Pseudo-science and religious loonies: Modi needs to purge the riff-raff he attracts

January 7, 2015

Narendra Modi’s new BJP government in India has been a breath of fresh air after the stagnant, smelly and stale environment in which the previous Congress government had got itself stuck in. It is still early days yet but Narendra Modi will need to get to grips with his idiot fringe before they leach away all his gains. The loony, religious Hindu right feel empowered and and are making fools of themselves. The sad part is that they elevate bigotry and prejudice and religious violence as being justified for their “holy cause”.

The idiot fringe consists  – among others – of supposedly pious people (men and women) who claim that “goodness” is implicit in being a “Hindu”. They bask in the reflected glory of the supposedly great days of Rama but their grasp of history is a little less than zero and is mostly imagined. Their use of pseudoscience and their interpretation of ancient scriptures sounds like those who manage to read every current event into the soothsayings of Nostradamus. They threaten to make Modi’s government a laughing stock. Before too long Modi will need to purge the BJP of the lunatic fringe.

They usually make up history whenever – and wherever – they lack knowledge. They have started a campaign of reconverting people they claim were converted to Islam or Christianity in the first place. They are not averse to using violence in their self-defined “just causes”.  They include idiots who are Members of Parliament calling for every good Hindu woman to have 5 children each! The same MP called Gandhi’s assassin a “patriot”. They also tend to be the same people who inculcate the culture of feudal fiefdoms and accord themselves and their followers the right of “droit du seigneur”. The so-called “god-men” are perhaps the worst sexual predators around.  They not only allow but they sanctify the rape culture that is endemic in all of urban India.

They also include those who would claim that ancient Hindu culture was responsible for all the major inventions and discoveries of the last 2,000 years. This has led to a wave of pseudo-science which is perceived by the loony right as being “politically correct” and fashionable under the new government. Unfortunately many academics are too cowed down by their own perceptions of career and government patronage to resist the nonsense. Even the Indian Science Congress currently going on feels that it must give space to the the pseudo-scientists and the charlatans. Allowing pseudo-science is academic misconduct which is just as bad as faking data.

One entire session of the current program (Indian Science Congress 2015 program) is devoted to “Ancient Sciences through Sanskrit”.

Pseudo-science at the Indian Science Congress 2015

Pseudo-science at the Indian Science Congress 2015

The nonsense claims range from the origin of hominids being in India to Vedic nanoscience and elephant urine as fuel for powered flight.

Indian Express: The paper on aviation is part of a symposium on “ancient Indian sciences through Sanskrit”, and will be presented by Captain Anand Bodas, retired principal of a pilot training centre, and Ameya Jadhav, lecturer at Mumbai’s Swami Vivekanand International School and Junior College. ……. The abstract of the Bodas-Jadhav paper says: “Aviation technology in ancient India is not a tale of mythology, but it is a total historical document giving technical details and specifications. Ancient Sanskrit literature is full of descriptions of flying machines, Vimanas. “From the many documents found, it is evident that the scientist-sages Agastya and Bharadwaja had developed the lore of aircraft construction. Aeronautics or Vaimaanikashastra is a part of Yantra Sarvasva of Bharadwaja. This is also known as Brihadvimaana Shastra. Vaimaanikashastra deals with aeronautics, including the design of aircraft, the way they can be used for transportation and other applications, in detail.” According to the abstract, the knowledge of aeronautics is described in Sanskrit in 100 sections, eight chapters, 500 principles and 3000 slokas. “Great sage Bharadwaja explained the construction of aircraft and way to fly it in air, on land, on water and use the same aircraft like a submarine,” the abstract says.

“He also described the construction of war planes and fighter aircraft. This paper will deal with manufacturing an alloy for making aeroplanes, the specialised dress material being virus proof, waterproof and shock proof for the pilots. This was given by Bhardwaja sage in Brihatvimanshashtra. He had mentioned 97 reference books for aviation.”

According to the abstract, the paper will provide a short account of the special diet for aviators, and on “emergency food” for times when regular “fooding facility was not available or possible”, as recommended in the Aharadhikaran. “Bharadwaja has considered the climatic changes in the atmospheric levels while considering the dressing of the pilot. He has mentioned 25 types of viruses in the atmosphere which attack the human skin, bones and the body… In Vastradhikaran, he has given the reason for special clothing and the process of making fabric. After studying all above points, which are mentioned in Brihatvimanshashtra, we came to know that ancient Indian sciences and specially aviation technology was so advanced. The most interesting thing about the Indian science of aeronautics and Bharadwaja’s research was that they were successfully tested in actual practice by an Indian over hundred years ago. In 21st century, we should study and spread the achievements of our sages,” says the abstract.

Basking in a past and imagined glory!

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Oil wars: US crude drops below $50 as Saudi Arabia drops prices to protect market share

January 6, 2015

Some stock markets are spooked as oil prices continue to slide, but bringing oil price back to a cost-based price is a good thing in the long term. For too long – almost 45 years – oil producers and their governments have fleeced the consumer. Oil prices have had no relationship to cost of production but have been governed by artificially controlling its scarcity (by the OPEC cartel) and pricing it at the level of unacceptable pain for the consumer. Predatory governments have assisted by taxing oil products as far as they can even for the necessities of living (gasoline, diesel, LPG, fertilisers, pesticides…). If the present oil wars bring the price to the consumer in line with the cost of production – and there is no shortage of oil available to be produced – then it is a fundamentally sound, and long overdue, removal of one of the great, artificial distortions of the market place.

History will show the OPEC cartel to have held back development for 4 decades and to have been an evil thing.

Even if Saudi Arabia is engaged in a multi-pronged war – against shale oil, against Russia, against Iran – the root cause of the drop is that there is no longer a monopoly that the OPEC cartel enjoys. And the the way being shown by US shale oil is available to many more countries. In the short term it may well affect stock markets as these fetters are removed but in the long term this is an inexorable driver of growth – especially for the developing countries and their hard pressed consumers.

Remarkably many oil producers are now even increasing production in a time of a glut and cutting prices to win market share. They are being short-sighted. As the Opec cartel collapses, and it becomes a buyer’s market it will be oil price which governs and even then only for short term supply contracts. It will no longer be possible for the cartel oil producers to extort long-term contracts at high prices from developing countries who have no alternatives.

FP0106_Oil_C_JR

2015 not 2014 — via Financial Post

 Financial Post: U.S crude crashed below US$50 a barrel while benchmark Brent crude tumbled under US$53 after data showed Russian oil output at post-Soviet era highs and Iraqi oil exports at near 35-year peaks.

Meanwhile, the outright price for Canadian heavy crude fell below US$35 a barrel. ……. The drop in WTI pushed the pushed the price of Canadian heavy crude to US$34.64 per barrel, a level that could make producing crude from the oilsands unprofitable for most operators in the world’s third-largest crude reserve.

Many of the region’s operators have already slashed capital spending and slowed work on new projects in order to cope with the price crash, though production from the region has not yet been affected.

…… Top crude exporter Saudi Arabia revealed it had made deep cuts to its monthly oil prices for European buyers , the sixth time in a row since June when it had slashed prices, corresponding with the rout in crude futures markets over the period. Analysts read the latest cut as reflecting Saudi Arabia’s deepening defence of its market share for crude. The OPEC kingpin also trimmed its prices for U.S. refiners for a sixth straight month, while raising rates for Asia.

…… Some traders seem certain that U.S. crude will be trading in the US$40 region later in the week if weekly oil inventory numbers for the United States on Wednesday show another supply build. ……. 

Russia’s oil output hit a post-Soviet high last year, averaging 10.58 million barrels per day (bpd), up 0.7% thanks to small non-state producers, Energy Ministry data showed. Iraq’s oil exports were at their highest since 1980 in December, an oil ministry spokesman said, with record sales from the country’s southern terminals.

The Russian and Iraqi data overshadowed reports of drops in Libya’s oil output due to conflict. Libya’s oil output has fallen to around 380,000 bpd after the closure of the OPEC producer’s biggest oil port Es Sider, along with another oil port Ras Lanuf.

The sooner oil price drops to less than $40 per barrel, the sooner the oil price can stabilise for 12 – 18 months. Then, as the price works its way through the economies of the consumer countries, the markets could see a year or two of stable, sustainable growth.

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“Filthy” Vikings were plagued by gut parasites

January 5, 2015

The observations of a 10th century Arab traveller, Ahmad ibn Fadlān ibn al-Abbās ibn Rāšid ibn Hammād, about the hygiene of the Vikings more than a thousand years ago, are being confirmed by new DNA analyses. Ibn Fadlan describes the Eastern Vikings while the new DNA studies are about the Western Vikings, but their living conditions and habits would have been very similar. ScienceNordic reports that a new DNA study “conducted on thousand-year-old parasite eggs recovered from Viking faeces, shows that both the Vikings and their domestic animals were plagued by parasites — which most likely enjoyed excellent living conditions in a dirty world in which domestic animals and humans lived in unhygienically close proximity to each other”.

The paper is published in the Journal of Parasitology:

Martin Jensen Søe, Peter Nejsum, Brian Lund Fredensborg, and Christian Moliin Outzen Kapel (2014) DNA typing of ancient parasite eggs from environmental samples identifies human and animal worm infections in Viking-age settlement. Journal of Parasitology In-Press.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1645/14-650.1

Study author, post-doc Martin J. Søe from the Department of Plant and Environmental Sciences and the Centre for Geogenetics at the University of Copenhagen, explains:

“It’s fascinating to be able to examine these extremely old parasite eggs and establish which species they came from,” says Søe. “We can use this to say something about what people suffered from during the Viking age and which domestic animals they kept in one location or another. It can also answer questions about the interaction between humans and animals and how close to each other they lived.”

The new study is part of a large scale project in which Danish scientists are charting the evolutionary, demographic, and health-related stories from the earliest settlements and up to modern times. ………. 

….. In the study, Søe examined the content of parasite eggs in soil samples from a Viking settlement near Viborg. The soil samples came from a latrine used during the period 1018-1030.

The scientists began by separating the ancient parasite eggs from the soil and then extracted DNA from them.

By sequencing the DNA, Søe was able to determine which species of parasite the eggs came from and whether the species infected humans.

The study shows that the soil samples contained parasite eggs from roundworm and human whipworm, along with liver fluke from cattle or sheep

“You can’t tell if they come from parasites that infected humans or animals by simply looking at the eggs,” says Søe. “But by examining their DNA, we are able to confirm what we until now have only believed to be the case: that a thousand years ago, humans carried these parasites around.”

Going East the Vikings were seen as “handsome but filthy”

Ibn Fadlān was a 10th-century Arab traveler, famous for his account of his travels as a member of an embassy of the Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad to the king of the Volga Bulgars. His account is most known for providing a description of the Volga Vikings, including an eyewitness account of a ship burial.

File:Ibn Fadhlan manuscript.jpg

Ibn Fadhlan manuscript

Elements of Ibn Fadlān’s account are used in the novel Eaters of the Dead  by Michael Crichton (adapted to film in The 13th Warrior with Antonio Banderas as Ibn Fadlan), in which the Arab ambassador is taken even further north and is involved in adventures inspired by the Old English epic Beowulf.

Some excerpts from Ahmad ibn Fadlān:

They are the filthiest of all Allah’s creatures: they do not purify themselves after excreting or urinating or wash themselves when in a state of ritual impurity after coitus and do not even wash their hands after food.

I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blond and ruddy; they wear neither tunics nor kaftans, but the men wear a garment which covers one side of the body and leaves a hand free. Each man has an axe, a sword, and aknife, and keeps each by him at all times. Each woman wears on either breast a box of iron, silver,copper, or gold; the value of the box indicates the wealth of the husband. Each box has a ring from which depends a knife. The women wear neck-rings of gold and silver. Their most prized ornaments are green glass beads. They string them as necklaces for their women.

In the case of a rich man, they gather together his possessions and divide them into three portions, one third for his household, one third with which to cut funeral garments for him, and one third with which they ferment alcohol which they drink on the day when his slave-girl kills herself and is burned together with her master.

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Erectile dysfunction of a wind turbine

January 5, 2015

Environmentalists like wind turbines mainly for their phallic symbolism. The sight of multiple phalluses sticking up all over the countryside  makes them feel good about the virility of their “movement”.

The erectile dysfunction problem is probably psychological. As it is, wind turbines are subsidised because they cannot perform with no wind or with high winds. But this collapse was in light winds. A rapid infusion of subsidies would probably help.

Turbine collapse County Tyrone 2nd January 2015 The Independant

Wind turbine No. 3 at the Screggagh wind farm, Northern Ireland (Nordex N80, 2.5MW, 80m rotor) collapsed in light winds – image The Independent

The Nordex N80 wind turbine has an 80m diameter rotor and the tower, from ground level to hub, is also 80m tall. It is supposed to operate between wind speeds of 3 m/s and 25 m/s and its power rating of 2.5 MW is for a wind speed of 15 m/s. It is supposed to be able to withstand a wind speed of 70 m/s (but I suspect that this is just an optimistic calculation and not based on any realistic trials).

The design is with a modular tubular steel lattice tower. From the pictures I would speculate that it is a tower design failure. Possibly the fatigue conditions (caused by rotor imbalance or wind gusts) have been underestimated such that some strength (thickness) has been sacrificed for keeping the weight down.

The Guardian: The cause of the collapse is unclear as winds were light on Friday. It is understood the rotor blades spun out of control and the sound of the mechanical structure crashing to the ground could be heard up to seven miles away.

 

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The certainty of the improbable

January 4, 2015

When you toss a coin, there is complete certainty that an event that is only 50% probable will occur. When you roll a dice there is absolute certainty that a 16.67% probable event will come to pass. It sounds trivial. After all the probability is only to distinguish between outcomes once it is certain that the coin will be tossed or that the dice will be rolled. Probability of an outcome is meaningless if the coin were not tossed or the dice not rolled. But note also that the different outcomes must be pre-defined. If you toss a silver coin in the air the return of a golden coin is not included among the pre-defined, possible outcomes. That a roll of the dice can result in a 9 is not “on the cards”.

Probability or improbability of an event or a causal relationship is meaningless unless the certainty of some more general event or relationship is certain. Moreover as soon as we define the event or relationship to which we allocate a probability, we also define that that event or relationship is permitted. It is certain that tomorrow will be another day. Only because it is certain can we consider the probability – or improbability – of what weather tomorrow might bring.  Suppose we define the weather as being either “good”, “bad” or “indifferent”. We can guess or calculate the probability of tomorrow’s weather exhibiting one of these 3 permitted outcomes. My point is that as soon as we define the improbable we also make it certain that the selected outcomes are all permitted. Then even the most improbable – but permitted – weather outcome will, on some day, occur. Not just permitted – but certain. If the improbable never happens then it is impossible – not improbable.

We use statistics and probabilities of occurrence because we don’t know the mechanisms which govern the outcome. If mechanisms were known in their entirety, we would just calculate the result – not the probability of a particular result. The very mention of a probability is always an admission of ignorance. It means that we cannot tell what makes something probable or improbable and even what we consider improbable will surely occur. An outcome of even very low probability will then – given sufficient total occurrence – certainly occur. The 2011 earthquake and tsunami off the Tōhoku coast was a one-in-a-1,000 year occurrence. The probability of it happening next year remains at one-in-a-thousand. But given another 1,000 years it will (almost) certainly happen again.

One of my concerns is that the use of statistics and probability – say in medical trials – is usually taken to imply knowledge, but it is actually an admission of ignorance. No doubt the use of statistics and probability help to constrain the boundaries of the ignorance, but the bottom line is that even the low probability risks will materialise. The very use of probabilities is always because of a lack of knowledge, because of ignorance.

In the beginning of December I was having a regular medical check-up and I was offered a flu-shot for the winter which I took. But I got to wondering why I did. The influenza vaccine is effective in about 50% of cases (i.e. 50% achieve protection). Around 5% – irrespective of whether they achieve protection or not – suffer some adverse reaction to the shot. Around 0.5% of the 5% (1:4,000 of total vaccinated) suffer a fatal reaction. In our little clinic perhaps 3,000 were vaccinated this winter. About 1,500 would have achieved protection and about 150 must have had some adverse reaction. Most likely one person has or will suffer a fatal reaction. I was just gambling that I would not be that one person. When some new drug is said to have a 1% chance of adverse effects it only means that it will certainly have adverse effects for 1 in a hundred cases. When that one person chooses to take that drug, he may be making the best medical choice possible – but it is the wrong choice.

A low risk for the multitude but a certainty for some. The chances of something improbable never happening are virtually zero.

Improbable – but certain.

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Get yourself a luck-bucket

January 2, 2015

The new paper in Science showing that two-thirds of all cancers are due to random cell mutations and not due to life-style, environmental conditions or inherited predispositions, is getting a lot of attention today.

Abstract: Some tissue types give rise to human cancers millions of times more often than other tissue types. Although this has been recognized for more than a century, it has never been explained. Here, we show that the lifetime risk of cancers of many different types is strongly correlated (0.81) with the total number of divisions of the normal self-renewing cells maintaining that tissue’s homeostasis. These results suggest that only a third of the variation in cancer risk among tissues is attributable to environmental factors or inherited predispositions. The majority is due to “bad luck,” that is, random mutations arising during DNA replication in normal, noncancerous stem cells. This is important not only for understanding the disease but also for designing strategies to limit the mortality it causes.

Nearly every newspaper headline describes these random cell mutations as being “bad luck”. And that got me to wondering about the nature of “luck” and our perceptions of “luck”.

To be “lucky” an event has to be improbable. The consequences of the lucky event may be good or bad. “Luck” or “fortune” if not qualified by the word “bad” are generally taken to be “good”. Any event which is expected is never classified as being “lucky”. That somebody will win the lottery is highly likely and is not a matter of luck. That one particular person shall win the lottery will always have a very low probability and therefore becomes a lucky happening. All those who didn’t win are not “unlucky” because their loss was expected. But to have the winning ticket which is then carried away in an improbable gust of wind could be considered “unlucky”.

I like to think of luck or fortune as a flowing river. But not everybody is near this river and not all the flow is advantageous. Some of the flow is downright poisonous. The person with “good luck” is then the person who is not only near the river but also has a bucket to capture some of the advantageous flow. The difference between the lucky person and the ordinary person is then access to the river and the existence and the suitability of the “bucket”. I think of a person with “bad luck” as one with an ineffective bucket who picks up some of the “poisoned” or disadvantageous flow. The bucket is both a container and a filter. The Romans praying to the Goddess Fortuna or Hindus praying to Lakshmi are effectively trying to buy their “luck catching buckets”. Sportsmen or gamblers going through superstitious rituals before a match or a play are trying to prepare their “luck buckets”. I used to have a “lucky tie” that I always wore to job interviews. I see athletes and footballers cross themselves before their race or their game but they are only praying for their buckets.

Statistically it may be inevitable that there will be some lottery winner. The intelligent designer of the lottery well knows that he will pay out. But he does not know to whom. And he cannot exercise the control to determine (except in a rigged lottery) the winner. There are – in a simple lottery – two random events to consider:

  1. the process by which the lottery tickets are distributed, and
  2. the process by which the number of the winning ticket is selected.

Suppose there are a million tickets numbered one to one million and that one of these numbers will be selected. There is a certainty that a winning ticket will be declared. The operator of the lottery has no need of and no recourse to luck. I have to first acquire a ticket and then my number has to be selected. The odds of my being in the game are somewhat less than one and only then would I have a one-in-a-million chance of winning. My luck-catching bucket does not have to control both these events but it does need to be able to ensure that I get a number and that the particular number allocated to me is also the particular number selected to win.

So the task is to get myself an effective luck-bucket which is not too unwieldy. An instruction manual on how to use it would be helpful But first I need a map showing me where the Luck River flows. But if I don’t have a lottery ticket my luck-bucket won’t help me. So perhaps the first thing to do is to get myself into the right game.

But my buying a lottery ticket is so improbable that this too is a matter of Luck.

There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, a hole.

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Ten questions to address during 2015

January 1, 2015

Rather than making resolutions (which I won’t keep) I have listed the 10 questions that I would like to consider (but won’t) during this next year:

  1. Are not “rights not to ” integral to “rights to”? Rather than freedom of religion, would it not be better to have freedom from religion or perhaps the “right to be free of religion”?
  2. Isn’t the continuity of an organised religion entirely dependent upon the brainwashing of children to follow that religion?
  3. Is evolution constrained (imprisoned) by the Earth? or is Earth the prison planet for evolution?
  4. Why do we need priests to tell others what to believe? Aren’t priests  – by definition – an institutionalisation of inequality?
  5. Why do all societies have taxation on wealth creation instead of on wealth consumption?
  6. Why do we need or allow cost or price inflation?
  7. Why are concepts of equality not subordinated to justice?
  8. Could Shia (+US) versus Sunni (+Russia) start WWIII? or Russia versus EU? or China versus Japan? or China versus India?
  9. Do we need barbarism to exist to be able to define civilised behaviour?
  10. Why don’t physicists and cosmologists just admit that they cannot (yet) explain any one of the fundamental forces of nature (the strong interaction force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force and the gravitational force)  and instead of using jargon just call them Magic Force Types 1, 2, 3 and 4?

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Seven years of plenty from March 2015?

December 31, 2014

Tomorrow is just another day, the first day of the month we call January after the two-headed (two-faced?) Roman God Janus. The day is just another day of the 365 ¼ days the Earth takes to orbit the Sun. The first day of January as the start of another orbit is an arbitrary choice and does not coincide with any special position of the Earth or the Sun. It is 9 – 10 days after the winter solstice and the lag can be put down to the fact that the solar cycle giving the year is not a nice, clean, simple multiple of the lunar cycle giving our months. The months of course have been massaged to have a variable number of days to make 12 months fit to a year.  In Roman times, the year started on March 1st of a 10 month year. The ten months were clearly too short for the solar year, and the 50 or so days between the end of December and the start of March were acknowledged but empty and unnamed. January and February were added later to complete the solar year.

But in spite of being just another day, the 1st of January is important, not because of the Earth’s position but because humans need to be able to draw a line and start anew. For most it has been a bad year or, at best, just another ordinary year. For only a very few has it been a “good” year. We crave something to look forward to, to better times. And what better way to define the end of a period and a renewal than the start of a New Year.

A year ago on 1st January 2014, I hadn’t heard about ISIS or IS. The video of the beheading of James Foley has been – for me – the single most disgusting clip of 2014. Human behaviour continues to vary from the sublime to the barbarous. My contempt for organised religion has only increased during the year. Every case of religious violence can be traced back to a rabid mullah or imam or priest or rabbi. Islamic barbarism has distinguished itself – again. My image of 2014 is dominated by barbarous Islamic extremists. The heights of Islamic culture and poetry and art and science have long since gone and we are now seeing the depths of behaviour Islam (among other religions) can inspire. But there has been too much talk about “human rights” and not enough about corresponding “human duties”. We continue down the misguided road of legislating for human behaviour.  The rich/poor divide has widened but politicians forget that this is because the poor lack the education and the opportunity to escape the poverty trap. It is not because the rich have taken from the poor as they would like to pretend. And yet global poverty and famine and malnourishment and homelessness have declined. Politicians have vacillated as usual. Barack Obama has not lived up to the high expectations he once inspired and the new Pope Francis is on a cheap popularity quest. Courage is not particularly visible. A new economic cold war between the EU and the US against Russia has started. There are no political leaders in Europe and the EU is becoming a bureaucratic monstrosity. China and India have been unable to be the motors for global growth.

The World Cup came and went. FIFA was shown -again – to be a deeply corrupt organisation. India demonstrated that frugal engineering could allow space to be within the reach of those not so well off. Big Science – exemplified by CERN – applies a bureaucratic rather than an innovative approach to Science. Science by press releases to secure funding is more important than thinking out of the box (which cannot get published). Peer review is more pal review or even self-review. There is more ice at the poles than for 40 years. There is more ice at the Antarctic than ever measured before. Oil price has dropped spectacularly as shale oil production has increased and demand has declined. We have a year of low fuel prices ahead. In 2014 there were many small but no major volcanic eruptions or earthquakes or tsunamis. A VEI5+ volcano eruption is now well overdue. The internet and internet English and internet crime are all still growing. War is increasingly being privatised and outsourced. In a post-modern world, political correctness is becoming obsolete.

All in all, just another ordinary year.

The astrological pundits tell me that a period of unprecedented antithetical planetary positions since the 1930’s started in 2008. Apparently planets were “opposed” to each other or at “right angles” to each other or were “antagonistic”. The financial crisis – they are quick to point out – began in 2008 and reached its depths in 2013 in accord with the antagonistic alignments! In any event these unpropitious alignments come to an end in March 2015.

The end of seven lean years perhaps and the start of seven years of plenty?

As they say here, “ett gott slut och ett gott nytt”. I wish all a

A Good End and a Good Start

 

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Sorrow – and some relief – as debris and bodies from QZ8501 found

December 30, 2014

It is a tragic accident and 162 people lost their lives. That is an event causing great pain and sorrow. But there will be some closure for the relatives and friends of the victims.

There is also some relief. It is not a complete and mystifying vanishing act as for MH370. There was no conspiracy and the possibility that it was a terrorist act is very low. It was primarily a thunderstorm ( and possibly some pilot or air traffic error) which was responsible. There was no encounter of the third kind. It was not an Asian version of the Bermuda Triangle.

Reuters:

Indonesian rescuers saw bodies and luggage off the coast of Borneo island on Tuesday and officials said they were “95 percent sure” debris spotted in the sea was from a missing AirAsia plane with 162 people on board.

Indonesia AirAsia’s Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact with air traffic control early on Sunday during bad weather on a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore.

Pictures of floating bodies were broadcast on television and relatives of the missing gathered at the crisis center in Surabaya were shown weeping, their heads in their hands. …..

Online discussion among pilots has centered on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled. ……

On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

It seems the pilot was climbing to avoid the thunderstorm and had reached 36,300 feet but may have been flying too slow:

Geoffrey Thomas, an aviation expert and editor of airlineratings.com, believes that while climbing to avoid the storm it encountered, the pilots could have induced an aerodynamic stall, similar to how the Air France AF447 crashed in 2009.

On Sunday, Indonesian aviation consultant Gerry Soejatman tweeted out a “leaked” picture of an air traffic control screen showing the QZ8501.

“Leaked photo of ATCscreen on #QZ8501, it ended up at 36300ft and climbing but ground speed only 353 knots! Uh oh!,” he wrote on Twitter.

An Emirates flight on the same screen was flying at a similar altitude but was much faster at 503 knots.

“The QZ8501 was flying too slow, about 100 knots which is about 160km/h too slow. At that altitude, that’s exceedingly dangerous,” Thomas told Australia’s Herald Sun.

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Sweden’s December Agreement abandons parliament for a postmodern, back-room “party democracy”

December 30, 2014

Sweden’s December Agreement can be described simply as an agreement between six of the eight political parties in parliament to abdicate their “rights” and duties – when in opposition – to oppose a minority government made up of some of the other parties to the Agreement. The Agreement negates the representative strengths of the eight parties in parliament as established by the electorate. It is claimed that it is to ensure the continuity of government by making the opposition of the two parties not represented, impotent. The two not represented are on the far left and on the extreme, nationalistic, racist right.

Parliamentary democracy as such has been abandoned in that two particular parties – representing 20% of the electorate – are being suppressed by the others getting together in a “collusion of the cowardly”. “Truth” is simply whatever promotes my (or my group’s) will or interests. None of the party leaders who signed-up to the December Agreement gain much credit. None managed to raise their vision to anything beyond maintaining their own party positions within the pig trough. The Prime Minister, Stefan Löfven was not prepared to resign or face a new election. The new leader of the Moderate Party, Anna Kinberg Batra was too new and too scared to face a new election. The Environmental Party’s Åsa Romson was only too happy with her meagre 7% to remain at the “big table” and in government. The small party leaders from the Alliance don’t come out very well. They were running scared of being wiped out in any new election and were not prepared to come out from under the protective umbrella of the Moderates. Each party had its own fears and it was an agreement based on fear and truly a collusion of the cowardly. There is not even a pretence of trying to represent the interests of their voters. It is all about the “lowest common denominator” and no hint of aspiring to the “highest common numerator”. It is the triumph of a grey, bureaucratic pragmatism over any hint of vision or idealism.

It occurs to me that this is nothing but postmodernism applied to parliamentary democracy. It is whatever you want to make of it. It is a form of “postmodern democracy” which degrades a traditional parliamentary democracy to something else. I take postmodernism to mean a world where

our interests and desires often use “reason” to promote their fulfillment; “truth” is simply whatever promotes my (or my group’s) will or interests.  There is a “political agenda” in whatever we claim to be true. Knowledge is not neutral. (This observation utilizes the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”) In response to the unbiased certainty, postmodernism emphasizes that our ideas and judgments are embedded within a historical-cultural context; so we can never fully remove ourselves from it by pure reflection. 

The will of the electorate as represented in parliament has been over-ruled by the party leaders in the back-rooms. If this is the new world of parliamentary democracy then parliament itself is irrelevant and meaningless. It is only the back-rooms and the decisions taken there which apply. Electoral democracy manifested in a parliament is abandoned and it is only those who choose the party leaders who then meet in the back-room who matter (and to some extent this is already the basic flaw in all multi-party democracies).

 

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