Something to look forward to

Solving the problem of poverty is easy. All we need to do is to get the government to buy plasma TVs and give them to poor people. Everyone knows that rich people have plasma TVs, and poor people don't. Plasma TVs are what separates the rich from the poor. Giving poor people a plasma TV would make them rich people. Or even if it didn't actually make them rich, this would be the most effective first step to address the serious imbalances in economic and social injustice in today's world of have and have-nots.

Well, actually, any intelligent person knows that the previous paragraph is utter nonsense. But substitute the word 'notebook computer' for 'TV', and you will become the darling of the leftist elites, who are intent on forcing tax payers to buy millions of notebook computers so they can be distributed to those more worthy than themselves.

We have the international OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project, Australia's determination to give a notebook to every Aboriginal child, and then Kevin (Pixie) Rudd's election promise to give one notebook to every school child.

Apparently the average destitute Aboriginal child, struggling with substance abuse, domestic violence, sexual molestation and chronic ear infections will get onto the internet to research the solution to his community's problems.

"Hey Dad, it says here on www.social-workers.gov.au that you should stop getting drunk and bashing mum and I. How about going off to AA?". "Hey Mum - it says here on www.healthy-eating.gov.au that diet is an important lifestyle choice. How about some fresh food for dinner?" "Hey bros, I read on www.say-no-to-drugs.gov.au that sniffing petrol can damage your brain. I guess we'd better stop doing it now."

Fly. Pigs. Might.

In African nations, there is a plan to give free notebooks to children who don't even have electricity. 'No problem,' say the scheme's advocates, 'we can attach wind-up generators to them. And they could even be use to supply light in their mud-huts after dark!' Are there any intelligent people who find this anything other than totally perverse?

Even The Pixie's proposal to supply notebooks to bogans in a first world country is faltering. It seems that the rubbery figures used in estimating the cost of the one-laptop-per-bogan scheme didn't take into account that the notebooks have to maintained. You need IT support for them. IT people, dear reader, are those people who command obscene salaries for doing something that the rest of the population don't even understand. IT support is expensive. More expensive, in fact, than the computers themselves.

The cost of buying a notebook for a motivated, middle-class brat is just the cost of the notebook itself. Within a day, a teen-age computer nerd will strip off the firewall protection and censorship filters, and be happily surfing www.horny-cheerleaders.com in between downloading his homework from essays-for-sale.com, and still have time to post party invitations on MySpace.

But how long is a notebook going to last in a mud hut? Or even a tin hut? Or even a bogan's school bag, getting thrown around with the footy boots?

Answer: not even until the next federal election. Oops.

And the destitute African children? Apart from sending Nigerian 419 scam letters, there is little in the way of local industry which can benefit from information transfer. Social networking is a great way for bored western teenagers to kill time, but when there are animals to feed, crops to grow and water to fetch, on-line gossip about pop stars is pretty much irrelevant. Commodity prices on the other side of the world won't help you if you are merely subsistence farming. And great literature is of no interest to someone with an empty stomach.

Doubtless these elitist initiatives will result in someone, somewhere doing something useful, and the proponents will declare the whole fiasco a success. But does anyone think that the hundreds of dollars per unit would not have been better spent on food, medicine, conventional education or even on a mercenary force to topple their corrupt thieving governments?

And that applies for governments other than Australia's too.

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Mahem in Mumbai

Try as they might, the followers of the Religion of Peace can't seem to avoid controversy. Some particularly devout Allah fanboys decided to conduct their own little Jihad in Mumbai, and kill as many Westerners as they could. On second thoughts, maybe these ones weren't trying that hard.

Anyway, the local police followed procedure - rushing to the scene and standing around looking for opportunities to take bribes. Unfortunately the guy in charge got shot, and so did two of his deputies. Total chaos ensued.

But at least our own government officials responded appropriately. Kevin (Pixie) Rudd stood up in parliament and branded the perpetrators as "murderers and cowards" (he was, presumably, talking about the terrorists and not the local police). Good on ya, Kev! Here is a true leader! Someone who will ignore several decades of politically correct cultural relativism and call a spade a spade!

But hang on, did he say 'cowards'? Isn't a coward someone who runs away from personal danger? These terrorists were quite prepared to die for their beliefs. Their beliefs might be little radical (that Allah wants them to kill as many kaffirs as possible), but they are prepared to die for those beliefs. And that doesn't make them cowards. Religious extremists maybe. Sadistic lunatics probably. Murderous psychopaths definitely. But not cowards.

The coward rhetoric may sound good. And many alert-but-not-alarmed people may be comforted by the words. But they illustrate a fundamental lack of clarity of thought, and understanding of the enemy.

The first step in winning a war is understanding the enemy. To predict his strategy, you must understand what he will do in a given situation. To understand what he will do, you must understand what motivates him. The motivation of a coward is totally different to that of the irrational religious zealot.

Of course fuzzy thinking is, and always has been, the choice weapon for the lovers of bigger government. The Pixie is merely continuing the tradition. The idea that higher minimum wages will create jobs, or that a welfare state will make us rich, or that socialism will create equality, or that government declared wars on poverty, obesity or drugs will make us free and happy.

Running away from personal danger might be undesirable, but running away from reality is surely worse. What a pity there is no war against ignorance and fuzzy thinking.

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Stop the drop

There's something funny about blood. People get emotional about it. Whether we are spilling it, or ensuring that it's thicker than water, or adding it to our sweat and tears, we are pretty close to it most of the time.

Blood is clearly very important. That's why it's critical that the government makes so many rules about it to stop us doing what we want with our own blood.

For instance, the government has laws against actually paying any poor people for donating blood.

Until recently there were also rules against selling blood. It's not that no-one was allowed to profit from the blood industry. The doctors who administer the blood, the nurses who service them, and the many many health administrators who take their immodest salaries to keep us safe - they are all allowed to benefit from the blood industry. The recipients presumably benefit from the blood industry too - by receiving blood. Actually the only people who aren't allowed to benefit from the blood industry were the people who actually donate the blood.

Which may be why blood supplies are always critically low, and the supply system is always in crisis.

In fact the blood supply situation has gotten so critical, that the government has a new mechanism to deal with it: making blood recipients pay for the blood (at least at private hospitals anyway).

Exactly how having the government charge people for consuming blood will increase the number of people supplying blood is a bit of a mystery for us mere voters. But clearly the government must have the answer. The government is very smart. That's why they are the government.

The Daily Telegraph is running a typically hysterical front page article complete with an ailing blond child called 'Ruby' on the cover. Apparently Ruby is an immunoglobulin transfusee (that's medicarati for 'needs lots of blood'). It's good that the paper cleared that up because 'Ruby' doesn't look anemic. Actually her cheeks are quite rosy, and she doesn't look underweight either. In fact, in a few years, people will probably be describing Ruby as 'Rubenesque'.

Regardless, the blood-thirsty Ruby attends a private hospital, and the government has decided to make private hospitals pay for blood. The embattled NSW government (which is unable to balance their budget even in the wake of unprecedented revenue surges) has resorted to the desperate measure of charging private hospitals for blood.

So on the one hand we have a government which forbids people selling their blood, but still forces people to pay for it, and on the other side we have people who want to ban both the buying and selling of blood.

Isn't it supposed to be the capitalist elites growing obscenely fat by sucking the blood of the hard working proletariat who are victims of their needs?

No Dear Reader. It's your socialist government, and their blood tax.

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The lie unravels

The Daily Telegraph reports that hundreds of women who have duped men out of years of child support for children that are not theirs can now be forced to pay back the money. DNA techniques can, of course prove conclusively who the father is, and isn't.

Needless to say, WIMMIN!'s groups are outraged that WIMMIN! will have to actually take responsibility for their actions.

Angry women's groups said last night that it would be the children at the centre of the disputes who would suffer most if money were paid back.

Apparently these loving mothers are going to take it out on the children.

The money has already been spent on rearing the child, If the mother is forced to pay it back, its hard to imagine the child won't be disadvantaged.

Apparently WIMMIN! shouldn't have to pay their debts if they have already spent their ill gotten gains on raising children. Does that mean they don't have pay mortgages, or car loans or credit cards too? Or is this a special exemption which only applies to men they have lied to?

While the knee-jerk reaction might be to have some sympathy for 'confused women acting in good faith', perhaps women who have have so many partners in the space of a month that they don't know the paternity of their child should speak up about their uncertainty before pursuing a man they claim to be responsible.

While people may not have an obligation to let a partner know about their infidelities, they surely have an obligation to report relevant factors when suing them for child support.

She said men should raise doubts about paternity when they are first told they are a father.

Serves them right for believing the word of a woman I guess.

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Pale and afraid

Amrozi, was a bit of an enigma. The continually grinning Bali Bomber inhabited the pundit space somewhere between the smiling assassin and the village idiot. Regardless, the smile was wiped off his face last night as he and two of co-conspirators faced a firing squad for his efforts in promoting the Religion of Peace. Media reports described his final moments as 'pale and afraid'. Maybe he was starting to suspect that the whole thing was a trick. Maybe there weren't 72 virgins for waiting him - maybe he was the virgin.

Several generations of Indonesians, of course, have been taught to hate Australians by both their Islamic leaders and their corrupt government. Focusing the hate toward the rich, hardworking and comparatively uncorrupt nation to the the south was a good strategy both for the survival of the dictatorship, and the religious elite.

But murdering 202 people in a nightclub was a bit excessive even if 88 of them were Australians. This went way beyond the call of duty. Embarrassingly so. The Indonesian government was shamed into accepting the help of the Australian Federal Police in tracking the bombers, and their judiciary were then sullenly forced to convict and then execute them - or have their hypocrisy and corruption exposed to the whole world.

This is the cynical view of course. The un-cynical view is that the Indonesian power bloc realized that the Bali bombers represented a zealotry which could destabilize the government. Hatred of westerners is good, but must be moderated. Government sanctioned protests outside the Australian embassy with the occasional incursion into embassy grounds while burning the Australian flag; spitting on foreigners in the street - that kind of stuff.

Regardless, the really interesting thing (as usual) was the reaction to the executions. Most of Balinese Muslims seemed to be on Australian TV screaming for more infidel's blood. No surprise there. This is pretty much what Australians have come to except from Religion of Peace. Unfortunately some Australians had the bad taste to celebrate with a beer. Faux pas!

Whether The State should be in the business of executing people is a question of debate. One of the most powerful arguments is 'we are no better than them if we kill too'. A little contrite perhaps. But celebrating the spilling of Muslim blood because the Muslims are celebrating the spilling of Christian blood? Hmm .. there but for the grace of Allah ..

There is something disturbing about celebrating the execution of someone with a beer. It is one thing to shrug, and say 'who cares?', or even 'at least it's over', or even a 'hoist by his own petard'. It's quite another to actively celebrate someone's execution. Even an evil psychopath like a Bali bomber.

But at least it's over.

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Clueless

Most Australian taxpayers wouldn't have been surprised to see the weekend's headlines 'ABC given $22M handout'. The ABC gets hundreds of millions of dollars of your hard-earned every year, so what's another 22 between pork barrels? But there might have been a little confusion about which ABC was getting the money. It wasn't the media broadcasting giant created to spread the gospel of collectivism to the masses. No dear reader this was the other blood-sucking tax-leaching namesake 'ABC Learning'.

ABC Learning is a private company which caters to parents who value their career above caring for their own children. It's all about outsourcing. If outsourcing is good enough for the public service, then why not outsource Junior's upbringing too? Leave the job of child raising to government-approved experts! Need a well deserved rest? Why not just pay someone to take a well deserved rest for you. Actually they do that already - it's called 'the dole', but we digress.

ABC Learning was so badly run, that it couldn't even make a profit by sucking on the inexhaustible corporate welfare tit, and has been placed into receivership by the banks, which are owed over half a billion dollars.

The childcare centers are (of course) still running, money is coming in (much of it from the government) children are being cared for, carers are still caring. But thousands of parents are terrified that they might have to take responsibility for their own children if the centers start closing.

Perhaps they should think again. The banks might be greedy, but they are not stupid. The centres are worth far more as going concerns than they were if the assets were liquidated. Consider:

1. If the centers were closed, there would be a bunch of parents wanting carers for their kids.
2. Setting a up a child-care center is expensive and takes considerable skill and resources.
3. The receivers won't get much for three blocks and a baby change table on eBay, and would still have to pay for the leases on the centers themselves.

Ergo, it would be far more profitable to sell the centers as going concerns than to liquidate. Even giving the centers away for nothing would be cheaper than paying out the remainder of the leases on the buildings!

This is a situation which bankruptcy laws (and market forces) will take care of all on their own. The government didn't need to give the banks $22M of tax payers money to keep things going until Christmas. But once again, the (supposedly Leftist) government is determined to socialize the losses and privatize the profits. And thousands of supposedly loving parents nod approvingly and dote on the latest government intervention.

Infants need to grow up sometime. Companies do too. Maybe it's time for this whole industry to be weaned off the government tit.

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Trumped at last!

Dealing the race card has been a time honoured favorite for a generation of ethnic minorities. Whenever you don't get something you asked for (like someone else's money for instance), just throw yourself on the floor and scream 'racism' repeatedly. It works for small children, so why not victims of racial discrimination?

Of course time marches on, pets die, children grow up, and societal attitudes to things like institutionalized racial discrimination evolve. But not always for the better.

Like in the case of former ATSIC commissioner Alan Wolf, who is suing the Tasmanian Aboriginal Council for not being racist. Yes, dear reader, for not being racist.

The Australian reports that Alan Wolf, who has presumably based his entire career on claiming to be a member of the institutionalized racial minority (that would be the Australian Aborigines for anyone who doesn't get out much), has suddenly found that the Tasmanians don't accept his qualifications as an Aboriginal and won't give him preferential treatment in his application for a fishing licence. He may have apply with all the white people at the back of the bus.

If this all seems a little confusing to anyone with a logical mind, It really is totally logical. You just aren't considering the bigger picture.

Remember that Aborigines (by weighted genetic proportion) are actual less than two percent of the population. That's not much to support a political movement. [Actually it's probably about the same as the Libertarians, and look how spectacularly ineffectual they have been in changing Australian politics]. Even as a special interest group, the percentage is too low to have much effect.

So in the heady '80s, Aboriginal lobby groups decided that the best special interests of the Aborigines were served by an 'inclusive policy'. That is, get as many people as possible to claim to be victims of the Aboriginality, regardless of whether they were, or weren't actually of pre-European ancestry. Even in Tasmania.

And boy it worked. Never was there so much hand-wringing and self flagellation for such a small minority group. And the buckets of money started flowing into 'Aboriginal concerns'.

This might have been a surprise to those of us unfortunate enough to have been educated by the Tasmanian State education system. We were taught that the last full blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal was a woman called Truganini, who died in an Aboriginal settlement in 1876 (far too soon to have given birth to modern political correctness).

But the money still flowed. And nothing exceeds like success. Once money (and affirmative action policies) were flowing. Then a new strategy was effective - to maximize your share of the trough by locking people out. Suddenly, people of questionable ancestral qualifications were having that ancestry questioned.

One of the fastest growing populations in the world has suddenly started shrinking. A new genocide, or just a mercy culling of a stupid political movement?

Normally leftist political movements shrink when the government money supply is cut. But in this case the movement is just reeling from a reduction in blood supply.

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Too much bull in bear market

Your ABC headline is

Bailout approval fails to boost US stocks

And the article begins:

United States stocks have fallen heavily after Congress passed a huge financial rescue plan, as investors remained nervous about a global credit squeeze and the weak economy.

After giving Treasury 700 Billion to buy trash for cash, which was supposed to restore everyone's faith in capitalism to the extent that they would re-invest their life savings in the stock market.

Of course turning to a socialist solution would save capitalism. Obviously. We knew this was true. George Bush told us so!

Oops. At least it's only tax-payer's money.

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On the money!

Battling a male dominated patriarchal society is a worthy goal. And feminists everywhere put self-interest aside in other to join the good fight.

Occasionally some chauvinist might question whether shrill cries for affirmative action, and all manner of reverse discrimination, are actually selfless demands, and dare to suggest that self interest might be a factor. Sacrilege! Of course, affirmative action did wonders for middle class white women destined for a career in the public service, which by coincidence were exactly the people screaming for it the loudest. The actual minority groups seem to have been marginalized along the way somehow, but everyone has to make sacrifices for the common good, don't they?

But only the very stupid would argue that there could be any self interest in the latest Productivity Commission initiative: paid maternity leave.

The ALP has consented to this in principle, but refuses to give a deadline. Apparently there will be a lengthy pregnant pause before the scheme is consumated.

Under this scheme, private employers will be obliged to pay eighteen weeks maternity leave to women who drop a bundle. They will be eligible to be reimbursed by the government for the wages, but not the compulsory 9% superannuation.

Now, just in case anyone of subnormal intelligence is actually reading this column (we don't discriminate here, and try to cater to all intelligence levels), let's think this through:

Firstly lets take as given that employers are rich greedy capitalists growing obscenely fat sucking the blood of the hardworking proletariat who are victims of their needs. (That's why the employers have an obligation to subsidize a woman's reproductive desires. Obviously).

Now consider a greedy capitalist employer who has two applicants which seem pretty well matched. One is a young woman (the ones that are still of child bearing age, not the old wrinkly ones that have either missed their biological alarm clock, or spawned to excess already). The other is a man.

Now for the hard part: What is the employer going to do? (You have one uncomfortable pregnant pause to think of your answer). Time's up ..

If your answer was 'she will employ the woman', then go to the bottom of the class. Sorry, but you are not even smart enough to work out the root cause of the pregnancy, let alone pass Wimmin!'s Studies.

If your answer was 'she will employ the man', then you get a 'C'. You are too smart to do Wimmin!'s Studies, but not actually smart enough to succeed in business.

If your answer was 'she will factor in the risks of employing the woman, and offer her less money to compensate' then well done. You are thinking like a businesswoman! Very soon you too will be growing obscenely fat sucking the blood of the hard working proletariat!

Yes, it's good to see the Wimmin!'s movement finally able to demonstrate their credibility, by pushing through a regulation which will quite obviously work against women's interests.

Of course, the cynical reader might observe that it will work in the interests of the old boilers - the ones past child bearing age, and focused on their career. Those women increasingly concerned about the competition which is younger, more energetic, and more likely to have qualifications in something other than Wimmin!'s Studies.

Of course not. Their credibility is intact - it just has a few stretch marks.

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Lead me to the tax trough

The collapse of Socialism provided an opportunity for the Left to sort the men from boys. The Leftists had to make a call, declare Socialism a dead, unworkable and discredited ideology, or to become slimy crypto-socialists, and try to introduce socialism through the backdoor via 'wars on poverty', 'third ways', or climate change initiatives.

Laying the boot into crypto-socialists over these issues has been fun over the last decade, but now the shoe might be on the other foot, and the Right might be in for a good kick up the derivatives, as the US financial market apparently faces its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

Banks are collapsing, confidence is collapsing, money supply is vanishing. And capitalism has been rocked to it's foundations! Babies will starve! The dead shall walk the earth! And we will all be forced to watch reruns of Melrose Place! Only the Government is big enough, powerful enough and wise enough to save us from this crisis!

Well, maybe. For the ordinary conservative in the street, it's a bit hard to see the crisis.

There are cries of 'banks are collapsing!' But exactly why a bunch of of merchant bankers losing a few or their millions (or even all of them) could be regarded as a 'crisis' is a bit of a mystery. Easy come, easy go. Doubtless the average sub-prime banker will be back to enjoying his weekends on his yacht and mistress shortly after getting out of prison and starting up a new derivatives venture.

There are cries of 'people's superannuation assets will fall!' Well, that may be true, but looking at the unsustainable growth in superannuation over the last few years, did anyone think that a correction was not on the way?

There are cries of 'but people will lose their houses!' Apparently those people who lied about their income levels, and lied about their existing debt levels, and who consequently can't afford to pay mortgages for homes they could never realistically afford have some kind of divine right to continue to use other people's capital to do so. Here in Australia at least, there were no shortage of scaremongers talking about 'what if interest rates go up'. In fact Little Johnny was doing that right through his last two terms in office. Hands up who didn't know about 17% interest rates under the previous Labour government. Hands up who didn't think that interest rates could ever rise. Okay, hands down liars and idiots.

There are cries of 'house prices may fall!' But exactly why affordable housing would be such a bad thing would surely be a mystery to those who would like to enter the housing market. It might even be a mystery to the many renters who have to compete for rental properties at unprecedented levels. Of course for the middle class baby boomers who already have houses it might be a blow the ego. Bragging about how much your family home is worth is a favorite past-time at the suburban barbecue, and that might have to be replaced with .. um .. conversation?

Thankfully of course, the government (as usual) has a solution to the problem: an intervention. Yes, dear reader, yet another intervention. And as usual it involves

• a bigger more powerful government, imposing greater regulations on what people can and can't do;
• spending a truckload of your hard-earned money; and offers
• no guarantee of success.

The US taxpayer is being forced to invest 700 billion dollars into cash for trash assets and, ever anxious to emulate his US superiors, Kevin (Pixie) Rudd is going to force the Australian taxpayer to invest 4 billion on his pet home-loan scheme.

Of course the government interventionalists are in good company here. There are many educated, intelligent and well-off individuals who claim it is our last best hope for prosperity. The market, they claim, has failed. The government must intervene. Industries must be nationalized. Corporate welfare must be given out. And the taxpayer must pay. And pay. And pay.

And there are others who point out that this is not a failure of the market. It is merely part of the market. There are many people who made bad decisions.

• People made bad decisions to buy houses they could not afford
• People made bad decisions to lie about their finances in order to borrow money they couldn't repay
• People made bad decisions to lend those people money
• People made bad decisions to lend the money to the people who lent money to other people, ad infinitum.
• People made bad decisions to invest in institutions which were lending money to these people.
• These people will be poorer as a result of that decision.

Sounds pretty much like creative destruction at work - something the free market is pretty good at. People who make bad financial decisions lose their money (they end up being 'poor'). People who make good financial decisions make money (they end up being 'rich'). Rapidly plummeting share prices are an opportunity. Undervalued assets are an opportunity for people to buy bargains.

But of course, governments must be seen to be doing something - anything, because we all know that making this worse is better than doing nothing.

It's time for the true free marketeers to come out of the woodwork. All the free-market-real-men who believe that the free market will do its thing and recover over time, versus all the choir-boys who want to panic and push the 'Daddy save me' button and bring the forces of government crashing down on the last bastion of free enterprise and capitalism. It's time to separate the men from the boys.

Separating the men from the boys is usually a pretty good thing. It's just that sometimes you have to use a crowbar. Or at least the blunt instrument of government intervention.

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Hard at work

Intellectual elites know that the word 'dumb' is nothing to do with intelligence, but is actually about the ability to speak. Yours truly is writing this in the middle of a child Party Land center, and the thought that that children should be seen and not heard is a pretty attractive one at the moment.

[Note to self: next time bring an MP3 with recordings of small animals being slaughtered with blunt objects - it will drown out the sound of the children, and be marginally more pleasant].

But most people use dumb to mean unintelligent, and 'dumbness' is something we are supposed to lose in our esteemed child educational institutions, which are of course governed and controlled by the Intellectual Elite.

For any school teachers who happen to have read this far, and are bristling at the suggestion that they label themselves 'Intellectual Elite', consider the fact that The Government has authorized you to dictate to a totally captive and non-consensual audience what to think, and consider that Yours Truly has no such authorization. Bu we digress ..

A recent survey conducted by some other Intellectual Elites has confirmed what many of us have known for quite some time - that literacy levels in Australian children have actually fallen over the last thirty years.

This generation of Australians are first generation who are dumber than their parents. Dear Reader, indulge me for a minute. Take a look at your parents. Isn't that a terrifying thought? Can you imagine an entire generation desperate to control the lives of those around them via the ballot box, and making worse decisions than the Baby Boomers?

Of course given that the socialist Baby Boomer generation are now mostly grandparents, the previous generation (Gen-X) didn't have a very high bar to jump. But the current generation (Gen-Y) must be playing The Limbo.

In spite of all the advances in technology over the last thirty years, all the extra educational funding per child, all the computer assisted learning techniques, the advances in pedagogical understanding and the reduced class sizes (giving more teacher time for each student), literacy levels have actually decreased.

Of course some of the squishy readers may protest about education being about more than readin', writin' and 'rithmetic. Modern education, we are told, must be about 'life skills': the ability to cope with the rapidly changing world, and installing 'societal values' in children like 'compassion', 'social justice', 'Land rights for gay whales raped in nuclear war', and a hundred other non-outcomes which are totally immeasurable.

'Political awareness' used to be a compulsory university subject in the People's Paradise Republic of China, but there is no such subject in Australian schools: mostly because subjects aren't really taught any more. They just move from issue to issue. One politically correct indoctrination session slides into another seamlessly in today's highly efficient streamlined goal oriented educational system. And the result? Something vague, squishy and immeasurable.

The teachers (assisted by their unions) have managed to put themselves in a position where they have no measurable goals. Even politicians have to put themselves to a vote every three of four years. Teachers don't even have to do that.

So yours truly thought to have a dig at a friend of the wife who recently joined the class of the Intellectual Elite as a school teacher - one who is still pumped up about her new found importance, and not yet cynical enough to take it a bit less seriously.

Clearly this is a subject which has come up in the staff-room recently because her response was instantaneous. There was no denial that the reduction in literacy was a bad thing - just a denial that the educational system was to blame.

In spite of the fact that The Teachers have total control of the students for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 35 weeks a year for over ten years, child literacy was apparently beyond their control.

It was the fact that students didn't read any more; the fact that they watched television; the fact that they played video games; the fact that they used computers; the fact that they surfed the internet; that teachers weren't properly respected. The list went on and on. Parents were to blame. The media was to blame. Capitalism was to blame. Society was to blame. Everyone was to blame, apparently, except The Teachers, and The Government Educational System.

It's good to see the teachers picked up one skill in their time at university: sophistry.

And the victims are our children.

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Building character in the playground

Yours truly was recently the recipient of a newsletter on School Bullying. As a parent who last year removed his child from a class because of consistent bullying which the teacher refused to control, I read it with some interest.

The teachers must take lessons specifically to deal with parents who complain about bullying, because the response was flawless.

First she denied it was happening, then when should could no longer deny it, she assured us should would stop it immediately, then when it clearly didn't she met further complaints with statements like 'there are family issues with that child that I am unable to discuss'. Apparently the needs of the bully were greater than the needs of those being bullied. I guess he came from a 'more needy' family than ours, so it was okay.

Clearly we were unable to stop it happening, but we could do the next best thing - make it some other child's problem by moving my own child elsewhere. And we did.

Bullying has been in the news more and more because of the advent of mobile phone cameras. More and more bullying episodes have been filmed and found their way onto youtube.com or even onto the TrashMedia like ACA.

The DoE, the unions and the teachers closed ranks to stop this trend of course: they banned mobile phones at many schools - making it harder for people to show what happens, and thereby concealing the amount of bullying that was happening under school care.

But, prisons and schools are always somewhat porus. Phones get smuggled in and videos smuggled out. So the DoE was shamed into actually looking like it was concerned about the problem, and commissioned a little booklet to send to caring parents.

And it was full of great information. It said what a bad thing bullying was. It said that bullies were victims. It said that bullies often had emotional problems. And it gave parents advice on how to counsel a child who was being bullied at school.

But there was something missing.

There was absolutely nothing in the book about the responsibilities of the teachers to ensure that a child was not being bullied. In spite of the fact that the children are under total control of the teachers for six hours a day, in spite of the fact that parents who refuse to send their children to school are threatened with goal sentences, in spite of fact that parents are powerless to stop bullying themselves, in spite of the fact that the only people who can protect children from being bullied are the teachers themselves, it said nothing about teachers having a responsibility to prevent bullying. And it said nothing about a parent's recourse if the teachers refused to prevent the bullying.

All care but no responsibility?

Well .. no responsibility anyway.

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A few of the Rudds' favorite things - your money

Baby sitting is not really very complex thing. It basically involves changing the occasional nappy, introducing the children to the delights of late night horror movies, and then pretending they were in bed at 8:30, while helping yourself to the contents of your host's liquor cabinet.

Seriously, a child could to it. And in fact children do. The majority of 14 year-olds seem to do it to earn a few dollars an hour to top up their phone cards so they can flirt via SMS.

But not in the Rudd household. In the Rudd household, the 14 year-old son needs a baby sitter of his own. Huh?

Whether 14 year old Marcus is still breast fed hasn't actually been made clear, and nor should it be. It's really none of our business what goes on behind other people's closed doors and it really shouldn't concern us.

Except of course if we are forced to pay for it.

Yes gentle reader, the baby sitter was being paid for by you - the tax payer.

While the rest of us have to pay for our own babysitters, the multi-millionaire Rudds put their baby-sitter on the staff payroll for The Lodge, and the tax-payer was expected to foot the bill.

This is Uncle Kev's idea of implementing spending cuts, and sticking up for the working class. 'Onya, Kev!

But we shouldn't be too quick to label the man a hypocrite. After all, Kevin Rudd has always been a big proponent of the Nanny State. It's good to see that he inflicts it on his own children.

Even the true believers might need a spoon full of sugar to swallow this little indiscretion.

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Spare the lash, spoil the teddy

Every statist knows that inciting religious hatred and insulting religions is a dreadful thing. So dreadful that responsible governments must lock up their citizens for doing so.

It might have taken Australia some time to catch up with the trend, but the various Australian governments have followed in the footsteps of great nations like Sudan, which have had such laws for centuries - as demonstrated by the recent jailing of school teacher Gillian Gibbons. She was charged with 'insulting Islam' after she allowed her students to name a teddy to be called Mohammed.

They were going to publicly flog her and jail her for a year, but in an uncharacteristic moment of compassion, they sentenced her to 15 days, followed by deportation. Uncharacteristic presumably because of the hordes of angry machete-wielding protesters demanding her immediate execution.

One local quoted as saying "She is a teacher and should be teaching her pupils to be respectful and have morals but instead she is doing the opposite." Morality is truly in the eyes of beholder.

While it's easy to foam at the mouth at the latest excesses from the members of the Religion of Peace, one has to question the motives of 56 year old Gillian Gibbons. What would possess someone of sound mind and (rather overweight) body to go to Sudan to teach?

Any intelligent person would either avoid the world's garbage dumps entirely, on at least minimise their time there to a few shonky arms deals before flying out to somewhere more civilized. But it takes all kinds. Some people feel the need to educate the Muslims. Perhaps she thought that familiarity would breed consideration? Perhaps she thought that she could make them more tolerant by letting them know about western feminist theory? Or (if the nature of school teachers in Australia is any indication) perhaps she is just stupid.

Teachers are fond of saying that you're never to old to continue your 'learning journey'. Now she is about to enjoy a few weeks of 'learning journey' herself.

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This part went to the Wong person

Peter Garrett is accident prone. One only has to watch his uncoordinated onstage antics from his rock-star days to see this. Frankly, it's surprising that he didn't fall off the stage sometime during a Midnight Oil gig and experience Human Frailty first hand - and break his neck.

But, one only has to consider Keith Richards to realize that some rock stars do defy the odds to live to an age which challenges actuarial predictions as well as common sense.

And common sense wasn't in great supply when Mark (Maddog) Latham took in the washed up rock star and appointed him to be ALP Lap Dog. And Peter has been messing on the carpet ever since.

He took the dunce's cap in an almost flawless campaign conducted by Kevin (Pixie) Rudd, in which everyone in the ALP was told to just say 'me too' after John Howard said anything. For some reason Garrett felt a need to strong to contain - and said that they would 'just change everything' when they were elected. Oops. You belong to the ALP now Peter. And the company takes what the company wants.

Now Peter is paying the price. He is going to keep the title of 'Environment Minister', but he will actually spend his time opening local fetes dedicated to retarded immigrant Aborigines raped in nuclear war or something. He might call himself King of the Mountain, but any environment duties requiring a Real Man have been handed to someone with real balls - the Asian Lesbian: Penny Wong.

We'll just change everything? Well, some of us are enjoying the changes already, Peter.

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>> Please Sir, I want some more