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.
Daily Archives: September 30, 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.