Blogoir: October

A curious article in the FT by John Gapper argues that the mainstream US media have moved to the Left to reflect the 'national mood'.

Surely it is more a determined attempt by pro-Democrat tendencies in these outlets to shift the national mood so that their candidate wins?

The Gapper analysis gets a bit confused at times:

All this, and falls in advertising and circulation, is pushing newspapers back to a scrappier, more plain-spoken and partisan “yellow press” past. Instead of soberly trying to filter all information with a careful “on the one hand, on the other hand” balance, they are becoming more colourful in tone and politics.

Some old hacks are shocked. Michael Malone, a columnist and “one of those people who truly bleeds ink when I’m cut”, wrote on ABC News online that the bias to Mr Obama on television and in newspapers was “not just bewildering but appalling”.

Day by Day gets it:

Obama is talking about 'spreading the wealth around'.

The deep problem with that idea is that it is not so easy to spread the energy, creativity, persistence, ambition and willingness to take risks and to make sacrifices which together combine to create the wealth in the first place.

So there needs to be an understanding - explicit or implicit - between those who create the 'surplus' wealth now up for spreading and those who stand to get after the spreading ends more than they put in.

Because if there is no reasonable understanding, the whole exercise is little more than state-run looting.

And, sooner or later, those who work hard and make sacrifices to create all that wealth will be so dispirited or disillusioned or angry that they stop trying. Or even just ... disappear.

And thus society will tend to become poorer and poorer.

In our despair, let's recall the closing lines one of the greatest speeches in the history of civilisation:

Because: freedom is not empowerment.

Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered.

Freedom is not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on Welfare get, and how free are they?

And freedom is not an endlessly expanding list of rights. The right to education, the right to health care, the right to food and housing - that is not freedom, that is dependency.

And those are not rights, those are the rations of slavery; they are hay and a barn for human cattle.

This from Right Coast sums it all up:

Thus I have tried to pay attention carefully as Obama and his many proxies have explained what his actual plans would be.  These are much more comprehensible.  

With some gratitude I realize that all the talk of Hope and Change can be distilled into a two-fold message that is both direct and pure:  If Obama is elected President, the government will give me money.  And second, that would be fair.

But what if you are one of the people who need to Give so others may Get? Depends how you play it:

There are many ways to get checks from the government, and my sense is that an Obama administration would be amenable to all of them.  For someone like me, an academic, working in some way for the government seems promising.  So while I may be taxed more, I think the chances are good that I could find some job where I would be well paid and not actually have to do any work.

So, it's easy.

Just relax. Let Big Government look after you.

Wasn't there a song once about this sort of thing?

Back home after some busy days a-training some sassy young diplomats, straight out of the egg and buzzing with cheery optimism until I arrived.

I also have been visiting an elderly friend in hospital.

Beyond a certain age most of one's friends and maybe even one's close relatives have died.

So there is unique loneliness and despair in being in a hospital ward, largely conscious but unable to move much or to read or talk, knowing that after so many years of life's marathon one at last has entered the stadium and is plodding wearily and inexorably to the finishing line - and oblivion.

The hospital staff bustle around, and try to be positive. But how much can they be expected to motivate themselves to care kindly for people who are beyond being set right by clever medicine yet who somehow linger on defiantly as their body systems edge down, one by one?

What these ranks of aged patients - lying there like so many withered leaves - need more than anything is just love, expressed by someone being there with them as the long hopeless hours drag by.

And people fit enough not to be in hospital themselves are all rushing around, getting on with life. There is just not enough of this unique love to go round.  

Lord Ashdown and Richard Holbrooke have penned a long joint letter to the Guardian warning about the risks of the international community taking its eye off the Bosnia problem.

They focus on what they see as the basic aim of Republika Srpska PM Milorad Dodik:

His long-term policy seems clear: to place his Serb entity, Republika Srpska, in a position to secede if the opportunity arises.

But they do strive to maintain some balance:

... his rival, the senior president of all of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haris Silajdzic, has stressed the need to abolish the two entities that make up Bosnia, to create one non-federal country. Dodik professes to respect Dayton and Silajdzic wishes to revise it, but both men are violating its basic principle: a federal system within a single state. This toxic interaction is at the heart of today's Bosnian crisis.

They want the 'international community' (ie Washington and Brussels) to step up their game:

Post-Irish referendum, the EU's foreign policy will be, above all, a Balkan policy. Attention has recently focused on Kosovo. But Bosnia has always been the bigger and more dangerous challenge.

Really? The EU's foreign policy (such as it is) will be and has to be 'above all' about bigger things than Bosnia, including the Middle East and relations with Russia.

The Bosnia problem is fiendishly complex.

And fiendishly simple.

The Holbrooke Dayton settlement - partly because Holbrooke personally did not want to listen to good advice - gave the Bosnian Serbs too much and the Bosniacs/Muslims and Croats too little.

That 1995 outcome (with Silajdzic an active participant) itself resulted from an earlier 1994 strategic philosophical blunder by the US and Germany which forced the Bosniacs and Croats into a clumsy allieance against the Serbs.

And thus the current uncertainty.

It boils down to two general options.

Stop the cart and try to rewrite Dayton, so that after extensive political pain and convulsions a newer, more stable cart can move down the road faster.

Or keep the existing cart trundling forward, albeit in fits and starts, while incentivising its bickering passengers to stop fighting each other and focus on common success.

Both have pros and cons. A supposedly sensible choice in fact depends on what is little more than crude guesswork as to where the cart is likely to get to and when, under one or other option.

I suspect that the first option will not have the necessary international (or local) political will behind it to be accomplished in a sensible time-frame, and so risks almost indefinite stagnation.

But let's be honest, now and again.

One root of the problem is that it really just makes little sense to allow Albanian Kosovars to leave a democratic Serbia, but insist that come what may Bosnian Serbs have to be content with a dysfunctional frustrated Bosnia.

And maybe the clever Haris Silajdzic should start working hard towards success, so that the Serbs are keener to join a winning option, rather than sulkily poring over all the failures?

A witty observation attributed to Croatia's late President Tudjman had it that when one travelled East from Zagreb, the next properly Christian city one came to was ...

Manila.

In other words, Croatia was (he believed) civilised Europe's frontier with sprawling Asiatic, un-Christian despotism and cruelty.

Yet as recent events have shown, maybe Croatia and Uzbekistan are in fact - and not by some chance - related?

There is to be a Special Prize for Blogs this year for the first time, under the rubric of the excellent Orwell Prize 2009.

Here is what one needs to offer to be in with a chance of winning:

The Orwell Prize rewards those who achieve George Orwell’s ambition ‘to make political writing into an art’. Entries should therefore be of equal excellence in style and content.

‘Political writing’ is defined in the widest possible sense, and encompasses subjects including (but not limited to) party politics, social issues, public policy, the media, conflict, public services, history, economics, the environment, local government, and international relations.

Bloggers should submit permalinks for 10 posts of their choice.

Bloggers should have a clear relationship with the United Kingdom or Ireland; the intended audience of the blog should be British or Irish.

Interesting to see whether I get anywhere with my own entries. Since I started this Blog back in January this year I have made some 600 postings - which ten are most likely to be apprecoated by the judges?

Ideas please.

As I peruse the statistics for the readership of this Blog, I see that most people who swing by do so for less than 30 seconds, but a non-trivial number of people stay for an hour or more.

It is boring scrolling back through archived blog material on any site. It all dates so incredibly fast.

But in case anyone wants More in an easy-to-access way, I have set up a Greatest Hits category on the Index column so that certain pieces which prompted special interest can be read quickly.

So if (as I know you do) you want Russia/Georgia, Polly, Gagged Dips, the N-Word, Eggs, Craig Murray, Zhirinovsky, Kraftwerk, Beef, Nongqawuse, Bambiland, Liberal Fascism, EU Budget and my glorious role in crushing press freedom in the UK - here they all are, and more, in a handy convenience pack.

From Balkan tabloid Kurir:

Zašto stjuardese moraju da budu lepe?

Da bi avion mogao da se digne!

Hoho. It helps to be Serb to get it.

Tim Worstall makes an eloquent case for thinning the ranks of the stupid, once and for all.

In Brussels this week my hotel gave me a free copy of New Europe, a weekly European newspaper with a lively web presence.

See eg my former colleague Sir Stephen Wall on whether Britain (sic) is a European nation.

No surprise at his answer (Stephen was HM Ambassador to the EU): We have no choice but to be European.

Hmm. Who defines what 'European' is, and what 'choice' means in this context?

See also an interesting piece by Joschka Fischer on the search for an Arab Jean Monnet.

The New Europe back page features the somewhat eccentric thoughts of one Kassandra. I was intrigued by this piece on what looks like a good move to kill off a ghastly wasteful European Parliamentarians PR exercise, a clunky naff €5m(!) Facebook for MPs called MyParl:

Controversial blog England Expects first announced the death of MyParl.eu last Thursday: “The madness that is Myparl (myparl.eu), the facebook for MEPs is dead. I am informed that a letter has been sent by the European Commission to Mostra Communications cancelling the contract. Let there be great rejoicing. Indeed and step forward Jon Worth, Tim Worstall, Bruno Waterfield and others who have succesfully embarressed the colleagues into cancelling it.”

So far so unexceptionable.

That said, the hapless MyParl website is still alive and well as of this evening. Die, will you?

But Kassandra then continues:

We’d like to know how a budget for a project that has been approved can be cancelled (without the companies failing to fulfill the clauses of their contracts)? Also, assuming that the project was supposed to be launched in October (now!), wouldn’t that mean that all the cost-intensive tasks of making the website had already been incurred - making it very inefficient and wasteful to terminate the project? How can a project be terminated before even being judged? Who is going to own all the ‘code’ developed by the companies?

Is this meant to be a spoof? Or does Kassandra really believe that a self-evidently rubbish project should be continued just because lots of money has been spent on it? Has he not heard of sunk costs?

He concludes:

The project should probably continue. After all, if projects are initiated, funded, and then cancelled without the companies showing any results, people might begin to get the wrong impression and come to their own conclusions about the whole arrangement.

No.

They might at last start to get the right impression about the 'whole arrangement'.

First Iain Dale. Then Boris Johnson.

They both look forward to an Obama victory.

Maybe they should read this.

Or this view from Paul Rubin:

Democrats draw their political power from trial lawyers, unions, government bureaucrats, environmentalists, and, perhaps, my liberal colleagues in academia. All of these voting blocs seem to favor a larger, more intrusive government. If things proceed as they now appear likely to, we can expect major changes in policies that benefit these groups.

If those of us who favor free markets for the freedom and prosperity they bring are right, the political system may soon put our economy on track for a catastrophe.

And this list of issues where a strong Democrat showing could lead to serious if not irreversible strides towards new Big Government collectivism.

It all seems to me to boil down to a depressing choice.

Between something like today's Big Stupid Government (McCain).

And Stupidly Big, Hugely Stupid Government (Obama).

The fact that some UK Conservatives scarcely appear to think about this, but dwell instead on 'Hope' and 'Change' shows that our own politics have slumped into bland attitudinising.

The Road to Serfdom indeed.

Blogging latterly light, or to be precise nil - I have been on diplomatic training expeditions (as trainer) in Brussels and London.

Interesting trying to explain to young diplomats how to set about working out how to respond in policy and media terms to a serious event.

My approach: whatever the job (policy submission, draft letter, draft speech, media speaking notes), before you start identify in a couple of words what the Message emerging from that work needs to be.

Is it all about Concern, Activity, Urgency, Consulting, Persuasion, Anger, Irritation, Condemnation or what?

Because if you have that thought and the accompanying few words in mind to define the argument, your end-product is much more likely to have Focus throughout.

If not, you risk rambling and getting side-tracked - as you do not know where you are going.

And NB that as Frank Luntz argues in his terrific book on communication Words that Work, "it's not what you say - it's what people hear".

'Hearing' in this context means more than actual hearing. 

Great slabs of long/dense paragraph prose served up on a page say Boring, before the reader even tries to start reading the text.  If you scratch your nose on TV when answering a question about Iran's nuclear capability, the audience will see and define and remember you as that nose-scratching guy, not someone trying to advance a sophisticated policy argument even with lively words.

Vexing. But realistic.

Via an agitated Guido, more on seeming collectivist anxiety about the impact in High Places of personal freedom .

Namely Culture Secretary Andy Burnham:

The time has come for perhaps a different approach to the internet," he said. "I want to even up that see-saw, even up the regulation [imbalance] between the old and the new."

He said that perhaps the wider industry, and government, had accepted the idea that the internet was "beyond legal reach" and was a "space where governments can't go".

Burnham said that he would like to "tighten up" online content and services and "lighten up" some regulatory burdens around the TV industry.

Then this:

The internet as a whole is an excellent source of casual opinion," he said. "TV is where people often look for expert or authoritative opinion."

The second reaction to the rise of the internet has been a "tendency towards safety first and the tried-and-tested, and way from innovation, risk-taking and new talent", he argued.

"TV is in danger of ceding to the internet as the place where new talent is found."

Has this man watched British TV recently?

What is the basis for the proposition that TV gives me expert and authoritative opinions? Why is it that whenever I watch a programme on a subject I kniow a lot about, I spot obvious inaccuracies and probably deliberate distortions, even downright propaganda?

How about this appalling example when accuracy really mattered?

Or this?

Why is it 'dangerous' - and dangerous to whom - if new talent is not found by TV?

Memo to next government:

TV exists as it does now only because of technological limitations back when it was invented, which have outlived their usefulness. It has no reason to continue in its current bloated and decadent form. Do not try to prop it up.

PS  And do not mess with bloggers.

Atlas Shrugged is Ayn Rand's peerless story of the man who stopped the world.

The hero, a brilliant inventor called John Galt, decides to stand up against galloping collectivism and 'go on strike', removing his mind and personal energy from the economy. He persuades other key industrialists to follow him. They just vanish from public view, often taking lowly jobs but doing them well.

The US economy starts to grind to a halt as the contradictions caused by collectivist appropriation of private talent accumulate, and the willingness of the best minds in the country to be exploited and cheated dwindles.

Helen Smith prompts an exchange on whether the time is coming when people have so lost faith in public institutions and rapacious tax and other official policies that they 'go John Galt' by opting out, one way or the other:

Perhaps the partisan politics we are dealing with now is really just a struggle between those of us who believe in productivity, personal responsibility, and keeping government interference to a minimum, and those who believe in the socialistic policies of taking from others, using the government as a watchdog, and rewarding those who overspend, underwork, or are just plain unproductive.

No perhaps about it, if you ask me.

Can exasperated voters who want small(er) better government have a say, simply voting not to pay certain taxes any more? They are trying this line of attack in Massachusetts. Bring it on.

The problem is that Ayn Rand (rightly) dragged the argument right back to the absolute basic question of human existence: what right does anyone have over the mind (and therefore productivity) of another human being? If exchange of talent is not truly free, what is the moral justification for state compulsion?

In the book John Galt suffered for many years in isolation as he watched things decay. The State finally tries to torture him to try to force him to make available to 'society' his brilliance and output. The electric torture machine breaks down. Through his pain he tells his torturers how to fix it.

How many of us have that quite degree of fortitude when we face the folly of the state piling on ever more taxation to pay for ever-declining effectiveness?

To be continued...

 

I venture to Brussels tomorrow on Eurostar from St Pancras.

I hope not to endure the agony which Tim Worstall suffered recently.

Odd how so many things in principle are both more flexible and inflexible simultaneously, for no evident reason?

Daniel Finkelstein eloquently spells out the already eccentric view that the honest way to describe a Disaster is not to proclaim a Triumph:

There is room for plenty of argument about whether the crisis could have been averted by better management. But this is almost beside the point. What matters is not whether the bust was avoidable. It is that the preceding boom was illusory.

The idea that boom and bust had been abolished was not a small claim among many. It was the central claim of this Government. It was the boast of boasts - the boast upon which all other boasts were built. And now it has been revealed as totally empty. Not triumph, then. Disaster. Not victory. Total, utter, dreadful defeat.

On the other hand, in the great and glorious uplands of North Korea there is nothing but Triumph, as well as Validity and Inexhaustible Vitality, as we have just seen.

Which is where we are heading:

The orgy of borrowing over which Alistair Darling now presides and which some Tories wish to continue — such as the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, who recklessly calls for continued spending on capital projects for the capital that, pending economic revival, cannot be afforded — must end.

If it does not, it will not merely be our children who have to pay it off, but their children.

That will mean high levels of taxation and the consequent suppression of an enterprise culture for decades to come.

Given that so much of this mess is Labour’s fault, I cannot see the problem in the Tory party’s saying so, and saying, too, that the tough remedies that they would have to implement in office would be Mr Brown’s fault ...

Fundamentally, someone in politics has to make a case for capitalism: as I have written before, it is this or North Korea.

Oh well, they say that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

Good job - as in N Korea they are urged to eat it.

Can this stuff be for real?

Or is it a spoof site trying to make North Korea look ridiculous by emitting spoof communistic nonsense, a sort of uber-Commie Postmodern Generator putting Marxist phrases in random order and thereby making no difference to the senselessness of the outcome?

Thus:

Pyongyang, October 13 (KCNA) -- "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea Is a Socialist State of Juche with Invincible Might", a discourse of General Secretary Kim Jong Il given to Rodong Sinmun, the organ of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party of Korea, and Minju Joson, the organ of the DPRK government, is evoking lively response from among all servicepersons and people in the DPRK.

The work reviews with pride the 60-year-long history of the DPRK which has covered the road of the most shining victory under the guidance of the great leader and the great party. And comprehensively expounded in it are the popular and independent character of the DPRK, which has applied the Juche idea in the nation-building and state activities, and its invincible might and the tasks and ways for pushing ahead with the building of a great prosperous powerful nation ...

It also implanted in the hearts of the Korean army and people the validity and inexhaustible vitality of the WPK's Juche-based idea and line of nation-building as more steadfast faith and provided them with highly important guidelines for pushing ahead with the building of a great prosperous powerful socialist nation.

The cool thing about North Korean news is that it never changes.

So, picking a day at random, ie 17 February 1998, one sees this:

Floral basket to G.S. Kim Jong Il from Pres. of Democratic Congo

Pyongyang, February 17 (KCNA) - General Secretary Kim Jong Il received a floral basket from President of Democratic Congo Laurent-Desire Kabila on his birthday. The basket was conveyed to an official concerned on Monday by Nellie Ngoy Twite, private secretary of the President of Democratic Congo on a visit to Korea.

Things were hot in N Korea as I celebrated my own birthday in May 2006:

Kim Il Sung initiated the Pothong River improvement project as the first step for carrying out gigantic nature-remaking projects and attended the ground-breaking ceremony of the project on May 21, Juche 35 (1946). He took up a shovel in person at the head of the liberated people, greatly inspiring them in the building of a new country. 

Ryom Sun Gil, chairman of the Central Committee of the General Federation of Trade Unions of Korea, in his report recalled that under the energetic guidance of the President the Pothong River improvement project was completed in a matter of 55 days, turning the river into a river of people's happiness and prosperity.    

The historic cause of the Juche-oriented gigantic nature-remaking projects started by the President has been successfully carried forward at a new level under the tested leadership of Kim Jong Il. 

He authored the famous work "On Improving and Strengthening Land Administration," providing an immortal great programme to be implemented for carrying out grand nature-remaking projects. 

The reporter stressed the need for all the people to more dynamically carry out gigantic nature-remaking projects true to the last instructions of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il's far-reaching plan for land administration so as to bring a rosier future to the rich and prosperous country at an early date.

OK OK. I'm convinced.

It is a spoof. But a good one.

I was almost convinced it was real

Insofar as anyone thinks about it all these days, the UN just sort of 'emerged' after WW2, at that conference in San Francisco, didn't it?

Dan Plesch at SOAS has been looking deep into the history of those times and is pulling together a goodly bunch of fascinating material showing that the UN in fact grew from a Declaration of United Nations in 1942, which itself built on the Atlantic Charter of 1941.

In fact the allies of the United Nations fought as such and were busy planning the post-war world from quite an early stage of WW2.

British publicity material of the time of course had to jump over one very inconvenient truth, viz that Hitler had not started the war on his own.

Thus a 1945 booklet 'published for the United Nations Information Organisation published by His Majesty's Stationery Office' described the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 as Germany "without even a declaration of war" advancing its armies deep into Poland. No mention of the attack from the East by Soviet forces two weeks later.

The need to accommodate Stalin's lies and post-Yalta cheating as the price for an exhausted peace affected the actual San Francisco Conference itself. The Americans in the end had to concede the Soviet definition of the 'Polish problem', to keep the Soviets on board.

This Poland, one of the honourable original signatories of the 1942 Declaration by United Nations, was not present. 

This scandalous betrayal of core UN principles on the very day the UN Charter was signed prompted one of the greatest moments in musical history.

At the gala concert the great pianist Artur Rubinstein (of Jewish origins from Lodz in Poland) observed acidly that he could not see the Polish flag among all the flags in the hall.

He then changed the programme and played the Polish anthem, to a tumultuous and moving ovation.

Sixty-three years later in July this year we have seen post-Soviet Russia and still-communist China vetoing a UN Resolution aimed at putting pressure on their little pal Marxist Mugabe.

Result?

This:

Death is stalking Zimbabwe’s children, as a potentially catastrophic famine gathers momentum. Aid agencies say that half the population, about five million people, face starvation, two-thirds of children are out of school and water shortages have led to deadly cholera outbreaks.

Not to forget this:

Zimbabwe's annual inflation rate - already the world's highest - has soared to 231,000,000%, newly released official figures for July show.

Of course the UN does its fair share of good work.

But who counts the victims of UN-manufactured hypocrisy and double-dealing, brought into the UN by Communists and there from Day One, all those decades ago?

Foreign policy is - at root - simple.

Identify a clear and fair-minded position. Then use all available sticks and carrots to pursue it. And don't give up quickly, lest you lose impetus and credibility.

Thus one might think that Russia's August power-play to slice off parts of a fellow European country would be enough to make European leaders take a firm and sustained view that such behaviour has to have negative consequences.

Alas not.

This article describes the incoherent EU thrashing around over Russia/Georgia/Belarus which EU taxpayers are now subsidising.

And this one:

The key argument in favour of an 'EU Foreign Policy' we hear in the UK is that it acts as a multiplier for British positions.

What tends not to be mentioned is that it acts as a multiplier for other EU Member States 'positions too, not least when they disagree with us. 

It is fascinating to debate whether it is better for the EU to have no policy at all than a bad one.

That is now the choice we are given.