More politics (stop reading now Bagman) as the issue of ‘faith schools’ came up again. Interesting language from Blair today as he said:
The prime minister said axing Muslim schools would mean ending Catholic, Jewish and Protestant schools too.
“Realpolitik” would prevent such a move, said Mr Blair.
Hardly a strong defence of them then. After all, ‘realpolitik’ prevents us from abolishing nasty people or crime, but that doesn’t mean it’s not something we’d like to do.
Why are ‘faith schools’ bad? Because it’s wrong to base a school around a particular ideology – imagine if we introduced ‘Labour’ schools or ‘Vote Eugene’ schools. You’d have thought that a divine, unwavering belief in a supreme power would be able to survive a few hours a day of not being lectured on why that particular supreme power is really really cool.
However, I’ll go along with the spirit of ‘realpolitik’ and respectfully respect a school to support my faith in the Invisible Pink Unicorn (Blessed Be Her Holy Hooves). What do you mean I’m in a small minority? What – like Jesus against all those Romans? OK OK, fair point. In that case – let’s have a Jedi Knight faith school. (Fourth largest reported religion in the country I’ll have you know.)
Moral values call to Tory leader
Conservative traditionalists have entered the fledgling Tory leadership contest by pushing their next leader to fight liberal attitudes.
A group of “socially conservative” Tory MPs say the party should echo George Bush’s “faith, flag and family” slogan.
Yeeeeeeeeees, that’s a great idea! Go for it! Absolutely concentrate on that, because we could learn a lot from them.
Aren’t they just terrifying? You know that, if it fucks up, every PC in the network will be useless Internet-wise. Just upgraded my Netgear DG834G to the latest firmware version and everything seems cool. Theoretically it can now support ADSL2+, although I have no idea what that means in reality 
Still, nice to be up to date!
Friday was the last ‘normal’ day at Eton and as usual we packed a lot in. We started with our final round of lessons including Physics, where we set off water rockets from the rooftops of Eton and Philosophy, where we finally debated for the last time whether the water rocket was really a water rocket or just a collection of bottles and elastic bands with some water in. No, not really. We had to argue for and against the existence of god. In my case, mostly against. I do believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn though.
We also had some more History – consistently the most interesting subject of the week which concluded in some History of Art showing in painting form how man has progressed from “Hey, I own nature!” to “Holy shit, nature’s fighting back!” And also some Maths, which proved something very interesting about 1.618. (See – more evidence against god. If god existed the ‘magic number’ would be something hilariously simple, like 42 or something.)
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As babbleblog correctly reports, the next version of Windows (codenamed Longhorn) will be called Windows Vista.
My very first reaction was “Um, ewww”
Now that I’ve thought about it a little more, it’s not the worst thing Microsoft could have chosen. However, I would have much preferred either a version number or another set of two letters. XP always sounded good to me, Vista is too much like – another word – because it is! (Apparently years don’t work well because they date quickly.)
Still, nice to see some concentration on the user interface in Longhorn Vista!
Linda Moffitt on Colombia: “Such a sweet memory of the four of you meeting up in Colombia!” Dec 2, 07:42
