From The Barrel of a Gun

Price Fixing

2010-06-21T19:01:00.003+01:00

A Sutton Trust report suggests that university tuition fees, currently capped by law at £3,255 per year, would have to rise to £7,000 per year before the cost deterred a significant number of would-be students. The report is being spun as meaning that government plans to raise or scrap the fee cap would cause a fall in student numbers. Which of course is probably not a bad thing given the prevalence in recent years of students with poor school results going to bad universities, degrees from which are worthless, doing 'joke' degrees like Travel and Tourism, or doing a degree purely for the student lifestyle rather than the education. This would be no problem except that they're sending the bill to the taxpayer. But ignoring that for a moment, isn't it worrying that fees of £7,000 per year could decrease student numbers?

When you consider that only a couple of the most expensive universities in the United States such as Yale charge £7,000 per year for tuition, it seems much less of a problem. It's true that American universities offer four-year degrees so the total cost is greater than for most British degrees, which are just three years, at the same rate. Then again, you are getting (with the possible exception of Oxbridge) more bang for your buck so the 'deterrent' effects of price will be mitigated at least somewhat.

Even so, the cost of a three-year degree at £7,000 per year would be equal to that of a four-year degree at Ivy League schools like Brown and Harvard.

We know that students from wealthy families do better at school and are more likely to go to the very best British universities even though fees are capped. Presumably those who would be put off going to university by such fees would be at the poorer end of the demographic and thus less likely to be looking at Oxbridge anyway.

If the fee cap were to be scrapped we could probably assume that Oxbridge and perhaps one or two others like LSE would charge in the region of £7,000 per year whilst other universities would be less, and that the only problem this might cause would be that the small number of poor students who are academically qualified to attend Oxbridge etc would have to settle for a cheaper university. Even then, we know that US universities offer such generous financial aid to poorer students that black kids with the necessary qualifications attend Ivy League schools at the same rate as similarly qualifies (and statistically wealthier) white kids.

Even if such aid did not materialise, a fee cap does not follow as a solution to the problem. Surely the most appropriate government action would be to provide assistance to the poorest and most highly qualified students so that they can attend these expensive universities, whilst else-wise allowing the free and proper operation of prices.

Trash Talking

2010-06-07T12:45:00.004+01:00

The BBC asks 'should recycling be rewarded?' The obvious answer is: It depends. The question is analogous to 'should work be rewarded?' If a person is working to produce left handed monkey wrenches or deep-sea bath tubs then probably not. If they are working to grow food or build cars then the answer is likely to be yes. So it is with recycling. If recycling is a productive pursuit then people should be paid for it. Indeed markets perform this function well with other things. People do not generally go to work in the morning out of the goodness of their hearts or because the government fines the unemployed and rewards those in work, they go to work because market induce them to do so through the wage incentive. If recycling is indeed productive then markets should incentivize people to do it by offering payment. The question really is whether recycling is productive, whether it's more productive than the alternative uses of resources, and whether markets are providing the appropriate incentives given the answers to those questions.

As far as I am aware the reality is that household recycling is generally not productive in that it uses more scarce resources to collect, sort, clean and prepare recycled material for use in the production process than it does to acquire new material from scratch - and this is why there are few examples of firms being willing to pay for household waste. A notable exception in the past is payment in return for aluminium cans, though the reduction in the thickness of cans and thus the quantity of aluminium that can be derived from these has largely ended this practice. Of course, most people do recycle regularly without realizing it. Television is frequently punctuated with adverts for companies that will pay in return for scrap gold, and selling things we no longer want on eBay has become an obsession for some. This is also a good demonstration of how markets adjust prices in accordance with the scarcity (relative to the level of demand) for goods. If the materials needed to produce new aluminium cans were rare, nearing depletion, can manufacturers would be willing to pay handsomely for used cans to recycle. Equally, if the resources needed to produce new cans were plentiful they would be unwilling to pay large sums for used cans. And of course, everytime we sit down on our sofas, drive our cars or type at our keyboards we are recycling these things because it is more efficient to re-use them than to buy a new one every time.

This should not be confused with the question of whether people should be explicitly charged (e.g. by the kilogram) for the landfill waste they produce . Incentives need to be on both sides for people to make good choices.

Now, markets might not offer (an efficient level of) payment for recycling material if the benefits of using that material are not confined to the firm itself i.e. if recycling has a social benefit above and beyond the private benefit. For example, if producing glass bottles from scratch is extremely polluting (which dirties people's washing and gives them cancer) whilst recycling bottles produces no pollution, and all other costs and benefits are equal, it would be more efficient to recycle. Yet this might not occur because the bottle manufacturer does not feel (most) of the benefit of refraining from polluting the air. However, most of the materials that households can recycle are not especially polluting to produce. More over, the recycling process can often be quite polluting itself. It's quite uncertain then that recycling reduces social costs and that government action to incentivize it could be justified on that basis. Where there are social costs, it seems simpler and more comprehensive to impose fines (i.e. taxes) on the pursuit that is actually socially costly such as producing bottles in a polluting way. This would give firms the appropriate incentives, not just to recycle rather than produce in a polluting way, but to use other solutions such as making the process of producing new bottles cleaner, or inventing an alternative to bottles that can be made without pollution.

One commenter on the BBC's question replied that a reward scheme would be better than proposals to fine people who throw away 'too much' or recycle 'too little' because fines only induce people to fly-tip. This is an example of the unfortunate but all too common misconception that there is a substantive incentive difference between imposed costs and granted benefits.

Suppose we have determined some target for how much we would like people to throw away (to landfill/incineration etc) and two options are proposed on how to achieve this. The first is to fine people £10 each time they exceed the target. The second is to reward people £10 each time they meet (or fall below) the target. The commenter believes that the option to fine would cause people to fly-tip any waste they produce over the target level so as to avoid the cost of the fine, but the situation under the reward option is identical. The cost of going over target under both schemes is £10. By going over target with a system of fines, obviously a fine is incurred of £10. By going over target with a reward system, equally, you lose out on £10 you could have had. The effect is the same, either way there is £10 at stake in the decision.

Furthermore, because rewards must be paid for through taxation, and fine revenues spent on public goods*, a reward to cooperators (those who do not exceed the target level) is an implicit fine on rule-breakers because they will be taxed but not rewarded. Equally, a fine on rule-breakers is an implicit reward to cooperators because they will benefit from services provided with the revenues.

Having said that, there may be two small differences between fines and rewards. The first, and fluffier of the two, is the psychological effects of mathematically identical incentives being couched in terms of punishment and reward. This is a matter for psychologists, but given the impersonal nature of refuse laws I would be surprised if this had a significant effect. The second is that humans tend to experience diminishing returns to income. That is to say that we value the first £10 of income more than we value the next £10. If our daily income rises from £0 to £10 we move from starvation to survival, a very large benefit. If we move from £10 to £20 we move from (assuming we accrue income 7 days a week) survival to being able to rent a house, feed ourselves and pay some bills - a large move, but smaller than the previous. If we move from a daily income of £1,000 to £1,010 then the benefit is smaller still. This is relevant because the £10 we already have in our pocket is likely to be valued slightly more than the £10 of potential income that we might forgo by failing to meet the target. This would indicate that fines might be a slightly more cost-effective way of ensuring compliance than rewards because we might have to offer an £11 reward to create incentives equal to those of a £10 fine. However, there is no inherent difference which many people find it difficult to wrap their head around.

*In the sense of those goods provided by government, not the strict economic sense of a public good.

Why you shouldn't vote

2010-05-06T14:35:00.008+01:00

It's election day once again, our twice-a-decade or so chance to participate in the democratic process, to have our say, to express our judgement of the current government, to 'throw the rascals out' or award a mandate to some other group. Today most everybody is telling you to vote. You'll see television and internet ads, newspaper opinions, even Google implicitly telling you to vote. Twitter and Facebook, forums and blogs, are full of people urging you to vote. "You must vote," they say, "it is your duty to vote."

I often explain to people that voting is pointless in a practical sense, and inevitably people reply "So you're saying I shouldn't vote," confusing a positive statement with a normative one. I don't tell people they should not vote, I only describe an empirical fact. I have to back up and say "Hey, I never said you shouldn't vote. Just that you shouldn't feel motivated to vote because you think you're making a difference. If voting makes you happy, go for it." But here I'm going to say otherwise, and say what nobody else is sayong: You should not vote.

You should not vote, firstly because it makes no difference in the real world to whether you do or not. There have probably been millions of elections in the course of history (given that each country has hundreds of districts, multiple levels of government etc) and no significant election has ever turned on a single vote. We can say at least then, that the chance of any given election turning on a single vote is likely to be in the order of millions to one. Indeed, it has been calculated that the chance of a US presidential election turning on one vote is 100 million to one. Even if this were to occur of course, your vote only made a difference if you voted for the winner. So in such a competitive election, where the probability of you voting for the winner is about 50%, the probability that your vote will make a difference is 200 million.

It can be shown graphically how your vote makes no difference. The charts below show a situation where two parties, A and B, face off in a single member plurality election. In the first, you make the decision to vote and the result is 12 votes to party B and 10 to party A. Party B wins.

In the second, you make the decision not to vote and the result is 11 votes to party B and 10 to party A. Party B wins. It wins regardless of whether you vote or not.

There is then no significant practical gain from voting, you do not influence the outcome. Even supposing you did influence the outcome of a constituency election, it is very rare for a party to have a (bare or absolute) majority in the commons of one seat, and things are further complicated by the lords and the EU and the tendency for parties to rescind on their election promises, so you still wouldn't have a significant, predictable influence on legislation.

This apparent irrationality of voting has long been noted and the paradox that people continue to vote regardless has been discussed at length. Most conclude, and indeed there's much evidence to suggest, that people vote for two reasons: 1) Because it makes them feel good, to participate, exercise their right, make their voice heard etc and more importantly 2) to avoid the costs of not voting, because there is a perceived 'duty to vote' which leads people to feel guilty and be shamed by their friends and family if they do not. Being seen to vote, and thus to be civic minded and responsible, is a major benefit, and why introducing postal voting usually leads to a fall in turnout rather than an increase.

Usually this is all considered well and good. Voting is thought important in a collective sense, we need some people to vote, yet it would be irrational for any individual to vote unless they got some private benefit like feeling satisfied for gaining standing amongst their peers. If it makes people feel good, there's nothing wrong with it, and it fulfils an important political function.

I disagree. People should not feel good about voting. They should not because they are participating only in a bankrupt system, they are legitimizing a government which deserves no legitimacy and perpetuating the self-sacrificing, debasing and utterly destructive philosophy of duty to the state.

"But if nobody voted..." then government would observably have no legitimacy and people would see it for the morally destitute institution it is.

The only duty you have on election day is not to engage with the most destructive force known to man. Don't make a pact with the devil, he doesn't deserve your vote for or against.

Libertarian Standing

2010-05-04T16:50:00.002+01:00

A study by The Pew Research Center finds that Americans are equally divided on how they view libertarianism, with half regarding it as negative and half positively.

Republicans view the term negatively, Democrats are split, and independents view it positively.

Interesting stuff. I wonder if the negative rating from Republicans is a result of ignorance (Republicans tend to be less educated and less well informed than Democrats) and thus confusion of "libertarian" with "liberal" in the modern American sense of left wing.

Neighbourhood Watch

2010-04-20T10:43:00.003+01:00

I saw this poster on a phone box at the weekend. It terrified me to my very soul, and for entirely different reasons to those intended.

You gotta be kid-ney!

2010-04-20T07:06:00.003+01:00

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics suggests that financial incentives be used to encourage organ donation. They are completely right, as I detailed here.

Putting Rocks in Your Harbour

2010-03-09T17:45:00.003Z

Reactionary protectionism is akin to saying that because I have put rocks in my harbour, you will put rocks in your own. This is essentially what Brazil has said. There's nothing legitimate or beneficial to Americans in general about the US government subsidizing American cotton farmers (though the cotton farmers like it of course), but this helps not hinders Brazilians. If American taxpayers want to be so generous as to pay to produce the cotton that Brazilians buy, why should they object? Why anything but rejoice at their good fortune?

Brazilian cotton farmers, of course, may be unable to compete with the government subsidized American farmers. Placing a tax on the American goods that Brazilians buy, making life more expensive for Brazilians, is not the answer. Brazilian cotton farmers will not be happy, but ultimately it benefits Brazil for it to have a cheaper source of cotton and for the labour and resources previously dedicated to cotton production to be freed, now able to be employed for more productive purposes.

Unpatriotic Games

2010-02-24T16:12:00.003Z

Suggesting that you do not want England (not even the United Kingdom...) to win the football World Cup is likely to get you a jackbooted call from the po po. The 'visit' was said not to be "in response to any public complaint about the shirt slogan [but rather] by an officer acting on his own initiative." Going and telling the shop owner that a complaint had been made would be one thing, for an officer to spot the shirt (what was he doing looking closely enough in a shop window to read the tiny writing on this one??) in a window and take it upon himself to try and intimidate a local businessman into censoring himself is another.

They call it an "advisory visit". Perhaps Grampian Police could use an "advisory visit" vis a vis staying the hell out of other people's business.

Tory Teaching

2010-01-18T12:21:00.004Z

The Tories want to discourage people with third class degrees from becoming teachers and encourage people with 2:1 and first class degrees. Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? Why not let parents decide? Why are politicians the ones choosing how schools are run for the entire country?

Healthcare Costs

2009-12-28T02:15:00.002Z

My previous post on healthcare received the following comment:

Why is it surprising that government health care costs have increased? As you noted, the government focuses on covering very specific groups. Among these groups are are the elderly and veterans. As for the veterans, one would expect costs to treat would increase due to the ongoing wars. As for the elderly, almost by definition the people who must rely on Medicare are those who are too sick to have affordable health insurance (i.e. their premiums would be too high for them to pay). It's not surprising that costs to treat the sick are higher than costs to treat the healthy.

I'm not sure veterans healthcare should be facing increasing costs. While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are producing more injured servicemen than were seen in the 1980s and 1990s, they are producing fewer than in the 1960s and 1970s with the Vietnam war. Also, veterans from the First and Second World Wars are dying off. There were surges in the number of veterans in those wars, so as they have grown old they've been producing greater costs for the system. Now they are dying, those costs are disappearing.

It's true that Medicare is specifically for old people, and old people get sick more often than young people - who are using private healthcare. But Medicaid costs are increasing as well, and Medicaid is for the young. Also, even taking Medicare on its own, just because it targets people who get sick often shouldn't mean its costs accelerate faster than the private sector. After all, the private sector only spends on people who get sick, even though it covers those who don't. Both Medicare and private health insurers spend only on sick people, so their costs should move in tandem.

That is, assuming the proportion of old people to young stays the same. This is not the case of course. What about the baby boom? Is it not the case that the flood of baby boomers entering the Medicare system has pushed up costs? No. The baby boom started in 1945, and Medicare started in 1965. The first baby boomers were just 20 years old. Today, the first baby boomers are 64. Since Medicare only covers those over 65, they won't be eligible until 2010, and the vast majority of baby boomers won't enter the system for years.

In fact, from 1910 to 1945 the US faced low birth rates. In 1965 when Medicare began, it was taking on people born in 1900. Unfortunately, birth rates don't go back that far. Going back to the earliest figure, 1910, that corresponds to a Medicare entry of 1975. In 1910 the birth rate was high, higher than at any time during the baby boom in fact. Since birth rates fell from 1910 to the mid-1930s, you would expect Medicare costs from 1975 to 2000 to be falling. In reality, not only did they increase for the duration of that period, they accelerated on four separate occasions (see the graph in my previous post).

For most of its history Medicare has been facing relatively low, and falling, entry levels, but next year it will start accepting a flood of baby boomers. If costs have been spiraling with a decreasing number of entrants, just imagine what will happen when the trend reverses.

The Killing Grounds

2009-11-08T22:23:00.005Z

In the United States, it is the policy of the ironically named Department of Defense that soldiers are forbidden to carry personal firearms on base, even if they have a concealed carry permit for that state. Outside of live fire exercises, the only people on military bases who are armed are police. This is an identical situation to that found in most American universities, all schools, some shopping malls and even entire cities and states such as Washington DC and Illinois. These policies are designed to create 'gun free zones'. I call them killing grounds.

Mass murderers like Nidal Malik Hasan take no notice of the 'no firearms beyond this point' signs posted at the gates of Fort Hood. The servicemen and women who followed the rules paid for it with their lives. On the 5th of November Hasan shot 43 people before a female police officer and ex-SWAT team member reached the scene and gunned him down. A little over 1% of Texas residents have concealed handgun permits, so there's about a 43% chance that one of those lying dead or in hospital might have been carrying a gun that day, had it not been for DoD policy. When you consider all the people who were in the area but, thankfully, avoided being shot, it becomes all but a certainty.

How many people have to die before people realise that being disarmed does not make us safe?

Unhealthy Bias

2009-11-07T23:44:00.010Z

In this article the BBC feature a graph, shown below, titled "Private health insurance costs soar."

Now, here's the same graph with a few additions of my own:
The horizontal red line to the right indicates one half of total US health expenditure in 2007. Notice that the proportion that is private only just nudges over the halfway mark, with almost 50% of US healthcare spending being done by government.

The red dots are the points where each component of healthcare osts makes a noticeable increase in its rate of growth. Notice that private healthcare has just three increases in growth rate over the period: once in 1970, once in 1980, and once in the mid 1990s. The governmental components, however, have five increases a piece. In 1970, 1980 and the mid 1990s, but also in the early 1990s and the late 1990s. In two of the the three periods where there are also private increases, the public increases come before the private increases. Only in 1970 do private companies precede government in increasing healthcare costs.

More important, however, are the slopes of these components. Notice that over the entire period, the slopes of the two government components are always steeper i.e. increasing faster, than the private component. The angled red line on the private component exactly follows its slope from 2000 to 2007. Above it, are two further red lines showing the course of government healthcare spending had it grown at the same rate as private spending from 2000 to 2007. Instead, we see that both government components have grown considerably faster than the private sector.

Private health costs in 2007 were only just over 50% of the total, and since government costs are increasing at a much faster rate, it's likely that today it is government healthcare which constitutes the majority of healthcare costs.

So:

Even though it only covers very specific groups, government spends more on healthcare than the population at large
Government spending on healthcare has accelerated more frequently than the private sector
Where increases in private and public sectors have come together, government acceleration in costs have almost always preceded private costs, eliminating the theory that private costs might increase public costs, and validating the converse
State healthcare costs have 'soared' at a much greater rate than private costs

Why, then, does the BBC choose to specify that 'private' health insurance costs have soared?

Yes Men

2009-10-30T17:08:00.004Z

You might think that being given the job of advisor to the government meant that you were supposed to, you know, advise. Apparently "You're doing it wrong," is not advice the government likes to hear.

Shiver Me Backbones

2009-10-29T19:54:00.005Z

The BBC have some sniveling advice for anyone taking to the high seas if they should be attacked by pirates: don't resist, learn how to say "Hello," and "Welcome," in the local language so they know you won't fight back. My advcie would be that if you ever find yourself in this situation, make sure you have one of these to hand.

Shock Value

2009-10-28T14:03:00.003Z

The government's unelected politico, Peter Mandelson, has announced plans to forcefully disconnect those who illegally download content from the web.

I was shocked to learn that only one in 20 music tracks in the UK is downloaded legally. We cannot sit back and do nothing.

A shocking figure, no doubt. One might think that if only 1 in 20 music tracks being downloaded are bought legally, that the music industry would be in turmoil, with record labels going bankrupt and artists being laid off left right and center. What's shocking, perhaps, is that the music industry hasn't shrunk to one twentieth of its pre-Napster size. In fact, the music industry is growing.

Success Story

2009-10-16T04:13:00.005+01:00

The government claim that a recent 'crackdown' on underage drinking has been "a success." As evidence of this, they cite the following 'results' of the campaign:

• 5,171 litres of alcohol were confiscated
• 3,721 actions were taken for drinking in public, including 500 dispersal orders
• Almost 2,000 young people were referred to support services, including 324 for alcohol treatment
• 1,829 parents were informed about their children's behaviour
• 18,660 youngsters were directed to other activities in their areas
• 2,467 test purchase operations were carried out - 349 licensed premises failed
• A further 515 police operations were carried out in the 69 areas, with 2,074 youngsters who were drunk and causing trouble referred to support services

Of course, we do not know what these figures would be normally. Was there actually an increase in, for example, referrals of young people to 'support services'? If so, how big an increase? You will note that none of the figures given are 'outcomes'. For example, we do not care how many parents were informed, how many litres of alcohol confiscated or how many 'youngsters' were directed to 'other activities'. The ultimate aim of the program was to reduce crime. Did it achieve this? We don't know. We haven't been told. This suggests, since government will be the ones with the figures, that it did not - or else they would be shouting about it.

Even if it did succeed in reducing the narrow segment of 'underage drink related crime', how much of that crime was 'caused by drink' as opposed to simply happening to occur in proximity to drinking? Even if a reduction in underage drink related crime was achieved, and even if this did not simply cause a corresponding increase in 'youth non-drink related crime', at what cost did it achieve this?

We are told that the scheme cost £1.4m, but that will be (like most government figures) wildly misleading. More likely, the scheme cost several times that, but the £1.4m is only what it cost above the cost of the normal activities of the bodies involved. For example, £X million of police money usually spent on Z and Y will have instead been spent on this project, but not counted in the figures because it was already on the budget sheets. So, while we may know what it cost us 'extra' in monetary terms, we don't know the real total cost. Although we probably don't even know the 'extra' cost. For instance, does the £1.4m include any increase in visits to these 'alternative activities' or 'support services'?

We also have no idea of non-monetary costs. Did it result in an increase in other areas of crime, for example? How many young people who would not have caused any trouble were unnecessarily hassled by the police and/or had their property confiscated? How much trouble would not have happened under normal circumstances occurred only because of the scheme itself e.g. otherwise pacific teenagers kicking off when police hassled them about drink?

To make good decisions one needs to know the costs of the choices one is faced with. Businesses, charities and individuals have every incentive to find out the true costs of their alternatives and make informed decisions based on those costs, weighed against the potential benefits. Government has every incentive to ignore costs, to make every project appear as cheap and successful as possible. And this isn't merely a PR stunt. Sometimes businesses will say a project was a success when it was a failure to save face, but where as the business will quietly scrap the scheme and do something productive instead, government carries on blindly. It's easy spending other people's money.

A Taxing Education

2009-09-21T12:15:00.005+01:00

The CBI says that students going into university should pay higher tuition fees, more interest on student loans and face greater means testing for grants. The president of the National Union of Students, Wes Streeting, dismisses the report as "unsurprising" given that it comes from a group of top business leaders and university chancellors - fat cats, as the NUS calls them. I had to laugh out loud when I heard him say this on television; this coming from the president of the National Union of Students.

He says that this will make students worse off, but for most it will not. Tuition fees are paid for with loans - so higher fees are not paid for by students, but graduates. Equally, higher interest on student loans is only paid after you leave university.

Not that I support the CBIs proposals as such, I would like to see an end to all government funding of students. Can hardly accuse me of bias, right? This would have three advantages

1) Ending government interference in universities, allowing better quality higher education of a kind more genuinely in demand by business and academia to flourish

2) Making students face the actual costs and benefits of the decisions they make, ending the phenomenon of students going to university simply for the 'lifestyle' or to secure worthless 'joke' degrees - creating a more economically efficient situation with more university places for those who will genuinely benefit from the investment of getting a degree, and more workers in the labour force from those who do not really need to go to university

3) End the situation we have today where people who have never been to university or who paid out of their own pocket to go abroad are seeing money fly out of their pay cheques to fund those who go today, and create one where the people who use universities are the ones who pay for them

4) Encouraging saving through parents saving more for their children's educations (rather than that money being robbed in taxes) which encourages investment and benefits the economy

Some people worry, however, that such a system would mean that only rich children can go to university and that even smart poor kids won't be able to afford to go. Of course, there are a number of options one can take in order to go to university in the absence of government funding. Firstly, as mentioned, parents can fund their own children. This is the only option that might not be open to poor children, since their parents will find it more difficult to save. The second option is to secure a scholarship from the university, a company or a charity. Thirdly, student loans, and fourthly one can work at the same time. Lastly, would-be students can enter the workforce full-time and save for university, then go in a few years time.

Some would still say that these options are not convincing alternatives to government funding; surely some smart, poor kids still won't be able to go? Well, take America for example. The United States does not fund university study for students, they must use one of the above options to get a degree. Of those who leave high school ready for college (i.e. with sufficient qualifications and the desire to go) 9% are black, and 9% are hispanic. We know that blacks and hispanics are poorer than whites and Asians, so we would expect them to make up a much smaller proportion of college students. In reality, the figures are mirrored almost exactly with the percentage of first year college students who are black or hispanic being 18% (/ 2 = 9%). This suggests that pre-existing wealth is not a significant factor in whether someone can go to university beyond the tendency of rich children to do better at school than poor children - something which is not solved through government funding of higher education students (16% of the US population is hispanic, 14% is black). It suggests that the five options listed above are indeed sufficient to allow smart poor kids to get a university education and that there is actually no need for government to pay. By 'pay', of course, I mean steal.

Backwards Thinking

2009-09-10T23:31:00.003+01:00

This quote from the BBC in an article about how Britons are more skeptical about climate change than they were five years ago:

The survey, by Cardiff University, shows there is still some way to go before the public's perception matches that of their elected leaders.

I hope I don't have to point out to anyone how sickeningly backwards this statement is.

Obama: Increasing Healthcare Costs

2009-09-10T02:14:00.004+01:00

Barrack Obama has just given a speech on healthcare to the US congress. His two pillars of healthcare reform, as they are being called, are insuring the uninsured and lowering healthcare costs. Here are some of the policies he laid out:

Banning insurance companies from denying coverage on the basis of you having a pre-existing condition

Banning insurance companies from dropping or watering down your insurance when you get sick

Banning insurance companies from giving check ups and mammograms etc

Banning people 'who can afford it' from choosing not to take out health insurance

Taxing health insurance companies to fund the plans in his bills

You could be forgiven for thinking that his proposals were designed specifically to raise the cost of healthcare!

Imagine if car insurance companies had to insure cars for any repairs they may need, even if they are already broken. Do you think that would make car insurance cheaper? Of course not, suddenly companies would have to pay for repairs to a large number of cars they didn't have to previously. Because insurance depends on most people paying more in than they take out, the corresponding increase in revenue wouldn't even begin to cover the increased outgoings.

Imagine if car insurance companies had to cover the cost of your MOTs and any trips to the mechanic for diagnosing a problem - and couldn't charge for this. The only result would be to shift the costs from the people who consume these services the most, who pay as they go currently, to a rise in premiums for everyone. The cost of insurance would rise for most people.

He wants to require all people to take out health insurance. Suppose there are 100 doctors, and 100 patients. The doctors charge an average of $30 per visit. Now imagine that there are now 200 patients. Will the doctors charge less than they did when only 100 patients were competing for their services? No, the increase in Demand will bid up the price of healthcare.

And finally, he plans to pay for the whole project through taxes imposed on health insurance companies. That's nothing other than another entry on the 'cost' column of insurance company balance sheets. Imagine if instead of 'tax' the description said 'raw materials' or 'labour'. Since when has an increase in costs lowered prices?

Obama's plans represent an ignorance of the most basic tenants of economics and are transparent in their nonsense. I only hope Americans can see the dangers that await them if they adopt these policies, let alone it should become, as is inevitable, a slide down the slippery slope towards the centralized, state-owned, tax-funded monopoly health industry we (don't) enjoy in this country.

Blowing Smoke

2009-09-06T03:34:00.006+01:00

It is illegal in Britain to market cigarettes as safer than other cigarettes. The intended consequence of this legislation, I suspect, was for people to simply give up smoking, or not take it up in the first place, because of a (at least perceived) lack of 'safer' cigarettes.

The unintended consequence, however, is that consumers no longer know which cigarettes are the safest. All cigarettes are bad for one's health of course, but no doubt some are worse than others or, to look at it another way: some are better than others. The inevitable outcome, then, since damage to one's health is not what one desires from smoking, is that fewer of the safer cigarettes and more of the less safe cigarettes will be smoked than would otherwise be the case.

A further unintended consequence is that cigarette manufacturers no longer have any incentive to research, or indeed to produce, safer cigarettes.

Beware of policies with good intentions but little consideration.

Community Leaders

2009-09-05T18:27:00.002+01:00

What is a community leader? Do you know one? Have you ever seen one? Government and the state run news media keep talking about them, in this story for example, but I certainly can't think of anyone leading my community. What do they even mean by community?

At What Cost?

2009-09-05T03:16:00.002+01:00

The BBC tell us that 63% of parents place kitchens and cookery lessons as top of their wishlist for schools. Firstly, I wonder if "no increased spending" was an option on the survey... Secondly, I wonder how the results would have changed if the corresponding effects on taxation and borrowing of each choice had been explained for each option.

Cover Up

2009-09-04T22:42:00.007+01:00

Does it seem wrong to anyone else that a council can write to you (using an imperfect government system to determine your supposed address) and, if they receive no reply, send workmen to come vandalise your property? What gives them the right to simply presume your consent? Or, worse still, think they don't need any. Did nobody think to make other attempts to get in touch? Did it not occur to the workmen (or whoever decided to send them) to ask someone in the building? Like, for example, the owner?

This comes on the back of police in Richmond stealing (and I won't put that in inverted commas as the state-run media does, that's exactly what it is) from unlocked cars. They claim this is in the interests of the people they are stealing from. How does it do me any good if I park up to nip to the loo on my way to a sales meeting and when I come back the laptop with all my files on has been pinched by the police? Or if a courier goes for lunch and when he comes back the PDA with all the customer details on has disappeared?

They even have the cheek to leave a note demanding you pick the item up from a police station! Why should you have to go to them? If they are going to take your property they should deliver it back to you as soon as possible, along with an apology while they're at it (not to mention go to jail).

One of the dickheads in charge said "we are doing this to make sure people take responsibility of their valuables." People cannot take responsibility for their property if you steal it from them! To simply leave a note on the windscreen saying "I could have stolen your property; lock your car to avoid theft," that would be one thing, but to actually enter the vehicle and, unbelievably, take private property without permission is disgraceful! Does that mean I can help myself to the contents of a Securitas van and leave a note saying "Come pick your stuff up from me in Panama"?

How can this be legal? One rule for them...

Not Too Bright

2009-08-31T12:19:00.004+01:00

From September 1st the import and manufacture of 100 watt lightbulbs and all frosted bulbs will become illegal in Britain. The BBC headline this event thus: "Bulb bows out to mixed applause." The casual bias is astounding. "Mixed applause," implies that everyone is applauding, albeit at different rates. In reality, some people are applauding, others are not. Going on the (very small) sample of people polled by the BBC, the vast majority actually oppose the move. Polls from the US suggest almost three quarters don't want a ban.

A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said that "the majority" of people cannot tell the difference between an energy-saving bulb and a traditional one. In reality, 50% said they could not tell the difference, which means 50% said they could!

The government keep insisting that these bulbs are good for us because they save us money. If they save so much money and are so desirable, why the need to ban traditional bulbs? Their supposed superiority should speak for itself and people could make their own choices. Instead, an essentially harmless, revolutionary and much appreciated 120 year old invention is to be banned. The very light we see with must now be government sanctioned.

If we assume that energy consumption really is a negative externality, a cost consumers impose upon others through pollution, global warming etc, the solution is not to ban incandescent light-bulbs, it is to place a tax on the harmful activities - namely an indirect tax on the consumption of carbon or in this case, a tax on energy bills, proportionate to the percentage of energy that company sources through harmful means. Potentially, you could give an energy 'allowance' and only tax consumption above that, or scale the system so that the first kw/h has low or no tax on it, and increasing energy consumption faces an increasing tax rate. People can then make their own choices about how to live their lives, whilst actually facing (and paying for) the full costs of their decisions, not only the private costs.

Classic Fallacy

2009-08-30T13:45:00.004+01:00

The BBC's adoration for poverty knows no bounds. The author explains that when he was a kid, working class people ate unhealthily, smoked ultra-strong cigarettes, went on budget holidays and were addicted to gambling, alcoholism and bad newspapers. This, apparently, qualifies as 'a culture'. In the same vein as their romanticization of peasant lifestyles, the BBC think this is something worth celebrating. It is not. Not only is this kind of thinking wrong, it is dangerous because it implies that lowering our standard of living is either not such a bad thing or even beneficial.

It is not limited to a love of subsistence farmers and the inhabitants of slums, though, the Beeb are also getting excited about how we're all (supposedly) getting poorer, with a corresponding fall in our standard of living which they see as something to smile and get nostalgic about.

In the name of environmentalism, of 'the simple life', of wrongheaded thinking and misconceptions about the reality of poverty, the BBC and those like them would see us beggared and transported back to the stone age. We will not find happiness there, only tyranny and abject misery.

Increasingly Useless

2009-08-29T19:06:00.003+01:00

The UK population has grown at its fastest rate for almost half a century, and topped 61 million. This all comes amongst much concern about "the strain" that will be placed on public services, and how they will cope. Of course, nobody worries about the supermarkets running out of food, the department stores out of furniture or the supply of clothing drying up. We will not see a shortage of cars, there will not be a run on nappies and the shelves of electronics stores will remain well stocked. What is an increase in population but an increase in demand? And what private industry ever shuddered to contemplate an increase in demand?! The only sector that will suffer strain from an increasing population is the public one. The state is the only producer in history that has ever found itself in difficulty because too many people demand its produce.

Admitting Failure

2009-08-28T08:09:00.007+01:00

The BBC are up in arms about an investigation (read: calling up a few solicitors) into the hiring of lawyers by parents to help get their child into their preferred state school. In the UK, we have a system of state schools paid for through theft. Access to these schools is ostensibly 'free at the point of use'. Schools offer a fixed number of places each year and ration out places with an admissions process whereby parents must convince the school (or the local authority that handles centralized school admissions in the area) to offer a place to their child. In effect, this is largely random, dependent on the skill and inventiveness of parents in arguing their case.

The purported purpose of the state school system is to ensure equal educational opportunities for children, regardless of their socioeconomic background. In reality it does nothing of the kind. Schools in poor areas are consistently outperformed by schools in wealthy areas. Since socioeconomic groups tend to cluster geographically and because admissions are handled on the basis of proximity to the shool, this results in most poor children going to poor schools, and most wealthy children going to good schools. Furthermore, wealthy parents trounce poorer parents in the competition for good school places: They are more motivated, savvier to the system and more effective in their efforts. As the BBC story demonstrates, they can also put their wealth itself behind their application through the hiring of solicitors.

We then have a situation where the same socioeconomic biases that would exist without a state school system continue to exist with it. What's even sadder is that, if the provision of schools was handled privately, wealthy parents would spend their money on the school, funding the actual education of the child. Instead, parents spend their money on lawyers who add nothing to the educational process itself and are only a tool for ensuring the child receives a particular place - which spending on the school would do anyway. As well as failing to negate the issues of entrenched inequality, the state system also produces waste.

The BBC neglect to point out during their reporting that it is the system implemented by government that has produced a situation where parents feel the need to hire lawyers to get their children into a good school.

Rupert Goodwin

2009-08-25T13:53:00.003+01:00

I have to say a big thankyou to Rupert Goodwin, editor of ZD Net for slamming government plans to force internet service providers to disconnect customers who share copyrighted material. Well done!

Legal Low

2009-08-25T12:51:00.012+01:00

The government is planning to ban the possession and sale of three drugs which are currently legal:

GBL - a liquid prodrug of the illegal GHB, similar in its effects to ecstasy

BZP - pills, similar to amphetamine

And a drug marketed as Spice - a cannabis substitute that is smoked

Home Secretary Alan Johnson says that he wants to educate young people about the risks of drug use. In truth, Alan Johnson has no respect for young people, or people in general, and places no value in education. Regardless of the education you receive, he believes you simply cannot be trusted to make your own decisions. He will tell you the risks of taking these drugs, but if you decide that you want to take them anyway he will say "Wrong answer," and lock you away.

The BBC only seem to be able to come up with one instance of someone dying after taking GBL. They mixed it with alcohol which can cause a lethal reaction. It is alcohol + GBL that kills, not GBL on its own, not alcohol on its own. Why the push to ban GBL when alcohol is equally to blame?

They can also only come up with one death 'linked' to BZP. The man had also taken ecstasy. So... He had access to illegal drugs. How, then, would turning the legal drug he had access to into an illegal drug that he would also have had access to have saved his life?

They give no examples of anyone dying from Spice. In fact, the above are the only instances I know of deaths linked to GBL and BZP. People are also killed by buckets of water.

People talk about whether the war Afghanistan is becoming Britain's Vietnam, a quagmire. The real quagmire, the real Vietnam, is this failed 'war on drugs' right here at home. It has cost billions, killed thousands, and ruined the lives of thousands more, yet those in power not only wish to continue, but to ramp up the fight. A fight against whom? Against everyone. It is not just dealers and users ending up in jail who pay the price, we all pay. Prohibition forces users to pay higher prices for a product that is less safe. This means less money left to be spent on other things and more people being made ill, the cost of which is picked up by the taxpayer via the NHS, not to mention the emotional impact on the friends and relatives of those made ill or killed. It means that people who could live fairly normal lives instead are forced into crime and prostitution to pay for their habit. We all then suffer the consequences of crimes: as victims, through higher insurance premiums, through higher taxes to pay for police to solve the crimes and healthcare for the victims of violence. We also pay for the vast sums of money spent on enforcing drug crimes, not to mention the reduced police time and resources that can be dedicated to real crimes because they are tied up with drugs.

A huge percentage of crime in this country exists solely because of the prohibition on drugs. Theft, burglary, assaults, GBH, murder, intimidation and gangs are all conducted as part of the illegal drug trade. Heroin dealers have a habit of killing each other, and heroin users are want to steal to pay for the drug, its price inflated by government. Users of GBL, however, do not break into people's homes. The owners of shops selling Spice do not attack each other with hammers. The government has ignored a valuable lesson.

Banning these drugs will not make demand disappear. Either they will simply be sold by illegal dealers as with other drugs, or users will resort to the substances they seek to imitate. There was an opportunity here to develop the legal drug trade, to see them sold by responsible retailers, with accurate marketing, instructions and warnings. It has been missed.

Instead, gangs will have another product to push, to be sold in strengths one cannot ascertain and without guidance, another overpriced habit people will be forced to pay for through crime. Far from protecting young people, Alan Johnson will be killing them.

Paying Dues

2009-08-24T22:10:00.004+01:00

A man has been charged with grievous bodily harm after stabbing footballer Callum Davenport in both legs. Regardless of the prison sentence he receives, it seems to me that (assuming he is guilty) he should also pay the following:

A sum equal to the projected loss in lifetime earnings that his victim suffers as a result of both absence for medical treatment, and due to the injuries themselves

The cost of medical care

The cost of finding, catching, holding and prosecuting him

Damages for the pain, distress, loss of time, and any lasting injury, including scarring etc, that he has caused

If he cannot afford to pay, he should be put to work in prison, or indentured. If he has not paid off his debt by the time he dies, all his assets should be seized, including his organs.

Dog Fighting

2009-08-24T21:55:00.002+01:00

Similarly, New Zealanders are uppity about a man who killed his dog. Perhaps the headline should be "Man does what he wants with own property, people think they can tell him what to do."

National Disgrace

2009-08-24T21:41:00.004+01:00

In a further attempt to destroy any semblance of property rights in this country, the so-called Equality and Human Rights Commission has started court proceedings against the British National Party. They claim, perhaps correctly, that the BNP's membership rules included in its constitution are illegal because they restrict membership to "indigenous caucasians".

The BNP is a private organization. It is paid for by donations from private individuals and fees paid by members. It receives no government funding and does not carry out any governmental function. It is true that a handful of members happen to be MEPs who are paid a salary, but they are employed by the European Parliament as individuals, their membership of the BNP is irrelevant. The EU employes a people, not parties. More over, their salaries are paid to them as individuals, not to the BNP as a party. If they choose to donate some of their salary to the BNP, or not, that is their own choice regarding their income.

The BNP is, then, owned solely by its members. The people at large, through taxation, do not pay for the BNP. I have never been a member of the BNP, nor have I ever made a donation to the BNP, so I do not own any part of it. I should, therefore, have no say in how the BNP is run unless the people who do own the BNP would like me to have such a say.

Yet government wants to force the owners of the BNP to accept people into their ranks whom they do not wish to join them. It is no different to forcing you or I to invite people to our dinner party or barbecue whom we do not want to come. If I don't want black people to come to my dinner party, that is my choice. It is my house, my food, and I have (or should have) sole sovereignty over it. It is not for government to force visitors upon me and my property. As it should be with political parties. They are private property, their owners should be able to choose who joins.

Public Choice

2009-08-24T21:32:00.003+01:00

Nanny is quite keen on the idea of everyone being made to drink their pints from plastic cups instead of glasses. Like babies...

Plastic cups have been available for many years of course, and there's a lot of pubs; consumers can pick and choose which pub or pubs they visit so competition between them is high. If consumers actually valued the purported safety of plastic cups over the satisfaction of glasses pubs would be eager to make the change in order to attract more customers. As it happens, this is not the case. Why does the government feel the need to tell people, and we're talking the entire population of Britain here, where their priorities must lie and what their values should be? And not just tell them, but use threats of theft and violence to force small business owners to comply with not giving consumers what they want.

Good Riddens

2009-08-18T02:23:00.003+01:00

The BBC tells us that "Chicago shuts down." It is the government of Chicago that has (partially) shut down, not the city of Chicago. Shops and restaurants, taxi stands and office blocks, banks and supermarkets, factories and hair dressers will all remain open and the people of Chicago will go about their day as normal. In fact, I would be surprised if people found they had really missed their government at the end of the day! It's not even as if government is needed to provide garbage collection and libraries.

And so it begins

2009-08-14T18:00:00.003+01:00

Daniel Hannan, British MEP for the Conservative party, has been branded "unpatriotic," by the government. As is invariably the case, government and country have been conflated. I suspect Mr. Hannah might reply that he loves his country but fears his government.

Why do you need a gun at a protest?

2009-08-14T05:23:00.009+01:00

That's the question so many have been asking after Free Stater and liberty activist William Kostric carried a gun to a protest against Obama's socialized healthcare plans. The assumption of most has been that he is either a nut, an attention seeker, threatening the president or actually intent on murder.

I would say that the political motivation behind bringing a gun to a protest shouldn't be too obscure: to remind all that it is the people who control the government, not the other way around. There is a simpler reason, however. The same reason people carry guns elsewhere: to protect yourself, and others.

Protests are not little bubbles of heaven where crime is absent and violence impossible. Exactly the same rationale for carrying a gun to the shops, to work, to a restaurant, to class or on a night out also applies to carrying a gun to a protest. Indeed, protests are potentially dangerous places. In any protest there are going to be people who disagree with you, and some will take serious issue with what you have to say. Indeed, healthcare reform is an extremely controversial issue in the United States, and news reports speak of supporters and opponents of Obama's bill lining up opposite one another across the street during this particular protest. There's also the fact that you may well piss people off, even if they don't mind your message, just by getting in their way, making noise and so on. So carrying the tools to protect your own life and those around you makes sense.

And if any evidence was needed, we now have this video of William Kostric during the protest. A union member (according to the caption) is seen squaring up to, abusing and being extremely agressive towards Kostric. He then spots the gun on his leg, and moves along - although he does twice assault another man. At this point, in my opinion, Kostric would have been quite justified to have drawn his gun and arrested the man himself, but the Portsmouth police would probably not agree with me. With that in mind, Kostric was smart. He kept his cool, he did not rise to the abuse, get trigger happy or attempt to take the law into his own hands. A model of responsible gun ownership.

You will note, however, that a police officer is standing just a few feet away. He may well have seen everything and if not surely must have heard the commotion. Despite receiving complaints from two people and being given a description of the man who is still in sight, he lets him pass and makes no attempt to go after him. He was not arrested.

When the cops won't even do their jobs why don't you need a gun at a protest?

This raises an issue that has not been picked up in the British media. They have raised their heckles against American oppositions to so-called 'Obamacare' using the NHS as an example of where healthcare shouldn't go. The Guardian complains that opposition groups are 'well-funded', which is an insult and and a mark of illegitimacy to them it seems. Indeed money is a theme that runs throughout British reporting of the the debate, constantly commenting on the amount being spent on the campaign by opposition groups and accusing their commercials of being 'slickly produced'. Of course, if people actually support a cause enough to give money to it then it must be morally bankrupt! No mention is made of how much Obama and his supporters are spending, nor any mention of anything even approaching the staggering figure that billed healthare plans would cost.

The BBC allege that actually, Americans aren't opposed to socialized healthcare and that the whole thing is just a conspiracy whipped up by big business and neo-Nazis, even though polls show a 50-50 split between supporters and opponents of Obama's healthcare plans, suggesting that the furor is entirely genuine.

What's more, a focus is made on how angrily critics make their voices heard at town meetings and on threats, effigy burnings and graffiti that have been made in opposition to healthcare plans. Nothing is mentioned in the British media, however, of the kind of union violence seen in the Kostric video and in dozens of others across the country. As organized as opponents may be, they are not partaking in organized union violence and thuggery in the way that supporters are.

But then, Britain loves the NHS too much to think about that. One of the saddest results of that most irrational and destructive of human attachments: patriotism.

Man Protests With Gun At Presidential Visit

2009-08-13T02:14:00.012+01:00

Via The Guardian, the news video of a man in New Hampshire who is protesting against socialized healthcare with a gun on his leg.

Guardian fuckwit Maev Kennedy and the MSNBC reporters and talking heads all seemed amazed that this man could be legally standing around with a gun. One wonders aloud if "the law might be different in New Hampshire." Well, not really. In New Hampshire, as in 26 other states, more than half of the total, it is legal to carry a gun openly without a permit. In 14 others, you can carry a gun openly with a permit - which police are required to give you by law, within a time limit, so long as you don't have a serious criminal record or mental health problems. So why are they so shocked? Probably because they cannot countenance peaceful, ordinary people being able to defend themselves.

They keep stressing that he was standing on a church grounds, which is odd because you can do what you like on private property and open carry laws make no difference either way. If he was not standing on a church then he still could have legally carried his gun since New Hampshire has legal open carry, like the majority of states. Interestingly, he wasn't standing on the church initially. He started off standing in the main protest area by the school itself, and was approached by a Portsmouth police officer who asked him if he was aware that there is a federal law against carrying a gun within 1,000 feet of a school. He replied that he did, and that he also knew about the exception for individuals with concealed carry permits. As it happens, he had one, even though it isn't usually necessary to open carry. The officer said that he didn't know of that exception (it is genuine) and told him he would have to move outside the 1,000 feet perimeter or they would arrest him for criminal trespass. He was saved, however, by a call from the local police chief who, aware of the situation, had contacted a local church. The priest at the Greek Orthadox church across the street from the school had agreed to let the man protest, gun and all, on the lawn of the church: on private property.

It's also claimed that "only carrying a concealed weapon is illegal." This is not really true. Carrying a concealed 'weapon' is certainly legal, if that 'weapon' happens to be a knife, a can of pepper spray, a TASER, a baton, a set of nun chucks or just about anything else you can think of. And if it's a gun, then it's perfectly legal so long as you have a concealed carry permit, which you can get by simply filling out a form at a police station.

Both Kennedy and the MSNBC reporter say that the gun is registered to the man, one Willaim Kostric. New Hampshire does not have a 'registry' of guns or gun owners, and neither does the federal government (except for machineguns) so I'm not sure how that can be true.

The reporter's confidence that Kostric "will be gone," by the time the president arrives proves to have been misplaced, as he was indeed there when the president arrived and during his visit.

Also notice that at the end of the Guardian article they slip in this little nugget:

The phrase "time to water the tree of liberty" - a reference to a famous quotation from Thomas Jefferson, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants" - is also frequently used by a right wing group called Stormfront , motto White Pride World Wide.

They just cannot resist the temptation to smear gun owners and opponents of big government as racist. I wouldn't for a second imply that gun control advocates are racist simply because they support gun control, but none the less gun control does have its roots in racism, with the first gun laws enacted to prevent African Americans from possessing guns. If you look back to the segregation and racism of pre-1970s America it was overwhelmingly big government that was the problem. It was state-run bus services that made blacks sit at the back, it was government run schools that segregated students, it was drinking fountains paid for with tax dollars that were marked "whites only," and it was police officers and judges employed by the state that oppressed and denied equal justice to African Americans. I have no idea if Stormfront members actually do have a habit of quoting Thomas Jefferson, but so what? I'm sure they quote plenty of people from Mao to the Dalai Lama but that makes them neither communists nor Buddhists, and it doesn't make anyone who quotes Jefferson, Mao or the Dalai Lama a racist.

In fact, Kostric is not a member of Stormfront at all, he is actually a supporter of the Free State Project and the Free Keene group - both of which are decidedly non-racist. In fact, the Free State Project's constitution specifically bans racism of any kind! It should also be noted that Kostric did not make the sign specifically for this protest: he didn't have time to make anything new, so he reused a sign from a previous protest on state sovereignty - which has nothing to do with Obama, healthcare or race. He also carries a gun regularly, and did not do so especially for this protest. It seems that Kennedy has actually written her article based entirely on a Youtube clip of an American news network, and not at all on the event itself. Perhaps Frau Kennedy will do her research before she goes and embarrasses herself next time.

KOSTRIC 2012!

Drinking the Kool Aid

2009-08-10T07:10:00.008+01:00

In introducing this segment on BBC Breakfast this morning, serial cocktease Susanna Reid said "...just what can be done to stop binge drinking and bad behaviour [in town centers at night]?" Bad behaviour? You would think she was talking about children. But of course, that's how the government and its nationalised media group see people: little children who can't help themselves, who need controlling by and compulsory 'help' from the state. It also raises the question: does 'binge drinking' need stopping? Despite attempts to dress up the term with 'official' definitions, it has no medical meaning and no internationally recognised criteria. We do know it means drinking a lot over a short period of time, but why should government decide that adults choosing to drink more than government approves of should be stopped?

The clip itself is deeply depressing. Oldham council have, in their infinite wisdom, essentially imposed a minimum price on alcohol. Go below this limit, and a pair of strong arm enforcers in hi-viz jackets will turn up in your establishment to intimidate you and your customers, and charge you for the privilege. They'll also enforce upon you a draconian business model, requiring you to make customers form a single-file queue and serve no more than two drinks to anyone at once. You'll also have to hire extra door staff, despite the police presence you're being billed for.

The likely result? Businesses will suffer, consumers will drink at home/in public or travel elsewhere to drink, the increased price of alcohol will harm consumers' wallets and the silly system of queuing and drink limits will cause aggravation and violence. And we all get a little bit more used to the idea of policemen watching over us as we relax, and every aspect of our lives from the price of our drinks to how we queue at the bar being controlled by the state.

Pest Control

2009-08-09T16:54:00.001+01:00

Forget about gun control, looks like we need some snake control.

Hitting the Bullseye

2009-08-08T17:45:00.003+01:00

In this BBC video Spencer Kelly visits a so-called spy shop in London. After taking a look at the shop's hidden cameras, bugs and key loggers, he confronts the owner asking: can it really be legal to sell all this? She says that it is all designed for legitimate purposes - catching thieves on your payroll, making sure your babysitter is doing a good job, ensuring your children aren't talking to people you don't want them to - but that they can be misused. Kelly then says: "but that's why we have gun licenses, to take it to the extreme, so at least there's some element of an attempt to control."

Yes, that is exactly why we have gun licenses: an attempt to control. We have gun licenses because in 1920 the British aristocracy were concerned that too many working class people were buying guns and that they might overthrow the government. Gun licenses were not an attempt to reduce misuse of firearms, they were the ultimate method of controlling the population.

Transplanting Reality

2009-08-01T15:57:00.003+01:00

I blogged earlier on the subject of kidney sales, and how hundreds of lives could be saved each year if a market for organs was legalised.

Unfortunately, the government appears to be going in the opposite direction as we hear that private organ transplants using organs from dead donors will be banned. This means that if you want an organ transplant that can only use a dead donor, or if you can find a dead donor but not a live one, you will have no choice but to use socialised medicine; you will be banned from any alternative provider, all competition to the NHS will be banned.

What is interesting, and troubling, about this is that the government freely admits that there is actually nothing wrong with private transplants. The problem, they say, is that there is a perception that there's something wrong with them. A perfectly open example of hyperreality in government. The fantasy that there is something wrong with private transplants has become more real than the reality that there is nothing wrong with them, as government chooses to legislate on the basis of a fantasy it knows to be exactly that.

Sell Your Kidney

2009-08-01T15:46:00.003+01:00

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the waiting list for a kidney transplant is about five years (that is the average time a person needs to wait in order to get one). This number is expected to double in the next few years.

4,500 Americans and hundreds of Britons die every year waiting for a kidney, and similar figures are repeated across the world. There is, however, one country in the world where there is no waiting list, and where not a single person dies because there are not enough kidney donors.

Oddly, enough, this country is Iran. The reason Iran has no waiting list is that Iran is the only country in the world where it is legal to sell your kidney.

Many things are banned because people find them repugnant. Certain kinds of BDSM pornography are now banned in Britain. When the government does this, it makes a lot of people very sad and very pissed off, and it lowers their standard of living a bit. When the government bans people from selling their own organs people die, in large numbers, and often in misery. Thousands are condemned, even if they live long enough to get an organ, to years of dialysis.

There are a number of arguments that are made against legalising organ sales.

One is that black market organ transplants are marked by violence and fraud, the insinuation being that these themes would transition over into legal sales. On the black market, people sometimes have organs stolen when they go in for other operations, or are kidnapped and forced into surgery. Of course, this is not an example of someone being paid to donate their kidney; this is pure criminality. To legalise the paying of organ donors is not to legalise ripping out people's innards without their permission.

The practice is almost non-existent in Britain where the rule of law is strong. If someone steals your organs, you can go to the police and they will probably be caught. In any case, people are robbed of all kinds of things, not just organs. Simply because people can steal televisions is not a reason to ban them. And we know that even when organ sales are illegal, organs are still stolen - here in Britain, or more commonly abroad.

Some people are also defrauded; not paid as much as they were told they were getting, or not paid at all. Again, in Britain we have a strong rule of law and enforceable contracts. There are not widespread problems with people being underpaid (or not at all) for other transactions, there is no reason to believe it would be any more common with organ sales. The reason fraud is so common in organ sales abroad is that it operates in a black market. The people doing the surgery must necessarily be hard to find in order to avoid the law. This makes it easy for them to defraud people. Under a system of legal organ sales, surgeons would be out in the open, exposed to the scrutiny of consumers and the law.

Another argument, probably the main one, is that the rich will simply buy up all the organs and poor people will be left to die. In Britain, however, we have the NHS. It would be the NHS that bought most if not all of the kidneys (why go private when the NHS will buy you a kidney for free? Legalisation of organ sales could even be limited to the NHS if truly private sales were a genuine concern). We know that in Iran there is no waiting list at all, not a waiting list consisting only of poor people.

In the United States too, kidney sales would likely be with government since the federal government currently pays for dialysis. Paying for kidney transplants rather than dialysis would actually save the federal government millions of dollars each year - money that could be spent on saving even more lives, or otherwise.

Government, at least in theory, hands out kidneys on the basis of medical need, not ability to pay. That would continue with bought kidneys the same as with ones given away free.

Even in the private sector, the projections for the price of a kidney range from $5,000 to $15,000. The cost of the operation, assuming a free donor kidney, is $100,000. For out of pocket payments it really does not make a difference to poor people in terms of affordability. Of course, most people do not pay out of pocket, most Americans have health insurance. Even minimum wage Wal-Mart employees have employer health insurance. If the government wasn't paying for kidneys, insurance companies would - it doesn't need to be the individual patient paying directly.

The thing about organ sales, though, is that it increases the number of kidneys available. Drastically. Today, rich and poor alike die waiting for someone to give one away for nothing, but they don't have to. If there were more kidneys available because of legal organ sales, there would be enough for the poor as well as the rich.

It should also be noted that the rich are already best placed to get a kidney, either through playing the system at home and shooting up the waiting list or turning to the black market (here, or abroad), and have access to the best care (private dialysis).

A third worry is that the people who sell their kidneys will be people who are hard up; people in debt, for example. Why shouldn't these people sell what they have? If a person would rather lose a kidney than have them and their children made homeless, why shouldn't they? If the only way for a person to afford the education or training they need is to sell their kidney, who are we to tell them they should not?

This is really another benefit. Not only do lives get saved, not only do people get spared years of dialysis, but people in dire financial problems have another option. We know that kidney donors are as healthy as non-donors and that they have normal life-spans, so it's not as if people are giving up 10 years of their life or condemning themselves to serious health problems. Even the safety of the operation is excellent, about the same as an appendectomy.

Lastly, there is a concern that organ donation should be something somehow immaculate, that money will spoil it. Yet firemen, doctors, paramedics, teachers, nurses, police officers and soldiers all serve other people. They generally feel good about how they are helping other people, and there's a great deal of gratitude from the population - but they also get paid. We would not dream of expecting a doctor or a soldier to work for nothing, indeed most people think they deserve to be paid more! Why, then, do we expect the people who give up a part of their own body to go uncompensated? Indeed, in the organ transplant process it is the donor who is the only person who is not remunerated. The recipient gets a kidney, the doctors and nurses get wages, the companies that run the hospitals and make the drugs and supply the equipment get profits, but the donor gets nothing except, we hope, good feelings. Why should those good feeling disappear when they get money as well? Doctors feel good about saving people's lives even though they get paid. People feel good about buying fair trade even though they get the food, and about saving energy even though it saves them money.

I mentioned near the beginning of this post that organ sales are banned because people find the idea repugnant. But how much? Thinking about why there is a a prohibition brings up an interesting quirk of democracy. In 1998, 4.6 million people voted in a California state referendum to ban the sale of horse-meat for human consumption. This result was not reached because of careful, convincing argument on the side of prohibition that banning horsemeat was necessary to the well-being of society. It was the result of an emotional response against the idea of people eating horse-meat, one of repugnance.

When most individuals are faced with the dilemma of either seeing a loved one die or being able to give them an organ that will save their lives, but that happens to have been bought from a willing seller, most people would not let their repugnance stand in the way of saving that life. In such a choice, the sole decision maker is the individual, and that individual bears the full cost (or gain) of their decision. Under these circumstances, the answer to the question how much is: not much.

Relatively few people, however, have to endure watching a loved one go through the pain of dialysis, and death from kidney failure. At the ballot box, people are detached from the costs (and gains) of their decisions and will happily vote with their reaction of repugnance without having to watch the people their decision kills. Voting is also cheap, and the influence of a single vote is insignificant (since a voter is not the sole decision maker, but one of thousands or millions), so people have little incentive to reflect seriously on the decisions they make.

What can possibly be right about allowing people to suffer agony and death simply to protect an aesthetic sensibility that is hostile to certain kinds of voluntary commercial contracts? That dreaded fear of so many, that somebody somewhere might make a profit.

Danilo Zolo

2009-07-28T13:02:00.002+01:00

Just wondering if anyone could tell me more about this scholar? There was a really interesting section about his model of democracy in a Wayne Gabardi book I was reading but my library doesn't have anything written by him (Zolo) and Wikipedia has no English page on him. There's some books by him on Amazon but I'd like to know more before I shell out cash.

History Lies

2009-07-26T12:13:00.004+01:00

There is a great historical lie being perpetuated today. At this link, you will find a video of Gordon Brown speaking about the death of the British Army's last surviving veteran who served in World War One. Towards the end of the video, he says: " [We should have a commemoration day for WWI veterans] to remember what we owe to that generation of people: our freedom, our liberties, the fact we are a democracy in the world."

Do we owe these things to the men who fought in WWI? Looking at the history of WWI will help answer this question. WWI began when Austria made demands of Serbia; Serbia did not meet all of the demands, and Austria declared war on Serbia. To protect her interests in the Balkans, Russia began to mobilize in preparation for war. She assumed that a war with Austria would mean war with Germany, so mobilized on both the Balkan and German fronts. The Germans responded by declaring war on Russia. Germany, however, feared France would attack her from the West if she mobilized only in the East, so instead mobilized in both East and West and declared war on France for a preemptive attack. In order to achieve a pincer attack on France, Germany invaded Belgium. Britain had guaranteed Belgian neutrality in an 1839 treaty, and so responded to the German invasion of Belgium by declaring war on Germany.

So, Britain declared war on Germany to protect Belgium - not Britain. Germany neither declared war on nor attacked Britain. Belgium was not even a democracy by modern standards (or standards of the day even) - less than 1% of the population could vote, and a great deal of power was invested in an hereditary monarch.

Let us suppose, then, that Britain had not declared war on Germany and had in fact stayed out of the war. The war in Europe, then, would have remained confined to France, Germany, Russia and the other continental powers. Germany would either win the war, or lose it.

If Germany lost the war, history would continue much as it did in actuality after war's end - we can assume that the Nazis would rise to power on the back of Germany's economic ruin (caused in part by the Great Depression, which Germany was affected by primarily because of her involvement in WWI, and in part by reparations paid because of the war, and the strain of war itself) and the sense of humiliation and anger at the Treaty of Versailles - imposed upon her at her surrender. However, Britain would not be involved in this treaty. We know that in 1939 Hitler actually wanted to avoid war with Britain, both because of her powerful navy and because he was rather fond of her. If Britain had not been involved in WWI, and thus the Treaty of Versailles, he surely would only have been even more fond. If Britain had not fought Germany in 1914, her economy would be far stronger (see America's economic boom during and after WWI) and this would probably have made her stronger militarily. Thus, whether Britain had gone on to fight in WW2 or not, she would be in a much better position had she not fought in WWI. Belgium and France would maintain their sovereignty and territory invaded by Germany would be liberated.

If Germany won the war, Britain would still be stronger economically and militarily. Germany would have no issue with Britain, no reason to invade beyond simple greed. But an invasion of Britain would be prohibitively costly, even with all her captured territory - and there is no reason to believe Germany would invade purely on greed - she did not invade France for greed, she only invaded France to preempt a French attack. It is also likely, given a German victory in continental Europe, that the United States would become very close with Britain and defend her in the event of an attempted German invasion. After a German victory, Germany would likely be more prosperous than she was in reality during the post-war period, and Germans would have no one to feel animosity towards. It is therefore likely that the Nazis would not come to power. We cannot predict exactly what would have gone on in this new Europe politically, but I think it is safe to say it could not be worse than rise of the Nazis and WW2.

Thus, whether Germany won or lost the war in Europe, Britain would have been secure at the time and better off in the future had she stayed out of it. The only downside would be if Belgium and France were left occupied after a German victory. Belgium could hardly have been less democratic, however, and more people could vote in Germany in 1914 than in Britain, so France might not have lost out in the democracy stakes so badly, particularly from the British perspective of the period. It is therefore completely untrue to say that we owe what democracy, freedom and liberties we have to the men who fought in WWI. In fact, we (not to mention they) would probably be better off if they had not.

Now, you might say: Ok, so we don't actually owe them for it, but none the less they fought for it in their own minds, whether it was true or not. I think that's doubtful too. Recruiting campaigns specifically focussed on defending/revenging Belgium. I don't think it would have taken a great deal of common sense to know that Germany could not hope to mount a cross-channel invasion of Britain. Even when germany did control continental Europe in 1941, she could not mount an invasion.

Something else that should be considered is women's suffrage. It is probably true that WWI did have a positive impact on women's suffrage as women were shown to be competent in employment while men went off to fight, and women over 30 got the vote in 1918. But how much impact? The suffrage movement ceased operation for the four years of WWI. Had that campaign been maintained because of the lack of a war, women might have got the vote anyway. More over, equal suffrage for men and women was not achieved until 1928, well after the end of WWI. In any case, I think it quite fair to say that the men fighting in the trenches did not have the achievement of women's suffrage on their minds.

And yet, this myth that veterans of WWI fought for British democracy, freedom and liberties continues to be spun.

An Expenses Holiday

2009-07-26T11:45:00.007+01:00

Will Rogers once said "Just be thankful you're not getting all the government you're paying for," and that's exactly why I fully support MPs dipping their noses into the proverbial trough, fiddling their expenses and indeed having their salaries and expenses increased relative to government spending. If they fiddle their expenses, they go out and spend it on a plasma TV or an adult movie or a duck house, creating jobs and generating wealth. If they don't, lord help us they might try and spend it on us. Quite frankly I'd rather they burnt it.

If MPs must take our money, and I wish they would not, I would rather they spent it on themselves in their private capacities, where it is merely theft, than on us in their public capacities where it is theft levied to fund the most destructive of practices.

Watching Question Time last night (it was a repeat from a couple of days ago) and beside the usual complaints about expenses and salaries, was one about MPs' supposedly excessive holidays. I for one would like to see MPs receive longer holidays. The less time they have in parliament the less harm they can do.

Which Is It?

2009-07-26T11:38:00.003+01:00

So first Alistair Darling tells banks to stop lending recklessly and irresponsibly (3, 4) because that's what caused the financial meltdown (he says), and now he's ordering banks to increase the amount they lend (2).

Major Changes

2009-07-05T18:31:00.002+01:00

John Major talks a great deal of sense in this interview, the nonsense about the number of MPs aside which is a drop in the ocean of public spending. I only hope he is right about a sea change in the way this country is governed and a downsizing of the state.

Hex Wrench As a Weapon

2009-06-29T11:07:00.006+01:00

I had to buy a hex wrench set the other day. The 3/8 inch one:

Look familiar? Looks a lot like a karambit. The karambit is a knife, of course, but master martial artist Kelly Wordern, the cunning bloke he is, came up with the 'travel wrench'. This is essentially a blunt karambit made of high impact polymer. The problem with the travel wrench is that, whilst it is disguised as a wrench tool, it is designed to be a weapon. Police may well be familiar with it, and even if they are not a quick Google search will reveal its true purpose. A Draper 3/8 inch allen key, however, was never intended to be used as a weapon so unless it can be proved you were carrying it as a weapon you're in the clear.

You can hold it either way up, and use the short 'flick' on the end as a strike enhancer (just throw a punch so that point of the flick connects). This will seriously ruin someone's day, and it will cut their face as well as cause impact damage. You can easily fracture a skull with this. Striking the throat would be a very serious move. You can hammerfist (or swipe, depending on which way up you are holding it) with the flat bottom of the flick or with the long end. Using the flick will give better retention (no way you can go forward on it) but the long end will concentrate the force better, and also cut/pierce better. You can also hold it in a saber grip with the long end pointing forward and stab with it. It can also be used very effectively to exploit pressure points and for pain compliance.

A very versatile and nasty little improvised weapon. Thought I'd share.

Cutting Out The Truth

2009-06-19T08:17:00.005+01:00

In this article from 2008, the BBC claim that "Like other dangerous weapons, carrying a knife in New York City is illegal." Neither assertion is true. It is correct to say, as in most US cities, that a list of certain weapons are prohibited in public. However, not all 'dangerous weapons' are banned. Pepper spray, for instance, can be carried legally. New York City law specifically allows you to carry a knife so long as the blade is 4" in length or less.

How can the state get away with such shoddy journalism?

Blogger: Fucked Up

2009-06-19T08:13:00.002+01:00

If you scroll down this page you will see that many of my posts are written in different fonts and sizes of text, often varying in both between paragraphs. You will also notice that, in some of them, the first paragraph is indented slightly. I have no idea why this is. Looking at the HTML of my posts, Blogger has been inserting vast tracts of unwanted code to what I write. The only solution seems to be to remove this code which is inserted before and after basically everything I do and therefore takes a long time to get rid of. I cannot be bothered to go back and remove it from all posts.

If anyone knows what the problem is, please leave a comment. I'm considering movie to Wordpress but it worries me that I'll lose all my ratings and links and it will mess with everyone's RSS feeds.

News Sharing

2009-06-19T07:37:00.007+01:00

Good news and bad news. The good news is that, surprisingly, the 'Digital Britain' report did not recommend especially repressive action against file-sharing. It recommended only that ISPs be forced to send warnings to file sharers. Of course, government may well go further, who knows.

The bad news is that Virgin Media, who are the ISP I use when I am at my parent's house, and also the company I will be using in my new house next year, have stated that they will temporarily suspend the accounts of 'persistent file sharers'. Of course, as a private company I am, in principle, fine with them doing whatever the hell they like. It is their network, after all. However, they are only doing this because of the state enforcement of so-called 'intellectual property'. Virgin Media are making this move as payment in return for their new music deal with Universal. That music deal is only worth anything because government bans Virgin from copying the music that Universal publishes unless Universal gives them permission. In this way, intellectual property is self-perpetuation. Intellectual property owners use their misbegotten gains to pay to maintain their monopoly on ideas.

Sadly, outside of Sweden, there is little opposition to the tyranny of 'intellectual property' - a laughably ironic name. Even the (British) Libertarian Party state in their manifesto, and contrary to a wealth of libertarian thought, I might add:

Property rights are corporeal (your body), intellectual (your ideas, thoughts, beliefs), physical (possessions, land) and capital (your money or other financial assets).

I think we need a strong right-to-copy group, a movement preferably, to fight back against these kinds of moves.

What's The Point?

2009-06-19T05:39:00.006+01:00

A man named John Cornick has designed a knife, a variation of which has been released through British knife manufacturer Taylor's Eye Witness, billed as an 'anti-stab knife'. The BBC says the following:

He says a knife can never be totally safe, but the idea is it can't inflict a fatal wound. Nobody could just "grab one out of the kitchen drawer and kill someone".

As you can see from a picture of the ghastly things, this is utter nonsense:

To kill with this knife is as simple as slashing your victim. Bear in mind that the great majority of martial art and knife fighting experts will tell you that slashing is the more effective strategy as opposed to stabbing. At the very least, slitting the throat of your unarmed and possibly unsuspecting victim should be no problem. Also remember that every year people are stabbed to death with blunt screw drivers. Having a (partially) blunt tip does not prevent them being used to stab. Heck, even if we were to remove the entire blade from the knife we are still left with a rigid length of solid material which can be used to beat a person to death more easily than we might do with our fists.

Quite obviously, these knifes can have no bearing at all on premeditated crimes as criminals will simply avoid them. Even if these were the only knives legally available criminals have a number of options: use the black market to acquire illegal knives (as is hardly rare at the moment going on the 'scary table full of knives' pictures that the police put out, usually with a good percentage of the knives being of illegal types), grind down the tip or cut off the rounded portion to revert it back to a 'stabby' knife, or do what people do in prison and sharpen some other object such as a spoon into a shiv.

So the knife seems only applicable to 'heat of the moment' murders. As I have said, it is still quite capable of killing someone in such a situation. I'd be interested to know the percentage of stabbings which are of this type - I suspect it is low. For this knife to have an effect, it would require a very large proportion of the population to not only own this knife, but also own no other kind. How many people, when purchasing a product, consider whether how easy it would be to kill someone with it should they go off the rails? Of course, even if the knife were entirely useless for killing someone there is no shortage of lethal objects around the average home.

I wonder what you're supposed to do when the recipe says 'pierce the skin'... None the less, I have no doubt that within 20 years this type of knife will be the only legal kind in Britain.

Melik on Silver Linings

2009-06-19T04:50:00.009+01:00

In one of the worst pieces of journalism I have ever seen, the BBC's James Melik asks if there is a silver lining to the economic crisis.

There have been allegations that consumerism prompted the rampant spending that has led to the current dire economic climate.

What rampant spending is that exactly? The rampant spending which is forcing firms to cut back production and lay off workers? The rampant spending that is driving highstreet stores into closing? Consumer spending did not cause this recession, it is a lack of consumer spending which is both a symptom and a continued cause of it.

That isn't what makes the article such a bad piece of journalism, however. Melik isn't just wrong on that point, he has no overriding point, no answer to his own question, and nothing to show us at all. He introduces a group called The Compact who agree not to buy new things and only recycle, trade, barter used things and so on. This group is not new to the recession, however, it has existed since at least 2006.

It is not especially relevant, but interesting to note that the founding member he talks to is a complete idiot:

Rather than going out and buying a book, she now walks around a store, makes a note of any title she wants, then goes to a library to borrow it.

....why not just go to the library?

He goes on to mention Freecycle, which was founded in 2003 and talks about 'freeganism', a lifestyle which started in the 1990s. The term 'chief household officer', an tenuous link at best to any kind of point he might be trying to make, has been around since at least the start of 2007. All of these originated before the recession, so how can he use them as evidence of changes in consumer attitudes? He might offer group membership figures over time, but he does no such thing.

He quotes a man named Martin Raymond who says that the recession is an opportunity for people to 'change their habits' and that we 'must not let that chance go by'. He does not say what those habits are or how they might change. He does say that:

People are now understanding they are going to have to depend on each other - employees are deciding to take a day off work without pay, or even a pay cut, to avoid their colleagues losing their jobs - that's kind of a new phenomenon," says Mr Wallis.

It is hardly a new phenomenon, but what is his point? After the recession, are people going to work for free when doing otherwise does not threaten their jobs? Will people cut their own pay when they could earn more at no cost? If so, why might this be a good thing? It does not seem like a great deal for workers, though I am sure big business will appreciate the change.

He wins no prizes for pointing out that in time of recession people are more willing to compare prices, barter and so on. It is well known that consumers face diminishing marginal utility. The second Mars Bar offers us less satisfaction than the first. When we are wealthy, an extra pound offers us little satisfaction, so incurring a small cost for a gain in leisure time (versus spending time shopping around for a better price) is acceptable. When we are less wealthy, the extra pound is worth a lot more to us, so we are more willing to trade leisure time in order to save it. He offers no evidence or explanation as to why, when we become wealthier again, we won't go back to the way we acted previously.

Figures show that people are buying less, and also buying products which have a certain integrity about them in terms of sourcing.

The first point is fairly obvious in a recession! The second may be true... He offers no data, and neither do I, but I would not be at all surprised if the growth in 'ethical' goods (fair trade, organic, green etc) had slowed or even reversed in recent months. Even if it has continued to grow at a steady rate, again, its roots lie before the recession.

Interestingly, after just talking about how consumers are supposedly buying more local, organic goods and caring about their quality and source and such like, he says:

The desire to spend, and spend conspicuously, seems to have taken a back seat for the moment.

These seem to be contradictory claims. People are supposedly less keen on spending, but more keen on buying more expensive goods i.e. spending.

The case made for changes in consumer habits beyond the plainly obvious due to the recession is almost non-existent. There is no attempt made to examine whether these changes, if they even exist, might hold after the recovery. Exactly what these changes are is obscure; he constructs a tattered ensemble of disparate, narrow and vague examples and there is no attempt to discuss why such changes might be a good thing.

Mixed Up

2009-06-19T04:39:00.007+01:00

This BBC article talks about government efforts to target so-called 'binge drinking':

Areas of England blighted by summer binge drinking are to receive extra government money to tackle the problem.

As it turns out, it is not binge drinking that is being targeted:

A total of £1.4m has been made available for 69 towns and boroughs to help provide tougher enforcement and support for teenagers who drink.

Both police and youth services say under-age drinking and anti-social behaviour often worsen during the school summer holidays.

It is in fact 'under age' drinking. Why are the two conflated?

In Defence of Footballers' Salaries

2009-06-11T12:01:00.013+01:00

I was reading a blog post elsewhere regarding the news that footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has been bought from Manchester United by Real Madrid for £80 million ($130 million). It was said that this was "crazy," and that there must be better things this money could have been spent on. Commenters called it obscene and said the money should be given to charity.

It is to these people that I would wholeheartedly recommend The Price of Everything, a didactic (not to mention romantic) novel by GMU economist Russel Roberts. In the words of Tyler Cowen: "the best attempt to teach economics through fiction that the world has seen to date."

Let's try economics 101. First, I should dispel a kind of myth that people have that wages are determined by the level of skill a person possesses. This is similar to the incorrect assumption that prices are dependent upon how much it costs to make something. Neither is true.

Price is a function of supply and demand. There is only one Cristiano Ronaldo, so supply is very low. Of course, there is only one of you and I, but we are hardly as unique. You and I have jobs that could be filled by other people with relative ease. In other words, there is a relatively high level of competition for our jobs. This competition competes down our wages. If you or I refuse to work for £11 an hour and demand £12, there will probably be someone who will happily take our place for £11. Ronaldo has very few competitors. There are other high level footballers, but probably only a very small handful who are as desirable as he. And of course, desirability from the point of view of the club isn't just about skill. He could be a terrible footballer, but if he attracted massive crowds and huge TV audiences he might be worth it. So, supply is low.

Supply is also perfectly inelastic i.e. totally unresponsive to changes in demand - that means that no matter how much demand for Cristiano Ronaldos changes, there will never be more than the current supply level of one. Usually, when demand rises for a good there will be an initial increase in price as more people 'bid' for what is, in the short term, a fixed stock of the good. For instance, if people suddenly went off rice and demanded twice as much pasta, there is only so much pasta in the world so the price would skyrocket. In the long term, however, firms will be incentivized by the higher price to invest in production of pasta. Resources will flow out of rice production and into pasta production. The supply of pasta will increase, and the price will fall back again. With Ronaldo, there is no such fall back. When demand for Ronaldos increases, nobody can make more of him so the price goes up and stays up.

Supply and demand meet at a point of equilibrium. This is the 'market clearing' level where, if price was set any higher, there would be unsold units (Ronaldo would be unemployed), and, if it were set any lower, there would be people willing to pay but unable to buy because stocks had run out (Ronaldo would have two clubs offering him the asking fee with nothing to choose between the two).

Remember that by 'demand' we do not mean 'how much people want something'. We mean how many units of the good consumers (as a whole) are willing to purchase at a given price level. Imagine we have 10 Greubel and Forsey wristwatches. If we set the price at £1,000 each demand might be at 1 million units. The result would be a shortage of Greubel and Forsey wristwatches; specifically, a shortage of 9,999,990 watches. There would be a queue outside the door of 1 million people waving £1,000 cheques at us, but only the first 10 (essentially randomly selected) would get their watches.

This is an inefficient and undesirable situation. Firstly, the allocation of the watches is made in a random fashion, we cannot differentiate between who wants the watches most. If we raise the price then the people who don't want the watches a great deal will lose interest and we will be left with the people who most want the watches. It is right to point out at this moment that this method of allocation does not work perfectly in terms of allocating resources to those who most want them if we think of this is as the strength of feeling one has. We are talking about effective demand i.e. 'want' backed up by economic power (usually money). Do not be under the illusion, however, that this excludes all but the rich from scarce resources. Of course, all goods are scarce and yet ordinary people get by just fine and have plenty of resources. We do not go without bread or plasma screen TVs because the rich hog it all. This allocation usually does not even exclude ordinary people from very high priced goods if they want the good enough. An ordinary person who deeply wants a Greubel and Forsey more than anything else in the world can indeed save up and buy one - essentially outbidding a much wealthier individual who will make do with something a bit cheaper.

Of course, it does bias the wants of the rich over the wants of the poor. It is always easier for a rich person to buy a Greubel and Forsey than a poor person. Why should it be this way? Because if goods are allocated in a constant state of shortage, with prices too low, income and wealth will have no meaning. We would all have an equal chance of getting a Greubel and Forsey randomly allocated to us through queuing. That would mean there would be no incentive to earn more, which would mean that instead of a very smart, skilled person becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a movie director or a computer programmer, they might instead work in a video store. They might be a brilliant doctor and a terrible chef, yet open a restaurant - it doesn't matter to them that they won't get many customers because getting many as opposed to few would afford them only useless wealth.

More over, firms would have no incentive to produce more or less of things. If Greubel and Forsey can only sell their watches for £1,000, and consumer demand happened to double because of a shift in fashion and taste towards complicated mechanical wristwatches, there would now be 2 million people waving £1,000 cheques at the door. Greubel and Forsey would still only make 10 watches, however. If price is allowed to adjust freely with demand, on the other hand, a doubling in demand will signal to Greubel and Forsey to make more watches because they can make more money. If Greubel and Forsey set their price at £194,000 (as they do in reality for a Tourbillon 24 Secondes) then they would make several tens of units each year, and there would be no queues. They would find that if they raised their price to £195,000 they would not sell all of their watches. If they lowered their price to £193,000 they would find themselves with someone waving a cheque at them but with no watch left to sell him. This high revenue then allows Greubel and Forsey to invest and make more and better wristwatches that would not be possible if they only sold 10 for £1,000

So, to link this back to Ronaldo - why is it good for Real Madrid to buy him for £80 million? Ronaldo is a producer of wealth. He makes money for the team he works for. The £80 million is not a waste, Real Madrid believe (and are probably right) that Ronaldo will make them in excess of £80 million by playing for them. He will make them money, and, correspondingly, make money for their advertisers and those that advertise at the stadiums in which they play. He will make money for the construction companies that build the stadiums, for the hotdog sellers, for the football magazines, newspapers, television companies and dozens of others. Most of all, he produces utility (satisfaction) for you and I who sit at home or on the terraces and enjoy watching him play. We are the ones who, because of that demand to watch him, pay for cable subscriptions, buy products from adverts, eat hot dogs, buy football magazines and all those other things.

Why not pay him less, then? Why not have Real Madrid pay him just £40 million? Well, they could not have done that. Manchester United would have kept him for themselves or sold him to someone else who bid higher. It took £80 million for Real Madrid to outbid everyone else who might want to employ Ronaldo. If the salary of footballers was capped at £40 million Ronaldo would simply choose randomly between the competing clubs hoping to employ him. Real Madrid can make at least £80 million from him, but he might choose to stay at Manchester United who can only make, say, £60 million from him. >£20 million of potential wealth would be prevented from ever coming into existence.

That is why footballers' large salaries are a good thing. Wealth is not a zero sum game, a fixed pie to be shared out. It is not a choice between paying Ronaldo and giving that money to charity; it is a choice between having that wealth or not at all.

Private Memorial

2009-06-10T21:08:00.005+01:00

Well apparently a crazy guy in a part of the United States that has a total gun ban for normal people (and correspondingly the highest murder rate) has walked into the Holocaust Memorial Museum and tried to shoot the place up. Luckily, good men with guns were there to stop him. Cops? Nope. Private security guards. Funny how the cops only turned up after it was all over.

Why I Didn't Vote

2009-06-05T07:05:00.008+01:00

Voting is irrational.

Perhaps, I should qualify that: voting is irrational on the grounds that most people claim to be motivated by. It's a fact that has puzzled economists for many years: why do people bother to vote when it is so obviously pointless?

Voting is not free - nothing is, after all. Voting costs you time which could be used for leisure or for working. It costs you the effort of going to the polling booth, it costs you from the wear on your shoes and clothes, from any petrol you might use to drive there. It even costs you in the time and effort you spend thinking about who to vote for, and perhaps financially from buying newspapers and the like. It costs you in that you have to put your name on the electoral roll.

A rational individual will only consume a good (voting is a good) up to the point where the cost from consuming one extra unit of the good (the cost of voting once) equals the benefits gained from consuming one extra unit of the good (the benefit of voting once). So how do the costs and benefits stack up?

I will take the European Union elections as an example. In my area, in 2004, about 1.5 million people voted in the EU elections. The smallest gap between parties who got an MEP (and between the lowest party that got a candidate and the highest that did not) was about 60,000. Now, working out the actual probabilities in proportional representation systems is a fucking nightmare (very simple in Westminster elections), so I'll approximate it in the following way. If we just take the two closest parties vying for an MEP, and assume that to be the election. We assume the majority of the preferred party can range from 0 to the observed majority, which in this case is 60,000. Equally, if they lose, their vote will vary from -1 to -60,000 (we assume they win on a tie for simplicity). So the probability that your vote would have decided the election of an MEP is about 120,000 to 1. Not good odds. In reality, if I were to work this out exactly, the chances would be much slimmer. This is just an approximation to illustrate how even under the best circumstances voting is ineffectual.

Let's count the time taken to go and vote as the only cost involved, and assume it takes 15 minutes. The average hourly wage in the UK is about £11, so the cost of voting, just based on the time it takes to do it, is about £2.75. That means that, for your vote to be rational, you would have to value deciding the election of an MEP at about £330,000. That is to say that if I gave you £330,000 and said "You can either spend this however you like, or give it back to me and I'll let you decide who becomes this MEP," you would pick the latter.

Of course, your vote can only possibly decide the election of a single MEP, out of several in your area. That MEP then goes on to become one of 785 in the European Parliament. So, your 120,000 to 1 chance of deciding who becomes MEP is filtered through the chance that the election of that MEP will actually make any difference to the votes in the European Parliament. Looking at the 22 most recent votes in the European Parliament, the smallest majority by which a vote was passed or rejected was 267 (I can't be bothered to average them all out). So, even if this were the typical majority, your MEP only has a 534 to 1 chance of deciding the outcome. And that doesn't take into account that the candidate who would have won had you not voted, or voted differently, might have voted the same way. Ignoring that possibility, that means your vote has a chance of deciding a vote in the European Parliament in the region of 156 million to 1. And of course, there is no guarantee that your MEP will vote how you want him to, so you might actually influence the vote oppositely to how you would prefer, or have no effect if he or she abstains.

On top of that, you have to consider the probability of the vote in parliament, assuming it goes the way you would like, because of your vote, actually influencing the real world in the way you wish. You might, for instance, vote for a candidate because you want them to vote (as you believe they will) for the European Parliament to pass a law creating some kind of system or organisation for managing or controlling immigration. However, there is a very real chance that this law might be implemented badly and have no effect, or even produce unexpected/unintended consequences and have a negative effect as you see it (assuming you are right in thinking it should have a good effect, and the probability of you being right in what you think is best is another thing I will not include).

Even ignoring that, for voting to be rational you would have to value the (expected) real world effects of your desired MEP deciding legislation the way you would like at around £429 million. That is, assuming you are risk neutral. In reality, a majority of individuals are biased against risk so the value would need to be adjusted upward for most people.

I think it's fair to say that most people do not have such a value system - and those who do not will tend to be wealthier which means the cost of voting is greater (the more you earn, the costlier your time spent not working e.g. voting).

So, the vast majority of people are not voting because they want their candidate to win, or their policies to be implemented, or to prevent another candidate from winning. Rather, there must be some intrinsic value in voting. People must gain satisfaction from the act of voting, independent of the (essentially insignificant) real world (potential) benefits. Either that, or they are indeed acting irrationally and are simply not thinking - that is to say that every five years millions of people are duped into spontaneously wasting their time.

To the title question then: why don't I vote? One reason is that there is no one I would like to elect. I have almost no preference for any particular candidate over another, so being able to pick which one wins is worth approximately nothing. More over, I simply don't garner the intrinsic benefits that others do. If voting makes you feel good because you are taking part, or exercising your democratic right - that's fine. Not me though.

There are a couple of 'intrinsic' motivations that don't make much sense. One is the idea that one should vote because people fought/died for our right to vote. For a start, neither of the World Wars were fought so that British people could vote, and certainly not in European elections which didn't even exist. World War One was fought to protect Belgian neutrality, and World War Two was fought to protect Polish neutrality - and Poland wasn't even a democracy. I admit I don't know a great deal about the suffragettes but as far as I am aware only one died - and that was an accident.

More to the point, though, people dying or fighting for something quite clearly doesn't make it one's duty to do it. Many German soldiers died for Nazism, and many North Koreans and Vietnamese and others for communism, but this does not make it a good thing to practice Nazism or communism.

Then there is "I like making a difference," which is, as we have seen, not really true. And lastly "What if everyone thought like that [didn't vote]?" The answer isn't clear and is quite interesting to ponder, but none the less irrelevant since not voting yourself does not quantifiably lead others to not vote.

Back to me though. I do not support the current system or substance of government in this country. Indeed, I utterly oppose it. I couldn't rightly say that my voting would materially legitimise the system - as with voting, a single abstention will have no effect. However, to me it would be contrary to my convictions, to my principles, to vote and internally legitimise the system I oppose. So, not only are there no benefits and material costs, there are internal costs too.

I don't vote because it makes me worse, not better off.

Note: If I were using the maximum possible majority, I would need to assume a uniform probability distribution which would make the odds slightly better than I would describe because, in reality, majorities tend to cluster near the center. This shouldn't matter though, as I used the observed majority in place of the maximum.

A Word on Machineguns

2009-05-31T22:13:00.004+01:00

As a keen opponent of government, it's quite natural that I have an interest in private military ventures (as I've touched on with my cunning plans for the fate of a certain South Pacific island...). This is, some would say, the most basic and most legitimate function of the state (at least in terms of defence).

I'd like to talk about the machinegun, though. I don't think many people know that the first use of a machinegun in war was not by a national army, but by private individuals. Hiram Maxim donated one to the Emin Pasha Expedition, which was a private venture of 400 men, deep into Africa. Why did they go? Well, largely for the money - it was funded by a Scottish businessman. But also just for the hell of it; some of the officers actually paid to get a spot on the excursion, so fierce was competition.

A few years later, the first military unit to officially adopt the weapon was the Singapore Defence Corps. Again, this was a private organisation, not a government one. The Maxim guns were paid for by local businesses and donations from abroad.

They were again used by Cecil Rhodes' men, in the First Matabele War, before they were first used by the British Army itself. Then, in the Second Matabele War, the settlers (the British Army being absent) used their privately owned Maxim guns to defend their laager at Bulawayo.

Then of course there was their use in the mid-twentieth century by the Haganah and other Jewish paramilitary groups in Mandatory Palestine (when that country became Israel these paramilitary groups became the government Israeli Defence Force or were outlawed, but prior to that they were private).

I'm sure there are other instances, but those are plenty of other examples of private machinegun use in war (and I'd be interested to hear of them) but those are some I can think of.

Why I Support Corruption

2009-05-24T14:49:00.003+01:00

There's an article on the BBC today about Will Rogers. It made me remember something he once said: "Just be thankful you're not getting all the government you're paying for."

And that's exactly why I fully support MPs dipping their noses into the proverbial trough. If they fiddle their expenses, they go out and spend it on a plasma TV or an adult movie or a duck house, creating jobs and generating wealth. If they don't, lord help us they might try and spend it on us. Quite frankly I'd rather they burnt it.

A friend said to me she would rather the money be spent on properly mending roads so she didn't keep getting stuck in potholes.

But she would not get properly mended roads, she would get traffic jams now and potholes later. If they spent it to help the poor, they would only beggar them. If they spent it on food production, they would produce a famine. If they spent it on the Sahara desert, within two years there would be a shortage of sand.

If they must take our money, and I wish they would not, I would rather see it spent by politicians in their private capacity, where it is merely theft, than in their public capacity, where it is theft levied to fund the most destructive of activities.

Higher Purchase

2009-05-18T09:25:00.003+01:00

The state media is taking a dim view of hire purchase, it seems. It's prime territory for them. There's firms, which we all know are evil, there's people buying stuff, which we all know is bad, and the potential for people to lose out - and obviously any kind of risk whatsoever is completely unacceptable.

What they seem to be so upset about at the heart of it is that the hire purchase company, BrightHouse in this case, lets someone borrow their stuff on the agreement that they'll pay them for it, but when they don't pay i.e. when they steal from BrightHouse, they have the nerve to expect their stuff back.

Now, to be fair, it's not just the whole idea of hire purchase, it's also what they call bullying. The first example seems to be that a woman missed her payments and an employee on the phone told her that the goods would be repossessed. Doesn't really sound like bullying to me.

I'm not even sure why she says she started crying. So, this woman has epilepsy and can't work, so the fact she was in hospital doesn't affect her income as it might if she were working. The only problem was that she'd missed the payments - which she probably should have set up as a direct debit anyway. All she had to do, presumably, was give pay by debit card over the phone. Or she could offer to write a cheque and hand it to the bailiff when he turned up. Or she could give him cash (if she's well enough to be at home as an apparently single mother, surely she must be well enough to pop to the cash point). Even if she literally had no way of paying until a few days later like she said, even if she didn't know the bailiff can't actually take the stuff until he gets a court order, surely she'll get the stuff back just as soon as she pays up. I really wouldn't burst into tears over going a few days without a washing machine. And what does an unemployed person need with a washing machine anyway?

The next allegation, admittedly, is more serious: that the bailiff put his foot in the door. Now to me, that's trespassing. Walking up to your door once of course is fine, it's reasonable to presume (in the absence of signs) that the owner will consent to you calling on them. However, it is not reasonable to presume that they are ok with you (or even just your foot) coming into their home. And to actually interfere with their property i.e. preventing them closing their door...

Now, it's true that in theory the company should be able to come and take its goods - they are its after all. However, the contract was agreed on the basis of the current system where they can't do that.

Equally wrong is the bailiff lying, saying he had a legal right to enter.

As I say, I do think that contracts should be allowed where the company can come and take its goods from you without needing to involve the police. Of course, you could call the police but I should think the thing to do, given that the company would have proof of ownership, would be to let them take the goods and then have it go to court to see if taking them was justified under the contract.

Riled Up

2009-05-18T05:34:00.002+01:00

I think the government have been reading my blog....

Breach of the Peace

2009-05-16T09:30:00.003+01:00

There are many different terms I've heard at one time or another for the type of thing I'd like to talk about in this post. The only one that I am certain exists as an offence in Britain is a "breach of the peace." I've also heard "creating a public nuisance," "disorderly conduct," "creating a public disorder," "loitering," "public indecency," and "blocking a public highway." The worst of all, but one that I believe does not exist here (thought it does in the United States, at least in some states) is: "disobeying an officer."

What all of these have in common is that they are offences which are so broad, vague and wide ranging that virtually anything can be placed within their remit. The fact is that just about anything you might be doing, or might be goaded into doing by a police officer (such as swearing) can be used to arrest you, prosecute you and punish you.

They are also, I think, quite unnecessary. It is surely not beyond the ability of the brightest legal minds to create more specific laws which prohibit that which we might want to prohibit. As it happens, most of the things these laws (are meant to) cover, I think, should not be crimes in any case, but even if we wanted to keep them they could be written down properly.

That, I think, would make Britain a substantively freer place to live, greatly reducing the arbitrary power of the state and the thuggish omnipotence of its hi-visibility paramilitary wing.

Broad Casting - Geddit?

2009-05-13T13:41:00.003+01:00

Am I the only one who finds this terribly Orwellian? It's only a matter of time before they replace her voice with a recording, and then the woman herself with a robot - a little hovering bot that floats endlessly from street to street, blaring out canned slogans and phrases. Calling everyone "citizen." I'm sure there's been many such things in science fiction movies. I think I remember a similar thing in The Fifth Element, Blade Runner... probably others too. Reminds me of the Eyebots in Fallout 3 that tirelessly roam the wasteland playing the Enclave radio station on speakers.

You know what does prevent burglaries? 00 buck.

Stepped On

2009-05-12T23:33:00.003+01:00

The latest politically motivated scare tactic the state media is using to discourage us plebs from using the white girl's petrol is to prattle on about it being cut with other chemicals. They pay special attention to all the nasty things the cutting agents are normally used for. The BBC article lists boric acid as the most common agent, and says it is "more commonly known as an insecticide," when in fact its most common use is as an antiseptic. Not quite as unpleasant a though though, is it?

Now, you would think the BBC News, as a supposedly journalistic organization, would want to tell the whole story. They don't just try and tell you what is happening in the Middle East, they try and tell you why. Not so with drugs, though. Why is it that cocaine is sold in a very impure, less healthy and much riskier form than it might be? The answer of course is prohibition. The singular reason for the cutting of cocaine is that the illegal drugs industry is one forced to operate underground by the gun barrels of the British state. Cocaine firms, if they can be called that, are banned from operating in the open where they can create a brand, a reputation, where they can be held to account by consumers, where consumers can choose what to buy and know what they're buying.

Without all that, the quite natural (if unscrupulous) thing for cocaine suppliers to do is to use underhanded methods to increase profits. Consumers, competition, government, they have no effective way to prevent this, or avoid those that do it.

I can't see any grounds for anyone to disagree with that. It' true, there are examples of firms in legal, open industries that have deceived their customers in a similar way but these examples are few and far between, relative to the consumer market, and limited in scope. They were also brought to a successful end.

Yet, not a word of this from the state media. I wonder why.

When They Outlaw Paintball Guns, Only Outlaws Will Have Paintball Guns

2009-05-11T15:49:00.002+01:00

Germany, famous for its mass genocide and war mongering, is moving to outlaw paintballing. Britain very nearly managed to outlaw airsoft, a similar simulated combat game, but that now continues with participants having to register before being allowed to buy airsoft guns. This move in Germany looks set to be an outright ban, however.

One has to wonder just how many murderers have been regular paintballers...

Hero Worship

2009-05-10T00:12:00.003+01:00

It seems as if you have to try pretty hard not to be a hero these days*. For example, The Sun newspaper is running a campaign called Help For Heroes at the moment. I have to wonder just how many of the soldiers they help could accurately be described as heros. Running out into intense enemy fire to rescue a fallen comrade - sure, that's heroism. But not many people ever do that. Getting your leg blown off by a mortar shell that just happened to land on you as you were hauling supplies from one building to another is not heroism. Getting hit by an IED as you're driving down the road in an armoured personal carrier is not heroism. Taking a bullet during a run of the mill firefight is not heroism.

I saw a Youtube video posted by The Mirror newspaper showing a soldier being beaten up by British police (which is a subject for another blog), and they described him as a war hero. Yet, they didn't mention him winning any medals or performing any great acts of bravery. It's as if just being a soldier is enough to warrant the label 'hero' - especially if you happen to be killed or wounded.

Now, you might say that it's brave to be a soldier in and of itself... Perhaps, but even if that's universally true I don't think it's a sufficient condition for heroism. It's like deciding that you like soldiers, so you'll attribute good things to them, even if they don't possess them - calling every soldier a genius, for example, even though obviously only a very few are. And it's not just me being petty or pedantic - it devalues the term for those who deserve it. When every one is supposedly a hero it leaves nothing for those who are genuinely heroic. The Mirror described that soldier in the video as a war hero, who had done nothing out of the ordinary so far as I can tell, and they'll describe the next bloke who leaps onto a grenade in the exact same way, with no differentiation.

It's not just soldiers either. When policeman Stephen Carroll was murdered in Northern Ireland he was hailed as a hero. Why? He was killed responding to, as far as I can tell, a routine call just like he and every other such police officer does most every day. He probably had no idea he was putting his life in danger.

And when the second Bond helicopter crashed in the North Sea, the dead pilots and even the passengers were praised as heros. Again: why? Just because they died? Does getting killed suddenly make you a hero? I don't think that makes for a very useful term.

There's plenty of genuine heroism out there, and I'm all for recognising that and giving praise where it's due, but it's ridiculous how worthless the term is being made.

*Hyperbole, I doubt this is anything new.

Yaar!

2009-04-08T18:16:00.003+01:00

Yesterday it was in the news that a US merchant ship had been hijacked by pirates in an area of sea "heavily patrolled," by European Union navies. The US seamen reportedly fought the pirates in a battle lasting five hours, before the ship was taken. What I'd like to know is: how was it that no EU navy could help them? In five hours, they certainly could have got a helicopter to them - why didn't they fly over and machinegun the fuckers? Or land soldiers or marines on the ship to fight the pirates? Heck, they could even have evacuated the crew.

Now we hear that the US crew have, according to the Pentagon, recaptured the ship. Information on what really goes on out there is hard to come by, and it's something I find pretty interesting. There was a case a couple of weeks ago of two British security contractors working on a ship in this area jumping overboard after trying to fight off pirates with water hoses and one of those crazy, useless directional sound jobbies. If they were using water and loud music to fight of AK and rocket wielding pirates, obviously they didn't have guns. I'd be amazed if the US crew managed to fight off armed pirates without being armed themselves - holding them off for five hours and then recapturing the ship. So: do US crews carry guns?

Whether they do or not, apparently the vast majority of, if not all, ships go unarmed - why is this the case? You would think a well stocked gun cabinet would be a worthwhile investment for a shipping company where multi-million dollar ships and cargos are involved. I suppose there might be an issue with legality, but surely a lot of countries would be cooperative in allowing foreign ships to dock with a few weapons on board?

If that isn't possible, how about this: set up a company, buy some guns in the US and hire some ex-special forces types. Buy or hire a small ship, big enough to put a couple of helicopters on the deck, and buy said helicopters. Anchor somewhere out to sea off the Somali coast, and run a business dropping off armed security guards on ship as they pass through the area, for a fee. The mothership would need to be well protected of course, but that's fine. Sea King helicopters are $6.4 million per unit, private military contractors get paid something like $120,000 a year by Blackwater, but I'd imagine this job would be considerably cheaper as it's a lot safer. Not sure how much it would cost to rent or buy a ship and convert it to work as a helicopter carrier. Few tens of thousands of dollars for the equipment. I don't think cost is too prohibitive, but how much could you charge? The beauty is that because your security blokes get on after the ship leaves port, and leave before it arrives, there's no problem with taking weapons in to port.

Terrorising Terror

2009-03-24T14:08:00.007Z

Herr Smith has been prattling on about the risk of dirty bomb being supposedly increased. I suspect this is a little bit like when they tell you that smoking pot increases your risk of horribleexplodingheartosis by 30% when the risk is 1 in a million i.e. the risk is now 1.3 in a million.

Let's be clear: British Islamic terrorists suck. I don't mean they suck because they murder innocent people, I mean they suck AT murdering innocent people. Look at the only attacks they have made: a would-be suicide bomber down the road from me in Exeter managed to fuck up his own face and hurt no one else, an attempted bomb attack in London saw every single bomb fail to detonate, an attempted suicide car bombing in Glasgow saw the bomb fail to detonate and the bombers get their asses kicked by an airport worker... and the only 'successful' attack, 7/7 in London, used home made bombs - four terrorists died and managed to kill 52 people, or 13 each. They'd have killed more with rifles. The fact is that Islamic terrorists haven't got their hands on so much as a hand grenade, let alone the material to make a dirty bomb. If you look at the types of bombs they used, even if they had mixed them with radioactive material, they'd not have spread that material over more than a city block.

'Dirty bomb' sounds scary, doesn't it? Radioactive material all over the place? Good god. Well, no, it's not that scary. The US government did a little investigation into the idea, and concluded that if a dirty bomb went off and there was no evacuation and no attempt to clean it up, the radiation would kill only.... oh... well, actually, they said it would kill no one. In fact, it wouldn't even cause any serious illness. Dirty bombs are little more than a myth, nobody has ever made one, and if they did it would be a waste of their time.

I like mind games though, so here's what I'd do if I was a terrorist: First, convert a few thousand pounds into US dollars, then get on a ferry to France and drive on down through Spain. At the coast, catch another Ferry over to North Africa, then hop from border to border using internal charter planes - driving across the borders, then finding an airfield and getting another plane. Cross over into Somalia and split the cash, burying it in two different locations. Find some locals with weapons to sell and use the buried money to buy some AKs, grenades, mortar and RPG rounds (you bury the halves so they don't just rip you off). Plenty of ammo too. Find a place to shack up, and disassemble the AKs. Strip them down as much as possible, steam clean each part and throw each one in a box full of scrap metal, then ship those back to the UK. Next, pull the bullets out of the cartridges, empty out the powder and remove the primers. Ship the bullets and cartridges back to the UK (or discard them, and buy them legally in the UK) and hide the primers and powder for taking them back into the UK yourself. Also hide the explosives and head back the same way you came. Cross back into the UK via ferry, and glide right on past customs.

Collect your packages, which you will have mailed to many different addresses throughout the UK, held under false names, reassemble the guns and ammunition. Rig bombs out of the mortar rounds, grenades and RPGs - now you have REAL explosives, not something cooked up in a garden shed. Make some of the bombs detonated by a mobile phone call, and others by an alarm i.e. a timer. You also have guns and ammunition. Buy some body armour, load bearing gear to carry spare magazines, that sort of thing. Put the bombs detonated by phone into packages and FedEx them to shops in train stations with a next day, timed delivery. Have a guy keep a lookout for the delivery boy, when he's walking up to the shop, through a crowded part of the station, call the detonator.

Then, lie low until the tubes start moving again. When they do, meet up in teams of three. Each team finds the biggest, most crowded tube they can, at rush hour, and gets on. All three go to one end, and, in-between stations, two of them open up with AKs on the passengers, sweeping down the train. Number three doesn't shoot until they reload - his job is just to stop them getting rushed by passengers when they do. If they kill everything on the train, move to the station. Keep going until the police come. Then, set timers on the bombs you've got in your rucksacks and charge the police. Hopefully, when they come to check the bodies, they'll go off.

Any spare guys, you could have them drop off bags in hospital emergency rooms, just long enough for them to get out, then go to town with AKs, targetting doctors and surgeons specifically, and destroying equipment, starting fires and keeping fire crews away. Spill petrol across roads leading to the bomb sites and leave decoy packages all over. Call in threats that certain ambulances have been wired with bombs. Anything to disrupt the medical response - a lot more people are going to be injured than outright killed, so the best way to maximise deaths is to make sure they don't get treatment. Doing the hospitals first will draw armed police to a siege situation they won't be able to solve for a while, leaving the shooters on the trains more time before fewer armed police show up.

Well anyway, that's how I'd do it if I WAS a terrorist. I hasten to clarify that I'm not!

Lost His Kudos

2009-03-16T03:00:00.002Z

I had given David Davies some credit for his resignation over what he called the issue of 'civil liberties' (personally I don't understand why 'liberties' isn't a good enough term but there you go). However, as I think everyone knew really, he's still the same Tory cunt he always was. Now, he wants to ban protests against the military. He says that he has simply rewritten the religious hatred bill and replaced 'religion' with 'uniformed military personnel' - the problem of course is that the religious hatred bill was a piece of illiberal horseshit anyway. In fact, I'd say that this law (or rather, a tabled amendment to the policing bill) is even worse than the religious hatred law. It's worse because the religious hatred law stops private individuals speaking out about other private individuals - and private individuals rarely do a great deal of harm. This law, however, would stop private individuals speaking out about individuals who serve government - and individuals who serve government tend to do a great deal of harm indeed.

Now, it's beside the point really, but I don't agree with David Davies that British soldiers are the 'cream of society'. It really shouldn't matter how noble or grand a group is, they should never get special 'protection'. But anyway, I disagree. Far from it, in fact. These are men (and women) who have volunteered to join an armed wing of government, an armed wing that enforces the government's arbitrary, unrestrained, and entirely illegitimate will upon the people. And of a more topical nature, an armed wing that travels abroad to intervene in foreign affairs and wage wars of aggression. The typical line is that they are "just following orders", but so are hitmen. These people know what the British armed forces do, they are well aware that they are likely to be sent overseas in such manners, they are not victims of politicians, they are their facilitators. A politician is nothing, a politician is a man in a suit, but the soldiers are the ones with the guns. It is their complicity that allows the politicians to do the things they do and that makes them far from heroes. I don't doubt that many or most of them are very good at their jobs, very brave even, but I will not respect them.

Many, I am sure, will be shocked by that (though I hope not too many libertarians). I find it very sad that there is such a strength of state-manufactured nationalistic pride in these groups. They have become untouchable, even more so than the monarchy perhaps. I think that's a very bad thing.

I'm Glad We Have The BBC

2009-03-12T17:24:00.001Z

To tell us things like this.

Weasel Words

2009-03-09T19:45:00.006Z

I find it interesting how, after two soldiers were shot dead (and two more, and two civilians wounded), various political types have branded the attack "brutal" and "cowardly." Presumably, not all murders/killings in war are "brutal and cowardly" or those terms would rather lose their meaning. So what is it about this attack specifically makes it brutal and cowardly? I would say: nothing. So far as I am aware there was no torture and no mutilation. One might describe a very vigorous bayonet charge that scythed through an enemy's position as 'brutal', but I can't see how that sort of usage could apply here, it was just a bit of shooting. "Cowardly", seems even more ridiculous. You can hardly pick a more intimidating target than an army base, and it's not as if they left a bomb somewhere, they directly engaged the soldiers with rifles. Even if they did leave a bomb, I wouldn't call fighter pilots dropping JDAMs on Terry "cowards." Yes, they ran away, but that hardly makes them cowards. When the SAS raid some enemy camp they don't hang around to get buttfucked, they get in, do the job, and scarper.

The Northern Ireland Secretary, Shaun Woodward, called the attack "callous," what a meaningless description. When British soldiers gun down Taleban or insurgents or, yes, IRA gunmen, are they callous too? How do you know what the IRA shooters felt? Callous might be a reasonable description if they had walked down the street shooting people randomly, but they specifically targetted individuals, that doesn't seem any more callous to me than any other such killing. Woodward even seemed to take issue with the Real IRA calling themselves the Real IRA, saying it was 'self-styled'. Do regiments, political parties, governments and government departments not pick their own names now?

Yes, men have been killed and wounded, that's very sad, but let's not use that as an excuse to talk bullshit, eh?

Oh, and another thing: when a soldier gets shot he is not 'injured', he is 'wounded'. Get it right, BBC.

What I'd really like to know is: where do the British army get off having such shit security? Seems to me that when the black helicopter types are telling you that the risk of an attack is "severe" and when news breaks that the SRR have been depoloyed, a sure fire way to piss off men with guns, that it's a no-brainer that said men with guns are doing to try and slot your ass.

If I were running an army base, I'd want two steel gates connected by a short corridor of HESCO Concertainers. Outside there could be an intercom and CCTV to get the first gate open. Arrivals would drive into the 'airlock' of Concertainers and the gate would shut behind them. A guard (just one) could then check their papers, search the vehicle if necessary etc, and then let them on through the second gate. In this case, accepting pizzas, all that would need to happen would be to take the pizzas off them, open the first gate, and let them reverse out.

This way, if they have a bomb, it gets contained by the gates and concertainers and only the one guard would get killed. If they're gunmen, they find themselves trapped in this box area. They can kill the guard probably, but then it's a gunfight instead of a Turkey shoot from there on out, and the soldiers have the advantage of cover, height, and knowing exactly where the attackers are at. The outer gate means that only those who can get inside can get in on the action. So if I let in a pizza delivery, only the pizza delivery man gets in. The IRA are left on the outside where they can't touch me. The inner gate stops them from getting further into the base and contains blast/gunfire.

Even if you are going to leave the base to accept a delivery, why send FOUR men to do it? That's just asking for a machinegunning.

Killing The Police

2009-03-07T01:52:00.005Z

A protester has thrown green custard in the face of Secretary of State for Business Peter Mandelson. Quite aside from the fact that said protester clearly needs to find herself some cock ASAP, this has raised the issue of the legitimacy of direct action. I would hope that it is no secret that I am a great supporter of direct action. Democracy simply does not work, not in the way it is thought to. Yes, democracy can be the least worst way for making decisions that don't really matter, like the level of government defence spending, or for decisions where there's intractable and perfectly legitimate differences of opinion, abortion for example, but it's no good for big decisions and it's certainly no good for bringing about the kind of radical change that is needed.

I think protests, activism, non-compliance, non-cooperation, civil disobediance, disruption and all kinds of activities are collectively far more effective than just turning up to a ballot box every five years. Those things, are all peaceful however. Throwing custard on someone is not. Now, she does point out that of course Mr. Mandelson was not wounded by the attack, but she still interacted with him physically in a malicious manner. His body was not damaged, but neither would it have been if she had grabbed him in a headlock, yet that is still assault. Not to mention that it surely ruined an expensive suit.

Does that mean I oppose her actions? Well, in terms of her cause I have no real opinion. I'm not a scientist and I've seen convincing evidence on both sides of the climate change debate. Though it's true I would disagree with most of the policies she would propose. I would not, for instance, block the expansion of Heathrow, I'd just slap a blanket tax on carbon emissions. Then again, I wouldn't be facilitating airport expansion through compulsory purchase orders. However, I fully beleive in self-defence. It doesn't really apply to Mandelson as he is, at worst, allowing people to emit carbon without paying the costs, he's not actually doig the emitting (at least, no more than anyone else). If catastrophic, man-made global climate change is a reality, and if Mandelson were in charge of some nationalised industry pumping carbon in to the atmosphere and not paying the costs, then in that case yes, her actions were legitimate. I make no secret of the fact that I believe in the legitimacy (though do not engage in, I hasten to point out) the killing of police officers in this country.

Props to the Lib Dems

2009-03-02T18:46:00.004Z

Now, I'm not one of the snivelling cowards who supports the Illiberal Supporters of Mob Rule, but I must give some kudos to their treasury spokesman Vince Cable. Although I criticised him in my previous post for saying that there was no question that Fred Goodwin should be deprived of his pension, he has at least had the considerable balls to stand up in front of a public hue and cry for Fred's blood (and shirt) and say that legislating for one man would be, in his words, "potty." I'd have used somewhat stronger language myself, but there you go.

More On The Robber Barons

2009-03-01T16:13:00.004Z

The Party is gearing up its incessant scheming, and how worried it is getting me. Herr Harman was full of pant-fillingly scary quotes such as:

It may be enforceable in a court of law, this contract, but it's not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that's where the government steps in.

Sir Fred Goodwin should not count on [keeping his money] because it is not going to happen.

The prime minister has said that it is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted.

And treasury spokesman Vince Cable said:

Nobody disputes that Sir Fred should be deprived of his pension.

Watch the video in the article and notice how Harriet spends most of her time saying Goodwin is the devil and how terrible this all is. Politiceering (yes, I made it up) at its most blatant. She knows the people are angry about Goodwin having this pension, angry at the government for letting it happen, so she spends her time trying to show that she agrees with the people (or as she would say: the public, wouldn't want to humanise them would we now?), not explain the government's apparant failings or how it is going to 'correct' them.

This is of course a massive issue. Not Fred's pension, that's small potatoes. £650,000 a year is 0.1% of government spending. The real issue is that the government is apparently going to retroactively alter a man's legal contract; steal wealth. Usually government taxes income or sales or a certain activity, rarely does it so blatantly kick in your door and ransack your home.

Media Whores

2009-02-27T17:55:00.003Z

The BBC has a pleasantly glowing article regarding what they politely refer to as 'male escort' services. I wonder if they'd be quite so upbeat about female prostitution...

Labour Espouses Theft

2009-02-27T12:32:00.005Z

Well of course they do, we all know that Labour supports taxes. At least they use legislation to achieve that particular travesty though. Now, however, they risk moving into a new era of the robber-baron. With regards to the £16 million pension fund of Sir Fred Goodwin, recently retired head of the Royal Bank of Scotland, John Prescott said:

I believe basically take it off him and let him sue in the courts.

Gordon Brown said:

When banks fail... the people who make the mistakes cannot... run off with entitlements...

How responsible Goodwin is for RBS's failings is questionable, but that should be immaterial. RBS, which is 70% state owned, has a legal, contractual obligation to pay him his pension. The money is essentially his. To refuse to give it would be outright theft. Not just morally, but legally.

I wonder if Gordon Brown will be giving up his pension...

Of course, as I say, it doesn't matter. All that matters is who's got the guns.

Royal Fail

2009-02-26T14:10:00.002Z

As I've said, government plans to sell off part of the state-monopoly on door-to-door mail deliveries, Royal Mail, is something at least. Unfortunately, that isn't the only part of their plan. It features a host of other things, including:

A new fund to protect the universal postal service, which may be at risk from private competition in the future

Say what?! They need to protect the public postal service in case it gets replaced by a private one? I thought the whole point was that private firms supposedly couldn't do the job?

Budgeting

2009-02-19T22:06:00.003Z

I was having a ponder about my little pet fantasy of a private invasion (more here also), specifically about specific costs. Let's work with an initial budget of $50 million. There's at least 6 million libertarians in the US alone, so if one in ten gave $83, that'd do. Or if all gave $8 and 30 cents. Or if one very rich man gave the whole amount. Or we could find investors of course. With a $50 million dollar initial cost, and, by my estimation, something like $2.6 billon dollars of land sitting on Tuvalu if we do away with development and planning laws... well, that's a rate of profit of 5,200%! I think it's within the realms of plausibility that such funding could be sourced in the future anyway. So...

I think we'd need one medium lift helicopter to ferry supplies and such, we could go for the American Blackhawk at a quite reasonable $5.9 million. Let's call it six. Then we might want, say, four light helicopters. I'll take the MD500 Little Bird, a bargain at well under $1 million a piece. So let's call it $10 million for helicopters, including at least one nose mounted night vision camera for search and rescue, spare parts and the like.

Then we'll need manpower of course. Blackwater contractors start at about $100,000 a year. So let's give them $200,000 just to be safe. At that wage, we could hire 100 men for a year for $20 million. We could deploy them all for the invasion itself, and then operate shifts afterwards to keep the peace. Other South Pacific islands of comparable size to Tuvalu have about 100 police officers so I'm assuming that number as our opposition. I doubt they are routinely armed and probably have next to no training or will to fight. Hopefully they'd be taken completely by surprise. I doubt a shot would be fired. You could probably do the initial invasion with maybe a quarter of that number, but I'm playing it safe.

Even if personal gear costs $10,000 per man, that's only $1 million. That leaves $19 million for training, incidentals, fuel, chartering a ship, hiring ground crew for the helicopters and a guard for the ship, 4x4s for land transport, accommodation, food, pre-invasion reconnaissance and so on and so forth.

Quite do-able I think.

Of Terrorists and Freedom Fighters

2009-02-17T09:42:00.004Z

Talking to a friend last night, she commented that "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." I'm not sure that's true. I don't think that whether somebody is a terrorist or not comes down to the justness of their cause. In other words, whether someone is a terrorist or not should be an empirical question.

Here's my definition to that end; a terrorist must:

1) Not be acting as an agent of an established government. In other words: if a US soldier, in his capacity as a US soldier, does things that would otherwise make him a terrorist, he is not a terrorist because he is a state actor. Equally, the state itself is not a terrorist organisation. This does not mean it is justified in those actions, only that it is something other than terrorist. Now, by my definition of government, a group like the Taleban might qualify as government, hence why I add 'established' i.e. only the predominant government(s) in a country which have an established political control are excluded from the term terrorist.

2) Deliberately target with violence intended to cause death, or threats of such (e.g. hostage taking), those who are neither in the business of exerting force, or involved with the immediate administration of such. So soldiers (both combat and otherwise) can be targeted without invoking the label of terrorist. As can police officers, whether they are door-kickers or pen pushers. Politicians, I think, are something of a grey area, or at least I'm not decided.

3) Do number 2 for a higher end i.e. they do not target people simply for the sake of killing them or of getting rid of those people, but for the sake of bringing about some other change. For example, a KKK member bombing a black church simply because he wants to kill black people, or reduce the number of black people in the world, is not a terrorist. But an IRA member who bombs a high street in order to force politicians to give in to his demands, is a terrorist.

Now, this definition attempts to avoid value judgements. Granted, it does include motivation, but this should simply be a case of asking the person in question 'why did you do what you did?', I can't see any reason they would lie or be blind to their own motivations. So, a person might be pursuing a cause you very much agree with, and still be a terrorist. So terrorism isn't necessarily a bad thing, that depends on whether you think what terrorism is is a bad thing. Equally, someone might be fighting for a cause you disagree with but not be a terrorist.

Gang Members

2009-02-15T04:47:00.003Z

A term that troubles me. You don't have to look very far to find politicians, police officers and ordinary people talking about "a crack down on gang members," and "getting gang members off the streets," and "targeting gang members."

Today I heard someone talking about how police have been spying on people on the internet and coming to their homes to steal their property. He said that the police have made a big mistake by making this tactic public, because now people will be warned out of posting pictures of themselves with knives/weapons online and real gang members will go undetected. It made me thing: what's wrong with a gang member? The answer, of course, is: nothing! If they are stabbing people or stealing things or what not then of course that is wrong, but this is not what people say. They say "gang members." It would of course be terribly cynical of me to think the following:

That this is a deliberate of subconscious attempt by the ruling class to ingrain in the population the idea that one can be criminal independent of action. In other words, you do not have to kill or rape or steal to be in need of locking up, your very identity, or those of who you associate with or your membership of a group or organisation is justification for your criminalisation.

The Most Stupidest Law Ever

2009-02-11T14:03:00.003Z

Some dumbfuck in America's hat has decided to make it a crime to wear body armour... whilst committing a felony. Let's think about this a second: why might a felon wear body armour? Answer: because they're afraid of getting shot. In other words, they think that if they do not wear body armour they have a pretty good chance of getting shot and dying. So, if you're a felon and you have to choose between a little bit of extra jail time and getting shot and killed, which is it going to be?

Watchdog #2

2009-02-09T07:33:00.002Z

As if that wasn't enough, Watchdog have done a new 'investigation' where they've found what we already know: that you can buy things abroad that are legal abroad, but illegal in the UK. In this case: knives. Not just any knives obviously, as "knives" aren't illegal in the UK or we'd all have great difficulty devouring yummy steak (rare please, rare but not cold). The article doesn't specify what kind of knives, but I'm guessing they're automatic knives or balisongs. Anyway, check the bullshit:

Watchdog said its team considered the knives so dangerous that they handed them over to police and the weapons will now be destroyed.

Why? What were they afraid of? Did they think these knives were 'so dangerous' they might leap off the table and cut them up? I've seen girls less dickless than these dumbfucks.

eBay, the site used to purchase the knives, said:

Trust is the engine of eBay and as the UK's number one e-commerce site, we know we have a responsibility to keep the site safe for our buyers and sellers.

I'm sorry, keep their buyers and sellers safe? What does that have to do with anything? The sellers are American, they've got nothing to do with anything. They broke no laws or anything. And the buyers? What, do they think the buyers are going to stab themselves? Do they think they can only stab themselves with an illegal knife? Is a kitchen knife not good enough? The only thing eBay would be keeping their sellers safe from if they had prevented this somehow would be from the blazing guns of queenie's finest constabulary as they enforce the tyrannical laws that can only be assumed to be the product of mass, undiagnosed down-syndrome in the House of Commons.

The BBC article goes on to say:

Figures released by the Metropolitan Police last month showed that the number of fatal stabbings rose last year as the number of deadly shootings fell.

It said there were 83 knife killings last year, compared with 74 in 2007. And the number of gun murders fell from 30 to 17.

Who gives a fuck? What does it matter whether it was a knife or a bullet or a fist? Maybe if they spent less time exhaling human excrement and more time shooting politicians and committing suicide we might actually get somewhere.

Watchdog #1

2009-02-09T05:40:00.003Z

It's well known that the BBC is doing it wrong, but rarely does it to do it quite so wrong as when it broadasts Watchdog. This anti-market, government apologist piece of rectal fluid masquerading as the Jesus of consumers recently came out with a brilliant and totally necessary piece of investigative journalism which concluded you can buy fake shit and illegal shit on teh internets. In this report, they manage to completely misunderstand the internet and the laws they're so determined to legitimise and defend. Take a look at the video: Man wants to buy television from a seller on Amazon Marketplace. He emails the seller from, presumably, the same email address that his Amazon account is registered under. In other words: he asked the seller "please phish me." He then gets an email that appears to be from Amazon asking him to make a transaction using Moneygram, not Amazon. He does not check the email is genuine, he does not email Amazon to ask about the email, instead he emails the seller. The seller replies with a lie, that Amazon's payment system is down. Again, the man does not check this, but believes random, anonymous person he is communicating with via email and sends him hundreds of pounds.

So, let's go over what happened once more: Man sees item for sale on Amazon. Man contacts the seller outside of Amazon. Man gets reply outside of Amazon. Man sends money outside of Amazon. The only part Amazon played in the whole thing was their being the place where this fucktard found the guy who later ripped him off. It's like suing a pub because the bloke you met there robbed your house the next day.

What does he expect? Are Amazon supposed to pay back money they didn't take from you on the basis of a story, a story they have no knowledge or proof of given that none of it happened on their site? Are they supposed to magically know when a seller on their marketplace is a scammer? There's much talk of how people are trusting because 'it's Amazon' but clearly it is not Amazon. There's even a ratings system, as if it wasn't obvious enough, to show you the reputation of individual sellers. Did this prick ignore the seller's bad/non existent rating and buy from him anyway?

They then wheel out some mindless bint who sent off a camcorder without receiving the money before hand. Again, she gave away her account's email address and didn't check the validity of the messages she received. Essentially she met someone on Amazon, and that person lied to and stole from her outside of Amazon. Amazon can hardly be held responsible for letting you meet bad people, especially when they have no way of determining who the bad people are.

Next, there's much frowning and word-spitting as they reveal that the BBC has managed to break the law. Bravo. Yes, they found that you can order things from Germany that are legal in Germany, but not in the UK, namely pepper spray and CS gas. So, the seller never broke any law. The only people breaking the law here are the BBC! Interestingly both the 'reporter' and a Trading Standards officer refer to these items as 'offensive weapons'. Now, whilst that may be true, that's really not the issue. You can but offensive weapons on Amazon perfectly legally, because it is perfectly legal to buy, own and sell offensive weapons. The reason it's illegal to sell pepper spray and CS in the UK is that they're prohibited weapons under the Firearms Act.

What You Need to Know about the Bailout

2009-02-07T23:16:00.003Z

Everyone needs to see this. The widespread, and complete misunderstanding of the global economic downturn is, I believe, one of if not the greatest threat to liberty and prosperity.

Golly Gosh

2009-02-05T23:14:00.003Z

Carol Thatcher has been sacked by the BBC after she used the word 'Golliwog' to describe a tennis player in an off-camera conversation whilst filming The One Show. Personally, I think whitey and darkey need to get over the use of words and stop worrying about the damn things. I thought niggers were meant to be laid back anyhow?

But what I think doesn't really matter. Since the BBC is a branch of government that should not exist, every decision it makes is one I oppose. However, if we ignore that fact and think of the BBC as an ordinary, private employer, it should of course have the right to sack its employees for any reason it likes, so long as this is in line with the contractual agreement between employer and employee. If a firm thinks it's better off sacking someone who calls a spade a coon then that's their business decision and the market will either reward or punish them for it.

What interests me is the remarks made by Geoff Hoon, Labour Party cracker, on Question Time just now. He said that the word Golliwog, whilst sometimes merely the name of a children's toy, is also used offensively and therefore it is wrong to use it. Because of this, it was therefore legitimate for the BBC to make the decision to sack Carol Thatcher for using it. Or in other words:

If government disapproves of A
Then firm may sack for A

However, it only seems to flow one way because the following is also true:

If government approves of A
Then firm may not sack for A

At first glance this might not seem that incongruent. What he's saying is that if the government disapproves of something then it's up to the employer to make its own decision: the government won't force them to ban it. But if the government approves of something they WILL ban the employer from banning it.

Adult Babies

2009-01-29T07:02:00.002Z

In a monumental cock-up, the BBC have let slip their infantilising nature. We are all children, and we need our betters to make all our decisions for us.

And it will include proposals on how to protect children, as millions, many of them under-18, visit social networking sites and play games online.

A Technicality

2009-01-27T12:29:00.005Z

That's how police officers (or should I say: scum*) seem to view the absence of a law. With a few exceptions I won't go into here, it is an offence to possess a sharp or pointed article in a public place. That's what the law says. The law very specifically say "in a public place" because that's the only place it applies, and the only place it is or ever was meant to apply.

Well in this article, some prick and a chess-neck are scouring the internet on the taxpayer's clock and dime to spy on the social networking profiles of... innocent people. Not only do they trawl through profiles looking for pictures of people with knives in public, but also for those with them in private:

If they were posing in a public place, like on the street or a park, the law has been broken and they'll be arrested.
Even when pictures are taken in private, though, which isn't technically breaking the law, he says the weapons are so dangerous his officers pay a visit to the people involved.
"We show the parents their pictures," he explained, "recover the weapons and make sure they know that behaviour is unacceptable.

Why are these people spending other people's money to go and thell them off for doing something perfectly legal? Did they ask for their 'help'? What right to they have to 'recovor' i.e. steal these 'weapons'? Why is 'that behaviour' (what behaviour? being photographed holding man's oldest tool?) 'unacceptable'?

*No, I'm not one of those people who belives that wearing a hi-viz jacket makes you Jesus incar-fucking-nate. By agreeing to work as a government paramilitary you are an accessory to murder, theft, kidnap, vandalism, tresspass, intimidaion, threats, black, bribery and racketeering, and often carrying out such acts yourself.

Headlines That Don't Muck Around

2009-01-27T12:18:00.004Z

I love them. Here's my favourite from the BBC:

Freight train on fire after crash

Grrrr! Doesn't it make you just want to rip a phone book in two and impregnate the weeping, 13 year old widow of your vanquished and blood soaked enemy? That's a real man's headline! Chuck Norris and Jack Bauer only read headlines like this.

Harry and the Hairy Situation

2009-01-11T17:41:00.003Z

The grandson of our Illustrious Leader has got himself up Essex without a condom once again, this time by (prepare yourself) using the word "Paki". Good god in heaven, what will that honky son uvva bitch dream up in his lilly white head next. I suppose while he's out blowing apart ragheads with his fancy new rifle he's got plenty of time to think up more offensive terms for old darkie. Them niggers could use a few more put downs.

Anyway, the point I'm slowly getting to is that the BBC in their legendary journalistic impartiality, have written the following:

Prince Harry's racist remark about a Pakistani member of his army platoon has prompted widespread criticism.

Now, who the hell are they to call it "racist"? Not even Al Beeb's trademark inverted commas are present*.

*E.g. Gun owners 'feast on living puppies'.

Land

2009-01-11T17:33:00.002Z

I've commented before on certain aspects of British libertarianism (Britarianism? Because everything needs a catchy name) that perplex me, namely the fixation on the (note the capitalisation) Rule of Law, "bringing back manufacturing" and other protectionist policies e.g. energy self sufficiency, an incomprehensible and rather disturbing infatuation with the monarchy, and now: land. Land seems to be the new class. People are obsessed with it. I am only reminded by their prattlings of women who suffer from "penis envy". It's tied up in class I suppose. Land owners are dehumanised beyond all recognition. They're rich, posh, unproductive, lazy, greedy, selfish, fat, they even have titles sometimes, and a lot of people seem to be intensely jealous of them to the point of wanting men with guns to steal their property off them. Not cool.

Brown The Magician

2009-01-04T05:18:00.003Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7810178.stm

PM 'to create 100,000 new jobs'

Dangerous Mail

2009-01-03T02:50:00.007Z

I felt the need to dissect this Daily Mail article by Lorraine Fisher. Not that anyone knows who she is, but it helps to put a name to a fuckwit. The headline reads:

Protesters say it's their right to watch sadistic porn. Tell that to the mother of the girl murdered by a man addicted to it...

She inadvertently picks up on a rather crucial point. The man she speaks of is Graham Coutts. Of course, he wasn't addicted in the medical sense, as one is addicted to heroin, but if indeed he had some kind of compulsion to view violent pornography, we can consider a ban on such material to have much the same effect as the ban on heroin. As we all know, nobody takes heroin in Britain. Oh no wait...

The truth is that this material will still be freely available, just as it is now. In fact, whilst heroin is still available under prohibition, it is LESS available than it would be legally, because customs and the police intercept it (and this is what creates the black market and pushes up prices, which causes all the unpleasantness that gets blamed on 'drugs', but that's for another day). In the case of violent pornography, nobody is going to be intercepting it. Supply remains unchanged.

The only difference will be that, after the fact, you might get done for it if the police catch you with the stuff. Of course, they will only be able to catch you with it if they're investigating some other crime for which they have grounds to search your property or computer. Graham Coutts, whose murder of Jane Longhurst, by way of a campaign by her mother, sparked the incoming ban on 'extreme pornography', was never investigated by police prior to the murder. Therefore, he could not have been prevented from murdering her by way of being locked up for possession of extreme pornography. Even if the material drove him to commit the crime, he would still have had access to it under the new law. Events would have played out identically to the way they did.

The article proper starts with this shocking expose:

Bound and gagged, a desperate woman fights for breath as a noose tightens around her neck.
Her glassy eyes bulge with panic, her tongue lolls and her face is stricken with fear as a camera records every moment of her torture.
And you can view it all in comfort on your living-room computer.

One presumes from this passage that Lorraine is, in fact, a complete fucking liar (as if being employed by the Mail wasn't indication enough). How would a "desperate woman" be able to 'loll her tongue' whilst being "bound and gagged"?

More over, we must ask ourselves: what is actually being described here? A woman being hanged. If Lorraine wants this image banned, she'd be banning such depraved movies as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, rated PG in the UK.

She moves on by attempting to contrast opponents of the new law against supporters:

On one side are figures such as pornographer Ben Westwood, son of avant-garde fashion designer Vivienne, and a motley crew of supporters who - using the platform of free speech - argue that such material is harmless and that any adults should be allowed to view it.
On the other is a quiet and dignified 77-year-old woman who blames such horrific images for the savage and degrading murder of her daughter.

I'm not sure Ben Westwood really counts as a "pornographer" as such. I don't think his work is really meant to be fap fodder, they're just saucy pictures. And what's with the descriptor "motley"? Are proponents of the law all identical? Presumably she doesn't mean merely that there is variety amongst opponents, what she means to imply is that they are haphazard, rag tag, and few in number. None of which could be said to be true in relation to proponents - 63% of those the government surveyed opposed tightening the law and at least two major groups have been set up specifically to organise opposition to the law, not to mention several other groups which have also campaigned.

Meanwhile, Lorraine does something uncharacteristically clever. Having just described a "motley crew of supporters" on the opposing side, she says that "on the other is a... woman", as if Liz Longhust is fighting this battle against depravity single handedly. Lorraine has biased the article to make the idea of violent pornography clearly reprehensible to most 'normal people', so when she describes the "motley crew" we get the sense that they're a worthless minority, a band of cranks and loonies of no significance. But when she tells us about Liz, she's meant to be seen as a lone crusader, an underdog. She plays the sympathy card.

Liz is said to be "quiet and dignified". This describing the woman who said she wanted violent pornography to be banned so that people could not "feed their sick imaginations". Passing such judgement on others falls somewhat short of dignified, and the sizeable campaign she has devoted herself to the past years hardly constitutes "quiet".

After describing Jane's murder, she goes on to explain how violent pornography related to Coutts:

Coutts's trial heard how for eight years before the murder in 2003 he had trawled the internet looking for pictures of women being strangled and raped.
He'd killed special needs teacher Jane 'to satisfy a bizarre and macabre fantasy' harboured since he was 15.

Now, bizarre and macabre is a description I'm more comfortable with. Undoubtedly fantasies of necrophilia are bizarre in that they are rare and unusual, far removed from conventional sexuality. By definition they are macabre. Sick, as I mentioned above, drips a little too much of moral elitism to be taken seriously.

More to the point, however, note that Coutts was looking at violent pornography for eight years. He did not stumble across these pictures and go out and murder someone, he was seeking them out. Indeed, according to the court, Coutts had exhibited an interest in, and actually engaged in breath play (sexual choking, strangulation etc) with consenting partners five years before he started accessing pornography on the subject. It is not a case that he found pornography and was corrupted by it, his fantasies pre-dated his viewing of violent pornography.

Asked about opponents of the law, Liz answers nonsensically:

They say imagery doesn't make you go out and do something you wouldn't otherwise do, but what I saw during Coutts's trial was a man who wanted to murder, and encouraged that part of himself by visiting those sites. They made him feel he wasn't alone in his preoccupation. I think before he found like-minded people on the internet, he believed he was the only person with those thoughts. But when the internet came along, he saw there were all these websites, so he thought it was all right to have these fantasies.

She goes right to the heart of it when she admits that Coutts was "a man who wanted to murder". Pornography did not cause him to want to murder, he wanted to murder before pornography was involved. Might pornography have kept him on that track when he otherwise might have left it? Perhaps finding that he wasn't the only one interested in necrophilia made him avoid seeking help when he otherwise would have? Well, no. Coutts had already seen a doctor and a psychiatrist about his urges, to no avail. He then turned to pornography.

As it happens, things didn't turn out this way, but consider what Liz has just told us: that before he found porn, he "beleived he was the only person with those thoughts. But when the internet came along, he saw there were all these websites, so he thought it was all right to have these fantasies." There was never any suggestion that Coutts thought that what he did was all right, or that the websites he looked at made genuine acts of rape and murder seem ok. Given that he knew the real acts were wrong, why should he have believed the fantasies were not "all right"? Who do you think is more likely to murder: the man who knows murder is wrong, but feels alone in the world and guilty for fantasies he sees as wrong, or the man who knows murder is wrong and knows that it's ok to fantasise so long as it's kept fantasy, and that there are other people like him? Seems to me that porn actually made him LESS, not more, likely to murder Jane. As I say, it turned out, unfortunately, that "less" was not good enough for Jane - but then you never hear about the people who DON'T kill people.

The article continues:

Of course, it's impossible to say whether Coutts could have been prevented from killing Jane.
But he was viewing extreme pornography websites, and the frequency of his visits to those sites reached a peak in the days before her murder and during the time that he was visiting her body.

It's not impossible to tell. Two in the chest and one in the head will "prevent" most anyone. As they say, "an ounce of buckshot beats a pound of restraining orders."

She says that his viewing peaked before and after her murder... does that mean he just happened to watch more porn and that made him murder her? Or were increased frustration and urges driving him to watch more porn? Was he trying to substitute real life murder with fictitious pornography and lost the battle? Does she really think that he just happened to watch more pornography after raping and murdering a young woman, and that this caused him to have sex with her corpse? Or was the fact that he had a hot little corpse hidden away downstairs turning him on and causing him to look at pornography to alleviate this?

Later in the article, she talks about what Ben Westwood thinks:

...He argues that countries which have banned such material have seen an increase in violent crime against women.

She goes on to say:

It's a debate that's raged for decades, with few studies offering definitive evidence.
It is interesting to note, however, that after lapdancing clubs opened in Camden, North London, incidents of rape in the surrounding area rose by 50 per cent and other types of sexual violence by 57 per cent.

So, she completely ignores the point that Westwood has made, and comes out instead with an example of an entirely different situation in an entirely different context. Rather than an example of a ban on violent pornography reducing crime, or of legalisation of violent pornography increasing crime, she gives the example of lapdancing clubs opening in Camden and rapes and sexual violence rising. Completely meaningless. No causation, not even a time frame, and no relation to the issue at hand.

Further breaking her "quiet dignity", Liz is quoted further:

It does annoy me when these campaigners say they shouldn't be restricted because of a tiny minority.
'We're all restricted quite a lot because of a tiny minority - I'd like to not have to lock my door, but because of a tiny minority of criminals, I do have to.

Campaigners don't (or shouldn't) say they shouldn't be restricted because restricting a large group because of the actions of a tiny minority is wrong. They shouldn't be restricted because the new law won't work, may have the opposite effect, will in any case have a generally detrimental effect, sets a precedent for further restrictions, and is generally unjust.

However, the comparison to the perceived requirement to lock one's doors in defence of the law is fallacious. In fact, it quite nicely demonstrates how illegitimate the law is. If you do not lock your doors you risk having people come into your home and take all your stuff. In a way, you are forced to lock your door by the implicit threat of force against your person or property. Who makes these threats? Criminals. Now, if you do not burn your porn collection you risk having people come into your home and kidnap you, holding you for up to three years, or taking thousands of pounds worth of your stuff. You are forced to burn your porn collection by the explicit threat of force against your person and property. Who makes these threats? The government. In this way, the government is at parity with criminals. It is, however, even worse. Where as the criminals do not actively threaten you, the government does.

Breaking and Not Exiting

2009-01-03T01:23:00.002Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/7808930.stm

Armed police have surrounded a house in Wigan.

Officers from Greater Manchester Police responded after receiving reports that a man was refusing to leave the property in Hereford Road, Hindley.

Is it a crime not to leave your own house now?

More on My Fantasy

2009-01-02T11:14:00.004Z

To continue from my previous post, one thing I thought I'd find it hard to do is to estimate how much it would cost to invade a country like Costa Rica, Panama or Tuvalu. However, prolific mercenary and general badass Neall Ellis has helped me out a bit. He said, in 2000, that if the UN would pay private security firms to end the war in Sierra Leone, it would cost them $50 million (the link is actually a very interesting read, I plan on buying his book which should be out this summer). He says:

If the United Nations was prepared to do it, I believe private military organisations would be the way to go. Say 500 men as a good force; buying a couple of helicopters, plus ammunition; so you are looking at maybe $50 million a year to sort out this war.

That's actually a lot less than I'd have thought, and we're talking about fighting a well armed, highly motivated and experienced rebel army. Much more than what we'd face in any of the above countries, namely a poorly equipped, inexperienced police force. Costa Rica is about 25% smaller, and Tuvalu is one seventh the size.

So, anyone got a few spare lying around?

"You wanna mess with Socrates, he'll put choo on ya knees,"

2009-01-02T07:31:00.004Z

Socrates, puppeted by Plato in The Republic, might have been more 'Original Statist' than 'Original Gangsta', but he could trash talk like the best of 'em. In discussion with Glaucon he says:

You of all people shouldn't need reminding that in one way or another a lover, or an admirer of young boys, is smitten and aroused by anyone of the right age.

SNAP

I'd swap the pink slip to a bright purple and leopard print Buick Riviera for the chance to see a down and dirty rap battle between Aristotle and the philosopher formerly known as Socrates.

Gun Ignorant

2009-01-02T05:52:00.003Z

'Tis sad testimony to the state of Britain's gun culture when a woman receives a gun* in the post by mistake and exclaims:

I couldn't believe my eyes. I was petrified and didn't dare touch it in case it went off.

Of course, those of us who aren't completely fucking ignorant of simple mechanical processes know that guns don't "go off" when you touch them. They go off when you insert ammunition into them, disengage all safety mechanisms and pull the trigger. It's clear from the picture that the gun in unloaded and in safe. The location of the trigger is plain. She could have picked it up and used it as a hockey stick and it wouldn't have gone off.

*As it turns out, and as the charging kit included in the package should have given away, the gun was a dummy designed to shoot infra red beams for training purposes.

Individualisation In Discourse

2009-01-02T00:01:00.003Z

By individualisation, I mean the basing on or associating of one's argument with a particular academic. Even excessive reverence for a particular writer can be dangerous. There are two primary pitfalls. The first is that, it leaves you open to attacks of the nature "You agree with Smith, Smith thought schools should be publicly funded, therefore you agree that schools should be publicly funded." What the argument fails to realise, and what the mistake of he who says he agrees with Smith (or, more realistically, seems to imply it) is, is that few people ever agree on everything. I might agree with Smith or Friedman or Mises on a lot of things, but I might also disagree with them. The fact is that I can agree with some of what Marx or Hitler wrote, most thinkers manage to get at least the odd thing right, and there are a few which get quite a long way there (Friedman, for example).

The second pitfall of course is that, as a form of argument, it is completely bankrupt. The truth or falsity of an argument is completely independent of who expounded it. "But Mises wrote that..." means nothing. Who cares what he wrote? The important thing is whether he was right, and that's separate from who "he" is. Having said that, emphasising the support a particular academic has for an argument, theory or policy can be useful, if still bankrupt. A common cause of aversion to libertarian ideas is that they are 'out there', distant from the main stream. This leads people to believe the ideas are necessarily ridiculous, the reserve of cranks. This is of course meaningless as I have just explained: who holds or does not hold the ideas has no relation to their validity. However, people are often stubborn and refuse to see that fact, therefore there is some utility in explaining that particular ideas were first proposed or taken up by famous, well respected, influential academics, that, right or wrong, the ideas are serious and cannot be dismissed lightly. Not that any idea should be dismissed lightly of course, but people have a tendency to think like that.

None the less, beware of individualising your argument and opening yourself up to assumptions of a necessary parity between a thinker's ideas and your own, and making logically meaningless arguments.

Global Terror

2009-01-01T05:46:00.003Z

When politicians talk about global terror, they usually refer to Muslims blowing up trucks or flying airplanes into skyscrapers. What they don't mention, is their own employment of terror. Take for example a law Norway has just passed banning the purchasing of sex. Like terrorists, these Norwegian politicians aim to enact change through means of violence and terror perpetrated against civilians. The law relies on Norwegians being too scared to buy sex. If they should dare to try, and get caught, men with guns will kidnap them. If they resist, they will be killed.

Of course, plenty of countries ban prostitution. What makes this law noteworthy is that it criminalises Norwegians, not just for purchasing sex in Norway, but for doing so anywhere in the world. It doesn't matter where you go, you cannot escape the excessively long arm of this particular law. What's worse is that there are a couple of similar global-terror laws planned in Britain.

As always: Watch out, and buy ammo.

Change of Name

2008-12-30T05:44:00.002Z

This advert is currently showing on British television. Made me smile, given my recent nomular reassignment.

Work For The State

2008-12-27T16:36:00.000Z

Live for the state.