tim's experiment

The funny thing about the Chief Executive’s “meet the public” session in Tin Shui Wai was that if you were a mere member of the public it was quite difficult to get in. Buried in the Post’s pre-piece was the interesting snippet that more than half the seats were spoken for in advance. They were wanted for “aides and the media”. This is of course nonsense., There is no need for hordes of aides to sit in the hall and the media can stand at the back as they do on other occasions. Clearly someone wished to ensure that the dwindling ranks of Leung admirers were well represented among the questioners.

And so it came about that one of the people in the audience wanted to express concern about the effect on her children of the discovery that a primary school teacher had sworn at a policeman. Mr Leung effortlessly dragged this easy ball onto his own wicket, “The Education Bureau should submit a report that is fair and impartial on whether the series of incidents would have an effect on our teachers, teaching quality and youngsters,” he said, “It would be a surprise if the government did not take an interest in an incident which has aroused public concern.”

According to another newspaper the Education Bureau is already in contact with the school where the teacher concerned works. Who is there to contact in the middle of August, one wonders. The vice-chairman of Education Convergence, Mr Ho Hon-kuen, said the Chief Executive should leave the matter to the Council on Professional Conduct in Education.

Now look, people, criticising the police, with or without obscenities, is clearly an expression of opinion on a matter of public interest. It is an exercise of the free speech promised to Hong Kongers by the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law, the Bill of Rights Ordinance and (just for a giggle) the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China. A teacher outside the classroom and on holiday is no more answerable to the Education Bureau, the Chief Executive or the Council on Professional Conduct in Education than anyone else. She is free to say and do whatever she likes within the law, like a policeman on pre-retirement leave.

I suppose some people will wonder if they want their children to get the idea that it is OK to swear at policemen. But it would be an odd arrangement if this was a test for members of a profession who are allowed to teach lurid notions about gay sex, antediluvian superstitions about contraceptives, and pseudo-scientific claptrap about the dinosaurs lasting until 2,000 years ago.

Actually the police force must take some of the blame for the present rather delicate state of its relations with much of the public. The force has vigorously resisted for years the notion that it should be renamed a police service. They want to be a paramilitary force. I have never been able to find a substantial reason for this preference beyond a childish enthusiasm for fun with guns, but there it is. A paramilitary force is by its nature close to the line which separates it from an occupying army. People do not confuse policemen with monks or social workers because that is the force’s wish. Hard words go with the territory.

If the policemen who work on demonstrations are upset at being sworn at I have a constructive suggestion. Whenever I am stopped for speeding or some other traffic trivia the policeman delivering the ticket is pleasantly surprised that I do not swear at him and often says so. So we should let the traffic cops do the demonstration duty. They’re used to being sworn at.

Meanwhile let us note the rampant hypocrisy being deployed in this area. A few weeks ago I wrote about the case of a primary school teacher who committed an indecent assault and was merely bound over. Those who are bound over admit the facts of the case. Not a word from anyone about the desirability of having a primary school teacher who engaged in drunken gropings of female strangers. The Chief Executive called for no reports, the Education Bureau did not volunteer one, the school said it was a private matter and the Council on Professional Conduct in Education was mute. I infer that this whole swearing at police thing is a political potion brewed up by DAB pilot fish to embarrass people they disapprove of and defend the right of left-wing thugs to disrupt other people’s meetings and protests. Shame on the lot of you. Or as we teachers apparently say these days, f*** you!

I don’t know what to make of this sign – which if you’re curious can be found in Edinburgh Airport. Is it a symptom of liberation, or of continuing slavery? Who is it protecting from what? Well it’s nice to know the toilets are cleaned by someone.

Last week the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman again chided Japan for failing to “come to terms with its history”. I think he was upset over the launching of a new helicopter carrying ship, though this can hardly be relevant to present foreign policy disputes because it is a large boat and must have been ordered years ago. Anyway this is a theme to which the Chinese Foreign Ministry regularly returns, usually apropos of some synthetic outrage like a history textbook or a shrine visit. No doubt Japan still has a lot of history to come to terms with. Well we are all warned against throwing stones while living in a glass house, and this is a fine example.

The 20th century was remarkable for huge calamities in which millions of people died: wars, famines, upheavals, massacres, genocide… By the 1950s this led to the coining of a new word “megadeaths”, for the convenience of people who wished to discuss the end of civilisation in the next war without typing “million deaths” all the time. Most of the casualties could be blamed on three remarkable men — or if you prefer remarkable criminals – namely Hitler, Stalin and Mao. Now we all know that Hitler accounted for six megadeaths by deliberately turning killing into an industry. But that is nothing like his total, which depends on how much we put down to his account of the total deaths in World War 2, which ran to 55 megadeaths. Some of these must presumably be allocated to Hirohito. Some also must be put down to Stalin, though he needs no help, having caused a famine (20 megadeaths) and numerous examples of political persecution and ethnic cleansing. Mao is a bit easier to handle. We can spare him a share of the Chinese Civil War (3 megadeaths) because as a head of state he is in a class of his own: the famine following the Great Leap Forward is now reckoned to have produced between 45 and 50 megadeaths in a mere four years. To that we can add another 7 megadeaths from the Cultural Revolution.

The interesting thing about this is not that these three men were spectacularly bad – no doubt others would have done as much evil given the opportunity – but the way in which they are now regarded in the countries they bathed in innocent blood. Hitler is generally reviled. Denying his crimes is a criminal offence in some European countries. Uncle Joe is now regarded even in Russia as an embarrassment. Mao on the other hand still beams down in portraiture on his capital city. People still queue to walk past his remains. One wonders what they say, under their breath. The consequences of his rule have emerged gradually and painfully. Many documents remain concealed. Nobody has been prepared to come to the obvious conclusion that he was a mass murderer on a grand scale.

And this brings me to a curious concept circulating currently, the “Tacitus trap”. This is not a commonplace of Classical studies. Apparently it was discovered by a China scholar in search of a tactful way of saying that many of his countrymen do not share the Chinese Communist Party’s high opinion of itself. Tacitus observed of one of the emperors whose reigns he chronicled that eventually he was so ill-thought-of that even when he did good things they were ignored or misinterpreted. The implication is that the Chinese Government is in danger of being stuck in a “Tacitus trap” despite its economic successes because of unsolved political and social problems. I think this assumes that people have very poor memories. The Chinese government may be in a trap. It is not a Tacitus Trap, it is a Hannibal Lector Trap. When you have been a serial killer for a long time people find it difficult to believe that you have found religion, turned over a new leaf and become a harmless upstanding member of society.

There is an old saying that “Treason never prospers. For this there is one reason. If it prospers, none dare call it treason.” While mass murder is unacknowledged, asking other people to study their history is ill-advised.

I would like to pay my respects to a Mr “Charlie Chan, Mid-levels” who has taken up a worthy cause in which some of us have been labouring in vain for decades. Mr Chan wrote a letter to the Post commenting on another Chan (Ronnie) who had criticised parts of John Tsang’s budgets as foolish. Basically the two Chans agree in criticising Mr Tsang, but that is not the point which had me cheering over my cornflakes. Mr Chan (Charlie) dealt at some length with the defence of Mr Tsang’s give-aways offered by an “unnamed government source”. He went on to criticise the anonymity, in words on which I cannot improve: “If a government source wants to give information to the public the person should not remain ‘unnamed’. The South China Morning Post should desist from publishing such government quotes unless they are backed by a name and and official position.”

And so say all of us. I think I first made this point in a column in the old Tiger Standard in about 1981. It has come up regularly since. Without effect. Government sources like to be anonymous. It cloaks them in the majesty of spokesmanship even if they are actually rather junior. It allows political appointees to speak without revealing the possible conflicts of interest which seem to be a trade mark of the present administration. And it allows the speaker to lie with impunity, because when he is contradicted by another nameless spokesman later we do not know who he or she was, or whether the first, or the second nameless spokesperson was telling the truth. Or, maybe, neither.

It is a little unfair to blame the continuing attractions of this practice on newspapers. Reporters hunger and thirst for information and find it hard to be picky about where they find it. One of the British newspapers (the Guardian, which being a non-profit-making publication can afford to be high-minded about these things) did for a while boycott the anonymous briefings provided in Downing Street. No other media followed this example. Perhaps it is better that we should regularly be reminded that we are led by cowards and deceivers who are too ashamed to do their speaking in public.

I fear also that Mr Chan is a bit optimistic in expecting any fearless innovations in abrasive journalism from the present leaders of the Post. Still if they are considering his suggestion I happily second it. While they are at it they might also consider the attribution of parts of stories to un-named “analysts”. Today (Tuesday) the lead story was a rewrite with adornments of a Xinhua story (as we call pieces of political propaganda in a mainland context) about a meeting between a senile retired war criminal (Henry Kissinger) and a senile semi-retired despot (Jiang Zemin).

I have no intention of commenting on the content of this story, which was not journalism and so of no interest. From a technical point of view, though, we were given in the first paragraph of the story an interpretation from “analysts”. In the ninth paragraph we had some shameless interpretation – “This is a clear message…” – attributed to nobody at all. In the 17th paragraph (this is not a short story) the unnamed analysts are with us again. In the 19th paragraph we finally meet one analyst, Zhang Lifan, whose credentials are “formerly with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences”, whatever that means. Mr Zhang hovers over the next seven paragraphs, and then we go back to Xinhua. Readers who wade through another six paragraphs of gloop then find the “analysts” in action again.

This leaves readers with real stamina pondering an interesting question. In a story of this length, why were we not told who were the unnamed “analysts” who contributed so much of it? Mr Zhang may be an analyst but he is not “analysts”. I realise there are matters in Chinese politics on which careful people may not wish to speak in their own names. But nobody is going to get into trouble for saying nice things about Jiang Zemin.

You don’t get many complaints from the DAB, but there is one issue the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment etc has made its own: glass escalators. We have been here before. The DAB has a Women’s Affairs Committee. From time to time before it has complained that the architecture of some staircases or escalators makes it possible for men to see more than a gentleman ought to see when the installation is used by a lady not wearing trousers. Some of the cads concerned even take pictures. This  curious preoccupation with the possibility of illicit knicker glimpses has now blossomed into an annual survey.

The number of places to which the survey objects has “more than doubled”, said The Standard. It has gone from seven to 19. The committee’s chairman, Elizabeth Quat, said that the places on the list were only the tip of the iceberg. Well if she really means that it seems rather a scandalous waste of everyone’s time to put out the survey results at all. Count them properly or shut up. I also have some misgivings about providing people with a list of the best places for this sort of thing. I am sure none of my readers is interested in looking at underwear but just in case, apparently the peepers’ paradises are the Ping Shan Tin Shui Wai Public Library, the swimming pool in the same place (not a City of Sorrow for everyone, apparently) the Hong Kong Central Library, four MTR stations – Tin Shui Wai (again!) Long Ping, Kam Sheung Road, and Hung Hom – and several shopping malls of which Hysan Place and Popcorn were named.

This is a strange problem for the DAB ladies to get their knickers in a twist (to coin a phrase) about. It appears to be totally victimless. The usual response that the committee gets from shopping malls is that nobody has complained. And why should they? Being beheld by a man is perhaps, if you notice it at all, mildly irritating. But in the end, what harm is done? It is difficult to believe that the activity which bothers the DAB ladies is as common as they think it is. After all a preoccupation with underwear is an unusual sexual foible. Most of us get no excitement from a surreptitious upskirt view. And many of those eccentrics who do would not, I fancy, wish to spend a lot of time lurking round escalators in the hope of getting a glimpse. After all if you really want this sort of thing the internet will provide plenty.

One also has to wonder about the DAB women’s committee’s priorities. If this is a social problem it is a tiny one. is the committee so steeped in complacency and admiration for our government that it sees no need for research or action on issues like domestic violence, child-care, sexual harassment, exploitation, discrimination against women at work …? The DAB from time to time announces the results of some dubious survey which has revealed that Hong Kong people are concerned about livelihood issues, not politics. Have the DAB’s students of public opinion tried asking women what issues they would like more work on? And if they did, how many women asked for action on transparent escalators?

Goodness I did not expect this. The students are on holiday, the staff are attending to their research or conferencing (which is what we call being on holiday in academic circles) political punch-ups continue at their usual level but somehow the question of who should be the next president of Lingnan University is still filling columns. Some of them quite interesting and some of them not.

Let us start with a piece by one Ronald Teng, who, we are told, is the founder of MEA, a promoter of liberal art education. Readers who wish to know more about MEA should not waste their time Googling it. Having sorted out a way of eliminating Middle East Airlines and the Ministry of External Affairs (India) I still could not find any web presence with these initials except the Medical Education Association, which doesn’t sound like liberal arts to me.

Anyway, to business. Let us start with the bad news. Mr Teng may know a lot, but he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. So we were treated to this “If you look at how other (that is, foreign) universities select their president, you will  find that representatives of the student union are not allowed in the board of governors’ or trustees’ meeting. Even when they are they have no say in the selecting of the president, or any official.” The nice thing about sweeping statements of this kind is that they can be falsified by the production of one counter-example. This one will do: when I was the President of the Student Union of the University of Lancaster in 1970-71 I did in fact sit ex officio on the University Council and I was a member of the committee which selected the next Chancellor of the University.

Slightly less erroneously, but not much, Mr Teng also devoted a good deal of space to the demolition of the view that Presidents, or Professors, should be elected by the students. Nobody is asking for that. Mr Teng says that students are “stakeholders” but not all stakeholders are created equal. A fair point. But stakeholders come in different guises. The students are not just the stakeholders of the university, they are its clients. Their wishes are important and should be considered. A university ignores their preferences at its peril. There are, after all, other universities.

Having said which Mr Teng was spot-on in his main point, which was that it was extremely ill-judged of the new president to refer in his opening speech to the Chairman of the University Council as “his boss”. This betrays such a serious misunderstanding of the way the system is supposed to work as to suggest that the new Pres, Professor Leonard Cheng, was not such a good choice after all. Universities are supposed to be autonomous organisations pursuing academic ideals. Their government is divided between a Senate, which represents the academic side, and a Council, whose responsibilities are purely practical. The purpose of the Council is to provide expertise in such matters as personnel, finance and construction, about which academics are generally uninformed. The Council should have nothing to say about teaching or research – in other words the important outputs of the university. It is a servant, not a master. It is true I suppose that institutions which used to be private colleges or polytechnics may not be quite up to speed on this point. They should be working on it.

And so onwards and upwards to the Post’s editorial writing department, where odd things were going on this morning. The Post’s person with a pen thought that Prof Cheng was well known in academic circles. This was “probably why (CY) Leung sought his advice when drafting his campaign platforms…” But nobody can be criticised for having his advice sought. The complaint is not that Prof Cheng was asked but that when he was asked he said yes. Being on a campaign team is not like being on a government advisory body. It is not public service. It is a personal help to the person who is trying to get elected. People are entitled to suppose that if Prof Cheng agreed to be on Mr Leung’s advisory team it was because he approves of Mr Leung and what he stands for. After all I am also quite well known in local academic circles. If Mr Leung had invited me to join his team I would have told him to … well, I would have refused.

The Post then opines that “the truth is that Cheng … has gone through a well-established selection mechanism,. which takes in to account academic excellence and leadership rather than political considerations. There is no evidence to suggest that due process has not been followed. To suggest otherwise does not do justice to those who played a part…” This may be the truth, but for less gullible observers the question has to be “how do we know?” We do not see the process. We do not meet the people. We are not told who was considered or who was rejected or why. We are simply presented with the result. And the result looks suspicious.

I fear that the Post and its people have not yet got the full measure of what is bothering local university students, which is the growing suspicion that the government is filling top university posts with its friends, supporters and fellow travellers. In the long run this will pave the way for the emasculation of those parts of the universities which deal with controversial current issues and the expulsion of academics whose views do not fit in with the Leung worldview. The new OU chief is a member of the NPC, the Post notes. So, oddly enough, is Prof Cheng’s “boss” the Chairman of the Lingnan University Council. Are we beginning to see a trend here?

Interesting piece in Pravda today about the selection of the new president of Lingnan University. This was written by an authoritative source, Bernard Chan, who conveniently for this topic happens to be the Chairman  of the Lingnan University Council. As such, Mr Chan says, he “oversaw” the selection process. Unsurprisingly, in Mr Chan’s view, the process was entirely without fault or flaw. This leaves Mr Chan with the small problem of how to explain the fact that some of the university’s students are unhappy with the appointment. This is easily achieved by accusing some students of giving the media and their fellows a “rather inaccurate version of events”. This is summarised (with the use of the rather ominous weasel word “essentially”) as being that the new president, Leonard Cheng, was chosen “at short notice for his political opinions and that student opinion was never sought”. Mr Chan goes on to claim – though he does not give examples – that there were other “inaccuracies” and then launches into the political stratosphere with the claim that the storm in his particular teacup is symptomatic of “deepening intolerance within the wider community”.

Let me say at this point that I approach this little schemozzle in a spirit of complete impartiality. People whose opinion I respect speak highly of Professor Cheng. Mr Chan seems from his public writings to be intelligent, open-minded and well-intentioned, at least by the standards of Exco and the NPC, on which he sits. And if there is any truth in the rumour that the new president is going to close the Cultural Studies Department that is OK by me. When I hear the words Cultural Studies, to adapt an old joke, I reach for my Browning.

Having said which, it seems that Mr Chan has engaged in the venerable trick of putting words into his opponents’ mouths, which always makes it easier to win an argument. It does not matter too much to anyone whether Mr Chen was chosen “at short notice”. A bad choice made at leisure is still a bad choice. Mr Chan’s account of the selection process suggests a spectacular waste of time and money. The “search committee”  – Heaven forbid that we should restrict our recruitment to people who want the job badly enough to apply for it – started work last November. Unfortunately this is the last date Mr Chan supplies so we do not know how much time it spent on “consulting stakeholders” about the desirable qualities of a new president. It then conducted a tendering exercise to select a “recruitment company”. The company approached 384 potential candidates. All this activity was meaningless. Bear in mind that in selecting a university president the field of serious candidates is quite small. We exclude people who do not have a Chinese surname (rule one: no gwailos), people from the mainland (politically sensitive), and people over 60, as it is embarrassing to appoint someone past the age at which his colleagues are required to retire. This brings the field down to a few people currently working in America and a few people currently doing senior administrative jobs in Hong Kong universities. This is why so many “global searches” for senior university jobs produce such distinctly unglobal results. The serious shortlist had five names on it, which could be considered quite good in the circumstances, and two rounds of interviews got the number down to one. It would be interesting, though no more, to know at what stage Prof Cheng’s name appeared.

The point about this process from the student point of view, though, is that it is all private. This is routinely defended on the grounds that nobody will apply if there is a danger that he will be known to have been rejected. But there it is. All you get is the result. Having a student observer on the selection committee reduces the number of people who are kept in the dark by one, which is not much help. Accusing people who say that “student opinion was never sought” of inaccuracy is a bit rich under these circumstances. OK, one student’s opinion was sought. only a few thousand to go.

Now, having disposed of these irrelevancies, we get down to the nitty gritty, which is the fear that Prof Cheng was chosen because he was one of CY Leung’s ten-man advisory panel before the CE election. Mr Chan says he was not aware of this. Apparently he takes little interest in politics – an unusual trait in an Exco member. He concedes that “some of my colleagues on the search committee” did know. Mr Chan at this point turns to mind-reading, Noone mentioned it because they did not consider it relevant, he says. This is a tricky little number. If the matter was not discussed how do we know people did not consider it relevant? People’s mental processes are not always obvious, even to themselves. Students are I think entitled to feel unreassured.

Mr Chan, possibly sensing that this is not his strongest point, departs hastily for a friendly irrelevance. Is it, he wonders, acceptable that candidates should be ruled out because of their political activities. This is “intolerance”, he says. “Do we want a climate where academics avoid advising politicians for fear of damaging their careers?”

This is standing the argument on its head. Nobody is suggesting that being an adviser to a politician should be a bar to academic preferment. What they are saying is that it should not be a boost to promotion chances either. One is tempted to ask Mr Chan, rhetorically as it were, if it would be acceptable to have a government which distributed jobs to its friends and supporters. But the trouble is that we do have such a government. Numerous people have found their way onto sundry advisory, consultative and indeed decision-making bodies for no visible reason other than that they supported Mr Leung. The consultative machinery has been turned into a retirement pasture for DAB carthorses. It may well be that this deplorable tendency stops at the gates of Lingnan University. but some suspicion is entirely understandable. Mr Chan, who is up to his ears in the establishment, is not, I fear, the man to  allay it.

Nor is his boss. Priceless quote in today’s press from CY Leung “I work in perfect harmony with Mrs Lam, the team of principle officials in the accountability system, and all civil servants”. Come on Mr Leung, give yourself a chance. I am quite prepared to believe that rumours about Carrie Lam being unhappy are exaggerated, but there is no perfection in this world and in large organisations under constant public scrutiny harmony tends to be thin on the ground. Ludicrous levels of optimism not helpful.

Dear Uncle Sam,
I understand that many of your legislators are upset because young Mr Snowden was not arrested before he left us, even though your government had sent to Hong Kong an application to have him detained and extradited. It seems there was some deficiency in the documentation attached to your application and consequently Mr Snowden was free to leave. Some people in Washington apparently think this is all the result of a devious plot to annoy them, hatched in Hong Kong, Beijing or even Moscow. These speculations are very wide of the mark.

As any resident of Hong Kong could tell you, an attempt to extract from our government anything more complicated than a postage stamp invariably provokes a request for a document which you haven’t got with you and didn’t know you needed. The documents demanded range from obvious items like a photocopy of your ID card, two passport photos and a proof of address, to tricky exotica like your birth certificate, or your wife’s birth certificate, or your mistress’s birth certificate … This is just the way our bureaucrats work. Your documentation was treated the same way as everyone else’s. Of course we all nurture the friendliest feelings towards your country, but procedures are there to be followed and it is in all cases up to the applicant to ensure that he presents the necessary documents in the appropriate order. If he doesn’t then the application fails.

Incidentally I notice that the US government also has an interesting appetite for unnecessary paperwork. Just the other day someone who is applying for a Green Card on the strength of his status as the spouse of an American citizen asked me for a letter to say that I had witnessed his wedding. Apparently the certificate provided as part of the proceedings does not meet your requirements. Maybe your arrest warrants don’t meet ours.

All right, I know many horse racing people are nice types, attracted to the business by the opportunity to work with horses. And if there were no racing the horse population of the world would be considerably smaller.

Still sometimes the attitude of people around racing to the animals on which the whole game depends is disgusting. I am resigned to the fact that any horse too injured to return to the track is promptly shot. Owners are greedy heartless creatures whose participation in the sport rarely has anything to do with liking horses, and they do not want to pay for the upkeep of invalids.

Still, callousness about animal suffering reached new heights on the back page of yesterday’s Post, where under the by-line of Alan Aitken a five-horse pile-up on the track was reported. The report was, quite properly, mainly focussed on the jockeys who fell off as a result of the crash. One of them broke two limbs. But we did not stop at him. we were treated to a total of 14 paragraphs explaining exactly what happened to whom, with what consequences, what the other jockeys remembered of the incident and who would be riding again, when.

Only thing I was left wondering was: what became of the horses? You had to turn to the Standard for the low-down on the real victims here – after all the jockeys are volunteers. Three of the horses had bruises. Two of the horses had more serious injuries and were shot. Nice game, isn’t it?

It is brave of Mr Snowden to blow the whistle on his country’s spies, but the story does not come as a big surprise. This sort of thing has been going on for decades. Nor am I impressed by the suggestion that it is subject to some kind of judicial oversight. I suppose the arrangement in America is that if you wish to intercept one named individual’s mail, email, phone calls or whatever with a view to later prosecution then you have to get a court order. But that is not most of what is going on.

Huge quantities of electronic traffic are being hoovered up and searched for signs of subversive activity. We all know roughly how this works. The people who accommodate this blog often remind its author (who doesn’t usually bother) of the importance of putting down a few keywords. This ensures that the person who is searching for the topic you have covered can find it.

People who are really keen on attracting traffic take advantage of the way computer searches work. In the early days of the internet most of the commercial sites were selling porn. In order to attract customers using search engines they generally included a large slab of prose which consisted simply of 57 synonyms for “sex”. Sometimes these were repeated several times. Later they discovered that they could conceal this part of the site from customers by the simple wheeze of printing it in white type on a white background. The computer search engine still read it but the visitor, unless he highlighted the text by accident, did not.

Now whatever miraculous means the American spies and codebreakers use to collect the millions of bits of internet which they wish to scour for items of interest, in the end they are going to have to come down to something rather similar to sort out the possible wheat from the much more numerous chaff.  So if for example I insert here some such meaningless phrase as “terror bomb avenge Osama blow up White House death to America” the computer will pick this out as a potentially interesting item. Hi guys! Sorry. False alarm.

This does not actually do me any harm. But it would be foolish to suppose that this is always the case. Many people find themselves mysteriously banned from flying, for example. Others have bombs dropped on their houses. Some of them find the police taking a mysterious interest in their innocent activities. Some people whose illegal projects are in the dream stage are offered help by bogus co-conspirators who, when the fake bomb is planted, then arrest everyone concerned, to the great credit of the law enforcement agency concerned.

So there is a cost to this sort of thing. A gentleman who wrote to the Post last week put his finger on the heart of the matter (though he proceeded to draw the wrong conclusion) when he said that in the hunt for lawbreakers it was sometimes necessary for innocent people to be questioned, and even detained. Indeed it is. But it is expected, in civilised societies, that the inflicting of inconvenience of this kind will be proportionate to the seriousness of the crime involved, and the chances of the technique solving it. We do not arrest the whole population in the hunt for a shoplifter.

There was a time when an important legal principle stated that it was better for 100 guilty people to go free than for one innocent one to be punished unjustly. This now seems to have been replaced in the USA by the view that it is better for 100 innocent foreigners to be killed than for one American to be endangered. Americans must feel safe from terrorism, even while they sacrifice thousands of their fellow citizens every year to the absurd notion that it is a human right to have a gun in your pocket.

When Mr Obama says that Americans do not need to worry about being unlawfully snooped on he leaves open the possibility, indeed the certainty, that the rest of us should be very worried indeed. Yet human rights are supposed to be universal. Can you have a black man as President and still be racist? I suppose so.