Hugo Chavez

I've been doing my own private mourning, thank you. I had heard the Hugo took property he wanted when the deed records weren't complete. Ahem, big deal of course. But Hugo insisted that deeds go back through 1821 through an interval where records for some reason were far from complete. Now I don't now about the oil development except to read from the Economist, and he seems to have shown the same interest in oil production at the state run oil company as the communists did on news gathering in their staffing of Isvestia and Pravda. As for stealing from the future, you do know that Argentina was the richest country in the world, per capita income wise, at the turn of the century. Puzzled? I guess, like me, you really don't remember 1900. No, what I am mourning about is that these largely Catholic countries can be such a mess while Israel with a little sand and Palestinian only buses can have such a dynamic economy. To his credit though, and clowns seem to be more in favor these day, Chavez didn't kill his opponents.

The Atlantic if I recall correctly had an interesting graphic a year ago. It showed that the Roman empire hit a nadir bushel of wheat earned per hour of labor in the middle of the third century. One of the error dynamics of the Roman derived states seems to be a struggle between syndicalism in control of property and redistribution on a base of static development of resources or TFP to coin a phrase.

When I hear some news, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The Vatican announced recently, somewhat in defense of the Inquisition, that it killed only 1.8% of of it's prisoners of conscience or accused witches. There is kind of an asterisk that reduces the percentage in that the Church largely excludes figures from the Spanish Inquisition which it notices, mostly belatedly I assume, was an independent operation. 'Take that, Trotsky,' I guess since the communist figures are worse.

"Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, who was at the news conference where the study was presented, said that the lessons of history never come to an end.

Acknowledging the past was all the more relevant given the continued use of torture in the 21st Century, most notably by US troops against prisoners held in Iraq, he said" which just goes to show that things haven't really changed too much. Reality testing and humility are both still optional in princes of the Church. Perhaps the suggested defensiveness of the cardinal relates to being associated with a trespass, Church language for psychosexual aggression. When the Church had control of things, its prelates may have felt that the existence of the targets of its Inquisition implied some agreement with their trespass which is why we had the Inquisition to begin with.

China

The Atlantic magazine has a couple of great windows on China this month. J. Fallows shows how China is our industrial back office; Dallas, by the way, is, in part, a financial back office for New York. Interesting is that it has not grown on the Japanese or Korean model, that is the state favoring certain industries or companies. Like Topsy it has just grown as free trade zones were established. So that Japan makes Toyotas but China makes Del, IBM etc laptops. The branding is actually part of our profit and the Chinese pick up the littlest bit. Fallows, in part, covers the activity and career of an Irish business owner in China. Having learned and reported a lot, Fallows closes with asking him to suggest a Chinese government official of any level that might have been useful in facilitating the boom. "I don't know any," is the business man's response. Talk about hands off! But there is still more fascinating detail. The second article is about a 91 year Catholic bishop and his integration of being Chinese, and putting up with the communists, as well as the 'veneration of ancestors' and being Catholic.