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Nuke roundup

· International affairs

There is an excellent round up of the current nuclear threat in today’s Opinion Journal.

According to another government study, Pyongyang has also been at work on two very large “electrical generating” stations that, upon completion, will produce sufficient spent nuclear fuel to yield 200 kilograms of plutonium, enough to manufacture approximately 30 nuclear weapons a year.

It is a long article but well worth the time it takes to read it.

October 21st, 2003 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)

No Child Left Behind – different lessons to the ones they thought

· Education & Academia

For a while now I’ve been noticing something called the No Child Left Behind Act, which Republicans were hugely pleased about when President Bush signed it into law as recently as January 2002, but which has now turned pear shaped, as we say in these parts, with extraordinary speed.

There’s more about No Child Left Behind today in the New York Times, because the Democrats now smell blood in the water on this.

The gist of No Child Left Behind is: (a) Education Must Be Better For Everybody, So There, but er … (b) you’ll have to pay for this compulsory improvement yourselves.

Here’s the start of the New York Times coverage today:

Congressional Republicans are nervous about a G.O.P. poll that shows them losing ground over education. But how could voters not be disappointed by the Bush administration’s mishandling of education policy generally, and especially its decision to withhold more than $6 billion from the landmark No Child Left Behind Act, the supposed centerpiece of the administration’s domestic policy?

The new law is supposed to place a qualified teacher in every classroom and wipe out the achievement gap between rich and poor children. Schools that fail to make steady progress are labeled deficient and required to provide students with costly tutoring and allow them to transfer to more successful public schools in the same district.

In some districts, more than 40 percent of the schools are called “in need of improvement.” The lack of money from Congress has licensed a backlash by states that never wanted to comply with the law anyway, especially the provision that requires ending the achievement gap between rich and poor.

This is classic statism. A bunch of people have a notion about how the world should be which they get all excited about. So, they get the government to say: that’s what must happen. Within a few years it becomes clear to all that these ‘education reformers’ would have done far, far better to have just sat on their porches, drunk liquor, and said howdy to passers-by.

The point is, the everyday language of government, so to speak, is a language of compulsion and suppression. No Child Left Behind was sold as … well, as: no child left behind! What it actually says is: you must supply “better” education, which turns out to mean education done by people with fancier exam results to their names, to everybody, and especially to poor people. If, on the other hand, you have been teaching poor people with great success for the last few years, but without fancy exam results to your name, guess what? Stop it at once you bad bad person!

No Child Left Behind – a textbook example of statism in action – has, because it is statism, made things worse.

I guess it’s all education in how the world works, but the people who need to learn their lesson are the idiots who unleashed this shambles. They need to learn how wrong they were. And it’s all part of statism that they will do anything rather than learn their lesson.

The Democrats will now make the running in this argument, but sadly, the only lesson they want anyone to learn is that More Money should be spent.

If more money is spent, that’ll be yet more education, this time in the folly of stealing money from one bunch of people and spraying it over another bunch.

As Perry de Havilland would say at this point: the state is not your friend. And that applies just as much to education as it does to anything else.

October 21st, 2003 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)

Hydro-electric power with a difference

· Science & Technology

Natalie Solent links to news of this new discovery:

A team of researchers led by Dr. Daniel Kwok and Dr. Larry Kostiuk in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Alberta has discovered a new way of generating electric power from flowing water.

When a liquid such as water is passed through a small channel, a physical phenomenon called charge separation occurs. The surface of the channel becomes ionically charged and opposite-charged ions in the liquid are attracted to it.

At the same time, like-charged ions are repelled from the surface. This results in a thin liquid layer with a net charge. This region, known as the Electric Double Layer (EDL), ranges from several nanometres to a few micrometres thick.

To harness this phenomenon, the research team constructed a microchannel with a diameter similar to the EDL itself and then forced the liquid through the channel. This resulted in only one type of ion in the EDL being transported downstream, creating a current and hence a voltage difference across the ends of the channel.

An external electric circuit was constructed by placing electrodes at the ends of the channel, and electrical energy was extracted from the device as current flowed between the electrodes.

I am impressed, I think. Or I will be as soon as I am convinced that this is not just wishful thinking in techno-babble.

I am not so impressed by the Calgary Sun’s reporting of the story. They regard the “response from the international community” as being more significant than the workings of the invention itself, which is to get it the wrong way around, I think. But after they have given us a few paragraphs about all the phone-calls and e-mails that have already flown around concerning this new gadget, they too get around to describing what it does…

With the help of two graduate students, the two professors were able to light a small bulb by simply squeezing a syringe of ordinary tap water through a glass “filter” with microscopic-sized holes they call microchannels.

They invented their “electrokinetic” water battery by harnessing the natural energy that is created on a very tiny scale when a flowing liquid meets a solid surface, creating an electrical charge. Water forced through a microchannel results in the movement of positive and negatives ions in such a way that one end becomes positive and the other negative.

…and how significant it might be:

The inventors are particularly excited by the fact the electricity is produced cleanly and involves no moving parts.

The discovery could in a matter of years lead to batteries for everyday items such as cellphones and calculators being powered by pressurized water.

The Green Movement will be appalled. How can they be expected to prevent all forms of technological progress and take humanity back to the Stone Age, if even Canadians are doing stuff like this?

More seriously, is this the technology that might finally make electric cars a serious proposition?

And: what kind of water is involved here? Does it get used up by the process? Will salt water suffice? Tap water? In fifty years time will the World Economy be yanked this way and that by WPEC?

Time for the Samizdata commentariat to do their stuff.

October 21st, 2003 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)

New from Baghdad

· Middle East & Islamic

I’ve lately been following the writing of the new kid on the Baghdad block.

Good stuff, well worth a regular read.

October 21st, 2003 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)

Fascism and Socialism

· Historical views

From our friends at the Libertarian Alliance, a very interesting article on the close historical links between fascism and socialism (or at least Marxism). It has never ceased to amaze me how many people think that fascism/nazism and socialism are somehow divided by a wide gulf.

Sure, states professing fascism and nazism went to war with a state professing to be communist/socialist, but the most bitter struggles are always internecine, and anyway how can you miss the fact that the name of the Nazi party was National Socialist?

The article should provide you with ample ammunition to make uncomfortable the many, many socialists out there who view “fascist” as the ultimate in derogation.

From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.

Mussolini and a group of adherents launched the Fascist movement in 1919. The initiators were mostly men of the left: revolutionary syndicalists and former Marxists.

Apart from its ardent nationalism and pro-war foreign policy, the Fascist program was a mixture of radical left, moderate left, democratic, and liberal measures.

Given what most people today think they know about Fascism, this bare recital of facts is a mystery story. How can a movement which epitomizes the extreme right be so strongly rooted in the extreme left? What was going on in the minds of dedicated socialist militants to turn them into equally dedicated Fascist militants?

What indeed? The remainder of the article, on first read, seems to be well-researched and well-thought out story of intellectual and political ferment.

James Gregor has argued that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, a claim that has to be handled with care. Marxism is a doctrine whose main tenets can be listed precisely: class struggle, historical materialism, surplus-value, nationalization of the means of production, and so forth. Nearly all of those tenets were explicitly repudiated by the founders of Fascism, and these repudiations of Marxism largely define Fascism. Yet however paradoxical it may seem, there is a close ideological relationship between Marxism and Fascism. We may compare this with the relationship between, say, Christianity and Unitarianism. Unitarianism repudiates all the distinctive tenets of Christianity, yet is still clearly an offshoot of Christianity, preserving an affinity with its parental stem.

Yes, the authoritarian acorn never falls far from the collectivist tree.

October 20th, 2003 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)

Hypersonic developments

· Aerospace & Astronautics

Here is an interesting bit of development work being let by the DOD which I found while reading through a list of contracts:

United Technology Corp., West Palm Beach, Fla., is being awarded a $49,405,000 indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract for research and development for the Robust Scramjet. The Air Force will issue delivery orders totaling up to the maximum amount indicated above, though actual requirements may necessitate less than this amount. At this time, $220,000 of the funds has been obligated. Further funds will be obligated as individual delivery orders are issued. This work will be complete by September 2010. Solicitation began April 2003, and negotiations were completed September 2003. The Air Force Research Laboratory, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, is the contracting activity (F33615-03-D-2418).

A SCRAMjet is a Supersonic Combustion Ram jet, an engine which is of use only for hypersonic speeds. It would needed for missiles or near-suborbital warcraft.

PS: For those not familiar with the space community, the Air Force Research Lab at Wright Patterson (AFRL-WPAFB) is where very interesting future-looking propulsion systems work is done. If you want to talk about things like antimatter engine design, these are the lads.

October 20th, 2003 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)

How India is booming by “shaking off its statist shackles”

· Economics, Business & Globalization

Much is being made, rightly, of China’s growing economic importance in the world, following China’s recent and very newsworthy space mission.

But now here’s a really interesting and encouraging New York Times article about the rapid and highly visible economic progress now being made in India. The most encouraging thing about the piece for me is that not only is this progress described, it is also explained:

This is no longer the India of Gandhi, among history’s most famous ascetics.

The change in values, habits and options in India – not just from his day, but from a mere decade ago – is undeniable, and so is the sense of optimism about India’s economic prospects.

Much of India is still mired in poverty, but just over a decade after the Indian economy began shaking off its statist shackles and opening to the outside world, it is booming. The surge is based on strong industry and agriculture, rising Indian and foreign investment and American-style consumer spending by a growing middle class, including the people under age 25 who now make up half the country’s population.

The lesson – and being taught in the New York Times, please note, rather than merely in some free market Think Tank think piece – is that if you want rapid economic progress and a sense of optimism, you have to shake off your “statist shackles” and open up to the outside world.

The use of the word “statist” I find especially interesting. I could be wrong, but I don’t believe that’s a very common usage over here, and for that matter how common is it in the USA’s mainstream media? It makes the point perfectly that the important divide now is not between different factions wanting to use state power to do this or alternatively that, but rather between all of those who want their country or state to be or to remain bound by statist shackles, and all those who want those statist shackles shaken off. (You may need to slow down a bit when you try to say things like this out loud.)

For the sake of the entire world, I hope that the Indians themselves draw this same lesson from their own emerging success, and then teach that lesson to the rest of the world. Combine them doing that with the Chinese having so visibly retreated from their own far more horrific statist mania unleashed by the lunatic Mao-Tse-Tung and as a result also emerging into economic superpower status, and the twenty first century could end up being a very good one. It already looks like being a very prosperous one.

October 20th, 2003 | 46 comments - (Comments are closed)

Once they’ve got our number …

· Big Brother

From last Friday’s Guardian:

Charles Clarke, the education secretary, is fighting for a short bill in the Queen’s speech next month which would give every child an identity number and allow local authorities in England to share information about any suspicion of neglect or abuse in the family.

The bill would be the first instalment of the government’s plans to reform child protection after a public inquiry into the murder of Victoria Climbié.

Which nicely illustrates the connection between state “protection” and state numbering of its human possessions.

What is objectionable, I think, is the idea that all children, the overwhelming majority of whom are not suspected of being abused, will nevertheless get numbered. Is that really necessary?

Plus, you can’t help wondering if, after a brief interval while we all get used to this process, children who have got their numbers will start not to shed them, even when they’ve stopped being children. After all, it isn’t only children who need protecting, is it?

October 20th, 2003 | One comment - (Comments are closed)

Britain’s best selling living novelist sees where we’re coming from

· Science Fiction & Fantasy · Self defence & Security

Natalie Solent has some striking gun-control analysis from Night Watch by Terry Pratchett, Here’s a bit of the bit she quotes:

There had been that Weapons Law, for a start. Weapons were involved in so many crimes that. Swing reasoned, reducing the number of weapons had to reduce the crime rate.

Vimes wondered if he’d sat up in bed in the middle of the night and hugged himself when he’d dreamed that one up. Confiscate all weapons, and crime would go down. It made sense. It would have worked, too, if only there had been enough coppers – say, three per citizen.

Amazingly, quite a few weapons were handed in. The flaw though, was one that had somehow managed to escape Swing’ and it was this: criminals don’t obey the law. It’s more or less a requirement for the job. They had no particular interest in making the streets safer for anyone except themselves. …

Natalie concludes her comments thus:

I suppose Pratchett might say that Vimes’ opinons are not his own, but, even so, Vimes is not just a one-off hero but a much loved character who stars in several books: this shows at the very least that Britain’s best selling living novelist sees where we’re coming from.

I guess it’s a case of read the whole thing.

October 19th, 2003 | 29 comments - (Comments are closed)

Steady….

· UK affairs

Independent TV news has just reported that Tony Blair has been admitted to hospital with a suspected heart irregularity.

No updates yet.

October 19th, 2003 | 40 comments - (Comments are closed)

The Trauma Business

· North American affairs

The ambitions of the political classes are danger enough but let no-one underestimate the threat posed by the therapy culture:

New York City taxpayers are probably going to be liable not only for the physical injuries inflicted in Wednesday’s Staten Island Ferry crash — which include ten deaths and about 60 injuries resulting in hospitalization, some of them horrific — but also for damages potentially payable to all of the unhurt passengers, widely estimated to number 1,500. A “federal maritime doctrine allows all those who were in the face of danger and who suffered emotional distress to file for compensation, even if they were not physically injured”. Among likely claims, according to Columbia law dean David Leebron, are those from “passengers who claim to now have a fear of ferries that affects their ability to commute and earn a living”.

Damn, I’m thinking of making a claim myself. So what if I actually live in London? So what if I was 3000 miles away when the tragedy occured? I saw it on the news, didn’t I? As a result I have been emotionally scarred, my life has been ruined, I can’t sleep at nights, I keep getting flashbacks and…yadda, yadda, yadda.

Of course, the therapy culture wouldn’t exist at all if it wasn’t so well incentivised with rewards.

October 19th, 2003 | 19 comments - (Comments are closed)

You’ve got it, we want it

· Opinions on liberty · UK affairs

These must surely be salad days for our Labour government. Free of any concerns about an effective opposition, they can roll up their sleeves, spit on their hands and get down to some really serious looting:

Gordon Brown is considering imposing capital gains tax on the sale of all houses in an attempt to plug the widening gulf between his spending plans and public finances.

The Telegraph has learnt that Treasury officials have held confidential discussions with private sector tax consultants on extending the levy to domestic properties.

The reform would mean homeowners facing a tax of up to 40 per cent on any profits made from the sale of their home, which for many people is their principal asset. The levy would, however, raise £11 billion a year, equivalent to 4p on the basic rate of income tax, according to government figures.

I think some clarification is required because the opening paragraph is not entirely correct. Currently a tax of 40% is charged on all capital gains which includes the capital gain made on the sale of property or land. However, one’s principal dwelling home has always been exempt from this charge. Now HMG is proposing to abolish this exemption (although the effect is the same as imposing the tax on ordinary homeowners).

The Chancellor has already indicated, however, that he believes that homeowners are “lightly taxed” and is looking for additional methods to control the buoyant housing market.

‘Lightly taxed’?!! The guy has got some nerve. And it’s abject drivel that this is about controlling the ‘bouyant housing market. This has been on the cards for a while. Gordon Brown has already plundered private pension funds and I knew that it was only a matter of time before he turned his avarice on the last stores of privately owned wealth. There was no way he could leave all that booty untouched with a ballooning public sector into which money must be shovelled like coal into a roaring furnace.

It’s a no-brainer for the government. A general election is still as much as three years away and they are going to win it handsomely anyway. In the meantime they can placate their opponents on the left and reward their supporters in the state sector.

The way things are now, there is nothing to stop the state from growing until the bones of the last taxpayer have been picked clean and left to bleach in the sun.

October 19th, 2003 | 36 comments - (Comments are closed)
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