Message to youth: Why you need a Tea Party

The BBC has allowed the fox in the chicken coop by inviting historian Niall Ferguson to give this year’s Reith Lectures.

A conservative by nature and learning, Ferguson is noted for his many historical works and TV programmes, such as The Ascent of Money. His lectures pick up last week’s Insight theme that publicly funded news services, such as the BBC, should not be used as vehicles to promote views of other taxpayer-funded organisations urging more government spending.

This was emphasised to me by a UK reader of this Insight, though in his first lecture Ferguson focuses on the evil of politicians borrowing for current generations at the expense of future ones.

Ferguson finds it worrying that young people, who are inclined to support Labour or the Green parties, are their own victims in the making by demanding such borrowing.

In a nutshell, Scottish-born Ferguson,  who now teaches at Harvard, says the young find it quite hard to compute their own long-term economic interests:

It is surprisingly easy to win the support of young voters for policies which would ultimately make matters even worse for them, such as maintaining defined benefit pensions for public employees. If young Americans knew what was good for them, they would all be in the Tea Party.

Apart from a brilliant lecture, the BBC’s transcript has the full Q&A session at the end. One question relates to the Occupy Movement which

became tremendously exciting to young people to explain the distributional conflicts of our time in terms of percentiles and so implausibly we had people proclaiming themselves to be members of the 99% and hurling abuse at members of the one per cent.

Ferguson goes on to explain the long view of history:

The debt is a symptom of something much more profound that’s wrong with representative government, and what’s wrong – and this I think is really the point – is that decision-making has ceased to have any reference whatsoever to the notion of Burke’s contract between the generations.

…I think the debt is just a symptom of a chronic inability to take difficult decisions in the present when it is so much easier to pass the cheque to a future generation that isn’t represented. And that’s the point: the young aren’t represented and the unborn for sure aren’t represented.

Egypt’s accidental president
I spent last weekend in Dunedin, where I heard the Reith lecture on the local access FM station, which broadcasts the BBC World Service each morning until 8am. But my primary purpose was to attend the Otago Foreign Policy School.

There’s no room here to summarise the excellent sessions on all aspects of the Middle East. But it was highly topical, given the Syrian’s shooting down a Turkish jet, Hamas continuing to bomb Israel without any complaint from world bodies, and the election of Mohammed Morsi as Egypt's new president.

Some of the best commentaries were in The National, a relatively new English-language daily newspaper established in Abu Dhabi and which is an oasis in the Gulf’s dismal media offering.

Issandr El Amrani describes Morsi as an “accidental” president,

who spent his election campaign being derided as "the spare tyre" – a reference to his being the backup choice to the Muslim Brotherhood strongman Khairat Al Shater. As he trailed in the polls until a week before elections began, many said he had no charisma and would have a hard time making it to the second round of elections. But Mr Morsi had the last laugh.

Also in The National, Bradley Hope says Morsi has been handed a “poisoned chalice”

by gaining the public responsibility for Egypt's path to stability and prosperity without the executive powers to make meaningful changes. "The deck is stacked against him, but I certainly don't think it will stay that way," said Eric Trager, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who is in Cairo. "Even if he doesn't have formal power for awhile – and I don't think that will last long æ he'll still be able to use the bully pulpit in a very influential way."

Anti-oil rig activists kill fish
The perverse hatred of the Greens and their allies toward oil drilling rigs has formed an unsual conservation movement which wants to retain them even after they have become redundant.

About 650 unused oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico are slated for demolition by a US government edict. But, as a New York Times reporter explains,  these rigs now support boundless sea life where none before existed:

Schools of jack and snapper, solitary grouper and barracuda circle in its shadows. Dive boats periodically stop at the enormous structure, where dolphins, sea turtles and sharks are often spotted.

Now, 30 years after it was built and months after it was abandoned, it is set to be demolished under Interior Department rules governing non-producing ocean structures. And when it goes, the lush ecosystem that has grown around it will also vanish. There are now about 650 such oil and gas industry relics, known as idle iron, that may meet this fate.

The federal government’s own estimates are that the blasts needed to remove just one platform would kill 800 fish, although others who have observed the process put the number in the thousands. A typical four-legged platform becomes the equivalent of two to three acres of habitat, these scientists say.

Greg Stuntz, of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University Corpus Christi, says:

"These structures attract marine life that normally wouldn't use the area. Much is growing on them, from corals up to marine mammals."

Campaigners to retain the rigs as “reefs” range from the Gulf of Mexico Fishery Management Council to Texas Governor Rick Perry and a coalition of seven recreational angling organisations, including the Coastal Conservation Association.

Super powers chase medals
A month before the opening of the London Olympics, Xinhua News Agency is already bragging that China will top the gold medals table ahead of the US.

A Xinhua editorial sets out in precise terms where China can expect to win gold medals, and predicts it can win at least 37. At the Beijing Olympics, China won 51 gold medals, the US came second with 36.

The US had the bigger medal haul overall with110 to China’s 100.

I couldn’t find a link in English to the editorial but in a May report from Nairobi, a Xinhua reporter spells out the method:

Since finishing third in the medals table at the 2000 Sydney Games, China went back to the drawing board and adopted 'Project 119' which basically looked at the number of medals available in each discipline and devised a way of wining the maximum from them.

In Beijing, China reaped its harvest of gold mainly from its traditional strongholds of weightlifting (8), diving (7), gymnastics (9), and shooting (5). It also reaped its first gold medals in boxing, archery, rowing, sailing and trampoline. There was also a surprise gold in fencing in the men's individual sabre, China's first in 24 years.

Accountancy firm Pricewaterhouse Coopers has also crunched the numbers (use attachment below), coming up with the US winning a total of 113 medals to China’s 87. Russia is third with 68 and the host country, boosted by a “home advantage” boosting its tally by seven to 54.