Thanks for, er, “oraculating” me Howard. I promise I won’t tell your wife.To get me started, I’ll go over an ambiguous statement in your post I would very much like to see cleared:You could credit socialism for keeping those old farts alive past their time, but nobody wants to say that.Howard, you’re scaring me.One thing I know for sure is that Socialism around the world has a very impressive record of making people die abruptly and in mass.Since the cause of their death is not natural or accidental (Oddly enough, I don’t believe “ethnic cleansing”, “political purges”, “forced work and slavery”, “disastrous economy management”, “reality denial for ideological reasons” or plain “negligence, corruption and personal enrichment of the ruling elite at the expense of the masses” can count as “accidents” or “natural causes”) I’d say it’s safe to assume that Socialism has proved repeatedly its efficiency at making people die prematurely.Under these terms, we could say that anywhere else (i.e. places where people die prematurely without the goodwill of Socialism) it is also safe to assume that serious life threatening conditions (still not including Socialism) make people die before what our species could reasonably and globally expect to be our time.And even that is very variable and non predictable. Therefore there’s absolutely no certainty on the actual term of “our time”, no matter what statistics can say.Statistics, as you know, are just observations in retrospect used as a basis for estimation and extrapolation and are strongly dependant on a vast amount of heterogeneous factors. Consequently, I’m having a hard time figuring out how Socialism (or any other “ism” actually) could keep anybody alive past their time. At best, medical efficiency, advanced health care and a reasonably operational society - such as, say, what you can find in a developed liberal democracy that can follow up on scientific/medical research and found advanced health care systems thanks to the wealth provided by a capitalist economy - can reduce or thwart the effects of life threatening conditions - such as, say, heat waves - at a variable degree, depending on the efficiency of its medicine, the quality of its health care and the state of the society.But nothing can keep you alive past your time (I’m not talking about cool movies such as Hell of the Living Dead, or French political zombies such as Jean-Pierre Chevenement who already died once and that’s probably the reason why he hates America. I mean, being a dead Socialist zombie must be a horrible thing when I compare it with a living one.)In that sense, your statement is wrong. Maybe you could credit Socialism for providing enough counter measures to the various life threatening conditions, including or not heat waves (and clearly, that’s something on which I would definitely disagree with you, but let’s go with it for the sake of the argument) but you can’t credit it for keeping people alive past their time. That’s close enough to intellectual fraud as well and looks dangerously like the basic old time Communist propaganda.Unless, of course, we are really talking about a predetermined time before the given society starts shooting the people, minus those who are granted an amnesty or a reprieve, thank to Socialism, and therefore would be kept alive past that allocated time of theirs.But I’m quite certain that the Howard I know from Howard’s Oraculation wouldn’t make or even just imply the apology of such a system.Following your perfidious oraculation of the frogman (yes, perfidious Howard. You hid in the comments of a post that’s not related to that topic, with your oraculator at hand. You ambushed me and tried to oraculate me by surprise, don’t deny it.) and since you’re referring to her, I went to read the post by Virginia Postrel that triggered your oraculation strike.I’m sorry to tell you, Howard, that I don’t see how her original post on that issue (“The downside of solidarity”) could be misunderstood like you (and others as it seems) did. And while her following post elaborated the first one quite clearly, it wasn’t required as far as I’m concerned.I swear I’m not saying so because I’m French and Virginia Postrel is a gorgeous smart woman while you, Howard, are not (a woman).But I do think you are slightly… How to put that… “twisting” Virginia Postrel’s writings and what they imply or not. Having personally experienced the same ‘bloggotreatment’ in a not so distant past, I learned the hard way how to recognize it when it happens.I have no reason to believe that you’re ill-intended in doing so though, and that is the reason why I didn’t frogmanize you straight away as a reprisal to your perfidious oraculation. Consider yourself lucky.That said, I think Ms. Postrel made her point clearly, particularly in her second post and so have no intention to comment it furthermore.Instead, I’m just going to expose you what I believe are flaws in your oraculation and the reason why your beheading strike missed the frogman (In short: that was a trick. I wasn’t in that bunker. You can’t catch me. Screw you.)Just to get one minor thing out of the way, I must tell you that stating ‘nobody anywhere has air conditioning just because the weather is so mild’ is plain wrong. Private stores (including small ones), some museum and some other public buildings are equipped. Some individuals do as well.Does that mean these are particularly farsighted or, what, stupid people who would go through the hassle and the cost just to enjoy that comfort once in a lifetime?The argument generally invoked here for not installing air conditioning is certainly not the mildness of the weather. It’s cost. And a whole slew of rather weak excuses such as sanity or impact on the environment. And anyway, during a normally hot French weather (let’s say 35 degrees in the north half of the country), only a fool would claim that he doesn’t care about a comfortable 20/22 inside the buildings and cars (I’m talking in funny Celsius degrees here, of course).I’m not blaming Socialism for killing our oldies in the heat wave, and neither would I blame Capitalism for Chicago or the French weather’s supposed centenary weather stability.I’m blaming a system and a society with a strong and consistent Socialist “inspiration” (I guess that French characteristic is difficult to deny) for not providing the required counter measures while its main argument for existing such as it is - and for puncturing our income - is precisely to provide them and to provide them to all, particularly to the most vulnerable.Once you take the responsibility to deal with and possibly thwart any given situation, you can’t blame the situation itself for putting you in the position where you can’t fulfill your obligations. Tricky and confused sentence, I’ll give you that, but in any case, it sounds close to intellectual fraud as well, if you ask me.In the problem at hand - and that’s the reason why I think it’s legitimate to blame the system here - I do believe that the astonishingly high number of dead is, to use a fashionable term these days, “the smoking gun” despite or rather because of the unusual yet a priori manageable situation:No system is error free and there will always be an irreducible margin of unavoidable accidents of course.Call that “Acts of God” or “Shit happens factor”, whatever.That said: I don’t believe an advanced health care system, network of expertise and sanitary vigilance is destined - particularly at such a costly price - to “business as usual” situations.Such a system, benefiting from so many resources should precisely fully reveal and prove itself in unusual situations by limiting the casualties as close as humanly and technically possible to the margin of unavoidable losses. If not, if the vast amount of human and technical resources the system consumes is just here to take care of bruises or heal sprains, but fails tragically when a more serious crisis occurs, well, I’m sorry, it’s not a good deal. It’s counter productive. It’s wasted resources and wasted human competences which in that particular case, resulted in a ghastly number of dead.I’ll put it bluntly: in the XXIst century France, I would consider 100 deaths because of heat in summer to be concerning and painful, but part of the irreducible margin. Shit happens. Under an exceptional heat wave, the kind that would happen once in a century, I guess 1 000 dead would still be concerning and painful but probably still be within the unavoidable accidents limit. Act of God.This is, of course, just a very raw and non scientific estimation. But in any case, 10 000 dead in a developed country on the eve of the XXIst century, such as France, is out of the boundaries. It’s off limits. It’s a serious failure of the system.It shouldn’t friggin’ happen.And I’m sorry, but when a system that has to deal with the probable and the unlikely, the unexpected and the statistically predicable, the human factor and the acts of God fails in such a tragic dimension all it means is that it’s a badly designed system that you have to rethink.It’s the system that has to be adapted. You have no power over the issues it’s supposed to address, themselves.Again, no certainty in the duration of “our time”, just various degrees of efficiency in the countermeasures to avoid its premature ending.The deafening silence of those in charge of this system - when they’re not boisterously playing “responsibility ping-pong” - is in that respect particularly eloquent.Earlier on, I called it an “unusual yet a priori manageable situation”. That’s one of the things that really bug and infuriate me indeed.We’re talking about the heat here, and once again, in what is (still) a developed country.This wasn’t a new and unknown virus (By the way, who knows the final count of death by SARS?), plague, a chemical terror attack or the invasion of teenage mutant ninja turtles from outer space. This wasn’t even sudden tornadoes, flood, volcano eruptions or, what do you know, the antiglobos “changing the world” on a national level.This was, so to speak, “just” heat. Its effects and the procedures to thwart them are very well known by the health professionals and, maybe to a lesser extent, by the average Joe. Judging by what I know of other countries, there was nothing here that couldn’t have been humanly and technically prevented in France.There was no potable water shortage before, during and after the heat wave. What the people missed basically was information and alert (And I mean even before thay had to reach the hospital) - oddly enough, from a system and a state that’s usually so keen on wasting public money to “sensitize” the public. We’re told repeatedly that smoking is bad, that driving fast kills, that Euro is good for us, that de Villepin is a man, and so on.How come we weren’t told that the bodies were piling up in the morgues at an alarming rate? How come the French information network that’s so efficient in reporting every single American or British soldier death in Iraq since the first Coalition tank crossed the Iraqi border couldn’t simply yet as consistently and effectively recall the basic precautions to take under those conditions, that were happening right here, in France?When the first 100 dead started to pile up in the morgue, I guess the people in charge thought: “Hmm, that’s painful and concerning but hey, shit happens”.And I can’t blame them.When the number reached 1 000 - make it 2 000 if you like. Hell, make it even 3 000 - I bet the same people (as far as they were still on duty, and not on the beach), while trying to make some room to store the bodies, thought “Hmm, that’s very concerning and very painful. But it’s darn hot these days. Must be an act of God or something.”And still, I can’t blame them. It was darn hot and you can’t force all the people to take the appropriate precautions for themselves all the time. Act of God, natural selection at work, whatever.But after that? 4 000? 6 000? Up to 10 000? (The undertaker business even talk about 13 600).What then?Shit happens? Or structural failure of a system that, as we’ve been told repeatedly, is so specific and unique in that part of the known universe?If that system can’t tell us - before it’s too late - that a rather non lethal (considering that basic precautions can help us going through, even without air conditioning and at the cost of a few uncomfortable days) situation exists (granted, most people can tell that the weather is hot. But as we grow old, our personal thermostat shows some deficiency, or so I was told.) and what to do to but also what not to do (Drinking - Drinking what exactly? Showering or bathing? Any other trick?) then, not only that system has to be redesigned but what’s worst, I can’t imagine the consequences if it’s not in case of some other, more lethal situation.Yes Howard, as you wrote they (we) were unprepared for a heat wave.And that is definitely the frightening part of the story.  Because we are told our socialized(?) socialist(?) health care system is the best there is.

Dave, Dave, Dave… Howard is a friend (er, Howard, you’re still a friend right?) and I swear I don’t want to know what a knock out is.

What about f*** romance, dammit?

That said, I must admit that the words “Mississippi Queen”trigger some rather nice and pleasing expectations.