Romanian baroque

When I came here in 1998 it was a period when the reformists, the CDR, were in power. I heard many stories about how corrupt the other side, the post-communist PSDR, which renamed itself the PSD, had been in their 6 years in power until 1996. “Nobody can forgive them for what they did”, a friend told me. “Except the electorate.” “Yes, except the electorate.”

The CDR governments made very important and necessary changes but they ran the economy into the ground and the PSD came back to the dismay of all the nice people in Bucharest.

One of them told me that living under the PSD was like living under an army of occupation.

The analogy was a good one. The PSD looted the country with arrogance and made little attempt to hide their depredations.

It was the occupation that began after the war with the liberation, which was no liberation, by the Russians, but the PSD were no longer communists.

In the summer of 1989 leading East European communists came to realise the end of communism needn't be the end of them but a management buyout and the opportunity to make a great deal of money that could be spent in Western capitals. 

This is the story of the National Salvation Front that took power after the revolution, claiming to expunge communism but in fact continuing the communist party in a new form. It became the PDSR and then the PSD. 

Both the main Romanian parties are very corrupt but the National Liberals are thin, more like a debating society. 

The PSD is not a national party so much as a federation of local parties, which replaced the old communist organisation in the counties where they control power and money. 

Romania you have to understand is a feudal system, but one without charming baronial castles and well-bred aristocrats

In 2003 I said to a lawyer who was sleeping with many of the leading figures in the PSD and consequently was unusually well informed that the party was a form of organized crime, to which she replied accurately enough, "No, it's not, it's completely disorganised."

I used to follow politics very attentively, read the newspaper carefully, found out as much as I could, and knew a lot of stuff. Then my interest moved to other things: Brexit, Donald Trump, the Middle East.

Recently I woke up from what seems like a long sleep. I feel like a Rip Van Winkle who's awakened to see how things have changed in 20 years. And how have they changed? They've changed enormously and yet they haven't changed at all.

The rich men 20 or 25 years ago were slightly absurd figures, badly dressed with dangerously sexy wives. Husbands and wives alike fitted the definition of nouveaux riches: expensively cheap.

Now they're much more sophisticated and they eat microscopic amounts of food at cool venues like Loft. They visit Monaco regularly. 

In fact the Monaco circle is a very powerful circle of highly controversial people who hold enormous power in Romania. They are mostly in real estate but some are underworld. One very rich and famous (non--underworld) member of the group is suspected of murdering a potential whistleblower. Several fled Romania to escape prison. 

25 years ago the judges were easily bribed but I was told that a call from the Victoria Palace (in other words the seat of the Prime Minister) always overrode any bribe, however large. The judges, in the time of the PDSR, were subordinate to the politicians.

Now the judges seem to be a power centre of their own. There is a very clear link between the judges and the PSD even when the PSD is in opposition, as it is for the time being since it pulled out of the coalition at the behest of Kimberly Guilfoyle, but the judges do not take orders as they used to do from politicians.

The judges are shameless in a way they weren't 25 years ago, when hypocrisy was a tribute that vice paid to virtue. They complain about politicians who  seek to curtail their independence. This is the approved language of the European Union again, which takes the place of the old limba de lemn or wooden language that Communists used to speak.

Lia Savonea, the President of the High Court of Cassation and Justice, which is the supreme court, is the best case in point.

Honest judges complain about trial rigging and the European Chief Prosecutor, who is a Romanian, backs them but Lia is untouched and untouchable. She is the state.

She dismisses accusations of corruption as inventions of centre-right politicians.

Meanwhile she acquitted an alleged underworld figure who faced a 7-year sentence for robbery while she and her husband did a real estate deal with the defendant's uncle

25 years ago judges would issue nonsensical decisions. Criminal files would simply disappear. 

Files still disappear but more common is prolonging trials for so long that the statute of limitations kicks in.

In 2014 Romania introduced a new criminal code. In 2018 the Constitutional Court ruled that Article 155 was not clear about which acts reset the clock and postponed the operation of the statute of limitations and therefore was null.

For four years the Romanian Parliament did nothing about it.

In 2022 the Constitutional Court ruled that there were no grounds for interrupting the statute of limitations during those four years. In effect it ruled that the clock had been ticking silently since the day the date of the alleged crime.

Nearly 10,000 criminal cases, indictments, and active convictions vanished. All sorts of high-profile people received a get-out-of-jail-free card, like in Monopoly.

This epitaph in an English churchyard comes to mind: "I wasted time and now doth time waste me."

The solution clearly is to abolish the statute of limitations and to replace the judges with new judges. Neither of these two things is going to happen.

It is not true that nothing can be done because it has been done in Albania and Moldova. In these countries a hostile takeover of the judiciary took place in which auditors from abroad investigated the wealth of the judges and very many were thrown out.

But Albania and Moldova have the advantage over Romania that they're not in the European Union and want to get in and have therefore to do their best to impress Brussels. 

Romania is in the European Union and is at ease in Zion.

Compliance is the name of the game and instead of civil servants being men in crumpled crimplene suits making $100 officially from their salary we have better though still badly paid people who speak the language that the European Union likes and, like rabbits illuminated by car headlights, are absolutely terrified of being accused of corruption.

As ever in Romania, it's baroque: the triumph of form over substance.

I was told that after the PSD left office in 2004 and the so-called centre-right took power, bribery became much less in the civil service. People still wanted bribes but they were frightened of receiving them and they didn't intend to do anything without a bribe so nothing got done.

In fact as we now know, although it wasn't necessarily apparent at the time, the old system carried on, but in a diminished form, under the centre-right government.

It is difficult to say whether Romania has gained more or lost more from being in the European Union. Probably, on balance, it has lost more because the free movement of people has meant millions of Romanians have left Romania to be replaced, in the case of workers, by badly paid third-world immigrants.

Undoubtedly living standards have risen a lot since Romania joined the European Union and to some extent it's because of European Union subsidies and investments. But prices rose enormously and foreign companies ate the Romanian market. 

The investments tend to favour certain groups, particularly, of course, the rich, but also the university graduates in the cities, and a very large amount of the European money is stolen in clever ways. 

The PSD have become very much more sophisticated. Their children are educated at Ivy League universities.

As G.K. Chesterton pointed out, there are two kinds of cynicism: the cynicism of the young which is unattractive and the cynicism of the old of which he approved. Employing the latter is a very useful exercise. 

Viewed cynically the European Union is as corrupt as Romania but it's corrupt in a much more sophisticated way and the Romanians are becoming sophisticated too.

I am an Englishman who left as Tony Blair started and looking at Romanian corruption from an English pre-Blair point of view it seems terribly shocking but if I were a Frenchman or an Italian, it would not. Nor from an American point of view.

The most interesting aspect of the Kimberly Guilfoyle scandal - the latest development - is that she asked for €100,000 to give access to the Trump White House. How very, very Romanian it seems, say Romanians disappointedly. In fact Romanians are less amateur than Kimberly who accepts cards. 

The corruption in America, which was always extreme, is now much worse, it seems, than the corruption in Romania.

The decline of the American Empire

Marco Rubio complains that Iran spends money on weapons rather than on building roads, even though the U.S. does the same.

“Every dollar and every penny that that regime gets, they don’t spend it on roads or bridges or helping improve the lives of the Iranian people. They spend that money on Hezbollah and Hamas and militias that fire rockets out of Iraq and the Houthis. They should have spent their money on their people, and instead they spend their money on terrorism and on weapons."


Since the United States has threatened to bomb Iran into the Stone Age, weapons are something Iran needs, I'd say.


Unlike Iran the USA uses its weapons on the other side of the world, not to defend itself or even its interests. The US launched, without any provocation, the present war with Iran. The Israelis who persuaded the US to do this hoped it would lead to the splitting up of Iran altogether yet little Marco complains that Iran wastes money on weapons. 

Does his American audience notice this? 

Actually not, is my hunch. 


In 2016 he described Donald Trump as a con artist and a serious threat to the United States and he has been proven right but these things are now equally true of Marco Rubio. More importantly, both men are serious threats to the world. 

Meanwhile here's Brian Berletic.


"And in case there is any doubt, the US admits 100s of its advisers are involved in facilitating the war on Yemen, which is obvious even without the admission as Saudi Arabia itself lacks the capabilities to wage such a war.


"It is a US war in all but name.


"The US is an over-extended empire increasingly draining its own proxies to compensate for its own growing limitations.


"This recent development is just another symptom of this process."


Events these days are reminiscent of the late Roman empire. The Battle of Adrianople 378 comes to mind, when the barbarians learnt how to defeat the Roman infantry square and the world changed forever. Compare that with drones. 

As I said before, Donald Trump has something about him of a businessman who got elected Roman emperor by paying the Praetorian Guard. 

Come to think of it Elagabalus's parties were much more unedifying even than Epstein's and Persia played a big role in defeating Rome as she is defeating Trump.


Persia will never be destroyed. Persia is a constant which has seen the founding of all the states in the world, the Roman Empire, the Athenian republic, even China. I think she will outlive Israel and quite possibly the United States.


Marx said, "History repeats itself: first as tragedy, then as farce." The current world situation seems to be a mixture of the two. A tragedy in Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine, a farce in the Persian Gulf. 

And the Houthis are defeating America again.

10% of Romanian judges are said to be corrupt, but more of the very senior ones. Lia Savonea, "absolute ruler of the court system", is married to a man who declares a minimal income but has made millions in real estate.

"The ongoing fallout from investigative reports exposing systemic networks of elite magistrates—who use administrative reassignments to intentionally delay top-tier corruption trials past their statutes of limitations—continues to plague Bucharest. Public distrust in the independent judiciary remains at a staggering 70%." News item today.

It is staggering that 30% of Romanians do not express distrust in the judiciary.

It is deeply shocking.

I was speaking yesterday to a very senior competition lawyer who told me that if she no longer believed that the Romanian justice system did justice she would stop being a lawyer.

It showed a very good heart on her part but her faith in the system surprised me. Then again competition law is very much cleaner than other areas of law.

Competition law is something very important to the European Union because it concerns major international companies and it's very carefully scrutinised from Brussels. In competition cases the judges, unlike in most areas of law, are well trained. The room for bribing judges is very small as most of the firms that work in this area are either international firms or very well-known and famous Romanian firms. Cases are very high-profile.

When I came to this country in the 1990s I spent a lot of time talking to lawyers and heard innumerable stories of open, overt corruption. I could say much. 

After Monica Macovei became justice minister under President (and former Securitate agent) Traian Basescu we all understood that things became clean but in fact they did not.

There was a wonderful documentary in December by an outfit called Recorder, which broadcast judges openly talking about the occult influences that were brought to bear on them. (How wonderful a thing the internet is in enabling all sorts of things to be exposed that formerly would have been buried. Let us hope the European Union does not succeed in muzzling it.)  

This resulted in a remarkable public scandal where one very brave judge Raluca Moroșanu stood in front of the judges of the Court of Appeal who gathered together to reassure the public on television and to condemn the Recorder report. Without preface and without being invited to speak she accused them of widespread malpractice and talked of rigged trials and systematic retaliation by senior judges against less senior ones who were not biddable.

The judges had been ambushed. 

They were recorded by journalists talking audibly on their telephones saying they'd received messages from the PSD adjacent head of the Court of Cassation (the Supreme Court) who was giving them orders in absentia. She owns two very expensive houses, by the way, bought by saving up her salary. 

Like baddies in cowboy films the judges started to argue among themselves and became laughing stocks. It was very funny indeed. The Court of Appeal’s first press conference was meant to bury the exposé but instead the Court was hoist by its own petard. 

Thousands took to the streets across Romania, demanding the state protect honest judges. President Nicușor Dan bypassed the compromised judicial councils to consult directly with reformists. 

Now, the battle rests before the Supreme Court which is, of course, a judge in its own cause.

Nothing will be done about this in the end.

By the way almost three quarters of the judges on the Court of Appeal are women and 20 years ago the figure was almost two thirds. The very few women taxi drivers in Bucharest are almost always more honest and better drivers than their male counterparts. When it comes to judges, unfortunately, women are not more honest than men.

In England judges can be impeached, although no judge has been impeached since 1680 and he was not removed from office.

Judicial corruption in England isn't prevented by the threat of impeachment, but a sense of honour amongst the elite to which judges belong, even now despite the egalitarian social changes brought about by Tony Blair.

The pre-Communist Romanian elite was very unsatisfactory. But something nobody says is that the worst thing that communism did was to destroy the elites and any sense of noblesse oblige.

Most Romanian lawyers will tell you that some judges, who do not become judges as a result of a career as a lawyer, like in England, but like in France are trained specially to be judges, are venal.

10%, according to one judge speaking to Recorder.

There have always been honest Romanian judges. I was told in the 2001 about one judge who happened to be a gypsy and sat on the Supreme Court that he was one of the minority of honest judges on that court. That was in the old days.

What is fine is for Romanians to complain about this but when a foreigner like me does so people may be unhappy.

Google no longer makes it easy for chance readers to see what's written in blogs so not many people will read this.

Has it occurred to you that we are living in the most interesting period in the world's history?

"He comes, nor want nor cold his course delay;
Hide, blushing Glory, hide Pultowa's day:
The vanquish'd hero leaves his broken bands,
And shows his miseries in distant lands;
Condemn'd a needy supplicant to wait,
While ladies interpose, and slaves debate.
But did not Chance at length her error mend?
Did no subverted empire mark his end?
Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound,
Or hostile millions press him to the ground?
His fall was destin'd to a barren strand
A petty fortress, and a dubious hand;
He left the name at which the world grew pale,
To point a moral, or adorn a tale."

Johnson, Samuel not Boris, on Charles XII of Sweden’s invasion of Ukraine in 1709, which was then part of Russia, and his defeat.


This is a very interesting article by Dominic Sandbrook on Poltava and Putin. I agree with quite a lot of it. 

                                  *

I wrote this very short post four years ago because I love The Vanity of Human Wishes and Dr Johnson. No doubt I intended it as the start to a post I never wrote.

Mr Sandbrook's article still seems to me extremely topical. Do read it. 

I agree with it entirely except for one mistake - Putin did said he might want to join NATO - and this paragraph which as is out of date:

"Today it’s very common to regard Putin as a kind of anomaly. We think of the Western-dominated, rules-based international system as the norm. The West represents order, and Putin represents disorder. We stand for continuity; he represents change and chaos."


I certainly don't mean that it seems out of date to regard Putin as representing disorder. Very obviously he does. I am not in any way an admirer of Putin or an apologist for the Russian invasion of Ukraine, quite the contrary, but the rules-based order did not exist and it is a phrase that is archaic after the U.S. attacks on Venezuela and Iran and threats to Panama, Cuba and Greenland.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said something similar at Davos in January (so recently but it seems so long ago):


""We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically... This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes."

Has it occurred to you that we are living in the most interesting period in the world's history since the Reformation or more probably the fall of Rome? 

I hope this is a period of creative destruction. The fall of Rome was obviously not. 

If Europe were Christian

People can't think the way they want to in Iran. They have to think the way they are told to. At least that's what I'm told by one British person who lived in Iran. 

We can't think the way we want to think in Europe either. We have to think in terms of equity, diversity, inclusion, feminism, etc. It's a kind of godless religion.

But Iranians do believe in God.

Years and years ago I read somebody say that if countries took Christianity seriously they would resemble, in many ways, Iran. 

I guess if Europe was really Christian there'd be no bathing costumes, no mixed colleges or mixed schools and divorces would be considered scandalous. 

Divorce is considered nothing at all in Muslim countries of course. 

It's a mistake to think that Islam and Catholicism resemble each other except in the sense that they're both hard religions as opposed to soft religions like Anglicanism. Islam resembles Calvinism.

The reason why the Iranian birth rate fell vertiginously and is now one of the lowest in the world is because the government in Iran spent a lot of time and money encouraging birth control in the first years after the Islamic Revolution. They are not like Catholics. 

If Europe were genuinely Christian, it would have a very high birth rate. 

LNG gangster shakedown

I was reading shortly after the beginning of the Ukrainian war that America was pressing her allies (vassals) for sanctions against Russian energy in order to sell LNG. 

I'm deeply ashamed to say that I thought that, at the time, unnecessarily cynical, which was, of course, absurd of me. War fever, I suppose, got the better of me. It can be infectious although I think I'm inoculated against it now. 

Great Britain is the biggest European importer of American LNG if you consider that Britain is in Europe. Of course, as an island it can't be any more European than Cyprus or Malta but that's considered pedantic. 

Most EU countries now buy very large amounts of exorbitantly priced American LNG, particularly Germany, Italy and Spain.  Ireland, Denmark, Cyprus. Malta and Latvia do not and nor do the Balkan countries which is why Miss Guilfoyle is so actively trying to sell LNG around the region from her embassy in Athens.

The question of her exact relationship with the good-looking man constantly at her side who is working for the company selling one particular brand of LNG is really irrelevant. 

She's working on behalf of the U.S. government, meaning Donald Trump and I'm quite sure that he thoroughly approves of her brutality in bringing about the downfall of the last, recalcitrant Romanian government. 

France, to her credit, continues to import Russian gas as well as buy LNG.

South Korea is negotiating about buying exorbitantly expensive Alaskan LNG because it wants US defence support. India has increased its imports of LNG from $10 million to $25 million in order to avoid punitive American tariffs. Vietnam, Taiwan and China have bought massive amounts of the American gas. 

It's pretty much agreed that Ukraine destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline with the knowledge of the CIA and it's not cynical but common sense to see the connection between this and selling LNG.

Yet people talk about the threat to the world economy from Iran. 

People are curious. 

No that's not true. People are incurious.

Quotation from the Persian poet Saadi

 "However much you study, you cannot know without action. A donkey laden with books is neither an intellectual nor a wise man." 

'A little loyal Jewish Ulster'

In 1917, Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British military governor of Jerusalem, said a Jewish homeland in Palestine would give England, he wrote, a "little loyal Jewish Ulster in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism."

In 1922 750 of the fearsome and murderous Black and Tans were sent to Palestine from Ireland after the creation of the Irish Free State by Churchill, then Colonial Secretary, to keep order. This is the beginning of the story we see continuing to unfold now in the Gaza Strip. 

My involuntary neighbour

 

I just realised that Calin Georgescu is in a cell 300 yards from my apartment in an obscure and dimly lit street, placed there not long after Kimberly Guilfoyle overturned the Romanian government. I walk past angry people shouting "Calin Georgescu President of Romania". It remember I am a Jacobite. 

It seems to symbolise something, though I am not sure what, about the people who rule the world, whoever they are.

Compliance and the decline of the West

DEI,  compliance and procurement laws exist because they are an uncommonly effective instrument for consolidating market share by big multinationals.

It's an extremely regressive tax and for big multinationals it means lebensraum.

In Romania as throughout the EU the future of compliance is a fully automated, algorithmic regime.

The introduction of the SAFT digital tax reporting system last year is an example.  It required smaller companies to upgrade their software at a cost of thousands of euros and many of them ceased operations for want of the means to do this. 

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) audits are now mandatory for many unlisted firms and are costly. Multinationals handle this without too much trouble. A small, agile supplier in Cluj can't compete.

This is not a new phenomenon but a major historical change. It's the secret of success for example of Philip Morris in Africa 20 years ago in lobbying successfully for more regulation and squeezing out their local competitors.

Philip Morris killed its competitors and is now killing their customers. 

With increased automation and increased use of AI, the problem changes exponentially.

Business is a Darwinian world, it always was and must be. What is remarkable is how many people come from nowhere, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and create vastly successful and powerful companies, which then, in turn, may fall apart, as some people think Amazon might. 

Creativity and creative destruction are what make a country in economic terms just as in any other terms, including political and artistic terms. European countries are in decline in terms of innovation, not just in economics but also in politics and in the arts.

The most worrying thing, as far as I can see, is that, by excluding nimble small firms from competing and forcing them to work as subcontractors or to live off the largesse of the bigger companies, the room for innovation is moved from small individuals to big organisations. 

An analogy is with the world of scientists. Some decades ago scientists were independent operators trying to invent things. Now they work in large teams and often in large organisations. 

The room for the brilliant mad professor is very limited now. The tolerance for counterintuitive and dissident ideas in science and in business is also more limited. Groupthink is the inevitable result.  

The G7 countries' success rests on the innovations and ingenuity of people a hundred years ago who founded highly successful companies.

Volkswagen's success is largely based on the work of its founders. 

It continued to be very successful until it became faced with the exigencies of being forced to use expensive energy in place of Russian energy and other problems of the age in which find ourselves encamped like bewildered travellers. 

Meanwhile, where are the small German companies like Volkswagen was 100 years ago?

New companies are constantly needed, and anything that prevents them from growing and making money is bad, not only for the economy but also for the culture of Europe. Anything that stops this happening risks turning Europe into a museum, which, in many respects, it already is. 

America, with its free market laws, is much less at risk which is why most of the big tech companies of the last many years have been American, though some have been Eastern European or Chinese. 

Tennyson said long ago, "Better a year of Europe than a cycle of Cathay." 

But now it looks as if the boot is on the other foot, Cathay is the innovator, and Europe is going to be the stagnant bureaucratic place that 19th century China was.

You might imagine that the defence sector is overwhelmingly dominated by big multinational companies like Lockheed Martin, but in fact a lot of small, originally very tiny companies in Romania have been very effective at producing drones for sale to the Ukrainians, something which the Ukrainians want and which makes money for Romania. 

They may be good at making drones, but now they have to be good at compliance. 

It is hard to imagine how the garage-built drone operation will continue to exist in 10 years' time. Let's hope the war is will be over by then but drones will still be needed and important innovation and competition will be needed.

Not having any expert knowledge in this field, my default setting is to believe that state regulation is almost always a bad thing unless it can be proven otherwise.  This is the exact opposite of the Napoleonic philosophy that animates the European Union. Margaret Thatcher looks like a historical blip now. 

We don't know how long the European Union will last, but it will last for quite a long time. The regulatory superpower will do a lot of harm to a continent which is already in steep relative decline, despite or because of being richer and more comfortable than it ever was in its history. 

I said here recently that one of the reasons why Spain ceased to be the most powerful country in the world was because she had far, far too many priests. Europe will have far too many lawyers, far too many compliance specialists, far too many human resources people, and not enough people who come up with creative ideas for the real world, as opposed to legal stratagems, HR strategies and financial engineering. 

Lawyers and financiers are very necessary but not sufficient. In the 1980s people complained that too much Oxbridge talent went into the City of London, but the City made the United Kingdom a great deal of money. It is better very disproportionate numbers of the best talents go into stockbroking and banks than going into law or compliance auditing. 

As Europeans are not having children (I am to blame here too) perhaps it doesn't matter anyway. 

A tale of two cities: Budapest and Bucharest

Viktor Orban in Hungary was the most interesting European leader of the last 30 years. He created a national business class to resist the foreign takeover of the economy and to enrich himself, his family, his party and his clients. 

The Western establishment tried hard to undermine him and eventually saw that it could not defeat Mr. Orban by preaching liberalism, a creed he had thoroughly discredited at home. 

Instead, they found their instrument in Peter Magyar, who had been a leading member of Mr Orban's Christian nationalist party Fidesz  and who cleverly maintained the familiar rhetoric while opening the country up to foreign direct investment by multinational companies and American energy interests, especially liquefied natural gas (LNG).

In Romania, the challenge to the West or pseudo-West took the form of a sudden sovereignist, pro-peace surge, epitomised by the unexpected rise of Calin Georgescu. 

The cancelling of the presidential election in which Mr. Georgescu came first in the first round may have been done at the fiat of the Americans or may have been a spontaneous attempt to please the Americans by the notoriously corrupt Constitutional Court court, which is part, of course, of the murky Romanian deep state. I hope it's the latter and suspect it's the former but it makes no difference in practice.  

The subsequent victory of Nicusor Dan and his putting together a centrist coalition cordoned off the right, making sure Romania remains a relatively safe place for multinationals, if they know how to lobby effectively which they certainly do. 

When Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan refused to buy exorbitantly priced LNG from a company with close connections to the Trump campaigns a dinner between Kimberly Guilfoyle, the PSD leader and an aide to President Dan was followed by the break-up of the coalition government over which Mr Bolojan presided and a political crisis that continues. 

La Guilfoyle is later said to have threatened to do the same thing to the Greek government if they did not buy the LNG. Implicitly she was offering East European politicians access to the Trump White House and the chance to make money with LNG contracts.

Viktor Orban thumbed his nose at European Union directives to phase out Russian gas, but went as a supplicant to Donald Trump, whose fierce supporter he was, and at a meeting in the White House asked for and received a one-year waiver from U.S. sanctions on Russian hydrocarbons. 

The price of this American indulgence was a $600 million commitment to purchase American LNG and nuclear fuel. 

Pure gangsterism. 

These are the methods of a successful New York real estate man.

Under her new Prime Minister Peter Magyar, Hungary remains trapped in this expensive American embrace. 

Though Mr Magyar has dutifully pledged to meet the European Union's 2027 deadline for a total abandonment of Russian energy, Hungary is still compelled to pay a ransom to the United States simply to keep its domestic grid alive, without any need for a visit from the seductive and brutal Kimberly Guilfoyle.

My opinion of Vladimir Putin - I am saying this in response to one journalist who insinuated that I was pro-Russian

To support Putin is to make terms with murder, as is supporting Netanyahu or Trump. 

This is a cartoon that I liked from 2014, after the Malaysian airline was downed in Ukraine. Russian nationalist Igor Girkin and two others were found guilty in absentia by a Dutch court. He claims to have been responsible for the outbreak of the separatist rebellion in eastern Ukraine in 2014, but Owen Matthews whom I trust says the revolt was in fact orchestrated by Vladimir Putin. 

AI saves the world?

I am no expert on AI or on IT in general but I'm very optimistic about AI because I hope it will prevent bad actors (such as the European Union) from trying to police freedom of speech and restrict access to information. 

I believe it will present a heaven-sent alternative to the importing of unskilled labourers into Europe and developed countries in general. 

Drones even up the playing field and enable smaller countries and smaller forces to withstand the expensive armoury of the United States or Russia. 

Technology however is not the decisive factor in wars; in the last resort wars are won by the side which is motivated and no country is more motivated in the world than Iran, which is facing threats of genocidal annihilation from Donald Trump.  I wonder how high morale is in Ukraine or in Russia at the moment. 

An Englishwoman used the American pejorative term for homosexual 'faggot' in an SMS to her best friend. 10 policemen and one policewoman arrested her in her bath. I wonder if the word bugger gets you arrested. Praising the IRG gets you 14 years.

She tells her story to Piers Morgan here.

Another woman is standing trial for praying silently close to an abortion factory.

England is not Assad's Syria but it is a soft police state evidently.

Dana Budeanu, the Darwinian influencer who admires rule-breakers, crooks and Kimberly Guilfoyle

Dana Budeanu and her former husband more than 20 years ago revolutionised the Romanian tabloid market with magazines like Ciao and Cancan. They copied the kind of stuff you get in Western papparazzi magazines but she gave the by-lines a very distinctive flavour.

She gave her readers permission to be cruel and sold what I call PSD chic, the glamour of the very rich in the so-called high society where politicians, businessmen, and sometimes the criminal underworld mix with television stars and journalists like her.

From there she grew to be a well-known influencer with strong opinions on politics.

Claud Cockburn famously parsed the popular novels of the interwar years in his book Bestseller! to explain the philosophy that underlay them. Reading Miss Budeanu, her philosophical position is a very interesting one.

It's pure Darwinism and I remember a high-performing and glamorous female psychopath moving in exactly the circles that Miss Budeanu moves in once saying to me that Darwinism really is a religion.

It is another word for psychopathy too.

Dana Budeanu is a very clever girl. She knows exactly how to sell the party she supports, the PSD. She doesn't pretend that it's clean or honourable or high-minded or concerned about the poor. On the contrary she just subverts the idea that being clean and honourable and high-minded are admirable qualities. It makes it much easier to defend her favourite politicians and make anyone who disagrees with her look like they are uncool.

So instead of attempting to defend the PSD leaders who are accused of making a deal to the detriment of Romania with Kimberly Guilfoyle over dinner in Bucharest earlier this year, she just takes a completely different tack: one of unabashed admiration for Kimberly herself and contempt for the fact that the Romanian politicians don't know how to play the game as well as she does.

Dana loves power and nobody has more power than the American state.

For her, Kimberly Guilfoyle isn't the absurd figure that she appears in snobbish Anglo-American eyes or the sexist joke that many Romanians think her, but an alpha predator.

"Look at Kimberly Guilfoyle. She walks into a room like a category-five hurricane, backed by the raw power of the Trump network. She doesn't come to negotiate; she comes to dictate terms. Our local Romanian politicians look like terrified, clueless schoolboys holding their little notebooks in front of her. They look like absolute amateurs trying to play chess with a tiger."

That is I'm sure true. It's a case of Greek meets Greeks in Greece, Romania and throughout the Balkans.

It is comic and tragic and pure gangsterism.

Some more quotations from Dana Budeanu:

"The Trump school of power doesn't care about your diplomatic protocols or whether some fragile local coalition gets its feelings hurt. Kimberly knows exactly how the world works: you show up, you grab the energy deals by the throat, and you move on. Seeing little public commentators try to critique her style is pure comedy—she operates on a planet they will never even see through a telescope."

"Laws, regulations, taxes... you think these were made for the geniuses who move millions overnight? No, darling. They were built to keep the sheep inside the fence.When a truly smart boy bypasses your bureaucracy and skips out on paying tribute to a corrupt state, I don't see a criminal—I see an alpha who refused to be chained by mediocrity."

"You sit there with your calculator screaming about 'tax evasion' while these men are buying yachts in Monte Carlo. They didn’t get rich by filling out forms and waiting for permission. They saw a loophole, they took it, and they created an empire. That is called talent. The rules are just suggestions for those who don’t have the balls to break them."

"Nothing great in this world was ever achieved by being transparent and obeying the speed limit. The 'smart boys' of energy and real estate understand how the game is played. They create their own laws. While you are crying over a receipt, they are changing the financial map over an expensive lunch in Mykonos."

"There is an absolute art to being the wife of a rule-breaker. You must be as sharpas a diamond and twice as expensive. They don't buy clothes from the mall; they buy pieces that signal absolute dominance. A woman who knows how to style a six-figure wardrobe is a strategic asset to a powerful man. She is the visual proof that he has won the game of life."

The most beautiful building in Bucharest

 

I never saw before today quite how beautiful the Telephone Palace in Bucharest is. Notice the Art Deco tracery on either side of the main tower. 

It was designed by Edmond Van Saanen Algi, a Romanian-Dutch architect, and two American architects Louis S. Weeks and Walter Froy. It pastiches the skyscrapers that were defining New York at the time. From the roof I am told you can see the Transylvanian Alps a.k.a. the Carpathians on an exceptionally clear day. 

It was opened in 1934 by King Carol II and was the tallest building in Romania until 1956. It narrowly escaped British, American and German bombs.

The best buildings in Bucharest, apart from a tiny number of 17th- and 18th-century churches, are the Art Deco buildings and of these the Telephone Palace is undoubtedly the best. I also love the 1850s houses behind Piata Sf Gheorghe very much.

The modern world expands

The Marubo tribe in Brazil, an isolated community of 2,000 people living near the Ituí River was very excited to have internet access, thanks to Elon Musk’s Starlink but now tribespeople stare fixedly at their telephones. The tribe or its elders value chastity but now many young tribesmen share porn clips in chat groups.

Starlink has saved lives (from snake bites) and a young tribeswoman dreams of being a dentist in Sao Paolo.

Fallen angels

Angels are bright still, though the brightest fell.
MACBETH iv. 3.


The angel choirs of Angelico, with the flames on their white foreheads waving brighter as they move, and the sparkles streaming from their purple wings like the glitter of many suns upon a sounding sea, listening in the pauses of alternate song, for the prolonging of the trumpet-blast, and the answering of psaltery and cymbal, throughout the endless deep, and from all the star shores of heaven.
RUSKIN.


Ah ! not the nectarous poppy lovers use,
Nor daily labour's dull, Lethaean spring.
Oblivion in lost Angels can infuse
Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing.
MATTHEW ARNOLD

 From Bowyer Nichol's Words and Days (1895): the entry for yesterday.

Latest on Guilfoyle scandal

The Financial Times cites new independent sources who attended the dinner where Kimberly Guilfoyle threatened to bring down Greek government as the Americans had brought down Bolojan, as well as officials who were briefed on the confrontation immediately afterward. FT has credibility. It's not the Murdoch press.

On TV former President Traian Băsescu, accused of murky things himself, defended PSD leader Sorin Grindeanu against treason charges but strongly praised the state-owned energy company Romgaz for rejecting the contract. According to internal data, the unfavourable price difference between European and American gas would have inflicted massive financial losses on Romania, estimated between $50 million and $300 million.

The debate intensified following a leaked photograph of a political dinner held on March 31 at a Bucharest restaurant, which included Kimberly Guilfoyle, Grindeanu, high-profile PSD figures and presidential advisor Florin Vlădică. Băsescu argued that Vlădică's presence firmly connects the Presidential Administration to the negotiations, asserting that President Nicușor Dan was undoubtedly briefed on the matter. According to Băsescu, the highly experienced U.S. Ambassador—whom he described as a seasoned former prosecutor—is actively leveraging her diplomatic influence to pressure Romanian politicians into bypassing Romgaz’s refusal.

While Băsescu refrained from directly linking these stalled energy negotiations to the recent dismissal of Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan's cabinet, he noted that Romanian politicians historically yield to foreign interests. He referenced past controversial deals, such as the Bechtel highway contract and the privatization of the Galați steel mill, as examples of Romania offering economic favors to international powers. 

Guilfoyle was not acting alone to enrich her close associate.  The Trump family are heavily involved. The Albanian connection brings Jared Kushner to mind.

The hero is Bolojan, the villains PSD, AUR and the generals who decide contracts. 

They all know in Romania, Greece and the White House that Russia is no threat to Nato but it's all about making money.

Is murder wrong?

AJ Balfour, the only philosopher to become Prime Minister of England, said that philosophical argunents for why murder is wrong agree only in their conclusion, which forced him to suspect that the authors began with the conclusion and worked backwards.

"It is true, no doubt, that the subject-matter of Morality is, or is believed to be, familiar to all the world. But it is also true that every philosopher has found himself compelled to search for the grounds of its authority, to map out its provinces, and to explain its origins. I have read many of these arguments, but, in spite of wide differences of method and profound disagreements in principle, I have found that they almost invariably coincide in one singular result. Whatever their starting-point, they all arrive at the same conclusion. They may differ as to why we ought to be good, but they are practically at one as to what goodness consists in.

"It is a matter of common observation that moralists of every school, however much they differ as to the grounds of obligation, are very nearly agreed as to the thing which is obligatory. They may argue indefinitely as to why murder is wrong, but they are all agreed that it is wrong. They may find it impossible to harmonize their theories as to the nature of the moral sense, or the origin of the concepts of 'duty' and 'right,' but they are quite at one when they come to practical rules of conduct.

"The reason of this phenomenon is not far to seek. The moralist does not, as a rule, generate his premises and then deduce his conclusions. He starts with his conclusions."

AJ Balfour, A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, Being an Essay on the Foundations of Belief, 1879.

Balfour had intended to call it A Defence of Scepticism and scepticism is the most important conservative value but his uncle Lord Salisbury (this is where the phrase 'Bob's your uncle' comes from) warned him to rename it lest people who only knew it by its title would assume he was sceptical of the existence of God, something that would have killed a political career in that more civilised era.

Even these lines show AJP Taylor was right to call Balfour trivial but he makes a point that is true enough and not just about philosophy. 

People come to their views from emotions and then justify them. 

This is why wars happen. 

If you seek the proof look around you, though unfortunately people no longer think murder is wrong, if it happens in far away countries.

"I think Donald Trump has correctly sensed the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age, which is genocidal" said former US Ambassador Chas Freeman about Mr Trump’s speech last week at the UN.

Yes - more true today than ever

'Sooner or later ... one has to take sides. If one is to remain human.'

Graham Greene in The Quiet American, the most devastating critique of American foreign policy there is.

Herbert Hoover from the grave blames Franklin Roosevelt for Pearl Harbor and says England and France should not have gone to war in 1939

If it were not for plane journeys would I read books? 

Coming back from Athens I finally started Herbert Hoover's wonderful book Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath which was on my Kindle.

Like Neville Chamberlain Hoover was a great man in the wrong place at the wrong time - in Hoover's case US President at the time of the Wall St crash which started the Great Depression

Had he been president in 1941 Japan would not have gone to war with the US (he argues that FDR provoked Pearl Harbor and the Japanese capture of various British and French colonies). 

Had he been president in 1939 England and France might not have ended up declaring war on Germany. 

Hoover called Chamberlain's guarantee to Poland's security "the biggest blunder in the whole history of European power diplomacy" and done because FDR pressured England and France to do so.

He said US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of John F Kennedy, was used by FDR to get England to take a hard stance against Germany but in fact unlike the president Joe Kennedy, who became close to Chamberlain, was keen to prevent war.

Interestingly in his diary entry for December 27, 1945 James Forrestal (then US Navy Secretary) records playing golf with Kennedy and that "Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews had forced England into the war."

In Hoover's view, had FDR not done this Hitler would have moved east to fight Bolshevik Russia leaving the democracies out of the war. 

Baldwin naturally wanted war, if it couldn't be avoided, to be between Germany and Russia with England staying out, as he explained to a three man parliamentary delegation of whom one was Churchill in 1936.

Historian Maurice Cowling, who would have taught me had I gone to Peterhouse, said the same thing. 

John Charmley probably thought so too. It's implied in his two books on appeasement, which he self-deprecatingly described as translations of Cowling into English.

If Hoover was right the USA laid the foundation for the American empire that rules most of the world today at British and French expense in 1939. 

There is a direct path between US pressure on England and France to give the Polish and Romanian governments a guarantee of military aid in 1939 and the cold war, the expansion of Nato to Eastern Europe and the recent US attacks on Iran and Venezuela.

I blogged about the book here years ago without having read it.