It appears that being a teacher really is no guarantee that you're not a fucking moron, as demonstrated by the National Union Teachers. They want to ban the Ministry of Defence from giving talks to students on a potential career in the military, because they use "misleading propaganda".

Apparently they don't give a true enough picture of life in the armed forces. Bollocks. Besides, any half-intelligent person would, y'know, check up on the details before they took a job.

And they really did come out with some complete bollocks:

Any one who can say this with a straight face really is too stupid to be a teacher. Even a PE teacher.

It isn't up to teachers to decide what careers their students should consider. It is their duty as educators to provide all the information to their students to enable them to make their own informed and intelligent choices - not just the ones their teachers would prefer them to make.

Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those who can't teach go to NUT conferences and pass idiotic Leftist motions like this.

UPDATE: Two teachers object to the NUT's statements.

ASBOs have failed. Rather than deterrents, they have become badges of honour among young thugs. So what is the government's response? To roll them out over young potentials as well:

So they just haven't learnt from their mistakes, have they? Handing out "baby ASBOs" to even younger children - especially those who haven't even done anything very bad at all.

The name of the scheme that is to to deal with this just sums up Labour's entire style of government: Family Intervention Projects. Why do they feel that they have the right to intervene in out lives?

When this comes alongside the proposal to put young children who "exhibit behaviour indicating they may become criminals in later life" on the DNA database. I mean, WTF? Since when has being a behaving badly ever been a good enough reason for your DNA to be added to their Big Brother database?

Have we finally abandoned the idea of innocent until proven guilty? Do you no longer actually have to commit a crime before you can be convicted for it?

Baby ASBOs and adding disruptive children's details to the DNA database will not prevent them feom becoming criminals, but the opposite - pushing them in to a life of crime, since that seems to be what is expected of them!

Ok, that's not quite true. Shlomo Benizri, of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish Shas party, actually said:

Erm... so if earthquakes are the fault of the gays, what happened to the whole tectonic plates thing? Or did Shlomo Benizri just skip basic geography, and headed straight to the bigoted religious nut class?

And if his conclusion is indeed true, why are those countries who offer gay marriage/civil partnerships not experiencing earthquakes to a far greater extent than Israel who is merely recognising them? Or is that just too much like logic?

In other news, Iain Dale promises to avoid shaking his genitals in future. Something I think we can all be thankful for.

No-one can apologise for something that someone else did. I can't apologise for something you did, and you can't apologise for something I've done. And neither of us can apologise for something someone else did. Any apology we did make wouldn't mean anything since we didn't do it and so have nothing to be sorry for.

This is an obvious fact, right?

So why do politicians persist in apologising for things that happened before they were in power, grown up, or in some cases even born? How can Kevin Rudd apologise for Australia for the "profound grief, suffering and loss" inflicted by successive Australian governments on the indigenous Aboriginal population? Just like Blair or Livingstone can't apologise for the brief period in history where Britain perpetuated the slave trade [and the same goes for the Papua New Guinea tribe and the cannibalism of their ancestors]. Not with any real sincerity can they.

They can regret what happened, but they can't apologise for it. Regretting an incident is fine and not a problem. We all have some regrets about past issues. But we can't apologise for something we didn't do. Any apology made is just an empty and meaningless gesture. If we carry this idea on, children born of rape will be apologising to their mothers for their father's actions, and ultimately everyone will have to apologise to everyone for something that some long-forgotten ancestor did.

However, Rudd does have slightly more legitimacy in making his apology than Blair or Livingstone for theirs, since the period his apology covers goes right up to the 1960s. But even that is a long time ago. Way too long. Just let all this stuff go for crying out loud and let's move on a equal people, not looking back over our shoulders at past slights!

Idiocy of the day:

Imposing a tax to foster a more giving culture? WTF? On what planet is he living where you can impose a tax to foster a culture of giving? That makes bugger-all sense. You can't force someone to do something and then expect them to do choose to do it.

The reason that the relationship between the Edwardian philanthropists and charity has become "fractured" is because the State has taken on so many of those tasks and is just having the same people pay for it, just through coercive taxes rather than by charitable giving. It's a pretty simple equation: the more you take by force in taxes, the less they give by choice as charity.
More taxes = Less charity. So get that through your thick head, Frank.

Of course Mike Ion thinks it "has real merit". But then, he would.

Image: Frank Field MP

Is this racist?

Of course not, but I bet that the usual suspects will claim that it is.

What this demonstrates is that Britain is being racialised by the very people who claim to be doing the opposite through "positive" discrimination. Because these non-white groups are being recognised and given powers because of their 'race', it makes 'white' people - who don't have the same sort of racial grouping, certainly in this country, feel weak since 'whites' don't have any power inherent in our race, just that which we have as individuals.

Any sort of attempt to grant power to groups based on race, gender, sexuality, religion etc. just backfire in the end, as instead of making the members of those groups equal, it does precisely the opposite - and that causes resentment.

Politically correct stupidity.

Selling and buying sex has never been illegal in the UK. Yet Harriet Harman seems to think that that's simply not good enough, and that the precedents set by centuries of history - covering even the most prudest eras - isn't good enough for her. What she is attacking she says "just because something has always gone on, it doesn't mean you just wring your hands and say there's nothing we can do about it" she is ignoring the very foundation of British society, law and democracy - precedent and organic development, taking into account the past. Of course this doesn't mean that what has gone before is always right, but it certainly means that there needs to eb damn good reason before you even consider changing it.

Let's look at this from a rights perspective. I own my body, right? We all agree on that point. So I can do whatever the hell I like with it. After all, that is what manual labourers - the people Harman's party claims to represent - do when they sell their labour. And what we all do when we work - we sell our labour in whatever form. Thus, we can do what we want with out own bodies.

Then we have the fact that the money I earn, after I have paid my taxes to the State, are mine to dispose of as I wish. This money I can spend on anything I wish, as it is my money, that I have earned, and on which no-one else has any claim. Right?

So, why should I not be allowed to buy or sell sex if I so wish - wish my own body or my own money? It is right that some activities associated with prostitution - such as pimping and brothel-keeping - are illegal. But the simple activity of selling and buying sex certainly should not be. It is referred to as the "oldest profession" for a reason, and it will long outlive Harman and her ilk. After all, sex is a one of the basic needs of mankind - and not everyone can or wants to get it without paying.

Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian

How on earth can driving whilst using a mobile phone a bad enough offence to warrant jail time? Especially for two years! Yes, it's stupid and dangerous - nobody is claiming that it isn't - but it sure as hell isn't worth the potential sentence of two years in jail. Especially at a time when the prisons are so overcrowded that they are releasing real criminals early!

Even the idea of a custodial sentence for such a minor crime is ridiculous, especially considering the current state of the prison system. And two years is an absurdly long length of time in itself. People commit far more serious crimes than driving whilst using a mobile phone and get shorter jail sentences.

This is a policy aimed solidly at the middle-class, aiming to criminalise them. Just give larger fines and more points to the perpetrators, and raise the penalties for actual dangerous or reckless driving and it's results.

Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian

It's just pointless and stupid. Taxing alcohol won't reduce the amount of people who drink or the number of drinks they have. Cigarette tax was been raised constantly, yet the number of smokers didn't drop off because of it. Putting a higher amount of tax on alcohol won't stop anyone drinking. It wouldn't stop me, for one. Those who want to drink will continue to do so unless the tax hike is absolutely huge - and a tax increase of that size would be electoral suicide.

As it is, we already have the second highest rate of tax on alcohol in Europe! As if paying a bit more will actually prevent people from buying it! All it will do is mean that people readjust their expenditures to spend less on other things.

24-hour drinking is the best law passed by Labour in the past decade. We are not at the stage of having a "continental style" drinking culture, and that is primarily because they won't let us. 24-hour drinking is still an urban myth. Few places have a licence to do so, let alone actually do so on a regular basis. Most pubs still close at 11pm, so even so technically 24-hour drinking is possible, in reality it isn't, and there has been no change. How is our drinking culture supposed to change if the opportunity to do so is not there? Even if it was, you couldn't expect it to go through a metamorphosis overnight. It takes time for cultural change to happen - several years, if not more. It's only been two since the law was passed - and it hasn't exactly been fully implemented since then, either.

Doctors who claim that there should be more tax etc. on should, if you pardon the crudity, just fuck off. Your job is to fix us after we make ourselves ill. You can tell us that we can make ourselves ill through drinking too much, but then shut the hell up. We are adults and can make our own decisions about our own bodies. If we want to drink, we will. Advise us how much we should limit ourselves to - and make it better than a guess - then shut up and be there to fix us when we're ill. That's your job, not to police what we do and demand that we don't do anything that might make us ill.

Very simply, taxing alcohol is never going to stop people from drinking, or even make them cut down. To suggest that it will is to ignore human nature.

Sources: BBC, The Telegraph, The Guardian

Regular readers will know that I don't normally swear [mainly because I just could never match the peerless swearblogging of Devil's Kitchen or Mr Eugenides as you can see here], but this warrants a good number of swear words.

Oh, for fuck's sake. What is it with this stupid fucking government that makes them think that making delinquents stay in school for two years longer will actually help them in any way? I mean, the kids who leave school at sixteen tend to be the same little shits who hold everyone else back by mucking around in class. They're the non-academically gifted kids who just don't want to stay in school for longer, but want to go and do something useful to them and their future.

This idea is a fucking stupid one, thought up by a bunch of statist cunts who think two more years of compulsory schooling will make up for their failings in their last eleven. Bollocks will it. All it will do is hold back those who do want to work, as the twats who piss around in class will still be there disrupting everyone else. When those bastards left after GCSEs, school became far better as those who were left had chosen to do so, and so put in more work and pissed around in class less.

Frankly, there are no benefits to making kids stay in school until they are eighteen. At all. All it will do is cause mass truancy, and then criminalise those truants for having the gall to decide what is best for them!

But ah you say, "under the plans pupils would not have to continue with academic lessons but would be required to receive training." But who the fuck going to provide this training? What is it going to be in? What purpose is it to have? How are you going to make them attend? The practical problems in this are fucking immense - and I certainly wouldn't trust any government - and certainly not this bunch of cunts - to implement such a scheme with any real thought to the practical considerations.

Apprenticeships and training for school-leavers already exist. Companies take on apprentices and train them up already. The difference is that the apprentices they have have chosen - at least to a far greater degree - to go into this trade. Thus, those who want to stay in school already can and do - after all, it's free unlike university. And those who want to get into a trade can and do so as well. And the ones who don't will just be a distraction to those in school and just lower the educational standard on the country or just be useless little shits if forced into an apprenticeship.

When it comes down to it, not everyone can do a skilled job anyway. It simply isn't possible. Someone needs to clean the streets and the toilets, stock the supermarket shelves, and wait tables, etc. after all. Every single job has to be done by someone. The best way to get 16-18 year-olds to get off their fat lazy arses and either get a job or stay in school is to cut their dole. Say they can only get half or even not a single fucking penny until they are 18.

Conscripting 16-18 year-olds into longer educational is a seriously fucking stupid idea. Instead of pumping money into educating them when they don't want to learn anything, put it into adult education for when they have decided that they're fed up of doing a shit job and do want to learn. When it comes down to it, you can't physically make every 16-18 year-old stay in school. it's not possible, and is just absurd to even suggest, yet alone include in the Queen's Speech!

So, Blinky Balls and Cyclops Brown, and the other authoritarian statist cunts in the government - fuck off. Just fuck right off.

For more on this subject, visit the group blog Educational Conscription.

The prize for the most stupid sentence I have read today goes to:

How on earth can freedom possibly be about authority?! They are polar opposites!

That just - and I mean just - pipped this in sheer stupidity:
Tom Paine has ably destroyed this ridiculous assertion, so go there and read his post.

Erm...

I think you'll find that your own gallery of pictures creates that impression for you [especially the one on the right], Georgia - not that I'm complaining, you understand. Also, when you have a title such as "Miss England" people are going to assume that you are "a bit thick" and "tarty". It goes with the title.

Yes, it is unfair and may well be untrue - but that's life. If you actually have a brain, then you knew that it is what people would expect to see in someone with a beauty competition title before you entered. So get over it.

Source: BBC

This really does just opens the doors wide open for toilet gags and PCs...

Why did they choose a toilet block as their office location? Despite having "automatic air extraction to minimise odours" there is no way that the toilet will not smell at all - all public toilets do. The toilet is hardly the place you go and expect to discuss issues such as drug abuse and anti social behaviour, anyway. It's more likely to be the place where they are committed!

Placing a police office in a toilet is not inspired in any way. It's just pretty stupid. It is the sort of idea that comes up in a brainstorming meeting where people are invited to be "creative" - and then quickly abandoned. This should have been abandoned before it even left the drawing board stage, if not the very moment it was even suggested.

It is unlikely to generate much of the interest they want, but will undoubtedly generate a large of number of very predictable, but nevertheless funny, toilet gags at the expense of the PCs stations there, and all of the area's police. Which I am going to avoid making now. Feel free to make them in the comments, though.

Source: BBC

Does the fact that a young aide "blacked up" and another posted the photo along with a jokey caption mean that the Tories are racist? Of course it doesn't. Yet Dawn Butler says that this shows that the Tories "ha[ve] not changed one bit". Quite what she is suggesting, I don't know. Anyone who makes such a link between one young aide dressing up and an entire party being potentially - if not actively - racist is an idiot. Yes, both of them were stupid. But, last I heard, stupidity wasn't a crime. If it was, all of the present government would currently be residing at Her Majesty's pleasure.

What is shows is that Labour react against anyone who does not fully accede to their racism, their politically correct "positive discrimination" - such an oxymoronic phrase that I'm surprised that anyone can utter it in all seriousness. There is nothing "positive" about discrimination, after all - discrimination is discrimination is discrimination. And discrimination, we all accept, is wrong.

Racism can go in any direction, from any and to any. So why is it that Labour believe that only whites can be racist? Because they are living in a world created by their politically-correct infatuations with an "equality" that is anything from equal at all. Nelson Mandela himself came out and said that we shouldn't read racism into every situation after a man was reported to what was then the CRE for "blacking up". So why won't Labour listen to him on this? Because that would be common sense.

Labour is living in a racial world that stopped existing years ago. People my age don't see race or skin colour as meaning anything. It's just your genes, innit, not who you are. It is these middle-age race campaigners who are the modern racists, who fixate about skin colour and creating an "equal" [ie. unequal] country.

To my generation, "race" means bugger-all. We believe in meritocracy, where a person earns their own position, not one where they have one already created simply because of their racial origins, usually demonstrated by skin colour. Who cares what your ancestors may have been or done? To them, it means everything. Who is the racist here?

Image: Oxfam
Sources: The Guardian, Daily Mail

This just has to be right at the top my list of the most idiotic thing I have ever heard anyone ever say:

Erm, WTF? How on earth can climate change [it's lucky that they stopped using the term "global warming" because it's bloody freezing at the moment] be the greatest threat to global equality? Surely dictatorship, totalitarian government and PC extremism [as well as the culture of state dependency - on the development of which Theo Spark has a great parable] is a greater threat?

Equality is not prevented by global warming in the slightest. If anything it will do the opposite - if the doomsday claims by eco-fascists is correct - by reducing us all to the same level? If anything under their conditions, us in the developed world would be far more screwed than third world countries.

Climate change is not - and cannot - itself threaten global equality. It might have some impact on it, in a roundabout way, but to claim that it is the "greatest long-term threat" to achieving global equality is utter rubbish, and gives the issue far far more importance than it deserves.

Source: BBC

Is Brown going to try and repeal the pretty much only good law Labour passed?

The 24-hour drinking law is pretty much the only good law that Labour have passed in the last decade. The old drinking laws were out of date and causing much of the problems Britain had with alcohol-related crime themselves.

24-hour drinking remains nothing more than an urban myth. Few people want to drink at all times of the day, but what the laws do is enable pubs and bars to set their own closing times. This means that 11pm isn't throw-out time at every pub, and so much of the alcohol-fuelled violence is distilled by the lack of such large numbers of drunk people in the same area at the same time. The longer drinking times also means that few feel so pressured to down lots of alcohol quickly just as 11 o'clock approaches. They can thus take their time, and then end up getting less drunk. The 24-hour drinking laws may not have been a complete success, but the adaption of a national drinking character takes time. But the effects of the change have been positive overall.

And now Brown wants to repeal this law. What an idiot. This shows that his centralist, authoritarian nature is shining through. Let people drink when they want to. And binge-drinking as they define isn't "unacceptable" at all. Constant binge-drinking at that level is, but the level they set binge-drinking at - about 4 pints - is absurdly low. Real binge-drinking doesn't start until at least 7 or 8 pints.

What Brown is doing is trying to exert the power of the state over something which is none of it's business. How much, when, and where I drink is none of his business. Everyone knows the effects that alcohol can have on their body, and they make their own decision based on that how much to drink and how often. It's not the government's job. To even try and repeal the new drinking laws would be a very very stupid idea.

Sources: BBC, Metro

Yes, this is absurd. But no, Devil's Kitchen, it isn't an example of them being "Little Hitlers". Under the alcohol licensing laws, all supermarkets that sell alcohol are obliged to run a scheme under which all shoppers buying alcohol who appear to be under 21 are asked for ID before they can purchase alcohol. As the penalties for selling alcohol to minors is serious - resulting in a £70 fine and potential criminal conviction for the checkout operator themselves and any supermarket who did this three times in any twelve-month period loses its ability to sell alcohol, a serious revenue cut - many supermarkets have gone for the extreme approach of requiring checkout operators to request ID for every alcohol purchase. They do this to basically cover their own arses. As you may have realised, many checkout operators [and other supermarket workers] aren't the brightest crayons in the pack.

Yes, to require ID from a man as obviously over 21 as Mr Ralls is absurd - but done simply to cover themselves. The manager's reaction appears over the top. He should have just told the checkout operator to sell him the bottles of wine. But considering the way in which Mr Ralls also appears to have reacted - such as refusing to confirm he was over 21 because it was a "stupid question" - almost certainly did not help the situation.

Yes, it is absurd. But it's not the fault of the checkout operator, or even necessarily the manager. They should have just sold him the wine - but company policy is company policy, even when it's stupid.

UPDATE: Re-reading the BBC article I have to fall even more to the supermarket staff's side - Mr Ralls refused to confirm that he was 21 by not answering the question put to him. If I am reading it correctly, he was not asked to produce ID but to answer "yes" to the question "are you over 21, sir?" - verbally confirming that he was over 21. He is quoted in the article as saying: "I wouldn't dignify the question [of whether he was over 21] with an answer." Whilst refusing to sell the wine was absurd, Mr Ralls certainly didn't help the situation. It was a very simple questions with a very simple [and obvious] answer - but an answer which he refused to give. To a certain extent he has only himself to blame.

Source: BBC

Lunatics running the asylum? No, even more absurd - school children writing their own tests.

What the hell? Let's read that again: "Pupils should mark their own classwork and decide what their school tests should cover". What? Why?

This is quite possibly the most stupid thing I have ever read. Have they actually thought it through? Obviously not.

Our education system is in enough trouble as it is right now, which the dumbing down of GCSEs and A-levels to extent where more a than a quarter of A-levels are As, and nearly one in five GCSE grades are A or A*. SO this idea really isn't going to improve confidence in the education system at all. In fact, if it ever comes into practice we might as well just give everyone an A and get it over with.

Can the idiots who devised this even remember being at school or even in education at all? Have they completely forgotten the simple fact that all school children will do anything not to work - or at least work hard. If it is the pupils themselves who pick the exam questions, A-level maths will consist of questions on the level of 2 + 2 = ?.

The QCA report said that:
That ignores the very simple fact I mentioned above - school children don't want to work. I always found this sort of "self-assessment" of work as pointless and certainly not constructive. It doesn't help to pretty much waste time going through old work - it is far more useful to get it marked and appropriate feedback written on it. The teacher then knows what areas need work. But trying to "engage learners with the quality of their work" like this is never going to work. Ever.

The dumbing down of education needs to stop and be reversed - this is going in very much the wrong direction. It truly does take us to within one step of rubber-stamping all exam papers with an A.

Source: The Telegraph