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| December 2003 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ISSUE #61 - 14th December 2003 [632+171=803] |
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Paul
Bremer, US
Pro-Consul in Iraq, on 14th December,
The Religion of Environmentalism My
attention was kindly drawn by Michael
Mac Guinness to a
recent speech by Michael
Crichton, doctor, movie director and prolific author.
In it, he distinguishes
reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda, problems from non-problems,
and He
is convinced that the human psyche demands that we believe in something
which gives give meaning to our lives and makes sense of the world.
It may not be God, but such a belief is still religious in nature.
Today,
he suggests, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is
environmentalism, the religion of choice for urban atheists. He draws
parallels :
Whatever
about religion, there was, however, never an environmental Eden. In times past, lifespans were 40, plagues swept the planet,
famines were endemic. Humans lived amongst filth, flies, disease,
killed animals with abandon to survive, they waged constant warfare
against each other, practiced infanticide, human sacrifice, cannibalism.
Parts of the world are not much different today. Yet people
today still hang on to the Eden myth in the face of overwhelming
contradictory evidence, dreaming of returning to that blissful
pre-pollution nature paradise that never existed.
If
you want evidence of how facts are not allowed to get in the way of
environmental faith, look at world population growth.
Population explosion has become a cliché, and indeed since 1750 it
has grown from one billion to six billion, and is still climbing at 40
million a year. Yet, as
elaborated in a previous post,
this is a mark not of failure but of extraordinary human success in
combating early death. Nevertheless, environmentalists for
most of the last century have been bewailing the disaster the explosion
foretells as the global population races towards 11 billion by 2050.
There will not be enough space and food to support the explosion,
they fear, and it heralds even deadlier pollution.
This
was still the theme only a year ago, at the Johannesburg World
Environmental Summit Yet
recently, environmentalists have begun to notice what scientists have been
predicting for at least ten years – that due to falling fertility the
population around 2050 will actually stop rising. It will flatten
off, at 11 billion, maybe less, and may even decline.
heir faith
demands a continuing threat of doom, so now they confidently predict an
economic crisis caused by a population that is shrinking and ageing,
without a thought that they’ve been proved wrong for the past 100 years.
Faith does not require facts.
In fact
there’s a whole slew of wrong predictions
He goes on to
claim that, contrary to the unshakeable belief of the religion of
environmentalism,
Just
as religious fanatics see no other path for humankind but their own, so
too do many environmentalists, and this is a dangerous path.
Religious extremism in its various forms has been responsible for
millions of deaths over the centuries – indeed, the trend continues to
this day. So too has
environmentalism, the DDT ban being but one example.
(The wicked diversion of precious billions of dollars to meet the
ineffectual Kyoto
requirements on CO2 emissions would be another.) We
therefore need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion
altogether and start applying hard science instead.
We
need to be trying various methods of accomplishing things that appear to
threaten the environment, encourage a market in competing analyses and
solutions. We need to be humble and open-minded about assessing results of
our efforts, and to be flexible about balancing needs. Religions are good
at none of these things. So it’s time to abandon the religion of environmentalism, and return to the science of environmentalism, and base public policy decisions firmly on that. If
you have the time, you should read the whole 4,000-word speech.
Invite Old Europe to Bid for Iraq Reconstruction Work On 12 December, blogger Andrew Sullivan made a robust defence of George Bush’s exclusion of France, Germany and Russia from nearly $19bn-worth of contracts being handed out in Iraq.
George Bush’s own defence was similar :
These are great words that really give me a warm feeling of schadenfreude at the expense of those perfidious Old Europeans. But both men are wrong. For in their understandable rush to punish America’s non-Allies, they are falling into the tired trap of protecting producers at the expense of consumers, rather than the other way round. For this is always a zero-sum game - you can never protect both. In this case, the consumer is the Iraqi people. The war was launched to liberate them (as well as to forestall proliferation of WMD), and Congress has budgeted up $20 bn solely for reconstruction. So surely that means getting the best value you can from every dollar spent, because only in that way can you maximise the amount of reconstruction you can get done for the money. In turn that means fostering open, global competition for every contract. Only where there are genuine concerns about security, should particular contractors or countries be excluded from particular tenders. You might hesitate to invite a Syrian or Sudanese company to bid for a contract to build a new armaments bunker. But it is ridiculous to exclude, on security grounds, the German company Siemens that already provides most of the passenger screening equipment at US airports. To prevent companies from Old Europe from bidding will indeed punish them, while at the same time rewarding those economies that supported America in the war, put their troops in harm’s way and suffered deaths. But it is not right that such a reward will also be a punishment for Iraqis by reducing the amount of reconstruction they’re going to get. And by the way, Americans will also be punished, because it’s their hard-earned tax dollars that will be unnecessarily squandered. So, distasteful as it feels, Mr Bush should, for the sake of the Iraqi people, re-think his exclusion policy.
Amnesty’s Communist Human Rights Week Last week was designated Human Rights Week by Amnesty International. Its Irish section chose the occasion to launch an “Imagine Campaign”. Yoko Ono has donated to Amnesty the rights to John Lennon’s tuneful song, Imagine, which, as we come up to Christmas, is being sung and recorded by children for distribution on CD and video. No song, say Amnesty, “has the power to more eloquently capture the spirit of our message of human rights and dignity for all than Imagine.” Really ? Have you seen the lyrics ?
Aren’t we talking here of a rabid Communist ideology ? All mankind’s problems will go away once we eliminate every vestige of religion, national characteristics and private property ? Yes, as that cuddly Uncle Joe or Papa Mao would say, we may have to kill another hundred million people who do not conform to Imagine’s society model we are building, where no-one takes responsibility and everything is provided. But it’s all for the best in the long run. Once we have imposed this new world order, there will indeed be a brotherhood of man. Only we prefer the term Comrade. Beautiful as the song sounds, Amnesty’s wilful association of it with a campaign for human rights is a scandal. The very ideology that the lyrics advocate was responsible for more deaths and misery in the 20th century than the total of all other man-made causes in history. Only if you emphatically oppose human rights and human dignity should you be singing this on the barricades. And it is especially disgraceful to deceive children into thinking it’s something warm, comfy and Christmassy. It’s sinister.
The Economist Drops its Commas I’ve always been a believer in clarity of expression, especially in the written word since unlike talking you don’t get a chance to correct yourself (although with blogging you do !). I am irritated by sentences without verbs. (“This being a common example.”). It grates to hear the use of feminine-sensitive plural pronouns in a singular sense (“Everyone is responsible for their own destiny”). Nevertheless, to very occasionally split an infinitive is just about tolerable in some circumstances. For many years, the Economist’s Style Guide has been my bible, and in fact based on it I’ve written two other style guides for companies I’ve worked for. As the Style Guides sums up, “clarity of writing usually follows clarity of thought”. Now Lynne Truss has come out with a cheerful little book entitled, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves - The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” which is turning out to be this Christmas’s bestseller. Naturally I’ve bought a copy, and it’s excellent. Tells you everything you need to now about squiggles, lacking only a reference to Victor Borge’s seminal phonetic punctuation. It was, therefore, with some interest that I read the (subscription-only) Economist’s approving and entertaining review of it, “The joy of dots”, on 6th December. But I was even more amused to note that the Economist had itself in the same edition committed an elementary punctuation error that changes the meaning of the sub-heading of its cover story, no less, there on the first page. “The dollar’s slide has further to go, but if handled carefully it could help not harm the world economy” What happened to the two missing commas either side of “not harm” ? Without them, the sentence means that the dollar’s slide could “help to not harm” the world economy. I think they mean “help instead of harm”. I wonder if they’ll publish my letter to them (they didn’t). Pedants and sticklers unite.
I cannot speak for others, but I am now receiving 15-20 spam e-mails for every proper one. Provided I remain in Dublin, it’s no more than a minor irritant to hit the delete button 20 times, always checking I’m not accidentally deleting a genuine message. However, if I go away for, say, a week, several hundred e-mails await my return. Longer, and it can exceed a thousand. Outlook Express has a Block Sender facility which can help, however it requires five strokes per message which is just too clumsy when you’re dealing with maybe 30 spams at a time. Moreover, spammers usually use different sender addresses for each mailing. Has anyone got any low/no-cost sure-fire ways for deleting or diverting spam before it hits the inbox ?
Don’t let yourself be caught by this telephone scam that is earning a lot of money in the UK. Similar scams are probably occurring in other jurisdictions. Upon answering the
telephone, you hear a recorded message congratulating you on winning an all-expenses trip to an exotic location.
You will then be asked to press 9 to hear further details. If you press 9 you will be
connected to a premium rate line that costs approximately £20 per minute. Even if you disconnect immediately,
it will apparently remain connected for a minimum of 5 minutes, costing around £100. The final part of the call
involves your being asked to key in your postcode
and house number (which has other serious consequences). After a
further two minutes, you will receive a message informing you that you are
not one of the lucky winners after all. Your total bill will be around £260. Since the calls are
originating from outside the The only safe solution is
to HANG UP before the message prompts you to press 9. Even safer is to HANG UP on any unsolicited
“free offer” call.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch. The scam appears to be a
variation on a theme. A variation is a call, or text message, from
someone claiming to be a telephone engineer conducting a test on the line and asking
you to press buttons. The rule should be never to press 9 (or 9, 0# or 0, 9#) for anyone you don’t know and trust.
Those canny New York feminists are delighted to have found a fresh reason to be outraged at the way women are oppressed by males at cinemas, auditoriums, stadiums, dance halls, bars and other types of gathering hubs in the city. The latest symbol of brutal subjugation is that males are provided with more than their fair share of rest-rooms in these establishments. Therefore, the numbers of places where they can have a slash is to be slashed until they are half the number of the women’s rest-rooms. Doughty Brooklyn Councilwoman Yvette Clarke is trying to get “The Restroom Equity Bill” enacted for all new construction and renovations. A key clause explains that, “the absence of sufficient women’s bathrooms in many places of public assembly, and the resultant lines for women’s bathrooms, is one of the most blatant, demeaning, and visible forms of gender discrimination in our society.” I’m not making this up. Equity, you see, should be measured not in the number of male/female restrooms, but in the time spent there by males/females. Women spend twice as long, therefore they should have twice as many. Oh, and their restrooms should also be bigger, because men just, er, zip in and out. Men don’t need extra space to struggle with pantyhose, nor to handle delicate grooming matters, trade advice and admonitions, bond with their buddies, complain about the women in their lives. And if you don’t agree, you’re a male chauvinist pig, obviously a wife-beater and probably a racist.
Quote : “Wanted - young, well-built men aged 18 to 30 to slaughter”
Bernd Juergen Brande,
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ISSUE #60 - 7th December 2003 [245] |
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It’s not everyday a nearby neighbour becomes Miss World, so forgive me for giving the top spot to the gorgeous Rosanna Davis from Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin, a friend of my (very lucky) nephew, and daughter of singer Chris de Burgh. Now known as Miss World 2003, she describes herself as a “fun-loving yet humble person and hopefully a great ambassador for my country and for women all around the world”. 
DHL Missile Strike - The Inside Story On
22nd November, at 10:15 am local time,
a Russian-built SAM-14 (shoulder-fired Surface to Air Missile) hit an Airbus A300 B4 freighter over Iraq. Despite the fire that
erupted in the port side wing on impact and the
“in-flight emergency” that was declared, the aircraft managed to land safely in
Baghdad with no casualties. The aircraft, registration
OO-DLL, was leased to
and operated by European Air Transport (EAT), which is a Belgian company
owned by the courier company DHL, itself a German company owned by
Deutches Post World Net. Media coverage of this attack has been scant.
What is presented here is an inside account from impeccable
sources, never before published. What
Happened on Board the Aircraft The aircraft had just departed Baghdad
International Airport (formerly Saddam International) bound for Bahrein, and was passing 8,000 feet when
the crew felt a shudder and heard a rumbling noise from the left hand side
of the aircraft. Immediately the crew were alerted by the “Master
Warning” system of problems on the hydraulic systems.
With three separate hydraulic systems – blue,
green and yellow – the A300 will fly and is controllable
with the loss of any two. But it is not controllable with
the loss of all three, as all the control surfaces – rudder, ailerons,
elevators, horizontal stabilizer, flaps and slats – are directly moved
by the hydraulics and have no manual reversion. The flight engineer checked the hydraulic panel
and noted that the pressure and quantity for the green
and yellow
systems were reading zero. The crew therefore started the “Dual
Hydraulic Systems Failure” checklist and whilst doing this, realised
that the blue system
readings had also reduced to zero. Whilst discussing this and attempting to find out
what control if any was still available,
In fact the fire was in the outboard end of the
wing in the area of the aileron and end of the flaps and was being fed by
both the hydraulic fluid and the fuel.
Due to the configuration of the aircraft with
its engines slung low beneath the wing and fairly well outboard of the
aircraft centreline, it was still possible to maintain some control.
The landing gear was successfully extended and
locked down using a manual procedure. An attempt was made to land on
runway “33 right” at Baghdad International, but due to the
circumstances the aircraft actually touched down – fast and very heavily –
on the parallel runway, “33 left”.
The speed at touch down was approximately 210-220 knots with a sink
rate of 2,000 feet per minute, compared with “normal” figures
of 135-145 knots and 200-300 feet per minute. After landing, the only
retarding devices available were the engine reversers. No brakes or speed
brakes and no nose-wheel steering either, due to loss of hydraulics. Whilst slowing down - unmanoeuvrably - the aircraft
left the runway and ran off into the sand, with the engines still in
reverse, until the aircraft finally came to halt (they would normally have
been deactivated at 60 knots). The engines were damaged after landing,
with the starboard one ingesting a rolled barbed-wire fence. In
fact, the whole aircraft is a write off, but due to the flight
crew’s skill and presence of mind, no-one was hurt. Whether or not the
insurance will pay out for the hull loss is under debate.
Who Did It and How ? The SAM-14, sometimes known as the Strela 3, is built in Russia. Weighing 10kg, it is the successor to the SAM 7. More accurate and reliable than the SAM 7, it has a larger warhead - 3 kg, twice that of the SAM 7. Its maximum range is 4.5 kilometers with an altitude of up to 9,900 feet. Two SAM-14s had in fact been launched against the DHL aircraft, but only one reached its target. It was the first strike on a civilian aircraft since the war. Clearly, the attack was carried out by people allied to Saddam’s defeated Ba’athists and/or foreign insurgents. An extraordinary aspect, however, is that the attack was covered live by French journalist Claudine Vernier Palliez and her photographer, working for Paris Match, who seemed to be - to use the familiar euphemism - “embedded” with the perpetrators. They are the source of the photograph below. With difficulty you can hunt down their story, in French, on the magazine’s painfully clumsy website. Amongst other things, the magazine proudly proclaims, “Iraq: Exclusive, Our reporters were with the rebel commandos who hit the DHL cargo plane. They fired missiles at the Airbus” But you can easily find
In addition to the Paris Match scoop, a six-minute video showing a masked militant firing the missile was delivered to Sara Daniel, who is a journalist with the French weekly, Le Nouvel Observateur. The footage, which you can view, shows ten militants, their faces covered by chequered keffiyeh headdresses or white scarves, carrying out the attack. The missile, launched from the shoulder, is seen shooting up into the sky after being fired by one of the men. Leaving a vapour trail it makes a sharp U-turn and homes in on the DHL plane. The militants are then seen rushing away in a car. The eleventh militant - who presumably shot the footage - films his own lap in his haste to get into the vehicle. Later shots show the stricken aircraft descending. The militants clearly have great trust in the integrity of French journalists. Background Since August of this year, EAT have been operating from Bahrein to Baghdad
on a daily basis for DHL Bahrein. For convenience,
“DHL” is used in this article to designate the employer of the crews
flying the aircraft. Although George Bush declared that “major
hostilities” were over last May, Iraq remains, as we all know, a
hostile place, for both machines and people, whether military or civilian,
and of whatever nationality or religion. The Hazards of Baghdad International A vital document for flight crews in any country
is the Air
Information Publication, or AIP. It contains all the data necessary to
operate safely and within the rules of the issuing State -
No Air Information Publication has been
published for Iraq since 1990 and no such AIP is in force at the present
time. The French airline
Corsair has given this reason for refusing to fly British troops into
Basra. The operation into Baghdad is particularly
hazardous, without the absence of an AIP and the added risk of people
firing missiles at you. As a result, the crews flying into Baghdad were
basically having to make it up as they went along, with a lot of input
from certain security people. The approach favoured by the military and
ex-military crew members is to come overhead the field at 15,000 feet and
start a spiral descent keeping within a two-mile safe zone around the
airfield. The safe zone is maintained by US Army helicopter gunships. This approach results in the aircraft turning
finals well above the normal approach speed.
And with more than 45° of bank, sometimes up to 60°, the only way
to lose the speed is to pull the aircraft’s nose up with the power at
idle and rolling out of the turn at the same time.
This hazardous routine would definitely be a
fail if you did it in the simulator on your check ride.
Perhaps for this reason, it was never practiced in the simulator,
and not much thought seems to have gone into what to do if something went
wrong. A failure of the engine on the inboard side of the turn with more
than 45° of bank at less than 1,000 feet could be disastrous. It should be noted, moreover, that this evasive manoeuvre is possible only when landing, not on take off. It was, therefore, not available to the DHL aircraft that was shot during its departure from Baghdad. Insurance ? What insurance ? With all this extra and unfamiliar risk, the DHL
flight crews were understandably concerned about insurance cover,
especially as those who had their own personal insurance policies, eg
mortgage protection or life insurance, were informed by their respective
companies or underwriters that the policies would not cover Iraq or any
other war zones. Initially, DHL management told the crews that
the normal company insurance policy would continue to cover all crew
members operating in the Middle East with no reduction in cover for Iraq.
But no documentary evidence of this was ever shown to anybody.
Then, because of the disquiet, the Director of Operations wrote to
advise that DHL had set up its own fund for additional cover up to a
maximum of €400,000 per employee, but again no documents were presented.
The insurance status of the crews is still
uncertain. Danger Money Meanwhile,
when the company first told employees that there was the
possibility of operating into Iraq (and Afghanistan), with crews being
based in Bahrein for 15-day tours, the first question on
many people’s lips was “How much danger money are you paying ?” “None”, came the reply. This seemed a little strange as
Moreover, as the normal night stop allowance in
Scandinavian countries is €30 per night higher than anywhere else that
DHL goes to, most people thought that it was probably better to stay in
Europe and fly to Stockholm occasionally, than to spend 15 nights in
Bahrain with no extra allowances and without the added hassle of people
trying to shoot you down. Volunteers Though the company insisted that all crew
members were to be asked to go to the Middle East on a strictly voluntary
basis only, with no pressure applied, the reality was a bit different.
There were first-officers on the now defunct
Boeing 727 fleet looking for a future on the Airbus fleet, and others on
the A300 fleet who were eligible for promotion to Captain.
They knew that part of the selection process consisted of asking
the Crew Scheduling Department if the proposed aspirant had been
cooperative. Refuseniks were not given a friendly response.
One was asked why he’d never complained about flying to Belfast;
another was told that flying to Baghdad was safer than Vitoria in Spain
(not true, despite some high ground).
They were told again and again that the operation was safe.
So volunteers did indeed come forward, for a
project that was highly lucrative for DHL, and demanded extra and
unconventional skills because of the dearth of infrastructure information
and the tricky two-mile safe zone over Baghdad International.
Yet it carried high personal risk with dubious insurance cover and
no extra remuneration. Indeed, the heroic captain on the flight that
was attacked had only held a command for six months and was one of the
more junior captains on the fleet. Conclusion The whole operation seems to many to be amateurish
and mercenary. Some also ask what
is a German-owned Belgian company doing in Iraq anyway. The crew were extremely lucky, as well as
skilful. Had the missile
exploded in the fuel tank or hit the engine, the outcome could have been
very different. Just as lucky
are DHL and its associates who before long can resume earning earn large rewards by
flying into Iraq.
Zimbabwe - A More Optimistic View Despite differing viewpoints and perspectives, it is interesting that Guest-Blogger Des below, many of the Commonwealth Heads of Government who met last week in Nigeria and myself all seem to conclude that President Robert Mugabe should go.
By Guest-Blogger Des It was quite a coincidence that you had just written
about Zimbabwe in the Tallrite Blog Issue #58 as I was returning from spending a week there. I read
your piece with
interest. There is no doubt that most of what you wrote was
factually accurate - indeed, in a few instances the truth is even less
encouraging than you stated (eg, the Minister for Finance is now
projecting that inflation will reach 700% by the end of the year rather
than 455%, a loaf of bread now costs Z$5000 rather than Z$2900).
Despite the accuracy of your facts and statistics, I felt that the
impression created by your piece was materially different to that I formed
by visiting the place. I believe that most Zimbabweans - most particularly
those who share your own views on the political situation there - would be
disappointed by the impression created. The country is in the grips
of a political and economic crisis, but it is not in ruins.
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Cannibal Armin
Meiwes, 
