Old age hair annoyances

The grey hair I can cope with - at least it hasn't fallen out. It's the surplus that gets me. Eyebrow hair used to know when to stop growing. Now there's at least fourteen that don't. Is this follicle Alzheimer's or something? Then there's the nasal hair, apparently suffering from the same condition. What the fuck is that for, exactly? What evolutionary purpose does it serve? None, as far as I can see.

Hire ex-soldiers as teachers, says union

From the Scotsman:

"Retired soldiers should be recruited as teachers to improve discipline in Scotland's schools, according to a teaching union official.

An American scheme has inspired the idea proposed by the NASUWT to tackle the "war zone characteristics" of some classrooms and turn "troops into teachers".

Roy Robertson, secretary of the union's Clackmannanshire branch, who served in the Territorial Army for more than 20 years, said he had seen violence in the playground escalate from "a bit of kicking" to "smashing someone's head into the ground".

I have to say, some of my colleagues seem to be struggling to get the whole military/school life-balance thing organised in their brains properly. First there was the frankly juvenile motion adopted by the NUT favouring a ban on military presentations in schools. But this is over-compensating a tad, to say the least. It's probably superfluous to reproduce them but the following reasons why this is a potty idea occurred to me:

1) Instead of drawing ideas from an American scheme, mightn't it be an idea to have a look at some countries that don't actually have schools that are so mental you have to call in the troops? Just a thought.

2) The military is definition a social arena where civil rights are suspended. So while the idea of court marshals for errant pupils might be emotionally desirable, it really isn't appropriate, is it? It's rather a school-boy error, rather than a teacher's one, to fail to identify weakness in school discipline as a failure of civil society.

3) It's not that I can't appreciate that things like expertise in the use of weaponry and hand-to-hand combat would be both fun and helpful in the classroom environment. It's just that we wouldn't be allowed to use either of these skills. Meanwhile, because what is taken for granted is so often forgotten, it's worth remembering that while good discipline is an essential prerequisite, it helps if teachers actually know stuff and can communicate said stuff. Skill in the former, indifference to the latter: this is no basis on which to judge whether someone is suitable for teaching.

Sex-addict Tory peer, Lord Laidlaw, gives £1m to charity

This would be a charity to help people like Lord Laidlaw himself who are suffering from this terrible affliction:

"One of the Conservative Party’s richest donors is to give £1 million to help people who become obsessed with sex, after he admitted to battling against a sexual addiction throughout his adult life."

You wouldn't have thought someone could reach the age of 65 and still be such a stranger to the human condition. Being 'obsessed with sex' isn't an illness you need therapy for, you dumb tax-dodging parasite. Who isn't obsessed with sex? Nature demands it, does she not? What the 'sex-addicted' are suffering from that the rest of us aren't is rather the opportunity. Like this sort of thing, for example:

"The [News of the Screws] reported that he paid for groups of prostitutes to fly to Monte Carlo, where he lives as a tax exile, for allnight parties at the luxury Hermitage Hotel. Some of the women used cocaine during the parties, although Lord Laidlaw did not."

Because even on those occasions where good sense cannot restrain the goat within us all, the slide into ruin is nevertheless never quite so dramatic - largely on account of the fact that this kinda shit is rather beyond our means.

I blame the teachers, myself

This is for me the picture of the month, nay, year...



Via

Parties and their leaders

There's lots of stuff about Brown and why he's so crap. Having gone from a coronation applauded, for the most part, by Labour-leaning journalists, the present buckets of refuse being poured on him from a great height is almost enough to make one feel rather sorry for our Gordon. Almost, I stress - but Andrew Rawnsley had a good point, I thought:

"It is a common and very human delusion. If only I could change one thing about me, so people say to themselves, my life would be transformed. If only I could get a new wife/husband/job/breast size/head of hair/house, then everything would be wonderful.

Just as human beings fall prey to this delusion, so too do political parties. When life seems bleak and miserable, the single thing they yearn to change is their leader. This delusion was one of the main reasons why Labour MPs forced Tony Blair to leave Number 10 earlier than he wanted to go. By poetic symmetry, this delusion is now one of the main reasons why Gordon Brown is coming under so much pressure and attack from within his own ranks.

When they waved goodbye to Tony Blair, far too many Labour people were under the misapprehension that he would take most, if not all, of the government's problems and unpopularity with him.
[...]
They had forgotten their history, one lesson of which is that the party itself has never been all that popular.(Emphasis added.)

Too true - and by no means confined to the Labour party. I'm wondering if it could be counted as a general rule - that when political parties start to think that the electorate are like them, they are - to use the technical term - fucked.

We saw it with the Tories under Major, deluding themselves that what would really float the electorate's boat was someone as hardline Eurosceptic, small statist, tough on foreigners, tough on the causes of foreigners, as many of them were. They had to go through William Hague, IDS and Michael Howard before the penny dropped.

Now it's Labour's turn; they did it under Blair and now under Brown. In another Brown-related post, Peter Ryley identifies part of the problem in the way that parties target swing-voters. A fair point in the context he uses it - but what strikes me is the way in which parties, when they're going through these phases of deluding themselves that people like them so much more than their leaders, have an impressive ability to completely ignore the polling evidence.

This is Brown's problem. Not so much his apparent inability, according to his fans, to let his 'true values' shine forth. It's worse than that. Even if he managed to do this, I doubt it would help him one iota. I'm repeating myself but the problem with Gordon's groupies is that they confused being Scottish and grumpy with social democracy. Brown is culturally Labour to his finger tips - Scottish Labour at that. This is the Labour that promotes and rewards, not according to merit or need, but based on calculations that are estimates of past loyalties and perceived betrayals - almost emptied as it is of any ideology. It is the reason, in case it escaped anyone's attention, that we have what seems to me to be about the weakest Cabinet in living memory - and I'm not sure even the history books could yield a weaker one. This is the sort of Labour that Scottish voters rejected in favour of the nationalists - even though a majority of us do not favour independence. (Maybe some day an English commentator will get this, but I won't hold my breath.)

What to do? I'd doubt getting rid of Brown would do them much good - it certainly wouldn't reflect very well on a party that gave him a coronation just under a year ago. Just like getting rid of the frankly useless Wendy Alexander wouldn't reflect very well on the Scottish party having given her an, um, coronation under a year ago. You'll be detecting a pattern here.

Labour members, Labour die-hards - if you listen carefully, you can just hear them muttering about loyalty, asking who's side I'm on, the usual shit. Yours. This is why I feel bound to point this out: the problem is you, comrade, the problem is you.