Until today, I did not know that Berlin had a wild boar problem. As happens in many situations, city folk find wild animals to be cute (until they kill a child or more favored animal). Even when a cougar found itself in Chicago, a block from an elementary school, many decried the police’s decision to kill it.

The final paragraphs of the Berlin story are the best:

Some Berliners are defying the law every night, bringing boars food out of affection for the beasts. Unemployed truck driver Michael Gericke opened the trunk of his white Mercedes and tossed corn onto a parking lot. A score of hogs scrimmaged over the spoils. One tried to climb into the trunk.

Mr. Gericke says he has been feeding boars here every night for 12 years, making him the doyen of Berlin’s boar-loving underground. Every two weeks he spends €15, or about $20, of his jobless benefits on a 110-pound sack of corn. “Feeding them corn diversifies their diet,” he says.

Only a handful of people have come out to feed the foragers on this December night. In summertime, says Mr. Gericke, hundreds of Berliners show up.

Berlin’s forestry officials say they’re filing charges against Mr. Gericke that could lead to a hefty fine. Mr. Gericke says that won’t stop him, because he can’t pay anyway. “Even if they send me to prison instead, I won’t stop.”

His loyalty to boars stems from an epiphany he had years ago, when he opened his car door and a large tusker he’d been feeding hopped in. “I thought he was going to bite my leg off,” says Mr. Gericke.

Instead, the boar put his head in Mr. Gericke’s lap. “It was as if he was saying, ‘Thank you,’” Mr. Gericke says.

Mr. Eggert, the hunter, thinks it’s time Berlin’s authorities got tough. He says: “We should just gather hunters at the these feeding sites, make the civilians stand aside, and feed the swine with lead.”

A nice Teutonic statement.

Greece is in bad shape.   It is a very small country, with only 11 Million, at most with a very fractured political and civil society.  It is next to a much larger, richer and more dynamic country (Turkey) that happens to be occupying a history Greek homeland and is veiwed by Greeks as it’s nemesis.  It is a country ripe with conspiracy theories and suspicion of what it calls “the West.”  In many ways it has more in common with its neighbors on the southeastern shores of the Med.   It’s political culture is completely corrupt.

As one conservative newspaper put it:

“This is a country with a state that is in a shambles, a police force in disarray, mediocre universities that serve as hotbeds of rage instead of knowledge and a shattered health care system. It is also on the brink of financial ruin.”

I highly doubt that Greece will still be part of the EMU by 2013.  It’s best hope would be to tie its fate with its dynamic neighbor, but alas, I don’t see that happening.  Down the road, though, don’t be surprised if Turkey has a growing sphere of influence in the Eastern Med.

“Russians are shifting their cash into foreign currencies and buying things they don’t need as the economy stalls and the central bank weakens its defense of the ruble, signaling a larger devaluation may be on the way. The currency has fallen 16 percent against the dollar since August, when Russia’s invasion of neighboring Georgia helped spur investors to pull almost $200 billion out of the country, according to BNP Paribas SA.”

I once read an interesting science fiction short story set in a near-future world where inflation was so rampant that people would buy something almost immediately after being given cash as a hedge against inflation.  Commodities often make the best hedges and precious metals are doubly helpful because they can be made into jewelry and become a movable bank.

I’m not sure what these Russians are thinking though:

“Those who don’t want to spend are keeping more money at home or in safe-deposit boxes because the government guarantee on bank accounts is limited to 700,000 rubles, said Yulia Tsepliaeva, chief economist in Moscow at Merrill Lynch & Co.

Alfa Bank, Russia’s biggest non-state lender, said demand for boxes has increased about 40 percent since October, and there are few available.

“The Russian experience with saving is not that good and people prefer to consume and enjoy rather than save in pre-crisis situations,” Tsepliaeva said. “Buy cash dollars and put them in mattresses or safe deposit boxes but not in accounts because most crises are accompanied by banking crises.””

Relying on the Russian government to a) honor it’s 700,000 ruble guarantee and b) not raid safe deposit boxes strikes me as a risky bet.

In Mexico the term Drug War has real meaning. Mexico is undergoing a convulsion of violence as the cartels are trying to out-violent each other. It is not just a matter of gangsters killing gangsters, in some places, such as Tijuana the narcos are killing innocents just to show the cops that they can bring anarchy whenever they desire.

This LA Times article is about 23 Seconds in that war.

Or, Something I did not know this morning:

“Russian combat casualties in the conflict [in Afghanistan] were quite low-under 3percent-but the Soviet army suffered horrendous rates of illness, especially infectious illness.  Three out of four soldiers who fought in Afghanistan – 75 to 76 percent of the entire Soviet army in the country-had to be hospitalized for disease.  Some soldiers were stricken by bubonic plague, but malaria, cholera, diphtheria, infectious dysentery, amoebic dysentery, hepatitis, and typhus were, if anything, more common….According to the [US Army] report, one important factor was military hygiene.  The average Russian soldier changed his underwear once every three months, washed his uniform and blankets at about the same rate, drank untreated water, left his garbage unpicked up, defecated near his tent rather than at a field latrine, and, even when involved in kitchen work, only washed his hands after a bowel movement when an officer made him.”
p. 75 of The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time, by John Kelly

Over the last few days I’ve been reading Paul Theroux’s “Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.“  The book is an account of Theroux’s jouney by train through Europe and across Asia and back, a repeat of a journey he took over thirty years ago that formed the basis for his book “The Great Railway Bazaar”.

At the very beginning of his book, he gives the account of his travels through southwest Europe, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria.  His description is one of a dreary, backwards landscape, filled with sullen people, universal in their desire to escape west to the more developed lands of Europe.

“Stubborn seediness has great appeal, and this ramshackle railway had not changed in thirty-three years.  It was, if anything, worse, almost a parody of my previous experience.  The Hungarian border was farcical too, the customs-and-immigration people tramping through the carriage in wet boots and ill-fitting brown uniforms.  The Romanian border at Curtici was even grimmer, as though another act in the same farce:  big beefy-faced brutes with earflaps and gold braids, a dozen of them swarming ove the train demanding passports, opening bags.

…

The Third World sting and disorder were strong in Bucharest, its suburbs looked blighted, its farms muddy and primitive.  Romania was another country people were leaving, all of them headed west.  The look of Bucharest was desperate and naked, the look which is without shame or self-conciousness: everyone struggling, everyone dressed as though for a hike on a rainy day or dirty job.

…

Certainly, these aren’t happy places, people are leaving or just not having children, and not participating in old customs and institutions.  In short, they are cultures in collapse.

Arriving in Istanbul, he sounds like the explorer, happy to return to civilization.

“Nikolai [a fellow passenger, a Romanian] was speechless.  It was obvious that he had prepared himself for a shabby Asiatic city of oppression and torture, crumbly mosques and fez-wearing Turks and backward-looking Muslims.  Instead he was greeted by a grand and reimagined city of laughing children and beautiful women and swaggering men which had been ignored by Europe and sneered at by the Islamic republics.  It was a city of ancient gilt and impressive modernization.  He could see that the old city had been preserved – we were passing through it…Nikolai shriveled into a country mouse and, with his forehead pressed against the train window, looked as though he were going to weep in frustration.”

I was especially intrigued by his descriptions of southwest Europe because my city is home to many recent immigrants from those countries.  If his descriptions are close to accurate, I can see why they left and I’m happy they made it here.

It struck me that these countries form an undeveloped and uncontrolled frontier for Europe and they represent a huge challenge for the EU if it is to expand its common market and infrastructure eastward.  Indeed, it might be analagous to the US’s expansion and development westward accross North America. Taking the analogy a step futher, during it’s western expansion, the US underwent a period of some of its strongest isolationism.  Simply put, it had bigger issues at home.  Seen in this light, Europe’s reluctance to spend more on defense or entagle itself in external matters to a greater degree, may be an indication of the level of work it has to do at home.  No doubt, the European welfare system consumes a lot of capital, but given the condition of Europe’s frontier, it may be a while before Europe can be counted on to contribute more on the global stage.

Juan Del Mar speaks terrible Spanish. He’s fluent enough, actually he’d gotten quite better since meeting his wife several years ago, or so I’ve been told. Yet his accent was so thick that it would confirm what a look at his blond hair and blues eyes would have already questioned, he wasn’t really from Central America. His friends called him Blanco.

Yet, according to his passport, his birth certificate, and to Juan, he was born in a little village in Nicaragua. Some speculated that he had been a Soviet advisor for the Sandanistas, for it was obvious to everyone that Juan was Russian. Juan knew about these rumors and did not dissuade them, although he was far too young to have taken part in that war. He had only been in his late teens when the USSR ceased to exist. He preferred that no one knew the true story of his background, particularly if it meant he never saw another Russian again.

I first met Blanco on a scouting expedition on the southern coast of Costa Rica. I was looking for some undeveloped land to purchase with some investment partners. At the time the area was kind of the back of beyond, the government hadn’t paved the main road up the coast, yet. My partners and I hope to take advantage of all the Baby Boomers would be retiring in a few years and looking for a cheap tropical place in which to live on their fixed income. Up in the area I was looking there was one old beach hotel and Juan was working the bar.

I didn’t know the hotel was there until I saw it and was happy to have a reason not to drive back down into the city that night. After checking in, I went to the bar, which was empty except for Juan and the hostess, and ordered a beer.

“Are you Russian?” I had asked him, in Spanish, after hearing him talk.

“Nicaraguan.” He’d replied.

I started to open my mouth and he continued, in English, “you’re pretty nosy considering that I know where’ll you’ll be sleeping tonight,” and then he winked at me.

Looky Here

Kenilworth

“There are more Koreans in California than any place outside of Seoul and more people of Mexican ancestry in Los Angeles than in any community other than Mexico City. The Golden State is seen by some as a tremulous new world where everyone is a minority. At Hollywood High School, eighty languages are spoken.”
from this book:
Lasso the Wind

I have come to see America in general as an empire for everyone else. They can send their people here to prospers and be pioneers to this day, and they do. The quote above exemplifies that to me.

Also: There are more Tongans and Somoans in California than in Tonga and Samoa, think about that.

Ht: Ben Casnocha

David Mamet explains why he is no longer a “‘brain-dead’ liberal” (his words) and comes up with an eloquent recommendation of the basic libertarian world view:  get out of the way, we’ll figure it out.

We all do so well, when we just muddle along.

HT: Travis at TJICistan.