Chinese Roots in Egypt?

FP: Does Chinese Civilization Come From Ancient Egypt?

He also cited several ancient Chinese classics, at one point quoting historian Sima Qian’s description of the topography of the Xia empire — traditionally regarded as China’s founding dynasty, dating from 2070 to 1600 B.C. “Northwards the stream is divided and becomes the nine rivers,” wrote Sima Qian in his first century historiography, the Records of the Grand Historian. “Reunited, it forms the opposing river and flows into the sea.”

In other words, “the stream” in question wasn’t China’s famed Yellow River, which flows from west to east. “There is only one major river in the world which flows northwards. Which one is it?” the professor asked. “The Nile,” someone replied. Sun then showed a map of the famed Egyptian river and its delta — with nine of its distributaries flowing into the Mediterranean. This author, a researcher at the same institute, watched as audience members broke into smiles and murmurs, intrigued that these ancient Chinese texts seemed to better agree with the geography of Egypt than that of China.

U.S. global stature collapsing

Positive attitudes toward the United States were part of rising social mood. Just as the president benefits from rising social mood, so the U.S. benefited in its role as global leader. As global social mood sours, however, the U.S. is on the decline. What started under Bush is accelerating rapidly under Obama. There is an internal component as well. The U.S. is fracturing internally as negative social mood causes the public to pull away from extremist interventionist policies towards the isolationist pole, pulling U.S. foreign policy back towards the center. Towards the center the U.S. will act more in its self-interest, which will cause it to conflict more with foreign nations. Other nations are the same, which is why we see increasing international disputes across Europe and Asia.

However, the acceleration of the decline under Obama is quite remarkable. Even though Russian defectors are common, one American defects to Russia and Obama refuses to meet with Putin, making America appear weak to the entire world. Obama has also likely armed Al-Qaeda with American weapons, though there is no direct link as of yet, it is quite possible that one will emerge from the Benghazi investigations. The latter has led to protests in Egypt:

Obviously the U.S. has stirred up hatred and protests as a result of military campaigns, but these are the supposed allies of America, the Egyptians who want to be friends with the West and have a Western-style democracy. I cannot remember a time when American foreign policy managed to anger the entire population of a nation it was not at war with.

Can Egypt Recover? Will EGPT Bottom?

I've been looking for Egypt to collapse by the time this cycle of social mood and revolution completes. With dwindling foreign reserves, there's going to be a currency crisis even if the nation is able to return to some form of political stability.

Lingering Crisis in Cairo Dims Egypt's Economic Outlook

The political conflict between President Mohamed Morsi and his opponents threatens to do further damage to Egypt’s pivotal tourism industry, drag down already-depleted foreign-exchange reserves and increase the country’s painfully-high inflation rate north of 8%.

.......While Egypt’s foreign reserves totaled $36 billion in December 2010, they plummeted as low as $13.5 billion in March 2013. Reserves rose to $16 billion in May thanks to a recent cash injection of $3 billion from Qatar and a $2 billion interest-free loan from Libya.

Egypt is living off of foreign aid at this point. If the nation does anything to jeopordize foreign support, they will run out of currency reserves and be unable to import food.

Socionomic and Antifragile potpourri

Able to post regularly again, for how long who knows.

Highly recommend Nassim Taleb's Antifragility. I wouldn't describe it as a self-help book, but many of the ideas in the book can be applied to daily life, as well as to business and government and everything in between.

Below is a 1 hour interview with Taleb that is chock full of ideas.


One of the ideas in Antifragility is signal to noise. He uses the example of news, most of it is noise. He says that many days, news should be a couple of lines, and other days it should be pages and pages. In order to fill up time and space, however, news is filled with lots of noise. He gives the example of 1-to-1 signal to noise in one year. That is, you check the major news for the year and half is signal, half is noise. Well, on a daily basis, the signal to noise ratio will be something like 1 to 99.

Back in 2010, I often wrote about the political problems in the EU and the likelihood of a breakup. I have tried to cover major developments such as extreme parties in Greece, Scottish and Catalonian secession movements, but otherwise I view these stories as confirming the signal. Unless something changes, I don't feel the need to cover every blip along the trend. Occasionally, I write about it to remind myself or for new readers, but otherwise I'm not interested until the trend changes. EU breakup is still on.

Similarly, I covered Egypt's problems last year. Literally one year ago, I posted: Egypt heading for collapse. I see news such as this: Egypt's protests reveal deficit of trust in Muslim Brotherhood as confirming the socionomic theory and the signal. It wasn't noise. If I'm wrong or something changes, it is worth writing about, otherwise Egypt is still headed for collapse.

Now there is ethnic cleansing in Los Angeles. This is an early stage movement and has major, major implications for American politics because it ties into the secession movement. There could very well be a Mexican secession movement in the Southwest before the South ever gets around to declaring independence. In any event, it is a marker for what is possible as social mood declines, with serious interracial violence in the cards in places such as LA.

Finally, China is enjoying a small bounce in social mood evidences by the stock market rally, but mood remains generally negative. In What Causes Revolutions?, Patrick Chovanec writes:

A surprising number of people in China have been writing and talking about “revolution”. First came word, in November, that China’s new leaders have been advising their colleagues to read Alexis de Tocqueville’s classic book on the French Revolution, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (The Old Regime and the Revolution), which subsequently has shot to the top of China’s best seller lists. Just this past week, Chinese scholar Zhao Dinxing, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, felt the need to publish an article (in Chinese) laying out the reasons China won’t have a revolution (you can read an English summary here). Minxin Pei, on the other hand, thinks it will.

He goes on to quote Richard Pipes:

So, around 1900, we have a mechanically rather than organically structured state that denies the population any voice in government, and yet, at the same time, aspires to the status of a global power. This aspiration compels it to promote industrial development and higher education, which has the inevitable effect of shifting much opinion and the power to make decisions to private citizens. Pre-1905 tsarism thus suffered from an irreconcilable contradiction. A not-insignificant segment of the population received secondary and higher education, acquiring, in the process, Western attitudes, and yet it was treated as being on the same level with the illiterate peasantry, that is, unfit to participate in the affairs of state. Capitalist industrialists and bankers made major decisions affecting the country’s economy and employment, yet had no say in that country’s politics because politics was the monopoly of the bureaucracy …

The result was a situation which Marx had rightly predicted had to arise when the political form — in this case, heavily centralized and static — no longer corresponded to the socio-economic context — increasingly dispersed and dynamic. Such a situation is by its very nature fraught with explosive potential. In 1982 [Pipes writes], when I worked in the National Security Council, I was asked to contribute ideas to a major speech that President Reagan was scheduled to deliver in London. My contribution consisted of a reference to Marx’s dictum that, when there develops a significant disparity between the political form and the socio-economic context, the prospect is revolution. This disparity, however, had now developed in the Soviet Union, not in the capitalist West. President Reagan inserted this thought into his speech, and the reaction in Moscow was one of uncontrolled fury: this, of course, was a language they well understood and interpreted to mean a declaration of political war against the Communist Bloc. Their anger was enhanced by the awareness that the statement was correct, that they were ruling in a manner that did not correspond to either the economic or the cultural level of their population.

Egypt hits the wall

Egypt to Start Foreign Exchange Auctions as Reserves Plunge

The North African nation’s central bank said the sales and purchases of U.S. dollars will take place periodically and aim to “preserve foreign-currency reserves and ration their use,” according to an e-mailed statement today. The new mechanism will support the dollar interbank market, it said. Egypt’s net international reserves have slumped almost 60 percent in the two years since the start of an uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak.

“The current level of foreign-currency reserves constitutes the minimum and critical level that must be preserved” to meet necessary needs like repaying external debt and importing “strategic commodities,” the central bank said in the statement.

Egypt needs dollars for food. If food prices rise, Egypt will go hungry.

Market Vectors Egypt Index ETF (EGPT) rallied post-Spring, but it will reach new lows as the currency collapses.

Foot and mouth disease breaks out in Egypt; another sign of the social mood?

Foot-and-mouth disease spreads in Egypt

Violence continues in the wake of Arab spring

Cairo government office torched as protests rage

Egypt's tax authority building in Cairo was set on fire as street protests against army rule raged into the early hours of Sunday, state TV footage showed.
Parts of the building, close to the interior ministry, were set ablaze, state TV said.

Anti-government protests, triggered by violence at a Port Said soccer match which killed 74 people, have killed a further 12 people in the last four days.

Libyan militia accused of torturing to death ambassador to France

Human Rights Watch said that Omar Brebesh, a career diplomat who was cultural attache and then ambassador to France between 2004 to 2008, was brought in for routine questioning in Tripoli over his work for the former regime.
His body turned up at a hospital in Zintan, the town two hours' drive to the south-west that was a hub of last year's revolution, beaten, bruised and with some of its toenails removed.

The Zintan Brigade, one of the revolution's most powerful militias, has clashed with rivals in Tripoli. Most recently, members fought for control of the former beach compound of Saadi Gaddafi, another of the dictator's sons, with members of the Misurata Brigade, once seen as a Zintan ally in Libya's complex patchwork of regional rivalries.

Egyptians continue to rage

Egypt: Cairo rages as football disaster bodies come home

Police fired tear gas and rubber bullets as supporters of Egypt’s biggest team, Al-Ahly, and thousands of revolutionary activists surrounded the interior ministry to protest against the worst footballing disaster in Egypt’s history.
The crowd, tens of thousand strong, called for the fall of the Army Council and for Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, de facto head of state, to be hanged.

Many accused supporters of Hosni Mubarak, the former president whose sons Gamal and Alaa had close ties to Egypt’s football establishment, of deliberately instigating the violence at the Port Said stadium of Al-Masry following their 3-1 win over Al-Ahly on Wednesday night.
“This was not a sports accident, this was a military massacre!” the crowds chanted. Supporters of the rival Cairo club Zamalek turned out in sympathy.

In Clashes With Police, Egyptians Unleash Fury Over Soccer Riot Deaths

News reports indicated that many of those killed in the fighting were teenagers or younger, and at least one victim in the Cairo morgue appeared to be younger than 10.

Groups of ultras organized around rival clubs began appearing in Egypt within the past decade. Although rival fans often clashed, all shared a common culture of obscene chants, special firecrackers and instruments, and a violent hatred of the police who usually try to control them. Some paint vulgar insults to the police on walls around Cairo.

In the year since the uprising against Mr. Mubarak, the ultras have increasingly found that political demonstrations are good for practicing their second favorite sport, fighting with police officers.

Egypt's stock market bottomed at the start of the year, as social mood declines. However, the stock market has rebounded and didn't drop much after the riot. We may see a further rebound as power transfers from the military to democratically elected representatives, but longer term, the outlook is negative.