A libertarian view of the British political parties

I'll keep this brief.

• The Labour Party is fundamentally opposed to liberty.
• The Conservative Party doesn't believe in liberty, or anything else.
• The Liberal Democrats should believe in liberty, but their policies fail to confirm this. A confused party.
• The Libertarian Party is the only one worth supporting, but it's very young and very small.

The least bad result of the election currently in progress might be a Con-LibDem coalition. Ideally, they might veto each other's sillier ideas. Though things seldom work out ideally in politics.

Cliology

Cliology may be defined as the science that seeks to understand and predict the course of history—from Clio, the Greek muse of history. As far as I know, no such science is currently practised, but it was named and interestingly discussed in Michael Flynn's novel In the country of the blind (1990).

Such a science was already imagined in the 1940s by Isaac Asimov under the name of psychohistory, but I have a feeling that Flynn's name may triumph in the long run, because by now we already have the genuine scientific fields of cliometrics and cliodynamics, both of which could perhaps be seen as early precursors of cliology.

It is, of course, impossible to predict the course of history with accuracy, but statistical analysis and a general understanding of historical forces may eventually enable people to predict history well enough to be of some use: just as a weather forecast may be of some use even if it's sometimes wrong.

In the fiction of both Asimov and Flynn, cliology is more or less a secret science, used to predict the history of a population that's unaware of cliology. Asimov, at least, felt that the predictive ability of the science would be spoiled if the whole population under study was aware of cliology and of its specific predictions.

This awareness would make prediction more difficult, but I think not necessarily impossible, for two reasons.

• People have always attempted to predict future history, and there are some future historical developments that can be predicted fairly well without advanced science. Sometimes, people aware of such predictions can change their behaviour to avoid the predicted event; sometimes, even knowing the prediction, they can't avoid it. I don't think this will change in any fundamental way if the predictions become more accurate.
• Predicting the future of people who are aware of the prediction is a kind of recursive problem, and I think science in general is not helpless in the face of recursive problems. Computer programs, for instance, routinely include recursive functions.

Even if recursive prediction doesn't work, a non-recursive prediction would be far from useless. It could be seen more as a warning: if you carry on the way you're going, this is what will happen.

Al Stewart rides again

Although I have a good collection of Al Stewart albums already, in November I acquired two more, A piece of yesterday (double-CD compilation, 2006) and Sparks of ancient light (new material, 2008).

I'm pleased with both. I had most of the songs on the compilation already, but it's the best result of remastering I've heard so far: the improvement in sound quality is really worthwhile, even through iTunes and mid-fi loudspeakers.

I now discover belatedly that there's a five-CD compilation called Just yesterday that maybe I should have chosen, had I known about it.

Sparks of ancient light is a minor album that won't convert anyone into an Al Stewart fan, but if you like him already this is superior to some of his other later albums (Down in the cellar is also worth trying). It's a pleasant and lively album on which he sounds younger than 62. As usual, the songs mostly have historical themes; there's even one about Hanno the Navigator.

Death of a dupe

Akmal Shaikh was executed in China in December after being caught entering the country with 4 kg of heroin in 2007. It seems that he was tricked into carrying the heroin and may not even have known it was in his luggage.

Drug smuggling (even if intentional) isn't a violent crime and I don't support the death penalty for it. But the interesting thing to me about this case is that most of the outcry about it from other countries (the UK in particular) was that Shaikh should have been let off on grounds of mental illness.

Eh? Surely the rationale for executing someone is that he's a danger to other people, and you can permanently nullify the danger by executing him.

Does mental illness make a dangerous person less dangerous? I don't think so. Why, then, is it relevant? Surely, any court considering execution should be trying to determine how dangerous is the accused, not how sane he is.

In this case, Shaikh seems to have been stupid, but probably not sufficiently dangerous to be worth executing. (I've read that he had a previous conviction for sexual harassment, so he wasn't harmless.)

Pirates ahoy! Care for some tea?

A group of Somali pirates has been captured after attacking a French navy ship by mistake, apparently thinking it was a harmless cargo vessel. (BBC)

Captured? Wouldn't it have been simpler to blow them out of the water and leave no survivors? I don't know what modern navies are coming to...

I mean, those people actually opened fire on a naval ship. They could hardly claim to be anything but pirates; and the penalty for piracy was always death. But these days it seems that taxpayers must pay for the feeding and guarding of these people, and probably for lawyers to prosecute and defend them; and they will probably go free in the end to attempt more piracy. It's a mad world.

What is a liberal?

Noticing on Facebook that a number of my friends classify themselves as politically liberal, I tried to look up what this is supposed to mean.

My 1983 Chambers Dictionary offers only vague generalities: “befitting a freeman or a gentleman, directed towards the cultivation of the mind for its own sake, disinterested, generous, noble-minded, broad-minded, ...”

The Oxford English Dictionary says, “Favourable to constitutional changes and legal or administrative reforms tending in the direction of freedom or democracy.”

Wikipedia describes liberalism as “the belief in the importance of individual freedom.”

The American Heritage Dictionary is the most specific, giving two politically relevant definitions:

• “A political theory founded on the natural goodness of humans and the autonomy of the individual and favoring civil and political liberties, government by law with the consent of the governed, and protection from arbitrary authority.”
• “An economic theory in favor of laissez-faire, the free market, and the gold standard.”

Taking all this into consideration, it seems to me that a lot of people these days could describe themselves as liberal in at least some senses, including me. I have doubts mainly about the natural goodness of humans and the gold standard; but in other respects I'm probably more liberal than most of the people who describe themselves as such.

Cider

Having gone to school in the West Country, I encountered cider fairly early on, and I've often been willing to drink it over the years, though I haven't specialized in it. The problem is that the available ciders tend not to be good.

Over in England for a short time recently, I stayed at the Coach & Horses pub/hotel in Kew (which I can recommend, incidentally), and tried the draught Blackthorn cider they had at the bar. I liked it, and went on drinking it while I was there.

Now I look on the Web and find that apparently it's not a real cider made in the approved way, so I shouldn't really like it. Hm. Nevertheless, I found it preferable to the other ciders in the shops—which I suppose aren't real ciders either, by the same criteria.

Back home, I can find two Spanish ciders on sale within walking distance: El Gaitero, which looks like cheap champagne and is soft and bland and a bit sweet; and Zapiain, a Basque cider that tastes like apple vinegar. Neither is really what I'm after. In a spirit of experiment, I tried mixing the two. The mixture is perhaps an improvement on either one by itself, but still leaves something to be desired.

Is it really difficult to produce a cider that's neither sweet nor vinegary?

Windows Vista and old fonts

I've come rather late to Windows Vista, but I'm now using it at last. One of the problems I find is that its font installer doesn't recognize my old Type 1 PostScript fonts, which was rather a shock. I paid good money for these fonts once upon a time, and see no reason why I shouldn't go on using them.

I discovered a solution that doesn't involve spending any money. The Vista font installer recognizes Type 1 fonts if you supply them in the form of PFM files. These were not originally supplied with the fonts, but are created automatically by the Windows XP font installer.

So, while I still have a functioning Windows XP system, I'll have to install all my old Type 1 fonts on it, and save all the PFM files for use under Windows Vista. A bit of a hassle, but things could be worse.

I wait to find out whether the Windows 7 font installer will accept PFM files...

Health care: still in the Dark Ages

I was struck by the following extract from The Economist's special report on health care and technology:

A report by the Institute of Medicine estimated that up to 100,000 Americans are killed each year by preventable mishaps such as wrong-side surgery, medication errors and hospital-acquired infections—a larger number than die from breast cancer or AIDS.

Sometimes such errors can be prevented without fancy technology. It helps to write “not this leg” on a patient's left leg before surgery on his right leg.

What a sad comment on the state of modern health care. And in the country that spends the most money on it, too.

Bigger and better tax havens

An article in The Economist (see original article) describes how an Australian researcher named Jason Sharman tried to register anonymous companies and open bank accounts for them in 45 places around the world. He was successful in 17 cases, 13 of which were OECD countries, including the USA and the UK.

In these cases, the bank can't reveal the owner of an account to any inquisitive government, because the bank doesn't know. So these accounts are safer from investigation than those in a traditional tax haven, where personal identification is normally required.

The USA is particularly attractive in this respect because there you can apparently get tax-free interest on your untraceable riches.

I pass on this useful tip to any of you who may be wealthy enough to consider taking advantage of it. However, bear in mind that you shouldn't believe everything you read, even in The Economist. There may be hidden snags.