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I've always kept in touch with old bosses and they did with me; perhaps only after having parted company did they appreciate what a good worker they had lost and I realised what a good boss they had been to me.
Shuffling through an old cardboard box containing bits and pieces, I've just come across this very old postcard from my boss in Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdulghani Mofarrij, who had been more than my boss: he had been a very kind and very gentle man - a gentleman, no less - and, I would like to think, I had also been his friend!
Well, he never wrote to me again with some details because sometime in 2005 he died of a sudden heart attack. Rest in Peace, Adbulghani!
Here we are, teetering on the brink of World War III, and the debate about transgender athletes is even becoming an election issue, with calls to disendorse the candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, for her "insensitive remarks".
In this current climate of ridiculousness where even the smallest departure from "political correctness" is shouted down, it takes "balls" to put out this video clip. I just wished our politicians grew some. As this top female swimmer says, "You can't have happiness without "-piness".
Today my computer screen had red ink all over it! Almost every share nosedived, with my rusted-on old favourite BHP taking one of its biggest nosedives in one day right down to $48.49.
After it had reached an intraday high of $53.72 on Tuesday before finally closing at $53.17, it dropped almost a dollar on Wednesday when it closed at $52.30, dropping another $1.60 on Thursday to $50.70, before the market put the boot in today, selling it down to a $48.49 close.
But not all is lost: Citigroup upgraded BHP from "neutral" to "buy" (I did buy a few more!), and my friends at Trading Central "detected a 'Bollinger Bands' chart pattern formed on BHP Group Ltd. This bullish signal indicates that the stock price may rise from the close of 48.49."
American-born British businessman Bill Browder did not set out to expose Russian money laundering operations and link President Vladimir Putin to those schemes. But after Browder’s Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, was arrested and found dead in his jail cell, the gloves were off.
Browder lobbied Congress for years until the Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012, allowing the United States to sanction individuals suspected of human rights abuses, including Russian judges, Saudis involved in the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Chinese officials linked to the abuse of Uighurs.
His book "Freezing Order - A True Story of Russian Money Laundering, State-Sponsored Murder,and Surviving Vladimir Putin's Wrath" is more explosive, compulsive and gasp-inducingly, spine-tinglingly, mouth-dryingly, and heart-poundingly thrilling than any fiction you will have read for years - and it is all true! For a preview, click here.
Barry Crump's rattling good yarn "Wild Pork and Watercress" has been made into a rattling good movie: "Hunt For the Wilderpeople", directed and written by Taika Waititi, and starring incomparable Sam Neill and Julian Dennison.
Over his lifetime, Barry Crump was married five times and had nine sons, so I wonder how he found the time for all his writing, but write he did, in a simple, direct narrative voice which was straight to the point.
He also acted in many TV commercials, including for Speight's Beer:
So grap yourself a beer - Speight's, if available - and settle in for an enjoyable read of "Wild Pork and Watercress", after which you may go onto ebay and order your own copy of "Hunt For the Wilderpeople".
Iwas quite put out when our favourite dentist Grant Brodie retired. He was so gentle and yet so efficient that he had become almost a friend and our six-monthly visit to Ulladulla part of our social colander. However, after two appointments with his replacement Liam Pearce I am very pleased to report that he is just as good, possibly even better (if that is possible).
My next appointment is for the 18th of May, just a week after our trip to Sydney to visit another friend, Professor Clark at the LIFEHOUSE, who removed those messy cancer cells from my throat almost four years ago.
We'll drive as far as Wollongong to park the little FORD Focus at our friends' place, Reg and Kini, before catching the train to Sydney. After my appointment, we keep travelling north by train to the riverside town of Brooklyn which I had visited - what? eight years ago? - click here.
I've booked into another favourite of mine, the "The Anglers Rest" - never mind the missing apostrophe! - and we'll take the Riverboat Postman to relive some of the magic of the movie "Oyster Farmer".
Then it's back to our own river magic, another six-monthly dental in August, another six-monthly in September with my dermatologist, and another six-monthly with my radiologist in November. And that just about sums up everything there is to see on our leaky social colander.
Was it the Dalai Lama who, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered "Man! Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health" ?
It had already traded as high as $2.19 in the last twelve month, and at its present $1.70 it is, according to my good friends at Morningstar, already fairly valued but I keep an eye on it just in case it drops down again a few notches.
As the iron ore industry ponders its ‘green steel’ future, miners developing high-grade products will gain the support of steelmakers and investors. Hawsons Iron is one of these – an emerging iron ore company that saw its share price jump 18 per cent in April and has experienced a 176 per cent increase last month.
Earlier this week, it was revealed the Australian Government had renewed the major project status (MPS) of the Hawsons Iron project in Broken Hill for another three years.
Once up and running, Hawsons Iron will produce a 70 per cent iron (Fe) product known as ‘Hawsons Supergrade’, poised to be one of the highest-grade Fe products on the seaborne market.
Overcautious, I took only a small position in Hawsons in mid-2021 when it was still trading as Carpentaria Resources. This has paid off, and I have since doubled down on it, and not too soon either, as even Morningstar thinks it is trading at a 48% discount to its fair value.
I wrote elsewhere that BHP's "stock price may rise from the close of 52.50 to the range of 59.75 - 61.25". American forecasters Morningstar followed suit with their analysts making double-digit upgrades to fair value across the resources sector, forecasting that booming commodity prices will linger for years to come:
"Diversified miners Glencore, Rio Tinto, BHP and South32 saw upgrades between 11% and 23% on the back of higher price forecasts for copper, coal, aluminium and iron ore. Coal miners New Hope and Whitehaven Coal had the biggest upgrades at 33% each, with thermal coal prices set to remain at more than triple their 2020 levels over the next 18 months.
Big upgrades for almost all the miners under coverage were first mooted last month and reflect the growing view that commodities prices will remain elevated until 2024 and, in some cases, beyond, says Mathew Hodge, Morningstar director of equity research.
'Commodity prices have surged on robust economic growth and supply worries, exacerbated by the Ukraine war and Russian sanctions,' he says. 'After updating our commodity price assumptions, the fair values for most miners on our coverage list will also rise.'
Morningstar is the latest in a line of analysts to boost valuations for the mining industry as hopes fade of a speedy resolution to the shortages and disruptions driving up prices for everything from coal to nickel.
The upgrades pushed several miners back into fairly valued territory despite the broader resources sector trading at an average 21% premium to Morningstar’s fair value." - click here.
According to Morningstar, of the three major Australian iron ore miners, BHP offers the greatest upside with their "fair value" of $57.82 against yesterday's close at $52.50 (after an intra-day high of $53.72), whereas Fortescue's "fair value" was assessed at $21.73 against yesterday's close at $21.61, and Rio's at $121.66 against yesterday's close at $120.56.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe is an Austrian school economist and libertarian/anarcho-capitalist philosopher. Earlier this month Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe appeared on SERVUS TV for a discussion "On State, War, Europe, Decentralization and Neutrality." An English translation of the following transcript was prepared by Leonhard Paul, a law student from Germany.
Interviewer: I would like to welcome our second guest in the studio. It is the philosopher and economist with an international range Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Nice to meet you, Mr. Hoppe. The dream of a united Europe, the eternal longing of the empire. Do you also dream this dream?
Hans-Hermann Hoppe: No. I don’t dream of this dream at all. My dream is the dream of a Europe, which consists of 1,000 Liechtensteins. I will also try to explain this. First of all, you have to realize that there is a difference between states and private companies. States are organizations that do not earn their money by producing something that people want to buy voluntarily or by offering services that people want voluntarily. States live from compulsory levies, taxes and from printing their own money. For this reason, states are institutions of exploitation. Economists have called them stationary bandits for this reason.
I.: Stationary bandits?
H.: Stationary bandits. They stay in one place. There are also roving bandits who would be …
I.: … would be highwaymen. Institutionalized highwaymen, so to speak, that’s the state?
H.: Right. They’re institutionalized. And, of course, states as bandit organizations have an interest in increasing their loot. They, including the entire public service, live at the expense of productive people. But when this exploitation becomes too severe people tend to migrate to other regions. Therefore, states have a tendency to expand their territory. One way they will try expand is by waging wars. After all they can pass on the costs of war to the populace, whereas a private person or a private organization would have to bear the costs of aggression themselves. So states are by nature more warlike than private law organizations.
I.: If I may, Mr. Hoppe. You are basically calling for a Europe of a thousand Liechtensteins. Switzerland is probably already too big for you.
H.: Too big.
I.: Too big of an organism. We are, so to speak, the imaginary superpower now in this paradigm. But isn’t this atomization of Europe just an invitation for the predator states, which also have predators in their coats of arms? Like Russia, for example, with a double-headed eagle with claws that can grab terrain on all sides. Isn’t this parcellation, this fissuring of Europe through the thousand Liechtenstein an invitation to the potentates who unfortunately have always existed in history?
H.: Then the answer would be that we can only defend ourselves against these big states by becoming a big state ourselves.
I.: Exactly.
H.: But then wars would become really big wars. Small states wage at most small, relatively harmless wars. Large states that have emerged from wars wage war the way we see them today.
I.: You have lived in the USA. You now live in Turkey. You know big states; you also know the logic of great powers. Be honest now: The great powers have always lied about a reason to conquer small countries. They have made metaphysical or ideological systems out of whole cloth. So isn’t it precisely this disintegration, this fragmentation of Europe, that is the most dangerous thing in the present situation?
H.: Even large states have to make sure that they have support within their own population for the wars they undertake. You have to be able to somehow explain the cause of the attack clearly to your own population. It has been emphasized not by chance that the biggest problem for Putin is probably not the immediate military events, but the fact that Russia is a country where there are few children. The mothers who are now losing their children in the war will ensure that support in their own country will continue to decline.
I.: And your point supports the argument that Putin can’t say anything or even must forbid calling this war a war, because he is afraid to lose support at home.
H.: Therefore, one must advise small states to pursue a strict policy of neutrality. Of course, they should arm themselves. It should not be without cost to attack them. Nevertheless, if you know there is no chance to win a war against a foreign power, you have to consider surrendering, because you see that only one corrupt gang is exchanged for another corrupt gang. For example, the Ukraine war: It is not the case that Ukraine has been an exemplary democratic Western state. On corruption indices they were worse than Russia. The economic productivity per person in Ukraine is lower than the economic productivity per person in Russia. The leaders in Ukraine are corrupt.
I.: Yes. I can follow you in the principle: power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. And the greater the power, the greater the corruption. There’s the principle of small is beautiful, so maybe a smaller country is easier to govern. But let’s stay with this willingness to defend at the moment. How are the small ones supposed to defend themselves when a big power-drunken ideology-drunken state suddenly has the feeling that it can roll over certain areas? How do they defend themselves?
H.: One answer would be that we also have to form a large state. But a large state exploits its domestic population particularly heavily. Do you want this as an answer to a possible attack by another big state? The other variant is that small states enter into a series of alliances with the possibility of acting together against an enemy. A right of veto would be necessary, because one sees the danger in NATO that small states—let’s say, the Baltic states—because they feel safe …
I.: … that they have become overconfident.
H.: … behave in a particularly brash way. And as a result they could drag the whole West into wars, so to speak.
I.: Now a completely different challenge: There is also the discussion about climate change and refugees. If I understand you correctly, you actually advocate for a cooperative intergovernmental model. One would then have to try to combat climate change, perhaps through an alliance of smaller states. How do you see the small-state model in the light of such other so-called global challenges?
H.: I’m not at all sure that this is a global challenge or whether it’s not an invented problem. Nobody has denied that there is such a thing as climate change. The question is: What is the human contribution to these problems? There is by no means only one answer. We are led to believe that there is scientific consensus on what exactly is causing this. That is untrue. The alternative is: If there are such challenges that the weather becomes warmer, different regions will naturally govern differently because the crisis presents itself differently in different areas. Greenland is affected differently by global warming than the Maldives. The idea that there should be a correct global temperature, so to speak, is completely absurd.
I.: In principle, you would say that this whole climate issue is almost a kind of power-ideological presumption.
H.: They want to centralize and have chosen this topic. Each person adapts individually to such situations. Either one buys more refrigerators or one buys more air conditioners or something like that. But I can’t even agree with my wife on the temperature in the bedroom. I would like it to be colder. She would like it warmer. How megalomaniacal do you have to be that people, who are a little bit more on the kindergarten level in terms of their education, believe that they themselves know what the average global temperature has to be. They presume to know how we can bring that about by intervening in the economy in all areas. They say: you can’t eat that, you have to drink that. You are not allowed to go there. But you have to go there, and so on.
I.: Well, I think that many people (at least I) follow you in this criticism of power and the bureaucratic overarching. But nevertheless I must challenge you here also a little, Mr. Hoppe. Is it not a fact that the founding of states is a cultural achievement? The famous social and political scientist, the great liberal Dahrendorf said: the nation state, this somewhat larger entity, is still the only suitable framework for the rule of law and democracy—what do you have to say to Ralf Dahrendorf? You as a former Habermas student.
H.: Germany has been unified by wars. Italy was unified by wars. Even Switzerland emerged from a war.
I.: A very short war.
H.: But still from a very short war, the Sonderbund war, and one group was forced to obey the other group. You obey us now! Although in itself the demand was that there must be a unified agreement of all cantons, which in fact did not exist. So why should one agree to a statement that nation-states are a great invention, when a war was necessary to create such a thing in the first place?
I.: But you were in the U.S. and the U.S. is one of those rare examples where one could say that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the liberal nation-state functioned very well almost as a liberal national imperial entity.
H.: No.
I.: Would you also say the U.S. has to split up again?
H.: In America there has been a war, a tremendously brutal war, which in comparison to what Putin is doing in Ukraine now, was probably worse because they deliberately targeted the civilian population that they wanted to destroy. To this day, there are large parts of the American South that believe that this was the war of northern aggression. Before that, the opinion was similar to that in Switzerland: individual states could leave the union of the United States. That has been settled since then.
H.: I am sure that the basic idea of the European community is to reduce competition between countries. A common taxation policy is introduced, which takes away any reason for economic entities to move from one place to another. With the euro monetary competition has been abolished, which previously prevented countries from printing money at will. They were afraid of devaluing their currency. With the euro this fear is no longer necessary. The cohesion of the European community at present is essentially due to the fact that the bandit leaders of the leading states practically bribe the bandit leaders of the less solvent states. As soon as the economic power of Europe is going down by punishing the productive ones more and more these support payments are no longer possible. Then the European Union will break apart.
I.: A sobering conclusion. If I have understood you correctly, you do not believe in the functioning of these institutions of a European Union. We have already come to the end of our discussion and I thank you very much for your visit to the studio.
P.S. Speaking of Liechtenstein, did you know that in 2007 the Swiss Army invaded Liechtenstein by accident: it was dark, and they couldn't see where they were going.
Re-reading Robert Lacey's The Kingdom brought back memories of the film dramatization of Death of a Princess which took place less than five years before I took up employment in the world's biggest sandbox, Saudi Arabia:
One noon-time towards the end of July 1977, Princess Misha'il, granddaughter of Prince Muhammad ibn Abdul Aiziz, was led out into a car park beside the Queen's Building in Jeddah and forced to kneel down in front of a pile of sand. She was then shot dead. Standing near by was her young lover, Khalid Muhalhal, nephew of General Ali al Shaer, special Sa'udi envoy to Lebanon, and, when the young man had seen the princess die, he also was executed - by beheading.
Nearly three years later, in the spring of 1980, a film dramatization of these executions and of one journalist's attempts to investigate them was broadcast by ATV in Britain, and this broadcast caused King Khalid such offence that he instructed Great Britain to withdraw her ambassador from the Kingdom. There was even wild talk at one stage in April 1980, of not only the ambassador but all 30,000 Britons working in Sa'udi Arabia being put on planes back to London.
Such were the bare essentials of the painful international melodrama that flourished for a season around Death of a Princess. The outline of the princess's story was straightforward. Married off at an early age to an elder relative who took little interest in her, Princess Misha'il, the daughter of one of old Prince Muhammad's less distinguished sons, turned for consolation to young Khalid Muhalhal and enjoyed with him a romance whose flamboyance scandalized the rest of the family. The couple tried to elope. To effect her elopement, the princess staged a drowning, leaving her clothes in a pile on the shore of the Red Sea. Then she tried to escape with her lover from Jeddah airport, disguising herself as a man. They were caught, and both suffered the death penalty prescribed for adultery in Sa'udi Arabia's code of Islamic law.
There we were, Enzo the waterdragon and I, sitting on the sun-drenched verandah and listening to ABC Radio National's "The Minefield" with Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens, when the name Iris Murdoch popped up. Who was Iris Murdoch?
A quick look at wikipedia reveals her as "Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE (15 July 1919 – 8 February 1999), an Irish and British novelist and philosopher. Murdoch is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. Her first published novel, Under the Net (1954), was selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library's 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Her 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize. In 1987, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked Murdoch twelfth on a list of 'The 50 greatest British writers since 1945'"
www.archive.org comes up with a score of books, of which "The Sea, the Sea" seems to have been one of her best-known. What an amazing find!
And, perhaps highest accolade of all, they made a movie of her life:
It stars Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch. Since Padma likes any movie with Judi Dench, and I want to know more about Iris Murdoch, I ordered it right away. That's two birds with one payment of $5.95, postage paid.
If the current national debt were divided up, it would be around $25,000 for every man, woman, and child, including those of us - myself included - whose debts are no more than what we swiped onto our VISA-card during the latest shopping spree at ALDI.
The interest alone on this massive debt is nineteen trillion dollars! To put that into perspective, if you paid $1 million in interest a day to help the government pay off its debt, it would take you 2400 years to clear the slate.
And here's the kicker: based on forecasts, by 2025 - in just three years! - the national debt will have climbed to $68,000 for every Australian.
If you look too deeply into the abyss", said Nietzsche, "the abyss will look into you." The face of war in our time is so awesome and so terrible that the first temptation is to recoil and turn away. Medusa-like, the face of war, with its relentless horror, threatens to destroy anyone who looks at it for long.
But history tells us that these things snowball. In "Why Nations Go to War", John Stoessinger discusses the start of World War I. He quotes extensively from the famous "Willy-Nicky letters", the notes passed back and forth after the Sarajevo incident by the Kaiser and the Czar, who were cousins (Britain’s George V was also their cousin: incredible that the world was run that way!) Those letters were at first cordial and filled with demurrals; why, no, cousin, war is out of the question! And yet, within a month or so, they were writing to each other that, alas, there was no alternative.
When I was a youngster in post-war Germany, reading about the horrors of World War I in Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war book "Im Westen Nichts Neues" turned me into a pacifist for life. Here's the movie:
Has the world changed in a hundred years? Vladimir Putin doesn’t seem so different from the czars, in terms of imperial ambition. And we have no idea what he’s capable of. Basically, what President Putin has said quite explicitly in recent days is that if anybody interferes in Ukraine, they will be met with a response that they’ve ‘never had in [their] history.’ And he has put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert. So he’s making it very clear that nuclear weapons are on the table.
If he gets desperate, he may well decide that his best move is to drag everyone into world war. If the Russian economy is going to tank, why not tank the world economy? If Russians are dying, why not all the others as well? From the point of view of a cornered imperialist whose imperial dreams have gone off the rails, it’s the most logical play.
If these thoughts keep you up at night, you may as well spend those sleepless nights reading John Stoessinger's "Why Nations Go to War". To read the book online, simply SIGN UP (it's free!), LOG IN, and BORROW.
Ich wanderte im Jahre 1965 vom (k)alten Deutschland nach Australien aus. In Erinnerung an das alte Sprichwort "Gott hüte mich vor Sturm und Wind und Deutschen die im Ausland sind" wurde ich in 1971 im Dschungel von Neu-Guinea australischer Staatsbürger. Das kostete mich nur einen Umlaut und das zweite n im Nachnamen - von -mann auf -man.
Australien war der Anfang und auch das Ende: nach fünfzig Arbeiten in fünfzehn Ländern - "Die ganze Welt mein Arbeitsfeld" - lebe ich jetzt im Ruhestand in Australien an der schönen Südküste von Neusüdwales.
Ich verbringe meine Tage mit dem Lesen von Büchern, segle mein Boot den Fluss hinunter, beschäftige mich mit Holzarbeit, oder mache Pläne für eine neue Reise. Falls Du mir schreiben willst, sende mir eine Email an riverbendnelligen [AT] mail.com, und ich schreibe zurück.
Falls Du anrufen möchtest, meine Nummer ist XLIV LXXVIII X LXXXI.
Notice to North American readers:
This blog is written in the version of English that is standard here. So recognise is spelled recognise and not recognize etc. I recognise that some North American readers may find this upsetting, and while I sympathise with them, I sympathise even more with my countrymen who taught me how to spell. However, as an apology, here are a bunch of Zs for you to put where needed.
Zzzzzz
Disclaimer
This blog has no particular axe to grind, apart from that of having no particular axe to grind. It is written by a bloke who was born in Germany at the end of the war (that is, for younger readers, the Second World War, the one the Americans think they won single-handedly). He left for Australia when most Germans had not yet visited any foreign countries, except to invade them. He lived and worked all over the world, and even managed a couple of visits back to the (c)old country whose inhabitants he found very efficient, especially when it came to totting up what he had consumed from the hotels' minibars. In retirement, he lives (again) in Australia, but is yet to grow up anywhere.
He reserves the right to revise his views at any time. He might even indulge in the freedom of contradicting himself. He has done so in the past and will most certainly do so in the future. He is not persuading you or anyone else to believe anything that is reported on or linked to from this site, but encourages you to use all available resources to form your own opinions about important things that affect all our lives and to express them in accordance with Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Everything on this website, including any material that third parties may consider to be their copyright, has been used on the basis of “fair dealing” for the purposes of research and study, and criticism and review. Any party who feels that their copyright has been infringed should contact me with details of the copyright material and proof of their ownership and I will remove it.
And finally, don't bother trying to read between the lines. There are no lines - only snapshots, most out of focus.
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