ZeeBubba's House of Cheerful Horror

2006-09-06T16:18:00.000-07:00

The way negotiations are conducted in the Arab middle east is wonderful.

So, lets say you have two sides, lets call them Ahmed and Abdul that are negotiating through a mediator. Both have certain interests and demands of the other. The mediator is trying to construct a compromise document that will be the basis of an agreement. Now both Ahmed and Abdul will verbally promise absolutely anything to the mediator as long as it doesn't make it into the agreement. If one of Ahmed's conditions for an agreement is that Abdul's son's donkeys must stop grazing in Ahmed's yard, Abdul will promise to force his son to slaughter the donkeys. Once that promise is made, Abdul will ask that the condition remain outside the document because he will take care of it within his own family and putting it into the document undermines Ahmed's control of his own son. The moment the agreement is signed leaving out the donkey clause, Ahmed will enter into lengthy negotiations with his son. Eventually he will declare that they have reached an agreement that half the donkeys will be moved to a different grazing area, but the consensus within the family is that the other half of the donkeys must stay continue grazing on Abdul's land.

The way the Iranians conduct negotiations is even better.

First, before you get into negotiations you must have pre-negotiations on the terms of the negotiations. You will discuss what can be discussed, what must be discussed and what can't be discussed. Second, once you get into negotiations, you will not know if you are negotiating with the person that is capable of making a commitment. Third, the negotiators' conditions and terms will change day by day with no particular pattern. Fourth, verbal promises made are not worth much (see # 2,3). Fifth, once an agreement has been reached verbally you will realize that you have really agreed on none of the conditions and negotiations must start again in order to write all the conditions down (see #3). Sixth, once an agreement has been reached on paper you will realize that the person you were negotiating with who swore that he is authorized to negotiate isn't authorized to commit to the document agreed to (see # 2 again). Seventh, if you actually do reach and sign an agreement with someone authorized to commit to it, you will realise the agreement is only good while the other side is incapable of asking for better terms. Eighth, you will also realize that the other side is continually trying to improve its position so that it can very soon try to renegotiate the contract. Ninth, in the next negotiations the previous agreement and all others will be completely ignored and you will start all over.

2006-08-13T15:18:00.000-07:00

Done blogging about this war. Some things are very clear to me. I'll write them down somewhere and read over them once in a while to see if I was right. Thats the other function of blogs. That is to go back in time and read about the opinions you once held. And though it is easy to go back to 'correct' any blog entry it is a bit harder to lie to yourself that you were right while you are doing it. Its not that I have often been wrong in what I write, its that I feel like an ass writing about some things.

Past couple of weeks I got a small taste of what the Israelis go through every time there is a war. I know several people that are definately in Lebanon and a bunch that may have been called up and sent. Israelis my age would probably directly know a very large number of people in the army or the reserves. Looking for familiar names in lists of dead soldiers is shitty.

I am not going to write about what the state of Israel should or should not do when the fundamental consideration behind many of the policy calculations is how many Israeli soldiers will die. Olmert, Peretz and Halutz will have their day in court, so to speak, without me chiming in.

2006-08-12T19:07:00.000-07:00

This ceasefire is a joke.

Peacekeepers are being deployed but without the ability to shoot, so what exactly is their mandate and what can they really be expected to do?
The Lebanese government is meant to deploy south, and do what?
The Lebanese army is supposed to disarm Hezbollah. However this will have to be done with Hezbollah's acquiescence since the Lebanese army can't do this itself.
The Hezbollah is supposed to withdraw north of the Litani. What the hell does that mean? The Hezbollah is a guerilla force. They take off their uniforms (if they are actually wearing one) and they are civilian residents of the South Lebanese villages.
What is the mechanism for the 'unconditional' release of soldiers?
What happens if Hezbollah refuses to allow additional French/Spanish/Turkish troops to enter South Lebanon?
What happens if Hezbollah decides to launch missiles from north of the Litani?

This ceasefire is like throwing a bucket of water on a burning forrest. You can claim that you are doing something and pat yourself on the back, but the fire will keep burning.

1) The Israelis have another 24 hours to get to the Litani. They are doing this through airlifts and setting up a line on the Litani.

2) Hezbollah will keep fighting 'as long as Israeli soldiers are on Lebanese soil'.

3) The international force is nowhere near being assembled. Getting 15,000 troops organized and to Lebanon will take longer than 7-10 days (Rice's estimate from yesterday)

4) As long as the international force doesn't yet arrived the Israelis will continue operations.

This 'cease-fire' if it ever actually gets implemented will be very, very short with both sides getting ready for round 2. The next round will likely involve the Syrians.

2006-07-27T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Israelis decided against a wider operation because they are afraid that Syria might get involved. At the same time they are calling up reservists. I doubt the reserves will just sit around the Lebanese border when they do get called up....

They are calling up 3 divisions.

This isn't going to do much to reassure the Syrians.

2006-07-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

Israel has just run out of options...

The only reasonable option left is a full-scale invasion of South Lebanon.

2006-07-26T08:00:00.000-07:00

If the Israelis do not launch a massive invasion of Lebanon within the next 2 days this will end badly. The conditions being postulated in Rome for a ceasefire to be imposed on Israel are absolutely horrendous for Israel...

Foreign troops will prevent Israeli operations into Lebanon.
Foreign troops will not disarm Hezbollah.
Lebanese troops will not disarm Hezbollah.
Hezbollah will not be disarmed.
Nasrallah will claim victory (justly).
The soldiers might [not] be returned in a prisoner exchange.
Iran will continue to supply weapons to Hezbollah.
Hezbollah will fire missiles at will.
Moderate regimes will be destabilized.

This is a terrible conclusion and makes an absolute joke out of the Israeli objectives when it set out on this operations. If there is a reasonable man among the Israeli leadership he will understand that to agree to a cease-fire now is absolutely insane.

If this operations ends under the Rome ceasefire conditions, it will create the conditions for war with Syria within 2 years. This is both because it undercuts Israeli deterrence in the eyes of the Syrians and because it will make the Israeli government weaker and more prone to aggressive actions.

There has been a failure in communications between Israeli intelligence and the Israeli government. As a result there is a complete disconnect between the objectives outlined by the Israeli government and the means used by the IDF to try to carry them out. This is probably a combination of several factors. The first is the fact that both the Israeli prime minister and defense minister have no serious military background. The second is the fact that the current Chief of Staff of the IDF is an Air Force general. The Air Force has a distorted view of war, in as such as it seriously overestimates the possibility of winning a war against a determined and prepared foe via airstrikes alone.

So, plan A appears to have been to win through airstrikes. I guess if Hezbollah was completely unprepared and had all their katyushas/missiles/positions exposed and unfortified that might be possible. However, Hezbollah had clearly prepared its positions, bunkers and command structures to sustain heavy airstrikes and heavy artillery fire and still remain operational.

Plan B was not ready.

2006-07-23T12:22:00.000-07:00

No massive escalation = little chance for victory.

Since Hezbollah positions are heavily fortified all over south Lebanon there is no chance to take them out from the air. This has been shown over the past 12 days by the fact that the Hezbollah is still capable of sending 80-150 missiles per day into northern Israel despite the attempts of the IAF to knock out the launchers.

The following are the victory conditions for the various parties:
Israel
- Unconditional return of captured soldiers
- Forced end to rocket/missile attacks on Israel
- Destruction of Hezbollah military capabilities
- Elimination of Hezbollah leadership
- Recreation of deterrence vis-a-vis the northern border.

Hezbollah
- Trade of captured soldiers for prisoners held by Israel.
- Maintenance of capability to keep hitting Israel with rockets.
- Maintenance of organized ability to operate within south Lebanon.
- Keep Hassan Nasrallah alive
- Maintenance of deterrence vis-a-vis Israel.

Syria
- Ability to maintain resupply lines to friendly Lebanese parties.
- Prevent any arrangement that doesn't take Syria into account.

Clearly the Israelis have been unable to obtain any of their goals except for the last one. I would assume that some element of deterrence has been established by the massive damage inflicted on Lebanese infrastructure. Whether this will be enough to prevent a future outbreak of violence depends on how much restraint the rest of the Lebanese actors can force upon the Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has proven itself highly effective. It has been hitting Israel with rockets for 12 days. Israeli airstrikes have been unable to stop them. Israeli limited ground attacks have encountered heavy resistance resulting in Israeli military losses. Nasrallah is the visible symbol of Hezbollah's leadership, and he is still appearing every couple of days on Arab TV stations. While he is alive and missiles/rockets are hitting Israel, any and all Israeli damage inflicted on Hezbollah has minimal value.

Syria can talk to both Hezbollah and Iran. It can resupply Hezbollah. It is trying to deter Israel from a full invasion of Lebanon. It will have to be consulted in any agreement.

As it stands now Hezbollah has fought Israel to a standstill. The following possible steps for Israel are ALL problematic.
1) Invasion of south Lebanon and recreation of security border zone.
- The optimistic idea behind this is that once this zone is created some agreement can be reached relatively quickly with the Lebanese government, the Syrians, the Europeans and the US to hand the border zone over to the Lebanese government and an international force. First there will be heavy casualties from fighting in the rugged terrain of Lebanon against the Hezbollah. This is also problematic because once Israel invades South Lebanon it is in a bind. It needs desperately to obtain an agreement so that it can leave and declare victory. In this situation the Syrians and Iranians are in no way interested in a fast agreement. The Hezbollah, Syrians, Iranians would once again try to inflict damage on the occupying Israeli forces and to deny the chance for any arrangement. Over time Hezbollah gets more support from within Lebanon and the refugee/humanitarian situation that is created in Lebanon by an Israeli invasion works consistently against Israel. Israel is denied victory.

2) No ground invasion of Lebanon. Provocations (airstrikes inside Syria) against Syria in order to threaten escalation and signal readiness to attack Syria.
- If the Syrians don't back down this is a war. Who knows if the Iranians do anything stupid. In any case, provocation towards Syria will increase international pressure on Israel to cease the fighting. If the Syrians do back down there is a chance that Hezbollah will stop shooting missiles and that some sort of agreement can be reached to put in a temporary international force in south Lebanon. Once things quiet down the Syrians will again destabilize Lebanon by funding/supplying Hezbollah or a different proxy that will threaten northern Israel and force the international force out or into inaction.

3) Refuse ceasefire and continue limited ground operations in order
to try to weaken Hezbollah.
- This increases pressure in the short-term on Israel to sign a ceasefire and seems unlikely to be able to force an end to all Hezbollah rocket fire at Israel. In the longer-term the continuation of low-intensity fighting with no chance for escalation on the north border can decrease the international pressure on Syria/Hezbollah for an agreement, while at the same time maintaining a situation of uncertainty/constant threat on the northern 1/3 of Israel.

4) Agree to a ceasefire and start negotiating. The ceasefire will function as a bandaid. The urgency for an agreement will decrease significantly, which means that international pressure for such an agreement will quickly dissipate. The ability of Israel to restart military operations in Lebanon will be limited. Effectively this is a return to status quo ante.

5) Invasion of Lebanon with no intention of creating a security zone. Take Lebanon up to the Litani, clearing Hezbollah and destroying its infrastructure within the area. This must be followed by an immediate unilateral withdrawal back into Israel, while using special forces and airstrikes to disrupt Hezbollah's ability to reestablish its positions in south Lebanon. This weakens Hezbollah, provokes Syria and eliminates most of the rocket/missile threat from northern Israel. The military steps allow the declaration of victory. The political result creates the conditions for at least a temporary agreement. However, there are risks involved here. First Hezbollah might fire long-range missiles from north of the Litani, which might suck Israeli forces into fighting north of the Litani. Second the Syrians might join the fight in Lebanon. Third the Lebanese army might join the fight against Israel. Fourth this might result in many Israeli casualties during fighting against the Hezbollah. Despite these problems this might be the most reasonable option.

These are all bad, its just a question of picking the best of the worst options. I am sure there are other options, but I don't see them.

2006-07-07T18:45:00.000-07:00

Double meanings.

A couple of months ago I saw a book at B&N which I thought was interesting. I am now sorry that I didn't buy it. So, apparently, you are not allowed to give somebody a negative recommendation. You can get sued for doing so. So for this reason there are special techniques for getting around this problem. The book I saw was written to explain how to give a recommendation to a person you do not wish to recommend. This involves double meanings and there were hundreds of beautiful phrases in there.

I found a few phrases online from a similar vein:

"In my opinion, you will be very fortunate to get this person to work for you."
"I most enthusiastically recommend this candidate with no qualifications whatsoever"
"I am pleased to say that this candidate is a former colleague of mine"
"I can assure you that no person would be better for the job"
"I would urge you to waste no time in making this candidate an offer of employment"
"All in all, I cannot say enough good things about this candidate or recommend him too highly"
"The candidate was responsible for immeasurable contributions to our organization."

2006-07-07T18:32:00.000-07:00

So anyway, the situation in Gaza is going down the drain. Hamas and Israel need to agree to a cease-fire, a la the understanding reached between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon following the Grapes of Wrath operation. That seems rather unlikely while Hamas is holding an Israeli soldier captive. Whats even more surprising to me is that the Israelis do not know where he is being kept. Its unlikely that the PRC, being a ragtag clan-based outfit, would be capable of keeping a secret this long. This suggests that the operation was planned and carried out entirely by Hamas. If the captured soldier winds up dead Hamas leaders will start dying.

2006-06-27T11:45:00.000-07:00

Looking at these kidnappings in Israel..

The Israelis are already blocking Gaza.

This is going to be a very nasty situation. The Egyptians are deploying forces on the Gaza/Egypt border. They have some idea of what will happen and are trying to make sure they don't get tens of thousands of Palestinians crossing into Egypt.

Most likely the Israelis will issue an ultimatum. Either the soldier and settler are released or Israel will invade and temporarily occupy Rafah with the intention of rescuing the soldier and hunting down the PRC leadership in Rafah.

If the soldier winds up dead, the Israelis will expand the operation and start killing the leadership of Hamas...

2006-05-27T09:03:00.000-07:00

Well.. I didn't get fired.

I came in at 6 in the morning and recovered all the files from the standby machine..

Almost no one noticed that the files were missing.

phew..

2006-05-25T19:25:00.000-07:00

Hmmm.. I think I might get fired tomorrow...

Basically, it is generally a bad idea to delete customer data on production machines and... I have done so today. Not on purpose mind you, but I did edit the script that 'cleans' old data from our systems. In layman's terms I turned this script into an OCD hypochondriac, which caused a lot of data to be deleted prematurely.

This either means that everything will be recovered from what is effectively a 2 layer backup, or that some data will be lost. If I also screwed up one of the levels of backup, then I can only recover most of the data from the second layer and some data is lost and I might have a problem.

I sent a message to the sysadmins 2 hours ago with suggestions as to how to recover he data, but I haven't heard anything back... There are 2 things I really dislike:
1) Knowing what needs to be done and not having the ability to do it (in this case because I don't have access to our machines from home [yet.] )
2) Waiting for information.

So, I am sitting here blogging waiting for the kind sysadmin (really nice person, though doesn't seem it at first impression) to give me the break-down....

yeah.... bummer.

And I had just gotten a raise too.

Note to self: from now on try to put nothing into production on thursday and friday.

So, tomorrow I am going early, early in the morning to try to see if I can recover the data.

Though come to think of it, if I get fired in the morning, I'll have the whole day free. I think I'll take my NYC guidebook with me tomorrow. I haven't been on the staten island ferry yet. I have always wanted to take a round trip. I hear its free. I also want to visit Greenpoint, Williamsburg and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn, just to see if they are nice. The American Indian museum is like 100 feet from the office where I will have worked until tomorrow. I have never been. Not to mention Ellis Island. The ferry is like 4 mins walking distance away from my former place of work. Again, I have never been...

Must remember to bring my camera tomorrow...

2006-05-09T22:12:00.000-07:00

this is disturbing.

2006-04-20T19:05:00.000-07:00

World Beard Championship - Oct. 1, 2005 - Berlin

2006-04-17T12:23:00.000-07:00

Hmmm..

The US, EU, Japan and Israel are no longer transferring money to the PA. Thats probably about $800 million of direct transfers to the Palestinian treasury and another $900 million in support for ongoing humanitarian and infrastructure projects.

The $50 mil that came from Iran and $50 mil from Qatar would probably need to become monthly payments to keep the PA afloat.

I doubt that this will happen - the Arab states have never been very consistent in funding the Palestinians - and so the Hamas government should be bankrupt within a couple of months. Then all hell breaks loose. The optimistic scenario is a short quick coup led by the usual characters - Fatah and Fatah dominated security forces. The pessimistic scenario is a descent into anarchy and civil war.

Boris.

2006-04-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

Interview with Matt Szulik

[I haven't read it. I just like the guys name. He probably should avoid doing business in Russia.

2006-04-05T21:24:00.000-07:00

Stumbled across the Pointless Driving School - yah...

2006-04-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

What is philosophy? Well, apparently its a perfume: yup

What is evil? Its a credit card offer I got in the mail from something called 'Upfront Rewards'. Absolutely positively evil. They are giving away a free laptop*.

Yeay! free laptop!

[EVIL!!!]

* You must transfer $5,000 balance to the credit card and you must maintain a minimum balance of $3,500 for 18 months. If during the 18 months your balance drops below $3,500 you will be assessed a one-time $600 penalty.

2006-03-30T10:13:00.000-08:00

Because of the votes of soldiers, Kadima & Meretz gain a seat each giving Olmert the ability to create a 61 MK 4 party coalition (Kadima, Labor, Pensioners, Meretz).

This coalition will be stable as long as Kadima marches to Labor's tune. Meretz can't stay in the government if Labor leaves, so Labor effectively controls 25 MKs out of the stable core of the 61 MKs in the likely coalition.

If Labor at some point believes that it has a chance to win an election and form a government it can force elections.

So I guess the question now is how long this will take.

Another interesting thing is to watch what happens on the Israeli right. There are 4 [relatively] small parties - Likud, Israel Beitenu, NRP and National Union. Together they control some 32 seats. Some mergers seem likely. If Kadima ever crumbles (possible), the right might be able to form a government. (32 + Shas + UTJ = 50 + Pensioners + 4 renegade [former Likud] Kadima MKs = majority.

2006-03-28T19:40:00.000-08:00

This is a really shitty distribution of seats for Kadima.

Kadima - 28
Labor - 20
Pensioners - 7
Meretz - 4

UTJ - 6
Arabs - 10

Shas - 13
Likud - 11
Israel Beitenu - 12
National Union - 9

So, in order to have a majority Kadima either needs a 4 party coalition - 61 seats (Kadima, Labor, Pensioners, UTJ)
Or bring in Shas - 61 seats (Kadima, Labor, Shas)

Note Shas leader Rav Ovadia Yosef decreed against unilateral withdrawals, so this would probably kill Olmert's plans.

Kadima only has 8 seats more than Labor meaning that any coalition will be almost one of equals, which is something that doesn't usually lead to stability in Israeli politics.

Kadima itself is very weak with numerous ideological groupings coming together for the sole purpose of winning the elections. It will be hard to keep all of them satisfied when so much negotiations with small parties will be required in order to form a government. In the future when the topic of conversation will be further withdrawals in the West Bank it will be even harder to keep all of Kadima supporting the party.

The only bright spot is that Shas, UTJ and the Pensioners are desperate to be a part of the next government. Lieberman also promised to be in the next government, and Netanyahu will probably get bored being the leader of the 5th largest party and will either leave the country or try to join the government. If Netanyahu stops being the leader of the Likud, there is little stopping that party from joining any coalition and effectively folding into Kadima.

I don't believe this government can stay in power for very long and wouldn't be surprised to see new elections within 2 years.

2006-03-28T14:20:00.000-08:00

Something is rotten with these exit polls. This 'pensioners party' has 6-8 seats? Thats 150,000-200,000 votes. I'll wait for the real results.

If the exit polls are correct then I am extremely surprised by the results shown by the Labor party. They won 20-22 seats. Considering they must have lost a bunch of seats to the 'pensioners' this demonstrates some major strength within that party and means that some people younger than 50 are actually voting for Labor. For a while the Labor party's voters kept getting older and I believe the statistics for the last election (2003) showed that under the age of 30 or so only 1.5% of the people voted for Labor.

This pensioners party is very surprising as well. Completely out of left field. I am still trying to figure out where these people came from... Probably mostly former Labor voters. Maybe also some former Shinui voters (though this is less likely since Shinui was very very right-wing on economics).

One thing that is clear is that if Sharon was still in control of Kadima they would have taken 40+ seats easily. Of the 12-14 that went to Israel Beitenu half would have voted for Sharon. Probably most of the 'pensioners' voters would have also gone for Sharon. And a few extra seats would have come from Labor and the Arabs.

In any case Kadima and Labor will now start arguing over ministerial positions within the next government... It will be interesting to see how fast the 'pensioners' get co-opted into the next government. Kadima/Labor/Pensioners/UTJ would probably be a very stable government. Kadima also has a bunch of other coalition options available to it.

2006-03-28T10:43:00.000-08:00

I am following the Israeli elections. These are going to be some weird results. The Russian party - Israel Beitenu - might surpass the Likud as the 3rd largest party in Israel. This is especially true if the voting doesn't pick up within the 1 hour or so that is left. It looks to me like the predictions and polls that were done before the election are going to be proven useless.

With low voting, organization becomes more important. Kadima, Labor, Likud and Meretz have shitty organizational abilities. Shas, Israel Beitenu, UTJ and National Union are very well organized. Israel Beitenu will fill up buses with old Russian people and drive them to the voting places. The rabbis of Shas & UTJ will instruct every person capable of voting for these parties to go to the polls. National Union is a settler / settler supporter party.. Very well organized and energized following the Gaza withdrawal...

And now for something completely out of my ass:

Kadima gets 33
Labor gets 17
Israel Beitenu gets 14
Likud gets 13
Shas gets 12
National Union gets 9
UTJ gets 7
Meretz gets 6
The Arab parties get 7 combined
The Pensioners party gets 2.

Lets see how close I get.. Note that Kadima will form the next government - Kadima, Labor, Shas or Kadima, Labor, Meretz, UTJ

2006-03-12T12:27:00.000-08:00

If what is happening in Iraq is not a civil war, I think we need to define what a civil war is... We can add this to the list of terms whose meaning is being disputed by the US government.

The bomb that blew up in Sadr city killing 50 or so people is bad, its really bad... Sadr city is home base of the Mahdi army, led by Muqtada al-Sadr. Surprisingly this guy and his militia have become one of the few elements within Iraq who still want to see a unified Iraq.

There will be retaliation and counter-retaliation... Ever since the Samarra bombing the speed down the slippery slope to civil war has been increasing....

2006-03-06T12:39:00.000-08:00

Interesting period in Palestine.

The first step taken by the Hamas dominated Palestinian parliament was to rescind the measures taken by the previous Fatah dominated parliament in its last session. Fatah was trying to transfer as many powers to Abbas as possible prior to the handover to Hamas. The idea was that Abbas keeps control over the security forces, the appointment of judges and many other powers, leaving the Hamas with a platform for talking but nothing more.....

So now the question is what Abbas/Fatah will do. Will they accept the loss of these powers or will there be a showdown. In any showdown Hamas loses. Parliament can get disbanded, and any protests can be put down by military force. The question is whether Abbas and Fatah are ready to go to the brink, because if not then they should prepare their Paris retirement apartments...

2006-02-26T17:36:00.000-08:00

Come to think of it the next big thing online will be a platform for aggregating various other web apps. Whoever can come up with a good UI and backend platform for allowing people to place web-based content within constantly updated cute widgets pasted on some web-based canvas wins a prize. In particular if they are smart enough to create an easy to use API for enhancing the platform.

Boris.

2006-02-26T16:10:00.000-08:00

Saw an article about blogs and so I decided to post an entry..

I was thinking about blogging and technology in general and the interesting thing is that most commonly used web-based applications are 1 generation behind browser technology.

The design of modern web-apps is still commonly built around the fill-out-the-form/press-submit UI model. This is strange because modern browsers can be used to create real interactive interfaces like the kind you see in offline applications. Technologies like Javascript and CSS, which are both commonly allow seamless browser presentation of data from backend servers. This means that at some point those 'submit' buttons will just disappear.

Actually search engines themselves are getting stale. Google & Yahoo & MSN styled search engines returning a list is terribly old-fashioned. Grokker and Kartoo are ok, but still lacking something. Kartoo is too graphicy and Grokker too plain. All search engines rank the relevance of websites to the desired keywords. It should be elementary to present this in a graphical form. Google uses a pagerank algorithm to determine the importance of sites. So for say a PR9,PR8,PR7 documents you have a graphical icon of the site. For everything else you have site name and a short description. You throw the keyword searched for in the center and surround it with the highest ranking results, with the low ranking results further out of the middle circle. It would be like a diagram of an atom. Search terms are the nucleus and the results the electrons in various shells around the nucleus.

Anyways.. Time to press the submit button...

2006-02-15T10:00:00.000-08:00

Tom & Katy aren't breaking up! I can stop planning my suicide.

This article was in indexed by Google News. The interesting thing is that it was published by Xinhua, the Chinese national news agency. Apparently there is somebody in China who cares.

[In case there is any possible hint of the shadow of a doubt, I don't.]

2006-02-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

No one needs more French than found here...

2006-02-06T21:43:00.000-08:00

Where the hell did they find all those danish flags to burn?

2006-01-28T00:42:00.000-08:00

So here is the situation with Israel & Hamas.

Hamas' victory is not very important. There were no talks with the Pals before, there will not be any now. There will also be no pressure on the Israelis to talk to the Pals. It is a shift, but I am not sure whether its that much worse for the Israelis. Before there was discussions of whether the PA isn't acting against terrorism because it doesn't want to or because it logistically can't. Now that question is moot. There is no way to make Hamas act against terrorism (ehh itself?). Because there is no question of the possibility of negotiations, Israel will proceed with unilateral steps. Israel will continue building the wall and separating from the Pals. It will set up checkpoints in the West Bank and there will not be any traffic between Gaza and the WB for a long time.

Hamas will try to maintain a cease-fire, but its in a worse position to do so than the former government. While Israel probably will not target Hamas targets its still open season on Islamic Jihad. In order to maintain a cease-fire Hamas will have to pressure Islamic Jihad into submission (unlikely). It should be understood that the Israelis will continue killing Islamic Jihad ppl.

Hamas also needs to maintain 500 mil. euro / year coming in from Europe. Even if this money is received Hamas will have lots of trouble paying everyone on the PA payroll. The PA payroll consists of tens of thousands of armed men, mostly affiliated with Fatah and al-Aqsa. Fatah also has its own armed groups which will in any case will not come under the supervision of a Hamas gov't.

If Hamas doesn't maintain a cease-fire or put a cork in Islamic Jihad Israel will reinvade all areas under PA control.

The PA should collapse pretty soon. I don't know what happens next.

2006-01-24T17:47:00.000-08:00

Reminder to self:

Don't do at home what you can do at work.

Don't do at work what you don't have to.

Try to not have to do anything at work.

2006-01-07T22:05:00.000-08:00

I got bored and went to Ynet to read about Sharon. One of the articles is titled "You wrote: We love you Arik" and it has a few responses picked out by the Ynet editors followed by responses from the readers. Obviously there are plenty of comments wishing him health and a speedy recovery. Some are more detailed.

Here are some translations:

"My 3 1/2 year old daughter came back from kindergarten crying and stormy. The teacher spoke about the PMs health. She was very upset and it took us a long time to calm her down. She asks all the time about his health and asked us to go visit him."

"Dear Arik. When I heard about your harsh prognosis I got very upset... I want to cry but I try to hold back the tears that eventually conquer my face. Though I have now surrendered to the tears, I hope that you will not give up. Maybe you lost a battle, but the war hasn't yet been decided. Please don't give up".

"If I could only hug you, you wouldn't leave my arms for a long time. You are like a father to me. Like a father you were and will be for me, you are the man that I admire most, more than any movie star or singer. Just wanted you to know that the whole country is behind you .. and you will never be forgotten. I pray for your health when I go to school and when I come home. Arik please get healthy, don't die. Love you very much." <16 year old>

"Dear Prime Minister, your people love you and appreciate you and above all need you to lead our country and look to her security. Please win also this battle..."

"I gave my son your name. Today my son is 33 years old and when he was born I called him Sharon. When you were still just a general in the army I knew you would be a leader... All those that angered you, god will make them pay. Dear and beloved man we pray for your health."

"Arik Sharon, I am a Palestinian Arab. As an Arab I am considered your enemy. However, I wish you a full recovery, because after all you were a man that loyally represented your people in governing the country. Get up from the bed and make a strong peace."

"Personal story. 5 years ago I was a bride with sad eyes about to be married. Why sad eyes? Because my dream was always that my father would lead me down the aisle. But fate struck and he was no longer alive. A minute before I got called to the Hoopa my cellphone rings and on the line is PM Ariel Sharon... Hecalled me to wish me mazal tov. At that moment the sadness disappeared and instead tears of happiness came to me and I knew this was a sign that my father is watching over me and is taking care of me. ... That day I wrote a thank-you letter that I never sent... My name is Sharon. My brother's name is Arik. My father was a soldier that served under Sharon. They were injured in the same battle and were in the same room in the hospital. Because my father was alone in Israel Arik's first wife took care of him while he was in the hospital like he was family. My father promised her that when he ahd children he would name them after Arik and so it was. I never met him personally but my father was always telling me stories. Whenever they met they would always carry on as good friends though they didn't stay in contact. When I heard about Sharon's condition my conscience started hurting because of the thank-you letter that he never received and maybe never will. So, I hope that he recovers, not only because he is the PM, but also because I must get him this letter that I have been carrying around for 4 years and haven't sent. Get well and come back to us.."

[ and this one is my favorite]
"Arik, I hope for all of us that you are again lying to us and that everything is fine. I am willing to forgive you for everything. Just please become healthy again and don't leave us in the hands of Bibi and Peretz"

2006-01-04T18:47:00.000-08:00

Ariel Sharon is done. As of this moment he is still alive, but he will not be able to continue to be Prime Minister, and an acting PM has taken over the job. I wish him good health, but the prognosis isn't good.

The man shook up the entire political establishment and has left the scene before it stabilized again. What happens to his party - Kadima? Kadima and Ariel Sharon were the same. The major reason for people to vote for that party was so that Ariel Sharon would be prime minister. Its only real pledge to the voters was 4 more years of Arik. And now no more Arik. Kadima doesn't even have a candidate list made up. There were no plans for any procedure to do so. Sharon was just going to make it up himself based on who would get the most votes. Kadima doesn't really have any branches in the country or any regular members. All it is right now is a bunch of politicians that are led by a man who is certainly out of political life as of now.

In national elections Sharon would have swept the floor with both Netanyahu and Peretz, and now what? Ehud Olmert as prime minister? Olmert isn't terribly popular. He has the reputation of being a slimy bastard. Ideologically he is probably very similar to Sharon and has been acting as his mouthpiece for the past 3 years. But he doesn't have Sharon's military background to be much of an authority on security matters. He has also been implicated in several major corruption scandals. Netanyahu is probably even worse. he is an incapable prime minister with a terrible personality. Completely egotistical and lacking any real principles, his only interest seems to be personal gain. When he lost the election to Barak in 99 he just quit politics and only came back when Sharon brought the Likud back to power. Peretz has no experience on the national level. He is a labor organizer and has risen to prominence through the Israeli national labor union organization. His political and economic ideas are half-baked. So, effectively all the current choices for prime minister - Peretz, Netanyahu, Olmert - are shitty. If Silvan Shalom had won in the Likud then there would be at least one reasonable candidate.... But he lost to that moron Netanyahu. If Peres won in Labor, ....... Come to think of it Olmert isn't that bad when compared to his alternatives. Question is whether he will actually be in charge of a credible real party, or whether Kadima will start to fall apart in the coming weeks. Its hard to see some of these personalities going back to the Likud so soon after they made their dramatic departures, but in Israeli politics these things are doable. Israelis, like Americans, have very, very, very short memories.

This is going to be an interesting election... If they actually do happen. So much uncertainty and Knesset members that are sure to lose their seats. Without Sharon there is a chance for a national unity government that could come together to prevent elections in 3 months.

2005-12-29T17:32:00.000-08:00

Bubba's world.

Death to anyone who uses more than one exclamation point in their email! The fact that its an email and not a phone call should be enough to dissuade you from believing that themessage warrants three exclamation points. "The cookies have arrived :) !!!" certainly doesn't qualify for 3 exclamation points no matter how much you like shortbread or chocolate chip cookies. And smileyfaces just make it so much worse.

Also, why don't we save "Good morning" for good mornings. And I would also like to request an honest answer to the question "How are you?" Shitty, depressed, bored, hung over, unhappy, lonely, pissed off, sleepy, sick, and contemplating mass murder all qualify. How about just OK? Why is OK reserved for situations where you have just been sick or fell down a hill? "Great", and "Wonderful" as standard responses should be left to the mentally insane. The following expressions should be left for sarcasm only: "Yeay!","Hooray!","Yahoo!","Fabulous","Awesome". As should "I am so psyched", "Aren't you excited?" and "I am fired up/stoked".

OK?

2005-12-29T17:24:00.000-08:00

I sit on the bus without my glasses on the way from work. I watch the lights go past the window and with the right music I start to believe that my anger, angst and pain can open a hole in this world (somewhere near the front of the bus) and I can squeeze through. And there will be nothing. Endless time. My anger will dissipate and I will live in that moment. I will feel good. My mind will be quiet. My thoughts left to drift to a different level where everything will be clear and nothing to dress up that whore of reality in her makeup of lies and human weakness. And then the track ends. The bus ride is over. I get off the bus, the anger stays and the whore laughs at me.

2005-12-23T15:17:00.000-08:00

There is a very interesting situation coming in Israel. The Palestinians are supposed to have elections for the PA assembly in January. The PA assembly, like all other bodies of the Palestinian Authority are the product of the Oslo agreements signed between Israel and the Pals in 1993. In effect, under Oslo, Israel granted effective temporary autonomy to the Palestinians under the leadership of the PLO. Oslo also includes the mutual recognition of the two sides in perpetuity, with the PLO accepted as the legitimate representative of the Palestinians and the Israeli gov't of Israel.

Now, for the past 12 years or so Hamas has considered the PA as tainted by the fact that it was founded by the Oslo accords. Since Hamas never recognized the state of Israel it could not accept Oslo which included mutual recognition. For this reason Hamas has boycotted all elections to PA bodies since 1993 (it did participate in local elections, but this doesn't compromise its position).

Hamas is now going to run candidates in the Jan 25 elections. So what does this mean? Does the fact that they are running implicitly recognize Israel? Probably not.

About 3 years ago I was arguing with one of my professors that Hamas will only participate in elections when they think they can win. I believe that this is still the case. Hamas believes it can win the election. Judging from the fact that they won elections in most of the local elections in the West Bank and had a very strong showing in Gaza local elections they could be right.

What if Hamas loses? Then the big winner will be Marwan Barghouti, the leader of the Fatah "young guard" and head of the al-aksa brigades, fatah's 'militant arm'. If anybody could be held responsible for the 2nd intifada it would be him. And in fact he has been held accountable for several murders of Israeli citizens and is currently serving some number of consecutive life sentences in an Israeli prison.

Abbas will still be the president (chairman or whatever), but the fact that his cronies will win so little support will completely paralyze his ability to do anything. The new Fatah 'young guard', if victorious, will certainly want their leader release from prison before negotiations take place. This will not happen. And if Hamas wins negotiations are impossible. Whatever happens the PA as conceived of in 1993 will have disappeared, with no new arrangement in sight.

2005-12-19T22:01:00.000-08:00

I started work today. again. The backend has been turbocharged in the past 4 years. Everything does more and does it better. The company has been growing ridiculously fast and was forced into adding new capacity and new functionality along the way. My problem is that my initial assignment is basically in-house technical support. Non-technical people will be asking me questions about how and why the system does things. If I was working as a developer I would need to know how one particular aspect of the system runs and could ignore much of everything else. Since I am tech support I need to be familiar with all parts of the system so that I can look for problems. And there are lots and lots of parts of the system, though the flow of problems seems to be very manageable. I am a technical person so I can figure out [over time] how things are connected and I can look at the underlying programs and databases to help me understand why they do things the way they do. I have absolutely no idea how the non-technical client support people ever figure out anything about the system. Their manual has about 700 pages and its unclear to me how they are able to master even the basic operations of the system. The client support department is experiencing very high turn-over and hiring as if its a cold calling operation. It must however take at least 6 weeks to get a new hire to a point where they can independently do anything. At the same time their client list keeps growing faster and faster.

Blegh.. This is going to be a long week and I have friday off.

2005-12-19T21:39:00.000-08:00

The new Iraqi government looks like its going to look exactly like the old Iraqi government. The Sunnis will take some more seats, the Kurds a bit less. I fail to see how the Sunnis will be brought into the government, or how the pre-election promise of constitutional amendments will be carried through. So, 4 more years of a Shiite fundamentalist government.

On the bright side it does appear that the Iraqi security forces are becoming better, so they might be able to take over more responsibilites from the Americans. Additionally, the violence might be significantly lower in the coming weeks than it was before the elections. If the Sunnis were to be brought into the government violence would continue to be much lower. In the likely case that the Sunnis get left out in the cold again the violence will go right back up to pre-election levels.

The biggest real problems are distribution of future oil revenues and control over the army and police forces. The Shiites want much of the oil revenues to stay in the South so they are pushing for regional autonomy. This leaves the Sunnis with several collapsing and partially destroye cities and minimal prospects for growth. The more divisive element is the day-to-day operations of the Iraqi security forces. They are getting better trained, but they have very few Sunnis in positions of power and they seem to have been infiltrated by the Shiite militias. As such they seem to enjoy torturing Sunnis and murdering former Baath party members. Unless the Sunnis are given a way to control what the security forces in their areas are doing it becomes only natural that there will be strong Sunni resistance to the new Iraqi state.

2005-12-11T12:19:00.000-08:00

I have become convinced that the Israelis, with American complicity, will attack the Iranian nuclear program within 2 years. Without American complicity it is impossible because it seems highly unlikely that Turkey would allow Israel to use its airspace to target Iran. Once American complicity is assured though, the strike becomes much easier. First of all Iraq's airspace can be used securely since its partrolled by the USAF. Refuelling or emergency landings can take place in Iraq.

Question is what happens next. How bananas do the Iranians go?

First the obvious stuff. Hezbollah will shell all of northern Israel. This will followed by an Israeli offensive into Lebanon to clear out the Hezbollah artillery and missiles. Iran will probably also launch some long-range missiles at Israeli targets. I doubt there will be a serious reply to this. Iran will provide additional support to groups that target Israelis, both in Israel and abroad. It will probably also launch some major terrorist attacks on Israeli embassies and Jewish centers, as it did in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1994.

Next, the Iranians will probably blame the Americans for this attack. This is where it gets interesting. A direct attack on US troops in Iraq would be suicidal since the Iranians are outclassed. However, American troops in Iraq are Iranian hostages. The Iranians will supply explosives, training and safe haven to Iraqi Shiites to launch attacks against US forces in Iraq.

Iran is also rolling in dough, so the destruction of a couple of labs and reactors would probably not be enough to dissuade them from pursuing nuclear capability. This means that until Iran decides to abandon its nuke program it will either need to be bombed every once in a while or that it would have to be invaded and the government replaced. Neither bombing alone or an invasion is very good. An invasion would require significantly more firepower than the invasion of Iraq. The Israelis can't do it (don't have the troops, can't afford it, and would be the least welcome invaders of all time), leaving the Americans and the Brits. Iran is roughly the size of Alaska - 4 times the size of Iraq. Its population is more than double that of Iraq. Iran hasn't been in a war since 1988 and its armed forces are significant, though partially outdated. Opposition to the regime is minimal and there are no major ethnic groups that can be counted upon to support the invasion. The government is religious fundamentalist and who knows what it would do when pushed into a corner. To defeat the regime you would probably need triple the invasion force for Iraq. It would take much longer [than major combat operations lasted in Iraq] and there would be a long-term insurgency problem. To occupy the country would require more forces than were required for the invasion. The forces simply do not exist. The second option - of intermittent bombng - is also bad. Each time you bomb you have to start looking for the next target and each will be better hidden and better defended. Again the Israelis probably don't have the resources for maintaining the bombing and responding to the threats generated from Lebanon and from the WB&G. The Brits and the Americans would have to do this as well...

The most reasonable option would be some sort of combined bombing-clandestine campaign. The US would have to start organizing and training Iranian ethnic groups (Kurds, Azeris) to fight against the government. The CIA would then bring together all opposition to the Iranian theocracy into one organization (something like it did with the INC in Iraq). Money would also be contributed to sectarian and anti-governmental organizations. Training can be done in Iraq and in Afghanistan. At the same time a sustained bombing campaign against the Iranian nuclear program would commence. The initial objective would be to force the Iranian government into unpopular measures such as cracking down heavily on protests and opposition. Over time more serious opposition and possibly the government will be replaced by more friendly elements. In any case, the replacement of the government should not be the objective, but pressuring Iran into stopping its nuke program. Spending $5-10 billion a year on bombing and clandestine activities for the next 5-10 years would be cheaper than fighting a full scale war and occupation. If this strategy is chosen then the main thing would be not to get carried away. If regime-change became the objective rather than an end to the Iranian nuclear program, then it will harden the resolve of the clerics and their supporters and eliminate the chance for a compromise.

2005-11-30T22:21:00.000-08:00

Found a nice link:

Distribution of income between states 1929-2003

This goes back to the argument about the contribution of the South to various war efforts. In 1929 State per capita income in the South was less than 1/2 of the state per capita income in the north. The poorest state - South Carolina had per-capita income of $2300 as compared to $9717 for the richest state NY. The next poorest states were: Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. The rest of the former confederate states were all below average in income. This is in addition to the fact that the population of the south was rather small before the huge population boom of the second half of the 20th century. They simply couldn't have contributed much to the war efforts of the 1st half of the 20th century.

2005-11-20T14:49:00.000-08:00

Orkut.

Google is starting to bother me. Their philosophy of rolling out products while still in Beta testing is evil. Basically they claim that some of their products are still in Beta and this allows them to pretend that membership is exclusive and this makes it somehow more desirable. It uses the fact that humans have an inherent desire for membership in exclusive organizations. The way this works online is that in order to join Gmail and Orkut you have to be invited by somebody who is already a member.

Unfortunately I too am human. One of my roommates in Israel had Gmail so I got an invite. Once into this exclusive club you realize that everything is pretty much the same. Its still email, though with some cute new features. The other Google beta invite-only product is Orkut. Orkut is Google's answer to myspace, friendster, hi5 and yahoo 360. All these are 'social networking' sites. The idea is that you invite your contacts into the network and as they join they bring in more of their contacts. This allows you to meet contacts of contacts. For the longest time I couldn't find anyone with an Orkut membership to invite me. The truth is the only reason I wanted in was because I couldn't otherwise get in and see if its any good.

So anyways I found a place where to ask for an invite and received one. Now that I am in, I see its pretty much the same as the other networks with small differences. Orkut seems to be bilingual in Portuguese and English. By this I mean that 3/4 of the membership is in Brazil. This is by itself strange and is probably being explained by somebody writing a PhD. thesis on online social networking. The other thing is that there are communities that you can join. A community just seems to be a message board where you can see many people's pics and interests. I can see how this can be useful in identifying possible friends if the communities where small enough. However once these go past 30 or so it just seems to become a jumble of faces. An excellent idea might be for these social networking sites to split up these communities geographically once they go over some number. Or at least display community members in order of geographical proximity. I mean its great and all that Hasheem Mahmoud of Lagos, Nigeria shares my love of bonzai trees, but its much more useful to know that Jane Smith of central NJ does so as well.

OK, so if someone wants an invite to Orkut or Gmail tell me.

2005-11-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

The problem in Iraq is that the two objectives of the US in the region - confronting Iran and confronting terrorism are at odds. In order to confront terrorism there must be stable control over central Iraq. The most likely candidate to exercise such control is a centralized Shiite government. However such a government would be pro-Iranian. There is an alternative. There must be a counterweight to Iran. It used to at least partially be Iraq. Iraq once shielded Kuwait and Saudi Arabia from Iran. It demanded money and respect for this function, but it did fulfill it. Since Iraq is now broken, somebody else must do this job (if the US takes this job then its deployment in Iraq will be near permanent). The break-up of Iraq, as well as the current position of the Sunni Arabs allows the possibility of the intervention of the Arab League, or more specifically Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia (and the GCC) on the side of the Iraqi Sunnis. The fact that Syria is currently very weak means that it probably will not be able to prevent such an intervention even if it wanted to. Were this to lead to an Egyptian deployment in central Iraq, supported by Jordanian supply lines and connections in the region and by GCC money, then perhaps such a counterweight can be found again. In addition the Arab League intervention, if it was led by Egypt and Jordan, could secure central Iraq and prevent it from being used as a terrorist staging ground. Hopefully the former elements of the Iraqi government can come together around the Arab League intervention and create a stable structure in central Iraq. How does this work? For a start the presence of the Arab League should give the Sunnis a much more powerful voice in the government, limiting the role of Iran. In addition the Egyptian, Jordanian and Sunni Iraqi intelligence operatives can conduct clandestine operations against the pro-Iranian factions in the Iraqi government. The Americans can withdraw to Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar and leave the Arabs to deal with the Islamists. Let the Egyptians run Abu Ghraib.

This is a short-term solution to limit Iran's influence in Iraq. Iran has the chance to become way too powerful in a very sensitive region of the world. So, in the longer term the Iranians will have to be confronted and its government will need to be deposed.

2005-11-08T15:25:00.000-08:00

The US is proper f$&$&d in Iraq.

Every surrounding country has an interest and they don't match up. Internally every ethnic group has its own interest and again they don't match up.

Internal:
The Kurds want independence. They would be willing to settle for autonomy, but I have doubts as to whether they will allow Arab troops to patrol Kurdistan. So if anything it will be just one step short of independence. With their 75,000 peshmerga fighters they will probably have the ability to resist such encroachments. They can't stand up in front of the Turkish army though and so declaring independence seems foolhardy.

The Sunnis want to go back 5 years. A Shiite fundamentalist dominated government does not appeal to them. Their options however are only limited to destabilizing the current order since they don't have the numbers or support to impose their own order. When Iyad Allawi's block lost the last elections it became very unlikely that a Shiite-Sunni coalition could unify Iraq.

The Shiites want unified Shiite Fundamentalist - led Iraq. They have the numbers to do it and are likely backed by the Iranians and Syrians. Not to mention the Americans. The problem is that the Sunnis and Kurds will be hard to bring into such a system. Not to mention the fact that the Israelis, Saudis, Jordanians and Kuwaitis will likely oppose such an expansion of the Iranian influence in the region.

External:
The Turks want a strong unified non-Iranian leaning Iraq. If thats not possible then any arrangement that keeps the Kurds under control is fine with the Turks. Otherwise their own Kurds might become very bothersome and would have safehaven in northern Iraq from which to strike into Turkey. If an arrangement comes out in which the Turkish Kurds will find safehaven in Iraq the Turkish army will easily roll over Iraqi Kurdistan and could probably just as easily take over all of Iraq.

The Syrians want a strong unified Iraq because they have their own Kurds. The Syrians, along with the Iranians would like the Americans to walk away with a bloody nose and a black eye, leaving behind an Iranian-backed central government in Iraq. Not only the Kurds, but also the Sunni Arabs in Iraq could pose a problem for the Syrians. If there was anarchy in central Iraq on the border with Syria then some Sunni fundamentalist violence might spill over into Syria, destabilizing the minority Alawite government in the face of its domination of a majority Sunni country.

The Saudis, Kuwaitis and Jordanians want a strong counterbalance to Iran. The Kuwaitis would probably even prefer that the Americans stay permanently.

The Israelis would probably prefer a counterbalance to Iran regardless of color. A democratic Iraq would be nice, but I am assuming the Israelis gave up all hope of that. They would probably not mind if the Americans stayed permanently. Were the Americans to leave they would probably place their bets on the Kurds in order to prevent a strong Iraqi state and to use them to partially destablize Iran and Syria.

The Iranians are probably the only ones interested in a unified democratic Iraq. This is primarily because their allied Fundamentalists will win elections. Were they to do so, Iraq will come under the Iranian umbrella. The Iranians will also want to prevent the Kurds from exercising independence and would work to undermine their autonomy, otherwise their own Kurds might start getting notions.

----

Now you have a large number of players and between the Israelis, the Turks, the Iranians, the Saudis and the Americans plenty of resources to play with. Its also hard to see an outcome that can be agreed upon between the players since some players don't actually talk to each other. The Iranians have the strongest cards for a long-term game - influence over the Iraqi Shiites, over the Syrians, and a long open border. This will probably not change over time. The only way that some sort of equilibrium can be found is if the Iranians were weakened and their hold over the Iraqi Shiites was broken. This could only be done through regime change in Iran. Short of this what you have is either an effective dissolution of Iraq followed by a Turkish or Iranian intervention or an Iranian allied Iraqi Shiite state. In either case there is likely to be a civil war as there are too many players to avoid massive violence. The American presence does nothing to change this outcome and the American training of the new Iraqi army only makes the latter outcome more likely.

2005-11-06T21:37:00.000-08:00

I have been reading about this French rioting. Its amazing. 3300 cars were burned, schools and other buildings destroyed. 10 police officers were injured by shots fired on them by a mob. Elsewhere club-wielding rioters attempted to attack police who responded with tear gas. The French government has effectively lost control of several 'suburb-ghettoes' of Paris and neighborhoods in other cities. The most amazing thing is that in 11 days of rioting not a single person has been killed. Were this to happen in the States there would be national guard with shotguns in the streets within a week. A few rioters would be shot and everybody else would go home and hide.

So lets see what the French government will do with their fellow citizens. The French race-blind policy of assimilation, whereby the immigrants are meant to forget what they were and to become culturally French is basically on trial here. The first problem is that the immigrants don't quite want to fully assimilate. The second is that the white French still see these newcomers as foreigners and discriminate accordingly. Its just that the government refuses consider race to be an issue and so can hardly do much to treat the problem. Regardless of what happens from this point on, this should leave little doubt that the French can't just pretend that inside every Muslim/black immigrant to France is a Frenchman trying to get out.

This Szarkocy guy is also interesting. The same guy that has called on the government to crush this rioting 'scum' has called for affirmitive action and a regression from the apparently failing French model of assimilation towards more Anglo diversity models.

So what are the French going to do? How do you stop rioting that is spreading?

2005-11-02T20:41:00.000-08:00

What the fuck is a Judeo-Christian and have you ever met one?

2005-10-31T14:41:00.000-08:00

On the idea of having allowed the South to secede without the civil war, and whether the US would be better off without the South right now...

The truth is as far as the federal government is concerned, the north-eastern states are net losers in the equation. In all studies done on where federal money is spent it has been shown that the northern states contribute more than they receive and the southern ones receive more than they contribute. This is based on data collected by the Tax Foundation. According to the data for every dollar of federal taxes levied on New Jersey, the state gets 57 cents back in federal funding and contracts. In similar situations are New York, Massachussets and Connecticut.

In addition I really do not see what difference it would have economically. The most likely case is that there would be some sort of EU style economic union, or at least a NAFTA style free trade agreement. So whatever the value the Southern states have economically would not be lost were there to be an amiable parting of ways.

So what if there are major companies in the South? Are they going to stop selling their products in the North or are they going to stop sending dividends to their shareholders in the North?

As far as mentioning Berkshire Hathaway... Since when has Omaha, Nebraska been in the South anyway?

You argue that there are bright lights in the manufacturing sector in the south.. You surely know that the reason for this is because factories in the South often employ lower-waged non-union labor. Oil and natural gas are in any case sold at prices set at a global level as West Coast oil prices after Katrina demonstrated.

Yes America would be weaker militarily and I have already argued that the current military posture is not necessary and even unsustainable. Yes America would have a smaller gross GDP, though I fail to see this having a major negative impact on the lives of the citizens of America.

I was thinking that the South should have been allowed to secede 145 years ago, but if we were talking about today then if anybody should secede its the North-east. Let the United States keep the debt and the defense commitments. There would finally be a functioning 2 party republic, or even better a parliamentary system with a pm. Its not like there are no reasonable Republicans - Senators Snowe, Collins, Specter and Chafee are all from the north-east. The only independent (formerly Republican) senator - Jeffords - is from Vermont. How does the Federal Republic of America sound? (NY,NJ,CT,PA,MA,RI,NH,VT,ME,DE,MD) = GDP of $2.67 trillion = 4th in the world. Population: roughly 60 million. GDP/capita roughly $44,500...

The question is basically, with an economic union established, what value does a political union have if views on all issues are so far apart?

2005-10-30T21:15:00.000-08:00

Lincoln's folly.

It seems to me Lincoln should have let the South go. What was so important that 600,000 soldiers had to die for? Is a political union with a bunch of fundamentalist racists really worth that much? And don't say slavery, because that wasn't the crux of the issue. The slaves were freed almost as an afterthought and Lincoln was perfectly willing to allow slavery in order to avoid the war. With the British juggernaut crusading against slavery, it would have probably been eliminated in the South by the late 19th century.

The South could have had its state-based confederacy and the North could have created a centralized country out of the remaining states. That would have avoided the federal-state conflicts that sprung up over time (mostly in the South again). The South could have had its faith-based compassionate-conservative wwjd politics, while the North could have concentrated on the socio-economic questions just as they had come to fore in Europe.

I don't know. It seems that there are two countries here, not one. Even the party system is broken. A Republican from the north-east is at least as liberal as a democrat from the south. Does anybody in the northeast or on the west coast really care about who does what with who and where as long as it hurts no one? What do I care if two dudes want to get married? Of course there are complete nutsos on the liberal side as well. Fur is murder, moral vegetarianism and the living earth stupidities are alive and well in the blue states. At least these groups are small enough to not even have much of an influence on local elections. How many of these guys are in congress? Now compare to the number of bible thumpers.. Now you get your relative distribution of power between the extreme liberals and extreme conservatives.

No wonder things like this pop up on the internet...

2005-10-30T15:39:00.000-08:00

routine reminisced, a face shed
a phone call, a meeting set
a hopeful night, a little walk
a dinner served, some useless talk
a door opens, its time to part
the hope born, deserted dies
of ending cumbersome goodbyes.

2005-10-29T09:44:00.000-07:00

Leave me be,
so I can ferment,
Let me dream,
so myself I can remember.
Wake me from my nightmares,
so myself I can forget.
Shatter all the mirrors,
as they lie.

2005-10-28T08:55:00.000-07:00

Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff at the Department of State between 2002-2005 trashes the decision-making process in the white house.

Very interesting read... US forces are apparently staying in Iraq for 5-8 years more. Wilkerson believes that leaving now will mean that the Turks might take Iraqi Kurdistan and then the Syrians and Iranians might get involved in the other parts of Iraq. Were this to happen the Iranians would control both the Iranian and southern Iraqi oil fields and be in a good position to destabilize Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The US will then have to go back within 10 years with a larger force to take and secure the oil fields. Wilkerson comes back to the fact that the US uses disproportionate amounts of energy and resources and thus needs secure access to the resources of the Middle East. Unless this changes (unlikely) the US is tied to the Middle East.

There are many other interesting things in Wilkerson's presentation and in the Q&A session that followed. To me the most interesting was the entire intelligence establishment's belief in Iraqi WMDs. This position was apparently supported by foreign intelligence services, including the French, the British and the Germans.

2005-10-24T15:51:00.000-07:00

military spending

The us military budget of roughly $500 billion is insane. the capabilities of the us military are so far beyond any of its competitors that it begs the question of whether there really is a need for so much spending.

The US military expects to be able to respond to a crisis anywhere in the world within a week or so. For this purpose the US has 12 carrier battle groups, each capable of taking on the entire airpower of all but perhaps 10 countries. On the seas, in opposition to these 12 carrier groups, the rest of the world could put together perhaps 10 of their own, among which number are included carriers of friendly countries - the Brits (2), the French (1), the Italians (1), the Spanish (1), and the Thais (1). The Russians have one and the Chinese, though they have been buying old Russian carriers and playing around with them (literally) haven't commissioned one of their own. In addition, the non-US carriers are smaller and carry fewer aircraft than American carriers, leading to a situation where out of the roughly 1250 aircraft carrier based aircraft 1000 are American.

In other words, there is no threat to global US navy supremacy. The basing of the carriers, as well as of the US army and air bases definately feeds the conspiracy buffs world-wide with plenty of ammo for their theories of US world domination. Though the US has no colonies, the number of bases it has worldwide is amazing. 20 years ago these could be justified by arguing the need for the ability to deploy anywhere in order to stop a Soviet advance. At present these arguments no longer have any validity. In addition to the omnipresence of US naval reach there is also the fact of US rapid-deployable forces. The special forces, the airborne divisions and the marine expeditionary forces can each be deployed within days to anywhere in the world. The air power needed to dominate any enemy is likewise available in bases world-wide. After a bit of research I am ready to argue that the US can take on all comers without any assistance from allies.

The problem with such a situation is that there is very little gained from this ability. If its not utilized its a lot of money being wasted on the ability, and if it is utilized it is even more money wasted on its utilization. In either case what is it exactly that US gains from such a global reach?

At least the Brits used their military power to extend their economic sphere of influence. Anywhere they went they signed semi-exclusive trading contracts with the locals. Over time these contracts had the effect of pauperizing the natives while creating wealth and export markets for British industry. In any case the army of the British empire was largely subsidized by the natives. This was of course true when the British posessions world-wide were run by quasi-independent private companies (the East India Company for one), but even when these colonies was handed over to the state the profits were still made and kept within the British empire. The British collected taxes and sold their products in their controlled territories. At the same time the British had large numbers of surplus people they could use to control colonies and colonize those most suitable for economic exploitation. Tens of millions of people left the British Isles for settlement abroad. Millions more ran the British colonies abroad, always at the expense of the native populations. The British empire fell apart when they no longer had the excess population to run the empire and when revolts and civil disobedience drives made the colonies unprofittable. Changing morals (the decline in the willingness of the British to slaughter the natives) also contributed to the changes.

What does the US get from its global military presence??? A big bill... Its absolutely insane. Does the US really need 12 carrier battle groups when the closest naval competitor is Britain with 2 small carriers? Does it really need to keep supposedly protecting the Japanese and the Koreans who are perfectly capable of protecting themselves? Against whom do they need protecting? Is there a military commitment to Taiwan and is it worth it? How many aircraft carriers does it take to fight a global war on terrorism? What is the job of the US military in today's world?

2005-10-20T15:14:00.000-07:00

Ability and Self-Confidence.

Everyone seems to agree that it is important in a society for individuals of that society to be able to perform the tasks needed by it. The common indicator of a society's performance however seems to be the sum of the subjective satisfactions of the individuals of a society with their stations in it. These two ideas lead unfortunately to two different directions. The first direction is to realistically educate members of a society towards being good at performing jobs available in a society and through proficiency in their profession to be happy with their station in life. The second approach is to educate individuals towards being happy and self-confident and with their newly found self-confindence people would happily and proficiently carry out whatever tasks fell upon them. Or so the logic goes. Naturally there are problems with both approaches. In both approaches the flaw lies in the fact that in any society only a small percentage of positions that are available are of high enough societal standing to allow a person employed in them to take any pleasure from his station in life. Additionally out of any group of people some are more naturally capable than others. So in the first approach people will be prepared for their dull and tedious jobs and do them well. In the second most of the people with high self-esteem will have dreamt of doing jobs they aren't capable of and will be unprepared for their dull, tedious jobs and do them poorly. Interestingly in the first approach those that are performing tedious jobs will most likely place most of the blame with the natural structure of society and resign themselves to their tedium while spending their excess time and money on revolutions and in pubs or beerhalls. In the second approach, with its emphasis on the individual, people will blame themselves for their failures and spend their excess time and money on seeing shrinks and reading self-help books. A consequence of this is of course that if any new opportunities open up, they will be more quickly seized by those unresigned to their fate and always working on their self-esteem rather than those drunk on alcohol and content with tedium. The end result of both of these approaches is that both are flawed, since man was never meant to be happy with his station in life, regardless of what it is...

In any case, the sum of the subjective satisfactions of the individuals of a society is more dependent on the weather...

2005-10-18T22:54:00.000-07:00

I started thinking about the Middle East thing again. By thing I mean the whole peace process.... The problem with it is twofold. First there are final status issues that can't be immediately agreed upon, partially due to underlying support for contradicting positions within the two populations, and partly due to the lack of trust between the negotiating parties (the Israeli and Palestinian governments). Second, there is the issue of marginal groups, both inside and outside the governments flexing their muscles by playing the wrench in the machine. Without a final status outline it is nearly impossible for either side to deal legitimately ruthlessly with these minorities. One can not act forcefully to facilitate a final status agreement when one isn't sure whether there will be one in the first place.

This was the problem with the Oslo accords. For all their fine language they create essentially no barriers to cheating by either side, or create any rewards to either side for dealing with rowdy elements. The original idea of Oslo was that it would create trust between the negotiating parties, while in fact it did the opposite, because it created incentives for cheating. The Israelis were busy prejudicing final status negotiations by building settlements (something not expressly prohibited by Oslo, in spite of what some may read into it). The Palestinians were in no hurry to deal with their terrorists or to instill the principles of peace and coexistance in their people, quite understandably as well, as these steps are what would be required of them in the implementation of the final status settlement. Once time came for the final status negotiations the two sides were no further in trusting each other than they had been during the Oslo negotiations. Their populations were likewise unwilling to compromise following consistent cheating by both sides.

One possible way of resolving the problems of the Oslo game is to add some major rules to the game. First one needs a proper scorekeeper. Lets say the Quartet (US, EU, UN, Russia) can do this job. Second one needs a means of blurring certain final status issues. This can be done by presenting a range of final status outcomes, say one has Palestinian sovereignty over the entire area of East Jerusalem, the next only gives them the Arab and Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, but only the Muslim & Christian quarters of the old city, the third gives them only the Arab neighborhoods of the city and the Muslim areas of the old city. The next gives them some Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, but nothing in the old city and the last gives them a capital in Abu Dis, outside the borders of Jerusalem and gives the Israelis full control over East Jerusalem. The sides would select a base case to start with, but it would not necessarily be the final one.

Third one needs to build trust and prevent cheating. This can be done by setting up some sort of a scoring system whereby the trangression or failure to act by one or another side would be an own-goal of sorts and would give points to the other side. Thus a terrorist incident would mean x number of points to be awarded by the judge [the Quartet] to the Israeli side. An assassination of Palestinian militants could be x points to the Palestinians. At the end of the prescribed time period of the game, the final status outcome would be chosen from the possible range based on the score to date whereby the 'winning' side would pick from the range of final status outcomes made available to it by its score.

Fourth and most important, there must be a clear definition of one side or the other abandoning the game. Equally important is a penalty on the side that walks away first. The penalty must be very very significant. Say for the Israelis the loss of US financial support and for the Palestinians the loss of their own EU financial support and the Quartet acquiescense of Israeli annexation of major settlement blocs.

The last problem is that of actually getting the sides to sit down and agree to such a game. And of course the problem of formalizing the idea into a formal plan with rules and all.

In all actuality the odds of either side agreeing to anything remotely similar to this is negligible. Such a game would severely limit the options available to both players and places a very high cost on walking away.

2005-10-12T22:18:00.000-07:00

Things I learned recently.

I am reading the biography of Paul O'neill - former sec of treasury - bush 43 administration. Basically it claims this administration is being driven by ideogical and political forces with little appreciation for the best long-term interests of the country. People who prefer not to use the scientific method in drawing conclusions and setting up policy. According to the book, the president is an inexperienced fool being led by the nose by those close to him - Rove, Cheney, Hughes and others. They use scripted cabinet meetings and stacked task forces to drive policy in the direction that they desire. Moderate people - O'Neill, Whitman and Powell were being used as fig leafs by the administration to conceal an extreme right-wing policy. Massive tax-cuts were pushed through despite the mutual disapproval of O'Neill and Greenspan, who wanted the tax-cuts to be dependant on the continuation of budget surpluses. Within the administration the tax cuts were backed by supply-side economists. The book also mentions that military action against Iraq was brought up in one of the first cabinet meetings, long before Sept. 11. WMDs in Iraq were cooked up in spite of the CIA, not because of it. All multilateral peaceful approaches to confrontations were ideologically dismissed.

Why can't we have better leaders? How can Bush have been elected, not once, but twice?

I also realized several things by reading the book. First that decreasing corporate taxes should increase stock prices. Second that high-risk dollar-denominated foreign bonds are partially mitigated in risk by the possibility of US-led financial rescue. Its just a matter of asking the question: which countries would the US not allow a default? Is it also not possible to hedge against default by shorting a country's currency?

Moving on.. I also read a book on the British empire (Niall Ferguson - Empire), where tbe author argues that the British empire may have been a force for good and that the US must take over where the Brits left off. He argues that if the British hadn't been in India, the Japanese would have been worse colonialists.. And that the Germans in South Africa would have done much worse than the British. The Brits also can be said to have crusaded for an end to slavery during the 19th century. He also expresses the idea that colonialism actually improved the economic fortunes of the colonized (at least in some places) by creating incorruptible British legal systems in the outlying colonies which would ensure the safety of investments and thus accelerate their flow. He also credits the Empire with bringing civilization to the heathens and leaving many functioning democracies in its wake.

All in all, it was a thought-stimulating read. Some of the conclusions are reasonable, but the question remains: Would people rather be materially better off and ruled by incorruptible foreigners or poor but ruled by corrupt locals? Rationally the answer should probably be the former, realistically historically the answer seems to usually be the latter. If people choose the irrational choice, should we bother asking them? A British imperialist would probably say no and colonize them. An American [neo-imperialist] would just argue that people are rational beings and the question is moot, would then invade and be suprised by the unfriendly welcome, and then surprised again by seemingly irrational election results.

I also read several books on South Africa. The whole apartheid thing interested me a lot, especially the creation of the bantustan states. I think it would be interesting to compare the rump state of Gaza to Transkei or Ciskei. The SA government gave independence to several of the bantustans and the government of Bophutswana in particular initially resisted being absorbed back into post-apartheid South Africa. Interestingly a Boer (white Afrikaans speakers) rebellion was meant to break out to support the independence of Bophutswana before the rebellion was hijacked by complete loons and abandoned by the majority of its intended participants. It was interesting to read how different groups of white South Africans coped with losing power and learning about the rather heinous actions of the white apartheid government. One of these heinous actions was the use of death squads to dispatch black leaders. While the officers in these units were white, the men were often former black anti-apartheid guerillas that were turned.

Bantustans were also tried in Namibia while it was a South African colony. There are some very strange people down there. For example in Namibia there is a very proud group that calls itself 'the Bastards'. They are the descendants of Cape Dutch settlers and native African women. At some point they obtained self-consciousness and as a group trekked north to set up their own colonies in Namibia. They speak Dutch, have Dutch names and declared an independent state in 1872. No one recognized it of course.

South Africa is appealing.. I would want to go there some time. The diversity in that country is very impressive. First you have the 80% of the population which is black, but even these are divided into many tribes and languages - Zulu, Tswana, Venda, Xhosa and many others. Then there are the 10% who are whites and these are Afrikaaner, English, Portuguese, French and others. Then there are the Coloureds, who are various mixtures of white, black and malay. There are also the Indians and the Cape Malays. Only problem is that its expensive to fly there and not so safe to be there... Though the safety concern might be overblown, I know in Israel it was.

2005-10-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

argh!
fear, fear, frighten frighten
give them something new to bite on
the bird flu, the bird flu, the bird flu is coming
will make all our troubles look like nothing
corruption, scandal, quagmire, war
we can always fool them all!

2005-10-01T16:25:00.000-07:00

Hmm... OK.. Lets title this "Americans are stupid"

evolution vs. creationism:
64% of Americans believe that "human beings were created directly by god"
55% of Americans believe that both evolution and creationism should be taught in school
23% of Americans believe that only creationism should be taught.
12% of Americans believe that only evolution should be taught.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=581

ghosts, miracles, devil, hell
miracles (89%), the devil (68%), hell (69%), ghosts (51%), astrology (31%) and reincarnation (27%)
"Even more surprising is that some people who say they are not Christian believe in the resurrection of Christ (26%) and the Virgin birth, Jesus born of Mary (27%)"
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=359

76% of the population believes they will go to heaven. 2% that they will go to hell, 4% to purgatory. 89% believe in heaven and 73% believe in hell.
http://www.harrisinteractive.com/harris_poll/index.asp?PID=167

18% of the population believes that the sun revolves around the earth:
http://net127.com/1999/07/06/poll-sun-revolves-around-the-earth/

48% of Americans read A BOOK over the last year.
http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/ReadingAtRisk.html

46-51% of the adult population would probably not be able to read a book anyway...
http://literacy.kent.edu/Oasis/Pubs/nalsrev.htm
http://www.nifl.gov/reders/reder.htm

some more stats out of "Redneck Nation" by Michael Graham:
70% of Americans believe in angels.
50% of Americans believe they have their own personal guardian angel.
42% - haunted houses
26% - witches
80% - government is hiding the truth about aliens (thanks X-files)
32% - have seen an angel

I am still looking for some stats on American historical and geographical knowledge. In particular I would like to know how many Americans can pinpoint the tiny continent of Asia on a map..

OK, now a basic question. If 51% of Americans believe in ghosts (or in any other belief with wide-ranging support) am I allowed to state that such a view is stupid despite the majority acceptance it has gained?

Yes I am. Its stupid.

What if I was to find a poll where the majority of those polled believed that Montenegro was a country next to Bolivia? Does the fact that the majority believe this fallacy give it any credence?

No. Its still just as dumb.

2005-09-26T20:11:00.000-07:00

ping

just ping

just wanted to ping

just ping

ping

I feel I should explain how it is possible to do 'nothing'. It seems that some productive people are incapable of understanding the concept of doing 'nothing'. I guess it all comes down to definitions. Obviously it is impossible to do nothing unless one is dead. However 'nothing' is different from nothing. For example eating, sleeping, shitting, etc. are all things one does when one does 'nothing'. One might also read, cook, watch TV, listen to music, write useless blog entries, hang out with friends and do various kinds of activities and still when asked by someone what he had done over the past week would respond that he had done 'nothing'. Somebody who says they have done 'nothing' is somebody who has unfortunately absorbed society's understanding of life as an exercise in productive labor in its most protestant-ethical meaning. That is, 'nothing' is anything not fundamentally contributing to one's earnings potential and consequently (protestant-ethically) to salvation. Notice someone that did not accept such a bleak theology would never reply that they have done 'nothing' during any period of time. They would have been talking to friends, watching a little TV, listening to some music, 'working' on their blog, 'working' on even eating, but never, never doing 'nothing'. Thus the curse of people that do 'nothing' is not that they do nothing, but they don't take pleasure from all the little nothings that they do do.

2005-07-26T21:48:00.000-07:00

I have decided to archive my brain farts. Mostly because I find them entertaining, but way too easily forgotten. I am hoping that the continuous writing down of brain farts will lead to a fart avalanche process which might result in a hideously delicious massive brain gas explosion.

Alternately they might just result in a series of smelly brain fart driven posts.

Now that I have made a decision to write down brain farts, my mind seems temporarily out of gas.

Oh, wait, its cycling back..

Brain fart entry # 1.

My brain has been farting all day trying to formulate several gaseous things. The first is in the field of international trade. I am basically trying to figure out how the US economy is managing the whole trade deficit problem. It seems to basically come down to the fact that with the end of the gold-backed currencies, the relative strengths of most currencies are determined by market forces and a country's currency stability in the face of market forces is based on its holdings of currency reserves, which are denominated in dollars. If somebody has euros and they need dollars they go and buy dollars on the currency exchange markets. The going price is the one that somebody is willing to buy/sell euros/dollars. In the case of some countries, mostly in Asia, the central bank steps in and determines what it considers an acceptable exchange rate for its currency and as long as it has the foreign reserves to keep selling its currency for the price it sets then it will succeed in setting the price... Even in places with market-based exchange rates, the central banks will sometimes step in to limit the fluctuations of the currency. The ability of these countries' central banks to defend their exchange rates is determined by the size of their own foreign currency reserves. This, in turn, is generally counted in dollars. Until the mid-20th the relative price of currencies and the ability of a country to defend its currency (should it choose to do so) was determined to a large extent by the amount of precious metals (gold,silver) possessed by countries.

If a country's gold possessions decreased, then the relative value of its currency decreased causing its exports to be more competitive, rebalancing trade and causing parity in a country's current account. Even without the gold standard, freely floating currencies should rebalance based on trade and their economies would readjust accordingly. This would be true in every case except one: the United States. Because you see we have the ability to print gold. This has in fact become our biggest area of competitive advantage. So, lets say the Chinese have the humongous low-paid, relatively low-quality work-force and produce low-capital intensive, high-labor intensive goods. The Europeans have a well-paid, high-quality work-force and produce high-capital intensive, and low-labor intensive goods. We got them all beat. The United States prints gold. Not only do we print it, but we package it and sell it abroad. Its our export. The whole trade deficit thing would make perfect sense if we replace the $ figures with pretend gold amounts. Say everytime you see $20000, you replace that with 50 ounces of gold..
So our accounts would simply look something like this:
Imports: (trade goods - oil, cars, computers, knick-knacks, etc) worth 3150000000 ounces of gold
Exports: (trade goods - airplanes, tanks, chemicals) worth 1786250000 ounces of gold and gold in the amount of 1363750000 ounces of gold

Now as long as you find 1363750000 ounces of gold every year, there is absolutely no problem. And of course there isn't, because we have discovered what alchemists dreamed of for thousands of years and we use printing machines to produce gold. Of course, dollars aren't really gold... However, many countries are currently perfectly willing to hold on to massive amounts of dollar-denominated debt and assets. So the international competitiveness of the US economy consists of its ability to create massive piles of dollar-denominated debts that could be sold abroad as if they were golden. The US consumers of course have no problem in complying with such an interesting demand and gorge themselves on cheap credit...

The US consumer's job is to spend, spend, spend (preferably on credit). Their debts are combined into huge blocks and sold abroad. Whats the point of actually producing something in the United States when all we need to do is to find new and innovative ways of packaging and selling dollar-denominated debt abroad? So, can there ever come a time when the world will not want our pretty green gold anymore? Nah... And even if that day comes, our economy will just simply and rapidly adjust and we will start producing knick-knacks to trade with the rest of the world that might not want to trade their goods and resources for our green gold anymore. Painfull? Nah. I am sure that many real estate agents will quickly and painlessly become engineers and go to work in factories. And the consumers will gladly trade in that 4WD SUV for a reasonably priced compact... No problem, right??

Brain fart entry # 2.

I am trying to figure out what it is that would make a good book. The answer is interesting characters and an interesting story. What however makes characters interesting? What makes their interactions interesting? And what makes the story interesting?

I guess that in order to be interesting characters must arouse some sort of emotions in us. This can be in the form of identification with their thoughts and feelings. Alternatively this could be in the ability of the characters to embody certain traits that we either like or dislike. Probably most effective then would be a character that we can identify with, but which has certain tragic flaws that we can also identify with but that we strongly like or dislike. A character that is similar to us, but wherein elements X, Y, and Z (on which we feel strongly) are somehow different and opposite from ours. Even better would probably be where we can see and even partially understand the flaws of the characters. This would cause some sort of internal contradiction between our understanding of the flaw and our condemnation of the thoughts and deeds resulting from it.

There are also less interesting characters that basically have a perfectly consistent character and off of which the main characters develop and differentiate. There is also a genre of ideal characters - superheroes, supervillains, but from my point of view they are much less interesting and appeal to a very different part of the brain. I'll have to think more about superheroes and supervillains and the whole appeal of completely unconflicted characters. Probably there is an appeal of a clear struggle with a clear and obvious result. An appeal to the ideals behind the superheroes which people aspire to achieve in themselves.

What makes interactions between characters interesting? In my opinion here there are two main aspects. The first is misunderstanding caused by imperfect information and character flaws. The second is deception and the reasons behind it. The more we can identify with the motivations behind deception and the flaws causing misunderstanding, the more entertained we are with the development of the relationships and the outcome of the interactions. This is especially true where the interplay of motivations and flaws has an unclear outcome or where the characters are developing over the course of the book causing the interactions to again have a non-obvious conclusion.

What makes the story interesting? Here I am a bit lost... I'll think about this one tomorrow afternoon while I am swimming in the pool... Probably something to do with uncertainty resulting from multiple narrative strands and multiple flawed characters coming together. This is probably combined with some aspects of a consistent central strand that is running towards an unexpected conclusion, that should in many ways be consistent with the interactions of all the characters and events and at the same time leaves you fulfilled and unrushed. Importantly, probably the conclusion must not kill the meaningfulness of the interactions of the characters that happened in the earlier events. Thus all the interactions and events must consistently lead to an unexpected conclusion. There probably lies the biggest pitfall... Often, either the conclusion is not unexpected, or the chain of events does not consistently lead to it.

Anyways, enough farting for one post... cheers.

2005-07-09T22:58:00.000-07:00

check out Google Earth.

Its really, really, really, really cool. In the US you can zoom in on what seems to be much of the country. In NYC it displays the way the buildings are constructed, dont know about other urban areas. Everywhere it colors and displays the street names among many other landmarks...

cheers.

2005-07-07T19:33:00.000-07:00

X number of places to visit before you die...

So there I was looking at National Geographics' 50 'greatest places of a lifetime' to visit and of course as anyone else would do I was checkmarking the ones i've seen.

I am up to 18 out of 50, but interestingly they are concentrated in the world wonders and urban spaces categories... So I have seen 8/10 urban spaces (I haven't seen Rio or London) and 7/10 world wonders (I haven't seen Angkor, Machu Picchu or Mesa Verde). And thats counting the artificial world wonder of cyberspace which has no business there. While the Acropolis (and Greece in general) is overplayed and shouldn't be in this list, I'll take it. Then there is Vermont, Tuscany and the Alps which I'll claim on technicality of having been there at one point or another.

Here is a link. Do a count.

2005-07-05T14:33:00.000-07:00

Hey e$.. This is a reply to

The Overstretch Myth

They are insane.

In order to consume a country must produce. We produce a lot less than we used to and consume a lot more than we used to. We consume more because there is a lot of cheap money floating around our economy, which causes our asset prices to rise and makes it seem that we (as individuals) are in good financial positions. There has been no corresponding inflation in goods because much of them are imported and their prices are kept down by currency manipulation by our trading partners, most notably the Chinese. The other side of this is that foreigners are using their dollar profits from trading to buy American assets and liabilities which in turn drives up the 'adjusted' savings rate that Levey and Brown talk about.

Were the exporting nations (mostly East Asian) to try to drop their dollars they would themselves be in a shitty situation. Their asset bubbles (supported by their US dollar assets) might crash, killing much of the domestic consumption, their currencies will rise in value, their goods will be more expensive in the US and they will face a huge production glut from a loss of US market share. Production gluts make for nasty economic consequences. This is the explanation for our trade deficit. Theirs is based on the assumption of perfect knowledge and fair play (ie: that foreign central banks are buying US dollars from their exporters because they think its a good investment), something that simply doesn't exist here. The change that took place several years ago when the buyers of dollar denominated liabilites stopped being foreign private investors and became mostly foreign central banks should have set off warning bells. What needs to be understood is that the problem is not in the already existing dollars that may or may not be dropped by Asian central banks. The problem arises in the fact that what is happening here is that stability of the system is based on somebody trying to maintain the price of a commodity whose supply is increasing at a very fast rate with no particular increase in the demand. We are continuously increasing the amount of dollars in circulation and somebody else is expected to keep buying them in order to keep their value constant. Its like MAD's freaky cousin.

A good quote is that the fiat dollar system is "a childish game in which, after each round, the winners return their marbles to the losers".

This is basically what is happening here... Yes this can continue for now, but to argue that this is healthy is insane. While the United States is trying to maintain some sort of hegemony over the world, the rest of the world seems to look at us as the Eloi to their Morlocks.

The first step is to stop the increase in the number of dollars being released into the wild. This must take the form of an end to US government deficits. The only way to achieve this is to kill the Bush tax cuts and in fact increase taxes on the top 5% income-earners and at the same time end these silly imperial deployments around the world. The next step is to increase the domestic production base. Since capital is cheap and will probably continue to be cheap the only thing missing to increase domestic production is to ensure a market for US-made goods. This would require a significant amount of government intervention, including tariffs on targetted industries which would also increase government revenues. When the market is ensured, this is when US corporate capital will be repatriated and used for investment rather than as dividends for additional consumption. The domestic production would eventually replace current consumption which is driven by phantom assets and easy credit with a more healthy consumption driven by real income growth for the middle and lower classes.

To rely on fair play, some strange inherent economic superiority and on the long-term continuation of the function of the dollar as the world's sole fiat currency is insane.

2005-07-02T13:44:00.000-07:00

Screw Africa, Japan, Europe and China; bring on the trade wars.

I am watching Live 8 on MTV and it seems to be a really cool concert and might actually push the G8 into lowering sending some aid to Africa and maybe even lowering tariffs on some agricultural products. Great you are thinking. There are people starving in Africa while the rich white farmers are making billions due to the trade protection and other subsidies given to them by national governments. The idea behind Live 8 is that they are not actually asking for your money, just your 'support'. Now, this is a bit misleading. When they are asking people to pressure the G8 into sending money to Africa, they are in fact asking the G8 to send money collected from everybody's taxes. This money is the citizen's money. They are also asking for a decrease in the protection granted to farmers in developed countries. This again is an appeal to redirect money that otherwise would cycle through the national economies towards the national economies of African nations. These are significant sums of money. In fact, unless we would like the abandonment of millions of acres of farmed land in the United States, France and Japan, these are steps that need to be avoided. The final effect of such steps in the United States would be the creation of a large country where there will be huge cities with huge suburbs and large stretches of abandoned land in between.

Pardon me, of course, but screw the poor African farmers. The national governments of Europe, America and Japan owe nothing to them. There is no social contract between rich nations and poor nations, and no responsibility for poverty or starvation can be placed on the doorstep of the G8 nations.

There is however a social contract between the national governments and their citizens. The governments have a duty to protect the economic well-being of their working citizens - be they farmers or industrial workers. Obviously, since their citizens also happen to be consumers there is a trade-off between the well-being of the producers and the well-being of the consumers. It should be noticed that as the wage-earning laborers are also the consumers, the destruction of the industrial wage-earning base limits the ability of the wage-earners to buy consumer products. In any case, the destruction of the industrial base through the free-trade export of industry produces higher profits for the owners of corporations, thus effectively redistributing wealth from wage-earners to those that own the capital. International corporations control almost all of the industrial production and the distribution outlets for consumer goods. Less than half of the US households own stocks, and of that the vast majority is in the hands of the top 5% of the population. This small minority benefits from globalizaton and free-trade. This is the explanation for the rising economic inequality that is prevalent in every country that does not protect its industry and its wage-earning base. A second problem is that the redistribution of wealth also should in the long-run have the effect of decreasing the size of the national market because people that make more money spend less of their income, as a percentage, on consumption than the middle class and the poor. They also have higher savings rates, but with the lack of controls on capital movement, are likely to seek higher returns on their assets and to send their savings for investment abroad. Why invest in a contracting national market with high labour costs when there are no barriers to imports when you can gain bigger advantages from investing in markets that are actually protected by their national governments? There is in fact no free-trade! The Japanese, the Chinese and others subsidize their own industries through the manipulation of their currency and through the limits placed on imports. The Europeans subsidize their own industries through giving money to unproductive industries only to make sure they stay afloat.

The current trade policy also effects the ability of the US government to collect taxes from its citizens and to fund its current spending commitments. The ability of the rich to use all the tax loop-holes at their disposal and the fact that long-term capital gains and dividends are also generally taxed at lower rates than middle-class incomes, mean that the taxes collected by national governments should be lowered by the redistribution of wealth thus further decreasing the ability of government to help its citizens.

Last, but most important is a misconception that seems to be common belief. This, the idea that the wealthy American national market is international public property is just plainly false. This vast market owed its wealth to the infrastructure created and maintained by the national government which paid for them using taxes levied on local taxpayers and on local tax-paying businesses. It seems reasonable to give those companies and citizens that created the infrastructure some advantages in access to the market in return for their contribution to its creation. It also makes sense to create national economic policy based on the interests of the majority that doesn't have significant stock holdings rather than on the interests of a large minority that owns the capital. This effectively means putting up trade barriers to protect whatever is left of American industry and to foster the reindustrialization of America. The protection of the US market will stimulate large investments by foreign and domestic companies that wish to continue to have access to the US market.

Proceeding from this point onwards on the path that has led to a situation where the US has a trade deficit of more than half a trillion is plainly insane. It should be understood that every dollar of the trade deficit is a dollar that is not cycling through the US economy. The impact of a half a trillion dollar trade deficit is in fact trillions lost to the national economy if you consider that money spent in a local economy circulates more than once through the economy. A trade deficit is one of the worst kinds of inefficiencies that a national economy can have. The only thing that has kept the US economy afloat is the fact that foreigners and foreign governments are still content buying up American bonds and companies thus ensuring that more and more money will flow out of the country in the future, and constantly undermining the ability of the US to pursue an independent economic policy.

Without reindustrializing through government protection of the US market for US-produced products, the United States is doomed to become a second rate power over the course of the next 25 years. Yes this is protectionism and there might be trade wars as a result. It might be about time we had a trade war. Who will be hurt more from this? The US economy, which is running a trade deficit of half a trillion dollars or the Europeans, the Japanese and the Chinese who are running a surplus? A trade war, or the threat thereof seems to be the only way of bringing US trade policy and economic relations between the US and the rest of the world back to a sane long-term policy. So, basically as I stated at the top, screw Africa, Japan, Europe and China; bring on the trade wars.

2005-06-16T01:48:00.000-07:00

I listened to some Israeli music today. Just sorta stumbled upon it..

It is true that a lot of Israeli music is just shitty copies of American pop culture. There are rappers and Britney Spearses and there is Mizrahi ethnic music which has no equivalent in the States but is still usually low-brow stuff. Coexisting with these strands is a large body of excellent and still widely listened to music.

The interesting thing about a lot of this music which also applies to many Israeli music is a much more complex approach to human nature and human relationships. It seems deeper than the stereotype filled garbage that is played in American pop music and on American small and large screens. In reality its not at all deeper. Its just just closer to reality. Characters in films, and artists in music simultaneously take life seriously and sardonically. Human interaction is filled with pain, miscommunication, lies, deceit, things unsaid, double meanings, momentum, sarcasm, boredom... These are not shown as disfunctional aspects of relationships, but as normal, expected every-day things. Humans are shown for what they are - inconsistent, irrational, moody, vindictive, vulnerable, manipulative, lazy, conflicting - and these adjectives rather than applying to one person for all of their lives can apply to one and the same person at different times of a single day.

A second aspect that seems to be grossly understated in American culture are changes in a person's outlooks and views as he ages. Somehow the mass culture doesn't recognize that a person changes over time. It basically avoids providing any serious realistic portrayal of the psychology of people as they get older. Or rather the complete cultural focus on one period of a person's life - youth - has crowded out even minimal focus on other age groups and has hampered the ability of people to understand the process of aging except as a journey initially to and then for a long time away from the elusive youthful ideal.

Its almost like there was an agreement made between Madison Avenue, Radio and Hollywood about 40 years ago according to which the mass culture has chosen to define the characters that we allow people to become. The people that are like each character are then clumped into market segments and society is built as an amalgamation of these market segments.

After rereading the last few paragraphs a thought came to me that simplifies the previously stated notions. Basically American culture has a very superficial approach to life. Its almost like for Americans life is a very simple thing and a deeper understanding or look at psychology and life processes is only necessary for celebraties and serial killers. Everybody else should be able to get through life on instinct and momentum. Any wonder that so many people end up on Prozac, Zanex and psychotherapy? No one ever equipped them to deal with life.

2005-05-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

This is as close to a reasonable solution that I have seen

http://www.southerncrossreview.org/34/galbraith.htm

However, any solution that creates a weak federal Iraq is basically creating a situation where either the United States itself has to stay in the region to balance the Iranians or the Iranians become the undisputed regional power in the Gulf.

2005-05-27T23:05:00.000-07:00

The New Shiite Iraq aka Up Shit Creek Without a Paddle.

Iraq was traditionally the counterweight to Iran in the Middle East. Since its creation by the British, Iraq has been a base for pan-Arab nationalism - the idea that the ideal situation for the Arabs is to have one state from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf. This ideology has traditionally been followed by the Sunni Arabs in the Middle East and is the intellectual source of much of the region's rhetoric. The Arab League was the institution that was created to execute the goals of pan-Arabism and its avowed purpose is to bring the Arabs closer together until a pan-Arab state can be created. Fortunately however there has never been a single Arab leader who has had the power to create such a unified state over the objections of the others, though Nasser came close in the early 1960s with the creation of the United Arab Republic. Under Saddam this rhetoric was even more pronounced and most propaganda that came out of Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war was fitted with the message that Iraq was leading the Arab nation in its struggle with its Persian Shiite enemies. The reason why the government in Iraq has followed this ideology was because it has always been ruled by Sunnis strongmen and the Shiites had little voice in the formulation of the country's identity. Many Shiites bought into the rhetoric and during the Iraq-Iran war, the mass defections that the Shiite Iranians expected from the Iraqi side did not take place (though isolated cases did take place). It would seem then, that Saddam succeeded in educating the Shiites to be more attached to their Arabism than to their Shiism.

When we invaded Iraq in 2003, the only way of maintaining Iraq's traditional role was to leave it in the hands of the Sunni Arabs. Ideological constraints forced the United States into pursuing a democratic experiment in that country. This included the dismantling of the Sunni army, the de-Baathication of the government and the bringing into the power structure of the Shiite parties. The elections of 2005 pushed this trend further along when the Shiite coalition - the United Iraqi Alliance took more than half the seats in the National Assembly. With the amount of airtime given to the Iraq election it is very surprising that very little research was done into the make-up of the UIA. If anybody had done the research they would have noticed that the biggest parties in the coalition were the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the al-Dawa party, and the party of Moqtada al-Sadr. The last seems to be more of a party based around a temporarily popular young firebrand. The other two are entities of long-standing.

Both SCIRI and al-Dawa have their origins in the religious seminaries of the holy Shiite city of Najaf. In the 1950s and the 1960s the clerics there devised an ideology to counter the left-wing ideologies that were gaining ground in the Shiite community. The mostly young clerics, rather than following the traditional Shiite theology of abandoning the world to its ills until the return of the 12th Imam (think Messiah), became convinced that all the answers for proper Islamic government were already in the Islamic teachings and that it was their job to create a state based on Islam and to rule it in its name. They believed that such a state would need to be ruled by a hierarchy of clerics answering to the all-powerful head of state who as the supreme source on the interpretation of the Koran would hold all authority, both secular and religious. The most prominent Iraqi founders of this ideology were Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim and Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr. The most widely known scholar who adopted this ideology was the Ayatollah Khomeini. This ideology gained notoriety when it was implemented in Iran after the Islamic Revolution. During the reign of the Baath and of Saddam in Iraq leaders of the al-Dawa took refuge abroad, mostly in Iran. SCIRI was formed in Iran out of some al-Dawa activists and some Iraqi POWs and fought on the side of the Iranians during the Iran-Iraq war. SCIRI maintains a close relationship with the clerical establishment there, including cooperation between the SCIRI's armed wing - the Badr Brigades and the Islamic republic's hard-core parallel army - the Revolutionary Guards. The al-Dawa as an organization does not have as close relations to the Iranians as SCIRI. This stems from a basic theological difference between SCIRI and al-Dawa. SCIRI believes that the supreme authority for the institution of an Islamic state is the Supreme Religious Ruler of the State of Iran. al-Dawa never accepted Khomeini's claims to supreme authority in the Shiite world. It is more interested in an independent supreme Iraqi Shiite cleric. Their relations with the Iranians are nonetheless warm.

Clerics from the al-Dawa movement were also prominent in the creation of another notorious organization. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the new Baath government in Iraq started throwing out the firebrand clerics who preached this ideology. Many of the clerics were Lebanese and made their way back to that country where they soon created several organization that after 1979 would merge to become the Hezbollah.

Another aspect of this ideology relates to the grand view of the relations between the world and Islam. Strangely enough the Shiite clerics of Najaf came to essentially the same conclusion as the Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb, whose ideology forms the basis for much of the beliefs of Sunni Islamists. Their conclusion was that Islam is fighting a war against the ideologies and forces of the West. They did not differentiate much between Communism, Capitalism and Democracy, pointing out that all these ideologies are secular in their base formulation, whereby they are not derived from an absolute source. The capricious and non-absolutist nature of these ideologies, according to these scholars, make them unsuitable for the world of Islam, which already has a ready constitution, economic system and form of government in the form of the Islamic system. The attempts by the West to hold up their ideologies as models for imitation put the West into conflict with the Muslims, creating a need for the Muslims to fight back.

From the description given of the main Shiite political parties it should seem clear that an Iraq that is run by SCIRI and al-Dawa is unlikely to confront a surging Iran, as it would be expected to do under pan-Arabist Sunni minority rule. Due to the ideological constraints of both parties (i.e. neither party is a big fan of democracy) it also seems unlikely that a secular Democratic government will last long in a United Islamic List governed Iraq. Because the new Shiite-led government will probably try to implement some aspects of Islamic rule, it is also unlikely that good relations can be maintained between the Sunni minority (both Arab and Kurd) and the Iraqi government.

All this leaves the US up shit creek without a paddle... I am still trying to come up with a good outcome scenario as far as the Iraqi situation goes.

2005-05-27T02:20:00.000-07:00

Rhetoric and Resources

So, apparently the neo-cons have decided that a War on Terror means imposing Democracy on the Muslim world, starting with Iraq. This objective has been stated in speeches by the President and those around him.

Do we have the resources for such a project?

We have started our 'crusade for democracy' in Iraq, where things are definately not going well. We are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into that country with seemingly little result. We are running a budget deficit of somewhere in the neighborhood of $450 billion dollars and our defense spending seems to be only growing. The US national debt has already reached $7.75 trillion, not including the bankrupt Social Security cookie jar.

We have stationed 150,000 US troops on the ground and brought in maybe another 15,000-20,000 allied forces. We have supposedly trained over 100,000 Iraqi police and national guard, even though according to most reports the only effective forces are several thousand Special Forces and what used to be the Kurdish peshmerga. Any dream of replacing US troops with allied forces is long forgotten after the withdrawal of the forces of 10 countries and the planned withdrawal or downsizing in 2005 of the forces of at least four others (Italy, Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine). These withdrawals would leave only the Americans, Brits with sizable fighting forces facing the insurgency (the Koreans are sitting in the Kurdish zones, the Japs dont leave their compounds). The already stretched US forces are going to need to control even more territory once the withdrawing forces hand over command of their sectors to the US military.

The US Army is facing a recruiting crisis, and has not met its recruiting goals in at least three months. Even more alarming is the four month shortfall in the Marine Corps recruiting. The reason for the crisis is clear and it stems from the fact that during wartime fewer young people want to join the army to face the possibility of death in combat. This is especially true in a situation where the population is almost evenly split on the question of the need for the war in the first place. Where are the troops for this war going to come from? Are we facing a prelude to a new national draft?

The tens of billions of dollars spent on the ground in Iraq and the 1800+ US and coalition dead and 12,000+ wounded have not created a stable situation in the country with car bombings going off almost every day for the past month. The Pentagon and White House have made no statements on a time-table for a withdrawal or created any clear benchmarks for such a withdrawal.

If Iraq is only the first stage in a grand strategy of spreading democracy then the resources currently spent on the military will continue to be spent and the massive overseas deployments will also continue. With the federal budget deficit and national debt being what they are, where is the money for this grand plan for the world going to come from?

I ask again, do we have the resources for this grand project? And if not, then should we not be thinking up an alternative strategy to the 'crusade for democracy' being executed by our leaders right now?

2005-05-19T11:55:00.000-07:00

Hubris

There seem to be a large number of people in this country that believe that the world should be run according to some principles, and if the world refuses then it is the world and not their principles that need to be fixed. The idea that some principles must be scrutinized as to whether or not they can be applied or not to the real world seems to be far from their thinking when they make their decisions.

Now bypassing the whole discussion of trying to impose freedom and liberty by force and to instill democratic values on tribal sectarian structures through imperialistic institutions there are some things that are just insane within the country itself.

In a situation where the US military is incapable of meeting its recruiting goals the US Senate and House of Representatives have passed a bill according to which the military would have to restructure their forces so that women are not put into combat support positions. These 'forward support companies' would usually be in charge of logistics and can be imagined as being involved in training, supply, repairs and administration. This comes after the realization that support companies stationed in Iraq are coming under fire from the insurgents and that there is no front-line with convoys getting attacked regardless of their passengers. Now the wise senators and representatives have decided that frail women are not ready for war and that they need to be protected from the Arabs by bureaucratic means if necessary. This is in spite of the fact that as a result of such legislation the US military will simply have to take men that would otherwise be sent to combat units and redirect them to plug holes. I suppose they will take the women out of these units and send them to be secretaries... Progress is made once again towards the American utopia of equality and justice for all regardless of gender, race, national origin, etc... Does anybody suppose that the next time the US tries to preach equality of the sexes they might get an opposing argument based on such US policies as this one?

This bill has also decided to increase the number of Army and Marines by 10,000 and 1,000 respectively - at a time when they can't meet their current recruiting goals! Talk about living in the clouds!

This comes on the heels of another brilliant policy in regards to the US intelligence community. The US military has recently made headlines for axing linguists proficient in Arabic and Farsi for being gay. Now, as people might be aware, there exist a major need within the US government for people that are fluent in several languages - Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, Pashtun, Korean and Uzbekh to start with. These languages are useful for a very obvious reason - the TERRORISTS and INSANE PSYCHO DICTATORS speak them. And at least theoretically the purpose of an intelligence community is to understand the enemy and to provide the Vice President with information about what the enemy is up to. Of course in America the purpose of the intelligence community is to create long analyses from which politicians can pick and choose sentences to justify irrational policies. I have ventured off-topic...

Back to the facts. Here is another fact: Americans suck at learning foreign languages. Go to any foreign non-English speaking university world-wide with a study-abroad section. I guarantee you that that the students who know the local language the worst will be American. This is in addition to the fact that Americans are not known world-wide as major travellers. They are more of the tourist bus people - off the bus at the Eiffel tower - quick Maggie take a picture - back on the bus - on to the Louvre - quick Joey take a picture - 'isn't Paris beautiful? its so much more beautiful than Bloomington.' (yeah, thats hard) - back to the States in 8 days. Paris, by the way, sucks.

Again I meander. What if I add to these facts another one: It takes 63 weeks for the US military to train a person to be proficient in Arabic or Farsi. In any case when you add up these facts you figure that the US must be doing everything possible to hire and keep the maximum number of these people at their jobs. See, here is another situation where logic doesn't lead you in the right direction. They are firing these people..

This country's moral standards are being set by a bunch of Southern Puritan white people for whom moral principles are more important than objective reality. These are the same people that believe that September 11 occured because of the 'pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America' (Jerry Falwell - September, 2004) Let me explain what the good reverend means. What he means is that Jesus is in person protecting and guiding the actions of the United States. As long as the US is a 'moral' country it will be protected by Jesus and will only be hit when the 'morality' of this country wanes. Why continue to explain? Let the honorable Dr. Falwell bury himself:

Falwell said he believes the ACLU and other organizations "which have attempted to secularize America, have removed our nation from its relationship with Christ on which it was founded."

"I therefore believe that that created an environment which possibly has caused God to lift the veil of protection which has allowed no one to attack America on our soil since 1812," he said.

(The veil of protection? I thought those were called oceans.)

And here is a serving of Pat Robertson, speaking right after Dr. Falwell.

"We have sinned against Almighty God, at the highest level of our government, we've stuck our finger in your eye," said Robertson. "The Supreme Court has insulted you over and over again, Lord. They've taken your Bible away from the schools. They've forbidden little children to pray. They've taken the knowledge of God as best they can, and organizations have come into court to take the knowledge of God out of the public square of America."

Frankly, I think that this country needs a bit of relief from the forces of religious fundamentalism. Could somebody please invade? Or even better maybe we can divide the country along the Blue/Red state lines? They can have Bush, Jesus, Texas and Iraq. We'll take Clinton, Guilliani, Cali and Hawaii... They can have all the Jesus and decency they want.... We'll just take the meager godless left-overs...

2005-05-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

History - Americanized away into fiction.

I am guessing that for every Hollywood quasi-historical movie one can write a couple of pages on the discrepancies between real history and the Hollywood kind. Now I fully understand that the objective of Hollywood is to write a good story, one that will sell to an American and to an international audience. I also understand that it is better to have a exciting and entertaining historical drama with some discrepancies than to have a lifeless documentary style boredomfest which is historically accurate. Nevertheless, the understanding of these facts of showbiz does not prevent me from seeing and being seriously annoyed by inconsistencies in the movie, especially when these errors have no impact on the fictitious storyline. It is especially worse when the events themselves are more dramatic and would probably play better on screen than the story as written by Hollywood!

So, I went to see the movie 'Kingdom of Heaven' and now that I have let it digest I am going to point out both the historical mistakes and the logical problems that plague this movie.

The story starts out roughly in the early 1180s with a blacksmith named Balian. He lives in a small French village and he is under great strain as his wife has just committed suicide and is thus barred from heaven by Catholic doctrine. A Crusader knight [Godfrey of Ibelin] with his multicultural posse (which very strangely includes a black crusader knight. In 1180 IN FRANCE!) on his way back to the Holy Land drives into town and declares himself to be his long-lost father who had a thing with his mother many years back. Due to what sounds like a rather painful wound he has since lost the ability to sire children. He proposes that Balian comes with him to the Holy Land. Balian initially rejects him but then in a moment of rage he kills a priest and so is stricken by spiritual depression. He leaves his village and after what appears to be many days on the road reaches Godfrey's posse. Quite soon a large group of archers and knights catch up to the Crusader posse and demand that Balian be handed over to them. When this is refused by the crusaders a well-planned set piece battle immediately starts. Through might and determination the crusaders overcome the attackers.

[problem - logical: the idea that a strong force can be instantly organized and sent to look for Balian seems unlikely with the communications infrustructre of the 12th century. It would take weeks for any message to leave the village, get to the bishop, be sent back to the feudal lord, and from the lord to his vassals to organize a search party of this size
problem - historical: the real Balian of Ibelin was born a lord in the Holy Land. He was married (to Sybille's step-mother) and had 2 children by the time of the loss of Jerusalem. There is something that the movie got right, and that is the fact that a simple blacksmith did actually have the chance to become a lord in the Holy Land. This was due to the extremely high mortality rate among Franks in the Holy Land and due to the fact that very few people wanted to stay in such a shithole. A good warrior was therefore quite hard to find. Most came, saw, fought a little and went home.]

Godfrey is badly wounded. He is taken to a hospital in the Italian port of Messina. The hospital is surprisingly sanitary.

[problem: the crusaders had no idea about the causes of infections and believed that most sicknesses were the result of a spiritual curse. this contributed to the low survivability of crusader knights in the Holy Land. wounds were often fatal because of the conditions of the hospitals. thus the modern looking hospital you see in the movie is unlikely, not to mention the idea that Godfrey survived his previously mentioned quite unpleasant injury and lived to be wounded again. Here is a description of a visit of an Arab physician to the Crusaders and a description of what the Crusaders called medicine from the autobiography of Usama al-Munqidh who lived in the 12th century:

They brought before me a knight in whose leg an abscess had grown; and a woman afflicted with imbecility. To the knight I applied a small poultice until the abscess opened and became well; and the woman I put on diet and made her humor wet. Then a Frankish physician came to them and said, "This man knows nothing about treating them." He then said to the knight, "Which wouldst thou prefer, living with one leg or dying with two?" The latter replied, "Living with one leg." The physician said, "Bring me a strong knight and a sharp ax." A knight came with the ax. And I was standing by. Then the physician laid the leg of the patient on a block of wood and bade the knight strike his leg with the ax and chop it off at one blow. Accordingly he struck it-while I was looking on-one blow, but the leg was not severed. He dealt another blow, upon which the marrow of the leg flowed out and the patient died on the spot. He then examined the woman and said, "This is a woman in whose head there is a devil which has possessed her. Shave off her hair." Accordingly they shaved it off and the woman began once more to cat their ordinary diet-garlic and mustard. Her imbecility took a turn for the worse. The physician then said, "The devil has penetrated through her head." He therefore took a razor, made a deep cruciform incision on it, peeled off the skin at the middle of the incision until the bone of the skull was exposed and rubbed it with salt. The woman also expired instantly. Thereupon I asked them whether my services were needed any longer, and when they replied in the negative I returned home, having learned of their medicine what I knew not before.

]

Godfrey dies shortly after giving his sword and fiefdom to his newly found son Balian. Godfrey also imparts upon him the need for loyalty to the king and the directive to protect 'the people'. Balian then sets off on a ship towards the Holy Land. After an inconvenient storm, which wrecks the fleet he was on, he finds himself a lone survivor along with a very lucky horse that landed perfectly on a deserted sunny beach. On shore he meets 2 Arab men on horseback. They demand his horse and when he refuses they attack him. Balian kills one of them and takes the other as a hostage/guide.

[problem - logical: what language would a newly landed crusader and a Saracen talk to each other in? Much of the armies of the Muslims during the Crusaders consisted of Turkic tribesmen for whom Arabic would be a second language used as lingua franca in the Muslim world. Learning French to speak to the barbarians coming from Europe into the Arab world seems unlikely. It is the same reason why so few Americans or Europeans speak minor African dialects. For an uneducated crusader on the other hand to know any language other than his native French seems equally unlikely. Communications would probably take place on the level of grunts and jesticulation until either the crusader learned some Arabic or would employ a Christian Arab to work as a translator.]

The Saracen guide takes Balian to Jerusalem where Balian frees him in some vain attempt at modern political correctness and gives him a horse to boot.

[problem - logical: balian is in essence a modern man - he is tolerant of other religions, honest, forgiving and understanding. Where these traits would come from only the writers of the screenplay would know. The idea that some truths are self-evident is a quaint Americanism to put it politely or put bluntly: outworn bullshit. where would a poor [illiterate] blacksmith from France have any understanding of Islam or for that matter any understanding of basics of modern morality? If one searches the Crusader sources on Islam one would find a complete lack of understanding of that religion amid an atmosphere of disgust and contempt for it. Furthermore, the crusaders had no doubts about the truth of their religion, the falseness of all others and the justice of their crusades into the Holy Land.]

Jerusalem is portrayed as a city where all religions come to pray in peace and understanding.

[problem - historical: other than the complete lack of understanding that prevailed on both sides of the divide, the real problem is historical. Upon arrival in the Holy Land the crusaders proceeded to slaughter or expel the populations of all the major cities. The Jewish and Muslim populations of Jerusalem were almost uniformly slaughtered with very few survivors. The same fate met the populations of Haifa, Caesarea, Beirut and all other cities that fell without a negotiated settlement. Other cities - Ramle, Tiberias, Jaffa - were abandoned in fear prior to the arrival of the Crusaders and their populations went into exile in the Muslim lands. Yet other cities, such as Acre, Tripoli and Askelon, which fell after a negotiated settlement, the population was allowed to leave. In many cases the Crusader knights, seeing an opportunity for plunder, broke the terms of the settlement and slaughtered the populations anyway. Now where is this history lesson going? Well, it seems clear that some Muslims and Jews returned to some of these cities after the initial conquest. The problem for this movie is the fact that Jerusalem was a special case. Between 1099, when the Crusaders took Jerusalem, and 1187, when they lost it, no Jews or Muslims were allowed to settle in the city. (Joshua Prawer The History of the Jews in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) p.46-47) This was a continuation of the Byzantine policy that had kept Jerusalem Jew-free until the Muslims took it in 638. There were Arabs in Jerusalem at this time, but they were all Christians and invited only because the Crusaders could barely populate even a quarter of the walled city of Jerusalem and also needed a skilled labor force which they themselves did not bring with them. ]

Balian is found by his father's peoples and is brought to his fief where he quickly makes the desert bloom by demonstrating to the moronic backwards savages the concept of a well and of an irrigation system.

[This at a time when the biggest city in Europe probably had fewer than 15,000 people and Baghdad and Cairo both had populations in the hundreds of thousands, sewer systems and public baths.]

He soon meets Sybille, the wife of Guy de Lusignan. Somehow she instantly decides to start a relationship with him. In fact it almost seems that she decided to do so prior to meeting him. He also meets the ailing king and a man the movie called Tiberias. These three share some sort of understanding about the need to be moderate and to prevent such extremists as Guy and Reynald de Chautillon from causing a war.

[Tiberias is probably closest historically to Raymond of Tripoli, who was also the master of the city of Tiberias. Reynald did exist and he was basically an ass. He, along with Templars raided Muslim caravans going to Mecca and at one point even attempted a raid on Mecca itself.]

Soon Reynald causes a war and Balian rides to the defense of the fortress of Reynald de Chautillon, Kerac - Crac des Moabites - where Balian and his 40 knights attack Saladin's full army.

[This obviously didn't happen, but this also demonstrates that the Balian of the movie is a fucking moron]

Surprisingly almost all of his knights survive the idiotic attack and are released soon thereafter to the army of the leper king of Jerusalem who negotiates a truce with Saladin.

[In 1183 Baldwin IV (the leper king) became very sick and appointed Guy as regent. In the same year Kerak (with Guy inside for a wedding ceremony) was besieged by Saladin. Baldwin IV rode out with his army and lifted the siege. No truce signed.]

The differently abled handicapable king is however unfortunately dying. So now we have the problem of succession since Guy is married to Sybille and she is the sister of the leper king. A solution to this problem is proposed to Balian whereby Guy gets whacked and Balian marries Sybille and becomes king. Balian in a fit of righteousness refuses. The leper dies and Guy becomes king. [ahem.. prooving once again that the Balian of the movie is a fucking retard]

[Later in 1183 Guy proved to be a coward in dealing with Saladin and Baldwin IV made his young nephew (Sybille's son) his successor with Raymond of Tripoli as regent. By 1185 the leper king was dead. A truce was negotiated in that year by Raymond of Tripoli in the name of the new king - Baldwin V. Guy was disgraced and went to Ascelon with Sybil. By 1186 Baldwin V died and though the Crusader barons probably would have preferred Raymond of Tripoli [Tiberias] as king, in the absense of Raymond from Jerusalem, Sybil organized her own coronation and gave the crown over to Guy. Raymond tried to set up an alternative coronation in Nablus, but failed and asked for Saladin's help in obtaining peace with Guy. More dramatic than the movie's political games aint it?]

For some reason Guy sends only three metalheads to kill Balian. Not surprisingly they fail. About this time Reynald has raided a caravan and captured Saladin's sister. Saladin invades with his army and all the lords gather in Jerusalem to discuss what should be done. Under pressure from the military religious orders and from Reynald Guy decides to go to war. Raymond and Balian refuse and leave. The crusader army runs out of water and is crushed by Saladin.

[Historically Reynald raided a caravan and might have captured Saladin's sister. Though shortly after Saladin made a promise to kill Reynald, this did not start the real war. After some minor skirmishes Raymond was able to hammer out a truce with Saladin (at least for himself). Shortly later, a Saracen party led by Saladin's son was crossing, with permission, through Raymond's land near Tiberias. The Templars, not knowing that the Saracens had permission, attacked the numerically superior Muslim army near Nazareth and were slaughtered almost to a man. Soon thereafter the main body of the army under Saladin crosses into the Crusader lands and besieges Tiberias. By this time the Crusaders had called up all of their manpower and had mercenaries from Europe. The Crusaders encamped in Sepphoras [Tzipori], which is in the Gallilee sitting roughly halfway between Tiberias and the Mediterranean. Sepphoras sits on the major roads leading from Tiberias into the Crusader lands. It also sits on some of the most fertile lands in Israel with plentiful water for the huge army that the crusaders had. While they were sitting on this point their army was invincible. They are sitting on a big hill from which they never have to move out to fight. There are almost no other water resources suitable for a large army between Tiberias and Sepphoris. No army can besiege them for any amount of time without water resources. At this point the Crusader army gets word that the city of Tiberias has fallen with only the citadel still holding out, being personally defended by the wife of Raymond of Tripoli [Tiberias] and several knights. A meeting is called where a public argument takes place between the masters of the military religious orders and Raymond of Tripoli. The military orders and the newly arrived crusaders want a fight. Raymond and many native barons are against a battle because they understands that moving from Sepphoras is a bad strategic move and that the loss of this army is the end of Jerusalem. Raymond also understands that even if the citadel of Tiberias falls he would just ransom back his wife within a few months or years. This would not be the first time such a transaction took place. Raymond himself had spent many years in captivity. Fearing that he would be called a coward and wanting to use the already paid-for mercenaries King Guy decides to march to relieve the citadel of Tiberias. Had they not made this terrible mistake they could have held Jerusalem much longer. They marched out towards Tiberias but they were being constantly harrassed by the Muslim horse archers. They were marching very slowly at the speed of the infantry because they had to constantly march in formation and neither the cavalry nor the infantry could survive separately. The infantry would be cut down by cavalry charges, while the heavy cavalry would have their horses shot out from under them turning them into immobile infantry. For this reason the cavalry had to move with the infantry so that the infantry archers could protect them from the Muslim horse archers, while the infantry needed heavy cavalry protection from cavalry charges. After a day of marching in full armor under the hot July sun (temperature somewhere in the 90s) without water and with the Muslims starting fires in front of them, the crusaders camped in a plain with no water and no protection. By the next day Saladin had them surrounded in the plain near the Horns of Hattin and the Crusaders were finished. The terrain where this battle took place by itself deserved to be in the movie. It is in hilly country, from here you can see Tiberias and the landmark itself - the Horns of Hattin - is an extinct volcano. Some of the cavalry, led by Raymond (and including Balian of Ibelin), tried to break out and succeeded. The rest of the army, disorganized and tired was attacked by Saladin and defeated. The victorious Muslims sold the captured infantry and sergeants at arms into slavery. The prices of slaves in Damascus plumetted the next day. Saladin massacred all the captured members of the orders of the Hospital and the Temple. The basic idea is that Crusader armies can not fight without knights, so if you slaughter the orders you deprive the Crusaders of many of the best knights.]

Now Balian goes back to defend Jerusalem from the inevitable attack. He arrives there to find no defenders. The first thing he does is set up some high-tech siege warfare weapons and to calibrate the ballistas and the catapults. He then proceeds to energize the defenders of the city with an inspiring speech on the lack of justice of their cause and the sanctity of the city of Jerusalem to all three religions, not just their own. If ever there were words capable of inspiring men to sacrifice their lives for the defense of a holy city, these are not them. He then, in a fit of chronologically misplaced democratic values, knights the whole male population of the city. The newly emancipated knights then proceed to valiantly defend the meaningless barren rocks of what they had formerly thought as the holiest city of Christianity. After several successful defenses of the city Balian, after negotiations, surrenders the city to Saladin who lets everyone leave peacefully. Balian (a lord) and Sybille (queen of Jerusalem) are then seen back in a shitty village in France where they live happily ever after as blacksmith and wench.

[error overload.... reboot.... OK, So in reality Balian was one of the few knights to break out of the disaster of Hattin. Soon after Hattin Saladin set up a siege of Jerusalem. Balian went into Jerusalem with Saladin's permission in order to get his wife and children out of the city. Once he got there he was begged to organize the defense of the city. He supposedly asked for and received permission from Saladin to do so while his family was allowed safe passage out of Jerusalem. He organized the defense of the city, perhaps even knighting some youths who had not fully completed their training. That he knighted the whole population of the city is absurd as Balian like any other noble would think in hierarchies and bloodlines. That he would make any speech but to proclaim the sanctity of the city and to promise its defenders salvation is equally ludicrous. To believe that a 12th century knight would admit any element of guilt for the crusades - sanctioned by the Pope - is also out there. Anyways... after repelling several attacks Saladin enters into negotiations with Balian and makes an agreement whereby each Frank would be allowed to leave the city if he was able to pay a certain amount of gold. Those that paid would be given free passage to the coast. The patriarch and the servants of the Church were of course the first to leave taking with them the treasury of the city and not caring much for the poor of the city. The nobility and anyone who could afford to pay left peacefully. The rest of the Frankish population was sold into slavery. Essentially the terms of the surrender were reasonable for the time period.

Balian moved to Tripoli (in modern Lebanon) where he continued to be an influential lord though his lands had been conquered by Saladin. He was later given new lands by Richard [the lionhearted]. In 1192 he helped Richard negotiate a truce a treaty with Saladin. He died in 1193. His children continued to be prominent lords in the Crusader kingdoms. After Guy was freed in 1188 Sybille and Guy went to Tyre (in modern Lebanon) , one of the few remaining Crusader cities, but were denied admission by Conrad, a competitor for the throne of Jerusalem. Guy soon joined the Third Crusade in sieging Acre. Sybille and her daughters died of an epidemic in 1190. The death of Sybille meant the Guy no longer had a credible claim on the throne of Jerusalem. However to compensate him for his 'loss' (of the kingdom) he was given the newly conquered kingdom of Cyprus which his descendants (he obviously remarried) continued to rule until the late 15th century. Seems to me he got a pretty sweet deal.]

Now there are a few historic inaccuracies of which the most annoying was not using the bit about Raymond of Tripoli's wife being held under siege in the citadel of Tiberias and him still being against committing the Crusader army to her rescue. Why not use this? Its drama at its best and allows a great actor like Jeremy Irons to make a dramatic speech and show the contrast between Raymond and Guy!! All you had to do was introduce the wife of 'Tiberias' in the beginning of the movie. She just needs to smile, look nice and say like 3 words. 'I wife Tiberias'.

As far as the battle and siege scenes in the movie, they are pretty good. The acting is nothing special and the characters are cut-outs. Everybody is good except for several evil lords and priests who are fueled by blind hate and are trying to disrupt the perfect harmony prevailing between the Muslims and Christians. This movie is about as PC as it gets.

Time for an anti-PC rant... So why can't we show the slaughter of the Templars or the enslavement of the remnants of the Crusaders at Hattin or of the poor of Jerusalem? If you want you can put in scenes of the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in the beginning of the movie. Why must American movies shy away from moral complexity. Why can't we have a hero who is a man of his time? Why must he be some modern PC man transported back in time a thousand years? Is there no way to portray the past honestly and not portray what we would like to have happened rather than what actually did happen? Is it impossible to portray hate, not by a small minority, but hate and dislike as something endemic in a society? How can you fight hate and racism and bigotry if you refuse to believe that it can actually be the normal condition for human beings? If we can't even show hatred as being prevalent a thousand years ago how can we every conceive the fact that many societies are still based on hate? That children are taught that blind hate is normal? That reason itself is no protection against a hate-mongering education? That religion itself can be the source of blind hate? Did the Muslims hate the Christians during the Crusades? Yes. Did the Christians hate the Muslims during the Crusades? Yes. Were Catholics doctrinally taught to hate all Jews for killing Jesus until the 1960s? Yes. Were the Germans as a people taught to hate the Jews during the Nazi Reich? Yes. Do the Palestinians hate the Israelis? Yes. Do the Arabs hate America? Yes. Were the Crusaders crusading because their religion taught them to do so? Yes. Are the Muslims fighting against the Americans because they believe their religion teaches them to do so? Yes. Are we allowed to actually portray these truths in cinema? No. Only if we are talking about small extremist minorities. Even if historically or statistically we can show that these were/are prevailing trends. To even consider that a whole population can hate irrationally is somehow against some American civil religion.

Is there any doubt that the actions and policies of countries not sharing American values can not be understood with such ideological constraints on the thinking of American decision-making organs?

OK, got carried away a bit.. Good Night..

2005-05-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

Bubba's Movie Review and Business Start-Up Essentials

Today I saw an Israeli movie called "Lalechet al haMayim" (Walk on Water). It was made by an American-Israeli or Israeli-American director (the name is Eitan Fox). It tries to deal with a bunch of topics. It brings in the holocaust, modern Germany, modern Israel, forgiveness, generational gaps among other things. Its not crap. Its relatively good in simply being a movie in which the point is not obvious, and it not forgiveness a la The Interpreter or other shitty Hollywood movies. I will have to think through the movie again to understand it, which can be either good or bad... In either case the mere fact that the movie requires thought is a refreshing change. In particular I am trying to figure out what walking on water means as a metaphor....

The movie deals with second and third generations of Israelis and Germans after the Holocaust. A Mossad agent/assassin, whose parents were Holocaust survivors, suffering major emotional trauma is sent on a mission where he has to get close to a German woman volunteering in Israel and her hippie brother. The objective is to find information on the whereabouts of their Nazi grandfather. The Nazi's grandchildren are deeply conflicted with their grandfather's famous role during the war. They are rebelling against their parents and their grandfather's Nazi ties. The sister is volunteering on a Kibbutz in Israel (relatively common to find German girls in Israel either studying in Unis, working on Kibbutzim or even more strangely converting to Judaism [often they will have Israeli boyfriends. when they break up with them they often get a Palestinian boyfriend and become deeply pro-Palestinian]). The brother is rebelling in other ways. The brother comes to visit his sister in Israel on a mission to bring her back to Germany for their father's 70th birthday party.

Anyways, the movie takes place in Israel and in Germany. Dialogue is conducted in German, English and Hebrew. Its a good movie and though it is a bit preachy at times (the part with the Arab guy) generally stays away from blatant preaching. The ending is good in surprising, a bit emotional in presenting. Overall its worth seeing.

The Israeli part of the movie seemingly takes place in the first few months of 2002 when I was in Israel and it reminded me of the events, the places and the general atmosphere. First it seemed that there was an attack almost every day until operation Defensive Shield. Second the fact that when a terrorist attack happens everybody's cell phone starts ringing and people just start calling everybody who could have been in the bombing. Israel is very small so many cell phones will ring. Or that every time after an attack on the radio they would start playing sad music, and that after a while, though depressed, people mostly just got used to the situation.

===================================

As far as business goes.. I spent some of the day reading the book 'e-myth revisited' which deals with how one should visualize the process of creating a business. Though I generally loath to admit lapses in understanding on my part, i must admit that the book has helped me greatly in better understanding the processes and concepts behind building a successful business. I initially thought of starting a business as simply doing actions A,B,C in order to make money, however if one were to do that then he would be stuck doing actions A,B,C indefinately because he hasn't built a business, he has created a new highly repetitive job for himself. He has also created a situation where he is stuck in his 'business' because he is the 'business' and without him there is nothing to sell. In essence a business must be visualized as a venture that can be formulated and systematized and then be capable of repetition without the involvement of the owner. This way it can be be run by remote or sold if so desired. In order to create such a business one must explicitly outline the roles, functions, power relations and interactions of the staff and the process for carrying out the financing, marketing, customer support, shipping, purchasing, and all other aspects required for running the business. Even though initially one person might fill all the roles within the company, once the company expands there is a need for understanding which roles are taken up by the new employees and which ones are maintained by the owner and how they interact between them. Additionally in order to have continuous operation of a business some redundancy may need to be built into the system in order to not allow the departure of one key employee or contract to fatally wound the hole system. So if I initially had thought of hiring one freelance graphics designer to do my graphics, it might be better to have 2 designers on a rotating basis so that if one is lost the other can pick up the slack while another designer is found. The same applies to other functions.

Because of this newly found understanding of how successful businesses are started I have also rethought the value of a business plan. I had previously put little value on it and thought of it as essentially a useless attempt at predicting things that can not be measured beforehand. Now I see that the value of a business plan is to outline a vision of both present and of the future and to conduct business in such a way as to work towards the future vision.

At the same time the book is full of American psychobabble... spirit, wild horses, the enterpreneur inside. Imagine your eulogy and work backwards, where do you want to be in 20 years? 50 years? Some of the greatest people I know are like mature businesses, they know how they got to where they are and where they are going. The difference between warriors and everybody else is that for warriors everything is a challenge, for everybody else it is either a blessing or a curse. blah blah blah.. blah blah... blah.... Self-fulfillment, setting personal goals and reaching them, setting a goal for your life, creating benchmarks, living a purposeful life... All that self-improvement qualities in people that we, as Americans, are supposed to respect and revere. What a bunch of crap. A pathetic attempt at substitution for a god, absolute benchmarks and a sense of community that we have sacrificed on the altar of personal control and self-aggrandizement. Since we no longer respect any old-fashioned absolute beliefs ([in a squimish voice] eeeuuuh you mean members of other religions will go to hell? eeeuuh you mean Jesus doesn't really love absolutely everybody? (btw, he f@$#*ng hates you) eeeeuuuh you mean Western civilization is better than [insert other civ here]? eeeuuuh you mean I don't have full control over my life?) we are forced into creating benchmarks for ourselves because the fact that we helped Mrs. Oldaswood cross the road does not give us any satisfaction because it doesn't help us reach our goal of $2 million, a perfect marriage and a 12 bedroom mansion half-way around the world. Is it any wonder that regardless of where we set our goals we are still going to be disappointed? If we succeed then we have nothing more to live for unless we can come up with new and even more grandiose arbitrary goals. If we fail then we have failed and there is no one to blame but ourselves because we are in full control of our lives, right? And though I use a moralizing tone, its not as if I am an external spectator...

Anyways, I have rambled on long enough. good night.

2005-05-02T19:26:00.000-07:00

It would appear to me that the world economy is essentially based on American bullshit.

Now hear me out.

The major economies of Asia - Japan, China, Korea, Taiwan - survive by creating products that they can sell to the giant American consumer market. The factories that are currently in place in each of these countries count on their continued ability to market their wares to the vast American market and thus if The United States economy was to tank, theirs would contract significantly as well.

European economies - Germany, France, England - though they have a major market of their own, still [especially Germany] are impacted significantly by global trade and by the American and Asian markets. Their economies are also slowly being 'liberalized' and are opening up to the 'free market', which basically means that they are transitioning from countries that actually produce something concrete - cars, electronics, steel - to countries which import these products from Asia and produce something else instead, hint: its brown, thick and gushes. The value of this brown murky gold is however to a large extent based on its international exchange rate which is often established by the American consumer, thus connecting the European economies to the American one.

I am waiting for a time when bullshit becomes a commodity and you can buy it and trade it as you would be trading cotton or iron. In fact I suggest that we immediately create a bullshit index using which we can quantify the health of the American economy. Its time to introduce this index or bullshit commodity prices into our calculations of the way the world economy functions.

"The value of bullshit rose 1.7% over the past 3 months. Growing customer confidence and a cold spring season which caused many consumers to stay home and watch TV contributed to the rise of bullshit commodity prices. The Asian markets responded by rallying and the Nikkei closed up 3% on expected increases in exports to the United States. The markets were apparently not concerned with the recent Asian bullshit affair in which the Chinese and Japanese central banks were buying up blocs of American bullshit to keep its prices high in order to boost exports."

America is the world's biggest producer of bullshit (George Carlin). Were bullshit prices to decrease, many of the best paid Americans - the CEOs, the lawyers, the PR people, the marketing and sales people - would lose their jobs or take pay cuts. This trend would work its way down through the US economy, especially impacting the all important service sector, which is based on serving the same highly paid, but often bored and unfulfilled individuals. The American economy would thus suffer, as would the European and Asian economies from surplus production capacities for goods Americans can no longer afford. Bullshit-based industries and professions in these countries would follow their American mentors downards thus further cutting into the customer base for global manufacturing. The entire world's economy would thus be seriously damaged giving the Great Depression of the 1930s a numeral after its name.

I should be careful now as I don't want to rock the boat. It would really suck to fall overboard...

2005-04-29T20:55:00.000-07:00

I have decided to write something, but do not have a particular topic in mind...

So I guess I'll just have to rant. This will of course be an enormous leap from my highly structured and pointed usual essays, but all one can do is try.

Now here are the options. I can either review another movie, the Korean blockbuster TaeGukGi, or I can discuss what I have learned so far about sales and marketing... Or even better I can do both, though the topics are not in the least bit interconnected, and not even I can connect them with some twisted logical leap.

So, TaeGukGi is a Korean war movie about (yes you guessed it) the Korean War. It follows the story of two brothers who were both drafted into the South Korean army against their will. The elder brother, an uneducated shoeshine boy (not really a boy), tries to protect his younger sibling and tries through heroic deeds to find a way to send his student brother away from the war. Over time he basically turns into a Korean Rambo whereby commie bullets and bombs seem to basically curl out of his path. He becomes drunk on the glory of his battle achievements and estranged from his idealistic younger brother. I am not going to bore you with the rest of the details of this movie, except to say that the ending, though predictable, is still sad, which I must say is refreshing compared to the endings of most American movies. The brutal war scenes are reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan, but this movie I would say is better in the way it portrays not just the cruel randomness of war, but in portraying the effects that war has on the nature of men.

The movie leaves neither the communist North or the South morally clean or superior and shows the brutality of both sides. The idea of 'at war as in war' is foreign to Hollywood, but seems to find a home in many of the scenes of this movie, in spite of the moralizing of some of the characters. Overall I would say that this movie is an excellent one and should be seen by every person in Washington. Maybe they will start fewer wars and understand that if you are going to send armed forces to a conflict you can not expect to have a clean war; there will always be civilian casualties and other eventualities of war...

On a side note it should be remembered that the Korean War did not officially end. There is currently a cease-fire in place which could be broken any moment. The ROK (South Korea) has a well-trained standing army of 700,000. It has a reserve force of 5,000,000. If anyone is counting, they will see that the South Koreans can mobilize a bigger army than the United States has. If the South Korean army is anything like the Israeli then important reserves could be mobilized within 72 hours. Current projections state that South Korea and the US would have 3-10 days of advance warning of a North Korean attack. This means that North Korea would be attacking a South Korean force that numbers at least several million in a country where mountains make mobile warfare essentially impossible assuring that any North Korean effort to attack would probably stall within several days. At the same time South Korea would achieve complete air and naval superiority and with the help of the US airforce can seriously damage North Korean forces massing in the narrow mountain valleys that make up Korea. Given half the inclination it seems that the South Koreans would be able to defend themselves without any American aid. Why are US forces still in Korea?

Now off to the magical land of sales and marketing to those that have too much already.. So far here are my notes:

Sales focus
- Affluent customers want recognition of achievements/expertise
- Don't tell people how good your goods are tell them how good your gods make them.
- Tell how your products improve life, love, wealth, health, career, looks, security or leisure.
- Present Problems / Offer Solutions.
- Confidence in a business is the top determinant of a sale, not quality.

Customer Lists
- Develop a customer list.
- Preferrably create a customer club.
- Constant sales and discounts make for unhealthy customer lists.

Printed materials
- Every aspect must inspire confidence.
- The headline is 90% of an ad. If they are not stopped by the headline they will never read the rest.
- Present sufficient stats and information to convince.

Tactics
- In mailed materials use 8 stamps rather than 1.
- Use postcards as they are already opened.
- Reuse artwork.

Media for ads
- Post on public bulletin boards.
- Classified ads.
- Direct marketing coupon books.

Cheers,
Boris.

2005-04-27T21:43:00.000-07:00

So Bubba needs a scheme again.

This time Bubba has effectively decided to sell crap to people who don't particularly need it but can be made to want it just long enough to place an order.

What I mean to say is that I would like to encourage relatively affluent consumers to exercise their dormant curiosity in certain product lines that might cease to interest them shortly after making a reasoned purchase.

Now the problem is finding a product line in which you can charge a high enough margin to justify your costs. I was thinking cellular phone accessories, but though I can easily find them at really cheap prices at wholesale, I don't think I can move large enough amounts of product with high enough margin.

Several ideas are currently floating in my head:

1) A catalog of various minor crap that I can get from numerous suppliers that are cheap to buy at wholesale, but might be interesting to a prospective buyer. Knives, in particular strange and murderous looking ones can be sold. When you are selling a knife you are not selling a middle aged man just a hunk of reworked steel, you are selling him an image of himself as Rambo, back when Stallone was young, or as Sean Connery as 007, again back when he was young. So for a $1.50 knife you might be able to get $11.99. In the same way you can sell a $1.90 lighter with a compass as the Delta Force Survival Training Lighter for $9.99. Other similar stuff can be sold.

2) Security products - this includes personal and home security. Although stun guns are illegal in NJ, NY there are other things that one can carry such as expandable metal rods and various pepper spray containers (not to mention some clever knives). The home security component of this would be cameras with monitors and various other contraptions for real surveillance and for the deterrence of thieves.

Other product lines are under consideration, but the security products line has the lead for now because of the possibilities of expansion into the field of installation and maintenance of security systems, and of course the fact that Americans are just plain paranoid about their personal safety and the safety of their valuables (this is the work of the media bastards. a kid disappears in florida and now Billy can't go out to play and has to watch the brainwashing on TV so that he can be even more paranoid).

The basic long-term idea behind this scheme is presented in the diagram below. A projection of sales can not be done with any certainty until the initial phase is complete. The initial exposure for the website would be provided by printed brochures that should scare the shit out of middle aged suburbanites prevalent in these parts. Such brochures/pamphlets would be distributed in places where these possible consumers gather - transportation hubs, shopping malls and for good measure thrown into those containers for car catalogs. Bulletin boards would also be utilized. Marketing efforts online would probably not initially be useful as marketing online seems to be significantly overpriced in comparison to offline marketing. I don't know what laws apply to the distribution of pamphlets or the liberal use of bulletin boards, but at the initial phase I doubt that much trouble can be encountered from widely scattering these brochures. This is of course a time-intensive procedure and must be accounted for..

Each brochure would try to sell the most impressive (read high-margin) inventory and direct people to the websites where they would be exposed to other products. Orders would also be accepted by phone and by mail-order. If the initial sales period is successful, a customer database can be created for future direct sales efforts. I figure that the initial stage objective should be to obtain roughly $250 in profits before sales expenses per day, which at the reasonable average margin of $10 / item would mean selling about 25 products every day. Costs for sales - printed materials, graphics design, phones, etc will need to be calculated a bit later. Most of these orders would probably [hopefully] come through the internet which would allow me in the initial period as the lone employee to continue to work on the distribution of printed materials, the design and sales copy of future brochures, and the expansion of the website.

Now I just need to come up with a name and some kind of idea for the theme for the website and printed materials. I gladly accept comments and help from mysterious strangers.

2005-04-27T21:40:00.000-07:00

Bubba's 'plan' for world domination or hopefully to make a couple of bucks..

2005-04-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

Bubba's Movie Reviews.

Sin City (very nice.. one miscast)

Overall a very nice movie, though pity that the stories are not more interrelated. All the actors are excellent. Unfortunately the second story has one miscast, Clive Owen. Don't get me wrong, he is an excellent actor, but while all the other characters manage to be positively cartoonish (notice Rosario Dawson and Mickey Rourke), Clive Owen just seems to have missed the point of his role - don't be complicated, just be cartoonish.

The Interpreter (typical suspense crap, nothing inspiring)

Typical suspense crap. Twists and turns here and there, none too surprising. Reasonable, but not exceptional acting. A predictable ending. The only suspense for me was whether or not this movie would break the mold by actually having the main character succumb to the darker instincts or whether it would go all PC and forgive, forget, overcome and cry. Is this supposed to be a movie for adults or for nine year olds? This guy killed your family... Are you going to let him spend the rest of his short life in a 5 star European prison writing his memoirs and arguing with Slobo about the intricacies of international politics? Well, apparently Ms. Kidman will.

Sahara (typical adventure crap, one miscast)

a.k.a. Confederate Treasure. Indy, eh, sorry Dirk Dickweed is a brave adventurer who travels around looking for a Confederate battleship in the middle of the Sahara. It gets worse. There is a woman. She sorta just shows up on a beach and miraculously is rescued by kung fu grip Dirk who along with his retard of a partner is capable of taking on dozens of AK-47 armed men with the clever deception of wearing Bedouin outfits. The armed men of course don't notice the fact that the men's face and arms happen to be white. Of course they might just be a couple of typical Bedouin albinos, but then again they could be the only two white guys in that country. In any case after a long search, the battleship is discovered when in order to create cover for their jeep from a helicopter pilot with terrible aim Dirk throws explosives into a random sand dune. The sand dune is blown up to reveal a battleship. Lucky. They then use a cannon from a battleship that has been covered by sand for 150 years to fire a single accurate cannonball into a helicopter. Obviously there was an evil dictator on that helicopter. There is also some loosely connected story about a waste-treatment plant in the middle of the desert and how it is threatening the whole world with pollution... Obviously somebody has to save the day, and the marines aren't in town because they are all deployed in Bagdad. Crap. Crap. Crap....

There are also the evil corporate CEO, the loyal former naval admiral, the noble savage, and several geeks to round out the cast. Now, Penelope Cruz is very cute, but if nobody had noticed she is tiny. I might have believed Selma Hayek in that role, but Ms. Cruz is just not believable as a kick-ass danger-seeking doctor. She was probably a poor choice. All the acting was boring and uninspired and the only redeeming point of this movie is Steve Zahn... That tells you a lot about this movie.

This film is CONDEMNED.

2005-04-25T06:29:00.000-07:00

Money, Bullshit and Love (inspired by George Carlin)

The ancient Greeks were great thinkers. The image that we have of them is of a group of gentlemen sitting around in togas eating a hearty meal, drinking wine and discussing philosophy. Obviously somebody had to harvest the grain, slaughter the chickens, cook the meals and stomp the grapes to make the wine. These individuals do not make it onto T-shirts or into history books. The image of the Greeks is of course just an image that depressed Europeans created over the past 500 years of Western civilization which has usually been very, very bloody and depressing. They were looking for a Golden Age and for inspiration for their struggle against the orthodoxy of the Kings and the Popes. Regardless of the justification, the image they created is an example of one of Bubba's essential elements of modern civilization - bullshit.

The Greek philosophers - a couple of dozen of rich, white, slave-owning Greeks who liked little boys - were very interested in the questions of science. They wanted to break down all of nature into a small number of essential building blocks. The same idea has been driving the modern sciences (both natural and social) for the past couple of hundred years. Unfortunately this effort in the social sciences has been limited to the ivory tower of academia and due to this reason it has also gotten polluted by bullshit. So, for those that do not have a Masters degree in bullshit I have decided to break down modern Western civilization into its essential elements. I believe the same effort can be made for other civilizations and it will in fact produce a different result thus proving that the basis of all civilizations is not the same.

In any case, as the first line has suggested, Bubba's essential elements of modern civilizations are money, bullshit and love. I was tempted to simply break it down to money and bullshit, but then decided that this would be too cynical of me and so I decided to add a positive element to modern civilization. Now how can one use this? Well in essence, once one is capable of breaking all human interaction into these categories it might be possible to differentiate between them. We should probably look at some examples...

Lets start with business. Now a beginner would simply put this one in the money category. He would however be wrong and would thus not understand the basics of business. Now for simplicity's sake lets break business into two components: business-to-business interaction and business-to-consumer interaction. Granted that in both components money is exchanged between the parties. However if one looks just a bit closer at each of these, he will notice that there is a barely hidden bullshit component. The interaction in business-to-business relationships, where it must be said that both sides fully understand what is going on, is conducted via the use of the language of bullshit: law. In fact, the use of law (bullshit) is growing to such an extent that all the worries about the job prospects of graduating law students have been for nought. They will find a well-paying job dispensing their own bullshit and ingesting and digesting the bullshit of others to make sure that all the bullshit digested is kosher. The cost of the growing legions of relatively high salaries will of course be passed on to the consumer.

This brings us to the interaction between business and consumers. Now this is where the excrutiating self-mutilating banging your head on the pavement bullshit begins. See, the lawyers and businessmen understand the bullshit being thrown all around, but when they go into the marketplace they encounter unsuspecting innocent consumers who have been taught to believe in the essential goodness of modern civilization. The consumers will of course pay for their naivete. Not that there is malicious intent on the part of the companies, its just business. So, now if the language of inter-business relationships is law, what is the basis of the bullshit involved in business-consumer interaction? Well, its images, brands, trademarks, copyrights, spokesmen, spokeswomen, models and 'customer relationships' to name a few.

See, many companies no longer produce their own products but simply have sub-contractors in the third world that cheaply produce the products. So what is left to the American companies is to sell the products at a profit. Now say I get 100,000 toothbrushes produced and put each one in a plastic bag and attach a price tag to it. Would you buy it? Probably not. Why? Because there are going to be another 15 types of toothbrushes screaming out at you with pretty colors and pictures and telling you that if you use their product your smile will look nicer, your breath will smell better, in other words, people will like you more. Now do you just want a toothbrush or do you want people to like you?

You might even rationally say to yourself that you pick a toothbrush based on its design features, size, color or price, or that you buy the coolest looking toothbrush you can find. The coolest looking toothbrush? Its a toothbrush for god's sake! Unless you plan to wear it as an accessory attached to your bag or in your hair, it really doesn't matter what it looks like. Or maybe you have gotten yourself an electric toothbrush... Hmmm.. You jog an hour a day and take the stairs to burn calories, but are daunted by the prospect of having to brush your teeth in the morning? 'its more comfortable' (or so the commercial said), 'it makes my teeth cleaner and better-looking' (the model on tv had really nice looking teeth), 'its better for you' (i must find some way of justifying this purchase, but i can't find anything specific) ...

So why is it that we buy these products? Well, there are whole sciences behind it. There are of course the always obvious fields of advertising and marketing. More interesting however is something called consumer psychology, which I have always associated for some reason with psychological warfare. Probably because the objective in both cases is to use the understanding of the behaviour of masses of individuals in order to benefit the employers of the psychologists rather than their target audiences.

In any case the idea behind modern marketing is to add bullshit to a product so that it can be sold at a higher price. The bullshit comes in many forms, always appealing, always friendly, and always expensive. It comes through commercials on television, through ads in newspapers, through product placement in movies, through star endorsements, in fact through any door one will open even a crack it will come gushing in. The primary objective is to create a brand with a favorable image. Think of Coca Cola. Are you thinking of a dirty dusty factory in a sweat and smell infested third world country where dirty looking unkempt bearded fat workers are pouring sugar into huge chemical vats and throwing in random small animals and insects once in a while for shits and giggles? No? Are you imagining yourself running along with other beautiful people on a deserted beach at sunset with a perfect body, no worries and feeling pure unadulterated happiness? (well probably not after the first description..) Or lets say Starbucks.. Are you sitting in a dimly lit cafe surrounded by beautiful intellectual people all smiling attentively while you are demonstrating your superior intelligence and occassionally sipping on a double moca latte with cream? You are probably not thinking of a poor South American peasant struggling to collect coffee beans next to the cocaine field while being whipped by a greasy supervisor wearing a Starbucks baseball cap, are you?

What is Coke? overhyped sugar water. Starbucks? come on, be honest, thats not really coffee... is it? and you aren't that smart anyways.. and the people you are with aren't that hot either and in any case they aren't really paying attention to you...

Sorry.. got carried away a bit. To sum up, when you are buying a bottle of Coke for $1 you are paying 7 cents for whats inside the bottle, 5 cents for the bottle and 88 cents for running on a beach with the beautiful people. Now, unless you are actually at a beach with the Swedish bikini team or with the cast of a soap opera (and I don't mean serving them drinks), you are overpaying for your Coke. You are paying for bullshit. So when you are drinking the coke remember that the ingredients on the side of the bottle are misleading. It should read:

Ingredients: Carbonated Water 11%, Sugar 1%, Bullshit 88%

Enjoy your next coke.

I'll probably post more on Bubba's essential elements later... Now I am going to go watch some TV and get my fill.

2005-04-22T16:31:00.000-07:00

Bubbas Movie Reviews:

Since I have been on 3 different flights within the past 48 hours I have had my fill of movies. Here are some with short ehh comments.

Be Cool - star-studded crap
Bridget Jones 2 - fat girl romance crap, though Hugh Grant was pretty cool
Shall We Dance - j los huge dancing ass crap
Spanglish - bilingual crap/mierde though Tea Leoni was good
Taxi - its just bad

Not a single one of these is worth watching for any reason whatsoever. They should have not been made and should be forgotten by all who see them. I put a curse on the directors, producers and actors of these movies (except for Tea Leoni and Hugh Grant). May they all be forced to sit down to watch their movie over and over and over again until they repent before humanity for the brain pollution that each of these movies has caused. Then they should be flogged, and then drawn and quartered.

There needs to be a way of punishing those that make bad movies for their deeds. Clearly the fact that I don't go see bad movies doesn't stop 20 million morons from watching them instead of reading a book. Of course in reality these 20 million morons would otherwise be probably watching episodes of Newlyweds, Elimidate, Survivor, American Idol and 'The Real World' (this title alone makes me want to barf). The producers of these shows should by the way be crucified and/or impaled along with their actors and the morons who agree to appear on them. I am still debating whether their audiences should join them.

Yes I know what freedom of speech is. It is a sacred right. But isn't there some way of punishing those that bring people into the movie theaters under false premises?
'You will be blown away'
'Action sequences'
'The most amazing blah you have ever seen'
'You will laugh/cry/be shocked by the suspense/horror/romance/adventure of this movie' (usually you laugh when you should shocked and cry when you should be laughing)
Maybe make them pay for damages? Or at least for the time a movie takes as well the time one needs to recover? Lets see. A bad movie takes 2 hours including the previews. After a bad movie it takes at least 2 more hours to recover or possibly one hour and two beers. And of course we have to demand a refund of the money spent under false impressions.

The average American probably makes about $14/hour, so for a total of 4 hours that would be $56 + $10 for the price of the ticket. The total is $66/person for a bad movie.

Lets take Godzilla. It has a running time of 2 hrs 20 mins and grossed $136 mil domestically, which translates to about 17 million Americans seeing it at an average ticket price of about $8. So lets use some basic math to figure out the damage figure.

17,000,000 * ((5 hours * $14/hour) + $8) = $ 1,326,000,000.

So, we should be able to sue Sony for $1.3 billion dollars worth of damage and lost time due to the release of Godzilla in 1998. Now this is only the domestic calculation. If we combine with this a global audience we arrive with the following overseas total:

$242 million gross overseas / $5 (average ticket price) = roughly 48 million people whose time is worth lets say $10/hr on average.

48,000,000 * ((5 hours * $10) +5) = $ 2,640,000,000.

So in total Sony should be liable for roughly $4 billion worth of damages to the planet and lost productivity that could be spent on time and investments in education, in enviroment and real culture, or at least spent on a good movie.

So what would be a way from stopping people from seeing bad movies? I suggest an alliance against bad movies which would monitor the hundreds of movies coming out and deter people from seeing the bad ones. I suggest that it be called the National Organization for the Condemnation and Repression of Awful Pictures (NO-CRAP). The preferred method of deterrence should be stink bombs or skunks. Upon the release of the movie it would be rated by a prestigious committee of NO-CRAP movie experts. If a movie was found to be Condemnible, a message would be released sanctioning an attack on the movie. Supporters of NO-CRAP would infiltrate cinemas nation-wide armed with a dozen stink bombs each. Every 20 minutes or so a stink bomb would be set off with the worst stink bombs reserved for the very end of the movie. Actions would be carried out just often enough to make it a part of people's considerations when choosing a movie to see. In the long term, just the threat of such actions would be sufficient from dissuading people from seeing bad movies.

We have learned that a centrally organized organization can easily be stopped, so for this reason NO-CRAP cells must be organized without the involvement of the Movie Condemnation Committee, thus separating the Condemnation Committee from the Implementation Squads.

The world must unite against bad movies in order to save humanity from another Godzilla, another Alexander, another Constantine, another Alone in the Dark. Can we truly allow such resources to be wasted on such drivel when so many real problems can be solved if the resources and time spent on the creation and consumption of such crap can be redirected towards more useful goals?

2005-04-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Day 21 - Zombie goes to Hong Kong

I arrived in Bankok as a zombie incapable of any thought but 'SLEEEP'

I figured out that I wasn't going to get much sight-seeing done in this state in the 7 hours I had until my flight to Hong Kong and so just headed straight to the Bangkok airport.

Had the set breakfast at a Japanese restaraunt in the airport. The breakfast was a bit weird. It was rice with a piece of salmon, miso soup and a bunch of weird salad looking things. It was also hideously overpriced, but I had some Thai baht to burn.

After breakfast I went over to the departures area where I fell asleep for a couple of hours.

At 1 I had my flight back to Hong Kong which went smoothly. I was flying Emirates which I had thought would be an interesting flying exprience with the flight attendants looking like Osama. However, it turned out that the flight attendants were an international lot with the majority being young petite British, Russian and other girls. I was sincerely disappointed. I am sure there was a movie, but I don't remember what it was and the food was reasonably good. Alcoholic beverages were also served so I am not sure how Islamically legitimate Emirates is. Overall I would say that the Emirates flight was rather pleasant with the only Arab elements being that things were said in English and Arabic, the fact that the British flight attendants were being forced to wear a make belief Arab headdress, and several Arab men with discoloration on their forehead where they are supposed to touch their head to the ground during prayers. My friend Hash (Iranian) said that some people just rub something on their forehead to get that look so they would get more respect as religious people.

Once I arrived in Hong Kong I had to find accomodations for the night because I was flying out the next day. I know I should have booked beforehand, but I was lazy. So I took the airport shuttle to the hostel where I had stayed before only to find that it was full. I was going to go down to the backpacker ghetto on the Kowloon side, but there was one more guest house right next to the starbucks where I got some tea. I checked it and they had a nice closet-like room with a bed and a TV. Not much else fit in the room, but I was still a zombie so I just took the room. I watched a bit of telly where they were showing a blatant product placement for McDonalds whereby the whole premise of the show was a guy looking for the world's most unique McDonalds. They had some McD in the North with a snowmobile drive-through.

In any case I set my alarm and went to sleep.

2005-04-19T15:47:00.000-07:00

Day 20 - Chiang Mai -> Bangkok

Had an extra half-day in Chiang Mai before going off to the train to Bangkok. I made the mistake of buying train tickets pretty late so I was stuck with a 3rd class no A/C seat - 'the genuine experience'. On the bright side instead of paying $17 for the nice seats I ended up paying $5 for the hell seats.

So during the afternoon I got some food, checked my email, uploaded some pics and basically did very little. Then I got on the train at 4PM and the weather was still scorching. In addition the amount of legroom was rather limited and spending 15 hours sitting down in a train where you can not stretch out your legs is not a pleasant experience. I did get some consolation from the fact that these were not the worst possible tickets because there were some people that got standing tickets and I saw them standing for 15 hours straight. I had hoped that some people would be getting off and I would have some room to stretch out, but unfortunately unlike my train trip to Chiang Mai, on which by the end of the line there were 2 people in my compartment, in this case nobody was getting off without their seat being immediately taken over by a newcomer.

Before I left I was only able to upload like 5 albums of music onto my Karma so after 3 weeks I was sick and tired of Faithless, Joss Stone and Alicia Keys. So basically I got through like 10 45 minute long lectures on American history roughly from the Great Depression all the way to Vietnam. On the negative side I didn't get any sleep...

2005-04-18T20:41:00.000-07:00

Day 19 - The 'trek' continues

The day started early. Our guide awoke us at 6:30 in the morning. Unlike Bangkok and Chiang Mai these Thai highlands were refreshingly cold at night and in the morning and I had no choice but to put on the only extra clothes I brought - a second t-shirt.

Prior to exiting our sleeping quarters I proceeded to take out and eat one of my prepared meals of canned sardines and bread. Upon exiting I was again surprised by the fact that a native breakfast was prepared for us. Surprisingly their breakfast was quite similar to the one we enjoy in the civilized world - scrambled eggs, toast and folgers coffee.

After breakfast we set off on a one hour hike over a conveniently marked jungle path which led from the village towards the location where we were supposed to meet our elephant transport. We arrived in a small village and were met by native women selling trinkets that look strangely similar to trinkets I had previously seen in the markets of Chiang Mai and not particularly different from those I saw in Beijing. Whether these native women had been able to establish a trade network for their trinkets in Beijing or whether these authentic native bracelets were produced in an authentic Chinese labor camp 'factory' somewhere in the Guanzhou province of China I will never know because I ain't buying that crap.

In any case we waited for some time in the village while our two mighty elephants were driven into the water and bathed by 12 year old boys sitting on the elephants' heads. These gentle giants waited patiently while they were being washed and then stood quitely by while our group posed individually for pictures with them. After the elephants had been bathed the handlers attached benches to their backs and we started climbing on top of them. I was told that 3 people would ride per elephant, but the benches seemed pretty small for that number. After the Australian couple got on and sat on the bench I was invited to board the elephant. I had sat down on the bench when I was told that this was not my place and my guide informed me that 'elephant neck stronger than elephant back'. This was to signal me that I was to sit on the elephants neck during this part of the trek. I slid down and prepared for the journey. Unlike the fluffy images we have of elephants, they have very thick coarse hair on their backs. At the same time riding on the elephant's neck was many many times more comfortable than riding a camel. The skin is relatively soft as is the top of the animal's head where I had to hold on to keep my balance when the beast was going up or down slopes. Unfortunately I do not have a picture of me on the elephant, but hopefully I will eventually be sent a picture taken by the german guy from the back of the other elephant. (probably not)

In any case once everybody was seated - with the australian couple and me on one elephant and the handler and the german couple on the other - we were off. Our guide remained behind in the village. The day was really very hot so it was uncomfortable. In addition to this the novelty began to wear off quickly since we had no control over where the elephant was going. It had probably been walking the same path for the past 20 years and could have probably taken every step blindfolded. After half an hour I was tired of both sitting the way I was on the elephant and the whole experience and wasn't afraid of the prospect of falling into the cold refreshing river water off the back of the elephant. We rode the elephant for about an hour and a half down a path and through a river. The elephant would occassionaly refresh itself by taking air into its trunk and expelling it in a stream into its face. It would also use its trunk to spray water on its feet. The elephant also used its trunk to pick up sticks to scratch itself and to pick up branches to swat away the flys buzzing around. These seem to be rather intelligent beasts.

After an hour and a half we got to another village where our guide was already waiting for us. He checked the time and informed us that the sun was too hot to begin rafting now and in any case our bamboo raft was still being prepared. The bamboo raft is a pretty simple contraption. You take some long bamboo sticks and you use bamboo bark to tie them together. They are easy to repair as well all you do is tie bamboo bark around those beams that are coming off the raft.

After a nap of a couple of hours we were ready to go on an adventurous trip down the wild river. The wild river was in no place more than 4 feet deep. There were however some places where the raft would get stuck and sometimes down certain rapids it would gain enough speed that when it would hit a rock and come to a complete stop and people would almost fall into the water. I did fall into the water, but was rescued from drowning in 9 inches of water by the german guy who pulled me back into the raft. I did however sustain a mild cut to my forearm where it hit one of the rocks. Fortunately I had my first aid kit and applied iodine.

The raft was piloted by our guide who stood in the front of the raft and directed where the front of the raft would go by pushing off the bottom with a long bamboo stick. He would sometimes shout out directions to the 2 out of the 3 guys also standing and holding bamboo sticks in the back of the raft and who wuld occassionally try to direct the boat as well. I am not sure how much help we were in the back of the raft but am positive that most of the work was done by the guide and we were more a decoration than a practical aspect of this cruise. In the beginnining of our rafting cruise we were joined by a native boy who had a fishing net. Unfortunately there were very few fish and before he had caught a fish he decided to get off our boat and go back to the village.

After about 3 hours of rafting we arrived at a lodge where we had some Chang Beer and some Phat Thai and waited for a pick-up truck to go back to Chiang Mai. Within 2 hours we were back in Chiang Mai and I was back at my hotel. That day in the evening I went out determined but circumstances dictated the abandonment of my goal and the retirement to my abode and sleep.

The next day I had to catch a train back to Bangkok because I had a plane to catch back to Hong Kong and onwards back to the States.

2005-04-17T21:58:00.000-07:00

Day 18 - Chiang Mai - 'trek'

Today I started on my 'trek' to visit some isolated hill tribes, visited and photographed only by a select group of several million intrepid explorers of the uundiscovered countryside of the most touristy town in Thailand. The hill tribes are in fact so remote that in order to visit one of their camps one is forced to undertake an arduous journey by elephant and bamboo river raft. Fortunately the friendly natives were able to provide the elephant-back transportation that we required for our journey.

After a light breakfast, we undertook an arduous 40 minute trip by pick-up truck to the local market where we bought supplies. The term was unclear to me and I bought up food as if I had to feed myself for the next 2 days. This would prove to be an inaccurate understanding of the fundamentals of this 'trek'. Along for this journey I was joined by a couple of Germany and another couple from Australia. Unlike myself who apparently again misunderstood the basics of this trip they were all wearing flip-flops and sandals. I was outfitted in hiking boots. In any case from the market we were driven by our brave native pathseeker to one of the Thai National Parks. At the entrance to the park there was a traditional outdoor native restaraunt serving such traditional dishes as hamburger and fries and iced coffee. We followed a well marked and well trodden path to a waterfall where we were instructed that we had the option of taking a dip. This was again unexpected to me, but fortunately I had bought silk blue underwear the day before and went into the water in these. The water was quite refreshing, but our grueling journey was still waiting for us.

After the waterfall we were off into the jungle. After about an hour hike we came to a hill village. The natives were strangely unsurprised by the present of their foreign guests. Some were even so brave as to offer us cold Coca Cola, Singha beer and water. Despite my attempts to trade some trinkets for the drinks, the natives were apparently capable of understanding what money was and were happy to accept Thai baht in payment. After a short break we were off again, though the natives did not seem surprised or upset to see us go.

We hiked up for another 2 hours until we came to another village. This was where we spent the first night. A man who was probably the village chief welcomed us and showed us to our humble abode, which consisted of a large room with few furnishings. He kindly lay some rugs on the ground and gave us blankets to cover ourselves with at night. He then proceeded to cook for us a meal of rice and several dishes of meat. Again the inhabitants of this village were unsurprised by our presence, making it almost seem to me that they are quite used to the presence of foreigners. We were again offered coke, beer and water as drinks. After the meal a fire was kindled where we sat about and discussed various topics. The natives did not come to speak to us, but our guide entertained us by digesting various kinds of bugs. He then offered to us a fried bug, which tasted a bit salty, with a strange but not unpleasant aftertaste.

After the fire died out we retired to our room and went to sleep.

2005-04-16T02:01:00.000-07:00

Day 17 - Chiang Mai

I arrived to Chiang Mai this afternoon. The train ride was uneventful. Got to practice my Hebrew a bit with some Israelis. Other than that the only problem was that the train was a/ced to the bone. From the train station took a pleasant 2km walk to the guest house..

So far it seems to be a very pleasant place to spend a couple of months. The accomodations and the food are cheap. There are things to do with literally hundreds of different treks into the countryside to visit the various hill tribe villages in the area. There is even a self-improvement aspect of this town with courses being offered on various aspects of Thai culture - massage, cooking, language, others.. Its pretty strange to see a group of white people spend their vacation in thailand trying to learn thai cooking, but there it is.

Anyways, tomorrow I am taking a trek for 2 days which will involves riding on an elephant, rafting down a river, and obviously a bit of hiking. The cost of the entire thing including the admission ticket to the national forest, the tour guide and whatever else is 1470 baht, which is roughly $37.

And best of all, this damn water holiday is over.

I am off to see some temple and then try to find a nice pub to get a couple of beers..

2005-04-14T21:03:00.000-07:00

Day 16 - goodbye Bankok

Tonight I am taking an overnight train to chiang mai, which is in the north of the country. I thought about going to cambodia, but its supposed to be a pain in the neck to travel there. I thought about going to the beach, but I am just not a beach person. So, I am going to Chiang Mai...

I walked around Bangkok yesterday, and was soaked entirely. Interestingly when you are walking around in the beginning when nobody hit you yet everyone just lets you go by, then somebody takes a small shot at you, then somebody a bit bigger shot. Two minutes later somebody decides to pour water down your back... Then there are the 40 year old Westerners who run around with gangs of super soaker armed 12 year old Thais spraying everybody. They can't quite keep up with the kids, but they are trying.

Anyways, I have a train at 9:30pm and I have to figure out what to do until then in order not to get wet. I'll probably take the SkyTrain down to the ferry and go see some site.

Posted some more pics of Beijing and of the Great Wall at imagestation.

Update.

I tried to go down to the National Museum, but surprise surprise it was closed for the national holiday. I had even amazingly been able to get there and back without getting at all wet. Once I got back to my hostel I went across the street to a cafe to wait out the watery bastards. I wrote up my theory for what is currently happening in East Asia between China and Japan and read through every English newspaper the cafe head. Trying to wait them out turned out to be a mistake because by the time I got out it was time for the evening traffic. Now traffic in the west means that cars are moving, albeit slowly. In bangkok, nothing moves and the intersection which I had to cross had literally a dozen trucks with obnoxious teens on board. There were also foot patrols with water guns patrolling both sides of the road. In the 1.5 minutes it took me to get across the road to the hostel I was sprayed by at least 3 people. I got my stuff and headed down to the train station via the SkyTrain and Subway. I avoided getting soaked, but had to wait in the train station for my train. In any case I had no desire to be out in Bangkok at this time getting wet.

Cheers,
Boris.

2005-04-14T02:14:00.000-07:00

Day 15 - Bangkok

I am still trapped by this holiday. At least I have finally bought some flipflops. I for most of the afternoon and thus avoided getting soaked. On the way back from the train station 20 minutes ago I had to go through 2 squads of soakers.

So far today I have gone through 2 temple complexes. First about yesterdays Grand Palace/Temple complex. Its like Disneyland. Basically it looked like a little crappy souvenir made of colored glass and gold and silver foil that you can buy on the streets, only blown up to great proportion. Its all shiny and mirrory and it looks very nice from far away, but up close its just too much.

The temples I was in today - Wat Pho and Wat Arun were much nicer, especially the latter. Wat Arun is particularly impressive. Though decorated with similar kind of colored glass as the palace, the glass has been allowed to darken and age giving it a more ancient and less tourist-driven feel. It is also a much more interesting complex because while the Great Palace complex seems like a random plopping of buildings, Wat Arun looks like a large tower surrounded by 4 smaller towers. Each tower is decorated intricately. There are stairs (also decorated) winding from the bottom of the large tower to the top. These stairs aren't open all the way to the top but still...

Wat Pho had some celebrations for the Thai New Year. Apparently these consisted of pouring scented water on statues of the budha and depositting small coins into many many jars at the temple to the reclining buddha. Wat Pho is known for housing a huge fat reclining buddha. Also at the celebrations were dancing troupes of Madonna-clad pre-teens doing traditional Thai dances of questionable origin. And of course as everywhere many many food stalls selling different kinds of foods. So far I have tried the dumplings, which are a bit sweet for me and a dish consisting of rice with an egg fried in oil on top. Yesterday I also tried some squid looking things on a stick, but am still shying away from what look like fish balls on a stick. I feel that I am playing Russian roulette with my stomach whenever I eat at these stalls.

I am going to try to leave Bangkok tomorrow. I think I am going to go to Trat and from either into Cambodia or to one of the islands closeby.

Another problem I am having is that the place which currently holds my images is being bitchy and so I am trying out some others right now. I posted the last of my HK/Macau pictures to picturetrail.com/berseken, but I am looking around for a place to upload the beijing pics..

For now, go to www.imagestation.com and log in as me to see the pics.

Gotta go.

Boris.

2005-04-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

Day 14 - Bangkok

I am held hostage in the hostel. I can not venture out without fear of being sprayed by thousands of supersoaker carrying Thais. Those not fortunate enough this morning to own a supersoaker have had an opportunity to acquire one at a little stall set up on pretty much every corner of the city. The city seems to have organized into pick-up truck squads. Each pick-up truck is equipped with a bathtub of water. Those sitting in the back of the pick-ups take turns taking water out of the tub to spray any pick-up trucks going by, any tuk-tuks (tricycle looking taxis with lawnmower engines), or any people just walking by.

The occassion apparently is Songkran - Thai new year. Apparently as a sign of respect young people pour water down the backs of their elders while wishing them happy things. Others use some kind of white mixture to coat the faces of passer-bys in order to 'ward off evil'.

Here is some info on this 'festival'

As you can probably imagine that what might have once been a tame tradition in the villages of Thailand has been slightly transformed [mutated] in the ridiculously large metropolis of bangkok into what it is now, which is just water spraying for fun..

In any case.. Yesterday I arrived late night in Bankok and shared with some people a ride towards the center of town.. I got to the hostel at about 2am and interrupted some poor people in my dorm room. In the morning I woke up and went to the Palace complex. I took the SkyTrain (which is a pretty nice looking air conditioned train system) down to the pier and then the ferry up to the complex. Now at this point let me explain the main problem with Bangkok - its weather. Its absolutely horrendous. The temperature is somewhere in the low 100s and the humidity is very high as well. Sweat just rolls down my head. When I got out of the air conditioned airport last night my glasses just fogged up and refused to defog. Today I am wearing contacts so its not a problem, but the sun is still very strong. Now the problem is that i hadn't packed for this heat. I was thinking Hong Kong weather, but this is the tropical variety. No wonder the Americans lost Vietnam. They were trying to run away from the sun. The next problem is that i hadn't packed for Songkran. I don't have flipflops or shorts. I made the mistake of not buying them today in the morning.

So after seeing the palace complex I went back to the hostel and posted some of my delayed China material. I then went walking around in my usual outfit - hiking boots, jeans, shirt, backpack - and then the pick-up trucks started coming. I was trying to make it down to the backpacker district - Kho San Road and i took a tuk-tuk to get there. The problem with tuk-tuks, as opposed to taxis or buses, is that they have no protection from waterguns, so by the time I got out of the tuk-tuk I was completely wet. I was still thinking that i had a chance to get down to Kho-San Road, but the closer i got the more congested it got, the more people, the more water, the more pick-up trucks. When I got to the entrance to the road it was physically impossible to make it inside due to the high volume of people already there. Added to this the continued soaking and face-whitening. I basically just gave up and went back to the hostel to dry and regroup. I don't think I am going to be leaving the hostel any more this evening....

Cheers,
BR

2005-04-12T22:57:00.000-07:00

Day 12 - Beijing

Today I did the touristy thing. I took a taxi to the Summer Palace which as the name explains was the summer residence of the latter emperors of china. Its a very nice place with a large lake in the middle, with several palaces on an island in the middle of the lake. The other temples and palaces are on the side of the lake. Apparently the funding for the construction of this palace was taken from funds that were supposed to go to the building of a modern Chinese Navy in the late 19th century. The empress, who embezzled the funds did however construct one ship, albeit one that doesn't float, built out of marble on the lakeside.

The Summer Palace was flooded by waddling Chinese tourist groups in their cute matching hats following a guide carrying an umbrella. Once in a while there were groups of confused middle-aged European wearing matching name tags. To make the story short, there was lots of staring by the provincial tourists at the strange white person walking around.

The Summer Palace looks very nice, but the biggest complex is unfortunately under construction. Once again my enjoyment of a Chinese cultural place has been damaged by preparations for the Olympic games. Speaking of which, there is plenty of memorabilia for the 2008 Olympics already floating around, including official stuff sold at ridiculous prices, and black market stuff at a tenth of the price.

From the Summer Palace I went down to the Lama Temple, which is supposed to be the second most important Tibetan temple next to the one in Tibet. Its nice and suprisingly peacefull considering that right outside its walls is a bustling and polluted intersection. Chinese people come in and light up their incense and do their bows... The monks are walking around in their orange-red robes... very authentic..

After getting some pictures of the Lama temple I went down to look for an internet cafe at the China World Trade Center. This is a very modern looking complex housing a spiffy mall with all the famous designer names. Unfortunately they closed down the internet cafe just to spite me so I had to go down to the internet cafe I knew on Tianamen Square where I browsed the web a bit, and then did a bit of browsing around the general tianamen area. There are many shops open and a bustling trade in all kinds of kitschy Mao souvenirs... The stores and the roads are not on the same level as those in Hong Kong though, all looking dirty and dejected.

From here I decided to go check out the pub area at Sanlitun. I got lost in the hutong again, so I had to take a cab down to that area. The pub area consists of one street with pubs on one side of the street. The sidewalk is full of Chinese offering various not-so-legal services. The area is patrolled by threesomes of Chinese police walking back and forth though strangely doing nothing about all the Chinese hawkers.

Among the Chinese there was the curious presence of a black guy from somewhere in Africa. He walked alongside me and offered me hash. I went down to one of the pubs recommended by the Rough Guide, had a beer and left. I tried to find the other area where pubs were recommended, but that street seems to have been largely torn down. There was just one pub which seemed to almost be a cultural center for the Afro-Chinese community. Here i was once again offered some drugs. I left his area and walked downtown. On the way I passed many franchises including McDonalds, Outback Steakhouse, KFC, 7-11 and many others...

I took the subway back to the hotel, though the bus service was no longer running. I hence had to walk back to the hostel using a map and a compass.

Back at the hotel I turned on the TV to watch the Chinese news in English. They spoke of a visit of Chinese president ? to south China where he met with local representatives and promoted 'harmonious socialist society' with communist characteristics. Included in the coverage was an interview with a woman who said everything was getting better because of 'the party's people-first policy'. Watching Chinese news was an interesting experience in itself. Interesting the weather was done by a weird looking white guy.

Another interesting thing is the demonstrations going on against Japan. They are all staged by the government. It seems to be part of a campaign against Japanese membership in the UNSC. The same day I saw the 'China Daily' newspaper where conveniently Japanese gas bombs were discovered the same day as demonstrations were going on. Its all staged and stage-managed by the party. China might not be economically a 'communist' country, but its still a one-party dictatorship and if anybody believes that a spontaneous demonstration can be organized without the support of the government, they are insane. Someone somewhere must grant permission for the gathering to occur in some particular place. There is no freedom of speech and assembly in China, remember? Just like these demonstrations start they will be (quitely) stopped once the Chinese government is satisfied.

2005-04-12T06:09:00.000-07:00

I am back in the free sorta almost country of Hong kong where i can actually access blogger. I will post more on my travels in the People's Republic later as i am standing at a terminal nicely set up by the Hong Kong airport authorities and there are people waiting. To keep it short, i went to Beijing, did all the touristy things and left.

Done:
a 9km hike on the Great Wall,
walked past a porcelain Mao,
a visit to the Forbidden City,
a visit to the Summer Palace,
a visit to the Lama Temple

I kept some notes so I will set aside a couple of hours and post a play-by-play of my visit.

Now i am off to board a plane to Thailand.. Going to be fun arriving there at night, but hey just bought a guide and exchanged money in the Hong Kong airport so i should be fine. This airport by the way is really good..

Cheers,
BR

2005-04-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Day 11 - Beijing - Great Wall

Woke up this morning with a complete lack of desire to go on a 9km hike. Twisted and turned in bed for about an hour until I decided that I might regret skipping out on this and that I would then have to go find another way to get to the Western Wall, so lazy fears over uncertainty beat laziness and I went down to the hostel from where the minibus was leaving.

I got to the hostel a bit late, but the driver was even later. In any case from the hostel were leaving 2 Slovenians. When we got on the bus there were also a couple of Korean girls, a Brit, an Aussie and a girl from Singapore. The drive to the Great wall takes about 2.5 hours. Once we get there the driver turns around collects the money, points in a direction and tells us that we should make a right after the 28th tower at the bridge. So we started walking. I didn't bring a hat so I was wearing my rain jacket with a hood.

A bunch of innocent women farmers apparently decided to take the same hike on top of the wall from their village down to Simatai where the hike ends. I am sure there are more effective ways of traversing the distance other than an actual walk, but the language barrier prevented me from expressing my misunderstanding. In any case, one of the friendly farmers decided to walk near me and help me through this arduous journey. Interestingly she decided to slow down whenever I did and speed up whenever I did so and seemed concerned about my health. She then proceeded to point out several shortcuts to me. At this point I didn't feel like having a minder so I pointed out to her that I did not need a guide. She replied that there is a custom - 'one visitor, one friend walk'. I again demonstrated my lack of enthusiasm at the suggestion and she finally got to the heart of the matter. She took out a book, some postcards and other stuff that she wanted me to buy. I rejected these. I had however done a very touristy thing when I bought a 'Great Wall' baseball cap earlier on. This probably signalled me out as a good subject for hassle. In any case my farmer/friend/guide/minder followed me for the next hour or so taking every opportunity to again and again try to sell me something. After roughly the halfway point she gave up and left. From this point on there was a pleasant hike, though tiring. The hat certainly helped and I was suprised how much easier it was to hike with one's head covered. The pleasant hike was interrupted occasionally by other friendly Chinese farmers trying to sell me something.

The Wall is an interesting contraption. It goes up and down, up and down and up and down and follows the contour of the mountains. The hike I did, from Jinshanling to Simatai was of course over a rebuilt section of the wall. Even rebuilt at many points it was partially damaged. The wall is definately a feat of engineering, and is an amazing feat of what forced labor, when taken in large enough quantities and driven mercilessly can accomplish. Stretching so long and so far away from civilization I have no idea how this wall could have ever accomplished any objective. The whole length of the wall can not be guarded and it can be scaled with ropes at almost every point. The guardtowers might work during the day, but at night I doubt they would be able to do much. At the same time there is always the problem of corruption, laziness and sleep.

At the end of the hike there is a bridge for which you have to pay to cross and then a cable ride down to the bottom. There was a line for the cable, so I just walked down. At the bottom there are several restaraunts. At one of them the people who came in the minivan with me gathered and we had a meal of what was essentially barbecued chicken. The driver came a bit later, picked us up and took us back to Beijing. We got to Beijing at about 6 and some of us went to a retaraunt to get a full meal. This consisted of rice and thin pieces of chicken and beef...

After this I went back to my hotel and went to sleep. I should have gone out, but i was tired after the hike.

Boris.

2005-04-10T01:50:00.000-07:00

Day 10 - Beijing.

Today I decided to go through Tianamen square and up through the Forbidden City..

I took the subway down to Tianamen and then saw the line to get in to pay respects to Chairman Mao. I got into line. I was approached by a young guy wearing a smart suit who seemingly was directing the people traffic all around. He pointed at my bag and said 'no bags'. He then gestured for me to follow him, which I did. Half running he led me to the Checkroom where I depositted my bag. On the way back he tried to get me back into line where I had left it, but failing that he asked for money. Apparently he was not a staff member. I gave him 10 kwai and sent him on his way.

I got back into line at the end and walked slowly towards the tomb. The line was tricky whereby only the tail of it was visible, while after walking through the gates of the tomb the line truly revealed itself. Many people, many seemingly peasants from the countryside came to pay their respects. For those that had forgotten how one does this, there was a conveniently placed flower shop right inside the gate of the tomb where one may procure flowers to place at the chairman's side. After walking for a while I got to the entrance of the tomb. The strange thing was that the tomb smelled like salami. I don't know whether the staff had a salami sandwich for breakfast or whether the chairman had by this time become edible, but the smell was there nontheless. At the entrance to the interior part of the tomb sits a huge statue of the chairman who sits there looking down at the people filing through his tomb. At the feet of the statue there is a cart on wheels that receives the flowers that had been bought about 100 feet away at the flower shop. The wheels would suggest that the return trip is made once the cart is full. This seems pretty capitalist of them...

In any case after the outer hall where the statue sits the line proceeds to the inner hall where what looks like a porcelain statue of the chairman sits encased in glass. 2 soldiers are standing guard next to him. After filing through this room one is led ito a large room full of stalls selling various kinds of memorabilia. This ranges from watches where the Chairman's hand moves every second to lighters that look like the little red book to various kinds of jewelry with the chairman's face on it. The worst of all was a yellow shiny medallion in the shape of a heart with the chairman's face engraved on it. Thats the one I bought.

After walking out of the mausoleum, the shopping mall proceeds with many more watches, lighters, medallions, and various other crap.. I didn't notice this, but I would not be surprised if the chairman's body was slowly turning over in his glass casket.

After leaving Mao's tomb I proceeded up to the Forbidden City. Now for all its grandeur, the Forbidden City consists of a couple of dozen fairly consistently outfitted rooms which look like many Chinese restaraunts in the states. The interior is also relatively sparsely decorated. Although the complex is very large, the fact that the buildings are almost identical makes it a bit boring in the end. I walked around for a couple of hours and the most entertaining aspect was not inherently a part of the complex. The Chinese are apparently repairing the structures and roads in preparation for the 2008 Olympics influx. Now, in order to make the roads more appealing, they set the concrete black bricks down and then they have a large group of people sitting down with hammers and putting notches into each brick so as to make it looks sorta whitish. I showed a picture of this event to some people and they had initially guessed that what the people were doing was tai-chi...

After leaving the Forbidden City I entered a temple complex which was more interesting because it rises up over the city and allows one to get a pretty good view over an otherwise pretty flat city. The temple buildings themselves looked similar to the buildings in the Forbidden City.

After this I was trying to get to a pub which was recommended by the Lonely Planet, but got lost in the part of Beijing called the Hutong. These are small one-story single extended family houses built hundreds of years ago using a set design with inner and outer courtyards. There are many of them and they have since been communalized with many families being assigned to live in each one. In any case thee are very much run-down and the roads and not marked. In addition to these many of these roads/alleys are not displayed in the Lonely Planet map of Beijing, which is of limited use due to the small size of the map and the large size of the city.

I eventually stumbled onto the backpacker part of this neighborhood with several cafes, restaraunts, pubs and hostels in the area. I sat down in a couch of a cafeterria of one of these hostels and ordered a 3 kwai tsingtao beer. Across the table was seated a guy from Germany. He was joined by a German woman and a British guy. After several beers I joined their conversation and when they went to get dinner along with the niece of the German woman I went with them.. I was taken to a nice restaraunt/pub with just one minor defect. There was no internal bathroom. In order to relieve oneself one had to go across the street to a public toilet. In any case the menu of the evening was what was explained to me to be 'beijing cuisine'. This included dumplings which looked and tasted like Russian pelmeni, and some very nice non-spicy beef with cashew nuts served with rice. After the meal I took the taxi back to the hotel and tried to get soem sleep because the next day I had signed up to do a 9km hike on the Great wall.

2005-04-08T01:10:00.000-07:00

Day 9 Beijing

So I arrived in Beijing. Nothing exciting here. It was just an airport, not different from any other airport in the world. No shifty-eyed communist agents, no interrogation, not even any reference to communism. A bunch of ads everywhere for all kind of capitalist companies.. What a rip off.

The airport guy looked at my passport and just stamped it. No minder, no interrogation, no movie..

The next adventure was supposed to be finding an ATM machine that would accept my capitalist mastercard plus card. However, there was one just outside the arrivals area, so no fun there either...

Getting a taxi to the hotel was more fun with people approaching you claiming to represent taxi companies... Many wear official-looking suits and try to get you into some taxi while flashing you a card that claims a 350 kwai charge for the privilege of being driven into town by them. I had to forcefully rip the card that had my hotel name on it from one of these.

I looked for the least active taxi driver and got into his car. The more lazy he is the less likely he is to rip you off. Ripping people off requires way too much energy, too much trouble. You need to pretend to be somebody you are not, convince the person that he is paying the right price, and run away so fast that he does not recognize that he has been bamboozled..

So, in any case after an uneventful 40 minute trip from the airport which cost me a whole of 94 kwai I arrived in the hotel. The whole time I was making sure he was going in the right direction by using the compass I had acquired for 5 HKD. With my sense of direction this was the best investment I ever made. I am never going anywhere without it again. The hotel was in a shitty smelly part of town, but it itself was not too bad. A couple of people even spoke English. I am guessing I was the only white person that stayed in this hotel in a long time, but the service was reasonable. The only problem was getting from this hotel to the center of town. I had to take a bus to get to the subway. After I figured out how to do this I only had a problem with transportation once, when I was returning late from the center and the buses stopped running....

After settling into my hotel room and taking a shower I was off to Tianamen square. Apparently white people are about as common as green monkeys in the outskirts of Beijing because on the subway I was being stared at continuously. If somebody had offered me a banana I wouldn't have been surprised.

I arrived in Tianamen square after a short journey. Now I was in the heart of the beast, and Ronald McDonald was right there with me, along with 7-11 and Colonel Sanders. Anyways, Tianamen is a humongous concrete square with several monuments in the middle. I arrived first at the gate itself where the big poster of Mao is displayed and from where apparently he declared the People's Republic of China. Got a picture taken and headed south. I was approached by a couple of friendly kindergarten teachers who just happened to be on their way to work through the square. They asked the usual questions and then proceeded to explain that where I should really be is the Old part of Beijing which is being torn down for the Olympics and that they were headed in that direction themselves. I don't know why, but I didn't fully trust these kindergarten teachers, and left them to wander southwards towards Mao's tomb. I looked back to notice the kindergarten teachers striking up a conversation with some other tourists.

On the way to Mao's tomb I was approached by a couple of history students from the university who just wanted to speak English and also casually recommended that I should go to Old Beijing. In any case I was able to get a bit of an explanation from them about several of the monuments. Apparently one was the represenation of one of the four classes of people they have in China. This was a sculpture of the soldier class, which along with the worker, farmer and the academic classes made up Chinese society. I don't know where the merchants and the beggars come into this class system, but there were definately quite a few of each in the area. Now for some reason I didn't trust these history students either, so I proceeded to go to 7-11 to get some food and then home and fell asleep. I didn't sleep much the night before because I had an early bus to catch to the airport and I got a new roommate who had travelled through Thailand and throught the States so I was talking to him for a while.

I had planned on waking up several hours later and going to explore Beijing some more, but couldn't force myself up and ended up getting about 12 hours of sleep that night...

2005-04-07T03:33:00.000-07:00

Day 8.

The weather was good today so I went back up to the Peak, where unlike the last time I could actually see all of Hong Kong from.

Went down to the travel agent and picked up my tickets. I am flying out tomorrow at 8 in the morning to Beijing. I am coming back on the 12th when without leaving the airport I am getting on a flight to Bangkok. I will be in Thailand for about 8 days before I come back to Hong Kong just in time to get on a plane back to the States.

The efficiency of this place amazes me. I was able to get a paper ticket in my hand within 30 minutes of walking into the travel agent's office. This along with the excellent transportation system and the high caliber of the human resources that seems to be available here guarantees this city a place as one of the best places to do business in the world.

Outside of this it also seems to be a very nice place to live, as long as you have a good salary. There are parks everywhere and very nice ones at that with artificial waterfalls, pools, fish, trees, and the other park amenitites. And these parks are in the middle of the city within a couple minutes walk from the skyscrapers. Outside of the city there are many areas for recreation - for hiking, water sports, horse riding. There is a racetrack and if you really want to gamble you can go to Macau which functions as Atlantic City for NYC. Inside the city are plenty of areas with up-scale pubs and with a varied clientele.

It might be a very nice place to work for a year...

cheers,
BR

2005-04-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

Day 7 recap. back to Hong Kong

Went walking about. Ended up in a pub in Central. There was a good cover band playing all the classics - queen 'another one bites the dust', 'bohemian rhapsody', pink floyd 'another brick in the wall (part 2)' and various other songs... Left for very, very Oh Bubbish reasons.

Anyways, some comments so far.

I didn't understand the reasons for the masks worn by some people while walking around Hong Kong. I had thought it was to prevent breathing in pollution or to avoid catching SARS or something. I was watching TV and apparently the local health department suggests that if you are sick that you wear a surgical face mask in order to prevent other people from getting infected. Sounds reasonable, no? We should be doing the same, why aren't we? Its not like its still the 15th century where we think disease is a curse of god spread by Jews and witches. Wonder if this will ever catch on in the west. Probably not, I think that in Western society we still associate disease and sickness with weakness and immorality.

Another thing I noticed is that in advertisements for McDonalds they have a clown that looks like Ronald McDonald, but the only difference is that he is Asian. I guess thats reasonable, if you make Jesus into an Asian in Asia, then why should the other god of the west not adopt a native form.

OK, cheers,
BR.

2005-04-06T06:28:00.000-07:00

Day 7: Macau -> Hong Kong

And now the negative side of Macau. There is no internet. Or rather no internet for a reasonable price. The only way to get internet appears to be through the expensive hotels where I would have to pay $10/50 minutes, which is not a reasonable price. So I needed to get back to Hong Kong in order to check on my reservations for hotel in Beijing.

After waking up in a nice hotel in Macau I walked around a bit and went down to take some more pictures. I then boarded a ferry and came back to Hong Kong and back to my hostel.

People are waiting for internet. In any case my reservations came through, I am picking up the tickets tomorrow and I am off to Beijing on friday.

cheers,
BR

2005-04-06T04:43:00.000-07:00

Day 6 recap - Macau.

Came back late the night before and so slept way too late. At about noon I rushed down to the hotel lobby to check out and leave my bags. I went down to the touristy part of the town and took some pictures. The architecture does look sorta European. The people have a slight tint of non-Asianness. Once in a while you see the admixture of Portuguese or African blood into the gene pool. This is not visible in Hong Kong. The Portuguese had a different idea of colonization. They didn't have the British uppityness, and so didn't have a problem intermingling with the local native population. The British apparently brought their own women, while the Portuguese made do. I am a bit surprised by the fact that the population of Macau is only 15% Catholic as I would have expected the Portuguese to be more persistent in their quest to save the souls of the heathen. In any case, the signs are in Chinese and in Portuguese, though I didn't hear anybody actually speaking the language, except when I walked by the Portuguese School of Macau where some mixed looking kids were speaking it among themselves.

Anyways I took some pictures of the local touristy place - one street, a fort and a blown up church with only the front facade still standing. These places look nice and are positioned so one can almost take a picture without including the crappy buildings that surround the touristy sites. Despite the Lonely Planet's assertion that there is a bit of reconstruction going on, the houses are in a very bad state of disrepair. On some houses you see what they may have looked like in their heyday, but most are just shite.

This accomplished I went about looking for a cheap hotel. Apparently there are no hostels in Macau and the closest thing to reasonable budget accomodations was a run-down hotel. After looking at the room and getting back into the elevator to go back downstairs, the elevator mysteriously went up a floor where a young woman was smiling and offering a massage. I cordially rejected her proposal, left the hotel and went back to the hotel I had stayed in earlier and booked another night. I stayed in the hotel and listened to John LeCarre's 'Absolute Friends' audiobook. In the evening I went down to the casinos and lost a bit of money which I proceeded to wash down with losing a bit more money in a vain attempt to win it back. I failed in this and went down to get a beer. After drinking a beer and walking about some more I went back to the hotel and went to sleep.

2005-04-06T03:16:00.000-07:00

Day 5 recap - Hong Kong -> Macau.

The afternoon was spent looking for a package to china. Unfortunately these, when bought together with a full tour is prohibitively expensive, on the order of $1500. I also checked the possibity of buying only the tickets and doing everything myself. The price was about $750 for my desired route. So I decided that I am going to buy a package to Beijing for 5 days and then come back to Hong Kong and go somewhere else in Asia. I am thinking Thailand, maybe some other place. The package to Beijing cost me about $350 including air and hotel.

During my day of travels in Hong Kong I had the opportunity to try out the 2 remaining forms of transportation available in the city: the tram and the taxi. Both were comfortable, though the tram has now become my favorite means of transportation in Hong Kong. Its cheap - .25c, it goes all across Hong Kong island, thus letting me go to almost any place in Hong Kong. It has 2 stories, something I have never seen on a tram before...

After making my reservations I took the tram down to the ferry. After I made the reservation I had some time, and since I was already splurging I got myself a hotel in Macau for $60. I took the ferry to Macau, which took about an hour. Just as I was settled in my seat, I had to get off the boat through crowds of chinese gambling addicts and go through immigration again and get another stamp on my passport. The other passengers were definately in a hurry to get off, although it might be possible that its just simply a Chinese cultural norm to get on and off planes and ferries as if your seat is not really reserved until your ass is safely planted in it. I noticed that on the flight from Tokyo, the Chinese had lined up to get on the plane a long time before boarding and continued to stand there in line until allowed on the plane.

I have never understood why people do this, because its not only the Chinese that are guilty of this. It doesn't really get you in the air any faster! If you get on now or in 20 minutes, your seat will still be the same and the plane will still take off at the announced departure time. I prefer to sit down and wait until the line runs down so that I can walk from my seat in the departures hall to my seat on the plane without having to stand in line. Likewise, getting off the plane it seems entirely unreasonable for anyone except those carrying only hand luggage to rush to get off. Has anybody ever actually arrived at those damn luggage carousels and seen their luggage come out instantly? No! it always takes at least 10 minutes for the bags to start coming up and your bag will be the last one! (the same idea applies to waiting at passport control. if you run towards the little booth or not, you are still entering the same country and you will still have to wait for your bags next to the carousel. Bloody wankers.

Hmm.. bit of a tangent, so anyways. Once in Macau I walked past the big casinos - the Sands, the Fortuna and the Lisbao on my way to my hotel. The hotel turned out to be very nice as was the room. This was one of the first times I had stayed in such a nice hotel when travelling. After taking a shower I went down to do some gambling.

The Lisbao casino, considered the flagship casino on Macau is very finely furnished in quasi-Las Vegas fashion. The first thing that I did upon walking in, as I have been doing many times upon entering any place in Asia is to scan the crowd and look for white people. This time there was a confused group hovering in a corner trying to figure out the games that people were playing. Frankly I have no idea how most of these games are played. Some look like dominoes, others are just plain weird. The most popular game seems to be Baccarat, with the most tables and with people sitting and jotting down the results of the evening's games. Trying to find some pattern in a completely random game I guess, or using a "system" that is sure to overcome the fact that the odds are always in the casino's favour. Good Luck. There is in fact such a system, but it requres ridiculous amounts of work and is then only capable of increasing your odds of winning in blackjack by a couple of percentage points. If an average game of blackjack has a casino edge of half a percent, a good cardcounter will sit down at the table when he has the edge. In any case this is impossible in the Macau casinos because the deck is reshuffled way too often for any card counting to cut the odds and also because the blackjack rules are terrible, giving the casino probably at least a 1.5 percent edge. These rules include the fact that the dealer does not check for blackjack at the beginning of the hand and that you can only double on an 11 (A CRIME!). These rules alone are enough to kill the hopes of any cardcounter.

In any case, I played and after winning a bit at first I started losing and for my 2 days spent in Macau I lost about 150 patacas which is roughly $20.

After leaving the casino and getting a bit lost in the process I wound up in the casino's little mall. As I was looking for the exit it dawned on me that dozens of beautiful Asian girls were trying to get my attention and the attention of any guy that came by. After finding the exit I went down to another casino - the Fortuna. They were supposed to have a lounge where I can get some drinks. On the way I heard a familiar language. It was coming from groups of white girls that were standing on the corner, also trying to get the attention of passing Asian gentlemen. They looked depressed and indignant and could hardly hide their disgust with their surroundings and whats worse of all they simply were not capable of smiling. These were the exotic white Russian prostitutes of Macau.

After failing in finding the Fortuna lounge I went down to the pub area. In this area I sat down and had a beer. The other people were all playing a strange game that looked like yatzee. I asked somebody and they explained to me that this is basically a drinking game based on poker. 2 people roll five dice. The person that can assemble the best poker hand - pair, 2 pair, 3 of a kind, 4 of a kind wins. The loser must obviously drink. I moved on to a different bar where a bad rendition of bad American songs was being sung by what seems to have been a Filipino band. There was a Gwyn Stefani song in there somewhere. After a couple of beers I went home.

Cheers,
BR

2005-04-03T20:42:00.000-07:00

Day 4 recap

Packing light has its downside. I have now officially put on my last pair of clean socks. Considering that I have already been away for about 6 days and I brought only 3 pairs of socks, clean is a relative term. Cleaner socks.

Anyways yesterday I sat around in a Starbucks for a couple of hours and read their local English newspaper. Lots of junk. An interesting story about how the US economy resembles the pre-1987-crash economy. Another one about some English financial analyst that is recovering after he was attacked by the Triads by accident. Yes, by accident. Apparently some guy drank too much and got kicked out violently from a pub. His Chinese girlfriend was pissed off cause her man got dissed. She called up her Triad pplz and they came down to the pub with meat cleavers to deal with the bouncers. They found a guy and beat him badly. Wrong guy. Yah. God has a plan.

Ok.. There was some other stuff in the paper that was interesting. Apparently not interesting enough though so while I remember being entertained I don't actually remember why.

After reading the paper I realized that I still had not gone on the Star Ferry. So I rushed off to Kowloon where I jumped on the Star Ferry headed to Central. I was in Central in about 4 minutes with no pictures to show for it. If anyone figures out how to take nice sharp pictures off the side of a rocking boat in the middle of the night please let me know. Is there a way of cutting the time needed for the camera to process pictures at night?

I walked around a bit in Central. Or more accurately I got lost a bit in Central. Found myself in the pub area. It was dead again. Went back to the hostel. At the hostel discussed China with my roommates. Will China ever have the standard of living of America? No, there aren't enough resources in the world. Will China be democratic any time soon? No, probably not. Is China's one child policy working? No, not outside the big cities.

Anyways.. I am leaving this hostel today (hopefully). I will get my passport back and take the ferry over to Macau and try to find lodgings there. If I find nothing reasonable I will come back to Hong Kong.

Changed the template the blog uses. Now open for comments and suggestions.

Chinese is beginning to sound like chicken squawking to me. Is this normal?

Posted more pics,

BR

2005-04-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

Still Day 4.

I am quickly getting bored of both the hostel and of hong kong. I went out to the last of the three pub areas in Hong Kong - Wan Chai. Wan Chai used to be known as a hangout for US seamen, and for soldiers and marines during the Vietnam war. It could be easily imagined what kind of places it was known for at the time.. Despite what might be stated elsewhere, these kind of places have not left and the only difference is that instead of soldiers and sailors the visitors are now ex-pats and wealthy visitors. In order to build up their confidence prior to taking the next step several high-class bars have been built in the area. These are very nice and obviously rather expensive. A pint of beer will run over $HK50. I had a very small beer at one of these bars for $HK25 and left. I was in this area at about 8pm and the most visible characteristic of these up-scale places is the overwhelming preponderance of white males, with the minimal presence of white women. Occassinally a white guy will walk by with an Asian girl or a elderly couple that probably got lost... The places that were popular with US military personnel during the Vietnam war are located right next to the up-scale expat bars and it takes little imagination to understand that their business picks up after the finish of the sports games playing on the TV screens in the bars.

I am off to go get a book and then sit down with a hot tea in Starbucks or off to see a movie. I think I am going to try to leave the hostel tomorrow. Maybe once I get my passport back I'll try to get over to Macau.

cheers,
BR

2005-04-03T01:34:00.000-08:00

Day 4 in Hong Kong.

OK.. so I woke up this morning and my left eye was hurting a bit. I can see fine so I think its just one of the muscles that open and close the eye that is at fault. I will wait a bit until I put the contacts back in. On the bright side I have my new glasses with which I can see much better.

I went up to Mongkok and walked the market there. I finally saw Rolexes, though I need to do some research before I buy myself a fake rolex. First I don't want to buy a fake super-expensive model. A $3000 watch model on my hand might (?) be real, a $40000 watch with diamonds is probably not going to be believed. Also a bunch of the same stuff as at every market. Zippos, domino sets, jewelry, clothing, electronics.

List of things to buy for now:
little red book
fake rolex

I was going to go visit a "recreated" Hakka walled village but roughly halfway between Mongkok and the station I needed to go to I encountered a problem. Apparently something I had eaten earlier had caught up with me. Now I don't know whether it was the microwaved eel on a stick or the deep-fried shrimp looking thingie on a stick, or possibly the dried fish or maybe even the Starbucks frappuccino, but suffice it to say that I could not continue to my destination and had to leave the Metro and quickly find a toilet. I found one but decided not to chance the trip and returned back to the hostel.

The interesting thing about these markets is the weird street food. Any Chinese person on Fear Factor would have an unfair advantage since they have already eaten such delicacies as turkey's kidney, chicken knee soft bone, fried pig's intestines, among many others... I am still trying to stick to chicken, beef, noodles, sushi and seafood. The 24 hour supermarket across the street from the hostel has a good selection of prepared food.

On the way back from Mongkok there was a media event near the hostel. There seems to be a media event around here every couple of days. Last time there was apparently a media event whereby a store called Bauhaus was being called. The event was a bunch of guys (white & asian) carrying a cage with a Chinese guy inside while chanting "Bauhaus" in unison once in a while. You gotta give them points for originality.

Today there was apparently a horse race which was the center of attention. I asked a young Chinese guy what the hoopla was about and he replied that there is a particular horse which had won 15 races in a row and if it wins two more times it will set a world record. The race took about a minute and the favorite won. Horseracing is apparently big here...

Anyways, I posted some more pics.
http://www.picturetrail.com/berseken

BR

2005-04-02T19:00:00.000-08:00

Day 3 recap.

Posted some more pics.

In the evening yesterday me and Malcolm wanted to go to the foreigner bar area on kowloon. When we got to the subway we firgured out that we forgot the guidebook at the hostel, so we decided to wing it. After walking around for about an hour and not finding the westerner bars we made an agreement to go into the first bar we saw. This turned out to be a chinese bar with no westerners. The chinese were sitting around basically gambling and drinking loudly. Some were playing some kind of dice game and others were playing card games. The TV was playing a Man. United soccer match with Chinese commentary of course. After a beer we left and went back to the hostel. I walked around a bit more outside and noticed that they were playing western movies at the cinema. I am not sure how funny the Chinese will find 'The Pacifier' when it seems to make people cringe in the west.

I was happy to come back to the hostel to take out my contacts. I don't think I'll be wearing these every day.

Anyways. I am probably going to go up to the market at Mongkok. When I was back in the states I saw a Hong Kong cop movie called 'one night in mongkok'. It is supposed to be the gritty part of HK.

I am stuck in Hong Kong for at least another two days.

People are waiting to use the computer.

Boris.

2005-04-02T04:49:00.000-08:00

Day 3.

posted some pics from day 2. My camera is out of batteries again. Will post more pics later.

Today I went down to Lantau island to see the big buddha. To get there I took the ferry which took about half an hour. Then there is a 40 minute busride up the hill towards the Po Lin Monastery where the Buddha is based. The Buddha himself is big, but not that big, so I don't know whats the big deal is about. Basically they say he is the biggest something something something something bronze Buddha statue in the world. You can probably describe anything as the worlds biggest anything. I am the proud owner of the biggest shaved white balding head with brown eyes and with a goatee and with a mole on the left side of my face and another one under my chin on the right side attached to a 5'10", 185 pound big boned body wearing blue jeans and hiking boots. Ok, i might be exaggerating a bit.

Anyways. The Buddha and the monastery were not terribly impressive themselves, but the island they are built on add a lot. The journey there was also interesting. The ferry passed by multiple uninhabitted islands. The coast of the Hong Kong Island itself is almost entirely developed, with the exception of the very southern side. However, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region includes multiple islands which are sparsely populated. The biggest of these is Lantau. It is sparsely populated, and most of the population appears to be employed in the construction trade based on the amount of construction work going on on the island. I don't know what they are building but they are definately killing the island as a location untouched by [modern] civilization.

Anyways. I went down to the eyeglasses store and picked up my pair of glasses and my contacts. It took me like an hour but I finally stuck the damn things into my eyes. I am guessing that its normal that my eyes are still itching a bit and my peripheral vision is a bit blurry. However its pleasant to not have to wear my glasses anymore. I also finally bought a nice little travel electric shaver and shaved my head. While looking for this model (one that supports 110-240V) I went through several 'department stores' like Sogo and through a mall called 'times square'. There is also a World Trade Center and a Broadway. It is a weekend, but still every store is overflowing and people are buying. Consumeristic consumption seems like a national pasttime... The electronics stores are full of people and of really cool products. There is no sales tax, and the selection on every kind of product imaginable is ridiculous. The prices on electronics are nothing special, but on clothing they seem to be really good.

Basically for somebody who likes shopping (somebody unlike me) Hong Kong must definately be at the top of the international destinations. In fact come to think of it, it would probably be a good vacation spot for American businessmen. They can send their wives to go shopping, while they can go hiking, sailing, swimming, drinking, whoring, whatever.. HK has it all. That is except location. Its just a bit too far from the States to be a good destination for a week worth of vacation.

I have a new problem. I went to several travel agencies today that specialize in English speaking tours and they were all closed. The fact that it is saturday might have something to do with that. In any case I might have to rough it into china and get some flights in Yangshuo or Guilin if nothing comes up last minute.

Still looking for that rolex..

cheers, is anybody reading this?

BR

2005-04-01T18:52:00.000-08:00

Day 2 recap.

So yesterday I went back to my room and met my new roommate, Malcolm. A Scottish Lad, Malcolm had just come in from Beijing which he called his "trial by fire". Apparently the highlands of Scotland did not prepare him for being stared at and pointed at by hundreds of people whereever he went.

Anyways, we went over to TST to take some night pics from across the river into Hong Kong. We then proceeded up to the Temple St. Night Market which should be called the Temple St. White Market based on the number of white people there. The Night Market is about 3 streets long and has little shacks on both sides of the walkway. You can buy fake watches, Zippo lighters, leather bags, jewelry, t-shirts and anything else a tourist might want to bring back home as a souvenir. The only thing that I couldn't find was a little red book. However I was informed by Malcolm that when I get to Tianamen Square I will have plenty of little red books offered to me by a crowd surrounding me as if I was Mao himself. So, Dmitry your little red book is coming. Oh yeah, I also did not see any rolexes, which surprised me. Most of the knock-off watches were CKs.

Another thing that surprised me was the negotiation style of the vendors. I don't know whether they have gotten lazy from the easy money they make at this market or if this is a cultural Chinese thing about negotiations, but I couldn't get them to scream a price at me as I was walking away. In India if you do not get the price you want you start walking away and the merchant will call out a better price. In this case the merchant starts high - 30, I ask the price again - 27, I start negotiations at 10, the merchant comes down to 25, I raise the offer to 15, the merchant shakes his head and looks away. I am walking away expecting a price of 20 to be quoted and nothing is called out to me. I feel betrayed. They refuse to play the game. I feel cheated and I haven't even bought anything.

So in the middle of the night market obviously there is a place for people to get some food. We got ourselves some Chinese Tsingtao beer. Its not bad. Its also not Chinese beer as the brewery was built by the Germans before WW1 when they had a sphere of influence in China.

After the Night Market, where I bought for myself a little carrying bag for my Karma and for my camera, we went down to the pub area in Central. I was there the day before yesterday and it was a bit empty. Yesterday night the place was full of white people. Its seems like very much a happening place, albeit with really annoying loud music. The beer prices are also rather expensive.

cheers,
BR