by David Steven | Apr 14, 2010 | UK
Daniel Hannan – Euro MP and the most influential politician on the Internet – has been finding the election campaign pretty stressful. Fortunately, he’s an early adopter of what I am told is the latest new television sensation from across the Atlantic:
In the evenings, Mrs H and I unwind by watching The Wire which is, for my money, quite the best cop show around. Spreading itself comfortably over five series, it uses the space to develop its characters. There are no straightforward goodies or baddies here, any more than in Shakespeare’s plays. And the dialect is addictive. Several times, on the campaign trail, I have had to force myself to say “yes” rather than “true dat” or “mos def”.
This is much more than just downtime though.
Jimmy McNulty – in real life an Eton boy like David Cameron (“I didn’t know him then but I do now. I know his wife a bit because my best friend used to be crazy for her. When she wound up marrying Cameron, we were like, ‘Why do you want to be with that fucking Tory boy?'”) – has endorsed the Conservatives, sending Toby Young weak at the knees (“Dominic West is a genuinely cool famous person – a fantastically gifted actor and a movie star in the making. It was almost as if Jack Nicholson had come out for George W Bush.”)
Not only that, Hannan reckons that The Wire provides a model for policing Britain’s lawless streets:
The programme doesn’t immediately look like an endorsement of the Tory policy of elected police commissioners. On the contrary, it often shows honest rozzers being made to do the wrong thing by vote-grabbing politicians.
Then again, perfection is not of this world. An elected sheriff might make the wrong call, just as an unelected chief constable might. The difference is that we can’t get rid of the unelected chief constable… The last word ought surely to go to local people.
And you know what? Unless The Wire is lying, those Baltimore coppers are out patrolling every day. They have to, you see: their bosses answer to local voters. Messy as it can sometimes be, democracy is a pretty good idea.
As the man says, true dat. Mos def.
by Mark Weston | Apr 13, 2010 | Africa, Economics and development
A couple of weeks ago in the small, poor Sahelian town of Dori in northern Burkina Faso, we were sitting at a roadside stall having a breakfast of coffee and dry bread. As we sat with our backs to the road, a group of five young boys, aged no more than twelve, hovered behind us like seagulls waiting for scraps. From time to time one would move closer, as if making to pounce on a morsel of bread, before retreating again when we looked round. They stood there for twenty minutes. After we got up and left, one of them ran to the table and downed the dregs of Ebru’s coffee.
These are the talibe children of West Africa. They are ubiquitous. In the towns of Burkina Faso, Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, posses of these young boys – uniformly skinny, dirty and covered in dust – have been constant companions on our trip. They roam the streets in packs, carrying empty, lidless tomato tins or little plastic buckets, and approach everyone they see for money or food. You never get used to the sight of them.
The boys’ story is grim. Many have been sent from their villages at the age of five or six by destitute parents to live with marabouts, Muslim “holy men” who promise to feed and shelter them and teach them about the Koran. ‘Their parents are too poor to look after them,’ says Karim, a Dori yoghurt seller, ‘and they are uneducated, so they believe the marabouts when they tell them they will house and clothe their kids.’ A few of these marabouts are genuine, and the children combine work in the fields with Arabic and Koranic education. But most are charlatans. ‘They go to the market, buy a cap and a gown and a Koran and say they are Koranic masters,’ Karim, a devout Muslim explains, ‘but it’s pure child exploitation.’
The children are sent out into the streets every morning. They are expected to earn 150 or 250 CFA francs per day (about 20-35p, or 50 cents) from begging. A former talibe child from Niger tells me that if they do not hit their target, the marabout beats or tortures them. Many therefore take to stealing if they haven’t begged enough near the end of the day.
Few receive any form of education, because their masters want them on the streets. Some of these Fagins have twenty or thirty boys. Twenty children can mean 5000 CFA (£8/$12) per day, huge money in these parts, so they do not waste time with teaching.
At night, the children sleep together on crowded floors in marabouts’ homes. Few get enough rest – we often see boys sleeping in the dust under trees in the afternoons. Those who surrounded us at the breakfast table were seriously underfed. In Ouagadougou a few days later, another feral-looking child asked us for money. When we refused, he began staring feverishly at Ebru’s bag and then made to snatch it – I pushed him away, and felt his ribs like a radiator through his T-shirt.
Karim is pessimistic about the children’s future. ‘They get used to this life of begging and stealing, so when they eventually grow up and escape they can only slip into a life of delincuency.’ The boys would make easy prey for extremists and warlords. The Burkina Faso government does occasional round-ups and places them in workshops so they can learn a trade, but this risks encouraging more parents to abandon their sons to the marabouts. Karim believes it is a ‘river that can’t be damned.’ Universal free education with meals seems the most promising solution, but Burkina’s performance in this area is abysmal – fewer than half of rural children are enrolled in school.
by David Steven | Apr 12, 2010 | Conflict and security, North America
Much of the opposition to START (see previous posts) is embarrassingly hackish. Take this ‘analysis‘ from the Foreign Policy Initiative’s Jamie Fly and John Noonan:
A nuclear free world isn’t an ignoble goal, but it needs to be approached realistically. Focusing on the stockpiles of the United States and Russia and limiting U.S. options for use of nuclear weapons does nothing to change the calculus of Tehran and Pyongyang.
Henry Kissinger, who is now among the chief proponents of nuclear disarmament, wrote in 1957 in his landmark study Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy that “A renunciation of force, by eliminating the penalty for intransigence, will therefore place the international order at the mercy of its most ruthless or irresponsible members.”
Our unwillingness to penalize countries such as Iran, North Korea, and Syria for their illicit activities only empowers them. It sends the message to other states potentially seeking nuclear weapons that the path to a weapon can be pursued with few repercussions.
If President Obama were truly concerned about the future of the international nonproliferation regime, he would follow his recent disarmament “accomplishments” with some serious action to ensure that rogue regimes realize that there is a price to be paid by those who choose to pursue nuclear weapons.
You have to love the “If President Obama were truly concerned…” line. Of course, the President is just pretending to be worried about the issue – it’s all part of his cunning plan to sell America out to foreign and socialist overlords. Or something like that.
A causal reader would also be left thinking that Kissinger opposed the treaty, when of course he is right behind it, issuing a joint statement with George Shultz, William Perry, and Sam Nunn:
We strongly endorse the goals of this Treaty, and we hope that after careful and expeditious review that both the United States Senate and the Russian Federal Assembly will be able to ratify the Treaty.
Obama is following the (bi-partisan) playbook that Kissinger, Schultz, Perry and Nunn set out in their 2008 A World Free of Nuclear Weapons op-ed. It recommended:
- “Changing the Cold War posture of deployed nuclear weapons to increase warning time and thereby reduce the danger of an accidental or unauthorized use of a nuclear weapon.
- Continuing to reduce substantially the size of nuclear forces in all states that possess them.
- Eliminating short-range nuclear weapons designed to be forward-deployed.
- Initiating a bipartisan process with the Senate, including understandings to increase confidence and provide for periodic review, to achieve ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, taking advantage of recent technical advances, and working to secure ratification by other key states.
- Providing the highest possible standards of security for all stocks of weapons, weapons-usable plutonium, and highly enriched uranium everywhere in the world.
- Getting control of the uranium enrichment process, combined with the guarantee that uranium for nuclear power reactors could be obtained at a reasonable price, first from the Nuclear Suppliers Group and then from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or other controlled international reserves. It will also be necessary to deal with proliferation issues presented by spent fuel from reactors producing electricity.
- Halting the production of fissile material for weapons globally; phasing out the use of highly enriched uranium in civil commerce and removing weapons-usable uranium from research facilities around the world and rendering the materials safe.
- Redoubling our efforts to resolve regional confrontations and conflicts that give rise to new nuclear powers.”
Is there any issue serious enough not be used as a partisan football in the US? I fear not.
by David Steven | Apr 11, 2010 | Influence and networks, UK
The absurd price of online access to academic journals is a scandal.
It costs $15 to look at this paper I co-wrote for Science on HIV/AIDS (for just 24 hours, too!) and £20 to buy this World Economics paper of mine. As a co-author, I wasn’t paid for either of them – the benefit from the copyright accrues solely to the journal publisher.
This absurd situation is made far worse when work has been funded by the taxpayer. Alex and I wrote a paper for the Foreign Office which Palgrave wanted to reprint in one of its journals. Again, no fee was on offer, but they wanted worldwide copyright until 70 years after Alex and I are both pushing up the daisies:
In consideration of us agreeing to publish the contribution referred to below (the “Contribution”), you assign to Palgrave Macmillan the copyright in the Contribution in all media throughout the world for the full term of the copyright including all revivals and reversions.
Palgrave even has the cheek to argue they are doing this to protect my interests. “Ownership of copyright by the journal owner facilitates international protection against infringement of copyright, libel or plagiarism, it argues, “It also ensures that requests by third parties to reprint… are handled efficiently in accordance with our general policy which encourages dissemination of knowledge within the framework of copyright.”
It also generously offers to let me “make and distribute copies of the contribution to colleagues, for the personal use by such colleagues (but not commercially or systematically, e.g. via an e-mail list or list serve).” Gee, thanks guys.
Although we refused to sign the rights away, online access to the Palgrave version of the paper will still cost $30. Our fee from the government was small, but the same principle holds for scientific research on which millions of pounds of public money has been lavished. The public pays. The academics do the work. And the public pays again if it was wants access to the results. Who benefits? The publisher and non-one else.
At the moment, Tom Watson is canvassing suggestions for his Digital Manifesto for the upcoming British general election (he is standing for re-election in West Brom East). I added the following pledge for him to consider:
As a commenter on Tom’s User Voice site points out, this would mean boosting “open manuscript repositories, open access journals, and/or new hybrid publication models.” The government would be using its buying power to push much more research into the public domain, where it can seed further news ideas and create a dynamic knowledge commons.
If it joined with a few other governments, it could permanently change the academic publication model almost overnight.
As Iain Dale has pointed out, Tom Watson is setting himself up as the unofficial Member of Parliament for the Internet – and is very keen to hear what web users have to say. So do head over to his site to comment and vote on this and other digital economy ideas, or to add your own suggestions…
by David Steven | Apr 11, 2010 | Conflict and security, North America
It seems that the START treaty is going to struggle to make it through the Senate, despite President Obama’s confidence that a swift passage is possible.
Today, Joe Lieberman (an independent these days, who caucuses with the Democrats) took to Fox News to claim that ratification would be impossible unless the administration extracted concessions from Russia on missile defence and began to build a new generation of nuclear weapons:
We have to make darned sure our nuclear warheads are capable, are modern as world leaders arrived in Washington for the start of a major nuclear summit. I’m going to be real hesitant to vote for this treaty unless we have a commitment from the administration that they’re prepared to modernize our nuclear stockpile.
For the Republicans, Lamar Alexander said there was ‘not a chance’ of ratification in 2010 – and that consideration of the treaty should wait until 2011.
What credibility does Obama’s nuclear strategy have if it lacks backing at home? Not much, I fear.
