Texas murders the mother-tongue.......

 

One feature about Texas that is well known but seldom commented upon is the respect given by its denizens to other people. Although congenitally insubordinate, respect is almost always shown to women, elders and superiors.

 

About the only thing Texans have no respect for whatsoever is the English Language.

 

This is the state of Hee Haw, Memaw, Papaw, Billie Bob and Bubba. As far as pronunciation is concerned, Texas has rewritten the dictionary and much of its definitions. Even my more sophisticated and educated Texas friends have no problem with calling Linda Me Maw instead of grandma.

 

The etymology is in doubt and may stem from babyish efforts to arrive at grandma just as the baby word for brother is bubba. One might gain the impression that the south in general and Texas in particular are linguistically handicapped.

 

I for one refuse to respond to papaw which sounds more like something to eat than a family designation. Pepaw is also used and borders on the vulgar.

 

But in a state filled sectioned off with millions of miles of bob whar, what can one expect. I actually encountered a lad recently who was seemingly lost on the prairie. He and his amply endowed spouse came upon me by surprise, stopped their pickup truck and asked if I had noticed some rusting coils of bob whar around anywhere.

 

When the penny finally dropped, I managed to confess no knowledge of barbed wire coils anywhere around.

 

That one could see for miles in any direction appeared to have no relevance to the original question. More surprisingly, we became friends, at least to the extent that we take morning coffee together at the local grocery store and petrol station where farmers and ranchers muster to talk about cows and the weather.

 

Footnote from Hay GB.

 Local pronunciation variants have a habit of getting into the vocabulary, sometimes changing their meanings. ‘Sass’ was a mispronunciation of ‘sauce’. I see ‘roil’ used quite frequently of late. It really means mixing liquids and solid, like cement, but it is now wrongly used to mean ‘rile; then there’s the dropping of ‘r’, as in ‘cuss’ and ‘bust’. Some supposed Americanisms are actually found in Shakespeare – ‘varmint’, for one.

 

Thought you might like to know that!

'So farwell, Maggie......'

At the 1979 General Election I was Returning Officer for a safe Labour constituency. When the result came in I thought for a moment that there had been a mistake. The right-wing Tory candidate had romped home. As this was a bellwether constituency I knew that we were getting  a  Conservative government with our first woman Prime Minister and that we were in for a bumpy ride.

 

I returned to the UK in 1970, perhaps the most dismal decade of modern times. I found a country that was like an impoverished old dowager, living on memories, stony broke, and facing inevitable decline.

 

We had nationalized industries that were always hemorrhaging money and providing a terrible service. In those days, it took a least 3 months just to get a telephone. British Steel was losing £1 million a day, perhaps £10 million in today’s money. And so it went on.

 

Maggie set about privatizing them, but she made sure that in the IPOs small investors were favoured – ‘Tell Sid!’. For the first time ordinary people became investors in their own economy, a new class of capitalist.

 

She gave the right to buy for council house tenants and created the ’property owning democracy’.

 

Manufacturing industry was being ruined by trade union militancy under the leadership of the likes of Jack Jones (recently revealed as  a KGB plant), Red Robbo, and others of that ilk. The print unions were rotten with Spanish practices, such as clocking on for night-shift and then going home. Dockers seemed to be in almost permanent dispute.

 

And we had the miners constantly holding the nation to ransom with double-digit pay demands. They could, and did, bring down governments. They had to be tamed and they were.

 

In 1979, nearly 30 million days were lost by strike action. Maggie changed the law to ban secondary picketing and other abuses, and introduced strike ballots. In 1997, when the Tories lost office, the number had fallen to 235,000. Today, strikes in the private sector are almost a thing of the past, with 93% of strikes being in the public sector.

 

With the ‘Big Bang’ in the City, the UK changed from ‘the sick man of Europe’ to the world’s banker, its number one financial centre.

 

In foreign affairs, she was undoubtedly the stiffening behind Reagan in bringing the Cold War to an end, helped, no doubt, by Gorbachev apparently being smitten by her.

 

And what I did not know until reading Robin Renwick’s piece in the Sunday Times about his time under Maggie as Ambassador in South Africa, that she had a deep hatred of apartheid. It was probably she of any foreign leader who cajoled FW de Klerk into the final settlement. She formed a sound friendship with Mandela, who was visited  frequently by Renwick when he was still in jail, and Number Ten was his first on his visiting list when he came to Britain.

 

She also lanced the boil of Rhodesian UDI after every effort had failed in the previous 15 years; she can scarcely be held responsible for the way things turned out many years after she left politics.

 

Then there was the Falklands war which made the world realise that the old lion still had teeth (the cover of ‘Time’ magazine had a picture of a RN carrier and the headline ‘The Empire strikes back!’).

 

Her biggest failure was the poll tax, which contributed to her downfall.

 

During her rise to power her biggest enemies were within the Tory Party itself and the  Establishment. This was not only because of her  sex and the difficulty of the old guard accepting a woman as leader, but sheer snobbishness over a grocer’s daughter. The Establishment had to go and it did.

 

She was the greatest peace-time Prime Minister of the 20^th Century. She saved Britain in 1980 as assuredly as Winston saved it in 1940.

 

So farewell, Maggie. We shall not see your like again.

How to become a Mandarin!

Cameron has recently acquired a new Mandarin at Her Majesty’s Customs and Revenue,  which in these straitened times has to be one of the most important Civil Service appointments.

 

The new CEO of HMRC was CEO of Suffolk before moving to Birmingham. She was also Returning Officer for all elections.

 

In 2005 there was the biggest-ever vote-rigging scandal regarding both the 2003 and 2004 elections which resulted in the only Election Court to have been held in the whole of 20^th Century. The judge said that ‘it would have disgraced a banana republic’. Her excuse was that she had been in strategic, not operational, control’, a piece of buck passing if ever there was.

 

She had not endeared herself to her political masters. She had been appointed by a Labour administration but control had passed to a Tory/Lib coalition. She did not endear herself by publicly expressing left-wing views when a local authority CEO should be a political eunuch. She refused to move to Birmingham, and commuted to Suffolk every week-end, and was therefore nowhere to be seen when the MG/Rover crisis broke.

 

So she had to take an early bath.

 

One would have thought that this would have been the end of a career and the occasion for a graceful early retirement on a pension of around £80,000 and a big lump sum payment.

 

But she immediately landed the job of Director General of immigration at the Home Office without having a single day’s experience in the Civil Service, and she became CEO of the new Borders Agency when this was created.

 

In this post she was criticized by the Commons Select Committee for ‘catastrophic leadership failure’, the Chairman Keith Vaz describing it as "more like the scene of a Whitehall farce than a government agency operating in the 21st century".

 

She then became Permanent Secretary at the Department of Transport. On her watch we had the West Coast Main Line fiasco, when the botched letting process is estimated to have cost £100 million.

 

It was not long before she got another blast from the Public Accounts Select Committee for an "unambitious and woefully inadequate" response to National Audit Office criticism of poor customer service at HMRC.

 

She was awarded the CB for outstanding  public service.

North Asia and East Texas

 Amid the constant bombardment of O by the political right, news here is dominated by the Koreas and Kim Jung Un's mismanagement of his country. Nobody takes him as a serious threat to the US or anybody else, but people do marvel at the extent to which his handlers have allowed him to make of fool of himself, North Korea and the military.

 

 Emotions are running high among the Northeast Asian countries just now and nobody seems to like anybody very much. Japan is largely isolated what with the enmity it continues to generate from its behaviour during the war and its adherence to cultural superiority. China frustrates everyone by its diplomatic subtleties that leave world leaders guessing what they want and where they stand.

 

A smart karate chop to NKorea's neck would at least clarify their attitude toward Kim Jung Un and thereby deliver the message to stand down. Not that KJU would, mind  you, as his prolonged adolescence is testing everyone's patience. The spoiled brat of Northeast Asia is having his day, but it will not last.

 

Of much more juicy concern here is the spate of killings in East Texas. Our eastern region is a state unto itself and has a well deserved reputation for being an extension of the deep South with all its ignorance, prejudice, bible thumping, gun culture and just plain obstreperousness. It is also one of America's many refuges for white supremacists.

 

However, no solid link between the supremacists and the killing of a local district attorney and his wife were found. We do know that the supremacists in question are an offshoot of America's Aryan Bortherhood; a prison gang with organized groups outside prison walls. The Aryan Brotherhood is deeply involved in drugs and that may prove to be a link between it and law enforcement, but there are many scenarios that could be postulated.

 

One thing for sure, the issue is not one of racism as that is pretty much taken for granted in East Texas.

Cyprus: bail-out balls-up!

Quote of the week: from the President of Cyprus

 

“I would like to send a message to the Cyprus people that there is no other way, there is no alternative apart from freeing (the country) from the troika’s and the memorandum’s bonds…by leaving the troika and the EMS behind us, we will ensure our national independence, our national sovereignty, our moral integrity and our economic independence…If we remain bound by the Troika and the memorandum Cyprus’ destiny is already foretold and there will be no future.”

 

(The troika is the EU, IMF and ECB).

 

This seems to put a departure from the EMS back on the agenda.

 

Nobody seems to have a good word to say for the settlement; even the spinners in Brussels have been ominously quiet. The one certainty emerging from this miserable shambles is that the suits in Brussels will stop at nothing, including expropriation, to preserve their zombie currency.

 

The countries that have  most on the hook for the bail-out are  Germany (€2.5 billion), France (€1.9 billion), Italy (€1.6 billion) and Spain (€1 billion). These are loan guarantees, of course, not payments.

 

It is now obvious that joining the Eurozone was a disaster for both Greece and Cyprus. The Cypriot economy is (or was) based almost entirely on tourism and financial services. The € makes for expensive tourism compared with non-€ competitors because it is over-valued for Club Med countries.

 

The Cyprus crisis has more in common with Iceland than Greece. Greece came to grief because it became an incorrigible spendthrift, maxing out on its national credit card and governing itself as if it were a third-world country. Tax evasion was commonplace, the public sector bloated and overpaid, and with eye-watering retirement benefits. Aspects of the public sector were risible; for example, the cost of running the railways was such that it would have been cheaper to send every passenger by taxi.

 

In short, they brought it upon themselves.

 

As with Iceland, the central problem in Cyprus was a banking sector so huge (8 times GDP) that over-extension brought down the entire house of cards. Cyprus banks went so heavily into Greek bonds that when these were ‘restructured’ under the bail-out  the banks were bust. Iceland could solve its own problem because it was not a member of the Eurozone. It devalued, tightened its belt and got on with it. Cyprus, of course, cannot unless it leaves the €.

 

The crisis seems to have been mishandled from the beginning. It must have been obvious that Cyprus was in deep trouble when the Greek crisis happened a long time ago. Not much was done about it – muddle and meddle was the order of the day.

 

The solution is an ongoing train crash.

 

As late as last year Cyprus was expected to emerge as one of the major off-shore financial centres aka tax havens. Purloining depositors funds has put paid to that. Banking depends on trust, and thieving from the customer has destroyed all confidence. Even worse is the leak from Brussels that Cyprus will not be a one-off but most likely a precedent,

 

The barely-legal clamp-down on capital transfers has only made things much, much worse, although it is surprising that people had not shifted their money months ago when the crisis first emerged.

 

There was also a thriving business in ‘round tripping’ – shipping money to Cyprus and then home again as foreign investment mostly free of tax.

 

So it’s farewell to all that, and to all the jobs that went with it.

 

The irony is that the bail-out sum was peanuts. The amount from all EU contributors to the kitty is about the same as the UK’s annual foreign aid budget.

 

This makes the decision to require Cyprus to raid the depositors (and this was made by Cyprus, not the EU) incomprehensible even though the insured depositors have since been made exempt, unless it is placed in the political context. In Europe, Germany call the shots. Merckel is facing an election. The German taxpayer is fed up with bank-rolling the Olive Belt. And it particularly resents the prospect of rescuing Russian money-launderers.

 

The irony is that Cyprus is way down the list of countries most likely to be a risk for money-laundering and terrorist-funding. It is ranked as 114 out of 144 countries. Germany is at 68!

 

Moreover the Germans were persuaded to give up the mighty DM by assurances that ‘no bail-outs’ was an inflexible rule written into the Maastricht Treaty, and that there would also be rules on the levels of permissible debt – deficits not to exceed 3% and debt not more than 60% of GDP(which were quickly broken by, amongst others, Germany itself). They feel bitterly aggrieved and rightly so.

 

Optimists maintain that off-shore gas will be the salvation.

 

This is possible but perhaps not probable.

 

The stumbling block is Turkey. Here chickens are coming home to roost. In 2004, Cyprus blocked a carefully constructed UN proposal for reunification of the Turkish sector. Cyprus ought not to have been admitted to the EU before reunification. Now the Turkish Cypriots are unsurprisingly laying claim to their share of the gas revenues. Without more, this could have been ignored because the Turkish zone has no existence in international law.

 

But Turkey itself has the clout to make things very difficult for Cyprus. The only feasible way to get the gas to market is via a pipeline to Turkey.

 

It is common knowledge that Gazprom would like to get its hands on the gas concession, and Cyprus has resisted this so far in expectation of getting a better deal through international competition. Its bargaining position is now much weakened. If Gazprom does get the concession the pipeline problem might go away because Gazprom’s strategy might well be acquire the concession to avoid undermining its current near-monopoly in its main markets and to leave the gas field fallow to avoid depressing the price.

 

Even if all went to plan there would be no cash-flow until 2019 at the earliest.

 

Cyprus is now facing the prospect of a ruined economy, huge unemployment possibly exceeding 25%, and a 20% drop in GDP.

 

Some rescue!

 

 

 

EU mandarins refuse to learn..

I don't usually do cut and paste stuff, but I was so struck by this piece from Die Weldt, courtesy of Open Europe, that I thought it deserved a wider airing.

“The disastrous decisions regarding the future of Europe have been completely without consequences. Despite all the mistakes made the system appears to be incapable of adapting. The tanker remains on the wrong course.”

“It belongs to the biggest disappointments for convinced democrats that up until now, neither on the European level or on that of the nation states, there are no noteworthy efforts to clarify the causes of the euro crisis… The Bundestag has also not covered itself in glory. There has been no cross-examination of Hans Eichel and Gerhard Schröder why they agreed to let Greece join the euro despite the fact that already then there was a strong suspicion that the Greek figures were problematic.”

"Democracy is adaptive and able to correct itself. However this is out of the question in the worst crisis to hit Europe after the war. Here, the euroscepticism of many of the continent’s citizens is justified. They see that in this crisis that this Europe is not created on transparency, enlightenment and accountability. This creates the impression that they are dealing with a conspiracy of the elite, conspiracy against common sense."

“EU elites are afraid of washing their dirty laundry for fear it will portray the European project in a bad light… It is part of the pride and ethos of a democratic polity to clarify failures and to draw consequences.”

“With the exception of the changes to the eurozone’s regulatory framework forced through by the Germans there have been no intentions of rethinking the fundamental assumptions of the EU… One gets the justifiable impression that nothing can divert EU mandarins from their current path and their pre-conceived opinions. The euro has not worked? Ok, let's try an even higher dose of community building… In Brussels they mourn over bad poll numbers and believe that this is only down to national populists who have wrongly explained Europe.” 

"With Portugal, Spain and Greece there was once the quiet hope that good European governance would be diffused via a kind of osmosis process from the EU headquarters in Brussels into the periphery. That has worked only in part. In some respects, the abundant money from the EU’s structural funds has had the opposite effect to that which was intended. They have strengthened clientelistic structures and made people there believe their system somehow works. Ultimately, politicians always had enough money via Brussels assistance to distribute to cronies and voters. As long as money was available, many people profited from this system. Then along came the crisis which showed that it just does not work and carries with it significant competitive disadvantages.” 

"At present, the EU is obviously not an adaptive system. Nothing is solved, no one is held accountable. Responsibility for consequential mistakes is lost somewhere between the many capital cities and the corridors of Brussels. As long as this does not change, one should not be surprised by the bad reputation that this European undertaking enjoys among citizens."

 

More GBH of the English language

Following my piece ‘The cold blooded murder of the English language’ I regret to report that none other than The Economist, which has always prided itself on its pellucid prose, has fallen prey.

 

Here are some extracts from its latest edition.

 

‘Never have so many crustaceans died in vain’, (Michael Heseltine) whooped.  Whooped? Heseltine? Did he also say ‘Cripes’ and ‘Yaroo’?

 

‘You nodding off yet?’ one duffer asked a colleague (delegate at the Small Business conference). ‘Duffer’, an inefficient, useless or stupid person.

 

‘They (small businesses) lose out to megacorps (non-word) with the welly to stand up to suppliers. Welly? Very Essex Man, then,

 

And finally……

 

‘….the (UKIP) party’s  jackanapes leader, Nigel Farage’ (jackanapes – a mischievous small boy). Oh, very Richard Littlejohn, except he got there first (‘Blair, the grinning jackanapes’).

 

I commend to the writers an excellent publication.

 

It’s called ‘The Economist Style Guide’.

 

‘Management Today’ is worse.

 

One would expect the writing to be serious and business like.

 

The February issue carried a 2 page piece with the title covering half the page in bold upper case.

 

Its title?

 

‘HOW TO MANAGE ASSHOLES’.

 

It managed to get no less than 30 assholes, an unpleasant Americanism, into the piece. That’s a lot of assholes.

 

And the motoring correspondent vouchsafed that the Mitsubishi Evo FQ was ‘fucking quick’ (geddit?).

 

Personally, I reckon that the Editor is – er- an arsehole.

 

 

Barmy Beeb....

The BBC is getting dottier than ever.

 

We regularly watch ‘Countryfile’ on the BBC, which is supposed to be about what its name suggests, but has become a Party Political Party broadcast on behalf of the Green Party.

 

This week they had a piece about bees, or rather, the lack of them. Not in my garden. I understand that the disease affects only one species; another bit of green alarmism?

 

Then one on a research programme about incestuous adders (who pays for this nonsense?). The townie presenter was so frightened of the snakes that should wouldn’t go within ten feet of them, even though they were being handled by the researcher.

 

And a longish piece about how we should not import fruit and veg and revert to seasonal local stuff. I failed to follow the point, unless the Greens regard it as sinful to eat asparagus except for 2 months of the year.

 

To cap it all, the Beeb insisted on a risk assessment to film Morris Dancers.

 

Over on radio, I hear that Ambridge has become more ginger than green.

 

You couldn’t make it up!

 

Talking down Britain....

I am at a loss to understand why our politicians and the media are constantly talking-down Britain; almost every day we hear gloomy statements about the economy, ‘triple-dip’ recession, the debt burden, but little that is positive, and in any case  OBR and ONS numbers are almost always wrong because they are published straight out of the egg.

 

Growth, we are told, is almost non-existent. But this in itself only tell part of the story.

 

Sure, construction is markedly down on 2011, partly due to Osborn’s bad decision to cut capital spending (which he only marginally adjusted in his non-budget). New house building might be stimulated by the ‘mortgage guarantee’ crust that little George tossed at the hoi polloi, although it is more likely to encourage reckless borrowing and a new housing bubble.

 

North Sea oil and gas is down, largely because predatory taxing by Brown (and not rectified by Osborn) has been a major disincentive to investment. But – and I have not seen this reported anywhere -  the industry now has the technology to extract 90% of the known reserves whereas hitherto 60% was the best that could be expected.

 

Manufacturing overall has been something of a disappointment, but capital equipment is up by no less than 21% since the 2009 low, and vehicle manufacturing is up by a staggering 46%.

 

Unemployment is the lowest in the EU area, and despite large cuts in the public sector, there are more people in work than ever before. An emerging issue is a good rate of growth in high-skill sectors. Our poor education system is unlikely to supply the demand for skilled people, which means immigration. If Mrs May’s addlepated immigration policy is any guide, we have a problem.

 

Overall, there is a good rate of growth in 75% of the economy.

 

But the underlying problem is that we have the worst Government since – well – the last one!

 

Snow's no joke

The cold weather here has been a catastrophe.

 

A young farmer who started on his own only last year, and so is up to his ocksters in debt, has found his entire herd of 40 cows lying dead on the hillside. He is now on suicide watch.

 

Another farmer can’t account for any of his sheep. They are almost certainly dead and buried in the huge snow drifts.

 

A lady smallholder can’t find her 28 sheep. They too are bound to be goners.

 

And it will be some time before we know the full extent of the stock losses. On a more uplifting note the response of the community has been amazing. Hundreds of people have turned out to help dig out sheep from deep snowdrifts and to carry feed to places inaccessible by vehicles. This is pretty dangerous work, up there in the hills, because of the risk of getting lost or of falling down hidden gullies and ditches.

 

The Manx just shrug and say ‘ It ‘appens!’ Tough old birds.

 

This gives you a flavour of the IOM at this time.

This is the glen just above our house. It looks more like Norway. And this is part of the TT course.

We have been fortunate. We only had about 2 inches, and we have been able to move around normally. A mile down the road the snow is up to 4 feet deep. Many houses in the neighbouring village have been without heat and light since last week. Fortunately there has been no more snow, but we are still getting below-zero temperature forecasts for the next 10 days.

This is the scene across to our little town of Ramsey, a mile away.

 

Bloggers, watch out! Leveson's about...

I have been trying to devil out what the devil is going on post-Leveson, no mean feat because the details have been under-reported.

 

One thing of immediate import is the danger that the rules will be used to suppress bloggers. It looks as if they will be used against ‘professional’ bloggers and those who sell advertising – users of Wordpress, for example. But we can be pretty certain that powers-that-be are itching to get their hands on social media generally. And we can be equally certain that any deal that has the agreement of all three parties is bound to stink. A disturbing aspect is that hacks will have to justify their sources of information, which opens the door to outing whistle-blowers and journalists’ otherwise protected sources.

 

The present mess stems for Lord Justice Leveson’s probe into the murkier corners of Fleet St, the phone hacking scandal, the intimidation of celebrities and crime victims, the cuddly relationship between the media and the police and politicians, and giving bribes in return for information. The irony here is that all the misdeeds committed by the Red Tops were capable of being dealt with under existing law. The lack of law enforcement might have had something to do with the recipients of brown envelopes.

 

What is proposed is a new Press Regulator created by Royal Charter. The ostensible reason for choosing this archaic and bizarre device is supposedly to remove press regulation from political control.

 

There will be a ’recognition panel’ to supervise the regulator. I have yet to discover the exact powers of the regulator.

 

The press will be expected to sign-up to the new system. A newspaper that refuses to join may face punitive damages in the event of a successful complaint.

 

There is an almost total lack of clarity about who will be appointed to the new bodies and by whom.

 

And the sanctions to be imposed on offenders are fuzzy, apart from giving apologies the same prominence as the original story.

 

So will it work? I doubt it. The big players – NI, Telegraph, Mail, and Mirror – seem to have already decided to play hard-ball.  The Speccie and Private Eye have already announced non-cooperation. All this comes at a time when the print media is fighting for survival, with circulations halved in recent years and increasing competition from electronic media; both the Gruaniad and the Indy seem doomed in inky format.

 

The real choice is between a press that can often be vile, but which has been relentless in the pursuit of lying politicians, expenses fiddling, and all manner of public scandals that would otherwise have remained hidden, and a regulated press minding its Ps and Qs.

 

But the general public doesn’t seem particularly bothered either way, and that really is worrying.

 

Letter from America........

 

Too much bad news in the world press. Your record-breaking winter is an apt beginning. It is incredible that the snow and ice and freezing temps have been so severe and have lasted so long. I see pictures every day of snow-bound vehicles, people dressed in parkas and boots and rescue operations in the Scots Highlands of hikers and climbers who dared to venture beyond their capabilities. Being from Minnesota, I know what severe weather is like and how to deal with it and when not to challenge it. My hope is that the weather will warm up before the UK runs out of fuel oil and gas.

 

Wherever I turn in the Middle East, gloom and doom prevails. The Syria thing has gone too far and should really be brought to a conclusion. The US strategy has been to 'hope for the best' and provide reportedly non-weapon aid to the rebels. Bashir al Assad, like Saddam in Iraq, rules through an elite minority that is seemingly crush-proof. Perhaps the recent reports of Bashir being shot by his bodyguard will dampen if not entirely stop his rampage. However, every single one of Syria's neighbors have been brought into the fray in one way or another and the rustled feathers of these neighbors will remain part of Bashir's legacy.

 

For the most part, US news agencies have been silent about the alleged shooting. It is astounding how we can hope for the best without having a clue to what that might mean. We should have learned by now that once the despot is overturned, a new one emerges that is considerably less appealing then the previous one.

 

 

We all thought that the demise of Saddam would put an end to the conflicts there. Now, the new Prime Minister, Nouyri al Maliki, is attempting to calm Shiite groups by allying with Iran and virtually opening the doors of friendship between the two predominantly Shiite countries. Maliki is sufficiently confident to even refuse our new Secy, of State's request to deny Iran access to Iraq airspace. The relief route for arms and supplies to Syria has long been known to flow through Tehran and then into Damascus by land and air. Even some of our Iraq war veterans are asking what their comrades fought and died for in that conflict.

 

 

Would you believe that I recently heard a political commentator suggest there would soon be an entente between Shia and Sunni Muslims? This is about as likely as the lion and the lamb sharing the same water hole. One thing we can count on, but seldom do, is that the Arab world will always be in some sort of disagreement with one another. There is no basis for unity there given the different aspects of Islam, different tribal associations, different racial orientations and different cultural and linguistic foundations.

 

 

I note with interest that your David Miliband is forsaking politics in favor of a role in the International Rescue Committee.

 

He will certainly be in good company what with the litany of current and past members reading like a who's who in world affairs. I cannot quite understand his motive and why he opted to come to the US when he still has a future and a following in the UK.

 

 

The big financial news here remains the ECB's raid on the larger Cyprus banks and its threats to do the same thing in Spain and Italy and possibly other member states. There is a modicum of support here to target foreign holdings in Cyprus banks, particularly Russian holdings, as the conviction prevails that the money was dirty in the first place. It does seem as if the Bank of Cyprus was somewhat lacking in discretion with respect to the origins of funds deposited. More importantly at the moment, is the issue of ECB's having the legal right to dip into the personal savings of investors in its member banks for purposes of bailing out failing economies and, ultimately, of saving the Euro.