Enda kenny and the Siege of Leningrad...

Had a letter in the Indo about this:

ENDA Kenny's comparison of Ireland's economic problems with the siege of Leningrad is bizarre. A far better historical analogy would be with the Treaty of Versailles. A single country is being accused of being solely responsible for a European disaster and is now expected to make financially unsustainable 'reparations' without any consideration of the long-term consequences for everyone involved.

Not only does Ireland now face a prolonged period of economic chaos ending in a default, but, like Weimar Germany, it has a deeply dysfunctional political system that is ill-equipped to handle the challenges it will soon face. The bottom line is that Ireland didn't invent the euro, but is expected to shoulder the blame for its failure.

It is now obvious that this country was run into the ground by an incompetent political elite, with not one single TD of any party attempting to stop the madness.

But while Ireland has an entire parliament building full of culprits, none of the architects and managers of the euro are being asked to explain why they stood back and did nothing while ludicrous quantities of debt flooded the periphery of Europe.

Until this issue of fiscal mismanagement is resolved, the future of the euro -- and the entire European project -- will remain in doubt.

Yesterday's Green party press conference was bizarre in that the Green TD Paul Gogarty insisted on keeping a small child on his lap throughout:


Presumably he did this so there would be at least one person in the room who would believe them...

Theft of Sandbags...

Apparently the economy is so bad that people are stealing sandbags intended for flood prevention:

“On Sunday morning, in the region of 1,000 sandbags used to provide defences in these coastal walls were discovered to have been dismantled and removed.

...

The spokeswoman said it was difficult to see how members of the public might have mistaken the sandbags as being available for general use as it was “fairly obvious that they were there to protect the gaps in the coastal walls”.

I sent the following letter to the Irish Times, which doesn't appear to have been published:

Madam,

Who in Dublin would have a need for a few thousand sandbags and be self-centered enough to put their own welfare before that of the public? Possibly Government TD's preparing their constituency offices for the aftermath of the next budget....

Airtricity claiming non-existant 26% discount?

In today's Irish Independent Charlie Weston says that Airtricity is claiming to off a 26% discount off Gas and Electricity:

Yesterday the company claimed that the combined discount of 26pc would mean a bigger overall energy cost saving for households who sign up for both electricity and gas supplies with Airtricity.

In fact they are offering a 20% discount for Gas and a 6% discount for electricity with a 1 year lock in and a 100 Euro exit fee, but someone at the Indo appears to have decided to add the two percentages....

D B Cooper Was An Amateur

Saw an interesting article about D B Cooper in Air and Space mag.

Added my 10c:

While everybody wants to believe that D.B. Cooper got away I think he died on the night. I'm a former skydiver with over 450 jumps, including one from a a Boeing 727 at the World Freefall Convention.

The first odd thing is that D.B.Cooper was apparently wearing slip on shoes. No skydiver in 1971 would have jumped wearing such shoes - landings were fast at the best of times and you needed ankle protection. Any experienced jumper who was planning this would have had footwear with proper ankle protection.

But the part which makes it obvious to my mind that Cooper wasn't an experienced jumper was that he didn't bring a parachute with him. Skydivers are understandably picky about equipment and any jumper planning a hijacking would prefer to bring his own equipment rather than rely on the government to provide it to him. Not only did he create a dependency his plan didn't need, he also telegraphed his intentions. If, instead, he had disguised the parachute as a bomb and then left a suitably fractured and psychotic suicide note before jumping out the back with the money it would have taken people days - if ever - to figure out what he'd done.

The third thing I'm not so sure about - apparently he was seen using paracord to tie the money bag to himself. You need to be extremely careful about attaching anything to yourself and especially an object that is loose or can move. Simply failing to secure the chin strap on your helmet results in agony as it beats against your skin in the 120kt airflow. Attaching a large object and then being able to fall cleanly and not tumble - which is essential for a safe opening - would require practice. Instead he was almost certainly an amateur who left the plane, lost his shoes, tumbled wildly while trying to open his borrowed parachute and then spent the rest of his life regretting it...

BOOK OF THE DAY: Climate Wars

Since when has a review of a two year old book qualified as an 'Opinion' piece?

Having apparently run out scary global warming pieces for the moment the IT has presented a review of a two year old book in the slot that has been used before for this purpose.

Climate Wars was first published in 2008 as for all I know may well be a very readable and credible but hypothetical examination of the effects of a significant increase in Global Temperature. But given that it was published in 2008 why should a national newspaper of record use up editorial space on it now? Why editorial space instead of the book review section?

The review itself doesn't really add much, and seems to have been written before the publication of the book itself - some quick googling revealed that the text of the review has been around for ages, if it's URL is anything to go by:

http://coraifeartaigh.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/climate-wars.pdf

Given that ClimateGate has revealed that thanks to poor data management and politicized science the millions of euros invested in global warming research has failed to produce quality results and that we have no way of verifiying either the extent or cause of climate change I have to wonder if this book is still relevant.

More Climate Skeptic bashing at the IT...

Following hard in the heels of John Gibbons attack on Bjorn Lomborg the IT's environment reporter Frank MacDonald makes no attempt to understand the arguments advanced by skeptics in an opinion piece which is just as full of venom and short of facts as Gibbons. The title - "A dialogue of the deaf with US climate sceptics" pretty much says it all, but neglects to mention that Frank is the one who's hard of hearing...

The key questions to ask here are:

Why does Frank think the Heritage Foundation are representative of US Climate Sceptics? What not speak to Anthony Watts or the Canadian Steve McIntyre? These guys are asking hard questions which climate scientists either won't or can't answer. Why ask a bunch of DC Republican lobbyists?

Any bets on whether any letters on this are printed? I think not...

When I put it to him that the World Meteorological Organisation had identified the past decade as the warmest since records began, followed closely by the 1990s, Lieberman dismissed these findings as “grossly exaggerated” – even though they were grounded in scientific measurements taken all over the world.

This head-in-the-sand approach is reminiscent of the Birthers, a daft grassroots movement that believes Obama has no right to be president because he “wasn’t born in the US”. It simply doesn’t matter that he has a birth certificate from Hawaii and can point to a contemporaneous birth notice in one of the local papers.

Ah yes 'grounded' in 'scientific measurements'! Given the ongoing arguments about data quality in this area this is something which deserves a discussion but doesn't get it. And why the comparison with the Birthers, an openly political movement with nasty overtones?

“We care about the environment,” said nuclear specialist Jack Spencer...

Ooooh! Jack Spencer is a nuclear specialist, which presumably makes him untrustworthy by definition....