Happy Easter

- back Tuesday



"Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow"


A E Housman - scholar, poet, uphill gardener, Bromsgrovian.

New Liberal Myth Discovered by Certified Lunatic

Hey - it's OK - the foetus doesn't feel pain ! An expert has said so - in the British Medical Journal, no less. Carry on killing ! (unless you're engaging in female foeticide, of course).

The interview is 25 minutes in (RealAudio).


John Humphrys (for it is he) : "Right - so your contention is that the baby - er, the foetus, cannot feel pain until ... ?"

"Dr" Stuart Derbyshire, a psycho logist : "Until it's had an opportunity to undergo some sort of learning process - until it's had an opportunity to undergo a process whereby pointing and showing occurs"

Humphrys (interrupting) - "But that would suggest it's weeks - possibly months - after birth - and surely that's nonsense, isn't it ?"

Derbyshire : "It possibly is weeks, possibly months - I mean it's very difficult of course to ever draw a line as to precisely when it happens - but I do think we can draw a line and say that it is vitally dependent upon a process that's going to take place outside of the womb. Pain - in the same way - all experience is in a sense social (at this point Humphrys looks round nervously to check that he can get to the door - LT) - it's dependent on other people, and that doesn't occur until the point of birth."

Humphrys : "Dr Derbyshire, many thanks"

Oh for the forensic intellect of a Natalie Solent, to fillet this fool as he deserves ! Lacking that, I'll plough on as best I may.

One can see what he's getting at, of course. Sharply withdrawing the foot from the amniocentesis needle, "screaming" as the abortionists suction cannula approaches, frantically flailing about during uterine contractions as your heart rate hits 200 - hey, maybe it's "just a reflex reaction". You get into the open air, someone holds you upside down, runs a finger round your mouth and slaps your back - that crying's just reflex. Maybe the little one doesn't really know that he's in pain.

We're back with Bishop Berkely, and all our experience being just a set of pictures in the brain.

This would seem to be nonsense even on the bad doctor's terms. Were some ill-intentioned person to go up to him and stick a needle in his hand, he'd snatch the hand away by what I'd call instinct. He wouldn't stop to consider whether it hurt or not. But that doesn't mean that it wouldn't hurt.

This isn't some wonderful new theory - Mr Derbyshire was expounding it in that same BMJ ('the Guardian in a white coat') ten years ago. Why are the BBC and BMJ bigging him up now ?

"The US is considering legislation to make doctors tell women seeking an abortion it will cause the foetus pain."

Ah, I see. Those evil Americans, not killing people again. They're quite happy to execute murderers, but against killing babies. How sick can you get ?

For the father of children, Dr D seems totally convinced that the unborn have no interaction with humans outside of the abortionists saline injection. Didn't his wife talk to the baby ? Our children certainly reacted to outside stimuli while still in the womb.

Dr D's thesis, of course, implies that you could torture a new-born, or indeed month-old baby to death over a period of days without it feeling pain, or being able to "to process the subjectivity of pain" as he puts it.

And as for animals - well, when did a lab rat last have much of a relationship with its carers ? Looks like open season on dumb animals - and he does indeed support medical experimentation, in a robust spiked piece lambasting the appeasers in the medical research laboratories, kow-towing to the animal rights lobby.

"The impression is that research animals are a 'necessary evil', when in fact they are necessary, period."

Dr D wrote this from the relative safety of Pittsburgh, PA, a place not renowned, as is the UK, for the extreme violence of its animal rights lobby.

Strangely, though, he doesn't attempt to argue that animals don't feel pain. He writes of them being "distressed" and that they "will suffer". Surely, if the beasts have no interaction with humans or other animals, even supposing the degree of brain function which Dr D considers necessary for consciousness, then we can chop away with a will.

Dr D reminds me of another brain guru who seems to have no knowledge of actual human beings - Richard Dawkins. Logic is all. I detest SHAC and the Newchurch Nazis as much as anyone - but Dr D is scary too. He's an utilitarian extremist.

"It makes no sense for animal researchers to engage in a discussion of animal welfare beyond ensuring that the animals will be properly housed, fed and exercised, and that they will be generally physically and behaviorally nourished as much as possible to benefit their performance as an experimental subject. The idea that we should - or even can - be any more concerned about their welfare stretches credibility.

Giving animals AIDS and other diseases, carrying out experimental surgeries and infusing untested drugs hardly sound like procedures aimed at protecting the animals' welfare. Mistreating animals is unacceptable because it ruins experiments - but any further concern for the animals' wellbeing is beside the point."

"It was worse than a crime - it was a blunder !"

You could apply these same arguments to animals which will be killed for food. I happen to think it makes perfect moral sense to care for animals up until the time you harm them, and that there is such a thing as a necessary evil. Even if they don't fit Dr D's exacting definition of consciousness.

"Those of us who research with animals, or support the benefits of such work, have made a moral choice. We place human wellbeing and health above that of animals and we unequivocally believe that human life comes first."

Well, some human lives, anyway. As the BBC acknowledge, Dr D "is linked to pro-choice groups". He certainly is - namely the Pro-Choice Forum, which seems like Spiked to be run by the his old mates in the Living Marxism crowd.



15-week old 'insentient blob' (© J. Hari 2004)


"By the second month, the embryo will kick and jerk if poked at, and by the fourth month the stroking of the eyelids will result in squinting instead of a violent jerking movement: indeed stroking the lips results in sucking behavior.177 Tickling the scalp of the fetus at the surgical induction of labor will result in movement; Liley writes that "stroking the palm of the prolapsed arm elicits a grasp reflex, and to plantar stimulation the footling breech obliges with an upgoing toe."178 According to Verny, by the fifth or sixth month, the fetus is "as sensitive to touch as any one-year old.179

In addition, the fetus will respond with "violent movement" to a needle puncture. Goodlin reports that during the performance of "hundreds of amniocenteses" normal, healthy near-term infants would invariably respond to "needle sticks" with movement and drastic fetal heart-rate changes."

Liley, using multiple fetal x-ray films, described the process of birth and particularly contraction as one of "frantic" flailing fetal movement, with the arms and legs being thrown about and what appeared to be an active resistance to each contraction. Liley observation was that this behavior is characteristic of the reaction of a post-birth human being to severe pain. Liley writes:

If one attempts to reproduce in the neonate by manual contraction a mere fraction of the cranial deformation that may occur in the course of a single contraction the baby protests VioIentIy.190

Liley, citing Karelitz' findings, writes that the first sleep of neonates after birth is "more profound than any subsequent sleep" based on the strength of the stimuli needed to awake them, thus testifying to the ordeal that labor has indeed represented.192

I Told You Blogging Was Light ...

Too light. I don't like it.

But alas it's 11.17 and I've only just finished printing off some bumph for a new contract with some new employers, I'm using the PC in the bedroom and my darling is hinting that she wants to get her head down. School holidays have begun and she's wiped out by 10 pm. At least I can get some rest at work !

What is annoying is that there's so much to blog about, from Tory Blair and his Blue Labour party to ...


A couple of things ... the BBC are, as befits good liberals who care about the vulnerable, in favour of killing unborn children - if that's what mummy wants. Pro-lifers are 'anti-abortionists', pro-abortionists are 'pro-choice' (note - I can do that, but my bias is open). If a pregnant woman is stabbed to death, headlines about her dead 'babies' get quickly changed.

But if baby girls are being killed at a different rate to baby boys ... we have an issue, sisters. Time to invent a new word, in the best traditions of homophobia and Islamophobia. Kill as many kids as you like ... but in an equal opportunities stylee, or you'll be guilty of ... FEMALE FOETICIDE !


I've blogged afore about the death of Welsh culture. Here are some sad testimonies from the front line. English refugees from crime and immigration, plus a few scallies bringing the former, aided by the A55 and M4, are destroying Welsh-speaking Wales. The retirees, and those seeking a peaceful place to raise children, are destroying the very culture that made the places peaceful.

I live in a very small village, and even though villages like Abersoch and Llanbedrog were Anglicised about 10 to 15 years ago, it is during the last five years that the greatest effect has been seen on Garnfadryn. In the last 2 - 5 years the village has died on its feet in terms of the Welsh language and community spirit. In the year 2000 alone, four houses, where elderly Welsh people had lived until their deaths, came on the market. Small wonder that the houses went to retired English people. The shop has already closed and there is talk that the Chapel will go the same way. I believe that what has happened recently is that houses in Abersoch, Mynytho, and Llanbedrog have been filled by English people and that people are beginning to discover other houses in places like Rhiw, Garnfadryn, Bryncroes and Tudweiliog. Penrhos can’t help being such a beautiful place, but I feel that it will die as a Welsh community if houses are not available for young people. Anyone who has walked through Aberdaron on a winter’s day knows that the situation is a heartbreaking one.

And here is this weekends Sunday Times property supplement (with pretty picture of Tenby on the front page), helping in the destruction.

"Wales is the new Cornwall"

In Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion, the area that begins where the M4 ends, the average price of a detached house is £100,000 less than the national average, according to the Land Registry. But figures from the Halifax show that prices increased by an average of 155% in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire between 2000 and 2005, compared to 125% in Devon and Cornwall.

A survey by the Office for National Statistics at the end of last year revealed that the southwest is no longer the top destination for internal migration. Bob Humphrey of Stacks, a property search agency, says: “Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire are the baby sisters of Devon and Cornwall. We are witnessing an increasing stream of holiday buyers and downsizers from west London and the West Midlands.”

A Small Post

At Biased BBC.

Apologies ..

for light blogging, when there's so much to blog about.

24 Minutes From Risca

What a pity.

In Marc Almond's words "a great, unique singer of great, unique songs. But enough about me".

Still, he went after a sell-out show. But a shame to die in a lonely hotel room, with the missus a couple of thousand miles away.

I stop and smile
I take my bow
I leave the stage
And then somehow

Backstage - I'm lonely ...

I Don't See Any Elephant

Two stories on BBC Radio Four. Apparently, the population of the cities is much younger than that of the countryside.

I wonder why ?

Next, a preview of today's French riots - in which Caroline Wyatt seems to have no clue as to the identity of the people expected to attack demonstrators, shopkeepers, police this evening.

It's Thatcher's Fault

This is obviously the NuLab rebuttal strategy - I heard David Miliband coming out with it a week or so back, now Jim Murphy (who he ?) on the Today programme. (Health Warning - contains obligatory poke at the 'middle class')

"Yes, OK, social mobility is declining. But the study that shows it compares children born in the 1950s with children born in the 1970s. Those 70s children were at school in the 80s - under Thatcher."

Apparently something in the zeitgeist - the sight of unemployed parents, the 'grotesque level of child poverty' - so traumatised Thatcher's Children that they ceased to strive for a better future. More importantly, they did worse at school, hence the "increasing relationship between family income and educational attainment" of which the report complains.

If Messrs Miliband and Murphy were right, we should have seen social mobility plummeting in the 1950s and 1960s, as the hideous effects of the 20s and 30s depression kicked in. I believe child poverty was a tad more severe, too. My mother had two pairs of school shoes - one full of holes, with cardboard in the soles to protect her feet, in which she'd walk to school. When she got to Dynevor, she'd put on the 'best' pair. (Cries of 'Luxury !')

Yet the 50s and 60s were seen as times of increasing social mobility. Anything else happen in the 1980s ? Like the first generation to have a fully comprehensive school system ?

Lighter than Light Blogging

Sorry - too much work. So I really shouldn't have created this.

We're Not Having Kids - Again

Alison Wolf with a long and fascinating essay on what she sees as the triumph of women in the labour market (there's another essay to be written on how female role-models have moved from the 'angel in the house' to the porn star, but that's a different story).

"Three consequences get far less attention than they deserve. The first is the death of sisterhood: an end to the millennia during which women of all classes shared the same major life experiences to a far greater degree than did their men. The second is the erosion of "female altruism," the service ethos which has been profoundly important to modern industrial societies—particularly in the education of their young, and the care of their old and sick. The third is the impact of employment change on childbearing. We are familiar with the prospect of demographic decline, yet we ignore, sometimes wilfully, the extent to which educated women face disincentives to bear children."

For the death of female altruism, you don't have to look much further than the nursing profession, where on-the-job training has been replaced by academic training (contining a hefty chunk of political indoctrination) run by the likes of Tom "Too Professional to Care" Murray.

And childbearing ... it was interesting to look at Nordish's snaps of the demos in Liverpool and Blackburn against the lovely Condi.

Scallyland seemed to have a lot of people of my age out on the streets.

From 1976 to 2006 ...

Blackburn was a little different.

"Tomorrow belongs to me ..."

Merle and Johnny

Howard Husock in City Journal.

In a television appearance with Haggard, Cash recalled one of his trademark prison concerts in San Quentin. Haggard remarked that he’d been there for the concert. When Cash noted that he didn’t recall Haggard being on the bill that day, Haggard replied, “I was in the audience, Johnny.”

I discovered country music through youthful drinking in Irish pubs, particularly the legendary Lamb and Flag in Worcester, whose jukebox contained two absolute classics - Merle Haggard's "I'm A Lonesome Fugitive" and Hank Thompson's "A Six Pack To Go" coupled with "The Wild Side Of Life". Beautiful. Short, sweet and to the point.

Hey Mr Bartender ... (long pause then a guitar chord)

Please don't be so slow ... (drums kick in)

I've got time for me more round
And a six pack to go
Tomorrow morning's Sunday
I'm gonna be feeling low
So please please bartender
I want a six pack to go
I've been drinking all day long
Taking in the town
I've done spent my whole paycheck
Just a honky tonking round
Well I don't have enough to pay my rent
I ain't gonna worry though
I've got time for one more round
And a six pack to go

(cheerful guitar ...)

One six pack to go !

Fair's Fair, Now

The attacks by the casseurs on French demonstrators are being covered by the BBC.

They're just not being given the kind of prominence they would be if the attackers were natives and the victims not.

During a recent protest "thugs hit the shop windows on their way up the avenue, and hit the demonstrators on their way down".

Who are they? Ask any shopkeeper, and they will tell you that they are the same youths of immigrant origin who rioted across France's impoverished suburbs in November.

This report manages to tell the truth and ignore it simultaneously. Can you imagine the BBC's coverage if the casseurs were white 'right-wingers' ?

"The festival atmosphere quickly darkened as a small group of troublemakers began to target trade union stewards trying to keep order on the march.

Those youths smashed the windows of a cafe and soon took on the trade unions' security men in random brawls, as the peaceful protesters - young and old - continued on their route across the River Seine and on to Place de la Republique"

"But once they reached their destination in the eastern city centre, most student demonstrators - and the workers who came out in support of them - quickly left as more youths descended on the square, with the sole aim of picking a fight with the riot police.

These youngsters - aged between 15 and 25 - were wearing hooded tops that obscured their features. Many wore masks, so they could not be identified."

"The irony is that the government's new job contracts were brought in hurriedly to help youngsters in France's troubled suburbs - where last November's rioting brought severe social and racial problems into sharp focus."

An irony not lost on the great Dalrymple.

"Whether they know it or not, the people on the streets in France were demonstrating to keep the youth of the banlieues — who recently so amused the world for an entire fortnight with their arsonist antics — exactly where they are, namely hopeless, unemployed and feeling betrayed. For unless the French labour market is liberalised, they will never find employment and therefore integration into French society. You have only to speak to a few small businessmen or artisans in France — the petits bourgeois so vehemently despised by the snobbish intellectuals — to find out why this should be so. The French labour regulations make employment of untried persons completely uneconomic for them."

UPDATE - via the comments, France-Echos with photos of the kind of thing the BBC prefer to ignore. Not sure if I follow his politics, but the snaps are pretty eloquent.





UPDATE 2 - More Dalrymple.

"The French do not go to the banlieues, but what they fear is that the banlieues will come to them. Perhaps it is starting to happen. My nephew and a friend of his were walking through the Bois de Vincennes, overlooked by elegant Parisian bourgeois apartment blocks, when they were set upon by two Africans and three Arabs. They were not badly injured, but at the hospital their mothers were told by the staff that such attacks, carried out not for gain but for the sheer pleasure of revenge upon the hated comfortable French, were now commonplace."

Stopped Clock "Sometimes Right" Shock Horror

In among the usual nagombi ("this howl of existential anxiety") the BBC's Caroline Wyatt gets the odd bit of sense in.

"To the barricades, they went, these revolutionaries, to fight for their rights - to pensions, mortgages and a steady job.

Such odd revolutionaries. No heartfelt cry to change the world, but a plea for everything to stay the same.

For France to remain in its glorious past: a time of full employment and jobs for life - a paternalistic state to take care of them from cradle to grave"

"A recent survey suggested that for most of the young in France, the real dream is to become a civil servant - a fonctionnaire. To work in government offices with regular hours, long holidays, and a 35 hour working week."

Blogger Rue Rude isn't so poetic about existential anxiety.

"Casseurs with hoods and masks are all around Place de la République right now breaking things and causing mayhem right now, 20h30-- stay out of central Paris if you can. "

And the Pub Philosopher on the story the MSM ignore - how, once again, ghetto youth are attacking the demonstrating 'bolos'.

Light Blogging

Lots of work, so a few links.

I said the other day that "one of the things I'm interested in is documenting how it all went pear-shaped, what life was like before the Fall, the cultural drivers behind the destruction, the personalities involved, and some of the original documents."

The destruction has fallen most heavily on what was once the British working class.

"And the sandcastle virtues are all swept away,
In the tidal destruction, the moral melee"

as someone once wrote. I haven't time to investigate the fascinating subject of how the MIDDLE classes, before the fall the touchstone, exemplar and ambition of the respectable working man, became the object of the hatred and scorn of the 'representatives' of the working class, themselves middle-class almost to a woman. It would be interesting to research Hansard and socialist writing to discover when 'middle-class' became a term of abuse. I'd guess 1970/80s, with a few forerunners like Richard Crossman.

Let's just look at what the working class could do for themselves, before they had an enlightened State to do it for them.

Via commenter Phil Jackson, a look at The Classics In The Slums. And Frank Prochaska's series of posts at the SAU on the voluntary institutions of the working class. Enjoy.

Those DFES stats

I speculated a while back that "if you asked the DFES for a breakdown of primary school numbers by ethnicity (recorded by each head and reported to the DFES) the figure would be 25%+ for ethnic minorities in England."

The figure (table 47a) is 20.2%, if you include Irish and Irish travellers as natives.

2.3% of kids are "unclassified" - including mine. You can opt out of this South African style system if you wish.

My Generation, Baby

"I am a modern man - the Beatles, colour TV - that's the generation I come from" - Tony Blair, 1997.


One of the things I'm interested in is documenting how it all went pear-shaped, what life was like before the Fall, the cultural drivers behind the destruction, the personalities involved, and some of the original documents.

This post will be a little disjointed, as it covers some big themes, each worthy of one or more essays - which I have neither the time nor ability to write.

There are several elements involved in this documentation. One important one is to bear witness. A key liberal myth, the "Myth of the Myth of the Golden Age" holds that crime wasn't REALLY lower in the past, streets weren't REALLY safer."He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future."

At present this is a difficut task for our liberal elite. There are simply too many people alive who can remember Britain in the 1950s or even the 1960s (remember that the culture of the 1960s only spread in the 70s - and went mainstream even later, around the time Habitat stores opened everywhere. For an accurate picture of 1966 England look at the World Cup Final crowd - 95% in ties - ties ! and many also sporting hats).

But these generations - the wartime generations - are dying and will soon be gone. Mortality is even now on the horizon of the post-war grammar school boys, the people - of whom I'm one - who destroyed the culture to which they were the heirs.

So it's important to record the lives and opinions of these generations, partly for their own sake, but partly to refute the arguments of those who believe that the present is always better than the past.

Three documents - two on the cultural drivers of destruction, one on Edwardian Britain.

First the Independent on the 50th anniversary of the play "Look Back In Anger", as reviewed by the late Keneth Tynan in 1956.

"All the qualities are there, qualities one had despaired of ever seeing on stage - the drift towards anarchy, the instinctive leftishness, the automatic rejection of 'official' attitudes, the surrealist sense of humour ... the casual promiscuity, the sense of lacking a crusade worth fighting for and, underlying all these, the determination that no one who dies shall go unmourned ... The Porters of our time deplore the tyranny of 'good taste' and refuse to accept 'emotional' as a term of abuse; they are classless, and they are also leaderless."

I'm not quite sure what happened to to the underlying theme, but all the rest were representative enough - a small manifesto for the counterculture.

Another document - I must admit to never having heard of the Preston poet Alan Dent - and having read some of his stuff I wish he'd never heard of Dylan Thomas. But his "Memoria Technica" is important in that if you wanted to know what the Sixties were a revolt against, you'd only have to read this. All the themes are there. Namely :

Capitalism - indeed, paid employment of any kind - is dull and morally reprehensible. Success in this world is a token of moral worthlessness.

Here
society’s handshake was a pay-packet and slavery

for he was famous in his realm
in Leyland and Chorley
from Accrington to Darwen
in Lancaster and Blackpool and as far as Oldham
he had conquered with his charm
the blue-eyed father and slick commercial traveller
filled the emptiness of his life by selling
as vain men fill the emptiness in their lives by selling
selling themselves a dream of themselves


Church is a dull thing that the straight parents make us do.

freedom from the narrowness of a niggard isle
from sexless Wesleyism
and God drowned in the Ribble
dirty with Protestant profit
and freedom was in no choice but to choose

On dull Sunday evenings at six
tight-suited smart and calm
on the back-row wicker seats
in a plain poor dour building
in a rich pretentious zone

I want to get drunk and have sex with girls.

I took my pre-sex preaching
then pubwards quiet querying and queer
went on my usual crusading quimquest


Respectability sucks.

my dream was freedom from the boss and the bureaucrat
my dream was the death of deference

In its own way it's also a manifesto for change - and a manifesto triumphantly implemented - as the figures for church attendance and a walk down any High Street on a Friday night will bear out. Though not quite fully implemented - all over Preston small boys, neatly dressed, will even today trot off to their religious classes once a week, with greater or lesser enthusiasm. But they'll be clad in white, not Sunday best - and their classes are on Fridays. I can still remember the cheerful kids pouring out of the madrassa in Woodhead Road when I lived in Bradford.

What a contrast with a Victorian working man - the Blackburn poet William Billington. What was that about the working class being uninterested in education ?

A dacent chap ull do his best,
An' eawt o' wod he's earnin
Ged th' owdest son a trade, an' th' rest
O' th' lads a bit o' learnin;
Bud iv he's eawt o' wark; wey then,
Unschollard, unbefriended,
His childer grow up into men—
Aw wod this war wur ended!

("this war" being the American Civil War, which closed half the mills in Lancashire)





The third document I stumbled upon while trying to find some lyrics for an old 78 in my posession. The Hubbard family archives contain the unedited 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. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

Four salient points - the safety and order of the Edwardian world, the all-pervading influence of Christianity, the still rigid class structure, and (as anyone reading childhood memoirs of the era will recognise) the enormous contrast betwen the tighty regulated and rigidly enforced relationship between adult and child, where any adult's word was law in every sphere, and the freedom/liberty/license of children's relationships with each other. In George Borrow's memoirs he desribes gang warfare and running battles between schoolboys (with however, none of the knife-work you'd get in, say, London today) in the Edinburgh streets. Reading the passage where the village boys torment Frances' Downs syndrome brother, I was reminded of Laurie Lee's gang of Cotswold adolescents plotting to waylay and rape the village idiot - a mentally deficient girl.

(The cultural level of the respectable working class in late Victorian times was remarkable. When our decorators arrive the radio is the first thing to go on. Can't work without it. Once ...

"When we had the local painters and decorators in the house the most beautiful part-singing would re-echo throughout the place all day, as they, the maids, the daily woman and the scullery maid all joined in, each one taking his or her part in perfect harmony." )

Straight Intta Compton

Imagine a part of the US where black children routinely skipped school on Thanksgiving Day in case they were shot for attending on a day of 'white celebration'. It would be all over the Guardian and BBC like a rash.

Different considerations apply when The Man isn't involved. Face Right reports on tensions in LA betwen black and Latino.

In 2005, widespread fighting between Latinos and African Americans, sometimes necessitating lockdowns and the deployment of police officers, rocked 12 schools in Los Angeles County....

Channa Cook, a teacher at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, said that even in her school, routinely regarded as one of the best in Los Angeles County, black students each year skip school on May 5 -- Cinco de Mayo -- the day when Mexicans celebrate a 19th-century military victory over France. Mexican gangs have warned in graffiti that they will shoot African Americans attending school that day.

"Large swaths of Los Angeles, such as Watts -- a place that Earl Paysinger, the deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described as an "ecosystem for African American culture" -- are now increasingly Latino. The nearby city of Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap, is now 60 percent Hispanic. "The movement of Latinos into these communities has been nothing less than a demographic earthquake," Paysinger said."

I remember even fifteen years go arriving in Chicago and being amazed at the number of Mexican immigrants - having to use my holiday Spanish in a bar to be understood.

Huge demographic shifts, previous inhabitants now outnumbered - sounds familiar somehow.

Lunatics - "We Run The Asylum Now"

"Patients who self-harm are being allowed to do so under supervision in hospital in an innovative scheme.
The practice is being allowed as part of a six-month investigation into the care of people who self-harm at St George's Hospital, Stafford."

"Around 100,000 A&E consultations each year are linked to self-harm. Experts say many more people may be practising the technique in secret."

I like "the technique". Just as we're on the way to the medicalisation of criminality ("a serious personality disorder") and the human condition ("depression"), we now see cutting holes in oneself as a form of therapy. How long before cutting holes in other people is treated likewise ?

As Dalrymple recorded a patient saying, "I had to kill her, Doctor - or else I don't know what I'd have done".

In line with the spirit of this post I suggest that the "technique" be videoed or put on a live Web feed. I'm convinced there's a market for that sort of thing among the Zoo and Nutz generation.

That Budget

The (privately-educated) Paul Anderson speaketh :

"The spending splurge on education is a serious challenge to the Tories — and it puts the sterile education bill arguments about the structure of the school system into perspective. Who really cares about the precise role of local education authorities if we're chucking cash at schools?"

It's a pity IMHO that they don't raise the amount per pupil to 8K (the same as average private school fees) immediately. Then we could see the poverty of the 'cash gets good results' argument in all its glory.

I write as a (state-educated) parent with two children at comprehensive and a third in year 6 primary, who with heavy heart and light wallet is mulling over an acceptance letter for him from a local school. Whose fees are, by strange coincidence, £8,000 a year.

Mary Ann - BBC Find New Ethnic Group

Thanks to the Rotty Pup for this one. From the artist's illustration of the trial usd by the BBC it appears that she was killed by a white guy and five of an ethnic minority new to me - the grey men.



Come to think of it, wasn't John Major from Brixton ?