From the eXile, a back-to-school quiz. (Includes rude bits.)
I had to ask my Armenian colleague to explain some of it, which was difficult for her as she was laughing too hard.
Monthly Archives: September 2005
Interests meme
From
Look at your LJ “interests” list. If you have fewer than 50 interests, pick every fifth one. If you have between fifty and seventy-five interests, pick every seventh one. If you have over seventy-five interests, pick every tenth one. If you have fewer than ten, pick all of ’em. List them on your LJ, and tell everyone exactly what it is about these things that interests you so much.
A funny result this: seven writers (five female, two male); three works of literature; two places; and two closely linked leisure activities. It would be interesting to try this again, with 14 interests picked at random. But anyway, here we are:
Enlightened? I hope so.
Pink Floyd/Bush montage
This is awfully good, though no doubt all of you have seen it already.
Long weekend over
I’ve realised I quite often do a Sunday night update reflecting on the week just past, which is perhaps not a bad habit to get into.
Great to then take the day off. Having driven all weekend two weeks ago, then four pretty intense days in the office, then seven days on the road, I would have fallen over if I’d gone into the office on Friday. Also it was U’s first day at school so I needed to be around really. I seemed to have a few days’ leave left, so enhanced family time is probably the nest way to use it.
My Grand Plan for the rest of this calendar year is to bring order to the house. Too many boxes are sitting around unsorted, some from when I changed job in 2002, some from when we moved here in 2001, some from when we moved to Belgium in 1999; I dread to think what may be in them. I’ve got through two big ones this weekend, and found all kinds of things, for instance an unanswered postcard from ten years ago – I googled the sender, found a likely email address, and sent a quick “Hi, sorry I didn’t reply in 1994” type message. Maybe I’ll hear back.
Also went to IKEA on Friday to buy some more bookshelves (mysteriously the shelves we have appear to have more than filled up). Orignally the plan was to put them in F’s room but he didn’t really want them, and in fact there’s a much better argument for them going into ours.
I tried to replace my lost clothes on Saturday, and then K (who is on livejournal but never uses his account) came down from Antwerp and we watched Alien, the Director’s Cut – frankly I don’t know the film well enough to spot the differences but I enjoyed it as ever.
Today was the annual village fete, an enjoyable event which I’ll try and remember to invite people to come along to next year. I’ll also remember to get a babysitter; we had to go in shifts with F, but did some decent shopping for the grownups (a Thunderbirds video for me, a Rubik’s cube for Anne).
Feeling very tired now, but ready for the week ahead.
Ann’Sannat – “Welcome into the Morning”
Last time I was in Moldova, I was telling a friend about the Belgrade band, The Orthodox Celts, who are a completely Serbian group playing completely Irish music. She responded that Moldova has its own equivalent, and promptly copied for me a CD of Ann’Sannat’s album, “Welcome into the Morning”.
It took me almost a year, but I finally listened to it this morning, and really liked it. Unfortunately the copying was a bit wonky on the final tracks, so I thought, I’ll see if I can buy one over the internet. Amazon, astonishingly, has not heard of Ann’Sannat. Luckily they do have a website, and I clicked on the “buy the CD” link with great anticipation…
…only to find that it simply lists the three shops in Chişinău which stock the CD. I shall have to rethink my strategy.
You might say that, but I couldn’t possibly comment…
In a certain unnamed country, there was an incident a few months ago when the President’s motorcade was bombed as he was driving through the capital. I asked a senior international official about this recently. He said:
“Well, the amount of explosives used wasn’t enough to cause any serious injury to the car or even to bystanders; which is surprising in a country like this, where they know very well how to make bombs.
“And when we got hold of the video from the President’s security guards, who were in the car behind, filming the President’s car and the crowds around it, they wouldn’t give us the version with the sound track. When we did get it from another source, we were very interested to notice that none of the guards reacted – even to the extent of saying “shit!” – at the bomb attack on the President’s car which they were supposed to be guarding.”
“So,” I asked, “your conclusion is…???”
“Our investigations are still ongoing,” the official replied, poker-faced. It’s obviously not in his personal interests to come out and say on or off the record that the President’s own security team bombed their own motorcade, let alone speculate about why. But he was very happy to leave us the impression that he thinks that is precisely what happened.
(This isn’t especially new material, as we had about two thirds of the story in our last report on the country in question published a few months ago; but it’s always good to get it confirmed by someone at senior level.)
Refugees?
I like this [Elijah] Cummings guy, but what’s this shtick about not calling people displaced by Katrina “refugees”? “These are not refugees, they are Americans, they pay taxes.”
Excuse me?
What do these people think “regular” refugees are? Chopped liver? They’re human beings. What is it, Americans are something loftier and better than, say, tsunami victims in Sri Lanka?
I’m not being disingenuous. I know that they are trying not to get this poor sods get any more labelled. But the net effect is to add some baggage to a word, ie “refugee”, that didn’t carry it until yesterday.
Most of the replies to her post make the technical point that to be considered a refugee by international law you have to have been displaced across a recognised international frontier; otherwise you are an “internally displaced person”. This is vocabulary I’m very much accustomed to at work, for obvious reasons. In Nagorno-Karabakh, for instance, maybe a million people were driven from their homes during the conflict, but the only ones who count as refugees are the couple of hundred thousand who fled to Armenia; those who ended up elsewhere in Azerbaijan are IDP’s.
But this is specialised stuff for those of us who deal in international relations for a living. On the broader point,
Ms. Watson and others also took issue with the word “refugee” being used to describe hurricane victims.
“‘Refugee’ calls up to mind people that come from different lands and have to be taken care of. These are American citizens,” Ms. Watson said. [Can’t find the line about taxes, maybe it was on TV only]
Elijah Cummings added, “they are not refugees. I hate that word.”
On the one hand, perhaps Diane Watson is trying to make the technical distinction referred to above – she has actually visited refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border, after all, whose inhabitants fled the denocidal horrors of Darfur. On the other, Cummings’ riposte has definite nuances of “refugee” being a stigmatised word; that “refugees” are never people like us.
Well, they are. One of my earliest memories is of waking up late at night to find my mother moving around my room gathering up cuddly toys. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was getting things “for the refugees”. It was years before I worked out what must have been going on. This must have been in August 1971, when over 2,000 people were intimidated out of their houses in Belfast, with one of the areas of concentrated violence being the Suffolk area of West Belfast, a mile and a half from where we lived, and people taking refuge, among other places, in the school which I would later attend. (Overall during the Troubles, 30 or 40 thousand people in Northern Ireland were forced to move from their homes, the biggest forced population movement in Europe between 1945 and Nagorno-Karabakh.) [Edited to add: Oops, forgot Cyprus there. But it’s certainly the biggest forced population movement in Western Europe since 1945.]
I remember also Serb spokesmen during the Kosovo in 1999 attempting to convince the international community that the massive flow of people from Kosovo were not “really” refugees because they had cars and decent clothes. As the Serbs of Kosovo were to find out only a few months later, refugee status can hit anyone regardless of their level of material possessions.
Of course it’s desperate and demoralising when your country’s ability to look after its own citizens has deteriorated to the extent that hundreds of thousands are forced from their homes, whether the culprit is Man or Nature. If we have to use the word “refugee” to bring home to people just how deperate the situation is, then we should do it. There, but for the grace of God, goes any of us.
Sveti Naum
Thanks to
Note in particular Misha Glenny and Enver Hoxhaj performing the feat of bilocation, which in some eccesiastical jurisdictions qualifies you for sainthood!
What I’ve been doing
Spent last weekend at a conference in the utterly beautiful surroundings of Lake Ohrid, in the southwestern corner of Macedonia.
Here is the fortress and basilica overlooking the old city:
And the church of Sveti Jovan Kaneo, which we have a painting of in our front room:
Tried to take a decent picture of the church at Sveti Naum, but it wouldn’t fit; if anyone better at photo editing than me feels like combining these three into a composite, please do.
Bagpiper at Ohrid
Springs at Sveti Naum
Our boat trip from Sveti Naum to Ohrid
Just a few pictures from the rest of the trip:
You don’t get a lot of white Europeans who are leaders of small Islamic sects. But it’s important to remember that you do get some.
And here is the local national heroine, though of course she was born in what is now Macedonia rather than what is now Kosovo:
And finally back in Skopje, here’s the Macedonian government building where the Prime Minister’s office is, and a rather obscure visitor in front.
September Books 1) Emergency Sex
1) Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures), by Kenneth Cain, Heidi Postlethwait, and Andrew Thomson
The title here is pretty misleading, in that there’s not a lot of sex in it. But it’s a very interesting book nonetheless, as three UN workers, two American and one New Zealander, one a doctor, one a lawyer and one a former social worker, reflect in intense narrative form what it was actually like on a human level to participate in the UN peacekeeping missions of the mid 1990s – success (as it seemed at the time) in Cambodia; humiliation in Somalia; failure in Rwanda; intervention too late in Bosnia, Haiti and Liberia. For all three, their initial sense of idealism and optimism about the mission of the international community in general and the UN and US in particular faded once confronted by the brutal realities of life in the field and incompetent, uncomprehending superiors. There are grim, horrible, memorable descriptions of prisons and mass graves, and honest descriptions of the hedonistic methods of relaxation (security situation permitting) once out of the office at the end of the day.
A very interesting book. Doesn’t speak completely to my own experience – I’ve never actually served in a war zone (growing up in Belfast is pretty small beer compared to the situations described here), or worked in any official government or intergovernmental capacity, or (thank God) had particularly incompetent or uncomprehending bosses to deal with. Also, I have always had an instinctive cynicism about international interventions – it never comes as a surprise to me when national or institutional interests, rather than the actual conditions on the ground, take over the agenda, whereas for Cain, Postlethwait and Thomson it seems to erode the very core of their raisons d’être. It is, of course, deeply frustrating when that happens, and one of the things I love about my job is that we are funnelling information about the situation on the ground directly to the people at the top so as to try and distract them from their national or institutional agendas. And sometimes we succeed.
Stratfor on Katrina
Friends-locked, because it’s copyright; cut-tags because the two pieces are long; but very interesting analysis, looking at the geopolitical implications of this appalling tragedy:
A Category 5 hurricane, the most severe type measured, Katrina has been reported heading directly toward the city of New Orleans. This would be a human catastrophe, since New Orleans sits in a bowl below sea level. However, Katrina is not only moving on New Orleans. It also is moving on the Port of Southern Louisiana. Were it to strike directly and furiously, Katrina would not only take a massive human toll, but also an enormous geopolitical one.
The Port of Southern Louisiana is the fifth-largest port in the world in terms of tonnage, and the largest port in the United States. The only global ports larger are Singapore, Rotterdam, Shanghai and Hong Kong. It is bigger than Houston, Chiba and Nagoya, Antwerp and New York/New Jersey. It is a key link in U.S. imports and exports and critical to the global economy.
The Port of Southern Louisiana stretches up and down the Mississippi River for about 50 miles, running north and south of New Orleans from St. James to St. Charles Parish. It is the key port for the export of grains to the rest of the world — corn, soybeans, wheat and animal feed. Midwestern farmers and global consumers depend on those exports. The United States imports crude oil, petrochemicals, steel, fertilizers and ores through the port. Fifteen percent of all U.S. exports by value go through the port. Nearly half of the exports go to Europe.
The Port of Southern Louisiana is a river port. It depends on the navigability of the Mississippi River. The Mississippi is notorious for changing its course, and in southern Louisiana — indeed along much of its length — levees both protect the land from its water and maintain its course and navigability. Dredging and other maintenance are constant and necessary to maintain its navigability. It is fragile.
If New Orleans is hit, the Port of Southern Louisiana, by definition, also will be hit. No one can predict the precise course of the storm or its consequences. However, if we speculate on worse-case scenarios the following consequences jump out:
- The port might become in whole or part unusable if levees burst. If the damage to the river and port facilities could not be repaired within 30 days when the U.S. harvests are at their peak, the effect on global agricultural prices could be substantial.
- There is a large refinery at Belle Chasse. It is the only refinery that is seriously threatened by the storm, but if it were to be inundated, 250,000 barrels per day would go off line. Moreover, the threat of environmental danger would be substantial.
- About 2 percent of world crude production and roughly 25 percent of U.S.-produced crude comes from the Gulf of Mexico and already is affected by Katrina. Platforms in the path of Katrina have been evacuated but others continue pumping. If this follows normal patterns, most production will be back on line within hours or days. However, if a Category 5 hurricane (of which there have only been three others in history) has a different effect, the damage could be longer lasting. Depending on the effect on the Port of Southern Louisiana, the ability to ship could be affected.
- A narrow, two-lane highway that handles approximately 10,000 vehicles a day, is used for transport of cargo and petroleum products and provides port access for thousands of employees is threatened with closure. A closure of as long as two weeks could rapidly push gasoline prices higher.
At a time when oil prices are in the mid-60-dollar range and starting to hurt, the hurricane has an obvious effect. However, it must be borne in mind that the Mississippi remains a key American shipping route, particularly for the export and import of a variety of primary commodities from grain to oil, as well as steel and rubber. Andrew Jackson fought hard to keep the British from taking New Orleans because he knew it was the main artery for U.S. trade with the world. He was right and its role has not changed since then.
This is not a prediction. We do not know the path of the storm and we cannot predict its effects. It is a warning that if a Category 5 hurricane hits the Port of Southern Louisiana and causes the damage that is merely at the outer reach of the probable, the effect on the global system will be substantial.
Hurricane Katrina: Crunch Time
Hurricane Katrina continues to rage over southern Louisiana. The storm already has left the primary oil and natural gas production regions and is assaulting the mainland itself.
First, the good news. An 11th hour burst of relatively dry air succeeded in taking (a touch of) the wind out of Katrina’s sails. In technical terms, this means the storm has been downgraded to a Category 3 hurricane; however, as of 10 a.m. local time, 100 mile-per-hour winds are still hitting New Orleans.
Another small bit of good information is that the storm did shift course to the east in the early hours of Aug. 29 and is traveling due north. Though parts of New Orleans will still be in the “eyewall” — the most dangerous part of the storm — the city itself seems posed to just barely avoid a direct hit. As of 9:30 a.m. local time, Katrina’s eye was even with New Orleans on an east-west axis
Very soon, the focus will shift from stunned awe at Mother Nature’s raw power to the dreary and painstaking work of damage assessment and repair. The storm passed directly over the Mississippi River’s mouth, raising the prospect that the main channel has shifted. Such a development would delay the reopening of the river until the channel could be resurveyed and likely dredged. Depending on the silting, that could take a few hours — or a few weeks. Add in damage to critical energy infrastructure and initial damage estimates, before a single assessor has put foot on soggy Louisianan ground, are at a floor of $30 billion.
It is difficult to predict the damage — and impossible to underestimate the significance — of what the United States faces. The city of New Orleans, the Port of South Louisiana and Port Fourchon combined serve as the hub of trade and energy collection and distribution for the middle third of the country. All have been hit — and hit badly. But, for a few hours, we will not know specifically how badly.
Which means that we are now in the realm of logistics, and if what few scattered reports out of New Orleans are correct, there will be few people available to do the work necessary to repair the damage.
The northwest quadrant of the hurricane is currently whipping waves south and southwest across Lake Pontchartrain. With storm surges expected to hit as high as 20 feet — before the waves are taken into account — the expectations are that water is already gushing across the northern levees protecting New Orleans from the Mississippi. Needless to say, no one is standing on said levees reporting live. The world will have to wait a couple of hours until winds drop back into the double digits before a few brave souls can venture out and assess how bad a shape the city is in — particularly whether the levees held at all.
That remains the question. In addition to the humanitarian disaster — there are scattered reports that several evacuation centers have sustained heavy damage — there is at least one report of a barge breaking free of its moorings. Should it strike the levee in the current conditions, the rupture would put the viability of the city in doubt. At present, there is at least one report that one levee has been breached already, although it is not clear if the barge caused the breach.
Assuming that all were well in the world and that the New Orleans pump system were safe above water (it is not), operating at full capacity the city could drain itself in three weeks. A more likely figure is six months. If New Orleans is out of the equation, then repair efforts will need to be based from further inland at a slow pace and higher cost. The next few days will be a race against time to get everything in working order again. What is not clear at this point is whether there will even be a city from which to base the effort.
By George Friedman
The American political system was founded in Philadelphia, but the American nation was built on the vast farmlands that stretch from the Alleghenies to the Rockies. That farmland produced the wealth that funded American industrialization: It permitted the formation of a class of small landholders who, amazingly, could produce more than they could consume. They could sell their excess crops in the east and in Europe and save that money, which eventually became the founding capital of American industry.
But it was not the extraordinary land nor the farmers and ranchers who alone set the process in motion. Rather, it was geography — the extraordinary system of rivers that flowed through the Midwest and allowed them to ship their surplus to the rest of the world. All of the rivers flowed into one — the Mississippi — and the Mississippi flowed to the ports in and around one city: New Orleans. It was in New Orleans that the barges from upstream were unloaded and their cargos stored, sold and reloaded on ocean-going vessels. Until last Sunday, New Orleans was, in many ways, the pivot of the American economy.
For that reason, the Battle of New Orleans in January 1815 was a key moment in American history. Even though the battle occurred after the War of 1812 was over, had the British taken New Orleans, we suspect they wouldn’t have given it back. Without New Orleans, the entire Louisiana Purchase would have been valueless to the United States. Or, to state it more precisely, the British would control the region because, at the end of the day, the value of the Purchase was the land and the rivers – which all converged on the Mississippi and the ultimate port of New Orleans. The hero of the battle was Andrew Jackson, and when he became president, his obsession with Texas had much to do with keeping the Mexicans away from New Orleans.
During the Cold War, a macabre topic of discussion among bored graduate students who studied such things was this: If the Soviets could destroy one city with a large nuclear device, which would it be? The usual answers were Washington or New York. For me, the answer was simple: New Orleans. If the Mississippi River was shut to traffic, then the foundations of the economy would be shattered. The industrial minerals needed in the factories wouldn’t come in, and the agricultural wealth wouldn’t flow out. Alternative routes really weren’t available. The Germans knew it too: A U-boat campaign occurred near the mouth of the Mississippi during World War II. Both the Germans and Stratfor have stood with Andy Jackson: New Orleans was the prize.
Last Sunday, nature took out New Orleans almost as surely as a nuclear strike. Hurricane Katrina’s geopolitical effect was not, in many ways, distinguishable from a mushroom cloud. The key exit from North America was closed. The petrochemical industry, which has become an added value to the region since Jackson’s days, was at risk. The navigability of the Mississippi south of New Orleans was a question mark. New Orleans as a city and as a port complex had ceased to exist, and it was not clear that it could recover.
The Ports of South Louisiana and New Orleans, which run north and south of the city, are as important today as at any point during the history of the republic. On its own merit, POSL is the largest port in the United States by tonnage and the fifth-largest in the world. It exports more than 52 million tons a year, of which more than half are agricultural products — corn, soybeans and so on. A large proportion of U.S. agriculture flows out of the port. Almost as much cargo, nearly 17 million tons, comes in through the port — including not only crude oil, but chemicals and fertilizers, coal, concrete and so on.
A simple way to think about the New Orleans port complex is that it is where the bulk commodities of agriculture go out to the world and the bulk commodities of industrialism come in. The commodity chain of the global food industry starts here, as does that of American industrialism. If these facilities are gone, more than the price of goods shifts: The very physical structure of the global economy would have to be reshaped. Consider the impact to the U.S. auto industry if steel doesn’t come up the river, or the effect on global food supplies if U.S. corn and soybeans don’t get to the markets.
The problem is that there are no good shipping alternatives. River transport is cheap, and most of the commodities we are discussing have low value-to-weight ratios. The U.S. transport system was built on the assumption that these commodities would travel to and from New Orleans by barge, where they would be loaded on ships or offloaded. Apart from port capacity elsewhere in the United States, there aren’t enough trucks or rail cars to handle the long-distance hauling of these enormous quantities — assuming for the moment that the economics could be managed, which they can’t be.
The focus in the media has been on the oil industry in Louisiana and Mississippi. This is not a trivial question, but in a certain sense, it is dwarfed by the shipping issue. First, Louisiana is the source of about 15 percent of U.S.-produced petroleum, much of it from the Gulf. The local refineries are critical to American infrastructure. Were all of these facilities to be lost, the effect on the price of oil worldwide would be extraordinarily painful. If the river itself became unnavigable or if the ports are no longer functioning, however, the impact to the wider economy would be significantly more severe. In a sense, there is more flexibility in oil than in the physical transport of these other commodities.
There is clearly good news as information comes in. By all accounts, the Louisiana Offshore Oil Port, which services supertankers in the Gulf, is intact. Port Fourchon, which is the center of extraction operations in the Gulf, has sustained damage but is recoverable. The status of the oil platforms is unclear and it is not known what the underwater systems look like, but on the surface, the damage – though not trivial — is manageable.
The news on the river is also far better than would have been expected on Sunday. The river has not changed its course. No major levees containing the river have burst. The Mississippi apparently has not silted up to such an extent that massive dredging would be required to render it navigable. Even the port facilities, although apparently damaged in many places and destroyed in few, are still there. The river, as transport corridor, has not been lost.
What has been lost is the city of New Orleans and many of the residential suburban areas around it. The population has fled, leaving behind a relatively small number of people in desperate straits. Some are dead, others are dying, and the magnitude of the situation dwarfs the resources required to ameliorate their condition. But it is not the population that is trapped in New Orleans that is of geopolitical significance: It is the population that has left and has nowhere to return to.
The oil fields, pipelines and ports required a skilled workforce in order to operate. That workforce requires homes. They require stores to buy food and other supplies. Hospitals and doctors. Schools for their children. In other words, in order to operate the facilities critical to the United States, you need a workforce to do it — and that workforce is gone. Unlike in other disasters, that workforce cannot return to the region because they have no place to live. New Orleans is gone, and the metropolitan area surrounding New Orleans is either gone or so badly damaged that it will not be inhabitable for a long time.
It is possible to jury-rig around this problem for a short time. But the fact is that those who have left the area have gone to live with relatives and friends. Those who had the ability to leave also had networks of relationships and resources to manage their exile. But those resources are not infinite — and as it becomes apparent that these people will not be returning to New Orleans any time soon, they will be enrolling their children in new schools, finding new jobs, finding new accommodations. If they have any insurance money coming, they will collect it. If they have none, then — whatever emotional connections they may have to their home — their economic connection to it has been severed. In a very short time, these people will be making decisions that will start to reshape population and workforce patterns in the region.
A city is a complex and ongoing process – one that requires physical infrastructure to support the people who live in it and people to operate that physical infrastructure. We don’t simply mean power plants or sewage treatment facilities, although they are critical. Someone has to be able to sell a bottle of milk or a new shirt. Someone has to be able to repair a car or do surgery. And the people who do those things, along with the infrastructure that supports them, are gone — and they are not coming back anytime soon.
It is in this sense, then, that it seems almost as if a nuclear weapon went off in New Orleans. The people mostly have fled rather than died, but they are gone. Not all of the facilities are destroyed, but most are. It appears to us that New Orleans and its environs have passed the point of recoverability. The area can recover, to be sure, but only with the commitment of massive resources from outside — and those resources would always be at risk to another Katrina.
The displacement of population is the crisis that New Orleans faces. It is also a national crisis, because the largest port in the United States cannot function without a city around it. The physical and business processes of a port cannot occur in a ghost town, and right now, that is what New Orleans is. It is not about the facilities, and it is not about the oil. It is about the loss of a city’s population and the paralysis of the largest port in the United States.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The United States historically has depended on the Mississippi and its tributaries for transport. Barges navigate the river. Ships go on the ocean. The barges must offload to the ships and vice versa. There must be a facility to empower this exchange. It is also the facility where goods are stored in transit. Without this port, the river can’t be used. Protecting that port has been, from the time of the Louisiana Purchase, a fundamental national security issue for the United States.
Katrina has taken out the port — not by destroying the facilities, but by rendering the area uninhabited and potentially uninhabitable. That means that even if the Mississippi remains navigable, the absence of a port near the mouth of the river makes the Mississippi enormously less useful than it was. For these reasons, the United States has lost not only its biggest port complex, but also the utility of its river transport system — the foundation of the entire American transport system. There are some substitutes, but none with sufficient capacity to solve the problem.
It follows from this that the port will have to be revived and, one would assume, the city as well. The ports around New Orleans are located as far north as they can be and still be accessed by ocean-going vessels. The need for ships to be able to pass each other in the waterways, which narrow to the north, adds to the problem. Besides, the Highway 190 bridge in Baton Rouge blocks the river going north. New Orleans is where it is for a reason: The United States needs a city right there.
New Orleans is not optional for the United States’ commercial infrastructure. It is a terrible place for a city to be located, but exactly the place where a city must exist. With that as a given, a city will return there because the alternatives are too devastating. The harvest is coming, and that means that the port will have to be opened soon. As in Iraq, premiums will be paid to people prepared to endure the hardships of working in New Orleans. But in the end, the city will return because it has to.
Geopolitics is the stuff of permanent geographical realities and the way they interact with political life. Geopolitics created New Orleans. Geopolitics caused American presidents to obsess over its safety. And geopolitics will force the city’s resurrection, even if it is in the worst imaginable place.
Uncomfortable moment
Stuck at locked door between access ramp from plane and rest of the airport, am very tempted to break the emergency glass!
Last day
Got up at 0630 to drive to Skopje. Four meetings and then flying home. Can’t wait.