Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The previous two posts may seem an exercise in pedantry: so what if Britain is less dependent on Gazprom than Germany or Poland now? Shouldn’t we look beyond 2016 – beyond 2020, even – to a time when Gazprom becomes the…
A follow-up to Thursday’s post on Gazprom and the UK. Reuters sounded alarmist when it reported in 2015: Russia provides around 30 percent of the EU’s gas and a single supply deal signed last year by Britain’s biggest energy supplier Centrica meant…
Amber Rudd, the UK energy secretary, is expected to offer these arguments against Brexit: Relying on energy from abroad is not without risk. We have seen how countries such as Putin’s Russia use their gas supplies as a tool of…
George Soros talks sense… Putin is a gifted tactician, but not a strategic thinker. There is no reason to believe that he intervened in Syria in order to aggravate the European refugee crisis. Indeed, his intervention was a strategic blunder,…
For those willing to read beyond the first paragraph, S&P provided a detailed list of Poland’s fiscal risks in their downgrade note (linked by Puls Biznesu). The nationalists’ fiscal preferences have already begun to show, according to Moody’s: Moody’s has warned that Poland’s incoming bank tax threatens…
There has been much wailing from certain quarters that S&P’s January 15 downgrade of Polish foreign-currency debt from A- to BBB+ was motivated by “politics” and had nothing to do with Poland’s economy. This argument does not make sense, and…
When I got back to Moscow after the winter vacation earlier this January, one of the first things I had heard (on the boring but, at least, non-government-owned FM station that pretends to focus on “business” but mostly babbles amateurishly about financial…
To follow up on Commissioner Muižnieks’ statements, let’s focus on the EU and imagine it were a super-state settling refugees based on the availability of land, without regard to their wishes and to those of the natives. A natural approach would be…
Nils Muižnieks is the Council of Europe Commissioner of Human Rights. (The CoE is not a EU body; it includes all states at least partly located in Europe, except Belarus.) He has written extensively on Europe’s obligation to accommodate refugees…
I don’t know much about psychoanalysis. One thing I do know now is that, practised outside of the doctor’s office, it turns into quackery — as a rule. Psychoanalytical studies of fiction often read like ravings of a mental patient.…
A Russian LJ user whose nick I don’t remember has drawn the public’s eye to the anthem of Andorra. Its text is a short poem in Catalan coming as it were from the mouth of Andorra herself, an ever-young princess…
As one Russian LiveJournal blogger remarked, if David Irving deserves three years in jail, Anatoly T. Fomenko deserves the firing squad. Fomenko, a member of the Russian Academy of Science, is a distinguished mathematician with an all too avid interest…