'Nother Solent

Building peace, Palestinian style.

Reuters excels itself in describing two murders, including that of a two month old baby, as... well, you read it.

Millions of people have read and shaken their heads over the famous line from Vietnam, "in order to save the village it became necessary to destroy it." The same millions read things like this daily and see nothing wrong, nothing odd.

Reuters' hands are not clean. They have made the payoff for murders like these that bit bigger.

A challenge from Michael Moore.

Peter Cuthbertson says, answer it. I strongly agree with Peter's stance that individual, reasoned e-mails are much better than a firestorm of anger.

Though by now I know plenty about it from both attackers and defenders, I haven't seen Bowling. That makes me reluctant to answer on my own account. I was, however, very impressed by the David T Hardy critique mentioned within Peter Cuthbertson's post. What was so good about it? The way that most of it was independent of the politics of the matter. Somewhere on Biased BBC I once said that the ideal B-BBC post would be one that would make even a staunch supporter of the BBC nod and say, those guys have a point here. That's what Hardy's piece does.

The Panacea Society

Notice to Sealed Members and Water Takers

Should a State of Emergency arise whereby communication with Headquarters is interrupted or becomes difficult, continue to fill your bottle with Water as required and repeat the Blessing.

Sprinkle your Houses

THE PANACEA SOCIETY

BEDFORD

This advertisement appeared on page 5 of the Daily Express on the first day of World War II. It is a large advertisment, taking up a quarter of the page, and must have cost a substantial sum. The Society are still with us, although they seem to have declined in importance. Perhaps this will change when and if Joanna Southcott's Box is opened in the presence of 24 bishops of the Church of England and all the world's ills are solved and/or the Apocalypse finally comes (sparing only Bedford, the original Garden of Eden).

Very odd folk. But in a way, not half so odd as their interaction with the Charity Commission. The sterling efforts of this Commission press release to fit the Panaceaists into the very model of a modern charity border on the heroic.

"Commission staff had been concerned for some time that this unusual religious charity was not putting its assets to effective use..."

Kidnap those bishops!

...and they have worked with its trustees to revise the constitution, laying the foundations for significant modernisation and a broadening of its activities.

How, exactly, do you 'modernise' bringing about the apocalypse (ex. Bedford) or 'broaden' solving all the world's problems? I suppose you could broaden the apocalypse bit by sparing Biggleswade too.

The Charity Commission works extensively both on updating the legal and accounting framework within which charities must operate as well as with individual charities, large and small, to keep their constitutions effective and up to date.

Kidnap the bishops by helicopter.

Simon Gillespie, Director of Operations commented:

"Charities come in many forms. What matters is that they are not only charitable in the definition of the law, but also that they are effective and efficient in achieving their aims in the modern world.

Hello? Hello? Anyone home? We are talking about opening a box left by a prophetess - possibly reincarnated in the form of Princess Diana - in order to bring about the apocalypse, sparing only Bedford. Is effectiveness and efficiency in achieving these aims really part of the remit of the Charity Commission?

"The principle of charity is ages old. But times change, and charities must modernise to continue to be effective. That's where we can help."

Your tax money at work.

You know, if pressed, I'm probably more receptive to the notion of an apocalypse than most of the people I know in this irreligious age. But in the struggle of the Charity Commission to corrall these sublime visionaries into the world of mission statements and P.A.Y.E. I honestly don't know which side were nuttier.

(Blame Lileks talking about the small ads in 1939 newspapers for inciting me to write this.)

Two quick notices.

Alice Bachini is unable to blog at the moment because of some problem between Blogger and her new domain. I think there might be something interestingly paradoxical about a statement containing a hyperlink that will falsify itself when the blog starts working again... but I'm too tired to really work it out.

And, while I'm on self-falsifying statements, non parlo Italiano. Ho dimenticato tutto! Quasi tutto, anyway, especially when my eyelids are drooping, which is why I won't yet try reading Enzo Reale's blog "1972." But the links list and the key words I recognize do suggest much of interest.

Jobs you don't see anyone doing any more.

I feel some regret for the loss of the rag and bone man, having happy memories of rushing out to see the horse clop down the street. Still, a society so poor that old bones are tradeable items is not, in general, preferable to our own. The vanished profession of my mother's generation was less picturesque: the kitten-drowner. She had unhappy childhood memories of running away to hide while it was done. But what else could you do? A healthy cat might have twelve kittens a year, and all the other female cats in the area were doing the same, in geometric progression if unchecked. The idea that vets might one day do surgical operations - with anaesthetic and masks and everything - on cats would have been considered bizarre. I mean, this was in the days when "cat food" meant "mice".

When the conversation turns to rag and bone persons my thoughts naturally turn to the Green Party. What calling could be more local, more ecologically sound? It certainly fits in nicely with Green policy #EC945: "introduce import and export controls on a national and/or regional bloc level, with the aim of allowing localities and countries to produce as much of their food, goods, and services as they can themselves." (I do like that "allowing". The effect of the import controls is to forbid them to do anything else.) But if all is to be done at a local level, I think the party must reconsider the kitten-drowning angle. Current policy AR409 calls for subsidized spaying and neutering of 'companion animals'; but could - indeed should - the local economic unit really support operating theatres for pets? Wouldn't a big bucket of water be a lot kinder to the earth?

UPDATE: I am so happy that absolutely everyone who reads this blog knows the meaning of the word "irony".

Flash crowds on the internet.

Although his blog Blacktriangle.org (see below) may be new to you, you have almost certainly seen one of Antony Cox's creations. If you've ever wondered what it's like to have one of your posts go round the world on the crest of a word-of-mouth tsunami, read this.

Medical error, errors of justice and premature systemizing errors.

Anthony Cox of Blacktriange.org, a blog specialising in pharmaceutical and medical safety issues, has been following the case linked to yesterday, in which Dr Feda Mulhem accidentally killed cancer patient Wayne Jowett by injecting Vincristine into his spine instead of into a vein. Mr (or should that be Dr?) Cox's original comments made in June are here and a quick update from yesterday is here. He argues, linking to two reports, that it was a complex amalgam of factors that killed Wayne Jowett.

That's no fun! Let's jail someone instead.

I cannot blame Wayne Jowett's parents for thinking that way in their pain, but it's not a sustainable paradigm. Some people have much less excuse for their desire for one-sentence solutions. Here's an example: one particular mad meme that gained currency in the late eighties and early nineties and ruined many lives before it ran its course, was: "children never lie about accusations of sexual abuse."

You'd think that no one could possibly mean that "never", wouldn't you? You'd think that it was merely an aphoristic or melodramatic way of saying children rarely lie in their accusations, or that accusations should be taken seriously. But I looked into it then, and I've looked into it since, and there truly were influential people in the fields of child medicine and social work who said at length and in terms impossible to misconstrue that never meant never.* It was almost as if they fled in horror from the pain and effort of having to think about case by case justice.

Difficult as it is to decide about questions of justice, even they are more fun to think about than questions of specific improvements to systems. We all can speak about what's fair, but before you put your reputation on the line with a detailed recommendation to change the way doctors or engineers do things you must (a) have immersed yourself in the day to day practice of oncology or bridge-building or whatever and (b) habitually detail off some of your brainpower to maintain the duties of an observer even in the thick of a crisis.

The appropriately-named Professor James Reason, linked to here by Anthony Cox, clearly does have the right sort of mind to both observe and participate. The link takes you to a fascinating lecture on why we all cock up, always will cock up, and what doctors and health administrators should do about it. He specifically mentions Vincristine. I'm not just being polite with that 'fascinating' - the talk very much reminded me of certain types of blog post by Brian Micklethwait or Steven Den Beste where they try to tease out why exactly people can half-listen to some music but not other music or [can't think of a Den Beste example about how engineers really go about their work, but he does do them occasionally].

Jumping back a topic, although I talked with scorn about the desire for "one sentence solutions", it is equally dogmatic to deny that they ever exist. When me and my brother and sister were teenagers we used to have lots of quite bitter arguments that started off with a dispute over what TV programme to watch. We would then pick up, in the usual way of arguments, any other bones of contention that happened to be lying around and hit each other with them. (This happened in the days when VCRs were an exciting new gadget on Tomorrow's World.) You could have written a whole thesis about what our rows revealed about sibling rivalry, clashing inter-family dynamics, unresolved resentments etc., etc., etc.

Then one day my mum went out and got a portable. Click. 90% of the arguments switched themselves off just like that. Our problem had been a shortage of TVs.

Fortunately none of our family had any vested interest in claiming that Star Trek vs Young Musician of the Year was a deep and knotty problem needing its own government minister.

You never get away from having to think somewhere along the line. The solutions to our problems (assuming they exist at all) are either simple or complex. If they are complex, they are complex and that's a bummer, and if they are simple it's still complex to figure out whether you dare apply them.

*One or two of them eventually changed their minds overnight. Guess why.

Once is happenstance.

Twice is coincidence.

Three times is enemy action.

(The quote originally comes from Ian Fleming's Goldfinger.)

Doctor jailed for making a culpable but unintentional mistake that caused a death.

Teacher jailed for making a culpable but unintentional mistake that caused a death.

Slot in your own example of "vicious criminal carrying out premeditated act of evil let off lightly because he or she gained the sympathy of the judge or let off entirely because of a legal technicality" here.

My own candidate for the slot dates back to about 1996. I cannot find a link about it but it made me angry enough that I am pretty sure I have remembered the outline right. (If you know more, please email me.) A woman was having an affair with an army man, a sub-aqua instructor if memory serves. She feigned friendship with his wife, suggested a walk in the woods to her and strangled her when they reached an isolated place. She was let off a custodial sentence because the judge thought she was not likely to kill again. Damn right she wasn't - would you go unarmed within twenty feet of her? I remember there being some bitter comment from the murdered woman's parents. Well they might be bitter. Their daughter had done nothing whatsoever to deserve to lose her life. She cannot even have known in her last minutes why a woman she called friend was attacking her. Yet her stolen life was treated as a written-off cost, a bad debt given up upon, spilt milk not worth crying over. Hey, the important thing is that we move on, and put the past behind us!

That's what happens when the justice system is concerned with doing good to society and not with nasty, primitive individual retribution. The prison sentences handed out to the doctor and the teacher and all the corporate manslaughter prosecutions the public so revels in are an attempt to do good to society by increasing the costs of carelessness. (And, of course, a much easier way for cops and politicians to look good and justify their salaries than actually catching criminals. You can look up the address of a negligent teacher or a company director; a rapist is not so cooperative.) While I don't claim that negligence should never result in jail, I very much doubt as to whether this attempt to skew the incentives often works. The careful reader of this blog will notice that I am far from sentimental about teachers and doctors - yet there can be scarcely a teacher alive so callous as to think before going off on a school adventure holiday, "not that I'm bothered if the brats die, but I don't want to go to jail so I will take some precautions after all." Nor are there many doctors so insouciant as to be untroubled by the possibility that they might misread a label and forever have the death of a human being on their conscience - but who nontheless wake up in a sweat for fear they might go to jail for it. Yet these sentences only make sense if they change the incentives acting on doctors and teachers.

UPDATE: Mike Zorn writes,

Meanwhile, farmer Tony Martin is still in jail for shooting a robber in his home. It's unlikely he'd still be there if only he had "regretted his actions". The arguments for keeping him in jail included "he is a danger to burglars."

ANOTHER UPDATE: Antony Cox of Blacktriange.org, commented on the "doctor jailed" case here - but please scroll up to Wednesday's posts to see more.

Bookmark this.

It is an excellent, highly structured summary of the arguments against ID cards. The main headings, argument by argument, are in the grey panel on the right. It also has one of the quickest links in history - to my Samizdata post mentioned below - but, I assure you, it's so good that even having a bit of me in it doesn't make it significantly better.

(I know, I know. My modesty is but one part of what makes me so wonderful.)

Does God go planet-hopping?

Read O&P on the redemption of extraterrestrials, when moral stictures are universal and when particular, genetic predispositions to eat whole bags of chips, etc.

Here's another relevant Chesterton quote, while I think of it: “Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’”

Wadda we want? Sufficientarianism! Whenda we wannit? Now! With a better name, I think this could be the unifying ideology of the future. Read this interesting post from Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber with equally interesting comments from left and right.

Personally I think we must all beware the sin of envy.

A law-abiding person has nothing to fear?

Over at Samizdata I have scribbled down some examples of wholly or mostly law-abiding people who do have something to fear from surveillance.

I'm still diligently sawing away

- just hitting the tibia after getting through the fibula. Thank goodness for cloning, eh? Meanwhile, here are two letters pulled from my mailbag.

Mark writes:

After reading your fisking of Denis MacShane and the Finnish EU propaganda
unit I thought I ought to tell you I was the unsuspecting victim of EU propaganda myself the other day.

On Monday afternoon I was watching the a stage of the Tour of Spain bike race on Eurosport when an advert for the common agricultural policy of all things popped up during an ad-break. To say I was a bit taken a back would be an understatement. I've watched Eurosport for years and I've never seen anything like that before. They used to run a really annoying ad for a German beer all the time during the Tour de France 6 or 7 years back that got on my nerves but at least it wasn't on my dime.

Viewers were told that the CAP provides us with plentiful and high quality food yada yada yada. Humm, I thought. That food is too plentiful it ends up in butter mountains or dumped in the third world and undercuts local farmers. So far so bad. Quality. Oh yea ,of course, New Zealand with their laissez faire agriculture have all those awful apples and that un edible lamb. Er, not.

So it's bad enough we pay taxes for French farmers to sit about smoking Gauloises and playing boule and then payer over the odds in the shops for produce but now we have to pay to fed bullshit. But, hey, I'm Denis MacShane won't mind so that's alright then. Wanker!

James writes:

Practically every library service in the UK has an extensive and expensive EU information service. I know, because it was my misfortune to administer one for a while. Kensington Central Library turned a member of staff over to its administration and promotion full time for a while. Where this puts Denis MacShane's comments I'm not sure. He shouldn't mind, though. Until your blog told me otherwise, his name had me put him down as a footballer.

On another issue, James added some comments sympathetic to Peter Cuthbertson as he battles against a few people who really need to take two paracetamols and lie down. I commented, then realised that my comments were based on a misunderstanding as to which post he was talking about. So I shall just say, there's plenty of thought-provoking stuff at Conservative Commentary's temporary home.

Our Wonderful NHS.

When Patrick "Paddy" Dunn repeatedly risked his life to do this do you suppose he ever dreamed the day would come when an ambulance crew from his grateful country wouldn't even risk bending down to pick him up as he lay injured on the floor? In case you are wondering, he weighs less than ten stone. In another similar case mentioned in the story some nurses, those modern angels, would not lift an eight and a half stone woman into her bed for fear of injury - theirs, not hers. So she slept in a wheelchair for a year.

Welcome to the future, Sir Patrick! Maybe you had to wait until your tenth decade to see it, but at least you have lived to see the logical end-point of a command economy in health: the command, the rule, is all and the health that really matters is that of public sector workers. True, some or even most of them still cling to outmoded notions of caring for the sick. But don't worry, we have Health & Safety inspectors to deal with that nonsense.