PM Refuses To Meet Fantasists.

One thing that Cameron has done which I do approve of, is publicly refuse to meet a quartet of retarded US Senators who want an "investigation" into whether BP was involved in the decision to release the Lockerbie bomber last year.

Given that there is a complete lack of evidence to suggest such a conspiracy it is clear that the Senators are indulging in irresponsible demagoguery to capitalise on BP's (deserved) unpopularity over the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico the Senators should be considered to be on a par with truthers, birthers and people who insist the moon landings were faked.

Update: As Matthew points out in the comments, David Cameron has now caved and is going to meet the tinfoil hat wearing senators. So reverse everything I just wrote about Dave.

The Big Society

I have almost no idea what it is or whether it is a good thing, so if you do know what it's about do let me know.

Hours Of Fun

Test your approximate number sense here. Supposedly this tests your innate ability for mathematics rather than what you've learned.

Abolish The Monarchy

As a right of centre individual I'm supposed to support the monarchy I guess, however the only reasons I can think of for keeping it are:

1. The Queen is pretty good, and Prince Phillip is awesome.
2. It provides a link to the Commonwealth.
3. It really pisses off dreary class warriors who make up most of the republican movement.

Those aren't strong reasons though. When I look at the downsides- the inevitability of a buffoon like Prince Charles becoming King, the lack of accountability, the minor & ex royals who milk their connections, the endless fodder to the tabloids and the democratic deficit- I just think those seem stronger than the positives.

We've had a republic before during the protectorate so it wouldn't be a wholly revolutionary concept.

Interview Of The Day

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via

Labour Leadership

Who I want to win: Ed Balls, a divisive figure who will keep Labour on the margins.

Who should win: David Miliband, he's a bit weird and has a habit of speaking in meaningless generalities but he seems determined to fight on the centre ground rather than appealing to the base.

Who will win: Ed Miliband, he will hoover up the second preferences from any other candidate.

Who should have stood: Alastair Darling, he is a much more substantive figure than any of the candidates. The economic woes were largely the result of his predecessor as Chancellor and he appears to be an honourable individual (resisted pressure from Brown & Balls to cook the books according to Mandleson's memoirs) apart from a bit of flipping.

Putin: Still Quite Gay

Going on a date with a Hollywood bachelor to watch men getting sweaty. Yep he's still gay.

Irony Bypass

A newspaper is outraged over companies trying to exploit public interest in Raoul Moat to make money.

According to a google news search the paper in question, the Daily Mail, has run 62 stories about the pathetic inadequate in the last 4 days.

'Craven, Complacent, Conceited & Catastrophic'

The coalition's commitment to reducing prison numbers has been presented as being something surprising and out of character for a Tory dominated government. However this is only because people make the mistake of believing what the Tory's say rather than traditionally do (with the notable exception of Michael Howard). Stephen Pollard reminds Telegraph readers of one of Margaret Thatcher's Home Secretaries:

One only needs to turn the clock back a few years to the tenure as home secretary of one of the most craven, complacent, conceited and catastrophic public figures of recent years: Douglas Hurd. As home secretary he presided over record crime increases, allowing more criminals to roam the streets than any of his predecessors and ruling out any notion of reducing crime. Lord Hurd's philosophy was Conservative penal tradition at its worst: that the purpose of policy was to stem the increase in crime. The thought of reducing it was laughed out of court.

No liberal penal idea was too much; any idea of punishment didn't bear contemplation. As home secretary, from 1985 to October 1989, Lord Hurd set out to reduce the prison population. The consequence was a rapid increase in crime. In 1985 there were 46,800 prisoners, rising to 50,000 in 1988 as judges responded to the consequent crime wave. But rather than back the judges, he cut the prison population so that it fell to 45,600 soon after he left. Police-recorded crime increased from 3.6 million in 1985 to 4.5 million in 1990. Yet even today he still bangs the drum for reducing prison numbers as chairman of the Prison Reform Trust.

When Labour claimed that a Tory government would take us back to the 1980s I was delighted, unfortunately the one aspect of the Thatcher government that the coalition seem to want to emulate is their strategy on crime, where the brilliant idea of not locking up convicted criminals led to a surge in offending.

Ken Clarke attributes the fall in crime from the early 1990s to his success as Chancellor rather than Howard's tenure as Home Secretary. However it is noticeable that the recent recession saw a drastic fall in the homicide rate to its lowest point for almost 20 years so it isn't really clear cut that economic growth reduces crime.

Taxing Issues

Can't really argue with this, the greed and avarice of the British taxman is costing this country the opportunity to host major events because our courts have quite bizarrely allowed a system to evolve where the inland revenue charge people on their global endorsement income, to the point where they can end paying more than 100% of their UK earnings in tax.

I don't see how it can possibly be enforceable though, what obligation would a foreign athlete have to provide the Inland Revenue with their financial details?

Would they start asking for international sports stars to be extradited to face trial if they don't disclose their total earnings?

Go Watch

Those lovely people at Channel 4 put some of their old programmes on YouTube where they can be watched for free. This includes the awesome Garth Marenghi's Dark Place, which is one of the best TV comedies of the last decade but which wasn't really as popular as it should have been. So go an watch it:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3
Episode 4
Episode 5
Episode 6.

If you haven't seen it then go and do so now.

I said "NOW!".

MILF!!

Sorry.

Break Up The School Year.

I was reading something about the effect of being born at the right time of year has on a child's chances of becoming a professional footballer- my view is that the evidence for such an effect is pretty strong even if the biggest populariser of the idea, Steve Levitt, probably bungled the data by lumping together a bunch of countries where the cut off date for school is at different points in the calender.

Anyway sport is trivial in the grand scheme of things so that isn't too important, except for the fact that it reveals a more important underlying truth- that being born later in the school year hinders children's development more generally:

Research by the Institute for Fiscal Studies two years ago found only 53% of girls and 47% of boys born in August reached the expected educational level at age seven in state primary schools in England, compared with 80% and 70% of those born in September.

So if we want to increase standards in schools and help all pupils achieve their potential, why not split the school year up? Instead of each class consisting of a cohort born within a 12 month period, why not have them born within a 6 month period? It might be more expensive, although only for smaller schools, and it would probably require a rejigging of the whole school calender, but there isn't any reason that should be set in stone. The expense may be offset though by having fewer behavioural difficulties and needing less in the way of additional assistance for late born children as they will be less likely to be misdiagnosed as having special needs.

Plus we could end up with a better football team!

We're Doomed- Somali Terrorism Edition

I've blogged almost incessantly about the terrorist threat posed by Somalia. Actually I wrote one post 4 years ago predicting that it would be a problem but even so I believe that I was right and the terrorist attacks in Uganda by Somalian Islamists would appear to bear that out.

More serious from our point of view is that, as Ed West points out, if Somalian militias are going to strike outside our borders then we have a problem. You can argue that the solution is to simply stay out of Somalia and therefore not provoke them but with the piracy and harbouring of Al Qaeda suspects that may not be possible.

The most prominent Somali exile in the West, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has repeatedly stated that the clash between modernity and traditional values keeps that community isolated and that we, the West, have to work to assert the value of our own values and not go in for the multicultural hogwash of pretending that all cultures are equal and need to be conserved. Otherwise the social and economic statistics will continue to tell a dsimal story and will fuel terrorism.

Polanski Let Off

A court in Switzerland has decided that film director/ child rapist Roman Polanski will not be extradited to the United States. At least the whole affair has lifted the lid on how many in both politics and the entertainment industry will tolerate almost any behaviour provided that it is done by someone that is a member of their tribe.

Profile In Courage- Hain On Hain

Peter Hain pays a heartfelt, generous and emotional tribute to the courage of Peter Hain, here. It's hard to suppress a tear:

Even worse, the leader of the demonstrations was "one of their own", the son of white South African parents who had been jailed, banned then forced into exile, a teenage activist named Hain.

Noble Lies

One of the staples of US feminism is the Superbowl violence myth, this is the claim that during the Superbowl there is a surge in domestic violence cases of around 40%. This is completely untrue and has zero basis in fact. Which is why it is disappointing to see that our own police forces have been promoting something similar- the World Cup domestic violence myth, something they also peddled 4 years ago.

Christina Hoff Summers writes:

Could the World Cup Abuse Nightmare be a copycat fraud?

“A stunt based on misleading figures,” is the verdict of BBC legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg and producer Wesley Stephenson. They recently investigated the alleged link between the televised World Cup games and violence in the home for their weekly program Law in Action. On June 22 — day twelve of the 2010 World Cup — they aired the story. It included an interview with a prominent Cambridge University statistician, Sheila Bird, whom they had asked to review the Home Office study and its finding of a 30 percent increase in domestic abuse. She found it to be so amateurish and riddled with flaws that it could not be taken seriously. The 30 percent claim was based on a cherry-picked sample of police districts; it failed to correct for seasonal differences and essentially ignored match days that showed little or no increase in domestic violence.

There's a very telling quote that says so much about how our modern police forces work:

The motives behind the British scare are harder to fathom. It was not the work of feminist hard-liners but rather of a network of government bureaucrats, social-service workers, police personnel, and public officials — including the new home secretary, Theresa May. History offers many examples of depraved societies pretending they are better than they really are. England, an enlightened and humane country, is perversely fascinated by stories that falsely depict its citizens as corrupt and degenerate. Those behind the exaggerated crisis are not going to recant in the face of mere facts. When the BBC investigators presented Carmel Napier, the deputy chief constable of Gwent, with the evidence that the study she and her colleagues were promoting was specious, she replied: “If it has saved lives, then it is worth it.”

The attitude of Carmel Napier- that what is expedient is preferable to what is true- is one of the reasons behind policing disasters like the shooting of Jean Charles De Menezes or the fatal beating of a passerby at the G20 summit, when the police were more interested in spinning a yarn than establishing the facts.

As the article points out, it probably doesn't save lives anyway, seeing as it encourages victims to blame their plight on an external factor like the World Cup rather than being in a poisonous relationship with a thug.

Failing Upwards

The foster carer who was struck off for "allowing" the 16 year old girl in her care to convert from Islam to Christianity has won her appeal against the decision. This is of course good news as it was a disgraceful decision by Gateshead Council in the first place- the idea that state bodies should consider it their duty to uphold religious strictures against apostasy is extraordinary- but this is one of the most depressing sentences you will see:

Gateshead’s decision was quashed by a court in Leeds last week, prompting criticism of the former head of its children’s services, Maggie Atkinson, who is now Children’s Commissioner for England.

The sort of people responsible for this kind of thing aren't simply a few bad apples, they are the people who are so respected in their field that they get promoted to national roles where they can influence policy.

The carer isn't the only victim in all this, they actually took another child whom she was caring for back into care, which given the outcomes for children in care is tantamount to child abuse, yet the person responsible for this is now the "Children's Commissioner" supposedly upholding the interests of children.