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This year we are likely to see a regime change in Bagdad and if we're very lucky in Pyongyang. Brussels would be taking optimisim perhaps a bit far!

It occurs to me that this is an area in which libertarians who are sceptical of the public relations exercise known as the "Saddam's the worst thing since Hitler" can agree with the libertarian interventionists. It also shows up the fundamental dishonesty of the leftist "peace" campaigners.

Talking to a "peace" protestor a couple of weeks ago I was informed of the following alleged facts:

1. that Iraq was a client of the US and armed by the Reagan and Bush senior presidencies.
   
2. that the people of Iraq would bear the brunt of any US led military intervention.
   
3. that the sanctions against Iraq were killing hundreds of children every day;
   
4. that the US was only interested in manipulating the oil price, though I'm clear whether it is supposed to go up or down.
   
5. that the "peace" protestors are against any war and in no way endorsing the Iraqi regime (which remains nameless).

Contrast the claims with the attitudes of the same people about the regimes of general Pinochet in Chile and the apartheid regime in South Africa.

1. The left claimed that both were US client states, so why didn't the peace protestors defend those regimes from proposed US sanctions? Obviously the "client state" claim is irrelevant or untrue.
   
2. If the people are going to suffer most from military action, how come they don't defend the German people who suffered from a terrible invasion in 1945: Soviet troops were ordered to rape every German woman they could find in Berlin. The "peace" protestors are not normally known for minimising the trauma of multiple rapes on women and children.
   
3. How come the South African children who presumably suffered from the leftist inspired sanctions against South Africa weren't worth defending? Perhaps they were meant to suffer and become useful puppets in a Soviet war of liberation.
   
4. So where were these "peace" protestors when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands in 1982, or when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, or Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1980 (admittedly they must have been confused by this one)?

Funny how it's only the regimes that support socialism (preferably of a racialist tendency) or anti-modern theocracy that are deemed worthy of "peace" protestor support.

A Commie is a Commie is a Commie. There are grounds for opposing war, but the Communist Dictator Defence League isn't one of them.

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One of the Georges - I forget which - once said that a certain number of hours' sleep each night - I cannot recall at the moment how many - made a man something, which for the time being has slipped my memory. Baxter agreed with him. It went against all his instincts to sit up in this fashion, but it was his duty and he did it.
- P. G. Wodehouse (in Something Fresh: A Blandings Story, 1915)

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No one seems to have mentioned the death of Joe Foss (who died on New Year's Day) here yet. As I have just read his obituary in the Daily Telegraph (link to article is currently down) I had better write something.

Joe Foss was a true American Hero, "Ace of Aces" in the struggle against the Japanese in the skies over the Pacific, destroying at least 27 enemy aircraft personnally. He was a fine officer and an inspiration to the men who served with him. He survived being shot down and spent hours drifting in shark invested waters. Joe Foss was also a fine thinking officer who never let his aircraft be tricked into hunting enemy fighters - if this meant letting enemy bombers through to attack U.S. air bases.

For his bravery and skill Joe Foss won the Congressional Medal of Honour and many other decoratons.

However, Joe Foss was not just a good Marine - he was also a man of grit in civilian life, helping to save his families' farm in Depression hit South Dakota (after the early death of his father) by hard slog. After the war Joe Foss turned down a vast sum of money for the film rights to his life (he was to have been played by John Wayne) because the film company wished to include a love affair that did not occur.

From running a flight school in Sioux Falls South Dakota Joe Foss served his State as Governor and in the United States Congress - before being defeated by George McGovern.

Joe Foss then became an outstanding broadcaster famous for such long running series on American rural life as "Joe Foss Outdoorsman".

Joe Foss's commitment to liberty did not weaken with age and he was President of the National Rifle Association from 1988 to 1990 and was staunch in his belief that Americans had the right to be armed to defend themselves and others "period".

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Michael Peach, the home educating house dad, doesn't only write about home education. He has this to say about the current state of British gun control:

Two teenage girls have been shot dead in Birmingham. Details are sketchy as nobody wants to talk to the police but it seems they were shot outside a party and a car was riddled with bullets, at least thirty shots were fired. Already the call has gone out for stricter gun control with the government now considering a minimum sentence of five years for carrying an illegal weapon.

This misses the point completely. The situation is this ... the bad guys have got guns. No amount of extra sentencing is going to change this. It is time to stop messing around and let the good guys have guns too. Would the gunman or gunmen have been able to fire at will if he thought someone else was going to fire back. He / they had a gun and could just take their time and fire at will knowing they were totally unthreatened. Just the thought that he might get shot himself would have made him think twice before going on the rampage.

As is now being proven everyday on the streets of the UK Gun control does not work.

And yes, this was the same incident that Perry de Havilland noted here yesterday.

The significance of this is not just what Mike says, although heaven knows it's true enough; it's who he is. Britain's home-educators are a less God-fearing and more string quartet playing, Labour voting, Guardian reading, vegitarian, sandal-wearing, woolly knitting, woolly wearing, woolly minded lot than those of the USA. If just a tiny number of those people even get to hear that someone like them thinks that the gun problem in Britain now is that people like us don't have enough guns, then the long term beneficial effect could be enormous. This is, after all, an extremely simple idea to grasp, even if your first reaction to it is one of pure horror, and once someone has put the notion in your head, it is hard to shake it out.

In the USA, if I get the picture right, believing what Mike says is fairly normal, and in some parts almost de rigeur. Not everyone does believe it, but everyone knows that others do even if they don't. Right? (Commenters feel free to correct me if I need it.) In Britain, such is the primitive state of this debate that the number of people willing to say things like this in public, such as on the radio or even in a blog, is as close to zero as makes hardly any difference. But as we all know, the difference between hardly anyone and actually no-one can be all the difference. So special kudos to people like Mike who are willing to say such things.

In general, Mike's blog is well worth the regular attention of samizdata readers.

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Jeffrey Tucker has written a superb article about conservative statist central planning, but one paragraph stands out for me:

Central planning has several universal features. It is coercive. It bypasses the needs of the consumers for the sake of politics. It relies on edicts which may or may not reflect reality. It does not take advantage of the price system, profit, or loss. It is impervious to change. It ignores local conditions. It does not permit flexibility according to circumstance. It robs those who know the most of the ability of make decisions and innovate. It creates incentives to obey the plan but diverts attention from the real goal, whatever it may be (and it may be the wrong goal). It ends up over utilizing material resources, underutilizing human ones, and not generating the intended results.

What could I possibly add to that?

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The Home Office is to publish a consultation paper to help gauge how much electronic invasion of privacy the public is willing to accept.

This is a second attempt at a code of practice for controversial snooping laws, the first draft code was shelved by the government after causing outrage among privacy advocates who protested against allowing
a broad range of government agencies, including all local authorities, the NHS, the Postal Services Commission and the Food Standards Agency, to demand the communications records of Internet and telephone users.

Home Office officials insist that the new consultantion document to be published early this year will be placed in the public domain and show the totality of how data is accessed.

All departments responsible for authorities accessing communications data are being asked for help to make sure the paper properly reflects what is being done and by whom.

I bet you anything that the 'whom' will be faceless government departments with names George Orwell would be proud of.

The state is not your friend

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Crikey! This news story suggests certain elements in the Chinese police are actually concerned about privacy, so much so that they apologised to a family after busting into a man's house where the guy was watching porn with his wife.

The world turns. Are we getting close to the point where China, a communist state albeit one hurtling ever faster down the capitalist path, may be becoming more concerned about privacy than Britain?

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Theodore Dalrymple is a pseudonym used by British psychiatric doctor-cum-commentator, Anthony Daniels. A man with a tangibly Burkean Conservative mind, he wades hip-deep through the detritus of inner-city Britain, surveying a wasteland that stretches as far as his eyes can see.

Not surprisingly he has a rather jaundiced view of this country. Indeed, so relentlessly pessimistic are his columns and books that one wonders whether a majority of readers end up by being his patients.

However, being gloomy does not necessarily mean the same as being wrong. While other talking heads, both of the left and of the right, mount their various hobbyhorses and gallop off furiously to nowhere in particular, Dalrymple has hit the big nail resolutely on the head with a dire warning about the Nazification of Britain:

"I grew up believing that it couldn’t happen here; that the intrinsic decency, good sense and ironical detachment of the British would have precluded Nazism or anything like it from taking root in our sceptred isle. Now I am not so sure. Utter vileness does not need a numerical majority to become predominant in a society. The Nazis never had an electoral majority in Germany, yet Germany offered very little resistance to their barbarism. Of course, it is highly unlikely that history would repeat itself in anything approximating the same form; but evil, unlike good, is infinitely multiform. We can invent our own totalitarian evil. There is little doubt that we have prepared the ground very well for evil’s triumph."

Just as the Germans had prepared the ground by the construction of the top-down Bismarckian state. Both citizens and civil servants obeyed the orders of their political masters without question because that is what they had become used to doing. The nature of the orders, or the consequences of their execution, were not subject to any meaningful moral analysis or challenge.

"Whenever I have dealings with British bureaucrats, an insistent question is at the back of my mind: is there any order you would refuse to obey? From my observations of their conduct, my guess is that, in general, there isn’t; that they would prefer mass slaughter to the loss of their jobs and that, in the event of a post facto trial, all of them would fall back on the old excuse, I was only obeying orders."

From my own career as a practising lawyer, I can only concur. No regulation is too ridiculous or damaging not to be zealously enforced or robotically obeyed. In this. much of Britain's professional class collaborate. It is simply too dangerous and career-damaging not too. The consequences of dissent are financial ruin, so there is no dissent.

"Recently, I received a circular headed New Ethnic Categories that began with the words, ‘As you may know, we are required to monitor the ethnic origins of our staff.’ Who was this ‘we’ of whom the circular spoke: no names, only ‘The Human Resources Unit’ (Orwell could have done no better). And no decent reason for this fascistic practice was given; the ‘we are required’ being the final and irrefutable argument in its favour. Again it is a fair bet that not a single peep of protest was uttered in the office of the ‘Human Resources Unit’ when this circular was sent round."

Who issues these orders? Where are they formulated? What is their purpose? Who benefits from their execution? These are the real questions.

"The organised lying that results from centralised information-gathering not only blunts critical faculties and makes it impossible to distinguish true information from false, but also morally compromises those who participate in the process: everyone is made an accomplice of the central power, and so less and less does anyone feel able to make a stand. The more state employees conform to the rules laid down, the more helpless and degraded they become, which is the ultimate purpose of these rules. When you go to the doctor nowadays, you are not seeking his advice; you are finding out what the government has told him to do. Only appearances remain the same; the reality is changed utterly."

The same applies for the private sector which has succumbed to such vast swathes of top-down state code that much of it is, in effect, nationalised. The more our behaviour, choices and dealings are prescribed for us, the less we rely on our own faculties in the pursuit of good judgement. Thus does civil society itself begin to dissolve.

"We, too, are now creating a cultural context in which great state crimes are possible, though perhaps not yet inevitable. When I see the routine inhumanity with which my patients are treated by the state and its various bureaucracies, often in the name of obedience to rules, I think that anything is possible in this country. Yes, when I see the baying mobs of drunken young people who pullulate in our city centres every weekend, awaiting their evil genius to organise them into some kind of pseudo-community, and think of our offices full of potential Eichmanns, I shudder."

Britain has, in the past, so successfully resisted the pull of tyrrany because of the Anglo-Saxon heritage which has set the face of the individual in opposition to the state. Contrary the continental countries where the guiding ethos was governed by a vision of the state as the tree and the citizen as a branch of the tree. Since WWII in particular it is the latter view which has trumped the former in this country to the extent that it can no longer be assumed that Britain has some sort of magic amulet against the establishment of outright tyrrany in the future.

It is for this reason that traditional arguments between Left and Right seem so circular and impotent. All ideologies have been left bleeding on the battlefield while the Regulatory State has ridden to triumph. We are ruled by an essentially apolitical elite who exercise power for the sake of power and without any real guiding principles except the maintaining of that power.

This leaves us with an ideological vacuum; a wide-open playing field for someone or something that has the verve and gumption necessary to capture the popular imagination. I like to think that this could be libertarianism as part of a wider yearning to throw off the yoke of the interventionist state. But, sadly, history does not corroborate that hope.

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Whilst looking for something entirely different I stumbled across the public domain slides and script for a talk given by John Poindexter: "Information Awareness Office Overview". Since there was some discussion about this DARPA research project a few weeks ago, I have acquired copies and placed them on our server.

That way, if a slashdot occurs, instead of causing headaches for some unsuspecting research site administrator, I'll only annoy the ISP that hosts us.

You will probably want to do "the rightclick download thing" as these are pdf documents.

• Information Awareness Office Overview script

• Information Awareness Office Overview slides

Cheers!

Addendum: If there is sufficient interest, I will acquire and post some of the other talks.

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Our favourite pinko blogger, Brian Linse is in London...

Little does he know the effect of drinking out of a Samizdata.net Coffee Mug will have on his fragile political sensibilities...muuuahhhhhh!

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Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott plans to restrict the right of council tenants to buy their homes. This is very encouraging to me as it is a policy calculated to remind the large 'new bourgeoise' of former 'working class' people with aspirations to become property owners just how out of sync a socialist meta-context is with their real lives.

The problem is now that some tenants have bought their homes at big discounts, and then sold them on to property companies, who in turn sell them on at a profit.

Yes, shocking. When 'working class' people (a largely empty term when in reality the majority of British society is utterly bourgeois) make too much money, they start getting strange notions that they should be allowed to keep it and that is clearly something the Labour Party needs to stamp on! The notion of poor people turning a big fat profit by engaging in capitalist activities like selling their own property is anathema to a party which exists to dole out other people's stolen money to a supplicant class.

In a manner which is actually technically more in tune with the fascist variant of socialism, they are happy for people to 'own' private property' (e.g. such as allowing a person to purchase their council house), but if they then dispose of that 'private' property for their personal benefit in a manner not in accordance with 'national objectives', that is seen as an 'abuse'. Which is to say, Labour shares the fascist view that private property is just fine, particularly the bit in which the former council tenant pays the council for the property... provided it does not actually then mean the new 'owner' in reality controls the thing he has just paid for.

Economically at least, modern regulatory statism has a large streak of fascist thinking at its core and this is an good example of that sensibility at work.

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Gun crime continues to rise in Britain, with two young girls shot dead
at a party last night.

Perhaps Britain should ban all handguns. Oh, that's right... they already are banned. So let's ban... I dunno... let's ban something else... toy guns, just like they are in Sweden! That will do the trick!

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"A convoy of anti-war activists, likely to include dozens of British volunteers, will leave London next month to act as human shields protecting strategic sites in Iraq."

Oh please not again.
- Salam Pax

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Spiritual movements are revolts of thought against inertia, of the few against the many; of those who because they are strong in spirit are strongest alone against those who can express themselves only in the mass and the mob, and who are significant only because they are numerous
- Ludwig von Mises

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I picked up the following little titbit from an email newsletter of We The People. For those of you who don't remember, that is Bob Schultz's tax protest organization.

It seems that Congressman Henry Hyde thinks the Constitution he swore to uphold and protect is just a bit, well... passe:

"Congressman Ron Paul reminded the Chairman of the House of Representatives Committee on International Relations that the Constitution required a congressional Declaration of War before the armed forces of the United States could be applied in hostilities overseas, not H.J.R 114, a congressional Resolution authorizing the President to decide if and when to apply that force.

However, Chairman Henry Hyde is quoted, for the record, "There are things in the Constitution that have been overtaken by events, by time. Declaration of war is one of them. There are things no longer relevant to a modern society.Why declare war if you don't have to? We are saying to the President, use your judgment. So, to demand that we declare war is to strengthen something to death. You have got a hammerlock on this situation, and it is not called for. Inappropriate, anachronistic, it isn't done anymore..."

The 50-member Committee then went on to vote against the substitute amendment offered by Rep. Paul, which read simply (after the resolving clause), "That pursuant to Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, a state of war is declared to exist between the United States and the Government of Iraq and the President is hereby authorized and directed to employ the United States Armed Forces to carry on war against the Government of Iraq and to bring the conflict to a successful conclusion."

The Committee then went on to approve H.J. Resolution 114, which was eventually approved by Congress."

Ron Paul is the nearest thing to a libertarian we have in public office. Although he is registered Republican... he is a libertarian. Some of you may remember his 1988 Presidential campaign with Andre Marrou as his Vice Presidential running mate. I was a Russell Means delegate at the nominating convention in Seattle that year, but that's how it is in politics. Once the streamers and confetti have been swept off the convention floor everyone gets behind "the horse what won". I wrote the Space Policy statements for them and thus had the chance to work with Ron and his campaign team on a number of occasions.

Ron's congressional statements were not grandstanding. They were principled statements of his belief in the Constitution and in Liberty. That is just the sort of man he is.

For those space activists among us: Ron Paul is also the only Presidential candidate to ever appear at an International Space Development Conference: the 7th ISDC, held in Denver in May 1988. Some of the local Colorado LP were working his Denver visit and one of them was also on the ISDC conference committee (I had chaired the year before in Pittsburgh). He knew me in both my LP hat and my L5 hat... so I acted as liaison and briefer before Ron's talk. We even had a heckler from Martin-Marietta to keep it interesting: Bob Zubrin!

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It has just gone midnight here in the UK and so I will begin by extending my very best wishes to all our readers for a happy, healthy and prosperous New year. Sadly, I suspect it will not be peaceful.

However, there is some good news to be had. The BBC TV teletext news service (no link, sorry) is reporting the result of a nationwide survey of parents the result of which is that a relatively whopping thirty one percent are considering home-schooling. The reason given was the growing disillusionment with the current education system.

Since this is not the kind of news the BBC would wish to propogandise about, it may just be an accurate reflection on the way Britain is moving on this issue.

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There are all manner of idiots in the world. There are dangerous idiots, annoying idiots, (Lord help us) influential idiots and then there are some idiots who wallow in such specious gibberish that it requires a hard heart to look upon them as anything other than pitiful.

The Guardian (where else?) has a long record of providing a platform for pitiful idiots as illustrated by the column they insist on giving to George Monbiot:

"If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards."

Perhaps it's just you that is going backwards, George. Not sure about the rest of us. Mind you if you right, then perhaps the nutty 60's has something to do with it.

"The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion."

Ah George, you haven't been reading your Julian Simon like a good boy. You haven't have you? Naughty.

"Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic."

Which you clearly have been.

"The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production."

Er, care to explain that, George?

"Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt."

I'd love to give this a Fisking but I must confess that I have no idea what the f*cking hell he is actually talking about. It sounds like the kind of marxoid tripe they teach at universities and which is so deliberately opaque that it must be very clever and authoratative and therefore beyond question.

"Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land."

Time for a 'Made-up-Statistics' warning!

"Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000".

Suppose that has nothing whatsoever to do with Gordon Brown's tax increases which have deprived us of so much of our disposable income? No, course not. Silly me for even asking.

"The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present."

'Bernard Lietaer'? Never heard of him but I'll wager that he's the kind of smelly, dysfunctional political activist who haunts Labour Party fringe meetings with a shopping bag full of newspaper clipping and scribbled essays in the hope that he'll get an opportunity to corner some hapless victim and bore them into the grave.

"Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad."

Buying the Guardian is definitely bad. Otherwise that one sentence contains everything you need to know about Mr.Monbiot. He is a jealous, begrudging loser who has spun an ideological mask of deceit around himself in order to provide a fig-leaf for his po-faced, anti-human, defeatist miserabilism.

Pitiful. Just pitiful.

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There has been some discussion on the Libertarian Alliance Forum about "if they know where the weapons are, then why don't they just tell the inspectors where to go?" I will attempt to tackle this question from a tacticians' point of view.

Iraq is big: about the size of France and a hell of a lot emptier. There are miles of underground facilities. We can't possibly be one hundred percent certain we've found everything. No matter how long the inspectors take there is uncertainty for the Searchers. However there is also uncertainty for Saddam. He can't know what our spies have found out, if anything.

So we have a mathematical "game" with two players that might be likened to "battleship", but is far more complex. It's also deadly serious. There are potentially hundreds of thousands of lives at stake.

One player has assets on his hidden board and the other player is trying to find them. The second player knows where some of the assets are but can't even be sure what percentage they know of; the other side knows all of its' assets but can't be sure how many of them the other side knows. This gives us a matrix of four possibilities:

1. Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
2. Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher knows of it.
3. Searcher knows of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.
4. Searcher does not know of the asset : Owner believes the Searcher does not know of it.

What is the best strategy for each player?

The owner will be as helpful as possible on all the sites they believe the Searcher knows of. They can clean them out in advance and pretend great surprise at the inspection. The pretense also assists them in their game playing over the other three categories.

They know their assumptions about some sites are "false positives" but they can't know the percentage or which ones are in categories 2 and 3. So their best strategy is to toss some proportion of the uncertain sites in with the first group. They can hope to gain information if they can learn how many of the sacrificed assets were "known". It might be zero, it might be all. Either way, they gain information for the next round.

The Searcher wishes to give them as little information as possible. They know that categories 2 and 4 exist and the only lever they have is category 3. If the Owner doesn't know what the Searcher doesn't know, they may give up more assets they believe are compromised. Some of those assets will be in category 2 and others in 3. The Searcher proves the existence of category 4 this way.

Lets look at the actual situation with Iraq. The UN inspectors have a list of known sites; Saddam will have had them cleaned up in advance. However Saddam must have evidence that some other sites may be compromised. He can't be sure. His best bet is to force the CIA to show its' hand. That reduces his uncertainty and gives him a better idea of which assets are safe. He can admit to whatever the CIA finds, claim oversight, apologize and claim "that's it, there ain't no more."

At this point the CIA will have used its' information up but gained no knowledge in return. They can prove nothing at all and have lost. Saddam can keep his remaining hidden weapons, safe in the knowledge they are firmly in the "we know they don't know" category. That is the game Saddam would like to see played. He wins and eventually... we lose a city.

A better game plan for the CIA is to give out nothing, or give out only information that might elicit a response which returns useful data. The inspectors will find nothing at the "we know you know" sites; Saddam may try to guess which sites the CIA know so as to preclude getting caught, but he cannot know if he has been successful until the endgame.

Endgame comes at the end of January. The inspectors will lay out what they have found. They may have gotten some "new" sites. The CIA can then estimate how honest Saddam has been. If the inspectors are given info on "everything we know", then either Saddam has told the truth... or he has outplayed the CIA. In this game plan the odds are in the CIA's favour.

The existence at endgame of "they didn't know we know" assets pretty much proves there are also "they know we don't know " assets. QED as they say at the end of mathematical proofs. We win and Saddam receives an all expenses paid vacation in Valhalla.

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I am trying to figure out who 'Holland & Barrett' are worried might sue them if they discovered NUTS in their packet of... Whole Cashew Nuts!

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Perhaps not the best feel-good title for my first posting and certainly not the usual New Year's Eve admonition but it concerns the aspect of reality that urged me to blog in the first place. It is also just too horrible to pass on in the interest of New Year's festivities.

There are many living hells in the world today but North Korea deserves a special mention. According to Anthony Daniels, one of the few journalists to have visited North Korea, no other regime comes remotely as close to annihilating the human personality as North Korea's does.

Never in history have human beings been so dragooned into uniformity and blind obedience as in North Korea. The regime is one of bread and circuses: but attendance at the circuses is compulsory and the bread has been replaced by rockets.

The North Korean ideal is an eternal marchpast of the Leader by millions of people, expressionless until they let out a howl of rehearsed joy when the leader raises his hand to them. I have seen it myself, and am glad to have done so: for it was absolute political evil, the ne plus ultra of inhumanity.

I know most people realise that North Korea is a 'bad guy' although Bush mentioning it as part of the Axis of Evil will certainly prompt some anti-American idiotarians into defending it. In some vague way, we know North Korean are oppressed by a Stalinist-type regime, have been starving for some time and now the North Korean leadership have hit the headlines with their nuclear weapons antics. But just as during the Cold War we didn't know what communism really meant for the individual citizen in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, now we don't know how exactly the North Korean variety of communism continues to crush human creativity, spirit and dignity.

It doesn't help that an alarmingly high number of other useful idiotarians who have encountered the evil there either cannot or refuse to see it. The former US President Jimmy Carter managed to see in Pyongyang a second Manhattan. Anthony Daniels calls it not blindness, but hallucination. He concludes:

The only question, then, is how to destroy it once and for all: whether to let time take its toll (for all things pass); to offer little fat Kim a gilded retirement in Monaco watching the pornographic films that he is said to like; or to threaten war.

I know which option I'd take.

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For about the last six or seven years I have been reminding whoever would listen that there is nothing pre-ordained about the survival as a serious force in Britain's affairs of the Conservative Party. It could disappear without trace. Now I find myself making the equally (now) controversial point that it might not disappear. That isn't pre-ordained either.

I have a theory about the Conservative predicament. It's basically guesswork and could prove entirely wrong, but here goes.

The plight of the Conservatives is basically punitive. People hated their nastiness and then their nastiness and their incompetence (a particularly lethal combination) and decided to make the bastards suffer. For as long as arrogant, careerist bastard idiots continued to regard the Conservatives as an appropriate focus of their pathetic careerist fantasies, the voters would go on humiliating them. It would feature them as pathetic villains in girlie fiction who would in due course have to make way for PC wildlife photographers in the affections of the heroines. It would sneer at them relentlessly on the BBC. It would regard Conservatives as worse than motorbike freak drug addicts as potential boyfriends for their daughters in old-fashioned suburban TV sitcoms. It would trash them so mercilessly that even they, the Conservatives, would realise that something was seriously and probably permanently wrong, public affectionwise, with their social situation.

It doesn't matter what is being said. What matters is that the Conservatives have to understand their utter insignificance, to stop talking as if they think that what they say or how they do their hair or who they choose as their leader or what they think about rail privatisation or what sort of cardigans they wear matters, at all, to anybody. Then, when it has finally dawned on even the most stupid and malevolent and socially inept of these people that they really might prove utterly marginal to anything whatsoever, the voters will say: okay, you people have suffered enough. You're still ghastly, but we've made our point. Voting Labour all the time is costing the nation too much. Too many other bad things are being done. Time for (some of us to) vote Conservative again in sufficient numbers to shake things up a bit. Time to end the Thousand Year New Labour Reich.

This moment may (I'm guessing) be approaching. For the next few months, still, the Conservatives will be able to say and do nothing right, just as has been the case for the last decade. But then - when Conservatives are all finally saying: right, that's it abandon ship it was fun while it lasted but now it's gone gone gone – and for that exact reason, the Conservative votes will start again mysteriously to assemble themselves. The important thing is for the Conservatives to have extremely public discussions which take it as axiomatic that they will never, ever be back in serious business again in the old style. They need to internalise and to be seen to have internalised their own insignificance, ghastliness and patheticness.

Support for this notion comes, I think, from Scotland, where, according to David Farrer, the Conservatives are doing really quite well. I surmise that this is because the Scottish Conservatives got to their "well that's it we're doomed doomed" state rather sooner than they did in England, and therefore the voters decided that the punishment could cease rather sooner than it has down here.

I can't emphasise too strongly that this is all guesswork and could be utter rubbish. All I really wanted to say to samzidata's readers when I sat down to do this was: Happy New Year!

I'm off to see the new Bond movie, in a cinema, with a fellow samizdatista. I expect it to be the cinematic equivalent of the Conservative Party: absurdly implausible, formulaic, full of sex and violence but in a ludicrously dated way, and demeaning to women and to ethnic and linguistic minorities. If not, I shall be wanting my money back.

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I recently had an email chat with Paul Blase, the CTO of TransOrbital, and he kindly provided me permission to publish his description of a winter night's launch in Baikonur. I've known him for many years because we've both been involved with the Artemis [Lunar Settlement] Project, and my company (Village Networking Ltd) is also a proud member of the Artemis Group of companies. However I will be the first to admit that a small Linux, internet and software consulting and development company in Belfast, which barely (and I do mean barely!) makes ends meet is not nearly so interesting as TransOrbital. I'll leave the rest to Paul. I had just asked him about O-rings in Russian winter...

The Dnepr is silo-launched, so environmental problems are minimal. Being an ICBM, though, they can launch the thing into a blizzard if necessary. Fortunately the night was very clear. At the launch last week it was -30 C with a nice breeze from the North. I had very warm boots and an insulated coverall. Even so, we all spent a lot of time in the tea-and-coffee trailer. Perhaps 60 people there, including the Italian launch team and the Kosmotras and Baikonur reps. (The Saudi professor got sick and went home, the German and American teams went home after the payload capsule was sealed and didn't stay for the launch). Rather neat: it was dark so that we couldn't see the silo proper, even with the full moon. They announced "liftoff" (they don't use a countdown, just tell us the time left at about 15 second intervals) and suddenly this light appeared about 50 ft in the air. The sound didn't hit for 20 seconds (the viewing stand is 7 km from the silo); not loud enough for a Shuttle launch, but definitely a rocket going off. The light soared away to the East and the night was clear enough that we could see it for a good 2 minutes, and even see the first stage cutoff and separation. They need to work a bit on their anouncer's patter - their updates were mostly along the lines of "all systems functioning well". It hit orbit and deployed the payloads at 915 seconds after launch, at about 5 second intervals.

Paul Blase

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I have visited Kenya several times over the last thirty years and have always regarded it as one of the few outposts of relative sanity in that part of the world. Over the last fifteen years however it has grieved me to see one of the brighter sparks on the continent gradually sink into the kleptocratic morass that generally characterises African nation states.

So I really do hope that the fall of President Daniel arap Moi and his corruption riddled Kanu party spells a new beginning for Kenya. I am far too cynical to automatically assume that Mwai Kibaki and his victorious National Rainbow Coalition will not succumb to the 'African Disease' but I suppose the mere fact that the passing of the old political order was so painless is grounds for a little cautious optimism.

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...if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers
- Rudyard Kipling, from Kim

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Garry North at LewRockwell.com tells us:

Once the United States military has established control over the oil fields, which I assume it will do at the beginning of the invasion, Iraq will not be able to feed itself.  Control the flow of oil, and you control the only thing worth controlling in Iraq.  The government will topple.  Even if it doesn’t, who cares if the U.S. government controls the oil?

At that point, the oil-drilling concessions will be handed out by the United States government’s puppet regime.  "Y'all come!"  This will buy off Europe’s foot-dragging politicians, who will be able to go to their voters and say, "fait accompli."  They will have offered token resistance to the United States, which is all that European voters expect.  Now they will reap the rewards, either directly by the participation of their national oil companies or indirectly by enjoying a lower price of oil.

The USA wants to invade Iraq to 'control' the flow of oil. Bush wants to do this in order to increase the supply of oil and therefore lower the price... and clearly saying "Y'all" is prima facie evidence of conspiratorial evilness. Gotcha.

However...

"Iraq’s oil fields are capable of providing far more than an extra million barrels of oil a day.  This is why the United States has in effect capped Iraqi wells by its oil-for-food embargo.

Right, so Bush has been doing beastly things to Iraq to keep oil prices up then?

Richard Perle is the chairman of President Bush's Defense Policy Board, a civilian advisory group.  He co-authored a paper in 1996, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," which was published by the previously mentioned Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.  The report is still on-line.  It calls for the establishment of a new balance-of-power foreign policy in Israel – the same system, it might be added, that twice led England into world war, and which twice required the United States to bail out England.  The report made suggestions to the Likud Party, which is Ariel Sharon’s party.

Ah, its not about oil, its about Israel. Right. And if 'balance-of-power' is such a terrible idea, when why are LewRockwell.com always so bent out of shape by the current pre-eminence of the USA?

And what is this about bailing out England? I guess Scotland, Ulster and Wales were not 'bailed out' then? It is usually a good indication of someone engaging in a cranio-rectal insertion when they refer to the UK as 'England', which is rather like describing the USA as 'New York State'. And this is someone who has such knowledge of International Affairs that he can see through the machinations of the sinister Oil Illuminati.

The United States must defend the interests of the alliance by bringing new supplies into production.  This was what the invasion of Afghanistan was all about: establishing protection over a new pipeline from the Caspian Sea oil fields, either through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into the tankers, or through Turkey.  This pipeline is important if Russia is not to control this flow of oil.  The Great Game of the 19th century – Russia, Turkey, England, Afghanistan, and India – is still being fought.  For a good analysis of the pipeline issues, see the September, 2001 article on Turkey and the pipeline, which is posted on the Web site of the joint Israeli-American organization, the Institute for Advanced Strategic & Political Studies.

Ah. Its all about Russia! Or more accuratly, depriving Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, of oil. Gotcha. And that is what Afghanistan was 'about' too... in case an oil pipeline might, some time in the future, go through there. Or through Pakistan. Or through Turkey. Or maybe Gloucestershire?

The oil lever is the lowest-cost foreign policy tool at the government's disposal.  This will require American troops in Iraq on a permanent basis. This is a deliberate no-exit strategy.  The Administration plans to send in troops that will become as permanent as its 5,000 troops in Saudi Arabia.  How many troops will this be?  As many as it takes to control the marginal price of oil. The United States government is about to replace OPEC as the pricing agent of world oil.  The name of the game is still cartel pricing, but there will be different hands on the spigots.

Oh, so it is all about oil then! If someone can explain what this gibberish actually means, I would be very grateful. And to think there was a time when I actually admired the Lew Rockwell group.

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I don't think anyone is naive enough to believe that the highly state-controlled business of arms sales isn't a tool of foreign policy. With that is mind, news of this deal might be interesting:

"Lockheed Martin has won a contract to supply 48 new F-16 fighter jets to Poland, in Eastern Europe's biggest military deal.

The US firm beat off competition from the French manufacturer Dassault and a joint British-Swedish venture by BAE Systems and Saab to secure the deal."

I have not the first clue about the relative technical merits, or otherwise, of the various fighter jets concerned but I do know that high-grade weapons deals such as this are loaded (scuse pun) with political and diplomatic significance. The arms business is seldom just about business as one of the parties to the negotiations is only too quick to point out:

"Dassault chief executive Charles Edelstenne accused the Polish government of making a political decision by choosing an American plane rather than a European one.

"The political element was the dominating element, much more than the quality of the material and the price," he told Radio France Info.

"I felt for a very long time that they very much favoured rapprochement with the Americans. So it's not a surprise," he said."

Sour grapes? Well, possibly. But, then again, he might just be right:

"Lockheed was backed by a $3.8bn US government financing package and some heavy lobbying by President George W Bush's administration."

Alright, every government lobbies on behalf of its domestic arms industry. But Poland is one of the ten or so former Eastern Bloc countries pencilled in to join the European Union in 2004 and, arguably, the most important of them. How odd that the Poles should so publicly rebuff their prospective Euro-partners in favour of the Great Satan.

Could it be that the above-mentioned 'lobbying' was about more than jet-fighters and that the Bush administration has decided it would be good strategy to gently lure the Poles away from the twitching tentacles of Brussels? Watch that space.

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I can't imagine that HMG enacts legislation with a view to spawning a whole new line of British pulp fiction novels and crime thrillers but it certainly sounds like it:

"New powers allowing police and customs officers to seize criminals' assets come into force on Monday.

The Proceeds of Crime Act will mean that money can be confiscated from all types of criminals and not just drug dealers, as previous laws allowed."

'All types of criminals'?. Only the financially successful ones surely?

The Proceeds of Crime Act referred to in the article has established the Civil Assets Recovery Agency (CARA) as a branch of the police force empowered to confiscate assets from those 'suspected' of criminal activity.

"The new act will enable police and customs officers to search for cash anywhere in the UK and not just at the country's borders as was previously allowed.

From now on they'll be able to crash into your home and root around the sofa looking for lost coins. Don't laugh, you can pick up quite a lot of money like that.

"Even when there is no criminal prosecution a new assets recovery agency can now step in."

Which is to say, they can target anyone they want whenever they like and for reasons they will never have to prove and whilst that all sounds (and is) scary enough, I have every reason to believe that it is HMG that will regret this in the long run.

Most nominally law-abiding, work-a-day citizens will not be targeted and, consequently, will bask in blissful ignorance. No so the drug-runners and gangsters, who will be only too aware of it (they are always far better versed in the law than most citizens and quite a few lawyers) and the smart ones will regard CARA as a corruption charter. For relatively low-paid public officials, the lure of easy cash, cars or luxury goods is something to which they can all too easily become addicted. Processing law-breakers through the justice system is difficult and time-consuming. Surely much more tempting to let the gangsters get on with doing whatever it is they do and live off the earnings.

This isn't about the government stopping criminals; this is about the government getting into bed with criminals. It's a scriptwriters dream.

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Computer games are evolving at an astonishing rate, acting as the primary driver of desktop computer development (after all, how many people actually need a 2.5 GHz CPU, a 128 Mb graphics card and 512 Mb of RAM to do word processing and spreadsheet work?)

Back in the Paleolithic age of computers (the 1980's), computer games looked like this...

Wolfenstein: Shoot! Mild fun... but not for long

Mildly amusing but crude in the extreme. By the early 1990's however, came the advent of the 'FPS': the First Person Shooter!

Wolfenstein 3D: Shoot! Great fun... but not for long

They seemed astonishing at the time, actually putting you inside the gun wielding hero. The graphics were rather basic, to put it mildly and after a while the lack of multifaceted interaction tended to make the games rather tedious after the initial 'gee whiz' factor wore off... other than opening doors, the only way to interact with things was to shoot at them.

My goodness how things have changed!

Wolfenstein 3D begat Doom, which begat Quake, Hexen, Marathon, Unreal, Duke Nukem, Tomb Raider etc, etc... all worthy 'shooters' of steadily increasing graphic quality.

Sudden surges came with games like Half Life, released at the end of the computer games neolithic era (1998) and yet still playable now...and featuring not just excellent graphics but Artificial Intelligence which actually shows a bit of intelligence, rather than just a desire to commit virtual suicide... Half Life & the spin-offs Blue Shift and Opposing Forces brought also the ability to 'talk' with the computer generated denizens of the game as opposed to just shoot at them.

Half Life: Don't shoot, he is on your side.
Great fun... for hours on end!

Then games like No One Lives Forever (NOLF), a spy thriller set in the 1960's with frequent plot specific cut scenes came along, and suddenly the story line of the computer game actually started to matter.

NOLF: Cate Archer, at the grave of her 'dead' mentor

The next generation of releases saw the success of story intensive NOLF and soon games of almost cinema grade plot and characterization started appearing, such as the conspiracy ladened Deus Ex and then the gritty darker than dark Max Payne.

And so yesterday the new Gamespy PC Game of the Year was announced, and it is the excellent No One Lives Forever 2.

As well as being superb graphically (caveat: you do need a high spec computer to get the best out of this game), it is just down right funny! Set in the 1960's, this 'spy shooter' owes more to the wonderfully camp 'Man from U.N.C.L.E.' than James Bond or Smiley's People. Although slightly more 'serious' than Austin Powers (but only slightly), it provides endless entertainment by allowing you to eavesdrop on the all-too-believable conversations of other people.

NOLF2: This Indian H.A.R.M. agent has a sword...
but Cate has a Kalashnikov

I look forward to continuous progress in computer games... pure distilled essence of capitalism married to explosive creativity. Within a few years, interactively with the virtual environment will be almost total, opening up steadily more ambitious story telling possibilities whilst at the same time the holy grail of photorealism comes closer to realization. The future is so bright, we are going to need shades to see it. I can hardly wait!

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Patrick Crozier posted a piece on Transport Blog the other day about something called SkyTran, which I hereby throw to the Samizdata comment pack to see what they make of it. It seems like a wonderful idea.

Said Patrick:

Further to my investigations into alternatives to driving, I stumbled across a site promoting SkyTran. SkyTran will be a 100mph, computer-controlled, magnetically-levitated, almost door-to-door, non-polluting, personal transportation system. It will whisk us to our destinations in futuristic, light-weight pods, eliminate congestion at a stroke, cost next to nothing, turn a profit, allow spectacular views and be built along existing rights of way.

Can it be done? I have no idea. But I so, so hope it can. Imagine, an almost perfect transport system, making trains and cars look like the 19th century technologies that they are and consigning both to the rubbish bin of history.

I love it.

Maybe it was just that other blogs were taking the Christmas holiday off and there was nowhere else to go, but I've been struck not just by the quantity but also by the quality of the comments samizdata has been attracting recently. I can't reasonably expect the number of comments that David Carr got for his piece about communism not collapsing the way it should, but a dozen or more good, informed responses to this proposal, maybe referring to what else has been said about this scheme by critics and commentators in America, is not an unreasonable hope. The more lucid of these comments, if there are any, can then be swung back to Transport Blog, together with a link to the rest if them. So let's show these trainspotters what we can do, eh? A very cursory google search got me to several more commentaries about SkyTran, but they all seemed to be echoing the original sales pitch. Has anyone been minded to shoot the thing down in flames?

I'm not sure I quite love SkyTran. There's something uniquely satisfying about choosing and owning your own vehicle, which SkyTran doesn't seem ever to allow. Nevertheless for commuting SkyTran looks most enticing, if it can be made to work.

SkyTran is basically a scheme I myself have gone a good way towards inventing – in a science fiction kind of way – as a result of my decades-long enthusiasm for the idea of road pricing. Road pricing, once it is installed (and I do believe that it will be with us in a big way any decade now), will reward the road operator who manages to fit as many vehicles as he can onto his road, and this he might eventually do by taking control of the vehicles himself. The trouble with both trains and road vehicles now is that the gaps between them are too big. Computerised control of the vehicles by the system itself might make much denser track and road usage possible. Essentially, what you need are traffic jams which move along as convoys, all vehicles starting and stopping at the same time, yet the individual vessels being separable and recombinable into different convoys, by destination. Need I add that you also need the faultless driving - second by second, day after day, year after year - that a humans can't manage but which a computer might?

But we're decades away even from a fully rational pricing system for roads, and who knows when computerised vehicle guidance will come on the roads, if ever? This might be a much quicker fix, at any rate for urban transport.

My principle technical confusion about SkyTran is: does the system involve "points"? (As in railway-type points. Funny, I never realised until now what an odd word that is to describe what it describes.) It seems as if it must, in order (a) to allow the SkyTran pods to go from any destination to any other destination, and (b) to enable the pods to detatch themselves from the main line and to insert themselves into the stopping system, like so many London taxis in a cab rank.

Such road pricing as does happen in the near future will definitely help, because it will concentrate minds wonderfully on dreaming up and arguing about possible alternatives. Alternatives like SkyTran.

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I am back in the warm embrace of the West - the weather being considerably warmer in London than in Bratislava. I shall write more about my 'adventures' abroad, suffice to say that towards the end of my trip I was genuinely looking forward to coming back home.

The politics and the public life in Eastern European countries usually make me appreciate the subtlety(!) of British politics, but my first encounter with the news in Britain quickly dispelled any reluctant appreciation of developed western democracy. The most upsetting development is the tax rises awaiting the British taxpayers in 2003 or as Francis Elliott of the Sunday Telegraph calls it, a 'triple whammy', which could add up to as much as £1,200 per family:

1. A one per cent rise in National Insurance
   
2. An average seven per cent rise in council tax
   
3. Congestion charges in major cities

According to the same article, taxes are rising more steeply in Britain than in any other European country, while in America, the tax burden has fallen in recent years by 0.7 percent to 29.8 percent.

As Maurice Fitzpatrick of Tenon, a national accountancy firm puts it:

"This is the year that Labour will break cover as tax-raisers. People will feel a direct impact for the first time. In the past, the Government has been chipping away at the margins. This time, it will be a straightforward assault."

I suppose Labour has no need to fear the opposition anymore, as the Tories oscillate between moribund and ridiculous. Their feeble and seriously confused proposals to reduce public spending by 'saving' money confirm just how clueless the Conservatives in Britain are:

"It's too early to say how much [public spending can be reduced], but it could be up to 20 per cent. There is waste going on all over the place. It's completely ridiculous. Everywhere there is a massive spraying of money, without it actually delivering anything."

Shock, horror, Mr Flight. And you are going to sort it out how exactly? By setting up commitees of advisors to find ways of simplifying the tax system, and by providing government support for company directors who set up employee share schemes as a way of promoting 'democractic capitalism'!?

Oh, and first let your comrades know, because they were very surprised to hear about this.

"We had a memo about this in November but since then, nothing. When I heard about it on the radio you could say I was more than a little surprised."

Watching the Labour government unmask itself and the Conservative Party to hasten its demise, I wonder how much longer it will take for a decent opposition to emerge. Not that I put much hope into any opposition arising within the existing political meta-context or know what would make an opposition 'decent' under the circumstances. Any ideas?

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"America is fighting the War on Terrorism for one reason: to Secure the American Homeland, whatever it takes. If that takes Empire, fine."
Trent Telenko

I hope that the US destroys the North Korean Communist regime by the time I've posted this text. If there is a legitimate nuclear target anywhere on Earth right now, the North Korean plutonium refinery has to be it.

I also would give a cheer if Saddam Hussein were to end up dead in a traffic accident, or choke on caviar, or find breathing under a pillow difficult, or take a cruise missile up his fundament.

And I am crtainly not one of those people who hopes that lots of American troops die in Iraq over the next few months.

I fear that the British military capability is over-stretched and less effective than its champions would like us to believe. For this reason I am wary of jingoistic talk in London. I would prefer to hear about orders for a decent rifle, a decent tank, a fighter that's actually operational and reassurance that the anti-chemical warfare suits work.

I also question the double talk about nukes in Iraq when the good reasons for toppling/killing Saddam are...

1. he's a national socialist tyrant
   
2. he's allegedly one of Al-Qaeda's main financial and logistical backers.

I'm told there is evidence to back up this claim, so why the red herrings?

BUT, the comment which opens this posting worries me. First it is obvious that if President Bush were seriously taking this line (I don't think he is, but Mr Telenko may know better), then Europe had better do a deal with the fundamentalists, because America is clearly prepared to sacrifice allies as part of "whatever it takes", it has the ring of the Yalta betrayal about it. The history of Japan from 1902 to 1945 and its deteriorating relations with the British and Americans is a nasty precedent.

Second "if that takes empire, fine" is precisely the scenario in which libertarians should not (and many will not) support the US. Waco was not a crime because Americans were killed, September 11^th would have been a crime if the only victims had been Latino office cleaners. "Homeland" is a very nasty term to the four thousand seven hundred million people who don't have a US passport or a Green Card. If the War on Terrorism is about protecting the US at the expense of the rest of the world, we've got a new Iron Curtain coming down, this time in front of the Statue of Liberty.

I really didn't expect my warnings about the long-term temptation of absolute power to be vindicated so quickly.

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The trick to beating student unions is to force them to follow their arguments to conclusion. Student politicians tend to be the sort of student who enjoys controlling other people's lives. They hear fond stories of student protests in the 1960s, but are disillusioned by the lack of interest in student politics among today's undergraduates. Boycotts particularly appeal to this mindset.

Let's say a student politician proposes that the union ceases trading with any business with involvement in Burma. The result of such a ban would be minimal. But why should only Burma be included? The boycott is because the country has a poor human rights record. Surely, therefore, the union should cease dealings any country that abuses human rights? It is much better to student politicians the idea that lots of products ought to be banned. That way, there are two possible outcomes. The boycott will be stopped by the Tory wets (who would put up with a boycott of Guinness but couldn't cope if Gordon's disappeared too). Alternatively, half the drinks in the union bar disappear overnight, in which case people stop going to the union, and its power therefore decreases. It's a win-win situation.

The problem is that this strategy is far too risky when it comes to national politics. If you tell the government to be more consistent, it might actually do what you say, and mess up the entire country. It's much better for governments to mess up the economy inconsistently than do it properly.