Day: 2 September 2020

Last Friday, I put my car in for service at Locharbriggs near Dumfries. To pass the time away, together with my little cocker spaniel, we walked along the very pleasant former railway trackbed to Dumfries town centre, a five-mile hike. Having arrived at the main square I sat down to enjoy a Classic Magnum, watched avidly by my dog Dusty, eagerly waiting to lick off his entitlement from the stick. The town centre was fairly busy but nothing like as busy as it was before the UK governments began their destruction of the small businesses and the panic measures enforced by draconian regulations and powers. As a former police officer of middle rank and happily retired, I began people watching, a habit I have been unable to change since retirement. As a law graduate, my interest was in criminology and I found that Lombroso's Theory of Criminology, although discredited, was useful to spot and keep an eye on potential miscreants. This theory would I suppose be identified by the woke brigade as racial or unwarranted profiling and no doubt present day senior officers of the spineless and promotion ladder plotter type would not approve of such profiling. Basically the theory involved stature and appearance. The shape of the head was quite important and although not necessarily infallible, it formed a ...

School Threatens to Send Children Home for Joking About Covid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YR5ApYxkU-U A school in Hastings has told parents it will send their children home if they make "humorous" or "inappropriate" jokes about Covid. The Independent has more. Pupils could be excluded for “malicious coughing or sneezing” or making “inappropriate” jokes about the coronavirus pandemic, a school has warned.And at a second school, any pupil refusing to follow hygiene routines and social distancing will immediately be moved to a separate area, leaders say.The Ark Alexandra Academy in Hastings, East Sussex, set out a list of coronavirus “red lines” that will result in fixed-term exclusions for pupils breaching them.The academy says “humorous, inappropriate comments or statements” related to Covid-19 and “purposeful physical contact with any other person” are off-limits and will risk the child being sent home. You can read the school's letter to parents here. Worth remembering that Milan Kundera's satirical novel The Joke about a man whose life is destroyed after he makes an inappropriate gag on a postcard to his girlfriend was set in Soviet-controlled Czechoslovakia. Only 84% of Children Have Returned to School in Scotland Tens of thousands of children have not returned to school in Scotland, according to the BBC. More than 100,000 pupils in Scotland are absent from school with attendance down to 84.5%, according to ...