After driving Saab into bankruptcy it seems that Victor Muller’s Spyker will still come out of it pretty well. Accounting gymnastics will give Spyker (Saab’s former owner) a profit of some 140 million kronor (€16 million).
Saab Automobile’s bankruptcy has a shortfall of over nine billion kronor (€900 million) and many creditors will not get a penny. But Saab’s former owner, Spyker, has managed to show a profit of over 140 million kronor just because of the Saab bankruptcy. “It sounds very strange that Spyker makes a profit because of Saab’s bankruptcy. But we don’t know what lies behind and what legal documents were drawn up between the companies”, said Marie Karlsson Tuula, associate professor of civil law and specialist in bankruptcy matters. ….
Last week I flew in and out of New Delhi’s new Terminal 3 at the Indira Gandhi International Airport. It took me 20 minutes to clear immigration, baggage collection and customs going in and 15 minutes to clear immigration and security on my way out. The Indian security personnel are getting their act together. I have to say that I found the security check more simple, more thorough, more courteous and more credible than that at Munich when I got back to Europe (and Munich is one of the better airports and far more customer-friendly than Frankfurt).
Compare that with the apparent incompetence at London’s Heathrow.
German politicians and plagiarised dissertations are reaching new heights. You can now get political credit for returning your doctorate awarded for a plagiarised dissertation provided you do it before you are found out.
There’s a bizarre case brewing in Berlin, Germany. A local politician, Florian Graf, chief of the CDU party group in the city-state governing council, announced Friday afternoon that he was returning his doctorate to the University of Potsdam.
His announcement (here his text) was a very strange tale. It seems that he had submitted his thesis and delivered the copies to the library, but requested that they not be on loan because he was publishing an article and the journal wanted to be the first publisher. And then he got the piece of paper saying he had a doctorate and has been using it ever since, even though he does not have the thesis published.
And now he’s come to realize, as he said to the Bild-Zeitung, that he is sure that he did not follow quoting conventions and asks for everyone’s forgiveness. And his fellow party members are rushing to hug him and say: ohhhh, that’s bad, we’re so sorry, you are such a nice guy. He’s requested a vote of confidence for Thursday (Tuesday is a holiday in Germany, and most of the country will take Monday off as well).
I have been away for a few days on assignment conducting some business and project reviews.
I can’t help feeling that over the years technology has changed and tools have changed and financial scenarios have changed and markets have changed but the behaviour of people to others remains much the same. The fundamental drivers of behaviour are the same and are probably genetic. But perhaps some of the prejudices of 30 years ago – against women in the work place and against ethnic groups – while still present have reduced significantly. The prejudices against the young and the old still persist.
The recent BBC story about the Catholic Church’s Office of the Inquisition pressurising some US nuns who are considered too liberal by the Church hierarchy got me to wondering whether our behaviour today is much different to that in medieval times.
To make the parallel to medieval times we have to substitute modern institutions. Governments and their institutions ( such as the United Nations or the IMF or the ICC) are today the equivalent of the medieval monarchs and their Catholic Church. They bless some countries and excommunicate others. They tolerate the same behaviour (for example the quest for nuclear weapons) in favoured countries and condemn it in others. They support uprisings against some of their less-favoured member countries and help suppression of rebellion in others. They enforce sanctions – even with the use of collective force – against some and ignore the same behaviour in others. And like the college of cardinals a select group of 5 nations and the 15-member Security Council makes up the holy inner circle controlling these institutions.
We have been seeing signs that a new solar minimum is probably established and that we are in for a decade or two or three of global cooling. Whether this minimum will be as deep as the Maunder Minimum (1645 – 1715) or more like the Dalton Minimum (1790 – 1830) remains to be seen. Of course we will not know whether we are truly in a Solar Minimum until we are half-way through it. It has been proposed that this new minimum be named after Theodor Landscheidt who predicted this in 1989.
Now Japanese astronomers are also predicting a solar minimum similar to the Dalton Minimum and a period of global cooling. However results from the solar observation satellite Hinode also suggest that an unusual configuration of the sun’s magnetic poles may also be on its way.
Back in February last year the story of the massacre of up to 100 huskies in British Columbia came to light. Apparently the dogs which had been used for taking tourists on sled rides had been killed by Robert Fawcett because the number of tourists had reduced drastically after the 2010 Winter Olympics. Fifty-six dogs were dug up in a mass grave near Whistler after information leaked out in January 2011 that Fawcett had been getting workers compensation for “post traumatic stress” following his killing of the dogs. Now 14 months after the massacre The BBC reports that the dog-killer has finally been charged with animal cruelty.
A man who admitted killing more than 50 dogs in the western Canadian province of British Columbia has been charged with animal cruelty. Robert Fawcett ran a company offering dog-sled tours but its business slumped after the 2010 Winter Olympics.
He killed the huskies by shooting them or slitting their throats.
British Columbia’s criminal justice branch said that Mr Fawcett – who ran Howling Dog Tours – faces one count of “causing unnecessary pain and suffering” to dozens of sled dogs in April 2010. He is due to appear in court next month.
The killings became public after Mr Fawcett won a compensation award for post-traumatic stress as a result of the killings. ..
Immediately after this accident it was being touted as the greatest environmental catastrophe of all time. The hyperbole is of course necessary to generate headlines and the “alarmist brigade” who believe that humanity is the worst thing that has ever happened to the earth are quick to pile on the exaggerations. But the earth is rather more resilient than they would like us to believe.
This Friday, April 20, will mark two years since the explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon oil rig caused vast quantities of crude oil to flow into the Gulf of Mexico.
But despite the size of the spill, “the natural recovery is far greater than what anybody hoped when it happened,” said James Morris, a professor of biology at the University of South Carolina. “The fears of most people – that there would be a catastrophic collapse of the ecosystem in the Gulf – never materialized.” …….
He’s been impressed with the recovery of the area’s ecology.
“The fisheries have come back like gangbusters,” he said. “One of the interesting findings was that after the oil spill, bait fish populations collapsed, and predator populations boomed. The reason was that there was no fishing pressure on the top predators because people stopped fishing after the spill. So the predator fish populations rebounded, and they grazed down their prey.”
“The marshes that I saw actually looked very good,” he added. “And I was taken to the worst by officials who wanted to impress us that the damage was really significant, and that you could still find oil in the marshes. And you can still find oil in the marshes, but the greatest damage to the place where they took us was from the trampling by the reporters, scientists, and agency people tromping around out there looking for damage.”
“There’s some evidence that perhaps there are some lingering problems, but it’s not entirely clear,” Morris said. “For example, there’s ambiguity about whether there’s been an effect on species like dolphins. Some people will remain forever convinced that dolphins are washing up because of this spill, but in a recent report that NOAA just released, the dolphin mortality was unexplainably high leading up to the spill. So before the spill, the dolphin mortality was higher than normal, and it’s been higher than normal since the spill.”
But “alarmism” is based on making predictions of catastrophes to come which will never be put to the test during the lifetime of the forecasters.
India test fired its Agni-V ICBM today. Initial reports are of a successful launch though details of the 20 minute flight will take some time to be analysed.
The Hindu:India demonstrated its Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capability on Thursday by successfully launching its most powerful and longest range missile, Agni-V, from the Wheeler Island off the Odisha coast.
The 17-metre-long surface-to-surface ballistic missile lifted off majestically from a rail mobile launcher at 8.04 a.m. After a flight time of 20 minutes, the missile re-entry vehicle impacted the pre-designated target point more than 5,000 kms away in the Indian Ocean with a high degree of accuracy.
Video of the launch ( from two different cameras) has already been posted on You-Tube. I can imagine that the most beautiful words for all those involved was the calm repetition of the phrase “Vehicle state is normal”.
Climate models – at best – are gross over-simplifications of the chaotic layer of atmosphere around the earth in which climate and weather manifest themselves. Solar effects, the effects of clouds, of volcanoes, of aerosols, of sulphur compounds, of ocean currents and of the winds can only be crudely modelled. There is no evidence that man-made carbon dioxide has any significant impact on weather or climate. No one really knows when and how ice ages come and go. The models use fudge factors galore and each only represents the imperfect understanding, the prejudices and the biases of the modeller. And yet IPCC and governments have got so caught up in their own smug rhetoric about the science being “settled” that they prefer to believe the model results even when they are “inconsistent with reality”.
