Author: Anthony

It’ll cost money and it won’t work – Darling’s upbeat message

The BBC reports that trials will take place of x-ray machines and body scanners at railway stations. This will slow up passengers and ensure that money is diverted away from services, while also providing no extra security (since not all stations can or will be covered).

Alastair Darling’s view: “You cannot have a completely closed system on the underground or the railways for instance – it just wouldn’t work.”

X-ray machines at stations = just wouldn’t work. You read it here second.

The grating self-righteousness of the bourgeoisie

Battered by the OFT’s claims of fee-fixing, the Independent Schools Council has come out whining. In a statement quoted at the BBC News website, their general secretary, Jonathan Shephard, managed to exhibit all the worst traits of the English middle classes, self-righteousness, special pleading and defensiveness.

His bleat was, more or less: the poor independent schools didn’t know the rules had changed, and it was all quite sensible, and no-one minded really, and surely laws were only for poor people to obey, and the OFT were being beastly cads who just didn’t understand how gentlemen behaved, and why don’t the OFT go and catch some real criminals rather than nice middle class people doing 70 in a 30 zone who just happen to be blatantly flouting anti-cartel laws.

Most extraordinary was his claim that:

“Schools have no motive to raise more money than they need. Any money raised from fees has to be spent on the children and the schools so any extra money might be spent on better food or another brick for the gym.”

Yes, or massively subsidised accommodation for teachers, new wallpaper for the Headmaster’s study, or perhaps a jaguar-fur lined jaccuzi for the staff room.

As I’m sure he and his colleagues have said to a thousand pupils: Stop snivelling, Shephard, and take it like a man.

Losing your human rights was never so boring

The headline message from this post is that the US Senate just passed an amendment denying habeas corpus – a fundamental human right – to anyone detained at Guantanamo Bay. And that’s very bad.

Obsidian Wings has a description of the amendment and its potential effect, written before it passed yesterday. It also has a second post, with more description, written after the vote passed 49-42 on the floor of the Senate.

All is not over yet, but SCOTUSblog and Opinio Juris discusses the consequences for some major human rights cases currently before the Supreme Court.

Update: More in the New York Times.

Gomorrah and Sod ’em

Pat Robertson, former presidential candidate and evangelical wingnut, has told the people of Dover (PA):

If there is a disaster in your area, don’t turn to God — you just rejected Him from your city.

Why? Well, at the elections last week Dover’s citizens booted out their school board for promoting the teaching of ‘intelligent’ design instead of evolution, and incidentally making the town a global laughing stock.

But God’s cross now. Honest, Pat says so. Brrrrr!

(via The Washington Post)

9/XI

The Virtual Stoa – the site whose masthead date is still in the French Revolutionary calendar – notes that November 9th is a recurrent theme in German history, being the date on which the Kaiser abdicated, the Beer Hall Putsch failed, and the Berlin Wall fell. It is also the date of Kristallnacht.