Eta to end ceasefire with Spain

Well, shit.

If you should ever get the chance, grab a copy of Mike Davis’ Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb. Indescribably fascinating. Davis is also the author of Planet of Slums, also very interesting. From Amazon:

From the world’s first car bomb in 1920 (actually a horse-drawn wagon, exploded by anarchist Mario Buda in downtown Manhattan), to those incessantly exploding in Iraq, Davis shows how these “quotidian workhorses of urban terrorism” are responsible for “producing the most significant mutations in city form and urban lifestyle.” Whether the product of fringe militancy or “clandestine state terrorism,” Davis shows, the car bomb has a limitless capacity to create and sustain fear (largely because of low cost and technological accessibility).

Given the weapon’s ubiquity in modern times, a “brief history” scarcely allows room for the numerous theaters of conflict within which the car bomb has evolved, including Northern Ireland, Beirut, Israel, the U.S. and Colombia, let alone much political background on, say, the Tamil Tigers’ bombing campaign in Sri Lanka. At its best, this is a gripping supplementary history, full of surprising, often contrarian facts and voices behind some of the most spectacular acts of violence on record. Despite clearly populist sympathies, Davis steers away from romanticism, keeping tight focus on the indiscriminate violence inflicted upon innocents. Packed with horrific and heartrending details, the book goes beyond the statistics to portray the human and moral costs of this gruesome political lever.

To be fair it is a little left, certainly anti-occupation in the way in which it is anti-war, and people will definitely balk at the news that pre-1948 Zionists (the Stern gang) and the US (CIA director William J. Casey and Reagan) had a very big hand in the establishment and development of this tool of terror. It also won’t come as news at all to other people, so. The context in which the book places the likes of Eta, the Bali Bombing and September 11 within a more-or-less progression of a mere technique is very impressive.

But the news that Eta has had enough of not blowing shit up in Spain is not good news. That they don’t kill as many people as in heady late 70s is small enough comfort.

To help in the feeding and the seed of man/And not in the bleeding and the end of man.

Stupid Scientific Workplace is hiccupping. In the meantime (while I wait for my wife to return from her Latin class).

Massacres and paramilitary land seizures behind the biofuel revolution

“Armed groups in Colombia are driving peasants off their land to make way for plantations of palm oil, a biofuel that is being promoted as an environmentally friendly source of energy.

Surging demand for “green” fuel has prompted rightwing paramilitaries to seize swaths of territory, according to activists and farmers. Thousands of families are believed to have fled a campaign of killing and intimidation, swelling Colombia’s population of 3 million displaced people and adding to one of the world’s worst refugee crises after Darfur and Congo.”

While this is going on,

“Coca production in Colombia has surged despite US-funded eradication efforts, according to an estimate that casts fresh doubt on Washington’s “war on drugs”. Satellite imagery collated by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy survey suggests that cultivation of coca, the raw ingredient of cocaine, jumped 8% last year to 156,000 hectares.”

Funnily enough, looking in Google News for Colombia and Biofuel:

Coca production in Colombia shows 8 percent rise: HULIQ, NC – 12 hours ago

President Alvaro Uribe:”Production of coca in Colombia rises”: Pravda, Russia – Jun 3, 2007

Colombia’s President says White House survey shows 8% rise in coca: PR-Inside.com (Pressemitteilung), Austria – Jun 3, 2007

Massacres and paramilitary land seizures behind the biofuel revolution: Guardian Unlimited, UK – 1 hour ago

Colombia Goes Full Tilt to Return to Grace: Wall Street Journal – 22 hours ago

Colombian coca production up for 3rd straight year: Houston Chronicle, TX – Jun 3, 2007

Biofuel gangs kill for green profits: Times Online, UK – Jun 2, 2007

Anyone spot the odd one out? Anyone? Poor Wall Street Journal.

This came as news to me. I always assumed the problem from biofuels was just the effects on food security and diversity via corn. We have already seen the adverse reactions in Mexico (Foreign Affairs is carrying a bloody great piece on the matter, How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor. The US is also beginning to see price hikes as a result.

For some reason I never spotted the follow-on effect that land values would have. The subsequent effects on economic growth in middle-income countries will most likely follow basic Economic Principles as well (long-run economic growth requires security and stability. Our example in class is Botswana. Zimbabwe is a good example of a country going in the other direction), such that agricultural countries such as these will not only cease producing actual food, but they will decline in growth, income and living standards at the same time. Goody gumdrops. Meanwhile we will have our SUVs running on corn even while it’s still in everything we eat and drink (in the US. Thank you very much Secretary Butts).

The coca problem also kicks in with the land loss – if you were a farmer, and now find yourself with the family but no family farm, how do you manage? You produce opium on what little land you can get instead of actual food on the land you had. And so ad infinitum, I guess. And that couples itself to the destabilisation already underway to further undo supply controls until we’re at a few bad chapters from Clear and Present Danger.

So where’s the win? I don’t see how there is one. GW Bush in his last State of the Union Address called for a level of biofuel utilisation that is utterly unachievable, not to mention dangerously unecological (that environmental and humanitarian disaster). For me, a screaming leftie tit who doesn’t drive, it’s as simple as not pumping food into our bloody petrol tanks. I don’t see how economics is even required for this one.

Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing/News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in

Discussion positively abounds lately about the global carbon emissions market. There are two memes/arguments involved here: first, a global market means a global price. The Coase theorem writ very large indeed. Secondly, although UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon is on board (remember him? He’s the new UN boss. Give him time to become famous, he only just started), it is also true that less than a dozen countries pump out 90% of carbon emissions.

This is without subjectivity or elitism: if the 10 richest countries are the ones poisoning the planet, only a solution that pulls us all together will work, long-term. And that probably means a market over some hippy initiative to help the poor (Clare Short tried this as well, with mixed results). The Australian Stock Exchange is on board, already laying the groundwork for a carbon futures market in 2012 – the proposed date for initialisation of the global trading market. Domestically, the Prime Minister (who, surely, can’t still be in office in 2012?) has said Australia will have its own trading market by 2012 at the latest.

With whom, I wonder, will we trade? Probably Tasmania. Who knows. At least Western Australia appears to be engaged already, and planning to have emissions to sell, rather than buy.

As it stands, we already buy into carbon sinks, probably more than most (and as long as nobody else got involved it might have worked, just maybe).

The problem remains, though, as ever. As GW Bush proved in his first few weeks in office, giving a shit about international treaties comes and goes. How does the US prosecute China if it breaks the rules and, say, over-produces greenhouse gases? Do we fine them? Suspend them from the market? What if the market itself simply becomes a system whereby rich countries buy our consciences and our toxic lifestyles at the expense of 3rd world development (and the future inhabitability of our poor planet)? No reason why not – if it’s going to be established to work for the rich countries, it will probably work for the rich countries.

Moreover, if or when such a market proves quite unworkable for the rich countries, and/or poisonous for the poor countries, what the odds of this clock being turned back?

Do I have a better plan? No, no I don’t. I actually work with the assumption that none of this will count for all that much, because the simple physics of carbon emissions are that we pump them out by burning up our fossilised history at a million years an hour. I’m not as pessimistic as, say, Jim Kunstler, but I do think, by and large, that we’re going to run out of stuff to burn to run our cars. We will grind nearer (at least) to a halt, but at least our emissions will, too.

Which is kind of a shame, actually, because the world will need Economists about as much as it needs million-BTU air conditioners, Happy Meal toys and off-Broadway musicals. I plan on learning how to farm and shoot.

Going, going…Gonu (I’m so sorry about that)

Found this first over at the Oil Drum…

Category 5 Cyclone Aimed at Strait of Hormuz.

Yes, that is the gulf from which our oil sails. Perhaps God has her own idea of gunboat diplomacy – force diplomacy by wiping out all the gunboats. Man, I wish.*

*Desire not stated in earnest. I’m still kind of a New South Welshman – a state that doesn’t get mere weather these days, so much as hammered. I don’t wish catastrophic weather on anybody, including Saudi oil platforms or the US navy.

Go back to the Oil Drum to track the cyclone and the story. Oil prices already are.

I will stop/I will stop at nothing/Say the right things/When electioneering/I trust I can rely on your vote…

It begins:

“The roll-out of a multibillion-dollar high-speed broadband network in the cities could be rushed through as the Federal Government tries to seize the upper hand in the debate before the election.

At the same time, it will spend $900 million – $300 million more than expected – on improving internet speeds and access in regional and remote areas.”

Now bear in mind that only a couple of months ago the PM was decrying a Rudd/Labor broadband plan ‘reckless‘ because it involved the Future Fund:

“This appears to be an economically irresponsible way of funding a program,” Howard told parliament. “It also appears to be short-sighted with no regard for the future and no regard to the fact that of all the challenges this country faces, none is greater than the ageing of our population.”

Second, Telstra* is likely to benefit greatly from this deal, particularly given that it is not getting along with the monopoly-averse Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. In fact not only had Telstra not even handed in a formal proposal for their plan to roll out (and control) a Fibre to the Node network, they campaigned against the ACCC so heavy-handedly that the PM had to step in.

(*Non-Australians: Telstra is what used to be the state-owned telecoms monopoly, now partially-privatised. The Future Fund, by the by, is made up of the billions earned selling off the majority ownership – the government now holds only something like 17% of the shares, when originally they were supposed to retain 51%, and control of the board. That turned out not to have been a core promise).

Telstra, of course, doesn’t have the best record when it comes to serving the Bush, and their proposed charges for rivals to use their network were the sticking-point with the ACCC in the first place.

Rudd/Labor’s plan was government/private (not in a Blairite PFI travestic fashion, one hopes), securing some…security against Telstra-monopolised crappy broadband extending barely to suburbs while Australia falls further behind Asia. The question is, might it anyway?

Certainly, after Labor put forth its plan to invest towards 5bn AUD in infrastructure, the Libs needed something – and they have it. The PM recently complained, “Why should we use $2.7 billion that’s been locked up for future generations, why should we use that to fund the provision of something that the private sector ought to provide in a normal market situation?” Well, for a start one ought to wonder at least for a moment what they expect to get for their investment – taxpayers usually accept lower rates of return than shareholders.

Second, those future generations might appreciate an telecommunications infrastructure of the first order when they start trying to compete with the rest of the world.

Third, those future generations might like to know why government cooked up a plan that sidelined the ACCC altogether – especially if Telstra ends up getting exactly what it wanted all along, and those future generations don’t – remember that last time this government was in charge of large-scale infrastructure?. Optus’ ‘G9′ consortium is promising entry-level prices half that of Telstra’s (we believe – Telstra isn’t making much public at the moment, just advertising against the ACCC and demanding that we leave it all up to them). Unfortunately their funding isn’t all that secure, and they’d still need Telstra’s copper wires along the way.

Frankly, I’d rather an open and transparent process involving the government, the ACCC and the public (if only as a poor referee between Telstra’s lapdog and Singapore’s lapdog). Even if Australia doesn’t get its legislation in before the election.

Girls are Evil

Pete, I still have this. My students love it.