Marbury

self-congratulation alert

A new poll in the Sunday Times has the Conservative lead down to 2%. Tory blogger Tim Montgomerie draws conclusions:

One of the big lessons of the last week is that there is no evidence that attacks on Brown's character and style of politics have any traction. The bullying and 'forces of hell' episodes excited Westminster but do not appear to have done Brown one scrap of damage.

Of course, if he'd been reading Marbury he would have seen this (not) coming.

Ps "Gordon Brown on course to win election" is a headline you could have made a lot of money by betting against in the last year.

free tilly?

The New Yorker's Susan Orlean on whether all whales should be free:

In 2002, I wrote a piece for the magazine about Keiko, the orca who played Willy in the “Free Willy” movies. He had spent almost his entire life in one concrete pool or another. After his movie career ended, the irony of his movie role (an amusement-park whale who is ultimately set free) versus his real-life role (an amusement-park whale who was still in captivity) caused a stir, and many millions of dollars were then spent to try to un-tame Keiko. It was too late for Keiko, though: he resisted the program, showing only passing interest in wild whales, instead preferring the companionship of human children and rubber buoys.

being boring

A quick note on the healthcare summit. I'm almost entirely ignorant of the details of the policy debate and also of the arcane political procedures of Capitol Hill. Neither can I accurately judge the mood of American voters on this issue. But my rather ill-informed and un-authoritative view is this: the gabfest might have done a lot more good than people are giving it credit for. Everyone's saying it was super-boring, nobody watched, the Republicans didn't embarrass themselves, etc.

But I think it might have helped take the heat of the issue. The majority of Americans oppose the healthcare bill. Not necessarily on substantive grounds, but because they're angry about the economy and even angrier that the Democrats are pissing around behind closed doors doing deals, and trying to ram a bill down the nation's throat, blah blah. But the summit might have helped it become more mundane than that: here are two parties, they're debating it, they disagree, but one has more votes than the other. At which point it becomes more understandable, duller and less of a secret socialist conspiracy.

Being boring is the point.

connections

To the RSA last night to see Nicholas Christakis talk about his amazing work on how much our lives are shaped by our social networks. One of his most striking findings - the results of years of painstaking research - is that obesity spreads via social contagion. If your friend's friend becomes obese, that makes you more likely to become obese. Similar effects have been found with smoking, and levels of happiness (there's a great exposition of Christakis's work here). As an aside, Christakis remarked that when his study on obesity was released, the US newspapers tended to report it as, "Getting fat? Blame your friends." The UK press, by contrast, went for: "Are your friends getting fat? It may be your fault." This says much about our respective national psyches.

For more on social networks, read this extraordinary report on America's successful hunt and capture of Saddam in the wake of the Battle of Baghdad. Amidst all the disaster, it's a success story that has been forgotten about; as the author of the piece Chris Wilson notes, it was by no means inevitable that Saddam would be captured. A cadre of smart officers, some schooled in sociology (!) used social network theory to track him down.

perils of twitter

The Rt Hon. Ed Miliband's Twitter feed today (read from bottom):

 

This isn't funny, of course. Not funny at all.

sport is life

I love this video:

The person who posted it says he uses it as a motivational tool - the moral he draws being "never quit, don't stop trying even when things look bad". When I watched, the moral I drew was more like "It's really uncool to try in the first place." Suspect this reflects badly on me.

criminology fieldwork

Via McSweeney's: a police report on the robbery of three liberal arts graduates:

Perp Two then informed Mr. Wilson-Stern, Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Miller that their "white asses" should listen up and that he and Perp One and Perp Three were going to rob the house and would soon be gone. Mr. Wilson-Stern informed Perp Two that he is, in fact, 1/64th Cherokee and asked whether Perp Two had read Kyama Sozuki's article on race as a social construct in The Stanford Sociology Review.

Perp Three then demanded to know where Mr. Wilson-Stern, Mr. Miller and Mr. Goldstein kept their valuables. Mr. Wilson-Stern replied that his MacBook Pro was in his backpack under the living room table. Mr. Goldstein replied that his laptop and iPod Touch were on his desk upstairs. Mr. Miller replied that his signed copy of Susan Sontag's On Photography was laying on the credenza next to the tanzu.

how could we ever have loved such a bastard?

Nick Cohen on the psychodrama of the British media, seized by self-loathing and self-deceit in equal measure:

Like spurned teenage lovers, former Blairites wail that he ravished them and then betrayed them, and that he must pay by suffering every kind of humiliation. They cannot accept that Blair made an honourable mistake: knowing that Saddam Hussein had possessed the means and the will to commit genocide in the past, he believed that the dictator continued to possess them in 2003. The accusation that he was guilty of human error is not good enough. Blair must have lied to Parliament and the country. He must have known that there were no WMD in Iraq but went to war anyway. The result of the almost sexual revulsion behind the campaign against him is that we are now on our fifth inquiry into Iraq. Like the European Union with the Irish electorate, the media class will keep demanding inquiries until they get the right result and find that Blair conspired to steal their virginity.

c-span nation

The televised healthcare summit is underway. David Frum is captivated:

If this is political theater, it is theater for people in full-body casts who can’t reach the channel changer.

the dead shark

The polls are now telling a consistent story: Labour is closing on the Tories. Considering we're at the end of a third term of a tired government led by an unpopular Prime Minister, this is pretty extraordinary. John Rentoul talks to a bemused Labour MP:

"What is going on?" one Labour MP asked me this week. "Who are these people who want to vote for five more years of Gordon Brown? It's extraordinary."

In this week's Spectator, James Forsyth offers a gripping analysis of the Tories' confusion. Key quote:

It is as clear to the country as it is to the top Tories that the Conservative election campaign is in trouble; that the party seems to be stagnating. One aide puts it like this: ‘A shark has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we’ve got on our hands is a dead shark.’

Or is just stunned?

I still back the Tories to win (and to win an overall majority) but there's no doubt they ought to be doing a lot better than this at this stage. So what's the problem? I'd say there are two key reasons for their stunted progress. One is that, despite the hothouse atmosphere of Westminster and the vagaries of polls, people's underlying political perceptions are formed and unformed at the speed of igneous rock. In other words, voters still don't quite trust that the Tories aren't the same party that was led by Mrs Thatcher and John Major. The second is that Cam and Os have never quite convinced the electorate that they are grown-ups; a problem that their confused, ever-shifting response to the economic crisis has starkly illuminated.

what is sarah palin's deal?

Jeb Bush on Sarah Palin (as related by Toby Harnden):

“I don’t know what her deal is. My belief is in 2010 and 2012 public leaders need to have intellectual curiosity. The world is really an amazing place but it is very complex, it is very fast moving. If you think you’ve got it all figured out, the minute you start thinking that is the first day of your demise... So if she has those skills and she wants to run then she’ll be a great candidate.”

In Bush's guarded language (though you can hear a touch of anger bubbling over in that first sentence) this is a way of saying "Why the HELL  are we EVEN TALKING about this DELUSIONAL WOMAN as a potential GOP candidate?"

america goes south

The US is relocating its London embassy from Mayfair to Vauxhall (the misleadingly named Nine Elms, to be precise). You can choose whether to interpret this as implicit acknowledgement of imperial decline, as a sign of straitened times, or as canny property management. Or none of the above: the embassy claim it's so that they can be close to Vauxhall station. It's good for buses too (after all, who wants to pay that pesky congestion charge?).

The State Department is touchingly proud of the proposed design, rendered above. The rationale for it is very Age of Obama:

In recent years, the government has relied on standard embassy designs as it worked to rapidly replace or upgrade overseas facilities in the nervous post-2001 environment. Many of those were criticized for being fortress-like, forbidding and isolated from their surroundings and the people they serve. The choice of the KieranTimberlake design suggests that the more open process has yielded exactly what the State Department's Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations was looking for: "a modern, open and secure" building that was sensitive to London's architectural context.

For those of you unfamiliar with Vauxhall, said context is mainly spectacularly ugly glass-and-metal boxes and grim housing estates. So, perfect. You can't say the architects aren't sensitive to Britain's wider cultural context either. The new embassy will have a moat:

A semi-circular pond will function as a protective moat along the Thames side, while a spiraling landscape to the south sets the building away from potential car or truck bombs. A complex envelope of blast-resistant glass and a polymer skin (known as ETFE) will provide both security and energy efficiency, while shading the building on its sun-exposed sides.

Perhaps they can be persuaded to add a bombproof duckhouse and gun turret.

pink leather shorts and a pick-up truck

Frank Bruni's profile of Scott Brown, the new senator for Massachusetts, is a small work of art: perceptive, vividly detailed, generous, tart and funny. Brown is one of the more exotic blooms of American politics, a former male model who successfully cultivates a truck-driving, blue-collar image. In Bruni's portrait he comes over as shallow and vain but likeable, sort of like Sam Malone in Cheers but without the womanising - the most convincing evidence of his personal decency is the strength of his marriage and the fact that his daughters, now in their early twenties, clearly adore him. The youngest, Arianna, has a healthy sense of mischief, though. She gets her own back for being called out as "available" in her father's acceptance speech by sharing a bit of Brown family lore with Bruni: her father turned up for his first date with his future wife wearing pink leather shorts:

The pinkish color drained from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. “I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,” he said. “And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.”

As he told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it. “If I wore these now,” he said, “I’d get shot. But it was the ’80s. Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y.” The shorts went with his tan at the time and a pair of white shoes that he owned, so he gave them a whirl. “Gail comes out and she’s like, ‘Those are pink shorts.’ I said: ‘Yeah, you like them? They’re great. Comfortable. Feel this leather.’ ” With this last phrase, he slowly stroked the side of one of his thighs, apparently miming the gesture he made in front of her.

Read the whole thing.

another one bites the dust

Another member of the Taliban's inner circle falls to the Pakistanis:

Mullah Kabir is a longtime associate of Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s founder... “This indicates Baradar was not a one off or an accident but a turning point in Pakistan’s policy toward the Taliban,” said Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow of Brookings Institution and a former C.I.A. official. “We still need to see how far it goes, but for Obama and this is the best possible news. If the safe haven is closing then the Taliban are in trouble.”

mister language

Language Log introduces me to a treasure trove of brilliant comic writing: Dave Barry - aka "Mister Language" - on linguistics. A couple of extracts:

Q. Please explain how to diagram a sentence.
A. First spread the sentence out on a clean, flat surface, such as an ironing board. Then, using a sharp pencil or X-Acto knife, locate the "predicate," which indicates where the action has taken place and is usually located directly behind the gills. For example, in the sentence: "LaMont never would of bit a forest ranger," the action probably took place in a forest. Thus your diagram would be shaped like a little tree with branches sticking out of it to indicate the locations of the various particles of speech, such as your gerunds, proverbs, adjutants, etc.

Q. In the song ``The Joker,'' what is the mystery word that Steve Miller sings in the following verse:
"Some people call me the space cowboy
Some people call me the gangster of love
Some people call me Maurice
'cause I speak of the (SOMETHING) of love.''
A. According to the Broward County Public Library, the word is "pompatus.''
Q. What does "pompatus'' mean?
A. Nothing. Steve made it up. That's why some people call him "the space cowboy.''