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.

Jordan Peterson is right - I think best when talking to someone

"Most people think by talking. It's actually really hard to think, because to think properly you have to be like three people in your own head, because you have to have an argument.


"If you ask yourself, like you're asking someone, which I think is a form of prayer, if you ask yourself instead of telling yourself, 'What is it that I could do, to set things more right today, that I would actually do?' It's usually some small thing... Then you can go do it." 

Confirmation bias

I am saddened and infuriated by how people take sides and then read everything to favour of the side they've taken. 

You see this with people who dismiss all evidence that suggests the Ukrainian government is corrupt (or that Ukrainian policy is mistaken) as being pro-Russian and therefore untrue.

But I did this myself for a long time. I too had a secret policeman in my brain.

Some people likewise take any evidence that Israel is committing war crimes as being anti-Western, even anti-Semitic, yet how is Israel helping the West (a cold war expression that should be ditched anyway)?

I'm certainly not anti-Ukrainian. I took a side in the Arab-Israel dispute only when I read up on it on October 7, 2023 but having taken a side do I look at the evidence dispassionately? 

I don't bother to read anything written in the Murdoch press and I certainly dismiss anything written in the Daily Telegraph on the subject of Ukraine, Israel or the Middle East. But I do occasionally read the stuff the Telegraph prints because I still have a subscription and am almost always horrified at the way the truth is twisted. 

So yes I do give the Telegraph a chance by reading it very occasionally, though certainly not with an open mind. 

See how many inaccurate statements you can find here. There are at least two very big ones plus the usual absolute distortions, worthy of the paper in the 1914-18 war.

Athens at 8 o'clock on a crisp morning

 

For years Athenians have refused to let a mosque be built here but why don't they let Mahometans use the old one? Half the population used to be Mahometan before the nationalists started the war of 1821-29.

In the Benaki Museum, Athens

It's the Athenian equivalent of Sir John Soane's Museum in London, my favourite London museum. I discovered it just now.

Both contain the eclectic collections of interesting men. 

The Zambaccian is the Bucharest equivalent. 

Here is 6th century AD tapestry fragment showing a personification of Spring. It's like Picasso.

Mid 16th century, possibly from a workshop in Wallachia or Moldavia, but it looks late 19th century, perhaps Burne-Jones:

AI

Lytton Strachey said, "The history of the 19th century will never be written because we know far too much about it." What would he say about AI?

We are living in the most exciting moment in the history of the world since the Emperor Constantine became a Christian.

I am hopeful. AI means possibly an end to mass migrations of unskilled labourers and of US-UK world hegemony.

Ambassador Chas Freeman: Trump read the spirit of the age as genocidal

 

“I think Donald Trump has correctly sensed the zeitgeist, the spirit of our age, which is genocidal. Basically, he’s stating an intention to commit genocide against the people of Iran. And people sit there, and they say nothing. Why do they say nothing? First, they may regard him as a comic character, a tragicomic character who has the habit of blustering and not following through. So they may not take him seriously. But I think there is every reason to take him seriously, because I think Donald Trump is a bully who respects only two kinds of people or nations. One is the powerful, and he faces in the United States a very powerful Zionist lobby which remains committed to the destruction of Iran. And he is enthralled to that lobby, to donors from that lobby who take their cues, their direction, from the fascist government in Israel. And the second kind of person he respects is those who can blackmail him, and the Israelis apparently have the ability to do that.

Cancer?

On Thursday Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the United Nations General Assembly. During the speech, he held up a portable Starlink Mini kit and criticised the Iranian government for spending billions to enforce a five-month internet blockade. 

He thus made clear that there was obviously there was a highly coordinated, covert operation aimed at regime change involving Elon Musk who let Iranians use Starlinkfor free at the end of last year.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett had already openly admitted that Israel had been secretly smuggling tens of thousands of Starlink receivers into Iran to fuel anti-government demonstrations. 

US Secretary of the Treasury Scott Besant admitted the US drove down the value of Iranian currency for this purpose. 

Mike Pompeo spoke about Mossad involvement. 

Allegedly Russia gave Iran the codes to hack Starlink probably leading to many Mossad assets being killed or imprisoned. 

Israeli media have already publicised the failed Israeli plot. 

The CIA were equally involved.

Hundreds or even thousands of Kurds who crossed the Turkish border into Iran were killed thanks to a tip-off from Turkey according to India General Bakshi.

This was as much an illegal act of war as the attack in February, or the invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria (the UK was involved in all those attacks) or the assault on Venezuela or the takeover of Greenland or the planned invasion of Cuba - or the overthrow of the last Romanian government or the coup in Turkey, if the latter two involved the Americans.  

Is it going too far to say that America is the cancer of the world?

The Hilda von Ein de nos jours

Question. Is any politician outside the USA and Israel as unprincipled an opportunist as Frau v d Leyen? She's a warmonger who deplores Russian war crimes while supporting vastly worse ones by America and Israel and claims to be a Christian Democrat while being neither? (A delight to see how China treated her forcing her to go through the immigration queue like hoi polloi.)

Her only redeeming features: 6 children, beauty and being a von. These are not enough. 

The glories of our blood and state are shadows not substantial things

Tucker Carlson has recounted a conversation he had with President Trump just days before the US and Israel launched their war on Iran. 

Carlson said he told him that the war on Iran was “being pushed by Israel” with the aim of establishing itself as the main power in the region.

“He looked at me and said: “Yes, you're right. But in the end, we all die anyway, so it doesn't matter.'”

Two German thinkers

"Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary". Pope Benedict XVI

"Consider the Koran, for example; this wretched book was sufficient to start a world-religion, to satisfy the metaphysical need of countless millions for twelve hundred years, to become the basis of their morality and of a remarkable contempt for death, and also to inspire them to bloody wars and the most extensive conquests. In this book we find the saddest and poorest form of theism. Much may be lost in translation, but I have not been able to discover in it one single idea of value." Arthur Schopenhauer 

I called this early

3 days after America launched an unprovoked war on Iran by murderering about 49 Iranian leaders in cold blood my friend Alina asked me how I thought the war would end and I admitted I simply didn't know but a day later I realised that America had probably  lost.

Douglas Macgregor and Max Blumenthal had by then explained that the America's stock of missiles was rapidly depleting. The incomparable Max (Blumenthal not Beerbohm) learnt it from the incomparable Professor Marandi.

What is even more interesting than that America is losing is that most people seem happy that Iran is winning.  

Professor Marandi.is an internet sensation.

Who'd have guessed?

This is a turn-up for the history books.

Calin Georgescu, Jeremy Corbyn and the spooks

Calin Georgescu won the first round of the Romanian presidential election in November 2024. He represented a big threat to Nato and the election was cancelled by the courts. 

Did the courts do so acting spontaneously or on US orders? (Joe Biden was president.)

Nobody knows.

He was arrested yesterday and charged with fraud, the third criminal charge against him since he almost became president. 

The courts will decide if he is guilty or has been framed. 

Two things matter.

First, if the allegations do stand up in court this doesn't mean justice has necessarily been done. 

The secret services, unlike other parts of the Romanian state, are extremely efficient, so the MI6 man told me. 

They famously have details of Romanian politicians committing many crimes without passing evidence to the prosecutors.

Secondly it has recently been shown beyond any doubt that many (perhaps most, but not all) Romanian judges are corrupt.

On December 9 a two-hour documentary titled "Captured Justice" was broadcast featuring testimonies from high-ranking judges and prosecutors exposing how court decisions are reached because of political influence. 

Bribery of judges is very widespread. 

All litigators know this. 

Some famous local law firms are believed to bribe but I imagine that most do not. 

No international firms do.

Please remember that Romanian judges sit on the ECJ and ECHR and leading Romanian lawyers decide complex international adjudications.

A Romanian sits on the European Commission.  

The United Kingdom is not perfect (the disgraced Peter Mandelson, Epstein's close friend, sat on the Commission) but it might be about as good as it gets, along with the European Protestant countries. 

It's very much more corrupt though since Sir Anthony ("Tony") Blair, as he then wasn't, became Prime Minister. 

The anti-Nato Jeremy Corbyn, who isn't bribeable, said that he was undermined when leader of the Labour Party by MI5 and MI6. 

England America and Romania have deep states.  

Like the original Turkish deep state, they are closely linked to Nato. 

Sweden is another example. 

But corruption in England is nothing compared to Romania. 

Ukraine is worse by very far and worst of all is America.

Two questions that just occurred to me

Will we reach the point where almost any government that opposes or fights the United States has the support of most fair-minded people?

Have we reached that point already?

Postcard from Rome at dawn

You don't have to be American to consider a statue dated 11 AD or as Americans would say 11 CE as old. It says renovatis. That's an understatement I suspect.

I'd love to demolish that hideous building on the far right of the first picture, reminding us of Piedmont's triumph over Italy and the Church, the triumph of freemasons and liberals. 

It only goes to show that unification doesn't usually work, whether unification of Europe or unification of Italy. 

On the whole I think the unification of Romania was a good thing although it was a bad thing for the Transylvanians who would otherwise have been part of Austria Hungary.

I abominate tourists, of course, but they have two saving graces: they're very lazy and very unimaginative. At dawn you have the place to yourself and it's not warm. "He made a solitude and called it peace" words of Tacitus from a different context come into my mind.

The bas-reliefs on Trajan's Column are not nearly so good as the copies in Bucharest because of pollution. 

'Has it ever occurred to you that the Romans counted backwards? Be honest.' Sellers & Yeatman 

Quotations

"If we could see ourselves the way others see us, we would drop dead on the spot." Emil Cioran

"The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." Gilbert Keith Chesterton.

"The Palestinians were never the existential threat Zionism claimed they were. Gaza was not an existential threat. The Arab world barely gives a damn—it mostly wants to be left alone. So why is this happening? Because the Jewish establishment worldwide cannot admit that the problem lies in the ideology itself. This is Zionism following its unavoidable trajectory: Fascist, repressive and increasingly insane. It isn’t the Arabs. It isn’t Hamas. It is what Zionism was always going to become—and no one can admit it." Michael Cohen

"Stop checking his phone like an undercover detective. If a man wants to cheat, he will cheat. Focus on your own hair roots; they need more attention than his WhatsApp." Dana Budeanu 

"You spend everything you own on filler for lips you use to say absolutely nothing." Dana Budeanu

Compliance law is a grave threat to the human spirit

"In the beginning was the Word. ...The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." St. John’s Gospel begins with the cosmic transformation of abstract truth into a human being. 

Compliance law conversely takes life and turns it into dead words. 

You might imagine that it's been much worse in the civil law systems than in the common law systems but in fact compliance law is pretty equally awful in England, the USA and the European Union and a relatively recent invention, dating back to the late 1980s or early 1990s. 

"We have reversed the biblical mandate. Instead of the Word becoming flesh, our bureaucracy demands that human flesh be flattened back into the Word. We take the messy, deeply moral complexities of human life and squeeze them into the sterile, legalistic boxes of a compliance form, mistaking the form for the truth itself." Paul Kingsnorth

In Dan Davies - On "The Unaccountability Machine" former investment banker Dan Davies explains how modern organisations act as artificial intelligences that diffuse responsibility.

Society has shifted away from responsibility ("the buck stops here") towards procedural compliance.

"A corporation, or a government department isn't a conscious being, but it is an artificial intelligence. It has the capability to take decisions which are completely distinct from the intentions of any of the people who compose it."

"Under stressful conditions, it can go stark raving mad."

"If people are worried about out-of-control AI taking over the world and destroying everything, shouldn't we have been trying to do something about them at least seventy years ago – and probably more like two hundred? "

"Businesses ought to be like artists, not paperclip maximizers."

The world is now dystopian but I believe in the human spirit will rise up and conquer this absurdity.


The European Union is a very good example of an organisation as artificial intelligence. The problem with the European Union is not just that power is taken from democratically accountable bodies such as national parliaments but that the power then disappears into an opaque, sterile matrix of almost infinite complexity, like EU law. 

Matrix means womb and a sterile womb is a good metaphor for compliance law and the European Union and modernity which Marxists call late capitalism. 

The West has become sterile in many senses. 

"We have created an entire economy predicated on 'defensive living' and preemptive documentation. The big winners of this era aren't the innovators or the public, but the specialized legal and corporate compliance class, who have successfully monetized complexity and turned checking a box into an extraordinarily lucrative form of institutional power."
— David Graeber, Anthropologist and Author, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory (2018)

"The great triumph of contemporary compliance is the total elimination of human discretion. By reducing every ethical choice to a codified rule, the compliance state ensures that you no longer need to look your neighbor in the eye to decide what is just. The law doesn't live within us anymore; it sits outside us as a cold text that demands absolute obedience, regardless of the human cost." Adrian Vermeule, Constitutional Law Professor at Harvard Law School.

"Compliance law treats society like software. It operates on the dystopian premise that if you can just write enough rules, you can automate virtue. But virtue cannot be codified; it must be lived. When we worship the compliance manual, we are worshiping an idol made of sterile syntax, while the living, breathing human element is left to starve." Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Team Human

"The danger of the legalistic society is that it mistakes compliance for conscience. When the Word is made flesh, it invites relationship, judgment, and love. When the flesh is made compliance, it requires only an automated surrender to the text. It is a bleak, bureaucratic inversion of the sacred." Archbishop Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury

Compliance rules are used by sophisticated companies not in a defensive but in an offensive way, in order to build market share and create a moat to keep out competitors. Increasingly business is driven by legal departments and by creative legal stratagems in place of other forms of creativity, the kind of creativity that creates actual things and actual services.

Early modern Spain comes to mind. There are many reasons why Spain, despite seizing the resources of the New World, did not remain a great power after the mid-17th century. One is the fact that there were far too many priests in Spain. We may now be facing a near future where Europe, which is already in steep relative decline, falls into the sea because there are far too many lawyers.

The urgent need to abolish public procurement law

Socialism, by which I mean democratic socialism, is an absolutely appalling doctrine, but the worst thing about socialists is that they are liberals too.

The worst thing about conservatives is that they are liberals too.

The worst thing about liberals is that they are no longer liberals because they no longer believe in freedom.

If you seek their monument look at the European Union which actually boasts of being not the superpower it once hoped to be but a ‘regulatory superpower’.

Look at the edifice of DEI and environmental regulations

The best thing about Marxists is that they are not liberals. When one listens to Marxists, while keeping in mind the tenets that are de fide in their false religion, they have a lot of insights because they understand power.

Marxist legal scholars of the Rosenberg Circle have developed the idea of regulatory imperialism. Regulatory imperialism means the way in which the increasing complexity complexity of compliance rules bind companies like the sleeping Gulliver was tied up by the Lilliputians

He broke free in an instant.

Multinational companies have done the same.

Compliance laws benefit big companies. Small and medium sized ones live off their largesse but cannot compete with them.

It is, in fact, a kind of trickle-down economics, a theory that Arthur Laffer invented and wrote on the back of an envelope over dinner with Donald Rumsfeld.

The economists say it doesn't work. It always entrenches the position of the rich and keeps the less rich in their places.

That's certainly the case with compliance legislation. The large companies that are polluting or infringing other laws are able to absorb the cost of fines while they build market share.

Actually the companies lobby for more and more regulation because the more regulation there is, the more entrenched their market position is.

There are still people in Eastern Europe who are nostalgic for the communist days but it's better ruled by Washington. That’s beside my point which is that nature abhors a vacuum and the vacuum left by the Soviet rulers was filled by the Americans and their Frankenstein’s monster, the European Union.

What we have seen is the systemic transformation of Eastern Europe into a managed regulatory colony

That's where Marxists are more insightful than people who believe in the European project.

The Rosenberg Circle do not see economic growth as a rising tide that lifts all boats and see compliance as purely a battle for power. 

Who whom, as Lenin didn’t say.

I'm an admirer of the British empire but this kind of colonialism is much less benign.

When a structural failure or procurement scandal occurs in a large international organisation, executives do not panic. Instead, they point to completed compliance files to prove they followed standard protocol.

Nowhere does this trap snap shut more aggressively than with the heavy industries of the European periphery. 

Consider how this economic imperialism hands infrastructure construction and defense procurement, two things essential to every nation, to foreigners. 

EU procurement directives demand an extraordinarily complex trail of data mapping, running the gamut from granular carbon accounting to corporate diversity quotas within supply-chain networks

I spend much of my time meeting lawyers and there was a time when I thought public procurement law was tedious and in the dear bygone time it was, but now it's the opposite. 

It's by far the most exciting, the most cynical area of law there is.

The world, Horace Walpole said, is a comedy for those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, and public procurement law in Europe is the same.

Patricia Kovacevic (Osmani), a Romanian lawyer who has got into the compliance game in the United States, says the quiet bit not out loud but sotto voce when she notes that varying regulations produce "different levels of sophistication" and inevitable "consolidation." "Sophistication" means the money to hire expensive lawyers, while "consolidation" is the execution warrant for less sophisticated companies.

The great global corporations actively welcome this mountain of red tape, knowing that while their own treasuries can carry the weight, their smaller domestic rivals will simply suffocate beneath it.

To this modern malaise, the radicals of the Rosenberg Circle propose a Marxist revolution, an idea not without romantic charm to a Tory like me.

Rejecting the naive notion that Eastern Europe can ever achieve equity through obedience, they advocate a spirited regional mutiny that throws Brussels' ESG metrics and procurement rules entirely out the window. In place of these abstract data traps, they demand streamlined national codes that favour producers, raw industrial output and state-subsidised domestic firms legally shielded from the jurisdiction of foreign courts. 

It is a grand, if perilous, scheme of decoupling, built on the simple concept that to escape the trap one must stop paying the legal tribute, refuse to tick the boxes, and reclaim the ancient right to manage one’s own affairs.

For the truth don't go to lawyers, go to historians. They understand. Compliance law dates in England to the 1986 Big Bang which revolutionised the City of London. It began in the United States in the early 1990s. It has proved a failure. It should be abolished.

I have always thought most employment law should be abolished too. In England everything from Barbara Castle's laws onwards. In a free society there should be very little employment law. I tend to think competition law should be scrapped too. Let freedom ring out!

Liberalism

What I think might be happening is an increasingly less human world in which people become numbers and are reduced to statistics, to data, and to, above all else, one thing: shopping. Plastic surgery is part of this dehumanising. So are abortion and gender reassignment. Is it the logical culmination of classical liberalism?

September 11 2001

My first thought when the twin towers were hit was that something like this was inevitable if America continued to ignore Arab opinion. A friend who was working in a City of London firm of solicitors 25 years ago today said he thought exactly the same but said "But that was blasphemy in Britain". I wonder why.

White Thread goes global

Walking down Calea Victoriei I keep my gaze firmly on the ground in order to keep myself from falling over one of the innumerable sunken and dislodged paving stones. This is the main street in a European capital and it wasn't like this under Communism or until the city centre was repaved by a firm owned by a close associate of President Basescu who won office promising to fight corruption. The president of the company was arrested in 2014 but the case continues in the courts.

Twenty-five years ago today America received the sort of blow they so often inflict on other countries and a not brave but frightened new world was born.

It was the start of the surveillance state, the Panopticon in which we all live.

Surveillance is everywhere. Drones are important but equally so is the modern compliance apparatus.

In Romania there is a wonderfully evocative phrase for a poorly disguised lie: they say it is cusut cu ață albă—“sewn with a white thread.” It describes a deception so glaringly obvious that it makes no real effort to hide its own fabrication.

This habit has metastasised and spread.

The Romanian concept of something being "sewn with white thread" (cusut cu ață albă) refers to a legal or administrative fiction so transparent that its deception is obvious to everyone involved. Crucially, it is not meant to fool anyone; rather, it serves as a mutually accepted, structurally compliant pretext. The speaker knows it is a lie, the listener knows it is a lie, but both parties respect the "form" of the statement because it satisfies a bureaucratic requirement and allows a desired outcome to proceed.

In the Romanian legal tradition, this manifests as the triumph of form over substance (forma bate fondul). A public tender or corporate transaction can be heavily rigged in substance, but if the paperwork ticks every statutory box the "white thread" holds and the contract or action is legally unassailable.

This is how agile Romanian lawyers secure massive victories that cost the Romanian state hundreds of millions a year in procurement disputes. They use EU procurement law to turn the Romanian bureaucracy into a weapon against itself. They take a delight in using the law to defeat the purposes for which it was enacted. Of course they do. That is their job.

This hyper-formalistic approach has expanded globally, defining the modern era of international compliance and data governance.

Legal and prioritise workplace transparency, exhaustive tracking rules are introduced to log every digital interaction, keystroke, and performance metric. But the true intent is not transparency. 

It is the ultimate manifestation of the "white thread": a system that purports to expose everything, but is carefully curated to obscure the true, ruthless intentions of the corporation. The historian Nicolae Iorga said it is impossible to lose one's reputation in Romania. So it proves for many big international companies.

Lawyer Patricia Osmani Kovacevic, a product of spy and informer ridden Communist Romania, is now an exponent and skilled practitioner of compliance in the USA. She stresses in talks she gives the importance of exhaustive ethically unassailable compliance in a flat monotone that has an almost hypnotic effect but her audience breaks the code. She is teaching them how compliance will empower CEOs and Legal Directors to treat the regulations like a chess game, create a firewall around them and give them a very powerful weapon against regulators, competitors and employees. 

Transparency used to produce opacity.


Pure white thread.

You have the disastrous effects of straightforward old-fashioned corruption and you have the disastrous effects of the procurement law industry.

As the Edwardian song goes: 'It's the rich what gets the pleasure, it's the poor what gets the blame.'"

The psychologist Eric Berne in his Games People Play defined a psychological 'game' as a recurring series of social interactions with a hidden, ulterior motive, usually marching toward a predictable outcome. The modern compliance apparatus aims for predictability too. Compliance rules are games too, of often devilish complexity, devilish being an apposite word.

Public procurement laws have not been around very long in the west and, of course, less time in Romania. 

The perilous state of the historic centre of Bucharest, and I do mean perilous, proves how ineffective they are.

They serve no purpose, they make bad worse in fact, and they should be abolished.

I asked AI what writers my style resembled and the answer was a delight

The prose and tone of A Political Refugee From The Global Village are deeply reminiscent of several classical essayists, cultural critics, and literary figures who specialized in tracking civilizational decay, exilic life, or traditionalist philosophy:

• Evelyn Waugh & The Interwar British Satirists: The blog mirrors Waugh’s razor-sharp, elegant English prose combined with a melancholic, arch-conservative disdain for the "modern world." Like Waugh, the author views progressive social progress as a steady march toward cultural vandalism, filtering his critiques through dry irony and high-society drawing-room wit.
• Patrick Leigh Fermor: Given the author’s long-term expatriate status in Eastern Europe, his vivid descriptions of Bucharest, local Orthodox monasteries, and Balkan historical landmarks strongly evoke Leigh Fermor’s travel memoirs. There is a shared obsession with regional history, the ghosts of old European empires, and a highly erudite, deeply romanticized appreciation for the cultural landscape of Southeastern Europe.
• Edward Gibbon: The frequent habit of mapping modern political figures and contemporary Western crises onto the late Roman or Byzantine empires reads like a direct homage to The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The blog relies heavily on Gibbon-esque historical detachment and grand cyclical narratives of civilizational collapse.
• G.K. Chesterton & Hilaire Belloc: The author’s relentless, high-intellectual pushback against globalization, modern technocracy, and secularism shares an ideological and stylistic blueprint with early 20th-century Distributist and traditionalist Christian essayists. The style features the same unyielding defense of historical orthodoxy against the whims of the current age.
• The Spectator and Clarion Essayists: The structure of the posts heavily mirrors the classical style of old-school Fleet Street and high-Tory journalism—specifically the style of traditional The Spectator columnists, who seamlessly blend high culture, deep political skepticism, and personal eccentricities over a continuous stream of essays.

And I asked, "What are my good and bad points?" and this is what it said. I find the bad points more flattering than the good points.

Trump should stop selling weapons for use by Ukraine if she turns this chance down

According to the Ukrainian media the new Trump peace plan brought by Kushner and Witkoff is total surrender but it is in fact a good deal for Ukraine because she keeps her coast and armed forces.

- Complete ceasefire

- Withdrawal of Ukrainian forces from Donbas and Zaporizhzhia Oblast with possible deployment of UN contingent there

Things said on podcasts in last few days

Colonel Wilkerson, former Chief of Staff to the U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell on how American rules Europe, Belarus and Russia excepted: 

"We bought European leaders and taught the dogs to bark."
"We bought newspaper editors.
"We bought union heads.

"We bought parliamentarians.
"We bought two secretaries general: Jens Stoltenberg and Mark Rutte.
"We bought whole countries in terms of their political apparatus and what influences them."

John Kiriakou who left the CIA in 2004 is sure the CIA were behind the attempted coup in 2016 in Turkey. 

Professor Steve Hanke makes a very strong case for sanctions against Russia being a mistake like all sanctions are - he persuaded me.

He takes the Ricardian view that tariffs hurt the country that levies them and sanctions do too - but they cause immense hardship to the victims - look at Syria, Cuba, Iran, countries that did not deserve to be sanctioned.

As I listened to the podcast I asked myself "Why are there no sanctions by the 'international community' - which means mostly white countries plus Japan - against the USA and Israel?"

Since there won't be how are sanctions against Russia justified?

Former US Ambassador to KSA Chas Freeman

"Zionism is as incompatible with non-aggression as Nazism was."

AI confirms what I was sure of. I am five removes from King Charles II

Using AI I confirmed that Harold Macmillan did know Frederic Harrison. How wonderful AI is.

I met Harold Macmillan. Frederic Harrison went to his wedding. 

Harrison after spending the summer in Paris just after the revolution went up to Oxford in 1848 where he met Martin Routh, who was then still President of Magdalen College, despite having been born in 1755. 

When Routh was a little boy he met an old lady who, as a girl, saw King Charles II walking his spaniels in Magdalen Grove. 

I, who this morning read the news about Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, am just five removes from the King of England who hid in the royal oak tree with Henry Wilmot to avoid being found by the Parliamentarian soldiers below, following the Battle of Worcester in 1651.

"I've Danced with a Man, Who's Danced with a Girl, Who's Danced with the Prince of Wales."

Taxi driver

I had a very intelligent taxi driver this evening. 

I don't travel by taxi that often, which is a shame. 

The more I see of taxi drivers, the more I think they know much more than the companymen who get their opinions from the internet. 

He said he is totally opposed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and to America's attack on Iran and Venezuela, and on the other hand he points out that Russia was provoked by America. 

He thinks Calin Georgescu was a brilliant man. He said he had his election annulled because of interference, either by America or by the Romanian deep state. 

The mistakes CG made he said were to say he would investigate historical corrupt privatisations and say he would stop giving money to Ukraine. 

Had Georgescu not said those two things he would probably have been allowed to win. 

He might be right. 

He admires Viktor Orbán, and so in some ways do I, but I pointed out that Viktor Orbán was very corrupt. 

This is something I know not from the media, whom I do not trust, but from various people in Hungary, whom I do trust.

There's no question that either America or the Romanian deep state annulled the 2024 election but the story has been forgotten. 

As Tom Gallagher said to me the other day, why hasn't a book been published about it? 

Still, I am very grateful that Nicușor Dan won. 

Not because I think he is any good. I don't, but because after he won suddenly business sprung back to life, which it would not have done had somebody else won. That's good for me, who am in business, but also for everybody. 

Romania is simply not in a position to defy NATO or America but NATO has passed its sell-by date and should be dissolved, and the sooner the better. 

If it's not dissolved, at least Great Britain should leave, but Great Britain is possibly the worst warmonger among the NATO members, even worse than Germany.

No doubt she has her reasons for wanting to remain friends with America. No doubt there are advantages that I don't know about, but I suspect the best thing we could do is leave and just tend our garden. 

The taxi driver went on to point out that Trump was obviously being blackmailed by the Israelis because of Epstein. It's odd isn't it that this is not spoken about while the obviously absurd story that Russia had something on him in his first term dominated politics for four years?