Blogoir: November

As someone said:

The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can.

Thus with investments. You invest in a business as a vote of confidence in its ability to do well. If it fails to do well, that tells you something about that business - and something about your judgement.

Big heavy household name corporations ought to be a safe enough option over time?

Not exactly:

A dollar invested in GM shares twenty years ago would today have a face value of about 7 cents. There is no five year period that I could find in the last thirty years for which GM’s stock price outperformed the S&P 500. 

The market capitalization of GM is now under $2 billion, which is substantially less than that of such icons of our economy as Cognizant Technology Solutions, DaVita, Inc., Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold, and the Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan. 

A good idea to invest gabillions of US taxpayers' money in this one?

The main argument is that even if these firms are going nowhere, the new 'investment' saves jobs.

That reminds me of the value-subtracting industries in the USSR, 'enterpises' which sold products where the final market value of the products was less than the market value of the raw materials which had gone into making them.

The point is that investing in old bad jobs steers huge resources away from new good ones.

The problem is that the workers in the bad old jobs exist in organised fashion - and make a noise.

The workers in the good new jobs by definition do not yet exist and are silent, unorganised.

So politicians grab money from Sucess to subsidise Failure. They invest in the past, not the future. They ignore the opportunity cost issues.

Another brisk step down the road to ruin.

I dimly remember getting a fountain pen or something cool like that for my sixteenth birthday.

But things are different these days in the USA.

The Pedant General makes an observation on my posting about the Four Attributes of Economic Success:

I think you have still missed one thing.

Whilst the rule of law is the essential underpinning without which none of the four political aspirations can take root, the rule of law will not allow for prosperity unless that system of law encompasses security of property rights.

I did not so much miss it but take it for granted. I assumed that it went without saying. But as I used to tell my Embassy team:

Never Assume! Assumption is the Mother of ****-up.

Why does the distinction in fact matter?

The other day I was at the House of Commons, giving some MPs the doubtful benefit of my views on Russian foreign policy.

I recalled those amazing days in 1991/1992 when as Deputy Head of the FCO's Soviet Department I had to work up Western policies for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The problem we faced, I told them, is now much clearer than it was then.

We in fact had two problems.

We did not understand Communism. And we did not understand Capitalism.

We clever officials never had had to think about either - both were just there, rather like the weather.

Which explains why, boosted by our then Thatcherite zeal, we pushed for mass privatisation, assuming that the only way to get things going across the Soviet space was to move as much activity as possible into value-adding private hands away from the value-subtracting state.

This was in fact a successful policy.

After some seven decades of Scientific Socialism Russians struggled to find food to eat. After all those vainglorious Gorbachev witchcraft policies, Moscow still had no bananas.

Within weeks and months of the introduction of Fairly Scientific Capitalism, market mechanisms were producing and distributing food across all those time zones.

Bananas arrived! And milk - thanks to McDonalds.

Yet it now is clear that the critics of Shock Therapy were right, albeit not for the reasons usually adduced.

There was not enough Shock, and not enough Therapy.

Above all we failed to see that without our throwing much more effort at helping Russian reformers set up independent courts and develop respect for private property, those new-found property relationships across Russia would be prey to collectivist comebacks, as now has happened to a depressing degree.

See eg this elegant analysis of how senior Russian officials 'privatise revenues and nationalise losses'.

So, yes.

Capitalism equals the Rule of Law plus Private Property rights for the whole country.

What does that remind me of..?

Oh. This.

This reminds us all about the famous Drake equation: N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

But there was a problem:

The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses.

And guesses — just so we're clear — are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

The Drake equation can have any value from "billions and billions" to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing...

And so to Climate Change:

And lo, weird science leads to weird economics:

Similarly, green initiatives will open new markets only if other nations subsidise inefficient technologies bought abroad. Thus, the real game becomes which nations get to suck up other nations' tax-financed subsidies.

Apart from the resulting global inefficiency, this also creates a whole new raft of industry players that will keep pushing inefficient legislation, simply because it fills their coffers...

... President-elect Obama is now facing countless people who claim that subsidies for renewable energy and CO2 taxes are great ways to tackle global warming and forge a new green economy.

Unfortunately, this is almost entirely incorrect. Taxes and subsidies are always expensive, and will likely impede growth. Moreover, if we really want to tackle global warming, we shouldn't spend vast sums of money buying inefficient green technology – we should invest directly in R&D to make future green technology competitive.

Which no doubt we won't do.

Sigh.

You have to doff the cap to some of the Guardian's leading columnists.

They come out day after day, whirling their delicate arms in a pugnacious defiant way, only to be knocked flat on to the floor by Tim Worstall:

As we’re all surveying the rubble we’re agreeing that the root cause was that interest rates were set at inappropriate levels. So, in order to counter act this we’re going to give away our power to set interest rates?

Good one, good one.

Splat.

Clunk.

A reader asks:

Do you approve of the current US and UK policy to appease nationalist Albanian threats of violence?

There may be people out there who do not follow the Kosovo problem with close attention. Just to remind them that the long-running attempt to the EU's bright young Laura Norder into Kosovo continues to be ... long-running.

Kosovo has declared itself independent. So Kosovo does not like to see the UN negotiating with Belgrade over how the international presence in Serb-dominated areas of northern Kosovo is to be defined.

Belgrade wants to keep it defined in UN terms, as it has strong UN membership support for its core position plus the hope of a Russian Veto if things get too difficult.

Kosovo/Pristina wants the UN to give way to the EU for the same reason Serbia wants ultimate UN authority to stay.

Meanwhile both UN and EU face a tough choice. How far are they prepared to go to suppress local Serb or Albanian hostility to their presence on the ground?

As a British general put it to then International Development Minister Clare Short once in Banja Luka (Bosnia), "The locals are compliant because they know that if it comes to it we'll kill them."

So do I approve of 'appeasing' those locals on either side who threaten violence against honourable international officials and troops doing their best?

Well, no. But the problem is not quite that.

Rather this. If as seems to be the case we (the 'West') are not ready to let Serbs and Albanians fight it out over the desultory territory in dispute, then we end up unhappily appeasing all sorts of difficult people when we are then caught in the middle.

Which is why the Kosovo case study is such a supreme example of Negotiation on different levels sumultaneously.

What matters more to the US/UK/EU? How to balance the threat of Kosovar force on the shabby streets of Mitrovica today against the prospect of a humiliating UN veto exercised by Russia down the road? Risks of killing Kosovars (or Serbs) to stay credible? The policy defeat which an eventual UN veto night entail?

What matters to the Kosovars? To focus on building up a successful new state in the majority areas of Kosovo they control, or to insist on the porinciple that all Kosovo is their's?

What matters to Belgrade? To move quickly towards 'Europe' and leave behind a Kosovo full of people who do not want Serbia and who Serbia does not want either? Or to stick to the principle that Serbia can not have part of its territory stripped away without its consent?

What matters to Moscow? To risk rows with the US/UK in New York over these irrelevant scraps of Balkan territory, not to mention the inconsistencies its positions might create closer to home? Or to be seen to be throwing its weight around toughly?

That Moscow choice is at least quite easy for the Russian leadership.

For the EU/US/UK things are trickier. 

Having chosen to stand in the middle of the road, we risk getting run over.

An interesting discussion last night with someone looking hard at Values in British public life.

It seems that senior civil servants are now brooding on the existential aspects of their relations with Ministers in an attempt to identify the Core Values of public life, which latterly are thought to have been lost in the fog of targets, objectives, strategies and so on.

Call me pessimistic, but I am pessimistic.

Values derive from Responsibility.

So much government process is now outsourced upwards/outwards to the EU and downwards/inwards to Agencies and Units and other exotic post-modern bureaucratic phenomena.

This means that politicians' main effort is to live by ad hoc tactical moves. To try to snatch success whenever anything positive happens, and to profess determination to take action (usually creating yet more process either with another enquiry or close consultation with EU partners and/or other 'stakeholders') when something goes wrong,

What exactly does any Minister claim responsibility for these days?

Everything in general ("something must be done!") yet nothing in particular? 

It comes to this. Successive governments have created a sprawling state structure so complex that it is almost impossible to understand it, let alone do anything purposeful with it. Thus ruling politicians' ability and willingness to give leadership by taking responsibility is much reduced.

The Baby P horror story exemplifies this. No-one at any level in the vast social policy chain concerned appears to be taking responsibility.

Instead we get the blandly repulsive language of official buck-passing, such as this:

In line with government guidelines for such circumstances, we immediately set up an independent review into what happened and have acted on every recommendation..." 

The review process is important in understanding what happened and how procedures can be strengthened for the future. Where we have needed to act, we have done so.

"This serious case review has revealed clear evidence of appropriate communication between and within agencies as well as weaknesses in specific areas of information flow."

It found that "safeguarding structures exist across Haringey agencies and offer a sound framework for the implementation of required procedures", but also identified "scope for improving the detailed application of some processes".

So top civil servants can pore over Values as much as they like, but without their political leaders taking responsibility it can not get very far.

Above all, no-one is ready to say that the point in any system is not slavishly to follow rules, but rather to use judgement. And then to accept responsibility for bad outcomes if those judgement calls turn out poorly.

As has been said:

... things are complicated. Long-term v short-term. Big v Small. Certainty v uncertainty. Principle v Politics v Practical v Possible.

Thus in a democracy what Ministers need is a team of skilled people able to help them steer through these operational and philosophical complexities for a few years.

People who simplify complexity but in a subtle, nuanced way. Who are good at bringing people of rival opinions together and explaining convincingly what might best be done. People who can juggle numerous balls but keep their eye on the Big Picture. People of unerring accuracy.

And 'Judgement' is the word for all that. Without Judgement a civil servant (like a Minister) is fairly useless.

Without Judgement there is no Responsibility.

And without Responsibility there are no Values.

As world leaders grapple with rival ideas for tackling the global financial crisis, keep an aghast eye on what the EU under France is up to in redefining European security.

President Sarkozy and President Medvedev have come up with a proposal to hold a major OSCE summit in mid-2009 aimed at discussing 'European security architecture'.

RFE/RL described Sarkozy's position:

At the postsummit press conference, its French host, President Nicolas Sarkozy, spent relatively little time criticizing Russian actions in Georgia. He appeared much keener to look ahead and speculate about ways in which the Russian-Georgian conflict could lead to changes in the existing pan-European security arrangements.

Unprompted, Sarkozy threw his weight behind Medvedev's proposal for a new European "security architecture" and said the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) should convene a summit in mid-2009 to discuss the idea. In doing so, the French president came close to suggesting he is less worried about Moscow's designs than U.S. strategy and tactics in Europe.

"We could then lay the groundwork for what could be the basis of an agreement between us [all], as long as we don't talk about missile shields that will not lead to security, that will complicate matters, and that will render [security] more remote," Sarkozy said.

Returning to the theme in a different context, Sarkozy spoke of "some of Georgia's friends" whose "military ships in a nearby sea" and its "missiles, shields, and soldiers" had not proven nearly as effective as the EU's mediation and commitment to the peaceful resolution of conflicts.

It has been a central aim of Soviet/Russian foreign policy for decades to get the US security guarantee for Europe diluted - if the biggest defender of European Pluralism walks away, far easier to exert Soviet/Russian influence in rather less than pluralistic 'Russian' ways.

And it has long been the core aim of France to dilute 'Anglo-Saxon' influences in Europe.

Can it really be happening that these different but not unrelated malign ambitions are finally seeing a window of opportunity to join forces and redefine the institutional basis for our common defence - and therefore the very basis of European society?

The insouciance with which France is claiming to speak in the name of the EU about Russia's dismemberment of Georgia - and the bravura rudeness of Sarkozy towards the Polish Government - are also remarkable by any standards of diplomacy as practised in living memory.

That said, there is also an economic dimension to French/Russian manoeuvring:

Sarkozy also revisited his idea of creating a fully shared "economic space" between Russia and the EU, first mooted in a speech in September.

"I remain convinced that we all -- the Russian Federation and Europe -- have an interest in working toward a common economic space, which would allow the creation of interdependencies, and would definitively rule out all forms of confrontation -- because they would undermine common interests," Sarkozy said

What if Europe is offered a Deal? Disentangle ourselves from those cowboy Americans, and in return we get the Europeanisation of Russia and no more 'conflict' in Europe.

Would many weak collectivist-minded governments of Europe and the weak collectivist-minded Kremlin find that quite a tempting offer?

Maybe Moscow and Paris are counting on a distracted, cynically 'progressive' Obama Administration not to care too much, and a domestically weak British Prime Minister devoting all available energy to the global economy and seemingly disengaged on these strategic political questions?

Big Stuff.

Very Big Stuff.

What makes for brilliant writing, in English at least?

A subtle combination of perhaps three big things.

Clarity, Energy and Wisdom.

Clarity of message, combined with clarity in delivering it.

Energy in both thought and language.

Wisdom in cutting through the infinite hubbub of facts and arguments out there and looking bluntly at things that matter, both now and over time.

Here are two impressive recent examples.

First, P J O'Rourke demolishing US conservatives for letting down themselves and the country.

Try these passages which jump off the page/screen and sock you on the nose:

Liberalism had been running wild in the nation since the Great Depression. At the end of the Carter administration we had it cornered in one of its dreadful low-income housing projects or smelly public parks or some such place, and we held the Taser gun in our hand, pointed it at the beast's swollen gut, and didn't pull the trigger...

... The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances ...The law cannot be made identical with morality. Scan the list of the Ten Commandments and see how many could be enforced even by Rudy Giuliani...

... Our impeachment of President Clinton was another example of placing the wrong political emphasis on personal matters... we accused Clinton of lying about sex, which all men spend their lives doing, starting at 15 bragging about things we haven't done yet, then on to fibbing about things we are doing, and winding up with prevarications about things we no longer can do.

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is.

The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. And voters--all the voters, right up to the tippy-top corner office of Goldman Sachs--think so too.

We, the conservatives, who do understand the free market, had the responsibility to--as it were--foreclose upon this mess. The market is a measurement, but that measuring does not work to the advantage of a nation or its citizens unless the assessments of volume, circumference, and weight are conducted with transparency and under the rule of law...

We've had the rule of law largely in our hands since 1980. Where is the transparency? It's one more job we botched...

Devastating. Simple. And profound.

For a very different subject and (it must be said) a denser if not even rather exhausting style, see Camilla Paglia on how she chose the works to include in her superb poetry anthology Break, Blow, Burn:

A homoerotic love poem by Auden that I had always planned to include begins, “Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm.” But when I returned to it, I found the poem perilously top-heavy with that single fine sentence. Everything afterward dissolves into vague blather. It was perhaps the most painful example that I encountered of great openings not being sustained...

I found Bishop’s much-anthologized poem “The Fish” nearly unbearable due to her obtrusively simmering self-pity. (Wounded animal poems, typifying the anthropomorphic fallacy, have become an exasperating cliché over the past sixty years.) ... It may be time to jettison depressiveness as a fashionable badge of creativity...

Emanuel’s intense imagery, skillfully underplayed, is tremendously evocative. The knife and white-bellied trout suggest sex but also a masochistic vulnerability. Exquisitely caught details abound in quick scenarios ... This poem patiently, methodically offers its story without sentimentality or melodrama. There is no flinching from harsh facts and yet no gratuitous self-dramatization either...

A. R. Ammons’ “Mechanism” upset me severely and still does. This poem should have been the dramatic climax of Break, Blow, Burn. In fact, it should have been one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century. Its vision of complex systems operating simultaneously in human beings and animal nature is at the very highest level of artistic inspiration. But in execution, the poem is a shambles, with weak transitions and phrasings that veer from the derivative to the pedantic...

Two great writers and thinkers.

And we get to read them for free.

It is always a pleasure to see a leading Singaporean politician in top form.

See this elegant and ideas-rich speech to the Asia Society on 11 November by Singapore Senior Minister Mr Goh Chok Tong.

Several lively judgements:

For the last two hundred years or so, the international system has largely been shaped and dominated by the West. Non-western countries were largely the objects of international relations or arenas of international tussles rather than full participants ...

... there is a common source of discomfort: in East Asia, capitalism flourishes without western style liberal democracy. This challenges the preferred historical narrative of the West in a fundamental way. And it is worth noting that unlike Meiji Japan whose ambition was to ‘leave Asia’ and ‘join the West’, India and even more so, China, have no such ambition.

... If authoritarian systems were the answer to growth, North Korea and Myanmar would be among the richest countries in the world. So would Zimbabwe. And if liberal democracies were always right, Iceland would not have gone bankrupt. Nor is Iceland’s insolvency an aberration. In 1976, the UK was forced to apply for an IMF loan and in return had to accept measures imposed by the IMF.

Ha!

He suggests four attributes of successful political systems:

First, there must be accountability and transparency. For long-term political stability, governments must govern with the consent of the governed, expressed through the ballot box or otherwise. While temporary political stability can sometimes be achieved through repression, force cannot sustain economic growth over long periods since growth requires the liberation that comes with competition and the support of the people...

Second, governments must have the capacity for long-term planning and execution. It is important that government policies can withstand populist pressures. While politicians must be responsive to their peoples, the first duty of all leaders is to lead. Far too many elected leaders nowadays govern according to what the polls say...

A third attribute is social justice and harmony. By this, I refer to the need for governments to provide every citizen with an equal opportunity to compete and succeed. Equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome, and it is inevitable that some would fare better than others in any competitive system ... A political system which provides for an inclusive society and is capable of delivering social justice will enjoy wide support from the people.

The fourth attribute is a culture of identifying and grooming talent for public service, whether in the political arena, bureaucracy or private sector. A meritocratic system of administration picks out the best through a fair and just selection process and provides a competitive environment for the brightest brains to join and work in the government.

All this sounds remarkably like the recipe for Singapore's success, of course. Singapore has achieved outstanding results, even if the consent of the governed in Singapore tends to be expressed not through the ballot box but 'otherwise' as Mr Goh Chok Tong coyly describes it.

Still, let's remind ourselves of the fact that fifty years ago Cuba was doing better then Singapore, and now is largely a wreck. Had Cuba adopted the Four Attributes and maintained an open society, it could have developed a successful practical ideological alternative to USA-style capitalism.

NB also the unbending meritocratic part of the Singaporean message. This is a not a society which dumbs down exam standards to avoid hurting underperforming students' feelings by giving them low marks.

All that said, maybe Mr Goh Chok Tong is not in fact completely right.

The deep basis for the sustained success of Western-style liberal democracy is not so much the Western political system but the Western legal system which underpins it.

It is this which ensures that Rules Matter. And which produces the graceful transfer of power now under way in Washington.

Asiam-style capitalism benefits directly from this, as no doubt many of its key business transactions are run through Western law firms, with the independent courts in the USA or UK acting as the ultimate font of fair decision in case of dispute.

And without creating honest legal process based on the profound idea of the Separation of Powers, Asia will never be as free of Western philosophy and influence as it might like - and claim - to be?

This elegant analysis by Theodore Dalrymple on the horrible Baby P story - read it, overseas readers, and despair about modern British underclass life - looks hard at why many of our bureaucratic structures are dysunctional.

Including this fierce passage:

 ... [the] purpose of the British public service is to provide a meal-and-mortgage-ticket for those who work in it, especially at management level. The ostensible purpose of an organisation is rarely its real purpose. I know this from my experience in the Health Service.

Which leads him to point this out too:

Thus, when a problem reveals itself, the response is a curious one, that is to say simultaneously one of work creation and work avoidance.

The work creation consists of instituting ever more “failsafe” and “best-practice” procedures, usually with all their associated paperwork, which are then bowed down to and worshipped like the Golden Calf. Of course, this creates the impression of terrific pressure of work, that can be relieved only by the employment of more and more staff with strange titles such as Compliance Manager and Best-Practice Co-ordinator.

This work creation is dialectically related to the work avoidance. So much effort goes into the procedure that no time, energy or inclination is left over to secure the alleged purpose of the procedure.

Is here, the Audacity of Hazel edition in honour of H Blears MP and her demented ginger weeble views on blogging.

The Guardian (Adrian Pabst) helpfully gives us one, by blowing thick layers of dust off the ideas of one Karl Polyani, a Hungarian who in the 1940s (says the Guardian) repudiated market liberalism and state socialism.

What he advocated, according to this bewilderingly strange article, is this:

Crucially, Polanyi's vision for an alternative economy re-embedded in politics and social relations offers a refreshing alternative to the neo-liberalism of left and right. In practice, an embedded model means that elected governments restrict the free flow of capital and create the civic space in which workers, businesses and communities can themselves regulate economic activity. Instead of free-market self-interest or central state paternalism, it is the individual and corporate members of civil society who collectively determine the norms and institutions governing production and exchange.

Far from romanticising older, simpler societies and economies, Polanyi, with extraordinary prescience, warned that financial crises would recur because markets are not self-regulating – they require political direction. So what can governments do? Specific measures include, first of all, extending fair trade prices and standards from agriculture and the food industry to other parts of the economy. Second, replacing the minimum wage with a just wage that reflects the true value of labour. Third, pushing for global capital controls, coupled with new incentives to reconnect finance to the real economy by promoting investment in productive, human and social investment.

Don't you just love that Dave Spart adverb beginning the sentence? Crucially, ...

Was Polayani really so extraordinarily prescient in predicting periodic financial crises?

There have been plenty before he came along, and there will be plenty more.

Why?

Because they are a feature, not a bug!

They occur in the way that a car driver sometimes drives dangerously despite road traffic being heavily regulated. The car gives him the option of moving speedily from A to B, and of avoiding trouble through fast acceleration and strong brakes. But those same excellent qualities of the car also allow reckless people to do reckless things now and again.

Financial crises thus reflect the fact that we favour Choice over Coercion. This gives us all the vast benefits of intelligent risk-taking, but also periodic pain from the consequences of stupid risk-taking.

Financial crises are a loud bleeper on the control-panel telling us all to slow down and drive more carefully, preferably not lending money to people/institutions who are unlikely to pay it back.

As for the specific Polyani proposals themselves, did this Hungarian really believe that his policy goulash could be workable?

On the one hand it seems to envisage national 'civic spaces' in which 'workers, business and communities' regulate (sic) economic activity.

On the other it presages some uber-authority determining global capital flows.

The only thing certain in this tumultuous confusion is that it would need armies of unelected bureaucrats to decide on 'fair' trade and 'just' wages, and so create stunning new forms of confusion and conflict.

This whole article turns on the assumption that the economic crisis has confirmed the bankruptcy of economic liberalism.

Er, no, Adrian Pabst-Spart.

So what we really need now is to collectivise everything? Are Poly Ani and Polly Toynbi by some strange chance related?

Here's an idea.

Let the owners of the Guardian sit down with all the workers and journalists and shareholders and start to negotiate a new basis for deciding 'just wages' for all.

Then come back in ten years' time when the preliminary results have been achieved and let us know how it is working out.

Russia, says the Guardian, is opting for a charm offensive to try to see off the deployment of sophisticated US missile defence systems in Poland and Czech Republic.

It did not take long for the Obama team to encounter the complexities of Poland and points East:

President-elect Obama has spoken to the president of Poland about relations between the two countries but didn't make a commitment on the multibillion-dollar missile defense program undertaken by the Bush administration, an Obama aide said Saturday.

That contrasts with a statement by Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who said Obama told him the missile defense project would continue.

This one will drag on.

The Obama team can be expected to be leery of a Bush Administration commitment to this system until they get into office and have some heavy briefings on what the point of it all is.

The Russian leadership are in a (for them) comfortable position.

Either the deployment goes ahead, in which case they can 'respond' by putting some missiles of their own in Kaliningrad to make the EU nervous, while quietly whipping up some anti-American protests in Poland and Czech Republic and anywhere else they can find.

Or perhaps the Obama Administration lets it drift into the long grass by examining in no particular hurry its 'workability'.

In which case the Russians can enjoy reminding the Poles that they have made a fool of themselves by getting so close to Washington on this one; that Washington is listening to Moscow rather than Warsaw and so becoming a lot more 'realistic'; and that Poland has been left looking ... weak.

Chess - or Monopoly?

What game is President Obama going to play - and be good at?

The Holocaust did not take place only in the well known concentration camps of central Europe.

Here is a good website about the Semlin Judenlager, just across the river from downtown Belgrade, where several thousand Jews were murdered with the support of a mobile gas van:

On 29th May 1942, German Foreign Office representative in Serbia Franz Rademacher proudly declared that 'the Jewish question is no longer an issue in Serbia. All that is left is to sort out the question of property'.

Crimes on this scale of course give all sorts of reasons for those who survive not to talk about them. The British Academy project behind the website explores this phenomenon in the Serbian context:

... the destruction of the Jews was assimilated within the dominant symbolic orders, first within multi-ethnic Yugoslavia - where the heroism of the Partisans, rather than the victimisation of the civilian population, constituted the primary object of memory - and later within the post-Yugoslav ideological milieu, which was dominated by Serbian nationalism and preoccupied with the suffering of Serbs under the Ustasha regime in Croatia during the Second World War.

A rather unhappy formulation - juxtaposing 'multi-ethnic' (ie nice) Yugoslavia with the 'post-Yugoslav ideological milieu, dominated by Serbian nationalism' (ie nasty)? But the page on the site dealing with this is better.

There is a world-weary view of foreign policy - exemplified in this bantamweight article by Sir Christopher Meyer which keeps reappearing on the Times website as if it were Deep Truth - which insists that 'nationalism' never goes away and can only be contained/managed:

Ethnic and nationalist rivalry is as old as sin, and as inextinguishable...

Globalisation and interdependence were supposed to have swept aside these ancient feuds and rivalries. Theories of the postmodern state now abound. Tony Blair preached how national interest would be trumped by the spread of “global values”. This is self-evident rubbish.

For here is the paradox of the modern world. Money, people, culture, business and electronic information cross porous frontiers in ever-increasing volume. But as national boundaries dissolve in cyberspace, so everywhere the sense of nationhood and national interest strengthens. Five minutes in Beijing, Washington, Tehran or Moscow will tell you that.

Well, a definite 'maybe'.

But when one looks closely at latter-day 'nationalism' across former Yugoslavia it is hard not to conclude that the Tito regime created the specific circumstances for the subsequent nationalist convulsions, by suppressing or twisting for many decades the truth of what happened in WW2 for its own communist ideological purposes.

And this left millions of grieving traumatised people grappling to find an identity based on moral and psychological reference points which were not lies or otherwise dishonest.

Nothing now can put right what happened at the Semlin camp.

But it can be remembered in our best attempt at a thoughtful, respectful - and above all honest - way.

That Day by Day cartoon reminds me of a private meeting I had in 1986 with top KGB defector Oleg Gordievsky about a year after he was exfiltrated from Moscow by MI6.

We talked about what Gorbachev was trying to do at that time to reform Communism, not least his campaign to cut Russians' massive vodka consumption to make the Soviet economy more effective.

Gordievsky said that Gorbachev utterly misunderstood the problems. He really believed that the Soviet economy was like a car whose only problem was a badly running engine: if it stopped running on vodka and tried running on petrol, the Engine of Socialism would whir into action and propel it off into a bright future.

"In other words," I said, "Gorbachev believes in witchcraft?"

"Exactly - he believes in witchcraft!"

Which takes us back to John Galt.

The point about Collectivism is that it assumes that the fuel of disciplined creativity which runs society is like milk from a cow which can be milked greedily without limit.

It assumes witchcraft.

And as the cow finally keels over, exhausted and dying, the ensuing starvation is never the fault of the people who have flogged it to death.

Day by Day explores British classic cars:

Fascinated by the fascinating subject of diplomatic memoirs?

Check out a magnificent article in the latest edition of Diplomat magazine:

At their worst, diplomatic memoirs offer cliché piled on cliché, the wordily pompous intertwined with the coy, the self-important and the banal.

Hardened professionals tiptoe quickly for the exit when they stumble over the following sort of thing:

“On Wednesday 7 April Peaches and I with some other colleagues dined with the Ruritanian Ambassador and his charming (if overfed and underperfumed) wife Bacteria, who hosted a dinner in honour of the visiting Minister of Agriculture.

At first the Minister did not enjoy the evening. He peered with ill-concealed despair at the grilled moose stew and salted plonka, not opening up when I quizzed him on his government’s latest protests on the iniquities of the CAP. But after a few glasses of best Ruritanian hangova he relaxed, and even told a ribald joke at French expense.

All in all, just about a worthwhile evening. Yet as Neznam drove us back in the Jaguar bumping over the potholes to the Residence, I was all too well aware that in neighbouring Ambigua the clouds of war were gathering…”

Yet terror at writing such tosh has not stopped countless diplomats down the ages – not to mention their spouses – from having a go. And distinguished successes abound...

Read on.

Until you get to the passages about Ramadan which seem to be ... trespassing.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urges rich Western countries to abandon their 'unsustainable' way of life, so as to respond to Climate Change.

Hmm.

China has long resisted calls to join rich nations in setting targets for emissions cuts, saying its relatively low per capita emissions and recent emergence as a major source of greenhouse gases should exempt it from action.

Scientists said in September that China had leapfrogged the United States as the world's biggest producer of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the principal gases that cause global warming.

One thing which is really, absolutely unsustainable in rich countries is the inexorable growth of the state and associated collectivist instincts:

In its assumptions about the size of the state and the role of government, almost every advanced nation is more left than it was, and getting lefter.

Even in America, federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today. The Heritage Foundation put it in a convenient graph: It's pretty much a straight line across four decades, up, up, up.

Doesn't make any difference who controls Congress, who's in the White House. The government just grows and grows, remorselessly.

And it's set to get worse. Much worse:

The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole.

By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state.

That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal.

For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?

Quite.

Sooner or later it will all just crash. And that will hurt.

Proposition 8 passed in California, defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Who backed it? People like these:

There are so many other groups in the exit polling that voted for Prop 8 overwhelmingly (as in, more than 60%):

   * The elderly (65+)
   * Republicans
   * Conservatives
   * People who decided for whom to vote in October (but not within the week before the election)
   * People who were contacted by the McCain campaign
   * Protestants
   * Catholics
   * White Protestants
   * Those who attend church weekly
   * Married people
   * People with children under 18
   * Gun owners
   * Bush voters
   * Offshore drilling supporters
   * People who are afraid of a terrorist attack
   * People who thought their family finances were better now than 4 years ago
   * Supporters of the war against Iraq
   * People who didn't care about the age of the candidates
   * Anti-choicers
   * People who are from the "Inland/Valley" region of California
   * McCain voters

So who best to blame for delivering this seemingly rather clear message to those who support 'same-sex' marriage'?

Why, of course, those uppity blacks:

Although many of the state's black political leaders spoke out against Proposition 8, an exit poll of California voters showed that black voters favored the measure by a ratio of more than 2 to 1.

Not only was the black vote weighted heavily in favor of Proposition 8, but black turnout -- spurred by Barack Obama's historic campaign for president -- was unusually large, with African Americans making up roughly 10% of the state electorate.

Maybe the real problem for the same-sex marriage proponents is that out of some 22 million eligible voters in California, fewer than five million people voted No against Proposition 8?