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Hide-and-seek with Russian subs in the Stockholm Archipelago

October 20, 2014

It is the 1980s again and a sense of déjà vu. A real Red October and the hunt is on.

Fifty shades of the Cold War!

Of course it may not be a Triton -NN, Russian, stealth, submersible, high-speed craft wandering around the Stockholm archipelago – but it may be. It could just be probing Swedish defences or the boat may be in trouble. Or it could be nothing at all (though that seems unlikely). The Russians could be testing the new Red/Green Swedish government. Or carrying out a “live” training exercise but “against” a non-NATO member to minimise the risk of live fire. Or it could be a German or even a Polish submarine on a surreptitious training exercise!

The Russians have announced that they have no boats in trouble or missing so it is unlikely to be another Kursk.

The Triton-NN concept has been known for some time but there are few actual sightings.

Triton NN Submersible image padelt-online-de

Triton NN Submersible concept image padelt-online.de

There are many theories around but the most “objective” update I have found is from the Finnish -Swede military blogger Corporal Frick. He writes:

The major news was when Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet reported that a signal emerging from the archipelago outside of Stockholm had been sent on a Russian Navy distress channel. When the search operation got underway, there was renewed traffic, which was encrypted, and a transmitter located in Russian Kaliningrad answered. This was the first evidence that decidedly pointed towards Russia as the country of origin. This could also explain the, in my opinion, rather strong and decisive response by the Swedish Navy when the first visual sightings occurred.

Representatives of the Swedish Defence Forces have denied that they have received knowledge about a distress signal, although the exact wording leaves the possibility open that A) the info has been distributed on a strict need-to-know basis, and as such is not available to the officers involved in the operation, or B) the interpretation that a signal on a known foreign military channel used for distress signals does not equal a known distress signal. They have also clearly stated that they do not know the country of origin or exact nature of the underwater activity, and as such they will continue to refer to it simply as “foreign underwater activity”. Most importantly, it has been confirmed that three visual sightings have taken place, and that the operation will continue for a number of days. Imagery from one of the sightings has also been released. The picture is grainy, but could be interpreted to show some kind of a midget submarine, e.g. the Russian Triton NN.

20120210-225617.jpg

A real Triton-NN? image from 2008 oplatsen.wordpress.com

The question of where the mother ship is located has been focused on the Russian-owned Liberian-flagged crude carrier NS Concord. The ship has been anchored outside of St Petersburg since the beginning of May, acting as a floating storage. Last week, it set sail and sailed to a position right outside the border of Swedish territorial waters, where it has since loitered. To begin with its AIS-data gave the destination as Danish Straits, but today this was changed to Primorsk. When the tanker suddenly found itself in the limelight, the Russian research/sea survey vessel Professor Logachev suddenly headed out to sea, destined for Las Palmas(?). It remains to be seen if this vessel will make a stop outside of Stockholm, but the timing seems somewhat suspicious. The Logachev also happened(?) to be traveling in the middle of the three-ship Dutch naval flotilla heading home from Tallinn, with the Walrus-class submarine HNLMS Bruinvis probably not far away either.

The Triton-NN could – it is speculated – carry upto 6 Spetsnaz divers and 2 crew. There is also some suggestion after a sighting of a black-clad figure that somebody could have disembarked and come ashore on an island in the archipelago.

A Russian Ethan Hunt?

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Posted in Defense, Politics, Sweden | 2 Comments »

WHO’s politically appointed country heads in Africa dropped the Ebola ball

October 18, 2014
Dr Louis Sambo

Dr Louis Sambo, WHO Regional Director Africa

Why are the WHO’s Regional Directors (for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo) not answerable to the head of the WHO in Geneva?

The first indications that the Ebola ourbreak was getting out of control were raised in April by Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF).

BBC: Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) warned in April that the outbreak was out of control – something disputed by the WHO at the time.

…… In the worst affected countries – Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone – the Ebola virus has now killed 4,546 people with cases of infection numbering 9,191, according to the latest WHO figures.

AP carries a damning story of the complacency of the African WHO representatives who seem to have been unwilling to even acknowledge that there was a problem on their turfs. That the country heads of the WHO are mainly political appointments is not perhaps so surprising, but even all the Regional Directors around the world are apparently not responsible or accountable to the WHO head in Geneva.  That does not seem to be an organisation very conducive to taking actions on medical reasons alone. Presumably the African Regional Director is himself a political appointee (from Angola in this case) and  was elected to his position in 2005. It would seem that the position of Regional Director primarily reflects some political balance rather than just competence for the job to be done.

The outbreak began at least in January and by April had already killed 69 just in Guinea (around 70% fatalities of those infected).

AP:

In a draft document, the World Health Organization has acknowledged that it botched attempts to stop the now-spiraling Ebola outbreak in West Africa, blaming factors including incompetent staff and a lack of information.

In the document obtained by The Associated Press, the agency wrote that experts should have realized that traditional infectious disease containment methods wouldn’t work in a region with porous borders and broken health systems.

“Nearly everyone involved in the outbreak response failed to see some fairly plain writing on the wall,” WHO said in the document. “A perfect storm was brewing, ready to burst open in full force.”

The U.N. health agency acknowledged that, at times, even its own bureaucracy was a problem. It noted that the heads of WHO country offices in Africa are “politically motivated appointments” made by the WHO regional director for Africa, Dr. Luis Sambo, who does not answer to the agency’s chief in Geneva, Dr. Margaret Chan.

 ….. The document — a timeline on the Ebola outbreak — was not issued publicly but the AP was told the health agency would be releasing it earlier this week. However, WHO officials said in an email Friday that the timeline would now probably not be released publicly. No official at the agency would comment Friday on the draft report.

Dr. Peter Piot, the co-discoverer of the Ebola virus, agreed in an interview Friday that WHO acted far too slowly, largely because of its Africa office.

“It’s the regional office in Africa that’s the front line,” he said at his office in London. “And they didn’t do anything. That office is really not competent.” 

WHO’s other regional directors — the Americas, Southeast Asia, Europe, Eastern Mediterranean and the Western Pacific — are also not accountable to Geneva and are all elected by their regions.

Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, also questioned why it took WHO five months and 1,000 deaths before the agency declared Ebola an international health emergency in August.

“I called for a state of emergency to be declared in July and for military operations to be deployed,” Piot said. But he said WHO might have been scarred by its experience during the 2009 swine flu pandemic, when it was slammed for hyping the situation.

In late April, during a teleconference on Ebola among infectious disease experts that included WHO officials, Doctors Without Borders and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, questions were raised about the performance of WHO experts, as not all of them bothered to send Ebola reports to WHO headquarters, according to the draft document.

In the timeline, WHO said it was “particularly alarming” that the head of its Guinea office refused to help get visas for an expert Ebola team to come in and that $500,000 in aid was being blocked by administrative hurdles. ….

In fact the outbreak dates back at least to the beginning of this year. In Guinea, 69 people had already died between January and April 21st of Ebola:

MedicalDaily: Apr 21, 2014

Sixty-nine people have died since January of Ebola in the West African country of Guinea with 109 cases now confirmed by the World Health Organization (WHO). … WHO’s Dr. Rene Zitsamele-Coddy said in a press release. “As soon as the outbreak was confirmed on March 21, we started to work with [Guinea officials] and other partners to implement necessary measures,” she said. ”It is the first time the country is facing an Ebola outbreak, so WHO expertise in the area is valuable.”

 

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Turkey is “against” Kurdish separatism much more than it is “against” ISIS

October 14, 2014

I remain of the opinion that Turkish government policy is dominated by being against any Kurdish unity or separatism even if it means that their actions may assist ISIS. A Greater Kurdistan with access to oil wealth is a much greater fear than any new Caliphate. Two reports today only serve to strengthen my perception of Turkey walking the tightrope between NATO membership and an application to join the EU on the one hand, and their reluctance to intervene against ISIS if it helps the Kurds to consolidate their territory and attacks on PKK on Turkish territory on the other.

BBC: Turkish jets bomb Kurdish PKK rebels near Iraq

Turkish F-16 and F-4 warplanes have bombed Kurdish PKK rebel targets near the Iraqi border, as their ceasefire comes under increasing strain. The air strikes on Daglica were in response to PKK shelling of a military outpost, the armed forces said.

Both sides have been observing a truce and it is the first major air raid on the PKK since March 2013.

Kurds are furious at Turkey’s inaction as Islamic State (IS) militants attack the Syrian border town of Kobane. Fighters from the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) have been aiding Kurdish YPG militia in Kobane and Turkey has refused to help supply its long-standing enemy with weapons or allow Kurdish fighters to enter Syria.

NYT: Turkey Denies Reports of Deal for Use of Its Bases in Fight Against Islamic State

A day after American officials said Turkey had agreed to allow its air bases to be used for operations against the Islamic State, which they described as a deal that represented a breakthrough in tense negotiations, Turkish officials said on Monday that there was no deal yet, and that talks were still underway.

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New red/green Swedish government attacks the elderly who would dare to work

October 12, 2014

Traditional socialists it seems would prefer that the elderly not work for longer. They should should leave the work-place, sit-out their days in an old-age home and die out quietly without making too much fuss. “Self-employed” has always been a dirty word in the socialist lexicon and the new Swedish government is training its sights especially on the elderly self-employed.

As it is, the age discrimination that is endemic in Sweden makes it virtually impossible for the elderly (>65 years old) to get employment. About the only real possibility for the elderly to work is to employ themselves and to be self-employed. The new government in Sweden wants to make it even harder for the elderly to be employed (by others) and to milk them for extra taxes when they do. The special payroll tax is to be increased by 8.5%. Employers must pay the extra and if the elderly are self-employed then they will have to pay the extra themselves. When the discrimination is built into the tax code then it must count as institutionalised age-discrimination.

It seems such a waste of experience and knowledge. The evidence shows, and common sense says, that it is not the elderly who take jobs away from the young. The elderly – when they are employed – are usually employed for the depth of their experience which is not an area of competition with the young. The previous government had managed to increase the employment of the over-65s by 1.5 percentage points. But the new government clearly wants to change that.

Of course the key point is that when over-65s lose their jobs, they do not – statistically – swell the ranks of the unemployed. And the new socialist government wants to milk whatever taxes it can from the elderly – especially if they are self-employed.

But in the long term the demographics dictate that with increasing longevity, society will have to encourage that people remain gainfully employed – on average – much beyond the age of 65. By 2050, this will need to be at least 70 years. The left will have to lose their antipathy for the elderly.

From Swedish Radio:

The red-green government is making it more expensive to hire seniors. From next year, the fee paid by employers for workers over 65 will be raised. Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson says that the government needs the money.

The government wants to increase national revenues by 18 billion kronor next year. More than two billion will come from the increase in the fee paid by the employer to employ people over 65 years, the so-called special payroll tax. 

It thus becomes more expensive for firms to hire the over-65s from 1st January 2015.

The previous Alliance government had lowered the special payroll tax in 2007, and given the over-65s higher earned income tax credit. This resulted in more over-65s working according to a study by the Institute for Labour Market Policy Evaluation, IFAU.

“These reforms led to an increase in employment by 1.5 percentage points”. says researcher Lisa Laun at IFAU. The study could not determine what impacedt employment most; the lower payroll tax or the higher tax credit. But both reforms together gave more jobs for the over-65s.

Lars Calmfors is a Swedish economist and Professor of international economics at the Institute for International Economic Studies at Stockholm University. He spoke to Swedish TV:

“It does not seem wise, if one wants to get older people to stay and work. We know that we have large departures in many professions, not least in health care and the teaching profession. One is keen to keep people at work here so the measure is probably ill advised”.  So said Professor Lars Calmfors  after the government proposed that the payroll tax for the elderly over 65 years will increase by 8.5 percent from the year-end. It is a tax paid by the employer for each employee. The self-employed must pay the tax themselves. 

Lars Calmfors sees two reasons why the payroll tax is now being raised for the elderly; first that the government needs more tax revenue, and second, that the government might think that fewer older people will take away jobs from the young – something that is not at all supported by research. 

“There’s very little support for the theory that higher employment of the elderly leads to lower employment among young people. Most indications are that in countries that have high levels of employment for the elderly there are also high levels of employment for young people. They don’t seem to compete against each other” said Lars Calmfors to SVT.

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What does the deployed oxygen mask on MH17 signify?

October 10, 2014

So the Dutch Foreign Minister made a boo-boo by revealing that one Australian passenger was found to have an oxygen mask around his neck. He has been criticised  for revealing this information which found no mention in the preliminary Dutch report. The crash investigators and NATO (why NATO?) have also been vehement in denying that this changes anything in the preliminary report. The final report is not due till summer 2015.

NYT: Frans Timmermans, the foreign minister, mentioned the discovery of the oxygen mask late Wednesday during an appearance on a popular Dutch television talk show, where an interviewer brought up the July 17 crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which killed 298 people.

Wim de Bruin, a spokesman for the Dutch national prosecutor’s office, expressed dismay about the disclosure on Thursday. He confirmed that forensics experts had found a yellow plastic oxygen mask around the neck of a male victim among the bodies that arrived at Eindhoven Air Base a week after the crash.

Why the fuss? Why would it be significant whether the oxygen masks had deployed or not?

The point apparently is that if the aircraft had been brought down by a Russian ground-to-air BUK missile – fired by the rebels – then the aircraft would have failed catastrophically and there would have been no time for the oxygen masks to deploy. All on board would have died almost instantaneously.

If instead MH17 had been brought down by a Ukrainian fighter jet – as the Russians suggest – then the air-to-air missile would not have been as immediately catastrophic as the much more powerful BUK missile. Then there may well have been time for some of the oxygen masks to deploy – even if the aircraft was later “finished off” by cannon fire. I am given to understand that the size of the wreckage found is not consistent with just an air-to-air missile but could be consistent with cannon fire subsequent to a missile. More tellingly, some of the many, small and uniform “shrapnel holes” found could have well been due to external cannon fire. The Russians keep asking why the cockpit – ground control conversations have not been released but I have not seen any convincing explanation for that information being withheld.

NYT: 
Analysis: The shrapnel came from outside the plane
Many of the holes are relatively small … … and uniform in size.

Mr. Foster said the contour of the aluminum and the blistering of the paint around many of the holes indicate that small pieces of high-velocity shrapnel entered the aircraft externally. 

MH 17: Shrapnel or external cannon fire? image NYT

It is also possible that that some tampering took place on the ground after the event. This is implied by some of the statements attributed to “officials”. However, it seems improbable that somebody – a pro-Russian rebel is implied – could have looked for and found an intact oxygen mask – especially if they had not been deployed – to drape around one of the victims’ neck.

But the bottom line is that if there was time for the oxygen masks to deploy then it is more likely that a Ukrainian jet was responsible rather than a BUK missile. Such a “politically incorrect” conclusion would not be acceptable for NATO. It is unlikely that any final report will come to any such clear conclusion. I am afraid that the final MH17 Crash Investigation Report will be – and maybe already is – compromised. The final conclusions will be contaminated by political agendas.

But the oxygen mask does make the theory about a Ukrainian jet being responsible a tad more likely.

Whoever was responsible, 298 innocent people were killed.

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Posted in Aviation, Holland, Politics | 2 Comments »

US, UK and Turkey give up on Kobani

October 9, 2014

Neither the US or the UK see Kobani or its Kurds as having strategic importance. The US admits that air strikes alone cannot save Kobani. Turkey sees greater strategic value in not supporting the Kurds than in confronting ISIS.

As I thought, Turkey sees ISIS and their vision of a Caliphate as being a lesser evil than any future Kurdistan. Their reluctance to assist with ground troops to confront ISIS in Kobani has probably helped the US to stay out as well. John Kerry has confirmed what I suspected that helping the Kurds in Kobani is not a strategic objective (though one does wonder whether Obama and Kerry have any strategic objectives at all beyond public relations) for the US. The UK is content to follow where the US leads (or stays still).

ISIS must be quite encouraged by the US / UK idea of “a buffer zone for the influx of refugees crossing the border from Syria”. It suggests that the US and the UK have already given up on Kobani. They will effectively write off Kobani and put all the refugees into a miserable limbo. But it will help their ally Turkey from being invaded by more Kurds and in general a weakening Kurdish position. But they have no intention of protecting any such “buffer zone” from a rampaging ISIS. It will be nothing but a refugee camp with no exits.

Meanwhile the US-led air attacks against ISIS is giving Assad more room to attack his other opponents in Syria.

Deutsche Welle:

At a press conference on Wednesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry indicated that saving the besieged Syrian town of Kobani from the terror of the “Islamic State” (IS) was not a strategic military objective for the United States.

Joined by British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond to address the press, Kerry also said the idea of a buffer zone proposed by Turkey should be thoroughly studied.

“As horrific as it is to watch in real time what is happening in Kobani … you have to step back and understand the strategic objective,” Kerry said.

“Notwithstanding the crisis in Kobani, the original targets of our efforts have been the command and control centers, the infrastructure,” he said. “We are trying to deprive the (Islamic State) of the overall ability to wage this, not just in Kobani but throughout Syria and into Iraq.”

He said the US and the UK were considering a buffer zone for the influx of refugees crossing the border from Syria – an issue Turkey should not have to deal with alone.

The advance of IS into the Kurdish town of Kobani, which can be seen from the Turkish border, has prompted 180,000 residents to flee to Turkey.

Turkey continues to watch.

BBC:

Turkey’s foreign minister says it cannot be expected to lead a ground operation against Islamic State (IS) militants in Syria on its own.

Mevlut Cavusoglu also called for the creation of a no-fly zone over its border with Syria after talks in Ankara with new Nato chief Jens Stoltenberg. …… Activists say IS now controls about a third of Kobane after fierce fighting. Monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, quoting “reliable sources”, said IS was advancing towards the centre of the town from eastern districts. Earlier, a Kurdish leader in Kobane said IS had entered two more districts overnight, bringing in heavy weapons.

Mr Cavusoglu was holding talks with Mr Stoltenberg and US envoys on possible Turkish action against IS. “It is not realistic to expect Turkey to conduct a ground operation on its own,” he told a news conference. “We are holding talks. Once there is a common decision, Turkey will not hold back from playing its part.”

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Posted in Behaviour, Politics, Turkey, UK, US | 1 Comment »

Turkey watches – while ISIS advances against Kurds

October 7, 2014

The US is bombing ISIS positions in Syria. But when ISIS advances against the Kurds in the border town of Kobani, Turkey – although a NATO ally – is content to watch. An enemy of the Kurds is almost a friend!!

Turkish tanks on the Syrian border near Kobani – image ibtimes

Of course nothing is simple in the Middle East.

But sometimes it seems to me that anything that weakens the Kurds is considered a “good thing” by the Turkish government. I have the feeling that even Turkey’s membership of NATO is subordinate to their goal of containing the Kurds and preventing the growth of a Kurdistan which stretches across part of present day Turkey. A “Great Kurdistan” as Ralph Peters’ map shows (from this analysis) is Turkey’s nightmare.

Great Kurdistan a Turkish nightmare – graphic Ralph Peters

For Turkey it is a choice between evils. They could well perceive that an ISIS Caliphate may be less of a geographic threat than a Great Kurdistan.

Caliphate claimed by ISIS – graphic zerohedge.com

The many ISIS advances also cast doubt on whether the US air strikes will be anywhere near as effective as Obama hopes and has proclaimed.

Our objective is clear:  We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counterterrorism strategy.

At Kobani, ISIS advances are not even being contained – let alone degraded and destroyed.

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Posted in Behaviour, Middle East, Politics, Turkey | 1 Comment »

Are Hong Kong demonstrations spontaneous or foreign financed?

October 6, 2014

After the US and Europe supported and financed demonstrations in Ukraine, one wonders if some of the US interest – and funding for “promoting democracy” – is now directed at China and its extremities.

Certainly in 2012, US government or government supported institutions spent quite a lot of money for promoting “democracy” in Hong Kong. The National Endowment for Democracy reports for 2012:

China (Hong Kong)

American Center for International Labor Solidarity
$139,532
To continue to advance worker rights by building the capacity of democratic trade unions in Hong Kong. The Solidarity Center will work with its partners to advocate for collective bargaining rights, utilize local and international mechanisms to improve working conditions, and promote understanding of worker rights abuses and developments in China among the international labor movement and human rights community.

Hong Kong Human Rights Monitor
$155,000
To raise the standards of human rights protection and democratic representation in Hong Kong. The Monitor will carry out human rights monitoring, casework, campaigning, and public education drawing local and international attention to civil rights and human rights developments in Hong Kong.

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs
$460,000
To foster awareness regarding Hong Kong’s political institutions and constitutional reform process and to develop the capacity of citizens – particularly university students – to more effectively participate in the public debate on political reform, NDI will work with civil society organizations on parliamentary monitoring, a survey, and development of an Internet portal, allowing students and citizens to explore possible reforms leading to universal suffrage.

Grant descriptions are from the 2012 NED Annual Report.

The numbers for 2013 are not yet out but were probably over $1 Million compared to the c. $750,000 in 2012. It would have risen further in 2014.

The NED is said to be private but is funded by the US Congress.

The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs “is an organization created by the United States government by way of the National Endowment for Democracy to channel grants for furthering democracy in developing nations”- Wikipedia

The American Center for International Labor Solidarity better known as the Solidarity Center, is a non-profit organization affiliated with the AFL-CIO labor federation that serves as a conduit for US foreign aid.

The Hong Kong demonstrations may well have been spontaneous to some extent but they were also certainly not free of external support and funding and instigation. Clearly some substantial funds came through various US channels.

And I would not be at all surprised to learn that some EU and even some Japanese funds have been channeled into Hong Kong. But I am not so sure that using mob action to instigate change always leads to a promotion of democracy. A mob cannot be equated to being representative of the “will of the people”.

 

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Science by Press Release: Overhyped “gravity waves” were just dust

September 27, 2014

In March this year there was a great deal of publicity about the detection of gravity waves after the Big Bang. There were Press Releases and promotional videos and blanket coverage in the media. There was talk about Nobel prizes. Not unlike the massive publicity mounted by CERN about the discovery of (or more accurately the potential discovery of a possible indication of a particle not inconsistent with) the Higgs boson particle. After that non-discovery also there was talk about the CERN team being awarded a Nobel Prize! Even a member of the Nobel Committee was taken in by the publicity and fought for CERN the organisation, to be awarded  the physics prize. Most of the campaign in favour of CERN was initiated and orchestrated by the PR department at CERN and the CERN fan-club.

Now it turns out that the gravity waves may well have been cosmic dust.

BBC: One of the biggest scientific claims of the year has received another set-back.

In March, the US BICEP team said it had found a pattern on the sky left by the rapid expansion of space just fractions of a second after the Big Bang. The astonishing assertion was countered quickly by others who thought the group may have underestimated the confounding effects of dust in our own galaxy.

That explanation has now been boosted by a new analysis from the European Space Agency’s (Esa) Planck satellite. In a paper published on the arXiv pre-print server, Planck’s researchers find that the part of the sky being observed by the BICEP team contained significantly more dust than it had assumed.

BIG Science of this kind needs BIG FUNDS. BIG FUNDS need BIG CLAIMS. A BIG CLAIM followed by a retraction is seen to be better – from a publicity perspective – than an uninteresting claim or no claim at all. The people who control the BIG FUND purse strings are generally governments in the form of bureaucrats and administrators and politicians. They don’t usually read the scientific papers themselves. But they do read the Press Releases and take note of the number of column-inches of newspaper articles that are generated. Promotional videos with many hits on You-Tube are also taken note of.

This is science by Press Release. Scientific quality is now judged by the amount of publicity generated.

I am not competent to judge the technical content of these “discoveries” and therefore have to rely on others who are. And so I take note of what Sean Carroll, a CalTech physicist writes on his blog:

Ever since we all heard the exciting news that the BICEP2 experiment had detected “B-mode” polarization in the cosmic microwave background — just the kind we would expect to be produced by cosmic inflation at a high energy scale — the scientific community has been waiting on pins and needles for some kind of independent confirmation, so that we could stop adding “if it holds up” every time we waxed enthusiastic about the result. And we all knew that there was just such an independent check looming, from the Planck satellite. The need for some kind of check became especially pressing when some cosmologists made a good case that the BICEP2 signal may very well have been dust in our galaxy, rather than gravitational waves from inflation (Mortonson and Seljak; Flauger, Hill, and Spergel).

Now some initial results from Planck are in … and it doesn’t look good for gravitational waves.

Planck intermediate results. XXX. The angular power spectrum of polarized dust emission at intermediate and high Galactic latitudes
Planck Collaboration: R. Adam, et al.

planck-bmode-spectrum

The light-blue rectangles are what Planck actually sees and attributes to dust. The black line is the theoretical prediction for what you would see from gravitational waves with the amplitude claimed by BICEP2. As you see, they match very well. That is: the BICEP2 signal is apparently well-explained by dust.

….. Planck has observed the whole sky, including the BICEP2 region, although not in precisely the same wavelengths. With a bit of extrapolation, however, they can use their data to estimate how big a signal should be generated by dust in our galaxy. The result fits very well with what BICEP2 actually measured. It’s not completely definitive — the Planck paper stresses over and over the need to do more analysis, especially in collaboration with the BICEP2 team — but the simplest interpretation is that BICEP2’s B-modes were caused by local contamination, not by early-universe inflation. ….. 

“Science by consensus” and “science by press release” and even “science by press release about the consensus” have infected much of what passes for science today.

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BJP dumps Shiv Sena. As expected?

September 25, 2014

The 25 year old alliance between the BJP and Shiv Sena is finally over. Of course it was actually an alliance between Bal Thackeray and the BJP and without him the Shiv Sena is just a shadow of what it once was (and some might say that it was always a blight on Indian politics with Bal Thackeray – and being a shadow of a blight without him was a welcome shift to the light!). But the simple reality is that the BJP – at national level – does not need the Shiv Sena. In fact they are a liability.

ToI: The 25-year-old BJP-Shiv Sena alliance split on Thursday amid continued deadlock over seat-sharing for the October 15 Maharashtra assembly polls.

After several rounds of talks over the last few days, senior state BJP leaders announced on Thursday evening severing of the ties between the two parties, blaming Shiv Sena’s “inflexibility” for it.

“We have conveyed our decision to snap ties to Shiv Sena. The decision was taken with a heavy heart,” Maharashtra BJP chief Devendra Fadnavis told reporters after a meeting of the state party’s core committee.

While this split is just for the Maharashtra elections, it is effectively a national split since the Shiv Sena is a zero without or outside of Maharashtra.

After the Modi wave at the general elections it was only a matter of time. Back in July I speculated

The biggest credibility challenge that Narendra Modi faces is to convince Indians – and the outside world – that he represents something much larger, secular and inclusive than the narrow, religiously-bigoted  and exclusive position espoused by the RSS and some even more extreme Hindu nationalist groups. But he has to do this equitably but without giving the perception of appeasing the Muslim fanatics.

And he has to clean his own house first. His ally in Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena, is now an embarrassment and a liability. Within his own party also there is no dearth of intellectually retarded loud-mouths. They are all now a burden and unless he cuts them down to size they have the potential to negate all his efforts to be  inclusive.

The Shiv Sena is a special case and I think Modi can afford to dump them. They have just made utter fools of themselves  ……..

……. The Shiv Sena remains a force – if only in Maharashtra – but they are in a declining spiral and my reading is that it would be least damaging for Modi to dump them now – early on in his term – and cap his losses.

 

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