A Nobel Wheeze

In a recent The Rest Is Politics Alastair Campbell made a suggesion that I suspect wasn't entirely serious. It seems to me though that it deserves serious consideration.

<RS-style-interruption> 

Habitués of The Rest Is Politics will be familiar with the frequent interruptions made by Rory Stewart when  Alastair Campbell jumps in in medias res (as Rory might put it).

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Stewart doesn't always manage to keep Campbell in check. A recent example of a misinterpretation that he didn't forestall involved a bit of proof-reading jargon. In a recent podcast Alastair Campbell seemed to be talking about someone called 'Elsie Conservative'. He was halfway through the next sentence  before I realized that he had said '(l.c.) conservative'. Until my short spell working at OUP in the early 1980s I hadn't met the abbreviation 'l.c.' (=lower case), and I've never before heard 'small-c conservative' rendered in this way.

</tangent>

This is what Wikipedia says about USAID: 

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created to provide foreign aid, disaster relief, and economic development.^[4] Established in 1961 during the Cold War by President John F. Kennedy, USAID was designed to counter the Soviet Union through the use of soft power across the world. In 1998, USAID was reorganized by Congress as an independent agency.

With average annual disbursements of about $23 billion from 2001 to 2024, USAID had missions in over 100 countries, in areas as diverse as education, global health, environmental protection, and democratic governance. An estimated 91.8 million deaths, including 30.4 million among children younger than five years old, were likely prevented by USAID funding between 2001 and 2021.... 

On January 24, 2025 President Donald Trump ordered a near-total freeze on all foreign aid.  In February, the administration placed most employees on administrative leave. The absence of authorization from Congress led to lawsuits against the Trump administration.Also in February, the administration made several allegations of wasteful spending and fraud, allegations which were generally reported [HD: sic; many observers would prefer 'found'] to be false.

Several days later, Secretary of State Marco Rubio issued a waiver for humanitarian aid. However, a key issue developed over whether the waivers for lifesaving aid were actually translating into aid flowing. Despite the waiver, there was still much confusion about what agencies should do. More than 1,000 USAID employees and contractors were fired or furloughed following the near-total freeze on U.S. global assistance that the second Trump  administration implemented.

On January 27, 2025, the agency's official government website was shut down. 

<HD-update> 
Generally I've removed footnote references from that Wikipedia entry, as they wouldn't work  without a lot of recoding. But one footnote points to this Impact Metrics Dashboard (and at time of blogpost, the most recent upate was on 26 June). If, in a Wikipedia-esque sort of way, you think 'NEEDS CITATION', you know where to look.

<inline-ps>
Another footnote cites this report from the National Library of Medicime. whose title says it all:  Evaluating the impact of two decades of USAID interventions and projecting the effects of defunding on mortality up to 2030: a retrospective impact evaluation and forecasting analysis

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</HD-update>

</RS-style-interruption> 

 Alastair Campbell's idea is in two steps:

1. Nominate USAID for the Peace Prize.
2. Invite Trump to receive it on their  behalf, given that they have been disbanded.
   
   
   

I'm afraid that 2 is unlikely to happen, for  diplomatic reasons. Besides, Trump wouldn't accept. But I think the first step is worth considering. The criteria for those qualified to make nominations, according to  the Peace Prize criteria for nominators  include:

• Members of national assemblies and national governments (cabinet members/ministers) of sovereign states as well as current heads of state...

and

University professors, professors emeriti and associate professors of history, social sciences, law, philosophy, theology, and religion; university rectors and university directors (or their equivalents)... 

So most citizens of the free world  could ask a member of a national assembly to do it, and any suitably qualified academic could do it. I'm sure there must be dozens of Harvard staff who would happily join in.

It's not uncommon for  the Peace Prize to be awarded to an institution. The only drawback I can see is that the Nobel Committee might invoke the No Posthumous Prizes rule, which I thought had been invented off the cuff by a misogynist to justify the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin from Crick and Watson's prize. And as the earliest date for the award would be 2026 USAID will by then be well and truly defunct.

That's enough for today.

b

Update: 2025.08.26.20:15 – Added <inline-ps />

What do you do with a foot?

I first heard the expression 'step foot' 20 or 30 years ago, when I dismissed it as a one-off mistake; or maybe, as I was working at the time in a US-based company, I imagined it was a feature of American English (AE). But I've been hearing it more and more, and have finally looked at a Google Ngram that compares the two.

The expression 'step foot' made a negligible impression until the early 1990s

<autobiographical-note>
I'm reading at the moment a novel set in the time of Henry (Tom Jones etc.)
Fielding:  

The 'guilty' novel

The 'guilty' novel

It would be ridiculous to expect a modern novelist to write all the dialogue in a historical novel cast in the vernacular of the day; without linguistic anachronisms it would simply be unintelligible. But I don't think I have ever seen this phrase in print, and I had only just seen this Google Ngram (or maybe, now I think of it, the fact of my interest in the expression made me notice somethng I'd been seeing for years but not paying attention to).

Anyway, for whatever reason, I did notice when an eighteenth-century character used a late-twentieth century speech form.
</autobiographical-note>

But that Google Ngram lumps together by default all English appearances of the queried text, from Google Books in general. It is possible though to narrow it down to AE or BE.

<tangent>
...but not Australian English or South African English, or....Besides, what does 'AE' mean? Does it include Canadian English, or ia 'A' just an abbreviation for 'USA'? And besides,  how can a Google Books title refer to any particular geography? Does 'BE' include Indian English and all those other Englishes that publsher's rights contracts refer to as relating to the 'traditional British Commonwealth' (or did when I last had to deal with such things, in the early 1980s)?

So many questions, so little time...
<tangent>

And AE, as usual, takes the lead in the evolition of English:

The 'step foot' line begins to heave itself up off the x-axis as early as the 1980s. By contrast, in BE that line shows no significant sign of life until the mid-late noughties, when in AE it had been growing increasingly strong for 30-odd years. And whereas in AE 'set foot' outnumbers 'step foot' about 10:1 in BE the number is more like 15:1; give it a few years though. 

(I'll never use the arriviste 'step foot', but my grandchildren may. Speaking of which, as I'll be seeing them all tomorrow, there are things I should be getting ready....)

b

 

Infamy at Deef Castle

 MrsK and I began (and decided not to continue with  the other seven parts of ...) The Count of Monte Cristo (the new one on U & Drama) the other night. The Radio Times had praised it for its faithfulness to Dumas' original, but we should have known that 'faithfulness to the original' can (but needn't...

<exception>
(as is demonstrated by the BBC's 1964 version starring Alan Badel...

<autobiographical-note>
{which I remember watching [but not following or sticking  with] as a recently-turned 13-year-old; its mournful theme tune [which in my mind's ear I hear  as featuring a horn solo, though at that age I wouldn't have recognized the instrument, and it may be a figment of my imagination] didn't promise the sort of derring-do that might have held my attention at the time] and the names were all pronounced in a funny way [Badel pronounced his sweetheart à la française – stress on the last syllable – /mɛrse'dɛz/ : this clashed with my own understanding, honed as it was by my recent exposure to I Spy On the Road – I knew how to pronounce Mercedes (odd name for a woman though, I thought at the time)].

</autobiographical-note>

The IMDb page for the 1964 Count of Monte Cristo has many reviews (20 at time of going to press), all of which rate it very highly (and several of them mention faithfulness to the text – although at 12 x 25 mins it's shorter than the new one.)
</exception>

...) can lead to an adaptation that to quote the review in last Sarurday's Times ...

<parenthesis>
(that's The Times, known in some parts of thr world as 'the London Times', but more memorably [at the time of the move from Fleet Street] as 'The Wapping Liar')
</parenthesis>

...is 'clunky'. The characters  are two-dimensional, the plot is advanced not by the action but by the stilted dialogue, and to make suspension of disbelief even  less possible the foreign names are treated to the most ridiculous of San Ferry Ann pronunciations. The Château d'If is a lot less intimidating as the ' Castle d'If'; we should be  grateful, I suppose, that it's not 'Deef Castle'. One of its inmates is promised to be Jeremy Irons, which might make it more watchable; but he didn't appear in episode one so we'll have to give him a miss.

l'Envoi

I usually enjoy The Rest Is Politics (both Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart's original and the US spinoff with Katty Kay and  Anthony ('the Mooch') Scaramucci (more robust than the Beeb's Americast), but recently they've been spoiled for me by the ads for HP, which offer a special TRIP discount. I don't want the discount; as an ex-employee I already get one. Rather than giving out discounts I'd prefer them to treat their older pensioners with a modicum of decency.

<administrative-background general- interest="nugatory">
By a quirk of UK pensions law, Defined Benefit pensions (the good sort, which most people don't get any more), if earned before 1997, are treated differently than pensions earned more recently. While recent pensions are legally required to be kept at a more-or-less steady value by annual increments, pensions earned before 1997 attract  'discretionary' increases (i.e. in practice, courtesy of HP, in the UK [though not in the USA, or anywhere  else for that matter]  more often than not, nothing). As an example, the first ⅔  of my service (1984-1997), earns less (or barely more – life's too short to do the sums – what do you take me for, obsessional?) than the final ⅓ (1098-2004) , because the more recently earned pension has kept pace with inflation while the earlier period's earnings have increased, over more than 20 years, by a single figure percentage.

This is immoral, and I would think barely legal, as it constitutes discrimination on grounds of age. I am far from being on my uppers, but I'm much less well-off than HP pensioners in other parts of the world. So the HP  ads  rankle. Bitter? Moi?                                                               

 <tangent>
If you're really interested in this pre '97 stuff, you could start with this Lexology page

<inline-PS>
For a graphic explanation of this injustice, with particular reference to HP, see here.
</inline-PS

</tangent> 

</administrative-background>

I'm missing the cricket again, so finita la commedia.

b

Update: 2025.08.16.17.40 – Added <inline-PS />