'Nother Solent

Still in the Guardian,

Polly Toynbee says

So Lib Dem university-fee subsidies will go overwhelmingly to middle England families; the few of the poor who go to university already get their fees paid. Manual workers will pay taxes for lucky middle-class kids to go free.

Interesting that this true and excellent libertarian meme has reached Polly Toynbee.

Hostages.

The day before yesterday, when I first read this BBC "Have Your Say" piece, in which readers are invited to state their opinions on hostage taking in Iraq, I was struck by the number of readers who appeared to give countenance to xenophobia against Westerners. I wondered whether all those who made comments on the lines of "They are only there for the money" or "All foreigners should* get out of Iraq" would be say similar things if, God forbid, some criminal or fanatic gang started taking foreign workers in Britain hostage.

I don't think that's likely. Our society is too tightly organised. But it is likely that if the tactic works, it will spread - but to other parts of the Third World rather than here. Much of the world's migrant labour leaves one poor country to work in another slightly less poor country nearby. Tensions run high where surpluses are small.

If the tactic works. It did for hijacking

(Since I first looked at the forum it has changed. The average of the comments has shifted in a direction more hostile to negotiation with the terrorists. I can no longer see some comments I thought I remembered. I may have been unduly depressed by early statistical outliers. The forum also includes criticism of the BBC and other media outlets for giving the terrorists so much publicity. )

*I phrased this sentence badly. "Should" can either express the idea that a course of action would be prudent or that it would be morally good. Some people saying that all foreigners should get out of Iraq mean that the risks of staying outweigh the benefits and it would be prudent for them to get out. Agree or disagree, that's fair comment. However other comments (seen on the BBC forum mentioned and elsewhere) either approved or excused the struggle of the Iraqi resistance to expel foreigners and infidels. Add scare quotes to taste, but that is a view that would rightly be treated as abhorrent if expressed by the BNP. Possibly the BBC noticed this and that's why they deleted some comments from the forum that appeared earlier. (Amendment added September 27th)

Heartwarming.

Jonathan Steele writes in the Guardian:

In Gaza and the West Bank, for all the chaos and confusion of authority caused by 37 years of Israeli occupation, Palestinian leaders and Palestinian society remain far-sighted, civic-minded, and secular enough to keep out these kinds of Islamist soldiers of fortune. Al-Qaida and its followers are unknown in Palestine. Foreign aid workers and western journalists have never been kidnapped. They are more likely to be killed by the Israeli army than by gunmen on the Palestinian side."

Guess which category of persons you can indiscrimanately slaughter without losing your Guardian approval rating for being far-sighted, civic-minded and secular.

LATER: Also spotted by Norman Geras, and he makes other good points I missed.

Lost at sea.

A friend told me the story of yachtsman and would-be circumnavigator Donald Crowhurst's last voyage and I can't get it out of my mind.

I'd never heard of it, but it seems to be quite well known. Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall wrote a book, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst and it was also recently covered in a Channel Four programme, Force of Nature. Here's a quote from the C4 website:

Crowhurst had decided to cheat. Knowing that his boat would never survive the rough Southern Ocean, he had contrived to sail across the Atlantic to the coast of South America where he would lay low and wait for the other eight competitors to catch up. Meticulously, he kept two log books, one recording his actual journey and the other his fabricated one. He spent hours each day carrying out complex mathematical calculations to maintain the deception.

He ceased all radio communications for 111 days and waited until he was sure the other competitors had cleared Cape Horn. In mid-April 1969 he learnt that Robin Knox-Johnston had completed the race, earning himself first prize – the Golden Globe trophy. But the second prize of £5000 was still up for grabs.

Crowhurst knew that he couldn't afford to win even the second prize because this would expose his log books to the scrutiny of the judges and the world's press and he would be found out.

By now, Nigel Tetley was the only other competitor besides Crowhurst in the running for second place. When Tetley learned that Crowhurst was just three days behind him, Tetley pulled out all the stops to ensure he won the second prize. But on 21 May, to Crowhurst's horror, he heard that Tetley had pushed his boat too far and had sunk. Crowhurst's strategy had been blown apart, he was now in the lead.

After spending months in solitude working on his log books, Crowhurst's sanity gave way as he faced the certain prospect of being found out and disgraced. He stopped racing and spent 150 hours in a writing frenzy, poring out his soul in a 25,000-word revelation of angry gibberish. By the time he finished he'd lost all touch with reality. 'I am what I am. I see the nature of my offence. It is finished. It is finished,' he wrote. Then, taking his ship's clock, he stepped into the Atlantic and disappeared.

As the sidebar says, it couldn't happen now. Modern GPS technology ensures that no competitor nowadays could sustain such a fraud, and, one hopes, that no competitor is likely to crouch in the hundred-plus days of awful isolation that drove Crowhurst to suicide.

Ironically, Crowhurst himself invented an early hand-held navigational aid called the Navigator. It allowed the user to take bearings on radio beacons.

The 1968 Golden Globe race seems to have been ill-starred; this account says that Tetley, the competitor who came second, never got over the breakup of his boat and himself committed suicide shortly afterwards. Yet another competitor, Bernard Moitessier, gave up the lead position and the race itself so that he could sail on to Tahiti where "you can tie up a boat where you want and the sun is free, and so is the air you breathe and the sea where you swim and you can roast yourself on a coral reef."

The same sun still shines and the air is still free. But these days you'd roast yourself on the coral reef while knowing your position to the inch ... and having it known.

Men in Tights again.

(Yes, I do seem to have lost the knack of thinking up new titles. Again.) I am glad to see that Mark Steyn is defending "tradition and a well-sheathed leg."

David Gillies writes:

Like you, I have no idea what 'atomicity' is intended to signify in this context, but if we're talking activity then the calculations are trivial. The nuclear decay equation says N(t)=N_0 Exp[-lambda t], where N_0 is the quantity of radiactive substance at time zero, so rate of change dN/dt = -lambda N_0 Exp[-lambda t], where lambda is the decay constant and is equal to ln(2) divided by the halflife.

Set t=0 in dN/dt to get the activity of N atoms of a radioactive substance = -lambda N_0. Put in the halflife of DU - 4.51 billion years, and the number of atoms of U238 in 800 tons of DU (800,000 x Avogadro's number/mass of one mole of U238) and you get a figure for the activity of about 26 Curies. Spread over the whole of Iraq that's a negligible radiological hazard.

BTW, your other correspondent is incorrect when he says U235 is much more radioactive than U238. It's not - their halflifes are both very long, and they only differ in radioactivity by a factor of five or so. The difference is that U235 can sustain a chain reaction and U238 can't.

Green hair.

A reader (I recognise the email address but in line with my usual policy haven't said his name because it's not included in the body of the email) writes:

Why does Koizumi Junchiro have green hair? A number of possibilities:

1) He is one of the survivors of the Muvian empire which was destroyed by Atragon¹ many years ago. Alll of the Muvians were Japanese with Blond wigs.

2) It's his Irish/Greek ancestry.²

3) It's bad lighting.

¹ "Kaitei gunkan," or "Flying submarine Atragon." the movie was a lengthy thank-you-note to Hirohito by the writers and producers for not forcing them to fight to the death 18 years earlier.
²Koizumi Yakumo is the adopted name of Patrick Lafcadio Hearn, author of "In Ghostly Japan," etc. I doubt that the current PM is his great-great grandchild, but, who knows? Advertisement: Capricorn Publishing's POD edition of "In Ghostly Japan" is now available both in the US and UK for only $14.99 or L 9.99 through Amazon.uk/usa. Unlike our competitor (ahem) it has all he illos, footnotes, diacritical marks, etc. A book doesn't have to be a plain whitebread download from Project Gutenberg.

James Rummel

of Hell in a Handbasket writes:

Would you define yourself as a citizen of Britain or a subject of the Crown? And how do you think many of your fellow countrymen would answer? (I realize that yours might not be the typical reply.)

I is a-thinking.

I know how I want to answer: subject. But that's mostly because in British (as opposed to American) political discourse the sort of people who raise this question all want to make Chris Patten President of Britain. Such people think citizen is a nicer word than subject because citizens are democratic but subjects have their heads chopped off. It's no use talking to them about all the citoyens who had their heads chopped off in the the French Revolution either, because that sort of Frog-bashing talk is just the sort of archaic baggage a foward-looking European nation needs to drop.

But what do I think really? Does it matter? In law and daily life the two are pretty much the same. Google for "subject or citizen" and most of the hits you will get refer to legal procedures for gaining or renouncing British citizenship. It seems the lawyers mention both in the same breath to avoid trouble. Then again, that implies there is a "trouble" to avoid...

I gather from my friend (and occasional correspondent on this blog) "ARC" that Edmund Burke wrote much that is relevant to this question. However to claim to be a Burkean on the basis of what my mate said he said is a little desperate. (But if - not that I'm hinting or anything - ARC would like to summarise what he said in writing, my pages are ever open.) I shall just note that if I allow another year to go by without my having read Reflections on the Revolution in France I shall eat my Golden Jubilee commemorative plastic hat.

Back to the point. Consider the following dialogue:

Husband: Will you still love me when I'm old?

Wife: Yes, beloved. 'Till death us do part', that was the deal.

Husband: Would you still love me if I lost my job and all my savings?

Wife: You bet, honey. 'For richer, for poorer'... I trust this conversation is purely rhetorical?

Husband: Of course, sweetling. Would you still love me if I became a serial killer?

Now it's getting awkward. Part of the reason why the wife loves the husband is that she is quite sure he won't take to serial killing. His non-serial-killerness is part and parcel of what makes him him. When we do hear of a wife who finds out her husband is a serial killer we don't blame her for seeking a divorce. There is something admirable as well as tragic about a wife who would say her husband is her husband no matter what his crimes, but to keep our admiration of her we have to stipulate that she expresses her steadfast love for his higher self, you might say, by turning him into the police.

This analogy has got off the point. I should have specified a less extreme crime but don't want to go back and change it now. The point I was trying to make is that in national as in wifely loyalty the object of loyalty changes, both in itself and by external circumstances, yet still retains a continuing identity. Some changes may be so extreme as to break the notion of continuing identity, but they are rare.

Past history is part of that identity. If the husband were to ask, "Would you still love me if I had been born Japanese, instead of, as I am, Kenyan?" the question is not really answerable. The wife may have nothing but friendly feelings to Japanese people generally. But the fact is that the husband she loves would be someone else without his Kenyan upbringing, appearance and culture. Seeking to be other than Kenyan would be a serious step.

Subject was the deal history gave me. If I felt my head was in danger I might feel differently, but it isn't - in fact the subjects of the Crown do rather better in terms of liberty (despite my many fears and complaints on that score) than do many citizens of other countries whose constitutions sound a lot better. It isn't necessary to claim that we do better on all counts against all other countries in order to feel that constitutional monarchy is a good flag to follow.

ADDED LATER: Time for a little libertarian metacontext, as they say at Samizdata. The debate is framed so that one chooses between subject or citizen - but one could say, neither. Actually I wouldn't. But I'd like the choice.