(35)

"The background to this method of policing is that NuLab became increasingly irritated with the police detecting crime. This tended to militate against the working classes (few question the link between poverty and crime). Being so unutterably incompetent, NuLab were were unable to tackle poverty (unless by increasing it, they can claim to be tackling poverty). One solution to this was to make crime detection a more egalitarian process. By criminalising "anti-social" behavior that was more likely to committed by the middle classes (speeding, hunting etc), then issuing directives for police to ramp up their response to such infractions, the thinking was that this would highlight how criminality was not the preserve of the put upon working classes.

On top of this, there existed a situation whereby the number crunchers claimed that the fear of being a victim of crime far outweighed the reality of being a victim of crime. Hence the emphasis shifted away from tackling crime i.e oppressing the working classes, to tackling the fear of crime. This had a cheap solution: high visibility policing. It is this thinking that lead to the introduction of those decaffeinated police officers known as "PCSOs", along with the requirement for high visibility vests worn with officers. This type of thinking also results in situations such as the Forest Gate incident, whereby the number of officers present seems to far outweigh the threat and the inclusion of the press in high profile operations. All of these things are designed to tackle the FEAR of crime, not crime itself."

From one of our readers, "Fed_Up", commenting on my recent encounter with the police. Thanks for the comments. The one here raises the issue of class. It is sometimes said that these days, the cops, or at least some of them, are the "paramilitary wing of the Guardian newspaper". This represents a significant shift in the cultural/political standing of the police over my lifetime.

Consider this: there is no doubt that during the 1980s, when the Conservatives were in power, some of the police powers used at the time got on to the statute books with relatively little complaint from what I might loosely call "the right". Not everyone was complacent, of course. Libertarian Alliance Director Sean Gabb and the LA's founder, the late Chris R. Tame, were early in pointing out at the time that no consistent defence of liberty makes sense if it is confined purely to economics, a point that some Tories to this day don't seem to grasp. While coppers were pinching Rastafarians in Brixton and hitting coalminers on the head in Yorkshire, a lot of the middle classes were happy to look the other way. As an unashamed middle class Brit with mortgage, happy marriage and decent job, I am the sort of person, I suppose, that has in a certain way been radicalised by the CCTV state, or "parking warden culture", as one might call it. It is important to understand, however, that the sort of petty exercise of power has been going on, sometimes unremarked, for years. So I certainly don't feel sorry for myself. I am, more than anything else, depressed at the fatuity of "security theatre" policing. It must, at one level surely, gnaw away at the morale and self respect of decent coppers. But there is no doubt that the role and status of the police has changed and so has the type of person that might be attracted to making a career in it.

I must say I am still stunned by the open admission of one commenter on my earlier posting that random searches are good for "fishing expeditions". We were not very kind to him on the previous thread. Justifiably.

For a good take on what has been going on with policing in the US, Gene Healy of the CATO Institute think tank has a sharp analysis. Several US readers expressed their horror at what is happening here in Britain; I am afraid that things are not so great in parts of the US, either. And as for France, etc.....

(19)

Hollywood illiberals such as George Clooney and Michael Moore made a career of sneering at the ageing Charlton Heston, which was almost enough to make me join the NRA. True, many of Heston's conservative views might be as dated as his movies. But a willingness to take up arms for human freedom is one reason why we still don't live on the planet of the apes.

- Mick Hume, reflecting on the stance on the right to bear arms that was taken by the late, great Charlton Heston. Here is a wonderful tribute to Heston by the US actor, Richard Dreyfus. Dreyfus is a 'liberal' in the American usage; his comments show real class and generosity of spirit.

(4)

Heathrow Airport is a horrible place: overcrowded, dirty and unable to cope with the volume of traffic. A few days ago, Terminal 5 was opened. As a result of the demented decision by the British Airports Authority, the Spanish-owned company which has a monopoly franchise on UK airports, to blend international and domestic passengers going through the terminal, BAA has decided to fingerprint everyone who goes through terminal five. Soon all passengers going out of Heathrow, and other BAA airports, such as Gatwick, will be affected. The queues will get worse, and ironically, so will the vulnerability of passengers to terrorist attack during peak times. One hates to think what it will be like during the summer holidays and over the Christmas break.

Richard Morrison has a good old rant in the Times of London today about this issue. He points out that BAA has introduced the system at its own behest, not because of the government. For once, a libertarian cannot just bash the state for this, at least not as the direct culprit. I have no problem per se in a private airport operator setting certain rules which customers are free to ignore by going elsewhere, but as BAA has a monopoly, it hardly is a model of free market capitalism. BAA was privatised initially with its monopoly largely intact, which was a mistake. Of course, if passengers feel safer going to airports which demand iris scans, fingerprints, ID cards, body searches, intense questioning, and all other manner of intrusions into privacy, by all means go to these places. For the rest of us, even those who fear terrorism, we might prefer to take our chances and travel like free law-abiding adults, rather than convicted criminals.

For a good, sober look at the trade-offs with security measures and the unintended bad effects of things like this, this book is a good place to start. The author is not some hard-line civil libertarian and quite friendly to a lot of security ideas, but he understands that there is no security system in the world that is fail-safe and argues that it is about time people were allowed to weigh the risks more intelligently.

(5)

In a recent interview ("When nature is one step ahead", New Scientist, 2008 02 09) marine biologist Raphael Sagarin has little to say about security that a libertarian could disagree with:

You can look at virtually any question about security through a biological lens, from how to develop weapons systems to how to organise government departments. You look at what the most successful organisms do to solve their security problems, and then you try to use that. One clear lesson is that the species of systems that have been around the longest, adapted to many different environments and captured the most resources have a structure of fairly limited central control, with a lot of autonomy.

He believes DHS should be broken up into a number of smaller organizations; that TSA carries out actions which are an incredible waste of resources and that some of the best work the government does is through small organizations like DARPA.

It is a very interesting read if you can find it.

(46)

Thanks to Nick Cowen of the Civitas Blog, I have just been reading another of those man facing prosecution for defending himself stories:

A shopkeeper could be charged with murder after an armed robber who tried to steal the day's takings was stabbed with his own knife during a struggle.

Tony Singh, 34, described as a hard-working family man who often works 13-hour days, was ambushed as he shut his shop on Sunday evening by Liam Kilroe, 25, a career criminal who was armed with a knife.

Mr Singh fought back and, after a fierce hand-to-hand struggle, Kilroe was seen by witnesses to stagger away clutching the knife to his chest. Kilroe was taken to hospital, where he died, and Mr Singh was detained by police. He is now waiting to discover whether he will be charged, and is on police bail until February 29 pending further inquiries.

Lancashire police confirmed that papers had been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, which will decide whether Mr Singh should be charged with one of three offences: murder, manslaughter or assault.

Mr Singh, who suffered injuries to his neck and back during the struggle and had to be treated in hospital, insisted yesterday that he had acted in self-defence. ...

I suppose the authorities have to consider the possibility that Mr Singh may have done something wrong despite all appearances to the contrary, but in this case they appear, unless this report is way off the mark, to have no evidence of any such thing. It could be that the police routinely hand over all the evidence in such cases to the CPS, no matter how heroically the shopkeeper behaved and no matter how completely the villain got what he deserved and how completely the heroic shopkeeper did the rest of us a favour by, as it turned out in this case, killing him. And whereas in theory there could be a prosecution, the chances of one actually materialising are very remote. In which case this is a story about lousy journalism.

But, as Nick Cowen points out, what the shopkeeper appears to have done is what the criminal justice system failed to do. He punished an already arrested and many times previously convicted career criminal, who should have been in jail already but who was actually roaming the streets trying to commit more robberies. The justice system should have stopped that, having already had every chance to do so. Tony Singh's heroism showed up what a lousy job it was doing.

The phrase "taking the law into their own hands" is often used by the authorities in circumstances like these. But by the look of it, Tony Singh didn't so much take the law as catch it and save it from being smashed, after the authorities had themselves dropped it. And you can't help suspecting that, in the eyes of the authorities, this was the real crime here. Why couldn't he just have handed over the money like a sensible chap?

(26)

With the occurrence of yet another violent attack on a crowd of disarmed people in the news, Glenn Reynolds suggests we start sueing the universities. If a University or any other organization defines its facility as a 'Gun-Free Zone' it has an implied contract duty to protect you, and if it has failed to take measures to do so is in breach of that contract.

Think of it this way: you have a constitutional Right of self defense. When a property owner or government makes entry onto that property contingent upon waiving that Right, they imply they will in return defend you against harm. This is not all that different from a situation I faced a decade ago as a C-level manager at a UK ISP. If our net news feeds were wide open, we were a common carrier; but if we put any sort of filtering into effect we were expressing editorial control of content and therefor liable for what we missed, be it child-porn or whatever.

Let the fun begin!

(26)

...All the wonderful tools of liberty. But... but... I see not a single example of that German-Swiss engineering marvel, the SIG-226, as featured on this blog's masthead!

(23)

Christopher Hitchens reckons the CIA should be scrapped for its many recent screwups, including the latest fiasco over the NIE report about Iran. I agree, although the question is largely academic: governments are not known for scrapping institutions that go awry. But the NIE fiasco - which actually might endanger our security since Iran is still trying to produce enriched uranium - does add to the impression that security services are in danger of becoming the problem, not the solution. And the recent issue surrounding alleged destruction of taped evidence of torture does not exactly square with an institution operating under the rule of law, as Andrew Sullivan has put it recently, although Sully has not drawn the logical inference that the CIA should be closed down.

Here is the crunch paragraph from the Hitchens piece. Read it all:

And now we have further confirmation of the astonishing culture of lawlessness and insubordination that continues to prevail at the highest levels in Langley. At a time when Congress and the courts are conducting important hearings on the critical question of extreme interrogation, and at a time when accusations of outright torture are helping to besmirch and discredit the United States all around the world, a senior official of the CIA takes the unilateral decision to destroy the crucial evidence. This deserves to be described as what it is: mutiny and treason. Despite a string of exposures going back all the way to the Church Commission, the CIA cannot rid itself of the impression that it has the right to subvert the democratic process both abroad and at home. Its criminality and arrogance could perhaps have been partially excused if it had ever got anything right, but, from predicting the indefinite survival of the Soviet Union to denying that Saddam Hussein was going to invade Kuwait, our spymasters have a Clouseau-like record, one that they have earned yet again with their exculpation of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It was after the grotesque estimate of continued Soviet health and prosperity that the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued that the CIA should be abolished. It is high time for his proposal to be revived. The system is worse than useless—it's a positive menace. We need to shut the whole thing down and start again.

Question: should the same logic apply to MI-6?

(147)

This YouTube video on the Volokh Conspiracy shows a truly outrageous incident where a policeman in the USA tasers a man who was at no point threatening anyone and who was actually calmly walking away from the policeman. The longer CNN coverage gives more context and makes it more clear to me that this was a completely unjustified use of force.

Yet more proof no state should have a monopoly on the means of violence. The incident is astonishing and at least it does show the value to the public (and without doubt to honest decent policemen) of having all traffic stop incidents videoed.

(21)

It seems to me that we've reached the point at which a facility that bans firearms, making its patrons unable to defend themselves, should be subject to lawsuit for its failure to protect them. The pattern of mass shootings in "gun free" zones is well-established at this point, and I don't see why places that take the affirmative step of forcing their law-abiding patrons to go unarmed should get off scot-free.

- Instapundit

(19)

We have said this kind of thing here many, many times, and will say it many, many more times, but I think this puts it particularly well:

People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that's the exact opposite of a civilized society.

The rest of it – the posting is by "marko" and is entitled "why the gun is civilized" – is equally eloquent. It is quite short and anyone who is inclined to will have more than enough time to read it all.

It is particularly refreshing to read an American arguing against gun control without once mentioning the US Constitution. I am not opposed to the US Constitution, most of it, but I think that Americans should spend at least some of their time explaining why most of it is right, instead of just taking it for granted as a stack of unchallengeable axioms. When they do argue without relying on this document, it certainly makes it easier for us foreigners to link to them. [M]arko's argument is not American only; it is universal.

(16)

Quite a lot has already been written about the British government's demented suggestion that security of public transport will be improved by installing airport-style security checks at 250 "strategic" railway stations (places, presumably, such as Paddington, St Pancras, Victoria and Liverpool Street in London). Bloody marvellous. A hint of the chaos this will cause, the enormous economic damage and ruination of the railway industry that will ensue, struck me this morning as I took a Tube ride from Covent Garden to Victoria on my way to work from an early meeting in the City. Victoria's Tube station was closed due to "overcrowding on the platform", according to a public announcement. The crush of crowds was terrible. Now, just work it out, gentle reader. Imagine in say, two or three years hence, if Gordon Brown's daft idea takes root: massive queues at London railway stations in the evening rush-hour as people struggle to get home, huge groups of people milling around stations waiting to be passed through security. A perfect target for a terrorist, you might might think.

You might indeed think that. I bet a few of the more intelligent police and security service folk realise that. But not Gordon Brown. I am no longer convinced that Brown is particularly bright, in fact. We have long been assailed with this image of a brooding, obsessive Scot with his books and his clever ideas. Cleverness? I think his intellect should be regarded like one of those flakier tech stocks in the late 1990s - greatly over-priced and due for a rapid fall. I already sense that this process is under way. Let the selling continue.

(8)

Blogger Patrick Lasswell had a real world encounter of the 'dial 911' kind that shows whilst civic virtue is a good thing, it is even better when the upstanding citizen has a firearm to hand when investigating a disturbance.

Hiding in my front yard from a shotgun armed maniac last night made me reflect on my libertarian leanings. The Second Amendment never seemed so clear to me as an individual right as I waited for the police to arrive, and waited. I was carrying only a telephone and a flashlight, and updating the 911 operator as the lunatic passed twenty yards from my position it occurred to me how very much I appreciate owning rifles, and how very, very far away they were at the moment.

Read the whole thing. Fortunately the encounter in question was 'merely' alarming, yet clearly there was potentially for a shooting and thus Patrick was in violation of Jeff Cooper's First Rule of Gunfights: have a gun.

Patrick, you live in the USA so you have no excuse to emulate the disarmed civilian population of Britain.

(35)

"My faith in airport security has never been the same since I noticed that the man confiscating the shaving foam in my hand luggage (while leaving me with the razor) had the word HATE tatooed on his knuckles."

- Daniel Finkelstein.

(14)

There is a direction connection between this:

It's rather telling that the UN's American defenders fail to directly address an indisputable fact: U.N. Human Rights Council's subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights has endorsed a report denying the existence of a human right of self-defense, and the subcommission, pursuant to the report, has declared that all national governments are required by international human rights law to implement various gun control provisions - provisions which, by the UN's standards, make even the gun control laws of New York City and Washington, DC, into violations of international law because they are insufficiently stringent. (See page 14 of the draft BYU article.)

... and this:

The Somalian model has spread across the planet, from the Congo to chaotic East Timor to Afghanistan, where the Taliban have violently resurfaced, to Iraq. Populations are taken hostage, terrorized, and sacrificed, the spoils of wars by local gangsters. Under various pretexts - religion, ethnicity, makeshift racist or nationalist ideology - commandos contend for power at the point of AK-47s. They fight against unarmed populations; most of their victims are women and children. Terrorism is not the prerogative of Islamists alone: the targeting of civilians has been used by a regular army and by militias under the command of the Kremlin in Chechnya, where the capital city of Grozny was razed to the ground. Where the killers appeal to the Koran, it is still primarily Muslim passersby who suffer. Algeria, Somalia, and Darfur (at least 200,000 dead and millions of refugees in just a few years, with the Sudanese government, protected by China and Russia, acting with impunity) are live laboratories of the abomination of abominations: war against civilians.

The answer to the problem of gangsters terrorising unarmed populations is, and I know there are many who genuinely think that this is a cure worse than the disease (hence all the benign support for this malign UN repression): let the populations be armed.

(8)

I was going to write the following comment on a blog article written back in 2005 by a US Muslim political activist who is calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

I would like to thank you for writing this article.

Having a Muslim political activist call for American civilians to be disarmed in their own country is just about the best politically supercharged endorsement for civilian gun ownership I can imagine. If the NRA was paying you to write this, it was money well spent (that is just rhetorical of course, I am sure they did not and you probably actually believe what you are saying). Please, keep writing more along this line!

But I decided not to. There is a well known axiom: "Never interrupt the enemy when he is making a mistake"

I hope he is still writing such articles.

(0)

Kim du Toit, a regular commenter on these parts with a blog of his own, links to this story about a self-defence shooting in Dallas, Texas. Just scroll down and read the comments from the cop at the end. Absolutely superb.

The left-leaning Observer newspaper (UK), meanwhile, carries a hostile piece about gun ownership in the US and the amount of gun crime there. The problem is that the article does not really take into account the rather glaring fact that in Britain, a country with the fiercest gun laws this side of Alpha Centauri, there has been a lot of gun crime in our cities lately.

Here is an except:

An average of almost eight people aged under 19 are shot dead in America every day. In 2005 there were more than 14,000 gun murders in the US - with 400 of the victims children. There are 16,000 suicides by firearm and 650 fatal accidents in an average year. Since the killing of John F Kennedy in 1963, more Americans have died by American gunfire than perished on foreign battlefields in the whole of the 20th century.

The problem with all these sort of statistics, I reckon, is that they need to be put into context. Cultures matter: in parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, gun ownership among the adult population is widespread, but gun crime is low, and that fact cannot just be attributed to all that healthy Alpine air. In the US, gun crime is closely linked to drug gangs, and I gently venture to suggest that the War on Drugs, which is a disastrous policy, is the culprit. The statistics given by the Observer - it provides no source - do not tell us whether gun crime is rising or falling, or is stable, or what other categories of crime are like. Nor does it adjust for population levels to compare with other countries where gun ownership might be quite high. It may of course be that some crime, such as acts of domestic violence, would drop if gun ownership was outlawed, but what would happen to things like domestic burglary, for example? I certainly would not want to burgle anyone's home in Texas for the fairly obvious reason that I would end up very dead.

(0)

I first wrote this article intending it to be a comment on this thread at the Volokh Conspiracy. It grew so big and wandered 'through every room in the house', straying away from the specific topic so I decided not to inflict it on them. Instead, Samizdatistas are the lucky beneficiaries. Seriously, I presume most of you will skip it. That is fine. Here is the amendment as it appears in the US Constitution.

Amendment II

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In reading the Federalist Papers it appears obvious, at least to me, that 'the militia' and 'a well regulated militia' are two entirely different things. Hamilton clearly describes in #29 a great deal of commitment and training required to "acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia" [my underscore] and speculates that for "the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens" it "would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss".

In #46 Madison calculates the number of "a militia" at 1/8 of the entire population.

The highest number to which, ... a standing army can be carried ... does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; ... This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."

Clearly Hamilton's "well-regulated militia" and Madison's "militia" are entirely different and together with the title of the New York statute that Eugene Volokh cites,"An Act for Settling and Regulating the Militia ...", suggests that the degree of regulation of the militia was a continuous scale.

(0)

But for those of you who find discussing it a little dry, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Thanks to Glenn Reynolds and Breitbart.tv for the pointer.

(0)

The Brave One is a good film, and I would encourage people to go and see it. Even though this means putting money into the pockets of Time Warner, which is hardly my favourite corporation.

- warning: spoilers follow ...

[Alas, remainder of article was lost in a server crash on 22nd Oct 2007. Bugger]

(1)

Burma is a good example of 'gun control', i.e. a state of affairs where firearms are a legal monopoly of the government forces. One side has good intentions and the other side has loaded rifles, and the result (so far) has been the same as it was in 1988 - or even back in 1962 when the late General Ne Win first set up his socialist administration.

However, me being a cold hearted man whose mind starts to wander even when shown scenes of murder and other horror, the situation reminds me of the philosophy of David Hume. This mid 18th century Scottish philosopher claimed that government was not based on force - but rather that it was based on opinion. Hume did this to mock the claim that there was a great difference between the 'constitutional' government of Britain and the 'tyranny' of France - under the skin both sides are basically the same, was his point.

This was part of David Hume's love of attacking what his opponents (such as Thomas Reid) were to call "Common Sense". David Hume was involved in what are now called 'counter intuitive' positions. Hume claimed (at times) that there was no objective reality - that the physical universe was just sense impressions in the mind. This did not stop him also claiming (at times) that the mind did not exist, in the sense of a thinking being, that a thought did not mean a thinker - that there was no agent and thus no free willed being.

Whether David Hume actually believed any of this - or whether he was just saying to people "you do not have any strong arguments for your most basic beliefs - see how weak reason is"... is not the point here. The point is that many people. including many people who have never heard his name, have been influenced by the ideas of David Hume.

For example, Louis XVI of France did not actively resist his enemies, going so far as ordering others, such as the Swiss Guard, not to resist, because he had read David Hume's History of England - it was his favourite book. In his history Hume claimed that Charles the First did not get killed because he lost the Civil War (as a simple minded ordinary man might think) - but because he had fought back against his enemies at all. If he had not resisted his enemies, they would have seen no need to kill him (a clever counter intuitive position).

So Louis XVI did not resist. It is possible that he was given cause to doubt Hume's wisdom right before his enemies murdered him, and so many others, but we will never know the answer to that I suppose.

In Burma, as in so many other places, many people seem to have thought that opinion, namely the good intentions of the majority, were more important than firepower - they appear to be mistaken.

"You are showing lack of respect for the dead" - perhaps, but I am warning people not to stand against men with rifles when you are unarmed. Get the firepower, one way or another, and learn how to use it, then you may have a chance at liberty - you can not have it, or keep it, without firepower. And that remains true even if you win some soldiers over to your side with appeals to their reason.

(13)

David Shayler, the ex-M15 spook, always struck me as being only 90 cents to the dollar. I bumped into this character a few years ago at a bash hosted by Privacy International, a perfectly sensible campaigning group. This item if it is true (via the Register), suggests I am right about the dark-haired one.

Methinks M needs to tighten up the recruitment criteria.

(21)

A public service warning! You surf the internet at random using FireFox (which generally you should), you may stumble across a website, which could infest your machine with a virus. But this is nothing new, I have heard about these evil websites full of Trojans and other nasty viruses and I know better... I hear you cry. Apparently, this particular attack does not require a download. Which means that is unlikely to be trapped by your anti-virus software, certainly in the short-term.

Protecting yourself for now is fairly simple. You will need to make a trivial modification to your FireFox settings.

To do this, start FireFox, enter the URL “about:config”, scroll down, and for each of the following entries make sure it is set to “true”.

If it isn’t, right-click the line and choose “Toggle”, which will set the value to “true”

network.protocol-handler.warn-external-default
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.news
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.nntp
network.protocol-handler.warn-external.snews

This will at least give you a warning that Firefox is being asked to do something suspicious; you will have to judge for yourself whether it is nasty.

Thanks to Alec Muffett and Geoff Arnold for the heads up and advice.

(27)

An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women - in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife.

As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject.

(49)

It will come as no surprise to regular readers of this blog that when I come to the USA, I use the opportunity to and do some shootin' and visit my weapons-in-exile (such as one of which is featured on the Karl Popper book at the top of the page, although technically that particular 9mm weapon belongs to my fairer half, my otherwise identical piece is in .40 cal). Of course this trip was no exception and so I have been rescheduled my ongoing homages to the Yuengling Brewing Company until the evening and headed to one of the more remote parts of Pennsylvania to frighten the wild life and try to resurrect some rusty rifle and pistol skills.

As mere possession of a handgun is illegal, it is at times like this that just how far Britain has fallen really hits home. For all its many and variegated flaws, in the USA enough people with some attachment to liberty have managed to fight off the worst excesses of those authoritarians who favour crime victim disarmament. It is interesting that many PA Democrats are actually quite pro-gun, even though many politicos in that sinkhole called Philadelphia are quite authoritarian and anti-gun (note that NRA ratings are not all that good an indication of a politician's true position). It is good to see that the right to self-defence and to own and shoot guns is widely respected even on the political left.

However man does not live by guns alone and the USA has many other things to offer...

Apple pie and a dawg... how American is that, eh?



Big Ice Cream, Big Bikes, Short Shorts... I must be in the USA again!

Back in London tomorrow. Oh crap.

(9)

I am an avid reader of science fiction, and the use of futuristic fiction as a source of ideas is a welcome development. The best science fiction is that which explores the boundaries of our concepts whether in the mind, the computer or how we relate to each other. This is one of the advantages of defending the freedom of the mind, the expression of which is usually described as freedom of speech

Anti-terror chiefs in the United States have hired a team of America's most original sci-fi authors to dream up techniques to help them combat al-Qaeda.

Ideas so far include mobile phones with chemical weapons detectors and brain scanners fitted to airport sniffer dogs, so that security staff can read their minds.

The writers have also put government scientists in touch with Hollywood special-effects experts, to work on better facial-recognition software to pick out terrorists at airports.

The Department of Homeland Security has set aside around $10 million - one tenth of its research budget - for projects dreamt up by the best brains in futuristic fiction.

Whilst DARPA is a useful channel for futuristic ideas, ten percent of a research budget handed over to any project is not such a good idea. Once the institutional apparatus is set up, with a secretariat to flesh out the innovative ideas, and the bureaucratic accretions which turn gold to mud, what will be left. A few nuggets from the civil service quicksand.

More useful is the Sigma organisation set up by Andrew Arlen some years ago, if it survives the seductive sirenic call of the public sector:

Mr Pournelle said the facial recognition plan was one of a number that aimed to replicate ideas seen on television shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS, a similar show. "In real life, the computers are still nowhere near as good as they are on TV," he said. "It's just one of several high risk, high pay-off projects we have suggested.

He is a member of Sigma, a group set up by fellow writer Arlan Andrews to pursue "science fiction in the national interest. Mr Andrews, who predicted handheld, electronic books long before they became a reality, said: "We spend our entire careers living in the future. Those responsible for keeping the nation safe need people to think of crazy ideas."

How unusual that CSI, paraded as an authentic and naturalistic program, can be classified as science fiction, on the grounds that the technology deployed is probably three or five years ahead of our current capabilities. Yet, the same confusion may dazzle the Department of Homeland Security. The politicians will reach for science fictional solutions when actual success probably stems from incremental graft on current processes and clear procurement and privatisation.

Research is often touted as a PR solution for public sector problems. Treat this with scepticism.

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This quote is from a year ago, January.

Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker was happy to hear the bill was defeated. "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

And this editorial was written last August.

We must give due criticism to the University for its decisions that put students in greater danger than was necessary. By that I am not so much referring to the decision to allow morning classes to take place, but rather the decades-old policy that prohibits students, faculty and staff from legally carrying firearms on campus. This ban even goes so far as to include those who have valid Concealed Handgun Permits.

For those of you who have not heard yet, 32 people died at Virginia Tech today.

Here was Virginia Tech's solution to a mass killer on campus.

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Guns cause violence, like flies cause garbage

- Zink Mitchell

(34)

This story catches the eye:

The UK's Jedi community today expressed concerns that government plans to ban Samurai swords could hinder their freedom to wield lightsabres in public.

The UK's Home Office today issued a consultation paper ahead of legislation intended to ban Samurai blades by the end of the year. In a bid to "protect the public", replica Samurai swords will become illegal to import, sell and hire in Britain.

The quote marks around "protect the public" are deserved. Quite how such a ban will "protect" anyone is a mystery. The ban on handguns has not led to a dramatic fall in gun-crime, as the recent spate of shootings in London demonstrate all too plainly. If swords are banned to prevent crimes, why not go the whole hog and ban kitchen knives?

Come to that, why not take up the idea of banning opposable thumbs? Human beings - we are not a feature, but a bug!

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Everything I have heard and read tells me that this kind of thing used to be true in Britain.

I live in a very small street with only eight houses, but delivery vans come down here at least twice a day. Fed Ex and that other company. People have a lot of parcels delivered by not the Post Office these days. The internet brings us gifts every day.

They bash on the door a few times, then put the parcel down and walk off. One time, a delivery man hid the parcel under our doormat. I guess he thought it was more valuable-looking than usual (true- it was Lego/s). Nobody expects parcels to be stolen from doorsteps. Everywhere I’ve lived in England, that would be insane. I never minded about crime when I lived in the UK, but that was before experiencing life in a place that feels this safe. It's wonderful.

I heard a story from my brother-in-law about Nottingham in the thirties. Apparently, in a very poor part of town and at a very poor time, as was the practice in such places in those times, a man used to come round with a big leather bag, collecting rent, in cash. This man was not liked. People went hungry to ensure that he got his cash. But it never occurred to him or to anyone that this was a stupid thing for him to do, because it was not stupid. Anyway, one day, he left his bag in the middle of the street for some reason, full of cash, unattended. A while later he came back and collected it, untouched, all the money still there. Those were the rules.

But stories like that about long-ago Nottingham are far easier to dismiss than the contrast that Alice Bachini-Smith describes from her own direct and hugely contrasting experiences. To tell me that I am wrong about 1930s Nottingham only involves saying that the story has become exaggerated over the years, as maybe it has. To tell Alice that she is wrong means telling her that she is wrong about her own experiences. It means calling her a liar, pretty much.

As to why things worked like this in most or even all of Britain in the past and still do work like this in the more law abiding parts of America, well, that is another argument. The reasons are quite complicated, I would say. (For instance, I have long believed architectural design to be part of the story.)

I recall publishing an interesting piece for the Libertarian Alliance by the historian Stephen Davies entitled Towards the Remoralisation of Society about these kinds of arguments. This was published in 1991 but since then the story in Britain has surely changed rather little and if anything has got somewhat worse. (Here and here are some more recent writings by the same author, the former being a book that you have to buy, but the latter being a blog posting that you can actually read.)

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If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.
If you're unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it...
If you're unhappy and you know it, ring the cops.

If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.
If you're unhappy and you know it, and you really want to show it...
If you're unhappy and you know it, jump up and down.

(The original version of this post was rather obscure, so I have expanded it. I also felt that a musical setting would render the advice of the Minister on how to assist an old woman being beaten up more memorable to citizens anxious to do the right thing in these difficult times.)

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... on TV programmes he (quite sensibly) does not watch. Her Majesty's Government was actually doing something about Big Brother. Granting him more arbitrary power. The Telegraph's legal editor explains:

[The Serious Crime Bill] allows judges, sitting without juries, to make orders which, if breached, would put us in prison for five years.

Two conditions must be satisfied before the court can make a serious crime prevention order. First, the judge must be satisfied that someone has been "involved in serious crime" - anywhere in the world.

To be "involved", you do not have to have committed a serious offence, or even helped someone else to have committed it. All you need to have done is to conduct yourself in a way that was likely to make it easier for someone to commit a serious offence, whether or not it was committed.

And what is a serious criminal offence? Drug trafficking and money laundering, of course. But also fishing for trout with a line left unattended in the water. Depositing controlled waste without a licence. And anything else that a court considers to be sufficiently serious.

Read the whole thing here. The Bill itself is here. Observers of government will notice that it is, unusually for important legislation, being introduced in the Lords. I would welcome any theories why.

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A mailing from the Royal United Services Institute invites me to a conference in April:

The Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) is both the backbone and the lifeblood of the country. It comprises the assets, services and systems that support the economic, political and social life of the UK. Any disruption, damage or destruction to all or part of the CNI could result in grave consequences for the functioning of government, the economy and society. Clearly the CNI is vital to the country’s well-being but the planning and implementation of its security is a Byzantine process; the CNI is a complex and uneven environment with ownership and responsibility spread across the public and private sector.

The threats it confronts are myriad including terrorist attack, industrial accidents and natural disasters. As demonstrated during the July 7 bombings, the Buncefield Disaster, and the foot and mouth outbreak, the CNI is a labyrinthine web of interdependent vulnerabilities that requires a coordinated and coherent response across its entirety to ensure its effective security and resilience in the face of such threats.

Dangerous rubbish. This is an epitome of the statist miscomprehension of complex systems, of economies and ecologies. 'It is messy; we must coordinate it,' they say. There are vital things that can be identified in advance as such, and other things not necessary to the 'backbone of the country', they think.

But the connections in a natural web are flexible, or they don't get established in the first place. "Interdependent vulnerabilities" are what make systems adapt, the source of resilience. In unmanaged, open, systems everything is important and everything is unimportant: all things contribute their part to everything else (and you can't directly measure their contribution), but competition ensures they are all redundant and replaceable.

The response to 7 July was a demonstration of improvisation by thousands of separate actors - millions if you count all those who took simple decisions to get out and walk, rather than passively waiting to be evacuated by the authorities, which would have been the orderly, planned, way to do it. London was functioning again in a day, despite, not because of, the "strategic interventions" that restricted the recovery of traffic flow, and filled the streets with police.

Livestock farming in Britain almost didn't survive the Deprtment for Rural Affairs' "coordinated" response to the last "foot and mouth" outbreak. Fortunately at the time DEFRA lacked the powers to coordinate more farmers out of business. The department didn't see it like that: Its plans were frustrated, and that's why things were as bad as they were. The 'defect' has been eliminated by the Animal Health Act 2002 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Nobody in government had to tell Tesco's dealers to buy up more petroleum in Rotterdam when the Buncefield depot caught fire. The state way is a 'strategic reserve' of petrol under armed guard somewhere, distributed eventually by rationing according to who is important enough to get it, after declaration of a suitable emergency. As it was, loss of 20% of the country's stocks overnight caused scarcely a single car journey to be cancelled - apart from those of the people no longer commuting to the flattened industrial estate.

Those ex-commuters would not be comforted by the thought that distributing tiles or soft drinks is not "critical" and not to be guarded by the state. What they do matters to them and their customers. When I want petrol, petrol matters; when I want tiles, they matter. We are all equally made poorer by the unavailablilty of either, because we can't predict what we will want. Nor can the state.

How dare the planners decide for me what it is I want, as they do implicitly when they define some workers, some structures, as "key"? Well there's a confirmation bias at work. What the state can best monitor is important (invisible, uncontrollable processes couldn't be); so those who work for it are. Chaos is bad. State plans are designed to control chaos; therefore they do, and any unfortunate or unforseen consequences are just the remnants of chaos uncontrolled. Bad things are not in the plan, so not of the plan. They are part of the failure to squeeze out doubt, never caused or exacerbated by wrong or unnecessary decisions by the authorities.

The misunderstanding at the heart of planning is a fundamentalist belief that order and simplicity are public goods. They aren't. It may be good to have them in your own life - if you want them. It is probably necessary to have them in managing a task, running a business, playing a game; to make any well-defined single goal attainable. Clarity in shared procedural rules is highly desirable. But if we want to live in a world where the goals and threat aren't well defined, where we have a choice, and where how we live is not vulnerable to simple shocks from unexpected angles, then universal order and simplicity are bad. Conflict and competition, difference and redundancy are good. The more disorder, uneveness, and complexity our society has, the richer our lives, and the better equipped we are collectively to meet disaster by routing around damage.

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Does anyone in London know who this piece of shit is? This creep assaulted Jackie, one of our intrepid Samizdatistas, so if you recognise him, please either let us know (e-mail link is in the sidebar) or if you prefer call British Transport Police on 0800 40 50 40. For the story, see here.

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A brigadier general (retired) writes to The Times:

Last week, a security scanner at the Waterloo Eurostar terminal detected a credit-card-sized toolkit in my overnight case as I set out for Paris on business. ...

Read the whole thing. It is not long.

I am reminded that we are only a fortnight since St Crispin's day.

He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t'old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, "Tomorrow is Saint Crispian."
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day."
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember, with advantages,
What feats he did that day.

What did you do in the "War on Terror," Daddy?

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NO2ID has demonstrated how it is possible to clone the Home Office's wonderful new ePassport while it is still in the post, without taking it out of the envelope.

The Home Office is unconcerned: with classic disingenuity its spokesman told The Guardian, which carried the first part of an unfolding story:

By the time you have accessed the information on the chip, you have already seen it on the passport. What use would my biometric image be to you? And even if you had the information, you would still have to counterfeit the new passport - and it has lots of new security features. If you were a criminal, you might as well just steal a passport.

But of course the Home Office does not care. If there is a conflict between your personal security and official convenience in logging the details of passports at borders - which is what it means by 'improving the security of passports' (note plural) - then there was never any doubt which would win.

An Anonymous Coward on slashdot pinned it down:

The basic problem isn't the algorithm they choose. It's that their goal is incompatible with security.

They wish to establish a world where all people can be instantly identified, correlated with commercial profiles, and tracked wherever they travel.

How can this be done "securely"? It cannot.

Thank you, Admiral Poindexter.