Suspended disbelief

These are the most grotesque stereotypes or stupid stereotypes about Britain that I’ve read:

Simon English writes for the Evening Standard: London is like the third world. He bases his claim in that [...] from Heathrow to Holloway Road took, at four hours, nearly half as long as the flight across the Atlantic. Fair enough. Google Maps, arguably a bit optimistic as always, attributes 59 minutes to the same itinerary, that is four times less.

But then the columnist is not happy in London: “It felt like I had returned to a third-world country — nothing works and everyone is grumpy (me included)“. I ignore just how much he knows of the third world, but I hope not too much because the newly rebranded ‘emergent countries’ are far more dangerous, cruel and depressing than London is. Mr. English concludes his articles claiming that “the two main airports remain a national embarrassment.” Ein? Surely he means “the transport links to the two main airports”.

• An island nation that bulked up on debt and lived beyond its means. A plunging currency. And a financial system edging toward nationalization.
  Falling Pound Raises Fears of Stagnation
  By JULIA WERDIGIER and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
• Marks&Spencer: the most depressing and dull store in the world. It is was not based in the UK, one would have imagined it’s an UKranian or Kazahk import
• Obesity: saturated fat, in all its variants, is the staple of the British diet
• Only one type of cheese: cheddar. Enough said
• Carpet in the bathroom. Don’t ask when was the last time it was replaced. Even one day ago it’s just too long
• Two taps in bathrooms, one for cold water, the other for hot water. Why?
• Shoes have all rubber soles. Clarks produce is not recognised by the World Health Organisation as “shoes”
• Snacks are sweet chocolate-flavoured bars. Even for grown-ups
• A nation built by pirates and bucaneers. Tell us something we don’t know

Anthony Hilton is a city commentator with a column on the London Evening Standard.

Four days after the Black Monday of 21st of January 2008 he reflected that It would be nice to think the world’s bankers could be left to twist in the wind, paying the price for their mistakes, but the world does not work like that. The credit-crunch [...] may be entirely caused by their greed and excess but everyone else will pay the price.

Also: The financial sector is already turning down fast and the UK economy is now a giant hedge fund with a huge bet on financial services – and no Plan B for when it all goes wrong. For the past 10 years London has reaped rich rewards from the global financial boom and it will again in the future [...] The main engine driving the UK economy is running on empty.

I don’t know who has or have the data on as many as 25 million people in the UK that the government “lost” a couple of months ago. It is tempting to speculate with the idea that the data is already in the market and up for takers. Child Benefit data is a product with a relative long shelf life, so we might never know when it is sold and to whom.

I cannot remember the name of any of the heroes of Chernobyl. Either can you. The reason is that Chernobyl was a battle without official heroes. They are the uncomfortable truth about the nuclear accident. There is no Hollywood drama film about Chernobyl. Thirty one emergency workers and reactor staff directly killed by the accident were the first of thousands of civilian and military casualties.

Gorbachov explained years later that one month after the explosion in the nuclear plant, the accident was far from neutralised. If the magma under the reactor reached the water layer under the plant, the rivers Pripyat, Dnieper and eventually the Black Sea would become polluted for ever.

10,000 miners where sent to dig a tunnel under the melting reactor chambers. They worked unprotected under extremely stressful conditions. They were not informed about the risk they were running working in

100,000 military and 400,000 civilians joined the liquidation. They watered the roofs of houses to remove the radiactive dust. They knocked down houses and buried them. They killed all the animals in the area. The battle of Chernobyl renders many dystopian SciFi movies a toddlers game. Remote control robots fried their circuits while pushing graphite cylinders away from the roof of the plant. 3,500 Russian soldiers (bio-robots) on 17 September 1986 had to replace the mechanical robots. They were exposed to 10,000-12,000 Roentgen / hour for 2 minutes. Their eyes hurted and they had a metallic taste in their mouths.

Gorbachev claims that the cleaning of the disaster cost was of 18,000 roubles (1 rouble = 1 dollar). The Perestroika had to deal with that cost and with the decline in the price of oil, vital for Russia commercial trade.

Population kept unaware and exposed to radiation for days

One of the learnings of the disaster, and of many others that following, including Fukushima, is that disinformation is the first consequence of a disaster. Even Gorbachev was kept away from the truth during the first hours and days from the disaster. He was told that there was an accident followed by fire. He was not informed that there had been an explosion. The Russian authorities did not disclose the official reports. So did the French about the pollution in their territory. Revealling some of the truth would have prevented many deaths and the neglect of hundreds of thousands of sick and disabled.

1,000 million dollars are expected to be spent building a cover for the reactor in 2012.

Röntgen equivalent physical is the absorbed energetic dose before the biological efficiency of the radiation is factored in. More precisely, the rep is defined as 93 ergs per gram.

I have a drinking habit. Can I stand in office?

Yes, just make sure that you keep your enemies happy.

You know what is coming: plenty of stereotypes about Spain:

• Earlier this week we had the viral explosion of a video-parody about office workers in Madrid. From Sweden, the country with more legal holidays in Europe after the Netherlands. The soundtrack of the video is complete with “Olés” in the background.
• Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor of the day, criticised the early retirements and many days of holidays in Spain and other Mediterranean countries.

Interestingly, official statistics show that Germans work less hours than Spaniards. the number of legal and average days off per Spanish employee is lower than per German worker. The legal average retirement in Germany and Spain is identical and pushed recently in both countries from 65 to 67 years. She is riding on the wave of the official discomfort to the announcement of plan by Telefonica ealier this month to offer early retirements to thousands of its employees in Spain.

Mrs Merkel launched this tirade against Spain and other Mediterranean countries at an event of the Christian Democrats party in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. She is following a text book strategy: feed the anxiety of your voting constituents with populism and pose as a grand chief of state with a global vision at international summits.