Troubles in Toulouse

By Jamie Douglas

Sarkozy and the Elevated Terror Threat

France has been hit by thee back to back mysterious “terrorist attacks” out of the blue, all having been carried out by gunmen on a scooter with faces darkened out by helmets.

On March 15, three soldiers were attacked, two of them killed while the third one expired of his head wound later. This comes on top of the murder of an officer the week before. Then on Monday, there followed an attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse, when again, it was gunmen on a motorcycle who opened fire outside the Ozar Hatorah secondary college, killing a Rabbi along with three children and severely wounding another. Now it must be made clear to my readers that two of the soldiers killed in the second attack were Muslims, and that the first headlines released by several French as well as British news outlets immediately claimed it was a racist killer at work. French prosecutors have now confirmed that the killers in the third incident used the same bike as in the other two attacks and the guns used are also allegedly the same.

Some of us are aware that the French elections are a mere month away, and that Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, is woefully behind in the polls. I must reveal to my readers at this point that I have had several opportunities to see how ruthless and murderous the French intelligence service operates (Isle of Pines, New Caledonia, Tahiti, and Martinique). Would I be surprised if, at this critical juncture in the French elections, Sarkozy ordered some type of “black bag” operation to improve his standing in the polls? Not a freaking bit. In fact, I would be sorely disappointed if he did not pull this hat trick so close to the elections. Stand by for more public insecurity in France.

There is a lot at stake there. ...Like who will control the purse strings for the near and distant future! As people in the United States fail to understand, the socialism they have come to fear so much is not Marxism or Trotskyite or even just the regular fare of communism. The UK for all practical purposes is a socialist state, but has also tried to be very capitalist, which has caused a lot of confusion about their priorities. The socialist model of the UK always envisioned health care (NIH) and the pensions of the Boomers. What they failed to do was to have a valid model that took into account the difference in the life expectance between the times the Boomers were born and today, when they are refusing to go quietly to their early graves, as the statisticians had forecast.

Similarly, the socialists in France who are poised to win the elections are not Marxists or any such thing. They do not want to turn their nation into a social welfare state. Au contraire, mon ami. What is poised to turn France into a welfare state are the policies of the government currently in power as well as the two preceding ones: it is the colonialism coming home to roost, and all those benevolent administrations having allowed all those immigrants to come home to “Mother France,” completely overwhelming the social fabric that was so carefully woven over centuries. But now, after exploiting the colonies so brutally and for so long, the government felt that all those multi ethnic people would just come home to Mama and integrate into the French countryside, maybe pick grapes and take on the menial jobs. The country never figured that they were inviting a breakdown of their social structure, ghettos, and riots in Paris and Marseilles.

That Airbus 380 Problem

Well, it just won’t go away! Airbus in Toulouse just admitted that the problem will be with them for years and cost hundreds of millions of €uros. Those little wing riblets that hold the skin of the plane in place apparently are a lot more susceptible to stress than the computer models imagined they would be. A new experimental batch that has flown for less than 200 hours is already showing the same cracks.

The alloys used in the “new and improved” components apparently showed much worse signs of fatigue that the original ones. Now what? This aircraft is the flagship of Airbus’ lineup. If, and I hope it will not happen, there is a catastrophic hull loss midair with the loss of close to 500 lives, it will lead to the grounding and immediate redesign of the wings. But of course, to do that now would spell doom for the A-380. So is this going to be the Pinto of the aircraft industry, or the Corvair?  I have no idea, but rest assured, I will not fly that potential doomsday machine until they have fixed that vexing problem.

Jamie Douglas