Quotulatiousness

May 19, 2012

Salvage operation on Costa Concordia to cost more than £200 million

Filed under: Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

The Telegraph headline says £200 million, but the scrap value of the vessel must be much lower than that:

The operation is due to start in the next few days and is expected to take a year, with the battered ship to be towed to an Italian port in one piece and then dismantled for scrap.

“This is the largest ship removal by weight in history,” said Richard Habib, the president of Titan Salvage, the American company that has been given the job of raising the 1,000ft-long, 114,500 tonne cruise liner.

“The magnitude of the job is unprecedented. But we feel confident that we can do it and do it safely, with the least disturbance to the environment and the economy of Giglio.” The Concordia has been wedged on rocks and semi-submerged just a few yards from the coast of Giglio, an island off Tuscany, ever since it ran aground on the night of Jan 13.

[. . .]

The two companies’ plan for removing the wreck involves extracting the huge chunk of rock embedded in its side and patching up the torn hull.

Engineers and divers will then construct an underwater platform beneath the ship.

They will also fix steel compartments or ‘caissons’ to the side of the ship that is out of the water.

Two cranes will slowly pull the ship upright so that it rests on the submerged platform.

The caissons will be filled with water to help the cranes lift the massive weight of the ship.

Once the vessel is upright, more chambers will be attached to the other side of the hull.

All the caissons will then be emptied of water and filled with air, which will stabilise the ship in preparation for it being towed to a nearby port for demolition.

May 9, 2012

Misreading the European electoral tea leaves

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:19

Brendan O’Neill points out that there’s something lacking in the analyses of all the recent electoral upheavals in Europe:

Great claims are being made in the wake of the local elections in Britain, the presidential elections in France, and the legislative elections in Greece. Britain’s Labour Party may have secured the votes of just 12.5 per cent of the eligible electorate, but it came top in the local elections, and so we’re told that ‘Labour is back’. The victories of Hollande in France (where he won 51.63 per cent of the vote to Nicolas Sarkozy’s 48.37 per cent), and of SYRIZA in Greece (the anti-austerity, radical left coalition which won 16.78 per cent of the vote), are being talked up as a ‘new dawn’ for European social democracy. According to a Guardian editorial, we have witnessed a ‘stunning victory… for the left in Europe’.

These observers urgently need to take a reality check. Because in truth, the most striking thing about the recent elections in Europe has been the utter absence of any matters of doctrine, of principle, of ideological outlook. In England, France, Greece, Italy, no doctrinal matters whatsoever have been raised, far less contested. These elections are best seen, not as a new dawn for social democracy, but as an unfocused emotional reaction against things — against Sarkozy, austerity, Brussels. Actually, it’s worse than that. Where once the left was concerned with creating a new reality, one based on systems and values quite distinct from those of traditionalists, today’s emerging left is obsessed with avoiding reality, with hiding away from the harshness of economic life in 2012 and simply saying: ‘Be gone!’ The problem with the newly successful left movements is not just that they’re attracting shallow protest votes, but that they’re extraordinarily infantile, blinkered outfits.

The only ‘doctrine’ uniting the various movements against austerity in modern Europe (both the left-wing and right-wing ones) is the doctrine of responsibility aversion, of shirking seriousness in favour of emotionalism. What the cheerleaders of these movements fail to realise is that being anti-austerity without positing an alternative route out of recession, without any serious proposals for stabilising economic life in Europe, is mere gesture politics. In fact it’s an act of irresponsibility, of wilfulness, where the key aim is to insulate oneself and one’s supporters from the harsh realities of our recessionary times rather than face up to those realities and potentially transform them. The new anti-austerity posturing, to quote an old communist, is an infantile disorder.

April 14, 2012

The fall of the House of Bossi?

Filed under: Europe, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

BBC News has a profile of Umberto Bossi, who recently had to resign as head of the political party he founded, Italy’s Northern League:

… Mr Bossi made one of his charismatic, raucous and fiery speeches, declaring in essence that northern Italians were no longer going to kow-tow to Rome’s greedy politicians and to pay their taxes to enable lazy southern Italians to live on public welfare.

One of his famous phrases was “Roma ladrona” meaning “Thieving Romans!”

It was all pretty provocative stuff, and had strongly racist undertones.

The League mocks the accents and the origins of Southerners whom they derisively call “terroni”. I suppose “ignorant peasant” would be the nearest English translation.

[. . .]

Sixteen years later it turns out that Umberto Bossi has apparently been dipping into the public trough, even more deeply than the Roman politicians he was so critical of when he founded his separatist party, and set up the phantom north Italian state he dubbed “Padania” – meaning the country of the river Po.

In 2004 Mr Bossi suffered a stroke which left him with impaired speech, but failed to quench his political ambitions or his vulgar public manners.

He frequently uses swear words in public to smear anyone he does not like and often gives the finger in front of TV cameras to make his message even more clear.

[. . .]

According to court documents, Mr Bossi’s wife bought no fewer than 11 houses and apartments with Northern League party funds.

Mr Bossi himself had his own house done up with public money and his son Renzo — nicknamed by his father the Trout, who in fact does have a somewhat fish-like expression — also had access to apparently unlimited cash to indulge in his taste for fast cars.

The party even paid for the Trout’s speeding tickets, not to mention medical expenses. The 23-year-old has now been forced to resign from his sinecure as a regional government official, which brought him 12,000 euros (£10,000, $16,000) a month.

March 17, 2012

Schiaparelli’s ambiguous word choice and the lasting obsession with Mars

Filed under: History, Media, Science, Space — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Scott Van Wynsberghe reviews the hold that fictitious Mars has held on the imagination since “canals” were observed:

Mars, the most obsessed-about extraterrestrial body in the universe, has come our way again. On March 9, Hollywood unveiled John Carter, the first film adaptation of a famous series of Martian adventures written by Edgar Rice Burroughs, better known as the creator of the jungle hero Tarzan. Burroughs’s Martian yarns act as a portal to 135 years of cultural history that really is out of this world.

The bizarre story of humanity’s modern entanglement with the Red Planet began in 1877, when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported the existence of “canali” on the Martian surface. In Italian, that word can mean both “channels,” which are natural formations, and “canals,” which are not. According to science writer John Noble Wilford, that ambiguity was never cleared up.

[. . .]

Caught between science fiction and the supernatural, actual scientists were in trouble. French astronomer Camille Flammarion, for example, alternately wrote about Mars and reincarnation (1889) and Mars and science (1892). In 1900, the inventor Nikola Tesla announced that he had monitored transmissions from either Mars or Venus, but he was jeered (biographer Margaret Cheney thinks he was just detecting natural electromagnetic patterns in space). In 1921, radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi thought he had received a signal from Mars, but that, too, went nowhere. The biggest offender, however, was American astronomer Percival Lowell.

In 1895, Lowell released the first of a series of books proclaiming that Mars was inhabited. The canali, he said, really were canals, supporting a civilization struggling to survive on a dying globe. Although rightly scorned by other astronomers, Lowell was a superb writer and a frequent lecturer — Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, heard him speak — so his message spread. (And, in a way, it is still spreading: Think of that recent, much-debunked conspiracy theory about a giant, sculpted face on the Martian surface.)

March 15, 2012

Rome Reborn 2.2: A Tour of Imperial Rome in 320CE

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Rome Reborn 2.2: A Tour of Ancient Rome in 320 CE from Bernard Frischer on Vimeo.

This video presents a fly-through of the latest version of Rome Reborn (2.2). The new version incorporates some new content (including the Pantheon) and for the first time includes animations.

Rome Reborn is an international initiative to create a 3D digital model of the ancient city as it might have appeared in A.D. 320. For more about the project, please see: www.romereborn.virginia.edu.

For more information, contact the project director, Prof. Bernard Frischer at: bernard.d.frischer@gmail.com; cell +1-310-266-0183

March 14, 2012

A possible solution to Canada’s long, long search for new search-and-rescue aircraft

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:46

David Akin in the Toronto Sun:

Here’s the back story: For nearly a decade, the Department of National Defence has had cabinet approval to go out and spend $3.1 billion on new search-and-rescue planes. That’s a big contract and several aircraft vendors wanted to win that deal.

Aircraft makers and their lobbyists knew which buttons to push within DND but also at other key government departments such as Public Works and Government Services and at Industry Canada.

The goal of the lobbyists was to rig the bid so only their plane could win.

Pulled eight ways to Sunday by the heavy lobbying, the bureaucrats at three departments kept pushing pieces of paper at each other but never got close to making some purchase decisions.

Now, with the possibility that the search-and-rescue purchase process could be tied up in the bureaucracy for yet another year (followed by delivery of planes years after that!) the government may be ready to slice through this Gordian Knot and simply turn to our American allies to pick up most of their fleet of C-27 Spartans.

Apparently one of the remaining hurdles to be cleared is that the manufacturer of the Spartan aircraft, Alenia Aermacchi, is trying to prevent the sale and is even threatening not to provide spare parts or service to any country that buys the aircraft from the US. I have no idea why, but I’m sure there’s a reason for it.

February 15, 2012

Italy faces the end of “a job for life”

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

You could say that they’re not happy about the possibility:

It was just an off-the-cuff quip during a television interview this month. But when Prime Minister Mario Monti remarked that having a job for life in today’s economy was no longer feasible for young people — indeed, it was “monotonous” — he set off a barrage of protests, laying bare one of the sacrosanct tenets of Italian society that the euro zone crisis has placed at risk.

Reaction was fast, furious, bipartisan and intergenerational. “I think the prime minister has to be careful with the words he uses because people are a little angry,” Claudia Vori, a 31-year-old Rome native who has had 18 different jobs since graduating from high school in 1999, said of Mr. Monti’s “monotonous” moment.

[. . .]

In Italy in particular, every major political force after World War II subscribed to the idea of guaranteeing the work of the male breadwinner to preserve the traditional family structure, said Elisabetta Gualmini, a labor expert who teaches at the University of Bologna. This social doctrine was also blessed by the Roman Catholic Church, which still holds much sway in Italy.

“The problem is that this model is myopic” in a global marketplace, Professor Gualmini said. “But Italy has entrenched itself on this model, which became a strong ideology and so rooted in beliefs that it cannot be challenged.”

January 21, 2012

The Birkenhead drill

Filed under: History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:55

Mark Steyn’s latest column in the Orange County Register contrasts the behaviour of the crew of the Costa Concordia with that of the crew (and male passengers) of the RMS Titanic:

In the centenary year of the most famous of all maritime disasters, we would do well to consider honestly the tale of the Titanic. [. . .]

On the Titanic, the male passengers gave their lives for the women and would never have considered doing otherwise. On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.” After similar scenes on the MV Estonia a few years ago, Roger Kohen of the International Maritime Organization told Time magazine: “There is no law that says women and children first. That is something from the age of chivalry.”

If, by “the age of chivalry,” you mean our great-grandparents’ time.

In fact, “women and children first” can be dated very precisely. On Feb. 26, 1852, HMS Birkenhead was wrecked off the coast of Cape Town while transporting British troops to South Africa. There were, as on the Titanic, insufficient lifeboats. The women and children were escorted to the ship’s cutter. The men mustered on deck. They were ordered not to dive in the water lest they risk endangering the ladies and their young charges by swamping the boats. So they stood stiffly at their posts as the ship disappeared beneath the waves. As Kipling wrote:

    We’re most of us liars, we’re ‘arf of us thieves, an’ the rest of us rank as can be,
    But once in a while we can finish in style (which I ‘ope it won’t ‘appen to me).

Sixty years later, the men on the Titanic — liars and thieves, wealthy and powerful, poor and obscure — found themselves called upon to “finish in style,” and did so. They had barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. They, too, ‘ope’d it wouldn’t ‘appen to them, but, when it did, the social norm of “women and children first” held up under pressure and across all classes.

Today there is no social norm, so it’s every man for himself — operative word “man,” although not many of the chaps on the Titanic would recognize those on the Costa Concordia as “men.”

January 19, 2012

“Vada a bordo, cazzo!”

Filed under: Europe — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

It takes a lot to vault ahead of someone like world-class competitor President Bashar al-Assad of Syria in the most-hated person contest, but Captain Francesco Schettino has “triumphed” in this, at least temporarily:

The coward in the hot seat is Captain Francesco Schettino, who infamously abandoned his sinking ship, the Costa Concordia, leaving hundreds of passengers stranded in the dark off the Tuscan coast.

The transcript of his conversation with Gregorio De Falco, an enraged Italian Coast Guard, has made a hero of DeFalco and rained down contempt on Schettino. T-shirts with an enraged De Falco’s command, “Vada a bordo, cazzo!” (Get back on the boat, for f—’s sake!) have been a big hit.

In the latest implausible explanation for his behaviour, Schettino claims he tripped on the listing Costa Concordia and somehow found himself in a lifeboat from which he was unable to extricate himself. Certainly he did not return to the stricken vessel, where rescue operations went on until 6 a.m.

The Christian Science Monitor lists the bumbling Schettino’s “top four deceptions.” The best (or feeblest, depending on your level of cynicism) is a variation of the old insurance claim excuse — the tree came out of nowhere and hit me.

Update: Now there’s speculation that the shipwreck may have been caused in the course of an attempt to impress a young woman.

The 25-year-old blonde, identified as Domnica Cemortan, was invited onto the bridge as the cruise liner sailed perilously close to Giglio, in what was apparently a ‘salute’ to an old friend of the captain’s and a favour to the ship’s head waiter, whose family were from the island.

She was reportedly the guest of one of the ship’s officers and may be the woman that passengers saw drinking and chatting with Capt Francesco Schettino on Friday evening, a few hours before the Costa Concordia ran aground.

Italian judicial authorities, who are investigating the accident and the captain’s conduct, want to interview Ms Cemortan, who according to her Facebook page was born in Chisinau, Moldova, and lives in Bucharest, Romania.

They believe she may be able to shed light on what happened on the bridge when the giant cruise ship collided with a rocky outcrop, ripping a massive gash in its hull.

Adding to the mystery, she was reportedly not on the official list of passengers and crews.

January 17, 2012

The media angle on the Costa Concordia wreck

Filed under: Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Tim Black points out the most common media memes about the Costa Concordia have much more to do with snobbery and disdain than with human interest or concern about the actual causes of the shipwreck:

The sequence of events that led to the sinking of the luxury cruise liner, the Costa Concordia, is now pretty much established. But facts have not got in the way of a variety of commentators who are using the accident to parade their prejudices about too-big ships and ignorant passengers.

[. . .]

These are the tragic facts so far. What no one knows exactly is why it happened. Explanations have been mooted, of course: a power blackout affecting the ship’s steering; inaccurate navigation charts failing to show the rocks; or human error, in particular by the ship’s captain, Francesco Schettino. Yet while the exact reason for the ship straying off course remains unclear, that has not stopped another object of blame coming to the fore in some of the coverage. That is, the real, underlying reason for the Costa Concordia accident is to be sought not in the actual events of Friday evening but rather in the profit-driven, build-‘em-high cruise industry and, by association, in the sea-faring ignorance of all those who sailed aboard her.

This is why so much of the coverage seems obsessed with the size of the Costa Concordia. Over the past few days, we have been repeatedly told that cruise ships have doubled in size over the past decade. While this is true — and as the twenty-sixth-largest liner in the world, the Costa Concordia is far from the most impressive of this new breed of ships — the Concordia’s size does not actually tell us why it was three miles off course. Nor does it explain why the ship’s crew was unaware of the rock outcrop despite having navigation equipment. Yes, perhaps ship size does affect manoeuvrability, but would a smaller vessel not have suffered a similar fate that befell the Concordia? In fact, the obsession with the ship’s size sheds very little light on what happened to the Concordia on Friday evening.

What the convenient obsession with size draws upon, rather, is an antipathy towards the cruise industry, a sense that it is little more than the ocean-going equivalent of that other right-thinking person’s bête noire, Dubai. In other words, a vulgar testament to profit and sky-high consumption. So although size here is not really relevant as a cause of the Concordia’s capsizing, it appears relevant to certain commentators as a symbol of commercial hubris, of complacent materialism.

December 6, 2011

The Battle of Ortona

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:16

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies is marking the anniversary of the Battle of Ortona in 1943 by sending Twitter updates from @BattleOfOrtona to outline the historical events of the 1st Canadian Division and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade in this key battle of the Italian Campaign. Here is the situation just before the battle opened, from Terry Copp:

The Canadians were involved in a series of isolated battles in the mountains of Central Italy in November 1943 when General Bernard Law Montgomery issued orders for an advance up the Adriatic Coast to seize control of the east-west road Pescara to Rome. The American 5th Army was to launch a direct advance towards Rome at the same time.

The Canadians were still in the mountains when British, Indian, and New Zealand troops fought their way across the Sangro River, forcing a German withdrawal to the Moro River. The 78th British “Battleaxe” Division had shot its bolt at the Sangro and Montgomery ordered the fresh, full strength Canadian Division to take over the advance on the coastal flank. The move was to be completed by the night of 5 December.

The German 10th Army, responsible for the defence of Italy east of the Appenine Mountains, contained 12 divisions — 10 infantry and 2 armoured. The 76 Panzer Corps held the river lines south of Pescara with 1st Parachute, 90th Panzer Grenadier, 26th Panzer and 65th Infantry divisions. Normally an attacker needs to outnumber the defender by at least 3:1. This ratio could not be achieved in December 1944 and with the beginning of heavy winter rains air power could only play a small role. Everyone but the infantry was optimistic.

December 3, 2011

Remembering the “Italian Stalingrad”

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:04

The Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies will be starting a series of “live tweets” to remember the 1943 Battle of Ortona. Follow @BattleOfOrtona to get the full story, as narrated by Terry Copp.

November 28, 2011

The real reason the German bond auction failed

Filed under: Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Tyler Cowen explains:

If Germany and a few other, smaller AAA countries were to guarantee or monetize the debts of Italy, Spain, and possibly France and Belgium, never mind Greece and Portugal, Germany would not be AAA itself. The German median voter has very little interest in guaranteeing the above-mentioned debts. If German yields are flipping upwards, it is, in my view, because investors now see the whole euro deal as unraveling and don’t want to deal with the complexities and flak. A big chunk of the German auction didn’t sell at all. You don’t have to think that Germany is ripe to default to see that markets are warning Germany not to take on the whole burden.

The only remaining question, if Germany isn’t willing to take on the entire burden of European debt, is when will the whole edifice come crashing down and who’ll manage not to be crushed by falling debris.

November 24, 2011

Nigel Farage on “German-dominated Europe”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

November 4, 2011

Opening moments of the G20 in Cannes

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:01

From the tone of the article, even the Guardian is finding it hard to take the politicians seriously this time:

The red carpet was drenched and sodden, the palm trees battered by a storm and even the trumpet fanfares of the French Republican Guard were muffled by the wind.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s glittering G20 summit at Cannes was supposed to be a showcase for his skill as the caped crusader: Super Sarko, fighting his way through the markets and eurozone crisis to rescue his personal damsel in distress, France’s endangered AAA-credit rating.

Instead, the opening hours on the French Riviera seemed more like a muted crisis-gathering of head-scratching politicians, some staring into the jaws of political death, fearing being punished at the ballot box or hung out to dry by their own governments.

Even without the specially summoned whipping boy, the Greek prime minister George Papandreou — who had a constantly furrowed brow and clasped hands, as pressure was heaped on him over his resignation-referendum ping-ping — the red-carpet arrivals ceremony often looked like a roll call of doom.

Silvio Berlusconi arrived in the rain with a huge black overcoat perched on his shoulders, shoulder pads visible from space, likened by his own press corps to a mafia boss from the Sopranos.

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