My Predicions about the Future of France

By Jamie Douglas

First about my lack of presence: Last week, I not only cracked my skull but in the following nosedive also appears to have broken my sternum, as is suitable for a man my age. After an unknown period of time I tried to sneak back into bed without disturbing Julie, which of course was impossible in my state. “Dog” knows what the dog thought, but had I been the dog, I would have laughed my ass off.

So some weeks ago I wrote a piece forecasting Sarkozy’s defeat as well as the EADS team having to re-engineer the entire wing assembly for the A-380 Super Jumbo Jet. It turns out that every single wing will have to be completely redesigned for all future models coming off the line. But also, every aircraft flying will have to be refitted with the redesigned wing. (I am not gloating at all here.) Whenever you introduce a new model, whether it be toothpaste or rockets (ask the North Koreans), you might encounter problems. So here is the exchange with the very nice lady who lives 9 km from France:

 

Thursday, March 22, 2012

French Turmoil and the Elections in Gaulle: A Reply to a Reader

By Jamie Douglas

At this very moment I am writing this, one of my favorite nations is under siege from a lone lunatic gunman while the elections are turning out to be quite a spectacle. So I opened my fan mail today, and found this very polite letter from a woman who lives a mere nine km from France.

Hello Jamie,

I have recently been given the access details to The Expatriate News and there have been fairly numerous articles from your good self about France, their upcoming elections, Airbus, the random shootings in Toulouse, adjusting to living in France, etc. Living in the Mendoza area in Argentina I am not exactly sure what your background and experience is relative to France because you are somewhat off base in some of your pronouncements which are covered quite nicely in the general press in France and Europe.

Are you French, have you ever lived in France, do you speak French? As one who grew up in French Canada speaking both French and English and has lived within 9 kilometres of France for the last 25 years, it seems odd that you focus many of your articles (at least the ones I have seen so far) on France when you live in South America.

Why not tell us more about the delights of Argentina in particular and South America in general rather than trying to "teach grandma how to suck eggs" when it comes to France? Incidentally, and despite your advice to the contrary, Sarkosy will retain his Presidency and the problems of Airbus are not like you represent at all!

Bonne journée!

Dear Reader,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful comment, and for being a reader of the Expat Daily News. I will try to address your concerns

First, let me give you my qualifications to write about the subjects that I write about. I am an aerospace engineer and world traveler, having investigated more than 40 major commercial aircraft accidents word wide and accumulated over 6000 hours in multiengine jet aircraft from Learjets to the giant C5A/B. I lived in France for many years, having been born just a stone’s throw from the border in La Suisse Romande, and spent years going to school in France. I therefore feel somewhat qualified to write about the current goings on there. We may disagree on the political side, as you may feel closer to the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, than I do. I personally feel that he has let all of the people of France down by taking the passenger seat in Angela Merkel’s grand plans.

It has also become quite painfully obvious that he did accept 50 million €uros from Mr. Ghadaffi to pay for his election. But enough of that! I doubt that short of an inquisition Sarkozy’s supporters will ignore any evidence to the contrary.

Now about the shootings in Toulouse, which also happens to be the French home of EADS, the parent company of Airbus, and why I, sitting here in South America would be writing about that. You have to agree that that is kind of a silly question. In the age of instant electronic communications via computer, I could write the same stories from Tonga or Antarctica. I write about things that affect all of us. And the brutal murders of the victims at a Jewish school affect me as much as the horrific accident in that tunnel in Switzerland last week. So I write about them.

I do write quite a bit about Argentina over on our sister site, Expat Daily News Latin America. (In fact, just today, my editor asked me to lay off Argentina.) I wish I could write more about the “delights” of this amazing country, but if you go back into the archives on that site, you will find that this is not always possible, these days. I am most aware of what is going on here and read the official Gazette every day. I sense that I am a witness to the next downfall of this charming country, which has never learned from its unfortunate history. As far as countries in Latin America, I once again invite you to look around the Expat Daily News Latin America website, where you will find a great deal of information.

I politely agree to disagree with you on the subject of President Sarkozy, not just based on polls, but because I read articles in the French press, as well as the rest of the world. Before I write my daily articles, I spend hours reading publications from around the globe, as well as being in contact with journalists.

But perhaps you could enlighten me and the Airbus engineers in France, Germany, and England what the problems with the wings on the A-380 really are. I am sure they would love to have grandma teach them how to create new alloys that will not crack under normal flight conditions.

Again, I want to thank you for taking the time to write to me in such an educated and civilized fashion. Vive La France!

Jamie Douglas

San Rafael, Mendoza

The following is the prequel to the above conversation.

My predictions have of course come true. The French people have made themselves a “comfortable” socialist bed, though it may be made of straw and all those poor and underprivileged immigrants will end up sucking up the wealth and peace of the state. This however is the karmic adjustments of the “boot in the ass, nigger” (my apologies to all my friends of color) colonialism. Yes, it is a bitter fact that the industrial revolution would have turned out differently without slavery and the stealing of continents and their natural resources, which of course include the millions of slaves.

Jamie Douglas,
Argentina

[image: French President Elect François Hollande, via Wikipedia]

So You Wanna buy a Chevy Volt?

By Jamie Douglas

I think it was called the Perpentum Mobile? Well here it is, compliments of Frederic Chopin:

It is likely to be the only one you will encounter in gravitational environments. Friction and gravity take their toll, no matter what.

Now, about electric or other exotic powered vehicles: We have a few samples cruising around already. But there are a few minor problems with this so called “green solution.” First and foremost, when it comes to transport, there is no green solution. It takes energy to take you from point A to point B. If you walk, you consume calories, which have to be replenished with food supplies that are brought to you by trucks, planes and ships. If you ride a bicycle, all the components are made of materials that contribute to the pollution of the planet, such as aluminum, rubber, and various exotic alloys that are brought deep out of the earth’s crust so that you can have your ultra light Shimano components.

But all that is small change compared to the ultimate wet dream, the electric vehicle, which is completely pollution free, or is it? There is no free lunch, in the real life of energy. It is a constant trade off, ever since the steam engine was invented, or even before that, when mankind discovered fire, used it for heating, cooking, and eventually the forging of metals (and we  refer to them of “Homo Primitivus!”). Our ancient forefathers that, through learning about forging and alloying, discovered processes that today make planes fly and space ships go to Cassini. Along the way we discovered the internal combustion engine, by way of Dr. Ferdinand Diesel, and through more sophisticated refinements of petroleum products, discovered gasoline and plastics, amongst many others.

So in the latter part of the 20^th century it came to pass, that scientists discovered that the ozone hole over Antartica was getting bigger all the time, and that was likely to bring about global climate change (not global warming as it has been repeatedly and mistakenly called). A lot of the blame for that was of course brought down on automobiles and trucks, and to the credit of the automotive industry, after screaming and kicking, they came up with the catalytic convertor, which turned some of those harmful “greenhouse gases” into “harmless emissions” with which you could still close the garage door and end your financial or marital misery.

So what would be better for the economy than to start marketing electric cars, which will cause the whole neighborhood have to change their entire electrical system, so that every carport will have multiple 220Volt outlets, requiring much bigger transformers, rendering the neighborhood even more unsightly, and causing the occasional sleeping family to “sleep away” while their abode burns to the ground.

Now to the main point of my article: Are electric cars really less polluting than conventional powered cars?

The short answer is a resounding No! But the lengthier, more technical analysis leads us to a slightly different conclusion: Hell no!

While street level emissions may be reduced by a good percentage, every night, when you plug in your EV, power plants, both coal fired and nuclear, are working overtime to supply your lithium ion batteries with their power to take you to and from work or the mall or school, with a full 30% loss in efficiency compared to pouring fossils fuels into your tank, which, in the end, are powering your EV directly or indirectly. So are you helping the planet breathe more easily? Hell no. You are contributing to more pollution, by allowing US power companies to burn more high sulphur coal, which creates more acid rain and all around pollution. But wait, they are buying carbon credits from more developing nations such as the Cook Islands, Mauritius, and other not yet developing countries that have not yet figured out how they are ultimately getting screwed by the likes of Goldman Sachs and company by receiving a few million dollars in carbon cap money, which will only end up in the pockets of the top officials, who will retreat to their French Chateaus when the sea levels rise.

Bottom line: No electric cars, No fake hybrids, No carbon emission trading. Nobody to date has seriously planned for the hundreds of millions of toxic batteries that will eventually have to be disposed of. Maybe that giant hole that the DOE has dug outside Las Vegas will find some use after all. We already are facing monumental problems with cell phone batteries that for the most part are also Lithium Ion, and it is in those small batteries that the individual consumer can see and feel the inefficiency of charging batteries. The chargers become hot, which represents waste energy, and it takes hours to recharge your portable devices. Now multiply that by the amount of batteries it takes to power a car. Get the picture?

Instead, a big Yes to urban and suburban mass transport, a rebuilding of the railway system, where a trailer van can be transported for a fraction of the cost of transporting it via truck.

The world railway system needs to be rebuilt and electrified for efficient use by the masses, in the exact manner that he Chinese are doing at this moment. Of course it is being done with the same money that they have extracted by making cheap consumer goods for the Western World, through technology transfer. China has surpassed the USA in infrastructure improvements by far, while the USA is lagging more and more behind. Our highways, bridges, ports and rail systems were stopped in their betterment with the Reagan administration, when cutting taxes became the priority of the millennium, and anti property tax crusaders began to crisscross the country, spreading Ayn Rand’s and Milton Friedman’s mantra of anti taxation. ...which 25 years later leads to the closing of libraries that were founded by one of the nation’s great benevolent capitalists, Andrew Carnegie, who realized early on the potential the educated masses would have in the development of this newly settled continent.

So continue in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie, use your brain, buy a small, low polluting vehicle, and use mass transport anytime you can. It will benefit your great grand children greatly. They might have clean air to breathe, without having to go to Oxygen Bars.

Do your part, before this species amuse itself into extinction. Thank you!

Jamie Douglas

Patagonia