Grandstanding

The decision of the United States to abstain on the UN Security Council resolution critical of Israel is understandably being presented as a milestone in the US stance on the Israel-Palestine question, and the associated "outrage" gives Fox News and related outlets a nice glide path into Christmas. But does the Israeli government actually care as much as it says it does? Here's a press release on the Kremlin website --

Vladimir Putin had a telephone conversation with Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israeli side's initiative. The two leaders continued to exchange views on the current situation in the Middle East and reaffirmed their readiness to further actively cooperate in the fight against terrorism.

So on the eve of what's been presented as a new low in UN-Israel relations, Bibi wasn't on the phone to Washington looking to get anything resolved; instead he was talking to Vladimir Putin, who also has a UN Security Council veto, about general regional issues. If the passage of this resolution was really such a concern for Israel, he could have asked Putin to veto it.

The episode looks much more like the typical sound and fury, signifying nothing. Meanwhile Bethlehem will have its one-day spotlight looking very unrepresentative of the daily lives of West Bank residents.

Merry Christmas.

Putin to Obama: Stop Whinging

From the typically wide-ranging end-of-year Kremlin news conference today --

They would be better off not taking the names of their earlier statesmen [Reagan] in vain, of course. I’m not so sure who might be turning in their grave right now. It seems to me that Reagan would be happy to see his party’s people winning everywhere, and would welcome the victory of the newly elected President so adept at catching the public mood, and who took precisely this direction and pressed onwards to the very end, even when no one except us believed he could win. (Applause). The outstanding Democrats in American history would probably be turning in their graves though. Roosevelt certainly would be because he was an exceptional statesman in American and world history, who knew how to unite the nation even during the Great Depression’s bleakest years, in the late 1930s, and during World War II. Today’s administration, however, is very clearly dividing the nation. The call for the electors not to vote for either candidate, in this case, not to vote for the President-elect, was quite simply a step towards dividing the nation. Two electors did decide not to vote for Trump, and four for Clinton, and here too they lost. They are losing on all fronts and looking for scapegoats on whom to lay the blame. I think that this is an affront to their own dignity. It is important to know how to lose gracefully.

Downward Spiral

An amazing photograph from Italian news agency ANSA shows wanted Berlin truck rampage suspect Anis Amri sitting with a group of Tunisian asylum seekers in Lampedusa, 3 April 2011. 

Quote of the Day

Professor Angus Deaton in Saturday Financial Times "lunch with ..." slot --

But his bigger frustration is with what he sees as the detached and technocratic backgrounds of so many people in centrist politics nowadays. “If you think about the first leaders of the UK’s Labour party, they were singing hymns on the train platform as they went off to work. And they were of ‘those people’,” he says. “If you think of someone like Gordon Brown, who I have immense admiration for, and Obama — and the high point of my year this year was my meeting with Obama — he’s not one of ‘those people’ any more. He’s an intellectual with progressive views who is making policy in a way that he judges is good for those people.”

Twice Oppressed People Ever

Under Facebook's moderation rules, you can't say "Irish women are stupid" but you can say "Irish teenagers are stupid."

Why? Because Facebook's gatekeepers categorize both "Irish" and "women" as a protected category, but not teenager, so the algorithm only captures the first statement.

Süddeutsche Zeitung explains.

Greater North Atlantic Co-Prosperity Sphere

The emerging white nationalist alliance between European neo-Nazis, Russia, and Trump officials needs a name. Hmm: Axis of evil?

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) December 21, 2016

The new non-aligned movement

The Wall Street Journal has sight of the cooperation agreement signed between the Putinist United Russia party and Austria's Freedom Party --

The agreement, seen by The Wall Street Journal, describes “mutual noninterference in internal affairs” and “equal, reliable, and mutually beneficial partnership” as key principles ... The Russian official who signed the agreement with the Freedom Party, Deputy State Duma Speaker Sergei Zheleznyak, is a target of U.S. and European Union sanctions because of his support for Russia’s annexation of Crimea. “We must work to expand the development of the partnership between our parties and countries, including on questions of international security, the migration crisis, economic and humanitarian development, support for traditional values, and protecting the environment,” Mr. Zheleznyak said.

Note the way that the language on a broad range of issues has been co-opted by what is an ultra-nationalist and illiberal alliance.

Berlin

A Christmas tree flattened by a huge black truck -- which also killed 9 people.

Photo via N-TV. 

Facts still arriving

The Ankara assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey: it seemed clear from the photographs that the assassin had a professional relationship with guns and Reuters reports --

Two security sources identified the gunman as an off-duty police officer who worked in the Turkish capital.

Everyone is going to rush to fit the assassination into a Syria narrative, but if 2016 has taught us anything, it's that nothing is that simple.

The Usual Suspects

Sunday's New York Times reports on the prolific Hillary Clinton-focused fake news outfits run by James Dowson. The article focuses on Dowson's connections to pro-Putin activities but he's better known in Ireland as a provocateur feasting on Unionist "outrage" such as above at "flag" protests in Belfast in 2013 (much more on this career phase from Slugger O'Toole).

There's understandably a lot of effort being directed now into what exactly is new about Trumpism. But a critical element is simply old grievances which surfed social media organizing capabilities into new causes.

Photo: Scottish Daily Record.

Long memory

Vladimir Putin in press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe --

But there are many questions in this respect [Kuril Islands dispute], including regarding economic activity and security. For example, when in 1956 the Soviet Union and Japan were close to resolving this dispute and signed (not only signed, but also ratified) the 1956 Declaration, as we know, and it is an established historical fact, the United States, believing that it has interests in this region, in the person of then-Secretary of State Dulles presented an ultimatum to Japan: if Japan does anything that contradicts the interests of the United States, the US will assume full jurisdiction over Okinawa.

Carry on up the Nile

At President Obama's news conference yesterday --

I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers [in Syria]. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced.  I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that’s taken place in South Sudan that’s not being reported on partly because there’s not as much social media being generated from there.

It's a bit ridiculous for him to be sniping that there's not as much reporting about the dire situation in South Sudan when (a) there's been nothing stopping him talking about South Sudan and (b) his last action on South Sudan was a dead-of-summer waiver for South Sudan from the Child Soldiers Prevention Act, with a new UNICEF report confirming that use of child soldiers remains pervasive in South Sudan.

They never went away

Irish Times --

Horse-racing tycoons John Magnier and JP McManus have sold an office and retail building on Place Vendome in Paris to Norway’s oil-rich sovereign wealth fund for €1 billion. The duo bought the Vendome Saint-Honoré property in 2007 for €650 million from Hammerson plc and Axa’s real estate management unit. They subsequently spent a considerable sum refurbishing the building.

It's as if the Irish property implosion never happened. The breathless reporting of megadeals, the oil money customers, the description of Magnier and McManus line of business as horse-racing, the lack of curiosity about how two individuals with only a stud farm between them (in the Irish mythology) could be dealing in this kind of cash, the blasé references to offshore corporate structures, and the obsession with prestige properties. They flew the tricolour over Place Vendome. The rest of the country went broke.

Deterrence

White House statement --

This Administration has made clear that an extension of the Iran Sanctions Act, while unnecessary, is entirely consistent with our commitments in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Consistent with this longstanding position, the extension of the Iran Sanctions Act is becoming law without the President's signature. Extension of the Iran Sanctions Act, which was in place at the time the JCPOA was negotiated and remains so today, does not affect in any way our ability to fulfil our commitments in the JCPOA. The Administration has, and continues to use, all of the necessary authorities to waive the relevant sanctions, to enforce those that are outside the scope of the JCPOA, and to reimpose sanctions if necessary in the event that Iran should fail to perform its commitments under the JCPOA.

To understand the signals being sent to Iran by the above, the Iranian government is supposed to interpret the difference between the President not signing a bill when Congress is in session versus when it is not in session, and further between the sanctions that apply based its nuclear ambitions versus the sanctions that apply to its other activities in the Middle East.

And it's that choreography of the President's signature up against the flattening of Aleppo!

2013 Obama meet 2016 Obama

President Obama at the 2013 G20 summit in St Petersburg when the live issue was the Assad regime use of chemical weapons --

And sometimes the further we get from the horrors of that, the easier it is to rationalize not making tough choices. And I understand that. This is not convenient. This is not something that I think a lot of folks around the world find an appetizing set of choices. But the question is, do these norms mean something? And if we’re not acting, what does that say? If we’re just issuing another statement of condemnation, or passing resolutions saying “wasn't that terrible,” if people who decry international inaction in Rwanda and say how terrible it is that there are these human rights violations that take place around the world and why aren’t we doing something about it -- and they always look to the United States -- why isn’t the United States doing something about this, the most powerful nation on Earth? Why are you allowing these terrible things to happen? And then, if the international community turns around when we’re saying it’s time to take some responsibility and says, well, hold on a second, we’re not sure -- that erodes our ability to maintain the kind of norms that we're looking at.

Follow-up call

New York Times 2 days ago--

Bahrain’s embassy in Washington held its annual National Day celebration last week at Mr. Trump’s new luxury hotel there. The hotel has come under scrutiny by American government ethics experts who worry that foreign governments, special interest groups and others will book rooms and events there to curry favor with the president-elect.

Bahrain News Agency today--

Manama, Dec. 14 (BNA): His Majesty King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa held a telephone call with the US President-elect Donald Trump and congratulated him on the US people's trust in the recent presidential elections, wishing him every success. HM the King underlined deep-rooted historic and strategic relations between the two friendly countries, voicing keenness on further promoting them for the best interest of both countries. He also wished the new US President-elect abundant good health and further progress and prosperity to the American people. On his part, the US President-elect expressed heartfelt respect and appreciation to HM the King, voicing keenness on working together to further bolster the distinguished historic and strategic relations between Bahrain and the USA and lauding growing bilateral cooperation at all levels.

Irish President in monetary policy outrage

The Financial Times spends a few hours in the official residence with President Michael D. Higgins --

He lambasts the European Central Bank, which some Irish people believe — often against the available evidence — to be the cause of Ireland’s recent brush with the financial abyss. “I’m not supposed to have an opinion about the ECB, but how could you not, given that it is one of the world’s most important institutions?” he ventures. “How did it ever come to be? How did France ever allow it? The French thought it could be [operationally] in Frankfurt and that its intellectual apparatus would come from the grandes écoles. Well, that has been blown apart.”

Force

Above (via CNN Turk) the crater left by the car bomb outside Besiktas Vodafone stadium in Istanbul last night -- note how the blast went through several layers of the road. 

Putin's Mission Accomplished moment

Vladimir Putin addresses by video conference a concert held at the historic Palmyra ruins in Syria, May 5 2016, to celebrate the recapture of the city from ISIS.

With Russian and Syrian forces now busy flattening eastern Aleppo, ISIS has recaptured Palmyra.

It's not always Wagner

Financial Times on the rise of Breitbart News --

Breitbart, who died unexpectedly in 2012 aged 43, was not a typical conservative — he once told the FT he enjoyed late 1980s dance music culture ...

Word games

Statement from leaders of all G7 countries except Japan, via White House --

... strongly condemn the Syrian regime's attacks that have devastated civilians and medical facilities and use of barrel bombs and chemical weapons.

From President Obama's speech in Tampa yesterday defending his counterterrorism policies --

We’ve eliminated Syria’s declared chemical weapons program.

The truth of that sentence hinges on the word "declared" and its substance is undermined by the accurate description of the situation in today's "G6" statement.

Incidentally, this Reuters story explains how the Iraqi government assault on Mosul was reworked on Iranian advice to use the same tactics as Aleppo, i.e, a complete cutoff of all escape routes from the city. The US government is supporting the Mosul assault.

Cloudboosting

Wall Street Journal --

A U.S. Weather Tradition Takes the British Isles By Storm

... Storms have been named for centuries, but it wasn’t until 1953, when the National Hurricane Center in the U.S. started officially naming Atlantic tropical storms, that they were christened before making landfall. In the U.K. and Ireland, storms were named on an ad hoc basis until last year. A realization that something needed to change occurred in the 2013-14 season, when one particularly bad tempest was given upward of five names by various meteorological and media outlets across Europe, going by the aliases Simone, Carmen, Allan, the St. Jude Storm and Cyclone Christian. The incident pushed the Met Office and Met Éireann to take ownership of the naming of storms that passed over their territories. They based their system on the U.S. National Hurricane Center’s conventions as well as their own national weather warning services. Rules include avoiding names that start with the letters Q, U, X, Y and Z (there aren’t enough of them), and those that were used for particularly destructive storms in the recent past, such as Andrew or Katrina ...

To say that a US weather "tradition" underpins this trend is a stretch. In fact, it was the clearly untraditional Weather Channel practice of naming winter storms that led to the practice -- the met offices were reacting to would-be Brick Tamlands coming up with their own names for storms in the age of clickbait. As quotes in the WSJ article well reflect, there's a general dubiousness about naming storms when wind is so frequent, but that's the time horizon of the social media beast. As we've documented before, the concession on naming storms has done nothing to stop the continued import of Weather Channel clowning, including the use of their names for storms that the met offices don't name, and screaming into a TV camera in gale force conditions.

The difference in weather conditions between the US exposure to infrequent but highly dangerous tropical storms and the recurrence of wind in the north Atlantic is reflected in the fact that the most resonant weather tradition in the UK and Ireland is the shipping forecast, i.e. the names are used for the sea areas affected by the storms rather than the storms themselves, 

The populist front

Two slightly connected observations.

1. It looks like an oversight that Donald Trump's seemingly abrupt outreach to Taiwan has not yet been linked to deep Republican lore, specifically the 1950s demands to "Unleash Chiang" so as to open up a reverse takeover of Red China by Taiwan, It was of course a preposterous vision, carried on in mocking fashion in a Bush family in-joke to nearly the present day. But someone in Trump's circle, or maybe Trump himself, doesn't get the joke.

2. For the last few weeks, pundits have been rushing to their keyboards to type up "Merkel is the liberal West's last hope" articles. Sceptics have therefore, rightly, been quick to draw attention to Merkel's promise in her CDU party speech today to ban wearing the burqa during public administrative transactions.

Anyway the point is that if Merkel wins next year's election -- which at this point she is likely to do -- it won't be because she fits some New Pundit definition of liberal, but because she knows how to maintain a moderate conservative electoral coalition large enough to give her space to implement moderate conservative policies.

Part of how she does this is being tactically astute. It's forgotten now, but Merkel saw the dangers of Davos attendance last January, an insight that still seems lost on the Thought-Leading Ted-Talking fools headed there again this year. Even her burqa ban might be more aimed at detaching herself from the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot choir than any substantive imposition on observant Muslim lifestyle in Germany.

In that same speech from which the burqa ban grapped all the attention, she also said --

Ehrlich gesagt: Wenn ein Freihandelsabkommen mit den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika Hunderttausende in Deutschland auf die Straße bringt, aber die so grausamen Bombardierungen auf Aleppo so gut wie keinen öffentlichen Protest auslösen, dann stimmt irgendetwas mit den politischen Maßstäben nicht mehr

Loosely: if a trade agreement with the USA can bring hundreds of thousands onto the streets in protest, but the cruel bombing of Aleppo brings almost no public protest, then something has changed in political standards.

That's an effective dig at the very selective nature of "outrage" as the currency of populism, just as Aleppo has been displaced from the news by whatever is the latest Trump tweet.

A seed of populism

The current political context in Europe calls to mind a missed sign of divergence between the general public and technocrats that occurred with the introduction of the Euro single currency in 1999. There was a widespread public perception that businesses used the conversion from national currencies to the Euro to round up prices, resulting in generally higher prices than prevailed prior to the switchover.

Economists patted simple hoi polloi on the head and told them that they'd made the same mistake as Nigel Tufnel in Spinal Tap, namely confusing numbers ("well it's one louder, isn't it?") with the reality that whether prices went up or down was a purely arithmetic exercise based on the currency conversion factors.

Subsequent research found scattered but tantalizing evidence that some prices really did increase but at the same time indicated that perceptions were the dominant influence in whether people thought this happened or not.

Yet that sense that the Euro had done strange things to national economies despite what experts said looks like a prophecy of what was to come in 2008 -- and part of the explanation for why credibility has been so difficult to restore.

Nigel's amp, By Source, Fair use, Link

Photo of the Day

Great Wall Street Journal reporting from northern Iraq about the town of Qaraqosh, a historically Iraqi Christian town much of whose population has fled; after ISIS was cleared out, it's now defended by a local Christian militia commanded by a retired Iraqi Army officer. The above is part of the scene of destruction inside the town's Mar Gorgis church. Photo by Juan Carlos for the WSJ.

Trump in new U-turn outrage

RTE --

Clare County Council has confirmed that the application for the coastal protection works near Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, Co Clare, has been withdrawn. The hotel, owned by US President-elect Mr Trump, had proposed building a 2.8km sea wall along a public beach to protect the golf resort. The wall would have been 4.5 metres in height and built from rock. Last night at the opening of the public consultation on revised plans for coastal defences at Doonbeg new plans were displayed that did not include the previously proposed wall.

Welcome to the Jungle

Full story.

Make Switzerland awkward again

With Donald Trump's Cincinnati speech renewing his commitment to his anti-globalization campaign position, it's worth noting that the next World Economic Forum in Davos -- where the Davoisie assemble -- will be taking place in the week leading up to his inauguration on 20 January.

Trump in new religion outrage

Irish Times article on the extensive connections of Trump's Treasury Secretary nominee Wilbur Ross to Ireland --

Around the time he was pumping money into Bank of Ireland, he once inquired of an Irish official whether Irish people would be more inclined to repay their mortgages because they were Catholic.

Undiplomatic

With the US apparently hoping that the Assad-Putin flattening of eastern Aleppo will at least remove the issue of what to do about it, the Financial Times reports on more permanent effects of its inaction, in the form of the opposition deciding to deal with Russia --

One opposition figure, when asked why he thought Russia would seek a deal with the rebels just as Mr Assad appeared to be winning, said Moscow was “essentially saying: ‘Screw you, Americans’.”