November 18, 2006

Burqa bans.

If you want my take, it's here on the comments to this Samizdata post.
The burqa is obviously bad. Where it is not oppressive it is arrogant. The situation ought to be
- you want to wear it in the street? OK, if you must.
- you want to wear it in my shopping centre? Sorry, against company policy. OR Welcome inside. Depends on the company.
- you want to wear it in an airport? Ha ha, most amusing madam. This nice gentleman will now escort you to the exit.

I very much agree with this part of what TomWright wrote: "We are no longer allowed to respond to such a perceived threat in any meaningful way. We can not refuse service if someone enters our store in such attire, due to anti-discrimination laws, nor can we verbally complain to those wearing a face covering for similar reasons. We will either be accused of being intolerant or, in the case of Britain, and the US in some places, possibly arrested and/or accused of a crime or civil rights violation. ( I may be misunderstanding recent laws, but not by much). I will cease to care about someones choice to wear a face covering when I can freely refuse service to someone that wears one, or demand they leave my property, or be able to respond to such a perceived threat in the traditional way: By a direct verbal warning, followed by an ounce or so of buckshot if they fail to heed that warning."

However I draw the opposite conclusion from his. If we admit the government's right to control people's clothes we strengthen the very forces that have stopped us using the voluntary, individual social pressures that are the best defence against creeping surrender. Where coercive institutions are strong a fanatical minority is well placed to capture them and turn them to its own purposes.

Er, when I said "I very much agree", I trust the bit about the buckshot was rhetorical.
Posted by Natalie at 07:46 PM

November 17, 2006

My work / life balance

is all wrong at the moment. There is work in it.

Light posting for a while.


Posted by Natalie at 04:03 PM

The guilty man.

JEM writes, regarding Milton Friedman:

Natalie,

Now I feel guilt about wishing him a long life [as did I - NS] less than a month ago.

Silly, but I do,

JEM

Whenever I get back from holiday and discover that a war, disaster or atrocious crime has stained the earth while I was not paying attention to the news I know in my heart that if I had been looking after things properly it would never have happened.

Odd creatures, humans. But most of them are quite nice once one gets to know them.
Posted by Natalie at 03:55 PM

November 16, 2006

November 15, 2006

EU Warning: this barometer is not to be eaten.

Cleanthes of Select Society fisks an MEP called Linda McCavan. Little Linda does not appear to have paid attention in her physics lessons. Or her counting lessons.

This page from her website, "What Does an MEP Do?", tells us:

Labour's European Members of Parliament ensure that Brtian's voice is heard at the heart of the European Union.
Brtians never never will be slaves...

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Brussels.


Posted by Natalie at 06:30 PM

No Title

Is democracy like sex? asks Glenn Reynolds, master of the teasing headline.
Posted by Natalie at 01:03 PM

Cold war winners.

Dunno why something this intriguing was buried in the Times business section:
Spy who soaked up London life with his KGB mates

... Some in Moscow say that Mr Lebedev “went native” while working as a spy in London, developing a taste for English manners and ideas. He is a member of a Moscow club called the London Spies, made up of former espionage agents who were based in London, who meet occasionally to drink Scotch and remember the good old days.

Posted by Natalie at 12:46 PM

Radio Solent hates the old!

Andrew at Biased BBC explains.
Posted by Natalie at 09:30 AM

So long as we tick the box marked input who cares about the output?

Alex Singleton of the Globalisation Institute criticises the Millenium Goals view of foreign aid.
Posted by Natalie at 08:30 AM

November 14, 2006

The divine right to free speech.

JEM writes:
I hold the BNP in contempt.

But I hold attempts to suppress free speech in even greater contempt.

For that reason, and that reason only, I would suggest to the BNP that it turns itself into a religion -- the "British National Church"?

If that makes the coming law against religious hatred look like an ass, that is because it is an ass, and those who forced it through are even bigger and far more dangerous asses

I wrote in this Samizdata post:
The conclusion that free speech promotes racial harmony is not obvious at first sight. Words lead to deeds, one might think, and so, obviously, harsh words will lead to harsh deeds. Nonetheless you may make some headway among sceptics if you ask them whether in their own lives they think it better to bottle up resentments or to voice them before they become explosive.

Do a little mental scan now of those countries where freedom of speech has reigned longest and is most secure - aren't they also the countries that people of all races are desperate to get into? Partly that is because free countries are rich (riches being consequence of freedom) but it is also because they are the places where race conflict means a riot not a massacre.

Posted by Natalie at 05:19 PM

"Kind of a weird combination."

Mark Steyn has said some nice things about this blog in the past, but that won't stop me saying that the most piercing quote in his interview with John Hawkins was from John Hawkins:
Europeans, from what I've seen, have a generally more dim view of the Middle East than Americans - like they think it's futile to try to build democracy in Iraq. You know, everywhere that you talk about -- well, democracy in the Muslim world just won't work. Yet, they're bringing in all the Muslims you could possibly imagine into their own home countries, and they're building them up to such a percentage that....if you get up to where 20%, 30%, 40% of your population is Muslim and you don't think Islam is compatible with democracy, that's kind of a weird combination. How's that happening?
Posted by Natalie at 09:40 AM

Ask the experts.

I don't know who wrote this piece appearing on "Sokwanele", a Zimbabwean opposition website. If the author still lives in Zimbabwe he or she is probably happier to forgo the pleasure of a byline. The seventeen months that have gone by since it was written have not, unfortunately, made it any less relevant. I don't necessarily think Chinese economic influence in Zimbabwe or Africa generally is a bad thing. Perhaps - never thought I'd write this - the voice of the People's Republic of China speaks with the nearest approach to economic wisdom that the government of Zimbabwe is willing to hear. But if you'd ever wondered why Mugabe should seek advice from the nominal Marxists who rule China, wonder no longer:
On becoming a Chinese colony

But the Chinese government is also perhaps the only one that succeeded in destroying their own economy while yet remaining in power. They reduced their own economy to ruins during the "Cultural Revolution" of the 1960's and 70's, when they subdued all ideas outside the accepted party line through extreme brutality and deliberate breakdown of society. As communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, they prevented the same from occurring in China by the brute force symbolised by the massacre of hundreds in Tienanmen Square in 1989. They probably understand what ZANU PF are trying to do, and are quite prepared to help them do it.

And
They will assist ZANU PF to gain total control of all information that circulates in the country so that people may remain in ignorance. They even know how to depopulate cities and send "unwanted elements" to the countryside for hard labour.
Yes, the Chinese would know about that.
Posted by Natalie at 07:27 AM

Coming soon: Tesco Value bustles.

The November/December edition of Tesco magazine contains an article by Dr Miriam Stoppard called "12 health-hazards of Christmas."

The advice for the Ninth Hazard begins ...

If the sheer stress of Christmas causes someone to faint:

  • carry them to a cool, quiet place and hold smelling salts under the nose
I don't think Tesco has sold smelling salts since Jack Cohen "decided to invest his service man's gratuity of L30 in NAAFI surplus groceries to sell from a stall in the East End of London." (My browser is seeing it as "L30" anyway. Given that the business has grown a little since then, I think the Tesco website could afford proper pound signs.)

Mind you, I'm sure someone still makes 'em. Yes, they do. Perhaps they've come back in since I last had cause to swoon. In a world where there is, they tell me, a good remake of Battlestar Galactica no reinvention is too strange to be possible.


Posted by Natalie at 07:08 AM

November 13, 2006

But only right wingers could sink so low

as to share a talking point with the BNP, as my correspondent does below and my Biased BBC colleague Laban Tall does here? Not so.

Lib Dems & extremists: an on / on relationship.

(Via Drinking From Home and Fib Dems)


Posted by Natalie at 04:20 PM

Horrified because not horrified.

ARC writes:
...waiting in a Heathrow flight gate late on Friday I could not avoid catching a long session of BBC news that was showing on a huge screen. But (while their coverage balance could have been better) this is not material for a biased BBC post (their coverage balance could also have been worse).

The lead story was the acquittal of Griffin on charges of hate speech. They described the acquittal, showed the discussion outside the courtroom and then showed an excerpt from the covert BBC film of his speech at a BNP meeting that had been the cause of his prosecution. Then they showed the chancellor demanding new laws to ensure that such acquittals would not occur again. After some discussion, they moved to their next item; the MI5 warning of the number of plots and the rate of radicalisation among the moslem young.

The speech horrified me. Let me rephrase that: the excerpt from the speech, shown in that context, horrified me, because the speech itself did not. I had been expecting something crude in language, viciously offensive in tone and wildly inaccurate in fact; something that would not have lessened my belief in free speech or my contempt for laws against it, but would have made the temptation understandable; something that would leave me willing to discuss whether its form, if not its content, should be moderated. The part the BBC showed failed - massively - to live down to these expectations (and I have a hard time seeing the late-night BBC choosing to suppress Mr Griffin's worse indiscretions and show only his milder remarks). In the excerpt, Mr Griffin asserted, in no very exceptionable language and tone, that many verses in the Koran assert the rights of Moslems engaged in Jihad to the loot and slaves so conquered. I am not given to reading the Koran but I know the history of both the byzantime empire and its moslem successor states very well and the moslem conquest was run along such lines; they were not of course unique in this among armies of their time and place.

My first thought was that free speech is in real danger in this country; we have come very far in a few short years when that particular speech can be prosecuted. My second thought was that anyone capable of being tempted to old-style (as opposed to PC-style) racism would have that tendency sensibly increased by watching that news bulletin; the government's strategy seems a good deal worse than useless in its own terms. My third thought was that the 'safety fascist' culture of fear has its analogies elsewhere. The police have had 'racist' insults thrown at them a lot by the government and others for years; quite apart from political appointments, it may be that senior police officers are now tremblingly eager to provide evidence of their anti-racist credentials.

The chancellor asserted that public opinion would be behind his call for further laws. One can only hope it will not be so.

UPDATE: After I posted this, my correspondent contacted me to say that he had misremembered the name of the BNP leader. I didn't spot that at the time but I have now corrected the post.
Posted by Natalie at 04:08 PM

Mythbusting all round.

Whittle on the right, Wardytron of Harry's Place on the left. (Scroll down to "we armed him".)

Someone in the comments nails another one. This was started by "resistor", who says:

For those who still deny that the Americans supplied Saddam

From that famous Stopper journal USA Today

Report: U.S. supplied the kinds of germs Iraq later used for biological weapons

WASHINGTON (AP) — Iraq's bioweapons program that President Bush wants to eradicate got its start with help from Uncle Sam two decades ago, according to government records getting new scrutiny in light of the discussion of war against Iraq.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent samples directly to several Iraqi sites that U.N. weapons inspectors determined were part of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program, CDC and congressional records from the early 1990s show. Iraq had ordered the samples, claiming it needed them for legitimate medical research. (Related story: A look at U.S. shipments of pathogens to Iraq)

The CDC and a biological sample company, the American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including the West Nile virus.

The transfers came in the 1980s, when the United States supported Iraq in its war against Iran. They were detailed in a 1994 Senate Banking Committee report and a 1995 follow-up letter from the CDC to the Senate.

The exports were legal at the time and approved under a program administered by the Commerce Department.

Resistor quotes more of the article - including the bit where Senator Robert Byrd, whose opinions have moved on since he was in the Klan without ever stopping anywhere near sense, questions Rumsfeld on the matter.

Stonking good reply from "DocMartyn":

No [I think this is a typo for "Not"-NS] the "American Type Culture Collection" again. Look, the American Type Culture Collection, is a not-for-profit organisation that holds and supplies micro-organisms to researchers all over the world. In the early mid-80's when I started my M. Sc. in biochemistry/microbiology I used to flick through their catalogue and lokk [look] at all the nasties you could order. It would supply pathogens to ANY RESEARCHER in any INSTITUTION in ANY NATION.

With twenty-twenty hindsight this was perhaps a bit silly, but it cetainly not racist. Moreover, the supply of these pathogens does have a public health role as they are used to investigate the exact nature of an outbreak. The American Type Culture Collection was nothing to do with the US Government, and the CDC is dedicated to eradicating dieases, not spreading them.

"It sent samples in 1986 of botulinum toxin and botulinum toxiod — used to make vaccines against botulinum toxin — directly to the Iraqi chemical and biological weapons complex at al-Muthanna, the records show."

That what it does. You can get small amount of botulinum toxin to this day. It has a number of uses, for raising antibodies, for vaccination or antidotes, has been used to paralyse specific muscles in some disease states and more recently in cosmetic's. The amout sent to Iraq could not be used to make weapons.

"[T]he American Type Culture Collection, sent strains of all the germs Iraq used to make weapons, including anthrax, the bacteria that make botulinum toxin and the germs that cause gas gangrene, the records show. Iraq also got samples of other deadly pathogens, including the West Nile virus."

The point is what? I could go outside now and dig up a spade full of earth and isolate anthrax spores in a couple of days, botulism is easily contracted and the bug can be obtained from the same source. West Nile virus is not common in the us and enter the country in a consignment of car tyres. You need slides and antibodies to it if you aregoing to test for it.

Microbiologists need miro-organisms, they get them from a catalogue. The best collection is the American Type Culture Collection. If the American Type Culture Collection refused to deal with third world countries the US would be treated as a bunch of racists. Biological weapons are more than bacteria cultures. To weaponize a mirco-organism you need many more things which the US and UK NEVER supplied. So cut the crap and write about something you understand.


Posted by Natalie at 02:29 PM

Crib sheet for the argumentative warmonger

, courtesy of Bill Whittle, who argues against some of the commoner bumber-sticker slogans. Here's one of his replies:
There are millions of people – actually, probably billions now – who genuinely believe that the wealth of the US was stolen from third world countries. This is one of the great perks of living a life free of the ability to think critically and do a little research. I have heard this slander repeated so many times I decided to look into some actual numbers to see if there is anything to this charge. This is a perfect example of how critical thinking allows you to see the unseen. That attitude, Google and ten minutes is all you need to shoot lies like this down in flames.

Okay. The US Per capita income is $41,300. That of a poor, third world country –Djibouti, say -- is $2,070.

Now it gets interesting. The US gross domestic product – the value of everything we produce in a year -- was last measured as $12 trillion, 277 billion dollars (hundreds of millions of dollars being too insignificant to count in this economy).

The GDP of Djibouti is 1 billion, 641 million US dollars.

A little basic arithmetic shows me that the US has a GDP 7,481 times greater than Djibouti. A 365 day year, composed of 24 hours in a day, yields 8,760 hours per year. Hang on to that for a sec.

Now, let’s suppose the U.S. went into Djibouti with the Marines, and stole every single thing that’s produced there in a year…just grant the premise and say we stole every goddam thing they make. If we hauled away all of Djibouti’s annual wealth, how long would it run the U.S. Economy, which is 7,481 times greater?

Well, 8,760 hours divided by 7,481 gives you an answer of 1.17 hours. In other words, it takes the U.S. 1.17 hours to produce what Djibouti produces in a year.

If the US really did go in and steal everything that the bottom thirty countries in the world produce, it might power the US economy for two or three days.
Posted by Natalie at 02:17 PM