This week it finally emerged that Tony Blair has been waging a 20 month battle to keep some of his advisory relationships secret, and the committee that vets this sort of thing finally got fed up with Blair’s stalling. On Wednesday The Guardian revealed that Blair has been seeking to protect two relationships, one with a South Korean oil firm, the other with the government of Kuwait. Conveniently, as The Guardian points out, the South Korean firm has interests in the Kurdish area of Iraq. Who knew? The Guardian recounts:

According to a committee spokesman, Blair’s claims of the need for secrecy were first made in July 2008, when the committee agreed to break its normal rules, and postpone publication for three months.

Blair’s office went back to the committee in October of that year and asked for a further six months. They promised to let the committee know as soon as the “market sensitivity” had passed.

Committee sources said they heard nothing further and had to “chase” Blair. This culminated in a formal letter from the committee last November. Blair’s office responded last month, claiming the deal was still too sensitive to reveal.

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This morning the New York Times carries as its lead story something with this headline: States’ Rights Is Rallying Cry of Resistance for Lawmakers. And the article is replete with examples of state lawmakers passing measures that would, in theory, limit the reach of the federal government. So, just to repeat the examples that The Times leads with (having done our work for us already):

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The Times article points out that legal and constitutional scholars are pretty much of the view that this is mostly a bunch of hot air. But that doesn’t seem to be deterring state lawmakers from shouting a lot. Full Story »

Jerusalem, by Jez Butterworth, has been one of the hits of the season here in London. There has been pretty much nothing but adulation for the play itself, and the performances, particularly Mark Rylance as the protagonist. It opened at the Royal Court last fall and has since moved on to the Apollo Theatre for what looks set to be a very long run (well, April 24th anyway). And it will undoubtedly be hitting America soon. So we had high expectations when we went to see it last week. And now we’re completely baffled. This is a very long (three hours and twenty minutes, with two intermissions) and very bad play, much of which makes no sense whatsoever. And audiences and critics love it. An “instant modern classic,” according to The Telegraph.
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Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just finished testifying (at his insistence) in front of the Chilcot Iraq inquiry. After some discussion of how he thought that invading Iraq “was the right thing to do,” we’ve been getting a stream of figures and more figures and then even more figures in an attempt to justify why the military had what it needed, irrespective of what anyone else has said. Brown himself came across as a rather pleasant and well-meaning sort of fellow—he wasn’t nearly as patronizing as Tony Blair was, nor as abrasive as Alistair Campbell was, nor as apparently clueless as Jack Straw and Geoff Hoon were. He seemed to be trying to be both avuncular and precise at the same time, but he couldn’t help himself—he kept butting into questions with long and detailed explanations as to why the Ministry of Defense (MOD) was in fine shape.
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Sometime between now and June 7 the UK will have a general election—and if consensus is correct, 7 May is the day. What is starting to look possible—indeed, likely—is that there will be no Parliamentary majority. If there were a majority, it will be either Labour or the Conservatives, since the Liberal Democrats are unlikely to emerge as the new majority, although they are well represented on local councils all around Britain, and they may hold the balance of power in the event of a hung parliament. And up to a couple of months ago, it seemed pretty clear that it would be the Tories. David Cameron had done an admirable job of reconstituting the Conservatives into a party that seemed to have some thinking, some vigour, and some common sense. He rode his bicycle around, he supported (and still supports) the NHS, and he’s made a determined effort to broaden the appeal of the party.
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As a follow-up to our earlier post on corporate earnings this season, we’ve put together some longitudinal data courtesy of Bloomberg’s wonderful little EA function, which those of you with a Bloomberg service can double check if you want to make sure we’ve got our maths right. Bloomberg data only goes back to Q405 earnings (and shows up as Q106 reporting), but still, that’s 17 periods including the current one, which is somewhat more than halfway finished. And, yes indeedy, something weird is going on this quarter—but it may just be a continuation of a trend that started in the first quarter of last year.
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We had a great time watching the Olympics. I honestly have no memory whatsoever of paying any attention at all to what was going on in Turin four years ago—maybe we were travelling, maybe we just forgot. It was hard to not notice these Olympics here in the UK, given the relationship with Canada—everyone has some family that settled there, it seems, and there are a whole lot of Canadians who live in the UK. And, you know, hope springs eternal in curling. So after the disastrous start, we resolved to just put the Olympics on and leave them there, in support. Not that we’re huge fans. But winter Olympics area always a lot more fun than the summer ones. And then there’s the fact that watching them here in the UK is an outright pleasure.
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The news that an orca has killed a trainer at Sea World comes as a shock, but not really as a surprise. As has been widely reported, the killer whale, named Tilikum, grabbed his trainer, Dawn Brancheau, by her hair and pulled her under water, shaking her. The trainer apparently died of “multiple traumatic injuries,” although there hasn’t been much further on the cause of death since the incident. It sure looks as if she was just shaken to death. This all took place in front of an audience at Sea World in Orlando, Florida, which was evacuated shortly after the whale started playing, or whatever it was he was doing. This is part of the problem, of course—it’s often difficult to interpret motives to animals whose facial and body expressions we think we can make some sense of. For whales and dolphins (and orcas are actually dolphins) this difficulty is compounded immensely. At the moment, no one has a clear idea what Tilikum actually had in mind.
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So yesterday we hopped up to Oxford to see the Steampunk show at the Museum of the History of Science. Both Oxford and Cambridge have such museums, and they’re both a short day trip from London. And to have a show on Steampunk—the first museum show on the subject, we’re assured. How cool is that?

So for the unenlightened, what is Steampunk? It’s a genre of sf (which can be either science fiction, or speculative fiction, although when I use the latter term, people usually look a little confused, so then I have to explain that it’s what a lot of people call science fiction these days, since the term “science fiction” barely encompasses the breadth and depth of the genre any more—but that’s another post). Anyway, Steampunk (or, more properly, the Steampunk revival) got its start with The Difference Engine, in which William Gibson and Bruce Sterling married hardcore sf with a Victorian world. Full Story »

Those of us who are paid to pay attention to what’s going on in financial markets have had a number of distractions recently—the ongoing “crisis,” if that’s the word, over Greece and other countries on the periphery of the European Union, and whether or not any of them will default (probably no); the question of whether many of the millions of jobs lost to the current recession in America and Europe are likely to come back (probably no); whether Peyton Manning is the greatest quarterback of all time (probably no, and who cares?). But our main distraction these days is corporate earnings. That’s because we’re supposed to know whether companies are making or losing money, but even more importantly, whether or not they’re doing better or worse than Wall Street analysts say they’re going to do. That’s because what markets respond to is often not actual performance, but performance versus expectations. And an awful lot of the happy talk in the media about how we’re pulling out of the recession is based on the “fact” that corporate earnings are looking pretty good.
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The Craftsman, by Richard Sennett
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, by Matthew B. Crawford
Makers, by Cory Doctorow

Years ago, when we lived in the middle of New Jersey, I managed to get myself elected to the local school board, mostly by accident. This wasn’t exactly the plan—it was the incumbents, and me, and I just did it so that there would be a contested election. To my surprise, I got elected. And one of the first things I got to do, after dealing with the budget that got voted down that year for the first time in living memory, and the proposal to get rid of the German teacher (which passed), was deal with the proposal to get rid of the shop program and replace it with something that had “technology” in whatever the rubric was, presumably because everyone in the shop classes was now going to become a “knowledge worker.” I spoke against the plan, but I think I lost the argument, which was not unusual. I voted to keep the German teacher, and that didn’t work out either. Full Story »

Well, sadly, I couldn’t take my laptop into the auditorium, so it’s all written notes. You might as well head over to the Guardian Iraq Inquiry website for the live blog there. It’s the best one out there. So before I start watching the talking heads give their analysis, or, even worse, that of other Labour Party hacks (Margaret Beckett is droning on right now on Sky–anyone who lives in the UK will know what a dreaded prospect that is) here are some observations.

It was a bit surreal, in fact–the Alternative Viewing Facility turns out to be the large auditorium in the Queen Elizabeth II Center where the inquiry is being held. There must have been 800 people in there, not many of them likely to have been on Blair’s side. All very well behaved, I must say–and a really broad age range, Clearly a lot of people had taken time off from work, as I had. This was important. It’s like being in the Iraq marches in 2002 and 2003–there was a need to bear witness, and this was one of those occasions that required it. Chilcot, to his credit, understands this, I think. It goes without saying that neither Tony Blair nor the current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown (who testifies next month) wanted this inquiry. There were lots of demonstrators outside, of course, but there seemed to be even more police. Full Story »

OK, today is the big day. We’ve already had three hours of Tony Blair this morning, but they’re only letting the public in to either a morning or an afternoon session for Blair’s testimony, and I got the afternoon. I can’t believe I got one of these tickets—I never win anything. But here we are.

And I haven’t heard back on whether they have Wi-Fi in the room that I’ll be sitting in, so I don’t know if I’ll be able to post. If not, it will all come out in one large post later.

So what happened this morning? Blair was asked about what happened at Crawford (nothing special, no secret deal), the relation of Iraq to the mid-east peace process (none, apparently, although he said he was “frustrated” at the lack of progress), his relationship with Bush (fine, and did not set conditions). So far, Blair’s main point is that 9/11 changed everything—specifically, the perception of risk. So even though he more or less conceded that the actual risk posed by Saddam Hussein did not change, the perceived risk did. And he was very fudgy on one point—he saw no real difference between regime change and disarming Iraq, an interesting non-distinction for someone who trained as a lawyer to make. Blair also said that his comments in his now-notorious interview with Fern Britton of the BBC last year was a mistake. We’ve also learned that Blair seems to worry a lot about threats—he’s mentioned Iran several times today. Is he secretly lamenting that he didn’t get an attack on Iran in while he still could? Full Story »

We learned a lot this past week in the Iraq Inquiry. Jack Straw, for example, told us that he almost thought the war was a bad idea, and was, well, awfully close to being illegal. But then he changed his mind, apparently, maybe. That’s the way it went pretty much the whole week. Geoff Hoon agreeably admitted that he did what he was told to do. I suppose reading between the lines, we learned that everything that was done under Tony Blair was against the will and judgment of those who worked for him–and yet, somehow, they managed to do what he told them to do anyway.

And we have an exciting week coming up. First, we have a bunch of people from the Foreign Office, who will be telling us that in all likelihood the invasion of Iraq was illegal without a second UN resolution, which of course Tony was happy to ignore. Full Story »

As a former resident of, and still eligible voter in, the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I feel compelled to comment on yesterday’s special election to fill out the unexpired term of the late and great Ted Kennedy. As the entire universe now knows, Martha Coakley, the State Attorney General and Democratic candidate, lost to Scott Brown, a state legislator and the Republican candidate. This will have consequences, such as reducing the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate from 60 to 59. There are also numerous press reports and blog posts about how this is the death of health care, of Obama’s program, and of democracy as we know it. The circular firing squads are lining up even as I write.

So, two things. First, what happened? Simple. Democrats didn’t show up. Brown got about the same number of votes as John McCain did, but Coakley only got about 60% of the votes that Obama got. There was no massive swing to the Republicans. It’s just that the Democrats didn’t bother. Full Story »

This forthcoming week we expect some more outright lying to go on in the Chilcot inquiry. This is because those appearing—-particularly former Defence Minister Geoff Hoon and former foreign secretary Jack Straw-—have an occasional habit of doing this. Both are expected to provide some interesting testimony, especially in light of testimony this past week from Alistair Campbell, and testimony in December from a number of senior military figures.

Before getting to what we might expect, let’s look at what we learned this past week. P.G. Wodehouse’s Lord Emsworth, whose motto was “Stout Denial!” would have been proud of Alistair Campbell. Campbell, Tony Blair’s Communications guy, can lie with the best of them, and we presume he did. In fact, what was unsurprising about Campbell’s testimony was the extent to which he stuck to the script, while at the same time the extent to which he tried to blame everyone else. Campbell’s testimony and answers to questions even included a reference to Psalm 56 on his whiny blog, “All day long they twist my words”, which, as Hugh O’Shaughnessy pointed out, would be funny if it came from someone else. Full Story »

Haiti is so obviously beyond words that I’m not going to bother to even try. If you want to support relief efforts, may I suggest Paul Farmer’s outfit, Partners in Health, who have been operating in Haiti for some time. Farmer’s work in Haiti was the subject of a book by Tracy Kidder, Mountains Beyond Mountains. Their direct link to Haiti Relief is here.

And if you think speaking French is advantageous here, which it probably is, there’s Doctors without Borders, who also already have people there on the ground. Their Haiti donation link is here.

Tony Judt has been a leading historian of, and thinker about, the post-war world for a number of decades. Any regular reader of The New York Review of Books will be familiar with his output, in which he regularly embarrasses most of the rest of us with his understanding, judgement, and, perhaps equally important, his humanity. He has been a near-singular and powerful voice for reason on any number of issues, including the mid-east, where he has been actively involved in Israeli issues since before the six day war (during which he volunteered on a kibbutz to replace settlers off fighting), and post-war Europe. He has taught modern European history for a number of years at New York University, and of course has received his share of academic honors, all deserved. Born in London’s East End of Jewish immigrant parents, he received his Ph.D. from Cambridge before eventually settling in America, as the English are fond of doing. On any number of grounds, he is one of the positive contributors to the world.

He also has amytrophic lateral sclerosis, a form of motor neuron disease, and he is degenerating rapidly. Full Story »

The New York Times ran an interesting article about Roger Ailes a couple of days ago. Ailes is the head of Fox News at News Corporation, owned and run, of course, by Rupert Murdoch and various offspring Murdochs. Ailes is one of the most important people in the United States, by virtue of his re-creation of the concept of television news, morphing from something that vaguely resembled news into something that is indistinguishable from right-wing propaganda. And it has had enormous impact on television news in general, and on US political, and broader, culture, as anyone who has seen Outfoxed knows.

It turns out that not everyone in the Murdoch family is happy with Mr Ailes. Full Story »

It being 12th night and all, we’re waiting for another bout of snow to hit London, getting ready for the feasting and partying to mark the end of the Christmas season (except in the Armenian Orthodox church, which celebrates Christmas today, and other Orthodox churches, which celebrate it tomorrow). The wild boar is roasting away merrily, and everyone’s mead cup is full. So here we are. This will be the last post on this series for this Christmas season. There’s quite a lot I didn’t cover—Renaissance Christmas music being the most gaping omission. Still, one of the great things about Christmas music is that there’s always more of it. Whether it’s new songs being written by contemporary composers, or thousand year old chants being rediscovered, there’s more music out there all the time. Every year I stumble on an unexpected delight—this year it’s been an album by the Netherlands Chamber Choir, conducted by the erstwhile Paul van Nevel, called Mirabile Mysterium, mainly a bunch of little known but nonetheless stunning choral pieces, mostly from the 15th and 16th centuries. Particularly noteworthy is the title piece, by Jacobus Gallus (1550-1591), as well as a whole raft of Spanish Renaissance songs. And next year I imagine there will be something else equally captivating.

But that’s only if the dim bulbs still running the music industry haven’t killed the industry dead at that point. Full Story »