Wednesday, 29 December 2010

The fall of Moscow - by Richard... Wednesday, December 29, 2010


Something that even the 1941 Nazi invasion did not achieve has been briefly imposed by freezing global warming – the closure of Moscow's airports. Reported by AFP and many others, things got so bad that "near riots" broke out as frustrated, cold and angry passengers expressed their opinion of Russian customer relations.

The problems are a particular embarrassment for Aeroflot, we are told. Russia's flagship carrier now operates out of a state-of-the-art wing of Sheremetyevo airport and has made enormous efforts to break out of its dowdy Soviet mold. But state television led its evening news broadcasts with Internet footage of exasperated passengers - many of them scheduled for one of Aeroflot's 153 cancelled flights - banging plastic security containers against Sheremetyevo's floor.

RIA Novosti news agency said that Aeroflot attendants were attacked at Sheremetyevo and AFP reporters saw hundreds trying to shove their way past Domodedovo's passport control as exasperated security officials called the police for help.

"There is absolutely no information and they just keep sending you from one place to another," growled a young man named Dmitry Menyayev. "People are on the verge of a nervous breakdown," another passenger was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Interestingly, the problems arose from a spell of freezing rain, which caused a power outage at Domodedovo airport, as well as coating roads with ice and leaving more than 300,000 people and 14 hospitals without electricity in southeast Moscow.

Sheremetyevo airport, on the other hand, blamed cancellations on a shortage of de-icer fluid – exactly the same problem that grounded Brussels flights – but further blamed "a German subcontractor that never provided with its regular shipment of de-icing fluid".

President Dmitry Medvedev has instructed his chief prosecutor to look into the affair, which the Russian media is reporting, and in some detail.

Tensions, The Moscow Times reports, were high late Monday in Domodedovo, where thousands of passengers spent hours with no food or drink except what they had with them and no information on when their flights might depart.

The airport - lit only by candles - suffered a 14-hour blackout Sunday. Some 8,000 people spent a sleepless night on the premises as more than 150 flights were delayed. Departure halls and local cafes at the airport were still unlit as of late Monday, and passengers, many on the verge of hysteria, thronged check-in desks for information on their flights.

An Interfax reporter described the inside of the terminal as looking "either like a movie about revolution or a horror film." Passengers said they had to spend time in the unlit halls without any help or information.

"It was completely dark, everyone was running around and nobody knew anything. I was shocked by the complete indifference of airport officials toward passengers," a blogger, Anna Goryainova, wrote (more photos on this site).

Perhaps Heathrow was not so bad after all, but then our time has yet to come. It remains to be seen how well we manage when the lights go out. But one thing is for certain, if this global warming can bring about the fall of Moscow, we are in for some interesting times.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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No worries - by Richard... Tuesday, December 28, 2010

After recent claims that all this bad weather is caused by global warming, it is comforting now to be told that this is "just natural variability pulsing back briefly overwhelming the greenhouse warming". The real problem is that: "Climate deniers think that unless you've got constant warming every year the greenhouse warming has gone away. And they forget about the natural variability".

But don't worry little people. We should expect now to see the global warming trend take over again.

COMMENT: NEW GLOBAL WARMING THREAD


Morano on Fox - by Richard...

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Twenty hours in 40 seconds - by Richard...

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"Citizens' initiative procedures" - by Richard...


I did try the "ignore it and it will go away" strategy – not in any expectation that it will work ... (the greenies found that it didn't – see above), but simply as a time-saver. One should, though, visit thisbit of stupidity, if for no other reason than to enjoy the comments – which are giving young Hannan a hard time.

But then, anyone who suggests that getting parliament to debate something on the basis of a number of signatures, and then confuses it with democracy, deserves a ragging. One might ask, for instance, for parliament to debate waste strategy. And what good would that do? And if it was to do any good, should not parliament be debating it, without recourse to "Citizens' initiative procedures".

Says just one commenter: "What happens if 100,000 people vote to enter the Euro? Or abolish private schools? Or stop immigration controls? Or introduce Sharia Law? Do we give parliamentary time for that? There could be thousands of measures which any vested interest could take up. You really are clueless Hannan".

I'll bundle this with the Priestley thread, for comments purposes ... it seems to fit there.

COMMENT: PRIESTLEY THREAD

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The price of green - by Richard...

About half a million pensioners spent Christmas in bed, in order to keep warm. It is more complex than just fuel poverty, but it is certainly the case that every new windmill and every new middle-class solar panel user, milking the system for the feed-in-tariff, is putting heating out of the reach of still more pensioners.

What people forget, though, is that the greenie objective, quite deliberately, is to increase the cost of energy, firstly to discourage its use and secondly to make inefficient alternatives more attractive. By this means, greenie policies put pensioners in bed ... and hasten them to their coffins.

COMMENT: GLOBAL WARMING THREAD

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The price of indifference - by Richard...


In yet another example of how ill-served we are by the media, today we see The Independent offer a front-page headline proclaiming: "Waste crisis means 80 giant furnaces set for go-ahead in 2011".

That "waste crisis" is, of course, the one created by the EU's waste framework directive. It prohibits the use of landfill - the cheapest and most effective option - for the disposal of household waste, and substitutes the most expensive and least effective ... incineration - and now, at enormous cost and disruption, these incinerators must be built.

Needless to say, though, the newspaper article, under the by-line of Jonathan Brown, does not mention the EU. There is not the slightest hint of EU involvement. Instead, we learn that "a grassroots revolt is growing" over the plan to install incinerators on more than 80 sites under the so-called "dash for ash".

Then we are told that "the Coalition must decide this summer whether to give its blessing to the £10 billion roll-out of the new incinerator chimneys, which continue to meet fierce levels of local resistance from those who would live in their shadow".

Thus does the egregious Jonathan Brown present a completely false picture. The "Coalition" has nothing to decide, other than to continue with the implementation of EU law, with a starting price of £10 billion for the incinerators that the public most certainly does not want.

As for the "grassroots revolt", this will not be allowed to interfere with the administration's need to obey its master's demands. The decisions have already been made as we descend into madness. The clever-dicks prattle but they consistently ignore this issue, preferring to deal the trivia, disguising their lack of power. All that remains is for us to pay through the nose for their indifference, and pay we will.

COMMENT THREAD

Posted by Britannia Radio at 07:46