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In response to the government’s new education initiative, it is proposed that students will have to pass a test to be promoted to the next grade level. The new test will be called the “First Arithmetic and Reading Test”, or FART.
All students who cannot pass a FART in the second grade will be retested in Grades 3, 4 and 5 until they are capable of passing a FART.
If a student does not successfully FART by grade 5, that student shall be placed in a separate English program known as the “Special Masters Easy Learning Language”, or SMELL.
If, with this increased SMELL program, the student cannot pass the required FART test, he or she can still graduate to middle school by taking another course in “Comprehensive Reading and Arithmetic Preparation”, or CRAP.
If by age fourteen the student cannot pass a FART, SMELL, or CRAP, he or she can earn promotion in an intensive one-week seminar known as the “Preparatory Reading for Unprepared Nationally Exempted Students”, or PRUNES.
It is the opinion of the School Inspectorate that an intensive week of PRUNES will enable any student to pass a FART, SMELL, or CRAP. And in the long term, this revised education initiative should help "clear the air".

SYRIA

YES OR NO?

No, for **** s sake no! All credit goes to David Cameron who did precisely what a democratic leader should. He let his personal and professional opinion be known. Upon realising that his opinion was not necessarily shared by those whom he is paid to represent on the international stage, he allowed Parliament (those elected and paid to represent us on the domestic stage) to vote on what we went on to do. The decision was made and he respected it. That is a textbook demonstration of how democracy works. Contrast this with the actions of the cataclysmic moron we had "leading" the country last time this decision had to be made.

We are not Team UK: World Police, we don't have to wade in every time someone somewhere does something we don't like. The USA is a shining example of precisely how NOT to run a country. They have an appalling human rights record, a vast prison population, deep seated racism, hugely corrupt public officials, the death penalty, almost no social security and a way of life (the much lauded 'American Dream') which revolves around the concept of greed, excess and selfishness.
Why would we not invade them and make them see the error of their ways?

I wouldn't mind, but it's hardly as though we're in a position to be dictating to anyone else. We're in a complete mess (although that is also, predominantly, the fault of the last bunch of clowns who had a bash at running a country, a task for which they were woefully inadequate), we are not the people to dictate policy to the rest of the planet. If that job should fall to anyone, it should be either Australia or Germany, the two most sorted, comprehensive, head-screwed-on-right nations on the planet.

Matt.

NO

i cant add anything to the previous comment except to say , i pretty much 100% agree with everything written there.

it is about time countries like ourselves and the usa sorted theirselves out before poking their nose into other countries affairs.

agreed, we should take a long hard look at how countries like australia do things.

I pretty much agree too, except that Germany and Australia have their own shortcomings. Australia, in particular, cannot claim the moral high ground, given its appalling treatment of refugees in its own part of the world. The UK and other western countries are doing what they can to help refugees, and diplomatically to end this conflict. One wonders why neighbouring Arab countries are not doing more. The Israelis must be quietly laughing their socks off.

I'll grant you, Oz is not perfect, but then, I never said it was. I suppose, however, they do have the defence that Australia is so isolated from anywhere that a refugee might reasonably come from that there is no good reason for them to help. I've done plenty of study around refugee law and took it as an elective in my Undergraduate Degree, so I do understand the issues in law (and reality). I do sympathise with the situation in which refugees find themselves. To be in that place in life must be just about the worst existence that a person can face. However, there are an awful lot of well developed nations lying between us and the country of origin of all refugees. We are an island, we are not the easiest country to get to from anywhere. The only countries for which we in England are the natural port of call are Scotland and Wales and, last time I looked, neither of those nations produced a single refugee ever. I have no problem with Syrians or Africans or Pakistanis or anyone else fleeing their home nations for fear of their life or liberty, but for Christ's sake, head to the nearest safe nation, not the nation which will spoon feed you all the money you can eat.

Matt.

in fact great post.

I agree Matt. The UK and others are sending aid to the Syrian refugees; I don't think anyone is proposing that those refugees should come here. (I also believe we should not allow Europeans into the country, and that we should get out of the EU, but that's a different topic).

Many of those claiming to be refugees world-wide are so-called economic migrants, and these are probably the biggest problem for the UK and Australia. Others are trying to escape the effects of such things as climate change, famine and poverty. It's an international problem requiring a global solution. But these people, for the most part, are not criminals; for them it's simply a matter of life or death. And, whatever their reasons for migrating, we should be treating them with compassion, not as if they were international criminals or enemy combatants. And in this respect the UK's record has probably been as bad as Australia's in recent years.

However, I believe the original question was, should we intervene militarily in Syria, yes or no? I think we are agreed, as are most people, that we should not. Which is not to say that we should completely rule out providing weapons or indirect support to those fighting the regime or that some form of international action through the UN will not be necessary. Nor that those political and military leaders responsible for crimes against humanity should not eventually be brought to justice. But neither the UK nor the Americans should be acting unilaterally as an global police force.

HS2.

Is there seriously anyone who thinks this is a good idea?

Listen, i'm thick as pig sh*t when it comes to politics but even from me this has got to be a no no.

No, there's not a person alive who genuinely believes that spending £50,000,000,000 on a Victoria relic which allows half a dozen fat Cock-Er-Knee businessmen get to Birmingham 10 minutes faster than they can today is a good idea.

For ****'s sake, if you want a way to get to Birmingham which is already faster than the train, might I suggest the M1? It doesn't come to a shuddering halt every time there's a week in the month, people rarely, if ever, jump in front of a car while it's travelling along that road, commuters may travel in safety, peace, quiet, comfort and to the dulcet tunes of Radio 4 and all for the princely sum of about 45p in diesel.
HS2 will be closed half the time for there being the wrong kind of sun in the sky and the other half for either endless track repairs being carried out by the woefully incompetent cowboys who repair (sorry, "repair") the present traditional railways or else it'll be closed because Bob from accounts found out that his wife had run off with Terry the milkman and that splattering himself all over the front of 300 tonnes of train was likely to hurt less than hanging himself.

The juice simply isn't worth the squeeze. If we haven't got £500,000,000 to give NHS staff a 1% pay raise, we sure as hell haven't got 100 times that to build a railway line which will be cripplingly expensive to use and hugely expensive to maintain.

The train had its day 150 years ago. Then, Mr Benz invented his MotorWagen and immediately, henceforth and forevermore, the train became obsolete.We're spending all this money on a train that no one wants, all the while reducing speed limits all over the country to a frankly embarrassing 20mph. Jesus wept. We whinge (rightly) about the power of the NRA in America blighting lives, but we have exactly the same problem over here with militant GreenPeace, Totnes types and their BRAKE counterparts.

Morons the lot of them. A 100mph limit on the M1, some proper driver training before allowing people out on to the roads and you can save yourself £50,000,000,000. Simples.

Matt.

HS2 is not the answer to our country's considerable infrastructure problems.

I'm afraid the government (as usual - infact with any government) is looking for a quick-fix to a difficult and ever-growing problem. I think you can spend less than half of whatever ridiculous figure is being quoted by simply doing a range of smaller link-building roads better linking small and medium towns towards eachother and other job 'hubs'.

One cheap (of course I mean ludicrously expensive) gimmick is not going to fool the public in to thinking that transport problems are solved.

Brilliant article by Patrick Cockburn 'Where War Reporting Goes Wrong' about propaganda, bias, and political manipulation of the media: http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/07/ ... oes-wrong/

“Earlier this year, the ‘Counting Women In’ coalition produced a report called ‘Sex and Power 2013 – Who runs Britain?’ claiming that ‘the exclusion of women from positions of power damages both women and men’.

The report laments the fact that only 15.6% of High Court judges are female. And yet, a man is far more likely to be sentenced to prison by these ‘male dominated’ courts than a woman who has committed the same crime.

The report also complains that only 14.2% of University Vice Chancellors are female. And yet, according to HESA Statistics (Higher Education Statistics Agency), women are far ahead of men at university.”

(The above information is extracted from a most interesting article by Zara Faris about women, power, and feminism, from the point of view of a muslim woman: http://thedebateinitiative.com/2013/07/ ... eed-power/