Stephen Harper is feeling some of that effect from the millions he put into “infrastructure” projects as part of Canada’s own stimulus plan. You will recall that Ottawa solicited proposals from local governments before handing over the money. Inevitably, a goodly number turned out to be . . . shall we say . . . not entirely crucial, leading to articles like this, pointing out that — oh dear — taxpayers were financing bocce courts via deficit spending. Not to mention sending money to rich people in good neighbourhoods! Even funding for the arts — which Harper was previously criticized for providing too little of — was thrown back in his face as a cheap attempt to correct his earlier gaffe. (If he hadn’t corrected the gaffe, of course, it could have been portrayed as a “continuing snub.” Don’t try to beat the media folks, you can’t win.)
So what’s the lesson here? Politicians should ignore the experts and do what makes people happy, even if it’s unlikely to have much long-term benefit? Politicians should never expect the public to appreciate their efforts unless there’s some kind of individual payoff? Politicians should stay out of the economy, because no one is ever satisfied anyway?
Pick any one of those. Just don’t run for president or prime minister if you want to be popular.
Kelly McParland, “Obama could save America and lose the election”, National Post, 2010-07-29
July 29, 2010
QotD: You can’t beat the media
Replacing one impossible ideal with another
Colby Cosh linked to this Guardian article, saying “I’m afraid she’s right. ‘Thin’ is something every girl can at least strive for. Only God can make Christina Hendricks.”
When it comes to the ideal female body-shape the pipe cleaner is out, the hourglass is in — or at least it will be if the new equalities minister, Lynne Featherstone, manages to chisel out her will on the perfect body image.
“In the autumn the minister will convene the first of a series of roundtable discussions with members of the fashion industry, including magazine editors, models and advertisers, to discuss how to boost body confidence among the young,” the Sunday Times reported yesterday.
One might think that one of the first steps to boost such confidence might be to abolish school weigh-ins and make puppy fat a normal rite of passage rather than the subject of a health warning via the National Child Measurement Programme. (Can any woman think of anything more likely to have produced a fear of being on the chunky side than turning up to school one morning and being plonked on a set of scales?)
While I’m happy to have any excuse to post a photo of the delightful “YoSaffBridge”, this is another example of Nanny State thinking: (some) women have body image issues, therefore we must spring into action and fix it.
Rather than replacing the old impossible images with new impossible images (as the creative director of Harper’s Bazaar pointed out, the fashion industry exists to create the fantasy you’ll never live up to) an equalities minister should throw out all notions of obsessing about feminine beauty and concentrate on helping young girls think about the size of their achievements rather than the flatness of their navels, and the scale of their ambitions rather than — in Joanie’s case — the rather spectacular power of their bosoms.
An end to ASBOs in sight?
BBC News thinks that the much-maligned ASBO may be going away.
Home Secretary Theresa May has signalled the possible end of Asbos in England and Wales, saying it is “time to move beyond” the orders, first introduced by Labour 11 years ago.
They have been imposed on 10-year-old boys and 80-year-old women, used to sober up persistent drunks and mute noisy neighbours.
Of course, one of the more useful aspects of the ASBO has been to allow the media an easy way to find stories to run in the quiet times, like this one:
A 60-year-old man from Northampton was banned from dressing as a schoolgirl.
Peter Trigger’s Asbo stopped him from wearing skirts or showing bare legs on school days between 0830 and 1000 and 1445 and 1600.
The authorities acted after parents complained he was waiting near a primary school dressed in clothes similar to school uniform. He then breached this in December last year by bending over in front of his neighbours repeatedly.
You see, without the ASBO, reporters would have to dig up gems like that themselves, instead of having the local police blotter highlight the most newsworthy items for them.
I often wondered, when reading some of the weird and whacky things that people were hit with ASBOs over, why existing laws weren’t applied (lots of these violations were clearly against the law before ASBOs were created). The intent may have been to give judges more flexibility in sentencing, but in practice it appears to have created a “market” in unusual sentences and distorted the notion of equality before the law.
July 26, 2010
The unwillingness to disbelieve
Mike Elgan debunks the latest “mind-crogglingly cheap computer for the masses” announcement:
“India unveils $35 computer for students,” says CNN.com. “India unveils prototype for $35 touch-screen computer,” reports BBC News. “India to provide $35 computing device to students,” says BusinessWeek.
Wow! That’s great! Too bad it will never exist. That this announcement is reported straight and without even a hint of skepticism is incomprehensible to me.
[. . .]
India itself doesn’t build touch screens. They would have to be imported from China or Taiwan. The current price for this component alone exceeds $35. Like touch screens, most solar panels are also built in China. But even the cheapest ones powerful enough to charge a tablet battery are more expensive to manufacture than $35.
Plus you need to pay for the 2GB of RAM, the case and the rest of the computer electronics. Even if you factor in Moore’s Law and assume the absolute cheapest rock-bottom junk components, a solar touch tablet with 2GB of RAM cannot be built anytime soon for less than $100.
More to the point, no country in the world can build a cheaper computer than China can. The entire tech sector in China is optimized for ultra-low-cost manufacturing. All the engineering brilliance in India can’t change that.
There’s also the point that government bureaucracies and university engineering departments are not designed for or experienced in the mass production techniques that any of these “ultra-cheap but powerful” computing initiatives all require. Have you ever heard of a government that could keep their hands (and political priorities) out of the critical decision of where this wonder device would be assembled, tested, packed, and distributed? The “industrial policy” wonks would need to get intensely involved in such a decision and the location would have to meet diverse electoral and financial requirements (note that the economics of the project won’t even make the top five priorities in the process).
Awarding the contract to just one area would be unthinkable: the benefits must be seen to be helping areas that elected the current government and emphatically not going to opposition ridings. The horsetrading over that alone would consume any possible price advantage such a scheme might have over ordinary computers and software bought commercially.
You’d have to say that they’re still following his guidelines
In an issue of Granta several years back, Binyavanga Wainaina provided some highly detailed guidelines for western writers to use in their work about Africa. Based on the results, you’d have to say that his guidance has been taken to heart by most novelists, journalists, and television personalities:
Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.
Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.
In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it — because you care.
H/T to Gerard Vanderleun for the link.
July 23, 2010
July 22, 2010
Theme music retrospective
I spent too much of my childhood TV watching time hiding behind the couch whenever this program was on. I was too scared to watch, but wouldn’t let my mother turn off the TV:
Listening to all of them now, it’s only the first one that really sets the hair on the back of my neck quivering . . .
H/T to Rob Beschizza for the link.
Gay characters on British TV: still (mostly) negatively stereotyped
British TV, bastion of high-brow entertainment (at least to foreign audiences, who only see the “good stuff”), still has trouble coming to terms with how gay people are portrayed:
Gay people were portrayed positively and realistically for just 46 minutes in 126 hours of TV programmes, a study by Stonewall has found. They were shown as predatory, promiscuous or comical stereotypes half the time they appeared.
Soaps and reality shows such as Hollyoaks, I’m a Celebrity . . ., How to Look Good Naked and Emmerdale gave most screen time to gay, lesbian and bisexual characters or issues, but they were almost invisible in talent shows and dramas.
Researchers watched the 20 programmes most popular with young viewers for 16 weeks between last September and January 2010. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people were portrayed for five hours and 43 minutes in total — but 36% of that was negative, according to the report Unseen on Screen, and 31% was realistic but showed them as upset or distressed.
Stonewall monitored shows on BBC1, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five including The Bill, The X Factor, EastEnders, Blue Peter, The One Show and Strictly Come Dancing. It found that BBC1 portrayed lesbians for just 29 seconds out of nearly 40 screen hours.
July 16, 2010
Another round of anti-drug hysteria?
In times of economic uncertainty, we seem to get more off-the-wall panics about other things. Things like kids trying to find legal ways to get high. Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link saying “. . .this is not The Onion! But it is hard to tell. I think I’ll try it when I get home.”
It’s not even news. Nutmeg’s (very mild) hallucinogenic qualities have been known for centuries. As they allude to in the video, the required dosage is so high that it’s the equivalent of smoking a rope: there may be a benefit, but it’s not worth the effort.
Stock up on nutmeg for your ordinary cooking needs, as this inevitably will lead to hysteric calls to ban the substance, or to have it only sold in registered outlets with a log kept.
July 9, 2010
Matt Ridley on the onrush of DOOM!
Matt Ridley is about the same age as I am, and he clearly heard all the same warnings, predictions, and prophecies of doom that I heard when I was a teen:
When I was a student, in the 1970s, the world was coming to an end. The adults told me so. They said the population explosion was unstoppable, mass famine was imminent, a cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was beginning, the Sahara desert was advancing by a mile a year, the ice age was retuning, oil was running out, air pollution was choking us and nuclear winter would finish us off. There did not seem to be much point in planning for the future. I remember a fantasy I had — that I would make my way to the Hebrides, off the west coast of Scotland, and live off the land so I could survive these holocausts at least till the cancer got me.
I am not making this up. By the time I was 21 years old I realized that nobody had ever said anything optimistic to me — in a lecture, a television program or even a conversation in a bar — about the future of the planet and its people, at least not that I could recall. Doom was certain.
The next two decades were just as bad: acid rain was going to devastate forests, the loss of the ozone layer was going to fry us, gender-bending chemicals were going to decimate sperm counts, swine flu, bird flu and Ebola virus were going to wipe us all out. In 1992, the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro opened its agenda for the twenty-first century with the words `Humanity stands at a defining moment in history. We are confronted with a perpetuation of disparities between and within nations, a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and illiteracy, and the continuing deterioration of the ecosystems on which we depend for our well-being.’
And as we all know, it all came true . . .
Ridley’s latest book is The Rational Optimist, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. I didn’t always agree with it, but it was refreshing reading material. Recommended.
July 5, 2010
QotD: Blogging and the spirit of journalism
I believe the blogosphere first truly gained traction in America for a good reason. There is something about blogging’s freedom from the constraints of conventional journalism that captures an American ideal: civic engagement totally free of anyone else’s influence. It is an ideal of a fourth estate hostile to authorities public and private, suspicious of conventional wisdom, and, above all, confident, even when confidence seems absurd, in the power of the word and the argument to make a difference . . . in the end. The rise of this type of citizen journalism has, in my view, increasingly exposed some of the laziness and corruption in the professional version — even as there is still a huge amount to treasure and value in the legacy media, and a huge amount of partisan, mendacious claptrap on the blogs.
But what distinguishes the best of the new media is what could still be recaptured by the old: the mischievous spirit of journalism and free, unfettered inquiry. Journalism has gotten too pompous, too affluent, too self-loving, and too entwined with the establishment of both wings of American politics to be what we need it to be.
We need it to be fearless and obnoxious, out of a conviction that more speech, however much vulgarity and nonsense it creates, is always better than less speech. In America, this is a liberal spirit in the grandest sense of that word – but also a conservative one, since retaining that rebelliousness is tending to an ancient American tradition, from the Founders onward.
Andrew Sullivan, “Happy 4th”, Daily Dish, 2010-07-04
July 2, 2010
QotD: Overworked word of the year
Okay, I want to hear everyone in the auditorium this time, okay? Even all of you folks there in back! I want it loud, and I want it proud! Ready? And . . . UNEXPECTEDLY!!! Truly, it was a flabbergasting, never-to-be-repeated freakish turn of events that absolutely no one could have anticipated. A lighting bolt out of a clear blue sky, as it were. The asymptote just raced off to infinity, leaving only gobsmacked surprise in its wake.
Monty, “Friday Financial Briefing”, Aces of Spades HQ, 2010-07-02
June 30, 2010
Coming to the small screen soon: “Modern Spies”
It’s a perfect media pitch: modern spies in America! It’s bound to be a mid-season replacement on Fox in 2011!
Charles Stross wonders why this is a surprise:
The only thing I’m startled at is that anyone would find this surprising. Pre-Glasnost, the KGB was heavily into the economic and corporate espionage business — not simply trying to suborn politicians and penetrate rival intelligence and counter-intelligence agencies, but actively trying to gain competitive advantage for the Soviet Union’s big industrial enterprises. From the early 1980s on, it was a huge priority for them — and indeed, Vladimir Putin was allegedly employed by the KGB directorate concerned with economic espionage. And human intelligence operations, even long-term infiltration ones, are comparatively cheap to engage in — given that agents need to work to maintain a cover identity, it takes relatively little money to maintain them in the field and to maintain a management structure at HQ: the cost of a single spy satellite would cover a hundred spies and their controllers for a multi-decade mission.
Looking at this, it’s hard to disagree with Jim Geraghty “I hope some creative casting director is signing Jewel Staite to play the alleged Russian spy Anne Chapman.”
June 25, 2010
Internet access forces retirement of military TV network
Strategy Page notes the imminent demise of two media staples: Armed Forces Network (AFN) broadcast television and the traditional base newspaper:
U.S. military television stations in Europe are halting the broadcasting of their signals. Not because so many American troops have left Europe since the end of the Cold War, but because everyone has cable. A few broadcasting towers will keep operating, for the few areas where barracks are not yet wired for cable. The big losers are American retirees and military families living off the base. In addition, a lot of locals enjoyed the availability of the “American Channel” and the military oriented content. It was something they could not find on the largest local cable plans. AFN often broadcast American TV shows before they were bought by local networks for broadcast in dubbed format. The dubbing is often poor, and many Europeans speak English, and like to get American TV shows as soon as they come out. But now that’s all history.
[. . .] the technology tidal wave is also destroying the oldest form of American military media; the base newspaper. Four years ago, U.S. Air Force bases began to scrap a century old tradition; the base newspaper. Some bases later brought the papers back, because they found there were a significant minority of base residents who did not use the Internet (which was supposed to replace the newspaper.) But that is not going to last long.
These weeklies were almost standard on military bases, mainly as a vehicle for getting out information of use to all those who lived or worked there. There were administrative announcements, as well as social ones. The base newspapers served a morale function, as well as a practical one. But the news papers cost money, some $3,000-$5,000 a week. The papers were distributed for free, and now there’s a trend towards eliminating the papers, and just putting out all the information on the base web site. All bases now have web sites, and troops, especially younger ones, find these more useful than newspapers. Surveys indicate that most junior troops don’t even read newspapers (nor do their civilian peers). But all these young troops rely on the web for news, and other information. The troops also note that, when they are deployed overseas, or just away from the base for a few days, they only way to stay in touch with what’s happening on the base is via the web site. But many older NCOs and officers, along with their spouses, do still read newspapers. It’s a generational thing, so the base newspaper is still doomed.
