How would you like to deal with a rogue nuclear armed state in the Middle East? That may be coming to you a lot sooner than you think.
I am not speaking of the usual suspects like Iran or whatever other currently fashionable bogey man you want to name. Rather, I fear that Israel may Click Here to continue reading.
Regular reader know that this week’s rant of the week was about family being forced to move from a neighborhood in Great Britain because they had become a target of criminal gangs. One might think that Inspector Gadgets dark and gloomy out look might give you a skewed out look on the state of Great Britain. So we thought we would provided you some links to some news stories about Great Britain.
Record numbers of Britons are leaving – many of them doctors, teachers and engineers – in the biggest exodus for almost 50 years.
Skilled professionals, including doctors, are leaving the UK in record numbers
Over a quarter of qualified professionals who have moved abroad had health or education qualificationsThere are now 3.247 million British-born people living abroad, of whom more than 1.1 million are highly-skilled university graduates, say the researchers.
More than three quarters of these professionals have settled abroad for more than 10 years, according to the study by the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
No other nation is losing so many qualified people, it points out. Britain has now lost more than one in 10 of its most skilled citizens, while overall only Mexico has had more people emigrate.
Granted this is offset in raw numbers by the amount of immigrants coming into the Great Britain. But it makes you wonder why so many natives can’t wait to get out of their country.
A police chief has admitted he was forced to move house by youths lurking outside his home.
Superintendent Wayne Mawson, in his forties, said he left the property in Hackney because he did not want to confront teenagers sitting on his wall.
The head of operations for Haringey, north London, added that the youths had made him nervous about his work – and confessed he had given in to their loitering.
Blog posts on this story can be found here and here.
And for good measure, read this rant by Macro Man.
Oakland’s recent gun buyback was especially ridiculous. The police offered up to $250 for a gun “no questions asked, no ID required.” The first people in line? Two gun dealers from Reno with 60 cheap handguns. Fortunately the buyback did manage to get some guns off the street, too bad they were turned in by a bunch of senior citizens from an assisted living facility. Whew, the streets are safe at last.
From the New York Times via Megan McArdle……
African nurses and pharmacists are also sought after by clinics and drug store chains offering better pay and legal assistance with immigration, said the experts, who include the heads of several pharmacy and medicine schools in Africa. “The resulting dilapidation of health infrastructure contributes to a measurable and foreseeable public health crisis,” the article said. “The practice should therefore be viewed as an international crime.”
Investigator Gadget tells a story that is set in modern day Britain, but could easily be set in the last days of Rome, or any other failing culture.
This story in the New York Times has been told many times over the history of the British and American empires. It will probably happen many times again for as long as there are Anglo Saxons around who want to rule and be loved at the same time.
We have not been keeping up with the news in the way we should. Here are some links from Spiegel that we should have posted when they came up.
First, a large treasure find?
Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.
Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.
If this is true, Indian Jones was wasting his time. Who wants a holy grail when you can find this much gold?
Also fish with weird dangly things?
“We had some of the world’s experts on Antarctic fish, and they were completely, completely flabbergasted,” said Martin Riddle, the lead researcher of the Australian ship, Aurora Australis. “Many of the fish had very large eyes…[and] fins in various places. They had funny, dangly bits around their mouths.” The fish experts on board, Riddle said, “were unable to name them.”
Who knew that dangly things was technical term that cold be applied to biological phenomena? Not that we are casting stones. In fact, we heartily approve of this approach to learned discourse. Shortly, we shall all sound educated.
Moving on to more boring news, Germany’s state own banks are having problems….
Matthäus-Maier’s bank KfW has already had to provide IKB with close to €5 billion in a series of three bailouts. With KfW itself gradually running out of cash, the federal government has now contributed another €1.9 billion.
The state of North Rhine-Westphalia has injected €1 billion into WestLB, another state-owned bank, as well as providing the ailing bank with another €3 billion in loan guarantees. The situation is even worse in Saxony, where the state has issued €2.73 billion in loan guarantees to Sachsen LB, that state’s Landesbank, as Germany’s state-backed regional banks are known. The other state-owned banks are providing another €14 billion in guarantees. Hamburg-based HSH Nordbank urgently needs €1 billion in fresh capital, while BayernLB last week reported a €1.9 billion write-down as a result of subprime exposure. BayernLB announced Tuesday that the bank’s chief executive, Werner Schmidt, will be stepping down as of March 1 as a result of the crisis.
The situation for Germany’s public banks has become so dramatic that it threatens to topple what has been one of the key pillars of the country’s banking system. The state-owned banks are supposed to bail each other out when necessary, but the problem is that many are in trouble themselves and hardly in a position to help their peers. And things could get even worse.
Germans used to be known for the soundness of their banking system. But now a days, everyone is sub-prime.
Speaking of the world being turned up side down, who would ever have thought that Europeans would be telling America that we are underestimating the likely hood of Iran getting the bomb? This from a group of experts who work for the European Union……
As part of a project to improve control of nuclear materials, the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy set up a detailed simulation of the centrifuges currently used by Iran in the Natanz nuclear facility to enrich uranium. The results look nothing like those reached by the US intelligence community.
For one scenario, the JRC scientists assumed the centrifuges in Natanz were operating at 100 percent efficiency. Were that the case, Iran could already have the 25 kilograms of highly enriched uranium necessary for an atomic device by the end of this year. Another scenario assumed a much lower efficiency — just 25 percent. But even then, Iran would have produced enough uranium by the end of 2010.
For the purposes of the simulation, the JRC modelled each of the centrifuges individually and then hooked them together to form the kind of cascade necessary to enrich uranium. A number of variables were taken into account, including the assumption by most experts that Iran isn’t even close to operating its centrifuges at 100 percent efficiency. What is known, however, is that the Iranians are operating 18 cascades, each made up of 164 centrifuges. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad himself said last April that the country had 3,000 centrifuges in operation. At the time, most Western observers discounted the claim as mere propaganda. But the International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed Ahmadinejad’s assertion in November.
This would not be news, except for the fact that EU is telling the US that it might not be hawkish enough.
The difference between the war in Iraq and the Vietnam War is simple: Vietnam was winnable and Iraq is not.
Now I am not casting aspersions on the success of the surge or anything like that. In any kind of military terms the US army has done well. This is especially true if you compare them Click Here to continue reading.
This photo essay from Zombie Times is this week’s essay of the week. Thankfully, the situation it documents is confined to Berkeley. But we should not forget that the contest between revolutionaries and nationalists has been fought out for real on a national scale in many countries. And the results have never been pretty.
Lately, it has become common to compare Obama’s speaking abilities and popular appeal to Reagan’s. Its kind of tricky to judge the validity of this comparison. Most of Reagan’s famous speech’s happened after he was already President were as most of Obama’s speeches so far have happened on the campaign trail. You can’t really draw a fair comparison between the two types of speeches.
But there is one similarity between the two men. They both rose to prominence with a famous speech they gave at convention for another man. With Reagan it was a speech he gave at the convention that nominated Barry Goldwater called “A Time for Choosing.” With Obama, it was a speech that he gave at the convention that nominated Kerry called “The Audacity of Hope.”
In both cases, the candidate that they where supporting would go on to lose. But in both cases, the speech’s laid the groundwork for their personal future campaigns. This allows us to compare their speaking ability at a similar points in their careers.
So here is the closing portion of “A Time For Choosing”….
And here is the closing portion of “The Audacity of Hope”……
There was a strong wind in northern New York on Sunday and it caused a mass causality event in Rochester. This from America’s North Shore Journal….
At about 12:38 p.m. EST today, the Monroe County 911 Center received a cellphone call reporting a 20 car pileup on I390. In the next few moments, a dozen more calls flooded in. Gates Volunteer Fire and Volunteer Ambulance were dispatched.
Just six minutes later a State Police officer on scene requested “as many EMS rigs as possible”. As late as 12:50 a caller reported that collisions were still occurring.
Gates responded, declared a Mass Casualty Incident, and additional resources were requested. The professionals in Monroe County and Rochester City Fire and EMS responded. Chili, Churchville, Greece, Henrietta were among the initial responders from the local region. Rochester City Fire and Airport Rescue responded with extrication tools and manpower. The commercial agencies, Rural Metro and Monroe Ambulance sent ambulances and personnel.
It’s flu season. The local hospitals were jammed. Space was made, people called in, trauma beds made available. One by one the ambulances rolled out with the injured.
Apparently the total number of cars involved in this accident was 36.
This demonstrates why you will be on your own in any major disaster. If 36 cars can strain first responders, just think what would happen if hundreds or thousands of people got hurt.