Peter Nolan

Waghorne on Q&A

Richard appeared on Questions and Answers last night, this time on the panel rather than in the audience, which is probably the ultimate mark of distinction for Irish media people.  Seeing him square up with Labour's Michael D Higgins is particularly entertaining.

Reach out and touch someone

HSBC's motto, "The world's local bank" is turning out to be more appropriate than I might have wished.  For the last two weeks, I've been trying to open a simple business account for a limited company that I run at a city-centre branch of the bank.  The bank doesn't give phone numbers for its staff or branches.  The result is that every time that either they or I have a query, we have to go through the HSBC call centre, rather than contacting the business manager directly, meaning that I'll get a call back the next day, if I'm lucky.  To get any response, I have to take a ten minute tube journey and walk in to seek out the individual concerned in person.  The world is flat? Not with HSBC. 

Building on sand

The FT has been trying to get to grips with credit products in general and this week referenced a report from Creditflux, the bible in this part of the industry.  Don't try and look up the original article - subscriptions cost about eight hundred pounds a year. 

The nascent market in derivatives on the ABX Index, a basket of 25 large issues of bonds backed by US home equity loans (roughly equivalent to the non-conforming mortgage market in the UK) must be the Waziristan of the financial markets - an obscure and distant place where important events go on largely unreported.   However, the market is growing rapidly, one of a third generation of credit derivative products, the first being the single name default swaps and the second the products trading correlation  risk between credits, including baskets of the iTraxx and other credit indices.   

Hedge funds and other active players have been taking big bets against the US housing market using contracts on the ABX since this time last year, traders tell me, which now seem to be paying off. 
The US government statistics have shown the wilting of the US new home sales over the past six months.  The markets have taken note of the knock-on effects on US housebuilders and for the profits of HSBC.  However, the February CreditFlux headline "Liquidity Vanishes at ABX HE crumbles", puts some figures on the underlying market, with the ABX-1 for BBB mortgage backed securities now trading down some 10% from its initial level, equivalent to something over a 2.5% jump in yields for these bonds, depending on your assumption about their average life.  No doubt, this is a strong indication of further trouble to come for the consumer and the US economy as a whole. 

Monocle

Following the press coverage of Monocle in the papers this week, the new magazine appeared in newsagents yesterday.   I got a copy in  Liverpool Street station, appropriately enough, on my way to the Frontline Club to drop in my membership application form.  My first reactions, having read about a quarter of it, is that visually, it's much less impressive than I expected: The photos in the stories, like the one on the Japanese navy, are fairly humdrum - no action or no exotic and striking tableaux to catch the eye.  The most eye-catching things are the ads for luxury goods with which the magazine is packed. 

None of the news stories I've gone through so far seem very surprising - the cover-story on Japan shouldn't surprise anybody who reads the Economist, the NY Times or WSJ regularly in its account of Japan's quiet resurgance as a military power and the growing naval competition in Asia.  It seems to lack both the Steve Irwin factor ("Jesus, how the fuck did he not get killed?") and the writer's point of view that gives a spine to writing on current affairs. 

On the other hand, I was at a university reunion later in the evening and many of the ladies at least seem to have heard of the impending launch of the magazine - which surprised me.  The marketing buzz seems to have been handled well. 

Overall, I think that Charlie Baker's Diplo magazine looks and reads much better, in spite of being put together by students and impecunious freelancers in a hole in the wall off Greys Inn Road. it's monocle for grown-ups. 

More on the Irish academic boycott of Israel

Apartheid-era South Africa needed the black population to exploit the treasure chest of minerals and the country's agricultural land.  The Palestinians, as distinct from Israeli-Arabs, seem to no longer play a role at all in Israel's society or economy in this age of Chinese and Thai guest workers, apart from as suicide-bombers, hence the "apartheid" wall.  Two peoples, two states - why not?

Prof Asher Susser, who heads the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University has been criticising the comparison and the academic boycott mooted in a letter to the Irish Times signed by sixty-one academics.  These included TCD law lecturer, Senate candidate and Mary Robinson wannabe Ivana Bacik, known at Trinity as "Vlad the Impaler", one lecturer at UCC who was convicted of storing explosives for the IRA in England and some acquaintances of mine.  Notable by their absence was anybody with a professional specialisation in international relations or a publications record on the Middle East like, Rory Miller at KCL, Michael Cox or Fred Halliday at the LSE, Eunan O'Halpin at Trinity or others. 

"I was born in South Africa . I know what apartheid is. Israel is not an apartheid state. I lived in an apartheid state and left it because it was an apartheid state, as did many others. The comparison is either ignorant, propagandistic, or both combined."

Any attempt to equate the treatment of Palestinians by Israel with the position of black people under apartheid was completely misguided: "It is simply, absolutely incorrect. How come Palestinians in Israel are members of our parliament? How come they are professors in our universities? How come they are treated in the hospitals where everybody else is treated? If anybody knew a word about South Africa , that was never the case, ever, anywhere in South Africa . The whites and blacks didn't ride the same buses, didn't ride the same trains, didn't sit in the same theatres, couldn't sit on the same benches in the park."

By all means necessary

I've never been convinced that torture would be any use.  According to accounts I've read, like The Interrogators' War, by army interrogator Chris Mackey, Brainwash by Dominic Streatfield or Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine - baloney.  Added to this is the French experience, as related in Sir Alastair Horne's history of the Algerian War of Independence, A Savage War of Peace that I read last year.  Horne impresses on the reader that torture was used widely and at the discretion of French troops and police, but never proved effective at anything other than destroying the confidence of the French home front in the authorities; there's an online interview with him here.

Now, the American military and police leadership are worried that their troops are being sold on counterproductive brutality by the hit series 24.  According to this New Yorker story, the American military and the FBI seem increasingly uneasy with its storylines making the case for torture as a counter-terrorist tool - the constant ticking bomb scenarios, the effectiveness, proven again and again of pain, in producing, useful, accurate and timely information and the utility of drugs as truth serum. 

As one conservative TV writer says:

“Every American wishes we had someone out there quietly taking care of business,” he said. “It’s a deep, dark ugly world out there. Maybe this is what Ollie North was trying to do. It would be nice to have a secret government that can get the answers and take care of business—even kill people. Jack Bauer fulfills that fantasy.”

The show's main writer is a leathery conservative in an overwhelmingly liberal industry:

Surnow said that he found the Clinton years obnoxious. “Hollywood under Clinton—it was like he was their guy,” he said. “He was the yuppie, baby-boomer narcissist that all of Hollywood related to.” During those years, Surnow recalled, he had countless arguments with liberal colleagues, some of whom stopped speaking to him. “My feeling is that the liberals’ ideas are wrong,” he said. “But they think I’m evil.”

Orange and Green

Easyjet CEO Andy Harrison was also making some good points in an opinion piece in today's FT on the recent rise in air ticket taxes levied by the UK in this year's budget, namely that the carbon costs are now much smaller than the tax collected through APD.  The emissions may not be the only negative externality of the airline industry - I live directly under the flight path to City airpoort, but both the small cost of the emissions and the tiny proportion of the total greenhouse gases they account for would both push air travel far down the list of priorities for action against climate change. 

A poor example is the £2.4bn (€3.6bn) that the UK government collects annually from air passenger duty. APD provides no incentive for airlines to operate the cleanest aircraft; it completely omits air freight and private jets; the proceeds are not allocated to any scheme to improve the environment; and it is disproportionate – on a UK domestic return flight, the £20 APD is now 25 per cent of the average fare and about 10 times the cost of offsetting the carbon emitted on an EasyJet flight.

What Tyler did next...

If you're the kind of cool metrosexual who insists on going to Reykjavik for the weekend to buy new shoelaces, you probably already read the design bible Wallpaper*.  Now,the Canadian wunderkind Tyler Brûlé is shortly to launch a brand new monthly news magazine called Monocle.

According to profiles in the Observer and the Monday Media Guardian, he's keen to avoid being tied down by any requirement to regurgitate the news as the Economist and others do. Also a no-no for him is what he alleges is competitors' over-reliance on PR copy. Instead, he offers in-depth journalism and coffee table book-quality photojournalism, as in their first cover story on Japan's growing naval power: "It's a great piece of geo-political analysis and it's also an outtanding piece of reportage."

The Wallpaper* style comes through again in the photos - "I don't care if it's a man or a woman reader, sometimes people want to see a picture of a warship or a handsome looking helicopter" - and the design and volume of a coffee table book, crammed with luxury goods advertising, all for a steep five pounds an issue.

I'm keen to see someone try to take on and beat the Americans - Vanity Fair, The Atlantic and The New Yorker - at the magazine game. If nothing else, I myself would be delighted to have a magazine that will last me longer than a restaurant dinner, the curse, I regret to say, of being a very fast reader.

The Pursuit of Happiness

"For only now", (He is talking about the Inquisition, of course), "has it become possible to think for the first time about people's happiness. Man is constitued as a mutineer; Can mutineers ever be happy?"

The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, Chapter 5, "The Grand Inquisitor"

The modern version of the Grand Inquisitor's concern with men's souls is more ridiculous vacuity than sinister fundamentalism, Toby Young finds in this week's Spectator, where he observes a class in happiness at a public school:

Listening to the various speakers at the one-day conference, it soon became clear that their purpose is both more high-minded — and less objective — than the word ‘Happiness’ implies. They are not simply advocating that children should be given the skills ‘to pursue their own good in their own way’, to use John Stuart Mill’s famous phrase. Rather, they have a very clear idea of what the good life consists of — and it doesn’t include drugs, alcohol, television, video games or high-tech consumer goods like iPods and Sony PlayStations. Rather, their notion of ‘Happiness’ is closer to what Socrates called eudaimonia — a state of profound emotional and intellectual fulfilment that stems from living a meaningful life.

He thinks that the field could benefit, as we all might, from some deeper thinking:

My own feeling is that, far from having some sinister, totalitarian agenda, the advocates of ‘Happiness Classes’ aren’t nearly ambitious enough. Clearly, part of the appeal of this approach to liberal intellectuals is that it manages to go a little further than PSHE in terms of teaching children fundamental values without breaching the sacred taboos of multiculturalism. Martin Seligman, the intellectual founder of the ‘well-being’ movement, is on record as saying that both the terrorists who blew up the Twin Towers and the firefighters who died trying to save people from the collapsing buildings led ‘meaningful lives’. In other words, ‘Positive Psychology’ is, at its core, a relativist doctrine — and the same goes for the ‘Happiness’ cult.

By their fruits shall ye know them

Via Harry's Place, I note that Dublin-based Imam Shaheed Satardienon, originally from South Africa, but now preaching to a congregation in the city is not performing the dog-ate-my-homework contortions of the Muslim Council of Britain, judging by an unusually frank and comprehensive statement to mark Holocaust Memorial  Day, including this reference to the behaviour of Arab leaders, including Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj al-Amin, during WW2:

It is sad to discover that although the majority of Muslims involved in WWII fought with the allies against the axis powers, there was collusion between a hand-full of prominent but unrepresentative Muslim clerics with the Nazi regime.

The Observer's Henry MacDonald gave more background on the Imam in an article in January. 

Satardien fell out with the main Dublin mosque at Clonskeagh, singling out the influence of Yusuf al-Qaradawi, an Egyptian born sheikh who has spoken openly in support of suicide bombers and issued fatwas on gays.

According to Satardien, al-Qaradawi's European headquarters is based at the Clonskeagh mosque in south Dublin. Its own website refers to al-Qaradawi and to Clonskeagh as the headquarters of the sheikh's European Council for Fatwa and Research. The authorities at the Clonskeagh mosque and at the South Circular Road mosque, the other main establishment in Dublin, angrily deny the extremist accusation. They point out that these mosques attract thousands of mainstream Muslims to their doors each week.

Satardien, however, is adamant that extremist Wahhabi sects have infiltrated the republic's 40,000-strong Muslim community, especially in Dublin. 'Young, impressionable Muslims in Ireland are being raised to think that suicide bombers are cool. I know for a fact that when the Americans killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi [al-Qaeda's leader in Iraq who died after an airstrike in June last year] there were prayers for him in this city. This was for a man who slaughtered other Muslims. What I am trying to do is convince the young people that such practices are un-Islamic, that there is another way,' he says.

A big open question is what role the organisation Qaradawi leads, the Muslim Brotherhood, plays in Ireland.  Given the Brotherhood's open role in terrorism in Israel - through its branch there, Hamas - in the violent insurrection in Syria in the eighties and earlier against the Egyptian government of Nasser - there's no question that it's extreme in its aims and perfectly willing to use violence, whether against outsiders or other Arab Muslims.  So much so that, according to Foreign Office
memos leaked to the New Statesman's political editor Martin Bright, British diplomats, in spite of the Camel Corp stereotype, see no realistic possibility of talking to the Brotherhood.given the lack of common ground and its imperviousness to reason.   All in all, the Brotherhood seems to be the same as same as Opus Dei is unfairly portrayed by Dan Brown in the Da Vinci Code, a power-hungry group of fanatics who place no value on human life in their quest for power.  Shouldn't somebody be doing some checking in Dublin?