Compliance and the decline of the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A tale of two cities: Budapest and Bucharest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pure gangsterism. 

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

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

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

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

Romania has been an American colony since the USSR broke up. Before that President Ion Iliescu, who had had Ceaușescu shot, had had a hotline to Gorbachev.

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.

Kimberly Guilfoyle boasting that the U.S. orchestrated the downfall of Romanian Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan's government shows once more 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 all Romanian politicians do America's bidding.

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 turbines, solar panels etc are manufactured abroad, and the profits are sent abroad. Local real estate investors however do make big money.

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 a worse story with defence projects because they are shielded from scrutiny for reasons of national security.

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.

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 British diplomats in the 2000 US presidential election were in favour of Bush for fear that, under Gore, America might become isolationist but there was also a widespread fear that Bush would be an isolationist.

If only.

What Romania and Europe need is an end to the war with Russia as soon as possible so long as Ukraine keeps her coast. Also, 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 these are impossiblities.

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.ă

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

Much as I think that Romania would be better off as 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.

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

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

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

AI saves the world?

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

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

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

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

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

She tells her story to Piers Morgan here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is another word for psychopathy too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is comic and tragic and pure gangsterism.

Some more quotations from Dana Budeanu:

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

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

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

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

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

The most beautiful building in Bucharest

 

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

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

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

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

The modern world expands

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

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

Fallen angels

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


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


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

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

Latest on Guilfoyle scandal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is murder wrong?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is why wars happen. 

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

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

Yes - more true today than ever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.