marbury

the year that was

britain's threat to america

The New York Times has a must-read report on how Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab became radicalised. The second sentence from this extract is particularly striking:

In recent days, officials in Washington and London have said they are focusing on the possibility that his London years, including his possible contacts with radical Muslim groups in Britain, were decisive in turning him toward Islamic extremism. That view, if confirmed, would offer a stark reaffirmation that Britain, the United States’ closest ally, continues to pose a major threat to American security.

Towards the end of the report you'll find some explicit suggestions as to where and by whom UFA became indoctrinated (including a possible link to Major Hasan), information that probably won't be reported here because of our libel laws.

beware of engineers

That Umar Sparky-Pants was an engineering student is no surprise. Slate has an excellent piece by Benjamin Popper on recent research showing that a disproportionate number of terrorists have engineering degrees:

Gambetta and Hertog write about a particular mind-set among engineers that disdains ambiguity and compromise. They might be more passionate about bringing order to their society and see the rigid, religious law put forward in radical Islam as the best way of achieving those goals. In online postings, Abdulmutallab expressed concern over the conflict between his secular lifestyle and more extreme religious views. "How should one put the balance right?" he wrote.

Terrorist organizations seem to have recognized this proclivity—in Abdulmutallab, obviously, but also among engineers in general. A 2005 report from British intelligence noted that Islamic extremists were frequenting college campuses, looking for "inquisitive" students who might be susceptible to their message. In particular, the report noted, they targeted engineers.

shurely shome mishtake

Despite the valiant efforts of Senator Max Baucus to construct a bipartisan healthcare bill, he ultimately failed to get any Republicans to come aboard, something he clearly regrets bitterly. He has an interesting story to tell - but unfortunately he tells it whilst slurring. Is he drunk? We don't know for sure. But we do know nobody's talking about what he actually said.

reaction times

Politico's Josh Gerstein makes a very sensible and welcome comparison:

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of September 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called “shoe bomber,” Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate.

That stands in sharp contrast to the withering criticism President Barack Obama has received from Republicans and some in the press for his reaction to Friday’s incident on a Northwest Airlines flight heading for Detroit.

Perhaps the news cycle has speeded up somewhat since then. Also, perhaps Bush had earned himself such "credit" in the arena of taking-terrorism-seriously after 9/11/01 that he didn't need to react to the next incident so quickly, whereas (apparently) Obama has yet to gain his war-on-terror stripes. What's missing from that perspective, however, is something Obama is trying to re-introduce - an awareness of AQ and their (potential) followers as a target audience. The bigger fuss the president makes over a failed terrorist attempt, the bigger they look.

now watch this drive

Ambinder has another excellent post on the politics of the Abdul Sparky-Pants incident - this time on why Obama chose to play golf yesterday, as per his pre-arranged schedule, rather than holding a press conference or flying back to the White House:

In a sense, he is projecting his calm on the American people, just as his advisers are convinced that the Bush Administration projected their panic and anger on the self-same public eight years ago.

It's a tough and novel approach -- and not at all (as they say in Britain) party political -- because the standard political script would have the President and his Attorney General appearing everywhere as soon as possible.

six geese are a-laying in my apartment

The magnificent McSweeney's presents a horrifyingly literal interpretation of the Twelve Days of Christmas:

Day 6

Six geese a-laying. Hmm, that's so weird because I was just telling someone that I could use some MORE FUCKING BIRDS. Do you have any idea how much shit six geese generate in a single day? Literally, pounds. Pounds of green, grassy turds. And in case you're curious, all six of them have been a-laying since they got here. There are no less than seventy-five enormous eggs in my apartment right now. And as a side note, I just tried to make an omelet out of one of them and almost ralphed. Very gamy.

new theory of terrorism required

What's most inexplicable about yesterday's scare is that the guy carried explosives and a liquid-filled syringe on to a transatlantic plane - when most of us get stripped of Soltan Factor 8  - despite being on a no-fly list. 

Ambinder has the most interesting take on the political ramifications: 

I am sure that, in the minds of Obama's top counterterrorism officials, they are trying to figure out whether it is worth putting a name to what might be three loosely connected events. Is it sufficient to say that Zazi, Hasan and this Nigerian are all part of the same circle, the same fundamental structure? Do they represent a phase change in the nature of terrorism?  These are harder questions to answer and pose harder questions to solve than the questions of who, what, when, where and how. We'll fix the security flaw, or patch it up as best we can.  What the Obama administration lacks now is a theory of terrorism. Maybe one doesn't exist in the real world; maybe the Bush administration's theory of terrorism exacerbated the problem.  It is this administration's challenge to explain how their approach keeps us safer, and then to demonstrate that their approach keeps us safer.

fired up, ready to party

Obama meets a fancy-dressed Edith Childs of Greenwood, South Carolina who coined the phrase "fired up, ready to go" and inspired the story that Obama told on the campaign trail over and over in 2007 and 2008 (via the official White House photo-stream).

man on wire

Ross Douthat writes one of his familiar on-the-one-hand-on-the-other columns about Obama's first year. Along the way he makes a good point: Obama, like Reagan, is attempting to introduce his "base" to the realities and compromises of governing, but unlike Reagan, he's doing so without having built up credits and credibility with them over the preceding decades - a lack that leaves him walking a tightrope without a safety net. It will take an enormous amount of political skill not to fall off.

Douthat also acknowledges the salient truth about year one:

Between the stimulus package, the pending health care bill and a new raft of financial regulations, Obama will soon be able to claim more major legislative accomplishments than any Democrat since Lyndon Johnson.

barry from dc

Tim Kaine, chairman of the Democratic Party and buddy of the president, is doing his last radio call-in as Virginia's governor when he takes a call from D.C and hears a familiar voice...

cheering up henry

Marbury will taking a break for the festive season. In the meantime, here's a Christmas phone call from President Nixon:

it was china in the study with the lead piping

The Guardian's Mark Lynas has an absolutely superb report on went wrong in Copenhagen. No, George, it wasn't Obama's fault, and it wasn't - as the NGO's and much of the Western media would have us believe - a case of rich countries screwing poor. It was China, who exerted a quiet dominance of the summit from beginning to end, with the sole intention of stopping any meaningful agreement from happening.

princess elizabeth

Elizabeth Taylor as you've never heard her before (well, unless you've seen this before):

kill bill kill bill

Nate Silver - quite possibly the sanest, smartest, most lucid voice in the whole political blogosphere - has been taking on those on the left who argue that it's better to trash this imperfect healthcare bill than pass it, and suffering a hot blast of unreason for his troubles. It's one thing to disagree, but his antagonists simply aren''t interested in an honest argument. It's a bit like trying to reason with the hard core of the GOP:

One of the reasons I consider myself to be a progressive/liberal/whatever is because, more often than not, I've found progressives to be on the "right" side of the argument. They're more empirical, more "scientific", less dogmatic, less sophistic, less demagogic, less anti-intellectual -- not always by any means but at least some majority of the time. After tangling with the kill-billers, however, I'm beginning to have my doubts.

For some people, the dopamine-kick of crying "betrayal" is simply irresistible.

(But still they come at him - Silver valiantly takes his battle into the comments section.)

dept. of anthropology

The New York Times takes a quizzical look at the peculiar British tradition of panto:

Pantomimes reflect a strange paradox of the British national character: that people can be at once so uptight and so gleefully, childishly uninhibited.

It's panto or being blind drunk that brings it out.

copenhagen: consolations and scapegoats

Two views of what happened up north.

David Aaronovitch sees some reasons to be cheerful:

After Copenhagen the wise business model is green. Who is going to prefer to put their money into dirty technology, when the global search is on for the green kind? After Copenhagen, no one can say that they didn’t know there was a debate about climate change, even if they then choose to ignore it. After Copenhagen no one half-sensible can come out with the glib explanation that it’s all the fault of the Yanks (Barack Obama is the best president to do global business with that some of us are likely to see for a while), or that we don’t understand the Chinese, or that the problem is the timidity of the politicians, or that we are somehow absolved. After Copenhagen, we know better where we stand.

"No one half-sensible", huh? Here's George Monbiot:

The immediate reason for the failure of the talks can be summarised in two words: Barack Obama.

Um. I think China may have had something to do with it. And, as Aaronovitch point out, the sheer impossibility of the task that the participants had set themselves (how do you get 110 countries to agree on anything?).

Monbiot has an unfortunate knee-jerk tendency to blame the Yanks. But the first half of his column - in which he deigns to (re-)explain the problem - is very good, and an encouraging sign that climate change activists are beginning to recognise it's not enough to shout DUH! at the great unwashed whenever they wonder what the big to-do is about.

101 is a crowd

the winehouse pantomime

I know, I know, she's offensive, it's terribly sad and all that...but this is kind of funny:

Amy Winehouse is in trouble again after overdoing the Christmas spirit and causing mayhem at a pantomime in Milton Keynes...Winehouse, who according to the Sun newspaper spent large parts of the show standing up, continually disrupted the performance by shrieking "He's fucking behind you". Many children in the audience of 1,400 were apparently reduced to tears as she shouted: "Fuck Cinders, Prince Charming. Marry me" and laid into the Ugly Sisters, yelling that they were "bitches".

In the end the poor theatre manager had to go and drag her out, getting kicked in the groin for his troubles. Merry Christmas!

brown in copenhagen

The Prime Minister's efforts to wring a truly meaningful deal out of this shambolic summit may have come to naught, but they were little short of heroic. John Rentoul, one of Brown's fiercest and most persistent critics, gives credit where it's due:

The lazy assumptions that I shared - that Brown hates international meetings, that he is shy, awkward and rude, and therefore a poor negotiator - turn out to be wrong. I am told by his spin doctors that he used his relationship with Barack Obama to help save the summit as it approached meltdown on Wednesday and Thursday. They tell me that he chaired difficult meetings brilliantly, and that he chaired so many of them, with such energy and stamina, that he seemed to be directing the whole show. What is really extraordinary is that they are right.

the uncanny power of metaphor

Most politics-watchers are now relatively familiar with the idea that by "framing" policies in terms of powerful metaphors or concepts, politicians can influence the way people think about it. Eg, to talk of "tax relief" frames taxation as an affliction. The politician who gets their frame in first wins a headstart (the linguist George Lakoff is most strongly associated with this analysis ). A recent experiment has pushed this theory even further. It's fascinating not so much for its political implications as for what it tells us about the way metaphors unconsciously influence our thought.

69 Arizona undergraduates participated in what they were told was a study of media preferences. First, they were given two articles to read about airborne bacteria, with half the group reading a piece suggesting that that they were exposed to a significant risk of "bodily contamination". Then, they were given one of two articles to read on US domestic political issues, with half the group reading an article that used country=body metaphors in a discussion of innovation (eg "After the Civil War, the United States experienced an unprecedented growth spurt, and is scurrying to create new laws that will give it a chance to digest the millions of innovations"). In the third step, participants were given two questionnaires to fill out, one of which was on immigration.

The study's results showed that the participants who had read about the dangers of bodily contamination from airborne bacteria were significantly more likely to have negative views on immigration – if they had read the second article which used body-metaphoric language in referring to the United States. Those who read the piece about contamination but hadn't read the article that used the body metaphors weren't affected in the same way.

It's an extraordinary example of the power of metaphor - even at a remove - to unconsciously influence the way we think about things.

Go to Language Log for a fuller explanation and discussion.

the anti-branson

The FT has an absolutely priceless interview with Michael O'Leary, the boss of Ryanair. O'Leary clearly loves his reputation as a cantankerous bastard, and he plays up to it brilliantly, slashing away with abandon at the sacred cows of modern managementspeak, including its formal reverence for the company's employees and customers. Here he is on his staff:

As I try to prise off the worryingly sturdy wrapper on the bagel, he says there are two “great things” about lunchtime in an out-of-the-way office like Ryanair’s. “One, there’s nowhere to go and eat,” and two, the only time staff are allowed to use the internet for personal reasons is between five past one and five to two. “So they all tend to stay at their desks at lunch hour!”

The staff get another pasting as he moves on to talk about management consultants (“should all be euthanised”) and MBAs (“bullshit”). “MBA students come out with, ‘The customer’s always right,’” he says, adopting a whiny voice. “Horseshit! The customer’s usually wrong! And, ‘My staff is my most important asset.’ Bullshit! Staff is usually your biggest cost!”

And on the customer, usually described as infallible:

And then there is that other source of endless aggravation, Ryanair’s passengers. Especially the ones wrecking his efforts to shave luggage-handling costs by checking in their cases (for an extra £30) because they are “too mentally bloody lazy to travel with carry-on bags”.

Whether he's right or not, there's something very bracing about O'Leary's candour...