More news reports.
Hurrah for the USA!
Delightful TV footage this morning of Bear Stearns executives in handcuffs, charged with fraud and misleading investors. Charged with not communicating the true risks of the sub-prime market. They moved their own money to safety whilst keeping everybody else in ignorance of the fact that the economic and financial shit was about to hit the fan.
Will the British authorities now follow this excellent example? Don’t hold your breath. Do keep a clothes peg handy for when the stench gets really bad.
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Jerry Springer, a token American on Question Time last night, was supposed to give his views on the Irish rejection of the new EU treaty. He spoke of the international forces at work in the world, and the power of multi-national corporations and international finance, and the need for greater internationalism.
Presumably he’s very aware of what it feels like to be part of a liberal minority in a country that’s constantly bombarded by strident neo-conservative propaganda, and he sees the need for decent people throughout the world to make common cause in resisting the machinations of the fat cats, the war mongers and the crazed power-mad politicians who currently rule the planet.
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“Software is my primary contribution to the world.” - Bill Gates on his retirement from the chairmanship of Microsoft in order to concentrate on running his charitable foundation and giving away his $60 billion fortune to good causes. Hurrah for Bill and Microsoft!
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17 teenage girls in a high school in the States formed ‘a pact’ to get pregnant. Well it’s better than our teenagers forming pacts to commit suicide, though still pretty worrying from the point of view of their levels of emotional and spiritual intelligence.
The Targets Culture #1
Ken Jones of the Association of Police Officers is calling for the abolition of government targets for the police, and for giving the police more independence so that decisions can be made locally, where priorities and operations ought to be managed.
There is said to be resistance to the move from “officials in Whitehall”. Well of course there is.
Fair enough for Ken Jones to say that those police forces that are doing well should be given ‘foundation status’ and allowed to direct their own efforts, subject to local scrutiny. Why can’t he see that it’s the police forces that are in many cases understandably unable to reach centrally imposed targets - and are having their efforts to fight crime hampered by remote civil servants and politicians and their unreasonable demands - that most need to be free of the targets culture and encouraged to demonstrate their competence to manage themselves and take decisions at the local level?
The Targets Culture #2
“The government has been warned that many of the schools it is threatening to close in England and Wales are actually doing well.” - Lead story on BBC1 and Radio 4 today.
More than a quarter of the schools that are missing their targets and are therefore being threatened with closure by a government that sees them as failing, actually have Ofsted reports that say they are good or outstanding.
What these schools, and teachers’ union officials, are apparently failing to notice is that whilst their last Ofsted report may have been very positive, their next Ofsted inspection team will arrive there and pay little or no attention to what goes on in the school, even if the quality of the teaching has been monitored and assessed as 60% good or better, and will concentrate more or less exclusively on the recent test and exam data and how it matches against the government targets and ‘expectations’.
Christine Blower is the NUT’s acting general secretary. This morning she pointed out that two thirds of the schools on the government’s list of schools facing closure have been graded as satisfactory, and a third of them were actually described by Ofsted as good or outstanding in their last inspection.
She made the point that public humiliation and destabilisation is not the way to improve schools. So the interviewer raised the issue of exam success, and how crucial that is in our society. I was crying out for Christine to point out that the key issues are pupil progress, sometimes from very depressed starting points, and the unreasonableness of arbitrary targets for children aged 11 and 16. These are what really matter.
Ms Blower said that publishing a list of threatened schools is unhelpful and demoralising. Jim Knight (for it was he) said the government had not published a list! “We are determined to tackle failure - we’ve set a benchmark”. What a fuckwit.
The twat blames local newspapers for publishing lists and for branding schools as failures if they get less than 30%! And who is it, Jim, that’s been banging the drum about schools failing if they score less than 30% A -Cs? Not you, by any chance? How fucking dim can you get?
“There’s a whole range of things we can do to help those schools that are persistently stuck”, says Jim. So why haven’t they been doing them these past 10 years?
Jim’s threatening to turn ‘failing’ secondary schools into Academies. 27 of the schools on the list are already ‘Academies’!
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Why don’t people feel happy, and more content? So asks Tom Harris MP, in his blog, according to Radio 4. Duh!
http://tomcharris.wordpress.com/about/
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And finally . . .
A police helicopter has been ‘attacked’ by aliens in a UFO, which was described as ‘flying- saucer shaped’. I’d love to be around if and when the arrests are made. How to caution an alien? Finding a translator could be a problem. Oxzen says: Bust These Aliens.
Personally I’m keen to see more police helicopters up there spotting the local crims, running them to ground and bringing them to book. For scratching my car, for starters.
Presumably the Bush response would be to launch a War On Aliens, instead of just setting out to arrest the perpetrators.
Could these aliens be irresponsible teenage joyriding aliens, out of their parents’ control, buzzing helicopters for fun? They probably hot-wired and stole a UFO: I can’t imagine any grown-up adult alien behaving like this. Surely mature aliens who are sophisticated enough to build interplanetary and intergalactic spacecraft can’t have the emotional intelligence of a demented hoodie?
Maybe we need targets for apprehending aliens in unlicensed and uninsured UFOs. For taking and driving UFOs without permission. For the reckless and dangerous driving of UFOs. A target of 1 would be good.
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The Chief Rabbi, Jonathan Sachs, was on Thought For Today again. I love this man. He was talking about the amazing capacity of humans for inventiveness and self-healing, giving the recent example of a man afflicted by cancer whose body had been able to heal itself, thanks to the inventiveness of scientists who had injected him with millions of clones of his own cancer-fighting cells.
He pointed out that being healthy isn’t freedom from being ill - it’s the ability to recover or heal what’s been harmed. A cure often lies within ourselves, if only we know where to look.
An extension of this thought is that it’s the responsibility of parents, teachers, writers and artists to show young people where to look in order to cure themselves of mental, emotional and spiritual sickness. But is this currently on the school curriculum, or done in any meaningful or determined way within our schools, thanks to the target-setting and academic testing culture?
Another interesting thought of the Rabbi is that Creole is Pidgin English plus grammar, and is a language invented by young people. I’d never really thought about that, any more than I’d thought about the innate, instinctual human ability to create and to learn languages, and the instinctual ability of animals to communicate in various ways. Time to get back to reading Chomsky.
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There was a guy on Radio 4 today talking about his new book which describes the disgusting attitudes and behaviour of City Boys - the scumbags who work in the City of London and manage its citadels. What’s interesting about his book’s ‘revelations’ regarding the total lack of morals and ethics of people like hedge fund managers and their lackeys is that we know this stuff already.
We know very well that the bonus culture, and the greed that drives it, is responsible for the materialism, the casino mentality and the willingness to take massive risks with other people’s money. We know that these people are corrupt and corrupting. We know that these people are drugged up little shits and predatory and drunken hard-faced old bastards.
The only interesting thing here is why we think this is revelatory news, and what might now happen as a result of our awareness of the way our national life is being fucked up by these bastards, by the ‘credit crunch’, the bonus culture, bank runs, insolvency, bankruptcy, government bail-outs and the mountain of debt that so many poor suckers have been conned and nudged into taking on. Answer - nothing at all.
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Peter Carey on Desert Island Discs this morning was talking about Bob Dylan, and what a genius he is. Yes indeed. It’s been a privilege to have lived a lifetime in parallel with His Bobness, and to have experienced his incredible musical output as the years rolled by. Rolling Thunder indeed.
Peter chose Thunder On The Mountain from Modern Times, and Idiot Wind from Blood On The Tracks as two of his discs: the first time I’ve heard anyone on DID choose more than one Dylan track.
Coincidentally this week I made myself a CD of Bob tracks from 1990 onwards. There are many compilations of early and middle period Dylan, but none that I know of that are just tracks from the most recent 20 years.
Bob is an artist par excellence. He reflects the world and the human condition as it really is, and doesn’t tell you what to think or to feel. It’s the enlightenment, the insights, the wisdom, the provocation, the iconoclasm and the humour that matter, that can make a difference to millions of people that the man will never even meet.
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Whilst the majority of this blog, and indeed most of my blogs, might seem to suggest that this government needs to fuck off and die, I have to say I was impressed with David Miliband on the Today programme, speaking about Europe and foreign affairs - just as I was impressed with him when I heard him speak to a conference a few days after he was rushed into the post of Secretary of State for education. I just hope he never gets to be the party leader, and has to stop being something of a real person, and stop being something of a real thinker.
I’m worried about this man, who, for all his inexperience is clearly very bright and able, and seems to have some measure of understanding of the world and its affairs, and some perspective. So far he’s resisted pressure from people to throw his hat into the leadership ring, but he might still come to feel that to do so at some stage would be a noble pursuit. Don’t do it, David. Stay grounded and stay real.
You’re not a Blair psychopath/android. Carry on enjoying life - you’re still very young. Yes, you’re a lot more able than your half-wit colleagues in the cabinet, but so what? Have a bash at Chancellor and Home Secretary, or shadow those posts, and a decade or so down the road will be time enough to become party leader. Just learn to put up with whoever does it in the meantime.
Your time will surely come, and if you still have your wits and your sense of the absurd, and your energy and commitment, then that will be the right time. And if a twat like Blair can do it, and a man with height issues like Sarkozy, then so can you.
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