Society

Wednesday

The Spectator

The importance of what Bush is saying about Iran

President Bush’s statement to the American Legion  that “I have authorized our military commanders in Iraq to confront Tehran’s murderous activities” is understandably getting a lot of ink this morning. But this is far from the first time that Bush has warned Iran of the consequences of its actions in Iraq. Back in January, he told the American public: “Iran is providing material support for attacks on American troops. We will disrupt the attacks on our forces. We’ll interrupt the flow of support from Iran and Syria. And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq.” So it would be wrong to

The Spectator

Paul Keating regrets

APEC–the group which brings together the countries of the Pacific Rim including the US, Russia, Japan and China–is meeting in Sydney next week and to mark the occasion former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, one of the organisation’s creators, gave a speech and an interview lamenting its failure over the last ten years to turn into a regional security organisation. He makes some good points especially about the toxic relationship between China and Japan, which if anything is worse than when he left office ten years ago. Read the whole thing.

Sarah Churchwell

The supernatural is as British as fish and chips

We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. We’re all accustomed to stories about credulous Americans; as an American living in Britain I am constantly asked to defend the 43 per cent of my compatriots who believe in creationism. Naturally, I can’t begin to; they’re the same people who voted for Bush, after all, which I find a far more mind-boggling proposition. But before British readers get too cocky, let it also be remembered that last year a poll showed that 22 per cent of Britons believe

Edie Lush

Calling in the Geek Squad

Why would anyone choose to spend an afternoon with a self-proclaimed geek in a clip-on tie, who calls himself a ‘field agent’? Carphone Warehouse is betting that many of us will jump at the chance. They’ve brought the Geek Squad over from the US and are offering their nerds to UK consumers and their computers. Why would anyone choose to spend an afternoon with a self-proclaimed geek in a clip-on tie, who calls himself a ‘field agent’? Carphone Warehouse is betting that many of us will jump at the chance. They’ve brought the Geek Squad over from the US and are offering their nerds to UK consumers and their computers.

Theodore Dalrymple

Moral panic is the right reaction: we are afraid of our young

Some things don’t change in Britain: the teddy bears and CCTV pictures, for example. First come the teddy bears. A princess dies in a sordid drunken accident, a child is abducted in Portugal, two girls are brutally murdered in Soham, a child is shot accidentally-on-purpose and you can’t open a newspaper without seeing a photograph with a teddy bear in the foreground among the gladioli. The legitimate grief of the people most directly involved is swamped by the maudlin tears of strangers who muscle in on it; and the stuffed toy becomes for us what black-plumed horses were for the Victorians. I look forward to the day when the lions

Tuesday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Diana’s death: cui bono? Everyone it turns out…

Megan wonders why, ten years on, Princess Diana is back on the front pages. The simplest answer, natch, is grubby: she still sells. No British paper has been more Diana-obsessed this past decade than the once-great Daily Express, but despite the sardonic ribbing it receives from the rest of the British press corps every time it trots out another “Diana’s Ghost seen at Highgrove” nonsense, it sells, I understand, an extra 30-40,000 copies. Something similar must be true in other countries; indeed some of the most fanatical Diana-adorers I’ve met have been American. Maybe many women still do secretly wish they could be a Princess. Remember  that years before the

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How anti-American is Jason Bourne?

Chris Orr decries Mickey Kaus’s decrying of The Bourne Ultimatum as “anti-American”. Chris is right to observe that the film’s good guys are also American government officers and that Joan Allen’s character says of water-boarding etc that “This isn’t us” but ultimately (ha!) I can’t quite agree with his conclusion. I thought it a rather searing indictment of the United States, albeit for rather different reasons. As my friends know I’m generally a pretty pro-America kind of chap. Some of my best friends are American, don’t you know. Even so, there are limits. What The Bourne Ultimatum did capture was an arrogance that gives the United States a permanent right

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Krugman speaks sense on education. He just doesn’t know it.

I have no interest whatsoever in health policy, but I am interested in education. Paul Krugman’s column yesterday mocked one strand of conservative (libertarian actually) education thinking. So let’s end this un-American system and make education what it should be — a matter of individual responsibility and private enterprise. Oh, and we shouldn’t have any government mandates that force children to get educated, either. As a Republican presidential candidate might say, the future of America’s education system lies in free-market solutions, not socialist models. Isn’t this a transparently ridiculous argument he suggested, before going on to say, well, that’s what we currently have in health care. But of course Krugman’s

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Private Idaho

World Gone Mad: the Senate Ethics Committee is going to investigate Senator Larry Craig’s “incident” in a Minneapolis airport bathroom. For crying out loud, what earthly business is it of theirs? I find it mystifying that poor Senator Craig was even arrested. So what if he propositioned someone? What’s that to you or me? And why is it worse or more “lewd” that he should do so in a men’s bathroom than were he to try and pick up a buxom young blond in a nightclub? When did asking for sex become illegal? (Having sex in a public lavatory, absent the owner’s consent, is of course a different matter.) What

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Declare victory and just go home?

According to a new Zogby poll, 11% of Americans think the US has already won in Iraq. This confirms my long-held view that a non-trivial percentage of the population can be persuaded of absolutely anything. Other findings include: Asked which of the 2008 presidential candidates would best handle the war in Iraq, Rudy Giuliani topped the list with 14% support, followed by Fred Thompson (11%), Hillary Clinton (10%), Barack Obama (9%), John McCain and Joe Biden (7%), John Edwards (5%), and Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich at 4%. But overall, more Americans said they were unsure (15%) than supported any single candidate to best handle the

Sarah Standing

Lady of the night

I don’t ‘do’ sleep very well. Never have. If I do manage it, I don’t do it for very long. Or long enough. I am not an insomniac yet according to a recent survey by the Sleep Council I seem to be suffering from the latest teenage disease called “junk sleep”. Junk sleep is when the quality of sleep is compromised by spending too much time on computers and watching T.V. and apparently one in three kids survive on as little as four hours sleep a night. I think the experts have attributed this latest health syndrome to the wrong age group. In our household my three offspring do precious

Monday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

How to be a pundit

Memo to New York Times/Guardian* columnists: it would be a public service were you to follow the great Myles na Gopaleen’s example: Not the least of my duties is keeping an eye on the Editor of this newspaper and rebutting, for the benefit of our simpler readers, the various heresies propounded in his leading articles. Saturday’s article was agreat shock to me… And again: Today, undismayed by many a reverse, I take up the cudgels on behalf of the Irish nation against the historic enemy of the Irish nation – the Editor of The Irish Times… *Actually all papers could benefit from a dose of mutiny in the ranks. It

Sunday

The Spectator

Our outrage should give us hope

The more you read about the murder of Rhys Jones, the more shocking it becomes. The combination of a BMX—a symbol of childhood fun—and a brutal shooting brings home just how brutalised our society has become. Jon Swain’s piece in The Sunday Times comparing Liverpool to the war zones he has reported from painfully details this point. But the sheer level of outrage this pedal-by-shooting has generated should give us hope; especially if this outrage can be harnessed to effect a substantive change in our culture. Before moving back to London last year, I lived in Washington for four years where the kind of incident we saw in Croxteth Park

Saturday

Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 25 August 2007

Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an up-to-date pocket-format book less trying to the wrist joints to read in bed than Jonathon Green’s 1,300-page Dictionary of Slang. Julian, or possibly Sandy, in Beyond Our Ken (1958–64) or Round the Horne (1965–68), would say: ‘Oh, Mr ’orne, how bona to vada your jolly old eek.’ I was reminded of them when leafing through Tony Thorne’s Dictionary of Contemporary Slang (A&C Black, £9.99), an

John Torode

Diary – 25 August 2007

‘I’m not Jewish, but I love Israel, and I try to holiday there every year.’ An uncontentious remark, surely, but it produces Batemanesque horror around the scrubbed-pine dining tables of London’s chattering classes. Arad, Israel ‘I’m not Jewish, but I love Israel, and I try to holiday there every year.’ An uncontentious remark, surely, but it produces Batemanesque horror around the scrubbed-pine dining tables of London’s chattering classes. You are more likely to boycott ‘apartheid Israel’ than visit it for pleasure — unless you are Jewish, Islamophobic or Paul Johnson. Since I returned from last year’s trip, which coincided with Israel’s justified — but mishandled, unsuccessful and deeply demoralising —

Interconnect

Diary of a Notting Hill Nobody | 25 August 2007

Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right! Monday Great to be back from hols to find the green shoots of Compassionate Conservatism sprouting again, thanks to Mr Redwood’s brilliant report. Well, we always said tax cuts were super-popular and deserved to be top of the agenda — and it turns out we were right! Now it’s just a simple question of translating it all into policy. As a first step we’ve

Ursula Buchan

Bedding pleasures

Depending on whether you are a housewife, Lothario or a gardener, ‘bedding’ can mean a number of different things. Depending on whether you are a housewife, Lothario or a gardener, ‘bedding’ can mean a number of different things. As a horticultural term, it dates from the early decades of the 19th century, when adventurous Victorian head gardeners, especially those working on large private estates, began to use large numbers of low-growing tender plants to create a colourful, exuberant display on terraces and parterres. These tender perennials and annuals (mainly from the frost-free regions of South America and South Africa) — calceolarias, pelargoniums, lobelias, salvias, petunias, African marigolds and the like

Taki

Tactics of greed

Gstaad Elie de Rothschild, who died a couple of weeks ago while on a shooting trip in Austria aged 90, once told me the story of a young Arab kebab seller who always parked his stand across from la Banque Rothschild on rue Lafitte. The Arab was asked for a loan by an acquaintance of his. ‘Look here,’ he told the man, ‘I have a deal with the bank across the street. I will not lend money and the Rothschilds will not sell kebabs.’ End of story, as they say. I thought of Elie, with whom I used to play polo, when the you-know-what hit the fan last week. Bankers

Jeremy Clarke

Collective scepticism

The theatre was a converted Anglican church. Was there perhaps a lingering, antagonistic Christian spirit at work here tonight? Or was there perhaps a rival medium in the audience, blocking the channels? These were very real possibilities, said Paul, barely suppressing his anger. But he rather thought that the root cause was the collective scepticism of the audience. He had to say that we were one of the most difficult audiences he and wife Tracy had ever had to work with. It was almost unbelievable, he said, but he’d heard titters and even ‘comments’. Tracy was close to tears. She began to pace the stage. ‘I’m getting a Daniel,’ she

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 25 August 2007

Q. I am going to stay with some grown-ups in a house next to the beach in Suffolk. I will be the only boy of eight who is staying. The other children are too old to play with me. There is no television and I have finished the Harry Potters. What can I do? L.B., Camden Town, London A. You might follow the example of Milo Rowse, aged eight, and his friend William Polito who staged a summer display outside Milo’s house in Thorpeness. The boys filled a disused aquarium with a selection of 20 or so insects and other wildlife ranging from beetles to woodlice to newts, all found