"Electing Police Chiefs would Undermine Democracy"

The Tories plan to ensure that police commissioners are accountable and elected by the public. Sounds like an excellent idea. We have so many unelected officials dictating our lives, why not start a process where people in authority are actually accountable to the electorate?

The police chiefs aren't happy of course, they could be out of a job, but the counter-argument seems to me ridiculously oxymoronic. They are saying that having elected police commissioners would undermine democracy. What a bizarre statement.

Sir Hugh Orde hits out at Tory police plans

Sir Hugh said any idea the police were under "political influence" could undermine democracy.

Political influence undermining democracy? So being accountable to the people you serve is undemocratic?

Devil's Kitchen says my thoughts in his usual no holds barred style.

Labour not too keen on free speech and democracy

Ministers warn of poll boost for BNP after Question Time

Perhaps we should ban Labour from appearing on the box, lest they get a poll boost too.

It's the biggest story on the Guardian website. But sometimes we all agree that gagging is immoral.

Muesli munching, goatee stroaking, free range, bollock free, nampy pambies...

are imposing their fucking stupid ideologies, on the rest of us:

BBC's attempt at re-writing nursery rhymes to be happy fucking clappy liberal hippy shite. No longer did Little Miss Muffin run away from the spider who sat down beside her. No. She fucking well made friends with it! LITTLE MISS MUFFET MAKES FRIENDS WITH SPIDER. Wtf guys.

And...

More Guardian obsessive compulsive disorder from Waltham Forest and Newham councils which have decreed that schools must close for Muslim, Sikh and Hindu holidays. Jews outnumber Sikhs in the area yet their holidays are not in the socialist council decree. Wtf guys? At least attempt some consistency you fucking heathens.

Update: Private Eye reports the two councils have had this policy since the 80's!

PC FAIL: School says no to 500 year old traditional English folk dance because somebody might take offence... of the traditional black face paint

from the right wing tabloid let's kill teh immigrants... The Guardian newspaper.

A troupe of morris dancers who smear black makeup across their faces as part of their traditional costume were prevented from performing at a primary school in Gravesend, Kent, because of fears that they could cause offence. Peter Hargreaves, of the Motley Morris group, said the school asked if they would perform without blackened faces but they refused. Hazel King, headteacher at Chantry primary, said: "We found ourselves weighing up any potential offence versus not wishing to compromise the morris dancers' tradition. It's a 'damned if we do, damned if we don't' scenario."

Welcome to the 21st century where "potential" "offence" means that traditions that stretch back centuries are effectively completely censured by imagined "offence" - that terrible and pervasive disease of modern times, anyone can catch it any time and the results are dire. A bit like swine flu.

Sorry to be so boorishly predictable and terribly "right wing", but I wonder if any ethnic dances or expressions will be redacted or withdrawn for potential offence at this school? I wonder if some of the less than Gentlemanly verses from the Quran will be censured during Religious Studies? ... I wouldn't mind so much -- if there was a hint of consistency in any of this hyper-political correctness guff.

UK Prisons are "universities of terror"

So says Professor Michael Clarke at The Independent.

The director of Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warned a series of successful police operations have turned prisons into "universities of terror".

He said security services may look back at the last eight years as a "golden age of counter terrorism" marked by success and good luck.

Mr Clarke said: "The phenomenon will not wither away in the near future: it is likely to be generational.

"All the available evidence is that radicalisation of alienated Muslim youth in the UK can taken place very rapidly as long as it is based somewhere on personal contact."

Mr Clarke said the evolution of recruitment and terrorist techniques of British cells is "entirely possible" as they learn from their mistakes.

He added: "Most of the plotters have left behind a trail of forensics behind that has led some police professionals to predict that this will seem like a golden age of counter terrorism, when we were both successful and lucky."

Prison staff urgently need to be trained to combat radicalisation and prison gangs need to be severely dealt with.

There's been a terrible mixup... you're son is black

...there was a terrible mix-up when the wrong sperm was mistakenly used by the hospital fertility clinic the couple attended in their hope of becoming parents.

The result is that while Keith, 47, and his 46-year-old wife Catherine are white, their son is black.

Hahahaha! Hahaha, hahaha. I'm sorry it's just the way they have managed to word it. From none other than the Daily Mail.

"James W. Von Brunn and the Poison of Racist Collectivism"

On Wednesday, according to news reports, James W. Von Brunn, a longtime belligerent racist and anti-Semite, walked into the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and opened fire, murdering a security guard before he himself was shot and neutralized. Good people everywhere recognize the vicious criminality of his attack, and the particular insidiousness of his motivation to lash out where he did.

In reflecting on this tragedy, it is an appropriate time to contemplate the sanctity of innocent life, the horror that is unleashed by bigotry and intolerance, and the fragility of peaceful human relations. We should all be thankful that such hate-motivated violence is rarer in modern America than it has been in other places and times.

Unfortunately, many commentators have found a political, even partisan, lesson to be learned. They have said this vindicates the Department of Homeland Security document circulated earlier this year that warned against "right-wing extremists." Specifically, they have said that those who criticized the report were wrong all along.

But what were the criticisms? I recall no one arguing that anti-Semitic murderers were not criminals whose acts were horrific and uncivilized. There was no critic of the report, so far as I know, who complained that such antisocial elements as Ku Klux Klan members, Timothy McVeigh wannabes, and bigoted criminals, did not deserve the condemnation that all of civil society heaps upon them.

The problem with the report was that it painted all so-called "right-wing extremists" with an absurdly and obscenely broad brush. It lumped together the above violent agitators with peaceful political activists and recently returning veterans. It warned about people who are anti-government, anti-Federal Reserve, anti-gun control, anti-illegal immigration and anti-abortion.

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