Hair of the dog. Ha ha ha ha, cheers, sir! [ Mops sweaty brow ] Good grief! What's in this?

Sod it!! I just pressed post when I was barely done. Never mind - please ignore.

Kids enjoy learning, and it's not their fault that we have systems that make that difficult for them because basic rules of discipline and personal responsibility are now out of favour. I don't mean this to come across as antagonistic, but genuinely it seems to me that the first part of your sentence ("Kids enjoy learning") is contradicted by the second part ("basic rules of discipline and personal responsibility are now out of favour"). You can be rude all you want about public schools ... With respect, I really do not think I was being rude about public education at all. My point is that young graduates who go into teacher training after leaving university are, for the most part have a mentality and attitude, both likely born in their home and social background, that is quite different from the majority of children they are going to become responsible for teaching. I do not evenI This means that from the outset they may find it challenging to get into the mindset of students who are just not that interested and who may have very different ideas about the importance of education. This is particularly true in the UK where many newly qualified teachers find themselves sent into the worst performing state schools - an experience which research from the House of Commons shows sees them dropping out of the profession altogether within two years of qualifying. Or, as noted, they move into the independent sector not because education there is "better" but because the children, for the most part, are likely to be less disruptive on the whole (and if they are disruptive may be more likely to have parents who support the teacher, not take the side of the child).

Ersatz life.

I don’t think she was ever seen at the school again Not entirely surprising given the circumstances. Things seem to be little better now, according to a recent House of Commons report: 21.7% of newly qualified entrants to the sector in 2017 were not recorded as working in the state sector two years later. The five year out-of-service-rate for 2014 entrants was 32.6%, the highest rate during the current series, which dates back to 1997. The ten year out- of-service rate for 2009 entrants was 38.8%; this is also the highest rate since 1997 A number of these never come back, but apparently others move into private education as it's less the teaching and more the behaviour of the children that's a leading cause of driving them away (together with an excessive amount of paperwork, much of it for government data monitoring). But it’s interesting how teaching seems to attract so many people who are fundamentally ill-suited to the job. Sometimes I wonder if many if not all teachers are fundamentally ill-suited to state-funded public education almost by definition since they are graduates and therefore have a proven interest and enthusiasm for education that won't be shared or even comprehended by a good 60-70% of the children they are going to teach. The gap in mentality and understanding of what school is for in the eyes of many parents/children on the one hand and teachers on the other is likely to be so wide in some schools as to render any more traditional notions of education seem almost futile (a situation in which 'progressive' methods find a way in as the final nail in the coffin). I suspect the majority of new trainees are either naive and idealistic or else cynical and opportunistic. The former need to radically revise their expectations or else turn into something so ethereal that they are no longer affected by what's going on around them. The latter probably end up as heads of department in no time at all, and if it suits their ambitions, aggressively promote whatever is most likely to win them plaudits (such as CRT, now).

"The video includes comments that do not meet the professional standards for educators. They are inappropriate and inexcusable," While there's no question that her behaviour was completely unprofessional, I'm nonetheless a little bit uneasy on this one. If sixth-grade is for 11-12 year old children, the boy who is heard mockingly announcing "I was just trying to be annoying" has a voice that sounds remarkably deeper than you'd expect for a boy of that age. When I was at school there was a teacher who'd reputedly cried during a lesson some years before. Whether it was true or not was irrelevant - the point was, every class thereafter, including ones I was in, made a concerted and sustained effort to see if they could maker her cry again. Children, especially in this age group, can be phenomenally cruel to each other as well as to anyone in the vicinity (siblings, parents, peers, teachers). The teacher was completely unprofessional to have called him a "dick" - and that, I'm certain, is what she actually called him, only later and rather unconvincingly trying to recover it as "dip", short for "dipstick" (which is really not that much better if I think about it) - and all the other things she said. But it also apparently seems to have been this boy who alleged that the unicorn cupcakes, presented by her out of her own pocket to her students on the last day of class at the end of what has been an exceptionally challenging year for everyone, were some kind of Pride month messaging. There doesn't seem to be any reason to think that this was the intention, given how widely available unicorn cupcakes are in stores and supermarkets shelves. So yes, OK, she was in the wrong - but some of the kids out there can try the patience of a saint. Even more so when they're actively going out of their way to provoke a meltdown.

Youtuber spots flaw in a forthcoming TV show.

While quite clearly an idiot of the common-or-garden variety, I suspect Kelly is also making herself a useful one with this kind of nonsense. A conceit of Marxoids of various stripes over the best part of the last 175 years has been the assertion that Capitalism, and with it Liberal Democracy and so on, will "inevitably collapse under the weight of their own contradictions." What Kelly (and other kinds of identitarian very much in the same mould) is doing is a kind of stress test for the idea of personal freedom and individual liberty (ideals Marxoids claim are a Capitalist hoax), pushing it to such an extreme that it can't be seen as anything else as absurdly grotesque (something that logically must collapse under the weight of its own contradictions). It's as if she is saying: "OK, you say I have freedom and individual liberty in America? But do I? Unless I have the freedom to completely define myself and my own self-image howsoever I want and the freedom to change that definition and image to whatever I want whenever I want, how am I "free" to be an "individual"? You complimenting someone on losing weight shows you were already defining them under your terms, not theirs. QED - we don't have freedom and individual liberty in America! Ha!" I exaggerate for effect - but not by much. And what she's doing (unwittingly) is not stretching the ideals of personal freedom and individual liberty to their breaking point - it's just the baseless assertion that what freedom and liberty mean are indistinguishable from solipsism. Anyway, needless to say, Kelly will be as oblivious to this as she is to the toll her denial may be taking on her. But that's what makes her ideally suited to the role of ideological Kanonenfutter.

... what, exactly, were they afraid of? In news that will no doubt shock everyone around here, it seems that while the tactics of the latter-day Storm Detachment are crude, they are not altogether unsuccessful: "We're standing here telling you you're being racist, you're being offensive ... why can't you say sorry?" "Fuck white fragility! Fuck white fragility! ... Fuck Jordan Peterson! Fuck Jordan Peterson!" "Nazis and White Supremacists assaulting people at your protest - do you have any comment on that? ... Are there views in alignment with yours?" "Charles Murray, go away! Racist! Sexist! Anti-Gay!" All the more so when this Sturmabteilung, much like their predecessors, have friends in high places condoning or even endorsing the same: "Be careful. Walk lightly. We ain't playin' with you." "My intention was, to basically be an analysis of whiteness as a political ideology, as a structural power" "Racism is in the DNA of this system and no reform or no legislation can change that. Nothing short of Revolution can bring freedom"

From the website College Tuition Compare: The average tuition & fees of Yale School of Medicine is $64,024 for academic year 2020-2021. From the poster advertising the event: It is the policy of Yale School of Medicine, Continuing Medical Education, to ensure balance, independence, objectivity and scientific rigor in all its educational programs. From the event: [White people] suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil [ ... ] White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time [ ... ] We keep forgetting that directly talking [to white people] about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain.

Is there a word for something that has the power to shock while simultaneously being completely predictable? Need to to describe 90% of replies to this post. (Awful lot of pronouns on display). Unrelated: I’m here to interview the cast of Channel 4’s new musical comedy, a six-part series following the exploits of an anarchic all-female, all-Muslim punk band setting out to make some noise [ ... ] The series is loosely based on screenwriter Nida Manzoor’s own life navigating the diverse creative collectives of London. Makes me wonder what the qualifications are for becoming a producer at Channel 4 (UK).

I'd forgotten about this ... God help us, there’s more. It's a well that never runs dry.

*Now with functioning comments. Thought the patrons seemed unnaturally quiet this morning, save for Muldoon of course. Pour one for yourself and pop this behind the bar, would you? In his new book Fake History, the anti-Brexit firebrand Otto English [ ... ] explains, history “has been written by white males, about white males, for white males”. You'll no doubt be simply shocked and amazed to discover that this gentleman here is the very same 'Otto English' who so fulminates against everything white and male. Fake History is one of the worst books about history I’ve ever read [ ... ] It’s so shoddy, so abject I feel a bit guilty even writing about it, like a grown man punching a toddler. Yet it’s important not to let it go. Indeed.

What mobile phones dream about when they're on charge.

Imagine how Disney will make the wokest Indiana Jones movie ever. If you come to rely extensively on woke lefties as writers and storytellers, the people you’re hiring may be accustomed to being applauded for mouthing a patchwork of attitudes that’s internally incoherent and which will shift according to fashion Critical Drinker hits the nail on the head there. What with Ford being 80, at best he'll have to be in a walk on part as some kind of Bosley figure to a trio of suitably diverse Charlie's Anthropologists. And yes I know that is obviously mixing different films, but that doesn't make it any less likely. And I also know Jones was an archeologist, not an anthropologist, but since the former will no doubt be recast as an insensitive imperialist coloniser I wouldn't be surprised at all to discover that there will be a subplot with a twist which involves them liberating museum pieces and putting them back where they belong in some kind of supposedly ironic table-turning. Naturally, Jones will be presented as some crotchety dry-as-dust old fart, a patriarchal gatekeeper trying to constrain their brilliance, and therefore (ironically) erasing the memory of Marion Ravenwood from the first movie and how she was no shrinking violet but a single woman entrepreneur who could drink macho Mongolians under the table, who packed a mean right hook, and who wasted no time in planning an escape from the French guy. And since Jones is famous for fighting Nazis it does make me wonder whether the new enemy will, in fact, be Middle American Christian fundamentalist MAGA hat wearers, who are also secretly White Supremacists, who have a plan to steal some ancient relic that will help them bring about the Republic of Gilead for real. If it doesn't end up being any of those things, I am pretty sure they will have been tabled at a production meeting at some point. They are, after all, nothing if not drearily predictable.

Unforeseen events. Another kind of unforeseen event. The victim of the unforeseen event - Nahiem "Abu Layth" Ajmal, has been described as'a “voice of moderate Islam”'. His opponents are already spreading disinformation on social media, suggesting he was attacked for being a pedophile. And speaking of still more unforeseen events - the young men in cars festooned with Palestinian driving around Jewish neighbourhoods in North London threatening to "Fuck their daughters" and "Rape their daughters" in order to "send a message" to British Jews turn out to have driven in a convoy all the way from Bradford. A very specific form of threat not entirely without precedent or interest.

If Columbo were anime. You shouldn't really need Columbo for this: a lingering mystery solved Part 1, Part 2.

Early this morning ... I would have been face down in the bushes at that time. On the bright side, I did stumble across this from Douglas Murray while I was trying to extricate myself from the foliage: In the book publishing industry 100% of respondents in the survey identify as being on the left, the sort of echo chamber that even academia can only look at with envy. bewildered and peevish middle-class Labour supporters, all basically berating those they clearly regard as their social inferiors Neatly summed up here.

[ Starts thrashing bushes with stick. ] Still thought it was last night so was on my way home, but might as well come back in as the sun's past the proverbial yardarm. Does it make me a bad person that I can't stop gut-laughing at things like this, this, and this not to mention also this? (I wouldn't mind, but, to put it mildly, I don't even like Boris Johnson - I just think it's absolutely hilarious watching the more pompous and narcissistic Twitterati blame absolutely everyone and everything under the Sun rather than look in the mirror or actually, for once, listen to how they must actually sound to other people.)

Bookstore of note Nocturnal sights Shadows in the sky There's so much ugliness about these days, but these three, not one, but three, were really quite uplifting ... not a word to often feature in my vocabulary.

[E]xperience and common sense don’t stop the many educational idealists from dreaming of a land that allows children to be truly “creative”, unfettered by old-fashioned subject disciplines with their utilitarian exams, unchecked by pernicious, untrusting inspections, free of all those “damaging” reports that seek to put a grade on ability ... As is well-known, from Scotland to the United States, Finland has been the poster-child for an education system flying in the face of "experience and common sense". Demand to learn their secret success was so high that many started charging just to walk through their doors. They're quick these Finns! But since 2013 Finland has moved from A* to C- in the PISA league, and in the last PISA report of 2018, the country has slipped back in every category, and nowhere more so than in the reading gap between boys and girls which is greater now in Finland than in any other PISA country. Oh, dear. Never mind. No doubt that wasn't "real" creativity and progressivism after all. Full article on the fading love affair with Finnish schools here. It includes some choice quotes from Hannah Arendt, too, from 1954: “[C]onservatism, in the sense of conservation, is of the essence of the educational activity, whose task is always to cherish and protect something — the child against the world, the world against the child, the new against the old, the old against the new.” And “The problem of education,” Arendt wrote, “lies in the fact that by its very nature it cannot forgo either authority or tradition, and yet must proceed in a world neither structured by authority nor held together by tradition.”

What? Oh yes. I've heard of people stuffing bras and jock straps for that ... fuller look. But asses? I must have missed the memo on that one ...

Laurie Penny has really let herself go. You know I had quite forgotten she even existed. So prompted by something like nostalgia to see what you meant, I came across this: My Highly Unexpected Heterosexual Pandemic Zoom Wedding So, at the age of 35, Laurie Penny has got herself married. And not just married, but married to a man, just the one, ad not one part of a polyamorous huddle or whatever they call it. An actual man, not a transman, a biological male; one noticeably taller than herself in that traditional could-be-mistaken-for-patriarchal male-female, husband-wife dynamic. And in a ceremony involving a traditional exchange of wedding vows (from the article: '...“by the power vested in me by the state of Utah, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”'). The only thing "highly unexpected" about this is that she seems to think this state of affairs would be seen as highly unexpected to anyone at all instead of being, as it is, drearily predictable. Who did she think she was convincing with those regular announcements of her being genderqueer, or polyamorous, or nonbinary polyamorous toaster-kin or whatever it was that month? And this is why I'm bringing this up at all. If it were just that she had got married, this would be a kind of 'So what? Just let her be'. But it irks me because Penny, and all those activists cut from the same cloth, not only never express the slightest regret for having berated others in the most insulting, the shrillest and most blood-curdling tones, even up to and including accusations that you are literally killing them for not accepting whatever gibberish they happen to think is in vogue that day, but they always just laugh off all their hypocrisies with a kind of "Oh, well, Tee-hee, oh, you didn't think I was being serious did you?" kind of shrug. All that venom, all that vitriol, they drenched you in with such vehemence turns out, apparently, to have meant next to nothing to them at all. And moreover, they seem to display ingenuous surprise should you still seem aggrieved at them for having put you through all that tortuous bullshit. Without any irony, naturally, this is an actual line taken from her piece, but with my italics: THE MOST DEVIANT commodity on the modern internet isn’t sex, it’s sincerity. By definition, it can’t be manufactured, and it’s difficult to replicate and resell, both of which make earnest enthusiasm suspect. As ever, I see she's still telling us far, far more than she intends.

Dumb as a Box of Rocks™: Chicago cops may soon need permission before chasing a suspect on foot Bree Newsome, a self-described writer, producer, activist, artist and consultant, expands an already full résumé to include total fuckwit - succeeds.

(Off topic - one for an upcoming Friday)