Such a good idea to encourage private enterprise to get involve in sponsoring educational efforts don’t you think? Don’t you?

In Britain, McDonald’s is sponsoring a conference of head teachers – they’re the ones who are supposed to be getting their pupils to eat more healthily, while religious nutter creationsists are being given hundreds of children to play with for their very own in so-called City Academies. (They only need to put in a couple of million pounds and they have control of an entire school, presumably forever – generation after generation. No wonder some parents are fighting against it.)

In the US, the right-wing, particularly the extreme right-wing, is trying to buy the campus mind, as one story has it. Not only are drug, agricultural and chemical companies funding research into products out of which they want to make a great deal of money (something of which I have experience in my early days when an animal feed company had hoped to make me and a friend their free student labour for a laborious trial), but they are trying to take over the humanities by funding projects of their own choosing. I wonder if Wal-Mart is funding research into the minimum wage, or into how to get even more state benefits for their pitifully paid employees?

Isn’t it a good thing that we know kids will always rebel against things being shoved down their throats – well, we hope they will.

A correspondent complained my last quiz reference was a bit dumb, so here’s the post-modern, big-word version:

You are a Gender Nazi. Your boundary-crossing
lifestyle inspires awe in your friends and
colleagues. Or maybe they’re just scared you
will kick their asses for using gender-specific
language. Either way, the wife-beater helps.

What kind of postmodernist are you!?
brought to you by Quizilla

But you can safely assume that I don’t look like that – never gone in for tats.

* The changing shape of US law on sexual harassment in the workplace. US law, but universal issues.

* A history of child prodigies over the centuries – it seems it is not just Hollywood child actors who have problems.

* Of course you can’t take this sort of thing too seriously, but the latest Prospect list of the world’s 100 top intellectuals contains 10 women. Slightly better than the world leader’s count then.

* News you can use: a list of tips for getting the best out of Gmail. Now if only they wouldn’t call the delete bin “trash” …

* The internet as the new Samizdat. Contains lots of American newspaper/magazine gossip and this lovely critique of copy-editors (sub-editors):

“Written by Thomas Farragher, my colleague at The Boston Globe, it reproduced the Gettysburg Address as if the speech had had to pass through the meat grinder of the Globe’s main copy desk. I’d just had one of my own harrowing experiences with those ferocious editors, and the parody rang true.

Fourscore and seven years ago (can’t we just make it 87 years ago?) our fathers (WHO ARE THEY?? Any mothers???) brought forth on this continent (North America?? Northern Hemisphere??) a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men (people, men and women, what???) are created equal. (Why don’t we just say they founded the United States and leave it at that? Pacing’s better.)”

Like most good satire, it has an element of truth about it.

One of my favourite themes is how there is no such thing as the “good old days” – senior members of society have been complaining about the manners of youth not being up to their standards ever since the first Homo sapiens sapiens thought she could turn a strip of leather into a neat little bikini.

So some suggestions on behaviour on a bus:

“* Sit with your limbs straight, and do not with your legs describe an angle of 45, thereby occupying the room of two persons.

* Do not spit on the straw. You are not in a hogsty but in an omnibus travelling in a country which boasts of its refinement.

* Behave respectfully to females and put not an upprotected lass to the blush, because she cannot escape from your brutality.

* If you bring a dog, let him be small and be confined by a string.”

Want to guess the date?

From The Times of January 30 1826, via Time Out magazine.

I find the class issues of this interesting, given the source. Did readers of The Times, or at least those assumed to read The Times travel on omnibuses at all? And wouldn’t they have been assumed to know how to behave? Was this perhaps meant for the servants? Not having the original context there’s no way of knowing.

History

For the first time a giant squid, inhabitant of the ocean depth, has been filmed, the BBC reports. And it looks like the horror movie people might have been right about its hunting methods, and the scientists wrong.

And reality is also getting a little closer to the SF writers – particularly Kim Stanley Robinson of the Mars trilogy fame (although I don’t know if he invented the idea) – wiith a successful experiment on the quest to build a space elevator – which if it ever came off, would get rid of all those messy, dangerous rocket engines. (Via Instapundit.)

Tony Blair’s speech to the Labour conference:

For eight years I have battered the criminal justice system to get it to change. And it was only when we started to introduce special ASB laws, we really made a difference. And I now understand why: the system itself is the problem. We are trying to fight 21st-century crime – ASB, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime – with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens.

The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me: that must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.It means a complete change of thinking. It doesn’t mean abandoning human rights; it means deciding whose come first.

“Batter”, such a nice choice of verb, don’t you think? And he wants a “complete change of thinking from innocent until proven guilty”.

Mr Blair wants “victim’s rights” to come first – so if she or he gets up in court and puts on a really strong performance, the crim gets an extra couple of years in jail. (Heading fast towards Hammurabi’s “eye for an eye” – back to the 1700s, that’s BC, of course.)

So today, the mother of the innocent Brazilian electrician shot dead by police on the London Tube says Sir Ian Blair, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, must resign.

Mr Blair?