This week’s essay of the week is not really an essay per say. Rather, it is a slide show on the demographic changes in Europe. If you have been following Europe’s demographic situation, these slides might not tell you anything you do not already know. But even if that is the case, I still think that these charts will bring the reality of the crisis home.
For example, I already knew that the number of people over 65 had overtaken the number of people under 14 in Europe. But to see a chart comparing the growth of the number of the people over 65 with the fall in the number of people under 14 since 1980 really brought home to me how rapid this change has been. Makes you really think about what the next 25 years are likely to bring.
It is like seeing a train wreck in slow motion. Those under 14’s are the only ones who can have the children of the future. Not only are that, but those under 14’s are the ones who are going to have to pay for the retirement of their elders. It’s not going to be pretty.
In the process of getting my refrigerate license, I had it pounded it into my head that the method by which CFC’s (such as Freon) destroyed the ozone hole was well understood. So I got a chuckle of this….
But chlorine peroxide is a difficult molecule to work with. Extremely unstable by sea-level laboratory standards, it’s been hard to isolate in pure form for study. And despite the generally accepted cascade of ozone depletion reactions, it hadn’t even been detected in the Antarctic until 2004, which difficulty had been largely chalked up to its short lifetime. Now, though, a team at JPL has produced the best synthetic samples of chlorine peroxide to date, and they’ve checked how quickly it decomposes in the presence of ultraviolet light. And, well. . .the problem is, the stuff falls apart much more slowly than anyone had predicted – many, many times more slowly. If they’re right, it’s hard to see how the accepted chemistry of chlorine peroxide-driven ozone depletion can be correct.
9/26 was Petrov Day. A day set aside honor a man who decided not to destroy the world and was remanded by his superiors for his wimpy behavior. Read all about it in this rant.
This can be found on a number of websites…..
Some time back there was a major disaster at The State’s Technology Services Division. Details were sketchy but for two full days, employees of The State were unable to logon to their computers or access email, and that this caused business within The State to grind to Click Here to continue reading.
This from the New York Times…..
A large holiday party ended abruptly Saturday night when a second-story deck collapsed and plunged 10 feet onto a concrete patio, injuring more than 30 people.
The Point Pleasant Beach police said that 11 to 25 people were on the 12-by-20-foot wooden deck at the rear of the two-story beachfront house Click Here to continue reading.
Whenever humans recognize a mistake, a mysterious wave of electricity passes through the brain. Researchers think the signal could explain addiction, error correction and even the sixth sense.
It is taken for granted by most people that the rule of law requires a state. Spencer Heath MacCallum challenges that assumption in an essay entitled “The Rule of Law without the State.”
Mr. MacCallum’s proof case is none other then Somalia. This might be a little hard for some people to swallow, but the fact is that Somalia has done better by all relevant statistics since its central government was abolished. It has even improved relative to other African countries.
Now correlation does not prove causation, so Macallum’s statistics don’t prove anything. But reading this essay reminded me of Samuel’s lecture to Israelites when they asked for a king. Especially since customary law the world over tends to have a lot of similarities with the Old Testament law.
In spite of man’s bungling nature, what can go right occasionally does so. The problem is that man typically draws the wrong lesson from when things go right. Long before 9/11, a group of highjackers almost succeeded in using a plane as a bomb. But because they were stopped, no one took the threat very seriously.
But if you read up on Air France Flight 8969, you realize how close it came to crashing into the Eiffel Tower. Or maybe how close the highjackers came to blowing up a plane over Paris. The information that is available to the public is not very clear on that point.
All that is known for sure is that Air France Flight 8969 was high jacked in Algeria in December of 1994 and the highjackers wanted to fly it to Paris. At a pit stop in Marseille the highjackers demanded 3 times as much fuel as was needed for the flight to Paris. And something convinced the French that they needed to storm the plane as soon as possible.
Regardless, this plan might have succeeded had the French government’s original plan been carried out.
In the beginning the French government did not seem to realize that this was a suicide mission. So they made a deal with the highjackers; in return for releasing the woman and children, the plane would be allowed to fly to Paris. But at first, Algerian government would not allow the plan to take off. It seems that this delay enabled French intelligence to overhear the highjackers talking about the best way to blow the plane up over Paris.
At that point everything got fouled up in bureaucratic infighting. The Algerian government and the French government both wanted to storm the plane. In fact, the Algerians had been against letting the plane takeoff from the very beginning.
But the French government did not want the Algerian commandos to storm the plane. Instead, they wanted their own Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (most commonly referred to by the acronym GIGN) to handle to problem. Naturally, Algerian government wanted its own commandos to do the storming since the plane was on Algerian soil.
After much French arm twisting, a compromise was reached. The Algerians let the plane take off, and the French tricked the highjackers into landing at Marseille on the excuse that the plane was low on fuel. There, the GIGN intended to storm the plane. But once again things started going wrong.
The Highjackers must have realized that something was up because they suddenly took the plane close to control tower and opened fire on it. This forced GIGN to charge the plane instead of sneaking up on it as they were intending to. If it had not been for their heavy body armor, the GIGN agents would have been massacred. As it was, they were initially driven back, and many of them were seriously injured. But they managed to keep the highjackers occupied while the passengers were evacuated.
After that, they just kept on shooting until all the highjackers were dead. They must have been shooting blind because the pilots who where cowering in the cockpit had to tell them to stop shooting when all the highjackers dead.
Watching the video below of GIGN storming the plane makes you realize how badly everything could have turned out. They were very fortunate.
(One annoying thing about the Video is that the narrator does not understand anything. For one thing, he keeps saying that GIGN was throwing explosives and he makes it sound like it was an explosive that ended the fight. In reality, only the highjackers threw a grenade which injured many people. GIGN was only throwing flash bangs as there were still pilots in the cockpit. The “explosive” that GIGN throws into the cockpit at the end of the video was flash bang. The GIGN guys were running because of the well aimed hostile fire. Once flash bang went off, they started advancing again. You can see a higher quality version of this same video here. Also this clip is longer but there is no sound.)
The idea of a town with no road signs conjures up ideas of Italian-style traffic mayhem, with cars whizzing everywhere and nervous pedestrians diving for cover. But for some traffic experts, such chaos is to be embraced — or, as the title of a recent traffic conference in Frankfurt put it, “unsafe is safe.”
Now the town of Bohmte in the German state of Lower Saxony is putting its money where its motor mouth is — it’s getting rid of its road signs in a bid to cut accidents.
Action T4 (German: Aktion T4) was a program in Nazi Germany officially between 1939 and 1941, during which the regime of Adolf Hitler systematically killed between 75,000 to 250,000 people who had intellectual or physical disabilities. Performed unofficially after 1941, the killing became less systematic. As it is so aptly […]
