Blogoir: October

Every time I swing past Keith Hennessey's site I am struck by how fine a job he does in explaining complex big things.

Look at his vivid account of how different graphs can be used to show supposed improvements in the US jobs market - and the real-life numbers of jobs being gained or lost.

Somewhere in the bowels of my mind I remember O-level maths about measuring the rate of change of the rate of change (ie the way a car accelerates). Yes folks, that 'differentiation' is back. Politicians beware:

Trivial changes in the slope of the line are not worthy of Presidential comment.  When he does comment on them, he creates a faulty impression and exposes himself to the risk that the number will again change and force him to change his message, as the Administration had to do last Friday.

Listening to sundry BBC interviews with sundry intolerant Anti-Fascists trying to disrupt the Question Time programme tonight, I started to think about something my Catholic friend mentioned yesterday, namely the Death of Common Sense.

Here is one well-travelled account of his (sic) tragic end.

And there's the book:

But the issue we talked about yesterday perhaps is rather different.

Namely that common sense requires things to be believed which are (a) common (in the sense of being widely shared), but also (b) not really questioned too much.

And that society as an idea rests on some shared 'common sensey' assumptions, for in their absence there can be little except restless uncertainty and therefore moral and political instability.

Now we look to have a tsunami of politically correct ideological collectivist bossiness, coupled with secularisation and an Internet-driven free-for-all in which truth and lies and rubbish and value all slosh around looking for buyers.

Anything and everything is questioned, non-stop.

That has to be a mighty force for driving out anything common at all between people.

Thus, the Questions.

Do modern societies which believe in a fully free market of ideas carry the seeds of their own decay, as there is less and less 'common' to help keep people together?

Does giving a high-profile platform to people whose claim to fame is not their logic and honesty but rather their sheer emotional intensity (BNP-style racists, extreme Greens, Muslim radicals) empower them and reduce common sense still further?

Do those communities where sheer intensity of Belief prevails over Reason have an edge these days?

And, finally, do the people who vote for the BNP do so in part because they feel that somewhere, somehow they are being stripped of their common sense without quite grasping how or why it is happening? 

The decision by the Catholic Church to create a formula to allow Anglicans to join the Catholic Church but keep some of their Anglican persona is a stunner.

Above all, because it represents the latest move in a Great Negotiation which has proceeded for some 500 years as between Rome and the English Church. Who answers to whom, and why? And who gets the valuable property portfolio? How best to effect this move itself has been the subject of learned theological manoeuvring for well over a century. 

But it is astonishing also because the current Pope performed this move in a crude but tough power-play sort of way.

He concluded that the current Archbishop of Canterbury and the Anglican Church had lost authority to the point where the Catholic Church could 'just do it' by announcing both a plan and a quite new outcome, rather than painstakingly carry on haggling over it for, say, a few more decades.

Remarkable.

Try this beyond awesome line from the Times (emphasis added):

Meanwhile, the Church of England will recapture the moral high ground in the eyes of the secular, English-speaking world by consecrating women bishops. It might even liberalise its position on homosexuality.

Exactly.

The Church of England has decided - after generations of feebly trying to please everyone - to go for the Moral High Ground of the decadent and vapid secular English-speaking world which has no moral reference points at all and, indeed, specifically asserts that in principle no such moral reference points can exist.

Because it's all relative, see?

But from that rather unlofty moral high ground vantage point rump Anglicanism will have a good but dwindling view as the Pope tidies up some loose ends to get the planet's growing Catholic/Christian world in better shape to tackle the Muslim challenge.

Now that's what I call a real Negotiation. With, say, another 1000 years or so to go before our distant descendants can decide who's winning.

In the meantime, we have merely joy. And a forlorn Archbishop of Canterbury.

Yesterday I heard an exultant Catholic friend say that the Anglican Church now looked like a lollypop left in the sun on a park bench:

"Soon all there'll be left will be a stick with a damp stain on the end".

Update: Have a look at the various links here at First Things where the Anchoress is following the issue much more closely than I ever can.

I like her reference to distinctions between the churches that teach the era throughout the faith, and those that teach the faith throughout the age.

Liam Murray does a good job in suggesting how British National Party leader Nick Griffin might best present himself on TV tonight when he joins a controversial BBC Question Time panel.

The excellent point being that if the other panellists want to be seen to show Griffin up as a nasty extremist, they need to prepare for his best, blandly friendly style and think of ways of dealing with that lest they look the more aggressive and unpleasant.

Somehow Liam's posting made me think of the final second round TV debate between Presidential candidates Donald Tusk and Lech Kaczynski in Poland in 2005.

The Left-populist Andrzej Lepper had been eliminated in the first round, and his (mainly poor) voters were likely to incline to Kaczynski. Instead of trying to woo them in his own direction, Tusk made a serious mistake in excitedly accusing Kaczynski of being the sort of extremist who would attract such low-life support.

This allowed Kaczynski to say something to the effect of "Look, millions of Poles have suffered during Communism and the transition from it. We need to bring these deprived people in to the political mainstream, not insult and marginalise them!"

Kaczynski that night came across as much the bigger man. And won the election handily.  

Is it a good idea to bring the BNP into a respectable TV debating format like this?

I don't watch TV (much) so I have no real view. There is no prospect at all of the BNP achieving anything other than marginal nuisance value, so it probably won't make much difference. UKIP is much more of a threat to all mainstream political parties, yet life goes on.

Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is on the panel tonight. I recall a senior FCO official telling a meeting of UK Ambassadors that "of course Jack Straw is sensitive to Muslim concerns - he comes from a Muslim constituency".

By which he meant that Straw represents a Christian 'White British' constituency with a sizeable but by no means decisive Muslim community in it, namely Blackburn.

If there is one thing which annoys ordinary folk, it is the idea that 'their' reality and values are being defined by the presence in their midst of a lively ethnic minority, especially a community whose loyalties are not always clear.

Maybe something for the patronising British chattering classes to mull over as they work out what the BNP 'really' represents?

For those readers interested in Funny British Ways, here is another one.

We here have a body called the Press Complaints Commission which presides over a Code of Practice giving some rather specific guidleines on how the 'press' whould behave. Here they are.

If a member of the public is unhappy with the way a media outlet has behaved, s/he may complain to the PCC. If the complaint is upheld:

5. Complaint upheld

If the Commission concludes that the Code has been breached (and the breach has not - or cannot - be remedied) it will uphold your complaint in a public ruling. The newspaper or magazine is obliged to publish the critical ruling in full and with due prominence. This is a serious outcome for any editor and puts down a marker for future press behaviour.

Quite why this is a 'serious' outcome for any editor is not quite clear to me.

But if you are unhappy with the PCC you can complain about them too, to the grandly titled Charter Commissioner - none other than my friend from my Bosnia times, Lt Gen Sir Michael Willcocks. He will make some very grand findings indeed.

I mention all this because Martin Belam looks at the PCC in the context of that Daily Mail article by Jan Moir. The PCC has seen 21,000+ complaints lodged about it.

Martin also links to this piece by Sarah Hartley on the Fifth Estate.

Am I missing something?

If newspapers want to set up Codes of Conduct on how eg they report goings-on in hospitals and schools and generally behave, with a view to meeting what they decide are 'the highest professional standards', let them get on with it.

If they then fail to meet those standards, the public will no doubt notice and make their purchasing decisions and allocate their time accordingly.

The point is that a PCC-like organisation comes from the days when there were relatively few media outlets, with relatively few ways for the public to express dissatisfaction. Thus some sort of lofty 'establishment' arrangement was needed to keep a 'balance'.

Has it worked? How would we know?

One argument might be that without the PCC the media would spiral to the bottom of the populist cess-pit. Well, some outlets would, and some would not, fighting to keep a good market share by being honest and sensible. Plus we had rampant scurrilous pamphleteering and general free-press anarchy a couple of hundred years ago and yet we survived. 

Today so much TV and newspaper output is riddled with error, dumbing-down or prejudice/bias (and perhaps it always has been) that the idea of 'high professional standards' in this sector seems somewhat far-fetched. If the PCC were tasked to deal properly with every complaint on this score, it would seize up in minutes.

Martin Belam:

Perhaps the most useful thing to come out of this will be wider public awareness of just how ineffective press self-regulation is about handling complaints on the grounds of taste and decency when widespread offence has been caused to an audience not directly involved in the story.

Indeed. Plus how many of those unhappy with the Mail on this and other counts are regular Daily Mail readers and actually buy the newspaper?

Maybe these days a storm of emails and twittering and the other phenomena of the Internet age are as good as anything else at alerting editors to a sense that maybe they have got something wrong in their output, and so risk losing readers/markets? 

In other words, no PCC 'reform' is needed? 

Instead let the so-called professional media be free to sink and/or swim and/or be obnoxious and/or make a fool of themselves.

Just like the rest of us?

Is hosted by Liberal England.

It links to some howls of denunciation of an undoubtedly unpleasant article in the Daily Mail. Including this nicely tuned sexist analysis from one Clairwil:

Consequently the repulsive, fat bitch had to haul her big, lardy, arse back to her keyboard and find some justification for rejoicing over the barely cold corpse of a dead man in his early thirties.

Such is public debate in this country these days.

Still, Max Atkinson does his best to analyse some of it.

Tory Bear does some digging on the Labour Party's zany allies in the European Parliament.

And strikes gold.

Or does he?

He is unimpressed with Mr Andrzej ("It is impossible to rape a prostitute!") Lepper:

Where to start with their leader and the sleaze, the criminal activities and the general insanity of the man. Another former communist, he has done time for assault and even demanded sexual favours for jobs in his office.

Of course I met Lepper a few times when I was Ambassador in Poland. He was a genial and wily Polish version of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, although being Polish Mr Lepper's excesses are much more genteel and do not involve shooting at voters' pets from a railway carriage.

For a few helter-skelter months Lepper was even Agriculture Minister in the Polish government, where he made a rather favourable impression on a passing House of Commons delegation. But eventually Jaroslaw Kaczynski threw him overboard, having drawn away the core of Lepper's voting base.

Alas Tory Bear is wrong to say that Labour "sit hand in hand" in Europe with Mr Lepper's Self Defence party. The empty Lepper tendency collapsed in the 2009 EP elections and they won no seats.

And is another of his targets the Troofer Giulietto Chiesa still an MEP? Apparently not.

Hmm.

As the lugubrious examination of UK MPs and their expenses drags on, the way new Parliamentary candidates are chosen attracts keen interest.

The Bracknell constituency has been selecting the Conservative candidate to run for Parliament next time round, using an Open Primary format.

Uber-blogger Iain Dale was one of the seven people who made it through the selection process to this stage. In the end he came third, behind Rory Stewart (fiercely accused by Craig Murray of being an ex-MI6 crusading neo-Con, no doubt the reason he did so badly) and the winning candidate, local doctor Phillip Lee.

Iain writes generously about the whole process here.

He links to Bracknell Blog which gives a full and fascinating account of why the different candidates appealed or not. He describes Phillip Lee's leaflet:

The front was very clear with 3 points all starting with local (local doctor, local man, local man loyal to his constituents). In his speech too I hear Local, Local, Local.

This and what was evidently a solid if not polished performance on the day won the event for Dr Lee.

What do people want from an MP? No clear answer, as different people will focus on different aspects of what the job involves (and what they think it involves and should involve). This 'open primary' process no doubt has its flaws, but it does compel candidates to put themselves forward in public in a way not done before. As Iain notes, the questions ranged wide:

We covered a huge range of issues including nuclear power, working with the local councils, Europe, Heathrow, how we would split our time between Westminster and the constituency, Trident, the euro, our personal priorities and the NHS...

Basically, there are two sorts of MP. ...

Those who arrive in Westminster to champion local interests with not necessarily much knowledge of the way Big Government in the UK and Brussels work.

And those who arrive in Westminster with a pretty good idea of how Big Government works, but less of a feel for the purely local side of things in the area they represent.

I'd be in the latter camp.

And plausible/credible/effective - or not - for that reason?

The BBC is running a radio series on FCO Valedictory Despatches, a now lost art-form in which Ambassadors gave Whitehall the benefit of their Views on leaving a post and/or leaving the Foreign Service altogether.

One of my first postings on this site described my successful late-night lunge to suppress freedom of speech and keep one of these despatches safe from the nosy public.

The programme has a website linking to some original FCO despatches obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, 'redacted' or otherwise.

Check out for example what's left of Sir Robin Renwick's from Washington in 1995 after the censoring mice got to it, and his swipe at the 'Europeanisation' of our foreign policy with its resultant unhappy attempts at positioning UK policy "somewhere between the French,Germans and Americans".

My own Valedictory telegrams were sent in profusion from three posts: Sarajevo (1998); Belgrade (2003); and Warsaw (2007). From Belgrade I sent three, one each for Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro.

The Warsaw ones issued after the new rule 'suppressing' these policy/career summaries came into effect. So I duly sent two telegrams:

-   one on the philosophical aspects of the end of communism in Europe (extracts from which readers in a world scoop here have seen: The Final Submission)

-   one describing my Lifetime Career Oscar Achievement Awards, a self-indulgent but droll list of the best and worst moments of 28 years' service. This masterpiece itself won an Oscar: The Award for the Best Final Telgram in FCO History ("brilliant")

The BBC series is well researched and should be well worth a listen if you are interested in the way diplomacy has evolved, both for better and worse, in recent decades.

Oh, and even though they have not put any of my works on the website they did interview me, so maybe I'll have a walk-on role.

Here he is, in fine form: 

This is a fascinating account of Thomas Jefferson's time in Paris as an early US diplomat before the French Revolution: an article written in 1872.

Many striking points of interest and insight.

Such as Benjamin Franklin's view of Diplomacy:

Benjamin Franklin's excellence being, that he conducted the intercourse of nations
on the principles which control men of honor and good feeling in their private business, who neither take, nor wish, nor will have an unjust advantage, and look at a point in dispute with their antagonists eyes as well as their own, never insensible to his difficulties and his scruples

Little did Franklin, one of the greatest ever philosophers and practitioners of human rights, imagine the UN Human Rights Council.

And how about the negotiations between Jefferson and John Adams with the Ambassador of Tripoli over how much the USA should pay to ransom some sailors captured by Barbary Pirates?

Different offers were available - at different costs:

• $660,000:           peace treaties with the four piratical powers
• 30,000 guineas:  permanent peace with Tripoli
• 12,500 guineas:  one year peace treaty with Tripoli, renewable annually
• $10,000:            simple payment for the 20 hostages

Each offer came with a carefully calibrated payment for the Tripoli Ambassador as the negotiating fee.

The two innocents Jefferson and Adams were somewhat stunned by this blackmail approach to international relations:

Disguising their feelings as best they could, they took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury.

The ambassador replied: It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise...

Sounds familiar?

Here - via Arts & Letters - is a fascinating article by Eric Hoover exploring how far we can identify common characteristics among the current (or any)  'young generation' which are going to echo far into the future:

Kids these days. Just look at them. They've got those headphones in their ears and a gadget in every hand. They speak in tongues and text in code. They wear flip-flops everywhere. Does anyone really understand them?

Only some people do, or so it seems. They are experts who have earned advanced degrees, dissected data, and published books. If the minds of college students are a maze, these specialists sell maps...

Figuring out young people has always been a chore, but today it's also an industry. Colleges and corporations pay experts big bucks to help them understand the fresh-faced hordes that pack the nation's dorms and office buildings.

As in any business, there's variety as well as competition. One speaker will describe youngsters as the brightest bunch of do-gooders in modern history. Another will call them self-involved knuckleheads. Depending on the prediction, this generation either will save the planet, one soup kitchen at a time, or crash-land on a lonely moon where nobody ever reads

Or is all such analysis just a big noise by crafty academics to get lucrative research bucks and large speaking fees?

As the proud owner of three Millennials oscillating wildly (a bit like their father) between self-absorbed knuckleheaditude and breezy brilliance, I need to know the answer.

The latest developments on the Torture issue - the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed - are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with the problems arising from 'tainted' foreign material.

Anticant delivers a fierce analogy:

This egregious performance reminds me of Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’ who regales his sadistic sovereign’s ear with graphic descriptions of torture and execution and then, when it transpires that the hapless alleged victim was the Mikado’s son, pleads that he in fact wasn’t there, and had merely sought to add “a touch of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” . 

If torture is OK, let’s say so forthrightly and use it ourselves unblushingly. If it’s not, let’s do everything we can to stop it, whoever is doing it. What we shouldn’t be doing is to make humbugging prevarications along the lines of “We only practice the highest standards of food hygiene, but if some of our foreign suppliers send us tainted meat we have no option but to feed it to our customers”.

Craig Murray celebrates his birthday:

If you read the Guardian report of the High Court judgement, in any other age a Minister caught behaving as appallingly as Milliband has, would have resigned. I would love to be locked in a room with the little twerp for a couple of hours to teach him about the reliability of intelligence from torture. I would have him confessing to menbership of Al-Qaida before I severed his second testicle...

Which is of course the major point. Binyam Mohammed is an innocent man whom we gave over to torture for no reason. The thousands tortured in Uzbekistan into confessing to Al-Qaida links were almost all innocent. That is just one problem with the "Torture Works" argument put forward by Britain's highest paid thug Jonathan Evans.

'Innocent' is an interesting word to use to describe Binyam Mohamed. According to Craig 'almost all' the thousands tortured in Uzbekistan were innocent. How does he sift out the guilty ones?

Here is what the Americans thought Mr Mohamed was up to:

According to the U.S. government's allegations, Osama bin Laden visited the al Farouq camp "several times" after Mohamed arrived there in the summer of 2001. The terror master "lectured Binyam Mohamed and other trainees about the importance of conducting operations against the United States." Bin Laden explained that "something big is going to happen in the future" and the new recruits should get ready for an impending event.

From al Farouq, Mohamed allegedly received additional training at a "city warfare course" in Kabul and then moved to the front lines in Bagram "to experience fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance." He then returned to Kabul, where the government claims he attended an explosives training camp alongside Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber.

Mohamed was then reportedly introduced to top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. By early 2002, the two were traveling between al Qaeda safehouses. The U.S. government alleges that Mohamed then met Jose Padilla and two other plotters, both of whom are currently detained at Guantánamo, at a madrassa. Zubaydah and another top al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, allegedly directed the four of them "to receive training on building remote-controlled detonation devices for explosives."

At some point, Padilla and Mohamed traveled to a guesthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, where they "reviewed instructions on a computer ... on how to make an improvised 'dirty bomb.'" To the extent that the allegations against Mohamed have gotten any real press, it is this one that has garnered the attention. Media accounts have often highlighted the fact that Padilla and Mohamed were once thought to be plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, but that the allegation was dropped, making it seem as if they were not really planning a strike on American soil.

Indeed, all of the charges against Mohamed were dropped last year at Guantánamo. But this does not mean that he is innocent...

Innocence in this context might mean different things, such as:

• that the suspect in fact had nothing whatever to do with the terrorist conspiracies concerned but had been wrongly charged
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but for some or other reason the case could not go to court successfully
• that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but had been cleared by a court

Anyway, my point is rather this.

That on the one hand we are urged by progressive-thinking people to believe that the UN Human Rights Council vote against Israel this week somehow represents a serious moral position adopted by a majority of honourable countries.

And that on the other hand, if HMG were to accept secret intelligence material from almost any of the countries in the majority, and perhaps any member of the Council, the same progressive-minded people would howl with indignation that we were taking evidence probably tainted by torture in the countries concerned.

Look at the list of countries which voted for that Resolution:

Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia

From which of those states would secret intelligence drawn from local interrogation of terrorist suspects not be suspected of being extracted by torture or serious brutality (insofar as there is a difference) or otherwise illegitimate 'pressure'? 

Look at the other countries who abstained or opposed or found it All Too Difficult:

Opposing:  Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, United States of America

Abstaining:  Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Uruguay

All Too Difficult:  France (plus UK)

Same question.

So, problem.

Do we close down all secret intelliegnce cooperation in the one area where we all really need it?

And if we do decide to take some risks in that sense by continuing cooperation, how to organise our procedures so that the secret sharing arrangements are not blown open by the oh-so-principled UK courts, risking the flow of inward material drying up and so putting UK lives at stake?

On this one, David Miliband made a clear and strong statement.

That it might be unpopular does not make it wrong.

A great diplomatic flurrying around the latest vote by the UN Human Rights Council in effect condemning Israel.

The resolution passed seems to be this one. The resolution welcomed the earlier Goldstone report which condemned human rights abuses by Israel and Hamas alike. But it also contained a long list of condemnations of Israel's policies, with nothing by way of 'balance'.

The vote was, as far as I can see, thus:

Reader Ken Buxton writes to point out the elegant writing and political prescience of Lawrence Durrell, author of the Alexandria Quartet.

I had a shot at that massive work years ago and reeled away defeated. But I recall a stunning, lyrical description of an early morning duck-shooting expedition. The reader reviews at Amazon give a good account of the strengths and weaknesses of the book. which is not to be attempted unless you have stamina and are keen on High Literature.

My own link with Durrell is more prosaic. From 1948-52 he had the job of Press Attache at the British Embassy in Belgrade, a position I too had many years later. And he wrote about his diplomatic experiences in a surreal style, with wit and aplomb.

So many of these short stories stand out, not least the one describing the trip to Zagreb by train across communist Yugoslavia organised for the Diplomatic Corps, where one Ambassador was knocked out by a passing railway station. And the one where the Ambassador swallowed a moth at a festive dinner for the Serbian Communist Timber Workers Collective or somesuch. 

Here it is. Buy it, and be much amused.

Remember the hard wrangling on how the so-called new EU Embassies would be set up under the Lisbon Treaty and its External Action Service?

No you don't. So look here.

Some very important issues at stake here, namely who ultimately gives the orders to these missions. Is it the EU in its purest federalistic form of the Commission? Or the member states acting through the European Council?

Or some murky compromise?

MEPs are pressing for the Commission to rule the roost. Why? Because this gives MEPs the most power over the new arrangements!

And if they do not get their way, they may block appointment of the new Commission.

An interesting and obscure and not-so-little issue with far-reaching implications for what we wistfully like to think of as 'national sovereignty'.

As usual, it is impossible to find out in any reasonable way what eg the UK national position on this might be. Since revealing it at this stage could reduce the chances of it being accepted or manoeuvred through. But insofar as most serious member states quite like having Foreign Policy kept for themselves, it is likely that we'll be unimpressed with the idea of outsourcing ultimate control to the Commission and MEPs.

I hope.

So as and when the Lisbon Treaty comes into full and final effect, a final 'deal' on this important subject will be hammered out behind closed doors between the biggest EU hitters and then presented to a bemused European public as the Answer.

Post-democratic institution-building in action. 

West Germans followed East German jokes to try to assess the popular mood under Communism, says Spiegel Online.

Such as:

What if the desert were communist? Nothing would happen. Then there'd be a sand shortage.

Droll, nein?

This time a curious and very unastonishing piece in the Spectator by Martin Bright, which uses as some vital evidence Craig Murray's long-lost fleeting relationship with Kaminski in the mid-1990s.

I have posted a comment suggesting that media bunnies might like to ask David Miliband three questions:

• did No 10 host Mr Kaminski for lunch with a passing Polish leader following the Law and Justice election win in 2005? My own memory says yes, but I might be wrong! So let's check, please
• did No 10 and the FCO urge the Embassy in Warsaw to get alongside key PiS people such as Mr Kaminski to help secure the EU Budget deal in late 2005?
• did No 10 and the FCO congratulate themselves on a fine outcome for the UK at the 2007 Lisbon Treaty talks, achieved in good part because PM Tony Blair worked so closely with President Lech Kaczynski?

What is wrong with Labour? Is this the best they can do?

Burble on about close links between the Conservatives and PiS when they themselves have worked hard to get key PiS people onside to help achieve UK Objectives?

Not so much beyond contempt as beyond bizarre.

An interesting article on how sprawling Texas is adjusting fast and creatively to energy shortages - by keeping well clear of interstate connections and therefore US federal regulations.

H/t Instapundit.

I previously linked to analysis of Russia's startlingly bad health statistics.

Last night I was down at Eton College addressing the school's busy Slavonic Society on the Psychology of Bigness, with special reference to Russia.

I used one graph from this piece to show just how grim Russia's situation is from a demographic point of view.

Have a look at the two WHO graphs plotting how mortality rates decline as a country's wealth goes up (healthier people, fewer stupid accidents, better educated people and so on).

Russia is in a league of its own: a fairly wealthy and well educated society, having catastrophic and avoidable mortality rates (deaths to younger people caused by epidemic HIV, traffic accidents, TB, chronic alcoholism, smoking and so on).

Let’s consider “external causes” of death such as injury or poisoning. In 2006, Russian death rates from external causes were almost three times higher than those states of the former Soviet bloc that joined the European Union in 2002. How does that compare with the world?

Well, in 2002, only six countries had death rates from external causes higher than 200 deaths per 100,000 people. Guess which was one of them? And just look in the next graph at the company it keeps. By these metrics, Russia’s health situation isn’t third world—it’s fourth world.

For a full and unrelentingly gloomy analysis of Russia's death crisis, read this.

Still, when it comes to acting very tough, Russia's Psychology remains indeed Big.

Does anyone have any better news?