This report from the BBC is interesting: parents are prepared to lie to get their children into a good school.

Incredible, isn’t it? Having done the Water Cooler thing with the report, and asked colleagues and friends, I have to say that no-one is surprised or even dismayed by it. It is regarded as one of the travails of 21st Century family life.

And compared with the same people’s reactions to the information that you pay fees for your children’s education, it’s considered to be positively virtuous.

Using deceit and dishonesty to get an advantage for your children is socially acceptable. Good, old-fashioned hard work and self sacrifice is socially unacceptable.

You tell me who has the problem.

…but when I hear someone insisting on PC standards of language and policy, my automatic response is, “What are you trying to hide?”

What, exactly, is Political Correctness?

According to Wikipedia (that great repository of untested theories, unchallenged truisms and unquestioned popular doctrines) Political Correctness is the policy of avoiding giving offence by use of language, ideas, policies, or behaviour.

At this point I have to make myself clear: I am talking about that policy. I am not talking about the principles, espoused by those who defend PC-ness, of liberality and enlightenment. But I have to say that no-one was ever liberated or enlightened by the censorship of offensive language, ideas, policies, or behaviour.

If you want liberty and enlightenment then, I say, Political Correctness is exactly the
wrong way to go about it. This is because there is no causal link between a person’s verbal lexicon and their ethical conduct; getting someone to speak ethically does not make them behave ethically. Praxis, not rhetoric, teaches ethics.

In fact, rhetoric, in the form of Political Correctness, is the art of concealment, dissemblance and misdirection – and therefore the perfect tool for the bigot and the deceiver whose intentions are to do nothing for those they claim to be assisting.

My model Medevac helicopter (let’s all sing together, “Suicide is painless, it brings on many changes…“) has been getting a bit of a battering recently.

Darling Wifey insists that this is because it is a silly little toy – and in an ironic way, she is right. It is. It’s a counter-rotating twin-rotor miniature model helicopter, far too small and insignificant and basic to cope with some of the manoeuvres I have been attempting recently. It’s designed for gently hovering around inside a house, flitting from chair to table to floor, not twisting and turning around the garden.

Which is why it keeps on suffering from crashes and other disasters. When you have two rotor blades spinning in opposite directions less than an inch apart, you are bound to have little accidents when you push the machinery beyond its design limitations. Accidents that result in your prized helicopter falling to the ground around you like sharp rain. And after a hundred hours of flying and countless accidents, my little heli is flying less like a piece of precision model engineering, and more like a cloud of unconnected screws and cogs.

The solution is simple. No, you don’t fly it gently.

You buy a bigger and better heli. A single rotor with fully cyclic/collective pitch mixing. It has a bigger engine, blades three times longer, and the ability to fly upside-down!

Weeeeehhhheeeeeeee!