The Ed Matts story gets better and better. The Guardian solicited further creative photoshopping from readers. The results are hilarious. This one by James Smith is my favourite.
Category Archives: Politics
Photoshopping, dog-whistles and the election
Wonderful story in the Guardian about Ed Matts, the Tory candidate for South Devon, after the right-hand photograph appeared on his campaign literature showing him and another prominent Tory, Ann Widdecombe (aka Doris Karloff), holding placards which apparently parrot the new Tory ‘tough’ line on immigration (code for xenophobia). The only problem is that the pic is a photoshopped version of an earlier picture (the left-hand one) in which the two politicos are shown campaigning in support of a local failed asylum seeker and her family who faced deportation. Verily, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
The Net and the election
My musings in the Observer about how the Net might affect the election are here.
Correction: AA points out that Howard Dean self-destructed in Iowa, not (as I had stated) Ohio. Doesn’t affect the argument, but I should have double-checked.
“Events, dear boy, events…”
… was Harold Macmillan’s celebrated answer to a journalist’s question about what can most easily steer a government off course. The extraordinary events of this evening concerning the fate of Rover, the last British-owned volume car manufacturer, provide a vivid illustration of Mac’s adage. First, Patricia Hewitt, the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, announces at a press conference that the company is going into receivership. This is immediately denied by the Board, which says that they have merely asked their accountants to advise them. But even if the company wasn’t going to the wall before Hewitt’s statement, it certainly didn’t seem to have much of a future afterwards! Would you buy a used (or even a new) car from such an outfit?
What’s funny about this (and what reminded me of Macmillan) was that this came on the day after the damaging internal feud between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown seemed to have been settled. It looked as though this last lingering credibility problem for Labour had been laid to rest. And then along comes Rover (which has always been an economic basket-case) and upsets the apple-cart.
The Grokster case
My Observer column on the case now before the US Supreme Court is out.
In a high-ceilinged courtroom in Washington last Monday, seven men and two women sat listening to arguments about technology. As far as we know, none of them is especially knowledgeable about technology.
Indeed, one of them disdains even to use a laptop, and writes his judicial opinions by hand on a yellow legal pad. But these are the highest judges in the US, and they are deciding the future of computing and possibly of the internet itself.
This may seem a grandiose claim, but bear with me…
The truth about Gerry Adams & Co
Terrific piece by Ruth Dudley Edwards in the Financial Times pointing out that the Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ was based on suspension of disbelief by the British, Irish and US administrations. They chose to believe that there was a Chinese wall between the terrorists of the IRA and the leaders of Sinn Fein, whereas in fact no such division ever existed. (‘Naive Idiot’ was the code phrase for Blair found in secret Sinn Fein documents during a security raid in 2002.)
The simple truth that is emerging, even in the US, is that the IRA, which is inextricably linked with Sinn Fein, has grown into one of the richest and most sophisticated criminal organisations in Europe, with tentacles extending to the US and Colombia. Its ultimate ambition is to take power in the Republic, and to this end it funds a huge army of Sinn Fein activists. It has planted sleepers in politics, the media, the law and business. It is using money obtained by criminal means to buy up legitimate businesses (it is now the biggest pub owner in Ireland) and it is replicating northern ghettoes in some southern inner cities.
Yet Blair, who is terrified of a bomb during his election campaign, and Ahern, who follows his lead, continue to talk to Adams and to bleat about inclusivity and the need to revitalise the peace process. If they refuse to face reality, there is a real danger that should Sinn Fein pretend to split from the IRA, they will go along with another disastrous fiction.
One of the few good things about the Bush regime is that it never fell for the proposition that Gerry Adams was a light-skinned Mandela.
Security blindness
Interesting editorial in MIT Technology review about the long term implications of siphoning off research funding to support a narrow security agenda. Excerpt:
American technology—just like its foreign policy, domestic politics, and popular culture—has been swept up into what President George W. Bush calls “the global war on terror.” The U.S. R&D establishment has narrowed its interests in the years since September 11, 2001, concentrating its resources on technologies that provide security: weapons systems, defenses against biological weapons, biometrics, network security. The U.S. government’s research-and-development budget is now bluntly militaristic. In fiscal year 2005, federal R&D spending rose 4.8 percent to $132.2 billion, but 80 percent of that increase went to defense research. And most of that increase is committed to the development of new weaponry, like the ballistic-missile defense system. In all, the government will spend 57 percent of its R&D budget for 2005, or a record $75 billion, on defense-related projects. President Bush’s proposed 2006 budget, now being debated in Congress, would introduce cuts to many civilian programs but spend an additional $600 million on defense research.
The author (Jason Pontin) goes on to point out that organisations like the Natiional Science Foundation and the national Institutes of Health are being correspondingly starved of federal funding.
Chinese puzzles
China is the great enigma of our time, riddled with contradictions. It’s clearly an awakening geopolitical giant, and is potentially the only country which might one day challenge the US for global supremacy (a thought which keeps many right-wing US crazies awake at night). Almost every piece of electronics kit I buy (yea, even the sleekest stuff from Apple) has “Made in China” stamped on it somewhere. Microsoft has set up two labs in China — one to do R&D, the other to speed up the transition from R&D lab to product. Bill Gates spends a lot of time wooing the Chinese leadership. Yet the official position of the leadereship is that a special Chinese version of Linux is what will underpin all computing on its territory.
The Chinese (communist) government proclaims its desire to become a fully-fledged member of capitalist society and has even signed up to WIPO. And yet Mark Anderson (who keeps his eye on these things) says that no US company would dream of risking its intellectual property in China. Western companies are happy to have their hardware made there, but wouldn’t risk revealing their software there because of fears of being ripped off.
This has had an interesting side-effect. The Indian government, which hitherto has been one of the few administrations to take a relatively enlightened line on intellectual property at WIPO, seems to be hardening its stance and moving towards the ‘Strong IP’ side of the argument. One explanation for this could be that the Indians (who see China as their major rival) have spotted what’s going on and think that by having a Strong IP regime they can attract the Western investment that eschews China. This might be a shrewd move in the short-term, though in the longer term it may lock the Indians into the unfolding IP catastrophe.
In the course of seeking enlightenment on the Chinese enigma, I came on this elegant lecture, “Peering into the Future of China” by Brad DeLong of Berkeley. I wish more academics were as clear as this.
Iraq: status report
Very good Open Democracy piece by Tim Garden, who was formerly Assistant Chief of the Uk Defence Staff. Sample:
Four distinct groups now threaten Iraq. First, former regime elements, who are largely drawn from the Sunni population, and number somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 fighters. There are then two different groups of Islamic extremists who can field suicide attacks. The foreign fighters, including those led by Musab al-Zarqawi, number about 1,000. A new development is the emergence of home-grown Islamist insurgents. They are still fewer than 500, but their numbers are increasing and they can deliver great destruction. Fourth, the biggest security problem of all comes from organised crime. At least twelve of Iraq’s eighteen governorates have a major crime problem, particularly when the criminals work with the insurgents.
Garden sees two possible outcomes:
1. A fragile, but improving, situation in Iraq with the hope that coalition forces might leave by the end of 2006.
2. A country which begins to look more like Afghanistan than Vietnam, with increasingly lawless regions. The prospect for coalition forces is then without limit, as the worst route of all would be to abandon Iraq and allow it to become a force for instability in the region.
Quote of the day
We’re not going to spend taxpayers’ money on a program so that Microsoft can further consolidate its monopoly. It’s the government’s responsibility to ensure that there is competition, and that means giving alternative software platforms a chance to prosper.
Sérgio Amadeu, president of Brazil’s National Institute of Information Technology, the agency that oversees the Brazilian government’s technology initiatives.
From a New York Times article on the Brazilian government’s resolute stand on Open Source software.