I know that morality is seen by many as an elastic concept. And I accept that in times of civil and military strife, compromises are occasionally made that offend common decency.

In the case of the Levant, Israel has for decades occupied lands belonging to the Palestinians. And a fair number of those Palestinians would like to see every single Jewish man, woman and child driven into the Mediterranean Sea.

Prisoner releases are part of the healing and reconciliation process in such situations. And, difficult though it may be to accept, some of those freed from prison may be psychopathic killers. I don’t know about the 198 Palestinians released today from Israeli jails, but with Samir Qantar, at liberty since June of this year and hero-worshipped for far longer, there is no doubt as to this man’s state of human being.

That makes it all the more disgusting to read the following, taken from a BBC News report of today’s prisoner releases:

“Mrs Haran was able to see the exchange taking place in the distance on the Lebanese border as she laid flowers on the northern Israeli beach where, according to eyewitnesses and the court verdict, Qantar shot her husband in front of her daughter, and went on to smash in the little girl’s head.” [my emphasis]

Can you imagine what the public reaction would be to a British journalist writing about Myra Hindley and Ian Brady’s “alleged” murder of three children in the 1960s? In the Israeli context, “allegedly” would be a more efficient way of saying “according to eyewitnesses and the court verdict”.

If the verdict of an Israeli court was that Qantar shot two men in front of a four year-old child, and then proceeded to crush the little girl’s head with his rifle stock, then surely we have to accept that is what happened. Unless, that is, evidence is presented to an appeal court which leads to the conviction being overturned.

So what’s with the BBC form of words?

In an interview for al-Manar TV, Qantar is reported to have said:

“Allah willing, I will get the chance to kill more Israelis.”

I guess that no longer being in prison increases that chance significantly; the will of “Allah” is completely irrelevant.

From the start I’ll admit that Pakistan is beyond my ken. This fractious entity makes no sense to me, and long ago did I abandon any attempt to comprehend it.

And yet Pakistan is impossible to ignore. Political leaders are assassinated on an almost daily basis, the intelligence services sponsor international terrorism while the country pretends to be an ally in the war on terror, the military skims vast profits from the many, many private businesses it controls, and the most spivvish individuals imaginable are groomed for the highest of offices. Pakistan is the very definition of a criminal state.

In continuance of this long and ignoble tradition we now have Asif Zardari, husband of the late Benazir Bhutto, herself a victim of the assassin’s bullet and bomb. Zardari, otherwise known as “Mr 20 percent”, has spent much of his life with his hands in other people’s pockets. Now we are told that this thieving bastard is likely to succeed military dictator General Pervez Musharraf as Pakistan’s next president.

Mohammed wept! Should we now be opening books on the date of the next military coup? Why should Zardari be the only one to profit from the implosion of this nuclear-armed state?

“The meek shall inherit the earth”, said a troublesome zeroth century carpenter from the Levant; “the meek shall inherit nothing”, said a larger than life American composer some 2000 years later. Which one of these prophetic voices does the evidence lead you to believe?

British government plans to build new coal-fired power stations have been roundly damned by domestic environmentalists, most recently at the climate camp near Kingsnorth in Kent. They have also been subject to stinging criticism from voices across the developing world who berate the UK for calling on poor nations to cut atmospheric carbon emissions while continuing as normal itself.

Given that American scientists and environmental experts have now joined the chorus of critics, the government’s plans are looking very wobbly indeed. Representatives of the Sierra Club, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote last month to David Miliband, and warned the foreign secretary that the proposal for up to eight new coal-fired plants threatens the chances of the US joining a post-Kyoto carbon emissions regime.

As they stand, the plans for new power stations at Kingsnorth and elsewhere do not stipulate so-called “clean coal” technologies. And the reason is that the carbon-sequestration technologies concerned are far from ready, and may never be viable.

From the US scientists’ letter:

“As proposed, these conventional coal plants lack any limits on their emissions of carbon dioxide and would drastically increase the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions and make achievement of your stated pollution reduction goals extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible. Building new conventional plants and setting the UK up to fail and lose its leadership mantle will make our work in the US all the more difficult.”

This is stern stuff, and the response from energy minister Malcolm Wicks shows that the government is rattled by this and other criticism of the new coal plans:

“E.ON have proposed that the decision taking on Kingsnorth be deferred until completion of the Government’s planned consultation on ‘carbon capture readiness’. Deferring it would also mean that we would defer any decision on a public inquiry.”

My interpretation of Wicks’s response is that the government knows it made a mistake in publicly committing to new coal. It is therefore looking for way to shelve the ill-considered plans and save any further embarrassment.

More here from the Observer’s environment editor Julie Jowit.

How alternative plastic electrolytic membranes can help bring down the cost of fuel cells

Fuel cells may be an environmentally-friendly means of generating electrical energy, but they are also very expensive. Much of the cost of fuel cells is in the electrolytic membrane that separates the anode and cathode sites. To lower the cost, engineers are looking to replace traditional cell membranes with alternative materials.

A ceramic membrane containing iron oxide nanoparticles could provide an alternative to the traditionally used Nafion copolymer discovered in the 1960s by scientists at DuPont. But ceramics are by their very nature brittle, and it will be a challenge to use such materials in applications where catastrophic failure would render the devices instantly useless.

Engineers Avni Argun, Nathan Ashcraft and Paula Hammond at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, US, have created a membrane material in thin film form that can improve the power output of direct methanol fuel cells (DMFCs). “Our goal is to replace traditional fuel-cell membranes with these cost-effective, highly tuneable and better-performing materials,” says Hammond.

Current DMFCs are compromised by the fact that Nafion is permeable to methanol. This wastes fuel and lowers the efficiency of the cell.

Using layer-by-layer assembly the MIT team led by Hammond created a film based on a highly sulphonated form of poly(2,6-dimethyl 1,4-phenylene oxide), or sPPO for short. The film, which has the consistency of plastic wrap, is reported to be two orders of magnitude less permeable to methanol than Nafion, but compares favourably in terms of proton conductivity. In tests, the engineers coated a Nafion membrane with the new film and incorporated this into a DMFC. The result was an increase in power output of more than 50%.

So far the researchers have used the new film as a complement to Nafion. But at the same time they are exploring whether the film could be used on its own. “In the short run we are looking at modification of the current Nafion membrane to quickly implement our novel materials for commercialisation,” says Argun, who is lead author of the study published recently in Advanced Materials.

“The key thing we are working to improve is the processing time it takes to make these membranes,” says Argun. “Using a technique developed in our lab, we can reduce the fabrication time by over a factor of 25. This work is currently underway.” The equipment used in the study is designed for laboratory-scale work, but Argun notes that Avery Dennison is developing a commercial technology that can adapt the layer-by-layer assembly technique to a fast roll-to-roll process.

As well as fuel cells, the MIT film has potential for use in photovoltaic cells. “We are looking at using these materials as a solid-state electrolyte in dye-sensitised cells,” says Argun. “This is similar to previous work in our group, but our current layer-by-layer systems have superior ion transport properties and mechanical stability and integrity.”

The Hammond group’s fuel cell membrane work was funded through the DuPont-MIT Alliance, which expired at the end of 2007. It is now being supported by the National Science foundation. The researchers are open to interactions with other companies with a view to creating new partnerships.

Further reading: “Highly Conductive, Methanol Resistant Polyelectrolyte Multilayers”, Argun et al., Adv. Materials 20, 1539 (2008).

Figure: MIT engineers have created a new, thin-film material for use in methanol fuel cells (source: Avni Argun and Nathan Ashcraft/MIT).

The royalists are rising in revolt against the republicans of Britain…

Says Republic spokesman Graham Smith:

“Republic’s campaign against the oath of allegiance has clearly rattled these royalist-ultras. It is extraordinary to see the monarchy advertised in this way. The royalists clearly fear for their beloved institution, but I would be surprised if Buckingham Palace would approve of this sort of publicity. The last thing the palace wants is more scrutiny, but that is what this advert will prompt – particularly as it has the backing of high-profile royalists such as [Boris] Johnson*, [Derek] Conway** and [Iris] Robinson***.”

The advert, which was produced by the Constitutional Monarchy Association, is a rallying cry to royalists to save Britain’s most ludicrous institution. It is a reaction against the insidious influence within the media of organisations such as Republic, and the growing number of treasonous hacks who would send our dear Betty Windsor into exile or worse.

And what a splendid recruiting poster for the anti-royalist cause it is.

* London Mayor Boris Johnson is descended from Württembergische royalty.

** Derek Conway is a disgraced Tory MP who had the parliamentary whip withdrawn following revelations that he employed his indolent son Freddie as a researcher, and from the public purse paid the lad some £40,000 over three years for doing absolutely nothing.

*** Iris Robinson is a Northern Ireland politician, and member of the UK parliament. A “born-again Christian”, Robinson is famous for saying: “There can be no viler act, apart from homosexuality and sodomy, than sexually abusing innocent children.”.

She really is a piece of work, Britain’s paranoid and delusional Home Secretary Jacqui Smith. But we should be safe as long as she, her department and contractors remain so incompetent and generally unfit for purpose.

Further to the recent discussion of Orwellian public information broadcasts and posters, I saw on TV last night a new one produced by the UK Border Agency. This is aimed squarely at employers who might be employing foreign workers without valid papers. It’s real Fortress Britain stuff, with a menacing voiceover and scary camera work. If I can find a clip I’ll post it here.

So are our political leaders deliberately exploiting the zeitgeist, appealing to the pond life who on the one hand wibble continually about the ‘nanny state’, speed cameras and parking fines, and on the other complain about eastern Europeans nicking their prized tattie lifting jobs, and praise the surveillance cameras that now infest our cities, towns and villages?

Now I struggle not to overreact to New Labour control freakery. Only the other day I had a row with a relative who did a classic Godwin, and in a forum for medical professionals compared the ‘health fascism’ of the current British government with the German National Socialists of the early 1930s. Such comparisons are of course fatuous, but it’s getting harder and harder to dismiss them.

No borders – no controls – no-one is illegal.

A few words are in order concerning the story reported today that Brazilian, German, Irish and Norwegian horses competing in Olympics show-jumping trials have been found with performance-enhancing drugs in their systems.

The offending substance – capsaicin – is not derived from chillies, as is claimed in many news reports. Capsaicin is chilli. Or rather it is the active ingredient that gives the diminutive peppers their oomph. So is capsaicin a “performance-enhancing drug”? I think this stretches the definition somewhat. There is the possibility that a chilli pepper shoved up a horse’s arse will give the beast a bit of a kick, but surely the results would be too unpredictable to be of use by sporting cheats.

What’s next – banning athletes from eating curry the night before a race? Or, indeed, ever? That would certainly be the end of British sport, given that the national dish is chicken tikka massala.

Chinese government spokesman Jack Roger appears to have gone missing, and no-one, not even his private office staff, has the foggiest idea where the confused and vulnerable 66 year-old could be. Spiegel journalist Ullrich Fichtner is most concerned for Mr Roger’s physical and mental well-being. If you should have any reliable leads as to the missing man’s whereabouts, please let Herr Fichtner know and help put the poor man’s mind at rest. Jacques Rogge

A German friend asks if a billboard designed to reassure security anxious Londoners is real, and whether the Orwellian message it contains was sanctioned by the useless wastrel tosspot currently in charge of the city. Well, Anja, I’m sorry to say that the poster is very real indeed. But given that it’s now around six years old, Boris Johnson cannot take the credit for this inspiring initiative.

In 2008 there is a creepy public information broadcast doing the rounds on this side of La Manche. The advert for the TV licensing authority goes on about everybody and everything being in “The Database” from which it is impossible to hide:

So watch out, is the message, or there’ll be a knock at your door at five in the morning!

And to think that our current Home Secretary used to be a dope-smoking hippy and all. What went wrong? My best guess is that at some point Ms Smith lodged her spliff in the wrong orifice, and it was all downhill from there on.

My advice to Brits is to take your televisual apparatuses and deposit them in a calm and civilised manner in the foyer of number 2 Marsham Street, London SW1P 4DF.

Please, please, Anja, may I claim mental asylum in Germany? Will you put in a good word for me with that nice Dr Schäuble?

I think I’ve sorted out the problem with comments in this here Interweb space. If you detect any gremlins, please email me and I’ll do my best to squash the little bastards.