places that succumb to its effects. There will be more refugees from failed states. The wave of refugees coming from these places are people who want to remain civilised. It's time we accepted this simple fact. We could do much worse than to take in these people.

Syria today therefore offers us a glimpse into the post-apocalyptic future we ought to fear. The fragile, brittle state collapses as result of economic and environmental chaos, there's nowhere to run. We can't go around assuming this is stuff that only happens in far away lands.

How Many Refugees?

Before the recent surge of Syrian refugees, I did a quick search on Google and found that in 2015, the refugee count according to the UN was 60 million people. Out of the 195 or so UN member nations, let's hypothetically say 100 are up to receiving refugees. The other 95 are candidates to send out more, rather than receive, but we'll leave that issue for a moment. I know this is a gross oversimplification, but I want to lead you through this so you understand the scale of numbers. That would make it 600,000 per nation to take in from the refugees that exist right now. If we said the realistic number of nations that are able to take refugees was more like 50, we're talking about 1,200,000 per nation.

That's a big number, but it goes to show that Germany is doing pretty well when Angela Merkel says they will take 800,000 people. It's effectively saying they'll add 1% to their population with refugees. In any case, 800,000 is not entirely out of the order of magnitude that sits between 600,000 and 1,200,000 people.

Australia on the other hand, says it will take 20,000 this year. It's an amazingly paltry figure, really. It's a whole order of magnitude out from the problem as it exists. If it were left to Australia, it would take 60years' worth of refugee visas before it took in its share of 1,200,000. So one wonders just what on earth Peter Dutton is asking "what can Australia do to help?" when the mathematics are very simple - Australia needs to up its refugee intake to about 240,000 before it can claim it's punching its weight.

More to the point, that 1% rise in German population is probably going to add a whole bunch to GDP growth in the coming years. Think about all the new whitegoods and TVs and demand on real estate that will arise out of the arrival of these people. Its not a half-dumb move to be taking these people in. Australia's economy could do a lot worse than adding 240,000 people straight off the plane from Syria.

News That's Fit To Punt - 27/Jul/2014

An Interesting Take On Putin's Russia

To my thinking Russia under Putin has been a shit sandwich wrapped in a Crony-Capitalist Kleptocracy wrapped in an Oligarchy of former KGB people with connections. But that's just me. Others may tell me of their beautiful literature or cinema or poetry or whatever, but in most part Russia since Putin has been a contemporary art project of how awful petty nationalism can be in the 21st century. It's like a country taken over by a man with an inferiority complex who wants to boast of his secret inner greatness. As such the country displays strange impulses in all its affairs, from its handling of the Chechens in Georgia to the land grab of Crimea to funding extremist nutjobs in Ukraine just to stop Ukraine joining the West to hosting bad looking Olympics and wining unlikely World Cup bids.

So, here's an interesting article explaining how these impulses play out inside Russia.

Some Western pundits, including foreign policy realists and anti-interventionists who see US support for Ukraine’s pro-Maidan leadership as a textbook example of meddling and dubious alliance-making, contend that the Russian point of view in the Ukraine crisis has been insufficiently considered and unfairly maligned. Russia has legitimate reasons, they say, in not having hostile neighbours, not being surrounded by NATO members, and for feeling general resentment at being kicked around by the West after the end of the Cold War.

There is certainly much to debate about various US and NATO actions in Eastern Europe after 1991, and the extent to which the United States should be involved today in counteracting Russia’s coercion toward its neighbours. That said, it is hard to see by what moral or geopolitical principle an authoritarian crony capitalist regime in Moscow is entitled to bite off chunks of a non-consenting Ukraine.

A few years ago, retired Russian general and former arms negotiator Vladimir Dvorkin wrote in a column for ej.ru that the real cause of the Kremlin’s anxiety about NATO expansion was not fear of invasion - an absurd idea given Russia’s nuclear arsenal - but fear of ‘‘encirclement’’ by more liberal and modernised societies, which would then exert pressure on Russia to follow the same path.

I guess I would be one of those people saying the West ought not to be meddling in Ukraine. But as you know I base that observation of never being able to win the Eastern Front in computer games as Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II or Hitler. I just don't see much meat on the bone that makes it worthwhile, although I will say that resources in Ukraine are underdeveloped. It's entirely another debate whether more petrochemical resources development - i.e. mining for gas and oil - is a good way forward for what was once the breadbasket of Eastern Europe. I would contend it wasn't.

Was Nuts Yesterday, Is Nuts-er Today

It's an interesting thing that the world leader on a collision course with Vladimir Putin is Tony Abbott, who while he may not have the military might to scare Russia for a moment, has the ample opportunity to dis-invite Putin from the G-20 meeting in Brisbane later this year. Of course, Tony Abbott is jumping at the opportunity to be any kind of international statesman because his own domestic politics aren't working out well. One would imagine it is similar in nature to Vladimir Putin's desire to go invading neighbouring states that were once part of the USSR, just not as violent.

The advice he got yesterday from the international community about sending troops to Ukraine to help 'secure the site' of the MH17, was that it was nuts. This sentiment has been echoed by the ADF itself, through unofficial channels otherwise known as "figures who" do "not wish to be named".

The senior defence figure, who did not wish to be named, said it was a poor idea for Australia.
''They can't secure the site,'' he said. ''It's kilometres long and wide. They could escort Australian officials and provide close protection, but this is a civil task rather than a military task and it's a terribly volatile area.

''We don't have the language skills or knowledge of the area.

''For any military deployment, you have to look at a status of forces agreement with the government and, given the area the aircraft is in, I don't think there is anyone to make that agreement with. What I've heard is the rebels don't want more than 30 investigators there.''

What's particularly interesting about this is that while Tony Abbot was in opposition, banging on about how he will send the Navy to "stop the boats", similar leaks came out of the ADF saying the Navy wasn't exactly equipped to be doing this kind of thing. This was Advice which was promptly ignored - and so we can reasonably expect this bit of advice would be ignored as well.

More interestingly what we're seeing from Tony Abbott is a pattern where if he can't solve it through sloganeering, he's totally happy to send in the men and women in uniform to just sort it out, out of sight with the benefit of official secrets to make the whole thing un-transparent and utterly opaque. One can therefore imagine that should unfortunate things be found in Ukraine, they'll jump to an immediate "can't comment, our troops are in operations" mode of communication.

Age of Entitlement Ending? More like Age of Ultron-Perks

I offer this to you without comment.

Nice To Be Vindicated

"They Must Be Nuts"

I've been writing here for some months that the last thing we - as in non-specific people of the West - should do is send any troops to Ukraine. The MH17 incident and the 39 Australians on that downed plane have forced the issue of Ukraine's situation a lot closer to our shores in Australia. Sometime in the recent days of statesman-like posturing, Tony Abbott has been making noises about putting our boots on the ground in eastern Ukraine to 'secure the site' (whatever the hell that means, many days after there's been looting).

As readers know, I've been dead against sending anybody out there for good reason. If the separatists are dumb and ill-informed enough to down a jet liner from a neutral nation outside of he conflict, what's stop them shooting at our people just for being there? Today we find that some people with professional insight think this is a bad idea too.

"They must be nuts," Joerg Forbrig, a senior program officer for central and eastern Europe at the Berlin bureau of the German Marshall Fund of the US think tank, said. "It's a very dangerous proposal and will be seen as a provocation by the separatists and the Russians."

Ukrainians' desire for closer links with Europe, the US and their allies has long been a source of tension with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who intervened in Ukraine after the pro-Kremlin President Viktor Yanukovych stepped down in February fueling the five-month long insurgency.

The US says a surface-to-air missile fired from territory held by the rebels shot down the plane, while stopping short of alleging direct Russian involvement. Putin's artillery is firing on Ukrainian military positions from inside Russia, a US State Department spokeswoman said this week.
-----
A spokesman for the UK Foreign Office said Britain would "offer logistical support and is keeping in close contact with the Australians and Dutch over how it can assist, though it won't be putting be sending police or technicians to Ukraine".

"We believe a UK. armed presence in eastern Ukraine would not be appropriate," the Foreign Office said in a statement. "The UK stands ready to provide constructive support to the mission."

This isn't some trip into a place where there's not much civil authority - it's a place where Russia is using subterfuge to make it look like there's not much civil authority so they can wrest some more territory off Ukraine. The polite realpolitik thing to do has been to ignore the subterfuge and instead place mild sanction on Vladimir Putin and his crony-capitalists but sending troops has been and always will be one of those things we would much rather not do. The reality is that it would be sending people with an immensely blinkered perspective right into a war zone - and if seen with a colder objective view, would rightly be a provocation to the Russians.

In other words, "baby don't you do it".

I was watching The Drum this week and there was commentary to the effect that Tony Abbott's been getting some kudos for being the only Western leader to stand up to Vladimir Putin. This might be true, but this is only because Russia isn't a vital trade partner for us and we're really far away from Moscow's considerations. Sending in troops to Ukraine would change that greatly. The outcome of that shift will probably mean more dead Australians. And how the hell will Tony Abbott explain that when it inevitably happens?

Outrage Over Ukraine

From The Land Of The Pathetic

From the sensibilities of the west, it has to be said the sensibilities of Slav countries are pretty gross. They think the west is a bunch of pussies running scared with effete, gay politics and feminism and political correctness. Judging from the way we behave, they might even have a point, but the flipside is that the sensibilities of say, Russian militarism or Ukrainian separatism are deeply alien to the west. As such, I've felt it unlikely for us to muster the energy, finance and logistics to mount a war in Ukraine to help our new friends who want to join NATO and the EU and be effete, gay-accepting, feminist-run and who want to be politically correct like us. It's too much too soon and too far away and too expensive.

It's a bit like being asked to drive out from Bondi to Penrith for a one-night stand. Can a one night stand be that good to warrant the drive? Similarly, can having Ukraine as part of NATO and the EU be such a good thing? Think of the differences in culture and cultural attitudes, history and views on history. About the only thing the west has in common with Ukraine might be white people with particularly pale skin and that might even be the grand total sum of it.

Anyway, the Pro-Russian separatists among the Ukrainians has shot down a Malaysian airliner with a missile; early accounts suggest that it was a mistake - they thought they were shooting at a local military aircraft. Imagine their shock to find raining burnt corpses. Now it's an unspeakable political mess.

Vladimir Putin is blaming Kiev; The Russians are denying culpability; Americans have verified it was a surface to air missile; Tony Abbott is making a fist of being a statesman. It's a veritable scene of chaos out there, leading to the question, on the eve of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, what exactly are these politicians going to do to avert World War III? Putin trying to pin it on the Government in Kiev and Tony Abbott beating his chest, seem like "fightin' words" to me. If it was a genuine mistake and they fired on the wrong plane, then they should just scapegoat this Igor Girkin and make him wear the blame. It's not like we'll be missing this miserable soul on this face of this planet. The refusal to just hand this guy over to The Hague for the Western European hypocrisy show for crimes against humanity would look to the world like Putin was condoning the missile firing.

Then again, Vladimir Putin has a way of doing things in just the right Soviet Russian way to bring disgust and repulsion to the front of our hearts. A despicable practitioner in repugnant artless propaganda, Putin will surely hit all the wrong PR notes as he insist on his insane position that this is all the fault of the people in power in Kiev. Like, hullo!

As Pleiades pointed out to me over the phone this morning, it's interesting how this event has shoved the Israelis marching their forces in to the Gaza Strip from the headline of most news sites. But that is not the only thing that is disturbing about the timing of this event. two days ago, the BRICS nations launched their own international monetary fund, cutting out the US Dollar as the reserve currency. Not many in the mainstream media talked about it, but it represent nations with over 3 billion people combined, giving the US Dollar the middle finger. A day later, President Obama stepped up sanctions against Russian firms, locking them out of debt markets. Within 24hours, a rocket from the Russian side of the Ukrainian conflict shoots down an airplane.  It's enough to make you raise questions about just exactly where do Putin and Obama see things going.

As for Tony Abbott, he remains the dickhead he was yesterday and all the days before. No amount of Thatcherish poseur-hood is going to help him look better in the eyes of the electorate.

Quick Shots -19/Apr/2014

What I Lie Awake Thinking

I was thinking in my half-waking sleep dream mode this morning that the world's free market could be understood very clearly as this giant chaotic mass of fear and greed. The bears and bulls are exactly that, animal spirits of fear for the market and greed for the market. It then occurred to me that Karl Marx could see the logical ramification of this capitalist system as a giant train wreck and that somehow human beings with our superior rational intellect would want to add rationality in to the mix.

Of course the communist experiment of the Twentieth Century ended up being mostly fear: fear of Stalin, fear of Mao; fear of counter-revolutionaries; fear of freedom and the corrupting influence of capitalism and so on. But you look at something like the post-Soviet economy of Russia and it is clear that the logical outcome of capitalism is the kind of oligarchic Kleptocracy and all that inequality that comes with such structures. China has similarly headed straight to the income inequality and disparity between the oligarchs and the ever-suffering peasants.

The most worrying aspect of free market capitalism isn't even this disparity in income or the mis-valuing of labour or the reification of money or the degradation of government and public finnances or the emergence of these oligarchs. It's that the more we commit to it, the more extreme our reliance becomes, upon a system that is essentially held up by our collective fear and greed. Think about the fact that we are 72hours away from starvation and riots. All that fear and greed has taken us to the ledge and here we are thinking this is the best deal going on how to distribute goods and services.

I'm not about to go become a communist but you'll pardon me if some mornings I think to myself there must be a much better way than what we've got.

Is QE Really Working?

This is what makes me ponder each and every day. It seems that the most successful thing Quantitative Easing has done is shore up the prices of equities and risk assets. The second most successful thing it has done is gone out of the first world into emerging markets in the carry trade - which is another way of saying it didn't really go to the places in the economy for which it was intended. This is disturbing because the ramification of this is that the economies that most propped up asset prices did so by shipping inflation out to the emerging markets.

I don't know about you, but I imagine this is having an effect on commodity prices because frankly, you can't print that much money and not have inflation showing up somewhere.  It sure hasn't been appearing in America or Australia or the UK, but lately the price of food staples have gone up steadily. The last time this happened it prompted the Arab Spring so we may be headed for even more instability around the globe.

Just to make things a little tricky, Bernanke's successor Yellen has announced the taper will progress at a constant rate and this is sending investment money back to America, but you have to wonder if the emerging markets are going to be able to handle the drop in liquidity and the rise in commodity prices for food staples.

Then there is the little issue of moral hazards associated with the bail outs. It seems the people who benefited the most from QE and TARP and all the socialised losses governments have taken on around the world as debt (and bad debt at that), were not the people on 'main street' as they are called but the top echelon of the wealthy. Not the 1%, but in fact the top 0.1% have made the most wealth out of this exercise. If you lost your house and job in the GFC, I think you'd be entitled to feel quite duped by all of this stuff. The data coming out of the USA saying there's a recovery going on seems to betray the fact that a lot o the jobs created since the GFC are lower in value than the jobs lost. If the Fed and the US Government worked so hard for this outcome, then surely there's a problem in reflexively thinking that the bail outs were a success. Thus,  seven years on from when the GFC started to happen, we should be asking just who is benefiting from all this Quantitative Easing?

Ukraine, The Ugly

It's one of those situations that won't go away. Russia has essentially taken the opportunity of the instability to annex Crimea back into Russia. While there has been much tub thumping condemnation of Russia by the first world, it seems the other nations in the BRICS have tacitly moved behind Russia. NATO i making noises about moving troops in to Ukraine while the interim government in Kiev has declared the Russia-sympathisers as terrorists. You can see that this is not going to go in any direction of pretty.

Putin and his government have been saying this week that Ukraine is on the brink of a civil war. They may well be heading in that direction right now. All the while I'm a little curious as to what exactly the Obama Administration thinks it is going to accomplish in Ukraine. There is a growing bit of incredulity every time the White House announces it's going to send a ship through the Bosphorus into the Black Sea. This lone vessel encountered (or rather, got buzzed by) a Russian jet that came within 1000yeards.

It's enough to make you wonder if Obama and Putin want to repreise the Cuban missile crisis. Unlike Kennedy ad Khrushchev who had to work through elaborate diplomatic channels. Obama and Putin have been on the phone 6 times with very little to show for it. Putin being an ex-KGB man makes it immensely difficult to read, let alone game for advantage, while Obama has a record of drawing lines in the sand and letting people walk all over them.  If all of this ends up as a hot war in Ukraine with NATO troops on the ground, I think that would be the day things have gone incredibly wrong.

News That's Fit To Punt - 17/Mar/2014

Why So Quiet?

Oh boy. I've just spent a week in snot hell and cough purgatory. This series of 'flus I've been hit with one after another has just flayed me and slain me. it sucks to be laid out like this. The number of days one loses to this sort of thing makes one a little more than cranky.

Anyway, I'm slowly on the mend and I am merely in cough purgatory right now.

I Crane, You Crane, We All Crane Our Necks For Ukraine

All that rubber necking and neck-craning is about Ukraine and Crimea this week. It's a weird story in that none of the participants are attractive and all of them could be accused of having ugly agendas. Underneath all of the rhetorical flourishes is a country that's basically going backward with neglect and I do have a few things to say about this because like the Baltic states, Ukraine is probably owed something a bit more from the West than mere lip service. I won't go into the horrible history of collectivisation in Ukraine under Stalin, which preceded the horrors of the German invasion, followed by the USSR sitting on the country like so much exploitative deadweight, and this was followed by the post-Soviet disintegration of what little economy existed in the place. Oh, and let's not forget Chernobyl which also sits somewhere in that time line. For a nation of 50-odd million folks, it's hardly had the sort of self-determination that other nations have had. It has arguably had much less than Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary - and we know how those states fared under the Soviets.

And so this nation is cleft into two. The Ukrainians desperately want to join the West. The ethnic Russians want to stay close to Mother Russia. But the economy of Ukraine is a basket case. It is going to run out of its foreign reserves at some point this year and when it does it's going to default. So the West would prefer not to have to let Ukraine into its club at the EU, having struggled through the issues of staving off Greece and the rest of the PIIGS defaulting on their bonds. Germany has been particularly conciliatory towards Russia because it buys gas from Russia as well as a fairly obvious desire not to have to bail out an impending financial crisis in Ukraine. After all, why adopt a stray dog with rabies?

Still, from the Ukrainian point of view, you can understand that they want to join the West, join NATO, rid themselves of Russian influence. The youth protesting in Kiev clearly want to join the EU so they can leave Ukraine and go live in Paris or London with an EU passport. And can one really blame them? And you can just hear them asking, why won't the Americans come rescue us?

Just why won't the Americans come and rescue them? The truth, is always historic. The Baltic States hoped beyond hope that the West would come rescue them from the yoke of the Soviets and that never happened during the Cold War for obvious nuclear reasons. The eastern marches beyond Poland are really distant places. It's no place to be sending armies and every field rests upon the legacies of Napoleon and Hitler's marches deep into Russia. You wouldn't try it if you've war-gamed it, and if you've war-gamed it, you'll know how hard that distance gets. So the Baltic States and Ukraine sit just outside the embrace of Europe, a sort of grey zone that fades from a civilised, cultured Europe into something more blunt, crude and Rus.

Naturally, the Obama Administration has threatened Putin with harsh language (much like Hans Blix in Team America threatens to do) and it's had about as much effect as you can imagine. The Americans have no stomach for a war, they certainly have no stomach for a nuclear exchange with Russia and so they keep wagging their index finger on the grand stage. A Lithuanian tells me this is appeasement and the best thing Obama can do is to just nuke Crimea.

"Just nuke it!" he said.

"What about Mutually Assured Destruction?" I asked.

"What you don't understand is that this isn't the 1960s any more. All those Russian missiles are rusted in their silos. They can't fly. The Americans can just blow them up and they won't come back with anything!"

I share this, just so you know how the people from the Grey zone of the Eastern marches feel about all this. It's very simple. To them, only a nuked Russian is a good Russian.

Obama might look like he's losing this diplomatic stoush, but that's the point. There's no winning on the Eastern Marches against the Russians and at least this way, American casualties are limited. Shame about all those Ukrainians.

4K TV - Not Enough Content, Too Much Detail

Somewhere along the way I forgot to post this, but while we're on the subject of Russians I thought of this.The gab this week is that 4k TV is too soon and not likely to reward Australian consumers because there's simply no 4k content around. they would be correct. Nobody is broadcasting 4k (it's hard enough getting1080p content regularly) and Blu-Ray isn't coming out on 4k until later this year. You can't download 4k content for the sheer size of the files and so 4k TV is just not well-endowed right now.

But there are unlikely things about the 4kTV format that's quite surprising.

I was watching a 4kTV broadcast a little while ago in a shop. It was during Wimbledon and they were showing women's tennis. Now, I've watched a lot of tennis in my lifetime so I can tell you if I'm seeing more or not. On screen at the Sony store, I was watching Maria Sharapova return serve, crouched, racquet at the ready, bouncing around on the balls of her feet, and white panties peeping from under the short skirt, which is the classic pervy shot you get in women's tennis.

And here's the thing. 4k TV is so good I could see her dimpled cellulite on the back of her thighs.

And I thought to myself, do I really need this much detail?

One Of Our Submarines

Without a doubt the weirdest sequence of news this week was the disappearance of flight MH370. It went from a straight up, "plane is missing, must have crashed" narrative to a convoluted narrative of mobile phone calls and engine pings to satellites to radar readings, hours after the plane went off view. they still don't know what happened or where the plane is, and if it crashed somewhere int he South Indian Ocean, it might never be found because the depths there can go down to 7000m.

It's all a little creepy because all kinds of scenarios have been tossed around including 2 stolen passports and a possible politically motivated hijacking, but the bottom line is that plane has gone missing with a big load of people, and nobody can explain it well.  In the absence of any kind of solid explanation all kinds of theories have flourished and they have been perversely interesting if only because the Malaysian Authorities have looked totally hapless in their search for this plane.

One thing is for sure. From here on in, this story is only going to get weirder and weirder.

Protesting Abbott

The March in March thing came and went and lots of people went and marched against the misgovernment of Tony Abbott. Being sick as a dog I missed it entirely, which is a bit of pattern with me. I think the last time there was a big protest thing against APEC, I was sick in bed and watched the whole thing from the couch. Anyway, I'm actually not a good protester type. I'm liable to do something crazy and who knows where that would land me? So it's good to watch it far away from where the adrenaline could drive me to lunacy. :)

Jokes aside, it seems the placards presented at the marches have offended a number of people saying they're much worse than 'Ditch the Witch' levelled at Julia Gillard. There are several thing that need to be said about that.

1. Not a single Federal ALP member was photographed making speeches next to a sign like this. It's not so much that the sign said 'Ditch the Witch', it's that Tony Abbott was willing to be photographed with such a sign, lending it credibility with his office of Opposition Leader.

2. It's hard to take serious the offense taken by people who are looking to take offence. I mean, really. Those complainers are being wowsers, and nobody respects a wowser.

3. Yes, Tony is copping worse insults than than did Julia but that's because he's doing worse than Julia - That's why the sobriquets are worse. Live with it. Tony does.

Ian Roberts, Champion Of Causes

Ian Roberts has been a remarkable man. Having competed at the top level in his sport - a very macho sport at that - he came out as gay. He then turned to acting, and he's gone to NIDA and pushed ahead bravely with that. This month, he's basically come out and said he is brain damaged, and that this damage was a result of all the concussions he suffered as a Rugby League player.

Even Matty "Bring-back-the-biff" Johns has recanted his denial of the concussion issue. In the face of the frank, unapologetic moral authority of Ian Roberts' admission, what else can any sensible man do but put down the gauntlets and arms? It's a landmark moment in a sport that's been in denial about concussions for the last three years, if not the last 3 decades. Not only has Roberts forced the sport once to confront gender issues, he has now forced it to confront the occupational hazard of playing Rugby League.

He has to be one of the bravest people around. I am in awe.

China, Defaults, 2014

This week a solar company called Chaori defaulted on its bonds in Shanghai. The remarkable bit might have been that the Chinese government let it happen, because up until now, they've defended all these dodgy-bond moments by swooping in and making sure the bonds were paid out. This time, they simply let the company default. Ouch.

Get ready, there are going to be a whole bunch of these. The Chinese Communist Party narrative is that they're going to let some of these companies default so that it sends a bit of realism back to the investors. If you think such a process can be controlled, then good luck. I think we're beginning to see where China's over-reach is going to bring down markets. This could get ugly folks.