It’s the antibiotics apocalypse! Again…

Ignore the Chief Medical Officer’s fearmongering: antibiotic resistance can be tackled with new antibiotics.

by Robin Walsh 

The UK’s chief medical officer (CMO), Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a splash in the media this week with her warning that antibiotic resistance is the new climate change. There is a ‘catastrophic threat’ of ‘untreatable’ diseases, she said, which promise to return us to a ‘nineteenth century’ state of affairs. The CMO has form: she warned the House of Commons health select committee about the same problem in similarly stringent terms back in January – a case not so much of apocalypse now, as apocalypse again.

As with all such stories, reading the actual CMO’s report leavens some of the hysterical excesses of the press, which were stoked up by the CMO’s excitable media appearances. Setting out the epidemiology of infectious diseases in the UK, the report highlights that while some drug-resistant infections, such as the well-known Clostridium difficile (C diff) and MRSA, are becoming less widespread, there is an increasing occurence of harder to treat multi-drug resistant bacterial infections, which, although still only in the hundreds of cases per year, are on the rise. The report states that only five antibiotics to fight such infections are currently in phase II or III trials, so the cupboard seems worryingly bare of new, necessary drugs.

So if we’re running short on drugs, how can we make more? A sensible article in the British Medical Journal from 2010 clearly set out the challenges facing the development of new antibiotics. Firstly, there are many regulatory hurdles that make running clinical trials in this area difficult. More importantly, there is a major financial disincentive for drug companies to develop antibiotics. Currently, drugs which are profitable are those for chronic conditions that are prescribed lifelong: painkillers for arthritis, diabetes drugs, and the like. A drug that you take once to cure you is unprofitable; doubly so if it is likely to be husbanded to prevent resistance developing until the patent runs out. A change in government payments to incentivise new antibiotics, like that which already applies to so-called ‘orphan’ drugs for rare diseases, would be an easy and rational step towards producing more drugs that meet our needs.

While there is some discussion as to whether the low-hanging fruit of easily produced effective drugs have already been picked, if you’re not even trying to harvest from the tree, you’re not going to find any fruit. As the BMJ article states, only 1.6 per cent of all drugs in development by big pharmaceutical companies are antibiotics.

The Show Trial of Sergei Magnitsky

Russia puts a dead man in the dock

A tombstone on the grave of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky

It sounds like something out of a Nikolai Gogol story, but it's true: Sergei Magnitsky, killed by abuse and neglect in a Russian prison at the age of 37, is now on trial more than three years after his death.

On Tuesday a Russian court held the second hearing of a sham trial to convict him posthumously of tax evasion. That hearing was postponed at the request of Magnitsky's state-appointed defense attorney, who pleaded for more time to prepare a defense.

Assuming this gesture was not part of the charade, he needn't have bothered. As in the show trials of the 1930s, the outcome is assured. The whole point of putting this dead man on trial is to secure a conviction and rob the victim of his status as an international martyr. Last year the U.S. passed the Magnitsky Act, which sanctions and bans from travel to the U.S. Russians implicated in his murder. Some countries in Europe may do the same.

The Putin government has no interest in seeing Magnitsky's name cleared. Yet it is revealing that Moscow feels bound to produce a verdict. Even Vladimir Putin's Russia seeks to adopt the trappings if not the substance of criminal justice.

Magnitsky's real "crime," the one for which he was killed, was to expose official corruption and the theft of state assets after his client, investor Bill Browder of Hermitage Capital, was expelled from Russia in 2005 and forced to liquidate his holdings there. Perhaps conscious of the absurdity of trying a corpse, prosecutors last week added Mr. Browder to the dock in absentia. So the world will be treated to the spectacle of a trial of a dead man and a foreigner living in Britain—all to improve the image of Putin's regime.

The Russian state, in its benevolence, granted the defense attorney the time he requested this week. But there can be no stay of execution for Sergei Magnitsky, and his trial deserves the full measure of the world's contempt.

The Dogma of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism, like the caste system, paints people into the corner where they happened to have been born

By Thomas Sowell

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogma of multiculturalism.

Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

Multiculturalism is a tempting quick fix for groups that lag; it simply pronounces their cultures to be equal with others, or “equally valid,” in some vague and lofty sense. Cultural features are just different, not better or worse, according to this dogma.

Yet the borrowing of particular features from other cultures — such as replacing Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, even in Western cultures that derived from Rome — implies that some features are not simply different but better. Some of the most advanced cultures in history have borrowed from other cultures, because no given collection of human beings has created the best answers to all the questions of life.

Nevertheless, since multiculturalists see all cultures as equal or “equally valid,” they see no justification for schools to insist that black children learn standard English, for example. Instead, each group is encouraged to cling to its own culture and to take pride in its own past glories, real or imaginary.

In other words, members of minority groups that lag educationally, economically, or otherwise are to continue to behave in the future as they have in the past — and, if they do not get the same outcomes as others, it is society’s fault. That is the bottom-line message of multiculturalism.

George Orwell once said that some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual could believe them. Multiculturalism is one of those ideas. The intelligentsia burst into indignation or outrage at “gaps” or “disparities” in educational, economic, or other outcomes — and denounce any cultural explanation of these group differences as “blaming the victim.”

There is no question that some races or whole nations have been victimized by others, any more than there is any question that cancers can cause death. But that is very different from saying that deaths can automatically be blamed on cancer. You might think that intellectuals could make that distinction. But many do not.

The Client State

Cutting Corporate Welfare Queens Off from the Dole Would be the Best Way to Cut the Debt

by George Washington

In previous installments, we’ve noted that we could more than offset the need for the “sequestration” budget cuts by doing any one or combination of the following:

• Ending massive subsidies to the giant banks

• Reducing fraud and waste

• Ending the failed drug war

• Ending subsidies to the nuclear industry

• Stopping the counter-productive quantitative easing by the Fed

Here’s another way to offset the need for budget cuts: cut off the welfare queens. (Jamie Dimon – shown above- and the other Wall Street queens are the largest recipients of welfare.)

Liberals and conservatives agree that we should stop subsidizing the fatcats. For example, the conservative Cato Institute points out that corporate welfare amounts to almost $100 billion per year. Cato notes:

Corporate welfare often subsidizes failing and mismanaged businesses and induces firms to spend more time on lobbying rather than on making better products. Instead of correcting market failures, federal subsidies misallocate resources and introduce government failures into the marketplace.

While corporate welfare may be popular with policymakers who want to aid home-state businesses, it undermines the broader economy and transfers wealth from average taxpaying households to favored firms.  Corporate welfare also creates strong ties between politicians and business leaders, and these ties are often the source of corruption scandals in Washington. Americans are sick and tired of “crony capitalism,” and the way to solve the problem is to eliminate business subsidy programs.

Cato also notes:

The federal government continues to subsidize some of the biggest companies in America. Boeing, Xerox, IBM, Motorola, Dow Chemical, General Electric, and others have received millions in taxpayer-funded benefits …. In addition, the federal crop subsidy programs continue to fund the wealthiest farmers.

A Community-Based Alternative To The Welfare State

Freedom of choice and competition are the only real alternative

It is important to discuss alternatives before the Status Quo devolves and collapses, so we have an intellectual framework to guide healthier, more sustainable alternatives once the current system implodes.

by Charles Hugh-Smith
Two of the key characteristics of an empire in terminal decline are complacency and intellectual sclerosis, what I have termed a failure of imagination. (The others are military over-reach, chronic deficits, a parasitic Elite that is immune to what's left of the rule of law, weak leadership, mass dependence on the Central State and excessive consumption.)

Michael Grant described these causes of decline in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire:

There was no room at all, in these ways of thinking, for the novel, apocalyptic situation which had now arisen, a situation which needed solutions as radical as itself. (The Status Quo) attitude is a complacent acceptance of things as they are, without a single new idea.

This acceptance was accompanied by greatly excessive optimism about the present and future. Even when the end was only sixty years away, and the Empire was already crumbling fast, Rutilius continued to address the spirit of Rome with the same supreme assurance.

This blind adherence to the ideas of the past ranks high among the principal causes of the downfall of Rome. If you were sufficiently lulled by these traditional fictions, there was no call to take any practical first-aid measures at all.

In other words, if our idea of intellectual rigor and honesty is Paul Krugman dancing around the Neo-Keynesian Cargo Cult campfire waving dead chickens and mumbling the same old nonsensical chants about aggregate demand, we are well and truly doomed.

This same intellectual sclerosis and spiritual vacuum characterizes our acceptance of the current welfare state. That dependence on the State is destructive to the the well-being and productivity of the dependents and to the fiscal health of the State is self-evident. As management guru Peter Drucker observed in his 1993 book, Post-Capitalist Society:

Joseph Schumpeter warned in 1918 that the fiscal state would in the end undermine government's ability to govern. Fifteen years later, Keynes hailed the fiscal state as the great liberator; no longer limited by restraints on spending, government in the fiscal state could govern effectively, Keynes maintained. We now know Schumpeter was right.

Germany's Green Energy Disaster

A Cautionary Tale For World Leaders

By Howard Rich

There’s nothing wrong with expanding renewable energy sources. The more choices available in this (or any) marketplace the better consumers will be served – both from a price and a quality standpoint. However serious problems are caused when government starts using taxpayer resources to subsidize or incentivize these expansions. Things get even worse when centralized planners start manipulating market choices or trying to manage the marketplace itself by controlling the generation of power.

This is precisely what is happening in Germany – where command economists have failed spectacularly in their bid to force a national transition to renewable energy.

In 2000 Germany passed a major green initiative which forced providers to purchase renewable energy at exorbitant fixed prices and feed that power through their grids for a period of twenty years. Promulgated by a Socialist-Green coalition government – this initiative has since been embraced by Germany’s Conservative-Liberal majority, led by Chancellor Angela Merkel. In fact Merkel has doubled down on Germany’s renewable energy push in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan – ramping up government’s plan to phase in renewables while taking the country’s nuclear power industry offline.

Merkel’s government shut down eight reactors in the immediate aftermath of the Fukushima disaster (which was caused by a tsunami – a threat Germany isn’t exposed to) and has vowed to shut down all remaining nuclear facilities by 2022. The problem? Despite heavy government subsidization, renewable energies simply aren’t filling the void.

“After deciding to exit nuclear energy, it seems as if Ms. Merkel’s coalition stopped its work,” a former German environmental minister told The New York Times last year. “There is great danger that this project will fail, with devastating economic and social consequences.”

A year later the project is failing – resulting in what one German industry expert termed a “chaotic standstill.”

Because It Worked So Well For Stalin...

Five-year plans in the Land of the Free? Apparently it’s not that far off from reality.

by Simon Black

Yesterday Senator Tom Harkin introduced S. 544, “a bill to require the President to develop a comprehensive national manufacturing strategy.”

In effect, Senator Harkin wants the President to centrally plan the economy. Never mind that the President has zero experience in business or manufacturing. But hey, this worked out so well for Stalinist Russia, it’s no wonder Mr. Harkin wants to copy that model.

Not to be outdone by Mr. Harkin’s long-sighted vision, President Obama is drawing up plans to turn over Americans’ financial data to the nation’s spy agencies. So now, on top of everyone else, law-abiding citizens in the Land of the Free can count on the CIA and NSA combing through their bank statements.

Of course, it’s all for your protection against men in caves who wish to do you harm.

This is the same reason they irradiate and/or sexually assault airline passengers. It’s why they have to be able to assassinate Americans on US soil by remote control plane. It’s why they’ve authorized military detention of US citizens. Etc.

When you step back and look at the big picture, it really makes one wonder – how big of a piano needs to be dropped on people’s heads before they notice what’s happening..?

I acknowledge that people have roots. I understand that folks can’t easily pick up and leave their jobs, friends, and family. I understand there’s a lot of inertia involved.

But if you see the writing on the wall, there’s so much you can do to protect yourself against this lunacy. Own precious metals, preferably stored overseas. Open a foreign bank account. Ship your retirement savings abroad. Travel a little bit. Know, in advance, where you would go if you finally hit your breaking point and needed to leave the country.

The trend is clear. Every single day the political elite gives us even more evidence that they’re working overtime to destroy the economy and what few remaining civil liberties still exist.

It’s a difficult truth to acknowledge given that most people have been brainwashed from a very early age in public schools to trust in their government. But placing any amount of confidence in this system utter folly. And dangerous.

There’s no need to panic; rather, it’s important to take measured, rational action. The above recommendations are not alarmist, they’re steps that make sense no matter what happens.

In almost any scenario, you won’t be worse off for having gold and silver stashed away overseas. You won’t be worse off for traveling abroad and finding a nice place you enjoy. You won’t be worse off for taking back control of your retirement savings.

Yet it the bottom falls out, you’ll be one of the few people left standing. Unless, of course, you’d rather wait for the next five-year plan to kick in.

BRICs Abandoned by Locals

Fund Outflows Reach 1996 High

By Michael Patterson, Julia Leite and Rajhkumar K Shaaw 

The 2.5 million rupees ($45,984) Nirav Vora had in the Indian stock market six years ago have plunged by 72 percent. Now the 39-year-old father of two in Mumbai, who depends on investment income for his livelihood, is plowing money into government bonds.

“The confidence of small investors is rock bottom,” Vora said by phone on Feb. 26. “They have no faith in the markets.”

Vora’s exit from equities is being repeated across the biggest emerging markets as disappointing profits and growing state intervention cause stocks to trail global shares for a fourth year. Trading by Brazilian individuals has dropped to the lowest level since 1999, exchange data show. Russian mutual funds posted 16 straight months of outflows, the most since at least 1996, and withdrawals in India are the biggest in more than two years. Chinese investors emptied more than 2 million stock accounts in the past 12 months.

After amassing unprecedented wealth during 14 years of world-beating economic expansion, citizens of the so-called BRIC countries are losing their appetite for shares even as U.S. households return to stocks. While the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDU) is trading at an all-time high, the MSCI BRIC (MXBRIC) Index remains 37 percent below its 2007 peak as economic growth disappoints investors and policy makers do little to improve the treatment of minority shareholders.

‘Steady March’

“This is a somewhat steady march to the exit,” Michael Shaoul, the chairman of New York-based Marketfield Asset Management, which is wagering shares in Brazil, India and China will fall, said by phone on Feb. 27.

The four-country MSCI gauge fell 0.3 percent at 10:14 a.m. in London, bringing its 2013 drop to 0.7 percent. That compares with an 11 percent gain for the Dow Average and a 6.8 percent increase in the MSCI All-Country World Index (MXBRIC). The Shanghai Composite Index has climbed 0.4 percent and Russia’s Micex Index (INDEXCF) advanced 2.2 percent. India’s S&P BSE Sensex index is little changed, while Brazil’sBovespa Index (IBOV) has retreated 6 percent.

The last time individuals in Brazil and India were this pessimistic, the nations’ benchmark equity indexes fell more than 10 percent in 12 months, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Local selling hasn’t reached levels of “capitulation” that signal market bottoms, said Shaoul, whose $6.9 billion MainStay Marketfield Fund (MFLDX) beat 99 percent of peers tracked by Bloomberg in the past year.

Why Socialists Loathe Tolkien's Shire?

Tolkien would have loathed our brave new world with government of thought and deed by state regulation and acronym

By DAVID PLATT

A cinematic juggernaut has just rolled into town. With the first film in the new Hobbit trilogy, its director, Sir Peter Jackson, has embarked on a quest to repeat his Lord of the Rings omnispectacular. Over the next few weeks we may have to become accustomed to images of Baggins in Burger King and Mordor in McDonald’s. The media hype which all this marketing guff engenders will no doubt cause our literary and cultural custodians to remind us (with that form of detached ennui which they have perfected) that Tolkien is no more than a sort of reactionary Harry Potter. Philip Pullman was therefore right to denounce it all as “infantile” and Richard Eyre justified when he termed Middle Earth the “Kingdom of Kitsch”. Jim Naughtie will continue to sigh when any reference to J.R.R. Tolkien is made on the Today programme—and Mark Lawson will tell BBC Radio 4 audiences that this form of bread and circuses isn’t a patch on Ken Loach’s recent outing into poverty among Asian minorities in Bootle.

But wait. Things are not as they seem. There is an agenda here. There usually is when it comes to popular culture—but in the case of Tolkien we are looking at big politics. For the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion and The Hobbit was the greatest conservative writer of the second-half of the 20th century. No—not in an Ayn Rand sense, nor in the raw modernist style embraced by T.S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis. Rather, Tolkien combined remarkable talents for story-telling and philology with a matching ability to communicate conservative values and images with unequalled popularity. His pre-history of the West is dominated by hereditary structures and a settled social order that appealed to the nostalgia of a postwar generation. He was clearly doing something right, given that Rings has sold more copies than almost any other work of fiction in history. It has been voted the nation’s favourite novel in England, Australia, the US and even Germany.

It is this astonishing success that underlies the fierce hostility one encounters from a literary and cultural establishment dominated by the liberal Left (notwithstanding the brief counter-cultural popularity which Rings had in the 1960s). While by no means all on the Right “get” Tolkien (the poet John Heath-Stubbs called it “a combination of Wagner and Winnie-the-Pooh”), all too often those who should know better are simply carried along by an ill-informed deference to established critics who shout louder. Too many conservatives simply do not engage in this area of cultural politics—and then naively wonder at general elections why the broadcast media is pumping out an undercurrent of left-wing assumptions which have scarcely moved on since 1945.

Reductionism Undermines Both Science and Culture

Applied gigantism coupled to an abject neglect of human scale, leads to urban dystopia

by Ramray Bhat and Nikos Salingaros 

Reductionistic thinking, which is the philosophy of contracting complex systems in science and society to smaller or single causalities, is dangerous. With this contraction comes an indifference towards uncovering and appreciating complex explanations and the variability contributed by the context. In the sciences, reductionism leads to the unfortunate skewing of effort and funding towards what are promoted as “basic” questions, and the neglect of disciplines that are most likely to help humanity by acting on practical scales. The effects of reductionism in society are even more alarming. Reductionistic thinking leaves little room for variety, cultural traditions, living urban environments, or religion, thus reducing our worldview to a sterile minimalism bereft of several of the most glorious achievements of evolved human civilization. There is also the additional and more practical consequence: reductionism is responsible for leading us towards societal collapse.

Notwithstanding the continued imagery of the wild-haired scientist untouched by surrounding happenings and upheavals, science has intensely contributed to, and at times rewritten, social and political histories. Among the more contentious of its contributions is the philosophy of reductionism. Thus physicists in the earlier part of the last century were prone to investigating the dynamics of atoms and everything smaller than them, as if matter and all its wonderful properties could be explained only through protons and neutrons, later moving on to quarks and other such elusive elementary constituents. Similarly, much of biology in the latter half of the twentieth century was devoted to understanding and developing the tools for understanding the workings of genes, to the extent that Richard Dawkins advocated a worldview wherein it is the genes that live and evolve, using individuals and their anatomies as vehicles for perpetuation (Dawkins, 1990).

Advances in both material physics and biology have exploded these myths and shown that explanations of how inanimate and animate things work, and are made, cannot simply be broken down into their components. The very idea of any component being elementary has lost its nineteenth-century meaning, where the whole could be put together straightforwardly from elementary mechanical parts. Mechanisms are in fact intricate and layered, and interactions between components contribute as much, if not more, as the components themselves. Moreover, the environmental context also matters and is an intrinsic part of structure and function. Nevertheless, the reductive mindset refuses to go away. What’s more, like all the different ways by which science and technology have come to dominate our lives, the reductionist worldview now influences how we think about anything and everything.

What Will Become Of Chavez's Gold Hoard?

Physical gold is modestly short of priceless to a criminal

by Peter Christian Hall

In August 2011, while undergoing cancer treatments that ultimately failed him, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez began withdrawing 160 tons of gold from U.S., European and Canadian banks. “It’s coming to the place it never should have left. ... The vaults of the central bank of Venezuela, not the bank of London or the bank of the United States. It’s our gold,” he said on national television as crowds cheered armored trucks carrying an initial bullion shipment to the central bank.

While Chávez suggested the gold repatriation might forestall a Libya-style seizure of Venezuela’s assets by Western powers he had antagonized, IHS Global Insight analyst Diego Moya-Ocampos told Reuters it might stymie potential claims by foreign corporations seeking compensation for nationalizations they had endured. Central Bank of Venezuela President Nelson Merentes said it was “an act of financial prudence and sovereignty” intended to guard against problems in the international markets.

The shipments, conducted by air after much talk of alternate delivery modes, concluded five months later in a celebratory caravan. (Germany’s doing it, too: Berlin has ordered repatriation of 674 metric tons of gold, worth $34 billion, from Paris and New York.)

The Caracas hoard would today be valued at around $9 billion, were it not for the fact thatVenezuela has been selling it — about $550 million worth in the first eight months of 2012, according to the International Monetary Fund. Did further sales follow over the past six months, with proceeds partly paying for the public largesse that helped fuel Chávez’s victorious up-from-the-sickbed presidential run?

Hint: Even with the additional cash from gold sales, Venezuela’s foreign exchange reserves hit a five-year low in September, three weeks before Chávez won a narrower-than-customary victory over Henrique Capriles, who will represent the opposition in a presidential election to be held on April 14.

‘Zionist’: the worst insult in the world

Among the Western chattering classes, ‘the Zionist’ has replaced 'the Jew' as the cause of the world's ills

by Tom Bailey 

Speaking to the Jewish Chronicle newspaper recently, UK Labour Party leader Ed Miliband reportedly claimed to be a Zionist. The article in the JC read: ‘Ed Miliband: “I’m a Zionist and oppose boycotts of Israel”.’

However, Miliband’s self-identification as a Zionist lasted less than 24 hours. He has since clarified that he was responding in the affirmative to the question ‘Are you a Zionist?’ with the answer ‘Yes, I am a supporter of Israel’. He would not actually describe himself as a Zionist, though, he now says.

It seems Miliband is prepared to proclaim his support for Israel as a Jewish state. He supports the idea of that state as a homeland for the Jews. Yet the ideology that is associated with the creation of the state and with the larger project of creating a permanent Jewish homeland - Zionism - is something he is reluctant to sign up to.

The reason for Miliband’s reluctance is pretty obvious: Zionism is no longer simply a term denoting a particular ideology. A Zionist is no longer just someone who supports the creation of a Jewish homeland. Rather, Zionism has become a term of abuse, the worst term of abuse there is in modern, right-thinking circles; the word Zionism is now used to denote something deeply sinister, something beyond the pale of bien pensant civilisation. A Zionist is now imagined as an evil shadowy figure, eating babies while playing puppetmaster of world politics.

Stitching up press freedom behind closed doors

Giving into blackmail never solved anything

by Mick Hume 

One minute reports suggest that the leaders of Britain’s main political parties are finally getting ‘close to agreement’ on a new system of press regulation, the next we are told that talks have ‘broken down’ again. Whatever the latest twists, the one certainty is that the hard-won freedom of the press from state supervision, fought for over centuries of public political struggle, is now in danger of being stitched up and sacrificed quietly, behind closed doors.

The main drivers behind this attempt to tame the press have been the Labour Party and its allies in the Hacked Off lobby. These illiberal forces have tried to turn history on its head by claiming that regulating the press, long the ambition of kings and tyrants, is now a ‘radical’ cause for ‘ordinary people’. To pursue their crusade for statutory regulation, they have proved willing to hold democracy to ransom, threatening to disrupt the political process via a handful of peers in the House of Lords unless they get their way.

A brief summary of the tortuous legal and political shenanigans as we know them to date. In his report last November, Lord Justice Leveson proposes that a tough new ‘independent’ press regulator must be backed by statute. Labour, the Lib Dems and Hacked Off demand that Leveson’s proposals be implemented in full. Tory prime minister David Cameron says he wants to implement Leveson’s plans for taming the press, but balks at the notion of a new law to help do so.

In an effort to escape the corner they have thus painted themselves into, the Tories then propose that, instead of a parliamentary law, the new regulator should be recognised by a Royal Charter. As pointed out previously on spiked, if anything this is potentially even worse than statute, evoking shadows of the old system of the Crown licensing of the press. Labour and the Lib Dems have suggested that they might accept a Royal Charter as an alternative to statutory-backed regulation – but only if it is embedded in statute!

As these top-level negotiations have dragged on into 2013, the high-handed pro-regulation lobby has opted for more direct action. First Labour peers, led by Lord Puttnam and backed by others from all corners of the House of Lords, attached an amendment effectively creating a Leveson law to the Defamation Bill that was going through its final stages in parliament. Cameron then indicated that he would rather drop the entire bill to reform the dreadful libel laws than allow such a press law to be created via the backdoor.

Outraged by the prime minister’s refusal to do as he was told, the pro-regulation ‘rebels’ then threatened to attach a Leveson amendment to every piece of legislation in the House of Lords, whether it was about energy policy or business regulation, until the government allowed a press regulation law to pass. This is effectively an act of political blackmail, which would hold the entire parliamentary process to ransom until the government agreed to their terms.

This week, it appeared that the blackmailers might be close to success, with Cameron reportedly agreeing to a compromise deal. Under this new plan, a statute would be passed that did not refer specifically to Leveson or the press, but which underpinned more broadly the status of all Royal Charters. Thus we would be left with statutory regulation of the press in all but name. Latest reports suggest that Cameron has now had second thoughts, broken off talks with Lib Dem deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and Labour leader Ed Miliband and decided to publish the Tories’ plans for a Royal Charter on Monday. We shall see.

Here we go again

Latest Greek Aid Tranche To Be Delayed After Troika Talks Break Down

Here we go again. As we reported yesterday, Greece was due to present to the Troika "how to cut a massive 150,000 public sector jobs: a move which will result in an immediate surge in public unrest, and an exponential jump in strike activity.... Greece is locked in talks with international creditors in Athens about shrinking the government workforce by enough to keep bailout payments flowing. Identifying redundant positions and putting in place a system that will lead to mandatory exits for about 150,000 civil servants by 2015 is a so-called milestone that will determine whether the country gets a 2.8 billion-euro ($3.6 billion) aid installment due this month. More than a week of talks on that has so far failed to clinch an agreement." Fast forward to today when we learn that any hopes a last minute solution would materialize, allowing the monetary spice to flow and the €2.4 billion loan to be paid, were just dashed following a breakdown in talks between Greece and the Troika. Deja vu all over again.

From Kathimerini:

Troika representatives are due to leave Athens on Thursday with no final agreement having been reached with the coalition on a range of structural reforms but with the Greek side insisting that the pause in the talks will not lead to complications in the disbursal of its next loan tranche from the eurozone and International Monetary Fund.

Talks between Prime Minister Antonis Samaras and officials from the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank lasted for a couple of hours on Wednesday night but there no conclusion was reached on matters including the reduction of civil servant numbers and a payment plan for firms and individuals who owe social security contributions.

Who can forget the perpetual Greek optimism, which spun every development, no matter how bad, as very good. For those who have, here is a reminder:

Despite the apparent impasse in the discussions, Finance Minister Yannis Stournaras insisted that the two sides were edging toward a deal and that Greece’s next loan tranche of 2.8 billion euros was not in danger.

“There has been significant progress in the talks with the troika,” Stournaras told journalists after leaving the talks at the Maximos Mansion, in which he also took part.

“The negotiations will continue when the troika representatives return. There is no issue with the loan tranche,” he added.

Destructive Creation

Aesthetics are not science

by Theodore Dalrymple 

When I was a small boy adults used to say to me, ‘If you ask a silly question you’ll get a silly answer.’ This irritated my nascent sense of logic: for if I genuinely did not know the answer to my question, how could I possibly be expected to know that it was silly? And could anything be silly in the absence of knowledge that it was? This was my childish equivalent of Socrates’ or Plato’s doctrine that no one does wrong willingly: a doctrine that does not accord with my clinical experience as a doctor, let alone with my experience of life. But at the time, the accusation of silliness seemed to me worse than merely wrong: it was unjust. I did not appreciate at that age that there could be such a thing as a responsibility to know, even if one did not.

One of silliest questions I have ever heard, and heard often, is why some or many countries are poor. This is to get everything exactly the wrong way round, as if Man were born rich and had somehow to achieve poverty. Of course, it is possible for those who were formerly rich to become poor, for example by improvidence or the spoliation of others; but immemorial poverty requires no explanation. It is wealth that needs explaining, mankind not having been born in marble halls with a silver spoon in its mouth.

I once bought a slender volume entitled Why Bad Dogs? This set out to explain why some dogs barked incessantly, bit the postman, wouldn’t walk to heel and so forth. I am such a dog-lover that I find it difficult to put myself in the place of those who dislike dogs, but still I wondered whether the question asked by the title was the correct one. Dog-lover as I am, I am not the Rousseau of dogs; I do not think that canine nature, untouched by association with humans, is good; and if I were writing the Social Contract for Dogs, I should not begin ‘Dogs are born good, but everywhere they bark.’       

Clearly it is important to frame one’s questions correctly if one wants a real answer: often one does not, for the interrogative is not always used simply to obtain information but also to confound and irritate, as every child knows. The other day I came across a book published in 1937 by A R Powys, one of the Powys family that produced so many writers, mostly unread today, though some were well-known in their day and John Cowper Powys still has his devotees. His brother, A R Powys (1882 – 1936), was an architect and preserver of ancient buildings who also wrote essays on architecture, and one of them in the book that I came across, From the Ground Up, was titled Origins of Bad Architecture. This is a question that has long troubled me, so much so that my wife says I have become something of a bore on it. Whenever I see an eyesore in otherwise beautiful surroundings, which is often, I remark upon it, whereupon my wife, who agrees that the twentieth century was an urban aesthetic disaster, tells me I should clam down (eyesores make me angry) because what is done is done, and working myself up about it will do the landscape no good and will do me harm.