technically speaking....................

 

     As an adult, I'll have to come to comprehend the fact that the world, technically speaking, is too vast to be conveyed by language.  It's too grand and too horrific, to complex; too full of love and weather and brutality and governments and movies, to name the first phenomena that come to mind; too overwhelmed by its own history (The Great Vowel Shift! Shintoism! The invention of gunpowder and the printing press and electricity!), not to mention its hopes and fears for the future.

-Michael Cunningham, Unsayable: A Life in Writing

Any Major Dude With Half a Heart...........

 

.................celebrates the World Cup by offering 48 songs, one from each of the countries playing in the on-going tournament.

soccer does matter.............

 

Successes allow leaders to strut and pontificate, to make grand speeches about the symbolic ramifications of victory.  Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France.  That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.  And soccer does matter, does offer insights, often unconscious, into the desires and doubts of a culture, never more so than in the quadrennial snapshot offered by the World Cup.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

A whole lot of projecting going on........

 

We have no historically successful roadmap to go by, and in a sense this may be a situation like Hayek's critique of government planning -- that a perfect roadmap cannot exist because we don't understand the mass of individuals we are "liberating", or even how they define "liberated', or even if they really want to be "liberated."  As all of us humans do, we project our own preferences and outlooks and assumptions on people where they may well not fit at all.

-Warren Meyer, thinking a bit about Iran

finding....................

 

Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.

-Tara Mohr

via

On rationality...............

 

Rationality is thus an a priori assumption rather than a description of the world.

-Charles Kindleberger

great is the responsibility.................

 

The time at which I stand before you is full of interest. The eyes of all nations are fixed on our Republic. The event of the existing crisis will be decisive in the opinion of mankind of the practicability of our federal system of government. Great is the stake placed in our hands; great is the responsibility which must rest upon the people of the United States. Let us realize the importance of the attitude in which we stand before the world. Let us exercise forbearance and firmness. Let us extricate our country from the dangers which surround it and learn wisdom from the lessons they inculcate.

-Andrew Jackson, from his second inaugural address, March 4, 1833

One upside...............................

 

.....................................of young children:

One of the best parts about having young children is so much of your time is devoted to their activities that you don’t have a lot of time to pay attention to the outside world. Some parents complain about being busy all the time but I find it to be a welcomed break from paying attention to all of the craziness this world has to offer.

its normal crop........................

 

Nobody is surprised when a fig tree brings forth figs.  Similarly, we ought to be ashamed of our surprise when the world produces its normal crop of happenings.  A physician or a shipmaster would blush to be surprised if a patient proves feverish, or a wind contrary.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8:15

full...............................

 

Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

-attributed to Helen Keller

What, me worry.......................?

 

Americans are still not worried enough about the risk of world war.

Inadvertently.................ah, history

 Deprived of French help, on December 28, 1783, the Turks officially acknowledged the loss of the Crimea.  Exclaimed on observer, "The Russian state has spread out like ancient Rome."  Indeed, Catherine's swollen dominions now stood larger that the entire Roman Empire at its height.

     But there was a price to be paid for this brash expansion.  For one thing, Catherine's actions had inadvertently opened the wounds of religious wars that would one day cross borders and carry over into a new age.  For another, the Crimea remained a boiling stew of biases, prejudices, and fierce hatreds.  In the years that followed, while annexation was one thing, actually extending Russian control over the region remained an exasperating business.  Russian forays into the area known as the Caucasus were especially riddled with troubles—in 1785 a rebellion broke out among a deadly mix of Chechens, Avars, and other tribes.  Descending down from the mountains, a shadowy leader wrapped in a green cloak and espousing a mystical version of Islam proclaimed a Ghazavat, or holy war, against the Russians.  With dauntless flair and lightning strikes, this self-anointed "Sheik Mansur" led a coalition of mountain tribesmen that harassed and tormented the Russians with guerrilla warfare, laying the seeds for a conflict that still sputters today.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

except when it isn't..............

 The complacent investor view that geopolitics should be ignored might be true, except for the times when it isn’t. We suspect we are in one of those times. If we are right, current extreme levels of geopolitical tension will lead to lower stock prices over a timeframe that lasts more than a couple of hours.

-David Einhorn, from here

Here's a mental framework..............

 In a world where the economy becomes a key tool that great powers use to prosecute their conflicts, it’s completely impossible to just “stick to the economics”.

-Noah Smith, from here  

Probably a good thing..........................

      In truth, to the rest of the world, even as the American Founders boldly harbored utopian visions of the perfect republic, and as theyir wondrous ideas propounded in the Constitution fanned exuberantly outward, across the oceans, into the courts of the world's great powers, the United States remained little more than "revolting colonies," a fringe republic, an obscure land on the margins of Western civilization.  As Bernard Bailyn trenchantly reminds us, America was a "small, unsure, preindustrial borderland" filled with "provincials."  One European diplomat, the Comte de Montmorin, summed it up this way: "the united States," he sneered, were "the laughingstock of all the powers."  So, while Americans now groped forward to wrestle with their numerous inconsistencies—there were many—and their unresolved problems and seemingly insoluble dilemmas (they were numerous as well), the eyes of the world were not on these rustics.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

a sense of history............................

       Driven, singularly willed, quietly but fiercely ambitious, hot-blooded and bold, and uncommonly charismatic, he cherished the military, but he also cherished something even far greater: a sense of history.  And virtue.  Thus, when a movement among the troops mounted at the end of the war to make him king of America, he rebuked them; it had given him, he said, "painful sensations."  Thus, when he learned of the pending mutiny among unpaid and disaffected officers of his army, Washington personally rebuked them, saying an insurrection would only "open the floodgates of civil discord" and threaten the very liberties for which they had fought.  Thus, when he informed Congress after Evacuation Day that he was relinquishing military power and turning it over to them ("I retire from the great theatre of action"), he was self-consciously imitating the legendary Roman republican leader Cincinnatus, who returned power back to the Senate and retired to his farm.  This single action, more than any other, was a virtuoso performance: His refusal to seize power that a Caesar, or a Cromwell, or a William of Orange would have eagerly grasped, and, moreover, his refusal to even entertain the notion of accepting power others would have gladly handed over to  him, earned him an international prestige and a domestic power that no American, before or after, has surpassed.  The old French generals saw him as a great captain because he did not let a superior force destroy his army; the world recognized him as a great man  because he did not let his victorious army turn loyalty to him into a military dictatorship of the United States.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800

Everything you wanted to know...........

 ...............but were afraid to ask about Pakistan.

Pakistan was originally imagined as a utopian project alongside other 20th century nationalisms created from the wreckage of European empires, in this case, the British Raj. In its early years, the country did benefit from an esprit de corps that allowed it to consolidate a relatively capable state from a fractious population consisting of refugees andeven managing to outperform India economically for many years. This relative economic success, or at least ability to keep pace, helped feed a brash and confident Pakistani nationalism that defined the country’s identity for decades and was symbolized byiconic institutions like its once-proud national airline and armed forces. . . .

At the root of Pakistan’s many crises is the issue of elite capture of the state and economy. A study in 2021 by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) highlighted the level to which Pakistan’s economic system has been turned into a machine for extracting subsidies and other perks for the country’s elite at the expense of the vast majority of its citizens. Unlike many other developing countries, Pakistan is a consumption-based society that spends lavishly on elite consumer goods and pricey defense systems rather than investing its capital in productive industries necessary for future growth. Among the beneficiaries of Pakistan’s kleptocratic economic system are a small handful of corporate and political power brokers, the country’s class of large feudal landowners, and its sprawling military establishment – the latter which serves as the guarantor of Pakistan’s national security while also doubling as its largest corporate conglomerate and real estate developer.

Methinks he underestimates their influence . . .

 First, the fiat age has enabled economies large and small, countries near and far, to paper over their problems with cash. . . .

Second, everyone—and I mean everyone—is doing it.  The only systems in existence today that are not expanding their money supply are those that have consciously chosen to forego economic growth in favor of price stability. . . .

But it is China, where monetary expansion is the standard operating procedure for everything, that has truly broken the bank.  Since 2007—the year everyone started talking about the Chinese taking over the planet—the supply of yuan has increased by more than eight hundred percent. . . .The Chinese economy, even by the boasts of the most ultranationalist of Chinese, is still significantly smaller than the American economy, and yet the Chinese money supply has been larger than America's for a decade—often twice as big.  So of course the yuan is a store of value for no one.  Capital flight out of China to the U. S. dollar network regularly tops $1 trillion annually.

     China's financial system, paired with its terminal demographics, condemns it to not being consumption-led, or even export-led, but lending-led.  That makes China vulnerable to any development anywhere in the world that might impinge raw material supply, energy supply, or export routes—developments Beijing cannot influence, much less control.  China has been on this path to destruction for nearly a half century.  This is not the sort of iceberg-on-the-horizon disaster that any tightly controlled, forward-thinking, competently led government should fall prey to.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Fifty ways.......................

 .........................the World is getting better.

Opening paragraphs...............

      Japanese soldiers described World War II as a "typhoon of steel."  It certainly felt that way to Akio Morita, a studious young engineer from a family of prosperous sake merchants.  Morita only barely avoided the front lines by getting assigned to a Japanese navy engineering lab.  But the typhoon of steel crashed through Morita's homeland, too, as American B-29 Superfortress bombers pummeled Japan's cities, destroying much of Tokyo and other urban centers.  Adding to the devastation, an American blockade created widespread hunger and drove the country towards desperate measures.  Morita's brothers were being trained as kamikaze pilots when the war ended.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology