Blogoir

RFE/RL is an excellent resource for all sorts of detail about what is happening in the former Soviet Union. See especially The Power Vertical, a blog written especially for Russia wonks and obsessive Kremlin watchers.

Try these pieces:

One about new popular protests against price rises and corruption (even if the 'tide of protests engulfs more Russian cities' title is ridiculous):

Tatyana, a 50-year-old preschool teacher in the central Russian city of Penza, must now spend 5,000 rubles ($168) per month on water, gas, and electricity. This leaves her with just 2,300 rubles ($77) to feed her two teenage children and her husband, an invalid whose health problems prevent him from working

Garry Kasparov always has interesting things to say:

Because sticking to the current form of governance, which is to say guaranteeing the survival of Putin's regime, will necessarily lead to the demise of Russia within its present borders.

The Far East and Eastern Siberia are already developing according to a Chinese scenario, the full scope of which will be revealed in the near future. In the next 10 to 15 years, a lot of Russian territories will become at least de facto Chinese. This will change the situation in Russia fundamentally...

And the (maybe a bit overwritten?) Online Petition against Vladimir Putin:

Bubbling away nicely?

Or just minor hiccups in all that vast space, which as ever changes very slowly in its own very Russian way?

You're a great leader. You make speeches.

In our Tower of Babel world, is it better to keep hammering away on the same themes (and often using the same words and phrases) to get your message across?

Maybe.

But don't overdo the clichés.

Or people will start listening to you for all the wrong reasons.

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!

Sarajevo's Dnevni Avaz reports that the Bosniac member of the three-person Bosnian collective state Presidency, Haris Silajdzic, is travelling to London to visit Ejup Ganic tomorrow - presumably in jail. The office of the Serb member of the Presidency Nebojsa Radmanovic mournfully complains that he still has not been informed.

This (if it happens) has to be an extraordinary first in the Diplomatic History of the Universe - a head of state visiting another state specifically to meet a prisoner from his country held in that state's prison on an extradition charge.

Come on, British media, DO SOMETHING ON THIS STORY! Don't leave it to me to report this first! I'm just a humble blogger.

Meanwhile legal challenges to the court decision not to release Ganic on bail continue, as do moves by the BH side to muster arguments on the substance of Serbia's extradition request. Serbia is still pulling together the documents it says it needs to support its case.

Ganic's renewed bail application may be heard later this week. 

Background over at Balkan Insight on Ganic's high-powered defence team, including Clare Montgomery who was part of Pinochet's defence team.

A fine article at Devil's Kitchen reminding us how New Zealand slashed socialism in a series of bold, strong moves (emphasis added):

It cost us twice as much to get a poorer result than we did 20 years previously with much less money. So we decided to rethink what we were doing here as well.

The first thing we did was to identify where the dollars were going that we were pouring into education. We hired international consultants (because we didn’t trust our own departments to do it), and they reported that for every dollar we were spending on education, 70 cents was being swallowed up by administration.

Once we heard this, we immediately eliminated all of the Boards of Education in the country. Every single school came under the control of a board of trustees elected by the parents of the children at that school, and by nobody else.

We gave schools a block of money based on the number of students that went to them, with no strings attached. At the same time, we told the parents that they had an absolute right to choose where their children would go to school. It is absolutely obnoxious to me that anybody would tell parents that they must send their children to a bad school.

We converted 4,500 schools to this new system all on the same day...

It will happen here too.

One day. When we decide to drive back government to sensible levels.

Bring it on.

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?

Robin Harris, former adviser to Margaret Thatcher, lambasts at NRO the way judicial processes are being used and (he says) abused in the UK for foreign or other political purposes:

The British authorities allowed themselves to become dupes of judicial manipulation, and it will be hard to claw back towards common sense. Serbia is a signatory to the European Convention on Extradition. This should mean — but does not — that its courts conduct their business fairly. No one, knowing the circumstances, could imagine that Ganic would receive a fair trial in Belgrade. Yet Britain has limited its own options, by legislation passed in 2003 that reduces the scope for ministers to intervene to stop such cases.

Any present or former politician, high official, or soldier from any of the countries involved in the wars accompanying the breakup of Yugoslavia is now at risk of arrest on a politically fabricated charge if he or she comes to Britain. But one cannot stop there. Leading figures from many Western countries have also been involved in Yugoslavia’s wars, particularly in Kosovo in 1999. A Serbian court could issue warrants against these figures, too, and the British police will, as we have seen, unquestioningly act on them.

So Gordon Brown’s assurances are less than reassuring. It is not only private groups that manipulate international justice. So can states with ill-functioning judicial systems and little respect for veracity or equity.

The abuses inherent in universal jurisdiction will, therefore, continue to manifest themselves in acute form in Britain, unless radical reform is undertaken. In the meantime, Heathrow arrival gates could usefully be marked: “All hope abandon, ye who enter here.”

Fine (more or less), except that it does not take us far.

Either we make extradition arrangements or we don't.

If we do, there are three general choices:

• let the courts decide, according to firm criteria which respect human rights and as far as possible common sense (ie as far as possible 'neutral' and unpolitical decisions)
• let Ministers decide, ditto (ie as far as possible reasonable decisions which weigh the UK public interest in an openly political way, and for which Ministers are publicly accountable)
• some sort of messy hybrid (what we now have)

Then there is a quite separate list of questions:

• Do we have 'easier' extradition arrangements for countries we regard as capable of running a fair trial (ie relatively few)?
• If we do, how much easier should they be? Is the aim to get foreign feuding out of our courts asap?
• How far if at all should we (courts or Ministers) look at the substance of the request and the background circumstances?
• Do we have no extradition arrangments with countries abusing human rights (ie most of them)?

The problem with having easier extradition arrangements for some ostensibly respectable countries (including EU and would-be EU partners) is that even they may allow political murky considerations to drive extradition requests. See this Ganic case. 

The problem with having no extradition arrangements with 'bad' countries is that any gangster or corrupt oligarch from that country can make a beeline to the UK and hide behind those laws and/or 'human rights.

No clearly good answer here, in either theory or practice. Reasonable people will disagree as to which extradition requests (and processes and principles) are well founded, and which are a scandal.

Robin Harris appears to advocate some sort of reserve trump card for Ministers to step in and stop any extradition or other such proceedings they dislike for foreign or other policy reasons.

That's one way of doing it. But it opens another risk, namely that decisions made by Ministers in such circumstances will be politically motivated and capricious and therefore open to legal challenge - hard to maintain any sort of consistent principle one way or the other.

In any case, there looks to be no way to stop the UK courts having full-blown legal battles over the politics of other countries. Since even if we have a 'let Ministers decide' rule, decisions will be challenged in the courts on any number of procedural and substantive grounds. See the Pinochet cases - nice earners for the lawyers involved, all at UK taxpayers' expense.

As for Ejup Ganic, it may all be over next week if the Serbian government fail to put together a convincing dossier which establishes enough of a case to answer to force the matter into a substantive extradition process.

If they do produce enough evidence to achieve that outcome, the whole saga could become really very complicated. If not dramatic.

Is it money you have now plus money you know you'll have, or are sure you'll have?

Is it costs you have now plus costs you know you'll have or are sure you'll have?

What about expected costs which don't in fact arise or are deferred? How to account for that 'saving'?

What if you spend that 'saving', then persuade yourself that you can make a similar saving next month and spend that too?

Which time period 'counts'? Is it OK to run up unaffordable debts in Period A, then simply roll them over into Period B and proclaim budget discipline?

Welcome to the dark world of 'gaming the budget window', a core feature of Obamacare. And a purposeful further step down the Road to Ruin?

As usual, Keith Hennessey explains.

Over at the latest Crawford Diplomatic Despatch:

It all boils down to a profound infantilisation of public life. Government has turned into feckless dim-witted parents who treat their children like spoiled brats. The children themselves duly morph into something neurotic, angry and sly.

To win the public’s loathsome brattish affections and get re-elected, the parents offer endless sweeties, only to be aghast when the brats start to think that this is how things must be – even when there is no more money for sweets, and their own teeth start to rot from all that sugar.

The door-bell rings. It’s the bailiff:

Nice islands you have over there. Pity you can’t afford them any more…

A lively effort is being mounted to raise money to secure the release of one Nick Hogan, who has been imprisoned here in the UK for not paying a £3000 fine and a further £7000 in costs for failing to stop people smoking in his pub.

Try Old Holborn, who has set up a PayPal button. Nearly £4000 has been raised in little over 24 hours.

Galling as it is to have to pay money into the coffers of the state to get Nick Hogan free when he arguably should not be in prison, it will be an impressive sign of libertarian people power if he is quickly released when the money to pay his fine is raised.

What I strongly object to is the definition of a privately owned pub as a 'public place' under the relevant legislation. Just because the public have 'access' to a pub does not mean that it should be treated as a public place. The public are welcome to walk in and see what they like and dislike before deciding (or not) to stay.

If a landlord wants to allow people to smoke or take their clothes off or otherwise amuse themselves on property he owns, anyone not liking it may leave. Market forces can decide how far pubs and other establishments make provision for eg smokers and/or non-smokers alike.

This tendency by the state to usurp private property rights for 'public' purposes is utterly obnoxious, whether it applies to pubs or sport. See this piece on Football Socialism.  

Exhibit One:  Robert Baer, former CIA officer, looks at the the evolving world of organised assassination.

Exhibit Two:  Professor Kenneth Anderson praises President Obama's efficient use of Predator strikes in and around Pakistan:

... of all the ways it has undertaken to strike directly against terrorists, this administration owns the Predator drone strategy. It argued for it, expanded it, and used it, in the words of the president’s State of the Union address, to “take the fight to al Qaeda.”

* * * * *

Once upon a time wars were sort of personal. A King or Emperor would be peeved at the temerity of another King or Emperor or Duke in challenging his authority or grabbing some land. A mass of hapless conscripts would be rustled up and led off to battle.

That went on for a long time. Civilians were there to be looted by foraging armies as they passed through the countryside. 

Then it all got big and impersonal, as Machine Age wars emerged - vast armies slugging it out, with startling levels of casualties, all because of rivalry between states or ideologies. Civilians supporting the war effort became targets themselves as the notion of 'total war' took hold.

Now war is shrinking again, almost to nano levels. Technology is allowing individual opponents to be targeted and hit with something close to unerring accuracy. 

This poses important policy and legal questions.

Once a state declares war, new rules kick in. See Wikipedia on the Laws of War for a gallop round the main points. Kenneth Anderson has a learned blog on the subject. 

Basically, once war is declared (and assuming that that itself is done lawfully - see the Chilcot Inquiry) violence on a significant scale is justified (including collateral damage) as long as the force used is reasonably aimed at the rights targets with as much proportionality as might be mustered, plus reasonable efforts made not to harm civilian targets, and so on.

The invention of new hi-tech weapons is changing all that. Why blow up large numbers of combatants when it is relatively easy to zap specific enemy leaders and/or their senior henchpersons?

Why indeed? Hundreds of Serb squaddies were killed when NATO bombed Serbia in 1998. Yet Milosevic was not targeted. Something seems not quite right there.

In short, Predator killings are the most humane form of war ever invented.

But once war moves into that sort of phase it starts to look much more personal, and lose the 'impersonal' implacable quality of larger-scale choreographed hostilities.

In fact it starts to look more like assassination. Or even common murder, but done in a 'cowardly' way by remote control from far away, a ghoulish video-game experience for an amused operator. 

If a state thinks that only a tiny number of enemy leaders are the real problem, is it not better or even right for civilian police to be used to arrest them? Who gives any leader the right to order such 'extra-judicial killings'? Isn't that sort of thing a tiny step away from murdering an opponent in a Dubai hotel?

Of course, a busy predictably progressive campaign to delegitimise this sort of warfare is well under way. Kenneth Anderson's excellent article above describes in great detail how it works, and how it is gaining traction at the UN and elsewhere. He bemoans the Obama Administration's failure to step forward and strongly justify the policy:

What the United States says regarding the lawfulness of its targeted killing practices matters. It matters both that it says it, and then of course it matters what it says.

The fact of its practices is not enough, because they are subject to many different legal interpretations: The United States has to assert those practices as lawful, and declare its understanding of the content of that law.

This is for two important reasons: first to preserve the U.S. government’s views and rights under the law; and second, to make clear what it regards as binding law not just for itself, but for others as well...

... upholding the American view requires more than simply dangling the inference that if the United States does it, it means the United States must intend it as law. Traditional international law requires more than that, for good reason.

The U.S. government should provide an affirmative, aggressive, and uncompromising defense of the legal sense and sensibility of targeted killing. The U.S. government’s interlocutors and critics are not wrong to demand one, even those whose own conclusions have long since been set in stone.

This is the nub of it - what self-defence means in the modern world:

A broader legal category than “armed conflict” (a subset of it), self-defense might consist of tiny strikes using, for example, covert CIA actors against terrorists, yet not rising to the full level of sustained fighting that crosses the legal threshold into “armed conflict.”

It might be invoked in places and ways outside of traditional theaters of armed conflict such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq. The president’s legal advisers should be elaborating the legal arguments for self-defense, and not solely armed conflict, as the proper international law “frame” of the president’s statements.

As previously noted, this is a classic Amazon Space issue:

The best (if not only) way to deal with individual terrorist formations lurking in foreign lands - if the governments of the states concerned are unable or unwilling to do it - is not to invade the place and create all sorts of new tensions and contradictions.

Instead it is to proclaim them to be enemies and then hit them before they hit us. 

Thus a new international law precept starts to emerge.

Every country in our networked world benefits from the network. So every country has a responsibility to do what it can to defend the global network from attacks by criminal extremists trying to wreak wider havoc.

If a country can't or won't suppress extremists on its territory, it necessarily forfeits its sovereignty to the extent necessary to allow others to defend the network by taking such action as they see fit, with minimum intrusiveness and respectable proportionality.

The great advantage of this approach is that it keeps the issue of war where it belongs - at the level of states and state sovereignty. States are given a positive incentive to deal firmly with extremists on their soil, since failure to do so will lead to their sovereignty being temporarily qualified as others step in to do so.

If by contrast a state is clearly unable or unwilling to take action against our enemies lurking in its territory and known to be plotting violence against us, that is in effect an unfriendly act against us by the state concerned. It is then our right and duty to respond at the state level with all possible proportionality and care to deal with the problem.

In other words, with a well-aimed Predator.

My earlier piece on Hamas and the 'cloned' passports has been picked up by Spy Blog, who watches like a hawk everything to do with UK government surveillance and other technologies.

He adds some useful expert points on just how difficult it is to come up with any foolproof scheme for catching people travelling under false identities:

Charles Crawford's points apply equally well to the older non-biometric Passports, which were apparently used in Dubai, as well as to the newer International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant "biometric" ones, since these only currently contain a digitised image of the passport photograph and what is written on the face of the passport, and do not yet contain any fingerprint or iris scan biometric identifiers.

Facial Recognition is pretty useless at a passport control checkpoint, where there are lots of variations in ambient lighting etc. The UK Passport Service and some other foreign government equivalents do try to use it on their centralised digitised Passport Photo databases (which is why there are stupid rules on the size of such photos, in which you are now forbidden to smile), to try to spot obvious multiple applications in different names, but this is hardly an infallible automatic system, which needs plenty of experienced human facial recognition effort as well.

Spy Blog links all this to unconvincing official claims that UK ID cards would reduce 'identity theft'. He makes an interesting point about the impact on intelligence work if robust identity identification technology (linking names to identifiable individual people) were actually set up everywhere:

If biometric fingerprint Passports ever do work and centralised computer linked biometric readers ever do become universally installed at every border post, then where does that leave British or other intelligence agents, undercover policemen or special forces personnel ?

It may be possible to officially fake the UK National identity Register database entries and issue them with a genuine UK Passport and / or ID Card, under their cover name alias, but if they have ever crossed a foreign border in the past, perhaps when on holiday or business before they were recruited into a secret role, and had their fingerprint biometrics scanned, then, in theory, the mis-match in names using different Passports, should automatically be flagged up on the foreign government system.

Read it. Complicated. But fascinating.

The UK Labour Party are said to be doing rather better in the opinion polls.

Crikey.

I am baffled that anyone at all would still vote for them. What does it take these days in terms of incompetence to be 100% discredited and thrown down the steps of public opinion?

Plus it's not just the incompetence. It's the sheer sustained banality and selfishness of the top people concerned, as they set coarse, publicly funded spin-doctors on each other then quickly kiss and make up when they see a camera.

Last night on ITV News a grinning reporter noted that the story of Gordon Brown's bullying in his own office was not likely to go away, but added that voters seemed to be approving when he was portrayed as 'passionate' and 'committed' and 'intense'.

What is happening?

Simple.

Peter Mandelson has been Milosevicising the UK for over ten years, and it shows.

Part of the remarkable success of Milosevic in Serbia, where he effectively ran the place for some 15 years despite one disaster after another brought about by his stupidity, lay in his ability to dumb down Serbia's collective expectations. To replace reality with sloganising.

Thus rock bottom, which Milosevic duly reached in 2000. When people were reduced to one loaf of bread as things decayed, it was a Huge Victory when the standard of living soared to 1.5 loaves per day.

A 50% increase in wealth! Thanks to the Government! Long live Serbia! 

Here it's the same trend but from a higher altitude.

Last night's ITV News was dominated by emotional interviews with relatives of patients who had died in another NHS hosital collapse. There was fleeting reference to the role played by 'government targets'. But the sense of the news clips was to whip up populist injustice that the people who had run this hospital had escaped without serious sanction.

See eg this morning's Daily Telegraph:

Bosses at scandal-hit Stafford Hospital escape scot-free

Buried at the bottom of the article is this:

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said it was unacceptable for NHS mangers to be responsible for major failings at one organisation and then to get another job elsewhere in the service. The trust admitted Mr Yeates left with six months’ notice pay and his salary at the time was around £160,000. But officials said they were trying to discover if he had received any other payments on departing.

Huh?

Huh?!?

No. That's merely disgraceful.

What's unacceptable is that the media do not finger the Health Secretary and the Labour Party for allowing this and so many other scandals to happen on their watch.

The bureaucratic obsession with Targets which has led to so much dysfunctionality in the way the UK works itself can be traced back directly to Gordon Brown's long years at the Treasury, when his bullying and control-freakery was directed at the UK as a whole. not merely his glum immediate team.

And so it goes on.

Every fiasco is the responsibility of anyone other than the government whose policies and attitudes have created the framework for such fiascos.

Any puny success is hailed as a great victory by Ministers and their passionate, committed and intense Great Leader.

And as more and more people emerge uneducated and sulking from Labour's state education system unable to do anything other than emote in a soap opera way about the life's challenges and complexity, an ever-larger electorate of lumpen whiners grows. People dependent on the state not just for their endless 'benefits' but now for their very thought-processes.

So TV marketing heads in their direction, and politics stops being about anything adult. Instead we turn public life into a Reality Show, or more accurately an Unreality Show.

And shallow, greedy post-modern TV executives - above all in the BBC where salaries exacted from the TV licence poll tax have soared to the sky - are complicit in New Labour's Mandelsonian furtive subversion of any sort of comitment to truth and honesty.

As that happens it is next to impossible for the Conservatives and other parties to do anything but get dragged along. Because they have to show they care.

Gordon Brown is unambiguously revealed to be unfit for office? Quick, get out the Thesaurus ... flip-flip-flip as pages turn ... Gottit.

He's intense. Passionate. Committed.

He's not bullying people selfishly for himself. He's doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

Who does not remember the end of George Orwell's 1984?

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast ! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

George Orwell got it wrong.

Gordon Brown is not bullying people selfishly for himself. He's doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

In 2010 it's Big Brother's enormous face and tearful eyes gazing down on the blank-eyed voters, with Peter Mandelson on his EU pension and UK salary lurking out of screenshot propping him up in his chair.

O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast !

Yes. Gordon's won that victory over himself.

He's suffered horribly. But he's prevailed.

He loves us, the voters.

So everything's alright.

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.

For those who have not seen it, here is how the USA's 'Tea Party' political gamechanging grassroots protests against Big Government started a year ago:

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.

A fascinating sub-plot (or maybe it IS the plot) in the Greece/Eurozone debacle is the role played by über-bankers Goldman Sachs, as bailed out by the US government. Whose people and former people pop up everywhere.

Baseline Scenario is hot on the case. It looks as if Mario Draghi's hopes of becoming ECB president are in steep decline. He has some searching questions to answer.

Will the last guinea pig on the Titanic please switch off the lights?

Luckily the Technology Liberation Front give us the answer.

Pragmatic optimism.

More from me (if you can face it) over at Business and Politics.

On Iran - who is weak and strong in the Negotiations between Iran/USA/Russia/China:

It all boils down to a simple proposition: you don’t win more in any negotiation than your objective strength deserves.

In a struggle between a lion and a hyena, different sorts of strength (physical power, agility, guile, deviousness) all come into play.

And on a more metaphysical level, what does it mean to say that resources are 'finite'?

Is "Toyota’s stuck throttle ... a metaphor for our greedy, addictive, all-consuming, cancerous so-called civilization"?

Er. No.

A good round-up from Michael Ledeen on the moves by the nervous Iran regime to curb protests:

One of the most fascinating aspects of the current phase of the Iranian revolution is that many of those arrested knew it was coming, had the opportunity to hide, but chose to go to jail.  They viewed their arrest as a badge of honor, and (not to make light of the horrors of Iranian jails) perhaps even a good career move.  They expect the regime to fall, and they are building up credits for the next government.

He links to two energetic sites, worth a look if you are interested in the passion of pro-reform Iranians: Planet Iran and homlafayette.

An interesting sub-plot is the way the Iranian regime is closing down mobile phone, Gmail and other services which might help people mobilise fast and well.

Who knows, it may work. But it also suggests that when an elite are that scared of the mass of the youthful public, something bad is going to happen to them sooner or later.

See also this loser.