Fluent Radical

In the voluminous discussions of the need for an English Parliament
here,
here
and recently here (which I fully support),
there is one important question that has been overlooked.

In what style of architecture will we build the thing?

Now I recently paid a visit to Washington D.C., my first, where I was able to view
close up some of what I consider to be the most inspiring architecture in the world.
The Neo-Classical look has a lot going for it. My only reservation about Option A
is that this might look a little, umm, silly in the middle of London. (Or indeed,
York).

Option A	Option B

As for alternative B…

Well. Nothing against, nothing against. I like Deep Space Nine as much as the next man.
It’s just that my personal preference (and I’m guessing the fairly conservative
CEP movement is going to agree with me here) is more along these lines:

Yes. That would fit the bill nicely. What is this building anyway?

A father high on cannabis broke his baby daughter’s leg because her crying woke him up, a court has heard.

Jeremy Jenkins, defending, said Pugh had been tired through lack of sleep. He added:

“This defendant never really had a chance in life.”

The poor dear.

Jeremy Jenkins continues:

“He does accept however that what he did was wrong and does accept that it means a considerable period in custody. It will be worse for him in jail because of the attitude taken by fellow prisoners towards people who commit these type of crimes.”

Just fellow prisoners? Whereas this lawyer takes a far more progressive attitude to such things I suppose.

(Thanks to Laban)

I’ve just added a strikingly optimistic counter to the sidebar. It goes up to 99,999,999. Seems a bit restrictive.

Say: “Pfshah! So we should just let Oxford run the country then?”

(note: may not work on someone who went to Oxford)

I just decoded all of Nu Labour’s constitutional policies:

Notice a kind of pattern? This is too much to just be ineptitude. It appears New Labour are trying to remove power from any locale, country or nation that people actually care about. Why could this be? Perhaps it’s to do with the Leftish drive to place “experts” in positions of power.

The two reasons I might engage in a government level are
(1) I care about the place that that govt. represents. (my reason)
(2) I am an interfering do-gooder who enjoys interminable meetings that always end with more restrictions on local businesses and people. (the Left’s reason)

Remove the first reason as sucessfully as New Labour are doing, and they’ll end up running the country completely.

For the cost of the Olympics we could:

• Give every secondary school in England £352,000 a year every year for ten years to promote sport.
• Give every secondary school in England an equivalent endowment, leading (at 5% interest) to an annual income of £176,000 a year in perpetuity to promote sport.

So lets not hear any more about how the Olympics are coming to promote sport in the UK.

(12,000,000,000 divided by 3409 secondary schools (source) divided by 10 = £352,000,
£3,520,000 endowment *0.05 = £176,000)

We know that the FDA or NICE have institutional incentives to ban drugs that may be beneficial, as to them false positive is far worse for their careers than a false negative.

I.e. consider the following two mistakes for a regulator to make:

1. Approving a drug that unexpectedly kills people it wasn’t supposed to. This one ends your career.
2. Not approving a drug that could improve people’s lives. This one hardly anyone, if anyone, ever finds out about.

The second mistake is the one you’re going to want to make, so you’re not going to approve drugs even when there are people who it might help.

On the other hand Merck has the opposite incentive:to try to retail drugs even when they are more unsafe than the regulators approve of.

So we have two competing institutions and patients need for useful drugs is caught in the middle.

If we had a regulatory situation where adults were allowed to make up their own minds about the risks and benefits of a drug, then Vioxx would be legal for sale but with clear instructions as to the risks taken. Some would still take it, some would not, and it would be their (and their doctors) choice based on the facts.

In such a situation the incentive for pharmaceutical firms to massage the data would be much reduced. It would still exist as better data will make more people accept the apparent risk, but the massive incentive that exists to bring the drug just below the arbitrary risk line that FDA/NICE might require would be gone.

So it’s hard to get worked up about this “evil” corporation out to make money. Everybody’s out to make money, including the regulators - who never want to be scapegoats. We should be asking for an adult regulatory regime, not demonising the businessmen.

The Cornerstone group of Conservative MPs, talking last week about the dangers of over-libertarianism, need to study up on the rise of the Right in the US. The Republican Party is the home for libertarians and traditionalists. The Conservative Party must do the same, and not ditch liberal ideas but find some way for them to coexist alongside family values. After all, as Dinesh D’Souza says, they are not contradictory. Libertarians want people to be able to live their lives as they choose, and traditionalists want them to choose the good life.

In theory, the exam boards could publish results by simply returning the percentage of the papers marks received and the percentile of the year group this puts the student in. Like so:

Maths 80% -4th percentile
Biology 72% -23rd percentile
English 54% -40th percentile

But instead we ask our exam boards to unify these two figures into a single grade; presumably because this kind of results return is too complicated to be understood by students, parents or university admissions tutors.

So we ask the boards to ‘editorialize’ the results, to give us their opinion on what these two statistics imply about the ability of the student. No one seems to be asking why, even though there are very few people who if it was put like this would now trust the exam boards opinion. It appears as though the only remaining reason for the A-E grading scheme is so that the government can continue to obfuscate the actual ability of students.

Publishing the raw results like this won’t mean that exams will become harder, but it will allow the universities to distinguish the better pupils. Offers from universities could become a mix of grades and percentiles. Cambridge could require very high percentile marks in all subjects, Russell group universities could require a high percentile in the chosen subject and simply high grades in all papers etc.

This would also lend some transparency to the system, which would put pressure on boards to explain the justification for the gradings.

Why do liberals and conservatives disagree so strongly about the EU? Here is one hypothesis.

Liberals believe everything good comes from the state, and the core functions of the state: the Police, Education, and the Health Service are all (in the main) still functions of the nation states.

Conservatives believe that everything good comes from the individual, from enterprise in the economic and civil realm. But the economic realm of the country is now almost entirely the province of the EU.

For the Liberals we have full control over the good stuff in life, for the Cons we have given up the most important things in life.

In defense of the second point of view, Hayek’s view was that virtually all of our public and private life is in some measure related to economic issues. Family picnic anyone? EU regulated food, drink, textiles (for rugs) etc..