Ecofont

Now I know the world has gone stark raving mad:

The prints we make for our 'daily use' not only use paper, but also ink. According to SPRANQ creative communications (Utrecht, The Netherlands) your ink cartridges(ortoner) could last longer. SPRANQ has therefore developed a new font: the Ecofont.

And it's got holes in it. To save ink. I'm speechless.

And in case any of you wanted to see what it looks like, here's a sample.

Nice eh? Typography is never going to be the same again.

The NSPCC: anti-child

Sometimes It's Peaceful has done an exhaustive three part posting on the NSPCC. It's not a pretty sight.

NSPCC part 1: anti HE?

NSPCC part 2: anti family?

NSPCC Part 3: anti child?

Really, people have to stop giving money to the NSPCC. They are not a force for good.

Human rights and liberties

Lanna at Head Desk has been pondering the question of the universality (or not) of human rights, and I started to write a comment there, but I decided it was worth turning it into a full posting here.

I've been wondering about the distinction between human rights and liberties for some time now and in recent weeks have come to the conclusion that a human right essentially defines an entitlement and therefore a duty on government (and perhaps on others), while a liberty defines a restriction on government (and perhaps on others). I've also concluded that human rights are potentially disastrous.

Here's an example of why.

Lanna's a home educator, and as I've commented previously, there is an ongoing campaign against HE by the government. They have instituted a review of the whole area - the fourth in three years IIRC - and this appears to have been preordained to conclude that there is a need for home inpections by state-approved monitors. Once in place, this will no doubt lead in time to the outlawing of HE. By way of a softening-up exercise, the government has arranged for its client charity, the NSPCC, to make vague insinuations of child abuse in the direction of home educators, which Lanna reckons is a fairly obvious attempt to stigmatise the whole community before regulating and legislating against them. It certainly looks very much like the similar treatment dished out to smokers and foxhunters in the past and so I think she may well be right.

So what has this got to do with human rights? Well, from the HE perspective, how come then the state can demand entry to your home? How come they can force your children to talk to them? How come they can demand that you not be present? Haven't you got a right to privacy? The right to a family life? You would hope, wouldn't you that your human rights would protect you against this sort of thing. But you'd be wrong. The government will argue that the mere possibility of the loss of the child's rights justifies the loss of parental rights to privacy.

And this is the problem with human rights. By creating entitlements, but no understanding of how to balance different people's entitlements off against each other, they create confusion and sow discord and eventually leave the field of debate entirely empty, ready for government to legislate as they wish. 

In this case the government has decided that the parent's rights are secondary. (This rather conveniently coincides with their own prejudices and the needs of their financial backers in the trades unions and the educational establishment, who of course want to stop state schools from haemorraging pupils.) But it is clear that they could just as easily have referred to the right to privacy of the parents and decided something completely different. The same set of human rights can give entirely different outcomes depending on who happens to be in power at the time and the whims of whoever is funding them.

Human rights give governments the power to do what they want.

So how would it work with a liberties-based approach?  The first thing to notice is that a liberty doesn't say anything about any individual's entitlements. But by defining what government may not do, the definition of a liberty implies how the rights of the individuals are to be balanced, and moreover, it implies them in a way that makes the outcome completely clear:  there is only one possible conclusion that can be drawn.

For our HE example, the US Fourth Amendment (this is clearer for explaining the principles) simply says that the government may not enter the home without reasonable suspicion and a warrant. While this doesn't actually seem to address the question at hand - of how to balance the rights/needs/entitlements of parent and child, these things all flow naturally from the elucidation of the liberty. The rights of the child do receive appropriate protection ("if there's reasonable suspicion, we'll come and check things out") as do those of the parents ("we'll leave you alone unless there's reasonable suspicion").

Liberty works. It has worked for hundreds of years when it has been given the chance. Human rights don't. They never have.

Freeing banks

Jonathan Pearce at Samizdata reports on Professor Kevin Dowd's ideas on how to stop banking crises happening again. It's not the same as the way Gordon Brown thinks it should happen.

Quagmires we can do something about

Biased BBC:

Given that more people have died needlessly at Stafford Hospital than in the military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan COMBINED, I was wondering why the BBC is not running a new campaign to get the Healthcare out of the "quagmire" that is the NHS? No blood for bureaucracy?

More target setting insanity

Criminals are not being prosecuted by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) or are being offered deals so that money can be saved and targets can be met, according to the Police Federation vice-chairman Simon Reed.

From here.

I agree with Ken Livingstone

Ken Livingstone:

The civil service is a malignant conspiracy against the national interest.

How can you possibly be in the Labour party, which tries to expand the influence of the state and opposes privatisation, while at the same time believing the civil service to be a malignant conspiracy against the national interest?

Unless you are in favour of malignant conspiracies against the national interest...?

BBC holds the law in contempt

There is a derogation from the Freedom of Information Act created specifically for the BBC.  When the new bill was wending its way through Parliament, the BBC and Channel 4 complained to the Home Office that they would not be able to do their job properly if covered by the Act. They argued that, if for example their journalistic sources were compromised, they would no longer be able to collect important news stories. They didn't  mention Robert Peston acting as a receptacle every time a minister wanted to make a diversionary leak, but that kind of activity would also presumably have been threatened were the corporation to fall under the Act.

In the event, a compromise was reached and the derogation was written into the act, exempting the BBC from its terms but only regarding "journalistic and artistic" activities. At the time it was agreed that this would cover all of the day-to-day activities of the BBC. See here.

With depressing predictability, the BBC, those lovers of freedom of information, have now set about expanding the scope of the derogation as far as they possibly can. The meaning of "journalistic purposes" has been expanded to cover editorial policy, reviews of editorial and journalistic performance and a host of other activities that can't possibly have been the original intention of Parliament. The Information Commissioner (ICO) has sat back and accepted all this.

Even where an activity is known not to be covered by the derogation, the BBC routinely claims that it is. The ICO has managed to show his teeth on the subject of the BBC's finances, which he has ruled are not covered by the derogation. And does the BBC care? Take a look at some of the decisions of the Information Commissioner.

• Someone asked for production costs of East Enders. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked for the name of the highest BBC earner in Northern Ireland. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked for the 20 highest paid entertainers at the BBC. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about expense claims at BBC Scotland. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about money handed out in game show prizes. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't. 
• Someone asked about spending on radio stations. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about budgets for Top Gear. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about costs of the Children in Need appeal. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.
• Someone asked about expense claims made. The BBC said it was covered by the derogation. The ICO said it wasn't.

I could go on, but I think you get the drift by now. You have to remember that decisions of the Information Commissioner carry the full force of law: they are equivalent to the decision of a judge. So for the BBC to continually argue that financial information it holds is not covered by the Act can only be described as contempt of court. The powers that be at the BBC clearly feel that the law can safely be flouted, and continually so, without the slightest fear of any comeback.

And meanwhile the Information Commissioner doesn't even raise a squeak of complaint. And why not, we might wonder? It's speculation, but perhaps the BBC and the ICO are both happy with the arrangement since both sides can keep themselves comfortably employed, bloated pensions fed by the poor unsuspecting licence fee payer and the poor unsuspecting taxpayer that they both wilfully ignore.

What to do with big business

Picking Losers says "disintegrate it".

A disastrous idea from BoJo

Boris Johnson holds forth in the pages of the Telegraph, unveiling his latest bright idea. Headlined as

an education policy to gladden diehards, enrage trendies - and preserve the glory of English literature

it is, on closer inspection, just a call to have children learn poetry at school.

Boris! No!

Think about it. The sun is shining, Jonny and Jenny are bored and are staring out of the window wishing they could run around outside. What better way to put them off poetry for the rest of their lives than to order them to learn the first twenty stanzas of Grey's elegy, with the threat of dire punishment for non-compliance.

Can storied urn or animated bust
Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

I mean, who gives a stuff? The sun's shining! What person of any sensibility or love of nature would want to be inside reading a book?

My children love poetry. They pick up poetry books for fun (yes, for fun) and recite verses to unsuspecting visitors to our home. This is a particularly popular activity when it's raining or when there's nothing better to do.

The glories of English literature are being preserved, in homes all over the country. English literature is safe there, unmolested by the dead hand of the state.

Leave it alone.

Whitewash in Albany

An interesting post for climate watchers over at Freeborn John. It's the murky tale of how dodgy data finds its way into the surface temperature records and the duplicity of the University of Albany, New York in trying to whitewash the alleged fraud.

Read the whole thing.

Word "alleged" added, 18/3 following a comment.

More backside covering at the BBC

When the BBC refused to get involved with the DEC appeal for Gaza, I noted the possibility that this could be an arse-covering exercise ahead of their being forced to publish the Balen report into biased reporting of the Palestine conflict.

There's more of the same reported in the Graun, which carries the news that the corporation has now refused to broadcast a controversial play about the history of the state of Israel.

In an email seen by the Guardian, Radio 4's drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe said that he and Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer thought Churchill's play was a "brilliant piece".

But Howe wrote: "It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer, Radio 4 controller] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill's view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can't do Seven Jewish Children."

Could I be a terrorist?

There's an interesting article at the American site, Freedom Politics. It seems that in the state of Missouri at least, libertarians are seen as potential terrorists. There's a list of "red flags" that law enforcement officials should be on the look-out for. They're all based on the American situation, but translated into a UK context they are as follows:

• Support for minor parties like the Libertarians and UKIP
• Talk of “New World Order” conspiracy theories
• Opposition to the Bank of England and support of the gold standard
• Opposition to Army involvement in national security
• Opposition to the EU
• Opposition to universal military service
• Tax resistance
• Possession of subversive literature: “pictures, cartoons, bumper stickers that contain anti-government rhetoric. Most of this material will depict the HR Revenue and Customs, ACPO, HSE, UN, Police and EU in a derogatory manner.”

I don't know about you, but I would sign up to the majority of these. I wonder if I'm on a terrorist watch list somewhere?

A straight lift

I've lifted this straight from the pages of Instapundit because it's far too good not to be repeated.

READ MY LIPS: No new waxes! “The painful Brazilian wax and its intimate derivatives are in danger of being stripped from salon and spa menus if a recent proposal to ban genital waxing is passed by the state’s Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling.”

UPDATE: Reader Lou Minatti suggests an alternate headline: New Jersey Politicians Support Bush.

Re-redesign

Reaction to the redesign was, ahem, not universally favourable. That's OK though, it's been a good learning experience. Rather than throw my hands up in disgust, I've put through a number of tweaks to the template to address some of the criticisms. These seem to be sending me back towards the place I first started, but that's OK too.

Let's see how it goes. I can always pull the plug and go back to the old template.