I Have Got a Splitting Headache.

Even by my hangover standards it's bad. At around 13:00GMT on 18/4/12 I've been up for about four hours and it only seems to be getting worse. I think a large part of the problem is my frustration at not being allowed to post what I wanted last night.

Although there are no promises post-pub I was hoping to explain how we are once again reaching a crunch point over the Eurozone with both China and the USA dancing around each other over how much they're prepared to the contribute to the so-called "firewall" around banks exposure to bad debt. The USA are using this as an opportunity to antagonise China by doing things like mocking their space program through the space shuttle Discovery's final trip to the Smithsonian museum piggy-backing aboard a jumbo jet. Personally I think the USA will get much further by engaging China is genuine conversations about things like carbon intensity. In negotiations over global warming/climate change carbon intensity rather then carbon emissions is China's preferred measure because rather then simply giving a total of emissions it adjusts for factors like population and economic activity.

Also I may have decided that after trailing it so extensively I need to explain further about the regional impacts of the Belgian bus crash even if I was in no position to do so. I'm still not really in a position to go into much detail but here's the short version; The Belgian bus crash put a lot of pressure on the government of Switzerland where the crash took place. Switzerland has come in for a lot of pressure from across Europe and the world to open up their famously secret bank accounts in the name of reducing tax evasion. However apart from reducing tax evasion opening up Swiss bank accounts also massively increases the control governments have over private citizens and business. Another example of this would be proposals in the 2012 British Budget to make it more difficult for rich individuals to donate money to charities. This is important because private enterprise and the charity sector make up a large part of what is known as "civil society" which is basically everything between the state and private family life. The US paper argued that one of the main problem with bringing democracy to the Arab middle-east is that successive dictators have restricted the activities of the civil society to the point where it doesn't really exist.

So by forcing the Swiss banks to open up their accounts and stopping people giving money to charity all in name of stopping tax evasion it seems that rather then trying to bring democracy to the Arab middle-east nations like Britain are trying to make the democratic world more like the Arab middle-east. I can't imagine why people would want to stop my posting things like that.