Great Travelers, Great Stories

Traveling through space is geography.  Traveling through time is history.  I just finished reading the Travels of Marco Polo and Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux simultaneously; okay, actually I was alternating between them.  As fate would have it, they’re traveling somewhat the same route, at least part of the way.  No I didn’t plan it that way.  If I had, then it wouldn’t be serendipity.  I like that word, and I like the meaning behind it, the happy accident; the brilliant mistake.  It’s not a race, because I already know who’d win.  Slow as they are, trains are fast compared to caravan travel on the Silk Road, or even the open seas, which was the only option in Marco Polo’s time.  But as long as every picture tells a story, then overland travel is eminently worthwhile.  Once they’re known and renowned, then even the most impressive trail among them can become boring.

The strangest thing is not that Polo’s observations seem so dated, though, as you would expect from travels that occurred some 750 years ago.  No, the strange thing is how dated Theroux’s observations seem.  Those observations are barely forty years old, and occurred in an era that I know well, the same one that gave birth to my own significant travels.  In fact if I had to place them within a historical continuum between Polo’s era and this date of January 2012, then I’d place them about half-way, which is to say that almost as much has happened within the last forty years as in the seven hundred which preceded it.  If that s

The Incredible Sinking Dollar

Just when you think the dollar couldn’t suck any more or any worse than it already does, then it starts going down again, kind of like London Bridge, I guess. You stateside people could care less, right? I can’t blame you. Any effect there only shows up in higher prices, especially oil, whose producers are very aware of ‘real’, that is, stable Euro-based, value. Considering that the US has some of the lower free-market prices around anyway, those effects are somewhat mitigated. So what’s the cause of the once-almighty dollar’s slide into oblivion? That’s the $64K question. The simple answer is that people are buying fewer of them. So why are people buying fewer of them? There are many reasons, including lower interest rates, better options elsewhere, and the likelihood that China has bought about as many dollar-denominated securities as it can reasonably justify. Another reason is that the US is spending them like crazy, and borrowing like crazy, the other side of the flow chart. This is largely due to ‘the war’, always a pricey expenditure, hardly the economic justification of war that conspiracy people like to make it out as. Then there are the low-tax policies that are doctrine for the Bush administration in general. Unfortunately low taxes mean high borrowing. The resulting flow makes the dollar weaker and creditors richer, trickle-up economics. Republicans like to pretend they’re rewarding entrepreneurship and fiscal responsibility by keeping taxes and welfare benefits low, but there’s no shortage of welfare for the rich when Bear Stearns is about to go belly up, nor any excess responsibility when predatory lending practices create a mortgage and credit crisis that ends up affecting us all, innocent bystanders included. Fortunately talk is cheap, but knowledge short, and scuttlebutt thicker than Beijing smog when it comes to economics. How are we supposed to figure it out when the ‘experts’ are just making it up as they go along? There is no science of economics, only theory.

I think the main thrust of capitalist theory is that as long as the economy keeps growing, then any wrinkles will get smoothed out with time if not inflation. In other words, it’s a confidence game. As long as everyone keeps the faith, then the economy keeps growing. They may very well be right. I used to be very skeptical of such theory; after all how can an economy keep growing when resources are limited? I tried to imagine our culture spreading through outer space in some sort of metaphorical expanding universe, but no matter how romantic the image in its appeal to me, space travel is probably more of a drain than a boon to the economy. The advent of the Information Age has shown the limitations of my skepticism and earlier lack of vision. In the computer age knowledge truly is power and there are no limits to resources when you’re talking about intellectual property. But without Communism to keep it honest, capitalism no longer is. Europe’s even getting in on the act now, with eight-figure annual CEO disbursements, predatory lending practices, mortgage scandals, the whole schmear. Not surprisingly England is at the lead in this, but others are learning quickly. Ironically Russia, hardly the richest country in Europe, has by far the most billionaires, highlighting the inherent injustices. This makes you wonder what their Communist era was really all about, apparently little more than a police state to reign in the wildest impulses of the rich and corrupt. France and Germany both have conservative business-oriented governments anxious to dismantle suffocating welfare states that took years to build. For their part labor unions are famous for claiming their piece of the pie without ever really considering the possibility that maybe they should share a piece of the investment risk also. The labor/management dichotomy is critical to labor’s dinosaur way of thinking.

So what does all this have to do with the shrinking dollar? Maybe we should be asking why the dollar was so high in the first place. It hasn’t always been in fact. During the last war, yes the famous V-fingered war, the dollar fell as low or lower than this, and inflation rose much faster. This followed the Bretton Woods agreement of 1972 in which exchange rates were allowed to float instead of being fixed rates. This was after previous B-W agreements pegging rates to the dollar as opposed to gold, which some diehards still long for as currency as if its value were transcendent. In reality it only became useful as currency when there was plenty of it and its value well known, like silver before it, beads and shells before that, and tobacco in times of war. So dollars became world currency after WWII, but it wasn’t until the ‘Reagan Revolution’ that the dollar rose to new stellar heights. Whether the US wanted it that way is debatable I guess. Does a queen bee ask for workers to stuff her with royal jelly? It’s a privileged position, but entails loss of freedom for the royal fat-butt, not to mention the nauseating task of laying eggs for the whole world’s use. In the currency metaphor, the royal jelly is consumer goods and the eggs are dollars. To export to the US was to mine for gold. The US is the only country in the world that can’t re-value its currency, at the total mercy of the others, who need dollars to do business. Increasingly that means China, the modern world’s workhorse whose own currency is virtually useless outside its own borders. China has always demanded one-sided trade, payment in currency rather than a two-way flow of trade. This is what provoked the Opium Wars of the 1800’s, since that was the only other currency acceptable to the celestials, however illegal. I guess it made them more celestial. In all fairness opium was routinely given to British children in the early 1800’s to quiet them down. It worked like a charm. Things only came to a head when the balance of trade turned in Britain’s favor.

Now China buys T-bills and other US securities denominated in US dollars. Though much scuttlebutt has been bandied about Internet and conspiracy circles about ‘the loan’ or ‘loans’ ‘propping up’ the US economy which they can ‘call in’ anytime they want, I can’t find any of this anywhere, just one-way trade and large holdings in specie. Call it Chinese-style communism. So what’s the bottom line here at Ground Zero? Well, with China saturated with dollars and the Thai baht stable, you can bet they’re buying plenty of these now, too, strengthening the local currency. That and high oil prices are fueling inflation like I’ve never seen here, at the same time that the economy is flat from governmental neglect. Thus with the dollar weak and the Thai baht strong, a simultaneous double whammy, much of the economic advantages here have faded. Couple that with increasingly restrictive and arbitrary visa policies, and the bloom is off the rose. With the US real estate boom now faded and hotel rates moderating accordingly from their highs of a year or two ago, while prices in Thailand are inflating rapidly, a room in LA doesn’t cost much more than one in Bangkok. Food costs are less here, but so are portions. The buffet lunch in downtown Chiang Rai isn’t much cheaper than a Chinese buffet in Flagstaff, AZ, cities of similar size. Gasoline in Thailand is about four bucks a gallon, the US cheaper, depending on your location. Most traditional Third World countries have gasoline prices higher than the US, so who’s complaining? Everybody, of course. More importantly, who’s doing anything to change it? I notice a lot of new LP gas stations popping up in Thailand. I haven’t noticed them anywhere else.

So Thailand is not so cheap anymore and the US is not so expensive. The US is in fact looking better all the time. US wages are getting a boost for the first time in years and we might very well have a responsible presidency on the horizon. Interest rates are dropping drastically, so it’s a bad time for saving, but a good time for doing business. Housing prices are lower than they have been for several years. Foreclosures are rampant, bad for the original owners, but good for someone looking to pick up a bargain. A cheap dollar makes US products more attractive overseas, possibly moving it to a more favorable balance of trade. Maybe it’s time to give the US another look. Since my wife just got a K-1 visa, I think I will, for a while at least. There are still places there I haven’t been, like Puerto Rico, maybe? Hmmm…..

Over-Population and the Price of Gas in Flagstaff

Oil prices kissed one hundred bucks a barrel yesterday for the first time in history, only slightly mitigated by the fact that a buck ain’t packing all that much of a bang these days. But that’s a psychological barrier, so everybody starts waxing philosophical about the future of the planet, etc. Don’t worry about the planet. That’s the problem- human arrogance, to think that ‘the planet’ is all about us, and only us. The planet will do just fine. Don’t worry about you and yours either. You’ve never had it so good. Don’t even bother worrying about ‘life’. Bacteria are quite resilient, around almost as long as there’s been something liquid to swim in, even surviving ‘global freezing’ a full hundred million years before the Cambrian ‘explosion.’ ‘Global warming’? Piece of cake, at least for the gigajillions of bacteria that we host symbiotically. They’ll find other sources of food, even without our plumbing systems. If you want to worry about something, worry about the species. There’s good reason, not least of which is the fact that almost all that have ever existed are now extinct. The fact that our intelligence gives us an advantage is easily outweighed by the fact that it also causes most of our problems. A dumber species might do better in the long run, if only they’d stop breeding so much.

We’re victims of our own success. Evolutionary success is equivalent to reproductive success, usually. We humans have to change all these equations to suit current fashion, so that now cultural evolution is arguably more important than the biological kind. That’s too bad, because we sure now how to screw, up a good thing, that is. Will we ever be content just going through the motions? As always, time tells. For millennia the overriding principle of life was to reproduce it, the more the better, ‘family values’ defining our interactions and even reaching the status of religion Back East. Wars used to be fought to capture people for resettlement and lineage expansion, long before anyone thought of putting up borders to keep them out. So now that we’ve conquered the planet how do we conquer ourselves, our desires, our traditions, our obsessions? After all, global warming is only a problem because there are billions of us producing it. If there were only a billion of us world-wide, you could drive all the Buicks and Pontiacs you wanted. Over-population was an eighties problem, largely forgotten since China dealt with it, however haphazardly, on their own front. China’s good at seeing the writing on the wall, even in foreign alphabets. India will pass them in population soon, and others are making up for lost time also.

We sometimes worry about those billion or so ‘yellow devils’ ‘over there’ creeping through the cracks into Chinatowns and Chinese restaurants around the world, General Tso’s ultimate strategy of infiltration through the stomach and bowels, unlike the Western obsession with hearts and minds. Given their traditional obsession with cash income in all trade relationships, our mutual relationship runs sweet and sour. They invented it, after all, paper money and playing cards. The Opium Wars were more about currency than drugs, at least the first time. Opium was currency, the only product they would accept besides silver. The rest is history. I assure you they worry much more about those billion ‘white barbarians’ surrounding them on all sides, i.e. Europe, America, and Australia. India’s right there, equal in total numbers, especially if you add their sub-continent and cultural neighbors Nepal and Sri Lanka. Islam accomplishes with dogma what India failed to accomplish with karma, bringing Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia over to their camp to surpass a billion. The population race is in a dead heat, emphasis on ‘dead.’ Maybe it’s time to lay down our crosses and swords, penises and wombs, and call it a truce. Modern warfare certainly no longer depends on the human wave assault. Words defeat the sword; information defeats bombs.

Limit reproduction to two children ABSOLUTELY and see how many of our problems might go away. Instead of giving tax credits for more children, give tax credits for less. After all, cultural evolution allows for many forms of satisfaction, not just watching your sons and daughters grow up to despise you. The main ‘proof’ for global warming is that chart of ‘inconvenient truth’ showing a spike in temperature that coincides perfectly with the spike in the industrial revolution’s exhaust emissions, first coal, and then oil. Has nobody noticed that that graph also coincides with the spike in population that equally defines our epoch? After steady population growth since the origin of food production some ten thousand years ago, from around the year -500 BCE to around 500 CE the world population remained relatively stable, stuck at around a hundred million or so, at least a quarter of them in China. It only managed to double in the next thousand years, given devastating political turmoil and the growth of cities, a great career move for bacteria and viruses. Then the playing field went berserk. As the ‘Pax Britannica’ eventually won out internationally and Materia Medica won out internally, that stalemate changed radically. The Industrial Revolution created the wealth, in real terms, to sustain large families, with fewer of them now dying. Even Chomsky will admit that we’re richer than ever, albeit with lingering problems. Only Africa has been systematically left out of the prosperity, with life expectancies still hovering around the low forties in many countries. The world got its first billion simultaneously living inhabitants right around 1830. It got its sixth billionth right around… wait a minute…

What I want to know is why, with oil hovering at a hundred dollars a barrel, is gasoline hovering locally at three dollars a gallon, the same as when oil was selling between sixty and seventy dollars a barrel? That would be due to certain, uh, psychological factors, right? Supply and demand, right? Tell that to the poor guy trying to feed his family in the Third World outback. Don’t blame America. Prices, if anything, are MORE in the third world; the US, by comparison, tends to be cheap. In highly competitive Thailand, prices, at current exchange rates, are right at four dollars a gallon for the premium grades. In quasi-Communistic Cambodia, they are at least that for the low-grade blends, ditto for Canada and their integrated NAFTA economy. The recent riots in Burma were sparked by a sudden increase in gas prices. Riots had already occurred in Indonesia, an oil-producing nation, for the same reason. Without Communism to keep it honest, it seems that capitalism no longer is. Is Islamistan any better? The USSR used to subsidize her satellites; does Arabia? She must, if Egypt can sell gas at $.65 a gallon, less than Kuwait or Riyadh. Egypt doesn’t produce any. It’s only $.12 right now in Caracas. What does that say? How much is dependent on local real estate prices or political considerations or profit margins, and how much goes to government taxes anyway? Gasoline is currently selling at $1.74 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, the U.S. commonwealth territory. It is exempt from most US taxes. Remember what the price of a barrel of oil was in 1998? I bet you don’t. It was twelve dollars. Have things changed that much in ten years, be it supply, demand, output, income, China, America, Europe, or Islam? Oh yeah, I almost forgot… 9-11, that explains everything.

We’ll lose the battle against global warming without renewed population control efforts. I can think of a thousand reasons to control carbon emissions, but that’s just not enough to reverse global warming. We will lose that battle. Any thought that the oil will run out before the heat becomes too much ignores coal, which is not only dirtier, but which will never run out. Any more questions?