'Nother Solent

All can have prizes, I don't mind.

Belatedly, I'd like to respond to Ben Sheriff's criticism of this old post of mine. [FUTZ! Internal link stopped working when archives updated on Sunday. Just click the man himself: he quotes all you need to know.] He thinks I'm too mean to hard-working but limited students. Actually, I did once, and with fair success, teach remedial maths and English and I was always careful to guard the pride of my students. What I objected to in the letter was the nonsensical and demeaning assumption that an F was as good as an A. It is not (although the F student may be as good a person as the A student), and that hard fact of life is better learned early.

It was said in the old days that noblemen only learned one art well, that of horsemanship. That was because "the brave beast is no flatterer and will as readily throw a prince as his groom." What once went for princes now goes for young black boys in state schools. The one art they learn truly is football, because there the crude coaches will give them the unedited information they need in order to progress. Their highly qualified teachers don't.

Here, though, is one change that might please everyone at no cost in honesty. Rather than have GCSEs or A-Levels (or whatever they call them this week) graded A - F, so that everyone knows in their heart that D to F are failing grades, why not have the same upwards-pointing grading system as now exists in music?

A "Grade 1" would be the most basic level. A "Grade 8" would be advanced knowledge. No grade 2 pianist fools themselves into believing that they are as good at the piano as a grade 3 pianist, but on the other hand our grade 2 boy or girl most reasonably thinks of his or her grade as an achievement gained, not as a failure to get the next grade up.

I'm not saying this

BBC News 24 article on documents found by the IDF in Arafat's compound is particularly good - but at least I can apply the "blog this" function to it. The ordinary blogger website doesn't seem to be working.

Later: Blogger is back. And so am I. After ten days of Welsh countryside, unseasonal sunshine and happy ignorance of the mayhem in Israel, I cannot say that it is an unmixed pleasure to reconnect to the wider world.

I am conscious that people a great deal better informed than I have talked this subject into the ground. But, for what it's worth, here are some thoughts:

If I could go back in time and had the power that always is supplied with such fantasies, I'd do everything possible to disentangle terrorist Palestinians from non-terrorists. As several people have observed it's extremely odd to find the Christian Arabs in bed with Arafat. And, among Muslim and Christian Arabs alike, there ought to be a solid block of people whose prosperity resulted from trade with their Israeli neighbours. The fact that there isn't is a rebuke to Israel. And look what happened to Israel's allies in Lebanon.

But I can't go back in time. Here and now the malign death-fixated collective identity of the Palestinians seems to have extinguished all other voices. The whole strategy of the suicide bomber is to make sure that the others of his race cannot be trusted. (Yes, they also wish simply to kill Jews. But even people as mad as they are they cannot believe that they will kill a significant proportion of the Israeli population. As with all terrorism the main aim is to bring down reprisals which will inflame formerly passive groups and hence bring about ordinary war.) And, for now, the suicide bombers have succeeded in that aim.

So it's war. Bad news. I was going to call war the ultimate expression of collectivism, but that is wrong. Genocide is the ultimate expression of collectivism. War is bad news but not the worst of news.

Infantile Italians.

Look, I never thought much of the Roman law that a son was subject to his father's rule even to the extent of the son being put to death at the command of the paterfamilias. But this is taking things to the other extreme. Reuters report that an Italian court verdict holds that a father must continue to support his eternal student son (the boy is now in his thirties) until sonny deigns to announce that he has found a job "in line with his aspirations."

Hi. I'm back. And where do I turn

to get some market-oriented common sense about football? Why, the Guardian, of course.

Talking of free markets, reader, hip-hoppist and fellow-blogger Cal Ulmann points out that, "If the state was not giving away internet service for free, via the library, a market may have existed."