Skip to main content

Window on the World

It is always interesting checking through the viewing stats for this blog.

I see the IP address of several friends- Steve G, Steve T, Simon M and Andy W know who they are!

Tristan has left several interesting comments, as has Andrew Montford- apologies for the delay in posting some of these, I had failed to notice that they were not being e-mailed automatically for review.

On the other hand I see IP addresses from all over the place- those from the Baltic Countries are especially welcome- notably my old friend Igor, who I look forward to sharing a drink with the next time I am in Tallinn.

The latest set is particularly interesting: many from Latin America with Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico and Colombia all being represented. I have regular readers in the US, Canada (a country close to my heart as a former student there) Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Germany, Poland, Italy, Luxembourg, Finland, the Netherlands and Belgium.

In the UK I see readers from Parliament and several Universities- Imperial, UCL, and various Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, York, Durham, Napier, Edinburgh and many others. Since they seem to return, I hope that they are finding something of interest! I see several colleagues in City firms and a variety of Scottish IP addresses.

Since this blog is now approaching 5000 individual page loads, I hope that this fairly small but diverse group of readers have enjoyed the rather varied mixture of my thoughts- I shall seek to refine them and hopefully make them more readable as this blog develops.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Concert and Blues

Tallinn is full tonight... Big concerts on at the Song field The Weeknd and Bonnie Tyler (!). The place is buzzing and some sixty thousand concert goers have booked every bed for thirty miles around Tallinn. It should be a busy high summer, but it isn´t. Tourism is down sharply overall. Only 70 cruise ships calling this season, versus over 300 before Ukraine. Since no one goes to St Pete, demand has fallen, and of course people think that Estonia is not safe. We are tired. The economy is still under big pressure, and the fall of tourism is a significant part of that. The credit rating for Estonia has been downgraded as the government struggles with spending. The summer has been a little gloomy, and soon the long and slow autumn will drift into the dark of the year. Yesterday I met with more refugees: the usual horrible stories, the usual tears. I try to make myself immune, but I can´t. These people are wounded in spirit, carrying their grief in a terrible cradling. I try to project hop

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas,