And from Alpha Ventus:

The alpha ventus consortium DOTI, formed by the companies of EWE, E.ON and Vattenfall, can look back with satisfaction on a successful 2011: the twelve wind power turbines of Germany's first offshore wind farm have fed over 267 gigawatt hours of electricity into the German power grid over the entire year. This puts the amount of power generated by alpha ventus at around 15 percent over the projected total for the year.

"These results exceed our expectations", says a pleased Dr. Claus Burkhardt of EWE in his capacity as DOTI Managing Director and General Project Manager. "The exceptionally high power yields achieved by alpha ventus in 2011 are due primarily to the nearly constant and excellent wind conditions at the wind farm together with a high turbine availability of up to 97 percent."

267 GWh with 60 MW is 51% net capacity factor (what EDF calls the load factor)

Which means that the actual load factor of German offshore wind is 2/3 of that of French nukes (and that is with a mediocre wind year in 2011, let's wait until we have 2012 data which was a better wind year)

With Flamanville now budgeted at EUR 8.6 billion by EDF, we're talking 5.4 EUR/W, compared to 3.5 EUR/W for offshore wind. Which means that nuclear MWhs, for plants built today, cannot be cheaper than offshore wind MWhs...

Wind power

If we're to create a new Denmark together, we have to invent a new way of communicating and of doing politics. Words like socialism, liberalism, and solidarity might just be words describing the world of yesterday and not the world of tomorrow. A modern world is manifold, and our democracy should be as well.

This is surely part of the story of how Borgen became the most important program on European television. The current failure of Europe is epistemological as much as economic, and not only have the structures of parliamentary representation outlived their functionality, but so have the very terms and principles by which we conceive of democracy. As the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck has argued, the shift we are seeing in Europe is one from "government" to "governance"--or, if you prefer, from democracy to administration, from a system in which political leaders enact the will of the people to one in which they act merely as "debt-collecting agencies on behalf of a global oligarchy of investors." It's not as if Germany and the other, richer EU nations are bailing out the citizens of the EU's troubled nations (if only!); instead they're going to banks and other financial institutions capable of pressuring the chancelleries of Europe, net creditors and net debtors alike, into submission. Market orthodoxy has reduced politics to such narrow territory that, in this fourth year of the crisis, even Iceland has a brighter political and economic future than the states of the Eurozone and European Union. So one part of Borgen`s appeal is that it postulates a Europe of another kind, where different politicians still generate different outcomes, and where the future of the country is not yet written in the bank ledgers. This is alluring even in Denmark. Partly because the Danish krone is pegged to the euro, Denmark's economy is still nowhere near recovery, and Thorning-Schmidt has driven Socialdemokraterne to its lowest opinion poll ratings in decades.

do you watch this, Jake?

It's a fine line between homage, parody, and consumer opportunism. Jess Walter

Morgan Gliedman lives in Manhattan's fashionable Greenwich Village and is nine-months pregnant with a child by her Harvard-educated partner. Few would have thought the 27-year-old daughter of a respected doctor could be an aspiring terrorist.

Yet police who searched the couple's apartment while investigating a credit card theft found an explosive material, bomb-making manuals, a sawn-off shotgun with 60 rounds, nine rifle magazines and a flare gun modelled on a grenade launcher.

Ms Gliedman was arrested at her home on West Ninth Street on Saturday with her boyfriend Aaron Greene, 31, according to the New York Post. But her appearance in court had to be delayed when she went into labour.

The building and others nearby were briefly evacuated after a plastic container containing seven grams of hexamethylene triperoxide diamine was found in the living room.

Despite the fact that it turns out they're heroin addicts, you can't help but wonder if this connection is the one that'll be pushed hardest

Mr Greene, 31, is reported to be a member of the Occupy Wall Street protest group

Guardian - Zoe Williams - Iain Duncan Smith's polemic is politics at its most cynical

And this, I think, is the true division of the Conservative party - the ones who are mistaken versus those who are wrong deliberately. Some of them are simply out of their depth, do not understand the benefits system or a government's realistic prospects of controlling the economy, don't get why well-meaning guys who are prepared to suck up to enterprise and clobber the unemployed wouldn't, on that basis alone, be enough to instil confidence and growth and convince a ratings agency.

Others take the Fox News approach: if you can just get enough misinformation out there, enough people who were only half-listening might half-believe you. Competing claims don't need to relate to facts, their validity will be judged on the manner in which they're delivered. You may have to retract later, but what does that matter? Does it even count as humiliation when the only people talking about it are the ones who disagreed with you anyway?

This is politics at its most cynical, its most rebarbative; this is politics pursued purely for personal advancement and for the game, in defiance of the public interest and the long term. I have a feeling that the first type of Tory would despise this second type even more than I do. The trick now is to tell them apart.

However, I can't help ut notice that the sound is quite tinny compared to my old set, which makes me think that a "Home Cinema" kit may be needed.

anybody got any hints or tips about what to look for ? I'm more the cheapskate end of the deal than all singing all dancing.

And DVD players ? If I'm joining the 21st century I might as well do it properly.

keep to the Fen Causeway

The Bank of International Settlements has produced a paper discussing the global shortage of safe assets and suggesting a solution. It's a fascinating paper, not least because of the glimpse it affords into the looking-glass world of finance. I've noted before that to the financial world, the real economy is simply a source of resources to support financial trading and investment. If the BIS paper is anything to go by, so are governments.

...

The BIS paper makes it very clear that a country that has no central bank, does not issue its own currency and has no control of monetary policy cannot create "safe" assets - although it seems to make an exception for Germany, probably because its dominance in the Eurozone means that effectively it runs the place. ...

...

... As BIS puts it:

"It is of the essence of a safe asset that it should not become unsafe."

Therefore, governments whose debt is regarded as a safe asset must operate monetary and fiscal policy in such a way that their debt retains its value. They cannot allow inflation to rise significantly, and they must maintain control of public spending to ensure that they can always meet their liabilities when they fall due. The very existence of safe assets relies on the soundness of sovereign monetary and fiscal policy.

From a national economic perspective, this looks completely ridiculous. On the one hand, government must produce unlimited amounts of debt to meet the financial system's demand for safe assets, and allow the central bank to exchange this debt freely for new money. But on the other hand, they must maintain strict control of inflation and government spending so that the safe assets they are producing remain safe. So the debt/GDP level can rise to the skies, though they will pay nothing much for it: in fact debt/GDP would become a completely meaningless measure of the soundness of public finances. But woe betide any government that ran a deficit. ...

...

However, there is one very important point to the BIS proposal. It eliminates once and for all the idea that monetizing public debt inevitably leads to hyperinflation. The BIS model shows that monetizing debt can be done at at little risk of inflation. And for BIS, sovereign default is a disaster, because it destroys safe assets and risks the stability of the financial system. That reason alone is sufficient to justify debt monetization, given central banks' responsibility for financial stability. The IMF, the EU and - especially - the Bundesbank should take note. Better to load the central bank up to the skies with its own government's debt than risk a catastrophic sovereign default and global financial system meltdown.

And the other thing to note is this. In the BIS model, each currency-issuing nation has a public savings bank - government - and a public fractional reserve lending bank - the central bank. The fractional reserve lending bank acts as lender of last resort for the savings bank - hence debt monetization. And it is itself backed by government, because as a last resort government would use tax income to recapitalise the central bank. ...

Britain could become a `second-class' member of the European Union under plans floated in Brussels yesterday.
An influential group of European federalists, who want to see Brussels given even greater powers, is suggesting the UK is relegated to `associate member' status.
The move would see Britain remain part of the single market but freed from much of the social legislation and bureaucracy associated with full EU membership.

Rational public debate about the economy and government's role in the economy is currently in extremely short supply.  In a debt-deflation, a weak economy saved from Great Depression-level misery by half-way, inadequate government action, government spending is now blamed categorically for the ills of the economy by the aggressive austerity campaign that has captured the political discussion in major capitals.  Previous flaws in the economic theory of the state and theory of money, typically consigned to the realm of different economic "tastes" or moral persuasions, are now revealed to be catastrophic gaps in most economists' and the public's understanding of the basics of the capitalist economy.  The predatory austerity campaigners, many originating from within the financial industry, have turned what should have been an era of greater clarity about government's critical role in the economy into a scapegoating of government for ills perpetrated for the most part by components of the financial sector or by the subservience of the public sector to the financial sector.  Austerity policies when implemented are the equivalent of `economicide' as they strangle government's ability to spur lagging demand for real goods and services as well as government's role in steering the economy to deal with challenges that the private sector can't or doesn't want to face on its own.

Yesterday around 70 immigrant squatters and protesters have stormed the Vatican Embassy in Paris in protest against the church and its decision to evict squatters from an empty church in Lille to "preserve the sacred space". Many of the squatters are now on hunger strike.

The protest started mid-morning as the squatters pushed their way through police and security staff into the Embassy. They unfurled a banner through an upstairs window that read, "Jesus defended the stranger. What have you Christians done for your undocumented brothers?" The protesters decided that they had `made their point', and finally left the building two hours later.

No arrests were made by the attending riot police, but a spokesperson said that: Quote:

"The invasion of a sacred diplomatic space was being viewed with extreme seriousness".

Ana Palacio (Spain's foreign minister under Aznar): Europe's Narrative Struggle (Project Syndicate, Jan. 2, 2013)

The main impediment to further progress is that two competing narratives have emerged to explain Europe's economic travails and lay out a path forward. One centers on the eurozone's structural flaws and aims at strengthening the institutional framework, whereas the other highlights faulty domestic policies and focuses on austerity. Alarmingly, the resulting political debate has degenerated into a shrill cacophony of moral righteousness, finger-pointing, scapegoating, and stereotyping.

In fact, though often portrayed as irreconcilable opposites, the two approaches to resolving the euro's problems are complementary - indeed, essential - components of any realistic approach to ensuring the eurozone's future. Likewise, neither narrative alone can provide a vision for the EU; the gap between them can be filled only by trust.

Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and even France need to control their deficits and streamline debt. But no degree of austerity on its own will enable Europe's southern economies to get back on their feet.

www.dirtycello.com

Rebecca Roudman is a professional cellist in the Oakland East-Bay Symphony, the Santa Rosa Symphony, and the Jazz Mafia. She has performed with Carlos Santana, Isaac Hayes, Liz Phair and Lyrics Born, and shared a stage with Elvis Costello, JJ Cale and Ry Cooder. She is well-known in the bay area for being a very versatile cellist, being able to play all sorts of musical genres - from classical to rock to improv.

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