Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2009 Civil liberties Canada to remove "truth" as a defence to hate speech laws? The Canadian Human Rights Commission is demanding just that, according to this interview with journalist Ezra Levant. It's that whole Human Rights Kill Civil Liberties meme again.
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2009 BBC There's some moderately good news on the BBC front - the corporation looks as though it will lose some of the licence fee, which will be used to prop up ailing commercial broadcasters. OK, so propping up businesses with obsolete business models is not a good thing of itself, but removing the licence fee is a top priority for restoring a modicum of sanity to public debate in this country.
The reaction of the BBC is an outrage though - Sir Michael Lyons is quoted as saying
People would do well to remember that licence fee payers give us their money in good faith, believing it will be spent on BBC services and content. "To suddenly tell them midway through the settlement that their money is being siphoned off, as some have suggested it should be, would be more than an act of bad faith, it would be tantamount to breaking a contract.
What a travesty that statement is. A contract is freely entered into by both sides. The licence fee isn't. Whichever way you look at it, Sir Michael is living mafia-style off the fruits of an elaborate protection racket. He is a party apparatchik who has reached the position he is in because he is a Labour party loyalist.
We can do without his pious cant about bad faith and breach of contract.
Bishop Hill Jun 14, 2009 BBC Politicians Sleaze It looks like a fraud against the British public from where I'm standing:
Kinnocks have six state pensions
Card fraud probe targets 300 detectives.
These chickens will come home to roost eventually.
Bishop Hill Jun 13, 2009 Civil liberties Home education One interesting aspect of the Badman review of home education is its demand that parents should once a year submit plans for what they are intending to teach children for the next twelve months. This seems rather extraordinary to me, since the school my children attend claim that they cannot give me such a plan for the following week.
As some have observed, this will signal the end of one important thread of home education, namely child-led, autonomous learning. The whole point of autonomous learning is that it's unplanned.
It's interesting to consider the legal implications of the proposed changes. According to the Human Rights Act,
...the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.
Now if one's philosophical convictions are that education shall be child-led and autonomous, it seems to me that the government will breach the HRA if it insists that autonomous education is verboten. Now of course, the HRA isn't worth the paper it's written on since the courts will not strike down an act of parliament which breaches it. Instead they will merely issue a statement to the effect that a breach has occurred. I wonder though if one could ask the government, or perhaps ask the courts to enquire, if their intention is to breach the HRA. If it is, then it might be reasonable to ask them to say so explicitly.
Bishop Hill Jun 12, 2009 Climate One of the most hilarious mantras that climate modellers intone in their media appearances is that the models must be right "because they've got physics in". The fact that huge swathes of the physics are parameterised - in other words they are not modelled at all, but are summarised down to a single number that the scientists hope will do the job - is quietly overlooked. Or at least, it's quietly overlooked by the climate modellers. Sceptics, of course, have been yelling about the deficiencies of this approach for years, to complete media indifference.
One of the most egregious parameterisations in the climate models is that of clouds, which are one of the most important feedbacks to the climate system. There has now been an attempt to rectify this failing - Steve McIntyre has picked up a remarkable report from a few years back that raises some interesting questions.
A team of climate modellers decided to take their model that one step further and intead of parameterising their clouds, they built a simple cloud model into each gridcell column (imagine vertical atmospheric columns rising up from each point on the earth's surface). The result was that the Earth turned out to be much less sensitive to carbon dioxide than previously advertised. The clouds essentially stopped some of the heat reaching the Earth in the first place.
Crisis over then? Perhaps. We'll have to see.
In the meantime we can wonder why these results, which were available to the IPCC during its Fourth Assessment of the world's climate, barely warranted a mention in the report. As someone once said, "Hey, it's climate science".
Bishop Hill Jun 12, 2009 Civil liberties Home education Terribleman, appallingman, sickoman, tyrantman, evilman, sinfulman, ruinousman, rottenman, putrescentman, baseman, poisonousman, wickedman.
The Badman report on home education is out, and it's monstrous. Forced entry to people's homes is recommended. Revolutions have been started over this sort of thing.
I'm too angry to say anything sensible. Read Lisa instead.
Bishop Hill Jun 10, 2009 Politicians Sleaze Kreepy Gerald Kaufman's excuse for claiming £220 for two grapefruit bowls: he has diagnosed himself as having obsessive compulsive disorder and so he has to have them.
This has to be a joke....
.....doesn't it....?
Bishop Hill Jun 10, 2009 Quotes Drunken sailors generally spend cash that they’ve already earned themselves, rather than running up debt to be paid by others. If our politicians started spending like drunken sailors, it would in fact represent a dramatic improvement.
Bishop Hill This is odd. The BBC has allowed someone to write an article that is not fully supportive of the catastrophic global warming thesis.
I wonder if they feel their bets need to be hedged, all of a sudden.
Bishop Hill Jun 9, 2009 Labour Politicians Sleaze Spin 1. Yesterday Lloyds TSB reported that they are to repay £2bn on their bailout money (the economy has turned).
2. Yesterday again, Gordon Brown, survived a meeting of the parliamentary Labour party which might have been expected to unseat him. Perhaps Labour MPs felt the economy was on the turn.
3. Today, Lloyds TSB accounced that it is to close down all of its Cheltenham and Gloucester branches.
Could it be that these news items are in some way linked? Institutional investors in Lloyds may have needed persuading that the time was ripe to repay the bail-out. The government is, of course, the majority shareholder in the group. Could it be that government agreement to the closure of C&G was the price the investors extracted? It is certainly odd to find a company making major stock exchange announcements on consecutive days. Even odder when you notice that the good news preceded Gordon Brown's moment of truth, while the bad news came later.
If this is right, then C&G would effectively have been closed down in order to allow Brown to take some good news - the repayment of the bail-out - to the House of Commons yesterday.
Interesting thought, isn't it?
Bishop Hill Jun 8, 2009 Blogs That last post - I have this nagging concern that it's not actually original and that I ripped the idea off someone else. If I did, I apologise. It's a good idea though.
Bishop Hill Jun 8, 2009 Education Home education Let me tell you about a school I know.
As schools go, it's a big one. The grounds and buildings are extensive although it has to be said that they're a bit of a mish-mash. They've had some new buildings in recent years, but many of them are a bit shabby and run-down to be frank. Still, everyone seems happy enough with them; "Needs must", they say. The parents are the same really - a real mix. The school has managed the unlikely feat of bringing together families from all sorts of different backgrounds in one place and avoiding all those social rifts you seem to get at most comprehensives: there are machinists and lorry drivers and teachers and accountants: name a job and you'll probably find a representative among the parent body somewhere. It's non-denominational too, with Christian and Moslem families represented alongside the secular majority. It's a cross-section of society at large I guess, and by and large they all seem to rub along together pretty well.
It's perhaps not the best-equipped school around: some decent science labs wouldn't go amiss for a start, but hey, some schools won't even let the kids try science practicals these days. Despite the less-than ideal facilities, the school still manages to achieve some truly excellent results. The children - it's co-ed by the way - score very highly in standardised tests of their language and maths skills - way above the average in fact, and what is really remarkable is that children from poor families are doing just as well as the rest - better in fact than a middle-class child at an average school. This is the kind of school where a bright kid from a poverty-stricken background can get their chance in life.
There's no selection though: no academic hothouse, this. There are children who are academic, of course, but most are just like any other kid: good at some things and not so good at others. The school has more than its fair share of special needs kids too. It's not easy coping with such a variety, of course, but they seem to have found a way to more than muddle through. I'm sure that other schools could learn a lot from watching them.
It's a fine school then. An extraordinary one, even. So there's no surprise that it's very popular, with the school roll growing at as much as 25% a year. With more and more parents wanting to get their children admitted, it's just as well they have so much room: so far they've been able to accomodate everyone who wants to get in.
It strikes me that this school should be, to a socialist, pretty much the ideal. Just run down the list again - comprehensive, non-denominational, child-centred, and turning out rounded, self-motivated children with literacy, numeracy and skills to boot. This is everything the left says it wants in a school.
So why the hell do they want to close it?
(*The inspectors report is here, by the way).
Bishop Hill Jun 7, 2009 Climate The precipitous descent of the Times from the newspaper of record into a propaganda sheet for greens is something to behold.
Today's "news" features an article by environment editor, Jonathan Leake, in which he reports that Britain will experience 3-4oC temperature rises by 2080. This is so entirely daft, I hardly know where to begin. It's hardly even controversial that climate models are not particularly skillful. Even the IPCC only predicts 2 degrees per century, and this claim is on the verge of being falsified just a few years after it was made.
In fact, there is not a single climate model that is skillful at regional or seasonal levels. Not one. And yet here we have Leake quoting Nigel Arnell, professor of climate science at Reading University as saying these outcomes are "likely". This is deeply unscientific.
Interestingly, the Met Office report on which the Leake article is based turns out not to have been released yet. I wonder if it's actually rather more hedged about with caveats than the headlines would suggest?
Bishop Hill
As far as I can tell, Prof Arnell is an economist, which might help explain why he gets this so terribly wrong.
