Technical difficulties with Blogger, my host, have meant that my home page and archives are no longer easily accessible. Although others seem to have had the same problem, Blogger shows no interest in fixing it.

Crisis! I could migrate Pondblog to another host but, frankly, I'm getting bored with blogging. Quite apart from anything else, it takes a four-hour chunk out of every day - time, I think, that I could put to better use.

So, with some reluctance (becasuse I did enjoy it enormously), I am going to retire Pondblog. I'd like to thank those who encouraged me to get involved in blogging in the first place, those who have commented on what I have written and those who have suggested stories that might be included. I should particularly mention Brenda, in England, whose many suggestions have been much appreciated.

So long...and thanks for the ride.

I don't suppose it will have much effect on the outcome of the trial, because Scooter Libby is charged with lying to a grand jury, but it certainly adds to the weight of questions about the behaviour of Valerie Plame and her husband Joe Wilson. The National Review points out that "The accepted version of events is that Vice President Dick Cheney got things started when he asked for information about possible Iraqi attempts to purchase uranium in Africa.

"After that request, CIA employee Valerie Plame Wilson suggested sending her husband to look into the question, and after that, the CIA flew Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate.

"But...new documents suggest that Mrs. Wilson suggested her husband for the trip before the vice president made his request. In other words, Joseph Wilson's visit to Niger, which everyone believes was undertaken at the behest of the vice president, was actually in the works before Dick Cheney asked his now-famous question. And if that is true, our current understanding of the chronology of events is wrong."

I didn't post anything about it at the time, but it is a very delicious little scandal of the Outposts-of-Empire type. There was a big parade in Granada on Saturday to mark the opening of a stadium paid for by the kind Republic of China. Lofty Chinese gentlemen were present. Come time to play the Chinese national anthem, and the Granada Police Band, bless their cotton socks and whiskers, played the Taiwanese National Anthem.

As you might imagine, a dry wind from the east began to blow.

Now the hapless Bandmaster, according to Caribbean Net News, has been relieved of his responsibilities, and the Deputy Commissioner is "spearheading" an investigation.

Lahdamercy.

I think some Mideast observers may not understand quite what the significance of this story is. The New York Sun says: "The United Nations is seeking to stay clear of Lebanese politics as it sets up an international court in Beirut to prosecute the suspected killers of a former prime minister, but Lebanon's pro-Syrian president says the tribunal will incite political unrest and lead to violence.

"A February 5 letter to Secretary-General Ban from President Lahoud, seen by The New York Sun yesterday, shows clearly that Syria's allies in Lebanon are set to fight the proposed international tribunal, which could further isolate and discredit the Syrian government.

"In a significant step toward establishing the international tribunal — designed to try suspects in the assassination of a former prime minister, Rafik Hariri — the United Nations's top legal counsel, Nicolas Michel, yesterday signed an agreement with the government of Prime Minister Siniora.

"The United Nations will not 'allow itself to be used as a political tool' in negotiating the establishment of the tribunal, Mr. Michel told reporters."

Confused? Don't blame you.

What has happened is that the Government of Prime Minister Siniora has finally summoned up the courage to sign an agreement with the UN to set up an international tribunal in Beirut to investigate the assassination of Rafik Hariri.

The office of President of Lebanon is, in the odd post-Civil War construction of that government, symbolic. Mr Lahoud doesn't, as the title President might suggest to an American, run the Government. He is, however, Syria's main man in Lebanon, and what he gets to run is his mouth. Which he is now doing, because this tribunal makes Syria uncomfortable, as well it should.

Closing John Deuss's First Curacao International Bank has dealt "a hammer blow" to the alleged crime of carousel fraud, according to the UK Paymaster General, and losses in revenue as a result of it have since fallen by 90%. The Guardian's Business section carries those comments in a story suggesting that "customs officers arrested 10 people after raids across Britain and Europe and said they had frozen dozens of bank accounts in Dubai.

"Revenue & Customs said the arrests followed a five-year investigation into a systematic attack on the VAT system which is thought to have cost the taxpayer a quarter of a billion pounds. Ten men were being questioned in police stations in London last night after raids in south Wales, the West Midlands, Cheshire and Buckinghamshire. Four European warrants were issued for arrests in France and Spain...

"Carousel fraud occurs when someone imports small expensive items such as computer chips or mobile phones free of VAT, sells them on with the VAT added but pockets the VAT and disappears. The goods often pass through a chain of companies and are re-exported with the VAT reclaimed. They are then re-imported and spun round the so-called carousel again."

Byron York of National Review points to the soft underbelly (well, one part of it, anyway)of the Scooter Libby trial: "Whatever Judge Reggie Walton rules, the argument has exposed the underlying dilemma in the case, one that arose on the very first day of the trial, when Walton gave the jury this instruction: 'No evidence will be presented to you with regard to Valerie Plame Wilson's status. That is because what her actual status was, or whether any damage would result from disclosure of her status, are totally irrelevant to your decision of guilt or innocence. You must not consider these matters in your deliberations or speculate or guess about them.'

"Of course, Mrs. Wilson is the woman at the center of the CIA-leak affair. The case began with the allegation that the Bush White House illegally leaked her identity in an effort to get back at her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for his high-profile criticism of the administration’s case for war in Iraq. Everything in the investigation grew from that seed, and ultimately Libby, the vice president's former chief of staff, was charged with lying to investigators who were trying to determine who had leaked Mrs. Wilson's job status. And yet, in his instructions, Judge Walton told jurors that they were not to consider - not even to think about - Mrs. Wilson's job status."

Syria is in the throes of one of its biggest crackdowns on dissidents in many years, according to an article in today's Guardian. "As many as 12 reformers and writers have been arrested this month in a new show of strength by the regime.

"It is a far cry from the mood a few months ago, when the Syrian regime was under considerable international pressure and faced the possibility of being unseated by a high-profile UN investigation into the murder of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri. The investigation continues - the UN team is due to issue its latest report in mid-June - but the latest arrests suggest the Syrian government is much more confident about its position than it has been for some time.

"The arrests began early in the new year, when several dissidents were called in for questioning after attending opposition conferences abroad. Then, earlier this month, around 500 political activists, reformers and intellectuals signed a new Beirut-Damascus declaration, in which they criticised the Syrian government and said Syria should mend its relations with Lebanon and grant the Lebanese real independence from Syrian tutelage. They called for democracy in both countries and a proper investigation into the murder of Hariri. The investigation is still sensitive because a preliminary UN assessment has blamed Syrian intelligence for the killing. Four pro-Syrian Lebanese security chiefs are already in jail charged in connection with the massive car bomb that killed Hariri and 20 others on the seafront in Beirut."

The Telegraph's curmudgeonly book guy, AN Wilson, is pretty conservative about who he praises. He complained recently, for example, that Seamus Heaney's "greatness is taken for granted by certain metropolitan pundits," despite never having "actually written anything to justify the reputation." But he may have a weak spot.

"That there was an old world that has now passed away, a heroic world, snatches of which we hear only in half-comprehended song, is an ever-present awareness in the works of JRR Tolkien. He is the only modern writer of what might be termed fantasy-literature who conveys this sense – which we find in Virgil and is also present in the Beowulf poet - of a heroic past that is slipping out of memory.

"As a Germanic philologist, he expounded the old Icelandic Eddaic verses that recount the doings and death, for example, of Atli or Attila the Hun: he died in 453, was celebrated in song for 500 years, and immortalised in Atlakvitha some time before the Viking settlement of Iceland in 985. Or those mythic beings, the dwarves, preserved in the Voluspa, a mythology of the North, perhaps written down in the 11th century, but keeping alive much older memories of, among others, 'Veigr, Gandalfr, Vindalfr, Thrainn...' - that is, the Potion-elf and the Sprite-elf...

"Tolkien soaked up all this stuff through his imaginative pores, just as he made it his pastime to learn the older languages of northern Europe - Irish, Welsh, Norse, Old English, Gothic. The fragmentary nature of these language survivals, especially Gothic, is itself something that, if meditated on intelligently, could only produce a Tolkienian world perspective. You feel all the time that something has been lost - it has been lost partly through the passage of time, partly through human malice and wickedness. Language and poetry alone keep its half-memory echoing."

Grand. No mere metropolitan pundit he.

There is still a debate on global warming, despite claims to the contrary. The Wall Street Journal says the most recent report, the the fourth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "should be understood as one more contribution to the warming debate, not some definitive last word that justifies radical policy change. It can be hard to keep one's head when everyone else is predicting the Apocalypse, but that's all the more reason to keep cool and focus on the actual science."

The real news out of that report, the Journal says, may be how far it has backpedalled on some of the claims of the previous assessments.

When the London Times publishes an editorial entitled Time to go, Tony, it's as well to believe that these are his last few days at Downing Street.

"The prime minister is damaged goods and whatever happens in the remaining weeks of his premiership, he will remain so. He is damaging the Labour party by his continued presence and, more importantly, he is damaging British politics. As a democrat and a patriot, he must recognise that, as he must recognise that the task of his successor will be to clean up British politics and restore its reputation. The sooner that task begins, the better."

Charles Moore is the author of a Telegraph piece published yesterday that explains Mr Blair's fall from grace in the eyes of the British people as well as any I've seen: "The Government that began looking the most moral has ended up looking the least; and that is not an accident. In its beginning was its end.

"Mr Blair reminds me of those medieval heretics, the Cathars. Their leaders were known as parfaits. Believing that they were already chosen by God for salvation, they could do no wrong, and were therefore not bound by the rules that bound everyone else.

"Tony the parfait thus thinks 'sleaze' in Parliament is a very terrible thing, and passes strict laws to control it, yet in practice exempts himself from them since he, by definition, cannot be sleazy. He must feel genuinely wounded that he is now, as they say, helping the police with their inquiries. By his very being, he believes, he cannot be guilty."

Norman Mailer's publicity machine is trotting him out all over the place at the moment, since his new book, The Castle in the Forest, has been on the shelves for a couple of weeks. Robert McCrum of The Observer has a piece in today's issue: Norman Mailer says people are 'going to have a shit fit' over his new novel, The Castle in the Forest, about the childhood of Adolph Hitler, narrated by a devil, inhabiting the body of an SS officer, Dieter.

"'At a given point,' he says, 'you snicker to yourself and you say, "Oh, they're going to be livid."' The writer seems unfazed by this inevitability. 'It's impossible not to identify to some small degree with the protagonist [Hitler], so the book is going to be offensive to a lot of Jews. They won't like it. The right wing will hate it. God not all-powerful? Not all-loving? I expect there'll be considerable resistance,' he goes on with glee. 'And a lot of radicals are not going to like it, because most radicals believe that to talk about God and the Devil is retrogressive.' Add up the Jews, the fundamentalists, the radicals and what he calls 'the Acumenarians', an especially low form of critical life in Mailer's world, and he's just about to alienate most of America. So why does he do it?

"That's a question people have been asking about Norman Mailer for more than half a century. Probably, we are still as far as ever from an answer. But in the process of a prolonged and often raucous public self-examination, Mailer has become a contemporary figure of myth, a great American icon who is venerated and reviled but impossible to ignore."

And Brenda from Britain sent me a link to another, this one in the Los Angeles Times. It's a first person piece from the man himself, with a headline that may be the best thing about it.

"What I've said about [The Castle in the Forest] is that I wanted to hit the longest ball, I wanted to hit it out of the yard. But I do think this book goes further in what it has to say than any other book I've ever written. And it has - what's the phrase I'm looking for - it has more profoundly disturbing ideas in it than any book I've written."

What's the phrase I'm looking for?

It's a question one hates to hear asked, but Mark Morford of the San Francisco Chronicle figures it's time: Is Tom Cruise the Messiah?

Take it away, Mr Morford.

"What if the astonishing proclamation made by top gooberhead Scientologist (and official Friend of Tom) David Miscavige is urgent and accurate and Tom Cruise really is that happy cult's personal Jesus, a true deity who may not be recognized in this lifetime for his divine contributions but who, in the future, will be 'worshipped like Jesus' for what he has done for humankind and therefore we have all been looking at Jerry McGuire and Days of Thunder and MI:III exactly wrong?

"Can you imagine? No? Me neither. Here, try this bottle of Ambien and this forced ingestion of 3,000 powdered copies of Us Weekly and this enthusiastic partial lobotomy. There. Can you imagine now? Excellent."

Whitney Balliett, one of the most skilful and graceful writers about jazz, has died at his home in New York City at the age of 80. He wrote for the New Yorker for four decades. The Los Angeles Times recalls that "Balliett began writing a regular jazz column for the New Yorker in 1957. To convey the essence of music and musicians, he avoided technical terms. He considered himself an 'impressionist' when he wrote about musicians because music is fleeting, so 'transparent and bodiless.' In his observations, he created portraits of entertainers in action.

"Jazz critic and poet Philip Larkin described Balliett as 'a writer who brings jazz journalism to the verge of poetry.'

"Whitney Lyon Balliett, the son of a businessman, was born April 17, 1926, in Manhattan. While attending the private Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, he began what he called his 'erratic noncareer as a drummer' after hearing a jam session on a Sunday afternoon at Jimmy Ryan's club on New York's West Side.

"One of Balliett's most-anthologized pieces was his 1962 profile of clarinetist Pee Wee Russell, titled Even His Feet Look Sad."

"As for Russell's music, Balliett wrote: 'No jazz musician has ever played with the same daring and nakedness and intuition. His solos didn't always arrive at their original destination. He took wild improvisational chances and when he found himself above the abyss, he simply turned in another direction, invariably hitting firm ground. His singular tone was never at rest…. Above all, he sounded cranky and querulous, but that was camouflage, for he was the most plaintive and lyrical of players.'"

WH Auden is a dark man, as well as being an extraordinaily gifted one. I'm not really up for dark stuff this morning, so I'm focusing on the lightest quote I could find in this long, fascinating and well-worth-reading piece by James Fenton of the Guardian: "Auden once said to me: 'Every woman wants to play Hamlet, just as every man wants to play Lady Bracknell.' He often talked about Wilde, and clearly thought a lot about his fate. Ansen records him asking: 'Did you see The Importance of Being Earnest? It's an extraordinarily good play. It's about nothing at all, which is what makes it so good. Lady Windermere's Fan has some social references, which makes it not so good. But The Importance of Being Earnest isn't a bit dated. The trouble with Shaw's plays is that they're all brain and no body, which isn't good for the stage. There may not be any body in Earnest, but at least there are clothes. Obviously you have to see it - you can't just read it.' And in the next sentence he tells us that 'Lear won't do on the stage'. And in the one after that: 'Wilde, after all, isn't important as a writer - he couldn't write at all - but as a behaver.'"

Martin Kettle of the Guardian makes a hell of a good point: "If Scotland Yard can complete the complex and sensitive Litvinenko investigation in a little over two months, why is there as yet no end in sight to the police investigation into the loans-for-honours case which is now more than 10 months old and counting?"

The answer is, I think, that Assistant Commissioner John Yates, who is heading the honours enquiry, is running it like a man who is simultaneously writing his memoirs.

Terrific feature in the Guardian that has public figures confessing their guilty pleasures. There is a minimum of the kind of plonking nonsense you'd expect if the public figures quoted were of the normal run. There is one man who likes rap, which is a bit borderline, but John Berger compensates by managing to make bicycling sound almost the way I remember, long ago, de Saint Exupery made flying sound.

Here's a sample: Denis Healey, who is a very nice British politician (once described as the best Prime Minister Britain never had), confesses a fondness for French cabaret music: "Edith Piaf, of course, is the queen of the genre, but there are others: Yves Montand, Jean Sablon. The only one that came close to it in England is Vera Lynn. My favourite number is a Jacques Prevert song performed by Montand called Barbara. Rappelle-toi Barbara/N'oublie pas/Cette pluie sur la mer/Sur ton visage heureux. I heard it for the first time at the end of the war - I used to go to the cabaret cafes in Montmartre a lot back then. It's a song about the war, or about the emotions that people used to feel during the war: it's about being in love with someone you haven't even met. Songs like these are important: they keep you in touch with life. There is nothing remotely like it nowadays."

A little Friday morning present for you: The Times Literary Supplement has just republished this strikingly pretty poem by Paul Muldoon.

The Son of the King of Moy

after the Irish


Met this child on the Roxborough
Estate. Noblesse, she said, Noblesse
Oblige. And her tiny nipples
Were bruise-bluish, wild raspberries.

Daniel Mitchell, former McKenna senior fellow in political economy at the Heritage Foundation, writes in the Washington Times that the International Monetary Fund has done a lousy job of studying flat tax reforms: "The IMF study actually reveals strong evidence that flat tax reforms have yielded Laffer Curve effects (The Laffer curve is used to illustrate the concept of the idea that governments can maximize tax revenue by setting tax rates at an optimum point). But the authors attempt to mislead readers by claiming that tax reform is successful only if the revenue feedback is at least 100 percent. Even more astonishing, they assume that this revenue feedback effect should happen within one year of reform. So even though taxable income climbed significantly in most flat-tax nations and income-tax revenue generally has exceeded expectations, readers are supposed to conclude that the flat tax is a failure.

"It's unclear why the IMF is hostile to pro-growth policy. Cynics point out that the international bureaucracy has an incentive to perpetuate poverty since that creates more pressure for a bigger IMF budget, but hopefully ignorance is the real reason.

"If nothing else, the IMF is a poor judge of global trends. The authors wrote that 'the question is not so much whether more countries will adopt a flat tax as whether those that have will move away from it.' This is a rather bizarre claim since Romania and Georgia adopted a flat tax last year, while Macedonia and Kyrgyzstan joined the flat tax club this year. Moreover, no nation with a flat tax has chosen to go back to a discriminatory tax regime. Even the new government in Slovakia, comprising socialists and nationalists, decided to preserve the flat tax rather than risk killing the goose that is laying golden eggs.

"It's unfortunate that socialist governments have a better understanding of tax reform than bureaucrats at the IMF."

He wrote a fine book, The Six-Day War, which I'm proud to have on my shelves. He's just written a new one, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present, which will soon sit on my shelves. The books make him an historian, but he is also a soldier - a major in the Israeli Defence Force. He's an American, and an Israeli at the same time. And he seems to have little difficulty in slipping into the appropriate role at the appropriate time. Forward includes an excellent profile of Michael Oren in its current issue.

"Now 52, Oren was born in New Jersey, the son of a career officer in the United States Army. After 10 years of living on kibbutzim on and off from the age of 15, he decided to make aliya in 1979 at the age of 24. He has, as he says, 'gone through all the things Israelis are supposed to do.' This is a bit of an understatement. Oren's accomplished academic career - receiving degrees from Columbia and Princeton universities, and now acting as senior fellow at a renowned conservative Israeli think tank, the Shalem Center - has been interspersed with periods of fulfilling his duties as an 'unabashed, unapologetic Zionist', as he calls himself.

Not long after immigrating, he saw combat as a paratrooper in the 1982 Lebanon War. During the Gulf War, he served as the Israeli liaison officer to the US Sixth Fleet. He was then an adviser to Yitzhak Rabin in the '90s and the director of the Department of Inter-Religious Affairs in Rabin's government. As recently as last summer, now with the rank of major in the Israel Defense Forces, he was head spokesman for the northern command in the war with Hezbollah, dodging Katyusha rockets as he escorted journalists around the Lebanese border. Asked if he would ever consider entering politics, he responds with enough exaggerated protest to indicate that the thought has crossed his mind (he says he has a recurring nightmare where he wakes up and is the prime minister of Israel).

"Tall and imposing with a shock of gray hair and a pointy nose that makes him look a bit like the comedian Steve Martin, Oren said that it strikes him as strange that he has not been cornered more often about how he reconciles his identity as an historian and a sometimes official of the Israeli government. 'I understand it's problematic,' he admitted. 'But there’s no alternative to it...'

"Even though he was critical of certain aspects of the way the war in Lebanon was waged this past summer, Oren said he remained quiet about his opinions while he was in uniform. He insists he would refuse orders if ever asked to lie. He saw his job less as propaganda than as telling 'the Israeli Army side of the story', even when he was aware that there was another equally valid side. Oren said that though he felt the war was being won militarily, he also thought it was being lost politically. “I never talked about losing it politically, but when I came home on leave I wrote two scathing articles, one for The Wall Street Journal and the other for The New Republic,' he said. 'Next day, I put on my uniform and that was it. I'm a soldier.'"

Well spotted, Brenda.

Gian Carlo Menotti, who organized music festivals in Spoleto, Italy, and the U.S. and helped bring opera to the masses with his repeatedly televised Christmas work Amahl and the Night Visitors, died Thursday at a hospital in Monaco. He was 95, according to the Los Angeles Times: "'He died pretty peacefully and without any pain,' his adopted son, Francis Menotti, told the Associated Press.

"Menotti was sought after worldwide as a director of operas composed by others, and he wrote his own, including two that earned Pulitzer Prizes. 'I wish I'd never started staging operas. It has taken so much time away from my composing,' he told The Times in 1987, when he directed Puccini's La Boheme at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. 'I have wasted so much of my time directing other people's work.'

"Nevertheless, Menotti's own compositions were also much in demand, and he had been called the most-often-performed living composer of opera."

The digital revolution has given a huge boost to one of the older and more traditional forms of electronic media - the radio.
Britain's Independent Newspaper says: "According to figures released yesterday, the digital age has created a new golden age of radio, with the number of listeners in Britain at a record high of more than 45 million every week.

"The figure for the last three months of 2006 is the highest since Radio Joint Audience Research (Rajar) began compiling records in 1992, and is attributed to growing numbers of people tuning in on the internet, digital television and mobile phones.

"Rajar said almost eight per cent of people aged 15 and above listen to the radio on their mobile phones, a 24 per cent increase over the same period of 2005. A quarter of 15- to 24-year-olds said they tuned in this way. Listening over the internet rose by 10 per cent and by nine per cent on digital television."