" French paper Le Point reported that French police are searching for three former paratroopers in connection with the Toulouse Jewish school shooting that left four dead.

According to the report, the paratroopers were dismissed over suspicion of being neo-Nazis in 2008. The Jerusalem Post could not confirm the report. "

- - -

" Earlier in the day Gil Taieb, a vice president of the CRIF, France's Jewish umbrella group, told The Jerusalem Post he had no doubt the attack was a hate crime.

"For someone to locate this school in a place like Toulouse means he knew what he was doing," Taieb said. "He went there to kill Jews." "

Once again the media leaps to the conclusion that the far right must be the perpetrators of the crime. Could it be that racism was a factor in these crimes - that the institutions of the French Government are so bent towards looking the other way, when it comes Algerians, that they would fail to pick up on a murderous terrorist?

Reform and the National Party Agenda

I read something the other day, about the the differences amongst branches of Conservatism.

For some, the goal is to take Government power in order to reform and manage better the institutions of Socialism. If only we were in charge, they reason, we'd protect all of those programs and entitlements people cherish but wouldn't waste as much money and time on it as the Socialists do.

For others, one might call them genuine Conservatives, the goal is to take Government power in order to remove those programmes and entitlements, recognising that they present an extreme moral hazard by their very existence.

Which is why it is interesting reading David Farrar's take on exactly where the National Government is right now. I do understand that National has a strategy of not going faster than the electorate is ready for, given the upheaval of the late eighties and early nineties, and its impact on the minds of party planners, but it does seem a rather limp-wristed set of reforms to get New Zealand out of the mediocre state it is in now.

The Educracy

After many years of reflection, I have come to realise that the vast bulk of the knowledge I use both privately and professionally has been amassed through private study. I like to read, and that has been where I have accumulated the knowledge that I use. The major exception is the low-level tech course I did, but even then the instructors themselves made it explicitly clear that you would learn far more in industry than any course could teach you, and that has been the case.

Of course, schools cannot teach people all the facts. It would be a boring world if you could learn everything about everything by the time you were 18. What they should be able to do is give their students the tools to learn the world for themselves: writing, reading, maths and intellectual curiosity. I think it is fairly clear to most, that the majority of students do not come away from school with any kind of intellectual curiosity, that they got from school. The ones who wanted to do science and learn more always did, and the ones who didn't never did.

What I'm building to is this: it is a waste of money spending thousands chasing the the lower end of the student body, to create the 'knowledge wave', which even if it has been dropped from official language is still the key principle guiding our education bureaucracy. It is the notion that if we can just get everyone to become brilliant intellectuals, we'll solve our problems by exporting profitable ideas. And it will never work, no matter how much money is spent on it.

What we need is the ability for students with talent and interest to access the paths to development, and for everyone else to be ready for the workplace, with functional maths and English. Now, there seems to have developed over time the notion that physical labour is not as rewarding as intellectual pursuits, either materially or intellectually. I'd suggest the origin of this notion is none other than over paid education bureaucrats, but I might be being uncharitable, it probably goes back to their predecessors, the aristocracy.

Ultimately, a child's education is in the hands of their parents and themselves, and it is not only useless trying to change their values if they are interested in physical things, it is decidedly counter-productive.

My Blog

I'll not explain too much about myself, other than that I live in New Zealand, have done so for most of my life (I was born here) and I took the name "Moneo" for my blog name after reading Frank Herbet's fourth Dune novel.

I'm a former left winger, now a conservative libertarian. I don't think the term is an oxymoron, Liberty is a precious good worth conserving for all men.

I do believe some very bad times are coming, and the ongoing assault on order and character over the last sixty years by liberal radicals are going to make things much much worse.

"Some people have no sense of humour."

I recently came along the title of this post, in an article about a music video involving atheists portraying Christ visiting strip clubs and getting drunk.

Now, people are free to express themselves as they see fit. If denigrating the Lord God, beloved of one quarter of humanity, is what you see fit to with that right, then so be it. I won't stop you, although I will certainly criticise you.

But from where comes this phrase, so oft heard in debates of this nature? What those men wrote and performed was sick and insulting. Precisely what defence, in their minds, is the phrase "Some people have no sense of humour" against those charges: of being insulting, sickening? It says many things. For one, it says 'I am free to insult you'. More than that, it is expressed as an error in the viewpoint of the insulted: 'you are deficient in the way you view the world'. If we examine the content of the artistic piece in question, we find it isn't very clever at all. It simply puts Christ in the reverse of a lot of the myths about him: he was abstemious and pious, so lets make him a womanising drunk.

There isn't much more depth I care to go to on this issue. The men who made this video are shallow, and so shallow reasoning will suffice to counter them. I will make this point though: this is their sincere form of worship. And it has nothing positive to proclaim, aside from drunkenness and womanising, but a lot of violent feeling toward the myths of Christ. If they wished to get truly deep, they should probably consider the origins of that impulse.