Draw Breath

If there's one lesson that the government will take from the Nice treaty debacle, it's not that they should argue the case for the Lisbon Treaty. After all, with Nice only 8% of voters surveyed declared that they had a good understanding of the Treaty and it can't be much better this time around.

Besides, if they try to argue the facts they will likely end up in a mess. The Treaty is generally an unexiting, obscure and complicated institutional reform so there's nothing inspiring to argue for. More importantly no campaign is hell bent on a misinformation strategy (viz bullshit about article 48 of the treaty, or about corporate taxes etc etc) because they don't have to win the debate (and patently can't on the facts): they simply have to depress turnout. And turnout is the key to understanding why Nice 1 failed: the no vote barely increased from previous referenda but the yes vote collapsed, falling by half from the Amsterdam Treaty.

So what will the Government do, beyond bellowing threats at the electorate? They will run the referendum on the rights of the child on the same day. This element in the strategy was mentioned here, reporting Bertie Ahern's reply to a question by Enda Kenny: "If possible I would like to honour the commitment we made on the children's rights referendum." It's not particularly edifying politics (regarding either Lisbon or the rights of the child) and the politics of ideas it certainly is not, but if the gambit of running multiple referendums achieves its end of producing a high turnout it would be very difficult for the Government to lose.

There was a bizarre feature in yesterday's Guardian on political advertising in Iowa. Nothing particularly controversial about the content, but I was struck by the strange scientific claim behind the piece. The thrust was: Iowans are subject to lots of ads from caucus candidates. No shit. But wait: apparently the Guardian knows this because they "commissioned a survey of a local TV station and found that in one half-hour period eight political ads were aired."

Is it just me but doesn't that read a little bit like: "watched television for half an hour"?

It gets better though. There's a comment on the survey method at the bottom of (the online version of) the article: "Dean Treftz, a reporter with the Daily Iowan, campus paper at the University of Iowa, listed the advertisements broadcast over a 30-minute period on his local TV station." So the first passage, strictly speaking, out to read: "The Guardian got a student to watch TV for half an hour and he wrote down stuff that happened."

Also, the half hour coincided with the early evening news.

High level content analysis indeed.

…is here.

The open road, the freedom afforded by a life of wandering, is much celebrated in every art form. Literature is full of tales of the lure of wandering, either in non-fiction form or in the creations of Swift, Shakespeare, Twain or Jack London In music, the Bruce Springsteen song Further On (Up the Road) perfectly evokes both the uncertainty and the excitement afforded to the traveller.

I have recently finished the book Into the Wild by John Krakaur, the film version of which is playing in cinemas at present (and is certainly worth seeing). Into the Wild tells the story of Chris McCandless who gave up every trapping of civilisation in order to retreat to the wilds of Alaska and live off the land.

In theory, Chris McCandless had everything going for him; a close relationship with his sister (if not his parents), financial security and a keen intellect which was propelling him fairly effortlessly towards whatever career path he desired. However, the more solid the pillars of his life became, the more he felt bound to break free and leave it all behind. The actual catalyst for McCandless’s departure may be explained by the revelation that for the early years of his life his father was continuing to have a relationship with a former wife. Morally repulsed, McCandless’s reaction was to wipe out his own entire previous existence.

Krakaur paints a vivid picture of what life was like for the first two years of McCandless’s adventure. Both the book, and to an extent the film, point to his capability for self-sufficiency and total retreat but also to his capacity for engagement with those strangers he met. This is a recurring irony in the Chris McCandless story.

When his death comes, he is actually not as far away from civilisation as he thinks. An up to date map would have pointed out a number of escape routes close by. All the more heart-breaking is the fact that it is just at this point that he has realised that it is within his desires to live among people again.

Comparisons with Cormac McCarthy’s The Road come to mind when reading Into the Wild. Unlike McCandless, McCarthy’s man is condemned by some cataclysmic event to take to the road with his son. Death stalks them at every turn. Palid greys, duns and blacks are the colours of their surroundings. However, what is important in The Road is not the physical state of the father and son nor their surroundings but rather their own inner strength and the strength of human bonds.

McCarthy’s strongest message is that to have any hope of peace. the inner landscape must be more fertile than physical surroundings, selflessness must be a stronger impulse than regard for oneself. Despite its terror-filled vistas, this is what ultimately renders The Road an epic and Into the Wild a cautionary tale.

One of the hidden shames of the British prosecution of the Iraq war and occupation has been the apparent abandonment of interpreters in Iraq when the army was done with them. It did appear that this had been solved, with the government promising UK refuge to Iraqis who had worked for them during the last few years.

According to today's Times, though, the government might be in the process of drawing back on their (which means: our) promises. For further detail see Dan Hardie's blog. For what you can, and ought to, do if you live in the UK, see here.

Via Crooked Timber. 

Via Twenty Major, I see that St Luke's Cancer Hospital in Dublin is set to close, with services being moved to a radiotherapy centre in the enormous St. James's hospital closer to the city centre. It's a sad thing to see a hospital closed. In my experience it's a common phenomenon that cancer centres are regarded with a seemingly strange level of affection on the part of patients and their families. This, I guess, is largely down to the incredible people in oncology departments who not only administer the technologies of medicine but the massive emotional impact that cancer can have on patients' families (often, in fact, the impact is greater for families than for the patient themselves).

Still, all that said, I think that the move to centralise cancer services is probably the one bright element in the monumental, world-historical, fuck-up that is Irish cancer care (see here, also via Twenty Major, for one example of how bad things are).

Cancer services are best provided in a centralised manner for two reasons. First, oncology is very very expensive (and set to get more so), so it's simply easier and more effective to pool resources than it is to have a radiology machine here and another one there etc. And it's better to have lots of experts in one place than to have them either dotted around the country or (as also happens) driving from hospital to hospital. Second, and I don't think people consider this very often, people with cancer tend to end up needing all sorts of other services – CT scans, dermatologists, pain management, kidney stuff and so on. If you don't have the resident expert or technology at your own small hospital, you're going to have to bundled at great discomfort and expense into an ambulance to be ferried to the scan or whatever. That is just not a good thing.

Given all this, while the Irish health services is an almost criminal disaster from end to end, I just can't bring myself to feel regret at the concentration of cancer services in Ireland. It's sad that St. Lukes will close, but it will probably make the lives of cancer patients (those who have got in the door anyway) just a little bit easier and, perhaps, a little bit longer.

I see that Conrad Black has been sentenced to six years in the slammer. Corporate fraud trials tend to be very complicated things indeed, so there's no use simply assuming that Black robbed the company silver, at least in an obvious way, though he was certainly recorded removing delicate files from his office when he discovered he was under investigation.

Anyway, Richard Finlay an excellent essay on the real-life space opera villain that is Conrad Black over on his blog. Also, you might want to check his comments on subprime out while you're over there.

The San Francisco Chronicle has a depressing piece on the proposed solution to the sub-prime crisis. It makes a gloomy companion piece to this article from the FT in August, outlining the various frauds (criminal and not) surrounding this shoddy saga.

Unlike the Enron debacle, if this one shakes out into a full-blown crisis (as it well might), there'll be no getting away from systematic failures of surveillance, governance and the like. Or to mix a couple of metaphors, when there are more bad apples than good, you start thinking that something's wrong with the basket (hat tip to Meditations71 for passing on the SF Chronicle article).

There's a strange debate going on at the moment over the US Army's Counterinsurgency Field Manual (pdf). One Ralph Peters objects to its (as he sees it) over-emphasis on politics, while Dave Dilegge responds by taking issue with various parts of Peters's analysis (hat-tip Mark Grimsley).

I'm certainly not qualified to comment on any of these debates in depth, although I do object to Peters's misconception that we academics only cite examples that support our arguments. We undergo a peer-review process specifically so that we can't do that. Anyway, I have a feeling that Peters also misunderstands the 20:80 military-political ratio cited in the report. He says that progress can't be made without squashing the more unruly of the natives (perhaps that's just a little bit of a misrepresentation). So, he concludes the military aspect of counter-insurgency is far more important than the ratio gives it credit for.

Perhaps Peters ought to have a peek at the British Army's report (pdf, with thanks to Will Crawley for the link) on Operation Banner. As I recall, one very significant aspect of this report is the army's (revisionist perhaps) self-conception of holding the line and containing the violence until politics could actually kick in and resolve the problems. I suspect that that – not some totting up of various actions on a war-war/jaw-jaw balance sheet – is what the 20:80 conception refers to.

Draw Breath's resident bloggers were belting out the tunes at the very pleasant Queen's University Annual Carol Service in the Great Hall last night. Maybe it's just me, but I got a real sense that religious types are trying to capture the Christmas message for their own purposes this year. Most sinister. And bad for the economy.