Krach!

 The world bourses are falling. TASE is 3% down and some stocks are under -10%. The speculators fear the Fed's rising interest rates, Europeans (and America that is indebted 100% of GNP) fear the correspondingly higher debt burden. I have no such fears but I don't like these oscillations. 

To the left, is a graph comparing 1927 and today. I am uncertain this superposition is valid or not. 

Sax Rohmer: "The hand that held my arm was bony and clawish; I could detect the presence of incredibly long finger nails--nails long as those of some buried vampire of the black ages! Choking down a cry of horror, I opened my eyes... and looked into the face of my guide. It was Dr. Fu-Manchu!"

The Opium Wars

The Manchu emperor sent his best to confront the English invasion, a direct descendant of Ghengis Khan who had passed the exams (special exams for sons of princes) and assigned him thousands of troops. They knew that the goal was Ningbo, so the Mongol prince built tall walls to stop the invaders. He was convinced that the English could not run nor climb the wall because of their heavy woolen uniforms so that if they fell they could not get up again. The Brits climbed easily the wall and planted their flag. The Chinese ran away and the Brits (Irish, Scots, Hindus, etc.) found an empty city. That was 160 years ago, one wonders if the Chinese have developed better martial skills in the meanwhile. Foto: The battle of Chosin Reservoir, Korea, Chinese prisoners, 1950. 

The Battle of Chosin Reservoir took place in November and December 1950 in North Korea when 25,000 American Army soldiers and Marines were surrounded by 150,000 Chinese forces.

In “The Battle of Chosin Reservoir: Surrounded, Not Defeated,” a symposium, these brave men share what it was like to fight against overwhelming odds in extreme temperatures (as low as 40 degrees below zero) and the struggle to bring out their dead and wounded.

Jews in China

 During the Tang dynasty. Very nice piece. 

Gary Chambers, the Senator from Louisiana

Gary - smoking marijuana - may be Louisiana's next Senator. Chambers said it is "long past due that politicians stop pretending to be better or different than the people they represent." What will the meritocratic mandarins on the other side of the Pacific Ocean think?

Virtuous Cycle

There is full employment in the West but Central Banks keep injecting liquidity. The new money is invested in high tech like Intel's fabs, but some find their way to the bourse. The growing demand for liquid assets fuels rise and the machines, that make the decisions in most funds, play the momentum. As Soros explained in his reflectivity theory, this attracts even more money creating a virtuous cycle that ends with the explosion of the bubble and recession. Prices have reached a permanently high plateau and inflation will keep them there indefinitely. Or not. As for me, although depressed, I play the game. One Hindu guru explains that money can be and is created, and inflated, people look for assets that cannot be created from thin air, like gold, silver... and bitcoin. Illustration: Dutch master Rubens. 
 

The Myth of China

I'm reading the Opium Wars book and it upsets the Leftist/Communist myths. Opium was not introduced by British imperialists, it had been extensively used as an expensive medicine forever.  The Brits in India produced better quality and cheaper opium, and the Chinese bought it. See left. 

Manchu-occupied China was suffering severe financial stress, as silver was its sole currency - taxes and army salaries were paid in silver, and from 1805 the South American silver mines were exhausted and the continent was undergoing a generation of chaos (rebellion against the Spaniards and post-independence civil wars). The silver inflow from Mexican and Peruvian mines had stopped. In this situation, the Qin state fell into semi-paralysis and European iron gunboats encountered feeble resistance.

Chinese imports of Bombay opium were bleeding Chinese silver, collapsing the Manchu imperial state. The myth that British imperialists drugged impotent Chinese does not represent all the truth about China's collapse, because the Manchu regime was already in an advanced state of decomposition. The Manchu ruling conquerors were 0.3% of China's population. They ruled by terror and bureaucracy.

BTW, now I understand why the exam to be recruited into the bureaucracy - the eight-legged essay - was just a composition about a classical poem or saying. Literacy was the key skill of an efficient bureaucrat: the Chinese writing system was incredibly complicated, and all the business of the large Empire was done by detailed reports and letters. 

Flower children in Israel

Not long ago it was the Age of Aquarius and many Jewish flower children sang with Rav Karlebach and settled in Israel.  One Dati-Leumi Aquarian turned up as a client, they live in a Hungarian-speaking moshav and tried to work the land in the highest, purest, Earth-friendly, ecological husbandry. Very nice idealist Americans. 

They refused to connect with the municipal services and built a wetland to recycle the water. They have ducks swimming in the black stinking pond and goats to graze the polluted swamp grass. They are paying religiously the municipal sewage fees although they never used the service. They decided to clean up that overflowing eco swamp and connect the house to the mainline. That requires planning and permits, my trade. 

When in Berkeley, California, in 1970, I befriended on the street a traveling group of "hippies", something resembling the "Hair" movie. Being the serious idiot I was and am, I failed to avail myself of the free sex they were famous for, and dropped off and continued my travels with the Greyhound bus.