One of the less-discussed advantages of the Lisbon Treaty is that it would put an end to the ‘rotating’ Presidency under which the EU is currently run. This is the Buggins Turn system in which the Prime Ministers of even piddling little states get to strut it on the world stage for six months, miming an importance and power that they do not possess. Each one embarks on his or her moment in the sun with a grandiose ‘agenda’ which, given the glacial pace of inter-governmental processes, is unachievable within the allotted term. (Nicolas Sarcozy is the current incumbent and he is determined to ‘sort out’ the Irish Referendum result.) And then the baton is passed to another, equally deluded, premier whose fantasies and pretensions have likewise to be taken seriously by EU officials.

I remember being in Ireland when we first held the Presidency. Sue and I stayed in the Westbury in Dublin, which was the official hotel for the EU Summit. We seemed to be the only non-EU residents in the entire hotel. Outside was permanent gridlock of black limousines and motorcycle outriders. I fell into conversation with a bored driver who was waiting for his assigned clutch of VIPs. “This is not a good weekend to die in Ireland”, said he. I inquired why. “Because”, he said, “the government has hired cars from every funeral director in the country. There’s nothing left out there except bloody hearses.”

From The Register…

An air traffic control fault that brought Dublin airport to its knees last week has been traced to an intermittently flakey network card.

Sadly, while the problem was simple enough to diagnose, it’ll be weeks before the airport’s air traffic control system will be able to run at full capacity.

The system went for a little lie down last Wednesday, and while it was back up and running soon enough concerns over its capacity meant authorities had to slash the number of flights in and out of the airport.

It wasn’t until Wednesday that the Irish Aviation Authority was prepared to say “operations at Dublin Airport are now generally meeting demand” though “some minor delays may be experienced at peak times”.

Thales ATM, the makers of Dublin’s ATC system, conducted a review of the system, and after crawling around the airport with their little torches, “confirmed the root cause of the hardware system malfunction as an intermittent malfunctioning network card which consequently overcame the built-in system redundancy”. The flakey card had been responsible for previous problems since June 2.

Apparently, Thales ATM stated ”that in ten similar Air Traffic Control Centres worldwide with over 500,000 flight hours (50 years), this is the first time an incident of this type has been reported”.

So, problem solved? Er, sadly not. The IAA has slapped in further monitoring tools, and plans “an enhancement” to the failure recovery system. But whatever happens, the system will need to be revalidated, which could take weeks. In the meantime, it will “slowly add capacity“, but for safety reasons “will not operate the system to its limit until the system has been re-validated”.

The Irish Times ran several pieces on the ensuing chaos, including this one which, en passant, contained a gem of a quote from RyanAir’s CEO.

Another contentious issue for passengers and airlines is compensation. Under European consumer regulations, passengers must be offered help free of charge while awaiting a rerouted flight, with meals, accommodation if necessary, transport between the airport and accommodation and telephone calls provided. But some airlines resent having to reimburse the cost of disruption which was not their fault. When asked yesterday about his passengers’ complaints that they weren’t offered the courtesy of a cup of a tea or a taxi fare to their hotel, Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary said: “Personally, I think that’s a load of nonsense. You paid an airfare of €40. You saved around €150. Buy your own cup of tea . . . Why are we providing cups of tea because the IAA can’t run a radar system properly?”

First there was Obama taking on Hilary Clinton. Now this. Whatever next?

Plain speaking from this week’s Economist.com

Capitalism rests on a clear principle: those who get the profits should take the pain. For the system to work, bankers sometimes need to lose their jobs and investors their shirts. Yet were a collapsing Bear Stearns or Fannie Mae to sow destruction for the sake of a principle, it would impose a terrible price in lost jobs and output on everyone else. The unpalatable truth is that by the time a financial crisis hits, the state often has to compromise—to impose as much pain as it can, of course, but to shoulder a large part of the losses nonetheless.

That formula comes at a heavy price. Fannie and Freddie were supposed to help Americans buy their own homes, by making the mortgage market work better. But it has been an awful deal for the taxpayer—a Fed economist calculated the implicit debt-guarantee was worth a one-off sum of between $122 billion and $182 billion. Because Fannie and Freddie barely lowered the cost of borrowing, little of this subsidy went towards boosting home ownership. Instead, just over half—about $79 billion—went straight to their shareholders.

Normal financial-services firms should have been dealing in the safe, middle-of-the road mortgages that Fannie and Freddie specialise in. Except that they were crowded out into subprime mortgages. Fannie and Freddie should never have grown so large. Except that they wanted to exploit the margin between the government-guaranteed borrowing costs and the commercial lending income. They should have been stopped by Congress and their regulator. Except that they spent some of their subsidy on a fierce lobbying machine.

Which is how we wind up with a system in which profits are privatised and losses are nationalised.

… in 1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II, his wife and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.

The photograph (from the Library of Congress) shows the family outside a house in Tobolsk where they were kept prior to their murder. The picture was discovered as part of a 1921 copyright deposit.