Harry Mount(ainous Cock)

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Man makes horrifying discovery. Victorian schools facades are just that, facades. Behind the 19th century walls of these schools lurks a terrible secret, they are not really Victorian at all! They are 21st century!

Goodbye, Mr Microchips (or why computers should be banned from our schools)
Have you been inside a primary school recently? The old blackboards are gone, and so are the wooden desks with those little inkwells. No great loss, perhaps, but what has replaced them is frightening.  Those handsome, Victorian red-brick board schools, set up under the 1870 Education Act, might look pretty much unchanged on the outside. But on the inside they have become little offices. Whiteboards, hooked up to computers, are the main teaching tool in the classroom. Whole areas are given over to ranks of gleaming screens.
Tosser.

Has the clawback begun?

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Stop and search powers illegal, European court rules
The ability of UK police to use "arbitrary" counter-terror stop and search powers against peace protesters and photographers lay in tatters today after a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights.

The Strasbourg court ruled it was unlawful for police to use the powers, under section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, to stop and search people without needing any grounds for suspicion.

The widely-drawn ruling said that not only the use of the counter-terror powers, but also the way they were authorised, were "neither sufficiently circumscribed, nor subject to adequate legal safeguards against abuse".

The use of these powers has grown fourfold, from 33,177 times in 2004 to more than 117,200 in 2008.

The Metropolitan police have used them most, but 11 other forces in England and Wales also make routine use of them.

A political furore ensued when it was disclosed that the whole of Greater London had been secretly designated for stop and search without suspicion since 2001.

Working like a charm

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Osama: 10 - United States: Nil by Eric Margolis
Except for Communists, a notorious bunch of liars, I had never heard anyone call my beloved America an imperialist power. In those days, the US appeared the acme of good – in large part because its rival, the Soviet Union, looked so wicked. But after the USSR collapsed, absolute power absolutely corrupted Washington’s ruling circles and drove them to seek "full spectrum domination" of the globe and its energy resources rather than a cooperative new world order.

Sheik Abdullah Azzam was the teacher and spiritual mentor of a young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Azzam gave bin Laden the blueprint for his later war against the west. Azzam was murdered in 1989, likely by a western intelligence service. His pupil, Osama, launched a seemingly quixotic mission to overthrow the western-backed dictatorships and monarchies that misruled the Muslim world, and drive western power from the region.

Bin Laden proclaimed his grand strategy in the 1990’s. He would oust the modern "Crusaders’ by luring the US and its allies into a series of small, debilitating, hugely expensive wars to bleed and slowly bankrupt the US economy, which he called America’s Achilles’ heel. Bloody attacks would enrage the US and lure it into one quagmire after another. Bin Laden was dismissed by western intelligence as a crackpot and "enragé." But both the dimwitted President Gorge W. Bush and the intelligent President Barack Obama fell right into Osama’s carefully-laid trap.


Twitter. The crack cocaine of the interwebs!

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When I closed down my Twitter accounts a while back I was under the impression that they would be deleted permanently and immediately, which was fine by me. I didn't want the temptation of sneaking back - burning bridges, and all that. Without the distraction of Twitter I happily got on with building up my blog again. I'd lost about 30,000 visitors a month (uniques) and I knew it would take time and a lot of posting to get things back to where they were.

It only took two weeks to get my Google rank back to 5 (from 4) and there has been a steady improvement in visitor numbers. I'm not a stats freak. I rarely even check my figures or my referals. I've always aimed my blogged at about a dozen or so people. These are who I have in mind when I decide to post something or link to something which, as a link-blogger, is what I mostly do.

Then I got an email from Twitter. Would I like to revive my accounts? Apparently they are dormant for six months during which time they can be easily restored, with all the old setting etc intact. I resisted, of course! For about two minutes :) Then I just had to crank them up again, not knowing whether I would actually restart Tweeting or not. I've decided that I will.  I'm HERE.

Keep the bastard out!

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Madeleine detective plans to speak his mind in UK
Goncalo Amaral, the Portuguese detective who initially led the investigation into Madeleine McCann's disappearance on the Algarve in 2007, and who has since become the bane of her parents' lives, is due to come to England next month to speak at a conference in Nottingham organised by a group who claim - like him - that the girl was never abducted.
These are the dirtbags who've invited him. The blogosphere's very own McCann libeller and old-lady killer, the nasty John Hirst, isn't involved with these people. He prefers to pursue the McCanns with his hateful accusations independently. But they are all cunts!

Put your tits away or else...

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Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: Licentiousness breeds extremism

On blogs now thought to be written by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian accused of trying to blow up a plane over Detroit, you are given the impression from news reports that he was a lonely boy, unhappy with his peers who drank and partied. At university he apparently cut himself off, tried to hold on to Islamic Puritanism in a country of no shame, no restraint...

For Umar Farouk and many other Muslim men like him, living in such a landscape is literally intolerable. He confesses that he does try to lower his gaze in front of females, wonders if he should get married because he is getting too aroused. You could make a movie, a Taxi Driver for our times, about just such an anti-hero, the hormonal male who is expected to live a life of total abstinence in the middle of licentiousness.

Islamic Stalinism is set to grow stronger. A society in a state of perpetual abandon cannot survive that onslaught. We need to sober up and see what we have become. The future is grim; it needs us to be serious.
Shorter Alibhai-Brown Showing your tits breeds plane bombers. Dope!
In an alarmingly short time, the nation has gone from Fifties uprightness to public striptease
She still lived in Uganda in the Sixties so perhaps she needs reminding:



And if the sight of female flesh is really that intolerable to these young Muslim men there are plenty of places they can go and live where it isn't a problem:

Surely not?

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The 'false' pandemic: Drug firms cashed in on scare over swine flu, claims Euro health chief
Wolfgang Wodarg, head of health at the Council of Europe, accused the makers of flu drugs and vaccines of influencing the World Health Organisation's decision to declare a pandemic.

This led to the pharmaceutical firms ensuring 'enormous gains', while countries, including the UK, 'squandered' their meagre health budgets, with millions being vaccinated against a relatively mild disease.


Eternal optimist?!

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Sir Clive Sinclair: Down but never out, the eternal optimist is back

The really sad thing about this man is that he still refuses to accept that the C5 was a joke, a pile of crap, completely useless and doomed to failure from day one:
But Sir Clive, who describes himself as "the eternal optimist", still thinks he was right. "I think it (the C5) was a good idea then and I do now, and we sold quite a few thousand and people loved them." But he goes on to confess: "Clearly I should have handled it differently. If I had it could have succeeded." His voice tailing off, he adds: "I rushed at it too much and invested too much in the tooling and I should have gone a bit more gently into it."