The Segway Diaries

Neer do’ well/ man about town Clarsonimus, that veritable denizen of the moist and intrigue ridden alleyways of Berlin interviews some shady booze-hound. Enjoy. If the voices don’t get to you.

Greenies Still Orbiting Uranus

Remember that scourge to humanity, however many humanity destroying scourges before called the Hole in the Ozone Layer™®©? The n-th thing that was supposed to prove to the the poor misguided children with running water and flush toilets that everyone in humanity was wrong about the way they live, and that environmentalist who live no differently weren’t? Well ¡No Pasarán! Reader and commentator Papertiger writes:

Do you remember way back when you wrote up this about the ozone hole?

As it turns out, you were right. Chemists poke holes in ozone theory.
The Montreal Protocol, agreed in 1987 and ratified two years later, stopped the production and consumption of most ozone-destroying chemicals. But many will linger on in the atmosphere for decades to come. How and on what timescales they will break down depend on the molecules' ultraviolet absorption spectrum (the wavelength of light a molecule can absorb), as the energy for the process comes from sunlight.

So Markus Rex, an atmosphere scientist at the Alfred Wegener Institute of Polar and Marine Research in Potsdam, Germany, did a double-take when he saw new data for the break-down rate of a crucial molecule, dichlorine peroxide (Cl2O2). The rate of photolysis (light-activated splitting) of this molecule reported by chemists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California1, was extremely low in the wavelengths available in the stratosphere - almost an order of magnitude lower than the currently accepted rate.
The rapid photolysis of Cl2O2 is a key reaction in the chemical model of ozone destruction developed 20 years ago.
If the rate is substantially lower than previously thought, then it would not be possible to create enough aggressive chlorine radicals to explain the observed ozone losses at high latitudes, says Rex. The extent of the discrepancy became apparent only when he incorporated the new photolysis rate into a chemical model of ozone depletion. The result was a shock: at least 60% of ozone destruction at the poles seems to be due to an unknown mechanism, Rex told a meeting of stratosphere researchers in Bremen, Germany, last week.

In the course of investigating global warming, I have discovered that the other planets you would expect, the ones with atmospheres, also have their analogs of "ozone holes". It seems that they are a feature of planetary rotation rather then a defect.

Here are some pictures: Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Venus, and Mars, and finally Earth.
Note: The Martian ozone hole is barely visible due to the thin atmosphere. The only reason it is viewable at all is because of a planet wide dust storm in 2002.

Good on ya, PT – and thank you. The one thing that’s obvious about the things that greenies always seem to find so pressing, urgent, risk-laden, around the corner, and so forth, have far more to do with a need to be liked while they act on their urge to dismantle any available pillar of a civilization they had no part in building.

After all, who really wants to go back to the days where we were all worse off: less healthy, lived shorter and uncomfortable lives because the economy and society as a whole depended heavily on human and animal manual labor, and didn’t have the advantage of energy and material resources that are affordable enough for everyone in society (and not just an elite,) could benefit from – which ultimately where the “green” movement is leading us away from, whether they know it or not.

Imagine that: a slow dissolution of individual rights over how they conduct themselves and what they do with their property for the sake of an abstraction which is supposed to be for our own good, regardless of the fact that a majority wouldn’t agree... sounds mighty familiar.

As if a bunch of lit majors could even tell you what ozone even is. All they know is that someone told them that you aren’t allowed to disagree with them.

French rabble rousers file lawsuit calling for arrest of Rumsfeld while he is in Paris

Détestables petites crottes de groupuscules des droits de l'homme-euh. French human rights groups file complaint against Rumsfeld for torture at Abu Graib and Guantanamo while he is present in France for a Friday morning conference. French judicial system is dragging its feet until Rumsfeld blows this joint.

Leftist Strikes Versus Reform

Trains stand idle in French train stations as strikes against badly- needed reforms in the public sector get worse. Meanwhile, La Baf heads for the Gare Saint Lazare to put the situation into meta- ouch! -phor…

Détestable petite crotte de pisse-copie franchouille

Espèce de connard de journaliste francisque (avec à l'appui, ses ouvrages issus de son boulot d'un planqué d'un institut de recherche) : les Américains disent que le problème, c'est islamisation de l'Europe, donc le problème c'est forcément les Amérloques.

UPDATE: Rue89, dans une démonstration éclatante de bravoure franchouille, change de titre pour son article. Détestable petite crotte de pédaloïde de pisse-copie franchouille.

Erik Svane et Dan Greenberg dédicaceront leurs albums (Général Leonardo : Croisade vers la Terre Sainte et Au service du Vatican) au Boulevard des Bulles (50 Boulevard Saint-Germain) le 25 octobre à partir de 15 h, à la librairie Nation le 26 octobre, et à Album Bercy le 27…

(More on Leonardo Da Vinci…)

Geneva Conventions: Follow the Rules and Let the Fight Be Fair!

(Thanks to RV)

Fest shows the trivialization of the Nazi era (& demonization of America) seeking to create a category of good Americans like Hitler's "good Germans"

Published in Germany 13 months ago, Ich Nicht is a memoir by the late Joachim Fest, author of the best-known German study of Hitler and a co-publisher of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It describes his father, his family and growing up in Nazi Germany. The book is exceptional because it tells in a modest, believable, quietly bitter and totally proud way of the family's extraordinary decency — no ironically "good" Germans here — and its refusal to bend before Hitler.

Thus writes John Vinocur in an article that ought to be distributed throughout the blogosphere.

The title packs it all in: Ich nicht, Fest's father's phrase, borrowed from the Book of Matthew. Others betray you, Ich nicht.

…Just days before he died and his book came out, Fest said of [Günter Grass]: "This confession comes a bit too late. I can't understand how someone who for decades set himself up as a moral authority, a rather smug one, could pull this off."

A year later, going over Fest again, and thinking vast English-speaking audiences have no access to Ich Nicht, it's clear his book should be read in tandem with, or in opposition to, Grass's Peeling the Onion.

On one hand, Grass the great novelist has composed a personal recollection almost absent of history, but suffused with willful imprecision about his days in infamy's uniform.

On the other, Fest has written with remarkable detail about being a teenager in that awful time, describing his father's unfailing resistance to the Nazis, how a family could work to learn of Germany's atrocities and mass exterminations, avoid having its middle son get pulled into the SS and keep its honor to the end.

The juxtaposition of the books is remarkable, and it goes against reflex thinking about what or who is automatically prone to good or evil.

Nazi horror has not much place in the account by Grass, the leftist icon. A knock on the door, a letter, the phone ringing are the daily terrors, confronted and often overcome by the Fest family in the memoir by a man who didn't argue with those who called him a conservative.

…Other current happenings struck home, too, at the absurdity of Ich Nicht not finding a publisher in English:

A German opinion poll, appearing last week, showed 25 percent thought there were "good sides" to the Nazis; and a 1,238-page book by Jean-Luc Leleu, published in France with the title La Waffen SS, Soldats Politiques en Guerre (or, the Waffen SS, Political Soldiers at War), came out detailing the training, indoctrination and political function of this component of the SS world that Grass has so much trouble remembering.

That's not all.

Fest's book, in its description of his family's difficult life in Berlin, also testifies to the absolute trivialization of the Nazi era (and demonization of America) present in blogs seeking to create a category of Good Americans, comparable in their submissiveness on Iraq to the so-called Good Germans who went along with Hitler.

…As Fest makes clear, nobody in Berlin in 1940 was listening to radio call-in shows debating whether the invasions of France and Poland were morally acceptable.

…Read now, Fest's memoir can work as a warning to today's easy claimants of righteousness, and against the reflex appropriation of the moral high ground by any person, or faction.

Ich Nicht is strong and unique. Without it, the English language these days is short a very good book.

The Anti-Americans (a hate/love relationship)

David's Medienkritik has the entire broadcast of the PBS documentary that No Pasarán described a couple of months ago, including the teachings in the Lycée Henri IV, "the school where France's future leaders are groomed" (video 2, 2:10 minutes from the end, with an extract on No Pasarán)…

هُدْنَة

Paru le 23 octobre 2007: Houdna de Guy Millière. (ISBN 0-9774224-6-1)

Séances de dédicaces

Erik Svane et Dan Greenberg dédicaceront leurs albums (Général Leonardo : Croisade vers la Terre Sainte et Au service du Vatican) au Boulevard des Bulles (50 Boulevard Saint-Germain) le 25 octobre à partir de 15 h, à la librairie Nation le 26 octobre, et à Album Bercy le 27…

(More on Leonardo Da Vinci…)

To Arms! Brothers Dear! Gird on the Trenchant Brand! Strike Home! Strike Home! No Craven Fear! For Home and Native Land!

A short article of mine was published in CHAB News, the quarterly newsletter of the Confederate Historical Association of Belgium.

"La Louisianaise" (CHAB News, Volume XXXV # 1, mars 2007, p 11-12) speaks of the place of music in the Civil War era while showing the influence of immigrants' homelands on soldiers of the 1860s.

While Germans from Baltimore adapted Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum, turning the Christmas tree song into a patriotic tune (Maryland, My Maryland), Louisiana soldiers took La Marseillaise and adapted the words (in English) to the situation in the 1860s.

Al Gore Carbon-Neutral Speech Thingy

Nobody seems to believe the Draft Gore poster is real. T'is indeed! Thank goodness, it allows for so many parodies (cheers to Mamapajamas with inspiration by K T Cat)…

A "big ball of humanity, rolling around, limbs and heads sticking out of it": More science fiction from Christopher Cook…

Damn Those Catholic Priests and… When You Think About It… Religion in General!

No; much better to entrust our children to our schools (preferably secular) and to our teachers…

Better dead than Red

... too bad Sarkozy wants him to be read.

« Parmi ceux qui sont en prison
Se trouvent nos 3 camarades
Berselli, Planquette et Simon
Qui vont passer des jours maussades

Vous êtes tous trois enfermés
Mais patience, prenez courage
Vous serez bientôt libérés
Par tous vos frères d’esclavage

Les traîtres de notre pays
Ces agents du capitalisme
Nous les chasserons hors d’ici
Pour instaurer le socialisme

Main dans la main Révolution
Pour que vainque le communisme
Pour vous sortir de la prison
Pour tuer le capitalisme

Ils se sont sacrifiés pour nous
Par leur action libératrice.»