'Nother Solent

Diana Hsieh

has an update on her lawsuit here. Arthur Silber is more free to comment, and does so here, and scroll up and down for more.

BTW I am told that her last name is said like the French chez i.e. "shay" but sort of quicker and flatter. She probably won't be thrilled to hear this, but that puts her in the same category (Names Which Are A Pronounciation Minefield, So Watch Out) as Michael Bellesiles, which apparently comes from the French belles îles and is said "bell eel." Lest anyone take offence, I must add that I find "Hsieh" a pleasing syllable, and as for Bellesiles, he may not be the History Monthly centrefold I would put on my garage wall, but a last name meaning "Beautiful Islands" is pure poetry.

We didn't actually see

the Mekon die, did we? Excalibur, which follows Dan Dare, is also good.

I just saw an advert for a doll called "Baby Wee-Wee." Now when I was little I had Tiny Tears. You could give her a drink and she'd do a wee-wee immediately afterwards, poor thing, which suggests renal failure. But for some reason it was always little girl dolls who did that. There's progress for you. In these happy days we have Baby Wee-Wee, who evinces his masculinity in the most plastic fashion. But I don't think he'll grow up happy with that name.

Important stuff.

Dan Dare is on at 8.55am on Channel 5.

Things Your Mother Should Have Warned You About, Part II:

As Blair so sensibly puts it, "...my elevated fear of Yorkshiremen and circus performers will help protect me against their menace. "

Things Your Mother Should Have Warned You About, Part I:

Chapman warns: "Inside every such songsmith is a totalitarian monster trying to get out."

Rumsfeld on root causes.

Peter Regas writes: "I thought you'd appreciate this response by Sec. Rumsfeld to a question at the 11/11/02 Fortune Global Forum. Like a lot that Rumsfeld says, I found the response both refreshing in its candor and its insight."

It was, too.

Q: ...In order to defend prosperity in some parts of the world is there not a need to attack poverty in addition to all the other steps that you've taken?

Rumsfeld: Certainly there's a need to do that and I guess the question is how does one do that?

I was involved in the so-called war on poverty here in the United States and I've traveled the globe and seen just terrible poverty. I had a friend once and he was asked to chair a commission, an international committee, and the title of it was What Causes Poverty. He declined. He said I will do it but on one condition. The condition is that we change the title and I'll chair a committee on What Causes Prosperity. The reason he said that was, the title What Causes Poverty leaves the impression that the natural state of the world is for people to be prosperous and that for whatever reason there are prosperous people running around making people poor when you say what causes poverty. He looked at the world the other way. He said the natural state of people is to be relatively poor and that there are certain ways and things that can be done that can cause prosperity. They can create an environment that's hospitable to people gaining education and people gaining investments and people finding ways to contribute in a constructive way.

There are big portions of our globe that are so far behind the rest of the world that it is a dangerous thing. It is an unfortunate thing for those people. It's a heartbreaking thing.

The task for the developed world is to see that we do not just salve our consciences by finding ways like Lady Bountiful, we can give some country this or some country that which then is gone and disappears. But to the contrary, that we find ways to encourage countries to take the kinds of steps that create an environment that's hospitable to enterprise and to education so that the nation itself can do those things that will begin to ameliorate the kinds of terrible poverty that we see around the globe.

Certainly the United States has a responsibility as do the people from every nation in this room have the responsibility to contribute to that."

Source: link

With friends like these....

You'd think a guy from the Cato Institute would see the danger to civil liberties in national databases, wouldn't you? Arthur Silber heard an interview with Cato's Charles V. Pena which suggested that things may be blacker than we thought, when even those with a pro-freedom background concede crucial aspects to the statist side:

"Pena started out correctly, stressing the massive invasion of privacy that this plan entails. But then he spent the last few minutes of the interview saying that the burden of proof should be on Poindexter: that Poindexter needed to show that this plan actually could prevent acts of terrorism -- and that if he could demonstrate that, then it would be fine. To be absolutely fair, he didn't explicitly say that "it would be fine" -- but the whole way in which he structured his argument led inevitably to that conclusion: if Poindexter proved that the plan would prevent future terrorist acts, then the plan should go into effect... [snip]

... if this is the manner in which the issue is posed, of course Poindexter can prove that a plan like his would stop terrorism -- and so could I, and so could any one of you. All you need to do is employ enough people -- say, half the population -- to spy and keep tabs on the other half 24 hours a day, and you would never need to worry about any act of terrorism ever again."

I'd add that once a government has such power it is damn near inevitable that they will kill more than the terrorists would. I'm not making light of the terrorist threat, just giving the correct weight to the overmighty state threat. They've killed tens of millions so far.

Also scroll down for a detailed post about abortion, which presents a view I don't agree with extremely well. It had attracted 23 comments last time I looked.

"Blog years are like dog years, only longer."

Dawson remembers the sights and smells of his puppyhood, and links to John Weidner remembering some of the cars and postmen he chased back in them days.

LATER REFLECTIONS: Dawson was saying, rather wistfully, that he couldn't seem to find the same enthusiasm at the moment. There's a lot of it about - Joe Katzman has taken a break, and Bill Quick decided he'd had enough the other day, though he later changed his mind. Dr Frank took a break and has come back zinging, as has David Janes.

I hesitated to say what I'm about to say, because I thought people might read too much into it. It may sound dreadfully like something the boss would say as the most tactful gloss possible on the fact that the contents of your desk can now be found in a plastic bin bag at the front office, but, honestly, I don't mean it like that! I just mean the exact semantic content of my words: we bloggers should all relax a little. Life, hobbies, spirits all go in waves. If anyone feels like slowing down, or taking a break, it need not be occasion for Stakhanovite appeals to work harder. And if you want to just keep batting on even though the runs seem to have dried up, then that's fine, too.

UPDATE: As if to put my sanguine attitude to the test, I find that Dodgeblogium and Letter from Gotham are shutting up shop. The former team are to go to other blogs, but the latter is not - Diane E says, "To those of my readers who have flirted with the idea of starting their own blog I’d recommend it heartily. Give it a go. Go until you reach the end. Then stop." Nonetheless I hope we'll hear her voice again. My e-mail basket is always open for a start.

Heated debate

in Denmark over female circumscision.

UPDATE: I think the link works now. Thanks to all those who let me know.

Answers! We got answers!

To Eugene Volokh's quiz on colonies in the Western Hemisphere, wherein all the answers are absolutely true, except No. 11. In contrast Snopes lists the horse's ass/rail gauge story as "false." Bah. However, when you read the Snopes account rather than just the status indicator it seems as if the author actually backs up the theory in some cases:

"Horse-drawn vehicles, whether they were chariots or carts or carriages, all served similar functions, so practical considerations (e.g., the speed at which horses could travel, the amount of weight horses could pull, the number and arrangement of horses that could be controlled by a single driver) required that they be relatively similar in size as well.

"That may suffice as an explanation covering the specific combination of horse-drawn vehicles and roads, but what about vehicles that travelled on rails instead of roads (such as trolleys), or that weren't pulled by horses (such as trains)? Why should they be similar in size to their predecessors?

"Although we humans can be remarkably inventive, we are also often resistant to change and can be persistently stubborn (or perhaps practical) in trying to apply old solutions to new conditions. When confronted with a new idea such as a "rail," why go to the expense and effort of designing a new vehicle for it rather than simply adapting ones already in abundant use on roadways?"

The Snopes author does not so much deny the theory as think it wrong in detail, prosaic and uninteresting. He adds at the end that not many people would be interested were it not for the mention of a horse's ass. Well, I don't know about that - I liked it, there are millions of railway enthusiasts in the world, and railway gauges also come up in military history (see the mention of the US Civil War in the Snopes account), not to mention in discussions of whether standards should evolve or be imposed. Snopes is a wonderful institution, but I wonder if researching for the site, and seeing the full range of human folly and credulity, runs the risk of making its veterans a little bit grouchy.

Thanks to reader Robert Dammers for the link.

UPDATE: Brian Micklethwait liked it too, and he didn't even mention horse's whatsits. There is something appealing about the idea of tracing the effects of seemingly inconsequential decisions through history. James Burke wrote a whole book and TV series, Connections, doing just that.

What's wrong with welfare.

Steven Chapman puts it very well.

"Then the State comes along, and tells you that, when the going gets tough, you can rely on it to get by. This new state of affairs relieves you of the 'burden' of maintaining the high degree of goodwill and mutual self-interest which maintains a community/society, and furthermore, because the state is a system rather than a person, no expenditure of goodwill on your part is necessary to get what the State is offering."

Scroll up for a killer piece of research about UN Resolution 242, too. Sheesh, I wish I could come out with that sort of detailed knowledge.

Puzzleaholic.

Fresh from his victory re Sherlock, Guillermo de Jevenois has another go. He writes:

I am afraid I can't resist a puzzle. My chips for the Malaysian competition
are on:

HORSE

I am sure you had come up with it already,

Hmmm. I'm not sure about this. It doesn't seem to fit the actual wording of the clue, as quoted in UK Transport. To be fair, I should have quoted the wording more exactly myself. But could be, could be, and the explanation of its vital connection with the railway system is so funny that it jolly well ought to win anyway:

Railroad Tracks

The UK Standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5
inches. That's an exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the
pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that
they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some
of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel
ruts.

So who built these old rutted roads?

The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the
benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts?

The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying
their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were
made for or by Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel
spacing. Thus we have the answer to the original question. The United States
standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches derives from the original
specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.

Specs and Bureaucracies live forever. So, the next time you are handed a
specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be
exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide
enough to accommodate the back ends of two war-horses.

Now the twist to the story...

There's an interesting extension of the story about railroad gauge and
horses' behinds. When we see a Space Shuttle sitting on the launch pad,
there are two big booster rockets attached to the sides of the main fuel
tank. These are the solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by
Thiokol at a factory in Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs might have
preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train
from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line to the factory runs
through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel.
The tunnel is slightly wider than a railroad track, and the railroad track
is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So a major design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced
transportation system was determined by the width of a horse's ass!

Source: link.

MommaBear

has announced that she is leaving Dodgeblogium. Her announcement is here.

You never know what the dice will bring.

The EU may just have rolled for sanity and passed, on one small issue at least. Not possible, you say? Then take a look at this from Layman's Logic:

"The Times Online has spotted an opportunity to potential get rid of some European legislation:

"The quantities in which humdrum beverages such as water or wine are sold is not just a marketing convention or a result of the subtle action of consumer preference. It is, sometimes, a matter of EU law and the Commission is beginning to wonder whether that is sensible.

A working paper (there is always a working paper) concluded: “The EU seems over-regulated compared to the rest of the world” and “The fixing of sizes by legislators enables manufacturers to limit consumer choice”. The Commissioner for Enterprise, Erkki Liikanen, has given everyone a chance to air their views at http://europa.eu.int/yourvoice/*.
If the survey finds against rules on pack sizes, the Commission will repeal the directives and abolish the rules."

Next stop, CAP et al. After you to vote...

* link is correct - the printed address is a touch vague"

I wouldn't actually bet on the abolition of the CAP by electronic vote any time soon. But we might as well give this a go.

Congratulations

to Guillermo de Jevenois who was first with the correct answer: The Naval Treaty, written in 1893. He found the answer in http://www.sherlock-holmes.com/

Tough luck, Peter, you were pipped at the post. No cuddly toys, I'm afraid. Tell you what, how about a real life pet mouse as a consolation prize? Oh, I forgot. You already have some.

Oh, and while you're suffering,

tell me which Sherlock Holmes story it was that mentioned the Bertillon classification system. A small prize will be awarded* for the first correct answer.

*By someone else in another competition altogether.

Trivial pursuits around the world

. See if you can find a word fitting this pattern: [ - - r - e] in a way that has something to do with unpunctual trains. If you can you will be able to help win a crossword competition for a Malaysian reader of UK Transport. The story of Patrick Crozier's mysteriously rising hit counter charmed the socks off me. Future generations won't be able to understand this at all. Or rather, they will be bemused that anyone thought such everyday events worth mentioning.

Progress spoils a lot of good stories. I used to tell a little anecdote about that time a group of us holidaying together in France became accidentally split into two sub-groups and each sub-group had to work out who the other sub group would be most likely to phone in Britain in order to get back in communication. If you are over 30 you can stop nodding your head and telling the computer about that time in Lanzarote, I understand that you understand. If you are under 30 the point is that mobile phones have not always existed.

So, had enough yet of wasting the finite processing power of your brains on idle puzzling that is no good to man nor beast? If you crave more, I can help. Eugene Volokh has hinted to me that my mini-team entry to his recent historical and geographical quiz was creditable but not all-conquering. So far as I know entries are still open. I'll make it easy for you - on second thoughts, no I won't. Suffer.

Dem bones.

Did you know what they did before fingerprints? James Rummel does. They measured bones. He finishes by wondering what all the police departments and detective agencies did with all the Bertillon records after fingerprinting rendered them obsolete. If someone does unearth them it would give us a fascinating statistical picture of the state of health of our ancestors. Those among them who came to the attention of the police, anyway.

UPDATE for anyone who had trouble with that link. James Rummel writes: "Re the Case of the Shifting Handbasket...

Blogger was sending people who clicked on the link you put in your blog to a post I had made earlier that had nothing to do with Bertillon. I republished an archive or two and posted a blank page. All to confuse the bedeviled computer and convince it to sit up and fly straight. The link, which I just tested, is now sending people to the correct link."

(My bold type.) That's the way to deal with 'em. Let 'em know who's master.

More about Kibbutz Metzer.

Diane E of Letter from Gotham has pointed out that the Guardian did eventually report that horrifying story of the murders of children and adults at Kibbutz Metzer. This account appeared at 6.40pm on their website on the day after the massacre. It stresses the mildly socialist idealism of Metzer's founders. This was the image of Israel I - and many Guardian readers - grew up with.

And this, alas, is an all too typical image from that part of the world these days:

``I will have to say Kaddish (prayer for the dead) for two little kids. It's an entire family,'' the father said, fingering two pacifiers that belonged to Noam. The boy would fall asleep with one pacifier in his mouth and one in his hand. ``How can a man - if you can call him a man - shoot a boy with two pacifiers?'' Ohion said.

The Iranian professor condemned to death for "blaspheming the prophet" (i.e. challenging the ruling clerics) has decided not to appeal. His quoted statement does not suggest a death wish, but refers to "letting the judiciary handle it." I presume this means that there is some advantage of tactics or principle to be gained by not appealing. Even the Islamic Republic News Agency concedes that there is widespread public anger at the death sentence.

Blunkett's re-writing of history

. In an article for the Telegraph yesterday, our dear Home Secretary said dismissively that the right to trial by jury dated back to 1855, not Magna Carta. Peter Lilley MP wrote back.

UPDATE: It's like a horror movie. SEE a computer disintegrate before your very eyes! If the link doesn't work for you either, read this:

Re: Re-writing history
Date: 13 November 2002

Sir - David Blunkett makes the absurd claim that "the right to jury trial dates back to 1855, not the Magna Carta" (Opinion, Nov. 12).

He could not be more wrong. As a result of Magna Carta, jury trial had become an automatic right for those accused of felonies for centuries prior to 1855. In that year a predecessor of David Blunkett brought in a measure to transfer some minor cases previously handled by juries for trial in the "police courts". However, he recognised that this would be acceptable only if defendants retained the right to jury trial should they so prefer.

The future chancellor, Lord Campbell, said in the debate: "Had the minister not retained the option of trial by jury, I must have opposed the Bill as unconstitutional."

This Government brought in two Bills - mercifully defeated in the Lords - to take that "constitutional" right away from defendants entirely in two thirds of all cases. Labour still has a manifesto pledge to do that, but now proposes to advance by a pincer movement. Some cases will be removed from juries because they are simple and minor. Others will be removed because they are complex and major. If the Government succeeds in this it will have left little scope for jury trial at all.

No wonder the Home Secretary is trying to re-write our history to exclude a cherished right.

From:
Peter Lilley MP (Con), London SW1

Talking of blirgdays

, I have learned that I share mine with Brian Linse's next door neighbour on the Instapundit blogroll, Listen Missy. I have always liked the look of this blog, what little I could see of it behind the Internet Explorer Script Error sign that always, always, always pops up and completely freezes the computer every time I try visiting it.

Say hi to Missy from me, someone. (I would myself, only her e-mail address is somewhere under the ice.) I shall now have to take the utmost care not to click on one of my own links.

Scary Squirrel World.

Honestly.

You let these blogs out for one minute, and there they are, breeding all over the place. Shocking, I call it. You may recall that I mentioned the Dude's first birthday a couple of days ago. Now he has posted some birthday reflections.

I assume "cute as a bug's ear" is an American or Tennessee-an term of endearment. Like the French "my little cabbage" these things often appear quaint in translation.

One in forty.

Jim Miller has a timely reminder of what France went through in the First World War. As a proportion of men of military age the ratio was even higher; it was rare to meet a person who had not lost a father, son, husband or brother.

Let slip the blogs of war...

I should really have had that as my headline for the previous post, but 'tis here I ride forth to battle. I've been meaning to respond to this post by Junius for a couple of days. After describing why he sees himself as being on the left despite some common grounds with non-lefties, he says:

Natalie's reaction to the facts Dalrymple adduces is helpfully summarised by her thus:

This is the life that welfare brings about.

This is the life that minimum wage laws bring about.

This is the life that subsidised housing projects bring about.

This is the life that the drug war brings about.

This is the life that cringe-multiculturalism brings about.

This is the life that moral relativism brings about.

Now Natalie follows these sentences with a quote from Dalrymple about how leftists deny the reality he's writing about. Since I think I am, as I mentioned, the blogospheric conduit for the very article about the Parisian banlieu that she discusses, I find this particular ad hominem jibe especially inappropriate.

This has some justice to it, though an admirer of Dalrymple I would eventually have found the article myself, I am pretty sure. As I said in an e-mail to Chris Bertram, I was put in a bad mood by a column that same day by Hugo Young where he launched an ad hominem attack on free-market conservatives, speaking of them as putting "compassion in the dustbin where it had always belonged". I actually meant to blog about him first, then hit on the Dalrymple article as a perfect example of the things his compassion would prefer not to see, then quite forgot about Hugo Y's sins while absorbed in Dalrymple's bleak vision, then had to do something else and finally came back to post about Young after Dalrymple, despite having thought of what I wanted to say about Young before seeing Dalrymple. Phew.

Returning to the main argument, Chris writes:

In any case, the libertarian reaction to the Dalrymple-facts is actually significantly like the (smart) leftist one: namely, to accept the description but refuse the prescription. Dalrymple wouldn't accept the "drug war" item on Natalie's list and is usually inclined to cite cultural factors alongside and often ahead of the institutional ones she mentions.

Like you I quote Dalrymple approvingly without going aong with his entire mindset. Actually I do usually agree with him on the cultural factors as well, but I'm inclined to think that they often follow on, with a time lag of a decade or so, from the incentives that a society or physical reality puts in place. I don't claim that the causation is inescapable. There is always scope for individual moral choice. But since no one objects to the observation that the Japanese are a generally polite people because Japan is crowded, no one need object to the observation that a seventeen year old single girl on a council house waiting list, who knows having a baby will get her a house, is not generally a person you expect to wax eloquent on the sacred crown of virginity.

But Natalie's list encapsulates a pretty standard libertarian reaction. And it also raises several questions in my mind. Libertarians often push the line that state intervention makes worse the problems it purports to solve or creates worse problems as unintended consequences. That's often true, though to assert it as a universal law rather than looking at the facts of each case strikes me as dogmatic.

I do not assert it as universal, and I don't think I've ever read an explicit declaration that the rule holds true in literally every case. Not that I've done a survey or anything, but I always assumed that when Libertarians say "the state always screws up" they were employing conversational exaggeration, such as when I say, "I can never remember how to spell exaggerate." The state usually screws up because it has no incentive to find out what people really want and what really works.

Libertarians also oppose things like "subsidised housing projects" because they are subsidised and because this requires raising money in taxes.

So, the natural first question to ask is: "Which of these is more fundamental, tax or social effects?" and, specifically, "If the social measures you list actually worked, would you still oppose them anyway because of the taxation question?"

Tocqueville said that "Any man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave." At rock bottom, I agree, and hence would oppose them anyway, but fortunately - and not coincidentally - I can escape his harsh choice by observing that your "if" is an extremely rare one. We are always being told that we must swap freedom for safety, social mobility, compassion or military success, just as fifty years ago they told us we must swap freedom for prosperity. (Government advisers were still whiffling on about the superior efficiency of planned economies right up to the time of Wilson.) That turned out to be a load of old cobblers and so will this. In general, free countries are safer, less caste-bound, more compassionate and win more wars than non-free.

A second, more directly Dalrymple-article-related question would be to ask why you are confident in asserting that the welfare-state is at the root of these problems when he also mentions, specifically, questions of urban design. Though the design of large housing projects is also a matter of state control, we can pull it apart, analytically, from the welfare issue.

We can, but I prefer not to! They are closely linked. The housing blocks that everyone hates were nearly all put up by local or national government because a developer who tried to sell homes like that to people who could choose otherwise would go bust in no time. Oh, fashion might decree them for a while, and there is always room for differences of style, but in general the block of flats is the home of last resort. Left to themselves most people buy houses like kids draw, houses with front doors and gardens. They may be tiny, shoddy little houses with front doors and gardens because the people are poor but they won't have multiple walkways so the mugger has fifteen different escape routes, and you won't only be able to reach your living room by a lift or fifteen flights of stairs and your little castle and its plot will be yours and your family's and no-one else's

Furthermore, I've heard tell that, like racehorses, modern blocks of flats all have one great-great grandaddy. Architects all over Europe admired the Karl Marx Hof (spot the hidden political clue in that name) when it went up in Vienna, and cheered when the Socialist Schutzbund defended it against Dolfuss's militia. Whether Otto Wagner himself consciously or unconsciously intended this of the original design, one of the things that its successors were actually built to do was to facilitate violent revolt.

Third, the welfare states that exist in the West vary fundamentally in design and rationale (one helpful set of labels distinguishes among Beveridgian, Bismarckian and Scandinavian models). Do you want really to say the same things about all of them?

Broadly, yes. Of course one may be a good deal less bad than another. I do not know much about this subject.

Fourth, since all these states have welfare-systems, they are all clearly responding to a set of problems: poverty, social insecurity, social exclusion and so on. What would you put in their place? One possible answer is, of course, "nothing". But that rather raises the issue of dependence in a different form since those unable to fend for themselves will have their fending done for them by others (such as family) - if they are not to perish - and so will be dependent on those very fenders. Often intra-familial relations are benign, but not always....

My answer echoes similar answers I give elsewhere. I can't claim (any more than can a socialist) that my way would be better in every case, just generally. In the absence of the state I wouldn't see the family as the only hope of the paralysed, mentally deficient, or those too old to work. There would be charities, churches, trade unions, neighbours, swanky gits who wanted to look good by endowing almshouses, companies who wanted good publicity. And there'd be more money to spare, and a greater sense of responsibility. Question: would you donate in such circumstances, assuming there were no state welfare? You would? So would I.

But, you say, what if someone falls through the net? To which I say, they are falling through the net now. People die in blocks of flats and no one notices for weeks, because they all assume it's the State's business.

It's a bit like parents sending their grown up children out into the world. The parents know that they will suffer and err. Yet they accept that their sons and daughters have to stand on their own two feet; to keep on bankrolling them and buying them out of trouble is almost to ensure that they grow up unsatisfied, incapable and quite probably vicious.

Fifth: "What do you think about universal basic income?" Since this is a proposal for solving the same problems that the welfare state purports to address, but without the poverty-trap/dependency downsides, libertarians ought to have a favourable reaction. Unless, of course, the tax-subsidy issue is really the fundamental one, in which case why are taxes ok to fund school voucher schemes and not other welfare programmes?

I think universal basic income (or a negative income tax) would be better than the mess we have now, but not ideal, as taxes would still be raised by coercion. Likewise I cheer when I read about court decisions that smooth the path of vouchers, despite thinking that no state provision at all would be better still.

Like many a quiz show, life and politics often present us with a choice between a small but safe prize now and the big wager for higher stakes. Which should you go for, your principled ideal or a makeshift that is very far from it, and which may delay or discredit it, but that would be some help to suffering people and does have a realistic chance of being enacted? That dilemma is scarcely unique to Libertarians. I can give no general answer.

There is, in addition, something really scary about vouchers that has sometimes tipped me right over into opposing them. It is this: vouchers would give the government even more power to decide what education is. At the moment private schools are financially independent of government. Yes, there is some regulation of private schools even now, but it is not too onerous. Under a vouchers regime an enormous chunk of a private school's income would depend on its continuing status as a recognized school. How easy, how terribly easy, it would be for the bureacrats to politely "suggest", and the schools to politely accept, a single government approved ethos. Ye gods, I'm talking myself back into opposing vouchers as I write.

I try to restrict the reference-dumping in debates like this, as most people don't really have time to embark on a course of reading at my say-so, but I'm surely allowed to mention one or two books. They would be Charles Murray's Why I am a Libertarian, which is so short you could read it in your lunch hour, and for the architecture, Dr Alice Coleman's Utopia on Trial.

"As I was saying..."

Two neighbouring posts on Blogs of War are separated by several months. But the doc is now back and dispensing wisdom. I learnt this fact from Random Jottings, whose first ever post you can see by clicking the link. Just two days earlier AintNoBadDude said hello to the world. And now look at us all, one already, walking, talking and posting half chewed rusks into the slot of the video recorder.

Now I'm losing posts.

First I just couldn't publish; now they are actually disappearing. I'm going to call it a day before I end up breaking this computer.

A broader vision.

The Guardian and Ha'aretz both have reports of the same story. Both start off straightforwardly enough. Here's how the Guardian tells it:

"At least five people were killed and three others wounded last night when a suspected Palestinian gunman entered a kibbutz near the West Bank and opened fire."

Factual and to the point, you say. Nowt wrong with that as reporting. Only that's how the Guardian ends, too. [At least that's how it ends in the story as electronically published at 10.30 GMT on Monday morning. Anyone want to do one of those cache things to preserve it for posterity?] That's all "Chris McGreal in Jerusalem and agencies" actually saw fit to say about the story that provides the headline. Ha'aretz has a little more detail. You may find it interesting. Newsworthy, even:

"Five people were killed and three injured when a terrorist late Sunday infiltrated Kibbutz Metzer, near Israel's pre-1967 border with the West Bank, killing two small children in their beds, their mother, and two other adults.

"The Al Aqsa Brigades of Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement claimed responsibility for the attack, in which the gunman penetrated the security fence, entering a house and killing the children and their mother, then shot dead two adults he encountered outside the dwelling.

"The victims were identified Monday as Revital Ohayoun, 34, her sons Matan, 5, and Noam, 4, Dor Yitzhak, 44, who served as the secretary of the kibbutz, and Tirza Damari, 42, of Elichin, who had come to the kibbutz for a visit.

"The kibbutz, founded by the leftist Hashomer Hatzair movement, was known for vigorous advocacy of reconciliation with its Arab neighbors, and support for a future peace including an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank."

The bold type is all mine. I'm very far from indifferent to the murders of Dor Yitzhak and Tirza Damari, but, just in terms of "stop the presses" potential, I think the ages of the two children - the two children sought out by the murderer, the little boys of four and five who were deliberately, cold bloodedly shot to death with their mother - score, don't you? I mean, the Guardian thinks other poor little children's ages are of interest:

"The military said it had also detained a 15-year-old Palestinian boy on his way to kill Israelis, and arrested a senior member of Hamas in Hebron who was planning another suicide attack.... The military declined to discuss the circumstances of the arrest of the 15-year-old boy in Nablus, other than to say that it is certain he was about to carry out a suicide attack in Israel. If true, he would be one of the youngest suicide bombers so far. "

I can think of several possible defences for the Guardian. (1) It takes time for a story to break, and Ha'aretz is nearer the action. (But we live in the age of e-mail and Chris McGreal is in Jerusalem.) (2) Ha'aretz may be quicker to print and distribute than the Guardian due to smaller circulation in a smaller country and more up-to-date technology. This is just my guess; but I can imagine the Guardian sticking with older technology out of deference to the print unions. (But that wouldn't stop them updating their website. I am pretty sure Ha'aretz did, though I must rely on memory. When I first looked at the Ha'aretz story this morning I don't remember seeing the detail about the Palestinian killing the four and five year old children in their beds, nor do I remember the description of how that kibbutz is known for its advocacy of reconciliation with Arabs.)

What I cannot understand is how anyone could have heard the name of the kibbutz, the number of the dead, the claim of responsibility and yet not have heard, or not thought it worth reporting, that two of them were children. Every other report that I have read - and the three I link to here were chosen at random from Google News - at least mentioned it.

The Guardian is usually so keen on context, too. Let's look at what they say later on in the same article:

"Mr Arafat's Fatah faction was meeting with Hamas in Cairo yesterday in an attempt to secure an end to attacks inside Israel, at least during the general election campaign, for fear of playing into the hands of the Israeli far right."

No other reason?

"The Palestinian leadership has made it clear that it would like a victory for the Labour party, which Mr Arafat calls his "partner in peace".

If you say so, Mr Chairman.

"That appears an unlikely prospect right now, but the left - with its proposals for immediate talks with the Palestinians without preconditions - is gaining strength inside the Labour party.

"The Cairo talks are expected to last several days, and also aim to provide a broader vision to carry the intifada forward. "

A broader vision to carry the intifada forward. What an inimitable conclusion. So now we know what killed Matan and his little brother Noam. Now we know what their mother could not protect her sons from in her last bloody and terrifying minutes. (In what order did they die, I wonder? What order should we hope for; the mother first and the children seeing her slaughtered, or vice versa?) It was insufficient appreciation of the fact that this sort of thing might not be helpful to the electoral chances of the Israeli Labour party. It was narrowness of vision.

UPDATE: On reflection, I was probably too harsh to the Guardian in the post above. Re-reading the story it does not cohere; and that supplies the explanation for the appearance that shocked me, namely that the Guardian had hundreds of words apparently dedicated to the shootings while not mentioning that two of the victims were children. I now think that the story as originally written never involved them at all. It was just a roundup of the events of yesterday. Then this latest atrocity came along. Quickly the authors slapped a sentence about it at the beginning of the article, and then a subeditor took the headline from the first paragraph of the story. I still think that to prattle of a "broader vision to carry the intifada forward" as if the murders so far were no more than a management error is pretty sickening.

O Valiant Hearts.

This was one of the hymns at the Remembrance Sunday service I attended today. The sound play to this link doesn't really get across how gentle and wistful the tune is.

"All you had hoped for, all you had you gave."

A happier anniversary has just passed, as a reader reminds me. On the 9th November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell. Here's one man's story. My own recollections of that momentous event? I missed it. Didn't feel well for a couple of days, stayed in, didn't fancy any TV.