Mike Meade, one of the nicest and most valued of my academic colleagues, retired today. This is him in characteristic mode when replying to the toast.
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Billt
Tom Catchesides has a great picture of Bill Thompson in full flow at the Cambridge Film Festival.
Democracy 1, Wall Street 0
Nice openDemocracy piece by Godfrey Hodgson.
The amount Paulson proposed to disburse to his former colleagues and rivals was bold in its immensity: $700 billion – or more, if that’s what it would take. The work would be undertaken by the treasury department. There would be the lightest supervision, no higher authority to judge whether the rescue was being carried out competently or even honestly. The three-page scheme was wrapped up and popped out over a weekend, to minimise public scrutiny (see Saskia Sassen, “The new new deal”, 23 September 2008).
In retrospect, it could never have worked – for even in the George W Bush administration, it was recognised that such a vast government expenditure would have to pass Congress. True, the government’s placemen expressed the administration’s trademark arrogance and contempt for democracy at this stage (most notably the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, John Boehner: “We don’t need 535 members of Congress adding their best idea. We need to keep it clean, simple, move it through the House and Senate, and get it on the president’s desk.”) But from millions of Americans came a clean, simple response of their own which their elected representatives have found it impossible to ignore: no.
En passant, one of the most worrying things about the coverage of this story is the extent to which most of the TV and radio specialists — like the sing-song Robert Peston of the BBC — have bought into the Wall Street mindset. Watching Peston shaking his head mournfully at the folly of American politicians and warning of the dire cataclysms attendant upon their misguided votes just underlined how far the disease has spread.
Stallman: Cloud computing is a trap
Bobbie Johnson has an interesting piece based on an interview with Richard Stallman who, as usual, is in contrarian mood.
The concept of using web-based programs like Google’s Gmail is “worse than stupidity”, according to a leading advocate of free software.
Cloud computing – where IT power is delivered over the internet as you need it, rather than drawn from a desktop computer – has gained currency in recent years. Large internet and technology companies including Google, Microsoft and Amazon are pushing forward their plans to deliver information and software over the net.
But Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.
“It’s stupidity. It’s worse than stupidity: it’s a marketing hype campaign,” he told The Guardian.
“Somebody is saying this is inevitable – and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it’s very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true.”
The 55-year-old New Yorker said that computer users should be keen to keep their information in their own hands, rather than hand it over to a third party…
The real menace of Palin
Terrific piece by Sam Harris.
We have all now witnessed apparently sentient human beings, once provoked by a reporter’s microphone, saying things like, “I’m voting for Sarah because she’s a mom. She knows what it’s like to be a mom.” Such sentiments suggest an uncanny (and, one fears, especially American) detachment from the real problems of today. The next administration must immediately confront issues like nuclear proliferation, ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and covert wars elsewhere), global climate change, a convulsing economy, Russian belligerence, the rise of China, emerging epidemics, Islamism on a hundred fronts, a defunct United Nations, the deterioration of American schools, failures of energy, infrastructure and Internet security … the list is long, and Sarah Palin does not seem competent even to rank these items in order of importance, much less address any one of them.
Palin’s most conspicuous gaffe in her interview with Gibson has been widely discussed. The truth is, I didn’t much care that she did not know the meaning of the phrase “Bush doctrine.” And I am quite sure that her supporters didn’t care, either. Most people view such an ambush as a journalistic gimmick. What I do care about are all the other things Palin is guaranteed not to know—or will be glossing only under the frenzied tutelage of John McCain’s advisers. What doesn’t she know about financial markets, Islam, the history of the Middle East, the cold war, modern weapons systems, medical research, environmental science or emerging technology? Her relative ignorance is guaranteed on these fronts and most others, not because she was put on the spot, or got nervous, or just happened to miss the newspaper on any given morning. Sarah Palin’s ignorance is guaranteed because of how she has spent the past 44 years on earth.
I care even more about the many things Palin thinks she knows but doesn’t: like her conviction that the Biblical God consciously directs world events. Needless to say, she shares this belief with mil-lions of Americans—but we shouldn’t be eager to give these people our nuclear codes, either. There is no question that if President McCain chokes on a spare rib and Palin becomes the first woman president, she and her supporters will believe that God, in all his majesty and wisdom, has brought it to pass. Why would God give Sarah Palin a job she isn’t ready for? He wouldn’t. Everything happens for a reason. Palin seems perfectly willing to stake the welfare of our country—even the welfare of our species—as collateral in her own personal journey of faith. Of course, McCain has made the same unconscionable wager on his personal journey to the White House…
Thanks to James Miller for the link.
Two-timing
“So let me get this straight – hours before the vote McCain was taking credit for making it happen and moments after its failure he’s blaming Obama, who has remained hands off on any creit or blame, because Republicans in the House didn’t deliver enough votes to pass it.
And he’s accusing Obama and Pelosi of putting politics ahead of the country?”
A comment on the WSJ site on its report of McCain’s increasingly erratic behaviour over the $700 billion ‘bailout’.
Afternoon flower
Seen on a kitchen table this afternoon.
SMS: the US finally gets it
From the NYTimes…
In the fourth quarter of 2007, American cellphone subscribers for the first time sent text messages more than they phoned, according to Nielsen Mobile. Since then, the average subscriber’s volume of text messages has shot upward by 64 percent, while the average number of calls has dropped slightly.
Skip to next paragraphNicholas Covey, director of insights for Nielsen Mobile, attributed the spike in messaging to the spread of QWERTY-style keypads, whose users send 54 percent more text messages than those with ordinary keypads. He also said that phone companies had encouraged users to text by offering large or unlimited text-messaging bundles.
Teenagers ages 13 to 17 are by far the most prolific texters, sending or receiving 1,742 messages a month, according to Nielsen Mobile. By contrast, 18-to-24-year-olds average 790 messages. A separate study of teenagers with cellphones by Harris Interactive found that 42 percent of them claim that they can write text messages while blindfolded.
The Blue-stater’s manifesto
From Dave Winer
I’m the kind of guy the red stater’s hate.
I have an excellent education, and I didn’t stop after I finished school. I worked hard, and struggled, and made a success of myself. I didn’t borrow money, I don’t have much in my Social Security account, but I do have good retirement savings and health insurance. I have a well-used passport. I read voraciously, and on some subjects, systematically, and communicate with people on the Internet from all over the world.
Because of my education both formal and continuing, I have a perspective on the world that people in the flyover states not only don’t have, but that they openly express hatred of. I know that’s an extreme statement, but listen — in the east and the west you don’t hear ignorant people boasting of their ignorance the way Sarah Palin did in her acceptance speech at the RNC. But in the middle of the country, esp the South, you do hear that. A lot. So much so that you can pretty much win a national election by appealing to that character flaw.
Now I’m not a Democrat, and I’m quite conservative on a number of issues, but they still call me “The Left” when dismissing me. I follow the example of my maternal uncle who said he was a Party Of One, he thought for himself, and made up his own mind. So I am totally Pro Choice, anti-death penalty, and I practice no religion. That’s another reason people in the flyover states hate me.
But I’ve decided I don’t care if they hate me or not. After all, they say that we as Americans shouldn’t care whether people outside the United States hate us. So why should I care if they hate me?
I used to enjoy going to the US — especially to the West Coast. But then in 2000 I got a shock. Firstly because the Supreme Court handed the presidency — wrongly in my view — to George Bush. And secondly, because I realised that I didn’t know a single American who had voted for him. And then it dawned on me that all the Americans I know are on the East or West coasts. I didn’t know a single person who lived in the Red (aka ‘flyover’) states. Not a single one.
Dave the Hedge-Hog
Well, well. Guess who’s funding the Cameroonians.
The Tories were accused last night of being bankrolled by a City ‘wolf pack’ after it emerged that the party was receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds from hedge fund managers who have been making vast sums of money from plunging bank shares.
After the Financial Services Authority had, in effect, barred the controversial practice of short-selling bank stocks and the Treasury was forced to draw up a rescue package for Bradford and Bingley, it emerged that a small group of City financiers who have made fortunes from falling stock markets are paying at least £50,000 a year to the party.
Their donations entitle them to membership of an elite supporters club called the Leaders Group, which bestows invitations to functions attended by David Cameron, something that has prompted allegations that the Tory leader is supporting ‘cash for access’. Last night, in an attempt to quell a mounting row over the party’s finances ahead of this week’s conference, the party put details of the Leaders Group on its website…
I’ve just looked through the site and I can’t find any mention of these generous short-sellers.