The Lessons of Paris-on-Thames

LONDON -- Can beauty be stifling? Paris puts that proposition to the test, a city manicured to perfection that has confined its immigrant underclass to the invisible suburbs and burnished every surface of its seductive allure.

Certainly, a lot of young Parisians have voted with their feet, moving across the Channel to Paris-on-Thames, aka London, where they come not so much in search of jobs -- although there have been more of them -- as of the global swirl: that raucous mix of innovation and grunge missing in a too-perfect Paris.

Taxes on the rich are evil, socialists are evil, the French are evil, and we have proof!


Wind power

German offshore pioneer Alpha Ventus exceeds expectations

The pioneering Alpha Ventus wind farm in the German North Sea produced about 15% more power during 2011 than expected by its operator, the consortium DOTI.

The 60MW development supplied more than 267GWh of electricity to Germany's national grid last year.

The better-than-predicted figure was due to "excellent" wind conditions and high turbine-availability of up to 97%, says project director Claus Burkhardt of EWE, which owns DOTI along with fellow utilities E.ON and Vattenfall.

267 GWh with 60 MW means 4,450 full load hours, i.e. a capacity factor above 50%. And that's real data - in a year which was considered a pretty bad wind year onshore.

Wind power

If you haven't read Sir Ian Blair's Guardian article endorsing plans to privatise many of the functions of the police, you ought to. It reflects two iron rules of the relentless drive to outsource and marketise the parts of the state that have so far been left alone: first, that mindboggling policy extremes tend to be recast as matters of simple common sense; and second, that nothing suits those who would dissolve the barrier between state and market like a crisis, which is the essence of what Naomi Klein famously called the Shock Doctrine.

I am not accusing Blair - nor, indeed, the equally supportive Association of Chief Police Officers - of being zealous privateers; the point is, they are inserted into a tangle of institutions so relentlessly pushed towards what people like me call neoliberalism that they almost unthinkingly do its work.

His argument is measured; level-headed, even. As he sees it, now that the "shibboleth" of police numbers has been dropped, and forces are thereby free to manage the impact of such drastic cuts, outsourcing has become a very sensible option. This is not, he says, "a shock, horror idea". The basic pitch is all about efficiency and "modernisation": to use the argot of the last government, "what works". But here's what Blair omits: this debate is also about accountability, transparency and the most fundamental elements of democracy - not to mention the question of who the police are there to serve, and what they are meant to do.

Harris gets right to the nub of the question about privatisations, if policing is ultimately only possible by the consent of the policed; what happens when serving the policed ceases to be the primary concern ?

keep to the Fen Causeway

The results of Friday's election for Iran's parliament, the Majlis, generate a political climate in Tehran that augurs well for the commencement of talks over the nuclear issue. The US administration senses this. The big issue is whether President Barack Obama can carry the United States' two key allies - Saudi Arabia and Israel - in the quest of finding a "permanent" solution to the US-Iran standoff.

Yet this has been a season of fables. Iranian politics arouses great curiosity, and election time becomes a carnival of fables. Four years ago Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was usurping political power and the country was becoming a military dictatorship. This year's hot pick (so far) is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is dispatching President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad to political exile and the Majlis is their arena of contestation. It's all forgotten how Khamenei fought off single-handedly the reformists' challenge in 2009 and preserved Ahmedinejad's presidency.

True, Iran's politics, like politics anywhere, is complex. The Shi'ite religious establishment is known in history as fractious. Party politics as is known in Western liberal democracies does not exist in Iran. But factions and cliques and interest groups realign incessantly, and that gives much verve to Iranian politics.

Friday's election has been no exception..........

Ambassador M K Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and Turkey. So this is the real inside baseball skinny

keep to the Fen Causeway

My pal Klaus today reached half a million page views of his own blog at a blog spot for Swedish-speakers that he co-set up and financed  a couple of years or so ago.

So Klaus made a short video today. His son thought the original ending too sad and cried, but then directed the new denouement post-credits. Just as in Dallas, it was all a dream.

 

You can't be me, I'm taken

The Foreclosure-to-Rental Boondoggle » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

The reason that housing prices have dipped only 33.6 percent in the United States instead of 60 percent as they have in Ireland, is because the big banks have been keeping inventory off the market. If the millions of homes-that are presently headed for foreclosure-were suddenly dumped onto the market, prices would plunge and the biggest banks in the country would be declared insolvent. That's why the banks have slowed the flow of foreclosures. According to Amherst Securities Group's Laurie Goodman, "....2.8 million borrowers haven't made a payment in over a year. Add that to the over 450,000 real estate owned (REO) units and you have approximately 3.2 million that are in the shadows. We are liquidating about 90,000 homes a month. That's about 36 months of overhang; a really shocking number."

Will the advice about creating titles to houses soon be appropriate for the US?

A vote for PES is a vote for EPP! A vote for EPP is a vote for PES! Support the coalition, vote EPP-PES in 2009!

Jesus.

H.

Christ.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

Any chance you guys could stop sending stuff over here without the accompanying turbodiesels that make them actually worth buying?

I mean, c'mon, my wife's Jeep can do 34 mpg on the highway, ffs.

Or at least take back those moronic Smart Fortwos?

Be nice to America. Or we'll bring democracy to your country.

As for the "Fiscal Compact", it is rendered a dead letter by Spanish actions.

Gracias a Dios. If the text were enforced, the consequences would be ruinous. It enshrines Hooverism in EU law, and imposes contractionary policies without the consent of future parliaments - including any future Bundestag. Indeed, it probably violates the German constitution.

But it won't be enforced in any meaningful sense because the political realities of the EU are already intruding, and will intrude further. A president François Hollande of France will rip it up.

The Latin Bloc is awakening.

"I honestly thought he was just playing up to the far-right voters, because that's what Republicans are supposed to do in the primaries," said Grand Rapids, MI resident Dan Banks, who explained he had dismissed as manipulative campaign rhetoric Santorum's assertion that President Obama would send Christians to the guillotine. "But now it's dawning on me that this guy means it, all of it. Every single thing he says is an accurate depiction of how he sees the world."

"So, when he said that Satan was currently attacking the United States, he meant exactly that," added Banks. "Satan, the devil himself, is attacking the United States. Rick Santorum believes this is a real thing that is actually happening. I...wow. Just wow."

Gallup polls taken during the campaign show an evolving awareness among voters that Santorum is not lying about any of the horrifying things he says. For example, in August of last year, 96 percent of voters said they thought Santorum could not possibly be serious when he said gay marriage was "an issue just like 9/11," compared with only 9 percent today. And in that same time span, the number of voters who believe Santorum was not at all kidding when he said the president had a "deep-seated antipathy toward American values and traditions" has increased more than tenfold.