'Nother Solent

Prison governor 'not living in real world.'

As the man says there is some justice after all.

David Janes is helping President Bush deal with his mail. Warning: not work safe for Turkish officers of general rank.

The Royal British Legion

are supporting the pensioners' demo against council tax rises.

Why? What's it got to do with what the Royal British Legion is for?

I'm sympathetic to pretty well any campaign for lower taxes, though having seen it repeated six times on every single Liberal Democrat leaflet that comes through the door I really don't think I need to hear the phrase "a Council Tax system that takes account of an individual's ability to pay" from the Legion as well.

I can see why there might be plenty of overlap between the membership of the Legion and this particular campaign. So what? Why should ex-Servicemen qua ex-Servicemen have any better a knowledge of an economic issue than anyone else? Frankly, old age pensioners are probably worse judges of this than average, having grown up in an era that quite seriously thought that a nationalised industry was bound to be more efficient because its workers would have a purer motivation than mere moneymaking.

Come November I always have a poppy. That isn't going to change. But much more of this from the Legion and it will lose its identity as a Services charity and just become part of the background radiation emanating from assorted NGOs. Bip-bip-bip will go my pay-attention Geiger counter. Something that matters? Nah, it's just the Legion banging on about their theories of taxation again. Discount it.

Help the Aged are in on the act too, but I'd already given up on them.

Just mucking about.

It's not exactly clear what happened in the bus crash that killed this boy. What is clear is that while he was sitting on the top deck of the bus, a group of his schoolfellows were pushing, shoving and fighting in and around the driver's cab. One of them may have grabbed the wheel.

There are two possible political morals to this. One is, don't have schools. Children in large groups behave like troops of baboons. The other is, if you are going to have schools, have discipline.

Cargo cult regulation

. On a more serious note, this post about regulation by Thought Mesh contains a whole bundle of profound truths.

... the gist was that our corporate customers cannot comply with their reporting and auditing requirements. There are so many and they are so detailed that compliance is apparently no longer possible.

And

... the requirement is now not actual compliance, but “improvement” over time ... It’s the “no child left behind” theory of corporate regulation. One is left to wonder if we shouldn’t be trying for a set of regulations that is actually possible to obey. The answer, of course, is that it’s best for the regulators if everyone is guilty of something. Then when bad things happen, there is a nice selection of the usual suspects to pin the blame on, all of them disarmed because they are in violation of some regulation.

A.O.G. is talking about commercial regulation here, but he could equally well be describing the sovietised British education system:

In another sense, it’s cargo cult regulation. Some good company is observed to perform some action. Therefore if every company is required to do that, they will be good companies. In fact, this kind of regulatory environment, with endless obscure rules and universal compliance failure, is perfect for the sophisticated con men. Not only does it provide a thicket of procedures to hide in, but it distracts everyone into watching the forms without time to worry about the results.

Can you feel the power coursing through you?

Then take your finger out of the plug, stupid. I like success books, I really do. That's why I was so entertained by the product line of a company selling demotivational tools that I found out about via Thought Mesh.

For instance, is this not a profound truth?

Rob Hinkley's

got a letter in the Guardian. Here it is. He says it's been slightly edited. He should count himself lucky; years ago a friend of mine wrote a letter denouncing equally censorship by fundamentalist Christians and by politically-correct socialists. By the time it had passed through the Guardian's digestive system it emerged as a denunciation of censorship by "Christian socialists."

I am worn to a ravelling

, like the Tailor of Gloucester and for much the same reason.

Ten things I hate about cutting out pattern pieces:

• You have to clear and clean the dining table before you even start. Unnatural, I call it.
  
• It's the twenty-first century, the Mars mission has been announced and the pattern pieces are still made out of tissue paper. I hate cutting tissue paper. I hated it in Mrs Baker's class and I hate it now.
  
• They fly all over the place on the breath of a curse.
  
• If the dog gets one you're doomed.
  
• I haven't even started on the fabric yet. First off, the cutting layout depends on the width of the fabric, the nap of the fabric, the size of the human being concerned, the pattern repeat of the fabric, whether you are making Dress A, Dress B or Dress ZZ Plural Alpha, whether you have or have not opted for the optional contrast trim, and whether Mars in Sagittarius opposes Jupiter in Gemini.
• You have to think horribly hard about which way up everything goes. Pattern pieces can be right way up (white on the diagram) or wrong way up (spots); fabric can be right way up (stripes) or wrong (like I always get it). In other words the code for paper wrong way up is the same as for fabric right way. Or do I mean paper wright and fabric rong? Probably.
  
• You get backache from leaning over the table for so long.
  
• You forget that you weren't meant to have the fabric folded so you end up cutting out stuff you only need one of twice and have to go back to the shop to buy more fabric only they've discontinued it so you have to move your head around in silly directions in order to puzzle out a way to sqeeeeeze the pattern pieces into the remaining fabric.
  
• Someone says, 'Mummy are you being a puppet?' during this process.
  
• Alternatively, you forget that you were meant to have the fabric folded so you have to do everything twice over.
  
• Make that three times. Mustn't forget the lining, must we?
  
• During the whole horribly stressful process you have to be a goody-goody. What I mean by this is that you must, you simply must, put away each stage as you finish, carefully pin little labels saying "piece 6, lining x2" or something similar to each bit and do other soul-numbingly bureacratic things. Pfaugh!
  
• The wretched tissue paper won't go back into the packet it came from. It is topologically impossible for the cut-out separate shapes to have a larger volume than the single sheet they came from, but they do, sister, they do.
  
• Did I mention the backache?

So that's more than ten things? Sue me. I am undone and worn to a thread-paper, for I have NO MORE TWIST.

If you are looking

for more Kilroy-Silk stuff, it can be found thataway.

'And exactly what do you suggest we do with all the students who are "got rid of" because of disruptive behaviour?

So asked a correspondent to Freedom and Whisky after David Farrer said schools should be privatised, and free to eject troublemakers. Here's how David Farrer answered. I say, actually the private sector is already much better at educating and reforming disruptive children than the state for the excellent reason that their parents' money is collectively as good as anyone else's. Not as copious, sometimes, but as good: there is a market there. A private school that can take in a yob at yob-premium fees and then manage things so that he is no longer a yob (meaning the school does not have to bear yob-premium costs) stands to make a handsome profit. A parent that finds out that he or she must pay extra because of their kid's bad behaviour is highly motivated to start taking an interest in said behaviour.

However if a child is so horrible that no one wants to teach him, let him rot. I said the same thing at greater length - no, on second reading, at about the same length but with greater acrimoniousness - on March 28 last year.

Shock news just in: Bloggers are Real People, Live in Real World.

Norman Geras knows famous folk. No, not him. My kids have never heard of him, unless it's from me, and if it was via me it doesn't count since as a parent I radiate a deadly fame-invalidating uncoolness field or something.

The properly famous person known (rather well, it appears) to Norman Geras is, as I have belatedly twigged after a child-centred rant about all those books on the living room floor, her.

Getting personal.

It seems that the inspection reports on childminders are to go online. The confidentiality protections the story mentions are derisory.

We're all used to inspection reports on schools being made public. I have mixed feelings. On the other hand it gives absurd importance to the mouthings of yet another pack of government inspectors. It's a sad sight to see parents and teachers worrying about what the G-men think rather than what each other think - or what the children think. On the other hand one is inclined to welcome any incoming foot with a decent chance of connecting with the educational establishment's bloated backside, however ignoble the body the foot is connected to.

At least in the case of schools, though, the blow is softened by collective responsibility. Also Ofsted stay at a school for a week. It may make them the guests from Hell but at least the school gets numerous chances to show what it can do. In contrast a childminder's future will be made or broken by the opinion of one official having made one or at the most two visits. Just pray the inspector doesn't come calling when you are having a Bad Kid Day.

The solution isn't to have yet more or longer official visitations. I personally would find it difficult to welcome an Ofsted inspector into my home for a whole week, wouldn't you? Also the last thing you want is inspectors with too little real work to do; they will spend all their time instead of just some of it leafing through your Beatrix Potter books in search of unacceptable gender stereotypes.

Remind me never to become a childminder. Remind me never to become a child.