Save the Humans

Greens Under the Bed

There is a good article in the Times Online at the moment: "Blunt warning about greens under the bed".

The idea of red=green is not new, but it is well written:

His band of angry young men would find Gore where once they found Marx

Where once they raged about the fleecing of the proletariat and quaked at the march of fascism, Blunt and his circle, transposed to today’s college bar, would rage about the fleecing of the planet and quake at its imminent destruction. If you squint, red and green look disarmingly similar.

My desire to live a free, mundane life is a fundamental cog in our messy, glorious, capitalist democracy. It is built on millions of such small entrenched postitions. Red-filtered, my desires are despicable and bourgeois and must be beaten out of me with indoctrination or force. Green-filtered, my small desires are despicable acts of ecological vandalism. My house is a carbon factory. My desire to travel, to own stuff, to eat meat, to procreate, to heat my house, to shower for a really, really long time; all are evil.

This last bit is very well put. Environmentalism is all very well until it actually intrudes on our lives. At that point it is really no different from communism in its impact, whether environmentalists are communists or not.

President Obama Loves Debt

If the USA's government spending (which was bad under Bush and seems simply frightening just six months later) is getting you down, try this video. And if driving so fast bothers you because of the carbon emissions, think of it as public transport instead.

Send your Kids to an Independent School

The Telegraph has an article buried away on page 12.

Private school students earn a third more than state pupils

That is a very large amount. I hope that the difference isn't so great in New Zealand. But it helps to explain why so many people effectively pay twice for their childrens' education. Things are particularly grim in the UK where private education is at least twice as expensive as New Zealand, and there is no state subsidy. Some mothers (or fathers) take up work solely to pay for fees.

About one-in-12 British children (eight per cent) are educated privately at independent schools.

The popularity has increased in recent years, perhaps because some of the worse state schools have finally been opened to the scorn they deserve, but partly because too many children have been watching the Harry Potter movies. More recently, the recession has had the opposite effect. At least in the UK a number of independent schools have closed or applied to join the state system. The socialists must be smiling.

"Our findings suggest that rather than family background
being the predominant factor, private school education seems to offer
something else to the equation."

What a shock that must be. Something else? Could it be the private schools themselves? How awful?

The teaching unions have always claimed that private schools are a waste of time and money. A concerted campaign against independent schools has been going on for decades. Selective schools (called grammar schools in the UK) were mostly closed in the 60s. Around where we live there are still a few and they are as popular as vice. Tony Blair was hammered within the party just for sending his son to a C of E school (a state school, but a nice one). He rightly put his son's education before left wing politics.

"Even after adjustments for qualifications gained and family background,
those in the top 10 per cent of earners who had attended independent
schools earned on average 20 per cent more than state school pupils in
the same salary band."

Perhaps it is time to hand over management of state schools to those who actually know what they are doing. Perhaps that is a bit harsh. But it is surely madness to allow the state to continue its near-monopoly of the school system. The monopoly is doing what any monopoly does: stifling innovation, creating division, wasting money and now, reducing future earnings.

What a shame.