Bizarre BBC bias

A jaw-dropping piece of BBC leftism: at the end of an article describing the festivities surrounding the reopening of the Festival Hall, readers are asked to comment as follows:

Should City bankers donate a proportion of their fortunes to causes like the Royal Festival Hall? Let us know what you think using the form below.

Just remember folks, it's not a party political bias - the BBC promulgates a wide variety of left wing views.

(Via Biased BBC) 

Global warming in a frontier society

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, an excerpt from a Wall Street Journal Article (subscribers only).

The story according to which politically connected industries block economic developments that would be beneficial overall but redound to the detriment of the big players is one expounded mostly by cranks in the U.S., but is commonly accepted in Europe. This results from the fact that in Europe, this kind of thing happens. Market signals on employment, wages and production are all attenuated by government's heavy hand to a much greater extent than they are in the U.S. Stagnation in Europe has many faces, but one of the most important is the stasis of the corporate constellation: Most European economies are dominated by the same large companies that ruled the roost decades ago, while in the U.S., many of our largest and most successful companies didn't exist a generation ago.

This comparison is not new. But its relevance to the global warming debate is not well-understood. As a former Carter administration official at the conference put it, "America is, psychologically, an open-frontier society. Europe's frontier closed a millennium ago." In other words, the characteristic American response to, say, climate change, is to believe that technologies— and even companies—that do not now exist will crop up to solve the problem, assuming there is a problem. The characteristic European response, as exemplified by the German conspiracy theorist in Venice, is to focus on how to get the businesses to behave "better."

The open frontier view was captured by a Silicon Valley representative in the room. He stood up to announce that "clean tech" would be to this decade what high-tech was to the 1990s. The companies that would revolutionize our energy usage, he claimed, were now being funded by venture capitalists, and the Ciscos, Microsofts and Googles of the next decade would be the companies that solved the energy puzzle. We hadn't heard of any of them now, he insisted, but they would be huge. Is he right? Maybe. Who cares? It's his money, and the money of his colleagues in the Valley. The point is, if there's a conspiracy to keep revolutionary clean technology down, he didn't get the memo. The notion that this is simply a trans-Atlantic divide can easily be overstated. There are statist Americans and entrepreneurial Europeans. But the divide between the open-frontier camp and the closed-frontier camp is very real, and of the utmost importance to the global warming debate.

I can't help feeling that Mr Brown will shortly be appointing a "Clean-tech Czar", to be accompanied by a "Clean-tech levy" on bottles of wine, or something equally unconnected with the problem. It's coming, I tell you.

Quote of the day

Jeff Norman, in a comment in this thread. 

Dead-tree press is dead

Michael Yon has written another post about Iraq, of a quality and detail that you will never get from the MSM. This time he's on patrol with the Queen's Royal Lancers when they are caught up in an IED attack, and it's a gripping tale he has to tell. He also makes some interesting points about the lack of armour for British forces, and asks whether this is necessarily a bad thing. EU Referendum has written at length about this issue so it's good to have a different perspective.

Campaign for legal government

There seems to be some interest in the idea for a Campaign for Legal Government over in the comments at Guido's place. The idea is that it will take the buggers to court every time they do something dodgy.

They'll be busy then. 

In favour of teenage drinking

There's a small park, just over the road from the episcopal palace. We use it as a kind of extension to the garden whenever we can, since our own back yard is a bit small for the kids now.

Mostly it's fine, but on all too many weekends the ground around one or more of the pieces of play apparatus are a sea of broken glass, the result of some of the local yoof relieving their boredom. Strangely enough I sympathise with them in some ways. This is a rural village, and there's literally nothing for teenagers to do on a Saturday night. Even town, which is a half-hour walk away, has nothing. Living in the country is great for small children, but for disaffected teens it is probably a nightmare that they can't wait to end.

My own childhood was in suburbia, but in many ways we had the same problems; no money, and precious few facilities. It only got better at around the age of sixteen when I was taken aback when my father suggested, in response to my regular whine about being bored, that I get myself down to the pub for a drink.

And how right he was. Suddenly we were able to join the adult world, and once you knew which pubs wouldn't ask too many questions you could be pretty sure of a night's fun whenever you wanted it.  It's a way of doing things which just doesn't exist any longer, now that the police are in and out of the pubs checking for underage drinkers. Back in my day, teenagers went off to grown-up pubs and had a few pints and nobody batted an eyelid. The bars were full of adults, and if you were misbehaving you would be thrown out. Essentially you were an adult until you stepped out of line, at which point you suddenly became an child under adult supervision. It was a civil society way of dealing with the problem. You soon learned that keeping your head down and drinking quietly was the best way not to attract attention - you were taught to drink in a (relatively) civilised fashion, .

I don't mean to suggest that it was a perfect arrangement - some people are always going to step out of line - but I sometimes wonder if it was better than the current arrangement, where teenagers sup buckfast on the park benches and end the evening by smashing the bottles against the baby swings. 

Climbing trees

This weekend, Mrs Bishop escaped to England for a girly shopping weekend, leaving Mr Bishop with three baby bishops. Since Granny Bishop was on holiday too, this could have been a struggle, but the possibility of having to entertain the nippers single-handed was averted by dint of inviting lots of schoolfriends and their parents round.

Amazing fact though - both of the families invited were surprised, nay shocked, that Mr and Mrs Bishop allowed their children to climb trees, and freely admitted that they were far too fearful to allow such dangerous behaviour. I wasn't aware of any other uses for trees, myself. I didn't tempt fate by letting on that one of the baby Bishops rides his bicycle without a helmet, and once managed to ride at high speed into a brick wall in the process. I will probably be reported to social services any day now.

On a similar theme, Instapundit has been blogging regularly about the Dangerous Book for Boys, which looks set to be  a bestseller over on that side of the pond, and if Glenn Reynolds has it right, the start of a pardigm shift in the way boys are raised.

There is no consensus, anyway

There's a very interesting article here, which summarises and indexes a series of profiles of some global warming sceptics. These are not a few obscure eggheads in out of the way colleges - there are some big name scientists in there.

My series set out to profile the dissenters -- those who deny that the science is settled on climate change -- and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world's premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop -- the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of emails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

The consensus is a myth. 

Craig Murray on libertarianism

Craig Murray explains some basic principles of a libertarian.

Legislating on taste and personal morality is assumed. Authoritarianism is the default setting. The anti-foxhunters and anti-smokers have got the strength to impose their will, the anti-abortionists not, at least in the UK. But why do we have to seek to impose our will by force, not reason?

Why indeed? I have sometimes wondered at the kind of sick mind that would seek to criminalise the use of imperial measures, for example.

Marketing

A commenter on the posting on packaging informs me that environmentalists are protesting about "the large amount of packaging used for marketing purposes". This distinction had entirely passed my by, and was certainly not mentioned by Jeanette Winterson in her whinge on Question Time. It's also not clear to me just how large this alleged problem is - what proportion of packaging is used solely for marketing purposes. Still, let's examine the case.

We first need to ask what is the problem with packaging used for marketing purposes. It is clearly not the fact that it is packaging per se, since, according to my commenter, environmentalists have no problem with packaging used to protect goods. This can only mean that the objection is, in fact, to use of resources for marketing.

This being the case, we must ask why they are directing their fire against marketing through the medium of packaging. Why not other forms of advertising and promotion? Do billboards not use resources? Does a TV commercials not involve flying film crews to exotic locations with a vast and ugly carbon footprint to match? What is it about packaging which is so uniquely wicked?

We need to know. 

Direct action

I'm not sure if I've ever come across an example of a corporate bigwig engaging in direct action on behalf of their company. Richard Charkin, the CEO of Macmillan Nature, was understandably annoyed at Google's approach to digitisation of publishers' intellectual property.  Rather than engage some lawyers or write a letter of protest, Mr Charkin seized the bull by the horns and took a visit to Google's stand at Bookexpo America where he and a colleague half-inched a couple of laptops.

I confess that a colleague and I simply picked up two computers from the Google stand and waited in close proximity until someone noticed. This took more than an hour.

Our justification for this appalling piece of criminal behaviour? The owner of the computer had not specifically told us not to steal it. If s/he had, we would not have done so. When s/he asked for its return, we did so. It is exactly what Google expects publishers to expect and accept in respect to intellectual property.

'If you don't tell us we may not digitise something, we shall do so. But we do no evil. So if you tell us to desist we shall.'

I felt rather shabby playing this trick on Google. They should feel the same playing the same trick on authors and publishers.

Two wrongs don't make a right, of course, but one can't help but have a sneaking admiration for Mr Charkin. We might even quietly wish Macmillan well in its unlikely role as the David to Google's Goliath.

Packaging

I was listening to "Any Questions" the other day, and was trying to stop my toes curling  - an involuntary spasm caused by the foolish inanities of Jeanette Winterson who is apparently a famous writer. Ms Winterson was telling us about protests which various environmentalist bodies had organised in order to protest at what they saw as the excessive volume of packaging produced by supermarkets. However, it can't be true that the packaging is unnecessary. Here's why.

The green argument takes two premises:

1. The level of packaging found in supermarkets is unnecessary.
2. This is annoying to customers
   

They reason therefore that supermarkets should not use so much packaging in future.

Let us observe however that supermarkets are greedy capitalist organisations. I don't think that anyone, least of all Ms Winterson, would disagree with this. We should also observe that supermarkets spend huge sums of money on packaging - which has become a multi-billion pound industry on the back of supermarkets' custom.

The question we therefore need to ask (and which Ms Winterson and her ilk need to supply an answer to) is: "Why are these greedy capitalists spending such large sums of money on something which is (a) unnecessary and (b)pisses their customers off?" Could it be that the packaging is, in fact, necessary after all? Could it be that it is actually protecting valuable products from damage or decay? Could it be that the supermarkets are actually the good environmentalists, and the Wintersons are in fact pushing us down a road that will see us wasting huge amounts of food, as happens in the third world?

Perish the thought.

 

Another climate station

Following on from the previous post, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at a UK climate station on Google Earth. The idea was really just to see if I could find the "Stephenson Screen" - the small box of tricks used for recording climate data rather than to do any surveying as such. . My nearest stations are Edinburgh Airport and the Royal Observatory. Taking the view that the Observatory would be smaller I zoomed in on Blackford Hill, and was pretty astonished to find what appeared to be the climate station straight away.

As you can see, the station (marked) is surrounded by a circle of grass. By the miracles of Google Earth I was able to measure this as having a minimum radius of 9m which is the bare minimum permitted by the guidelines. The surrounding roads are a no-no though, and the buildings around the perimeter are too close to the station which should be at least a distance of four times the height of the buildings away. Since we can measure the distance to the nearest building as being 18m this implies a maximum height of the building of 4.5m. This seems implausible.

All in all, it looks as though there may be problems with data quality in the UK too - if it can't be got right at a major scientific institution it's unlikely that the stations in agricultural colleges and so on are going to be much better. It's a pity that the Google's hi-res images of the UK cover such a small fraction of the country.