Boris’s Falklands Moment or Who cares about Covid parties after this.
Margaret Thatcher rescued her popularity when she decided to take on Argentina after it invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982. Boris Johnson may have done the same with a daring dash to Kyiv. Two master politicians in action.
Russia doesn’t make much `stuff’.
Have you ever bought anything with Made In Russia on it? The Russians economy is built on raw materials, many of them the world can’t do without.
War could bring on a recession
Calgary oil analyst Josef Schachter says the coming recession will also hit oil prices:
“The invasion of Ukraine has spiked up crude prices. We expect that higher energy costs will knock down crude demand by 4-5Mb/d later this year due to a global recession. When global recessions unfold, crude prices plunge sharply. In 2008-2009 during the financial crisis demand fell by over 5Mb/d (from over 88.5Mb/d to 83Mb/d). The price of crude fell from US$147.27/b to US$33.55/b in eight months. During Iraq's invasion of Kuwait prices rocketed from US$16.16/b in July 1990 to a high of US$41.15/b in October and then plunged in four months to US$17.45/b as recessionary demand destruction occurred. WTI today is at US$107.85/b. WTI has fallen from the high at US$130.50/b in early March to US$99.60/b today (April 6). (down today by US$2.36/b)” info@schachterenergyreport.ca
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Nigerian fuel subsidies are ten times more than budgeted
Gasoline in Nigeria costs 162 naira a litre- about 39 cents US. The price is subsidized by the government and the spike in oil prices means Nigeria will spend around $10-billion to subsidize drivers. Nigeria produces oil but it has a refinery shortage so it imports gasoline. There were lineups even before the recent oil price spike.
Rates for oil tankers through the roof
There is a boycott not just of Russian oil but also Russian-owned oil tankers. That has the perhaps unintended consequence of further pressure on oil prices. Someone has to pay the freight and it will be you.
A small Russian Tanker
On the day Elon Musk became the largest shareholder in Twitter
Musk is now on the board of Twitter. He has criticized it, wonder if he will force any changes? A friend who is not a Musk fan— he thinks he is a stock manipulator— says Musk uses Twitter to help Tesla and its stock price.
”Has there ever been another instance of a person using a product to break US laws, try to defame international heroes and ruin the lives of innocent people who was then elected to the Board of that company?”
Lirk: a word I had never heard of.
“That bed is full of lirks” said the woman in my life inspecting my shoddy attempt at making the bed. She told me a lirk is a wrinkle in a poorly made bed, a word she learned from her mother who was born in Fraserborough, in Scotland.
I went to the Oxford English Dictionary to check it out, and after trying several different spellings, came up with the meaning of lirk. Read on.
When the House cost too much. (Thanks to The Spectator.)
Essay of the Week
History Today ran a piece about the demise of the last Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and it reminded me of an obit I wrote in 2005. It was of the grandson of the Socialist Chancellor of Austria, Karl Renner. Both were Karl.
Someone at the CBC once told me that Karl said that a good tailor was the only thing you needed to get ahead in Canada. He must have been great fun.
Karl Renner never meant to come to Canada. He was sent here at the start of war as an internee, an "enemy alien" kept behind barbed wire in one of several camps for Germans and Austrians, many of them Jews, who were living in England when the Second World War broke out in 1939.
Although not a vengeful man, Mr. Renner did get back at the Nazis. He later helped to create Canadian war propaganda, German-language radio broadcasts aimed at sowing doubts in the German population, and stayed on for most of 65 years.
The Nazi race laws were one of the reasons Karl Renner and part of his family fled to England. The other was that they couldn't abide living under Nazi rule. Although his father had been a practising Protestant, the Nazis classified him as Jewish. "As far as the Nazis were concerned, he was Jewish," said Frances Ashley, Mr. Renner's sister. The classification applied to his son, too.
In May, 1940, the British didn't have time to decide who was a threat and who wasn't. They put them all in internment camps, such as on the Isle of Man, and then shipped them to Canada. "The British panicked," said broadcaster and writer Eric Koch who went to England from Germany in the mid-1930s. "We were interned by the British and sent to Canada."
Both men spent about two years in "enemy alien" camps. Later, Mr. Renner would joke that although they were given the same rations as men in the Canadian Army, they ate better. The chef from the Ritz in London was among the detainees at his camp at Farnham in Quebec's Eastern Townships.
The internees arrived in May, 1940, and settled down to life behind the wire. Soon, however, Ottawa questioned whether they should be treated as prisoners of war and in mid-1941 reclassified them as refugees. The government also realized they could be useful. Some, like Mr. Renner, were given a chance to work.
He spent a short time at the spy school at Camp X outside Toronto where he polished his propaganda skills. From 1943 on, Mr. Renner and others wrote and broadcast propaganda aimed at the German population in a unit with the ominous name of the Psychological Warfare Committee. The Canadian Censorship Board also asked Mr. Renner and many others to translate letters to and from some of the 32,000 German prisoners of war held in camps in Canada. What they gleaned was often used to advantage in their radio broadcasts. The service began transmission during Christmas, 1944.
at distinguished the German-language material was that it was prepared by very bright persons who understood German, could empathize with the German population as well as the prisoners," wrote Arthur Siegel in his History of Radio Canada International. "Karl Renner, the Censorship's Board's contributor to psychological warfare, had himself been an internee when he first arrived in this country, although he was a refugee from the Nazis."
Even 10 years after the war, Canadian officials glossed over the treatment given to Germans and Austrians who had fled the Nazis. "A native of Vienna, Karl came to Canada in 1940 and worked for a time with the National War Services in Ottawa," read the announcement when Mr. Renner was named a correspondent for the CBC International Service, implying he arrived as a happy immigrant.
Karl Renner was a man of polished manners and a sharp wit, a product of a privileged childhood in Vienna and a direct connection to the culture of central Europe. In Canada, where he lived for most of the past 65 years, he was always the life of the party.
He loved his connection to European socialist aristocracy. "We don't have to work, we're socialists," was a favourite throwaway line. And he had a string of them.
"He had beautiful manners, spoke several languages and was a beautiful dancer," recalled Joan Irwin, a retired journalist who knew him in Ottawa and Montreal. "He was very aware of his family background. He lived two-thirds in the present and one-third in the past."
Karl Renner's socialist connection came through his maternal grandfather, Karl Renner, the first Chancellor of the Republic of Austria. He was born Karl Renner-Deutsch (his father, Hans Deutsch, had hyphenated the two names) in Vienna in 1917. The year of his birth shaped his life. The Austro Hungarian Empire was at war with Britain, Canada and the rest of the Empire, France and Italy and soon the United States. When it ended, so did the Empire that stretched from parts of Poland in the north to Trieste and the Adriatic in the south, covering 11 ethnic groups. Vienna went from being the centre of a polyglot empire of 50 million people to being the capital of a poor man's Switzerland with just three million people.
Karl Renner, grandfather of the man who has just died in Ottawa, was the son of a Moravian peasant and a prominent socialist politician, first elected to Parliament in 1907. In her book, Paris 1919, University of Toronto historian Margaret Macmillan details how Karl Renner, who was leader of a peace delegation at Versailles, used his charm to save chunks of land for the new Austria. "Karl Renner, a cheerful, portly man, fond of good food and drink, card games and dancing," was how Ms. Macmillan described the Austrian chancellor.
By all accounts, it also described his grandson, Karl Renner, who had long since dropped both the hyphen and his father's name. Big-picture politics continued to shape young Karl Renner's life. When that other Austrian, Adolf Hitler, took over his native country in 1938, young Karl Renner fled to England. His grandfather remained in Vienna under a kind of house arrest throughout the war and re-surfaced in 1945 to help Austria maintain its delicate balance between the Soviet Union and the West.
In England, the grandson of the old Austrian Chancellor was a social hit. His dancing skills made him a favourite at balls; his Austrian airs added a cosmopolitan sparkle, helped out by anti-Nazi views.
After his internment and then freedom in Canada, Mr. Renner returned to London and worked for an oil company, travelling across Europe. In 1948-1950 he worked for the International Refuge Organization in Italy. During his time in Europe he maintained his Canadian connection, making freelance radio reports to the International Service.
In the mid 1960s, he returned to Montreal to serve as public-relations officer for the service. By then, the Cold War was at its height and much of the service was broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
Mr. Renner's ambition was to become head of the department but worried his connection to a famous socialist family might have done in him. "Socialism and communism were seen as closely related during the Cold War," said his wife, Juliet Harrison. Some of his friends thought he was thwarted, in part by his own louche image.
"He loved to give the appearance of never working very hard," said Mr. Koch. His old friend Joan Irwin remembered that Al Johnson, the Saskatchewan-born president of the CBC, was not fond of the smooth Karl Renner.
"Al Johnson thought Karl was frivolous," said Ms. Irwin. And, in many ways, he was. Years of diplomatic parties gave him a weakness for drink. One of his affectations was to carry a silver flask filled with vodka. Eventually, one by one, he gave up his vices.
Some time in the mid-1970s, Karl Renner moved to Ottawa. He loved it there. The Austrian embassy treated him as a near deity and he was invited to many receptions. Recently, the current ambassador paid him a visit.
He visited Austria often, staying with his mother at the family home near Vienna. When his mother died, the house was dedicated to his grandfather and made into the Renner Museum.
Karl Renner was born in Vienna on Feb. 7, 1917. He died in Ottawa on Jan. 26, 2005. He was 87. He asked that some of his ashes be buried beside his parents in Austria, and the rest spread at Lake Memphramagog in Quebec's Eastern Townships.