'Nother Solent

Scottish terror kid gets three years.

Hope this isn't a harbinger of things to come.

Smith also admitted sending packages containing a substance which claimed to be a eucalyptus aromatherapy oil, along with instructions to rub the substance onto the face and hands.

It was actually caustic soda, which can burn the skin and damage the throat and stomach lining if inhaled.

Packages were sent to the prime minister's wife, Cherie Blair, and to Margaret Ashcroft, an aide to Liberal Democrat MSP Mike Rumbles. No-one was injured.

Edgar Prais QC, defending, said his client had been ordered to send the packages by the head of an anti-English Scottish terrorist organisation, which cannot be named for legal reasons.

He argued that Smith had been "naive, gullible and immature" but not "callous".

I know it's a defence barrister's job to, well, defend his client but the caustic soda bit sounds fairly callous to me.

I probably haven't read your email.

I probaby will read your email eventually. I've been busy carving pumpkins, cooking Evil Chocolate Spider Biscuits and Blood Rice and making a costume for a wraith of the underworld.

Do you get angry when your country is insulted?

I do. I suspect that it is an under-reported but very real motive for supporting the war in Iraq and related causes. This post by Paul Marks is ostensibly about reasons not to admire Halifax's conduct prior to WWII, but then veers off into interesting and honest self-examination.

I do not like socialist dictators (such as the ex-dictator of Iraq) - I dislike their torturing and killing of the local population and (if I am to be honest) I, at gut level, dislike their insulting Britain and the United States at least as much as I dislike their 'human rights abuses'. People I do not know torturing and killing other people I do not know is something I condemn (even if I suspect that the people who are being tortured and killed would also be torturers and killers, if they had the chance) - but people insulting Britain or the United States or the West generally is what really makes me angry.

Surely, anger at insults should not be one's primary motive - but is it defensible? I can't decide. Creditable or not, it is the way people are.

In law and in politics the adversarial system is a well-tailored garment

that decently covers raw human nature while not disguising its essential form.

It is not nakedness. The most beautiful bodies can go unclothed as they did in Eden but when ordinary people go naked they often look ugly and even more often look undignified. At the same time, uncontrollable passions are aroused. The most beautiful natures are above the need for an adversarial system but when ordinary people attempt to do without its formalities they often act basely and even more often act chaotically- and, again, uncontrollable passions are aroused.

It is not an exquisitely embroidered yet bulky robe, such as an emperor might wear. The form of the man or a woman under the robe might be sublime or hideous - you'd never know under all that brocade. Systems of law and government that affect to be beyond self-interest are like that: beautiful but stiff and impersonal.

Oliver Kamm's defence of the adversarial system got me thinking these thoughts. You will gather I agreed with him. And even if you don't agree, dear reader, you will surely give thanks that here finally, finally is a man who says 'highest common factor' when he means 'highest common factor' and not 'lowest common denominator' like all the other innumerate crudbrains.

I D best
Said I D S
But all D rest
Said that's B S.

Stay cool.

I'm still in the land of the living. In fact, according to my loving family, in whose company I have been spending this half term, I am taking a brief vacation in the land of having a life. Whatever can they mean?

The upshot is that I am even worse at answering emails than usual.