When your face looks like this, don’t criticise a girl whose face looks like that:
According to The Telegraph:
Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel, has now said: “Kate Middleton has a nice silhouette and she is the right girl for that boy.
“I like that kind of woman, I like romantic beauties.
“On the other hand, her sister struggles.
“I don’t like the sister’s face. She should only show her back.”
Time for another public apology, I fear, Karl Lagerfeld.
That is all.
Ouch.
The Economist seems to have taken an even dimmer view of Mitt Romney’s recent foreign excursion than I did. In a scorching piece subtitled “Like Bush, but without the cosmopolitan flair”, the newspaper rips Romney for what they call his “horn-honking, floppy-shoed clown show” of a foreign trip.
The newspaper rightly lays into Romney for stating before he left on his ill-fated trip that he would not comment on foreign policy matters while on foreign soil (in accordance with usual protocol), but then reneging on his promise and doing precisely that while in Israel. They note:
… he moved on to Israel, where his campaign promptly involved itself in a diplomatic scandal (this time with actual consequences) over whether it had said that Mr Romney would back a unilateral Israeli strike on Iran. Mr Romney went on to declare Jerusalem the capital of Israel, a position no American administration has ever taken because discussions over the final status of the city are the most explosive subject in Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. Then this morning, at a fund-raising breakfast largely populated by ultra-rich Jewish Americans, Mr Romney managed to suggest that Palestinians are poor because their culture is inferior to that of Jews.
Sigh. Presidential candidates are just not supposed to do that. Aside from the fact that it is highly irresponsible to start announcing an alternate US foreign policy abroad before the votes have been counted and you have been sworn in to office, explicitly backing the policies of one foreign political party (Likud), or a coalition, unnecessarily meddles in Israel’s domestic politics. It is a blunder committed by someone with no sense of diplomacy and no thought to the consequences of his actions, save for the effect it would have on shoring up his base at home.
The Economist takes particular exception to Romney’s speech at a fundraiser:
“As you come here and you see the GDP per capita, for instance, in Israel which is about $21,000 dollars, and compare that with the GDP per capita just across the areas managed by the Palestinian Authority, which is more like $10,000 per capita, you notice such a dramatically stark difference in economic vitality,” the Republican presidential candidate told about 40 wealthy donors who breakfasted around a U-shaped table at the luxurious King David Hotel.
Don’t say things like that when The Economist is listening. They have facts and figures to hand, and both the time and brainpower to use these facts and figures to make you look like an ass hat:
To make matters worse, Mr Romney got his numbers wrong. Per capita income in Israel is over $31,000; in the Palestinian territories it is closer to $1,500. Those aren’t the kinds of numbers that divide industrious Protestants from happy-go-lucky Catholics. They’re the kind of numbers that divide South Korea from Ghana. You don’t get those kinds of divisions because of cultural differences.
…
Comparing the income of the average Israeli to that of the average Palestinian, as though their prospects at birth had been equivalent and their fortunes today are largely the result of their own efforts and their “culture”, is gratuitously insulting and wreaks damage to American diplomacy.
It really does wreak damage to American diplomacy. Yes, to some extent Obama did the same thing with his own foreign tour in 2008 – his speech in Berlin where he talked of the need to engage better with the world and partner with other nations, while quite true to my mind, was also perhaps an inappropriate repudiation of the existing American policy under then-president Bush – but this is of a different order altogether. At some point, a future hypothetical President Romney would have to engage with the Middle East peace process, and enraging one half of the debate with needless and groundless attacks on their “culture” are only going to make that already vexing job even more complicated.
Furthermore, the idea that some ethereal thing such as “culture” accounts primarily for the disparity in per capita wealth between the two populations is so absurd as to be ridiculous. A man as supposedly intelligent as Mitt Romney surely understands that, regardless of your views on where responsibility for the troubles lies, Palestinians and Israelis are not born with equal prospects at birth, diverging only because of one culture’s superiority over the other.
As The Economist wryly notes at the end:
Perhaps at a fund-raising breakfast in New York, Mr Romney might compliment the city’s wealthy Jews and Hindus on their culture of educational excellence, which has made them so much richer and more accomplished, on average, than America’s evangelical Christians and Mormons.
I think we all know that Romney won’t be saying anything of the kind. Calling Palestinian culture inferior carries no penalties back home. Criticising evangelical Christians, on the other hand…
Free speech continues to be squashed in Britain as a teenage Twitter user is arrested for sending mean-spirited and hurtful tweets to British driver Tom Daley. In a wonderful piece of journalism, the BBC neglect to tell us the precise wording of the tweets in question, saying only that “the 18-year-old received a message telling him he had let down his father”. Unhelpful, BBC. They go on to report: “A 17-year-old boy was arrested at a guest house in the Weymouth area on suspicion of malicious communications”. Apparently this is a crime in Britain, now. It goes without saying that mocking an Olympic athlete and making insulting reference to his late father is reprehensible and in very bad taste; equally it should go without saying that it should not lead to arrest, criminal charges or incarceration
Email may be king for most of us these days, but in Japan the humble fax machine is still alive and well, and in frequent use, both in the workplace and at home. This is partly attributable to the aging population – with one in five Japanese being over 65 years of age, many of these older citizens are more comfortable with the familiar fax technology. Also a factor is the perceived impersonality of the email as a medium for communicating with valued clients, or sending time-critical messages.
An extremely valuable Stradivarius violin was left on a train in Switzerland by an absent-minded musician. This makes me feel slightly better about losing my bank card last month.
At the conclusion of his Beethoven symphony cycle with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra at the BBC Proms, Daniel Barenboim gave a moving impromptu speech thanking the audience and the organisers for the opportunity. In his remarks, he said: “Our gratitude to the BBC who gave us this wonderful, unique opportunity to be here and play all the Beethoven symphonies – and in every concert one, and sometimes two, works by Pierre Boulez – and have all that televised. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you, we travel a lot, there is no country in the world that would do that for music and for culture”. Barenboim is not my favourite musician in the world, but the work that he is doing here is priceless.
Following the sad death of author Gore Vidal at age 86, The Guardian has assembled a selection of 26 of his most memorable quotes. My personal favourite: “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television”. Or perhaps: “There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise”.
The BBC reports that many disabled people feel that media coverage about benefit cheats has worsened attitudes toward them. The article states: “When asked what could be contributing to such hostility, 87% singled out people claiming disability benefits to which they are not entitled. And 84% highlighted negative media coverage about benefit cheats”. Based on these numbers, you might be forgiven for thinking that the thing that would make the most improvement for genuine claimants would then be to crack down harder on illegitimate claimants. But apparently 84% trumps 87%, and what we actually have to do is have the government tone down its rhetoric about fraudulent claims, and have the media stop reporting about it. Who knew?
The Labour Party was forced to apologise and disassociate itself from comments made by supporters, eagerly anticipating the death of the former Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. The Telegraph reports: “Last night, Louise Mensch, the backbench Conservative MP, called on Labour to respond after being sent a message by a follower who claimed to have worked for the Party inviting her to a party following Lady Thatcher’s death”. Labour responded, saying “Language like this has no place on politics or civilised society. No one should be wanting to celebrate the death of anyone.”
We have it all wrong, according to Rush Limbaugh. Mitt Romney’s overseas trip to the United Kingdom, Israel and Poland was actually not a complete disaster. We just think that it was because the US press pool travelling with Romney are deliberately harassing him (by this, I think he means asking him questions at press conferences) and trying to trick him into making mistakes. Like Sarah Palin’s famous “gotcha questions”. Says Limbaugh: “They’re trying to create gaffes. They’re working on behalf of Barack Obama. They are attempting to carry forth the meme that Romney’s foreign trip is a disaster, that it’s one gaffe after another. They’re trying to do this in the mainstream. And the fact of the matter is Romney is having a home run of a trip”. Well, that’s good, then. Insulting your best ally on day 1, fawning to appease the views of one particular Israeli party (despite promising not to create new foreign policy as a candidate travelling abroad) and being rebuffed by the Polish Solidarity movement are all good things, in Limbaugh’s world view. Of course, if you want to make the argument that these things don’t matter because the only important thing is the perception of the trip back home, as Romney’s aides are trying to do, it might help if the candidate actually spoke with the US press pool that are travelling with him.
Tim Stanley, writing in his Daily Telegraph column, comes late to the Chick-fil-A party but essentially agrees with the view taken by Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, many others and myself, that attempts by local politicians to bully Chick-fil-A by withholding permits to open new outlets as punishment for the views of their executives is unseemly, unwise and unconstitutional. He does close with a good point though, aimed at Rahm Emanuel: “Someone should explain to Rahm Emanuel that gay rights was supposed to be about guaranteeing privacy, abolishing legal discrimination and defending the dignity of the individual against the prejudice of the mob. It wasn’t supposed to be about creating a new standard of acceptable opinion and enforcing it with the muscle of the state. Liberalism without a profound respect for difference is just fascism by another name.”
Mark Oppenheimer, writing in The Nation, has an interesting profile of Canadian/American conservative thinker and former Bush Administration aide, David Frum. I’m quite an admirer of Frum’s (though we would disagree strongly on some issues), particularly since he penned the famous “Waterloo” piece criticising the Republican tactics opposing US healthcare reform, which got him fired from one of the jobs that he held at the time. This long-form piece looks in some depth at the evolution in Frum’s thinking, showing the areas where he has moved (gay marriage, tax policy) and those where he has definitely not moved (foreign policy). In an interesting aside, the author characterises David Frum’s new position thus: “Frum has found a new synthesis, according to which a moderate welfare state stabilizes the United States so that it can remain internationally strong. A little liberalism at home helps keep us neoconservative abroad.”
What happens when an electricity grid failure knocks out power for half the population of one of the most populous nations in the world? Well, apparently, the story gets buried deep down at the bottom of the BBC News homepage. I did not know that it was possible for a technical fault or excessive consumption to cause such a widespread failure, but given that it is, I hope that the British and American governments are taking suitable precautions to guard against a similar failure, perhaps caused by malicious intent rather than technical fault.
In another bold signal of intent, China has announced plans to land an unmanned probe on the surface of the moon next year, as part of their wider project to land a man on the moon at an unspecified time. China has already achieved significant milestones in terms of human spaceflight, recently including their first spacewalks, first manual docking manoeuvre and first female astronaut.
One of my very favourite pieces of music, Piano Concerto no. 3 by Béla Bartok (1881-1945), performed here by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Simon Rattle, with Andras Schiff as the soloist:
The mini fugue section starting at 0’50, introduced by the piano and then picked up by strings, is sublime.
In fact, I love all three movements of this piece. The second movement is so serene and still (the piece was a gift from Bartok to his wife, written in his final days, and in many ways can be seen as a farewell letter to her, or to life), and makes a marvellous contrast with the explosive start to the final movement, given here.
The Obama re-election campaign recently released via Facebook this picture of an Obama supporter holding aloft a hand-written sign, detailing in colourful lettering the reasons why they voted for the president in 2008 and plan to do so again in 2012:
This is all very well and good, notwithstanding the dubious nature of some of the “achievements” listed, but then it all goes wrong in point #8. The placard creator writes:
“Despite inheriting one of the worst economic messes since the Great Depression, he added 2.6 million private sector jobs to our economy, and indications are that the economy is slowly improving. To anyone who thinks it’s been too slow – don’t you know you can’t turn the Titantic around in a day?”
Now, I get the message behind this, and I actually agree with it. The economy was falling off a cliff when Obama took office, and the tales told by Republicans about how sunny and wonderful everything would have been if only John McCain had won and we hadn’t had that awful stimulus package that did nothing to help us are just pure grade A baloney. The stimulus was necessary – much of the money may have been misdirected and there may have been a dearth of “shovel-ready” projects in which to invest, but it is a great falsehood to argue that it made things worse.
However, I also think that any election literature that includes the phrase “indications are that the economy is slowly improving” is pretty weak and perhaps should not see the light of day. And the Titanic metaphor?
Apparently you “can’t turn the Titantic [sic] around in a day”. In fact, you probably can’t turn it around at all, given the fact that the wreck lies two miles beneath the surface of the north Atlantic ocean. But if it were still afloat, I’m sure that it’s turning circle wouldn’t be that bad. Then again, maybe that’s why it hit the iceberg.
But do you really want to be comparing the US economy to the Titanic? Really? Is that wise? Are you just trying to give some ammunition to the Romney campaign at this point?
Come on, Obama campaign, you can do better than this.
# you can’t turn the titanic around in a day
Semi-Partisan Politics 