Further to this unhinged drama, Glenn Reynolds ponders modern state schooling:

A seven-year-old boy was suspended because he chewed his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun. Now, really, why would you suspend a kid for that? A gun-shaped Pop Tart isn’t a threat to anyone. Nor does chewing a Pop Tart into the shape of a gun suggest violent tendencies. Meanwhile, a 5-year-old girl was charged with “terroristic threats” for talking about her pink toy gun that shoots… bubbles. The school suspended her for 10 days and required a psychological evaluation. And in Maryland, boys were suspended for playing cops and robbers and using their fingers as imaginary guns. Who is frightened by this sort of thing? People who can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality. […] 

A Pop Tart gun, a finger gun, or a toy gun — even a pink one that shoots, gasp!, soap bubbles! — isn’t any danger to anyone. Nor is playing with toy guns a sign that a kid is mentally ill or dangerous. It’s a sign that a kid is a kid. When schools and teachers react hysterically to such non-threats, they’re telling us one of two things: Either that they lack the ability to respond realistically to events or that they recognise that there’s not any sort of threat, but deliberately overreact in order to stigmatise even the idea of guns. The first is educational malpractice; the second is educational malpractice mixed with abuse of power. Neither inspires confidence in the educational system in which they appear.

When I was maybe five or six years old, I took to school a Marvel comic, which, naturally, led to a playground battle of ray guns, fireballs and atomic annihilators. Oddly enough, all of my friends survived this exchange of imaginary firepower, and even the toppling of entire imaginary buildings. So far as I can recall, no-one actually bombarded themselves with gamma rays in the hope of turning green. Still, I can’t help wondering how that kind of thing would go down among teachers who hyperventilate at the thought of a single pink bubble gun. Presumably our juvenile imaginations would, for some, now be a cause for concern, possibly correction.

Related, George Will:  

Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments.

Mr Eugenides feels the pain of the Chavistas: 

The Guardian has this week been a newspaper in mourning. The death of Hugo Chavez has hit morale hard, with the newspaper all but running a black band around its website in deference to the passing of the man it clearly regarded as the leader of all progressive forces south of the Equator, if not the Watford Gap. […] Tariq Ali’s piece… was a masterpiece of its kind, a full-throated encomium of praise that made Chavez sound like a world-historical colossus, a one-in-a-million fusion of two parts Gandhi, one part Bolivar and a dash of Han Solo, instead of the vaudevillian punchline that he was by the end. No mention was made of the gigantic failures, the petty thuggery and intimidation of opponents, the contempt for the constitution or the rule of law. Why should there have been? To these people, everything is about speaking so-called truth to power, even if it means singing the praises of dickheads like Chavez one week and then with a straight face labelling Rupert Murdoch a horrifying threat to democracy the next.

And Heather Mac Donald on teen pregnancy and what mustn’t be said about it: 

Less predictable was the charge… that the [teen pregnancy] posters “perpetuate gender stereotypes.” Even the most seasoned observers of the academic-advocacy-victimology axis might not have seen this one coming. Presumably, the ads “perpetuate gender stereotypes” by pointing out to “Dad” the costs of child support and to “Mom” that when the father takes off, as he likely will, she’ll be left holding the diaper bag. It appears that we have a new politically correct fantasy: unwed teen fathers are as likely to be the sole provider for their child as teen moms.

As usual, feel free to add your own links and snippets in the comments.

As the much-missed blog Burning Our Money is back with us, and with a book to sell no less, readers may wish to reacquaint themselves with some items from the BOM archive. There are hundreds of illustrations of how our betters set fire to money someone else had to earn. For instance, this innovative scheme: 

A thousand colourful bubble blowers are to be handed out to revellers in Bolton centre. The aim is to encourage drinkers leaving pubs and clubs to focus on playfully blowing bubbles on their way home, instead of getting into scuffles. It is the latest initiative to curb alcohol-related anti-social behaviour. The blue and orange bubble blowers, which double as pens, will be handed out by Police Community Support Officers and town centre ambassadors on Saturday nights in December.

Another subject close to many readers’ hearts is the presumption of our publicly funded arts establishment. On which, this: 

According to Michael Lynch, the departing head of London’s expensively refurbished Southbank Centre, the private sector hasn’t donated nearly enough to fund his arts empire: “Corporate Britain had in my view let down the side. They need a sense of values.” Apparently, none of those gazillionaire Goldmans’ bankers has given “anything meaningful,” and he describes them as a “bunch of bastards.” Arts, you see, are A Public Good, and rich bastards have a civic duty to dig deep in their support. Everyone knows that. Just like they know that art is what the artist says it is, not what the customer says. Philistinism – aka customer choice – is no excuse… How then did the Southbank manage to fund its costly refurbishment? According to Lynch, “the Government, to their credit, got behind us in a big way.” Well, that was awfully sweet of them, but – and this may be news to Mr L – the government doesn't actually have any money. In reality, once again, it was we poor schmucks who paid. How much? Precise details are sketchy, but we know the refurb cost £111m. And the vast bulk of that came from taxpayers… In addition to that, the Centre is receiving a £20m a year tax-funded subsidy towards its running costs. There are certainly some bastards involved in this, but I fancy they’re not working at Goldmans.

And there’s this item, on the remarkably unpopular West Bromwich arts centre, boldly named The Public, which two years after opening had failed to attract a single paying customer. The venue, which promised to “make the arts more accessible,” had nonetheless managed to consume almost £60 million of public money and suffered three insolvencies. Among the aesthetic wonders sadly neglected by locals was a piece by the artist Michael Pinchbeck, a “five year live art project” called The Long and Winding Road. For his mammoth and challenging installation, Mr Pinchbeck “packed a car with the belongings of his brother and drove to Liverpool where his brother died in 1998.” After touring the nation and presenting his car full of rammle to any passers-by who wandered too close and paused fractionally too long, Mr Pinchbeck announced that he would conclude his mighty artistic work by “driving the car into the River Mersey.” The car was subsequently crushed and its fragments displayed for further enrichment of the public. Not to be outdone, the West Bromwich arts centre had its own, no less ambitious announcement regarding the project: “Admission will be on a first-come-first-served basis.”

Another of Mr Pinchbecks’s colossal works, “a deconstruction of Shakespearean stage directions,” can be savoured here. 

Chris Snowdon on demands for the banning of alcohol adverts and sponsorship:

The headline of the [British Medical Journal] editorial refers to the drinks industry “grooming the next generation” – a distasteful attempt to draw a parallel with paedophilia – and much of the text is devoted to online marketing. The internet has, of course, created new regulatory challenges as well as new commercial opportunities, but there is no evidence that online marketing has led to a surge in underage drinking. Quite the reverse. Regular alcohol consumption by 11 to 15 year olds has fallen by two-thirds in the last decade – from 20% to 7% – and the proportion of these children who had ever drunk alcohol fell from 61% to 45% in the same period. The BMJ’s call for a total advertising ban is manifestly not a response to a growing crisis; rather it is the “next logical step” in a campaign to apply the anti-smoking blueprint to alcohol. It is no coincidence that one of the editorial’s authors, Gerard Hastings… holds the view, often espoused by left-wing environmentalists, that consumption is primarily caused by advertising rather than by wants, and he is already looking beyond tobacco and alcohol as industries to clamp down on, asking last year “should not all advertising be much more circumscribed because the consumption it engenders harms the planet?” 

And speaking of left-wing environmentalists and their views on advertising, let’s not forget the deep, deep wisdom of Mr George Monbiot.  

Topher Field offers a short history of terrible taxes and the cost of government:  

The ancient Egyptians taxed ordinary cooking oil and you could actually be punished if you didn’t use enough of it. In Russia in the 1700s, you were taxed for having a beard… The English invented a hearth or chimney tax, where you were taxed on the number of fireplaces your house had. In the late 1600s, the English bureaucracy had a brainwave. Why not tax people’s windows? In order to avoid this daylight robbery, the British began bricking up their own windows to save on tax… And when they taxed bricks, people made bigger bricks. 

Of course we’re much more sensible now, right? As Field says, “Your own government shouldn’t be the reason you struggle to make ends meet.” 

Thomas Sowell responds to this and ponders the state as parent: 

Professor Sunstein is undoubtedly correct that “people make a lot of mistakes.” Most of us can look back over our own lives and see many mistakes, including some that were very damaging. What Cass Sunstein does not tell us is what sort of creatures, other than people, are going to override our mistaken decisions for us. That is the key flaw in the theory and agenda of the left. Implicit in the wide range of efforts on the left to get government to take over more of our decisions for us is the assumption that there is some superior class of people who are either wiser or nobler than the rest of us.

Ah, those would be our egalitarian overlords, making life fairer from high above the herd. Lovely people, obviously.

And Mike Denham of Burning Our Money has just published a book. One for the shelves, methinks.

As usual, feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments.

Another classic sentence, this time from the Guardian’s Jill Filipovic, who tells us: 

Somehow, big food companies have convinced us that drinking a 32oz soda is a matter of personal liberty, and that the government has no place in regulating how much liquid sugar can be sold in a single container.

Apparently those evil food companies have – somehow, nefariously – made some of us consider the proper role of the state and whether it should have any business telling people what size beverage they may drink while watching a three-hour film in the local multiplex. Yes, that must be it. How else can we explain the fact that not everyone agrees with Jill Filipovic?

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

All Pop Music Will Henceforth Be Terrible.  

The government is “waging naked class war,” says the Guardian’s Owen Hatherley. Can leftwing pop music avert catastrophe? 

Making vaguely alternative pop music is, it seems, all but impossible without indefinite subsidy, an Arts Council grant, a subsidised spell at art school and a bohemian squat to call your own. Yes, these young titans of the left need the state to make them edgy and countercultural. And there can be no better use for taxpayers’ money than indulging would-be pop stars while they become “class conscious” and find themselves, musically. However long it takes. 

Rebellion, Revisited.  

If what these educators want sounds a bit like grooming, a little predatory, that’s because it is. 

The problem is that adversarial role-play, like that of leftist academics Furr and Garelick, has little to do with reason, refutation or how the world actually is. It does, however, have a great deal to do with how those concerned wish to seem. In order to maintain a self-image of heroic radicalism – and in order to justify funding, influence and status – great leaps of imagination or paranoia may be required. Hence the goal posts of persecution tend to move and new and rarer forms of exploitation and injustice have to be discovered, many of which are curiously invisible to the untutored eye. Thus, the rebel academic tends towards extremism, intolerance and absurdity, not because the mainstream of society is becoming more racist, prejudiced, patriarchal or oppressive – but precisely because it isn’t.

Which may explain the doublethink of Mr Arun Smith. 

You’ll Notice They All Wear Shoes.

San Francisco’s radical nudists are remarkably needy. Your children must, simply must, see their genitals.

Imagine you’re out shopping with the kids in tow and having to weave your way through large groups of unattractive men waving their tackle at you. One doesn’t have to have “unrealistic issues of body shame” to find the exhibitionism tiresome or inappropriate. And the denials of any sexual aspect are also unconvincing, especially given that so many of the participants are enthusiasts of fetish clubs and websites catering to people who like public sex and scandalising others, and for whom the whole point is to have an audience, whether titillated or repelled. It’s rather like how the people at last year’s ‘protest’ claimed they just wanted to be left alone – while squealing for attention on a traffic island in the middle of a busy intersection.

Monbiot and the Morlocks.

George Monbiot encounters the exotic underclass. Things go badly wrong.

Maybe George wrote the article to show us how difficult it is to be virtuous, indeed heroic, at least as he conceives such things. I suspect, though, that any moral lesson is quite different from the one intended. You see, George believes in sharing, by which of course he means taking other people’s stuff. Yet he’s remarkably unprepared for that favour being returned. Say, by two burly chaps with neck tattoos and ill-tempered dogs. And as these burly chaps were members of a “marginalised group,” and therefore righteous by default, George was expecting noble savages. Alas, ‘twas not to be.

There’s a world of wonder in the greatest hits.