The Scramble For Europe

The six part series about African civilisations run on BBC4 from the PBS channel in the last part of six dealt with the carve up of Africa by European powers in the 19th and into the 20th Century. At one stage, the newly created German Empire, called a conference at Berlin in 1884 of the key 16 European states involved.

There is a part of Africa in all of us according to this recent study reported in Science Daily but in the late 19th Century the ideas about humanity by the theorists gave substance to the rulers of Europe adding parts of Africa to their domains. Otto Von Bismarck, Chancellor of Germany, did not want this to trigger wars and conflicts between European states for the riches to be had.

But in 1888 his Kaiser Wilhelm I died, his successor Frederick lasted only three months before dying so Kaiser Wilhelm II ruled. He dumped Bismarck in 1890 and set out to change the course of history on his own terms and by 1914 and after a series of crises a major European war broke out.

The term for all this was the Scramble for Africa, not unique in that in the continent down the millennia there had been many wars, empire building, wealth taking and political and economic flux and ways of life and civilisations almost forgotten.

With the Europeans it began with the Portuguese and it was not long before others followed. They began with trading posts, which became towns, which then had rich merchants who needed defending and used both local and mercenary troops from Europe. At the same time they became parts of local townships and capitals.

It was not long before these became involved in internal conflicts to their own advantage and soon enough the outsiders came to take control of some areas and in others had indirect rule by the power and influence they exerted on the local rulers. These often welcomed the outsiders as essential to their economic and social futures.

More Europeans came in to settle and Africa became a subject continent with few exceptions and the structure of its society, institutions etc. became more European and less African to the point where the old was almost or completely lost.

But remove this to the late 20th and new 21st Century and change the pattern from Europeans taking over to others taking over Europe, perhaps from Africa but also from other places. Then follow the money and who has effective economic control. Not least look at the patterns of movement and settlement occurring In Europe.

Where do our finance, investment funds and other sources of infrastructure investment and other key areas come from? Who is dictating the key financial decisions and on what basis? Who provides our energy? Who do our politicians run to for advice, decisions or to sort out their many messes and conflicts?

Like the Africans of the past the Europeans of the present are seeing a Scramble for Europe and who can tell where it will end and who will control which parts of Europe by the mid 21st Century?

Sir Henry Newbolt Revisited

There's halitosis on the pitch tonight, the linesman's jamming and the ref' got tight. Punch up, punch up and to hell with the game. The World Cup Final promises to be another grim struggle of alpha male domination. There are better ways of spending the time.

At least we will be spared all the flannel of our historic problems with the French. The battle scene from Laurence Olivier's "King Henry V" is on Youtube if you like all that sort of thing. Rather like a Saturday night on the High Street but more organised.

As in many things the game we have now is removed from its origins in this country. The 1863 idea of making rules worked for a while but is falling into disuse. Perhaps we might look for the historic alternatives.

The Chinese, as ever, seem to have been there a millennia before in the game of Cuju, see Wikipedia and picture above. Probably, there are still places in China some locals play a kind of equivalent.

Is it now time for an entrepreneur to copyright rules, put some money into it and see how much the TV satellite providers come up with?

It might have made a better alternative to the World Cup than blokes chasing each other on bicycles. 

Have A Nice Blog

There have been several blogs recently that have gone off the radar and I suspect more to follow.  There will be many reasons for this.  Some will decide to get a life or rather another one, others have finally run out of time, others will have had ultimatums from spouse/partner or other family or creditors or the boss.

There will be a few who feel that they have said enough and have little more to add. One group will be those who became so enraged about the  government that they are at a loss to know how to direct their feelings.  A reason for this is the new lot have barely begun their work and we need to see what will be what.

Broadly bloggers seem to fall into three major groups with a largish fringe.  There are the professionals for whom the end of the dead tree press is nigh and who wish to be at the commanding heights of the blogosphere.  Others are representative of one organisation or established grouping or another and whose output reflects this.

Then there is the broad range of general bloggers and blogs which may be from a base of an organisation but open to wide debate or individual in scope.  The fringe is just that, a random collection of individuals and groups who want to have their say and hope someone agrees.

Among the professionals and those who need to have a high rate of posting there is always the danger of misreading the runes or making bad mistakes.  There are those with an angle sometimes difficult to estimate but often blatant.

There is nothing much new about this kind of thing.  If you look in Wikipedia at “The Thomason Collection of Civil War Tracts” you will see that in the 17^th Century all our ancestor bloggers were alive and active. 

I have spent many happy hours wending my way through this material. It has more depth, is largely better informed and frankly in many ways more entertaining than much of the 21^st Century blogs.

It is fascinating to see just how Archbishop James Ussher arrived at his views on the delicate theological matter of just how old the earth was. Nowadays on the basis of more recent science most of us, but far from all, especially in the USA, believe that he was wrong.

So who was he?  He had been busted from his See by the 17th Century Civil War, pitched up as Lecturer at Lincoln’s Inn, was bad at it because his teeth had fallen out and then roped in by Oliver Cromwell to stop the row about the age of the earth causing mutiny and friction among the members of the Eastern Association.

Ussher could almost be a template for the blogger of modern times. In the 18^th Century the printed debates were almost as active and in the press there would be well informed parallel comment.

The most famous is Junius of the “Public Advertiser” who is now thought to have been Sir Philip Francis. If he was I suspect he was using feeds from others, notably Jeremy Sneyd, friend of Sheridan and who was connected to the Johnson circle.

Then there is Cobbett and others like him. Dickens in the 19^th Century started out as “Boz”, almost a classic blogger style operator, although wordy by 21^st Century Standards. Many of the 19^th Century writers were predecessors to the blogs in the shape of their writing and opinions.

During all these periods there were ups and downs, more activity and less activity and a wide range of opinion and coming and going. So not much changes; only the means of communication.

What has happened was that in the mid to late 20^th Century a great deal of the printed word and media fell into the hands of smaller, more powerful and concentrated groups, substantially commanded from the centres of power.

Now the web and the ability to write, to communicate and to research has become so much easier and literally anyone can join in and they do.  If the representatives of the past media establishment do not like it they should remind themselves that their position has been only an historical accident. What is happening now is in many ways a reversion to the past.

The one issue that does worry me is that a good many of the professional and the representative bloggers are simply not looking at many of the serious sources of information. There is a huge amount of solid information that needs looking at and deserves using in informed comment.

This is the difference between many bloggers and their equivalents of the past.  They were normally better informed for their time and able to handle complicated ideas and information.  The present knockabout business is not enough in the world we are in.

Football Fantasy

Given the extensive coverage of the Russian World Cup perhaps it is high time GDPR, Privacy, Inhuman Rites and all that were applied to football  This would be along the lines of the following.

An unspecified team to play against another team from a far away country later in the week has been announced.  Following an appeal against the team manager granted by telephone call to a High Court judge by the distraught WAG of a man who has not been selected, an injunction has been granted.

This is on the grounds of privacy to avoid hurting his feelings and his prospects of a highly profitable imminent media rights agreement.

The manager would not comment save to say it would make life easier in the after match analysis.  The spokesman for the football authority concerned said “Who reads the programmes anyway?”

Goalkeeper - Mr. X.

Defenders - Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X.

Midfielders - Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X.

Forwards - Mr. X. Mr. X.

Substitutes - Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X. Mr. X.

Spectators will be blindfolded and assisted to their seats.

Representatives of the media will not be permitted to name players nor give any description that might allow identification.

The referee and officials will not be permitted to point to players or to record their names or any decision.

The judge will be available in a hospitality suite to give injunctions, guidance and committals for contempt of court as necessary.

No result of the game or associated games will be announced until the formal appeal is heard in court sometime late in 2021.

Plunder And Modernity

Is the old baggage of theories and “isms” we have collected down the years out of date and now impedes real discussion and awareness of what is going on out there? The problem is finding new words and a structure of ideas that does and can be understood and to reduce matters to the simplest possible.

It is that the world is ruled by a changing group of people who have gained control over the financial systems, scarce resources, communications and means of distribution. They are above the law, can control politics and their interests extend into almost every home and location in the world from which they extract increasing amounts of wealth.

Much of the developed world is collapsing into debt slavery and much of the undeveloped world is already there. There are two possible words, Plundercrats or Lootocrats with Plunderocracy and Lootocracy as the group options. The second comes a little too close to the old Plutocrats associated with past “ism’s”.

The first is a little clumsier but is more accurate as it more or less describes their mode of operations.  I am settling for Plundercrats. It arises from the debate about whether the Vikings were raiders or traders. Over their period they seem to have been both and the two went together. They were not the only ones at that time.

If you look at history in the longer period and over wider territories than Europe and the Mediterranean there have been times when there have been many types of mobile armed groups with predatory intentions and purpose who have plagued others and have taken what they wanted.

What made The Vikings different was that they arrived suddenly by deep sea voyages and did not trouble too much about who they attacked. The churches and monasteries were not sacred as far as they were concerned if there was plunder or loot to be had.

To reduce all the political structures of history to their basic form essentially you have four organisational layers (who says I am not up to date?) above the base farming, working and trading elements in a society.

You have War Bands, roughly a boat load of Vikings or Saxons and the like. Above them you might often have a War Lord who is recognised as senior and sometimes controlling of a number of War Bands, maybe by consent, maybe by force.

Above the category of War Lord there is Overlord who can command the loyalty and support of a number of War Lords.  Then it is possible to have a superior lord who commands, and/or controls and is recognised by Overlords and other Warlords as their superior.

To put it into old fashioned European terms an Emperor or major King might be a superior lord, other Kings with sundry Dukes, Princes as Overlords, and then ranks of Warlords and War Bands below them.

This system covers one or another most complex political systems in history.  If you scratch below the surface of either ancient or modern supposedly representative systems you can find the same basic structure. They might have stopped cutting throats and all the rest but the idea is control and supremacy.

The key to this is that these are in continual flux and do not remain static.  Groups can rise or fall with either astonishing rapidity or over several generations. One situation can change form and then change again and again.

What is it all about?  Essentially just like the aggressive Viking raiders, plunder, loot and money taking to enable the gathering of wealth to trade in desired goods and to create status.

Also, the more of it you take the greater the chances of ascending the ladder of lordship, so long as you can keep it and your followers together. During our human history the various grades of lords have rarely cared too much about what happens to those below them and the collateral damage.

All these war band leaders and their lords are Plundercrats or Lootocrats and they are with us today in the shape of the globalised financial, oil and business communities.  They have now escaped the control of the military lords; indeed they pay and command them.

This is done through their political agents and stewards, sometimes theoretically representative, often dictatorial who depend on their funding and support for the access to media and the bands of followers they lead.

Unluckily, their greed and rapacity has done so much damage that in the vast urban areas and their helot populations new groups of predator War Bands are springing up.

They are going out of control and will soon either contest the local Plundercrat leadership or by operating as independent entities that are impossible to control these War Bands will reduce the major economic bases to extreme forms of poverty.

The Plundercrats will then form or recruit their personal War Bands and retreat into heavily fortified communities, sometimes having to pay ransoms or forfeits to any better equipped War Band that might turn up asking for cash, as did the old Vikings.

I saw this big fast boat down at the coast that is there for the taking. If around thirty to forty blokes with time on their hands and all the right kit would like to come along we could have an interesting trip.

Should we start at Marbella and move on to Monaco? Call it our own personal Human Rights Campaign.

Healthy Puffing

One of the major problems in medicine is determining what is actually wrong with a patient. Our traditional system of going to a doctor, if you can find one, saying what you feel like and where relies on her or him working out what it might be.

If they think it is not serious then probably you will get a prescription for whatever and packed off ten minutes later. If this does not work and your repeated visits became a nuisance you will be sent for Hospital examination. If at first they suspect "serious" you might get there a lot earlier.

What happens next might be determined by how busy they are and whether you are still more or less functioning. It can be very hit and miss. The net result is that weeks, months, or even years down the line the real cause etc. might be determined and dealt with.

According to "The Engineer" we could now avoid a great deal of this coming and going, guesswork, tests that are the wrong kind or not very good or might not identify what is wrong. It also means that the time between detection and treatment is radically shortened which means better survival rates and less handicaps.

If this kind of equipment had been available in the past how many lives would have been changed for the good and how much agony avoided?

Watering No Flowers Again

Exactly eight years ago I had a post on water shortages.

This is it below:

A number of times in the past I have mentioned that one of the developing serious issues in the world is that of water supply and distribution.  In the UK we may think we do not have the problem but it would only take marginal shifts in several related areas of supply and demand to create one.  And it will be one with no easy or cheap answer.

Quote from “The Ecologist” of 29 June 2010:

Report lists top ten countries at risk of water shortages.

Sub-Saharan African countries top list of those with most vulnerable water supplies as report warns of 'looming crisis' in both Asia and Africa from pollution and depletion of natural water resources.

Depleting water supplies are increasing the risk of both internal and cross-border conflict as competition between industry, agriculture and consumers increases, according to an assessment of world most vulnerable countries.

The report from the analysts Maplecroft, says that the ten countries most at risk are: Somalia (1), Mauritania (2), Sudan (3), Niger (4), Iraq (5), Uzbekistan (6), Pakistan (7), Egypt (8), Turkmenistan (9) and Syria (10).

The ranking was based on an assessment of access to water, water demands and the reliance on external supplies with countries like Mauritania and Niger more than 90 per cent reliant on external water supplies.

Dam conflict.

Egypt, ranked eight by the report, is dependent on water from the Blue Nile, and is in the midst of an ongoing dispute with Ethiopia over the construction of the Gibe III dam in Ethiopia, which it claims will further deplete its water resources. The dam, which would be the largest in Africa, has also faced opposition from NGOs who claim it will devastate fisheries in neighbouring Kenya.

A separate report has highlighted the worsening problem of water scarcity in the Himalayan sub-region of India, Bangladesh, China and Nepal. Although none of these countries made Maplecroft's top ten list, the Indian-based Strategic Foresight Group (SFG) say they will have to cope with 275 billion cubic meters less water within 20 years - more than the total amount of water currently available in just one of the countries – Nepal.

It says that while global warming may take two centuries to seriously deplete the Himalayan glaciers, some impacts will be visible sooner. The Yellow River in China and the Ganges (with its tributaries) in India are expected to become seasonal rivers by the second half of this century.

The high water demands of agriculture in both India (where it accounts for 90 per cent of water usage) and China (where it accounts for 65 per cent of water) will lead to a drop in wheat and rice yields of between 30-50 per cent by 2050, according to the report. It said both countries would be forced to import 200-300 million tonnes of crops.

Water pollution.

In addition to natural depletion, the report also pointed out the increasing scarcity of water resources due to pollution. The Yellow River Conservancy Committee estimates 34 per cent of the river is unfit for drinking, aquaculture, and agriculture.

An estimated 30 per cent of the tributaries of Yangtze River are extremely polluted and in India, 50 per cent of the Yamuna River, the main tributary of the Ganges is extremely polluted.

Data for rivers in Bangladesh are not available, but a study published recently in the Lancet medical journal said up to 77 million people in Bangladesh had been exposed to toxic levels of arsenic from naturally contaminated groundwater supplies.

In total, SFG says that more than 30 per cent of the major Himalayan rivers are biologically dead and unfit for people or fish.

Unquote.

In the summer of 1976 a number of areas in the UK experienced shortages that caused substantial disruption.  If an accident can happen, it will.