Iain Dale quotes an interesting gob of writing (note the new category I have created - “bits from books") by Jeremy Paxman (from this book).  I now quote the same bit:

Being loved is what so much of contemporary politics is about. In a post-ideological age, the Labour Party has built its success upon seeming safe and appealing to people who might never otherwise have voted for it. Yet you cannot achieve radical change without being willing to confront those who might be disadvantaged by it. The difficulty is that the great battles which divided the parties after the Second World War - on nationalisation or nuclear weapons, for example - are finished. The Welfare State brought the state into everyone’s lives, but the consequence has been that it turned ministers from lawmakers to managers. And managers of a system which is bound to fail, at least part of the time. Where, once upon a time, governments impinged very little upon people’s lives, there is now scarcely an area of human behaviour which is not touched by the law. Yet, while government is all pervasive, it is not, by its nature, particularly effective: the public knows from its own experience that ministerial boasts about the superiority of British health services, education or transport systems, are empty. So the opportunity which the politician thought he had to make an impact on the lives of the entire population is just as easily an opportunity for the citizenry to blame him for the failures they see all around.

In an age when politics was driven by profoundly differing convictions about how the world ought to be organised, enemies were the price of progress. But when all that is being argued about is the mechanisms by which services are delivered to the general public, there is nothing to stiffen the backbone. Politicians have to become evangelists for a system which is intrinsically incapable of delivering what is asked of it: the greatest credibility problem of modern politics is that the political process cannot answer adequately for the performance of the public sector. It follows that the wisest ministers are those who realise soonest how very little power they really have. The number of politicians who can look back on their ministerial careers and feel that they really made a significant difference to their country is small. Roy Jenkins could honestly recall his time as Home Secretary and say that he had achieved something, in endorsing the reforms to the laws on abortion and homosexuality. Margaret Thatcher emasculated the trades unions. Tony Blair gave Wales an assembly and Scotland a Parliament. But quite what the Secretary for Culture, the three junior ministers and their aides write in their diaries each night is something of a mystery.

When it comes to this allegedly “post-ideological age”, you can count me out.  Just because your ideology has failed, that doesn’t mean that all ideologies have failed.  It just means what it means, that your ideology has failed.  Not mine.  My ideology remains true, and you must, if you care about the truth, accept it.  You admit that yours had failed.  One-nil to me.  Now, I’m going for a two-nil victory.  I want you to admit that my ideology has not failed, and is true.  If you think I’ll settle for a draw, by sportingly volunteering the idea that my ideology has also failed when it clearly has not, just because you have admitted that yours has, and when on the contrary the failure of your ideology only goes to show how right my ideology was all along, think again.  I know that thinking is not something you now like doing any more because it hurt your brain so much the last time around, but do it anyway.

When I say “you”, in the above paragraph, I mean ... well, you know who I mean.  I mean all the people I mean.  But, and this is the interesting thing to me about the above quote, I rather think that maybe I do not mean Paxman.

Government is not by its nature very effective?  It is a system which is intrinsically incapable of delivering what is asked of it?  That sounds a lot like my ideology, to me.

But then again, I guess that might be true for any ideologist who regarded his ideology as still flourishing in the post-ideological age.  What does Paxman think it is about the intrinsic nature of government that makes it such an inevitable disappointment?

I suppose that if I really want to know, I’ll just have to read the book.  Which just goes to show that there is no better way to sell books than quoting long bits from them.

I heard something extremely interesting this evening, while watching a US TV cop show of otherwise impeccable mediocrity called Law and Order: Special Victims Unit:

Lorna Frankel: “Hey, you can’t arrest them. This is a free country.”

Fin Tutuola: “No, it’s a democracy, and the majority of us don’t like what’s going on here.”

I did a little detective work of my own, and found that snatch of dialog here.

This is a distinction I seldom hear made.  Reality rears its head in the most unlikely places.

So instead of yesterday’s artyfartyfoto, I could have had this.  Obvious when you think about it.

There’s no doubt about it.  When it comes to pictures, words can greatly add to the fun.  (Sadly, for that last one, you have to scroll down from the top of the page to find what I’m talking about.  So, scroll down to May 23rd, and you’ll get the picture.)

Busy day today doing other things, so a quota photo.  A friend thought this one, which I took just under a week ago, to be one of my better ones, and I’m happy to go with her choice:

That’s the steps up from the South Bank to the upriver Hungerford footbridge.  On the right, the spikey things that hold up the footbridge.  And the only Billion Monkey involved is me.

This test match has not, on the pitch, been very special at all.  Pietersen’s two hundred yesterday was as routine a test match double century as I have ever heard about.  But the commentators have known for days now that the weather this morning was going to be horrible, and they had a couple of treats lined up for us.

First, they arranged to repeat the Radio 4 show from last night fronted by Rory Bremner about the fifty years of Test Match Special, which they duly did repeat, in two chunks, in among chatting about the weather.  It’s getting brighter, no it’s getting darker, blah blah.  Play will start at 1.30pm, oh no it won’t.  That was the sort of self-congratulatory guff you would you would expect, all of it entirely justified, I hasten to add.  Arlott, Johners, Blowers, Truman, CMJ, Aggers and the rest of them, culminating inevitably in Johners and Aggers giggling about how whoever it was couldn’t quite get his leg over.

Equally entertainingly, anticipating rain, they had lined up Sir Viv Richards, already a part of the commentary team, to reminisce with them, about such things as what it was like playing for a dominant West Indian side, and what it was like being a young West Indian starting out in county cricket.

I realised how special this was and started scribbling notes.

Thomson (yes that Thomson, of Lillee and Thomson fame) bowling for Middx, to Richards, batting for Somerset.  Suddenly a routine county game before four hundred at Lords becomes a mini test match, with two giant egos clashing like King Kong versus Godzilla.  “All the batting side comes out onto the balcony.  At the other end it was Selby v Roebuck and they all went back in again.”

Richards on his chewing gum.  “I reckon someone missed out on a sponsorship deal there.” Yes, indeed, it was as much part of his preparations as his bat, pads, gloves, box, etc..  No chewing gum?  My God, where’s my chewing gum?  Throw me my chewing gum! He didn’t wear a tooth protector guard gum shield, because it interfered with the flavour of the chewing gum.

Boycott about Gooch and Boycott batting against the Windies pace men in the seventies.  Holding and Roberts open for the Windies.  After they have done their worst, Gooch says to Boycott: “We’re alright now, it’s the second stringers.” Garner and Croft.

Agnew is the night watchman in a county game against Hampshire.  He survives for the night, and spends the first half hour of the next morning at the other end, while Andy Roberts bowls to David ("he always had time") Gower.  Not to be forgotten.

Brian Close, a giant of a cricketer still very fondly remembered, captains Somerset, and he takes a shine to the new lad Richards.  Close drives Richards along the motorway, but his head starts to wobble forward into the steering wheel.  “How do I tell the Skipper that he must stop and have some coffee?” They do stop.  Richards does get Close some coffee.  Again, not forgotten.  Imagine if they had both died in a crash.  Close played twenty-two tests and never made a test century, so they said.

The Viv Richards way with bowlers.  The better they were the more he tried to dominate them, it was generally agreed.  Vic Marks remembers consoling fellow spinner John Emburey: “He must think you can bowl because he keeps hitting you out of the ground.”

Richards reckoned that coming to play county cricket when a quite young cricketer toughened him up, and made him concentrate and be more responsible, about cricket and about life.  In the Caribbean, they pride themselves on being a little too laid back.  Playing county cricket added that polish of ruthlessness to his game.  So, naturally, the thought arises that if England want to help world cricket, it might find a way of ceasing to polish Australians, and instead to polish the current crop of horribly unshiny Windy players, especially their bowlers.

And so on.  There were at least another dozen titbits at least as good as those.

None of the commentary of the actual game was as special as this rain-stopped-play stuff.  Apart from that chat, the classiest thing about this Headingley Test so far, the highlight of the TV highlights last night, was when an Avro Lancaster, the last one that can still fly, flew over the ground.

Today I have been feeling under the weather, as the saying goes.  When I was younger, this was just one of the many mysterious things that old people said for no reason.  Now I know only too well what this phrase means.

I have been consoling myself by listening to, and now watching on the TV highlights, England murder the Windies at Headingley.  Trouble is, the Windies are now such a feeble cricket team that there’s no fun in it.  Instead, I just got even more depressed, thinking of how good they used to be, and how bad they are now.

Like all bad cricket teams, they also had whatever bad luck was going.  One of the batsmen was wrongly given out today.  Yesterday, Pietersen was stumped, but off what turned out to be a no ball, and today he made a double century.  During his stand at the end of the England innings with Plunkett, both batsmen had scored their highest test score in the innings they were engaged in playing.  That’s the kind of thing the commentators usually notice, then asking each other if this has ever happened before.  But they missed this particular item of trivia completely.

Worse for the Windies is that their two most capable batsmen, Chanderpaul and Sarwan, are both now out injured.  England, meanwhile, have got stronger.  Vaughan is back as captain, yesterday scoring a hundred in his first test match innings for eighteen months.  And whereas at Lords it was England who early on lost a key player, Hoggard, to injury, this time their bowlers were more than adequate to see off the weakened Windy batting, Hoggard’s replacement, a bloke called Sidebottom, taking six wickets.  After England had declared at 570-6, the Windies were rolled over for 146, and were 22-2 by the end, following on.  Rain is forecast for tomorrow, but England surely won’t need three whole days to finish this one.

Maybe they should send for Brian Lara.  He was retired after the World Cup.  At the time, his feeble captaincy and their over-reliance on his batting seemed liabilities.  Now, they miss his batting, and the feebleness looks more fundamental than merely feeble captaincy.  They just ain’t good enough.  The World Cup, which was supposed to give Windies cricket a boost, was such a long drawn out shambles, and the Windies themselves did so badly in it, that it can only have made things worse for them.

Cricket needs the Windies to be much better than this, that is, much better than a mediocre English county.  Apparently they’re fast losing interest in cricket back home in the Caribbean.  I’m not surprised.

After all the excitement of this photo of Saturn, here is another.  Well, not a photo.  It’s more like a CAT scan.  Once again it is the work of Cassini.

This false-color image of Saturn’s main rings was made by combining data from multiple star occultations using the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph.

During occultations, scientists observe the brightness of a star as the rings pass in front of the star. This provides a measurement of the amount of ring material between the spacecraft and the star.

Cassini has given scientists the most detailed view yet of Saturn’s densely packed B ring. Cassini found that this part of the rings is densely packed with clumps, called self-gravity wakes, separated by nearly empty gaps. These clumps in Saturn’s B ring are neatly organized and constantly colliding, which surprised scientists.

The clumps in Saturn’s B ring, 30 to 50 meters (100 to 160 feet) across, are too small to be seen directly. However, scientists can map the distribution, shape and orientation of the clumps. Colors in this image indicate the orientation of clumps, and brightness indicates the density of ring particles. The formation of wakes is strongest in the bluer regions, where ring particles clump together in tilted wakes. Particles in the central yellow regions are too densely packed for any starlight to pass through.

The ultraviolet imaging spectrograph measured the flickering of the star Alpha Arae as it passed by the rings Nov. 9 and 10, 2006.

This circumstance seems to me yet one more example among many previous thousands and many more thousands to come, of the fact that the true heroes of astronomy are the instrument makers.  The theorists theorise away, on the basis of insufficient evidence.  And they are eventually proved right, or then again wrong, by the next lot of instruments.  Once the instrument guys produce their next lot of pictures, the truth is pretty much clear for all to see, and frankly the theorists might just as well not have bothered.

As it says in the press release:

“The rings are different from the picture we had in our minds. We originally thought we would see a uniform cloud of particles. Instead we find that the particles are clumped together with empty spaces in between,” said Larry Esposito, principal investigator for the Cassini ultraviolet imaging spectrograph at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “If you were flying under Saturn’s rings in an airplane, you would see these flashes of sunlight come through the gaps, followed by dark and so forth. This is different from flying under a uniform cloud of particles.”

Because previous interpretations assumed the ring particles were distributed uniformly, scientists underestimated the total mass of Saturn’s rings. The mass may actually be two or more times previous estimates.

Previous interpretations?  Just extrapolations beyond what they had learned for sure from earlier instruments.  Guesses by people who didn’t know, in other words.  And then, thanks to Cassini, they did know.  And now they will make more guesses based on what even Cassini isn’t now telling them, which will be equally worthless, even if these guesses happen to be true.  Am I missing something?

I still don’t know how proper CAT scans work, or even, really, what they are.  But I am now confused about this on a somewhat bigger scale and in greater detail.

One of my fondest hopes for my Billion Monkey photos is that as the years go by, they will come to look odder and odder, as more and more Billion Monkey equipment and behaviour that is familiar now becomes a thing of the past.

And today, Michael J. emails with a link to a piece which suggests that, any decade now, pictures like this ...

... may become relics of a bygone era:

South Korea’s Electronic Technology Institute announced the development of a new image sensor chip that allows digital cameras to capture vibrant images without a flash in dark spaces.

The digital camera equipped with the chip will be able to take high-resolution photos or video-recordings at 1 lux.  The camera will be able to snap pictures in places such as theaters, underground traffic tunnels, or dark-lit bars and clubs.  The chip promises clear pictures with light as bright as the lighting from a candle 1 meter away in a dark room and is said to be 2,000 times more light sensitive than other sensor types.  The will initially be used for camera phones, CCTV cameras and vehicle rear-view cameras.

Institute officials stated that state-run Korea Electronics Technology Institute has developed the single carrier modulation photo detector (SMPD) chip using nanotechnology.

Here are some more snaps from the Billion Monkeys Flashing! collection:

Such pictures will, I hope, become obsolete in another way beside the obvious one.  For, apart from being rather dramatic, what with the flash going off and all, most of these pictures are not actually very good.  Too blurry.  That’s because, inevitably, all photos of people using flash get taken in bad light.  I draw the line at flash photo-ing Billion Monkeys, even if they are themselves flashing.  They wouldn’t like that.  Some would turn nasty.

The creepy bit is how CCTV cameras will be able to see in the dark.

I don’t get sent free books (see the previous posting) that often, but I love to acquire books on all manner of subjects.  So, here’s an idea.  The next book which gets posted to me will get something written here about it.  Not necessarily a full-length review or anything.  Just something.  The book can be about anything whatsoever - fact, fiction or any combination of the two.  And even if your book comes second or third in the race, you might still get lucky and get a mention.  In fact, let’s make it that any book that reaches me within the next month will get mentioned.

Email me (top left where it says “contact") to get my address.

I am an occasional career counsellor.  I specialise in helping my punters find out what sort of career they would like to have.  If you don’t know what you want out of your career, but need to know (especially if you need to know in rather a hurry), sign up for one of my sessions (it only takes one) and there’s a very decent chance we’ll get it eighty percent sorted within a couple of hours.

Once you know what career you want, good luck finding it, and more good luck doing it.  I can’t help you so much with that.  I have some ideas, but nothing that special.  My main suggestion is: don’t be scared to ask other and better people than me about it.  Few will object.  Many will relish the chance to show off.  The worst that can happen is that they say no.

To find out what sort of career people want, I have a clutch of questions I ask them.  What things (work or anything else) have you done that you are most proud of?  What - given all the money, time, talent, breaks (i.e. regardless of whether you’d actually be able to get it or do it) – would be your perfect job or perfect life?  When your time is your own, what do you do?  If you had only one day left to live, what would you do?  Things like that.

Well, here’s something that might turn into another question of that kind.  During that shit job you had, did you learn anything, and if so what?

I realize now that the reason I picked up so much information about negotiating and marketing from these less-than-challenging jobs is because those are areas that interest me. I’m good at them and I like watching how other people do it.  You will notice in your early, random jobs that you gravitate toward certain lessons.  What you like learning about is probably what you like to do.  Learn from yourself by watching how you learn from others.

That’s from page 9 of The Brazen Careerist by Penelope Trunk, and is one of the rather few things she says (at any rate in that early chapter) about how to work out what you want.  But of course, I picked it out, because of what I am most interested in.

After I’d linked from here to her blog in connection with something or other, Penelope Trunk guessed I might be interested in reading her book and writing about it, and sent me a copy.

I’ve now reached the bit about the grind of getting that first half decent job, which is now what seems to have replaced the grind of doing that first half decent job, which is what our parents and grandparents did.  I am looking forward to doing the job, so to speak.  I think I will enjoy that more.  Reading about it, that is.

Another Billion Monkey picture!  But this time, what it illustrates is not anything notable in the way of Billion Monkey behaviour patterns.  Billion Monkeys hold there cameras out in front of themselves.  Unlike Real Photographers, who hold their Real Photographer cameras right up against their eyes.  Big deal.  You already knew that.

No, the point of this Billion Monkey snap is to talk about back lighting.  I really like the way the sun creates a corona around everyone’s faces.

All of which is by way of an intro to this next picture.  Moving from the mundane to the magnificent, here’s a photo of the planet Saturn, also back lit, taken not by me but by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft:

Click to get it bigger.  Steven Pinker (scroll down to May 8th here - I got to this from here) complains that this snap has not received the media attention that it deserves.  I think that perhaps the problem is that it is not only geeky science with nobody dying or getting divorced or anything, but that also, because of the back lighting, it looks rather fake.  The effect of the back lighting is to make the solid bit of Saturn look like it has been plonked down on top of the rest of the photo.  The thin corona around Saturn, presumably its back lit atmosphere, adds strongly to this impression, because it looks like the join.  The rest of the photo is extraordinary, most notably the wispy stuff beyond the regular rings.  But newspapers have enough problems with fake photos that they actually did fake themselves for them not to be wanting people to accuse them of having faked Saturn.

Brian Micklethwait dot com quote of a week ago:

I love it when female singers turn up wearing enough clothes.

My three favourite pops just now are: Christina, Gwen, Scissors.  Instant oldies but goldies all three of them.  When it comes to proper copies of these vids from the digital TV, it’s one (Christina A – my very favourite) down and two to go.

Now there’s an odd expression.  Let me make it clear that I did not eat the thing in question because it disagreed with me and I just got a bit carried away during the subsequent exchange of views.  No, that is not what happened.  First I ate the thing.  Then it disagreed with me.  Hence the light blogging during the daylight hours today.

So last Friday night, due to overwhelming popular demand (see the comments here), I recorded a conversation with Antoine Clarke about Sarkozy and his win in the recent French Presidential Election.  It lasted just under fifty minutes, and as I said to Antoine at the end, great stuff, and full of lots of detail of the sort that Anglos are unlikely to know.

We talked about lots of things, in particular about what kind of man and politician Sarkozy is, and how he differs from his predecessors as President of France (which is all part of why they voted for him).  Ségolène Royal’s qualifications, or rather her lack of them, were also mentioned, as was Sarkozy’s approach to the Islam issue, and the state of the French economy.

I’m an adjective!

Incoming from Michael J telling me about this:

Actually, as he later emailed to suggest, I had already spotted it, at Idiot Toys.  Not an idiot toy at all, in my opinion.

My worry is that the keyboard looks too narrow, and the keys too small to type with comfortably.  The problem is that if the keyboard is wide, the screen becomes too wide to make it fold simply.  If the screen is a sensible shape, the keyboard becomes too small, as I fear it has here.  Although, this photo makes it look usable.  I’d like to actually see this thing, and try typing on it.  This is why we still have shops.

If my suspicion is right, then the answer is surely to fold the keyboard in the middle.  But, that particular one (on the right here), also by Fujitsu, was only a “concept”, and it seems to have been abandoned, in favour of the one above, which is what Fujitsu now regards as preferable.

But, just going by the photos, I think that this earlier one looks particularly cute.  It was apparently the exact same size as a thickish CD case.  So, guaranteed to ruin your pocket, which is not really what you want in a pocket computer, is it?  But, couldn’t they have just smoothed it over a buit, instead of abandoning it?

Further thoughts: Is it just me, or was the old one female, and is the new one more male?  This looks like a switch from elegant handbag-mirror to clunky masculinity.  I’m thinking especially of the white bits on the new one, which reminds me of the white plasticated warriors in Star Wars.  And does my preference for the lady mirror make me gay?  Maybe just old.  (Actually what I am is Stray, i.e. straight but with lots of gay habits and tastes.  But that’s for another posting.)

Any fule can gugle for cats, but it takes a few seconds of actual intelligent thought to google for cat sculptures.  Here are my three favourites when I did this ...

... together with two that I found on Flickr.  Click to get to the original big pictures.

I haven’t had many photos here lately, so guess what, yes you’ve guessed it, Billion Monkeys!!!  And it’s four snaps of Billion Monkeys.  Not four billion snaps of monkeys.

No particular category of Billion Monkey activity this time, although two of these four happen to feature one of my favourite Billion Monkey pastimes, namely Billion Monkeys photoing themselves! But the reason I like the one with the hairdos is because of the hairdos, not really (or not only) because of the auto-photography.  Basically I just like these snaps, all of which were taken during the last few days.  Click to see more of what’s going on in them.

The dramatic statue is of Queen Boadicea, on a chariot.

The wheel behind Boadicea is The Wheel, idiotically referred to as the London Eye.  It’s not an eye.  It’s a wheel.  So, I always call it The Wheel.  When did you last see an eye in the form of a big circle of little eyes, which slowly rotated, always in the same direction?  Exactly.  Never.  Wheels, on the other hand, do rotate.  It’s what they do.

Someone called Melissa is stirring it, and quite successfully to judge by the comments from men of a certain age.

Tory blogging is close to death, I can announce. It’s been in intensive care for some time thanks to the meanderings of Iain Dale and the endless pronouncements of ConservativeHome but now the Cornerstone has launched a blog and, mind crushingly dull as it is, it can only be a matter of time before these sites start eating each other.

Conservative blogs are already almost exclusively the preserve of right wing men of a certain age.  http://www.cornerstonegroup.wordpress.com/ is just overkill

There are actually quite a few Conservative lady bloggers, to my certain knowledge, and when you consider how slim my certain knowledge is about Conservatives, especially Conservative ladies, that surely means that there are a lot.

Nevertheless, for all its inaccuracy about mere facts, I think Melissa Kite gets across very well one of the things that must particularly worry the mainstream pundits, which is that it is impossible to keep up with everything that the bloggers blog.  She pronounces Conservative blogging dead and she clearly wants this to be true, but must know that it isn’t so.  Boring is, after all, the old complaint from prudes about pornography, and you just know that they know it isn’t, and that for them that’s just the trouble.

If you are a mainstream Conservative pundit, duly anointed by a mainstream Conservative magazine, then what if some of the things these unknown, an in their entirety unknowable, Conservative bloggers are saying are more interesting and more talked about than what you are putting?  And what if you never even hear about this? Your paid slot in a magazine guarantees you some pay, but it no longer guarantees you clout, readers, authority.  And what if that eventually means that you end up not even getting paid?

It reminds me of those super-jock jet pilots in The Right Stuff, who are terrified of getting left behind.  What if mainstream journo-ing is like jet piloting, but what if the rules have changed?  What if you can go back to being as male and as old and as ugly as you want, and what if the top Tory bloggers are more like astronauts?

The battle within the Conservative Party between the ugly-but-expert and the pretty-but-dim never ends.  But, for the time being, and just when the pretties thought that Cameron had yanked the rules decisively in their favour, blogging has shifted the balance back towards the uglies.  Melissa has her harvest of derisive comments on this posting, but from now on, the men of a certain age will be talking amongst themselves.

Dizzy comments exultantly:

How cool is this? A proffessional journalist engaging in a flame war! The rubicon has been crossed! We’re through the looking glass! [insert random cliche here]!

Is “proffessional” some kind of deliberate misspelling?  I’m guessing just random internet carelessness.  And all the “proffessionals” who read that scream: These bastards can’t even spell!!

And astronauts couldn’t fly things.  That is, they could, but they often didn’t bother.

One of my favourite hobby-horse type ideas is that, for all their profound annoyingness and all round Frenchness, the French are one important group of people, and when they change their minds about something important, that’s important.  (In the nineteen seventies, for instance, they changed their minds about the USSR.  They decided it was an abomination.) It comes down to the fact that they are so very eloquent, and so very good at persuading Americans in particular of ... things.  Look at how a great gaggle of worthless French academics, with nothing to say but with their oh-so-Franch way of saying it, have for decades dominated US academe.  How did these charlatans manage this?  Gift of the gab, basically.

So, I also reckon this French volte face to be extremely important:

In the hard-fought French presidential election campaign, the most important and controversial international issue has been France’s Middle East policy. And depending on the results, the election may mark the first major change on that issue for three decades.

There is good cause for a paradigm shift in French foreign policy as the decades old policy continuum towards the Middle East has undermined the national security interests of France. This doctrine’s underpinnings attempted to undermine US primacy in international affairs, as it considered that parity and equilibrium were more apt in cultivating stability in the international order. This approach failed to placate authoritarians and rogue regimes, and France was continually sidelined in the aftermath of these policy implementations.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal, the candidates of the centre-right and Socialists respectively, won the first round of the presidential election on April 22. They both have promised major shifts in France’s stance on the Iranian, Lebanese, and Israeli-Palestinian issues if they are elected on May 6.

The model they are reacting against is that of current President Jacques Chirac, who for 12 years – following in the footsteps of predecessors back to Charles de Gaulle – has allied with the perceived underdogs to US imperialism. Thus France was eager to rally to the support of human rights abusers including Arab dictators such as Yasser Arafat and Saddam Hussein. By making France the Arabs’ favorite Western state, Chirac and other Gaullists have tried to create an alignment to counter the unquestionable - and in France, much-despised - primacy of the United States.

Written before Sarkozy won, obviously, but all the more interesting because Ségolène Royal was part of this, and therefore won’t oppose it when Sarko starts doing it.

Even if you deeply regret this switch, regarding it as one from sanity to madness, you might still agree with me that it is trés important.

Touch wood, fingers crossed, hope to die, blah blah, my internet agonies have abated.  The answer turned out to be to take my “router” (sp?)off of the top of my 400gb external storage device, which was making the router too hot, said my Computer Guru, or maybe, said Michael Jennings, emitting deadly magnetic rays and screwing it up.  Whatever the nature of the contagion, moving the router to a cooler spot, away from the 400gb drive, letting it cool down and then starting it up again seemed to sort out whatever was the difficulty.  So, now, I am reconnected to that Other World which now means so much to so many of us.

Being disconnected from the Internet was a most disagreeable experience, and not at all the opportunity that some speak of such disconnection being, e.g., to venture out and accomplish other things besides, e.g., blogging.  Everything I now do is done with half an eye and ear to the Internet.  Today, for instance, I had it pencilled in that I would ring someone up and Set Up A Meeting.  But how could I do this if it had been necessary during this potentially developing relationship for me to consult some website, or receive some incoming email?  I would have had to confess that I could not now do this.  So, I postponed this business until my connection to the Other World was restored.

It went deeper than that.  I became reluctant even to think.  This was because thinking would have brought with it the possibility of suddenly being seized with the desire to find out about something by googling it, or even to blog about something.  But luckily for me, I have an excellent book on the go, and I was able to revert to an earlier style of intellectual life and self-occupation.  I soaked up a story and its associated ideas and lessons, suppressing any tangential thoughts or questions.. 

Nothing but this today. Michael Jennings is posting this on behalf of Brian so that he can post something today. Michael is resisting the temptation to post something that will ruin Brian’s life.

Incoming:

Brian,

International, professional athlete billion monkeying alert:

here

here

Mark

Outstanding.

That’s this guy, obviously.  And while I was at that second one, I came across this, which is, if anything, even more outstanding.

Adriana on advertising:

The assumption that we are interested in advertising and messages that these people feed us “across all platforms” is still alive and writhing.

Being a good friend of Adriana from way back, it has taken me a while to get my head round the idea that old-school advertising is doomed.  But I am now starting to get this.  Basically, in the old days, they advertised at you, and you said: “I want that!” Now you say: “I want this”, and go looking for it.  Advertising contributes less and less to the story of how we now buy stuff.

My most vivid recent experience of “interruptive advertising” was when a day or two ago I tried to read economist.com.  I did read it, very contentedly, but first I had to “watch” an advert.  What a joke.  I made myself some coffee and just waited for it to finish, meanwhile noting that if I ever wanted to launch a hostile takeover bid I would have known where XYZ bank wanted me to go, had I bothered to note the name of the bank they were plugging.  Luckily for the bank I didn’t get its name and thus acquire a mild dislike and mild contempt for it, and a determination to ignore them when that hostile takeover by me of Microsoft finally gets under way.

More contempt than dislike.  Because I think I did quite well out of this, as did the Economist.  It was the bank that was being separated from its money to little purpose.

Little point, but worth making.  When a TV commercial break ends, during old-school TV, you have to be back at the screen before the adverts end or you’ll miss stuff, which means that in practice you subject yourself to a lot of advertising punch lines, for the sake of not missing anything of that movie you are trying to watch.  But once that Economist commercial has finished, I just get to the Economist premium content page, and I can take as long as I liked making my coffee.  I miss nothing if I ignore the advert completely.  How much and for how long will banks continue to be willing to pay, for “attention” like that?  ("Attention" is one of Adriana’s favourite words.)

The thing is, it’s one thing to show adverts and quite another for anyone to pay any attention to them.  In an old-school world of scarce information – although scarce messages is more accurate - adverts were all part of the scarce message universe that you eagerly scanned to get hold of that even more scarce information that you needed to navigate in the world.

But not any more.  Now, when you want to know something, what are the chances that the next message you encounter about that thing will be an advert?  Far less than of yore.  Of yore, you waited until you saw an advert - or maybe some editorial plug in a newspaper, which is, actually, the same thing - and you grabbed it eagerly, thereby making up that magic percentage number that advertisers drool over, of how many people “responded”.  But now, you immediately put your question to the Internet, and you immediately start getting far higher quality answers than any advert could possibly supply.  Adverts just become a more or less decorative, more or less annoying irrelevance.

Which means that in due course, the Economist is surely going to have a problem.

But I won’t.  I will have no shortage of such stuff to read.  I believe that the blogosphere now fills the gaps left by the old-school media.  As the old-school media, no longer able to rely on advertising revenue, start to collapse, either by just collapsing, or else by collapsing more subtly into a bunch of people no better than bloggers and paid about as much, then good bloggers will, energetically but without any great fuss or fanfare, fill the gaps left by the good old media.  There will probably still be advertising, in among the cracks of the new world, like street hawkers in a world where real business is done indoors.  But old-school advertising will be no more.

And meanwhile, it is writhing.

This Economist piece puts flesh on the bones of the now widely understood idea that mobile phones are good for economic growth:

As phone coverage spread between 1997 and 2000, fishermen started to buy phones and use them to call coastal markets while still at sea. (The area of coverage reaches 20-25km off the coast.) Instead of selling their fish at beach auctions, the fishermen would call around to find the best price. Dividing the coast into three regions, Mr Jensen found that the proportion of fishermen who ventured beyond their home markets to sell their catches jumped from zero to around 35% as soon as coverage became available in each region. At that point, no fish were wasted and the variation in prices fell dramatically. By the end of the study coverage was available in all three regions. Waste had been eliminated and the “law of one price” - the idea that in an efficient market identical goods should cost the same - had come into effect, in the form of a single rate for sardines along the coast.

This more efficient market benefited everyone. Fishermen’s profits rose by 8% on average and consumer prices fell by 4% on average. Higher profits meant the phones typically paid for themselves within two months. And the benefits are enduring, rather than one-off. All of this, says Mr Jensen, shows the importance of the free flow of information to ensure that markets work efficiently. “Information makes markets work, and markets improve welfare,” he concludes.

... and markets improve welfare.  I love the matter-of-fact way he says that.

The thing is, in fishing, mobiles have made a really big difference.  Fish markets are a big deal.  Rotting fish is a big deal and that happens very fast.  Fishermen going from not communicating at all with the shore to communicating pretty much perfectly with the shore is a big deal.  So, although the principle of mobiles helping economically is now routinely understood, this story really underlines it, really well.

How about this for a Taiwanese parliamentary cat fight.  Thank you to the London Paper, and while you’re there Czech out the video of a parliamentary man fight.  (Dog fight?)