Blogoir: January

As 2010 looms one looks back at one's website stats for the site's second full year:

2009

• 79000 Unique Visitors
• 178,000 Visits
• 634,000 Pages
• 2,076,000 Hits

2008

• 42,600 Unique Visitors
• 97,000 Visits
• 458,000 Pages
• 1,429,000 Hits

Not clear to me how many of you follow by RSS feed and where if anywhere those numbers feature in the stats. But in any case a year of solid growth for what is never going to be a site which features self-indulgent sensationalism, and so attracts a sensitive yet highly intelligent readership.

Google Analytics breaks these stats down into all sorts of esoteric detail. Broadly speaking, a link here from one of the big hitter sites (Guido, Iain Dale, Devil's Kitchen) adds a juicy but fleeting stats bump.

What matters is to keep readers' attention for longer than a few seconds. It is especially gratifying that during the year many thousands of readers have stayed here for an hour or more.

* * * * *

So much for 2009, when not much went well in the greater scheme of things: too much underperforming if not corrupt government in too many places. The Climate Debacle in Copenhargen seemed to epitomise the end of a certain way of looking at big picture policy-making. Lots for a new UK government to think about in 2010 at home and abroad, if it is to make a difference for the better.

If worthy citizens in some or other English constituency choose me as a Parliamentary candidate and I surge to victory in the ensuing 2010 election, then maybe I'll be well placed to feed in some serious New Thinking, welcome or otherwise.

If not, then more of the same, for as long as I can afford it. Some people ask me why I do not write a book. The main reason is that it would not get the readership I win through the site. On the other hand, people might buy the book. Anyone wanting to contribute generously to help support my blog writing needs only to offer. All sensible currencies accepted.

I expect to reboot the 'look' of the site somewhat in the New Year, mainly to get rid of some clutter and simplify the colour scheme. I find that whereas in daylight the main background looks an attractive pale creamy colour on my screen at least, it mutates as night falls into a murky custardy hue.

Plus look out for a significant new Ambassadors Mediation initiative in January.

Happy New Year. And thank you.  

Reader Norman Fraser in his amazement despises this site:

I am amazed at how intellectually short-winded most of your posts are...

Yet mothishly he flickers to and fro around its warm glow. See his latest comment on my posting below about those climategate email Source Code Hiccups:

Still kidding yourself in ever more verbose and pseudo-technical ways Charles

Well.

The point of the powerful Climate Change arguments is to bring about a massive re-engineering of society now so as to help deal with significant risks in the future.

The practical effects of these risks coming about (warmer air, less Arctic ice etc) are predicted on the basis of reliable science research (at least, many serious people claim that).

The costs of those risks coming about are mainly calculated using economic analysis. Plus there are some benefits too - some changes will be 'bad' as currently valued, some 'good'.

Then we have to work out what the smart way is to invest now to reduce at least some of the likelihood of worst-case scenarios happening far down the road - hence the Stern Report.

Which, of course, is still taking heavy hits for the untransparent way it included key assumptions on the 'future discount rate' - how we put a cost today on the value of avoiding much bigger costs in the future (or something like that).

It does not seem to me to be unwise that we all look very hard at all the data and assumptions going in to these fearsomely complicated policy areas. Since the financial and human cost implications of getting it wrong - either not investing enough in the right areas, or investing too much in the worng areas - look to be truly vast, if the worst Climate Change predictions are true but also if they are not.

The usual angry reply to any attempt to call into question current policy is, "But simple science proves the greenhouse effect global warming case!"

Alas, science is just not that simple.

This is an elegant piece of work by Willis Eschenbach about the complexity of different systems.:

For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.

So that’s the problem with “simple physics” and the climate. For example, simple physics predicts a simple linear relationship between the climate forcings and the temperature. People seriously believe that a change of X in the forcings will lead inevitably to a chance of A * X in the temperature.

This is called the “climate sensitivity”, and is a fundamental assumption in the climate models. The IPCC says that if CO2 doubles, we will get a rise of around 3C in the global temperature. However, there is absolutely no evidence to support that claim, only computer models. But the models assume this relationship, so they cannot be used to establish the relationship

And check out the wonders of Constructal Theory while you are at it.

Will anything we do now head off the next Ice Age grinding its way in our general direction in 2000 years' time? Lawks:

For the last couple million years of the Quaternary Period you can see by looking at long term temperature graphs that the interglacial periods have been shorter than the glacial periods. Our civilization is very much a product of the current Holocene/Anthropocene interglacial period. We should try to make this period last.

I would prefer we didn't burn up all the limited supply of fossil fuels now so that we could burn them later when we really need to heat up the planet. But the average human discount rate precludes that sort of restraint and long term planning.

We effectively can't even plan for 50 years from now. 2000 years is out of the question.

Am I kidding myself (and my myriad readers) in linking to gripping work such as this?

Or am I doing what any prudent consumer does, and reading up on a wide number of reviews before I buy an expensive product?

Perusing Hacker Factor I found this notable device, a Gender Guesser programme for (yes) guessing the gender of a writer from 300 or so words of prose.

Worth a try.

So I cut and pasted this passage from a recent blog entry of mine:

The strength of the Iranian protest movement lies in its diffused, domestic and almost spontaneous mass nature. But that can be a weakness too - to bring down a system like Iran's will require deadly focused force aimed at the heart of the regime, and probably a lot of ruthless killing along the way.

One way Western powers can help is to try to drive wedges into the system. To try to identify moderate or wavering fanatics within the ruling elite, and urge them privately that the game is up - and that they should hold back as and when the final crisis comes. Nothing like an obviously authentic secret personal message from the top of a Western intelligence agency to concentrate the mind.

More publicly we might want to think about setting up websites populated by lists and pictures of the worst people in the Iranian regime whom we would expect the Iranian people to want to put on trial for crimes against humanity, as and when the regime falls. Once people are on an open list that warns that the long arm of Justice will eventually nab them, who knows what they might do to get off it?

And when in doubt, push stories that the regime's top people are getting ready to run away. Those around them are likely to believe them and get cross at the idea of being left behind to face the music. Remember all the rumours that Milosevic was poised to flee to Kazakhstan?

The trouble with countries as corrupted as Iran is that far too many people are implicated in misdeeds. Which means that it may suit the mass of pirates running the ship to throw a couple of leaders overboard as if in a great popular convulsion and go below decks for a while, to bide their time when they can sneak back into power or at least strong places of influence under a new fairer dispensation...

The result? Wow!

Genre: Informal
  Female = 246
  Male   = 708
  Difference = 462; 74.21%
  Verdict: MALE

Genre: Formal
  Female = 248
  Male   = 668
  Difference = 420; 72.92%
  Verdict: MALE

So then I thought I'd better throw into the pot some prose from a Typical Woman by way of cross-checking. How about Jane Austen?

Genre: Informal
  Female = 399
  Male   = 380
  Difference = -19; 48.78%
  Verdict: Weak FEMALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European.

Genre: Formal
  Female = 427
  Male   = 228
  Difference = -199; 34.8%
  Verdict: FEMALE

It works!

But just one more check ... how about Polly Toynbee?

Public jobs are tough. Running a local authority, or a beacon comprehensive or teaching hospital in a hard-pressed borough, takes more managerial talent than running any company. Selling food or cars has just one target – the bottom line. Compare that with a public manager's multiple goals. A happy and well-educated child or a recovered hip-fracture patient returned safely to their home require skills no investment banker has. That is why it's one-way traffic: no one asks retail managers to run schools, hospitals or councils. They might find the responsibility for other people's lives hair-raising – and the pay would be too low. However, public servants jeopardise the respect they deserve once they, too, want their worth weighed in gold.

That is why, as Compass proposes, we need a high pay commission covering both sectors. To be fair to the public administration committee's excellent report, it was beyond their remit to include the private sector. As committee chair Tony Wright points out, their proposed commission would track private sector comparators and report on general pay trends: "There is no doubt that private pay drags the public sector along in its wake

Result? Eeek!

Genre: Informal
  Female = 222
  Male   = 295
  Difference = 73; 57.05%
  Verdict: Weak MALE

Weak emphasis could indicate European

Genre: Formal
  Female = 107
  Male   = 245
  Difference = 138; 69.6%
  Verdict: MALE

Is this what happens to women when they work for the Guardian and BBC for too long?

Another Browser link, this time to a fascinating interview with Stephen Lucas, a heavyweight expert on Soviet Law.

This is well worth reading since it casts some light on an area largely neglected in Western analysis of Communism, namely the way the Soviet regime tried to give legal effect to its ideological dogmas.

For example, the catastrophic collectivisation of agriculture:

... law was used as a pretext for going to the countryside and expropriating grain, how it was used as an engine for change from peasant subsistence farming to mass collectivisation.

In March 1929 the notorious article 107 of the criminal code in 1929 was widely applied to those hoarding grain. You got three years’ “deprivation of freedom” for the crime of deliberately increasing prices by “buying up grain” or by “not putting it on the market” (ie, delivering it to the government) and you were also subject to “full or partial confiscation of your property”.

And yet everybody was hoarding grain because the state was seizing as much as possible for the towns, there was nothing otherwise to eat and you feared for your next harvest or supply of grain...

Not so sure about this:

The demise of the Soviet Union was the demise of a country underpinned by a concept, an ideology, an alternative vision – socialism. It was an evangelical empire posing questions about how best to manage an economy, the extent to which the state provides social welfare, the scope of human rights and the importance of the arts and science.

That said, it was also an empire with a darker side. But since 1991 it seems like we have lost something when it comes to politics – lost the enthusiasm to debate about the bigger questions and to worry about whether there is a better alternative –  ideology seems to be missing. The mere existence of the Soviet Union almost seemed to provide a counter ideological force that helped us to question and frame the nature of how we in the West choose to live.

The great hero of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is John Galt, 'the man who stopped the motor of the earth'. The bold idea is that when the greatest creative minds of society go on strike, the system inexorably breaks down.

Pretty fanciful?

No. In fact the Soviet Union came up with a better way to run this experiment on our behalf. It murdered tens of thousands of its great minds and stopped the rest from being truly creative.

And, yes, after some seventy years of this madness in 2001 the spluttering Soviet motor finally simply seized up, and the whole system keeled over.

Laws and all.

No great loss - apart from all those millions of its victims.

Here via the Browser, going from strength to strength with its insightful and witty links, is a terrific piece deconstructing what at first glance looks like a photograph of a fine example of curvalicious womanhood.

But on closer inspection see how the image has been ... manipulated.

Does it matter? Is this sort of thing some sort of subliminal breach of trust?

The original photograph itself relayed through a lens an image capable of being presented in many different ways. So in some sense the original photograph itself is already a manipulation, in that it is only one of many options available.

That said, it is fairly feeble to fiddle with the image electronically to amplify some body parts - and subtract others?

With the diplomacy of Climate Change in some disarray after Copenhagen, back to all those emails.

Here is a powerful piece from Dale Amon at Samizdata which looks at the technical methodology. Namely, if (big assumption) one pulls together a great mass of reliable data, how to present the data in a meaningful way?

Lots of assumptions are built in to this process. And it can be done with more or less transparency. And no electronic hiccups.

Or not:

Let me explain. Computers represent numbers in binary. Any signed representation (ie one that handles plus and minus) will use some formatting trick to differentiate the two. The problem is, if a positive number gets incremented to be one bit too big... it may suddenly become a negative number.

Regardless of what does happen, any calculation using the value after an overflow might as well be a random number generator. The results are totally, utterly worthless. There is not a chance in hell that the output will be meaningful.

There are ways of dealing with this sort of thing but I will not go into that sort of techno-detail here. My goal is simply to point out that if the statements I heard are true, I must cease to believe the validity of any output from CRU and CRU related models.

There is really only one acceptable way for the field to recover credibility and reinvigorate trust. The code for models must all be made open source. It must be released into the public domain where experts in numerical programming can openly argue about the validity of the code, the mathematical techniques and the mathematical and physical simplifications and assumptions it contains.

I will no longer believe results which lack this corroboration. If an author refuses, I am going to assume they have misdeeds to hide.

Fair enough?

But also this:

A collapse in carbon output is going to occur and the reasons for it have nothing to do with cap and trade or Copenhagen or any other State or NGO foisted crisis plan. By the middle of this century liquid fuels such as gasoline will be generated using the Fischer-Tropsch process in some updated form.

It will be carbon neutral because part of the feedstock will be free for the taking: atmospheric CO2. It will be split using either grid power, mechanical nanotechnology or genetically modified algae (some of which is purportedly working already). With the addition of energy, CO2 -> CO + O, and the Carbon Monoxide may be fed into the same FT process that was used to fuel the Nazi war machine. Towards the end of World War II this was nearly the only source of fuel available to Germany. Anyone who believes this technology is unproven on an industrial scale is simply historically ignorant.

Carbon based grid power is already declining as a relative portion of US energy (30% according to a recent SciAm article). I expect that decline to accelerate as use of ever cheapening and ever improving solar panels really starts to bite.

We will also see inputs from Space Based Solar Power growing explosively by 2050. New technology nuclear and perhaps even game changing wild cards like Polywell Fusion will be taking up major roles by then as well.

If you toss in the huge impacts nanotechnology will have on all facets of technological civilization and the expected population decline in the second half of the century one begins to wonder exactly what will be the climate change problem of 2100? If human CO2 inputs collapse and population declines what climatic impact will the modeling of that scenario show?

Good questions.

If you want LOTS more analysis of the leaked emails from someone with, hem, strong academic science credentials, here is John P. Costella B.E.(Elec.)(Hons.) B.Sc.(Hons.) Ph.D.(Physics) Grad.Dip.Ed.

The popular rising in Iran against its revolting regime is gaining momentum. But will that be enough?

A good WSJ piece on the Big Picture:

Much has been written about the fact that Iran's democratic movement today combines the three characteristics of a velvet revolution—nonviolent, nonutopian and populist in nature—with the nimble organizational skills and communication opportunities afforded by the Web. Less discussed has been the significance of the youthfulness and Internet-savvy nature of the Iranian population.

Seventy percent of Iranians are under the age of 30. And in a population of 75 million, 22 million are Internet users. In spite of the nominal leadership of reformists like Medhi Karroubi, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami, the real leaders of the movement have been the thousands of groups and individuals who work autonomously, and whose structure replicates the Internet.

A good case can be made, and is made by me at least, that the fall of Milosevic in 2000 was the world's first Internet-driven revolution: public opposition to the regime was amplified by well-networked opposition groups, and especially the OTPOR students group.

Iran seems to be taking this to a far higher level. It is a bigger country with a huge youthful population and all the networking benefits of massed mobile phones, Twittering and the rest. Even if it is losing skilled people at a startling rate:

... Iran is today one of the most corrupt economies in the world. It also has the ignominy of topping the list of all countries in terms of brain drain. Each year, between 150,000 and 180,000 of the country's best and brightest leave the country. The yearly cost to Iran for this brain drain alone is estimated to be almost equal to the yearly cost of the Iran-Iraq War, according to the World Bank

See for example how an attempt by the regime to smear an opposition figure by showing him in women's clothes has backfired - the symbols used by the regime are swiftly being annexed by protesters themselves and used to hit back in fierce post-modern irony.

Yesterday I heard the argument from a top UK official who is closely following all this that one good move by President Obama has been to neutralise the argument that the USA is the Enemy of Islam; it is far harder now for the Iranian regime to blame its woes on the Great Satan's machinations.

Maybe.

We went round this one earlier in the year - should or should not Western leaders speak out in support of Iranian protesters? Thus:

By not encouraging them publicly, Western leaders send a signal that they don't care if they win or lose. Demoralising and profoundly cynical?

Let's be fair and not exclude one option. Namely that in some way the Americans and maybe Europeans too have agreed with the Iran Opposition leaders not to say anything in public, so as to deny the regime the propaganda momentum of saying that the Wicked West is fomenting anti-Iranian spies and disarray.

This is what happened in the historic Serbia election of 2000.  As a matter of deliberate policy the Americans did not come out publicly in favour of Kostunica against Milosevic. Instead they whistled nonchalantly and looked the other way, while quietly throwing technical and other support to the anti-Milosevic organisations.

This crafty silence led to a good outcome for Western policy, viz the giddy collapse of support for Milosevic, precisely because the whole campaign against him was not 'internationalised' - Serbs could think of it as a purely home-grown revolution.

I'd like to think that something like this is going on in this case...

Thrashing around wildly as the protests intensify, the regime has decided to blame someone else: Great Satan Lite, ie the UK:

Manouchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, claimed statements from the British Government were inciting demonstrations that swept the country's biggest cities on Sunday. He warned that Iran would strike back against the British and other western governments that were supporting the opposition movement launched in the wake of June's disputed presidential election.

"If Britain does not stop talking nonsense it will get a slap in the face," he said. "The lowly and downgrading remarks by some foreign officials show the black stain on their record in their contradictory interactions."

The regime even summoned HM Ambassador Simon Gass to berate him in this general direction and to show Iran's official rage at this provocative and inflammatory outburst by David Miliband which plunged a perfidious British dagger deep into Iran's internal affairs.

What might we best do to help?

The strength of the Iranian protest movement lies in its diffused, domestic and almost spontaneous mass nature. But that can be a weakness too - to bring down a system like Iran's will require deadly focused force aimed at the heart of the regime, and probably a lot of ruthless killing along the way.

One way Western powers can help is to try to drive wedges into the system. To try to identify moderate or wavering fanatics within the ruling elite, and urge them privately that the game is up - and that they should hold back as and when the final crisis comes. Nothing like an obviously authentic secret personal message from the top of a Western intelligence agency to concentrate the mind.

More publicly we might want to think about setting up websites populated by lists and pictures of the worst people in the Iranian regime whom we would expect the Iranian people to want to put on trial for crimes against humanity, as and when the regime falls. Once people are on an open list that warns that the long arm of Justice will eventually nab them, who knows what they might do to get off it?

And when in doubt, push stories that the regime's top people are getting ready to run away. Those around them are likely to believe them and get cross at the idea of being left behind to face the music. Remember all the rumours that Milosevic was poised to flee to Kazakhstan?

The trouble with countries as corrupted as Iran is that far too many people are implicated in misdeeds. Which means that it may suit the mass of pirates running the ship to throw a couple of leaders overboard as if in a great popular convulsion and go below decks for a while, to bide their time when they can sneak back into power or at least strong places of influence under a new fairer dispensation.

We Western diplomats will want to think that things have changed once and for all, and pat ourselves on the back for having played a limited hand so deftly. But in practice it all will be much less dramatic than it looks...

See Russia and Serbia passim.

2010 to see long awaited regime change in Iran? Or only in UK?

A busy few days for old-fashioned diplomacy, with China taking no obvious notice of British and other pleas for clemency in the case of Akmal Shaikh, and the Tehran regime hauling in the British Ambassador Simon Gass to issue dire warnings about a 'slap in the face' from Iran.

Some thoughts. First, Akmal Shaikh.

Mr Shaikh was well known to the British Embassy consular team in Warsaw when I was Ambassador, as he was then living in Poland and often pressed the Embassy to intervene in his different battles with the Polish authorities. I do not remember getting involved myself in all this. Anyone keen to find out more can run an FOI request and see what emerges.

The Polish media have been looking at Mr Shaikh's life and times in Poland. See eg this piece by TVN which mentions that the Lublin police held Mr Shaikh on charges relating to driving while under the influence of alcohol - and threatening terrorist attacks. And this other report from Polska newspaper:

He was married to a resident of Lublin. He came from London in 1998 and offered the city fathers to start an airline, among other ventures. He would turn up at the town hall every six months, each time with new ideas.

In 2005 for example he decided to build a huge mosque. He presented his initiative to the then councillor Dariusz Jezior but the latter showed no interest in the idea. Since that time Akmal kept sending him SMS threats. - I will bring people from Pakistan, terrorists who are more ruthless and will do what needs to be done - Akmal wrote to the councillor who eventually brought the case to the police. 

Hmm.

Once Mr Shaikh was convicted in China on drug smuggling charges and faced execution, the British government had a dilemma. How best if at all to intervene?

Various options were available:

• do nothing, and hope that Chinese justice might end up leaving him spared execution
• press publicly for clemency
• press privately for clemency
• try to get others (eg the EU) to take up the issue

The way most likely to fail in such cases is to press frequently, noisily and publicly, since that means that any act of clemency by the other side will look to have been done under humiliating foreign pressure. Former diplomat-turned-politician George Walden (who served in China) sums up the issues here well, and looks back at some awkward history.

That said, if a veritable global storm of protest can be generated - as in the case of the Sharpeville Six in South Africa - that approach can work.

Part of the problem here is that most countries, even (especially?) those without serious democracy, like to maintain that their legal systems are independent of political influence. So it is easy for the authorities to shrug their shoulders and say primly, "Sorry, we'd love to help - but alas our hands are tied. You British of course understand, since your own independent judiciary is rightly feted as an example to us all".

Which is why HM Government strove to pitch the arguments in terms of possible room for manoeuvre within the Chinese system itself, pressing the point that Mr Shaikh had rights which (arguably) had been denied.

But that too was a double-edged sword - did the Chinese want to accept that their own system made errors?

What about getting others to weigh in? A deathly hush from the EU's new High Representative Baroness Ashton? In any case, other leaders are usually loath to get involved in such national cases - they do not like pumping out synthetic indignation when they have no real way of identifying the true facts of the case for themselves.

Over in China the Embassy will have been busy trying to decide and advise where if at all pressure might most persuasively be applied. National or regional level? Justice Ministry or eg more politically via the Prime Minister's office? How best to pitch the 'tone'? Unfailingly polite if not deferential? Or with a sense of anger and some sort of hints that China/UK relations will suffer if the 'wrong' outcome arises?

In London the calculation was rather different. How to balance the best chance of success - more or less completely silent diplomacy - with clamour from the family and various NGOs that HMG needed to do 'more' to secure a reprieve? In the end as many as 27 different appeals by Ministers (with a personal one from Gordon Brown) were made. Too many to be wise - and perhaps even so many as to be annoying?

In this dismal case nothing was likely to work, and nothing did work.

Hence now sharp public diplomatic exchanges between London and Beijing, with the Chinese Ambassador summoned for a difficult meeting with FCO Minister Ivan Lewis and China telling London to 'mend its ways'.

Hence the FCO left is brooding on its failure here and the earlier bitter words between London and Beijing after the Copenhagen fiasco:

In both cases the Foreign and Commonwealth Office appears to have considerably overestimated its leverage with the emerging superpower, convinced until it was too late that China was so desperate to avoid public criticism that it would yield to private pressure. A wholesale change of direction is ruled out but senior government figures admit to feeling shaken by the twin failures.

“Changing our China strategy into one of non-engagement or isolationism is neither credible nor desirable and would be counterproductive,” said a government source. “But do we wake up this morning with a little less trust on our side? Yes, we do.”

Yesterday on BBC Radio Five Live plenty of people were telephoning in to say that Mr Shaikh deserved no mercy, and that the UK too should bring back the death penalty.

A Lib Dem MP said that the Government had done all it could and proclaimed himself simply lost for words to know what the answer was.

Maybe it depends on the question?

I hope by now that you have all read The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. It is one of the most profound science fiction short stories ever written, because it has at its heart the core question of science and indeed existence:

Can entropy ever be reversed?

What is entropy?

It can be looked at in different ways. One is here: Entropy is a measure of the uniformity of the distribution of energy.

Or this:

Rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, entropy measures the disorganization in a system. It is essentially a commonsense law of probability: events with a high frequency occur more often than events with low frequency. Systems proceed from initial states of low probability to end states of highest probability or final equilibrium...

Imagine for example two separate containers of the colors blue and yellow with a valve connecting the two closed systems. When the valve is opened, molecules of each color advance to the other side. Over time, the two colors blend together to form a uniform green. Once the system reaches an equilibrium of greenness, there is no going back to the initial states of separate yellow and blue.

It is much the same when shuffling a deck of cards. Even with a well-defined initial sequence, this “closed system” quickly becomes disordered and confused. For the sake of simplicity, the act of shuffling consists of removing the top card and placing it back in the deck at random.

After one shuffle, the deck has changed to one of fifty-two alternatives, each strongly resembling the original order. After many repetitions, however, the original sequence will have been completely destroyed.

In this manner, order is relentlessly replaced by increasing disorder as closed systems degrade to more probable, less informative states. Simply put, entropy is a measure of lost information...

This passage is lifted from an elegant piece by Randall L Schweller, which takes this concept and applies it with much insight to international relations.

Try this:

What some call global governance is little more than a spaghetti bowl of clashing agreements brokered within and among thirty thousand or so international organizations of varying significance, from the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission to the United Nations.

One wonders how states make decisions and forge long-run strategies these days when it is virtually impossible for them to figure out where international authority over any issue resides, and which agreements, interpretations and implementations of rules and laws have salience and should come to dominate.

And this:

... the transfer of global wealth and economic power now under way—roughly from West to East—is without precedent in modern history in terms of size, speed and directional flow. If these were the only processes at work, then the future of international politics might well conform to the benign, orthodox liberal vision of a cooperative, positive-sum game among states operating within a system that places strict limits on the returns to power.

But this is not to be because, in a break from old-world great-power politics, there will be no hegemonic war to wipe the international slate clean. We will therefore be stuck with the bizarre mishmash of global-governance institutions that now creates an ineffectual foreign-policy space. Trying to overhaul existing institutions to accommodate rising powers and address today’s complex issues is an impossible task.

So while liberals are correct to point out that the boom in global economic growth over the past two decades has allowed countries to move up the ladder of growth and prosperity, this movement, combined with a moribund institutional superstructure, creates a destabilizing disjuncture between power and prestige that will eventually make the world more confrontational...

Lots more where that came from. Terrific.

Read the whole thing if you are interested in the larger patterns and deeper trends and tendencies which help explain why Copenhagen was doomed to fail.

Britblog Roundup 253 is hosted by Amused Cynicism.

It links to Two Doctors greenly blaming leading planetary Leftists for the Copenhagen debacle:

Having got nowhere in 2009, I am going to have another self-indulgent shot at the 2010 Orwell Blog Prize.

2009 winner was Nightjack, a UK policeman writing his blog anonymously who was later 'outed'. He is on the jury this year, so my own thoughts on the fact that his name was revealed to the world (namely that was a risk that came with the territory, especially if one is in the public service and writing about it) might or might not appeal to him.

It is not quickly clear from the Orwell Prize website which criteria the judges use in choosing a Blog Prize winner. Still, nothing ventured nothing gained. I have to select ten entries over the past year.

Now let's see...

As the children get older it is highly efficient to buy smart presents for oneself but make a play of bestowing them on the progeny.

Such as, for example, the remarkable 'graphic novel' Logicomix:

Rush off and buy it with your remaining Christmas money. Now.

It is the long, wry, subtle yet fascinating story of the interplay between key philosophers (notably Russell and Wittgenstein) as they grappled with some of the deepest questions of logic and mathematics:

• is 1 + 1 = 2 saying something universally significant, or is it a trite tautology?
• is infinity a misconceived idea?
• is the world made up of facts or objects?
• is Logic a branch of Mathematics, or Mathematics a branch of Logic?
• is Mathematics not far from mysticism
• and, most importantly, how if at all can Pure Reason be applied to human affairs?

The book takes us through the ebb and flow of arguments and the lives of the key thinkers, setting it all against the background of Russell being pressed to say whether it was 'right' for Americans to go to war against Hitler.

And if all that were not enough to digest after a large slice of Christmas cake, it ends with an account of the Oresteia, the trilogy from ancient Greece, in which the extreme rationality of justice and mercy is explored in gory detail.

The point (I think!) is that to avoid a tortured road to melancholy or madness, 'objective' logic needs to stay rooted in 'subjective' yet honest human experience. Something for conservatives and liberals alike to mull on in 2010?  

A towering achievement, beautifully drawn and presented. 

And if that is not enough, get this one too: 

A superbly readable account of the history of mathematics, simply explained with glorious illustrations. Marvel at how brilliant people centuries ago scratching away on parchment by candle-light identified the rules which allow us to construct our world.

The point about books like this is that you feel a lot smarter for a few hours after having read them, even if most of it is just too darn difficult.

In our family the period immediately before Christmas Day is taken up with the annual ritual of home-made Christmas cards.

This tradition started when Crawf 1 appeared and has developed over the years as successive Crawfs have appeared and grown. Originally simple coloured drawings with some sort of family theme linked not always coherently to Christmas - the Pokemon phase lasted rather longer than it should have done - the artwork has become steadily more sophisticated.

First smart art paper and glitter pens, then additions of family photographs cut out and pasted, and now the wonders of digital camera technology. And as the junior Crawfs have got older, flashes of biting satire and even droll wit have appeared, not to mention art school design themes.

This year saw Santa crashing down into our daughter's bathroom through our leaky roof, some pointed references to supposed teenage-style crushes, and (bizarrely) two independent creations featuring the dog being cooked served for Christmas Dinner with an apple in its mouth.

This year's innovation: FaceGoo, an iPhone app which allows you to stretch photographs into grotesque contortions (eg a normal looking mother-in-law deftly transformed into the witch from Snow White) and save the results. The dog scarcely recognised itself.

Anyway, with each Christmas generating well over ten family cards of different shapes and sizes, it is a bigger and bigger job every year just to hang them all up. They are our main treasured family archive.

All of which is just to say that there comes a point when the blogging wheels stop turning for a few days as waves of relatives and mince pies storm and finally overwhelm the battlements.

And we all feel much the better for it. 

Some readers of this site will know of the wonderful books of Misleading Cases written by A P Herbert, which cast a wry satirical eye on the application of legal principles to real life.

See for example his impeccable reasoning in the legendary case of Fardell v Potts, which analyses the legal concept of the reasonable man and concludes that at Common Law a reasonable woman does not exist.

A P Herbert also had a lot to say about motor cars. He pointed out that if someone turned up at a gathering elbowing people out of the way and shouting Parp Parp to force a way through the throng, that bullying aggressive person would be shunned by polite society.

Yet once that person was out on the public highway and inside a heavy fast car, everyone was expected indeed to defer and move aside briskly, however rude and aggressive the driver might be.

Hence the case Haddock v Thwaile, where a pedestrian sues a motorist. If someone brings on to a public road a wild beast that escapes, Haddock contends, they must answer for all the damage "which is the natural consequence of its escape".

The judge takes Haddock's side. A motor car should in law, he pronounces, be regarded as a wild beast - a comparison made all the more apt by the size of the offending engine (45 horsepower).

What pedestrian could cope with 45 horses tethered together, galloping at full speed past a frequented crossroads? "The ordinary walking citizen cannot be expected to calculate to a nicety the speed, direction and future conduct of such monsters, for not even their own drivers can do that."

Not a trivial legal arugument:

... in Haddock v. Thwaile, where the Court of Appeal extended strict liability under Rylands v. Fletcher to motor-cars on the highway, and - carried away on a tide of Luddite eloquence - revived and extended the law of deodand by ordering the unfortunate motorist's car to be destroyed.

Nowadays it is almost forgotten that this story is nearly based on fact. Before the First World War, at the dawn of the motor age, the English courts came within a whisker of imposing strict liability upon the owner of a motor-car for all the damage which it causes in use.

All of which is a long-winded way of suggesting that hard-pressed cyclists on our busy roads might want to invest in a few of these. 

Is hosted by the raging Mr Eugenides.

He kindly links to a couple of postings by the "ever-readable" me.

But also have a look at a stirring defence of bullet points.

And a Cheese-like look at the issues surrounding the outing of a blogger in Scotland.

Plus home-schoolers are rising en masse against the state's control of education.

And lots more.

Goes to the Times website today:

Bad, bad and very bad. Our critics' butcher this year's turkeys

As the myriad delgates wend their various snowy ways from the Copenhagen Global Warming Summit, what is the overall assessment?

Not UN, but UM.

Unambiguous Mess.

Key aspects of the whole thing were a priori perverse from a Basic Diplomatic Technique point of view.

Let's audaciously and even hopefully assume that the science is settled (which it isn't), and that we all agreed that human pouring out of carbon emissions is really likely to do heavy global damage in decades to come.

And that we all agree that we need to cut man-made emissions.

If the real aim was to deliver a significant global new deal on emissions reductions (as opposed to eg boosting the role of the UN and/or redefining global order as ends in themselves), this was a bizarre and doomed way to set about it.

Look at this Wikipedia list of heavyweight global emitters (lists by countries according to per capita emissions are very different, but not really relevant when it comes to Saving the Planet - it's total emissions (and the trends of growth of emissions) which matter, not where they come from):

1	China	6,103,493	21.5 %	4.57
2	United States[11]	5,752,289	20.2 %	18.67
-	European Union[12]	3,914,359	13.8 %	7.84
3	Russia	1,564,669	5.5 %	11.03
4	India	1,510,351	5.3 %	1.29
5	Japan	1,293,409	4.6 %	10.14
6	Germany	805,090	2.8 %
7	United Kingdom	568,520	2.0 %
8	Canada	544,680	1.9 %
9	South Korea	475,248	1.7 %
10	Italy[13]	474,148	1.7 %

South Africa is at 13th place, providing 1.5% of global emissions - the most polluting African country by some way, but still not that important overall.

These figures measure emissions by burning fossil fuels. Add in carbon emissions caused by deforestation which exposes peaty soil which then dries and emits CO2, and Indonesia (19th in the list above) soars towards the top of the charts as the world's third biggest emitter.

So to make a strategic difference, we need a negotiation aimed at a possible treaty involving (say) the top twenty heavy emitting countries alone. No UN. No NGOs. No EU. No-one else.

They could sit in relative seclusion somewhere and work up robust ideas on a comprehensive set of deals - transparency, rich-to-poor subsidies, moves to cheaper energy sources and so on - without a howling circus outside.

Plus any deal reached by those countries (including all UN Security Council members plus a majority of the world's population) would have such political authority and technical weight behind it that the rest of the world would have little choice but to accept it.

Indeed, if the issue is (as we all agree) so urgent, the rest of the world would be wildly applauding that the countries causing the vast mass of the problem had shown leadership and responsibility and taken real steps towards solving it.

Instead we saw a globalised free-for-all which predictably degenerated into an uncontrolled and squalid haggle in which everyone wanted a bung to sign up.

Since the number of countries which can (a) afford a bung, and (b) might be inclined to pay one is pretty small, the haggle turned into farce, with populist charlatans like Chavez and Mugabe ranting insultingly against 'capitalism', and no-one having the nerve to turn off their microphones and bundle them back out into the snow.

So the whole thing was structured to fail, with the EU noisily in the lead.

If you are President Obama, how do you salvage something from this wreckage?

Cut a small deal, any deal, proclaim victory, dash for home.

But there has to be something in it for the USA. No American President is going to throw money into a doubtful international pot without some way of being able to claim that some of the money is being spent honestly now and then.

Hence Obama's statement insisting that without respectable verification arrangements a deal would be "empty words on a page".

A typical punchy 'Western' politician's sound-bite, which had one important advantage - that it was true.

But also one serious disadvantage - that it allowed various undemocratic regimes to pretend to have a hissy fit at this insulting impugning of their sovereignty, including China.

A US blunder? Or just part of the trite negotiating mind-games going on?

Finally, it all ended in comical gyrations, culminating in Obama sitting down with the Brazilian, Chinese, Indian and South African leaders to hammer out something or other among themselves, far from the madding crowd of NGOs and all the other leaders.

Thus it came about in spasm of post-modern irony that a small self-proclaimed group of countries defined the main outcome on behalf of everyone else, with the European Unionists (collectively the third biggest CO2 emitter) left outside. Ditto Russia, left holding its cute little red reset button handed over by Hillary Clinton. And Indonesia, a huge emitter. 

The progressive-Left symbolism of this is magnificent: no Dead White Men (especially those sanctimonious Europeans) spoiling the photo-shot!

We decide - Dead White Men pay!

A New World arises.

The bickering starts. The UK is pointing the finger of blame at different suspects, including sundry leftist regimes from Latin America: Bolivia, Venezuela and Cuba. A bit late now for New Labour to realise what we are dealing with here?

* * * * *

Of course there is a lot of science in climate change. Including physics.

Remember how the EU is a vital and valuable multiplier of UK interests?

How about this:

Europe came to Copenhagen as the bloc that potentially stood to lose the most. The fear was that the US and other countries would refuse to cut their emissions further, but the EU would be forced by public pressure, or by the US ... this would leave it carrying most of the cuts and economically compromised.

The EU need not have worried.

No country forced its hand on emission cuts in the negotiations, and it was itself comprehensively split, with countries such as Poland and even Germany reportedly blocking moves by Britain and others to put the cuts on the table.  

Once again President Obama dissed the UK, despite (or because of?) the Prime Minister's undoubted work and rhetoric to get a 'better' deal:

Unfortunately for Brown he did not receive a name check from Obama in his roll call of those to be thanked for their efforts to reach a deal.

Conclusion?

The worst-run negotiation in human history.

Because the issue at stake is by definition 'global', everyone demands that everyone takes 'responsibility' for tackling it.

And so no-one takes any responsibility.

Small countries irresponsibly exploit a unique chance to act as spoilers to get bribes.

Larger countries mainly responsible for causing the problem exploit the chaos to shrug off any real responsibility for doing something about it. 

And the European Union for all its huffing and puffing 'leadership' was left peering through the window as the USA, China and India did what they liked, with the Brazilians and South Africans there to let Obama tick the Latin American and African political correctness boxes.

Can anything be more incompetent in raw diplomatic technique terms than this?

All in all good news, according to some:

If India, China, America, Brazil (and Uncle Tom Cobley and all) carry on with “business as usual”, then anything Europe does to cut its emissions is irrelevant, at best: it will cause pain and hardship for its own citizens to no purpose whatever.

So let’s toast the negotiators of Copenhagen. By failing so spectacularly, they have presented us with a wonderful Christmas present. All we have to do is open it.

The Browser hosted an excellent first birthday party last night in London.

The Browser is a good-looking attempt to set up a smart person's online content aggregator organised in helpful but manageable categories - somewhere between the eclectic and leisurely Arts & Letters and the Economist. It is getting a solid and growing readerhsip, so far by word of mouth.

Virtue needs to be rewarded. So add it to your Favourites and swing by regularly.

The question on the lips of many people at the party including senior newspaper folk and indeed the Browsers themselves was, how to make money from content?

Advertising is down anyway and drifting fast away from traditional media formats, such as newspapers. And why pay for newspapers when there is more than enough to read out there for free?

What, after all, are most newspaper stories these days other than rehashed material from the wires or pieces cobbled together by someone sitting in an office scouring the Web - in other words, bloggers? Investigative journalism is expensive and does not necessarily generate much material.

Take the Daily Mail's noisy recent 'special investigation' on Climategate - how much of it had not already appeared on blogs and other websites?

Or the Guardian's searching investigation into Tony Blair's financial arrangements - outsourced to its readers!

All in all, we seem to be heading back to something like the hurly-burly world of C18 coffee-shops and myriad scurrilous pamphleteers, as the legacy media try to work out how to get money from us for their work. But they have a job on their hands.

Which columnists really add unfailing must-read insight and value? Not many, and mainly on the FT. The rest are just paid paid bloggers who happen for now to enjoy access to senior politicians and bureaucrats.

I suspect that technology will solve the problem. Once someone works out how to make a reliable Kindle-type gizmo which makes it easy to read online or download reading material of all shapes and sizes - articles, blogs, websites and the rest - we'll all be happy to pay for some sort of content subscription.

The smart sellers will sell their material very cheaply, hoping to build up lots of tiny pots of revenue-stream rather than fewer big ones. And (crucially) they'll have to find ways of selling packages of material with others.

If I want to read only a couple of FT/Times writers plus a specific favourite Guardian and Indy and Daily Mail writer each day (and/or some US and French writers too), why can I not 'bundle' their work myself in a customised webpage and pay just for that?

Maybe that device exists and is called an iPhone? It's just that the sellers are trapped in huge legacy complexity and have not caught up with its possibilities?

But even then the people selling content will have to find a way to compete with those who produce lively, elegant work but do not sell it, using their online material to build revenue in other ways.

Such as me.

Except that revenue-building bit is not working out too well...

On into 2010.

As feverish efforts intensify among global leaders to transfer money other than their own to and fro among each on an unfeasibly mammoth scale, back on earth some patterns are emerging.

Which help explain why Greenland was not called, for example, Whiteland.

What seems to be the case is that temperatures (in Greenland, remember, not necessarily elsewhere) are slowly dropping over the last 10,000 years; that we're in a relatively cold patch in the general variation over that period; but that's just part of the long, slow descent to the next Ice Age. Peak warmth in this interglacial has passed.

Brrr.

Remember the FCO website's prophetic announcement of an EU statement welcoming Free and Peaceful Elections in Honduras?

That seems to have vanished. And we still have no official UK pronouncement via the site on this complicated issue with its many regional and other ramifications.

So much for British Foreign Policy under this beyond hopeless government.

What about the EU and Baroness Ashton?

Type Honduras elections or Honduras elections EU into the FCO website Search box and the best the site can give us is a stale EU statement issued before the elections 'demanding' that 'all actors in Honduras' respect the rule of law and good governance principles.

What?

What???!?

Why this discriminatory thespianistic EU/FCO focus on actors?

What about the massed ranks of Honduran stage crews, camerapersons, directors, producers, set designers, lighting experts, sound engineers, wannabes who make the tea and everyone else?

Are they to be left free to rampage around in their trendy mincing outfits and disrespect the rule of law?

Cut!