Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Wednesday

Alex Massie

One Iranian Policy We Should Welcome. And Copy.

Andrew Sullivan is soliciting examples of what one might term The Iran Behind the Headlines. Here's one I blogged about last year. As Alex Tabarrok put it at the time: Only one country in the world has eliminated the shortage of transplant kidneys.  Only one country in the world has legalized financial payments to kidney donors.  That country is Iran. In an important report,nephrologist Benjamin Hippen argues that the Iranian system has saved thousands of lives and it should be used if not as model then to inform America's efforts to eliminate its deadly shortage. Want to solve the organ donor shortage? Learn from Iran and permit donors to be compensated. *NB: This doesn't mean I approve of the Iranian regime or welcome its policies in other areas.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Swimming with Barracuda: The Continued Adventures of Sarah Palin

What next for Sarah Palin? Todd Purdum's Vanity Fair profile is designed to be, as Jason Zengerle puts it, brutal. But, as the Economist's Democracy in America notes, there are times when it also, perhaps unwittingly, makes one feel a little sorry for Governor Palin. Whatever her shortcomings, she wasn't the one who put her into a national race she was ill-prepared to handle and, whatever else may be said about her behaviour on the campaign trail, unattributable sniping from John McCain's advisers should be taken with some salt, not least because it so conveniently absolves McCain of the mistakes that helped doom his campaign. Palin is a useful target for just about everyone these days.

Alex Massie

The Worst President in American History?

Thomas Sowell is a clever fellow who has made important contributions to any number of debates. Alas, he seems to have abandoned the ship of sanity to swim with the loonies. A sad business. A quadrupling of the national debt in just one year and accepting a nuclear-armed sponsor of international terrorism such as Iran are not things from which any country is guaranteed to recover. Just two nuclear bombs were enough to get Japan to surrender in World War II. It is hard to believe that it would take much more than that for the United States of America to surrender — especially with people in control of both the White House and the Congress who were for turning tail and running in Iraq just a couple of years ago.

Alex Massie

At last, some encouraging news on health…

Good news! At least for me. From a list of "Health Myths": 5. Cracking your knuckles will cause arthritis. Knuckle-crackers are no more likely to have arthritis than those who don’t make annoying popping sounds with their fingers. Nice, for once, to come across some good health news. It doesn't happen often... Thanks to Ezra Klein for the heads-up.

Alex Massie

May God Protect Us From the ICC & All Their Improvements…

Not all change is necessarily or automatically regrettable. Even in cricket. Nonetheless, anytime anyone from the ICC talks about future plans you know that something terrible is on th ecards. No surprise then that David Taylor, president of the world's worst governing body, suggests that what we what to see is four day tests and that there's a "need" for day-night test cricket. Never mind that there's absolutely no evidence of any demand for day-night tests, nor that day-night first class cricket was a complete and utter failure when trialled in the Sheffield Shield a few years ago. Nor is there any obvious demand or need for four days tests. True, test matches have not always been played over five days, but back then sides were capable of bowling 110-120 overs a day.

Alex Massie

When Cabinet Ministers Attack Bloggers…

Fraser's most recent post is one of the funniest things I've read this week. Regardless of the detail lurking in the government's numbers, this is the sort of thing that proves that this is a decrepit, exhausted government. Who would have thought that it would all end with cabinet ministers haranguing people about blog posts? And not just once, neither, but five times? Shouldn't a minister of the Crown have better, more important* ways of filling their days? Ed Balls has just called me up about my post from this morning, hopping mad. He instructed me to "take that post down now". I thought he was joking: has there been some change to the constitution where ministers now have power over the media? But he was deadly serious. "You should not call me a liar," said Balls.

Monday

Alex Massie

Immigration & Welfare Reform

Unsurprisingly, Fraser made some sound points in his two recent posts on immigration. But the main lesson, surely, to be drawn from his argument is that the problem lies with British welfare policy rather than British immigration policy? Fix the former and some of the economic concerns about the latter might be reduced. Then again, how much of the anti-immigration argument is actually predicated upon economics? Or, to put it another way, who counts as an immigrant? I rather suspect that there aren't too many people terribly exercised by Australians or Americans or Frenchmen or Irishmen holding down jobs in Britain. Which, if true, would lead one to suppose that the "problem" is not foreigners per se but the wrong kind of foreigner...

Sunday

Alex Massie

Name of the Year

Tamara Lush is a pretty groovy name, you'll agree. But, sadly, not groovy enough to merit entry into the draw for the annual Name of the Year contest, a perennial celebration of the extraodinary variety, vivacity and eccentricity of American names. Controversy abounded in 2009 as, for the second year in succession, the voting public (all 10,000 of them!) disagreed with the Panel of Experts responsible for organising the competition. While the High Committee selected Sacramento's Juvyline Cubangbang as the year's Best in Name, the public voted for a championship show-down between Michigan's Iris Macadangdang and Barkevious Mingo, a football player at Louisiana State University. The winner?

Alex Massie

Wimbledon & Murray’s Progress

Andy Murray serves against Serbia's Victor Troicki in a Men's Singles match in the third round of the 2009 Wimbledon Tennis Championships at the All England Tennis Club. Photo: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images. So that's week one out of the way at Wimbledon and it's a case of so far so good. Not just for Andy Murray but for Roger Federer too and the prospects of the final most people in this country want to see. Partisan considerations aside, the reason one would like to see a Murray-Federer final is that they're the two most interesting players to watch and the two best shot-makers in the game. And, of course, a Murray-Federer final would guarantee a splendid, pleasing result: either a first slam for Murray or Federer's record-breaking 15th. It would be a final with no downside.

Saturday

Alex Massie

Saturday Afternoon Country: California Style

Way back in carefree college days in Dublin, I had a friend who considered Dwight Yoakam one of the great artists of the late twentieth century. Since the glory of country music had yet to be revealed to me, I scoffed at this. Not that I was alone in doing so, mind you. Another friend earned much mockery for his devotion to the late John Denver. The rest of us were all far too sophisticated for all this hillbilly music. How wrong we were. That being so, it's time to take leave Nashville and Texas and take a quick trip to California to pay homage to the west coast strain of country music. Specifically, the Bakersfield sound made famous by the likes of Buck Owens. The purest modern expression of that style is, I think, the splendid Mr Yoakam.

Friday

Alex Massie

A Vital Service for MPs…

Clearly this is the website for MPs. And, er, journalists. Yup, it's Falseexpense.com. Happily, they assure parliamentarians that "We do NOT violate the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act (1981) of England and Wales." Which is a relief... [Via Bruce Schneier.

Alex Massie

Motor City Woe

Michigan native Amy Sullivan on the latest scandal in the Motor City: Monica Conyers, Detroit councilwoman and wife* of House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers, pled guilty today in a bribery case and now faces five years in prison. Conyers is only in her first term on the council, but had already previously made headlines for threatening to shoot a mayoral staffer, [and] accusing then-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick of rigging her office chair to electrocute her... Kilpatrick, of course, is in jail himself these days. A book I'd like to read: a social, industrial, political and cultural history of Detroit, 1920-2009. It's a fascinating, if not melancholy and tragic tale that deserves a proper treatment. Maybe it's been written: can readers recommend any particular history of Detroit?

Alex Massie

The Muslim Menace to Our British Nationality. For Real!

Here's a disturbing report from one of the great institutions of the land: They cannot be assimilated and absorbed into the British race. They remain a people by themselves, segregated by reason of their race, their customs, their traditions and above all by their loyalty to their religion, and are gradually and inevitable dividing Britain, racially, socially and ecclesiastically... Already there is a bitter feeling among the British working classes against the muslim intruders. As the latter increases, and the British people realise the seriousness of the menace to their racial supremacy in their native land, this bitterness will develop into a race antagonism which will have disastrous consequences for Britain.

Thursday

Alex Massie

The Never-Ending Neoconservative War on Soccer

Long-time readers may recall that one of this blog's minor amusements is chronicling the ridiculous extent to which some Americans - mainly, it must be said, on the right - go in their efforts to decry the baleful influence of soccer upon the American ideals of manly sporting excellence. There was, for instance, this example in March, complaining about the insidious impact soccer was having on the culture of suburban America.

Alex Massie

A Desperate Prime Minister’s Desperate Ploy

Although I've long felt that the Unionist parties would have been well-advised to call Alex Salmond's bluff and have an independence referendum as soon as possible (like, er, this year), the notion that Gordon Brown might decide to hold a referendum on Scottish independence the same day as a general election strikes me as a typically Broonian too-clever-by-half wheeze that, upon closer inspection, turns out to be utterly daft. In other words, James Macintyre's story in the New Statesman is sufficiently silly that one cannot immediately discount it. Here's what Macintyre writes: Meanwhile, a separate idea, bold if controversial, is quietly being considered for the same election day: a referendum in Scotland on independence.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

June 24th, 1314: A Good Day for Scotland, a Vital Day for Unionism

Robert Bruce (1274 - 1329), King of Scots from 1306, breaks the handle of his battleaxe as he kills the English knight Sir Henry de Bohun with a blow to the head before the Battle of Bannockburn, June 1314. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images. Mercy, how can one forget that this is the 695th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn? Scottish nationalists, naturally, like to claim the day for themselves and there's an annual (and I suspect, dreary and chippy) nationalist rally at the battlefield but it's not theirs to claim as their exclusive property. Far from it. Because, in the end, Bannockburn was a great Unionist victory too. For without it, there'd have been no Union, merely the Incorporation of Scotland into England.

Alex Massie

The Washington Delusion

In one sense, of course, John McCain is correct to say: "The president saying that we didn't want to be perceived as meddling, is, frankly, not what America's history is all about." And while one may say that, more often than not, the United States has been one of, for want of a less crude way of putting it, the Good Guys even that country's admirers must acknowledge that this has not always or universally been the case. And that has led to problems. It also, frankly, makes one pretty happy that John McCain ain't President.

Alex Massie

Talking Tough on Iran

If you knew that you were likely to be framed by the police, would you go ahead and commit the crime anyway, reasoning that you had nothing to lose? Would that be the sensible thing to do? Then, at trial, suppose you decided that, even though you were innocent of the charges brought against you, it would be sensble to behave in a manner that gave the jury reason to suppose that you might in fact be guilty after all. Would that be a sensible policy? That's the rough-and-ready comparison I'd draw with the question - still vexed, it seems - of how to talk about events in post-election Iran. Plenty of commenters and other folk, such as Tim at Conservative Party Reptile, argue that no-good has come from taking a measured, even softly-softly approach.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Obama’s Miserable Pandering

We'll get back to Iran in due course, but first here's a miserable moment from today's press conference at the White House. Asked by some ghastly hack from McClatchy about his smoking (and the so-called "frustration and fear" that comes from stopping smoking), Barack Obama replied: Look, I've said before that as a former smoker I constantly struggle with it. Have I fallen off the wagon sometimes? Yes. The — am I a daily smoker, a constant smoker? No. I don't do it in front of my kids. I don't do it in front of my family. And, you know, I would say that I am 95 percent cured. But there are times where ... There are times where I mess up. How craven is that? Pretty dire stuff.

Monday

Alex Massie

David Cameron Fails his Persian Exam.

Iain Dale, however, thinks Cameron passed with flying colours. I suppose it was merely a matter of time before the "Why Won't Obama Come to the Aid of the Protestors?" meme spread to this side of the Atlantic and now, courtesy of the good* Mr Dale, it has. And apparently Gordon Brown and David Milliband havel also failed to help the Iranian regime by offering sufficiently forceful denunciations of their behaviour. That's not what Iain wants, but it's what would have happened if the President, Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary had followed his advice. Iain's post is headlined "What Would Thatcher & Reagan Have Done About Iran?