Category: People

A view of England – from France.

A work trip to Brittany, France and a chance to reflect on the differences.

I’m sat writing this in my hotel room on the outskirts of Quimper in Brittany. Usual overcast and drizzle but considering I’m only a couple of hundred miles south of home, that’s the only similarity with the Devon weather.

Quimper
Quimper

They simply seem to have no comprehension about the recession. There are small signs of some new office building being empty but more buildings seem to have appeared and business appears to be booming. The super market where I have lunch is even busier than last year and the shops are full of people buying things.

What’s the difference?

I’m sure my friend Chris [Chris Snuggs, another author on this Blog] who I used to work for here will be able to say, but I can’t believe it’s all about the main business of food and agriculture, which predominates in this part of the country.

Back home in Devon, the same set of circumstance ought to hold true as it’s mainly agriculture and tourism, just like in Brittany.  However there is a vibrancy in Quimper that I find refreshing.  And a lack of charity shops!

What can we learn from this?

I was bought up in an environment that did not trust the French and it wasn’t until I got an opportunity to work here 10 years ago I realised that it wasn’t all that I’d been told.

I really like Brittany and its people who are friendly and very welcoming. There is definitely something to learn from this.

By Jon Lavin

Climate warming: the debate

Patrice Ayme believes it is real, on a scientific basis.

On the 16th October, we published a Post called Climate warming?.  The sub-heading gave a clue to the content of the Post: What’s the truth about climate warming, e’rr change?

My stance was to express doubt about man causing climate warming. But then, a good friend of this Blog, Patrice Ayme, added this comment:

Lowest ice on record in the Arctic was 2007, then 2008, and now 2009. [More exactly the sea with more than 15% ice reflecting.]
As I pointed out on http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/ (May 31, 2009).
The sun has been going down in the last 30 years or so… Watch the nice graph there, extracted from Science Mag…
We are just coming out of a solar minimum so pronounced that cosmic rays, less deflected by the sun’s magnetic field, have become a problem… This explains why greenhouse heating has been less pronounced than some expected in the last few years. Things should pick up in the next 7 years, as the sun heats up. The multiplying factor is 3 or 4…

It seemed appropriate to ask Messrs Ayme and Carlin for permission to reproduce both their Blog articles. Both very kindly agreed – thanks Gents.

These are long articles – but will inform you in a way that the mass media never do.

Here’s Patrice (Alan Carlin’s article tomorrow):
Read more about this important subject

A Jet Powered Beer Cooler

A New Zealander, or Kiwi, demonstrates that a sense of ingenuity and humour survives ‘down under’.

It would be unfair for copyright reasons to reproduce this delightful story on this Blog, but here’s a picture to whet your appetite, so to speak.

engine1

Go to the website and enjoy.  Laughter guaranteed.

By Bob Derham

The Polanski Affair

France, Polanski and respect for the Law.

Roman-Polanski2
Polanski

I have always associated France with surrealism after, at a fairly young age, seeing those amazing photos of early 1920s surrealist art by Duchamp, Ernst and others. In recent days this surrealist experience has returned with a vengeance in the bizarre case of Roman Polanski, with a reported 62% of French people believing that the arrest of Polanski in Switzerland was an unjustified affront to a long-standing resident “artist” and citizen of France.

The strongest condemnation of this arrest was initially by the French Minister of Culture, Mr Frédéric Mitterand, who said the affair “had no sense” and who expressed his “profound emotion” at the arrest of this “film director of international repute.”

Read more of Polanski’s arrest

Greenspan being quite remarkable!

Fingers crossed this becomes a key political statement.

I am indebted to Baseline Scenario for drawing my attention to a recent article in Bloomberg.  Greenspan is voicing what many regard as so obvious we wonder why the present US Government haven’t been pushing for this for some time. (And if you want the answer to that question, read this)

Anyway, in the Bloomberg story Greenspan says:

“If they’re too big to fail, they’re too big,” Greenspan said today. “In 1911 we broke up Standard Oil — so what happened? The individual parts became more valuable than the whole. Maybe that’s what we need to do.”

Breathtaking!

And Greenspan goes on to say:

“Failure is an integral part, a necessary part of a market system,” he said. “If you start focusing on those greenspanwho should be shrinking, it undermines growing standards of living and can even bring them down.”

Amen to that!

By Paul Handover

Insulting us?

Is this, in the end, how our Governments are treating us?

Yves Smith runs the incredibly successful Blog, Naked Capitalism.  Frankly, I have no idea where she finds the time to put together her Posts, many of which are constructed on the back of in-depth research.

On Friday, 16th October there was a Post which has huge implications.  It is all about Access Journalism.  It needs to be read.  Here’s an extract.

Let us start with the cheerleading in the media over Wall Street, and in particular, Goldman earnings. Matt Taibbi, in “Good News on Wall Street Means… What Exactly?,” tells us why this is so distorted:

It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000 the other day and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so fucking what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.

The press has been on a downslope for at least a decade, as a result of strained budgets and vastly more effective government and business spin control (and it was already pretty good at that, see the BBC series, The Century of the Self, via Google video, for a real eye-opener). I met a reporter who had been overseas for six years, opening an important foreign office for the Wall Street Journal. He was stunned when he came back in 1999 to see how much reporting had changed in his absence. He said it was impossible to get to the bottom of most stories in a normal news cycle because companies had become very sophisticated in controlling their message and access.

As I said, please read the Post in full.  Oh, and I see Baseline Scenario picked up on this as well.

By Paul Handover

The loss of a dear friend?

More than a grain of truth in a ’round robin’.

The Internet has produced many changes to the way we all behave.  One of them is the ease by which all sorts of material may be circulated rapidly.  Much of it is tittle-tattle but a recent one caught my eye.  I was in two minds to publish it but having seen ahead of time Paul’s forthcoming Post about Access Journalism (visible from the 19th onwards) convinced me I should.  Make of it what you will.

Read more of this Post

Climate warming?

What’s the truth about climate warming, e’rr change?

I will put my hand up to subscribing to the notion of humans having such an effect on Earth’s atmosphere that climate warming was likely, inevitable and could be the destruction of life, as we know it.  It seemed to fit the idea of mankind being disconnected from the planet and completely out of touch with the reality that our Earth is a fragile place, our atmosphere a (relatively) very thin ‘skin’ around our planet and few of us spare a second thought for protecting the environment for the generations to come.

earth-moon

But gradually the faint sounds of opposition to the ‘simple’ argument that man is screwing up the Planet have become clearer.  The latest is a very clear cry.

Read more about this Post

Dolphins – will you help them?

One man’s mission to stop the killing and capture of dolphins.

A dolphin is one of the most beautiful creatures on this planet.

dolphin

I was going to write a very long Post setting out the reasons why everyone who cares for these creatures needs to get involved. But, in the end, a few links and extracts achieve that much more effectively than several hundred words from me.

Read more about saving and protecting Dolphins

Integrity vs Entertainment

It’s a funny old world …

Recently I was asked to run a detail lasting 4 hours in an Airbus simulator, for a film crew coming from Australia.

I was told by the training office that this was just operating the instructor panel on the simulator to help them get the information they needed regarding certain situations that would be explained in a television documentary to be aired on a Sunday evening weekly program.

A320 simulator 'cockpit'.
A320 simulator 'cockpit'.

Apparently the various people involved had visited Airbus, and were due to return to Australia for interviews with some of the major airlines operating Airbus aircraft.

I soon gathered that the likely scenario was to be the loss of instrumentation and automation as experienced by an A380 crew recently, and what might have been the case with the A330 lost over the Atlantic.

Read more about this Post