This via the Guardian

Carfull now!

He has plenty of people to shout down people like these lunatics who claim to believe he’s a psychotic commie-Nazi, but here ya go:

Print out a high-res version and and stick it up in your local creche, why dontcha.

Councillor Maurice Ahern was canvassing for the local elections in June and came around our road on Saturday. He and his team were all looking a bit sheepish, seemingly only knocking on the doors of houses that looked like nobody was in.

And they put this leaflet through the door:

But mainly at election time.

Oh my. Google’s automatic face-blurring technology might have got a bit over-zealous:

Unfortunately they’ve fixed it now. Thanks to Google Sightseeing for the spot.

New York proposes pedestrianising a chunk of mid-town Broadway. This is a great idea from just about every perspective - the New York DOT even says it will improve traffic flows by eliminating a few of those acute-angle junctions, which makes sense.

The story reminded me that I’d like to see something similar done for quiet residential streets but on a much more informal basis. Lowman Road, where I live, is closed off one Sunday afternoon every year for a street party, featuring the usual elements of live music, outdoor drinking, weird tat-stalls, sun-stroke, and communist balloons for children. It gets crowded, partly because it is obviously a special occasion, but also because lots of people on the street come out and stay out, chatting to each other or playing footy with the local kids, etc. It’s all very nice, and each time I think “hey, we should do this more often”. Not the whole party rigmarole - just close the street (it’s about 100m long) to through traffic so that people can use it without fear of being run over without warning. It’s not as if there would be a massive impact on traffic - in half an hour last Sunday afternoon, I counted eight cars going past, two of them local residents coming or going. So the displacement onto the parallel Jackson Road would be about one extra car every five minutes, hardly enough to notice.

There are a lot of residential streets in London like mine, where the traffic flow is high enough to scare off children playing and other casual use but low enough that diverting it elsewhere every so often won’t make much difference. In policy terms, closing these streets off to through traffic once every fortnight or month in summer could do a great deal to promote outdoorsy fun, improve physical health, boost that kind of neighbourliness all politicians seem to be in favour of, and make the city a more pleasant place to raise children. It may also bring about a more subtle psychological shift, from the perception of streets as places where cars rule and people fear to tread, to places where people rule and cars go slowly.

If it was such a great idea people would be doing it already though, right? Maybe, or maybe it’s one of those things that people don’t do because they don’t see people doing it, a tipping-point sort of thing. I can also see councils treating it as more of a pain in the arse than an opportunity to improve local quality of life, so there’s a natural role there for any mayor who wanted to promote the idea, if he can be bothered.

Brian Lenihan. No matter what you think of the man, there’s no denying that he is Ireland’s minister for finance. It’s true that he was recently ranked as the second worst finance minister in Europe, for what appears to be no particular reason. But with Ireland’s finances in such a bad way, what with the recession, plunging tax receipts and rocketing unemployment and all, there’s just no time for popularity contests or thinking about things. Here he is, talking, on the radio:

“If you shop at home this Christmas, and shop a little bit more this Christmas and if you recognise that money is going to help educate your children and care for people in hospitals and pay for our medical expenses, which the State has to pay for, I think you’ll realise that it is important to shop at home.”

I’m not above doing my bit. For Christmas, I’m going to buy Brian a time machine, so he can go back ten years, apply the same splendid logic to income tax, and we can at least endure the hard times with a decade of decent investment in health, education and public services behind us.

I found this on The Chancer, an apparently ‘banned’ clip from Star Trek TNG wherein Data muses on the IRA and terrorism. I bet it’s even more banned now. Of course, the ma was Irish.

If you had a time machine, and you travelled way back in time to kill your grandfather, John McCain would be there watching you!

McCain knows all about paradoxical contraptions and the what not. Here’s a quote from a recent interview he did with Time magazine:

I can only imagine what Saddam Hussein would be doing with the wealth he would acquire with oil at $110 and $120 a barrel.

Whoa, my head, it’s like I’m skiing on a Möbius strip! I can’t only imagine what Saddam would be doing with oil that would be very dear because the Middle East would be destabilised because he would be both dead AND a crazy dictator, presumably depending on when you opened the box.

Barack Obama has a new book coming out, just bursting with goodness and many a regrettable hostage to fortune (hopefully). But that’s nothing compared with what’s to come.

The new release was assembled over the past few weeks and is not part of the senator’s current deal with Crown, which calls for him to write two more books, including a children’s book.

Barack Obama is contractually obliged to write a children’s book in the near future.

I drafted this post in November 2005, more than a year after Obama gave this speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention (I had only just read it). And yes, I was genuinely excited and uplifted by reading much of that speech.

I never posted, because I always thought I would get to a more thorough, deserving analysis of that speech and, I hoped, the person who made it, about whom I was genuinely curious. I never did. But, for no particular reason, except maybe this one, here in all their toe-curling glory, are my initial thoughts (as saved by the good people at Wordpress - damn their eyes).

Title: The ‘voice of reason’ market? Huuuuuuuge market.

Barack Obama. He’s too good to be true, right?

I’ll be honest with you. Obama creeps me out a little bit. And it’s not just the whole ‘head boy at Hogwarts’ goody-goody vibe; that’s just my own built-in prejudices biting. I can get over that. But he makes me uncomfortable. I hate listening to a politician and thinking, ‘Hey, people should listen to this guy. This is a great idea - and I think he means it!’

And that was it.

According to the Center for Global Development, Ireland ranks only behind Sweden in terms of positive policies towards development in Africa.

The index attempts to quantify the impact on development of a range of policies, not just the usuals like aid and trade but also policies on migration, the environment, security and so on. Ireland does well in large part because of its contribution to peacekeeping in Africa.

Here’s the new Tánaiste, Mary Coughlan, in a picture I found infinitely depressing.

And if that arms-aloft, shoulder-raising, parish flag-waving doesn’t get you down, how about this from the accompanying report:

Thousands poured on to the streets in Bundoran, Ballyshannon, Ballintra, Laghey and Donegal town as victory rallies were held in each before the Tánaiste, who is also Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment, reached her destination…

Why, what could be less creepy than a victory rally held when no-one has won anything?

She pledged: “I’ll be doing my best for the people of the northwest, particularly my own county.”

Oh… I see. As you were, Donegal.

A few things I’ve been reading / listening to recently, all from America:

In ‘Clogged Arteries‘, Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes say transport funding in the US has been spread too thinly and not targeted towards the congested cities where it can do most good. They link this overly-egalitarian approach to the proliferation of ‘earmarks’ in federal transportation legislation, ie the ‘everyone gets a new highway’ approach to consensus-building.

In this speech (see also here and here), Jonathan Kozol attacks (among other things) unequal public school funding: New York City spends $11,000 per child in public schools, compared to $19,000 in nearby suburbs and $22,000 on Long Island, never mind the fact that children in the city tend to come from more problematic backgrounds. Much of this disparity is due to the funding of local schools from local property taxes with little redistribution according to needs.

In ‘The Inherited Ghetto‘, Patrick Sharkey describes the forces varying from outright to indirect discrimination that have contributed to the ongoing racial segregation of residential America. Notably, the response to the growing economic marginalisation of blacks in urban areas due to industrial decline and middle class flight to the suburbs was not to try and regenerate cities but to institute mass incarceration.

Finally, in ‘A Level Playing Field for Cities‘, Ed Glaeser gives a handy summary of how these issues fit together:

While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty.

I think there’s a fairly different approach to these kind of issues in England, which seems to have smaller spatial inequalities and greater concern over ‘postcode lotteries’ in public services and the like. The absence of a legacy of extreme racism may have a lot to do with this, but I’d also link it to the much greater centralisation of government and public finance in England. I’ve tended to see this a bad thing as it reduces local government’s incentive and ability to pro-actively develop their area, but it does have the effect of smoothing out inequalities - obviously by greater redistribution, but also in a prior sense in that when services are funded by local taxes the incentive to surround yourself with rich people and keep as far away from poor people as possible is that much stronger. It’s also worth noting that Glaeser criticises American land use restrictions of the ‘maximum density’ type, while restrictions on sprawl (which I believe he also dislikes) have arguably contributed to the relatively good performance of English cities.

Anyway, these issues clearly have ramifications beyond economics and local government finance. If I had the academic chops I’d like to try and write something about it all under the general heading of ’spatial justice’ (as compared to ’social justice’) that also brought in issues of political and environmental rights, but I don’t really have a clue where to start.

Take a look at this video of a recent Obama speech.

In the background on the left, right at the start - isn’t that Louis Theroux?

Funny coincidence: just yesterday I was reading the bit in the script for Annie Hall where Alvy finds a copy of the National Review in Annie’s apartment and suggests she gets William F. Buckley to come round and kill the spider in her bathroom. I thought “Hee hee, brilliant! Wait, who’s William F. Buckley?”. Well, now he’s dead, but apparently he was a leading conservative intellectual in the days before that was a contradiction in terms. Tyler Cowen links to some interesting YouTube clips, including this interview with Chomsky. Buckley’s persona is pretty odd: he’s obviously clever, but (to me, anyway) he comes across as a pompous and somewhat oleaginous bullshitter who in this case has his rhetorical ass handed to him by young Noam.

Update: some considerably less superficial analysis here

If Billy Bragg can fix the House of Lords I see no reason why Lilian Thuram cannot bring peace to the Middle East. And I’m sure there have been worse reasons for deciding who hosts past World Cups.

Peace through Superior Football
by Pascal Boniface and Lilian Thuram

When it comes to wishing for peace in the Middle East – virtually a New Year’s tradition ­– one needs to be careful. So many hopes have vanished in the bitter failure of so many negotiations. But we have a wish for the Middle East – one that, while perhaps not bringing peace, can create one of peace’s preconditions: goodwill. Israel and Palestine should jointly bid for, and be awarded, the Football World Cup in 2018.

The Israel-Palestine conflict has lasted far too long. The Annapolis peace conference ended a seven-year freeze on negotiations, with President George W. Bush asking the conflict’s main protagonists to reach an agreement by the end of 2008.

Nothing prevents us from hoping that a fair and just peace can be achieved by then. There is no curse that keeps Israelis and Palestinians from living side by side peacefully. Where there is a will, there is a way.

But nurturing the will to achieve long-lasting peace depends on more than political negotiations. Israelis and Palestinians need an underlying source of solidarity if they are ever to settle their large disagreements and prevent their small ones from erupting into violence.

Although football cannot solve the region’s major strategic problems, it has much to contribute in this regard. Football mobilizes energies and unites enthusiasms. After the 2010 World Cup in South Africa – a country where peace has taken root – and before the 2014 tournament in Brazil, it will be time to select the host for 2018.

If a peace agreement is concluded before that choice is made, a 2018 World Cup jointly staged in Israel and Palestine would be a fantastic opportunity to consolidate the gains for both sides. Infrastructure investment would then follow.

The joint organization of the 2018 World Cup in a place where two peoples were once at war would serve as a powerful symbol of the way that sports can serve the cause of peace. Indeed, the prospect of hosting the football World Cup might constitute yet another incentive for Israelis and Palestinians to reach a settlement. Let us imagine that they could then work hand in hand to host the biggest sporting event in the world.

I think it would also help if we could send Peter Crouch to the West Bank for a while - the people there would be so distracted by his lanky frame and paradoxical lack of aerial threat that they would soon forget about their political grievances.

I do enjoy the deliriously clichéd style of much American political commentary:

The cheeseheads have spoken. And the message they delivered in the Democratic primary in Wisconsin was loud and unequivocal. There are fancier (or gentler) ways of interpreting it, but what the hearty souls who braved the subfreezing temperatures to cast their votes from Milwaukee to Menomonie announced was this: Virginia and Maryland weren’t anomalies; Barack Obama has the Big Mo; and Hillary Clinton is close to being forced from the stage by another lady — the fat one who likes to sing.

The Clinton campaign is laboring mightily to stuff a sock down that corpulent old dame’s throat.[continues…]

OK, some dare.

(Just because I like matchy things and these appeared a day apart.)

Jonathan Schwarz at A Tiny Revolution:

It’s hard for our type to comprehend this, but it’s true. Much of real right-wing power in the United States, right up to senior White House staff, sees the world like this. They simply cannot understand why anyone to their left behaves as they do, and the only answer that makes sense to them is “TREASON!!!” They honestly believe that “secular progressives” (as Bill O’Reilly likes to call us) are pining to turn America into the New Caliphate…

Of course, this seems utterly bonkers to us, but remember: from their perspective, simply telling the truth is treason.

Fintan O’Toole on the reaction to Enda Kenny’s criticism of Bertie Ahern:

As a comic turn, the notion that it is treasonous to raise the awkward issue of Bertie Ahern’s finances and tax affairs when he is outside the jurisdiction (including, presumably, when he is Manchester) is good for a laugh. But this “hit me now with the green flag wrapped around me” posture has a serious side…

Let’s remember what, in this world view, is not treasonous. It is not treason to line your pockets with private donations while you’re in well-paid public office.

It is not treasonous to evade the tax and exchange laws of your country, as Haughey did, by stashing that money in the Cayman Islands. It is not treasonous to accept large sums from private citizens while you are minister for finance. Or to withhold evidence from a tribunal established by the Oireachtas until it discovers it for itself. Or to be unable to produce a tax clearance certificate. Or to state, quite bluntly, that you appoint people to State boards because they are your friends. But it is treasonous to criticise any of these things.

I liked Matthew Yglesias’:

I think Kansas will beat Virginia Tech, but the real winner of the Orange Bowl will be John McCain as the merest thought of football reminds voters of his toughness.

Got it right too.

It seems that Fulham football club has decided to appoint the esteemed, and rather haggard, Roy Hodgson as the manager. Lawrie Sanchez and the caretaker boss, Ray Lewington, led the struggling team into the relegation zone. In a similar move, the board of another struggling team have decided to change management, despite apparent improvement in recent form. It is certainly a difficult decision to change mid-stream, especially when the team has built up a rapport with the manager.

Steve Staunton is reported to be top of the list to see them through the rest of the season. Although, they are an ambitious group, with an eye on a spot in Europe.

No schwellenangst from Boris Johnson:

I don’t want to see metopes with centaurs and amazons on every entablature.

But why is it that mass housing once regularly incorporated human, animal or vegetable images - art of one kind or another - and yet we offer the buyer nothing of the kind today?

It doesn’t need to be much - just some visible point of pride - to satisfy what the Germans call the Schmuckbedurfnis - the lust for ornament.

Schmuckbedurfnis! That’s pretty good. Shame about the rest of the speech. FWIW, I think there are two main reasons new housing is generally pretty low-quality. Firstly, everyone’s so desperate to buy they’re grateful just to get on the ‘ladder’ and as a result aren’t as picky as they should be. Second, the highly skilled manual labour that produced the beautifully made Georgian and Victorian terraces Boris loves just isn’t available anymore in the plentiful quantities and / or at the relatively low cost it was back then. Most manufacturing or artisan jobs have disappeared save for some top-end niche producers, but even if somebody in China could churn out masses of attractive stucco cornicing nobody’s going to bother shipping it over here. The same goes for any number of internal or external markers of design or quality of finished product, and your averagely-priced new modern home suffers as a result. Increases in building costs already outpace general inflation, God knows what it would look like if it was actually adjusted for quality.

This argument is a bit too convenient for the many developers out there who are fundamentally imaginative and not punished for it, however, and I suspect standard designs would improve pretty fast if people started being a lot more picky about what they buy / rent.

* We need a long German word for Fellowship Of Long German Word Aficionados …

The great thing about the UK Climate Change Bill is that everyone has their part to play in taking the PM down a peg or two.

Section 4(4) provides as follows:

If, in any one year, United Kingdom carbon dioxide emissions exceed the national annual target figure for that year by more than ten per cent then, in addition to the measures provided for in subsections (1), (2) and (3), the select committee referred to in subsection (2) shall consider whether the salary of the Prime Minister for the financial year in which the report laid under section 3(5) was laid should be reduced by up to 10 per cent, and shall make a recommendation concerning the Prime Minister’s salary.

Gordon Brown better buck up fast, or there’ll be a hell of a lot of televisions being left on standby down Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath way.

This is pretty fucking chilling. “A series of catastrophic failures” seems about right. Jean Charles De Menezes was a victim of top-to-bottom incompetence (and the sad but predictable fact that some guys get way too excited when they’re allowed, encouraged even, to run about waving guns at people), but just because no one person can take all the blame doesn’t mean that nobody has to take responsibility. If being a manager means anything it should mean being held accountable for the failings of your team, and if Blair doesn’t possess the basic decency to realise this and step down he doesn’t merit the job in the first place. Resign.

From Reuters:

Bin Laden to release 9/11 anniversary video

Jolly good. Will this include remixes by the Neptunes, a duet with Kylie and never-before-seen footage of a young Osama doing a karaoke version of Unchained Melody?

Maybe I’m just sentimental, but I thought this was both cute and informative. BBC World Service got a boy born when Tony Blair became Prime Minister to go round interviewing various people about The Blair Years. The best bits for me are when he interviews other kids, because (a) kids say the funniest things (which we often find funny because they are simple and true, which is a bit odd), (b) kids are pretty left-wing, and (c) You don’t get to hear kids talking in a vaguely natural context on the media much, usually the little bastards are trying to sell you something.

Anyway, I liked the interview with Idriss, the kid with the excellent Somali London accent who initially tries to defend Tony Blair on the grounds of investment in schools and so forth, then concedes “Yeah, some don’t like him, because of the Iraq war … and other wars”.

The round-table with a focus-group of ten-year-olds on the priorities for the incoming PM was great, too: I especially loved the way Ben used his chair’s prerogative to completely ignore in his summing-up the strong push from the lobby for being nicer to animals.

As I can’t blog here in work cause we’re still on stupid Explorer, I’ve been reduced to doing my dirty work elsewhere, so here

I’m sure this is very bad blogging etiquette, but I hope you like the colour scheme.

First rule of Ceann-Comhairling, just like teaching, is don’t let the little bastards see they can wind you up.

Loving some of the comments on YouTube:

I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy, I will remind the Deputy…

Stick a dance beat behind that and you’ll have a dead cert for number 1 on your hands…

I visited Poland last year, as was blogged, and it seemed like a nice place. They have twin-brothers as prime minister and president, a situation aching to be turned into an hilarious 8:30pm BBC1 sitcom. However, it turns out that this new law makes it a far darker sitcom, something Chris Morris would write.

It’s difficult to reconcile this kind of thing with the ethos of the EU and the general agreeableness of the Poles I have met.

Deadly typo in John Water’s column today on Bertie’s crusade against “aggressive secularism”.*

“They argue that the State and public policy should become intolerant of religious belief and preference, and confine it, at best, to the purely private and personal, without rights or a role within the pubic domain.”

*Is Bertie cracking up just like Blair has?

Anne Coulter, who is what they call a “conservative pundit”, has raised the tone of the embryonic 2008 US presidential race. Here, she speaks (at the ‘Conservative Political Action Conference’) about John Edwards. You know, the ineffectual one…with the hair.

It’s always funny to see things descend to this level, but this is pretty fast. I think they should wait til each party has selected a candidate, then concentrate all their powers of cutting  satiro-lambastment at him or her.