Burma: whaddya gonna do?

Corrupt dictatorships need corrupt dictatorship neighbours for mutual money laundering and, if the worst comes to the worst, as padded boltholes for overthrown leaders. China's support of hoodlum governments in North Korea, Laos, Burma and Kazakhstan is the fruit of parleys between goons who, while talking up friendship between peoples and making large scale deals in oil and lumber (and arms and opium and rubies...), respect each other for what they are: greedy slimeballs. All that's missing is the Jersey accent. As for the protesting monks, the Burmese leaders probably saw this one coming when they moved the capital 400 km northwards. To dislodge them, the marchers have a long way to walk, and they will have to get past a lot of Chinese hardware.

I read in the First Post "In a country of 55m, there are 400,000 soldiers. Add in their families and dependants and you get 2m people who live better than the rest, with their own shops, schools and hospitals, have a grip on the country's resources and see little reason to give it up." HEY! That idea was stolen from the Brits! Actually, the Japanese stole Burma from the Brits, then perfected the idea. Does that sound too confusing? They then farmed the idea out to the local generals, in return for looted hardwood and rubber. The deal is still on. It's what they call constructive engagement.

The plundering of England

It used to be simple: Normans against Saxons. You could tell which side was which by the language. Normans were the tall blond ones who spoke French, which was the official language of government in England for something like 400 years. Saxons went from being freeholders to become tenants. Now, 941 years after the Norman invasion the linguistic divide has been reduced to a few vestigial shibboleths, and a German royal family sits on a vast real estate portfolio amassed over the centuries by Norman and Tudor forebears, with former owners paying for recalcitrance with their heads, and often spilling their guts as well. Over time the gruesomeness has gone but the Domesday heist continues. The use of treason charges to increase Crown property was rendered unnecessary by the purchasing power generated by estates already under management, and calls for land reform have been democratically stymied by the landowners sitting in the House of Lords.

So are we now at peace?

In modern England the two sides have morphed into two opposing "interest groups": those who pay *interest* - or rent - and those who collect it. The former have a vested *interest* in higher inflation, which reduces their debt, while the latter have an *interest* in it staying low, and also hold the most of the levers to make sure it does. Perhaps significantly, house prices are left out of the calculation. This simple omission masks an important fact: that even when interest rates appear stable, the rising equity base on which interest is being paid means ever increasing income for the lenders.

Look at the small-ads outside Earl's Court station and you will see that all the rents asked for accommodation are higher than the wages offered for jobs. This situation would have been familiar to Saxons living under Norman landlords.

The Norman invasion's legacy is a nation obsessed by property - and blondes. Hair dye has allowed Saxons to become temporary Normans. Tabloids and trash TV create working class celebrities out of nothing, and then shoot them down when they start behaving to the manor born. Conversely, Normans have learned to jettison plummy vowel sounds when dealing with the feral underclass at home, only to rediscover them when among their own kind in foreign ski resorts.

Curiously, Brits facing eviction for unpaid mortgages still love their Queen. But if a flick through the Daily Mail is anything to go by, they still have a lot of hatred to spare, and no fixed object to pin it onto: dole fiddlers, philandering vicars, other drivers, football referees, striking railmen, pedophiles, and the judges who let them out.

Maybe by sending their brave lads to sort out other conflicts in the world, they can make their own ones disappear. Bringing home the World Cup would help. But I think we ought to draw the line at pontificating at African governments who go in for genocides, ethnic cleansing and wholesale expropriations. After all they are merely preparing the ground for constitutional monarchies of their own. And will one day learn to plunder in a more gentlemanly way.

The Soup God anyone?

Who could ever accuse Stuart Kauffman of atheism? In his creation scenario where chemicals self organise into cells, as a water droplet finds its spherical shape, internal forces are at work. Compounds begat compounds, until a quorum of compounds with catalytic action took over, an autocatalytic set was formed and creation took off big time. This is where the soup thickens, and gets too complicated for most voters. But mercifully Stu boils it down for them by saying all we need is to assume 1 or 2% of the compounds are catalysts and the whole thing ferments on its own. We don't even have to name any individual components, just do the math! The same process of self-organization is happening on the macro scale in human society.

Stu's explanations are elegant and for some, esoteric, while his writing style has reviewers divided. So how are we going to popularize his ideas to reach type A personalities and the Bible Belt voter? Stu's book At Home in the Universe is meant to be a popularization of his earlier work The Origins of Order. One thing comes through: Stu is a believer. But being clever is a lonesome business. What we need to do is figure out how we can sell the Soup God to the mathematically challenged. A hard road lies ahead.

Don't sell your huts

So Vanuatu is the happiest place on earth?

The archipelago of 83 islands in the western Pacific is the happiest place on the planet, according to a new "happy planet index" published by the New Economics Foundation (NEF). The UK languishes in 108th place, below Libya, Iran, and Palestine.

Well I've got my beef about that too.

The three biggest unhappiness factors in modern society are rent, debt, and the lies of those in power. And the higher the rent, deeper the debt and more cynical the liars, the bigger is the unhappiness. What can be happy about a place where musicians can no longer afford to live, and greengrocers or fishmongers can no longer afford to set up shop? Where debts are resold behind the debtor's back at a discount he would be glad to receive himself? Where credence in disputes is given by default to the smarter dressed?

If, as many of my friends believe, the UK has gone down the pan, I am sure a lot of that is due to the Englishman's propensity to use his home as a financial instrument. And put himself in hock up to his eyeballs to do so. The only winners in putting housing out of people's reach are the lenders.

At this time of year, my picturesque little riverside village in the South of France fills up with English visitors. You can spot them with their faces glued to the photos in the real estate agent's window. On learning that I live here, one old gentleman looking for a place to spend his retirement, asked me if the area was up and coming, valuewise. He had two houses up for sale in Blighty, and could afford any of the houses here cash down. But he had lost the ability to simply decide if he liked something.

So my advice to the Vanuatu folk, faced as they are sure to be with an influx of well-to-do happiness-hunters, is: hang on to your islands. Let people visit. Let some people come to live. But don't sell them your huts.

The End of Trust

Francis Fukuyama envisaged an End of History in which men lost their chests and everybody sort of drifts into that least evil state: liberal democracy. He then wrote a book called Trust which explained why only the West and the Japanese can have a large corporate culture. I am still waiting for the sequels: The End of Trust. Or how about History Reboots? But seeing as how Frank's academic and government postings are helping mellow out his point of view towards the ultra violet end, maybe someone else should take up the story…

Is Liberal Democracy really the last stage of history? This idea of letting people vote for what they wanted slowly developed into the wholly laudable exercise of taxing the haves to pay for public services. It then morphed into buying the votes of the poor with the money of the rich. For a while at least. Now the USA shows the way forward out of this stagnant impasse: instead of taxing the rich you hit them for campaign funds to bamboozle the poor. A lesson from biology: stuff grows or it rots. Should Liberal Democracy be any different?

So how will Trust end? One way is stock option remuneration packages. They transform executives from loyal company servants into ravenous sharks with a three year agenda: to make the results look good at the end of that period for just long enough to cash in and get out – and on to the next. These predators will always be in demand because of the connivance of an equally predatory shareholder base. And Devil take the hindmost.

Another thing Frank has a dig at is Chinese society. The lack of trust outside the blood-related extended family is the reason why they can't have large corporations. The news provides examples of Chinese hankee-pankee:

• eBay.cn has had a taste of sellers copy-pasting legit ads from the US site into the Chinese site to attract innocent bidders for unbelievable (and not to be believed) bargains. Now you need an ID card to become a member of Chinese eBay.

• Beijing street vendors are selling mantou buns with a filling made of cardboard picked off the street and spiced up to taste like meat.

• Efforts by Chinese wine makers to create a French style appellation contrôlée culture are stymied by label forgers

• The biscuit goes to the recently executed head of the corrupt Food and Drugs administration, whose 170,000 product approvals will now have to be re-examined one by one.

These examples show what the Chinese need to learn from the West if they are to create the large corporate culture: they just don't have enough hypocrisy. Oops, I mean they lack a sophisticated business model. What those bun sellers could use is a pharmacy degree. They could go multinational and sell drugs! Those eBay fraudsters need to get Wall Street trading licenses to give their talents full vent. Give those label forgers green cards and let them become contemporary artists. And the Chinese FDA? Take a leaf from the American FDA's book and just don't be so obvious!

http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama/Books.html

Dubya's short memory

Iraq's political leaders have agreed on a constitution, Bush said. "Now they are discussing some other legislation about the sharing of the wealth of the country, about constitutional review. All this needs consensus. We are not working by the majority rule of 50% plus one." Did I hear you right, Dubya? Blessed are they with short memories.

Houdini in the desert

Well, the name hadn't been used, which was a good start. And it encapsulates the feeling you experience when you have finally released yourself from all your bonds, unpicked all the locks that held you back in your life, thrown of the chains and stood up a free man to discover... nobody's watching. And there's no water.