Saddam Hussein hanged

Almost 4 years ago, I arrived in the US in the middle of the debate about whether to go to Iraq, and French fries were not free yet...Then the war started. I became a bit wary about walking around the neighborhood as I saw American flags and signs supporting the troops sprouting in every garden (and that was in liberal San José). Then Saddam Hussein was found hiding in a hole and everything was supposed to get better; mission accomplished. Since then, things hadn't gotten better, something that looked like a civil, sectarian war had settled in Iraq, and Saddam Hussein was sometimes auditioned. What was at stake then? Justice, the premises of Iraqi democracy, the truth about all that had taken place in Iraq since Saddam Hussein had been in power. Then, suddenly, Saddam Hussein was held responsible for crimes against humanity, and sentenced to death. One day later, he was hanged...This execution has stirred a lot of debate already, from pro and anti war governments, religious authorities, Christian and Muslim. Personally, I'm against the death penalty in general, for several reason. My first reason is, there's no way back in case of an error. Second reason, I judge it almost as barbaric as the initial crime itself. I consider that imprisonment, associated with a severe restriction of rights, is a good enough punishment. However, I accept it in some cases, even though I would not advocate it. My arguments are that sometimes the guilt is well proven, as it is the case for Saddam Hussein, that, in some cases, the criminal won't learn anything from his/her imprisonment, and thus the society shouldn't pay for his/her life in jail, or that the crime is just too horrible (as it is for crimes against humanity) to justify his/her being kept alive. What bothers me in the Saddam Hussein case though, is how fast he's been condemned and executed. I don't think this is how Justice should be rendered, it's not a good sign for Iraq, and I would have liked the investigations to go further and tell us more about the links between Iraq and, in particular, western countries such as France (my country), the US, Russia, etc...
Lastly, I'm very uncomfortable about the fact that a video of the execution has been taken and released on the internet, and that some people would like to watch it, which is another sign of barbarism to me.

Un pilote de quad abattu

Quand on m'a parlé de ce fait divers, ma première réaction a été de sortir une blague un peu grasse. Voilà, un gars fait du quad, ce petit truc ridicule à 4 roues, en bas de son immeuble, et il se fait tirer dessus par un voisin. C'est triste, mais c'est aussi assez ridicule. Et Il y a des choses que je ne comprends pas. Les medias parlent de "pilote de quad". Quand on google "pilote de quad", on ne tombe que sur des articles sur ce fait divers. Qu'est-ce qui faisait de ce jeune homme un "pilote" et pas un simple conducteur? Aussi, je me demande, où ce jeune homme conduisait son quad. Les journaux télévisés ont montré une video tournée sur le lieu du drame sur laquelle on voyait plusieurs quad évoluer. Y avait-il une piste désignée en bas de l'immeuble? Les medias ne parlent pas de ça. Si il conduisait effectivement sur une piste désignée, alors oui, c'est très triste, on a tiré sur quelqu'un qui pilotait un quad, faisait sûrement beaucoup de bruit, mais n'était pas attaquable car il était dans son droit et il aurait fallu attaquer (en justice, pas à coup de fusil) les responsables, leur demander de mettre un mur anti-bruit, que sais-je. Sinon, alors c'est regrettable, le jeune homme a été abattu, mais qu'on m'explique ce qu'il faisait là et pourquoi la police n'intervenait pas. Cette affaire est symptomatique de certains travers de notre société, tels la victimisation indue de certaines personnes, le matraquage mediatique, et une offre incomplète d'information.

Political cartoons

I love political cartoons, it's an art. Cartoonists have to put an idea, sometimes about really complex situations (note that cartoonists can be sent to jail just like journalists...), in just one image, rarely more. That's one reason why I love reading Courrier International (and no I don't just look at the pictures...). In case you don't know this great magazine, Courrier International is a weekly publication that gathers and organizes articles from newspapers around the world. Most articles come with a cartoon, not necessarily the original one, and that's how I've discovered these great cartoonists:
- Patrick Chapatte
- El Roto
- No-Rio (Norio Yamanoi)
- Ann Telnaes
- Mix & Remix
- Danziger
- Damien Glez
- Hachfeld

There are many others to be discovered, some of their work can be found on Courrier International's cartoons page.

TNT

Cela fait quelques mois que la TNT a débarqué à la maison. J'étais sceptique au début, du genre "je vois pas ce qu'on va faire avec 20 chaînes de plus". Je me trompais. J'aurais dû dire "je vois pas ce qu'on va faire des 16 chaînes restantes". En effet, il y a quelques très bonnes chaînes sur la TNT. Bien sûr, ça dépend des goûts, mais dans mon cas, ce sont les chaînes qui proposent de l'information et des débats, sur des sujets d'actualité concernant essentiellement l'environnement, l'économie, et la politique. Mes chaînes favorites sont LCP et ITélé, ainsi que La Cinquième et Arte.
Ce que j'aime avec les chaînes publiques comme LCP et La Cinquième, c'est que leurs émissions sont assez longues, donnent du temps à leurs sujets et aux intervenants. ITélé propose des émissions intéressantes, avec d'excellents intervenants, mais le contenu est souvent très court, pollué par la pub et la rediffusion. Entres autres émissions que je suis avec intérêt et plaisir: C dans l'air, N'ayons pas peur des mots, Le journal de l'économie, Y a pas que le CAC, Ca se dispute, et 4 colonnes à la une.
Finalement, ce qui m'étonne toujours quand je regarde les émissions précitées, c'est qu'avec tant de personnes de bon sens, aux idées intéressantes, mêmes parmi les politiques invités, qui ont une tribune pour s'exprimer, dont le discours est accessible, il y ait tant de démagogie et si peu d'action politique valable et citoyenne.

Chroniques d'un citoyen à Montreuil

Mieux que Les Chroniques de Riddick, les chroniques de CitizenJerome à Montreuil. Problèmes rencontrés jusqu'ici:
- vol du casque de moto d'un ami par un habitant de l'immeuble. Le casque était posé sur une poubelle et ça a été compris comme "casque à prendre ou à jeter". Un casque presque neuf...Depuis, le récupérateur a été identifié, confronté, même offert des facilités pour rendre le casque (il en avait besoin le jour de la confrontation pour aller chercher quelqu'un). Depuis, l'ami n' a pas récupéré son casque, le ton est monté avec l'emprunteur, un petit gars qui tutoie tout le monde, se donne des airs de racaille, qui dort le samedi après-midi et reçoit les gens en slip . Il va peut-être falloir porter plainte contre lui, c'est dommage d'en arriver là...
- inondation du plafond et des murs de ma cuisine par les voisins du dessus. Ceux-ci, des locataires, savaient qu'ils avaient une fuite (en fait trois), mais ne faisaient rien. Il a fallu insister, convaincre leur propriétaire, trouver un plombier à leur place et le faire intervenir. Mes voisins du dessus sont des gens charmants. Ils crient très forts quand ils se disputent, la dame crie au secours, les trois enfants courent partout, ils stockent leurs portes de placard dans la cour et surtout...ils ne s'occupent pas de leurs fuites!
- mon père s'est fait casser un carreau et son ami (un qui se déplace en voiture) deux. En l'espace de trois semaines...

Vous reprendrez bien une petite part de dette?

Un des gros problèmes de notre beau pays la France, peut-être le plus gros d'ici quelques années si nous ne changeons rien à notre conception de l'Etat: le poids de la dette publique. Et là on pense Pébereau. Entre autres choses. Il y a une grande injustice dans cette histoire. Nous, les jeunes citoyens français, nous devrions payer pour les erreurs de nos parents, erreurs délibérées qui plus est dans la mesure où ces erreurs ont été conçues dans le but de vivre confortablement sur notre dos, sous l'excuse de grands principes idéologiques. D'où la rage, compréhensible, de certains, et leur cri: nous ne paierons pas vos dettes.
Références:
Les Echos
Impulsion Concorde

A limit to economic and population growth?

This is what I had been thinking for quite some time. I wanted to write something about it, but the NYT published an edito that develops my arguments. Here I reproduce the edito:

The End of Ingenuity

By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

MAYBE Malthus was on to something, after all.

First, some background: Twenty-six years ago, in one of the most famous wagers in the history of science, Paul Ehrlich, John Harte and John P. Holdren bet Julian Simon that the prices of five key metals would rise in the next decade. Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues, all environmental scientists, believed that humankind’s growing population and appetite for natural resources would eventually drive the metals’ costs up. Simon, a professor of business administration, thought that human innovation would drive costs down.

Ten years later, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues sent Simon a check for $576.07 — an amount representing the decline in the metals’ prices after accounting for inflation. To many, the bet’s outcome refuted Malthusian arguments that human population growth and resource consumption — and economic growth more generally — would run headlong into the limits of a finite planet. Human inventiveness, stimulated by modern markets, would always trump scarcity.

Indeed, the 1990s seemed to confirm this wisdom. Energy and commodity prices collapsed; ideas (not physical capital or material resources) were the new source of wealth, and local air and water got cleaner — at least in rich countries.

But today, it seems, Mr. Ehrlich and his colleagues may have the last (grim) laugh. The debate about limits to growth is coming back with a vengeance. The world’s supply of cheap energy is tightening, and humankind’s enormous output of greenhouse gases is disrupting the earth’s climate. Together, these two constraints could eventually hobble global economic growth and cap the size of the global economy.

The most important resource to consider in this situation is energy, because it is our economy’s “master resource” — the one ingredient essential for every economic activity. Sure, the price of a barrel of oil has dropped sharply from its peak of $78 last summer, but that’s probably just a fluctuation in a longer upward trend in the cost of oil — and of energy more generally. In any case, the day-to-day price of oil isn’t a particularly good indicator of changes in energy’s underlying cost, because it’s influenced by everything from Middle East politics to fears of hurricanes.

A better measure of the cost of oil, or any energy source, is the amount of energy required to produce it. Just as we evaluate a financial investment by comparing the size of the return with the size of the original expenditure, we can evaluate any project that generates energy by dividing the amount of energy the project produces by the amount it consumes.

Economists and physicists call this quantity the “energy return on investment” or E.R.O.I. For a modern coal mine, for instance, we divide the useful energy in the coal that the mine produces by the total of all the energy needed to dig the coal from the ground and prepare it for burning — including the energy in the diesel fuel that powers the jackhammers, shovels and off-road dump trucks, the energy in the electricity that runs the machines that crush and sort the coal, as well as all the energy needed to build and maintain these machines.

As the average E.R.O.I. of an economy’s energy sources drops toward 1 to 1, an ever-larger fraction of the economy’s wealth must go to finding and producing energy. This means less wealth is left over for everything else that needs to be done, from building houses to moving around information to educating children. The energy return on investment for conventional oil, which provides about 40 percent of the world’s commercial energy and more than 95 percent of America’s transportation energy, has been falling for decades. The trend is most advanced in United States production, where petroleum resources have been exploited the longest and drillers have been forced to look for ever-smaller and ever-deeper pools of oil.

Cutler Cleveland, an energy scientist at Boston University who helped developed the concept of E.R.O.I. two decades ago, calculates that from the early 1970s to today the return on investment of oil and natural gas extraction in the United States fell from about 25 to 1 to about 15 to 1.

This basic trend can be seen around the globe with many energy sources. We’ve most likely already found and tapped the biggest, most accessible and highest-E.R.O.I. oil and gas fields, just as we’ve already exploited the best rivers for hydropower. Now, as we’re extracting new oil and gas in more extreme environments — in deep water far offshore, for example — and as we’re turning to energy alternatives like nuclear power and converting tar sands to gasoline, we’re spending steadily more energy to get energy.

For example, the tar sands of Alberta, likely to be a prime energy source for the United States in the future, have an E.R.O.I. of around 4 to 1, because a huge amount of energy (mainly from natural gas) is needed to convert the sands’ raw bitumen into useable oil.

Having to search farther and longer for our resources isn’t the only new hurdle we face. Climate change could also constrain growth. A steady stream of evidence now indicates that the planet is warming quickly and that the economic impact on agriculture, our built environment, ecosystems and human health could, in time, be very large. For instance, a report prepared for the British government by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist of the World Bank, calculated that without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, by 2100 the annual worldwide costs of damage from climate change could reach 20 percent of global economic output.

Humankind’s energy and climate problems are intimately connected. Petroleum’s falling energy return on investment will encourage many economies to burn more coal (which in many parts of the world still has a relatively good E.R.O.I.), but coal emits far more greenhouse-inducing carbon dioxide for every unit of useful energy obtained than other energy sources. Also, many potential solutions to climate change — like moving water to newly arid regions or building dikes and relocating communities along vulnerable coastlines — will require huge amounts of energy.

Without a doubt, mankind can find ways to push back these constraints on global growth with market-driven innovation on energy supply, efficient use of energy and pollution cleanup. But we probably can’t push them back indefinitely, because our species’ capacity to innovate, and to deliver the fruits of that innovation when and where they’re needed, isn’t infinite.

Sometimes even the best scientific minds can’t crack a technical problem quickly (take, for instance, the painfully slow evolution of battery technology in recent decades), sometimes market prices give entrepreneurs poor price signals (gasoline today is still far too cheap to encourage quick innovation in fuel-efficient vehicles) and, most important, sometimes there just isn’t the political will to back the institutional and technological changes needed.

We can see glaring examples of such failures of innovation even in the United States — home to the world’s most dynamic economy. Despite decades of increasingly dire warnings about the risks of dependence on foreign energy, the country now imports two-thirds of its oil; and during the last 20 years, despite increasingly clear scientific evidence regarding the dangers of climate change, the country’s output of carbon dioxide has increased by a fifth.

As the price of energy rises and as the planet gets hotter, we need significantly higher investment in innovation throughout society, from governments and corporations to universities. Perhaps the most urgent step, if humankind is going to return to coal as its major energy source, is to figure out ways of safely disposing of coal’s harmful carbon dioxide — probably underground.

But in the larger sense, we really need to start thinking hard about how our societies — especially those that are already very rich — can maintain their social and political stability, and satisfy the aspirations of their citizens, when we can no longer count on endless economic growth.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Trudeau Center for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

Global Cooling

How stupid is that? At a time when we're all supposed to be concerned about global warming, when we're supposed to find ways to cut down heat trapping gas emissions and our energy needs, we, at my office, have to turn the AC on, because our building heat system is malfunctioning. Even though the temperatures here in Paris are not that low, a sign that "there aren't any normal seasons anymore", they're low enough that we have to wear coats and scarves, and have the heaters on.