Magpie's Nest

Poems by Alex (primary offspring)

2011-01-12T07:14:00.000-08:00

The White Bike

The white bike
And the polite ammonite
Went to ignite
A parasite.

"Not quite",
Said the parasite.

It check a website.

The ammonite
Ran away on a motorbike.

The bike
Got frostbite.
Alex Moorhouse, 2011.

The Mite

The mite
Was childlike.

It disliked dynamite.

It gave a wiggle
And a giggle
And a jiggle.

Alex Moorhouse, 2011

Just got this in my inbox...

2010-12-09T06:09:00.000-08:00

... wondering how legit it looks to you guys...

To: Peter.Darby@BHM.Co.Uk
From: oikygove@toryhq.co.ni

GREETING!

I WRITE TO YOU TO MAKE MOST FORTUNATE OFFER!

FOR SMALL INVESTMENT, GUARANTEE BIG INCOME!

ONLY £20,000 STERRLING, AVG. WILL, OVER 50 YEARS, GET YOU £400,000! FOR SURE!

PLEASE DEPOSIT MONEY WITH ANY NAMED UNIVERSITY. NO WORK REQUIRED. THREE A STAR A LEVELS NEED TO BE SHOWN. I HAVE ATTACHED THESE TO THIS E-MAIL.

GO WITH BLESSINGS!

MICHAEL GOVE, DEPT OF EDUCATT... EJUCA... LEARN STUFF GOODER!

... Where's my chequebook?

Doing it on purpose.

2010-11-25T07:18:00.000-08:00

With some uneasiness, and a couple of proviso's, a TV entered Tan-Y-Fron yesterday.

Quite pointedly, the digibox did not and hopefully will not. So no live broadcasts. It's just a big screen, for occasional use.

As in, if it gets used, it will be used for a definite occasion. Maybe not a big one, like last night's viewing of a double bill of Brain of Morbius and Toy Story 3, but not channel surfing.

One of our number in the house expressed concern that she didn't like TV because of her own problems in resisting just sitting and watching ANYTHING... which I can completely relate to.

(See also resisting just eating ANYTHING in my case. Easy fake temporary satisfaction, I guess.)

So the TV is going to become like a freshly baked cake, or that one book, or a board game... rewarding, but not entirely convenient enough to be taken for granted.

As usual, this is firing some other thoughts in the butterfly brain, so hang on...

Doing it on purpose.

Speaking personally, whenever I do something "just because", it's unsatisfying. Watching whatever's on TV. Eating whatever's in the fridge. Scanning through chunks of my rss feeds. Most casual PC games.

Making time, making effort, doing things on purpose, much better. Writing. Most boardgames. You get the idea.

Thing is, some things can be done either on purpose or just because. Some people play RPG's because, well, it's what we do every Thursday. Some people have sex, or get married, or go to church, or don't go to church, or send their kids to school, or vote for a particular party, just, you know, because.

Some people do some of those things "just because" sometimes and "on purpose" sometimes.

A couple of years ago, there was talk on The Forge RPG site about "playing on purpose", trying to break through the old saw of RPG's being 20 minutes of fun wrapped up in three hours of play. There was some resistance to it from some quarters, a lot of it sounding a bit like Mrs Doyle, when faced with a tea making machine that "takes the misery out of making the tea"; "Maybe I LIKE the misery!"

But really, most of the time, doing stuff without doing it on purpose is, yes, easier. But so much less fulfilling, possibly less worthwhile.

Now excuse me while I drink the HELL out of this GODDAMN COFFEE.

The truly Bizarre notion of National Events.

In the last few years, noting the proliferation of TV channels, alternative viewing options, timeshifting, YouTube, etc, there have been periodic paeans to the notion of the National Event That Everyone Watched on TV.

The Royal Variety Show. Royal Weddings, Funerals and Bar Mitzvahs. National Football Matches. The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Show. The Moon Landing. Live Aid.

The fact that we don't all do the same thing at the same time as a nation is supposed to be a damning indictment of Thatcher's, Blair's, Brown's Cameron's Britain. "How can we have a national identity if some people aren't watching EastEnders," seems to be the implication.

It's all quite silly, and the more you think about it, the sillier it gets.

Widespread TV ownership, say 1960 for argument's sake (enough that getting to see this kind of event TV could be taken for granted).

Widespread fracturing of TV viewership, say 1995 for arguments sake (enough options that the terrestrial stations start to sweat).

So that's what, 35 years of national unity imposed by Big Brother screens?

What did we have before that arbitrary 1960 date? For one thing, tighter local communities, for all the good and bad that implies.

There were national events, sure: Royal weddings, coronations, war and peace, but these were celebrated and felt not as individual households plugged into a massive national identity, but as part of a community that was tangibly celebrating, commiserating, panicking, or protesting within arms length of each other.

(Obligatory sidetrack into mentioning a scion of my mother's side of the family who spent VE parading a sign saying "Churchill Is A Warmongering Bastard". Don't accept myths of national unity of opinion at face value. And remember Winnie lost the post-war election.)

Having conditioned us to interact with the national consciousness via a TV screen, when the viewing is fragmented, so will national identity.

And to an extent, good. That level of implied national unity, even on just a cultural level, is historically speaking downright odd.

And some communities only exist through screens. And if you're reading this, you're part of one of them. Hi.

So yes, I think this sort of national unity is a) bizarre and b) on the way out, and I'd like to think it will at least partly be replaced with a new form of the old community spirit, some of it virtual, some of it of necessity physically local.

In fact, to be frank, in the long term it's the only sustainable way. And it's pretty much been what the evolving brain has created in a feedback loop with other evolving brains over a lot longer than the 35 years of "One nation under TV". We're badly adapted to being in a community of 40 million, never mind eight billion. A couple of hundred (you know, like the average Facebook friends list, or what you can just about fit into a village hall) seems to be the human brains' median social comfort zone.

Which makes me very suspicious of anyone trying to sell the truly bizarre notion of National Events.

Which makes me happier that we've left the digibox behind.

Inhabiting the corpse of the RPG industry

2010-11-01T03:52:00.000-07:00

Another random blurg, after the food blurg, a game blurg.

So, everyone's talking about the death of the rpg industry*. Or at least it's dwindling to stump.

Some random thoughts:

1. Thirty years ago, when I first threw polyhedral dice in anger, if I wanted to play a game about, say defeating a dragon, what were my options? Blocky ploygons on the atari 2600. Read a fantasy novel. Play a miniatures wargame, or a board game which would come in two flavours: moronically simple roll and moves or Avalon Hill titles with rules more complex than the average house purchase document. Even text adventures on home computers were a couple of years away, and then were essentially fantasy novels revealed through through working out puzzles.

D&D and it's clones were state of the art.

Now... well, World of Warcraft and Dragon Age are just the beginnings. Consoles and PC's offer immersive experiences with as much an illusion of freedom as you get in most table top games, without having to arrange time with half a dozen folks for a whole evening.

As goes return on time invested, RPG's are looking lousy. But so is writing, and acting, and crafting, and other hobbies that require more effort than finding a charged controller and the right disk. And they're still going strong. At least partly because people recognise that part of the reward comes from knowing you've made the effort to do something that takes effort.

These are activities that value the product of effort, rather than the experience of entertainment. Can RPG's do the same? Should they?

It's been over ten years since people first started talking about this, about gaming on purpose, on taking the activity seriously, as much as a garage band or amateur drama club would, to work on producing a worthwhile experience for the participants. Otherwise, why not just plug in the Xbox?

2. Paper fetishism.

What is a table top RPG? In a product sense, it's mostly books, a few dice. Even when sold as electronic media, RPG's are usually electronic stand ins for paper books. Often some of the best looking books you will see, and more often than not, these days, with indices and hyperlinks inside the text.

I want an electronic toolbox for playing a game. I want to be able to fire up a character creator from the get go, I want tools to manage the job ready to roll.

I want to be able to run a whole game from an iPad. Possibly a networked set of iPads No, I don't have an iPad, but keep the design philosophy in mind when thinking about...

An app for Universalis that takes free text input from multiple chat clients, allows tagging of text and busting it out to objects created on the fly while tracking tokens and dice pools.

An app for Inspectres that tracks the dice pools and rolls between all players, who's had a confessional, etc...

An app for Dogs in the Vineyard that contains the town builder, character builder and conflict trackers...

So far, I've mostly seen dice rollers, online mappers with some game functions embedded for D20 derivations, and character builders, mostly fan built, mostly... not great. And especially not great for games from the Forge diaspora.

But developing takes time. And costs money. And no-one yet knows if anyone will pay for for table top rpg's in this form. So it's not going to get done.

And those who are still publishing will be publishing like it's 1989.

3. And does it matter?

You can buy a new buggy whip, if you want to. Which means someone is still making money out of the proverbial thing that you can't make money out of any more.

The shops may be going, but the online outlets will stay. The conventions will shrink, but they'll keep going until the rising cost of travel will kill all such shindigs.

And, you know, rising fuel/electricity costs could get people to look again at local, social, low-electricity forms of recreation.

My boy wants to play table top RPG's. He wants to get his friends involved.

The industry is shrinking, if it was ever an industry at all. The hobby? It's barely out of the cradle.

*Mostly triggered by http://gmskarka.com/ , who commonly suffers, along with many other intelligent commentators on RPG's, with people arguing with what the voices in their head tell them is being said rather than the actual words.

By gum, that was lovely...

2010-10-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting here, recovering from what must be one of the best meals I've ever eaten.

And just look at me. I've eaten a hell of a lot of meals.

Finally, after many false starts where it became painfully obvious they were trying to avoid me, even to the extent of moving their restaurant lock stock and barrel from Irby to Wallasey Village on the very day I'd booked a meal, myself and my partner, having dispatched offspring to the care of a paramilitary youth organisation and grandparents, snuck into Cromwells half an hour before we'd booked the table.

Yeah, didn't see THAT coming, did you?

While I went off to secure cash for the evening, my partner settled herself in with her back to the window and a hot chocolate in front of her.

Firstly, this meant that my face was pointing to the outside world. Which I think was a major contribution to us having the downstairs of the restaurant to ourselves from six until nearly eight on a Wednesday evening. This, the staff assured us, has never happened since their move to Wallasey.

I'm available for hire to anyone wishing to send me to a rival establishment to scare away business. Reasonable rates.

Secondly, it meant I was faced with Cromwells' version of the hot chocolate. Being a tall glass of hot milk with a great big chunk of chocolate on a stick indulgently melting away in the middle of it.

Pacing myself a little, I went for a pot of green tea while interrogating the menu. I'm not a tea snob, and all I can say is that it was markedly more pleasant green tea than I'm used to.

So on to starters. My partner went for the Blacksticks Mushroooms, portobello mushroom topped with Blacksticks Blue cheese and Cromwells own red onion marmalade. She claimed later that the marmalade was the highlight of the meal, but it must be said, only because it is fantastically good. It had a lot of competition.

I went for the black pudding topped with roast apple and peppercorn sauce. The sauce was quite mild, the black pudding just spiced enough, most and tender (again, I'm used to leathery black pudding, or seemingly underdone almost runny stuff; this was a delight). It's easy to overwhelm with spice and peppers in this lot, but it was pitched just right.

Already, I was feeling failry well fed, probably because I've been on a somewhat drastic feeding regime recently, and this was a very off piste excursion from what I ought to be doing. Three hail mary's and a day on the evian for me tomorrow...

Onwards, and with the recommendation of the waitress, my partner took on the red pesto linguine, while I went for the pie of the day, steak and onion, with chips. Before, when ordering a fresh pasta in a restaurant of this standard, you expect a modest amount; now, my partner may not be tall, but I expect to be able to see her chin when looking across the table, not to find it obscured by linguine. And linguine of near perfect texture, with a superb red pesto, pine nuts and parmesan, at that.

Meanwhile, I picked up a chip and bit into it... my partner caught my look and asked what was up. I passed her a chip, and she got the same surprised, almost shocked, look on her face. These were, quite possibly, the greatest chips we'd ever tasted: fluffy, light, with the barest crunch on the outside. The pie was packed with a meat that was rivalling the chips for lightness of texture, very flavoursome, with a gorgeous crunchy vegetable selection on the side.

Then the desert. After toying with ordering all six dessert options (apart from possibly Bakewell Slice, which my partner claims is "too sweet"; she also claims that icing "ruins" cakes, and is clearly delusional), I cut the deadlock by generously offering to order the jam roly poly and custard, and offering to share with my partner, allowing her to go for the plum crumble tart with cream.

The crumble was gorgeous, just tart enough to earn the name, and the jam roly poly fantastically sweet and stodgy (as it should be). If more people ate this kind of jam roly poly, there would be fewer wars. Mainly because I cannot imagine anyone being able to get up and fight after polishing off a whole bowl of it.

Didn't get to chat with the folks at Cromwells as much as I'd like: one of them was having his wedding reception upstairs (they claimed... anything to avoid me, I reckon), but the waiting staff were friendly and genuinely wanted to make sure the experience was as enjoyable as possible, and by gum it was.

Plans are already being laid to get granny in for an afternoon tea, and if I can get to the tweetup there in November, I will be.

Overall: if you ever need an excuse to break a diet, this certainly qualifies. Now, to the exercise mat to clear off some of this roly poly...

Okay, here's the deal...

2010-05-11T06:18:00.001-07:00

You know who I want? A party with a sane response to the ongoing financial meltdown, a commitment to civil liberties and some sort of plan to stop us increasing the body counts (and bills) in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Cameron's financial plans seem to amount to "sit on our personal fortunes and laugh at the proles", will grant everyone the finest freedoms money can buy, and don't mention the war. Labour pissed the boom years up the wall sucking up to the corporate interests that were always going to run back to the Tories when it started raining and claiming an end to boom and bust, are insane control freaks ("just a LITTLE more government and we'll have this fixed, a couple of hundred more laws..."), and don't mention the war. And no-one knows what the lib-dems planned economically, least of all them. Make initial good noises on civil liberties, but have caught the labour bug of not trusting the populace. And don't mention the war.

So frankly, I'm "behind" none of them. Whoever gets in, the next few years at least will be worse than you think, no matter how bad you think it's going to be.

Everyone clear where I stand now? Good.

Now like I said before, I expect either a Cameron minority govt or lib con agreement, but whatever happens, it's likely to go into meltdown before September.

And I don't want ANY of the current options.

Pink stinks less than viral marketing.

2009-12-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

So, most people have at least peripherally noticed that over the last few years, really lazy marketing departments have been pushing versions of popular products in pink: iPods, radios, yes, even pink scrabble.

It's lazy marketing because it follows insane logic of "We don't have enough market penetration with female tweens, they like pink, let's make a pink version." I guess it worked well enough to keep it going for a while, and the appropriation of pink for breast cancer let them shift more pink crap with an air of piety...

But I'm guessing that they didn't shift enough, because out of nowhere the Pink Stinks campaign has appeared.

Pushing a really pathetic claim that all this pink crap oppresses little girls more than, say, the constant judgemental attitude of the press towards women's bodies (and I notice that Gok Wan, who seems to think empowerment means getting naked on national TV, is backing the campaign), Pink Stinks by some miracle seems to have got a really good press officer just in time for the christmas rush.

And all over the press, the blogosphere and twitterscape, lots and lots of manufactured stimulus response outrage from people who are NOT going to be dictated to, they WILL face down the PC brigade and BUY MORE PINK CRAP FOR THEIR LITTLE GIRLS THIS YEAR.

Because, you know, you fight DA MAN with consumerism. That'll show 'em.

And Pink Stinks will go away again until the next time the buyers overestimate demand for pink crap.

(Historical note: for Victorians, pink was for boys, blue was for girls. Honest. I've seen very silly evolutionary psychologists trying to explain why girls "naturally" prefer pink, because it couldn't possibly be a social construct. They are wets and weeds and I diskard them uterly.)

How dumb is three strikes for Broadband?

2009-11-20T05:33:00.000-08:00

Because if we applied it to other services...

If they thought you had ordered pirate DVD's by mail three times, they'd stop you receiving or sending mail.

If they thought you had made recipes from a pirated cookbook three times, they'd take your kitchen away.

If they thought you had used a car to take a dodgy DVD to a friends three times, they'd take away your driving licence.

If they thought you had obtained a dodgy DVD in a pub three times, they'd ban you from pubs.

Used electricity to watch pirated content? Then why not have your electricity taken away.

I used to have a couple of photocopied books. Guess I should just burn my library now.

Oh, and remember, they want to be able to do this without due legal process. On the say so of Mandleson's appointed deputies. From the MPAA and RIAA.

Listen, Doubleday doesn't get to check my bookshelves, Warner don't get to check my hard drive, not without a frigging warrant and probably frigging cause.

This is basic, page one, rule of law. We shouldn't have to explain this to a government minister.

Well, they've fired the starting pistol...

2009-11-19T06:15:00.000-08:00

Children, Schools and Families Bill

Never mind the assurances that nothing would be done until the official response to the enquiry, let alone the select committee report, there it is.

Anyone got any idea what is so wrong with HE that we need further legislation and powers RIGHT THE F NOW? Or any of these "high profile cases" that aren't, in fact, failures of state authorities to properly use their current powers?

A parliamentary petition might help a little now, as it's got to be voted on. The commons debate will be drawn out, thanks to the select committee members who were engaging with Badman, and there will not be an entirely smooth path in the Lords either. Certainly, there's a good chance this could get delayed until after the election, and then quietly go away to die.

A petition or a few would at least force MP's to engage a little with those materially affected by the bill.

As for the statement of non-conformity, or whatever it is... look, if you're not going to comply, why the hell are you shouting "I will not comply" now, before it's the law? You are registering yourself not only as a home educator, but a "trouble making" home educator, which is exactly what they want to get a frigging list of.

If you're not going to comply, then don't. Comply.

As for "Parents United", you harvested my email, spammed me anonymously, stalked me on twitter then bugged out when you realised youcould be traced, and you want ME to put MY name and expose MY family for your half arsed, ripped off "statement" when you won't even say who you are?

You're making EO look classy.

We are the people they've been looking for...

2009-11-12T01:44:00.000-08:00

http://www.wearethepeoplemovie.com/

Imagine if you will that you are happily working away in your kitchen, say, baking some bread. Not unusually you have your radio on. Lets presume you're a smug, middle class, university educated so-and-so, so you have radio four on.

While you are kneading your dough, a programme comes on about the crisis in bread. The state bakeries are turning out bread that can, to be fair, be excellent in both taste and nutritional content on occassion, but much of the time is bland and full of empty calories. In many cases, it turns out to be actively carcinogenic.

In fact, despite what the government say, many independent experts say that it's as good for you, on balance, as eating cardboard. The official bread making process is laborious, inflexible at the bakery level and subject to interference on the slightest whim of the Minister for Bread, Scones and Baked Goods.

The minister is not allowing state bakeries to use the international bread test, as it doesn't mandate "Traditional medium slicing".

While you are warming your oven and letting your dough prove, many experts come on the radio, debating what should go into the official governmental standard bread making process, whether adding additional mandatory stages helped, whether it's the fault of the standard tin, whether it would be improved by making poppy seeds compulsory, and, of course, blaming the bakers (who have to follow the official process), the inspectors (who have to enforce the official process) or, ultimately, the farmers for producing such terrible, terrible wheat these days.

By the time they have finished that section, your bread has risen nicely and is ready to be baked. The pundits are moving on, saying, well, they are trying their best, British bread is the best in the world and, according to their figures, better than it has ever been. One of them says sagely "Baking bread is HARD. If it was easy, we would have cracked it by now".

Maybe today you've made a cottage loaf, or a tiger loaf, a baguette, a fruit loaf, soda bread, bara brith... but there it is, hot, and delicious. And you know, maybe today it didn't rise right, or turn a little crustier than you hoped, but it's only a days baking, you can have another go tomorrow, and at least you know exactly what went into it.

And that's exactly how I felt about education when I saw that trailer.

From Twitter 11-10-2009

2009-11-10T18:00:00.001-08:00

From Twitter 11-09-2009: From Twitter 11-08-2009: From Twitter 11-07-2009: From Twitter 11-06-2009: From Twitte.. http://bit.ly/1mctVA
From the "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" folder... http://bit.ly/4qNmz0
Citizen Journalism at it's best: http://bit.ly/3XnCLQ
Just applied for a job: http://bit.ly/4FPz76 wondering how far it will get before they set the application on fire.

Tweets copied by twittinesis.com

Graham Badman, King of projection

2009-11-05T03:23:00.000-08:00

Sure, let's bandy around psychological disorders, Graham. Let's do that.

Let's start with Mbp. Let's ignore that the syndrome is of dubious medical acceptance, and go into it.

It's where someone, desparate for approval or sympathy, invents or creates evidence of abuse or harm in another, usually a child, and perhaps colludes in creating and/ or concealing the actual sources of harm.

These sad individuals often seem unable to adequately divorce their fantasies of vulnerable people that only they can adequately protect from the reality that it is their own actions that are placing these people in harms way.

These people often engage in elaborate ruses, sometimes involving their family and friends in their deceptions. They portray any attempts to reveal their deceptions and actually causing harm as personal attacks on their blameless character.

Now. Graham Badman produced a report which, on the basis of no defencible statitstics, claimed that home educated children were at risk from their parents, that only the intervention of state appointed officers, like him and his daughter, could protect these children, despite the documented vastly worse outcomes for state cared children. Badman's daughter joined at least one home educating group under false pretences during the review. When the poor quality of the review was highlighted, further requests for information about Badman's conduct of the review was denied on the grounds it could be used to defame or villify him.

It's a classic case. There's no hope for him. In accusing the home educators of MBP, Badman was indulging in textbook projection, placing his psychological problems onto an external scapegoat.

If critically examining a man's "work" is defamatory, if telling the truth about him is villification, then call me a domestic extremist.

HE Consultation! Important please read. Time sensitive

2009-10-15T07:09:00.000-07:00

(copied with permission of the author, Elaine Greenwood-Hyde)

Hi,

please read the whole of this email as it contains important information for every home educator, information that some may not be aware of.

We are currently facing the biggest threat there has ever been to home education and everything could hinge on this current consultation which ends on this Monday 19th Oct. I cannot stress just how important it is that these proposals are defeated because they are planning much more than registration.

Hot on the heels of this consultation they intend to consult on the definition of what constitutes a suitable education. First they intend to hog tie us with compulsory registration, inspections and annual licensing to home educate and then they intend to determine the content of our home education.

Here is a link to the announcement that they are planning a consultation on suitable education.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/8299694.stm

Smaller URL

http://tinyurl.com/yg3t56k

Please do fill out the consultation on home education and enourage friends and family to do so too. Even if you think the consultation has pre determined outcomes you have nothing to lose. You do not have to write a lengthy response to each question, you can answer a simple no or yes.

Here is a link to the current consultation. Please note it ends very soon.

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1643&external=no&menu=1

Smaller url

http://tinyurl.com/l82dxm

Please feel free to cross post this email to other home educators and groups, but please remove my personal details/email address first. Thanks for reading

BWs Elaine

Watch out for the reposts!

2009-09-22T14:56:00.001-07:00

Again, especially on the facebook feed: trying to save some old posts, nothing to see here, move along.

A rant (repost from 18/09/09)

2009-09-18T13:14:00.000-07:00

Graham Badman.

The bad penny, the pee into the wind, he just keeps coming back.

After he turned in his woefully prepared report into home education, for which, as far as we can understand, the conclusions were written first, we tried to challenge either him or the DCSF on it.

And we were told "Mr Badman does not work for the DCSF, he is independent, and has turned in the report, so it is nothing to do with him any more, and since it was independent, it can't be wrong, so the DCSF can't be challenged for putting forward a legislative program based on it."

So we got a hearing arranged for the select committee on education. AHEd, working through freedom of information requests, got very robust figures where not only did Badman give none, but Baroness Morgan claimed that they "weren't the basis of the report".

And today..?

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/everychildmatters/publications/documents/laeelectivehomeeducation/

I'm sorry, WHAT?

This "independent researcher", who no longer has anything to do with the report, can get the DCSF to forward his request for "better figures" (and with a later deadline than other evidence) to every LA in the country?

Now, as far as I make it, that makes at least three different versions of the state of play that Badman and the DCSF have spun.

1) Badman is independent, the report is soundly based in empirical evidence.
2) Badman is independent, the report is based on soft evidence that we can't find right now.
3) Badman is working for the DCSF, we'd like some evidence that we forgot to collect. Since the dog ate the last lot.

What really annoys me isn't so much that it betrays a set agenda from the outset.

We knew that.

Nor that their evidential cupboards (along with their coffers) are bare and that the stats in the report are a triumph of auto-proctological accounting.

We knew that.

It's that they thought no-one would notice. It's possibly the most half-arsed, cloth-eared, pig-ignorant attempt at a cover-up that I've seen since my chocolate encrusted three-year-old son claimed the biscuit tin fell on him.

It makes the machinations of The Thick of It look like machine like competence.

More than anything, it shows the level of dismissive contempt that Badman, Balls and all their little wizards have for home educators, parliament and the population as a whole.

They're trying to move the goalposts and think no-one will notice. I spurn them as I would spurn a rabid dog with dysentery.

Simon Webb, education warrior. Contains language.

2009-07-30T13:22:00.000-07:00

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/schools/simon-webb-we-must-get-tough-on-home-schooling-1764348.html

From my facebook thread:

I believe Simon's children are miserable hothoused prisoners of their home who are desperate to escape their father, and will probably end up broken drug addicts selling their bodies for cash due to being unable to properly form relationships after their claustrophobic upbringing.

And I have as much evidence as Simon does of his worries. So I demand that I be allowed to inspect him.

Also, note that Simon "works with children with special needs in inner London ". So I'm guessing that he works for, or at the very least hand in glove with, the LA.

And from twitter:

thatdebswoman: OMG, I've only read the first paragraph & already seething - who the fuck is this prick?

pete_darby: Someone who wants Ed Balls to hold him, as the auto's scare him.

bridd: he wants Balls' sweaty caress

pete_darby: There is nothing good or right about that sentence.

Villification and Harassment...

2009-07-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Now, this really does take the biscuit.

The Department of Continued and Sustained FAIL are threatening to take their ball away... no, it's even sillier than that.

They're trying to take their facts away.

They're linking the existence of the satirical Badman Blog to the work of those brilliant people working away at official figures to demonstrate that Badman produced his figures in a monumental act of auto-proctological statistics.*

And so, they are reviewing the provision of FoI requests in light of the possibility that they may be used to "defame or vilify" the authors of the review.

Yes, they are witholding facts in case those facts are used to portray the author of a review (that claimed that monitoring was necessary, despite their being no evidence, on the grounds that some authority figures have "issues" for which their is no factual basis) in somewhat of a bad light.

I take it then that it is now policy that you can defame and villify a whole class of people on the basis of hearsay and deliberately manipulated figures, but that it is unacceptable to use facts to challenge that vilification.

Oh I forgot... in order to defame and vilify a whole class of people, you have to be working for the DCSF. Silly me.

*(And to those who doubt that, I say that any man who has spent a good portion of his life teaching science who then takes an unrepresentative sample, extracts the median value and then multiplies it unweighted across the whole class to obtain an aggregate figure, is not being merely disingenuous but actively misleading. Either he is too mendacious to be trusted with the review or incompetent. You see, unlike Mr Badman, I tend to vilify and defame people solely on the basis of clear evidence of their actions.)

Another letter to inDCSFpendent

2009-03-19T13:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Sir,

Helena Cox (letters 18-Mar-2009) raises a spectre of insular religious home educators, presumably as part of a general push to get public support for governmental oversight of home education.

I wonder if she has written, or had published, similar "concern troll" letters about state approved faith schools, or indeed the culturally homogenizing effect of general state schools in eliminating the very diversity of opinion she claims to be defending.

I have far greater faith in parents than the state in being able to decide on an appropriate education for their children, and the more I see reported on the state of schooling in this country and the woeful outcomes for the children mired in state education, the greater my faith grows.

I am writing as a humanist-pagan home educator who counts amongst his, and his children's, home educating friends people of all faiths and none, including as some of our closest friends a family who fit the description Helena gives to a T. I have no fears for their children, as you could not find a more loving and supportive family.

Social diversity cannot be defended by state imposed homogeneity. Perhaps Helena should ask whether she believes that home education should only be for "people like us" and that "people not like us" should be forced to be like us.

And if she thinks faith based home education is "tantamount to child abuse", I can only wish that she is speaking from a blisfully naive viewpoint of not having witnessed child abuse. The comparison is crass and insulting to all parties.