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10 questions for Larry King

Time.com has this interview with Larry King, in which he answers readers' questions on his 50-year long broadcasting career and the future of television journalism.

Watch it here

Why Mamet's no longer a liberal

David Mamet, a lifelong liberal, began writing a play about politics. And guess what happened?

Mamet's November centres on the argument between:

A president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

And he found his own politics shifting, shifting, shifting:

I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philospoher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

What should Northern Rock do next?

So, you have been appointed the chief executive of Northern Rock. Congratulations. But what do you do now?

The preferred alternative of the current management seems to be to repeat reassurances that many depositors refuse to accept and then wait for the share price to drop so low that Northern Rock is bought by a big bank.

This involves just sitting there as depositors, one after the other, conclude that they may as well take out their money. After all, the risk is all one way. Why not close your account?

This may, in the end, be the only thing they can do. But I must say, if I were the CEO or their PR agency, I wouldn't feel satisfied.

Here are some things they could do:

Board members queue up outside a branch to put in their own assets into Northern Rock accounts.

Provide a one-off lump sum to all savers, payable if their money is in their account in, say, three months time

A publicity campaign using ordinary savers, "people like you", who are sticking with the Northern Rock.

Are they doing these things? It seems striking that they are so passive.

In response to the Virginia Tech massacre

So what to make of the grim killings at Virginia Tech?

The Washington Post's leader, in typical stately fashion, asks all the right questions:

Would the university have suffered the same tragedy if Virginia law did not prohibit the carrying of guns on campus? Should metal detectors be ubiquitous in American classrooms and dormitories? And why are gunmen so apt to carry out their lethal rampages at American schools?

The New York Times is tougher:

Sympathy was not enough at the time of Columbine, and eight years later it is not enough. What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.

James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, uses a column in the LA Times to give a brief history of mass murder by gun-wielding lunatics. He examines the social changes that have increased the incidence of such massacres.

So what has changed? For one thing, the United States has become much more dog-eat-dog, more competitive in recent years. We admire those who achieve at any cost, and it seems that we have less compassion for those who fail. (Just look at how eager we are to vote people off the island or to reject them in singing competitions.) This certainly increases frustration on the part of losers.

Then there's the eclipse of traditional community: higher rates of divorce, the decline of church-going and the fact that more people live in urban areas, where they may not even know their neighbours. If mass murderers are isolated people who lack support, these trends only exacerbate the situation. Many mass murderers, for example, are people who have picked up roots and moved.

He concludes by saying this:

It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.

A graduate student from Virginia Tech wrote this article last year, complaining about the ban that stops students from carrying concealed weapons (hat tip Samizdata):

Now consider the situation of this past Monday. A violent criminal who clearly has no respect for other people’s lives is running loose on campus, his precise whereabouts unknown. And while the police did an excellent job of patrolling campus, they simply cannot be everywhere at once. Is it not obvious that all students, faculty and staff would have been safer if CHP holders were not banned from carrying their weapons on campus?

What the Board of Visitors has effectively done by banning CHP-holding students, faculty and staff from carrying their weapons is creating a “Safe Zone” for criminals who do not care about the rules anyway. Disarming law-abiding citizens has never made the general populace more secure.

To British ears, the idea that ordinary people carrying guns makes the population safer sounds mad. But we forget our own lost history of gun ownership. Richard Munday wrote this article a couple of years ago. It's a fascinating read:

A century ago, the possession and carrying of firearms was perfectly normal here. Firearms were sold without licence in gunshops and ironmongers in virtually every town in the country, and grand department stores such as Selfridge's even offered customers an in-house range. The market was not just for sporting guns: there was a thriving domestic industry producing pocket pistols and revolvers, and an extensive import trade in the cheap handguns that today would be called "Saturday Night Specials". Conan Doyle's Dr Watson, dropping a revolver in his pocket before going out about town, illustrates a real commonplace of that time. Beatrix Potter's journal records a discussion at a small country hotel in Yorkshire, where it turned out that only one of the eight or nine guests was not carrying a revolver.

Robbie Millen

The end is nigh. Maybe

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has reset its Doomsday clock. Apparently, it is five minutes to midnight.

The BBC website reports on this move as follows:

Experts assessing the dangers posed to civilisation have added climate change to the prospect of nuclear annihilation as the greatest threats to humankind

Experts in what? In atomic science, I presume. This provides them with a unique insight into the consequences of a nuclear explosion, but not in the probability of it occurring. It is this probability that the clock is measuring (or should I say indicating since it isn't any kind of measure).

They also have no better insight than anyone else into climate change.

The quality of their understanding is illustrated by the fact that during the Cuban Missile Crisis the clock was further from midnight than it is now, while in 1984, when Reagan was President, it was nearer to midnight than at any other time. These seem eccentric judgments and political rather than scientific in origin.

Given that I've only got five minutes left to live I am not going to waste any more of it on the Atomic Bulletin.

Real freedom means being able to wear a veil

There has been a vibrant debate about whether Muslim women should be entitled to wear a veil in public. Now the debate has reached a new pitch with this story:

A man who was being hunted for the murder of a policewoman is understood to have escaped from Britain by disguising himself as a veiled Muslim woman.

Does this conclude the argument?

I don't think it does.

Despite my opposition to all kinds of fundamentalism, I think that a liberal society ought to be able to withstand a few people exercising their free choice to wear a veil. And it is important to understand that, difficult though it is for many us to comprehend, it is a free choice.

This story is not about the veil, it is about airport security. It is unbelievable that they are busy checking my 6 year old son's bottle of still water, causing huge queues, while letting a wanted man waltz through security dressed as a woman, without having arrangements in place to check his face.

John Bolton resigns - was he what the UN deserves?

John Bolton has resigned as US Ambassador to the UN. The Economist argued that his main success has been to unite the southern hemisphere against the rich north. Newt Gingrich in this National Review article from last year defended Bolton from the accusation that he is too tough, rough and uncompromising. From the Left, the stalkerish website Bolton Watch has been keeping tabs on him. And here you can read The Nation's take on Bolton's original appointment:

Perhaps the real damage is the signal Bush has sent to the other members of the UN: that the United States is not really serious about the organization it helped to found. Almost as worrying is the implicit message of encouragement to the know-nothings on the extreme right of the Republican Party, who get their news and geography from Rush Limbaugh and Fox, and see the UN as a cabal of gun-reforming, gay-liberating, abortion-peddling, US Constitution-undermining foreigners.

But does the UN deserve to be treated seriously? If you read Rosemary Righter's splendid (but long) piece in The Times Literary Supplement, the answer will have to be "no". The UN is looking rather beside the point.

The UN no longer exists, as it did in 1945, in lonely eminence. It must compete for influence in a world of instant communications and multiple voices, and of networks inside and outside government that operate across frontiers with unprecedented ease. Globalization is transforming not only the world economy, but also the relations between governments and their increasingly mobile, disconcertingly better-informed citizens. The inter-state threats which the UN’s security machinery was designed to address have been largely displaced by the problems of collapsing, dysfunctional states and the globalization of organized crime and terrorist networks.

Robbie Millen

Are doctors and nurses more likely to be killers?

The doctors I've known are terribly good company because they usually have a well-developed sense of black humour and an amusing line in misanthropy. And who can blame them when they have to deal with the rest of humanity. Alas, some health professionals take their misanthropy too far. Stephan Letter, a male nurse and Germany's most prolific serial killer, has just been jailed, with 28 deaths on his hands.

A disproportionate number of serial killers have been doctors and nurses. This snappy article in the British Medical Journal argues:

There are enough recorded instances of multiple murders by doctors (real or bogus) to make at least a prima facie case that the profession attracts some people with a pathological interest in the power of life and death

Because death and dying maybe a workaday experience for doctors and nurses, I wonder if they may find it emotionally or morally easier to kill? Or perhaps they simply have more opportunities to murder?

Robbie Millen

A better idea

After a sale at Christies yesterday the Chair of the Communist Party, Anita Halpin looks set to become a multi-millionaire. Her family is establishing ownership over thousands of paintings stolen from them by the Nazis.

What will she do with the money?

Professor Margot Light of the London School of Economics is clear:

To each according to his needs is the communist philosophy, so she should keep what she needs and give away what she doesn't.

What a ridiculous idea. The "each according to his needs" philosophy is meaningless. She can't "need" this money at all or she'd be incapable of clothing or feeding herself already.

I've got a better thought. Why not keep the money and give up communism.

Veil of silence

Phil Woolas's comments about the veil-wearing teacher seemed to me highly incautious. Should a Government minister wade in and call for an individual teacher to be sacked? Isn't the school in the best position to decide this, perhaps with help from the local authority?

And does the Prime Minister agree with me? The exchange at this morning's Downing Street press briefing was comically evasive (PMOS, incidentally, is the Prime Ministers Official Spokesman):

Asked if the Prime Minister agreed that the teaching assistant at the centre of the current debate regarding the wearing of veils should be sacked, the PMOS replied that what the Prime Minister believed was that there was a debate going on, and that these were matters which should be resolved locally.

Asked if that meant that the Prime Minister thought that Phil Woolas should not have spoken his mind about it, the PMOS said again that there was a debate going on, and people were perfectly entitled to contribute to that debate from all points of view.

In other words, the Prime Minister is arguing that he shouldn't express a view because the issue is going to be decided locally, while also saying that it is fine for ministers to express a view because there is a debate going on.

Which is it?