Graham thinking about China, Oil, trade and energy :

De-Scribed

Been offline for a bit so I don't know how much of this trickled through to the UK media, but Lula has been in China last week with hundreds of Brazilian business leaders. They're up to signing all kinds of trade agreements including a nuclear technology exchange.

Why? Brazil has some of the largest Uranium deposits in the world. China has the technical know-how to build nuclear power-stations (and weapons if it comes to it.)

I'm pretty convinced now that if the world doesn't do anything much about looking for alternative energy, we're going to be sleepwalking to a nuclear dependent future over the next 20 years.

China wants to put down a deposit on Brazilian uranium. Lula wants China in a block of the bigger, more advanced, developing countries (basically China, Brazil, India, ...) able to stand up to and negotiate with Europe and the US. Not clear how much more there is to Lula's strategy than this, though trade relations between Brazil and China have been increasingly friendly. Last year when flu killed off the Chinese poultry population, they covered it by importing from Brazil. Brazil already gets it's electronic consumer goods from China and can see China as a big market for it's agricultural products and natural resources.

This relationship is going to be interesting. If Lula's strategy works, Brazil, China, India will be reducing their dependency on the West by increasing free trade with each other.

Graham Lally : what is the best way to get a point across in our society?


De-Scribed

Here's something you probably weren't expecting. Gbloink! 1.8 is out.

Not altogether happy with this release. It's something I've been faffing with for a couple of years. But maybe some feedback will help. Also I'm including the source, considerably tidied and GPLed, so you can play with it.

Gbloink! 1.8


ThoughtStorms: Gbloink

ThoughtStorms: WikiPoweredArgument

ThoughtStorms: TheWantingWithoutAName

Palast: They don't give a shit about popular support. Bush is running on fear. He's the fear candidate. He's the "you better get scared cuz those guys with the towels on their heads, they're coming to git you" candidate. People have to understand what the game is: pump the fear. His daddy created Osama bin Laden, who came back for us. His daddy created Saddam. And now he's creating Musharraf and all the other crazy bastards, and it's going to be a very fucking dangerous world. They're going to make it so goddamn dangerous that then they'll turn around and say, see, you need us. They're selling fear. That's their commodity.

Guerrilla of the Week

Q : Phil! why aren't you blogging?

A : Very bad home connection. And firewall at work blocks access to blogger.

Follow

ThoughtStorms: RecentChanges

for political arguments, cool software engineering stuff I'm learning and more ....