I may have finally put the lid on my professional consultancy career and moved into voluntary mode. My last paid work – an edited book of case studies of innovative schools in South East Europe and a policy paper on Albanian education - have been filed with the European Training Foundation and I am now free to devote to voluntary projects whatever energies and skills that I retain. Unless of course, something else emerges to tempt me out of retirement. So this seems like a good time to start a blog and join the rest of the self-indulgent invaders of cyberspace.
Paul Wachter is less self-indulgent. He is a journalist in New York and the son of my good friend in South Carolina. Paul has just launched a website http://www.againstdumb.com/ It is a goldmine for distant readers wanting to have quick access to an intelligently selected sample of US high quality journalism without subscribing. The articles are targeted against cant of all types but primarily in the arenas of politics, world events and culture.
My recent trip to the British Isles enabled me to reconnect with my own culture, origins and language as well as to deepen friendships and family solidarity. On my journey from Leeds to Dublin I observed the heartless Ryanair official charging two diminutive old ladies an extra 35 GBP each when their cabin bags proved 2 cms too wide to slide into the frame that they use to measure the 20x44x55 cms. dimensions allowed. My backpack was similarly too wide but I managed to sneak past with it on my back hidden from the censor’s view. Thankfully my overcoat has several large pockets in which I can secrete some of my new book purchases.
The usual nonsense of Polish politics runs on unabated. Lech Walesa, first president of post-Communist Poland is currently suing the present president Lech Kaczynski for libel as this extract from the New Poland Express 27.11.09 indicates:
A bitter and seething feud between Lech Walesa and President Lech Kaczynski found its way to court last week with the Solidarity icon suing the nation’s leader for libel. Their lawyers faced off in a Warsaw district court with Mr Walesa demanding an apology and PLN 100,000 in damages for the president saying that he was a communist spy, code-named Bolek, in a television interview last year. Making his anger over President Kaczynski’s comments evident the former union leader pledged to “get him”, and reminded the world that a court hearing in 2000 had already cleared him of being Bolek. “When he took office the president vowed to respect the law,” said an angry Mr Walesa. “I have a verdict from a court proving my innocence. A legal expert cannot behave this way, refusing to respect the verdicts of our justice system,” he added, referring to President Kaczynski’s possession of a doctorate in law. The president failed to put in an appearance although his lawyer called for the case to be dismissed, arguing that a district court had no jurisdiction over the nation’s head.
While the legal battle between former president and serving president provoked a flurry of interest in the Polish and international press, it also testified to the acidic relationship that now exists between two men who once battled communism together. “It’s fair to say that they are sworn enemies,” said Doctor Jacek Kucharczyk from Warsaw’s Institute of Public Affairs, adding that the state of affairs dates back to the early 1990s when the then President Walesa dismissed Mr Kaczynski from his staff. Since then this, coupled with the belief that Mr Walesa had worked for the communists and betrayed the Solidarity revolution, has fuelled a desire in the president, adds Doctor Kucharczyk, “to pay him back.” “For Kaczynski, he is the main enemy and a symbol of what has been wrong with Poland since 1989,” said Doctor Kucharczyk. “In fact he is not just a symbol of what is wrong, but a reason behind a transformation that in their view is phoney.”
The ‘phoney transformation’ refers to the view of Zaczynski and his twin brother, leader of the former government and now defeated Law and Justice Party ,that the communists apparatchiks were never properly rooted out (lustration is the term for this process). Many of them became the new capitalists and now enjoy great affluence, envy of which the populist Kaczynskis used to win the popular vote in becoming the previous ruling party.
As the Copenhagen Climate Summit approaches one would hope that Polish politicians might use their energies on larger issues focused on the future not the past. My own pre-occupation with ‘world-saving’ has been marginally challenged by recent encounters with people, literature and internet sites that question the validity of conventional wisdom arising from the UN IPCC’s studies and projections on global warming and the role of human-produced carbon emissions. In particular the case presented by Christopher Booker “The Real Global Warming Disaster” has caused me to start a reassessment of those threats. Reading the book coincided with revelations that East Anglia University Climate Research Unit, one of the four sources of IPCC climate data, had been manipulating their results: Professor Phil Jones, the climatologist at the centre of the leaked emails row, said last week that he “absolutely” stands by his research and any suggestion that the emails provide evidence of a conspiracy to manipulate or hide data that do not support the theory of man-made climate change was “complete rubbish”. This quotation from the Guardian has been superseded by subsequent calls for the professor’s resignation by the Guardian’s environmental campaigner George Monbiot: ‘I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed’ (Guardian, 27.11.09).
Good for Monbiot! His passionate and satirical columns and books have fuelled the highly emotional, even ‘religious’ attitudes of many ‘greens’ and he sees Jones as discrediting the campaign. I am trying to balance my own understanding by examining both what are tagged the ‘warmist’ and the ‘sceptic’ cases. The way that ‘conventional wisdom’ is constructed by the media and spreads around the globe to inform public policy underpins this conundrum. Certainly the upward trend of globally averaged temperature measurements has levelled off and declined since 1999 despite continuing increases in CO2 emissions. But ‘truth’ about causes, consequences and trends in the immensely complex global atmospheric system, past and present, and speculation about its future remains elusive.
Zwakow-Suble, Tychy, 29.11.09