The Hound of Arles

Seen on a wall in that wonderful town during the annual Photography Festival some years ago.

Quote of the Day

”The essence of war is violence. Moderation in war is an imbecility.”

• Admiral Sir John Fisher

Which is why armies use fragmentation bombs, poison gas and other ways of killing civilians.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Cannibals (A Night In London | Official Live Video)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Russia’s War on Ukraine: A Roundtable

This post from Bari Weiss’s Common Sense blog is also a ‘long listen’ if you prefer to listen to the podcast of the conversation between Niall Ferguson, Walter Russell Mead and Francis Fukuyama. But she also appends a good edited transcript of the conversation. What’s intriguing (to me, anyway) is the extent to which they disagree — especially as they come from the same neck of the ideological woods. Two of them (Ferguson and Fukuyama) are from the Hoover Institution, which Wikipedia describes (accurately IMO) as “a conservative American public policy institution and research institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, and limited government”. That of course doesn’t mean that they’re not interesting but…

Anyway, hope you find it interesting.

’Limits to Growth’ 50 years on

It’s 50 years since The Limits to Growth, a book based on a simulation model of the world created using the Systems Dynamics  modelling tool developed by Jay Forrester at MIT, was published. It caused a storm when it was published, but that subsided over succeeding decades until — ironically — attempts to model climate change brought simulation modelling back into fashion.

Of the team that built the ‘Limits’ model, only Dennis Meadows is still around. (His wife, Donella, who also worked on the model, died in 2001.) The not-for-profit Resilience.org website had the good idea of interviewing Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of the book. I found the transcript of the interview fascinating, not least because I did a live, transatlantic interview by phone with Meadows for the BBC way back in 1973. And two of the PhD students I supervised did dissertations on the L-to-G model. So this is a topic dear to my heart.

Here’s how the conversation started:

Q: First, how is reality tracking with the scenarios you and your colleagues generated 50 years ago?

Dennis: There have been several attempts, recently, to compare some of our scenarios with the way the global system has evolved over the past 50 years. That’s difficult. It’s, in a way, trying to confirm by looking through a microscope whether or not the data that you gathered through a telescope are accurate. In fact, accuracy is not really the issue here. Our goal in doing the original analysis was to provide a conceptual framework within which people could think about their own options and about the events that they saw around them. When we evaluate models, we always ask whether they’re more useful, not whether they’re more accurate.

Having said that, I will also say that the efforts which have been undertaken have generally concluded that the world is moving along what we termed in our 1972 report to be the standard scenario. It’s an aggregated image of the global system, showing growth from 1972 up to around 2020, and then, over the next decade or two, the principal trends peaking out and beginning to decline. I still find that model very useful in understanding what I read in the papers and in trying to think about what’s coming next.

Worth reading.

’Talking Politics’ bows out

Yesterday’s edition of the Talking Politics podcast was the last. After six years, its host, David Runciman, his colleague Helen Thompson and their producer, Catherine Carr, gathered in David’s office in Cambridge to bring it to a graceful close.

Its passing leaves a gap not only in my week but also in the public sphere. There was nothing quite like it in the exponentially-exploding podcasting world. TP built up a massive audience across the world because it offered a unique opportunity for people everywhere to hear David and Helen and other prominent scholars of politics, international relations, economics and technology put events of the day into the wider and deeper contexts on which true understanding depends. Many middle-school pupils in their final years were influenced by it to consider studying politics at university. I know that if it had been around when I was a teenager, I might have taken that route rather than studying engineering.

But all good things come to an end. Six years is a long time doing a weekly show in the middle of busy professional lives. And if any educational bureaucrat wants to see what real public ‘impact’ is like, then Talking Politics provided a pretty good paradigm. It’ll be a very hard act to follow.

Londistan: favourite city of Russian oligarchs

My Observer colleague, Nick Cohen, had a fine column on Sunday about how Putin’s wealthy friends have used the UK’s swingeing libel laws to silence and censor journalists who find out too much about them.

In the safe space of the House of Commons, Labour MP Chris Bryant quoted from leaked government documents, which stated Roman Abramovich should be watched because of “his links to the Russian state and his public association with corrupt activity and practices”. God help anyone who says as much outside when the government has not put him on its sanctions list.

Bear the costs of challenging wealth in mind when you wonder how London became a centre of corruption. Anglo-Saxon law brings class justice rather than real justice. The verdicts of individual judges are not to blame – whatever their faults, they do not take bribes. But the price of reaching a verdict is so high that few dare run the risk of being left with the bill. A system can be rigged even if the people in charge of it are honest, and there is institutional prejudice in the English justice system in favour of wealth that is as pervasive as institutional racism in the police.

Let one example stand for thousands. The Parisian intellectual Nicolas Tenzer tweeted that the French equivalents of George Galloway and Nigel Farage acted as the Kremlin’s “useful idiots” when they appeared on Putin’s propaganda channel RT. RT sued, claiming that not only had Tenzer libelled the station but that he was guilty of an “encroachment on the dignity” of its journalists – as if security guards did not strip its hacks of dignity every time they went to work. Naturally, the French courts found against RT. Astonishingly to anyone involved in the struggles for free speech in the UK, the cost of the case was just €10,000 (£8,400).

Compare that with the price of writing about the Putin regime in the UK. In January 2021, after Putin’s agents had poisoned him but before he was jailed, the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny praised Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People. It is indeed the book of the moment, which shows how KGB men created the world’s most dangerous rogue state. Abramovich, three other Russian billionaires and Putin’s energy company Rosneft sued.

The case was trivial. Belton’s publishers HarperCollins settled it agreeing to make changes to the text most readers wouldn’t notice. Yet although it never went to a full hearing, the case, it was revealed to me, cost HarperCollins £1.5m – 178 times the price of the libel trial in France. In effect, HarperCollins was fined a small fortune for publishing an anti-Putin book by the English legal system.

One of the most nauseating aspects of the Tory government’s sudden resolve to go after Putin’s buddies in London is that it took his murderous assault on Ukraine to embarrass them into action. They have presided over a period in which London became the world’s leading money-laundering centre for the dodgy super-rich from abroad. Many of the city’s fancy law firms have gleefully (and profitably) tendered to the legal needs of visiting plutocrats, and the co-chairman of the Tory party, Ben Eliot, not only raised nearly £2 million of Russia-linked donations for the party (according to the Financial Times), but makes his living running an outfit called Quintessentially, which the paper describes as,

a luxury concierge company that launched its Russia office in 2006, and has expanded it to roughly 50 employees at its base in Moscow.

The concierge group removed some content related to its Russian operations from its global website this week after Vladimir Putin, the country’s president, launched his invasion of Ukraine.

However, it has not taken down its separate Russian-language site with the slogan: “Access the inaccessible. Achieve the impossible.”

The FT goes on to explain that Quintessentially (which has membership fees ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 a year) has

boasted of how it helped wealthy Russians in London find properties, advise on the best schools and staff such as nannies”. One former staffer said the group often helped its Russian clients hold lavish parties.

As I write this, the owner of this ‘concierge’ service is still the joint chairman of the UK’s governing party.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of London’s role as the money-laundering centre of the world, why not tune in to hear the Liberal Democrat MP for Oxford and Abingdon reading out (under Parliamentary Privilege) the names of the 35 London-based oligarchs named by Alexei Navalny.

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On reflection…

Quote of the Day

”I used to be Snow White… but I drifted.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Händel | “The Harmonious Blacksmith” | Wilhelm Kempff

Link

Long Read of the Day

 George Packer on the War in Ukraine

Transcript of another sobering conversation, this time between Packer and Yascha Mounk.

Q: What do you think the lasting significance of this moment is going to be?

Packer: It’s very hard to know, since the moment has just begun. As much as I expected this—I never thought Putin was bluffing—I’m also shocked by it. There’s something profoundly disturbing and astounding about the sight of tank columns, airborne assaults, and ballistic missiles in Europe. I think it could go one of at least two ways. Either this will be the moment when Western democracies realize that there’s a new Cold War—which is very hot right now in Ukraine, but which has been building for years, in the form of great power autocracies that have become more and more bold and energetic, using threats and force to get what they want. The moment when not just the Western democracies, but all democracies realize that they have to put up a struggle—to see this as a concerted threat to what we care about, and that it’s not going to stop in Ukraine. It may not stop in Hong Kong. So that would be one way to mark this moment, looking back: as the moment when, essentially, the democracies got serious and realized that this was a fight that they couldn’t keep avoiding. And I don’t mean guns-blazing “fight”; I mean seeing this as the greatest threat to our interests, which really are very close to what our values are, or should be.

The other way it could go is that this is a moment that Putin wins, and doesn’t really suffer enough to regret. Xi Jinping sees it as an outrageous move that Putin got away with, and that they—and other autocratic and kleptocratic states who have been in informal alliances—are emboldened and begin to act with more and more impunity and audacity. Meanwhile, the rest of the world continues to look on with horror, but in a sort of state of passivity or paralysis. I think the next few weeks are going to tell us a lot more about which of those two outcomes we’ll look back on when we think about the invasion of Ukraine.

We’re appalled by Putin now, but the west gave him the green light

Good column in the Guardian by Jonathan Freedland.

The History Channel is broadcasting live. The US commentator who made that quip meant that events currently unfolding in Ukraine will be remembered for many decades to come, that future generations of schoolchildren will be called to memorise the date of 24 February 2022. But it’s true in another, darker sense too. For this is a grimly retro war. Russian troops marching across an international border, closing in on a European capital? Families sheltering in underground stations, children parted from their fathers, civilians donning uniforms and reaching for rifles, vowing to fight to the death for their homeland? An actual invasion of one European country by another? Footage of such events looks strange in colour: it should be in grainy black and white.

Because Europe was meant to have left such events behind, if not in the 1940s – when the Nazi bombardment of Kyiv began at 4am one day in 1941, rather than the 5am hour chosen on Thursday by Vladimir Putin – then later in the 20th century, when Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 or Prague in 1968. Instead, history is back – confronting us with a choice we imagined we’d made long ago.

Freedland’s point is, in a grim way, the obvious one: that nobody who was paying attention over a decade and a half could have been surprised by Putin’s invasion. He transgressed three times over that period, and each time didn’t pay the price for his aggression. So not surprisingly he assumed he’d get away with overrunning Ukraine.

This is all the wisdom of hindsight, of course. Same applies to the question of how it was that Germany and other continental European states felt able to make themselves so vulnerable to an autocrat over critical supplies of gas and oil.

There’s something about contemporary democracies and their ruling elites that makes them congenitally incapable of thinking ahead.

My commonplace booklet

Clever use of the Tinder app by a young Ukrainian woman.

She conned invading Russian soldiers into giving away their locations. Link

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Springing up

Quote of the Day

”How much better for Putin if he had waited until 2024. Didn’t he see that the US is sliding down the path to electing a Putin lapdog in 2024. Why bother with Ukraine? He was about to land the big fish.”

• Dave Winer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | The Winter’s End

Link

Well, it is the second day of Spring.

Grace under pressure

This came from Dave Pell this morning:

The fighting is in Ukraine, but the front in this war stretches from Kiev to Mar-a-Lago. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and MAGA’s Big Lie are both part of a broad war against democracy. Hopefully Americans will be inspired by Ukrainian bravery and stand up for democracy, because it’s all connected.

As a teen during the Holocaust, my dad was hunted by Ukrainian henchmen working for the Nazis. When history pushed, he pushed back. Today, he would be proud of the courage shown by Ukraine’s Jewish president Volodymyr Zelensky. When the U.S. offered him an escape route, he responded, “The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride.” Man, I wish my dad — who survived the Holocaust because he got a gun and ammunition — was around to hear that line from a Jewish leader in Europe. Zelensky, the former comedian who used to play the part of a fictional president, found himself in a situation that is all too real. The guy Trump thought was so weak that he could be blackmailed during that phone call has proven himself strong enough to becoome an international hero fighting against a corrupt madman and for democracy. He is the very opposite of Donald Trump.

As Franklin Foer writes his Atlantic piece, A Prayer for Volodymyr Zelensky, “The whole world can see that his execution is very likely imminent. What reason does he have to doubt that Vladimir Putin will order his murder, as the Russian leader has done with so many of his bravest critics and enemies?” And yet, as history pushes, the standup stands firm. During the last years of his life, my dad repeatedly lamented that Americans weren’t taking the threat to our democracy seriously enough. “Vhy aren’t the people out in the streets?” Well, today, inspired by the Ukrainian grandson of a Holocaust survivor, hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets across Europe, and even in Russia itself. The fight is there. The fight is here, too. It’s the same fight my dad fought. It’s all connected.

Franklin Foer’s prayer for Zelensky

Dave Pell referred to this. It goes in part like this:

When Zelensky rejected Washington’s offer of exile, he wasn’t making an obvious decision. After Germany invaded France, Charles de Gaulle made his way to London. Or to take a more recent example: Afghan President Ashraf Ghani boarded a helicopter out of Kabul the moment he heard a rumor that the Taliban had entered the city. And, really, who could blame them? Most human beings would rather not have their enemies hang their corpse from a traffic light, the sort of historic antecedent that is hard to shake from the mind.

In Ukraine, the decision for a leader to flee would be the expected choice. It’s what his predecessor, Viktor Yanukovych, did in the aftermath of the revolution in 2014, leaving behind his palace filled with exotic cars and ostriches for the safety of Moscow. The enduring failure of Ukrainian democracy has been the gap between the code of behavior that applies to the elite and the one that the rest of the country must follow. It’s been the elites who profit off the state, who stash their ill-gotten fortunes in French villas and Cypriot bank accounts, while their compatriots have stagnated. By staying put, Zelensky has erased this gap. There’s no airlift awaiting his fellow residents, so rather than accepting the perk of his position, he’s suffering in the same terror and deprivation that they are forced to endure.

A week ago it wasn’t at all obvious that the world would rally to Ukraine’s cause. Nor was it clear that the Ukrainian people would mount a collective resistance to the invasion of their country. There are many reasons why the tide has turned like it has, of course. But it is hard to think of another recent instance in which one human being has defied the collective expectations for his behavior and provided such an inspiring moment of service to the people, clarifying the terms of the conflict through his example.

Last night, Zelensky posted a video of himself standing on the street, speaking into the humble recording device of the smartphone, stubble crusting his face, surrounded by the leadership of the nation, stripped bare of all the trappings of office. “We are still here,” he told the nation. I pray that will be the case tomorrow.

Amen.

Long Read of the Day

‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes

Look, I know you’re busy. We’re all busy. But if you read nothing else today make time for this remarkable interview with a remarkable woman, Fiona Hill, who has worked both as an academic expert on Russia and as a presidential advisor in both Republican and Democratic administrations. She also testified to the congressional impeachment hearing on Trump’s dealings in Ukraine.

This is a transcript of the interview that Maura Reynolds, a Senior Editor at Politico, conducted with Hill on February 28. Reynolds says that she wanted to know what Hill had been thinking as she watched the footage of Russian tanks rolling across international borders, what she thinks Putin has in mind and what insights she can offer into his motivations and objectives.

Reynolds got her money’s worth. And you can have it too.

And thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to it.

Putin’s Bloody Folly

David Remnick’s New Yorker piece:

What threatens Putin is not Ukrainian arms but Ukrainian liberty. His invasion amounts to a furious refusal to live with the contrast between the repressive system he keeps in place at home and the aspirations for liberal democracy across the border.

Meanwhile, Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine, has behaved with profound dignity even though he knows that he is targeted for arrest, or worse. Aware of the lies saturating Russia’s official media, he went on television and, speaking in Russian, implored ordinary Russian citizens to stand up for the truth. Some needed no prompting. On Thursday, Dmitry Muratov, the editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, said that he would publish the next issue in Russian and Ukrainian. “We are feeling shame as well as sorrow,” Muratov said. “Only an antiwar movement of Russians can save life on this planet.” As if on cue, demonstrations against Putin’s war broke out in dozens of Russian cities.

And were brutally repressed, I think.

Things will have to get much worse in Russia for the population before street revolts become unquashable. And the big problem about political mobilisation there is the almost complete absence of a countrywide organisational infrastructure for mobilisation — as openDemocracy points out:

Russian society lacks institutions that are capable of taking up the organisation of protests, especially at short notice. For example, the 2021 protests over Navalny’s arrest were organised through Navalny’s network of local coordinating teams around the country – perhaps the only real political machine left in Russia. Since the end of the last decade, the Navalny network has been the centre of all protest activity in Russia. The organisation included 45 regional branches, with 180 full-time employees and an unspecified number of volunteers.

Thanks to these resources and planning, the network managed to establish contact with a wide section of Russian society. After the Navalny network was declared an extremist organisation in June 2021, the legal structure was liquidated and many of its employees were forced to emigrate abroad. The social media accounts of the network (including Telegram channels and mailing lists) – which established contact with Russian audiences – were more or less frozen.

That’s why Navalny was seen as such an existential challenge by Putin. He had built a network that could to to him what had been done to other authoritarians in other places.

My commonplace booklet

This is lovely — a Twitter bot that automatically logs the flights (and destinations) of Russian oligarchs’ private jets.

Currently tracking this lot:

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Smoke signals

Quote of the Day

”Well, if I called the wrong number, why did you answer the phone?”

• James Thurber

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | Five O’Clock Blues | 1939

Link

Just as good at 9am IMHO.

Long Read of the Day

A Future For The Lakes

A fascinating and thought-provoking essay by Lee Schofield on how the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has been re-wilding a part of the Lake District that they lease. Includes a few paintings by the author.

As visually spectacular as the land we took on at Haweswater was a decade ago, it was damaged in all sorts of ways. Ancient woodland clearances, followed by centuries of grazing, coupled with peatland drainage, a superabundance of deer, river engineering, hedge removal, fertiliser and pesticide use had left the place in tatters.

An overgrazed, over-drained landscape is one in which water moves swiftly. The faster the water flows, the more energy it has, and the greater its capacity for erosion. Sediment reaching Haweswater reservoir, into which our land drains, is bad news for water quality.

Working in partnership with landowner United Utilities, we’re ten years into a transformation of our third of the reservoir’s catchment, restoring its ability to slow and purify water, alongside bringing back some of its natural riches.

Thanks to Andrew Curry, in whose blog I first saw it.

What if Putin turns out to be a ‘loser’?

Heather Cox Richardson’s wonderful blog set me thinking about the US Republicans…

Since 2016 there have been plenty of apologists for Putin here in the U.S. And yet now, with the weight of popular opinion shifting toward a defense of democracy, Republicans who previously cozied up to Putin are suddenly stating their support for Ukraine and trying to suggest that Putin has gotten out of line only because he sees Biden as weak. Under Trump, they say, Putin never would have invaded Ukraine, and they are praising Trump for providing aid to Ukraine in 2019.

They are hoping that their present support for Ukraine and democracy makes us forget their past support for Putin, even as former president Trump continues to call him “smart.” And yet, Republicans changed their party’s 2016 platform to favor Russia over Ukraine; accepted Trump’s abrupt withdrawal of U.S. troops from northern Syria in October 2019, giving Russia a strategic foothold in the Middle East; and looked the other way when Trump withheld $391 million to help Ukraine resist Russian invasion until newly elected Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky agreed to help rig the 2020 U.S. presidential election. (Trump did release the money after the story of the “perfect phone call” came out, but the U.S. Government Accountability Office, which investigated the withholding of funds, concluded that holding back the money at all was illegal.)

But rather than making us forget Republicans’ enabling of Putin’s expansion, the new story in which democracy has the upper hand might have the opposite effect. Now that people can clearly see exactly the man Republicans have supported, they will want to know why our leaders, who have taken an oath to our democratic Constitution, were willing to throw in their lot with a foreign autocrat. The answer to that question might well force us to rethink a lot of what we thought we knew about the last several years.

And of course we know that Trump’s favourite sneer was to call opponents ‘losers’. Which makes one wonder how he will respond if Putin turns out to have dug a big enough hole to endanger his political survival.

Bossware is booming

Further to my Observer column on Sunday, here’s a clip from a report by Valentina Romie in yesterday’s Financial Times:

Staff surveillance is at risk of “spinning out of control” Britain’s largest federation of trade unions has warned, adding to concerns that the UK has fallen behind its EU counterparts in this area of workers’ rights.

About 60 per cent of employees reported being subject to some form of technological surveillance and monitoring at their current or most recent job, in a survey by the TUC published on Monday — up from 53 per cent the previous year.

Three in 10 respondents agreed that monitoring and surveillance at work had increased during the Covid-19 crisis. The survey was conducted in England and Wales between December 14 and 20.

Also: A study by the European Commission found that “there has been a sharp increase in the demand for online workplace surveillance tools” as a result of the pandemic-induced shift to remote work.

BP sees the light

Well, well. The BBC reports that BP is to offload its 19.75% stake in Russian state-owned oil firm Rosneft after Russia’s “act of aggression in Ukraine”. So it has yielded to pressure from the UK government to make the move since Thursday’s invasion.

BP’s share in Russian state oil giant Rosneft has long felt uncomfortable; this week under heavy political pressure it became untenable.

The chairman of Rosneft, Igor Sechin, is a close ally of President Putin. Rosneft supplies fuel to the Russian army.

Immediately offloading the stake to a potentially inappropriate buyer was not an option.

The company has decided to “divest” – meaning it will sever its financial ties with Rosneft, stop taking a dividend and step back from its two seats on the board.

Company officials say it is too soon to say exactly how this stake will be disposed of.

It could potentially be seized, or sold.

It will mean a significant financial hit, but a price BP had little choice but to pay.

The BP CEO Bernard Looney said that he had been “deeply shocked and saddened” by the situation in Ukraine and it had caused BP to fundamentally rethink its position with Rosneft.

Interesting. Would this be the same Bernard Looney that the PA News agency reported as appearing on a panel with Putin last October, an appearance that he later described as a “privilege”? Shurely shomw mkishtake, as Private Eye would say.

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Some light in the darkness

Quote of the Day

“Since 1945, Western Europe has enjoyed a holiday from history. That has bred an unearned sense of moral superiority vis-a-vis unluckier people.”

• Simon Kuper, Financial Times 26/27 February, 2022

That vacation has just come to an end.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news from Ukraine

Smetana | Má vlast “The Moldau” | Vienna Philharmonic | Barenboim

Link

Long Read of the Day

If you’ve ever wondered how you would cope if you suddenly had to flee your home, then this piece will strike a chord.

The night before Russia started the war, my friends and I met to come up with a plan. None of us really ever thought Kyiv, where we lived, would fall. At worst, we figured there would be some sort of staged terrorist attack in the city to get the government to capitulate, but we decided to have our most important things ready anyway: passports, marriage certificates, cash, watches, jewelry.

I got home around 1 a.m. on Thursday. At 5:30 a.m., a friend called to tell us that there had been an explosion in Kyiv and that a Russian invasion was underway.

My wife and I shot up and started packing. I grabbed my Timberland boots and sneakers, in case we’d have to abandon our car and walk through the forest to safety. We took layers to keep us warm and water bottles. I also packed my computer, phone, chargers, and my Bitcoin hardware wallet. (After becoming a successful poker player, I’d founded an eSports company, Qlash. In the past six months, we had been trying to figure out how to enter the crypto market, and I had invested a bit of my own money.)

Compulsive reading from beginning to end.

Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.

Interesting little essay by Matthew Guay which makes those of us who are relentless note-takers a bit uneasy!

We don’t write things down to remember them. We write them down to forget.

Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.

Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.

So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.

Ring any bells with you? It sure does for me.

Think WFH means your boss isn’t watching you? Think again

Yesterday’s Observer column:

And then, in the blink of an eye, working from home had become not just an acronym – WFH – but a cliche and Zoom, like Google before it, had become a verb as well as a noun. The tiresome daily commute shrank to padding from bedroom to kitchen to a laptop on a desk. For an initial period, utopian visions of better work-life balances blossomed. But then the new reality dawned: instead of us going to the office, the office had come to us and we were working, eating and sleeping in it.

Still, we had a bit more autonomy WFH than we had in the office under the beady-eyed surveillance of managers. Or so we thought. But capitalism – and its servant, technology – never sleeps. Those managers, who had always regarded WFH as some kind of work-avoidance scam, realised that digital technology was just the ticket for keeping an eye on their newly remote subordinates. It would make sure that they weren’t idly browsing Pinterest, or bidding on eBay, or doing private emails, or a thousand other unproductive things, on the company’s dime. And so a swarm of tech companies evolved to service those paranoid suspicions. Thus was born the new industry of little tech…

My commonplace booklet

AH 2.0 Nice piece of photoshopping by Quentin.

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Tulip Mania

Quote of the Day

”All men are brothers, but, thank God, they aren’t all brothers-in-law.”

• Anthony Powell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Sail Away | Live in London, 2011

Link

Long Read of the Day

Putin has taught us a brutal lesson

By Frank Bruni in the New York Times:

What I see on the faces and hear in the voices of so many of the people around me is sheer disbelief about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and a brutal war in Europe: Aren’t we supposed to be past this? Didn’t history move on? The Wall came down, the Cold War ended, and democratic liberalism was the wave of the future, which wouldn’t be so kind to strongmen like Vladimir Putin.

Well, Putin didn’t get the message. Nor did plenty of others around the world. Our notions about history were innocent and disregarded most of it. They also depended on a solipsistic projection of Western — and, especially American — culture and beliefs onto nations that share neither.

Rueful wisdom of hindsight.

Madeleine Albright on Putin

In the piece above, Frank Bruni mentioned her recollection  of meeting Putin when he was Acting President of Russia. Here’s the money quote:

In early 2000, I became the first senior U.S. official to meet with Vladimir Putin in his new capacity as acting president of Russia. We in the Clinton administration did not know much about him at the time — just that he had started his career in the K.G.B. I hoped the meeting would help me take the measure of the man and assess what his sudden elevation might mean for U.S.-Russia relations, which had deteriorated amid the war in Chechnya. Sitting across a small table from him in the Kremlin, I was immediately struck by the contrast between Mr. Putin and his bombastic predecessor, Boris Yeltsin.

Whereas Mr. Yeltsin had cajoled, blustered and flattered, Mr. Putin spoke unemotionally and without notes about his determination to resurrect Russia’s economy and quash Chechen rebels. Flying home, I recorded my impressions. “Putin is small and pale,” I wrote, “so cold as to be almost reptilian.” He claimed to understand why the Berlin Wall had to fall but had not expected the whole Soviet Union to collapse. “Putin is embarrassed by what happened to his country and determined to restore its greatness.”

And this invasion is the latest instalment of that project.

My commonplace booklet

• A Twitter stream aggregating material from Ukraine Link

• Robert Reich: Eight sobering realities about Putin’s invasion Link

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Two Little Horses

A Citroen Deux Cheveaux: perfect car for a Provencal summer.

Quote of the Day

“For several months, the West has been threatening Vladimir Putin with massive economic consequences should he escalate aggression towards Ukraine. In the last 24 hours, Western allies have had an opportunity to live up to this threat and have failed, instead issuing sanctions as a form of punishment, punishment that will not deter further action. The Kremlin only respects strength and the response of the West has been weak; arguing that the West needs to keep its powder dry for further action is not going to deter Vladimir Putin. We’ve taken a peashooter to a gunfight. The whole point of the sanctions has been to deter Putin and if at the first chance you get to use these sanctions you only tickle his feet, what’s the point?”

• Tom Keatinge of the Royal United Services Institution

Much as I enjoyed the colourful turn of phrase, it’s worth remembering that RUSI is the UK military’s favourite think tank. I wonder if “taking a peashooter to a gunfight” is original. It sounds American to me.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

When I have a crazy work day, I play this in the evening.

Long Read of the Day

The US is unmasking Russian hackers faster than ever

If it’s accurate, this article in the MIT Technology Review is interesting because it suggests that there have been significant developments in the technology. Attribution has, up to now, being the biggest impediment to rapid, accurate and proportionate responses to cyberattacks.

Just 48 hours after banks and government websites crashed in Ukraine under the weight of a concerted cyberattack on February 15 and 16, the United States pointed the finger at Russian spies. Anne Neuberger, the White House’s deputy national security advisor for cyber and emerging technology, said that the US has “technical information that links the Russian Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU)” with the DDoS attack that had overloaded and brought down the Ukrainian websites. “GRU infrastructure was seen transmitting high volumes of communication to Ukraine-based IP addresses and domains,” she told journalists on February 18. It’s believed that the cyberattack was meant to sow panic in Ukraine as over 150,000 Russian troops massed at the border.

EVs make it harder to quell fire on cargo ship

From Quartz:

The cargo ship Felicity Ace is aflame from bow to stern with a lithium-ion battery fire that can’t be put out with water alone.

The fire has been burning since Wednesday (Feb. 16), as the ship drifts in the Atlantic about 200 miles southwest of Portugal’s Azores Islands. Its 22-person crew abandoned ship and was rescued on Thursday.

The ship left Germany on Feb. 10 and headed for the US with about 4,000 Porsches, Bentleys and other luxury cars aboard, and some of those were electric vehicles. It’s not clear if the batteries contributed to the fire starting in the first place—a greasy rag in a lubricant-slicked engine room or a fuel leak are the usual suspects in ship fires—but the batteries are keeping the flames going now. A forensic investigation will take months to determine the cause.

It seems that large quantities of dry chemicals are needed to smother lithium ion battery fires, which burn hotter and release noxious gases in the process. And pouring water onto the ship wouldn’t put out a lithium-ion battery fire and the added water weight could make the ship more unstable.

The only consolation (for this EV owner, anyway) is that they were Porsches, not Teslas!)

My commonplace booklet

Donald Trump’s crowd have launched a new social media platform. It’s called Truth Social and seems basically to be a clone of Twitter — except that users will exchange ’Truths’, not Tweets. So will they be able to Retruth Truths, then?

And of course there’s the difficult question of UnTruths.

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A new map of Ukraine?

Europe’s sanctions nightmare

From Politico

In a public show of alignment with Washington, the Europeans have been talking tough on sanctions against Russia, even before Putin sent “peacekeepers” into the east of the country on Monday night. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has vowed to cut Russia out of the international banking system and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson says that Russian companies won’t be able to conduct transactions in U.S. dollars and British pounds.

Imposing those financial sanctions could hit Putin hard, but the EU’s position is hazy when it comes to squeezing his all-important hydrocarbon revenues, which provide more than a third of Moscow’s budget. It remains unclear whether banking sanctions would prevent EU payments to Russia’s state-run gas company Gazprom. As things stand, the energy money looks highly liable to keep flowing to Moscow, even during a Russian war against an EU ally.

I’ll believe they’re serious if they do stuff (like cutting Russia out of the SWIFT inter-bank system) that’s effective enough to prompt retaliation Putin by throttling or shutting off the gas supply to Germany. So I’m not holding my breath.

Quote of the Day

”There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.”

• Ben Franklin

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Torelli | Trumpet Concerto in D Major | Voices of Music and Dominic Favia

Link

Voices of Music is a fine outfit trying to release one new video per week and also pay their musicians and staff. They sponsor free house concerts that pay musicians a full fee; give detailed presentations on how to take music online at music conservatories; and release videos from their extensive performance catalog. There’s a ‘donate’ link on their videos. I’ve clicked on it because I often link to their work.

Long Read of the Day

How Facebook twisted Canada’s trucker convoy into an international movement

Nice piece of analysis by Ryan Broderick of how a labyrinth of Facebook groups and right-wing media turned the trucker protest into an international story and eventually prompted a heavy crackdown by the Canadian government. If you wanted a case-study of the exploitation of Facebook by right-wing activists, ingenious free-riders and Fox News, then this would be hard to beat.

Based on Facebook metrics, the core of the Freedom Convoy was never really anything more than a small collection of local conspiracy theorists who were then suddenly given a megaphone by America’s powerful right-wing disinformation machine. Their campaign was first supercharged by Facebook’s algorithm, which currently favors content shared within local groups, and was then blasted out into every feed and screen possible by ravenous conservative tabloids. American right-wing publisher The Daily Wire, founded by conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, latched on to the story at the end of January and published 66 articles featuring the keyword “convoy” between January 28th and January 31st. And the most popular story of theirs from this time period actually promotes a Facebook group that would eventually get shut down by the platform after barely four days for repeatedly violating Facebook’s policies around QAnon.

Thanks to David Garcia for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Need to explain what a ’typewriter’ was/is to your grandchildren?

Why not try this?

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Raptor and Friend

Quote of the Day

“In baiting a mouse trap with cheese, always leave room for the mouse.”

• ‘Saki’ (H.H. Munro)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | The Parting Glass

Link

Davey’s imaginative twist on a beautiful Irish song.

Interestingly, General Martin Dempsey, the 18th Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, sang it on his retirement in September 2015. Which may puzzle some people until they realise that Dempsey is a good old Irish name!

Long Read of the Day

Russia’s got a point: The U.S. broke a NATO promise

Interesting OpEd from May 2016 by Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson in the Los Angeles Times.

Moscow solidified its hold on Crimea in April, outlawing the Tatar legislature that had opposed Russia’s annexation of the region since 2014. Together with Russian military provocations against NATO forces in and around the Baltic, this move seems to validate the observations of Western analysts who argue that under Vladimir Putin, an increasingly aggressive Russia is determined to dominate its neighbors and menace Europe.

Leaders in Moscow, however, tell a different story. For them, Russia is the aggrieved party. They claim the United States has failed to uphold a promise that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe, a deal made during the 1990 negotiations between the West and the Soviet Union over German unification. In this view, Russia is being forced to forestall NATO’s eastward march as a matter of self-defense.

The West has vigorously protested that no such deal was ever struck. However, hundreds of memos, meeting minutes and transcripts from U.S. archives indicate otherwise. Although what the documents reveal isn’t enough to make Putin a saint, it suggests that the diagnosis of Russian predation isn’t entirely fair. Europe’s stability may depend just as much on the West’s willingness to reassure Russia about NATO’s limits as on deterring Moscow’s adventurism.

This was written two years after the Russian annexation of Crimea.

The academic article on which it’s based is here.

What real transparency looks like

Molly White is one of the sharpest and technically informed critics of the current crypto bubble. She also has an exemplary ‘full disclosure’ page on her blog. It goes like this:

I strongly believe in clear disclosures by journalists and others writing about cryptocurrencies and related topics.

I own no cryptocurrencies or NFTs. I have no particular financial interest in whether web3 takes off or not, though I have plenty of non-financial interests; after all, I do have to live on this planet, and I spend enough time engaging with the tech industry and online to care about the futures of both.

I am not paid to write about cryptocurrencies or related topics, nor am I paid to create my Web3 Is Going Great project. I don’t post sponsored content on that website, its associated Twitter account, this website, my blog, my personal Twitter account, or anywhere else. A few generous people have sent money to me via Twitter tips with comments about Web3 Is Going Great; I have earmarked that money for cloud hosting costs, which I otherwise pay out of pocket. I don’t run ads or otherwise make money in any way off the project or my blog.

I hold no long or short positions pertaining to cryptocurrencies or crypto-related companies. I do have some investments in the stock market and other traditional forms of finance, which I pay someone much smarter about and more interested in finance than I am to handle.

For those who think it is crucial to have interacted with crypto to write about it: 1) you are wrong, but 2) you will be pleased to know that I went through the process of signing up for a Coinbase account and buying one popular cryptocurrency and one shitcoin towards the end of 2021, around when I was starting my deeper research into this space. I sold all of them a week and a half later and closed the account. I made a whopping profit of $16.90 off the whole endeavor (pre-tax).

I wish more people writing about this stuff were as forthcoming.

War in Europe is unthinkable — until it isn’t

Funny how complacent we’ve become. This from the New York Times…

But just how far Europe is prepared to go in shifting from a world where peace and security were taken for granted remains to be seen. For decades Europeans have paid relatively little in money, lives or resources for their defense — and paid even less attention, sheltering under an American nuclear umbrella left over from the Cold War.

That debate had begun to shift in recent years, even before Russia’s menacing of Ukraine, with talk of a more robust and independent European strategic and defense posture. But the crisis has done as much to expose European weakness on security issues as it has to fortify its sense of unity.

Ms. Franke, 34, a senior fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, is not convinced that anything short of a major Russian invasion of Ukraine will very much alter public opinion.

“We’re having in Europe and Germany a status quo problem,” she said in an interview. “We’re very comfortable with this version of European security, and most people don’t realize that to defend this status quo we need to act.”

The elite feels the cold wind from Russia, she said, but “on the level of public opinion, people want to be left alone and for nothing to touch them.”

My commonplace booklet

 How insulated glass changed architecture

Interesting 8-minute video Insulated glass shaped the look of the 20th century. Big but poorly insulated glass windows went out of fashion as electricity enabled artificial lighting. Builders needed a new way to install windows that let in natural light, but also controlled heat. Insulated glass was that solution. Link

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The Boss

Imagine if your boss always looked at you like this. Well, mine does.

Quote of the Day

”Not in the clamour of the crowded street
Nor in the shouts and plaudits of the throng
But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.”

• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Muddy Waters and The Rolling Stones | Baby Please Don’t Go | Live at the Checkerboard Lounge

Link

Chaotic and unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day

The German Bind

Nathan Gardels, the Editor of Noema magazine, has written an interesting essay about the standoff between Russia and the West. As I read it I kept thinking of Keynes’s famous 1919 polemic, The Economic Consequences of the Peace — in particular his insight into what the Allies’ determination to humiliate and punish Germany would do to that country.

Here’s the passage that caught my eye:

In 1996, well before Putin’s ascent to power, Alexander Lebed, a popular former Russian general and presidential candidate critical of the bibulous Boris Yeltsin, wrote an essay for my Global Viewpoint newspaper syndicate. Already then, the resentment at being played by those with the upper hand was gestating. As he framed the issue: “When politicians and military planners, who were so used to the lengthy ‘struggle of position’ against the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, found themselves in a very favorable position, it proved too difficult for them to give up the temptation to, finally, at long last, implement their former plans.”

For Lebed, this steady advance of a hostile military alliance into the space its own allied forces had just abandoned rubbed in the ignominy of defeat. “If this sense of loss and humiliation that comes with defeat is allowed to fester in the Russian mentality, it may lead to an inferiority complex that can only be overcome by gaining new victories, preferably over old rivals,” he warned, invoking the lesson of Hitler’s rise in the wake of Germany’s sense of humiliation after the Versailles Treaty that ended WWI. “Territories come and go,” Lebed wrote, “but humiliation of a nation’s dignity remains in the minds of the people. … It injects the virus of vengeance into the defeated nation.”

Presciently, he went on: “I doubt very much that pushing Russia to the backyard of Europe will increase the sense of stability and certainty, or make Russia more democratic and predictable. This approach by the West is destined, at best, to place both sides peering at each other suspiciously from across the fence, fists in our pockets.” And so it has.

Perhaps miscalculating, Putin seems to have sensed a weakness in the West relative to Russian strength and saw a chance to finally push back. He took his fists out of his pockets and moved massive military force to the Ukrainian border, in the process achieving the very opposite of his aim by fortifying the resolve of an alliance that was on its way to obsolescence.

Talk about unintended consequences.

DIY surveillance est arrivé

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, intensive surveillance was a prerogative of states. After the arrival of the internet, and especially the rise of companies such as Google and Facebook, ISPs (internet service providers) and mobile networks, it became a prerogative shared between the state and private companies – corporations that log everything you do online. Surveillance became a kind of public-private partnership. The companies do much of the work and readily cooperate with security agencies when they come armed with a warrant.

Way back in 2009 the German Green politician Malte Spitz went to court to obtain the data that his mobile phone operator, Deutsche Telekom, held on him and then collaborated with the newspaper Die Zeit to analyse and visualise it. What emerged was a remarkably detailed timeline of his daily life, a timeline that would have been readily available to state authorities if they had come for it with appropriate legal authorisation.

But in internet time 2009 was aeons ago. Now, intensive surveillance is available to anyone. And you don’t have to be a tech wizard to do it…

Brexit = ‘buy from Europe’

Coruscating column by Simon Jenkins.

A massacre is occurring. More than 35,000 healthy British pigs have been slaughtered and buried on farms since September, with an estimated 200,000 languishing in a backlog.

The reason is that abattoirs lack the staff to process them, largely due to Britain’s exit from the pan-European labour market. In October, the environment department offered 800 six-month visas for foreign butchers. But it insisted they go through its laborious scheme for seasonal workers: barely 100 turned up. Whitehall also refuses to curb imports of European pork – which now makes up 60% of the UK market and rising. To the National Pig Association, Brexit means buy from Europe.

And, later,

Leaving the EU had some arguments for it. Leaving the single market had none. “Soft” Brexit within that market would have been far been easier to negotiate. Leaving it has meant wrecked supply chains and terminated scientific collaboration. It has undermined recruitment patterns and destabilised Northern Ireland. It has crippled the fish industry and impeded billions of pounds of UK trade. Its consequences have wavered between nuisance and disaster.

So is Brexit a ‘success disaster’? Actually no: a success disaster is where something is so successful that it overwhelms its creator. Brexit is just a disaster.

My commonplace booklet

What it’s like having the Russian army around Interesting Twitter thread. Impossible to verify, though. Link

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