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I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is my own.
- Number Six (Patrick McGoohan) in classic TV show The Prisoner

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LIBERTY 2002: the European conference of The Libertarian International and Libertarian Alliance

Saturday 9 November - Sunday 10 November, 2002
10.00am-6.00pm
The National Liberal Club
Whitehall Place
London
SW1A 2HE
England

Speakers:

• Professor Norman Barry - Business ethics and regulation: A libertarian view
  
• Stefan Blankertz - Nature or Nurture: A libertarian perspective on the Debate on Intelligence
  
• Professor John Burton - Why libertarianism is losing out
  
• Dr. Eamon Butler - 'Third Way' interventionism in the UK and its lessons
  
• Professor Antony Flew - A critique of welfare rights
  
• Alan Forester - Why libertarians should take children seriously
  
• Professor Terence Kealey - Science is not a public good - and requires no public support
  
• Sarah Lawrence - The semblance of consent: how tyrants use the illusion of freedom
  
• Professor Tibor Machan - Are political principles stable?
  
• Richard Miniter - The reality of the Middle East and libertarian policy dilemmas
  
• Dr. Ken Minogue - The chameleon servility and its contemporary camouflage
  
• Robin Ramsay - In defence of paranoia: myths and realities of "conspiracy theory"
  
• Francois-Rene Rideau - Government as the rule of "Black Magic": On Human Sacrifice and Other Modern Superstitions
  
• Panel Discussion: Libertarian Iinternational and Libertarian Alliance Representatives - Liberty and Strategy in International Context, Chaired by Hubert Jongen, Chairman of The Libertarian International.
  
• Panel Discussion: Mark Littlewood, Dr. Sean Gabb & Dr. Chris R. Tame - The Destruction of Civil Liberties in the UK and its lessons
  

The £75 conference fee covers conference attendance, morning and afternoon tea and coffee, and the closing Banquet (but not accommodation - see below for a suggestion on this).

Are you going to attend the LIBERTY 2002 conference? Several members of the Samizdata Team will be there, so ask around and I am sure you will be able to find us.

Accommodation: The cost of accommodation is NOT included in the price of this conference. The Libertarian Alliance recommend Central Conference Reservations who offer discounted booking for a wide price-range of hotel accommodation in London. They can be contacted at:

Central Conference Reservations
10 Dudley Court,
Upper Berkeley Street,
London, W1H 7PH;
Tel: (+44) 020 7724 4470
Fax: (+44) 020 7706 4244
Email: centralreserve@aol.com

Alternatively, you are of course free to make your own bookings directly or via a travel agency.

HOW TO BOOK FOR THE CONFERENCE:

Please cut and paste the form below into a word processor, fill it in and print and return to one of the addresses below:

BOOKING FORM

I/We wish to book ..... places at the Liberty 2002 Conference at £75 ($111 US) (115 €uros) per place.

Note: The Libertarian International can accept all three currencies if you book via them, the Libertarian Alliance can accept only Pounds Sterling or US Dollars. See below for how to book with either group.

Name: ...............................................................

Address: ............................................................

..........................................................................

..........................................................................

Country: .............................................................

Tel: ....................................................................

Fax: ...................................................................

Email: ................................................................

I enclose a cheque, payable to "The Libertarian Alliance", in pounds sterling for ..... or in US dollars for .....

Please note that the Libertarian Alliance can accept only cheques in pounds sterling or in US dollars.

Return to: Dr. Chris R. Tame, Director, The Libertarian Alliance, 25 Chapter Chambers, Esterbrooke Street, London, SW1P 4NN
Tel: 020-7821-5502 Fax: 020-7834-2031 E-mail: admin@libertarian.co.uk

ALTERNATIVELY, if you wish to pay by cheques in Euros or in any other European currency, you may send your currency's equivalent of 115 €uros,
payable to "The Libertarian International", to:

The Libertarian International
P.O.Box 21,
B-2910,
Essen,
Belgium.
Fax:+31-165-348035
E-mail: info@libertarian.to

BANK: RaboBank acc. 17.43.35.350.

E-GOLD account nr. 102265 (Libertarian International).

Note: If you chose to pay via The Libertarian International, you must send a copy of this booking form to BOTH the Libertarian Alliance and to The Libertarian International.

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Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective.

In both the United States and Britain home education is on the increase. Roland Meighan, formerly special professor of education at Nottingham university estimates that at least 1% of school aged children are home educated in Britain. In the United States the figure is 5% with a growth rate of 20% each year and rising. In both the United States and Britain home education is increasingly a step taken by families disillusioned by the provision of mainstream education.

However, the content of this disillusionment seems to vary enormously. In the States, despite a growing number of secular home educators, the religious reason continues to dominate. In a society that separates religion and state, religious parents, especially those on the fundamentalist right are likely to withdraw their children from schooling. In contrast, Britain has no such separation of religion and state. Religious education and a daily act of worship are mandatory in state schools and the government is set to forge ahead with plans to increase the number of state funded schools with an explicitly religious foundation despite the protests of the National Secular Society. Of course, for some religious families this weak inoculation of school based religion is insufficient, especially when evolution is taught routinely in biology classes, but those who withdraw their children for religious reasons are very much in the minority of British home educators.

In the United States, Ronald Presitto¹ tells us that the right of parents to raise their children according to their religious convictions is at the heart of the divergence between 'home schooling' and the educational establishment. In contrast, most British home educators begin with pragmatic concerns - children are withdrawn when severe bullying incidents fail to be resolved, when they are too bored to tolerate the standardised national curriculum, when their special needs are not taken into account or when the only school place offered is at some dismal, failing institution where you wouldn't leave a dog. Some do start out with convictions about individualised education or religion, but these are the minority.

What American home schoolers and British home educators have in common is the reaction of their 'authorities' to their presence. From local officials to policy makers to government ministers there is a swathe of opinion that believes that parents are not to be trusted with their children and that the State, whether it is secular, socialist or broadly Judaeo-Christian, represents safer hands and inculcates more objective values. Recently in Britain the host of a prestigious legal radio programme (Radio 4 'Law in Action') opined exactly that in his weekly Guardian column - teachers are trained, accredited and hand down the official package to children, but heaven (or not) only knows what parents might be doing to their children.

In America, Presitto traces these attitudes to modern American liberalism, to progressives who rated common enterprise above the interests of the individual, giving rise to increased state powers and justifying this expansion as being in the people's best interests - secular and scientific. Parents, on the other hand, were suspect - they might infect and instill their young with dogma. In Britain education was first provided by the church and continues to be apparently 'Christian', but it is a mild, perhaps peculiarly British, strain of Christianity that goes hand in hand with socialist fears that parents might exploit or abuse children or that individualism might run rampant against the idol of communitarianism. In both countries, Marx's scorn for "the bourgeois claptrap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child" is alive and well in educational and political arenas near you right now.

Despite Britain's recent adoption of the convention on human rights, which protects a right to a family life, this scorn is made all too evident in recent British politics. The Blairite government has introduced Connexions an iniquitous Orwellian electronic card issued to young people to enable them to access educational and other services, but only after they have gone through detailed interviews revealing every scrap of their own and their parents private lives. More recently a Bill which makes compulsory the drugging of children deemed to have 'ADHD' and which will criminalise parents who try to stand in the state's way has been introduced.

In Britain, despite having stepped out of the state provision of education, many home educators come from left wing backgrounds and have a great deal of sympathy with the view that if they have nothing to hide then they should be willing to let the authorities into their homes or produce their children on request - often in the name of saving other children from supposed exploitation or abuse. In Britain it often takes a first hand encounter with an intrusive and bullying local education authority inspector to make people reconsider their stance and ideology is usually something that develops along the way. Without the lobbying numbers of their American counterparts, many British home educators are fearful of putting their heads over the political parapet at all and though there are an increasing number of activists and signs of mature political thinking, there is also a great deal of suspicion of making any kind of stand. Behind the scenes in British home education there is certainly disillusionment with state provision, but the fight is not a religious one and, for many, not even an ideological one. Instead there is a confused picture - astute thinking and activism jostle alongside the concerns of down shifters, eco-worriers and socialists who just can't quite stomach the system when it comes to their own children.

In the States parents have won battles to protect the 'traditional interests of parents'. In Britain, home educators are holding their breath - they have watched French and Irish home educators loose rights and, within their own community, are witnessing an ongoing and protracted attack on the rights of Scottish home educators (where a separate law to that of England and Wales operates). British home educators have the advantage of being broad based, largely secular, not easily dismissed as wild dogmatists, but for all that they are living in interesting times in the face of Blairite infractions into liberty and need to galvanise before the fence they are sitting on is bulldozed for
their own good.

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood

¹ = What's Behind Home Schooling? by Ronald J. Pestritto in 2002 edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune,Thursday, October 3. This
article is archived at The Claremont Institute.

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They've never caught a rabbit, but they're eagerly sniffing around for some children to harvest.

According to these Tranzi bloodsuckers, HM Government has not been sufficiently zealous in nationalising children in order to better protect them from their venal, barbaric and untrustworthy parents.

"Every one of the very large number of child deaths caused by violence and neglect in the UK starts with a smack, according to Lady Walmsley."

The real reason HM Government won't enact these stupid laws is because they know that there is widespread public opposition to them; thus proving that it is not the world which is going mad, just the people who think they run it. And the people who think they run it have an agenda which necessitates the eradication of the family as an impediment to the building of New Global Man.

I'm not as angry as I should be about this because I actually think that the UN is lighting its own way to dusty death. I am reminded of that story of a meek little housewife who turned into a rage-beast and lifted up a truck to save her trapped child. It is probably nothing more than an urban legend but even if it is, it serves a useful function for it is an expression of the universal folk-knowledge about the lengths a parent will go to to protect to their children.

The UN will now have made itself that little bit less popular in Britain and, as their agenda creeps forward, the mask of purported benevolence will begin to slip, the sinister purpose will be seen for what it is and little folk the world over will turn on them like Viking beserkers.

As for me, I have a little disposable capital that I might just invest in the double-headed axe business. After all, the UN, they ain't no friends of mine.

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Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood is a freelance writer and home educator. She is a supporter of Taking Children Seriously and writes on home education, autonomous education and non-coercive parenting from a libertarian perspective. Her third book, Bound To Be Free deals in depth with the hidden costs of so called 'free' education, including further discussion of the issues below

According to last week's Independent on Sunday a new mental health campaign sparked off by the fear that parents may face jail over compulsory drug orders for their children if a new Bill becomes law. Not content with collecting personal and private data on parents and children via the Orwellian Connexions scheme, the Blairite regime is now proposing to parent our children for us still further by accusing parents who do not favour drugging their children of being negligent and denying their children medical treatment.

The use of the ADHD drug, Ritalin, continues to rocket - 208,000 in 2001 compared to 2,000 a decade earlier. Compulsory treatment orders are a symptom of a culture which treats children as products and an adjunct of administering a brutal, centralised 'free' education system. Those who do not conform to this 'one size fits all' educational machine are 'bad' and/or 'dysfunctional' and can be diagnosed and treated. The more the system feels threatened, the more aggressive the intervention. In a collapsing state education system so-called hyperactivity disorders such as ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) are popular tools of control and neatly shift the focus of failure away from the non-individually responsive institution and onto the child.

There are an increasing number of doctors and psychiatrists who consider that there is no objective difference in the behaviours of so called 'normal' and ADHD children. There are even some, like Thomas Szasz, who put these objections vigorously, pointing out that feeding children what is effectively 'speed' in order to curb what is not a disease, but a 'catch all' for troublesome behaviour, is a matter of adult convenience and control, not of medicine.

Formerly, quacks had fake cures for real diseases; now, they claim to have real cures for fake diseases.¹

When big brother is threatening to drug your children so that they can be more suited to the homogenised environments of state schools perhaps its time not only to fight back, but to ensure that more and more people are aware that they can opt out of the system entirely and choose the freedom of home education. The hidden costs of so called 'free'; state education are on the increase - not only through massive taxation, but also via services delivered with increasing menaces to civil liberties.

Dr. Jan Fortune-Wood

¹ = Chemical Straitjackets for Children by Thomas S. Szasz
     © 2001 The Foundation for Economic Education

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Paul Marks laments the timing and cost of upcoming events

The Mont Pelerin Society is holding its conference in London next week. Rumour has it that the price of actually attending the conference is quite absurd (over eight hundred pounds) [Editor: fortunately the Liberty 2002 Conference is only a mere £75].

However, there are fringe meetings and I have asked, and been allowed, to attend two of them (the panel discussion on the future of freedom at the Institute of Economic Affairs at 18:30 on Monday and the debate on a good and free society between Roger Scruton and Stephen Davis at the Travellers Club, 106 Pall Mall at 18:00 Tuesday).

Contrary to what is sometimes said there are still people in the Conservative party who are interested in liberty - but many Conservative activist types will be down on the south coast (perhaps listening to John Redwood and Co, at a Selsdon Group fringe meeting, explaining why Conservatives should "Stand up for Capitalism").

To have the Mont Pelerin Society conference clashing with the Conservative Party conference is unfortunate.

Paul Marks

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LIBERTY 2002: The European Conference of the Libertarian International and the Libertarian Alliance. This event will take place Saturday/Sunday November 9th/10th 2002 - 10.00am-6.00pm, at the National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE, England.

It costs £75 for the entire weekend, and if you've got that sort of cash to spare and you want to meet a throng of like-minded people including a truly excellent slate of speakers, face-to-face (remember that idea), then it's a bargain.

It is especially attractive when you consider that the event is taking place in one of London's most splendid buildings. And it's our building, for it dates back to the time when liberal meant liberal. We can't permanently reclaim it, but we can at least occupy it for one weekend. The staircase alone is worth the entrance money.

Follow the link above for booking and payment details, and to see the excellent list of speakers, and to find further links to their websites.

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Then you clearly have not been exposed to the Daily Mirror.

They call it an editorial. I call it a vomit-inducing hagiography, the final paragraph of which has the capacity to keep you awake at nights like the trauma of a mugging:

"It was a magnificent speech from a man who is rapidly becoming the greatest figure in world politics, second only, perhaps, to Nelson Mandela."

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to who is number 3 on their list? Personally, I shudder to think.

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There is an excellent article in the Telegraph which serves as a splendid example of just why so many libertarians regard democracy, as it exists in most countries, with profound ambivalence.

So they are being frogmarched back to the polls to reverse the decision they reached just 15 months ago. This is European democracy, Henry Ford style: you can reach any answer, as long as it is yes. In simply refusing to recognise the outcome of the first referendum, the government makes the point of the No campaigners more eloquently than a thousand speeches.

[...]

Mr Ahern and his supporters are relying upon the electorate accepting that there was something wrong with the June 2001 referendum. Although it produced a clear 54-46 victory for the No side, the turnout was just 35 per cent. This mandate is considered sufficiently unsatisfactory for another to be sought, although nobody for a moment believes that Ireland would be holding a second referendum had the same numbers produced a Yes vote.

If you ever wanted a demonstration of the fact the last thing democracy is about is 'the consent of the people', this is it. It is about justifying the actions of political elites.

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Blogger Alice Bachini rejects yet another collectivist 'one size fits all' approach to the problem of juvenile crime

If a certain group of people is identified as causing particular kinds of crime, is it OK to legislate against the rights of that group? Say, black men were proven to be responsible for 90 percent of stabbings. Would that make it OK to ban black men from buying or owning knives? What if white men between twenty and forty were responsible for 95 percent of all drink-driving deaths? Should we make a law banning them from pubs except between certain hours of the morning, say?

Obviously not. Which is why it is a good thing that plans to bring in an ageist curfew in Corby have been shelved. But of course, no-one there is concerned about the civil liberties of people under fifteen. The argument seems to be between those who want something done about certain kinds of crime perpetuated by this age group, reasonably enough, and those who think more football and youth clubs are the answer to immoral behaviour, which, they aren't. And I don't have any easy answers either, but I do think some kind of intelligent understanding that young people are human beings like the rest of us would be a good start.

My other main suggestion is to make it easier for young people to do proper, money-earning work. As long as the system continues to ban kids from doing honest mornings on low-paid milk rounds on the grounds that this interferes with their totally pointless unpaid days of school, it is actively preventing many of them from finding a good way forward with their lives.

Alice Bachini

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The debate over guns is a clash of cultures, a confrontation of different kinds of character, a disagreement over social philosophy and even, though few notice this, over free will and determinism. The contending factions don't need guns to detest each other. They would anyway.
- Fred Reed

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I'm off on holiday soon, and I nearly forgot to mention it. We got an email from Shams Ali:

Hi there!

With reference to your passage in the BLOG:

"And that is when it starts to become confused. Who exactly is going to do the applying? Evidently not 'politicians', but somebody will have to. What is a "non-political government" when it's at home? What 'fundamental principles' are these? Perchance, the Law of Sharia?"

The confusion arises from the human habit of jumping at conclusions without having done the spade work to dig out the facts.

The "fundamental principles" are enumerated and defined at
www.worldjustice.org/principles.html and the rules of their application at www.worldjustice.org/rules.html also the reasonings for the need for such institution are described at www.worldjustice.org/wcj.html and some history of it all at www.worldjustice.org/history.html for the difference between government and politics see www.truth-and-justice.info/govpol.html as for Judaism, Christianity and Islam see www.truth-and-justice.info/religions.html and for the various "isms" see www.truth-and-justice.info/isms.html. You will also find some stuff on government, politics, unions, pensions, etc., by browsing the www.truth-and-justice.info/issues.html - and all that stuff is the tip of an iceberg.

Once you've gone through the stuff, I would like to hear from you what exactly YOUR "libetarianism" is, or, in other words, whom do YOU propose to favour and at whose expense?

regards,

shams ali

I'm more of a Popperian than Shams and I think that jumping at conclusions is very different from jumping to conclusions. If it isn't Sharia, and if Shams tells us it isn't Sharia, then fine, it isn't Sharia. But he doesn't answer that with a yes or a no. Instead he tells me I have to do an iceberg of homework.

It's an old trick. You write long tracts, and refuse to supply short summaries and short answers to short questions. The idea is that people will immerse themselves in your oh-so-elaborate thought processes, but the reality is they mostly ignore you on account of you being a pompous git. I shall do neither. I have glanced at some of my homework, and now I'm just going to carry on communicating – guessing, asking and answering. If Shams Ali doesn't like it, tough. We'll talk about him amongst ourselves.

Being a libertarian (that's libertarian with another "r" in there, mate) I favour people who are trying to live their lives freely, with their justly acquired property, and I believe in defending them against all who attack them. Pretty much what you say, in other words, Shams, although that "at whose expense?" of yours suggests to me a world of fixed-sum falsehood. I'd like a world dominated by libertarian ideas, and by the libertarian people who most effectively believe in them, at the expense (was this is the sort of thing you were getting at?) of all those who adhere to other more aggressively predatory sorts of ideas, who, in my alternative world, would be kept out of serious power and out of the limelite.

Unlike Shams Ali I do want to answer the who-whom question concerning my preferred utopia because, along with Julian Morrison (who commented on my earlier posting), I believe that governing, dominating, setting the agenda or the tone or the pace, reigning, achieving intellectual hegemony, calling the shots, stopping the bucks - call it what you will - has do be done by people, and that's just as true for libertarianism as it is for any other ism. The rules matter. They matter a lot. But mere rules alone won't do it. Verdicts can't impose themselves. People have to impose them. As Julian says, "even absolute rules have fuzzy edges that require human judgement", although I don't think that libertarians will be able to break their own rules "with impunity", to quote the phrase that Julian goes on to use. I think that libertarianism brings good things out of even quite bad people, and it certainly will bring many good things out of the judges who preside in libertarian courts.

Shams Ali gives no direct answer of his own to my who-whom challenge, nor do I see any in the homework he set me. My suspicion is therefore confirmed. He wants to be the Supreme Panjandrum, but like almost all would-be Supreme Panjandra, under cross-examination he dodges the question and talks of other things.

For strangely, he does answer questions I didn't ask, about Judaism and Christianity. So, another question: where does devout in-your-face damn-all-agnostics-for-a-bunch-of-fence-sitting-wimps atheism (my preferred creed) fit in with all this?

A more serious question will come from my fellow libertarians: why am I bothering with this character?

Well, he's a Muslim. He certainly has ferociously orthodox Muslim things to say about the state of Israel. But he's writing in English, and apparently seeking to communicate with us Anglos and not just with other Muslims (hence the stuff about Judaism and Christianity). I favour engaging with Muslims in debate. I've learned quite a lot simply from doing a little of my Shams-homework.

Oh sure, I believe in threatening Islam with nuclear holocaust, as do others, such as Dale Amon. I think that's genuinely a good thing to do. I believe nuclear deterrence can work. But I also believe in trying to talk to Muslims about other much nicer things. The idea that we can't talk logically and politely with people whose fundamental axioms we disagree with and with whom we have other even bigger quarrels is just plain wrong. It seems hard to believe now, but I really do believe, with some of the commentators on David's pieces about Israel, that gruesome confrontations can sometimes calm down.

Also, Shams seems to come from the respectable bourgeois end of the Muslim spectrum, the Thatcherite end you might say, which is also interesting. Follow those homework links and you'll find many things to agree with, as well as to be angry about or confused by. If he were simply a zero-civility zero-creativity barbarian, then he'd be best ignored. But he's not that.

Finally, there's the nature of blogging itself. Blogging enables me to correspond, one little person to another little person, without wasting my replies only on my single little person correspondent. It used to be only big celebrity writers who could afford the bother of writing elegant and clever letters to one another, secure in the knowledge that eventually posterity would gather it all up and admire it. The rest of us, forget it. But blogging democratises the institution of the open letter.

Blogging makes it worth my while to correspond with Shams Ali.

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I think I might have a civil claim against the BBC. I was watching the news from the Labour Party Conference this afternoon whilst eating a sandwich and nearly choked when the BBC Political Correspondent Andrew Marr concocted this radiant gem:

"The important thing for the world right now is the continued dialogue between Washington and Blackpool"

My apologies to non-UK readers because you really do have to be British to fully appreciate just how pant-wettingly hilarious that statement is.

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It's the way the blogosphere works. Something happens in your back yard. Instapundit picks it up and tells you about it, and you get to work. It, in this case being an article in the New Statesman called "Bloggers of the Left, Unite!", by James Crabtree. The New Statesman not itself being very blog-friendly, Crabtree decided to put his piece up at the "iSociety" bit of one of his his own websites. Here's how it ends.

Should the left worry? Definitely. The blogsphere is an example of Willard Quine's coherence theory of truth: that things are true if they agree - or appear to agree - with other things that are held to be true. Right-wing bloggers are thus creating their own world, in which their truth exists often without debate. And the same may be about to happen in the UK. The journalist Stephen Pollard, the only British political blogger on the left, notes: "There are plenty of new British political blogs. And they are all - all - on the right." But political blogging is in its infancy here. It remains up for grabs. Got a computer? Got a view? Get blogging. There is a war to be won.

Or lost.

"Blogsphere"? Is that what they're going to call it?

There appear to be no links from iSociety to "all – all" – or even any-any of - those right wing Brit-blogs, nor to Instapundit nor to Andrew Sullivan, both also mentioned in the piece. Wouldn't want people actually trying to find out for themselves how unthinkingly and unargumentatively right wing or not as the case may be said blogs might be. For someone declaring war, Crabtree seems somewhat reluctant actually to engage with his enemy. But I suppose that when the attacks do start to come, from real blogs, there will be links.

And as for Stephen Pollard being "on the left" … Smack in the Blairite centre middle, more like, and with all kinds of market bells and whistles attached. Ditto Crabtree, to judge by who's paying for his web activities.

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There was special guest appearance today at the Labour Party Annual Conference in Blackpool in the shape of former US President Bill Clinton.

At least we were spared Hilary. Bill's sidekick and trusty companion for the day was film-actor Kevin Spacey who managed to muscle his way into every photo-op like Zelig.

Clinton was on top form, pressing flesh and distributing his effortless charm. One could have been forgiven for forgetting which of the two men was the movie-star. And, boy, were the BBC impressed. The commentators could barely contain their hormonal surges as Clinton glided through the throng. I've heard of politicians making love to the camera before but never have I seen the cameras making love to a politician.

He made a speech to the Conference. A long speech. The text of it may be available somewhere out there in cyberspace but if I was you I wouldn't waste valuable time hunting it down because a) it was dull and b) it's of limited significance. However, perchance you are interested, here is the gist:

"Mah friends, I am so pleased to be here with you today because we all share a common vision; one of peace, one of hope, one of children. Children, children, children, children. That's what we're about: children. And that's what the Third Way is all about; it's about you, me, us all joining together to strive for a better world for children. Children anywhere, children everywhere. Not like those knuckle-dragging right-wing loons who don't care about children. In fact, they eat children. We must not be like them. But we must also help them. We must help them to find a better way; the Third Way. So stay focussed and strong because I know that if we all work together and believe in ourselves we can make socialism work. Oh yeah, and Saddam is a real bad guy and he has to go. Thankyou. I love you lots."

He got a standing ovation

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Sunday's news reported an amazing turn in the upcoming US New Jersey elections. While the subject is of scant interest to the majority of our readers, the sheer audacity of the gambit deserves at least a passing note.

The issue at hand is the New Jersey Senate race between Democrat (Liberal; Socialist) incumbent Robert Torricelli and Republican (Conservative; Capitalist) challenger Doug Forrester. In June, Torricelli had a commanding 14% lead and expected an easy victory. Then one of his 1996 campaign contributors was convicted of making illegal contributions and sentenced to 18 months in jail. Torricelli apologized for failing to report some campaign gifts, was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee and everyone expected the issue to fade away into the politics as usual category.

But it didn't. Forrester kept the issue alive, and the results of the last poll showed that people were tired of politics as usual. Torricelli had dropped from 14 points ahead to 14 points behind.

After recovering from their apoplexy, the Democratic Party decided something had to be done. Torricelli obligingly fell on his sword and, in an emotional farewell on Sunday, withdrew from the running 35 days before the election.

Now for the audacious bit. The Democrats appointed Frank Pallone to take his place and are currently trying to get him on the ballot despite the election law that clearly states all nominees must be on the ballot 48 days before the election. As a handy precedent, a couple years back in Missouri, Mel Carnahan died in a plane crash a few weeks before the election and they couldn't replace him. That the NJ Democrats seek to swap in a pinch hitter simply because polls suggest their original candidate would have lost demonstrates their disregard for the entire election process. It is an attitude displayed all too often by politicians everywhere.

What does it all mean? Torricelli fell from grace because he flaunted the election laws. The Democrats current bait and switch tactics show they too put self-interest ahead of the law. It also shows they're still playing politics as usual.

Hopefully, the voters will teach them a new set of rules. Stay tuned.

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All hail the Web. And power to the people - at least those I approve of.
- Michael of 2 Blowhards, Aug 17, in a posting about the artistic significance of amazon.com

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"I don't mind keeping the bunny-huggers happy so long as it doesn't cost me a penny."

- Brian Aldridge, the Sage of Ambridge. Pity he's such a John Major.

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Just for the hell of it, here is a story that most certainly has its origins in someone's exceedingly boring job. I mean, typing "go to hell" into Google is almost as bad as ego-googling.

According to Computerworld, the No. 1 search result is Microsoft Corporation's home page. When asked about the devilish search result, Google spokesman Nate Tyler said it's an anomaly that Microsoft ranks ahead of even Hell.com, not to mention AOL and UNC. Unsurprisingly, a Microsoft spokesman declined to comment on the results of the Google search; AOL didn't return several telephone calls seeking comment. How on earth does a corporate spokesman deal with an enquiry like that?!

A reader of FlashGuru's MX101 known as Atomgas says it's not Google's fault, but rather the result of all the Web site authors who have a bone to pick with Microsoft:

"It's the they way Google works and what makes Google [the] best search engine ever," Atomgas said. "The difference between Google and other search engines is exactly this: Google makes the priority of the found results by the number and target of found links. If many people have links 'go to hell' pointing at Microsoft, Google will think that this is the best match to show to you, so the result[s] just show the mood of many Web site authors, not Google's opinion."

Well, now we know why linking in blogosphere is such a big deal...

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Or so says leading New Labour talking head and failed Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Mandelson.

He says one of Europe's "huge challenges" in the next couple of years includes "rebuilding the Atlantic alliance". Well this is indeed a 'European' problem, but not a British problem. British relations with the United States and Canada are just fine, thanks... it is the governments of France and Germany which have problems with anti-Americanism at the highest levels.

At least I agree with the dismal Mandelson on one point: the need for 'British Leadership' in Europe. Let the nations of Europe follow Britain as it walks briskly for the door marked EXIT.

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NASA have attached a web cam to the shuttle's external fuel tank and will be transmitting during the launch on the 2nd of October. There is a link on this page that takes you to NASA television.

Flight director Phil Engelauf (as quoted on the BBC web site) said:

the video's "wow factor" should be high.

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A few honest men are better than numbers
- Oliver Cromwell

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Regarding Dale Amon's problem of uranium smuggling, he's right, if the US can't keep "wetbacks" out, and the UK can't stop IRA terrorists from crossing from the Irish Republic, what chance for any country with a long, contested land border?

However, does anyone know anything EASIER to track remotely than radioactive isotopes?

If I were a terrorist I would order a truckload of ammonia and another of iodine, and a suitcase of coffee filters. A pistol to detonate the dynamite paste is probably the hardest item to locate in the UK (steal one from a police officer is probably the safest and most inconspicuous method).

In guerrilla warfare the optimum weapon is one that doesn't break down, and is cheap. This is why the British Army's SA80 rifle is a good weapon: no one has ever stolen one for terrorist use (because they are expensive and break if you look at them sideways ). Until someone makes a mass-produced, miniature nuke which is less prone to malfunctions than Microsoft software, I'm not going to worry overmuch about the threat of nuclear terrorist attack.

Just a thought for the paranoia squad: how do you know there haven't been a dozen dud nukes set off around the world last week in underground car parks? The triggers were just dodgy...

This is my favourite explanation for the non-appearance of Bin Laden: he's waiting for the b***** things to go off

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In discussing the options that are before the Israelis I wish to make it clear that I do not, personally, wish to see any of them unfold. I am merely resigned to the fact that one of them will unfold. This is analysis not advocacy and I have to make this point crystal clear because there are seemingly no end of people who are unable to distinguish those two things.

Now if I had my way, I would like to see some sort of negotiated political settlement that would bring a sort-of peace, or, at least, some measurable abatement in the level of violence. However, such an outcome would require not just an ideal world but a whole other world because it is not going to happen in this one. In this world, negotiations, conventions, conferences and processes are nought but an exercise in futility. You don't just have to take my word for that, you can refer to Article 13 of the Hamas Covenant:

"Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement…

Now and then the call goes out for the convening of an international conference to look for ways of solving the (Palestinian) question. Some accept, others reject the idea, for this or other reason, with one stipulation or more for consent to convening the conference and participating in it. Knowing the parties constituting the conference, their past and present attitudes towards Moslem problems, the Islamic Resistance Movement does not consider these conferences capable of realising the demands, restoring the rights or doing justice to the oppressed. These conferences are only ways of setting the infidels in the land of the Moslems as arbitraters."

A self-fulfilling prophecy if ever there was one. Still, if you were to ask the Palestinians they would probably argue that it was nothing more than an affirmation of an extant reality. As far as they are concerned, it's Jihad or it's nothing.

There may be all manner of tactical devices which the Israelis can employ in response but I submit that all of them will fit into the wider framework of the strategic option the Israelis choose to take.

Option 1: Leave

Give up. Surrender. Go. Just up sticks and leave the whole region to the Palestinians who are then free to do with it as they will.

I do believe a large number of Israelis would qualify for Polish or German passports and it is not beyond per adventure that some deal could be hammered out with the Federal Government in Washington that would see the Israelis transplant themselves to the USA where they would integrate seamlessly in less than a generation.

It is not all that far-fetched. If the ferocity of conflict continues to build, a life spent selling real estate in New Jersey or performing root canal in Arizona might appear marginally more preferable to a life spent patrolling the Lebanese border in a half-track.

This would certainly solve the problem as far as the Israelis are concerned but it may only be the beginning of a problem for a great many others. After all, if relentless Jihad succeeds in chasing away the 'invincible' and stubborn Israelis, would the bouyant and quickened global Islamic pity/terror apparatus start aiming its guns at other parts of the world? Kashmir is the screamingly obvious first choice. But what about Bosnia? Spain? Nigeria? Is it inconceivable that, a few years down the road, we find that parts of France or Holland have been designated as 'Islamic Waqf land'.

Option 2: War of Attrition

In a sense, this is what is being engaged right now but there is the option of settling into this for the long-term and rearranging internal and external security parameters for the long-haul.

At first sight, the Israelis would appear to have the all the advantages of sophisticated military, advanced economy and high technology. But wars of attrition are hugely expensive in terms of money, life and morale.

Security can always be stepped up but in order to continue to function as a modern, capitalist society Israel must remain relatively open and that means that some proportion of bombers and mega-attacks will get through. Being on the defence means you have to be lucky all the time; your attackers only need to be lucky once. Suicide bombings have already crippled Israel's highly lucrative tourism industry. It is no great feat of imagination to envisage the immense harm that a continuation of these attacks can do.

The Palestinians, for all their popular image as being poor and helpless, do actually have advantages in this war and they are estimable ones. The first is demographics. The Israeli birth-rate is actually slightly higher than the Western average but not even close to the Palestinian birth-rate. The Arabs will simply have more manpower to fling into battle. So much more, in fact, that they can absorb far higher losses than the Israelis without undergoing any material demographic decline. This puts time on their side

The Palestinians also enjoy the benefit of low expectations which means they can revert to any tactics they please against Israeli civilians without losing support while the Israelis must maintain the high moral ground which is expected from a Western democracy. The trouble is, they cannot win a long-term war of attrition from that vantage point. Quite apart from the demographic disparity requiring the Israelis to maintain a much higher 'kill-ratio' just to stay in the game, the longer the war drags on, and the bloodier and angrier it gets, the more the Israelis will have to get 'down and dirty' in order to win. War, as they say, is ugly and it is not likely to get any prettier for the TV cameras.

But as Israeli attacks and reprisals get ever more cruel and indiscriminate, will they lose whatever support that have in the West? Will the USA find it cannot no longer ally itself to a country that engages in those activities? The Palestinians might enjoy Western sympathy but they do not need it as they will always have the unqualified support of the Arab and wider Muslim world. But the Israelis consider themselves to be a part of the Western Enlightenment and if that West rejected them they would rapidly lose the will to fight on (if not the ability).

This means that Option 2 necessarily involves (for want of a better term) a propaganda war fought out on the battlefield of Western public opinion. It is in this theatre that the Palestinians have proved themselves, thus far, to be singularly more adroit.

But though the Palestinians have less to lose, they are just as vulnerable to exhaustion and a collapse in morale, especially if the Iraqi and Saudi money that keeps them from utter destitution dries up and the Israeli economy that so many Palestinians, ironically, rely on dries up too. It is always possible that starvation could leave them, quite literally, without the stomach for a fight.

Option 2 is really about a battle of wills. Who has the staying power for the fight? Who will cave in first? Which party is ultimately possessed of the greater determination?

I have no answer and neither, I suspect, does anybody else. Not even the protagonists themselves. But, as far as the Israelis are concerned, Option 2 will be extremely painful, very costly and fraught with risk and, at the end of it, they may still lose, leaving them with no option except Option 1 and wishing they had taken it in the first place.

Option 3: The Carthage Option

By this I mean nothing less than a sustained, systemic and savage programme of ethnic cleansing with a view to simply driving the Palestinians from the Levant and probably slaughtering 10-20% of them in the process.

Could the Israelis do such a thing? They may have the material capacity but do they have will for it would require a titanic act of will do execute. Could a nation that was established to provide a safe haven from pogroms and ethnic cleansing be the harbinger of such activities? If so, what would it do to them? Would they become something that they never wanted to be? How would the West react? Would the USA intervene? Would the rest of the Arab world intervene? Could the Arab leaders countenance doing anything but? What about the Muslim 'Umma'? Would they declare eternal Jihad on Israel and thus start a thousand-year war?

It is all too ghastly to contemplate and yet contemplate it we must, for the Middle-East conflict is no longer about Palestinian statehood, it is about who wins and the means by which they do so.

I also realise that I have rendered these scenarios in such as way as to sound inevitable when, to do so, goes against my grain. For I do not believe in inevitability nor fate. The human agency does not permit it. Therefore it is necessary to introduce a variable element; a fly in this deterministic ointment: the United States.

America's strategic goal is to prevent any repeat of the attacks that occurred on 9/11/01 and I do believe that they will go to extraordinary lengths in order to do so. One of these lengths could be the 'de-radicalisation' of Islam which means, in effect, the de-radicalisation of the Arab world including the Palestinians.

I have no idea if this is a part of US policy or not or even whether such a thing is within the contemplation of Washington. But, in the event that it is, then that could change things dramatically in the Middle East and allow for the possibility (however slim) of some political solution.

However, that is only conjecture. As far as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is concerned we are still left with the core necessity of the Israelis having to decide upon their strategic goal.

This is a battle for the future. If the Israelis believe that they have both a future and a manifest destiny then the path they must take presents itself. However, if they feel they cannot win the future then that feeds right back into the present and the game is up now. I do not know which path they will take but they must take one and soon.

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Following on from Perry's reference to the event on Saturday, and prompted by Brian Micklethwait, I have decided to commit my presentation to the Libertarian Alliance meeting to the Samizdata.

It isn't all arm-twisting. This is not just an important issue, unarguably one of the 'hottest' of all topics, it is one that has potentially global implications and I do think it fitting to examine it in depth.

This is not merely a recantation of the events that are plastered bloodily across our TV screens and newspapers every day for every bomb that explodes and every bullet that flies makes headline news and anyone reading this post is already likely to be conversant with the actual events.

This is more a strategic assessment and overview.

The conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians (or more accurately, this round of the conflict) can be traced back to the Oslo Accords of the mid 90's and the subsequent rounds of complex negotiations, culminating at Camp David in July 2000 when the Ehud Barak offer of Palestinian sovereignty over 95% of the West Bank, was rejected. Very shortly afterwards the Second (or Al-Aqsa) Intifada began.

Despite the welter of accusation and counter-accusation flying back and forth at the time, the real reason for the breakdown was the Israeli refusal to countenance the Palestinian demand for 'Right of Return' i.e. a right for all and any Palestinians to return and reside in Israel proper. It is a proposal that the Israelis cannot, under any circumstances, accept and one that the Palestinians will not, in any circumstances, withdraw.

But the breakdown of the Accords was actually a symptom of the problem and not the problem itself which was far more systemic. The Accords were never going to succeed because one side, the Palestinians, had a strategic goal and the other side, the Israelis, did not.

The Palestinian goal was always assumed by most to be independence and that was indeed true up until 1980's and the rise of Hamas. Hamas proved to be remarkably successful remarkably quickly, mostly because it provided a hard-line, Islamic, rejectionist philosophy and also because, as well as having an armed wing, it also provided 'Islamic social care' in the form of health care, schooling and welfare. They provided money and services to the families of suicide bombers (before and after recruiting the bombers) and even money and services to the families of alleged collaborators (before and after they tortured and killed them).

Despite (or maybe because of) this ruthless single-minded zealousness, Hamas succeeded in winning the battle for many Palestinian hearts and minds. Whilst it is true that not all Palestinians subscribe to Hamas, it is impossible to imagine a Palestinian political position that does not pay deference to them.

Hamas, as opposed to Arafat and the PA, are quite open about their agenda. It is contained in the Hamas Covenant. The following is from Article 11:

"The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day. It, or any part of it, should not be squandered: it, or any part of it, should not be given up. Neither a single Arab country nor all Arab countries, neither any king or president, nor all the kings and presidents, neither any organization nor all of them, be they Palestinian or Arab, possess the right to do that. Palestine is an Islamic Waqf land consecrated for Moslem generations until Judgement Day. This being so, who could claim to have the right to represent Moslem generations till Judgement Day?

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement".

A clear and unambiguous statement that no sort of compromise can be contemplated. Any solution that leaves Israel standing on even one square inch of 'Islamic Waqf' land is unacceptable and any Arab leader who is willing to entertain such betrayal will face assassination. (And, as an aside, I wonder if the Spanish have read this?)

There may, of course, be many Palestinians who do not share this view but I submit that they are not the ones in control.

The methodology for achieving this strategic Palestinian goal was not by going to war with Israel head-on. If the Palestinians were to don uniforms and march on Tel Aviv they would get their clocks cleaned. So that's not what they are going to do. Instead, the process was to be advanced in stages that start with a seemingly reasonable political demand being backed up by violence, bombings and shootings on the ground until that demand is met. Then comes a further seemingly reasonable demand which is also pursued with the employment of violent attacks until it is met and so on.

This is the methodology employed throughout the negotiations and it is why the Second Intifada erupted as soon as it became clear that the demand for 'Right of Return' had been rejected. It was rejected because for the Israelis it is a slow death-sentence. Leaving aside, for the moment, the validity of the claims of returnees, Israel would quickly have to absorb anywhere up to 6 million Arab returnees who would, within short time, reduce Israel's Jewish population to minority status. With none of the hatred and loathing having been assuaged by this measure (indeed, it would probably be thrown into sharp relief) the day-to-day violence would dramatically escalate. The majority Arabs would soon wrest political control from the minority Jews and then the fate of the latter would be sealed.

It is worth noting here that Israel does stand apart from other Western nations on the issue of ethnocentrism. Israel is not just a national project, it is an exceptionalist project. Israeli Jews must remain the majority and remain in control, else the raison d'etre of the State evaporates. No other Western nation exhibits such a conscious concern for its ethnic or religious composition. Indeed, most have vigourously eschewed the concept altogether, embracing, instead, the multiracial, multicultural ideal.

It seems quite extraordinary that the Israeli leadership went into the Oslo Accords with the objective only of securing some sort of peace and without being aware that, for their protagonists, the game had changed. But peace is not, nor has it ever been, a strategic goal and that left the Israelis without one. I believe that this loss of direction was wilful and reflected the belief among many in Israel that, despite all the evidence of Palestinian rejectionism, they would, given sufficient time, come to accept the reality of Israel's permanence and a de facto peace would materialise as a prelude to a settlement of sorts.

It is my view that this faith was misplaced and it has left the Israelis in a strategic paralysis from which they have yet to emerge. Despite all of Israel's military capability, their home-brew bomb-kit protagonists now have the upper hand just by virtue of knowing what it is they want to achieve and being prepared to pay the price to achieve it.

As things stand, Israel could be washed up. It will not disappear in a puff of smoke or an apocalyptic bang; there will no sudden big hole in the ground where Israel used to be. No, it will be more prosaic than that. Israel is a complicated, market economy with things like industries, transport, communications and night-life. Societies such as this can only operate successfully in conditions of relative calm. Just a couple of suicide bombers a month and the occasional large-scale attack and it all starts to break down. Soon, the young and the talented, who yearn for a normal life where they can do things go shopping and eat at restaurants without being killed, start to leave in search of it. Then capital begins to fly, then the economy starts to whither and the leadership loses its nerve and so begins the inexorable crumble. A long, drawn-out, hum-drum extinction.

In order to avoid Death by Indecision, the Israeli leadership must, within the near future, make a decision about the country's long-term strategic goal. It is my view that the Israelis have only 3 options from which to choose. None of them are easy and all of them are decidedly grim.

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If the UN adopts the kind of resolution authorizing force to enforce the kind of inspections that they should have a resolution adopted for, then I believe this resolution should say: In the event the UN adopts a resolution authorizing member states to use force to enforce the inspections, I believe this resolution should say that under those circumstances we should authorize force to enforce that UN resolution.

Carl Levin, chairman of the USA's Senate Armed Services Committee, summing up the current Democrat position on attacking Iraq, reproduced by Mark Steyn in his Chicago Sun-Times column yesterday

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While doing some research on my previous news item, I ran across this fascinating article on the WWII German nuclear weapons program.

Much of it was shrouded in mystery and misrepresentation prior to the declassification of the "Farm Hall Reports" discussed in the aforementioned link. Werner Heisenberg was caught out by statements he made in a bugged room when first told of the American bombs. It is quite apparent he was indeed committed to building a German nuclear weapon and might have if not for an egregious theoretical error.

Sometimes the gods do smile on us.

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I'm sure most of you have read or heard by now about the "15 kilos" of Uranium seized by Turkish authorities. It's turned out to be only 100 grams. I delayed writing about this due to my skepticism about the quantity. A quantity of enriched Uranium (ie high in U235) that "close" to critical mass in that small a container would be, shall we say, a bit on the warm side? ...in both senses! There are ways around this if it is all pelletized (as from power plant fuel rods) and packed in neutron absorbing materials. Those, along with the lead shielding, would drive the weight up. The taxi would have been down on it's axles!

So there were only 100g of possibly enriched Uranium and it was caught. That's the good news. But there is a dark lining to this "silver cloud". According to Ha'aratz:

Smugglers use Turkey's porous eastern border to import drugs, and hundreds of thousands of migrants each year illegally cross the rugged frontier on their way to more affluent European Union nations.

Police in Istanbul seized more than one kg of weapons-grade uranium last November that had been smuggled into Turkey from an east European state. The smugglers were detained after attempting to sell the material to undercover police officers.

Note what Ha'aretz leaves you to infer for yourself. We all know how successful attempts to stop drug smuggling have been. About all you can do with drug seizure data is infer an order of magnitude more was not caught. Given the value of fissionable material and the actual quantities seized in Turkey alone in the last year...

Folks, we have a problem.

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Armadillo Aerospace has finally let one of it's team fly on their testbed. Although the flight was a tethered one of short duration and trivial height, it encompassed all the dangerous bits of engine startup, liftoff, hover, setdown and engine shutdown. Major kudos are due to John Carmack and his team! You can read more and find the video here.

In John's own words:

We finally let someone ride on one of our landers. Only a few seconds in the air, but still pretty damn cool!

If the name John Carmack sounds familiar... it's probably because it is. He is a founder of Id Software and the author of all those classic state-of-the-art pushing games from Castle Wolfenstein through Quake Arena and beyond.

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For some years now, sister Daphne and brother-in-law Denis, with whom I had a most happy stay last weekend, have been telling me interesting things about dogs. I promised to do a posting about this earlier, and here it is. ("Education" is an odd way to categorise it, but this was the best I could find.)

D&D have two dogs themselves, but more to the point they've also been reading a particularly interesting book about dogs, The Dog Listener by Jan Fennell. Denis did a very positive customer review of this book for Amazon. However, these customer reviews apparently come and go, and Denis' one, which was there a week ago, seems now to have gone. Luckily I had already copied and pasted some of what he had said:

Her suggestions are so simple that, as a dog owner for many years, I thought they could not possibly work. I was so wrong that I was amazed. Within days my two labradors were so much more relaxed and better behaved that I experienced a fresh delight in keeping dogs. … Over the years I have read many books on dog training and this is the best.

Jan Fennell's wisdom is based on the observation of dogs and dog packs in the wild, including wolf packs, dogs being the domesticated descendants of wolves. In this respect Fennell's work resembles that of Monty Roberts, the famous "man who listens to horses" alluded to in the title of Fennell's own book, and the writer of the forward for it.

I read through The Dog Listener while staying with Daphne and Denis, and I can't say that I grasped all of its subtleties. But a few core notions I do now understand.

Dogs are pack animals, and the key to knowing how to relate to them means knowing how dogs relate to other pack members. Your dog, if you have one, thinks of you as a member of its pack.

And here's the most surprising thing. There is every chance that your dog thinks that it is the leader of your pack, and that you are its subordinate.

I had always imagined that dogs are like human infants only with about a hundred times more energy. That they might be worrying about their "owners" in the way that a parent worries about its child never entered my head. Yet when an "owner" abandons a dog, for example by leaving the dog at home, and the dog gets into a frazzle and bites the furniture and messes up the carpets, the dog isn't reacting like an abandoned child. The dog is reacting like a distracted parent who has lost its child. Don't think: neurotic dog, well, that's dogs for you, neurotic by nature. No. Think: pack leader who is failing in his basic responsibilities. Think: captain of ship who is out of his depth and who knows it. This is where the "neurotic dog" cliché comes from. Crazy, uncontrolled, obsessive behaviour is only natural for a dog in the sense that it is natural for me to piss in my trousers if someone holds a knife to my throat. That there are so many neurotic dogs out there is because there are so many owners who don't know how to take charge of their dogs. Such owners don't know how to relieve their dogs of overwhelming and impossible responsibilities.

Other boss dog ("alpha dog") habits: barking at strangers, on account of it being their job to guard the den against strangers; tugging at the leash, on account of it being their job to decide where the hunt goes; simply ignoring requests to come or sit or just calm down, on account of top dogs not obeying bottom dogs.

So how do you place yourself above your fellow pack member in the pack pecking order? How do you put a dog in its place?

The essence of the answer is: by ignoring it. When I arrived at the D&D household for the first time, I did exactly as Denisinstructed: ignore them, go where you're going, don't go towards them, don't make eye contact, don't pat them, don't smack them on the body, don't, don't, don't - and I soon had the dogs behaving as if I was the boss. This after a lifetime of greeting dogs in the human style, like long lost but low IQ friends – or like small children. Shouting enthusiastic greetings at them, smothering them in affection and body contact and generally making a huge drama out of how glad I am to see them - followed by them not giving me the time of day from then on. That's because if you do all that stuff, so natural to a human, the dog then reckons it outranks you. Everything you do to change that - more shouting, more you approaching them, more drama, more physical affection – only confirms their superior status to you in their eyes.

On the other hand, do to a dog what if done to another human would be called "cutting them dead", and the dog is yours to command. And perfectly happy about it. It works. If I can do it, anyone can.

After that it got more confusing. If a duly subjugated dog then approaches you and you pat it on the head and tickle its ears, are you confirming your superior status, or undermining it? More seriously, what's the point of owning a dog if, for its own good, you have to ignore it all the time? So far as I got from my first reading of The Dog Listener the answer is that you can play with your dog, but that you must do it at a time and with toys of your choosing, not his. And you keep these toys hidden away. But I could have got that wrong. If you want to explore the subtleties of all this, you'll have to read the book yourself.

On all other matters canine I defer to Denis's superior knowledge and far greater experience (to say nothing of Jan Fennell's of course), but one thing Denis said to me that I do severely doubt. I think he may have been rather exaggerating my expertise in saying, as he did, that I now know more about dogs and how to handle dogs than 99% of people (and he may even have said dog-owners). To put it another way, I think he underestimates how well Jan Fennell has been doing, with her television appearances, her books (there's now another), her public demonstrations and now her voluminous e-mail correspondence.

Not all those customer reviews are as positive as Denis's was. One says, for example, that Fennell's stuff is either well known already, out of date (whatever that may mean), or else over-dependent upon the idea of the canine hierarchy. The review I'm quoting now has also gone, unless I'm doing something wrong.

Although this book may help many people because Jan's techniques may work by accident, she hasn't got the faintest idea why they are. She tries to compare dogs to wolves, but appears to have learnt about wolves by reading the back of a cereal packet.

This isunfair. I distinctly remember a long description in The Dog Listener of a televised confrontation between a wolf pack and a new alpha-wolf who was offering himself as their new leader, their old one having died. You don't see TV shows on cereal packets.

Ignoring her dogs in the morning calmed them down because 'they accepted her as the pack leader'. Rubbish. She was no longer rewarding their excited behaviour with attention and that's why it worked.

Most dog trainers and behaviourists in the UK are holding their heads in their hands with despair that such a misinformed book is now the bible for the average dog owner looking to understand their pet.

As I say, Jan Fennell's stuff has definitely been getting around, certainly among the dog-people. I think I smell a turf battle here between the different dog-persons, with the old alpha-experts barking like hell at the upstart Fennell. I further suspect that these anti-Fennellists dislike the idea of canine hierarchy not because it's not a reality, but because it's a reality that they don't like. Egalitarianism among the animal trainers!

But what do I know? Take your pick. Or, use the comments section to tell me what's really going on here.

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Delectable! Her derriere is the very apogee of nadirs
- Overheard recently by Samizdata Illuminatus

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The image above, which I took about an half an hour before writing this article, shows an employee of Britain's premier cancer hospital, The Royal Marsden, standing by the front door having a cigarette. This is a man who works in a cancer hospital and comes face to face with the savage realities of what his habit vastly increases his risk of contracting, on a daily basis.

This picture says something very profound about human nature. One thing is for sure, it says more than any lengthy exegesis I could write about the futility of trying to use the violence of law to mandate behaviour the state feels is in the regulated person's "best interests". Ponder that.

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You remember the DMCA? It's that Digital Millenium Copyright Act that Americans concerned with freedom are getting so steamed up about. As usual the EU are not far behind in providing an equivalent for us over here to have bad dreams about. Chris Bertram of Junius has linked to an article by Julian Midgely which claims that:

...university lecturers or school teachers will need to appeal to the Secretary of State on each and every occasion that they need to make a copy of part of a copy-protected CD for teaching or research. Librarians, archivists, private individuals, and the disabled can expect to be similarly encumbered.