Category Archives: Imported

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Tosh 

Peter Preston: “What is this tosh about Labour losing?”

Let the Labour supporters flow 

Bloggers4Labour has implemented an integral newsfeed from the various Labour-supporting sites. Good idea.

Chronicle of a death foretold 

The Guardian has an extract from Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s new book anatomising the death of the Conservative party in the UK.

It’s a salutary reminder for those who are either fainthearted about supporting Labour at the next election or those who are worried about Labour failing to win a third consecutive victory.

  And yet the Tories are now whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up. They have been out of office for longer than at any time in 90 years, they are facing a traumatic third defeat, and even the fact that they are talking hopefully of holding Blair to a 50-seat majority speaks for itself. In many ways, the Tories had been undone by their own achievements, and have suffered from what Peter Walker once called “the problems of success”. It might indeed be said that Tony Blair’s government is Margaret Thatcher’s greatest success, while the fate of her own party is her greatest failure.

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Wrong by a factor of 365 

A friend who knows about water companies (he does municipal finance for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development) emailed me to say something must be wrong in my Wednesday item about London’s water losses. I linked to a BBC report which said that London was losing 1 billion litres of water a year because of leaks.

My friend reckoned that’s pretty good. A city the size of London probably consumes around 1 billion litres a day, he wrote.

Sure enough, I went to the original source and found out that both the BBC and my reliance on it was wrong. The London Assembly reckons that London loses 1 billion litres a day thanks to leaks.

Another misguided columnist 

Simon Jenkins discovers blogs and gets a lot wrong in The Times. Harry’s Place has the full deconstruction.

I have to say my heart sank recently when The Guardian announced Jenkins was going to join it as a columnist. Surely they could have hired someone with energy and new ideas, not someone who ran out of steam a long time ago (he’s been a columnist on The Times for a decade).

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From a Groove user 

Dave Winer asks whether there are any Groove users, in the wake of Microsoft’s acquisition of Ray Ozzie’s collaborative software company.

I’ve been using Groove extensively for the last eight months for a new venture I’m putting together with three partners. We’re scattered across the globe, and I’ve found the synchronisation, filing system and storage (and hence backup) really wonderful for us. It’s fairly cheap and easy to use. I’m a fan.

Another aspect that has been very good has been Groove’s support. One of my partners has had a series of technology problems (unrelated to Groove), but they’ve been available, patient and helpful. I worry about that side of things under Redmond’s embrace.

Anatomy 101 

The BBC’s Interactive Body is amazing (hat tip Lloyd Shepherd). I’m “shaky” on the skeleton and worse on organs. I clearly need some practice before I step into the operating room.

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The water scandal 

Apparently London is losing 1 billion litres of water a year because of leaks. In my road, this doesn’t seem surprising. A burst water main, which has occasioned a babbling brook running down our street, was reported to Thames Water last week and there has still been no action.

London’s losses could just be a sad comment on corporate incompetence, but water is the major problem for much of the world. About six million people die globally each year because of contaminated water, and 90% of the world’s diseases are still water-related.

I’ve felt the irony acutely as I step over the gusher outside my door. I’m chairing a debate tonight on water problems in the developing world. London’s blind neglect of its water — echoed in much of the developed world — is an insult to the major part of the world that lacks clean water.

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A cut more swingeing  

Brad DeLong has some advice for student writers:

  Nobody ever told them that if you are going to hand in a first draft, an easy way to significantly improve it is to, when you are finished, cut the last paragraph from the paper and paste it at the beginning. Your final sum-up paragraph–written at the end, as you have by trying to write down what you think discovered what you really do think–is almost always going to make a better first paragraph than the first paragraph that you wrote.

Nearly 30 years ago I was given advice that is one step more radical than Brad’s. Neil Rudenstine, then provost of Princeton and an occasional English professor, told me to take a look at an essay when I had finished and then cut the first and final paragraphs. It was sage advice then and something I’ve tried to follow ever since.

From a world that seems totally alien 

“The tax cut turned out to be politically more difficult than Johnson had foreseen… Conservatives worried that higher deficits would drive up inflation.”

I’m having a wonderful time reading Judgment Days by Nick Kotz, his account of the relationship between LBJ and Martin Luther King and their role in passing historic civil rights legislation.

What’s striking is how different the country was only 40 years ago. I’m not referring to the entrenched segregation and racism. What’s remarkable instead is the courage of Johnson to defy his southern base and roots, and the determination to do the right thing, not the politically easy or advantageous thing. And political alignments in 1964, as the quote above shows, were very different to today.

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Greenspan jumps the shark 

Bull Moose:

  Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan descended from the heavens this week to inform us lowly earthlings that we face a deficit crisis. Who would have thunk it? But, in his infinite wisdom, the man who knows all told Congress,
  “Unless we do something to ameliorate” rising debt levels, he told the House Budget Committee on Wednesday, “we will be in a state of stagnation.”
  This is from the man who has granted his blessing on the very tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy that has created this debt mess. Perhaps Mr. Greenspan has been residing on Planet Chutzpah!
  The Fed Chair has jumped the shark. His tenure as the gray eminence is over, kaput. Maybe, he doesn’t receive cable in his part of the universe, but the nation has been at war at the same time the Administration has been on a tax cutting and spending binge.

I would have dated the shark-jumping to his benediction of the tax cuts in Bush’s first year in office.

British Spin is back 

Here’s the best news of the week, in terms of UK politics.

Since the anonymous author is reticent about his RSS feed, you can find it here.

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Blog v op-ed 

Matthew Yglesias: “I’m thrilled that Paul Krugman has a column at the Times because the Times op-ed page is very influential and Krugman’s voice is invaluable. As a reader, however, I’d actually be much more interested in reading a Krugman-blog. The same is true, I would venture, of just about every columnist whose work I like. This, however, is a rather unstable situation. The value of the op-ed writer really only lies in the fact that more people read op-ed pages than read blogs. But as more and more people start reading blogs, the mere prestige factor of the column will decline. Eventually, I think, the format will vanish in favor of the greater flexibility afforded by online media.”

Sounds like another version of Dave’s bet.

Great leaders of the world, part XLIV 

BBC News:

  Reports from Turkmenistan say President Niyazov has ordered the closure of all the hospitals in the country except those in the capital, Ashgabat.
  The order, announced by a government spokesman, is part of the president’s radical health care policies.
  Thousands of medical workers have already been sacked under the plan.
  Civil rights activists have accused the president of sacrificing public services in favour of vast projects that glorify his regime.
  President Niyazov apparently took the decision to close the hospitals at a meeting with local officials on Monday.
  “Why do we need such hospitals?” he said. “If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat.” …
  At the same time, the president has also ordered the closure of rural libraries, saying they are pointless because village Turkmens do not read.
  Criticism of the president is not allowed in Turkmenistan, but civil rights activists abroad say he has destroyed social services while spending millions of dollars of public money on grand projects, such as gold statues of the leader and a vast marble and gold mosque, one of the biggest in Asia.

Shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union, the magazine I edited ran a series of who’s who features about the new countries of the former Soviet bloc. Covering the “stans” was particularly difficult, as so few people had any good information on them at the time.

I recall two tidbits from that feature. Niyazov was trying to get people to call him Turkmenbashy (leader of the Turkmens) rather than his rather Slavic name. And his neighbouring president, Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan, listed water skiing as one of his interests. As journalists sometimes do, we had “water skiing and gross human rights violations” as his recreations in early versions of the pages.

More hours, please  

Tyler Cowen’s latest China snippet is striking:

  Taiwanese factories in Dongguan [a city between Hong Kong and Guangzhou and a major centre of manufacturing] are facing a problem. According to a news report in the United Daily in Taiwan, over a thousand workers at a factory, which produces goods for big brand names such as Nike, demonstrated for two days and damaged equipment and factory cars. 500 armed police arrived and quashed the riot. Several leaders were arrested.
  The main cause for the riot was the limitation [sic] on working hours at the factory. The shorter hours have been requested by US companies so as to avoid criticism from various groups on long working hours. However, the mainly migrant workforce want to work longer hours so they can earn more [emphasis added]. Consensus had been reached by the US companies, the Taiwanese-invested factory and local government that the maximum working hours per week should be set at 60 hours [which is still a breach of Chinese Labour Law, but less than other manufacturing plants]. However, this reduction in hours was unsatisfactory for the workers and the resulting riot was serious.

World Bank: which is worse? 

Depending which source you read, there have been two names floating around as likely World Bank presidents to succeed Jim Wolfensohn. The Financial Times reckons Paul Wolfowitz is in the lead. The New York Times plumps for recently fired Carly Fiorina.

Here’s Mark Schmitt on Wolfowitz:

  If you were the Bush entourage, securely back home after a nicely scripted European trip, confident that you won’t have to pretend to like Jacques Chirac or any other people who speak foreign languages for a long time, what would be a good way to quickly send the signal that all that stuff about cooperation, consultation, multilateralism was about as serious as, oh, “humility” in foreign policy or “uniter not a divider”?
  Hmm, this requires some real creativity. A devious, twisted mind. Can’t invade another country — no troops left. Don’t want to bother Congress, too much trouble up there already. Apparently a lot of them didn’t have such a pleasant vacation last week, since dealing with pissed-off seniors is a little harder than getting garcon to bring extra ketchup for your fois gras.
  “I’ve got it,” says the quiet guy with the most devious imagination of all: “We’ve got that vacancy at the World Bank. Let’s put Paul Wolfowitz in there. Make the world come begging to him for their precious money.”

Not to be outdone, Dave Taylor vents his spleen on Carly:

  Am I the only one who finds this all surreal? She’s gained experience, but not the kind we’d want in the World Bank. I’m sorry, but when I look at Carly’s track record, I don’t see a “proven record in the corporate world”, I see a self-aggrandizing ego-centric manager who never stopped to understand or appreciate the culture and values of the company she ran, a CEO who embodies all that business guru Jim Collins warns against in his best-selling book Good to Great.
  The world’s poor, the third-world nations, and the global economy deserve someone smarter, more savvy, and more in tune with the culture and values of the organization that she leads.

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On the side of liberty 

Philip Stephens in the Financial Times (subscribers only) reflects on president Bush’s Brussels visit and reckons Europeans came off looking the worse. As much as it pains me to say it, I think he may be right:

  It seemed that every time the US president talked of liberty, one or other European leader would unfurl the standard of stability. Every American evocation of idealism collided with European realism. The religion of realism once preached by Henry Kissinger has been cast out by the evangelicals in the White House only to be revered as revealed truth in the self-consciously secular chancelleries of Old Europe.
  Thus when [Ukrainian president Viktor] Yushchenko joined the US-European summitry at Nato, the reception from some European leaders was cool. France’s Jacques Chirac left the room after the opening statements. Germany’s Gerhard Schröder and Spain’s José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero remained ostentatiously silent about Mr Yushchenko’s ambition to turn Ukraine into a fully fledged democracy.
  I am assured by French officials that this was not a co-ordinated snub. Mr Chirac had a pre-arranged meeting that could not be rescheduled. To others, though, it seemed an odd coincidence that, in shunning Mr Yushchenko, these three leaders had avoided giving offence to Russia’s Vladimir Putin. As Mr Zapatero left the room he was heard to remark that the session had not been “very sexy” – this from the leader of a country not too long ago freed from fascism. Mr Schröder’s silence seemed similarly deaf to the more recent liberation of East Germany.
  It is not just the French and Germans though. Tony Blair gets as close to Mr Bush’s rhetoric as any European leader. But the British prime minister’s liberal interventionism, which long predates the Iraq war, sees him attacked both by foreign policy realists on the conservative right and by those on the left of his own Labour party who now value anti-Americanism above internationalism.
  Though it pains me to say it, there is something in the distinction made by Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, between “Old” and “New” Europe. If the leaders of much of the western half of the continent are at best uncomfortable with the rhetoric of liberty, the same cannot be said of the new democracies of central and eastern Europe. The Poles, the Czechs, the Lithuanians and Latvians speak Mr Bush’s language, and unapologetically so. It was no accident that while the big powers of western Europe (Britain included) hesitated as the Ukrainian crisis first unfolded last autumn, the Polish and Lithuanian presidents insisted the European Union take a stand on the side of democracy.

As Stephens goes on to point out, the core of the European idea was once liberty: it was the bulwark against a return of totalitarianism. But that inspiring vision seems a long way away in the streams of bureaucratese that emanate from Brussels and other EU outposts.

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Dawkins against the LSE 

I heard Richard Dawkins lecture last night on “Is evolution predictable”. He’s famously good as a speaker: not as flamboyant as some, but wonderfully relaxed and literate. Of course he has perhaps the most extraordinary tale the world has to offer us to tell, but he does tell it well.

The lecture was at the London School of Economics, as part of its Darwin@LSE series. What I didn’t know beforehand was that there is a culture of anti-Darwinism at the LSE, and the Darwin programme is in part a reaction against that tradition.

It’s not, needless to say, the anti-Darwinism of the creationists, who would get as short shrift at the LSE as at any place of intelligence. Instead, it’s a left-wing critique of Darwinism that seems to have its roots in the distortions of social Darwinism earlier in the twentieth century.

Dawkins told me afterwards that his view was that social scientists that choose to ignore Darwinian thinking need to explain why, since evolution provides the fundamental explanation of why we are what we are.

That much is understandable. But John Ashworth, a former director of the LSE, told me a quirkier reason for the hostility. When William Beveridge was director of the LSE, he hired Lancelot Hogben to bring some dash of scientific thinking into the institution. Aside from his famous works popularising mathematics, Hogben’s own work concentrated on a particularly large kind of toad. As happens, Hogben’s toads started hopping about the LSE, getting everywhere they weren’t supposed to be.

When Ashworth asked Helena Cronin to start the Darwin series in the early ’90s, the first question Ashworth was asked at a faculty meeting was, “Does she work on toads?”

Whether it’s toads or social Darwinism, the result is that important, developing fields like evolutionary psychology and behavioural economics seem to be passing the LSE by.

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A great dateline 

Thomas Barnett’s weblog has an amazing dateline today: Sjøkrigsskolen, which translates as the Sea War School.

The best part of his post, however, was his comment on the dispute between the US and Europe over ending the arms embargo on China:

  This just isn’t going to work. The US can’t trade with and invest in China like crazy, sell arms to both Taiwan and Japan, and then tell the EU not to do the same with China on both trade and arms. We just don’t get to decide which other Core powers get to arm and under what conditions. China’s rising economically, and like any other country in such a trajectory, it builds up and modernizes its military. We can’t stop that, but we can shape it and work to make that process dovetail with a rising security alliance between us two. But the Bush Admin seems to think they’re in the driver’s seat on this one, when they’re not. I mean, China’s supposed to keep buying our debt so we can spend lots on our military and then we get to tell them what they can or cannot buy in military arms?

I don’t think you can argue with his logic. There are a raft of inconsistencies in the US policy (some of which Barnett explores further in his post). But I have to confess that I feel torn on this issue. The Realpolitik is as Barnett writes. There is, however, an amoralism about the European eagerness to get on with selling anything and everything to the Chinese, whatever the human rights record. I know the US will eagerly sell killing machines to a host of unsavoury regimes, but rushing to add another one to the list isn’t pretty.

A caution about social networking software 

Barry Ritholtz: “Eventually, there may be some consolidation [of social networking companies] — we see it starting already. That means two things: One, I have no idea where my personal data and address book will ultimately end up, what company or person; and B) the liklihood is that at least 2 but more likely 3 and probably 4 and maybe even 5, and quite possibly 6 of these firms will go belly up, the long dirt nap, buy a farm.

“And when that happens, the VC’s investments will be worth zero, nada, zilch, and they will seek to recoup something, anything, even just pennies on the dollar (pretty please?). And then the vultures will come in: strip the offices down to the bare walls, sell everything thats not moving for pennies on the dollar. Aeron Chairs (ha!), PCs, desks, wall cabinets, EVERYTHING.

“And when that happens, when the Bankruptcy Judge brings down the gavel, the most valuable asset these companies have — all of my personal info, plus all of your contact info, plus every person you know’s name/number/email address — will be sold to the highest bidder. They may promise that they will protect your data, but I simply do not believe they can control anything post banckruptcy. The contracts are ignored.”

Aggregating Labour blogs 

In the comparatively undeveloped world of UK political blogs, someone has come up with the good idea of gathering all Labour-supporting weblogs on one site.

It doesn’t look as though it’s part of their plan to truly aggregate the sites, by bringing the various feeds directly into the site. Still, it’s a good initiative. I’ve submitted Davos Newbies in the south London category, even though I don’t often comment on intensely local issues. But my local MP, I’m happy to say, is Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sports Tessa Jowell.