Tonight is an unusual night...

....because I think I'm going to sit down and watch television, something I've managed not to do for weeks now. I'm going to be watching this:

 

If you've never heard of it, Summerhill is a school in Sussex which is famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for not making its pupils attend lessons. In fact they don't make the kids do anything. This would have been fine but for the fact that their exam results were rather above the national averages. One can imagine the horror with which this was greeted by the bureaucracy. The result of all this was that the schools inspectorate tried to have them closed down, a battle from which the school has only recently emerged the victor.

Worth a look, I would have thought. 

Update:

Well, that was rather fun. It came across to me as one of the most subversive pieces of television I've seen in a long time. (This may not be saying much, I suppose, given how little time I spend in front of the goggle-box, but you get my drift). I might even go so far as to call it libertarian in outlook.

I wonder if the Beeb knew what they were getting when they bought it? 

Because of the unique way it is funded....

...the BBC will mot bother to check its facts.

Auntie Beeb has excelled herself today, with a rather unsubtle attempt to libel the entire home education community as child molestors. They've done a stealth edit to cover their tracks, but via the Google cache, here is the original piece.

 

 The key section is this:

Judith Gillespie, of the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, was worried that there was not register of youngsters withdrawn from school.

She cited a case involving five-year-old Danielle Reid, who was murdered by her mother's partner in Inverness in 2002.

A report into the case found the authorities had lost track of the youngster when her mother withdrew her from school.

As far as this goes these statements are true, but there is no connection with home education whatsoever. According to the independent report into Danielle's death, her mother claimed that the family were moving to Manchester. This is why Danielle was taken out of school. Quite how Judith Gillespie can attempt to make make a link with HE is beyond me. It looks like a rather transparent attempt to smear a lot of innocent people.

Dangerous ideas

Donald Clark points out to a short video at the TED site which is well worth a look. Donald summarises the ideas behind the lecture from Gever Tulley entitled "Five dangerous things you should let your kids do":

1. Play with fire – basic and necessary – intake, combustion and exhaust – a laboratory.
2. Own a pocket knife – powerful and empowering tool – extended sense of self – keep it sharp, cut away from body, never force it.
3. Throw a spear – our brains are wired to throw things – visual acuity, 3D understanding – analytical and physical skills.
4. Deconstruct appliances – don’t throw out the dishwasher – take it apart first. Figure out what the parts do and how it works.
5. Drive a car. Let them drive with you in control. Find a big empty space. Fun for the whole family!

Here's the video in full.

Quote of the day

Dr Crippen, the mastermind behind the best medical blog there is, has emerged from hibernation and is straight back into his stride, with a comment from a Professor of Paediatrics of his acquaintance:

“You know, if I were suddenly taken ill, I would be terrified to be admitted to a British NHS Hospital.”

Very amusing

If you need cheering up after the last posting, see this at Guido's.

Whither multiculturalism?

Bishop Nazir-Ali has set the cat among the pigeons today, by mentioning the I-word in less than flattering terms. He says that moslems are trying to set up no-go areas for non-believers. This claim has brought on the usual spluttering outrage from the political classes and the commentariat.

The BBC has rolled out its standard crisis management technique of packing interviews with people who oppose the prevailing views. The new, fluffier-than-thou Tories have been falling over themselves in their eagerness to be seen to say the correct thing, with the Willy Hague declaring that he knows of no such no-go areas.

Over at Pickled Politics, guest poster Rumbold says that the Bishop is just stirring up trouble. "Scaremongering" Rumbold says, and condemns the Bishop for not identifying these no-go areas.

Helpfully though, the Pub Philosopher has pointed us to a report that seems to back the Bishop's claim. Written by the former race relations adviser in Bradford, it documents how sharia areas have been set up in that city. The Philosopher also relates a couple of other horror stories along the same lines.

Throughout all this opinionating, I get the overriding sense that very few people actually want to address this issue - it does seem that there is genuinely a problem. Certainly those doing the criticising are very keen to condemn the Bishop and rather less keen to look into his claims first. Meanwhile those who are standing behind his Grace are not exactly bursting to tell us their proposed solutions to the problem.

I'm sure the denial on the one hand and the reticence on the other is a symptom of exactly the same thing. Which is a belief that if the Bishop is right then the only solution will involve ethnic cleansing and/or civil war. (And for the avoidance of doubt, I'm accusing nobody of actually supporting such a policy - I'm saying that there are some people who think we better do nothing for fear of starting a civil war, and there are others who think we'd better do something because if we don't we could end up with one anyway).

There. I said it.

We are almost certainly at a fork in the multicultural road we've been driving down these last fifty years, and one of those forks is signposted "Strife and Disaster", without doubt. To go down this road we can adopt policies of repatriating moslems or closing down mosques, and some of us would undoubtedly come out of the ensuing maelstrom in one piece, but very few people actually want this.

Of course we can just do nothing - continue to deny the existence of the problem and to condemn anyone who tries to talk about it. But that is just another road to the same destination. Let's not go there.

There is another way we might try though. A way that is impeccably liberal, although it would be hard for those on the left to swallow.

Stop subsidising multiculturalism. Stop supporting it. Put and end to the succour that the state gives to those who want to divide society rather than to unite it. We must create economic incentives for people to integrate into mainstream society. Standing squarely in the way of doing this is the whole ghastly panoply of "liberal-left" nannying legislation. This all has to go: scrap the race relations acts, tear up the hate speech acts, stop funding translators for immigrants and give them English lessons instead. Etcetera.

If someone doesn't want to employ a moslem, that's his business. But a moslem who finds his requirement to pray at inconvenient times is affecting his employability might just be willing to compromise with mainstream culture, and compromise is the start of integration. He's not forced to compromise, of course, but neither should he be able to force mainstream culture to compromise with him.

Mutual agreement. Liberalism.

We should remind ourselves too that this is just the policy proposed by Trevor Phillips of the CRE who has called for multiculturalism to be scrapped. It is striking how silent everyone has been on this subject since it was proposed in the wake of the 7/7 bombings in 2004. Shall we dust the ideas off and look at them again.

It might not work, of course. It may be that there is now a sufficiently large body of unintegrated moslems in this country that they can operate without the mainstream culture. We would in fact have brought about the balkanisation of this country.

But, for all the reasons above, let's hope not.  

Patient power

There's a wonderfully Orwellian article in the Times today:

Brown promises more patient power in vision for NHS of the future.

Great. I'm all in favour of patient power - you know, being able to choose where and when and by whom you are treated. 

Tell me more. I'm all ears.

The Prime Minister unveiled his vision for the future of the NHS, in which he said patients would take greater responsibility for monitoring their own health, for delaying the onset of illness, and for helping to direct their own treatment when they did become unwell.

So by patient power, he means doing work that was previously done by doctors yourself, and for free as well. 

Wouldn't "DIY healthcare" be a better description? 

Greens massacring the environment (Part 253)

A small update to what is becoming a regular feature on these pages - still more trashing of the environment by environmentalists.

This time it's the RSPB who have been doing their darndest to make this green and pleasant land just a little bit greyer and duller.

The populations of falcons, kites and eagles have increased sharply in the wake of reintroduction programmes and improvements in their environments. But now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has discovered that their success is leading to a decline in ground nesting birds such as the grey partridge, one of the most endangered birds in the UK, the capercaillie, the black grouse and its red cousin.

Will they apologise to all the gamekeepers they've been prosecuting?

Food prints

Following on from the previous post, Greenie Watch points us to an article at ICWales which wants us to think about something called food prints.

While buying food produced locally can cut down on carbon emissions used to transport the goods from their country of origin, the benefits may be counteracted by the “food print” of plants grown in greenhouse conditions.

The term is the latest buzzword used to describe the environmental impact of certain types of food production.

But while a carbon footprint refers to the emissions used to transport food across the world, a “food print” describes the amount of land needed to supply a person’s nutritional needs for a year.

So, there is something called the carbon footprint which kind of encapsulates the energy cost and maybe something of the global warming externality. Now there is the food print which sort of encapsulates the land cost. You might say it's all a bit confusing.

But talking about all these different footprints has given me an idea. Let's have a measure which actually encapsulates all the costs associated with production of something. You know - the energy cost, the labour cost, the transport, the raw materials, the taxes, the overheads. Everything. We could even add in the financing cost! That way we've missed nothing and we know that when we assess what the best way of of producing something, we really are working out the most efficient way of making it.

We'll call it "THE PRICE". And hey - if we charge consumers THE PRICE, they'll be incentivised to go for the most efficient, and therefore the most environmentally friendly option! Wow!! I really think I'm on to something here!

Do you think it'll catch on?   

It wasn't me guv!

Greenpeace biodiversity campaigns manager Andy Tait has a piece up at Comment is Free in which he tells us that the government has got it wrong on biofuels.

We are being sold a pup by governments and by the biofuels industry: a solution to climate change that actually risks making the problem worse.

Bravo Andy. You might also have pointed out to your readers that this is the problem with measuring carbon footprints rather than the full economic cost of something. The carbon footprint is just one cost among many, many different costs (and a small one at that). Unless you take them all into account you end up taking very silly decisions. This is why biofuels are not only associated with destruction of biodiversity but also with causing riots in Mexico and starvation in the third world. It's also why the track record of environmentalists has been to damage the environment rather than to enhance it. But hey-ho it keeps the activists off the streets.

It's also instructive to look at some of Greenpeace's earlier pronouncements on biofuels.

• Greenpeace today welcomed the Government’s announcement on a mandatory sales target for biofuels as a small step in the right direction. (link)
• When biomass is used to generate energy in an efficient and sustainable way, it has a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and we strongly supports this. (link)
  

To be clear, they have caveated some of their support with requirements that the production should be environmentally sustainable, but one has to wonder whether they were really so daft as to think that there was a great deal of spare land around that could be converted to biofuels production.

Actually scrub that, of course they were that daft.

It will be interesting to see if Greenpeace will now adopt a position of outright opposition to biofuels. I rather think a veil will quietly be drawn over the whole embarrassing affair. 

An American's home is not his castle

If you thought the frontiers of nanny statism were to be found in this country, you might have to think again. In Sacramento, the Californian state authorities are proposing that new homes should have thermostats which can be remote controlled by the local power company (which will obviously jump to the tune of the aforementioned Californian state authorities).

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a "programmable communicating thermostat" or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes' central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision.  Each PCT will be fitted with a "non-removable " FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose.  During "price events" those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes.  During "emergency events" the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

Original link via NC Media Watch 

Plus ca change.....

....plus c'est la meme chose.

Jock Coats, commenting on the previous post, says that he's sticking with the LibDems as he believes they are becoming more liberal.

Meanwhile, Eaten by Missionaries notes that Nick Clegg's first act as leader of the LibDems is to propose banning something. (Advertising directed at children, since you ask).

Libertarian party

The have been rumblings in the liberal parts of the UK blogosphere ahead of the impending arrival of a Libertarian party.

A new website went live on January 1st and a forum has been set up. I've been in two minds about LPUK, as it potentially splits the libertarian support over even more parties than it does at present. You can find people who think of themselves as libertarian in the Tories, LibDems, as well as UKIP. Throw in the Liberal Party and the Classical Liberals and you potentially have a terminally split party.

But with the Tories and the LibDems seemingly irredeemably statist and the others unlikely to reach the dizzy heights of "also-rans", I think a libertarian party might not be a bad idea, if only to draw attention to liberal ideas.

Let's see how it goes. 

Still startling

I'd actually read this before, but it's still pretty startling. In Scottish schools, sex education lessons are mandated, but contraception may not be mentioned.

I keep thinking that there ought to be a website to collate all the truly jaw-dropping examples of the way the state "looks after" us. If only there were more hours in the day.

(Via DK - sweary alert)

Learning difficulties

Comment is Free has a stark staring bonkers article by someone called Chris Hallam who is calling for smoking to be outlawed.

Ultimately, the ban [on smoking in public places] enacted on July 1 should not be the end of the legislative process but the beginning. The months and years to come should witness a wealth of legislation enacted by the government leading towards one ultimate goal: the abolition of smoking, whether public or private, throughout the land, forever.

You would have thought that after the chaos of the war on drugs and prohibition in the 1930s people would have learned that banning things has unintended and very unpleasant consequences. Mr Hallam obviously feels that tobacco smuggling gangs having gunfights on every street corner is a reasonable price to pay so he doesn't have to sully his nostrils with a whiff of tobacco smoke. Some people just never learn.

Where do they manage to get half-wits like this from? He calls himself a "freelance writer and researcher", although a Google on his name fails to turn up a single example of anything he has written before. He does seem to advise the Joseph Rowntree Trust, however. Which probably explains a lot.

My reading of it is that the bright writers were all on holiday so the Graun thought they'd get in some poor benighted soul with learning difficulties and a list to the left and give them their fifteen minutes of fame.

Well, your time is up Mr Hallam.

Goodbye.