Offline for a few days

I'm going to be offline, probably until the end of the week. Isn't work a bore?

More on educational conscription

Fabian Tassano has provided the convincing that I needed to support his campaign against extension of the school leaving age. His point is that this is not, as I had erroneously thought, a string attached to an offer of public financial support, but applies to anyone whether they are self-supporting or not.

This is clearly wrong. I'm convinced.

On a similar subject, Instapundit does a podcast today with Dr Robert Epstein who advocates letting teenagers leave school when they want to - providing they can pass the exams. This strikes me as a much more sensible idea for the twenty first century.

Michael Yon praises British Troops

There's a fascinating posting here by Michael Yon, the American blogger who is embedded with troops in Iraq. He has managed to get himself embedded with British forces in Basra and gives a gripping account of one of their combat operations. He is very diplomatic about their levels of equipment and lack of air support, and is suitably impressed by the courage they display in attacking Sadr forces despite this.

Quote of the day

Good Friday

On Good Friday, one of the baby bishops asked:

"Daddy, why is it called Good Friday? It wasn't a very good day for Jesus, was it?"

So why is it called Good Friday? 

Compulsory education

It's sometimes said that the nanny state and the welfare state are two sides of the same coin. Because the state, via the taxpayer, funds healthcare, it is said to be reasonable for government to dictate our diets and exercise regime.  A similar sort of argument applies to the government's plans to extend the school leaving age for those who have no job to go to, which have so irked Fabian Tassano.

Fabian seems absolutely clear on this issue - to his mind it is abhorrent and wrong for the state to dictate to people in this way. But to me the answer to the question of whether government should dictate school leaving ages is not an obvious one. If the taxpayer is to support these people, is it not right that they should also demand that the recipients of this largesse should actually do something useful with the money - like study?

Don't get me wrong - if I were running the country the taxpayer wouldn't be supporting these people at all. It's just to say that if I am forced to pay to feed someone who can't or won't support themselves, should I be fighting for their right to sit on their backsides doing nothing?

I don't mean to say that Fabian is wrong. Just that I need convincing that he's right. 

Book reviews

I've added a page of book reviews to the site. There's a link in the navigation bar. There's a couple of titles there now, and I'll add to the list from time to time.

Organic food

One thing I've never understood about organic food: why is putting safety-tested chemicals on food bad, but putting raw animal faeces on it good?

Ever had the feeling you're being watched?

Nigel Farndale, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, relates the story of a friend who was paid a visit by the local constabulary.

His mother rang to tell him that he had left the barrel of a shotgun - only the barrel - out of the cabinet. He said he would pop over next day to put it back. Before he could, the police arrived at the house and said they had reason to believe that there was a gun on the premises that was not under lock and key. The only way they could have known this was by intercepting his call.

Why, Farndale asks, are the police monitoring his friend's every call? The unwritten implication is that the police have got better things to do with their time than sit and listen in to the telephone conversations of taxi firm owners in rural Nowheresville. Somehow though, I think things have moved on and there is no need for policemen to sit listening in to the minutiae of school runs in the sticks. I'm sure I read somewhere that software now exists that will automatically monitor telephone conversations for key words and phrases like "gun", "get the" and "shove it up Blair's bottom". So it's much more likely that every telephone conversation of every gun owner is being monitored by a computer, or worse, that every telephone conversation in the country is routinely checked.

Perhaps somebody braver than me would like to do a test: ring a pal, and tell him you'd like him to drop the Uzi round in the morning. If the police break the door down shortly afterwards then we know something's amiss. Any volunteers?

Read the whole thing

If you have been overwhelmed by the wave of apocalyptic nonsense from the global warming lobby in recent days, go and read this at Climate Audit.

In fact, go and read it anyway. 

Shall we try something different?

Another day, another murder.

And another. There's more too. We are beset by violence. I've listed a few of the other headlines from the BBC England page below:

Woman quizzed over stab death
Two held after woman stabbed
Man charged over fatal stabbing
Gunshots fired at car and house
Woman stabbed by intruder
Body of man found in garden
Man arrested after fire at flats
Man suffers serious head injuries 

Anyone would think it was a good day to bury bad news.

If anyone from the metropolitan elite can rouse themselves sufficiently, we'll probably get the calls for tighter laws and fiercer punishments (these just days after announcing that we were going to have to put fewer people in prison). Lots of handwringing too, if experience is anything to go by, and if they get out of bed the right side, the powers that be might even declare knife or firearms amnesties which are at least good for a photocall.

The level of violent crime is now getting to the stage where anyone who is really thinking about the policy implications has to be asking themselves if we are barking up the right tree. We have had progressively tighter controls over arms for nearly a hundred years. It would be nice if we could point at any significant falls in violent crime to accompany these, but we can't. At every step of the way the numbers have just kept rising.

Can anyone really conclude from this that further laws will work? Where is the evidence? Of course there isn't any. Believing in legislation as the answer to violent crime is a matter of convenience for politicians, who find it gives them the appearance of activity. For others it's a religious belief engendered by the "yuk" factor they feel for weaponry. They have no choice but to back the politicians.

These are not rational approaches to the issue.

How about something completely different? How about repealing all the firearms laws, and take us back to the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when firearms were available to anyone who wanted them? We can exclude convicted criminals and minors from this, of course, but in essence everyone can have a gun.

Why should this work in theory? The answer is that the economic incentives for the criminal are dramatically changed. Attempting to steal someone's wallet changes from a "dead cert" option for the bad guy armed with a knife, into one of potential death. He can no longer know that he has the "military" advantage over his intended victim. And his attempted mugging could lead to his being killed, which fundamentally alters the risk/reward calculation he makes before his attack. Would he still mug someone if he risked death to do so? 

What then would be the practical implications? Would we end up with a bloodbath, as so many people argue? The evidence from America is strongly against this. Most US states now have laws allowing, and in many cases, requiring issue of concealed carry firearms permits. As each state has liberalised its laws, a little experiment has been performed to allow us to test the theory.

The results are hotly disputed, but in some ways it's actually rather surprising that this is the case. According to this page (which I've chosen because it looks reasonably neutral) the major study on this issue by Lott & Mustard, which found that relaxing the firearms laws reduced crime. Their study was critiqued by Black & Nagin who argued that Lott & Mustard couldn't support their findings. What Black and Nagin didn't say, however,  was that Lott & Mustard's figures indicated that looser laws raised crime.

So it looks as if at worst, liberalised firearms laws make little difference. Certainly, they don't seem to lead inexorably to bloodbaths and carnage.

This being the case, our worst fears about what would happen if our neighbours started to carry guns appear to be unfounded. We have made an inanimate object into a bogeyman and we torture ourselves about what might happen if things were to change. We should recognise this as irrational, and try to deal with the question purely by reason. We shoudn't fear trying something different.

It might just work. 

Dirty dancing

There's an eye-opening post over at The Language Business. The British Council has been spending lavishly on subsidies to the Akram Khan Dance Company. Two of the directors of the British Council are, coincidentally, also directors of Akram Khan.

How convenient. 

Quote of the day

Scottish Conservatives

The suggestion that the Conservatives should split off the Scottish end of the party has been doing the rounds of the blogs recently. There's probably nothing in the story, which has the ring of an off the cuff comment which has been blown out of all proportion. This doesn't stop it being an interesting idea though. The Scottish end of the party is something of an embarrassment for the rest of the Conservatives - a constant reminder that they are almost completely impotent north of the border. The Scottish Conservatives are probably equally embarrassed by the UK party, who play the part of an all-purpose bogeyman for the other Scottish parties, to be wheeled out to frighten the children with stories of the Thatcherite terror.

But if we just stand back and look at this for a minute, what is this actually going to achieve? Are the Scottish people suddenly going to take up free markets and small government when they listen to an Edinburgh-based Conservative party? Of course they're not. The Scottish people are wholly wedded to the idea of socialism. They think that free markets are something that happen in England. It's just not done up here. That's why we have five parties (Labour, SNP, LibDems, Green, SSP) offering more or less socialist platforms and the Conservatives who might as well be standing on a platform of genital warts for all.

Scotland, the country, needs to be cut free. Then it can go through the pain that will cure it of its delusion. Try socialism. Try it again. Then try it some more, and if that doesn't work then keep on trying it just a few more times. The turmoil and despair that this will create will act as a kind of mask so that when a radical new free market approach is announced, nobody will recall that a long-forgotten party called the Conservatives were advocating just such a policy many years before, not that they were widely reviled for it by the very people who now declared it the road to redemption.

By 'eck

Dinner in the garden. At the start of April. In Scotland.

Global warming isn't half great, innit?