Good Friday

On Good Friday, one of the baby bishops asked:

"Daddy, why is it called Good Friday? It wasn't a very good day for Jesus, was it?"

So why is it called Good Friday? 

Compulsory education

It's sometimes said that the nanny state and the welfare state are two sides of the same coin. Because the state, via the taxpayer, funds healthcare, it is said to be reasonable for government to dictate our diets and exercise regime.  A similar sort of argument applies to the government's plans to extend the school leaving age for those who have no job to go to, which have so irked Fabian Tassano.

Fabian seems absolutely clear on this issue - to his mind it is abhorrent and wrong for the state to dictate to people in this way. But to me the answer to the question of whether government should dictate school leaving ages is not an obvious one. If the taxpayer is to support these people, is it not right that they should also demand that the recipients of this largesse should actually do something useful with the money - like study?

Don't get me wrong - if I were running the country the taxpayer wouldn't be supporting these people at all. It's just to say that if I am forced to pay to feed someone who can't or won't support themselves, should I be fighting for their right to sit on their backsides doing nothing?

I don't mean to say that Fabian is wrong. Just that I need convincing that he's right. 

Book reviews

I've added a page of book reviews to the site. There's a link in the navigation bar. There's a couple of titles there now, and I'll add to the list from time to time.

Organic food

One thing I've never understood about organic food: why is putting safety-tested chemicals on food bad, but putting raw animal faeces on it good?

Ever had the feeling you're being watched?

Nigel Farndale, writing in the Sunday Telegraph, relates the story of a friend who was paid a visit by the local constabulary.

His mother rang to tell him that he had left the barrel of a shotgun - only the barrel - out of the cabinet. He said he would pop over next day to put it back. Before he could, the police arrived at the house and said they had reason to believe that there was a gun on the premises that was not under lock and key. The only way they could have known this was by intercepting his call.

Why, Farndale asks, are the police monitoring his friend's every call? The unwritten implication is that the police have got better things to do with their time than sit and listen in to the telephone conversations of taxi firm owners in rural Nowheresville. Somehow though, I think things have moved on and there is no need for policemen to sit listening in to the minutiae of school runs in the sticks. I'm sure I read somewhere that software now exists that will automatically monitor telephone conversations for key words and phrases like "gun", "get the" and "shove it up Blair's bottom". So it's much more likely that every telephone conversation of every gun owner is being monitored by a computer, or worse, that every telephone conversation in the country is routinely checked.

Perhaps somebody braver than me would like to do a test: ring a pal, and tell him you'd like him to drop the Uzi round in the morning. If the police break the door down shortly afterwards then we know something's amiss. Any volunteers?

Read the whole thing

If you have been overwhelmed by the wave of apocalyptic nonsense from the global warming lobby in recent days, go and read this at Climate Audit.

In fact, go and read it anyway. 

Shall we try something different?

Another day, another murder.

And another. There's more too. We are beset by violence. I've listed a few of the other headlines from the BBC England page below:

Woman quizzed over stab death
Two held after woman stabbed
Man charged over fatal stabbing
Gunshots fired at car and house
Woman stabbed by intruder
Body of man found in garden
Man arrested after fire at flats
Man suffers serious head injuries 

Anyone would think it was a good day to bury bad news.

If anyone from the metropolitan elite can rouse themselves sufficiently, we'll probably get the calls for tighter laws and fiercer punishments (these just days after announcing that we were going to have to put fewer people in prison). Lots of handwringing too, if experience is anything to go by, and if they get out of bed the right side, the powers that be might even declare knife or firearms amnesties which are at least good for a photocall.

The level of violent crime is now getting to the stage where anyone who is really thinking about the policy implications has to be asking themselves if we are barking up the right tree. We have had progressively tighter controls over arms for nearly a hundred years. It would be nice if we could point at any significant falls in violent crime to accompany these, but we can't. At every step of the way the numbers have just kept rising.

Can anyone really conclude from this that further laws will work? Where is the evidence? Of course there isn't any. Believing in legislation as the answer to violent crime is a matter of convenience for politicians, who find it gives them the appearance of activity. For others it's a religious belief engendered by the "yuk" factor they feel for weaponry. They have no choice but to back the politicians.

These are not rational approaches to the issue.

How about something completely different? How about repealing all the firearms laws, and take us back to the situation at the start of the twentieth century, when firearms were available to anyone who wanted them? We can exclude convicted criminals and minors from this, of course, but in essence everyone can have a gun.

Why should this work in theory? The answer is that the economic incentives for the criminal are dramatically changed. Attempting to steal someone's wallet changes from a "dead cert" option for the bad guy armed with a knife, into one of potential death. He can no longer know that he has the "military" advantage over his intended victim. And his attempted mugging could lead to his being killed, which fundamentally alters the risk/reward calculation he makes before his attack. Would he still mug someone if he risked death to do so? 

What then would be the practical implications? Would we end up with a bloodbath, as so many people argue? The evidence from America is strongly against this. Most US states now have laws allowing, and in many cases, requiring issue of concealed carry firearms permits. As each state has liberalised its laws, a little experiment has been performed to allow us to test the theory.

The results are hotly disputed, but in some ways it's actually rather surprising that this is the case. According to this page (which I've chosen because it looks reasonably neutral) the major study on this issue by Lott & Mustard, which found that relaxing the firearms laws reduced crime. Their study was critiqued by Black & Nagin who argued that Lott & Mustard couldn't support their findings. What Black and Nagin didn't say, however,  was that Lott & Mustard's figures indicated that looser laws raised crime.

So it looks as if at worst, liberalised firearms laws make little difference. Certainly, they don't seem to lead inexorably to bloodbaths and carnage.

This being the case, our worst fears about what would happen if our neighbours started to carry guns appear to be unfounded. We have made an inanimate object into a bogeyman and we torture ourselves about what might happen if things were to change. We should recognise this as irrational, and try to deal with the question purely by reason. We shoudn't fear trying something different.

It might just work. 

Dirty dancing

There's an eye-opening post over at The Language Business. The British Council has been spending lavishly on subsidies to the Akram Khan Dance Company. Two of the directors of the British Council are, coincidentally, also directors of Akram Khan.

How convenient. 

Quote of the day

Scottish Conservatives

The suggestion that the Conservatives should split off the Scottish end of the party has been doing the rounds of the blogs recently. There's probably nothing in the story, which has the ring of an off the cuff comment which has been blown out of all proportion. This doesn't stop it being an interesting idea though. The Scottish end of the party is something of an embarrassment for the rest of the Conservatives - a constant reminder that they are almost completely impotent north of the border. The Scottish Conservatives are probably equally embarrassed by the UK party, who play the part of an all-purpose bogeyman for the other Scottish parties, to be wheeled out to frighten the children with stories of the Thatcherite terror.

But if we just stand back and look at this for a minute, what is this actually going to achieve? Are the Scottish people suddenly going to take up free markets and small government when they listen to an Edinburgh-based Conservative party? Of course they're not. The Scottish people are wholly wedded to the idea of socialism. They think that free markets are something that happen in England. It's just not done up here. That's why we have five parties (Labour, SNP, LibDems, Green, SSP) offering more or less socialist platforms and the Conservatives who might as well be standing on a platform of genital warts for all.

Scotland, the country, needs to be cut free. Then it can go through the pain that will cure it of its delusion. Try socialism. Try it again. Then try it some more, and if that doesn't work then keep on trying it just a few more times. The turmoil and despair that this will create will act as a kind of mask so that when a radical new free market approach is announced, nobody will recall that a long-forgotten party called the Conservatives were advocating just such a policy many years before, not that they were widely reviled for it by the very people who now declared it the road to redemption.

By 'eck

Dinner in the garden. At the start of April. In Scotland.

Global warming isn't half great, innit? 

Guido & White

I've just watched the studio discussion between Guido and Michael White, several days after everyone else. Something Michael White said stood out to me as being a little odd. He was talking about Prescott's little problems last year and said:

If he's such a villain, how come we've just voted against ... against there being a casino in Manchester.

Firstly, "we've just voted...". Who's we? Labour? Is Michael White openly aligning himself with Labour? That would kind of prove Guido's point wouldn't it - that the press are too close to the politicians? Or does he mean the House of Lords? He's not actually been ennobled yet despite all his brown-nosing editorials, but perhaps he knows something we don't.

Either way he doesn't obviously give the impression of being a fearless independent journalist.

More public choice theory in action

From the Perthshire Advertiser we learn that councils are bound by law to deal with flood risks by creation of hard flood defences. It's illegal to use natural landscape features to absorb floodwaters.

Commenting on the Minister’s response to his question, [Green MSP Mark] Ruskell said: “The existing flooding legislation from 1961 locks us into building expensive hard defences, which as we have seen recently with the Milnathort flood are not always effective.

Cui bono?

Surely the only beneficiaries of this legislation would have been the building companies and the politicians they sponsor. 

Climate science is not sound science

It's pretty much fundamental that scientific results have to be reproducible in order to be accepted as valid. You have to describe exactly what you did, in sufficient detail for somebody else to be able to reproduce what you say you did. If they can't, and you can't explain  where they went wrong, then the result will be written off as erroneous or even fraudulent.

For many specialisms, statistical manipulation is a normal and necessary part of the  scientific process. In order for the results to be replicated, a number of things are necessary, but chiefly:

• the raw data
• how this was selected
• the statistical manipulations performed

Now obviously, for most studies, the amount of data is too large to reproduce in the printed journal. Because of this many journals try to enforce data availability in their conditions of acceptance for a journal submission. There seem to be two main approaches taken. The "strong" approach is that the data must be available in an online archive at the time of publication. The "weak" approach is a requirement that data is made freely available on request.

It's perhaps surprising that Nature, the premier science journal in the UK if not the world, adopts the weak approach. Their data availability policy is here:

An inherent principle of publication is that others should be able to replicate and build upon the authors' published claims. Therefore, a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols available to readers promptly on request.Any restrictions on the availability of materials or information must be disclosed at the time of submission of the manuscript, and the methods section of the manuscript itself should include details of how materials and information may be obtained, including any restrictions that may apply.

Compare this to the Journal of Applied Econometrics: 

Authors of accepted papers are expected to deposit in electronic form a complete set of data used onto the Journal's Data Archive, unless they are confidential. In cases where there are restrictions on the dissemination of the data, the responsibility of obtaining the required permission to use the data rests with the interested investigator and not with the author.

Well, so what? 

It matters because the rules are being flouted by scientists - particularly climate scientists - and the journals are struggling to enforce them. Requests for data are being ignored or met by delay and obfuscation. This is unacceptable, particularly for public funded scientists.  Steve McIntyre details just a few of the problems he has encountered in this comment:

[I]f the data is not archived at the time of publication, the authors will typically move on to other things and there is no guarantee that the data will ever archived. Lonnie Thompson had never archived any data from his Himalayan sites, some taken in 1987, until I started raising the issue in 2004 and then archived the least conceivable information. The time when the data is most useful is when you read the article. I like to see what actual data looks like before it's massaged and the best time to do this is when you read the article. So the data should be online contemporary with publication rather than a year later when you may or may not still be interested int he file.

As it happens, many of [dendrochronologist Rob Wilson’s] associates aren’t very prompt about archiving data. None of Luckman’s data is archived; Rob’s ICefields and B.C. data done with Luckman are not archived, other than the reconstruction. None of Esper’s data from Tian Shan is archived. Esper refused to provide data except through repeated requests through Science and even after over 3 years of effort, the data provision is still not quite complete.

This situation stinks, and it may well eventually develop into a full-fledged scandal. No science which is not capable of reproduction should be permitted in the IPCC process, and that means the IPCC should insist that data and methods are fully disclosed, before the paper is considered.

To my mind it's the journals who must take the primary responsibility for putting it right though. If the Journal of Applied Econometrics is able to insist on concurrent data archiving, then there is absolutely no reason why other disciplines cannot insist too. There is certainly no excuse for Nature, whose scientific cachet is so great that they reject 90% of submitted manuscripts, nor indeed for Science.

To my mind the journals who fail to insist on full concurrent disclosure are risking their reputations. If one of these articles is later found to be wrong, or even fraudulent, the journal will certainly get egg on its face. By insisting on concurrent disclosure they will at least concentrate the minds of the authors on ensuring that their data and methodology are flawless.

Let's hope they recognise this and do something about it.

Love your children

Every child at my elder son's nursery has received a leaflet from the Scottish Children's Commissioner or somesuch. This masterpiece of state-sponsored tosh is to be passed on to their parents. It's a remarkable document. Try this for example:

Love your children 

• Be affectionate, hug and kiss them
• Tell them good things about themselves and others
• They will feel more secure and learn how to treat others in a positive way
  

Who would have guessed it? I am now a new man and am now fully resolved to love my children. (I'm not sure about all that kissing though. Sounds most unhygienic). Or how about this:

Weapons are dangerous!

• Never allow your children near weapons
• Explain the dangers and consequences of using or carrying weapons

That puts paid to the baby's shotgun then. He will be disappointed.

The Scottish Children's Commissioner costs approximately £1 million every year. In their annual report we learn that some of this largesse has been lavished on:

development of the SCCYP website as a major interactive tool for communicating with children and young people.

And sure enough,  we find that the website has made it possible for small Scottish children to send poems and stories to their friendly neighbourhood bureaucrats. So far there have been two poems sent in, one called Fair Freedom and the other "Racist???". Unfortunately nobody has managed to send in any stories yet. Perhaps they're all busy on the discussion boards?

But there is no sign of Scottish schoolchildren flocking there either - the discussion board has now reached the sum total of eleven threads, on subjects as diverse as smacking and the minimum wage.

"Send in your suggestions", invites the SCCYP. Perhaps readers would like to oblige.