Daily Archives: October 12, 2007

Why Did Google Buy Jaiku?

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According to Technology Review, it’s all about mobile phones.

The terms of the deal haven’t been announced, but regardless of Jaiku’s price tag, the purchase could be a significant one. Google has long been rumored to be working on a mobile phone, or “gPhone”; Jaiku was originally developed as software for cell phones, and one of the company’s cofounders, Jyri Engeström, was a product manager at Nokia.

While Google has refused to comment directly on whether it’s developing mobile-phone products, its activities over the past few months indicate that it is. Google has announced its intention to bid on a large swath of spectrum in early 2008; it has acquired a mobile-phone software startup, Android, based in Palo Alto, CA; and in a handful of public statements, representatives of the company have alluded to trying to make the mobile experience better. When asked for comment, Google referred to its public statement about the purchase: “Although we don’t have definite plans to announce at this time, we’re excited about helping to drive the next round of developments in Web and mobile technology.”

Hmmm… Pure speculation, of course.

Is the oil, then?

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Writing in the LRB, Jim Holt thinks it is…

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks…

James Michaels RIP

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The man who turned Forbes into a great read, is dead. Nice obit in the Economist, which refers to his greatest scoop: he witnessed the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. Here’s his report:

‘Bapu (father) is finished’

New Delhi, January 30, 1948: Mohandas K. Gandhi was assassinated today by a Hindu extremist whose act plunged India into sorrow and fear.

Rioting broke out immediately in Bombay.

The seventy-eight-year-old leader whose people had christened him the Great Soul of India died at 5:45 p.m. (7:15 a.m. EST) with his head cradled in the lap of his sixteen-year-old granddaughter, Mani.

Just half an hour before, a Hindu fanatic, Ram Naturam, had pumped three bullets from a revolver into Gandhi’s frail body, emaciated by years of fasting and asceticism.

Gandhi was shot in the luxurious gardens of Birla House in the presence of one thousand of his followers, whom he was leading to the little summer pagoda where it was his habit to make his evening devotions.

Dressed as always in his homespun sacklike dhoti, and leaning heavily on a staff of stout wood, Gandhi was only a few feet from the pagoda when the shots were fired.

Gandhi crumpled instantly, putting his hand to his forehead in the Hindu gesture of forgiveness to his assassin. Three bullets penetrated his body at close range, one in the upper right thigh, one in the abdomen, and one in the chest.

He spoke no word before he died. A moment before he was shot he said–some witnesses believed he was speaking to the assassin–”You are late.”

The assassin had been standing beside the garden path, his hands folded, palms together, before him in the Hindu gesture of greeting. But between his palms he had concealed a small-caliber revolver. After pumping three bullets into Gandhi at a range of a few feet, he fired a fourth shot in an attempt at suicide, but the bullet merely creased his scalp.

From A treasury of great reporting: literature under pressure from the sixteenth century to our own time, edited by Louis L. Snyder, Simon & Schuster, 1949.

Speak, memory

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It’s funny how some books linger in the mind, long after you’ve turned the last page. W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn has had that effect on me. I wrote about it the other day, when I was just over half-way through, and I had a nice email from my friend and colleague, Martin Weller, who had seen my post and had been looking for something unconnected with work to bring with him on holiday. He’d been moved by what I’d written to get the Sebald book.

It was an unfamiliar literary form for me – a meditative travelogue. But Andrew Motion argued in a recent review of The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane that actually this is a relatively venerable form with its roots “in late 19th-and early 20th-century travelogues of the kind written by Edward Thomas”.

I felt slightly ashamed that I hadn’t known more about Sebald, who died in 2001 aged 57 when his car veered off a foggy road in East Anglia. A friend dug out two newspaper pieces, one an interview by Maya Jaggi published in December 2001, the other the Guardian obituary by his friend and fellow Norfolk resident, Michael Homberger (who features in The Rings of Saturn).

Sebald was born in a small Bavarian village in May 1944, the child of a “working-class, small-peasant” family. His father prospered modestly under the Nazis and rose to the rank of captain in the Wehrmacht. Like many (most?) German children of his generation, Sebald initially knew nothing about what had gone on during the Third Reich. “Until I was 16 or 17”, he told Jaggi, “I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it – which of course we didn’t. It was in the afternoon, with a football match afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-1960s, I could not conceive that these events had happened only a few years back”.

Perhaps this is why his writing is suffused with a preoccupation with memory. And why he always approaches things obliquely. The thing that struck me about The Rings of Saturn was that he always seemed to be coming from left field. Homberger says in his obit that Sebald believed that “attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality”.

The other interesting thing I discovered is that Sebald was a devoted photographer. (The Rings of Saturn is richly illustrated by low-grade reproductions of the kind of pictures taken by someone who uses – as I do — a camera as a kind of visual notebook.) “I’ve always been interested in photographs”, he told Jaggi, “collecting them not systematically but randomly. They get lost, then turn up again. Two years ago in a junk shop in the east End of London, I found a photograph of the yodelling group from my home town. That is a pretty staggering experience. These old photographs always seem to have this appeal written into them, that you should tell a story behind them. In The Emigrants [another of his books] there is a group photograph of a large Jewish family, all wearing Bavarian costume. That one image tells you more about the history of German-Jewish aspiration than a whole monograph would do.”

He’s right. I hope Martin enjoys The Rings of Saturn as much as I did.