Bishop Hill Feb 25, 2009 Health Liberalism Nanny state Regulation Hawke and Hunter has only been open a few months but the owners have created a "smoking room" that is even better than Boisdale's famous cigar terrace in London. It has its own bar, comfortable furniture, tropical plants and no shortage of heaters.
I still hate smoke, so I don't suppose I'd go, but you can't help applauding.
Bishop Hill Feb 25, 2009 Economics Charles Steele explains why the various stimulus plans won't work.
Expending scarce resources on useless projects may "put people to work," but it remains consumption of capital, and is simply more of what Adam Smith called decay. The idea that stimulus is stimulus and spending solves problems of capital misallocation is just crazy nonsense. Waste is waste, and it makes us poorer, not wealthier.
(Via Picking losers)
Bishop Hill Feb 24, 2009 Economics OK, so we need some money and fast. If you have a look around you, you can see how people deal with this kind of problem in day to day life - they sell assets - shares get flogged, the kids' old toys go on Ebay, the four-by-four gets dumped in favour of something smaller.
The government needs to do the same kind of thing too. There's a lot to flog off, but is it enough to fill the hole? Dunno, because we don't know how big the hole is, but let's see what we think we can get for a firesale of UK assets. Here's a start (valuations per my estimates or per the ASI):
I'm still working on filling in the gaps, but that's £297bn so far. Hospitals and Universities and HE colleges must add quite a lot to that though. I have no idea how to value them though. Anyone got any ideas? School numbers are roughly correct. The cost per school is 50% of the cost of a new-build, which may be a bit on the generous side, given that we know most of the recent capital spending by government is just "invested" up the nearest wall. What's clear from this is that in the wider scheme of things it's only by selling off the education and health sectors that we can hope to plug the gap, which was over £1trillion last time I heard.
Well go on then, get to it.
Bishop Hill Feb 23, 2009 Education This is a response to an article by David Semple on home education. David Semple is an Oxford-educated teacher and a state-worshipper: the kind of person who has got the country into the authoritarian mess it's in now. I don't normally do swear-blogging, but unfortunately I may have lapsed once or twice during this posting. Semple is basicly a fascist though and I think he deserves it.
Firstly, as a teacher, I’m not willing to be told what I can and can’t empirically examine by a political lobby. Those who provide education in schools are in a position to examine the education provided by home educators.
Bullshit. Teaching one-to-one is completely different to teaching one on thirty. Teachers know precisely nothing about home educated children, either individually or collectively. In fact, teachers know nothing about providing an education to anyone. They don't provide an education in their own schools, they provide indoctrination in left-wingnuttery and environmentalism. David Semple says himself that teachers are not properly trained and that they are delivering a deficient educaiton and yet here he is at the same time saying we should listen to what he and his ilk have to say about home education. The nerve of the man is astonishing.
It may be that the home school lobby don’t want to listen to some of the things which have to be said - but that’s a different issue.
Too right they don't want to listen to you. But you are going to try to force them to listen to you, and moreover to do what you tell them to, anyway. I can think of no better word for this than "fascist".
My concerns are as follows: a) what does the child want
This doesn't bother teachers in schools does it? The child gets the education the school is willing to give them, not the one the child wants. My son wants to learn history and geography and has been told in no uncertain terms that he lump it until high school. This is gross hypocrisy by David Semple, demanding things of home educators that he knows full well are not delivered and can never be delivered in schools.
b) is the child getting the same breadth of education as in a classroom;
Almost certainly. As we've heard in the news this week schools are delivering only English and Maths and not much else, a fact that David Semple even quotes himself! It would be astonishing if home educators could deliver anything quite as crap as Semple and his colleagues manage, and yet here he is questioning HE families.
c) is the child simply being taught to regurgitate the world-view of the parents;
Rather than being taught to regurgitate your worldview I suppose? If I had a penny for every time my children had been indoctrinated into some facet of environmentalism I would be a wealthy man. Oh, but wait a minute, you know better than me, don't you?
d) does the child have access to sufficient resources to support learning to a level equal to that which his or her peers will reach by the same age.
Give tax refunds to home educators. Problem solved. The problem is there is not a teacher in the country who would support this because for these parasites the education system is for feathering their own nests rather than providing a service. And anyway, just how much do you need by way of resources?
All of these things can be measured. I have always been particularly concerned about c) since I know that in the United States, home schooling is increasingly prevalent among extreme Christians and I have seen it suggested that this trend is the same in the UK. If home schooling can be a vehicle to prevent scientific learning, then we should regulate it.
Not only a fascist but an ignorant fascist. Home educators in the UK largely report that religion is not a reason for taking their children out of school. It's because they think that the education provided by Mr Semple and his ilk is crap. And what business is it of yours anyway if parents want to teach their children religious stuff? It doesn't affect you, you fascist prick.
The consequences for science of d) are equally important. If a child is to be kept out of primary school, this is of less importance, but post-11, large swathes of science teaching is practice-led. Titrations, dissections, circuit-building, oscillations and so forth are just some of the practicals for which the equipment is unlikely to be just lying around one’s house.
I am not so narrow minded, of course, to suggest that the lack of this equipment means that home schooling should be dispensed with.
You are pretty narrow-minded though aren't you?
It may simply mean that the LEA should have a remit extending to the provision of such equipment to community centres, where home schooling families can access it. Whether or not it gets used needs to be monitored.
Jesus, can you just for once open your slobbering fascist mouth without demanding that the state monitor somebody. Can you conceive of no human activity that shouldn't be snooped on and checked up on by the state?
I’ve never believed in measuring skirt lengths, tucking in shirts and so forth - and one-to-one teaching obviously gets rid of this sort of requirement. Additional time, with a suitably able parent, also offers the chance for a much broader range of activities - from mechanics to ornithology to wood work. However its a big step from saying, “This is possible” to ensuring that every home schooled child has these opportunities.
Ensuring these opportunities needs to be the responsibility of a body with no intellectual bias towards one form of education or the other - but since primary legislation is the responsibility of the State, it is to the State such a body must answer.
Bullshit again. This is the connection between leftwingnuttery and fascism made plain. "We demand opportunity for everyone and therefore we must have access to your home to check that you are providing it". Why don't you just go ahead and say that you want CCTV in every room to ensure that nobody is doing anything bad?
Collectively, as a society, we have a responsibility to our children - who are not the property of their parents and shouldn’t be treated as such.
And they are the property of "society" are they? You clearly think so. But if you took the trouble to check it out, you would find that children are legally the responsibility of parents. This is why it is not possible to sue the state when your teenagers take to drugs. Are you advocating that this should be possible? Of course not. When you say that children are the "responsibility of society" you don't mean anything of the sort. You are simply demanding a right to indoctrinate them to your personal preferences while avoiding any actual responsibility. It's the same as every other time you deal with the state - interfering busybodies get to tell you what to do but take no responsibility for the outcome. Teachers are not responsible for delivering a shitty education, child welfare officers are not responsible when children die. As soon as the state starts ruining the lives of home educated children they will not be responsible for that either.
Without taking away the right of a child to learn what interests them, there are also certain necessary things every child should know, whether John Holt and his fellow pro-home schoolers want to admit it or not.
Bullshit again. The majority of children come out of our shitty schools without even a semblance of an education and here is this arrogant prick of a teacher claiming that he knows better. The nerve of the man is astonishing.
I’m referring to things like the scientific method, skepticism and all forms of rational argument and the examination of evidence required to support or disprove such an argument.
I wasn't taught any of these things at my shitty bog standard comp. I learned them myself afterwards.
After all, this is a democracy. However distorted our public sphere is by a bias towards Capital, the opinions of the individual still have social consequences. So, as a fellow citizen in a democracy, I want everyone to know about things like evolution and to be able to judge the merits of an argument on the basis of rational thought, not on the basis of prescribed doctrine.
More ignorant prickery. What kind of a semi-educated halfwit thinks that democracy justifies anything? Vote to send people to the gas chambers and that's OK is it? This is why people don't want to let their children near people like you. What happens if someone doesn't want their children to know about recycling or whatever half-baked trendy idea some fart of a teacher has picked up in the pages of Socialist Worker? You couldn't have rational discussion of environmentalism in schools anyway because it's the new state religion and cannot be questioned. Why should your ideas take precedence anyway? What happens if the child isn't interested in evolution on the day you decide to teach it?
My only problem is that, even in schools, teaching to this standard is far from secure!
Genius! Let's try to stop the only alternative in town anyway!
In conclusion, I haven’t met a teacher yet who will deny the important role that family can play in a child’s learning. Also I don’t doubt, looking at the Swedish model as example, that there are better ways to organise education than what we currently have. Home schooling certainly has the potential to be one of these better ways - but how we talk about it is key.
"We" can talk about it all "we" like. Others just wish you'd shut up and let the rest of us get on with our own lives. But of course the Semples of this world will harass us without end because they're doing it for our own good.
Currently the State may be biased against home schooling - but there is no excuse for the near-hysterical reaction of home schoolers to a desire to regulate what they do. We need to find ways to open opportunities for child learning - at home or in school - and we need to do so knowing that this may be against the express wishes of the parents.
Understand this people. For those on the left they are not your children any more, they belong to the state. This is fascism, pure and simple. The man at the LEA knows better than you what is good for your children. David Semple is on a mission from Gordon and you are just going to have to learn your place.
This is at the core of my problem with home schooling; parents have replaced the absolute authority of the State with the absolute authority of themselves - and both need to be a lot more open to democratic regulation. This is reflected, to some extent, in the US figures below; of particular interest should be the 38% who are home schooled on religious grounds, and the 12% who object to what the school teaches.
Ignorant fascist again. Why quote the US figures? The UK ones are available and only 14% of UK home ed parents give religion as a reason. And regardless of that, what right do you have to demand that your views take preference? Choose liberalism and let people make their own minds up, or choose fascism and tell them what they must do.
Parents do have absolute authority because they are legally absolutely responsible. Get that through your cretinous teacher skull.
It highlights the hypocrisy at the heart of the home school movement and begs the question, since when are parents more qualified than teachers to choose what their children can and can’t learn?
Who gives a monkey's about the qualifications? The question is, who gets the better results and the answer is clear - home educating parents without degrees acheive better results for children than degree-educated teachers. Face it, you are working in an industry that does not do anyone any good. You are a waste of space and time. You are a parasite. Go and start doing something useful with your life and stop knackering other people's.
Whether boards of governors, LEAs or some body that will collectively represent home schoolers, this sort of regulation is the right of a democratic society - however we collectively decide to arrange it.
You can collectively naff off.
Bishop Hill Feb 22, 2009 Children Civil liberties In the brave new world of [Every Child Matters] parents are almost superfluous and completely interchangeable. They do feature on the pictoral explanation of a child's life, but they appear to have equal status to the 'third sector' and are placed further away from the child than:
- Maternity and Primary Health;
- Children's Centres;
- Extended Schools;
- Integrated Youth Services;
- Lead Professionals;
- Specialist Services;
- Multi-agency Locality Teams;
- The Team Around the Child;
- The Common Assessment Framework [opens pdf]; and
- ContactPoint.
Bishop Hill Feb 21, 2009 Civil liberties Libertarians of the left and of the right mean something entirely different when they talk about "liberty". This bodes rather ill for the Convention on Modern Liberty next week.
Bishop Hill Carol Gould at Pajamas Media:
Another glitch for Britain’s image in the world came on February 6 when television presenter Jeremy Clarkson, in an interview in Australia, referred to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown as a “one-eyed Scottish idiot.” The prime minister is visually impaired, is a Scot, and is believed by a large swathe of impoverished Britons to be an idiot, but the Clarkson gaffe made many feel that public decorum and the greatest of British attributes, graciousness, has evaporated.
Bishop Hill Feb 19, 2009 Climate So, here's the report on Sir John Houghton's lecture at St Andrews.
Sir John is a practising Christian and the lecture was part of a series on science and religion. It was filmed, and I understand that it should be available online in about a week's time at www.jamesgregory.org.
Sir John Houghton (it's pronounced 'Hawton', not 'Howton', I discovered) is a rather unprepossessing looking character. Not slick by any means. He dressed like a bureaucrat. I don't mean this as criticism - sartorial elegance isn't my strong point either - I just wanted to give an impression of the man. He has the darkest eyes I think I've ever seen. He is thinner than I remember him from pictures I've seen in the past. Older, more tired-looking.
The lecture was entitled "Global Warming - is it real and what should we do?". Unfortunately for expectant AGW science buffs, the lecture was mainly on the second bit, and I think this was a shame, because economics is not Sir John's specialism. It would have made more sense for him to speak on something he was actually expert in.
He started out with an admonition not to cheat on our children, our neighbours or 'the rest of creation'. For me, this didn't bode well for the rest of his talk. It's pretty clear that Sir John is a man with a mission. For him it's a moral thing, and he said as much in the lecture.
The scientific content was very thin. There was a graph (with a neatly truncated y-axis) of CO2 levels and an unsupported assertion that this leads to a change in climate. There was also a graph of projected temperature changes of between 2 and 6 degrees, extracted from AR4.
There was a lot of time spent on potential impacts - the European heatwave of a couple of years back (weather not climate, surely), sea level rises (photos of Bangladeshis swimming from floodwaters), more intense storms (these are apparently very noticeable), and droughts (photos of starving Africans. I found myself grinning at the nakedness of the propaganda. I hope he didn't notice.
My interest was reawakened rather when Sir John said he was going to discuss the uncertainties. However, I was quickly disabused of any hopes of a meaningful discussion because all we got was an argument from authority. The IPCC report he said, was the most thoroughly reviewed scientific document ever (or words to that effect). There was he said, a sustained misinformation campaign led by oil companies and the coal industry, which was intended to undermine them, but this attention had made the IPCC much better at their work. So much for the uncertainties.
Mark Lynas's book Six Degrees got a good plug. Sir John said even he found it quite scary in parts. (Ed: It's only a story, Sir John!)
Action to be taken included an end to deforestation, efficient energy generation and use, carbon capture, renewable energy (solar, tidal, wave, biomass (what, no nuclear?)).
Wealth has apparently come from fossil fuels (what, not trade?) and apparently we have to learn to SHARE (caps in original lecture). No political agenda there then.
I very much got the impression that on matters economic Sir John was well out of his depth. He said that the net cost of emissions reductions was zero. I found this a little surprising, to say the least. Sir John is however optimistic about global warming - because of the commitment of the scientific community, because the technology needed already exists and because of 'God's commitment to his creation'. Golly.
There was time for a few questions at the end. Sir John was not good here in my opinion. He waffled rather than giving precise answers.
He was pressed on his failure to mention nuclear power and he admitted that it was an option - one solution among many. On the subject of volcanos as a forcing he said that the impact was small compared to CO2.
He was accused (gently) of cherry-picking examples - he had mentioned warmth in Switzerland but not cold in China. He denied this, and said he needed examples which conveyed the message. The questioner also pointed out flat temperatures since 1998, but I don't remember if he addressed this point.
He was asked about very high levels of CO2 in the distant past (15% or more). Sir John said he is not a paleoclimate expert (didn't he give evidence to the Senate on the Hockey Stick?).
There was some discussion of overpopulation.
I had the final question and I decided to ask the topical question of whether a literature review such as is performed by the IPCC was adequate for questions of such huge import. He spent several minutes telling me that what they did was very thorough. He couldn't think of any other way of doing it, and unfortunately I couldn't get back in to say the word "replication", which I should have got into my question in the first place.
I very much came away with the impression of having listened to a piece of propaganda rather than a cogently presented scientific case, but it was not uninteresting for all that. While he is a perfectly acceptable speaker, this was not a persuasive case even for the undecided, I would say. The talk needed some vivid promotional graphic to help make the case. A hockey stick, say.
After the lecture, there was a chance to mill about in the foyer and have a glass of wine (which I avoided prior to the drive home) but I was able to spend quite a long time chatting to Sir John along with a group of other people. This was very pleasant and quite interesting. At the moment I'm not sure it is appropriate to report the contents of what probably counts as a private conversation, although there was nothing of earth-shattering importance said. If anyone can give me guidance on the jouralistic ethics of this situation, I would be interested: we were in the foyer of the auditorium and there was a constantly changing small crowd around Sir John asking questions.Thus some of what I heard was Sir John's replies to my questions, and some was his replies to other people. I don't know if this counts as public or private and reportable or not.
Sir John was very amiable and I got the impression that his views are quite sincerely held. He was quite forthcoming with his opinions and these were strongly stated (although not scandalously so), including particular disapproval of one sceptic he was asked about by one person there.
I've never met an FRS before, and I found myself rather disappointed that he didn't come across as cleverer. The sense of meeting a bureaucrat was overwhelming for me, although I admit I may have come with a predisposition to see him this way. My views on his knowledge of economics were reinforced though because when I pressed him on some of the points he had made during the lecture, he flannelled his way out of it.
I managed to get in a question about the hockey stick before he was dragged away to his meal with the bigwigs. Unfortunately he only had time to start his answer. Since his case has largely been stated before, I will risk reporting it here: the hockey stick was one graph among many and only gained prominence because of sceptical efforts. Paleoclimate has moved on. Nowadays some reconstructions show hockey sticks, some don't.
To his credit, Sir John was still trying to give me the rest of the answer as he was pulled away. Mind you if you were going to spend the evening supping with a bunch of divinity lecturers you might feel that there was a better time to be had debating hockey sticks.
Bishop Hill Feb 19, 2009 Civil liberties I'm just leaving to go and hear Sir John Houghton, but I've just come across something odd. The Indy is reporting that two American Baptists have been banned from entering the UK because they incite hatred gays.
"Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behaviour by inciting hatred against a number of communities.
"The Government has made it clear it opposes extremism in all its forms.
"We will continue to stop those who want to spread extremism, hatred and violent messages in our communities from coming to our country.
"That was the driving force behind the tighter rules on exclusion for unacceptable behaviour that the Home Secretary announced on October 28 last year.
"The exclusions policy is targeted at all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs."
Phelps, 79, and his daughter Shirley, 51, belong to the US Westboro Baptist Church based in Kansas which calls for homosexuals to be killed.
I checked out that last bit though, which says their Church calls for gays to be killed. Also the bit about "violent" messages. There's no mention of it on Phelps' Wiki page. Does he incite violence, or merely hatred? That's a crucial difference in my book. Is there perhaps some spinning from the Indy here?
No time to check now, but I'll look into it when I get a chance.
Bishop Hill Feb 19, 2009 Civil liberties Education Home Ed blogger Gill Kilner has taken a look at the government's sinister Every Child Matters agenda and finds its roots in the work of the colleagues in Brussels.
It's getting hard to reconcile support for the EU with support for civil liberties, wouldn't you say?
Bishop Hill Feb 18, 2009 Civil liberties A propos of my earlier post on what recent legislation we should try to repeal in order to reclaim our lost civil liberties, I was struck by the thought that it might be easier to simply repeal every piece of legislation introduced since 1997.
Off the top of my head I can think of nothing Messrs Blair and Brown have done that is worthy of retention. Have I missed something or shall we ditch the lot?
Bishop Hill Feb 17, 2009 Climate I'm going to try to get myself along to this.
"Global Warming - is it real and what should we do?"
Prof. Sir John Houghton
5.15 pm Thursday, 19 February 2009
followed by a Reception until 7.00pm
I don't know if there is going to be an opportunity to ask questions at the end, but if there is, what do you think I should ask him? I've got a few ideas of my own, but any suggestions would be welcome.
Bishop Hill Feb 17, 2009 Media A whole new approach to newspaper website design at the NYT. (via here).
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2009 Civil liberties I've been away for a long weekend, and have come back to find that the colleagues in the blogosphere have been keeping up the pressure on the civil liberties front. Chris Dillow's piece on the coming police state is well worth a look.
With Labour now trailing badly in the polls, a Tory landslide seems all but certain, so there is at least hope that things might change. My thesis for tonight is that, while hope there may be, expectation of any great change on civil liberties is a position that is not warranted by the facts, and is not therefore an adequate response to big government encroachment on the realm of the individual.
While I was rude about David Davis's absence from the media during the Wilders affair, a commenter on that thread pointed out that subsequent to my posting he had staked out the civil liberties argument on Question Time and that is certainly welcome. The rest of his party (with certain honourable exceptions) have been pretty craven in their silence. During my recent absence they have restricted themselves to issuing statements about food labelling and bonuses in state-owned banks.Before that it was a task force on maths teaching headed by B-list television celeb - a policy (if we can dignify it with that title) that would not have been out of place in any of the last ten years of Labour government.
Is this reticence part of a wider campaign among the Tories to simply let Labour lose the next election by giving them no firm Tory policy positions to attack? Or perhaps Conservatives agree with the arguments that the war on terror necessitates an expansion of the state security apparatus to levels unknown outside the communist bloc? We simply can't know what the Tories' true position is. The problem is that David Cameron has shown himself quite ready to go back on campaign promises after he is elected, so even if a statement were to be made, it is hard to know if we should believe him anyway.
Can we really face the prospect of going into the next election merely hoping for the best from the Conservative party? For me, civil liberties campaigners need to publish a list of legislation that should be repealed as the first action of an incoming government. No votes for anyone who doesn't sign up to it. The LibDems have of course already mooted a Great Repeal Act, but that was frankly not great enough. The encroachments of Brown and Blair go much further and much deeper than can be countered by the repeal of a dozen acts of Parliament. It's also worth noting that the website they set up at the time (2006) is now defunct.
Here's a partial list of suggestions (pinched from here).
Plus more here
To which I would add
I haven't examined most of these in any detail, but it's fair to say there are many familiar names there. I'm sure this is just scratching the surface.
Bishop Hill Feb 13, 2009 Civil liberties As I pointed out in my posting the other day, Shami Chakrabarti and David Davis have both been consipicuous by their absence from the debate over whether Geert Wilders should have been allowed into the country.
Legally, there now seems to be little doubt that it was unlawful to exclude Wilders, the showing of his film having gone off with barely a murmur of dissent in his absence, and with Wilders having actually visited Britain a matter of weeks ago without any discernable trouble. The Home Secretary is going to be extremely hard pushed to justify his exclusion on any legal basis.
So in legal terms, he should have been here, and those who support the concept of the rule of law should be incandescent over the Home Secretary's behaviour. Likewise, anyone with the remotest interest in civil liberties should be fuming too. So where are our champions of civil liberties? Why have they not been shouting from the pages of every newspaper in the land? Davis, nothing. Chakrabarti, nothing. The Liberal Democrats? Don't make me laugh.
David Davis is a politician and has presumably made a political calculation that he has little to gain from speaking out in favour of Wilders' coming to the UK, and a great deal to lose in terms of his future career (we assume that he will eventually seek high office again). We expect little else from politicians and can write off the LibDems on the same grounds.
Chakrabarti has no such excuse. She is the head of Liberty, a body that exists solely to speak out in favour of civil liberties. She has failed miserably to do so. Her silence over Wilders is not unprecedented either. She has made it abundantly clear that she doesn't feel that freedom of speech extends to nasty people; her words on Question Time last week can have left nobody in any doubt about that. She also has previous form on the "disappearing act" she has performed in the last few days, notably when Liberty maintained a determined radio silence over the Sikh play Bezhti.
Chakrabarti has demonstrated over the years that she will not stand up for those whose views she deems unacceptable. She will not defend unpleasant views. She will not speak out for unpleasant people. She hates racists so much that she will allow fundamental British freedoms to be trampled underfoot in order allow these views she detests so much to be crushed, regardless of the importance of the freedoms that are lost with them, and regardless of the duties entailed in her position.
What is the point of the woman? It is possible to find people with views like that in any pub, Conservative Association or working men's club in the country. People who think civil liberties are a secondary consideration are two-a-penny in the pages of the Guardian or the Telegraph. Why do we need Liberty if not to make the difficult case of basic freedoms for everyone?
Chakrabarti and Liberty are not champions of civil liberties. In many ways they are a direct threat to the English model of individuals untrammelled in what they can say and think. She should stand down and make way for somebody who wants civil liberties for everyone, not just the favoured few.
