Crime: a comparison

The useful Disaster Center has some very simply presented tables of long term trend statistics in areas like US traffic accidents and United States Crime Rates 1960 - 2000. The crime rates, based on the FBI's uniform crime reports, are equivalent to the police recorded crime statistics in the UK. Interestingly, they show that murder has not been this low in the US since 1965. Other crimes are similarly at 30-40 year lows: robbery has not been this low since 1968, burglary since 1966, larceny since 1973 and vehicle theft since 1968. The outliers are the brutal violent crimes of rape, still at its lowest level since 1979 (although given what we know about how rape is reported, the earlier figures are almost certainly far too low), and aggravated assault, which is still historically high, although this is the lowest level since 1986.

As for British crime, both the crime survey and the police recorded crime figures are discussed in detail in the official report (warning -- 199 page PDF).

Anywat, here are my calculations of comparable police recorded crime rates per 100,000 population. They're back of an envelope (literally), but are pretty indicative in my opinion:

Murder: US 5.5, UK 1.67 (US 223% higher)
Rape: US 32.0, UK 66.27 (UK 107% higher)
Robbery: US 144.9, UK 204.11 (UK 41% higher)
Aggravated Assault*: US 323.6, UK 432.93 (UK 34% higher)
Burglary: US 728.4, UK 1657.6 (UK 127% higher)
Larceny: US 2475.3, UK 3658.2 (UK 48% higher)
Vehicle Theft: US 414.2, UK 597 (UK 44% higher)

*This is the area with most discrepancy between the two classification systems. US aggravated assault means "an unlawful attack by one person upon another for the purpose of inflicting severe or aggravated bodily injury". I have interpreted this by including the British offenses of attempted murder, "wounding or other act endangering life", "other wounding" and "racially-aggravated other wounding." I think this is fair, as a lot of aggravated assaults in the US would probably be classed as "threats or conspiracy to murder" in the UK, as no actual bodily harm results. What you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts here.

Anyway, this leads us to the crime index totals:

Violent crime US 506.1, UK 705 (UK 39% higher) and
Total crime index US 4124, UK 6617.8 (UK 60% higher).

Pretty conclusive as to which is the safer place. Unless you're a drug dealer, of course...

What is the Anglsophere?

Jim Bennett's Anglosphere Primer is now on-line permanently for those of you who would like a better explanation of the concept.

AIDS in Africa: A Statistical Artifact?

The Medpundit has a lengthy post on hows the UN's statistics on AIDS in Africa are compiled. It's complicated, but essentially boils down to this: the UN's numbers are computer-generated and bear no real relation to what is really happening there. My old boss was following this story before he left and had made similar comments to me. There's a genuine problem here.

Brown's big gamble

Looks like Gordon Brown's reputation for economic competence is teetering on a knife edge. Both the Telegraph (Poor Prudence, ditched by the Enron Chancellor) and the Times (City fears Brown has ditched Prudence) use the same metaphor to express worries that the Chancellor's new spending plans could be a step too far. The Tories survived unpopularity for years because of their reputation for economic comptence. It would be hilariously ironic if Brown voluntarily thrust New Labour down the same road.

The Cryon Game

Been meaning to blog this for a while, but Jay Manifold has some interesting thoughts on why cryogenics are not incompatible with Christianity.

Enronia

Perhaps that should be the new name for the EU? After all, as the Telegraph spells out here:

The EMU is a mess of conflicting interests and crooked accounting. Britain must not join.

Drugs: a victimless crime

Until something like this happens. The analogy with tobacco breaks down right here.

Be he alive or be he dead...

Some unconvincing claims about Osama's health.

Goodness Me!

I just noticed that this site passed the 100,000 hit mark this morning. Thanks so much to all of you who are interested enough to read my random comments...

Zut alors!

Erm, well, I don't quite know what to say. The American Enterprise Magazine -- Online puts it thusly:

This week, in honor of Bastille Day, TAE Online will present seven days of unmitigated France-bashing.

That graphic makes the Sun's "Hop Off You Frogs!" campaign look quite subtle...

Can't resist a chortle, though.

Better late than never

Thanks to Stephen Pollard for highlighting this (with the words "My heart bleeds..."): Woman who sacked Israelis fears for job. How poetic.

What is Blunkett smoking?

Trenchant letter to The Times on the cannabis declassification decision that speaks for itself, I think:

As a former head of the drug squad in the Brixton area I totally support Keith Hellawell in his reasons for resigning and his subsequent public comments.

Few of the apologists for downgrading cannabis seem to have any knowledge of the market-driven aspects of the drug culture. There seems to be an assumption that both users and dealers stick to clearly delineated patterns of one type of drug in both consumption and trafficking. It is a dangerous fallacy.

Dealers will traffic and deal in multiple types and quantities. It isn’t only supermarkets that use multiple purchase incentives to boost their profits.
Users will be encouraged to experiment with different products and those that do almost always end up being totally addicted to expensive hard drugs of dubious quality. Exactly where the “retailers” want them.

“Crackpot” is the expression that comes to mind, but since when did the current regime in the Home Office first consult with the people on the ground before rushing through their ill-thought-out dogma?

Another letter on the same page points out that importing cannabis remains highly illegal, and this decision therefore has the perverse effect of undermining customs law. This decision looks stupider from every angle. As I've said before, outright legalization would be a better option.

The State: Judge, Jury and ...

Trial by jury, a fundamental constitutional right in the US, is once again under attack in the UK, which thinks it knows better. Mick Hume, a man who must have x-ray vision given how quickly he can get to the heart of civil liberties issues, sets out the simple arguments in the Times:

What should be of most concern to the rest of us is the broad sentiment behind these plans, and all of the other recent reforms and reviews of the justice system. They betray contempt for our integrity and autonomy as citizens, and an attempt to shift the relationship between the individual and state institutions further in favour of the State.

The Government’s attitude shouts from the draft White Paper leaked at the weekend. Try this breathtakingly arrogant statement: “There are too many cases where tactical manoeuvres designed to secure acquittals mean the right verdict is not reached, and that is simply not good enough.”

It seems that our longstanding jury system is “simply not good enough” for the Home Office, because it too often fails to deliver “the right verdict” — which can only mean, of course, a verdict of guilty. Gullible jurors, duped by slippery defence lawyers, are supposedly betraying justice. All that is missing from this familiar B-movie script is the avenging hero to right the system’s wrongs. Enter Mr Blunkett and the judges.

Interesting concept, that, "the right verdict." I thought verdicts were just or unjust, not right or wrong. Anyway, here's Mick's simple refutation of the Government's position:

Juries have a proud record of returning “perverse” verdicts that politicians and judges might not like. A jury must be entitled to make decisions according to its conscience, even if that occasionally contradicts the law as it stands. To say that juries should be tampered with because they don’t return the “right” verdict is similar to arguing that democracy should be restricted because some exercise their right to vote for the “wrong” parties. That attitude, I submit, really is perverse.

My jury, right or wrong.

It's really very simple, isn't it?

20/20

My boss (not me, grumble grumble) is going to be on ABC 20/20 tonight. Here's a sneak preview:

Journalists work hard, but we are intellectually lazy when we focus on sharks rather than undertows; road rage, or car-jackings, rather than drunken driving. It's bad journalism, and as Bob Lichter of the Statistical Assessment Service puts it, bad journalism is worse than no journalism, because it leads people to think they know things, when they don't.

Tune in!

Blogging Criticised by Blogger Shock Horror

Brendan O'Neill, not a man afraid to face controversy, gives the blogosphere a few home truths. He's probably right in a lot of what he says. I think the most important thing to remember when reading his argument is that he's calling for sub-editorial skills, not editors per se. The virtue, as well as the vice, of the blogosphere is that it takes away the filter of editors from opinions and allows us to see the whole range, warts and all. So the mysteries of genetics, constitutional law and rocket science can be brought to us all without some twit in New York saying that people aren't interested in the subjects, especially if they don't back up a liberal worldview. Yet it has to be said that without decent enough writing, those views would remain mysterious, obfuscated by lack of spelling, grammar or wit. There's not a blog on my recommended list to the left I don't think worthy of perusal, but even I don't read them all every day. The better they write, however, the more likely I am to visit. Overall, I'm flattered and amazed that anyone thinks my thoughts are worth reading on a regular basis. I hope the blogosphere takes Brendan's contribution in the spirit it was doubtless intended...

Duty

I'd missed this Dalrymple essay in The New Statesman until Chris linked to it. I can't think of a thing to add to the final paragraph:

So the malnutrition and vitamin deficiency that I see among so many young men and women, in conditions as far removed from famine as possible, are signs of an entire Slough of Despond about which most of us would prefer to know nothing, and from which we delicately avert our sight. I know of no greater dereliction of duty.

Dictator Perpetuo

Glenn is discussing the nature of dictatorship. I slightly disagree with him about the history of the term Dictator. The Roman dictatorship, with the one exception I shall come to shortly, was always a constitutional office. It was originally designed to meet short-term crises, with a maximum period of office of 6 months. After 202BC, however, no short-term dictators were appointed. When Dictators were appointed, such as Sulla and Caesar, their offices were authorized by law to restore the constitution. Their actions were not protected from the tribunes' veto nor the right of provocatio (appeal to the people). Nor was the Dictator exempt from prosecution after leaving office. During a cosntitutional crisis in 52 BC, the Senate, worried that Dictatorial power might be abused and wishing to protect the office and the people, appointed Pompey the Great sole consul instead. In Cicero's Republic Scipio Aemilianus dreams of becoming Dictator to restore the constitution. I therefore disagree with the assertion that the term Dictator was ever really pejorative in Latin.

The exception was Caesar, who had his Dictatorships renewed annually until in 44 BC he became Dictator Perpetuo, which was one of the final straws for the tyrannicides. Caesar feared prosecution for his many violations of the constitution, so the holding of imperium through the Dictatorship was the best way to avoid this. It was part of the genius of Augustus that he saw this tactic as crude, abusive and generating of resentment, hence his slow building up of imperial power by taking on the most valuable powers of other magistracies such as the tribunicia potestas. He never needed to seek Dictatorial powers.

I'm not sure that the term Dictator was really generally pejorative, except possibly among extreme republicans, until Hitler came along. I remember a line from a Fred Astaire song in the 30s which said "If I could be a politician with a chance to dictate/ I would say let it wait/ I'd rather lead a band," which seems to imply to me that it was an accepted political form. I also seem to recall McClellan writing about the possibility of him becoming a Dictator of the Union when he still had control of the Army of the Potomac. His usage implies to me that he was thinking in terms of a short-term extraordinary magistracy to save the republic, as the Romans thought of it, rather than that of an all-powerful tyrannical position.

In short, Hitler gave the word its current meaning. For 2,400 years it meant something else...

It's a crime

The British government's two crime measures were released today. Most of the key figures can be found via this BBC article. The British crime survey (BCS), the more reliable of the two measures, shows a stable crime rate, although this is mostly fueled by a continuing decline in burglaries, as far as I can see. However, the police recorded crime rates, analogous to the US's FBI uniform crime reports figures, cannot be ignored. Despite a shift in recording techniques which would have propelled a 5 percent increase any way, most violent crimes are up way beyond that, including street robberies which are up a staggering 28 percent. That's not a statistical artefact.

It seems that crime in the UK is, quite simply, cruder than it was. Criminals are robbing people directly rather than burgling them or pickpocketing. The murder rate, which is not susceptible to much manipulation, is up 4 percent, while the attempted murder rate is up 21 percent. Rapes are up 9 percent (I can't find what the BCS says about rape, which leads me to believe no significant fall is indicated). This all strikes me as a switch from the sort of crime where you're attempting to avoid detection and where you don't intend any physical harm to a cruder, violent, direct crime where you see what you want and you take it by force.

And that isn't an economic issue. It's cultural.

UPDATE: Chris Bertram has some sophisticated thoughts about the economic nature of crime. I had meant the last comment as "they're not doing it because they're poor," which seems to be the accepted reason among South London "leadership," as evidenced by that Newsnight panel I linked to a while back.

As far as Chris' post goes, there seems to be a lot of evidence coming out of American criminological research that shows that classical economic deterrence theory doesn't always hold true. There seems to be a large body of offenders for whom the risk/benefit tradeoff doesn't work. I'm not sure how valid these conclusions are, but they might fit in with a general thesis of the barbarization of the underclass.

After all, rationally, pickpocketing is a far better choice than robbery. There's no potentially dangerous confrontation* and you'll probably be long gone before people realize there's a crime, so reducing the chance of apprehension even further. But it takes time and effort to learn the skills. A reduction in pickpocketing and increase in crude robbery is, I would contend, evidence of a cultural decline in the criminal class.

Violent crimes tend to have different offender characteristics than property crimes. Rationality applies far more to property crimes. The fact that that set is continuing a steady decline and the other set is, in all probablity, increasing (at the very least in certain urban areas) means that I'm not sure the rational economic approach to crime as a whole continues to make sense.

At some level, of course, there is rationality in all criminal decisions, but the cruder the intent, the cruder the rationality. This may help explain the success of concealed-carry laws in crime prevention in the US. "I don't want to commit this crime because there's a chance I might get caught by police if certain circumstances prevail" is a more sophisticated thought than "I don't want to commit this crime because I might get blown away." Just a thought.

* Of course, the collapse of self-defence rights in the UK makes this less of a factor

Murray outraged

Treacherous backstabbing scumsuckers.

UPDATE: A friend of mine, who is in a position to know about the politics of all this, writes:

It's not just the fact (although that of course will play with Daily Mail readers) that the Gibbers are 'just like us'. It's the fact that they have made their preferences absolutely clear. This was not the case with Hong Kong. Granted, the Chinese would never have let them get away with a referendum, but I'm not at all clear about how it would have turned out. A straight vote between continued UK colonisation and reversion to China under guarantees of autonomy would have gone in favour of China at any time except 1989-90. The Hong-Kongers feel Chinese - the Gibbers don't feel at all Spanish. A three-way referendum including independence would have been inconclusive, and there is no way the Chinese would have accepted independence.

On the long-term future of Gib, inconvenient though it is, the Spanish have no case at all and will simply have to f*** off. We simply cannot countenance the active maintenance of territorial claims going back to 1704. If applied to the rest of Europe, never mind the rest of the world, we'd all be at war in five minutes. (We'll have the States back for a start.) This may sound far-fetched, but there are an awful lot of outstanding territorial claims - disregarding the wishes of the inhabitants - with great potential for trouble in the world.

We absolutely have to maintain the principle of no transfers of sovereignty against the wishes of the population involved. Just to start with:
a) a deal on Gibraltar would, without a shadow of doubt, set the Falklands off again - what's the difference? Sod all.

b) our extremely tricky Irish problem will be enormously destabilised. It's always been a central plank of our Northern Ireland policy that there will be no transfer of sovereignty against the wishes of the NI majority, and we spent ages riding the Republic off their constitutional claim to sovereignty over the North. If we reach a deal on Gib this can hardly fail to undermine our commitment to this, with potentially disastrous results among the bog-trotters.

The Spanish have no viable case except emotional rah-rah nationalism, of the sort we're expected to have grown out of. I've never seen it pointed out in print that validating a Spanish claim based on ownership before 1704 goes more than halfway to validating the claim of bin Laden and others that southern Spain belongs to the Muslims because they owned it before 1492.

But this is just a particularly bad example from the endless list of interests we are prepared to give up just in order to keep in with the Club Med and "strengthen our position" - ho bloody ho - within the ghastly EU. I wonder whether there is any limit at all to what we would be prepared to sacrifice. Personally, knowing the sort of people who run [the FCO], I very much doubt it.

Polls Apart

My friend Dr Roger Mortimore, one of Britain's leading psephologists, gives his take on internet polling techniques such as YouGov's in this MORI commentary column. MORI and the other mainstream polling companies have also had their problems with sampling recently, but I'd still prefer to take their word than YouGov's, for the reasons stated.

When is a conservative not a conservative?

When he's attacking the Vice-President, it seems. The media's reaction to Judicial Watch's action against Dick Cheney has been most amusing. That organization spent a lot of time attacking on President Clinton's ethical problems, for which it got labeled "conservative." Now, it's a non-ideological “watchdog group,” “Washington watchdog group,” “legal group,” “legal activist group” or “legal advocacy group.” The Media Research Center has the full story.

More on HRT

John Brignell of the UK's Numberwatch website demonstrates effectively how the HRT study results fall well within the band expected even if there is no causal link at all between HRT and the conditions mentioned.

The Euro: uniting the UK

Old-style socialist Tony Parsons, a brilliantly witty journalist on his day, writes in The Mirror about why he's opposed to the Euro. He lays down the gauntlet to his critics:

Convince us that British sovereignty should be given away.

Convince us that British freedoms should be meekly handed over to Brussels and Frankfurt.

Convince us that this country - with the lowest unemployment for 25 years and the lowest inflation for 30 - would actually be better off in the euro-zone.

But don't give us that tired old crap about the euro being modern. Don't talk about it as though it's a paltry style choice, like David Beckham's latest haircut.

Joining the euro would mean giving up basic democratic controls.

It would mean that much of our national life would be controlled by faceless men who we did not elect and, more importantly, we can't kick out.

The case is simple. It's not about xenophobic fuddie-duddies staging a last-ditch battle round the flag. It's about the power of the British people to decide their own destiny. At last, it seems, that realisation is uniting patriots of left and right.

HRT Foolishness

I had a suspicion that the decision to stop the American HRT trials might be an over-reaction and I think that has been confirmed after reading the actual report. The risks are marginal -- especially as, contrary to the way they've been portrayed, they are overwhelmingly non-fatal. Moreover, the researchers chose to emphasise as benefits only the small number of hip fractures prevented, not the much larger number of other osteoparitic fractures (a difference of over 100 incidences in the sample). Quality of life -- freedom from hot flushes, cramps, depression etc -- has also been studiously ignored. I'm amazed to say that the old British busybody Clare Rayner (a living embodiment of the nanny state) has it exactly right in The Guardian. Women need to be allowed to weigh the tiny risk of a probably non-fatal but serious condition on the one hand against the certainty of freedom from chronic debilitating symptoms on the other.

God, shmod. I want my monkey-man!

And here he is. A 7 million year old hominid skull has been found (in Africa, it goes without saying). That's a few million years older than the earliest other skull we have, and about 1 million years older than the earliest other remains. Looks like man diverged from chimpanzees earlier than we thought...

Gove gets it wrong?!?

Goodness me. I agree with Peter Briffa in his questioning of Michael Gove's conclusion in his other excellent survey of morality that politicians can do nothing to halt the collapse of British civilization:

The capacity of ministers to alter sexual activity, for good or ill, is minimal. The boundary between youth and maturity is one that has been dismantled by society not the State, through marketing imperatives, individual hedonism and the death of restraint.

I wonder what William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect would have thought about this. When they launched their campaign for a "reformation of manners," Britain was in a pretty decrepit state morally. Nevertheless, by judicious use of evangelism, example and parliamentary activity, they managed to impel a moral revival in Britain that helped drive the great reforms and innovations of the Victorian age. Ministers do have their place in the revival of Britain. I am surprised to see Michael so defeatist.

Hope, however

In a rather bizarre combination, Izvestia quotes Milton Friedman as saying the EU will break up in 5-10 years. His main reason is because of the cultural and linguistic differences, but he also points out the central problem with the Euro:

According to the US economist, giving up national monetary policy in eurozone countries leads to a higher unemployment rate as an immediate result of economic problems. Its is the "Achilles' heel" of the euro, Mr Friedman believes. If the monetary policy of the European Central Bank (ECB) is correct for a country like Ireland, for Germany it is absolutely not positive, he points out.

As is well known, the Dollar gets round this problem through a massively complex system of transfer payments between States. Nothinglike that has yet been proposed for the EU. When it is, the political nature of the Euro will be plain for all to see.

And more...

EUobserver reports on the proposal for a European Prosecutor, which will inevitably require harmonization of the European legal system. Guess which countries are out of step with the rest of the EU's legals systems...

By the way, notice this comment: "Commissioner Schreyer emphasised the need to get crime down to zero, which is not possible with the present structures." Just another example of how these people live with their heads in the clouds.

More EU madness

Forget about innocent until proved guilty. The EU now wants all car drivers involved in accidents with pedestrians or bicycles to be declared guilty regardless of the circumstances. This is one of the most brainless things I have read about in years, and that's saying something. Apparently the system "works well" in continental Europe, so Britain's silly little traditions about innocence have got to go...

Decriminalizing gives criminals free rein

The UK's former drugs tsar, still an adviser to the government, has resigned in protest at the effective decriminalization of cannabis. As he says,

"... there is no evidence at all to indicate that there is any change in the system. Even [the Home Secretary's] own committee says that cannabis is a dangerous substance, there's an increase in use among young people, there's an increase in people who are seeking treatment for the drug, and even in that report it does recognise that there is a link between cannabis and harder drugs.

"So why on earth, when there are these problems, we change our message and give a softer message, I do not know."

As I've said before, the evidence from the pilot programs is that decriminalization just gives drug dealers freer rein and has led to an increase in the price of cannabis but a decrease in the price and increase in sales of harder drugs. Disorder has increased tremendously.

This decision is the worst of both worlds. Legalisation would at least reduce (but not eliminate) the drug dealer effect, and public health strategies could be better targeted to mitigate the harmful health effects of the drug. But this decision is just plain, well, criminal.

A Jacksonian View of Europe

Thanks to Jim Bennett for this. This article at the Council for Foreign Relations site first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in April. It's a gem:

When Jacksonian America does think about Europe, it sees what Sheriff Andy of Mayberry saw in Barney Fife-- a scrawny, neurotic deputy whose good heart was overshadowed by bad judgment and vanity. The slow-talking, solid Andy tolerated Barney just fine, but he knew that Barney's self-importance would get him into one humiliating scrape after another.

Europe hopes for a world role more or less equal to that of the United States. Jacksonians roll their eyes. Jacksonians think that Europe-with a declining and aging population and an economy likely to grow more slowly than most of the economies of the developing world, to say nothing of the United States'-- is likely to continue to lose influence.

Europe's military thinking seems particularly unrealistic. Burdened with colossal welfare costs and pension problems that far outstrip anything the United States faces, European countries can't and won't make the investments needed to develop a significant military presence in the foreseeable future. Even if they spent the money, the major European countries-except possibly Britain-- are not very warlike. Europeans think of themselves as mature and evolved. Jacksonians think of them as yellow.

As Jim points out, "He might also note that Britain's profile on welfare and pensions is much more like the US's than Europe's, also on poluation and economic growth."

CCTV NBG

My collected thoughts on the British experiment with CCTV can be found on The American Enterprise Magazine Hotflash site. "It's an appalling waste of money" would be a fair summary of my conclusion.

Sorry about the hiatus

I had a really bad night on Monday (physically, thanks to some bug I picked up at the beach, I think) so spent most of yesterday dosing myself with a variety of potions and recuperating. Now, on to more important matters...

Don't expect miracles

Useful antidote to the hype surrounding VaxGen's announcement of an AIDS vaccine by The Times's science correspondent here. Bottom line, as in so many of these cases, don't believe it yet.

Laying the Smack Down

I have a great deal of time for the Media Research Center, who have exposed an awful lot of biased reporting over the years. I was, however, dismayed when an affiliated group, the Parents' Television Council, alleged, with no evidence, it seemed, that the then World Wrestling Federation's programs had caused children to kill each other. That was going far too far. And it has cost them. They have had to retract their charges, apologize personally to Vince McMahon and pay $3.5 million in damages. There is plenty of evidence that violent programming has some sort of effect on children, but precisely what is another matter. Saying this particular form of cartoonish violence directly causes homicides was just plain silly.

Idiot alert

Man beheaded statue of Thatcher 'to save son from capitalism'. How lucky we are to have such heroes among us...

Steyn Time

No Steyn in The Spectator this week, but that's okay because his National Post column is a classic. He deals with the pledge decision and the separation of powers that England had, but abandoned so foolishly.

Murray on Sex and Violence

My latest Tech Central Station column is up. Sex Still Sells looks at the real story behind some research that purported to show that advertisers shouldn't spend money on advertising in shows with strong sexual or violent content.

Jurnalishm 101

This depressing Times article (courtesy of Chris Bertram's excellent Junius blog) shows us the parlous state of higher education in the UK. For journalism courses, which are really in essence all about language and writing, it is hugely dispiriting that this comment should be made:

“Many of the students I teach have basic language and writing problems which have not been addressed at school or by the university,” says a lecturer in broadcast journalism at another university.

I have read other articles in which history lecturers complain that their students know nothing about history before Hitler. Such is this government's desire (and that of Major before Blair, to be fair) to increase the number of college graduates that they are pushing people into university places without the basic knowledge they need to do themselves any justice. It isn't fair, to the students, the lecturers, or the employers who are faced with applicants holding degrees that are, essentially, worthless.

Best practice

Writing in the Wall Street Journal Europe, the Director-General of the Confederation of British Industry says that America should learn fromthe British approach to corporate integrity (link requires subscription, I think):

Britain now has a system of corporate governance and accounting procedures that, while not perfect, stand above many other regimes. When I was a practicing corporate lawyer, before taking on my current role as director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, I spent a great deal of time jetting between the U.K. and the U.S. to complete deals. It was often said that too many lawyers were reaching the top in American companies, whereas in Britain accountants often got the senior jobs.

So, too often the culture in the U.S. seems to give an added determination to take everything to the margin -- to push it as far as the rules allow, regardless of what is right. That approach does not exist in Britain. If you examine the U.S. and U.K. accounting systems for example, the U.S. has a rulebook, tick-box approach, in which the auditing process is largely controlled by lawyers who try to ensure that the rules are respected -- even if the spirit is ignored. As far as we know, Enron's accounts complied with the applicable U.S. accounting standards. But did they reflect a "true and fair" view of the company's affairs, the mandatory test in an U.K. audit?

It is significant that Robert Herz, incoming chairman of the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board, the accounting profession's top rule-making body, has indicated that the U.S. should at least move its financial reporting to a principles- and substance-based approach that would bring it more into line with the U.K. approach.

His specific recommendations are:

1. Audit teams should rotate audit partners to achieve variety, rather than requiring companies to hire different audit companies each year.

2. Audit committees, and remuneration committees, should be composed solely of non-executive directors.

3. Shareholder democracy needs to be used to hold executives to account. Fund managers' pay should also be divulged to put criticism of CEO remuneration into context.

They're three pretty simple principles that could go a long way to solving the current crisis. As he says,

America must win back its corporate integrity. It should look eastwards, learn from its best friend, the U.K., and show its wish to engage with the rest of the world. Power and leadership are not the same thing. The most powerful nation on earth must show that it wants to lead by example and that occasionally means looking to best practice in other parts of a world that it sometimes overlooks.

America can learn from her allies. Here's a perfect example of how. I doubt she'll get much credit for it from outside financial circles, but that's a pretty important sector economically.

D'oh!

Take the quiz here!

Exodus

I'm off to Virginia Beach for the July 4 holiday. I meant to mention that yesterday was the 226th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, but forgot. What did they do on July 3, 1776, I wonder?

Sickening

My wife believes in the death sentence for rape. I think that would be excessive, as the Supreme Court has ruled. But what would be the reaction if someone proposed using rape as a judicial sentence? Thanks to Joanne Jacobs we know that it is happening in Pakistan. Girl gang-raped as 'punishment' is a report by Agence France-Presse and is utterly sickening.

Chaos in the name of efficiency

Libby Purves looks at the practicality of the British government computerizing all its records of what its citizens do. Reading this appalling catalogue makes me realize just how useful a suggestion is Oliver Letwin's proposal of a liberty test for new legislation.

We just want some Respect around here...

The TV industry treats some of its best property like red-headed stepchildren. The BBC, for instance, classes The Simpsons as a kids' show, because it's a cartoon. Similarly, they decided that Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, two of the most intelligent shows out there, must be kids' shows because they're fantasies. Then they realized that there's two much violence in them for kids, so they started cutting them (this resulted, apparently, in one Angel episode being reduced to 30 minutes duration and making no sense whatsoever). They do broadcast them uncut at a later hour, presumably oblivious to the fact that the kids who might have been intrigued by the mutilated versions are generally able to program VCRs.

It's slightly better over here, but not much. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which runs the Emmy awards, grudgingly nominated the outstanding musical Buffy episode, Once More With Feeling, showing again on UPN this evening. But, according to the Washington Post, they forgot to include it on the voting forms...

No wonder Dr Who hasn't been made for so long.

Health Scare Time

Irradiating Mail to Congress May Be Making Workers Ill, reports the New York Times. Well, actually, they think it's making them ill. The irradiation process is, as the story notes, exactly that which is used on food everyday. And that is safe.

Arab poverty: who's to blame?

America? Imperial Britain and France? Israel? No. Amazingly enough, a new UN-sponsored report comes to the conclusion that it's their own fault:

Lack of political freedom, discrimination against women and inadequate education systems have led to a substantial development gap between Arab countries and far poorer regions of the world, according to a new, Arab-written report on the subject.

You don't say...

Integration and assimilation

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (pukka chap), has raised the question of proportionality in legislatures, based on the under-representation of ethnic minorities in Britain's parliament. I think this is an interesting topic, so posted some comments, to which the Group Captain has kindly replied here. I must add his blog to the recommended list.

I thoroughly agree with the Group Captain about the need for more positive role models, but I am saddened by the fact that there doesn't seem to be the same motivation to provide them in the UK as there is here. Where is the UK's Center for New Black Leadership or Coalition on Urban Renewal and Education? You need genuine leadership from among all communities to help a nation function to the best of its potential. And this sort of leadership cannot be imposed.

Can this be true?

Respected former Newsweek Editor Arnaud de Bourchgrave claims to have information on Al-Qaida's encrypted e-mails. They have been attacking America repeatedly, it seems, but not in the 9/11 sense. This report blames the recent financial scandals on Al Qa'eda:

The "sleepers" managed to penetrate the upper reaches of corporate life and have sent encrypted e-mails back to al Qaida ("the base" in Arabic) to report an impressive string of successes -- Enron, Arthur Andersen, Tyco, Adelphia Communications, ImClone, Qwest Communications International, Dynegy, Global Crossing, WorldCom and Xerox.

The National Security Agency intercepted one of the e-mails. It was evidently from al Qaida's principal fifth columnist in the United States. The gender could not be established, but it bragged that Operation WorldCon had collapsed WorldCom and had seriously crippled the entire American military machine that is heavily dependent on the telecom giant.

I think this may be a little bit of wishful thinking on the terrorists' part. One or perhaps two of these scandals associated with an al qa'eda sleeper I can imagine. All of them? They wish.

It also strikes me as remarkably convenient that the nation's financial woes can be blamed not on this administration, or even the previous one, but on evil Islamic terrorists.

I'm getting more skeptical about this by the minute...

UPDATE: Grateful to Steven DenBeste in the Comments section for pointing out that the author admits it is a fantasy. He does so in a transitional sentence I skipped over. However, UPI themselves were pushing this as a "Breaking News Exclusive," so I'm not the only one to have been fooled into thinking this was some sort of new revelation...

Blood in the Telephone Booths

Rand "Ronaldo" Simberg has one of the best commentaries I've ever seen on one state's experiences with concealed-carry laws. Rand's on excellent form at the moment, clinically sticking each one in the back of the net, hence the monicker...

High crimes and misdemeanors

Hmmm. London's Liberal Democrats have initiated a form of local impeachment against the elected Mayor. I'm no fan of Red Ken, but this does raise two questions in my mind:

* If the Standards Board does disqualify Red Ken for this, won't the standards for unseating elected politicians be pretty low? And,

* How many of these Lib Dems approved of the impeachment actions against President Clinton?

I'd like to know the answer to the second question first...

Loss of privilege

Alan Judd (any relation to the Brothers?) sums up the European arrest warrant in his Telegraph article Of course Britain wants the best of both worlds. How could Her Majesty's Government just give away ancient privileges like this? They've given away a birthright. English rights and liberties are not some jumble to be rummaged around and thrown away as a Prime Minister sees fit. Yet this is what it has come to:

The democracy we evolved is very imperfect, but it does - or did - maintain that essential link between voter, elected representative and the law that governs the voter. If enough of us didn't like a law, we could change it by persuading or kicking out our elected legislators.

Now, we are governed by laws that we have no peaceful means to change. How could successive parliaments have so supinely agreed to emasculate their own and their electors' rights and powers? How could we have permitted it?

Unlike Mr Blair, most people in this island do not dream the Kaiser's dream, nor Mr Prodi's. Subjecting us to law that fundamentally affects our freedoms and that Parliament has no opportunity to reject amounts to imposition.

If our democracy continues to be leached from us in this way, it will eventually be expressed not through Parliament, but on the streets; and if it comes to that, we shall all have lost something very precious.

The sentiments of those last two sentences could have been expressed by Burke, Franklin or Adams, over two hundred years ago...

The Last Word

... on the World Cup shall come from The Telegraph, who comment on why the English were supporting Brazil en masse as they watched the final yesterday:

Underneath the sporting rivalry, we recognise Germany as a vital commercial partner, a reliable military ally and probably the Continental state with which we have most in common. It was simply that we wanted the team that had knocked us out to go on to win, and not the one that we had whopped 5-1 in the qualifying stages.

Pinch of salt

Idle and high on drugs? Not us, say today's youth, at least, according to YouGov, so I'd take this with a pinch of salt. The figure of 86% not using drugs regularly is striking, however. I wonder what it would be if their sample included those who don't use a computer...

He's Grandfather Paradox

Glenn points to The Eleven Day Empire. I presume this refers to the organization Faction Paradox in the Dr. Who books, who named their dominion after the 11 days "lost" in the conversion between Julian and Gregorian calendars... Jolly good if it is.

Sophisticated naivete

Lord Rees-Mogg presents an excellent summary of current "crises" like Worldcom and the supposed split between the US and UK. A marvelous effort of understatement, particularly in the latter case:

To the bewilderment of many European observers, and even of the US foreign policy establishment, the American electorate sees foreign policy in simple terms of black and white, friends and enemies and right and wrong. In the 20th century, Europeans usually saw the Americans as naive about foreign policy, either as simple idealists, like Woodrow Wilson, or isolationists, like Senator Taft. Yet Europe had to be rescued three times by the United States, in two World Wars and one Cold War. Our sophistication did not perform as well as US naiveté.

Yesterday, in The Sunday Telegraph, John Simpson[*] reported that even the British are back to playing the sophisticated game. “In 32 years of reporting on international affairs, I have never seen Britain and the United States more separated from each other ... the way George W. Bush’s Administration deals with the outside world is affecting even the most traditionally pro-American elements in British society ... leading British civil servants I spoke to about last week’s speech by Mr Bush regarded it as — I quote — ‘puerile’, ‘absurdly ignorant’ and ‘ludicrous’.”

If John Simpson says so, I’m sure it is so, though I know some other “traditionally pro-American elements” who are still strongly pro-American, whether or not they share President Bush’s views on the Middle East. I do not myself agree with all the propositions in his speech, but I did not find it in any way “puerile” or “ludicrous”.

Most Americans I know, both Republicans and Democrats, think he got it right. They see Israel as the only reliable ally of the United States, in a sea of hostile Arab powers, hostile to Israel and potentially supporting terrorists against the United States. They regard the attacks of September 11 as a declaration of war. They do, largely, support the creation of an independent Palestinian state, as does President Bush. They do sympathise with the Israelis, under attack from terrorists.

They were horrified by the family snap of the baby suicide bomber.

In the Middle East, as in Afghanistan, the President’s policies have great public support in the United States. The more sophisticated alternatives are seen as weak and ineffective.

The very etymology of the word "sophisticated" implies weakness. The sophists could not win their case with the plain facts, so they resorted to sophistry. How odd that Europeans should claim it to be a strength that they are sophist-like.

* By the way, see here for Rand Simberg's excellent Fisking of Simpson's arrogant tirade.

Profiling Foolishness

Last time I posted on this, I drew some criticism from one of the brightest minds in the blogosphere, but I'll persist. Fareed Zakaria's latest Newsweek piece, Freedom vs. Security, makes the most telling point about the foolishness of using racial profiling as a tool in law enforcement. It's too broad a tool to work:

It’s not that there isn’t a racial profile that one could compose. After all, in most major American cities, young black and Latino men are still overwhelmingly the most likely perpetrators of many kinds of crime. But police forces have found that racial profiling doesn’t work. David Harris, an authority on racial profiling who has interviewed hundreds of cops, explains that race is too broad a category to be useful. “Every cop will tell you what’s important is suspicious behavior,” Harris says. “If you focus on race, the eye is distracted from behavior and moves to what is literally skin deep.” Customs Service agents have also learned this lesson. They used to stop blacks and Latinos at vastly disproportionate rates to whites. Then they switched and began using information and behavior as their criteria. They looked at where and how tickets were bought, did background checks, watched whether you stuck to your bags at all times. As a result, they searched fewer people and found twice as many blacks and whites, and five times as many Latinos, who were running drugs.

Absolutely. Suspicious behavior, as I think I've said before, is the key. That does mean that airport screeners should stop randomly targeting little old ladies -- which just doesn't work either. But if a little old lady cries out "God is Great" at regular moments while brandishing pictures of her grandchild dressed as a suicide bomber, then I think she's worth a look. In other words, it should be at the discretion of the competent authorities. And those authorities are just as incompetent if they use racial profiling as they are when they confiscate Congressional Medals of Honor.

That Luntz poll...

My colleague Howard Fienberg takes a closer look at the poll of college students' attitudes to the war on terorism that inspired Lileks' classic screed, now immortalized in the House records by Tom Tancredo. It turns out that there are significant questions about the poll's methodology. See TCS: Tech - The Kids Are All Wrong?

Where's Osama?

As Emmanuel might ask. Here are some interesting bits of reportage. From Newsweek,
Osama bin Laden and the Mystery of the Skull while from its rival Time some evidence pointing the other way -- A Letter from Osama Bin Laden. Personally, as mentioned below, I tend towards the dead as a doornail theory, but if he is still scrabbling around somewhere, I find it reassuring that the mighty Al Qa'eda network, of which we are all so afraid and which has untold resources, has not been able to get a working videocamera near him in 6 months...

IQ Inanities

As anyone who read my breastfeeding/IQ piece (updated here) will know, I'm skeptical of the value of IQ as a measure of anything really useful. So have most liberals been since the late Stephen Jay Gould published "The Mismeasure of Man" and the subsequent Bell Curve controversy. I therefore found it fascinating to see this claim by a congresswoman who should know better:

"This president has an IQ of 88," Rep. Diane Watson, California Democrat, said also on Friday. "That tells you something." Miss Watson added that Mr. Bush's administration actually is run by a "shadow government" consisting of "his father and the guy who calls himself the vice president. ... The '88' certainly isn't making the decisions," she said.

And just how would she know? Even those skeptical of IQ claims would find it pretty unlikely that someone with an IQ of 88 could pass exams at Yale and Harvard Business School...

But if it is the case, shouldn't Rep. Watson be glad that someone has shown just how wrong the idea that IQ automatically translates into achievement can be?

World Cup Wrap-up

The Beeb gives us its alternative highlights of the tournament. My assessment? Well, I'd say the best team in the last 16 won, beating one of the worst teams in the last 16, who just happened to have the best goalkeeper. I'm not sure Brazil would have won the whole thing if Ronaldo hadn't picked the best possible moment to rediscover his form. He's my player of the tournament.

Talking of goalkeepers, I do find it interesting that in their last three matches Brazil struggled until an injury to the opposing goalkeeper seemed to help them. I've already written about how devastating Seaman's knock was to England. Rustu Recber had also had a fine game until he took a similar knock and allowed a goal minutes later. Then yesterday, Kahn was at his imperious best until he injured his hand. The fact the the opening goal came from him failing to hold onto a ball -- for what seemed like the first time in the competition -- speaks volumes.

As for England, Ireland and the USA, I think all 3 showed that their young teams have a huge amount of potential. In particular, I think that if Eriksson can instill some discipline into the English midfield this is potentially a World Cup winning side.

And, at the end of the day, Brian, that's what it's all about.

-- Harry Clarts, your football correspondent.

Divine providence

One man's reminder to the Ninth Circuit Court of what America's about: Mary Young Pickersgill's Banner

More on CCTV

Ye Gods. According to this Times briefing, a CCTV camera costs 20,000 pounds to buy and 12,000 pounds a year to run. There are 40,000 of them in the UK, so capital costs alone were 800 million quid. A quick NPV calculation over the next 30 years, assuming a 10 year life (optimistic, I know) before replacement and a discount rate of 8% (which was standard when I did cost/benefits in the early 90s) reveals a cost of 6.4 billion pounds. Are they likely to achieve that much benefit? Not if they only decrease crime by 5% they aren't.

Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime

A Sunderland woman has been jailed for three months for shouting, swearing and kicking the back of a seat. She didn't actually hurt anyone, from what I can make out. Is this part of a new, tougher sentencing regime in the UK? No, it's because she did it on an aircraft, thereby causing "fear and terror" among the other 200 passengers, leading to the pilot diverting the plane. The judge seemed to think her actions were especially dangerous because of events in recent months. Hmmm. Did the UK actually get any reports of what happened on Flight 93? You'd have thought 1 woman in 200 would have been easy to deal with...

Voodoo Poll alert

Long-time readers will be aware of my opinion of YouGov, the UK online polling organization that lucked out in getting the election result right. Now they ask The US and Britain: Is there a 'special relationship'? Go ahead and vote. You might win 100 quid...

UPI Column

My latest Recent research suggests... is up. It deals with the current obsession with obesity as a public health issue.

Wot's this sex thing, then?

The Telegraph missed a trick here. In the otherwise excellent editorial Less sex, more dirt, when they say that "Apparently teenagers don't know that sex leads to pregnancy" they fail to point out that this is after a good twenty years' worth of sex education -- not to mention probably fifty years' worth of biology -- in state schools. If you can't learn that sex leads to pregnancy, then you can't learn to take a pill or put on a condom...

The Word on Worldcom

I've been struggling to find a way to put this, now I find a correspondent writing to the Telegraph (first link under letters to the editor) saying exactly what I've been wanting to say. The current crisis is an artefact of the obsession with maximising the value of the firm as represented by stock price as opposed to more sensible measures. Stock price should really be irrelevant to the decision making processes of the CEO. As long as there is a real, solid financial base in the accounts, then everything else should proceed naturally. Well, that's my belief anyway. Here's what the correspondent says:

Now WorldCom. The use of sticks and carrots to influence behaviour must be as old as mankind. So why the shock, horror and surprise at the revelations of "mis-accounting" by major American businesses? Of course it's wrong, but the miscreants are responding to powerful incentives, and hoping to get away with it.

Thirty years ago, Wall Street started to preach that the primary responsibility of the chief executive officer (CEO) was to maximise "shareholder value", which meant share price as determined by the market, applying its own criteria. To help concentrate the minds of the CEO and those around him or her, increasingly large parcels of share options were added to their remuneration, to the point where many executives can now literally make fortunes in a few years. Some carrots.

The sticks include loss of job if you fail to please "the Street" in short order - so short that the average tenure of Fortune 500 CEOs is now less than three years. No jokes about executives with strategic vision, please.

And what the Street likes to see is relentless growth in income and profit. If by chance real business conditions aren't buoyant enough to achieve that, what is management going to do to protect job and fortune? Enter creative accounting. Eventually it must come to light, but there's a good chance of getting away with your golden handshake and options proceeds safely banked before the auditors find out or, as we now learn, others find out about the auditors not having found out.

Until the accepted wisdom changes to recognise that business is a human societal activity, that other constituencies than shareholders have serious interests in businesses and that management's responsibility is to build businesses that are successful in the terms of those constituencies, we shall continue to see disasters.

The distortions caused by Wall Street's and the City's obsession with "shareholder value" have resulted in disastrous reductions in research and development investment, in the "letting go" of hundreds of thousands of expensively recruited and trained people, in the undermining of supplier relationships and the redefinition of business as a purely economic activity.

This is destruction of real, durable shareholder asset value on a grand scale, and the impoverishment of the society on which business relies for its existence.

As we all suffer from Wall Street's "wisdom" and its City followers, the last eyebrows to be raised should belong to those who work there.

Fair enough, I think.

Big Brother keeping Britain in the dark

The British organization the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders has announced that its review of data about Closed Circuit TV as a crime prevention tool reveals that it's less effective in reducing crime than street lighting:

A (forthcoming) comprehensive review of the impact of CCTV [Welsh and Farrington] concludes that the overall reduction in crime amounts to a figure of five per cent. A parallel systematic review carried out by the Home Office looking at the impact of street lighting found a 20 per cent reduction.

It seems that quite a bit of the crime reduction that is attributable to CCTV relates to thefts of/from cars in parking lots. Nevertheless, the Government is arguing that Big Brother is worth the investment of 3/4 of the total crime prevention budget.

But the stark contrast between the effectiveness of street lighting and CCTV shows one thing above all, I think. Britain's streets are not very pleasant, and that contributes to crime. Dark, dirty streets occupied mostly by indigent youths are not conducive to safety. Clean 'em up, light 'em and move the youths along while getting to know the community. It's the recipe that's worked over here. CCTV is an expensive and illiberal red herring.

This couldn't happen to a US State

I think I'm right in saying that. Check out Emmanuel Goldstein's important comment on the Portuguese deficit crisis. Essentially, the European Commission can either fine Portugal up to 0.5 percent of its GDP (about $6 billion!) or walk in and take over the running of Portugal's economy. And the Euro is not a threat to sovereignty? Yeah, right, and here's a nice bridge I've got to sell you...

Dead as a dodo

Mark Steyn explains why Osama must be dead and why no-one's admitting it. I agree with these conclusions, tentatively, but am prepared to look a right fool if the bearded one suddenly appears having cast a vote on American Idol...

The Final Word on the Flag Reclaimed

Busy, busy day today, so apologies for the light posting. But this warmed my heart. It could be that this year's World Cup marks the first step on the road to full assimilation of immigrants into English culture. Funny how a sporting event achieves unasked what a generation of politicians have failed to do.

Hard Cell

The case that cell phones cause cancer is looking shakier with every new piece of long-term research.

Oh, for *UNCONSTITUTIONAL*'s sake...

A Federal court has ruled the Pledge of Allegiance 'unconstitutional'. Will somebody get these bozoes a dictionary? Simply because school children say 'under God' does not mean you're going to have Bishops of the Church of the United States appear, for Heaven's sake. By all means, make the words optional, but striking them out is actually a fairly blatant attack on the people's right to free exercise of their religion. The jurisprudence in this area has jumped right off the deep end and sunk without a trace.

Light in the darkness

Hilarious moment in the otherwise serious "Black on black" gun violence discussion on Newsnight, transcribed here. In a discussion chaired by brilliant if wayward Jeremy Paxman, one of the guests claimed, wholly unconvincingly, that the spate of black-on-black shootings in London is about getting money for food. Another guest disagreed. The first guest attempted to put him in his place:

SCHUMANN: Your education has enabled you to see things different from those who have not had that education. You should understand, I'm not being an apologist for the behaviour that happens amongst some of the errant minority in my community but you have to have an understanding of the psychology. You have to understand the psychological effects and the damage done by a poor educational system.

PAXMAN: Hang on, he is the psychiatrist.

Wonderful.

We are all guilty! WE ARE ALL GUILTY!!!

Peter Simple's character Dr Heinz Kiosk screams this mantra at any given opportunity. It seems, however, that Dr Kiosk has changed his name to David Calvert-Smith, Director of Public Prosecutions. He thinks all of Britain is racist. Janet Daley looks at the idiocy of this argument:

Now wait a minute. What exactly is the net result of this endemic racism? Does it have a material effect on the way justice operates or doesn't it? Having sprayed slurs far and wide over every agency and institution of society, from the press to the police, for perpetrating "stereotypical assumptions", not to mention every benign well-meaning individual citizen for being a closet bigot, Sir David then tells us that none of this counts for a row of beans in the end, because no "wrong result" has followed as a consequence.

Racism is bad precisely because of its consequences. If there are no ill consequences, then surely there is no culpable racism. Self-flagellation of the kind Kiosk and Calvert-Smith engage in seems to be simply a form of masochism.

Beaten to the ball

I was going to say something about the Germany vs Brazil final being a bit of a travesty, but Daddy Warblogs has beaten me to it. Exactly what I was going to say.

And what would have happened today if Hakan Sukur was at even 50% of his normal form?

Lucky blighters, both of 'em...

Desire for Streetcars

Interesting dichotomy here. In a recent American Enterprise Magazine Online hotflash, Paul Weyrich and Michael Lind praise the benefits of streetcars/trams as being transit that Conservatives can love. By contrast, a couple of weeks ago in the Spectator, Matthew Parris, who does not deserve his reputation in the blogosphere, outlined the reasons why trams are dreadful. As it happens, I tend to agree with Mr. Parris. He outlines why buses are better than trams in all of the areas that tram enthusiasts count as points in their favor. Weyrich's and Lind's arguments boil down essentially to "trams are cheaper than light rail." Well, buses are cheaper -- and better -- than trams. Now, buses do have a serious image problem here in the States, but I think that's because of a variety of outdated social factors. It's certainly no reason to waste tons of public money. Me, I'll take the bus.

Ever wondered what a British MP does?

Boris Johnson tells you, all in the course of building up to a dreadful pun. Quite right, too.

Right again

Michael Gove deserves to be rivalling Mark Steyn as the Blogosphere's favorite columnist. Here he is, getting right to the point about Palestinian "desperation":

This ideology of death is not then the product of hope denied, but hope fed. Fed not just by money and arms from neighbours, but fed, above all, by the folly of the West. The hope that terror will bring concessions, the hope that the West is weakening, the hope that fanaticism will prevail, is daily reinforced. That hope is nurtured by movement towards a Palestinian state which is accelerated, not delayed, by bombing. It is encouraged by news that decisive action against one sponsor of terror, Iraq, has been delayed. It is supported by news that the world’s most energetic sponsor of terror, Iran, is to be appeased by the granting of EU trade privileges.

It is also advanced by the moral confusion which suicide bombing has produced among Western elites. The campaign has been designed to obscure the wickedness of ethnic mass murder by seeking to place the killer on the same moral plain as his targets — both are to be seen as “victims”.

But that is only true in the sense that a Khmer Rouge, Waffen SS or Interahamwe footsoldier and those he slaughters are “equally” victims of totalitarianism. One is implementing an ideology of death, the others are that ideology’s necessary sacrifices. To contextualise the acts of the killers by arguing that they have no hope, to see “nobility” in their blitheness about the consequences as they take others’ lives, is to locate moral reasoning in individuals who wish to erase the most fundamental moral principle — respect for life itself.

It's all so simple. Gove elucidates it all so eloquently. In Heaven's name, why can't so many see it?

Spoon-feeding youngsters to reduce crime?

This remarkable news fits in with the discussion on recidivism below. It seems that young criminals given a diet of micronutrients while under criminal supervision perpetrated significantly fewer crimes than those who were given sugar pills. But can we trust people to look after themselves? Unless people are proposing that people be forced to eat certain things I can't see this research being of much benefit.

There's a reason people slip from healthy diets, sneak away from school lunches to eat Milky Ways and go back to fried foods after prison or hospital. To them, it tastes better.

By all means, feed people healthy meals in prison and perhaps reinstate milk and fruit in school (I can't see any problem with that unless you're a "taking children seriously" nutter), but this must not be used by the health fascists as grounds for a "fat tax" or some other statist outrage.

Jolly good

There's some hope for English law, after all. The High Court has ruled that amendments to EC regulations only form part of English law if the original legislation made provision for them. In other words, the various 1973-era acts were not fascist-style "enabling acts" giving carte blanche to the EU to do whatever they liked. To enforce the various EC food standards, the government will now have to spend precious Parliamentary time pasing primary (I think) legislation to deal with the issue.

Or, of course, they could decide that the British people are best placed to decide their own food standards. Nah, that's not very likely...

"And England shall be free..."

"If England means as much to you as England means to me," as the song went. It seems that England's flag now means something to a much larger section of the populace, as the BBC grudgingly admits. It's all the fault of unemployment and exploitation of Chinese flag makers, of course...

There but for the grace of God...

This is the team England thrashed 5-1 on their home soil a few months ago. I hope Brazil or Turkey (how exquisite if it were Turkey!) puts them firmly in their place at the weekend.

Fishy business

Christopher Booker's notebook has been a strong voice against the European destruction of the British fishing industry for years. It looks now as if the last rites are to be administered:

We thus begin to see the final account for that decision by Edward Heath in 1973 to hand over waters that contain four-fifths of Europe's fish stocks. Within a few years it is likely that we will be left with only a very small fleet, with rights to catch anything round our shores entirely controlled by Brussels.

Our chief remaining interest will be that we will be expected to provide and pay for a fleet of fisheries protection vessels, to enforce Brussels policies under Brussels direction. Any Royal Navy ships still involved will be required to have non-British officials on board telling them what to do.

British ministers will also have one further duty. Each time a new country joins the EU, they will have to sign a "designation order" giving its fishing vessels rights of access to the waters round our shores out to 200 miles, since under international law these are still British.

But doubtless this is an anomaly that Mr Blair could offer to sort out when, after Gibraltar, he is looking for something else to give away.

I await the day when British vessels, ordered to protect Spanish fishing vessels, come into confrontation with Canadian vessels seeking to protect Canadian territorial rights that the Spanish do not recognize. Will the Navy choose Crown or Europe?

Who ya gonna call?

Glad to see the CIA is taking the war on terrorism seriously.

Pink slips are the only answer.

Equal opportunity nutters

Just to show that I attract criticism from nutters on both sides of the aisle, I thought you might like to see this screed. It was written is response to my latest UPI column, where I commented that "the plural of anecdote is not data":

Anecdotal evidence is more conclusive than official statistics when officials deliberately distort them to suit their masters' agendas. For example, it is now common practice for police officicials to downgrade crimes across the board (from murder to manslaughter, for example) in order to improve their performance statistics and justify the prison empire US reactionaries have constructed.

Garbage in, garbage out. One has to make sure that official statistics are accurate and honest, before one can make pompous pronouncements about the superiority of results obtained from them. Look at all the 'scientific' data that came out of the Vietnam War, or from the Soviet Union, for that matter, before it collapsed. To declare those data reliable, even though one knows they are not (it's either that, or you don't know what you're talking about) is to betray science that much more, and make it even less likely that the public trusts or consults it next time around. Perhaps that's the ultimate goal of your obvious prevarication, to make science totally unbelievable, and throw us all back into the Dark Ages? The reactionaries would be pleased.

I see, so downgrading crimes justifies putting people in prison. Shome mishtake, shurley? The best thing about this disquistion is that it came from an ed.gov e-mail address -- the Education Department, which is, presumably, the last bastion against US reactionaries. And against objectivity, it would seem.

Crime and Punishment

My latest TCS piece is up. The Problem with Prison looks at what the latest recidivism statistics tell us about how the American prison system works. I suggest rehabilitation is necessary. One correspondent doesn't agree. She sent me this astonishingly racist outburst:

It was the phoniest bit of logic I've ever read. Rehabiliate criminals? I don't think so. Most of those in jail are there because they have low IQs and there is nothing that prison can do about that. And over-whelmingly those in prison both in the US and in the Britain are minorities, and especially blacks. If America was serious about crime we would do what we should have done a long time ago. Repatriate almost all blacks back to Africa. Our crime rate would drop by at least half and we could reclaim our cities. Britain almost had no crime until it started importing it with all kinds of immigrants who prey on the native population of whites. Deport them, make Britain white again, and the crime rate will drop. Duh!

Astonishing. Just goes to show that the "They are all guilty" crowd is still around, even though the "We are all guilty" idiots are making more noise at the moment.

Another old-fashioned concept bites the dust

The Founding Fathers of the USA liked to think that they were asserting their rights as free-born Englishmen. Well, that's a concept that seems to be out of fashion. Hidden in this report about new asylum laws in the UK is this remarkable point:

[The draft Bill] included new powers allowing the Home Secretary for the first time to deprive someone born a British citizen of his or her citizenship

The language in the draft Bill (PDF file) is as follows:

The Secretary of State may by order deprive a person of a citizenship status if the Secretary of State thinks that the person has doen anything seriously prejudicial to the vital interests of (a) the United Kingdom or (b) a British overseas territory.

There is an appeals process, but this strikes me as far too broad a power, and one that is inconsistent with British custom and tradition. Blackstone comments favorably that Englishmen cannot be exiled and retain their right of living freely in their land (although, of course, transportation became common after Blackstone's time). This power would amaze him. It must be resisted.

PP: Oh, and check this one out. Britons can now be extradited to European countries for crimes that are not crimes in the UK. The Legislature was not consulted on this at all.

Ignorance is Strength

This report, 'Brixton? Right now it's a 24-hr crack supermarket,' from The Observer (Sunday Guardian, essentially) of all places, strikes me as highly important. It starts off with a tale of police trying to arrest a drug dealer, but being surrounded by a crowd worrying about "police brutality". This amply demonstrates the trouble with the crime problem in the UK. People are overly concerned with secondary issues. Yes, of course police brutality is wrong, but crime on the streets must be a more pressing concern. Policemen need help, not criticism.

Anyway, the more important points are in the meat of the article. Here's the reality of the Brixton drugs decriminlization experiment:

'Many people find this film shocking,' said Moore. 'But it is the reality of what we are dealing with. The centre of Brixton is a 24-hour crack supermarket. We have 15 dealers during the day and up to 20 throughout the night. They each sell 100 rocks per week at £10 a time. It means the centre of Brixton alone is a crack market worth £12 million each year. The level of demand means that even if we arrested 1,000 dealers, they'd be replaced by 1,000 new ones the next day.'

When the cannabis experiment was launched by the outspoken Metropolitan Police Commander Brian Paddick, it was hailed as a brave step by the pro-drugs lobby but seen as a blow to law and order by others who feared it would lead to a relaxation of attitudes towards harder drugs. Paddick himself said: 'I have never known anyone commit crime to fund a cannabis habit.'

In recent weeks, criticism of the experiment from the community and the police themselves has risen. Locals have reported incidents of children as young as 10 under the effects of cannabis. Some children are said to have turned up at school stoned while there have been instances of children whose parents are dealers being employed as couriers and rewarded with cannabis.

Lovely. Kids are stoned and they're selling crack rather than marijuana (a dealer quoted later admits that addicting people is great business). That's a success. And here's the real clincher:

A recent Mori poll found that while half of all white residents in Brixton supported the experiment, the majority of black and Asian residents opposed it.

Fuller believes this is because the white middle classes have a rose-tinted view of drug-taking and do not see the problems that are caused in the same way as ethnic communities do.

Since the experiment began last July, there has been a 13 per cent increase in the number of cannabis dealers travelling to Brixton to sell their wares. Drug dealing offences in the borough have risen by 11 per cent and recorded cases of cannabis possession by 34 per cent.

What seems to most concern local people, however, is that by relaxing attitudes to cannabis, police have given a signal to all drug dealers that they have nothing to fear.

'The police have abandoned the streets to the dealers,' said Reverend Ivelaw Bowman of St Andrew's Church. 'You cannot use the bus stop at the top of Coldharbour Lane or the nearby telephone boxes because they have been taken over by the dealers. They sell drugs openly and without fear, even though you cannot move for CCTV cameras there. And it is the same people day after day. The law is not being enforced and the question everyone in the community wants an answer to is this: if we can see it, why can't the police?'

The interests of the local people have been subordinated to bourgeois prejudices, as I've argued before. Where are the David Clark-Smiths saying that this is a sign of institutional racism?

And one final point. This experiment was about cannabis:

There are other worrying signs. The standard indicator for the size and health of any drug market is street price. When drugs are in short supply, the price goes up - when they are plentiful, it falls. Since the experiment began, the price of cannabis had climbed from £27 per ounce to £30. Over the same period of time, the price of crack cocaine has fallen.

There's a respectable libertarian argument about the efficacy of drug laws. What's happening in Lambeth has nothing to do with that. It's about letting criminals have full rein. That's truly appalling.

Light Invisible

Darkness Visible, by the Rev. Walton Hannah is one of the seminal works on what Freemasonry (the British version) is all about. It spawned a less-than compelling answer, by a Mason and vicar who called himself "Vindex", entitled Light Invisible. Following the Black Rod fiasco, it seems that John Lloyd has decided to be New Labour's Vindex. His argument, which relies on the supposed humiliations of the Prime Ministers of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, is less than compelling, for two reasons:

1. The position of the Monarch as Head of State of those countries is most decidely not "anomalous". It is about the most "omalous" thing in those countries' constitutions, being the consistent, unifying factor that has helped maintain shaky unions and ensured continuity.

2. Lloyd complains that royals got precedence over elected officials. John, this was a funeral. I think I'm right in saying that every one of those royals he mentions was a blood relative of the Queen Mother. Suppose a local councillor died. Would Lloyd complain if the Mayor was seated behind the grieving widow? I bloody well hope not. This is a silly argument that looks good until you realize exactly what it is you're talking about.

I've been impressed with John Lloyd's work recently. But this feeble apologia has sent him back to Sept 10 in my eyes.

Sophistry alert

The New Statesman's leader is about speed cameras, and it puts the positive case for them quite well. Then it ruins it all with this outrageous statement:

Moreover, a child from social class V is five times more likely to be killed on the roads than a child from social class I. As the higher-income groups are more likely to drive fast (partly because they have higher-powered vehicles and more appointments), the car has become an instrument that allows the rich to kill the poor.

I am reminded of the scene in The Simpsons where the Springfield Republican Party meet in a lightning-surrounded castle, discussing what evil deed they can perpetrate next, followed by Bob Dole reading from The Necronomicon.

Neither Washington nor Moscow but...

The old slogan of the Socialist Workers' Party could apply to the European drift to what is called there 'the right'. Socialism has been rejected across Europe. This Times article explains why quite well:

[Socialism] is no longer a brand that sells. French voters know not only what they are sick of but what they positively want: lower taxes, less street crime, more realism — and less political correctness — on immigration, and less bureaucratic interference. Not the least of the sensible Jean-Pierre Raffarin’s appeal is the new Prime Minister’s promise to “simplify life”. Mr Blair has bucked the rightward trend — and indignantly, and in my view correctly, rebuts left-wing criticism that he has done so only by betraying the “socialist ideal”. Britain, teeming once again with regulations and form-filling on everything from small business and farmers to teachers and doctors, is more like continental Europe than it was before 1997. M Raffarin’s message could be potent here too.

People want less, too, of what the Italians call the snobismo of the Left. Voters are tired of sermons, whether about social inclusion or “building Europe”. It is at home that they want the spadework done. They want government that works — and that listens to what they want rather than telling them what they ought to want. They also want politicians who are not afraid to talk about the national interest — almost taboo on the Left. So they are veering back to the Centre Right whose historical reputation for competence is the reason why, the past few years apart, it has dominated European politics for half a century.

Of course, it isn't conservatism on the Anglo-American lines, but it's not socialism, and it's not fascism. That's got to be a plus.

She's back!

On Tory Revival I often used to link to Melanie Phillips' columns for The Sunday Times. Then she moved to the webophobic Daily Mail and I cried a tear or two. But now she's putting all her articles there up at MelaniePhillips.com. Huzzah!

Sigh

Veteran keepers -- are they worth it? I remember a glaring mistake by Peter Shilton in Italia 90, and Seaman's failure to notice that Ronaldinho was actually aiming at the goal goes up there along with it. I have to say that the knock Seaman took at the end of the first half seemed to me to be the turning point of the game, as Brazil suddenly realised he might be worth pressuring. Then Beckham unforgivably failed to make a challenge on the touchline and a couple of kicks later Brazil were level. Most people would not have sent of Ronaldinho (although I would have anyway) but I'd rather have had him on the pitch and the reasonable claim for the penalty by Beckham moments later upheld than the way it actually happened. The next 30 minutes were utterly depressing, however, as England looked like they were the side a man down. They played far, far too many inaccurate long passes to give the ball away rather than the short, accurate passes that win you chances when you're a man up. Scholes, Beckham and Dyer (Mag) were particularly at fault, I thought. I think we just panicked. Still, I think this side, with a new keeper and no Dyer, will do pretty well in Euro 04...

In fact, they should have played the way the USA did. They passed neatly and accurately, won the ball back when they lost it and created chance after chance but no luck (even when they beat Kahn, they were foiled by an unintentional handball). The USA can count themselves very, very unlucky to have lost in 90 minutes. They proved to me that they are worthy of being talked of as a major footballing power at last. See -- there's a silver lining to every cloud...

Nervous Gulp

Match fever grips England.

HAWAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY THE LADS!!!

The Fruits of Kiwi Experience

David Lange was probably the most influential politician New Zealand had ever produced. His adoption of some Thatcherite policies predated Blair's co-option of them by a decade. In this Independent column his Finance Minister tells Gordon Brown to learn from his experience in trying to fix the healthcare system by throwing money at it. As he rightly points out,

In Britain the privileged enjoy access to high-quality health care while the majority rely on sub-standard services. You are the fourth largest economy in the world, but you allow tens of thousands of your people to die from cancer when they would survive in Germany. You acclaim a system that has put the disadvantaged and the inarticulate at the bottom of the health-care heap and kept them there.

This is because of the funding system:

Every British family already funds a lifetime of healthcare, but it has no real say over how the money is spent. Hospitals and GPs depend on the system for their income, not their own patients. The only way to make providers more responsive is to give back to consumers the power to buy their own care.

That is why reform of funding of is essential. Social insurance schemes give patients the power of choice and the status of customers whom healthcare providers have to satisfy. No one is excluded. The disadvantaged receive assistance with premiums, making them – for the first time – purchasers with equal rights to the rich. Since the public have a free choice of doctor or hospital, the patient-doctor relationship is restored. Hospital staff no longer feel like political pawns. Everyone wins.

My wise and lovely wife has suggested that an appropriate slogan for healthcare reform should be something along the lines of

Healthcare is your life. Don't you deserve more control over it?

I think that could work. I wonder if the Tories will agree?

Welcome to the Blogosphere, Stephen

Good news. Serious British journalist and influential center-left thinker Stephen Pollard has joined the blogging community. You can find him at stephenpollard.net. Here's a sample of his first thoughts, on what Cherie Blair (Booth) and her ilk think unquestionable:

There are a host of other unstated assumptions which the likes of Ms Booth make about life and which they consider above argument: the view that somehow they do things better in Europe; that anyone who opposes greater european integration is a xenophobe; that it is our role to 'civilise' the hick Americans; that selective education is somehow morally inferior to comprehensive education (even if they have to resort to it for their own kids); and that the NHS is the only morally respectable form of healthcare provision.

And Stephen should know. He's worked among these people for years. Welcome aboard, Stephen.

Cool down

Great article by Andrew Kenny in The Spectator that sums up in three paragraphs my whole problem with the global warming scare:

The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago. Temperatures rose to the ‘Holocene Maximum’ of about 5,000 years ago when it was about 3°F higher than now, dropped in the time of Christ, and then rose to the ‘Mediaeval Climate Optimum’ of about 600 ad to 1100 ad, when temperatures were about 2°F higher than now. This was a golden age for northern European agriculture and led to the rise of Viking civilisation. Greenland, now a frozen wasteland, was then a habitable Viking colony. There were vineyards in the south of England. Then temperatures dropped to ‘The Little Ice Age’ in the 1600s, when the Thames froze over. And they have been rising slowly ever since, although they are still much lower than 1,000 years ago. We are now living in a rather cool period.

What caused these ups and downs of temperature? We do not know. Temperature changes are a fact of nature, and we have no idea if the postulated 0.5°F heating over the last 100 years is caused by man’s activities or is simply part of a natural cycle. What we can say, though, is that if Europe heats up by 2°F it would do it a power of good. We can see this from records of 1,000 years ago. Moreover, increased carbon dioxide makes plants grow more quickly, so improving crops and forests.

The Earth’s climate is immensely complicated, far beyond our present powers of understanding and the calculating powers of modern computers. Changes in phase from ice to water to vapour; cloud formation; convection; ocean currents; winds; changes in the sun; the complicated shapes of the land masses; the ability of the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide — all of these and a thousand other factors operating with small differences over vast masses and distances make it practically impossible for us to make predictions about long-term climate patterns, and perhaps make such predictions inherently impossible. The computer models that the global warmers now use are ludicrously oversimplified, and it is no surprise that they have made one wrong prediction after another.

Exactly. The Earth is probably warming, although we're not sure. Do we know what is going to happen in the future? Don't make me laugh. Is warming that big a deal and can we do anything about it other than hamstring our most successful technologies? My answer is almost certainly no.

Incidentally, I've noticed that one of the big names in the global warming movement, Michael Oppenheimer, is now "Milbank Professor of Geosciences and International Affairs" at Princeton. What an odd combination. Nice sinecure, though.

Engels' new angle

Bad cricket writer and worse social commentator Matthew Engels attempts to curry favor with his hosts over here by listing Fifty ways to love America. Actually, they're things to love about America, but lets not quibble too much with the dear boy, as he seems to be getting the point.

Your round

No I'm not! [Cue hilarity]. Thanks to Iain Coleman for reminding me about this. Oxford's Social Issues Research Center put out a Guide to the British Pub for foreign tourists some time ago. I recommend it if you're interested in visiting a real pub or two if you plan on visiting England. However, be aware that little of this applies to the packed, uncharming, unfriendly pubs that abound in the center of London.

What's the EU for again?

I thought the EU was about internal markets. Why exactly is it, rather than member governments, giving money to "Palestine"? Daddy Warblogs has a depressing tale of the miseducation of children and how the EU funds it.

Ah, diddums

Talk about throwing your rattle out of the pram. This is just plain unsporting.

Blair the Wrecker

Also in the Telegraph, Janet Daley outlines Blair's contempt for the British constitution, fearing that he doesn't understand it:

For the past 200 years or so, the peoples of Europe have had an unpleasant tendency to take to the streets and kill one another when the political arguments became too heated. Finding a systematic way to avoid this was a matter of some urgency if civil order was to be maintained.

Over the same period, while Continental Europe convulsed itself repeatedly in revolution and terror, the British, to their enormous credit, managed to carry on their parliamentary disagreements without violence, and often with lucidity, wit and intellectual dexterity. Adversarial politics should be a source of national pride, not shame.

As for Tony Blair's infatuation with the American presidency, this is a peculiar sort of fantasy for a man who clearly wants more control over events rather than less. The American President may have some very impressive rigamarole of office, but his country's constitution leaves him almost powerless at the hands of an unco-operative Congress.

The will of a prime minister with a large majority such as Mr Blair's is unstoppable. He is subject to none of the checks and balances that constrain the American executive. (But surely Mr Blair knows this. So what is he really after? Just the ego-boosting folderol of a presidency? Or a drastic re-working of the British constitution along the lines of the 18th-century American one? I am in the dark here. There is some evidence for both possibilities.)

This is an admirable summary, and one that anyone struggling to understand the British constitution should read.

The abolition of London

The Telegraph has an interesting case study of what crime is doing to Londoners:

This is not the London I grew up in, and loved. That was a city where I could go alone to school at the age of six, if necessary; a place where you knew you could find a policeman if something scary happened (which it did, from time to time, of course, because the past is not a halcyon dream). Last night, I said to my husband that I wanted to leave London, even though we were both born here. "But we'd still be running away," he said.

And he's right (even though fright tends to make conviction waver). Why should we be forced to leave our home, our friends, our work, the threads that weave our small world together? But how, exactly, do you live in a city where running scared is now an ordinary fact of life?

Incidentally, I wonder when was the last time that Tony Blair - that shiny happy man I voted for five years ago - travelled on the Tube, or his wife parked a car in a place where there might be a nightmare in the shadows.

I think, perhaps, that their city is no longer mine; that my fears are not theirs; and that the common ground that politicians should share with the rest of us has eroded into nothingness. And in that space, perhaps, exists a shifting, suspicious landscape, which some of us call London.

In fact, it's not so much crime as civil disorder. The demoralization of the police and the lack of security guards in car parks are examples of civil decay. It's a much wider problem than muggings. Americans have recognixed this. Blair's "modern" Britain, by contrast, is stuck in the past.

Petards a-hoist

Having seen what the media did to John Major's admittedly below-par administration, to New labour's immense satisfaction, I find myself especially amused by this reaction to the media's hounding of Blair's incompetents.

The hatred of terrorism

Emmanuel Goldstein defends Cherie Blair for her suicide bombing comments (despite earlier saying almost exactly what I said about her). He comments that it is wrong to regard her statement as extremist and that

the very act of blowing oneself up surely should be taken as proof of hopelesness

.

As I've already said on his comments section, I never said that this particular statement was extremist. What I said was that I wouldn't be surprised if she did hold extreme views on the subject.

However, I disagree completely that blowing oneself up -- with the express purpose of killing others, including children -- is a sign of despair. It is a sign of fanaticism and disregard for the value of life. Given that the victims are always intended to be of one particular racial group, it is also a hate crime, if that phrase has any meaning at all.

Saying "Oh, poor dears, you've got to make allowances" is a dreadful thing to say about people who meticulously plan and execute mass murders of other people based on their race.

I wonder, what is the last thing his/her victims see in a homicide bomber's eyes? Is it sadness and despair at what he/she is about to do, or is it wild-eyed fanatical glee tinged with hatred?

I know what my money's on.

Go Team USA!!!

A lot of attention being paid to footie in the Blogosphere and its environs. Instapundit, Nordlinger, TAP, JVL of the Daily Standard and now Clay Waters at TAE have all paid attention in recent days. Incidentally, check out Clay's blog.

Murray in defending New Statesman shocker

Gary Farber -- good to have you back, Gary! -- is slightly unfair to the New Statesman in his comments about another brilliant bit of British journalism. He castigated the NS for the outrageous statement that America is thinking about "regulating business for the first time in 70 years."

Well, that is what they said, but it's not what they meant. A quick look at
the article reveals that it's all about regulating business structure, not about regulations of business practice. I agree with Greenspan that the current dominant CEO paradigm is a bad thing for American business, so I'm pretty happy that people are starting to get concerned (although whether regulation is needed is another matter), but overall this was an example of sloppy rather than ignorant journalism.

Come in, No 10, your time is up

Robert Harris says that By this time next year, Brown will be in No 10. He argues from past performance. As the saying goes, however, past performance is no guarantee of future results. I happen to think that Tone is a lot wilier than Harris gives him credit for. If it comes down to having to do a deal with IDS or letting Brown eclipse him, I think Tony will do a deal with IDS.

Blunkett's Blunders

Michael Gove takes up David Blunkett's record as British Home Secretary (equivalent to the US Attorney General, with a few extra powers) and tears it to shreds. He's spot on in every criticism, especially this one:

He’s proposed a sweeping centralisation of the nation’s constabulary in his Police Reform Bill which would reverse the trend of successful law enforcement policy across the Western world. While the globe’s most effective police forces, such as New York, rely on devolution of responsibility and neighbourhood autonomy to tackle crime, Mr Blunkett wants to second-guess, meddle, interfere and regulate from his desk in Whitehall. These centralising proposals have been roundly denounced in the Lords by an alliance of Tory, Lib Dem, and independent peers. And hardly surprising too. Never mind the illiberal principle behind Mr Blunkett’s plans, just look at the incompetent practice in his running of the Home Office so far. If the man can’t even frame a single new law without cocking it up, how can he be trusted to supervise the enforcement of all those we already have? But those in the grip of Enronitis don’t think, or indeed act, straight. Over-extended yourself dangerously? Then go further still. Initiatives running into the sand? Then rev up the announcement-count even further. We’ve had 55 gimmicks and counting since Mr Blunkett arrived at the Home Office, one for almost every week in the job. And the result? Crime set to go up by 6 per cent, the biggest increase for ten years.

Yes, while the rest of the English-speaking world has either got crime under control or seen it reduced to levels unseen since the 60s, England is set to see crime increase again.

The Government's reaction to all this is to fiddle with the justice system. There's some truth in what Tony says here, but there's a lot of problems too:

[The PM] stressed the central principle: "That above all, the time has come to re-balance the system so that we restore the faith of victims and witnesses, that the court hearing will be fair to all participants and so that we restore their confidence that a criminal will be brought to justice.

"To achieve that shift we need major reform. We need clearer, simpler rules of evidence that trust the common-sense and decency of judge and jury." Mr Blair said cases should be in the best state they could before trial, "by involving the CPS from the outset."

"We need to look again at the double jeopardy rule, in place to prevent people being tried twice for the same crime. For serious offences if there is overwhelming new evidence that implicates the accused again, they should go back to court. That is the case in Germany, Finland and Denmark. If it makes sense there, it should make sense here too."

Mr Blair said the prosecution should be able to challenge a judge's decision to stop a trial on technical grounds in all courts, promised major investment in IT across the system and work to make sentencing help reduce reoffending with better post-release supervision of all those leaving prison.

He also said he wanted more power devolved to local police chief superintendents, "the commanders closest to the problems of each neighbourhood". He said: "Some of our reforms will be controversial. Many rules of evidence and other procedures were introduced to prevent miscarriages of justice, and protections for the defendant must remain.

"But it's a miscarriage of justice when delays and time-wasting deny victims justice for months on end. It's a miscarriage of justice when the police see their hard work and bravery thrown away by courts who let a mugger out on bail for the seventh or eighth time to offend again or when courts don't have the secure places to put people.

"And it's perhaps the biggest miscarriage of justice in today's system when the guilty walk away unpunished. A modernised criminal justice system demands justice for all and we are on course to deliver it."

Miscarriages of justice and soft sentencing are big problems (building more prisons might help in the sentencing area, Tone), but reforming the double jeopardy rule is not the answer. It will make police forces more likely to rush to trial with weaker evidence, confident that they can try again later. Some people will almost certainly be persecuted unjustly because of it.

Moreover, reoffending may be an artifact of bad prisons policy. If you don't rehabilitate criminals, of course they're likely to reoffend. That happens over here too, despite our better sentencing policies.

Returning to Double Jeopardy, my central rule for things like this is to ask whether it would be unconstitutional in the US. If it would be, then it's normally going to be a pretty big mistake.

Oh, Cherie!

Tony Blair's wife has apologized after saying young Palestinians had no hope but to blow themselves up. Her father, a veteran left-winger, has been outspoken in the past -- check out these comments on the monarchy -- so it's not too much of a stretch to think that she might hold some extreme views. Once again, the Blairs seem to have been wongfooted by the timing of an outside event. Their golden touch seems to be turning to brass.

What the ... !!??

I thought I'd grown used to the surprises in this World Cup. But this is the biggest one of the lot. Ye Gods!

My predictions aren't looking very good now, are they?

PS This summary of World Cup tactics is looking increasingly accurate.

Has the Eurocent dropped?

Dangerous or welcome? According to this EUobserver article, a group of young Europeans have realized that the EU's current direction is unsustainable:

The authors of the document "Vision Europe 2020 - Reinventing Europe 2005-2020" are convinced there are now only two possible choices for Europe: The one they present or an anti-democratic and xenophobic national-Europeanism leading to a certain “death of European integration as a historic project.”

They propose abolishing the European Commission -- huzzah! -- but want to replace it with a European Government -- uh oh! -- with a President elected by "his/her peers" -- double uh oh! -- and such things as a European criminal police force -- aaaarrgghhh!!!

I think I have to prefer the current situation, which is destined to collapse, to this attempt to produce what would be a democratic Europe, but one in which Britain would shrivel up and die as the different nation it has been for so many hundreds of years. It is better to face blinkered opponents than clever ones like these Europe2020 types...

Flags, Hume and Holidays

In some sort of Jungian synchronicity with my earlier posts, I now read Mick Hume in The Times about what the English flag means today. He says that this isn't about resurgent patriotism, but then says that it's about a search for a genuine collective experience. Err, yes, of patriotism, if they knew what it really meant. That's borne out by this bit in the final paragraph:

St George’s flag flies high this week, but in a survey, 83 per cent of English people did not know the date of St George’s Day. Nearly 70 per cent, however, wanted a Bank Holiday whenever it was.

Astonishing. They want to be patriotic, but can't be, because they haven't been told what it means. If the English people were actually educated about their culture and history, then they would be patriotic, and rightly so. But they'd also realise what was being done to them. Princes and parliaments would need to tremble on that day.

Madam, I'm Adams

The trenchant John Adams quote on the left comes from the marvellous FoundingFathers.info -- Quotations from the Founding Fathers. You can send people virtual postcards of the Bill of Rights, amongst other things. Sound.

Hume on Understanding the Activists

And Mick Hume has a great article on the Palestinian Question as a tool of the anti-globalizers in the New Statesman too. He concludes:

Western society is infected by a powerful sense of self-loathing and a rejection of its political, social and economic achievements. It was this spirit of self-loathing that led some, of the left and right alike, to suggest that America got what it deserved on 11 September. Those sentiments are no more progressive when aimed against Israel as a symbol of the west than when they are directed in irrational campaigns against GM crops and the literature of Dead White Males.

We may feel solidarity with the Palestinians, but that is no reason to endorse the anti-imperialism of fools. Populist anti-Israeli rhetoric is cheap, but it offers no solutions - especially when it ends with a demand for even more western intervention in the affairs of the Middle East. The long-suffering peoples of the region deserve better than to be used by those looking for somewhere convenient to strike sanctimonious poses.

Interesting that he quotes Tariq Ali, Christopher Hitchens' old Oxford muckah and extreme left-winger, in support of this argument. We've heard it before from Hume, but to hear it in the pages of the New Statesman gives me hope that the internal struggle on the left is being won by the forces of sense.

New Statesman, new sense?

The New Statesman's leader this week displays a rare grasp of common sense for that magazine. In decrying central Government's micromanagement of schools it betrays the truly liberal roots of its schizophrenic worldview. I do not disagree with a word of this conclusion:

Stripped of the capacity to manipulate the economy - by the global markets and the rules of the European Union - politicians can't keep their hands off the schools. They should relax the pressure, allow education to breathe again and let children enjoy childhood again.

I wonder if they could apply this argument to other areas where the NS regularly argues in favor of government intervention. Well, they could. But they won't.

Scapegoats and terrorists

Thanks to Rand Simberg and the JunkYard Blog for this one. There is a striking resemblance between Jose Padilla and "John Doe #2", the missing link in the Oklahoma Bombing case. Who Is John Doe No. 2? sets out the arguments and implications. At the moment, I'd rank this as a plausible conspiracy theory. If it's true, then those who decided to go after militias as the enemy really dropped the ball. As someone once said, big time.

Column alert

My latest Recent Research Suggests... column for UPI is up. It's not my best, although I think the recidivism points are important.

Energize!

Watch for all sorts of Star Trek references after what the BBC calls an Australian teleport breakthrough. This isn't Star Trek-style transporting, though. See this STATS article from '98 for a brief rundown of the problems (actually, the Beeb report covers it quite well too).

Bring on the samba boys

So it's Brazil vs England on Friday. Given our convincing performance on Saturday, our rock-solid central defence and the fact that Brazil haven't really played a decent team yet (Costa Rica had a ton of chances against them, and Belgium were very unlucky to have that goal disallowed and not go 1-0 up), I think England could very well win the match and advance to the semis for the first time since that heartbreaking loss to Germany at Italia 90.

Meanwhile, I think the USA stand a good chance of beating a below-par German side after their trouncing of Mexico. The USA are a lot better than most Europeans think, but not as good as they think they are. Nevertheless, they are brimming with self-confidence. They'll give Germany a good game.

The only downside for the Anglosphere in the footie world this weekend was Ireland losing on penalties after deserving to win their game against Spain. Typically, it was Sunderland's Kevin Kilbane who missed the penalty that essentially lost the game in the shoot-out. If West Brom want him back, let them have him...

Sorry for that little parochial outburst. Anyway, my predictions for the semis are:

USA vs Italy and

England vs Japan.

Italy to beat England on penalties in the final...

Happy Belated Birthday, Big Charter

I missed it on Saturday, but Jay Manifold celebrates the 786th birthday of the Magna Carta over on A Voyage To Arcturus. A few months ago I asked people what new public holidays they would want the UK to introduce to replace the anodyne "Bank Holidays." A few said "Magna Carta Day." Jolly good. Today should be a public holiday in the UK.