Here is Martin Hutchinson’s latest at Prudent Bear, quietly informing bovine optimists that globalisation carries profound and profoundly depressing implications for more than the benighted working class in the West.

Tata Motors’ emergence as front-runner to buy Jaguar and Land Rover from the ailing Ford brings one question uppermost to a commentator sitting at a wealthy Western desk: Precisely which economic sectors can be relied upon in the future to provide jobs for Westerners at wages higher than are obtainable in the Third World?  Will there continue to be opportunities to improve Western living standards, or are those living standards destined to descend to some kind of population-weighted average between Boston and Benin?

Tata is a typical and highly capable example of that new breed: the third world multinational company. Part of the multi-industry Tata Group, over a century old, from which it had access to both capital in its formative years and steel currently, it has established itself as the premier manufacturer of light trucks in India and as one of the top three automobile manufacturers. At the bottom of the market, it has announced plans to being out a 100,000 rupee (about $2,500 currently) automobile, which if successful will undercut its major competition by more than 30% and greatly expand the market for automobiles among the still impoverished Indian people.

Conventional Western business analysts have no problem with Tata manufacturing mini-cars for the Indian market, or indeed for developing country markets in Africa and elsewhere. They imagine that Tata is able to use its comparative advantage of cheaper labor to squeeze costs out of the manufacturing process, thus achieving what in the West would be an impossibly low price. They point knowingly to the expensive environmental features that the new automobile will lack, and imagine smugly that the it will be both tiny and of low quality, adequate for the noble impoverished of the Third World, but not seriously to be imagined as competition on the roads of London, New York or Stuttgart.

The announcement that Tata is to buy Land Rover and Jaguar has thus caused a considerable amount of cognitive dissonance. Land Rover and Jaguar are both icons of British automobile manufacture, hand crafted by generations of British skilled labor. Admittedly in the 1970s Jaguar’s quality control became so poor that Jaguars rivaled the Moskvich or the Yugo for frequency of repairs, but since 1979 or so quality has improved and the marque has established a cherished if not particularly profitable niche among the luxury automobiles of the world.  Moreover, would Western buyers shell out the substantial cost of a Jaguar if they knew it had been manufactured in India; after all, how could the quality be relied upon?

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Ron Paul supporters following Fox News talking head, Sean Hannity, down the street jeering at him:

While I don’t see this as indicating an imminent outbreak of violence against the Old Media, as I previously commented:

The Iowa/Huckabee/Paul/Fox/NH situation is nearly optimal for an outbreak of violence targeting the meat sitting in the old media offices—which is why I posted my article about “Bridling the Old Media Beast” (prior to the results of the Iowa caucuses).

Ron Paul’s 10% showing in Iowa is nearly perfect for violence against the meat sitting in the old media offices since it is just enough to prove Ron Paul is at least as viable as Huckabee was prior to his surge of Old Media attention—but not enough to force Old Media to give him fair time.  If Ron Paul is, indeed, getting nearly zero old media coverage in NH (by rights he should be getting at LEAST 10% of the total air time allocated to Republican candidates—given his Iowa showing, and more given the value NH puts on independents with which Ron Paul showed strength in Iowa) then it doesn’t really matter how well or badly he does there—Old Media becomes a military target.  The only question is when will military action be taken.  It may not be for some time but this situation will not be forgotten—it is permanently waking up huge numbers of young men to the structure of the tyranny under which they slave and are potentially drafted to have their balls blown off.

Rumors from multiple sources within Ron Paul’s Iowa campaign are that the “get out the vote” push on January 3 for the campaign, which had far more volunteers than any other campaign, actually ended up contacting only hundreds, not thousands of voters as was planned.

What happened?

Apparently, an “individual” claiming to be a real estate agent named Eduardo from Southern California acquired control of the voter database list and, uh, something went wrong…

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How gratifying when some geek researches an area of extreme and totally unacceptable male prejudice, and only ... confirms it.  Plus, in this case, an unexpected bonus.

From the Mail article, with apologies for the eggregious use of dishonest homosexual labels:-

Gay men are as bad as women at navigating, research has shown.  Both share the same poor sense of direction and rely on local landmarks to get around, a study suggests.  They are also slower to take in spatial information than heterosexual men.

... researchers say it is likely to make driving in a strange environment more challenging for gay men and women than for straight male motorists.

Psychologists at Queen Mary, University of London, conducted computer-based tests of spatial learning and memory on 140 volunteers recruited through advertisements in newspapers and magazines.  They showed that gay men, straight women and lesbians navigated in much the same way and shared the same weaknesses.  But there were also differences between gay and heterosexual men and straight and lesbian women.

The Queen Mary team, led by Dr Qazi Rahman, used virtual reality simulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory developed at Yale University. In one,

... the Morris Water Maze (MWM) test, volunteers were placed in a “virtual pool” and had to “swim” through a maze to find a hidden submerged platform.  Cues in the form of pictures, doorways, a lamp, a bookcase and other landmarks were sited in different places.

The other task,

... the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), involved finding “rewards” - musical tones - by exploring eight “arms” radiating out from a circular central junction. Four arms contained a reward and four did not, and participants had to avoid traversing an arm more than once.

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Most of us would be willing to sacrifice our lives in a war if necessary to stop the Old Media’s tyranny over our people’s minds, but few of us can see a clear means of accomplishing this since our people’s minds are driven primarily by our morals and the Old Media controls the morals imprinted on our people far more than any Christian church ever did.  We could go around blowing the brains out of news anchors, spreading hypercarcinogens in ventilation systems of Hollywood repaying—in some small part —what their images do to our peoples, mugging editors on the streets then killing them for their pocket change to pay for gas, food and lodging to get to the next serial “spiking”, etc. but it would merely be turned against us by the Old Media running endless “news stories” and making endless streams of “docudramas” portraying us as baby-eating perverts worthy of slow death by torture at best and “therapy” at worst—thereby strengthening the bondage of our people’s minds.

What to do?

Perhaps the Ron Paul grassroots campaign has demonstrated something we can do to bridle the old media beast…

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The widely circulated article “The Israeli Defense Company That Tallies the Iowa Caucus” may be a poison pill of sorts.  It makes the claim that the firm, Voxeo, that did the final count of Iowa caucus votes during 2004, was bought by the Israeli defense contractor Elron Electronics.  This ownership link may be a false claim according to a colleague:

I’m familiar with Voxeo; however, it doesn’t appear that Voxeo is
owned by Elron, though it’s true that the CEO, J Taylor, did sell his
earlier company to Elron. Chris Bollyn dropped the ball here, unless he can
prove that Voxeo is owned by Elron, which doesn’t;t appear to be the case.

Not that there aren’t many other reasons to be suspicious of the tally but this particular “link” is likely to be used to discredit legitimate suspicions if it is indeed a false link.

I am more of a Schopenhaurian than a Nietzscheian, and more of a Darwinian than a Schopenhaurian.  But the following two-part, 24-minute video by Alain de Botton is a populist introduction to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.  It comes with Norman Lowell’s approval, so it has to be worth a post here.

Part One

Part Two

and, with thanks to skeptical ...

Paert Three

Thanks for keeping us company these past 12 months.  It’s been, I think, a pretty static year, as these things go.  Certainly no 2005.  But in my patch, at least, there has been an outbreak of honest talk in the press.  The genie is out of the bottle, and it won’t be put back.  The consequences of that will become clear in the year ahead.

Read about it here.

Good luck to you all.