Beginning

Yesterday, I sat in on a webinar about sustainability and the green environment in relation to training the upcoming generation of apprentices in the construction trades. The presenters were earnest and sincere in their desire to promote awareness of the impending – some would say already present – climate crisis. The trouble was, though, none of them were expert in the field, having been drawn in from various, more established disciplines. Nevertheless, this is the way of the brave new world.

Coincidentally, this morning I read in the Spectator about the Unesco’s latest interference in this world: Education for Sustainable Development, ESD for short. It seems that the Unesco is not content with their current levels of alarmism and seek to embed ESD throughout the young people, expressly to encourage political climate activism. The programme states that ‘Empowering and mobilising young people of all genders… is a central part of ESD implementation’. Of all genders? Was it really necessary to trumpet that particular bit of virtue?

Anyhoo, if you were worried that young people are indoctrinated enough in our schools and universities the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization does not share your fear and wants to impose top-down mandates that every curriculum be re-tuned to harmonise with its political goal to ‘climatise’ every waking thought… and probably your dreams as well. Lest you also think you can maybe just ignore all this, the UN has taken the BBC’s stance on balance and central to the imposition of ESD is that ‘the educator has the duty of not being neutral’.

What this means is that, much like with diversity training, every lecturer, every teacher, every curriculum leader will be themselves re-educated to trot out the egregious drivel of the environmental protest movements. Whether they are concerned or not, whether they have the ability to understand ‘the science’ their jobs will be incumbent on toeing this line. And why this is worrying is because they will be fed the  Greta syllabus whereby every shower of rain is climate breakdown and every hot day will be an extinction event and your children are going to have the bejesus scared out of them.

There is the chance that those studying engineering and physics and other related STEM subjects will have the ability to see through the worst, but what of those reading the arts? Relying on the greater wisdom of your tutors used to be a safe bet when in search of the truth, but how reliable is going to be the externally moulded opinions of those with little or no training in critical thinking and the scientific method?

Is this where the Marxist infiltration of our establishments has brought us? From those hippies who became teachers, who rebelled against rigour in education, who embraced whatever new-age claptrap was in the wind and thus influenced the next generation of teachers, and so on. The UN is now questioning and challenging the very purpose of education and making decisions to leave out anything which does not contribute to sustainability, even as it redefines to its own end what sustainability itself means.

This is a war on civilisation, nothing less. And it should be met with a resilient rebuttal at every opportunity. Whenever your offspring seek to ‘educate’ you about your part in humanity’s downfall you need to be ready with more than just a ‘yes, dear’. But I don’t know if common sense can prevail, for this has in effect been happening for many years and many graduates are already approaching positions of power and influence. As far as this brave new world war is concerned it may not be just the beginning, but the beginning of the end.

Raab

Sitting here, working from home (during my annual leave, I might add) I can hear James O’Brien in the background embarking on a ridiculous schoolboy-style rant. Is he berating his parents for carrying out their scared duty to protect him from his own idiocy? Is he frothing about some monstrous injustice levied on his favoured left-wing causes? Nope, he is going on and on and on about the resignation of Dominic Raab.

Furthermore, he is behaving exactly like the small-minded, tin-eared bully he, and many of his right-on comrades, actually are. The words I hear come from a face one could surely never tire of punching. On so many counts O’Brien is on the wrong side of opinion, the wrong side of common sense and especially in the Carl Beech affair, the wrong side of the law. And as always, being of the left, he possess the ability to overcome the cognitive dissonance of having authored at least two books to the contrary.

But O’Brien is inconsequential. What is more important is the background to the accusations of bullying as applied to Dominic Raab. As he says in his resignation letter: "In setting the threshold for bullying so low, this inquiry has set a dangerous precedent. It will encourage spurious complaints against ministers…" He is right, I believe. Not, I hasten to add, that bullying is acceptable, but in that what is perceived as bullying is something we have probably all done at some time in our lives.

Where does this threshold lie? Sarcastic comments, the raising of an eyebrow at an idiotic suggestion, an expressed expectation that employees take their duties seriously, a sharp intake of breath? Every boss has had occasion to make his or her dissatisfaction clear, to admonish a colleague, to take issue with a proposal. Everybody has been exasperated with somebody else’s lateness, their lack of effort, their incompetence. Why should it not be permissible to get it out in the open, confront the elephant and then get on with business?

I’m really sorry that everybody has not the spine to take such criticism on the chin, but this is the brutal truth of the matter. Maybe if your efforts fall short of your employers’ expectations you are in the wrong job. Maybe if this is a regular event in your life it is not the boss who needs taking aside, but yourself. If high standards are not what you spire to, then don’t be part of the running of the country. If you can’t take the heat, etc.

Sadly, this is where the rise of the ideology motivated social justice movement culminating in the pre-eminence of the HR department has brought us. A Police ‘Service’ dedicated to justice for the criminal. Minority terrorism from the likes of the trans movement, the alphabet people and the various heads of the hydra posing as environmentalism. And government driven by the desire to be liked.

Well, sod it all. I want hard-headed police force and hanging judges. I want the intolerance of indolence and the rewarding of achievement, rather than the acknowledgement of mere, half-hearted participation. I want there to be losers as well as winners and I want it to be absolutely clear which is valued the more. I want bosses to be allowed to boss, and I want an end to the culture of anything goes, something-for-nothing, reward-for-failure and indulgence of hurt feelings. In short, I want my country back.

Go Figure!

Rishi Sunak is back on his maths obsession, but like so many others he is entirely missing the point, The reason we are so far behind other ‘advanced’ nations is that the political will to point at the whole herds of elephants in the room is absent. And this is by design. Education is still the path to future prosperity, but not for the nation. The way we are going we will soon be world leaders in mediocrity and identity politics.

The HR tails has been firmly wagging the dog for decades now and nobody with the power to hire, to shape the demography of the workforce, believes in merit any more. What matters most is a virtuous blend of the diverse. As long as a corporation can field a team of multicoloured, multicultural, neuro-diverse, gender-fluid incompetents it will be hailed as the pinnacle of human achievement even as it achieves the square root of fuck-all.

For years I have declared that while 20% of UK adults are said to be functionally illiterate, the other third are bad at maths. This used to get a chuckle; now it is met with silence and blank incomprehension… probably because fully half of UK adults have the numeracy of a six-year old, so can’t put two and two together. Rishi Rich wants to address all of this by making maths compulsory in some form until eighteen.

Too late, mate. Back in the bad old days of bricks in the wall at least each school-leaver entered the workforce with a role to play. Now, they don’t want to be bricks but identify instead as decorative planters, as corporate performance art, as influencers, copycatting other influencers in their turn. Children are no different from seventy years ago, they have just had the wrong thoughts put into their heads throughout their lives. Nothing wrong with being a brick – at least those bricks could read a bus timetable and add up their overtime.

Without bricks you just can’t build any walls at all. Only a very few have the talent to lead, to innovate, to design, to plan; the rest of us would be far happier just getting on with our own tasks and leaving the hard stuff to those who can do it. But no, the modern ethos is that you can somehow earn a living by not fitting in at all, and then altering society to look like you. Again, however, a tiny few will do the influencing and the lumpen masses will just follow them… over an economic cliff.

We need doers. We need plumbers and wiremen, builders and road-repairers. We need drivers and waiters and cleaners and shelf-stackers. We need doctors and engineers and scientists and entrepreneurs, too, but we will always need bricklayers if we ever want to build a wall. If you think about it the old bricks ended up being wonderfully diverse, simply by pursuing what they could. The irony is that by pursuing diversity above all we end up with herds of useless, bland, self-declaring morons without a talent between them.

Undeveloping World

The west is dying. In front of our eyes the developed nations – or at least, the leaders of those nations – have made conscious decisions to do absolutely nothing of value for fear, it seems, of upsetting people. So ashamed are they of progress, we are ‘undeveloping’. Instead of using the skill and ingenuity and the purposeful dedication of thrusting entrepreneurs, western governments have embarked on a series of self-harming measures which would have any individual immediately sectioned.

Net-zero; the method by which we roll back centuries of industrial progress and wealth creation and impoverish the masses to assuage the climate guilt of a minority of the concerned, but incompletely informed. The acolytes of St Greta of Thunberg would return us to caves without a moment’s thought, with all the human suffering that would bring about. Life spans without sophisticated medical care and nutrition would plummet and we’d be back to only having one generation of grandparents at best. Meanwhile, the third world would continue belching out smoke and CO₂ as they continued to strive for what we gave up.

‘We’ are still banging on about the slavery we abolished while our new idiot king is about to bill the taxpayer for reparations for things his ancestors really didn’t involve themselves in. Every museum exhibit, painting, play, movie; every bit of vernacular, street names, buildings, statues; every country home, every surname is to be rigorously interrogated for links to a trade nobody in 200 years has experienced. Oh, except for in many black and brown countries, which will of course be excused, as to accuse would be racist.

Our everyday life has been hijacked by the squeakiest of minorities, Nike being only the latest of famous brands eager to please only the genderqueer. Soon the very idea of a nuclear family will only be associated with memories of the atomic-bomb stand offs of the Cold War. Mummy and daddy? Wash your mouth out, child, and bring me my hormone blockers! How soon, one wonders, before it all becomes compulsory?

In the name of freedom, everybody will be able to occupy their own unique group identity… but in a group of one where are your allies? At least there once was a way of elevating oneself from the dreary lottery of birth right. Decent, respected teachers in a properly structured education system was that lifeline, and grammar schools – despite all of Labour's denials – landed many a pauper’s child a decent living as adults. These days we seem intent on preventing any child from even reaching adulthood.

As many have commented for many decades now, it is as if the keys to the asylum have been handed to the inmates. And, talking of asylum, why on earth do governments refuse to tackle head-on the mass importation of undocumented, unskilled, unwanted, aggressively anti-Christian immigrants and pretend that they are seeking asylum. I wonder if the incomers realise that all they have been told is false and there is no escape here from lives of crime and squalor. Indeed it is to be the new normal quite soon.

The UK, most of all, has the right, outside of the EU to reform all of this, but we won’t. Instead our judges and teachers, our police and armed forces, and most of all our useless parliamentarians will cling to the dead weight around all of our necks as if it were a life raft. Not waving but drowning. If ever we needed the little boy in the crowd to denounce the emperor’s nakedness, that time is surely now.

Bring on the AI

I’ll be blunt. I am suspicious of muslims, and of islam itself. Nothing less than total subjugation of the world population to the will of allah will satisfy them. Where they are dominant they are truly dominant and where they are the minority they quickly establish special status as victims of islamophobia, then use that victim status to gain privilege, to protect their own as they proliferate until their minority becomes capable of exerting power and influence over the indigenous population.

I am suspicious of those who convert to islam; converts to extreme beliefs – religion, supremacy, gender recognition, net-zero – are usually zealots, and almost always useful idiots to the cult. Adopting a quiet spirituality and living a life informed by nature, the cosmos, Gaia, compassion and doing no harm is fine, but what does a belief that you and only you are god’s chosen people say about your true motivations? Plus, you know, suicide bombs and all that…

So you won’t find me cheerleading for people like Sadiq Khan and Humsa Yousaf, both trumpeted as ‘First muslim [enter title here]’. I would far rather see them acclaimed as ‘Last muslim [whatever]’. Defining somebody by their religion is akin to defining them by race and we call that racism. So when black leaders make a great deal of their blackness we know that they see whitey as a problem to solve, a foe to be defeated. Humsa Yousaf is playing with the full deck of victim cards.

He is a racist, white-hating, Tory-hating, communist bigot, and he is about as Scottish as I am a Saudi. It says much about the Scottish National Party that they would support such a character at all, let alone as leader. But wait, the members didn’t elect him, instead the Left’s long march through the institutions has achieved its ambition of taking democracy as far away from the demos as possible. The certain decline of the SNP will be a joy to watch.

We used, as humans to progress from a state of helplessness, through childhood where normal values were instilled, then onto the world of work, of opportunity, of freedom to explore who we were and what we wanted from life. Some among us with more mature attitudes and charisma became leaders and then went on to become the wise elders. Now, it seems, all wisdom resides in the young and whatever they wish the adults must serve.

Stomp those eggshells all you like!

Aren’t we all just a bit fed up of being bullied by vocal minorities? Take the new head of the National Education Union (NEU) as a further example. The Marxist, race-baiting idiot, Daniel Kebede has stated that the teachers’ strike is not about pay but about "taking back control from a brutally racist state". Good grief, spare us the slave sermon. Are we sure he is a teacher and not a child? In any case if, as he says, it’s not about pay, I see no good reason why we should stump up any more cash. Maybe it will be better when Artificial Intelligence takes over, after all.

More Fool Us

Spotting the April Fool story in the day’s papers was always good sport, but these days you might be excused for imagining that every other report, on any given day, is just taking the piss. Very much so with the Wera Hobhouse sponsored Worker Protection (Amendment of Equality Act 2010) Bill which appears to have been waived through Parliament while the government was too busy applying sticking plasters elsewhere.

The amendment would impose a legal duty on employers to protect their staff from harassment by other employees and now also by members of the public. In law such harassment means “unwanted conduct relating to a protected characteristic” (i.e. age, disability, gender reassignment, race, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation) where that conduct has the purpose or effect of “creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”. This would include being offended by overheard remarks.

The idiots really are winning. This ‘Sneaks Charter’ would bring about a rash of actions without merit to further clog up the already overburdened legal system. And how hard would it be for two colleagues to arrange some specious insult, witnessed by other staff as a basis for suing their employer for damages? This is the sort of nonsense that should have its proposers put in stocks for judgment by the public, who are never currently consulted.

Critical Race Theory, the idiotic insistence that people who have never owned slaves owe anything whatsoever to people who have never been slaves, the notion that one can change gender by a simple declaration, child-centred teaching practices, recruitment for diversity… all of these are symptoms of a grand madness that has afflicted the developed world and will bring about its downfall. Are our leaders just fools now?

 Take that diversity in recruitment issue; a recent report decries the finding that fewer than 20% of  engineering undergraduates are female. So what? Do we see similar wails and gnashing of teeth when we discover that hardly any ‘men’ give birth? And isn’t that the very point? While there are some exceptional women in engineering and the sciences – and hurrah for them – why get all pissy about something which the supposedly uneducated populus can explain in a very short sentence?

 Naturally, the report authors also seem unduly concerned that in a country with a white majority population our engineers seem to be predominantly white males. Outrageous, they seem to say, we thought we were well on the way to eradicating this toxic species. It is almost as if they have never encountered an actual human person; that they have never considered asking them what they think; that they believe polls designed to elicit pre-ordained results are the only source of truth.

It has often been said that MPs should not only live in their constituencies, full-time, but that they should have held an ordinary job for some qualifying number of years. Not a think-tank internship, nor a special advisorship (And how come so many spads are so very young? It’s like the cult of management consultancy whereby actual experience is trumped by having gone to the right university.) I’d go further and ban graduates with an Oxford PPE degree from entering politics until at least the age of 40, with those years spent grafting in the dirt among the rest of us.

Not just April...

That such stupendously worthless legislation spouts like vomit from the over-indulged mouths of the monumentally privileged and feted suggests that the overhaul of Westminster is long overdue. The House of Lords is, likewise, crammed ever more full with useful idiots. And the media aids and abets their vandalism of the national psyche at every turn. It is little wonder that popular revolutions often begin with the slaughter of the intelligentsia. For all their supposed learning, they would be fools indeed to think that time is not coming.