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. 

Mandatory 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 camped 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 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 who had been a leading member of Mr Orban's party and who cleverly maintained the familiar populist 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.

Ambassador Chas Freeman on Pelle Taylor and Martin Sieff's podcast says Europe is the one continent where American hegemony will survive

"We have demonstrated that we cannot restrain Israel, that we cannot defend our own bases in the region, that we are not willing or able to defend the countries that gave us access to those bases... therefore we're out of business as the guarantor of Persian Gulf security. This is the collapse of the Pax Americana in West Asia to be followed by an indigenously contrived security architecture and the same thing is happening by the way elsewhere everywhere but Europe. Europe is brain dead apparently and unable to bring itself to talk to those evil Russians and has reversed history and imagined that Russia has constantly invaded Europe when in fact it was the French and Germans who invaded Russia and the Russians who pursued them home, illustrating the point that if you go abroad in search of devils to destroy, they may very well follow you out."

"Iran's terms for peace will include the removal of all American military forces from the region."

"The Iran war has become an economic war of attrition, and the United States is losing it... Storage is exhausted, diesel is at $6.50 in America and the inflationary second wave [has hit]."

The podcast is here.

Romania is not an independent country but an American colony, like England, France and Germany

Romania has been an American colony since at the very latest 1996, but really since Ceaușescu was executed.

Donald Trump Jnr's former girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle is merely doing the same things other American ambassadors did, but doing them without plausible deniability. She does vehemently deny saying what she is accused of saying but her denial isn't plausible.

Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, as La Rochefoucauld said, so hypocrisy and deniability are very important.

We all know that no politician becomes prime minister or reaches the Cotroceni Palace without passing through a vetting process by Washington and the CIA. Following his victory, Nicușor Dan immediatly joined Donald Trump’s Peace Council and held extensive high-stakes negotiations over American strategic deliverables - showing he understands that his survival relies on being a reliable vassal.

If Kimberly Guilfoyle felt comfortable boasting at an Athens dinner party that the U.S. orchestrated the downfall of Romanian Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan's government, it proves that Washington treats allied leaders like chess pieces.

"Sovereignist" influencer Oana Eftimie accurately notes that while USR politicians accuse AUR and PSD of treason by getting rid of Bolojan at Miss Guilfoyle's behest, in fact laws and contracts always favour foreign interests.

Larry Watts tells me that a number of leaders, like Kadar of Hungary, Jaruzelski of Poland and Kekkonen of Finland were KGB agents but what does it mean being a KGB agent when you're a head of state?

Dan Nicusor is not a CIA agent, nor was Klaus Iohannis, nor any of the other Romanian leaders, as far as is known, but they are, in effect, American agents because they have to be.

Politicians who are not prepared to play America's game, like Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Calin Georgescu in Romania, come to a sticky end.

Every aspect of Romania is run for the benefit of foreigners.

Look at the current boom in renewable energy, a fashion which was imposed on Romania by the European Union. The financing comes from abroad, the equipment (turbines, solar panels) is manufactured abroad, and the ultimate profits are sent abroad. Romania provides the land, the bureaucratic headache and the grid capacity.

The legally ironclad profits negotiated by finance lawyers are ultimately paid for by Romanians through their monthly electricity bills but the very hefty legal fees do stay in Romania.

Foreign construction companies, most of which are brazenly corrupt, use legal claims and litigation as a profit engine to make as much money as possible from the state, using predatory Bucharest lawyers, leaving the Romanian taxpayer to cover massive cost overruns, interest payments and legal fees. How much claims in total cost the Romanian state each year nobody has the faintest idea. Certainly over a billion euros but it could be much more. We just don't know. 

It's the fault of of the Romanian state. As Schiller said: "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."

In a wider way it's the fault of European compliance laws.

It's the same story with defence projects except they are shielded from scrutiny by being confidential, allowing cost overruns, inflated material billing, and high-margin profits to be funnelled abroad while local subcontractors do the work.

Romania, like most countries in the world, exists in an American-controlled information space and the media sedulously foster the narrative that Russia is a threat to Europe and somehow even Iran and China are.

None of these things are true but people with good jobs in foreign companies believe it. The waiters and taxi drivers see more clearly, which is why they voted for Georgescu.

Talking about threats from Russia and so on is for the suckers. Really it's about making money, of course, for corrupt local companies and especially for corrupt international ones.

Good foreign construction companies avoid entering the Romanian market because of its well-deserved reputation for intense corruption and for being chaotic. That means that the investors that do come in from outside are the worst ones.

As for defence contractors they are all as bad as each other and should be nationalised but their dirt is not specific to Romania. Romania is just an extreme example of the way the world works.

One group of people profit more than any other from all this. They are the lawyers.

AI and data will one day produce a law driven, risk-averse culture even here but it will be a very long time, and not in my lifetime, before doing business in Romania is for the risk adverse.

Political parties in Romania, from the ex-Communist PSD (a socialist party run by multi-millionaires which was once the anti-American party) to nationalist parties like AUR etc are all equally keen, as we saw with the Kimberly Guilfoyle affair, to bid for American largesse (rather as clients in princely states in British India competed for British favour).

If countries which were once great powers, like Great Britain and France, are under the American heel, there's no point in Romania hoping to decide her own destiny.

When empires come to an end it happens sooner than anyone would have imagined.

Remember that the British built New Delhi in the 1920s, not expecting to be leaving in 1947.

When American hegemony over the non-white countries is broken, as it will be, perhaps soon, that doesn't mean that American hegemony over Europe will cease upon the midnight.

I think it will continue however badly America behaves to its vassals until America decides truly to become America First, meaning isolationist.

As Neagu Djuvara told me Europe has lost its vital spirit and is in great (he thought inevitable) decline.

I remember speaking to the girlfriend of the British ambassador during the 2000 American election between Gore and Bush. She was in favour of Bush for fear that, under Gore, America might become isolationist. She was very young and probably echoed the views of her boyfriend who wasn't and the British diplomatic corps but there was also a widespread fear in 2000 that Bush would be an isolationist.

If only.

What Romania and Europe, of course, need is an end to the war with Russia as soon as possible on almost any terms and, if it's possible, a modus vivendi with Russia and good relations with China, Iran, the Houthis, and other actors who have alienated the Americans, but without antagonizing a vindictive America.

But Oana Eftimie is of course right. Nicușor Dan is not an independent actor on the global stage; he is a manager of a strategic border state and does his job well by making sure the pro-peace parties do not enter government.

Note that a presidential counsellor was present at the dinner with Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Much as I wish that Romania could be a neutral country outside NATO it's not going to happen. Romania doesn't have any real freedom of choice. It has to do what Romania has always done throughout history: kiss the hand that strikes her. And give it defence, energy and construction contracts.

Vladimir Putin

To support Putin is to come to terms with murder, as is supporting Israel or America. Discuss.

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. 

The unnecessary and unprovoked Iran war might continue for many years.

By the time it ends American world hegemony will be never be the same, and thank God for it, but catastrophic economic consequences will ensue and perhaps soon, I imagine. 

Former US. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman said yesterday that he thinks the Iran war might well go on for many years. 

All this is the fault of Netanyahu and Trump. 

I don't think Netanyahu losing power if he does will make any difference but a new president, if he's a Democrat or ideally an isolationist, might do, though American Democratic politicians are mostly as Zionist as their Republican opponents. The next Israeli prime minister will hold the same views broadly as Netanyahu but at least he will presumably be much less clever. At least it will be pleasant to witness Netanyahu and possibly Trump too behind bars. 

Brian Berlertic thinks the same.

"By way of deception, thou shalt wage war"

Here is an interesting clip dealing with the long history of Israeli false flag operations. It is very sad that the Middle Eastern Jews were persuaded by Mossad false flags to leave Iraq, for example, and end a very long and beautiful history going back long before Christ to the earliest times. 

“We create a pretend world. We are a global production company: We write the screenplay. We are the directors, producers, the main actors, and the world is our stage.” An Israeli intelligence agent on 60 Minutes, an American TV news programme.

Ulrike Guérot wants Europe to be one country, which ain't ever going to happen, but she wants it to be a free and democratic one which is even more impossible

Europe will not become a democracy because it will not have a demos. This is the reason a European single state will not happen. 

If only Austria Hungary had survived but that was an empire that became democratic, not a group of democracies that sacrificed their sovereignty for rule by soviets in the true sense of the word soviets, committees. 

Dr. Ulrike Guérot has now to my astonishment become one of my absolute favourites on the podcast Neutrality Studies. She argues that the European Union is succumbing to a "war psychosis" and that Europe has sacrificed its economic security and political sovereignty by cutting ties with Russia, while people who disagree are silenced in various ways.

She says that the USA and Israel are an "axis of global military power abuse" and their power is coming to an end.

All that's wonderful but many of her views are diametrically opposed to mine.

I recently reread an article I wrote about her some years ago that I think you should read if you didn't.

She sees the European Union as the solution to the German Question. Her internationalism is very German. Just as France's is French - she wants a surrogate for the Napoleonic system and la gloire. 

Everyone when he thinks about the EU has national reasons for his views. 

European man does not exist, any more than the New Soviet Man did. Frenchmen, Germans, Romanians do.

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 turbocharged the Romanian tabloid genre and admires 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 very comic.

"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."

To Western readers her views may seem shocking and the way her audience laps them up does shock me slightly, but in fact to a Romanian this is just how the world is. 

They understand much better than foreigners. Things are not going to get any better. 

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.

A dark but plausible hypothesis

"A dark but plausible hypothesis is that the American strategy now is to Ukrainify Europe, so that when Ukrainian men run out they can be replenished with Europeans. The point is not to copy every measure used in Ukraine. It is to reach the same result: a country so poor, so tightly controlled, and so sealed against Russia by propaganda that it can be spent as frontline material. In Ukraine that was done with IMF shock therapy, deindustrialisation and a long campaign that turned the country into an anti-Russian project. In Europe the tools are different — energy shock, the loss of cheap Russian inputs, fiscal strain, NATO rearmament and the same kind of information war. For it to work, unemployment and desperation must rise, and some form of attack from Russia must be provoked or fabricated."

So says Mattias Forsgren, a biologist who analyses geopolitics on Substack.

I don't buy this idea but he thinks in a way I like. A lot of the Russian crisis isn't about defence but energy profits. I learnt a lot over the years about how energy pipelines are central to geopolitics. A lot is about preserving and extending American hegemony. Correction: it's all about American hegemony as are the wars in the Middle East.

Mattias Forsgren shares a realist critique of American hegemony with John Mearsheimer. Both thinkers view international relations as an anarchic clash where great powers fiercely protect their spheres of influence, arguing that Western "liberal hegemony" and NATO expansion predictably triggered conflict by crossing clear red lines. To me who read history at the university this makes perfect sense.

The liberal reading of geopolitics as a clash of values is very misleading.

The world is a competition for power and money. Values are useful for propaganda.

Alison Mutler a British journalist in Bucharest, for example, says that the politicians are frightened of Trump leaving them unprotected against the threat from Russia. The politicians I know aren't scared of Russia but speaking to a journalist they might say so if that's their message to the public.

Larry Johnson sees a 90% chance of war between Russia and "Europe"

"Europe" is in inverted commas because Europe is a geographical expression and includes European Russia, Belarus, Eastern Thrace and plenty of other places which are not in the EU. 

Former CIA analyst Larry Johnson 2 days ago: "It's probably a 90% certainty there is going to be a war between Russia and Europe."

Pepe Escobar, asked if war was a realistic possibility, said the situation is "complex" and "depends on European political elites, who are full of warmongers."

"Right now, among them we have the leadership of the European Commission – who are all, in essence, warmongers – as well as Europe's key governments, such as Germany, France, and Italy, which are located far away from Russia. However, the core of a militant NATO lies in Eastern Europe, just as the Americans wanted. This includes Poland, the Baltic states, Romania to some extent, and, of course, the Scandinavian countries. It is all very complicated. One could say there is a sort of consensus among these political elites – a completely mistaken one, of course – that war against Russia is inevitable. They are already persuading the European population to think about this war."

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.

"They were using the only means they had to fight an invader": the violence in Palestine started in Jaffa in 1921

What a predictable and predicted disaster it is having the Jewish homeland in Palestine. It should have been carved out of Germany not Arabia, as the King of Saudi Arabia told Roosevelt in 1945.



The Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023 are the continuation of the story that began on 30 April 1921 when the Jewish Communist Party distributed Arabic, Hebrew, and Yiddish fliers in Jaffa calling for the toppling of British rule and the establishment of a "Soviet Palestine."


The party members were Eastern European immigrants some of whom arrived in Palestine before the Balfour Declaration but many of whom came after. Democratic socialists fought them and it somehow became fighting between Jews and Arabs that left 47 Jews and 48 Arabs dead.

Remember that in 1921 many of the most fanatical Bolsheviks in Russia and Hungary were Jewish. 

"They did not kill us because we were Jews, but because we were an invader. They were using the only means they had to fight an invader." Baruch Ram a Jewish pioneer settler said this of the riots. He left Palestine disillusioned by Zionism.

Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky said something very similar in his 1923 essay The Iron Wall.
"The Arabs are not executing pogroms against us in the style of the Russian tsarist police, which organized mob violence for its own political goals. They are fighting against the invasion of their country by a foreign people. They are using the only means they have." 

Actually the Czarist Russian authorities did not organise the pogroms. The last thing they wanted was violence or rioting of any sort. The pogroms were spontaneous and less the result of religious or racial prejudice than for class and economic reasons. The first anti Jewish pogrom after the October Revolution was however organised by the Bolsheviks.

"Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs." Gandhi, 1938

"I remember how it was in 1948 when Israel was being established and all my Jewish friends were ecstatic, I was not. I said: what are we doing? We are establishing ourselves in a ghetto, in a small corner of a vast Muslim sea. The Muslims will never forget nor forgive, and Israel, as long as it exists, will be embattled. I was laughed at, but I was right.” Isaac Asimov

Yes, he was right.


And what now?

I have absolutely no idea. I feel, however, that it is unlikely that Israel can survive indefinitely while it continues to behave in the way it does and I have a feeling that it cannot behave in any other way. 

Naza

Soldiers in the film Naza explain how they monitored children's phones to know the exact moment a father returned home, using that as the signal to launch a strike.

Naza sounds a must see film. It opens in Bucharest on 9 October and after its run at the cinemas will be streamed for free. Please go to see it if you want to know what is happening beyond the illusory world of the newspapers.

Retired US Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (once Colin Powell's Chief of Staff, the stage in his career of which he is least proud) recently said that what the IDF is doing in Lebanon 'is comparable with - no worse than what Hitler did'.

An Israeli woman I had dinner with in Tel Aviv years ago told me the way some young IDF soldiers behaved was no better than the Nazis.

Sir Keir Starmer expelled Members of Parliament from the Labour Party for much milder criticisms.

That wonderful doctor in England Dr Aladwan keeps getting prosecuted for her criticisms of the IDF and vilified in the Dailly Telegraph as if she's the bad guy. Why is free speech restricted by conservatives?

I don't see proof that she explicitly supports Hamas but simply wants the Gazans to fight the occupier - but why should support for Hamas or Hezbollah or the IRG be illegal in England?

These are disputes in far away countries between people of whom we English generally know nothing, to paraphrase Chamberlain on the Sudetenland.

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.

As Voltaire once said

“It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets" Questions about Miracles (1765). This is topical always.

"When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion." In a letter to Mme. d'Épinal

"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." The Age of Louis XIV (1751). 

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers” is often attibuted to Vooltaire but it is the Duke of Lévis in his 1808 book Maximes et réflexions sur différents sujets de morale et de politique. It is very true. Interesting questions are what matter especially when it comes to AI.

"Creator — A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh" is another and obvious misattribution. It is the godless HL Mencken in his 1920 work A Book of Burlesques. It might be true. It probably is.

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:

Meir Baruchin an Israeli teacher arrested in November 2023 for criticising Israeli actions towards Arabs on Facebook, talking to Chris Hedges, April 8, 2024

'Chris, we kill the Palestinians. We injure the Palestinians. We have more than 1,500 Palestinians in administrative detention. We demolish their houses. We confiscate their property, their waters. We cut down their olive trees. We put them in quarantines on Jewish holidays. And you know what? It goes even beyond that. We are conducting, for generations, a campaign to conceal every sign of Palestinian identity in this land, every sign of Palestinian culture. And most Israelis expect the Palestinians to accept it. And if they don’t, they can always leave.'

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?

Did America overthrow the last Romanian government like it has overthrown countless governments?

The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported that US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle allegedly claimed during a private dinner in March 2026 that the United States played a role in the downfall of the Bolojan government. 

During a discussion in March with the Greek Energy Minister Stavros Papastavrou, Miss Guilfoyle reportedly pointed to the recent collapse of the government led by Ilie Bolojan in Romania and said, "We can do this to any country we want. We can do it here too," prompting the Greek minister to counter that the U.S. cannot replace a democratically elected government. 

Miss Guilfoyle denies the claim. 

Ilie Bolojan is said to have refused requests from an American-Greek consortium Aktor Group to purchase U.S. gas at rates above market prices. 

The Wall Street Journal mentioned the heavy involvement of businessman and registered lobbyist Christos Marafatsos, who frequently shadowed Guilfoyle at official diplomatic meetings across the Balkans, lobbying for the Aktor Group, which recently expanded into the natural gas sector and stood to profit from these regional U.S. LNG distribution agreements. 

She recently joked that she is looking for a husband but Mr Marafatos is married.

Whether Miss Guilfoyle is on what the lawyers call a frolic of her own or acting for her government Europe has fallen into a well laid trap by replacing Russian energy by more expensive US LNG.

It looks terrible for the soi dixant sovereignists (as Farage's support for bad actors does).

In Albania in the late 1990s the Americans created a pyramid scheme which caused economic misery for years to get rid of President Sali Berisha, who was given his job originally because of US bribery. 

He offended the Americans by becoming too close to Turkey. 

My source for this is impeccable but I promised not to reveal it.

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.'”

Why are there still sanctions against Russia?

Trump is now openly stating at the UN that the drug trade was not the reason he attacked Venezuela, but rather to stop other countries Russia and China from gaining a foothold in the Western Hemisphere:

“Our actions in Venezuela are proof that the United States will no longer permit threats to America to gain a foothold anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and if necessary, we will use our unmatched military might to secure the vital national interests of the United States.”

State Department people still claim spheres of influence are no longer an acceptable idea. 

Why are there still sanctions against Russia?

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 Berrbohm) 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.