Month: August 2012

Fox News Reaches A New Low

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Eagerly snatching another opportunity to paint American conservatives as more patriotic than their liberal brethren, Fox News decided to jump on American Gymnastics gold medallist Gabby Douglas for showing insufficient national pride by wearing a pink leotard whilst competing:

 

Because, of course, the best way to demonstrate pride in and commitment to one’s country at the Olympic Games is not to compete to the best of your ability and bring home a gold medal, but rather to display the colours of your flag over a sufficient percentage of the surface area of your body.

I just can’t with this nonsense. I know it’s a personality trait in a lot of conservative-leaning people that I should perhaps try to understand (though as a conservative-leaning person myself I don’t think I have this tendency), that they place a great deal of value in reverence for institutions and symbols. There is certainly a time and a place for that. However, this need for all aspiring American politicians to wear a US flag lapel pin, and now this snide attack on Gabby Douglas for failing to show enough of the red, white and blue, is just ridiculous.

You don’t need to wear the modern day equivalent of an Uncle Sam costume to prove that you love America, and are proud of your great nation’s astonishing heritage and unrivaled accomplishments.

You don’t need to chant “USA, USA!” all the time if you don’t want to.

America became the great land that it is precisely because the people who made it great didn’t feel the need to talk about it all the time. They quietly got on and did it.

When nationalistic bombast is all you have left to display, then your country is in a bad place. America is not in that bad place, and God willing, it never will be. Fox News should focus on who will win the next Olympic gold medal for Team USA, not the clothing choice of their most recent champion.

Lords Reform – Actions Have Consequences

Samuel Hooper4 Comments

Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

Tim Montgomerie, writing at Conservative Home, believes that the decision by the Liberal Democrats to renege on their support for electoral constituency boundary reform in retaliation for Prime Minister David Cameron’s inability to win Conservative backbench support for House of Lords reform represents the Conservative’s “worst single electoral setback since Black Wednesday”, when Britain was forced to quit the ERM, torpedoeing the Torie’s reputation for economic competence:

When the Parliamentary and Voting Constituencies Bill was passed I celebrated the moment, noting that the introduction of fair-sized seats of equal population could boost the number of Tory MPs at the next election by up to twenty. That was certainly Conservative HQ’s view. This morning the hope of boundaries fairness** is close to death, if not dead. After having explicitly said there that there was no connection between Lords reform and equal-sized seats Nick Clegg has u-turned and claimed there needs to be a connection.

…

** Boundaries “unfairness” is one of the explanations for why Labour get a majority with a 3% lead in the popular vote while Conservatives need an 11% lead for the same result. Or to put it another way John Major got a majority of 21 in 1992 with an 8% lead and a 42% share of the vote while, in 2005, Tony Blair got a 66 majority with just 36% of the vote and a 3% lead.

There has been much outrage from Conservative MPs and political commentators about the decision, but most of it seems to be directed toward the Liberal Democrats – “how dare they do this to us?!” – than inward at their own political strategy and leadership.

If, indeed, boundary review is so crucial to the Conservative Party’s hopes of winning an outright majority at the next general election (and if this is the case, when Conservatives have managed to win elections under similar circumstances in the past, it is a pretty damning indictment of the current party’s policy positions and campaigning ability), perhaps David Cameron should not have played chicken with Nick Clegg on such an important matter.

Tim Montgomerie pretty much agrees in his article:

The only advantage of the likely defeat of boundary changes is that a central plank of the Cameron/Osborne battleplan has gone. Any residual complacency must have gone. They can’t carry on as they were. They need a game changer and, preferably, soon.

And perhaps, instead of venting their anger at Nick Clegg when said strategy blows up in their faces, Conservatives with an eye on the next election would do well to remember that because they sadly, miraculously failed to win the 2010 election outright, as a consequence they govern in partnership with the Liberal Democrats, and that if they screw over their coalition partners on a policy point close to their heart, they are quite likely to get screwed in return.

I don’t care what Nick Clegg said about whether Lords Reform and Electoral Boundary Changes were linked or not back in April of this year, as Guido Fawkes appears to do:

The Boundary Review had nothing to do with House of Lords reform. It was linked to the AV referendum which the LibDems secured.

Clegg accusing others of breaking promises beggars belief. The LibDems are desperately trying to spin this, but in reality the backbench Tories are the ones to sacrifice political gain for sticking to their principles – however wrong they are to defend the current upper chamber.

Waah waah waah. The Conservatives are supposed to be the more mature, politically experienced political party and they got played by the LibDems. Now people like me have lost two policy proposals that were dear to our hearts – democratic reform of the House of Lords, and reform of the UK’s constituency sizes and boundaries to make them more equal. I have no sympathy for them.

The Conservatives are the senior party in the coalition government. They should try acting like it.

A Perfect Landing

Samuel HooperLeave a comment
NASA’s Curiosity rover sends back a picture of Mount Sharp from the surface of Mars.
Picture: NASA

Amazing news. NASA’s Mars rover, Curiosity, successfully and safely landed on the surface of Mars in the early hours of the morning EST on Monday 6th August.

The New York Times summarises:

In a flawless, triumphant technological tour de force, a plutonium-powered rover the size of a small car was lowered at the end of 25-foot-long cables from a hovering rocket stage onto Mars early on Monday morning.

The rover, called Curiosity, ushers in a new era of exploration that could turn up evidence that the Red Planet once had the necessary ingredients for life — or might even still harbor life today. NASA and administration officials were also quick to point to the success to counter criticism that the space agency had turned into a creaky bureaucracy incapable of matching its past glory.

“If anybody has been harboring doubts about the status of U.S. leadership in space,” John P. Holdren, the president’s science adviser, said at a news conference following the landing, “well, there’s a one-ton, automobile-size piece of American ingenuity, and it’s sitting on the surface of Mars right now.”

Among the various images that have so far been received by NASA and released to the public, two are so remarkable that there are hardly words to describe them. Firstly, this picture, captured by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, of Curiosity making it’s landing on Mars, with supersonic parachute deployed:

Curiosity, supersonic parachute deployed, descending to surface of Mars
Photo: NASA

I believe that this is the first ever image of a human spacecraft landing on another planetary body ever taken from this perspective, from above, by a satellite orbiting that body – certainly I have never seen a comparable image from the Apollo missions either landing on the Moon or returning to Earth. It is amazing to watch the human-made Curiosity spacecraft, so small in the vastness of space but representing the very pinnacle of our technical and engineering ability, operating precisely according to the commands of scientists many millions of miles away, and executing a landing on another world.

Also astonishing is this 4 frames/second low resolution video taken by Curiosity, covering the period from heatshield separation to landing on the Martian surface:

 

We can look forward to many more pictures – panoramic images in colour and in higher resolution – in the coming days, though some accomplishments will have to wait awhile:

Over the first week, Curiosity is to deploy its main antenna, raise a mast containing cameras, a rock-vaporizing laser and other instruments, and take its first panoramic shot of its surroundings.

NASA will spend the first weeks checking out Curiosity before embarking on the first drive. The rover will not scoop its first sample of Martian soil until mid-September at the earliest, and the first drilling into rock is not expected until October or November.

Hopefully the initial success of this mission represents a firm step toward an ultimate manned mission to Mars, with all of the resulting benefits to humanity that it would bring.

Music For The Day

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

String Quartet in G Minor, 3rd movement – Andantino, doucement expressif – by Claude Debussy, performed here by the Emerson Quartet.

 

Despite having to study this piece for A-level music exams over a decade ago, I still very much enjoy hearing it. The CD recording by the Belcea quartet is also particularly good.

More Advice For CNN

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Apparently I’m not the only one with words of advice for CNN today.

Ramesh Ponnuru, writing at Bloomberg.com, believes that cable news “talking head” shows are getting a disproportionate share of the blame for the decline in the intellectual standard and civility of American political discourse, and that one way to redress the balance might be…to bring back “Crossfire”.

“Crossfire” is, of course, the show that Jon Stewart memorably mocked for “hurting America” with its adversarial, Left vs. Right format:

 

Ponnuru, however, makes a reasoned argument in favour of resurrecting the format:

By the time Stewart appeared on it to promote his book, the show had degenerated. At its height, though, it did a good job of sharpening political arguments. And the original format, to my mind, has never been bettered.

The show ran for half an hour and examined one question. There were two hosts: one liberal, one conservative, both opinion journalists rather than operatives for a political party. In the early 1990s, Michael Kinsley (now a Bloomberg View columnist) and Patrick Buchanan did the job. There were two guests, usually politicians or public-policy experts on each side of the debate. There was no studio audience.

Each of these features made “Crossfire” better. The one-subject rule made it impossible for the politicians to make it through the show on sound bites alone. That both hosts were journalists made for a fairer debate than the usual practice of today’s political shows, which put journalists up against political operatives.

This idea in its purest form would make a great format for actually getting to the rub of important issues. Spending a full thirty minutes debating an issue means that even the most cookie-cutter, by-the-book politician or political operative will soon run out of approved talking points and eventually have to speak freely based on their underlying core beliefs, better educating the public in the process.

The danger always comes, of course, when new gimmicks are included in an attempt to broaden the appeal of the show – in the case of “Crossfire”, the addition of a live studio audience significantly harmed the show, as hosts and guests alike started pursuing the soundbite that had previously been so successfully kept at bay in the show, in order to win a positive reaction from the audience:

It got worse, as well, when it added a studio audience. Hosts and guests alike now played to the crowd, which itself could add nothing more intelligent to the conversation than hoots and hollers.

Ponnuru concludes:

“Crossfire” was balanced by design, and I bet there would be an audience for it once again. Of course, I’m not a professional TV executive. Then again, the professional executives at CNN sank millions into “Parker Spitzer.” Maybe it’s worth listening to someone else.

If CNN is determined to maintain and consolidate the non-ideologically biased middle ground so thoroughly, depressingly vacated by Fox News and MSNBC, there could be worse ways to go about staging a comeback.