The Blair ‘legacy’

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Anthony Seldon had an extraordinary piece about Tony Blair in the Guardian. The headline — “Whatever the Brownites say, history will judge Blair as a political colossus” — says it all. Andrew Rawnsley — typically — tries to have it both ways in this morning’s Observer, arguing that while Blair has been a disaster, he will get his ten years in Downing Street and thereby join a select Pantheon whose other members are Robert Walpole, Henry Pelham, Lord North, William Pitt, Lord Liverpool, William Gladstone, Lord Salisbury and Margaret Thatcher.

David Marquand has written an elegant riposte to this baloney. It reads, in part,

Iraq was not a minor peccadillo, as Seldon seems to think. It was a monumental, unmitigated disaster, for which Blair is as much to blame as Bush. The shabby tergiversations of the run-up to the war – the misuse of intelligence, the contempt for expert opinion, the disdain for international law and the collusion with the United States in shutting down the Blix investigation of alleged Iraqi WMD – were venial in comparison with the sequel. The endemic conflicts of the Middle East are more explosive than they were. Jihadist extremism is more widespread and more bloodthirsty.

Iraq itself is slithering into civil war. Iran’s rise to regional super-power status has received an enormous boost. The chances of a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian crisis are smaller. Innocent British civilians are in greater danger. And all of this was entirely predictable. The charge against Blair is not so much that he acted illegally and immorally (though he did) as that he hitched his wagon to a US administration of swivel-eyed fanatics, consumed by a messianic fever and utterly ignorant of the realities of one of the most complex regions in the world. It was worse than a crime. It was a blunder for which we shall pay even more dearly in future than we have already.

So why did he do it? It would take a psychiatrist to answer that question fully. But two preliminary answers stand out. The first is that the flip side of Blair’s magical persuasive abilities is, and always has been, an extraordinary capacity for self deception. As Seldon’s own biography of him shows, he has always been apt to mistake his wishes for facts. Like the great actor he is, he lives whatever part he is playing; and if reality gets in the way, so much the worse for reality. The second answer is simpler. Like many people who have been at the top for to long he has succumbed to hubris. The bad news is that nemesis has struck his country as well as himself. The good news is that a merciful release is on its way.

I plump for the second explanation. Indeed I wrote about it last year. All Prime Ministers go mad, eventually, and the longer they server, the madder they become.

Secrets of the Wii

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From today’s New York Times…

The controllers communicate with the Wii console, a $250 box no larger than a child’s lunchbox, with the wireless technology known as Bluetooth. It is the means commonly used to link cellphones with their wireless headsets. The Wii remote also uses infrared, the same technology that links television sets with their remote controllers, to track where the controller is pointed.

In this case, a sort of crude camera — an image sensor — in the forward tip of the remote (the primary controller) detects tiny light-emitting diodes in a “sensor bar” that must be set on or very near a television plugged into the Wii. This system helps players use the remote to point accurately at specific things on the screen, like the virtual buttons to begin or end a game, or aim a weapon in a game.

Actions like pressing the buttons on screen or firing a weapon are conveyed between Bluetooth chips in the remote and in the console. The remote also contains a rumble pack, a component that vibrates to varying intensities based on information the console draws from the game’s programming and then passes to the controller.

But the controller’s most-talked-about feature is the capacity to track its own relative motion. This enables players to do things like steer a car by twisting the remote in the air or moving a game character by tilting the remote down or up.“

This represents a fabulous example of the consumerization of MEMS,” the tiny devices known as micro-electro-mechanical systems, said Benedetto Vigna, general manager of the MEMS unit at STMicroelectronics, a leading maker of the accelerometers embedded in the controllers. (Nintendo itself declined to talk about the controllers’ inner workings.)

He said the motion sensors, using the technology that activates vehicle air bags, can accurately sense three axes of acceleration: up and down, left to right, and forward and backward.

This is mostly achieved within the MEMS, micron-size machines that depend on submicroscopic structures carved into the silicon. For example, one structure moves like a tiny diving board, stimulated by the actions of the game players.

The structures are enveloped in an electrical field, Mr. Vigna said. When the MEMS elements are moved, the electrical field changes and the MEMS chip is sensitive enough to detect the changes. These accelerometers are so sensitive, Mr. Vigna said, because electrons — those subatomic particles that whirl around the nucleus of atoms like a video game in the making — can sense the subtle atomic-level movement of the silicon structures.

What’s amazing about the Will controller, is the elegance with which all this complicated stuff has been implemented and packaged. No wonder people are queueing up to buy it.

After Google Earth — what?

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Why Google Galaxy of course…

Google is extending its reach to the stars in an agreement with Nasa that will allow it to present web visualisations of the US space agency’s data on the universe. Nasa’s Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley on Monday announced a “Space Act Agreement” with Google that would include collaboration on large-scale data management and massively distributed computing as well as focusing on making the most useful of Nasa’s information available over the internet.

The agreement follows Google’s decision last year to build a 1m square foot campus in a science park linked to the research centre.There are plans for real-time weather visualisation and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars and real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle.

Google Earth, the software programme that maps the planet, will incorporate Nasa data into future releases.“This agreement between Nasa and Google will soon allow every American to experience a virtual flight over the surface of the moon or through the canyons of Mars,” said Michael Griffin, Nasa administrator…

Hmmm….I’ve always wanted to go to Mars.

The Chatham House verdict

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From the summary of the Chatham House report on Blair’s premiership:

As Tony Blair approaches the tenth anniversary of his election victory, and his final year in power, this paper assesses the impact of these, and other, events and concludes that a more nuanced relationship with the United States will be a requirement for Blair’s successor.

  • Although Tony Blair did not express much interest in foreign policy before becoming prime minister, in Labour’s first term it must be judged a qualified success. A key feature was Blair’s ability to demonstrate Britain’s European credentials while forging a close working relationship with President Clinton.
  • The post-9/11 decision to invade Iraq was a terrible mistake and the current débâcle will have policy repercussions for many years to come.
  • The root failure of Tony Blair’s foreign policy has been its inability to influence the Bush administration in any significant way despite the sacrifice – military, political and financial – that the United Kingdom has made.

    • Tony Blair’s successor(s) will not be able to offer unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy and a rebalancing of the UK’s foreign policy between the US and Europe will have to take place.

    Full report here.

    Going OTT

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    Ye Gods! Time Magazine has finally lost its marbles. This week’s Cover Story is about who is TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’. It begins:

    You — Yes, You — Are TIME’s Person of the Year

    and goes downhill from there. Sample:

    But look at 2006 through a different lens and you’ll see another story, one that isn’t about conflict or great men. It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

    The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It’s not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It’s a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.

    And we are so ready for it. We’re ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos—those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms—than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

    And we didn’t just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

    America loves its solitary geniuses—its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses—but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

    Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

    The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME’s Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

    There’s something especially nauseating about watching an old-media dinosaur sucking up to the denizens of the new ecosystem.