Fireballs, Lightning Bolts and Hell Storms

London from above, at night

I'm still writing on the talk that Bill King gave HPRA some weeks ago. Meanwhile, I stumbled across this amazing set of photos of London at night.

Commentary: Many of these photos are of central London. You can tell this by viewing the street scape, all of which are of buildings that were constructed many generations ago. The buildings are almost uniformly 4-7 stories tall. Compare those areas of London to the row housing in suburban Acton Town. Sam Staley wrote an email recently where he described Manhattan as a walking urban area. Inner London, built before the age of the Underground, is the same.

My company's London offices can roughly be located on the far right hand side of photograph #11. They are across the Thames from the London Eye, which was visible in a westerly direction from my company's cafeteria.

Finally, another item I look for when seeing a City from above is how much lighting of the city can you see from the sky? This is a rough proxy for the relative affluence of an urban area. I've traveled to many countries and have seen cities all over the world when flying over them at night. In poor areas of the world, you will notice that when you fly over their cities that there is very little light that is visible from the sky. In contrast, in the economically wealthy areas of the world, you can clearly see considerable lighting from the sky and these photos of London are a brilliant example of this phenomena.

Wizard

My neighbor's electric car

The Wizard's world has many secrets. Unfortunately, one of those secrets was blown this past week, once again by Wall Street Journal, which recently featured a friend of the Wizard who is in a beach front property rights battle down in Surfside. This time, my secret that was compromised is that one of my neighbors drives an electric car. He was featured in a Journal story entitled "You Know Gas Prices are high when Texans start driving golf carts", carried in the July 31, 2008 issue of the Journal and which can be read here.

My neighbor featured in the story, Andrew Kunev, actually lives in the part of our compound next to mine. He's been here for some time now and I pass by his three wheeler, white colored Zap Zebra Sedan, parked just inside our compound gate nearly everyday. The car always has a bit of an unbalanced look to it, which would cause me never to consider buying a Zap, but I've never seen any performance problems whenever I've seen him on the road. I saw him zooming eastbound along Westheimer last Friday evening as I was coming home from work. Mr. Kunev can be seen at 1 minutes 3 seconds, 1 minute 40 seconds, and 2 minutes 12 seconds in the Journal's online video, which accompanies the story.

Another encounter I have had recently is that I have seeing a teenager in the neighborhood north of where I live driving around on an electric scooter while I run workouts. He goes pretty fast down the street - probably 20 miles per hour - but the scooter makes a lot of noise. Nonetheless, he told me once while stopped at an intersection that he was coming back from the grocery store, something obvious from the fact that he was carrying two small bags in a backpack while on his scooter.

These stories have got me all pumped up about the idea of owning my own electric car, possibly as a project. Many years ago, I owned a green colored Volkswagen Rabbit convertible, much like this one. One idea I have is to go look online for an old VW convertible and convert it into an electric car. I love convertibles and am starting to hanker for another one. I spotted one website actually sells custom converter kits for doing it. Here are some photos of cars whose owners have done the job. Another idea would be to convert my current car into an electric car and buy another gas powered one.

The Wizard doesn't drive all that much, ergo I sorely doubt that on most days I would tax the capacities of an all electric car. My job and most amenities are within easy driving range of an all electric vehicle. I would probably keep a gasoline powered one for longer trips.

The Wizard believes that General Motors is making a mistake with the Chevrolet Volt, that being that at first GM was telling the public that the Volt would be in the $15-20,000 range. Then we heard that the Volt would run $30,000 - $35,000, but now we are hearing that the Volt might retail at $40,000. $40,000 is rather steep for most families.

The Wizard thinks that what Mr's Peters and Kunev are the ones on the right track. Their vehicles cost only $7,000 - $18,000. The main worries are how well the batteries will hold up over time (and when they will need to be changed), along with inclement weather and safety issues.

Still, this is low cost, non-gasoline dependent mobility, which can scale and which is within the price range of most developed economy families right now. I know from much travel and experience that motorcycles and scooters are a heavily used form of transportation in Malaysia and Thailand, where annual incomes are in the $200 - $5,000 range, much lower than those found in the West. Familiarity, along with preferences and tastes will count for much, but the Wizard thinks that solutions like this may be a realistic part of our mobility future.

Wizard.

UK: The Labour Party's environmental suicide

Between December 2006 and April 2007, I was sent to the UK three times by my Big Evil Company employer. The first trip was a stop over on my way to Algeria, while the latter two trips were made to backfill for my counterpart while he took time off for knee surgery and for paternity leave. I spent a total of nine weeks over in the Sceptered Isles.

While I was on the other side of the pond, it was impossible not to notice the amount of environmental hysteria that was being broadcast in the news, whether watching the BBC or reading the newspapers. Hardly a day went by where it seemed that there wasn't some reference to the Kyoto Treaty or that the Labour government was working towards some commitment to cutting greenhouse gases and telling the public that it must have shared sacrifices and belt tightening, all in the name of the Greater Good.

Well, lo and behold, here were are in July 2008 and we now hear of the news that in a recent by-election, the Labour Party lost a stronghold Parliamentary seat in Glascow. For those of you who are not quite up to snuff on your British politics, the world - very broadly - breaks down like this. The Labour Party has long held a very strong grip on Scotland and the north, while the Conservatives do better in southern England. To reiterate, this is a generalization, but as a broad picture statement, it does hold true. Hence, the fact that the Labour Party lost a long time seat to the Scottish National Party is quite a shocker.

As things stand now, the Labour Party majority in Westminster is now down to about 60. When Tony Blair first ascended to power in 1997, Labour had 418 seats. Now Labour has under 350 out of some 646 seats. It is in this context that the loss of a seat in Labour stronghold does not bode well for the Party come 2010, which is when the next general election must be contested. However, it may well be that there may need to be a coalition government formed in order to maintain a majority in the next general election.

But circling back to Labour's woes, much of the political commentary has been centering on the idea that people are starting to get fed up with paying high taxes on fossil fuels, all in the name of environmentalism. One adviser to the Labour government, Richard Parry Jones, warns that if Labour does not ditch its heavy taxes on automobiles, then UK voters are going to throw them out at the next election.

This is a fate that has happened to the Socialists in France and in Germany, where Sarkozy's rightists outright defeated the Socialists and Angela Merkel came to power via a grand coalition. As as this article points out:

In recent years, almost all of Europe's social democratic parties have lost in national elections. The collapse of support for Gordon Brown and his policies reveals a general decline of Europe's social democracy as a whole.

Motorists in the UK are paying the highest fuel taxes in Europe, an average of almost £900 annually. In the name of climate change mitigation, the government has progressively increased fuel, road and car taxes. It has burdened companies with a so-called Climate Change Levy and introduced an emissions trading scheme -- costly policies that have had damaging effects on British competitiveness, energy prices and living standards. As a direct result, a record number of people, particularly Britain's poorest, oldest and most vulnerable, are increasingly falling on hard times. As many as five million households, more than 20% of the UK's population, are today living in "fuel poverty."

Progressives in America have, in many ways, followed a similar pattern. It used to be in the early years of the 20th century that progressivism meant that there was a belief in scientific and technological progress that would make our world a better place. This belief would be coupled with some kind of redistributive and social safety type measures to uplift the poor and catch those who had fallen through the cracks. Instead, it seems that Progressivism now substantially means that technological advancements are not to be pursued because of fears or objections to science and technology. Instead, we are told that we have to cut back, all in the name of saving the planet from some imagined environmental catastrophies, damned the cost.

All the Wizard has to say is that Progressives had better take a look at what has happened across the water and pause, lest they find that voters decide eventually to drive them off of political agenda.

Wizard

2007: Temperature Monitors Report Wide-Scale Global Cooling

The year 2007 saw a number of weather incidents which startled the world, including snow in Baghdad, winter storms which stranded millions of Chinese during the Chinese New Year, record snow falls in the North America, China, and Siberia, and a recent thickening of the ice packs.

And now the data is in for 2007 from all four of the world's major sources of climate tracking (Hadley, NASA's GISS, UAH, RSS). The worldwide temperature drop from 2006 to 2007 was 0.65 - 0.75 centigrade. Apparently, that is the largest single year drop since record keeping began and enough to wipe out all of the global warming that has occurred since the late 19th century.

For my .02 worth, I've long had a gut feeling that solar activity, or perhaps changes in heat coming from the core of the earth, would overwhelm any climate change effects from human activity. All one has to do is think of what the atmospheric conditions are like on other planets to see how huge of a role the Sun plays in our fragile and pathetic existence.

One person I know wrote me back:

Interesting year-to-year change, which will, depending upon the point of view of the specific advocate, will be:

Let's face it, we simply do not know a whole lot about short-term, by which I mean periods of hundreds of years) climate change on Earth, despite the
large number of people who appear to be saying that they do.

Another wrote to me saying:

I've seen quite a few folks agree with you on that - ie. that the human effect on climate change is small.

Another wrote:

No. They have already changed the banner from "Global Warming" to "Climate Change."

It's the same way with pollution. No matter what we do to improve air quality, "Experts" will continue to claim pollution is worsening. It's called Political Science.

Sigh... I can only see the arguments getting fiercer if the world actually does enter an era where the earth starts cooling.

Wizard

Robert James Fischer (1943-2008)

And so the world awoke to news of the death of the King of Chess, Bobby Fischer. There is little I can add here that probably hasn't been written elsewhere, other than to add that it somehow all seems so right that Bobby would leave us at the numerical age - 64 - which also happens to be the number of squares that are on a classical chess board.

I have vague memories of the tall, lanky, intent, and striking looking Bobby when he was at the height of his playing powers. I can dimly remember as a small boy that my older brother was wrapped up in following the 1972 Spassky-Fischer match up. I remember that he used to play with my mother and that I would watch them, wondering about this strange game and how it was supposed to work. I do remember watching Bobby play tennis with Gail Goodrich at a tournament, but then it seemed that he disappeared from the public consciousness. I went to a parochial school where athletics was the past time of choice and none of my neighborhood friends played chess. In another time and another place, I might have become a master level player myself, but we were fated to play the newly created type of game called role playing games as teenagers. We then saw the onset of video game arcades in the 1980's, the precursors of today's home computer games. As it was, my memories of Bobby had faded like a ghost.

But it need not have been that way, and much of whether young people a generation ago might have picked up chess as a past time would in fact have depended upon Bobby Fischer. Chess, as a past time, has to compete with all other past times for time, money, and social attention, in order to thrive. In that sense, the Royal Game is no different in needing a charismatic figure than basketball needing Earvin Magic Johnson or Michael Jordon, or golf needing Tiger Woods. As it was, since he dropped out of the game, and out of public view, the surge of interest in the game - the "Fischer Boom" - was brief, like a fiery comet in the night. Bobby was literally fielding offers to play chess in Vegas for millions of dollars in the aftermath of his 1972 triumph. Anatoly Karpov became the first man to become a chess millionaire, but Fischer would have beaten Karpov to that title by 15-20 years had he stayed playing. It is a widely accepted observation that Fischer was literally 20 years ahead of his time when he was at the height of his game. Most people have no idea how much effort Fischer put into studying the game. Frank Brady wrote in Bobby Fischer - Profile of a Prodigy that Bobby owned some 480 chess books and thousands of chess magazines from all over the world in his apartment, many of which written in Russian, a language which Bobby taught himself how to read. He wrote that nearly all of the books had annotation notes written by Bobby under their board position diagrams. He had to part with some of them because he didn't have enough room to store all of them.

My thought is that Fischer, had he been a different person, would have held the title until around 1990 or so, probably losing it to a late 20's Garry Kasparov, who by that time had finally broken through the 2800 Elo rating barrier. What a match that would have been! Even today - 35 years later and armed with 3 gigahertz, 1 terabye sized disk computational power, and research assistants at their disposal - there are only perhaps 4 players in the world (Vladamir Kramnik, Viswanathan Anand, and Veselin Topalov, as well as Kasparov) who have achieved Elo ratings that are generally equal to or greater than that which was achieved by Fischer, who incidentally did all of his analysis on his own in the final age before the advent of personal computers.

Fischer could have easily amassed a fortune of over $100,000,000 had he kept playing, and could have been a hero to two entire generations of young American children. Instead, he found that once he had achieved the summit of being recognized as the greatest chess player in the world, he found that he literally didn't know what to do with himself. He gave a good chunk of his 1972 Championship winnings to a church which he then denounced (and with good reason) for malfeasance. Interest in the game cooled down after Bobby refused to defend his title in 1975. The game never really recovered and as a result, most really strong players struggle here in America to earn enough money to pay the bills. An acquaintance of mine who is a master level chess player has told me that there are only about 200-300 master level players in America (with an elo rating of 2200 or higher) who actively play the game. Most simply retire or go on to do something more lucrative.

It's hard to say where Bobby's anti-Semitism started, but it seems to me that it probably had the same roots which caused Bobby to be so difficult with his rock star, prima donna like demands which he imposed on tournament directors and game promoters. Maybe the rage from having been brought up in an unstable, fatherless household was too much for the chess board to bottle up, but that's an issue for the psychiatrists to chew over. As it was, I still find it hard to believe that he is gone. I hope that God has forgiven him and that he has left us for a better place.

Bobby Fischer - RIP.

Wizard

$100 per barrel oil and the U.S. Peso Dollar

The front page story on today's Houston Chronicle bespoke of the travails of $100 per barrel petroleum to modern day society. It was a good article, underlying the fact that the oil and gas industry does not waste one drop of a barrel of petroleum, but instead finds a way to use all of it. I write here because there was one aspect of the price rise of petroleum in recent years that was not covered by the story and that is the weakening of the United States dollar as a currency. This matters because petroleum is denominated in U.S. dollars when it is traded on world markets.

To give gentle readers a sample of how much the U.S. dollar has weakened in value over the past 5 years, I point you in the direction of the excellent Yahoo Finance and world currency website. What is really great about the Yahoo finance pages is that a reader can easily compare how the dollar has fared in world currency markets and what effect this can have on tradable goods.

Examples of how much the dollar has weakened include:

1) The dollar verses the euro. The dollar has gone from being worth 1.20 euros in 1999 to 0.96 euros in January 2003, all the way down to a petty 0.678 euros in January 2008. Put it another way, the euro was worth some 85 cents when it was created. Now a euro is worth about $1.50. The dollar has effectively lost some 44 percent of all of its value against the euro in the past 9 years.

2) The dollar verses the Brazilian real. I went to Brazil in 2003 on vacation. The real, (pronounced "hey ais"), was trading at 2.8 to 1 dollar when I went there. As one can see from the chart, the real has gone from 3.5 reals to 1 dollar in January 2003 to 1.76 reals to 1 dollar in January 2008. That's right folks. The Brazilians, who possessed currencies which suffered massive hyperinflation during long stretches of the 20th century, are now in possession of a currency which has doubled in value against the dollar in the past 5 years.

3) The Canadian dollar verses the U.S. dollar. The loonie has gained 1:1 parity on the dollar for the first time in some 30-40 years, having been worth only 64 cents in January 2003. So the loonie has also gained 55 percent in value against the dollar.

4) The U.K. pound verses the U.S. dollar. When I first went to the U.K. on holiday in May 2002, the Queen's money was worth $1.50. Now the pound, which hit $2 earlier this year, is just under, currently trading at $1.97. The dollar has lost 30 percent of its value against the pound in the past 5 1/2 years.

5) The Thai baht verses the dollar. The baht was trading at 43 to the dollar in January 2003, but now it only takes 30 baht to buy a George Washington note. The dollar has slid some 31 percent in value against the baht in the past 5 years.

6) The Russian rouble has gone from 32 to the dollar in January 2003 to 25 to the dollar in January 2008.

But then we compare these numbers against some of America's big trading partners, including Mexico, Japan, and China.

7) The Mexican peso has held steady against the dollar, losing only 8 percent of its value since January 2003.

8) The Japanese yen continues to bounce around the 110-120 yen to the dollar mark, a range it has done with some exception of the endaka period of the Clinton years.

9) Even the Chinese yuan, which traded at 5.2 to the dollar when I was in China, and which was revalued at 8.28 o the dollar in the 1990's, has been gaining strength and is now at 7.4 to the dollar.

As is well known, the Asian and Middle Eastern countries have routinely purchased untold amounts of U.S. Treasuries, both to help buoy their own currencies so as to continue to be able to sell something to America on terms helpful to themselves, and as a hedge in case markets lose faith in their own currencies. They also need a place in which to invest which is relatively safe and where their money will be put to productive use. They find all of these when they buy American treasury notes. In contrast, countries which have done little to interfere with currency markets have seen their currencies strengthen considerably against the dollar.

The Wizard thinks that what we are seeing is a long slow correction in the world's terms of trade with America. The United States has been running astronomically large current account deficits for 25 years now, and we have run up trillions of dollars of debts on our federal treasuries. Americans have essentially stopped saving money. Moreover, we will see in the next decade the retirement of the Baby Boomers en masse, which will per force require the United States to either raise taxes to meet the political demands of the Baby Boomer cohort retirements, cut their benefits, or continue to let things stay as they are and run up deficits and inflate them away through a punitive devaluation of the U.S. dollar.

The logical conclusion here is that world currency markets have spoken and have decided that the United States will not put its financial house in order, hence world markets will force America to put its house in order via the devaluation of the dollar. This of course revalues the terms of trade in all tradable foreign goods. As the Chronicle article notes, Americans will find foreign travel much more expensive, but we know that petroleum is also one of those traded goods. The Wizard postulates that had the dollar retained its strength, then we would be seeing oil prices at $60-$70 per barrel and not $100. That of course still means that the price of a barrel of oil has gone up 2-3 times since 2000, but that is different from a 5 fold increase in prices. What is interesting though is that a continuing slide in the value of the dollar would presumably improve terms of trade vis-a-vis the rest of the world, but it would also continue to push up the cost of petroleum imports which in turn would offset the improvements of the balance of America's terms of trade.

It is hard to tell how much of a correction would be required for America to come back to an equilibrium. The Wizard supposes that the Chinese, Japanese, and the Middle Eastern countries would need to be convinced that the dollar would continue to erode in value to the point where they would quit buying them. That in turn would send the dollar into a fully corrective tailspin. Maybe the dollar needs to lose another 50-75 percent of its value, on top of what it has lost already, before our current accounts finally balance out once again. On the bright side, manufacturing and other aspects of the economy which are not stuck in country would find it more preferrable to stay in America rather than to flee offshore. Jobs would be more likely to stay in country, indeed some of them might come back here.

As for what that would do to the price of a barrel of oil? Well, are you prepared for oil selling at $200 - $300 per barrel? Hold on to your seat folks. That would be a great reason for those jobs to come back here if we see prices like that. Prices like that also might finally make alternatives like cellulose ethanol a viable competitor to conventional petroleum. Hmmm. Now is that another reason why those Middle Eastern governments buy up our treasury bills? Think about it.

Wizard

Book Review: A History of God - The 4,000 year quest of Judiasm, Christianity, and Islam

I am wishing everyone out there a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

The Wizard is celebrating some of his 2007 Christmas by doing a bit of site clean up. Notably some static web pages that I have had hanging out there for years, and which look as though they were created in 1997, are being redirected to my blog page. Hence, the next 5 entries to be found here are redirects from elsewhere.

Enjoy!

March 27, 2004

Some time in 2002 or 2003, I was at home one evening watching The History Channel on television, when a curious television program came on. The program was entitled A History of God. Broadly speaking, the program was essentially about how our ideas of God have taken shape over time and what forces may have been involved in how the process took place. Being the history buff that I am, I was absolutely spell bound by both the subject matter and by the things that some of the people who appeared on the program had to say. In particular, there was one dignified British woman by the name of Karen Armstrong who enunciated some fascinating thoughts about the matter of God, and how our concepts of the Divine have both stayed stable and how they have evolved. The program mentioned that Ms. Armstrong, a former nun but who is now practicing writer / journalist, was the author of a book called "A History of God," so I wrote down this information and promptly headed over to a nearby bookstore to hunt down the book.

As for the book itself, I've read a lot of books in my life, but A History of God is a challenge to read. The paperback version of Armstrong's tome tops off at 399 pages, with another 60 pages of definitions, citations, notes and bibliography thrown in for good measure.

The book is composed of 11 chapters. The book's first 5 chapters start, as one might imagine, at the beginning of faith, and take the reader through the time of Muhammad. All of this was worth reading. However, in chapters 6 - 7 (and part of chapter 8), she writes about how God became the God of the philosophers and mystics during the era of the Middle Ages. This part of the book proved to be rather difficult to read because there are a few times where she - in a sense - repeats herself because by this time, many of the ideas of God that our ancestors had are now familiar to the reader. The book does pick up towards the end when in the last 2 - 3 chapters, she starts to approach more recent centuries. She begins to write about the rise of human rationalism and science. Topics like the "death of God," what ideas may we have about God in the future, or whether God even has a future are examined.

This is a difficult book to review, not because the topic is difficult, but because it is hard to distill so many ideas and thoughts into a relatively short review that touches on the many topics and ideas in this book. I may find that I might rewrite this book review sometime in the future in order to encompass matters I might have missed, or to extend the review so that I write more about the last half of the book.

I should clarify what I mean by the book being a challenge to read. The book is in fact quite readable and quite extraordinary. Ms. Armstrong has a gift of being able to delineate and get to the root of some complicated matters involving monotheism (the book does touch on Buddhism and Hindu ideas too), and do so in a way that a layman can grasp. Where the book becomes a challenge is that the reader has to make sure that he / she is staying alert and following along with the vast, ongoing train of Ms. Armstrong's great story. Readers encounter many personages, nation states, conceptual ideas, and conflicts that Ms. Armstrong covers in the course of this book. For example, at different times in history, men of different times and places have reached similar ideas about God, but in order to remember who had reached these ideas before, one has to look back at who had reached such conclusions before and why they had come to these conclusions. I found that in order to really get the most out of this book, I had to reread the book a second time and take notes in order to keep track of everything.

Armstrong starts the book off with her own story of her religious and spiritual journey. She clearly had some experiences that I think most people can smile at. For example, she writes about how easy it is for most people to conceive of Satan, but how are we to conceive of God? Or, for that matter, isn't the majesty of God supposed to be inconceivable to begin with?

I myself went to a parochial school growing up and I had to chuckle at Ms. Armstrong's efforts to "find God" when she was a nun. We all know full well that Satan is a red colored fellow with horns, but are we supposed to think of God as some huge, old, bearded fellow with a book that has everyone's name in it. Doesn't God look down on us from the heavens, waiting for us to die so that He can look at our report card and check off whether we are allowed into Heaven? Well gentle readers, things are not quite so simple in this world, and I'm sure things aren't so simple in the next one either!

There have been many theories about the origins of religion, but Armstrong writes about the idea that the ancients may have had ideas about religion because they may have been trying to deal with issues of the Unseen. She writes that what makes religious belief come alive for people is that religion works for them. Ideas and thoughts that may be relevant at one point in time might very well make little sense years later. People are spiritual animals, Armstrong points out that there are other ways in which we can have deeply meaningful experiences other than those experienced by religious belief.

Armstrong writes about the influence of Babylonian and Sumerian gods and their influence on monotheism. The Babylonians (and later the Greeks) thought that gods were not distant, unaccessible, or shut off from humanity. Ergo there was not any need for revelation. Faith wasn't something intellectual, or organized into Dogmas. Rather faith for the ancients was something that was held because the God Yahweh (or any other belief that was held) made good on his / her promises. Because of this view about faith, the Israelites had quite a struggle trying to let go of their old deities like Baal, and embrace Yahweh.

The God Yahweh was, as many Christians know, a jealous God. He (Armstrong traces how God became a "He"), also is a partisan God. Yes, Old Testament incarnations of Yahweh were later to be a source of frustration and consternation to later Jews and Christians. Similarly, the Unmoved First Mover of Plato and Aristotle seemed to many to be elitist. Later admirers of Greek thought, including educated Muslims and Jews, were to admit this. There must be some kind of Anthropormophism in religion, because we won't be able to identify with any faith that doesn't have such an element in it.

Religious faith needs to be effective in order to be successful, writes Armstrong. We watch while as the Israelites are overrun and exiled to Babylon, Yahweh makes a transformation. Yahweh becomes a Mover of History. Even enemies of the Israelites are His instruments. And yet, God relies on Man to act in the world, which became an important idea in Judiasm.

Later, we see the encounter of Greek philosophy with the Jewish faith. Armstrong devotes an entire chapter to the coming of the New Messenger, Jesus of Nazareth. She writes about the slow development of the concept that Jesus was Divine, which takes place over the next four centuries. She writes about the theological struggles that took place in early Christianity as Christian thinkers from all over the Roman empire battled to come up with a "workable" theology of The Trinity, which could encompass the story of Jesus and how Jesus the Man could also Divine.

Some interesting issues that Armstrong writes about were about how Jews, who used to be proselytizers of their faith, stopped doing so. This was because groups of monotheists, called God Fearers, who did not want to adapt all of the "baggage" of Judiasm, such as diet and various Laws, eventually convert to the new Christian faith. Jews became much more suspicious of converts. There were many converts to the new faith, but in the early centuries, such people were often slaves or lower classed people. What Armstrong believes brought "socially better off" people towards Christianity was the impressive social welfare efforts of the Church, as well as the intellectual efforts on the part of some educated Romans to expound on the new faith. Eventually of course, Constantine makes Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire.

Armstrong also delves into the difficult legacy that St. Augustine left Christianity, especially regarding the roles of women and sexuality. Of course, this was only part of St. Augustine's legacy. St. Augustine was having to deal with the world shaking fact that Rome herself had been sacked by barbarians in the year 410 A.D. This event literally marked the end of the empire, and nobody knew what was going to come next. His great polemic, The City of God, was partly written to answer the charge made by pagans that Rome had abandoned her earlier gods, which had protected her for over 1100 years. It was when the new God had been adapted, so went the thought, that Rome fell.

Another strong area of the book revolves around the story of Muhammad. She writes about the changes that were going on in Muhammad's world, and about how the Last Prophet, who had never read the Bible, nor had ever heard of any of the Patriarchs, ended up having a story that nearly parallels the stories of all of the previous Prophets and Messengers of God. She writes about the political genius of Muhammad, who managed to weave together a workable faith that synthesized the traditional laws and customs of Arabian tribes, along with a strong element of togetherness. His message was that all men were the same before the One God. All peoples of God, including Jews and Christians, were to be seen as brothers. This chapter is a must read for anyone.

The story of Muhammad reminds me that one of the strongest points of this book is that it gives just enough insight into the character of each and every person who makes an appearance to make the book nearly as much a history of religious figures as it is a history of God. There are many more figures in the later half of the book. I will not write about the last half of the book because that would make this review twice as long as it already is. I hope that reading this review will give you enough of a feel about what the book is like to read. I may add a "part II" to this review in the future.

If that is not enough for you, I will end this book review with one last story. I purchased two additional copies of this book for two co - workers who were the type of people who I thought would be interesting in reading Ms. Armstrong's book. One of my co - workers was a girl, a college student in her early 20's, who happens to be from a practising Muslim family. She told me that this book just absolutely blew her away and that this was one of the best books she has ever read! She told me that her father, who is a highly educated man, saw her copy of this book and immediately stole the book out of her backpack! She told me that her father was so amazed and enthralled by this book that he would not give the book back to her so she could finish it. This book was a New York Times best seller and the Wizard highly recommends that you find yourself a copy and see for yourself why this is so.

Wizard.

Thailand heads to the polls - again.

I stumbled across this story on Thailand's election in the International Herald Tribune. The IHT article sums up the entire political situation in the country quite nicely, to the point where I wish I could have written it. That is the biggest complement I could pay to Mr. Mydans.

It is becoming clear that the election that Thais are holding is not going to solve the question of Thaksin Shinawatra and the problems that Mr. Shinawatra's previous elections posed for the old guard in the country. Thailand as a nation will not make breakthroughs in achieving a truly pluralistic political society until the old guard of the Monarchy, the army, the bureaucracy, and economic elites realize that the country's large population of working poor represent its political power in the Democracy. If you are going to have a Democracy, then that is where the political power lies, not in the privileges enjoyed by the old guard. All Mr. Shinawatra did was cater to the country's vast population of rural peasantry and not to the palace or so much to the army. Until these questions are solved and the answers accepted by everyone, then look for more tensions to come.

Sigh...

Addendum edit: A pro-Thaksin party has won a substantial minority of seats in the 480 member Parliament and will reach out to minor parties to form a coalition government. It also seems the old guard military has passed an "internal security law" which blunts pluralistic progress. And so it goes that the stalemate will continue.

Chavez threatens America over oil

And so it has come across the news that South America's latest Caudillo, Hugo Chavez, is not pleased with the Venezuelan constitution which he himself wrote and is putting up for vote revisions. All this to push along his so called 21st century socialism, which of course is no different from the socialisms of the 19th and 20th centuries that succeeded - as the Wizard personally knows - in keeping billions of people throughout the world in dire poverty. Some people just never learn.

Today's epistle is about a specific aspect of the latest Chavez bombasts and threats - threatening to kneecap America by cutting off oil shipments in the event that America tries to intervene. In short order, such a threat will not work and the Wizard will tell his gentle readers exactly why.

As Daniel Yergin explains in his master work on the world oil and gas industry, The Prize, in the 1980's petroleum started being traded on world oil markets. Not all oil is created equal, as some petroleum from some places has lots of gunk in it like sulfur, metals, and other content in it which makes it more difficult to refine into useable products than other petroleum. The petroleum from Venezuela tends to be of the less desireable kind.

But the fact that Venezuelan crude is less desireable than petrol from other places doesn't mean it is not desireable at all. Indeed that's the whole point. Say for just a moment that Chavez make good with his promise to cut off oil exports to the United States. He needs to remember that in order to carry out his 19th and 20th century 21st century socialism, he needs oil revenues. As such, the country's fields need to continue to produce. There are supply schedules to follow and those schedules need buyers.

Now then, Chavez could try to command that the country's oil be sold to China or India, presuming that there would be enough buyers to use it. However, what would buyers do once their hands are on it? That is the problem is Chavez's threat. Petroleum is fungible and there is nothing preventing others from turning around and simply selling it to the United States at prices which are set by world oil markets. Indeed that is what happened to a large degree in the aftermath of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Petroleum exports still eventually reached the U.S. through other countries, once the world's oil and gas industry figured out how to reconfigure the supply lines and shipping routes.

The real problem for America in 1973 was self created - namely that the Nixom Administration imposed price ceilings (price controls), which as every first year economics student learns, results in shortages in supply. Because prices were not allowed to rise, rationing had to occur somehow and that rationing came in the form of waiting in line for gasoline, with the entire country wasting time, money, and gasoline trying to get more gas.

And so gentle readers, Chavez's threat is little or nothing to worry about. If Chavez does not want to sell us oil, then some other corrupt government in some other heavily politicized (hence making it a disordered and disastrously run country) will.

Wizard

Houston's own Roman Catholic Cardinal

It was front page news the Wednesday before Thanksgiving on Houston's paper of note that Archbishop Daniel DiNardo will be vested into the College of Cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church. Somehow it seems appropriate that the good Father will receive his appointment into the august body the weekend after that most American of holidays.

I was raised in a house of Protestant Lutherans. I was an occasional church goer as a kid, but I've had many people tell me that despite my cranky acerbic attitude towards a lot of things that I really am a sweet heart. So my religious upbringing might have done some good after all.

But one thing that attending 9 years of Lutheran school, nor 4 years of public high school tell me was that all that schooling really didn't give me a truly rounded understanding of things like faith and how religious beliefs had riveted human societies from time immemorial. It wasn't until I had gone through some long conversations with some of my school friends (who were raised Catholic), had watched some amazing History Channel programs, had traveled to other parts of the world, and done an enormous amount of reading on the ideas and doctrines of religious faith that I truly began to understand what the Roman Catholic Church meant to the world and why it is the way it is today. So I write this entry about Archbishop DiNardo's elevation to the Cardinal hood as a somewhat interested outsider, a wide ranging and curious layman if you will.

I have no special insider knowledge of the the ideas, troubles, or counsels of the Catholic Church of today. For some, most likely very secular lawyers, the Church has been only of interest when the some sexual abuse scandal erupts. For others the Church is a target of historical anger, whether because of forced conversions to the Catholic faith from their own indigenous beliefs or because of the Crusades it led to recapture the Holy Land. But what many people short change or overlook is the quiet piece of mind the Church has given literally billions of people over the past 2,000 years. It may never cross the minds of the Church's detractors of the countless newborn or infant children who were left abandoned to die by anguished parents, but were rescued by the Church believers. Even to this day, by the Church's own account the American branch of the faith alone assists more than 7 million people. Despite what many readers of this blog might imagine, I would far rather have dinner with someone like Cardinal DiNardo than with any computer programmer or politician.

So what to make of the Archbishop's promotion to the College of Cardinals? Well, what is of interest is that the College itself was expanded by Pope John Paul II when he was alive to 120 members (others say 180). The Catholic Church of America has some 70 million members, but already has 13 ordained Cardinals. Considering that this hoary Church has over 1 billion adherents, and that it becomes quickly clear that America is overrepresented in the College of the Cardinals and Europe is even more so.

Does this lack of democratic representative fairness matter? Well, one could argue both yes and no. The Cardinals choose who shall be the Pope, who in turn chooses who shall be in the College of the Cardinals. The yes side of the democratic fairness argument says that the Eurocentric focus of the Cardinals detracts from where the attention of the church should be, while the no argument says that Pope Benedict has made it expressedly clear that a substantial focus of his papacy is going to be to shine a light on the - if you will - spiritual impoverishment and to combat what he sees as the dangers of moral relevantism of today's Europeans and Americans. As such, who said we were talking about having a Democracy here anyway, given that that Church was a European faith whose aspirations were universal? What was interesting is that when Pope John Paul passed away, it did not take very long for the Cardinals to choose Cardinal Ratzinger as the new Pope. That could be seen as a signal that Church leaders were largely united in their deliberations on where they wanted to go and focus their energies on. DiNardo's appointment can be seen as a continuation of the struggle against moral relativism and as a nod to the fact that Hispanics in America are often Catholics. I attended the funeral of the mother of a Hispanic former co-worker last year, who was given Catholic rites, including a rosary.

I've traveled to Brazil, the Phillipines, Argentina, and to France, all of which are nations with substantial populations of Catholics. I've been inside some cathedrals in places like Rio de Janeiro which are hundreds of years old and are nothing short of works of art. Despite all of the concerns about the affairs of the West, it would have been interesting to see the election of a Brazilian Pope, or a Pope from Africa or Asia. I suggested this to a Catholic girl I used to work with who was from Trinidad. She went bananas, telling me that it wasn't right that a Pope be anyone but from Europe.

To me, what made John Paul so successful was that he was seen as an every man's Pope; a man who came from a modest background and whose life was colored by the fact that his homeland was under the thumb of Communism. People from all over the world loved him. A successful Pope has to not only have convictions, but also has to have a kind of identifiable charisma which John Paul had in spades. So far, Benedict seems not to have that magic touch that his predecessor had.

So I suppose one might say that yes, in the larger scheme of things, DiNardo's appointment makes some kind of sense. If the church allows some creativity for DiNardo's role, one could see him as a kind of ambassador for Americans to those south of our borders, strengthening the bonds of the Church throughout the Americas.

Enough musings for now about the affairs of the world's largest religious faith. I'm watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade as I finish this. Y'all have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Wizard

Book Review - Sprawl: a Compact History by Robert Bruegmann

One thing that I've kept promising myself about over and over again, but never actually do, is write more book reviews. One of my ambitions in starting this site was to write lots of book reviews instead of posting them to Amazon or elsewhere. I do get plenty of views for my Karen Armstrong book reviews (which I will be transferring to my blog page), so there are people out there who are interested in such things.

This review is of course about the book Sprawl: a Compact History, by University of Chicago historian and Architecture professor Robert Bruegmann. I actually was loaned a copy of this book from a fellow activist, which saved me the immediate trouble of ordering my own copy. I still think I will get around to purchasing a copy sometime soon.

I've certainly gone through my share of academic tomes over the years. Bruegmann's book clocks in at 230 pages, along with 50 pages of footnotes and reference pages. For an academic publication, Sprawl is a fairly easy read, with no dense calculus equations, a mere 10 graphs and 23 images of various cities and urban layouts, along with replications of various plans of cities and models. The book is simply laid out, with three parts. The first describes sprawl from a historical perspective and looks into ideas as to why sprawl takes place. The second part covers the various anti-sprawl political campaigns which have occurred over the past century. Last, Bruegmann looks a prescriptions and remedies for the alleged problems.

Amongst items I noted were the following:

1) Early in chapter 1, Bruegmann notes that there is no agreed upon definition of what constitutes sprawl. His footnote on the topic is over a page long. In the footnote, Bruegmann argues that "it has been the non measurable, especially aesthetic aspects of sprawl that have constituted the emotional heart of the debate on the subject."

The term sprawl has a negative connotation, much like the terms elitism or conspicuous consumption, but what's funny is that the target of that negativism has been rather ephemeral. An implied undercurrent is that sprawl is caused by other people and that it results from the poor choices by which others have decided to live their lives.

My comment: The definition issue should be of no surprise since we are largely talking about the study of social sciences and of urban settings. The entire field of urban studies is rife with definition problems, which often contribute to spill over problems such as having to control for data comparisons and mismatches. In case you want to debate the point, try determining what the population of the Houston metropolitan area is. Do you want to determine the population of the City of Houston, Harris County, the SMSA, the PMSA, or the H-GAC metropolitan area? Bruegmann notes that frequently when the urban population spreads outward, it triggers the addition of a new county to the metropolitan area by the U.S. Census Bureau. Metropolitan density may appear to plummet simply because of the addition of the new county, no matter whether the density of the actual urbanized portion of the area was rising and falling.

Since we don't have a firm definition of what exactly sprawl is, then anti-sprawl campaigners find themselves falling back on the old saw that I know it when I see it.

2) Bruegmann says that many of the things that anti-sprawl campaigners fear is based upon outdated data or evidence. For example, there is a pervasive fear amongst some that sprawl is accelerating and spiraling out of control. Bruegmann shows where the rate of new sprawl in most metropolitan areas is actually slowing down and that many cities are slowly growing denser. That statement is in fact true for Houston.

Bruegmann states that lot sizes reached their peak in the 1950's and 1960's, while houses built on newer lots since then have been getting larger. He says that quite a bit of newer development at the edge of urban areas consists of row housing and apartments.

3) Bruegmann writes that distant "exurban" sprawl, what could be described as very low density development in rural areas past the urban periphery, has been accelerating. This is mostly because the parcels of land are very large and there are more people (often very wealthy) moving out to those areas who still want to be within striking range of towns and cities to access their amenities. At the same time, we have seen the creation of affluent, distant work areas far away from cities where people make very long commutes to get to them.

4) If you are a James Howard Kunstler fan, it may be of interest to you (I already knew this) that the large cities of the ancient world, such as Rome, had population densities of 150,000 people or more per square mile. It's possible to imagine that Mr. Kunstler, who lives in a town whose density is less than 1,000 people per square mile, would be thrilled to live in such a city.

5) The first sprawl in ancient cities and those of the Middle Ages was due to activities which were performed that were often objectionable within the city walls, such as smoke arising from metal working or burial of the dead. Bruegmann correctly notes that historical cities faced the crushing economic burden of building and maintaining walls around their perimeters. As Barton Smith told us in class one day, there were economies of scale in defense, so sprawling outside of city walls was a problematic issue in a world where your enemies could come from out of nowhere. Suburbanites of the ancient world lived outside the walls of cities because they could not afford to live in them. They gave up access to services and protection of the walls in return for living in tiny hovels near roads. Meanwhile the extremely wealthy of the ancient world lived in extravagant villas near the seaside or other desirable country areas.

Intriguingly, Bruegmann notes that London was the first modern city in the sense that it abetted sprawl because for many decades it was the only city in Europe which did not have a wall around its perimeter.

6) Bruegmann says that many of the wealthy in today's American cities live in areas which were already inhabited by wealthy people at the turn of the 20th century. Unlike other places in urban settings where neighborhoods may rise, fall, and perhaps redevelop and rise again, wealthy areas stay wealthy.

7) Bruegmann describes the massive sprawl away from urban cores which happened all over Europe and America in the early decades of the 20th century. Until that time, it was the rich who had moved out of urban cores. Now the masses were rich enough to follow them. The availability of public transportation was augmented by the automobile. Curbs, gutters, sewers, street lights and electricity, which we take for granted today, were all installed and completed in this era. Contrary to the belief that it was people moving outwards, it was often the case that jobs in factories and manufacturing that moved outwards first, then families followed the jobs. This in turn left lots of cheap, empty space behind in city cores which later on were often used by new residents or enterprises that in turn helped to revive the cores of some urban areas. (My note - this just goes to show how complicated cities really are).

8) While writing about the central cities of Europe and America, Bruegmann states that he thinks that an average of 10,000 people per square mile seems to be a threshold whereby very extensive use of public transportation takes place. The two cities in America that have higher densities than this are Chicago and New York (I think Bruegmann may be getting a bit sloppy here as San Francisco also has density above 10,000 per square mile). Even then, use of public transportation is mostly a strong force only for transportation into central business districts. Or as Wendell Cox might put it, its all about downtown.

9) Tirades and battles against sprawl are often triggered in periods where there are large economic booms, such as in Europe and America during the 1920's, America in the 1950's, and in numerous places in the world during the 1990's. Those are times when the numbers of people with the means to move grow rapidly. Bruegmann writes that campaigns against sprawl often occur in the largest and fastest growing cities, which strangely enough are often much denser than smaller towns, cities, and villages. Brugemann notes that anti-sprawlers are much more active in Los Angeles than they are in Little Rock Arkansas or Lubbock Texas.

10) European cities have rapidly been approaching American and Canadian levels of automobile ownership and use, but I already knew that.

11) Bruegmann looks at the possible causes of sprawl. Anti-urban attitudes and racism are examined, but Bruegmann notes that minorities are just as likely to move to the suburbs as white people are if they have the money. As for "anti-urban attitudes", Bruegmann says that:

It is probably only possible to call Americans anti-urban if one accepts a specific set of assumptions about urbanity made by members of a small cultural elite. This group likes to think of urbanity as the kind of life lived by people in apartments in dense city centers that contain major high brow cultural institutions. In these dense centers, the believe, citizens are more tolerant and cosmopolitan because of their constant interaction with other citizens unlike themselves. Bruegmann goes on to say that most Americans, and increasingly people around the world, are rejecting or simply ignoring such ideas for an idealized city.

My note here - from my time of having spent 9 weeks in London, I can confidently say that having people live in dense areas does not make them any more tolerant or cosmopolitan than anyone living in low density areas.

Bruegmann writes about the idea that sprawl is "the inevitable unhappy result of laissez-faire capitalism." Bruegmann goes on to say that this assertion is a complete turn around of the thoughts of urban reformers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who believed that unregulated private real estate markets would inevitably lead to massively high densities. Benjamin Marsh, an advocate for the working poor, wailed that it would be logical for developers to crowd as many people into a single acre of apartment housing, as that would maximize their profits.

Bruegmann says of various government created causes of sprawl, such as tax deductions for home ownership, that other countries do (or do not) have such deductions as does America, but sprawl is still taking place. He correctly notes that the home owner tax deduction primarily benefits the rich and not those in the lower or middle class income brackets. Yet people with lower incomes buy homes anyway.

As for the "Americans do not choose to live in the suburbs because they would obviously choose a hip urban lifestyle over the dreary suburban life" argument, Bruegmann writes that this seems to point to an idea that greedy developers are in cabal with politicians to deny what people really want. Bruegmann notes that if developers were really to possess as much fiendish guile that is attributed to them, then they should be able to make as much money developing high density lots in cities as they do in the suburbs.

He also discusses the Who framed Roger Rabbit urban myth, where the demise of rail and streetcars was allegedly because General Motors supposedly bought up all the rail and streetcar lines to put them out of business. More to the point, Bruegmann notes (quite correctly) that motorized automobiles and trucks did not replace rail, trolleys, and street cars. What the automobile replaced were horse drawn wagons and carriages and it is important to note that the first automobiles were known as horseless carriages. It was buses that replaced rail and streetcars.

To get a visual look at this, I consulted my copy of Historic Photos of Houston by Betty Trapp Chapman. For the first 85 of the 216 pages of her book, there are very few photographs of automobiles or trucks. There are many photos showing groups of people who have neatly parked in front of buildings in their horse drawn wagons and carriages. There is a photo of a mule train of men and equipment moving along a road in South Texas going towards the oil fields. There is another photo, taken circa 1890, of volunteer firemen in a horse drawn service truck that looks to be about 40 feet long. When President William Howard Taft visited Houston in November 1909, he had a public procession where he was taken by horse drawn carriages and not in a street car. There are only 12 photographs with streetcars, including one where streetcars are jostling for road space with horse drawn carriages and pedestrians circa 1900 (it looks like the streetcar is going to hit a crowd of them!). In the next to last photo, there is a photo of a street car taken in September 1924 which has the caption, "Please step inside and look me over. I am one of your 15 new Houston street cars. I cost $13,000." That streetcar in 2006 dollars would cost $153,263. After the 1910's, there are no more photographs of horse drawn carriages or wagons.

12) The anti-sprawl campaigns: Bruegmann notes that aesthetic tastes of urban development amongst critics changes over time. When London continued to sprawl extensively in the early 20th century, architect critics at the time raged about the row housing that is a feature of London suburbs like Acton Town. They demanded that such development be stopped on grounds such as that Britain's farmland was being consumed. Fast forward to the turn of the 21st century and the spiritual descendants of those urban planners and critics rave these days about how wonderful those same suburbs are and that this is how developers should build cities because it economizes on space.

Bruegmann also says that the first anti-sprawl campaign in Britain witnessed the idea that building new roads filled up, ergo the argument of later anti-sprawlers "we can't build our way out of congestion" is actually far older than many assume it to be. As a side note, Julius Caesar banned wheeled vehicles from the streets of ancient Rome during daylight hours due to traffic congestion. No wonder when your city has population densities of over 150,000 people per square mile.

13) The anti-sprawl campaigns in the America of the 1950's came about, as noted above, because of the increases in affluence and population. William H. Whyte, he of the Organization Man fame, sponsored what was perhaps the first conference on sprawl and targeted Los Angeles as its epitome. Interestingly, Bruegmann says that Los Angeles has densified, but he says that the cost of transporting sufficient water to the L.A. metropolitan area has acted as a curb to more sprawl.

New arguments emerged, such as the costs of sprawl, social and environmental problems, arguments in the 1970's were advanced about the limits to growth, and attacks on the automobile became more and more shrill. Bruegmann states that the economic problems of the late 1970's such as stagflation, drove such concerns off the public agenda. However when Western advanced economies recovered and sprawl continued.

Bruegmann then goes on to list the latest wave of anti-sprawl complaints, which now include social concerns and equity problems, sustainability, and global warming. However the old aesthetic issues crop up again, which Bruegmann thinks is because societies have solved basic problems such as food production, shelter, water, and so forth. Since those problems have been solved, then people have time to - well - look for more issues to complain about.

The last part of Bruegmann's book covers various anti-sprawl remedies which have been attempted during these anti-sprawl campaigns, including a sharp analysis of the bizarre political marriage between Britain's Labour Party and the conservative aristocratic landowners of Britain which resulted in the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. He covers regional planning, environmental impact statements, anti-road building and highway crusades, and the case of the highly successful anti-sprawl efforts employed in building Moscow. I will leave it to the reader's imagination as to why it was that the Soviets were successful in curbing sprawl in the nation's capital. He also notes that the most recent anti-sprawl campaigns have now drawn a backlash in which there are now people who are willing to speak up for benefits that are produced by sprawl.

This has been a long entry, but it hope it provokes interested parties into reading the book and mulling over what Sprawl has to say.

Wizard

"We're here to save the world. Will you help?"

A quote from Chris Moyles, a British D.J., speaking to the crowd at Wembley Stadium in London during a Live Earth show, an event aimed at raising awareness about global warming.

Answer: Maybe. But I really don't know if the world needs saving just yet. So far the summer in Houston has been quite rainy, but it also has been quite cool. Temperatures have been several degrees cooler than average for some weeks now. On Friday July 6, 2007, the high temperature was a mere 84 degrees fahrenheit. The normal temperature for this time of year is 93 degrees.

Bjorn Lomborg hopes that everyone enjoys the shows, but he doesn't think climate change is the most pressing matter facing mankind.

A gathering with Jeffrey Friedman of Critical Review

So yesterday I managed to catch an HPRA meeting featuring Jeffrey Friedman, editor of the journal Critical Review, as the guest speaker. Critical Review is one of the few journals out there which is genuinely worth reading. The Economist is still a good read, as are various online newspapers throughout the world. On rare occasions I still pick through Foreign Affairs or some other journal. Good history books are always fun to read. These days though, much of my spare time for reading has been swallowed up by reading on IT issues, though I still can draw upon a vast background of reading which I have done over the decades.

There is plenty of economics or political blather out there for people to read no matter what your views are on these matters. Materials have become even more available with the advent of the Internet. However little of what is out there is really interesting. I can usually tell within the first 2-3 pages of reading an online academic paper or a print journal article whether the treatise is worth reading or whether it was probably written to keep tenure. I stay away from anything written by English professors, as well as most Sociology. If I exert serious effort, I can tell whether an Economics paper simply rehashes an old idea with newer and more complicated math.

What drew me to Critical Review was an incident that happened about 9 years ago. I was in a bookstore which used to be on South Shepherd, across the street from my auto mechanic. While getting my car worked on one day, I went across the street and perused through their offerings. That is when I saw a now classic issue of CR where they debated the issue of Public Ignorance and what such matters might mean for republics and democracies. I picked up the issue and probably learned more about how decision making goes on in the political arena than I had learned in years of reading anything else. I was hooked. I have read the journal on and off ever since. Most recently, Friedman has republished Philip Converse's 1964 classic paper on public ignorance, "The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics", along with an issue of scholarly debates surrounding the subject.

Friedman started off his talk by saying that he started CR in 1987. He talked about how the modern world really is too complicated for anyone to understand, and that this really has immense implications for those who would desire to craft public policies to shape the future in certain directions amenable to them. He then went on to describe the Converse paper and said that the great man's research is just there and is known in the political science community, though not widely known outside of it. Nobody has challenged or successfully rebuked what Converse wrote. It just sits there seeming to be something of a curiosity.

But there is far more to it than that. Friedman went on to say something that is not well known about some political polls, namely that many people do not know an answer or do not have answers to questions that might be asked of them in polls. What happens in such situations is that pollsters will push such sample members in their polls to take a position on poll questions when they say they don't know what to say. I found that to be very interesting.

Friedman mentioned that 90+ percent of the public knows little about politics, while the other 1-10 percent do know quite a bit. The more you know, the more dogmatic you tend to become. That does not surprise me one bit.

For my two cents worth, I have long felt after reading my original issue of CR that a big reason for public ignorance is economics. Time is scarce and there is little monetary gain to be had from spending endless hours reading about or becoming knowledgeable about politics, unless you happen to be a politician, a lawyer, a political scientist or other university professor, a bureaucrat, military officer, or a professional such as an engineer or doctor, or perhaps a single issue activist. Otherwise you would be better off simply concentrating on improving your job skills so that you would get better paid.

Friedman went on to talk about what he called "The Hobson's Choice (or Rule) of Democracy". We can basically have rule either by the largely ignorant masses or the dogmatic elites. Ignorance of politics is a worldwide phenomena, not something peculiar to the United States. So if you think that the French are all sitting at Left Bank cafes, sipping coffee at tables and holding forth on deep discussions about philosophical and public affairs, then think again.

Friedman says that dogmatism largely comes from the huge number of decisions and complications arising in our modern world in an array of issues. This results in huge amounts of data which need to be collected and analyzed. What dogmatism does is simplify understanding of complex issues and helps people screen most of the complications out. Friedman went on to say that one idea or theory is all it takes to change or see the world in a different way. You need an idea as a peg to hang your hat on.

So what do we have as alternatives, if any? Friedman went on to say that one Nobel prize winner stated that there are two forms of participation in life. One is what was called "Exit" and the other is "Voice".

What Exit denotes is the process of the personal and economic life of an individual. Life is a process of experimentation whereby someone feels their way forward towards the things that make them happy. Friedman gave as an example how someone might experiment with smoking cigarettes. If the would be smoker didn't like the taste of a cigarette, that is all that mattered. That person would not smoke that cigarette again. There was no need for the smoker to understand the cause of why that cigarette was disagreeable to her, whether the manufacturing was bad or the tobacco was bad or any other reason. All that mattered was that the product was disagreeable. Our female smoker will never try that cigarette again, ergo the "Exiting" or quitting of the action. The world then becomes a better place for it.

What "Voice" is denotes the world of politics. What politicians or political activists do is that they try to actively look for and identify "problems". They then try to dissect the cause of these "problems" and offer some "solution" using the coercive powers of the state. Using the above example, those in the political sphere might start investigating the tobacco company, complain about the product, the health care costs on the public dime, the habit forming aspects of smoking (note I didn't say its addictiveness), and so forth.

Wisdom is the accumulation of knowledge. The big problem here for people is that political outcomes or solutions are so hard to interpret that we end up arguing the same issues over and over and over again, going round and round in circles in the process. Rarely do the best ideas get into the arena because powerful organized groups who might get threatened by them will see to it that they get stomped out.

A question was raised where Friedman was asked to differentiate between a public ignorance critique of politics verses public choice. Friedman mentioned that two big problems of public choice are that public choice often allows its subscribers to go about demonizing politics and that public choice is arguably part, but not the whole picture. A fuller picture of politics is that the arena has both selfish interests who are out to gain something for themselves at public expense, but that there are idealists (often misguided ones) who need to be dealt with too. In a memorable turn of phrase, Friedman characterized public choice a kind of "right wing Marxism".

Friedman addressed the issue on how do voters make decisions. Citing Converse, voters often fall back on two big things. First is the "Nature of the times", meaning that if a war is going well or if the economy is going well, then voters often stick with incumbents. The second is nationalism or voting along ethnic / religious lines.

Another topic of discussion came up and that was whether free market economics is common sensical? Arguably, Friedman says no it is not. He pointed out that good economics often has unseen aspects to it (Amen brother!) and that you often have to think abstractly in order to grasp its implications. Meanwhile our brains which evolved during hunter gatherer times did not weed through the gene pool for men and women who were good economists, but they did weed out for beauty, brains, strength, and being able to hunt deer. The field of economics itself was invented in Britain in the 18th century and the complexity of the modern world has complicated its study even further.

Other topics Friedman spoke about had to do with the "Myths of Democracy". Does everyone's vote count? The answer is - No! Another myth of democracy is that voters should have had time to be fully informed going into the voting booth. That is true, but they rarely have much information digested, nor does it help that the vast majority of journalists who are supposed to be responsible for disseminating information to the public rarely have had any formal study of economics. Instead they rely on heuristics instead of detailed knowledge of issues and candidates in order to guide them.

Friedman stated that the goal of his journal and his seminars was to try to reach young people and educate the future judges, bureaucrats, and politicians of tomorrow so that they would at least have some grounding in freedom and free market arguments since they are often so bitterly attacked. They need defending, whereas as one member of the audience pointed out, wherever you look in the political economy of modern day America, everything is an absolute mess. That includes Social Security transfer payments, Medicare, Medicaid and health care, transportation, farm subsidies, education, policing and law enforcement, the list is endless. Even if the whole of the political economy is a mess, every program has plenty of defenders and well monied interests who have every incentive to make sure that things stay that way or get even worse.

In all, Dr. Friedman gave a fascinating talk and one I will always remember. I never thought I would get to meet the professor. I brought my copy of the latest issue of CR and had him sign it. He said he was thrilled to meet long time readers and was happy to hear that there are people out there really valued what he was doing since he didn't hear enough of that.

Bye for now...

Hong Kong - 10 years after the Beijing takeover

And so it is that the newspapers are full of stories describing what the world is like in Hong Kong 10 years after the British handed over their old colony to the Chinese Communists in Beijing. The general consensus is that the Beijing government has not made a basketcase of Hong Kong, much to the relief of many. It seems that what we have is a case of plus ca change, plus c'est la meme.

I stayed for six days in Hong Kong during my last break while I was in China. I actually went down to Guangzhou with a girl I knew after I left Zhouxian for good. We stayed there for several days before going to Shenzhen. I later went to Zhuhai and Macau on day trip while I stayed in Hong Kong.

I found Hong Kong to be a fast paced city which glittered with light and intensity. It would have been difficult for me to really make myself feel at home there though. It would have taken a long time to lay down roots and make my way in the world. I had few job skills at that time that would have been in demand which could not have been filled by locals. Housing, then as now, was also expensive.

Since that was 1992, the handover to Beijing was still five years into the future. Nevertheless, there was plenty of talk of Hong Kong denizens trying to secure visas to Canada, Britian, Australia, and the U.S. People just didn't know what was going to happen and many were effectively hedging their bets that Beijing was going to shut everything down - the media, speaking English, general rule of law in favor of cronyism and rule by the most politically connected, a reasonably efficient civil service, and so forth. Fortunately little of that has happened. There is a strong argument to be made that China has become more like Hong Kong rather than the other way around. Shanghai will surpass Hong Kong as China's busiest port this year and other coastal cities now look like Hong Kong.

I suppose the question to ask for the future is whether China will successfully reform itself from within before it wears Hong Kong down whether by accident or purpose. So far the Beijing government has played its cards well and has gotten everything is has wanted out of Hong Kong and there is no reason why from Beijing's standpoint why the status quo cannot continue. Look for Democracy or elections to be a long time coming.

Wizard

The fire of 1666 - and how London looks the way it does today.

The summer of 1666 was long, hot and dry. In retrospect it is easy to see how it must of reduced a city of wooden buildings to the condition of a tinderbox.

For the last several weeks I have been picking my way through London - A Traveller's History. The book is a solid general history of London as it has developed over the past 2,000 years. Perhaps the biggest lesson I have discovered is that changes in how a city is laid out come from catastrophes, often man made ones, which allow those those who have ideas to partially reshape the future when most people are busy trying to deal with the uncertainties and contingencies of the present. In recent centuries, the two biggest tragedies which have shaped modern day London are the visits which the Luftwaffe paid London during WWII and the fire of 1666.

The idea that a fire might sweep through London and reduce the city to ashes had been an issue which had worried the Crown for several generations and some attempts had been made to pass building regulations which would reduce the probability that a fire induced catastrophe would engulf the city. Alas, none of them passed.

The fire of 1666, which had its start in an neglected fire in a royal baker located off of Pudding Lane, ended up consuming over 13,000 houses and left scores of thousands of people homeless. Firefighting in those days largely consisted of attempting to create firebreaks in order to stop the spread of blazes. Unfortunately, the Lord Mayor hesitated in ordering such breaks and the narrowness of the streets inhibited escaping the inferno and fire fighting efforts.

Mr. Tames falls into the camp which believes that a beneficial side effect of the fire was that London was never touched by the Plague again. However a competing view on this matter is that the fire itself might not have been the reason for this. Other historians and epidemiologists have noted that the Plague was beginning to disappear from other European cities around this time as well.

In the aftermath of the fire, Tames notes that a rebuilding along long straight wide streets and avenues and creating a new order to the city ran into the issue of property rights, a concept which had already been rooted in centuries of English common law. This would have led to long and very costly negotiations over property ownership and property values. The Crown, which had only recently regained its place in English society in the aftermath of the English Civil War, probably did not have enough money to compensate all of the owners for their losses and was only recently reestablished in the minds and hearts of the public. A wholesale reworking of the city would have probably been much resented. The Crown itself, fearful of another potential rebellion from a restless public, was having to reassure the English people that foreigners or terrorists were not the ones responsible for the disaster. King Charles II did send out for rebuilding plans anyway and indeed was bombed with new plans, but these ideas largely came to naught. People were too much in a hurry to rebuild anyway.

Still, in the decades that followed, London did rebuilt itself with a real face lift. The old city of the Middle Ages was gone forever. Over 100 streets were rebuilt to be at least 14 feet wide. The first raised pavements for pedestrians were introduced. Walls of buildings were mandated to be built of brick or stone. Parliament passed new rules in 1707 and 1709 stipulating that houses which fronted onto main thoroughfares were required to be four stories high, while lanes of note were to have buildings of at least three stories high. Back streets, which often were organized into mews type development, were to be two stories in height. If you walk around London today, you cannot help but notice that most of the city is organized around these stipulations. Curiously, I have also noticed that many structures are built to the four story standard and rise no higher than that. Those buildings fronting major streets that do rise higher than four stories rarely rise more than 1-2 stories above that. Gentle readers of this blog might ask themselves why is that?

The other main lesson is that many people seem to admire this kind of urban development today, but it seems that London's development was largely in response to the safety concerns from 300+ years ago and not because of some master plan. The fact that the London has stuck with this kind of development since that time has led to many of the problems which the city faces today, including apartment type housing (flats) that sometimes is not equipped with all mod cons, traffic speeds (from all forms of transportation) which move along at an average speed of 10-15 miles per hour and having to stipulate that on street parking be charged to non-resident permit holders at a rate of 20 pence every 5 minutes (2.40 pounds per hour) in order to try to deter any further rises in motor vehicle use. These parking charges come with a caveat that vehicles have to move every 4 hours and that they are not allowed to come back to the same parking space within one hour.

Enough for now. Ever since I first came to London on holiday 5 years ago, I have wondered why it is that London looks the way it does. I would not be surprised if many other European cities have similar rules in place, at least for their inner cities (their suburbs might well be a different story). Now I know the answer.

Wizard

Happenings in Britian: Spring 2007 - Part III

Well, yesterday's Grand National came and went. And how did the Wizard fare? Well gentle readers, I hate to admit that the Crystal Ball was cloudy when it came to viewing this event, but me thinks that many had clouded visions when it came to picking winners yesterday.

A brief rundown on the Grand National yesterday. Of the 40 horses which entered the race, only 13 finished. There were several false starts and the Brits don't start the horses out of a gate when running this race.

I put a total of 200 pounds down on three horses, Point Barrow, Dun Doire, and Le Duc, none of whom finished. Point Barrow was heavily backed, but stumbled jumping over the very first grass fence! There are thirty grass fence jumps in this 4.5 mile race. Dun Doire pulled up at fence 23, while Le Duc unseated his jockey at fence number 6. The winner finished in the 4.5 mile distance in 9 minutes and 12 seconds and had 33-1 odds. The horse who finished fourth had 100-1 odds. In all, I think the bookies went home happy, as did the tiny number of those who actually bet on the long shots.

In other news, Prince William and his longtime beau Kate Middleton have split. How sad. Ms. Middleton has that classic Brit Girl look to her which makes my head turn. Somehow I hope that the two of them will reconsider maybe in another 3-4 years and end up getting married anyway.

Two Tolkien related items of note:

1) Yesterday afternoon I watched a soccer match between Sheffield United and West Ham United on the BBC-1. And guess who happened to be in a private box at the stadium enjoying the match?

The answer: Sean Bean. It seems Mr. Bean had childhood dreams of being a football star and playing for the hometown team.

The first TV shot showed Sean Bean with a bit of an unhappy look on his face, but the score was 0-0. Later after the Sheffielders put in a few through the net and won the game 3-0, Mr. Bean got just as pumped up as the rest of the crowd and went home with a smile on his face.

2) Today I took a long walk this afternoon to Camden Town and happened upon the famous street markets which stretch for many blocks. If any of you ever have a chance to come to London, you really should make an effort to see the Camden markets. These markets are probably the biggest hidden gem that tourists and short time folks like myself should see, but rarely do since they aren't widely advertised as part of touristy London.

Anyway, as I wended my way through the stalls and houses, I found myself walking into a place which advertised lots of old maps. I love looking at old maps (though I rarely buy them), but I so happened to stumble onto a used book store which was right next to where the maps were kept.

I had stumbled upon my own mines of Mithril.

For 30 pounds cash, I will be burdening myself on the trip home with the following books:

1) A 1985 Unicorn / Unwin Paperback version of The Silmarillion.

2) A 1981 copy of The Tolkien Quiz Book, compiled by Nigel Robinson and Linda Wilson.

3) A 1993 copy of The Tolkien Companion by David Day.

4) A 1968 copy of Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings, written by William Ready.

5) Four copies of The Hobbit, including a 1975 edition which had artwork depicting Smaug from Tolkien himself; a 1993 edition which has cover artwork depicting Smaug from John Howe; a 1988 edition with cover artwork depicting Smaug from David Garland; and a 1989 edition which has cover artwork depicting Rivendell from Ted Nasmith.

6) And last by not least, my Precious! I found a 1995 printing of a one book edition of The Lord of the Rings which is none other than the one with the classic John Howe portrait of Gandalf on the cover. I thought I would never find one of these. I fell in love with it on the spot and I already know that this version will become my favorite of all my Tolkien collection. The cover artwork has a dark green tint to it, but I consider this to be priceless.

As it was, I also threw down money on some incense, a City wide map of London, and some t-shirts from British rock bands The Jam, the Cure, and Joy Division which you just can't get back home. I ended up dropping about 100 pounds today, but had a blast doing it!

Ciao for Now.

Wizard

Happenings in Britian: Spring 2007 - The Grand National Horse race!

You would think that an American, especially a relative Anglophile such as myself, would know a lot of what goes on in a country like the United Kingdom. Wrong! This morning while eating breakfast with my colleagues at VLICA (the Very Large Industrial Corporation of America), I took a look at the television only to discover that tomorrow afternoon is the annual running of The Grand National horse race. The race, held at the Aintree Racecourse, promises to be quite a spectacle for a sometime gambling man such as yours truly. My colleagues told me that the premier race to be held tomorrow will feature 40 horses running in the race over a course of 4.5 miles. Furthermore, the horses have steeplechase type barriers that they have to clear! This ought to be blast to watch.

Clearly a 4.5 mile race with steeplechase barriers thrown in is a major endurance test for horses and predictably the animal rights freaks have come out squealing. Nonetheless, they should realize that nobody wants to see horses come to a nasty end over a mere human passion.

Though I am not in shape, I have done distance running for many years. If there's anything I know, that is that endurance races of all kinds throw the field wide open. There are so many things that can go wrong, especially in a race like this, that it only makes watching the spectacle that much more exciting.

This evening the BBC had a program where the sports writers made their picks as to who was going to win. They did expose spots on famous trainers and jockeys. I discovered that the Brits allow amateurs to race with the pros in the event, though an amateur hasn't won the race in 17 years. All of Britain's major newspapers have Grand National pullouts and guides in tomorrow's editions. I am getting pumped up!

I briefly thought of trying to get to Liverpool in order to see the race in person, but I'm thinking that I'll have to get up pretty early in order to make it up there. On second thought, I think I'll just stay and watch it on the telly.

But watching the Grand National at the hotel doesn't drain all of the excitement out of the event. I just need to make sure that I peer into the Crystal Ball first, take a look at the field, then go to a Ladbrokes and plunk down 50 or 100 quid on a 100-1 horse! Why not? After all, even the horse many think has the best chance of winning, Point Barrow, is being offered 11-1 odds over at Ladbrokes.

The World Awaits!

Wizard.

Happenings in Britain: Spring 2007

And so it was that I find myself in the Imperial City again. This time the weather is far better than it was during last January. The weather has been in the 60's and 70's during the day, with an occasional sunny day thrown in. I will write an analysis of London's transportation system very soon and hope to have some pictures thrown in of salient points as well. The purpose of this post is to draw attention to city issues which might interest people back home.

1) The 2012 London Olympic Games: Remember when the elites were battling furiously for Houston to be the host city of the 2012 Olympic Games? A former City of Houston council member named John Kelley founded an organization called the Houston 2012 Foundation and raised $6 million to try to foist the games off on Houstonians bring the Games to Houston.

I forgot to write about the London Olympic Games when I was here in January, but the subject should have been something I could have committed to the blog. Briefly, the politics behind the cost of the games got really hot while I was here three months ago. Here are some web sites which discuss the final bill that Britons are facing for the privilege of hosting the Games. You gotta love that possible 9 billion pound final bill - about $17.5 billion at April 2007 exchange rates for a half month of taking in athletic pleasures. That is 4 times the original estimated cost of hosting the games. A combination of constructing new housing, new sports temples, providing security, and some transportation are all contributing to the cost overruns. Residents of London are (as of this writing) being taxed to the tune of 38 pence per week in order to help cough up 625 million pounds of local money to pay for the games.

And to think that all of this could have happened to Houstonians! One of the rationales for building the downtown Light Rail line was that it was mandatory because we were going to host the Olympic Games!

2) The famed London congestion charge: As one might have expected, London Mayor Ken Livingstone and his friends on the London Council both upped the congestion charge in 2005 for entering the City from 5 pounds to 8 pounds. Moreover, the size of the congestion zone was increased, essentially doubling in size. One person has commented that the municipal powers in London have raked in 677 million pounds from the charge as of February 2007, but that only a fraction of the overall monies have been used to improve transportation capacities. That brings into question the entire issue of whether municipal authorities anywhere should be charging for road use, if only on the grounds that the collected monies will not be used for transportation but for - say - paying off the transportation union workers. Apparently money was supposed to be used for improved bus service.

Another matter that cropped up was that motorists were apparently driving right up to the edge of the zone and then driving around to find a parking space. Once they found one they would then jump on the Tube or onto a bus to get the rest of the way to where they were going. This prompted outrage amongst the local residents in those areas who were finding their assigned parking spots being taken by commuters. The general complaint was that congestion was (and is) being shifted around, rather than being slayed.

3) Now a pollution charge is scheduled to come into effect. Motorists who own what are deemed to be heavily polluting vehicles will be slapped with a whopping 25 pound charge.

4) I watched on Saturday as Cambridge beat Oxford in the 153rd annual boat race.

Ciao for now. More later.

Wizard

Your's truly in London and Paris - forthcoming

Tonight I am working on uploading images from my recent work trip to London. My weekend trip to Paris is bundled in the photos. I would also like to write some stories of my trip to Algeria from last December. An analysis of transportation, living conditions, and the historical development of London and Paris is also forthcoming as part of a presentation to be made in the future to the Houston Property Rights Association.

Here is a teaser.

Ciao for now.

Wizard

Happenings in Britain over the past few weeks

I promised everyone in my last post that would write about my trip to Paris. Well, I've decided to lie. I've decided to write a summary of various news topics which have been hitting the headlines while I have been here in the Sceptered Isles. Think of this as my continuation of a previous post where I talked about Silpa Shetty, David Beckham, and the potential breakup of the United Kingdom.

Amongst various happenings have been:

1) An intentional grounding of a cargo ship off the southwestern coast of Britian on January 22nd. I watched this on television with my colleages at lunch time at VLICA. This event provided plenty of fodder for jokes over what had happened. Apparently people came from as far as the Midlands and Kent in order to try to plunder the shipwrecked goods. Meanwhile the police were given new powers to stop people from hitting the beach in hope of making off with the goodies. Word had it that motorbikes were being sold on Ebay within a day after the ship ran aground.

2. Global warming and climate change have been ongoing topics over here, seemingly much more so than back in America. I can only think that it is because parts of Europe actually have glaciers, while glaciers have melted away. Recent winters have been mild for once. There are plenty of pious noises being made about how fossil fuels are running out and how Europeans have gotten their act together about environmental cleanliness.

Still, I have my doubts about the whole matter. Not about warming, mind you. I do submit that world temperatures have gone up about 1+ degree Celsius over the past 100 years or so. Wow! No doubt that there will be some losers over rising seas, which will do doubt submerge some low lying islands and force some people to move.

But here's the kicker. I have my ear to the ground fairly closely and there is no doubt in my own mind that there are more than a few people out there that love the fact that the world is warming up a bit! Global warming? Bring it on!

Another aspect of this debate that governs my thoughts is that several months ago I was in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on holiday. While there, I visited the National History Museum, which was not too hot. Try visitng the Muzium Negara or the wonderful Islamic Arts Museum instead.

But I digress. While I was in the KL national history museum, I saw a map of the Malay peninsula from 5,000 - 10,000 years ago. The map showed that the Malay peninsulsa was actually a couple dozen miles narrower at that time then it is now. In other words, the seas were higher at that point in time than they are today and covered parts of the landscape.

Meanwhile, Jared Diamond wrote in Guns, Germs and Steel that the Aboriginies (or Indigenous Australians) arrived on the Australian continent tens of thousands of years before when a land bridge still existed between Aussie Land and probably modern day New Guinea. If that was the case, then the oceans have obviously risen since that time (40,000+ years ago) and have pushed that land bridge below the waves. All of this happened while our ancestors were still struggling with figuring out how to create fire.

My point here is that even if we have global warming happening, then is it really going to matter in the big scheme of things? It seems to me that the Earth goes through cycles of warming and cooling regardless of whether we do anything or not. It just so happens that we may be going through a period of warming which we have had no experience with before. And I would rather have global warming than global cooling! It was only after the last Ice Age receeded 12,000 or so years ago that we humans rose to our current heights of civilization.

3. And finally, the current Labour government announced yesterday that homosexual couples would be allowed to adopt as everyone else would. Obviously, this directive angered religious groups, with Islamic faith groups siding with Catholics - imagine that! This was an extension of what is called the Equality Act. I am willing to put money down that religious adoption agencies will start shutting their doors within 2 years rather than comply with government mandates.

4. Meanwhile, a scandal has enveloped the Blair government where the PM's government is accused of selling Honors for Cash. And this from a government which wanted to do away with the hereditary honors and sweep up the House of Lords.

Enough for now. And I do promise my next posting will be about Paris!

Ciao for now. TMW

More railing about rail - trips to Heathrow and Charles De Gaulle airports

This past weekend I went to Paris. It was my first trip there and I had a fabulous time, even though I had only 45 or so hours to enjoy the City of Light. I would love to pay a second visit to France in the not too far distant future.

I will write about my visit to Paris in my next blog entry, but I wanted to share with readers my trips from my hotel to the airport, both to London Heathrow and to Paris Charles De Gaulle. I very nearly missed flights at both Heathrow going over and from Charles De Gaulle (nee CDG) coming back. In both situations, trams leaving from hotels to airports split. Going to Heathrow, the Piccadilly line train splits at Acton and either goes to Heathrow or Uxbridge. In the case of CDG, the RER B splits at the stop of Aulnay sous-Bois and either goes to CDG, or goes to the town of Mitry Claye. In both situations, the tram doors shut before the train operator had announced that the tram was headed in the direction which I did not want to go, ergo I had to get off at the next station and head back around.

The situation was freaky in the Heathrow case because the trams were full and I had to pass two trains before I could get on one. Even after I got on a Heathrow bound train, the tram I got on stopped at the Northfields station. It was announced the train was going no further leaving passengers stranded and having to wait for the next tram which arrived about 15 minutes later. While I was waiting for the Air France flight to Paris, I overheard a British man talking to someone about house inspections and he also took 90 minutes to get to Heathrow via the train.

In the case of my CDG adventure, I faced the hair raising scare of not speaking the language. The tram stop I was at had three platforms, leaving me to figure out which platform I had to get back on in order to make it back to the Anlnay sous-Bois station. I managed to get my predicament across to a French woman and did make it in. In both cases, taking the tram took about 1 hour 40 minutes to get to the airport. In the case of London, the distance from Heathrow to Central London is about 15 miles, while for CDG to central Paris is about 17 miles. This meant that rail travel amounts travelling a