I used to be a matron but as a patient I was treated worse than an animal. That was one of the headlines in yesterday's Sun. I do mean headlines, too. Jean Emblen's account was not top story but it was right up there among the footballers' wives. The editor of the Sun thought the readers would go for a story criticising nurses.

When did that happen? When I was a kid everyone was all soppy over nurses. It was considered quite shocking when a 1970s BBC soap opera called, tellingly, Angels depicted them as less than angelic.

We can't simply attribute this loss in esteem to the NHS. For round about the first half century of the existence of the National Health Service, nurses continued to be loved by all (it is only fair to say there are plenty of people, including those with recent experience of the NHS, for whom that has not changed; a huge amount depends on the individual hospital). So what has caused it? Does it reflect reality - are nurses really not as good as they used to be - or is it just fashion, a last ripple from the wave that knocked politicians over in the 1960s and teachers in the 1970s?

One possible explanation is that nurses are no longer paid that badly. There is nothing like low pay for calling forth guilty affection. Once the pay improved people no longer felt they needed to make up the shortfall with love.

However my impression is that the downward trend on the nurse popularity graph best tracks the increasing moves for the nursing profession to become more... professional. It's all "nurse practitioners" and degrees these days, and being more like doctors. No one ever had any trouble hating doctors, once the thermometer went down. People think that nurses these days think themselves too grand to change a bedpan.

Is this charge fair? Lucky me: I don't know. You tell me. All I can say is that it would not surprise me if there was a tendency for both human contact and the dirty but necessary jobs to be de-emphasised in modern nursing, and maybe I can find a way to blame the NHS after all. It is what I would expect to see from an old command economy. Compared to most command economies, the NHS in its early years had a huge amount going for it: a sense of mission was in its collective blood. But as time as passed the blood has thinned, or done something else old and dry and sad that I lack the medical knowledge to build into my metaphor. (The blood of armies dries up in the same way, but then a war comes along and de-mummifies them. Or replaces them. ) An old and somewhat ossified organisation instinctively prefers its staff to have measurable, academic and relatively high status skills rather than unquantifiable, physical and and traditionally low-status ones. But no one was ever loved for academic skills.

In the US, I learn, there has been a similar move from plain old nurses to nurse practitioners, but if the American equivalent of the Sun has started on the anti-nurse stories then I had not heard about it. This might be because US healthcare is, for the moment, not provided by the taxpayer. At least, a lot of it is, but not so visibly. My impression is that the extravagant love for nurses in the past and the extravagant annoyance with them now are both British phenomena.

Christ but I hate the BBC. This morning - probably out of some masochistic urge - I had the BBC Breakfast News channel on. I suppose my only defence is that I wanted to see those goals that England had contrived to score against that footballing colossus, Switzerland. Anyway, one item that came up was the issue of a proposed nationwide minimum drinking price for booze. There is already one in Scotland . There is a very high chance that such a minimum price, which flagrantly breaches the rights of sellers to flog their stuff at whatever price they think fit, will come into law.

Now it is no surprise, really, that the BBC tends to act as unwitting or even witting voice of government-favoured conventional wisdom, but the interviewer on this morning's show who was giving a representative of the alcohol retailing industry a hard time was particularly bad. This is the guy I mean, by the name of Simon Jack. His biography states he worked as a decade as an investment banker, so presumably the BBC thinks this gives him a terrific insight into the world of business. Well, I don't know about that - it may be that if this guy was any good at that job he'd be still working in the financial sector and earning zillions. Or maybe he realised that his heart was not in it and preferred to act as early-morning interrogator of businesses instead. This character seriously gets up my nose: a lot of his questioning is hectoring and demogogic, with questions such as: "But how can you defend your profit margins, Mr Evil Banker?"

This morning, he asked about how can the booze industry justify selling product at below cost of production. Surely, he said, this is designed to entice us poor moppets into buying lots of liquor and drinking ourselves into a stupor? Well, if Mr Jack had been awake during his college days while studying some economics, he'd realise that firms routinely sell some items at such cheap prices, even below production costs, to encourage a new market, whether it be for booze, cars or whatever. Free samples and all that. But obviously such pricing policies could not occur indefinitely: firms wish to make a profit. It was particularly weak for the industry lobby man not to state as much, and to assert that the industry is entitled to set its prices how it wants, and that anyway, why should not people be able to buy at prices mutually agreeable to them and the sellers - the vast majority of alcohol consumers do not turn into George Best or Oliver Reed and do not vomit over the pavement. But of course the BBC now endlessly repeats the charge that cheap drink is turning our city centres into beery nightmares and therefore, the rest of us should have to pay more for whatever is deemed to be causing the problem.

The BBC is leading the way as a news organisation that constantly hammers the booze industry, just as, in times past, happened to the tobacco industry. And the BBC Breakfast show, with its mix of hard news and what is a lot of fluffy, lifestyle features with lots of chats on the sofa, is a particularly persistent channel for this sort of temperance advocacy. In some ways, with its red sofas and pretend air of jollity in the morning, it is far more dangerous in this regard than snarling Jeremy Paxman in the evenings. At least you can usually switch channels to a late-night movie and watch Clint or whoever blowing bad people to glory.

A couple of further cricket games between England and Pakistan have now happened. In the first of these, Pakistan surrendered a winning position. Sound familiar? It should. In the second, they never got to a winning position in the first place. England were efficient in both games. I refuse to provide links to mere match reports. Did the Pakistanis lose because they were paid to, or is it merely that they are now utterly demoralised? Probably the latter, but given that one can't now be sure it is hard to care. That Pakistan's cricket bosses had to be bullied into suspending the players revealed as having cheated hasn't helped. Ijaz Butt in particular looks far more like part of the problem that part of any solution.

I'm reading this kind of reaction quite a lot, the one about being shocked, shocked. As in not actually very shocked at all. But the importance of what just happened is not that cricket fans now strongly suspect Pakistan's cricketers of cheating, but that we now know it. The cheaters are still protesting their innocence, and the wheels of justice will, as is proper, grind slowly on, but the market (i.e. the fans) is already now speaking, loud and clear. Guilty:

Stewart Regan, chief executive of Yorkshire County Cricket Club, said: "The phones haven't stopped ringing from people wanting to vent their fury and ask whether they can get refunds.

"I've fielded several calls and we've had numerous enquiries about cancelling tickets. From the club's point of view we can't give refunds simply because of a personal opinion about what's gone on, no matter how much we might agree with them."

"Might" agree. Hah. Now I'm watching the TV highlights of the game earlier this evening. The crowd is tiny, heavily outnumbered by empty seats. Pakistan cricket will not soon be forgiven by the English county clubs now caught up in this mess. They will want someone's blood, and since they cannot expect much satisfaction from Pakistan itself any time soon, they will probably look closer to home.

They won't have far to look. As Michael Jennings said in a comment on this:

Seriously, the judgment of Lord's and the ECB looks consistently bad. Somehow they missed getting properly involved in the IPL and ended up doing a deal with Sir Allen Stanford because they needed the money, and they then did this deal with Pakistan (who were unable to play games at home because terrorists attempted to kill the last foreign team that went there, and who India wanted nothing to do with) because they had empty stadiums and needed someone to play in them. Meanwhile, they were unable to do such things as cooperate sufficiently with the IPL so that English sides can participate in the Champions League. They seem to have made the wrong choice every time.

Indeed they do. Meanwhile, in New Zealand, there are fears that revenue from Pakistan tour could suffer. Indeed it could.

A free life makes it harder to acquire riches for this is not easy to do without becoming servile to mobs or kings.

- Epicurus

To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed.

- Vaclav Klaus

Wrapped up in some fairly predictable lawerly laments about Thatcher's Cameron's heartless cuts in legal aid there is a fascinating examination of the rise of the crowd-sourced legal advice website here: Tricks and cheats are the price of culling legal aid

Motoring trials are more frequently now defended by people who are making use of public special-interest websites such as PePiPoo which give advice to motorists both prior to and during a trial. Some advice is sound, some not so sound, but with the capacity to share approaches to defence has come the temptation in forums to share advice which, if followed, would result in a miscarriage of justice.

and

In some ways sites like these are a good thing: mass participation to help individuals to establish their legal rights is laudable, but to the extent that they encourage bad-faith practices, and ultimately provide tools to undermine the already buckling justice system, they are a serious problem – a price to be paid for legal aid cuts. The insatiable demand for help with litigation has given rise to websites on which anyone can offer their opinion on the law whether it is correct or misleading. In those circumstances it's the individuals in need of help who will lose out, running trials on a hiding to nothing, which will leave them worse off than when they started.

The author, the barrister Rupert Myers, whose articles for the Guardian are usually more friendly to civil liberties, concludes that "the government must find ways to curb the spread of tricks and cheats, while replacing these sites with the benefit of reliable help for those that need it." I suspect the call to replace these open websites with government ones is his professional self-interest talking. It does not matter. The government cannot replace these websites. Oh, they could find some legal grounds to close down these particular ones, PePiPoo (weird name) and Child Support Agency Hell, and "replace" them with government information website number four million and six, which rather fewer people would trust on account of the legal advice being sought in these cases being advice on how to legally fight branches of that same government. But unless the government is willing to censor the internet to a degree hitherto unprece- OK, better stop there for fear of giving 'em ideas.

As I was saying, now we have the internet people are going to discuss their problems on it, including their legal problems. Other people are going to give them advice. Have you noticed that about the internet? Rather sweet, I always think; the only thing people like doing on the internet more than talking about sex is advising others on everything from plumbing to childbirth for no reward. Of course some of the advice you get from unqualified strangers is bad. That, however, has also been known to be true of advice from qualified professionals.

Instapundit has recently been noticing a little buzz concerning thorium, as an alternative energy source to put all the other alternatives in the shade. I have no idea how this works, or could be made to work.

Others seem also to be somewhat uncertain about the details. I shudder whenever I hear anyone recommending a new Manhattan Project to accomplish whatever it is they want. All they could be sure about when they embarked on the original Manhattan Project was a huge bill. I prefer the kind of technology that can start in a small, rough and ready way, in a hanger or a laboratory somewhere, and then spread gradually, improving all the while in cost and efficacy as it gathers viable applications, and only being rolled out big time, with big money, once it is clear that it has worked on a smaller scale. This thorium thing sounds to me like people taking refuge from huge difficulties in an even huger impossibility. If these thorium reactors are going to be so tiny, why can't the first one be built in a shed?

But what do I know? And more to the point, what can our more tech-savvy commenters tell us about this?

Further to what I, and Johnathan Pearce, and Natalie Solent, have all being saying here about cricket corruption, and about how this is a story about more than mere cricket corruption, I just noticed this report from a few days ago, at cricinfo.com. Cricinfo is one of my regular haunts, so sorry for not linking to this earlier:

Betting in cricket and other sports should be legalised in India, a Delhi court has said, pointing out that the police have failed to curb illegal betting in the country. Legalising betting, the court said, would help the government keep track of the transfer of funds and even use the revenue generated for public welfare.

"It does not need divine eyes to see that 'satta' in cricket and other games is reaching an alarming situation. The extent of money that it generated is diverted to clandestine and sinister objectives like drug trafficking and terrorist activities," said additional sessions judge Dharmesh Sharma, of a Delhi trial court. "It is high time that our legislature seriously considers legalising the entire system of betting online or otherwise so that enough revenues can be generated to fund various infrastructural requirements for the common man and thus check the lucrative business in organised crime."

Now I will willingly grant you that this is anything but a pure libertarian argument, of the kind that would prevail in Brian-Micklethwait-world. Judge Sharma is emphasising the revenue gathering opportunity inherent in legalisation just as strongly as the anti-crime point. But for what it is worth, I also much prefer a legalised and quite heavily taxed and state-regulated betting regime to total illegality, if those are the only choices I am offered. And they are, given the current state of the world and of its predominant opinions.

I've known about the Kochs, and about their legendary wealth and about their massive support with some of it for the US libertarian movement, ever since I first became a part of the London libertarian scene in the late 1970s. (Although, I'm still not sure how they are pronounced. Cock? Coke? Kotch? (Coach?)) So the idea that their support for libertarianism is now or ever was some kind of covert operation, rather than just rich people spending their own money trying to do and spread goodness as they saw it, is, to me, utterly ridiculous. One of the Kochs even ran for vice-President, I am reminded here. Was that secret too?

Well, I guess it sort of was. What happens is that you spend two or three decades generally stamping and shouting and raising all kinds of heaven and hell, saying that every bit of sex and drugs and rock and roll and free marketeering that you can think of should be legalised, and they ignore you. Finally you start making some rather big waves, in some way that doesn't involve them helping in any way, even by them deigning to denounce you, and they then call you "covert". It wasn't even that they couldn't get you on the phone despite trying, twice. No. You couldn't get them on the phone, ever.

Personally I think it's a very good sign that they are now attacking libertarianism, pro-capitalism etc., by pointing out that there are these rich capitalists who are in favour of it. This tells me that they feel they are running out of actual arguments. It also tells me that they don't think that them drawing attention to the libertarian movement, by banging on about how these evil capitalists support it like this, can draw much more attention to this movement than we are now contriving for ourselves. In short, we are now up and running as a force in the real world beyond that of mere ideological intercourse among consenting ideologists, and they know it.

Here:

Will very high res teleconferencing substantially reduce the need for business air travel?

My answer? It may, in some sense, reduce the need for such travel, but that doesn't mean that it actually will reduce it. Face to face contact has a way of proving stubbornly superior to all the other kinds, for all kinds of weird reasons that you never saw coming. I can remember people saying that the internet blah blah would have us all working on the beech [sorry, see comments, when you get old your spelling goes into reverse] beach by around now.

But what do I know? And what does anyone else think?

Here is a long(ish) article stating that because financial investors think the UK government is serious about slashing the public deficit, this is keeping the prices of UK bonds high - which also means the interest rate that firms pay to borrow long-term is less than in a number of other countries.

Obviously, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. We are now entering a period when the various government departments of Cameron's administration need to deliver with real cuts, rather than simply talk about them. But it does seem that there is a real difference of perception in how markets view the UK (trying to cut the deficit) and the US (spend, spend, spend!). Other things being equal, it will cost a dollar-denominated corporate borrower more to get financing than a sterling-based one. The UK economy will benefit. Just one more reason to ignore the siren songs of the Keynesians.

In the previous posting by Brian on the alleged match-fixing scam involving Pakistan's cricket team, one commenter called Jim made the excellent point that gambling is illegal in Pakistan. It is, as the practice is banned under Shariah law - but there is a vast and thriving underground gambling industry there and indeed across the Indian sub-continent.

Now, as we libertarians like to point out, if you ban consenting activities between adults - such as betting on sports - then when such activities are driven underground, criminals get involved, with all the sort of consequences we are now writing about. That is not to say, of course, that if gambling were legalised in Pakistan, that the match-fixer gangsters would hang up their hats and do something else. But it would, in my view, help a great deal to drive some of these scum away.

Americans bored by all this talk of cricket might recall that baseball has had its problems in the past, as have other sports too. This Wikipedia entry is worth reading (and maybe improving).

And there are certain parallels in this issue with insider dealing in financial markets. On one level, I think that it should not be made illegal since it is difficult to work out the difference, sometimes, between a trader who is just quick off the mark to exploit new information and someone who happens to be privy to inside information. Arguablym, distortions caused by insider dealing eventually get arbitraged out by other investors. However, in the case of private stock markets, they are, as private institutions, perfectly entitled to set the rules so that trading is seen to be "fair" and open, if only to encourage investors to buy and sell stocks who might otherwise have been cynical about insiders getting all the best deals. It is like a private sports association setting down rules against things such as use of enhancement drugs, and so on. So long as no-one is forced to compete against their will, no-one can carp about the rules, and the adoption of such rules draws in more people and interest.

Back to the insider dealing point: As more people play in a market if the rules are seen to be fair, then this encourages greater liquidity and reduces the cost of capital. With the match-fixing issue, the costs of not punishing wrongdoers is something similar: it will drive away people from the sport due to greater cynicism, and hence reduce revenues, investment in new grounds and facilities, and so on. Cynicism, whether in sports, business or elsewhere, is a sort of deadweight cost on an activity by driving away fans, investors, etc.

My original thoughts having been here.

First: The Pakistani tour bosses have been saying that because there has as yet been no decision under British law to prosecute anyone, no wrongdoing has yet been proved. But the legal problem is that there has to be someone who lost a fraudulent bet, and finding such a person may be difficult, even impossible. But just because the British law may do nothing, that doesn't mean that cricket doesn't have any problem. Already, the News of the World has proved to almost everyone's satisfaction (if that suffices as the word) that no balls were bought and paid for, from Asif and Amir, if only to prove that they could be. That Pakistan test match captain Salman Butt and current Pakistan cricket boss Ijaz Butt refuse to acknowledge this only makes them look guilty also.

Second: Kudos to the British tabloid press. Sport often has reason to resent British news hounds. I was reminded recently, when reading this book, that ace Dutch soccer manager Guus Hiddink (who, unlike current England boss Fabio Capello, is fluent in English as well as soccer) turned down the England job that he would otherwise have loved to do, simply because he couldn't face his love life being done over by these ghastly people. But this time, a British tab picked a target truly worthy of its ruthless attentions. They nailed down and publicised beyond doubt, within a few weeks, what all the cricket anti corruption units and police forces of the cricket-o-sphere couldn't in over a decade.

Third: "Innocent until proved guilty" only applies to the legal system. If English cricket fans like me now regard Pakistan cricket as guilty until proved innocent, and most of us now surely do, we can impose our own sentence upon it right now, by refusing to pay to attend any more Pakistan cricket games in our country.

Fourth (the order of these points has now become rather random but I will bash on anyway): It surely doesn't stop at "spot fixing", i.e. at just a few no balls that don't affect the result. Match fixing is surely also involved, still. The Sydney test last winter in Australia, when Pakistan mysteriously threw away a dominant position, and the Lord's test recently concluded where, whatever official England cricket now says, the Pakistanis did the same thing again, both now look bent. Trott and Broad (who shared in a record stand for England), and the England team in general, understandably don't want to think this and have said in public that they don't. But they probably do, just as the rest of us do.

Fifth: England cricket is now busy demonstrating, in concrete and steel, the truth of the Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle, being now deep into a major historic costs swamp. Numerous expensive new stands have recently been built, or at least expensively refurbished, but they mostly can't now be filled at prices that will pay for all the work that's been done. Meaningful cricket games cannot be conjured out of thin air even at the best of times, which these times are not, and demand even for good contests is limited. Thus, to cancel the few remaining one day games fixed between England and Pakistan would, just now, be a particular disaster for English cricket. These games will be a disaster anyway, because they are now pretty much meaningless except as a way for the English press to carry on hammering away at this fiasco, but not as big a disaster as they would be if they had been cancelled, because this would have meant all the ticket money so far gathered for them having to be handed back. But, the Pakistanis should not confuse the deeply insincere welcome they will now get for their remaining games here with a general willingness on the part of England cricket to forgive them, i.e. arrange more games with them, or for them, in the foreseeable future. (Whoops. I nearly put "fix" more games.) If the Pakistanis want to go on playing international cricket with England, or in England against anybody else (which is their current arrangement on account of Pakistan itself being too terrorist-menaced for anyone else to visit), they will have to clean up their act.

Sixth: This ruckus here in England has caused a general raking over of the recent history of Pakistan cricket and its various rows. I have already mentioned how the recent test series in Australia is, as Michael Jennings said in connection with my earlier posting about this, being, as it were, re-evaluated. The same applies to things like the big row at the Oval four years ago, which ended prematurely amidst loud Pakistani protestations of complete innocence, this time of ball tampering. Even that run in all those years ago, between England captain Mike Gatting and that Pakistani umpire, starts to look a bit different. So, more significantly, do all the much more recent rows within the Pakistan camp. Shahid Afridi, the Pakistan one day captain for the remainder of the tour, who is said to be a particular hold-out against corruption, behaved very strangely when he recently (a) played like a loon in earlier games in this tour, and then (b) abruptly resigned as the test match captain. It looked crazy at the time. I now suspect that the true behind-the-scenes story might present Afridi in a rather better light. [Later: see also, as explained in the comments: Bob Woolmer, death of.]

Seventh: I have read recent internet comments from Pakistan fans saying that Pakistan has the best fast bowlers in the world, and that the only reason they are being accused of cheating is because the rest of the world, England cricket fans like me in particular, can't deal with this. Rubbish. If anything, these latest accusations embody the claim that actually, the likes of Asif and Amir are even better than they have recently seemed. They had Australia and England on the ropes recently and could have finished them off. They merely chose not too. How skillful is that?!? Which just goes to show how much is at stake here. A potentially world beating cricket nation, on a par with the West Indies in their pomp towards the end of the last century, and Australia since then until about now, has been brought down from hero to zero by all this.

Eighth: Although the attitude of fans elsewhere in the world, most notably in India, Australia and England, will be very important, the decisive factor in all this will probably now be the attitude of Pakistan's own cricket fans. What they now demand of their cricketers will determine whether Pakistan cricket now embarks upon the painful and difficult climb back towards cricket respectability, or just gets wiped out as a serious cricket force by its inability or refusal to do this. If the "they only say we cheat because we're better than them" school of thought triumphs in Pakistan - if, that is to say, they all bury their stupid heads in the sand - then it's goodnight Pakistan cricket.

On the other hand, England cricket officialdom had hoped that the recent England Pakistan games would attract large numbers of Pakistani fans living in England. But these fans have been notable only for their almost total absence. At the time, commentators said it must have been the prices being charged. But what if Pakistani cricket fans in England, who will have been paying far more attention to their team than I have until very recently, had already concluded that their cricket team was bent as the proverbial nine bob note, and had decided that they simply could not bear to watch it throwing games away any more? It makes sense to me.

Ninth (this has become like that joke about two Oxford philosophers overheard in debate, but never mind): What Michael Atherton said (Times so forget about a link), as flagged up here by Natalie Solent on Monday, about the illegality of betting in large parts of Asia, and the consequent extreme nastiness of the people who run it.

I do not underestimate the difficulties involved in cleaning up Pakistan cricket, and I strongly agree with all those who are saying what a particular tragedy it will be if Amir now has his career taken from him, as will, I think, have to happen. Either Amir will now get banned for long enough to really hurt his career, or they will just prove they aren't serious. But do not for a moment imagine that not cheating, if you are a Pakistan cricketer of talent, is a mere matter of Just Saying No. Threats are involved, not just bribes. If they can't charm and smarm you into doing their bidding, the gangsters are all too likely to try violence, not just against you but against your family. So, it absolutely won't be easy. It just has to be done if cricket in Pakistan cricket is to have much chance of surviving as a force in the world.

Either that, or we will all have to wait for Pakistan to stop being a totally failed nation, full of gangsters, and of religious maniacs who don't have a clue how to stop gangsterism but only make it worse (e.g. by banning all betting) and many of whom are gangsters themselves, and hope that when that has been accomplished (I give it half a century at the absolute minimum), they still remember cricket.

A pretty fair summary of what the Tea Party movement means for current US politics and the races leading up to the mid-term elections. For non-US readers who are unfamiliar with all this, the article is not a bad introduction. At least the Reuters report does not write it off as full of racist nutballs or religious bigots, and actually focuses on the anti-tax, anti-spending viewpoint of the Tea Partiers.