Video: Niall Ferguson on The Third World's War

24 November 2010 (Part 2 in the lecture series)

Although never a "hot" war between the superpowers, the Cold War was waged partly through a series of proxy wars in Third World countries from Guatemala to Korea to Vietnam. Although a great deal of attention has been devoted to a select number of U.S. Interventions in the Third World, there is an urgent need to see the "Third World's War" in perspective, showing how successful the Soviet Union was in pursuing a strategy of fomenting revolution and how consistently successive U.S. administrations behaved in response.

Video: Niall Ferguson on The Grand Strategy of Détente

18 January 2011 (Part 3 in the lecture series)

'Nixon goes to China' shattered the façade of Communist unity and dug the United States out of the hole it found itself in at the end of the 1960s. Critics have seen Nixon and Kissinger's policy as morally compromised, but was it actually the key to America's victory in the Cold War?

Video: Atlas Shrugged Movie Trailer Disappoints

My first reaction: it has the look and feel of a Left Behind type film in terms of production quality (not good). And please don't ask how I know what a Left Behind movie looks like.

Second reaction: setting it in the modern world is a questionable call. It's easy to criticize Atlas Shrugged today, but it's important to remember the context and historical period in which it was written. Aesthetically, there's not enough art deco in this trailer, and it should be in black and white, preferably filmed in a Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow grain. 

Also for such a long-winded story to have any chance of holding the attention of a general audience it probably needs A-Listers. While I'm not a huge fan of Angelina Jolie, perhaps she could pull off Dagny; maybe Antonio Banderas could play Francisco, etc.

Atlas Shrugged and its characters in particular captured my imagination when I was younger, but as I blogged previously Rand's ideas are (for starters) inconsistent.

Last word on the film adaptation of Atlas Shrugged goes to Tiger Beatdown:

I myself am greatly looking forward to the movie. Because the whole point of it – superior people make superior products and earn superior money because they're superior! – is going to be really complemented by the spectacle of this broke-assed movie made with former WB stars for like five cents.

Video: Niall Ferguson on China's Fundamental Problem

More clips from Professor Ferguson's Big Think interview can be viewed here.

2045: The Year Science Makes Humans Immortal?

Ray Kurzweil

For my money it just doesn't get any more bleeding edge than the 'Singularity'.

A good read published in Time yesterday on this topic, and radical life-extension, featuring inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, Cambridge Professor Aubrey de Grey, investor Peter Thiel, and others at the forefront of this (for lack of a better term) movement.

From the article:

The more you read about the Singularity, the more you start to see it peeking out at you, coyly, from unexpected directions. Five years ago we didn't have 600 million humans carrying out their social lives over a single electronic network. Now we have Facebook. Five years ago you didn't see people double-checking what they were saying and where they were going, even as they were saying it and going there, using handheld network-enabled digital prosthetics. Now we have iPhones. Is it an unimaginable step to take the iPhones out of our hands and put them into our skulls? 

Already 30,000 patients with Parkinson's disease have neural implants. Google is experimenting with computers that can drive cars. There are more than 2,000 robots fighting in Afghanistan alongside the human troops. This month a game show will once again figure in the history of artificial intelligence, but this time the computer will be the guest: an IBM super-computer nicknamed Watson will compete on Jeopardy! Watson runs on 90 servers and takes up an entire room, and in a practice match in January it finished ahead of two former champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. It got every question it answered right, but much more important, it didn't need help understanding the questions (or, strictly speaking, the answers), which were phrased in plain English.

The idea of the Singularity first hit me like a lightning bolt a little over a decade ago when I read Sun Microsystem co-founder Bill Joy's alarming Wired article titled Why the Future Doesn't Need Us. I've been fascinated and trying to wrap my mind around the many potential implications of exponential technological development and living indefinitely ever since.

The Antithesis of Idle Chitchat

If you're looking for a way to spice up your next dinner party or bar conversation then I encourage you to trot out the idea of science making immortality a reality within your lifetime.

As noted by Kurzweil, people can more easily accept the idea of superhuman HAL-like computer artificial intelligence in the foreseeable future than banishing death. Based on limited anecdotal observations women in particular seem to have an almost viscerally negative, knee-jerk response when first confronted with the notion that the necessary technological advances could arrive in their lifetime.

In fact I have yet to encounter a single woman that responds positively at first blush to the idea of living forever. Perhaps the only thing this reveals is a homogeneity amongst my circle of female friends and acquaintances. But it has led me to wonder whether there is something fundamental to radical life extension which makes it more appealing to men?

Personally, I don't think so. Rather I think this is a case of a big, hard to fathom idea traumatically upending the perceived natural order of life's apple cart. Once you get passed initial concerns over things like quality of life (living long but as a gimp or vegetable) or what this means for romance (and concepts like soul mates) then some women soften up their initial distaste for life extension.

I for one love the idea of extending life indefinitely! There is so much I would love to learn, see, and do; to one day catch a sunrise on planet Mars and then climb Olympus Mons, a mountain almost three times as tall as Everest!

So far as I can imagine there is simply nothing else which would more profoundly alter life as we know it than the Singularity and radical life extension. However, their prospect raises tectonic moral, philosophical, socioeconomic, and security implications. Joy's concerns, which are shared by Kurzweil, must be addressed.

Below is a video of a 17-year old Kurzweil during his 1965 television appearance on I've Got a Secret, and here is a link to his most recent television interview on Charlie Rose where he describes the Singularity.

Thank You Readers!

SeekingAlpha Top 5 Opinion Leader on Forex*

Dear Reader,

Apologies for the garishness, but the Seeking Alpha designation is a nice occasion to say a long overdue and warm thank you. 

It's been great to see the number of site visitors steadily grow since my first post in May of last year on sovereign debt, currencies, and gold. And I'm especially excited to see more and more always welcome comments. My hope when I started was for two-way communication and the trends are encouraging.

Regretfully this past week was slow in terms of blogging productivity. This has been due to my needing to focus on an exciting opportunity. Long story made short, some amazing doors are opening which should translate into some even more interesting and original content for this site going forward.

Thank you for your continued interest, and keep the comments coming!

Sincerely yours,

The PolyCapitalist

*If you're interested in learning how Seeking Alpha constructs its Opinion Leader rankings they're based on page views by investment category (e.g., forex) over the past 90 days. Here's more info.

Number of the Day: $30 billion

That's the amount of aid provided to Egypt by the U.S. since 1975.

Video: Niall Ferguson on Euro Optimism; Discusses Middle-East/Pakistani Upheaval

Link to Bloomberg video interview here.

Video: Michael Lewis Discusses His Personal Portfolio Strategy

Michael Lewis On Why Ireland Will Ultimately Default

Michael Lewis

Following up on his previous profiles of bankrupt Iceland and bailed out (for now) Greece, Michael Lewis has a new article titled 'When Irish Eyes Are Crying' in the March Vanity Fair.

I highly recommend carving out time to read the full article, but here are a few choice excerpts:

Not knowing why they were so suddenly so successful, the Irish can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing exactly how successful they were meant to be. They had gone from being abnormally poor to being abnormally rich, without pausing to experience normality. 

Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. 

The journalists were following the bankers’ lead and conflating a positive outlook on real-estate prices with a love of country and a commitment to Team Ireland. (“They’d all use this same phrase, ‘You’re either for us or against us,’ ” says a prominent bank analyst in Dublin.)

The most obvious change in the country’s politics has been the role played by foreigners. The Irish government and Irish banks are crawling with American investment bankers and Australian management consultants and faceless Euro-officials, referred to inside the Department of Finance simply as “the Germans.” Walk the streets at night and, through restaurant windows, you see important-looking men in suits, dining alone, studying important-looking papers. In some new and strange way Dublin is now an occupied city: Hanoi, circa 1950. 

At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years. 

A banking system is an act of faith: it survives only for as long as people believe it will. Two weeks earlier the collapse of Lehman Brothers had cast doubt on banks everywhere. Ireland’s banks had not been managed to withstand doubt; they had been managed to exploit blind faith.

If the Irish wanted to save their banks, why not guarantee just the deposits? There’s a big difference between depositors and bondholders: depositors can flee.

Now the Irish people finally caught a glimpse of the guy meant to be safeguarding them: the crazy uncle had been sprung from the family cellar. Here he was, on their televisions, insisting that the Irish banks were “resilient” and “more than adequately capitalized” … when everyone in Ireland could see, in the vacant skyscrapers and empty housing developments around them, evidence of bank loans that were not merely bad but insane. “What happened was that everyone in Ireland had the idea that somewhere in Ireland there was a little wise old man who was in charge of the money, and this was the first time they’d ever seen this little man,” says McCarthy. “And then they saw him and said, Who the fuck was that??? Is that the fucking guy who is in charge of the money??? That’s when everyone panicked.” 

Ireland’s 87 percent rate of home-ownership is among the highest in the world. There’s no such thing as a non-recourse home mortgage in Ireland. The guy who pays too much for his house is not allowed to simply hand the keys to the bank and walk away. He’s on the hook, personally, for whatever he borrowed. Across Ireland, people are unable to extract themselves from their houses or their bank loans. Irish people will tell you that, because of their sad history of dispossession, owning a home is not just a way to avoid paying rent but a mark of freedom. In their rush to freedom, the Irish built their own prisons. And their leaders helped them to do it.

"Financial-catastrophe tourism" is how Michael describes his visits to various European countries since the financial crisis began.

For more from Michael on his latest story check out the article's accompanying Q&A, where he predicts the Irish people, like the Greeks, will eventually say nach bhfuil níos mó (Gaelic for 'no more') and default:

(quote from Lewis' driver) "The problem with the Irish is that you can push them and push them and push them and they don’t do anything, then they snap and go whacko.” (Lewis' response) I think that’s going to happen. I think that you’re going to be surprised how much punishment they take, and then at some point they’re going to cease to take it. This may be years off; it may not be six months off. I think it’s a pretty slow-burning fuse.