Blogoir

Nick Hogan has been released, in an interesting example of Blogger Power (of sorts).

Anna Raccoon helped lead the charge - well done her and Old Holborn. Some of the detail on the case as they report it is striking.

I don't smoke and don't like being in smoke-filled places. But I dislike even more the idea that a privately owned pub or even a private club such as the Travellers is being treated by the state as a 'public' place.

No! Go away!

Imagine you run a toyshop. You have to sell a consignment  of 'white' Barbie dolls and 'black' Barbie dolls.

Should you price them at the same rate under all circumstances to show that all races are equal?

Does selling the black one at a cheaper price send a bad racial signal?

Or does it encourage white parents to buy black Barbies for their offspring, spreading racial harmony?

Does selling the black one at a higher price when you suspect you would do better by selling it cheaper send a signal that you do not care about poorer black customers?

Aaargh.

Update:

Let's explore some of the issues.

What if you as toyshop owner thought that selling the black dolls cheaper might prompt some consumers to complain about racism and/or offend some people (but not all)?

How should you start to measure the gain which more purchasers at the cheaper price would enjoy against the gloom caused (or self-induced?) among others?

Is there any sensible way other than the price mechanism to measure the weight of rival views view on the subject? If ten people complain but 900 do not, is there any issue? Is a good enough answer to those offended along the lines of 'shop somewhere else'?

In law we have the 'eggshell skull' rule: if you do something tortious (not tortoise - that's a hard shell) and one victim just happens to be prone to incur much greater damage as a result, too bad for you when the damages claim appears.

So if something you do happens to upset a category of people (who are prone to froth themselves to be upset at such things), should the law come down against you accordingly?

Or is that a blank cheque for the most neurotic to rule the rest of us? See also those cutesy Danish cartoons.

A lot in those Barbie dolls... 

Under the Lisbon Treaty the European Union has a new External Action Service, led by Baroness Ashton.

And as expected, it is struggling to trundle out of the hangar and get on the runway.

The main issue in the arguments over setting up the EAS is not all about how the EU might best throw its weight around in the world.

No! Much more important matters principles are at stake. Namely:

• who gets which top jobs?
• who decides?

In one early and much criticised power-play, probably the most important overseas job in the EAS went to ... a close colleague of Commission President Barroso, who was bundled through by Barroso before the EAS was properly set up. Many Europhiles see this as at best unseemly:

The fear is that the appointment of a Portuguese official, formerly Barroso’s chef de cabinet smacks of patronage and inappropriate influence. 

Not an inspired move, if the aim is to make the EU effective?

Since then there has been the long anticipated three-way struggle between member states (keen to get EAS defined and run in such a way as to pose no threat to national foreign ministries), the European Parliament (ever scheming to extend its power) and the Commission (having hundreds of people previously serving at Commission 'representations' overseas who need placing).

Behind all that are key European policy competences. Who leads and sets the overall agenda? The Commission, the Parliament, or Member States?

Zzzz.

Meanwhile Cathy Ashton too is being attacked openly from various quarters (including France) for being 'just not up to the job'. Although some of the examples cited are a bit strange:

... some experienced EU officials say she would have done better to have waited two months in order to learn the ropes from Mr Solana and his team.

“She hasn’t had the tools she needs. When Haiti hit, she did not even have a television in her office,” said Alexander Stubb, Finland’s foreign minister.

Huh?

Good. The last thing she needs is tedious 24/7 media propaganda flickering away distractingly in the corner.

Nor should she have rushed to Haiti to 'see for herself' the earthquake devastation there. Trips like that are basically do-something resource-intensive self-indulgence by the leaders concerned.

Maybe patiently plodding along is the inglorious but overall best available approach.

In short, all going just as I predicted.

A reader argues that I am underestimating the impact of Fox News in the USA:

Thus the numbers of people 'reached' in America are not the paltry 2.8 million you purport, but rather 80% of the total viewership for the day, 18,166,000, (again ridiculous, 20% of 18 million people did not tune into FOX news yesterday and spend the entire day watching it)...

So obviously many more people were one time show watchers tuning into an original program they wished to view, rather than spending their entire day watching a news channel on a non-news day.

I did not 'purport' anything. The figures I quoted were clearly describing 'prime time' viewership alone. That said, the ratings over a longer period of course stack up for Fox as for everyone else.

The media term for this is the cume. See how Arbitron defines it:

Major ratings products include cume (the cumulative number of unique listeners over a period), average quarter hour (AQH - the average number of people listening every 15 minutes), time spent listening, (TSL), and market breakdowns by demographic.

It is important to understand that the CUME only counts a listener once, whereas the AQH can count the same person multiple times, this is how to determine the TSL. For example, if you looked into a room and saw Fred and Jane, then 15 minutes later saw Fred with Sara. The Cume would be 3 (Fred, Jane, Sara) and the AQH would be 2. (an average of two people in the room in a given 15 minute period)

Which is why in fact CNN claim that their cume is greater than Fox's.

The point of my posting was to look at the sense behind the claim of a senior Democrat that four times as many viewers watch Fox as watch CNN. If the total numbers for both are relatively small, why if at all does that matter?

This piece supports my position, noting that back in 1969 the main evening US news channels would reach 40 million people (at a time when the US population was a lot smaller):

There's a growing perception that opinion news outlets like Fox and MSNBC drive the news agenda. Do they?

No. The state of the economy, the war in Afghanistan, whether swine flu is going to turn more deadly--these things drive the news. That perception may be there, but cable news is still a niche medium.

Fox's Bill O'Reilly has around 3.5 million people watching each night, or about 1% of American adults. That would get you canceled on broadcast television. The three nightly newscasts have about 20 million viewers, not 3.5 million.

What Fox clearly does is reinforce the sympathies and energies of a smallish number of conservative Americans. So what? It's a free country! Most other cable and network channels push in a more 'liberal' direction, far outnumbering Fox.

Where US conservatives do have an edge is with Talk Radio, with Rush Limbaugh reaching some 13.5 million listeners a week. But again, that is only two million per day on average.

The basic fact is that with the huge expansion of TV channels and Internet-based entertainment and information of the past couple of decades, fairly few Americans now watch TV for news and current affairs. Newspaper circulations are falling too.

Hence the vicious circle of those programmes (and newspapers) cutting reporters and so getting more and more shallow or even solely 'opinion-based' (ie making a loud and often silly noise) to try to keep up their ratings.

That trend is evident here in the UK too. See for example how the BBC lost my vote back in 1993 with its scandalously poor assessment of the attempted coup against President Yeltsin, which I watched at the Embassy in Moscow with gunfire echoing round the city in the background:

When I subsequently took up with a senior BBC personality the BBC's dismal, dishonest reporting at the height of the crisis he just shrugged, saying that that sort of dramatic reporting boosted ratings and was what people wanted to hear these days.

In short, if the Democrats want to blame something for their woes, maybe the right target is not Fox News but rather their own policies?

Via The Browser a rather lame article by Jay Rosen arguing that journalists in the USA have become so non-judgmental that they are striving for an impossible professional 'innocence' and are just missing the point.

By way of evidence he cites a long analysis of the Tea Party tendency in the USA by famed NYT reporter David Barstow, who saw much evidence that Tea Party people feared 'impending tyranny':

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways.

I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Jay Rosen says that it is not enough that a reporter show analytical detachment, and so 'merely' report on what such people believe:

Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable?

If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can...

We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.

Well, so be it.

What I dislike is the Rosen logic leap which takes us from where we are today to a banal lumpen Cuba-style tyranny - rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state - as if there was nothing in the middle which people should be worried about. Since he defines tyranny in such a banal way, Tea Party people ipso facto must be delusional!

Let's look at examples of the tyranny of modern life in the UK, which is all the more nasty for being insidious. Not the abrupt clumsy squashing of the public by a Monty Python Foot of Tyranny, but rather intellectual and cultural oppression by myriad pinpricks and official insults.

Thus the Tyranny of Filth. Drive between Swindon and Oxford, or round the intersections of the M40 and M25 and the M25 with M1. The roadsides for mile after mile are filthy with litter. What policy processes are happening to exact more and more taxes from people when the standard of public services is so obviously slumping? How can we be lectured incessantly by central and local authorities on 'the environment' while outside the windows of their offices the rubbish is piling up?

Or the Tyranny of Indoctrination. Listening to Radio Five Live in the car the other day (Friday), I heard the BBC presenter talking to a woman in Scotland about current snow problems. He asked her whether she thought it was down to Global Warming. "No, I don't believe in all that - it's just the changing weather" was (in effect) her reply. "You can say that. I can't" he replied in a curiously arch tone of voice. Huh?

Or the Tyranny of Complexity. My accountant tells me that many of his clients have had £100 notices for late tax filings, when he knows for sure that the returns were delivered on time (now the Revenue refuse to issue receipts to confirm delivery). He has tried to penetrate the tax system to find out what is going on. Eventually he finds a human tax-person: "We have hundreds of unopened envelopes here - there's a backlog."

Try the Tyranny of Official Querulousness. A five-year old girl was left in a car which had crashed into a river for 97 minutes because the police refused to try to rescure her as they had not had the right training.

The Tyranny of Educational Underachievement. Manipulating the results of school exams for non-academic reasons.

The Tyranny of Abuse of Public Funds to Reward One's Friends. See these especially awful examples from DFID.

Or the Tyranny of EU Deceipt, as exemplified by promising a referendum on the new EU Treaty then bundling it through Parliament instead.

And so many, many more.

It's not that any one of these is tyrannical in itself. Life is not perfect. Governments will over-reach themselves.

Rather that the cumulative effect of all these nasty developments is to create a new sort of PoMo post-democratic tyranny, one in which the citizens stop owning the state. Freedom and responsibility as currently understood - and as operationally meaningful ideas - decline. Instead everything sinks into an ooze of dirty ambiguity and mediocre uncertainty.

So if the Tea Party people are 'fearful' of that sort of thing accelerating in the USA as it has done here, as their Federal Government borrows recklessly against the future, are they really so wrong? 

Malta is a fascinating place for looking at some underlying issues of democracy and government.

Malta is 201st in the world’s list of countries by physical size, its area of 316km2 (one fifth the size of Greater London) just ahead of the Maldives and just behind Grenada. Its population (some 420,000 people) is comparable to that of Manchester, making it 171st in the world’s population rankings

The fascinating thing about Malta’s political life is that there is just so much of it. Voluntary participation in general elections soars to giddy heights of 95% or even more – the highest in the free world. Elections are won on national majorities of a few thousand votes, with two main parties slugging it out, the Labour Party and the currently ruling Nationalist Party. Party loyalty is very strong. If you are born into a Nationalist or Labour family, that helps shape your personal dentity. 

Hence you do not need much by way of maths to realise that if only several thousand people do decide to change their vote, the election results can be very different.

Which makes for vivid public life. Examples:

• If a voter is unhappy with the government’s work, s/he may gather together voting slips of other disgruntled friends and family members and dump them unceremoniously on a Minister’s desk as a sign of withdrawing support: “We have been waiting months for that planning application to go through. Where is it?” Since a typical Maltese extended family may have well over a hundred people, this dramatic gesture tends to focus Ministerial minds on helping that unhappy voter in a very practical way – a few more family ‘swings’ like that could literally lose the next election.
• As every Maltese citizen is likely to be firmly associated with one or other of the main political tendencies (and known to be so), ideas of loyalty and professional neutrality within the civil service are not what we in the much larger UK expect. Ministers have to think hard about best to work with their own Ministries, as officials from the ‘other side’ may be seen (fairly or unfairly) as likely leakers.
• A lot of Western political thought is built on the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ – parliament, government, judiciary, police, local administrations all having clearly defined roles ands responsibilities. Fine when it works. But how far can it work in the classic sense in a much smaller polity where everyone knows everyone else’s business and large family networks linked to political loyalty are so dominant?
• Likewise public appointments and official tenders. Opportunities for patronage and ‘clientelism’ are pervasive. Not that other, bigger polities necessarily do better.

All this and much more combine to make Malta an intriguing example of micro-accountability. Nonetheless, even on such a small island there is plenty of scope for things to go on in a less than clear way. Now lively local bloggers like journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia are hard at work bringing some new transparency to procedures which previously appear to have been less than satisfactory:

Malta is tiny and its judiciary is far from numerous. Yet in the last few years we have had this track record: one appeals court judge and a chief justice jailed for bribery, one failed attempt to impeach a magistrate (Labour refused to cooperate), one failed attempt to impeach a judge (Labour refused to cooperate), at least two magistrates who appear to have been relieved of most of their duties because of personal problems, one of which is said to involve alcoholism, and now the latest shenanigans involving Magistrate Herrera - though quite frankly, there is nothing ‘now’ about it at all.

That’s very impressive.

It’s quite clear from this mess that the entire system needs a rigorous overhaul. The first thing to go should be the discretionary approach to the appointment of magistrates and judges. Nominations for these positions should be made public and subject to public scrutiny.

Malta. Never a dull moment.

There are different sorts of bloggers.

Apart from all those who write honestly and well about Cats or Cars or Cooking or somesuch, there are those of us who attempt to tackle wider themes.

And we fall into two general categories:

1   Those who press their points home by unrelenting obscenity.

2   Everyone else.

Two leading UK swearbloggers are Devil's Kitchen and Obnoxio The Clown (I will now proceed to pleasure myself with this fish)

You get the general idea.

Oh, and there's Mr Eugenides. There have been handy Swearblogger Roundups.

Nonetheless, behind all the somewhat wearing barrage of rude words are some lively libertarian-leaning minds. Here's the Devil drilling down into some of the deep philosophical principles arising from the way copyright law works (or not).

These popular bloggers perform much the same function as the fans who chant obscenities at football matches. Most fans don't join in, but enjoy a weekly dose of the smutty wit and energy:

Charlie Nicholas illegitimate

He ain't got no birth certificate

He's an Arsenal bastard  

But swearblogging ultimately lacks impact because the swearers are too remote from the subject. They can rave away all they like about Gordon Brown and even urge people to vote for him, such is their hatred.

But Gordon Brown himself sits in No 10 ignoring this distant background army of enemies. 

The arrows are sharp and dipp'd in poison, but fired from far too far away. They clatter down outside somewhere, doing no damage other than to make the environment less tidy for other people..

No.

To be a really wonderful and effective blogger using calculated insults and occasional raw language, you need to be close to the subject of your invective.

Your insults need to hit home with the unerring power and precision which only someone who knows the target well can deliver. And everyone has to read these finely-turned insults - and marvel at them

Welcome to Malta's Daphne Caruana Galizia.

And this lively piece of writing:

Some men will shag anything, even if it still looks like a cross between something you can buy at Mosta Bacon and Worzel Gummidge after he’s taken a bath and has put on two bits of Lycra that are better suited to a Ukrainian escort - or, as on her Facebook page (yes, sir, the magistrate is on Facebook), a denim mini-skirt that looks very unfortunate on her sort of shape.

Phew.

Via The Browser an excellent account by Stephen Levy at Wired on how Google just keeps getting better. By using Google itself:

Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group.

There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,”

As for my favourite subject - me - I do not make it into the top Google pages if you search merely for Crawford.

But if you search for Charles Crawford, on page one of the Search results I wipe the floor with the myriad other Charles Crawfords out there, although our old friend the Abandoned Bunny does also sneak in. Almost the same on Bing.

Still, if you search Google for controversial former ambassador Craig Murray sweeps home. Fair enough.

I am heading to Malta, looking for work.

My first visit to the island, which has even more history per square metre than Poland.

Be there. Or be square.

Luckily the Technology Liberation Front give us the answer.

Pragmatic optimism.

Remember the Siege of Gondor in Lord of The Rings, when the defenders fall back from one defensive ring to the next as the wild armies of orcs crash through?

Brian Micklethwait painstakingly looks at how the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) came to add Immediate and Catastrophic to the acronym to give us ICAGW.

But now they are falling back in some disorder, yet ruthlessly trying to work out which position might be most tenable against the wild-eyed skeptic orcish hordes:

The Hockey Team, along with their most vocal fans, are now in this doomed position. But the CAGW camp as a whole is now deciding whether to back the Hockey Team or to cut them lose and concede the ground that the Hockey Team have so fraudulently occupied.

This Guardian leader says to me that the high command of the Grande Armée of CAGW is now attempting a retreat in good order to a position further back, which it thinks it can hold, rather than making a futile last stand now that would only destroy them all.

The CAGW camp, as they now wish to remain, losing the I but definitely keeping tight hold of the C, are now concluding that there is no future in defending the now utterly discredited Hockey Team, i.e. Mann and the East Anglians.

And although the IPCC gets no mention in this Guardian leader, other CAGW-ers are already saying, with similar reluctance but similar definiteness, that the now utterly discredited IPCC will also have to be cut loose from polite society, certainly in its now utterly discredited form, as crafted during the last decade or so by the now utterly discredited Rajendra Pachauri...

Actually, the debate concerns not only that, but whether, if CO2 does indeed cause warming, that warming is caused to any great extent by humans, and above all whether, anthropogenic or not, this warming will at some future date turn catastrophic.

To put it acronymically, the CAGW camp will still be fighting over all of those remaining initials. It's not just a matter of whether CO2 is causing the W. This is the terrain of the next big battle.

At what point do the skeptics get to behead warmists and catapult the heads back over the ramparts to terrify those still inside the crumbling castle?

I have had an enquiry from someone who follows closely UK immigration issues asking about the policy issues surrounding the opening of the UK labour market to Poles in 2004 when Poland joined the EU:

Did the UK government encourage mass Polish immigration into the UK?

No.

Well, not really.

What happened was this.

Parts of the Blair government were very nervous about a tidal wave of Poles and other Eastern Europeans washing over the UK once we opened our Labour markets unconditionally.

Or rather they were nervous about the Conservatives making a big row about it after Jack Straw announced the policy in 2003. The more so since most other EU countries in a show of noisy EU anti-solidarity made clear that they would not open their labour markets unconditionally.

Which meant that whatever tendency there was for millions of Poles and Czechs and Slovaks and the rest to storm out from their respective homelands to look for jobs would be funnelled mainly in our direction, making the tidal wave even more fast, big and scary.

So intense consultations took place round Whitehall - should the UK row back on this commitment?

PM Blair took a breezy decision. Let it rip.

Previous experience with Portugal and Spain suggested that there would be a surge of interest (and people) but in due course it would all calm down without too many problems. But he threw a small bone to anti-immigration fears by setting up a 'registration scheme' for new arrivals with a view to at least having some sort of numbers to use in subsequent debates on the issue. Other administrative devices were used to try to stop people coming over to UK and promptly claiming benefits.

Thus it transpired that I as Ambassador had to go along to the then Polish Interior Minister Jozef Oleksy to break the official news of our keenly awaited decision. Oleksy previously had been Polish Prime Minister, but had an unerring knack of attracting controversy and scandals - a droll and unconventional figure by most former communist standards.

I pompously told Oleksy that I had the honour to inform the Polish Government that HMG had taken an important decision concerning the UK labour market after Poland's EU accession in May 2004, namely:

• The labour market would be opened unconditionally with immediate effect on 1 May 2004.
• Any Poles who wished to travel to the UK to live or work could do so with out a visa.
• Moreover, an effective amnesty would be given to all Poles who had been living in the UK and working illegally.
• All Poles seeking to work in the UK would be expected to register under a new scheme, but registration was not a condition for getting a job.

Oleksy looked at me in amazement and said in Polish: "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?" What's the catch?

"No haczyk," I replied. "It's as simple as that."

Oleksy simply did not believe me. He was sure that just as most EU capitals were announcing different severe restrictions on Polish workers after Poland's EU accession, the UK had to do the same. There had to be a catch with those tricky Brits!

He kept pressing:  "Gdzie tkwi haczyk?"

I assured him that there really was no haczyk.

We meant it. Unconditional opening with immediate effect after Poland's accession. The Brits were simply generous, open-hearted people. The Poles might like to remember who their real European friends were after this.

That's how the Polish Flood started.

By mid-2006 there were claims that there were more Poles in the UK than in Warsaw. Some indeed were feckless.

But by 2009 as the UK economy drooped many were heading back home. 

In the great sweep of things, Tony Blair got this one just right.

Ten years from now, let alone twenty or fifty or one hundred, the whole episode will have been forgotten. Those Poles who have stayed in the UK will be doing well, often paying taxes and generally acting as a force for good sense and intelligent conservative values. If any country wants immigrants, get Poles.

Although in a famous telegram to London I did warn Whitehall that this was coming the UK's way - whether we liked it or not. (I'll write this up separately).

Unfortunately there were risks for Poles coming to our country, as the families of Anna Brandt, Karolina Gluck and Monika Sochocka so tragically found out.

For most others the experience seems to have been positive and helpful, with lots of Polish compliments to the UK on its easy-going ways and lack of bureaucracy(!).

And let's not forget that a while ago we were exporting our unemployed people to Poland in large numbers to look for work.

These things come and go.

As you try to grasp what is happening in Ukraine, you may well be asking yourself: what does Ukraine mean anyway?

And, needless to say, views differ. There is a root word kraj in Slav languages which has all sorts of nuanced meanings in different Slavonic languages, linked to the idea of land, or borders of land, or land on or around the borders of a country/territory.

Remember the Krajina Serbs, who attempted to set up a Serbian territory separate from Croatia until Croatian forces crushed their resistance and most Serbs fled to Serbia?

Or indeed Momcilo Krajisnik? Another unhappy Slav with the kraj root in his name.

So Ukraine suggests either a 'border' territory, or a 'separate' principality or territory in its own right, depending on who's talking.

Ukraine's voters accordingly seem to face two eternal choices. Either to be somehow part of the Russian psychological space, on the frontiers of Russia's western lands. Or to be a separate territory, defined in their own terms, and looking at least as much to Europe as to Russia.

Which explains why any person elected President needs to be a magic knight:

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is not a particularly happy one: the majority of Ukrainians don't want a head of state with clearly formulated ideological priorities, with the experience and attitudes of a radical political fighter, with an explicit geopolitical orientation, and with an economic-reform program that can be hard on their wallets. That may explain why different groups of Ukrainians have such widely diverging views of their country's past and future...

... the voting habits of the majority of Ukrainians could still enable a politician to become head of state who is capable both of winning the support of the majority of voters and of implementing genuine modernization.

That politician would simply have to have enough human virtues, combined with managerial ability, to overcome all possible objections on the part of either the east or the west of the country, and both the right and the left.

That may sound like a fantasy, but then the whole of Ukrainian history for the past 20 years has resembled a fantastic saga of wandering in circles locked in time, waiting for a knight to break the spell.

Elections there tend to be close-run things these days. Western Ukraine, predominantly Ukrainian-speaking, looks mainly West towards Brussels. Eastern Ukraine, predominantly Russian-speaking, looks mainly East towards Moscow.

Viktor Yanukovych is seen as East, Yulia Tymoshenko as West. It looks as if this time round East has edged home in front.

A triumph for Moscow over the West/Europe?

Maybe. But not a huge one.

There is now a lively and tough political space in Ukraine, and whoever runs the place has no real choice but to manage relations with both Moscow and the EU carefully.

Ukraine's main problem is that it is the subject of an existential tug-of-war between a Westernising trend in Slavic thinking and a more traditional Moscow/Eastern trend.

Alas for Ukraine, the Russians weigh less but pull harder on their end of the rope than the EU does. 

Some Europeans are more European than others. Too many EU capitals in general (and Paris in particular) are quite happy for that part of Europe to be seen as 'not quite European enough', and to stay mainly outside European processes. Why annoy the Russians for the sake of all that empty space and complicated people? 

Some Russians hanker after reabsorbing Ukraine somehow, although the grisly case of Belarus and wider failed attempts at CIS integration show that even under what appear to be optimal conditions it is not possible to put chunks of the Soviet Union back together again.

So Moscow contents itself with making sure that if Russia can't have Ukraine, the West won't have it either.

We can expect Yanukovych (if confirmed as President) to talk a lot about Europe, safe in the knowledge that the EU doesn't know what to do about Ukraine other than send in lots of consultants and bureaucratic experts, some of whom do some useful work now and then. Nothing much will happen on Ukraine/NATO.

Which is not to say that Ukraine will stagnate (necessarily). As someone has wittily put it:

On the one side we have neo-imperialistic Russian instincts, and lucrative energy pipeline intrigues.

On the other, a slow but inexorable tide of the porridge of EU process – and all sorts of transparent modern investment opportunity – edging eastwards across Ukraine on a scale far exceeding what Russia can ever offer. 

Right here:

And here's the story behind it.

It's very good.

Via the Browser, this heavyweight piece by Yves Smith at naked capitalism which looks at the issues swirling around the parlous position of Greece within the Eurozone and the wider implications.

Including this bold thought by Dani Rodrik:

I have an “impossibility theorem” for the global economy that is like that. It says that democracy, national sovereignty and global economic integration are mutually incompatible: we can combine any two of the three, but never have all three simultaneously and in full…

To see why this makes sense, note that deep economic integration requires that we eliminate all transaction costs traders and financiers face in their cross-border dealings. Nation-states are a fundamental source of such transaction costs. They generate sovereign risk, create regulatory discontinuities at the border, prevent global regulation and supervision of financial intermediaries, and render a global lender of last resort a hopeless dream. The malfunctioning of the global financial system is intimately linked with these specific transaction costs.

Or is that a truism, wrapped up in clever language? That as long as there are many different market-places there is no one market-place?

Maybe the Climate/Copenhagen debacle reminds us that nation-states are not planning to abolish themselves for what is proclaimed the Greater Good?

Is this.

Do you want to use about a minute of your fleeting, oh-so-precious time left on Earth to watch a ridiculous cartoon of a vigorously dancing pair of buttocks?

Yes. You. Do.

So, what are you waiting for?

Following Swedish developments closely as one must, I found this story linking my team Tottenham to an individual example of Swedish bandy extremism.

And is some furtive ethnic cleansing busily under way in Malmo? 

It is always difficult to work out when something is just an idiotic if unpleasant episode of local and no wider significance, and when something is part of a wider, really worrying trend.

Partly because this is just not easy to prove anyway with scientific confidence even when all the facts are clear, as they never are.

And partly because each side of the argument will tend to play up evidence it likes and downplay evidence it does not like.

Not to mention media and politicians making whatever noise suits their immediate purposes.

So is anti-semitism on the rise in Sweden?

If so, is it nonetheless still a marginal and at worst nasty phenomenon?

How would we tell?  

Time to branch out.

Not least on the dynamic Business and Politics Blog, where my first (albeit somewhat laconic) Diplomatic Despatch has just been posted.

More to come...

Here in full gush is our friend Johann Hari, this time bewailing the end of democracy in the USA:

For more than a century, the US has slowly put some limits – too few, too feeble – on how much corporations can bribe, bully or intimidate politicians. On Tuesday, they were burned away in one whoosh... 

It is this corruption that has prevented Barack Obama from achieving anything substantial in his first year in office. How do you re-regulate the banks, if the Senate is owned by Wall Street? How do you launch a rapid transition away from oil and coal to wind and solar, if the fossil fuel industry owns Congress? How do you break with a grab-the-oil foreign policy if Big Oil provides the invitation that gets you into the party of American politics?

... Yet the corporations that caused this crisis are now being given yet more power. Bizarrely, the Supreme Court has decided that corporations are "persons", so they have the "right" to speak during elections.

But corporations are not people. Should they have the right to bear arms, or to vote? It would make as much sense. They are a legal fiction, invented by the state – and they can be fairly regulated to stop them devouring their creator.

Our hero, you recall, is the person who wrote a long review of Atlas Shrugged and got a key passage completely wrong. It seems that here again he has not done his minimal homework.

Mind you, in interpreting the Supreme Court's decision President Obama too (a lawyer withal) likewise erred on the side of inaccurate populist exaggeration in his SOTU speech, and has had to be corrected at Huffington Post no less:

There is "a century of law" restricting direct corporate contributions to candidates. Last week's decision didn't address that law.

While the logic of the opinion -- which says corporate speech is entitled to the same protection as individual speech -- calls into question the corporate contribution ban, it doesn't overturn it. And the Court has traditionally treated direct contributions differently from so-called "independent expenditures" -- ads that discuss candidates but financed by private parties without the candidate's help.

Those who oppose the Supreme Court's decision would make themselves a tad more credible if they acknowledged that the law the Court struck aside was oppressive and odious, and a threat to free speech as any normal person would understand it:

“Our argument in the case wasn’t complicated,” says Bossie. “It was about freedom, and it ended up hinging on a very simple question: If the FEC is comfortable banning political films, like Citizens United’s Hillary: The Movie, around election time, would it also be fine with banning political books financed by corporations? The Justice Department’s attorney answered yes, the government did have the power to prohibit the publication of a book. When they admitted that, everything changed.”

“I think that answer sent a chill through the Court,” says Bossie. “It was that moment that was a catalyst for us, and gave us the opportunity to win on much bigger constitutional grounds than we anticipated. It became apparent that the government believed that they could ban anything: movies, books, pamphlets, the Kindle, you name it. It was a shocking revelation.”

Roger Pilon at Cato:

Relax.  Half of our states, states like Virginia, have minimal campaign finance laws, and there’s no more corruption in those states than in states that strictly regulate.  And that’s because the real reason we have this campaign finance law is not, and never has been, to prevent corruption.  The dirty little secret — the real impetus for this law — is incumbency protection. 

Sounds plausible to me.

Noting this in passing I was struck by the title of the video link:

Nick Gillespie pwns Blond Health Nazi

What on earth is pwns? This.

Which takes one to the anarchic future of the English language, and maybe of others too.

From English Lit to English Leet.

The tragedy of getting old.