The Abnormal Distribution

I am a UK citizen, a German civil servant about to be pensioned, who also studied and worked in California. I have considered myself an EU citizen and still do so. Readers may well understand why pending Brexit is worrisome as well as saddening for me. It is also frustrating in that there are 1.2…

The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/29/eu-leaders-begin-summit-talks-without-uk-for-first-time is reporting that European commission president Jean-Claude Juncker ….. had banned his commissioners from any talks with the British, he said. It is – or should be – unacceptable that an ECommission President “bans” ECommissioners from talking with any EU member state. This needs to be brought to order.

Call the EU countries without the UK the E27. Judging by the announcements from yesterday, the E27 are hoping for an orderly Brexit process which leaves all treaties intact (not just Rome, Maasstricht, Lisbon and so on, but also the EEA and EFTA agreements). The UK wants (arguably needs, but I won’t get into that) something…

Here’s The Guardian’s report on the European Council (ECoun) meeting Tuesday, 28 June 2016: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/28/cameron-eu-leaders-uk-control-immigration There is a meeting of almost the same group Wednesday, but it can’t be an ECoun meeting because the UK is explicitly not invited. Let me call it the E27. (It’s going to be tricky formulating a legally-valid bargaining position, because…

The US has the reputation of being the most iconoclastic and authority-antagonistic democracy in the developed world. But if all of the living presidents (Carter, Clinton, Bush Sr, Bush W, Obama) and VPs (Mondale, Quayle, Bush Sr. again, Gore and Cheney) came out and said “Choose X”, then the American public would choose X. It might still…

Rafael Behr has an argument in The Guardian today  for the planned UK tuition-fee regime for tertiary education based on a “Teaching Excellence Framework”. Reasonable, well-written, but large parts of it seem to me wrong. Let me pick on a couple here. Behr is right that some market mechanisms in tertiary education are appropriate. But not all…