Via Marc Ambinder, this graph is not, shall we say, good news for the Republican party's long-term prospects.
Sure, some of these young voters will likely drift to the right in years to come, but most people tend to fix their party identification early and hold on to it doggedly. And of course young voters today aren't spooked by the legacy of the 1970s the way their parents' generation is. Equally, to the extent (possibly exaggerated) that Iraq will have a lasting, quasi-seismic impact on American politics it seems, right now, likely to damage the Republican party more than the Democrats. That said, I suspect that it's the GOP's domestic failures that will prove just as telling in the medium to long term. Which is another way of saying that I'm very much looking forward to reading Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam's new book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream.
This paragraph tells you most of what you need to know:
The Scottish Government wants all primary schools to offer two hours of physical activity for all children each week - but figures from 2005 show that 5% of primary schools were meeting the provision.
I suppose the situation may be better in secondary schools but to the extent that childhood obesity is a problem, you're likely to have more success exercising the brutes than trying to monitor and control the sort of junk with which they stuff their faces. Plus, there are other benefits from sport too. But no, it's more sensible to sell off the playing fields...
Learning a valuable lesson from his predecessors, Friedman is an incrementalist. "I want to talk about what to do this year, not how to colonize the galaxy...There aren't that many people who are wiling to drop their lives and move to the ocean."
The always-estimable Katherine Mangu-Ward has much more on what you need to know about Seasteading...
Marty Peretz links to this Daily Mail account of an exhibition of photographs taken in wartime Paris which is, for obvious reasons, a matter of some debate in France. And yes, the photographs are shocking. Just not in the way in which either Peretz or the Mail seem to think they are. The Mail headline, subtle as ever, is "Oh what a lovely war! The dazzling photos of innocent Parisian fun that make the French so ashamed" while Marty titles his post, "What the Nazi Occupation of France was Really Like".
Here, for instance, is a photograph of three mademoiselles relaxing in the Luxembourg, circa 1942. How, the Mail wants us to ask, can these young Frogs be so blithe and innocent and carefree while their country is occupied y Nazi Germany and most of europe is ablaze? Isn't it just disgusting?
Well, maybe so but if you think that then you have a remarkably low disgust threshold. God knows a good deal of France's wartime history is dismal, depressing, often shameful stuff. But there's little to nothing about it that is especially French beyond the fact that it took place in France. By which I mean that we should be neither so complacent nor so arrogant as to suppose that Britain (or, for that matter, the United States) would have been vastly different in comparable circumstances. A bit better, we may cross out fingers and hope, but not much more than that. We can say there'd have been no British Drancy but it's a brave man who makes so bold a claim with any confidence based upon more than John Bull's bluster.
It's a simple thing really, but life under occupation must, one way or another or somehow, go on. Most people have little alternative but to make the best of a dismally bad lot. What else is to be done? Those of us who never experienced the humiliation and shame and ghastliness of occupied europe are not actually best-placed to sit in absolute judgement upon the collective failings or weaknesses of people whose lands were occupied by tyranny.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the pundit seeking heft to support his argument must eventually turn to George Orwell. This is, for sure, often a wise decision since much the most remarkable aspect of Orwell's writing is how much of it remains vivid and even valid today. But not all of it since Eric Blair was as capable of talking through his hat as the next intellectual. Thus John Quiggin, writing about the Olympic torch's travels across Australia, cites Orwell's view that:
Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.
There's a missing "can" there whose omission condemns Orwell. To observe that Situation A can lead to Situation B is far from the same thing as claiming that it must. True, we can all cite examples that might seem to confirm, albeit on a superficial level, Orwell's thesis: the Soccer War, football hooliganism and so on... but these are, in point of fact, rarities. Sport can be illused but that says more about the users than it does about sport or competition itself.
If you wanted to add to the vast fund of ill-will existing in the world at this moment, you could hardly do it better than by a series of football matches between Jews and Arabs, Germans and Czechs, Indians and British, Russians and Poles, and Italians and Jugoslavs, each match to be watched by a mixed audience of 100,000 spectators. I do not, of course, suggest that sport is one of the main causes of international rivalry; big-scale sport is itself, I think, merely another effect of the causes that have produced nationalism. Still, you do make things worse by sending forth a team of eleven men, labelled as national champions, to do battle against some rival team, and allowing it to be felt on all sides that whichever nation is defeated will "lose face".
It's true that Olympic-partisans make too much of the idea that the games represent some glorious global festival in which we celebrate our common humanity and all the rest of it. Much, perhaps even most, of this is humbug. But not all of it. Orwell complains that even a game as supposedly genteel as cricket can unleash fierce passions. He cites the threat to UK-Australian diplomatic relations by the 1932-33 Bodyline Series to support this point. But this is precisely wrong: such a threat, like the other occasions in which politics intrude, is a diversion from the main point, not an example supporting Orwell's contention.
April, 1993: "We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves."
April, 2008: [E]very speech she gave in Indiana on Friday and Saturday had the same topic sentence. “My campaign is about jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” she said, always to thunderous applause.
From a political point of view, it seems Hillary has learnt something. Of course, I suspect Hillary still believes what she said in 1993. Then again, just as troublingly, Barack Obama and John McCain would each be happy to waffle on about "a new politics of meaning" and how government can - god help us all - "fill us up". But such is the sort of guff that politicians on the campaign trail - never knowingly under-bashful as it is - feel compelled to promise. And, once again, it smacks of the particular form of megalomania that should disqualify from office anyone who has the audacity and presumption to seek it.
A doctor caught with 14 ecstasy tablets at a music festival has been allowed to keep his licence to practise.
A General Medical Council panel told Dr Fraser Gibb they were satisfied he only used drugs to enhance his life and not to "prop it up".
However, it found him guilty of misconduct and imposed conditions on his licence over the next 18 months.
But suppose Dr Gibb were popping the occasional pill to "prop-up" his life? Why would that be an affront to civilised society and all that's sweet and wholesome on this planet?
After all:
Colleagues at Dumfries and Galloway NHS Trust said the locum consultant psychiatrist at Crichton Royal Hospital was an asset to the trust and preventing him from working would not serve any purpose for patients.
This would, presumably, continue to be the case if Dr Gibb continued to take E while attending music festivals. Function seems rather more important than form in this, or any other drugs-related, case.
Actually, in the circumstances Gordon Brown may have done about as well as he could have at Prime Minister's Questions yesterday. But still, as this edited footage demonstrates, Brown was received a vicious flogging from David Cameron (start from the 2 minute mark):
Argentina is one of my favourite countries, so it's especially pleasing to note that, for once, there's some happy news from that melancholy land. Cato's Juan Carlos Hidalgo reports that a federal court has decriminalised the consumption of drugs. According to this account (in Spanish) the court ruled that arresting young people for possessing marijuana and ecstasy was pointless, serving only to create "an avalanche of cases targeting consumers without climbing up in the ladder of [drug] trafficking".
The case now moves to the Supreme Court, but the ruling is in line with President Cristina Kirchner's own preference for decriminalisation, while the Minister of Jstice, Anibal Fernandez, has also stated that targetting consumers has been a "total failure".
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