W: an empty shell?

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Last night we went to see W, Oliver Stone’s biopic about the life and disasters of George W Bush. The title comes from the fact that he is apparently known as ‘doubleya’ (or even ‘dubya’) by his friends and most of his family (though his Pa calls him ‘Junior’). I was disposed to like the film, but I’m afraid it’s a turkey despite a few good performances (notably by Josh Brolin as Dubya, Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Richard Dreyfuss as an authentically creepy Dick Cheney). I’m glad I saw it after Obama’s victory rather than before the election, because the main thought it provokes is wonderment that such a gang of warped, dysfunctional cretins could take over the government of a civilised country.

The obvious comparison is with Stone’s Nixon, which I think is a fine and absorbing film. One reason why W is so unsatisfactory might be that the current President’s character isn’t able to bear the weight, whereas Nixon, for all his many defects (or perhaps because of them) was a genuinely interesting and complex man. So in making W Stone was effectively probing an empty shell.

All of which makes me think that perhaps the upcoming Frost/Nixon film might be genuinely interesting.

Palin: English as she is spooken

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Nice column by Dick Cavett …

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the syntax-serial-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

Reykjavik-on-Thames?

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I know nothing about economics and so tended to regard my suspicions about the possibility of national bankruptcy as the fears of an uninformed mind. But Willem Buiter is a highly-informed mind, and he has a long, thoughtful blog post today on the FT site in which he discusses the possibility of a UK default.

The key question is, can the government meet all these fiscal commitments, whether firm or flaccid, unconditional or contingent and explicit or implicit ? Does it have the resources, now and in the future, to issue the additional debt required to meet the growing volume of up-front obligations it has taken on?

It’s a long, closely-argued, data-laden piece, and his answer, roughly stated, is that it depends on a lot of factors. But the interesting thing is that a serious academic economist is treating a question hitherto dismissed (e.g. by Charles Goodhart) as ‘inconceivable’ as, well, conceivable.

Fruitcakes of the world, unite!

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The Economist has received some hilarious objections to its endorsement of Barack Obama. This is the wackiest (from some guy in Missouri).

SIR –America’s election laws prohibit foreigners from contributing to the campaigns of elected officials. By publishing your endorsement before the election, you attempted to influence the electorate in a way that has far more impact than contributing money. You have, in effect, violated the spirit and intent of American law. Your European welfare-state mentality inevitably biased your conclusions. Americans are a centre-right people, whereas Britain is at best left-centre (word order is paramount here).

The nicest letter came from someone in Italy:

SIR – I would like to congratulate Mr Obama on his brilliant victory. In his official capacity as president of the United States he will probably have to meet our prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. I apologise in advance.

Obama’s economics transition team

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Wonderful rant by Willem Buiter in his excoriation of Obama’s economics advisory board. In a nutshell, the team is too old, has too few professional economists, too many people associated with past failures, is stuffed with protectionists — and has too many lawyers. It’s this last that gets Professor Buiter really riled.

According to Legal Reform Now! there are 1,143,358 lawyers in the US, one for every 200 adults. The main problem is not that there are over a million socially unproductive lawyers in the US. The problem is that these lawyers are an essential component of a dysfunctional legal framework that has created the most litigious society in the world. The damage this dysfunctional legal framework causes must be measured not primarily by the direct cost of litigation, astounding though it is, but through the actions not undertaken and the creative and productive deeds not done because of fear of litigation. The first thing we do…

Except for a depressingly small minority among them, lawyers know nothing. They are incapable of logic. They don’t know the difference between necessary and sufficient conditions or between type I and type II errors. Indeed, any concept of probability is alien to them. They don’t understand the concepts of opportunity cost and trade off. They cannot distinguish between normative and positive statements. They are so focused on winning an argument through technicalities, that they no longer would recognise the truth if it bit them in the butt. If you are very lucky, a lawyer will give you nothing but the truth. You will never get the truth, let alone the whole truth. Things have degenerated to the point that lawyers and the legal profession not only routinely undermine justice, but even the law.

But the American political system is completely dominated by this largely socially unproductive and parasitic profession. Consider the membership of the House and the Senate (according to the Congressional Research Service 170 members of the House (out of 435) and 60 Senators (out of 100) are lawyers). Consider the professional training and background of past and future presidents (including Obama, 26 out of 44 presidents were lawyers) – and weep.

Country diary: Mayenne, France

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Sarah Poyntz lives in the Burren in Co. Clare (one of the most magical places on earth IMHO) and is one of the contributors to the Guardian‘s Country Diary. She’s been in France on holiday and this is part of her latest Diary entry.

We were walking by the river below the forest when suddenly there was a whirr and between two trees flew a rocket of colour; turquoise, green, blue, orange – a kingfisher – a poem in flight. Down it dived, the stiletto-like beak pronging a small fish and, seemingly all in one movement, up it shot and away.

A squirrel, a kingfisher and a white and orange cat named Chibi. Some years ago we regularly took care of Chibi to let our French gîte owners off for their holiday. Then they sold up and moved, but we met them for restaurant lunches. This year we visited their new home. Suddenly a door was pushed open and there was Chibi. She walked towards us, meowing loudly, looking up at us and purring. She remembered us, remaining curled up at our feet throughout the visit and brought to mind a medieval monk copying from Virgil and writing a poem about his cat in the margins: “I and Pangur Ban my cat, / ‘Tis a like task we are at: / Hunting mice is his delight, / Hunting words I sit all night …”

Quote of the day

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“Leadership cannot really be taught. It can only be learned.”

Harold Geneen, the guy who transformed ITT into the 11th largest company in the US.

Tracking Traffic with Cell Phones

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From Technology Review…

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, hope that drivers with GPS-enabled smart phones will help them gather more-accurate and up-to-date traffic data. Starting Monday, volunteers in the San Francisco Bay Area and around Sacramento will be invited to participate in a pilot program by downloading software that tracks their movements and transmits this information, via the phone network, back to a server at the university. In return, the volunteers will receive personalized traffic information on their cell phones.

The idea is simple, says Alex Bayen, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the university. “Smart phones with GPS collect data from a regular commute and send it to a central system,” he says. “The system puts the data into a mathematical model that estimates traffic in real time and then broadcasts it back to the Internet and phones.”

The researchers’ model combines traffic data collected from static road sensors as well as from volunteers’ cell phones. Participants will receive personalized information such as travel-time estimates and traffic speeds along relevant routes.

The Joshua Generation

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David Remnick has a terrific essay in the New Yorker reflecting on Obama’s campaign and the role that race played in it. As with everything Remnick writes, it’s beautifully crafted and thoughtful. It ends like this:

Just a few minutes before eleven last Tuesday night, when Barack and Michelle Obama and their daughters walked out on the stage at Grant Park, and everyone around was screaming, chanting, and waving flags, the long campaign came to an end. Joy was in the faces of the people all around me, there was crying and shouting, but Obama seemed to bear a certain gravity, his voice infused not with jubilation but with a sense of the historical moment.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he began.

Obama had done it one last time. Having cast himself in Selma twenty months ago as one who stood on the “shoulders of giants,” as the leader of the Joshua generation, he hardly had to mention race. It was the thing always present, the thing so rarely named. He had simultaneously celebrated identity and pushed it into the background. “Change has come to America,” Obama declared, and everyone in a park remembered until now as the place where, forty summers ago, police did outrageous battle with antiwar protesters knew what change had come, and that—how long? too long—it was about damned time.

The same issue also has an interesting article by David Grann pondering how John McCain — a fundamentally decent man by all accounts — will recover from running a campaign which betrayed all his former principles about not taking “the low road” adopted by George Bush and Karl Rove when they destroyed his Primary campaign in 2000. Did his graceful concession speech come too late to rescue his self-respect? How can he live with himself, given the way his campaign developed into the hate-fest of the last few weeks? We will see.