Have Paris' bistrots and brasseries lost it?

I remember when you could go into almost any street Brasserie, Cafe, Bar or Bistrot in Paris and get a 'Biftek au frites', pay a reasonable amount and walk out saying: "They know how to do this, these French. Delicious".
We tried to find the old atmosphere at a recent 1-day trip to Paris, made possible by the only 2 ½ hour Eurostar door to door journey at £60 for a return ticket.
It was a mixed experience.
A confused and dirty Gare du Nord, a long queue at the single ATM in the arrivals hall followed by an even longer queue to obtain the obligatory carnet for the underground, was not a good start. It didn’t help that the EU-blessing of free travel for everyone seems to have filled Paris with hordes of begging Romanian gypsies, not to mention beggars on every street corner.

If this is Van Rompuy’s, Baroso’s and Schultz’s EU anno 2013, we don’t need it.

At previous visits we have begun the day with a simple petit dejeuner: cafe au lait, a baguette with jam and the breathing in of the atmosphere. We shouldn’t have done it this time.
A disinterested waiter did everything he could to tell these “Anglais” that they were not welcome. He managed to ignore us, forgetting to deliver jam and butter, ignoring the need for cutlery and plates and serving the cafe au lait as if it were a badly produced cappucino.
Apparently they charge 15% for service as standard on the bills in France these days! But not only that – the prices are roughly 50% above corresponding meals in the UK, even with a falling Euro.

My wife's omelette was the only star of the show. Clearly some French chefs have retained a little self respect - but there certainly were no extras for the waiter (which is what they seem to expect on top of their 15%).

So if you happen to pass Brasserie Sarah Bernhard around Tour St Jacques, don’t feel tempted to enter.

Later we had a more elaborate dinner, trying to convince ourselves that one bad experience shouldn’t be allowed to taint French cuisine and hospitality.

At the square next to the Metro Maubert-Mutualite there is a string of typical French shops selling wine, charcuterie, cheese and fish. It is like a little market and a very attractive one at that. Next to the shops, on the corner, there’s a fairly simple small Bistrot. We have been there before some years ago and had pleasant memories of our visit.

To make a long story short, if the food there is representative of what they can produce these days in France, at an exorbitant price, I can promise you that France will not last much longer as a leading EU-country. Perhaps it is too late anyway, as apparently the Muslims in Marseille and Avignon are having some success scaring charcuterie (pork!), wine merchants and lingerie sellers away. France without wine and sausages?
Mon Dieu!

Nevertheless, Paris has a “Je ne sais quoi” and we enjoyed our 8 hours cruising Paris on foot, walking ourselves an inch shorter – even while some of the time we had to accept a light drizzle.

My personal enjoyment could of course be because of my memories from many trips to the city of cities – or Mother of all cities in today’s parlance - but we agreed it would ‘vaut le voyage’ to return.

Perhaps bringing our own sandwiches this time - - - -

Change, Society and the Credit Crunch

I recently fell into the 1992 film with Mel Gibson, Forever Young. The film is about a guy, who is deep-frozen in 1939, waking up 50 years later as a couple of kids pilfer with the power supply to his long forgotten cryogenic coffin. In real life there are many people who pay for this delusionary “treatment” in the hope that future medical research can cure them from whatever fatal illness they carry in their body.

The major fallacy in this hope is not even the fact that their cells explode and are destroyed by the freezing process. The real rub is: will there be stability and continuity in society for even the foreseeable future – let alone the required 50, 100 or 200 years ahead? Or will the object of their efforts drown in war, broken energy supplies or something else?

I think I can say with 100% security:They have wasted their money.

This brought me to think about where else we make this mistake: that life will just go on and on and that the changes we experience will be manageable and arrive piece-meal, giving us plenty of time to adjust. In other words, how many years will pass between major societal discontinuity points?
West European people being up to 67 years old have lived through the longest period of stability ever experienced by anyone. Until recently this part of the world has had a voice with a lot of weight, i.e. “we write the history”, as we were the winners of WWII.

But even within the W. European borders there has been massive change, in some cases for the better, in other cases containing the seeds of massive disasters – we just forget. Spain and Portugal shook off their dictators. We (almost) got rid of 3 rather terrible ideologies: Fascism, Nazism and Communism.
Unfortunately we imported a fourth, a desert culture that preaches as much hate to people of a different belief as the old monsters. The European Union was established, as it grew out of the Coal and Steel Union, an attempt to establish free trade coalitions and the idea that the EU could create long term peace in a historically war torn Europe. (I shall deal with that fallacy at a later time). The technologies developed during WWII have been refined into peace technologies, applied in medicine, physics, electronics, communication and general infrastructure. This has created rich and prospering societies that seem to have become immune to the danger signals.

European overseas colonies became autonomous in the 1940s-70s, leading to mass immigration into Europe. Poverty and wars elsewhere send more people on a migration path, changing populations and religious demography beyond recognition. The effect is dramatic, as the original populations are forced to rethink or even abandon (change) their 1000 year old cultures while trying to accommodate the incoming hordes.

Two major political parties in Sweden, a country of ca. 9mill inhabitants, are now suggesting a complete opening of the borders, expecting a population growth through immigration to 40mill. They are obviously totally blind for the fact that Sweden has moved from being one of the richest states in Europe to a level, where social costs has eroded this position dramatically and immigrant criminality is rampant.
Then imagine free growth from 9mill. to 40mill. - uncontrolled!
The European Union has become a federal state, where laws are made centrally, while the national state concept actively is being discouraged. Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland are basically bankrupt, only kept afloat by the other EU members, the ECB and the IMF. As this happens without a well structured plan to bring their economies back on track, it can only get worse.

At the borders of Western Europe change becomes more violent: in Yugoslavia KZ-camps and ethnic cleansing as bad as seen in Nazi Germany could be experienced during the war of the 1990s, when new countries were established. East Germany (DDR) collapsed in 1989 as did the Berlin wall resulting in a united Germany, which again has become a European economic superpower. The Warsaw pact countries switched side to NATO and many joined the EU. In 1991 Ukraine became an autonomous country for the first time since Volodymir and Jaroslav in the 11th and 12th Century and immediately collapsed economically, even twice, within 5 years. For the populations of these countries such changes have been massive both culturally and economically, as national assets and personal fortunes came, went or changed hand.
And now the world has become global.

The clerical regime in Iran and the continued attempt by the Arabs to throw Israel into the Mediterranean must range top on the danger list, when we look at potential time bombs under world peace. Next time around it will not be as easy for Israel to repel an Arabic attack. The danger of a nuclear war has moved several paces closer.

But how do we assess the jihadist Islamisation of the world and the fact that one of the world’s richest countries, Qatar, has embarked on a major shopping spree for European brands? With increased economic influence it will be much easier for them to support the accelerating implementation of Islam. It already happens. Secular dictatorships in North Africa and Syria are now being replaced by Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood with Sunni/Shia infights and persecution of Christians as a result. Yet, we still look at Islam as a religion. It is not. It is a culture, a thoroughly different lifestyle that clashes violently with classic Western European values. It is very sad to see how easily we denounced these values, including the right to thinking, believing and speaking freely, just to accommodate a culture that so far is in the minority.

Or what will be the consequence of the march of the Chinese world-wide as they take over Old Europe’s manufacturing role and access to raw materials?

There are many more examples of dramatic change and the trouble is, that we look at it as step-change and not as discontinuity jumps. It is the “Boiling Frog Syndrome” again. We are caught asleep and our traditional piece-meal reactions to change only make things worse, as we let it happen as if life will go on as before.
It won’t.

Have we learnt anything from all this and from the past?
Public amnesia is rife, so quite frankly, I doubt it.

Does change (=improvement) mean that we are now able to do things better, more efficiently?

Not if you look at the UK’s National Health Service, which is a shambles, or the Falklands. We would not be able to defend these islands against an aggressor today, 30 years after we threw the Argentineans out.

More pertinently, are we in better control of our finances today? Have we learnt from disasters within living memory?
Definitely not.

Labour brought the UK to its knees economically through 13 years resource squandering, so that we now owe close to 10 times the value of our economy and the public debt stands at £1.5 Trillion – whatever that means!! The Conservatives are not improving anything despite firm claims. In fact borrowing is going up.

In the 1970s inflation was close to 30%. We seemed to get this under control and we have tried to alleviate the indebtedness and cost of loans for our businesses by holding the interest rate at 0.5% at the Bank of England. Our loans from the ECB and the IMF are just manageable – if we stay at an AAA credit rating.
The problem is that it has been too cheap to borrow money – and we did.

But what now if the interest rate goes up?

If I remember correctly, England was bankrupt after WWII and in the 70s under Callaghan, who had to ask the IMF to bail us out. Loans were charged at 18% interest, property was repossessed and the mood in the country was very pessimistic.
It happened again in 1987, when interest rates went from 9% to 15% and back to 12% in a day, showing that we really understood what was going on. Or?

And now a new financial crisis has played havoc with us for almost 5 years.
It happens again and again, but this time it is dangerous and hard to get out.

The government now guarantees everyone that their bank deposits up to £80,000 are safe. Not much of a consolation if you have a couple of million in the bank and it crashes. Could that happen?
Yes it could.
Do I have to guess that assets/ investments are leaving the country?

Remember Northern Rock in 2008 with queues outside the bank of people who wanted to withdraw their money. How could the Government guarantee your money, if the state’s debt is of dinosaurian proportions and interest rates went up?
Exactly – they couldn’t.

Since the credit crunch began, our economy has balanced on a knife’s edge and it is getting sharper and sharper. In my opinion there is a 99% chance that it will get worse. David Cameron is lying through his teeth, when he says that everything has improved and that the debt has been brought down by 25%. Eh? While increasing borrowing?

If Greece and Spain collapse, the shockwaves will be immense.
The question is then: what will the government do?

If the past is anything to go by – and I am not an economist – I think the state will take over and control every penny you own, try to withdraw, your pension payment, your investments and some foreign financiers will be called in to save the shreds.
Qatar? At what cost?

So, is there no way out?

There always is – and one way is a total collapse of the economy, as the past has shown us (Germany in the 1920s, USA in the 1930s), followed by rebuilding. This is probably the least preferable and most painful method.
But we can minimise the pain for a while – and perhaps long term, if we are willing to wait 25 years – which we may have to!
Stop our membership of the European Union circus!

This would be a sound alternative.

It will save us £55mill a day and take us out of the ridiculous tariff system the EU imposes on its members. A renewed free trade with e.g. the Commonwealth would be an immediate boon. Since Britain joined the EU, Commonwealth trade has become a trickle. This is an obvious place to start.

It would also bring law-making and administration back where it belongs and we would be free to design our own saving plank. Norway, Switzerland and Lichtenstein have shown that you may have all the benefits of the European Economic Community with economic growth at the same time as having the freedom of self-determination. It would give us the option to define our own way back to prosperity without disadvantages.

I think Britain’s exit from the EU will happen! Over 60% of the UK population is against the EU as a federal state, which is committed to the elimination of the national state, while running a gravy train for a select few and increasing its own power. EMPs receive Euro 12,000/month. It costs £600Bill/year to keep it running and the trade benefit - according to EU's own accounts - hover around "120Bill. If that doesn't say it all.
A plebiscite within the next 2 years is an absolute must, before things become totally uncontrollable.
As a result, the EU will break up - and not even the dirty trick with repeating the plebiscite to change the result, like in Holland and Ireland about the Lisbon Treaty, will help.

It is interesting to see how all the big-wigs with their snout in the jam-jar are now warning the UK: don't leave the EU. EMP and Commissioners, as they will lose millions when this dinosaur breaks up; the USA, because the 'special' friendship provides the Americans with a lot of inside knowledge and access; and all the misinformed, because they think the UK will lose access to a market of 500 mill. customers. Rubbish. Did Norway and Switzerland lose access? NO!!!!
The UK will become rich again.

Baroso, Schulz and van Rompuy will have to seek proper work and all the organisations that receive big handouts, keeping them in-line, as well as the money grabbing, un-elected commissioners, may have to find more productive ways to generate an income.

This would be a very desirable side effect of a collapsed EU.
Because collapse it will.

And then you will know what societal change is!!
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Change and Social Survival

Change, like time, is an almost uncontrollable concept. Whether we like it or not, we are being dragged more or less consciously, sometimes screaming, along.

For most of us change is dealt with reactively, as it often is impossible proactively to direct change. The main reason is that change is systemic: the planned transition from A to B more often than not becomes a move from A to K to Z, avoiding B at all – and then landing us with the issue of coming from Z to B, etc.!!!

There is another reason: many philosophers claim we have no free will; free will is an illusion. I don’t agree, but prefer to leave that discussion for later.

For most of us, the daily changing parameters of life concern small decisions such as shopping for dinner in the Supermarket. A clear plan for the day may change into something totally different, once we are under the marketing influence of the shop’s display. Fine, this can be termed “opportunity knocks” and as such it provides us with a feeling that we have a choice. There you go: Free Will!

Real change, the next level up, may be either social or societal.

Let me describe a few examples of social change first in this essay. To this group belongs a move of house, change of job, divorce, having children, fighting the neighbour and other issues, that will hit most people in a lifetime. These are problems, with which we all must learn to deal while remaining mentally healthy and fulfil our roles in life. We learn the necessary skills from early on in childhood, where at the same time we enjoy the parental protection. As we grow older through our productive lives, we have to use our practised ability to learn in order to control the 1000s of parameters that may lead us astray, so that we can find the fastest way between A and B.

Between 25 and 60 most of us have a major advantage: we generate assets – or money – which are the underpinning for most of our decisions. Money creates freedom. Decisions and change become driven by our attitude to the balance between cost and priority. We use the assets to lead our lives in the direction we want. This includes directing, guiding and paying for our dependants. If there’s any meaning with life, this is probably the main purpose: propagation of the species while securing the take-over by our descendants.

At the moment of writing a law has been introduced in the UK, which eliminates child benefit payments for families above £50k income p.a. For most of these families it seems to be the end of the world. They have become accustomed to a choice of several holidays every year, upgrade of their iPads every 6 months and a choice of restaurant visits. Suddenly £25/week/child delimits these choices. In other words, the feeling of freedom and ability to choose (i.e. the option of being able to change) has been curtailed. I leave it to the reader to ascertain how realistic this feeling is.

Social change also encompasses the flux in values, e.g. political correctness, freedom of speech (or not). Believe me: if someone had told me 30 years ago what our society would look like in 2013, I would not have believed them and asked them to stop the clock in order to get off the train. This is a good example of “the boiling frog” syndrome – we accept change, even when it is rather negative, as long as it is slow! – but these concepts demand a special treatment, too long for this little essay.

Time goes.
You survive.
And then we hit older age.
We have fulfilled our role and are essentially not of any real use any more.

The politicians call it the “burden” of the elderly – a rather disgusting characterisation, but typical of highly materialistic societies, where money has replaced family values, wisdom, experience and other “soft” values.

Do we not have the responsibility to include the elderly in an active society?
Are they not a part of or a significant consequence of our medical progress and technology? We spend a lot of money on longevity, so it appears illogical to me not to focus on an improved life quality of older people.

If the word “burden” is accepted, should we not choose to get rid of the elderly at a given age?
If so, I suggest the age of 75.
It is a compromise between some sort of nostalgia and family feeling and the rising maintenance cost after that age. Most children would probably agree, as any inheritance due would be available to them at a lifetime, where they could still enjoy the proceeds.

It has often hit me, that there is very little learning that transcends from one generation to the next. In the technologically accelerated world of the 2000s, living conditions and the need to follow and be totally updated on the complex composition of our society, have created an “ability-gap” which for many people is becoming an insurmountable chasm. The ubiquitous “iPhone, iPod, iPad, I Paid!” boomerangs on the productive generation in its later years by a demand to live with the consequences of what they created: one cannot just call a friendly tax advisor any more, a bank manager, talk to a utility customer services clerk or find a high street shop that can repair a wrist watch. On-line, automated, press 1/ press 4/ press 3 ending up with 20 min music before being cut off are on the menu of the day. A new form of 1984 has arrived, a technological and de-humanised society where those without the required android phone, broadband connection and the latest PC are ostracised by default.
Even 6-year olds have a better chance of matching the demands of the daily grind than a 70-year old person, who has contributed to this society with hard toil.

The consequence of entering Charon’s anteroom is often a feeling of isolation.

You don’t produce anything any more – neither children, new knowledge or money. No one expects you at work. If you have done a good job, your off-spring doesn’t need you. This need was the major objective, in particular when the human species tended to die at the age of 25. You have become an artifice, a product of medical technology, keeping you alive well above your shelf life, rather than a depository of answers to the eternal repetition of the questions that each generation asks. The delusion repeats itself: every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

As you age, your friends may begin to disappear. As a 75-year old said: “I don’t need Facebook to stay in contact; I’d rather have a Ouija board!”

When Orwell said: “The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness. For the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better”, he might have thought of old age as much as of our political and societal mismanagement. At any rate, for most people it is a fact, that freedom disappears with age, either because of failing health or because the money flow has dried up. Learning to live – happily – in these circumstances is mentally at a par with bereavement. Unfortunately our present social structure fails miserably here compared with the families of the past, who saw several generations staying together in large groups.

There is probably only one alternative, or solution, to what Zappfe called “suicide as a logical consequence”: “make sure you prepare for enough activities to keep you occupied for the next 40 years after retirement!”

In Coptic (Ptolemaic) Egypt, families lined the ‘Triclinium’ with the mummy-coffins of their departed family members, until such time where no one remembered who they were. The coffins were then dumped in the dry desert sand, later to be found by Flinders Petrie, the English archaeologist, reducing these artefacts to demonstrations of a highly developed skill of painting.
The content has lost its significance.

Well, perhaps this ritual is a bit far fetched in a dining room of 2013 and as few of us believe in the Roman concept of the "Lares", we had better concentrate on life here and now.

So, I have an idea for people to take on board, namely Christopher Hitchens’ words during an interview with Jeremy Paxman just before he died: “If you wonder whether to call someone or not – chose call. Always”.

And just a thought: the meaning of the Chinese phrase “May you live in changing times” is normally completely misunderstood.

It is actually a curse.

Freedom of Speech - YES, we did screw up!

How ironic that we live in a society that prides itself on 'Free Speech' and yet irrationally undermines the very idea by allowing the Police or a courtroom to decide, if I or someone else might feel insulted. There is a growing number of extremists who are prepared to maim or murder on the basis that they feel victimised and downtrodden by someone, who is expressing an opinion.

I plead for a REFORM of SECTION 5 of the Public Order Act or as a consequence suffer the loss of a most basic but essential HUMAN RIGHT: believing, thinking and expressing your thoughts - freely!
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See Rowan Atkinson's speech, if you haven't already, as it has gone viral long ago:
http://reformsection5.org.uk/2012/10/rowan-atkinson-rs5-video-goes-viral/

Freedom of speech - did we screw up?

Before he was executed by the Germans on 29 June 1944, Niels Fiil from the Danish resistance organisation, the "Hvidsten Group", said:

"I know Denmark will go towards brighter and happier times, where everyone freely can speak, believe and think - - - .


Is that so?   Ask Firoozeh Bazrafkhan, Rowan Atkinson (Mr. Bean), Salman Rushdie and the courageous Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Shame on those who let Niels Fiil down - in Denmark and England and USA and Holland and - - - -

Freedom of speech and thought

On the relativity of perception and change in society 1930-2012


During the summer of 2004 the Danes celebrated the silly period by having a heated discussion whether Ole Wivel and Knud W. Jensen, both pillars on the art and literary scene, ought to have confessed their Nazi-sympathies in the 1930s and 1940s.

It is clear that perception relativism often is ignored by people who should know better. Historians such as Barbara Tuchman (‘The March of Folly’) and Anne Appelbaum (‘Gulag’) have emphasised, that it takes very little time from the actual events till we either forget what happened or simply change our opinion or perception about them. This is not only because new information has become available or because it is physically impossible to ’think’ using the mind of the past, but it is also driven by a changed political and cultural situation, or in short: fashionable correctness.
One just need to look at how we now evaluate events in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine and how dramatical Western European Societies have changed in the past 20 years.

It is possible that with the passing of time we obtain a better understanding, but simultaneously we distance ourselves from the realities of the day and thereby the conditions that formed the background for the opinions, perceptions and decision processes. Seen in the rear mirror it becomes easier to criticise, even though our understanding has diminished; we blissfully ignore this fact.

What if we actually had found WMDs in Iraq? (Perhaps we did – only, it was people, not bombs!). Or if Chamberlain had been proven right? How about the Ukrainians, who offered their welcome to the invading German troops in 1941 with the traditional bread and salt. Were they traitors? Tolerance, indifference and ignorance are closely related concepts, which, in the different world of the information constrained 1930s, muddied people’s understanding – just as it happens today with perhaps too much information; important decisions are still taken based on 20% knowledge and 80% gut feel – both in politics and in business.

No wonder that the assessment of events, 50 years later, risk bearing no resemblance to what actually happened. This is the historian’s eternal dilemma. The change in perception will always be coloured by the swings in political reality. Our perception will always be formed by our present knowledge and not with the mind of the past. Knowledge doesn’t transmit automatically and once lost, it may be difficult, if not impossible, to recreate later.

In 1932 a large majority of the Germans considered Hitler to be a rather laughable person, who was bound to disappear shortly. Very few had a more clear vision, like Hindenburg, who said: “This man will lead us over the precipice”. The perception changed just 1-2 years later, but to many people the question was still whether Nazism was a little evil with a lot of good, or a blessing with a few drawbacks. The Germans – and surely the Danes – disagreed amongst themselves about which side of the scales weighed most.

If one leaned to the ‘good’ side, society had moved from chaos to order, economic growth after WWI and the 1920 and 1930 recessions, work after unemployment, prosperity, motorways, Volkswagens and a path to regain national pride.

Perhaps the dark side was a little more difficult to define in the beginning, although the Kristall-nacht ought to have been a wake-up call with a fire poker.

The negative picture disappeared in a flood of prosperity and a feeling of national greatness, which was anything but wasted on the Danes of the day. One should not forget that Denmark and Germany were rather closely connected through culture, education and business. A large part of the Danish industrial machine was a traditional supplier to the Germans. It was Danish engineers who built the German submarine base in St Nazaire, strategic bridges in Croatia and many traders became rich selling food supplies and manufactured goods to the Germans well into the war. However, before blaming the Danes this was a picture repeated across Europe.

In 1975, when I worked in Holland, people often asked me what language was spoken in Denmark and even exactly where Denmark was. Is it such a mental high-jump to realise, that people were less well informed in 1935 and had their mind set on different issues? We tend to forget, that the last 60 years of information distribution, political innovation and global development were still to come. Dad worked, Mum was a hausfrau, divorce was immoral, children grew up being beaten into discipline, colour TV and mobile phones were science fiction if even that, the toilet was often in the courtyard and shared by many, and Jews were “ not really it”. These were the social realities in the 1930s in Denmark, where the characteristic ‘where few have too much and fewer too little’ was about to be invented.

The Social Democrats and their programme of worker power and emancipation of women had changed the political, social and cultural scene and more was to come. But there was also a growing feeling amongst many that we had to be careful not to go all the way towards communism. Nevertheless, a new balance had to be found, as communists were growing in numbers as well.

This fact, together with the leaning towards a powerful Germany and the memory of the recent winter war in Finland, where many Scandinavians had volunteered on the Finnish side, were some of the major reasons for a strong anti-communist feeling. It therefore felt natural for many Danes (and other Europeans!) to join the Germans and continue the battle against the Russians (i.e. communists) forming the SS Viking division.

So, how do we judge this today?

We know too much! Socialism was a way forward at the time. Perhaps Communism and Nazism were as well? Who in the 1930s could tell for sure after the wars in the 19th Century and after WWI? At this time Stalin was creating ’Paradise’, building a state based on collectivism, but did we realise how many eggs he was cracking while making the omelette? Did we know that this process made Hitler’s approach look like play in a sandbox?
Both sides had their protagonists, often leading intellectuals and culture celebrities.

What we forget, when judging today, is to eliminate our 21st Century knowledge and think ‘1930’!

When we say ‘Nazism’ today, it evokes images of suppression, persecution, concentration camps and war. That was not the reaction in the 1930s.

But what do we say in 2012 about Stalin’s extermination of more than 20mill. People – in peace time!! – and deportation of whole populations, such as the Kalmyks and Tartars? How about the collectivisation in Ukraine, that in 1933-34 cost over 6mill. people their lives as one of the largest human-created hunger events ever bar Mao’s murderous acts? Or being shot for possessing food in this period? Gulags? Systematic removal – back to Russia – in the 1950s of all industrial production assets from East Germany, Poland, Czekoslovakia and Hungary, maintaining suppressed agrarian nations as a buffer zone towards the West? And how about Hungary 1956, Czekoslovakia 1968, Stasi, Ulbricht, and Honecker?

Hang on a second! Did we know all this in the 1970s, while the cultural elite in Denmark was as red as tomatoes? After all, this was only 35 years after Walter Duranty, New York Times, had reported ‘no problems’ during his Soviet sponsored travels in Ukraine, in the middle of the hunger disaster.
A report for which he got the Pulitzer prize.

Why has no one insisted and told the Danish left: “You owe us an answer?”
Perhaps it is easier to sling such questions at the now deceased Wivel and Jensen?
How many of the extreme left in Denmark have not said “we didn’t know”?

Obviously, people find it difficult to admit errors, and in the political climate after the war neither Wivel nor Jensen found the motivation to express remorse publicly. Who knows, perhaps their feelings hadn’t changed. Self perception, survival instinct and adjusted knowledge and information could be determining factors. No one wants to stand out as a social pariah. It must be remembered that many people, who had been too close to the Nazis, had been executed after the war. So in short: with an adjusted outlook, one has to consider the consequences and the lie becomes an invisible friend.
Clintons ‘I did NOT have sex with this woman’ is a good example.

Despite the realisation that Stalin was nothing less than a monster, probably worse than Hitler, and despite the collapse of both communism and the Soviet Union, it has still not become fashionable to attack the communists for their misbehaviour. Perhaps we still haven’t completely digested the information in the KGB and Stasi archives, where evidence of a planned East German led invasion of Denmark during the cold war came to light. Perhaps there are still too many old extreme leftists in power or opinion creating positions? A minister in the present Danish government (2012) is the ex chairman of the Danish Communist party and under investigation for having received personal funds from KGB.

Then it was much easier and more politic to accuse the asylum seeking Ukrainian Kravchenko for being a CIA spy than to expose Duranty and his nonsense.

In the 1970s I was mentioned in an extreme left anthology as an ‘enemy of the State’ – “Vrag Naroda”, a terminology with a very dark notion from Soviet times – due to the fact that I had worked in the Ministry of Defence. What would have happened, if Denmark suddenly had an extreme left government?

It won’t happen, you say - - - .

Then consider Malmoe in Sweden, where terror against Jews by Muslim immigrants has become a daily event, or Denmark, where the Police and Politicians are afraid of entering the immigrant Ghettos that have sprung up since 1983 (the implementation year of the “free for all immigration laws”?

Nazism? Communism?
Plus ca change!

In open and transparent societies we have a tradition of speaking up and to protest, based on our development during the last 200 years and our cultural roots in a humanistic outlook after the French and American revolutions. We therefore have the right to say to Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen and to many people still alive: “You owe us an answer”, but not to attack them from a position in a glass-house.

However, it is not just in Denmark that our (mis)concept of tolerance has led to a complete imbalance of what we accept and what not in terms of extreme opinions. A good example is represented by the Hizb-ut Tahir group. In England the jihadist and Imam Abu Hamza (finally extradited to the USA in 2012) has publicly encouraged extermination of Jews with a call to continue where Hitler stopped. It took the authorities several years to have him arrested, only made possible when the terror laws changed after 9/11.

The Imam Abu Quatada is another example. In 2004 he travelled up and down the country preaching jihad and repetition of 9/11. England is still trying to get rid of him (2012), prevented by the Strassbourg Court, that extradition to Jordan would hurt his human rights due to possible torture or execution.

On the other hand, the swell of resistance against medieval cultures, in particular hate-preaching religions, tend to be met with silence by the media or even laws prohibiting critique.
This does not make sense any more, as recently stated in public by Rowan Atkinson, (Mr. Bean).

The question is, whether our tolerance, normally a strong pillar in a democracy, will be criticised in the future. Is it possible, that in 30 years from now people will reproach us and say that we didn’t do enough? Or will they say: “You really managed that well”?

Personally I am afraid, that we will be considered a failure, as our democratic states slowly are abandoning the right to free speech. Without criticism, there will be no dialogue and the increasing undermining of our right to speak up will hit us hard in the end.

The right to speak up, think and express one self freely must necessarily be followed by the duty to defend it. It is inevitable that we sometimes exceed this right, but it is a necessary element in the exercise of democracy. The Americans manage this concept through their 1st amendment, but both they and Western Europe are slowly putting a clamp on this important issue. Consider the attempts to muzzle the free Internet; or an English person dragged into court for claiming Scientology to be a "Cult" (the case eventually thrown out of court); or a Danish/Iranian blogger critizising certain factual Islamic behaviours and facing arrest.

It took a little too long, during the WWII, before the Danes began to protest. They made good money on the Germans! Today other dangerous issues seem to find people in the West completely asleep. In particular religious criticism is considered racist or political incorrect. This loss of dialogue stifles our society, inevitably leading to a repeat of the Stalin and Honecker states if no one speaks up.
But perhaps it is understandable as we have not even come to terms with the past, the communist atrocities and Lenin’s omelette statement. 20-30mill. Russian and Ukrainian eggs. Cracked in time of peace.
And Europe still carries a huge guilt luggage over past colonial activities, colouring our behaviour.
In order to understand our thoughts and ideas today we have to go ”back to the future”. This future has been clear for some time concerning Nazism, but it hasn’t arrived yet in respect of our assessment of communism and certainly not in our understanding of the dramatic social upheavals that are going on in Western societies at the moment.

On 20 July 2004 the Germans had arranged a 60 year memorial day for the assassination attempt on Hitler’s life. There were many speeches and a solid attempt to unravel the built-in conflict: were the would be assassins traitors or heroes? The tendency went in the direction of heroes. After all, it was now 60 years later. But Schroeder avoided the use of the word ‘hero’, even though his speech clearly indicated this direction.
This shows how difficult it often is to change our stance and self perception.

In respect of communism, there are many who owe us an answer.
How long must we wait?

One also wonders what went through Kim Philby’s brain, when he sat lonely, isolated and under constant KGB supervision and censorship in his Moscow apartment, devoid of all human dignity. The sausages and sour cucumbers that he served for the last BBC journalist, who visited him before he died, were a far cry from the Steak and Yorkshire Pudding in his local pub back in England.
If his pitiful existence had managed to bring about a level of regret, he didn’t show it.

Our species is a master of self-deception!

How could we ever expect two pillars of society as Ole Wivel and Knud Jensen to show regret?
Perhaps we should wait until our own communist top-dogs are dead. It will be much easier to attack them then.

The many immigrants, who now express anger and hate against our Western societies and who left countries devoid of the concept of freedom, countries they didn’t like either, can now enjoy our benefits, order, security and social support – until they have re-created the societies they disliked so much!
People want freedom, but most have no idea what it means. And it is the first value to be suppressed - just watch the "free" Egyptians after the Arabian uprising in 2011-12 and how they treat the Christian Koptic population.

Long live the freedom of speech - the sharpest and only weapon we have left!
.

Triomphe d'Alsace Sept. 2012

The miserable summer of 2012 almost did my vine in.
Pollination half failed and 3 months of cold and rain made sure the remaining grape bunches had little chance of proper development.


Triomphe d'Alsace grapes in front of the house 16 Sept 2012.
It is clear to see which bunch has been thinned for unwanted green grapes



The result was tragic to watch.

I might have been able to support grape development through the recommended artificial "bee-action", i.e. fondling all the flower-bunches with the hand, but decided to let nature take it's course. That's something I shall definitely remember in the future.

As bees are not involved in the pollination of vine flowers, grape bunch development is totally dependant on the weather - probably equal amounts of sun and wind - but no one says you can't help it on the way. This is good to know when it concerns Triomphe d'Alsace, as this varietal otherwise tends to produce lots of  underdeveloped green grapes.

By the way, the bees - or those that are left of a dwindling population - were out late as well and we had no wasps at all this year, which saved me the usual production of wasp-traps.

Nature seems to keep everything in balance.

Having now thinned the leaves to allow the sun caressing the grapes for just a few more days and removed a good portion of the green and useless grapes, the final crop doesn't look as bad as I feared.

There could probably have been at least 50% more, but such is life for us 'viticulteurs'!!

My Brant vine decided to give it a rest this year. Virtually no grape bunches developed and the few that survived are small, un-ripe and utterly useless.

That's the end of the Brant vine as far as I am concerned!!

Vusschh - as we say in the family (even the cats understand what it means).




Triomphe d'Alsace 'roof' in the patio.

 

The two other Triomphe d'Alsace winegrowers in the street are also complaining. For one it is a total failure - almost no grapes at all. The other has decided to wait and see.

I have checked the weather forecast and decided to harvest Thursday 20 Sept., 3 weeks later than last year, as they promise it will remain dry and half sunny till then. Checkpoint Wednesday!

 

Once the grapes are picked, de-stemmed and lightly hand crushed, I shall verify the sugar content with my refractometer and determine the level of chaptalisation. Until then I will let it remain a surprise - or perhaps it is the same as receiving a letter from the bank: until you have opened and read it, the information is at least not bad!  

I have also decided to crush the grapes less than last year, allowing carbonic maceration like in Beaujolais and leave the juice and pulp in the maceration vat for 6-7 days instead of 3-4.

This should extract maximum fruit from the grapes, although there is a danger in doing so, as the chance of developing unwanted molds increases. Pressing down the cap of grapes and shells regular will hopefully keep this under control.

  Once all grapes are in the maceration vat and sugar has been added (if required), a layer of proper wine-yeast will be sprayed on top, left to develop for 15-25 min and then stirred into the fruit. This way the mostly unwanted natural yeasts will be suppressed and the wine will get a chance to develop the way I want it.   .

The CO2 mistake: Climatic theory and an eco-political disaster

In Danish popular story telling, there’s a collection of tales about a special group of people in the eastern part of Jutland (Jylland). Ostensibly they hadn’t invented neither the wheel nor the deep plate, i.e. they were intellectually challenged - in modern parlance. One of them once had a problem with a stork trampling the growth in a wheat field and didn’t know how to chase it out. As he couldn’t walk in there himself without destroying even more, he asked 4 of his friends to carry him into the field to take care of matters.
The stork went away.
Case solved.

This story reminds me of the CO2 explanation to the climate change these days.
Why? Because CO2 is not the direct problem and in the meantime we are trampling our wheat fields into pieces.

Here’s another important graph, in addition to the information I provided in my blog before:

CO2 increase vs Global Temperature variation: falling, rising, falling, and - - - - ?

It can be seen, that from 1958 to 1977 the avg. global temperature decreased, while CO2 increased, bar small variations.
But then from 1977 to 2002 the average global temp. increased, at the same time as the CO2 content of the atmosphere increased.
OK, so there is a delayed effect, you say?
How about the general decrease in the avg. global temperature from 2003 till now then, while the CO2 level continues to rise?

Anyone with a little brain should begin to ask serious questions about CO2 by now.

The terrible fact, however, is, that the UN, the IPCC and most governments have signed up to the completely unscientific conclusion: it’s the CO2 that does it.
And now it is difficult to erase the signature without losing face.

Greenhouse Gasses (GHG - CO2, Methane, etc.) are major players in the Earth’s calorific accounts, no doubt.
Water (vapour), however, is one of them and by far the most voluminous and variable GHG we have.
This is important to understand, as we know relatively little about the details of how clouds are formed, the sun’s radiation effects and the multiple other parameters (aerosols, dust, cosmic rays, etc.) that make up the parameters of the physics of the atmosphere.

New research shows that there may be a direct correlation between the Sun’s activity, its radiation and the cloud formation and that this has a direct impact on our climate, both short and long term via amplifying effects, where CO2 very well could play a secondary role.
But not a primary one.

The Danish researcher, Henrik Svensmark from Denmark’s Technical University, has developed a series of theories that are as simple as they are revolutionary: cosmic rays over the past 500 mill years, e.g. from supernovae (and the Sun), hitting the earth and being primary agents of cloud formation, have, together with the tectonic movements and changing sea-levels, had a major impact on life on Earth.

And on the climate!!!

The impact of the Sun is not surprising. It is after all the key supplier of energy to the Earth, to the tune of 170.000 TW p.a.
But there’s is clearly much more going on than caused by a little CO2 released by Aussie BBQs in the summer time.

When it was proved, that the Sun had a major effect on aerosols, the very germs of cloud formation, IPCC retracted with some excuse, that laboratory experiments and real atmospheric processes could not be compared.
But even this excuse has been deflated, as it has been proven (and accepted) that a decrease in cosmic radiation causes less cloud formation and less water content in the clouds.
More clouds, lower temperature - less clouds: warming of the surface.
That simple.

This therefore has a major impact on the Earth’s heat-accounts, eliminating the conclusions drawn by IPCC in their 2007 report.

it seems clear to me that the Sun – and cosmic rays – have a major impact on the Earth’s climate and this is something that sits very badly with the IPCC.
The enormous role of the oceans (and Henry's law) also seem dramatically underplayed.

It is now fair to conclude, that CO2 must come way down on the list of active agents.

So there we stand!
Major political decisions are being made based on a probably totally wrong basis.
This has severe economic, social and cultural implications that we can’t even begin to contemplate.

It does now look like:
1) There is absolutely NO correlation between the atmospheric CO2 at present and in the immediate past and the global temperature development.

2) The climate models used by IPCC are numeric, use too many assumed factors and do not even predict the present status, if data from the past are entered. Using such models to predict the future is close to religion, certainly not to science.

It is now a political – and probably deeply psychological – problem, how we turn this situation around and declare: “we were wrong”, before major damage has been done.
Perhaps it is already too late.

Both the Danish and the British government (and likely others) have chosen an expensive, faulty and deeply disastrous route to green energy production: Windmills.
They are expensive, only work intermittently, energy cannot normally be stored and they will not cover more than a few % of our energy need at about 10 times the cost of e.g. gas or nuclear power stations. In the UK it means installing 10 windmills pr day for the next 30 years - and not achieving our target from COP 2009.
£120bill for the UK -- DKK 120bill for DK - - it will cripple us with no benefit.

I shall probably come back to the socio-economic consequences shortly.
The psychological factors determining group thinking and opinion manipulation also deserve my pen at a later time, but frankly, the present situation makes me feel tired – and who am I to hope, that politicians one day will exhibit some genuine brain function rather than just producing hollow cavity noises directed at vote collection?

Until then, here's a little home-work for the thinking population: if I am right in the above statements, what does it mean, economically, that we invest in everything "green"? How sensible is it to buy our right to CO2 production, e.g. when we fly or on a larger scale when our industries produce CO2? Haven't we sacrificed our competitive advantage on a guilt-altar to a CO2 god, that doesn't exist? Are we not throwing away the child with the bath-water?

Energy professors Ian Fells and Gordon Hughes have warned the British Government.
You'd do well in googling their opinions.

AGW nonsense, IPCC swindle, CO2 rubbish and Global Climate Change

The graph shows the temperature at the Ice Cap of Greenland as a function of time

On 5 Dec. 2009 I wrote in this blog about my reasons for calling the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW)  a load of humbug.
Al Gore, David Cameron, Kofi Anan and most journalists apparently don't understand scientific method at all. They have all jumped the popular band wagon of claiming human responsibility for the change of climate in recent years.
I warned in 2009 against the political implications of accepting a theory based on very thin arguments, while refusing to listen to the many people, who had competent reasons to field serious objections to the idea about AGW.

When it is said that 100s of scientists, if not 1000s, support the theory, the first comment should be: who exactly are they?
Myrmecologists?
Why not people in the field of Physical Geography?

In fact, I found one, who has the courage to speak up and say that “the emperor has no clothes on”, Professor Ole Humlum at Oslo University. The following is based on his observations – unfortunately his book is in Danish, but it deserves a wider readership.

The second comment, I have, is the classical Aristotle statement, repeated by Einstein: Majority never decided the value of a theory; 1 person, who can put a spanner in a theory, is enough to eliminate every other argument. This is entirely in line with Karl Popper’s ideas of Scientific Falsification – to which I subscribe 100%.

The third comment must be to express the shock I got, when I read through the goings on at the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I first heard about IPCC during the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, COP-15, in 2009.
The conference was basically a disaster, as a) only IPCC’s AGW-positive opinion was presented (not exactly a scientific approach) and b) no decisions were taken – or at least only a set of pseudo-decisions that are unlikely to have any bearing on the assumed problem: human action causing warming of the globe.

So why is there such an adherence to IPCC’s beliefs (OBS, NOT proof, as their conclusions are a forgone matter) and often times public ridicule of people who have a different opinion?
Could it be that IPCC has been established under UN, that UN has a level of credibility and that states that follow IPCC’s recommendations and findings therefore seem credible and also add to both IPCC’s and UN’s credibility – repeating the circle?

The graph above, constructed according to isotopic analyses (GISP2) after drilling into the Greenland ice cap, tells an interesting story without using many words: throughout the last 11000 years, from the “Big Freeze” during Younger Dryas, the reasons for which remains enigmatic, and once again in 6000 BC and until today, there have been rather large climatic changes going on – none of which can be allocated with any reason to human activity in the form of excessive man-generated CO2 output. In fact CO2 levels were almost constant in the period 600-1850. (The well known Hockey Stick graph, see below).
As Prof. Humlum points out, periods with warming correlate to positive heavy human cultural activity, while cooling off periods are synchronous with problems, even disasters, such as the black death and the "Little Ice Age."

One of the problems with the CO2 theory is, that we actually know much to little about the origins of the climatic mechanisms, the impact of the oceans, atmospheric distribution and the proportion of Human CO2 to geological CO2 (volcanoes and other).

There are many good reasons to focus on water vapour, ozone, cloud cover, dust, sun activity, tilting variations of the Earth’s axis and – in particular – Henry’s law of CO2 absorption in water. Most of the CO2/water interaction happen in the upper 3m of the oceans’ surface! It is not rocket science to realise, that at various pressures and temperatures there is some dramatic chemical reactions going on.

Here are some really important facts that help understand the speed with which CO2 distribution over the two hemispheres takes place.

Ashes from a volcano eruption well to the north or the south of equator will take a long time to become evenly distributed in the atmosphere – probably several years. In contrast, the ashes from an equatorial volcano are distributed rather quickly. After the nuclear tests in 1950-70, that all took place on the northern hemisphere, CO2 with a C14 signature (i.e. humanly generated) took several years to become evenly distributed.

This contrasts with the observations from Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958, that the variation in atmospheric CO2, i.e. bang in the middle of a highly industrial period, happens synchronously on the northern and southern hemisphere! As most human CO2 is produced north of the 30th latitude, we should have seen a clear difference between the northern and southern hemisphere.
BUT WE DON’T!!!!

This means that the majority of CO2, although increasing at various rates, is NOT humanly generated.
Something, therefore is afoot.

When Mount Pinatubo blew up in 1992, there was only a very minor increase in atmospheric CO2 despite million of tonnes of CO2 being released. As IPCC is of the opinion that the oceans only slowly absorb CO2, something is clearly wrong with their assumptions.

IPCC – and thereby the politicians – have jumped to conclusions they should have been too clever to adapt. It helps nobody to form a final opinion and implement policies based on erroneous models, unless this opinion has a political value for the people in charge. Perhaps this is where “der Hund liegt begraben”?

The result is that professional scientists with diverging opinions find it difficult to join the discussion. It is also a fact that funding and budgets favour those who fall in line!
Another buried dog, perhaps.

When we have excessively warm summers, it is taken as a confirmation of the theory.
When we have rain and chill (like 2011 in the UK, it is "just a seasonal variation" that confirms the theory.
Ehh?
It was the Hockey-stick curve from the GISP2 measurements in Greenland that caused the furore about the correlation between humanly generated CO2 and climate change. It showed an ostensible increase of atmospheric CO2 from a stable 280 ppm in the period 600-1850 to the rapid "industrial increase" of 380 ppm today.

The Hockey Stick graph - deflated

This model has since been discredited to a certain extent, but the important conclusion people forget to draw is, that if the CO2 level previously was stable, why do we then see the rather dramatic climatic changes that made it possible for the Vikings to grow barley on Greenland (ca. 1000-1100) and that later made the Thames freeze over in the winter (the Little ice Age in 15-1700)?

The real conclusion, although not a solution to the issue, is,
a) that the climate has changed considerably in the past, without any relation to the change in CO2 level!! and
b) that the concept "global warming" must be seen in context - we are actually a good deal colder than experienced by the Romans and the Minoans!!
and
c) the graph has been used as an indication that we are on the way to a new ice age.
Well, that one I shall leave uncommented, avoiding predicting the future, as I otherwise would have made the same mistakes as the IPCC.

Our politicians are leading the train down the wrong track with totally misunderstood investments, that prevent us from allocating money to a much more balanced research situation.

Worse: our scarce resources are being spent on solving a problem over which we have no impact whatsoever!

Here's an ominous example:
In the UK all energy companies are increasing their prices way faster than inflation would predict.
The average family now pays £1300/year for gas/electricity.
This is double the amount of 3 years ago.
The prediction is, that in 2018 they will pay £2800/year.
Why?
Because all companies are falling over each other's feet to become "green", i.e. investing in renewable energy supply - despite a) no solid direction of what that means (= ineffective and haphazard investment with little predictable ROI) and b) developing solutions to a non existing problem (= the totally absent correlation between a global warming, that actually is not happening, and the humanly generated CO2 output.)

In England there are 6mill families that have to choose between heating and food during the winter months. This number will more than double by 2018.

If this is not madness, what is??