John Bald/language and literacy

Interlude: authoritarianism, taser guns and Alzheimers

Telegraph has an account of police using tasers to help them take person with Alzheimer's to hospital. You'd think that the authorities would at the very least wait until they had investigated the incident before saying anything, or even think before they spoke, but step forward Chief Superintendent David Hilditch:

'Our police officers and PCSOs have a variety of difficult situations to deal with on a day-to-day basis and are trained to tackle a variety of different situations.

''It's very sad that this gentleman had to be restrained through the use of a Taser but the officers were faced with a significant level of violence.

''It is to their credit that they successfully restrained the 59-year-old man without injury to himself and took him to a place of safety to be treated.''

No doubt it would have been sadder still if the three taser shots had killed the gentleman and safely delivered him to the undertaker's. But authority has to be proclaimed to be right, whether it is right or not.

Congratulations to Chief Superintendent Hilditch.

Interlude- the "success fee" racket

If a person loses at litigation, they pay their own and the opponent's costs. A difficult area of law, as, if your opponent is a multimillionaire publicly subsidised company, they can spend £250k in a 5 minute phone call, which you pay if you lose. I know this from direct evidence - the fee from one barrister in a reinsurance case was actually higher than this, before it came to court. In the one libel case I have taken part in, the "successful" defendant was left with a bill of £100k, which he had to pay in hard cash, after two days in court. In the bar afterwards, the lawyers graciously allowed the defendants to buy the drinks.

But "success fees" are worse. In addition to the costs actually incurred, you pay a 100% supplement if you lose. This is a dishonest and outrageous New Labour tax, moslty on insurance policy holders. In effect, lawyers play for double their money, taking on speculative cases and punishing insurers when they happen to win. Justice has nothing to do with it. Success fees should be abolished.

Interlude: Economics and the abuse of mathematics.

The Black-Scholes equation, here, is a convoluted formula which sought to calculate the value of "derivatives", financial transactions so far removed from reality that they could not be valued by any normal means. The problem with this nonsense is that one of its key symbols, for volatility, could vary by the second, throwing the whole thing into chaos. The key point happened when those loaded with interest charges, in the real world, could not or would not pay up. How could any intelligent people believe this in the first place? Probably because they wanted to, and because, for a while, it was profitable to. See the South Sea Bubble, and Dickens' Mr Merdle. 

Interlude: Lake Baikal, Russia

I'd never heard of Lake Baikal. This account, with a breathtaking photograph of the lake's frozen ice, is brilliant and worth reading if you haven't either. I managed to copy the pic.