King’s Cross Station, this morning. I love the light that floods in through that semicircular window.
Sucking up to the Cameroons
There’s only one word for the media coverage of ‘Dave’ Cameron: nauseating. The Tory party has been hijacked by a bunch of refugees from Notting Hill. (The press has already dubbed them the Cameroons.) I keep expecting to find Hugh Grant lurking somewhere at the back of the publicity pictures. So it was nice to find some robustly sceptical comment at last — in this case a splendid column by Jonathan Freedland in today’s Guardian. Sample:
Progressives should start telling the media: enough of the infatuation – it’s getting embarrassing. For a “compassionate conservative”, as Cameron styles himself, is not a new creation. We have seen one before – and his name was George Bush.
He too knew how to talk nice — “No child left behind” he promised in 2000, usually surrounded by plenty of telegenic black and female faces – but once he had installed himself in power, he was as ruthless a rightwinger as any Republican in history.
Cameron is no chum of Bush – and the president is unlikely to alienate Blair by getting too cosy with him now – but the parallel is not entirely bogus. For one thing, Cameron too is surrounded by ideological neoconservatives, his campaign manager and shadow chancellor George Osborne chief among them. Cameron strongly backed the Iraq war while his allies, Michael Gove and Ed Vaizey, last month founded the Henry Jackson Society, named after the late US senator who is the patron saint of neoconservatism.
It’s all of a piece with a new Tory leader who wants to look and sound kinder and gentler, but is actually truer and bluer. Europe hardly featured in the leadership contest, but one of Cameron’s few specific promises was to pull his MEPs out of the European People’s Party grouping in the European parliament – leaving them instead to rub along with a few ragtag nationalists and hardliners on the fringes. Even IDS [Iain Duncan-Smith] rejected that move as too batty.
I’ve always thought that the phrase “compassionate conservatism” is an oxymoron, like “military intelligence”.
Fact: The Henry Jackson Society was founded by a group of right-wing academics in Peterhouse, Cambridge. As I understand it, Gove and Vaizey were just early Parliamentary ‘patrons’ of the outfit. I was invited to join (one of the founders is a friend of mine), but gracefully declined, because I was unable to sign up to some of the Society’s key ‘principles’. I could not, for example: “Support the necessary furtherance of European military modernisation and integration under British leadership, preferably within NATO.”
Nice to see also that Simon Hoggart had noticed young Dave’s curious repertoire of hand signals:
There’s the fly fisherman, casting his line, the University Challenge student suddenly hitting the buzzer, and the pinball wizard working his flippers.
That’s more like it. Why, I feel better already.
The Sony DRM fiasco: one puzzle solved…
One big mystery about the Sony DRM fiasco is why were the anti-virus companies so slow to deal with the Sony rootkit? Now we know. The answer: they were afraid of
violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, according to security expert Dan Kaminsky. He says creating new software to remove DRM software is a violation of the DMCA, forcing antivirus companies to create patches that eliminate the software’s dangerous behavior, but do not remove it.
Barcode magic
Here’s a neat little scam. Print your own barcodes (using the Barcode Magic program), then stick a $4.99 code on a $150 iPod and pass it by a dozy checkout operator. Tut, tut!
The Yellow Press
Uncharacteristically sunny and almost nostalgic piece by Christopher Hitchens about the portrayal of journalists in novels and film. Waugh, Orwell, Frayn, Powell, Greene — they’re all here. Sample:
In the opening pages of Scoop, as William Boot is still in the train from Somerset to London and as yet has no idea what awaits him at the offices of the Daily Beast, he recalls that:
“He had once seen in Taunton a barely intelligible film about newspaper life in New York where neurotic men in shirt-sleeves and eye-shades had rushed from telephone to tape-machines, insulting and betraying one another in circumstances of unredeemed squalor.”
One of the most disorienting things about modern newspaper offices, by the way (for those of us who remember the good old bad old days), is that the squalor has disappeared. Too many newspaper premises now resemble Toyota dealerships. And nobody drinks at lunchtime any more. Sigh.
The message
Can’t see what a supermarket trolley has to do with it, though.
Keeping the torch of communism burning
But perhaps not quite in the way Comrade Vladimir Ilyich envisaged. A friend with a macabre sense of humour picked this up in a shop in Budapest!
The $100 laptop
This morning’s Observer column…
There is something about Professor Nicholas Negroponte which reminds me of the Old Testament. Genesis, 27:11 to be precise: ‘And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold Esau my brother is an hairy man, and I am an smooth man’.
Negroponte is indeed an exceedingly smooth man. He circles the globe (Business class or better, naturally) consulting heads of governments and captains of industry. He is always impeccably dressed, a fluent and persuasive presenter, and invariably leaves his listeners with the impression that not only does he have an ace up his sleeve but that the almighty put it there.
Until recently, his main claim to fame was that he founded the MIT Media Lab, a legendary institution in which smart kids are paid to explore wacky ideas. His latest Big Idea is a cheap laptop that would be given to poor children in developing countries, thereby ending the digital divide…
Update: If you think I’m unduly sceptical, see here.
And there’s a pretty scathing critique by Lee Felsenstein here.
Some thoughtful comments here.
What Tony Blair needs for Christmas
Yes, you guessed it — a Virtual Air Guitar! It’ll transport him back to his Oxford student days.
Chancellor announces review of intellectual property regime
Well, well. A Treasury announcement reveals that Andrew Gowers, recently deposed Editor of the Financial Times, will lead an independent review into intellectual property rights in the UK. The terms of reference are:
The review will provide an analysis of the performance of the UK IP system, including:
the way in which Government administers the awarding of IP and their support to consumers and business; how well businesses are able to negotiate the complexity and expense of the copyright and patent system, including copyright and patent licensing arrangements, litigation and enforcement; and whether the current technical and legal IP infringement framework reflects the digital environment, and whether provisions for ‘fair use’ by citizens are reasonable. The Government has previously committed to examining whether the current term of copyright protection on sound recordings and performers’ rights is appropriate. This will also be conducted within the review.
The inquiry will run for twelve months. Its web site is here.