Monthly Archives: May 2008

Shifting Tectonic Plates

Posted on by
16

The American continent is about to get its first high-speed train. Where?

Argentina.

Argentina on Tuesday signed a contract with a consortium led by Alstom of France to build the first high-speed train in the Americas, linking Buenos Aires with the cities of Rosario and Córdoba in three hours, nearly a fifth of the current journey time.

Patrick Kron, Alstom’s chairman and chief executive, said construction would start before the end of the year and last for four years. Alstom, which designed and built France’s TGV, Spain’s AVE and South Korea’s KTX, is providing the rolling stock, signalling and maintenance to the Veloxia consortium, which also includes Iecsa and Emepa of Argentina and Spain’s Isolux Corsan.

The total project, financed by French bank Natixis, will cost some $3.7bn and Argentina will issue 30-year debt. Alstom’s share of the project is worth around $1.7bn. The project is five to eight times cheaper than similar ones in France or Spain, Alstom says.

How long before Sarko shows up to offer them a nuclear power station? Alstom and Areva: two great French quasi-state industries that taste great together. And Argentine railway bonds – now there’s Edwardian for you…

Oh Dear Oh Dear

Posted on by
2

The Georgians may have lost two more UAVs in the escalating crisis between them, Abkhazia, and Russia (in so far as the latter two are distinct). At least, the Abkhaz side is claiming that their “anti-aircraft forces” shot down two drones, presumably Georgian ones; the Georgians deny it, which is interesting because they were keen to publicise the last such incident. Back on the 20th of April, the Georgians lost another UAV to a MiG-29 fighter – subtext, to the Russians, as no-one seriously believes Abkhazia operates an independent air force and certainly not one equipped with modern fighters. (They claim to have some Czech-made L39 fighter/trainers.) You can see the video here, complete with MiG-29 and missile.

Shootings-down of aircraft are always overclaimed, so it’s possible that everyone is wrong. The Russians suggested that the video actually shows a “NATO MiG-29″ (which isn’t actually impossible – Germany has some left over from the DDR), but no-one is convinced. If today’s statement is true, one has to wonder what the Georgians are up to as well – the drones in question are rather expensive Israeli Elbit Hermes-450s, and Georgia has only a couple of dozen. If they are deliberately testing the other side or seeking a provocation, they must really mean it.

Zeitgeist

Posted on by
1

Jason Burke of the Observer reports that the next few days are expected to bring the indictment of people involved in Ergenekon. Ergenekon? Well, if you read AFOE you’ll already know that Ergenekon is a secret extreme-right network of influence within the Turkish elite, suspected of being behind a succession of acts of violence, which came to light after the chance discovery of a stash of weapons. The prosecution alleges that the aim of the organisation was to bring about a military coup through a campaign of assassinations and terrorism intended to destabilise the Erdogan government to the point where the army could plausibly intervene.

Or not. According to one of the suspects’ lawyers:

‘There is not a shred of truth in them,’ he said. ‘This is 100 per cent political. It has all been cooked up by the government and by the imperialist powers, the CIA, Mossad and the Jewish lobby and the European Union to eliminate Turkish nationalism. There is no such thing as Ergenekon.’ His imprisoned client, Kemal Kerincsiz, told The Observer in an interview prior to his arrest he was a ‘patriot fighting the disintegration of the nation’.

The government, the imperialists, the CIA, Mossad, the Jews, and the EU all at once? Wow, it’s like one of our Macedonia threads but with real people. Read the whole thing; perhaps the most worrying suggestion is that the respectable nationalist party wants to invade Syria and share it out with Iraq. Right. But then, who can say what is sane?

Here’s Martin Jacques in the Guardian, regarding Italy. Now I usually have next to no time for Jacques, a character whose usual spiel is to write thousands of words about how Asian supermen are our rightful masters, and this is entirely unconnected with his current sinecure at a university in any given authoritarian state in Asia. But I think he has a point. Specifically:

This was demonstrated by the manner in which the supporters of Gianni Alemanno, the new mayor of Rome, a man steeled [s/b "steeped"?] in the fascist tradition, celebrated his victory in the Campidoglio with fascist salutes and cries of “Duce, Duce!”, just as Mussolini was once acclaimed by his adherents. Or the way in which Berlusconi felt able to declare, in response to the victory, that “we are the new Falange” – the name given to the fascist party in Spain in the 1930s. Or the fact that Umberto Bossi, at the first session of parliament, threatened violence if the centre-left did not acquiesce in its plans for federalism. “I don’t know what the left wants [but] we are ready,” he told reporters. “If they want conflicts, I have 300,000 men always on hand.” Or the fashion in which Gianfranco Fini, during a public walkabout with his followers in support of Alemanno, demanded to see immigrants’ residence permits, while Alemanno threatens to expel 20,000 immigrants from the capital, who he claims have broken the law, and shut illegal Roma encampments; with Bossi is no less vitriolic in his attitude towards immigrants..

Duce. Falange. Boasts of a party army. Recreational police harassment. There is something ugly in here, no? Having been responsible for suggesting that Berlusconi might just refuse to leave office last time round, I think I can claim dibs on this; there is something distinctly disturbing in the air.

You think? Here’s a British Conservative getting his fash on:

“This is like the March on Rome in 1922,” one shadow minister said as Johnson inched towards victory. Johnson will not march into London’s City Hall surrounded by blackshirts in the manner of Benito Mussolini’s supporters when they staged their coup d’état in 1920s Italy. But the lighthearted reference to 1922 gave a taste of the high Tory spirits.

I bet it did. I have a pet theory, which is that the crazier your housing market went after 2001, the weirder your politics did – the US, Australia, Spain, the UK, Italy. Compare the other northern European economies – far less crazy crazy finance, and much less weirdness more generally.

And, as if you needed confirmation of the strange times, Prachanda says it’s a triumph for global communism. Well, it’s a bit like being a Keighley fan; every win feels like the cup final.

Update: You think this isn’t serious? Heads get twisted.

Alexander von Humboldt Ate My Hamster

Posted on by
Reply

This post reminded me a lot of Vienna University in 2001-2002; I was there as a SOCRATES student, still actually a member of the Labour Party, while the strange times we live in began. I also first encountered the word “blog” around about then, and indeed visited the Blogger front page, but for some reason I didn’t take the jump to actually get blogging; I therefore bear some responsibility for Instapundit’s undeserved fame.

What do I remember, of the pre-Bologna German university? Well, one thing was the teaching staff, or rather their absence; you could go literally weeks without seeing your professor outside the huge lectures, but why would you want to? Their pompous titles were only matched by their pomposity in general. This didn’t go so much for the postgraduate assistants, but then, there’s only so often you actually want a row about Trotsky…

Another thing was the distinctive Austrian combination of bureaucracy and chaos. It took literally months to complete the process of registration, but it wasn’t as if anyone cared – I often wondered how many of my fellow students bothered to register at all, and how many weren’t even planning to graduate. This Gormenghast atmosphere was only reinforced by the fact I had lectures in the main university building on Dr. Karl Lueger Ring; within the 1870s Italianate monster was a world of high ceilings and flaking plaster, lectures where so many people were packed in the hall that I recall sitting behind a projection booth with my back to the lecturer.

In the entrance hall, there is a huge stone first world war memorial which is kept concealed by noticeboards because it’s ideologically significant to the Burschenschafter on one hand, and the political science crowd on the other. There was a weekly confrontation between the two groups next to it; what with the FPO and Co, we spent a lot of time demonstrating in one way or other. Above all, there was a sense of an academic life left behind, after the ideas and the people had moved on; the plaque commemorating Moritz Schlick, the philosopher murdered during a lecture by a Nazi student, just dramatised this.

Now, partly this was all sui generis. I would guess things were very different down the road at the TU with the engineers. But I do think it represents something like an extreme version of the German system, or rather its (powerful) humanities-plus-Staatsexamen wing. And I wouldn’t feel too nostalgic for it.

But I will, however, remember very well the excellent course which shadowed the European Convention process, protesting on the Ring, telling Robert Menasse he was an idiot…

Does God love Romania?

Posted on by
Reply

It would take a stand-alone blog to track the daily utterances of George Bush but here he is in St Louis today talking about his visits to Romania –

And they had just been accepted into NATO, and the President asked me and Laura to go, and there was 225,000 people, more or less, in the town square to see the American President. And it was raining.

Now, the interesting thing from my perspective was that I was here, and there was a balcony lit in the town square, and I was told this was where the tyrant Ceausescu and his wife had made their last public appearance. And the story has it that he — somebody started chanting, “Liar,” and he realized his power was slipping away, and then he tried to get out of there, and anyway, he was done in by the people. They were tired of him; he was a brutal guy.

And so that was my line of sight. And the President introduced me, and just as I got up to speak, a full rainbow appeared. And it was a startling moment. And I turned back — Laura was like — I went, look, baby, look up there. And so when I pointed up, 225,000 heads flipped around to look at the rainbow. I then ad-libbed, “God is smiling on Bucharest.” And the reason I did is because the rainbow ended right behind the balcony where the tyrant had given his last speech. Liberty is transformative, and it will yield the peace we want.

There’s a lot of Bush’s personality in that little anecdote: a self-serving mysticism, his remembering that he had departed from his script (which must therefore be a rare event) and linking God specifically to political freedom.  One wonders if God left Bucharest the same time he did.