Bill Thompson’s PowerBook is on its last legs. He’s wondering what to do next — and beginning to gibber about trying one of those forthcoming Vista laptops. Maybe it’s time for his friends to club together and save him from himself…

My friend Nicci Gerrard has written a perceptive piece about the Suffolk murders. Excerpt:

Hintlesham is a small, attractive village scattered along a main road (it’s just a couple of miles from where I live, and my husband, Sean, and I named one of our characters Jenny Hintlesham in the Nicci French thriller that we wrote when we arrived here). Now it is the place where Gemma Adams was left, in a swollen ditch off the road to Ipswich.

Copdock lies nondescriptly just beyond the noise of traffic, a village squashed between the A12 and A14 and almost swallowed up by the town; now it’s the site where Tania Nicol’s body was discovered in the same stretch of water as Gemma Adams. The ditch has become a churned-up stream here; on the bridge there are already several bouquets of flowers bearing messages from friends and from strangers. One of them – with a touchingly formal courtesy – addresses her as Ms Nicol…

It’s a typical Nicci piece — soft and intuitive one minute, detached and analytical the next.

The victims were beloved daughters, sisters, mothers, friends. Gemma Adams’ father spoke movingly of his “wonderful, beautiful” dead daughter, who was secure and happy as a child; she was a Brownie, loved horse-riding, played the piano, was “good”. Her addiction sucked her into a world from which the continued efforts of her parents couldn’t rescue her. Which parent, hearing this, wouldn’t feel a shudder of dread? We like to think we deserve our luck and are in control of our lives; actually we are forever walking on thin ice. And sometimes we are made more aware of this precariousness.

Most believe that the murderer has changed something about the way we feel about our community. We are not living through an Agatha Christie whodunnit in which a fiendish criminal, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, will be discovered and ejected, and everything will return to tidy normality; it’s a creepy psychological thriller in which the sheer horror of what has happened unsettles how we think about the world in which we live…

The (tiny) local police force is clearly overwhelmed by what it now has to deal with. The government, for its part, will respond with its usual duplicity. The Home Secretary will solemnly promise in front of TV cameras to provide any extra resources that are needed; while behind the scenes he will be gleefully pointing out to the Suffolk Constabulary that this is exactly why the government was trying to amalgamate local police forces into larger, less accountable, units.

Frank Johnson, a former editor of the Spectator and one of Britain’s funniest newspaper columnists, has died of cancer at the age of 63. Among his badges of honour was the distinction of having been fired by Conrad ‘Lord’ Black. There’s a nice obit in today’s Telegraph, for which he wrote every Saturday. It ends thus:

Johnson endured cancer with exemplary courage for seven years. Last Sunday, just before he went into hospital for the final time, he attended the performance of Aida at La Scala in which the tenor Roberto Alagna (as Radames) walked off the stage in a fit of pique after being booed; Johnson immediately filed the story to The Daily Telegraph.

He once drafted his epitaph as a cod footnote:

“Johnson, Frank (dates unknown). Journalist. No relation to Paul (qv). Claimed to have been one of the last lovers of Maria Callas (1923-77), although his testimony in such matters was said to be unreliable. Published a distasteful memoir of the relationship.”

The Callas reference needs explanation. He was an opera fanatic from early on and at the age of 14 appeared on stage at Covent Garden in Norma alongside Maria Callas. [Children’s parts at the Royal Opera House were taken by pupils at Frank’s school, and he and a classmate were recruited to perform as Norma’s two sons.] Johnson recalled the experience 25 years later:

“I could not forget that when Callas bore down on us with the knife, her nostrils flared; that when, dropping the knife, she repentantly clasped us to her bosom, her perfume smelt like that of an aunt who was always kissing me; and that at the first performance on February 2 there penetrated, into my left eye, the tip of the diva’s right breast, which partnership remained throughout the subsequent duet with [Ebe] Stignani… there are few men who can truthfully say that their eye made contact with the right nipple of Maria Callas.”

Amen.

Every Christmas there is a Must-Have gadget. It’s the thing that kids put on their Santa lists and has always sold out just before their addled parents get to the stores.

This year’s gadget is the Nintendo Wii — which (I can personally testify) is a fascinating device. Its USP is a controller fitted with accelerometers that you wave about — like so:

And therein lies a tale…

Today’s NYT is reporting that,

Nintendo said Friday that it was taking steps to keep energetic users of its new Wii video game console from breaking their televisions and ceiling fans.

[…] The trouble is that some players have grown so enthusiastic that the controller has slipped from their hands and taken brief flight. Players are supposed to use wrist straps attached to the controllers, but in some cases these have snapped.

Nintendo said it had begun a voluntary replacement program for the wrist straps. Thicker straps should mean fewer flying controllers, said Beth Llewelyn, a spokeswoman for Nintendo of America.

The new straps are free, Ms. Llewelyn said, but the company is not committing to replacing other household items — like the handful of televisions that have reportedly been smashed by unleashed controllers…

Well, well… The NYT reports today that…

Hewlett-Packard’s board has ended a crucial advisory relationship with Larry W. Sonsini, the powerful Silicon Valley lawyer, according to a person with close connections to the board.

The move is the latest repercussion from the company’s spying on directors and journalists, which has led to the criminal prosecution of its former chairwoman and a senior company lawyer by California authorities, several federal investigations, $14.5 million in civil fines as well as considerable embarrassment for a company that prided itself on ethical behavior.

After the year’s end, Mr. Sonsini and the firm he helped build, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, will no longer serve as outside counsel to the board. The law firm will still do legal work for Hewlett-Packard. A company spokesman said yesterday that “Wilson Sonsini will continue to have a relationship with H. P.”

Mr. Sonsini and his firm were not involved in the spying, which began after Patricia C. Dunn, the H. P. chairwoman, directed company lawyers and investigators to find the source of board leaks. But he was caught up in the events, and was criticized for failing to prevent the incident from damaging the H.P.

H.P.’s search for another lawyer to serve as outside counsel is expected to set off a scramble among Silicon Valley firms. “It’s not a big revenue item for a law firm, but being able to say to other clients that ‘I give advice to H.P.,’ is a prestige thing,” said a lawyer who did not want to be identified because he has done work for the company.

A spokeswoman for the Sonsini firm, Courtney Dorman, said, “There is a lot of ongoing work with H. P.” The firm handled the transactional work for H. P.’s recent $4.5 billion acquisition of Mercury Interactive, a business software company.

Mr. Sonsini, who serves as chairman of the firm he joined in 1966, had no comment. Ms. Dorman also said that the firm’s chief executive, John V. Roos, had no comment.

Just when I was thinking I’d like to dance on the old brute’s grave, along comes Greg Palast and does it for me.

The claim that General Pinochet begat an economic powerhouse was one of those utterances whose truth rested entirely on its repetition.

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende – who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

In 1973, the year General Pinochet brutally seized the government, Chile’s unemployment rate was 4.3%. In 1983, after ten years of free-market modernization, unemployment reached 22%. Real wages declined by 40% under military rule.

In 1970, 20% of Chile’s population lived in poverty. By 1990, the year “President” Pinochet left office, the number of destitute had doubled to 40%. Quite a miracle.

Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatized the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatized 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.

Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died. In 1982 and 1983, GDP dropped 19%. The free-market experiment was kaput, the test tubes shattered. Blood and glass littered the laboratory floor.

Yet, with remarkable chutzpah, the mad scientists of Chicago declared success. In the US, President Ronald Reagan’s State Department issued a report concluding, “Chile is a casebook study in sound economic management.” Milton Friedman himself coined the phrase, “The Miracle of Chile.” Friedman’s sidekick, economist Art Laffer, preened that Pinochet’s Chile was, “a showcase of what supply-side economics can do.”

It certainly was. More exactly, Chile was a showcase of de-regulation gone berserk….

You might argue that Greg Palast is not exactly a dispassionate commentator. But, interestingly, his view is largely supported by Oxford academic Alan Angell’s more detached account:

The second justification is that Pinochet created a model free-market economy. It is certainly true that there was massive privatisation and effective reduction of inflation. But the negative features are huge. The overall growth rate of the seventeen years of his rule was dismal – a little over 2% per annum. He engineered two massive recessions – that of 1975 (which could partly be blamed on the situation he inherited), and one of 1982-83 (which was due entirely to the regime’s economic policies).

There was enormous social suffering – unemployment at its peak was over 30%, and over 40% of the population were in poverty at the end of his regime. His government reduced social spending, with dire consequences for the quality of public health and education. Moreover, despite the commitment to neo-liberalism, the largest state asset, the state copper corporation Codelco, was not privatised, and Pinochet’s regime received colossal financial support from a state company nationalised by the Salvador Allende regime.

I could go on: the much-vaunted pension privatisation is now under attack, the central bank only achieved real independence under democracy. In truth, only after the recession of 1982-83 did the regime adopt sensible macro-economic policies.

It must also be stressed that these economic measures were accompanied by corruption which benefited Pinochet’s supporters – and also, we know now, the man and his family himself. The privatisations were used to reward supporters, and there was little transparency or effective regulation. The rich benefited enormously in Pinochet’s government leaving Chile with the legacy of one of the most unequal income distributions in the world.

The claim that Pinochet ruled for the benefit of the country can no longer be sustained. Undeniably, Chile has seen great economic progress since 1990 but this, I would argue, is the product of the policies of the democratic governments and not the legacy of Pinochet.