Blogoir: May

This polemic by Simon Jenkins hits many nails on the head.

Anyone who has seen the 'international community' in action in a troublespot can not but be dismayed.

Generous tax-free salaries and fleets of expensive 4x4s contrast luridly with the surrounding poverty. Armies of local and imported female 'sex-workers' setting up camp nearby. A Cargo Cult arrival of unanticipated succour but on an unmanageable scale. Ugh.

Another feature is the capture of internationalised taxpayers' money by different interest groups and factions not subject to normal processes of common sense.

No-one in any international body dares say that some things are just more important than other things. That would be Judgmental! Reactionary. Divisive. Or whatever.

A few years ago when I visited the UNMIK office in the sad shabby divided town of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo, there in the outer office of the senior local UN official was a bored-looking woman from Africa, assigned to the office at a senior level to monitor 'gender issues'.

Everyone else there knew that in practice, given what was going on in Mitrovica (periodic ethnic battles beside and across the bridge), she had nothing to do.

But there she sat, self-importantly doing nothing, being paid a large tax-free salary which might have gone to helping a good selection of poor people, eg in Mitrovica.

As Simon Jenkins says, it is extraordinary that HMG give so much of our taxpayers' money to organisations whose accounting practices and general transparency are so far below what HMG structures themselves have to accept.

Is one way forward the emerging US idea of a new 'League of Democracies', to try to bring to international processes some healthy - or at least healthier - accountability?

Former UN official Shashi Tharoor tries to persuade us that this is a Very Bad Idea:   

... the reason that decisions of the UN enjoy legitimacy across the world lies not in the democratic virtue of its members, but in its universality. The fact that every country in the world belongs to the UN and participates in its decisions gives the actions of the UN - even that of a security council in urgent need of reform - a global standing in international law that no more selective body can hope to achieve. This is the time to renovate and strengthen the UN, not to bypass it. 

But as he must know, the fact that so many undemocratic and corrupt regimes have serious influence via the UN is in itself a major obstacle to reform in the direction he claims to want.

Regimes which make no serious claim at all to be upholding human rights sit on UN Human Rights groupings. This 'legitimises' bad behaviour and blocks progress. The African voting bloc closes ranks to stop any meaningful voting on African candidates to the key UN Human Rights Council. Such manoeuvring combined with the cynical obstruction of Russia and China is condemning millions of Zimbabweans to disaster. 

Institutional reform? No way! Too many governments need to keep the organisation over-staff and wastefully run to win lucrative UN appointments as a form of patronage.

Western taxpayers are obliged to pay for all this, and then nagged to fork out for huge 'development assistance' to these regimes as well.

See also this unusual coincidence of US and UN views on the suffering in Burma. The USA generously has made available resources no-one else can deploy to help the cyclone victims. The Burmese regime's UN-legitimised socialist paranoia is condemning thousands of people to likely death and disease.

Should we continue to accept that this UN and all the other offshoots of it are the best of all options, albeit coming with a puny prospect of 'renovating and strengthening' themselves?

No.

It will all crash at some point, of course.

In our networked world, popular and populist opposition to the double whammy absence of reasonable accountability and reasonable efficiency will tend to grow . Especially from those compelled to pay for it.

The fact that at least some victims of murderous regimes can now make cheap mobile calls to the UN Security Council to scream for help as their killers approach no doubt will help focus minds.

For a few minutes of portentous debate. Then all those grandly excellent but deadlocked diplomats repair to their tax-free UN bars, to muse amicably on the world's wickedness.

I happen to think not. Or rather my instinct tells me that that is not what is best for the UK.

Maybe this boils down to an aesthetic point of view rather than an economic or political one?

On the economic merits, this article by Martin Wolf sums up my view on the merits much more cogently than I can.

Let's stay flexible.

In any case, the proponents of Eurozone entry face horrendous obstacles for the foreseeable future.

They would have to call a referendum.

A sizeable bloc of voters would say No for primal Eurosceptic reasons.

A further bloc would say No because they were persuaded on the merits that No was the better option.

And another sizeable bloc would say No to anything, simply to oppose whatever the government of the day proposed.

Who would want to bet on getting a Yes majority under those circumstances? And waste precious political capital trying to do so?

You may well be wondering how many countries have formally recognised the independence of Kosova (or Kosovo as HMG call it).

Here is what looks like a pretty comprehensive list.

Thus as of the end of May 2008 Kosovo's independence has been recognised by (only?) 42 out of 192 UN member states. But those states comprise 69.48% of global GDP!

China, India, Russia, Nigeria and Brazil have not recognised Kosovo's independence, so as well as a heavy majority of the world's states a heavy majority of the globe's population as represented by their governments are (as of now) either sitting on the fence or siding with the Serb view.

Which explains the heavy manoeuvring by some countries at the United Nations to block the EU from taking the lead role in Kosovo. 

The EU plans to move into and build up an independent new state. Many UN members insist that Kosovo's status is at best unclear, and want the existing UK presence there (UNMIK) to remain as a strong symbol of that point of view. 

A messy compromise may be emerging? But it is not a pretty sight.

Prompted by my previous post on (not) talking to Al Qaida, a reader comments:

[T]ell me again why you thought invading Iraq was such a great idea?

Fair enough.

My very basic view on Iraq is to be found in the Blogoir FAQs.

More generally, what constitutes a Great Idea in this context?

Which of these policy decisions would now qualify as a Great Idea? Thus:

• The Russian Revolution
• Stalin agreeing with Hitler the Molotov/Ribbentrop Pact
• UK/French Suez intervention
• Resisting communist aggression in the Korean War
• Resisting communist aggression in the Vietnam War
• Not intervening by force to resolve the Cyprus partition
• (Not) boycotting the 1980 Moscow Olympics
• (Not) boycotting the 1884 Los Angeles Olympics
• (Not) boycotting the 2008 Beijing Olympics
• Welcoming Mugabe's rise to power in Zimbabwe
• French sabotage attack on Rainbow Warrior
• Reagan/Thatcher standing firm against Soviet protests about 'neutron bomb' deployments in the 1980s
• President Clinton's 1998 bombing of targets in Sudan/Afghanistan
• Blocking Alaskan oil exploration
• Not intervening by force earlier in the Bosnia conflict
• Not intervening by force earlier in the Rwanda conflict
• Kosovo intervention
• 9/11 attack by Al Qaida
• Iraq intervention

As time passes these episodes start to look and feel ... different. Aspects of their value (or harm) which were not apparent or not seen as significant at the time become clearer, or at least assume greater prominence in history's eye.

Sometimes the long-term implications are very long-term. The Russian Revolution and WW2 as started by Stalin's deal with Hitler transformed Russia, but have scary demographic legacies now.

Mugabe began well. Then went Very Bad.

Olympic boycotts capture a moment. But have no lasting impact.

Episodes which look especially fatuous in hindsight are those which may have had some sort of policy justification (at least as seen by those driving them), but were Just Done Badly. Suez, Rainbow Warrior.

And policies howlingly condemned at the time (Reagan/Thatcher v the Soviets) now look like exemplary statesmanship.

Some policies done for sound reasons in one policy area may turn out to create other vulnerabilities (Alaskan oil)

Some policies abruptly shift the course of events into a different track, for better or worse: Kosovo.

Sometimes it is said to be a Great Idea to do nothing. But our doing nothing allows others to do something. This leads sometimes to painful/expensive stalemates (Cyprus, Nagorno Karabakh), sometimes to disaster (Srebrenica, Rwanda, Burma).

It is easy (and correct) enough to attack the Iraq intervention on many counts. There have been positive aspects too. And timescale needs to be borne in mind.

One of the worst leaders of our times was toppled and executed.

Iraq alone in the region has a chance to evolve in a pluralistic direction.

The Islamic world is having to look hard at modernising its attitudes.

And thousands of terrorists have been killed, even if they in turn have killed many more thousands of Iraqis.

So, a mixed picture. As usual.

Or not.

When the remaining Al Qaida leadership peep out of their remote squalid caves in darkest night and wonder if a Killer Drone has spotted them from a control centre thousands of miles away, do they say "Yup, 9/11 sure was a great idea"?

Sooner or later we may need to 'think the unthinkable' and talk to Al Qaida, according to senior UK police officer Sir Hugh Orde, who cites the IRA precedent.

Meanwhile Al Qaida is said to be in retreat, according to the head of the CIA:

But now, Mr Hayden said, al-Qaeda was losing the battle for hearts and minds in the Islamic world. He said there was a growing public resentment toward jihadism, and described the insurgency in Iraq as "more and more a war of al-Qaeda against Iraqis".

I don't like the analogy between talking to the IRA and talking to Al Qaida. The IRA had a motley assortment of essentially rationalist lumpen-Marxist nationalistic aims which in outcome terms (ie a new union of some sort between Northern Ireland and Eire) were not in themselves philosphically objectionable, even if terrorist killings were used to pursue those aims.

The aims of Al Qaida are - by our standards - utterly philosophically objectionable.

The mass forced subjugation of women. Widepread Islamic rule via a 'caliphate'. A new 'final solution' for Israel. And above all no vision whatsoever for a modern society that actually works:

... the conception of world order promoted by Bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists suffers from a fatal flaw that no thinker has been able to overcome. Islamic fundamentalists have been very good at highlighting and analyzing the weakness, backwardness, and problems afflicting current Islamic societies. They have also been good at proposing their own solutions--but very bad at the details. They have no Islamic model to hold up as appropriate for this day and age.

The Islamic Republic of Iran cannot be a model, because it is a Shia state, whose trajectory has been very different from those of its Arab neighbors. Moreover, the Ayatollah Khomeini's central political idea, the rule of the religious jurisprudent, constituted an innovation even in Shia thought, and it has been under constant challenge since his death in 1989.

Sudan is not a model either. It is a poor country, whose Islamic political system has not been able to withstand the tensions between the army, under President Omar al Bashir, and the Islamists, under the suave, Sorbonne-educated Hasan al-Turabi.

Usama Bin Laden and his followers, and many other Islamic fundamentalists as well, can cause disorder and conflict with and among the West and its allies in the Islamic world; indeed, they can widen the chasm between the two sides. But it is not likely that they will be able to implement an alternative order that can constitute a successful challenge.

So, question.

What might we actually talk to Al Qaida about?

A haggle over how to split the difference between the world of C21 and the world of C14? Do a deal on which corrupt Arab regimes to topple so as to spread purer and even less competent Islamic rule?

Negotiate whose ships will transport all Israelis somewhere else? Al Qaida's plans for dealing with the money supply and carbon offset? New techniques for executing homsexuals?

In the Irish context Sir Hugh opines about extremist republicans:

"A cornered animal lashes out, and these people are cornered. They are not wanted by their community, they've got nowhere to go."

Why not work together to corner Al Qaida? And hope the Americans come to blow up that corner?

If those in the corner then squeal quickly that they surrender, maybe then comes the time to talk to them - about that unconditional surrender, and that alone?

Update: If someone hits you really hard, do you negotiate or 'talk'? Or hit him back, even harder, to catch his attention?  Going quite well so far?

On the subject of Pollarding, the case of Jonathan (Jay) Pollard is interesting.

Basically, JP in 1986 was sentenced to life imprisonment in the USA for spying for Israel. He is still in prison, despite the generally close US/Israel relationship and numerous public and private requests by Israel at the highest level to have him released. The Wikipedia entry and 'his' website give plenty of background.

The problem for Pollard is the sheer volume of material he passed to the Israelis - the 'agencies' insist that an example be made of him, warning successive Presidents very bluntly against Pollard's release.

His wife in turn campaigns tirelessly for his release, although some her arguments (eg that he was an Ideologue, not a Mercenary) are surely not exactly smart?

My interest in this?

I was a student contemporary of Jay Pollard at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, from 1977-79.

This was a period deep in the Cold War, with Fletcher known then for hosting some hawkish anti-communist academics who warned in an unfashionable but - as it turned out - prescient way of nationalist tensions in the communist world and the like.

Pollard was very much part of a hard-line 'bombs and missiles' group of US students who would argue over lunch that the USA should have used tactical nukes to win the Vietnam war. 

One of this group's favourite pieces of kit was a circular slide-rule needed by would-be Bombers and Missilers to measure the devastation likely to be caused by nuclear and other massive explosions according to such factors as (a) size of explosion, (b) density of buildings and (c) local population. At a student fancy dress party one of them came dressed in a costume made up as one of these slide-rules. Cool, huh?

When the CIA and other agencies came for recruitment awaydays, Pollard was in the queue. He signed up with Naval Intelligence. The rest is history.

When I visited the Fletcher School again in 1999 during my sabbatical year at Harvard I met some students and mentioned Fletcher's most infamous graduate. None of them knew that he had been at FSLD. Maybe Pollard never formally completed his degree there, so has been quietly airbrushed out of the School's history?

Fletcher students! Remember the Pollard case!

And, if you have to end up as a spy, be a bit more modest than Jay was in what you hand over to the other side.

Controversy rages (zzzzz) over plans (or not) for the EU to have its own Embassies within the new External Action Service.

As previously described, this proposal of course is being hotly debated in Brussels, not least because hundreds of EU officials' jobs as currently funded are at stake.

This latest report looks like more of the same, with the European Parliament pressing for some sort of decisive say'in the appointment of 'EU Ambassadors', so as to create implicitly or explicitly a new source of collective European uber-legitimacy for the whole project at the expense of national sovereignty.

Note the crafty phrasing by the Foreign Secretary's spokesman:

Mr Miliband had told the Commons that work would not begin until the treaty had been ratified by Parliament and entered force next year. "There have been no discussions at ministerial or working level on the detailed organisation and functioning of the EEAS," he said on Feb 28 ...

... A spokesman for Mr Miliband said: "This is Tory fiction. Nothing in the allegation or reality contradicts the Foreign Secretary's February statement.

"While the commission or member states may draw up or circulate ideas for an external action service those ideas will have no status until they are agreed by all member states including the UK. There will be no final agreement until ratification is complete."

What this breezily glosses over is the fact that numerous detailed proposals are now sloshing around, some of which will have significant de facto authority. Whether they have gone to EU Working Groups or Ministers formally or informally or otherwise have 'status' is beside the point - heads of steam will be building up behind various ideas (some of course HMG will like and be pushing), so that when they do enter the system 'officially' they can be pushed through more easily.

But it is clear that unless we like the outcome we can block it, and that our partners know that. Just as we know that if they do not like what we want, they can block.

So as usual it comes down to two simple questions.

How tough are we prepared to be on the day?

And what do we (the UK) actually want?

A very important issue. Being discussed and debated in the UK in an honest open way?

No.

Tim Worstall (again!) links to a couple of examples of Pollard-like behaviour, namely hiding messages in a seemingly normal text.

This has been done in the FCO too, of course. Telegrams have been sent with the first or last letter of each new line spelling out a cryptic message.

Plus there was one post which tried to send as many animal metaphors as possible in its telegrams, preferably in as unobtrusive a way as possible:

• lion's share
• a difficulty not easy to bear
• the problem has been dogging us ...

It all passes the time as one pecks away at the dull official keyboard.

Examples please, FCO colleagues! 

Following my post about Russia's dire demographic trends along comes this sad story about suicides in the Russian armed forces.

All armies have these problems and do their best to play down the problem. The British Army in Bosnia had a significant number of suicides. One theory had it that better communications with friends and family back home made it more likely that bad news (eg break-up of relationship) would arrive with much more 'immediacy' and cause greater depression among the troops on the ground than might have happened before email and cheap telephone calls.

Plus, alas, shorter rifles made it easier...

That said, the Soviet Army had a richly deserved reputation for brutality against its own people.

I recall a Queen's Messenger telling me how he had seen a Soviet troop train at the station in Outer Mongolia. The troops were being transported in cattle trucks, poorly equipped. When a VIP arrived at the station a screaming officer had beaten at the soldiers with a stick to get them to lie down and not be seen, so shameful was their condition.

Traditions take a long time to change.

Update: the BBC quickly follows this story with one about US military suicides. Balance!

What is the significance of these stories anyway?

Someone must know how these suicide rates compare with the 'normal' suicide rates of young people across the USA. The US army is Big as is the Russian army - how many suicides might be expected 'on average' in each country among a civilian population of that size and age/gender profile? 

A nice observation from Tim Worstall this morning on why speculators send us all the right signals.

Money is great for buying much-needed gardening equipment and the like. But more importantly it is the ultimate information system.

Reflecting the accumulated choices of trillions of daily free transactions, money tells you everything you need to know about the relative value of things and activities - and their likely value in the future.

As Tim Worstall says, "Pretty good system? Eh?"

Indeed. Even if sometimes it tells you things about yourself which you really don't want to hear...

A report by Russian experts under UNDP auspices makes grim reading on Russia's demographic problems.

Basically, Russia has a uniquely dire set of trends combining to reduce fertility rates and increase mortality rates, leading to a notably shrinking - and ageing -population:

• demographic ripples from the massive loss of men in WW2
• low respect for human life
• absurdly cheap cigarettes and alcohol
• high abortion rates
• high traffic accident and murder and suicide rates (especially among younger men)
• popular hostility to immigration from elsewhere in the former Soviet Union
• surging AIDS/HIV numbers (1000 reported cases in 1997, over 400,000 cases in 2007)
• bad urban pollution
• and many others

It is fashionable in some quarters to blame these phenomena on allegedly capitalist 'shock therapy' following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But this careful analysis shows that the various effects arising from those changes (high unemployment, more cars, more 'marginalisation') have merely accentuated earlier trends which developed because of negative communist-era policies and attitudes.

The overall - and staggering - result? 

Russia is one of the few countries in the world where life expectancy has decreased in comparison to 1960s levels.

Not enough babies being born, too many unnecessary deaths (especially among younger men), 'social' illnesses killing off millions of people each year.

The authors propose various measures aimed at changing policies and attitudes but seemingly do not hold out much hope that a significant difference can be made.

Above all there seem to be simply too few young men and women around in Russia now to have children on the scale needed to change birth rates for the better, even if those young people were minded to have families and children on a notably higher scale than now.

Thus Russia appears to be on track to have something like 'only' 100 million people in forty years' time.

Not that Europe has anything to be smug about:

Unfortunately, the assumption of family duties by the state allows people to free ride on the fertility of others—which they seem to be trying to do in massive numbers.  As we've mentioned before, a society where everyone tries to free ride on everyone else is headed for disaster.  Europe's safety nets, or at least the pension systems, may contain the seeds of their own destruction.

Fascinating to see how Cause and Effect relentlessly work their way down the decades.

Tragedy is said to be unfolding within the UK Labour Party.

Phil Collins (former speechwriter for Tony Blair) with Richard Reeves argue that the Party has lost touch with its liberal tradition.

The full text is in Prospect (subscription only). But the core thought is here:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

And this:

Brown and his allies retain a benign view of the power of the central, expert state to build a fairer, better society.

Hmm.

A bit hard to blame all this on Gordon Brown after Tony Blair spent years announcing one new 'initiative' after another?

The authors go on to propose all sorts of different schemes which they claim to be unreservedly 'liberal':

Liberals have always insisted that actions become subject to legal sanctions if they harm others. It is now irrefutable that the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly by rich nations, is causing climatic changes which will harm those in the low-lying, equatorial nations, which are mostly poor: a clear form of "passive killing."

... A new liberal fiscal policy would be based on two clear principles. First, tax "bads" (like carbon) not "goods" (like work). Second, tax "unearned" rather than "earned" income ... The riches flowing from inheritance or soaring house values should be taxed more heavily than at present. While people should be able to take some increase in the value of their house free of tax—up to, for example, what they could have received from a risk-free investment like a gilt—anything above that should be subject to substantial taxation.

Hard to know where to start demolishing all this.

Is not the 'active killing' of their own citizens by many equatorial nations through deliberate repression (Zimbabwe) or sheer socialistic incompetence (Burma, N Korea) a much more immediate problem than long-term environmental risks?

Why should inheriting a family house be treated as 'income'?

If the problem is a neurotic 'authoritarian' insistence on state power, surely the best thing to do is cut taxes and ergo cut the state's role?

And what about the UK's soaring contributions to the European Union, a major multiplier of high-level meddling, waste and regulation?

Above all, why are the Labour Party's agonies a 'tragedy'? It is not a 'tragedy' that CD sales decline while on-line music sales rise. That's simply the result of better options emerging, even if those who have banked on CD sales face some tough times.

Thus the Labour Party's misery is in fact a valuable market signal, telling us all that the accumulated policies and taxes of Blairism and Brownism are not working.

The real tragedy lies in the fact that such stunning sums of money have been wasted by Labour in finding this out, as Labour's own Denis MacShane bravely acknowledges:

I do not know of a single minister who privately does not despair at the waste of money on pointless projects, publications, or legions of press officers that add no value. The taxpayer has given more than £1 billion of aid to India, even though that great country has more billionaires and millionaires than Britain and runs its own well-financed development aid programme. I was baffled as Europe minister to be told I had to waste 90 minutes being quizzed by a consultant when the kindly but shrewd tea ladies in King Charles Street knew what needed to be done. How much was paid to the consultant? What happened to his report? No one in Whitehall knows or cares.

Madness.

All that said, Collins/Reeves are on to something important.

Many government processes exist simply because they reflect clunky information flow options of many decades ago.

It now is possible to give citizens a far greater say in how their money is spent, and how much of it they want spent on 'collective' purposes. The role of government surely has to move from 'controlling' processes to setting reasonable but flexible frameworks and incentives for shared private differentiated action.

Unfortunately far too many vested state-funded interests are now far too well established to let this happen without serious and painful disruptions.

Incoming.

Some things just need to be pointed out for the edification of us non-Americans.

Thus yesterday Syracuse beat John Hopkins 13-10 in the NCAA men's lacrosse final.

So what?

Only that a crowd of 49,000 people watched the match.

Blimey.

HT: Power Line

Back in February I wrote about Communism and Nazism as the two vampires, asking which was worse.

Ayn Rand back in 1946 through the words of Ellsworth Toohey, uber-collectivist, explains it all in a brilliant passage:

Remember the Roman Emperor who said he wished humanity had a single neck so he could cut it? People have laughed at him for centuries. But we'll have the last laugh. We've accomplished what he couldn't accomplish. We've taught men to unite. This makes one neck ready for one leash.

We found the magic word. Collectivism.

Look at Europe, you fool. Can't you see past the guff and recognize the essence?

One country is dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the collective is all. The individual held as evil, the mass — as God. No motive and no virtue permitted — except that of service to the proletariat. That's one version.

Here's another. A country dedicated to the proposition that man has no rights, that the State is all. The individual held as evil, the race — as God. No motive and no virtue permitted — except that of service to the race.

Am I raving or is this the cold reality of two continents already? Watch the pincer movement. If you're sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going. We've closed the doors. We've fixed the coin. Heads — collectivism, and tails — collectivism.

Fight the doctrine which slaughters the individual. Give up your soul to a council — or give it up to a leader. But give it up, give it up, give it up.

My technique, Peter. Offer poison as food and poison as antidote. Go fancy on the trimmings, but hang on to the main objective. Give the fools a choice, let them have their fun — but don't forget the only purpose you have to accomplish.

Kill the individual. Kill man's soul.

The rest will follow automatically...

Next time you here someone insisting that Communism was 'basically a good idea, but carried out badly', throw that back.

Then read Anne Applebaum on the subject.

Back from New York. Getting there via JFK airport was an experience.

On the plane I filled in the usual visitor entry forms plus customs form using the only pen I had with me, namely a red-ink Pilot Vball.

When we reached the immigration officer my heart sank. He had the look of someone who was not there to help people Enjoy Life.

"Do you usually fill out legal documents in red ink?" he asked, his eyes glittering.

"Er no, but it was the only pen I had," I replied.

"You're not allowed to fill out these forms in red ink," came the acid reply.

I had wondered about this, but as the form gave detailed instructions on everything except the colour of the ink I had pressed on.

So I boldly hit back: "But the form does not say that you can't".

"It does not say that you can use red ink!" came the reply, as a cobra with a migraine warning a mouse to stand to attention to make the ensuing dinner pass less confrontationally.

"It does not say that you can use black ink either," I observed.

He stared at me as if I were insane. In deep pain he took up his black biro from its position next to a large plastic container full of flourescently coloured sugary candies. And he went through the whole form line by line inking over my red ink in black ink.

"Seems to me that makes it all a lot harder to read," I helpfully pointed out.

I was handed the black biro to sign my name over the earlier red version, which I did. The form now was a mess.

Then at last ... we were thru.

So much bureaucratic life is like this - people getting bored and slumping into meaningless procedure which inconveniences everyone including themselves and actually makes the end-product worse.

Had the immigration officer in this case said firmly but with a smile "Hey bud, use black ink next time OK?" the whole process would have gone faster. He would have made his point, and the actual form left with the US side would have been legible.

And he would have been happier in himself and in his work.

Or maybe they use scanners to 'read' all these forms so that dark ink really is necessary? If so, why not say so on the form and indeed to us to explain why we unintentionally had made life difficult?

As previously noted, this question of how to train/motivate public servants to have the right attitude ought to be at the heart of public administration. But it isn't.

Whatever.

We went to MoMA and saw the wonderful Steinberg drawings.

Back in New York, so re-reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

The blurb on the back of my Harper Collins edition describes the book as being all about 'ambition, power, gold and love'.

Not really. Did they read it?

This is the best book about Freedom and Communism, a rambling complex philosphical novel on a vast scale. It pits the Ultimate Individualist (Howard Roark, architect, uncompromiser) against the Ultimate Collectivist (Ellsworth Toohey, writer, collector of souls).

It is set mainly in the New York of the 1920s and 1930s. It opens with the defiant young Roark being thrown out of Architecture School for refusing to accept that the Classical idiom of pillars, mantels, grapes and other forms of such decoration and proportion is the only true one:

Your Greeks took marble and they made copies of their wooden structures out of it, because others had done it that way. Then your masters of the Renaissance came along and made copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Now here we are making copies in steel and concrete of copies in plaster of copies in marble of copies in wood. Why?

The Dean of the school is aghast. He asks Roark if he intends to design buildings in the 'modern' style Roark advocates:

Yes

My dear fellow, who will let you?

That's not the point. The point is, who will stop me?

Roark goes on to deride and defeat those architects who wanted to design the powerful new hotels and skscrapers of New York using all those Grecian and other classical motifs. His vision rather was sleek but finely proportioned buildings whose coherence emerged from the site and the materials used.

The architecture metaphor in the book is of course a vehicle for Ayn Rand (born a Russian) to describe the supreme ideological battle between Roark and Toohey - she was wriiting at a time when collectivist Nazis and Stalinists were enslaving and murdering millions of people across Europe.

Anyway, I conclude that although he articulates an admirably pure, unashamedly individual freedom Roark was not quite right on his architectural vision.

There is room in society for the eccentric and the misguided. The ridiculous kitschy mish-mash of styles indeed seen in many of the older New York skyscrapers gives them and the city its wonderful exotic charm now. Without all those brooding gargoyles and dazzling art deco designs poised far above the streets, Batman and Spiderman imagery would be far less potent.

I am off to New York for a few days.

When and why do places like New York decay and then recover?

Radical thinking plays a part in it:

almost all modern revolutions, from the Jacobins to the Nazis and the Communists, have ended with the streets running with blood, because murder has been at their heart, rather than an incidental means to an end. For revolutionary leaders like Stalin, “the really great prize of power was unobstructed enjoyment of murder,” while the revolutionary masses in turn “loved the man strong enough to take blood guilt on himself. For them an elite must prove itself in this ability to murder ...

... when a revolutionary elite calls for the overturning of restraints and the trashing of culture, it can end in something still worse—in the elite’s seizing control of the government and unleashing against some of its own citizens the very same murderous violence that government theoretically exists to curb.

But in such situations as in normal politics, the mass of people can realise that somehow, somewhere, things have just gone Wrong.

And when that happens, they make their views known in a rather brisk way.

Let's hear it for the rock band which extols the virtues of:

(a) Soviet Comunism; and

(b) B Obama

Doesn't post-modern irony sometimes go ... just a bit too far?

Read this remarkable piece by Ben Macintyre about the huge collection of papers and other material deliberately buried by heroic Polish Jews during the Warsaw Ghetto disaster of WW2.

They knew what they were doing:

The compilers of this archive knew they were doomed, and framed their project as an act of intellectual resistance to totalitarianism. “History is usually written by the victor,” wrote one of the team. “Should our murderers be victorious, should they write the history of this war, our destruction will be presented as one of the most beautiful pages of world history. Or they may wipe out our memory altogether.”

In Warsaw there is a fine collection of rare coins, including wonderful early English examples. This collection too was buried as the Nazis attacked (if I recall correctly under the National Museum itself), only to be thought lost but unearthed after Communism ended when someone (now elderly) involved in the plan came forward to describe the hiding place.

And remember Kragujevac in Serbia, where the Nazis rounded up many hundreds men and boys and executed them. They too knew they were doomed and wrote messages to their families on the scraps of paper they had with them. Many of those messages are on display in the museum. Unbearably awful and poignant.

Maybe this explains why so much of modern politics is so unforgiving.

The winners want to control the Present so as to control the Future and the Past alike. A lot at stake.

Gerard Baker in the Times today makes a weighty case against Hillary and why Democratic voters have rejected her.

So she should be put out of her misery: It would not be sexism or chauvinism but the clear-headed decision of a wise statesman, if Senator Obama brought this particular woman's presidential hopes to an unmourned end.

Sounds good? Yes.

But it's not true. Voters haven't, or at least they have not done so in any decisive way.

Look at Real Clear Politics analysis of the actual vote counts so far. Obama is ahead by only some 500,000 votes from 33 million so far cast.

Which maybe explains why Hillary Clinton battles on.

Facts. Nothing like em.