Tintin inspires a lot of metaphysical musing these days.

Such as the allegedly overwhelming case for his gayitude. Ou peut-être non.

And here is Tintin compared to great literature with psychological depth:

... the peculiar brand of obscene surrealism that marks the Pynchonian fantasy is not so far away from certain hallucinatory sequences in Tintin. In The Crab With The Golden Claws the alcoholic Captain Haddock fantasizes that Tintin is a wine bottle and attempts to 'uncork' him -- a comical fantasy ... but one that is not without a sense of violent threat.

Hmm. That uncorking business is a bit gay too? If not a bit too gay? 

Me, I'll stick to Iznogoud.

The Guardian website headline screams, as if in pain:

Whitehall devised torture policy for terror detainees

MI5 interrogations in Pakistan agreed by lawyers and government

The ensuing text reveals ... what?

That there was an 'official interrogation policy'. Directed at a high level in Whitehall. And agreed by lawyers and officials. 

Great Scott.

What would they want?

No interrogation policy? Or one run by a registry clerk somewhere? Or one which plunges on with no regard to the law?

The article claims that some suspects were tortured by in Pakistan gaols before being questioned by MI5.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc?

The evidence as presented in this fatuous article is just as consistent with the British Government doing everything right in difficult circumstances as it is with evil officially-sponsored or officially-endorsed abuse of suspects.

Which is not to say that what happened was right or wise. Just that if this is anything to go on, we can't tell.

Once upon a time a distinguished European leader almost described the EU's Common Agricultural Policy as:

... a programme which uses inefficient transfers of taxpayers money to bloat rich French landowners and so pump up food prices in Europe, thereby creating poverty in Africa, which we then fail to solve through inefficient but expensive aid programmes. The most stupid, immoral state-subsidised policy in human history, give or take Communism.

One fascinating feature of the policy is that huge sums of money (€55 billion a year is the total pot!) go to individual people (ie farmers).

Some of whom are Rich.

So, who gets all that money?

At last, a website and a team of people devoted to digging out that information and sharing it with us.

David Miliband's protocol problems in India (the risk or otherwise of annoying senior Indian interlocutors by being too 'familiar') raise an interesting operational point.

What is the role of the in-country Ambassador in such circumstances? In particular, how far should he/she go to brief the visiting Minister on how to behave?

Not so easy to answer.

The case for spelling out directly to the visiting Minister some no-brainer protocol pitfalls is that this should help avoid the sort of mess we saw in India this time round, plus it prevents the Minister blaming the Ambassador afterwards if there is a mess ("Why the hell did you not warn me about this sort of thing?").

The case against is that it is not easy to know quite how far to take this sort of thing without giving said Minister the impression that the Ambassador thinks he is a naive or insensitive or crassly rude person. Are eg table manners included? ("Please don't patronise me, Ambassador. I may not have had all your evidently wide-ranging social advantages, but I do know how to behave.")

My approach in protocol-conscious Poland when visitors were to encounter one or other or both Kaczynski twins?

Send the Private Secretary a punchy personal confidential email before the party got on the plane to fly to Warsaw, giving a frank but short description of the senior people the Minister is to meet and spelling out how each encounter should be handled from a protocol/manners/human relations point of view. Mention one or two specific things to do, or to be careful not to do. Then on the plane over a drink the PS can pass this text under the boss's nose and they can mull it all over as far as they think necessary, picking up any points of clarification on arrival.

This generally works quite well.

As long as the vividly cast email and the rest of the high-level briefing is not lost by the Private Secretary at some point during the visit.

Which causes other problems.

The latest Britblog Roundup is here. A couple of links to posts by me on the Hama Massacre and the WTD.

Lots of excellent and challenging material, such as this posting about new British legal prohibitions on photographing police officers.

Blimey.

If you can face worrying about climate issues as your financial lives wobble, swing by Climate Change Daily, a wonderful resource for articles to and fro.

Such as this one in Spiegel Online:

Germany's renewable energy companies are a tremendous success story. Roughly 15 percent of the country's electricity comes from solar, wind or biomass facilities, almost 250,000 jobs have been created and the net worth of the business is €35 billion per year.

But there's a catch: The climate hasn't in fact profited from these developments. As astonishing as it may sound, the new wind turbines and solar cells haven't prohibited the emission of even a single gram of CO2.

...

In the worst case scenario, sustainable energy plants might even have a detrimental effect on the climate. As more wind turbines go online, coal plants will be able to reduce their output. This in itself is desirable -- but the problem is that the total number of available CO2 emission certificates remains the same. In other words, there will suddenly be more certificates per kilowatt of coal energy. That means the price per ton of CO2 emitted will fall.

That is exactly what happened in recent trading. A certificate to emit a ton of CO2 cost almost nothing. As a result, there was very little incentive for big energy companies to invest in climate friendly technologies...

Which goes to show nothing except that clever policies - especially those claiming to have 'strategic' reach - often have Unintended (and Unwelcome) Consequences.

Which we knew already.

One of the core arguments for doing something about Climate Change is that it is unfair on future generations to behave badly now (pumping out carbon into the air) and lumber them with the far-reaching results of our selfishness/negligence.

Which assumes various things.

That, for example, the results of Climate Change will be mainly negative. That it is possible now to identify what we might do so as to benefit those future generations by preventing/reducing at least some serious negative outcomes. And that having identified what we might do, the costs of doing it look to be worthwhile.

Lurking in all these assumptions are some highly technical but vital calculations on the way we value the future beneficial outcome of spending now.

This in turn is based on assumptions about economic growth. 

Take the past 100 years. Despite two astonishingly awful World Wars, the Great Depression and so on, the mass of human beings are far better off now than was the case a century ago.

So it seems reasonable to assume that in a hundred years' time people will be at least somewhat wealthier than they are now.

Hence the dilemma. How much should 'poor' people now spend to benefit probably much 'richer' people far down the line?

The Stern Report took a hammering in part on this issue, the argument being made that its assumptions were untransparent or erroneous or both.

All sorts of complex exchanges ensued. See eg this:

Leonhardt says that Stern is "right for the wrong reasons", and says that "technically, Sir Nicholas’s opponents win the debate." The problem is that this is a very high-level and complex debate, which is not at all easy to follow. Leonhardt, with his talk of inflation, has shown that he is not up to following it.

This is no great failing, since I'm not up to following it either, and most economists I know also can't follow it. But if you can't follow the argument, you certainly shouldn't be declaring winners.  

So what are we lesser mortals meant to believe if even economists find it all too difficult?

The New York Review of Books had a more or less comprehensible clash of swords, with one of the contributors making this point:

The Stern Review, for example, assumes that global per capita real income will rise from $10,000 today to around $130,000 in two centuries. At the same time, it argues that we should take urgent steps today to reduce damages in the distant future based on its argument for near-zero discounting.

While there are plausible reasons to act quickly on climate change, the need to redistribute income to a wealthy future does not seem to be one of them.

And so on.

My point for now is a more modest one.

Namely to point out that those who seem to clamour the loudest for acting now to make life easier for future generations on Climate seem to be hell-bent on bankrupting those future generations by lumbering them with insane quantities of officially-driven debt.

Thus Perry de Havilland at Samizdata:

But to the entire political looter class, and I mean not just the elite elements but also including the millions and millions of people who took loans they could not repay and voted for the people whose regulations provided the perverse incentives for banks to loan money to them, the important things was to... keep lending.

And this, boys and girls, is what we call a Credit Bubble. And why do we call it a bubble? Because when loans are given out at a rate greater than actual economic growth can support, the amount of loans (assets) that go bad increases because the increased lending was not supported by an increased ability to pay the loans back... and when that fact becomes clear, people with money suddenly stop lending... the 'bubble' bursts...

... And how are the political looter class trying to remedy this situation? Well they are trying to re-inflate the bubble with the extra added spice of making the secured assets (property) even harder to repossess (in effect un-securing questionable loans either by fiat or with money plucked from the government's magic money tree). Pure genius.

Or am I missing something?

My doctor friends tell me that another English crematorium has had to spend a lot of money buying a huge US cremation machine to cope with the soaring numbers of obese people now dying whose bodies can not be squelched into a normal-size coffin.

A big problem.

Still, the intellectual leadership on these weighty issues is in fine shape:

I think that when this is translated into English it means:

Hmm, along comes another conked-out trunk of humours, a bolting-hutch of beastliness, a swollen parcel of dropsies, a huge bombard of sack, a stuffed cloak-bag of guts, a roasted Manningtree ox with pudding in his belly. Looks like we may need to buy a bigger machine?

It is justifiable if a British entrepreneur sets up a cheese business in France so that French cheese can be sold to the French. But it is not justifiable if that French cheese is sold to the British, undermining the British cheese industry!

The wise words of Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France.

Or something like that.

How best to defeat the law? Break so many laws simultaneously that the police can not cope:

Governments have found a way to circumvent the EU, by breaking so many rules at once, that the Commission cannot even begin to react effectively.

The answer to the contradictions within the Eurozone is to have one institution responsible for the EU's whole financial space. But that means a serious lurch away from national ability to cheat.

Plus it means that ultimately Germany has to pay out hugely for the profligacy of other EU members, while having no way to force them to behave better in the future. Not a good deal for Germany?

Tricky:

As for the eurozone, I always argued in the past that a break-up is in effect impossible. I am no longer so sure.

Our old enemy the EU Working Time Directive (WTD) last sighted was embroiled in deep procedural wrangling as between the various parts of the EU machine. Can it be left to rot in this long grass for long enough to get it entangled with new EP elections and maybe a fresh start?

One key area where its impact will be felt heavily is in the health sector.

Fans of this collectivist attempt to control our lives proclaim that of course it is essential that doctors and nurses not be tired when they do risky medical work on patients. They must work fewer hours!

On the other hand, doctors will get senior qualifications with far fewer training hours, so we'll have operations performed less well by less skilled doctors stressing out over their own lack of practical experience.

Plus, think about it.

Fewer hours mean more doctors, plus more shorter shifts to give the same amount of cover.

When a doctor hands over to her/his shift successor there is a short period to brief the newcomer on the medical issues going on among the current patients. Each handover necessarily involves 'information decay' - only so much of the mass of material in the departing doctor's head can be passed on.

Shorter shifts = lower information-levels per doctor. More frequent shift-changes = more information decay = a greater chance that some or other complication will be missed = more mistakes/complications/deaths.

Finally, if you are a doctor on a long shift you know that anything which goes wrong on your shift will be down to you to fix. As long as the shifts are not excessive, a positive incentive for maximum concentration.

The more frequent the shifts, the less responsible you are going to feel for the patients under your care: "only half an hour to go - let her deal with it". Negative incentive effect.

All these costs occur on the margins, so it will necessarily be next to impossible to 'prove' that the WTD caused the deaths and extra pain of those patients who will suffer it.

But they nonethless will have been caused by that.

Caused by a power-grab far away in Brussels by people and institutions not interested in the real-life outcomes, but rather determined to assert their ideological control at every possible level. And not accountable for the repercussions in any way that matters.

Not good.

You are a Prime Minister.

You throw overboard your Defence Secretary in a Cabinet reshuffle.

But you feel you owe him. And it's always better to keep ex-Ministers ostensibly busy, lest they start to chaff at their obviously 'ex-' status and cause trouble in the Party.

Maybe push him for the top job in NATO? Tricky - George Robertson was there recently, plus success on the military side might diminish British prospects for some top EU jobs coming along in due course?

Ah. Got it!

Create a new international Special Envoy position. That will give him a reasonable profile, plus a nice extra salary and office. And keep him out of the country part of the time.

Now, let's see ... which troubled part of the world needs a UK Special Envoy..?

This one.  

Sorted.

Oh Lordy! I did not expect this:

Sri Lanka has angrily rejected Britain's appointment of Des Browne, the former Defence Minister, as a special envoy to focus on the humanitarian situation in the war-torn Indian Ocean Island.

Rohitha Bogollagama, the Foreign Minister, said last night that the move was "extremely unhelpful" and warned of "major repercussions" for relations between Sri Lanka and its former colonial ruler.

"It is tantamount to an intrusion into Sri Lanka's internal affairs and is disrespectful to the country's statehood," he said – just a few hours after Downing Street announced Mr Browne's appointment to the newly created post.

"There is no further discussion with London on the matter."

How really really not to run a foreign policy?

Maybe this is the deeper problem:

The subversion of commonsense ethics to narrow legalism ...

... the sense of decay is palpable. As insouciance mingles with indifference, too many ministers act as if government belongs to them.

The Machine Stops...

You get what you pay for.

Nature fills a vacuum.

What goes up, comes down.

Pride comes before a fall.

And so on.

Thus:

Since the calamities of the Balkan wars, the average European planner has assumed that there are two worlds of military operations: NATO and EU missions on the one hand, with every hi-tech gadget one might desire, and under-resourced UN forces on the other. This is, in the phrase of the British UN expert Michael Pugh, “peacekeeping apartheid”.

But this division of labour no longer works. European forces are unable to keep up with US technology yet lack the growing sense of purpose of the emerging powers.

After the prolonged political pain of Afghanistan, NATO is unlikely to sign up for new long-range operations any time soon (as India and China note from their ring-side seats). The EU's refusal to intervene in the Democratic Republic of Congo during last year's crisis suggests that it is having second thoughts about even limited power projection.

The UN had a far, far worse year in the Congo, failing to stop a huge humanitarian disaster – French and UK diplomats have launched a process in the Security Council to address the peacekeepers' failings. They have no shortage of problems to tackle.

But as they sit down to talk these through with their Chinese and Indian counterparts, they should look to the long term.

In one or two decades, these emerging powers will be essential to keeping order worldwide. It is far from certain that Europe will be.

Now what was it we kept being told? That the EU was a multiplier of British influence?

That sinking feeling:

Investors who once considered their retirements safely protected wake up to a sinking feeling of uncertainty and gloom.

Sound like the great mortgage-fueled financial crisis of 2008? Sure. But it also describes a calamity likely to hit as soon as 2009.

State, local, and private pension plans covering millions of government employees and union workers with “defined benefit” accounts are teetering on the brink of implosion, victims of both a sinking stock market and investment strategies influenced by political considerations.

As pension funds grew and grew, the temptation emerged to use them to promote political causes rather than focus only on getting the best return for future pensioners.

So holdings in unfashionable countries (eg apartheid South Africa, now Israel) and product-sectors (eg cigarettes) were pronounced to be morally intolerable investments.

Which was fine as long as everything was whirring along nicely.

But funnily enough it turns out that if you want pension funds to deliver, er, pensions when things get tough, the best investments to have are in those sectors which make money:

In many instances, SRI amounts to union leaders or politicians gambling with other people’s money in support of ideological vanity.

What will be the cost of 'socially responsible investments? Or, more importantly, their value?

Again, you can evade reality, but you can't evade the consequences of doing so...

The point of the crushing and monumental brutality against Hama by the then Syrian leadership was to send a message to Islamic extremists:

Do not mess with us, and if you do we will respond with crushing and monumental brutality

Which has more or less worked quite well, as far as I can see: radical Islamists these days are much more active elsewhere.

This same attitude no doubt has influenced the Israeli approach to Hamas. Deliver a defeat heavy enough to catch their attention.

Hard to say how well that has worked. But one loud argument against it is that the Israeli action has of course massively boosted support for Hamas.

Or maybe not? Thus:

... clear military defeat is such an obvious setback that all but the most committed ideologues find it difficult to ignore or explain away.

The fall in Hamas' popular support does not by itself justify Israel's recent policies. But it does provide an important data point in the longstanding debate over the impact of military action on public support for terrorists. It turns out that you can cause that support to drop - if you win.

The problem is that to deal convincingly with extremely violent undemocratic people often requires extremely violent and even undemocratic methods. Not easy in a democracy.

Our old friend Negotiation:

... a good plan is to spell out unexpected costs to them of their success, and unexpected benefits to them of your own view prevailing.

A more ruthless strategy involves increasing their pain, one way or the other. But that works only if your willingness and ability to inflict pain exceeds the other side's willingness to tolerate it.

As Syria showed its Muslim brothers and sisters, back in 1983.

While we are thinking about who 'allows' what, the British Government have announced that Dutch MP Geert Wilders will not be allowed to enter the UK, as his very presence will 'threaten national security'.

The public debate appears to be focusing on this man's right to speak his mind. Not much mention of the fact that his audience (in this case our own members of Parliament) are having their freedom to listen to him denied.

His presence here poses a threat to public order only if some people lack the self-control to respond peacefully to his message (a strong anti-Muslim one). So in effect the Government appear to be saying that our freedom to listen in person to a properly elected European politician is trumped by an irate minority who will threaten public order.

Whose norms run this country these days?

Maybe it would be better to focus on who really does harm to Muslims, as opposed to making obnoxious noises about them?

Who these days recalls the astounding Hama Massacre of 1983, when the Syrian regime killed many thousands of its own citizens to cow Islamist extremists who had murdered up to one hundred officials in a local show of strength? Thus:

“A doctor, welcome …” then he transferred Dr. al-Khani to the Borsalan detention center, where he was exposed to the most painful torture, despite the fact that he did not provide any emergency treatment or first aid to anyone at all, then the torturers told him: “Since you are an Eye Doctor, we shall poke your eyes off.” Indeed, they poked one of his eyes then killed him facing the firing squad.

Has a single person who took part in this horrendous crime against Muslims been prosecuted or banned from entering the EU or chastised by an EU Working Group?

Or banned from entering another Muslim country?

Any answers?

Long pause

No. I thought not.

Blush prettily as I do to link to it, here is the Independent:

Despite reading it closely, I'm still not convinced of how on earth Charles Crawford is allowed to blog as he does. 

Which recalls this memorable exchange, when sardonic architecture student Howard Roark is being expelled for insisting on modernism and tells the Dean of the Institute where he can stick his Doric columns:

"Do you mean to tell me that you're thinking seriously of building that way, when and if you are an architect?"

"Yes."

"My dear fellow, who will let you?"

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

My article about Building Embassies from Scratch is in the latest DIPLOMAT magazine:

New embassies do represent an unusual challenge. Cynical Treasury officials like wartime embassies (cheap) or even no embassies (free). Don’t modern communications allow all this old-fashioned representational work to be done from and between capitals?

No. The issue, as always (perhaps more than ever in our Tower of Babel world), is maintaining discreet personal senior relationships. That needs smart, nimble people on the spot who do just that. People taken seriously by powerful local people, because they respect those powerful local people and engage sensibly on common issues...

Another opportunity for FCO bloggers to write a lively Op-ed:

A high-ranking diplomat at the Foreign Office has been arrested after allegations that he launched a foul-mouthed anti-Semitic tirade.

Middle East expert Rowan Laxton, 47, was watching TV reports of the Israeli attack on Gaza as he used an exercise bike in a gym.

Stunned staff and gym members allegedly heard him shout: 'F**king Israelis, f**king Jews'. It is alleged he also said Israeli soldiers should be 'wiped off the face of the earth'

Meanwhile says the Daily Mail website:

Mr Laxton, who is still working normally, is head of the South Asia Group at the Foreign Office, on a salary of around £70,000.

The FCO is on the case:

A Foreign Office spokesman said: 'It is too early to comment in detail on a matter that is currently the subject of police enquiries. But we take extremely seriously any allegation of inappropriate conduct on the part of our staff and continue to follow developments closely.'

Yet the News section on the FCO website seems to have little to say about this dull little story, leading instead on the gripping saga of Change of travel advice to Madagascar.

Diplomacy. All (and some inhuman) human life is there.

A reader writes about FCO blogs:

FCO bloggers try to keep to policy areas they have responsiblity for.  Diverging from this has caused the odd frantic call from London to the offending blogger.

There is nothing to say that staff cannot advance national interest behind closed doors AND engage in a public policy debate through blogs.  Blogs offer you the chance of writing an op-ed a day.  We should take that chance.

Hmm.

I think not.

Blogs offer you the chance to write an op-ed a day. So do newspapers. Yet how many op-ed pieces by serving British diplomats have there ever been? None?

The point is that under the way our democracy functions British diplomats can't work like that. Nor do they. Anything close to being critical or tendentious or spikey or provocative is likely to annoy either a host government or HQ or both.

Just say a diplomat posted a blog entry politely speculating on the wisdom of current Climate Change or Middle East policy. Imagine the scenes in Parliament:

"The Secretary of State apparently can not persuade even his own senior officials of the wisdom of this policy! Why should we take any notice of him?"

Which is why the FCO blogs are a friendly but bland product, making no serious contribution to the 'global foreign policy debate'.

One of the better FCO blogs by Stephen Hale tries to explain where FCO blogging fits in to the UK's foreign policy priorities:

More niche blogs, with well defined objectives, linked to specific projects or campaigns. Because the web is about niches, and it's within niches that blogs can have real value. We want our bloggers to reach their particular target audiences (rather than to generate general-interest traffic).

But how precisely do you begin to define what a 'target audience' is for any given diplomatic blog then target it without being at least a bit sharp and different? It takes months if not years to build up a non-trivial readership - blandness is not the way to do it.

Let's see what FCO bloggers have to say about this story:

David Miliband is criticised by a high-powered Commons committee today over claims that he "washed his hands" of alleged sexual abuse of Iraqi women at the British embassy in Baghdad.

The Foreign Affairs Select Committee demands to know why the Foreign Secretary had left an investigation into the claims to the same US firm that employed those accused of harassment.

An interesting set of practical management issues buzzing around in this one:

• how Embassies operate in tough environments
• legal status of contractors vis-a-vis the Embassy
• role of DFID vis-a-vis FCO
• how best to deal with alleged misconduct
• and so on

What will we get from the FCO blog empire on all this? My guess: a big round nothing.

NB not because the system is evil or incompetent or evasive.

Rather because there are other much better ways of dealing with serious questions than via the ephemeral and (said by one who should know) self-indulgent world of blogging?

Update: I have tried to post a comment on Stephen Hale's FCO blogsite expanding a little on the points above. Let's see if the comment appears after this scary message in Big Red Letters:

You have submitted a long comment and it has been marked as possible spam. Our moderators will still receive it and post it if it is in line with our terms and conditions. Comment has more than 1000 characters

As we all know, across its vast territory Russia has all sorts of energy resources.

And, as energy gets scarcer, Russia therefore gets richer and can throw its weight around again, right?

Not so fast.

The problem with vast energy reserves is that it costs a vast amount to develop them. So Russian firms either do this themselves, borrowing money on a vast scale to do so, or do it in partnership with foreign energy giants.

We have gone through a period of Russia doing deals with the big energy companies then briskly 'renegotiating' those deals to benefit the sprawling Kremlin-favoured Russian energy enterprises.

Since then energy prices have tumbled. So how is it all going from the point of view of Russia now?

A complicated story. But one answer might be: badly.

Bottom line:

Without the injection of foreign capital into developing their reserves Russia's grand vision as being a global energy provider look to remain as mere dreams unrealised. Perhaps surprisingly, the cash rich western oil companies still have an appetite for investment in Russia, and several are showing an interest in partnering Gazprom in the giant Yamal development in Arctic Siberia.

Without a doubt they will be far more careful the second (and for some the third) time around and we can expect to see guarantees in the form of internationally held bonds and cost-reimbursable contracts to be commonplace if such partnerships go ahead.

But having spent the past three years assuring its population that Russia is back to being a strong, independent country which does not need to partner with foreigners (a refrain which shows no sign of abating), how is the Russian government going to explain itself if it is once again signing "unfavourable" deals with western oil giants from a position of weakness?

At root this is all about attitudes to honesty and diligence.

We in the so-called West tend to think that when a contract is signed it has both legal and moral value, bringing a negotiation to an end.

The dominant political culture in much of the former communist world has it that a contract has no real significance, either legally or morally. Why should it have? But the signing of a contract often does mark the start of a more significant negotiation process.

Thus this Vast Negotiation. They need Money. We need Energy.

Those who run the Kremlin know that Russia needs huge sums of money to develop its energy reserves. But they chaff at the normal disciplines imposed by the West in lending it to them.

Yet we in the West need Russian energy - how tough can we be in insisting on transparency and respect for contracts?

продолжение следует, down the decades.