Blogoir: February

Via The Browser a rather lame article by Jay Rosen arguing that journalists in the USA have become so non-judgmental that they are striving for an impossible professional 'innocence' and are just missing the point.

By way of evidence he cites a long analysis of the Tea Party tendency in the USA by famed NYT reporter David Barstow, who saw much evidence that Tea Party people feared 'impending tyranny':

The other thing that came through was this idea of impending tyranny. You could not go to Tea Party rallies or spend time talking to people within the movement without hearing that fear expressed in myriad ways.

I was struck by the number of people who had come to the point where they were literally in fear of whether or not the United States of America would continue to be a free country. I just started seeing that theme come up everywhere I went.

Jay Rosen says that it is not enough that a reporter show analytical detachment, and so 'merely' report on what such people believe:

Seriously: Why is this phrase, impending tyranny, just sitting there, as if Barstow had no way of knowing whether it was crazed and manipulated or verifiable and reasonable?

If we credit the observation that a great many Americans drawn to the Tea Party live in fear that the United States is about to turn into a tyranny, with rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state… can we also credit the professional attitude that refuses to say whether this fear is reality-based? I don’t see how we can...

We have come upon something interfering with political journalism’s “sense of reality” as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin called it (see section 5.1) And I think I have a term for the confusing factor: a quest for innocence in reportage and dispute description. Innocence, meaning a determination not to be implicated, enlisted, or seen by the public as involved.

Well, so be it.

What I dislike is the Rosen logic leap which takes us from where we are today to a banal lumpen Cuba-style tyranny - rigged elections, loss of civil liberties, no more free press, a police state - as if there was nothing in the middle which people should be worried about. Since he defines tyranny in such a banal way, Tea Party people ipso facto must be delusional!

Let's look at examples of the tyranny of modern life in the UK, which is all the more nasty for being insidious. Not the abrupt clumsy squashing of the public by a Monty Python Foot of Tyranny, but rather intellectual and cultural oppression by myriad pinpricks and official insults.

Thus the Tyranny of Filth. Drive between Swindon and Oxford, or round the intersections of the M40 and M25 and the M25 with M1. The roadsides for mile after mile are filthy with litter. What policy processes are happening to exact more and more taxes from people when the standard of public services is so obviously slumping? How can we be lectured incessantly by central and local authorities on 'the environment' while outside the windows of their offices the rubbish is piling up?

Or the Tyranny of Indoctrination. Listening to Radio Five Live in the car the other day (Friday), I heard the BBC presenter talking to a woman in Scotland about current snow problems. He asked her whether she thought it was down to Global Warming. "No, I don't believe in all that - it's just the changing weather" was (in effect) her reply. "You can say that. I can't" he replied in a curiously arch tone of voice. Huh?

Or the Tyranny of Complexity. My accountant tells me that many of his clients have had £100 notices for late tax filings, when he knows for sure that the returns were delivered on time (now the Revenue refuse to issue receipts to confirm delivery). He has tried to penetrate the tax system to find out what is going on. Eventually he finds a human tax-person: "We have hundreds of unopened envelopes here - there's a backlog."

Try the Tyranny of Official Querulousness. A five-year old girl was left in a car which had crashed into a river for 97 minutes because the police refused to try to rescure her as they had not had the right training.

The Tyranny of Educational Underachievement. Manipulating the results of school exams for non-academic reasons.

The Tyranny of Abuse of Public Funds to Reward One's Friends. See these especially awful examples from DFID.

Or the Tyranny of EU Deceipt, as exemplified by promising a referendum on the new EU Treaty then bundling it through Parliament instead.

And so many, many more.

It's not that any one of these is tyrannical in itself. Life is not perfect. Governments will over-reach themselves.

Rather that the cumulative effect of all these nasty developments is to create a new sort of PoMo post-democratic tyranny, one in which the citizens stop owning the state. Freedom and responsibility as currently understood - and as operationally meaningful ideas - decline. Instead everything sinks into an ooze of dirty ambiguity and mediocre uncertainty.

So if the Tea Party people are 'fearful' of that sort of thing accelerating in the USA as it has done here, as their Federal Government borrows recklessly against the future, are they really so wrong? 

Malta is a fascinating place for looking at some underlying issues of democracy and government.

Malta is 201st in the world’s list of countries by physical size, its area of 316km2 (one fifth the size of Greater London) just ahead of the Maldives and just behind Grenada. Its population (some 420,000 people) is comparable to that of Manchester, making it 171st in the world’s population rankings

The fascinating thing about Malta’s political life is that there is just so much of it. Voluntary participation in general elections soars to giddy heights of 95% or even more – the highest in the free world. Elections are won on national majorities of a few thousand votes, with two main parties slugging it out, the Labour Party and the currently ruling Nationalist Party. Party loyalty is very strong. If you are born into a Nationalist or Labour family, that helps shape your personal dentity. 

Hence you do not need much by way of maths to realise that if only several thousand people do decide to change their vote, the election results can be very different.

Which makes for vivid public life. Examples:

• If a voter is unhappy with the government’s work, s/he may gather together voting slips of other disgruntled friends and family members and dump them unceremoniously on a Minister’s desk as a sign of withdrawing support: “We have been waiting months for that planning application to go through. Where is it?” Since a typical Maltese extended family may have well over a hundred people, this dramatic gesture tends to focus Ministerial minds on helping that unhappy voter in a very practical way – a few more family ‘swings’ like that could literally lose the next election.
• As every Maltese citizen is likely to be firmly associated with one or other of the main political tendencies (and known to be so), ideas of loyalty and professional neutrality within the civil service are not what we in the much larger UK expect. Ministers have to think hard about best to work with their own Ministries, as officials from the ‘other side’ may be seen (fairly or unfairly) as likely leakers.
• A lot of Western political thought is built on the idea of the ‘separation of powers’ – parliament, government, judiciary, police, local administrations all having clearly defined roles ands responsibilities. Fine when it works. But how far can it work in the classic sense in a much smaller polity where everyone knows everyone else’s business and large family networks linked to political loyalty are so dominant?
• Likewise public appointments and official tenders. Opportunities for patronage and ‘clientelism’ are pervasive. Not that other, bigger polities necessarily do better.

All this and much more combine to make Malta an intriguing example of micro-accountability. Nonetheless, even on such a small island there is plenty of scope for things to go on in a less than clear way. Now lively local bloggers like journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia are hard at work bringing some new transparency to procedures which previously appear to have been less than satisfactory:

Malta is tiny and its judiciary is far from numerous. Yet in the last few years we have had this track record: one appeals court judge and a chief justice jailed for bribery, one failed attempt to impeach a magistrate (Labour refused to cooperate), one failed attempt to impeach a judge (Labour refused to cooperate), at least two magistrates who appear to have been relieved of most of their duties because of personal problems, one of which is said to involve alcoholism, and now the latest shenanigans involving Magistrate Herrera - though quite frankly, there is nothing ‘now’ about it at all.

That’s very impressive.

It’s quite clear from this mess that the entire system needs a rigorous overhaul. The first thing to go should be the discretionary approach to the appointment of magistrates and judges. Nominations for these positions should be made public and subject to public scrutiny.

Malta. Never a dull moment.

Seen at Drudge:

Is nature out of control?

Er. Yes.

Wouldn't anything else be ... unnatural?

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance...these are all really hard, xxxx.

In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility...these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx.

In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential ...

Professor Scott Galloway spells it out.

My earlier piece on Hamas and the 'cloned' passports has been picked up by Spy Blog, who watches like a hawk everything to do with UK government surveillance and other technologies.

He adds some useful expert points on just how difficult it is to come up with any foolproof scheme for catching people travelling under false identities:

Charles Crawford's points apply equally well to the older non-biometric Passports, which were apparently used in Dubai, as well as to the newer International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) compliant "biometric" ones, since these only currently contain a digitised image of the passport photograph and what is written on the face of the passport, and do not yet contain any fingerprint or iris scan biometric identifiers.

Facial Recognition is pretty useless at a passport control checkpoint, where there are lots of variations in ambient lighting etc. The UK Passport Service and some other foreign government equivalents do try to use it on their centralised digitised Passport Photo databases (which is why there are stupid rules on the size of such photos, in which you are now forbidden to smile), to try to spot obvious multiple applications in different names, but this is hardly an infallible automatic system, which needs plenty of experienced human facial recognition effort as well.

Spy Blog links all this to unconvincing official claims that UK ID cards would reduce 'identity theft'. He makes an interesting point about the impact on intelligence work if robust identity identification technology (linking names to identifiable individual people) were actually set up everywhere:

If biometric fingerprint Passports ever do work and centralised computer linked biometric readers ever do become universally installed at every border post, then where does that leave British or other intelligence agents, undercover policemen or special forces personnel ?

It may be possible to officially fake the UK National identity Register database entries and issue them with a genuine UK Passport and / or ID Card, under their cover name alias, but if they have ever crossed a foreign border in the past, perhaps when on holiday or business before they were recruited into a secret role, and had their fingerprint biometrics scanned, then, in theory, the mis-match in names using different Passports, should automatically be flagged up on the foreign government system.

Read it. Complicated. But fascinating.

There are different sorts of bloggers.

Apart from all those who write honestly and well about Cats or Cars or Cooking or somesuch, there are those of us who attempt to tackle wider themes.

And we fall into two general categories:

1   Those who press their points home by unrelenting obscenity.

2   Everyone else.

Two leading UK swearbloggers are Devil's Kitchen and Obnoxio The Clown (I will now proceed to pleasure myself with this fish)

You get the general idea.

Oh, and there's Mr Eugenides. There have been handy Swearblogger Roundups.

Nonetheless, behind all the somewhat wearing barrage of rude words are some lively libertarian-leaning minds. Here's the Devil drilling down into some of the deep philosophical principles arising from the way copyright law works (or not).

These popular bloggers perform much the same function as the fans who chant obscenities at football matches. Most fans don't join in, but enjoy a weekly dose of the smutty wit and energy:

Charlie Nicholas illegitimate

He ain't got no birth certificate

He's an Arsenal bastard  

But swearblogging ultimately lacks impact because the swearers are too remote from the subject. They can rave away all they like about Gordon Brown and even urge people to vote for him, such is their hatred.

But Gordon Brown himself sits in No 10 ignoring this distant background army of enemies. 

The arrows are sharp and dipp'd in poison, but fired from far too far away. They clatter down outside somewhere, doing no damage other than to make the environment less tidy for other people..

No.

To be a really wonderful and effective blogger using calculated insults and occasional raw language, you need to be close to the subject of your invective.

Your insults need to hit home with the unerring power and precision which only someone who knows the target well can deliver. And everyone has to read these finely-turned insults - and marvel at them

Welcome to Malta's Daphne Caruana Galizia.

And this lively piece of writing:

Some men will shag anything, even if it still looks like a cross between something you can buy at Mosta Bacon and Worzel Gummidge after he’s taken a bath and has put on two bits of Lycra that are better suited to a Ukrainian escort - or, as on her Facebook page (yes, sir, the magistrate is on Facebook), a denim mini-skirt that looks very unfortunate on her sort of shape.

Phew.

The UK Labour Party are said to be doing rather better in the opinion polls.

Crikey.

I am baffled that anyone at all would still vote for them. What does it take these days in terms of incompetence to be 100% discredited and thrown down the steps of public opinion?

Plus it's not just the incompetence. It's the sheer sustained banality and selfishness of the top people concerned, as they set coarse, publicly funded spin-doctors on each other then quickly kiss and make up when they see a camera.

Last night on ITV News a grinning reporter noted that the story of Gordon Brown's bullying in his own office was not likely to go away, but added that voters seemed to be approving when he was portrayed as 'passionate' and 'committed' and 'intense'.

What is happening?

Simple.

Peter Mandelson has been Milosevicising the UK for over ten years, and it shows.

Part of the remarkable success of Milosevic in Serbia, where he effectively ran the place for some 15 years despite one disaster after another brought about by his stupidity, lay in his ability to dumb down Serbia's collective expectations. To replace reality with sloganising.

Thus rock bottom, which Milosevic duly reached in 2000. When people were reduced to one loaf of bread as things decayed, it was a Huge Victory when the standard of living soared to 1.5 loaves per day.

A 50% increase in wealth! Thanks to the Government! Long live Serbia! 

Here it's the same trend but from a higher altitude.

Last night's ITV News was dominated by emotional interviews with relatives of patients who had died in another NHS hosital collapse. There was fleeting reference to the role played by 'government targets'. But the sense of the news clips was to whip up populist injustice that the people who had run this hospital had escaped without serious sanction.

See eg this morning's Daily Telegraph:

Bosses at scandal-hit Stafford Hospital escape scot-free

Buried at the bottom of the article is this:

Andy Burnham, the Health Secretary, said it was unacceptable for NHS mangers to be responsible for major failings at one organisation and then to get another job elsewhere in the service. The trust admitted Mr Yeates left with six months’ notice pay and his salary at the time was around £160,000. But officials said they were trying to discover if he had received any other payments on departing.

Huh?

Huh?!?

No. That's merely disgraceful.

What's unacceptable is that the media do not finger the Health Secretary and the Labour Party for allowing this and so many other scandals to happen on their watch.

The bureaucratic obsession with Targets which has led to so much dysfunctionality in the way the UK works itself can be traced back directly to Gordon Brown's long years at the Treasury, when his bullying and control-freakery was directed at the UK as a whole. not merely his glum immediate team.

And so it goes on.

Every fiasco is the responsibility of anyone other than the government whose policies and attitudes have created the framework for such fiascos.

Any puny success is hailed as a great victory by Ministers and their passionate, committed and intense Great Leader.

And as more and more people emerge uneducated and sulking from Labour's state education system unable to do anything other than emote in a soap opera way about the life's challenges and complexity, an ever-larger electorate of lumpen whiners grows. People dependent on the state not just for their endless 'benefits' but now for their very thought-processes.

So TV marketing heads in their direction, and politics stops being about anything adult. Instead we turn public life into a Reality Show, or more accurately an Unreality Show.

And shallow, greedy post-modern TV executives - above all in the BBC where salaries exacted from the TV licence poll tax have soared to the sky - are complicit in New Labour's Mandelsonian furtive subversion of any sort of comitment to truth and honesty.

As that happens it is next to impossible for the Conservatives and other parties to do anything but get dragged along. Because they have to show they care.

Gordon Brown is unambiguously revealed to be unfit for office? Quick, get out the Thesaurus ... flip-flip-flip as pages turn ... Gottit.

He's intense. Passionate. Committed.

He's not bullying people selfishly for himself. He's doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

Who does not remember the end of George Orwell's 1984?

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast ! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

George Orwell got it wrong.

Gordon Brown is not bullying people selfishly for himself. He's doing it generously for you, the voters. Look, he can even cry on TV to show how sincere he is.

In 2010 it's Big Brother's enormous face and tearful eyes gazing down on the blank-eyed voters, with Peter Mandelson on his EU pension and UK salary lurking out of screenshot propping him up in his chair.

O cruel, needless misunderstanding ! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast !

Yes. Gordon's won that victory over himself.

He's suffered horribly. But he's prevailed.

He loves us, the voters.

So everything's alright.

Via The Browser an excellent account by Stephen Levy at Wired on how Google just keeps getting better. By using Google itself:

Google also has a larger army of testers — its billions of users, virtually all of whom are unwittingly participating in its constant quality experiments. Every time engineers want to test a tweak, they run the new algorithm on a tiny percentage of random users, letting the rest of the site’s searchers serve as a massive control group.

There are so many changes to measure that Google has discarded the traditional scientific nostrum that only one experiment should be conducted at a time. “On most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously,”

As for my favourite subject - me - I do not make it into the top Google pages if you search merely for Crawford.

But if you search for Charles Crawford, on page one of the Search results I wipe the floor with the myriad other Charles Crawfords out there, although our old friend the Abandoned Bunny does also sneak in. Almost the same on Bing.

Still, if you search Google for controversial former ambassador Craig Murray sweeps home. Fair enough.

Yesterday in London I was on the stage at the Polish Cultural Centre in West London for a discussion about Solidarity - Thirty Years After.

Others on the panel were Wladyslaw Frasyniuk (former top Solidarity activist and former political prisoner turned politician) - someone whose lively intelligence has left him an influential but quixotic player in Polish politics.

And Dougie Rooney, current President of the Trades Union Congress and a strong supporter of nuclear power.

Wiktor Moszczynski, press officer for the Federation of Poles in Great Britain, presided.

In my own remarks I shamelessly grabbed the opportunity to tease Dougie Rooney and remind the audience, not that most of the people there needed reminding, how the rise of the Solidarnosc movement in Poland in the 1980s had been a ghastly embarrassment for the British Left in general and the TUC in particular.

For many years senior Labour Party and trades unionists had been trooping to Moscow to ask for unobtrusive support from the Soviet leadership in their class struggles in the UK. In an epic act of national betrayal, Edward Kennedy too had travelled to Moscow in the mid-1980s secretly to ask for Moscow's help in defeating Ronald Reagan.

Not to mention that further back in 1920 assorted trades unions in England had mobilised to stop the British government sending weapons and supplies to newly independent Poland, then under attack from the Red Army whose avowed aim was to conquer Poland then move on to Berlin, Paris and London.

"Hands off Russia" had been the progressive cry, just when revolutionary Marxist Russia was greedily laying its own hands on as many territories as it could.

So, I said, there was a long tradition of both useless Useful Idiots and dangerous Useful Idiots in the Labour Movement, who had hated the fact that Polish workers were having the temerity to stand up for freedom against the Soviet empire, and so were threatening 'detente'.

Such attitudes ran deep in British society by the 1980s. By then Soviet Communism was like the weather - it was just there, for better or worse. I had had a problem in the FCO for echoing the Evil Empire language of Ronald Reagan in a speech I had drafted for Sir Geoffrey Howe. All sorts of people popped up pompously to intone that that sort of inflammatory rhetoric was likely to be 'destabilizing'.

Yet the Soviet Union was an empire, and it was (more or less) evil.

Luckily the arrival of Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had created a far-sighted vision for looking at Soviet Communism which created new realities on the ground far beyond these limp official cluckings.

In Reagan's wonderful phrase, "My idea of the Cold War is that we win, they lose." Which was what had happened.

I said that it was not surprising that the British Left had been hopelessly confused on the whole question. Run a Google search now and you see all sorts of squabbles still echoing on between the social-democratic Left, the Communist Left, the Trotskyist Left and the Really Trotskyist Left over who did what to whom back then.

And how appalling it had been for all of them that Margaret Thatcher was greeted by huge crowds of cheering Polish workers in Gdansk after defeating the Miners here in the UK.  

John Prescott (who knows a few things about British socialist and union politics) had found it all very hard to take, as he told me on one of his visits to Warsaw a few years back. Not only had many Poles seen Margaret Thatcher as a vision of hope. Much worse, the new Solidarity members coming to UK for fraternal consultations had all been pointy-head academics, not a real shipworker among them! 

I made one other point which perhaps was less comfortable to Polish ears.

Namely that on the one hand Poland rightly prided itself now on the huge sense of national unity and democratic but disciplined Christian principles which Solidarity came to represent. See eg this meeting itself.

But that mythic representation of Solidarity sat uneasily with the fact that millions of Poles had been more or less loyal to the Communist regime, whose agents and informers had penetrated to the top of Solidarity and indeed the Catholic Church. 

Hence continuing bitter feuding today over the 'deal' done with the Communists in the late 1980s.

Did Solidarity under malevolent influence of senior traitors within its own ranks pull its punches and let the Communists tip-toe away far too easily? And even if that was the case, did Poles now want to force through the final unmasking of all those double-agents in Solidarity and Church ranks?

This prompted shouts of Yes! from a small but noisy contingent of younger Poles in the audience, who appeared to blame Frasyniuk and other Solidarity veterans for the fact that so many young Poles still did not have jobs in Poland, and suspected that Lech Walesa had been a double agent...

* * * * *

It is all 30 years ago now. Ancient History.

Lech Walesa himself is still only 67. All being well he'll be around for Solidarity's 50th birthday party in 2030.  

I am heading to Malta, looking for work.

My first visit to the island, which has even more history per square metre than Poland.

Be there. Or be square.

John Mauldin of Thoughts from the Frontline writes a powerful weekly email on economic and investment themes to which one million people have subscribed.

As have I.

Because it is free.

His latest one is superb, disentangling different expert pessimistic and not-so-pessimistic analyses about the problems of the Eurozone, Greece and Spain in particular.

What I liked about this essay was the way he looked hard and fairly at rival views of unquestionable professional integrity, trying to find common ground and exploring the deeper reasons why they diverge.

He writes with tight precision:

... the valuation of the euro is not in and of itself a reason for the euro to disappear. At one time it was $.82. Then over $1.60. All currencies fluctuate, some more than others. What destroys them is political malfeasance.

What would put the euro at risk of a bad political decision?  A Greek bailout without serious conditions would be the one thing that could be a very bad start to a downward spiral. If Greece is bailed out, then why not Portugal or Spain or Ireland? What about the emergency room crisis that is Austrian banks?

The line has to be drawn, and it has to be a hard line.

On Spain he quotes another top analyst, Ray Dalio:

... Spain's external debts, have exploded without a significant offset of external assets. On net, Spain owes the world about 80% of GDP more than it has external assets.

As a frame of reference, the degree of net external debt Spain has piled up in a currency it cannot print has few historical precedents among significant countries and is akin to the level of reparations imposed on Germany after World War I.

We don't know of precedents for these types of external imbalances being paid back in real terms.

Heavy stuff. Don't subscribe unless you aren't feeling weak.

Meanwhile Soeren Kern at Pajamas Media explores how the leftist Spanish ruling class are blaming Anglo-Saxon economics for their rotten situation. And, that old stand-by when you have run out of intelligent things to say, conspiracies:

“Spain is the victim of an international conspiracy to destroy the country’s economic status, and then, the euro,” he said. “Nothing that is happening, including the apocalyptical editorials in foreign media, is just chance.”

Well, that is true. Hard to imagine articles in newspapers and magazines about Spanish recklessness being created by ad hoc atoms of ink randomly settling on the page.

But it misses the main point. Namely this staggering graph in the WSJ showing why for some 40 years the USA's federal government too has been on (and remains on) a reckless binge:

The small cheer in all this horror is that the US Democrats, main drivers of government profligacy, are running scared. The Tea Party tendency is focusing hard on this issue, to fine effect.

It is only a small cheer. Since the scale of the problem is now so daunting that it is hard to see good options for dealing with it. Stephen Spreuill looks at what the Republicans might include by way of policy ideas to start the decades-long trudge back to sanity.

What goes up, goes up and up and up before there is a crash or a total breakdown, when it comes down. The Eurozone is inherently less rational a phenomenon than the dollar, and so it will face its existential crisis sooner.

Update: Welcome Iain Dale readers

* * * * *

Former warrior-diplomat Al Haig has died, aged 85.

The obituaries are noting his unique contribution to the English language:

The Washington Post’s George F. Will called him as “an aerobic instructor for the English language, making it twist and stretch.” His instructions took the form of “Haigspeak,” which uniquely combined periphrasis, convolution, and bureaucratese, with a healthy salting of neologisms. “Caveat” was a verb in Haigspeak, and “epistemologicallywise” an adverb.

Basically, he inclined towards convoluted vocabulry of an extreme order.

To the point where (I was told) the following remarkable episode occurred.

Haig was US Secretary of State during the Falklands crisis. The then British Foreign Secretary and a team of senior officials had a meeting with him in Washington.

It went well enough. They departed in the car. Then they started to analyse what he had said. It became clear that one important sentence had been so opaque and tangled that its meaning was quite unclear.

Hence, an awkward question arose. How to go back to the US side to try to get the sentence explained?

It was rather embarrassing for the Foreign Secretary to telephone Haig to ask him to translate himself. But if the Brits asked his officials they might give an answer which was not what Haig meant, if indeed Haig's people themselves had understood what he had meant.

A lively discussion ensued.

Somehow it was sorted out.

And we retook the Falklands.

Hurrah.

I was down at Guidhall in the City yesterday, to watch the special ceremony of Poland's excellent Ambassador Barbara Tuge-Erecinksa being accepted as a Freeman of the City.

Barbara was deeply involved in the Gdansk Shipyard protests and the heroic rise of the Solidarity movement:

Active in the underground during the martial law in Poland, she was harassed by the communist party. "It wasn't a big deal compared to what happened to some," she remembers. "The worst experience was when my son was one year old -- to see those security men searching in my baby's cot."

The ceremony in part marked Guildhall's expression of appreciation for the remarkable generosity of Poles who during WW2 found a way to offer money to help repair Nazi bomb damage to the building.

And did you know another proud Polish connection? That Chopin's final concert was at Guildhall in November 1848, to raise money for Poles who had fled France to escape more continental revolutionary violence?

No, you didn't. Here is some background from Jack Gibbons, with deft musical accompaniment:

His last public appearance took place in London at the old Guildhall on 16th November 1848. The occasion was a concert and ball in aid of Polish refugees. Chopin played several of his shorter pieces on an upright piano in a side-room adjoining the main hall.

According to his pupil, Princess Marcelina Czartoryska, "Chopin played like an angel". By now completely exhausted, Chopin was greatly relieved to return to Paris where he spent the last months of his life virtually bedridden, supported by the generosity of his friends and pupils.

Yesterday a delicate modern bust of Chopin by Jaroslaw Alfer (latterly not on display as renovation works at Guildhall proceeded) was unveiled by the Ambassador in a new place of honour.

Or should it be honor?

All right-thinking and/or snooty English people will say that of course it is honour.

Honor is an Americanism. Ugh.

And they are right, these days at least. The different usages became formalised in the nineteenth century.

Not that the great men of 1800 or thereabouts minded too much. Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the US Declaration of Independence used honour.

And there on the wall of the room in Guildhall where Ambassador Tuge-Erecinska was sworn in as Freeman is a framed letter from Lord Nelson, expressing his honor.

All in all, a most honourable day for UK/Polish relations.

For those who have not seen it, here is how the USA's 'Tea Party' political gamechanging grassroots protests against Big Government started a year ago:

It is not easy (for me at least) to work out exactly what is said to have happened with the passports used by the group alleged to have murdered Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Were they 'cloned' or fraudulent?

Let's put possible options on the table.

1  Real blank passports, misused:  in secure British government locations in the UK and overseas are piles of 'blank' passports in serial number order, waiting to be issued. Procedures are in place to check regularly that the stocks of blank passports match the lists of passports printed and despatched to each location to await issue. 

I have done some of these checks myself in Embassy strong-rooms. It would be relatively easy for a corrupt UK official to steal a few of these blanks to pass on to gangsters/KGB/Mossad, but the risk of detection would be very high since sooner or later it would be spotted that issuing numbers were out of sequence with stock-lists and production/despatch-lists.

2  Real passports of real people, misused: the killers could have managed to get hold of real, properly issued passports of real people and alter and then use them for their own purposes. This would have to be done very well for it not to be detected, although having observed for myself the meticulously microscopic and ingenious efforts of teenage boys to alter dob on ID cards to win under-age access to Warsaw nightclubs, that presumably is no problem. The original owners would have to be left with an almost perfect copy of their passports to avoid suspicion. Too complicated?

3  Fake passports of real people, original identities kept: the killers borrowed a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but retained the purported identity of the original owners. If that was done in this case, why would the serial numbers be incorrect?

A day after Dubai police announced the names of the Irish suspects as Gail Folliard, Evan Dennings and Kevin Daveron, a spokesman for Ireland's Department of Foreign Affairs said: "We are unable to identify any of those three individuals as being genuine Irish citizens.

"Ireland has issued no passports in those names."

The passport numbers had the wrong number of digits and did not contain letters as authentic passports do, he added.

4  Fake passports of real people, new identities: the killers took a number of real passports of real people, then copied and altered them for their own purposes but added new names and manipulated the photographs to create new identities.

Some combination of 1-4 above: maybe this was done for operational reasons (a hurried job, and/or the killers could not acquire enough passports in any one category and/or wanted to mix 'n' match to reduce the risk of detection and/or later muddy the waters).

Was the operation a rushed and bungled Mossad job but then deliberately presented as being rushed and bungled to point the finger of suspicion elsewhere?

These Middle East waters will swirl and churn for a few days, but then revert to their normal deeply muddy state:

Officials in Dubai have confirmed that the Gulf state is now considering rescinding the 11 international arrest warrants issued on Tuesday, including the six British citizens initially named as suspects ...

Police declined to comment today on reports that the two Palestinians being held in the emirate were extradited from Jordan last week and include a security official from the Palestinian group Fatah, Hamas’s fierce rival in the occupied territories. The Palestinian Authority has denied the report.

An elegant essay by Theodore Dalrymple on legendary lofty US economist J K Galbraith.

Needless to say, what caught my eye was reference to a book JGK wrote in 1958, Journey to Poland and Yugoslavia.

As a fine, prosperous East Coast liberal from a democracy, JKG was disinclined to see what if anything might be wrong with these one-party communist states:

The main function of what Galbraith writes is to minimize the horrors of Communism, upon which he has hardly a word. Indeed, strict political control never intrudes much on his consciousness when he is in the Communist world. “I have generally avoided quoting by name my Polish . . . sources in this account,” he writes. “This is not because I have any great fear of compromising them. Many people . . . take no small pride in speaking plainly and do so without evident restraint.”

Other priceless observations follow. Noticing the drabness with which people are dressed, Galbraith remarks that it “may be the problem of socialism. Planners can provide for everything but color, and they cannot allow for that because so much of it is associated with idiocy great and small. In any case, the people of Poland have more liberty than variety.”

Under Soviet-imposed socialism you are free, Poles!

Free, that is, in general, which is the main thing. Just not in particular, which could be most disadvantageous.

One of the great advantages of Galbraith-style planning is the elimination of “idiocy great and small,” of the kind that people are apt to embrace when they have the choice. The solution: eliminate choice. You can have any color you like, so long as it’s chosen by the philosopher-king.

Later he went to China and somehow missed the fact that millions of people had been wiped out in the Cultural Revolution and preceding famines caused by Mao's policies:

Nor was Galbraith interested in who the Red Guards were or what they actually did. The fate of individual people was far beneath his notice, which explains why his anecdotes are so rarely interesting, let alone illuminating. His is a humanitarianism without a human face.

The point now?

Galbraith has come back into fashion: not only his ideas, which imply the need for a huge and expanding class of redemptory politicians and bureaucrats to save people from a fate that would be wretched without them, but his aristocratic assumption of unchallengeable moral superiority, written in his prose as it appears to be written on President Obama’s face.

How delightful to be so generous, so very right all the time, and yet make a fortune and stay at the Ritz!

Read the whole piece - a deft demolition of JKG's bewilderingly idiotic idea that business/markets are inherently ruthless, governments inherently benign:

There remains, however, an astonishingly gaping absence in Galbraith’s worldview. While he is perfectly able to see the defects of businessmen—their inclination to megalomania, greed, hypocrisy, and special pleading—he is quite unable to see the same traits in government bureaucrats.

Time for Climate Warmists to shape up?

Jones said he might submit a correction to Nature. But he nonetheless attacked bloggers and other critics for “hijacking the peer-review process… Why don’t they do their own [temperature] reconstructions? If they want to criticise, they should write their own papers,” he said.

Well, let’s see — could it be because we’re not the people advancing extraordinary claims about man-made influence on global weather patterns?  This must be some new, previously unknown tenet of the Scientific Method, wherein people who point out errors, bias, bad process, and unsubstantiated claims from scientists are somehow required to disprove their unsupported hypotheses.

Climate Warmists! Face the music. And dance rather less.

Here's the song. The sultry Diana Krall version: 

An attempt by an unkoolass to make Sarah Palin look ... plain?

Talk about missing the target.

Ann Althouse:

I can list many other politicians — female and male, Republican and Democrat — who have won favor in the hearts of the people through their looks. One of them is sitting in the White House.

As you can see, time for a New Look.

The old one looked too cluttered and (I was assured) too 'mid-90s'.

Plus the colours looked OK in the day but at night became disagreeable,

So, on to a simpler, cleaner, brighter future.

Thanks to Oxford Webware.

And you all need to be a tad more ambitious in taking up my assorted skills - and paying me accordingly.

See the new For Hire box.

More on academic Amy Bishop who 'allegedly' starting firing at her colleagues in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, killing three:

A family source said Bishop, a mother of four children - the youngest a third-grade boy - was a far-left political extremist who was “obsessed” with President Obama to the point of being off-putting.

But Mercedes Paz, a Brookline biochemist who also oversaw Bishop’s work in 1993, described her as a friend and a likable woman.