A word sure to strike terror into most males with a shred of youth left in them.

For me however, the friendzone was where two of the most important people in my life placed me, and I thank fuck they did. I am not unlucky with women, I have easily exceeded any of either my or anyone else’s expectations of me there. To even start the conversation like that seems like objectifying someone else and that is squarely NOT what this post is about.

This is something that has been bubbling away in the back of my mind for weeks and it is something I’d like to both reason with my younger self on and also say that the zone can keep some of the coolest people in your life – because its not all just about how many girls you shag, it is also about realising that some of those people are going to shape you and you don’t get to fuck them. This is a lesson that you can take one of two ways – either with resentment, like a spoilt child who couldn’t get what they wanted, or with some degree of maturity, and understand why – and that understanding and the subsequent friendship that came of it has been a lesson in how to live life – its not like those two girls were ordinary types – both of them were amazing – both troubled, both stunning, and both very genuine people. I’ve known them both for coming up on 15+ years and when we speak it does feel a little like yesterday we last spoke even though it may have been a year or more. To people who tell me boys and girls can’t just be friends – well, there’s always a chance you’ll get wrecked one night and end up pouncing on each other, but isn’t that half the fun – but its bullshit to think you cant just be friends. I have been stratospherically high with both of those girls, and for some reason, we knew that we’d wreck everything, we may have tried to wreck everything early on, but things put themselves in order and we understood where the lines were.

The Friendzone grates against what most red-blooded males think is the natural order, and yet sometimes those in that zone become the most powerful allies you can have – there is more to life than just a series of shags, and however you end up with that particular spacing between you and then next person, you might want to know how to make it work – there are endless stories of those in this predicament who got drunk and sunk the whole thing for 5 minutes worth of passion – only to find it was hardly as great as you might have thought – I can speak from experience there too. Flip side of that was someone I’d known since we were teenagers invited me over to a party one night, we were never close friends, ended up boning, and we’re BBFs now – I moved away a month later for work, so probably still in the honeymoon phase. When either of us are hungover as dogs, we’ll get on the phone, even though we’re at opposite ends of the planet, and laugh and cry our way back to normality.

I guess some of this depends on the value you place on friends. For me that value is vast – those people are the ones I have spent the best moments of my life with, I would probably take a bullet for and I love more than anything else in the world – excluding my wife and kids – whole separate category there though. My friends are my world, they keep me sane, we can safely go insane, and I know those fuckers will be there as we crawl on our hands and knees back to sanity.

Coming from a distinctly white, middle class background, I decided early on that life was both a combination of what you are allowed to make of it, and the effort you put into it. But a certain thinking outside of the box, a willingness to try new things and not thinking that you are basically bound to one stereotype that you are cast into by virtue of what colour, how much money you have, nor indeed how smart you are. It was never the way I chose friends and partners, I was happy with whatever came along, as long as one key criteria was met. They had to have a zeal for life. There had to be a spark. No spark, and then there was no input from me either. But anyone who rocked up with that spark, no matter who you were, I never found it hard to relate to. Back to the friendzone. There was one particular girl who had that spark in spades, she was an inferno, but like most infernos – get too close and all you’re going to do is get burnt. I recall seeing all the trainwrecks she made, not feeling sorry for them, and happy that I didn’t make a mess of it. It was kindof her and my running joke who she’d burnt this last week. She did churn through them, as one sometimes does when you’re early 20’s.

It doesn’t have to end up in bed. That is one of the great fallacies of the male-female interaction. Sometimes you realise, for whatever reason, its probably best you dont, and sometimes thats good advice, and you end up taking it. Yeah but often not – when do young dudes ever make sensible decisions right?

And the element of surprise

It’s getting a lot of press of late. The idea that China might actually invade Taiwan some time in the not too far off future and reclaim its “inalienable right” to reunification. Say what you will about the merits or otherwise of this, but for this argument, it probably good to have a look at the logisitcs and possible timing, and make a guess as to when this is likely to to happen.

To be clear, I think it is imminent. 2021. And here are the reasons why, and then after that I’ll get into how.

A) Beefing up defenses. Taiwant has embarked on a major upgrade to their military. In the previous 2 US administrations, 37 defence deals have been signed with the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_US_arms_sales_to_Taiwan

20 of those were with the previous term under President Trump. Defense deals dont happen quickly, and neither do the deliveries. Look closely at the differences however between what Obama sold and what Trump sold Taiwan and there is a big difference. Obama sold a lot of lighter munitions, transports, support euipment and so on. Trump sold weapons that can inflict massive damage on any invading force – 100’s of Harpoon missiles, armed drones, anti-radiation missles for attacking surface to air missile sites, Main battle tanks, F-16s, artillery systems etc – all with the express purpose of making any invasion from the PRC as difficult as possible. When these systems are in place and operational, this will significantly raise the cost of invasion in both cost and lives and may fully deter any invader once these (and other purchases such as submarines which are being indigenously developed) are in place. The window for a successfuly military campaign against Taiwan from China is not closing fully but it is narrowing.

B) Distraction from other countries with regards to the pandemic. The US has an internal crisis on its hands. Whether you believe the extent to which the media have portrayed it, even by the best scenario, they are weakened, both economically and administratevely. This is not lost of the Chinese who realise full well that the US sometime before the end of this year will be fast on the track to recovery and in a far better position to respond to external issues like say an invasion of Taiwan.

As Captain Jim Fanell, senior US Naval Intelligence offcer points out, the next 10 years is going to be the most dangerous in terms of the west vs China.

https://www.hudson.org/research/15045-transcript-the-rise-of-china-s-navy-a-discussion-with-capt-james-fanell

The CCP has committed to the reunification of Taiwan by 2049, which is the 100th anniversary of the takeover of China by Mao. As Fanell points out, there will have to be a bedding in period of around 10 years for the world to accept that any successful invasion of Taiwan is a done deal – whether it leads to WW3 or simply just a realignment, it will take time. So he states specifically that the period of 2020-2030 is the most strategically difficult time in terms of what China might do.

C) Other fronts. China hasn’t exactly been quiet on the Indian front either. And neither has India. That window is closing and is one I dont think will reopen. The Indians are buying a lot of S400 SAM batteries and they are amongst the best, if not the actual best. China cant play attrition here and the Himalayas are naotriously difficult to get the tremdenous amounts of men and materiel across to supply any real incursion. They can and do use their proxy of Pakistan to upset the balance there as well as their usual salami slicing land grabs in Ladakh, Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan and Arunachal Pradesh (the Tibetan 5-finger strategy of Mao). They just need to keep the Indians off balance there, but that wont last forever. Far bigger problems are coming shortly when they start to dam the Brahmaputra in a major way – and that is now in the initial stages of construction – that will have a massive impact on any downstream countries as they can basically cause droughts or flooding at will, and you know with the Chinese, any leverage, not matter how unpalatable, is employed. They are not worried about the Indians but they just want to keep the chain wrapped around their necks and give it a yank from time to time. Their main focus is on Taiwan.

Now to how.

This is the important part – getting 100’s of thousands across the strait, opening and maintaining supply lines and keeping any counter attack and internal insurrection at bay.

Can the element of surprise for such a massive invasion fleet be maintained? I would argue that to some degree that yes, it could, right up until the last second. Here’s how.

Sailing an amphibious landing force over the taiwan strait requires meticulous planning and would be known about well in advance – it would be immediately obvious to intelligence forces by way of satellite imagery. Staging continual drills in the area however lower the level of attentiveness of anyone looking in. Keep these drills going, keep aircraft flying to practise sorties and you do 2 things – first you try and wear the other guy out (you are simultaneously being worn out, so its hardly like you’re gaining anything there, but that isn’t actually the point), you keep attention on these points from any foreign intelligence, and in the background you marshall your troops. I do think a sea invasion will happen, and you have 2 windows to do that – May and October, but I dont think that is where the initial invasion will come from. Look for things to be happening in the days before an amphibious force can mount – I think to try and put an element of surprise in the initial attack will come from a totally different source, probably by way of civillian airliners. You’re not going to start shooting those down until its too late, by which time the invasion has begun and Beijing will be seeking to blind you.If you can land 90 planes quickly, you can get 30000 troops on the ground in hours and in places the Taiwanese government, thats 330 per plane and loaded with days worth of munitions and food, heading directly into urban conflict in the midst of a civilian population. Not the invasion Taiwan is expecting and a much more difficult style of invasion to defend against. And then, having cargo ships at sea, not packed with exports but dummies with further supplies and munitions as well as tanks and motorised units, having those east of Taiwan and immediately doubling back towards Taiwan, essentially attacking from the opposite direction that any conventional force land from, the defenses would be significantly lower.

You’ll want to keep the US out of the fray too, so blanketing the area with A2/AD assets and taking out a couple of foreign military vessels with a couple of DF-21s would be a massive deterent, if not an assassin’s mace style of blinding attack on the US itself – not a straight out attack, but something to cripple either key infrastructure or military response capability to keep them at bay, and then work to establish the facts on the ground as rapidly as possible, looks to be the most likely scenario that I can think of.

But hey – I am just an armchair general in a ricketty old recliner. What on earth would I know…

This is going to be very short and sweet.

One thing that has struck me, as with the friends I have, the jobs I have, the life I have, is that the one true strength is being able to adapt – not relying on the idea that some things are set in stone – nothing is.

It is your ability to accept that, and adapt, to impose change where it’s needed, to respect the old but make way for the new, however uncomfortable that is – this is, was and always will be the most important of our latent abilities.

“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance”. – Alan Watts

I wanted a change of direction. Paradoxically I wanted to get away from the negative, and yet here I am again talking about something negative – but doing as I often do – rowing the boat out on something and showing how bad it might be before trying to explain it is nothing of the sort.

The principle of negativity, tied to the feminine in many religions and philosophies (Yin and Yang in Chinese, Kali in Indian philosophy, nowhere to be found in western religion, and runs almost 100% counter to everything we understand in the west, or at least find politically palatable) – and anyone reading this is probably groaning already, but that is the point – you are all wrong.

The “Yin” principle, that is, the negative, passive, feminine quality, is taken completely out of context, and purely by reason of cultural adaptation in the west. When we say that this is the “negative”, we need to look at what “negative” means. For it is not what you think. In the west, we equate negative with something wholly bad, where in other cultures, the negative is not taken as something bad at all, but rather another piece in what goes into making the whole. A couple of obvious examples of this are the the words on a page and stars in space. Would there be printed words if not for the page, would there be stars if there was no space to put them in – these are two fundamental complimentary pieces of the same thing, only the negative side is the substrate upon which everything else goes on top of – it is the mother, it allows for other things to exist, and viewed as such it falls back into a much more understandible role. And it is not and cannot be viewed as a bad thing, rather it is the very thing underpinning the rest of existence.

So when people (wrongly) try and talk about the eastern religion’s derogatory sense of equating negativity with the feminine, it is us that have it wrong – we have misunderstood what they say, and what is actually meant is that the feminine is the foundation upon which everything else actually sits.

As a final point – in the east as in the west, the male role has usually been thought of as the dominant one. This is not a position I support – I can understand why, but I think society could do with re-thinking this, not in a feminist way, but in a more meritocratic way – the point being that the mis-application of this principle has in some small way contributed to this problem in the past, and removing it may help provide a fresh set of eyes on the issue.

There are not many who read my blog, I write about challenging subjects, and from a biased perspective. It’s time to move on from this – there’s plenty you can read from far more well informed people than myself on these subjects. Technology is my job, but its not what keeps me going. Politics is my fascination but it is inherently negative.

It is time to draw on what I see as the more fundamentally positive forces in the world, and talk about them, instead of the seething masses and all of their problems. Don’t worry, those problems are still front and center is pretty much everything I’ll write, but it has become time to write from a different perspective, one that is more encompassing, one that is better in tune with where we want to go, rather than where are.

I will have to chose every word from this point on carefully.

One thing that has always pissed me off about China is that lying is institutionalised. “We will not militarise the South China Sea”, 2 years later, bang, it’s militarised. “Peaceful Rise” – like f*ck its a peaceful rise. It is based now around coercion and threats as much as trade. But the story worked until it didn’t.

So with the world now a lot more awake to the fact that China’s open declaration (Made in China 2025) means that their industries face an existential threat, the response has started in earnest. Firstly, it is the US and tariffs. The main western industrial countries all complained about the US hitting them too, or not going via the WTO, but the US has one primary target in all of this, and down the road, the US has the option of selectively targeting its tariffs – and since China has walked all over the WTO, they would have a hard time pursuing the US through any WTO remedies. The double standards shown by the WTO if they were to entertain this sort of nonsense would probably destroy it. The Chinese will try however – they have already said so:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-china-wto/us-says-the-reckoning-over-china-trade-is-too-big-for-wto-idUSKBN1K11EQ

They wont get far this time. Trump has blocked appointments to the appeals court within the WTO, meaning its ability to handle trade disputes with binding force is disappearing fast, and according to the article above, will be all but non-existent in 2019. So long WTO. Now it’s bare knuckle brawls with no referee. The Chinese national petulance will be on full display here however. They don’t like their feelings being hurt.

There’s a lot of people around the world quietly impressed by the chutzpah shown by the Chinese. Give em an inch and they will take 100 miles. Lie about basically everything and no one can tell anymore what might actually contain some thread of truth. A great example of this was Huawei in a market I used to work in. We had just swapped a bunch of old equipment out for some shiney new Huawei stuff, and lo, out of the box, with no optimisation, it was performing much better than the older gear, that had been properly tuned. Basically Huawei had lied about everything to us – the stats lied, the setup was purposfully incorrect to improve the stats (we caught them red-handed there), and our ability to monitor for ourselves was so contemptuously degraded we were forced to rely on their reporting and their engineers, and then the real cherry, when I personally challenged their figures and asked for the raw data, I was told by my side to shut it. Never once before in my professional career have I, working for a major mobile operator, been told by said operator that I am not allowed to challenge the obvious bullshit results given by a dodgy vendor. Those slimey little fuckers had it all sewn up. Challenging vendors on major installations is WHAT YOU DO. IT IS A CENTRAL PART OF YOUR JOB. Except when Huawei is the vendor it would seem. Anyway. Enough petulance of my own. Back to the story. (all the guys working with me said they thought exactly the same thing by the way…)

The mercantile approach of the Chinese is beginninng to run into serious opposition. China had been almost unopposed up until Xi came into power. I don’t think his predecessor was anywhere near as feckless as everyone suspected. “Mr Woodface” laid the groundwork for Xi to do what he’s doing now.

https://thediplomat.com/2017/10/speaking-up-for-yesterdays-man-remembering-hu-jintao/

Anyone who can say that he presided over a country that averaged 10% growth for 10 years straight is no moron, to say he was part of a process that has kept that party rolling for 30+ years is nothing short of astounding. Then Xi comes along, and all of a sudden what was flying under the radar now appears in the headlights. “Made in China 2025” “Make China Great Again” (Yeah, he said it first…) “China Dream”, these alone started to get everyone nervous, and then you had Chinese industrial espionage and outright IP theft, not to mention forced tech transfers all hitting the headlines, well, of course it meant things were going to get tougher for the Chinese. Just this week Apple is saying it had its IP stolen by Chinese workers

https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/07/11/apple-theft-case-is-the-latest-in-a-long-list-of-high-tech-shenanigans/

Happens weekly. And the Chinese scream blue murder when they get accused of basically anything.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/30/china-african-union-headquarters-bugging-spying

Would be maybe ok were it a sole case, but it is happening everywhere, constantly.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-24/chinese-firm-sinovel-convicted-in-u-s-of-trade-secret-theft

– and their denials of wrongdoing in that case were epic.

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/26/what-president-trump-doesnt-know-about-zte/

That one is just ZTE taking IP from a patent pool and then leaving just before its turn to pay. Different method, same pattern, same result.

So when you add all of this up, the picture it paints is one very fucked up mess for China. Many countries do business with it through gritted teeth. Long gone are the rosy “win-win” media statements, everyone now feels slightly stiffed by them, and its only getting worse – China isn’t backing down. Fuck no. They’ve realised they made quite a mistake with “Made in China 2025” – that put the other industrialised countries into a near panic. That annoucement along with the methods they have outlined to back national champions and heavy government subsidies are in direct contravention of WTO rules. (see the bit above where I said they about to go running to the WTO to have a cry about the US tariffs. They don’t have a lot of shame here).

I dont see the BRI going much further, I dont see any chance of Europe teaming up with China against the US, they know Trump has another 2 years and things will probably go back to normal, if they lose their industries to China, well that is generations at least, that is the calculus they work to. I do see cyber attacks quietly ramping up, I dont see AI making any major breakthroughs, and I work in that field, but I’d give China an odds on chance of leading there – simply due to the fact you need incredible amounts of data – and China has that. The quality of the research that has come out of the US far exceeds anything from China. China has a lot of thesis and patent mills that plagiarise and print garbage.

Click to access long-cheryl_quality_implications_of_patent_promotion_policies_in_china_ec2342_seminar_1-25-17.pdf

That is the Harvard University School of Economics’ take on it.

This is all quetly leading to a showdown. Xi is as big a thug as Trump, just a lot more enigmatic. He wont back down. Trump, for all of his bluster wont cut and run on this – he’s made it crystal clear what his intentions are, and with guys like Pompeo, Lighthizer and Navarro (and now Bolton as well. He is living proof that there was an an attempt to cross a walrus with a politician, that met with some twisted level of success) with his ear, he started this rumble, its too late to walk away now.

Amongst many of my friends we’ve all quietly conceded that the future ain’t looking good. How bad it gets is anyone’s guess, but China has been allowed to get away its nonsense for way too long now. It’s reckoning time.

My Audi R8 V10

I always thought the letter R and the number 8 went together well. When you add “v10” to it it then starts to sound a little bit silly. But there is a massive difference 2 cylinders (and 1l of engine capacity) can make. I have driven the V8 before and it looked good, sounded good, but it didn’t have the one thing you want – balls to the wall speed. It was fast in a “well I am racing a merc here” sort of a way, but to take on a real challenger and qualify for supercar status, something more was needed.

Some clever wig at Audi suggested bolting on a Lamborghini Gallardo engine, management said sure, give it a try, and the R8 V10 was born. Be in no doubt then, while its pedigree is Audi, who is known for good construction and a slight boringness, its heart is that of the raging bull – the 5.2l Gallardo engine is anything but timid. take 35hp off the stock Gallardo engine and you are still left with something near the performance of a nuclear ramjet. (Yeah ok, that engine is taken from the S8. Dont wreck my story here)

First drive. Boring. Given that I had already bought the car my heart sunk. I did buy it without taking it for a test drive – it’s a fucking Audi R8 – whats a test drive going to do?Waste of time, or so I thought. But given the first experience of driving it for real I thought – blew cash for what – an ultimately unimpressive ride that looked good. I bought the car for the experience, and that experience sucked. At low speeds you felt like you were driving a battle tank. Difficult to turn, so bad even that the universal joints popped out at full lock and I was busy revving the car with no movement back or forward. Some serious disappointment going on, but too late, it was mine, and I had to put on a brave face and show mum and dad the lemon that was mine. That’s actually kindof how I felt – capped off by the fact that I stopped traffic by not applying the brake before engaging gear. Queue honks of disapproval (and derision).

Get out of town and – Wait. One. Second. The speedo clicked over 80km. The transformation from “Heavy handed unwieldy battle tank” to “5.2 liters worth of pure fun” was pretty quick. Now. Drive from Auckland to Tauranga. Take the back roads where you know there are:

A) No cops

B) No one else

C) Tight roads

D) Speed available

I was grinning like a schoolkid. And fuck was I moving. Getting over 200 without even pushing it. I hit 230 and was still accelerating fast.

The car was suddenly transformed from a deadweight (last car was an AMG Merc which was as easy to park as a mini. This was like parking a oil freighter) into the most sure footed, heart racing, electrifying supercar I have ever driven. Jeremy Clarkson has been quoted as saying that “this is the best car I have ever driven” I have never driven another supercar. I doubt very much I will. You point and it shoots. Some of the shit that I got up to was solely as a result of the car teaching me to drive it – shooting gaps I would never have thought possible otherwise. Taking corners marked 35 at 100 (and I shit you not, I did), simply because you knew you could without any trouble. I dont know what to compare this thing to, because as I say I will probably never have the chance to buy another supercar. This is it. The only one I will ever own. But I could have done way worse. Everything about this car says that it was designed and built by people who knew exactly what they were doing. Except for making the car not feel like an embarrassment at low speed. Maybe they did that on purpose to make you go faster. Works for me. I have given a couple of my better friends a drive and the results were unanimous. Big smiles. If anything I feel relieved that I have taken some of my money out of the sharemarket and turned it into something have enjoyable. There is no joy in stocks, but there sure as hell is in possibly one of the most well engineered machines invented.

Bottom line is you only live once. Plan for the future – but if time permits, live for today.

I wrote this one a few years back. Whilst living the life of a single consultant. I am now married with kids and no car – I dont need one where I live. I have no regrets, Nothing could replace the black car as we called it. Except a daughter. And I’d take my daughter over any car, any day of the week. Looking back it was a privilege and an incredible thrill to own one, and I am in business, so maybe one day – if I have the money I would want another – even the same one back again. It was a masterpiece.

(Republished from 2015)

Say whatever you like about ISIS, but for most of us, nearly everyone, ISIS is little more than a bunch of guys who have taken over a desert. They manage to poke the west in the eye every so often, and the response is always the predictable assortment of bombs, rhetoric and underlying lack of coordination between parties who if they really wanted ISIS gone, they would form a coalition and go in and get rid of them.

This hasn’t happened.

ISIS need a few things to survive. They need weapons, they need to sell their oil, and its very likely they need a lot of additional funding. These all come from, or go to, places outside their area of control. That implies complicity on the part of others who either sympathise or benefit from dealing with them. None of this is any surprise. And if you take any of the above support away from ISIS, they would quickly evaporate. But easier said than done. They key element here is weapons and  ammunition – militants need plenty of these. They have to come from somewhere.

So the next step is working out who is supporting ISIS from the outside, and why. The weapons that pour into the ISIS controlled area have to come through a coordinated logistical supply network – and these are expensive and hard to maintain. And, in theory, given that the terrain that ISIS holds, and the fact that they are not on the move – should be well known. For any nation with an effective strike capability, targeting these supply lines is one of the most simple ways of weakening them. ISIS could be defeated quickly if these were severed.

So where from, and why?

If you look at the countries surrounding the Syrian desert, you have Iraq, Jordan, Syria itself, Israel, Lebanon, and Turkey.

To look at each country in turn:

Iraq – They have their own ISIS problem, so they are in a similar position to Syria when it comes to the question of where the weapons are flowing from. It has to be from a non ISIS controlled area – either the south through Iraq, which is unlikely – the supply lines run through unfriendly territory for ISIS. To the northwest along the Jordanian border however is a likely route – Saudi is a tacit supporter of ISIS and ISIS controls the road down to the border through Iraq. So yes, Iraq indirectly is one possible supply line.

Jordan – not directly, but as above, an inlet through which Saudi can import arms.

Israel – I dont think anyone seriously believes that Israel is supporting ISIS. They are interested in a contained middle east that poses no threat to them, but apart from conspiracy theories, not really much chance.

Lebanon – No chance. They are a strong supporter of Syria.

Turkey – with the shortest route to areas under direct ISIS control, and the complicity of the Turkish government, this is where the majority of the arms are coming from.

http://www.dw.com/en/is-supply-channels-through-turkey/av-18091048

But why? Why would a NATO member support what is by all measures one of NATO’s perceived largest threats?

To start with, there is a lot of nuance in this situation – forget “Good guys” and “Bad guys” – it is more about regional claims, religion, state actors, and power. Firstly Syria – it wants to cling onto its territory. If Assad falls, there is a good case to be made that the country will disintegrate – the Kurds will claim a chunk, the Alawites, and others will go for theirs, and the country will likely remain in a state of chaos until a strong government once again gets into power. But the key thing to this is the idea of a strong government. Western style democracy in the case of Iraq has been shown to be weak in terms of governance and control – its not like different tribes want to peacefully coexist there – they are all out for settling scores – and that means continual conflict.

Turkey wants Assad gone, no matter the consequences. And this is the part where ISIS comes back in. If ISIS can be controlled – to the degree that they are effectively doing someone else’s bidding, and this is what appears to be happening, then collateral damage, as long as it is not in the sponsor’s country, is acceptable. Dont try and convince France, or Russia, or Lebanon of that, but Turkey seems to be allowing, if not abetting this.

So ISIS seems to me at least to be the weapon of choice for Turkey to pursue its ends in the middle east. Duplicitous in the extreme, myopic in its focus, but in terms of achieving a goal of keeping Syria in perpetual chaos, quite effective.

It will eventually backfire – unintended consequences usually change the form of any battle where many players have competing aims, but one side will emerge as the victor eventually there. We have no idea who. It’s like any demon – we think we can tame it, but if we keep feeding it, it will come back to bite us. It is a mirage, but given enough time and energy, could solidify and pose a real threat. Their supporters, just like the rest of us, had better be aware that if they do become a real force then they are to be feared. Currently however, they are a balloon, with messages of hate scribbled all over them, but incapable of survival without support from outside. It may change, for better or for worse, but currently they are an artificial demon, summoned in support of someone else’s cynical purpose. We run the real risk of turning them into a fighting force. Currently they live in the desert, they may not stay there.

Life is possibly the most tenacious idea we have ever been presented with. Forget business, love, work, just the actual idea of a continually self replicating, functional biological machines that as soon as they are born don’t need a manual on how to be themselves – you feed them and put them in the right environment and they will thrive. From humans on one end to extremophiles (biological beasts that have learned to adapt to some pretty extreme environments) on the other – life itself is characterised by the fact that it is hard wired to survive.

Except when it isn’t.

John Calhoun made a number of experiments in the 1960’s and 70’s around mice populations in controlled environments with an abundance of everything where all the natural threats to them had been removed. They ended in disaster. For the mice. Society tore itself apart. http://www.mostlyodd.com/death-by-utopia/ – You can read it for yourself – it contains links to other similarly well written articles as well. There were a couple of important conclusions that Mr Calhoun makes. The first was in mathematical form:

Mortality, bodily death = the second death
Drastic reduction of mortality
= death of the second death
= death squared
= (death)²
(Death)² leads to dissolution of social organization
= death of the establishment
Death of the establishment leads to spiritual death
= loss of capacity to engage in behaviors essential to species survival
= the first death
Therefore:
(Death)² = the first death

This formula might apply to rats and mice—but could the same happen to humankind? For Calhoun, there was little question about it. No matter how sophisticated we considered ourselves to be, once the number of individuals capable of filling roles greatly exceeded the number of roles, (attribution – this is quoting from the website)

only violence and disruption of social organization can follow. … Individuals born under these circumstances will be so out of touch with reality as to be incapable even of alienation. Their most complex behaviors will become fragmented. Acquisition, creation and utilization of ideas appropriate for life in a post-industrial cultural-conceptual-technological society will have been blocked.

Now to take a step back and apply this to the current condition for humanity as it nears the third decade in the 21st century.

There is no doubt that humanity is becoming very bottom heavy. Educated and industrial nations’ birth rates are sinking, many well below the replacement mark of 2.1 children per adult couple. The natural response to this is to bring in people from other countries. Long story short, in most cases, the population keeps rising. This is ok as long as there are jobs and stability and the required infrastructure is built and able to cope – the net effect is that the engines of growth and the tax base are happy. This reaches a plateau at some point however, after which things like social integration of foreign cultures, inter-racial tensions etc go from being something that from time to time is noticed to becoming more and more of a problem that is constantly there and needs to be dealt with.

So in this there is a direct link to the conditions (NOT outcomes) that Mr Calhoun describes – increasing population, no or limited resource problems, finite space in which to house people. Add in religion and cultural differences and after a point of continual expansion, you reach a point where no one wants any more incomers. It’s entirely an issue of perception and who to blame when things start looking as though they are taking a turn.

If you take one step back from the detail of the experiment and look at the wider picture of exactly what he did – a simulation of more or less ideal conditions for these creatures to thrive – no predators, no widespread disease, plentiful food, and the two constraints – finite space, and less obviously finite functional roles within a society, this was a combination that proved to be deadly to the survival of the species.There was no decline and stabilisation, there was at some point, the destruction of the idea, even at something of as simple a level as a rodent, of the society in which they lived. It seems that past a certain point of social disintegration that even depopulation didn’t turn the situation around – something fundamental to survival was lost, and nothing internal to the remaining population could bring it back – there was no innate sense of structure left.

Life’s natural balancers to this are conflict and disease (and predators, if you’re not at the top of the food chain) – and a sort of equilibrium can be maintained. What we have currently in the world can best be described as a major shift in equilibrium, at worst, I have no idea. Not good though. The point is, with an abundance of everything, the mouse society broke. Not just went into a balance at a lower population, but simply went out of existence – the skills the new mice needed to keep society running vanished.

Previously I had an optimistic outcome for us – that mirrored what Calhoun’s intentions for the experiments were – he set about trying to understand and design environments where the problem of lack of space could be minimised. This was originally written in 2015, when I thought there was still room for some adjustments that would have kept us away from disaster. But here we are once again, after a massive influx of migrants into Europe, who cause chaos, and one questions whether or not after a certain point the same conditions within the human system could bring about a similar fate. As time goes on and the dislocations grow larger, I think it’s very difficult to tell what will happen. But I will make two very open caveats – inequality and the disconnection of the wealthy – the growing unrest that this seems to cause could be a catalyst for breakdown – but this falls outside of the mode described above, the other is open revolution. And I’ll write about that separately.

For me the parallels between the mouse world and ours are this:

Growing dislocation – the poor having to abandon family to try and do anything to survive. Families survive better when they are together. This is working its way from the poorer classes on into the middle classes these days. In the mouse world it meant that instead of proper rearing of the young, they were kicked out at an early age and had to fend for themselves.

Fewer and fewer meaningful positions – if you look amongst any biological group, roles and responsibilities are a natural occurrence, and our society is progressively devaluing and removing these, with fewer alternatives.

Isolation. some groups, instead of partaking in society, shit themselves off in isolation – and forget how to interact with other members of society (in Calhoun’s world, he called them the “Beautiful ones”, in ours, we have various names for them, depending on where you are from. The “Hikkikomori” of Japan is one that has been examined in detail. There is no shortage of media coverage about how social anxiety is on the rise.

So – I think the parallels are there, to some degree. It’s what we are going to do about them – what we think is important to keeping our society together and acting on that, that counts long term.