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The UN has been asked by Islamic states to change the status of Palestinian territory. The idea is that this would further strengthen Palestinian claims to sovereignty over more Israeli territory than the US and Israel are willing to accept.
This raises questions about the definition of sovereignty. One might think that this means lands and citizens over which a nation has control. Libyan sovereignty was transferred from Qaddafi to a commitee because the commitee controlled “most” of the territory and citizens. Presumably they will be expected to demonstrate “effective” control soon in order to retain their claim.
The Palestinian Authority, for its part, seems to lack any effective control over anyone. That may just be a biased perception on my part. Yet it does seem reasonable that the UN ought to discuss this prerequisite for sovereignty before voting on recognition of a Palestinian state. Maybe the diplomatic professionals have all these issues sorted out in their minds. If they do, I would expect them to be able to work out a peaceful solution that ends the Arab/Israeli Conflict.
I have worked out a solution in my own mind, if anyone is interested. My solution is that the UN and all parties ‘not’ do anything that leads to violence. Mostly that means the the UN and all parties should not ‘do’ anything. It is patently obvious that everything the UN has done has increased the violence in the region. It is also clear that anything the Arab states have done other than sign peace treaties has increased the violence. And, finally, it is clear that the creation of a Jewish state and defending its existence has increased the violence.
Once all parties have simply stopped ‘doing’ anything, I’ll unveil the rest of my solution.
Wikileaks has released a searchable database of “secret” US messages sent between US Embassies worldwide and the Mother Ship.
Imagine, if you will, writing a novel in which the author creates exactly such communications using a third person omniscient perspective for the narrator. Wouldn’t such a novel be more or less identical to those “secrets” highlighted by the press in recent days? What, you don’t think so? Oh, I see. A novel would have a basketful of really nasty secrets and conspiracies between the worst kind of low-life scum imaginable; possibly even as bad as journalists!
There are several interesting things that have NOT been reported widely on this topic. Well, actually, there are millions of interesting things that will not be reported in connection with the Wikileaks leak. You will never read any report of an illegal conspiracy of US agents attempting to undermine the democratically established foreign policies of the United States. The complete absence of any evidence of wrongdoing is amazing.
Of course, both the stealing of secrets and the keeping of them are legal for governments, you understand.
The other amazing thing about this fracas is that the anti-war activists and their ad hoc allies are completely unaware that there is no dirt in this story. Mindboggling.
(Other blogs and sources list the embarrassing and unprofessional revelations of these leaks. What you will think depends totally upon your presuppositions.)
Espionage: What is it?
Spying is what nations do to find out what is really happening in another nation, particularly in government and military activities. A better term for this would be “collecting intelligence”. Intelligence is simply what raw data becomes in the brain of an analyst; in other words, the data may be lying around for lots of people to know and talk about, but it only becomes intelligence when some analyst tries to determine the significance of the data with regard to international relations. But the collection of intelligence is like fishing with a net; you catch all kinds of things along with the tuna. It should be noted, however, that gentlemen don’t spy on their friends; instead they just collect intelligence. (To be technical, “spying” per se involves breaking laws. Friends don’t have to spy on each other, they just ask questions openly.)
So agents go fishing for intelligence by finding as many ways as possible to collect data. They collect signals (SIGINT) that aren’t words; they collect signals (COMINT) that are words; they take pictures; and they get people with access to “collections” of data to steal it and pass it on. Wikileaks is an NGO dedicated to “openness” in government and it strives to enforce this openness by publishing “leaks” of data from insiders in any government anywhere. They don’t seek to “analyze” this data and produce intelligence “product”; they only make the data accessible to everyone. You could say they are intelligence subcontractors.
Now, as a “real” intelligence analyst (until Gulf One) I can say that there is a lot of useful intelligence to be gleaned from the Wikileaks publication of US diplomatic cables. But I can also say that just because some intelligence is useful doesn’t make it very interesting to normal people. I’m not saying that normal people can’t understand it; I’m saying that normal people don’t have any need for it. Wikileaks believes that exposing state secrets will make government more accountable to the people. This is usually true. But our government is already so accountable to the people that it can barely operate.
For example, take the “open meeting” laws which make it illegal for officials to ride to a government project site in a van and discuss the project while on route. That would be a closed “secret” meeting. Good grief!
But, the US is different from many nations. If the same secret discussions were published elsewhere the people might throw the bums out. But the American government (and most Commonwealth governments, as well) is staffed by people with nothing to lose. That is, their governments can’t drag them off to secret gulags and torture them or their families. The reason is simple; it would be your neighbors and friends dragging you off. There are no secret agencies that aren’t staffed by normal everyday people here. And every agency is so accountable to others that they could never carry off some secret conspiracy even if they wanted to.
Most people are skeptical when I tell them that. But most people haven’t worked inside the system—and most people watch too many movies!
So to spy on the US is to spy on the Little House on the Prairie family. We tell people in advance when we’re going to go to war with them; you don’t need a crystal ball to know what we are thinking and planning. We arrest and try our agents or soldiers for breaking laws (like yelling at terrorists and hurting their feelings). Our most offensive act is our overzealous self-righteousness.
Yet, even if I personally believe our diplomats should have been openly speaking their thoughts on Larry King and publicizing them in the Wall Street Journal (or Rolling Stone Magazine), there is no excuse for this low level private to not hang for his willfully treasonous behavior. Just because he was too stupid to realize that the information wasn’t very important doesn’t mean that he didn’t try to harm the US. The same goes for all the foreign agents who participated in this emergent espionage drama. Hang them all, immediately! (Note: “Hang” is a slang term meaning “suffer the full judicial consequences for a crime.”
But it doesn’t really matter what we do to these miscreants. They were too lame to do any actual harm to us. Yet we should be fair. If we’re going to hang real spies for passing real secrets to the enemy, we ought to treat these guys the same way. We shouldn’t hold their incompetence against them.
It does matter, on the other hand, that we start telling people openly what we really think. The duplicitous nonsense that passes for diplomacy these days has got to stop. The Saudis are morally bankrupt buffoons. The Chinese are wimps who can’t throw their own stupid leaders overboard (like the Soviets accidentally did, then felt so bad about it that they invited them back). The French ought to try working for a change and the Germans ought to try taking a break. And the Americans ought to turn off the TV and start reading books.
World Peace is actually quite easy.
Those of you who don’t recognize the title as the name of a recently released movie need to know that the title is the name of a recently released movie.
Thus begins the movie about the fastest 25 billion dollar valuation rise in history. Actually, the movie doesn’t start with those words (above); the movie starts with a fast-talking uber-geek named Zuckerman abusing the English language to speak a lot of words in grammatically correct sentences without actually having to participate in a real conversation.
The movie ought to be called “How to get rich without actually having to do any work”. I don’t mean Zuckerman, the founder of Facebook whose story is told in this movie. I mean all the people that got rich because they accidentally spoke to Zuckerman during the few weeks that he wrote the code for this website and brought the concept of social netowrking out of the closet.
Some reviewers firmly believe that this movie will win all the Oscars (or whatever) because of the excellent acting and script. Technically, I didn’t actually witness any great acting or scriptwriting in connection with this movie. All I saw was a perfect reenactment of the nerdy Silicon Valley subculture (subculture=behavior that is LESS than that of a real culture) that repeatedly mated with Harvard/MIT arrogance and exclusivity to produce… Facebook!
This will tell you more about me than I would candidly post as a FB status update, but I actually like Zuckerman. In the movie that is. I’ll have you know that former clients of mine actually call Zuckerman by his first name and he calls them by their first names and NOT because they friended each other on FB. That’s, like, TWO degrees of separation! Or is it one. Whatever. And I actually chatted with Bill Gates once. And if my client had been there instead of me, Bill would have said, “Hey, (client’s first name)!” Finally, proof positive of something is this: I frequently (geek-speak for “more than once”) ate at both Microsoft and Apple staff cafeterias in Silicon Valley. Some of my best friends are nerds.
So I can tell you with confidence that this movie did not have any acting in it whatsoever. They just did hidden camera shots in software engineers’ natural habitats and pieced together a faux-script from the clippings. Sort of like those 1000 monkeys who typed Shakespeare’s plays. Hey, it’s true; I read it on the Internet.
Seriously, there are lots of good “tips” to be gleaned from watching this movie. “The Social Network” evolved because of the competitive nature inherent in true genius. But nothing would have evolved if that hyperactive zeal hadn’t been diverted into untold hours and weeks of tediously detailed hard work. One former employee of one of my “Hey, Bill!” clients once explained to my client that he stopped working on his assigned project because it was “boring”. That former employee is now living in Cancun after suing my client for… never mind.
But the movie clearly shows that the difference between success and failure is simple. Just be good-looking, personable, smooth-talking and hire a good lawyer. Er, no; I mean, just master every aspect of your profession and put every waking hour into furthering your business plan and I’m sure you’ll end up with something. Hey, maybe you’ll even have a blog!
Take myself, for instance. I used to work for Dot Com startups that kept me there around the clock. I would sleep on the floor next to the box compiling multimedia hypertext titles before there even was multimedia hypertext, keeping one eye open to watch the light blink out after a successful CD burn. Then I’d rush to the airport to put the express envelope on the first morning flight to somewhere so other engineers could have it to test when they arrived at work. (At noon.) I’d tell you more but then I’d have to… oh, that was my previous career in intelligence. Sorry. Senior moment. But after all that work, you probably can’t imagine the levels of success that I achieved. I even got my name listed in the Easter Egg! Twice! (Some of you may need to ask an engineer what this blog is really saying; we don’t have the bandwidth here to spell it out.)
So the movie “The Social Network” is a great movie; assuming you don’t care much about acting and screenplay. I really did enjoy it. But I’m embarrassed to say that I used to think that what it shows was “normal”. To be honest, I only worked within a Christian subculture of the subculture. So I didn’t actually get a lot of the jokes in this movie–or even understand all the words. But the parts I understood were exactly like the Silicon Valley that I knew.
So, in conclusion. This movie shows the high tech industry just exactly as it really is–except for that huge slice of the high tech industry that is operated in accordance with high ethical standards, genuine loyalty and industry, touching humility, awesome generosity, unprecedented organizational efficiency and which produces a win-win-win-win outcome for customers, stockholders, employees and society in general.
(For a “real” review of the movie “The Social Network”, go here.)
Discussing “investing” with survivors of the Great Depression is “interesting”. These usually frugal individuals are understandably loathe to take risks with their resources, choosing instead to bank on whichever financial insight they adopted during World War II and afterwards. Often their senses and intuition are right on target—but their vocabulary is stuck in the past. They are rightly suspicious of “speculation” but often link that term to whole categories of investments. “Real Estate” isn’t a complete phrase, they say; “Real Estate Speculation” is.
My wife and I are survivors of the great real estate bubble of the 1980’s and the Dot Com Crash of the 1990’s and the Financial Industry Scandals of the 2000’s And we are learning that it pays to be more precise about both the vocabulary and the strategies of investing. We owned two homes in the 80’s while riding on the conventional wisdom investing bandwagon of the time. “Renting” is money down the drain, “they” said; so we bought on the margin, kept the first home as a rental after moving, bought again, again kept the second home after moving to Europe, then proceeded to loose money on both properties every month for several years until someone read us the proverbial definition of insanity. Starting my own business after that, I prudently arranged for housing under a lease-option while imprudently loosing some more money as a small businessman and employer. It could have been worse; my clients were venture capitalists starting Internet firms right and left until the mother of all industry collapses nearly wiped them out. Switching to “contractor” status, I supported construction firms participating in the condominium centric real estate frenzy that turned out to be a perfect storm of bad financial “speculations”. “Investors” were able to swing “deals” in which all parties formed a circle of no-money-down get-rich-quick artists that appeared to work ponzi-fashion until they all discovered that there was no real demand for the product. Fortunately for them, the subprime mortgage fiasco emerged from its cacoon and covered their tracks. The ensuing gloating of all the “stocks are better than real estate” investors didn’t last long as the trickery of the financial industry took down the leveraged stock empires and ended retirement for many of my most skilled investor friends.
I definitely agree that “speculation” is a financial cuss-word. But not all speculation is a result of greed working under lax ethical standards. Some of it is just following the leader. I was a real estate speculator when I bought my first two houses, even though I was just making good common sense decisions about my own housing needs. “Everyone” agreed that getting in to real estate was the right thing to do. Both times, I knew from day one that I would be moving again after only a couple years—I was in the military. The only way that purchasing a home for such a short duration made sense was for the homes’ value’s as “investments”. The problem was, no one was “managing” these investments. A manager is someone who knows what they are doing. And the fact that “everyone” was making lots of money on the equity in their homes at that time didn’t mean that they or anyone knew what they were doing. So mindlessly following societal trends is just as good a way to engage in speculation as any.
So for over twenty years neither I nor any of my friends and associates had much success with investing. Unlike my Great-Depression-raised forebears, however, I wrote it all off as a systemic expression of a world tossed about by over-centralized national economies. Huh? What does that mean? Exactly. I didn’t know either but it sounded good as an answer to people’s queries about my lack of interest in investments.
Fortune, fortunately, has led my wife and I to reconsider my self-defeating philosophy of life. Practical reasons also played a role. I had been striving to finance my own software development business for twenty years by monetizing my considerable professional experience. That is, I worked hard to earn enough money to self-fund my projects. I decided that my previous career represented a lifetime of investing in myself—and now was the time to start profit-taking. Recently something caused us to hear the question, “So, how’s that working out for you?” The answer suggested change was needed.
Now, from the vantage point of days and days—nay, weeks and weeks—of intense study (we took several courses in “investing”), we can be quite confident to boldly announce that we were wrong. Surprised? So were we, frankly.
We’ve learned that the difference between speculating and investing is simply a difference in skill levels. It’s amazing to see how many people enjoy good music and spend a lot of time “involved” in music. Yet hardly any of them are skilled musicians. They neither take lessons nor do they take the time to gain experience. While they aren’t musical speculators, they are spectators. And this is the way that most people are involved in investing. Except with investments they aren’t called spectators; they’re call losers.
The question is, can anyone actually learn how to be a skilled investor? The answer is an unequivocal maybe.
Investing takes several forms and it appears that everyone, all humans, now need to become skilled in most of them. There are “savings’”, “real estate”, “stocks”, “financial markets”, “small business”, “miserliness” and several more. The idea is that today’s global economy is so unpredictable that no one can cross all the hurdles without multiple streams of income. That is, we can all count on interruptions in one or more sources of cash and we ought to establish alternate sources to carry through the ups and downs of fortune.
A year ago I would have said, “Dream on!” I was convinced (based on experience and observation) that all attempts to put such a plan into action was not only pure speculation but doomed to failure. I didn’t know anybody who hadn’t lost more money in both real estate and the stock market than they had made. And I didn’t know any business ventures that were panning out as planned. And I didn’t know anyone with cash that hadn’t spent most of it without anything to show for it.
Yet each of us might not know anyone who is doing things right just as we might be unskilled in investing ourselves. Our ignorance, however, does not stop the world from turning nor does it make something impossible. It just means we are stupid.
So, it turns out that a sound investment strategy is not pure speculation. It is something that can be taught.
Before one starts investing in real estate or the stock market or building a small business there are several skillsets to be mastered. These are the things that any good parent ought to teach and drill into his or her children but that not many do.
Learn, work, save, shop, spend wisely, repeat as needed.
Yet even these are not the foundation for true success. The fundamentals of life are the absolute values upon which the universe rests and the essence of true morality upon which civilizations rest. While some people say that the answer lies in this or that religion, I suggest that history proves that relying on the religious foundation of any society has a high probably—a near certainty—for producing worse that failure. It will produce pure evil.
Since I’m also a teacher of topics that people call religious, I just say that if you have a problem with my last sentence, “Get over it!” God is and He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him—but He hates our solemn festivals and our trampling of His courts with unclean sacrifices. Yet He loves us, He loves you anyway.
The true standards for life are known to all; we are all without excuse. Regardless of our culture or our religion, we all know what to do to make our parents proud of us and what to do to embarrass them. Do the former and avoid the latter.
The trouble with “investing” is this: Too many investors have never grown up. They are an embarrassment to their parents, their friends, their employers, their spouses.
STOP IT!
Without a sound foundation in business ethics that span all cultures, civilizations and religions, you must under no uncertain circumstances get up tomorrow morning. Just lie there until you get your life sorted out with God. Whatever you do, do not invest in anything before taking care of this. It will just plague the world and not profit yourself.
Have a nice day!
It may sound strange to say that the first specific step towards building good investment habits starts with protecting your existing assets. But “protecting” is just another way of saying “saving”. So, following on from Phase One, once we get saved we can start saving.
In know this is a little linguistic fancy footwork, but the key to saving money is to keep your expenses lower than your income. This “activity” is more than just creating and following a budget. It includes understanding and planning for taxes, arranging for appropriate liquidity, diversification, establishing boundaries to liability, maintaining insurance, and becoming educated regarding all the risks that will certainly come.
Some things are easier to do than others. It is easier to find a good bank than to manage an apartment complex. It is easier to set up a Treasury Bill account than to know when to buy or sell stocks. So asset protection means to start doing the easy things first.
