Our Word is Our Weapon

More on Iraq, again from DevNews:

L. Paul Bremer, chief civilian administrator in Iraq, writes in the Wall Street Journal Europe that Iraq faces unique problems, but we have the experience of formerly socialist countries, as well as analysis of successful capitalist ones, to inform our perspective, While the ultimate future of Iraq’s economy will be determined by the Iraqis themselves, economic growth will depend on the birth of a vibrant private sector. And this will require the wholesale reallocation of resources and people from state control to private enterprise, the promotion of foreign trade, and the mobilization of domestic and foreign capital”.

Put diplomatically, the experience of formerly socialist countries is that programmes of economic liberalisation designed in Washington do not necessarily offer the best blueprint for progress.

Asking a private sector composed of undeveloped local companies and huge foreign corporations to ‘allocate resources to their most productive uses’ in a country characterised by grinding poverty and great oil wealth is a recipe for disaster. At best it’s a case of crossing your fingers and hoping for the best, at worse it will involve bringing into being the kind of ‘mafia capitalism’ and its associated rises in crime and drops in living standards and life expectancies that we saw in Russia after a similar ‘big-bang’ liberalisation programme (though the liberalisation programme was obviously not the only factor at work).

There is near-total market failure in Iraq at the moment, but laying the foundations for a thriving private sector is about more than slashing state subsidies and securing property rights. It’s about nurturing the economic, cultural and infrastructural dimensions of local companies so that they can actually compete and create functioning markets when the time comes. That requires state-led investment on a large scale.

Bremer, however, thinks domestic Iraqi companies should look forward to the imminent arrival of global competition, as it’ll give them the ‘market discipline’ needed to ‘become more productive’. It will never be a fair fight, though, as Iraqi companies will be competing against global giants who are not only more powerful in capital terms but also in the political sense - an effect that will be exacerbated if political control in Iraq remains in American rather than Iraqi hands.

By the way, Bremer says that “Following a disciplined, market-based approach will require difficult decisions and entail near-term sacrifices”. Always be wary of this kind of talk. It marks Bremer out as an omeletteer - he wants his omelette, and if he has to break a lot of eggs to get that’s just the way it has to be. The ends justify the means.

But wait, there’s more. “For this program to be successful”, concludes Bremer, “it must be endorsed by the Iraqi people”. So there you have it. Either the US administration has pledged to not tinker with Iraq’s economic and trade policies before a legitimate Iraqi government can make the decision, or it just doesn’t expect its tinkering to be ’successful’.

But don’t believe me: Adam Smith himself argued (quote reported on the Third World Network) that sudden abolition of trade barriers could lead to serious unemployment especially if labour mobility was low. “Humanity may in this case require that the freedom of trade should be restored only by slow gradations”, he said, “and with a good deal of reserve and circumspection”.

As post-war Iraq drifts through a fog of violence, frustration, poverty and ill-health, American policy-wonks are busy trying to work out how Iraqis are going to be made pay for the reconstruction of their country, now that the US has decided it has no interest in coughing up the dough itself. From the World Bank’s DevNews service:

The Bush administration is considering a plan to mortgage future Iraqi oil revenue to pay for reconstruction today, the Wall Street Journal Europe reports.

The proposal, which could involve issuing securities or trade credits based on projected oil revenue, has the enthusiastic backing of major US companies with operations in Iraq. But it has also generated resistance among administration officials who believe it raises daunting questions about the legal and moral right of the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority to assume debts on behalf of the Iraqi people.

It could be many months, or even years, before an elected Iraqi government is established and in a position to borrow on international markets. One other alternative would be for rich-country governments to give huge contributions for Iraq at a pledging conference tentatively scheduled for September. The UNDP will host a preliminary meeting of potential donors in New York next week, but both US and UN officials doubt they will collect enough pledges over the coming months to meet Iraq’s huge financial needs. The Bush administration hasn’t even asked Congress for new funds to rebuild Iraq, beyond the $1.7 billion appropriated.

So because the US won’t give any extra money to Iraq (in another story Andrew Natsios of USAID predicts that the US won’t increase its aid budget for Iraq this year), it will saddle Iraq with debts far into the future to pay for its own reconstruction. And because there is not even a hint of a beginning of an interim Iraqi-led regime, nobody will be able to do anything about it.

But that’s assuming the plan is realised. It might not be: as the story says, ‘rich-country governments’ could donate money to this worthy cause. Most governments, though, will worry about handing over cash to a so far rather incompetent occupying force, and may also decline to switch funds from aid to other poor countries. So that leaves the US and Britain - suddenly the Coalition of the Unwilling. The US was perfectly willing to spend tens of billions on the war - effectively transferring large clumps of this money from tax-payers to military-industrial contractors like Halliburton - and it is perfectly willing to use Iraqi money to finance reconstruction - effectively transferring this money to military-industrial contractos like Halliburton - but now it seems strangely unwilling to cut out the middle-man and increase its aid budge to Iraq. Maybe it’s easier to raise a budget for war than for peace.

There’s been a spate of developments in the ‘Publish What You Pay’ campaign recently (earlier post here). The recent G8 summit spoke in approving terms of increasing transparency in the extractive resources industries, and last week Tony Blair chaired a conference helpfully dubbed the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, at which he apparently “called for a voluntary agreement to disclose payments. Several oil firms, including BP and Royal Dutch/ Shell, and various developing-country governments, attended and made positive noises”. This from the World Bank’s ever-informative DevNews Press Review.

It remains to be seen whether the initiative really takes off, but Angola recently gave it a boost by announcing it would “make public all its oil payments, under a new push to stamp out corruption and attract aid and investment”.

France and Germany, with dishonourable support from Ireland, seem to have done a deal to avoid any major reforms of Europe’s bloated and destructive Common Agricultural Policy, which hands over billions to (mostly) the richest farmers in exchange for their agreeing to produce too much food and dumping it on the cheap into poor countries thus destroying local agricultural employment.

Agriculture commission Franz Fischler has compromised on a reform package that was already wholly inadequate from a development point of view as it would not rule out subsidising food exports to developing countries, but the French - chief beneficiaries of the CAP - are still not happy. “The only thing I can say is that this so-called final compromise paper is still not acceptable to France”, said their agriculture minister, Herve Gaymard.

What’s really outrageous is that the EU has already promised several times to reduce agricultural subsidies, and has extracted all sorts of trade concessions from other countries in return. It simply can’t keep doing this, though, as it will discover in September at the next World Trade Organisation ministerial conference in Mexico. If it refuses to budge on agriculture, developing countries will effectively collapse the talks, because they cannot continue to condone a system that so obviously robs from the poor to give to the rich.

The CAP is a nasty mess, and Ireland’s leading role in grabbing short-term riches in spite of the lasting developmental damage to others is shameful.

Supachai Panitchpakdi, Director-General of the WTO, has announced today the establishment of “a Consultative Board of eminent persons to advise him on the challenges and opportunities confronting the organization and the multilateral trading system”. Here’s a list of the membership:

Mr. Peter Sutherland (Chairman of the Consultative Board)
Chairman, BP p.l.c.;
Director-General of the WTO, GATT (1993-95)

Professor Jagdish Bhagwati
University Professor, Columbia University

Dr. Kwesi Botchwey
Director, Africa Programs and Research, Harvard Centre for International Development; Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government (1998-2002); and Minister of Finance of Ghana (1982-95)

Mr. Niall W A FitzGerald KBE
Co-Chairman and CEO, Unilever

Professor Koichi Hamada
Professor of Economics, Yale University

Professor John Jackson
University Professor of Law, Georgetown University

Professor Celso Lafer
Professor of the Law School of the University of São Paulo; Minister of Foreign Relations of Brazil (2001-2002) and Ambassador, Permanent Representative of Brazil to the WTO (1995-98).

Professor Thierry de Montbrial
Founder and President of the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI)

Since leaving what is now Supachai’s post as WTO Director-General, Sutherland has amongst other things been chairman of Goldman Sachs, chairman of BP, consultant-for-hire on international trade, oh and Chair of the European Roundtable of Industrialists, a business lobby group that campaigns for trade liberalisation. I’m sure all that experience will come in handy.

Did I mention he’s the European chairman of the Trilateral Commission, the international talking-shop so beloved of windbag globalisers and conspiracy theorists alike? Well, he’s among friends, as two other members of this select group - Fitzgerald and Montbrial - are coincidentally also Trilateralistas.

There’s a few other patterns. Half the board is comprised of senior academics at prestigious North American universities. Two, Bhagwati and Hamada, served on a previous WTO Consultative Board. All, as far as I can see, are either gung-ho in favour of free trade or never publicly critical of the idea. The most bizarre coincidence, however, is that both Sutherland and Fitzgerald are graduates of little old University College Dublin, in Ireland (so am I, as it happens - maybe I should have applied for the job …).

Oh well. At least Celso Lafer is interesting - he’s written books on the philosophy of liberalism, Hannah Arendt, ‘The Jew in Gil Vicente’s plays’ and much more besides.

The General Accounting Office of the US Congress yesterday released an analysis of the ability of the IMF to anticipate, prevent and resolve financial crises.

Among other things, the report tries to meaure the IMF’s ‘forecast quality’ for 87 ‘Emerging Market Countries’ in successive World Economic Outlook reports (latest one here) between 1990 and 2001. It finds that

WEO forecasts for GDP and inflation demonstrated bias in about 20
percent of the country cases. The direction of the bias was upward for GDP
and downward for inflation, indicating an optimistic tendency within the
WEO forecasting process … [And] nearly 40 percent of the
country forecasts were no better than an assumption that next year’s value
is the same as this year’s.

I’d be a lot happier if the IMF simply got their forecasts a bit wrong in a fairly random fashion - some too optimistic, some too pessimistic. There’s worse vices than optimism, I suppose. But the IMF’s forecasts are used by others to judge its performance as steward of the globalising world economy, and as propaganda for globalisation in general. Things may be bad now, but look - they’ll pick up soon, because the fundamentals are sound. The problem is not that the IMF gets things wrong but that it gets things wrong in a systematically self-serving and misleading way.

Continuing the focus on Africa, Jeffrey Sachs writes in the latest issue of the IMF’s ‘Finance and Development‘ as part of a debate on the role of ‘institutions’ (stuff like administrative, legal and judicial systems) in development. His focus is on the role of geography (see his Tropical Underdevelopment for a fuller exposition). Large parts of Africa, says Sachs, have suffered because they are basically all hinterland - Sachs reproduces a passage from Adam Smith describing Sub-Sarahan Africa’s lamentable lack of inlets, close navigable rivers and trade-friendly seas and gulfs - and the constant presence of malaria hasn’t exactly helped either.

Sachs continues:

A poor coastal region near a natural harbor may be able to
initiate long-term growth precisely because few financial
resources are needed to build roads and port facilities to get
started. An equally poor landlocked region, however, may be
stuck in poverty in the absence of outside help. A major project
to construct roads and a port would most likely exceed local
financing possibilities and may well have a rate of return far
below the world market cost of capital. The market may be
right: it is unlikely to pay a market return to develop the hinter-land
without some kind of subsidy from the rest of the world.

Which is quite like what I was trying to say in my post below. The market won’t meet all of Africa’s developmental needs because a lot of it won’t be profitable, at least not in the short term and probably not even the medium term.

So just because it will be difficult and unprofitable does not mean we give up on the prospect of development in Africa. Sachs emphasises the importance of the Millennium Development Goals as a benchmark for all development-related policy, and how an ultimately quite small increase in aid from rich countries would do wonders in helping those goals be met:

The extra $125 billion a year that would become avail-able
if official development assistance were raised from the
current 0.2 percent of GNP to 0.7 percent of GNP should
easily be enough to enable all well-governed poor countries
to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. Like official
development assistance, debt-relief mechanisms have been
wholly inadequate to date.

By freeing our thinking from one-factor explanations and
understanding that poverty may have as much to do with
malaria as with the exchange rate, we will become much
more creative and expansive in our approach to the poorest
countries.

Hopefully we will also stop wasting time hoping that trade liberalisation in Africa will magically make everything okay.

Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni met George Bush this week, and criticised the trade rules that means Africa does not benefit enough from its coffee exports. Coffee is subject to ‘escalating tariffs’ in Western countries, meaning that the processed finished product is taxed far more highly than the raw material. The result is that the ‘value-added’ parts of the chain are all located in the West while Africa is stuck with the low-profit harvesting part. Here’s what Museveni said (story from AllAfrica.com:

“The value of the coffee market is 70 billion dollars. We coffee producing countries get 5 billion. Who takes the remaining 65 billion? — somebody else! Africans are being donors but they do it in ignorance.”

More:

Trade, not aid is what’s crucial for nations like Uganda, Museveni said. “I don’t want aid; I want trade. Aid cannot transform society. If I get aid it must be aid that enables me to trade.” He said the marketplace “and its discipline” can “set us free.” But trade barriers stand in the way, he said, pointing in particular to agricultural subsidies in Europe and the United States, which he said undercut Africa’s agricultural economy…

“You hear so much of poverty in Africa, but, in fact, Africa is a very rich continent. The only problem is that we must simply move the value to the outside. We export only raw materials, we don’t export value-added products.”

Writing in the Wall Street Journal (and reproduced here by the World Bank’s Devnews service), David Ignatius wonders why “Amid a world of rising trade flows and economic growth, Africa is going backward”.

“It seems”, he muses, “as if the protestors have it backward: Africa’s problem is not that it has too much connection to the global economy, but too little. It needs more globalization, not less”.

Like any such statement, that carries far too much baggage, so I’ll just start things off by saying what I think Africa really needs.

Africa, I think, needs unfair barriers to its exports in rich countries to be dropped. It needs rich-country export subsidies that destroy its indigenous agriculture stopped. (It’s a cliche, but what Africa really needs is fair trade and not free trade). Africa also, desperately, needs its unpayable and illegitimate debts cancelled, and it needs far more development aid from richer governments.

In short, it’s misleading (and typical of commentators on globalisation) to say that Africa needs ‘more globalisation’, as if globalisation is all the same, and all benign. Africa, clearly, needs the right kind of globalisation. I believe that requires recognising that Africa will not benefit from quick liberalisation, but instead needs protection, and sustained high investment in health, education, public services in general, and the social and physical infrastructure that underpins all succesful states and all succesful societies - because you can’t have a modern, succesful society without a modern, succesful state.

So Ignatius has got part of the solution when he says that Africa needs quota-free entry for its exports into America. As he writes, “That’s discriminatory and unfair to other nations, but so what? Africa needs some positive discrimination”. But it’s dishonest to only make the small part of the case for Africa that could be construed as supporting the free trade agenda, especially if you then feel justified in making statements like “Globalization is an inescapable and, to me, benign fact of life. But that case will be clearer when its magic finally touches Africa”.

His other suggestion is that

US taxes should be zero for repatriated profits on new investments in Africa by US companies. That will instantly make investing in Africa more attractive. The commission estimates that if coupled with local African tax reforms, an overall reduction in business taxes of 10 percentage points could lead to a 20 percent to 40 percent increase in non-energy investment in Africa—or an extra $800 million to $1.6 billion annually. For every dollar lost to the US Treasury, the commission calculates, there would be a benefit to Africans of five dollars.

Sounds interesting, but I wonder if a tax break will really stimulate that much private investment in Africa. What Africa really needs is the kind of investment that doesn’t count its profits in dollars alone.

I’ve been working on several recently published documents with the view of doing a medium-length analysis of each, but it’s taking a while. So while I’m at that, here’s links to each one so you can read ‘em for yourself.

Treacherous Conditions - How IMF and World Bank policies tied to debt relief are undermining development, by the World Development Movement. Argues that the policies attached to new loans and debt relief by the IMF and World Bank have been shown to be unsuccessful, unfair and undemocratic.

The International Poverty Trap by Charles Gore (UNDP). In the ninth article in this issue of the Development Policy Journal, Gore (lead author of the UNDP’s influential Least Developed Countries reports) looks at development in the context of the Millennium Development Goals. He finds that “If trade inequities continue, along with current debt burdens, developing countries will face almost insurmountable problems in reducing poverty”. It’s a very detailed and very significant piece, and well worth reading.

Did the G8 drop the debt?, by Jubilee Research and CAFOD. Finds that the HIPC programme of debt relief launched at 1999’s Cologne G8 summit has failed even on its own terms, and that many of the poorest countries in the world are slipping back into severe debt unsustainability. The failure of the programme is partly to do with G8 heel-dragging, partly due to non-cooperating creditors and partly to do with unrest and civil wars in target countries. But where real debt relief has occurred, real improvements have been made: “In 1998,debt service took up twice as much (in terms of resources)as spending on health in the ten HIPC countries for which data was available. Since then,spending on health has risen by 70% (and is now one third higher than debt repayments)and total social spending has risen by 20%”. If debt relief and debt cancellation are not seriously stepped up then the world cannot expect the poorest countries to make progress in addressing poverty and health issues.

Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs): a rough guide, by the Bretton Woods Project. A short briefing describing PRSPs, the new vehicle for policy conditionality devised in 1999 by the IMF and World Bank when the phrase ’structural adjustment’ lost its charm. Concludes that PRSPs don’t mark all that new a direction by the IMF and World Bank, and that they’re often still full of the same old imposed free market prescriptions.

EU hypocrisy unmasked: why EU trade policy hurts developmentOxfam on EU hypocrisy, by Oxfam UK. Not keen to see the US get all the stick, Oxfam have produced a short briefing showing how the EU are not only just as bad when it comes to actually helping those living in poverty in the South, they’re far also slyer than the US who frequently make no bones about being a shower of selfish wankers.

Did anything good really come out of the G8 Evian summit for people in the developing world? Not that I can see. Despite much talk before the summit of a moratorium on subsidies on exports to Least Developed Countries, even this most basic step proved too much for the rich men’s club. The Bush regime seemed horrified by such a suggestion, and the same went for Brazilian president Lula’s suggestion of a global arms tax, with the proceeds to go on development.

What’s so worrying is that modest schemes like these and attempts to fix the glaring injustices of agricultural subsidies are getting nowhere at all, while other central components of world development were off the agenda altogether. Unforgiveably, the G8 barely gave a thought to further debt relief, despite completely failing to deliver on a promise of $100bn in debt relief for the Third World that was totally inadequate even when it was made in 1999.

This is a crunch time for human development. AIDS is wiping out societies in Africa, livelihoods are being wrecked by debt and grossly unfair trade rules, inequality and resentment continue to grow around the world. The rich and the poor have agreed on a set of developmental milestones to be reached by 2015 (the Millennium Development Goals), but the rich countries refuse to take the steps to get there. This is not ignorance; it’s not even negligence. It is criminal, and we should not let the bastards get away with it.

Interesting opinion piece by Peter Scott in the Guardian yesterday. Coming away from an exhibition of Sebastião Salgado’s photographs, he begins thinking of the consequences of increasing comfort in the ‘First World’ and our increasing unwillingness to face the ‘human casualties’ of globalisation. Here’s an excerpt:

Universities are failing what used to be called the “Third World” in three ways.

First, our teaching and research programmes seem to have less and less to offer. Or, more fairly because there are many committed people and interesting things happening in universities, on global issues the intellectual high-ground has been abandoned to media-obsessed (and media-obsessing) thinktanks and high-class punditry. So instead of real research into economic development in Africa or Latin America, or a deep understanding of other political cultures, all that is on offer are hand-me-down, neoliberal economic theory and glib analyses of liberation movements demonised as the “other” of terrorism.

Of course, there are radical critiques of free-market globalisation. But they, too, are generated in alternative thinktanks attached to new social movements, which no longer see universities as friends, let alone bases. Or these critiques are the work of lonely intellectuals in whom, if they have an academic connection at all, universities no longer take pride, or even acknowledge their affiliation - perhaps because it might put off corporate stakeholders.

Second, higher education is obsessed by a very particular, and partial, discourse of globalisation. There are opportunities, for example coveted membership of an elite club of global universities or the successful import of more and more foreign talent to sustain our science and technology base - the so-called brain gain.

There are threats, for example the loss of Britain’s academic great-power status or the penetration of the domestic higher education market by foreign rivals as a result of GATS liberalisation.

But there is no hope, no humanity. The globalisation of hobnobbing with Harvard, beating the Aussies in the race for international students or boosting UK plc in the knowledge economy is dumb before Salgado’s portraits of dispossessed children. But universities seem unable to give voice to those other globalisations - global solidarities (of which Salgado’s Exodus was a shining example), global resistances to mass-market, neo-imperial culture, sustainable development in the face of World Bank imposed “free” markets.

Third, the university has allowed its role as social critic to atrophy - not critic in a negative sense, sneering at the “real world” of productive work and popular culture; but critic in a positive sense, conjuring up new visions and new worlds. It is no accident that universities were able better to engage with the “Third World” when they were more confident about their responsibility to act as just such a creative critic.

I’ve got a certain sympathy with this point of view. In my experience, too many in universities have viewed the erosion of democracy and public power in the name of globalisation with a certain self-satisfied pleasure - as if academics become more significant in a world of shrunken and neutralised politicians.

Development studies has had the political core squeezed out of it. It’s no longer about emancipation and empowerment, about replacing outdated and oppressive structures with societies that value every life equally. It’s about efficiency, property rights and stimulating foreign investment flows - economics for hot places. Sure, those things are important, but concentrating on phenomena like prices and FDI obscures the structural imbalances that are keeping the poor in poverty.

I think the London School of Economics is a good example. When I attended, the prevaling sense was of an elite academy - a place for smart people to come to learn how to run the future. In economics, management and politics the concern was all about policy and never about people, all about how a small group of people could best organise societies rather than broadening access to political power (better yet was to give up politics altogether and engineer the abandonment of society to market forces). Overall, I felt that many people at LSE wanted not to learn how to help people decide for themselves, but how to decide for them. It was a profoundly cynical and corrosive atmosphere, and the couple of academics who understood that development was all about the distribution of power seemed comically out of place.

(So why the hell did I go there? Because it had some teachers I wanted to study with, and because it seemed like a good excuse for leaving Ireland. I was lucky in that I ended up in a class with lots of other dodgy radicals, learned some interesting stuff and had some fun. So I can’t really complain too much)

Just to run with this a bit more, I think it’s a symptom of a wider social trend, ie the mainstreaming of conservatism in the guise of ‘pragmatism’. Today’s Guardian had a digest of ‘politics news from the alternative press’, which turned out to be all left-wing publications such as Red Pepper or New Internationalist. I hadn’t realised that ‘left-wing’ had become synonymous with ‘alternative’, but it’s quite a good trick. I think there’s a danger that gradually, progressive ideas of any kind will become seen as a kind of nice-but-not-very-realistic dreamery, wholly unsuited to the age of pragmatic, commonsense ideas like the Private Finance Initiative and free trade.

Not content with retrospectively dissing his own free trade policy, Stephen Byers has been revealing more of the ideas that would have made him an excellent minister if he had hung around / had the courage and ability to actually implement them.

This week he’s been talking about a favourite subject of mine, social housing in England. The present government says it wants to improve the condition of run-down council housing, but only as long as it stops being council housing. If a council wants to meet the exacting ‘Decent Homes Standard’ it can transfer ownership of its stock to a private housing association, or it can borrow money (guaranteed by the government) through the Private Finance Initiative or by forming what’s known as an Arm’s Length Management Organisation (or ALMO: these are basically local authority organisations without any chance of those nasty councillors getting involved).

What it can’t do is retain ownership and management of its housing stock and expect the government to give it any money or guarantee any loans. Even if it’s a high-performing council that does an excellent job? Yep. Even if the tenants who actually live in the houses have rejected stock transfer, PFI or ALMO in favour of council stock retention? Even then.

The government has refused to justify this policy of blackmail - if you want a decent house do as we say - but now Byers says, in an interview with Inside Housing that when he was housing minister he wanted to give councils the option of stock retention with increased borrowing powers.

Fine, well done, but the government still isn’t listening. To anyone - not Byers, not Hammersmith and Fulham’s excellent tenant-led Housing Commission. This is one of the most significant, far-reaching, epoch-making social policies issues of today, and they’re just not bloody listening.

[edit: I’ll be writing a much more in-depth analysis of Labour’s social housing policy in the near future. You lucky, lucky things.]

I’m slightly bored at the moment so I’m going to break with tradition and go off-topic for a while.

Tonight’s brief jaunt through the blogosphere has led to my discovering GeoURL.org, a rather excellent project which lists and links sites by their real-world geographical ‘location’. Thanks to which I know that my internet next-door neighbour is the eponymous heroine of Alisonwheeler.com.

GeoURL.org also provides maps indicating the distribution of the 11,950 websites in its database. The vast, vast majority are in the US and Europe. Looking for the most isolated examples turns up Lucas Amaro and, from there, his pals at the very weird NukeTheWhales.com.

Then again, maybe there’s a few mistakes in the database. I’m pretty sure Cole Furniture isn’t “about 219 miles SW of Korla, China”.

Enough of all that, I think. I’m working on a couple of big articles for this site, which is one of the reasons there hasn’t been much activity in the past week. Just one, though.