Blogoir: September

Over at Business and Politics I ask some questions designed to help people sort out their own thoughts and identify which sort of business behaviour is 'greedy':

Question Four
A family firm builds up over generations now employs 400 people. One worker is a convinced Communist. He starts to agitate for a trade union presence to be accepted in the firm. He persuades 100 workers to join him, but the majority aren’t interested. For the first time in the firm’s history damaging disputes break out. Production slows. Customers are annoyed. Fearing that their beloved business could crash, the wealthy family owners sack the Communist and his 9 closest associates. These 10 people sue the firm for unlawful dismissal and win significant compensation. Who is being greedy? Why?

Go on.

Test your Greed IQ.

See (and hear) how a senior Labour politician describes some of the goings-on in the Labour Party in recent years as "wicked and malicious" - and then lies about it on TV.

Another triumph for ubiquitous micro-media recording.

Wicked. And delicious.

A young woman is unemployed. She has numerous tattoos and face-piercings, which some employers might find unattractive and not the sort of image they wish to present.

Question.

Should taxpayers who are paying for her unemployment benefits be entitled to expect her to 'smarten up' her appearance in a more conventional direction?

If she is entitled to look the way she wants, why aren't taxpayers entitled to say "Fine by us - but not at our expense?"

Who is being greedy here? Who, as Lenin might say, whom?

Devil's Knife and numerous commenters delve deep into these fascinating questions. Beware: Rude word advisory.

I have been writing a piece for Business and Politics on Greed.

It has involved intensive research on the Internet. I thought I would share with my loyal readers my core findings.

Thus:

Are North Korea's leader, Jack Straw, Neil Kinnock and Fidel Castro by some chance related?

Of course.

Why?

Because they are all part of socalist political family hierarchies, featuring a successful father whose fame and power and influence help propel their relatives to new glory.

We all know about Kim Jong-il whose son Kim Jong-un is now shooting upwards, such is his evident merit and popular appeal. And when one decrepit Castro can no longer rule, bring in another.

Then there's Oxford-educated Will Straw, and sundry Kinnocks. Rachel Kinnock previously was employed by her MEP mother as a research assistant, thereby helping her get her new job with Ed Miliband.

Is there anything wrong with all this? Plenty of political dynasties on the Right too right?

What is interesting about such stories is the light they cast on wider process.

Jonah Goldberg is in fine form here laying in to the hypocrisy and folly of those who insist that More Money is the answer to failing state schools while sending their own children to private education:

We’re constantly told about all of  these countries allegedly beating us in the classroom. Does anyone really think they’re doing better than us because they spend more? Really?

... Do we really think China and India are spending 20-30K per pupil on their new crop of math whizzes?

In 2008-2009, the  District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!  

Part of the problem in the USA is the dead weight represented by the huge Teachers Unions lobby:

These unions are, by a long shot, the largest contributors to members of Congress. The two major education unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), make 95 percent of their political contributions to Democrats.

And with a budget of more than $355 million, the NEA spends more on campaign contributions than ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Walmart, and the AFL-CIO combined.

President Obama sucks in all that support for Democrat causes, but then sends his own children to private school and opposes schemes intended to help other Washington families do the same.

Isn't there something creepy going on here with all these socialist families looking after themselves, first and foremost? Not the fact that they do so -- we conservatives applaud close family ties and reasonable family solidarity.

It's rather the way they simply refuse to draw from their own conservative lives intelligent and consistent policy conclusions for everyone else.

Here is a fascinating piece over at Spiegel Online describing the ambitions of the EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs (sic) to punish those EU member states which have the temerity to sell products which people want to buy and threby run a nice export surplus:

According to draft regulations drawn up by Rehn's agency, countries with chronic current account surpluses or deficits (in other words, countries that export far more than they import, or vice versa) are to pay an annual fine amounting to 0.1 percent of their gross domestic product (GDP), because they threaten the stability of the euro zone.

The proposal calls for countries with imbalances to be given early warnings and reprimanded. If their accounts remain out of balance, the European Commission will make political recommendations for their financial and economic policies, as well as for wage increases and structural reforms.

Mind you, it's not all bad:

The Commission also intends to monitor the budgets of member countries more carefully. It is introducing a new "principle of prudent fiscal policy-making," under which countries will not be allowed to let their budgets increase faster than the rate of economic growth.

As Commissioner Olli Rehn might say: "Fined - by me!"

The European Commission also plans to more vigilantly ensure that the euro-zone members energetically reduce their public debt levels towards the permitted upper limit of 60 percent of GDP.

If a country continuously exceeds this limit, or has had a budget deficit of over 3 percent of GDP (the upper limit under the stability pact) for over a year, then, at the beginning of the ensuing deficit proceedings, it has to pay a non-interest-bearing penalty deposit amounting to 0.2 percent of GDP.

The interesting thing about the European Union is that in a strange way it is always consistent. After all, the Union is basically a creature of international treaties between (now) 27 European countries. So it is not surprising that EU HQ broods on the way those countries and their respective governments behave, and if necessary tries to inflict some severe spankings when the naughty children get too far out of line.

That said, look at what is going on here. EU HQ appears to be planning to penalise workers and businesses in any country whose workers and businesses are especially successful.

Why?

Because too much success in one part of the European Union creates problems in the mediocre parts of the European Union, and therefore for the Eurozone as a whole.

This sort of thing is baffling to Brits.

How, we cry, can we punish (say) Yorkshire for being more successful than some other counties at exporting its production to other parts of the United Kingdom? If (say) Germany is doing particularly well at selling its production across the EU and beyond, that's a handy market signal for everyone else. Greeks, Italians, Poles, Brits and everyone else need to note carefully what what those annoying Germans have been doing to become so efficient, and try to beat them at the same game.

In other words (we think), the EU grows and prospers in the long run precisely because some parts of the Union are doing better than others -- that's how market economies work. Trying to put artificial limits, nay punishments, on the efficient end of this process must be total madness.

"That's all well and good," retorts the Commission. "But your feeble Eurosceptic analogy falls down.

Yorkshire indeed can't and shouldn't be punished for being relatively successful within the UK. It is part of the Poundzone, a single economic space with firm rules set down centrally.

The EU's problem is that member states' governments want the benefits of a single currency but refuse to accept the obvious responsibility of giving EU HQ the task of running the EU as a proper single economic space. This creates the contradictions which are now putting the whole project at serious risk.

The only way to keep the show on the road is, indeed, to do stupid things like punish successful exporting countries. The alternative would be far more stupid, namely to watch the Eurozone collapse.

In other words, don't shoot the messenger. We are here to help you create a bright new future, especially when you don't realise we are doing it."

Well, okay. Given the premises on which that esoteric but amusing argument is based, the conclusions do make some sense.

Back in the real world, it takes a former French Prime Minister to look reality squarely in the eye:

Europe at 27 is doomed to confusion and failure. It suffers from problems that the Lisbon Treaty has failed to correct. Lack of authority: the 1950s structure, with the [European] Parliament, the Commission and the European Council, being too heavy.

Oh well. The main thing is that Euro-virtue is always rewarded.

More lavishly than we mere mortals can possibly imagine.

Daniel Hannan MEP berates the fact that UK contributions to the EU Budget are rising steeply at a time when all Government Departments in the UK are being forced to look for deep cuts. (Note: a terse video clip showing Mr Hannan orating in the European Parliament, a melodrama not improved by an obviously bored Jacek Kurski from Poland's Law and Justice party ignoring the whole thing ).

What is he (Hannan) getting at?

Probably this:

Aaaargh! Shock! It's all out of control!

Er ... no.

I believe the position is roughly like this.

The UK's contributions to the EU Budget are agreed in advance in great chunks - we currently are in the 2007-2013 Financial Perspective, negotiated mainly in 2005.

During that period UK spending under some headings tends to rise. Why?

Simple. Because we wanted Poland to get a big lump of new EU money, and it necessarily takes a while for Poland to spend that money in fact. When Poland spends its money it gets a refund back from the EU pot. Ergo, it is expected that UK and other net contributors' contributions rise accordingly at this point in the Budget cycle.

In other words, to blather on about a jump in EU spending now is mainly junk populism. We are simply paying out what we promised in 2005, more or less on schedule, within the ceiling of that promise. The Treasury will have factored all that in to their long-term numbers.

Plus the Treasury will be quietly counting on the fact that a goodly slice of Polish and other EU spending will not get done in time, so money will be slipp'd back to the UK in due course from the EU pot.

In short, nothing much to see here folks, move along.

The real issue is quite different. At a time when HM Government is trying to make cuts in public expenditure to help deal with soaraway public debt (Note: what the hell is a 'cut' anyway?), what is its attitude towards the next EU Financial Perspective negotiations now coming into view?

Because any increase in our total contributions to the EU under these circumstances will be a real set-back, if not a disgrace.

This is the big one to watch. Open Europe:

UK Chancellor George Osborne has already sent a clear message to his colleagues in the EU.

"We are not going to give way on the rebate, and people had better know that at the beginning of the process, because they'll certainly discover it at the end", he said earlier in the week.

Sounds good and tough?

No. No!

Because the UK Rebate is a red herring.

What counts is the total lump of money we pay into the collective pot, not how it is calculated.

I'd be much happier if the Chancellor were demanding a (say) 25% cut in the EU's total spending over the next Financial Perspective period, but saying that in any case there will be a cut of 25% in the UK's contribution to that collective pot - if others want to pay a lot more to keep that pot full to current levels, fine by us.

To be continued.

In the meantime, it alas takes a senior Frenchman to tell Europe the truth. Namely that the EU as currently configured is top-heavy and doomed to fail.

Come on, UK Conservatives. Start to think strategically and show some hard-headed policy leadership on this one. Things are going our way. Who knows, this might even be popular with the British public.

Or is the Europhiliac LibDem part of the Coalition leaving you comfortably numb?

Anne Perkins at the Guardian muses on the fact that new Labour Party leader Ed Miliband's private life is no longer so private:

Hardly had the world learned the non-secret information that Ed Miliband's partner, the barrister Justine Thornton, was not also his wife, than a trawl through the birth certificates of their London local authority revealed the even more astonishing news that Miliband is not named on the birth certificate of his 15-month-old son, Daniel.

This is not some matter of minor prurience. The elevation of psychodrama over policy in the way politics and politicians are reported and discussed imbues this entirely personal matter, a minor question of bureaucracy, with a terrible significance.

The Daily Mail story:

Although the section headed ‘Father’ is blank, Daniel’s mother Justine Thornton is named, along with her Manchester birthplace and profession, barrister.

Daniel was born on June 2 last year and the birth ­certificate was signed by Justine in Camden, near the couple’s London home, five weeks later on July 9.

There is no suggestion that Ed Miliband is not Daniel’s father and when asked why his name is not on the register, a spokeswoman for the new Labour leader suggested he simply had not had time to fill in the form.

The Guardian might call that 'a minor question of bureacucracy'.

I call it obnoxious, an abdication of elementary family responsibility.

One's birth certificate is after all a defining document in one's life. You only get one of them. For E Miliband to be 'too busy' to complete the formalities needed for his own baby son's certificate is a disgrace.

It's so New Labour: Me, I rise far above stuffy paperwork and all that tiresome bureacracy to soar far, far above the mere masses, the sunlight reflecting off my gleaming Wings of Leadership.

If this is how casually disrespectful he is towards his own child and partner, how will he treat the rest of us if, heaven forbid, he ever becomes Prime Minister?

OK, pretty much all of us agree that it is reasonable for the state to use force against citizens for clear agreed purposes.

But does that mean that it is OK for the state to say that all the state's purposes, whatever they might be, are sufficiently important for force to be used against people who disagree, so that the state invariably gets its way by imposing its will?

Keith Williamson at NRO rightly sees this as a key moral issue:

The resort to violence is what makes the question of what kind of things it is legitimate for states to do an important moral concern.

It seems to me perfectly reasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to stop him murdering, raping, or robbing. It seems to me entirely unreasonable to shove a gun in somebody’s face to extort from him money to fund a project to get monkeys high on cocaine.

Those seem to me fairly reasonable distinctions. It is illegitimate for government to use force or the threat of force for projects that are not inherently public in character.

Warming to his theme he says this:

This is the sort of talk that gives the (always well informed, excruciatingly sober, generally sensible) folks at The Economist the howling fantods, inasmuch as they seem to operate under a kind of distributed version of the divine right of kings — always asking whether the rulers rule wisely, seldom asking whether they have the right to rule at all, and never asking whether and how much we actually need them. That’s why The Economist is the in-house newsletter of The Establishment.

This in fact is the key difference between democracy in the USA and democracy elsewhere.

Namely that Americans see democracy as having an identified and very specific source with accompanying moral authority:

America is an idea – an idea that free people can govern themselves, that government’s powers are derived from the consent of the governed, that each of us is endowed by their Creator with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Whereas eg in the UK we have a version of democracy which in effect is a hard-to-articulate deal between kings/lords who long ago amassed power by force of arms and the wider public. Our national loyalty expresses itself not as respect for ourselves as 'sovereign' but rather somewhat incoherently to The Queen as (I suppose) a symbol of 'the nation'.

This is why politics in Europe generally are much more socialistic, in the sense of skewed towards the idea that for most purposes government derives its moral authority from itself - from merely existing (see the EU passim). Government over here did not spring from and express an  identifiable idea - rather it just evolved from centuries-old practice.

Listen to any media debate in Europe about some or other policy. It tends to focus on the need for 'something to be done' - almost invariably by 'the government'. Rarely if ever is anyone heard to say that as a matter of principle the government should just keep its nose out - that 'government' a priori should be limited.

That sentiment by contrast is regularly heard on US radio/TV. People in the USA really do believe that they own the government, and that the government does not own them.

Which is why the Tea Party tendency in the USA is so important and welcome, but also hard to replicate elsewhere. It represents a mass expression of frustration that elected politicians on all sides (but above all Democrats) have been taking taxpayers for granted, bloating 'government' far beyond any reasonable or even controllable limit.

Not that translating Tea Party principles into action will be easy, or even possible, without a wider dramatic breakdown which compels everyone back towards first principles.

Why? Because whichever party is in power in the USA makes no difference. Government just grows and grows and grows:

As I noted in a recent National Review column on why Social Security reform has proved so difficult, shifting from a pay-as-you-go program to a funded system entails significant “transition costs,” which are borne by the very citizens who would decide to make the change.

Since today’s Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits are paid from today’s taxes, if we decide to pre-fund these programs then the current generation must pay twice: first for current beneficiaries, and second for their own benefits.

Put simply, to shift from an unfunded program to a funded program, someone must contribute extra funds. When the defining characteristic of domestic policy has been for voters to shift their own cost burdens to future generations, it is highly optimistic to expect current voters to accept a double burden. The expected result is to kick the can down the road, such that deficits grow and future taxpayers become even worse off.

Brilliant analysis by Andrew G Briggs.

Read it, then build a rocket and fly to Mars before the whole stupid business collapses under the weight of its own folly.

The WSJ does a good job at shining a light on the top-level secret machinations which have been trying to keep the Eurozone from falling apart.

Some vivid descriptions of how our beloved leaders behave towards each other:

When Mr. Sarkozy barreled into one meeting with camera crews and photographers in tow, Ms. Merkel icily ordered the cameras out: "I won't let you do this to me," she said, warning she wouldn't play the part of "the stubborn old bag."

The whole piece is an interesting insight on how the European Union 'really' works. When in doubt, it is the largest member states' leaders who call the most important shots.

Quite right too. They and not the EU Commission bigwigs are responsible to voters for extracting the taxes which ultimately keep the show on the road.

The more so since in substance when we talk about 'bailing out Greece' in fact it is all about protecting the large banks in France and Germany and elsewhere which lent all that money to Greece?

Mrs Crawf and I have been away for two days, mulling over the fact that we have been married for twenty years.

We repaired to the South Coast, namely Christchurch, for some bracing sea air. The hotel was teeming with trim and efficient Polish staff who were so startled by my attempts to speak Polski that we were given free chocolates.

Some tennis played in windy conditions on a local court tilting both sideways and downhill, watched by a scrawny fox. A walk along the beach. NIce mellow stuff like that.

Back home now.

Our China Anniversary is complete. Next stop, hiyo Silver.

I was back stalking in the long corridors of the Foreign Office today, to give a talk on behalf of ADRg Ambassadors.

I put in a word for Mediation as an example of the hard-edged soft power tool the UK now needed to be ffective at a time of growing global uncertainty - many political issues had at their root emotional uncertainty, and trained insights into how to tackle issues at that level could be really useful at all diplomatic levels.

But most of the presentation developed the idea of the decline in impact of UK and EU diplomacy caused by the accumulation of lumpen useless processy Mass at the expense of far more important diplomatic Velocity.

The EU (I said) was doomed to fail eventually and give way to something else. How to approach that fact now?

In the meantime, how to deal with the obvious international success of countries who got results often at our expense precisely by not being part of clunky, neurotic, over-engineered wider regional blocs: Venezuela, Brazil, China, Russia and so on? 

A good turn-out (70+ diplomats) sat there somewhat stunned to hear one damnable heresy after another.

I also asked them this question back from 2009 to see who had been paying attention:

What is the Supreme Quality in any Brief?

• Speed
• Looks at all angles of the problem
• Clear, reasonable recommendation
• Readable
• Accuracy
• Facts/Opinions/Recommendations kept separate
• At-a-glance understandable
• Honesty/integrity

And the answer is ..?

It was excellent that at least one person there got the answer right, because he is an avid and intelligent follower of this website. (We had a quick word - drop me a line!)

Good to see lots of old freinds again fleetingly.

And to be reminded why I left the UK's public service, in some despair.

Read this superb interview at Edge with W. Daniel Hillis about radical new ideas for looking at what cancer does:

Instead of saying, 'I have cance'", we should say, "I am cancering.' The truth of the matter is we're probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we're not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn't matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.

Who's Hillis?

Danny Hillis, an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He broke the von Neumann bottleneck and changed the way we think about, and use, computation. Hillis's contributions affect nearly every scientific discipline, not to speak of the daily lives of most people on the planet.

What's so striking about what Hillis says here is the way he links different aspects of learning and insight to look at problems in new ways:

There are techniques, for instance, where we can actually look within a cell, and see where a protein is within the cell. We can actually do microscopy below the wavelength of light now, which is a fantastic advance, by using basically little flashes of light, and computing on top of it.

For us mere ignorant beneficiaries of this genius it is impossible to imagine the sustained discipline and rigour and honesty required to invent these machines, and then create them and get meaningful results, then translate those scientific results into new techniques available to to the general public.

This is what civilisation is. Human creativity operating freely within an institutional and legal framework which protects discipline, honesty and accuracy.

What is the moral component of what Hillis does for us? Should we be grateful?

If he invents a process which transforms the lives of millions of people and each of those people gives him £1 or buys a drug he's helped create, he'll be a millionaire. Maybe a billionaire.

Is that unjust or unfair? Divisive? Greedy? Is he exploiting us by virtue of becoming so successful? How do we nurture the cleverness of such people - and of people honourably aiming that high who might well not be successful?

These questions lie at the heart of Atlas Shrugged, written about the idea that large numbers of brilliant people like Hillis (in the book's case industrialists) get revolted by the way 'society' takes them for granted and accuses them of exploitation. They go on strike:

The book has many failings and eccentricities. But the implications of the simple, startling premise - that most people are selfishly living off the brilliance of others and too often sneering at those others - is analysed unflinchingly.

More generally, what should we make of those ranks of crass authoritarian regimes at the UN sneering day after day at Western achievements and integrity, when they are all too ready to 'demand' that we roll out those achievements to them too when they have done nothing at all to deserve them?

Should we go on strike too one day?

I am fed up.

No, I really am. How many more times do I need patiently to explain to this country that Football Fascism is unacceptable.

What is Tim Montgomorie doing supporting the idea that the state should loot specific items of private property so that local MPs can show that they 'care'?

Too much.

Yours, fed up.

According to Iain Dale, the 'right-wing' blogosphere needs new blood:

Left-of-centre blogs take up four of the top 10 places and seven of the top 20. Last year there was only one left-wing blog (Tom Harris) in the top 10 and four in the top 20.

So does this indicate the inevitable ascendency of the left and the retreat of the right? It's possible, but if you judge a blog by quantity of readers I understand that even Left Foot Forward is still only getting about a third of the traffic levels of ConservativeHome.

The comparative decline of the right is not because existing right-wing blogs have been performing badly, it is because there has been no new blood. Norman Tebbit apart - and he has taken to blogging like an unemployed person takes to a bike - there are very few notable new right-of-centre blogs.

Charlotte Gore with her piercing laser kitty eyes knocks this down easily enough:

The point is that if the ‘Right Wing’ blogosphere seems static it’s probably because the ladders that helped the existing blogs to climb have been pulled up (and the primordial soup of voter angst that gave birth to the ones who created those ladders has long since disappeared), while the Left Wing blogosphere is creating its own rival and alternate power/ladder structure – patronage from Iain Dale not necessary a bonus in those circles.

According to Iain Dale, the soaring left-wing blog this year is Left Foot Forward led by Will Straw. Thank goodness we have a progressive answer to Cameronish Tory elitism there, ie one who had a famous political father and was President of the Oxford Union!

Several points.

First, no serious conclusions at all can be drawn from Iain Dale's Total Politics annual blog surveys unless the detailed results are published. Only some 2000 people voted for a selection of blogs. I suspect the results show a classic Long Tail result, with a tiny number of immensely popular blogs and the rest far less read.

Second, it takes time to build readership. Some so-called bloggers are paid journalists using their newspaper website to pump out more stuff, so they have a naturally high reader base to start from. One good thing about Iain's annual survey exercise is that it does give some modest prominence to individual writers (like me), pecking at their keyboards and trying patiently to build up readership solely by hard work and the odd new insight.

Third, Guido argues rightly that either you provide real news (usually stories some people don't want the public to hear) or you're just another chatterer. There is only so much time for people interested in politics to follow stuff about it on the Internet, and already there must be far too many suppliers for that limited pool of readers. So how could 'new blood' make any quick impact in this area unless it is backed by publicity money from somewhere and/or lots of friends in the wider media and political classes who give it free puffs and invites to events? See Left Foot Forward.

Iain Dale:

Who did BBC News have as their studio guests for 90 minutes? Mark Pack from Lib Dem Voice and myself. This seemed completely natural to them. There was a time when they would have instantly called on a newspaper political editor. They still do of course, but they now regard bloggers as suitable equivalents.

Bloggers have left the subs bench and are now playing on the main pitch...

No. Some politically inclined bloggers (a tiny proportion of the total) have managed to build enough of a following to get those sorts of invitations regularly, in effect to become an Official Member of the Chattering Classes.

Nice for those who get that profile, which of course plays back into increased online readership. And good luck to them - they will have worked hard to get that prominence.

But it's not really a big deal - it's just the MSM pretending to be more pluralistic by expanding the familiar echo chamber a little. If anything it serves to show just how determined the media remain to exclude libertarian and other more contrarian anti-Big Government and anti-Big Media opinions (see also Climate Change passim).

Still, this year I shot up the charts and got two shiny new Total Politics badges to wear.

Better than a slap in the face with a wet fish, as my late father would opine.

I have not been past Arts & Letters Daily recently, but it continues to carry a fine range of links.

See this one at the NY Times about Truthiness and Proofiness - different forms of approaching or presenting arguments in a specious or dishonest way.

Truthiness: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.”

Proofiness by contrast uses what purport to be hard facts, namely numbers, to skew argumentsto suit a cause: “the art of using bogus mathematical arguments to prove something that you know in your heart is true - even when it’s not.”

Examples aplenty given: “Proofiness” reveals the truly corrosive effects on a society awash in numerical mendacity. This is more than a math book; it’s an eye-opening civics lesson.

But how about yet another form of dishonesty? Frothing up a fake moral panic for ideological reasons, then letting the victims of that panic rot in prison or otherwise be punished, then concluding that those who did all that were being 'metaphorically' truthful?

Only in feminist America:

During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans -- most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me -- became convinced that they'd repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy...

Meredith Maran falsely accused her father. And now has written a book describing her 'Lie'.

It is noteworthy  how her use of words in this interview suggests that she has still not grasped the enormity of her wickedness:

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters' incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail -- and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

This suggests that the 'culture' somehow 'flipped' on its own. What happened was that the innocent (male) victims of her feminist rage started to fight back, and somehow the courts began to find for them despite furious feminist counter-arguments.

With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the '80s and early '90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there's a story there.

But of course. Turn one's perfidy into a story! Write a book. Make money.

Not only for me, but for a lot of women I know who made these false accusations, it was very much a social phenomenon. Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true. But there was a confusion between a metaphor and a fact. And it was a highly relevant difference.

What? Run that past me again, please.

Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true.

Yes, the core feminist lie remained intact. Men really were violent rapists and brutalisers of their own children. It's just that annoyingly they had not in fact done anything to reveal their evil nature, even though we feminists said they had.    

... when you look at the overall impact on the world, I'm glad it happened. Kids didn't used to be protected the way they are now. Another thing, one hopes, is that a little girl who does tell, or little boy, is more likely to be believed than was true before all this happened.

But ... but ... what if they are believed and they're making it all up?

During the election, when people were saying Obama was a Muslim, my leftie friends would say, "What's wrong with these people? They're such idiots. How can they believe that?" And I would be watching it and thinking, that's me. I know how...  I can never look at crazy right-wingers the same way

Hurrah. Solidarity between crazy people on Left and Right. So comforting.

A delicious insight into the way EU leaders squabble with each other when we can't watch what they are up to is given to us by Le Monde, as borrowed by Open Europe.

The top-level ghastly personal row breaks out over the French moves to deport Roma people. The various exotic interventions by S Berlusconi are what my teenage sons would call 'random'.

And behold M Barroso upholding his honour:

Sarkozy: "Barroso can't tell us what to say!"

Barroso: "I've the right to express my opinion, because I'm a member of the European Council myself. And I even have a special statute [...] We have done everything to help you with the European Parliament, which is furious on this issue. Let's not turn all this in an institutional quarrel. That would be excessive".

President Sarkozy of course sneers at Luxembourg, prompting this surreal exchange:

Luxembourgish Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker (trying to mediate): "Ms. Reding should not have talked the way she did. Nicolas should not exaggerate, though. It's only by chance that she was born in Luxembourg".

Barroso (interrupting Juncker): "But it was you who appointed her [as EU Commissioner representing Luxembourg]. Three times!"

Juncker: "Yes, but at your request..."

Let's tip-toe quietly away from this grotesque scene, leaving the last word of unambiguous wisdom with Silvio:

Berlusconi: "We need to silence the Commissioners!"

Tiens.

What does it all mean? Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire?

Spiegel Online picks up some French media jibes wondering whether N Sarkozy and S Berlusconi are merging into one new organism: Sarkosconi.

The EU is busy setting up its new External Action Service.

Vital to make sure from the outset that some of Europe's brightest diplomats get key positions on merit, not on the trivially irrelevant criteria of where they were born? Hey, we're all Europeans together after all!

Of course not.

Let's have quotas from here and there instead.

The Grandmother of all Pyrrhic Victories of form over substance.

The Crawfs are moving house soon. A valuer came round today to look at out furniture, too much of it for the new place.

Over many years we have spent, say, £20,000 on these pieces of different shapes and sizes. How to get anything back now? If they go to auction we're told we'll be lucky to get £6000, from which auctioneers' and other fees will be extracted.

eBay is fine if you have the know-how and energy to use it, but with the hassle factor of photographing and describing and posting all sorts of different things will it really do us much better than getting the whole lot whisked away in one sad van?

Some of our quirky souvenirs (a chess-set or two) picked up on sundry expeditions round post-communist flea-markets are worth a bit. Perhaps. The furniture? Sorry, but no thanks.

Is this fair? What about all the craftsmanship that went into some of those solid yet graceful Edwardian wardrobes and sideboards? Is it really worth not much more than firewood?

Does the Labour Theory of Value (worked up by K Marx and others) not help me here?

Or am I left with the Subjective Theory of Value:

... a buyer in a free market who offers to pay a price lower than that which is commensurate with the amount of labor used to produce the good merely communicates information to the seller about the value the good might create for the buyer...

The offer is in one sense an expression of the buyer's opinion, which the seller is free to reject.

Well sure, I am free to tell the valuer and auction house to get lost. But removals day looms fast - where then will all this stuff actually go?

Tastes change. Lifestyles change. As the valuer asked, "Who drinks from teacups or uses fish-knives these days anyway?"

Hmm. Not us, most of the time at least.

All of which mournful self-pity takes me (via Browser) to one zungzungu who has views on why modern journalists are a dying breed - their products were falsely insulated from competition for decades and weren't in fact much good (my emphasis added):

Print journalism is dying because the writing being produced by amateurs has enough use-value to show how over-valued in market terms professional writing has become or perhaps always been...

... what the internet has done is break the guild monopoly of a few publishers and allowed the market to “correct an inefficiency,” as the bloodless language of economics has it.

When people make the choice not to pay for your labor, that’s the voice of the market telling you to “re-train and re-skill,” a market that has just figured out that it can do without you.

And without my beloved furniture.

Sigh.

Market forces help you sing lustily - when you're winning.

I am rummaging around on the Internet for material on why international organisations are so ineffective.

I suspect it's all to do with the Square/Cube law, identified by Galileo. See here:

Doubling the length of the sides of the square creates an area four times the size. The effect is greater still for volume - as 'size' grows, volumes change faster than surface area.

This means that if something grows and grows (on Earth), eventually its sheer weight must cause it to collapse.

All of which somehow shows that the larger any organism or organisation, the 'denser' the internal processes need to become to support the surging weight and the energy needed to keep it moving. Mass grows at the expense of relative strength and nimbleness.

All of which takes us back to the EU and our old friend, the formula for kinetic energy:

E_K = (1/2)mv²

While I mumble irrelevantly to myself about all this in the corner, check out this fine piece about the way monster and sci-fi movies have played fast and loose with these basic physical relationships as they apply to biology.

Would the Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) really have struggled to pick up a needle to fend off a spider?

And what in fact would have happened when the giant octopus in It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) tried to pull down the Golden Gate bridge?

Read it - and find out.