Here we go… again.

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I’m a big Obama fan and am delighted that such a handsome couple have made it to the White House. But there’s something depressing about seeing Mrs Obama draped on the cover of the latest edition of the premier fashion rag. She’s a clever and interesting woman, but the glossy media are going to do their utmost to turn her into a clothes-horse. And it looks as though she’s playing ball. Sigh.

Photo by Leibovitz, naturally. Explains why she’s the only snapper in the world who can afford a private jet.

After the snows

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One of the most noticeable side-effects of the icy weather is the rapid deterioration of road surfaces everywhere. Wonder how long it will take to repair the damage.

The Most Dangerous Man in the World

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From Mark Anderson.

Now that we no longer have a chimpanzee in the cockpit of the F-16, some folks may be wondering, just who is the most dangerous man in the world?

The answer, I think, is simple: A. Q. Khan, “founder” (or perhaps chief thief) in charge of Pakistan’s first nuclear program, and, more importantly, of his own secret nuclear proliferation ring.

Dr. Khan, just released from house arrest this week, is now wandering around, free, no doubt wondering how to resurrect the absolute worst idea in the entire world today. Specifically: Goodness, how can I make sure that as many fundamentalist Islamic states (and, hey, crackballs like North Korea, too) as possible acquire nuclear weapons, as quickly as possible?

I suppose if one had to define insanity, Khan would be the walking definition.

One can hope that the real reason he was let out of the box was so that the FBI and CIA could track his every movement and unearth the rest of his still-extant client list. Or, even better, that he has been taken off the house arrest regime in hopes that he goes camping, and the tiger enters his tent and eats him, before Khan can destroy the Earth.

I never liked the idea that he only received house arrest. It was a bit like taking a Hitler wannabe and putting him on free-roaming probation in a Nordic country with blue-eyed teens.

Is there a worse crime against humanity than shipping nuclear weapons technology and knowhow to unstable regimes of indiscriminate pedigree and no obvious systems or sense of restraint? You might think there are today, but you would certainly not say it tomorrow, if Khan’s bombs had been used meanwhile.

This jerk belongs in jail, not in house arrest. Think of him like Napoleon, without the good parts…

Steve Ballmer’s Speech to the Democrats

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As some readers know (and others have probably guessed) there are lots of things about Microsoft that I dislike. But one thing I’ve always admired about the company is the fact that it’s never had any corporate debt. Bill Gates famously said once that he wanted Microsoft always to be able to run for an entire year without earning a cent in revenues. Until today, however, I didn’t know why he felt so strongly about that. Now, thanks to Mark Anderson, I do. He’s relayed the entire text of a speech Steve Ballmer gave the other day to the Democratic Caucus. Here’s the passage that made me sit up.

When I got to Microsoft and we were this tiny little company, we didn’t have the budget to put people up in hotels, so I lived with Bill. And every time I sat down, in every corner, nook and cranny of couches, tables, I’d find these little yellow pieces of paper with Bill’s writing that had a bunch of people’s names and companies’ names and numbers.

I think of myself as pretty good pattern matching… and I just couldn’t figure out what these numbers were.

So, finally I said to Bill, what is this? He says, Steve, I’m really always worried about whether we’re going to have enough cash to pay people. So, every night I write down everybody who works for us and how much we pay them, and every contract we have and how much it’s worth. I’ve got to count the pennies tightly and that’s why you’re here now.

It’s a great talk, which is essentially about how the US needs to reboot itself. And another interesting thing: he flew to the meeting on the red-eye scheduled flight, not in a corporate jet. A neat contrast to the automobile moguls, eh? And to the Citicorp execs.

On this day…

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… in 1945, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin signed the Yalta Agreement dividing the world up between them and effectively consigning the countries of Eastern Europe to their Soviet fate.

The Blond Bombshell

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Madeleine Bunting had a thoughtful column in yesterday’s Guardian about the search for political ideas following the implosion of Reaganite deregulated liberalism.

She focusses on Philip Blond, a theology lecturer at the St Martin’s College, Lancaster who in addition to writing a book on Thomas Aquinas is also apparently “giving David Cameron advice on progressive Conservatism”. It was his ideas, she says, “which peppered Cameron’s speech at Davos” and which has, apparently, infuriated Simon Heffer, the infant Tory columnist, who was apparently “apoplectic with fury last week as he lambasted it as terrifying, meaningless, obtuse and infantile”.

Blond may provoke fury and incomprehension on the Tory blogs, but party thinkers such as Oliver Letwin and David Willetts are intrigued. As are the more thoughtful on the Labour backbenches such as Jon Cruddas. Close watchers on the left acknowledge that Blond is opening up ‘potent political territory’ – territory that could go to the Tories but equally could be captured by another, or even a new, party.

The key to understanding Blond’s thinking is that he is reviving a long-neglected tradition of English radical conservatism that goes back to William Cobbett and John Ruskin and which last flourished before the second world war in the thinking of GK Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. If you are thinking that this kind of stuff can hardly be relevant to our current predicament, think again. From this tradition emerged a passionate attack on both the power of the state and the power of big business. Belloc's argument in The Servile State was that both capitalism and socialism enslaved the masses to their dictates.

Blond picks up these strands of conservative communitarianism and links them to two current critiques. The first is an attack on his own party’s hallowed faith in Thatcherite economics: it’s bust, argues Blond, and led to a form of monopoly capitalism which enriched only a tiny oligarchy. The second is an attack on the managerial technocratic welfare state which has destroyed the mutualism of the working class – and here, he owes much to Ferdinand Mount’s thoughtful Mind the Gap. Third, he attacks liberalism for promoting atomised individualism and moral relativism (which will go down very well with the Daily Mail constituency).

It sounds like a big bag of tricks, and it is; some new, some old, some borrowed, and only some blue.

Bunting goes on to remind her readers that dear old Belloc was an admirer of Mussolini, which brings a useful touch of historical perspective to all this. The lesson of history is that economic turmoil usually brings political and ideological change. The big political question for the industrialised world is whether the new political ideas are civilising or barbaric. Watching Gordon Brown & Co (and Brian Cowen in Ireland) floundering in the wake of the credit crunch one is struck by the thought: is this what the hapless politicians of the Weimar Republic looked like to their electorate? Incompetent, corrupt and out of date.

Footnote: Just realised that Blond studied at Peterhouse — a famous kindergarten for conservative thinkers.

Apple Store bans Facebook?

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Have you noticed how every Apple retail store is always packed with teenagers who are hogging all the demo machines? They’re obviously not going to buy Macs, so what are they doing? The answer is, apparently, FaceBooking. But,

In an effort to thwart off time-theft and loiterers, Apple has decided to add Facebook to the list of banned websites at retail locations nationwide. When I asked some of the genius’ today whether or not anyone noticed the change, they all said that Facebook stopped working sometime in the past week. One of the genius’ said “Apple Stores have become a regular Internet Cafe, so placing the most popular time-killer [Facebook] of them all on the banned-list will certainly help everyone get a chance to test out the computers”.

Source.

LATER: Dave Hill passes on a link which casts doubts on this:

Or is, just possibly, not true?

I know from experience that some Apple stores put limits on where on the Web you can take their demo machines — sometimes restricting Safari to Apple’s promotional pages.

And it’s certainly possible that individual stores have blocked Facebook — as MySpace has been blocked since May 2007 — because some of its members were hogging the machines.

Indeed, Ars Technica quotes an unnamed Apple employee who says his store has been blocking Facebook for about a month.

“It’s just trying to find a balance between letting people try out the computers, but not tying them up so others can try them as well,” he told Ars. (link)

But a person at Apple headquarters in a position to know assures me that there is no nationwide ban on Facebook in effect — permanent or otherwise.

I’m headed to the nearest Apple store to check it out. If you’re in one now, let us know in the comment stream where you are and whether the demo machine you’re using will let you get to your Facebook page.

UPDATE: CNET’s Caroline McCarthy beat me to it, did the legwork, and confirmed that Facebook is accessible at all three Manhattan Apple Stores, although as suspected there are individual machines in those stores that will redirect you to an Apple Store page.