Monday 28 February 2011

DANISH OSCARS

Denmark won the Oscar for best foreign film at the awards ceremony last night. It was the third time that a Danish film had won, after "Babette's Feast" in 1987, and "Pelle the Conqueror" in 1988. Congratulations to Susanne Bier, who has made a string of good films in recent years, notably "Brothers" in 2004 and "After the Wedding" in 2006.

One oddity was that the English name of the film has been changed from "Hævnen" (literally "the Revenge") to "In a Better World". Distributors often do that with Scandinavian films, for reasons that I don't understand. The wildly popular Stieg Larsson book and film "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" is in fact titled "Men who Hate Women" in both Danish and the original Swedish. I don't know why the name was changed, when they translated them into English.

I repeat my comment from last year's Oscars, namely that it is extraordinary how few people who are professional actors (Colin Firth a notable exception) can give a simple speech, even when they know that they may be called on to give one if picked as the winner. The organisers apparently asked this year's winners to cut down on thanking Uncle Tom Cobbley and All, since it puts off viewers, who don't know who these people are. Natalie Portman had obviously not listened, since I was one of the few people on this planet whom she didn't thank for her Best Actress award.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 27 February 2011

DANISH HEALTHCARE

Denmark has an admirable public health system. Pretty much everything is free (even dentistry is subsidised), and you have the right to have an operation in the private sector, at the state's expense, if the state can't deal with you within one month. That's probably about as good a deal as you can get in this world.

Yet the inexorable demographic trends of longer life, fewer babies and consequential increased dependency ratios affect this small, northern European country just like anywhere else. And that in turn has led to the beginnings, faint though noticeable because of their novelty, of a debate about priorities. Is it really such a good idea to carry out so many fat removal operations, for instance, particularly on young people, shouldn't they simply be told to cut out the sugar? Is it really such a good idea to provide respirators + care at home, when it would be much, much cheaper to look after such people in care homes? And so on and so forth.

In my view, the debate about the quality of old age is going to be one of the biggest, if not the biggest, issue in western politics during the next twenty years. Living to 90 is fine, if your physical and mental faculties are OK, you have a modest amount of money to pay your bills, and you have some form of social network. If these things are not around, then living to 90 is probably pretty miserable. What the Danish debate about healthcare (and its sister debate about old people's homes, also mainly stated funded) ultimately shows is that a large part of the current infrastructure needed to support old people may not be there in the future. Forging a consensus about what should or should not be part of the state-provided package will be the great challenge for politicians, mindful of the fact that pensioners are the most assiduous voter group of all.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 26 February 2011

THE EUROVISION SONG CONTEST (2)

Tonight was the contest to choose the Danish song for the Eurovision song contest.

I have to say that nearly all of the ten songs were dire. I only liked one, which came second. The girl sounded just like Taylor Swift, who I think is great. My 16-year old daughter says I have terrible taste in music, since I have admitted to liking P!nk, Shakira and now Taylor Swift. I don't care.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 25 February 2011

WRITTEN EXAMS

The head of England's exams watchdog has just said that pen and paper exams should increasingly be replaced by computerised tests. These are currently available only in a few papers.

I agree. I completed an English law degree during the noughties, and the exams consisted of nine 3-hour papers, all written in longhand. Since I rarely write anything longer than a Christmas card these days - and precious few of those - it was the physical act of writing that I found the most difficult part of the whole course. My wrist ached after each paper.

If the above applies to old fogies like me, then it applies in spades to the current generation of children, who learn to type almost before they can write. That is no bad thing, but the English obsession with pen and paper is increasingly old-fashioned. In Denmark, not only all schoolwork, but also the exams themselves, are done on computers. Indeed, a fair number of the exams are oral, even in supposedly "non-oral" subjects such as mathematics and physics.

It would be good to see more of that sort of balanced exam structure in the U.K. After all, what is the point of testing people's ability to write for 3 hours in longhand, if they never, ever have to do a similar thing for the rest of their lives?

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 24 February 2011

BIG LORRIES

Under normal E.U. rules, lorries (including their cargo) can weigh a maximum of 44 tonnes, either in the form of a truck and trailer or a "horse" and semi-trailer. The maximum lengths are 18.75m and 16.5m respectively, and in both cases there are usually six axles. In sparsely populated Finland and Sweden, however, they have long used - and, since 1996, have been allowed to run - truck and semi-trailer EuroCombi combinations reaching up to 25.25m and weighing up to 60 tonnes, usually with eight or nine axles. Securing the exemption from the E.U. was a crucial demand of these countries' important forestry and paper industries, which required transport of large numbers of long trees.

Since modern diesel engines are so powerful, a lorry can today pull 60 tonnes almost as easily as 44 tonnes, so using EuroCombi variants significantly reduces driver and fuel costs, and emissions, per tonne. Furthermore, the key determinant of wear and tear on the roads is not total weight, but weight per axle. In general, spreading 60 tonnes over 9 axles has roughly the same effect on the road as 44 tonnes spread over 6 axles.

With the question of carbon emissions increasingly in Governments' minds, and much of that carbon coming from lorries, more and more countries have begun to experiment with EuroCombi variants. Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, as well as non-E.U. Norway, all allow the bigger lorries, though only on certain routes. Generally, these are the motorway network, plus access roads to major freight terminals. The results of these trials will inform politicians' willingness to extend the scope of EuroCombi lorries.

A lot of people get hot under the collar about big lorries, but in the absence of alternatives (eg we ship much more by rail, which is unlikely to happen), the transport and environmental benefits are, to my mind, compelling. I suspect we'll see more and more big lorries in the future.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 23 February 2011

KARL-THEODOR zu GUTTENBERG

Karl-Theodor, Baron of Guttenberg, is the rising star of German politics. Still not yet 40, he is Defence Minister in Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition Government, and the future hope for the Chancellorship of the CSU, the Bavarian sister party to Ms. Merkel's CDU. He is easily Germany's most popular politician.

Yet he has just run into the sort of problem, that only seems to hit politicians with meteoric career paths. In 2007 Herr zu Guttenberg added to his many personal names the title of Doctor, after completing a PhD in law at Bayreuth University. However, it has emerged during the past week that he in fact copied parts of his thesis. This is in principle ok, if you make it very clear that it is not your own work, and give a clear attribution of the source. This did not happen. On 18 February, Herr zu Guttenberg said he would temporarily stop using his doctor title; on 21 February he said he would no longer use it; today, following an investigation, the university revoked the degree, citing "extensive violations" of its rules against plagiarism.

The affair has not - or, at least, not yet - affected his popularity with voters. But it has put Ms. Merkel in a very difficult position. On the one hand, she runs a Government short on star quality. On the other, she is having to defend someone whose "summa cum laude" (the top grade) thesis turned out to be partly or mostly the work of others. As more and more outsiders pick over the 400-page work on EU-US constitutional history, and the number of discovered plagiarisms rises, the pressure will be on to find a way out. My guess is that Herr zu Guttenberg will resign from his job "for personal reasons" before the summer holidays.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 22 February 2011

BMI

Your body mass index is a relationship between your height and your weight. To be precise, it is your weight in kg, divided by the square of your height in m (i.e. bmi = w/h^2).

If your BMI is under 18.5, then you are underweight, and if it is 25 or more, then you are overweight. I have never had any problem with the former, it is the latter I have to watch. Since my height of 1.8m is highly unlikely to change from now on, I can work out my maximum weight limit, if I want to have a normal weight. That is 25 x 1.8. x 1.8 or 81kg.

I have struggled to stay within this at times. The good news is that the past week's flu episodes completely took away my appetite, so that I am now safely within the normal band again. All I have to do now is stay there.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 21 February 2011

CHRISTIANIA

Christiania is a 34-hectare site on the island of Christianshavn, not much more than a stone's throw from the city centre of Copenhagen. It used to house military barracks and laboratories, from the time when it was a key part of the defensive ring around the city; but these were gradually abandoned during the late 1960's. In 1971, inhabitants of the surrounding area broke down the fencing, and occupied the area as squatters. Most of them haven't moved out since.

Christiania quickly attracted, and obtained a reputation for, a hippie lifestyle. A communal structure was established, which included a separate currency. Cannabis use was widespread, even though it is illegal elsewhere in the country (though internal rules forbid the use of hard drugs). No cars are allowed within the site. Houses, some of them architecturally terrific, were created by the residents, albeit without planning permission. All of this was tolerated, encouraged even, by the authorities, as a way of giving an outlet to such feelings and a place where otherwise socially deprived people (drug addicts, Greenlanders, the homeless, the unemployed) could thrive. In 1989 a special law took the area away from the city of Copenhagen and put it under the direct authority of the state.

To my mind, Christiania is a harmless, yet rather interesting, experiment in urban culture. It is a real community, and it attracts a lot of tourists. However, in the noughties, it fell foul of the minority right-of-centre coalition Government's passion for law and order, and in particular the demand from the supportive, yet very right-wing, Danish People's Party that the area should be cleaned up. In 2004, they passed a law abolishing the collective, and treating the 850 or so members as individuals. The police began to crack down on the hash trade, with various attempts at eviction, though none succeeded.

The other attack from the Government was through the courts. The 2004 law made it clear that the state owned all of the land; and the Supreme Court has (not surprisingly) just endorsed that view. There is now talk of forcing long-term residents out, if they don't buy their properties or otherwise contribute. The DPP believes, again not surprisingly, that that should be at a market price, which would be very expensive, given the proximity to the city centre. Illegally built houses would be demolished.

A compromise of some sort seems likely, but it will still be a sad end. The whole point of Christiania was that it didn't want to compromise with the ordinary rules of society. The fact that a small, rich country of 5.5 million people and lots of land can't find space for 850 folk with an alternative view is rather depressing. Particularly when they have been there for nigh on 40 years.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 20 February 2011

GOODY GOODY GUMDROPS (2)

One advantage of being ill is that I have absolutely no guilt feelings about watching vast quantities of Premier League and FA Cup football on our new 40-inch flat-screen television, which gives fantastic colour pictures. And since my wife is in the U.K., I don't have to bat away any "haven't you got anything better to do?" comments.

I am currently watching Leyton-Orient v. Arsenal. Typical cup football, played at 100mph. But exciting.

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 19 February 2011

FLU (2)

I had a terrible night the night before last, but it got materially worse last night.

I drove my wife to Billund Airport, since she is spending a few days visiting a friend in the U.K. On the way back, the car broke down. I think the alternator has packed up, anyway the electrics were completely gone.

It happened in the middle of nowhere. Fortunately, two of my four brothers-in-law live not far away, so I rang them to ask for help. The first was willing, until he told me that he was on a skiing holiday in Austria. The second came and collected me, and he towed my car the 15 or so km to his house.

The problem was that it is currently minus 10-12 degrees at night in Denmark at the moment (not as bad as the minus 42 degrees in Northern Norway, but that cold front is what is affecting us). So I had to wait in the car for an hour with very few clothes on. My flu went from bad to terrible, and is now better described as bronchitis.

Still, every cloud has a siver lining. My sister-in-law normally has to watch X-Factor on her own on Friday nights, since her husband is not remotely interested. This time she tucked me up on the sofa with a big duvet and a hot cup of tea, so that we could enjoy it together.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 18 February 2011

PLUMBING AND FLU

Yesterday I changed the U-bend on the sink in the bathroom. I don't know what the part is called in English; in Danish it's a "pungvandlåse".

Yesterday I also went down with flu. I had a terrible night, and was moaning so much, my wife had to leave and go and sleep elsewhere.

The thought that struck me this morning was whether I went down with flu because I had changed the U-bend. I'll think about that while I stay in bed.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 17 February 2011

BELGIUM

Belgium has just set what is believed to be a world record, namely 249 days without an agreement to form a Government. They took the record from Iraq, which prevaricated for most of last year as well. Iraq's agreement had to wait a further 40 days to get official approval, so perhaps Belgium hasn't got the record yet. However, judging from the remarks of the king's official mediator, who resigned recently after failing to achieve a breakthrough, no agreement is likely to turn up soon. I think the odds are still with Belgium.

I like Belgium. I lived in Brussels for 6 months in the mid-1980's, and met my wife there. People were very disparaging about Brussels, comparing it unfavourably with Paris, Amsterdam and Cologne. I couldn't understand why they were so hostile.

There was Governmental paralysis back in the mid-1980's, so not much has changed in 25 years. Perhaps Belgium doesn't really need a Government. If true, that would be a record worth holding.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 16 February 2011

VOTES FOR PRISONERS

The British House of Commons last week voted to continue the blanket ban on prisoners voting in elections. Although the decision is not binding, it was a bad move, for two reasons.

Before giving those reasons, a bit of history. The ban is the result of two longstanding ideas. The first is that under the common law, perpetrators of serious crimes (called "felonies", as opposed to "misdemeanours") were not only subject to personal punishment, usually death, but also forfeited their land and other assets to the state. The second is that the development of the right to vote in the United Kingdom was closely related to how much property you owned. Putting those two ideas together eventually resulted in the legislation which prevents prisoners from voting. This remains the case today, even though there is now no distinction between felonies and misdemeanours, and there is universal suffrage for everyone over the age of 18. In the United States, which has the same common law tradition, and where there is still a distinction between felonies and misdemeanours, felons in some states are not only banned from voting while they are in prison, but for life.

The more recent history is that in 2005, this blanket ban was rejected by the European Court of Human Rights in an appeal by a convicted killer, John Hirst. The right to be able to participate in free and fair elections is not an absolute one, and can be restricted if there is a genuine societal aim and the restriction is a proportionate response in order to further that aim. But the court decided that a blanket ban affecting all prisoners under a wide variety of circumstances did not meet this test. Under the rules of the court, the relevant Government losing such a case must enforce the decision. However, the then Labour Government prevaricated, and did nothing. Last June, the Council of Europe urged the new coalition Government to rectify the situation. Again, though, nothing has been done. After last week's vote, it is less likely that something will be done.

Now the two reasons. The first is that banning prisoners from voting does nothing to enhance their sense of belonging to society. Everybody who deals with prisoners - the police, prison guards, rehabilitation charities, prison priests - says that it makes their job of rehabilitation more difficult. It also adversely affects young men and ethnic minorities, since they are disproportionately represented within the prison population. Yet they are also two groups, where you would wish to increase their sense of civic responsibility. Other countries (eg Denmark) place no restrictions on prisoners' voting without discernible problems. Indeed, Ireland, which used to have the same ban as the U.K., dropped it a couple of years ago, following the Hirst judgment.

The second is that the European Convention on Human Rights is not only a "good thing" in itself, but a legal obligation enshrined in domestic law. Not enforcing the judgment leaves the Government open to compensation claims from affected prisoners and/or possible suspension by the Council of Europe (leaving the country in the sole European company of Belarus). More fundamentally, it is not a good thing, if a Government does not uphold its legal obligations.

The Commons vote, which is widely popular, is part of a more general movement in the U.K. to ditch the ECHR. The convention was in fact largely drafted by British lawyers after the second world war, and the U.K. was the first country to ratify it. It was happy to do so, since the convention was widely viewed at the time as a "lowest common denominator" document, unnecessary in the U.K., whose citizens were fully protected by the magnificent common law (one reason why British citizens were not allowed to appeal to the court in Strasbourg until 1966). Yet Britain does not in fact have a great record with respect to the ECHR, as the common law keeps on being found to have gaps in it. Examples include the treatment of IRA prisoners, the automatic life sentence for murder, and phone tapping (the famous case of Malone, where the courts were appalled to discover that decisions about phone tapping were taken by a functionary in the Post Office!). One of the most active pressure groups for formally incorporating the ECHR into British law were the judges, who were increasingly annoyed at having to give common law judgments that they knew would be subsequently overturned in Strasbourg.

The Human Rights Act, which incorporates the convention, says that British courts must "take into account" the decisions and jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights. What does that mean? Well, if the judgment is clear - as the Hirst judgment was - it means that they have to enforce it. Members of Parliament active in last week's debate seem to believe that the convention is a sort of a la carte menu, that signatory countries can dip into as and when they like. It is not. The whole point about signing up to such a thing is that it binds a country to the court's decisions, even if some of those decisions make for uncomfortable reading.

As with other matters European, the U.K. is making a bit of a mess of things.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 15 February 2011

QUANTITATIVE EASING

Quantitative easing is all the rage at the moment. But what exactly is it?

Before answering the question, it is worth remembering that central banks are not supposed to finance a Government's budget deficit, and in some cases are prevented by law from doing so. Such financing is called "printing money", and is a bad thing, since it increases the money supply and eventually leads to inflation. Governments are instead supposed to finance their deficits by issuing bonds (Treasury Bills, gilts etc) to the general public. When I lived in Tanzania, the Government had a perennial deficit, and no means of issuing bonds. Aid flows filled part of the gap; but the rest was financed by the central bank. This policy of necessity duly led to repeated tut-tutting and finger-wagging in the annual IMF reports.

OK, back to QE. Since Governments in the rich world are all currently running huge budget deficits, their economies' demand management cannot be boosted by fiscal policy. That leaves monetary policy, which is generally in the hands of the country's central bank. The main tool in their toolbox is control of the short-term interest rate (eg the "Fed funds rate") at which they lend to the financial system; by reducing that rate, they can boost liquidity and thereby demand. However, the tool has two problems associated with it. First, short-tem interest rates are almost zero already, so there is little or no scope for further reduction. Secondly, the tool has been likened to a string. It is easy to tighten the string when inflation is sprouting, since if the financial system has to borrow at higher rates from the central bank, then it will automatically raise its rates to its own end-customers (otherwise it starts making losses). But the converse is not true. If the central bank reduces its rate, then the financial system may or may not reduce its rates to its end-customers. It may well in fact say "thank you very much" and do nothing, preferring instead the higher interest rate margin (i.e. increased profits). There is quite a lot of evidence that that is exactly what has been happening recently.

So, with only a blunt tool in the toolbox, central banks have been looking around for something else. In comes QE. Under QE the central bank bypasses the financial system and buys Government bonds directly in the market place. Since demand for those bonds has now risen, their price will rise; which means (this being bonds) that their yield will fall. Which in turn will lead to falls in all bonds, which are generally priced to yield the Government bond rate plus a risk factor. By purchasing bonds in this way, the central bank has managed to reduce the economy's long-term interest rates, which should in turn stimulate demand.

Hang on a second. If the bonds were first issued to finance a Government budget deficit, and the central bank pays for these bonds by creating money (which it does), isn't the QE mechanism merely a 2-stage version of the "printing money" scenario outlined above, and therefore also a bad thing? There is one difference, in that under QE, the central bank can in theory sell the bonds back to the market at a later stage. But that effect is in the future; surely the current effect under the two mechanisms is the same?

Plenty of clever people seem to think exactly that. They incude Axel Weber, the head of the German Bundesbank and the front-runner to succeed Jean-Claude Trichet as head of the European Central Bank, when the latter steps down later this year. Mr. Weber has publicly criticised the ECB's decision to buy Greek and Portugese bonds in the market place, an action which is the European version of QE. Since European Governments have just agreed a Euro500 billion permanent bail-out, which will be used to do more of precisely that sort of thing, his views were at odds with the politicians'; following a meeting with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, it was announced last week that he would be stepping down from the Bundesbank at the end of April for "personal reasons". But Mr. Weber is not the only German who thinks this way; ex-Finance Minister Peter Steinbrück ruled himself out of the ECB job for exactly the same reason.

The differences between QE (good) and printing money (bad) remind me of the "angels dancing on the pin of a needle" arguments. The fact that politicians and otherwise sober central bankers feel compelled to try and emphasise them merely confirms that the world's rich economies are in a very deep hole indeed.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 14 February 2011

GOODY GOODY GUMDROPS

My wife inherited some money over Christmas, and today she went out to spend part of it.

The good news is that she decided to buy a 40 inch Samsung flat-screen television. The even better news is that it will be installed in the room, where we have access to 40 or so TV channels through the fibre optic cable. So I will be able to watch the Australian Open, Premier League, world ice hockey championships and much, much more in great clarity.

I am one happy bunny!

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 13 February 2011

BRIDGE (3)

I played in another bridge tournament today, with the same format as in the first one. We came third in our group in the morning session, which meant that we were in the top division when it came to the afternoon session.

We started dreadfully, scoring -10 on the first three hands (scoring is from -15 to +15, so our opponents in this round got +10). But we bounced back immediately with a +13 in the next round; and after 4 rounds out of 11, we were lying second. I then made a complete blunder. Finding myself in a 3 no trump contract with lots of misfitting suits, I ended up in dummy with 8 tricks in the bag and the winning king of hearts on the table. All I had to do was cash it, and make my game. But I was greedy, and misremembered the distribution. I thought I could end-play my opponent in clubs, so he would then give me two tricks in hearts to my king-jack instead of one. But he switched to a spade I was "sure" he didn't have and I went down. My partner raised his eyes in horror, since that single mistake cost us 7 points (-4 instead of +3).

After the afternoon coffee break (complete with very nice jam tart) we kept on nudging upwards, and by the beginning of the last round were lying fourth. The second and third placed pairs had to play each other, so there was a chance that they could cancel each other out and we could leapfrog up to second place. In fact, it was +2 to the second placed team, who ended on 26 points; we got +5 but that only took us up to 23.

What nobody expected was that the leading pair (they who had beaten us in round 1) had a complete meltdown and scored -13 on the round, dropping to fourth. Which meant that we ended up second overall, thereby winning three very nice bottles of wine.

I was left to rue the fact that if I had cashed my king of hearts, then we would have won the whole tournament by 4 points. Grrr!

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 12 February 2011

A FUNERAL

I went to a funeral this morning. It was not someone I knew particularly well - the mother of my wife's childhood friend - but I know the daughter well, and went for her sake.

I haven't been to many funerals in my life. Three of my grandparents, the obvious candidates, died before I was born, and the fourth when I was five; and I grew up without aunts and uncles. My father died when I was young, but I was only two. And a good schoolfriend died in a car crash when I was about eighteen; but I was at school in France at the time, and so wasn't around.

So my first ever funeral was that of my elder brother, who sadly died of a brain tumour in 2002 when he was 45 and I was 42. Since then, I have been to that of my father-in-law, my stepfather, and a couple of local people. Not many, really; though I suspect that will gradually change from now on.

When we lived in Tanzania, there were funerals all the time. It was a real problem, and not just because many of them were of relatively young people felled by Aids. The problem is caused by the expense, since the body must be transfered to the home village, which might be 2,000km away from Dar es Salaam, and the deceased's relatives must pay to get people home and to feed everybody who turns up. I have read that in South Africa, it is now possible to buy funeral insurance to cover the cost, which is a welcome development.

Despite, or perhaps because of, their greater experience of death, I think that Africans handle it much better. A European funeral - as, indeed, it was this morning - is sober and dignified, with much of it held in silence. An African funeral, on the other hand, is colourful and vibrant, with a lot of wailing and laughing and general chaos. Perhaps that is how it used to be in Europe, before we were taught to hide our feelings. If so, I think it would be a good idea if we went back to it. Death is a part of life, after all.

Walter Blotscher

Friday 11 February 2011

ARAB DEMOCRACY (2)

In the end, he went. Having said as recently as last night, in a televised address to the nation, that he would not resign, Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak did just that this evening. Cairo is now one big party city.

However, to use a well-worn phrase, this is not the end, but the end of the beginning. What happens next is still very unclear. Mubarak handed over power to the armed forces high command, not his newly installed vice-President, or any other civilian. What the army does with that power is an open question, which presumably will not be answered for some time.

The demonstrators have won the first round. We should not underestimate the size of that victory, but neither should we underestimate how much more change there still needs to be before Egypt can be declared a democracy.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 10 February 2011

MARKING SYSTEMS

Until recently, Denmark had a system for marking academic work (in schools, universities and so on), which my mathematically trained brain thought was bizarre. Here it is in full, from bottom to top.

00, 03, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13

6 was a pass, given for "unsure, but acceptable, performance".

Although Danes had no difficulty in using and understanding this system, there were nevertheless a number of problems with it. One was that in an increasingly international academic world, which the Danish authorities wanted to tap into, nobody outside the country understood it. Another was that it was extremely hard to get a 13, not least because the work had to be exceptional, original even. In some subjects (eg mathematics), that is simply not possible, at least until you get beyond Ph.D level.

So, in 2007, the system was changed. Did they go for an A to E system, as in the U.K.; or percentages, from 0 to 100; or 1 to 10; or something similar? No. Again, I set it out in full, from bottom to top.

-3, 00, 02, 4, 7, 10, 12

02 is a pass, so it is a bit like the A to E system (A being 12), plus two types of fail. In which case, why not just adopt that? And what on earth is the point of having a grade with a negative number? Danes don't appear to have any problems with the new system, but I am not sure that the rest of the world will get it so easily.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 9 February 2011

ENGLAND v. DENMARK

England played Denmark in a friendly football match in Copenhagen this evening. England managed to win 2-1 without - paradoxically perhaps - managing to look either stretched or the better side. I suppose that that is the whole point with friendly games, they are just too friendly.

On the England side, Theo Walcott confirmed why he should have been taken to last summer's World Cup, and Darren Bent was muscular up-front. On the negative side, John Terry is looking a bit long in the tooth these days, and Michael Dawson seemed out of his depth. For Denmark, Christian Poulsen is past it in my view, while Christian Eriksen, 19 next week, looks like a great talent in the making.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 8 February 2011

FRU RASMUSSEN (2)

My wife told me last night that Kromand (literally "Inn-man"), Fru Rasmussen's husband, has died. That is not so surprising, since he was over 90, and they were very much a team. The inn has continued since her death last year, but it was always going to be a matter of time.

The question now is; what happens to the kro? The Rasmussens had run the hotel and restaurant since just after the second world war; and their children, who must be close to, if not of, pensionable age, don't want to continue it. I suppose that they will try and sell it. But running such an institution is difficult in rural Denmark, and it only worked before because the building was fully paid off long ago.

What happens to the kro will give a good indication of the health of rural businesses in these straightened times. Sadly, I think that indication will be negative.

Walter Blotscher

Monday 7 February 2011

ARAB DEMOCRACY

Are we seeing a tipping point with democracy in the Arab world, a bit like what happened to the communist countries of Eastern Europe? For many years, it seems impossible to imagine that the situation will change. Then, suddenly, cracks appear in the wall, both literally and figuratively. And then it seems impossible to imagine how it used to be.

At a time when Egypt might go one way or the other, I would say no, for two reasons. First, unlike with the Sovet Union under communism, there is no one monolithic force keeping Arab populations repressed. Arab rulers may all be strongmen, if not dictators. But the forces keeping them in power vary hugely from country to country. Some of those strongmen (eg in Tunisia) may be swept away, some may survive. Indeed, the ones that survive are those most likely to adapt. Recent events have given them a huge wake-up call, and there is still time for them to turn that to their own advantage.

Secondly, again unlike events in Eastern Europe, the Western powers (i.e. the United States) are not actively egging on the insurgents from the sidelines. It was clear in 1989 that if communism fell, what replaced it would be welcome to the West. That is not so clear today. In particular, it is not clear that free and fair elections in Arab countries would automatically produce a regime to the West's liking. Moderate, or even radical, Islamists might come to power, and then what?

This concern is reinforced by the politics of one particular Arab country, namely the fledgling Palestinian state. It too is being repressed by a strongman regime, namely Israel; and illegitimately to boot. If Arab populations really got the idea that peaceful mass demonstrations could bring about meaningful change in their political circumstances, then what would that mean for the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? No wonder the Americans are struggling to find the words to describe and influence events in Egypt, and to coax them in the right direction.

Walter Blotscher

Sunday 6 February 2011

FLOODING

The ground has thawed for the first time since the beginning of November. And that means lots of water, not just from our property but from all the fields up the hill from us. The area around the compost heap is a lake, the back lawn is very soggy indeed, and the orchard is looking rather Somme-like.

The good news is that the Mole Army will not retake their compost heap headquarters for a while. Moles don't like wet ground, which is understandable. Who wants to live in a cold, flooded tunnel?

Walter Blotscher

Saturday 5 February 2011

THE LINGERIE FOOTBALL LEAGUE

Americans can dream up funny things when they put their minds to it. But the weirdest I have seen in a long time is the Lingerie Football League.

The LFL is a 7-a side American Football league, played by women. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. The problem is the uniform. Players wear shoulder pads, knee and elbow pads, and ice hockey helmets, pretty much like the men. The difference is that the rest of their gear consists only of very small bikinis and garters!

When I first saw this, I couldn't work out if it was supposed to be serious sport or soft porn. Officially, it is the former; many of the players are ex-college athletes from other sports. But the league's commissioner has also said that it is marketed towards "beer-drinking college students aged 21 and up". What a surprise!

Walter Blotscher

Friday 4 February 2011

WALLENSTEIN

Count Albrecht Wenzel Eusebius von Waldstein (more commonly known as Wallenstein) was the most controversial figure in the Thirty Years War, both at the time and afterwards. Reams of paper have been written about him, including an 11-act, 3-volume play by Friedrich Schiller in 1797-9 that followed on from his earlier history of the war. Schiller portrayed him as an idealistic figure, a man of destiny and genuine peace-seeker, murdered by his own officers. Others have presented him as a German or Czech nationalist, or as the last of the condottieri, the mercenary captains of mediæval Italy, who were made redundant by the emergence of the modern state.

Orphaned at the age of twelve, he eventually took over his father's modest estate in Bohemia after a conventional Protestant upbringing. He chose a military career, taking part in the latter stages of the 1593-1606 Habsburg war against the Turks, the training ground for so many of the principals in the later conflict, and converting to Catholicism as a way of getting on in Imperial service. He was fortunate to marry a rich widow, who then died young, leaving him her fortune. This he invested astutely, and he was one of the main beneficiaries of the reorganisation of property following the crushing of the Bohemian Revolt in 1620, the largest such transfer of assets in Europe until the communist takeovers after the second world war. Wallenstein carved out a 1,200 sqkm estate in north eastern Bohemia and built himself a huge palace in Prague, now the home of the Czech Senate. The profits from this and other ventures were loaned to the Emperor Ferdinand, who raised his estates to the Duchy of Friedland in 1624.

By 1625 Wallenstein was a very rich man, with military experience and growing ties to the Habsburg elite. But what catapulted him to the very first rank within the Holy Roman Empire was his offer that year to finance a complete Imperial Army at his own expense. The Bohemian Revolt, which dumped Ferdinand as King, started off as a local problem in one part of the Empire. What turned the event into a general conflict was the Bohemians' election of the Elector Palatine as his replacement in August 1619, two days before Ferdinand was himself elected Emperor in succession to his cousin Matthias. When the Elector Palatine foolishly accepted the Bohemian Crown - a move which required the Emperor's consent, which would obviously not be forthcoming - a full-blown constitutional crisis erupted. Ferdinand made the Elector an outlaw under the Imperial ban, and called on Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, at the time the richest man in Europe, to raise an army to enforce it. Although Maximilian and Ferdinand were both devout Catholics and the Elector and the Bohemians were hardline Protestants, the dispute was more legal than confessional. Maximilian and the Elector were both members of the Wittelsbach family, and Maximilian's main aim was to obtain the Electorate as a reward (which he duly got).

Wallenstein's later army offer was, therefore, enthusiastically received by Ferdinand, since it enabled him to escape from the military leverage of his nominal vassal. The Emperor could not pay Wallenstein back with money, but he could give him more titles. He was given the Duchy of Sagan in 1627; and after the Duke of Mecklenburg was punished for helping the Danish King in his war with the Empire, Wallenstein was given the duchy for life, and then, in 1629, as a hereditary possession. However, the idea of making someone of relatively low birth a full Imperial Prince was hugely controversial to both Protestants and Catholics, and made Wallenstein enemies amongst the Imperial nobility, notably Maximilian. Following backsniping, Wallenstein was obliged to resign his command in 1630, when he retired to his estates.

Two years later, he was back. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden had landed in Germany in 1630; and following his stunning victories at Breitenfeld in 1631 and the Lech in 1632, the Imperial forces were both demoralised and rudderless. Tilly, Maximilian's hitherto invincible commander for more than a dozen years, was killed at the Lech, and Gustavus had overrun most of Germany. Wallenstein took over the imperial command, and fought a draw with Gustavus at Lützen in 1632, which was costly for both sides. But since Gustavus was himself killed in the battle, the advantage seemed to swing back to the Emperor.

It is now that things started to go seriously wrong for Wallenstein. He had seen enough of war in general, and this war in particular, to know that nobody was going to win it outright. Much of Germany was already devastated; trade and agriculture were declining rapidly. Yet the longer fighting went on, the more the zealots on both sides started to gain the upper hand. Wallenstein spent most of 1633 doing not very much fighting, but instead trying to broker peace with the various enemy participants; Sweden, Saxony, France. However, his inactivity - which seemed close to betrayal - caused alarm in his masters, and Ferdinand and Maximilian decided to get rid of him. In February 1634 he was murdered by some of his own officers. The religious and national tangles caused by the war are vividly shown by the principals in this last act. Wallenstein, a Bohemian Catholic convert, was betrayed to the Austrian Catholic Emperor by his Italian Catholic subordinate Piccolomini; the deed itself was carried out by three of his officers, two Irish Catholics and one Scottish Calvinist. All were later rewarded.

Why did Wallenstein do it? Early modern history was rarely kind to "lads on the make". No sooner had they claimed the rewards of their effort than they were being attacked by nobles alarmed and resentful of the erosion of their special status; what was the point of being noble if any old riffraff could get in? Since no king or emperor could rule without the support - or, at least, tacit acquiescence - of those nobles, a former high flyer could quickly become a scapegoat for problems. As a clever man, shouldn't Wallenstein have remained living quietly on his estates?

With hindsight, yes. But that ignores the situation as it was then. The pool of European talent was limited, and Wallenstein was a big fish in that pool. Furthermore, he wasn't trying to create a dynasty; his only son had already died. The principal motive seems to have been a feeling that he was indispensable. The war had already dragged on for 15 years, and Wallenstein had convinced himself that he was the only person who could stop it. He couldn't, because the various protagonists were not prepared to compromise enough to get it stopped. It would take another 15 years, and a lot more killing, before the exhausted parties eventually managed to bring it to an end.

Walter Blotscher

Thursday 3 February 2011

DIARMAID MacCULLOCH

Diarmaid MacCulloch is Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford University. If that sounds rather dry and dusty, his writing is certainly not. His two books Reformation and The History of Christianity are two of the best books I have read in the past decade. He writes clearly about what at times can be quite dense material, he keeps things moving, he is always interesting and perceptive, and often witty. History at its best.

I wouldn't say that I was a particularly religious person. But I am a European. And the history of Europe (not all of it, admittedly, but a large part of it nevertheless) for most of the last 2,000 years has been one of Latin-speaking Christianity. If we want to understand how we came to be what we are, then we need to understand those two phenomena.

The public religiosity of modern American politicians can often sound grating or treacly to European ears. Yet it is easy to forget that until quite recently, we were all like that. Religion dominated politics, because it dominated life. Hardly anybody in Europe did not believe - absolutely and totally - in a Christian God; and that belief affected all aspects of a person's behaviour, both public and private. The great change came not when people who called themselves Christians began to differ markedly about what exactly they did believe in, to the point where they were prepared to kill and be killed in order to defend those differences - yes, this was one of the effects of the Reformation, but as MacCulloch's other book shows, such disputes had been going on for 1,000 years before Luther nailed his theses to that church door - but when the rational ideas of the Enlightenment pushed religion more and more into the private sphere. It was still OK to believe in an omnipotent being and an afterlife called heaven; yet that belief should not intrude on (say) proposals about how to structure unemployment benefit.

Despite huge technological progress since the 18th century, religious tensions seem to be on the rise again. Not necessarily amongst Christians (though there are still plenty of those; think contraception, the ordination of women and homosexuality), but between some Christians and some Muslims. Reading The History of Christianity makes you realise that it is not really belief as such that causes differences and problems, but the political structures and consequences of those beliefs. Even in the heart of the Reformation, people who thought - nay, knew -that their opponents faced an eternity of damnation, still managed to work together to solve common problems. Perhaps if more people read MacCulloch's terrific books, then we could find that common ground again today.

Walter Blotscher

Wednesday 2 February 2011

A BACK INJURY

I have spent much of today in a horizontal position. Yesterday I changed the chain on my chainsaw, prior to chopping up more wood. If you don't fit the chain exactly right on the rotor wheel, then you can't start the machine with that rope thingy, since the wheel won't go round properly.

That is exactly what happened. When I tugged hard to start it, the wheel didn't move, but something in my lower back did. It was painful yesterday, though I was still mobile and managed to finish my chopping. However, it seized up completely during the night, so I could hardly walk this morning. I have either been hobbling around or lying on the sofa on top of a hot water bottle.

Still, my enforced immobility means that I have ample justification for watching Black Hawk Down, which is just about to start.

Walter Blotscher

Tuesday 1 February 2011

DAS LEBEN DER ANDEREN

Das Leben der Anderen ("the life of others") is a terrific German film, which I saw again on television last night. It takes place in the former East Germany in 1984, five years before the Berlin Wall comes down. Ulrich Mühe plays Captain Wiesler, a dedicated Stasi officer, who carries out a bugging operation on the flat of Dreyman, a playwright who is officially suspected of wanting to undermine the regime. However, while sitting at the listening station up in the building's attic, he gradually works out that he is being used. Dreyman's actress girlfriend is coveted by the lascivious Culture Minister, who has asked Wiesler's ambitious boss to dig up dirt on Dreyman and thereby clear the field for himself. Wiesler is horrified by this systemic abuse of power. Within the tight constraints of his job, he manages to doctor his reports and remove evidence from the flat, so that Dreyman is exonerated (though the girlfriend is forced to collaborate and commits suicide in remorse). The immediate price for Wiesler's human kindness is demotion to a drudge job steaming open letters in the basement of the Stasi building. After Germany is reunited, Dreyman discovers - from the former Culture Minister - that he had been bugged all along, and gets to read his (copious) Stasi file. The film ends with Wiesler, now a humble postman, purchasing a copy of Dreyman's new hit book, which is dedicated to the anonymous Stasi agent, who had saved his skin.

There are two great things about the film. The first is the depiction of East German society, filled with drab colours, Trabant motor cars, and dead-end jobs. Everyone is either miserable or afraid or both. The second is the brilliant performances, particularly from Mühe as the robotically bureaucratic Wiesler and from Ulrich Tukur as his boss, the oily apparatchik on the make.

The film won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign language film, and has won a host of other prizes. They were well-deserved.

Walter Blotscher