Professor murdered

"Richard T. Antoun, author of "Understanding Fundamentalism: Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Movements", was a caring and gentle man who spent his life trying to dispel stereotypes about different cultures, especially Middle Eastern cultures, his colleagues at Binghamton University said Friday."

It's unfortunate then that his death should reinforce them.

Saudi national Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani has been charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Binghamton University Professor Richard T. Antoun.

Another Sad Tale ...

From the Sri Lankan camps where several hundred thousand Tamil civilians were interned after the defeat of the LTTE :

“The Tigers killed between 20 and 30 people in the group I was with as we tried to run,” V. Sivalingam, one of the final Tamil detainees released on Tuesday, recalled. “There were four or five of them. At first they argued with us. Then the crowd around them grew bigger. They began to panic. People started to push past them. Then they opened fire. Close range. Waist high. Directly at us. It was chaos. The military were shelling us at the same time.”

Sivalingam, a cook from Mullaittivu, had miraculously survived, and succeeded in reaching the army’s lines with his wife of 20 years and five children after an epic flight that involved wading through neck-high sea water for ten hours. Within a matter of days he and his family found themselves interned by the authorities in a Zone 2 camp of the infamous Manik Farm complex, where they remained until Tuesday.

The Tigers didn't want the Tamil civilians to leave the shrinking zone where their fighters were holding out, leaving them open to shelling by the (mainly Sinhalese) army. In the camp Sivalingam spotted one of the LTTE men who'd shot at them.

“I did nothing. I told nobody of his identity. I could have had him arrested but I didn’t. The LTTE had fought long and hard for us. At the end of it all they did terrible things — we know that. But they didn’t have much choice.”

It's not that, though. It's this :

“I said goodbye to my wife of 20 years for good when I walked out of the camp gates,” he said. “We had been through so much together. We had escaped through the fighting knowing it could be the end of our lives. But we survived. I loved her. But in the camp she consorted with the military for extra rations. That association disgraces her. She’s gone to Jaffna. I’ll never have her back.”

Did she do it for the kids ? Who knows ?

Pass on his decision. You really have to be in the shoes, methinks. I can hardly imagine any of it, but I was reminded of the scene in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward where former Gulag inmate Kostoglotov tells a sympathetic medic (Vera Gangart?) what happened to his imprisoned wife. I paraphrase :

"On the first day the guards arrange for the new women to shower so they can take a look at them. Then they get told, you'll sleep with so and so, you'll live in this hut ... if they refuse, they'll starve them or work them to death as an example to the others ... I don't blame her. She did what she had to do to survive. But we both knew it was over for us."

Solzhenitsyn knew worse than that, of course.

When young women like Laurie Penny argue for the right to be pissed up, half dressed and completely safe on the streets I wonder if they realise how slender is the divide between civilisation and 'do what thou wilt' - and how fortunate we are and have been in this country for the last few hundred years. We've not had anything in England like 1947 India or 1945 Berlin for at least a thousand years, since the Norman Harrying of the North and before that the Danish/Viking invasions.

Historically, our relative peace and civilisation over such a long period is most unusual. My fear is that the utopians of the Cultural Revolution, in well-meaning attempts to turn good into best, are well on the way to restoring us to the historical norms.

Hmm ...

... looks like the days of Lord John Taylor being wheeled out on the Today programme to be asked the vital question 'exactly how racist are the Tories' ? may be drawing to a close :

A Tory peer has been caught using someone else’s home address to claim tens of thousands of pounds in expenses. Lord Taylor of Warwick, a 57-year-old former barrister, told the House of Lords that his main home was a terrace house in Oxford which he neither owned nor lived in. The property’s owner, Tristram Wyatt, a university academic, said he was unaware that his address had been used as the peer’s main home.

Taylor has lived in his family home in Ealing, west London, since 1995. By claiming his address was outside the capital he accumulated more then £70,000 in subsistence expenses between 2001 and 2007. When confronted earlier this year, Taylor claimed he had lived at his mother’s home in the West Midlands during those years. However, this claim was false as his mother died in 2001 and her house was sold that year. His former wife has also confirmed that he lived in London, and nowhere else, until their separation in 2003. The disclosures will be looked at by the police team investigating peers and MPs. Taylor declined to comment last week.

Hmm. He's toast.

UAF/EDL - Nottingham

Someone who went to the demo as an observer and took a fair bit of video here :

"....when discussing the EDL he was pretty adamant that the entire organisation were guilty by association with the more extreme element, yet when talking about the Muslim community his opinion was that nobody could have a complaint against them in general, only against very specific extremists. You can't have it both ways, demanding exceptions for your favourites and making generalisation about your enemies; either you're biased, or you've extra information that you're not sharing."

I agree with the general point. If you can't tar community A with the brush of the bad things some of their members have done (killing and injuring hundreds of people with bombs on buses and trains, for example, or in the case of some less competent members trying to), then you can't reverse the logic and use outliers of community B as typical of everyone in community B. Let's have some consistency here.


Someone of my age who joined the UAF protest here :

...we started to look for demonstrators among the crowds of shoppers, Goths, stall-holders, army families and British Legion members.

I spotted a small group of badge-wearers near the stone lions of the Council House. Cautiously I scanned the badges. This was just as well. They included a small enamal badge with the figures "18". It could have been an advertisement for a lucky Lotto number but I doubted it. I've known for years about the Combat 18 code by which 18 stands for A.H., or Adolf Hitler. There seemed some irony that a badge-wearer combined his "18" badge with a Churchill "V for Victory" badge, but I decided not to stay and point this out.

We wandered past the stalls of Neapolitan treats and olive oil and the British Legion veterans holding huge flags. Eventually someone ran up to us. "Anti-fascist demo?" he enquired. "Other end of the square."

The Way We Were ...

I noted a while back the memoirs of Frances Roper, (nee Hubbard), an upper-middle class Englishwoman of good Christian family, describing the first twenty-odd years of her life in Ealing, the Forest of Dean, and her aunt's orphanage in South London.

More comprehensive, and illuminating a totally different society, is Gwilym Rhys Williams - The Story of My Life. Lord knows what it's doing on a Canadian blog - did someone emigrate ? Ah yes - Ruth Hartnup, Aberystwyth to Vancouver. Nice family pictures here.

This memoir incorporates descriptions of a boy’s memories of life in the colliery villages of Cymmer and Gwaun Cae Gurwen before the First World War; a remote Carmarthenshire farming community (Panteg) between 1914 and 1935; life as a Grammar School pupil in Carmarthen and a student at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth 1925-29; a life-long teaching career at Llandeilo Grammar School (he probably taught some of my mother's relatives - LT); life and travels as a member of the Army’s Education Corps during the Second World War; and a description of a social life in Llandeilo centred around Capel Newydd; ending with a post-retirement period in Rhuddlan.

Here's some Original Sin from the early years in the 'Waun' :

These days there is a great deal of talk and press-reports about the increasing vandalism and lack of social conscience among children. It seems to me that there was little social conscience among the children of my childhood, even though, as I have mentioned before, parents had the Victorian attitude towards the up-bringing of their children. Children, indeed, may have been well-behaved at home, but once out of the sphere of its influence, moral standards were influenced by gang behaviour...

One example of vandalism in our childhood was the game of counting who had smashed the greatest number of what we called bottles on top of telegraph and electricity poles. One does not see bottles today. They were ceramic bottle-like fittings on the cross-bar of the poles, around which the wires conducting electricity were wound.

Another example of violence was the gang warfare between the boys of the Waun and the boys of Garnant. On many Saturday mornings, the Waun boys, equipped with rubbish-bin lids as shields and having a stock-pile of stones, stationed themselves on top of a viaduct facing another bridge, where the Garnant boys had congregated, similarly equipped. We then threw stones at each other. Sometimes the Garnant boys wilted and we were able to chase them as far as the bottom of the ‘cwm’. Once we had a serious problem on our hands. One of our boys had a facial injury, with a copious flow of blood, the result of being hit by a half-brick. The problem was how to carry him back to his home. I remember our trying to tie together some kind of stretcher, but I can’t remember whether we had any success.

I can also give more examples of behaviour which showed a lack of moral conscience These examples may give you, the reader, the impression that I am even now a man of doubtful moral and social conscience. No, I’m fairly convinced that children can go through this phase in childhood, and yet become responsible and morally sound citizens.

Looking back, I sometimes think that I should have been ashamed of certain irresponsible and inconsiderate tricks that we played. There was a sweets shop on the main road, not far from Gron Road. It was owned by the Hicks family, the son of which family, by the name of Haydn, I became very friendly with during my College days. There was a long passage leading from the shop to the kitchen. We were able to see through the glass door of the shop whether anyone was in the shop. If there was no-one there we assumed that the person on duty would be in the kitchen. We would then open the door a quietly a possible – there was no bell announcing an entry. There in front of us was a long row of glass-lidded boxes of sweets. So, before knocking for attention, we would lift the lids of several boxes and stuff our pockets with sweets. Then we knocked and when Dorothy – usually it was she who appeared – came to the shop we would ask for a pennyworth of sweets. A despicable act indeed! But did we have a conscience about it? Hardly, because it was repeated several times. It was no worse a crime than stealing apples from gardens!

There was another despicable piece of behaviour which was repeated several times. In a nearby street there lived on her own a woman, who was considered rather ’simple’ or ‘not quite sixteen ounces’. We used to play tricks on her, such as leaning a can full of water against her front door, and after knocking running round the corner to see what happened when the door was opened. Usually, the can of water tipped inside, accompanied by a loud scream. At other times we tied a black thread to the knocker, and pulled it from around a corner. As soon as she appeared and then closed the door, the knocker was pulled again – this being repeated several times.

He's right. Children have little social conscience and are much now as they were ninety years back - or a hundred and ninety, if it comes to that. And note the almost automatic compulsion to torment the weak (as in the memoirs of Frances Roper and Laurie Lee), or take advantage of the unworldly, not to mention the appeal of gang warfare (as in George Borrow). The difference between those days and our day is not in the way children are, but in the way adults respond to their behaviour.


How many more of these wonderful memoirs are out on the Web ? Please drop any you know of in the comments.

Tasteless, but ...

I didn't join in (on either side) the Jan Moir/Stephen Gately brouhaha of a month or two back, as while the general philosophy behind her argument seemed sound, wages of sin and all that, I wasn't at all sure that any of it should apply in the particular case, because :

a) the poor chap wasn't even buried - there's a time and place and before the funeral ain't it. Bad form.

b) there seemed no evidence that Mr Gately was a particularly degenerate chap as practising homosexuals go - his civil partnership seemed to imply some kind of desire for respectable coupledom.

While a still stands, b seems at least debateable.

Friday Night Is Music Night ... Classical Edition

... and how better to relax at the end of the week than with a cello quartet playing Grieg ?




or if you prefer something a little gentler :

Where's Blair's Dosh ?

Presumably triggered by these two FT stories from a month back, the Guardian attempts to navigate the tortuous stream of Tony Blair's finances.

Blair has a complex web of structures involving 12 different legal entities handling the unprecedented millions he is receiving since he stepped down from office in 2007.

So mystifying are the former prime minister's financial structures – which involve highly specialised limited partnerships and parallel companies – that the Guardian today launches an open invitation to tax specialists and accountants to attempt to explain the motivation behind such structures. We have published the Companies House documents and other legal papers regarding the structure of the partnerships at guardian.co.uk and invite expert comment via our site at guardian.co.uk/politics/series/blair-mystery.

There is no suggestion Blair is doing anything illegal. But he refuses to explain the purpose of the secretive partnerships.

Cry havoc and let slip the accountants of war ! Tally-ho !

UPDATE - Tax Research Blog thinks there's a loophole which means detailed accounts don't have to be publically filed, if I understand correctly.

The limited liability partnership is tax transparent. If it had Tony Blair as a member he would pay tax at the UK highest income tax rate. So two companies are put in his place as members, and because of the loophole in the limited partnership accounting regulations this is acceptable: it does not change the fact that the limited partnership will not have to file accounts.

And then the two companies are owned by nominees to hide the Blair involvement – it’s just a pity one set of accounts had to give it away that he was the beneficial owner or we might still be unaware of all this.

So what did Tony want? Just a bit of secrecy and his profits sheltered at corporate tax rates seems the superficial answer.

But hang on – this structure came at some price, and has some cost to run – five figures a year with a first digit of more than one I suspect. So why do that? Because the entity at the top of the pile – Windrush Ventures No 3 Limited Partnership now has what most people want from a secrecy jurisdiction – complete secrecy and lower tax than might otherwise be expected, and all onshore.

So there is an obvious question outstanding still. Just what is it that Tony is so keen to hide that he’ll go to this length and this cost to do so?

A Sad Tale

I've mentioned (favourably) Lionel Shriver, author and chronicler of childlessness, before.

I'm sorry to hear that her brother has died - a death she foretold. The poor chap ate himself to death :

I write with some reluctance, because I feel protective of him. He's topping 330 pounds: 24 stone. He was once 5ft 7ins tall, but his vertebrae have compressed, and at 5ft 3ins I now look him straight in the eye. I used to look up to him in every sense. I ended our last two visits in tears. My brother breaks my heart...

Obesity exacerbates his emphysema, and he drags a portable oxygen tank with him like a faithful dog. Not long ago, the tank's battery died at a bus stop. My brother went into respiratory arrest, and only a good Samaritan who rushed off the bus got him to hospital in time to save his life. Every time I talk to my brother, I wonder if it's for the last time. Planning to see him during an author's tour in March, I'm counting the days, actively anxious that he won't still be with us three months from now.

Tweaking The Mangy Lion's Tail

Mr Miliband said: "This is a human story of five young yachtsmen. It's got nothing to do with politics, it's got nothing to do with nuclear enrichment programmes... it has no relationship to any of the other, bigger issues."

Mr Miliband does what he's best at, back-pedalling. Is this the same chap who only the other day was telling the Pakistani government and military what 'we want' them to do ?

Either Tehran can decide to play the incident down and let the sailors go, or it could turn this into a full blown diplomatic crisis.

Note that it's all about what Iran's likely to do. We're just prisoners of events. Doubtless if Iran get stroppy we'll huff and puff for domestic consumption then resume backpedalling. It's what we do.

When Gordon Brown asked the Libyans to be discreet about the release of Abdel Bassets Allsorts (you know, the convicted Lockerbie bomber with only three months to live) in August, Gaddafi arranged a huge welcome party at the airport complete with Scottish flags, an event shown on TV world wide. Brown's response to this humiliation was to cancel a visit by the Duke of York !

This isn't something that just started on Gordon Brown's watch. Mark Steyn on the last Iranian hostage crisis in 2004 - or was it the last-but-two or three ? I think the last one was two years ago, when I was in the States.

Britain's boys got hijacked and taken on a classic Rogue State bender. And the version being broadcast throughout the Muslim world is that Teheran swatted the infidel and got away with it.

That's what matters: getting away with it. Do you think Mr Straw, fretting over the "complications" of Anglo-Iranian relations, will make the mullahs pay any price for what they did? And, if he doesn't, what conclusions do you think the Islamic Republic will draw from its artful test of Western - or, at any rate, European - resolve? Right now, the British, French and Germans are making a show of getting tough on Iran's nuclear ambitions. Is that "tough" as in "Go ahead, imam, make my day"? Or is it "tough" as in that official's "one-way conversation"? Just a bit of diplo-bluster. If you were the mullahs, you might well conclude that the Europeans don't mean it, that they've decided they can live with a nuclear Iran, and you might as well go full speed ahead.

A nuclear Iran is a lot closer now.

Me No Understand

Indie, reporting on yet another asylum route - the "Saudi adulteress gambit".

Last year, the House of Lords ruled that the SFO's decision to drop the corruption investigation into the £43bn Saudi arms deal with BAE Systems was unlawful.

In a hard-hitting ruling, two High Court judges described the SFO's decision as "an outrage".

One of them, Lord Justice Moses, said the SFO and the Government had given into "blatant threats" that Saudi intelligence co-operation would end unless the probe into corruption was halted.

"No one, whether within this country or outside, is entitled to interfere with the course of our justice," he said. "It is the failure of government and the defendant to bear that essential principle in mind that justifies the intervention of this court."

How come all those Irish terrorists were let out after the Good Friday Agreement then ? Isn't that interference with justice ?

I see, they passed another law to let them out.

So all we need is the Serious Fraud Office (Saudi Arabia) Bill 2009 and we're laughing. Is that OK?

(my views on the BAe/Saudi bribery brouhaha are here.

I'd recommend anyone commenting on this issue to take a look at Anthony Sampson's book The Arms Bazaar. Bribery and large arms contracts have been together for a very long time. If we don't bribe others will. Even senior people in Western democracies can be bribed.

Now it's not unreasonable to say - no. We shouldn't bribe. Let others do it - we won't. Fine. If you don't want to bribe, get out of the arms trade. Which means closing a large chunk of what remains of Britain's technically advanced manufacturing industry. And in this case it also means a rupture with a powerful (we've sold them all that kit) oil-rich nation bordering Iraq. You can see why HMG might blink at this.

)

UPDATE - Jeremy Warner on doing business 'out there' :

Anyone with any experience of trading in the Middle East knows that the moment you tread further south than Marseilles, the law of contract becomes – how shall we put it? – somewhat pliable. For instance, it is relatively common place for clients in the Gulf to freeze payments to contractors. For us that may be breach of contract, but for them it is merely part of the hard ball of negotiation...

What's going on at Saad Group in Saudi Arabia is in some respects a great deal worse. Much of the money seems to have gone walk about, with local creditors being given preferential treatment over international lenders.

Domestic Violence As A Source Of Amusement ...

Imagine a man who finds his wife is unfaithful and attacks her.

Now imagine he attacks her with a golf club - a potentially deadly weapon.

Imagine she flees the house in terror, bleeding from head injuries, drives away, but because of her injuries crashes the car just a hundred yards away, while her husband follows, club in hand, to smash the car windows.

What would Cath Elliott say ? Or Laurie Penny ? Or the Stroppers ?

I dread to think what punishment would be deemed suitable for the offender - you all know I'm more of a rehabilitation type myself.




It's strange, but reverse the sexes of the protagonists, and both men and women find the idea* hilarious.




(* the idea, not the facts of the Tiger Woods case, which are obscure. Best of order in the comments please)

And Now We Come To The End Of Broadcasting For Today ...

... this station is closing for the night, and we'll be back with you tomorrow. So for now we'll leave you with some going-to-bed music. Did I mention that I love female voices ?

Friday Night Music

As Barack Obama tells it :

More than once, my mother would point out: “Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.”

Enfants de la Patrie (again) ?

I've written about this sort of thing before. Now even the Indie is noticing :

"No," he said. "I'm not watching the match. I never watch France play football. The team disgusts me because they are not really French."

What did he mean, I asked (although I knew exactly what he meant). My neighbour mumbled something about not liking the team because they didn't sing the Marseillaise before matches (something that has not been true for more than a decade). What he really meant was that there were too many non-white faces in the line-up (seven out of 11). I pointed out that every single France player in the now infamous main de Dieu World Cup qualifying team was born in France and mostly in Greater Paris. He looked embarrassed, made a "so what" hand gesture and walked away.

That same night thousands of young people from the poorer suburbs of Greater Paris poured on to the Champs Elysées to celebrate the fact that their country had qualified for the World Cup finals in South Africa next summer. These were French kids, born in France, but they were not celebrating France's morally-challenged victory over Ireland. They were celebrating – boisterously, and at times violently – Algeria's victory over Egypt in Algiers.

Guardian :

As the evening went on, more than 12,000 Algerians poured on to the Champs Elysées, which was closed to traffic as youngsters danced on the roofs of cars, chanting "One, two, three, Vive l'Algérie", and throwing fireworks into the dank November night. "I can't believe it," I was told by Samia, a 20-year-old student. "I've never seen anything like it. It's not just about football. It has to be about something else."

About midnight it became clearer what that something else might be. Armed police had by now gathered around the Arc de Triomphe, trying to break up the crowds. They were met with taunts, stones and fireworks. The party soon degenerated into a riot and the cries of "Vive l'Algérie" were replaced by the familiar battle cry of "Nique la police" (**** the police). The police responded with teargas and baton charges.

There were 60 arrests, and similar scenes in Lyon and Marseille. The violence carried on and by Friday morning the police reported that more than 200 cars had been burnt in the suburbs of Paris.

You have to remember that the same night France had cheated their way past Ireland to qualify. Yet the centre of Paris belonged to (violent) young French citizens who identified as Algerian.

Couldn't happen here, of course :

"You can cry now miserable Egyptians! We proudly defeated and humiliated you and we have now qualified for the worl cup 2010 in South Africa. You are the most hated people in the Arab world! Worse than jews."

Mr Indie - a chap called John Lichfield - seems to have been mugged by reality :

I have lived in France for almost 13 years. I adore France and I adore the French. I have to admit, however, that I have found the events of recent days – Sarko's crusade, Henry's handball, my neighbour's comments, the celebrations by French-born Algeria fans and the brutal response of the CRS – rather unsettling.

Eleven years ago, I was one of those who wrote admiringly of the Brown-White-Black France which won the World Cup. I, and many others, suggested that their victory might soften race relations in France; that other brown and black French kids might be encouraged to feel French; that white French kids would grow up with brown and black French heroes.

Since then, we have learned better.

Guardian ditto :

The sourness surrounding the Algerian victory seemed such a long way away from the famous "rainbow" French team of 1998 that beat Brazil in a glorious World Cup final at the Stade de France... This moment was hailed as the beginning of a new era in French cultural life. Eleven years later, that moment seems to belong to a very distant past. Indeed, the divisions in French society seemed to have hardened since then.

Laban doesn't think the lessons to be drawn are any different from last time :

So what, you may say. Why should we care about what happens in a far-away country of which we know little ?

Because their problems are ours. There's a terrible symmetry between the children and grandchildren of immigrants to France, much more radicalised, violent and discontented than their grandparents, and those to the UK.

Reality 1, Satire 0 (Again)

It's got to be the number one item on every prisoner's Christmas wish-list - their freedom.

But there was incredulity today when it emerged that one convict is actually going to have their wish granted - as first prize in a raffle.

The lucky inmate whose ticket is drawn in the £1 draw will be able to spend a day on the outside, enjoying themselves to their heart's content.

It is a reward being offered at Kirkham open prison in Lancashire in return for helping to prepare a Christmas dinner for elderly residents at a nearby day centre.

More 'Education'

a sad but by no means unusual tale via (of all people) Stephen Fry. No, I don't subscribe but enough people do.

But it's the comments that strike me.

Anyway, I'm one of those supply teachers, freshly arrived from Australia with a few years under my belt and a sense of freedom to supply teach. I ended my first week with a stiff drink and let go of the breath I was holding in for the whole week.
Wow. Didn't expect the utter lack of discipline, planning and chaos that I've so far seen at EVERY school i've been to.
My only slight objection to this very real piece of writing is when you mention about teachers who arn't afraid of taking charge. While I am only speaking on my behalf as a teacher I can see in this day and age when panic and pandemonium about our children's safety is at ridiculous level, teachers hands are, literally, tied behind our back.
I was warned, do not touch a child not even if they are in danger when I went for my interview. Excuse me?! I haven't followed that advice, especially in the half or dozen times so far I have physically squeezed myself in between two boys out and out fighting in the classroom and pulled one off the other.
I think the problem is, there is an absolute disrespect for teachers and the job they do. Students fight back with you, say the most horrible things to eac other explode wit anger at the smallest thing and constant endanger themselves and others with vicious fights and taunts right in front of my face. Now as a supply teacher I take it with a grain of salt, I mean everyone knows when your "proper" teacher is away its time to play, and I employ EVERY behaviour management technique in the book. Most of the time it works, once or twice though its been shaky and then what?
Its hard to control a child's behaviour when he has no respect for the situation or te boundaries, when they would rather hurtle themselves in a blind fit at another student in the class over them answering a question before they could.
The pent up anger and agression that is shown in students is a very worrying thing for me to witness, and I think before we worry about test scores and multimillion dollar equipment and classrooms we need to look at what sort of support can we give these children, and what sort of home are they coming from.
I as always feel sorry for the half or more of the class who have to sit and deal with this daily occurrance, and think what is it like for you??


I am (was) a teacher but found that many of the schools that I did work in it was just as you had described - crowd control and prevention of fights or breaking up fights. I loved teaching but due to physical health problems could not cope with 'THAT' kind of teaching so I now work in a bank!! I so wanted to teach those that wanted to learn - who had a thirst for it and an ever inquisative and enquiring mind - children who constantly questioned - these are the children who needed me - not the ones who could not be bothered or had no interest.

There are schools in inner London which have multiple playgrounds separated by skin colour. The pupils separate themselves this way, and the school has no choice but to supervise the 'black' playground with black staff and the 'white' playground with white staff, otherwise severe disruption occurs.

While I believe my own school isn't as bad as this, I see some of the things you describe regularly. The real trouble-makers are not tackled early enough or with sufficient seriousness. The result is the layer of kids that misbehave because they see others doing it - and would stop if their examples were excluded - remains. And yes, the easy targets are often picked on by some staff instead. I am a teacher. I regard myself as a professional, but the institution that is Education clearly does not agree. I teach in a culture of blame - it's not 'the management' that's at fault, it's those of us at the chalk face. I suspect all the 'good' teachers left the school you refer to a long time ago, probably fed up with the same thing I am.

I currently work as a bus driver. The level of abuse that myself and my colleagues have to tolerate on a daily basis from school children in our local area is obscene. If these renegade bullies talk to their elders in such a manner, what hope to the more vulnerable children in the classroom have?

Calm Down, Yazza !

Yazza has two personas for her two main media outlets

Indie : "I blame white men"

The world only feels right when women are removed from the public space. We know that is what the Taliban believes. The discouraging truth is that all nations would dearly like it if women went back indoors again to seek and find total fulfilment in babies and baking and these days 24-hour sexual availability.

Chance would be a fine thing. But not 24 hours. One wouldn't like to be doing a 10-hour day and worrying about the Home Front.

But of course, on the big picture Yazza is right. Throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls Taleban-style is exactly like criticising the appointment of Baroness Ashton as EU foreign minister.

Daily Mail : "I blame the permissive society"

(And I love persona 2 as much as I hate persona 1)

But it's not just Belle de Jour who (for a good price) gives the punters what they want, is it ?

(via Julia M)

Monbiot - "Phil Jones Should Resign"

I presume readers are already aware of "Climategate", the leaking of a large number of emails from the University of East Anglia's servers - which mails reveal a pattern of highly dodgy activity among professional warmists, particularly Phil Jones of the Climate Research ("then hide the data or tweak it") Unit. Refusing 'unbelievers' access to the raw data, including attempts to work round FOI, trying to get editors sacked and sceptical researchers' access to university resources withdrawn - that is just appalling. My emboldening below :

At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:

Mike,
I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc! Just sent loads of station data to Scott. Make sure he documents everything better this time ! And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is trawling them. The two MMs [McKitrick, McIntyre] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send to anyone. Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within 20 days? - our does ! The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it. We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that. IPR should be relevant here, but I can see me getting into an argument with someone at UEA who'll say we must adhere to it ! ...

UPDATE - all the mails and files (and many news stories) linked to from here.

I'm not an AGW sceptic, btw, but an agnostic. That doesn't mean I think that chucking large amounts of CO2 into the air is a wise thing to do without knowing the possible consequences. And I agree that the consequences could be apocalyptic (the fate of Mars, which it is now believed once had huge oceans, is ever before me), so a precautionary approach is wise. I'm sure human activity makes a difference - the crucial question is 'how much difference' - and 'how much difference compared with 'natural' changes' ?

In the Guardian, noted warmist George Monbiot :

It's no use pretending this isn't a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I'm dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign.

and in the comments :

I apologise. I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed. I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely.

contrarian2:

But if the science is that "settled," why refuse to disclose the data? If global warming so obvious and incontrovertible, why be in such a panic about FOI, why talk openly about re-defining "peer review", why threaten to (or actually) delete data?

I agree. It is exactly for those reasons that Phil Jones should resign. There's a word for his lack of openness and control of the data: unscientific.

"But where is it now?"

Sarah harks back to the days when 'people kept the laws and were polite and courteous. We didn't have much money, but we were contented and happy.

'People whistled and sang. There was still the United Kingdom, our country, which we had fought for, our freedom, democracy. But where is it now?!'

Sarah Robinson, who joined the Royal Navy when she was 18, says the Britain she once knew no longer exists.

The feelings of Sarah and others from this most selfless generation about the modern world have been recorded by a Tyneside writer, 33-year-old Nicholas Pringle.

Curious about his grandmother's generation and what they did in the war, he decided three years ago to send letters to local newspapers across the country asking for those who lived through the war to write to him with their experiences.

He rounded off his request with this question: 'Are you happy with how your country has turned out? What do you think your fallen comrades would have made of life in 21st-century Britain?'

What is extraordinary about the 150 replies he received, which he has now published as a book, is their vehement insistence that those who made the ultimate sacrifice in the war would now be turning in their graves.

There is the occasional bright spot - one veteran describes Britain as 'still the best country in the world' - but the overall tone is one of profound disillusionment.

Read the whole thing.

Nick, if you want to improve that website, (where you can buy the book) drop me a mail.

'If my fallen comrades could return to this country today, they would wonder who the victors were'

'They were the people we fought for - our folk and our country. For today's society I would not have done it.'