US special forces training in Finland

A Finnish machine gun crew during the Winter War in 1939-1940

This is great news from Finnish YLE:

US Army special forces in Finland for winter war games

The troops and their equipment will be heavily sequestered from the public eye during the two weeks of training exercises.

Apart from learning the ins and outs of winter warfare, the Americans are hoping for some night-time skiing, said Utti regiment commander Colonel Heikki Välivehmas.

“The timing is the best possible, because we now have a national training exercise that they can naturally join so they can experience a Finnish winter,” Välivehmas said.

The elite US Army soldiers will also provide training for their Finnish counterparts in international operations.  Välivehmas said the joint training will be beneficial for local forces.--

This year the Utti Jaeger Regiment has a contingent of 60 troops to be deployed as reinforcements in Nato’s Response Force (NRF) operations. The troops don’t know in advance what their assignment will be or where they will have to ship out.

From Utti, the US Army special forces will move on to Lapland next week. Members of the Utti infantry regiment will then test their American colleagues’ winter war skills across northern Lapland.

PS

The number of US special forces now training in Finland is limited - only a ten-man team - but their war games together with Finnish colleagues are still most welcome,particularly when one considers Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's recent bravado about Russia's armed forces moving on "to a new level of capabilities in the next three to five years". 

Greenpeace yacht to begin polluting two week cruise of the Great Barrier Reef

Yachts like the Rainbow Warrior 3 disturb the sensitive reef ecosystem. 

"The highlight for me was getting to surf and dive in places that not a lot of people 

have actually gone to"

Dominico Zapata, Greenpeace cruise guest activist, travelling on Rainbow Warrior 3

The Australian reports that the new Greenpeace yacht Rainbow Warrior 3 is about to begin a two week cruise of the Great Barrier Reef:

The Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior is about to visit Australia to highlight the threat to the Great Barrier Reef from climate change and coal exports.

The boat will remain on the Great Barrier Reef for two weeks, as part of a campaign against the expansion of the Abbot Point coal port in central Queensland.

Not a bad time to visit the possibly greatest natural wonder of the world. With loads of sunshine, warm seas, refreshing sea breezes and a warm climate all year round, tropical North Queensland weather is hard to beat.

In order not to make ordinary visitors, not able to afford the comfort of a small cruise ship, too jealous, the people at Greenpeace have chosen to call the cruise a campaign "to highlight the threat to the Great Barrier from climate change and coal exports". 

Scientists have for years now been worried about the great number of tourist boats disturbing the  sensitive reef ecosystem:

The millions of visitors that the Great Barrier Reef draws every year are also an unintentional contributor to the general decline of the reef. Not only leisure vessels heading out for tours to the reef but also reef-based activities such as reef-walking, using submersibles and even the runoff from various sunscreens are all thought to be contributing negative factors that – when combined with the sheer volume of tourists who frequent the reef – are much more impactful than they may seem. This is also not taking into account intentionally or neglectfully destructive practices such as littering and various other forms of man-made pollution.

The Greenpeace greenies obviously could not care less. These people think that their idiotic fight against imaginary human caused global warming gives them the right to pollute this and  other unique habitats.

Should we be worried about global cooling?

Global warming has stopped. But should we again start worrying about global cooling? Ken Gregory, director of Canada's Friends of Science thinks we should:

“The current solar activity is similar to that at the start of the Little Ice Age of sustained low solar activity and frigid global temperatures,” says Gregory. “It is the changing solar magnetic flux that affects climate, not the total solar energy which is virtually constant.”

“Canada and the US mid-west are the bread basket of the world,” says Len Maier, president of Friends of Science and a farmer himself. “Billions of dollars are being spent on climate change in the belief that the world will be warming. Our data shows a cooling trend for the past ten years. The cooling has begun due to solar cycles and galactic influences.”

The temperature index from the UK Met Office shows there has been no global warming for 15 years. From 2002 to December 2012, the best fit linear temperature trend has declined by 0.1 °C when climate models predicted a temperature rise of 0.2 °C.

Historically, the consequences of global cooling include extreme weather cycles, floods, freezing temperatures – and worst of all – crop failures.

“A one or two degree drop in temperature would significantly reduce agricultural crop yields in Canada,” says Len Maier. “We believe that current government ‘climate change’ policies to subsidize biofuel production are disastrous. These divert crops from food production to making fuel for vehicles. Food prices are up, due to a reduction in food stocks and changes in food security policies.” continues Maier. --

Maier points out: “We have spent a trillion dollars on climate change policies, diverted acres of food crops to biofuels, and made futile attempts to reduce CO2 emissions, while we stand on the brink of catastrophic cooling as the sun enters an extreme minimum of activity. Our position is that the sun is the main driver of climate change. Not CO2. These wasteful carbon reduction policies must be abandoned and food security dealt with instead.”

Read the entire article here

Former Russian banker Andrei Borodin on Vladimir Putin

Former Russian banker Andrei Borodin has been granted political asylum in Britain. Borodin told the Daily Telegraph that he was targeted by a politically motivated prosecution by Dmitry Medvedev, the former president who now is prime minister.

I do not know the circumstances in this case, but I know that what Borodin told the Telegraph about dictator Putin most certainly is true:

 “Nothing important in Russia can be done without the knowledge of the number one in the country. Mr Putin built a system of autocracy, corruption and unprofessionalism in Russia and now he is a hostage to this system. And what happened to me is the result of the functioning of this system, whose father is Putin.”

Professor Frank Furedi: history "has suffered most from the impact of the anti-intellectual ethos of contemporary pedagogy"

King George V and Queen Mary at the Imperial Durbar in New Delhi in 1911.

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".
George Santayana

University of Kent sociology professor Frank Furedi joins the UK debate on how history should be taught: 

Unfortunately, the current debate surrounding the new history curriculum is not so much about its intellectual content as how it should be taught. So when Richard Evans, the Regius professor of history at Cambridge, denounced the curriculum because it allegedly sought to restore the ‘rote learning of the patriotic stocking-fillers so beloved of traditionalists’, his main target was a pedagogic approach which he caricatured as traditionalist. His ire towards a pedagogy that assumes children should possess a sense of chronology and periodisation, and ought to be familiar with basic historical facts, is widely shared by the educational establishment.

Of all the subjects taught in the school curriculum, history is the one that has suffered most from the impact of the anti-intellectual ethos of contemporary pedagogy. In line with the vulgar tendency to promote key skills and downgrade the intellectual content of the subject, history today is taught as a series of discrete and unconnected episodes that are used as resources for developing children’s critical learning skills. The presentation of this modularised and fragmented past is justified on the grounds that facts, such as dates and names, are relatively unimportant. Instead, chronology and knowledge of the past are far less significant than the skills required to use them. According to this simplistic paradigm, skills trump knowledge.

 - -

Whatever the weaknesses of Gove’s proposed curriculum, at the very least it assumes that students studying history need to have a knowledge of the past. That represents great progress over the current academic-lite history curriculum.

Advocates of skills-dominated education regard the understanding of the past as having little relevance today. What they focus on instead is a complex, ever-changing and technologically sophisticated world. From this perspective, real history has no intrinsic virtue other than as a vehicle to teach ‘key skills’.
It is important to recall that there has been a long legacy of denouncing ‘traditional’ history on the basis that it is not relevant. Sneering remarks about ‘rote learning’, about the irrelevant lives of ancient monarchs, communicate the idea that history is an outdated relic of the nineteenth-century educational establishment.
But why should the subject of history be seen as a hangover from a nineteenth-century curriculum? Why should a study of people’s historical legacy be represented as irrelevant? Of course, from an instrumental perspective, the study of this subject is entirely unnatural and unrelated to the experience of children. How can the study of sixteenth-century English history be of relevance to twenty-first-century children confronted with the challenges of a hi-tech, globalised world? Yet, properly understood, history is probably the subject that contributes most to the broadening out of the imagination. One of its purposes is to help children transcend their own immediate experience and gain an understanding of how a community has evolved and developed an understanding of itself. It is ironic that policymakers, who are obsessed with training children to adapt to change, actively devalue the academic study of change.

Read the entire article here

(bolded text by NNoN)

How right Furedi is. This is of course not a problem that affects teaching only in the UK. Unfortunately the views of the leftist "progressive" education establishment are still dominant  in most other western nations, too. 

Earth Hour 2013: The bright lights of Berlin's (future) airport

They have not yet found the light switch at Berlin's new airport.

Remember the time when advanced technology was the pride of Germany? 

Well, nothing lasts forever:

At the problem-plagued construction site that will eventually become the Berlin International Airport, the terminal lights burn around the clock. And the reason is not to prevent workers there from succumbing to the winter blues. Rather, technical difficulties at the ultra-modern airport -- which will ultimately cost close to €4.3 billion -- mean that the lights can't be switched off.

"It has to do with the fact that we haven't progressed far enough with our lighting system that we can control it," Horst Amann, airport technical director, said on Wednesday during a rare public appearance.

That isn't the only technical hang-up at the airport, of course. Originally scheduled to begin operations in October 2011, its opening was unexpectedly delayed due to concerns about safety equipment -- before being delayed again last May. Since then, however, myriad problems, construction shortcomings, design errors and technical glitches have been found. Not to mention concerns that the building might be too small.

PS

Nothing so bad, as not to be good for something. At least the missing light switch will make it somewhat more difficult for the future airport to participate in the upcoming annual stupidity called The Earth Hour, on March 23 (unless they decide to follow the example set by Mauritius last year).  

(image by wikipedia)

Germany: Five winters in a row colder than average

The warmists' predictions about snowless winters in Europe have been proven wrong.

Dominik Jung, one of Germany's leading meteorologists brings us the following interesting information:

This is the fifth winter in a row in Germany which is colder than average

"Only a few years ago climatologists predicted that there would be no more winters in Germany with ice and snow. These days you only need to look out the window in order to know better". 

"Some clever climatologists first tried to explain this by saying that global warming was taking a breather. However, this breathing pause has now lasted for five consecutive winters. Accordingly, the debate about global warming has gone rather quiet lately. Whatever the reason may be."

"The earlier predictions and projections have been proven wrong, at least with regard to Germany and Europe and, taking into consideration the facts we have now, should be revised. Otherwise we will have a credibility problem. People are not stupid. They will understand what this is all about. So, let's see how long the 'global warming breathing pause' will last."  

How refreshing it is to hear a voice of sanity from Germany, the home of far too many envirofundamentalist greenies!