"Move along folks, nothing to see from all those leaked climate emails" say various people, such as these. And these.

Well some people want to linger to look more closely at the wreckage. Where they seem to spot three serious issues:

• moves to prevent publication of rival views
• manipulation/massaging of data to present a preferred result
• deliberate activities to prevent FOI enquiries being successful (Note: if proven, a devastating blow to the credibility of the people involved and to some extent to the credibility of their climate arguments)

Seems to me from what I have read so far that there is a serious case to answer here.

Which is not to say that it can not be answered. But it sure will have to be answered.

Bishop Hill (neither a Bishop nor a hill) is very readable on the technical issues at stake.

Update: the link in my comment below does not work for some reason. So here it is: Nigel Lawson in the Times. 

What makes writing good or bad?

Not always easy to tell. But if the writer is known to be a Great Writer, does it matter?

Try this gripping sentence:

The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.

Who wrote it? Possibilities include:

Charles Dickens

Sarah Palin

Raymond Chandler

Michael Connelly

P D James

Voltaire

Ayn Rand

Douglas Hurd

The answer (of course) is ... here.

Here is a trenchant analysis of the tendency of Bosnia to split in two, written by Matthew Parish, a lawyer who has worked in the divided Bosnian city of Brcko and knows what he is talking about.

His basic argument is that step by step Republika Srpska is heading towards separating from the other Bosnian 'Enity' - and that as and when this happens the international community will be as divided as Bosnia will be. His description of the way successive international High Representatives have overused their power and authority to make things worse through good intentions is especially convincing.

His conclusion? This:

Every measure should be used to ensure that even if gradual de facto independence is inevitable, and to a great extent has already occurred, any act of declaration of de jure independence – which might incite Bosniaks to take up arms, and Croats to themselves secede – is postponed indefinitely.

If the proper aim is delay, the international community can do nothing better than to leave the country alone, at least for now. The current strategy – of giving Dodik pretexts to detach himself from the rest of Bosnia – can only catalyse the secessionist agenda.

... However much sympathy for the Bosniaks’ situation one may have, knowing the atrocities perpetrated against them, their political aspiration of a unified Bosnia governed by majority rule is possible only for so long as the international community is prepared to run the country as a colony.

That level of commitment has evaporated. The Bosniaks must thus be gently disabused of their unitary political agenda, or they surely will be prepared to go to war for it, and foreign Muslim fighters will again be drawn in as they were in the 1992-95 war.

For international politicians familiar with the injustices of Bosnia’s first war, this is an unpalatable message. But the time is long past for pursuit of perfect moral ideals.

The danger of catastrophe unfolding in Bosnia is real and the overwhelming aim must be to prevent a second Bosnian war. The least bad option is to preside over Bosnia’s inevitable gradual disintegration with a moderating hand, ensuring it happens slowly, so its citizens become accustomed to the evolving political landscape.

Blimey. Strong meat.

He has a website too: http://matthewparish.com/

One of the most baffling features of modern Western civilisation - more accurately the UK/US version of it - is the way honesty has been downgraded to something contingent and 'relative'.

This applies particularly in education, where generations of pupils are being insulated against the unbending honesty of the reality that in most spheres of endeavour only disciplined hard work gets results.

Take languages. There is no way to learn a foreign language other than to learn it.

OK, if you are moved to a foreign country and have no choice but to communicate, you'll slowly absorb things. But otherwise you need to spend hours poring over long lists of words and phrases - and simply learning them. Some shortcuts exist, and oddly enough the more languages you learn the easier it becomes to learn new ones. Patterns emerge. One just gets good at learning languages.

Here in the UK the state system under Labour has failed to deliver disciplined language learning, and so is opting out of it. The number of children learning even one foreign language is falling fast, despite far more money than ever before being spent on education. Our collective national intelligence and insight and our very ability to learn are declining accordingly, with the private school sector increasingly the focus of any language learning of harder languages. Disaster.

The problem? Neurotic state micromanagement:

In fact, in the seven years till 2007 we shamefully fell in the list of OECD countries from 4th to 14th in science, from 7th to 17th in literacy and from 8th to 24th in mathematics. Almost every day newspapers carry a litany of complaints about 11-year-olds with zero reading skills, truancy, exam grade inflation, the dearth of good school places and other calamities.

What went wrong for Labour? In a nutshell: they saw the answer as micromanagement from Whitehall. The education department published, among other risible hortatory posters, one that showed a series of car jacks, the lever of the bottom one worked by the Secretary of State, whose impact reached every corner of every classroom...

Or try the USA, where maths teaching has been dumbed down for progressive ideological reasons:

High-math-achievement countries teach arithmetic in the elementary grades in a coherent curriculum leading, step by step, to formal algebra and geometry in middle school. The progressive educators, by contrast, support “integrated” approaches to teaching math—that is, teaching topics from all areas of mathematics every year, regardless of logical sequence and student mastery of each step—and they downplay basic arithmetic skills and practice, encouraging kids to use calculators from kindergarten on...

A form of mathematics stripped of much of its intellectual content has obvious repercussions for higher education and the American economy. Hung-Hsi Wu, a Berkeley mathematician, expressed the view of many of his peers when he wrote in 1997 that the brand of mathematics purveyed by the NCTM’s 1989 report “has the potential to change completely the undergraduate mathematics curriculum and to throttle the normal process of producing a competent corps of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.”

And then there's sheer cheating, scientists just making things up to win acclaim and official funding (although there is of course an unfine tradition of this behaviour going back centuries).

As the years tick by, overall standards and achievements edge down. Intellectual and ultimately physical capital inherited from the labours of other people down the centuries is frittered away, just as other countries which adopt a stricter approach to learning are now busy accumulating their own.

Ebb? Meet Flow.

Tim Worstall nails a nice one here.

MPs are moaning that the amount of textile waste (ie old clothes) in council tips has shot up. This, they say, shows that we are becoming addicted to wasteful throw-away fashion.

Except that it doesn't.

If we recycle lots more glass/paper/plastic/cardboard away from council tips as we are enjoined to do, obviously the proportion of everything else left in council tips which is not so recycled will rise, possibly even if we are throwing away less of it.

Showing exactly nothing.

In a startling development which is likely to change the very method of scientific enquiry, mainly for the better, hackers have grabbed from prominent UK scientists (Hadley CRU) a huge mass of material going back years about Climate Change - and published it online.

See the New York Times.

And the Herald Sun.

If the material is shown to have been genuine, many reputations and associated spending decisions may have to go into a Black Hole:

... perhaps the most damaging revelations  – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause...

Including by destroying material to avoid embarrassing UK Freedom of Information requests?!

This could get very interesting.

Over at Open Democracy a long and learned piece by Roger Riddell on the impact of Development Aid: a board member of Oxford Policy Management, a Principal of The Policy Practice and a member of DFID’s the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact (IACDI).

This mighty analysis explores at length whether the question "Is Aid Working?" is really the right question.

It finally comes to what looks to me like a sensible conclusion: that the systemic problems of international aid will not be addressed until ...

... those running aid agencies agree among themselves to devote far less energy and far fewer resources to defending aid by providing evidence of their own agencies’ successes and instead channel far more energy into highlighting aid’s systemic failures and weaknesses and into urging that they be addressed.

If such leaders believe there is a moral reason to provide aid, they should be leading the campaign to address aid’s systemic problems. This, in my view, is where the discourse on aid should be focused.

Well, quite so.

But just a thought.

If the problem is that people are poor and so need inefficient Aid, maybe there should be some hard focus on the tried and proven way to lift people out of poverty?

This article is, according to Word Count 4661 words long.

In it the words/phrases business, freedom, private sector do not appear once.

Why not?

Isn't that the right Aid question?

Reader Norman Fraser quotes from this anti-Rand piece:

In Rand’s novels the heroes pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They made big profits in unfavorable economic climates. Try pulling yourself up by your shoelaces. It can’t be done. Its all story telling, with no basis in documented experience.

And of course, she does not consider the collaborative context (school, roads, community) that make individual success possible. Rand's own life was a cauldron of broken connections, sexual indulgence, war on other people’s marriages, and narcissism of atomic proportions. Nothing new to show business. But pressing social issues are not show business. There is no real economics in Rand, and certainly no moral logic.

A dim quote from a dim link.

Where exactly do the supposed 'big profits' made by the heroes appear in the book? On the contrary, the point of the book is that they run down their own businesses to nothing, to stop the state from looting them first. They refuse to be exploited.

And of course she considers the 'collaborative context' - the whole book is about nothing else. Her argument is that once the state has the monopoly on power, a genuinely free collaborative context is hugely reduced in favour of inexorably growing oppression. As indeed happened across most of Europe at the time she was writing, and seems to be happening in much of the West now as the state refuses to shrink itself and greedily plunders future generations in a drunken binge.

Lots of people suffer as a result of the heroes' actions in Atlas Shrugged, but that's the stark issue the book poses: is it just for the state to force (ultimately by torture) some people to give their energy and talent for the sake of others? Do we have the right to withdraw our labour from enforced collectivism? If not, what obligation lies on those who receive the benefits of such labour but only sneer idly in return?

It is no surprise that these Randian ideas for better or worse are coming back into fashion, since the opportunities for spontaneous private collaboration are soaring (iPhone apps aplenty) just as sprawling, unaccountable state structures are failing.

The main glaring failure for me in the two Rand novels is the absence of any family life involving children - the unambiguous case where caring for others not on the basis of trade between free individuals but rather through simple instinctive love is essential.

The social question arising from that is at the core of modern politics - is a society like a massive family in which everyone has unambiguous and specific obligations to literally everyone else, which only a powerful and often unaccountable state can define and enforce?

If you think that is the case, how is the moral character of the state vis-a-vis the individual upheld in practice to maintain some balance?

Is there a de facto tipping-point issue here, when things change from people owning the state to the state owning the people?

Rand drove deep into these uncompromising questions, which is why I think her books are fascinating and profound.

Manifold flaws and all.

Update:  reader Norman Fraser warmly disgrees (again) - see Comment - although at least he has the good grace to admit that he has not read the two books concerned. He instead says that he has read the critics, but not apparently the large numbers of critics who give the books high ratings on Amazon for many different reasons. 

Oh well. Here for Norman and for anyone who has yet to read it is the famous Money Speech and the towering passage about honesty and responsibility which is so relevant today as governments in the West grapple with the results of their own greed - and try to keep our money honest:

When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money.

Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor--your claim upon the energy of the men who produce.

Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes.

Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions--and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think.

Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy?

Money is made--before it can be looted or mooched--made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability.

An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced...

I previously briefed you on the machinations behind the scramble for EU Top Jobs and the close relationship between Foreign Policy and Physics.

The dramatic result?

Not very exciting.

Belgium's Herman Van Rompuy is chosen as president of the European Council and the UK's Catherine Ashton becomes the EU High Represenative (aka foreign policy chief). An elegant score-draw between those preferring people with only one wobbly bit at the front, and those demanding more top jobs for people with two.

The modest good news about Baroness Ashton's appointment is that someone has to disappear into the morass of EU procedures and try to set up the new EU External Action Service along minimally competent and unwasteful lines.

Far too much of the current EU machinery is dominated by poor communication, ponderous procedures and petty empire-building. Brits tend to want to get on with doing a solid unwasteful job; if the EAS is ever to be significant and efficient, some sturdy UK common sense applied to its workings from the very start will be valuable.

How did the UK really do in all this?

Could this be a typical Brown manoeuvre? Cleverly executed but basically unwise?

The UK looks to have played a deft EU negotiating hand, stubbornly keeping Tony Blair in play as a potential candidate for the top job despite firm opposition from other capitals, then with pseudo-magnanimity trading in that demand to get something else, viz the appointment of Baroness Ashton as HiRep.

Nicely done, no doubt. But do UK plc really gain by having someone with no real foreign policy experience in that job, if that opens the way to others getting top EU economic portfolios?

Some pro-EU experts are doing their best to talk up the choices. My Polish friend Adam Jasser:

In some way the EU craving for star quality leaders was like trying to cover the lack of substance with appearances. Whether Europe will be treated seriously or not by the outside world depends on its ability to speak with one voice and get its priorities sorted out. If it happens,  Presidents Hu-Jintao, Medvedev and Obama will come to respect van Rompuy and Ashton pretty soon and the world will learn their names.

But if the EU remains divided, confused and stuck in denial about the changing world, no star qualities of any leader, even those of Tony Blair, will save it from real irrelevance.

Another reported view has it that Baroness Ashton will be a first-rate disaster.

Whatever.

There is no chance of the EU 'speaking with one voice' with these appointments.

Squeaking with one voice, perhaps.

It is not the words which count, but the authority, strength and sense of purpose of the speaker.

And since Europe's leaders have chosen people who are so vastly non-threatening to their own self-esteem, the key European voices with authority and sense of purpose will remain those in national capitals.

A point no doubt not lost on the UK Conservatives as they mull over how best to assert a clear UK voice for the better.

Lots of interest in Ayn Rand, with two new books about her and her lasting influence:

• Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right
• Ayn Rand and the World she Made

Which, perhaps, prompted this disappointing piece by Dan Hannan in The American Conservative which has a lot to say about her literary style but almost nothing about her ideas and the inadequacy of her two great works as novels:

Nor do the characters develop. They fall into two categories: listless masses and men of action. Those in the former category mill about dully as an undifferentiated supporting cast. Those in the latter group also are interchangeable. Their faces are invariably made of “angular planes.” They speak “without inflection” or “without emotion.” They make up for this by having impossibly communicative eyes...

P.G. Wodehouse manages such passages beautifully. Ayn Rand doesn’t. Indeed—again, there is no way of putting this without horrifying her legion of admirers—she isn’t much of a prose stylist.

She is especially bad at dialogue, making no attempt at either realism or readability but letting her characters converse in philosophical treatises. Queen Victoria complained that her prime minister, W.E. Gladstone, addressed her as if she were a public meeting. The cast of Atlas Shrugged address each other in a series of essays.

Well, so what?

There are many superb passages in Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, just as there are clunky dull bits if you want to find them. These are Big Books.

The key idea behind them is a simple and so profound question: under which circumstances (if any) does one person owe something to another?

Putting it another way, what  precisely is the moral idea behind the concepts of obligation and responsibility?

Rand explores these themes through a seried of admittedly formulaic characters who each have carefully defined attitudes to personal responsibility and its implications.

At one end of the spectrum are two unyielding men who insist on the highest principles - and pay a heavy price for doing so, Howard Roark and John Galt. At the other are sundry communists and weaklings bent on exploiting the generosity and effort of others for the sake of their own power. Along the spectrum are all sorts of people who for one reason or the other make unhappy or ruinous compromises and suffer accordingly.

Perhaps the greatest passage describing the consequences of moral confusion and irresponsibility is the one in Atlas Shrugged where a train hurtles to disaster.

The story is set against the background of the rise of fascism and communism and the battles of corporate leaders and other front-rank creative people to stay independent. The main corporation is a huge railway, which is struggling to stay in business as excessive government demands and consequent crumbling business loyalties lead to systemic decay.

It all comes to a head when a decision has to be taken. Should the main transcontinental express go through a dangerous tunnel or not? The corrupt top executives want the train to run to keep up the corporation's reputation and so save their own skins, but shirk the responsibility of saying so lest something go wrong. Thus the decision is passed literally far down the line to a frightened junior clerk. The doomed train chugs off into the darkness.

Rand describes that situation brilliantly and relentlessly. But to bludgeon the point home she fills the train with all sorts of archetypal collectivist passengers, who themselves have wanted the luxury of enjoying the fruits of private creativity while sneering at it and extolling socialist mediocrity.

Crash.

This famous scene is, of course, sneered at by modern collectivist Johann Hari of the Independent, who manages to describe it with unerring inaccuracy, completely (and deliberately?) missing the point of the episode and the book itself. Such incompetent work is what wins a Stonewall Award these days. Well done, Johann!

In short, the 'selfishness' Ayn Rand espoused was all about the joy and pain of having the very highest standards of self-respect and - therefore - respect for others.

Which brings us to Barry Ritholz: The Boring Bitch is Back. What a fine philosophy this person (who admits that he has not read the books for decades) advocates:

My actual problem with Rand — behind her blindingly horrific prose — is that she was pushing back against a totalitarian system in the Soviet Union, a corrupt and morally indefensible system she had every right to be infuriated by. But she applies that righteous fury and outrage to a Democracy, whose economy is Free Market based. Hence, rather than challenging the politburo, she challenges Unions. Cooperative behavior seems to be hard for her to grasp...

Worst of all, Rand’s Objectivism has become the rationale for all manner of morally repugnant behaviour. However, I did take one personal lesson from Atlas Shrugged to heart: Anytime I see a parked car with a John Galt bumper sticker, I like to knock off one of the sideview mirrors, and leave it on the hood. I include a note stating my selfish, random act made me feel good, and therefore should be a perfectly fine act in their world.

I assume the recipients miss the irony . . .

Just the sort of furtive, trite, cowardly nihilism which Rand so eloquently demolished.

Is hosted by Clairwil, coming off the BBRU subs bench and scoring well on links, less well on apostrophe's.

It links to this magnificent piece by Heresy Corner about Winston Churchill's miserable speech style.

And Punkadiddle on a lovely classic book cover (I had it too - not sure where it is now).

And who says fat isn't sexy? Try nineteenth century French peasants:

Beauty consists in being well-fleshed, glowing, plump and large

Look at it like this.

In a city there's a nice large green public park, where families and individuals stroll around happily.

One day a group of leather-jacketed aggressive foul-mouthed types and some snarly dogs turn up and postion themselves prominently in one corner.

This happens day after day.

Gradually the people who used to enoy the park start to steer clear of that corner. An unspoken sense of subtle anxiety develops among them.

Who are those people, and what are their intentions? Are we safe there any longer? And do we need the hassle in our lives of having to worry about it? Why not go elsewhere for a walk?

I was talking to someone who works in the EU system and lives here in Brussels. She has moved away from the Brussels centre because (as a 'white' European) she does not want to be jeered at and spat at by gangs of Moroccans and other immigrants hanging around on street corners. If necessary she'll leave Brussels and move to join her husband in a part of the EU where these issues do not arise.

Back to the park scenario. The point is that whereas the municipality/public own the park, the arrival of the nasty gang on a regular basis means that the psychological ownership of the park quickly starts to shift. 

Like an evil miasma, the gang's sneeringly malign influence spreads across that space, the more so for being ostensibly aimless and unfocused. 

The legal owners of the park (here in the form of the police) have to decide. Do they compel the aggressive new element to leave the park? Not easy. The gang members are committing no clear offence worth all the hassle of going to court; they may not go quietly; and above all the problem is not a Priority Target for government resource-allocation purposes.

Thus inch by inch the values of the more aggessive element come to prevail in the minds of all concerned. And if the gang hang around for long enough and erect a temporary structure unchallenged, the formal legal ownership of the park itself will start to mutate into something less clear. 

Even if the gang leaves and goes somewhere else, the underlying anxiety within the public will linger - maybe they'll come back one day. 

One way or the other, the gang wins. The public 'retreats'.

Which of course also goes to explain Russia/Georgia and many other issues of global politics. We are moving into a dangerous phase where the symbolism of will-power and sheer determination seem to matter as much as who formally owns what.

This is the deep sense of Russian policy towards the former Soviet republics and eg the Orthodox parts of former Yugoslavia (ie Serb-dominated areas). Moscow is aiming to assert that those territories may be legally independent but in fact they are under Moscow's psychological 'protection' - if the EU/US/West tries to push its values into those regions, they will face Resistance.

Ditto the new surge in open naval piracy. These nimble pirate gangsters are asserting that they define the operational and psychological order on the high seas - and if merchant ships do not repel them by force, they will use force to take them over.

So are the exceptionalist demands of eg Islamist extremists (and not-so-extremists) in Western countries all about establishing a psychological force field around their activities, as the first stage in establishing a quasi-judicial space outside normal national jurisdiction? In form and substance a process of incremental territorial conquest?

And as Mark Steyn argues, do we know it's really working when we see it happening and simply ignore it?

You didn’t have to be “alert” to spot Major Nidal Hasan. He’d spent most of the last half-decade walking around with a big neon sign on his head saying “JIHADIST. STAND WELL BACK”. But we (that’s to say, almost all of us; and certainly almost anyone who matters in national security and the broader political culture) are now reflexively conditioned to ignore the flashing neon sign.

Like those apocryphal Victorian ladies discreetly draping the lasciviously curved legs of their pianos, if a glimpse of hard unpleasant reality peeps through we simply veil it in another layer of fluffy illusions.

Two joint terrorism task forces became aware almost a year ago that Major Hasan was in regular email contact with Anwar al-Awlaqi, the American-born but now Yemeni-based cleric who served as imam to three of the 9/11 hijackers and supports all-out holy war against the United States. But the expert analysts in the Pentagon determined that this lively correspondence was consistent with Major Hasan’s “research interests”, so there was no need to worry.

That’s America: Technologically superior, money no object (not one but two “joint terrorism task forces” stumbled across him). Yet no action was taken...

The truth is we’re not prepared to draw a line even after he’s gone ahead and committed mass murder. “What happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy,” said General Casey, the US Army’s Chief of Staff, “but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.”

A “greater tragedy” than 14 dead and dozens of wounded? Translating from the original brain-addled multicult-speak, the Army Chief of Staff is saying that the same fatuous prostration before marshmallow illusions that led to the “tragedy” must remain in place. If it leads to occasional mass murder, well, hopefully it can be held to what cynical British civil servants used to call, during the Northern Irish “Troubles”, “an acceptable level of violence”.

Fourteen dead is evidently acceptable. A hundred and forty? Fourteen hundred? I guess we’ll find out...

Few new entries these days as I am back in Brussels trying to earn some money for Christmas presents.

While I am away have a look at the lively writing over at Samizdata at the moment.

Including a link to this energetic piece about Zimbabwe and how the retreat of the Mugabe-style state from the economy has led to a dramatic turnaround  Zimbabwe's fortunes.

It reminds me of the triumphant arrival of Scientific Capitalism in post-communist Russia. In the early days at least.

And for a brutalist analysis of the dangers involved in trying 9/11 'suspects' in US civilian courts, see Pat Buchanan's tirade here - notable if only as an example of the sort of vehement criticism these trials might well attract in the USA as they drag on.

Back to normal on Friday.

 

Patriarch Pavle (Paul) of the Serbian Orthodox Church died today at the age of 95.

A tiny, mild mannered yet complex figure, Patriarch Pavle did his best to identify a principled way forward during the madness of recent decades in Serbia but found himself entangled in the politics of Serbia's confused national identity and so had little impact on events.

My own most notable encounter with him came on Christmas Eve, 24 December 2002.

Devout Christian as I am not, I decided that year to join the small Belgrade Anglican community in their Christmas Eve midnight service which by long tradition was to be held in the Patriarch's private chapel at the Patriarchate (Serbian Orthodox Christmas coming in January, of course).

Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the door to the Patriarchate only to find it blocked by a couple of dozen Serbian toughs in black leather jackets who had decided that their pure nationalist anti-ecumenical principles overrode the Patriarch's courtesy to other Christian denominations.

An unseemly scene ensued as the then Chaplain Rev Warner tried to persuade them to let us enter.

Finally the Patriarch himself emerged and asked the bandits to let us enter the chapel. They showed him some personal deference but refused. We could have called the police and asked them to force a way in for us, but that felt a bit too unChristmasy.

So after milling around in the late night cold for a while as this absurd scene dragged on, we finally gave up and repaired to the Chaplain's nearby flat and had the midnight service there. It was all the more touching as it gave a sense of what it must have been like for Christians across the communist world privately celebrating their beliefs for fear of communist persecution.

This story, frothed up a bit for effect, made it into the Times: Mob stops UK envoy attending service 

The main outcome from my own point of view was a Christmas Day with the family ruined by the telephone ringing. I was summoned to the Foreign Ministry to be given a personal apology by the Foreign Minister. President Kostunica's office also called to apologise.  

This curious episode perhaps sums up the record of Patriarch Pavle: a decent, modest man, who alas lacked the authority to stand up successfully to Serbia's nationalist extremism?

A lively piece of work by Craig Murray looking at the prospects for Ghana getting rich and ruined by Oil Money.

Knowing nothing about Ghana or indeed about Oil Money, I leave it to you to work out whether his well-turned analysis makes sense. It is certainly interesting enough. 

But this caught my eye:

At the same time, revenue must urgently be directed to rural infrastructure, to increasing farm prices and developing agro-processing industry, on a scale not previously attempted. Ghana already has a major problem keeping young people in farming. Think how much this will worsen when oil starts to flow.

Why should young people stay on farms now that the country is going to get rich? Ghana as the anti-Nigeria, ie a new hi-tech Singapore-style place rather than a typical agriculture exporting African country?

Is not the point of acquiring such largesse that it gives a country the chance to look at quite different options, not merely ways to impose top-down solutions based on old ideas?

We recently considered the proposition that the European Union is a vital and valuable ‘multiplier’ for British foreign policy. And found it not altogether accurate.

Here is the definitive argument in favour of it, delivered in a high-profile speech by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and winning a gushing review from the Indy:

David Miliband yesterday delivered the kind of speech that is too seldom heard in British politics; a speech that made a strong and unambiguous case for a greater role for the European Union on the global stage. As the Foreign Secretary argued, it is in Britain's "national interest" to see the EU develop a strong foreign policy.

It was a forward-looking analysis. In a future that will be dominated by the two economic giants of China and the United States, relatively small nations such as Britain will struggle to be heard on their own. The institutions of Europe provide us with a potential megaphone. Britain would also benefit from the existence of an EU that punches its weight when it comes to preventing nuclear proliferation, dealing with Russia or confronting rogue states.

David Miliband:

… our European alliance is unlike any other. We share sovereignty in key areas. We cooperate across the full range of policy issues. And Europe is our continent. The idea that the UK can maintain its influence in Beijing or Washington or Delhi or Moscow if we marginalise ourselves in Europe is frankly fanciful.  In fact I would say the opposite; through leadership in Europe we augment our bilateral ties with other countries. Alone, we may be interesting; leading a group of 27 in common values and purpose, we have real sway…

The truth is that there is a deception at the heart of Conservative policy.  A deception of the country that you can hate Europe as it exists today and remain central to European policy making.  In fact, a failed attempt to renegotiate aspects of the European Union that the Conservative Party does not like will lead inevitably to more calls for Britain to leave the European Union. The fact that one third of Conservative candidates support such a position of withdrawal is testimony to the way the Tory wind is blowing.

The problem with this sort of thing is that it is really propaganda, not analysis.

So let’s get this one nailed, once and for all.

* * * * *

What makes any policy successful?

The answer lies in physics (scary, but true). The formula for kinetic energy is thus:

  E_K = (1/2)mv²

 

E_K = Kinetic Energy

m = Mass

v = Velocity

 

This shows why tank shells are small and very fast: you get exponential increases by increasing velocity, not if you increase mass.

 

Bomb X:         0.5kg travelling at 1000m/second

E_K =                0.25 x 1000 x 1000 = 250,000 Joules

 

Bomb Y:         1kg travelling at 1000m/second

E_K =                0.5 x 1000 x 1000 = 500,000 Joules

 

Bomb Z:          0.5kg travelling at 3000m/second

E_K =                0.25 x 3000 x 3000 = 2.25m Joules

 

And why reducing Velocity significantly diminishes Impact, even with a lot more Mass:

 

Bomb EU:         2.0 kg travelling at 200m/second

E_K =                1.0 x 200 x 200 = 40,000 Joules

(ie far less than the impact of smaller, faster Bomb X)

 

The Impact of anything moving, including Policy, has a lot to do with the relationship between its Mass and Velocity.

 

The key point about an EU Foreign Policy is that it certainly adds heavy Mass (lots of countries intoning the same thing), but it significantly reduces Velocity (ie the speed with which positions are formulated and then the nimbleness of actual real-life responses and associated resources deployments).

 

The result is uncertain and often much reduced Impact.

 

Which in part explains why the EU coordination processes at the UN are so gormless that even EU fans are worried.

 

The other core point ignored by Mr Miliband is that energetic national policies work because they are authentic. He seems to be saying that European nations are doomed to be ineffectual unless they pull together. This is simply not true. Or at least not necessarily true.

 

Countries like China, Russia, Brazil and India have weight because they are not part of any sovereignty-diluting wider formation. See also the case of Norway, which shows just what can be done by using diplomatic fleetness of foot and a pile of money to make a difference here and there.

 

And look at this story of France and Brazil together defining a position on a Climate Change issue. France strides ahead and in its quintessentially French way asserts a global leadership role, all the more impressive because it is solely ‘French’ and not laden down with weasel wordy compromises needed to suit each and every EU country which wants to stick an oar in.

 

See also President Sarkozy in 2008 noisily proclaiming victory in Georgia by cutting a ‘peace’ deal with Moscow on behalf of the EU which did not involve Russian troops withdrawing fully from Georgia’s territory. A great result for France/Russia – an awful one for the EU/Georgia.

 

That’s how a country uses EU weight as a ‘multiplier’ for its own interests – by being assertive and single-minded and largely ignoring the positions of many other EU member states. Look also at how Greece has used its EU membership to blackmail other member states including the UK into not accepting the name which Macedonia wants to use to describe itself.

 

Not exactly the sort of multiplier examples Mr Miliband had in mind?

 

Why did not Mr Miliband also be honest and offer us some examples of the damaging if not ruinous downside of EU coordination? Such as:

 

• The debacle at the UN Human Rights Council in October where the UK and (yes) France manoeuvred themselves into a pitiful no-show. To be fair, other EU countries on the Council (Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia ) did actually manage to vote against a one-sided Gaza/Israel resolution, so maybe this was down to sheer UK/French incompetence on the day?

 

• The fact that the EU has no policy at all on Cuba (since the EU in effect has outsourced its Latin America policy to socialist-led Spain) and a dopey one on Honduras

 

• The EU’s on/off policy of engagement (or not) with Belarus

 

• The startling sums of EU money wasted on ‘development’ in Africa with no serious way to include meaningful political conditionality

 

• The fact that even where issues involving Europe itself are concerned, the EU can not come up with a united policy – see recognition of Kosovo. (That example of course also might be said to show the unwisdom of the UK pushing ahead with key allies without working up a coherent EU joint position first?)

NB There are policy areas where Mass is better than Velocity. Such as the laborious rolling out of democratic processes to former Communist Europe.

 

Here (Ukraine, Belarus and other CIS countries) the sheer weight and tedium of EU process is the best weapon we have to grind down the resistance of post-KGB structures aimed at maintaining Russia’s psychological and operational control. It took decades for Communism to do so much damage. It has to take decades to repair the damage. Velocity counts for a lot less here.

 

But in many other areas, including most issues which fall for UN votes, the lack of Velocity brought about by EU wittering is a serious handicap.

 

In the UN Security Council permanent membership status of the UK and France the European Union has a tremendous asset. It would be far better for ‘Europe’ and European values if the EU just let the UK and France get on with it and simply endorsed whatever positions they thought made sense, rather than trying to ‘coordinate’ policy to suit every footling point of view and thereby just wasting UK/French time and resources to no useful end.

 

Put it another way: the opportunity cost of UK diplomats wearily haggling with EU partners over meaningless texts aimed at achieving ‘common positions’ is the time (and credibility) lost in not engaging hard with the emerging powers in the world on hard substance.

 

Outcomes in EU processes all too often mean dumbed down analysis and effort. We professionals all know this. It is not honest of David Miliband not to acknowledge this openly.

 

David Miliband makes a final ritual swipe at the Conservatives for their supposedly anti-European approach. Zzzzz.

 

But who systematically stripped from UK foreign policy-making most of the available resources by creating DFID, thereby reducing our policy impact in and with Brussels (“The worst decision we ever made” – R Cook)? Labour.

 

Who has wrecked European language learning in UK schools? Labour.

 

Who made a clueless attempt  a few years back to set up a bossy UK/France/Germany 'EU Trilateralism' which promptly crashed since they did not have the nerve to follow it through? Labour.

 

Who scaled back the UK’s EU Fast Steam scheme for civil servants, sharply reducing the number of smart UK officials getting good jobs in Brussels? Labour.

 

Who made concessions on the UK Rebate – and got nothing in return? Labour.

 

* * * * *

 

Let’s not pretend that all this is easy, or that point-scoring sloganising one way or the other helps.

 

I hope that William Hague becomes Foreign Secretary and (a) reboots the foreign policy process in London so debauched by Labour, and as part of that, (b) throws British weight about more assertively within the EU and at the UN.

 

Labour will have a hissy fit, wailing from the margins that the UK is ‘isolated’. Well, on some things such us upholding principles of honesty and democracy in the UN Human Rights Council it is better to be isolated if everyone else is looking in other, darker directions.

 

One good way to proceed will be to start by asserting a new UK approach to EU coordination at the UN. Namely that it will be much reduced in practice, and largely limited to working closely with France and Germany and any other EU country with immediate influence on the issue in hand, so as to focus not on limp process but on tough outcomes which are better for Europe.

 

Having established that new firm approach at the very top, the way will be clear to streamline a businesslike working relationship with the new EU High Representative, based on the UK telling him what positions the UK plans to take then working out how best to swing most EU opinion behind it.

 

In short?

 

A lot of nonsense is talked about the UK ‘punching above its weight’.

 

What the EU does is oblige us to punch below our weight, as part of its own flabby and disorganised weight.

 

And, as the iron laws of physics tell us, more Mass but much reduced Velocity = Less Impact.

Man on Crawford Extortion Charge

Not me.

Phew.

It reminds me of an interview I gave to a Bosnian news magazine. The final question was, "Are you related to Cindy Crawford?"

To which I wittily replied: We have nothing in common except our name and our beauty.

The more the government tries to change our behaviour to address 'climate change', the less the UK public incline to believe them.

Funny, that.

It of course all depends on the precise questions being asked.

Does human activity have an impact on the planet?  Of course.

Is it easy to measure that impact?  To a degree yes, but only over the relatively short term.

Does the climate change naturally anyway?  Of course. It would be impossible to imagine a world in which it didn't. It probably would be dead.

So how do we measure what changes are caused by Man, and which are occurring anyway?  Ah, now you're talking. Very difficult, the more so if you look at longer timescales.

If it turns out that human activity is affecting the planet, are the effects good or bad?  Some must be bad (eg if we eat every fish, no more fish). But again, it depends on what timescale you choose to use - what is Bad over (say) a century may turn out to be Good over a longer period. Thus the Industrial Revolution poured out nasty pollution (and still does) but it opened the way to far more economical use of natural resources now and into the future.

Is it better to act now to stop future bad outcomes?  This is the heart of it. We can't be sure what will be bad outcomes and what will be good ones. So it may well not be wise to overinvest now in vast inflexible and expensive schemes to 'prevent' climate change. Better (in my view) to spend money as we go, adapting to the effects of changes as they unfold over time.

So are you saying do nothing now?!  No. Energy-saving ideas and generally being less wasteful look to make sense. There will be a role for government in advancing those. But the main impetus must come from market forces and human ingenuity. Where else? Huge collectivist schemes are unlikely to be wise or sustainable in terms of popular support - we just do not know enough about Cause and Effect over the timescales concerned.

But what about all the scientific evidence?  Hmm. In the past thirty years 'scientists' have veered between warning of a new Ice Age to warning about Global Warming to (now) warning about Climate Change in any and all directions. Not very persuasive? 

Don't you care about future generations?  I do care about them, often. Some of them live in my house and demand pocket money. But one way to care about them is not to lumber them with huge debts and stupid policies brought about by our current ignorance and hubris. Look at it this way. Which scientific innovations or other trends/developments would you have stopped in 1909 to make things better now? And how would you have been sure that you hit the right ones then? Why should poorer people in 1909 have subsidised far richer people in 2009? Why should poor people in 2009 subsidise far richer people in 2109, or 2209?

Bottom Line?  Steady as she goes. Bet on the wisdom of people, not on the dogmatic certainty of governments. Because it is just not clear what to do for the best. And governments will make a far bigger mess if they get that wrong.   

When it comes down to it, what is a Blog?

Not much more than personal musings, often with links to other websites which in one way or the other serve to reinforce the point one is trying to make.

Some sites aim higher - to become places where intelligent people go to find at a one-stop-shop manifold links to intelligent work of all shapes and sizes.

Such as Edge, which is way too intelligent for me:

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE

We make technology, but our technology also makes us. At the online science/culture journal Edge, BB pal John Brockman went deep -- very deep -- into this concept. Frank Schirrmacher is co-publisher of the national German newspaper FAZ and a very, very big thinker. Schirrmacher has raised public awareness and discussion about some of the most controversial topics in science research today, from genetic engineering to the aging population to the impacts of neuroscience.

A superb and reliable aggregator is Arts & Letters Daily: not too many new links each day, but each one posted with dry humour and a liberal-minded instinct.

Have a look before they disappear down the A&LD page at the superb collections of links to articles and other writing of all shapes and sizes about the 20th anniversary of the end of European Communism and the Fall of the Wall. Such as this interview with Adam Michnik:

With the West struggling to come up with a response to Iran's nuclear ambitions, Mr. Michnik cites Ronald Reagan's approach to Poland as a useful model for President Obama. The day after martial law was imposed in 1981, the U.S. publicly sided with the Polish people against their regime.

"You have to support in a smart way those forces in Iran that aren't like that crazy president, that Islamo-Maoist Ahmadinejad," he says. "What is important for them is to see in America a friend. In Poland it worked; today there's no more pro-American country in the world." The violent repression of democratic protestors in Iran since June, he adds, indicates that "the ayatollahs must feel the breath of history on their backs."

But many many others too.

Finally, I have tripped over The Browser, another excellent site pulling together interesting work in a manageable format.

Including this handy link to the expensive watches worn by powerful Russians.

There's just too much to read, folks.

Via Drudge:

Swine flu causes surge of garlic sales in Serbia

As indeed it does.