King’s in the Frame

An unusual view of a famous building.

Quote of the the Day

”We are starting to hear some bizarre autarkic rhetoric when barriers are going up, and when there is a risk that new diseases such as coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage. Then, at that moment humanity needs some government somewhere that is willing at least to make the case powerfully for freedom of exchange, some country ready to take off its Clark Kent spectacles and leap into the phone booth and emerge with its cloak flowing as the supercharged champion of the right of the populations of the Earth to buy and sell freely among each other.”

• Boris Johnson, speech in Greenwich on February 3, 2020.

Note the date. This was arguably the most stupid speech ever made by a British Prime Minister. (See below for more detail.)

Five reasons the UK failed in Brexit talks – Jonathan Powell

Really salutary Politico piece by Jonathan Powell, who was Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff and played the lead role in negotiating, for example, the Good Friday Agreement.

I have spent the last 40 years involved in international negotiations of one sort or another, and I have never seen a British government perform worse than they did in the four years of negotiations that concluded with the Christmas Eve Brexit agreement.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of Brexit, purely in terms of negotiating technique, it is an object lesson in how not to do it. As the bluster and self-congratulation dies down, it is worth standing back and looking at what we can learn from the debacle.

We have ended up with an agreement which is more or less where the EU started. It is true that there have been a few sops to the U.K. position on the dynamic alignment of state aid and the role of the European Court of Justice. But on every major economic point, even including fisheries, the EU has got its way.

There are five principal reasons why.

It’s worth reading the whole piece. But in summary, here are the five mistakes Powell lists.

1. From the outset the UK massively overestimated the strength of its negotiating position.

2. May’s government fired the starting gun before it had worked out its own position, with the result that Britain spent the first two years negotiating with itself while the EU’s clock was ticking.

3. Third, the UK prioritised abstract principles of ‘sovereignty’ over pragmatic economic interests and wasted time protecting a theoretical concept it didn’t actually want to use ahead of practical benefits.

4. The government wilfully destroyed the EU’s trust in its commitment to implement what it had already agreed by threatening to unilaterally renege on the Northern Ireland Protocol. Johnson & Co imagined they could provoke a crisis and thereby give themselves the whip hand as the EU panicked. Instead the EU negotiators kept their cool and achieved the bloc’s objectives while the government wasted time on futile tactical games.

5. The UK never developed a strategic plan for the negotiations — an an incomprehensible omission for any kind of government. But the Johnson crowd seemed to think it was OK to turn up for talks and hope things would work out.

My take on this: Johnson’s administration was never capable of conducting serious, successful negotiations because of (a) the PM’s fundamental laziness, incompetence and inexperience, (b) it had a Cabinet full of second-and third-rate politicians, and (c) it was in thrall to a powerful party cabal of Europhobic MPs with delusions about British exceptionalism.

Given these factors, the resulting ‘agreement’ — which largely seems to give the EU what it wanted all along — was predictable. This is of course bad for the country, but it has the merit (from the Leave crowd’s point of view) of enabling them to blame the EU for their own failure. It’s a Trump-lite strategy in other words.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ode to Joy Flashmobbed

Link

I know I blogged this during the first lockdown, but if ever there was a day for repeating it, this is it.

60 years on

Charles Foster’s Plenty of Taste blog has a lovely post this week marking the 60th anniversary of the Beatle’s return to Liverpool after their sojourn in Hamburg.

The 27 December 1960 performance at Litherland Town Hall was a breakthrough – with over 1500 tickets sold – and cemented their name as Liverpool’s top live draw.

Just as sensational as the performance is this wonderful hand-drawn poster for the gig. The exuberant lettering for this and many other of their Liverpool concerts was done by a very talented signwriter, Tony Booth. The one above has been recreated from the original posters he did at the time for Brian Epstein. Booth’s story was told in a 2016 documentary for local BBC TV, which unfortunately I haven’t seen in full. It is previewed in this clip for BBC News, where you get a glimpse of Booth at work. Sadly, he died less than a year later, as this further clip tells us. His work lives on at this website, where you can buy the modern reproductions.

Imagine: you could have seen the Beatles live for three shillings! Nowadays you have to pay £1 billion to get 12 votes from the DUP.

Implications of the new variant of Covid-19

I’m temperamentally sceptical of soothing official advice about Covid. At the moment, the consensus seems to me that the existing vaccines will probably work ok, etc. Hopefully they will. But that’s not the really significant thing about the variant: it’s its much higher transmissability.

Zeynep Tufecki has a great piece in The Atlantic about this. “A more transmissible variant of COVID-19,” she writes,

is a potential catastrophe in and of itself. If anything, given the stage in the pandemic we are at, a more transmissible variant is in some ways much more dangerous than a more severe variant. That’s because higher transmissibility subjects us to a more contagious virus spreading with exponential growth, whereas the risk from increased severity would have increased in a linear manner, affecting only those infected.

Increased transmissibility can wreak havoc in a very, very short time—especially when we already have uncontrolled spread in much of the United States. The short-term implications of all this are significant, and worthy of attention, even as we await more clarity from data. In fact, we should act quickly especially as we await more clarity—lack of data and the threat of even faster exponential growth argue for more urgency of action. If and when more reassuring data come in, relaxing restrictions will be easier than undoing the damage done by not having reacted in time. [As if we in the UK didn’t know that.]

To illustrate the difference between exponential and linear risks, Tufecki cites an example put forward by Adam Kucharski from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, who’s an experienced modeller of infectious-disease outbreaks (and author of a rather good book on the subject, which I’ve read).

Kucharski compares a 50 percent increase in virus lethality to a 50 percent increase in virus transmissibility. Take a virus reproduction rate of about 1.1 and an infection fatality risk of 0.8 percent and imagine 10,000 active infections—a plausible scenario for many European cities, as Kucharski notes. As things stand, with those numbers, we’d expect 129 deaths in a month. If the fatality rate increased by 50 percent, that would lead to 193 deaths. In contrast, a 50 percent increase in transmissibility would lead to a whopping 978 deaths in just one month—assuming, in both scenarios, a six-day infection-generation time.

There are lots of things we don’t know at the moment. Just how much more transmissable is it, for example? 50%? 70%? We don’t know yet. What’s certain is that, as Tufecki puts it, “we are in a race against time, and the virus appears to be gaining an unfortunate ability to sprint just as we get closer to the finish line”.

2021 could be tougher than we think. Hope I’m wrong about that.

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The genius who is Matt

Matt, the Daily Torygraph‘s cartoonist, is a genius. Which — my lovely daughter thought — is why his annual collection would be a great Christmas present for her Dad.

She was right. Here’s just one reason:

Quote of the Day

”The privately educated Englishman – and Englishwoman, if you will allow me – is the greatest dissembler on Earth. Was, is now and ever shall be for as long as our disgraceful school system remains intact. Nobody will charm you so glibly, disguise his feelings from you better, cover his tracks more skilfully or find it harder to confess to you that he’s been a damned fool.”

• George Smiley in John le Carré’s The Secret Pilgrim.

Remind you of anyone?

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

Long Read of the Day

John Rawls: can liberalism’s great philosopher come to the west’s rescue again?

Good question, thoughtfully discussed by Julian Coman in this Guardian Long Read:

He begins with the arguments that broke out in the New York Times on how the paper should cover Trump after his election as President. Confronted with a leader who delighted in flouting democratic norms and attacking minorities, was it the duty of this bastion of American liberalism to remain above the fray or should it play a partisan role in defence of the values under attack?

As journalists and staff argued online, a prominent columnist “uploaded a PDF of John Rawls’s treatise on public reason, in an attempt to elevate the discussion”. Rawls, who died in 2002, remains the most celebrated philosopher of the basic principles of Anglo-American liberalism. These were laid out in his seminal text, A Theory of Justice, published in 1971. The columnist, Elizabeth Bruenig, suggested to colleagues: “What we’re having is really a philosophical conversation and it concerns the unfinished business of liberalism. I think all human beings are born philosophers, that is, that we all have an innate desire to understand what our world means and what we owe to one another and how to live good lives.” One respondent wrote back witheringly: “Philosophy schmosiphy. We’re at a barricades moment in our history. You decide: which side are you on?”

In an age of polarisation, the exchange encapsulated a central question for the liberal left in America and beyond. Jagged faultlines have disfigured the public square during a period in which issues of race, gender, class and nationhood have divided societies. So was Bruenig right? To rebuild trust and a sense of common purpose, can we learn something by revisiting the most influential postwar philosopher in the English-speaking world?

Worth reading in full.

Reasons to be cheerful?

The economist Tyler Cowen is temperamentally an optimist; his glass is always three-quarters full. In his Bloomberg column 2020 “gets an asterisk for Covid”, but he thinks the year also saw great scientific progress. For example:

• The astonishingly rapid creation of several kinds of Covid-19 vaccines
• A “very promising” vaccine candidate against malaria, perhaps the greatest killer in human history
• New CRISPR techniques that appear to be on the verge of vanquishing sickle-cell anemia
• GPT-3 (AI) technology that composes remarkably human-like prose
• DeepMind’s machine learning system that seems to have cracked the problem of protein folding
• Driverless vehicles appeared to be stalled, but Walmart will be using them on some truck deliveries in 2021
• SpaceX achieved virtually every launch and rocket goal it had announced for the year.
• Toyota and other companies have announced major progress on batteries for electric vehicles, with related products are expected to arrive in 2021
• Lots of progress in affordable solar power
• China has developed a new and promising fusion reactor
• Many more Zoom meetings will be held, and many business trips will never return.

You get the picture. Professor Cowen is an upbeat kind of guy. But he’s also pretty perceptive about what’s going on.

Talking Politics @5

Talking Politics, the podcast founded and hosted by my friend and colleague David Runciman, has been going for five years. I’ve been a fan of it from the beginning, and occasionally ‘appeared’ on it (if that’s an accurate of describing participation in an audio recording). By any standards — and especially those of academic ‘engagement’ and outreach — the podcast has been a knockout success.

How do I know that? Well, ponder some of the statistics:

• Total downloads over the five years: 19.6m (20.57m if we include the History of Ideas strand)
• Total downloads in 2020: over 8.1m
• Weekly listens in 2020: 155,000 per week
• Countries reached in 2020: 197

This week’s edition was #295 and was devoted to some reflections on the five tumultuous years by David, Helen Thompson and Catherine Carr, the producer of the show. It’s well worth a listen. After hearing it I fell to pondering why TP has been so successful. Here are the notes I made…

1. Timing and luck. David made the point well — five years ago turned out to be a perfect moment to launch a show like TP because 2015 was a moment when democratic politics suddenly began to be interesting again. My own take on it is that the academic study of politics was just entering a phase which had the hallmarks of Thomas Kuhn’s description of the intellectual crises which scientific disciplines periodically go through as a field’s theoretical paradigm encounters increasing scepticism among researchers and a rival theoretical framework begins to emerge. A key feature of these crises, Kuhn observed, was incommensurability — the absence of a neutral language in which the merits of the old paradigm and its emerging rival could be objectively assessed. (Think Newtonian dynamics with its billiard balls vs quantum physics with its neutrinos, quarks and Higg’s boson.) So there’s initially no way of knowing which one ‘should’ win. The difference between the exact sciences and the social sciences is that, in the former, the experimental and observational facts are obtainable and so eventually obsolete paradigms die a natural death. That’s not the case in the social sciences (or indeed the humanities), which is why pathological paradigms (like rational expectations in economics) live on long past their sell-by dates. My hunch is that the theoretical paradigms which had governed what is laughingly called ‘political science’ lost credibility after the 2008 banking crisis and its aftermath, and TP thrived in the resulting vacuum of ideas.

2. Given that, the fact that TP was often ‘wrong’ –in its predictions and analyses but cheerful in its acceptance of that — was a feature not a bug. When you’re in a crisis of incommensurability, that’s the only way to act rationally. And, critically, it’s what conventional political analysis cannot do: it has to purport to possess a coherent narrative for what’s going on because those involved believe that their credibility depends on it. This is perhaps a measure of intellectual insecurity, and one of the defining characteristics of TP is that the main contributors and hosts don’t suffer from that and were therefore able to live with radical uncertainty in a way that members of the political commentariat could not!

3. Another thing that marked out TP from the burgeoning ruck of ‘politics’ podcasts was that it was forever escaping from “the sociology of the last five minutes”. No matter how urgent the question of the day, there was always Helen Thompson excavating the long history and political economy of how we got here, or Gary Gerstle or Adam Tooze doing the same, or Ken Armstrong explaining the incomprehensible complexities of regulatory divergence and related arcana. And so on.

4. In that sense, the podcast has been a showcase for the advantages of sheer erudition. There’s no substitute for it — as the discussion of the Corn Laws that was highlighted in this week’s edition demonstrated perfectly. And one of the great advantages TP had was that of being located in a major research university. It wouldn’t have been able to tap into this huge pool of collective IQ, however, had David Runciman and Helen Thompson not been recognised by their peers as formidable thinkers in their own right. Being invited to appear on TP was recognised by many distinguished thinkers as a real compliment.

5. Finally, TP was a great exploiter of the fact that podcasting has a wider intellectual bandwidth than other media — especially broadcast media which even on a good day have the bandwidth of smoke signals. When my son Pete (also a podcast producer) was making his ‘MPs’ Expenses’ series for the Telegraph, I remember thinking that if journalism is the first draft of history, then podcasting looks very much like the second draft. And Talking Politics is v2.1.

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The Swiss Park in Versailles, on a peaceful Sunday morning walk.

Quote of the Day

”There are no credentials. They do not even need a medical certificate. They need not be sound either in body or mind. They only require a certificate of birth — just to prove that they were the first of the litter. You would not choose a spaniel on those principles.

• Lloyd George on the House of Lords, 1909.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Schubert, Trio op. 100 – Andante con moto

Link

Long Read of the Day

What We Want Doesn’t Always Make Us Happy

Nice Bloomberg column by Noah Smith.

There’s no clear consensus on how to measure happiness. Some neuroscientists have tried to link it to various measures of brain activity. But economists tend to use a method that’s a lot cheaper and quicker — they send out surveys and questionnaires asking people how happy they are.

Happiness research has led to some surprising and troubling discoveries. People seem to reliably seek out a few things that make them unhappy…

(Spoiler alert: it’s about a certain social media company).

Fast Food in Pompeii

Well, what do you know? According to the Guardian an “exceptionally well-preserved snack bar” has been unearthed in Pompeii!

Researchers said on Saturday they had discovered a frescoed thermopolium or fast-food counter in an exceptional state of preservation in Pompeii. The ornate snack bar, decorated with polychrome patterns and frozen by volcanic ash, was partially exhumed last year but archaeologists extended work on the site to reveal it in its full glory. Pompeii was buried in ash and pumice when the nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD79, killing between 2,000 and 15,000 people. Archaeologists continue to make discoveries there.

At first sight it looks like one of those counters in supermarkets where you make up your own pizza toppings — except that Tesco & Co don’t do classy frescoes. And of course you’re unlikely to be interrupted by a volcanic explosion.

What comes after Google search?

Nobody knows, but there are signs that Google isn’t hitting the spot any more. Daniel Gross has an interesting blog post about this.

In 2000, Google got popular because hackers realized it was better than Lycos or Excite. This effect is happening again. Early adopters aren’t using Google anymore.

They aren’t using DuckDuckGo either. They’re still using Google.com, but differently. To make Google usable, users are adding faux-query modifiers that to supress the “garbage Internet”.

You see this in the typeahead logs.

Gross has noticed also that more advanced users use modifiers like “site: filetype: intitle:” because adding “reddit” isn’t strict enough, because spammy websites often manipulate content to optimise their search results. Or searches for “Reviews UPDATED JANUARY 2020” exploit the fact that customers suffix queries with the year. What such experienced searchers are looking for is freshness, not a title match. “Something’s broken”, he says, “and a tiny share of Google is open for the taking”. A tiny bit in this context could be an awful lot.

One of the interesting things about this is that it reminds one of how much craft knowledge there is in using an established search engine well. I like to think I’m an experienced user, but there are often times when some of my smarter colleagues can find what I’ve failed to unearth. Which suggests there might be an opening not just for a specialised alternative to Google but also for a good course on ‘Advanced Search with [name your engine]’. Probably they already exist and I just can’t be bothered to Google them!

How to mark a fateful transition

Since next Sunday’s edition of the Observer will be published in a United Kingdom that is no longer a member of the European Union, today’s issue has gone to town on marking the significance of the change. As someone who has happily written for the paper for a long time (I think my first piece was published in 1982) I’m obviously biased, but I think that today’s edition is really special.

Just to pick some examples at random…

Tim Adams has a terrific long essay reflecting on how we got to this point.

One of the pointed ironies of the long farewell of Brexit has been that nothing has become the EU quite like Britain’s leaving it. Having tried hard for 70 years to find a single theme that unites the disparate nations of the continent, the EU has finally discovered common cause in the spectacle of serial foot-shooting that has marked Britain’s efforts to depart. As delay led to extension and to prorogation, the approval ratings for the EU never soared so high. Guy Verhofstadt, the Brexiters’ pantomime villain in Brussels, told me last year that Britain has come to represent to Europeans the consequences of not standing up to divisive populism. “You want to see what nationalism does? Come to London.”

The sadness of that observation is a reminder of Britain’s failure to bring to Europe the values with which we were once more clearly associated: democracy, scrutiny, a robust sense of fair play. Rather than successive governments insisting on a semi-detached “we know best” approach to Europe, for fear of riling the tabloid press, there would have been more courage in wholeheartedly engaging to reform its institutions. Britain, in retrospect, perhaps always flirted with crashing out because it misunderstood Europe from the start.

One of the points Tim makes is that just because the UK has left doesn’t mean that it can forget about the EU. This is spelled out in a sober, informative piece by Sam Lowe, a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Reform. The UK may have won the power to diverge from EU rules, he points out, but the new relationship will be one of constant renegotiation. The Trade Deal, for example,

marks just the beginning of the UK’s new relationship with the EU, and will inevitably evolve over time. Next year, for example, the UK will need to decide whether to link its own domestic carbon-pricing scheme with the EU’s, find out whether the personal data of EU citizens can still be stored on UK servers, and re-enter discussions on the working of the sea border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain.

There is also the outstanding question of financial services equivalence – a unilateral EU decision whether to allow certain UK-based financial businesses to continue selling directly to EU-based clients. Even if such permission is granted, we should not assume it will be permanent.

The UK will also need to decide whether to use the new-found freedom to diverge from EU rules and approaches, and if so whether it is willing to accept the consequences of doing so. If it chooses to do so, years and years of disputes and reviews await.

In the longer term, it is inevitable that every successive UK government will want to renegotiate, or alter, aspects of the relationship with the EU…

If one adopts the ‘divorce’ metaphor which has been endlessly popular with the British tabloids, the UK has got its Decree Nisi. Now comes the awkward period of finding a working relationship. Who picks up the kids from school? What happens at Half Term? What happens with one of the parents is ill? And how to handle Christmas?

There’s also a lovely piece by the Irish journalist Fintan O’Toole, who had been a merciless critic of the Brexit shambles from the very beginning. In today’s essay, headlinded “So long, we’ll miss you – we Europeans see how much you’ve helped to shape us”, he points out the ways in which the UK helped shape the EU about which it always seems to be ambivalent.

The single market is the EU’s great achievement – protecting it was, ironically, the overwhelming aim in the negotiations on future trade with the UK. It simply would not have happened, when it happened, if Margaret Thatcher had not pressed so hard. It is easy to forget – because it has suited almost every side to do so – that the blueprint for the single market was a booklet called Europe – The Future that Thatcher presented to her fellow leaders at the Fontainebleau summit in 1984.

The problem was that Thatcher could never accept that the workings of a single market would have to be counterbalanced by common social, environmental and safety standards, with the political, legal and administrative capacity to enforce them. The fact remains: the force that has shaped the EU for the past 30 years was set in motion by Britain.

Equally, without Britain, it is not at all obvious that the EU would have responded so boldly to the fall of the Berlin Wall by bringing the Warsaw Pact states into its fold. Again, it was Thatcher who proclaimed the goal of enlargement in her Bruges speech in 1988. It was under a British presidency that talks on membership were opened with the first wave of central European states. It was Tony Blair who later pushed for Romania and Bulgaria to be allowed to join. Here, too, the implications of a British policy were not really understood in Britain. It was not explained that free movement would mean more immigration from these countries. Or that the governance of a much bigger EU would inevitably have to be more closely co-ordinated. Nonetheless, on these two defining issues, Britain was adventurous, ambitious, energetic and effective.

History, says O’Toole, will judge that the long relationship between the UK and Europe has been good for both. So now is the time to forget the rancorous parting and get on with life. He’s right.

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Trinity Street, Cambridge, this afternoon.

Image courtesy of Molly Blackburn.

Quote of the Day

“Education is … hanging around until you’ve caught on.”

• Robert Frost

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks | Never Going Back Again | Live

Link

Long Read of the Day

Stock Picks From Space: Investors are using real-time satellite images to predict retailers’ sales. Is that cheating?

Fascinating piece by Frank Partnoy in The Atlantic

Sample:

There is an old story about Sam Walton: In the early days of Walmart, its founder would monitor how stores were doing by counting the cars in the parking lot. After seeing the power of satellite imagery in his factory deal, Tom had a similar idea, but on a scale Walton could not have imagined. He asked his brother, “What if we could count the cars at every Walmart?”

After a week together in the Rockies, the brothers had a plan. Alex left DigitalGlobe and negotiated with the company to sell him three years’ worth of archival imagery. Tom downloaded a mouse-click counter, which allowed him to count the cars in those photos by clicking on each one. After a few months of scouring parking lots—at Home Depot, Lowe’s, McDonald’s, and, yes, Walmart—the brothers had a data set to back-test. Sure enough, the number of cars in a retailer’s parking lots seemed to accurately predict the company’s revenues.

Always look on the bright side

From the irrepressible Henry Mance in the Weekend FT: (With apologies to Eric Idle and the Monty Python team…)

Some things in life are bad
They can really make you mad
Other things force you to stay at home
If this is your first pandemic
Don’t grumble, it’s systemic
And wait till they sort out our poor genome

And always look on the bright side of life Always look on the light side of life

If they put you in tier 4
Be glad it’s not a war
And that you’re not expected to be brave
Forget about the Zooming
Not to mention the self-grooming
Chillax now, you’ll survive the second wave

And always look on the bright side of life
(Come on!)
Always look on the right side of life…

There’s more, but you get the idea.

The Crown — Series 4

We’ve been slow to catch up with this. Last night we watched Episode 2: The Balmoral Test. Margaret Thatcher has become Prime Minister and Prince Charles has been persuaded by the real love of his life, Camilla Parker-Bowles (now married to some other bloke), that he ought to give Diana Spencer a try. The royals are ensconced in their hideous, neo-gothic, tartanised hunting lodge in the Scottish Highlands, as is their wont in late Summer and early Autumn, where they specialise in slaughtering innocent animals and playing party games in the evening like the inhabitants of an up-market residential care home.

One of the standard ordeals of an incoming Prime Minister is an invitation to Balmoral where he or she is put through a ritual humiliation by this tribe of huntin’-shootin’-and-fishin’ philistines. The episode opens with Thatcher and Denis in the plane on the way up wondering what lies in store.

What lies in store is a delicious series of humiliations. Their hostess is “out stalking” when they arrive. They’re assigned separate bedrooms, because upper-class tribe members only sleep with other people’s spouses rather than their own. A flunkey impertinently opens Denis’s suitcase in order to lay out his clothes — which infuriates his lady wife. Then they come down fully dressed for dinner (black-tie etc.) when it’s only the tribe’s afternoon teatime. After dinner they have to play a ludicrous party game involving a silly rhyme and a penalty which involves putting a large black mark on your face with a smoked cork.

But that’s just for starters. Thatcher is invited by HMQ to go stalking a limping stag the following morning. The only clothes the PM has packed are Dorothy Perkins-style stuff in primary colours. And she only has kitten-heel shoes, so is obliged to stomp about sodden moorland in a pair of cast-off size-5 boots provided by HMQ. She’s wearing enough perfume to alert a flock of reindeer in Lapland. She stumbles and nearly falls with every second step and eventually is taken back to the lodge, where she changes into something warm and dry and sits at a table going through her red boxes, only to be barked at by some royal harridan for sitting in “Queen Victoria’s chair”. Apparently “nobody sits in that chair”. The fact that she is the Prime Minister and that the entire ghastly tribe are able to live like this because of the vast pension provided by the state doesn’t seem to occur to any of them.

This episode had a strange impact on this blogger, who for decades had loathed Thatcher. I was a TV critic during her reign and had a policy (which the Observer tolerated) of always referring to her as “Mrs Hacksaw”. And yet half-way through last night’s episode I found myself rooting for her as she stared down her snooty hosts, determined as they were to point out how “common” she and her businessman husband were. By which of course they meant how awfully middle-class she was. In the end, she and Denis did what Prime Ministers never do — departed early. And I cheered them on.

The other person undergoing the Balmoral Test was young Diana Spencer who arrived after Charlie decided (on Camilla’s advice) to invite her up. Unlike Thatcher, she passed the test with flying colours. Not surprising, given that the Spencers have lived for centuries in the style to which the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas have become accustomed.

So the narrative drive of Series 4 is now established. The marriage of Charles and Diana was basically engineered by Camilla. But there is also a side plot: Diana is not as innocent as she looks. She had set out to lure Charlie, and the gambit paid off. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. The conventional story is that she was an innocent lamb sucked into the maw of a chronically dysfunctional family. Nobody who saw the famous Bashir interview will be entirely convinced by this.

Of course The Crown is fiction masquerading as reality, and I have no idea how it squares with it. Its ethics seem dubious to me: after all Diana’s two sons are still around and it’s insensitive, to say the least, to have their mother’s life turned into a revenue-generator for a giant American media corporation. If the BBC tried to do this, imagine the hysterical fury there would be from the British establishment, not to mention the salivating thugs of the Murdoch media empire who want to see the BBC eviscerated and shackled.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Washington’s Secret to the Perfect Zoom Bookshelf? Buy It Wholesale. Books by the Foot curates shelves full of books for Washington offices, hotels, TV sets—and, now, Zoom backdrops. *Link. Or, to put it another way, books really do furnish a Zoom.
• Ten Truths about Brexit. Unpalatable but informed and probably accurate. Link.
• In the US, School Shooting Drills Have Gone Virtual. Link

One Thursday morning in October, my daughter, an eighth-grader, spent her “homeroom” period performing a school lockdown drill. She was, of course, in her own house, like all her classmates. The students watched a video on their computers about lockdown procedures, then practiced hiding under desks. And so it happened that in this, the most absurd and bewildering academic year of her life, my eighth-grader tucked herself under the table in her bedroom, to prepare for the possibility that someone might try to shoot her, someday later, at her school.

Would like like to bring up your kids in the US? Me neither.

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Kubrick in Venice

Until I saw this poster in Venice years ago I hadn’t known that Stanley Kubrick had been a photographer long before he became a film-maker. He was quite a good one too, though a lot of his best shots were staged — which I guess was an indicator of how he would evolve.

A different kind of day

Such a strange Christmas Day. Normally it would have involved a crowded, noisy family dinner with much ado about Secret Santa, jokes about the absurdity of the Johnson government, commentary on the fiendish ingenuity of the virus, delicious photographs and videos of the latest infant additions to my extended family (I have 43 first cousins I’ll have you know), wistful speculation of when we might be able to see people we miss in person again, and slightly apprehensive speculation about what 2021 might hold.

Mercifully, we managed to have some of this by converting our car-port into a kind of outdoor sitting room to which family members dropped in — in a lightly-organised, socially-distanced rota — for a glass of fizz, Christmas cake and a chat. Lovely in its way, especially in the morning when the sun shone in and made the space almost comfortably warm. But still only a pale reflection of the real thing — a thought that was doubtless mirrored a hundred thousand times in households throughout the UK.

Quote of the Day

”The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it”

• Sydney Harris

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

In dulci jubilo | King’s College Choir, 2020 

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Best Version of Itself: Nora Ephron’s New York  

Lovely meditation by Carrie Courogen on Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally and New York.

Nora Ephron and I only lived in the same New York for a little over a year, though, of course, we didn’t really inhabit the same New York. I was a poor student downtown, she was a famous filmmaker uptown. We did share one thing, however: Central Park. New York’s park. Harry and Sally’s park. Our park. I like to think she delighted in its small wonders her last year here: the reservoir regulars who start running laps at the same time every morning, no matter how cold; the few short weeks in spring when you can smell old ladies’ perfume lingering in the air; the way bare backed bodies spread out across Sheep Meadow on a hot summer afternoon resemble a painting; the perfect afternoon walk by the history museum when the leaves begin to turn.

I miss Nora Ephron. I know it’s such a strange thing to say about someone I never even met, but it’s true, and I feel it more acutely as the years go by and the city seems to grow increasingly crueler and more difficult to love unconditionally. I still don’t live in Nora Eprhon’s New York; I have been made aware of this countless times over the past decade. I don’t think I know anyone who does though, really…

If you’ve liked Nora Ephron’s films, this is for you.

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This is the day for having your cake and eating it!

Note the homage to Linux.

Quote of the Day

”One Christmas was much like another… I can never remember whether it showed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.”

• Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Yo-Yo Ma, Alison Krauss | The Wexford Carol

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Thank You for Choosing Manger Health Systems for the Birth of Your Savior by Rebecca Saltzman

in McSweeney’s.

At Manger Health Systems, we strive to provide you with the highest quality care when the inn is full and you need to give birth to the child of God. To accomplish that goal and not get smote by the Holy Father of the Baby, we rely on your feedback to let us know how we’re doing. We care deeply about your experience, although we are also required by law to record patient satisfaction scores in order to remain eligible for CaesarCare funding, which we care about more.

Please take a few minutes to complete the following survey and return the postage-paid scroll. In accordance with HIPPA and DONKEE, your responses will remain entirely confidential, although they may be displayed in the gospels and misquoted for millennia.

Name: Mary, Wife of Joseph…

You get the idea. Keep going. It’s worth it.

James Joyce’s first Christmas Dinner

From Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This is the most unforgettable account of a family meal I’ve ever encountered. The Joyce family were bitterly divided by the Catholic church’s role in the downfall of Charles Stewart Parnell, one of the most formidable figures in British (and Irish) parliamentary history. The episode is read here by Andrew Scott. It’s 13 minutes long but worth it.

I once sat in the room where this meal took place. It was during a memorable afternoon spent with the literary historian Vivien Igoe (author of James Joyce’s Dublin Houses) who took me on a tour of all the houses in Dublin where the Joyce family had lived during James’s youth.

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The Butterfly Effect

In the Bleak Midwinter

In the bleak midwinter,
forced to stay at home,
Browsing on my laptop,
searching on my phone;
Trying to order presents,
my internet’s too slow,
In the bleak midwinter,
so many gifts to go.

Oh God, what should I get them
to put beneath the tree?
What’s this? A gift subscription
to the LRB!
In this bleak midwinter,
with all our plans on ice:
An LRB subscription,
reasonably priced.

Although I am a long-time subscriber to the London Review of Books this is not an endorsement from me. It’s just that it made me smile this morning. And it’s the first ‘Xmas’ ad I’ve seen this year that hasn’t made my flesh creep. There’s nothing more nauseating than sociopathic corporations pretending to be on your side. Which at the moment is what they’re all doing, when the only side they’re on is that of their shareholders and executives.

Quote of the Day

I wish someone would gamify the virus so people understand how it works, and how it’s actually something like a game, and how we’re completely blowing it. One of the skills the virus has is it can mutate. So it’s in our collective interest to reduce the virus to almost nothing before it can mutate to something our vaccines can’t deal with. The more virus is out there btw, the more mutations there will be. The way we’re doing it now, it’s like we have all the time in the world. So a million people travel by air to go to family gatherings and then a month later do it again, and fly home, spreading all mutations of the virus everywhere. We don’t have a lot of time. We don’t have time to worry about who Trump pardons. We need to worry about what the virus mutates to and how it might not be very human friendly, even compared to the virus as we now know it.

• Dave Winer

Just what I was thinking. The virus is a more sophisticated adversary than we, in our hubristic human way, ever imagined.

Long Read of the Day

 What is a letter? Literary correspondence in the age of instant communications

Lovely essay by Hannah Williams in the venerable TLS .

It seems that the end of letters as a literary form has been lamented for almost as long as the form has been in use, with each improvement in speed, reliability or facility taken as anathema to the letter’s insistence on slow contemplation.

It’s no wonder that we’re desperate to eulogize it: authors’ letters are integral to literature’s myth-making; they build a meta-narrative that offers a glimpse into the genius of the creative process. As well as a way to deepen understanding of an individual and their work, they have always been a repository of both salacious rumours and petty rivalries; a bedroom curtain twitched aside, a seat at a dinner party none of us were invited to. Reading authors’ letters is sometimes envisioned as a way to “bring the dead back to life”, an aim Jonathan Ellis both celebrates and warns against in his book Letter Writing Among Poets (2015). They encourage a kind of hazy romanticization, as if they were the key to an ultimate understanding of a body of work…

Particularly apposite in the age of Substack. This blog is published every day on the Web, but its arrival in people’s email at 7am seems to be what many readers particularly like (at least if my inbox is anything to go by). Which suggests that email ain’t dead yet.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam O’Flynn | Sliabh na mBan

Link

One of my favourite slow tunes. Beautifully played by the maestro himself.

The SolarWinds hack — contd.

Looks as though I underestimated the extent of the likely damage and the nature of the exploit. Bruce Schneier has the best piece on it that I’ve read to date. “The US has suffered a massive cyberbreach”, he says. “It’s hard to overstate how bad it is.” But it’s wrong to treat it as a massive Russian cyber-attack against the United States, on two counts. It wasn’t a cyber-attack in international relations terms but busines>s-as-usual espionage. “And the victim wasn’t just the US, it was the entire world. But it was massive, and it is dangerous.”

Espionage is internationally allowed in peacetime. The problem is that both espionage and cyber-attacks require the same computer and network intrusions, and the difference is only a few keystrokes. And since this Russian operation isn’t at all targeted, the entire world is at risk – and not just from Russia. Many countries carry out these sorts of operations, none more extensively than the US. The solution is to prioritize security and defense over espionage and attack.

So the SolarWinds exploit is not, as Senator Richard Durban said, “virtually a declaration of war by Russia on the United States” While President-elect Biden said he will make this a top priority, it’s unlikely — says Schneier — that he will do much to retaliate.

The reason is that, by international norms, Russia did nothing wrong. This is the normal state of affairs. Countries spy on each other all the time. There are no rules or even norms, and it’s basically “buyer beware”. The US regularly fails to retaliate against espionage operations – such as China’s hack of the Office of Personal Management (OPM) and previous Russian hacks – because we do it, too. Speaking of the OPM hack, the then director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said: “You have to kind of salute the Chinese for what they did. If we had the opportunity to do that, I don’t think we’d hesitate for a minute.”

We don’t, and I’m sure NSA employees are grudgingly impressed with the SVR. The US has by far the most extensive and aggressive intelligence operation in the world. The NSA’s budget is the largest of any intelligence agency. It aggressively leverages the US’s position controlling most of the internet backbone and most of the major internet companies. Edward Snowden disclosed many targets of its efforts around 2014, which then included 193 countries, the World Bank, the IMF and the International Atomic Energy Agency. We are undoubtedly running an offensive operation on the scale of this SVR operation right now, and it’ll probably never be made public. In 2016, President Obama boasted that we have “more capacity than anybody both offensively and defensively.”

A key point in the Schneier piece is his view that the US (and most Western countries) have relatively poor defences against cyber-espionage intrusions like this. And there’s a critical asymmetry at work here too. Russia’s dependence on networks is probably much less than ours, simply because they’re in a different phase of economic development. That’s why North Korea has been able to engage in brazen cyber-espionage and other tricks. Retaliation in kind will have near-zero impact on them, because they don’t have the kind of intensively networked society that we have. It’s an interesting case of the power of the powerless.

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Truffles, anyone?

Quote of the Day

“He stared the assorted meannesses and failed promises of American life straight in the face, and they stared back.”

• Brendan Gill, writing about Walker Evans’s photographs in James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Rachmaninov | Piano Concerto No.2 (Adagio sostenuto) | Khatia Buniatishvili

Link

11 minutes, but worth it on a chilly Thursday morning

Long Read of the Day

How an obscure British PC maker invented ARM and changed the world.

Lovely essay by Jason Torchinsky about a great Cambridge story.

ProRaw and the Gradual Gradation of Grays

From Om Malik. Probably only of interest to photo geeks. TL;DR version: it underscores the message that the computational photography enabled by high-end smartphone cameras like the iPhone makes it increasingly difficult to justify lugging around an optically-superior conventional camera. Sigh.

Om Malik is a keen Leica user and an interesting photographer. This post is his report on an experiment he did recently.

Last week, I decided to head to the Santa Cruz Mountains with a friend. The idea was to leave San Francisco, go down I-280, turn into Portola Valley, and then meander our way to Santa Cruz before grabbing a coffee and driving back down Highway 1. We would stop wherever, whenever a photo beckoned and a composition lured us. I was traveling light — just my Leica SL and the newly released iPhone 12 Pro Max, which I have on loan from Apple.

I wanted to use the adventure to focus purely on the iPhone 12 Pro Max as a camera and exploit the capabilities of Apple’s new photo format, ProRAW. I mean, everyone is talking about it. Everyone seems to love it. I just wanted to know what all the fuss is about.

Ben Sandofsky of Halide Camera has written an in-depth overview of the Apple ProRAW, which is worth the time and effort. He points out that, “Technically, there’s no such thing as a ProRAW file. ProRAW images are regular DNG files that take advantage of some little known features in the specification, and introduce a few new ones.”

I keep wondering what Ansel Adams would have made of all this.

Biden and the Solarwinds hack

Interesting NYT report. “This assault happened on Donald Trump’s watch when he wasn’t watching,” said Biden, stating the obvious. And he threatened retribution.

Unlike Mr. Trump, the president-elect left no doubt that he believed Russia was responsible, noting that both Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William P. Barr had said as much publicly, even if Mr. Trump would not. And Mr. Biden said once there was a formal determination of responsibility, a task that could take intelligence agencies weeks, “we will respond, and probably respond in kind.”

Oh yeah. One of the first things Biden will have to do is negotiate an extension of up to five years of New Start the nuclear arms control treaty that expires in early February. So, as the Times puts it, Biden will be “trying to strike a deal to prevent one threat — a nuclear arms race — while simultaneously threatening retaliation on another”.

Cyberwarfare represent a paradigm shift in aggressive behaviour between states, and we’re in the same position as we were in 1946 with nuclear weapons.

Fishing for sovereignty

From Jonty’s blog:

I know I should have noticed this earlier but the UK has agreed a Brexit fisheries deal already. In fact it has agreed 4 deals, the trouble is that they are with Norway, Iceland Greenland and the Faroe Islands.

Perhaps the reason that these agreements have got under my radar, is that the Government hasn’t made much of a fuss about them. Strange given that they allow for bilateral agreements on managing fish stocks and access to each others waters, which is a major problem in agreeing an FTA with the EU.

How the government managed to do this when, it seems to believe that without controlling its own fishing waters the UK is not a sovereign country is a mystery.

It is, until you understand the Brexiteer mindset.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Reuters: Pictures of the Year 2020. Link
• Joining Apple 40 years ago. Nice memoir by Jean-Louis Gasseé, who was VP of Product Development for five years before the return of Steve Jobs. Link
• January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all! Wonderful annual feature by James Boyle and his colleagues at Duke University Law School: a list of works that are coming into the public domain on January 1st. Link

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Woodhenge

North Norfolk coast.

Quote of the Day

”To yield to the mere process of disintegration has become an irresistible temptation, not only because it has assumed the spurious grandeur of ‘historical necessity’, but also because everything outside it has begun to appear lifeless, bloodless, meaningless and unreal.”

• Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beatles | Get Back | A Sneak Peek from Peter Jackson.

Link

Not a trailer but a glimpse of his forthcoming film. Wonderful.

Long Read of the Day

No ‘Negative’ News: How China Censored the Coronavirus

Great New York Times piece.

The Solarwinds hack

You will probably have seen stories about the so-called Solarwinds hack. Hackers acting on behalf of a foreign government — almost certainly a Russian intelligence agency — broke into a range of key US government networks, including in the Treasury and Commerce Departments, and had free access to their email systems. It’s clear that many other government departments had been penetrated and that the intrusions have gone undetected for many months.

The attack was only discovered because a FireEye, a well-known cyber-security firm, found that it had been hacked and began to investigate how it had happened. They realised that the intrusion stemmed from a vulnerability in a product made by one of its software providers, the Texas-based SolarWinds Corporation.

“We looked through 50,000 lines of source code, which we were able to determine there was a backdoor within SolarWinds”, a senior techie at FireEye told Bloomberg. After discovering the backdoor, FireEye contacted SolarWinds and law enforcement agencies.

Hackers, suspected to be part of an elite Russian group, took advantage of the vulnerability to implant malware, which then found its way into the systems of SolarWinds customers when they updated their software. So far, more than 25 entities have been victimised by the attack, according to people familiar with the investigations. But SolarWinds says as many as 18,000 entities may have downloaded the malicious Trojan.

So who or what is Solarwinds? It produces a piece of software called Orion on which according to the FT “hundreds of thousands of organisations around the world” rely to manage their IT networks. It’s described (perhaps fancifully) as a “single pane of glass” that can monitor everything in a system, and it seems that the hackers inserted malicious code into the software updates provided by SolarWinds to its customers, which then allowed them to open a back door that let them spy on their targets at will. The updates were released between March and June this year — which means that the hackers have been inside some systems for as long as nine months. It also means — as Ben Evans pointed out in his weekly newsletter, that the hackers have had the run of the internal networks and data of customers like the US Treasury, the Department of Energy (which, among other things, manages America’s nuclear weapons arsenal) and more besides.

This, says Evans, raises two questions:

1: This is today’s espionage, and the NSA spends billions trying to do this to everyone else. But what’s the line between espionage and something more? 2: How does this change how big networks are designed, managed and perhaps regulated?

It also raises another question: what should a state do when it is attacked in this way? Currently, this is an unanswered question. Will we get to the point where a cyberattack triggers what military people call a ‘kinetic’ response? If China eventually moves on Taiwan because it wants (or needs) that country’s chip-making expertise and facilities, will the US react with conventional military force? Or instead launch a crippling cyberattack on China, on the grounds that a conventional war could rapidly escalate to a nuclear confrontation? Same questions apply to Russia and the Baltic States.

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Bob Dylan on Paul McCartney. Link

  This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

The key question about vaccines

From Scripting.com

Quote of the Day

In short, “neoliberalism” is not simply a name for pro-market policies, or for the compromises with finance capitalism made by failing social democratic parties. It is a name for a premise that, quietly, has come to regulate all we practise and believe: that competition is the only legitimate organising principle for human activity.

• Stephen Metcalf, Link

Ideology is what determines how you think when you don’t know you’re thinking.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Exultate Jubilate | Regula Mühlemann Link

Long Read of the Day

Mutant coronavirus in the United Kingdom sets off alarms but its importance remains unclear

Terrifically calm and informative piece in Science summarising what is known just now about the new mutant strain of Covid-19 that has brought he UK to a juddering, isolated halt.

Last Writes

David Vincent’s final Covid-19 diary post of 2020

Early in the lockdown, David Vincent’s lovely book, A History of Solitude, was published. He’s also been contributing to a collective Covid Diary over the year. In his final post of the year, he observes how the incidence of loneliness, as measured by the Office of National Statistics, hasn’t varied much over the course of the pandemic, which is not something most of us would have predicted. “This stasis,” he writes, ” which contrasts so sharply with the switchback ride of government regulation, generates conclusions which may hold more broadly for the pandemic.”

Modern societies have developed a raft of techniques for exploiting the benefits of living alone and avoiding the worst of the pitfalls. In this regard as in so many others, Covid-19 struck a population full of resources built up amidst the consumer and communications revolutions in the modern era.

The second is that faced with a crisis for which no country was adequately prepared, individuals and social groups have proved far more adaptable than the arthritic structures of government. Community groups have come into being focusing on the needs of those suffering from the absence of company. Neighbours have looked out for neighbours with increased vigilance. And those most vulnerable have acquired new skills. As with so many of my generation I have gained a new mastery of Zoom and its rivals, without which my isolation from children and grandchildren would have been far more profound.

The third is that we live in time. Any experience, negative or otherwise, is conditioned by its duration. ‘One definition of loneliness’ I wrote in my book, ‘is that it is solitude that has continued for longer than was intended or desired.’ If there is no ending that we can see or control, then it becomes unbearable. With yesterday’s emergency Tier 4 lockdown, Christmas is going to be a trial for many separated families, despite the special dispensation to form a support bubble with others if ‘you are the only adult in your household’. But we do know that the vaccine is coming.

Light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe.

The threats to tear down the BBC have not gone away.

Great piece by Alan Rusbridger in today’s Guardian on the extraordinary, Murdoch-inspired, campaign to destroy the BBC.

It’s hard to know where to begin. Britain has, unusually, a highly polemical and often partisan press. Nothing wrong with that, so long as there is also a universally available source of news that aspires to be something different. Words such as impartial, fair, balanced and objective come to mind. Many people might not want to live in a country with the BBC as a sole source of news. An equal, or larger number, might not want Fleet Street to dominate the airwaves as well as the print and online spheres. The mix is all.

The timing of this debate is extraordinary. We are drowning in a world of information chaos, with many surveys showing a public no longer knowing who to trust. The middle of a pandemic, where real lives depend on the supply of widely available and reliable information, is an odd time to be playing up the possibility of destroying the very basis of our most used and trusted public service news source.

Cummings is on record as wanting more Fox News-style broadcasters in the UK. Yes, that’s the Fox News that dismissed Covid-19 as a hoax and slavishly parroted the White House line until the moment Murdoch decided to pull the plug on Trump himself. To replace the BBC with Fox News feels like a kind of national death wish.

The most recent Ofcom report into the BBC described an organisation still used by 90% of the population for news. Three-quarters of the users said it was important; 78% said it was high quality; 71% trustworthy. The corporation had, said Ofcom, responded “effectively and rapidly to Covid-19, additionally offering a significant amount of educational content to fill the gap when schools were closed”. There were zero breaches of the code requiring due impartiality or accuracy.

Rusbridger is right. The campaign against the BBC is like Trump’s against the New York Times. Clillingly documented by Patrick Barwise and Peter York in their book The War Against the BBC: How an Unprecedented Combination of Hostile Forces Is Destroying Britain’s Greatest Cultural Institution

Another, hopefully interesting, link

•  The most-read Wikipedia page on each day of 2020. Link

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