Alex Massie

This is, I'm pretty certain, just the usual sort of publicity-whoring nonsense but, just in case it comes to anything, we'd have a new winner in the Worst, Most Ludicrous Presidential Candidate Ever stakes: Let’s get one thing straight: Donald Trump doesn’t want to run for president. Honestly, he doesn’t. Not interested. But because the country is in such dire straits, he says, the business tycoon and perennial publicity hound just might have no choice. The country needs him. “For the first time really would think about it. And I am thinking about it. It doesn’t mean I want to do it. I’d prefer not doing it. I’m having a lot of fun doing what I’m doing. It’s a great time to be buying things.

Many thanks to Brother Bright for pointing me towards this completely charming British Council film about cricket. It's narrated by Ralph Richardson and John Arlott and features the 1948 Lords Test - Bradman's last appearance on the ground. The thing that's striking is that while everything has changed, the essentials remain much the same. In that respect then, like monarchy, cricket is close to the epitome of a certain kind of English conservatism. For more terrific films from the 1940s and 50s, digitised and made accessible in part thanks to Martin's New Deal of the Mind, pop over here.

Is, as someone suggested recently, to be either a dumb person's idea of a clever person or a clever person's idea of a dumb person. Or both. Perhaps the worst paragraph written this year comes, not surprisingly, from America's chief metaphor-mangler Thomas Friedman: More than ever, America today reminds me of a working couple where the husband has just lost his job, they have two kids in junior high school, a mortgage and they’re maxed out on their credit cards. On top of it all, they recently agreed to take in their troubled cousin, Kabul, who just can’t get his act together and keeps bouncing from relative to relative. Meanwhile, their Indian nanny, who traded room and board for baby-sitting, just got accepted to M.I.T.

That's the question asked by David Lammy and the Guardian today. According to the paper 21 Oxford and Cambridge colleges made no offers to black, British students last year. At Oxford just one student of self-described "Black Caribbean" background won a place. Only 35 applied. The headline figures are pretty terrible and enough to give anyone pause. But they are only headline figures. Virtual Economics argues that they don't tell the full story, not least because the sample sizes are often so small. He has a point: if just 35 Black Caribbean students applied to Oxford last year that's not much more than one per college. I'm not sure this is a large enough sample from which to draw too-firm conclusions.

There are only three things wrong with this Australian side. They can't bat, they can't bowl and they can't field. A harsh verdict and one that may need to be revised before the end of the series, but one that's an accurate appraisal of Australia's most recent efforts. This is a good but hardly great England side. It ain't Jack Hobbs and Wally Hammond hammering these hapless Aussie bowlers but Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott... "There's only one side playing cricket out there - and it's not Australia" said a commentator on Test Match Sofa* which is the kind of deliciously piquant assessment England supporters have been waiting to dish out for  25 years. Not since 1985 has an Australian side looked so helpless.

In California: Hours before their special news conference today, the cat is out of the bag: NASA has discovered a completely new life form that doesn’t share the biological building blocks of anything currently living in planet Earth. This changes everything. At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same. But not this one. This one is completely different.

On this, at least, there is consensus: devolution has proved a disappointment. How could it be otherwise when the Scottish parliament was granted power without responsibility? A parliament that may spend but cannot raise money is but half a parliament. Politicians like spending even more than they like taxing; removing that latter part of the deal leaves the equation unbalanced. It encourages the attitude that more money is the answer to every public policy problem and, in Scotland, has reinforced an already distressingly statist consensus. Yesterday's Scotland Bill, then, is a modest step forward. The proposals, based on the Calman Commission's recommendations, are needlessly complex and, in places, batty but they may be thought better than nothing and an advance on a failed status quo.

Move over Peter King, you've been trumped: Former ambassador John Bolton tells National Review Online that he would charge Pfc. Bradley Manning with treason for sharing U.S. intelligence with Wikileaks. “I believe treason is still punishable by death and if he were found guilty, I would do it,” Bolton says. Bolton is a reporter's friend: he always returns phone calls. Even for this entertainer however, I'd say this is going a little far. At least Bolton recognises that if there's "treason" about it's Pfc Manning who will face the charge. Other people, by contrast, appear to believe that Wikileaks and Julian Assange are engaged in treasonous behaviour even though Assange is not, um, an American citizen.