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.
Rant of the Week: 2/24/08-3/1/08
Reply
Category Archives: Politics
Essay of the Week: 2/24/08-3/1/08
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.
News From Spiegel
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.
Comparing Vietnam with Iraq
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.
Essay of the Week: 2/17/08 – 2/23/08
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.
Compare and Contrast
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”……
A lot of people hurt due to strong winds in New York
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.
Rant of the Week: 2/10/08-2/16/08
We here at the Ethereal Voice don’t much care for the factory method of educating kids. But if you are going to throw 30 odds kids and put them under one teacher, it is foolish to make them 30 odd kids with vastly different needs. The only way one teacher can have a hope teaching 30 kids is if their needs are roughly similar.
This is the basic fact of life that lies behind Scott Walker’s rant. Only, he wants to save public schools so we don’t think that he shares our views on factory education.
Rant of Week: 2/3/08-2/9/08
The hysteria on the on the political right that makes radical Islam out to be this great horrible threat is a dangerous thing. It is dangerous because it obscures the real problem. Even if radical Islam was wiped off the face of the earth, western society would still be in danger of collapsing. The problem is not that radical Islam is so dangerous but that western society is so rotten.
Popular conservative columnist Rod Dreher comes close to admitting as much in his rant entitled Dildos versus scimitars.
Essay of the Week: 2/3/08-2/9/08
The growing tension between Black and Hispanic communities has not received much attention in the main stream press. But it is a very real problem that could lead to lot of blood being shed in the years to come.
The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates by Steven Malanga is a good introduction to this issue. It is main problem is that Mr. Malanga is obviously not sympathetic to the immigrants, and that leads him to be unfair on a number occasions.
For example, he says….
A recent study by Harvard economist George Borjas and colleagues from the University of Chicago and the University of California estimates that immigration accounted for a 7.4 percentage-point decline in the employment rate of unskilled black males between 1980 and 2000.
Given that incarceration rates for black males also went up during that time period, I am highly skeptical of any study that can precisely pinpoint the porportion of the the fall in black male employment can be blamed on Hispanic immigrants. Even after you get out of jail, a record is a hard thing to get a job with.
You cannot blame Mr. Malanga for the conclusions of Borjas study of course. But Mr. Malanga does not seem inclined to even consider the alternate explanations.
But one Mr. Malanga’s unfairness is one of the things that helps makes “The Rainbow Coalition Evaporates” a good introduction to issue of Black and Hispanic tensions. After reading his piece, you will have no doubt about how many in the Black community have come view the immigration issue.