Reflections

A Milestone Passed

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

The Telegraph reports today on a scientific and technological milestone about to be passed by the human race – Voyager 1, the NASA space probe launched in 1977, is due to become the first man-made object to leave our solar system, the Milky Way:

Scientists launched Voyager 1 in 1977 on what was meant to be a five-year mission to Jupiter and Saturn, however 30 years later the vessel has continued towards the boundary of our solar system 11 billion miles from Earth.

Once the spaceship crosses this border it will enter interstellar space – the void between our solar system and the rest of the universe – becoming the first man-made object to venture beyond our solar “bubble”.

In the newspaper’s own comments section, many readers have been responding with the sentiments either of nostalgia (look what we could do as a species when we put our mind to it in that era) or with happiness (how nice to see a positive story in these difficult times, etc.). One reader, identified only as Hardeep_Singh, summed it up best for me:

“Extraordinary a glimpse of when anything was possible compare that to today’s mindset, ‘fairness’, protest, ‘lessons must be learnt’, etc.”

I know that I am in a small and diminishing minority of those who believe that even in these recession-hit, austere times, we should continue to dream grand dreams, and implement the ambitious programmes to make them possible. But it is my view that our societies cannot be built of just hospitals and schools and roads and bridges and the utilitarian things that bind us to the present; there must be room also for the arts, for medical research, scientific exploits and human-inspired voyages that perhaps don’t have a pre-determined goal in sight (Voyager 1’s mission after Titan was made up on the fly, the craft was not expected to remain functional for so long) but which generate new knowledge and bring back riches for us all nonetheless. I hope that our leaders will remember this, and that it will not fall exclusively to China and the developing world to explore these new frontiers and pass these milestones.

On a much more lowly, terrestrial scale, this article also happens to represent a small milestone in itself – the 100th piece that I have uploaded to this blog. Many thanks to you all, frequent and occasional readers alike, for your time, your comments and your support.

And God speed Voyager 1 on its journey.

George Osborne’s Last Straw vs My Back

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

George Osborne is receiving a lot of stick for his last-minute decision to postpone the planned 3p/litre increase in fuel tax left intact in his most recent, politically disastrous budget. Most recently he has been accused of cowardice for sending an unprepared junior minister – Economic Secretary Chloe Smith – to defend the government’s short notice U-turn on the BBC’s flagship ‘Newsnight’ programme.

Reports The Telegraph:

Chloe Smith last night strugged to answer questions about the decision to postpone the 3p rise in petrol duty.

After she refused to say when she found out about it or how it will be funded, the Economic Secretary was accused of being “incompetent” by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC’s Newsnight interviewer.

Mr Paxman also asked her whether she ever woke up and thought: “My God, what am I going to be told today?”

I think that we can now safely add political incompetence to the list of charges being levelled against Mr. Osborne in the wake of this all-too-avoidable mess up.

This is supposed to be a Conservative-led, tax-cutting government. It was bad enough that the 3p/litre increase in fuel duty was allowed to remain in George Osborne’s most recent budget in the first place, but the fact that it’s postponement was only announced yesterday, and that senior ministers had no prior notice whatsoever is an almost unforgivable act of political stupidity, for which David Cameron was predictably savaged during Prime Minister’s Questions today.

But more concerning to me even than the incompetent way that this – and almost every single other political decision of any significance recently – has been handled by the government is the fact that the Conservatives are boasting about their policy U-turn and rather petulantly demanding praise for their actions.

Take this typical tweet from Robert Halfon MP:

“In Welsh questions said to Minister that stoppage of August fuel tax rise means £16 million injected into Welsh economy”

I despair, I really do. I thought that it was only in the dystopian, nightmarish land that was Gordon Brown’s Britain that cancelling a planned tax increase could be said in any way to be injecting cash into the economy. How is making the decision to not do something monumentally stupid and increase a key tax that would punish many already-squeezed households in any way an injection of cash into the economy? At best it could very charitably be called a preservation of the status quo, or the maintenance of steady-state, though given the economic uncertainty created by arbitrary and last-minute changes of key fiscal policy such as this, even that assessment is doubtful.

This is almost as bad as the risible time when a desperate Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson tried to claim that the Conservatives’ election manifesto promise to cancel the planned increase in employers’ National Insurance tax contributions would “take millions of pounds out of the economy”, as though the state were the ‘real economy’ and not the other way around.

I’m done with all this, I really am. I actively campaigned for the Conservative Party at the last general election in 2010. I delivered leaflets, probably annoyed my friends on Facebook and Twitter with my political posts, and talked to countless people on the high street. And for my efforts, and those of all the many people who did far more than me to try to end Labour’s grip on power in this country, all we get is a government with a broken political radar, one which betrays core conservative principles and apparently one which pouts and expects praise and candy for doing precisely the things that it should be doing without any outside pressure from their political base, such as not raising taxes on squeezed households during a recession.

Michael Gove for PM, as soon as possible. Anyone else with me?

Vladimir Putin Does It Again

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

I have always held that there are certain very visible indicators which show when your country is drifting (or, in some cases, is firmly planted) towards the wrong end of the decent-ridiculous spectrum. So I made a list:

1. The word “Democratic” appears in the name

2. Parades consist of ICBMs, tanks and other assorted weapons rather than carnival floats and inflatable, floating Peanuts characters

3. More sports stadia named after current and former heads of state than there are research universities in the country

4. All  stadia, hospitals, public buildings and whatever research universities do exist are named after current and former heads of state

5. On the UN Human Rights Committee

6. The goose-step is the military march of choice

7. At big national events, when not goose-stepping, soldiers perform elaborate, highly choreographed dances to national folk music (thank you, North Korea)

8. Bear-wrestling, deep-sea-diving heads of state, or other cults of personality

9. Co-ordinated mass hysteria when the head of state dies (thanks again, North Korea)

To these sure signs of a bad time, we can now add one more, reported today by The Guardian:

10. The prime minister takes the time to meddle in decisions about who should chair the national Football Association following an earlier-than-hoped exit from Euro 2012.

Although it was expected that someone would take the fall for Russia’s loss, Fursenko’s exit came as a surprise.

“I have a feeling there is more to his resignation,” said Vyacheslav Koloskov, a former head of the football union and a former Fifa vice president. “Just three or four days ago, Fursenko said he was looking for a new coach, meaning he had no plans to resign. Something must have happened that made him change his mind,” he told local media.

Hmm. What could have happened to make him change his mind?

Nice going, Russia. Always blazing a trail and setting an example of strong institutions and democracy for all nations to follow.

Who will give us indicator #11? North Korea, got anything new for us?

 

Besides this old favourite, of course.

On Memorial Day

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

“Ragged Old Flag”, performed by Johnny Cash.

May God continue to bless the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and all those who have served and sacrificed in our armed forces.

Obama The Inevitable

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

–

Well, stop blogging for a month or so and when you come back, the world has turned a little bit. The ratcheting up of the Euro crisis, the effective end to the Republican presidential nomination process, the sudden and complete inability of David Cameron’s Conservative Party to do anything right, in terms of either action or image… Guess I learned something there. Anyway, picking up where I left off in April…

So much handwringing in the media at the moment about President Obama’s political fortunes and reelection prospects!

From Politico:

Nothing inspires Democrats like the Barack Obama swagger – the supreme self-confidence on stage, the self-certainty in private.

So nothing inspires more angst than when that same Obama stumbles, as he has leaving the gate in 2012.

That’s the unmistakable reality for Democrats since Obama officially launched his reelection campaign three weeks ago. Obama, not Mitt Romney, is the one with the muddled message — and the one who often comes across as baldly political. Obama, not Romney, is the one facing blowback from his own party on the central issue of the campaign so far — Romney’s history with Bain Capital. And most remarkably, Obama, not Romney, is the one falling behind in fundraising.

…

National polls, which had shown Obama with a slight but steady lead over Romney through April, moved into a virtual tie this month — despite Romney’s clumsy conclusion to the GOP race.

And from The Daily Beast:

The dirty little secret of campaigns is that there are usually just two messages. Either: Stay the Course or It’s Time for a Change. When Barack Obama won 53 percent of the popular vote and carried 28 states, just 14 percent of Americans thought we were moving in the right direction. So it was obviously a Time for a Change election. When Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton coasted to easy reelections, the country’s mood was undeniably Stay the Course. The election coming up in November is stuck in between. Americans don’t know whether to forge ahead or swing back.

And watching from across the pond, The Daily Telegraph:

There are storm clouds on the horizon for Barack Obama’s re-election.

Democrats indulged in over-confidence during the Republican primaries. It was an understandable reaction to the chaos that came with all the pandering to the far-Right and the rise of frankly laughable candidates like Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain in the search for an alternative to Mitt Romney.

After that debacle, the Romney campaign manager’s promise of an “etch-a-sketch” moment to re-shake and re-shape public perception about their candidate seemed a dose too hopeful.

But only a month after the Republican primaries all but officially ended, we have a real horserace on our hands.

…

According to a new Washington Post/ABC poll, 30 percent of Americans say they are worse off than when President Obama took office in the depths of the fiscal crisis. This is comparable to the numbers President George HW Bush faced when he lost re-election to Bill Clinton in 1992.

And right now Obama and Romney are essentially tied when registered voters are asked who would be better at creating jobs and handling the economy.

Why do we do this to ourselves?  Why spend so much time speculating about an event the outcome of which is almost a foregone conclusion?

I understand the motives of the professional media. People will not tune in to The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer or Hardball with Chris Matthews in significant numbers to get their daily dose of the campaign ups and downs if they think that the result is already assured. That would mean less advertising revenues for the networks, and a huge army of unemployed cable news talking heads who would suddenly flood the market and push unemployment back up above 9%. So the word must continue to go out that the uninspirational, unpersonable technocrat who is unable to motivate his base and who campaigns like an electioneering android with a gaffe bug actually poses a serious threat to Obama’s reelection chances.

With regard to the professional media, I think there is also the bias factor. And by that I don’t mean the fact that all news outlets are biased in one direction or another, but actually the fact that all of the television and most print sources (even Fox News to some extent) strive to appear “balanced” when reporting the news, to tell both sides of the story (even if, in Fox’s case, the tone of voice, facial expressions and screen captions help to “guide” the viewer as to which side is correct).

At some point – and not being a student of journalism and media I don’t know when – good television reporting stopped meaning uncovering and reporting the truth, but rather reporting and giving equal weight to both sides of a story. So if Sam says the world is round but Bob says that it is a perfect cube, today’s headline will read “Sam and Bob spar in congress over shape of the world” rather than “Bob effectively ends his career with insane statement”.

But why do we ordinary people do it to ourselves? Are we just led by the media, or is there something else at work too?

I suppose that I will be doing the blogging walk of shame come November this year if the unthinkable occurs and Romney does become president-elect. But seriously. Are we all really so bored and in need of intrigue that we are going to kid ourselves that this one is even going to be close?