Bill Murray's Blog, page 55
July 21, 2018
Quotes: On Juncker and the Right Time to Retire
“The atmosphere in Brussels has become, of late, reminiscent of the late Brezhnev era. We have a political system run by a bureaucratic apparatus which — just like the former USSR — serves to conceal important evidence. Especially when it comes to the health of its supreme leader, Jean-Claude Juncker.”
From the article Jean-Claude drunker – What’s ailing the President of the European Commission? by Jean Quatremer at the London Spectator.
July 20, 2018
Weekend Reading
Having a hard time finding the energy for all those weekend chores? Here is a rich roundup of articles you may have missed to occupy your time instead:
– Lagos: Hope and Warning – Nigeria’s mega-city, bursting with opportunity but strained with disorder, offers a cautionary preview of the future, by Armin Rosen in City Journal.
– Free advice – don’t become a freelance foreign correspondent: My dream job? Freelance foreign correspondent. Here’s why I’ve decided to give it up by Sulome Anderson in the Washington Post
– Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong – A geologist explains that climate change is not just about a global average sea rise, by Daniel Grossman.
– The Spanish ultra-athlete Kilian Jornet has conquered every major endurance event in running, skiing, and biking. Now he is setting records for climbing the world’s highest mountains. But can anybody really climb Everest twice in one week? Are Kilian Jornet’s Speed Records Too Good to Be True? by Nick Heil at Outside magazine.
– Fiona Hill was one of two women at the table with the Trump team on Monday in Helsinki (the other was Marina Gross, the translator). An academic, author and currently Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs, Hill has written a profile of the Russian president in Putin: The one-man show the West doesn’t understand at thebulletin.org.
– Here is a quote from How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths by Lynn Stout at Evonomics:
“It’s conventional wisdom in business circles today that corporate directors should ‘maximize shareholder value….’ Most shareholder-value advocates assume that shareholders care only about their own wealth. But … (t)he problem with the homo economicus theory is that the purely rational, purely selfish person is a functional psychopath.”
– And finally, here, in its best bureaucratese, is the European Commission’s Preparing for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union on 30 March 2019. It makes for train-wreck-viewing reading, including, in the event of a “hard Brexit,”
• The United Kingdom will be a third country and Union law ceases to apply to and in the United Kingdom.
• Citizens: There would be no specific arrangement in place for EU citizens in the United Kingdom, or for UK citizens in the European Union.
• Border issues: The European Union must apply its regulation and tariffs at borders with the United Kingdom as a third country, including checks and controls for customs, sanitary and phytosanitary standards and verification of compliance with EU norms. Transport between the United Kingdom and the European Union would be severely impacted. Customs, sanitary and phytosanitary controls at borders could cause significant delays, e.g. in road transport, and difficulties for ports.
In Monday’s Africa Vignette, we’ll cross Lake Malawi. See you next week.
July 19, 2018
Europe’s Wildest Country?
Interesting to note an unexpected consequence of the war in eastern Ukraine, according to Politico.eu,
“local residents, soldiers, rangers and environmentalists agree: The area is undergoing an unintended — and unexpected — rewilding.”
The article goes on,
“As recently as 2014, wolves attacking domestic animals in eastern Ukraine were tales told by grandparents. Today, in part because of a hunting ban in the war zone, large, wild predators are flourishing — along with other rare flora and fauna — along the 450-kilometer frontline.
“For hundreds of years populations of big animals were controlled, and now for the first time they are uncontrolled,” said Oleksiy Vasilyuk, an ecologist from the Ukrainian NGO Environment People Law. ‘For us, it’s great news.'”
•••••
Reactor four and the sarcophagus at the Chernobyl power plant, Ukraine.
Meanwhile in the country’s north, the exclusion zone around Chernobyl is Turning Into a Wildlife Preserve for Wolves, says an article posted this month at PopularMechanics.com. As Australia’s SBS points out in How nature reclaimed Chernobyl,
“It seems to indicate – much like the DMZ between North and South Korea that’s become a sanctuary for endangered species – that if we retreat from a region, nature fills the gap.”
The unique and unfortunate recent history of Ukraine may have made it Europe’s wildest place.
See more photos from Chernobyl and Ukraine here at EarthPhotos.com and if you’re interested in learning more about Chernobyl, have a look at my book Visiting Chernobyl here or via Amazon in your country.
July 18, 2018
Addis & Asmara Reconnected
Maiden commercial flight of Ethiopian Airlines arrives at Asmara International Airport today after interlude of 20 years. Foreign Minister Osman Saleh welcomes former Ethiopian PM and other dignitaries. Passengers on flight include businessmen, artists, journalists/individuals pic.twitter.com/c8aH9dpGe9
— Yemane G. Meskel (@hawelti) July 18, 2018
Thawing of Ethiopian/Eritrean relations will make a visit to Eritrea theoretically much easier, assuming Eritrean officials’ willingness to pony up tourist visas.
The Eritrean capital has been downright awkward to get to, with flights only from Sharjah and Dubai in the UAE, Cairo, Egypt, Istanbul, Turkey, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and Khartoum, Sudan. It looks like Eritrean Airlines runs a flight up to Milan-Malpensa, too.
Yesterday’s resumption of flights from Addis by one of Africa’s biggest and best-connected airlines, Ethiopian Airlines, marks real progress in reopening the Eritrean capital, Asmara, to the world.
A little like Havana, Asmara is a city frozen in time. As Quartz explains:
“It goes back to Benito Mussolini. When the Italian fascist leader decided to invade Ethiopia in the 1930s, he chose the country’s small northern neighbor Eritrea as a base from which to launch his operation. Thousands of Italians ended up migrating there to help with the effort. By 1939, half of Asmara’s population was made up of Italians.
“Petrol stations mimicking aeroplanes and boats, commercial buildings designed as trains, cavernous cinemas with fine period plasterwork and Art Dem interiors, fine ultra-modern hotels and offices, and government buildings with highly politicised monumental designs.”
Check out these photos from Asmara.
July 17, 2018
100 Years Ago Today
Here is the simple monument in Ekaterinburg, Russia commemorating Tsar Nicholas and the royal family who were executed on 17 July, 1918 outside of town. RFERL has a nice feature today, worth a few minutes of your time, called Before The Killings: Rare Photographs Of Russia’s Last Royal Family.
July 16, 2018
Helsinki
The site of the Trump/Putin summit is a compact, handsome, livable low-rise town of around 600,000. Click these photos to enlarge them.
President Putin’s hometown of St. Petersburg is a little less than 400 kilometers up the road. The high speed Allegro train connects Helsinki with St. Petersburg in three and a half hours, four times a day.
Mr. Putin must feel – almost – at home. The lay of the land, the lakes and forests, is the same in Finland as where the Russian president grew up. Here is Mr. Putin with Sauli Niinistö, the Finnish president, on a boat tour when we saw them last summer. Saimaa, the name of the ship, is also the name of the lake:
There are many more photos from lovely Finland here, at EarthPhotos.com.
Can You Name a Country?
Any country. Just one. Please?
July 13, 2018
Weekend Reading…
… and comment.
First, a handful of suggestions for weekend reading from browsing the internet this week:
Is Fixing the Climate Incompatible with American Ideals? Inalienable rights in the age of carbon dioxide by Mark L. Hineline at Nautil.us
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me by M. H. Miller at The Baffler: “Now thirty years old, I have been incapacitated by debt for a decade. The delicate balancing act my family and I perform in order to make a payment each month has become the organizing principle of our lives.”
Brexit Blunder? by Peter Zeihan at RealClearWorld.com
Stuff you should know: The Entire History of Steel: From hunks of iron streaking through the sky, to the construction of skyscrapers and megastructures, this is the history of the world’s greatest alloy, by Jonathan Schifman in Popular Mechanics
‘They will die in Tallinn’: Estonia girds for war with Russia The head of the tiny NATO member’s special forces details his country’s preparations for a conflict many here see as inevitable by Molly K. McKew at Politico.eu
My wife’s native language, Finnish, is kin to Estonian, and I’m a big Estonia fan. Apart from whether NATO’s decision to embrace the three Baltic countries was wise, and I’m not expert enough to know, the idea that our American president might back away from a now-made commitment to pretty little brave Estonia drains my American can-do, freedom-defending spirit.
Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion by Jonathan Chait at New York Magazine. This is New York Magazine’s characterization of our president’s relationship with Russia, not mine. I’m no conspiracy theorist. It’s a long article, convincing if from nothing other than accretion.
These quotes come from a fellow non-conspiracist, Tom Nichols, in a review of Chait’s article titled What Jonathan Chait Gets Right About Trump and Russia at Politico:
“…if the Russians hadn’t zeroed in on Trump—a man whose venality, vanity and vulgarity are like a menu of recruitable weaknesses—they’d have been guilty of intelligence malpractice.””
“…the litany of direct and indirect contacts with the Kremlin exceeds all possible exculpatory explanations.”
“If Trump was in deep with the Russian criminal and financial worlds, the Russian intelligence services knew it, and so did Russia’s top spook, Putin. Trump must know this as well.”
“The key is to induce the target to do what you want without telling him to do it—to be a friend, helping out friends.””
“…there is no way to read Chait’s story—or to do any judicious review of Trump’s dealings with the Russians over years—and reach any other conclusion but that the Kremlin has damaging and deeply compromising knowledge about the president. Whether it is using such materials, and how, is a matter of legitimate argument. That such things exist, however, and that they seem to be preoccupying the president, should be obvious.”
•••••
While our leader rattles around the United Kingdom this weekend breaking China, official Finland has canceled valuable summer vacation time at beloved lakeside saunas (ours, below) to prepare for Monday’s Trump/Putin summit. Here is Reid Standish at Politico.eu, setting the stage – in English – from the Finnish perspective. Let us all enjoy a quiet weekend until Monday, when all eyes will be on Helsinki.
While we’re here, why not take a look at a little bit of Finland in Pictures, from EarthPhotos.com.
Cheers for now.
July 11, 2018
Really Very Sorry About All This
[image error]Oh my.
Prominent Tory ministers, a silver-haired cypher and a blustering Trumpy buffoon, resign to tilt at Brexit windmills. Government, as ever, in peril. Stay tuned on this.
Football team eliminated by second smallest team ever to contest World Cup final match.
Could things possibly get worse?
•••••
[image error]
•••••
Nice try. Cudda Wudda Shudda.
July 10, 2018
Quotes: Appeasing Our American President
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“If the Europeans parked a brand-new aircraft carrier off the coast of Mar-a-Lago and tossed the keys onto the 18th green, Trump would simply charge them greens fees.”
– from Trump’s meaningless NATO spending debate by Jeremy Shapiro at the European Council on Foreign Relations web site.
Welcome to the NATO summit and your U.K. holiday, Mr. President. Photo from The Guardian.
