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Devaluing The Drachma & Other Pipe Dreams

Greece has been painted off late as a sick puppy stricken by the dead bolt of Euro lightening.

Not true.

If anything, leaving the Euro and bringing down the value of the Drachma as contemplated, would be an exercise in futility.

In these past few months, the US, Japan and the Swiss have made determined efforts to knock their currencies for a six.

They have not succeeded.

They are not a part of the Euro either.

It is not the Euro approach that is holding Greece back, it is Greece.

Let us close this futile discussion quickly, and move forward.

Forward into a unified, harmonized Europe, free from subserviance to the US and the UK, comfortable in close partnerships with the Middle East and China.

An Iran War?

There is a lot of chatter on the internet that the US & the UK are planning on a war against Iran in 2012.

Briefly, all war is diruptive, but disruption can bring quantum leaps ahead as well.

Sometimes in a war, who loses is more important than who wins.

As the rot spreads all over the Global Economy, constructive action has become a top priority.

2012 may be too far away, as a matter of fact.

If it would convince Europe that the US+UK are politically and economically finished, then bring the Iran war on.

Just as a note, not that anybody cares....Iran does not have any intention to build, and will not build....a nuclear bomb.

What Will The Arab Spring Achieve?

The end of Islam derived international terrorism.

In itself, a big achievement, but when you put it in the "War On Terror" context...you realize its true potential.

Essentially, all international terrorism is a lie.

If one country invades another...that is actionable, but when a bunch of malcontents from one country invade another country, that is just a lie which plays into the hands of the invaded.

Obviously, if history itself lies, this does not bode well for the retaliators either. Iraq and Afghanistan WILL bankrupt the US eventually. But as George Bush would testify - lashing back can be a great rush, baby.

What would the end of Islam derived terrorism mean for the world? Particularly for the George Bush's of the world?

They are not going to stop invadin anytime soon Dorothy.

You can see what lies around the corner already.

The battle has moved away from the Middle East, into Africa.

From the lust of power, to fear.

Kenya's recent incursion into Somalia is a testament to this movement away.

In this last conflict, the problem is not Somalia, or the lie that is Al Shabaab sponsered terrorism.

The problem is Kenya. And much like the US, its economy will also pay for perpetuating the lie of cross border terrorism.

We know that twisting history in the battle for power led to less power, less certainty, all across, for all of us.

Perhaps twisting history in the battle to preserve fear will lead to less fear all across?

Do you get a sense of what the system is pushing at us all?

Less power, less concern over power, less fear, and likely, less concern over fear as well.

All of this points to great change, sudden transition, and a lot at risk.

We are being readied for a socioeconomic change that will supercede anything in recent times.

When it occurs, in our typical limited cartesian fashion, we will establish cause and effect equations around it, and conclude that these events "created" the change.

When in reality, these events have merely set the stage.

Have'nt figured out what it is yet. Keep watching this space though.

The Palestinian State - II

Since a political solution to the Mid East peace process is all but impossible, this piece attempts at a strictly logical solution.

Premises:

1) The Middle Eastern conflict benefits oil dependent Western, South East Asian nations. Pretty much all of the world, essentially.

2) It benefits the entrenched rulers of benefits oil rich Arab countries.

3) The nature, consequences and effect of the conflict between Israel and Palestine are irrelevant to the rest of the world.....only that the conflict continue.

4) Jews have no other country in the world, to call their own.

5) The Palestinian identity is analogous to the Arab identity, and there is space on the planet for Palestinians, outside Palestine.

6) This conflict will not be solved by fair or just behavior from both sides, because the rest of the world has too much at stake.

7) It will not be solved by Israel de-escalating opposition to the Palestinians right to exist.

Conclusion

It must be solved by the Palestinians displaying heroic forbearance, and paying the cost of this forbearance, for as long as it takes, for the rest of the world to move on. Israel will not stop attacking, taking unjustly, and generally, disrupting. It is Palestine that must hold its hand. Only Palestine can solve this problem.

The Palestinian State will not bring peace, but it will show the Christian parts of the world that their policies are irrelevant. An unexpected bonus. Well timed.

Re-Negotiating UK-EU Relationship

The UK Parliament will consider a resolution on Monday to conduct a referendum either to leave the EU, or re-negotiate the UK-EU relation. There is also a chance that instead, the Parliament will actually pass a motion to give the Government authority to so re-negotiate without requiring a referendum.

This issue has not been given much leverage in the media. There is a strong chance that the motion will actually pass, and that the UK Government will, with or without a referendum, soon renegotiate the UK's relationship with the EU.

This post is aimed at the EU. Which should actually, welcome this renegotiation.

Let the UK withdraw from their commitments, but make sure they do not then get any benefits either.

Ultimately, the EU, after an exhausting period of change, has a hope.

The UK economy has none.

They may very well call you a poison to start with, but make sure that as they withdraw from the chalice, the spout they drink from is also stopped.

This would be a good, even inevitable, separation, and exactly what the EU needs, in the medium and long term.

Does Deprivation Make You Fat?

Have been trying to read up on Dopamine pathways in the brain, and how they can contribute to illusory hunger. This is well established scientific fact.

What is not so well know is how deviations in Dopamine pathways happen.

That got me thinking, could childhood deprivation, deprivation not from food, but from approval, instigate this change?

Such deprivation breeds people chronically yearning for approval, highly motivated to claim it, and bereft at the slightest rejection.

These behavioral anomalies tie in in well with the neurological changes that affect select individuals suffering from Dopamine caused illusory hunger.

Treating high levels of Dopamine by inhibiting the reuptake of Serotonin, its balancing neurotransmitter, have failed so far. Most drugs that do this affect the liver too badly to be considered safe.

This problem is probably better treated at the behavioral level, but with sufficient underlying knowledge of what happens inside the brain.

The insulin obesity connection has been done to death. The stress obesity connection has been done to death as well.

It is time now to start looking into the motivation-reward-obesity connection.

A Desperately Needed War

I was watching Ms. Congeniality the other day. Funny take on how beauty queens parrot the need for world peace.

If you consider the lessons of the 1930s depression though, you wonder if what the world today needs is actually more war. A winnable war, for the US and the UK. Two economies seemingly destined to take the rest of the world down the drain with them.

Lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan seem to rule out war as solving this depression though.

There is never one answer to a problem. And if the new depression, such as it is, cannot be cured by war, it will be attempted to be cured by something else.

These two Governments could accept deflation, and cut spending. Or they could accept inflation, and loosen the purse strings.

Over the next two decades though, there will be a gradual decline in both these economies. An unstoppable decline.

What the rest of the Global Economy therefore need do now, is to disentangle itself from these two economies, and re-form around them.

Critical to this would be the de-linking of Dollar Values from oil, and the de-reservation of the Dollar.

Further, export dependencies on the US and on the UK would need to be reduced, and innovation would need to be weaned out.

Simply because two countries are going down the drain, and Europe is required to harmonize ever more tightly, does not mean that we miss out on progress though.

Just what would need to happen before political leaders everywhere finally accept this course of action?

A catastrophic, visible, and irreversible failure of Anglo-American strength.

This is why it is critical that America lose resoundingly in Afghanistan. I had written numerous times before that America would stay on in Afghanistan till 2025. This estimate will now need to be revised down, in the light of changed economic realities. They, along with the UK, will leave in 2014, as agreed. The time is therefore short to prove American fallibility, if the Global Economy is not to stagnate in its entirety for the next two decades.

Just think about it…..our economic well-being depends on a bunch of ragged shepherds in the Afghan mountains hating the occupation enough, and fighting it enough.

Ironic that.

Time & Space

There has been a lot of talk lately about time travel. News recently broke that neutrinos, elementary particles emitted by supernovae and our sun, seem to be able to travel faster than light. This set off a nostalgia fest in the global media, with many articles about whether it would be wonderful to travel back...or not.

I have held matter and the two dimensions of space and time in fairly strong contempt for some time now. They are barely adequate as a canvass, but not so much as constraints. So was skeptical about the idea of time travel yielding anything useful.

Last night though, I saw the movie Source Code. By the end of it, I had an idea about how time could be shrunk, and expanded. It is a largely speculative thesis, but am sharing it with you, because it was such a rush, like heroin for the brain.

Enjoy.

To get this well, you would need some familiarity with the plotlines of The Matrix, Inception, Avatar and of Source Code.

Inception proposes a revolutionary idea, that our brain works faster, the more out of conscious control we are....and in the space manifested in our imagination during sleep, time slows down. The less in control the conscious, the slower real time gets.

Source Code shows a brain travelling into another’s dying memories, and somehow...seemingly altering reality, to prevent the death. In the so-called real world, the travelling brain dies, at its request, but the resurrected man, in another’s identity, lives on, in the destination reality.

Or does he?

Marry the main concept in Inception with this plot twist in Source Code.

The travelling brain, free from conscious control in the last nano-nano second of its real life, actually fires up to create an alternative reality, extending through a long span of time....so that the host identity seems to survive, with the created world intact, and go on to live a healthy, happy, normal life.

The travelling brain is therefore so powerful that it populates an entire world, creates life worth an entire planet, and lives itself out over extended time....in the very last moment of its real life.

This is a practical restatement of the relativity theory, but with space and resulting experience manipulation thrown in.

If time and space could be expanded out by the brain, then they can be contracted in as well.

It seems this is not travel, as we know it...because you run into some truly new things while travelling....and the brain that has merely expanded or contracted time and space, would largely be limited to it past learning.

Or would it?

Imagination is a central part of learning, and if we can learn things in the real world with imagination, we can learn them in a created world with imagination as well.

Everything has a purpose, and if a created world is capable of producing learning, then there must exist some mechanism to communicate this learning upward, using a tool that is not restricted by time or space.

Which essentially means that everything that is known or can ever be known, was always known, everywhere. And yet, there is always more to know, and it is this that we strive for.

This brings you to the question - what is real anyway?

Are we all just a spark in an exploding brain on a higher level?

And what would you do if you had a brain strong enough, would you stay tethered to this reality, or would you prefer to die here...and live there, in your imaged world, as the lead character in Source Code sought to do?

Or would you, like Neo in The Matrix, strive to be more than just a manifestation, and climb up through the reality ladder....one architect brain at a time?

Movies rarely capture textured choices, preferring black and white.

The character in Source Code knew that he would never have a complete body or brain in the real world, and chose to migrate, a la Jack Sully of Avatar. The character in Inception had children waiting, and came back to the real world.

For real people with real choices though, the larger consideration is that with each step you climb further down, the cost of learning reduces, less is at stake, and more is possible.

If we are in some imagination, which in turn, is in another imagination, ad infinitum, then we could even stay where we are, and eventually develop a brain powerful enough to generate experiences innovative enough.....to justify all the effort.

We could, in essence…strive to become a lesser God.

How cool would that be.

The Palestinian State

Have written a bit on the Mid East Peace before this.

The Palestinians want a State, with pre 1967 war borders, and with East Jerusalem as their capital.  They want this proposal to be considered by the UN on September 23, and to be recognized.

Today, Obama made a speech at the UN, acknowledging that Palestinians have the right to a State, but that this right can only be realized through dialogue.

Essentially, he lost his Jewish voters as soon as he re-articulated this acceptance of a Palestinian State. It is one thing to talk wistfully of aspirations, another to accept such a key point at the outset of the final battle.

And a key point it is, no matter what the media has been reporting on the Israeli mindset.

This negotiation is not so much a negotiation between two States, or even one realized and one nascent State. It is a negotiation between two people. Two people far closer to their religious identities, than they either are to their respective political identities.

The Palestinians are not uniformly Arab, nor uniformly Muslim....but the thrust is very much a Muslim Arab agenda.

Israel is a Jewish State, whether recognized as such or not.

Let us now consider their respective religious positions.

Judaism claims to be the religion of the prosecuted covenanted people, to whom alone revealed knowledge has been given, and who restrict their imprint to being the receivers of this revealed knowledge.

Islam, particularly as it plays out in the Arab countries, essentially claims that the only true revealed knowledge came to Islam, and that they have a practical duty to participate in life, and convince people, no matter what their initial persuasion, to see the true light. They have zeal, which is not meant to stop at anything, as it stands.

As you can see, where Judaism believes in contain and control, Islam stands for overwhelm and practically manage.

The establishment of a Palestinian State is a key point in these negotiations, because it defeats the Jewish position as soon as this State is so established.

Secondly, even though ultimately all religion is old learning and destined to fade out....what are the realistic chances of these two sides agreeing with each other on boundaries, Statehood and Jerusalem?

I believe the stance on the part of UK - to claim that negotiations could actually work - is self serving. They do not want the problem solved. The differences between Israel and Palestine serve the UKs long-term strategic interests.

In the case of the Obama administration, there is an element of naivety, going well beyond self-interest, and all the more frightening for it.

No matter what either the US and the UK say publically, they are not pro Israel, nor are they pro Mid East democracy, they are interested in keeping this conflict going. That is all.

It is an easier defended position to urge the these two sides to talk with each other and solve the problem.

The fact is, the world is going to have to step in, set aside the US and the UK, and assist the Palestinian State in being established.

Ring Fencing UK Banks

The UK proposes to ring fence Retail Banking.

This means that retail deposits would not be accessible to investment banks for risky investment activities.

This is expected to achieve relative stability.

This is a very coonservative response to the problem. Contain and combat.

Did not work before, would not work now.

What the Great Recession has taught us is that investment banking practices and policies themselves were and are harmful.

What is required is that investment bank activities be colored by retail values, to such an extent, that gradually, you get retail gains from the larger corpus of capital, and the attended risks reduce over time.

In the short term, ring fencing retail banking will make it costlier. Banks receive greater returns from investment activities, and will therefore charge higher interest rates on money that is withheld from investment activities. Just to keep in place.

In the long term though, retail will survive, but if investment banking values are left untouch6ed, it is investment banking that will wither.

The Tories are boneheaded enough to push through with ring fencing.

Now you know the consequences.