What's your name and number?

License tags in Sweden are boring. My Ford Ranger has OTJ 353, and I can tolerate it only because the two first letters correspond with my initials. My new (used) Chevvy pickup has an even worse one: LEC 436 – total nonsense. On top of that, our authorities removed all the interesting four-letter-word-combinations (in the language of heroes and great deeds many are spelled with only three) from the start back in -72.

But the system has it's limits. New tags now begin with X. And even if old combinations from scrapped autos are habitually recycled, only y and z remain.

(Readers of Swedish might be aware of that our alphabet does indeed not end at z, but has the additional å, ä and ö, but htat won't help. Å Ä and Ö was excluded from the start, along with capital i and those three-letter four letter words mentioned earlier suchs as KUK, BÖG, MUS, BUS, DÖD, RÖV, LÖK, CIA, IRS, FBI, NFA, NHL, and so on.)

oh, I'm digressing...

What I was aiming at was the fact that someone told me the other day that Chinese authorities – and regular people – are facing a tremendous name problem. Chinese name-laws are strict and in fact only about 1500 surnames are allowed to be used in the Commie State.

Considering that there are 1 300 000 MILLION chinese these days my less than accurate arithmetic tells me there are on average close to one million chinese to each alloted surname.

And that's a LOT of Andersons, if you ask me. . . .

Getting someone's name in the whitepages in Bejing must be a real drag . . . .

What? Not our fault!?

Swedish media is right now reporting the astounding news that global warming has not caused the melting of the glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro. It is a pending article in Scientific American that has caused the commotion.

This blogger, who since long have been frustrated by the sycophantic and less-than-critical reporting on the theoretical impact of human CO2 emissions on world climate, feel a little relieved.

Kilimanjaro's rapid glacial decline has, among other, been featured by Al Gore in his film as a Grand Proof of modern society's evil impact on the climate. Now, we learn, it might just be natural processes. Kilimanjaro (and Europes and the Andean) glaciers have been steadily melting since around 1900. One reason is that the so called "little ice age" ended after roughly 250 years in about 1850.

Sadly, it probably will not do very much about the hegemony of the ruling CO2-dogma.
For that to happen we'll have to await a change of the current paradigm, the one that strongly biases research directed at human caused global warming before other theories.

And remember, as long as governments can use the idea of reducing carbon emissions to tax energy, they will not give a hoot about if it's true or not!

EU without a free market?

The near-disastrous top EU meeting in Bruxelles is over. Politicians and commentators rejoice over the fact that the Union in the nick of time managed to get the outline for a new treaty on it's way.

In the end Poland gave up its ridiculous claim that Polands population (and thus voting strength within the organisation) should be added with another 20 million people in compensation for the loss the country suffered in WWII. (Needless to say, other european countries refrained from similar contra-factual claims, even if few but Sweden have gotten through that period of history without major loss of life)

But one wonders if not the french addition to the treaty's preamble is not worse – and sadly by now, even a fact.

By actually having the references to an open and unimpeded market struck from the preamble, France have opened a totally unnessecary ambiguity. And guess what president promised only months ago in the election that he'd "defend" french jobs against the effects of globalisation and foreign competition?

It really does not makes one worry less that an additional protocol was created that states that the free market shall prevail. Why this unnessessary ambiguity?

Well, National self Interest, of course. And the french know that game well. A fact that the CAP (EU:s common agricultural policy) proves tim and again.

The China Syndrome

Chinese president mr Hu Jintao has just finished a three day visit here in Sweden. Among stuff the marxist-leninist head of the larges kommunist state in the world has dined with the king, visited Volvo and had lunch with leading top corporations. Among them Ericsson, that secured a contract worth roughly one billion US dollars.

Prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt (cons) makes a point tonight in media that critisizing China in detail for its lack of respect for human rights was not "his style".

I would run a great risk if I conveyed medias version of the situation in China without checking it, Reinfeldt defended himself earlier tonight in an interwiev with Swedish national radio.

Of course he should get the facts checked. That's what the whole State Departement and his central policy planning staff is for, after all.