My subscription renewal for The Economist finally processed today: £140 for an additional three years. They make it quite a pain to renew as a student, with much mucking about with faxes, phone calls, student cards, and reference numbers. Even so, it definitely beats the standard subscription rate of £99 a year.
The new subscription will expire in June of 2009. There will be a new President in the United States; there will have been at least one more election in Canada; I will have completed my M.Phil and gone on to whatever will be next. There is a certain combination of satisfaction and trepidation that attaches itself to anything projected so far off into the unknown. It’s nice, at the very least, to henceforth be protected from inflation and unexpected losses of student status.
For comparison:
Money expended at Sainsbury’s this fiscal year (ie. since 1 Apr): £449.34
Money expended at Sainsbury’s between arriving in Oxford (23 Sept) and 1 Apr: £490.10
Since I have been here for 280 days now, that works out to £3.35 a day, which covers the great majority of my food consumption.
Another three years of neo-con insanity? Fuckin’ brilliant.
OK, while I work out what Milan means in his “how to comment” comment, three quick rejoinders. First, thanks to whoever it was who gave me the story on Lomborg – I know many people at Aarhus weren’t pleased with him, but couldn’t see how anyway could axe him because of his views – another myth laid to rest. The environmental scientists around this part of the world foam at the mouth at him, largely because he fuels the arguments of those who won’t take science seriously because they don’t want to hear the bad news. Insofar as his arguments suggest that we in the west can carry on in our own merry way – and I have heard him say as much in an interview – he’s encouraging our most selfish, indefensible, and inter-generationally unjust behaviour
Second, I am supported in my view that the US is not at war by no less a person than one of the recently-retired Joint Chiefs of Staff, who predicts no victory unless the country is prepared to give its all. This is precisely my point. I cannot envisage the majority of Americans – or Brits – wanting to “give their all” for this cause, any more than they’d tolerate the complete inspection of all persons and luggage entering the country because it would help with either the war on drugs or the war on terror. But my real point is that the White House cannot be allowed to use the “nation is at war” line to suggest that criticism is unpatriotic, or that members of the juduciary should abandon their oaths office and ignore the seperation of powers.
Finally, of course the SC decision on tribunals was limited, because the legal issue presented to the court was not the legality of Gitmo, etc., but whether it was constitutional for the President to create courts, and, moreover, whether any body under US jurisdiction could, in any circumstances, flout the accepted rules pertaining to the administration of justice.
Good review of a book by ex-Gitmo Brit in the current LRB…
Ian,
I mostly agree about Lomborg, but I think that he has been too frequently criticized on the wrong terms. Notoriously, Scientific American once wrote that even if certain environmental problems are much less severe than they are generally presented as being, we should exaggerate the severity so as to increase the chances of political action. That’s a view some people find justified, but I think that playing politics that way invalidates the special consideration generally given to science and scientists on the basis of expertise and impartiality.
Winning the war on terrorism is obviously impossible, given the way it has been defined. Like any societal scourge, terrorism can be at best reduced to a very low level phenomenon. Arguably, it already is. 3000 people died in the tragedy of September 11th, but ten times that number, at least, die of completely preventable malnutrition daily. One of the greatest costs of this war is the extent to which it distracts energies and attention from other causes.
What is the LRB?
V.K.,
Are you talking about the remainder of the Bush administration (a bit more than two years away) or my subscription renewal?