A Political Glimpse from Ireland

Today is a sad day in Africa, Robert Mugabe has been sworn in for a 6th term in a country that is falling apart. Some people even argue this fact which is beyond understanding since the numbers tell the story; 3 million Zimbabwean refugees live in South Africa.  That is 25% of the countries population as Zimbabwe is rumored to contain just over 12 million people according to a July 2008 estimate.  Can you imagine a quarter of a population being forced to leave their own country? Shouldn’t that give an indication to the President that things are not good?

Not in the fantasy land of Robert Mugabe where he might term these 3 million people “malcontents.” The situation is even tougher because of the politics involved. Robert Mugabe is well regarded in Africa for fighting for independence for his country therefore the leaders of the African Union give him a wide bearing. This is understandable but antiquated, how can the leaders of the AU abide by the level of violence and intimidation that preceded the election?

We can rule out an intervention from the U.K because they have their military committed to Afghanistan and Iraq with insufficient capacity for an effective operation in Zimbabwe. Can you imagine the headlines if they did act?

Ex-colonial power reasserts control in Zimbabwe…

The U.S could probably go in with some sort of military force but the PR fallout from such an action would be slightly less than the U.K. The only solution is for the AU leaders to combine their military might and send in a peacekeeping force to ensure free and  fair election. Action is not likely to occur soon therefore I urge everyone to write to their designated South African ambassador in their respective countries and urge a greater effort to remove Robert Mugabe since “quiet diplomacy” is currently showing no progress. The address of the South African Ambassador in Washington:

Ambassador Welile Nhlapo
4301 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Van Ness Building, Suite 2200
Washington D.C
20008

The price of oil increased significantly on Friday, climbing to $138.54 a barrel with the possibility of the price reaching $150 a barrel in July according to analysts at Morgan Stanley. This is not surprising given that summer is peak driving time for many Americans, but what happens after summer, will the price stabilize or should we expect further increases?

I was thinking about driving today and the difference between your typical Irish and American commute. When I lived in Worcester, MA, it would take between 45 minutes and 1.5 hours to drive the necessary 42 miles into Boston. Now that I live in Lucan, Ireland, it takes me about the same period of time to drive the 6.84 miles into Dublin. Given the vast discrepancies in distance, what is the actual cost in terms of gasoline?

1. It costs $3.93 per gallon of gas at a station in Worcester, MA.
2. For the same gallon of gas in Ireland, I would be paying $7.88 on average.

Yes, that is no exaggeration, but I used the current data available to come up with this unique figure:

1. There are 3.8541178 liters in 1 Gallon.
2. It costs someone in Ireland on average €1.32 per liter of gasoline.
3. Therefore for 1 Gallon of gasoline you would pay €4.99 in Ireland.
4. Using the current euro-dollar exchange rate, the typical Irish driver pays $7.88 per gallon for Gasoline.
5. That is 49.8% more than the typical American driver.

There are a few caveats with this math of course:

1. The euro-dollar exchange rate is not directly correlated to the price of gasoline therefore its inclusion does distort the real cost when comparing Ireland and America
2. I rounded of all figures to two decimal places with the exception of the Gallon-liter conversion.
3. The entire width of Ireland is a mere 138+- miles which his not anything significant compared to the size of the United States.

The point of all these figures and numbers is to illustrate how dependant society has become on every person owning a vehicle despite their detrimental effects to the environment. Ireland and America are both wealthy countries yet some people reading this must ask why it takes 45 min to drive a mere 6.84 miles into the city. The simple answer is traffic. People often joke around here, that Ireland is “Europe’s largest parking lot.” That may sound a bit nasty but there is significant truth to those four words, Ireland has been steadily increasing in wealth over the past 10 years with double digit GDP gains at some points. All this wealth has translated into more cars on a highway that was never meant to hold that many vehicles in any engineer’s imagination.

The government has been talking about instituting a city congestion charge for some time with no implementation to date however they have radically changed the vehicle registration tax. Basically you pay lower tax if your vehicle has lower emissions. I think that is quite fair, don’t you? It will certainly help to encourage consumers to drive vehicles that are more environmentally friendly.

No matter how environmentally friendly cars are, the fundamental problem of traditional gasoline exists and the only way to overcome that is through a significant investment in new and alternative energy sources. Billionaire Boone Pickens of BP Capital sums up the current situation simply and concisely:

“There’s nothing to it to start with,” Pickens said in interview at an American Wind Energy Association conference in Houston. “That’s not what’s happened. You have 85 million barrels a day of oil available in the global energy market and 86.4 million barrels a day of demand. So the price of oil is going to go up until you can kill demand.”

Mr. Pickens goes on further to reinforce his statement later in the interview:

“We’re using 400,000 barrels of oil less today than we did a year ago, but the Chinese are now using 500,000 barrels greater than they did last year,” Pickens said. “So whatever we kill in the way of demand, they pick up in their demand. You’re going to bid for the oil, and the highest bidder’s going to get the oil until you finally kill demand with price.”

In the West we are trying to find more oil, or different ways to more efficiently use what we already have but the problem is never going to go away. Oil is never going to go below the sub-$100 level because demand is going to perpetually increase. Nations like India and China are going to use more oil as their populations grow in wealth and prosperity and it is up to the West to find alternative methodologies to power our transportation systems to ensure a strong and stable macro-environment for future generations. I am not too sure on what technology to use, given the current food crisis, I am going to stay away from ethanol but perhaps hydrogen:

I was browsing around the internet today when I came upon RR’s homepage and the badge on the right hand pane. I am a member of Blog Catalog but in all honesty I joined the place because I had seen the icon on alot of blogs around the internet. To my astonishment, the people at Blog Catalog in conjunction with Amnesty International are making May 15th: “Bloggers Unite for Human Rights Day.” I am a firm believer in Human Rights having being born into a country where the color of my skin made me a second class citizen for a long time however in the present day I am lucky enough to live in a country where I am free to express my views no matter how crazy they may be.

Many of us living in the  Western Hemisphere forget how lucky we are; countries like China employ over 30,000 people to actively censor blogs like this one. This was proven to me earlier on this year when I tried to send the link to my blog to two friends of mine in China who cannot access it to this day. This kind of censorship is wrong as all people are entitled to read, express and voice their views on any subject. 2008 is  the 60th anniversary of the U.N declaration of human rights therefore I hope many of the other bloggers that I know will blog about this issue on Thursday. Some topics for consideration:

1. The wrongful imprisonment of journalists covering assemblies.
2. Governments that ignore the plight of citizens left to the mercy of gangs.
3. The censorship of the Internet in order to prevent freedom of expression.
4. Harsh punishments that include torture, forced labor, and starvation.
5. Sexual assault against women by members of military or militia.

This is going to be the second non-American related post in two days which is a record for me but I just received another email from Mr. Howard Kuff who is one of the few Westerners that have ever been to Tibet and seen the reality of the situation there. Many Chinese have accused Westerners like myself of not understanding the situation and that we should comment once we have visited Tibet. Here is a man who has been there and verifies what the Western Media has been saying about the oppression of the Tibetan people by the government of China.

You can find his website at http://www.changing-history.com, where you can also purchase his book which I plan to do at the end of the month once I get paid since I seemed to have squandered my money on the wonderful world of electronics again. Mr. Kuff further goes on to give his theory as to why China is so insistent about Tibet:

China wants world power. Water is the key to the future. Tibet is the key to the waters of Asia. It will take the World to force China to give this up. Control of water is control of humanity. We are all water and we all share water. China seeks domination. The people of Tibet are simply pawns in China’s quest for power.

I know this sounds a bit hard to believe that water is key to the future but many people overlook the issue of changing environment because it is quite convenient and makes our lives easier but millions of people around the world do not have access to clean water. Water is a key component of our human nature so given the fluctuating state of the global climate; wouldn’t it make sense that sometime in the future as the population of the world expands, that we will start to run out of this precious substance? I think so and given the fact that we just had the first World Water Day on March 22nd, perhaps this is something to think about. Here is an excerpt from the UNESCO World Water Day Report:

According to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2007, an estimated 1.6 billion people must acquire access to improved sanitation over the period 2005-2015 to meet the MDG target on sanitation. If trends since 1990 continue, the world is likely to miss the target by almost 600 million people.

To those of you who still doubt the assertion that China is trying to control the water, I urge you to adopt that as a premise (Also examine Mr. Kuff’s website) and follow along with my argument. Let’s look back at yesterday’s post, the Chinese in essence sold weapons to an unstable and illegitimate government for the sake of money or destabilizing the government. Which ever way you side, neither of these situations would have been good for Southern Africa however I think we can come to the conclusion that China is going to continue to try to flex its power over the coming years in order to make up for years of mediocrity. This is a shame and I hope that the Chinese people will eventually see through the shallow nature of the CCP’s policies. Tibet was free before China and deserves to be free now. The Tibetans are not Chinese and have a unique culture, tradition and understanding of the world. I honestly hope that the world will not fall for the CCP’s tricks in their efforts to cloak their actions with the “peaceful” Beijing Olympics.

This is a beautiful photo I got over at 看不见的西藏～唯色博客, the lady who runs the blog is Tibetan and lives in China and gives us the story on the ground whereas most News outlets are continuously tailed by Chinese policeman when they enter China. I really admire this lady because you cannot dispute what the is saying in there and the worst part of this whole story is that her blog has been hacked into twice with her passwords change because the nationalistic tendencies of some Chinese people cannot be controlled. Seriously, leave this excellent blogger alone and get over the Party Line.

Thanks to the folks at Wikileaks, I have come across an interesting document which is the shipping order for the weapons from Poly Technologies Inc. in China to the Ministry of Defense in Zimbabwe. Now, Zimbabwe has been in the news quite often in Europe because it used to be a British colony back however the country is in a crisis of leadership with the current administration trying desperately to cling to power while the rest of the world wants a change for the people of Zimbabwe. This man is Robert Mugabe, who I will from now refer to as “funny moustache”:

Now the even bigger news, was that despite the fact that that Zimbabwe is experiencing 165,000% inflation as of February. He has managed to pay for a shipment of Arms from the Chinese totaling $245,508. Now I wonder which Swiss bank did he have that money stored in? That shipment included the following (The scanned documents were not that clear so I did my best to reconstruct the cargo):

1. 7.62 x 54mm Ball (What is this for?)
2. 7.62 x 39mm Ball (What is this for?)
3. RPG7 40mm Rockets HE Type G9
4. 60mm Mortar Bombs Type PP89
5. 80mm Mortar Bombs Type W81
6. 80mm Mortar Tubes Type W91
7. 6 Fighter Jets (unconfirmed)

I have a few problems with this whole scenario:

1. Why did South Africa even allow this shipment to proceed all the way from China? I think we can blame president Mbeki for that as he has continuously been soft on President Mugabe because he helped out the ANC during their struggle against the prior Apartheid government. That is no excuse for letting the citizens of your neighbor suffer.
2. What was China thinking? Seriously? Why sell weapons to a truly crazy man like Mugabe? I think the Chinese government made another serious error of judgment in pursuing its non-interventonist policy in Africa. This is terrible to say this but at the moment looking back at the Chinese government’s dealings in Africa, we can truly say that they are motivated by economic gains rather than making a difference to the lives of people in Africa. Sure they perform a few goodwill gestures here and there but if that shipment of arms had landed in Africa, we might be hearing about Mugabe slaughtering the opposition in “defending his government from conspirators”
3. Lastly what is Mugabe thinking? Why does he want these weapons? My theory is that he is either preparing for more drastic measures against the opposition MDC or perhaps he is waiting for the international community to invade Zimbabwe so that he can put up a fight with his dying breath. Given the circumstances at the moment, I am more inclined to believe the 1st scenario but I guess we can thank the powers that be that no arms have gone into Zimbabwe.

People may criticize the United States for lacking a moral compass these days and that may be true considering the massive civilian casualties in Iraq but comparatively speaking, the U.S is nowhere near as bad as the government of China. There are over 300,000 dead in Darfur and the only government that can really do something about it is sitting in their cushy leather chairs and counting the money. My pick (Barack Obama) for the president of the United States said this:

Today we are engaged in a deadly global struggle for those who would intimidate, torture, and murder people for exercising the most basic freedoms. If we are to win this struggle and spread those freedoms, we must keep our own moral compass pointed in a true direction.

Now let’s put this into a nice short summary to simplify the situation:

The People’s Liberation Army (China) which owns Poly Technologies sends a shipment of Arms using the Cosco shipping company which is based in China but has an office in South Africa to the Ministry of Defense in Zimbabwe. Cosco relies on its subsidiary Cosren which is based in Durban (RSA) to unload the shipment and see it on its way to Zimbabwe. The Chinese don’t anticipate any problems (Are you kidding me?) but the Durban Dock Workers refuse to unload the weapons. The ship leaves South Africa to the chagrin of the Chinese government who insists that we should not mix politics and economics (doesn’t that sound familiar…). The ship tried to dock in Angola but is turned away again to have to make the long hard journey back to China with all the cargo “safely” on board.

Now if anyone would like to dispute what I have written today, please do so but read the facts first and I have nicely put the shipping documents in the Downloads section so make use of them before stating your argument. I am honestly ashamed to say that South Africa has a role in this saga and I hope South Africa, the international community and the Chinese government will take a sterner stance with Robert Mugabe so that the people of Zimbabwe can finally put their country back together.