A popular book

Former US President George W Bush´s memoir "Decision Points" has sold an astonishing two million copies in less than two monts, according to the publisher, Crown Publishing Group. And the book is not even out in paperback yet. According to the publisher, no other hardcover non-fiction book has sold even one million copies in 2010. Quite an achievement by the man who´s intellectual ability was universally berated by liberal and leftist media.

By contrast, former president Bill Clinton´s memoir has only managed to sell 2,2 million copies since it was published in 2004.

Chinese clone Russia´s Su-27 fighter

China was for a long time the major buyer of Russian weapon systems, but times have changed, reports the Wall Street Journal:

ZHUHAI, China—A year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cash-strapped Kremlin began selling China a chunk of its vast military arsenal, including the pride of the Russian air force, the Sukhoi-27 fighter jet.
For the next 15 years, Russia was China's biggest arms supplier, providing $20 billion to $30 billion of fighters, destroyers, submarines, tanks and missiles. It even sold Beijing a license to make the Su-27 fighter jet—with imported Russian parts.

Today, Russia's military bonanza is over, and China's is just beginning.
After decades of importing and reverse-engineering Russian arms, China has reached a tipping point: It now can produce many of its own advanced weapons—including high-tech fighter jets like the Su-27—and is on the verge of building an aircraft carrier.
Not only have Chinese engineers cloned the prized Su-27's avionics and radar but they are fitting it with the last piece in the technological puzzle, a Chinese jet engine.
In the past two years, Beijing hasn't placed a major order from Moscow..

PS
Many western companies, including major ones, seem to be unbelievably credulous in their dealings with the Chinese. Sooner or later they will regret it. The Chinese are also extremely active in the area of industrial espionage - as are the Russians.

About Merkel´s Christian values - and the EU Commission´s lack of them

It is encouraging that German Chanchellor Angela Merkel has began to speak out for Christian values in Europe:

"We have too few discussions about the Christian view of mankind," Merkel claimed in a recent speech. She then stressed that Germany needs to reflect more upon "the values that guide us, about our Judeo-Christian tradition." It was one way, Merkel maintained, of bringing "about cohesion in our society."

Samuel Gregg, Director of Research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty offers this commentary:

On one level, Merkel is surely stating the blindingly obvious. How can Europeans ask Muslim immigrants to integrate into European society and respect European values without Europeans themselves being clear in their own minds about what values are at the core of European identity and where these values come from?

And as much as significant portions of European society would like to deny it, it's simply a historical fact that the idea of Europe and European values such as liberty, equality before the law, and solidarity did not suddenly appear ex nihilo in the late seventeenth-century with the various Enlightenments. Central to the formation of European identity and such values was the synthesis of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem achieved by Christianity following the Roman Empire's collapse in the West in 476 A.D.

Indeed there's plenty of evidence that the antecedents of most of the various freedoms and genuine achievements of the various Enlightenments are to be found in Christianity. There is increasing recognition, for example, that the idea of human rights was first given concrete expression by medieval canon lawyers.

PS
The European Commission does not seem to share Merkel´s view. It has printed more than three million copies of a planner for secondary schools that includes Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Jewish holidays, without at all mentioning Christian holidays!

The GalliaWatch blog comments:

The page for December 25 is empty and at the bottom is the following message:

"A true friend is someone who shares your worries and your joy". It would be hard to find something more "religiously" correct!

The calendar includes Muslim Hindu, Sikh, Jewish holidays. Among others... Not to mention Europe Day and other key dates of the EU. No Christian holiday is mentioned even though Christianity is the religion of most Europeans. Johanna Touzel, spokesperson for COMECE (Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union) found the planner "unbelievable". A spokesperson for the European Commission spoke of an "error". He pointed out that future editions of this planner would not mention any religious holiday...
Remove everything rather than speak of Christmas!

China offers EU a helping hand (2)

In an earlier post I wrote about China offering the crisis ridden euro a helping hand:

China has promised to take further “concerted action” to support European financial stabilisation, including continuing to buy the bonds of countries at the centre of the sovereign debt crisis, according to senior European officials.

What we have here is a developing country (according to its own definition) governed by a communist party elite in reality bailing out the EU, the international "success story", that for "over half a century has brought political stability and economic prosperity to its citizens" and is "the world’s biggest donor of development aid to poorer countries".

Sic transit gloria mundi!

Here is how China defines itself, according to the editor of the China Daily newspaper:

Despite its overtaking Japan in second quarter economic output, the basic fact that China is still in the primary stage of socialism determines that the country will still be a developing nation for a long period in the future.

And here is how the European Union defines itself, according to its official website:

The European Union – a success story

The European Union needs no introduction. Over half a century, it has brought political stability and economic prosperity to its citizens. It has created a frontier-free single market and a single currency, the euro. It has reunited a fractured continent. The European Union is a major economic and commercial power and the world’s biggest donor of development aid to poorer countries. Its membership has grown from six to 27 nations, bringing the EU’s population to nearly half a billion.

http://europa.eu/abc/keyfigures/successstory/index_en.htm

Piers Corbyn - the weather forecaster who beats the Met Office and all the other forecasters

London Mayor Boris Johnson is impressed by the accuracy of Piers Corbyn´s long range weather forecasts. Corbyn, who works in a modest office, regularly beats the government supported Met Office and all the other big weather forecasting institutions with hundreds of experts and huge supercomputers. Corbyn forecasted the December severe winter weather already in May - and now he thinks a mini ice age is a possibility:

Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its "mild winter" schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year's mythical "barbecue summer", and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.
He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people - notably in farming - are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.
He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time - and he makes a prophecy.
I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

If you are interested in learning more about Piers Corbyn, here is his homepage.


PS
Johnson has for some time been a "warmist", believing in the global warming propaganda, which is why he still pays homage to this imaginary problem in his otherwise good column.

China offers EU a helping hand

China has, according to FT, promised charitable action in order to help the crisis ridden euro:

China has promised to take further “concerted action” to support European financial stabilisation, including continuing to buy the bonds of countries at the centre of the sovereign debt crisis, according to senior European officials.
The officials, who declined to be named, said Wang Qishan, a Chinese vice-premier, had given assurances that China would step up support for European stabilisation efforts “if necessary”. Mr Wang made the pledge during the third annual China-EU High Level Economic and Trade Dialogue, held in Beijing on Tuesday.

FT, citing EU officials, also notes that China has not formally linked its support to some specific issues, but that it has asked the EU to be granted "market economy" status and the lifting of the arms embargo.

PS
I think it is likely that we will not hear any strong criticism of e.g. China´s human rights violations from the EU leaders in the near future.

Obama - a one term president?

Commentator and analyst Nile Gardiner thinks that Obama might might not get a second term:

2010 is a year President Obama will definitely want to forget, after his party’s humiliating drubbing at the hands of voters in the November mid-terms. As I’ve noted previously, there is no sign at all of any kind of recovery for the president, and several new polls show that Barack Obama continues his steep downward spiral. On current projections, the president looks on course to become a one-term president, and a pretty undistinguished one at that.
According to the latest Fox News/ Opinion Dynamics poll, just 29 percent of US voters predict that Obama will be re-elected in 2012 – with 64 percent saying that he will not succeed in winning another term, an 18 percent increase from a year ago. Only 35 percent of Americans think Obama deserves re-election, compared to 53 percent who believe the country would be better off with someone else.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100068931/barack-obama-is-firmly-on-course-to-become-a-one-term-president/

PS
And Gardiner is not the only one who thinks Obama might end up as a one term president. This wellknown personality - who describes himself as "we the people" - has also suggested this possibility.