'Nother Solent

The SF author David Langford

tells how he was once on a radio phone-in about UFOs. An earnest caller rebuked Langford for his sceptical attitude. Was he not aware, said the caller, that there existed a detailed first-person account of an encounter in 1871 between one William Loosely and an unearthly robot? "Yes," said Langford, "I wrote it." The caller flatly refused to believe him, denounced him for his shameless connivance in upholding the conspiracy and rang off.

I thought this was a complete hoot, although some might be offended. Then again, no better time to kick Australians Sheolians than when they're down or up, I always say.

But I do hope the author realises that his creation is going to be republished as fact all over the Arab world.

(Via Alice Bachini's Tea-tray in the Sky and Damian Counsell's Pootergeek. By the way, here is a bad language warning for the third and fifth links in this post when it's too late for you to do anything about it.)

Vaguely topical trivium.

In this article by a much-travelled lawyer on his experiences plying his trade worldwide, he says he had heard that Louisiana "still bases much of its jurisprudence on remnants of the Napoleonic code" - rather than the Common Law. Drop that into discussions of reconstruction.

The writer, Eugene Wollan, also says that London is possibly the only truly civilised city left in the western world. As a Londoner born I am touched but a little surprised.

BTW, see if you can guess what I was searching for when I found this article on Google.

While taking a break

over the last few weeks I missed the startup of Brian Micklethwait's new unified blog. I discovered it just in time to discover that he's thinking of breaking it up again into cultural and educational blogs.

It's sort of like Balkan history. One pro-independence faction of Culture Blog posts have formed an alliance of convenience with the Education Blog Juche Front to plot acts of sabotage against Micklethwait.com's HTML. In response, rumours say, fanatic Pan-Micklethwaitian posts (themselves, ironically, of Culture Blog origin) are attempting to infiltrate the Globalisation Institute blog and Adam Smith Institute irredenta.

Kipling writes better than Bill Whittle

, says AOG from Thought Mesh.

True. But to damn as faintly as that is to praise.

A sure way

to tell if someone is an economic illiterate - or a politician pandering to economic illiterates - is if he or she demands a law to stop "price gouging." Iain Murray explains the subject.

Let me add my own two pennorth. (Three pennorth now - special crisis rate.) Would you like to see thousands of people devoting vast amounts of time, ingenuity and effort into getting supplies to those who need them most? Would you like to see both heartless people who ignored appeals to donate and generous people who have already given all they could afford galvanised into useful action?

You would?

Then let them make stackloads of extra money from doing it.

"There is an appetite for parent power, born of desperation."

Some excerpts from an article in the Times by Camilla Cavendish:

In Whitechapel last month, I met a Bangladeshi Tube engineer who had just got off the night shift and driven his children halfway across London to attend a two-week summer school. His own state education in London had been fine, he said, but his children’s was unacceptable. In a Victorian hall, two teachers were giving up their holiday time to teach almost 30 Bangladeshi children, aged from 5 to 15, with nothing more than poetry, flip-charts and high expectations.

... the average reading age of these children leapt by ten months in two weeks. What had they been doing for the other 50 weeks of the year?

Those parents would like to start their own school, if they could find a way to pay for it ... Planning regulations make it hard to find a site; health and safety regulations that demand state-of-the-art lavatories make it even harder; and two years ago Ofsted announced that it must inspect all new schools before they opened — a more draconian requirement than any on business.

Straight from the horse's mouth.

Guardian correspondent Jackie Ashley writes:

Tell people day after day that the world is doomed because of a combination of George Bush and the motor car; or that the west is overrun by murderous nutters, furious about an illegal war that cannot now be sorted out; or tell them that modern life makes pandemics inevitable - tell them, even, that their jobs are doomed because of China and the rising economies of the east, and there is nothing that can be done. What will the result be? Not, as some naturally hysterical journalists hope, a general uprising against global capitalism.

(Bold type added by me.)

Poisoning the waters of debate.

Never a site to keep us waiting for a juicy conspiracy theory, Daily Kos, in a post by Brenda, has the bald stated-as-fact headline "East side levee bombed by the Army Corps of Engineers." Apparently they did it so as to save the rich areas of town by drowning the poor. (Via LGF.)

Fortunately, well over half the commenters have some grip on reality.

Damian Penny comments:

They might be on the other end of the political spectrum, but the Kossacks and IndyMidiots are the new John Birchers. (Heck, on globlization and Iraq, it's hard to tell them apart.)

Follow his links to see what he means.

"Thought you'd never ask"

, says JMH, who has been yearning to talk survival lists.

Do it now while it's still fun.

The floodgates of anarchy.

I just now spotted that a little below Mr Lehman's letter on the Independent's letters page of 2 Spetember is the same letter from Simon Ferguson of Hatfield as appeared in the Times of 5 September. I can't put my finger on anything actually immoral about sending the same letter to all the papers, but the editor of the Times, where the letter appeared several days later, ought to wince at the duplication. Mr Ferguson's vision of American life once the veneer of civilisation is stripped off certainly has the knack of catching an editor's fancy.

I will spare you a duplicate of my post about the letter, but Moira Breen of Progressive Reaction writes:

Re Ferguson's "The speed of the breakdown implies that only the cursory removal of law and order is necessary for American society to descend into anarchy". Perhaps I am deeply misinformed because I do not have access to the BBC, but I was unaware that the social order had collapsed all across Katrina's huge swathe of destruction, rather than in a limited area of a city long notorious for its sleaze, corruption, and civic incompetence.

It's odd that he dwells on the famously law-abiding Japanese to try to make his point about the savagery of "American society". Is he suggesting that no other people - I dunno, say, no subset of Britons at all - would run wild under the duress of a Katrina-like catastrophe and the "removal of law and order"? (The crime stats do suggest that some Britons are fond of a bit of "looting" with the law intact and no natural disasters in sight, no?)

OK, so Ferguson is just being silly here. But the following statement - "...self-reliance, the right to bear arms and the pre-eminence of the individual over the State can be as destructive in times of social disaster as they are constructive in shaping the 'economic miracle'" - well, that just made my flesh crawl. "Self-reliance" is not the cause of corrupt, incompetent local government, and the decent folk trapped among the thugs in NO would have been a hell of a lot better off locked, loaded, and self-reliant.

I have read that the explanations the Japanese themselves give as to why they are so much more law-abiding than the rest of the world, in particular the Americans, have a disconcerting tendency to centre around Japanese racial superiority and/or homogeneity.

The homogeneity one I can just about accept. It's one less fault line to split along when a society comes under stress. That is not to say that there are not times when homogeneity can do harm; it made it psychologically easier for the Japanese to oppress other peoples during WWII, for instance.

Race was always there in the accounts of what happened in New Orleans. Some of the commentary of those slavering to finally reveal the awfulness of George Bush's America tended to parallel the commentary of those who believed that it all just showed that blacks were intrinsically irresponsible.

(ADDED LATER: Just because half the blogosphere has linked to this essay by Bill Whittle is no reason for me not to as well. It is long, but well worth your time.)

The videos of disorder, looting (including looting by policemen) and gang violence are indisputable. The first-hand accounts of racial harassment of stranded white tourists by black youths aren't going to go away either. However the more apocalyptic stories of mass rape and so on have not been confirmed. The Guardian's Gary Younge wrote yesterday:

New Orleans police have been unable to confirm the tale of the raped child, or indeed any of the reports of rapes, in the Superdome and convention centre.

New Orleans police chief Eddie Compass said last night: "We don't have any substantiated rapes. We will investigate if the individuals come forward."

I hope that the initial estimate of many thousand dead may also prove to have been an exaggeration. When there is a disaster in a developed nation casualty estimates peak after about two days then steadily decline as missing people finally manage to contact relatives. It's different for disasters in undeveloped nations, where days after the initial call relief workers can be confronted with whole wrecked villages they hadn't known about.

Mind you,

this whole thing about parading the relatives of murder victims before the judge does have one argument in its favour. It would sure beat Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. "I am afraid, Mrs Jones," the judge would say with that agreeable air of commiseration perfected by Mr Tarrant, "you didn't quite manage to clinch the extra five year bonus sentence on the scum who killed your daughter. Not really sure about how to say 'atrocious', were we? Perhaps you should have phoned a friend! Still, cheer up, you are still going home having put little Julie's killer away for a WHOLE THIRTY-TWO MONTHS!"

Better yet, let's make it "double or quits." The adaptation of the principles behind The Weakest Link to multiple-defendant terrorism trials I leave as an exercise for the reader.

A hierarchy of murder.

In the same edition the Independent there was a superb letter from one C. Lehman concerning the mawkish proposal to let the families of murder victims address the judge before sentencing.

The proposal that murder victims' families should be able to make direct appeals to judges before sentence is passed (report, 2 September) looks like more ill thought-out gesture politics from this Government and is one likely to lead to bad justice.

The losses and pain of crime victims certainly need to be recognised properly and there have been great improvements in the provision of support, for example by Victim Support, better liaison with criminal justice agencies so that the progress of cases is known to victims, and better provision of financial compensation.

But allowing victims or proxy victims to appeal directly to judges is a serious step too far. The criminal justice system represents the victim's interests and the interests of society in responding to criminal acts. In doing so, it has to operate more dispassionately and more proportionately than individual victims might wish. Sentencers already take a range of factors into account, including the general seriousness of the offence, individual circumstances and aggravating factors such as, for example, the age and vulnerability of a victim.

If we allow victims' families to speak to judges about the effects of someone's death, we risk creating a hierarchy of murder based on sentiment, the willingness of family members to speak and their fluency in doing so. Sentences should rightly vary according to the nature of the crime, but surely not according to whether a victim had a family who loved him, or whether the victim's family can speak fluent English.

And will victims' families really want this? Families already suffering from grief and guilt might feel that they have let their relative down if they either don't want to testify or find that testimony doesn't seem to have resulted in a longer sentence.

Grave crimes like murder and rape have grave consequences and it may be true that, in spite of the improvements that have been made in victim care, much more needs to be done to acknowledge the damage inflicted on victims and their families in these cases. Wouldn't this be better tackled by a rebalancing of sentencing principles overall than by allowing potentially unfair bias to enter in individual cases?

C LEHMAN

I had not thought of the point that if family members either could not face making an address or did yet failed to get an increase in the sentence it would add to their suffering. It had occurred to me that even as things stand today murder victims tend to be friendless or rejected by society: tramps, the mentally ill, drug addicts or prostitutes. Some killers correctly calculate that they are more likely to escape vigorous pursuit or punishment by going for victims in these categories. I don't want this calculation reinforced.

Pity the scapegoat.

This account of the hysterical anger directed against the former headmistress of Beslan School No. 1, which I read on the ferry home, was displaced in my mind by Hurricane Katrina. But as the floodwaters subside it is worth another look as being another illustration that the human need to punish someone for an awful crime is a wave that will breach the barriers of reason unless we keep the walls in good repair. The full story in the Independent of 2 September is worth reading but requires payment, but you will get the general idea from this:

It was meant to be a sombre day of mourning and remembrance but the first anniversary of the seizure of Beslan's School No 1 was marked by a display of raw anger yesterday as the school's hated headmistress was forced to flee a mob intent on attacking her.

"Murderer! Murderer!" the mob shouted at a frightened Lidia Tsalieva. "Why did you come here?" The Kremlin, which local people accuse of tragically mishandling the siege and its aftermath, was also targeted.

What did Lidia Tsalieva ever do to deserve this? Was she supposed to predict that her school would be overrun by terrorists and she herself taken hostage? Was she supposed to drill the classes weekly in what to do when faced with men who slaughter children while shouting "Allah Akhbar"? With a five minute quiz on snappy techniques for press interviews afterwards?

She is an ordinary woman whose heart has been broken. Perhaps she lost less than her attackers, merely (merely!) having her pupils killed rather than her own children, but she did no wrong. One would have to be superhuman to be prepared for what happened, or to react to it without fear and mistakes. We can try to sympathise with the storm of grief that prompted the mob to pursue Lidia Tsalieva, the real murderers having escaped them by death, but their suffering does not make them right.

Hard cheese

if your name is Katrina.

All those Labour MPs

who say that Ken Clarke is the Tory they most fear are lying their heads off, of course.

Cue smoke, drifting over cot wherein slumbers a little babe.

Panning shot follows the wisp of smoke to a half-extinguished cigarette resting on an overfull ashtray and presenting a fire risk. Next to it lies a newspaper with headline visible:

OUR CHILDREN AT RISK: PASSIVE SMOKING DEATHS UP AGAIN

VOICEOVER: Kenneth Clarke is Deputy Chairman of British Allied Tobacco.

The baby begins to cough...

Two long-standing ambitions finally fulfilled.

1) To meet someone I didn't already know who had heard of me as a blogger.

2) To know why I saw so many single shoes by the side of the road.

Michael Jennings writes:

I am not sure the scale and suffering of the disaster in the Kobe earthquake actually was greater than Hurricane Katrina. In fact I think that horrible as it was, that one was a much smaller disaster. The death toll in that case was around 5000, which while hideous seems clearly less than the final death toll from this disaster is going to be. And that disaster affected a relatively small area rather than the massively widespread devastation of this particular disaster. Sections of Kobe were indeed devastated, but Kobe is in fact one small part of a large metropolitan area, that also includes Osaka and Kyoto, and which contains perhaps 15 million people in total. In that context, there were lots of other police present nearby for the maintenance of law and order. (In truth I think the cultural factors are indeed different in Japan, but the kind of disaster was so dramatically different that it is not really a fair comparison).

However, the "There were lots of emergency services in Osaka nearby" factor should have helped the rescue operation after the earthquake also, but in fact the response in question was an absolute debacle. In that instance, huge amounts of bureaucracy got in the way, and the various emergency services were so busy having turf wars that it took a long time for them to do any rescuing. Volunteers were prevented from providing assistance. The armed forces took days to deploy.

What Kobe and New Orleans did have in common was woefully bad preparation for quite a predictable disaster. However, in Japan a lot of this was caused directly by bureaucracy. Japanese building codes were very strict for reasons that were explicitely "earthquake protection" but in truth were entirely about protectionism. The Japanese construction industry (along with the rice farmers) basically controls Japanese politics and the favoured powerful interests do not want to face competition, from abroad or from the less well connected in Japan. "Earthquake codes" that both force prices up and prevent competition were in their interests.

(That said, a good thing that did come out of this disaster was that this state of affairs was publicly exposed, and Japanese earthquake building codes are now largely about making buildings that will actually withstand earthquakes).

Nikhil Bhat

writes

I just thought I'd mention two other points our esteemed friend Simon forgot. First, gun control opponents here in the States see as their worst case scenario a land where guns are available only the criminals and to police...which is almost exactly what has happened in New Orleans. Second, if the preeminence of the state is superior in times of tragedy (which is what Mr. Ferguson implies), then such catastrophes as the Ukraine famine of the 1930s and the series of catastrophic floods in China in the 1960s should have had minimal effects.

Then there's the fact that southern Louisiana has a history of corrupt governance, rotten to its core. It's exactly because the state failed that put the once-dependent people in that situation. But Blithering Bunny touched on that.

Glad to have you back. Keep up the good work.

Your Loyal Reader,

Nikhil Bhat

PS--I'd be an even more loyal reader if you had an RSS feed of your own, and not one borrowed by someone else...wink, wink...

Thank you for writing, O loyal one. Award yourself the order of Heroic Forbearance of Long Absence, First Class.

I undertake to beat myself up mightily over the RSS issue and finally do something about it long after even my most devoted reader has moved on.

"If it saves just one life..."

I have written a post about arguments over gun control, government pamphlets on being prepared for disaster, and advice that works sometimes. It's over at Samizdata.

People see events as confirmation of what they already believe.

A writer to the Times, Simon Ferguson, says:

The speed of the breakdown implies that only the cursory removal of law and order is necessary for American society to descend into anarchy.

Such scenes did not accompany the tsunami or the earthquake in Kobe, Japan, ten years ago, despite the scale of suffering and disaster being greater in both cases.

The underbelly of the American dream is being laid bare — namely that self-reliance, the right to bear arms and the pre-eminence of the individual over the State can be as destructive in times of social disaster as they are constructive in shaping the “economic miracle”.

I have just come back from Switzerland, where there is not only a right to bear arms but a duty: every man is issued with his own assault rifle to take home after military service. Yet there was no breakdown of order there in the recent floods. I spoke to someone involved at quite a high level in organising rescue and relief. He said there were some instances of hysteria, but neither he nor anyone else I spoke to mentioned looting, let alone insurrection. True, the Swiss floods were nothing like as widespread as those in the US - but the experience of a small community whose homes are surrounded by the rising waters is similar.

So why are the responses so different? I doubt whether Mr Ferguson has any clearer idea than I do what really happened after the tsunami, an event that affected an appreciable fraction of the world's land surface. He must have missed the reports of a breakdown of order in Aceh, not that there was over-much there to start with. However he is right about Kobe.

Why did order break down in (some areas of) New Orleans? With my somewhat different perspective to that of Mr Ferguson, I blame welfare. Two or three generations of absent fathers due to the peverse incentives of a welfare system is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a violent society; it is just a very likely bet. As well as the violence, I think the welfare culture also promoted fatalism. As Blithering Bunny writes:

How little resourcefulness do you possess if you can’t even get you and your little children away from what you know will be a flood zone when you have plenty of warning? If most of these people were on welfare, then doesn’t say much for welfare culture. I would have walked if nothing else was possible.

But of course there was another possibility that the BBC didn’t consider: maybe these people just decided to take their chances, not believing that the flooding would be that bad. The goverment always trying to scare you, they might have figured, this won’t be that bad. Why spend my money on a beat-up? It won’t affect me, anyway. I’d rather stay here and protect my house, etc. It is a wrench to walk away from your home knowing there’s a chance that it will be ruined and you won’t be there to try to protect it.