Thanks to a BBC programme, Costing the Earth, I just heard about Desertec, a proposal to provide 10-25% of Europe’s electricity via solar power panels in the deserts of North Africa. What I thought was particularly impressive is the claim that the solar panels could provide a three-fold benefit for these African nations. They’d sell the power, of course, but they would also get desalinated water (because this is needed to run the power plants) and they could grow crops in the shade of the giant mirrors! I always thought that the problem with remote electricity generation like this would be the losses in transmission over long distances but the people behind this concept claim that by using High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) these losses would only amount to 10-15% of the power generated.

I have no idea whether this would be feasible, technically, politically or economically, (one critic says it would cost 0.15-0.20 euros per KWh - about double what we pay for power currently) but it sure sounds appealing on the face of it.

The EU has agreed to give up trying to force Brits to use the metric system. Without that pressure I fear my son will still have to learn about an archaic, illogical system of measures long past its sell-by date as well as metric. I remember being the first generation to learn metric in the UK and being told it was the future. And so it is - except here, it seems!

Seems everywhere I look there is news about how revenge corrodes the soul and how the ‘good guys’ often act badly.

Historical papers revealed by the Guardian in the last week told how during and immediately after WWII, Britain ran interrogation centres that sounded as bad as anything the Gestapo came up with. One in Germany that starved and tortured prisoners first targeted Nazi party members or former members of the SS then by late 1946…

suspected Soviet agents. Some were NKVD officers - Russians, Czechs and Hungarians - but many were simply German leftists. Others were Germans living in the Russian zone who had crossed the line, offered to spy on the Russians, and were tortured to establish whether they were genuine defectors.

By a depressing irony, “Of the 20 interrogators ordered to break the inmates of Bad Nenndorf… [six] were mostly German Jewish refugees who had enlisted on the outbreak of war.”

The revelations of the previous week were even more disturbing. During and after WWII, a torture centre was run in London - the “London Cage”. The fact that those tortured appear to have been largely SS men and those accused of war crimes does little to excuse the brutal conditions there.

And now by an odd coincidence Spielberg is about to release a film - Munich - about Israel’s decision to hunt down and assasinate the killers of 11 of its atheletes at the 1972 Munich games (reviewed here).

All of this makes one think about the way that things seem to be going both here in the UK and in the US where torture may now be illegal but evidence obtained under torture may be OK and where peaceful protesters against military recruitment are attacked by police.

Also see my earlier post-Abu Ghraib musings on a similar theme…

But hopefully with that out of my system I can return to our regularly-scheduled Xmas cheer!

My (French) wife turned out yesterday to vote for the European constitution but in vain. I can understand the French nationalists opposing it for similar reasons to those of our own anti-Europeans, but the idea among the Left that the constutition should be renegotiated to include more of a “social dimension” is just wishful thinking, and the idea promoted by old Left unions and right wing politicians that we should shut out the workers of the nations of central and Eastern Europe to protect our own jobs is both immoral and wrong-headed. Of course, it goes without saying that voting against the constitution to spite Chirac is equally misguided (since all major parties agree that the constitution should have gone ahead).

The constitution has plenty of weaknesses but if renegotiations did take place and in the unlikely event the result did pull the constitution further in a ’social’ direction, it would be even less likely to be passed in Britain.

I can’t put things much better than the Guardian’s recent editorial:

For all the anger about liberal Anglo-Saxon economics, the text does not include economic prescriptions that are any different from those in the Treaty of Rome in 1957… the text does improve on the botched Nice treaty and delivers significant improvements to the EU’s rickety institutions. It certainly makes more sense to have a full-time president of the EU, to give it strategic direction and continuity, than to go on with the musical chairs system … It is a good idea to have a foreign minister to boost Europe’s faltering global role. It makes sense to reduce the use of national vetoes to avoid gridlock, to slim down the European commission to streamline delivery and to give more powers to the European parliament. It is good to have a charter of rights.

All of the above seems now likely to be lost or delayed or weakened.

I hadn’t realised this inegalitarian idea rightly mocked when it was touted by Forbes in his US presidential bid has been gaining so much leverage. The Economist points out Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Serbia, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, Slovakia and Romania have introduced them.

But does it have to be the clownish conservative Boris Johnson? In France they have a serious politician blogger, “Dominique Strauss Kahn”:http://www.blogdsk.net/

A European pundit, Thierry Chervel, complains that key European newspapers and ‘cultural journals’ are not available online and suggests this impoverishes Europe’s public sphere. To prove his point he cites the failure of an initiative by Jurgen Habermas, who wanted to launch his “Kerneuropa -initiative” against the Iraq war and the “new Europe” via various European newspapers:

He published his own article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and assigned his colleagues to the Suddeutsche Zeitung , to the El Pais and in the Corriere della Serra. None of these papers however published the articles online. An interested intellectual in Madrid, Paris or Berlin would have had to go the main train station and purchase four newspapers from three different countries. A few days later, the debate was quickly forgotten.

Had Habermas invested a few thousand Euros to build his small website, had he published his article and those of his colleagues simultaneously in English, the sensation would have been big.

Well, it is not clear that this would have happened (and it seems that Habermas’ statement “actually is available online”:http://www.faz.net/s/Rub117C535CDF414415BB243B181B8B60AE/Doc~ECBE3F8FCE2D049AE808A3C8DBD3B2763~ATpl~Ecommon~Scontent.html), but the general point is an interesting one. It would certainly be nice if the major non-English=language European newspapers and magazines published their articles online for free and translated them into English - it would give a much broader perspective to the online audience but is unlikely to happen, alas.

Mark Liberman “posted”:http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/001168.html his own interesting comment and critique about this article asserting (correctly I suspect) that the root cause of this problem is not so much economic conservatism on the part of European newspapers but a larger “Internet illiteracy” on the part of many mainstream European intellectuals (including Thierry Chervel who does not have a website of his own). Hopefully this will change over time…

Apparently they intend to sue if there are any public readings of Joyce’s work (which is still in copyright) during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June - more details “here”:http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/ireland/2004/0209/2893527271HM3JOYCE.html (registration required). “Cory Doctorow”:http://craphound.com/ is rightly outraged.
thanks to Boing Boing and Lawrence Lessig for the link.

It’s so outrageous that you might almost think it was part of a conspiracy to make the EU’s current copyright stance look foolish.

Isabel Vincent at Canada’s National Post has gone to Kosovo four years after the war and finds it a mess, with ethnic cleansing continuing (of Serbs by Muslim extremists) and drug and people smuggling:

“More than 80% of Western Europe’s heroin comes through Kosovo, where several drug laboratories have been set up, Interpol officials say.”

The sources are more than a little one-sided - anonymous Interpol officials and a lot of data provided by a Serb diplomat (as well as an ex-Canadian ambassador) but it’s certainly not encouraging.

Let’s not forget about the former Yugoslavia while we try to take care of things in Iraq and Afghanistan (and numerous other countries around the world…)

Just for a change I thought I’d give my wife a turn on this weblog - she has just written a piece in this week’s issue of The Lancet analysing why more than 4,800 people died because of August’s heatwave in France and drawing the medical community’s attention to the need for better preventative health measures in such emergencies as well as better care facilities.

[Later - apologies - I didn't realise only subscribers can read it. FYI she concludes, "often medical and public attention focuses on intervention rather than prevention. However, a heatwave is different in nature from a very hot summer and requires a different approach. Doctors will know how to rehydrate patients but may not think about systematically providing practical tips to prevent heatstrokes. This is a lesson that up to now seems to be relearned with each new crisis."]