Natalie Solent |
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Politics, news, libertarianism, Science Fiction, religion, sewing.
You got a problem, bud? I like sewing.
E-mail: nataliesolent-at-aol-dot-com (I assume it's OK to quote senders by name.) Back to main blog RSS thingy 
Jane's Blogosphere: blogtrack for Natalie Solent. 
Links ( 'Nother Solent is this blog's good twin. Same words, searchable archives, RSS feed. Provided by a benefactor, to whom thanks. I also sometimes write for Samizdata and Biased BBC.) The Old Comrades:
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004
C and X. Jim writes: Dear Natalie Solent-or-whatever-is-your-real-name-is, On this blog, honey, I tingle with evil Solentoid Nataliness in every nerve and sinew! Over 30 years ago undergraduate physics labs in Glasgow University were run on very similar lines to the Oxford system you describe.My cat has allowed me to publish this laughable human delusion as part of her psyops strategy. Friday, March 26, 2004
There are dead rabbits everywhere. Dog-ownership reveals more joys each day. Our teeny dog Laptop is best pals with an enormous, friendly, enormous, bouncy, adorable, seriously enormous Retriever puppymonster who, in line with this blog's strict policy of total anonymity for companion animals, we shall call Dog X (not his real name). Dog X is the very soul of benevolence and charitable endeavour: he knows you want dead rabbits and he does his best to bring you them. He doesn't hunt them; Mr Fox already did that. He just thinks his human deserves to be given a little extra-special snack for being such a good human. (And if he has a little something himself while he's at it, where's the harm?) What is astonishing is how many good deeds he can pack into a single walk. Did you know that every single field you see has dismembered bits of bunny somewhere in it?
If an aerial view of the average field were to be marked with two points, A, where Laptop and Dog X are let off the lead, and B, the last resting place of Mr Bun, then Dog X's path would be a geometrically perfect A-B straight line. Click goes the lead-clip, pazoom goes the dog, "Blank!" goes his owner. "Oh blank, he's seen a dead rabbit again. Oi! Come! Dog X (not your real name), you blanky dog, come!"
Alas for her hopes. In solidarity I add my voice to hers.
Totally bleeding useless thing to do. If he wouldn't come to her he's scarcely likely to come to me, is he? He ain't coming to no one until he gone done got that coney. Or as Herodotus might have said, neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this courier from the swift completion of his appointed rabbit.
Laptop, in contrast, is not fully on-mission. His path from A to B would resemble a stretched out Slinky. He spirals round the singleminded Dog X loudly offering support and assistance, like a bit part saying "You go, champ!" to a Samurai girding himself to avenge his slain lord in single combat. Laptop thinks that running three times round a shrub shouting at it is a significant contribution.
While Laptop fights his rearguard action with the shrub, Dog X usually decides that safe carriage of the rabbit would be more efficiently achieved by swallowing it in one gulp. I thought only anacondas could do that. I guess there were a lot of things I didn't know about country life - but there you go, I really hadn't appreciated the melancholy abundance of dead rabbit until Dog X brought it home to me.
And regurgitated it at my feet. Thank you, Dog X. Zimbabwe has started paying off the IMF. Whether this is a good or bad move for Zimbabwe I can't tell you. I don't know that sort of economics. However it gives the impression that things are not so desperate there as I thought. Of course the 600% inflation isn't so hot. Thursday, March 25, 2004
Why I love Nintendo Official Magazine UK: "There's this guy and he's called Mr Driller. He drills. That's what he does. He doesn't muck about with other, non-drill-related things. He drops into a deep well filled with blocks which look like sweets and he drills. Down and down he goes, until he reaches the bottom or is crushed by falling blocks. The end." - From a review of a game called, surprisingly, Mr Driller Drill Land. Just how bad was it in Saddam's Iraq? Black Triangle links (scroll right down) to two surveys that give you some idea. These are separate from the BBC/ABC poll that everyone's heard about. The first samples the extent of human rights violations: Overall, 47% of those interviewed reported 1 or more of the following abuses among themselves and household members since 1991: torture, killings, disappearance, forced conscription, beating, gunshot wounds, kidnappings, being held hostage, and ear amputation, among others.The second survey asked how many doctors participated in human rights abuses: The survey found that physicians had falsified medical-legal reports in cases of alleged torture, performed physical mutilation as a form of punishment, and falsified death certificatesA few of the doctors admitted doing these things themselves. He didn't want to die. This report from the Guardian tells how a Palestinian boy loaded with explosives surrendered to Israeli troops. It seems that Hassam Mohammed Hufni (also called Hussam Abdo in some reports) is somewhat "simple" as country people used to say. No doubt his limited intelligence made him easy to manipulate - but when the time came, perhaps it saved him and others: the poisonous rhetoric that convinces most suicide bombers to override pity for their victims and their own desire for life could not get a grip in his more innocent mind.
Although the reigning ideology of Palestinian jihad loudly states that the best possible end for any Palestinian is to die while killing and the purpose of Palestinian existence is to be fuel for the fire, it is clear that the bomb-masters feel certain categories of Palestinian are more disposable than others. There was another case a few weeks ago where a woman caught in adultery was directed to "redeem" herself by carrying out a suicide bombing.
I can't help wondering what this boy's future will be - now that he has one. It is not clear whether the Hufni family knew or approved of his being used as a suicide bomber. They may well have. Present day Palestinian family life admits of many forms. Perhaps it seemed a profitable way to offload a liability, since even though Saddam Hussein's cash payments to the families of suicide bombers have ceased other payments continue. Any doubts could be assuaged by the thought that they wouldn't have to worry about the boy any more because he'd go straight to heaven.
But I don't know that is the case at all. Some family members of suicide bombers have dared in their grief to speak out, despite the pervasive fear. They have said they didn't know and that if they had known they would have begged their son or daughter not to do it. We won't know whether those Palestinians who shared ordinary human values were the vast majority or a bare majority or a minority or a tiny minority until, in some future time scarcely imaginable now, Palestinians have a free society. (Note I do not specify under what political arrangement this happy state might occur. You might be surprised how vague my opinions on the matter are. )
If Hassam's family did know, surely he cannot be returned to them. In any case I do not know what the the famous "Palestinian Street" does to suicide bombers who change their mind, but I doubt it's anything good.
Despite all this, we can still say "where there's life there's hope." Hassam Mohammed Hufni has life and may yet hope to make something good of it. Already he has turned aside from making something very bad of it, which is more than many manage.
My respects to the Israeli soldiers who showed him mercy at considerable risk to themselves.
UPDATE: It emerges that his family didn't know, and they are glad to have him back alive. However their objection was not to suicide bombings per se, but to their son doing them. Wednesday, March 24, 2004
My career as an academic cheat and fraudulent examiner. Brian Micklethwait has up a few comments about cheating in academia. I thought it might benefit the common weal if I described my own experiences. And if you didn't know before that "Natalie Solent" was a pseudonym, you do now. In the Oxford physics course of twenty-plus years ago practical work was done in pairs. You and your practical partner would work through a set course of well-known physics experiments, writing up your results in a file. Some experiments everyone had to do; others were optional but you had to complete a fixed number of them. The "kits" for each experiment had been around for donkey's years. It was common practice for the second year science students to sell their practical files to the freshers.
My main motive for cheating was lunch. When you and your partner had completed your experiment you went to get it signed off by a graduate student called a demonstrator, who was meant to discuss the experiment with you. If in the experiment just finished you discovered that the speed of light was what everyone thought it was then the demonstrator chatted about physics for ten minutes and then let you go. If, however, you had recorded a value for c of seventy-three miles per hour then the demonstrator would enthusiastically set out to dismantle the entire experiment until he either confirmed your result and discovered the hyperdrive or found out where you had gone wrong. Hungry undergraduates liked the first option better.
The difficulty about getting to lunch was that most physics experiments have to be thumped to make them work right. This fact is widely known, was true for acknowledged greats such as Millikan, but is not often admitted. That was why the second year students' files were so useful: knowing what the answers were meant to be helped enormously in getting them. (Remember that the second years themselves had almost certainly copied their results from earlier generations of students. ) Of course, you couldn't copy the earlier account word for word.
I never heard of anyone faking an experiment from beginning to end. Your absence from the lab would certainly have been noticed, you would not have had the minimum real-life experience of the experiment necessary to get past the demonstrator and, despite the prevailing dishonesty, that would have been regarded as going too far. My practical partner and I would work quite hard until the bloody thing started to go wrong. Even then we'd pummel the apparatus about for a while, hoping to convince it to yield the result in the book. But usually in the end we'd give up and go back to college to get to work producing a convincing fake.
A forgery is often true art. Sometimes I almost thought I learned more about physics in the process of constructing a plausible account of an experiment I had not completed than I would have learned in doing it. You had to ensure that the answer was off, but not too much off. You had to be ready to answer questions.
There was one particular experiment designed to teach us about statistics where you had to let a small ball drop out of a funnel and mark where it hit or something like that about a thousand times over. Then all the results for everyone were collected together and would, it was hoped, combine to display a nice bell curve. A rumour I heard said that one year the bell curve had a little subsidiary peak to one side of it. The authorities were very shocked. They thought the subsidiary peak represented all those who'd copied results from earlier years.
Wrong-o. The big peak showed that. The little peak belonged to the honest students.
Eventually, I became an honest student. For one thing, it was dawning on me that all the work involved in artistic fakery was actually more boring than being in the lab. So boring, in fact, that we got sloppy. One awful day found my partner and I seated in front of a demonstrator with a set of results in front of us which hadn't even been decently faked. We had not changed the final result from the whatever our particular pair of second year predecessors had put down. The demonstrator talked amiably about the experiment for a while then got out a big lined record book and wrote down our names and result at the foot a column of earlier results.
I forget which of us spotted our peril first, or by what desperate telepathy she communicated it to the other - but within half a second we were wordlessly conveying to each other that we were finished. Doomed. Dead meat. The only question was when the axe would fall.
Our result was only two lines below the one we'd copied it from. The two were identical to three decimal places, a physical impossiblity or damn nearly so.
Our demonstrator hadn't spotted it yet but eventually somebody would. There would be only one possible explanation.
Calling on the reserves of dramatic ability that come to the aid of the most indifferent of actors faced with a situation where they must lie to save their skins, we got through the remainder of the demonstrator's questions. He wanted his lunch, too.
We weren't hungry any more. It's amazing how suddenly previously remote concepts like "cheating" and "being sent down" can come to life when your doom is written in a book lying on a desk waiting for any idly curious soul to read. A quick council of war in the corridor had revealed a shaft of hope: our result was written in pen, but the old result was written in pencil. If we could get hold of the book and alter the old result to something different, we'd be fairly safe.
Have you ever stolen anything? When it's not a game it's harder than you think it's going to be. But we managed to get the book and both of us into the privacy of a cubicle of the nearby ladies' lavatory about five minutes later. Our situation gave us several reasons to work as fast as we could before anyone came round. The old result was rubbed out - it is dreadfully difficult to do that neatly when working at speed on a lavatory seat - and a new one substituted. Done, done, but we weren't safe yet. We had to get the book back on the table. Before that we had to get out of the lavatory. This was getting harder by the minute. There were footsteps everywhere. The lab was filling up after lunch and, if caught, our reasons for leaving the same cubicle simultaneously might prove awkward to put into words. I hope you will not think ill of my tolerance if I say that the consequences of giving the most easily available false explanation seemed scarcely more appealing than those following on from giving the true one - and there was simply no explaining away the book. We had several false starts, but eventually we got out and walked the long five yards down the corridor and plonked the book back on the desk.
Outside, safe and free, I stated pretty firmly that I never, ever wanted to be in that situation again. My partner said likewise. I'd like to claim that shame as well as fear was involved, but I think that only came later. Anyway, I started really doing the experiments right through to the end. Most of the time I still couldn't make them work but the long post-mortems no longer seemed so bad.
By the time I left university I was quite proud of my practical file, with a particular shamefaced pride I could not admit. The assessment of the final year experiments counted towards the degree, if I've remembered right, and my hard- and by now honestly-earned practical grade was well above the unimpressive results of the rest of my degree. It still makes me sad to recall that I forgot to reclaim my file when I left, so that what may have been the first genuine Oxford undergraduate account of the Hanle Effect experiment in years is now part of a landfill site.
Someone told me that they cleaned out the Augean stables a few years after I left. Some unfortunate chemist got caught and made an example of, and the system of scrutiny for science practicals was tightened up til it squeaked.
I mustn't forget that I also promised to tell you how dishonest I was as an examiner. Actually, I was cheating a little when I said that. I really, truly, honestly can't remember if I actually did mark a candidate dishonestly or not. This is how it happened, if it did at all. I was a teacher invigilating the GCSE Physics practical for the class I taught. I had a check list for each child asking whether he or she had done and/or recorded a list of required actions. The marks I entered in my check list counted towards their final result. One of the girls, a really nice kid, hardworking and, if not of the first rank academically, certainly not thick, had made an initial error in setting up her experiment that was propagating itself through all she did.
Oh, the pity of it. She generally understood physics pretty well. She'd just messed up today. Still, today's result was what I was marking. There was nothing I could do...
... Or maybe there was. Perhaps the fact that this girl's home language was not English could come to her rescue. Because I knew her and knew how she talked I could tell that a key part of her account of her experiment was simply wrong and showed a basic misunderstanding. However all her English was sufficiently bad that I could just about make a case that she understood OK, she just had expressed it badly. In those days bad English wasn't marked down in a Physics exam. I could gain her a few marks anyway, maybe just above to inch her above a C.
It would be a shaky case but I was unlikely ever to have to make it. Only a certain proportion of the exam scripts were moderated by an external examiner.
Here my mind goes blank. Did I sell such of my academic soul as was left unsold from my previous activities? Or did I just think about it and then pull back? I can remember the sun slanting down onto the honey-coloured wood of the lab bench. I can remember the crumbly old red rubber of a three-prong clamp on a grey steel pole and the reflection of the window in the face of a stopwatch, although not, funnily enough, what the actual experiment was. I can't remember what sign my pen made.
Whatever I did, I wasn't motivated by fear or ambition, the usual motives that prompt teachers to up their pupils' results. By that time I was pretty sure that a teacher's life was not for me and next year I'd be off to pastures new. I was motivated by niceness.
The academic world has to be protected from nice people like me.
There endeth my confession. I suppose that I ought to have entitled this piece "My career as a reformed cheat and possible fraudulent examiner only I can't remember whether I was or not." But attention-grabbing titles aren't cheating, they're art.
UPDATE: Want to see the view from the other side of the hill? The same post of Brian's that I linked to independently inspired David Gillies to recount his experience of being a demonstrator discovering massive cheating by students.
The comments to that post are also fascinating. Wobbly Guy offers a defence of the custom of passing on one's file to the next cohort. It's true that reading up on a previous account of the experiment and using it to structure your own procedure is not in itself bad - after all if a keen student reads up on how whatever pioneer of science first did the experiment in question then he should be praised. But file-sharing in the old-fashioned sense makes it perilously easy to lie about having done it at all and/or to copy blindly, as Wobbly Guy admits. Drat. Posting mixup. Much copying and deleting going on to cure it. Ignore the timestamps of the last few posts. I mean, in so far as you didn't ignore them anyway. Tuesday, March 23, 2004
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. Or, as Harold Laski once put it, De mortuis nil nisi bunkum. Scott Burgess compares two obituaries for Sheikh Yassin. The one by David Hirst in the Guardian ought to be preserved in formaldehyde, to stand in some future cabinet of curiosities beside all those adoring obituaries in the western press for J V Stalin. UPDATE: David Carr has more. Wipe away a tear as David mourns for the the Sheikh Yassin we knew and loved.
Heinlein. Glory Road. Can't remember the exact quote, but at the orders of the Empress this guy is taken outside and killed and Oscar says, "I was so upset that I had to have another cup of coffee." They got Yassin. Milk, no sugar. Instant will do fine.
True when you think about it. Before making a visit I thought it best to give my children a little briefing. I wanted to make sure they avoided a topic of conversation that might have been painful for our hosts. "So," I concluded, "we must all be very tactful." A sudden thought struck me: "You do know what the word 'tactful' means, don't you?" "Yes," said my son, a keen player of Age of Empires. "It means having good tactics." Monday, March 22, 2004
L'affaire Matt Cavanagh. In his latest post Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber gives the background to, and an unedited version of, his letter in today's Guardian. I agree with every word of his letter. Paticularly the bit about scavenging for soundbites that the Guardian edited out.
Judging from what I've read in blogs and the press about Cavanagh's unreconstructed views, he did not put forward the standard libertarian argument that to forbid racial discrimination is to violate the human right of free association. (The standard libertarian view is the view I hold. It is quite compatible with thinking that in all but a few special situations racial discrimination is morally wrong, a view I also hold.) According to Edward Lucas in a letter further down the page, "We invited Mr Cavanagh [to the ICA debate that started all the fuss] as a leftwing critic of equality of opportunity. He argued, for example, that it leads to an overemphasis on competition between individuals."
In other words the views I hold would be even more likely than Mr Cavanagh's to be described as pyschotic by David Winnick MP, a member of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee. As described by the Guardian this prominent Labour MP's own views appear close to totalitarian. He does not merely think it is pyschotic to oppose the discrimination laws he thinks it is psychotic even to question them.
That's us lot for the loony bin then.
Still, you never know with the Guardian. Tomorrow we might be treated to the amusing spectacle of Mr Winnick saying that he was quoted out of context, just like Mr Cavanagh before him.
(This whole affair seemed to me to bring out so well the intolerance of the Establishment view of tolerance that I've just cross-posted it to Samizdata.) Sunday, March 21, 2004
Our European future. A German investigative journalist, Hans-Martin Tillack, was arrested and held without access to a lawyer for ten hours by the Belgian police. What was he investigating? EU corruption, of course. He was the guy who broke the Eurostat story. Here's what the International Federation of Journalists had to say. Here's the EU Observer report on the story. Terrance Coyle knows Hans-Martin Tillack personally. He notes that the main Brussels paper didn't even mention the arrest. He says, speaking of the whole affair, that "this is scary." Now I don't want to contribute to a climate of hysteria. Herr Tillack has now been released. He wasn't roughed up. It seems that Belgian law permits or possibly even demands that suspects not be given access to a lawyer for the first day after arrest. True, all Herr Tillack's files have been scrutinized by the police and the names of his sources must have been noted, but there is talk of a law that is more protective of sources being passed soon. The authorities most likely were simply trying to stymie his investigation before the law was passed.
You're right. It's still scary. Friday, March 19, 2004
I don't feel too well today, so this is your lot: Letter to the Pocket Man by Tony Woodlief of Sand in the Gears. That little pocket is like a Roach Motel for keys; they check in, but they don't check out. To release them I have to drag the entire pocket apparatus out of my pants and tug, pry, and curse. My children don't need to see this."Sand in the Gears" is by turns very funny and very moving. Thursday, March 18, 2004
Vaccines and Evolution. Jo, a.k.a. Squander Two writes: One thing that you haven’t mentioned about vaccinations (unless it was in an older post and I missed it, ’cause I’ve been a tad occupied of late), is this fact about the nature of bacteria and viruses: they evolve. Yes, it is certainly true that, the fewer people who are vaccinated, the more prevalent the disease becomes, but that doesn’t really get around libertarian arguments: it’s still up to the individual whether they wish to defend themselves against the disease, and that’s fair enough. (Are libertarians supposed to support a parent’s “right” to risk their child’s life, though? Anyway.) The far more serious problem is that, the more prevalent a disease becomes, the greater the opportunity for the organisms that cause that disease to evolve to the extent that they may eventually be able to beat the vaccines. At that point, choice is simply removed from the system for everyone, as those who choose vaccination find that it is useless to do so – and that’s why vaccinations are a genuine public good. Airbrushing out De Gaulle. March 10 was the sublime moment when the internet allowed Terrance of Fainting in Coyles to leave duty as a something or other in Brussels and enter destiny. That was when he fisked this unintentionally hilarious speech to commemorate the Entente Cordiale. And if you think my "sublime moment" stuff was OTT, read the speech. Two letters on doggy poo. Not really, they came on e-mail. Peter Cuthbertson writes: I suspect you were more on target than you realised when you wrote of the "hottest political issues of our times". Ed writes: Now, to move on, what's all this about dog s**t? I live where no council has yet had the temerity to put one of those basket things- probably because they'd get left for many a stinky week before emptying. I did however once get roped into taking someone's dog for walks around the suburbs of York. I couldn't believe it when she handed me the trowel and a plastic bag, having never had contact with it (if you know what I mean) before. I'm not sure it's all fine and dandy either: people are prissy enough as it is, without humbling themselves in service to the suburbs with fastidious s**t-shovelling. I mean, drunkeness is an epidemic, and people apparently openly poo and wee and puke in the streets, but the next day they'll all remember to scoop their dog poop for the community. Irony of Ironies when it's human poop we're more likely to step in. Genetically modified dogs must be the way forward- to poop less, and more like rabbits in consistency.Quite. Yes. A project like this could restore the profession of Mad Gene-Splicer to public esteem. Raising the tone a little, I've long thought that living teddy bears would be cute. Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Chongryun. Run a Google search for this euphonious term and you will learn a strange story. Back in World War II thousands of Koreans ended up in Japan, some taken by force as slave labour or "comfort women", others driven to emigrate by poverty. Their descendants, embittered by their experiences and by Japanese racial prejudice, stayed a race apart. In the fifties they pledged their loyalty to the Northern, Communist half of their divided homeland and with support from the North set up their own schools and social organisations under an umbrella body called "Chongryun."
Ironically these devoted acolytes of Kim Il Sung grew rich by the most capitalist of means. Chongryun-operated (I had to change that from "Chongryun-run") North Korean clothes factories at one time had a quarter of the Japanese market and many Koreans made a mint from pachinko parlours.
Chongryun is still going. It has declined, gradually for decades, as North Korea's star waned and South Korea's waxed, and steeply in the last year in the light of suspicions that it had a hand in facilitating the abduction of several Japanese to tutor North Korean spies (which is another irony considering that many of the Koreans are themselves descended from abductees). Yet the number of Korean-Japanese children presently attending Chongryun schools is not around seventy-six as I would have thought but tens of thousands. Tuesday, March 16, 2004
A thought I had while walking the dog. And while I thought, the dog acted. I know you come to this blog for discussion of all the hottest political issues of our times, so here goes.
When I was a kid the idea of cleaning up after a dog had done its business in the street would have been regarded as only slightly less loopy than a dairy farmer going out into his field every morning and scooping up all the cow-pats. In those days all the dog-owner had to do to get his or her good citizen badge was drag the animal next to a lampost rather than letting it go right in the middle of the pavement. Nowadays things are different. I, like every dog owner I know, go out armed with a trusty plastic bag and, should the dog perform, add to the contents of the receptacles provided by the council.
Not everybody does, of course. I like to think that my friends are statistically skewed towards civic virtue. But it's undeniable that a rather large and rather good change in public behaviour has taken place. Furthermore the change was almost entirely voluntary and is enforced not by law but by social disapproval of those who break the rules. Sure, there is a sign on the poopy pot threatening a fine of £100 for letting your dog foul a public place but actual prosecutions are rare.
The physical infrastructure of bins and men in vans who empty them was provided by the council but could easily be organised privately. For all I know it already is, by private companies with whom the council has a contract.
So it's all quite nice and libertarian and now I think I'll talk about something else.
Monday, March 15, 2004
I've mocked Stephen Byers in the past. I'm not mocking him now. This scathing attack on the Max Hastings article I posted about last Thursday makes me think a lot better of Byers. Both Hastings' article and Byers' response appeared in the Guardian. I get the feeling there's a fair amount of shouting goes on across Alan Rusbridger's desk.
Talking of Hastings, it's dawning on me that the Great White Hunter has a bit of a thing about invitations. Mark Steyn reminded me of this article on the capture of Saddam Hussein where Hastings spake thus: ‘It is hard not to hate George Bush. His ignorance and conceit, his professed special relationship with God, invite revulsion.’Really? For some reason I find myself imagining something like this: *
Dear Revulsion & Friends
George Bush, his ignorance and conceit and his professed special relationship with God
will be
At Home
2-5pm this Saturday.
P.S. Guys, it's me really doing the inviting, Max!!! Only I don't want to say so because people might not want to come if they knew it was my idea. But I can trust you lot because you are Guardian readers, right ;-) Nudge nudge wink wink, eh! The Scottish Executive is hard at work. This august body is considering whether it should rule that Scottish teachers should scrap grades for essays and replace them with comments. The Scotsman reports: Such classroom trauma [getting a C minus] may be consigned to history under plans being considered by ministers to banish the use of grades on pupils’ work and replace them with constructive written critiques. This might be a good idea for all I know, or a good idea in many cases. Or it might be rubbish. Either way, why in the name of all that's holy are government ministers girding their loins to decide what red scribbles will appear on every schoolbook in Scotland? What do they know? And did you notice the overwhelming statistical evidence from down South that prompted, nay forced, the Scottish Executive to turn their mighty brains to this vital topic? The results of the King’s College study, which involved 24 teachers at six schools in the south of England, had seen clear overall improvement in pupils’ abilities after they had been taught for six-months using this method. A Victory for Al-Qaeda in Spain. Believe me, I don't like saying this. I don't like doing this. Once the line that "A vote for party X is a vote for the terrorists" gets into the political process it makes things much more vituperative. It breaks down the mutual assumption of good intentions that keeps peaceful discourse peaceful. It also puts people who want to vote for party X on the grounds of economic policy or some other respectable reason in an extremely difficult position. Yet helping to put that line into the political process is exactly what I am doing (within my tiny sphere) as I write this post. Why am I doing it then? Because, unfortunately, my dislike of the message does not change its truth: Al-Qaeda are happy today. Terrorism worked. Clearly, obviously, educationally, it worked. The Spanish electorate let it work on them. My everlasting sympathy for the victims of the mass murder does not change that truth. My sympathy for the people who may have wanted to vote against the Popular Party for all sorts of decent reasons does not change that truth.
How many times in history has the same pattern repeated itself? While the enemy mass at the borders the small countries cower and dodge. In public they talk of alliances, of standing together, but in at the same time each nation tries to hint to Khan or Sultan that, as your Highness surely knows, we are not the leaders... we are just small fry... perhaps we can work together... you don't want to go for us...
Pained but relieved each little nation watches as the next blow of the enemy falls not on them but on their neighbour. Until their turn comes.
It's the same story now, except that the notion of borders has become irrelevant.
Keep safe, as they are fond of saying on the TV. Keep safe now! A good way of doing that might be to stay off the trains in the week before your country's next election.
Saturday, March 13, 2004
About Spain... sometimes you think about a thing a lot but really it's just the same thought going round and round. In this post and the posts below it Normblog brings together some accounts of the victims of the train bombings.
What can I say? They sound like they were ordinary people. Like you and me and people we know. Except that their lives were cruelly cut short and ours continue. Friday, March 12, 2004
"It's difficult to teach them physics, so let's teach them "about" physics." Kevin Richardson writes.. er, actually wrote an embarrassingly long time ago: I was interested to read your piece on physics education both as an ex physics teacher (I taught it for eight years, up to 1980) and as the father of an 11 year old son who is about to transfer to secondary school this year.There, in more detail than I could have hoped to provide, is backing for my most melancholy suspicions about physics teaching (and syllathingies). Physics is difficult. (Confession: it was a bit too difficult for me in the end.) But there is scope for that very difficulty to be one of its selling points to both students and employers. I think what the subject needs is a little constructive macho. When you walk in to your first ever GCSE class the theme tune to "The Right Stuff" should be playing. A libertarian argument not to force vaccines. Alan M Robertson (who was "divorced from the web for two years" but is now reconciled) writes: am now on day four of my blog. I didn't know what to write about. So I dredged up some old material inspired by one of your comments. In finding your comment, I read your most recent posts. Heh. Instapundit posts on a Seattle Post Intelligencer headline so biased it's funny. The story beneath the headline was by the Associated Press, and Jim Miller says the bias from the AP is worse than that of the Seattle P-I.
... and a (presumably Republican) reader of the Corner has a personal reason for objecting to being held responsible for the actions of one's second cousins. There were no posts on Wednesday because I was busy. Then on Thursday I got stuck in to quite a long post about Max Hastings... 80% of which was eaten by the computer, despite being (I could have sworn) safely posted-but-not-published in the bottom window. It seemed best to walk away from the computer rather than scream and curse any more than I already had. I have tried to reconstitute the post below from memory. If the original one reappears, why then I'll have two. While I'm here let me say that if time permits today I'll try and post some of the interesting emails I have received. Thursday, March 11, 2004
Max Hastings' little joke. Max Hastings is in the Guardian today, flattering its readers: In this country, only the Guardian and Independent deal thoroughly with what is taking place, and display real sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians. Elsewhere a lot of space is given to apologias for Israeli conduct, some of which reveal a contempt for Palestinian human rights that invites the most baleful of historical comparisons."Invites." That carefully unattributed verb; how sweetly put. You are talking about the Holocaust, right? (That's the "most baleful of historical comparisons" that comes to my mind, certainly. It's a peculiarly indirect phrase to use if he means anything else and I don't for a moment think that he does mean anything else. ) The Holocaust, if you remember, regularly killed more Jews in an hour than the entire Palestinian death toll over many decades of conflict with Israel. The thing about invitations is that you don't have to issue them and you don't have to accept them. Discretion in this respect keeps you out of bad company.
A similar point about responsibility runs through this post commenting on Hastings' article by Norman Geras. Here is an excerpt: And there was I imagining that it is those who propagate, embrace and excuse anti-Semitism who are the real culprits. In the unlikely event that Max Hastings ever reads this he will have an answer ready: They make the cardinal error of identifying the Jewish people with the Israeli government, wilfully confusing anti-semitism and anti-Zionism. Often, they seem to demand that the behaviour of Israel should be judged by a special standard, that allows the likes of Sharon and Netanyahu a special quota of excesses, in compensation for past sufferings.But Mr Hastings has erected a straw man. It is so commonplace as to be a cliché to begin an article condemning the modern Jew-hatred by making the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism - and by making the distinction between anti-Zionism and opposition to the current policies of the current Israeli government, a distinction that Mr Hastings blurs. I for one do not wish Israel to be judged by a special standard. I wish it to be judged by the same standard as other nations. And by that standard I see that Israel's retaliation for Palestinian terrorism is far less indiscriminate than Russia's retaliation for Chechen terrorism - yet it is Israel that academics boycott, not Russia. I see that for the last half century Arab regimes have slaughtered Arabs in their thousands (Anyone but me remember the way Syria crushed the uprising at Hama? There were estimates at the time of eighty thousand dead. At least some people do remember the crimes of Saddam Hussein!) - yet it is not these killer regimes that are denounced in the UN but Israel. I see that Israel has universal suffrage, a free press, an independent judiciary and Arab members sitting in the Knesset - yet it is regularly called an "apartheid state." I see that Western PC activists will hound people out of their jobs for scarcely discernible or even unconscious offences against racial ettiquette - yet the same activists shrug their shoulders at a tide of anti-Jew racist speech and writing the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Nazi era, and which in many instances literally is Nazi, being translated or recycled Nazi propaganda and conspiracy-mongering. Finally I see again and again Israel being called a Nazi country which displays... oh, I won't go on. Others have denounced the odiousness of this comparison better than I could. I shall content myself with saying that at the very least it displays an inability to count big numbers. Hey, but maybe I should be less uptight, relax a bit, have a laugh about it all... d'you know, I think I will. Max Hastings lecturing in the Guardian (the Guardian!) about racial prejudice is pretty funny really, and here's a little wee anecdote that explains why.
Until recently Mr Hastings hadn't made any striking impression on my mind. I knew his name, naturally. It first came to my notice when he reported from the Falklands War, which I think he did well. After that I knew he was editor of the Evening Standard and then the Telegraph. Also I knew he had written books of popular history about the Second World War. I knew I had read a good many of his columns but couldn't remember specific ones. That was about it Hastings-wise for me. All that changed, however, when my husband came back from the library with a book of light-hearted hunting and shooting memoirs by Hastings called "Scattered Shots". As I may have mentioned, I like target shooting but am far too soft-hearted to hunt. Nonetheless I am quite happy to read books about it, and Hastings' book is extremely entertainingly written. At times I wondered whether Hastings had come under a miasma similar to the one that hung over P.G. Wodehouse's Bludleigh Court (and had power to get the local representative of Our Dumb Brothers League of Mercy up for an impromptu badger-baiting party at three in the morning), so great is Hastings' enthusiasm for blasting the local wildlife.
But not all his jokes are funny. Somewhere in "Scattered Shots" he tells a golfing story. (The book has gone back to the library so you are going to have to do without page numbers.) It seems that one time a golf ball struck by Mr Hastings landed straight on some unfortunate man's head, knocking him out cold for a few minutes. Fortunately the victim was a forgiving sort and having come round he said dazedly that he was quite all right and Mr Hastings should think nothing of it. What amazed me was the term Mr Hastings used to describe the man's good sportsmanship: he called him a white man. There was no question of him meaning it in a purely factual sense. So far as I could tell everybody in the story was white. He clearly meant it in the way that Bulldog Drummond uses it. Then, just to rub in that this was not merely an unfortunate slip of the pen, Hastings once more described the man in the same way in the closing paragraphs of the chapter.
Just think about that. It wasn't written in 1930 when race was the Big Idea and the Coming Thing and that the use of the phrase "white man" as a shorthand to indicate sportsmanship, honour or trustworthiness, was, unfortunately, commonplace; it was written in a book published in 1999. It wasn't written by some superannuated rustic; it was written by Max Hastings, a man who has edited Britain's best-selling quality paper, an opinion-former, a man accustomed to mix in London political and literary circles.
And now he's the Guardian's pet conservative! Go on, laugh.
UPDATE: Here Stephen Pollard lays into the same article. And here's a good letter in Friday's Guardian. "I do not recall Hastings or anyone else telling Africans that they are obliged to speak out against Mugabe's dictatorship in Zimbabwe on pain of contributing to anti-African prejudice." The blast in the Moscow Metro that killed forty people in February seems to have inspired another bunch of murderers to follow suit. Free trade. I think this post from The Corner is on to something: "[Employment is understated because] the internet has created a vast underground cash economy. The dozens of eBay sellers and independent retailers I did business with last year all got paid in cash and are not about to respond to a survey about any related activity....I just bought some things for the house [on the Internet]...and they wanted PayPal. I get computer parts the same way. It used to be that the only people that could benefit from a 'cash basis' were barbers and waitresses, but that is no longer the case.Once I would have been shocked. Now I shrug. Tuesday, March 09, 2004
Herd immunity. Ellie Kimmel writes regarding vaccination: I strongly suspect that vaccination regulations are, in most US states, waived for parents who have religious objections. That's certainly the case in Florida. Although there are a few specific deomonations that forbid vaccines (Christian Science comes to mind), most parents who obtain the religious waiver do so due to fears of negative vaccination outcomes. When I was a private school teacher in Florida, we have several parents, Catholic, Protestant, atheist, and Jewish, who requested and routinely received waivers, which, as far as I know, were automatically granted to anyone who stated a religious objection.Given modern anti-discrimination law I suspect that the power of liberal states to ensure herd immunity by making immunisation a condition of entry to schools is much reduced. If, for instance, the Nigerian rumour becomes common within Islam then we might eventually reach a stage where a requirement for immunisation will depress the number of Muslim children enrolled. That would make a school vulnerable to lawsuits in either the US or the UK. A cornerstone of modern anti-discrimination law is that things are judged by their effects, not their intentions. Of course the same laws also make it hard for even private schools such as Ellie Kimmel's to enforce immunisation rules. Even in the absence of law I doubt whether many schools would consider it worth the trouble to argue with a request for a waiver. The whole spirit of the times is against such a move.
My scary scenario hasn't happened yet and may never happen. So far as I know non-Nigerian Muslims vaccinate their children as or more conscientiously than White Britons do; wasn't there some kerfuffle a few years ago when it was discovered that Pakistan had a higher vaccination rate for some diseases than Britain did? I seem to remember Imran Khan lent his name and face to an advertising campaign to bring Britain up to scratch. The only relevance of King Hillary and the Beggarman to current debates is that it has a Lord Chancellor in it. That'll do.
Proud Lord Willoughby, I won't quote the whole thing having heard rumour of the long arm of the A A Milne estate. I might just casually mention that these guys run a useful website. Mind you, for us Lord Chancellor fans the poem has all the wrong morals. A shocking example of the arbitrary and unrestrained exercise of power by fictional monarchs. I loved the headline of this Fisk² post from Contintelpro Tool. Personally, I doubt the Fiskoid exists in flesh and blood. Isn't the most economical explanation that we are now onto Fisk 3.0 after earlier versions crashed? (Via Insty.) The Last Lord Chancellor. In this article William Rees-Mogg writes against the haste with which the Government, supported by Lord Falconer the present Lord Chancellor, has gone about the abolition of that office. Rees-Mogg says, Successful institutions grow like trees; they cannot simply be erected, like the Eiffel Tower. They acquire their authority over time. Take, for instance, the post of Lord Chancellor, which the Prime Minister has decided to abolish, as a matter of convenience arising from a bungled reshuffle of his Cabinet. No one knows when the office was first created. However, it certainly goes back to the period of Anglo-Saxon government.and The Constitutional Reform Bill proposes to abolish an office which has earned more than a thousand years of public confidence.and There have been only 26 amendments to the US Constitution in two centuries, of which the first ten were in 1791. The procedures required to carry an amendment, such as the amendment on marriage that President Bush is now proposing, are that it must be proposed either by two thirds of both Houses of Congress, or by two thirds of the states, and ratified by three fourths of the states. This means that any amendment is hard to carry. It has given the US Constitution unique stability. By the American standard, Mr Blair and Lord Falconer are acting with indecent and unconstitutional haste. Rees-Mogg may get his slowdown, for now. The Lords have voted to send the Bill to a Select Committee, which in practice will probably mean that there is no time to make it law before the next election. You will find few better comments on all this than what Sean Gabb wrote in June 2003 giving cautious support to the change itself but expressing deep anger at the change of name. At first sight this objection might seem shallow. It is not. To explain why not, Sean Gabb briefly described the history of earlier judicial reforms and said, ... [nonetheless] the Victorian reformers did all they could to preserve the old associations. Even if the substance was entirely replaced, the names of Queen's Bench and Chancery were retained. The New Courts were built to look old. Within a generation, I doubt if anyone but a legal historian really noticed what had been done. The present set of reforms is quite different in its regard for old associations. A few years ago, writs became claim forms and plaintiffs became claimants. There are proposals to stop the Judges from wearing their horsehair wigs. Now, there is to be no Lord Chancellor. The office has existed in England for at least 800 years, and began as a sort of secretaryship to the King. It is older than Parliament. Thomas Beckett was Lord Chancellor to Henry II. Thomas More was Lord Chancellor for Henry VIII. The office was satirised in Iolanthe. It has always been around in English history, and its holders have been some of the great men of English history. Even before the proposed abolition, the cumulative effect of these reforms has been to advertise a break with the past. Let another generation go by, and only a legal historian will be able to understand the mass of obsolete words contained in law reports from before the present century. Threads of continuity will have been snapped. The past will seem more of a foreign country than is needed. As I re-read this the stirred depths of my memory sent up a little bubble. I can't give you a reference or trace where this anecdote came from but I'm pretty sure of it and it makes me angry, despite the point at issue being purely nominal. After some previous reform of the law the authorities put out a press release boasting how they had updated and clarified obscure legal terminology, abolishing archaic terms and hence making the legal process more transparent to the citizen blah blah blah. This was reported in the press. Next day there was a letter to the editor in one of the quality dailies. (I think it was the Telegraph.) The writer said, and I had no trouble believing him, that what the authorities had actually done in their purging frenzy was replace Latin terms with... ... You think I'm going to say, "with English terms, clearly understandable to the man on the Clapham omnibus" don't you? Nope. With numbers.
I can't remember the examples the writer cited, but in each case a Latin phrase was replaced with "a defence under Regulation 18c" or some such. In other words Latin phrases that would have been entirely comprehensible to those who did speak Latin and relatively easy to pick up and remember by those who (like me) do not were replaced by numbers that were utterly incomprehensible to lay people and even to lawyers outside that particular specialisation. In addition a little bit more of our living history was lost.
As Iain Murray put it in the comments to a Samizdata post introducing Sean Gabb's article, this is no more than the usual practice of a conqueror: to "destroy an icon of the conquered people."
UPDATE: Iain Murray comments on his own blog here.
Monday, March 08, 2004
"A sense of fairness touches deep intuitions in the human brain. So, alas, does ethnic identity..." That's how Dennis Dutton begins a paragraph in this piece on equality under the law. He's talking about New Zealand, where Maori issues are particularly in the news as a Maori political party has just been started. Dutton continues: "...and successful modern societies have gone out of their way to defuse and redirect the demons of race." Yes. But I hardly had time to think about that before my interest was grabbed by the little anecdote of school life that he used to illustrate the general principle:
Which is why reading a story such as Megan Church's is so disturbing. Megan is a 16-year-old whose parents have removed her from Marlborough Girls' College.Yes again. Although the last gets little sympathy from me, I don't like the sound of the first two at all. Once upon a time I thought expressing fear of a white backlash was simply a clever way of delaying fair treatment to non-whites. Nowadays the fear seems real and urgent. I think I can imagine the outcome of this story as far as Megan is concerned. We know her necklace was precious to her or she would have taken it off "voluntarily" rather than ending up having it forcibly cut from her. So she gets the necklace fixed. She wears it for the next ten years, maybe for the rest of her life. Every now and then she tells its story and slags off her former school - and she mentions (how could she not?) the fact that Maori girls were allowed necklaces. Maybe she will be able to avoid unfairly projecting her resentment onto Maoris generally, but she would be no worse than millions of people if she did not avoid it. And her hearers would be no worse than millions of people if they did not avoid it either. This story is tiny, but the cumulative result of many such stories might well be the rise of a white mirror image to the newly formed Maori ethnic party.
David Carr once said to me that "when the backlash comes, don't kid yourself that it'll be us who replace the tranzis." Mercenaries seized in Zimbabwe. This is interesting. There's sufficient detail to suggest they aren't a lost Duke of Edinburgh's Award class or anything like that. Saturday, March 06, 2004
Polio and the tragedy of the commons. Anthony Cox writes: Thanks for the links, I would respond if I was still blogging. But why bother when someone else has already nailed it....Den Beste's link has some good arguments against libertarian ideas. I have a feeling that there are some good responses out there, but I don't know them. I hope this doesn't give the impression that all I'm interested in is defending my little ideological group. Perhaps a slightly more accurate statement would be that I can see the dim shapes of good responses to Den Beste but right now I cannot answer him. I don't despise my own ability to see dim shapes of arguments: usually I do manage to reach clear arguments in the end. It takes and should take quite a lot to make a person renounce their axioms. But for now, he has an awfully good point, doesn't he? LATER: The phrase "Right to exclude" is going to be a large part of any answer I might come up with. But not tonight, I'm turning in. "This is pompea last day sort of place." Awesome. A twenty-five year old Ukrainian biker girl has produced this unforgettable photo-essay about her distinctly unusual hobby. "I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. "Not to mention ghost towns across which looters, scientists and tourists of the macabre each make their own trajectories through the empty land - and through which this free spirit rides with a dosimeter at her hip and the wind in her hair. Thanks to Damian Penny and a long chain of equally awed bloggers which I traced as far back as Jessica's Well. Friday, March 05, 2004
It's been a while since I had a good old-fashioned anti-socialist rant. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Guardian's David Walker for this good old-fashioned socialist rant that reminded me of forgotten pleasures. Walker has been reading a report by the Treasury's Derek Wanless (who pops up everywhere these days) that says the poor are more unhealthy than the rich. Here's Walker's solution:
But wouldn't it be even cheaper to address the causes of the income disparity that in turn correlates so strongly with ill health? It would be, but where is the physician to recommend the progressive taxation that would underpin such a health-giving redistribution of income?Where indeed? On a Saturday night at about this hour I reckon he's just about reached the petits fours and will be calling for coffee and the bill any minute now. Good thing too, he's been moving left all night and one more drink would have had him recommending the massacre of the bourgeoisie. (The tamarind sauce was a little bitter, I thought. ) Getting back to Mr Walker, we'll start with his sloppy language. Nothing that Walker quotes from Wanless's report suggests that income disparity causes the ill-health. If you literally believed inequality caused ill-health the best policy would be to make all the rich, healthy people poor. Oh, I forgot, that is the policy.
Come to think of it, though, Walker missed a trick. Inequality does cause ill health, among baboons anyway. I read somewhere - oh, you Google - that baboons are more unhappy on a given ration of bananas when they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy than when they have the same banana allowance but are nearer being Top Baboons. That's another reason for not having socialism, say I. Ain't nothing more hierarchical than a socialist society! Without the entropic flow of money they stratify; and one of the ways they stratify is by access to health care. The elite have the skills to make sure their problems are first on the consultant's list; the lumpenproletariat do not.
But I digress. It is not inequality that should outrage but poverty. We have to get rid of poverty. So let's have more of the method of poverty-zapping that's worked for hundreds of millions of people worlwide.
Oddly, Mr Walker says quite a lot about the way poor people smoke more than rich people without explaining why giving the poor more of other people's money to buy ciggies would help. Free fruit and veg? I don't see it working, mate. Carrots, for instance are damn near free already. In the developed countries most of the health problems of the permanently poor class are behavioural.
A hypothesis Walker doesn't suggest but I do is that welfare makes you unhealthy. Welfare people spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, and that is bad for your health. (The fun thing about that last sentence is it presses all the outrage buttons while remaining perfectly defensible.) Inactivity, low morale and passivity are the hallmarks of welfare and are also the hallmarks of ill health. Getting folk off welfare would save lives.
I had a sort of preparatory proto-rant to this one over in the comments to this post at Freedom and Whisky. Some BBC report said that poorer people couldn't afford healthy food and couldn't afford exercise. Can't the BBC conceive of exercise outside a gym?
ADDED LATER: A thing I didn't bring out in this rant was that when I talk about health problems being behavioural problems nine times out of ten I think that harmful behaviours are made a lot more likely by bad incentives in society. In that respect I haven't changed much since my pinko days - although my views as to what constitutes a bad state of society have changed.
Yeah. I'm still a wimp.
Sulli has up two funny stories about politically correct editing. Here's my contribution to the genre, which I actually heard in a sermon: worried that he might hesitate or stumble over the deceased's name while reading the words of a funeral service, a Catholic priest got into the habit of using the the "Replace All" function of his word processor to print out the text with the correct name inserted every time. All went well until he had to conduct the funeral of a lady called Mary, closely followed by another funeral for a man called Joe. "Hail Joe, full of grace..." Thursday, March 04, 2004
More on polio vaccination in Nigeria. I'm putting this follow up to my Biased BBC post here rather than there because it's more about the story itself rather than the BBC presentation of it. There's plenty to say. Anthony Cox of the late lamented Black Triangle blog writes: You are making me all nostalgic about my blog, I've been covering this for And here's a link plus discussion from Gene Expressions: link One of the commenters ("bbartlog") to the Gene Expressions post brings up some reasonable arguments against vaccination. I concede that when liberty meets public health, sparks fly. Here are some of the issues:
OK, so I've raised all these questions and shown what a reasonable person I am. I've told the BMA to get their noses out of my life on this blog before now and no doubt I will again. Now let's get back to the immediate case before us. None of these points, thought-provoking though they are, seriously challenge the point I made on Biased BBC. The myth that "the Americans are lacing polio vaccine to make Nigerian women infertile" is baseless. While it lasts, it kills. If the BBC talk about "public service" means anything at all, it means educating people not to believe such rubbish.
UPDATE: Gadaffi believes similar conspiracy theories. This account comes via Noah of Africapundit. Wednesday, March 03, 2004
If you are at peace with the world, read Laban Tall and the reinvigorated Peter Briffa and they'll soon set you right. On Biased BBC I have up an angry post about BBC reporting of the conspiracy theory that is stopping many Nigerians from being vaccinated against polio. Tuesday, March 02, 2004
Cass Brown saw my piece on sick jokes, and now writes:
The website is here. Now, as it happens, Blog City is being upgraded so I haven't actually seen it. But the email struck me as straightforward and up-front so I'm taking it on trust. That sort of humour that I expect to see there isn't going to appeal to everybody, but there is a big difference between grim humour about your own position and mockery of someone else's, as members of the Guinea Pig Club could tell you. UPDATE: I'm afraid I still haven't been able to get the first link (http://cancergiggles.blog-city.com/read/472766.htm) to work. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong
Important Environmental News. Bjorn Lomborg looks like Harrison Ford. Bet that explains some of his success - and some of the fury against him. Monday, March 01, 2004
Sorry, too busy to blog today. I'll just mention that while desperately trying to hack down a few of the hydra-heads of email I found one offering me effort-free academic qualifications which came from a netscape email address starting with the characters "nataliesolent" and which had in the text the phrase "real name: natalie solent." Gosh, what an amazing coincidence, I don't think. I am definitely not offering fake MBAs for money, and so far as I know there is no other Natalie Solent on the net. May all spammers die a lingering death in the depths of space. |