Freeborn John

Blog move

2010-03-11T12:11:00.001Z

Now here: http://www.peterrisdon.com/blog/.

Cognitive dissonance

2010-03-02T09:59:00.002Z

Mine, this time.

Political Betting suggests that opinion poll success depends on parties being in the news; recent Tory poll setbacks have been the consequence of a period of news dominance by the Labour Party.

This suggests that the more the public sees of a given group of politicians, the more they like them.

I'm reeling.

Broadband issues

2010-02-26T15:57:00.003Z

Screenwriting software nowadays includes some very nice structures for collaboration online. So, there I was this morning, collaborating away in a scheduled work session with someone involved in a project I'm working on, when everything stopped functioning. I opened a web browser and saw a message from British Telecom.

My most recent BT broadband bill was issued on the 11th Feb, about two weeks ago. The screen I was looking at told me the service was suspended to show me a warning that the bill was about to go red. There was a link for me to click to acknowledge this, after which the broadband would be restored.

Great. Scheduled work session screwed.

I called BT and asked if this is a new system. Yes, it is. The woman explained that if customers didn't respond to the email they were sent, saying the bill is about to go red, then this online suspension/warning happens automatically.

I had received no email. What address was it sent to? The btconnect one they issued me years ago. In those years, I have called them at least ten times to explain I don't want their lousy email address and I have my own domain. Each time, they sent mail to my domain for a while, then reverted to the btconnect address. I don't even know what the address is any more.

So. My service switches to a new broadband supplier in ten days. And the voice line goes with it.

Rape - a case study

2010-02-26T11:52:00.003Z

This has just happened to someone I know, slightly.

Less than two months into his marriage to a Turkish woman, this man was accused by her of rape. They were living in a shared flat (both in mid-twenties) and the evening of the alleged attack, after the alleged attack, she was sitting happily with her husband and their house mates, chatting until bed time. She went to bed with her husband, who had allegedly raped her earlier, made him breakfast in the morning, again interacting with housemates perfectly happily, then she disappeared, as it turned out going to the local police station to make a complaint.

About a week before making this complaint, the woman had discovered that her application for permanent residency here would be fast-tracked if she was thought to be the victim of domestic abuse. The marriage itself had been fast-tracked because she had visa problems and she needed it to stay in this country.

So, after interviewing everyone, the police knew that the woman had a motive for making a false allegation, that it had taken her 12 hours from the alleged attack to report it, during which time she was with her alleged attacker and others, happy and laughing, and that between the time of the alleged attack and the complaint she had slept with her husband without any alleged coercion and eaten two meals with him. There was no physical evidence of rape.

The police charged the man with rape.

Then the husband withdrew his support for the woman's current visa application.

She called him, it was all a mistake, she hadn't meant it, didn't know why she had spoken to the police, would withdraw her complaint. This and half a dozen other calls were recorded by the husband. She followed him around, went to his house, slept with him repeatedly, promised to withdraw the complaint - all these things entirely of her own initiative. I think he was unwise to sleep with her under these circumstances, but she is extremely good looking and he is besotted.

The police were notified that all these things had happened. The CPS decided to proceed anyway and he had to attend court and enter a plea.

Then the woman withdrew her complaint. The case has had to be withdrawn. In my view, if the alleged offence had been anything other than rape, no charges would have been brought. As it stands, I suspect that because he had actually appeared in court, this will count as a "failed" prosecution.

There might be other problems with the legal handling of rape cases, but over-prosecution is one reason why the conviction rates are low. As an ex-policeman explained it to me, nobody wants to be accused of failing to take rape seriously. The police pass the buck, to the CPS, by referring flimsy cases to them. The CPS passes the buck to the courts, and the courts then have to acquit in situations where no prosecution should ever have been brought. Then the courts get blamed for this apparently high acquittal rate.

In this case, there might also be an example of the Law of Unforeseen Consequences. Fast-tracking residency claims for abused women of foreign origin who find themselves in abusive marriages here, dependent on the abusive husband for their visa, is an excellent idea, in principle. Where people do not freely choose their own spouses, for cultural reasons, this might be a problem that requires action. But the unforeseen consequence of the action that has actually been taken, the fast-tracking of residency applications, is that it has created an incentive for false claims of abuse.

New hockey stick graph

2010-02-26T06:47:00.003Z

Click image to see full size.

By Zombie

Mildly interesting

2010-02-25T20:17:00.002Z

Ever tried to open a local file in Google Chrome? Eh? I fell back to Firefox.

The mandatory Darius Guppy post

2010-02-25T19:01:00.002Z

Now, I see Guppy has been in The Telegraph. The thing is, um... that is... eyes feel heavy... I ...


    rtyuio
   dfghjkl;
    cvbnm,

Hmmm? What? Ah. Sorry. I must have dozed off and fallen face first into the keyboard.

© P. J. O'Rourke

Fettered democracy

2010-02-25T18:12:00.001Z

Good post from Squander Two. Two related points from it:

I'm all for constraining democracy within awkward undemocratic boundaries, as, for instance, the USA's system does. Imagine how much better British governance could be if the Deputy Prime Minister were always the Leader of the Opposition and the Prime Minister were forced to work with him.)

And, possibly more tongue-in-cheek:

Anyway, the whole point of the Northern Ireland Assembly is that the views of all Northern Ireland's political factions are represented, to encourage them to get involved in democratic politics rather than terrorism. So, by its very definition, the Assembly is supposed to contain at least one member who approves of this bombing. When every member of the Assembly condemns this attack, what that demonstrates is that they've set up the Assembly wrong.

The view from UEA

2010-02-25T18:03:00.002Z

According to The Telegraph:

In a submission to Parliament's Science and Technology Committee, which is investigating the disclosure of climate data from the unit, the university said it ''strongly rejected'' accusations that it had manipulated or selected figures to exaggerate global warming.

The university also denied suggestions that it had breached Freedom of Information rules by refusing to release raw data.

And it insisted the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had not lost any primary data gathered from monitoring stations around the world.

According to the submission, allegations that scientists hid flaws and research findings were the result of misunderstandings of technical jargon or statistical analysis.

On the other hand, I have been contacted by someone in the University, who tells me of a lecturer there in a scientific discipline, who told her students "that there were now nearly 50 people employed by the CRU (up from 5 or 6 10-15 years ago) and that, for them denying climate change would be like turkeys voting for christmas."

My source added: "There seems to be a general scepticism among students... I think UEA on the whole is standing by the "we did nothing wrong" line."

"We" being those staff not employed by the CRU.

I think it's unlikely that the UEA will throw the CRU under the bus, but less unlikely than it seemed before I received that communication.

If anyone finds this googling and has anything to add, I do preserve anonymity of sources.

Keeping in touch with customers using SMS

2010-02-18T15:50:00.002Z

My replacement mobile broadband modem arrived today, which is nice. An hour later, I received a text from the supplier, telling me that the replacement modem was now ready for despatch and would be with me in 3 to 5 days. A few minutes after that, another text told me they had received the faulty modem, which is sitting on my windowsill waiting to be posted, and giving me a url where I can track the repair.

Avient Air in Venezuela

2010-02-17T12:54:00.003Z

The above photograph was taken in Venezuela yesterday. It shows a McDonnell Douglas MD11 coming in to land at Barcelona airport. The livery is that of Avient Air.

Avient is a controversial company. Based in Wiltshire and run by former British Army officer Andrew Smith, their activities in Africa were highlighted by Amnesty in 2003 here:

In the government-controlled area of DRC , the UN found that a mining company, Oryx Natural Resources, had a close working relationship with Avient Air, a military company which supplies services and equipment to the Zimbabwean and DRC military.
The UN found a record of a payment in September 2001 of US$35,000 from the Oryx account at Banque Belgolaise to Avient Ltd., Avient Air’s sister company based in the United Kingdom.
In April 2002, Avient Air brokered the sale of six attack helicopters to the DRC government. Under the management of a former British army captain, Avient Air had been contracted to organize bombing raids into eastern DRC in 1999 and 2000. At the same time Avient Air organized logistics and transportation of mining equipment for Sengamines – a partly Zimbabwean-owned venture which is closely associated with the Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF) and in which Oryx Natural Resources is a shareholder – and was granted exclusive rights to two of DRC’s richest diamond concessions in 1999 by the then DRC President, Laurent-Désiré Kabila.

And here:

Another example is the Zimbabwean company, Avient, with management links to the UK, which was reported to have hired Russian aircraft and air crew to support the government of Laurent Kabila in the Congo with “air drops”, and also admitted to repairing and maintaining Russian MIG fighters for the Kabila regime.
[...]
In October 2002, a report of the United Nations Security Council accused two UK residents, John Bredenkamp and Andrew Smith, of illegally providing services and military equipment to the Zimbabwean Defence Force (ZDF) for use in the DRC. The UN said that Bredenkamp, a Zimbabwean businessman and one of the richest people in the UK,217with a personal fortune estimated at £720 million, was breaching EU and British sanctions against Zimbabwe through his arms brokering company Aviation Consultancy Services (ACS), in which he holds an active investment.218

ACS had offices in South Africa, Zimbabwe and the UK, and has worked with Smith’s company Avient Air. According to the UN, ACS has acted as a representative for major European arms contractors such as Agusta of Italy and BAE Systems of the UK. In the early 1980s, BAE supplied 12 Hawk jets to the Zimbabwe Defence Force (ZDF). But the UK and the EU respectively imposed an arms embargo on the country in May 2000 and February 2002. Contrary to those arms embargoes, the UN Report alleged that BAE spare parts for the ZDF Hawk jets, worth $3 million, were supplied by ACS in 2002. In addition, the UN obtained copies of invoices from Raceview Enterprises, a company controlled by Bredenkamp, for deliveries worth $3.5 million of camouflage cloth, batteries, fuels and lubricating oil, boots and rations.

And subsequently in a number of questions in the Lords in 2003:

The Lord Avebury—To ask Her Majesty’s Government what response they have made to the allegations against a United Kingdom-based company, Avient Limited, in Annex 3 of the initial United Nations Expert Panel report on the Illegal Exploitation of Natural Resources and Other Forms of Wealth in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, published in October 2002. [FCO] (HL4881)

The Lord Avebury—To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they had prior knowledge of contracts between the United Kingdom-based company, Avient Limited, and the governments of Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo to supply military services, as claimed by Mr Andrew Smith, a director of the company. [FCO] (HL4882)

The Lord Avebury—To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will give the dates and subjects of discussions between representatives of the United Kingdom-based company Avient Limited and the United Kingdom High Commission in Harare. [FCO] (HL4883)

The Lord Avebury—To ask Her Majesty’s Government when they informed Rights and Accountability in Development and its Congolese partner, Action contre l’impunité pour les droits humains, that they had been accepted as complainants against the United Kingdom-based company, Avient Ltd, in respect of alleged violations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s guidelines for multinational enterprises. [FCO] (HL4924)

The Lord Avebury—To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will give further details of the operations by an MI 24 attack helicopter in the Democratic Republic of Congo, said by the United Kingdom-based company Avient Limited to have been involved in the relief of isolated places; and what steps were taken by the National Contact Point for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Guidelines to obtain independent corroboration of the company’s account of the use made of this machine. [FCO] (HL4980)

A report in 2006, in the Sunday Times, added detail:

Under a crewing agreement [Andrew] Smith had signed with General Joseph Kabila, the future president of the Congo, on September 21, 1999, Avient undertook to provide aircrew who would “operate along and behind the enemy lines in support of ground troops and against the invading forces”.

Pelham claims he found that Ukrainian and Russian aircrews recruited by Avient on behalf of the Congolese airforce were flying blanket bombing raids that in all probability were killing and maiming civilians caught in the war zone thousands of feet below.

Rudimentary bombs made from industrial gas cylinders filled with TNT were being rolled out of the backs of giant Antonov transport aircraft flown at high altitude in indiscriminate raids, according to Pelham.

The crewing agreement signed by Smith and Kabila noted that Avient was acting as an “intermediary to facilitate the supply” of aircrew and said the company could not be held accountable for the individual performance of crew members.

Pelham says that the reality was different. He alleges that Avient was providing crews for aircraft involved in military activities, including Antonovs and an MI-24 attack helicopter gunship, and that Smith knew what they were doing.

In 2008, Avient was accused of helping import Chinese arms into Zimbabwe. There was a fascinating comments thread at This is Zimbabwe at the time. Scroll down to comment 29 and later.

The earlier allegations against Avient were investigated (.doc) by the DTI, as it was at the time, and rejected after the UN failed to offer any evidence.

I emailed Avient to ask what one of their planes was doing in Venezuela and, after complying with a request that I supply my home address and telephone numbers to them, I received the following mail from Andrew Smith. I had of course made it clear in advance that I would publish our correspondence:

Dear Mr Risdon

I am aware of the various accusations which have been made and they are all unfounded,

The authorities including Customs from whom we receive permission to load and depart from Europe are responsible for supervising the export of all goods.

Since the aircraft was loaded in Copenhagen International Airport for a flight to Venezuela, you can be assured nothing was untoward. The Freight Forwarder involved is Major Multinational Organisation, and that is whom we have contracted with to carry this cargo for the oil industry

Thank you for providing your details, should you feel inclined to take further interest may I suggest you direct your enquiries to the Customs Authorities in Copenhagen.

Yours sincerely

Andrew Smith

The suggestion that the cargo was related to the oil industry is plausible. Barcelona is probably the best-placed airport in Venezuela for goods destined for the Orinoco oil belt, one of the largest oil sand deposits in the world, and one that is moving into large scale production at the moment.

Avient has a strong presence in Zimbabwe, indeed it is sometimes described as a Zimbabwean company. I don't imagine it could have hurt their chances of getting this sort of contract that Chavez regards Mugabe as his "brother".

Africa watchers tend to pay special attention if Avient's livery is spotted in a trouble spot. Given Chavez's penchant for sabre rattling, I'd say this situation is worth monitoring.

And I wonder what the usual supporters of the Venezuelan regime would have to say if a business with these sorts of currents swirling round it were flying into, say, Israel with supplies.

James Paice MP on libel reform

2010-02-17T11:54:00.002Z

I just received this email from Mr Paice, my MP (and generally one of the good guys):

Dear Mr Risdon,
Thank you for writing to me about EDM 423 and libel law reform. I should explain that Early Day Motions are for backbench MPs and therefore as a Member of the Opposition Frontbench, I am usually unable to sign an EDM regardless of my views, unless it has been officially tabled by the Opposition.
I understand your concerns on this issue. It is important that those who contribute so much to research and culture in this country do not feel restricted from publishing intellectually challenging and informative articles. Fear of libel action should not curb debate by scientists, academics and journalists. Freedom of expression is the hallmark of a free society, and must be strongly protected.
If libel cases do succeed, the costs are often so crippling to defendants that even large newspapers are in difficulty in resisting some claims. It is evident that Britain has become an attractive place for individuals to bring about speculative libel action since lawyers will often bear the brunt of the costs in exchange for the potential awards available to winning litigants.
You may be aware that the Secretary of State for Justice, the Rt. Hon. Jack Straw MP, has recently announced that the Government is currently drawing up plans to alter libel law. Let me assure you that my colleagues on the Shadow Justice Team will continue to press the Government on this issue, to ensure that any changes to the law adequately protect individuals without placing too great a burden on, for example, scientists, academics and journalists.
Thank you for taking the time to write to me.
Yours sincerely,

James Paice, MP

Promising, I'd say.

Nooooo!

2010-02-17T09:58:00.001Z

Another email from the libel reform campaign:

Dear Friends,

We’re grabbing this chance while we have a quiet 10 minutes to give
you a bit of advance notice of the biggest, most important, and
hopefully the funniest, event in the libel campaign so far this year.

Later on today we are going to publicly announce ‘The Big Libel
Gig’ when some of the biggest names in UK comedy, science and human
rights will be sharing a stage to tell us that England’s libel laws
are unjust, against the public interest and need to be reformed.
‘The Big Libel Gig’ is at the Palace Theatre in London’s West
End at 7.30 pm on Sunday 14th March 2010.

There will be a very eclectic line-up of famous names including Dara
Ó Briain, Robin Ince, Tim Minchin, Shappi Khorsandi, Marcus
Brigstocke, Ed Byrne, Professor Brian Cox and Professor Richard
Wiseman.

The Big Libel Gig will also include a chance to hear from Drs Ben
Goldacre, Simon Singh and Peter Wilmshurst, who have all felt the full
force of England’s libel laws. They’ll talk frankly about how the
libel laws have affected them personally.

This is a one-off benefit event to raise money for the libel reform
campaign being run by the Coalition for Libel Reform, established by
the charities Index on Censorship, English PEN and Sense About
Science. If you can’t make the gig, other ways to support the
campaign include donating through the dedicated JustGiving page
http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQHUQgKDlAYBQZJBAAKVVw%3D
or email donate@libelreform.org for more information.

Tickets are now on sale from
www.seetickets.com/see/event.asp?e|artist=the+big+libel+gig&filler1=see&filler2=BLG

, at the theatre’s Box Office in person and by telephone on 0844
4124657. This has not yet been announced publicly, so beat the rush,
buy the best seats in the house and support libel reform.

We look forward to seeing you at the campaign’s most important,
funny, thought-provoking and staggering event of the year so far.

Best

Mike & Síle

The Libel Reform Coalition

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQHUQgKDlYYBQZJBAAKVVw%3D

The Libel Reform Campaign is a coalition of English PEN, Index on
Censorship and Sense About Science.

So far, 197 MPs have signed our Parliamentary Early Day Motion
calling for libel reform and the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has
formed a working party that the Libel Reform Coalition is represented
on.

Marcus Brigstocke?

Quote of the Day

2010-02-17T06:53:00.001Z

From Eric Raymond, in a post titled Who bears the cost of moral vanity:

I was born and educated into the class that produces “gentry liberals”, but I’ve come to loathe them. This is why. It’s always someone else who pays the cost of their posturing. Very often, it’s the people they claim to be helping: the black teenager who ends up in a drug posse because because minimum-wage laws would force the small businessmen in his ‘hood to take a loss if they hired him for a legal job; the coal miner who gets pneumoconiosis because nuclear-plant construction was strangled in environmental red tape; the woman found in an alley strangled with her own pantyhose, because the handgun she could have shot that rapist with was denied her by force of law.

They’re so very, very convinced of their moral superiority, they are. The pious anti-torture crusaders, the “economic-justice” cod-Marxists, the no-growth environmentalists, the gun banners, and all their kin in the tribe of wealthy white left-liberals. Armored by their certitudes and their sheepskins and their class privileges, they sail serenely above the deadly consequences of their meddling. Not for them any need to worry about second-order effects or process costs or who actually pays the cost for their delusions, oh, no. They are the anointed, and lofty intentions are their sovereign excuse however much damage they do.

Truly, I hate them all. Perhaps I hate them more intensely because I so narrowly escaped being one of them. But it’s really the invincible stupidity and myopia that gets me, and the way their “compassion” stinks of narcissism. If I could have just one wish, it would be this: let their folly come back on their own heads.

Physician, heal thyself

2010-02-16T19:42:00.002Z

Mick Hartley is, as usual, spot on in his criticism of a recent Peter Singer piece. But what strikes me is that Singer, a Professor of Philosophy, has committed a simple logical error when he asks:

Why do people give generously to earthquake victims, but not to prevent the much larger number of deaths caused by poverty?

Singer is begging the question. He is assuming that giving money to disaster relief is functionally similar to giving money to alleviate poverty when this is in fact a case he has to argue.

A simple, well known, logical error. How strange, from someone in his profession.

Self defence

2010-02-16T19:05:00.002Z

A characteristic snark from Blood and Treasure:

Incidentally, I believe this is in line with current Tory policy on reasonable self defence.

"This" being a BBC report:

A Russian farmer has been convicted of planting landmines around his field to ward off trespassers.

Bovine partisanship aside, for of course Tories are no more likely to approve of this than Labour voters (which is to say some of each might but not many), what would be a reasonable legal position when it comes to the situation a householder might face when waking at night, alone, in an isolated farmhouse, and hearing sounds from downstairs?

I don't see why the householder, as a result of someone else deciding to break into their house, should be expected to accept any form of risk to their personal safety. There's no reason why they should have to get into a fight that is in any way fair. That is, a fight the burglar has an even chance of winning. The only sort of force that is reasonable in these circumstances is overwhelming force, force that keeps the householder as safe as they were asleep in bed before anyone broke in.

The only test that should apply is whether or not they were still at risk when applying the force. So if a burglar is running at them, screaming, the householder should be able to shoot them without suffering any repercussions. If a burglar is running away from the householder, screaming, then to shoot and kill would be murder, to shoot and wound would be assault.

This approach would have been of little help to Tony Martin, who shot and killed a burglar who was running away.

Simon Singh's weird idea

2010-02-16T19:03:00.001Z

An email arrives from the libel reform campaign:

Dear Friends,

I’ve had an idea – an unusual idea, but I think it might just
work.

As you know, England’s chilling libel laws need to be reformed. One
way to help achieve this is for 100,000 people to sign the petition
for libel reform before the political parties write their manifestos
for the election. We have 17,000 signatures, but we really need
100,000, and we need your help to get there.

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFYYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

My idea

My idea is simple: if everyone who has already signed up persuades
just one more person each week to sign the petition then we will reach
our goal within a month!

One person per week is all we need, but please spread the word as
much as you can. In fact, if you persuade 10 people to sign up then
email me (simon@simonsingh.net
) and I promise to thank you by printing your name in my next book
… which I will start writing as soon as I have put my own libel case
behind me. I cannot say when this will be, but it is a very real
promise. My only caveat is that I will limit this to the first
thousand people who recruit ten supporters.

When persuading your friends remember to tell them:

(a) English libel laws have been condemned by the UN Human Rights
Committee.

(b) These laws gag scientists, bloggers and journalists who want to
discuss matters of genuine public interest (and public health!).

(c) Our laws give rise to libel tourism, whereby the rich and the
powerful (Saudi billionaires, Russian oligarchs and overseas
corporations) come to London to sue writers because English libel laws
are so hostile to responsible journalism. (In fact, it is exactly
because English libel laws have this global impact that we welcome
signatories to the petition from around the world.)

(d) Vested interests can use their resources to bully and intimidate
those who seek to question them. The cost of a libel trial in England
is 100 times more expensive than the European average and typically
runs to over £1 million.

(e) Three separate ongoing libel cases involve myself and two medical
researchers raising concerns about three medical treatments. We face
losing £1 million each. In future, why would anyone else raise similar
concerns? If these health matters are not reported, then the public is
put at risk.

My experience has been sobering. I’ve had to spend £100,000 to
defend my writing and have put my life on hold for almost two years.
However, the prospect of reforming our libel laws keeps me cheerful.

Thanks so much for your support. We’ve only got one shot at this
– so I hope you can persuade 1 (or maybe 10) friends, family and
colleagues to sign.

Massive thanks,

Simon

http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFYYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

The Libel Reform Campaign is a coalition of English PEN, Index on
Censorship and Sense About Science.

So far, 188 MPs have signed our Parliamentary Early Day Motion
calling for libel reform and the Justice Secretary Jack Straw has
formed a working party that the Libel Reform Coalition is represented
on.

Please also considering donating to keep our campaign going:
http://libelreform.indiemedium.com/lt.php?id=ZkQFWggKBFcYDEgEDAEBXg%3D%3D

Irony alert

2010-02-16T07:40:00.002Z

Sunny Hundal:

People reading political blogs generally seem to hate nuanced positions, but I’m going to try anyway. For that it’s likely I’ll get slammed by both sides but that’s fine. I need to get this out of my system.

And later in the same piece:

Nick Cohen is also having a go – the very same who on record as supporting the torture of detainees in certain circumstances, and has wrongly criticised feminists themselves in the past. With friends like these…

If you follow those links, you'll not see Nick Cohen supporting the torture of detainees, nor being wrong about feminists (all of them, Sunny?). But you will see him making arguments that are, well... nuanced. Too nuanced for Sunny, unfortunately.

Surface stations

2010-02-16T07:15:00.003Z

I just left this comment at John Graham-Cumming's blog. The Neo-Nazi revisionist bit refers to his use of the term "denier", which is always contemptible. The bit I've bolded is the important point:

Noise and uncertainty simply exist, for scientists and laity alike (comparing Freeman Dyson to a Neo-Nazi revisionist is unworthy of you). Pretending certainty that does not exist is not scientific, though it is the province of the fanatic.

People you call sceptics - a term of approval in a sane world - are not trading in obfuscation, but rather in terms of broad, sweeping issues. Without proxies, we can't reconstruct the historical record. Without a good measured temperature record, we can't calibrate proxies. We do not have a good directly-measured temperature record. This is not some niggly detail.

UPDATE: It looks as though jgc does not want to publish this comment. It's not on his site yet, though a later comment from someone else has appeared. Going out to bat for climate milleniarism does unfortunate things to people.

Error message

2010-02-15T11:11:00.000Z

Via

Cooperation

2010-02-12T18:26:00.000Z

One of the areas of dissonance between right and left is the meaning of the word "cooperation". For the right, it means something voluntary but also, and this is not a contradiction, involuntary. People harvesting rubber in Malaysia are doing so voluntarily, making a living. They are cooperating, involuntarily, with those who use the rubber to sheath electrical cables in another country.

It also means something awe-inspiring, something Newton put most succinctly when he said he had stood on the shoulders of giants. Here's Bill Whittle, writing about near-disaster flying a light aircraft, and touching on both these aspects of cooperation:

How many people were there with me that day? Not just the obvious two – Dana and Craig, who’s support kept my monkey brain in the back of my head to return to throw pooh another day. How many guys were watching me on radar, keeping me separated from far, far better men and women who do this in their sleep up there? How many people did it take to make the instruments, to mine the silica for the glass, to tap the rubber for the wires? Who laid the asphalt on the runways, who built the filaments in the approach strobes, and who attached the ceramic tips to my spark plugs? And how many millions of other unseen connections had to be made to allow me to do, routinely, and on a middle-class salary, what billions of dead men and women would have given a lifetime to taste – just once. In those few minutes I just told you of, I stood on the shoulders of millions of my brothers and sisters, not the least of which were two sons of a preacher from Dayton, Ohio – now long dead but with me in sprit every day. I was atop a pyramid of dedication, hard work, ingenuity and progress, following rules written in the blood of the stupid and the brave and the unlucky.

I had tossed myself a mile into the air and landed safe in this Web of Trust.

Global warming debates

2010-02-12T14:18:00.002Z

Monbiot and Plimer interviewed. An evasive Plimer simply refuses to answer a basic question. Not at all impressive:

In Australia later today, Tim Lambert and Christopher Monckton will be debating the same subject.

Physics GCSE question

2010-02-12T12:49:00.003Z

Patrick posts the following on his blog:

Patrick's comment on this is exasperated rather than detailed - he has to teach this stuff. But what strikes me is that all four statements are true of all four appliances. That they all produce heat is obvious. Sound is a form of kinetic energy and they all produce sound (even the toaster and lamp). Because they all produce heat, they all produce light, even if it is just infra red in some cases. In addition, the radio has an oscillator inside it, producing radio frequencies (for tuning) - it's the oscillators in TV sets that the old TV detector vans listened out for - and radio is a form of light. Or heat. And vice versa.

I don't think anything I've just said relies on a knowledge of physics beyond GCSE level. The demarcation of heat and light and radio waves as separate types of energy is out of date by more than a century.

I know this is the first question, and is intended to put the child at ease, but it should be possible to do that and still stay within the realm of contemporary knowledge.

Make mine a double

2010-02-12T10:59:00.002Z

Strong coffee might increase the risk of heart disease.

Within an hour of a single espresso, blood flow had reduced by an average of 22 per cent.
But when the volunteers drank a decaffeinated espresso, there was little or no change.

And:

... previous studies have also highlighted coffees potential harmful effects, others point to many benefits.
Recent research showed one coffee a day could nearly halve the risk of dangerous cancers affecting the mouth and gullet, while other evidence suggest three a day can slash the risk of Alzheimers disease.

Brain function remains high, cancer risk reduced, sudden death after active life. What's not to like?

We are not Spartacus

2010-02-03T13:55:00.002Z

My excuse is that I haven't been blogging much. Normally, I do chip in when there's a "We are all Spartacus" call on behalf of a blogger, and so do many people from left and right. Normally.

For some reason, the only places I've seen the case of the Reverend Stephen Sizer mentioned have been left of centre blogs. So, in case you haven't heard about it yet:

At 10am on Sunday 29th November 2009, I received a visit from two policemen regarding my activities in running the Seismic Shock blog. (Does exposing a vicar’s associations with extremists make me a criminal?, I wondered initially). A sergeant from the Horsforth Police related to me that he had received complaints via Surrey Police from Rev Sizer and from Dr Anthony McRoy – a lecturer at the Wales Evangelical School of Theology – who both objected to being associated with terrorists and Holocaust deniers.

Sizer then used the incident to try to intimidate another blogger:

Dear Vee,

You must take a little more care who you brand as anti-semitic otherwise you too will be receiving a caution from the police as the young former student of Leeds did recently. One more reference to me and you will be reported.

Blessings
Stephen

But here's what I find the most chilling part of the account:

The sergeant made clear that this was merely an informal chat, in which I agreed to delete my original blog (http://seismicshock.blogspot.com) but maintain my current one (http://seismicshock.wordpress.com). The policeman related to me that his police force had been in contact with the ICT department my previous place of study, and had looked through my files, and that the head of ICT at my university would like to remind me that I should not be using university property in order to associate individuals with terrorists and Holocaust deniers (I am sure other people use university property to make political comments, but nevermind).

An informal chat? What does that mean?

Are we to take it that if a complaint of defamation is made to them, police officers will contact a person's employer, visit that person, reach an agreement that they will delete a blog in its entirety, that they will do all this informally?

This is "informal" as in "the police have no jurisdiction"; defamation is a civil matter in which the police have no role, at least at the stage where nothing more has happened than a complaint from the aggrieved party.

Yet they still act to censor and intimidate a writer. This, entirely extra-judicial, harassment is a far greater worry than our current, infamous, libel laws. At least they involve court appearances and take place within the rule of law.

Solidarity

2010-02-03T13:51:00.001Z

I didn't know this:

... after 9/11, people came together to hold a candle light vigil on Mohseni Square in Tehran in solidarity with the American people. They came unfortunately under attack by the regime’s thugs for doing this.

From the Iran Q&A thread at HP.

Evil oil companies spreading disinformation

2010-02-03T13:40:00.002Z

Some fifteen years ago I saw a VHS video about Global Warming, produced by an environmental group in the USA. At the time, I was completely persuaded by the arguments for AGW, so I found the tape persuasive. One of the things it focussed on was a video presentation funded by evil oil barons, in which computer simulations showed how an increased level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would encourage plant growth. We looked at each other in disbelief, revolted by this "our friend Mr CO₂" propaganda.

It seems the oil barons were right.

The view from Iran

2010-02-03T13:36:00.001Z

This is a fascinating post at Harry's Place. Q&A with a pro-democracy Iranian in Iran. If you go there now, you can ask your own questions.

Who said this?

2010-02-03T12:27:00.002Z

We need to stand up to the special interests, bring Republicans and Democrats together, and pass the farm bill immediately

Guess

Via

Governments and public goods

2010-02-03T11:18:00.002Z

In an aside, Norm writes:

Incidentally here, I am intrigued by the reactions to this of some Republican politicians - to the effect that Obama's decision is 'a crippling blow', or even 'the death march', for human space exploration. I thought government provision wasn't all that central to human accomplishment, according to some philosophies.

Extreme positions exist on both sides of this debate - that governments should do almost nothing, or not exist (anarchism and extreme Libertarianism); that everything or almost everything should be done by governments. The second position is more common than the first (and few politicians of any hue argue that they themselves should not exist) but let's leave both aside and look at the main area of the bell curve of ideas.

Here, the debate is over the appropriate limits on government activity. Public goods like law and order and defence are generally recognised as being appropriate roles for governments. The constitutional right, classical liberals and moderate Libertarians tend to assert that the state should also enforce property rights and the law of contract, without which no free market can exist*.

So what of space exploration? For Republicans, or any other advocates of limited government, to support the notion that this should be financed and managed by government, and to do so without hypocrisy, they need to be arguing that space exploration is a public good.

For the purposes of this post, it doesn't matter whether that's an argument that could or should prevail. I just want to point out that there is no necessary inconsistency or hypocrisy in the position of a small-government Republican who wants the government to fund space exploration.

Small-government Republicans are not no-government Republicans.

*A free market is simply an arena for exchange in which all parties can act in what they perceive to be their own best interests, without coercion or deceit.

There is such a thing as a free lunch.

2010-02-01T19:26:00.002Z

Thanks to R for the pic.

A shared dream

2010-02-01T12:48:00.001Z

Coherent exposition of the anarchist position, from The Guardian:

"We organise horizontally, there's no leaders amongst us. A misconception about anarchism is that there's no leaders. I think it's more about everyone taking a lead in doing certain stuff. This is a shared dream of many people."

Another quote of the day

2010-01-22T15:20:00.002Z

Republicans must realize this evening that in America they benefit as there are only two parties. America is as fed up with them as they are with Obama. If there was a meaningful third party in the US, they would wipe the floor with both parties.

From an analysis of Scott Brown's election victory, at Iain Dale's blog.

Hmmm. There is a meaningful third party here, and we're just as fed up with them as we are with the rest of the political establishment. Yet none of the smaller parties seem poised for a breakthrough. The malaise, including low turnouts for elections, runs deeper than disillusionment with certain parties.

Quote of the day

2010-01-22T15:17:00.001Z

I’m excited that I'll learn about it in open court.

Ezra Levant, writing about the latest lawfare attack against him in Canada. Read Levant's post for the context of the quote.

Adaptive systems

2010-01-22T15:05:00.002Z

Interesting post here:

In a Japanese laboratory, a group of scientists is encouraging a rapidly expanding amoeba-like blob to consume Tokyo. Thankfully, the blob in question is a "slime mould" just around 20cm wide, and "Tokyo" is represented by a series of oat flakes dotted about a large plastic dish. It's all part of a study on better network design through biological principles. Despite growing of its own accord with no plan in mind, the mould has rapidly produced a web of slimy tubes that look a lot like Tokyo's actual railway network.

The slimy tubes work independently of one another, it seems:

The mould's abilities are a wonder of self-optimisation. It has no sense of forward-planning, no overhead maps or intelligence to guide its moves. It creates an efficient network by laying down plasmodia indiscriminately, strengthening whatever works and cutting back on whatever doesn't. The approach seems as haphazard as a human planner putting railway tracks everywhere, and then removing the ones that aren't performing well. Nonetheless, the slime mould's methods (or lack thereof) produced a network with comparable cost, efficiency and tolerance for faults to the planned human attempt.

The lesson here is obvious: complex adaptive systems are as efficient as planning when it comes to relatively simple problems like a city's transport routes. When the complexity of the problem is increased, complex adaptive systems continue to function, as we know because we can buy cheap pencils. There's no example of similar success in the area of planning, that I can think of.

Why did I choose pencils as an example? Over to you, Uncle Milt:

The Physics of Space Battles

2010-01-20T11:15:00.002Z

... combat spacecraft would likely get around the same way the Apollo spacecraft went to the Moon and back: with orbit changes effected by discrete main-engine burns. The only other major option is a propulsion system like ion engines or solar sails, which produce a very low amount of thrust over a very long time. However, the greater speed from burning a chemical, nuclear, or antimatter rocket in a single maneuver is likely a better tactical option. One implication of rocket propulsion is that there will be relatively long periods during which Newtonian physics govern the motions of dogfighting spacecraft, punctuated by relatively short periods of maneuvering. Another is that combat in orbit would be very different from combat in "deep space," which is what you probably think of as how space combat should be – where a spacecraft thrusts one way, and then keeps going that way forever. No, around a planet, the tactical advantage in a battle would be determined by orbit dynamics: which ship is in a lower (and faster) orbit than which; who has a circular orbit and who has gone for an ellipse; relative rendezvous trajectories that look like winding spirals rather than straight lines.

Second, there are only a few ways to maneuver the attitude of a spacecraft around – to point it in a new direction...

This reminds me of how I understand sea battles were fought in the age of sail. Vessels at the mercy of the elements, wind (gravity for space ships), plotting long courses, sweeping in arcs towards each other, advantage gained by catching wind (or a lower orbit). Interesting to think of space Admirals in the future, memorising Nelson's tactics.

European Arrest Warrant

2010-01-20T11:13:00.001Z

Deborah had been set up to drive a car packed with drugs from Spain to France. As she knew nothing about the drugs, the trial court cleared her of all charges, yet the prosecution appealed.

As neither Deborah nor her lawyer was informed about the appeal, no one was there to present her defence and she was convicted. She knew nothing about this until 2008 when she was arrested at Alicante airport after a family holiday. After a month on remand, the Spanish courts refused to extradite her because so many years had passed. She returned to the UK but was arrested again at Gatwick. Thankfully, the British courts agreed it would be unjust to extradite her. Yet the French refuse to remove the warrant, which means Deborah would be rearrested if she left the UK.

Although designed to deal with serious crime, EAWs are often issued for minor crimes. This puts huge pressure on the police and courts, and shipping people across Europe for petty crimes is, in itself, grossly disproportionate.

Law Society Gazette.

Test your knowledge

2010-01-20T09:10:00.001Z

Of Middle Eastern politics:

16. Israel has often been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of the Arabs in the “occupied territories”. The demography bears this out, because the Arab population of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza has:
a) plummeted from 6,500,000 in 1967 to 3,000,000 in 2009;
b) plummeted from an estimated 5,000,000 in 1967 to less than 2,000,000 in 2009;
c) remained steady at 3,000,000, despite huge natural growth in the rest of the world;
d) increased at one tenth of the pace of natural population growth;
e) increased from about 750,000 in 1967 to an estimated 3,700,000 in 2009, a population growth of nearly 500% in barely more than a generation, which is one of the highest rates of increase anywhere in the world.

17. Israel has also been accused of “ethnic cleansing” of Arabs who are citizens of the state, and deliberately enforcing policies designed to keep the Arab population small. This, too, is shown by the demography, in that the Israeli Arab population has:
a) dropped from slightly over 1,000,000 (40% of the overall population) in 1948 to 750,000 (20% of the population) in 2009;
b) remained at a steady 1,000,000 from 1948 to 2009, while the overall population has increased seven-fold;
c) increased from 500,000 in 1948 to 1,000,000 in 2009, representing a drop from 35% of the overall population to just 12% in 58 years;
d) decreased steadily by 2% per year from 1948 onwards;
e) increased from 150,000 (15% of the overall population) in 1948 to about 1,420,000 (22% of the overall population) in 2009.

Via Snoopy.

Consequences of drug prohibition

2010-01-20T09:07:00.001Z

The French health ministry issued a warning on Tuesday after eight people died and seven fell sick in two European countries from using heroin contaminated by anthrax.

Adulteration is one of the consequences of prohibition and the attendant impossibility of quality control.

Mass analysis

2010-01-20T07:29:00.001Z

John King made an interesting observation: Scott Brown took off during the Christmas Day bombing incident and the candidates’ very different reactions to that incident.

UPDATE: CNN’s reporter says Democrats were shocked by the “rage” that has now turned against them. Did they not see the tea party protests? Ah, no. They were busy mocking. Did they not watch the two gubernatorial races in 2009? Nope. They were spinning. That’s why they’re shocked now.

Commentary Magazine.

Pic of the day

2010-01-20T07:07:00.003Z

This view shows color variations in bright layered deposits on a plateau near Juventae Chasma in the Valles Marineris region of Mars.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Fifty years ago

2010-01-19T13:25:00.001Z

No thaw. A little more snow last night. Cannot unfreeze kitchen tap but unfroze the waste pipe by pouring boiling water down the straight part & hanging hot water bottle over the bend. Tried to dig a hole to bury some refuse but found it impossible even with the pick. Even at 6” depth the ground is like a stone.

9 eggs.

George Orwell's diary, 19th January 1940.

UPDATE: From the entry for the 15th Jan 1940:

This must be the longest cold snap since 1916-17, when we had very similar weather (about end of February 1917).

1916 was in the previous cold cycle, in 1940 the warm period that had followed was starting to turn downwards, from its peak in the middle 1930s, into what would become the cold cycle that ended at the close of the 1970s. Interesting that Orwell noticed the period. But then, he had the mind of a scientist. From the same entry:

Today an egg rolled out of one of the houses & got frozen. On breaking it find that the white goes to a substance like jelly with bubbles in it & the yoke° goes to a consistency like that of stiff putty.

The Incredible Sulk

2010-01-19T13:07:00.001Z

The name fits Charles Johnson as well as it did Heath. He's just name-calling now:

It’s looking like right wing tea party candidate Scott Brown will ride to victory on a wave of Fox News-fueled populist anger

Unintended consequences

2010-01-19T13:05:00.000Z

Of alleged media bias:

Perhaps the best news for Brown, however, is the media's insistence in reporting that the race is "neck-and-neck," "too close to call," "very tight race," etc. In fact, most polls indicate a growing Brown lead.

The less potential Brown voters hear about that today, the better.

Busking

2010-01-19T12:51:00.002Z

I was in Covent Garden once when a man placed a ghetto blaster on a nearby table, turned it on and started to sing. A woman appeared above, at the railings, and they performed a duet. It was wonderful and felt like an impromptu performance.

This is even better:

Last November, at the central market in Valencia, opera singers disguised as shopkeepers were selling produce at the various stalls there. Verdi's Il Travatore starts playing over the loudspeakers & they burst into song. None of the shoppers has a clue what's going on.

Via.

Brown vs Coakley

2010-01-19T12:33:00.003Z

They're voting today. Polling website FiveThirtyEight.com - which scored well during the Presidential election - is rating Brown as 3:1 favourite.

Haiti images

2010-01-19T11:56:00.001Z

From Nasa: the fault line and the aftermath, from space.

Newton's apple

2010-01-19T10:13:00.002Z

‘After dinner, the weather being warm, we went into the garden and drank tea, under the shade of some apple trees… he told me, he was just in the same situation, as when formerly, the notion of gravitation came into his mind. It was occasion’d by the fall of an apple, as he sat in a contemplative mood. Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself…’

From William Stukeley's Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton's Life, online in facsimile here.

Via History Today.

The limit of scepticism

2010-01-19T07:18:00.002Z

Phil Plait, who writes the Bad Astronomy blog and has just stepped down as President of the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), recently linked to this account of an unusual teaching technique:

What made Dr. K memorable was a gimmick he employed that began with his introduction at the beginning of his first class:

“Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things, is to try and catch me in the Lie of the Day.”

And thus began our ten-week course.

This was an insidiously brilliant technique to focus our attention – by offering an open invitation for students to challenge his statements, he transmitted lessons that lasted far beyond the immediate subject matter and taught us to constantly check new statements and claims with what we already accept as fact.

Plait described this as "lying for skepticism" and commented:

This is a wonderful story, and I think makes an effective teaching method. And it forces students to pay attention… while making them eager to do so!

The anecdote reminds me of a teacher I had at school. One day he came into our Medieval history lesson and asked of me, out of the blue, a very simple question, something like "When was the Battle of Hastings?" I replied, and the teacher asked "How do you know?" I pointed at a text book on the shelves and said the information was in there. "That's a secondary source," replied the teacher. "It was written in the 1960s. How did the author know?"

Both teachers were making the same point in different ways: check for yourself. Don't accept the word of an expert. Geoffrey Elton, at a talk given to my school's Historical Society, went further. History is, he argued, the essential study because it is a bulwark against tyranny. The study of history IS the process of refusing to accept the word of other people, even famous historians, even contemporary accounts of events. The habit of questioning, when applied to the present, protects us against would-be tyrants.

Now compare these attitudes with the following:

... it’s my opinion that there are severe limits on the kinds of scientific arguments into which skeptics may responsibly wade. If we’re serious about our science-based epistemology, we must be prepared to consistently defer to scientific consensus.

This last post and its conclusions have been welcomed by some from that part of the political spectrum most susceptible to climate alarmism. It was published on skepticblog.org. Yet it is entirely incompatible with the sceptical approach recommended by the teachers in the earlier examples.

For the author, and unfortunately for Phil Plait too, the limit of scepticism isn't science, or science about which the sceptical commentator is not an authority. It's climate change. With that single subject, according to the contemporary sceptical movement, scepticism is not allowed.

And that, surely, is the problem.

Turkish Hackers

2010-01-18T10:49:00.002Z

Anyone running mainstream CRM websites has got used to the attacks by "Turkish hackers", which usually exploit well-known vulnerabilities in CRM engines like Joomla and Drupal. The Jewish Chronicle site was hacked yesterday by "Turkish hackers" - the quote marks are because in this context people who say they're from Turkey probably aren't.

I don't have any inside knowledge, but I'd bet a fiver that the site software (Drupal) hadn't been updated recently. When websites are commissioned, there's often no thought given to ongoing security updating and monitoring so sites go without the security patches that are released periodically.

Solidarity postponed

2010-01-18T10:47:00.000Z

The Islamic Solidarity Games have been cancelled after a dispute between Arab countries and Iran over the name of the waterway dividing them

Mick Green

2010-01-18T10:43:00.003Z

One of the great British guitarists died a few days ago. Mick Green played with Johnny Kidd and the Pirates, then the Pirates after Kidd died. Wilko Johnson always acknowledged the influence of Green's playing. Here's the Pirates with Lonesome Train, from 1977.

Obit in the Jewish Chronicle makes more of Green's later work with Van Morrison.

Sodomy and sleeping positions

2010-01-14T18:59:00.002Z

This is doing the rounds at the moment, as an example of Islamic idiocy. Now, I'm as happy as the next man to make fun of religion but I think in this case it's a bit unfair. Here's the quote, from an ask-an-Imam page somewhere:

Questions

1. Is it true that if you sleep on your stomach the devil will sodomize you.
2. Is Harry Potter permissable and if it isn't will everyonw who reads them go to hell.

Answer

1. It is Makrooh (disliked) to sleep on one's stomach. It is not true that the Shaytaan will sodomise a person who is sleeping on his stomach.

2. Harry Potter is not a good read for Muslims.

and Allah Ta'ala Knows Best

Mufti Ebrahim Desai

It's the questions that are dumb, not so much the answers from the Imam. A lot of Christians think Harry Potter is the work of the devil. Sleeping on one's stomach is "disliked"? Islam is very prescriptive, claiming to regulate every aspect of life and this dislike is no more silly than many religious edicts. How about not eating meat on Fridays? Why?

It's just normal religious bossiness.

Hitchens on Iran

2010-01-14T15:25:00.002Z

Part 2 of Michael Totten's interview with Christopher Hitchens is online:

MJT: If the Obama Administration calls you up and says, "Christopher, we need you to come in here, we need your advice." What would you tell them?

Hitchens: I would say, as I did with Saddam Hussein—albeit belatedly, I tried to avoid this conclusion—that any fight you're going to have eventually, have now. Don't wait until they're more equally matched. It doesn't make any sense at all.

The existence of theocratic regimes that have illegally acquired weapons of mass destruction, that are war with their own people, that are exporting their violence to neighboring countries, sending death squads as far away as Argentina to kill other people as well as dissident members of their own nationality—the existence of such regimes is incompatible with us. If there is going to be a confrontation, we should pick the time, not them.

We're saying, "Let's give them time to get ready. Then we'll be more justified in hitting them." That's honestly what they're saying. When we have total proof, when we can see them coming for us, we'll feel okay about resisting.

Now this IS unpleasant

2010-01-14T13:37:00.000Z

Bacon flavour personal lubricant.

Straw in the wind

2010-01-13T22:46:00.002Z

Yes, true.

I was in Nice with my girlfriend when the Climategate story broke and was too busy to read much of the news. So when I got back I looked at the Telegraph website. Nothing on the front page, nothing in the news sections. But the first and third most read pieces on the site, according to the side panel, were blogs about Climategate.

I don't think the editorial team even noticed.

One old black man

2010-01-13T20:52:00.002Z

Here's how "one old black man defeated the entire Ku Klux Klan".

More:

On another occasion, he went into a cafe in Ada, Oklahoma with his friend, Oklahoma State Senator Gene Stipe, where he was stopped at the door by the waitress. She proceeded to tell them they did not serve Negroes there! Wade told the woman, “Ma’am, I don’t eat Negroes anyway, just give me some ham and some eggs!”

Wade told Senator Stipe that he had one wish…..to meet face to face with the leader of the Ku Klux Klan. He got his wish in the form of a nationwide radio debate with the Imperial Wizard. It was the meeting that ultimately, and over some time, would change the heart of Johnny Lee Clary, Imperial Wizard of the KKK. Wade and Johnny became best friends and Johnny is even Godfather of Wade’s daughter, Tia.

Rev. Wade Watts passed away, Dec. 13th, 1998. The night he passed away, two of his daughters heard him talking as he laid in bed. They heard Wade say “Thank You, Sir!” They asked him, ” Dad, who are you talking to?”, since they were the only ones in the room with him. Wade replied, ” I am talking to Jesus. He said He is coming to take me home.” The nurse came into the room, and asked Wade what he would like for breakfast in the morning. Wade replied, “It don’t matter, hon. I’m not going to be here for breakfast because Jesus told me He is coming for me.” That night, Wade died in his sleep.

Rev. Watts was like a father to me. I am grateful for all the years I had with him, and for all the wisdom and knowledge he passed on to me. He told me that he was passing me his mantle. I do not feel worthy to take it up; however, if he thought that much of me to invest all those years of time and wisdom into me, then I owe it to the memory of him to fight racism and continue his works. Wade and I always called one another “Old Partner”. I will miss him for the rest of my life, and will never forget him.

The writer was the Klan leader who burned down Watts' church.

Logical error

2010-01-13T20:20:00.003Z

Chris conflates an argument with a state of affairs here:

In the labour market, many people favour big incentives and little risk-pooling. Unemployment insurance, they say, reduces people’s incentive to find work, whilst big wage inequality encourages them to work harder.

However, when it comes to the market for corporate ownership, things are different. The dominant form - measured in pounds if not the number of companies - is dispersed ownership. This generates good risk-spreading but weak incentives.

You can see my puzzle. For workers, risk and incentives must be sharp. But for capitalists they must be blunt. Strange, huh?

People do argue that unemployment benefits reduce the incentive to find work, and that's got to be true. However, it's a lesser evil than starving unemployed people. But that's an argument. The situation with dispersed share ownership is a state of affairs that has developed organically, a very different thing. And it's less true in the case of managed funds where the risk is spread between many owners but the management of funds is concentrated in people who really do focus the minds of managers.

The problem is, this focussing is corrupted by cronyism, by the fact that business managers and fund managers are drawn from the same small pond and tend to reinforce rather than challenge each other's behaviour.

But that's a combination of corruption and stupidity. It's not capitalism. Capitalism would also exist if risk (share ownership) were less dispersed.

UPDATE: Link to Chris's post added.

Largess

2010-01-13T20:16:00.002Z

Tim is half right about this. There's no contradiction between a)

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.

And b)

It can only exist until the bureaucracy discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.

We have both situations. A (bureaucratic) political establishment offers other people's money to the electorate in order to gain power, in order then to help themselves to the contents of the treasury.

The Adams family

2010-01-13T13:51:00.003Z

Gerry Adams has posted an account of the history of sexual abuse accusations within his family. One interesting line is this:

There was no cover-up. No evasion. The fact is that it was one of my family members who, when we first became aware of the allegations, accompanied Áine and her mother to the Social Services.

A complaint was also made by Áine and her mother to the RUC.

To the RUC? That would have to be on record, and if it is then some of the criticism Adams has faced over this has been misplaced. That Adams was not the family member who accompanied his niece would not be surprising, under the circumstances.

Storm

2010-01-13T12:18:00.001Z

"You know what they call alternative medicine that's been proved to work? Medicine."

Movie blog here.

Ooh, ooh. Want.

2010-01-13T00:08:00.000Z

This. On CD, or even just the earliest volume.

Compare and contrast

2010-01-12T23:56:00.002Z

Nature, 9 September 2009:

Research cannot flourish if data are not preserved and made accessible. All concerned must act accordingly.

Nature, 2 December 2009:

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts. Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.

Letter to Nature, not yet online, 12 January 2010:

Your Editorial (Nature 462, 545; 2009) castigates “denialists” for making “endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts”. But you do not mention the reason — that the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has systematically tried to avoid revealing data and code.
Science relies upon open analysis of data and methods, and the UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has a clear data-sharing policy that expects scientists “to cooperate in validating and publishing [data] in their entirety”. The university’s leaked e-mails imply a concerted effort to avoid data sharing, which both violates the best practice defined in NERC policy and prevents verification of the results obtained by the unit. Asking for scientific data and code should not lead to anyone being branded as part of the “climate-change denialist fringe”.

Troubled Spirit

2010-01-12T23:49:00.003Z

Mars rover Spirit is in trouble, stuck in sand and unable to turn its solar panels towards the sun to gather enough energy for the coming Martian winter.

Built to last three months, it is now in its sixth year of operation. And even stuck in the sand, it can work:

"Spirit could continue significant research right where it is," said Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, deputy principal investigator for the rovers. "We can study the interior of Mars, monitor the weather and continue examining the interesting deposits uncovered by Spirit's wheels."

How politics works

2010-01-12T23:35:00.000Z

The Scorekeeper is not pronouncing [health care reform] dead until a Republican Congress is in place.

Google vs China

2010-01-12T23:32:00.001Z

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Google Inc. said Tuesday it might end its operations in China after it discovered that the e-mail accounts of human rights activists had been breached.

The company disclosed in a blog post that it had detected a "highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China." Further investigation revealed that "a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists," Google's post said.

Google did not specifically accuse the Chinese government. But the company added that it is "no longer willing to continue censoring our results" on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires. Google says the decision could force it to shut down its Chinese site and its offices in the country.

Source

Scientific research

2010-01-12T21:18:00.000Z

In 1981, Abol-Hassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that scientific research had shown that women's hair emits rays that drive men insane with lust.

Read it in full.

Be green - be fat

2010-01-12T20:58:00.001Z

Obesity is more green than being slim. Although you consume a bit more while you're alive, it's OK because you'll die earlier. Your lifetime total consumption of the earth's resources will be lower.

Seriously.

esr on crime rates

2010-01-12T18:47:00.003Z

What has caused crime rates to fall in the USA, and not to rise during the current recession? The ready availability of drugs, booze, contraception, abortion and cars. Unwanted kids are less likely to be born, and criminal personalities have so many more means available to kill themselves.

It's an interesting argument from Eric Raymond, though not noticeably buttressed by empirical data. However, have a glance.

Etchings

2010-01-12T18:06:00.002Z

This was a bit of a coup for someone:

Their ownership was then a mystery until they were discovered inside a railway timetable in a box of second-hand books purchased at a local book sale in the 1970s. The owner, who wished to remain anonymous, sold them for £441,000.

The anonymous second-hand book buyer had found eight etchings by William Blake. These have now been bought by The Tate and will go on exhibition later this year.

New blog

2010-01-12T15:47:00.001Z

Looks good:

http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/.

When I do my very very overdue update of the blogroll, it will be added.

Beyond the pale

2010-01-12T14:57:00.002Z

Should a broadcaster with links to extreme politics present the BBC's election special? How about one who said this, back in 2003:

I suspect that these days I'm politically closest to the BNP...

That's not quite what Dermot O'Leary told the Guardian back then. As pointed out by the Biased BBC blog today, in the Guardian interview in question he said:

Labour, Tory, Liberal or Socialist Workers?
I suspect that these days I'm politically closest to the Socialist Workers, but they'd take all my money so it's still Labour.

It's worth asking why The Guardian chose to add the tiny, electorally insignificant political cult that is the SWP to a list of mainstream political parties in the question. They're not the only ones who do this. Following Nick Griffin's appearance on Question Time last year, Jack Straw was quoted in The Times as saying:

"... there is something basically decent running through Britain and British politics from UKIP to the Socialist Workers Party. But he is beyond the pale on that."

The BNP is beyond the pale, in my opinion. But so is the SWP, which allied with reactionary Islamists in the RESPECT party. This isn't a left/right issue, plenty of mainstream democratic socialists object to the SWP, and the BNP's policies combine communitarianism with a form of socialism which, to many conservatives and liberals, places them on the left of the spectrum even though they are racists.

Islamists would place all non-Muslims in the position of second class citizens, all women would be third class citizens, and they would murder free-thinkers, gays, apostates and others in the cruellest ways imaginable.

These Islamist policies are not SWP policies, but the SWP have been willing to pander to them. SWP policies themselves are straight from the political tradition that murdered more than 100 million people, and enslaved billions, during the 20th century.

Odious as they are, the BNP do not propose to do remotely as much harm to anything like as many people. Their ugliness is just a subset of that of the SWP, with race and class acting as substitutes between them, different lenses performing the same task: focussing hate.

The BNP is beyond the pale. But so is the SWP.

[Thanks to J for the email about Question Time]

Gerry Adams summarised

2010-01-08T12:59:00.001Z

In order for there to be peace in the Middle East, Israel's government ought to agree to the resumption of the random slaughter of Israeli civilians.

Game theory

2010-01-08T12:05:00.001Z

In the wild:

At first glance, the male cleaner wrasse behaves oddly for an animal, in punishing an offender on behalf of a third party, even though he hasn't been wronged himself. That's common practice in human societies but much rarer in the animal world. But Raihani's experiments clearly show that the males are actually doing themselves a favour by punishing females on behalf of a third party. Their act of apparent altruism means they get more food in the long run.

Paralettick?

2010-01-08T11:50:00.002Z

I wish I'd seen this a week ago. A seventeenth century cure ‘for one that is paralettick’ (pdf).

From here via here. If you follow the first of those links you'll see other handy recipes, including one titled "How to cook a husband".

Sea ice extent

2010-01-08T07:37:00.002Z

This bothers me a bit. I was wondering why I hadn't seen any comparisons of sea ice extent in the Arctic on any of the sceptical blogs I read. Turns out the sea ice is at a pretty low level, despite the cold snap. At least, that's what it looks like to me. Land snow coverage is pretty unprecedented, though, from the looks of it - note: the 1980 slide below doesn't suggest there was no snow on the land. This has only been included in the more recent slides.

Source: Cryosphere Today.

Public service announcement

2010-01-07T19:43:00.001Z

A round up of last year's output from P. J. O'Rourke has been posted here. Enjoy.

Perverse resilience

2010-01-07T19:21:00.002Z

Hard-left blogger jamie k writes:

Both China and the US seem dedicated to the notion that systems which fail must be restored, whether over the economy or the environment. Call it perverse resilience.

There's a rather charming lack of awareness of irony there.

Peter Robinson

2010-01-07T18:46:00.002Z

Iain Dale:

He has said he is determined to carry on his governmental duties as normal, but after watching [a video clip of Robinson] you have to question whether he is in the right frame of mind to be able to do that. He seems a broken man.

Gerry Adams:

The matters revealed so far are private and personal family matters and the Robinsons are entitled to space to resolve their marital difficulties.

Issues of public policy and of Peter’s responsibility to fulfil the obligations of his public office are another matter but his willingness to meet Martin McGuinness on Thursday and his stated intention to make 2010 a better year for everyone is to be welcomed.

It is on that issue that judgement should be made, not on private matters. Iris and Peter Robinson have the right and deserve the opportunity to rebuild their relationship. I wish them well.

Adams gets this right, in my view.

RIP Prof

2010-01-07T13:49:00.002Z

Sometimes commenter on this blog, and a private correspondent of mine, Clay Bond, aka Rightwingprof died today after a short but savage struggle with cancer.

Avatar, a review

2010-01-06T21:46:00.003Z

A guest post by Adam Smith

Well, OK. Not really. Smith died a couple of hundred years ago. But Luboš Motl's review of this film reminded me of Smith on colonialism. Smith was, of course, a strong advocate of Liberal values - personal freedom, economic freedom, free trade.

**Mild spoiler below**

First, Motl, who refers to the blue aliens in the movie as smurfs:

Now, some conservative commentators have decided that the movie is a propaganda piece to attack the white race, capitalism, America, the U.S. army, and the technological life on Earth as we know it. On the other hand, the movie celebrates Gaia, primitive tribes, and white traitors.

Well, the story may surely be interpreted in this way - as a pure far-left propaganda - but I wasn't really annoyed by this obvious interpretation. Why? Simply because I didn't have the feeling that the corporation reminded me of the real corporations that I like in our world. It didn't even remind me of the armies on the Earth that I respect. ;-)

On the other hand, the smurfs were primitive but their life was a life in freedom, a very primitive form of capitalism where you have to earn your flying horses, and so on. In this sense, I think that the corporation in the movie was analogous to the people who promote the Big Government, to the climate alarmists, and all this stuff. They also wanted everyone to work for one predetermined technocratic goal.

I think Smith's sympathies would have been with the smurfs too. In the movie, Humans want to extract minerals from the smurf's planet:

Folly and injustice seem to have been the principles which presided over and directed the first project of establishing those colonies; the folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.
[...]
In ancient times the opulent and civilised found it difficult to defend themselves against the poor and barbarous nations. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it difficult to defend themselves against the opulent and civilised.

Free expression and the right to march

2010-01-06T20:12:00.002Z

The right of an organisation like the BNP or Islam4UK to stage a march is not the same thing as their right to free expression, but it's pretty close. The right to free expression demands that everyone can say what they think, or even just what they want to say even if they don't really believe it, somewhere, in a publicly accessible way.

But does that mean Protestant Ulstermen should be able to march through Catholic areas, taunting them, celebrating the defeat of the Catholic cause in old battles? Or that a small group of Islamists should be able to stage a provocation in the town, Wooton Basset, that has become synonymous with the return of the corpses of British servicemen and women to the UK? After all, both Orangemen and Islamists can express their views freely, in public, in other ways, so a ban on either would have no effect on their right to free speech (so I disagree in this particular with Longrider).

In both cases, though, there are political issues. As Steve says of this latter case:

In all probability, Choudary is hoping that his march will be banned. That way he can claim that the British authorities are so scared of his jihadi army that they abandon their principles. Free speech, he will claim, doesn't apply to Muslims. By allowing his march to go ahead his bluff would be called. His pathetically small group of wannabe-theocrats, marching through the cold streets in their night-dresses, would look more ridiculous than frightening.

That's absolutely right, and this, not the right to free speech, is the reason the march should not be banned. However, I can think of an interesting precedent, from the late 1970s.

James Anderson was Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall (it may have been Andersen, I can find absolutely no reference to him on the internet, despite the fact that he was one of the best police officers this country has ever had). He is not to be confused with the bearded religious maniac James Anderton, who was Chief Constable of Greater Manchester at the same time.

At that time, the National Front were staging marches in British cities and towns, and the Anti-Nazi League and others staged counter demonstrations. When the NF decided to march in a town in his jurisdiction, Anderson simply hid all his police officers. They were there, in vans, with anti-riot gear, but they were hidden, nowhere to be seen when the NF arrived at the railway station. So, rather than march unprotected, the National Front went home.

Can anyone think of a case...?

2010-01-06T15:22:00.003Z

From the comments to a post at the Quackometer, about James Randi and his recent statement about climate change (I'm copying just the relevant comments, snipping the rest):

ben goldacre said...
can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists, in their own field, all around the world, for a long period of time, by virtue of conspiracy (since that is the commonest accusation) or foolishness, held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time? and unanimously refused to concede to good quality arguments against their position? i'd be interested if there were any.

17 December, 2009 01:25

Gavin Schofield said...
If you took a loose definition of 'scientist' I suppose you could reasonably argue that, for instance the teachings of someone like Claudius Galen were more or less engraved in stone until around the mid 1500's - even though the facts contradicted them.

"His influence was so great that even when public readings from his texts were contradicted by the plain evidence of simultaneous dissections of the body, these discrepancies were ignored" - Medical Blunders, Robert Youngson & Ian Schott

However, I'd argue that this case and others like it from the same time can reasonably be ignored, as they can safely be considered pre-scientific. I can't think of any case like that from the last hundred or so years. I'm definitely not an expert here, and I could easily be wrong, but that's my current view.

Gavin Schofield, Greater Manchester Skeptics

17 December, 2009 02:43

Jim Lippard said...
Ben Goldacre: The usual example given is regarding meteorites (e.g., Ron Westrum, "Science and Social Intelligence about Anomalies: The Case of Meteorites," _Social Studies of Science_ vol. 8, no. 4, Nov. 1978, pp. 461-493).

17 December, 2009 02:51

Anonymous said...
Ben Goldacre: Many people claim this was (and to some extent is currently) the case for generative grammar in linguistics, providing you treat that as a science. It's far from (obviously) demonstratably incorrect though, and though it's less popular these days many people still support and work in the paradigm, myself included.

17 December, 2009 03:03

Vad said...
@Ben: my best offer to your challenge has to come with a caveat. I believe that the widely held belief that eating meat containing cholesterol leads to heart disease is wrong despite the seeming concensus on the subject. Though this falsehood is NOT being upheld by virtue of a conspiracy. Conspiracy by my definition means a willful, concerted effort of several people, but I don't think that's why the diet-heart/cholesterol has survived for so long despite being wrong.

Eventually that mistake will be corrected by science - which will progress better when the old guard of fat hysterics slowly die off.

I really try to keep out of the climate debate, because I get an icky feeling when I delve into it. I really, really like the idea of saving the planet and making it a paradise for us, but why - WHY - do everyone act like raving mad religionists trying to dumb down the question to one and only one factor: CO2. My soft, imprecise brain pretty much yells at me that this is no different than treating all heart disease as caused by saturated fat. As if there were no dynamics involved and we can just go linear on everyone.

It rubs me the wrong way so hard that I'm getting ready to fall down the likely wrong side of the fence out of nothing but spite.

17 December, 2009 11:40

bengoldacre said...
hi vad,

i think most peeople in medicine have been pretty iffy about the "eating cholesterol causes heart disease" thing for ages tho, as soon as contradictory evidenc started percolating through, and ppl wld now say (i think correctly) that there's something in there that involves cholesterol but its not clear what or how, or that specifically eating less cholesterol is better, but statins work a bit, and they lower cholesterol, and the blood levels correlate with some stuff, etc. it doesnt feel to me like cholesterol and heart disease is a case of almost everyone ignoring the currently available evidence against a theory. possibly a bit more organisational inertia among doctors than working epidemiologists and cardiology researchers too (big field, lots of new info all the time, and we're a bit slow in the head anyway).

the meteorites one is 19th century so i might not read it.

http://sss.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/4/461

17 December, 2009 15:02

Tim Farley said...
@BenGoldacre:
"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists ... held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time?"

I know its not a perfect fit, but what about the "stomach ulcers are caused by acid/stress" thing? I'm thinking about the period after Robin Warren and Barry Marshall put forth their h.pylori theory but before it was generally accepted. They had data, but didn't people refuse to accept it for a while?

17 December, 2009 15:15

Ben Pile said...
@BenGoldacre:
"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists ... held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time?"

But can anyone think of a case where a scientific argument has been the basis for such a comprehensive transformation of the world's entire political, economic, industrial and social organisation?

The process by which we move from "CO2 from human industry has caused changes to the atmosphere, causing it to warm", to "if we don't change the way we live right now, we're all going to die" needs more scrutiny. While it goes without it, and while many people act as though the imperative was issued by science itself, there will be a question mark over the legitimacy of political responses to climate change, and an even greater question mark over the relationship between scientific and political authority.

17 December, 2009 16:13

Anonymous said...
Ben Goldacre (01.25)

With the constraints you ask for do you seriously expect an answer:

"can anyone think of a case where the vast overwhelming majority of scientists, in their own field, all around the world, for a long period of time, by virtue of conspiracy (since that is the commonest accusation) or foolishness, held an opinion that was demonstrably wrong with reference to the facts available the time? and unanimously refused to concede to good quality arguments against their position? i'd be interested if there were any"

plus as you later say, having to be 20th Century+. I'd suggest you give up looking. You're not exactly being flexible. Why not add "and which were exposed by hackers." to really finish off the quest.

I mean "all around the world" - that's a pretty bizarre constraint in itself.

The conspiracy as such is in the behaviour at CRU and is not necessarily even fully conscious - is it a lie if you believe it to be true? The reality is, as will come to be understood by more of the lamely compliant 'skeptics' so shocked by Randi's statement, that most of climate science is completely malleable to interpretation/ adjustment and relies almost entirely on rhetoric (unprecedented, pre-industrial, natural v anthropogenic, pollutant etc) to persuade the feeble-minded. And for you less feeble 'skeptics' try reading about "distance lending enchantment" and Fleick's work et seq.

17 December, 2009 18:21

Anonymous said...
Continental Drift?

Proposed in 1912 but not taken seriously until the 1960s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Wegener

Not that I'm a climate sceptic

17 December, 2009 21:02

wen said...
Ben

This isn't science - more social assumption. How about Irish prisoners during anti-Irish racist periods - Birmingham 6, Guildford 4, Martina Shanahan (Winchester 3), Judy Ward, Danny McNamee etc. That used evidence. A consensus approved it (jury) and it took years to challenge. Socially we are capable of this. We are still doing it. Ask Jack of Kent.

I was interested once and did a bit of research and at least 1/2 of all Irish women on extreme sentencea in England (more than 15 years) were aquitted at various appeals. This was made up to 2/3 by those who upheld their innocence and behaved as thus after release ie no contact with any policits eg Gillespie sisters. What if that were true for the men too? What social assumptions would that challenge? How would we feel about our justice system during that period if we thought that might be true. (I'll send you the names and sentences and stories if you want).

Every one of them was sent down on consensus by evidence. Social assumptions are very powerful.

Not to undermine you. I'm someone who feels that we've taken taken more out of this planet in the last 200 years than was ever taken before and we are doing so expontially. I am tired of the terror-mongers. Just tell us what are the best things we can do to help ourselves. Stop terrifying us. I think a lot of the denying is because pwople can't cope with the fear anymore.

18 December, 2009 20:48

Architectural realism

2010-01-06T14:03:00.003Z

Julia's post here reminded me of an architectural triumph at the university I went to, in St Andrews. Andrew Melville Hall, one of the halls of residence, has its own Wikipedia article, which puts it like this:

Designed in the New Brutalist style by the renowned architect James Stirling, Andrew Melville Hall was built during a major expansion of the University in the 1960s using prefabricated concrete modules. Errors in construction meant that extensive remedial work was required over several decades. Plans for further buildings to the same design were abandoned.

It is of a striking design and is situated prominently at the North Haugh on a ridge overlooking the St Andrews Links. The hall resembles passing ships, a common theme of the architect's style.

It has become an important architectural landmark and has been ranked number 12 in the top 100 Scottish buildings of the last 50 years. Despite this, many students and townsfolk continue to regard it as an eyesore.

Here's what it looks like:

Even the grass is landscaped to look like waves, every few student rooms share a small "galley" with, as I remember them, round porthole-like windows, though I can't see these on the pic above (I was in a much nicer Hall until I moved to a cottage, and rarely I visited AMH).

So, the Hall was designed like a ship and the surroundings were landscaped to look like waves. There's a reference to remedial work in the Wiki quote above. I remember that too, it was going on at the time I was there. But I think the Wiki piece is a bit unfair. The "errors in construction" were perhaps just evidence of the architect's devotion to realism.

The Hall hadn't been given adequate foundations. So it sank.

Feet talking

2010-01-06T13:53:00.002Z

We can perhaps judge the desirability of countries not by happiness indices drawn up by think tanks but rather by migration - which countries are people leaving and which ones are they trying to move to.

Is there a similar judgement to be made about the desirability of forms of political governance within a country by looking at internal migration between constituencies represented by politicians of different parties?

I ask because of this fascinating snippet from an article by John Rentoul in the Independent a week or so ago (emphasis added):

The Boundary Commission is supposed to equalise constituencies anyway: that is its main objective. Yet it always lags behind population change, because it is working on out-of-date data and by the time the changes are made, the population has drifted further from Labour to Conservative areas.

Justice

2010-01-04T19:27:00.004Z

Chris asks:

should the concept of desert have any role in our thinking about distributive justice?

I'm interested in the use of the word "justice". This word has a long-established symbol:

Justice is, intrinsically, a matter of desert. What is in one of the scale pans must be balanced by what goes into the other. What's happened here - and Chris hasn't done this, initiated this, himself - is that the word has been redefined, meaning in this context "something I think should happen that I want to give great weight to".

This redefinition of words is much more characteristic of socialists than of people from other parts of the political spectrum. "Fair" now means, in political parlance, "high" or "redistributive" - as in the phrase "fair taxation". "Liberty" has been glossed with the word "positive" to mean "ability".

I don't know why this is characteristic of socialism. Orwell, of course, spotted this but I'm not aware he offered any analysis.

Carbon offsetting

2010-01-04T19:07:00.003Z

Adnams is a very good local brewery here, and I like to do my bit to support local business. But this was a bit of a worry:

Carbon neutral beer? Beer?

Then I realised I had a sack full of carbon in a fairly pure form that could be released into the wild to offset this carbon neutrality. And I had one of these:

Put the two together, and throw into the mix a rib of hung Aberdeen Angus beef, and hey presto:

Carbon offsetting can be fun!

Happy New Year.

Clunkers and market share

2010-01-04T19:01:00.002Z

Political Math posted this visualisation of the effect of the Cash for Clunkers program. Guess what? The program drove a significant transfer of market share from American car manufacturers to, mainly, Korean and Japanese ones:

A balls up

2009-12-09T11:08:00.002Z

This happened recently to a medical student I know. On placement in a rural GP's surgery, she was examining a pensioner.

"Are my testicles black?" he asked, to her surprise - the examination was for something completely unrelated. But she asked him to lower his boxer shorts, and looked, the man's testicles were the right colour, felt warm to the touch, had no obvious lumps or other problems.

"That's fine," she said. "Is there anything else?"

"Yes," the man said, speaking slowly and clearly. "Are my test results back?"

Morla equivalence

2009-11-06T16:55:00.003Z

There's a splendid car crash of pieties in this wibble from the Chief Rabbi:

"Parenthood involves massive sacrifice: money, attention, time and emotional energy. Where today, in European culture with its consumerism and its instant gratification because you're worth it."

There was no room for sacrifice for "the sake of generations not yet born" in such a culture.

"Europe is dying," he concluded and compared the situation in the continent today to ancient Greece with its "sceptics, epicureans and cynics".

He said: "That is one of the unsayable truths of our time. We are undergoing the moral equivalent of climate change and no one is talking about it."

Religion was the safeguard of morality and the decline of religion would lead to fragile families and communities in atrophy.

He has a point in his first paragraph. One of my oldest friends and his partner have been through a harrowing few years of miscarriages and disappointments because they left it too late. That follows a history of abortions-of-convenience in younger years. They are very typical of recent generations. The time to have kids is young adulthood, this does involve sacrifices. People who try to have it all simply transfer the costs of their ambition to their children, who have to bear them or forgo existence entirely.

The glib and complacent description of the source of so much human misery and burnt human flesh for so many centuries as the "safeguard of morality" is just par for the course.

It's the comparison with Climate Change that provides the car crash. Human population growth is one of the factors in climate change, if the alarmists are to be believed. The Rabbi's statement can be re-rendered as follows:

[population should rise] is the moral equivalent of [population should fall]

Europe isn't dying. If the massive expansion of population of the past couple of centuries were to be followed by a levelling off and even a slight contraction, so what? That would be a very good thing in all kinds of ways - especially economic and ecological.

Via Laban, who draws rather different conclusions.

Maybe your mother has cancer

2009-11-06T00:31:00.002Z

Romance is not dead.

Animated stereoscopes

2009-11-06T00:03:00.001Z

Of old Japan.

While I was away...

2009-11-05T15:48:00.001Z

Point of the day

2009-10-23T15:24:00.002+01:00

I haven't been blogging for personal reasons - been having too good a time to want to sit and type. However, this seems an excellent point, worth repeating, from Jonny Newton:

Nick Griffin looked silly on the programme, but what if the BNP ever got a new leader without a history of statements he wants to repudiate?

And, put slightly differently, from James Cleverly:

When [the BNP] are given the opportunity to act like real politicians they struggle and then they fail... Question Time provided the perfect vehicle to show this incompetence, but the BBC did what so many on the left do, obsess about the BNP and feed their inflated sense of self importance.

An important point

2009-09-28T17:26:00.000+01:00

From Gavin Kennedy:

Take the parable of the buyer in contact with the “butcher, the brewer, and the baker”. Most readers of the paragraph containing the parable, who have not read and understood Adam Smith in his books, Moral Sentiments and Wealth Of Nations, go hopelessly adrift in concluding that there is a clash of self-interest between the buyer of his dinner and his suppliers.

When someone buys meat from a butcher, both the self-interest of the butcher and of the buyer are served. This is not a zero-sum game; it is not the case that if someone benefits from a transaction, the other party loses.

The ugliness of the internet

2009-09-28T13:32:00.003+01:00

Oh, I know there are worse things. But I did a quick search about Roman Polanski, wondering whether I had any comment to make, and found that you can read the full transcript of the allegations made against him, 20 or 30 pages long, while looking at pictures of his victim as a 13 year old girl, the age at which she was raped.

That's certainly a convenience for the paedophile community.

Curing cancer

2009-09-27T23:49:00.002+01:00

I have no idea what the rights and wrongs are of the dispute between two Christian hotel owners and a Muslim woman who claims she was insulted by them. I doubt it should be a police matter, if the woman felt insulted she should have taken her business elsewhere. Personal disagreements are not the business of the police, and nor are hurt feelings.

The Christian couple at the centre of this are members of the Elim Pentecostal Church in Bootle. The largest congregation in the Elim organisation seems to be Kensington Temple, where Revival meetings are being held regularly, conducted by Gypsy William Lee:

"What's the point of praying for people if we don't expect them to be healed?" So said healing evangelist Gypsy William Lee during his recent visit to Kensington Temple in February. "When I pray, I expect God to heal", continued William.

Perhaps this is why William has seen such outstanding examples of God's healing power throughout his ministry. People all around the country have been healed of all kinds of sickness, illness and disease, including Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, terminal cancer, meningitis, blindness and deafness.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say I don't believe anyone has been cured of terminal cancer or Parkinson's, and that there is still only one recorded case of anyone recovering from Alzheimer's - and that wasn't the result of Gypsy William's ministrations.

Performatives

2009-09-27T21:40:00.006+01:00

What is a "performative"? Here's some context:

All performatives imply propositions. There's no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on.

A reasonable test of a passage of argument is that the opposite makes sense or that someone might argue it. If it doesn't, or nobody would, the passage is likely to be meaningless in some way, perhaps tautological, perhaps hollow. Perhaps, and this is more often the case, tendentious. I am in favour of "fair" taxation, for example. Nobody would say the opposite, that they are in favour of "unfair" taxation. We're all in favour of fair taxation, we just don't agree what that means. So using the phrase, as some politicians do, is tendentious.

To take an example from the above passage, it talks of "certain beliefs about the nature of reality". Such a belief might be that God exists. Both that sentence and its opposite (God does not exist) make sense. Does it make sense to say that there is no such institution as promising? Would anyone say that? Would someone be frozen, unable to make a promise, because they do not believe there is such a thing as a promise, or that there is but they are unable - not morally unable but unable because of their "beliefs about the nature of reality" - to perform it? If that were the case with someone, it would tell us nothing about the nature of reality, but rather something about that individual's psychology. But nobody would, just as nobody argues for unfair taxation.

You'll probably have guessed we're in the hinterlands of postmodernism here. Wikipedia's page about performativity includes this:

Philosopher and feminist theorist Judith Butler has used the concept of performativity in her analysis of gender development, as well as in her analysis of political speech. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes Queer Performativity as an ongoing project for transforming the way we may define - and break - boundaries to identity.

Peformativity is incredibly useful to a postmodernist, because it enables them to argue against "positivism" or a "representational idiom". What's a representational idiom? Here's where it gets sinister, as these things usually do. Also from Wikipedia:

Performativity is a concept that is related to speech act theory, to the pragmatics of language, and to the work of J. L. Austin. It accounts for situations where a proposition may constitute or instantiate the object to which it is meant to refer, as in so-called "performative utterances".

The concept of performativity has also been used in science and technology studies and in economic sociology. Andrew Pickering has proposed to shift from a "representational idiom" to a "performative idiom" in the study of science. Michel Callon has proposed to study the performative aspects of economics, i.e. the extent to which economic science plays an important role not only in describing markets and economies, but also in framing them.

In other words, it's being argued that in fields like science and economics, the "performance" of the scientist or economist "frames" the outcomes of their work - and not just that but also the very thing they are studying.

How is this useful to a postmodernist? It's a valuable tool if you're trying to argue something for which there is absolutely no evidence, or against which there is significant evidence. Which brings me to the full context of the first quote. A conversation with Terry Eagleton in the Monthly Review, as reproduced by Norm:

You say he [Dawkins] emphasizes a "propositional" account of religious faith above a "performative" one. But how far can one go believing in God performatively, through political acts, before it becomes a proposition?

TE: All performatives imply propositions. There's no point in my operating a performative like, say, promising, or cursing, unless I have certain beliefs about the nature of reality: that there is indeed such an institution as promising, that I am able to perform it, and so on. The performative and the propositional work into each other. But it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional, just as it would be for someone trying to analyze a literary text, which is basically a performance. Somebody who didn't grasp that would be making a root-and-branch mistake about the kind of thing being confronted. These new atheists, and, indeed, the great majority of believers, have been conned rather falsely into a positivist or dogmatic theology, into believing that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions.

Norm, rightly, remarks:

Terry is right to say, as he does further on in the interview, that 'It is a rationalist error to think that your opponents are simply stupid.' But he's wrong to deny 'that religion consists in signing on for a set of propositions'. That may not be all religion is about, but it is, centrally, about that.

Incidentally, thinking your opponents are stupid isn't just a rationalist error, but more on that later. First, I'd like to put in plain English what Eagleton is arguing - because one thing this language does is dress trivial or untenable arguments in fine clothes of verbiage. It is, as Richard Feynman used to say, like turning on a fog machine. Clouds of this fog billow out, and it's hard to see at all, let alone clearly, what the person responsible is saying.

Believing in God "performatively" to "begin with" means that acts, performances, behaviours can lead to specific beliefs. And that's certainly true. The problem with this is that enough ritual, incense, repetition - together with other aspects of religious behaviour, scourging, sexual abstention, sleep deprivation, fasting - can make anyone believe, eventually, in Archwaldo the Giant Turtle. Imagining that rationalists and atheists don't realise this is to accuse them of stupidity. Not only do they realise it, they think it's one of the problems with religious behaviour: it helps you believe in things that aren't true.

The fact that someone believes something has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it's true. The fact that someone can come to religious belief through, or helped by, performance - or that performance is a major part of their religious experience - has absolutely no bearing on whether or not the things they believe are true.

Chris Dillow wrote in support of Eagleton, in terms interesting for one so committed to evidence-based argument. He concluded:

One reason why writing about music is like dancing about architecture is that our language struggles to cross the barrier between practitioner and non-practitioner. Perhaps believer and non-believer will always be unable to understand each other. But then, why should all knowledge and beliefs be explicit rather than tacit and so amenable to “rational” debate?

People do, of course, write perfectly coherently about music, but they don't dance about architecture. I know what Chris means, writing about music is inadequate in some ways, the music has to be experienced. That's true, but it's a false analogy nevertheless. Equally false is the grouping together of knowledge and beliefs. These are not the same thing at all, in some ways they could be said to be opposites. We require belief for assertions for which we have insufficient knowledge, or that run contrary to knowledge. For me to think the world is flat would require belief and the suppression of knowledge, to think it is roughly spherical requires no more than knowledge. The shape of the world can only be determined through rational enquiry - and most importantly it can be determined like that. So can the question of whether, say, deficit spending is appropriate in a recession.

Ultimately, we might reach a stage of understanding of economics where we know - genuinely know - such things in sufficient detail to avoid recessions, or to understand that they are inevitable in the least bad forms of economies but that they can be mitigated according to certain rules. The more recessions we have and the more we study the reality of what happens, the closer we'll get to this stage. Belief, irrational, dogmatic belief, might help. It might produce hunches that can be tested and prove to be correct - as Polanyi argued (Chris's link on the word "tacit"). But the same could be said of throwing darts at a piece of paper with ideas written on it, or throwing dice to choose research avenues. Belief itself is of no value except to the individual holding it and that can be a problem for the rest of us. It's less often an asset.

The same is true of the question of whether or not there is a God. And that is the question, not whether or not some people believe in God, or even why they believe in God except where this is for rational reasons. Eagleton's argument isn't even wrong, it isn't even in the park. But that doesn't matter, it's not meant to be. It's designed to remove the subject from the sphere of the rational - that's what this means: "it is a typically positivist kind of mistake to begin with the propositional".

What looks like a clever dismissal of the inflexible Dawkins is actually a retreat from the debate. Eagleton cedes the ground of rational argument and says, instead, that religious belief is brought into existence through performance.

I think Dawkins might agree with that.

Baroness Scotland and resignation

2009-09-27T21:06:00.002+01:00

John Rentoul thinks it wasn't Scotland, but whoever was responsible for the legislation she broke should resign. That's much more important than someone resigning for breaking it.

This legislation was malevolent and stupid. Malevolent because it seeks to transfer responsibility for managing immigration from the government to private citizens. I'd be all in favour if that was it, and the government had stepped away from managing migration entirely, leaving it up to the web of individual contracts. But they haven't. So there are people here illegally, but now it's your fault.

Strictly, now it's your fault if you employ them. The correct remedy for illegal migration is to remove the illegal migrants from the country. But no, the government would have to take responsibility for that, and there'd be distressing press coverage of people clinging to door frames by their fingertips, or being given sanctuary in churches. So lots of them stay here. But what we can't do is let them work while they're here. This is the stupid thing. They stay, but can't be productive members of society.

Deficits and Keynes

2009-09-27T20:53:00.002+01:00

Two interesting reads. In both cases, people not normally identified with the left make an argument for deficit spending.

Richard Posner, who is difficult to categorise but sometimes identified with libertarian thinking, writes: How I Became a Keynesian. An extract:

But for a confidence-building public-works program to be effective in arresting an economic collapse, the government must be able to finance its increased spending by means that do not reduce private spending commensurately. If it finances the program by taxation, it will be draining cash from the economy at the same time that it is injecting cash into it. But if it borrows to finance the program (deficit spending), or finances it with new money created by the Federal Reserve, the costs may be deferred until the economy is well on the way to recovery and can afford to pay them without endangering economic stability. When investors passively save rather than actively invest, government can borrow their savings (as by selling them government bonds) and use the money for active investment.

From Samuel Brittan's speech to the Spectator Conference a couple of weeks ago:

I am in the delightful position of disagreeing with the consensus wisdom on economic policy. This states that the most important, if disagreeable, task of whatever government is in power after the next election will be to slash the public sector deficit.
[...]
The basic fallacy is known as the fallacy of composition: the belief that what is true on the small scale must be true on the large. Shakespeare's Polonius said "Never a borrower nor a lender be." Margaret Thatcher advised young people not to get into debt (except of course to buy a house!) Even accepting these homilies at their face value, they do not necessarily apply to the Government of the whole country.

The big error of the present economic discussion is to treat national budgets as on a par with the budgets of individuals or firms, which need to balance except for narrowly defined investment projects. Even if you also favour a balanced budget at the national level, it is at most a second order rule to give way if it impedes the achievement of broader economic objectives.

In fact the public sector balance has an entirely different function: that of offsetting gross disequilibria in the national and international economy. If attempted savings exceed investment opportunities, public sector deficits are needed for as long as necessary to fill the gap - a job which will otherwise be done by stagnation and unemployment. When economic recovery has reached a certain stage, the time may come to roll back public sector borrowing. But we have certainly not reached that stage yet and it is far too early to rule out a second or even third leg of the recession.