Australia is famous for a supposedly idyllic lifestyle, “mateship”, an opera house, funny accents, and kangaroos.

The country is also going through the worst drought in its recorded history.

Since 2003, the country has been completely parched. Rainfall has been at a record low—the last time Australia received so little rain was 108 years ago, during another infamous drought. This time, the drought is aggravated by some of the highest temperatures on record. Most of the affected territories have effected water-conservation laws, but it may have come too late. Australia’s industries have already been severely and adversely affected—their cotton industry especially harshly. Compounded with a 37% slash in water usage, Australia’s cotton industry has suffered a 66% reduction in production.

The country has changed politically too. Concerns over climate change prompted the public to oust the climate-change denier John Howard (who was incumbent for almost 12 years) and replace him with Kevin Rudd. Only nine days after his election, Rudd’s administration ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Australia’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions are second only to the United States, making this a significant milestone for backers of the Kyoto treaty.

Global warming has a significant impact on drought. As the global climate warms, rainfall patterns change. Most importantly, rainfall is redistributed—wet areas get wetter and dry areas get drier. In essence, rainfall trends get amplified—and the price for us to pay is extreme weather, including drought.

Whatever the cause, the lack of water is having a very palpable impact on world society. Notable examples include Southern Spain, South India, Darfur, and the Middle East.

The Murcia Situation

Water disputes of a different kind have manifested themselves in southeast Spain. The province of Murcia historically has been arid, but poor water management and misuse of resources have served to aggravate the effects of one of the worst droughts on record. Despite the extreme aridity, Murcia has seen the construction of water-hungry swimming pools, golf courses, resorts, and large farms. Agricultural water is largely used to grow crops such as lettuce, which require ample irrigation. Corrupt business practices abound; investors classify vacation resorts as “farms” and golf course grass as “crops” in order to obtain water normally set aside for agriculture. Combined with corrupt political practices, the situation is coming to a breaking point; a black market in water now flourishes, and average water prices are three times higher than usual. While riots have not broken out yet in Murcia, it is reasonable to expect that they will soon. After all, you can’t fool all the people all the time. (Read more about this here).

The Kaveri River Dispute

The Kaveri (sometimes spelled Cauvery) river in South India has been the focus of intense controversy since the early 1990’s. The river’s drainage basin provides most of the water for the states of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and the Union Territory of Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry). For much of its history, India has been divided up into petty kingdoms, often constantly at war with each other. As a result, ethnic tensions in India have always been elevated, often sparking violence over competition for limited resources. Unsurprisingly, the sum of each of the water claims of the different states is far over the actual availability of water.

When a tribunal set up to resolve the dispute ruled in favor of Tamil Nadu, riots broke out in Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka. Fearing for their lives, several thousand Tamil families left Karnataka. However, one might write this off as sporadic communal violence. The fact that there are so many ethnic groups in India suggests that there will be a lot of ethnic conflict. Water, being so necessary to our lives, is certainly worth fighting for.

Nevertheless, the violence seen here pales in comparison to another “water war” fought on a different continent: Africa.

Drought and Darfur

Decades of ethnic tension in Darfur reached a breaking point in 1983 and 1984, as rains failed during both years. The resulting drought and famine led to the overthrow of the incumbent president, Gaafar Nimiery.

Whether due to climate change or freak weather, a slew of other climatic problems struck the region in succession over the next two decades. Most importantly, increased desertification made water even more scarce in the already arid region. By 2003, when the current iteration/incarnation of the Darfur genocide began, water was already a precious commodity in the parched land.

While there are many causes of the Darfur genocide, the scarcity of water is certainly an important factor. Just like in the Kaveri River dispute, water served (and still serves) as a trigger to ignite long-standing ethnic tensions.

Looking forward: The Middle East

India and Sudan definitely do have a history of ethnic violence, so water-related tensions serve to ignite the metaphorical pile of kindling. However, even in more democratically-oriented but drought-plagued societies such as Australia, water plays a powerful political role.

It should be safe to expect that the next large-scale water-related conflict will be in the Middle East. The aforementioned empirical examples share a few similarities:

1. Competition for water—where the demand for water exceeds the supply.
2. Arid conditions for at least part of the year.
3. Water mismanagement, or unequal sharing of water resources.
4. A lack of political, economic, or social unity.

There is one area of the world I have not mentioned so far that meets all these criteria: the Middle East. Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims have been locked in a rather thorny conflict for one and a half thousand years, satisfying criterion 4. The desert conditions ensure that water is a precious, difficult to obtain, and rare resource. Up to now, disputes have mostly been handled diplomatically in the Middle East. However, that may not last very long. Unequal water sharing between Israelis and Palestinians has helped to heighten the already high tensions between the two groups; Israel also controls most of the water resources in its area. Nevertheless, a far more pressing concern plagues the future of the two countries: the supply of water is dwindling. The Jordan River has slowly been drying up, and the supply from aquifers is on the decline, forcing Israel to import water from Turkey in exchange for military technology. Undoubtedly, unless Israelis and Palestinians mutually agree on peace terms soon, the situation could easily spiral out of control.

Even between other Middle Eastern countries, the risk of war is still extant. Much of Iraq’s water, for instance, comes from the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Both of these rivers start in Iraq’s neighbor to the north, Turkey. Historically, Iraq and Turkey have not been on excellent terms; just last year, Turkey was beginning an invasion of Iraq before diplomatic pressure stopped the mobilization.

Cooperation is the key

Clearly, the world needs to rethink its policies toward water. It may be slightly optimistic to hope for total cooperation, but that is the best way to avert what could become a very thorny world conflict. Only with equal and fair sharing of water is it possible for the world to not have a water war.

Current manifestations of water disputes have largely been affected by climate change and global warming. The UN projects that in Murcia, precipitation will drop 20% by 2020 as a result of increased temperatures and changing rainfall patterns. Potential water conflicts will also need to be dealt with on the global warming front. By minimizing the effects of global warming, it will also mitigate the consequences of droughts.

While there are enormous barriers to creating a global water-sharing plan, fair and equal sharing plans can certainly be achieved on a local scale.

For the good of humanity, I hope it gets done.

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We remind you that the views expressed in this editorial are not necessarily indicative of the views of the editorial board of the Bourgeois Buffoon. Please see our disclaimer for further details.

When the communists in Vietnam took over, there was widespread opposition and a pro-democracy movement. In defense of their own government, the government of Vietnam resorted to “reeducation” camps and arrests on a huge magnitude. The same thing happened in North Korea, and Iran, among many other countries.

That itself is terrible. No one should be tortured, murdered, or even arrested for their belief system. This was the backbone of the American constitution and has secured our rights here for many years.

Sadly, this is not the case for the four students who were killed on May 4th, 1970 in Kent State University. Along with thousands of others, a semi-violent protest against the Vietnam War took place on that date, with angry students throwing rocks and other projectiles at national guardsmen. Consequently, in massive retaliatory disparity, the guards fired upon them, killing four.

Even today, in Guantanamo Bay, alleged “terrorists” are being held without habeas corpus or many rights that we Americans enjoy today. Many of the prisoners face forced sleep deprivation and cold cells, among others. These “terrorists” too have lost a conflict. Perhaps they fought for ending the occupation of Iraq. Perhaps they are completely innocent. If this continues, we shall never know.

More candidly, let’s look at the case of Mordechai Vanunu. He was a nuclear technician working for the Israeli government during the 70s and 80s. In a moral dilemma over the Osiraq incident and Israel’s own budding nuclear program, he alerted the British press with information about Israel’s program. Catching wind of this, the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) convinced Vanunu to go to Italy for a vacation (with an attractive Mossad agent), where he was kidnapped, smuggled aboard a freighter, and taken back to Israel. The Mossad did this in Italy to avoid the diplomatic fallout that would harm ties between the UK and Israel if the kidnapping had taken place in the UK. In Israel, he was placed under eleven years of solitary confinement and a decade more of imprisonment.

The United States never protested this, because it was a winning situation for the nation. If Vanunu had truly been successful, Israel would be forced to formally admit that it had unauthorized WMDs, thus making it impossible for the US to send aid there. Given that the US is sending 30 billion dollars in military aid to Israel over the next decade, it would be a big blow for Israel and the US if Vanunu had “won” the conflict. The US would no longer have a powerful ally in the middle east, and Israel would no longer have the aid so essential to its survival.

Once again, I’m not lambasting the people of Israel, or any other country for that matter. I’m criticizing bad government decisions made, and how it rather starkly contrasts with the reality of the situation.

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Just about a year ago, the Baltic state of Estonia went offline. Botnets, immense networks of hijacked computers, poured billions of hits onto Estonian government and commercial websites, and the Estonian servers, attempting to shoulder many times their normal load, gave up. Tensions were elevated-Estonians blamed the Russian government, who naturally denied involvement. For nearly three weeks, this siege continued. Eventually, the architect of Web War One was traced down to a Russian student living in Estonia’s capital, Tallinn (though any others involved, if any, are still at large).

Estonia is quite a vulnerable country to cyber-attacks. Besides being a reasonably small country, but just like other leading high-tech countries, it banks heavily on its computers to keep databases and necessary records stored. Other countries on that list of high-tech leaders include France, Germany, the U.K., and of course, the U.S.

After 9/11, the U.S. has become increasingly paranoid about safety—what with the border fence in the Southwest and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Accordingly (as of May 2008), the U.S. has not suffered from any major terrorist attack.

To say that, though, is perhaps slightly outdated. Just as the Internet has evolved, security systems have evolved. Terrorism, on the other hand, has evolved too—only faster. Flesh-and-blood terrorism is getting phased out of developed countries as security systems improve. The stringency of an American airport’s security screening has to be witnessed to be believed—and despite the greatly increased inconvenience, this strategy seems to be working. Terrorist incidents since 9/11 have mostly occurred in the Wild West of the Middle East: mostly in Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. There have been a few scattered incidents elsewhere, but they have been relatively infrequent and not at all crippling: bombings in Madrid and the Red Square caused minor panic but had little long-term effects. Terrorist attacks in India are side- and after-effects of Partition-era Hindu-Muslim tension. As far as flesh-and-blood terrorism—Terrorism 1.0—goes, the last crippling attack was 9/11, and the United States admirably recovered from that tragedy.

The attack on Estonia was somewhat crude—more of a coordinated mail-bomb attack than a nuke, one might say. It used a technique called DDoS, or Distributed Denial of Service, in which sites are flooded with traffic. Usually, the servers cannot cope, and the site and its associated services go down. DDoS attacks have been used for years, and server administrators have learned how to thwart these barbarians at the moat. As a result, Estonia could eventually selectively block the offending IP addresses.

Despite that fact, the Estonian attack is quite alarming—it was perpetrated by only one person (that has been caught so far). The fact that one person can cause such a significant degree of harm makes that one person incredibly powerful. And whose army, one might ask? The largest botnet in the world is estimated to have over 350,000 zombie computers. At this moment, they might be used simply to sent a few billion spam messages per day, but, as the Estonian attack shows, the potential for truly malicious use is incredibly palpable. A rogue nation has enormous power in computing.

Even some of our most solid sites are vulnerable. Did you think that YouTube could go down? No one really did. It services hundreds of millions of videos per day—terabytes upon terabytes of data. Surely, it had the capacity to deal with intense traffic spikes? Not quite so. When Pakistan blocked access to YouTube earlier this year, a mistake on the part of an ISP technician caused intense traffic spikes that shut down YouTube. Thanks to quick negotiation, though, the service came online within an hour.

Would the same happen if a malicious country hijacked a U.S. site? Botnets are located largely in the U.S., comprised of unsuspecting home users, thus eliminating the possibility of simply blocking external access to U.S. websites. An Estonian-style hunt for IP addresses would need to ensue, wasting days or even weeks of productivity—and crippling the U.S. economy. The U.S. can be likened to a porcupine, with tough outer defense. Attacking from the Internet would send a barb through the soft underbelly of the animal. A malicious nation, or a terrorist organization with a large Internet presence, could easily take down the world’s most powerful country.

The U.S. is certainly at a precarious position today on the Internet. Our borders are comparatively secure, but the wires are not. Terrorism 1.0 is inconvenient for terrorists—getting past the gauntlet of security checks, the Coast Guard, and/or the Border Patrol is difficult and risky. The Internet is a medium without these checks, and a strike there would strike closer to home than any incident in memory.

ADDENDUM: added July 4, 2008

It appears like history is repeating itself. Just a few days ago, the neighboring state of Lithuania suffered an attack of a different sort. After announcing a ban on the display of Soviet symbols, hackers defaced Lithuanian web sites with anti-Lithuanian slogans and Soviet imagery.

Fortunately for Lithuania, intelligence forewarned them of the impending attack, and the country managed to curtail a significant ammount of the potential damage. [The New York Times]

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SeppukuChu here, in my star-studded (?) debut.

The Last Prophet, Medivh, gave a dire warning to King Terenas. It proved to be the costliest mistake Terenas ever made in his troubled reign atop the throne of Lordaeron…

A sundered soul, from sight of night had fled
Sargeras‘ hate, that once had flowed so keen;
as once, the whole, by Titan’s might, possessed.
Aware of late, the sun now grows within

Prognostication’s evil, trumpet marked
the rage of old; he knew the warning keen,
and sought to save the free realms from the dark

He flew to ancient castled realm of men;
The palace sides, commanding fortress walls,
There through the painted tacit helm and hence
the falas tides, in spanning courtly halls

He came with might in thunder’s staggered force
with flying plumes in blizzard nether storm.
The flame of lightning’s yonder jagged course
the cry in runic wizard’s feathered form. Continue reading »

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This is a Shakespearean sonnet (14 line-structure, 3 quatrains and a couplet, alternate lines rhyme, and iambic pentameter) written in memory of my best friend, the Weighted Companion Cube from Portal .

It helped me through the chamber seventeen
before I killed it—what a dreadful act!
The greatest buddy I have ever seen
My heart is sad: a piece it did subtract.

Some hearts was painted on its cubic flanks
The color rose and white and black and gray
The blocky corners featureless and blank.
I set a record–burned without delay.

The voice of GLaDOS overrode my mind
And fratricide it ordered me to do
My conscience slowly, surely, was maligned
My moral judgment quietly subdued.

Forev’r shall live the story of the cube
My only friend who burned up in the tube*.

*I’m referring to the Aperture Science Emergency Intelligence Incinerator.

Obviously, this would make sense to you only if you’ve played the game Portal. If you haven’t, well, play it! It’s definitely one of the better games released in the past few years and definitely the most creative. First-person puzzlers are awesome!

On the other hand, if you are short on funds, try Narbacular Drop, the spiritual precursor to Portal.

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Computers are one of the greatest inventions of humanity, designed by some of humanity’s most brilliant people. With all due respect, though, their brainchildren, while enormously useful, have been subjected to some serious pain due to developers’ negligence. Here are a few examples from my personal experience.

Canon’s ZoomBrowser software for its digital cameras is truly terrible, and with other, superior tools such as Picasa, it’s also a tad bit redundant. Maybe the developers knew that when crafting the software…

Aaah, the heady old days of Firefox 1.0. This is a minor glitch fixed in 1.5, but it still retains its humor. Considering the amount of number-crunching going on in the browser, I’m surprised they didn’t catch this before, while the otherwise excellent browser was still in beta.

One of Windows Vista’s improved (or worsened) features is that it is more of a granny OS than anything since the days of Microsoft Bob. For instance, now the OS is kind enough to let you know that it is crashing*.

I like myself a lot, thank you very much! A rather bizarre glitch on the Facebook app Honesty Box.

Once, while browsing on Answers.com, I came upon this gem. Be careful, guys, when writing your code. Remember all the cases! And while on the subject of ads:

(Click on the image to enlarge). A rather odd juxtaposition, don’t you think? Lending Tree & mortgage fraud…

The future of software is in good hands!

* Before I get my house stormed by Microsoft zombies… explorer.exe was crashing in this case, not the entire OS.

**I’m not affiliated with any of the companies/products mentioned above. I took these screenies too =).

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“The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.”

… said Salvador Dali, though this applies to me, too.

No, I’m not exactly bourgeois, and no, I’m not (at least, I hope I’m not!) a buffoon. And just like any madman will tell you, I’m not mad. And don’t get me wrong, I’m NOT communist!

This is about the thoughtless tangents of a thoughtful mind: musings, poetry, and yes, madness. Naturally, that last point is open to interpretation. Call it what you must; madness is perceived, and it’s also relative.

Enjoy the blog, and please don’t leave your trash behind.

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