Educating Ritas, Bobs & Sues.

According to the Local Government Association Chair, Baroness Eaton, children need schools to be "safe, clean and attractive places in which they can learn."

Why? Okay, so I understand the safe bit as it can be distracting learning your times tables when someone is stabbing you - although there is research suggesting you learn things better when you are under stress - but do children really need clean and attractive places to learn?

We live in clean houses, with double glazing and central heating. Kids are kept inside to avoid them being raped and killed by paedophiles. They don't experience the dirt & germs of a normal childhood. A friend of mine used to lick the gravel in his garden as a kid, he's a healthy adult now. There was one kid with asthma in my entire school, the incidence has gone up a bit since then. Keeping kids in clean environements hasn't really helped them being healthy, I think a bit of dirt in their schools may actually help.

What point is there in making a school attractive? First of all, attractive to whom? The children, their parents or the staff? Because I doubt you're going to make anything attractive to all three of those groups. Something children find attractive - young children particularly - is likely to be life-threateningly gaudy for the teachers. Something parents find attractive is likely to be dull and disappointing to children. And something teachers find attractive is likely to be worrying to parents and scary to children.

If school is part of the way in which children are prepared for work, then schools should be dull. Classrooms lacking in stimulation should allow teachers to provide the only point of interest for children to focus on - education. You want to look at pretty walls? Go to an art gallery.

Perhaps it's my hatred of children leaking out again, but I do feel kids these days are mollycoddled and over stimulated. Part of my childhood was being bored, and I deal with being bored now much better because of it: I can make my own amusement. 13hr car trip? No worries, I can do something to amuse myself on the way. I don't need to watch a DVD or play handheld computer games to deal with the trip.

So Baroness Eaton, while I understand your attempt to grab money for schools, you may want to use a better argument.

Perhaps I'm Horrified At The Wrong Part

Read this story (the link is from the Daily Mail, I read it in the Metro) yesterday on the way to work, and couldn't work out what was bothering me about it.

The headteacher of a primary school where London Mayor Boris Johnson sends one of his children has been suspended over claims he watched pornography in his office

Having reflected on the above information, I realised that it wasn't those facts that bothered me. The story is obviously old (suspended in October last year), the reason for the suspension is obvious (pr0n at work is "bad", when your workplace is a school this is obviously doubleplus bad), and the first paragraph mention of Boris Johnson is being used to justify the exposure the story is getting now.

No, none of that bothered me.

This, bit, however, did.

Jay Henderson, 35, is awaiting the outcome of a disciplinary inquiry possibly due this week.

35?!?! Thirty fucking five? And he's the fucking headmaster? What the fuck? How? Shouldn't he only have progressed to head of year or something? How old are the rest of the teachers? Twelve?

As I said, I think I may have been horrified by completely the wrong part of this story.

Linux User Too Suspicious To Be Ignored

Rather a weird tale from Boston, where a Computer Science student has had all of his computer kit seized (and pretty much everything else he owns) and has been suspended from his job for the heinous crime of understanding Linux. The University are alleging slightly more than *just* that, but they do seem suspicious of someone who can navigate their way round a non-Windows OS.

The EFF - who is representing him - has a copy of the warrant and says

"In his application, the investigating officer asked that he be permitted to seize the student's computers and other personal effects because they might yield evidence of the crimes of "Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation" and "Unauthorized access to a computer system."

Aside from the remarkable overreach by campus and state police in trying to paint a student as suspicious in part because he can navigate a non-Windows computer environment, nothing cited in the warrant application could possibly constitute the cited criminal offenses.

There are no assertions that a commercial (i.e. for pay) commercial service was defrauded, a necessary element of any "Obtaining computer services by Fraud or Misrepresentation" allegation. Similarly, the investigating officer doesn't explain how sending an e-mail to a campus mailing list might constitute "unauthorized access to a computer system."

The Slashdot post that brought this to my attention was tagged with "Idiocracy", which sums it all up rather nicely.

No Shit, Sherlock

Apparently the UK is still an "unequal place to grow up" according to some research posted on the BBC.

To compound the "no shit" element, the report has found "success in life (is) largely determined by parents' backgrounds and earnings".

As if this alone wasn't enough of a shock, Martin Narey, chief executive of children's charity Barnardo's, said education had "not become the great leveller that many people believed it would be" and investment had "disproportionately benefited the middle classes". Which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever met a middle class parent and discussed the subject of education with them.

The report also suggests child tax credits should be available only to low-income families and that they should also have access to affordable credit such as interest-free loans. Rather than the current state of affairs where they're available to pretty much everyone, one presumes.

Thought Crime 2008

I know I'm coming to this a bit late, but I felt certain that there was no way it could progress as far as it has without someone seeing a bit of common sense. I am naive sometimes.

But first, a bit of background.

On May 16th a non Academic staff member at one of Nottingham's universities was arrested by the police. His "crime" was downloading and printing a document from the internet, for a friend of his in the Politics faculty. This document was the 'Manchester Manual' (so named because of where it was originally discovered), also known as the 'Manual of Afghan Jihad' or 'Military Studies in the Jihad [Holy War] Against the Tyrants'. To the Americans, it is known simply as the 'al Qaeda manual'.

"So," you may be thinking to yourself, "some miscreant has downloaded this for nefarious reasons from some pro-jihad website and has been caught. Good!" Well, if you are, just hold on a second. Let's have a look at which pro-jihad website the document came from, shall we?

That would be that well known sponsor of terrorism, the US Department of Justice. The document (split into four parts) is available for download here, here, here, and here. And I would heartily recommend that you do download it, if only to see if mass arrests follow. Oh, and to laugh at the phrase "undercover brother" - that reminded me of some kinda blaxploitation film.

The 'Manchester Manual' was originally obtained in April 2000 by British anti-terrorism agents and subsequently turned over to the FBI's Nanette Schumaker later that same month. It was originally the property of Nazib al Raghie (also known as Anas Al Liby to the US government) who was the equivalent of an old pensioner from the Afghan war living in retirement in Britain. At the time the manual was confiscated during a counter-terror recce operation, UK authorities were not interested in him. Neither, apparently, was the FBI and he was not arrested. Not unexpectedly, he then disappeared.

During the London ricin trial (where there was no ricin, and no crime) the defense considered the American government's description of it as "the al Qaeda manual" a manufactured title (see fourth paragraph from the end). Nowhere within the document is al Qaeda mentioned and it seems to have possibly originated in the last years of the Islamist resistance of the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan. But from time to time the Manchester manual has been used by the US government to make political points.

As part of Bush's justification for the fight on terror, whitehouse.gov links (third link under third sub-heading) to a display page for the manual at the Air University, Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base in Alabama (which seems to have gone down, probably due to the number of people trying to see what was downloaded). This page was a mirror of the John Ashcroft Department of Justice's old placeholder on the book; one which had been taken down although copies of the material still reside on its machine - and were the links given earlier.

So why did the University authorities decide not to investigate, but instead to pass the matter on to the Police? The only real grounds they had for suspecting anything to be amiss was the downloading of a book. A book which is, as I've just shown, linked to by the White House website, and available from Department of Justice servers. And a book which would be, along with similar 'manuals' from the IRA, the Nazis or the Shining Path, be a worthy document for discussion in a PhD.

Under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000, a person commits an offence if they "possesses a document or record containing information"..."of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism". The stunning vagueness of this sentence was focused dramatically in February of this year, when the Court of Appeal ruled that simple possession could not be enough for a conviction. There had to be demonstrable intent to commit terrorist acts as well.

The Times Higher Education Supplement reported on May 29 that the main accused was using the manual "as preparation for a PhD on radical Islamic groups [and] had downloaded an edited version of the al-Qaeda handbook from a site he found via Google... It is understood that [he] sent the 1,500-page document to the staff member... because he had access to a printer."

Not really a very good terrorist there, is he? Getting someone else to print the document for you, and then having the temerity to turn up and present yourself as being the person who downloaded it once the police arrived to investigate the person you'd sent it to. Your reward is potential deportation. Have a biscuit.

What the fuck is going on in this country when reading a public document - hosted by the US DOJ, ffs - constitutes a potential criminal act? I know I have invoked Godwin's Law previously by comparing Labour to the Nazis, but while the Nazis burned books, Labour seems intent on stopping anyone from discovering anything that would negate the bullshit they feed us in order to justify the removal of our civil liberties.

Fuck the Government before they fuck you. Join the Revolution.

I am the Revolution, and if there's anything left, I'd like my fucking country back.

Can You Hear Squeaking?

That would be the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) back pedalling from comments made by their own spokesman about collection of DNA from children who "exhibited behaviour indicating criminality in later life".

Gary Pugh, Scotland Yard's director of forensic services, told the Observer: "If we have a primary means of identifying people before they offend, then in the long term the benefits of targeting younger people are extremely large."

He added: "You could argue, the younger the better. Criminologists say some people will grow out of crime; others won't. We have to find who are possibly going to be the biggest threat to society."

An ACPO spokeswoman said that although they believe the National DNA Database is "an invaluable tool", they do not support DNA profiling for children. She said: "Gary Pugh has yet to take over as the ACPO lead on the National DNA Database...If Gary has expressed the views reported in the media this morning, they are his own personal views and not that of ACPO."

I can only congratulate ACPO for their decision to distance themselves from Gary Pugh's comments.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

Always nice to see in our wonderfully multi-cultural society that a group of non-elected (and probably middle class white folks) have decided that something may be offensive to Muslims. Oh, and probably offensive to builders as well.

Nice story from The Register about a digital book version of the Three Little Pigs entitled "The Three Little Cowboy Builders". Despite it having previously won "Best Primary Resource and Innovation in Education" prize at the Education Resource Awards, Becta (the government's educational technology group) explained to the publishers that they "could not recommend this product to the Muslim community".

I'm guessing it's the pigs. For fuck's sake. Can't we let the Muslim community decide for itself by seeing if they want to buy/use it? Rather than having some self appointed group of righteous twats decide it might offend them?

It's stuff like this that really irritates me. As you may have guessed.

You Fat Bastard! You Fat Bastard!

Ah, happy days listening to "Sheriff Fatman" by Carter USM. And a chant quite often sang directly at me when I was DJing. Although seeing the size of some people on the streets these days, I don't feel quite as fat as I once did. It's almost like I was ahead of the game and society has not only caught up with me, but is racing ahead.

There's recently been a report suggesting being fat is "not the fault of the individual" but was an inevitable consequence of a society in which energy-dense and cheap foods, labour-saving devices, motorised transport and sedentary work were rife. Being thin, it surmised, was a "surprise".

So you can imagine my own surprise when the Nanny^W Government decided to issue reports to any parent whose child was overweight. Because you know what'll happen next, parents will be fined. For something that's apparently not their fault. Although really, it is.

Now, I can see that the over-feeding/under-exercising of children by their parents can be tantamount to a form of child abuse. I'm not sure that fining the parents - who are probably on the lowest income and education levels and truly believe a McDonald's Children's Meal represents a nutritionally balanced value-for-money diet - is actually the way forward.

More can be achieved - in my opinion - by the introduction of free school meals, as has been muted for Scotland. Obviously they would need to be force fed to some of the kids, and I'm sure some of the parents would still try to pass bags of chips through the fence, but for me, that's the way forward.

Kids go to school - in theory anyway - to learn things. If learning what to eat in order to not get obese doesn't happen at home, then surely it should be taught in school? I'm not one for shoving more responsibilities onto teachers - I think parents should be the ones teaching moral guidance etc, but frankly take a look around you, it ain't going to happen - but bring back compulsory Home Economics lessons!

Government Dumbing Down Of Education

From the ever entertaining The Register comes a story about a Physics teacher at the end of his tether about the way Physics is taught and examined in the UK.

If you happen to have done O Level Physics in the 1980s like I did, the questions on the current paper - which he quotes on his open letter to the Department of Education - will stun you.

As the Government are the ones who set the syllabus and the ones who appoint the people who set the exams, it seems only fair to assume that it is that very same Government who are trying to dumb down the education system in this country.

Now why would that be? Little Jack, son of a middle class couple, struggles with tricky subjects like Physics and Math, but obviously he can't just be dumb as a post so there must be something wrong with the way it was taught. So let's change it. And, while we're at it, let's make it more political and/or politically correct as well.

This point is also raised by Civitas here

Dear the Government, fuck off out of the everyday lives of the population of this country. And stop trying to appeal to the middle class at every single turn.